On the fiftieth anniversary of an ambiguous event – the referendum giving French Africans the choice of immediate independence or a new status within a ‘French Community’ – this article points to the alternative forms of political action which opened up at certain moments in African history and how, at other moments, some of those alternatives closed down. It assesses concepts, issues and arguments used in writing the history of Africa, now that the recent African past – spanning the last years of colonial rule and the years of independence – is becoming a focus of historical inquiry.

This article raises the question of how scholars might make sense of well-known components of social organization in Africa in the absence of the increasingly criticized evolutionary and lineage models that once gave them meaning. In an effort to understand why our earliest glimpses into the distant Ganda past appear in the form of clan histories, the article examines the relationship between clanship, public healing and transformations in agricultural practices. Beginning around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ganda expanded upon earlier knowledge of banana cultivation to develop a land-intensive banana farming system. This process coincided with the transformation of previously territorial spirits into portable spirits capable of ensuring the health of disconnected groups of people. At the heart of these undertakings stood the ideology and practices of clanship, which furnished the conceptual bridge connecting transformations in agriculture and public healing. The webs of shrines situated on discontiguous clan lands created therapeutic networks that drew together communities whose leaders possessed a variety of skills, thus forging a powerful connection between clanship, collective health and the composition of knowledge.

This article analyzes the multiple and failed efforts to codify customary marriage law over the course of the twentieth century in colonial Gabon. It argues that these efforts illuminate the discursive arenas in which the colonial state, the church and African political leaders struggled to demarcate power and control over wealth-in-women. In a time of sociopolitical crisis and change state, chiefs and other elite African men all become involved in attempts to conceptualize, codify and administer customary marriage law. The contested process of codification reveals disjunctures in the articulation of male political authority in colonial Gabon.

This article reconstructs the forgotten past of the Gnawa who, over many generations, productively negotiated their forced presence in Morocco to create acceptance and group solidarity. The diaspora of black West Africans in Morocco, the majority of whom were forcefully transported across the Sahara and sold in different parts of Morocco, shares some important traits with the African trans-Atlantic diaspora, but differs at the same time. There are two crucial differences: the internal African diaspora in Morocco has primarily a musical significance and it lacks the desire to return to the original homeland. This diaspora is constructed positively around the right to belong to the culture of Islam, unlike the construction of the African American diasporic double consciousness. Black consciousness in Morocco exists in analogy to the Berber consciousness or the Arab notion of collective identity; it does not constitute a contradiction with itself. Black Moroccans perceive themselves first and foremost to be Muslim Moroccans and only perceive themselves secondarily as participants in a different tradition.

This article seeks to situate local oral traditions on Samori Touré within the contexts of both internal African empire building and French colonial conquest. It takes into account the experiences of the vanquished on the periphery of Samori's empire in an effort to reassess his legacy. It argues that local traditions not only provide a corrective to the nationalist historiography on Samori, they also complicate the notion of ‘resistance’ by demonstrating internal dissent and even rebellion against Samorian rule at a time of Samori's vaunted ‘primary resistance’ to French conquest. Finally, this article concludes by providing a contemporary reading of the southern Malian historical landscape, rooting local Samorian history and politics in particular ‘sites of memory’.

After an ill-fated religious revival, the Sufi teacher Yacouba Sylla and his followers became wealthy and politically influential in post-Second World War Côte d'Ivoire. They argued for an understanding of democratization and development that defined both ideas in terms of their community's own mystical experiences and world-historical significance, rather than in terms of modernity. As a way of making sense of their own past and defending their place in an increasingly tense political environment, these efforts achieved their most explicit articulation in a powerful story about Yacouba Sylla's refusal of a gift from Ivoirian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny.