Journal of African History最新文献

{"title":"‘For King and Empire’: The Changing Political, Economic, and Cultural Identities of Kru Mariners in Atlantic Africa, 1460–1945","authors":"M. Crutcher","doi":"10.1017/s0021853723000567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021853723000567","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article traces histories of the Kru in West Africa from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, arguing that divergent identities of fifteenth- to eighteenth-century Kru canoers became unified when that unified identity was necessary for maintaining political, economic, and cultural autonomy during and after the slave trade. In conjunction with earlier multilingual work on the Kru mariners of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article seeks to place the narrative of Kru identity and labor in a larger context of maritime history across the region at large. This article argues that the Kru relied on longstanding maritime traditions from localized groups to capitalize on the need for work and cash in a capitalist economy driven by growing European imperialism. The historical narrative of Kru maritime power shows how local and global identities in Atlantic Africa shifted in response to exploitation, blurring the lines between response and resistance.","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41649828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Deconconstructing Colonial Population Anxiety","authors":"Sarah A. Walters","doi":"10.1017/S0021853723000476","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853723000476","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47369398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"William A. Brown and the Assessment of a Scholarly Life","authors":"O. Kobo, Sean Hanretta","doi":"10.1017/s0021853723000427","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021853723000427","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45523942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Egypt in Africa: William A. Brown and a Liberating African History","authors":"Sean Hanretta","doi":"10.1017/s0021853723000440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021853723000440","url":null,"abstract":"In the spring of 1998, I had the privilege of sitting in on William A. Brown’s undergraduate research seminar on the history of Ancient Egypt (Kemet). Although technically a seminar, all fifteen weekly class meetings began with a substantial lecture by Brown. This provided an unusual opportunity to see some of the results of a lesser-known phase of Brown’s career: the decades he spent training himself in Egyptology (including learning the Egyptian language) and staying current with that field. Brown’s lectures that year offered a timely hybrid of the interests and commitments of Afrocentric Egyptologists, the data and reconstructions of more traditional Egyptology, and the general approaches of longue durée Africanist history. The result was an example of how an engaged historicism can produce accounts that respond to a wide range of political projects. While it does not always come through clearly in his published work, those who knew him personally know that Brown was firmly and explicitly committed to what he called a ‘liberated or liberating African history’. In a 1972 talk at the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC) in Atlanta, he told his audience, ‘the thing which concerns me very deeply indeed is what I call the mis-writing and mis-casting of American and generally European scholarship about Africa... and the implications of this kind of work for the Black liberation struggle in Africa and overseas, indeed for the world generally’. An analysis of this misleading scholarship had, he insisted, ‘real relevance to the struggle of Black and white peoples or other peoples of the world for various kinds liberation and self-determination’. The causal connection between scholarship and liberation passed through the representations of Africa produced in Europe and the US and their effect on global consciousness. ‘We’ve been conditioned’, he noted, ‘to expect bizarre or presumably barbaric behavior out of Africa and this is directly attributable to the scholarship on Africa which is available in the western world’. Africanist history was particularly to blame insofar as ‘the image that the world has of Africa is based upon the world’s understanding or misunderstanding of Africa’s past.... [P]olitical science, sociology, economics, all of the other disciplines adopt the assumptions which are provided by African history’. At the core of Brown’s idea of a liberating African history were two deceptively obvious convictions: that the motives and logics animating all historical agents could be approached via their","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49143355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lugha ya Dunia","authors":"Heather J. Sharkey","doi":"10.1017/s0021853723000555","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021853723000555","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42582041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"South Africa's Revolutionary Era","authors":"A. Lissoni","doi":"10.1017/s002185372300049x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s002185372300049x","url":null,"abstract":"ation and circulation in the round. Having described anxieties about fertility and mortality, in Chapter Six he turns to migration. In a fascinating analysis of provincial reports and correspondence, Coghe builds on a core theme of the book considering Angola as an embattled colony, prone to negative comparison and subversion by neighbouring colonial powers. Anxiety about porous borders leaking workers to neighbouring territories where taxes were lower and jobs were available, led to a series of initiatives in border regions. Officials sought to capture migration flows statistically and to incentivise against them through favourable tax schemes compared with neighbouring countries and by encouraging the establishment of mission stations, which offered educational and medical opportunities to compete with mission communities across the borders. Coghe describes the tensions between provincial officials and the central colonial ministry over migration, and — following another core theme of the book — shows how demographic information was collected, managed, and transformed to suit different agendas. In his Epilogue, Coghe describes the shift in global population discourse about Africa from a fear of