Originating in India during the British colonial occupation, ‘martial race’ is a notion that took on a transnational form in the wake of imperial expansion. Defined as the categorization of peoples based on their suitability for war, martial race theory was part and parcel of the colonial imagination. Colonists used the idea to control social dynamics within societies, often by creating and reinforcing division and class dynamics among African communities. Nonetheless, like many other colonial ideas, the concept of martial race was not stagnant. Instead, how it was applied, and by whom, varied across African societies, often with different gendered effects.

In Making Martial Races: gender, society, and warfare in Africa, contributing authors posit African agency as central, not only to the study of martial races, but also more broadly to conversations on gender, social dynamics and warfare, in both contemporary and historical Africa. By foregrounding African cultures and social histories, this edited volume raises the question of how Africans challenged, contributed to or negotiated martial race identities and theory in practice.

Approaching martial race in Africa from a breadth of research interests, the chapters within this edited volume are diverse, covering themes such as slavery, gender dynamics, labour trends and decolonization. The unique methodological approaches used by the authors add richness to the discussions and demonstrate how studies frequently attributed to the colonial period can have meaningful historical sources outside the traditional military or colonial archive. For instance, in the chapter ‘Women, militarism, and martial identities among the Acholi of Northern Uganda, 1800–1962’, Lucy Taylor uses proverbs, oral histories and supplications to shed light on how Acholi women utilized gender norms to impact cultural understandings of warfare, honour and family. Extending beyond the private sphere, Acholi women’s ability to influence men’s willingness to engage in warfare impacted larger British colonial recruitment practices.

The melding of temporal and political dynamics offers one of the most fascinating and unexpected contributions to this edited volume. David Bresnahan’s chapter on the Mijikenda, ‘In Mombasa they are “like prisoners” to the Mijikenda: martiality, trade, and inland influences on a Swahili port city’, highlights how small-scale or periphery actors like the Mijikenda utilized martial identities for political and economic power. Focusing specifically on seventeenth-century dynamics between the Mijikenda, an inland ethnic group, and the coastal city of Mombasa, Bresnahan shows how the Mijikenda used the two notions of martial skills and the ability to follow through with violence to control both immediate coastal–inland trading relationships and the larger dynamic between imperial powers including the Portuguese and the coastal authorities. Approaching the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a space for exploring martial cultures, Bresnahan extends the current timespan often allotted to the study of African martial identity by nearly 200 years, featuring how an ethnically diverse and geographically unique region like the Swahili Coast was not immune to martial identity discourse following the arrival of the Portuguese.

Charles G. Thomas’s concluding chapter, ‘From martial races to a people’s army: decolonization and martial identity in Tanzania’, complements Bresnahan’s by bringing martial race theory to the contemporary period. Thomas examines the co-option of martial identity within the Tanzanian post-independence period, and how an inability to reconcile with the social fault lines created by martial practices worked against the bolstering of nationalism and state identity within the country. Thomas’s and Bresnahan’s pieces explore how martial identities and cultures were utilized towards political aims, while simultaneously challenging the temporal timeline often allotted to the study of martial race. While both chapters find themselves physically at opposite ends of the edited volume, they speak to one another across page number, temporal and geographic distances.

By emphasizing the role of African agency within martial race discourse and practices over the course of 400 years, Making Martial Races: gender, society, and warfare in Africa symbolizes a turning point in the study of martial races in Africa. As pointed out by editor Myles Osborne, scholarship on martial race theory tends to be oversaturated in certain geographic regions of the continent. With scant attention to North Africa, the Horn and Central Africa exhibited in this edited volume, the book invites scholars to apply this new scholarship and its timely questions probing martial race culture, social dynamics and agency within other underrepresented African locations.