Cartography, which includes maps and plans as well as the processes and contexts of their production and use, played an important role in shaping colonial encounters in Africa. The early manuscript and print maps of the limited spaces of interaction, where Europeans expressed power prior to the 19th century, tended to be broadly representative of wide areas or focused closely on key locales, usually forts or coastal settlements. Until the late 18th century most tended to be imprecise and relational, with few clear markers of dominion or signs of administrative structures, and heavily dependent on local exchanges of knowledge.
As with other European fields of scientific knowledge that intersected African spaces and places, however, cartography accelerated in importance and changed in character with the expansion of colonial rule and the emergence of modern bureaucracies from the late 19th century. Although manuscript maps never lost their importance to local administrators or their place in the collection of information, cheap lithography after about 1850 assured colonial governments a greater number of precise and elaborate representations than ever before, which created a variety of notional spaces and spatial notions for the deployment of colonial power. Into the 20th century, compilation mapping from variegated data continued to yield slowly—and incompletely—to even more precise survey-based maps that claimed to approach truly objective representational accuracy. This claim of accuracy in turn abetted a variety of new economic, social, and political schemes under colonial auspices.
Overall, the relationship between cartography and colonialism was cyclical in that mapped processes framed colonial visions of African territory and spatiality and translated these illusions into instruments of power to advance those colonial designs on people, land, and resources. A lack of consideration for spatialities beyond the idealized model of planimetric positional representation or, thematically, colonial priorities and schemas of organization may be the most consistent characteristic of mapping in colonial Africa. At the same time, this cartography continued to depend on the knowledge of African informants or assistants and, ultimately, the work of locally trained professionals through political independence, which created spaces for interpretation, opposition, and coproduction that shaped the map output. The colonial relationship and colonial priorities thus framed cartography in African spaces throughout the era, although the discursive nature of mapping and its processual nature meant influences traveled in more than one direction, and the map was not simply a direct imposition.
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Article
Cartography in Colonial Africa
Lindsay Frederick Braun
Article
Dar es Salaam
Eric Burton
Dar es Salaam, a major urban center in early 21st-century East Africa, was founded in 1862 as a mainland outpost of the sultanate in Zanzibar. From its very beginnings, the town was a cosmopolitan, polyglot, and multiethnic space. Following colonial conquest, the Germans used Dar es Salaam as their capital of German East Africa from 1891 onward, as did the British administration of Tanganyika, as the territory was renamed after the transfer of power following World War I, until independence in 1961. Colonial rule shaped the city’s geography according to racialized zoning, yet both colonial and subsequent postcolonial governments often found themselves reacting to dynamics (particularly immigration and informalization) rather than initiating them. Since the late colonial period, social and political dynamics in Dar es Salaam—such as the growth of nationalism—have had repercussions in all of Tanzania. In the 1960s and 1970s, the city became a transnational revolutionary hub at the crossroads of Pan-Africanism, anticolonial currents, and Cold War rivalries. At the same time, at the national level, the government tried to peripheralize Dar es Salaam and announced the relocation of the capital to Dodoma in 1972. Despite the antiurban bias of Tanzania’s policies of African socialism (
ujamaa
) and neoliberal reconfigurations from the 1980s onward, both of which put a brake on state investments in urban infrastructures and services, Dar es Salaam remained a commercial, cultural, and diplomatic center. With a population that grew from 22,500 in 1913 to 5.4 million inhabitants in 2022, it has become one of Africa’s major metropolises.
Article
Early Factionalism in Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle
Brooks Marmon
The course of Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle was fundamentally shaped by tensions among competing nationalist factions. The impact of this dynamic is typically observed from 1963, when Zimbabwe’s long-serving ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU)-Patriotic Front, was founded following a fissure in the liberation movement. Earlier instances of intranationalist competition in Southern Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe) have generally escaped scholarly attention despite their pioneering contributions to the dynamics of political pluralism in Zimbabwe and the presence of noted political figures amidst their leadership.
