{"title":"The State of the Records of the Federation Union of Black Artists at the Johannesburg Art Gallery: An Overview","authors":"Brown Maaba","doi":"10.1017/hia.2023.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2023.1","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this paper, the author asserts that the Johannesburg Art Gallery has also done remarkably well in preserving archival material in the field of black visual art. Such documents shed light on the operations of the visual art industry in South Africa before the democratic dispensation of 1994. He argues that heritage practitioners, artists, and scholars can immensely enhance their knowledge through study of these records. The author also thinks that it is crucial for this unique collection to be digitized for preservation and access.","PeriodicalId":39318,"journal":{"name":"History in Africa","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45114259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
History in AfricaPub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1017/s0361541300006628
J. Seemann, John C. Finn
{"title":"Introduction","authors":"J. Seemann, John C. Finn","doi":"10.1017/s0361541300006628","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0361541300006628","url":null,"abstract":"Each of the following three papers is devoted to one or more aspect of conducting field research in Zambia. In this sense they form a complementary set, although this result was more fortuitous than planned. The intent had been to collect together several short papers which would address themselves to the manifold facets of fieldwork in African historical research. It is hoped that it will still be possible to do this, and it may be useful to discuss some (though by no means all) of the considerations that might merit attention in this regard: 1] With the increasing difficulties in securing research clearance in Africa, it is important -- perhaps even imperative -- that intending field workers develop viable back-up research proposals. The ways in which such alternatives can be applied could probably be illustrated best by one or two case experiences; for, if anything, it appears that the ability to pursue first intentions will diminish in the future. 2] Does Professor Kashoki's paper describe views which are representative of general opinion? Is there widespread disenchantment within Africa -- with the research attitudes and behavior of field researchers; with their commitments to the concerns of host countries; and with their care in assuring that the fruits of their labors are made easily available for local consumption? The views of other African historians, archivists, and librarians can help to reinforce or modify the arguments noted by Professor Kashoki, both by focusing on issues he has raised and by introducing new ones. 3] Graduate students (not to mention other researchers) cannot always function intellectually as freely as they might wish. They have always had to defer to the opinions and interests of their supervisors and their graduate faculty, as well as to the suspected attitudes of relevant funding agencies. Now it appears that the research priorities of host governments must be added to this litany, may even come to dominate it, as we begin to hear of “research brigades” and similar expedients. Whether this should be seen as good or bad will depend on a number of specific variables. In either instance, however, the short- and long-term ramifications of this new phenomenon need to be discussed.","PeriodicalId":39318,"journal":{"name":"History in Africa","volume":"5 1","pages":"273 - 274"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/s0361541300006628","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46580236","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Wives Wishing to Join Their Husbands”: Colonial Forgery, Gender Legibility, and Labor Migration in West Africa","authors":"Ndubueze L. Mbah","doi":"10.1017/hia.2022.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2022.3","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract European mobilizations of Africans for labor relied on the forgery that Africans can be harnessed into modern units of capitalist production only when organized into households led by wage-earning men supported by domesticated women. Between the 1930s and 1950s, Nigerian male labor migrants to Fernando Po and Gabon, as well as their wives, advanced diverse forgeries in response to the legibility protocols that European states used to control African migrants. Nigerian men used colonial documentation of their status as husbands to claim women’s bodies. Nigerian women used colonial documentation as wives and mothers to mask autonomy, illicit mobility, child trafficking, and sex work. This article develops a historical theory of forgery to explain how colonial legibility protocols and African manipulations of colonial documents constituted gendering practices. It focuses on the diverse documentary strategies women developed to evade colonial surveillance, including photographs to manufacture kinship and colonial court records to generate identities as temporary wives and fictive mothers. As European agents and African men strove to exploit women’s economic and sexual capacities, women used documentary and social forgeries to exploit fissures in colonial rule and create autonomous spaces of mobility and economic opportunity.","PeriodicalId":39318,"journal":{"name":"History in Africa","volume":"49 1","pages":"235 - 275"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43735649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cinema and the Idea of Fieldwork in Sol Plaatje’s Journeys","authors":"F. Pinto de Almeida, Aidan Erasmus","doi":"10.1017/hia.2022.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2022.8","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the mid-1920s, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje toured the South African countryside showing films he brought from the Tuskegee Institute in the United States. Plaatje’s cinema tours complemented his educational talks on the status of Africans in the Union of South Africa alongside the material he collected for books, speeches and political tours. Focusing on the itinerant cinema as an element of fieldwork, our article asks what can be learned from approaching Plaatje’s research practices. We consider Plaatje’s methods of research in relation to conventional notions of social scientific fieldwork, which also relied on modern media but were often entangled in colonial projects that projected an image of African rural life. Drawing on letters, novels, and accounts of his film screenings, our essay argues for an interdisciplinary engagement with cinema practices in African history that is attentive to the uses of mass media in research and the pedagogical valences of itinerant film screenings. Considering Plaatje’s cinema alongside the value he attached to travelling and mobility, we argue that his cinema puts the field to work and inspires new practices of research in African Studies.","PeriodicalId":39318,"journal":{"name":"History in Africa","volume":"49 1","pages":"39 - 63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45840859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Recycling Interdisciplinary Evidence: Abandoned Hypotheses and African Historiologies in the Settlement History of Littoral East Africa","authors":"Daren E. Ray","doi":"10.1017/hia.2022.