This study examines Swahili-language Islamic marital booklets (vijitabu) written between 1932 and 2020, focusing on their gendered chronotopes and nostalgic elements. These booklets, written by and for Muslim men, offer advice on marriage, sexuality, and related topics, reflecting societal changes and the influence of reformist Islam in East Africa. The analysis identifies four prominent chronotopic formulations: the contemporary East African context, the time and place of the Prophet Muhammad, the pre-Islamic world (jahiliya), and the modern West. A potential fifth chronotope, the afterlife (akhera), is contingent on adherence to the first four. The booklets valorize the Prophet Muhammad’s era while criticizing other temporal and spatial contexts, advocating for a return to early Islamic gender norms and marital practices to achieve happiness in the afterlife. This study highlights the booklets’ role in shaping gender norms and religiopolitical ideologies, revealing the interplay between nostalgia, religious authority, and sociopolitical context in East African Muslim communities.

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.

This article explores the development of the Safari Rally in the context of intertwined trends in mobility, sports, and consumerism at local, global and intermediate levels. The first section briefly presents the Safari Rally. The second section discusses the significance and development of the sport of rallying in the context of global automobility and changes in the motor industry, highlighting in particular the professionalisation of sport and the forces driving it. The third section analyses why the Safari became relevant to so many stakeholders in Africa and across the globe, and how these shaped its development from its colonial origins through decolonisation and beyond. Highlighting the factors accounting for the rise, and decline, of the Safari as a sporting event of global significance contributes to understanding how mobility, sports, and consumerism were interlinked across continents in the second half of the 20th century.

This essay is a study in bureaucratic knowledge production using the example of the postal system in German East Africa. There is a great deal of historical literature that focuses on bureaucratic-knowledge-as-power: bureaucracies produced information that was used to quantify and, ultimately, to control populations both in the metropole and the colony. In this piece I want to emphasize another kind of bureaucratic knowledge production: namely, information about the bureaucratic system that was created through bureaucratic practice — what I call “studied bureaucratic knowledge.” Beyond understanding German attempts to translate (linguistically, administratively, and culturally) one understanding of bureaucracy, the historian who pays attention to the users of colonial bureaucratic structures can uncover bureaucratic knowledge created by those who encountered those structures in their daily lives — and how that information in turned shaped their use of the bureaucratic system.

This article seeks to explain how Mau Mau combatants selected and killed their civilian targets. The central argument is that Mau Mau members shared a moral logic that informed whom they killed, how, and why they did it. This moral logic was partly based on traditional Kikuyu ethics of violence, which were widely held and traceable to the late nineteenth century. Yet it was also a logic born out of novel, albeit contested, ethical convictions that developed in the context of an asymmetrical anticolonial war in 1950s-Kenya. Using captured guerrilla documents and oral history interviews with Mau Mau veterans, the article analyzes the perceived offenses that civilians committed against Mau Mau, the motives of Mau Mau assailants, and the internal conflicts that arose regarding the killings of some civilians. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that the moral logic of Mau Mau killings was firmly rooted in a dialectical tension between longstanding Kikuyu ethics of violence and the harsh realities of waging an asymmetrical anticolonial war. It also shows that Mau Mau debates over who to kill formed part of a larger process of sacralization, whereby members of the movement reimagined what they deemed sacred, moral, and just measures for conducting the war.

Tourism in Africa was entangled with colonialism from the start. However, after the Second World War it became an integral part of the colonising powers’ development agenda, albeit one that has received little scholarly attention so far. This presented African states with a serious dilemma when most of them gained independence during the 1960s. On the one hand, tourism promised to stimulate economic growth, provide much needed foreign currency, and create employment opportunities. On the other hand, international tourism had the potential to threaten the economic independence of post-colonial states and perpetuate colonial stereotypes, as well as international and local power imbalances and inequalities. The newly elected governments had to deal with this “colonial baggage.” This article focusses on the transition from colonial to post-colonial tourism in two East African countries, Kenya and Tanzania. I explore how the late colonial government pursued tourism as a development strategy for the region. I also demonstrate how Kenya and Tanzania approached tourism and its colonial legacies in different ways after independence. To trace their respective tourism histories, I draw on published reports and newspaper articles, historical research literature, in particular, from tourism scholars of various disciplines, as well as archival sources.

