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The decision by the British Colonial Office to prohibit the German-born anthropologist Paul Kirchhoff from entering any empire African colony, including South Africa, created a diplomatic problem as well a nearly derailing a major research project, 'the Changing African', developed by the German linguist Diedrich Westermann, London School of Economics (LSE) anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and JR Oldham, secretary of the London-based International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (IIALC). This paper examines academic and political freedom, as well as the treatment of émigré scholars – those forced to leave for political and/or racial reasons –, in interwar imperial Britain and its colonies using Kirchhoff as a case study. It scrutinizes the role of government and its instrumentalities on the appointment of researchers, using political affiliation as a key factor; secondly, it investigates how quasi-academic institutions, such as the IIALC and the Australian National Research Council (ANRC) acquiesced to government demands. It also illuminates the transnational aspect of security services and the international reach of academic anthropology. Thirdly, it traces the impact such actions had on research project(s), that is, how research projects were modified considering a perceived or anticipated response by government and its instrumentalities in the colonies and dominions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, French senators voted to return 27 objects held in the country's museums to Benin and Senegal. When speaking to the French Press, the French Minister of Culture, said, "the bill is not an act of repentance, but an act of friendship and trust (Selvin)." Without repentance, how can France hope to build friendship and trust with its former African colonies? Although extant literature (Curtis; DeBlock; Hicks; Maaba; Maples Munjeri; Nevadomsky; Roberts; Shyllon; and Thompson) provides insight into how France could restitute African cultural property, this literature has not explicitly considered the role that anti-Black racism plays in France's resistance to the restitution of African cultural property. Therefore, we investigated the research question: in what ways might Critical Race Theory (CRT) inform policies and practices on the restitution of African cultural property from France back to African nations? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs the concept of multidimensional heritage to examine colonial statues in Africa since the era of independences through transnational, diachronic, and multi-thematical perspectives. Colonial statues are viewed as transnational phenomena, with a focus on the African continent, emphasising the complex and evolving connections to former colonial powers in Europe. To capture the complexity of heritage uses, which is often best comprehended over an extended period, a diachronic approach is employed, and three periods are considered: colonial statues at independence (1950s to 1980); revival of (neo)colonial statues (1990s-2000s) and renewed contestations (since the 2010s). The paper also delves into various ways in which the past is used and interpreted through colonial statues, discussing aspects such as public memory, identities, diplomacy, aid, and justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common feature of colonial towns in Africa was the 'beer hall', serving traditional sorghum beer under municipal monopoly to the African labour force. This system was designed with a dual purpose - to fund rudimentary welfare and housing services for workers whilst consolidating control of drinking and sociality. But it was oppressive, and therefore lacked legitimacy; beer halls became targets of anti-colonial struggle and faced stiff competition from illicit brewers and drinking dens. Little is known about how colonial authorities considered and addressed these problems. This article shows how authorities in late colonial Bulawayo - in the spirit of postwar developmentalism - attempted to make their municipal liquor enterprise more legitimate, by building a multitude of landscaped community beer gardens serving good quality sorghum beer, and hailing the African welfare, education, recreation and home ownership schemes built from the considerable profits. Notwithstanding this attempt to associate municipal drinking with respectable sociality and socio-cultural development, the Council received (and strenuously rebutted) sustained criticism from Africans and Europeans alike for its heavy promotion of alcohol, which undermined its moral authority as the arbiter of post-war development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of 'Portuguese race' started to take shape in the early 1870s, under the influence of Aryan mythology and the first iterations of Haeckelian social Darwinist concepts of 'historical races'. This notion evolved alongside theories of a 'race struggle' that would ensure planetary domination by the 'Aryan peoples'. With these theories as a reference, mass killings and genocides became regular features of the conquest of territories in Angola, Mozambique and Timor, from the mid-1890s to the late 1910s. António Sardinha, one of Portuguese fascism's leading doctrinaires, would revive the idea of a 'Portuguese race' in the early 1910s, infusing it with a certain air of mystique. Later that decade, Mendes Correia, a 'raciologist' initially related to the 'anthroposociology school' that gave rise to Nazi race programs, would fit the concept into a supposedly scientific framework. Mendes Correia also built up the mystical side by projecting the realization of the race onto empire. For the next forty years, his 'raciology' school would provide the Portuguese empire with its official 'science of the races', carrying out numerous anthropological field studies in the African colonies. Portugal's national day, June 10, was celebrated as Dia da Raça, the 'Day of the Race', by the fascist regime up