This article examines the history of Chilapalapa, a colonial pidgin language, in Zambia. ‘Prickly proximity’ is used as a conceptual tool to understand the ways in which fraught yet intimate interracial relationships are managed by many of the white farming community of Zambia, who are at once privileged by their colonial past and bound by it. The article further discusses the history of the language before arguing that the patterns of linguistic learning among white Zambians, influenced by a frequent attempt to regulate emotional distance and hierarchy, created a situation in which Chilapalapa retained considerable prominence and power. This case study demonstrates the importance of language to ongoing processes of decolonisation, not only at the more widely researched national level, but also at the interpersonal one. This raises questions of inequality, belonging and race which are pertinent for other nations across southern Africa.

This article engages with discourses of public memory and heritage as constituted by the biography of David Livingstone to understand how the past is instrumentalised in present-day Malawi and Scotland. It discusses how in Malawi and Scotland, Livingstone’s memory has influenced, and continues to influence, the making of bilateral relations between these two nations. Drawing on archival and documentary sources, interviews and exhibition analysis the article argues that the memory and mythology of David Livingstone have been preserved and reconstructed to enhance international co-operation between the two nations in what could be understood as ‘heritage diplomacy’. This heritage diplomacy makes claims to a mutual relationship that spans from Livingstone’s arrival on Malawian territory through the colonial period and into the post-colonial present. Moreover, this heritage diplomacy functions to create and strengthen strategic bilateral economic, cultural and political ties. At the same time, it promotes and solidifies Scotland’s national identity and its aspirations to sovereignty, autonomy and to the status of a global player. Commemorations, memorials, museum exhibitions, state institutions and civil organisations have become the main sites through which Livingstone’s memory is invoked or reconstructed as a shared heritage to facilitate international co-operation. The article contributes to our understanding of how heritage diplomacy is mobilised by nations to reinforce relations and promote their interests.

The African Union is emerging as a prominent actor in election assistance and observation. Considering the continued centrality of the electoral process to democracy-building efforts in Africa, African continental and regional organisations are increasingly monitoring elections and taking the lead in election observation processes across the continent. This paper contributes to the African agency literature by showing how agency is operationalised and implemented through international election observation. Focusing on Malawi’s recent electoral history (2004–2020), this paper argues that the African Union is institutionalising its election observation protocols and challenging the dominant position of western international actors, through enacting the role and agency of continental and regional actors. It critically assesses the African Union’s ability to undertake these efforts and how it has addressed elections, and the politics surrounding them.

An African ploughing his fields in western Mpondoland in 1910 uncovered two elephant tusks at the site of what had once been King Faku’s homestead. This obscure incident in the Transkeian Territories of South Africa provides an entry point to examining the consolidation of colonial bureaucratic control, and African responses to it, in the second decade of the 20th century by the Union of South Africa government. The unearthing of the tusks illuminated, on the one hand, Mpondo attempts to control the relics of Faku, and the memories associated with them, and to reassert traditional authority over the allocation of land; and on the other, efforts by the colonial administration of the Transkei to tighten control over land and strengthen ‘native affairs’ administration. In the process it explores how differing approaches to dealing with the government and contestations for power within Mpondo society impacted on their relations with the colonial state.

Very little of the vast literature on David Livingstone treats his decade as a missionary in South Africa, focusing instead on his later expeditions to central Africa. Described as a failed missionary who gave up evangelism for exploring, he came under fire in the second half of the 20th century for leading European imperialism in Africa. A deeper look into Livingstone’s mission experience from 1841 to 1857 shows that his highly original writing on theology, missiology and colonialism ranks alongside the better-known work of South African churchmen such as Johannes van der Kemp, John Philip and J.W. Colenso. His analysis and experience of settler colonialism on the Cape frontier and in the Transvaal were not incidental but central to his decision to seek an east–west corridor for the introduction of commerce and Christianity to a region he hoped might be free of colonial aggression and human trafficking.

A British protectorate from 1891, Malawi became independent in 1964. Historians typically recognise the period from 1964 to at least the early 1990s as one in which Malawi was under the dictatorship of President Hastings Kamuzu Banda. Freedom of expression was virtually non-existent in public and human rights were violated as a norm. However, as a result of both external and internal pressure, Banda was compelled to call for a referendum in 1993 and an overwhelming majority voted for multi-party democracy. Later, in 1994, the country adopted a new Constitution, one that clearly separates the three branches of government and guarantees civil rights. The new Constitution notwithstanding, there remain many provisions in the statutes and the legal codes that can be, and are, used by the authorities to repress or punish expression and to abuse citizen’s rights. Moreover, although the new Constitution clearly separates the three branches of government and ascribes to them their respective powers, several presidents have endeavoured to dominate the other two branches of government. Using an approach grounded in historical institutionalism, specifically the concept of path dependence, this article traces Malawi’s current socio-political institutions all the way back to when the country was a British protectorate. In so doing, the article takes a somewhat sympathetic view of the Banda dictatorship, showing how the institutions established under British rule influenced how Banda governed. Critically, the article shows that elements of these institutions continue to have an impact on civil rights and governance in Malawi today.

Scholarship on the Soweto students’ uprising of 16 June 1976 focuses on the political mobilisation of the march, the day of the march itself and memorialisation of the event. Many of these studies fail to portray the everyday lives of the students who protested against the Bantu Education system in South Africa, dwelling on the spectacular. This article primarily draws on oral history interviews with former student activists of the 1960s and 1970s to historicise their reading practices. It thus introduces a new layer to the story of the making of youth political consciousness in South African schools in the 1970s. The article shows how reading happened in the classroom, the playground and the home and how this reading led to the formation of multiple and contiguous subaltern counterpublic spheres that became the crucible of many of the student leaders of the march of 1976. It adds to the literature on the subversion of apartheid by exploring some contradictions in the system that were exploited by students and teachers.