During the war of Algerian independence, a number of committed British activists travelled to North Africa and Africa to meet FLN representatives : on their return, some lobbied the British government and administration in favour of the FLN, and most recounted their experiences in a number of public speeches (including in Parliament) and in a variety of publications and photographic reports, notably in the press. By 1957, several spaces had become the focus of attention of the government, the voluntary sector and anticolonial networks in Britain : North African cities, centres for refugees (sometimes rural, sometimes urban) and the Algerian maquis. In Algeria, parallel visits organised by the French government used the Algerian space (including the Sahara) to promote ideals of modernity and growth, in both urban and rural settings. This paper investigates the ways in which each space was used by the FLN to bring out particular strands of its liberation diplomacy to its British interlocutors, within the wider global context, and assesses the respective impact of these spaces on British anticolonial activists. Based on a variety of archives, this paper demonstrates that the spatialisation of independence movements in Africa, often underplayed, was in fact a structuring element of anticolonial activity in Europe, influencing not simply depictions of nationalist movements but policy decisions. It also shows that the « city diplomacy » of the major panafrican conferences, like Tunis in 1960 and Cairo in 1961, was rendered more effective by a wealth of other initiatives based on African ruralities.

As the armed struggle against Portugal advanced, FRELIMO employed the term "Liberated zones" to allude to the rural areas of northern Mozambique which were taken under its control. However, similarly to Algerian FLN or Guinean and Cape Verdean PAIGC, FRELIMO's "Liberated zones" were not just a territory. In FRELIMO's usually text-heavy information and propaganda materials, the "Liberated zones" were depicted as a sort of laboratory where "The people of Mozambique" were collectively experiencing the economic and social life that would govern the "New Mozambique." Based on archival research conducted in Portuguese, Dutch and North American archives, and on a vast collection of audiovisual materials raging from magazines, pictures, pamphlets, press releases, TV reports to films, this paper explores the visual emergence of the "Liberated zones" in FRELIMO's media diplomacy. To this effect, I will focus on the period from mid-1967 to mid-1969, as it is in this short time-frame that FRELIMO carried out the bulk of its diplomatic activity from Dar es Salaam (where its headquarters were) and Algiers (where its main Political Office was) to the "Liberated zones" of Niassa and Cabo Delgado. I argue that, in opposition to the urban imagery of the modern African capitals of Lourenço Marques and Luanda, which were the two emblems of the Portuguese "New State" in Africa, FRELIMO found in the rural site of the Mozambican "Liberated zones" its more iconic space of "Liberation." From 1969, foreign press, heads of states and international officials became frequent visitors to the carefully constructed space of FRELIMO's "Liberated zones."

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam housed the headquarters of many exiled African liberation movements. Grouped together in offices along Nkrumah Street, their representatives moved in cosmopolitan circles that formed around favoured bars, cafés, and restaurants, as well as at more official events, like diplomatic receptions. There they associated with journalists, local elites, diplomats, and the subversive operatives of white minority rule. Through both their rent-seeking behaviour and their ideological or ethnic affinities with local elites, the liberation movements became embedded in Tanzanian political affairs. The Tanzanian government became alarmed by the destabilising potential of the presence of these leaders, especially given their constant need for financial support and therefore assumed venality. In response, the authorities placed limits on the numbers of liberation movement representatives permitted in Dar es Salaam, rusticating or imprisoning those who contravened such regulations. This was apiece with the anti-urban animus of ujamaa socialism, which portrayed the city as a site of rumour and moral corruption. In particular, this paper highlights the role played by Potlako Leballo, the leader of the Pan-Africanist Congress of South Africa, in undermining a coup plot against led by dissident Tanzanians. By contextualising the diplomatic activities of multiple exiled leaders in the political geography of Dar es Salaam, this paper complicates existing branches of liberation movement historiography, which tend to focus either on Cold War diplomacy or a particular national(ist) case-study, often at the exclusion of the political 'noise' which surrounded their exile experience.