Reviews of Books

Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960. Volume 2, The History and Politics of Colonialism, 1914–1960, edited by L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan; Volume 3, Profiles of Change: African Society and Colonial Rule, edited by Victor Turner. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1970; 1971. Pp. x, 563; viii, 455. $17.50 each. Get access Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960. Volume 2, The History and Politics of Colonialism, 1914–1960, edited by Gann L. H. and Duignan Peter; Volume 3, Profiles of Change: African Society and Colonial Rule, edited by Turner Victor. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1970; 1971. Pp. x, 563; viii, 455. $17.50 each. Marcia Wright Marcia Wright Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 77, Issue 4, October 1972, Pages 1164–1166, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/77.4.1164 Published: 01 October 1972

Middle Colonialism - Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960. Volume 1. The History and Politics of Colonialism, 1870–1914. Edited by L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan. Cambridge University Press, 1969. Pp. 508. £5. - Volume 12 Issue 1

Reviewed by: The Other Zulus: The spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial South Africa by Michael Mahoney, and: The Griqua Past and the Limits of South African History, 1902–1994 by Edward Cavanagh T.J. Tallie The Other Zulus: The spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial South Africa By Michael Mahoney. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2012. The Griqua Past and the Limits of South African History, 1902–1994 By Edward Cavanagh. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Identities are incredibly contingent, particularly those crafted in the midst of colonial domination, as most historians of the colonial experience would be quick to affirm. Two recent publications in South African history provide both an understanding of the incredibly localized nature of colonial identity formation, with an eye to the larger politics of settler colonialism. Michael Mahoney’s The Other Zulus: The spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial South Africa is an ambitious yet careful study of the development of an overarching Zulu ethnic identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing from an extensive variety of government records, personal correspondence, and ethnographic archives, Mahoney constructs a survey of the colonial period in Natal and neighboring polity of Zululand that closely investigates the different pressures that shaped forms of tribal or inter-ethnic allegiance. For Mahoney, Africans who lived within colonial Natal in the years prior to the Anglo-Zulu War profoundly resisted identification with “Zuluness,” instead associating themselves with chieftaincies that had existed prior to the far-reaching conquests of Shaka, the first paramount Zulu ruler. Such a move found ready support with a colonial administration committed to governing on the cheap, particularly under the administration of Theophilus Shepstone, Natal’s long-serving Secretary of Native Affairs, who advocated for colonial rule that rested upon a maintained system of Indigenous governance. Mahoney argues that prior to the outbreak of war in 1879, Natal’s African population believed that their immediate interests lay not in an ethnic identification that required the recognition of a supreme and still very independent Zulu monarch north of the colony. Indeed, he asserts that the identification with local chiefdoms resulted from being situated between a colonial state “too weak to hate” and a Zulu king “too strong to love” (82). It was only after the Anglo-Zulu War that Natal’s African population, linked through a shared antipathy to rising settler power and strengthened through experiences such as those shared by young men on the goldfields of the Witwatersrand, began to look to a greatly reduced Zulu monarchy as a relatively powerless figure upon which they could project complex ideas of nationalist identification. For Mahoney, this process of new ethnic affiliation became most visible with the widespread identification of rebellious Africans with the Zulu monarch Dinizulu in 1906, over a quarter century after the defeat of the Zulu monarchy. Mahoney’s careful, detailed work is at its most effective when he examines the profound disidentification of Natal’s African population with the Zulu kingdom to the north; as he argues, “the Zulu ethnic identity of virtually the entire African population of Natal was itself not a given; it had to be established” (5). Thus begins a richly layered and source-rich description of the awkward negotiation of Africans between colonial rule and a larger Zulu identity. Likewise, by placing the focus of his study firmly in Natal, and not Zululand proper, Mahoney allows for a greater understanding of the complexities of identity formation within a (settler) colonial polity. The profound ambivalences of Africans within Natal with regard to both the Natal government and the Zulu kingdom reveal the limits of a settler state in compelling its Indigenous inhabitants and the nuanced ways in which those colonial subjects worked to articulate themselves on terms most amenable to them. Mahoney’s boldest offerings are also perhaps his most tenuous; in examining the process of African ethnic identification in colonial Natal, he offers productive challenges to the notion of colonial hegemony, particularly as it has been understood in both South African historiography and within larger British colonial history writing. For Mahoney, Zulu ethnic identification arose as a possible choice (which he terms a “moral economy”) in the midst...

Rural livelihoods and agricultural commercialization in colonial Uganda: conjunctures of external influences and local realities

Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960. Volume I: The History and Politics of Colonialism, 1870–1914. Edited by L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan. Cambridge University Press, 1969. Pp. xi+532, bibl., maps. £5 (U.K.). - Volume 40 Issue 2

Modern European colonialism was not all of a piece: its essential feature was the foreign rule of Asian and African societies in which socio-cultural institutions were conserved while the administrative apex was monopolised by a white elite. But techniques of rule varied greatly, as did their impact on indigenous society and the economic change they initiated. Factors affecting the pace and trajectory of change included the relative strength of settler and expatriate minorities, the links forged between the colony and international economy, and the sheer duration of the colonial period. Colonial populations had rarely been ethnically and religiously homogeneous before the European conquests, and colonial rule in Africa and South-East Asia exaggerated their segmentary character by encouraging the influx of non-European traders, shopkeepers and moneylenders, contract labourers and plantation workers, small entrepreneurs in the rice-milling and sugar-refining trades, and so on. Modern colonies were, consequently, ‘plural’ societies, and though pluralism did not extend to the autocratic political sphere, it had economic, communal and juridical dimensions which insulated vertical groups (usually defined by ethnicity) from each other.