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2022.7","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Scholars can elevate African voices as they recycle evidence from abandoned lines of research. This article discusses how to apply the confirmation and recycling methods of interdisciplinary research to engage with African historiologies. After reviewing contentious debates about Shungwaya from ca. 1955–2000, it draws on Mijikenda elder Thomas Govi’s descriptions of uganga and clanship (in a published collection of oral traditions) as a historiological theory for reimagining cross-linguistic collaborations, the formation of “stone towns,” and Islamic conversion in the settlement history of littoral East Africa.","PeriodicalId":39318,"journal":{"name":"History in Africa","volume":"49 1","pages":"97 - 130"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44006216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ecologies of Development: Ecophilosophies and Indigenous Action on the Tana River","authors":"James D. Parker","doi":"10.1017/hia.2022.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2022.11","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article argues for a reorientation of African environmental history that incorporates localized ecophilosophies, racial ecologies, and environmental justice, and posits that doing so allows us to challenge the sociocultural and ecological implications of colonial and postcolonial environmental development more rigorously in East Africa. Focusing on Kenya, I argue that environmental justice-oriented histories of economic development elevate the subjectivities, cosmologies, and experiences of rural Kenyan populations rather than reducing the environment and its resources to their instrumental qualities On the Tana River, pastoral and riverine groups such as the Pokomo and Orma suffered and challenged the exigencies of water extraction in specific ways tied to their existing relationships with the local environment. By looking at the ways rural communities in arid regions framed their environmental relationships, we can begin to appreciate the specific modalities and cosmologies through which they resisted the imposition of cash crop agriculture and water development. The article demonstrates an interdisciplinary approach utilizing Black ecologies and environmental justice frameworks that restores vitality to the rural experience of imperialism and offers more rigorous critiques of global development dogmas under racial capitalism, particularly surrounding the omnipresent threat of ecocide driven by dispossession, resource extraction, toxicity, and climate change.","PeriodicalId":39318,"journal":{"name":"History in Africa","volume":"49 1","pages":"65 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43330587","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rethinking Archives, Rewriting History: Other-Archives and the Interdisciplinary Approaches to Moroccan History of the “Years of Lead”","authors":"Brahim El Guabli","doi":"10.1017/hia.2022.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2022.6","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Archives are loci of power where state (and archive creators’) hegemony is reproduced and sustained through the stories they allow to be told and the ones they suppress. However, this applies only to contexts in which archives actually exist and are organized. I argue that Morocco’s postcolonial history challenges Western notions of archives and begs for a conceptualization of “other-archives” in which silenced stories find their way to the public arena and resist authoritarian amnesia. Not only do other-archives liberate history (re)writing from archival hegemony, but they also open up space for an interdisciplinary study of history. Other-archives, as I theorize them, allow the inscription of the voices of the subaltern into the other-archival documents while also helping to decenter history and historiographical discourses by creating the need for historians to collaborate with specialists in other non-history-focused disciplines, such as cinema, literature, sociology, and political science. This article reveals how the existence and wide dissemination of other-archives within the context of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission’s work in Morocco (2004–2005) spurred transformative debates among Moroccan historians and incited them to push the boundaries of their discipline through the use of tārīkh al-zaman al-rāhin (history of the present).","PeriodicalId":39318,"journal":{"name":"History in Africa","volume":"49 1","pages":"207 - 234"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43121917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Notes from the University of the Free State","authors":"N. Roos","doi":"10.1017/hia.2021.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2021.17","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Through an ethnographic telling of a curriculum reform project, this short contribution seeks to elucidate developments in the Department of History at the University of the Free State in South Africa. It touches on questions of transformation – both demographic and intellectual, what historical knowledge is valued, decolonization and international engagement, and it ends with some prognoses for the future.","PeriodicalId":39318,"journal":{"name":"History in Africa","volume":"49 1","pages":"361 - 366"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48632550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lorelle Semley, T. Barnes, Bayo Holsey, Egodi Uchendu
{"title":"Editors’ Introduction: African History’s Interdisciplinary Roots, Ruts, and Routes","authors":"Lorelle Semley, T. Barnes, Bayo Holsey, Egodi Uchendu","doi":"10.1017/hia.2022.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2022.17","url":null,"abstract":"History’s Interdisciplinary Roots, Ruts, and Routes Lorelle Semley* , Teresa Barnes, Bayo Holsey, and Egodi Uchendu Department of History, College of the Holy Cross,Worcester, MA 01610, USA Department of History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL 61801, USA Department of Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA Department of History, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nsukka, Nigeria *Corresponding Author: lsemley@holycross.edu","PeriodicalId":39318,"journal":{"name":"History in Africa","volume":"49 1","pages":"1 - 8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41695240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mau Mau as Method","authors":"Christian Alvarado","doi":"10.1017/hia.2022.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2022.12","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract During the period of the Kenya Emergency (1952–1960), an assemblage of anticolonial forces waged war against the British colonial apparatus and its allies. Their notoriety would be crystallized in a single, enigmatic phrase: “Mau Mau.” Through considering the character of both contemporary and current framings, this article contends that Mau Mau exists as a historical method in itself, rather than simply as a phenomenon subjected to the analytical frameworks of historians. Mau Mau’s mythological dimension—something acknowledged in even its earliest formal studies—has rarely been focused upon in any sustained way that centers its implications for historical methodology. Yet it existed as a signifier set within enormous discursive webs and systems of information that people interfaced with in myriad ways. More concretely, understandings of and debates about Mau Mau drove human action through their articulation in realms such as (counter)insurgency, politics, and popular culture in geographically-disparate regions of the world. Approaching “events” such as Mau Mau in this fashion reveals the layout of these discursive webs and how they formed around flows of imperial capital, anticolonial resistance, and professional networks.","PeriodicalId":39318,"journal":{"name":"History in Africa","volume":"49 1","pages":"9 - 37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48571534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}