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The Tsumeb copper mine in the Otavi Mountains of Namibia is famous both for its spectacular mineral specimens and for its unparalleled diversity of mineral species. The site was mined for nearly 100 years, first by Anglo-German and then by multinational companies; however, prior to that, the site was central to the economies of the Ndonga, Haiǁom, and Herero, who mined, smelted, crafted, and traded the copper. This paper attempts to fill a major gap in the early history of Tsumeb: how did control of Tsumeb's copper transfer from local communities to Germany? By synthesizing a wide variety of sources, this paper tells pre-colonial and early colonial histories of copper in the Tsumeb area, focusing on the Haiǁom who mined the copper, the Ndonga who smelted and crafted it, and the Herero who had historical relationships with the land. Throughout, the paper attempts to connect Tsumeb's local history with the larger regional context of South West Africa (now Namibia), and to provide a more in-depth account of the communities whose roles, in previous mineralogic histories of Tsumeb, have been reduced to: 'trouble with the natives.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on archival research to trace the techniques used by scientists and government officials involved with palm oil at the turn of the twentieth century. For them, mundane practices of "carefulness" were paramount as they worked on collecting, identifying, marketing, and improving the oil palm. But they also applied this so-called care to people: care of the oil palm was thought to presuppose care of the "native," providing a correction for what were seen as "careless" local manners of cultivation. Colonial techniques of care thus sought to encompass both plants and peoples within contemporary liberal rhetorics of efficiency and moral improvement. This embodies how scientific and political care can interlink through their undersides of control, exploitation, and domination, which remain obscured by narratives of care themselves. Examining these links between commodity histories and scientific techniques is therefore essential for understanding environmental and social concerns regarding oil palm plantations today. An awareness of the afterlives of colonial discourses might encourage a more critical "care" in response to these issues today, challenging taken-for-granted notions of the benefits of corporate care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quilts occupy a liminal position in the histories of art and material culture. Centering analyses around specific artworks like Martha Ricks' 1892 Coffee Tree quilt, as well as investigating women's writing about their material production, illuminates ignored narratives about the ways black women participated in international social, political, and economic networks around the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Quilters who emigrated from the United States to Liberia in the nineteenth century incorporated an aesthetic heritage from the American South with new visual vocabularies developing alongside the newly independent nation. Artists relied on networks with abolitionists in the United States and local textile knowledge to source materials for their work. Finished quilts circulated in local and international contexts, furthering social, political, and economic objectives. Like Harriet Powers' bible quilts, Ricks' quilts gained fame through exhibition and a whimsical artist's biography. Quilts' fragility as natural-fiber textiles in a tropical climate makes a finding a body of works difficult to examine as there are no extant Liberian quilts from the nineteenth century. However, it is possible to patch together a network of women artists, their patrons, and audiences from West Africa to North America and Europe through creative investigation of diverse historical records, including diary entries, letters, newspaper articles, and photographs. I argue that by examining Martha Ricks' artworks, self-presentation through portraiture, and published writing, it is possible to envision a new narrative of black women's participation in visualizing the newly-minted Republic of Liberia for Atlantic audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the Polish Maritime and Colonial League's ambitions to acquire colonies in Africa for Poland in the interwar period, using two cases of expeditions to Africa organised by the League: 1928 expedition to Angola and M/S Poznań's 1935 trade expedition to West Africa. These cases serve as examples of newcomers in the race for colonies who attempted to carve their share in Africa's resources by cooperation with Africans and European colonial powers, and the ways in which knowledge production and knowledge retrieval were used in the process. They reproduced European stereotypes about Africa and Africans, conceptualised Africa as terra nullius waiting to be cultivated by Europeans, and themselves as white Europeans destined to do this. Despite lack of lasting success of the League's projects, they reveal a network of colonial and inter-colonial encounters in Africa encompassing the existing empires and Africans, but also aspiring colonials. Thus, rather than a marginal phenomenon, they appear as one having a global context, entangled in the circulation of ideas and peoples, networks of competition and cooperation across and beyond colonial empires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that both Michael Banton and John Rex were ‘children of empire’, albeit in starkly different ways, and that these differences were at the core of their querulous exchanges over their long careers. The larger issue, however, concerns the impact of colonialism on sociology, especially in its formative years, and conversely, the role of sociology in providing erudite justification for colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper builds upon studies of the constitutive role of technology in the establishment of colonial order by demonstrating some of the ways in which a relationship between spiritual authority and technologies of the secular state came to be articulated together in the late colonial period, and hence embedded within contemporary postcolonial techno-politics. Focusing on adult public health campaigns in French West Africa, I suggest that that the end of colonialism sparked a host of debates about what counted as knowledge of political reality, the means to obtain that knowledge and the persons in which such knowledge was vested. Within this turbulent context, ideas about the ‘magico-spiritual’ were woven together with ‘secular’ instruments of the state, in the process forging new conceptions of political reality. By describing the dynamics of this process, my analysis of African socio-technical systems modulates some key science studies frameworks to make them more applicable to contemporary non-Western settings. While science studies can more than adequately account for how technology may be used to build ‘the nation’, to be applicable to postcolonial contexts such