This chapter outlines the ethnographic and qualitative methodology employed in this study. The methodological choices focus on understanding language ideologies in a multilingual setting. The study does not engage in a linguistic focus on speech patterns and instead emphasizes the cultural and social meanings that speakers attach to language. It challenges monolingual, Western-centric assumptions by exploring complex links between language and social structures. Data collection included interviews, field notes, observations, classroom recordings, and surveys on language use. The study uses grounded theory to analyse data, and it prioritizes speakers’ perspectives as experts of their own language culture. The chapter argues that decolonising research practices have to treat local language ideologies as legitimate frameworks rather than folk beliefs. A linguistic analysis examines public English, inspecting its variability and influence from both local and external norms. By integrating linguistic, cultural, and social data, the methodological approach provides a holistic view of how language ideologies emerge and intersect with broader social discourses.

Previous scholars claimed there were no women in the African Association (AA); however, from at least the early 1930s a significant percentage of several chapters’ formal membership was made up of women. It is possible that some of them were inspired by the AA’s message of redemptive pan-Africanism, but Chapter 5 argues that the practical pan-Africanism strand was often most enticing for the women who joined. Many of these entrepreneurial female activists found a pan-African identity useful in helping them meet specific needs, accomplishing personal or collective objectives, or gaining a voice in the largely male-dominated political sphere and access to governing authorities. But the women and men of the AA did not always agree on the proper way to build the African nation and the Association served as an arena of contested space. This chapter unpacks the implications of this rare example of a mixed-gendered political organization in colonial Africa.

Chapter 6 demonstrates how the African Association (AA) utilized the political concept of umoja to build an organizational structure that would create the unity needed to create progress in their various spheres of action: local, territorial, regional, and global. The organizational pinnacle of their African unity were five Association-wide conferences with continental aspirations. However, the continental vision and project of the AA was dramatically altered in the late 1940s and early 1950s due to both changing geopolitics and interassociational feuds that spurred territorial self-interest and the splitting of the Association. Using a framework of competing nationalisms, the chapter demonstrates how the moves from a continental African nationalism to territorial anti-colonial nationalisms were contested and not inevitable. Thus, the creation of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) in Tanganyika and the Afro-Shirazi Party in the Zanzibar Protectorate stemming out of the AA were not natural progressions but constituted a shrinking of vision and reengineering of aspirations.

This chapter synthesises the findings and discusses how sociomaterial processes shape languages. Challenging modernist linguistic paradigms, it examines how language categories emerge through diverse cultural, historical, and material practices. The chapter critiques binary linguistic models and universalist, teleological assumptions of standardisation, showing that stable linguistic systems are not ‘natural’, but result from specific sociopolitical and material conditions. In contrast, fluid linguistic practices in postcolonial and globalised contexts exhibit variability, innovation, and complex indexicality. Belize’s multilingual environment exemplifies a setting without a hegemonic linguistic centre, producing liquid linguistic norms. The chapter argues for decolonial approaches to linguistics that embrace heterogeneity and that challenge exclusionary, Eurocentric models. Ultimately, it positions fluid linguistic practices as a cultural avant-garde and understands postcolonial environments as inspiring insights into future global sociolinguistic orders shaped by digitalisation and transnationalism.

Chapter 4 is the first of two chapters exploring the lives of those who embraced the practical pan-Africanism of the African Association (AA) and why they chose to buy into an inclusive African identity. Reconstructing the demographic makeup of the organization through utilizing membership lists and application forms reveals that far from being an exclusive group of Western-educated elites (as previously believed), the membership of the group came from a plethora of professional, educational, and social backgrounds and were ethnically and geographically diverse. The AA’s diversity stemmed from its inclusive appeal to any black African regardless of ethnicity, religion, education, wealth, gender, or territorial origin, and its claim to be the sauti ya watu waafrika, the voice of the people of Africa. The AA’s pan-African ideas appealed most to those who fit uncomfortably in ethnically organized Tanganyika or culturally stratified Zanzibar and sought practical solutions to colonial life.