African History Research Articles

Unpacking the Gendered Edge of Slavery in Pre-Colonial Africa: A Critical Reading of The Hundred Wells of Salaga by Ayesha Harruna Atta

Using Ayesha Harruna Atta’s The Hundred Wells of Salaga as a stepping-stone, this research paper sets out to delve into the gendered structure of slavery. The article argues that the straightjacket of patriarchal masculinity with its attendant human toll was instrumental in mediating female slavery in pre-colonial Africa. That slavery exacted a heavy toll amongst African women is borne out in the physical and psychological woes of such characters as Aminah, Khadija, and, to a lesser extent, Wurche. The paper also brings to light this much – slave women serve as sexual objects and domestic labour. The pervasiveness of the dead hand of patriarchy reaches out into the practice of enslavement. The sexist edge of slavery reflects in many regards, so the article posits, the power of men, whose praxis is geared towards shoring their stranglehold on women. Men wield vis-à-vis women what the American scholar John Halloway calls ‘power over,’ thereby thwarting them in their well-meaning all-out drive towards full-blown ‘self-actualization.’ This investigation project makes the contention that one of the merits of The Hundred Wells of Salaga is to bring out into sharp relief the dogged refusal of women to take their patriarchy-induced lot in their strides. If anything, Aminah and Wurche’s pushback bears commending since it bespeaks not only a scathing reproach to male dominance and female slavery but also a stunning tribute to sisterhood as a sure-fire way out of the predicament of women. Methodology-wise, this paper taps into an array of perspectives predicated upon the social sciences and the humanities as well as literary theory.

Advancing Global Health Equity: The Role of the Liberal Arts in Health Professional Education

AbstractMuch innovation has taken place in the development of medical schools and licensure exam processes across the African continent. Still, little attention has been paid to education that enables the multidisciplinary, critical thinking needed to understand and help shape the larger social systems in which health care is delivered. Although more than half of medical schools in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States offer at least one medical humanities course, this is less common in Africa. We report on the “liberal arts approach” to medical curricula undertaken by the University of Global Health Equity beginning in 2019. The first six-month semester of the curriculum, called Foundations in Social Medicine, includes courses in critical thinking and communication, African history and global political economy, medical anthropology and social medicine, psychology and health, gender and social justice, information technology and health, and community-based training. Additionally, an inquiry-based pedagogy with relatively small classes is featured within an overall institutional culture that emphasizes health equity. We identify key competencies for physicians interested in pursuing global health equity and how such competencies relate to liberal arts integration into the African medical school curriculum and pedagogical approach. We conclude with a call for a research agenda that can better evaluate the impact of such innovations on physicians’ education and subsequent practices.

Matsotsi: The Migrant Detective and the Postcolonial State

AbstractRecent work on crime fiction has highlighted the genre’s increasingly transnational focus and the growing number of migrant detectives. Matsotsi, a little-known Nyanja text published in Zambia in the early 1960s, provides a much earlier example of this figure in Sergeant Balala, an Angolan detective fighting to contain the tsotsi menace in Johannesburg, South Africa. Matsotsi, however, does more than point to cross-border detection as a means of elucidating transnational relationships. Shonga and Zulu’s text manipulates the genres of the detective novel and the bildungsroman to tell a story about the relationships among the individual, the state, and the wider region at a key moment in southern African history, when Zambia and Malawi were on the cusp of independence. Although African language writing has often been considered too localized to be used for nationalist purposes, here it is mobilized for the purpose of state-making in a transnational context.

AN EXPLORATORY INVESTIGATION OF THE MOTIVATIONS OF VISITORS TO A NATIONAL HERITAGE SITE IN SOUTH AFRICA

Visitor motivations and behaviour are important aspects to consider for ensuring effective marketing and for providing satisfactory visitor experiences, as this could contribute to the sustainability of cultural heritage sites. The Voortrekker Monument and Heritage Site represents a significant part of South African history and attracts around 250 000 visitors per year. Some research on visitor motivations has been undertaken, but very little is known about the visitor motivations and behaviour associated with an urban cultural heritage site such as this attraction. This study seeks to investigate the motivations of visitors to the Voortrekker Monument and Heritage Site in order to determine the demand-side drivers for visitation. A hybrid survey method was used to collect data – both online (due to Covid-19 restrictions) and on site – by means of self-completion questionnaires. A total of 292 responses were received. An exploratory factor analysis reduced the data to four primary motivational factors, namely site features, education, hedonism, and convenience and novelty. This calls for further research and investigation, since the core offering of the site is cultural heritage, which does not seem to be the main motivator for visitation. Should cultural heritage sites in South Africa diversify their offerings too rigorously and not manage them sustainably, it could pose a threat to their authenticity and significance.

