Using new interpretations of oral traditions written in older documents, this article changes the origin of complex societies and larger kingdoms. Showing that the Kingdom of Kongo, presently believed to be the origin of large kingdoms actually achieved it status by conquering an existing kingdom, called Mpemba, the author reassigns both the date and origin point of kingdom level polities there. The author further points to new interpretations of documentary evidence to demonstrate that Mwene Muji and Kulembembe, located to the east and south of Kongo were also early large scale polities at a date as early as Kongo.

Scores of young men and women were killed by regime forces during the Arab Spring in Egypt (2011–2013). Their photographs assumed iconic proportions, meandering online and off through countless acts of creative remediation. This essay examines the different kinds of social and political work that these photographs came to play during this period, including as indexes of the revolutionary cause and as mediators of revolutionary subjectivities at a distance. This essay departs from extant studies of visual cultures of secular martyrdom or funerary portraiture framed by notions of commemoration, and instead stresses contingent presence grounded in the specific liminal temporality of the revolutionary process. In this temporal limbo, photographs of martyrs often blurred conventional boundaries between representations and their referents. Established visual conventions of funerary portraiture were turned upside down, and portraits of martyrs were understood not as representations of the dead, but as alive and present, sometimes more alive than the dwindling group of dedicated revolutionaries.

This article examines the interrelations between the political economies of the Ottoman Empire and the administration of justice for European merchants in Ottoman cities during the seventeenth century. By focusing on the sultan’s court of justice, the Imperial Council (divan-ı hümayun), and the Venetian merchants who appealed to it, this piece illustrates how Ottoman commercial interests and political concerns influenced the production and application of Islamic law (Sharia) in Ottoman courts for European merchants. To promote international trade, Ottoman political and legal authorities introduced new norms and procedures in matters of legal evidence and court jurisdiction in commercial cases between Venetian and Ottoman subjects, and they encouraged settlements in favor of foreign merchants and Ottoman-Venetian trade. These politics of justice, I argue, demonstrate the dynamism of the Ottoman legal system in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period characterized by global commercial development and Ottoman military and political ascendancy in the Mediterranean.

From 1967 onward, the ANC in exile recruited young non-South Africans classified as “white” to carry out clandestine solidarity missions because of their ability to travel freely around the country. Drawing on the recollections of these recruits, as documented in two books and presented in a series of webinars, this article examines how they exploited their white privilege to support the liberation struggle. By foregrounding female perspectives and focusing on the tensions caused by concealing political convictions, the article provides new insights into daily life in the underground movement and sheds light on this lesser-known dimension of international solidarity.

This paper examines state-business relations in Somalia. It argues that the Somali case presents a unique model of private sector development, where advanced businesses in the telecommunications, banking and financial sectors emerged despite the lack of formal state structure. The establishment of a formal government in 2012, however, raised questions about the ‘nexus between state and capital’, particularly on whether state institutions were ‘pivotal’ for business. In interrogating this question, the paper employs a qualitative process tracing approach and examines the relationship between the state and one of the largest private sector players – the telecommunications sector. It focuses on tracing the tax relations, which, as the material basis of the social contract between the state and society, offered fundamental clues into the sector’s willingness to invest in the state project. The article finds that despite capital’s capacity to survive in such contexts, there are certain junctures when formal state institutions emerge as critical for business operations. Thus, rather than a straightforward structural relationship between public and private power, the Somali case explicates the moments and instances when the state becomes critical for capital accumulation and offers greater insight into the molecular processes that underlie state-capitalist relations within the African context.

