Situated in the densely populated former North Nyanza District of western Kenya, Chavakali secondary school was the site where the colonial regime, the nationalist government, and international ‘developmentalists’ attempted to dictate the nature of education and by extension the place of the rural citizenry during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. This goal, however, was not easily achieved because ordinary Kenyans rejected the vocational-agricultural curriculum that school officials and development specialists championed as the ideal education program for rural communities. Chavakali students from Maragoliland, in particular, recognized the inherent contradiction of the Kenyan government's agriculture-as-development model continued from the colonial era – lack of land. Realizing how bankrupt the agrarian development model really was, they used their educational training to enter the wage labor sector on better terms than as simple laborers. Chavakali's nonsensical curriculum thus hardly produced the agrarian revolution that the state hoped would stabilize the countryside in the postcolony.

The article studies the contexts in which the idea of a separation of the Casamance from the rest of Senegal arose during the process of decolonization. The idea was an outgrowth of colonial representations forged since the end of the nineteenth century. It was first formulated by the French authorities in secret discussions with the representatives of the Casamance in the context of the 1958 referendum. It was taken over by local political leaders who saw it as a possible answer to the debates over representation that arose in the post-war process of democratization, and later by proponents of political mobilization at the sub-regional level after independence. By examining this little-known moment of possibility, the article shows that the claims of the current armed independence movement are in fact part of a longer, more ambivalent history in which a separatist imaginary of the Casamance took shape.

Based on both archival research and oral interviews conducted in northern Namibia, this article traces the history of public flogging in Ovamboland throughout the twentieth century. In contrast to recent scholarship that views corporal punishment in modern Africa mainly through the lens of colonial governance, the article argues that because the South African colonial state never withdrew the power to punish from the region's traditional authorities, these indigenous leaders were able to maintain a degree of legitimacy among their subjects, who looked to the kings and headmen to punish wrongdoers and maintain communal norms. Finally, the article explores why nostalgia for corporal punishment remains a salient feature in Namibian society today, 25 years after the end of colonial rule.

The editors of this volume affiliate their mission with an amplified and heightened sense of history that has swept Africanist scholarship in the post-independence era. They claim to take historical archaeology in Africa in a new direction by beginning the process of constructive interaction between history and archaeology (pp. 27-8). An intended component of their project is to create ‘alternative histories rooted in explicitly African sources’ (p. 16). They further raise our anticipation that the volume will examine the disjuncture between the practice of archaeology and contemporary life on most of the continent. This is a noble sentiment, yet the contributors fail to draw on African scholars who attempt to make archaeology pertinent to daily African lives. The editors' insistence on African representations in writing the past is poignantly contradicted by the paucity of African authors in their volume fourteen years after Peter Robertshaw's A History of African Archaeology was faulted for its failure to include more than two (non-white) African contributors. This practice largely restricts knowledge production to hegemonic Western perspectives and subverts the book's primary rhetorical theme of giving ‘voice’ to silenced African pasts. The cost of the paperback – $70 – also hinders access to African readers and their capacity to engage issues that arise in the fourteen chapters, three of which focus on West Africa, three on East Africa, one on North Africa and five on southern Africa.

Zambia's unsuccessful coup attempt in 1980 was initiated by members of the country's intellectual and business elite, who had played a leading role in the postcolonial civil service and state bureaucracy, but who became disillusioned with the takeover of the state by the ruling party before and after the declaration of the one-party state in 1972. Among their number was Valentine Musakanya, one of those convicted for the coup attempt. Using Musakanya's biographical and other writings, this article explores his intellectual trajectory from head of the civil service to political prisoner. In so doing, it investigates the role of life writing in aiding understanding of the postcolonial political history of Africa.

During Zimbabwe's struggle for national liberation, thousands of black African students fled Rhodesia to universities across the world on refugee scholarship schemes. To these young people, university student activism had historically provided a stable route into political relevance and nationalist leadership. But at foreign universities, many of which were vibrant centres for student mobilisations in the 1960s and 1970s and located far from Zimbabwean liberation movements’ organising structures, student refugees were confronted with the dilemma of what their role and future in the liberation struggle was. Through the concept of the ‘frontier’, this article compares the experiences of student activists at universities in Uganda, West Africa, and the UK as they figured out who they were as political agents. For these refugees, I show how political geography mattered. Campus frontiers could lead young people both to the military fronts of Mozambique and Zambia as well as to the highest circles of government in independent Zimbabwe. As such, campus frontiers were central to the history of Zimbabwe's liberation movements and the development of the postcolonial state.

Through their participation in an unequal Atlantic commerce, African merchants on the Gold Coast consciously transformed their dress in ways that expressed their cultural dynamism and economic success in an increasingly interconnected world. In discussing the web of cross-cultural commercial exchanges between Africa, Asia, and Europe, this article moves away from the tendency to regard Africans who adorned themselves in imported European clothing and textiles as ‘creole’ or ‘Europeanized’ elites. Labels like these not only assume the existence of an African cultural essence, but (inadvertently) deny the dynamism that has always characterized African cultures prior to the Atlantic economy. In the case of the Gold Coast, I examine how the Gã and Fante mercantile elite translated imported textiles and clothing into new cultural meanings, aesthetics and norms that emphasized family integrity, power as well as the ancestral, material and commercial value of inherited imported articles of adornment.

