Scramble For Africa Research Articles

‘The Happy Valley’: Temporalized Spatiality in Michael Radford’s White Mischief (1987)

ABSTRACT Contemporary times mark a fundamental shift in our sense and experience of the world. The postmodern condition — as remarked by Fredric Jameson (1991) and Jean-Francois Lyotard (1979), among others — calls for new conceptions of lived reality. Nevertheless, profound uneasiness with notions of space and time is not only a postmodernist obsession. Modernist cinema, on account of its aesthetic self-reflexivity, also grapples with ways of inscribing spatiality and temporality. The 1980s saw a resurgence of European heritage films, reminiscent of interwar years of empire (early 1920s–late 1930s), produced in Kenya. Out of Africa (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1985), White Mischief (dir. Michael Radford, 1987), and The Kitchen Toto (dir. Harry Hook, 1988) became global audience staples. Not only do these films perpetuate Western viewers’ ‘master-race’ instincts; they also reproduce ‘cult images’ of an ‘exotic’ African locale. This paper phenomenologically reflects on White Mischief’s nostalgic reconstruction of a colonial settler village, the Happy Valley, and its ultra-privileged white hedonists. It explores how materiality of physical space can aid re-inscription of time and vice versa. Turning the colonial gaze upon itself, in critical self-reflection, my analysis foregrounds profound ruptures, discontinuities and contradictions in the historical fact and experience of European colonialism in Africa.

‘Know the Game—Boxing’: Boxing in Colonial Kenya, 1895–1963

The history of organized boxing in colonial Kenya is complicated. The complexity stems from multiple facets undergirding colonialism. Until the last decade of British colonial rule in Kenya (1953–1963), organized boxing belonged to a tiny cadre of opulent white settlers in the colony. It became a sport for Blacks in the mid-1950s, especially impecunious Africans who appeared to colonial officials as lacking the qualities constituting morally acceptable citizens. This observation challenges the insinuation that British colonizers—administrators, missionaries, and settlers—introduced organized boxing in colonial Kenya exclusively for the indigenous people. This essay historicizes boxing in colonial Kenya (1895–1963). It is a socio-cultural history that grounds boxing within the broader history of colonization and contributes to the general history of sports and imperialism in Africa. The dynamics of class, race, citizenship, gender, power, and masculinity flow through the essay. Boxing in colonial Kenya is undocumented and undertheorized. The present work attempts to break this circle.

Lacey Sparks. Women and the Rise of Nutrition Science in Interwar Britain and British Africa Britain and the World. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Pp. 206. $119.00 (cloth).

Lacey Sparks. Women and the Rise of Nutrition Science in Interwar Britain and British Africa Britain and the World. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Pp. 206. $119.00 (cloth).

Asymmetries, Heiren Discourses, and the Geopolitics of Studying Race in Africa–China Relations

Asymmetries, Heiren Discourses, and the Geopolitics of Studying Race in Africa–China Relations

The ‘full-flowing stomach’: unwholesome food, climate, and colonialism in King Lear and Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive

Abstract This article considers Kristian Levring’s 2000 film The King is Alive from a radically open historicist methodology, analysing the film as a product of multiple interleaved archives. An adaptation of King Lear, the film’s relevant archive includes documents from the English Renaissance like the early modern recipe books and seventeenth-century medical treatises that this article uncovers. Yet because The King is Alive was filmed in an abandoned German mining colony in the Namib desert, the archive must also include accounts of the colonialist ‘Scramble for Africa’ more than two centuries after King Lear was written. The methodological deftness of history-as-adaptation allows us to see the film’s anxieties about food that rest at the nexus of these two archives. Shakespeare’s play worries about liminal foods—species-specific foods, foods that fail to nourish, and foods that become poison—but the film updates these concerns to implicate Western imperialism and global capitalism. Surrounded (and, in one instance, killed) by potentially botulistic cans of carrots that remain after the German occupation, the characters in the film must grapple with the toxic leftovers of colonialism, including Shakespeare’s playtext. The film thus asks its audience to consider further archives related to the imperialist roots of the invention of canning, the discovery of vitamins, and the export of Shakespeare as a ‘civilizing’ figure. Finally, the film gestures to the foodway challenges exacerbated by both capitalism and climate change, becoming a palimpsest of archives from across multiple temporalities: a Shakespearean past, a colonialist present, and a warming future.

