The continent of Africa has had a lengthy involvement in global maritime affairs and archaeological research with Middle Stone Age people using marine resources on the coasts of southern Africa, the Classical Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria, and Medieval Indian Ocean trade on the Swahili coast to the Atlantic triangular slave trade. Maritime archaeology is the identification and interpretation of physical traces left by people who use the seas and oceans. Middle Stone Age sites in South Africa such as Klasies River Mouth and Pinnacle Point have the earliest evidence for human use of marine resources including birds, marine mammals, and shellfish. This exploitation of marine resources was also coincident with the use of pigment, probably for symbolic behavior, as well as the production of bladelet stone tool technology. The extensive timespan of human activity on the coast around Africa occurred during changing relative sea levels due to Ice Ages and tectonic movement affecting the location of the coastline relative to maritime archaeological sites. Geomorphological changes may also take place over shorter periods such as the 1909 ce shipwreck of the Eduard Bohlen in Namibia lying c. one and half thousand feet landward of the shoreline.
Ancestors of sea-going vessels have been recorded on rivers from dugout canoes excavated at Dufuna in northern Nigeria and the first plank-built boats, such as the Old Kingdom Royal Ship of Cheops of Khufu, found at the Giza pyramids, which imitated the shape of earlier papyrus rafts. Classical documents such as the Periplus Maris Erythraei and Ptolemy’s Geographia record Arabian and Indian trade with eastern Africa including ivory and rhinoceros horn and describe fishing practices using baskets and sewn-hull boats of the inhabitants. The increase in oceanic trade links here during the medieval period encouraged the formation of Swahili port cities such as Kilwa and Mombasa. The former was in a strategic position to manage much of the gold trade between Sofala in Mozambique and the northern Swahili Coast. Portuguese forts, constructed in the 15th and 16th centuries on their trade routes around Africa, such as Elmina Castle in Ghana, Fort Jesus in Mombasa, Kenya, and Fort São Sebastião on Mozambique Island, dominate the ports and harbors. The first sub-Saharan underwater scientific investigations took place in 1976 of the Portuguese frigate Santo Antonio de Tanna that sunk during an Omani siege from 1696 to 1698. At Elmina in West Africa, studies were made of wreck-site formation processes around the 17th-century Dutch West India Company vessel Groeningen, which had caught fire when firing its guns in salute to Elmina Castle after arrival. More broad-based studies that interpret the functioning of the African maritime society in its wider environmental setting, both physically in the context of its religious buildings, harbors, fishing grounds, sailing routes, and shipwrecks, and by taking account of non-material aspects of the beliefs that influence behavior of coastal societies, have led to interpretations of their maritime outlook.
Article
In the open marketplaces found in cities and villages throughout Africa, women traders usually predominate. This gives women considerable weight as economic actors, because these marketplace systems are the primary distributive networks in most parts of Africa. A large proportion of Africa’s consumer goods and foodstuffs move through their intricate chains of intermediaries, which can include market retailers, neighborhood shops, street vendors, wholesalers, and travelers who collect goods from farms, factories, and ports. Although the vast majority of women traders live at or below the poverty line, some have risen to powerful positions that earn them the sobriquet of queen.
Different regions of Africa show distinctive patterns of trading practices and of men and women’s participation in specific trading roles, reflecting specific gendered histories of precolonial trade, colonial interventions, and waves of national policy. These variations arise not from some primordial isolation, but from traders’ varied positioning within longstanding trade relations that have linked Africans since ancient times between regions, across the Sahara Desert and over adjoining oceans. Women’s trading roles are more highly developed in western Africa than in eastern, northern, and southern Africa, where precolonial trading patterns were more radically disrupted by conquest, land appropriation, and apartheid.
Ideologies and arenas of practice such as Islam, Christianity, modernization, socialism, structural adjustment, and globalization likewise shape the constraints and opportunities facing women traders in any given situation. Because these influences operate around the globe, though not uniformly, they to some extent create parallel or convergent trends in widely separated nations. Deepening economic pressures today push even more women and men into trading to support their families and sustain the hope of prosperity. Market women struggle individually and collectively to keep their communities going under difficult circumstances that make formal economic channels function poorly. Their determined efforts give African economies more resilience as they respond to the challenges of war, political instability, and climate change.
