Climate change alters species distributions, and range-restricted species are particularly vulnerable. Our study used species distribution modelling under climate change for two montane bird species categorised as Near Threatened by the IUCN. The Drakensberg Rockjumper Chaetops aurantius and Mountain Pipit Anthus hoeschi are confined to the high-elevation mountains of South Africa and Lesotho. Understanding how their life histories mediate climate vulnerability is essential for conservation prioritisation. We used ensemble species distribution models within the BIOMOD 2 framework to predict changes in habitat suitability for both species under the high-emission SSP5-8.5 scenario for the years 2050–2080, relative to the current climate (1970–2000). The models predicted that both species are likely to experience contractions in their distribution ranges by the 2080s, with suitable climatic space persisting primarily in high-altitude areas of Lesotho and lower Drakensberg slopes. The Drakensberg Rockjumper exhibited severe declines, with mean suitability decreasing by 36.4% by 2050 and 63.5% by 2080, while the Mountain Pipit showed moderate declines of 4.4% and 18.9%, respectively. In terms of variable importance, the Drakensberg Rockjumper distribution is limited by temperature (22.4% importance), whereas the Mountain Pipit is limited by elevation (32.7%). Elevation-dependent patterns showed greater losses at lower elevations (1,500–2,000 m) for both species, with the Lesotho Highlands (>2,500) serving as climate refugia. Even within optimal high-elevation habitats, the Drakensberg Rockjumper’s distribution is projected to contract further. Its greater vulnerability to range loss than the Mountain Pipit is directly attributable to its sedentary life history and narrow habitat specificity, which limit its capacity to track shifting climatic conditions. We recommend reassessing the Drakensberg Rockjumper’s IUCN status, prioritising protection of high-elevation refugia, and considering assisted colonisation as a last-resort conservation measure. Future studies on physiological and ecological constraints will enhance understanding of their capacity to cope with climate change.

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.

Rates of judicial dissent vary dramatically between Southern Africa’s appeal courts, even though judges frequently circulate between their benches. This variation cannot be explained by the ideological distance between judges or by their judicial philosophies. Differing institutional arrangements provide better but still incomplete explanations. These arrangements reflect dramatic transformations in the region’s judicial cultures. Analysing these diverging cultures illuminates why some forms of dissent have proved particularly contentious, and why styles of adjudication favouring dissent in some areas of the law have aroused particular hostility. There is thus no straightforward ‘norm’ that promotes or undermines judicial consensus in the region.

The British invasion of the Zulu kingdom in January 1879, the imposition of British colonial rule from 1880 onwards, and the subsequent undermining of the Zulu royal family and the destruction of the kingdom from the 1880s to the early twentieth century have received attention in numerous historical publications and dissertations. While the primary focus of these studies is on how the British colonists placed the primary members of the Zulu royal family such as King Cetshwayo kaMpande and King Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo under siege, none has explored the impact of the British hostility toward other senior members of the Zulu royal family, such as Prince Ndabuko kaMpande and Prince Shingana kaMpande. Only Robert R. R. Dlomo and Jeff Guy have made brief references to these issues in their biographies of Kings Cetshwayo and Dinuzulu and Harriette Colenso. It will be shown below that the incarceration of Shingana and Ndabuko alongside their nephew, Dinuzulu, from 1889 to 1898, and the re-arrest, trial, and banishment of Shingana to kwaThoyana near Amanzimtoti from 1910 to 1911, and the re-arrest, retrial, conviction, and banishment of Dinuzulu to Middelburg from 1911 to 1913 were part of the British efforts to completely destroy the senior section of the Zulu royal family popularly known as the Usuthu.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Portugal launched armed campaigns to subdue its African colonies, following the example of neighbouring powers. The Ovambo peoples of southern Angola mounted strong resistance to Portuguese encroachment. Lisbon’s anxieties were compounded by the German presence in South West Africa. In late 1914, the Ovambo seized upon the Portuguese military defeat by German forces to lead an unprecedented uprising. Portugal retaliated in mid-1915 with a large-scale campaign that employed systematic terror. These tactics caused a famine that killed tens of thousands and arguably constituted genocide. This article examines the 1915 campaign in southern Angola, focusing on the devastating impact of Portuguese repression. It reflects on the links between colonialism, violence, and genocide, and considers the political reverberations of this violence in metropolitan Portugal.

Resilient Zulu moral economy compelled Natal’s sugar planters and white settler state to introduce Indian indentured workers since 1860. As concerns over productivity in a weak colonial economy informed this decision, meticulous management of labor time crucially shaped the treatment of migrant Indian indentees. Moreover, systemic violence in capital’s life processes formed the culture of work-discipline in the plantations and in other industrial sectors. Subsequently, as contract expired Indian indentees acquired relative economic mobility compared to Africans, they appeared in Zulu critiques of Natal’s settler colonial order. Ironically, dispossessed Zulus reproduced colonial logic of time management while discussing the comparative economic success of Indian “newcomers.” Zulu critiques of colonial labor management also complemented the racial exclusivity of migrant Indians. Analyzing the complex workings of capital, labor, and race in nineteenth-century Natal, this article explains how capital’s life processes shaped violent conflicts in the intimate domestic space of working-class lifeworld.

This article explores the systems of policing that emerged in the early Cape Colony (1652–1830). Contrary to previous historical scholarship that understood the institution to be largely nonexistent or of marginal importance to the colony’s political economic development, this article argues that the Cape colony’s systems of policing, which doubled as ad hoc military organizations, were not so much weak as privatized. It shows how this persistent tendency was motivated by the Dutch East India Company’s desire to maximize profits—though it manifested differently in different parts of the colony. Moreover, this article demonstrates that the mercantile economy that the company installed at the Cape ensured that private policing would become a vehicle of indigenous dispossession. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to the field of African carceral studies and understandings of processes of racialization in the early Cape.

This article offers the first gendered history of African radio audiences. It uses a comparative approach to demonstrate that colonial development projects in Ghana and Zambia successfully created mass African audiences for radio between the 1930s and 1950s, at a time when most radio sets on the continent were owned by white settlers. However the gendered impact of the projects was uneven. In Zambia the promotion of battery-operated wirelesses inadvertently created a male-dominated audience, while the construction of a wired rediffusion system in Ghana attracted equal numbers of male and female listeners. Ghana’s radio project offers new perspectives on the history of colonial development as a very rare example of a scheme that benefitted women as much as men. Differences in the voice of Ghanaian and Zambian radio also reveal that these early radio schemes had a lasting influence on broadcast content and listening culture in both countries beyond the 1950s.

This piece explores the parallel development of two fisheries management regimes in mid-twentieth-century Lake Malawi: one imposed by the British colonial government over the lake and the other by Senior Chief Makanjira focused on Mbenji Island. The parallel development of these regimes provides opportunity for close analysis of how fisheries management centred on different knowledge and practices led to distinctive legacies of governance legitimacy and efficacy. Given the increasing recognition that Indigenous knowledge is crucial to the future sustainability of fisheries globally, we contend that it is imperative to recognise the ways in which colonial pasts have embedded knowledge hierarchies and exclusionary decision-making processes within national fisheries governance regimes that continue to obstruct capacities to bring different knowledges, practices, and management approaches together effectively and appropriately.