At the moment of independence, the Karamoja region of northeastern Uganda occupied a unique position within the Ugandan state. Local communities existed largely outside the sovereignty of the state and remained disinvested from its politico-economic institutions, and policymakers saw Karamoja as a problematic challenge to their agendas of development, security, and nation-building. I contend that, in the years surrounding Uganda's independence, government officials, rural communities, and a small emergent local elite fiercely debated Karamoja's place in the Ugandan state in state spaces such as government headquarters, trading centers, and barazas. Examining these contestations in state spaces allows us to map the indigenous political epistemologies of Karamoja against the epistemology of statehood and demonstrates the diversity of political thought that existed in Karamoja. A look at political debates in Karamoja at the moment of independence also sheds light on gaps within the historiographies of belonging and marginality in African states and addresses Karamoja's exclusion from the historiography of Uganda.

In 1945, actions which have been understood as strikes against wartime inflation occurred across colonized Africa: this essay identifies a deeper motivation in the events which happened in the Uganda Protectorate in early 1945. An understanding that people had a moral responsibility to act, and leaders had a moral responsibility to see them, to listen, and to respond led from a mobilization of workers on town streets, to efforts to see wrongful deaths acknowledged, to gatherings in the courtyard of the Buganda king in which he was almost overthrown. In each of the three stages of the protest, Ugandans of different ethnicities asserted an ethic of mutual obligation which acknowledged no boundary between the political and the economic, spoke to authority with an expectation that they would be heard, and drew on enduring knowledge of politics as well as a range of new ideas to solve the problems they confronted.

This article analyzes the transformation of an image of ritual violence on the Kenyan coast from the sixteenth century to the present. Drawing on a range of sources, it shows how understandings of “mung'aro” — a ritual of senior male initiation among Mijikenda-speaking peoples — changed as it became an object of inquiry for generations of missionaries, explorers, colonial administrators, local intellectuals, and foreign historians and anthropologists. In the mid-twentieth century, mung'aro became a key feature of Mijikenda traditions of origin in Singwaya, but in such a way that it reversed the direction of a specific form of ritual violence described in nineteenth-century traditions. By focusing on the transposition and recombination of ritual motifs across practical and discursive modalities (namely, ritual and narrative), this article offers a new approach to “the limits of invention” regarding traditions of origin.

In 1975, the Ugandan state established an Economic Crimes Tribunal to investigate and penalize smuggling, hoarding, overcharging, and other commercial malfeasance. In the coming years, innumerable Ugandans were arrested and charged with contravening the state's economic regulations. Prior observers have seen this as another instance of a capricious state, but in this article, I demonstrate the popular investment in economic regulation. Ugandans demanded better stewardship of money and things because they were aghast at the ungovernable world of commodities. For one thing, the inaccessibility of so-called “essential commodities” — sugar and salt, preeminently — impeded ethical expectations surrounding social reproduction, hospitality, and masculine respectability. More troubling, essential commodities were not completely unavailable; rather, they were available on exclusionary and confusing terms. Relative deprivation was more upsetting than absolute scarcity because it offended a sense of consumptive entitlement. As a result, it was not only the state that accused citizens of economic crimes. There were widespread accusations in which allegation and denunciation circulated among neighbors, families, and bureaucrats in an urgent effort to discipline commodities and people.

Nymphaea thermarum Eb. Fisch. (family Nymphaeaceae) is a small waterlily endemic to Rwanda that has been categorized as Extinct in the Wild since 2010. We report the rediscovery of N. thermarum in July 2023, not far from its locus classicus, identify the current and potential threats to the wild population (mining and overharvesting by collectors, respectively) and recommend the urgent conservation measures and research required to save the species from extinction. The species occupies small muddy ditches fed by hot spring water used for avocado plantations and fish pools. The population comprises hundreds of individuals, including reproductive adult plants, and seedlings. In the short term, conservation actions should include land protection, negotiation to ensure that sufficient water is reaching the habitat of N. thermarum and the reassessment of the species on the IUCN Red List, probably as Critically Endangered. In the medium term, the creation of a nature reserve, the restoration of the areas already affected by mining, and the reintroduction of N. thermarum to its original site would support long-term in situ conservation of the species. Further research should clarify the total and effective population size, population structure, ecology and genetics of this species.