Journal of African History最新文献

{"title":"Intellectual Legacies, Political Morality, and Disillusionment: Connections Between Two Mozambique Research Institutions, 1976–2017","authors":"Carlos Fernandes","doi":"10.1017/S0021853723000038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853723000038","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract States and institutions often narrate their histories in one of two ways: underscoring continuity with the past or proclaiming rupture from it. This article studies the case of two research institutions in independent Mozambique to show that the history of rupture that some postsocialist political and academic actors claim has a more complex history. That history is related to other African independence struggles and newly independent states and is also embedded in the shape of postsocialist life. Focused on a brief period in time and on two research institutes, this article sheds light on wider processes in African history related to institution building, postcolonial universities and education, and the networks of the global 1960s, as well as those of socialist states during the Cold War.","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41699716","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":"Administering the KwaZulu Bantustan","authors":"Laura Phillips","doi":"10.1017/S002185372300018X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S002185372300018X","url":null,"abstract":"this social engineering strategy out: while most did not remember any particular films, they did remember the lessons in agriculture, health practices, and morality. By the 1950s, colonial officials began to take African critiques of colonial films more seriously, giving greater priority to narrative style and aesthetics, and involving more Africans in film production. As Ndanyi argues, ‘by protesting against badly produced instructional films, African audiences inspired a national dialogue about changes in cinema production’ (128). Instructional Cinema offers a glimpse into the making of colonial cinematic cultures; Ndanyi puts colonial Kenya into dialogue with other areas of the continent and deftly weaves examples from Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US into his study. In addition, he highlights underexplored themes in studies of colonial cinema in Africa of labor, masculinity, childhood, and the gendered dynamics of film production and colonial education. Ndanyi’s economical and elegant writing style and excellent use of images make this book a pleasurable read. While provocative and largely convincing, Ndanyi does leave the reader wanting more. While examples are drawn from multiple regions, with greater emphasis on the larger population concentrations in central and western Kenya, the reader is left to wonder: how ‘national’ was the debate about cinematic production? Were there regional variations in the response to instructional films based on diverse religious, linguistic, and cultural audiences? What did vernacular presses say about colonial films? Who was involved in these film productions? Ndanyi is to be credited for his variety of sources; yet engagement with a wider range of oral interviewees, particularly women, as well as closer analysis of the films themselves and integration of vernacular sources would have enriched an already fascinating study. For undergraduates, this book offers an accessible and enjoyable introduction to the world of cinema in colonial Kenya. For scholars of African history and colonial film history, this book demonstrates the ‘bidirectional’ nature of instructional films in ‘educating’ colonial subjects and the value of studying the active role of Africans in the translation, appropriation, and production of colonial cinematic cultures.","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43358366","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 Reproduction of Urban Capitalism: Street Food and the Working Day in Colonial Mombasa","authors":"Devin Smart","doi":"10.1017/S0021853723000063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853723000063","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article argues that street food was an essential part of the social reproduction of Mombasa's working class during the colonial period. Like in other expanding capitalist cities, as Mombasa grew, urban workers lived further from their place of employment, which meant they could not return home for their midday meal. Street-food vendors provided them lunch at low prices in convenient locations, and therefore reproduced the working day by provisioning the calories that bridged morning to afternoon. However, postwar municipal authorities also wanted to create a particular kind of urban society in which the ‘informal’ activities of street-food vendors did not fit, and tried to expel them from the city's streets. As these campaigns unfolded, an unresolved contradiction emerged between this elite view of Mombasa, and the reality that the services vendors provided were necessary for the reproduction of the city's economy.","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42540467","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 Conditions of Cancer Treatment in Postcolonial Uganda","authors":"B. A. Mulemi","doi":"10.1017/S0021853723000154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853723000154","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43996129","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":"West African Soldiers during the Colonial Era","authors":"G. Njung","doi":"10.1017/S0021853723000178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853723000178","url":null,"abstract":"Reid — Stapleton ’ s British West African Soldiers contributes substantially to how we understand, reconceptua-lize, theorize, recast, and reinterpret the centrality of the African colonial soldier in the European imperial project. Non-specialist readers in military history will benefit from, among others, Stapleton ’ s insights on colonial racism and ethnocentrism in Africa, religion and the imperial project","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46537572","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":"Urbanism and Identity in East Africa","authors":"Garth Myers","doi":"10.1017/S0021853723000166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853723000166","url":null,"abstract":"belief meant keeping silent about mass atrocities and going along with ZANU’s line, as British High Commissioner Robin Byatt did, that it was ‘a Biafra-type situation’, which meant an internal, ‘ethnic’ conflict that Britain could not intervene in no matter how bloody (284). It is challenging to capture the sprawling, opaque messiness of Zimbabwe’s liberation war with its vast list of actors and multitude of rumours, and at times the book suffers for it. Unlike other similar works, which are respectively organised around a particular administration’s decisionmaking or the political intrigue of a city like Dar es Salaam, Scarnecchia’s book jumps across a dizzying number of institutions, locations, and personalities. At times it is hard to follow why diplomats and politicians thought in particular ways or made particular decisions. The book’s scope also leads to difficult choices. There were some notable omissions, including Third World diplomacy, particularly during the 1960s; ZAPU’s institutional and military history; and a clearer sense of how the diplomacy related to the war’s military events. Given the book’s source material is largely from US and UK archives, there’s also a limited engagement with frontline state perspectives — particularly Mozambique’s, which played the critical role in Mugabe’s rise to power and in hosting ZANU’s army-in-exile during the most intense period of the war. Ultimately, Race and Diplomacy provides an important contribution to the historiography of Zimbabwe’s liberation war as a history of Anglo-American diplomatic initiatives. In this regard, although the book’s central argument about race is more contingent than is claimed, by writing about race as an ideational construct Scarnecchia points the way to diplomatic historians of the late twentieth century for how histories of international relations during this era can be significantly enriched.","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47077417","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":"Performing the Struggle Against Apartheid","authors":"Valmont Edward Layne","doi":"10.1017/s0021853723000099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021853723000099","url":null,"abstract":"Tyler Fleming’s book provides an account of the first production of ‘King Kong’ — a musical theatre production based on the life of the boxer Ezekiel Dlamini — in 1959. This musical rankled the apartheid state partly because it affirmed the aspirations of a Black urban class against an official state narrative which preferred a Black rural population. As a story of Black urban life that crossed over for mainstream white audiences, and became part of the canon and lore of South African theatre and popular music, the play stands as a landmark in South African cultural history. Fleming’s wellresearched study considers the ways in which the multiracial production confronted petty apartheid legislation. The author offers an abundance of empirical detail on the play’s production, its human and sociopolitical context, and furthers our understanding of African participation in cultural trends — in this case, musical theatre — by invoking Paul Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’ to argue for a multiplicity of perspectives on cultural production. Yet Fleming’s narrative exegesis remains firmly within the discipline of social history, at the expense of accounting for broader theoretical implications of the work. Chapter One considers the story of the character whose life is fictionally depicted in the play — the middling South African boxer Ezekiel Dlamini, whose fortunes and mishaps featured in local news and who died tragically by suicide in 1957. Dlamini’s story inspired a group known as the Union of South African Artists, which had been established earlier in the 1950s to support emerging Black creatives and advocate for better working conditions. Chapter Two picks up their story, tracing — from news and other sources — ways in which the leaders and members of the Union of South African Artists developed the play. It also includes fascinating detail about the organization’s work, such as efforts to secure royalties for Solomon Linda’s evergreen tune ‘Mbube’ (1939), popularised by the Weavers as ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ (1951). The union suffered a blow in 1954, when its founder and patron, the British cleric, Father Trevor Huddleston, was recalled to England. Yet Huddleston’s massive popularity in South Africa also ensured that his farewell event raised enough revenues for the union to acquire premises at the famous Dorkay House in downtown Johannesburg. Chapter Three considers King Kong’s popular reception in the media and, in the process, reads the production for the germs of shared nationhood and the potential for multiracialism in South Africa during the first decade of apartheid rule. This is the story that Fleming sketches in broad strokes, intercut with closely observed empirical examples. Ultimately, he argues that