This piece explores the parallel development of two fisheries management regimes in mid-twentieth-century Lake Malawi: one imposed by the British colonial government over the lake and the other by Senior Chief Makanjira focused on Mbenji Island. The parallel development of these regimes provides opportunity for close analysis of how fisheries management centred on different knowledge and practices led to distinctive legacies of governance legitimacy and efficacy. Given the increasing recognition that Indigenous knowledge is crucial to the future sustainability of fisheries globally, we contend that it is imperative to recognise the ways in which colonial pasts have embedded knowledge hierarchies and exclusionary decision-making processes within national fisheries governance regimes that continue to obstruct capacities to bring different knowledges, practices, and management approaches together effectively and appropriately.

This article traces the history of the repression of palm wine and alcohol (sodabi) in Dahomey, now Benin, with varying degrees of intensity, from the nineteenth-century kingdom of Abomey to postcolonial Dahomey. In parallel with the repression, this article also looks at the history of palm alcohol production. Dahomeans learned to distil wine from French peasants during the First World War, and were driven into sodabi production by French economic policies during the Great Depression. Using court sources, this article describes the social organisation, gender division, and economic rationale of sodabi production, as well as the occasions on which it was drunk. Ultimately, it argues that the repression of sodabi made it more difficult for peasants to improve their living conditions.

This article examines the central role of West Central Africa in the development of a global capitalist economy during the eighteenth century. Using a rich and overlooked set of records in English, Portuguese, and French, the article explains that rulers and brokers on the Loango coast championed ideas and practices of free trade and free markets from the rise of the Atlantic slave trade through at least until the end of the eighteenth century. The article shows that European slave traders opposed a free market by fiercely competing to obtain full control of the trade in African captives along the Atlantic Africa. In contrast, the West Central African states of Ngoyo, Kakongo, and Loango, located north of the Congo River, fully embraced free trade and free markets during the era of the Atlantic slave trade.

This article offers the first gendered history of African radio audiences. It uses a comparative approach to demonstrate that colonial development projects in Ghana and Zambia successfully created mass African audiences for radio between the 1930s and 1950s, at a time when most radio sets on the continent were owned by white settlers. However the gendered impact of the projects was uneven. In Zambia the promotion of battery-operated wirelesses inadvertently created a male-dominated audience, while the construction of a wired rediffusion system in Ghana attracted equal numbers of male and female listeners. Ghana’s radio project offers new perspectives on the history of colonial development as a very rare example of a scheme that benefitted women as much as men. Differences in the voice of Ghanaian and Zambian radio also reveal that these early radio schemes had a lasting influence on broadcast content and listening culture in both countries beyond the 1950s.

A review of Joel Cabrita’s biography of Regina Gelana Twala.

This article explores the systems of policing that emerged in the early Cape Colony (1652–1830). Contrary to previous historical scholarship that understood the institution to be largely nonexistent or of marginal importance to the colony’s political economic development, this article argues that the Cape colony’s systems of policing, which doubled as ad hoc military organizations, were not so much weak as privatized. It shows how this persistent tendency was motivated by the Dutch East India Company’s desire to maximize profits—though it manifested differently in different parts of the colony. Moreover, this article demonstrates that the mercantile economy that the company installed at the Cape ensured that private policing would become a vehicle of indigenous dispossession. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to the field of African carceral studies and understandings of processes of racialization in the early Cape.

The domination and exploitation inherent to colonialism entailed casting Africans as violators of European standards, expectations, and even aspirations. This article identifies messaging which permeated the everyday experiences of African wage earners by locating the ways in which employers embedded their understanding of Africans as potential violators into the employment relationship. It examines the records of the Tribunal de Première Instance in Dakar, Senegal, during the decades of high colonialism to reveal the nature of that dynamic, exploring implicit expectations among employers regarding their employees, particularly related to allegations of theft or abandonment of work brought against workers. Analysis of such cases particularly highlights domestic workers, who were overwhelmingly male. The interactions and claims in the justice records reveal clear constructions of violation within the attitudes and actions of non-African employers in colonial Dakar and present the court as a venue for perpetuating that rhetoric.

In 1959 and 1960, Cameroonian women nationalists visited the People’s Republic of China. These members of the Union démocratique des femmes camerounaises (UDEFEC) practiced what I term a “diplomacy of intimacy,” which highlighted the effects of colonialism on their bodies, fertility, and intimate relationships to create a shared affective experience of anticolonial solidarity with their Chinese counterparts. Expanding the definition of “diplomat” to reflect how diplomacy functioned in the decolonizing world reveals that women played a much larger role than previously understood. These women diplomats remained largely invisible to the Western powers and to the postcolonial Cameroonian government, but Chinese sources provide a valuable vantage point on their diplomacy. By drawing on sources from Cameroon, China, France, and the UK, I demonstrate that during decolonization African nationalist women represented their parties on the world stage, exercising far more diplomatic power than appears in histories of decolonization focused on the West.