until the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender hierarchy and inequality are attributes of Western colonialism enforced in several colonised societies. Similarly, feminism (Western), as the antithesis of European sexism, has permeated colonised societies and has been assimilated without proper reflection. This is concretely evident among the Yorùbá people of south-western Nigeria. Before European colonisation, Yorùbá culture was gender-neutral and gender-silent; women were seen as complementary and not subordinate to men. Hence, according to Oyěwùmí's work on The Invention of Women, caution and reflections must be raised on the continual adoption of mainstream Western feminist philosophy in Yorùbá culture. In essence, the colonial imposition of the Western gender binary in Yorùbá society and women's anti-colonial and feminist activities are discussed. Furthermore, the paper challenges some feminist approaches and ideologies in Nigeria, while advocating for a communal, transformative, and Pan-African feminism in Yorùbá and African societies. The decolonisation of Africa and the Yorùbá education system are recommended, alongside a proper history of Indigenous Yoruba people and knowledges. Contemporary feminist campaigns (including digital feminisms) and movements must also develop a 'shared text of blackness'. The duo should align and improve the worth of women based on the indispensability and esteemed status offered to women in 'pre-colonial' Yorùbá society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the 1930s, as technical officers from multiple territories in British imperial Africa toured the United States to study federal soil conservation efforts in the wake of the Dust Bowl, they made particular observations of programs among southwestern Native American populations and conferred with colleagues in the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs (OIA). These previously unexplored exchanges extended far beyond purely technical matters: they became significant opportunities for both British imperial and OIA officials to reflect comparatively on America's enduring settler colonialism, colonial situations in eastern and southern Africa, and parallel state agendas of "native development." This article focuses on three case studies—involving visitors from colonial South Africa and Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and Kenya to various reservations and Pueblos in New Mexico and Arizona—to reveal how officials used these transcolonial dialogues to articulate their particular interests in and promote their preferred approaches to managing colonized peoples and their landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examines Germano-Anglo colonial towns in Cameroon to determine factors accounting for the scarcity of infrastructure as well as streets and places with Eurocentric names. Using primary and secondary data, it demonstrates that the lack of infrastructure in the polity is a function of negligence by colonial and post-colonial authorities. With few pieces of public infrastructure, the authorities have had few streets and places to attribute names from Eurocentric lexical dictionaries. These findings contribute to knowledge of the relative impact of endogenous and exogenous factors on toponymic traditions as well as inter-country differentials in African countries' development profiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study attempts an exploratory overview of African military slavery, which is marked by the unusual longevity of the phenomenon and by its surviving social legacy. Before the colonial period military slavery was not confined (as is often supposed) to the Muslim states of North Africa and the Sahel, but was also practiced in many non-Muslim sub-Saharan societies. In the late nineteenth century the colonial powers liberated, conscripted or purchased African slave soldiers for their own armies. Although the institution of military slavery died away during the colonial period, it has re-emerged in independent Africa as child soldiering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the late 1940s to early 1950s, group councils in Malawi's Southern province wrote several petitions to the colonial state, which seemingly questioned the colonial justice system and what councillors perceived to be abusive socio-economic state policies. The state established group councils as advisory bodies to native authorities to further decentralise state power in line with Britain's post-war imperial reforms. Why did group councils resort to the use of petitions, and how do the petitions broaden our understanding of political consciousness in colonial societies? This article uses archival sources to address these questions. It discusses how Africans used group councils to contest and place demands on the reformist post-war colonial state. Through these petitions, Africans expressed their grievances against the colonial state, with which they enjoyed a symbiotic relationship as a provider of public services and a defender of their rights. Africans petitioned the state to remind it of its responsibility from which they considered it had strayed. The petitions illustrate the local people's knowledge regarding how the colonial state repositioned itself to perform its trusteeship role after the war and the contradictions of that commitment. Although overlooked in previous scholarship, the concerns these petitions raised, the article argues, point to how group councils, the very institutions the state created, became local spaces where African political consciousness was nurtured before it entered the broader politics of mass nationalism in the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Very little attention has been paid to the role of language in the Présence Africaine debates over British and French decolonization in the 1950s and early 1960s. My article fleshes out this history by exploring how key intellectuals connected to the journal and publishing house understood the relationship