The Ghanaian forest was well settled by agricultural communities prior to the opening of the Atlantic trade in the late fifteenth century. The most prominent of these settlements were earthworks sites, construction of which began in the first millennium ce and continued until their abrupt abandonment prior to the mid-fifteenth century. In this article, previous archaeological data are evaluated in light of current research to provide a plausible alternative hypothesis for the history of the Akan, placing that history in a much broader and deeper context.

This article reinforces the interpretation of numerous scholars who have highlighted the role of slave labor in groundnut production during the ‘cash-crop revolution’ in West Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also expands Jan Hogendorn's argument on the African initiatives involved in the expansion of groundnut production in colonial Northern Nigeria. In particular, it provides evidence of the key role of the emir of Kano (Abbas) and important merchants in the transition to groundnut cultivation and the significant use of slave labor by these large estate-holders. The article focuses mainly on the Fanisau unit of Kano.

This article documents a landmark dispute between British Petroleum (BP) and the Nigerian tax authorities that occurred over a N130 million (£100 million) capital gains tax assessment arising from an intra BP Group transfer of its 50 per cent shareholding in Shell/BP Nigeria. This was necessitated by a BP transaction in Abu Dhabi. This tax assessment, which was more than twice the yearly cash flow of BP's Nigerian operations at the time, ignited a chain of events and schemes that saw the British government covertly and overtly providing support to BP, with the primary goal of influencing the outcome of the dispute in order to protect the interests of both the British government and BP. Evidence in this article highlights the complexities of postcolonial relationships between centre countries and African ex-colonies.

This article reassesses the political alternatives imagined by African nationalists in the ‘first wave’ of Africa's decolonization through the lens of Cameroonian nationalism. After the proscription of Cameroon's popular nationalist movement, the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), in the mid-1950s, thousands of Cameroonian nationalists went into exile, most to Accra, where they gained the support of Kwame Nkrumah's Pan-African Bureau for African Affairs. The UPC's external support fed Cameroon's internal maquis (as UPC members called the underground resistance camps within the territories), rooted in culturally particular conceptions of freedom and sovereignty. With such deeply local and broadly international foundations, the political future that Cameroonian nationalists envisaged seemed achievable: even after the Cameroon territories' official independence, UPC nationalists kept fighting. But, by the mid-1960s, postcolonial states prioritized territorial sovereignty over ‘African unity’ and Ghana's support of the UPC became unsustainable, leading to the movement's disintegration.

This article explores the transnational politics of technology and science at the Rössing uranium mine in Namibia. During the 1980s, Rössing workers refashioned surveillance technologies into methods for trade union action. When national independence in 1990 failed to produce radical ruptures in the workplace, union leaders engaged in technopolitical strategies of extraversion, and became knowledge producers about their own exposure to workplace contaminants. Appeals to outside scientific authority carried the political promise of international accountability. But engaging in science meant accepting its boundaries, and workers ultimately discovered that technopolitical power could be limiting as well as liberating.

An important document in the Dutch Archives casts new light on the Kongo–Portuguese War of 1622, usually seen as a signal defeat for Kongo. This document shows that, after the Portuguese victory over Kongo at the Battle of Mbumbi, there was a second battle in which Kongo forces were victorious, and they in fact began the process of re-occupying lands the Portuguese had absorbed in earlier expansion. In addition, the document reveals the origins of a plan, conceived in Kongo, to form an alliance with the Dutch in order to attack Luanda and drive the Portuguese from Angola, a plan that was realized not in 1624 but in 1641.