In early 1960s Southern Rhodesia, a secretive underground of male nationalist youth envisioned a revolutionary army and pressed their political leaders to act. How they came to do so is a dramatic and largely neglected story of youthful political imagination, state violence and transnational military mobility, told in memoir and oral history. Many of the nationalist youth of this moment had first forged dreams of freedom as students in rural mission schools where they encountered astonishing stories of revolution and African independence. They concluded that educated, young leaders could transform the world and they energetically experimented with means of doing so before themselves joining the nationalist youth in townships. There they were confronted with a violent, intransigent settler state that forced them to reimagine routes to freedom. Evading this state produced the ‘militarised mobilities’ that took these young men into circuits of internationalist solidarity where they began to imagine the making of an army and the waging of war. Unusually among nascent liberation armies, they left Rhodesia as part of tightly organised nationalist youth networks intent on receiving military training and returned to these same networks as saboteurs and soldiers. Although their vision of warfare was not realised in these early years, it was the harsh lessons, personal relationships and eclectic revolutionary dreams of this moment that laid the foundations for the Zimbabwe African People’s Union’s liberation army.

This article examines the role of books and reading in the lives of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) soldiers, particularly in Angola from the late 1970s. The 1976 Soweto uprising led to the influx of hundreds of new recruits into MK and the reinvigoration of military struggle, which coincided with the opening of new military camps in Angola, with the Soviet Union and other socialist countries providing the bulk of provisions. Along with weapons, communication systems, transport, uniforms, food and medicines, the supply of books and other reading material was viewed as essential logistics, and libraries were created and resourced in each of the camps thanks to transnational solidarity networks, which are traced in the article. Political education was an integral part of military training, and books and reading were seen as important aspects of the political life and welfare of MK trainees, which helped to shape ideas about war, soldiering and revolutionary morality. Books were not just ideological tools, but were also a source of enjoyment and motivation that helped soldiers to cope with the hardships of military life and the politics of waiting. Reading practices in the camps took on oral, performative and collective features, and reading is remembered as an emancipatory activity through which MK cadres were able to make meaning of their lived experiences and connect the liberation struggle in South Africa to other struggles elsewhere. Books and reading were crucial to the making of MK as a political army and left a lifelong imprint on soldiers’ understandings of the world and visions of freedom.

This article offers a historical examination of the military co-operation between the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) and Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) soldiers during the Zimbabwean liberation struggle. It tells us about the kinds of exchanges that shaped the liberation struggle on the battlefield across three distinct and increasingly intense phases. Based on interviews with Zimbabwean and Mozambican war veterans and veteran memoirs, the article explores the dynamic of solidarity forged between Mozambican People’s Liberation Forces (FPLM) soldiers and Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) fighters inside Rhodesia. The article argues that the multitude of military training regimes and ideologies that the rank-and-file soldiers of the two armies had experienced and adopted played out in their interactions during the war. These differences created friction, conflict and disruption, but ultimately led to the negotiation of new forms of military co-operation and strategy that shaped specifically battlefield solidarities.

Camps in Angola were crucial training grounds for the South African liberation army Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) from the late 1970s and through the 1980s, a period when the Angolan state army, FAPLA (Popular Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola), was itself engaged in a civil war. The official position of the African National Congress and the Angolan government was one of solidarity based on a common political cause. Drawing on interviews and published memoirs, this article compares the understandings of politics that existed within the two allied armies, and how these understandings shaped and were shaped by the encounters between the two military forces during the time that MK was in Angola. For both groups, international solidarity was secondary to a nationalist vision. MK soldiers were fighting a liberation struggle in which they saw the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) as the ally of their own oppressors; FAPLA officers subscribed to ideas of solidarity but conscripted rank-and-file soldiers were reluctant participants in a civil war in which they recognised UNITA as compatriots. When MK soldiers were drawn into FAPLA’s military operations against UNITA, these incompatible understandings of the nature and purpose of the Angolan conflict fuelled support for their ‘mutiny’ of 1983–84.

The world is currently witnessing two contrasting economic policy experiments. On the one hand, President Donald Trump aims to replace other tax revenues with tariff revenues. All empirical evidence suggests that this idea will fail. On the other hand, the signing of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) has put the dismantling of tariffs on the policy agendas of 54 African Union member states. The implementation of the AfCFTA will affect government revenue in member states and might require a switch from customs duties to other revenue sources such as income and value added taxes. Such revenue transitions may be politically difficult. This article analyses the two stages of South Africa’s revenue transition, which occurred first after the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and then during the democratisation process in the first half of the 1990s, to improve understanding of the constraints to and effects of such transitions. The transition from a tax revenue structure anchored by customs revenue to one dominated by income taxes and taxes on domestic consumption was a protracted and unplanned process. The general revenue needs of the government led to the introduction of income taxes in 1914 and a broad-based consumption tax in 1979. Excise taxes have been in use since 1910 and in recent times have also become increasingly important for other purposes. Along with the shift in the role of customs duties from revenue-generating to protective instruments, and extensive use of non-tariff barriers, these developments meant that import taxes became markedly less important tax handles during the course of the 20th century. As a result, the revenue implications of the trade liberalisation process in the early 1990s were minor.

