Legal scholars continue to revisit historical treaties between Western and non-Western nations to challenge long-standing accounts of non-Western peoples’ engagement with international law. Following this trend, new scholarship has stressed African agency in Euro-African treaty-making. However, legal scholars have generally overlooked African perspectives, pointing to a lack of sources. Focusing on nineteenth-century treaty-making between France and the polities of the Western Sudan in West Africa, this article excavates African perspectives through a novel reading of Euro-African treaties in an African context. This reading analyses treaties within the Western Sudan’s broader diplomatic corpus in both French and Arabic. By focusing on markers of translation, transcription, and negotiation left on different copies of treaties, this method brings to light arguments and practices that have been obscured in published European-language versions. Reading Franco-Sudanian treaties in a Sudanian context reveals that different norms governed the ratification of treaties in the Western Sudan and Europe. Treaties that scholars have long considered unratified were in fact ratified according to Western Sudanian norms, which designated the governor of French Senegal rather than the French president as the official competent to ratify treaties for France. However, when French officials sought to use treaties to claim sovereign rights in West Africa against Great Britain, they pressed the president to ratify them again. Presidential ratification thus served to transpose Franco-Sudanian treaties from an African to a Western normative order. Uncovering the African origins of Euro-African treaties thus reveals their differential operation across autonomous inter-polity orders.

In West Africa, vast areas are being deforested; the remnant forest patches provide a wealth of ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation potential, yet they are threatened by human activity. Forest patches <100 ha have not been widely catalogued before; we mapped forest loss of small forest patches outside of protected areas in the Guinean savannah and humid Guineo-Congolian bioclimatic regions of Togo, Benin, Nigeria and Cameroon between 2000 and 2022. Focusing on the dynamics of small patches, without considering the splitting process of larger patches, we quantified changes in their number and area and the rate and trend of forest loss. Small forest patches are widespread, yet their area and number have decreased, while the forest loss rate is increasing. Primary forest patches lost almost half of their area annually – twice as much as secondary forests, and this loss was especially pronounced across small patches (0.5 – 10 ha), suggesting deforestation preferentially occurs in the smallest patches of primary forest. If forest loss continues at the current rate, 14% of the total forest area mapped in this study will have disappeared by 2032, jeopardizing their potential to provide ecosystem services and emphasizing the need for measures to counter their deforestation.

Education is a prerequisite for the attainment of sustainable development, with multiplier effects on society. This study examines the possibility of achieving inclusive and equitable education under the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, AU Agenda 2063 and ECOWAS Vision 2050. Copyright plays an essential role in either encouraging or barring access to educational materials, which are necessary for the attainment of SDG 4. Through a desk study using the laws and policies of English-speaking West African countries (Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone), the article examines the copyright laws of these jurisdictions in order to determine how they facilitate or stop access to knowledge. It finds that most of the jurisdictions (except Nigeria) have not maximized the flexibilities available for access to knowledge through copyright limitations and exceptions, thereby barring access to educational materials. It recommends a review of national copyright legislations in line with a developmental perspective.

Much of West Africa (and particularly the Sahel) may be once falling again under military government. This essay asks what, if anything, historians of Africa can contribute to an understanding of this phenomenon. I argue that writing the history and understanding the memory of military government will entail a renewed approach to political history and social theory. It will also entail confronting — just as so many citizens are currently doing — the peculiar failures of democracy in Africa's neoliberal era.

The central role of Gold Coast societies, ports, and cities in the emerging Atlantic circuit is critical to understanding the history of the Atlantic world. The study of the causes and effects of Gold Coast societies’ transition from African polities and economies to transatlantic entrepots and trading emporiums and their subsequent impact on the Americas has been the hallmark of Ray Kea's scholarship. Since the beginning of his career, Kea has been a significant contributor to the study of the African Atlantic, and the field's various debates and disciplinary evolutions. While many scholars of the Gold Coast recognize Kea's work as foundational to scholarship on the Gold Coast, engagement with his work has not been rigorous. Kea is often cited in bibliographies and aspects of his work have served as benchmarks for other forays into Gold Coast histories. However, there is a need to go beyond an appreciation for Kea as a trailblazer, passing reference of his scholarship, and bibliographic citation of his work to a more thorough and consistent discourse with his major ideas and propositions. Kea has been, for example, adept at integrating innovations and ideas in various disciplinary arenas. He dexterously applies Marxist and postmodernist theories, diverse historiographies of the Atlantic world, and conceptual tools to traditional archival and oral historical data in his analyses of Gold Coast and diasporic societies. This review essay argues for Kea's importance and the need for a deeper engagement with his work in the field by putting his work into conversation with both classic Atlantic historiographies and recent scholarship that has built off Kea's.