Article
Joe Lunn
World Wars I and II were very probably the most destructive conflicts in African history. In terms of the human costs—the numbers of people mobilized, the scale of violence and destruction experienced--as well as their enduring political and social impact, no other previous conflicts are comparable, particularly over such short periods as four and ten years, respectively. All told, about 4,500,000 African soldiers and military laborers were mobilized during these wars and about 2,000,000 likely died.
Mobilization on this scale among African peasant societies was only sustainable because they were linked to the industrial economies of a handful of West Central European nation states at the core of the global commercial infrastructure, which invariably subordinated African interests to European imperial imperatives. Militarily, these were expressed in two ways: by the use of African soldiers and supporting military laborers to conquer or defend colonies on the continent, or by the export of African combat troops and laborers overseas—in numbers far exceeding comparable decades during the 18th-century peak of the transatlantic slave trade—to Europe and Asia to augment Allied armies there.
The destructive consequences of these wars were distributed unevenly across the continent. In some areas of Africa, human losses and physical devastation frequently approximated or surpassed the worst suffering experienced in Europe itself; yet, in other areas of the continent, Africans remained virtually untouched by these wars.
These conflicts contributed to an ever-growing assertiveness of African human rights in the face of European claims to racial supremacy that led after 1945 to the restoration of African sovereignty throughout most of the continent. On a personal level, however, most Africans received very little for their wartime sacrifices. Far more often, surviving veterans returned to their homes with an enhanced knowledge of the wider world, perhaps a modicum of newly acquired personal prestige within their respective societies, but little else.
Article
Olatunji Ojo
The Afro-Brazilians of West Africa refers to a community of people that was born in the 18th century and matured the 19th century in the course of trade exchanges between Brazil and West Africa. This is not a racial group but one united by a mixture of racial, commercial, cultural, and familial ties with a range of African, European, and American ancestries. The original foundation of the community emerged through the shipment of enslaved West Africans to Brazilian plantations. Upon liberation, many of these men and women, wanting to avoid a life of bondage and racial discrimination in the Americas, returned home to Africa. Others too old to leave Brazil or unwilling to abandon their American families and investments sent their Brazilian-born children back to Africa to see long-lost families and for business and education. There were also those descended from Brazilian traders who made Africa their home, sometimes marrying African wives, as well as their descendants and associates, free and unfree. Whether born in Africa or the Americas and regardless of color, the presence of Afro-Brazilians on both sides of the Atlantic necessitated intercontinental travels and exchanges and the birth of a transoceanic community. The history of Afro-Brazilians in West Africa has been a long and widely studied subject with a focus on its political and cultural contributions to the subregion.
Article
Samuel Fury Childs Daly
The Ahiara Declaration was a speech made by Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the head of state of the secessionist Republic of Biafra, on June 1, 1969, in the town of Ahiara. It was issued in the final year of the war between Nigeria and Biafra, also known as the Nigerian Civil War. The Eastern Region of Nigeria seceded from Nigeria as the Republic of Biafra in May 1967 following a series of mass killings of easterners, especially members of the Igbo ethnic group, in northern Nigeria the previous year. In his address, Ojukwu gave a partisan account of the war and the events leading up to it, rallied Biafrans to continue the fight, and set out a political philosophy that would guide Biafra from that point on. It was written by a committee of Biafran intellectuals, most notably the novelist and poet Chinua Achebe. The declaration had multiple meanings: it was both ideology and propaganda, and it served both proscriptive and descriptive purposes. Its influences included the broader intellectual currents of black internationalism, a novel theory of radical anticolonialism, and the idea of “African Socialism”—a communitarian philosophy that emerged in distinction to socialist thought in other regions of the world. The Ahiara Declaration was not meaningfully implemented, both due to limited resources and to the fact that Biafra was defeated six months later. Nonetheless, the declaration is an important source for Nigeria’s history, and for the broader study of political philosophy in postcolonial Africa.
Article
Hamadou Adama
Ahmed Bâba (1556–1627) was among the most prolific and the most celebrated of Timbuktu scholars of the 16th and 17th centuries. During his childhood he was educated and trained in Arabic law and Islamic sciences by his father, Ahmad, and other relatives. His principal teacher, the man he named the regenerator (al-mujaddid), was the Juula scholar Mohammed Baghayogho al-Wangarî, whose teaching he followed for more than ten years.
