This article examines the complex and fluid relationship between Denkyira and Asante in the period c. 1660–1720 that saw the former supplanted by the latter as the leading power among the Twi-speaking Akan peoples of the central southern Gold Coast (Ghana). Dense oral traditions supplemented by a range of other materials are used to identify the site of the ancient Denkyira capital of Abankeseso, and to give an account of the settlements that served it and the gold resources that supported it. These same sources provide a detailed understanding of the reasons for defections from Denkyira to Asante, and how this process contributed to the first Asantehene Osei Tutu's epochal military victory over Denkyirahene Ntim Gyakari at Feyiase (1701). Asante policy towards defeated Denkyira is then discussed, and the legacy of the events described is considered. At a general level, this article makes a case for looking in detail and depth at the local conditions that gave rise to particular – and particularly complex – sociopolitical arrangements, and argues that studies of this kind can advance understanding of the formation and nature of polity and identity in precolonial Africa.

The Yangekori Rebellion was among the earliest extensive uprisings within Africa to be reported in European documents. This rebellion, which lasted for more than a decade, included domestic and market-bound slaves as well as free persons, all of whom became involved in promoting significant changes in traditional socioeconomic and political patterns. What made this rebellion unique and more informative for the present and for research relating to external slave trading and to rebellion within the diaspora, however, were its complex and local-based context, its multiple centers and its substantial involvement in a timely religious movement intent on transforming coastal society. Also instructive is the synergetic response that occurred among autocratic and otherwise quarrelsome rulers who were responsible for ending this rebellion, for re-establishing landholding patterns, and for defending themselves effectively against socioeconomic and political change.

This article argues that emirs modernized and enhanced their authority through cooperation with Christian missions in the anti-leprosy campaign in colonial Hausaland in the 1930s. New documentary and oral sources detail how Native Administrations and Sudan Interior Mission workers together established leprosaria that were important beyond religious interaction. Emirs translated Islamic ideals of charity into governmental responsibility for medical welfare. The leprosy scheme brought together the elite and non-elite in ways that would previously have been unimaginable and took emirs' power to new reaches in an era of expanding native authority in Nigeria and throughout much of British Africa.

Tanzania's Ujamaa villagization campaign of 1973–6 was one of the greatest social experiments in postcolonial Africa. Occurring during a time of continuing hope for a better future for the nation, the experiment aimed to improve the lives of the majority of rural Tanzanians. Despite this noble intention, the attempt at rural modernization failed miserably in many respects. Discussions of these failures have tended to give prominence to tangible explanations, ignoring more nuanced and qualitative issues, including environmental concerns based on local cosmologies. In an attempt to fill this gap, the present article uses a case study of eastern Iraqwland in northern Tanzania to explore local articulations of the compulsory villagization campaign and to interpret them in light of ecological perspectives that were prevalent at the time in Iraqw village communities.

When the Cold War broke out in Western Europe at the end of the Second World War, France was a key battleground. Its Cold War choices played out in the empire as well as in the métropole. After communist party ministers were ousted from the tripartite government in 1947, repression against communists and their associates intensified – both in the Republic and overseas. In French sub-Saharan Africa, the primary victims of this repression were members of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), an interterritorial alliance of political parties with affiliates in most of the 14 territories of French West and Equatorial Africa, and in the United Nations trusts of Togo and Cameroon. When, under duress, RDA parliamentarians severed their ties with the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) in 1950, grassroots activists in Guinea opposed the break. Their voices muted throughout most of the decade, Leftist militants regained preeminence in 1958, when trade unionists, students, the party's women's and youth wings, and other grassroots actors pushed the Guinean RDA to reject a constitution that would have relegated the country to junior partnership in the French Community, and to proclaim Guinea's independence instead. Guinea's vote for independence, and its break with the interterritorial RDA in this regard, were the culmination of a decade-long struggle between grassroots activists on the political Left and the party's territorial and interterritorial leadership for control of the political agenda.

Examples of chant, song and written propaganda from the mid-1950s are examined here in order to probe the debates and relationships which influenced the political future of the Ewe-speaking areas of southern British Togoland. While microstudies have been important in explaining sources of division between communities in these areas, propaganda provides a means of understanding the arguments, idioms and ideas about the state which brought many different people together behind the apparently peculiar project of Togoland reunification. The main source of tension within this political movement was not competing local or communal interests, but the unequal relationships that resulted from uneven provision of education. Written and oral propaganda texts, and the rallies where they were performed and exchanged, point to a surprisingly participatory and eclectic political culture, where distinctions between the lettered and unlettered remained fluid and open to challenge.