underpopulation in the interwar period, to growing concerns about rapid population growth and its proposed negative consequences for development post-1945. He shows how Angola largely sidestepped this wider ‘discursive reversal’ (250) right through to independence in 1975, due to the country’s continuing relatively high mortality, low population density, demand for labour, and good soil productivity. Meanwhile, ongoing Portuguese pronatalism restricted the influence of population experts and international family planning agencies throughout this period, potentially — as Coghe concludes — with a lasting legacy for Angola’s high fertility rate today. This is a carefully researched monograph, with meticulous detail on how population knowledge and policies are constructed. It reveals important themes and processes in Angolan history and colonial historiography, while also carrying lessons for today when global population anxieties are again on the rise. Coghe shows that such anxieties — and the data on which they are based — need to be analysed to reveal their racialised, gendered, and political underpinnings before policies can be enacted to truly enhance human and planetary health.","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42825681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Caliphate, the Black Writer, and a World in Revolution, 1957–69","authors":"M. Thiam","doi":"10.1017/s002185372300052x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s002185372300052x","url":null,"abstract":"In 1965, William Allen Brown (1934–2007) landed in Mali, a young socialist republic and former French colony that had become independent just five years prior. Brown was a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and had come to conduct fieldwork for his dissertation on the Caliphate of H amdullāhi, a nineteenth century theocratic state that had once stood in Mali’s Mopti region. Born in North Carolina, Brown attended school in Manhattan and the Bronx. After a stint in the US Air Force, he enrolled at Kentucky State College, the state’s oldest Historically Black College, and graduated in 1959 with a degree in History and Government, and French. He then attended the Sorbonne University in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship. In 1960, he started graduate school at UW-Madison, where he studied history and African Studies, and obtained his MA (1964) and PhD (1969). What was it like to conduct fieldwork in mid-1960s Mali? Specifically, what could have been the experience of an African-American graduate student attuned to ongoing political struggles across the Black world? Which scholarly influences shaped Brown’s approach to dissertation research? And, which broader debates were occurring in Brown’s academic fields — African Studies, African history, and Black Studies — as he was crafting his dissertation? This essay provides preliminary thoughts on these questions through an exploration of the political and intellectual worlds that Brown inhabited during the years 1957–69, on both sides of the Atlantic. The 1960s were a tumultuous decade, a time of momentous intensity to be a student and rising scholar. Following the threads of the civil rights movement in the United States, decolonization and Cold War in Mali, the study of Islam in precolonial West Africa, and the place of Black scholars in academic fields concerned with the study of Africa and Africans, one finds them tightly entangled in William Allen Brown’s graduate experience. The circuits of knowledge Brown traveled through crisscrossed the Atlantic and the Sahel, as he made his way through Kentucky, Madison, Bamako, Mopti, and Timbuktu. He may have crossed paths with Martin Luther King, Jr., and he","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45541165","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘Compliments from the Housewives’: Contesting White Public Space in Late-Colonial Nairobi","authors":"Meghan E. Ference","doi":"10.1017/S0021853723000452","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853723000452","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the racial politics of decolonization in late-colonial Nairobi in the decade before independence through the unique space of the colonial bus using archival letters from a group of European women who called themselves ‘The Housewives’. In letters to Nairobi's mayor and the Kenya Bus Service (KBS), the Housewives argued against a newly proposed transportation policy that would make all seating on the colonial buses the same price, doing away with the first-class section. The letters reveal that African bus riders, particularly Muslim women riders, were centrally important in this crucial time in Kenya's urban history. With Nairobi still under a ‘State of Emergency’ as military operations against the Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) were coming to an end, these letters show colonial buses as battlegrounds during the final years of British colonial rule in Kenya with extremely porous social borders and transportation vehicles serving as rich sites of urban life.","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47992294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Impact of Informal Mentorship: A Tribute to Professor William Brown","authors":"O. Kobo","doi":"10.1017/s0021853723000439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021853723000439","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48439548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Le témoignage d'Almamy Maliki Yattara sur W. A. Brown: Dr Brown through the Testimony of Almamy Maliki Yattara","authors":"Bernard Salvaing","doi":"10.1017/S0021853723000312","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853723000312","url":null,"abstract":"Résumé Almamy Maliki Yattara, en sa double qualité de traditionniste et d’arabisant, fut chargé par l’Institut des Sciences Humaines de Bamako d’accompagner W. A. Brown pendant ses recherches. Dans ses Mémoires, Yattara a laissé sur leurs enquêtes un témoignage saisissant, où transparaissent l’estime et la complicité existant entre deux personnes venues d’horizons si différents. On y voit également comment les curiosités et les approches du chercheur ont pu être influencées par les positionnements de son guide. Yattara décrit longuement leur quête des manuscrits arabes locaux qu’ils photographiaient inlassablement, dans un domaine de recherche où Brown joua un rôle de pionnier.","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47921779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}