Despite its pivotal economic position in Central Africa, the history of Zimbabwe's Wankie Colliery has scarcely been explored. Although the historical pattern of capital accumulation and class struggle on the colliery has yet to be traced in any detail, this article suggests that a useful starting point is the protracted labour crisis which convulsed the colliery in 1918. Attempts to expand output through intensified pressure on a dwindling supply of black labour soon established a vicious circle in which workers' health deteriorated rapidly. Hundreds of black miners were incapacitated by ‘tropical ulcers’. An ensuing commission of enquiry exonerated the colliery's management of any blame, but it is nonetheless significant for the light it casts on the British South Africa Company Administration's narrow conception of its role after the Privy Council decision depriving it of ownership of ‘unalienated’ land in the Colony. The article's last section examines the conflict between the colliery's management and organized white workers in the context of the racial division of labour. In doing so, it emphasizes the structural vulnerability of white labour in the colonial era.

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.

The Kangere cliché is widespread in the Great Lakes region of Zaire (Lakes Kivu and Tanganyika), where the Bembe, Fulero, Havu, Lega, Nyindu, Shi, Vira and others live. This cliché has been collected since the 1910s by missionary and colonial administrator researchers. Later it has been heavily used and interpreted in different ways. Thus certain modern scholars have made Kangere the first ‘king’ of the region and the ‘father’ of all bami, that is, the ‘kings’ of various ancient kingdoms existing on the shores of the Great Lakes, including Rwanda and Burundi! Their single aim was to refute the ‘Hamitic myth’.

In fact, the Kangere cliché is woven together from different elements taken from various ethnic groups of the region. Its elements were ordered at the same time that they were collected, in the course of the 1910s and the 1920s. They constitute an African response to the preoccupation of the colonial administration of those years: the creation of vast ethnic groups and politically and administratively viable entities. Whites wanted tribes, and blacks created them; whites wanted great chiefs, and blacks created them, the bami.

In their interpretation of the Kangere cliché, these researchers quite simply confused, erroneously, the ‘bwami symbol’ of personalized power (which existed in the area, and which chiefs of different ethnic groups possessed) with the ‘bwami state’ or kingdom, of recent, colonial creation.

In 1899 the French Colonial Ministry parcelled out the greater part of the French Congo among various concession companies in imitation of a similar policy adopted earlier by the Congo Free State. British companies which had pioneered the trade found themselves being treated as squatters and interlopers subject to legal prosecutions. They claimed that the French government had infringed the provisions of the Berlin Act and called for the diplomatic support of the Foreign Office. Their call was backed by the British Chambers of Commerce.

For long British humanitarians had been decrying the treatment of Africans in the Congo basin whose lands were being expropriated, and they had repeatedly appealed to the British government to ensure that the provisions of the Berlin Act were enforced. Consequently, the British merchants and the humanitarians found common ground for agitation.

In the face of such a powerful combination the Foreign Office had to act and protracted Anglo-French negotiations ensued. They were brought to an end in 1906 when the French government, while maintaining the principle of concessions, agreed to compensate the British firms for their losses.

One of the most puzzling and fascinating of all resistance movements is that known as the revolt of the menalamba. It occurred over a wide area of central Madagascar, mostly in the kingdom of Imerina, in the two years following the French invasion of Madagascar in 1895. The most mysterious aspect of the rising has always been the question of who, if anyone, was its leader. The official version, that reported by the French government in Madagascar, was that the movement was inspired or directed by a number of magnates at the old Merina court. The published evidence is so ambiguous as to have obliged every subsequent author to accept this version, although there was considerable doubt expressed as to its truth at that time. Recent research in previously unopened archives has thrown new light on the question.

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.

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.

This article studies infrastructure development in the colony of German East Africa from the early 1890s to 1907. By focussing on questions of continuity and change in the transition phase from the precolonial era to German colonial rule, the article demonstrates that colonial road planning coexisted and often collided with established infrastructure systems. After 1891, colonial authorities sought to transform existing caravan paths into all-weather highways. The analysis applies an actor-centred approach to explain why almost all of these efforts failed. A focus on those actors being expected to construct or maintain (residents) and to use (transport workers) colonial roads reveals the non-compliance of colonial subjects, the persistence of African spatial practices, and the resulting contestation of colonial rule in everyday life. In this way, the article illuminates how Africans responded to European interventions which restructured space and how these responses complicated and frustrated colonial road works. Hence, the article challenges classical narratives of infrastructure as a ‘tool of empire’ and instead highlights the resilience of vernacular structures and their producers under colonial rule.

This paper examines African peasant tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia from 1900 to 1980, from the cusp of colonialism to its end. It analyses shifting state policy towards African tobacco producers, the concomitant impact on peasant economies, accumulation patterns and the rural physical landscape and peasant responses. It focuses on the changing agricultural commodity value chains, cash crop asymmetries, and global market forces to explain colonial responses to peasant production and peasant agency. We argue that the symbolic value of each agricultural commodity, in entrenching the hierarchy of power relations and the institutionalisation of white control, mediated colonial responses to peasant production and concomitantly ‘peasant agency’. We use this case study to highlight the structural constraints on ‘agency’ and to explore how cash crop asymmetries helped structure agrarian encounters and power relations in colonial Africa. The paper uses archival sources from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, newspapers, and journals from the Tobacco Research Board (TRB).