In 1961, the Zimbabwean nationalist movement experienced its first significant split with the formation of the Zimbabwe National Party (ZNP) which broke away from the National Democratic Party. The ZNP, in turn, experienced its own rupture a year later when the Pan-African Socialist Union (PASU) was formed. Although these were the two only two nationalist challengers of note in the early 1960s prior to ZANU, several other short-lived Black-led political parties emerged at this time in settler-dominated Southern Rhodesia.
The ZNP and PASU appealed to rising grievances with the prosecution of the anticolonial liberation struggle. They were also a consequence of the changing geopolitics wrought by Africa’s decolonization. The two parties sought to consolidate their position by appealing to the emerging cohort of African anticolonial leaders across the continent. These efforts induced extensive backlash from the main wing of the nationalist movement, then led by Joshua Nkomo. Both the ZNP and PASU were short-lived, effectively collapsing by 1963. While neither party was able to effectively overcome these intense assaults, their comparatively fleeting existence shaped the political environment by influencing tactics and providing a template for subsequent nationalist contenders seeking greater longevity.
Article
Ethiopia in the Nineteenth Century
Teshale Tibebu
The history of Ethiopia during the 19th century involved three fundamental processes: (1) the Zämänä Mäsafənt (Era of Princes) and its coming to an end under Kassa Häylu, later Emperor Tewodros II; (2) the repeated attempts by Egypt and Italy to colonize Ethiopia, culminating in the Battle of Adwa on March 1, 1896; and (3) Mənilək’s territorial expansion and conquest of what is now southern Ethiopia during the last quarter of the 19th century in campaigns known as agär maqnat. These three distinct, yet related, processes laid the foundations for the making of modern Ethiopia.
The end of the Zämänä Mäsafənt was a key factor in centralizing state power in the hands of the emperors of Ethiopia. It enabled consolidating the power of the regional lords under the emperor, which in turn played a critical role in confronting Egypt and Italy’s colonial intrusions in the late 19th century. Mənilək’s territorial conquests in the south further strengthened the state, garnering vast human and material resources that played a critical role in the Ethiopian victory at the Battle of Adwa. All three processes worked in tandem: the end of the Zämänä Mäsafənt created a strong centralized state; such a state succeeded in nipping in the bud the colonial invasions of Egypt and Italy; and the successes of the agär maqnat campaigns added to the overall strength of the country. It also laid the ground for the problems of the 20th century, chief among them being the “national question.”
Article
Guinea-Bissau
Philip J. Havik
Guinea-Bissau’s current frontiers were drawn in 1886, while the territory was occupied militarily by Portugal in 1915. Its complex sociocultural mosaic derives from the long-standing presence of farming communities in the coastal wetlands and the transitional forested zone. Its rich precolonial and proto-colonial history is associated with the Kaabú federation, which resulted from the westward expansion of the Mali Empire under Sundjata Keita. Following the first Euro-African encounters in the 1440s, small Afro-Atlantic settlements began to dot the landscape along the region’s many rivers. Forming a dispersed network of trading posts, they served as hubs for the export of slaves to the Cabo Verde archipelago, Europe, and the Americas. Cross-cultural exchange created conditions for the formation of creolized strata and trade lineages in riverine ports, as well as for the emergence of a new lingua franca, Guinean Creole. The transformation of these settlements into Portuguese garrison towns in the 1600s set in motion the transition toward the proto-colonial period and Euro-African tensions. The advent of “legitimate” trade and export crop cultivation culminated in the occupation of the region by Portuguese—and French—troops, creating conditions for the establishment of an extractive colonial state. The indigenato system, based on racial discrimination imposed by the Portuguese colonial administration, was soon challenged by nationalist movements in the 1950s, resulting in a protracted guerrilla war and the unilateral declaration of independence in 1973. Portugal’s refusal to decolonize set in motion an international momentum while mobilizing the largely rural population in favor of self-determination. High expectations were soon dashed as successive governments failed to develop and modernize the country. Chronic political instability has dominated Guinea-Bissau’s troubled postcolonial trajectory. Despite the transition toward multiparty elections in 1994, the presidential regime has contributed to characterized as a failed or “narco” state, boasting a doubtful record of military coups and political violence. It has largely remained dependent on international development aid and multilateral peacekeeping missions.
