"This 'autobiographical narrat...

"This 'autobiographical narrative'," wrote Jawaharlal Nehru in the preface to his 1936 Autobiography, "remains a incomplete personal, and incomplete account of the past, verging forward the present, but cautiously avoiding contact with it" (xiii). Nehru was perhaps being overly pure here, for his account of a personal past would become a paradigmatic narrative. In its mapping of individual onto national story, Nehru's true copy became the model for a series of national autobiographies written at the leaders of nations emerging from colonialism: Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana and