Editors’ introduction

This issue of The Journal of African History contains six research articles and fifteen book reviews. Primarily focused on the twentieth century, though one article studies a one-hundred-year period in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, these articles remind us that how historians parcel out time and give it meaning is entangled with sources and historiographies. Reading these works recalls the insights of synthetic, state of the field articles in the JAH, like Stephen Ellis’s 2002 ‘Writing histories of contemporary Africa’ and Richard Reid’s 2011 ‘Past and presentism: the “precolonial” and the foreshortening of African history’. Writing about different ends of the historical spectrum, the contemporary and the deep past, Ellis and Reid both argue that connecting these periods is crucial to overturning European-oriented chronologies, concepts, and touchstones that have dominated professional history writing. The articles in this issue underscore the point that periodization is a working hypothesis not an inflexible structure. Read together, they raise questions about how we frame chronologies and how posing them differently can offer new ways of understanding the past and the actions of people in it. For example, Etana Dinka contends that Ethiopian imperial history ought to be read in conversation with European imperialism and Tim Livsey suggests that decolonization looks different from the vantage point of Nigerians and imperial migrants attempts to live in the Ikoyi reservation designated for white colonial administrators. Kwasi Konadu’s article opens the issue. Konadu does a close reading of two of the three cases before the Portuguese Inquisition related to the Mina (Gold) Coast in the sixteenth century. Konadu takes an approach to reading Inquisition sources similar to the one described by historian Keletso Atkins for reading colonial archival sources from Natal as like ‘interrogating a hostile witness’. Cross-examining the Inquisition cases through close reading, Konadu deconstructs their religious and political positions, exposes the everyday violence of enslavement, and surfaces modes of African women’s advocacy, resistance, and maintaining cultural and spiritual practices. To the extent possible, he reconstructs the lives and trajectories of two women (one enslaved and one formerly enslaved but freed at the time of the Inquisition trial). Graça and Mónica Fernandes lived near the Portuguese base at São Jorge da Mina and were sent to Lisbon, Portugal to stand trial for crimes against the church and crown. Both died in Portugal, Graça imprisoned in a monastery and Mónica released but prohibited from returning home. Framed by a reading of the third Inquisition case in which women are silenced, marginalized victims, Konadu’s piece offers insights about sexual violence, enslavement, religious practice, and power in early modern Atlantic Africa. Empire as a space and context also animates Etana Dinka’s article, though he concentrates on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like Konadu, Dinka uses a court case to frame his argument that even as Menilek’s empire imposed the colonial neftegna-gebbar, local elite and peasant actors took advantage of fractures in this military clientalist system to pursue their own interests and, in turn, changed elements of how it worked. Dinka draws on a wide and diverse set of sources including memoirs, British intelligence reports, published Amharic archival sources, and interviews to make his case. Dinka asks readers to consider the Ethiopian empire as working like and against