Article
The History of Gabon
Douglas A. Yates
Primeval rainforest at the Equator on the west coast of Africa, the land we know as Gabon, was settled prehistorically by Pygmies during the late Stone Age, and then by Bantu-speaking migrants during the Iron Age. These culturally diverse peoples did not develop a common language or political system with one another until after their violent conquest by Europeans during the colonial era. The Age of Discovery in the 15th century brought European explorers to the coast. The Atlantic triangle trade, with its slave barracoons and entrepôts, transformed some African communities along the coast into centralized kingdoms, and turned other clan-based societies of the forested interior into hunted peoples suspicious of any and all outsiders, European or African. The Scramble for Africa brought military expeditions into Gabon in the 19th century, when French colonial rule was established. Colonialism bestowed on the ethnic groups of Gabon a protonational identity of being “Gabonese,” although this nationalist impulse was muted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the effort of French authorities and missionaries to assimilate black Africans into France’s culture and civilization. Unassimilated colonial subjects in the interior of the newly conquered territory violently resisted French colonial rule until the world wars, by which time the assimilation project had sufficiently fashioned a new coastal French-educated Gabonese elite. The two world wars weakened France and led these assimilated elites to a call for political reforms, at first taking the form of mono-ethnic-based political parties, but eventually coalescing around multiethnic coalitions, largely francophone in outlook, while retaining many elements of older precolonial identities. Independence in 1960 brought to power three authoritarian rulers—Léon Mba, Omar Bongo, and Ali Bongo—as well as consolidation of an oil-rentier state and an oxymoronic dynastic republic. “Gabonese” national identity emerged, an imagined community constructed out of African music, literature, and art, yet incorporating French as its lingua franca.
Article
History of Higher Education in Kenya
Michael Mwenda Kithinji
The history of higher education in Kenya is defined by a struggle for domination by the various forces that have sought to influence the country’s social, economic, and political trajectory in the colonial and postcolonial periods. During the colonial period, the church had a major interest in education, which they viewed as an important tool in their evangelizing mission. However, the colonial government regarded education as an agency for social control as it attempted to mediate the competing interests of the missionaries, white settlers, and African nationalists. Similarly, the postcolonial governments saw education, especially at the higher level as significant due to its role in forming the elite class and as a mechanism for ideological control. Consequently, Kenya’s higher education landscape has witnessed a striking transformation as it served as an arena for powerful competing interests from the colonial period to the present.
The period between the inception of higher education in the late 1940s until the early independence period in the late 1960s was dominated by the colonial inter-territorial policy that severely limited the opportunities to access higher education. While the first postcolonial government of President Kenyatta largely upheld the colonial elitist ideas on higher education, this approach changed when President Moi came into office in 1978. President Moi wanted to leave his mark on education by increasing access to higher education. Many students were thus able to access university education, previously a preserve of the privileged few. University expansion remains an enduring legacy of President Moi’s administration, which the succeeding government of Mwai Kibaki inherited and enhanced.
Article
History of Malawi
Joey Power
The boundaries of Malawi in the early 21st century are rooted in European imperial expansion of the late 19th century and the establishment of the British Central African Protectorate (1891–1907) and, later, the Nyasaland (1907–1964) Protectorate. In 1953, Nyasaland was merged with Northern and Southern Rhodesia to constitute the Central African Federation. African opposition to this led to violent disturbances in 1953 and 1959. A state of emergency was declared in March of 1959 and the Nyasaland African Congress (NAC), the largest African political party in the protectorate, was banned and many of its leaders detained. The NAC was replaced by the Malawi Congress Party (MCP) during the state of emergency. The state of emergency ended in June of 1960 and party leader Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda led the MCP to a territorial election victory in 1961. Vows to end the “stupid federation” were realized in 1963 with the secession of Nyasaland from it. Nyasaland became the independent state of Malawi in July 1964 under an MCP-majority government.
