Abstract This article traces the history of the repression of palm wine and alcohol (sodabi) in Dahomey, now Benin, with varying degrees of intensity, from the nineteenth-century kingdom of Abomey to postcolonial Dahomey. In parallel with the repression, this article also looks at the history of palm alcohol production. Dahomeans learned to distil wine from French peasants during the First World War, and were driven into sodabi production by French economic policies during the Great Depression. Using court sources, this article describes the social organisation, gender division, and economic rationale of sodabi production, as well as the occasions on which it was drunk. Ultimately, it argues that the repression of sodabi made it more difficult for peasants to improve their living conditions.

Abstract A review of Joel Cabrita’s biography of Regina Gelana Twala.

Abstract This article examines the politics of restitution within the Black Atlantic through the case of the Restitution Study Group’s legal challenge to the Smithsonian Institution’s return of Benin bronzes to Nigeria. While most scholarship frames restitution as a struggle between Western museums and postcolonial states, this article shifts the lens to intra-Black debates that complicate inherited frameworks of return, foregrounding the unresolved legacies of slavery and the claims of Black American and broader diasporic communities. At the same time, it situates these debates within the larger global landscape in which Western institutions and nation-states continue to define the terms and tempo of restitution. By challenging the assumption that restitution is solely a matter between source nations and former colonial powers, the Restitution Study Group brings attention to how African elites’ historical participation in the transatlantic slave trade and the ongoing marginalization of diaspora communities shape contemporary claims. The article also places these interventions alongside disputes within Nigeria over custodianship between the federal government, Edo State, and the Benin royal court. By tracing these overlapping histories, ethical claims, and political stakes, the article argues that returns of looted artifacts are not simply acts of restitution, but processes of decolonial repair that reconfigure authority, belonging, and historical responsibility across diasporic and national contexts.

Abstract This piece explores the parallel development of two fisheries management regimes in mid-twentieth-century Lake Malawi: one imposed by the British colonial government over the lake and the other by Senior Chief Makanjira focused on Mbenji Island. The parallel development of these regimes provides opportunity for close analysis of how fisheries management centred on different knowledge and practices led to distinctive legacies of governance legitimacy and efficacy. Given the increasing recognition that Indigenous knowledge is crucial to the future sustainability of fisheries globally, we contend that it is imperative to recognise the ways in which colonial pasts have embedded knowledge hierarchies and exclusionary decision-making processes within national fisheries governance regimes that continue to obstruct capacities to bring different knowledges, practices, and management approaches together effectively and appropriately.

Abstract The domination and exploitation inherent to colonialism entailed casting Africans as violators of European standards, expectations, and even aspirations. This article identifies messaging which permeated the everyday experiences of African wage earners by locating the ways in which employers embedded their understanding of Africans as potential violators into the employment relationship. It examines the records of the Tribunal de Première Instance in Dakar, Senegal, during the decades of high colonialism to reveal the nature of that dynamic, exploring implicit expectations among employers regarding their employees, particularly related to allegations of theft or abandonment of work brought against workers. Analysis of such cases particularly highlights domestic workers, who were overwhelmingly male. The interactions and claims in the justice records reveal clear constructions of violation within the attitudes and actions of non-African employers in colonial Dakar and present the court as a venue for perpetuating that rhetoric.

Abstract This article offers the first gendered history of African radio audiences. It uses a comparative approach to demonstrate that colonial development projects in Ghana and Zambia successfully created mass African audiences for radio between the 1930s and 1950s, at a time when most radio sets on the continent were owned by white settlers. However the gendered impact of the projects was uneven. In Zambia the promotion of battery-operated wirelesses inadvertently created a male-dominated audience, while the construction of a wired rediffusion system in Ghana attracted equal numbers of male and female listeners. Ghana’s radio project offers new perspectives on the history of colonial development as a very rare example of a scheme that benefitted women as much as men. Differences in the voice of Ghanaian and Zambian radio also reveal that these early radio schemes had a lasting influence on broadcast content and listening culture in both countries beyond the 1950s.

Abstract This article examines the central role of West Central Africa in the development of a global capitalist economy during the eighteenth century. Using a rich and overlooked set of records in English, Portuguese, and French, the article explains that rulers and brokers on the Loango coast championed ideas and practices of free trade and free markets from the rise of the Atlantic slave trade through at least until the end of the eighteenth century. The article shows that European slave traders opposed a free market by fiercely competing to obtain full control of the trade in African captives along the Atlantic Africa. In contrast, the West Central African states of Ngoyo, Kakongo, and Loango, located north of the Congo River, fully embraced free trade and free markets during the era of the Atlantic slave trade.

Abstract The four pioneering African war correspondents who travelled to Asia in 1945 develop our understanding of Africa and the Second World War. This article argues that their tour challenges the existing scholarship on the conflict in two ways. Firstly, it bridges the common divide between “home” and fighting fronts in our understanding of wartime Africa. Secondly, due to the correspondents’ own positionality as colonial African newspapermen, it offers insights into African military service in ways not permitted by colonial and military archives. Within an overarching frame examining the tour’s origin and conclusion in Africa, the article assesses the correspondents’ activities in Asia in terms of their interactions with and analysis of African troops. Cumulatively, it contends that the correspondents’ tour both considerably expands our understanding of African soldiers’ lives in the Second World War, and also directly connects the “home front” with the Asian theatre of combat.