In February of 1960, the most powerful cyclone in Mauritian history, Carol, made landfall. In its wake, the British colonial state embarked on a reconstruction effort that would reshape the island for decades to come. This study examines how Afro-descendant Creole Mauritians understood Carol at the moment of its landfall and produced social meaning in the reconstruction efforts that followed. It sheds light in particular on the construction of cités, ‘cyclone-proof’ housing estates meant to permanently shelter those left homeless, at a moment when questions of racial coexistence defined debates over the end of empire. It shows that the building of the cités and the prospect of home ownership they allowed would become important touchstones in contemporary Afro-Mauritian notions of belonging and permanence in a society structured by racial exclusion. In so doing, this essay emphasizes the importance of the natural world to narratives of diasporic community in the southwest Indian Ocean.

Although John W. Colenso thought that he was merely acting as amicus curiae — a friend of the court — in compiling evidence to explain Langalibalele's supposed rebellion in 1873, the Bishop of Natal ended up writing a damning anti-colonial tract. This paper will attempt to show how this report — written for the Queen and Colenso's House of Lord peers — is not just an achievement in legal refutation and forensic analysis but that it was a linguistic and cultural statement about the working and limits of Zulu law as Colenso understood it through his interactions with his Natal converts. Although it is obvious that Colenso's audience was not moved by his supplications on Langalibelele's behalf, it is less obvious why those who thought of Colenso as a maverick and heretic should have ignored his thorough repudiation of cultural chauvinism. The paper will suggest that Colenso's Remarks were ignored precisely because to take them seriously would have meant abandoning the authoritarian underpinnings of the late 19th century colonial project.

It is often suggested that the work of E. P. Thomson played a pivotal role in shaping South African historical writing and provided the foundations for a new school of social history. Thompson's writings – often refracted through many other texts – were one influence amongst many. This article, drawing on my own experiences of key moments of individuals and institutions, argues that the decisive and central role that is ascribed to his work does not accord with much more complex and localised realities. The article touches on numerous other influences that shaped the research and writing of succeeding cohorts of historians. It also suggests that while The Poverty of Theory was an influential publication, it did not initiate new forms of research and writing, but rather contributed to debates that were already well underway. In conclusion, the usefulness of the category of social history is disputed, as in the South African context it lends to a lazy lumping together of a very diverse selection of historians and needs to be rethought or replaced.

In the wake of the South African war, the indenture and transport of over 63,000 Chinese men to gold mines in the Transvaal sparked a rush to supply smoking opium to a literally captive market. Embroiled in a growing political economy of mass intoxication, state lawmakers shifted official policy from prohibition to provision. Their innovation of an industrial drug maintenance bureaucracy, developed on behalf of mining capital in alliance with organized pharmacy and medicine, ran counter to local trends of policy reform and represents a unique episode for broader histories of modern narcotics regulation. This article considers the significance of this case and chronicles the contradictory interests and ideologies that informed political scrambles over legitimate opium uses, users, and profiteers. It shows how the state maintained its provision policy, for as long as it proved expedient, against varied and mounting public pressures – local and international – for renewed drug suppression. The argument here is that the state managed an epidemic of addiction on the Rand as an extraordinary problem of demography. It achieved this both through redefining smoking opium from intoxicant to mine medicine and through the legal construction of a ‘special biochemical zone’, which corresponded with the exceptional status and spatial segregation of a despised alien labour force.

Over the course of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70), many people in the secessionist Republic of Biafra resorted to forgery, confidence scams, and other forms of fraud to survive the dire conditions created by Nigeria's blockade. Forgery of passes and other documents, fraudulent commercial transactions, and elaborate schemes involving impersonation and racketeering became common in Biafra, intensifying as the Biafran government's ability to enforce the law diminished. Using long-neglected legal records from Biafra's courts and tribunals, this study traces the process by which deception emerged as a practice of survival in wartime Biafra – a process with important implications for the growth of fraud (known as ‘419’ after the relevant section of the Nigerian criminal code) in reintegrated postwar Nigeria.

Nous avons choisi d'étudier une région restreinte d'Afrique et une période limitée pour mieux pouvoir poser et tenter de résoudre des problèmes qui nous semblent au cœur même de toute réflexion sur l'histoire de la traite des Noirs: l'origine ethnique des captifs, la proportion d'hommes et de femmes, la mortalité, les rythmes annuels, le rapport entre l'offre africaine et la demande européenne. Nous avons essayé de montrer que tous ces problèmes, trop souvent abordés en ordre dispersé, sont en réalité inextricablement liés.

Various theories have been proposed concerning the homeland of the Nubian languages. Current historical and linguistic evidence suggests that it was in Kordofan or Darfur and that Nubian first entered the middle reaches of the Nile between A.D. 200 and 500. There it replaced Meroitic, which appears to have been spoken in the area for a long time. Meroitic may, but has not yet been proved to be a language of the Eastern Sudanic group. If so, the persistence of many cultural traits in the Sudan may be correlated with the stability of the Eastern Sudanic-speakers in the same area.