Within months of independence, the government and party unity were rocked by a “cabinet crisis” in which key ministers differed with Dr. Banda over foreign policy and domestic politics. Many key leaders resigned or were dismissed and thereafter left the country. This initiated a thirty-year period of autocratic rule that only ended in the early 1990s as a result of internal protest and international financial pressure. A 1993 referendum prompted a return to multiparty governance, and the 1994 elections led to the ouster of the MCP/Banda regime. Since then, Malawi has maintained a multiparty political structure, albeit with enduring challenges wrought by colonial and autocratic legacies.
Article
The History of Sudanese Nationalism
Yoshiko Kurita
Ever since its conquest by the armies of Muḥammad ‘Alī Pasha in 1820, Sudan (the Republic of Sudan today) has been subjugated to colonial rule by foreign powers—first by the Ottoman-Egyptian regime from 1821 to 1885, then by the British (nominally the Anglo-Egyptian “Condominium”) from 1899 to 1955. Consequently, modern Sudanese history came to be characterized by the emergence of a series of anticolonial popular struggles, such as the Mahdist movement (1881–1898), the 1924 Revolution, and other political movements in the 1940s and 1950s. In spite of apparent differences in style, method, and ideological background, these were essentially based on the energy of the masses aspiring for liberation from colonial rule.
The development of the national liberation movement in Sudan was a complicated process, since the modern Sudanese state itself was an artificial colonial state, and it was never self-evident what the “Sudanese nation” was. Building solidarity among peoples of different cultural and religious backgrounds within Sudan (such as the mainly Arab Muslim population in the north and peoples of different backgrounds in the south and the Nuba Mountains) turned out to be crucial to the anticolonial struggle. Because of the colonial situation which prevailed in the Nile Valley after the 1880s (Egypt itself was occupied by the British in 1882), the idea of a regional (if apparently contradictory) coordination of “Sudanese nationalism” and the cause of the “unity of the Nile Valley” coexisted. Finally, since colonialism inevitably had its socioeconomic dimensions, a conflict of interests between the privileged local elites (tribal and religious leaders) and the general masses emerged, leading to a struggle over who would represent the “Sudanese nation.” The independence of the country in 1956 did not put an end to the question of Sudanese nationalism, since the colonial nature of the modern Sudanese state remained unchanged, and the popular struggle against oppressive state apparatus and social injustice continued even after independence. Various elements of civil society, including trade unions, students, and women, called for a democratic transformation of the Sudanese state. Peoples of the politically and economically “marginalized” areas in Sudan (such as the South and the Nuba Mountains) rose up in protest against underdevelopment, leading eventually to the emergence of Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SLPM) in the 1980s, which advocated the vision of “New Sudan”—a type of “Sudanese nationalism,” so to speak, based on the aspirations of marginalized areas. Although, with the independence of the South in 2011 (a development which was not originally anticipated by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement [SPLM] itself) the modern Sudanese state (as it used to be known) ceased to exist, this does not mean that the heritage of various anticolonial struggles in Sudan has been meaningless. Rather, it constitutes a common property, so to speak, for the peoples in the region (though now divided between different states), and serves as a source of historical lessons and political inspiration for future generations.
Article
A History of Western Sahara
Francesco Correale
Writing the history of Western Sahara can be difficult insofar as it means breaking the silence surrounding the territory and its population, the Sahrawi, whose existence as political subjects is often denied. In 1975, without consulting its inhabitants, Madrid ceded the territory of Western Sahara, a Spanish colonial possession since 1884, to the Kingdom of Morocco and the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. A first Sahrawi nationalist movement was born in the late 1960s, but the Spanish authorities harshly repressed it. In May 1973, the Polisario Front was born, and the United Nations recognized it as the legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people in May 1975. Until 1991, Libya and Algeria supported it in an asymmetrical war in which it defeated Mauritania (1979) and contained the Moroccan army. On September 6, 1991, Morocco and the Polisario Front signed an armistice under the auspices of the United Nations that provided for the establishment of a UN mission (MINURSO) and a referendum on self-determination. Thirty years on, however, the Sahrawi people remain divided: many have lived in refugee camps near Tindouf (Algeria) since 1975, some inhabit Moroccan-controlled areas (80 percent of the territory), and others live in the diaspora. On November 13, 2020, after a breach of military agreements by Morocco, the Polisario Front declared the ceasefire null and void. The war resumed and remains ongoing.
