Abstract This article uses digital Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to visualize changing crop choice over time in nineteenth-century equatorial eastern Africa. It maps the locations of crops mentioned in early imperial sources, using contemporary cartographic representations of the region as a base. This enables a novel visualization of changing agricultural potential and vulnerability to climate variability over time. The maps contextualize the growth of commercial and political centers, a series of famines during years and seasons of below average rainfall, and the well-known environmental challenges of the early colonial period.

Abstract This paper is situated within the context of the onset of British imperialism in Nigeria at the end of the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the conquest of the Ijebu Kingdom. The episode, as discussed in the paper, is intended for stage or screen theatrical adaptation. It demonstrates the value of historical dramatization based on data foregrounded by standard historical and relevant research methodologies. The principal text in the paper, derived from primary and research-based sources, is outlined in a chronological narrative. The general idea is to enable the development of a script to create a historical drama.

Abstract The Ghana–Togo border separates the Ewe people from their ritual spaces and objects. In Nyive, a border town divided into Ghana Nyive and Togo Nyive, these ritual spaces and objects are in Togo Nyive. The liminal space of the border complicates ritual practice by preventing community members from moving the ritual drum Aɖaʋatram (madness has led me astray) across the river and the international border. Nonetheless, communities in Nyive use ritual archives to maintain their identities in the context of colonial separation. They remake their identities through the symbolism, origin narrative, handling, and use of the drum Aɖaʋatram.

Abstract In 1864, Umar Taal, one of the most consequential figures of nineteenth-century West Africa, perished in Maasina (Mali), a region he had conquered two years prior. Historians have studied the political and intellectual underpinnings of Taal’s last conquest, but not its ramifications inside families. Exploring colonial-era migrations and marriages in my own family in Mali, I suggest intimate history as mode of historical inquiry and writing to elucidate the afterlives of war. I provide a translocal and gendered microhistory of the aftermath of Taal’s jihad, showing how the ripples of past Islamic revolutions shaped the intimacies of twentieth-century family life.

Abstract This note offers a preliminary survey of archives containing photographic material – both digitized and nondigitized – related to northern Ghana. Despite the region’s historical marginalization, this condition has not necessarily resulted in a scarcity of sources. On the contrary, numerous archives preserve rich and underexplored photographic documentation. By identifying and describing key collections across institutions such as the White Fathers phototèque, the Ministry of Information in Accra, the University of Cambridge, the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, the Imperial War Museum, the National Archives in London, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, this note seeks to illuminate underexplored visual sources.

Abstract In the course of seeking indigenous documentation in a European-centered colonial archival repository, we uncovered a collection of African sources that highlight the literary work of African and Asian literate agents. The research enabled us to identify numerous indigenous African and Asian writings within an archive originally intended to support the Portuguese colonial administration. This article presents an archival survey on African documentation from Mozambique held in the Overseas Historical Archive (Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino), in Lisbon, Portugal.

Abstract The recovery of subaltern experiences in colonial contexts requires more than reading against the grain and interrogating silences. This paper describes “archival patchwork,” a way of working across diverse sources from multiple repositories, collecting small scraps of evidence about subordinated individuals, reconstructing social relationships, and stitching together patterns of daily life that aren’t visible otherwise. Archival patchwork accommodates present-day ways of working in neoliberal universities, acknowledges north-south disparities, and opens collaborative possibilities. The paper, pinned to South African history, enumerates digitization, transcription, and duplication projects that make archival sources for the colonial Cape more widely available. Although this paper’s evidence is focused in time and place, the methodology is broadly applicable.

Abstract This study examines the significance of nonhuman actors in writing African history. It asks why things and animals are at the margin of African history. It probes how the intersection of presence and absence manifests in things, and how this can aid historians’ imagination of the past. Finally, it seeks to know how the recognition and integration of things in the historical narrative can help understand the unaccounted past. The article draws from the Yoruba visual and verbal arts, particularly the oriki and Ifa corpus to argue that “things” are important historical sources that are methodologically useful and theoretically relevant.

Abstract Drawing on newspaper articles and oral histories, this paper provides an initial sketch of some of the issues at stake within the Ga community in Accra, focusing on the founding of the Ga Shifimo Kpee, a nationalist movement founded at the heart of the first President Kwame Nkrumah’s new capital and the seat of his own power in the new country. Rather than providing a definitive account of the Shifimo Kpee, this article highlights the ways in which foundational published accounts have sometimes inhibited a richer understanding of this period and analyzes primary sources to point to new avenues of interrogation.