This article explores radio broadcasting and monitoring by and about Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) leader John Garang during Sudan's second civil war, focusing on the core period of Radio SPLA broadcasting (1984–91). Through oral history, memoirs, and international monitoring reports, the article analyzes radio conversations between Garang and his critics — northern Sudanese, southern Sudanese, and international — to argue that radio battles directly shaped the struggle for political authority between Garang and the Sudanese government, and within the SPLM/A elite. Radio allowed Garang to speak to a dispersed audience within and beyond Sudan, presenting an alternative history of Sudan, publicizing his vision of a New Sudan, and asserting his pseudo-sovereign control of SPLM/A-held territory. However, Radio SPLA did not exist in a vacuum; Garang's rivals responded on government and international radio to criticize his leadership in targeted, personal terms. Radio thus powerfully mediated between personal, national, and international politics during the SPLM/A's liberation struggle.

From Basketmaker II to Pueblo II (200 BC–AD 1150), turkey husbandry flourished among Ancestral Pueblos inhabiting the northern and southern San Juan areas (300 BC–AD 1250) and the Rio Grande Valley (AD 1250– 1700) due to the ritual-symbolic importance of turkey feathers to rainmaking ideology. As primary caregivers, Ancestral Puebloan women's long-lasting social bond with domesticated turkeys was disrupted by Spanish maize and textile tribute (encomienda) systems and demands on Native labor (repartimiento) of the mid-1600s, a major factor contributing to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Despite the Spanish assault on their culture, Native people clandestinely practiced kachina religion by reusing turkey feather ceremonial objects, seeking refuge in ancestral mesa-top villages, and repurposing Spanish ecclesiastical materials as part of a pan-Pueblo resistance and revitalization movement. This study examines a previously overlooked form of Native resistance to Franciscan conversion efforts—“turkey girl” tales that appropriated and repurposed a Spanish religious folktale. Evidence suggests that these tales were authored by Pueblo Revolt–era war captains who attended Franciscan mission schools around the 1630s. To varying degrees, these “turkey girl” tales express nativist resistance to Franciscan conversion efforts, commitment to revitalization ideology, and pan-Pueblo ethnogenesis.

Canada has resettled more than 57,000 Syrian refugees since 2015 (Government of Canada, 2017). However, little is known about refugee children’s language and literacy development. The present study evaluated Syrian refugee children’s performance on language and literacy measures in English and Arabic, and examined whether the simple view of reading model is applicable in both of their languages. Participants consisted of 115 Syrian refugee children 6–13 years of age. They received a battery of language and literacy measures including word reading, vocabulary, oral narratives, and reading comprehension in both English and Arabic. Compared to the normative samples, refugee children performed poorly on English standardized measures. They also demonstrated difficulties in Arabic, as more than half of the children were not able to read in the language. Despite the relatively low performance, there was evidence to support the simple view of reading model in both languages. In addition, oral language skills played a larger role in English reading comprehension in the older group than the younger group. This age-group comparison was not carried out in Arabic due to reduced sample size. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

This article argues that on the borderland between eastern DRC and Rwanda, the past and its representations have been constantly manipulated. The cataclysmic events in both Rwanda and Congo since the 1990s have widened the gap between partial and politicized historical discourse and careful historical analysis. The failure to pay attention to the multiple layers in the production of historical narratives risks reproducing a politicized social present that ‘naturalizes’ differences and antagonisms between different groups by giving them more time-depth. This is a danger both for insiders and outsiders looking in. The answer is to focus on the historical trajectories that shape historical narratives, and to ‘bring history back in’.

This study analyzes the marriage patterns in accounts of ‘founder strangers’ and ‘first-comers’. By telling whether and when a child from a marriage between a Muslim and a warrior was successful or not, the accounts reveal the social code of the political elites in the Western Sudan in the period c. 1600–c. 1850. This social code expressed the elites’ concern with legitimizing their political autonomy as well as with reproducing their ruling position in a context of increasing warfare and growing reformist Islam. This social code structured accounts of both matrilineal warrior rulers and patrilineal Muslim rulers. Though methodologically rooted in classical approaches, historiographically this study contributes not only to recent research on state formation in Kaabu (present-day Guinea-Bissau) and Kankan (present-day Guinea), but also offers an approach to the Sunjata epic that hints at a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century origin of most of the epic as we know it. These fresh insights may shed new light on the history of the Mali Empire and its aftermath, and on processes of state formation in the Western Sudan in general.

This article synthesizes metaphors and practices surrounding human and bovine milk and semen appearing in the James Stuart Archive of Zulu oral history. The King's control of the flow of milk in society was the source of his power and the mechanism by which he controlled the state. A fluent understanding of this Zulu political philosophy in the Stuart Archive opens up a rich and underutilized source of historical information for Zulu history that adds significantly to prior studies. Parallels to these images in the Great Lakes region suggest a ‘milk complex’ rather than the common perception of a ‘cattle complex’.

This essay argues that the apparent discrepancies between oral tradition and other kinds of historical evidence in the western Serengeti, Tanzania, result from a rupture in time and space. As people were incorporated into a meta-ethnic region to the east dominated by the Maasai in the last half of the nineteenth century, they created new ways of calculating time and organizing space based on new kinds of age-sets. Within this larger context of widespread disasters the small, unconsolidated western Serengeti ethnic groups that we now know as Nata, Ikoma, Ishenyi and Ngoreme formed their identities. New generational and gender contests of power came into play as western Serengeti peoples responded creatively to the pressures of the late nineteenth century by mobilizing their own internal cultural resources.