Despite its contribution to Mozambique’s colonial economy and to the urban development of Lourenço Marques (contemporary Maputo), tourism remains a marginal theme in the historiography. Bridging this gap, this article aims to map tourism’s pivotal role in shaping regional dynamics and racial politics in the decolonisation era. It invites an exploration of colonial tourism as a regional system of leisure mobility taking shape across white-ruled settler colonial states in southern Africa. A regional lens is important not only because white South Africans and Southern Rhodesians accounted for the majority of the tourist economy in Mozambique, but also because tourist economies and practices were fundamentally entangled with the racial politics of settler colonialism and decolonisation. By examining the white tourist trade and a much more elusive strand of black leisure mobility, the article shows that tourist encounters politicised the everlasting question of colonial racism in Lourenço Marques.

In rural southern Zambia, people frequently tell dramatic stories about the dangers of entering into and maintaining relationships with others. Shared at social events, in work settings and at church gatherings, these vivid stories offer accounts of how local people were exploited or deceived by people they trusted: newly arrived outsiders, neighbours and even family members. This article examines the place of these stories in a social setting in which it is through such potentially dangerous relationships that care, economic assistance and personhood are achieved. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, I argue that these everyday stories encourage a form of moral discernment – the ability to remain alert to the pervasive dangers inherent to all relationships. However, moral discernment is a subtle and ambivalent skill that can easily shade into undesirable forms of behaviour, such as overt wariness, suspicion or detachment. In this context, everyday stories of relational danger offer a space in which the skill of moral discernment can be emphasised and dramatised without being presented as an unequivocally positive moral quality. This article contributes to debates on storytelling, personhood and dependence, offering new insights into how people navigate the tensions and complexities of social relationships in a rural setting of poverty and inequality in southern Africa.

This article examines the historical and contemporary dynamics of violence against black farmworkers in South Africa through a critical reading of media discourse. While dominant narratives emphasise the vulnerability of white farmers in the so-called farm attacks, the routine killing of farmworkers by white farm owners receives minimal attention and is often framed as accidental or disciplinary. Drawing on 45 English-language newspaper reports from 1998 to 2022, we employ discourse analysis and Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation to interrogate how these incidents are archived, narrated and depoliticised in the public domain. We argue that the farm remains a site of enduring racial subjection, where colonial and apartheid logics of land ownership, labour discipline and anti-black violence persist in the current democratic social order. We trace the repetition of fatal violence against farmworkers across decades as a means of managing white anxiety over land restitution and black autonomy. The framing of the killing of farmworkers as reckless serves to reaffirm white authority and preserve the racial hierarchies embedded in South Africa’s farms. This article contributes to the scholarship on land, race and rural labour by reinterpreting these killings not as isolated events, but as the afterlives of dispossession and the contested meanings of living on the land in the current democratic social order.

This article asks how and when the history of South African sport has been written, by whom, and how the scholarship was shaped by its political, social and intellectual contexts. A striking and rapid expansion of academic work on the history of South African sport is a relatively recent phenomenon as scholarly engagement occurred much later than might have been expected in a society where sport has been such a significant social and cultural pursuit. Three chronological phases in the historiography are identified. Firstly, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, when almost all historical work on South African sport was by scholars from outside the country. Reasons for the limited engagement by South African historians with a rapidly emerging sub-discipline are considered. Secondly, there was roughly a decade, from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, when the political context of a negotiated settlement and the advent of democracy directly and indirectly influenced a significant spurt in the production of sport history and the entry of a new cohort of scholars. An explicit and far-reaching recourse by sport historians to social history also emerged. Thirdly, from about 2004 to the present, there was a ‘coming of age’ of the genre in South Africa, the impetus and volume of work winning academic respectability and a confidence in the collective project. At the heart of that project has been the reclamation and reconstruction of the history of black sport, redressing decades of neglect and marginalisation. In each phase, as the historiography has been mapped, a distinctive feature is how inextricably the contours and terrain of sport have been interwoven with politics. And in turn, the politicised nature of South African sport shaped themes and directions of the historiography.

This article examines Mozambican and Angolan theorisations of literature’s role in the context of the armed nationalist struggles for independence during the period 1961 to 1974. I read these struggles in the light of debates over the role of intellectuals and elites, arguing that an analysis of them informs the conceptions produced by Frelimo and MPLA intellectuals of the political role of literature and writers. This article makes the case for taking seriously literary sources in understanding the ideologies of Frelimo and the MPLA and in grounding the analysis of literary texts published by these organisations in discussions of political and ideological questions relating to class, race, political economy and revolutionary strategy. Literary texts and discussions about literature produced by Frelimo and MPLA intellectuals are, moreover, useful for understanding the self-conceptions of these organisations in relation to other forms of anti-colonial, nationalist and socialist politics. I contend that, contrary to the pronouncements of some Frelimo and MPLA intellectuals, the ideologies of these organisations evolved in dialogue rather than as a rupture with the kinds of politics that these intellectuals disavowed. My approach seeks to unpick the positions put forward by intellectuals and institutions, namely Eduardo Mondlane, Mário Pinto de Andrade, Sérgio Vieira, Fernando Costa Andrade and the Centro de Estudos Angolanos (Centre for Angolan Studies).