This essay discusses the contours of what I call a new instrumental turn in Nigerian historical scholarship. It argues that the historical discipline in Nigeria is experiencing a new instrumental turn, which finds expression in several new features of academic history writing, teaching, and programming. Some aspects of this trend hearken back to the original instrumental history of the pioneers of Nigerian and African nationalist history; others represent something new, being responses to novel twenty-first-century anxieties and imperatives of nation-building, development, and the place of humanities knowledge in those aspirations. Unlike old conceptions of instrumentality, this new turn signals a more explicit agenda of problem-solving through historical research. It also entails a rather formulaic embrace of proposals for solutions to problems identified in or through historical research.

Independent Christian Churches were an important aspect of African anticolonial activism, but the political afterlives of these movements in the immediate postcolonial period have been broadly overlooked. This article studies the African Independent Pentecostal Church, focusing on its entanglement with the politics of reconciliation and state-building in a decolonising Kenya. During the 1950s Mau Mau uprising, the church lost its entire portfolio of land, churches, and schools. The article explores how church adherents sought to re-establish themselves on these holdings. These contests reveal that churches were political agents engaged in debates about the boundaries of postcolonial political community and the nature of post-conflict reconciliation. Churches’ roles as landowners and education providers meant denominational rivalries masked political struggles over justice for past violations. Embedded in intra-ethnic conflicts, churches negotiated with elites seeking to establish ethnic constituencies. Through this conflict and compromise, the brokered nature of the postcolonial nation-building project is revealed.

Historical analysis of Ghana’s late colonial mine communities has been extensive and overwhelmingly dominated by organised and politically active male mineworkers. Questions regarding the linkages between formal and informal mining actors and cultural ideas in the broader mine communities have remained inadequately explored. This article makes a timely investigation by critically analysing a range of governmental and corporate archival documents and situating the discussion within the context of expansive literature on Asante, and complemented by oral histories. It centres on the Asante/Akan term “kankyema”—a sociocultural phenomenon which women transformed towards economic ends to navigate the late colonial political economy’s mining income disruptions. The article argues for the essential need to centre marginalised voices in understanding diverse agencies in African mining history and for a deeper reflection on the potentialities of contextual sociocultural ideas—notably, how marginalised actors invoke and evoke their capacities over different times.

This article examines the politics of restitution within the Black Atlantic through the case of the Restitution Study Group’s legal challenge to the Smithsonian Institution’s return of Benin bronzes to Nigeria. While most scholarship frames restitution as a struggle between Western museums and postcolonial states, this article shifts the lens to intra-Black debates that complicate inherited frameworks of return, foregrounding the unresolved legacies of slavery and the claims of Black American and broader diasporic communities. At the same time, it situates these debates within the larger global landscape in which Western institutions and nation-states continue to define the terms and tempo of restitution. By challenging the assumption that restitution is solely a matter between source nations and former colonial powers, the Restitution Study Group brings attention to how African elites’ historical participation in the transatlantic slave trade and the ongoing marginalization of diaspora communities shape contemporary claims. The article also places these interventions alongside disputes within Nigeria over custodianship between the federal government, Edo State, and the Benin royal court. By tracing these overlapping histories, ethical claims, and political stakes, the article argues that returns of looted artifacts are not simply acts of restitution, but processes of decolonial repair that reconfigure authority, belonging, and historical responsibility across diasporic and national contexts.

The four pioneering African war correspondents who travelled to Asia in 1945 develop our understanding of Africa and the Second World War. This article argues that their tour challenges the existing scholarship on the conflict in two ways. Firstly, it bridges the common divide between “home” and fighting fronts in our understanding of wartime Africa. Secondly, due to the correspondents’ own positionality as colonial African newspapermen, it offers insights into African military service in ways not permitted by colonial and military archives. Within an overarching frame examining the tour’s origin and conclusion in Africa, the article assesses the correspondents’ activities in Asia in terms of their interactions with and analysis of African troops. Cumulatively, it contends that the correspondents’ tour both considerably expands our understanding of African soldiers’ lives in the Second World War, and also directly connects the “home front” with the Asian theatre of combat.

This study discusses the intersection between Black/African Digital Humanities, and computational methods, including natural language processing (NLP) and generative artificial intelligence (AI). We have structured the narrative around four critical themes: biases in colonial archives; postcolonial digitization; linguistic and representational inequalities in Lusophone digital content; and technical limitations of AI models when applied to the archival records from Portuguese-colonized African territories (1640–1822). Through three case studies relating to the Africana Collection at the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, the Dembos Collection, and Sebestyén’s Caculo Cangola Collection, we demonstrate the infrastructural biases inherent in contemporary computational tools. This begins with the systematic underrepresentation of African archives in global digitization efforts and ends with biased AI models that have not been trained on African historical corpora.

On 27 October 2021, Cambridge University’s Jesus College commemorated the historic return to Nigeria of the bronze statue of a cockerel called “Okukur.” This was looted from the ancient Kingdom of Benin in 1897 by British colonizers. The college resolved to relinquish ownership to the Oba, who is the cultural, religious, and legal head of Benin. On 23 March 2023, Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari decreed that the “ownership of the artefacts… is vested in the Oba.” The genesis of this order was controversies about the ownership, control, and management of returning objects. This article analyzes the role of the traditional institution of governance in the socio-legal politics of cultural heritage restitution in Nigeria. Building on the traditional leadership’s claims on the returned artworks, it explains the need to use the momentum of restitution to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of the national and international legal systems to protect cultural heritage.