King Kong was critical for how it performed the potential for multiracial and more harmonious futures. As other studies have argued, perhaps, Black popular music, theatre, and cinema promised the possibility of a ‘better’ life (in the material","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47536198","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":"A Cold War City","authors":"Andrew Ivaska","doi":"10.1017/s0021853723000075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021853723000075","url":null,"abstract":"system; the party-state had to abandon the assumption of an ‘oily’ socialist economy and instead find more obviously minimalist ways to survive (185). Grace’s account of the inner workings of oil barter in the Tanzanian Petroleum Development Corporation is an interesting and novel contribution to this history, though there is surely more to say about how the ‘self-reliance’ of government officials in the 1970s became a key ingredient of a new catch-as-catch-can capitalism in the 1980s. Grace’s conclusion offers a condensed but suggestive tour of the dramatically different auto world of the 1990s and 2000s: endless snaking foleni ( jams), deadly car crashes, and misafara (quasi-militarized government convoys that stop all traffic for miles and hours). Three decades of cheap oil and liberalized imports (most recently of cheap motorcycle taxis from China) have ensured that urban Tanzania is utterly choked by private transport, while the endless construction projects of the Magufuli administration (2015–21) will only put more wheels on the road. And yet elements of the previous machinic complex remain, from the rough communalism of the minibus (predictably demonized by Western planners) to the general frustration that the rich travel in private, air-conditioned comfort while the poor commute cheek to jowl. Like other recent works, African Motors retrieves the histories of 1970s and 1980s — as well as the deeper histories of African ingenuity — and gives them a new salience. As the planet confronts the limits of endless, petrol-dependent growth, African Motors shows us a different history of automobility, enriching our ability to think the car, development, and even modernity itself otherwise.","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47293825","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":"Humanitarianism in a Cold War Hot Spot","authors":"Charlotte Walker-Said","doi":"10.1017/S0021853723000191","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853723000191","url":null,"abstract":"In recent decades, historians, political scientists, and development experts have demonstrated how humanitarian intervention has eroded state sovereignty and even basic governmental rationality in a variety of countries in the Global South. Jeremy Rich’s book builds off of this literature to examine a nation-state that is arguably more of a ‘political assemblage’ than a cohesively bound, fully sovereign country: the Republic of Congo, renamed ‘Zaire’ in 1971, and currently referred to as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). However, Rich’s Protestant Missionaries and Humanitarianism in the DRC adds significant complexity to previous studies. Rich considers nation-building not by a government or indigenous social movement, but rather by a faith-based humanitarian aid organization — the Congo Protestant Relief Agency (CPRA) — whose leaders and volunteers formulated idiosyncratic and ideologically inconsistent strategies for contributing to and strengthening national reconstruction in Congo. Rich’s work stands in sharp contrast to previous analyses of humanitarian assistance and multilateral aid, as these mainly examine the work of foreign governments and global, secular institutions. Instead, he presents the approaches and worldviews of a missionary society and its aid workers who worked to both reimagine and shore up political stability, governmental legitimacy, and administrative functionality in a newly decolonized Africa. Rich concludes that CPRA’s work in early independence-era Congo marked ‘a watershed period in humanitarianism in Africa during the Cold War’ (7). He accomplishes this by deftly illustrating the dramatic exit of colonial government-sponsored missionary societies and their charitable wings and their replacement by a new iteration of humanitarian agent: faith-based relief organizations. While these new intercessors could be influenced by political agendas emanating from the Global North, much like their predecessors, Rich shows how committed they were to the principles of African self-determination. All relief provision and assistance in postcolonial spaces in the 1960s was to some degree political. Cold War rivalries, former colonial powers attempting to reinforce their prestige, domestic leftist insurgencies, and other political developments reified, misconstrued, or manipulated faith-based and other forms of humanitarian assistance in Congo, turning beneficence into the furtherance of some form of power. Even if neutrality was the stated aim of a humanitarian mission (and it often was not), the activities associated with relief provision or technical assistance directly affected governance, and therefore the survival of different political communities. In this highly precarious","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44236057","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":"People and Animals in Nigerian History","authors":"Oliver Coates","doi":"10.1017/S002185372300004X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S002185372300004X","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48623655","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}