between race, decolonization, and language. First, I sketch out the historical context for these debates and explain the raison d'être of Présence Africaine as a journal and publishing house, focusing particularly on the interventions its editors sought to make. Then I connect these contexts to a discussion of the contributions of key intellectuals to the 1956 Présence Africaine Congress of Black Writers and Artists. While most of the participants in the 1956 congress agreed that language as a fundamental building block and conveyor of culture would be crucial to this project, they were far from reaching a consensus on how or why that would be the case. Their discussions went beyond choosing between particular languages to parsing out arguments for deploying language as a tool for managing the legacies of Western civilization and the status of particular cultures within understandings of modernity and human psychology. Questions of dialect and accent as indicators of race, for example, were analyzed alongside discussions about the nature of authentic language use and the power structures embedded in the configurations of different languages. These debates were refracted through the parallel question of how the canon of Western thought was (and continues to be) constituted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In "The Wages of Harlotry," Kenda Mutongi examines the historiographical significance of Luise White's The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (1990). She argues that White's main contribution has been connecting the history of prostitution in Nairobi to histories of family, labor, sexuality, gender, colonial state, housing, urban life, and political economy—that is, White is a pioneer in writing entangled, layered, and intersectional histories that have an enduring influence today despite early skepticism about her work. Drawing partly on scholars' solicited reminiscences of teaching and reading the book, Mutongi shows that White has been a fierce feminist and a fascinatingly eclectic African historian. To fully understand the influence of White's book, Mutongi argues, we have to go beyond what we read between its covers and talk with people who lived and worked with White while she was researching and writing the book as well as those who have taught it to different generations of students over the last thirty years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of decolonisation implies the existence of a territory, entity, structure, or system which has previously been colonised by exogenous forces and thus needs to be liberated. In most African countries, the discourses of decolonisation of higher education emanate from the shared experience of imposed European colonisation that perpetuated epistemic violence on African indigenous knowledge systems. Thus, a lived experience of colonialism became a foundation for the decolonisation debates imagining and aspiring to alternative and inclusive futures. This point of departure yet makes the discussion of decolonisation as the subject of only those who have had colonial experiences – an event of interruption of a specific process considered colonial and therefore, undesirable. This approach conceptualises decolonisation in a narrow sense as a linear process with a distinct historical beginning, which is colonial, and an envisaged liberating decolonial end. This article critically challenges this dominant narrative of decolonisation and reconceptualises it as a complex, dynamic, and lifelong process of re-centring. It argues that decolonisation, as a concept in higher education, goes beyond a pre-existing colonial foundation. Taking the context of Ethiopia, a country that remained independent during the European colonisation of Africa, this article aims at reconceptualising the notion of decolonisation of higher education in a space that has never been colonised. The article discusses epistemological challenges of the Ethiopian higher education system and provides a proactive alternative future departing from monolithic epistemic tradition to a pluralistic approach that accommodates diverse structures of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the experiences of African medical auxiliaries belonging to rural colonial Fort Victoria province's sprawling Ndanga Native Medical Unit, this article considers the ambiguous position occupied by this front-line group who pioneered black medical care work in the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Although a great deal of work has been done on the histories of medical auxiliaries across colonial Africa, how they managed their incorporation into a marginal but evolving colonial healthcare system requires a fresher look. The recent emphasis on auxiliaries' cultural power and clinical acumen – two extremely important traits – has tended to overshadow the daily realities of their positioning on the margins of colonial health-care systems. Adopting a holistic approach, I reconsider the opportunities and constraints of their occupation. I argue that although African medical auxiliaries in remote rural places such as Ndanga were influential as culture brokers and providers of frontline care – a source of pride and inspiration for many – their haphazard recruitment, ad hoc training and casual conditions of service negatively exposed them to the vicissitudes of their colonial and professional subjugation. Moreover, as African medical training became more professionalised from the 1950s onwards, the once prestigious position of medical assistants was overtaken by newer categories of professionally trained African health-care personnel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism is presented on the 2005 Tanzanian historical novel (and what is referred to as a shadow genre novel) "Desertion," by Abdulrazak Gurnah. The book's depiction of the imperial nature of the British Empire in Africa, including the British protectorate of Zanzibar, is discussed. The portrayal of memory and desire in the novel is also discussed.