Following the Moroccan occupation of Timbuktu in 1591, he was exiled to Marrakesh in 1594, jailed for two years, then obliged to remain in the city for many years. He was widely known both for his teaching and for the fatwas (legal opinions) he issued. He was offered administrative positions but declined them all in favor of teaching.
In 1608, he was permitted to return to his hometown, Timbuktu, where he continued to write and teach until his death in 1627, but he held no public office there.
His special field of competence was jurisprudence. He was also recognized for his abilities in hadith and wrote several works on Arabic grammar. He is probably best known for his biographical compendium of Mâlikî (founded by Malik ibn Anas died A.D. 795 is orthodox school of Muslim jurisprudence predominating in Sudanic Africa and the Maghreb) scholars, Nayl al-Ibtihâj bi tadrîs ad-dibâdj, a valuable supplement for the Western Islamic world to Ibn Farhûn’s ad-Dibâj al-Mudhahhab.
His work specifically addresses issues relating to the significance of racial and ethnic categories as factors in the justification of enslavement. In the Bilâd as-Sûdân, Ahmed Bâba influenced the debate over slavery by relying on interpretations of Islamic precedent, which was invoked to protect freeborn individuals from enslavement. By extension, he impacted the transatlantic slave trade on the basis of religious identification with Islam and the desire to avoid the sale of slaves to non-Muslims, especially Christian Europeans on the coast of West Africa.
Article
Pierluigi Valsecchi
Slavery was a macroscopic reality in the documentable historical itinerary of the Akan region of West Africa, both as a recognized institution existing in all the societies of the region up to the late 19th century and as a crucial component of its relationships with the outside world from the late 17th to the 19th century. During this phase, and although it lagged behind other parts of West Africa, the Akan region became also one of the most important exporting areas in the Atlantic slave trade. The condition of a slave until the end of the 19th century was generally the consequence of capture in war, judicial sentence, sale for debts, and so on. Akan societies distinguished between different degrees and types of slavery: prisoners of war, convicts sold into slavery, foreign slaves who were purchased, individuals enslaved for indebtedness, children of slave parents, and the like. These gradations corresponded to differences in treatment and could guarantee certain privileges. Many slaves suffered harsh exploitation, deprivation, and constant existential precariousness, while many others were instead immersed in a whole gamut of living and working conditions that bespoke of a more or less advanced integration into the host society, mainly operating through inclusion within the institutions of matrilineal kinship. Pawnship was another widespread institution of servitude that veered toward slavery but remained distinct from it, at least in principle, due to its temporary nature.
The slaves who were shipped from the ports of the Akan region were called “Amina” (or “Mina”) or “Coromantee” in the Americas. These terms morphed into definitions of identity that the deported slaves themselves appropriated—whether or not they were of Akan origin—and that were largely based on common cultural traits originating primarily in the Akan world. The enslaved Amina/Mina and Coromantee left lasting marks on the history and culture of the black communities of several countries, especially in the Caribbean and Latin America and, to a lesser extent, in parts of North America too. A crucial reason was their role in slave insurrections and in the “Grand Maroonage,” that is, the establishment of stable communities of slaves who escaped from the plantations and eked out spaces of independence on the fringes of plantation society.
The early 19th-century abolitions of the Atlantic slave trade caused a decline in slave exports, but the demand for enslaved labor grew within the Akan region itself. While for most of the 19th century, slavery experienced an overall growth, in various coastal centers, and in some areas of the Gold Coast, this same period saw the development of anti-slavery sentiment and strong abolitionist pressures. Later in the 19th century, the abolitionist legislations put in place as a result of the colonial occupation by Great Britain and France had some crucial effects. These laws recognized for the first time the fundamental right to freedom of bonded individuals by outlawing their subjection and providing them with effective and immediate legal instruments for claiming their freedom in colonial courts. In actual terms, however, the pace of change in the realm of subjection was very slow and, all in all, unsatisfactory with respect to the initial intentions of the anti-slavery legislation. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, there were still cases of individuals sold or pawned. Slavery and pawnship, in fact, survived for decades, notwithstanding profound changes in the economic and socio-political framework. That legacy is still very much present in the memory and discourse of Akan societies in the early 21st century.