Western Sahara has thus been at the center of a decolonization conflict since 1975. In this conflict, history has been brought into play to justify the legitimacy of one position or the other, often highlighting positions that do not take into account the complexity of political and social processes. The two sides have systematically interpreted the various events in light of the conflict, generating multiple, contradictory narratives. According to Sahrawi nationalists, for example, the Sahrawi people have existed since the dawn of history. In the refugee camps of Tindouf, one often encounters narratives according to which the rock art of the Western Sahara territory is a direct and uninterrupted testimony of a Sahrawi people who have existed since prehistoric times. From Morocco’s perspective, by contrast, the Saharan territory has always been part of the Kingdom of Morocco, as if Morocco always existed in this form and was not itself the result of a long historical process. Indeed, it is often forgotten that the parameters of territorial sovereignty in this area did not exist prior to European colonization—a reality obscured by Morocco’s claims.
It is evident that writing the history of Western Sahara and its population is an impossible undertaking; it is therefore much more honest to propose a probable historical reconstruction, based on the rigorous interpretation of archival documents and testimonies collected within the framework of scientific research projects. Even so, such an undertaking can only ever be a subjective interpretation, mediated by knowledge but without any pretense of objectivity.
Article
Indians in South Africa
Goolam Vahed
The first persons of Indian descent in South Africa arrived as slaves transported there by the Dutch East India Company during the 17th century and were integrated into the “Cape Coloured” and “Malay” populations. Most Indians in South Africa are descendants of migrants who arrived in substantive numbers from 1860 as indentured workers on the sugar plantations of the British colony of Natal and free migrants who followed from the 1870s. After completing their indentures, many chose to remain in Natal, moving off the plantations and making lives for themselves as market gardeners and hawkers. The period after 1920 witnessed the rapid urbanization of Indians and the entry of many into industrial work. The merchant class, while hounded by racist legislation, consolidated a presence in both urban and rural areas. Despite government threats of repatriation, Indians were eventually accepted as citizens in 1961, albeit without the vote and subject to discriminatory legislation. In the first half of the 20th century Indians relied on India for redress. From the 1950s, they built nonracial alliances with the majority African population and played vital roles in the antiapartheid liberation movement. However, when nonracial democracy loomed, over 60 percent of Indians voted for the former white minority parties in the first democratic elections in 1994. Many were concerned about the implications of majority rule. This angst reflected that relations between Africans and Indians had been strained at particular historical junctures as Indians tried to negotiate a political identity within a field of Black consciousness, nonracialism, and African Nationalism. The rubric of “Indian” has been challenged in the postapartheid period by rupturing along religious, ethnic, and class lines. However, it is difficult to escape race identity since “Indian” continues to be a racial, as well as legal and political, identity in South Africa. This, together with many Indians’ relatively privileged position vis-à-vis Africans and rising xenophobia and Afrophobia in a context of widespread poverty, continues to subject many to concerns about their place in the fabric of South African society. This has powered a steady trickle of business and professional emigration. The working classes on the other hand remain embedded in a township “place” identity.
