This paper reviews Andrew Battell’s primary source material for the Jaga (Imbangala) of Angola as printed by Samuel Purchas from 1613 to 1625 in Purchas, his pilgrimage and Purchas, his Pilgrimes. It argues that Purchas most often altered Battell’s data in response to rivalries and Reformation politics in England rather than on new information from Battell. A broad, comparative reading of Purchas’s materials and statistical analysis of his editorial practices demonstrates that Purchas exerted more effort to counter data based on hearsay in the popular Relation of Pigafetta and Lopes than on carefully recording eyewitness data from Andrew Battell.

The rise of the Kingdom of Dahomey in the first quarter of the eighteenth century was a watershed event in the political history of precolonial West Africa. This article draws on a newly rediscovered copy of William Snelgrave’s diary who visited King Agaja of Dahomey in April 1727. The diary provides the fullest account to date of Agaja’s motives for invading Whydah in March 1727. In addition, the Diary provides the earliest evidence confirming the bona fides of Bulfinch Lambe’s 1731 mission to England to establish commercial relations with King George II.

Alexander Scott’s narrative of his captivity in the Sahara in the early nineteenth century presents a curious example of how information of foreign lands was received and legitimized in Britain. Through the input of individuals such as Joseph Banks and James Rennell, Scott’s tale was presented as an authoritative account of the inaccessible West African interior. This article pursues this process of authentication and demonstrates how elements of the editors” preconceived notion of the region colored the subsequent text and associated cartography.

This article focuses on the texts known as the “Agadez Chronicles” and “Y Tarichi,” which have been used by historians of the Central Sahara and Sahel to reconstruct the history of the Sultanate of Agadez and the Ader Kingdom in today’s Republic of Niger. The most frequently cited of these texts are published translations of copies of Arabic manuscripts that were made available to French and British colonial administrators by members of the elites of Agadez, Ader, and Sokoto in the first decade of the twentieth century. This article suggests that the copies handed over to the representatives of European empires had been altered to promote the interests of the local elites who circulated these sources. The article compares texts in the Agadez corpus with independent sources on the history of this region in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries; it discusses the political context in which the Agadez Chronicles were circulated at the beginning of the twentieth century; and it considers the implications of the proposed reinterpretations for the historiography of the Aïr and Ader regions.

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Hausa migrants traveled to the Cameroon Grassfields where they established multiple settlements known as abakwa, a term referring to descendants of mixed marriages between Hausa men and local, mainly non-Muslim women. Previous historical studies on Hausa diaspora communities in West Africa have largely concentrated on the spread of commerce and Islam. By contrast, this article asks how gendered power asymmetries, together with the essential diaspora factors of distance and travel, influenced the marital relationships that made the diaspora possible. This approach to Hausa diaspora history emerges from Islamic court records dating from the late 1940s to the early 1960s in British mandated territory. The founding of the court resulted in the institutionalization of Islamic household patriarchy as well as debates over Hausa values, especially marriage as a primary site of belonging and patriarchal control. This article demonstrates that marital negotiations and distance interacted with colonial legal structures and community patriarchy in a manner that both intensified women’s vulnerability and provided opportunities to strategically forge new identities and relationships.

This paper is about the exploration of discrepancies between words and deeds of Portuguese colonial rule in Guinea-Bissau, Portugal pretending to “integrate” and “enable” into colonial society those individuals of African origin who were deemed to be “civilized.” The essay illustrates potentials and limitations of margins of maneuver of those supposedly subjected under colonial rule. Against this background I will analyze the transformations, continuities, and ruptures of creole identities throughout time, showing how identitarian categories and classifications evolved, changed, and disappeared. It will be shown how the intersection with other identities has been a key characteristic of creole identity over time. In doing so, the analysis focuses on different areas, such as population demographics and classifications, education, and political participation.

This paper traces the development of studies of African household budgets in South Africa, from the 1920s up to the 1970s, and indeed in summary form till the present. It argues that, although the genre seems to be politically neutral, and only concerned to establish “the facts,” in reality the outcome of the various researches, and certainly their presentation was dependent on the political and institutional position of the researcher, whether “liberal,” linked to commercial institutions, or as part of the apartheid state.

This paper offers a critique of the existing historiography on the late apartheid period, arguing that white workers’ role in and experience of the unraveling of racial privilege in the labor arena has been obscured by a focus on the high politics of reform and on anti-apartheid resistance emanating from African labor and the broader black population. Reporting from the archive, it discusses two under-utilized archival collections – that of the Commission of Inquiry into Labour Legislation and of the Mineworkers’ Union – as sources for starting to write white working-class organization, politics, identity, and experience into the history of reform and resistance, thereby adding a new dimension to South Africa’s broadly conceived struggle history.

In this article I use oral and documentary evidence gathered during recent fieldwork and archival research in the UK and Kenya to explore the ways in which the Church of Scotland Mission to Kenya attempted to use sport to “civilize” and “discipline” the people of Central Kenya. I make a case for the important contributions the topic of sport can make to the study of African and colonial history, and offer a comprehensive critique of the only book-length work which explores the history of sport in colonial Kenya, John Bale and Joe Sang’s Kenyan Running (1996).

This article explores how indigenous games such as wrestling were marginalized during the colonial era and the contemporary impact of this legacy. Through the sport of wrestling’s neotraditional resurgence, I argue that the sport’s contemporary iteration which emerged behind the imposing walls of Kenya’s penitentiaries provides an important window into historic discourse and state control of sport rooted in the colonial past. Paying close attention to the methodological challenges and opportunities researchers of indigenous sport face, the article also examines the sources available for scholars interested in investigating the social history of indigenous sport in Africa.

This article explores one source through which African women’s sport history can be drawn and interpreted: the sport sections of African newspapers. In the case of Kenya, the major dailies, Daily Nation and The East African Standard, are repositories of information pertaining to the challenges that confronted female athletes. Taking into account the history and development of these media, the article addresses the question of why did Kenyan women lag behind their male counterparts in entering the sport at an international level? Focusing on the early post-colonial period, it is argued that institutional barriers abroad as well as economic and cultural factors at home disproportionately disadvantaged female runners in their career progression. These conclusions would be difficult to substantiate without investigating the Kenyan press, a valuable source for anyone seeking to access information about the lives of the women who have contributed to Africa’s sport history.

I argue that the postcolonial Senegalese soccer stadium became a space for imagining and performing the nation for separatists from the Casamance region who tied their separatist discourse to the fortunes of Casa-Sports, a soccer club based in Ziguinchor. The twin histories of Casamançais soccer and separatism demonstrate the interplay of “space” and “place” in the stadium – constructed originally for defining and controlling the Senegalese nation but commandeered by separatists for subverting it. Non-elite Casa-Sports supporters, however, contested or ignored separatist assertions that supporting Casa-Sports meant supporting separatism, and vice versa. Thus, these non-elites revealed the stadium as a “space-place” for simultaneous, multiple national imaginings.

This short report gives the rationale behind the creation of the website https://archivescolonialesbrazzaville.wordpress.com/, dedicated to the colonial archives of French Equatorial Africa in January 2015. It is argued that researchers and archivists can build highly useful websites in Africa even with a limited Internet connection.

The IFAN manuscript collection, including several fonds, is a very rich repository of mostly Arabic materials coming from different regions of the former Afrique Occidentale Française. Notwithstanding some of these manuscripts have been explored by historians since the colonial period, the potential of this collection is still untapped. This note focuses on some historical accounts from the Fonds Brevié, Fonds Vieillard, and Fonds Gaden.