This issue of The Journal of African History presents six articles which are connected by a number of themes which have long attracted historians of the continent: the relationship between elites and the marginal, the tension between the forces of integration and the frontier, and the ways in which communication and power align. Above all, they are united by an imaginative engagement with the challenges of a problematic source base. This issue's contributors demonstrate again how the evolving limitations of the colonial and postcolonial archive stimulate Africanists' creative rereading of the official record, reconstruction of multisite shadow archives, and triangulation between audiovisual, documentary, and oral sources.
Fabian Krautwald casts new light on the role of intermediaries in the reestablishment of colonial authority after the Maji Maji uprising in German East Africa. Through an analysis of the Swahili-language government newspaper Kiongozi, Krautwald highlights the multiple ambiguities of the colonial project. Kiongozi disseminated government propaganda but also allowed African writers to promote an alternative vision of the colony's future, while its stories exposed the unevenness with which liberties and controls were extended across the territory. Crucially, Kiongozi revealed an ideology of bureaucratic enlightenment which coastal elites constructed against the internal rationality of healing, learning, and governance within inland societies. The fractured nature of the colonial state and its capacity to form policy in willful ignorance of indigenous knowledge are further drawn out by David Bannister. Bannister shows how poorly-conceived trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) control measures in the Gold Coast's marginalized North caused a devastating epidemic of onchocerciasis (river blindness) in postcolonial Ghana. In this fine-grained study, Bannister demonstrates how the unintended consequences of public health interventions were the result of both the excessive autonomy of the colonial expert and the structural biases of a state committed to imbalanced development.
The question of how decolonization enabled the marginalized to exert new kinds of claims on the state is explored by both Nana Osei-Opare and Robert Rouphail. Osei-Opare's study of the language of protest and obligation in Ghana adds further nuance to understandings of how the relationship between the citizen and the state was negotiated in postcolonial Africa. The remarkable density of the empirical record of employees' complaints and workers’ asserted centrality to the national project sheds new light on how Nkrumahism was debated from below, and also demonstrates that in some contexts historians of postcolonial Africa need not be constrained by pessimism about the viability of the governmental archive. In Rouphail's analysis of Mauritius's Creole community of African descent, the unequal impact of Cyclone Carol in 1960 was understood both in terms of Afro-Mauritians' recurring experiences of displacement and impermanence and as an immediate threat to Creoles' capacity to shape the postcolonial state in their image. Rouphail traces how their community's rehousing in cyclone-proof estates saw Afro-Mauritian identity reframed internally around ideas of belonging and economic integration, even as the estates became the subject of an external racialized discourse that linked urban decay to ‘le malaise Creole’.
Educational exile has long been recognised as a catalyst for the development of pan-Africanist and nationalist movements in Africa, with recent scholarship highlighting how education migrants from the Global South reshaped campus politics in the Global North and experienced often-troubled relationships with their home governments on their return. Dan Hodgkinson takes this theme in a new transnational direction, detailing how Zimbabwean students engaged with the politics of the university in Nigeria, Uganda, and the United Kingdom during the 1970s, and how this exile politics informed their subsequent participation in the liberation struggle. By conceiving of the foreign university as a frontier zone, Hodgkinson is able to shine new light on student refugees' uneven impact on the functioning of the political community in Southern Africa. While some educational frontiers fostered creative dynamism and productive intermixing, others resulted in sterile isolation or disconnect. In the final article of this issue, Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye examines the theme of transnational mobility in relation to the politics of development in Mali in the 1980s and 1990s. Mbodj-Pouye brings together literatures on infrastructure, media, and place in an examination of the introduction of local radio as a means of connecting the remote region of Kayes with neighbouring regions and the larger diaspora. In tracing the evolution of radio's developmental purpose from geographical integration to community building, the article challenges assumptions about the relationship between democratization and media liberalization, as well as those between states, non-governmental organizations, and local populations in sustaining the viability of development projects in Africa.
The reviews in this issue represent the final batch commissioned by Emily Osborn, who completed her term as book review editor on 31 December 2020. We are grateful to both Emily and Editorial Assistant Deirdre Lyons for their service to the journal. Our featured review is Cheikh Babou's extended and incisive engagement of Francois Richards's longue durée narrative of Sereer history in the contested landscapes of southwestern Senegal. Other highlights include two studies that contribute to the growing interest in social histories of warfare on the continent: Lynn Schler on Chima Korieh's Nigerian history of the Second World War and Sarah Zimmerman's study of tirailleur Sénégalais conjugal and marriage practices, reviewed by Bruce Whitehouse. We also have two reflections on leadership in mid-twentieth-century Kenya: Julie MacArthur on Anais Angelo's history of the Kenyatta presidency and Robert M. Maxon's take on MacArthur's own edited volume about the trial of the legendary Land and Freedom Army leader Dedan Kimathi. Other reviews include the eminent historian Toyin Falola's assessment of a festschrift, edited by Toby Green and Benedetta Rossi, in honor of another eminent scholar, Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias; while Ras Michael Brown considers Kevin Dawson's groundbreaking study on African and African diasporic aquatic cultures.
We release this issue in the northern spring, normally a time for hope and optimism, which comes this year during an extended period of mourning and suffering. We anticipate the pandemic's end but rue the fact that COVID-19 vaccine inequality is now added to the host of historically manufactured injustices that structure our world. We wish you health and strength in the months ahead.
The Editors