Article
Abel Djassi Amado
Amílcar Cabral, the founding father of Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau, was one of the African political leaders who masterfully exercised key and decisive roles in the twin realms of political action and theoretical development. As the founding leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde, Cabral wore several hats: he was the chief diplomat and the commander in chief of the liberation movement; he was also the master organizer of the party and of the incipient state in the liberated areas. Yet, Cabral was far from solely a man of action; he developed a complex and sophisticated political theory of national liberation that gave substance and meaning to political action.
Article
The study of West Africa has contributed to the expansion of comparative arid-lands floodplain prehistory, from both the data collection (cultural and historical) and the theoretical aspects. The neoevolutionary approach that often pictures Africa as a backward continent has been successfully challenged. In the Middle Senegal Valley and in the Inland Niger Delta, research on their societies’ complexity done along these two subcontinent’s floodplains has described new processes (including urbanization) that were not previously featured in the archaeological literature. The two floodplains, because of their ecological diversity, with the richness of their ecological diversity, attracted Saharan populations affected by drought at the end of the second millennium and the first millennium BC. However, after their initiation occupation the two areas took different trajectories in complexity and settlement organization. Large complex settlements have been found at Jenne-jeno and in the Ile a Morphil that illustrate whole new trajectories of civilization. These forms of complexity, found in areas with historically known polities, were not included in the range of possibilities predicted by standard complexity theories regarding civilizational development. Ethnographic and historical data, reveal the existence of societies with a central authority embedded within and balanced by a diffuse, segmented and heterarchical power structure; often as a strategy to resist the individual consolidation of power. These societies exhibit evidence of horizontal differentiation and consensus-based decision making. All these types of organization are characterized by the presence of several sources of power vested in corporate entities, such as lineages, age groups, cults and secret societies.
Article
Southern Nigeria is rich in copper alloy cast works, such as those of the 9th-century burial goods of Igbo-Ukwu, the busts from 13th-century Ife, and the heads and plaques from the early 16th century from Benin City. Much scholarship has been devoted to these centers and yet there are other, perhaps even more historically important, works which have barely been acknowledged. The label “Lower Niger Bronzes” was proposed in the 1960s by William Fagg to account for those few pieces which did not fit with the three well-known centers’ works.
On closer examination, these bronzes are far more numerous and of greater antiquity than previously realized. The quality and composition of these works indicate that most were likely cast prior to the European coastal trade in Nigeria which dates from the late 15th century. Leopard skull replicas, humanoid bell heads, small hippos, scepter heads, and masks make up only a portion of the works now under study. Without their original cultural contexts, these artifacts are somewhat mysterious, yet with careful study of their compositions and forms, much is revealed of a period of southern Nigerian history which predates the current arrangement of ethnic groups.
Article
Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué
From 1958 to 1961, Kom women in western Cameroon cast aside their regular domestic and agricultural duties to engage in a revolt against British administrative interference in agriculture—normally their domain—and the alleged plan by the ruling political party, the Kamerun National Congress (KNC), to sell Kom land to Nigerian Igbos. In keeping with the practices of anlu, a centuries-old women’s organization generally deployed against people who violated the Kom moral code, women interfered with burial rituals; hurled insults at men in public; demanded the closing of schools, courts, and markets; set up roadblocks; destroyed and burned property; and defied both traditional and British authorities in the Bamenda Grassfields of western Cameroon. Their tactics included stripping naked in front of men. While local men considered the sight of the vagina in public to be a bad portent and thus understood the seriousness of the revolt, flabbergasted British officials had no idea what was to come. By seizing control of resources and demonstrating in public, Kom women disturbed local political power, and protested against British rule in the Southern Cameroons. They were a crucial force in the victory of the Kamerun National Democratic Party (KNDP) in 1961, which brought a restoration of political order at the time of independence.