Against a backdrop of pressing economic and strategic concerns shaping British policies after the Second World War, Field Marshal Lord Montgomery, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, embarked on an official tour of Africa in November-December 1947. He visited South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt, as well as other African territories. Montgomery's controversial report and the reactions to it cast light on British attitudes towards and perceptions of her African empire in the immediate postwar period, as shaped by Labour government defence and developmental policies. At the same time, it invites reconsideration of Montgomery's place in imperial and military historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The making and continuous shifts of African identities outside Africa have attracted interest from across critical disciplines. Imaginative literature has achieved a considerable status as a site and optic for critical engagement with evolving dynamics of the diasporization of African identities. This article sets out to extend what is known about this 'function' of literature by looking at how representations of female experiences of forced trans-oceanic African mobilities can potentially disrupt male-centred narratives and epistemologies, to become a critical site to read shifting trans-Atlantic African identities. Using Yaa Gyasi's novel Homegoing (2016), the paper explores how the metaphor of female descendancy dominating the narrative emplotment of female experiences of being and becoming African and African American in America, can be read as potentially illuminating and problematizing notions of African diasporic identities and in the process, charting new frames for re-imagining the present and future of African identities in the context of their pasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his book about his Irish–South African family and his childhood under apartheid, White Boy Running, Christopher Hope writes of the "bitter emotion" that infuses the politics of both Ireland and South Africa. This essay considers how the histories of political struggle in both places are intertwined through readings of photographs taken in Ireland and South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. I draw on these photographs to develop an argument about how affective archives of music, images, and poetry travel across time and space and serve as a conduit for raising awareness about injustice and for forging transnational solidarity. At the same time, these photographs provoke a consideration about how Irish identification with the struggle of black South Africans is complicated by the longer history of British colonialism and racism and how solidarity requires both remembering and forgetting. This essay also begins to trace the presence and work of South African activists in Ireland who campaigned against apartheid while they were in exile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The institutions that governed most of the rural population in British colonial Africa have been neglected in the literature on colonialism. We use new data on local governments, or "Native Authorities," to present the first quantitative comparison of African institutions under indirect rule in four colonies in 1948: Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Nyasaland, and Kenya. Tax data show that Native Authorities' capacity varied within and between colonies, due to both underlying economic inequalities and African elites' relations with the colonial government. Our findings suggest that Africans had a bigger hand in shaping British colonial institutions than often acknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how German Protestant missionaries to the Herero people influenced colonial "native policy" in German Southwest Africa in the years leading up to the Colonial War of 1904 to 1907. By the late 1890s, burgeoning European settlement increasingly displaced the Herero from their traditional territory. While colonial officials promoted more settlement, missionaries had developed a concept of conversion that linked Christianization with living in self-sufficient agricultural communities, and hoped to place limits on Herero displacement. Thus, missionaries and colonial officials engaged in protracted political negotiations over the creation of inalienable "native reservations" for the Herero. I show that missionaries' model of Herero conversion prompted them to promote an alternative mode of settler colonialism that would make room in Southwest Africa for self-sufficient Herero settlements. Prior to the Colonial War, missionaries succeeded in convincing the colonial government to begin creating reservations, thus shaping colonial policy according to missionary priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1737–8, officers aboard three British warships sent to Africa to secure seaborne commerce engaged in private trade themselves, in violation of navy regulations and parliamentary statute, and carried enslaved Africans to Barbados. Slave trading merchants from Bristol, Liverpool and London – whose business was hurt by this illegal competition – co-ordinated efforts and lobbied the admiralty and the house of commons to put a stop to naval trading and gain restitution for their losses. The episode was part of a long process of negotiation among stakeholders in the developing fiscal-naval state that eventually produced shared expectations about naval professionalism and the duty of commerce protection that were significantly influenced by mercantile interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes a localized conflict over a non-demarcated stretch of the Uganda–South Sudan boundary in 2014 as a starting point for examining the history of territorial state formation on either side of this border since its colonial creation in 1914. It argues that the conflict was an outcome of the long-term constitution of local government territories as patches of the state, making the international border simultaneously a boundary of the local state. Some scholars have seen