African history enriches the comparative study of sexualities, demonstrating a breadth of practices, inflected by location, era, and historical contingency. Despite pervasive stereotypes, earlier sexualities were often varied and expansive. Examples challenge conventional academic categories, revealing the intersections between aspects personal and societal, romantic and transactional, and even sacred and sensual. Some African cultures endorsed varied pre-marital sexual explorations among adolescents and many emphasized initiations that shaped youths into gendered adults. Marriages and children often represented sources of power for families, elders, and elites, including older women. African cultures often defined gender according to role and status, not biology, such as the widely occurring instances of female husbands who married women in recent times. Both marriages and lovers factored into African politics, providing important means of alliance-building. Yet, interests in sexual partners extended beyond these concerns and included instances of same-sex partnerships along with practices aimed at mutual pleasure. Sexuality also mattered to many Africans’ cosmologies about well-being, healing, and power. Some healers gained power through sexual acts, and others through abstinence.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

This chapter provides an orientation in the people, place and time of the book’s setting. It examines the precolonial history of the kingdom of Burundi, including the parameters of ethnic identity, societal stratification and dynamics of power in the nineteenth century. Through German conquest and transfer to Belgian control after the First World War, it considers the nature of chiefly authority and colonial ethnic policy, brought into focus by civil war and anticolonial rebellion in the early twentieth century. Focusing subsequently on the relationship between a subject peasant population on the border and their imposed chief, Pierre Baranyanka, it explores the chief’s authority of ‘commandement’, and the popular evaluations of his behaviour. While required to perform deference and obedience, the peasant population talked about politics through keen observation of personal behaviour, gossiping about the chief’s attitudes towards the king, and exchanging jokes and parables that expressed political opinion about their social superiors. With the return of the first elite students to study abroad, the chapter ends with the arrival of the ‘time of politics’ in the north of Burundi.