This article uses the Kenya Office in Cairo (KOC) to explore the intersections and tensions between territorial nationalism and supranational networks of anticolonial patronage during a brief window in the broader era of decolonization. It argues that the principal staffers of the KOC were in many ways marginal figures in Kenyan nationalist politics, but were able to build a degree of political capital and stature due to their proximity to external patrons in a period when more established nationalist figures were restricted to the physical space of colonial Kenya. The article then analyzes a factional schism within the KOC to highlight how nationalist outposts and exilic activists became imbricated in competition between political rivals and visions operating at multiple geographic and ideological scales. That the figures involved in the KOC and its post-schism rival would be sidelined by the official infrastructures of Kenyan nationalism and anticolonial internationalism and the “Big Men” who came to control them shows, first, that mobility is not always the most productive framework for apprehending these histories and, second, that proximity to internal and external patrons and the clout that accompanies this proximity were contingent and could both make and break political capital.

Since independence, the University of Khartoum and later, higher education as a whole, was a site of political struggle in Sudan. Critical to this was the issue of “university independence,” a value widely held by Sudanese elites, which successive regimes attempted to restrict. Relying on Sudanese national security reports, oral histories of student activism, and British diplomatic reporting, the paper charts the struggle over university associative life in Sudan from independence through to the ouster of President Ja’afar Al Nimeiri. It argues that the May Regime used restrictions on university life as a means of hampering political activity, yet faced serious pushback from students, faculty, and administrators who shared values of university independence. It was only when threats to the state’s security and legitimacy outside the university gates took place that the regime was able to successfully restrict university associative life. These efforts set the stage for further repression under the Ingaz regime (1989–2019).

Review essay of two books on gender and the struggle against apartheid.

This article examines the Companhia de Celulose do Ultramar Português (CCUP), founded in Angola in 1955, as a case study of late Portuguese colonial developmentalism. It argues that the company is best understood within the wider infrastructural formation that sustained it, linking eucalyptus plantations, railway transport, hydroelectric power, concessional land policy, and state-backed finance on Angola’s Central Plateau. Drawing on archival documentation and official company and banking reports, the article reconstructs the material, political, and institutional conditions that shaped the project between the mid-1950s and 1974. It shows that the CCUP’s projected competitiveness rested less on natural abundance than on a form of institutional fertility produced through inherited infrastructure, selective credit, politically structured energy prices, and the structural devaluation of African labour. Its history reveals how the very conditions that made late-colonial industry viable also imposed its structural limits.

Drawing on an extensive examination of primary sources, this paper considers the persistent tensions between state-led development and local agencies in Humera—a northwestern Ethiopian borderland—during the Derg regime. It explores how developmental projects in the contested borderlands have been shaped more by ideological showcase than by the pursuit of an efficient production system. As part of its agrarian reform, the Derg nationalized private commercial farmlands in Setit Humera and converted them into state farms. Employing peasant militia labor, a centralized administrative approach, and overlooking unique local conditions, the Derg launched the Humera State Farm not only for economic objectives but also to assert state authority in a politically contested frontier region. Despite substantial political attention, the state farm sparked multifaceted tensions and proved ineffective. Its final collapse in 1990 was ultimately driven by geopolitical conflict, as the farm became entangled in regional struggles involving the Tigray People’s Liberation Front and Sudan’s proxy actions against the Derg.

This article uses the idea of “fugitive science” to show how early twentieth-century writers and editors in colonial Freetown, Sierra Leone, repurposed eugenic ideas in their efforts to reform the British Empire. In the pages of West Africa’s most widely read newspaper, the Sierra Leone Weekly News, West African authors and editors reinterpreted eugenics to articulate political claims indirectly in the absence of substantive political power. They reworked transatlantic medical texts to cast local conditions of infant mortality as evidence of African racial degeneration under colonial rule in order to expose the contradictions of the ideology of sexual paternalism legitimizing imperial administration. These commentaries weaponized eugenics to frame polygyny as evidence of African paternal authority and political legitimacy. Some of these contributors transformed such sexualized discourse into organized politics when they formed the National Congress of British West Africa, which carried these claims into its 1920 meeting with the League of Nations.