the limited control of central governments over their borderlands and the intensification of local territorialities as signs of African state fragmentation and failure. But the article argues that this local territoriality should instead be seen as an outcome of ongoing state-formation processes in which state territory has been co-produced through local engagement and appropriation. The paper is thus of wider relevance beyond African or postcolonial history, firstly in contributing a spatial approach to studies of state formation which have sought to replace centre–periphery models with an emphasis on the centrality of the local state. Secondly it advances the broader field of borderlands studies by arguing that international boundaries have been shaped by processes of internal territorialisation as well as by the specific dynamics of cross-border relations and governance. Thirdly it advocates a historical and processual approach to understanding territory, arguing that the patchwork of these states has been fabricated and reworked over the past century, entangling multiple, changing forms and scales of territory in the ongoing constitution of state boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to work on development-centred technical and scientific expertise at the decline of the British empire in Africa. It focuses on the imagining of future agricultural landscapes in Sudan, exploring how such imagining was framed by the social and colonial worlds in which scientific knowledge about agricultural capacity in the north and south was produced. It draws on a private archive of letters, photographs and objects compiled by Roger Brain, an agricultural scientist engaged in research and census work for the University of Khartoum in Sudan between 1953 and 1959. His archive reveals the underlying assumptions, conventions and anxieties that framed the ways in which he viewed and understood the landscapes in which he worked. I argue that this framing shaped regionalized notions of inevitable technological transformation in the north, and notions of a fragile cultural distinctiveness coupled with a deep nostalgia for rural intransience in the south. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I make a case for oral traditions passed on from matrilineal members of the family to their (grand)children as a key system of knowledge that has informed and shaped black intellectual culture and the black radical imagination in South Africa and its transnational iterations. I focus on the work of Keorapetse Kgositsile, who attributes his cultural and political consciousness to his grandmother and mother, and asserts that they equipped him with the wisdom to survive the hostile environment of colonial modernity and apartheid. I put forth questions about a gendered black radical tradition and the place of these (grand)mothers in it. I adopt the heuristic matriarchive, which holds together locally specific matrilineally inherited worldviews, intersubjective relations, vernaculars, and aesthetics. I show how these have shaped pan-African sensibilities in this towering figure of South African modernity. When we consider the manner in which this prominent figure of black intellectual culture carries with him what I call the matriarchive to inform his work and politics in his itinerancy in the black diaspora, we open possibilities to investigate how the matriarchive was brought into locution with transatlantic cultural and political production. The issue of transnationalism and vernaculars serves to illuminate the mutations and transformations of the matriarchive in his work, which has enriched a polyglot internationalism. I argue that his work, shaped by a distinct sense of custom, culture, and community, has transformed his interlocutors in the black diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age is an essential category of analysis for African history. For over a century, social scientists have emphasized the central role of age-grading in African cultures. Whereas most people in precolonial African societies assessed age in relative terms (juniors vs. seniors), European colonialism expanded the legal importance of chronological age. Gender mattered to both definitions of age. Faced with two incommensurable systems for understanding life stages—one based on relational (male) seniority and the other on chronological age—African women growing up during the colonial period found new ways to assert a sense of belonging among generations of women. I argue in favor of a feminist methodology that recognizes the broader trend among a generation of young women in Africa who employed conflicts over age to assert their maturity, and in doing so located themselves in their own histories. Identifying female age sets and generations thus offers new perspectives on how African girls and women make and remake history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1850s, Malawi has seen various attempts by missionaries, settler farmers and administrators to transform peasant agriculture in the face of ecological, political and economic challenges. However, attempts to improve peasants' food production have received little attention in the Malawian and regional historiography. Here I explore the interventions that the colonial state and other European actors made to improve peasants' food production in southern Malawi from 1859 to 1939. I argue that, while colonialism disrupted rural livelihoods, it brought with it efforts to improve the practices by which peasants produced foodstuffs. The success of these efforts, however, was mixed and largely limited by the derogatory beliefs that colonial officials developed about African practices and the state's inability to take into account local context and history. In particular, negative attitudes towards African producers undermined the legitimacy and acceptability of the interventions among the peasants during the period under study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the earliest days of European expansionism, Africa has held a dual place in the Western imaginary, cast as a space of futurelessness