Drawing on port entry records for 487 ships disembarking nearly 80,000 captives in Cartagena de Indias, the primary slaving port in early colonial Spanish America, this article provides a new assessment of the relative importance of major African provenance zones for the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century transatlantic slave trade. Upper Guinea and Angola furnished roughly equal shares of forced migrants to Cartagena between 1570 and 1640, with a smaller wave of captives from Lower Guinea. While Angola eventually replaced Upper Guinea as the main source of slave traffic to Cartagena, the shift was more gradual than scholars have previously believed.

In 1916 a warlord named Oorlog – ‘war’, in Afrikaans – moved into the Kaokoveld in the far north-west of what is now Namibia, and drove off the original inhabitants. Shortly after, Oorlog was formally recognized as a chief by the newly established South African administration and elevated to the highest position of power in the Kaokoveld. This article, through investigating how Oorlog came to be elevated to this position of power, explores issues of colonial governance and personal relationships. By focusing on the micropolitics of the Kaokoveld, it emphasizes how interpersonal relationships – not bureaucratic structures – were of crucial importance in the establishment and maintenance of early colonial rule in Africa.

This article examines struggles for masculinity among Herero elders, South African colonial administrators, and the Otruppa, a Herero youth society that appropriated a German military aesthetic, in Namibia between 1915 and 1949. As previous scholars have argued, masculinities are mutually constituted through competitions for authority, though dominance is rarely achieved. Such contestations were integral to processes of Herero societal reconstruction following German rule and during South African colonial state formation, beginning in 1915. Different generational experiences of colonial violence and the destruction of the material resources that undergirded elders' authority led to conflicts between elders and youths over how to define Herero masculinity and negotiate authority in a rapidly changing colonial milieu.

In 1918, Faith Tabernacle Congregation was established in southern colonial Ghana. This Philadelphia-based church flourished in the context of colonialism, cocoa, and witchcraft, spreading rapidly after the 1918–19 influenza pandemic. In this context, several healing cults also proliferated, but Faith Tabernacle was particularly successful because the church offered its members spiritual, social, and legal advantages. The church's leadership was typically comprised of young Christian capitalist men, whose literacy and letter writing enabled the establishment of an American church without any missionaries present. By 1926, when Faith Tabernacle began its decline, at least 177 branches had formed in southern Ghana, extending into Togo and Côte d'Ivoire, with over 4,400 members.

In keeping with the law in place in the Colony of Ashanti in 1928, Dr Benjamin Knowles was tried and convicted for the murder of his wife without the benefit of a jury trial or the assistance of legal counsel. His trial and sentencing to death created outrage in both colonial Ghana and the metropole, and placed a spotlight on the adjudication of capital crimes in the colony. Inevitably, there were calls for reform of a system that could condemn an English government official to death without the benefit of the right to trial by a jury of his peers and counsel of his choice. Shortly after the Knowles trial, the colonial government did open up Ashanti to lawyers, and introduced other changes in the administration of criminal justice, but continued to refuse the introduction of jury trial. Nevertheless, the lasting impact of the Knowles trial was to make criminal adjudication in Ashanti, if anything, more lenient than the other area of colonial Ghana, the Gold Coast Colony.

Historians usually trace the start of the first civil war in the Southern Sudan to the Torit mutiny of 1955. However, organized political violence did not reach the level of civil war until 1963. This article argues that 1955–62 was a period of increasing political tension, local low-intensity violence, and social and economic stagnation. It shows how these conditions influenced the attitudes of government officials, informed the policies that they pursued, and made a Southern insurgency likely. This historical analysis helps explain why a full-scale civil war began in late 1963 and why it was not avoided.