At fifty, History in Africa remains unique in the academic publishing landscape. Historical debates, innovative analysis, and attention to methods are central to the challenge of writing and researching any history. We know that the stakes are different for the continent because African history is often overlooked and misrepresented. Various forms of information, knowledge, and learning have been facing attack in different ways and on a global scale. HiA continues to be a home for in-depth explorations, reflections, and discussions of epistemological questions about what happened in the African past.

The literature on freed Africans who returned from Brazil to West Africa in the nineteenth century has emphasized the centrality of Catholicism in Aguda identity, treating Islam as a marginal consideration despite its role in catalyzing the returnee movement. This article argues that Muslims formed an important component of the returnee population throughout the century. Taking as a case history the life of Saliu Salvador Ramos das Neves, a returnee who founded one of Lagos’s oldest mosques, the paper reconstructs his trajectory on both sides of the Atlantic. The analysis begins with the political context of his enslavement, moving on to his life in Bahia, Brazil, where he witnessed an important Muslim uprising, purchased his freedom, and formed a family with whom he emigrated to Lagos in 1857. In Lagos, he acquired land, expanded his family and household, and became an important leader among Muslim returnees. The article’s final section presents evidence that even after returning to Lagos, Saliu Salvador maintained commercial and affective ties to Brazil, as did many other Aguda Muslims. Some of those who engaged in trade were religious leaders, a fact that demonstrates Islam’s importance in the dynamics of the Black Atlantic.

Court records are rich primary sources to social historians, and much attention has been paid to these types of documents in different African territories. In most cases only summaries have survived, but in Angola complete proceedings have been preserved. Examining the court case collection available at the Benguela District Court, we discuss its strengths and methodological challenges, and present possible themes for future research. The use of these records reveals new aspects of the Angolan past, including more information on local norms and the ability of African women to use the Portuguese courts.

The violent and competitive context in which trade relations between the states of Senegambia and Europeans evolved required moments of calm and stability, which were decisive and important factors in the cohabitation of trade actors. Diplomacy was a fundamental political lever for European trade in Senegambia. It had become a major stake in the daily lives of the actors. Diplomacy was generally reserved for field actors from different political cultures and with different political and economic ambitions. Diplomacy took the form of negotiations, and took the form of simple agreements of principle, notably in the context of palavers, or the conclusion of trade and peace treaties. The aim of diplomacy, for example, was to establish strong, peaceful commercial relations between trade players and to regularize the tax system, which was the fundamental basis of trade and the expression of the sovereignty of local chiefs towards the Europeans.

Recent archaeological and paleoenvironmental research in the Ndali Crater Lakes Region (NCLR) of western Uganda provide important new insights into anthropogenic impacts on moist forests to the East of the Rwenzori Mountains. This research significantly changes previous interpretations of paleoenvironmental records in western Uganda and helps to distinguish climate change from human impacts. By drawing on multiple sources such as historical linguistics, archaeological evidence, and environmental proxies for change, a new picture emerges for a region that was a cultural crossroads for early Bantu-speakers and Central Sudanic-speakers between 400 BCE and 1000 CE. Detailed archaeological data and well-dated sites provide fine-grained evidence that closely fits episodes of significant environmental change, including a later and separate phase of forest clearance, soil degradation, and lake pollution caused by the saturation of the landscape by Bigo-related populations between 1300 and 1650 CE.

Fresque de changements environnementaux induits par l’homme et le climat dans l’ouest de l’Ouganda : la région des lacs du cratère de Ndali

Archival aerial photographs are a unique but underused and potentially game-changing source to study twentieth-century environmental and climate change dynamics. While satellite imagery with comparable high resolution appeared only in the early twenty-first century, archival aerial imagery with native sub-1-meter resolution became ubiquitous in the 1940s. Archival aerial photography therefore quadruples the time depth of high-resolution analysis to eighty years, allowing for a more reliable identification of structural trends. Moreover, the greater time-depth brings into focus the Great Acceleration that started in the 1940s, and virtually in real time. The article uses a human manual analysis of a sample from two time series (1943 and 1971) of archival photographs of the Oshikango area of Namibia (see Figure 1) to demonstrate how aerial photography complements conventional datasets. Namibia was one of the first places in colonial Africa where what subsequently became the standard protocol for “aerial mapping” was used and for which the imagery and the “flight plans” have survived. The standard protocol makes the imagery compatible with any archival aerial photography from the 1940s to 1990s and the flight plans contain key information to identify, interpret, and combine the individual photographs into orthomosaics. Although the use of manual analysis of aerial photography is not new, unlocking the full explanatory potential of high-resolution mass data requires machine reading and analysis. Current machine reading methods, however, are based on the pixel method, which identifies such features as farms, water holes, and trees only as low-resolution pixel aggregates. In contrast, the object method of machine analysis, combined with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology to unlock the sub-1-meter native resolution of historical aerial photography, renders visible individual trees and other features, including their precise location and size, allowing for the dimensions of trees and other features to be measured between different time series of images. The interrelationships between different features in the environment can thus be assessed more precisely in space and over time, for example comparing tree growth and surface water sources. A major challenge is that the object method used for high resolution geospatial imagery cannot be easily applied to monochromatic archival aerial photography because it has been designed for analyzing multispectral satellite imagery. As discussed in the article, using the manual sample as a training data set for an experimental machine-learning protocol demonstrates proof of concept for automatically extracting such features as farms, water holes and trees as individual objects from archival aerial photography. This increases the time depth of available high-resolution land use, environmental, and climate data from 2000 back to the 1940s and provides a base line for the Great Acceleration and brings the massive changes from the 1940s through the 1990s in focus as captured in aerial photography.

This article focuses on Ghana’s National Reconciliation Commission’s (NRC) archival holdings, which hold enormous value as a source for scholarly research but constitute a target of destructive forces, prompting the government to impose restrictive policies to regulate access to them. This article argues that in spite of the prevailing restrictions, opportunities exist for original enquiry into the NRC and Ghana’s human rights history through the piecemeal and selective access offered by the various repositories to researchers.

This note seeks to bring awareness to the wide variety of archival documents available for research in urban history in Kumase, Ghana’s second city and capital of the historic Asante Kingdom. We draw mainly on our experiences researching the history of Jackson Park, one of colonial Kumase’s earliest public parks.

This short report discusses the resources to be found in the Railway Archive in Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana. This report is also the result of various exploratory missions, as part of a cooperative effort between the Ghana Railway Company, the Institute of African Studies of the University of Ghana, and the International Institute of Social History, the Netherlands. The archive under consideration is classified as an institutional archive which provides unique insights into the social and labor history of Ghana– then Gold Coast– with some connections to West Africa and Great Britain. The archives provide additional material to the resources in the national archives in Ghana, best known as the Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD).

How has historical scholarship fared in Africa? What is the state of decolonization and deconstruction historiography in the production of historical knowledge on the continent? What role does the state play in aiding or undermining historians’ access to official historical data and the production of historical knowledge in postcolonial Africa? This article engages these questions. It harps on the reconstruction of African intellectual history as a daunting postcolonial challenge, and argues that historians on Africa need to engage with and reexamine the development of the discipline of history in Africa in relation to the debates on decolonization and the enterprise of history-writing in the production of historical knowledge and historical scholarship across the continent. This illuminates the understanding of the history of contemporary Africa. It also throws fresh light on the continent’s remote past as a way of establishing its connections with the present. Complementary to the problems of writing the history of contemporary Africa, this work argues that to appreciate and understand the problems of history-writing on Africa, we need to focus on the development and limitations of the discipline across the institutional sites of the universities in postcolonial Africa.