Article
International Organizations in Colonial Africa
Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro
European imperial expansion and consolidation in Africa was, from its inception, a trans-imperial process that was increasingly codified, regulated, and legitimized in an international sphere. Similarly, initiatives that aimed to counter Western dominance and hegemony across the 20th century looked for international institutions as privileged instances for claim-making and enhanced resistance against imperial and colonial projects. All these dynamics included several and diverse actors, networks, and institutions, from distinct geographies and with varied political and social outlooks. They gave origin to the global normative and institutional order of today. From the different but competing “civilizing missions” to the crystallization of self-determination as the global political norm, the history of Africa has been a recurrent feature of the mounting drives for internationalization that marked 20th century, offering several possible avenues of research for a global history of colonialism in the continent.
Article
Landscapes of Colonial Detention Sites
Anaïs Angelo
Built on the legacy of the goals established during the slave trade, early colonial prisons were essential to the expansion of the colonial conquest. Once slavery had been abolished, the jails it had established continued to provide reservoirs of free, cheap, and forced labor, which were indispensable to the economic exploitation and development of the colonies. Complex networks of detention sites expanded over time and became essential tools for colonizers to mark their authority over their territory and to control, discipline, and punish colonized populations. Leaving aside Eurocentric narratives on the birth of the prison, exploring the genealogy of detention in colonial Africa highlights the multifaceted landscape of detention sites. Penal detention was enforced in prison, detention, internment, concentration, and labor camps; these could be open or mobile, or they could comprise entire villages. Detention also served nonpenal purposes and materialized in asylums, orphanages, penitentiaries, work camps, and sanitary confinement. This multiplicity of detention sites demonstrates that detention cannot be solely defined by its geography or its scope, for colonial detention was profoundly pervasive and knew no clear territorial, legal, and architectural boundaries. In political systems in which everyday life was criminalized in the service of a “civilizing” mission, whole sections of the population were exposed to detention. Beyond the walls, barbed wires, and entry points of detention sites, bodies and minds were the main targets of the policies of confinement and punishment. The genealogy of the detention sites in African colonies reveals the way that the policies of detention nurtured a culture of violence that developed with, within, around, and outside them. For historians, it raises an important question as to the historical reconstruction and conceptualization of detention, freedom, and agency in colonial contexts.
Article
Mia Couto
Irene Marques
Mia Couto (b. 1955) is a contemporary Mozambican writer and biologist. Writing in Portuguese, Couto is the most prolific writer from Mozambique, and his works have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is the author of over thirty books, including poetry, short stories, chronicles, creative essays, novels, and children’s and young adult books. His works have won several national and international prizes and have been adapted to film, theater, and television. His topics cover Mozambican culture and religion, ontologies and epistemologies, orality, Portuguese colonialism, anticolonial resistance, wars of liberation, personal and collective identity, postcolonial nation building, civil war, memory, trauma, violence and amnesia, neoliberal international agendas of development, cultural syncretism, African “authenticity,” corruption, women’s oppression and agency, and gender fluidity. He is considered a highly innovative writer, known for inventing a plethora of neologisms; his literary creations show an intrinsic link between orality, poetry, and an evolving and dynamic language that draws heavily from the multiple cultural and linguistic realities of Mozambique. This creative linguistic manipulation is primarily present in his earlier work. However, Couto’s script is far from being a mere play on aesthetics—it is a literature fundamentally preoccupied with political, cultural, historical, and pragmatic matters, reflecting important aspects of Mozambique’s past and present historical and sociopolitical contexts.
Article
Nationalism and Decolonization in the Gold Coast
Paul Nugent
Gold Coast nationalism cannot be approached solely through the prism of decolonization. Debates about what constituted the building blocks of the nation go back to the start of the 20th century, drawing on renditions dating back a further half-century. A fundamental contention was that the coastal populations had entered the Gold Coast Colony through active consent, and that the sovereignty that had been conceded to the British was limited. And it was asserted that while Asante had been conquered, and the Northern Territories had been added through treaty, southern populations had been partners in the process. A second contention was that the Gold Coast nation was constituted by the sum of its traditional parts, which were necessarily of unequal size and complexion. Although the British acted on the basis of a different reading, this version enjoyed hegemonic status. It was repeated by the chiefs themselves but was most clearly articulated by the coastal intelligentsia.
