Studies of trans-Saharan trade have recently been revitalized, mainly through an exploration of local archives. These archives offer a further possibility: to investigate the link between local settlement and wider patterns of exchange. Material from southern Algeria and northern Mali suggests that oases were not viable without outside investment, that pastoral economies needed storage space and agricultural produce, and that intra-Saharan and trans-Saharan trade relied on each other. Hence, regional mobility and outside connections were not subsidiary but constitutive of the local, and local patterns of production and trans-Saharan commerce were aspects of the same system.

Between 1964 and 1975, development politics in Tanzania came to be organized around a version of ujamaa that normalized distinct gender roles and celebrated a generic ideal of the nuclear family. Yet as ujamaa villagization unfolded on the ground in the south-eastern region of Mtwara, rural people's practices rarely conformed to the ideas about gender and family implicit in official discourse and policy. Just as the institution of the family on the ground proved to be a complicated and fractured one, the Tanzanian state's understanding of familyhood and the larger project of ujamaa were deeply riddled with internal tensions.

The Ghanaian forest was well settled by agricultural communities prior to the opening of the Atlantic trade in the late fifteenth century. The most prominent of these settlements were earthworks sites, construction of which began in the first millennium ce and continued until their abrupt abandonment prior to the mid-fifteenth century. In this article, previous archaeological data are evaluated in light of current research to provide a plausible alternative hypothesis for the history of the Akan, placing that history in a much broader and deeper context.

Twentieth-century Natal and Zululand chiefs' conversions to the Nazaretha Church allowed them to craft new narratives of political legitimacy and perform them to their subjects. The well-established praising tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Zulu political culture had been an important narrative practice for legitimating chiefs; throughout the twentieth century, the erosion of chiefly power corresponded with a decline in chiefly praise poems. During this same period, however, new narrative occasions for chiefs seeking to legitimate their power arose in Nazaretha sermon performance. Chiefs used their conversion testimonies to narrate themselves as divinely appointed to their subjects. An alliance between the Nazaretha Church and KwaZulu chiefs of the last hundred years meant that the Church could position itself as an institution of national stature, and chiefs told stories that exhorted unruly subjects to obedience as a spiritual virtue.

Based on a close examination of European travelogues and the evidence produced in the wake of the formulation of colonial gun policies, this article contends that the significance of firearms in Central Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been unduly played down in the existing literature. The first substantive section of the article charts the movement of the gun frontier in nineteenth-century north-western Zambia. It foregrounds the new technology's economic and military applications, the means through which north-western Zambians overcame some at least of its limitations, and the plurality of innovative social roles that they attributed to it. Successive sections centre on the pervasiveness of gun-running in the early twentieth century and the implementation and profound social consequences of gun control laws.

This article reinforces the interpretation of numerous scholars who have highlighted the role of slave labor in groundnut production during the ‘cash-crop revolution’ in West Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also expands Jan Hogendorn's argument on the African initiatives involved in the expansion of groundnut production in colonial Northern Nigeria. In particular, it provides evidence of the key role of the emir of Kano (Abbas) and important merchants in the transition to groundnut cultivation and the significant use of slave labor by these large estate-holders. The article focuses mainly on the Fanisau unit of Kano.

Propaganda from Biafra and pro-Biafran rhetoric generated by its supporters drew heavily on ideas of modernity. This continued a pattern of associations rooted in colonial-era policies and ethnic stereotypes, and also represented a deliberate rhetorical strategy aimed at both internal and external audiences. During the second half of the Nigeria–Biafra War, the concept of race assumed an increasingly prominent role in both Biafran and pro-Biafran discourse, in part because of the diminished persuasiveness of Biafran claims about Nigeria's genocidal intentions. Arguments about race dovetailed with established claims about modernity in ways that persist today.

This article focuses on a single episode of racial interaction in 1931 in order to highlight competing notions of honor and respectability in a shared colonial society. This story elucidates how Africans and whites unraveled and rebuilt ‘racial etiquette’, the tacit code that guided individual encounters between blacks and whites and that were so vital to the expression of colonial power. In moments of transition, such as the early 1930s in Southern Rhodesia, the minutiae of racial etiquette were confusing, and this allowed for some dialogue between Africans and whites about what constituted proper behavior. As this story makes clear, Africans were as much a part of composing racial etiquette as whites, despite – indeed, because of – the latter's political power.

This article documents a landmark dispute between British Petroleum (BP) and the Nigerian tax authorities that occurred over a N130 million (£100 million) capital gains tax assessment arising from an intra BP Group transfer of its 50 per cent shareholding in Shell/BP Nigeria. This was necessitated by a BP transaction in Abu Dhabi. This tax assessment, which was more than twice the yearly cash flow of BP's Nigerian operations at the time, ignited a chain of events and schemes that saw the British government covertly and overtly providing support to BP, with the primary goal of influencing the outcome of the dispute in order to protect the interests of both the British government and BP. Evidence in this article highlights the complexities of postcolonial relationships between centre countries and African ex-colonies.

