In 1963, unrest in Sudan's three southern provinces (today's South Sudan) escalated into a civil war between the government and the Anya-Nya rebellion. The subsequent eight years of violence has hitherto largely escaped scrutiny from academic researchers and has remained a subject of popular imagination and politicised narratives. This article demonstrates how this history can be explored with greater nuance, thereby establishing a local history of a postcolonial civil war. Focusing on the garrison town of Torit, our research reveals a localised and personalised rebellion, made up of a constellation of parochial armed groups. This new history also demonstrates how these parties built upon experiences from imperial conquest and colonial rule when entrenching violent wartime practices such as mass displacement and encampment, the raising of local militias and intelligence networks, and the deliberate starvation of civilians — all common methods in subsequent wars.

This article examines the transformation of mineral matter into mineral property from the vantage point of Ga-Mphahlele, a section of northern South Africa's platinum belt in which minerals are particularly complex to access. Building on Thomas Sikor and Christian Lund's work, I show that the demands of mining capital played a key role in facilitating a co-constitutive relationship between political authority and mineral property. Because of the geological difficulties accessing Ga-Mphahlele's platinum, mining companies have only shown an intermittent interest in the area's minerals, resulting in a volatile relationship between mineral property and political authority. In turn, this has meant that minerals have often been a relatively unstable property form. By adding the role of capital to Lund and Sikor's analytic lens for studying property and authority, this article tracks the relationship between chiefly authority, African land purchasing, platinum companies, and the emergence of mineral rights.

In 1700 reports from Tripoli reached the congregation of Propaganda Fide in Rome that Christians, ‘little or uninstructed in the Faith’, were living in Bornu. Further enquiries revealed that these rumours related not to the kingdom of Bornu, but to a neighbouring, rival kingdom, that of ‘Gourourfa’ or ‘Carnorfa’. Two sons of the ruler of Bornu, interviewed in Cairo, stated that in ‘Canorfa’ there were people ‘who venerate the Cross and erect it over the houses and churches’, while the French Consul at Tripoli reported how he had seen slaves from ‘Gouroufa’ who made the sign of the Cross. In June 1710 two Franciscans, attempting to establish contact with these ‘Christians’, set out from Tripoli, passed through Murzuk and Agades, and were later reported to have died in Katsina in August 1711.

Hausa and Bornu sources indicate that these reports almost certainly referred to the Kwararafa, who on several occasions in the seventeenth century attacked Kano and Bornu. It is then pointed out that a Maltese cross was one of the motifs still used in the twentieth century as a decoration by an Aku of Wukari, a ruler of the Jukun, who are among the principal survivors of the Kwararafa. At least a section of the inhabitants of Wukari also preserved a clearly remembered tradition of having taken part in a migratory journey from the Nilotic Sudan to the Benue. It is suggested therefore that the reports of the French consul and the Franciscans, although garbled and consisting in the main of second-hand evidence, strengthen the possibility that the Maltese crosses used among the Jukun, in Nupe and at Benin indicate an influence which emanated originally from Christian Nubia and is perhaps connected with the Kisra traditions.

This article proposes that there is a gap in our current understanding of the globalising and deglobalising dynamics of mid-twentieth-century East Africa, one that might be addressed by consolidating and taking forward recent developments in the historiography of decolonisation. Recent work by international historians has recovered the connected world of the 1940s to 1960s: the era of new postcolonial states, the ‘Bandung moment’, pan-African cooperation, and the early Cold War. Yet East Africa is less prominent in these histories than we might expect, despite the vibrancy of current work on this period in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Bringing these two fields into dialogue, through an explicitly regional East African framework and with a particular focus on individual lives, expands our understanding not only of the ‘globalisation of decolonisation’ but also of the deglobalising dynamics of the following decades that are frequently reduced to a history of global economic crisis.

On 24 December 1949, two thousand women marched on the prison at Grand Bassam in protest of the detention of militants of the Parti Démocratique de Côte d'Ivoire (PDCI). Considered the first mass demonstration by West African women against French colonial rule, the march on Grand Bassam was a watershed moment in the Ivoirian anticolonial movement. Though party officials have framed women's activism as a political ‘awakening’, women's militancy was in keeping with longstanding practices of public motherhood, whereby women's status as caregivers — both biological and symbolic — authorized their moral interventions in community life. Maternal authority enabled a variety of powerful political tactics, yet in an Ivoirian anticolonial context dominated by elite negotiations, it also circumscribed women's activism. This article examines the women's march on Grand Bassam as a case study for understanding the possibilities and limits of women's participation in the Ivoirian anticolonial movement.

L'histoire préeuropéenne de l'Afrique au sud du Sahara doit-elle être considérée comme une véritable science ou bien continuer une carrière subalterne dans les fourgons de l'ethnologie?

The widely accepted argument of Migeod, that the existence of polar morphological types among Mende men is evidence of an ancestral mixture of Mandingo and forest-dwellers, is examined and rejected. Despite the great probability that the ancestry of the Mende is indeed heterogeneous, neither Migeod's argument nor his data support his conclusions. The uncritical acceptance which the argument has had suggests that a general caveat is as important as the particular point.