Article
Mohammed Bashir Salau
Unfree labor in Northern Nigeria is a subject of interest to an increasing number of scholars. The National Archives Kaduna (NAK) and other repositories in Northern Nigeria and elsewhere hold many records that are useful for the study of several forms of unfree labor that occurred within the present-day borders of Northern Nigeria. The history of these records is long, but most of the written records were produced in the period after 1800. The written materials are mainly in Arabic and English. Unlike the written records, the oral sources are mainly in the Hausa language and the collection of such oral information is related to the post-1960s efforts by scholars led primarily by Paul E. Lovejoy. Lovejoy also initiated the digitization of archival materials and oral sources related to unfree labor in Northern Nigeria in the early 2000s. The digitization effort is still ongoing. Scholars who have drawn on the available archival and digital material have focused on the theme of slavery in the precolonial era. Such scholars addressed several topics including plantation agriculture, military slavery, slave control, slave resistance, the ending of slavery, and the wages of slavery. Apart from the works on slavery that mainly focus on the 19th century, there are relatively few other works on the topic that have primarily dealt with the early colonial era or with the period between 1903 and 1936. While the history of slavery has attracted the most critical attention, the history of corvée and convict labor in Northern Nigeria has largely been neglected. Indeed, to date, only two works mainly deal with convict and corvée labor. Considering the little attention given to the themes of convict labor and corvée labor, there is clearly more room for additional historical works on these subjects than on the topic of slavery.
Article
Bala Saho
The Gambian archives, established in the 1960s, have rich and valuable resources for deeper study and teaching of the history of The Gambia and the subregion. The collections are representative of a substantial amount of The Gambia’s precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial history on a range of subjects, including settlement patterns, migration, family histories, folktales, myths, legends, proverbs, songs, religion, early colonial trading in The Gambia, histories of the ethnic groups and their cultural ceremonies, history of individuals, nationalists politicians, postcolonial political parties, and World War II. Although these sources can be valuable to students, international researchers, and specialists, there is a great need for their care and maintenance.
Article
Beverly J. Stoeltje
The queen mothers of Asante are linked together with chiefs in a dual-gender system of leadership. The symbol of authority and leadership in Asante is a stool (like a throne in England). Throughout the polities of Asante, each queen mother occupies her own stool, and each chief occupies his own stool, representing the authority of chieftaincy in a town or a paramountcy. This political model shapes Asante like a pyramid: queen mothers and chiefs of towns and villages at the base, paramount queen mothers and chiefs at the next level with authority over those of towns and villages, and the king of Asante, the Asantehene, and the queen mother of Asante, the Asantehemaa, at the top ruling over all of Asante. The king of Asante occupies the Golden Stool, the symbol of the Asante nation, which holds the souls of the Asante people according to popular belief. Although the position of queen mother has survived challenges, the relative salience of specific features of her authority has varied. Colonialism ignored queen mothers, and yet Yaa Asantewaa led a war and became a symbol of Asante identity. When the global women’s movement provided inspiration, queen mothers joined together to reclaim their authority.
Article
Hilary Matfess
Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, better known as “Boko Haram,” is the most violent phenomenon of the Nigerian Fourth Republic. It is responsible not only for a regional food crisis that has devolved into famine in some areas, but also the displacement of millions and the deaths of tens of thousands of people. The insurgency in Nigeria began as a dissident religious sect’s venting of local grievances in Maiduguri, the capital of the northeastern Borno State. The movement was founded at the turn of the century by Mohammed Yusuf, a Salafist preacher notorious for his rejection of Western education and government employment.
Boko Haram only gained significant international attention in the aftermath of the 2014 abduction of more than 270 schoolgirls from their dormitory in the remote town of Chibok, but the group did not always employ such deplorable tactics. Although policymakers in capitals the world over have been eager to emphasize the group’s connections to international terrorist groups, the movement is localized and often more akin to an African insurgency than to a prototypical terrorist organization. The group’s initial years were characterized by relatively benign activities like the provision of social services, punctuated by occasional bouts of criminality that, over time, escalated into a series of targeted assassinations that provoked federal government response. A series of violent actions ultimately transformed Boko Haram from a largely nonviolent fundamentalist religious movement into the lethal and resilient force it is today, known internationally for its brutality: notably, the group’s interactions with the Nigerian security sector, categorized by indiscriminate state violence; leadership changes within the insurgency’s ranks that elevated Abubakar Shekau following Mohammed Yusuf’s execution; and regional trends in weapons flows and ideological currents.
Article
Padraic Scanlan
Resistance to slavery within African societies was as complex and heterogeneous as slavery itself. For enslaved Africans and their descendants taken by force to Europe’s colonies in the Americas, antislavery was an existential struggle. Among European states, Britain was among the first imperial powers to pass laws abolishing its slave trade (in 1807) and slavery in its colonies (in 1833). Antislavery was a transnational phenomenon, but Britain made suppressing the Atlantic slave trade an element of its foreign policy, employing a Royal Navy squadron to search for slave ships, pressing African leaders to sign anti-slave-trade treaties as a condition of trade and coordinating an international network of anti-slave-trade courts. And yet, for many leading British abolitionists, “Africa” was an ideological sandbox—an imagined blank space for speculation and experiment on the development of human societies and the progress of “civilization.”