This paper analyzes the use of rubu unpaid “traditional” labor in Toro District in western Uganda during the colonial period. It explores how the “traditional” roots of the unpaid labor system were negotiated and reinterpreted by African elites through their attempts to gain more control over the labor through wrangling over exemptions and commutations for the work which, then, shaped British responses to the forced labor regime. Chiefs managed rubu labor on the ground and wielded a lot of exploitative power. However, the British administration used intermediaries, luwalo inspectors, to monitor rubu labor and delimit the power of chiefs. This paper also investigates the growth of commutations from so-called traditional labor as a colonial revenue generator.

This article reconsiders the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) “Media Trial” that followed in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. While both the original trial (2000–03) and its appeal (2007) have been widely analyzed, most observers have approached it as a case against three media bosses. This article suggests that the Media Trial was not only invested in the line between press freedom and criminal hate speech and, in relation to Ferdinand Nahimana, not solely concerned with his role at “hate radio” station Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM). Drawing on trial transcripts, other court records, and press coverage of the trial, I show how the tribunal actively interrogated Nahimana’s status as a historian and his research and scholarship as part of its judicial process. As such, I argue that the Media Trial helped codify the notion that Rwandan history had become “deadly” before the genocide and that the Rwandan historical field would need to be fundamentally transformed.

In the years following independence, history-writing increasingly became a strategic instrument of nation-building and a means of constructing a “usable past.” Using the South African writer Bloke Modisane’s research on the Maji Maji War in Tanzania as its point of departure, this article examines how newly independent African states navigated the politics of historical production in the early postindependence period. Although deeply invested in African history, Modisane was not a formally trained historian and remained on the margins of the emerging Dar es Salaam School of History. His uneasy reception in Tanzania not only underscores the tension between Pan-African ideals and national imperatives, but the challenges faced by intellectuals working outside official or institutional structures. While he never completed his research to the point of publication, revisiting his experience reminds us that the history of African history was also shaped by incomplete, interrupted, and forgotten efforts to write the past.

This article examines the late colonial performances of Adolphe Kisimba, a Congolese producer and performer who toured his show Mu Kongo – Mu Belgique to Belgium in early 1959. Developed under the auspices of the Belgian colonial state, this multimedia spectacular featured sketches, songs, a magic lantern light show, and a satirical “reverse ethnography” film of Belgian culture as narrated by Kisimba. This article traces Kisimba’s trajectory through state-sponsored shows such as Changwe Yetu, Spectacles Populaires, and the idiosyncratic Mu Kongo – Mu Belgique and argues that staged performance, and the international mobility that this art form inherently enables, served as a contested space in which Central Africans sought to redefine colonial hierarchies and through which they envisioned new professional horizons. The overlooked histories of Kisimba and late colonial African artists like him, this article suggests, offer new insights into African cultural negotiations and global outlooks before independence.

This article examines the formation of the first Luanda elites by exploring the trajectories of the members of the family configuration established by the matrimony formed by Juan de Viloria and Isabel de Oliveira in the early 1590s. By analyzing the evolution of the intricate web of interests that structured the Viloria family configuration between the 1590s and 1720s, the article probes how the early Luanda elites generated and mobilized social, economic, political, or symbolic resources that allowed them to establish ongoing partnerships with African, metropolitan, and Luso-Brazilian actors.

Dans cet article, nous abordons la connaissance géographique de l’Afrique centrale aux 16e–18e siècles. Notre attention est portée sur les références aux lacs Zembre et Zaïre dans les sources écrites et cartographiques des 16e et 17e siècles. L’hypothèse avancée ici est qu’il s’agirait des lacs Tumba et Maï-Ndombe (ex-“Léopold II”) situés en amont de la région comprise entre le fleuve Congo et le Bas-Kasaï, en République démocratique du Congo. Malheureusement, ces indications géographiques ont été perdues par les différents auteurs anciens qui associaient ces lacs au Nil et à la région est-africaine. Ce nouvel éclairage sur cette énigme cartographique permet de souligner que l’espace géographique compris entre le confluent du fleuve Congo et la rivière Kasaï était connu au royaume Kongo, puis en Europe, avant les explorations de l’époque moderne qui ont conduit à la colonisation de l’Afrique centrale.