This study discusses the processes of increasing social malaise and an “oppositional mood” in the Cape Verdean island of Santo Antão, where growing frustration between 1975 and 1990 led to the building of massive political opposition against the single-party regime in the archipelago. Early scrutiny of the shortcomings of independent administration, anger about the installation of a new police force, resettlement schemes, a failed agrarian reform, regime violence to achieve that reform, and a generalised mood of decline in the second half of the 1980s, constitute different elements explaining the unrest in that island. Based on newly available, local archives as an innovative source, the interpretation of a remote Cape Verdean opposition island also addresses the potential of studying opposition against “winning parties” and regimes after independence in wider regional frameworks, referring to discontent and “oppositional mood” elsewhere in postcolonial (Lusophone) Africa.

During the Nigerian Civil War, France became the main supplier of military assistance to the secessionist Biafra. In a neo-imperial pursuit to weaken the potential regional hegemon Nigeria, it secretly provided arms and ammunition to the Biafrans in collusion with Côte d'Ivoire and Gabon. Yet the driving force behind this Franco-African arms triangle was not the Elysée, but the Ivorian president Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Newly unearthed documentary evidence from French archives enables this article to break new historiographical ground: firstly, to show the Elysée's sheer reluctance to militarily assist Biafra and lack of a coherent policy in doing so; secondly, to confirm Houphouët-Boigny as the “mastermind” behind the arming of Biafra, as well as to identify his Cold War motivations; thirdly, to uncover Gabonese president Omar Bongo's increasing agency and influence in the scheme; fourthly, to demonstrate that it was the Ivorian and Gabonese presidents who transformed the arms triangle into a square by bringing the Rhodesians and, especially, the South Africans in; and, finally, to retrace the emergence and functioning of the “African-French” military assistance to Biafra at the policy level not only from Paris's, but also Abidjan's and Libreville's perspectives.

The Upper Guinea Forest (UGF; West Africa), a global biodiversity hotspot, has lost more than 90% of its original area since 1900, threatening endemic species such as the endangered pygmy hippopotamus (Choeropsis liberiensis). However, little is known about the proximate causes of this deforestation. We classified Sentinel-2 data using the random forest algorithm to differentiate between three main human processes (shifting agriculture, intensive agriculture or urban expansion) driving deforestation between 2000 and 2019 across the pygmy hippopotamus distribution area. Out of c. 89 600 km2 in the year 2000, 15 900 km2 (17%) of forest were lost, primarily to shifting agriculture (14 900 km2). Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia accounted for 14 900 km2 (94%) of the net area of forest lost, c. 15 times greater than deforestation in Sierra Leone and Guinea combined (953 km2). Forest loss inside protected areas is pervasive, and it is essential to prioritize conservation efforts in areas where deforestation is still low (e.g., Taï, Sapo and Gola Rainforest national parks). We suggest that the preservation of the UGF will face challenges associated with people’s demand for food and income. Continued landscape-scale planning and action to reduce deforestation are urgently needed to limit the impact of shifting agriculture on pygmy hippopotamus habitat.

While the challenges of family law reform and barriers to justice are widely studied, there is a gap in our understanding of the gendered nature of the use of courts in West Africa. Through analysis of judicial decisions in Courts of First Instance (Tribunaux de Première Instance) in Allada and Cotonou, Benin, this article examines how women and men use lower courts in family law cases. This article finds that despite barriers to access to formal institutions, women use these courts in equal numbers as do men, and they use them for divorce, as well as to claim child custody, child-support and alimony. Men mostly use family law courts to determine paternity and to seek divorce. Despite a widespread lack of confidence in courts and tribunals, these Courts of First Instance are a tool for women to challenge social hierarchy and to claim rights for themselves and their children.