In the 1920s, the formation of the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA) signaled a shift in which the educated elite across British West Africa combined to demand greater political rights and sought to pursue economic liberation in association with the black population of the Americas. In the 1930s, in the wake of the Great Depression, cocoa farmers were pitted against the European buying firms, and there was a proliferation of youth associations that took up causes such as the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Meanwhile, the injection of ideas derived from international socialism added a more radical inflection to Pan-Africanism. However, this momentum was halted by the outbreak of the war. As the Gold Coast Youth Conference (GCYC) looked to the future in the early 1940s, it abandoned Pan-Africanism and socialism. It continued to emphasize economic freedom but paid more attention to gaining political concessions. After 1947, the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) sought to pursue this agenda in alliance with the chiefs.
The notion that Kwame Nkrumah, who led the breakaway of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) in 1949, effected a radical rupture—even a revolution—is no longer tenable. Like his opponents, Nkrumah placed politics first and merely wanted self-government to come more quickly. After the 1951 election, the CPP governed in close alliance with the British. While it won the elections of 1954 and 1956, it singularly failed to attract mass support at the polls. Finally, while Nkrumah revisited older ideas derived from international socialism and Pan-Africanism, his real focus was on consolidating his grip on power in the Gold Coast—to the exclusion of addressing the concerns of border populations. After 1954, the CPP faced a coalition of parties that advocated a federal solution to the national question. Nkrumah, supported by Governor Arden-Clarke, insisted on a unitary state and toyed with drastically curtailing the powers of the chiefs. In the end the first was achieved, but Nkrumah backed away from a more radical overhaul. The conception of the Ghanaian nation as the sum of its traditional parts, and the assumption that the reach of the state is limited, was therefore further entrenched and remains fundamental to the social contract to this day.
Article
Nationalism, Liberation, and Decolonization in Angola
Didier Péclard
Angolan independence was achieved on November 11, 1975, after a 14-year-long war. The war was the result of three overlapping dynamics. The first was Portugal’s refusal to consider the possibility of a negotiated settlement for the independence of its colonies in Africa. Under the dictatorial regime of António Salazar, Portugal had become extremely dependent on its colonies, both economically and politically, and was therefore, by the late 1950s, bent on maintaining its colonial empire. The second was the development of nationalist feelings among Angolan elites, which eventually materialized in the late 1950s to early 1960s in two—and, as of 1966, three—competing nationalist movements. The third constituted a series of popular grievances within sectors of the Angolan population, especially landless farmers and plantation workers in the north, against their growing marginalization and impoverishment due to exploitative colonial policies. This eventually led to three uncoordinated revolts in January, February, and March 1961 that marked the beginning of the war of independence.
The division of Angolan nationalism into three competing movements—the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)—was shaped by Angola’s long history of violent integration into Portugal’s colonial empire. The 20th-century Portuguese colonial state in Angola relied on the exploitation of the so-called native workforce through a vast system of forced labor and on taxation. It was also exclusionary and discriminatory, leaving very few avenues for upward social mobility for Angolan “natives.” It was therefore mostly at the margins of the colonial world that such mobility was possible, especially within Christian missions. The integration of these Angolan elite groups into the colonial world, or their exclusion, followed different paths according to local contexts and histories. As a result, the different lived experiences of the social groups that formed the backbone of the nationalist movement made it exceedingly difficult for them to agree on a common vision for independent Angola. This, together with the uncompromising thirst for power of the leadership of the three movements and Cold War logics, contributed to the civil war that engulfed the country at independence and lasted until 2002.
Article
Numerical Data and Statistical Sources
Leigh Gardner
The use of numerical data and statistical sources in African history has expanded in recent decades, facilitated by technological advances and the digitization of primary sources. This expansion has included new analysis of traditional measures (population, government, and trade) as well as new sources of individual-level data such as census returns, marriage registers, and military and police records. Overall, this work has allowed for a more comprehensive quantitative picture of Africa’s history, and in particular facilitated comparisons within Africa and between African countries and other parts of the world. However, there remain misunderstandings about the collection, use, and interpretation of these data. Increasingly sophisticated methods of quantitative analysis can alienate scholars who have an intimate knowledge of the data and how they are produced, but lack specialist methodological training. At the same time, limited understanding of the origins and reliability of quantitative data can lead to misinterpretation.
