This article studies the issue of inflation in precolonial West Africa. In a recent publication, it was argued that there was substantial inflation in West Africa as early as the seventeenth century. In this article, data from the Gold Coast is reported, in order to show that the prices of slaves, used in recent previous research to analyze inflation, is a poor proxy for the prices of other traded commodities. Contrasting the case of the Gold Coast to that of Dahomey, it is furthermore shown that different societies in West Africa experienced different trends around the same period of time, cautioning against generalizations about broader regions.

Following the article by Klas Rönnbäck, this article responds by stressing some key elements missing from the original article. These include the connection of African economic history to world economic history, the question of periodization and economic change, and the issue of currency devaluation in the period in question. The response concludes by posing several questions of the theoretical assumptions made by economists regarding data, and problematizes the applicability of such models to a distant pre-colonial African past.

The famous 1957 wager between Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana is a signal event in modern African history. Yet it has never been adequately historicized. How did this fateful meeting come about? An archival discovery reveals the hidden history of the wager’s construction. This wager inaugurated a tradition of comparison between Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire that shaped both the ways that Côte d’Ivoire was seen by social scientists and the ways that Ivorians saw themselves.

In Ghana and other regions of West Africa a funeral poster is an important part of funerary ritual. Examining two funeral posters – one about omission and the other about inclusion of names – printed to commemorate two chiefs in two Ewe communities in Ghana and Togo, this article shows funeral posters as arenas of contestation, negotiation, affirmation, and elaboration of beliefs and conflicting views. The article argues that funeral posters are written with a local audience in mind, which means that they are a very useful source for historical enquiry about how people address the subjects of kinship and relationships among chiefs.

The social isolation of the African soldiery is a recurrent assumption in the historiography of the Second World War in Anglophone Africa; such factors as the experience of Hausa soldiers within a cohesive barracks community, a strong sense of warrior identity, and few ties to civilian life are too often generalized into an account of the soldiery as necessarily isolated. Focusing on Ijebu in southwestern Nigeria, an area with little history of colonial military service prior to the Second World War, this paper will argue that far from being deeply isolated, Ijebu soldiers and their families strove desperately to maintain customary obligations during the men’s military service in South Asia and the Middle East in 1944 and 1945. By examining soldiers’ petitions to the Ijebu District Officer, as well as petitions from their wives, brothers, and parents, we will see that soldiers were bound by a powerful sense of obligation to their extended family not only in terms of financial support, but also in relation to labor, security, administration, and redistribution. Contextualizing these sources in terms of the ethnography of customary obligations in southwestern Nigeria, this paper will argue that neither soldiers nor their families primarily regarded these men as martial professionals, but instead perceived soldiering as a subordinate and secondary concern to family and economic commitments, as expressed through customary obligations. Although it likely differs from the experience of soldiers from supposedly “martial” groups, the experience of the Ijebu sheds light on the military service of the newer groups recruited during the war.

The introduction explores the ways in which Jan Vansina wrote Africa’s earlier history. It argues that he overturned paradigmatic knowledge in part through policing boundaries between disciplines, but always in search of new knowledge. The boundaries enclosed different kinds of labor in producing evidence about the past. Each kind of labor teaches the scholar something about place, responsibility, and imagination. These afterlives of working in Africa informed Vansina’s interdisciplinarian publishing strategies, shape-shifting them into the imaginative, and prompting new generations of scholars to chart their own paths.

This contribution argues that Vansina’s methodological rigor and deep reading of the dynamic nature of African communities across space and time ranks him as one of the most effective pioneers and research leaders in African history. His work on oral traditions and the necessity of reviewing generally accepted narratives, provided tools to a continent that was often ridiculed for not having a history. Although Vansina’s work had its limitations, and few of his writings were provocative to some, it firmly rebutted the idea that Africa was a traditional and forever unchanging continent.

The essay revisits Vansina’s work on the Kuba kingdom, drawing together art historical, historical linguistic, written documents, and oral sources. It argues that Vansina’s eclectic methodology fostered continual revision to his historical conclusions as new material in one of those threads forced rethinking interpretations of the others. Vansina’s captions to images of material forms from Kuba exemplify skilled compression while figuring African audiences, artisans, and owners of objects with humor and respect.

This tribute to Jan Vansina explores the role of archaeology in the investigation of early African history, arguing for more work on the relationship between politics and the practice of ritual. The well-trodden topic of migrations of Bantu-speakers is revisited to examine the potential of genetics and archaeology to contribute to their investigation. Vansina often claimed to be a positivist and empiricist but there are contradictions in his writings that are tied to his changing vision of the purpose of precolonial African historiography. His view that African history must be meaningful to Africans resonates with recent developments in African archaeology.

This short essay explores Jan Vansina’s contributions to the study of Africa’s early pasts. In particular, it explores the impact of sustained ethnographic fieldwork on Vansina’s narrative style, which often imagined for deeper pasts the sorts of small-scale social interactions definitive of most experiences of fieldwork. This narrative style produced a tension between Vansina’s interest in large-scale institutions and historical processes and the smaller-scale social interactions sustaining them, offering us new research topics. Attention to the historical significance of the sorts of intimate interactions imagined by Vansina requires new approaches to the variety of archives he compelled us to consider in the pages of this journal.