This article reassesses the political alternatives imagined by African nationalists in the ‘first wave’ of Africa's decolonization through the lens of Cameroonian nationalism. After the proscription of Cameroon's popular nationalist movement, the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), in the mid-1950s, thousands of Cameroonian nationalists went into exile, most to Accra, where they gained the support of Kwame Nkrumah's Pan-African Bureau for African Affairs. The UPC's external support fed Cameroon's internal maquis (as UPC members called the underground resistance camps within the territories), rooted in culturally particular conceptions of freedom and sovereignty. With such deeply local and broadly international foundations, the political future that Cameroonian nationalists envisaged seemed achievable: even after the Cameroon territories' official independence, UPC nationalists kept fighting. But, by the mid-1960s, postcolonial states prioritized territorial sovereignty over ‘African unity’ and Ghana's support of the UPC became unsustainable, leading to the movement's disintegration.

Amid assumptions of a hegemonic Igbo Christian identity, conversions to Islam began in the late 1930s in the Igbo territory of south-east Nigeria – the only region in the country that was not touched by the nineteenth-century Islamic jihad and subsequent efforts to extend the borders of Islam in Nigeria. Four decades after the emergence of Islam in the Igbo homeland, and with the mixed blessings of a civil war, Igboland began to manifest clear evidence of indigenous Muslim presence. A key aspect of this article is how one can be both Igbo and Muslim. It considers the complex interplay of religious and ethnic identities of Igbo Muslims (including the mapping of religious values onto ethnic ones) until the 1990s, when Igbo Muslims began to disentangle ethnicity from religion, a development that owes much to the progress of Islamic education in Igboland and the emergence of Igbo Muslim scholars and clerics. Igbo reactions to conversions to Islam and the perceived threat of these conversions to Igbo Christian identity also receive some attention in this article.

From 1942 to 1945, British and American armed forces attempted to eradicate malaria in Accra by dredging the sacred Korle Lagoon and spraying the city with pesticides. They also conducted experiments on the biting patterns of mosquitoes by using human subjects as bait. But, despite the extent of the anti-malaria campaign, it is largely forgotten by the inhabitants of Accra, and those who do remember it regard it as a nominal event in the history of the city. This article contrasts the official military history of the anti-malaria campaign with oral evidence to determine why the event fails to resonate in the collective memory of the residents of Accra.

This article explores the transnational politics of technology and science at the Rössing uranium mine in Namibia. During the 1980s, Rössing workers refashioned surveillance technologies into methods for trade union action. When national independence in 1990 failed to produce radical ruptures in the workplace, union leaders engaged in technopolitical strategies of extraversion, and became knowledge producers about their own exposure to workplace contaminants. Appeals to outside scientific authority carried the political promise of international accountability. But engaging in science meant accepting its boundaries, and workers ultimately discovered that technopolitical power could be limiting as well as liberating.

In late-seventeenth-century Morocco, Mawlay Isma‘il commanded his officials to enslave all blacks: that is, to buy coercively or freely those already slaves and to enslave those who were free, including the Haratin (meaning free blacks or freed ex-slaves). This command violated the most salient Islamic legal code regarding the institution of slavery, which states that it is illegal to enslave fellow Muslims. This controversy caused a heated debate and overt hostility between the ‘ulama’ (Muslim scholars) and Mawlay Isma‘il. Official slave registers were created to justify the legality of the enforced buying of slaves from their owners and the enslavement of the Haratin. An equation of blackness and slavery was being developed to justify the subjection of the free Muslim black Moroccans. To prove the slave status of the black Moroccans, the officials in charge of the slavery project established a fictional hierarchy of categories of slaves. This project therefore constructed a slave status for all black people, even those who were free.

The consensus among many analysts of the Nigeria–Biafra War is that the conflict cannot be reduced to a mono-causal explanation. The tragedy that befell the West African country from 1966 to 1970 was a combination of many factors, which were political, ethnic, religious, social, and economic in nature. Yet the conflict was unduly cast as a religious war between Christians and Muslims. Utilizing newly available archival materials from within and outside Nigeria, this article endeavours to unravel the underlying forces in the religious war rhetoric of the mainly Christian breakaway region and its Western sympathizers. Among other things, it demonstrates that, while the religious war proposition was good for the relief efforts of the international humanitarian organizations, it inevitably alienated the Nigerian Christians and made them unsympathetic to the Biafran cause.

Zambia's unsuccessful coup attempt in 1980 was initiated by members of the country's intellectual and business elite, who had played a leading role in the postcolonial civil service and state bureaucracy, but who became disillusioned with the takeover of the state by the ruling party before and after the declaration of the one-party state in 1972. Among their number was Valentine Musakanya, one of those convicted for the coup attempt. Using Musakanya's biographical and other writings, this article explores his intellectual trajectory from head of the civil service to political prisoner. In so doing, it investigates the role of life writing in aiding understanding of the postcolonial political history of Africa.

An important document in the Dutch Archives casts new light on the Kongo–Portuguese War of 1622, usually seen as a signal defeat for Kongo. This document shows that, after the Portuguese victory over Kongo at the Battle of Mbumbi, there was a second battle in which Kongo forces were victorious, and they in fact began the process of re-occupying lands the Portuguese had absorbed in earlier expansion. In addition, the document reveals the origins of a plan, conceived in Kongo, to form an alliance with the Dutch in order to attack Luanda and drive the Portuguese from Angola, a plan that was realized not in 1624 but in 1641.