Historians of slavery in Africa have long struggled to recover the voices of enslaved people. In this article, an unusual set of sources found in Timbuktu (Mali) reveals the existence of a stratum of literate, Muslim slaves who wrote and received letters written in Arabic. These letters make it possible to probe the Islamic rhetoric used by Muslim slaves and ask how enslaved people who adopted Islam understood their faith. Did Muslim slaves arrive at different interpretations of Islam than those Muslims who were free? Using the correspondence of two slaves who worked as agents in their master's commercial activities in the Niger Bend and Central Sahara during the second half of the nineteenth century, this article demonstrates the extent to which Muslim slaves used appeals to their own piety in attempting to carve out a certain amount of social autonomy. For these Muslim slaves, Islam could be made to serve both spiritual and practical ends. And yet, this did not require slaves to interpret Islam in ways that rejected the legitimacy of slavery.

This article explores the politics of race and education in early twentieth-century urban Senegal, focusing on the exclusion of African students from certain schools and on the political controversy that grew out of a 1909 education reform. Based on letters from officials, politicians, and African residents, along with minutes from the General Council, it suggests that changes in urban society and colonial policy encouraged people to view access to schooling in terms of race. This article argues that in debating segregation and education quality, residents contributed to a discourse on race that reflected an increasing racial consciousness in the society at large.

In 1972 a British commission arrived in Rhodesia to test how acceptable the latest and most comprehensive proposals to end Rhodesia's rebellion were to its entire people. Africans rejected the proposals in overwhelming numbers. Such powerful opposition was attributed to the African National Council, said to be a new and spontaneous organization, but in fact the creation of the banned political parties. This article examines the political agitation during the Pearce Commission's visit to show how commonplace the layers of political affiliation, substitution, and deception were in the groups that both supported and opposed the proposals in 1970s Rhodesia.

This article addresses the struggle between the temperance and wine interests in South Africa during three phases: 1890–1920, 1920–48 and 1948–65. It argues that divergent outcomes were rooted in a combination of differential levels of internal cohesion and the configuration of the political arena within which the protagonists manoeuvred for advantage. Conflicting interests within the wine industry hindered collective action, whereas the temperance movement derived strength from its decentralized modes of operation and international connections. The latter pioneered mass action alongside the art of lobbying. After 1948, the wine industry turned the tables by cementing a special relationship with the National Party, while tapping into popular nationalism, youth culture, and emergent consumerism.

This article explores the relationship between understandings of youth sexuality and mobility, and racial nationalism in late colonial Tanganyika through a history of dansi: a dance mode first popularized by Tanganyikan youth in the 1930s. Dansi's heterosocial choreography and cosmopolitan connotations provoked widespread anxieties among rural elders and urban elites over the mobility, economic autonomy, and sexual agency of youth. In urban commercial dancehalls in the 1950s, dansi staged emerging cultural solidarities among migrant youth, while also making visible social divisions based on class and gender. At the same time, nationalist intellectuals attempted to reform dansi according to an emerging political rhetoric of racial respectability.

This article explores the different trajectories of advertising for schnapps gin and beer in Ghana and Nigeria during the period of decolonisation and independence up to 1975. It analyses published newspaper advertisements alongside correspondence, advertising briefs, and market research reports found in business archives. Advertising that promoted a ‘modern’ life-style worked for beer, but not for gin. This study shows how advertisements became the product of negotiations between foreign companies, local businesses, and consumers. It provides insights into the development of advertising in West Africa, the differing ways in which African consumers attached meanings to specific commodities, and possibilities for the use of advertisements as sources for African history.