Frederik W. de Klerk: Presidential Years in the International Arena

Abstract In South Africa's history, Frederik W. de Klerk has left numerous bookmarks. During his presidency (1989-1994), notable ones relate to his handling of foreign affairs. When he became president, he was a novice in this field. His reputation at home was initially built on conservative values. When he succeeded Pieter W. Botha in August 1985, South Africa was internationally isolated and internally in disarray. The date 2 February 1990, when he released Nelson Mandela from prison and unbanned the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), will forever be associated with an acclaimed and courageous political quantum leap. Soon afterwards, on 21 March 1990, he transferred South Africa's control and administration of Namibia to its first president. De Klerk dealt with two crucial issues head-on. First, he returned the military to true and proper civilian control. His decision to destroy South Africa's nuclear arsenal led to the signing of the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty in July 1991. By engaging in personal diplomacy, he forged remarkable relationships with President George H. W. Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who, together with other world leaders, recognized that De Klerk was determined to repair South Africa's disastrous foreign relations. He evaluated the events in Eastern Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and demise of the Soviet Union in their proper context. In December 1993, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela. Up to now De Klerk legacy in the realm of international relations have not been properly explored.

An Afro-Christian contextual analysis of presidential pardon in post-colonial African politics

Presidential or royal pardon is an age-long practice in precolonial Africa as well as in biblical times. This practice has never been without criticisms because of how, and on whom the pardon is granted. The trial of Jesus has been vastly studied within an African theo-interpretive model. However, the demand for the release of Barabbas rather than Jesus has not been adequately studied in a contextual or comparative theo-political manner in Africa. This is the thrust of this article. Using the desktop method, the article argues that presidential pardon granted to convicted criminals who are not allowed to serve judicial punishment is a stimulant for inveterate corruption in the polity. The theoretical argument of this article is that many African political leaders often resort to this kind of pardon that has adversely affected the polity. The significance of this is that this behaviour emboldens political leaders to continue to corrupt the system with dire consequences for the people.

Electoral Integrity and Quality of Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Case of Mozambique

This article comes about with the objective of analyzing the electoral integrity and the quality of democracy in sub-Saharan Africa, considering the case of Mozambique. The main argument that guides this article is that, in the case of Mozambique, electoral cycles are characterized by problems of electoral integrity, more due to the political centralism adopted by the ruling party, Frelimo. To support this argument, can be advanced a premise according to which the political centralism adopted by Frelimo was inherited from the colony, from the militarism of the struggles for independence and perfected in the socialist period. From a qualitative and multidisciplinary approach centered on African history and political science, this article concludes that, although Mozambique is formally a democratic country, its political practices denote that it is a country with problems of electoral integrity.

Must Dias fall? The politics and history of settler heritage in Southern Africa

ABSTRACT In the aftermath of the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ Movement and the ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests, the politics of heritage has been at the centre of new intellectual debates and political demands, especially in relation to the status of problematic historical monuments. This article examines a form of colonial heritage that has remained politically uncontested as well as unexplored in the specialised literature, i.e. monuments memorialising early modern European sea voyages, in particular those pertaining to Bartolomeu Dias, credited as the first European navigator to successfully complete the maritime route to India, through the Western Cape. The article suggests that Dias can be productively seen not only as a symbol of pre-apartheid European colonisation, but more importantly as part of apartheid’s broader settler colonial narrative of Southern African history. Drawing on the example of monuments exchanged between Lisbon and Pretoria in the early 1960s, the article argues that settler heritage making played into white South African narratives of European settler ‘pioneerism’, but also served to cement politico-diplomatic solidarity and friendship between white-ruled states in Southern Africa. By unveiling the politics and history of settler heritage in South Africa, the article hopes to convince its readers that Dias, too, must fall.

Dismantling Curricular Statues: Critically Examining Anti-Black Racism in Representations of Ancient Africa in Canadian Textbooks

Although Canada is portrayed as a benevolent multicultural society, the experiences of many of its racialized peoples point to the ongoing realities of racism. Research demonstrates that schools are central to perpetuating racism, in part through a prioritization of white Eurocentric curricula. But how might ancient history curricula specifically contribute to racism? In this article, we interrogate representations of ancient African societies as presented in three secondary school world history textbooks from Quebec and Manitoba and consider the mechanisms of anti-black racism at work. By using Fairclough’s (2003) approach to critical discourse analysis, we offer insights about how ancient history curricula do little to address the persistence of anti-black racism. Our analysis finds a continued valorisation of white Western civilizations at the expense of ancient African histories and Black peoples more generally. Further, we demonstrate how ancient history textbooks perpetuate specific anti-black discourses such as Black primitivity and an overemphasis on Black labour.

The technological landscape of human and animal transportation: Cases from Northern Nigeria and Southern Côte d’Ivoire

This paper sheds light on a West African technological landscape of the early twentieth century that transcended the boundaries of various West African population groups and natural environments. The conceptual framework of technological landscape employed in this study serves to explore the everyday spaces and details of trade and transport activities of merchants from Northern Nigeria, as well as the engagement of forest dwellers in Côte d’Ivoire in the trade of gold and other natural resources they cultivated, harvested and produced in the forest. Building on archival materials from Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, the paper considers various historical actors who have often been neglected in history of technology narratives but who are certainly relevant in West African (transport) history.

The Eastern Cape and East London: African Protest and the Historical Context of Bloody Sunday 1952

This concluding overview explores themes which provide background to the four articles in the part special issue on popular protest in the Eastern Cape, with a special focus on East London. As these articles demonstrate, East London became the site of some of the most explosive urban popular protest in South Africa from 1950 to 1952. First, we discuss distinctive features of Eastern Cape African history over the long term. Society in the Eastern Cape was shaped by a particularly violent and protracted colonial conquest, lasting a century, but also by an early and widely dispersed missionary presence and relatively incorporative franchise system. Both left deep legacies. Second, we focus on East London, and some social characteristics that underlay the protests of the 1950s. Despite control by an anglophone white elite, the City Council was strongly committed to segregation and conditions in the ‘locations’ were among the worst in South Africa. This helped to radicalise African urban communities who also united to a degree behind Africanist, rather than class or worker-based, ideas and rhetoric. Third, we discuss participation by women in movements of popular protest in the Eastern Cape, focusing on both rural and urban contexts. Women were deeply engaged in two periods of militant mobilisation in East London: from 1929 to 1931, led by the Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (IICU) and 1950 to 1952, led by the ANC Youth League. The relationship between political radicalism and spiritual renewal is also briefly discussed. This overview suggests that all three of these historical processes shaped the ideas, patterns, and radicalism of popular protest in early 1950s East London.

Whose city? (De)colonising the bodies of speculative fiction in Lauren Beukes's Zoo City

This article explores the (de)colonisation of the body and body boundaries in contemporary South African speculative fiction, paying particular attention to award-wining author, Lauren Beukes's, second novel, Zoo City (2010). I will apply Lara Cox's (2018:317) argument that 'Haraway's cyborg resembles the liminal view of identity presented by queer theory, which seeks to blur strict divisions between sexual and gender categories, dissolving binary oppositions such as woman/man and heterosexual/homosexual', to my reading of Zoo City. By centring the novel around Zinzi December, a resident of 'Zoo City' (the marginalised underbelly of Johannesburg), and situating the novel in the cradle of humankind, Beukes reacts against South Africa's colonial history and its colonisation of the body by blurring the animal-human boundary and challenging the colonial construct of body binaries. The novel can be read as a decolonial feminist text as it re-writes South Africa's apartheid history and critiques its division, separation and bodily segregation. Furthermore, I explore how fictional bodies are imagined and constructed in the text; I ask what kinds of boundary-breaking bodies predominate; and consider their thematic, narrative, and political significance in the postapartheid imaginary in relation to speculative fiction. I examine how new boundaries (particularly between 'normative' society and 'Zoo City') are formulated. Zoo City pulls into focus Kristeva's (1982) notion of the abject body as a central to its concerns, while also bringing attention to Foucault's (1992) notion of the 'disciplined' body. It foregrounds questions about the formulation and destabilisation of identity, with a particular focus on the construction of female identity. This article builds on the critical literature on the dystopian post-apartheid state by examining Zoo City's depictions of marginalised people and its construction of the body and body boundaries, as well as by extending the examination of representations of the body in speculative fiction.