even as white futurities were predicated on its exploitation. Appropriations of the future have persisted post-liberation, revealed in the divestment of futurity from bodies marked as queer or disabled. Drawing on historical moments and literary texts from Mozambique, Uganda and Zimbabwe, and on insights from queer theory, critical race theory and disability studies, I seek to demonstrate that the logics of white supremacy can be seen at work in these mechanisms of exclusion, even where whiteness itself is displaced – but that literary invocation of queerness and disability can thus be used to mobilize critique of this continuity. In centring the circumscription of futurity at the heart of colonialism, heteronormativity and ableism, then, I underscore the critical value of reading these as reciprocal and inextricable systems of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is true that expansionism under Fascism did not, for a long time, receive the attention that it deserved. This period of historiographic and literary amnesia has now, however, come to a close. As regards literary production, recent years have seen the publication of a number of highly regarded works – by such well-known writers as Gabriella Ghermandi or Igiaba Scego – that have used the novel as a means of exploring the legacies of empire. The article explores one of the most recent additions to this body of work, Francesca Melandri's Sangue giusto (2017). More specifically, it addresses the theme of secrets and their revelation that lies at the heart of the novel. It investigates the social and psychological ramifications of the discovery of the nature of imperial conquest under Fascism. It also explores how the novel interacts with the writing of those transnational African/Italian authors who have confronted the legacy of Italy's colonial past. The article considers the overall vision that Sangue giusto offers of Italy's relationship with Ethiopia, of the conceptual universe of colonialism, and of the enduring topicality of the memory of Italy's imperial past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the locally manufactured pottery at Christiansborg Castle in Osu, Accra, Ghana. Topics discussed include pottery at Christiansborg Castle, a 17th-century former trading post, Danish and British colonial seat of government and Office of the President of the Republic of Ghana; archaeological excavation at Christiansborg Castle; and use of hand modelling technique in locally manufactured pottery.

• Advances our understanding of the causes of the salience of ethnicity. • Establishes a cross-country relationship between indirect colonial rule and the salience of ethnicity in sub-Saharan Africa. • Shows, controlling for ethnicity and location, that ethnicity is also more salient in indirectly ruled areas of Namibia. • Causal mechanisms are shown to be the importance of traditional leaders and customary land in indirectly ruled areas. Why is ethnicity more salient in some contexts than in others? This paper provides new theory and evidence linking indirect colonial rule to the contemporary salience of ethnicity in sub-Saharan Africa. Using Afrobarometer survey data, I establish a substantively significant cross-national relationship between the indirectness of colonial rule and the strength of contemporary ethnic identification in sub-Saharan Africa. To show that this relationship is causal, I then exploit a sub-national research design leveraging regional variation in direct and indirect colonial rule across the country of Namibia. I show that, controlling for location and ethnicity, indirect colonial rule is also associated with stronger ethnic identification within Namibia both across the country as a whole and within 50 km of the border dividing indirectly and directly ruled areas of Namibia. This paper then disentangles why indirect rule is so robustly associated with the salience of ethnicity. I theorize and provide evidence that the effects of indirect rule can be attributed to the greater importance of traditional leaders and ethnically demarcated customary land rights in formerly indirectly ruled areas. As such, this paper helps uncover the causes of important regional variation in the salience of ethnicity, advances our understanding of the institutional origins of ethnic conflict in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and thus why indirect colonial rule is so often associated with poor developmental outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wide acceptance and maturation of the theology of missio Dei is the most important development in the theology of mission in recent times. It introduced a radically new understanding of mission and theology, and flowing from that a re-appropriation of ecclesiology. Mission studies are also characterised by a new appreciation of mission from the margins: liberation theology and the associated discourses on decoloniality, deep engagement in contextuality and the explosion of missional ecclesiology (missional church). This apostolic orientation of the church is of the utmost importance in the reflection on the future of theology. This research attends to the postcolonial discourse as an important critique of colonialism and understands the emancipation of Africanised or decolonised theological education as an inevitable and positive development. Contextual sensitivity, attention to diverse power structures and a predisposition to appreciate diversity open imaginative possibilities for theological education. This leads to the argument that decolonial African theology must confront issues of biblical hermeneutics. The proposal of this research is that missional hermeneutic is an excellent starting point. It describes the contours of a missional hermeneutic, attending to mission as central to the Biblical story, the meaning of mission and the conviction that reading Scriptures constitutes an essential part of missional praxis. Missional hermeneutic is a centring vision and purpose for theological education. The argument is for a missional curriculum that defines a centre that unifies the various