This issue of The Journal of African History presents five articles, each of which engages with some of Africanist historiography's most enduring debates. The first two papers focus on the theme of migration, both forced and free. Marion Wallace and Paul Naylor examine the story of Ayuba Sulayman Diallo, using five newly-discovered letters to highlight his evolving sense of agency, employed initially in securing his freedom from slavery, and latterly in commercial diplomacy. As well as enhancing knowledge of Senegambia and the Atlantic World, their article also throws new light on the uses of Arabic learning in eighteenth-century West Africa. Michiel de Haas brings Belgian and British archives into conversation to illustrate how labour migration from Ruanda-Urundi to Uganda during the mid-twentieth century was shaped by workers’ awareness of the fluctuating advantages afforded by mobility. This enormous population movement resisted all attempts by state authorities to bring it under control, finally ending of its own accord due to the internal economic logic of migrancy itself.
The nature of the postcolonial state is the theme that links this issue's final three articles, each of which adds new understanding to Africa's socialist experiments. Gerardo Serra and Frank Gerits’ microstudy of the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute analyses how Ghana's party-state tasked the social sciences with developing an official ideology melding the universalism of Marxism-Leninism with Nkrumahist iconography. The Institute's archives reveal the ambiguities and tensions inherent in the process of knowledge production, focusing on the engagement of individuals with the projects of decolonization and modernization. The limitations of the state come under scrutiny in Benedito Machava's innovative investigation of Frelimo's attempt to achieve hegemony on a shoestring through the development of underresourced reeducation camps. As Machava shows, detainees were disciplined by austerity rather than by panoptical domination, with the absence of infrastructure beyond the camps rendering escape nearly impossible. Jacob Wiebel and Samuel Admasie use ground-level institutional histories to shed new light on the experience of revolution in 1970s Ethiopia. As Stasi records reveal, the exceptional intensity and scale of the Red Terror came from below, through collaboration between trade unions and local administrations. The most significant legacy of the Terror, Wiebel and Admasie argue, was this aggregation of coercive power, which radically enhanced the capacity of the state to control civil society.
Violent conflict, along with its troubled legacies, is a theme that also permeates the Reviews section. Ebenezer Obadare tackles the ‘spectacles of suffering’ produced by the Biafran War, as described in a book by Lasse Heerten. A specific episode of that war, the Asaba Massacre, is the topic of a volume by S. Elizabeth Bird and Fraser Ottanelli, assessed here by Chima Korieh. The turbulent afterlives of state-sponsored violence in Namibia, the Cassinga Massacre, is considered by Vilho Amukwaya Shigwedha, in a book reviewed by Molly McCullers.
The Reviews section also features several books highlighting the worlds created by the connections and networks that stretch across regions, nations, and oceans. Ray Kea comments upon the circulations and relationships that helped to constitute the ‘African Middle Ages’, as described by François-Xavier Fauvelle in The Gold Rhinoceros. Joan Bristol reviews the spiritual biography, edited by Sue Houchins and Baltasar Fra-Molinero, of Chicaba, an African nun probably of Ewe origin, who lived in eighteenth-century Spain. A book by Harmony O'Rourke and assessed by Bridget Teboh traces the making of a Hausa diaspora in Cameroon and the role of women in that process. Todd Cleveland analyses the lives, commitments, and dilemmas of African professional soccer players who live and work abroad in Portugal in a volume assessed here by Peter Alegi.
The articles and reviews in this issue reflect the Journal's breadth of scope: temporal, geographical, and conceptual. As always, we are grateful to our authors for their incisive, careful scholarship.
The Editors