To what extent do Chinese construction firms foster linkages with the local economy and support local development outcomes? Despite increasing literature on the impact of Chinese infrastructure projects in Africa, relatively less attention has been paid to the specifics of this interaction, particularly concerning the characteristics of Chinese firms and the host country’s environment in which such partnership unfolds. Drawing on official documents, firm-level surveys and semi-structured interviews, this article examines how both private and public Chinese firms influence local development in Ethiopia’s infrastructure sector. The analysis focuses on several key factors shaping this impact, including employment generation, collaboration and subcontracting with domestic firms, technology and skills transfer and the creation of linkages between infrastructure projects and local manufacturing. The findings indicate that in Ethiopia, many Chinese companies are becoming increasingly integrated with the local economy. However, these synergies are neither uniform nor consistent across all firms or sectors. The study concludes that local economic benefits are contingent upon multiple factors, including the specific characteristics of Chinese firms, the strength of local capacity and the effectiveness of policies designed to regulate and promote local development.

This interdisciplinary qualitative research on Uganda combines an empirical approach with an analysis of theoretical studies. It argues that the retributive-oriented state justice system should take a more hybrid approach by absorbing the restorative method of traditional justice systems arbitrated by community leaders to improve the way sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) cases of refugees and asylum-seekers are addressed. The goal is to examine the interlinkages of restorative and retributive justice and why both systems should be better integrated to enhance ways of addressing SGBV. It is argued that there will be a positive impact on people in Uganda, including refugees who have suffered SGBV, if such an integration of both systems occurs. Drawing from interviews, it uses a theoretical framework of direct, structural and cultural violence within the continuum of violence. In this context, the study argues for a hybrid approach to depatriarchalize domestic justice systems, whether retributive or restorative justice, to contribute to better and more victim-friendly systems that consider the views and hopes of SGBV survivors.

This paper discusses the need for public policy limitation on two issues that the Nigerian Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act (SSMPA) regulates. First, the paper argues that the blanket non-recognition of the benefit(s) of same-sex marriage may breach Nigeria’s conflict of laws norms in certain transnational contexts. Second, it finds the prohibition of registration of gay clubs and organizations under the SSMPA a violation of the right to freedom of expression and association which both the Nigerian Constitution and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights guarantee. The paper therefore recommends an approach that Nigerian courts might adopt in determining whether the conferral of a specific benefit of same-sex marriage conflicts with Nigerian public policy in light of recent jurisprudence.

To inhabit the city is to inhabit a layered and contentious space, a space whose meaning cannot be comprehended without closely navigating its layers. This article analyses two images and representations – a tweet and a song – as narrative forms that reveal the palimpsestic nature of Nairobi in the context of the city’s expressway, which was constructed between September 2020 and July 2022. I read the expressway as a physical infrastructure for mobility as well as a material and metaphorical representation of urban marginalization, which at the same time materializes various forms of social marginalization and exclusion that predate it. The narrative forms, critically analysed together, underscore the palimpsestic nature of the city that would otherwise be obscured should readers be blinded by the iconicity of the expressway. I consider both the images, the tweet and the song alongside the arguments of Michel de Certeau, Karin Barber and Setha Low on urban aesthetics. While de Certeau provides lenses through which we understand the practices of everyday life in the city, Barber makes a case for urban infrastructure and the growth of popular culture, and Low focuses on how power relations influence the social construction of space. Ultimately, I argue for a reading of urban spaces using a synthesized literary approach as a nuanced way of understanding such spaces. This approach weaves together different media and approaches – both textual and visual – in its reading of the materialities of urban spaces and how meaning is constructed and contested within those spaces.

The ubiquitous presence of motorbike taxi drivers on the streets of Kampala, Uganda, has long been the subject of academic inquiry. This article interrogates the visible political symbols displayed on the motorbikes and the clothing of drivers, arguing that the aesthetic choices of drivers offer new ways of imagining Ugandan state pasts and futures. While the 2021 Ugandan presidential election has often been framed as a binary choice between President Museveni and Robert Ssentamu (popularly known by his stage name Bobi Wine), I propose that drivers’ conscious decision to display divergent political symbols must be understood through the history of cosmopolitanism in Kampala. Taking seriously the diversity of political visions suggested by the aesthetic markers of drivers enables us to appreciate the multifaceted challenges and possibilities for Uganda’s political future.