disciplines, one that places mission and missiology at the heart of theological education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New evidence reveals that some African soldiers in Britain's Central African Federation—today's Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe—developed African nationalist sympathies in the 1950s and early 1960s because of nationalist infiltration and the increasing unpopularity of colonialism. Discontent was also linked to participation in British counter-insurgency in Malaya, and news of Kenya's Mau Mau Uprising and the Congo Crisis. African soldiers questioned European officers, demanded commissions, wrote complaint letters, met secretly, circulated nationalist propaganda, joined nationalist organizations, made abortive plots and engaged in "subversive talk." With independence for Zambia and Malawi, white officers in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) doubted black soldiers' dependability in future operations against nationalist insurgents but had to rely on them because of limited white manpower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of anti–colonialism as a political and intellectual enterprise across Africa is one that has been characterised by ‘Great Men’. In an effort to broaden this scholarship, this article uncovers and recovers the history of African women as intellectual subjects in their own right. It focuses on the thought and practice of Charlotte Manye Maxeke in order to highlight how one African woman at the turn of the twentieth century grappled with issues of racism, sexism and politics in African freedom struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the ways in which Nigerian Cartoonist Etim Bassey Asukwo employs visual elements as counter-narratives against dominant governmental narratives on sociopolitical issues. It discusses the strategies of satire employed in cartoons which embedded in traditional Nigerian societies long before the advent of colonialism Cartoons, like their satirical performance predecessors; and also focuses on contemporary cartoons that share significant similarities with the precolonial tradition of satire.

Drawing on my experience of writing an account of Chota Motala, a Pietermaritzburg-based medical doctor and anti-apartheid activist, this article considers some of the historiographical and methodological challenges of writing biography in general, and South African political biographies in particular. On a general level, this includes whether biography is 'inferior' history, an 'illusion', and whether it can be written in a linear manner. Specific to my study, this article considers the theoretical and contextual issues relating to South African political biography; the role of the sources in shaping the narrative; the subjective process of writing a biography; and the variance in interpreting the character of Motala and his contribution in the political sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assesses Sino-African cooperation with a view to understanding its nature and subsequently identifying ways to improve it. Using a mixed method that combined in-depth interviews, Afrobarometer, and Johns Hopkins' China Africa Research Initiative (CARI) data, I find that, despite a few gains, China takes the lion's share of benefits from the cooperation. Indeed, the balance of trade is skewed toward China, and there is very little Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) flowing to Africa. Moreover, 'debt trap diplomacy' is crippling African economies, raising alarm over whether China intends to recolonize the continent. Also, while Chinese aid is negligible, the amount of contracts revenues and diplomatic support it gets from the continent makes one think Africa deserves more from the cooperation. Nevertheless, China, just like any other country, acts in its nation's interest. Therefore, it is incumbent upon African countries to ensure that they demand more from the cooperation. In the end, to address China's hegemony over Sino-African cooperation, Africa should prioritize the development of local content through technological and skill transfers, curb corruption, and build a critical mass of negotiators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Novelists and other cultural producers have long employed the African continent as a palimpsest to construct fantastical tales. From Sir John Mandeville to Joseph Conrad, Africa's blank spaces on the map have been filled with monstrous creatures that fuel the western imagination. As a consequence, this constant othering of the so-called 'Dark Continent' has had a deleterious impact for African states and their citizenries, as spectacularly evidenced in U.S. President Donald Trump's now-infamous labelling of the entire continent as a host of 'shithole countries'. This article wrestles with the continuation of this trend in popular culture via an empirical examination of the speculative fiction of the British novelist and performance artist, B. Catling. Publishing in 2015, The Vorrh is the first of the three novels set in a parallel Africa, specifically a former German colony that is home to remnants of the Garden of Eden. Focusing on the enchanted forest known as the Vorrh and the colony's (fictional) capital, Essenwald, this article employs methods drawn from geocriticism and popular geopolitics to interrogate Catling's built-world. This is done with the aim of connecting structures of iteration in the representation of fictional 'Africas' to the West's imperially inflected geopolitical codes towards the actual physical and human geographies that constitute the world's second largest and most populous continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with development economist Thandika Mkandawire is presented. Among the issues he discussed include how having lived under colonialism for a memorable portion of his life has shaped his perspective on African development, writers either inside or outside economics whom he considers as influential on his thinking, and the importance of democracy to the developmental role of the state in Africa.

