This paper considers an under-used and under-discussed archive of unpublished documentary sources that concern the rise and fall of an eastern Congolese warlord, Ngongo Luteta, during the late nineteenth century. It argues that Africanist historians not only need to pay greater attention to unpublished documentary sources – the weight of methodological discussion usually orients around oral sources – but also to treat them with the same interpretive rigor as oral sources. The argument is demonstrated by discussing the existing studies of Ngongo Luteta, which tend to focus on oral fieldwork even while they often employ documentary sources, and, then, pointing to some interpretive strategies for unpublished documentary sources that suggests a more complicated history of the interactions between Ngongo Luteta and the emergent Congo Free State.

Since assuming power after the 1994 genocide, President Paul Kagame and his political party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, have struggled to unite Rwanda’s citizens using, among other initiatives, a simplified version of Rwandan history to diminish the ethnic tensions that made the 1994 genocide possible. As a result, Rwanda’s history has become highly politicized, with vastly divergent versions of the nation’s past narrated in private settings, where it is more politically appropriate for Rwandans to share their experiences. This paper focuses on divergent representations of Rwandan monarchical figures – often unnamed – whom the narrators imbue with values according to their individual political affiliations, lived experiences, and identity. These narratives are indicative of the broader ways that modern Rwandans narrate their experiences of history in response to Rwanda’s current official history, as well as previous official histories. Careful analysis reveals much about the current political climate in post-genocide Rwanda: most notably, that Rwandans continue to see their nation’s past through vastly different lenses, demonstrating the enormous challenges facing the Rwandan government as it seeks to reconcile its population using current methods. It also highlights the ongoing need on the part of historians to approach contemporary sources critically, informed by sources produced and debated in the pre-genocide period.

Memories of political pedagogies in the elite colonial classroom are typically fragmentary and constitute limited historical evidence. But when contextualized and used in combination with coetaneous sources, such as textbooks and lesson notes, they can be crucial in the reconstruction of the transmission of political knowledge, its classroom assimilation and postcolonial negotiation. This article pieces together a number of unconnected but mutually consistent epiphanic moments in the life-writing and interviews of writers Chinua Achebe and Chike Momah, tracing and identifying a mysterious textbook of logic – R.W. Jepson’s Clear Thinking (1936) – and its use as a tool to rein in and redirect anti-colonial nationalist undercurrents at Government College, Umuahia, the elite colonial school famous for having produced eight renowned Nigerian writers.

This paper reflects on the ways in which Eritrea has been written about since circa 2001, the point at which the country entered a new phase of heightened authoritarianism and increased international isolation. It considers the ways in which Eritrea has been seen largely in “presentist” terms, due in no small way to the Eritrean government’s own intrinsic hostility to independent historical research, with an overwhelming fixation on its dire human rights and governance record, and on the nature of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), which governs in all but name. The paper urges a more historical approach, beginning with the critical three decades that preceded the emergence of the EPLF in the early 1970s.

There is a growing interest in the historical attitudes to work globally. This paper studies the stereotype of the “lazy African” in European travel accounts from precolonial West Africa. This was one of the central aspects in the European construction of an African “other” during this period, and came to be used as a justification for much European oppression in Africa in both precolonial and colonial times. It is argued in the paper that the stereotype has existed for much longer than suggested in previous literature in the field. Previous studies have also made over-simplified statements about the stereotype, since it overlooks a most significant trend among European writers, who described not only idleness, but also industriousness, among the Africans they wrote about. By the late eighteenth century, finally, the development of an anti-slavery ideology was followed by a challenge to the whole stereotype.

This essay gives an historiographical introduction to the article “On Burning One’s Bridge: The Context of Gluckman’s Zulu Fieldwork,” by Robert Gordon.

Gluckman’s 1940 essay “An Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand” (aka as “The Bridge”) is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential in social anthropology for signalling a paradigm shift. This paper publishes a chapter of a previously unpublished, undated manuscript by Gluckman – probably from 1946 – describing how he did fieldwork in Zululand. A contextualizing essay discusses why Gluckman went to Zululand, what his preparations were, how he famously got “banned,” the role of the regent and the native commissioners in orchestrating this, and how local anti-semitism also played its part. It also suggests that his “banning,” coupled to his marriage in 1939 to Mary Brignoli, a member of the communist party, were crucial factors leading to this paradigm change. Finally, the afterlife of “The Bridge” is sketched showing how dismal was its original reception among peers and colleagues.

