Oil exploration in Africa began during the colonial period. The discovery of oil in many African states and its attendant promises of development has been a double-edged sword for the continent. In many African countries, discovery of abundant oil fields coincided with independence, entrusting the management of huge oil reserves to the postcolonial states that emerged from the rubble of colonialism. Oil has made Africa a strategic energy source for the rest of the world. As of 2017, Africa was estimated to contain upward of 126 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, constituting about 10 percent of world reserves. Yet the search for more oil continues in many African countries. Oil generates immense revenue for states that have it but it also makes them susceptible to a boom-and-bust cycle that mono-economies often confront. The finite nature of oil and the technology that is needed to extract it have made oil a beautiful bride for multinational corporations and the state which partners with them. Elite competition is often the norm in states rich in oil, where its control is often accompanied by access to the huge resources, with no benefits accruing to the larger population. The process of elite accumulation of oil rent has preoccupied most scholarship on Africa since the 1970s, when many oil-rich states experienced a boom—hence the notion that such countries on the continent are a petrostate. Petrostates are susceptible to the resource curse of mono-economies, according to the analyses that have dominated the political economy literature for the better part of the last half century.
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The Petrostate in Africa
Omolade Adunbi
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Cannabis and Tobacco in Precolonial and Colonial Africa
Chris S. Duvall
Cannabis and tobacco have longstanding roles in African societies. Despite botanical and pharmacological dissimilarities, it is worthwhile to consider tobacco and cannabis together because they have been for centuries the most commonly and widely smoked drug plants. Cannabis, the source of marijuana and hashish, was introduced to eastern Africa from southern Asia, and dispersed widely within Africa mostly after 1500. In sub-Saharan Africa, cannabis was taken into ethnobotanies that included pipe smoking, a practice invented in Africa; in Asia, it had been consumed orally. Smoking significantly changes the drug pharmacologically, and the African innovation of smoking cannabis initiated the now-global practice. Africans developed diverse cultures of cannabis use, including Central African practices that circulated widely in the Atlantic world via slave trading. Tobacco was introduced to Africa from the Americas in the late 1500s. It gained rapid, widespread popularity, and Africans developed distinctive modes of tobacco production and use. Primary sources on these plants are predominantly from European observers, which limits historical knowledge because Europeans strongly favored tobacco and were mostly ignorant or disdainful of African cannabis uses. Both plants have for centuries been important subsistence crops. Tobacco was traded across the continent beginning in the 1600s; cannabis was less valuable but widely exchanged by the same century, and probably earlier. Both plants became cash crops under colonial regimes. Tobacco helped sustain mercantilist and slave-trade economies, became a focus of colonial and postcolonial economic development efforts, and remains economically important. Cannabis was outlawed across most of the continent by 1920. Africans resisted its prohibition, and cannabis production remains economically significant despite its continued illegality.
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Technological Change in Late 19th-Century South Africa
William Storey
Societies and technologies were deeply intertwined in the history of late 19th-century South Africa. The late 19th century saw the significant development of capitalist agriculture, together with the expansion of mining. The technological side of farming and mining had a significant influence on social and political development. Meanwhile, as in many other colonial outposts, local innovators and entrepreneurs played significant roles in business as well as government. Technological developments were not simply imported or imposed from Great Britain. Everyday technologies, ranging from firearms to clothing, were the subjects of extensive debate across southern Africa’s different cultures.
