In a 1975 essay, Chinua Achebe writes: ‘the nationalist movement in British West Africa after the Second World War brought about a mental revolution which began to reconcile us to ourselves’ (145). Achebe here singles out the revolutionary impact that nationalist movements could have at the ‘mental’ level, possibly going a great way in bringing about what he calls ‘a reconciliation with oneself’. Mid-century decolonisation gathered much of its momentum from such anti-colonial nationalist mobilisations across Africa and Asia. As Achebe records, the power of nationalist movements at a psycho-political level were undeniable, and they induced many colonised subjects to be actional. ‘Creat[ing] a real dialectic between [the] body and the world’ (Fanon 1952, 83), such mobilisations were conducive to remaking people’s ways of relating to themselves and their world. Yet the contextually diverse attributes and processes of anti-colonial nationalisms also had uneven effects. Their Janus-faced aspects have been a key preoccupation of Postcolonial Theory. Sometimes, as Neil Lazarus (2009), Crystal Bartolovich (2002) and Benita Parry (2004) have discussed, this has been to the detriment of understanding its role in sustaining anti-colonial momentum up to and beyond independence, but also to the benefit of examining the darker outcomes of some nationalisms in post-independence contexts (such as territorial secessions or ethnic conflict). The latter have been immortalised in cultural production ranging from novels to plays, films to poetry. Unresolved and riven with contradictions, the lived experience and subjective effects of anti-colonial nationalisms are grappled with time and time again in post-independence texts.