One profound yet relatively understudied contribution to tafsīr (Qur’an commentary) is that of Ibn ʿArafah al-Warġammī (d. 803/1401), a leading Mālikī scholar of eighth/fourteenth-century Ḥafṣid Tunisia. Although no separate commentary by Ibn ʿArafah has come down to us, his commentary on the Qur’an is accessible through the lecture notes that were compiled by his students. This article will examine one significant aspect of Ibn ʿArafah’s Qur’anic discourse that is barely acknowledged—his understanding of the relationship between the Qur’an and logic, and his use of logic in Qur’anic interpretation. It suggests that Ibn ʿArafah conceived of logic as embedded in the fabric of the Qur’an and felt a sense of urgency in using logic as an instrument for tafsīr. It also shows that the application of logic to Qur’anic interpretation is dominant in Ibn ʿArafah’s commentary to an extent that is not found in earlier works of tafsīr. Through identifying the different ways in which he intertwined the science of logic with tafsīr, this article will highlight Ibn ʿArafah’s role in the logical hermeneutics of the Qur’an and expand our understanding of how logic was used as an instrument for other sciences—in particular, for the interpretation of the Qur’an.

An Arabic-language tract crafted in in Makhachkala in 1949 offered an abrasive critique of ‘Alī al-Ghumuqī (1878–1943), ostensibly the father of the Dagestani modernist milieu (al-firqa al-jadidiyya). Who was ‘Alī al-Ghumuqī, what was his oeuvre, and why did the most prominent ulama of Dagestan despise him to the extent of publishing an original pamphlet cursing his legacy? In this article we set out to answer these questions and attempt to show that at the beginning of the Soviet century, the North Caucasus represented an important conduit for the circulation and further refinement of Islamic scholarship. We contend that the absorption and reproduction of modernist thinking among Dagestani ulama was not halted by the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks’ takeover. Indeed, we set out to show that in the North Caucasus between the 1920s and the 1960s, scholars continued to cultivate interest in Islamic jurisprudence, in fact unencumbered by the secularist policies adopted by the Soviet state. As we shall see, in this environment ‘Alī al-Ghumuqī morphed into what could be termed an epic figure and became so popular as to personify either the virtues or the evil aspects of modernist Islam.

The acclaimed novelist Barbara Pym worked for the International African Institute from 1948 to 1974 contributing her editing and administrative skills to the Institute’s journal, Africa, and output of scholarly publications on Africa. This article explores that contribution, her working relationships with Cyril Daryll Forde and other anthropologists, and how all this is reflected and referenced in her novels, especially in points of contact between Forde’s ethnography and Pym’s Quartet in Autumn.

Founded a century ago upon the initiative of three European men, each with links to colonial administration or mission, the International African Institute subsequently developed in directions that could hardly have been predicted. Most of those directly involved in the first two decades were from Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, including a growing number of academics. In addition to promoting creative writing in Africa and a common orthography for African languages, the Institute secured private American funding for a big research programme involving social anthropological fieldwork. After 1945, with decolonization on the horizon, the focus was on systematically producing ethnographic and linguistic handbooks. From the 1960s onwards the Institute endeavoured to shake off its remaining links to colonialism and – to a modest degree – to africanize itself. Its successes lay in organizing a series of International African Seminars, held at newly emerging African universities, and in continuing to produce the journal Africa, as well as several series of monographs.

Court records are rich primary sources to social historians, and much attention has been paid to these types of documents in different African territories. In most cases only summaries have survived, but in Angola complete proceedings have been preserved. Examining the court case collection available at the Benguela District Court, we discuss its strengths and methodological challenges, and present possible themes for future research. The use of these records reveals new aspects of the Angolan past, including more information on local norms and the ability of African women to use the Portuguese courts.

This note seeks to bring awareness to the wide variety of archival documents available for research in urban history in Kumase, Ghana’s second city and capital of the historic Asante Kingdom. We draw mainly on our experiences researching the history of Jackson Park, one of colonial Kumase’s earliest public parks.