In the 18th century, early British critics of the transatlantic slave trade argued that “Africa” presented an unparalleled commercial and imperial opportunity. Although the slave trade—and the plantations in the Americas that slave ships supplied with labor—were profitable, some argued that slave-trading regions could, with enough investment, produce goods and commodities that would be many times more lucrative. Moreover, if Britain were the first European power to abolish the slave trade, it might also be among the first to gain a territorial foothold on African soil. Over time, these arguments coalesced into the concept of “legitimate commerce.” A combination of Christian teaching, slave-trade suppression, and commercial incentives would persuade slave-trading polities to give up the practice and instead produce other goods. Legitimate commerce intertwined with a theory of civilization that held that any society that enslaved people was so degenerate in its social development that nearly any reform or intervention was justifiable. By the end of the 19th century, antislavery became a justification for European conquest.
There were at least three broad reform projects launched by British officials and merchants in Africa in the name of antislavery. First, drawing on critiques of the slave trade from the 18th century that emphasized the commercial potential of legitimate commerce, antislavery activists and politicians argued for replacing the slave trade with new kinds of export-oriented commerce. Second, in two colonies, Sierra Leone and Liberia, Britain and the United States experimented with the possibility of using Black people from the African diaspora as settlers and missionaries. In Sierra Leone, more than seventy thousand people, usually known as “Liberated Africans,” were repatriated from slave ships into the small colony. Third, in the mid-19th century, as the transatlantic slave trade declined, Britain and other European powers invested heavily in African plantation agriculture, particularly in cotton and palm oil monocrops.
Article
LaRay Denzer
Adelaide Smith Casely-Hayford (1868–1960) and her daughter Gladys May Casely-Hayford (Mrs. Kobina Hunter) (1904–1950) were a unique mother–daughter duo in 20th-century West African cultural history. They belonged to illustrious, multiethnic, coastal intercolony families linking them to European traders, indigenous Fante and Asante ruling houses, North American and West Indian settlers, and Liberated Africans relocated in Freetown in the 19th century. Educated in local mission schools and Britain, many in this group held high positions in the emergent colonial service, Christian missions, commercial firms, and modern legal and medical professions. Born in 1868 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Adelaide Smith Casely-Hayford spent most of her first twenty-two years in Britain where she had an elite upbringing and the type of education deemed suitable for a young woman of her class. Twice before her marriage to Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford, a lawyer from the Gold Coast, she returned for brief periods to Freetown where she tried her hand at teaching. After her marriage, she resided in the Gold Coast, where she felt culturally alienated, finding relief in two long visits to Britain. After a legal separation from her husband in 1914, she returned to Freetown where she flourished, gaining an international reputation as a writer, educator, traveler, and public figure.
Her daughter Gladys May was born in the Gold Coast in 1904 with a malformed hip joint that inhibited mobility. After her parents’ separation, Gladys’s visits to her father were a source of contention with her mother, sometimes curtailed by demands that she return to Freetown. Educated at the el-ite Annie Walsh Memorial School in Freetown and two girls’ schools in England, Gladys’ disinterest in further education put her at odds with her mother’s ambitions for her future career. Further, Gladys’s involvement in popular cultural activities was a source of contention. Whereas Adelaide was extremely class and color conscious, by her own assessment “a bit of a snob,” Gladys was equalitarian and delighted in mixing with ordinary people wherever she was. She became a journalist, produced theatrical performances, and quietly developed as an artist and poet, even hiding some of her drawings and poems during her lifetime. Only after her death in 1950 did her family discover her artwork and a cache of 350 poems. Now a noted Sierra Leonean critic ranks her as an accomplished poet and one of the first to write in Krio.
In the first half of the 20th century, few West African, western-educated, elite women achieved public influence outside their immediate society, whereas some West African women in “traditional” polities wielded power and influence as paramount chiefs, titled women, religious authorities, and resistance leaders. Rarely did educated elite women acknowledge their influential sisters. During her lifetime, Adelaide Casely-Hayford helped to shape girls’ education, cultural nationalism, and the formation of African identity in anglophone West Africa, particularly Sierra Leone, but also in the United States. Her daughter Gladys Casely-Hayford (later Hunter) was a pioneer Sierra Leone artist, dramatist, and poet who enthusiastically embraced popular Krio culture.
