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This article explores the interactions between the English Royal African Company agent Francis Moore and the king of Saloum, which Moore described in Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (1738). The king, in his efforts to maintain royal control over the slave trade, twice occupied the English company's upriver warehouse, taking possession of it and its goods for his own use. I argue that situating such extant travel accounts within the political circumstances of the encounters that generated them—the politics at the intersection—as well as the politics shaping their reception—the politics of the intersection—illuminates the cross-cultural production of ideas about and practices of sovereignty in western Europe and Africa during the transatlantic slave trade. Paying special attention to how Moore's account contributed to the coalescence of the figure of the African despot in European political discourse, the essay roots this trope in European experiences of subjection in the centralized Wolof/Serer military kingdom of Saloum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although women’s land rights are often affirmed unequivocally in constitutions and international human rights conventions in many African countries, customary practices usually prevail on the ground and often deny women’s land inheritance. Yet land inheritance often goes unnoticed in wider policy and development initiatives to promote women’s equal access to land. This article draws on feminist ethnographic research among the Serer ethnic group in two contrasting rural communities in Senegal. Through analysis of land governance, power relations and ‘technologies of the self’, this article shows how land inheritance rights are contingent on the specific effects of intersectionality in particular places. The contradictions of legal pluralism, greater adherence to Islam and decentralisation led to greater application of patrilineal inheritance practices. Gender, religion and ethnicity intersected with individuals’ marital position, status, generation and socio-ecological change to constrain land inheritance rights for women, particularly daughters, and widows who had been in polygamous unions and who remarried. Although some women were aware that they were legally entitled to inherit a share of the land, they tended not to‘demand their rights’. In participatory workshops, micro-scale shifts in women’s and men’s positionings reveal a recognition of the gender discriminatory nature of customary and Islamic laws and a desire to‘change with the times’. While the effects of ‘reverse’ discourses are ambiguous and potentially reinforce prevailing patriarchal power regimes, ‘counter’ discourses, which emerged in participatory spaces, may challenge customary practices and move closer to a rights-based approach to gender equality and women’s land inheritance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]