The place of the Bulhoek massacre in South African history

24 May 2021 marked the centenary of the Bulhoek massacre in which government police and soldiers killed about 200 members of an Eastern Cape religious group called the Israelites who had been called by their prophet, Enoch Mgijima, to prepare for the end of the world. This essay examines Mgijima’s life, his apocalyptic visions, his call in 1919 to his followers to come to a holy village, Ntabelanga, near Queenstown, and their clashes and negotiations with government officials over their right to occupy land. It discusses the government decision to use armed force to expel the Israelites and what happened on 24 May 1921. Finally, it draws a comparison with a United States (US) massacre in May 1921 in which white vigilantes attacked a black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma.Contribution: This essay narrates how the Bulhoek massacre resulted from a century of white land conquest and dispossession and some Africans turning to apocalyptic visions to understand their plight. Since then, the South African state has used force on numerous occasions to suppress both black and white dissidents. This essay draws a transnational parallel with the commemoration of another white massacre of blacks that also took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the US in May 1921.

Holocaust refugees’ experiences in, out of and nowhere in Africa

ABSTRACT Eppelsheimer’s article examines Holocaust refugees’ experiences in colonial Kenya. It draws attention to the autobiographical novels of German Jewish author Stefanie Zweig, as well as testimonies and memoirs of former Holocaust refugees who had fled to Kenya, and asks if and how refugees’ own experiences of racial persecution informed their responses to colonial racism. This article illustrates how Zweig responded in aesthetic terms to her experience in colonial spaces. It does so by examining autobiographical aspects of Zweig’s writings, highlighting the author’s upbringing in multiple cultures, literary traditions and languages, and discussing Zweig’s novels in the contexts of white British settler writing about Kenya, as well as the German ‘Africa-novel’­—both of which have shaped the images and perspectives of Kenya among millions of readers. It examines such European colonialist perspectives and discourses in literary texts as well as testimonies. In so doing, it questions whether a text like Nowhere in Africa, which is about the experiences of a German Jewish refugee family in Kenya, contributes to the silencing of African voices and the obscuring of African history by colonial historiography and literature.

Africa Commons: History and Culture

Africa Commons: History and Culture refers to one of the four modules in the African Commons database. The History and Culture resource (i.e., module) covers the cultures and history of Africa and offers the user more than 400,000 documents, including periodicals, books, images, and multimedia, ranging in date from the eleventh century to the present. The content is drawn from numerous institutions (e.g., universities and colleges, libraries, museums, corporations, governments) and countries (mostly in Africa) and covers almost 150 separate topics. As with other databases that provide images of original, historical documents, the readability of the materials available here can vary. Some are notably faded and therefore not easily read, though doing so is certainly not impossible. How exactly to navigate, enlarge, and reduce documents varies somewhat, as they are drawn from different online sources, but can usually be done without difficulty. Database content can be browsed and/or searched for by Title or Author or in the Summary, Full Text, or All Fields. However, searches by Title or in the Summary can often produce limited results, while those in Full Text or All Fields are far more productive. Even though the Search and Browse options are understandable and frequently produce useful content, it can be difficult to determine how relevant the search results are to the query submitted because the titles are generally not descriptive and summaries lack detail. Pricing is determined by the type and size of an institution, and consortia discounts are available. The content is in many ways exceptional, given its great breadth and depth, so it will be very useful to students and researchers of African history and culture, despite the difficulties mentioned above. While the licensing agreement for this database is too long and detailed, its provisions are average and give little reason for concern.

The influence of ujamaa policy in realization of developmental social work in Tanzania – Ubuntu perspective

The study applied desk research method to analyse literatures to gain a broader perspective on the influence of Ujamaa policy in developmental social work; it was developed by the late Dr. Nyerere’s in post-colonial Tanzania in the process of decolonization and restore development approach relevant to African context. Review shows that Ujamaa became the social development model (Developmental social welfare or the developmental approach) with a broad approach that promoted collective and holistic well-being of a nation. Ujamaa embraced values that entail African history, cultural values and ecology, applicability of Ujamaa policy marked the essence and applicability of developmental social work in Africa. Despite of various challenges, Ujamaa succeeded to achieve collective development through strengthening people and their communities’ livelihood capabilities, ameliorate social and economic problems. The model integrated families, kinships and groups into community participation and empowerment to achieve collective development in human face. Ujamaa’s principle of universal welfare, communalism, interdependence, shared resources, human dignity and participatory development, is widely studied in the world today. Based on the success of Ujamaa model, in October 2009 the UN General Assembly named Dr. Nyerere ‘a World hero of social justice’ and August 2014 he was awarded as Ubuntu Champion by the National Heritage Council of South Africa for his practical contribution in African Ubuntu. Conclusively, application of Ujamaa model in realization of SDGs by 2030 is vital. It’s recommended for social workers to demonstrate how developmental social work could contribute to building a better Africa and a better world.How to cite this article using ASWNet styleLembuka M. H. (2023). The influence of ujamaa policy in realization of developmental social work in Tanzania – Ubuntu perspective. People centred – The Journal of Development Administration (JDA), 8(3), 83-90. https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/jda.v8i3.5
 Visit journal website: https://jda.africasocialwork.net