Article
Terri Ochiagha
Chinua Achebe, acclaimed as the “father of modern African literature,” came to canonical prominence thanks to the seismic impact of his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958)—the best-known work of African literature in the world—and his indictment of colonial discourse in the seminal essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Massachusetts in 1974. His influence and impact, however, far surpasses these two literary events. While Things Fall Apart was neither the first African novel nor the first to capture the trauma of the colonial encounter, Achebe’s transliteration of the Igbo language—its beauty, philosophy, and cadences of speech—in clear, eloquent prose, and his intimate knowledge and subversion of the Western literary tradition enthused literary critics around the world, inspired generations of African writers, and was key in instituting African literature as a field of scholarly inquiry. He further helped shape the direction of African writing in editorial roles—most notably as the founding editor of Heinemann’s African Writers Series—and through his manifold critical and biographical essays, many of which preempt ideas at the core of postcolonial theory, albeit with a more accessible and mellifluous idiom.
Over the course of his writing career, Achebe published five novels (Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease [1960], Arrow of God [1964], A Man of the People [1966], and Anthills of the Savannah [1987]), children’s books (Chike and the River [1966], How the Leopard Got His Claws [1972], The Flute [1977], and The Drum [1977]), two collections of short stories (The Sacrificial Egg and Other Stories [1962] and Girls at War and Other Stories [1972]), two volumes of poetry (Beware, Soul Brother [1971] and Collected Poems [2004]), four collections of essays (Morning Yet on Creation Day [1975], Hopes and Impediments [1988], Home and Exile [2000], and The Education of a British-Protected Child [2008]), a political treatise (The Trouble with Nigeria [1983]), and his final work, There Was a Country (2012), a memoir on his experiences of the Nigerian Civil War.
Article
Michael Odijie
The ongoing scholarship on child slavery in cocoa farming in West Africa is examined by illustrating major developments in the field. Slavery was a mainstay of the labor force in early West Africa cocoa farming, especially in Sao Tomé and Príncipe. Whereas slavery in cocoa farming in West Africa historically involved adult slaves, the modern version is almost exclusively based on child slavery. With the promise of a job, child slaves are transported to Côte d’Ivoire from neighboring countries like Mali and Burkina Faso and transported to cocoa farms in remote villages. In Ghana, child slaves are transported from poorer regions. The modern literature on child slavery in the West African cocoa sector, which to a great extent has been led by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and activists, has not properly engaged with the history or evolution of cocoa farming or its link to modern child slavery. While the documentaries and journalistic case studies produced by NGOs and activists have offered crucial evidence of the occurrence of child slavery on West African cocoa farms, they have generated only limited questions and arguments. This is partly due to the practical goals of this literature—for example, showing that child slavery exists (via documentary approaches)—and the use of surveys to attempt to measure its prevalence. This focus primarily serves the antislavery campaign. The literature has also suffered from a lack of conceptual direction. The proximity of categories such as child labor and hazardous child labor has allowed stakeholders to shift the conversation away from child slavery to less problematic forms of labor, especially given the methodological difficulties encountered in uncovering child slavery. However, the literature that has sought to explain the causes of child slavery in cocoa farming in West Africa has been robust and historical due to the contribution of Marxist and other scholars who are not necessarily involved in the antislavery campaign. The campaign against child slavery in cocoa farming has led to copious programs and initiatives on the part of the West African government and other stakeholders.
Article
Florence Bernault
The article considers a large region comprising Chad, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Gabon, the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea.1 From the 1880s onwards, Central Africa was colonized by Spanish, French, German, Belgian, and Portuguese powers. Here Africans generally suffered a harsher kind of rule than in West Africa, as colonialism brought little capital and investments, and imposed brutal forms of extractive economy. Foreign powers, moreover, proved reluctant to dialogue with African elites. Yet, the colonial era was also a moment when Central Africans initiated radical political revolutions and capacious social changes, achieving independence in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout the period under consideration, moreover, important cultural creations in the form of music, popular painting, photography, and fashion became influential in the rest of Africa and beyond.