The early ʽAlawī state has repeatedly been described as heavy and efficient military government. In practice it functioned as a relatively loosely-knit tribute state. The achievement of its notable and long-lived second sultan Ismāʽil (1672–1727) was to shed the aegis of Fez, his economic metropolis, and set up an increasingly gigantic palace, beside a market town, as an independent political base. His central government there was characterized by minimal use of coin and minuscule central bureaucracy. For military support the sultan at first relied chiefly upon free troops, associated by fictional kinship with his most notable wife: later he relied increasingly upon black slave guards. But the motors of government at large were not imperial troops, whose functions were essentially deterrence and the hallmarking of government activity; they were provincial governors, bound to the sultan by ties of individual loyalty. These governors were responsible for the extraction of tribute destined for the palace.

Religion gave increased coherence to this state. This was not so much because of its association with literacy, as because it enabled the sultan, who needed religious prestige, to enhance his unremarkable claim to descent from the Prophet, by taking up the Islamic mantle of ‘Commander of the Faithful’. This was a forceful image for propaganda that could counter the close association between the palace and Moroccan Jewry. It could also validate demands for loyalty throughout the empire. A hard Islamic line was expressed in jihād, or holy warfare, against Christendom. The sultan's limited resources and his other military commitments prevented him from conducting active jihād much above the level of token confrontation. But there was also a moral jihād, waged, in so far as this was possible, by rejection of cultural and economic ties with Europe.

The main reference point for the chronology of the Bemba is their paramount chieftainship, Chitimukulu. A comparison of written records of traditions with the results of fieldwork in 1964–5 shows that it is impossible to determine the antiquity of this title with any precision, or to demonstrate any very clear connection with Luba or western Lunda history. There is however a strong probability that the Chitimukuluship was created some time in the seventeenth century, and it is certainly older than the eastern Lunda kingdom of Kazembe. There is no continuous genealogy of Chitimukulus before the end of the eighteenth century, but from this period it is possible to construct an approximate chronology of their reigns on the basis both of genealogy and of comparison between Bemba, Lunda and Portuguese sources. The first firm dates are supplied by Livingstone, in 1867 and 1872, and Giraud, in 1883. The chronology of Chitimukulu is compared, in two tables, with the chronology of other Bemba chieftainships and certain other chiefly dynasties in north-eastern Zambia and south-western Tanzania.

WITH the publication of these two volumes, the historical study of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa has reached its maturity. Drawing on five decades of scholarship since the professionalization of African history, and the long traditions of Islamic and African studies before that, these works – one the first truly usable textbook survey of the field, the other the first comprehensive reference – are both a successful culmination of what has gone before and guides to the paths ahead. In some cases the authors' and editors' careers are virtually synonymous with the field as a whole, as with the late Nehemia Levtzion, and all are among the acknowledged authorities on their specialties. David Robinson, author of Muslim Societies in African History, is one of the few who have established themselves as authorities on both the precolonial and colonial periods, and his work is central to active debates in each subfield. The individual and collective stature of Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels, editors of The History of Islam in Africa, along with that of the twenty-two other contributors, makes the authority of the volume unprecedented.

Shortly after South African College, the predecessor of today's University of Cape Town, opened its doors in 1829 faculty members found that they had a problem. In one meeting of the Faculty Senate alone, four students were brought up on charges that one had been ‘fighting and noisy’, another ‘fighting – kicking open the door of the Messenger's Room’, another ‘writing on the Professor's desk with chalk’ the words ‘Ziervogel is a vagabond’ as well as ‘threatening the messenger with his fist’, and another ‘idle, insolent & insubordinate in writing class’ who, in replying to a reprimand from the writing master, said: ‘You may go to the Devil’. Several others were noted in the records as absent from class and lying about it. Moreover, the young college had only two dozen or so books, but already nine of them had been ‘mutilated by tearing out the leaves & c’. And virtually all the means for securing property from theft – ‘various locks, claps and staples’ – had been ‘broken in the College, apparently by some of the Students.’ So intractable had the students become, in fact, that the college authorities constructed a small one-room prison with no windows on campus, which they called the ‘Black Hole’, in which to confine offenders who could be identified and condemned. Students were regularly sentenced to terms of three or four hours per day without bread or water, usually in the early evening, the number of days depending on the severity of the offense.

Students at South African College engaged in violence and intimidation of all sorts in the first half of the nineteenth century. They attacked professors and townspeople in Cape Town, preyed on each other, stole and destroyed property, and continually disrupted the operations of the college. These were not boys striving to become upstanding citizens, yet in the end they did for the most part, largely because in organizing campus violence some SAC students produced a reputation for leadership and a constituency that followed them. And that reputation proved useful later in securing positions in the city's merchant houses and in the colonial government. Later in the century, however, the violence subsided and was replaced with different means by which to produce a reputation for leadership, mainly structured competitions among students in a debating society, in sports and for high rankings in the examinations offered by the University of the Cape of Good Hope. What I wish to argue here is that the social relations created among students at South African College were important to forming elites in each successive generation. Moreover, it is important to know how these social relations were formed – mostly in competitions among students which centered around acts of violence, at first physical and later symbolic.

Informed by the notion of racial affinity, the European managers of the Church Missionary Society Niger Mission had required all black West Indians in their employ to make Africa their home. However, because the African posting involved a substantial devaluation in the material benefits to be derived from missionary service, West Indians vigorously objected to the idea of making Africa their home. They demanded instead to be perceived and treated as foreigners on the same footing as Europeans. Although they were subsequently defined as part of the expatriate workforce of the Mission, they were still denied parity with Europeans in the allocation of scarce benefits on the basis of racial considerations. Unresolved tensions over the redistribution of scarce resources led to the premature collapse of the West Indian scheme. This essay is an analysis of how the pursuit of socioeconomic self-interest affected the construction and representation of race and identity among the West Indians in the Niger Mission.