The article as a whole argues that the observations of Leo Frobenius in West Africa between 1907 and 1912, though they are commonly ignored by Anglo-American archaeologists and anthropologists, contain material which is of value to the historian of early twentieth-century West Africa. The author examines Frobenius's methods and observations in the light of his own statements (some of them in works which have not been translated into English or French) and suggests various outside sources which could be used to check the reliability of Frobenius's accounts.

The attitude of Anglo-American anthropologists is explained in terms of developments in anthropological theory since the First World War.

The article examines the defects of Frobenius's anthropological method, as exemplified by his work among the Kabré of North Togo shortly after their ‘pacification’ by the Germans; and suggests that the observations themselves may be more reliable than Frobenius's method would lead one to expect.

The article then considers Frobenius's archaeological method as exemplified by his work in Ife, argues that he was somewhat unscrupulous in forcing the sale of artefacts, and also, that by failing to keep adequate site records or even to supervise the digging himself, he destroyed a considerable amount of archaeological evidence at Ife. Historians should, however, study his work in Ife to note where such destruction has taken place, and what kind of evidence has been destroyed.

The article suggests outside sources, both oral and written, which might enable historians to check the veracity of Frobenius's account of his own method, and also the reliability of the observations themselves. Finally, it is suggested that an assessment of the reliability of his observations in Togo and Nigeria might be generally indicative of the reliability of his observation throughout West Africa in the period 1907–12.

An inheritance dispute heard before one of the chiefs’ courts established in Asante under indirect rule illustrates the multivalent, dynamic character of social institutions at a time of economic and political transition. Litigated in 1951, the dispute raised questions about the meaning of ‘family’ and ‘belonging’, and their significance for people's access to wealth and their obligations to one another. Played out against a backdrop of potentially far-reaching social and political change in Ghana and beyond, cases such as this one suggest that terms such as ‘belonging’ and ‘family’ are best understood as labels for complex social processes, rather than facts that determine people's social identities and entitlements.

This article examines the experiences of immigrants from British and French West African colonies in the Accra lunatic asylum in the first half of the twentieth century. Placing particular emphasis on how immigrants got into and out of the asylum, the article argues that immigrants were marginalized and manipulated by colonial psychiatric institutions to a greater extent than non-migrant colonial subjects in Gold Coast. In making this argument, the article argues for the value of adding colonial origin and subjecthood to the racial and gendered perspectives that have dominated the history of health and medicine in Africa to date.

Beginning in 1856 and ending in 1876, Portuguese colonial authorities in Mozambique registered almost 55,000 enslaved and freed Africans (libertos). The sources for these twinned registration processes are located in the national archives of Portugal and Mozambique. Fragments of the originals survive for only six of the ten districts of the colony, but contemporary copies exist for nearly all districts. Combined, they provide a unique opportunity to understand both the extent of slavery — as opposed to the export slave trade — and the process of abolition in late-nineteenth-century Mozambique. In this article we first describe the registers themselves, then focus on the registration of enslaved and freed Africans, the resistance of slaveholders, and the kinds of information that we can glean from the registers. We also explore the ways in which freed Africans were employed after registration and the extent to which being a liberto implied ‘freedom’. Finally, we consider how the registration led to new laws and policies in Portuguese Africa, opening a new era of European colonialism and imperial expansion.

This article draws attention to the comparative lack of material on the origins of African nationalism in Zambia, and suggests a framework of analysis and possible future areas of research on the subject. In contrast with some other East and Central African territories, Zambia offered little or no primary resistance to the imposition of colonial rule, but in other respects the country resembled neighbouring territories in the first three decades of colonial rule. There is a need for further study of Watch Tower and the Welfare Associations, the former in the inter-war years, the latter in the 1940s. The Copperbelt from 1930 to 1950, with its problems of urbanization and the colour bar, is a vital factor setting Zambia apart from other tropical dependencies. Here, Africans were confronted with the determination of Europeans to retain political and economic power, whatever the policy declarations of the government. The politicization of the territory can be traced from here, and the role of the Bemba-speaking peoples as the spearhead of protest had its origin in their powerful position on the Copperbelt.

As colonial and nationalist governments pursued small-scale development in mid-century northern Ghana, so-called ‘voluntary’, ‘communal’, or ‘self-help’ labor became a key determinant of funding. District records and oral histories show how colonial officials, chiefs, and party politicians alternately cast unpaid labor as a way to cut costs, a catalyst for new forms of politics, and an expression of local cohesion. This article extends analysis of ‘self-help’ beyond articulations of and debates about national policy, examining daily negotiations over budgeting and building. It follows two chiefs who used their ability to raise labor to navigate a rapidly changing political landscape. The line between coercion and voluntarism was rarely clear, nor were the meanings of labor fixed for administrators, chiefs, or their constituents. These local actors created the circumstances for successive governments to frame unpaid labor as a legitimate demand on rural citizens.