Making Waves: René Vautier's Afrique 50 and the Emergence of Anti-Colonial Cinema Steven Ungar My preferred of the French filmmakers in their eighties is René Vautier. Now there's someone whose work I'd like to get to know better. —John Gianvito A measure of evolving approaches to French colonial cinema over the past quarter-century came to me recently in the form of Pierre Boulanger's 1975 monograph, Le Cinéma colonial, which was one of the first books on the topic I read some twenty years ago. Looking at the book again, I realized the extent to which Boulanger's industrial-commercial perspective on mainstream features from Jacques Feyder's L'Atlantide (1919) to David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962) had fashioned colonial cinema into a set of what Graham Greene used to refer to as entertainments. While this emphasis may have been viable for the films Boulanger took into account, the corpus from which he drew precluded serious or sustained engagement with the politics of colonization during the period in question. 1 As a result, no mention was made of state-funded short subjects produced in support of colonial policies ranging from education and public health to recruitment of soldiers for the French military among local populations in occupied territories. Equally notable was exclusion of a small but influential set of documentaries whose critiques of the policies noted above promoted the consolidation of anti-colonial sentiments during the period from 1945 through the March 1962 Évian agreements that granted political autonomy to Algeria following 132 years of colonial rule. Even if this exclusion resulted from a decision to study only feature films rather than from a reluctance to contend with the politics of colonization, the invisibility of anti-colonial films in Boulanger's account is significant and questionable. My purpose in what follows is to contribute to ongoing reassessments of French colonial cinema by considering René Vautier's 1950 documentary short, Afrique 50, a type of film whose absence in Boulanger's monograph I take to be significant. At the same time, I mean to situate Vautier's film among models of engaged and militant filmmaking over a somewhat longer duration referred to by film scholars of the past decade as a golden age of the short subject and documentary in France. 2 [End Page 34] My interest in Afrique 50 concerns its place within French colonial film considered over a longer duration, from late nineteenth-century works by Jules-Étienne Marey and the Lumière brothers to post-independence documentaries and fiction features by Gillo Pontecorvo (La Bataille d'Alger, 1966), Claire Denis (Chocolat, 1988), Moufida Tlatli (Les Silences du palais, 1995), and Philippe Faucon (La Trahison, 2005). At the same time, I mean to demonstrate that a significant measure of Afrique 50's oppositional stance concerning colonial policies can be marked by the censorship and criminal condemnation to which it was subjected. Additional measures include its remove from foundational assumptions concerning colonization to be found in listings of interwar features inflected by melodrama (La Maison du Maltais, dir. Pierre Chenal, 1938) and romantic adventure (Pépé le Moko, dir. Julien Duvivier, 1937), as well as newsreels and propagandistic documentaries such as La France est un empire (dirs. Emmanuel Bourcier and Jean d'Argaves, 1939). 3 Ongoing reassessments of the past twenty years also contend with the transition from colonial and post-colonial periods. While this transition—some think of it instead as a break—is often marked by France's withdrawal from Algeria following the March 1962 Évian accords, the role of Afrique 50 within the phenomenon of decolonization between 1945 and 1962 remains to be explored in full. Those who cite Afrique 50 as the first anti-colonial film in France could take their cue from Vautier, who makes the claim in his 1998 memoir, Caméra citoyenne, before adding that he was not thinking along such lines when he undertook the film. 4 The claim is consistent with the persona of renegade or rogue filmmaker (cinéaste à contre-courant) that Vautier (1928-) has cultivated while completing more than twenty films on topics ranging from colonial Africa, the Algerian struggle for...

Journal Article Colonialism in Africa 1870–1960. Vol. III. Profiles of Change: African Society and Colonial Rule Get access Colonialism in Africa 1870–1960. Vol. III. Profiles of Change: African Society and Colonial Rule. Ed. by Victor Turner. Preface by Peter Duignan and L. H. Gann (Gen Eds.). Cambridge at the University Press. 1971. 455 pp. Bibliog. Index. (Hoover Institution Publications) £5.00. $17.50. Iain Somerville Iain Somerville Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 48, Issue 1, January 1972, Pages 147–148, https://doi.org/10.2307/2613688 Published: 01 January 1972

Peter Duignan and L. H. Gann (ed.): Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960. Vol. 3. Profiles of change : African society and colonial rule. Edited by Victor Turner. (Hoover Institution Publications.) viii, 455 pp. Cambridge: University Press, 1971. £5 - Volume 34 Issue 3

Colonialism in Africa 1870-1960; Vol III, Profiles of Change: African Society and Colonial Rule