Article
The Ottomans in Northeast Africa
A. C. S. Peacock
In the mid-16th century, the Ottoman empire expanded to encompass parts of the modern Sudan, Eritrea, and the Ethiopian borderlands, forming the Ottoman province of Habeş. The Ottomans also provided aid to their ally Ahmad Grañ in his jihad against Ethiopia and fought with the Funj sultanate of Sinnar for control of the Nile valley, where Ottoman territories briefly extended south as far as the Third Cataract. After 1579, Ottoman control was limited to the Red Sea coast, in particular the ports of Massawa and Suakin, which remained loosely under Ottoman rule until the 19th century, when they were transferred to Egypt, nominally an Ottoman vassal but effectively independent. Politically, Ottoman influence was felt much more broadly in northeast Africa in places as distant as Mogadishu, at least nominally recognized Ottoman suzerainty.
Article
Ozurumba Mbanaso or King Jaja of Opobo
Joseph Davey
Between 1800 and 1900, West Africa’s coastal states struggled to maintain autonomy in the face of imperial overtures from European trade partners. Simultaneously, these states coped with an overwhelming buildup of domestic slaves, some of whom rose to unprecedented higher political and economic positions. One particular individual, King Jaja of Opobo, came to the fore as an extreme example of how slaves became more capable of taking advantage of the changing political, religious, and economic landscape of the Eastern Niger Delta during this period.
Born Mbanaso Ozurumba in the Igboland village of Umuduruoha in 1821, Jaja, as he would become known to his European trading partners, traversed the domestic slave systems of Southeastern Nigeria and arrived in the Delta trading state of Bonny in 1833. He obtained tremendous wealth and political influence through the burgeoning palm oil trade, ultimately becoming the head of one of Bonny’s most influential canoe-houses. Due to an internal dispute with a rival canoe-house in the late 1860s, Jaja removed his followers to a previously uninhabited island and cut off Bonny’s access to the lucrative interior oil markets. From 1871 on, Jaja monopolized the palm oil trade in the region to become the most influential trader from his new position as king of the island community, which he would name Opobo. However, by 1884, the relationship between Jaja and his British trade partners deteriorated, leading to Jaja’s exile in the West Indies. Political pressure forced the British to return Jaja to Opobo. Unfortunately, the once-powerful slave-turned-king died while trying to return home in 1891.
Article
The Politics of Decolonization in French and British West Africa
Frederick Cooper
At the end of World War II, Britain and France tried to find new bases for the legitimacy of empire. Their hesitant moves created openings that African political movements exploited. Scholars have tried to capture the excitement of this process, first focusing on the drive to create nation-states, then exploring other possibilities, both regions within territorial states and federations among them. Historians have drawn on archives and interviews as well as a wide variety of texts produced by political movements.
Although Africans had long conducted politics through both local idioms and pan-African connections, the postwar openings led political movements to focus on arenas where they could achieve results. In French Africa, this entailed a partially successful struggle for French citizenship, representation in both the French and territorial legislatures, and social and economic equality with other French citizens. Eventually the French government tried to diffuse claim-making by devolving internal autonomy to territorial governments. When Guinea obtained independence in 1958 and other African leaders differed over whether they should create a francophone African federation within a Franco-African confederation or participate as equals in a French federation, the movements shifted to seeking independence and a new relationship with France.
Britain failed to get African politicians to focus on local governance. Instead, politicians demanded power in each colony. Meanwhile, Britain tried to appease African social movements with a program of economic development only to face escalating demands and heightened conflict. Although fearful of disorder and corruption, the government decided that the best it could hope for was to have attracted Africans to a British way of life and to achieve friendly relations with African governments that, led by Ghana, came into power.
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