This article examines the transformation of mineral matter into mineral property from the vantage point of Ga-Mphahlele, a section of northern South Africa's platinum belt in which minerals are particularly complex to access. Building on Thomas Sikor and Christian Lund's work, I show that the demands of mining capital played a key role in facilitating a co-constitutive relationship between political authority and mineral property. Because of the geological difficulties accessing Ga-Mphahlele's platinum, mining companies have only shown an intermittent interest in the area's minerals, resulting in a volatile relationship between mineral property and political authority. In turn, this has meant that minerals have often been a relatively unstable property form. By adding the role of capital to Lund and Sikor's analytic lens for studying property and authority, this article tracks the relationship between chiefly authority, African land purchasing, platinum companies, and the emergence of mineral rights.

This article examines the history of energy use in colonial Senegal from 1885 to 1945, and it considers how African populations and French colonial officials built a colonial energy economy through overlapping and competing infrastructures of local and imported fuels, labor, and networks of transportation. As the colonial state constructed a new system of infrastructure, from railways and roads to trains and trucks, the French extended their reach into the interior and increased the production of cash crops. At the same time, peasant farmers, migrant workers, and urban merchants incorporated colonial infrastructures into their own regimes of energy use while also fashioning an infrastructure of locally produced fuels. Through the entanglement of local and colonial infrastructures and labor, as well as the appropriation of various forms of technology, Africans and their colonizers forged a hybrid colonial energy economy — not organic, not industrial — specific to the context of colonialism.

This article examines the means by which perceived threats of sleeping sickness epidemics were used to justify extensive population resettlement through the formation of ‘concentrations’ in Ulanga District, Tanganyika, between 1939 and 1945. Underlying this specious spatial reordering of communities were ulterior motives that interpreted and pushed broader colonial development agendas of social engineering. The prominent role of leading colonial officers, notably A. T. Culwick, is emphasised and reexamined, especially in relationship to paternalism and the coercive aspects of closer settlement. This article explores the nature of legitimised coercion, contested meanings of the League of Nations mandate, and tensions within the administration. Local resistance to concentration challenged colonial hegemony and the self-fashioned form of benign autocracy constructed by officials like Culwick, who relied on a projection of prestige for political authority in his district and among his peers. Concentration was therefore a contested and contingent process with dissent evidenced both against and within government.

This paper examines African peasant tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia from 1900 to 1980, from the cusp of colonialism to its end. It analyses shifting state policy towards African tobacco producers, the concomitant impact on peasant economies, accumulation patterns and the rural physical landscape and peasant responses. It focuses on the changing agricultural commodity value chains, cash crop asymmetries, and global market forces to explain colonial responses to peasant production and peasant agency. We argue that the symbolic value of each agricultural commodity, in entrenching the hierarchy of power relations and the institutionalisation of white control, mediated colonial responses to peasant production and concomitantly ‘peasant agency’. We use this case study to highlight the structural constraints on ‘agency’ and to explore how cash crop asymmetries helped structure agrarian encounters and power relations in colonial Africa. The paper uses archival sources from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, newspapers, and journals from the Tobacco Research Board (TRB).

In the early 1960s, when a majority of African countries were gaining independence, the training of personnel capable of implementing nation-building projects became imperative for new African governments, even though higher education opportunities on the continent remained scarce. In a context of competition with the former colonial powers and the USSR, the United States decided to set up scholarship programs for the training of postcolonial African elites. Through the analysis of one of these programs, the African Scholarship Program of American Universities (ASPAU), this article will show that in addition to the Cold War motivations of the US government, pan-African connections and university initiatives were essential in laying the groundwork for the project of educating Africans in the United States. It also highlights the too often overlooked role played by African leaders and academics in the concrete realization, reappropriation, and questioning of overseas training projects.

On 10 May 1964, on his return trip to the United States from Mecca, Malcolm X landed in Accra for a weeklong visit to the capital of the ‘Black Star of Africa’. This high-profile visit, which took place only nine months before Malcolm X's assassination, has assumed an important place in biographical accounts of his life, as key to understanding his religious and political transformation or ‘conversion’. Yet we know surprisingly little about how Malcolm X's visit resonated locally, what kinds of meanings it generated, especially in the new nation's capital. Based on newspaper accounts, private paper collections, and written and oral reminiscences, this article explores Malcolm X's visit as a significant moment for accessing the conflicting interpretations of race and liberation politics that converged, cohered, and collided in Ghana during the first decade of independence.