This article explores invisibility and the unseen, as well as presence and visibility, in relation to a French colonial photographic archive left by Henri Gaden. This archive comprises numerous collections of images and documents; it is heterogeneous and multivocal in nature, a feature that is theorized. Part of this article focuses on a case study of Henri Gaden and the development of his photographic methods. However, a broader argument is made about the way the French colonial regime, often contradictory in its goals, facilitated photographic invisibility through cropping images. There is a strategic invisibility in the construction of this archive, manufactured invisibilities that point to contradictions and uncertainties, which reveal anxieties and desires of colonial authorities. The article highlights another form of the unseen: epistemic invisibility of modernist photographic methods—that is, in the framing of an image, especially the absent presence of the photographer, as well as the unseen social relationships that constitute a photographic encounter. By attending to Gaden's voluminous correspondence, analytical strategies are developed to recover these forms of the unseen. Reading across varied archival sources not only highlights their contradictory nature, but also makes visible those aspects of the photographic encounter that would otherwise be left invisible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The annexation and establishment of Natal as a British colony by 1845 was an event defined by conflict and concerns for security in British Southern Africa. The threat of invasion from the nearby Zulu kingdom or the possibility of an indigenous uprising continued to cast a shadow over the growth and expansion of the colony during the following decades. In response, those living within the colony offered multiple solutions, both actual and theoretical, related to the protection and stability of this emerging colonial state, including white volunteer corps, mounted police, and even indigenous levies. This paper examines the debate that defined these proposed solutions from 1845 to the Anglo–Zulu War of 1879. Whether from within the colony itself or from other regions of the British Empire, the suggested solutions and the debate over security were illustrative of the concern about external and internal threats that permeated the European public consciousness of British Natal. Some residents of the colony offered their own military expertise (or lack thereof); others looked to the Afrikaner population as a model for control; and a small number, who did not even reside in the colony, expressed their readiness to 'devote the best years of their lives' to the security of the colony. Such willingness, along with the other solutions to the issue of colonial security in British Natal, sheds considerable light on the emergence of imperial power in nineteenth-century Southern Africa, and constitutes a valuable addition to the history of Natal, settler colonies more generally and the British Empire at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognising the impact of religion on state action, this article identifies two variables that interact to affect the type and level of violence employed by Western states against Third World targets. First, variation in the degree to which the prominent Christian denominations and organisations within these states view evangelisation as either an individual-level or national-level process – Christian individualism vs Christian nationalism – has determined church support for using violence as a tactic. Second, the level of influence that churches and missionary organisations have over their home states affects the ability of Christian actors to directly impact state actions. Western violence against Third World peoples is expected to be lowest when churches and Christian organisations view evangelisation in primarily individualistic terms and have significant influence over the state. The article examines the relationships between concepts of evangelisation, Christian influence over state policies, and levels of violence against the Third World by examining British, French and German colonialism during the late colonial period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the 15th century, informal education existed in Ghana with the goal of introducing young people into the society. The traditions and values of the community, as well as the meaning of life, were taught to the child. By using postcolonial theory as a framework for analysis, it is evident that the Western formal education introduced to the people of the Gold Coast by the Christian missionaries and the British Colonial government did not serve the indigenous population well. Rather, it denationalized and facilitated the indignity and loss of cultural identity of the Ghanaian. The missionary and colonial education aimed at character training and civilization resulted in cultural annihilation and religious, and linguistic hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]