This essay examines issues of ageing and old age in Xhosa-speaking communities to c. 1860. Drawing primarily on records of the Wesleyan Methodist and London Missionary societies, the article examines the construction of Xhosa ageing, old age and death in missionary writings. The primary medium of missionary reflection was the figure of the ‘Abandoned Mother’, modelled on contemporary British metaphors, that represented yet another atrocity story for legitimating the mission enterprise and the emerging colonial regime. It also argues that there were fundamental contrasts in the images of ageing and dying between those of the Xhosa and those of the missionaries. Though older persons found certain themes in the Christian message attractive, they preferred the local cultural model of ageing, old age and death.

During the British colonial period a substantial young African population emerged in Dar es Salaam. Both colonial officials and African elders viewed this with dismay. They felt the resulting demoralisation of African youth posed a threat to both (African) authority and (colonial) order. However, measures aimed at addressing the ramifications of this phenomenon were mostly unsuccessful. Ironically, whilst British colonial policy aimed to keep African youth quiescent in rural, gerontocratic, tribal administrations, colonialism in fact provided the context in which both rapid urbanization and generational tension occurred. These continued to occur after independence; and it is argued that TANU politicians not only inherited the problems associated with the administration of the Tanganyikan capital, but that their responses were influenced by European and ‘elite’ African attitudes of the colonial era.

This article explores political tensions between successive nineteenth-century rulers of the inland delta of the Niger in central Mali (the Fulbe Diina of Hamdullahi and the Futanke successors of al-Hajj Umar) and the pastoral interests of the Fulbe chiefdoms on their eastern periphery, in a region known as the Hayre. A close study of changing forms of local governance and natural resource management demonstrates that although different strategies were employed by the Fulbe and Futanke states to control the Hayre, the internal dynamics of the region can only partly be explained by the influence of these central powers.

Mali's Office du Niger was conceived on a monumental scale to produce cotton for the French textile industry after the First World War. Undaunted by the conspicuous absence of both manpower and a viable crop, Émile Bélime, the scheme's originator and presiding genius, believed colonial authorities could compel people from all over French West Africa to settle there. Under pressure from Paris, local administrators became his recruiting agents, forcibly resettling some 30,000 Africans by 1945, when the colonial ministry privately declared the scheme an unqualified failure. In 1960, France recycled the project as a prototype of disinterested aid to a developing country.

In the early colonial period the frontier towns of Kayes and Medine on the Upper Senegal River were home to a community of Muslim originaires of the four communes of Senegal. The article examines this group's efforts to establish and maintain a Muslim tribunal in Kayes, thus preserving a space for their privilege and identity within the French colonial system. But while their appeals to the colonial administration were successful in 1905, a 1912 revision of the legal system took away their privilege and made Muslim originaires constituents of native courts. The article provides context for understanding the Muslims' protests, as well as the administration's changing attitudes towards them. Whereas much of the literature on the originaires has focused on their status as assimilated Africans with voting rights, this article calls attention to their identity as Muslims.

The French in West Africa remained deeply ambivalent in regard to applying naturalization policies to their African subjects. Applying a distinction between ‘citizenship’ and ‘nationality’, this article traces the history of French colonial policy from 1789 through decolonization in the 1950s. Apart from the originaires of the four communes of Senegal, who had ill-defined rights of French citizenship without ever being considered French nationals, naturalization policy in West Africa became so restrictive that no more than sixteen individuals were granted French citizenship each year between 1935 and 1949. This article uses dossiers of naturalization cases from French West Africa.