This introductory article reflects on the trajectories, possibilities, and limitations of studying institutional life in Africa, with a particular emphasis on Uganda. Engaging with some of the central issues articulated in the African Studies Association’s theme for the 2017 Annual Meeting – “Institutions: Creativity and Resilience in Africa” – it considers the category of “institution” and how it has been imagined and contested in Africa’s past and present. The article begins by examining the competing visions of institutions across the continent in the late colonial period. It then moves to a closer consideration of institutions within Uganda’s historiography, while also introducing the articles in this collection and the themes that tie them together. The final two sections turn to the question of sources, illuminating both the possibilities and limitations of recent developments regarding Uganda’s archives. In so doing, this article considers not only the shifting terrain of Uganda’s research landscape, but also explores the ways in which the study of institutional life is animated by deep, longstanding deliberations on questions of community, authority, and reciprocity.

This article examines the material underpinnings of the political diplomacy pursued by Ugandan leaders towards European colonial figures in the late nineteenth century. Imperial historians have traditionally understood the institutional processes of treaty-making, diplomacy and state administration as part of the workings of the European “Official Mind.” As such, analyses have been overwhelmingly based upon written colonial sources such as governmental papers. This article provides an alternative perspective on institutional life in Uganda by demonstrating that material objects also served as sites of political praxis for both the governed and those governing when exchanged in the form of a gift. The products of these exchanges can be found in museums across Uganda, Kenya, and Britain. Their biographies shed important new light on the interactions between the material and political worlds as well as between local leaders and the imperial state, yet they have received little critical attention from historians. This article seeks to reinstate their role into the political process, and in doing so, reconfigures our understanding of these different imperial institutions.

This article concerns some of the personal commitments and relationships that compelled British anthropologist Aidan Southall to write his seminal essay titled “The Illusion of Tribe” (1970). It analyzes the contested ethnic movement that Southall’s doctoral work on the Alur obscured, the reasons for this act of concealment, and the ways these experiences shaped the ideas he later advanced.

Africans historians have recently paid more attention to postcolonial archives, trying to locate these elusive collections as well as thinking more critically about how to use them. Uganda, in particular, has been an important site for reconsidering the role of postcolonial archives in historical research. Using the archives of Uganda Prisons Service as a case study, this article explores how official records can illuminate the social histories of public servants and the postcolonial state. Along with surveying the state of Uganda’s official archives – particularly those of the Uganda Prisons Service – it explores how these documents provide insight into the everyday experiences and concerns of prison officers after independence. Beyond its bureaucratic functions, paperwork served as a site in which officers could negotiate their responsibilities and relationships. Through the archives of the Uganda Prisons Service, we learn about the social worlds of prison officers within and beyond the prison walls, thus better understanding their experience of public service beyond narratives of corruption and brutality. Ultimately, this article demonstrates the ways in which official archives can be used to study the postcolonial state from a social history perspective.

In 1953, Lacito Okech, a precolonial royal messenger, Christian convert, and colonial chief, became the first Acholi to write and publish a history of his people. The book was instantly popular, inspiring many other Acholi to write histories of their respective chiefdoms. However, although these works constitute the bulk of vernacular Acholi histories, scholars have not paid attention to them, partly because of language limitations and partly due to limited scholarly interest in the history of the region. This article uses Okech’s life and book to explore important questions about the production of local history in colonial Acholiland. In particular, it explores Okech’s adroit manipulation of his complex circumstances at the intersection of the roles of messenger, convert, and colonial employee, his dilemmas as a local historian, and the influence of his roles as an intermediary between the Acholi on the one hand and the Church Missionary Society and the colonial regime on the other on his writing of history.

Literature on ethnicity in Africa meets literature on multispecies ethnography to their mutual benefit. Multispecies ethnography considers people together with other-than-human beings, insisting the figure of the human is an interspecific one. We explore the ways in which multispecies ethnography needs history as part of a story about power and politics. But, the burden of the essay argues that historians of ethnicity need multispecies ethnographers’ embrace of a broader canvas of life, in motion at many scales. Historians of ethnicity need a greater awareness of change and continuity in the presence of other-than-human life forms, over time. Those same historians also might adopt the readiness of multispecies ethnographers to recognize other than the descent metaphor at the heart of thinking and making groups.

This article argues that ritual performances of song by a guild of healers called basamize situate humans and other-than-human familiars in an ecology that has a strong impact on ethnic identification in southern Uganda. An idiomatic song, ubiquitous throughout the region in focus, helps define the contours of this ecology. Primary and secondary sources link the song to oral traditions that suggest a move beyond descent as an organizing principle in Africanist discourses on ethnicity and ethnic formation.

This article uses recently unearthed private papers and ethnographic fieldwork to explore the intersection of political practice and environmental ideation in colonial Buganda. In the early to mid-1900s, colonial administrators sought to draw Ganda interlocutors into abstract conversations about a natural world that was devoid of political power. Through Witchcraft Ordinances, imperial administrators sought to distance spirits, rocks, trees, snakes, and other life forms from the concrete world of social movement and dissent. But in late colonial Uganda, the trade unionist Erieza Bwete and the influential spirit prophet Kibuuka Kigaanira navigated environmental spaces that were imbued with political significance. Uganda’s economic and national histories, informed by methodologies that privileged philosophical materialism, overlooked how interactions with multispecies animated anticolonial politics and larger debates about authority. To challenge these earlier assumptions, this article shows how colonial literati and a late colonial prophet interacted with a natural world that was deeply political to conceptualize independence and challenge colonial power.

Many studies of ethnic formation find metaphors of descent at the core of largely masculinist discourse about belonging and difference. This study integrates the meaning, affect, and information-sharing prompted with the other-than-human beings – in particular, trees – enlisted during rhythmic assembly at an Island shrine in east Africa’s Inland Sea (Lake Victoria), in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Fostering ethnic identification there drew on lateral connections that crossed language, region, and standing without creating boundaries. A gendered discourse exceeding the masculine was likely indispensable to this sort of belonging. The beginning of a long period of bellicose state expansionism and the deep history of public healing in the region framed these developments.