Afrocentric Study of Black Female Identity in Alice Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness

African American playwrights always tend to manifest their African heritage and culture (Afrocentrism) through their plays. In other words, Afrocentrism means African centered-ness. Afrocentrism or Afrocentricity basically focuses on Africans and places African history, heritage and culture at the heart of any analysis. One of the Afrocentric writers is Alice Childress whose texts generally center on the devastating effects of racial discrimination, sexism and classism on women of colour.
 This study is principally concerned with the one-act play of Alice Childress, Wine in the Wilderness, which was written in 1964 and was first performed in 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, as part of the series, “On Being Black”. In Wine in the Wilderness, Childress is bound by history and tradition since several references can be found in the play that considers Africa as a homeland and wellspring of strength. This paper investigates some questions such as: how does Alice Childress employ the Afrocentric value in the play? What is the purpose of Afrocentrism in the play? Who best represents Afrocentrism throughout the play? This paper delineates that Tommy, as an undereducated heroine and as a true Afrocentrist female in the play, is proud of her black culture and her blackness.

African History and Meleko Mokgosi: Your Trip to Africa

Abstract This article argues that the group of paintings entitled Your Trip to Africa, by US-based Botswanan visual artist Meleko Mokgosi, advocate for a clearer, more realistic encounter with Africa and its people. The paintings, motivated by Peter Kubelka’s 1966 experimental film documenting a hunting party in Sudan (Our Trip to Africa), admonish the viewer to pay attention not just to what they see but to how they see. This admonition is an important reminder for African historians as well. We should beware of the pitfalls of writing the history of Africa through a racialized discourse, fashioned in the West, that ignores or distorts experiences and subjectivities of the dark-skinned Africans that, necessarily, precede any racialized discourse. Just as important, Mokgosi reminds us that in representing African history we should be wary of essentializing or aestheticizing Africans to confirm our preconceived notions of their lives and histories: Africans should not be made instruments to serve historical narratives that reinforce our own ways of looking. Ultimately, Mokgosi’s paintings remind us of the artifice underlying any effort to portray the reality of Africans, and their history.

An Overview of the Benefit of Archaeology to the Study of African History

Every place around the world has a past. Effort has been made to improve the method of historical studies and research in an effort to better understand the past events, culture, people, places, traditions, values etc. The quest to acquire all these knowledge berried in the distant past is critical to academic excellence not just history as a discipline. Archaeology involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Africa has the longest record of human habitation in the world. The first humans emerged 6-7 million years ago, and among the earliest anatomically modern human skulls found so far were discovered at Omo Kibish, Jebel Irhoud, and Florisbad. However, Africa has the larger part of its past unwritten because of lack of writing knowledge, hence, the critical role of archaeology to supplement oral traditions which modern African historians relied heavily on. This research aim to explicitly detail the benefit of archaeology to the study and understanding of African history, it reveals how archaeology could further aid in debunking Eurocentric views of Africa lacking history and also emphasized the role archaeology could play in helping history students understand the past.

Eunuchs and the Practice of Power in the Early Songhay Empire

Abstract Eunuchs were central to court life in many parts of precolonial West Africa, nowhere more than the Songhay Empire. This article argues that eunuchs were institutionalized there by the askia Muḥammad I in the late 1490s as part of his broader project of Islamic legitimation. Eunuchs, who served many practical functions, were also symbols of imperial splendor, placing the Songhay court on the same footing as its peers elsewhere in the Dār al-Islām. Once implanted in Songhay, the eunuch institution would develop a life of its own, culminating in the empire's legendary 4,000-strong eunuch cavalry in the 1580s. Yet until now, the traditional chronicle sources of imperial West African history—the Tārīkh al-Sūdān and the Tārīkh al-fattāsh—have not been read for what they can tell us about this understudied institution, one that significantly affected the construction of gender and authority in the region.