Colonialism in Africa 1870–1960. Volume 3: Profiles of Change: African Society and Colonial Rule. Edited by Victor Turner. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Pp. viii, 455. $17.50.) - Volume 66 Issue 2

Colonialism in Africa 1870-1960. Profiles of Change: African Society and Colonial Rule. Volume III

Colonialism in Africa has entrenched the exploitation of natural resources, a legacy that persists today through multinational corporations, foreign debt, and neoliberal policies. The Democratic Republic of Congo, with the world’s largest cobalt and copper reserves yet over 60% of its population living in extreme poverty, exemplifies this enduring global inequality. In this context, the hadiths of Prophet Muhammad PBUH, which stress distributive justice, prohibition of monopoly, and ecological stewardship, gain critical relevance. This study explores the normative contribution of hadith to economic and environmental justice in postcolonial Africa. Using a qualitative descriptive method with historical-critical and theological-normative approaches, it integrates hadith textual analysis with the socio-economic realities of African societies. Findings reveal three main points: first, hadiths on water, land, and tree planting articulate principles of conservation and equitable resource distribution; second, Islamic ecotheology frames environmental degradation as a violation of human responsibility as God’s khalīfah (steward); third, development models grounded in hadith values offer alternatives to exploitative global capitalism. The study concludes that revitalizing hadith is vital not only for theological discourse but also for guiding ethical and structural systems, aiming to build a more just and sustainable global order for African societies still burdened by colonial legacies.

The construction of the ‘black Other’ can perhaps best be characterized as a politically motivated pattern of argumentation in colonial discourse. It was crystallized in the reality of German colonial rule in Africa between 1884 and 1914–18. The achievement of German colonial rule in Africa was considered a task of national importance; and colonial rule could be justified by employing an image of the Other. However, this deployment of the Other should not be seen as merely a political strategy in the context of the power politics of colonization. It also brought into focus widely held racist views of the world. The history of German colonization was characterized by the use of repressive violence in the name of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’, concepts that had their origins in the Enlightenment. This cultural-missionary project declared colonial expansion to be a type of humanitarian intervention and an educational endeavour. This was in sharp contrast to the racism, based on social Darwinism, that claimed Germany's undeniable right to acquire colonial territories as a matter of the ‘survival of the fittest’.

Migrant labor is one of the most extensively studied subjects of Africa's colonial history, helping to inaugurate the professional study of Africa in multiple academic disciplines. Anthropologists in the 1940s, working to outline the impact of colonial rule, used migrant labor to demonstrate the changes occurring within African societies previously considered immunized by tradition against major social change. Economists in the 1950s and 1960s, seeking to gauge the prospects of economic transformation in Africa, examined migrant labor between the traditional and modern sectors of the economy in order to divine what future changes in the balance between these two putatively separate economic spheres might follow from increased investment under colonial and then post-colonial development schemes. Scholars of African politics and society in the era of independence used migrant labor to examine the relationship between states and citizens in newly independent countries, as well as to forecast how this relationship would continue to evolve following the end of colonial rule.Migrant labor was also an important subject for the first professional historians of Africa. Just as the anthropologists who inaugurated the professional study of Africa used migrant labor as an indisputable marker of cultural dynamism, so too could historians use migrant labor as an indisputable marker of diachronic change. The historical study of migrant labor took some time to develop, as the first wave of historians of Africa were predominantly interested in researching precolonial Africa, so as to establish an authentically African past for the emerging postcolonial future. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, increased historical interest in studying colonial rule brought a rapid proliferation of migrant labor histories, diffused through a confluence of closely related historiographical strands.1 One was the focus on African workers as key actors in challenging and ultimately overcoming colonial rule, and a potential force for ushering postcolonial Africa further along the path toward modernity.2 Another was the animated debates, inspired by underdevelopment theory, over Africa's historical relationship with global capitalism.3 Still another was the equally animated debates over the role of material relations in shaping African societies, as well as the proper analytical framework (or mode of production) through which these relations ought to be categorized and understood.4 Hovering over these historiographical nodes was the reigning paradigm of social history, in which economic relationships were understood to be the primary driver of historical change, and to offer the most perceptive lens into the broader arc of history's march toward the present.Migrant labor was well-positioned to feature prominently in all of these historiographies. For labor historians, migrant workers presented a discrete group of individuals whose actions-protests, evasion, strikes, and so on-could be clearly catalogued as an example of the interlocking dynamics of structure and agency as workers confronted the onset of colonial rule.5 For economic historians, migrant laborers instantiated the changes wrought by colonial rule in a particularly vivid way, as the dramatic rise of migrant wage labor-especially in eastern and southern Africa-made clear the scale of the transformations inaugurated by colonial capitalism.6 For historians participating in debates over African modes of production, migrant laborers' movement between work and home made it possible to extend critical analyses of capitalist transformation and its attendant models into regions that had not been previously subjected to rigorous materialist analysis, having instead been considered largely unaffected by such transformations, owing to the fact that capitalist enterprises in many parts of colonial Africa were limited in number and geographically concentrated into a few limited areas.7In the late 1980s and 1990s, however, the previously vibrant historiography of migrant labor entered into significant decline. …