studies should also be able to address the role of socio-technical contestation for producing techno-political states of enduring instability and disequilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the most unintended consequences of colonial rule in French West Africa was the Islamization of large parts of it. Islamic movements have often been interpreted in specifically political terms, as instances of 'collaboration' with or 'resistance' to colonial domination. They can better be understood in terms of the emergence of a qualitatively new 'Islamic sphere' conceptually separate from 'particular' affiliations such as ethnicity, kin group membership or slave origins, as well as from the colonial state. This paper considers two cases in detail: the Hamawiyya, a branch of the Tijani Sufi order whose leader was exiled by the French and which was brutally repressed in the 1940s; and the `Wahhabiyya', an anti-Sufi movement which emerged after World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, studies of imprisonment and incarceration have focused on the growth of male-gendered penal institutions. This essay offers a provocative addition to the global study of the prison by tracing the emergence of a carceral system in West Africa in the nineteenth century that was organized around the female body. By examining archival testimonies of female prisoners held in what were called "native prisons" in colonial Gold Coast (southern Ghana), this essay shows how birthing, impregnation, and menstruation shaped West Africa penal practices, including the selection of the captives, the duration of their time in prison, and how the prison factored into the legal infrastructure around tort settlements for debts and crimes. The term "prison of the womb" is used here to describe how the West African prison held bloodlines captive, threatening the impregnation of a female kin member as a ticking clock for tort settlement. Furthermore, it will be shown that this institution was imperative to the spread of mercantile capitalism in nineteenth-century Gold Coast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the dynamics of interracial sexual relationships in the Colony of Sierra Leone during the era of the new imperialism between 1870 and 1914. Although British anxieties about interracial sexual relationships and mixed-race progeny were evident before the era of the new imperialism, it was in the late nineteenth century that British imperial and colonial authorities created more rigid racial hierarchies that hardened the delineations between colonisers, intermediary proxy groups, and the colonised. However, it was not only Europeans who disapproved of interracial sex during the new imperialism, and the adoption of a Victorian sexual ethos and cultural nationalism among the Creole population contributed to their social disapproval of interracial sex. These attitudes had an impact on race relations that resulted in the clandestine nature of interracial sex in colonial Sierra Leone from the late nineteenth century and the shame attached to mixed-race ancestry in colonial society. This article examines the shifting attitudes of social disapproval towards interracial sexual relationships displayed by both Europeans and Creoles in colonial Sierra Leone and analyses the impact these attitudes had on the dynamics of interracial sexual relationships and on the mixed-race heritage of the Creole ethnic group during the era of the new imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines cross border movement and language barriers in West Africa. The Economic Community of West African States Protocols on Free Movement of Persons, Rights of Residence and Establishment established in 1979 made the movement of persons possible with little or no impediments within the West African Sub-region, with the vision of a fully integrated subregion in years to come. In spite of the high rate of migration which characterizes the sub-region, language barriers which impede the cross border movements of persons have not been given much attention in West African migration studies. The study therefore seeks to examine language barriers in West Africa and how they manifest in the movement of persons within the sub-region. The study adopts a descriptive approach, examining the manifestations of language barriers in the intra-regional migration dynamics of West Africa. The study finds that the existence of a linguistic gap is a fact in West Africa, however, the development of multilinguism and cross-border languages have been instrumental to abating the language barriers in the Sub-region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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There is an immediate connection between British histories of trade, empire and colonialism and the West African collections at the Manchester Museum. All objects have the potential to impart information about moments in their lives and a close reading of these collections show how objects actively shaped local and global networks of understanding within and between the locales of West Africa and Manchester. Through a series of collection-based case studies linking objects and archives, this article provides evidence of how narratives relating to complex histories of empire are not confined to one type of object or to collections donated at a particular time. Each object history is unique; put together these histories encapsulate a complex range of interactions. A 'culture of amnesia' has meant that the underlying politics concerning the contacts and exchanges necessary to enable the physical movement of an object from one cultural context to another has, until recently, been left unexamined. This article aims to show that, via a detailed consideration of objects in the collections at the Manchester Museum and the evidence associated with them, it is possible to explore this phenomenon. In doing so this article will add to the body of research aimed at revealing the potential and importance of using museum collections to recover neglected histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focussing on locally-owned newspapers in colonial West Africa, this essay presents a history of reading in the colonies which experiments with reading beyond, or reading outside, the anti-colonial nationalist perspective that prevails over newspaper history. The essay asks what kind of 'information' about the values, attitudes, aspirations and articulations of diverse colonial readerships can be extrapolated from the indigenous press, and about the manner in which 'non-readers' in West Africa interacted with printed forms, including the newspaper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the condition of press in West Africa during 1880 and 1930. It mentions that it was a period of literary freedom, creativity, originality and experimentation. The newspaper allowed the local readers to contribute, however the contributors never revealed their identities. It mentions that the work of the authors reflected, anger and condition during the colonial period.