James Stuart was employed by the Natal government to make a “compilation” describing British military operations against a Zulu insurrection in 1906, but he took so long to complete the work that it was published in 1913 with private funds and included a discussion of the event’s aftermath. In this critical analysis of Stuart’s work, emphasis is placed on the long process of its compilation and writing as well as Stuart’s use of sources, and the internal coherence of his argument.

The paper looks at the population registration and issuing of reference books in the Transkei in the 1950s and 1960s. The dompas became the iconic object of apartheid policing within the logic of urban racial segregation and capitalist labour exploitation. The analysis proposed here investigates population registration through the lens of materiality and visuality. It sketches the visual economies that facilitated the scheme in a rural area and explores the role of photography in one of apartheid’s most notorious administrative schemes. Along the lines of Walter Benjamin’s reflections on technological mediation the paper retraces how the dompas as an image/object oscillated between panoptic surveillance and subaltern contestation.

This introduction explains why it is important to include the history of labor and labor relations in Africa in Global Labor History. It suggests that the approach of the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations 1500–2000 – with its taxonomy of labor relations – is a feasible method for applying this approach to the historiography on labor history in Africa. The introduction ends with an analysis of four case studies that are presented in this special section, with a specific focus on shifts in labor relations and how they could be explained.

Previous studies of past labor relations in different parts of Africa have relied almost entirely on documentary sources. While such records can provide valuable insights into the range of different labor categories that have existed and the relative proportions of the population involved, for much of the continent they are severely restricted in a temporal sense. Thus, for many areas suitable documentary materials covering the periods prior to 1850 are scarce; as is the case, for example, for much of East Africa. To extend scholarly understanding of the nature of labor relations prior to this date, alternative sources need to be utilized. This paper presents a brief overview of the potential scope for utilizing archaeological data, with specific reference to mainland Tanzania. The paper also highlights the many limitations of archaeological data and offers some thoughts on how these might be addressed from both a conceptual and methodological perspective. The paper concludes with an appeal for more studies oriented toward investigation of the archaeological remains of the last five hundred years and greater dialogue between the region’s historians and archaeologists.

This article analyzes trends in demography and labor relations in Tanzania for four cross-sections: 1800, 1900, 1950, and 2000. It discusses the quality and nature of the sources available on demography and labor relations in Tanzania for the aforementioned cross-sections. Subsequently, it reconstructs the main trends in the population size and composition, and connects them to the major shifts in labor relations in relation to the major historical events that took place in Tanzania over the last two centuries.

This article looks at the shifts and continuities in labor relations in Zimbabwe from c. 1900–2000. It does so by looking at three cross sections (1904, 1951, and 2002) to examine the changes that have taken place. By exploring the continuities (subsistence agriculture) and shifts (limited industrialization and urbanization) of labor relations over this period, it is hoped that the article provides a comprehensive account of the rapid and radical changes Zimbabwe underwent during the twentieth century and the impacts these have had on the peoples and economies within the southern African nation.

In Angola, a trend towards labor commodification, set in motion under the impact of the nineteenth-century produce trade and colonial rule, has been reversed in the decades since independence. Angolans have always worked mainly in the reciprocal sphere, but with the growing commercialization of the economy after the abolition of the slave trade, self-employment has also become a constant in Angolan labor history. By 2000, the rural population was thrown back to subsistence farming, while the larger part of the urban population has tried to survive by self-employment in the informal economy. Wage labor, widespread under colonialism, has become less common.

The archival sources gathered for my PhD research have all been posted to a blog, www.opensourceguinea.org. Among other things, the sources trace the migrants and laborers in and around the plantation island of Fernando Pó, moving through numerous empires and societies in Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Cameroon and Gabon for most of the twentieth century. Having sources “speak for themselves” to the “public” and even “amongst themselves” contributes not only to an expansionary information commons, but also to a methodological reorganization and pluralization. When a multiplicity of sources are displayed and interlinked as hypertext, the static conceptual lenses of traditional social and cultural history dissolve.

This report provides practical ideas and methodological warnings regarding the use of Ghanaian archives for the writing of social history.

The first years of Gaskiya ta fi Kwabo, the oldest Hausa newspaper, have recently been made available online for research. They provide a sometimes idiosyncratic perspective on the Second World War.