The recent racial reckoning has challenged scholars to recover Black voices that have been erased from historical accounts. This essay is my reflections on the challenges I faced in conducting research on African voices in politically and racially charged settings in Lesotho and South Africa over the past half century. After the political atmosphere began changing in South Africa in 1990, I served the individuals and communities I write about by rectifying historical injustices such as returning a holy relic to a religious group, the Israelites, and facilitating the return of remains of Nontetha Nkwenkwe from a pauper’s grave in Pretoria to her home.

During the early 1970s, the Sahel suffered from drought and famine. Previous research has emphasized how these factors weakened West African states. The drought, however, provided an opportunity for a transnational river organization in the Senegal River basin (the OMVS) to obtain financing for an integrated development program. Wall shows how the OMVS leveraged concern about famine to obtain funding. She uses digital text analysis to demonstrate institutional priorities shifting to focus on agriculture. This combination of document analysis with digital methods demonstrates how famine strengthened a multi-state organization, requiring a revision of how this event affected African political capacity.

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s 2018 novel De purs hommes fictionalizes recent incidents of homophobia in Senegal to interrogate the relationship between queer men and social dynamics in the country. This article demonstrates that the novel deploys multidirectional critical discourse and oblique narrative tactics to highlight the foundational role in Senegalese culture and society of the fraught dichotomy between private and public life. Bryson contends that the novel unearths these queer roots in order to incorporate all normative identities into queer existence, conceptually blurring the social barriers to LGBTQ+ agency in the country.

Scholars often dismiss the importance of local archives in the reconstruction of postcolonial African history, stating that they are superficial, unorganized, and unreliable. Amin challenges that notion and argues that those archives are central to the study of African diplomatic history. Based on extensive and previously unused documents, he argues that Cameroon’s Ahmadou Ahidjo leveraged his U.S. policy to develop his country and protect its sovereignty while maintaining a firm grip on power. This reappraisal of Ahidjo’s actions engages debates about the contours of U.S.-African foreign policy and the challenges new nations face as they navigate external relations.

On October 23, 2019, Botswana held its twelfth free and fair election. For the first time in the history of Botswana’s electoral democracy, a former president (Ian Khama) defected from the ruling party and supported the opposition. The opposition coalition, working informally with Khama, mounted a spirited campaign against the well-oiled machine, the incumbent and long-ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP). Seabo and Nyenhuis reflect on the 2019 general election, analyze the outcome, and consider the implications for the future of Botswana’s electoral democracy. They argue that barring other factors, the BDP’s resounding victory was mainly a result of Batswana’s rejection of former president Ian Khama.

Land claims and contests have been central to the construction of political authority across the African continent. South Africa’s post-apartheid land reform program aims to address historical dispossessions, but the program has experienced numerous obstacles and limits—in terms of pace, communal land access, productivity, and rural class divides. Drawing on archival and newspaper sources, Kelly traces how the descendant of a colonially-appointed, landless chief manipulated a claim into a landed chieftaincy and how both the chief and the competing claimants have deployed histories of landlessness and firstcomer accounts in a manner distinct to the KwaZulu-Natal region as part of the land restitution process.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, colonial governments used human-lion interactions to further their efforts to reproduce white supremacy in northwest Namibia. Drawing on archival, oral, and published sources, Heydinger presents this “animal-sensitive history,” which examines the central role of livestock in antagonistic human-lion interactions. The government has historically played a major role in securing European dominance over lions, while African pastoralists have suffered from human-lion conflict. Government interventions had lasting effects on human livelihoods and the geography of lion survival. Lions were eradicated on white farms, but they thrived in Etosha—where livestock were prohibited—and yet maintain a tenuous presence in Kaokoveld. Heydinger examines the ways in which human livelihoods and lion survival remain linked to one another to this day.

Set in a context where material accumulation is valorized, this article analyzes narratives of sika bone (bad money) as expressions of economic uncertainty by market women operating in an era of increased financialization. The ethnographic evidence supports previous arguments about the impact of economic change in this millennium, a change that fosters both rationality and superstition in equal measure. Salifu proposes that sika bone indicates a sense of uncertainty fostered by economic change in the supply of cash and formal credit, a sentiment that is expressed by applying old notions about occultic means of accumulation to new and equally enigmatic circumstances.

From nearly any perspective and metric, the effects of malaria on the African continent have been persistent and deep. By focusing on the malady of malaria and the last century of biomedical interventions, Graboyes and Alidina raise critical historical, ethical, and scientific questions related to truth telling, African autonomy, and the obligations of foreign researchers. They provide a condensed history of malaria activities on the continent over the past 120 years, highlighting the overall history of failures to eliminate or control the disease. A case study of the risks of rebound malaria illustrates the practical and moral problems that abound when historical knowledge is ignored. In light of current calls for renewed global eradication efforts, Graboyes and Alidina provide evidence for why historical knowledge must be better integrated into global health epistemic realms.