The Blood Brotherhood and Colonial Treaties and Alliances: Between Myth and Reality

Abstract This article examines the representation and use of the blood exchange between European expeditionary leaders, that worked in the service of king Leopold II, and African rulers in Central and East Africa during the late nineteenth century. While the blood brotherhood played a role in the appeasement of African rulers and the conclusion of treaties, the details and origins of the procedure are often unclear. Europeans believed that the blood brotherhood was an African legal custom, even though recent anthropological studies suggest it differed from the inter-African version of the blood brotherhood. Europeans styled the blood brotherhood as the African counterpart to the European treaty, which served to support the legality of the much-contested treaties that Leopold II’s representatives had concluded, often under dubious circumstances. While the blood brotherhood therefore functioned as a practical tool to establish European influence and sovereignty over African rulers, it was also as a means of glorifying the white European explorer as a pseudo-scientist and well-meaning broker of peace. This article complicates the traditional narrative of how treaties were concluded during the Scramble for Africa and highlights the need for a critical re-examination of the legal practices and representations of colonialism.

Dragon Ships to the Dawnland: Eugène Beauvois and the Vinland Viking Expeditions in the Nineteenth-Century Settler Imagination

Abstract Between the mid-1700s and the Great War, people in Europe and North America were gripped by a frenzy of enthusiasm for all things Viking. Eminent scholars and ordinary readers discovered an insatiable curiosity for medieval Scandinavia, imagined land of dragon-prowed ships and saga heroes. Among these enthusiasts was the prolific French historian Pierre-Eugène Beauvois (1835–1912). Beauvois was fascinated by the Norse voyages to continental North America, known in Old Norse as “Vinland.” By arguing for extensive pre-Columbian European settlement in the Americas, Beauvois stole the glory enjoyed by Spain and Italy as the first “discoverers” of the “New World,” shifting it to Norse populations that Beauvois linked to France. Such a vindication of early voyages by ethnic “cousins” of the French presented France as genetically destined to colonize foreign lands, thus legitimating their conquest of Africa. Yet Beauvois’s arguments extended beyond simply positing a meaningful Norse presence in medieval North America. He maintained that Indigenous culture was really just a watered-down residue of transplanted European culture. By asserting that central components of Indigenous cultures such as language and religion derived from medieval European models, Beauvois usurped Native positionalities and affirmed the rightness of the settler colonial project.

Endogenous Colonial Borders: Precolonial States and Geography in the Partition of Africa

We revise the conventional wisdom that Africa’s international borders were drawn arbitrarily. Europeans knew very little about most of Africa in the mid-1880s, but their self-interested goals of amassing territory prompted intensive examination of on-the-ground conditions as they formed borders. Europeans negotiated with African rulers to secure treaties and to learn about historical state frontiers, which enabled Africans to influence the border-formation process. Major water bodies, which shaped precolonial civilizations and trade, also served as focal points. We find support for these new theoretical implications using two original datasets. Quantitatively, we analyze border-location correlates using grid cells and an original spatial dataset on precolonial states. Qualitatively, we compiled information from treaties and diplomatic histories to code causal process observations for every bilateral border. Historical political frontiers directly affected 62% of all bilateral borders. Water bodies, often major ones, comprised the primary border feature much more frequently than straight lines.

Beyond Nation and Empire? Questioning the Role of Religious Missions under Portuguese Colonial Rule at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

From the beginning of European overseas expansion in the fifteenth century, religious missions occupied an important place in the internal organisation of colonial empires. Their contribution to the ideological structuring of imperialism and the interaction with local populations is undeniable. With the emergence of the new imperialism and the scramble for Africa (after the 1870s), the missions, often anticipating the colonial political and administrative presence, enhanced their role as advocates of Europe’s “civilising mission”, above all through the education of the colonised peoples. For Portuguese decision-makers, the religious missions, with a multi-century tradition, had an important role in defending territorial claims overseas and promoting the empire’s nationalisation. However, the lack of national missionaries, Christianity’s inter-confessional competition in the nineteenth century and the emergence of international legal rules protecting missionary activities hindered Portugal’s strategies. Using sources from several archives (in Lisbon, the Vatican, and elsewhere) to emphasise the role of a transnational missionary staff and the international law of missions, this text intersects these aspects, examining their convergence in the controversial case of the exit and replacement of Jesuit missionaries in Mozambique in 1910–1911, to demonstrate the need to look at the missionary issues in the Portuguese overseas domains from perspectives that go beyond nation and empire.

Tuning systems and european colonialism in Africa.

Tuning systems and european colonialism in Africa.

The New Scramble for Africa

Abstract The relationship between Africa and the developed world has been a subject of much discussion over the years. Recently, however, there has been a lot of controversy around China’s activities in Africa. Several criticisms have arisen alleging the exploitation of Africa by China. This study set out to examine China’s activities on the African continent with a focus on Ghana and Ethiopia to clearly reveal the various sides of the argument and put them into perspective. The study also sought to establish whether a new scramble is occurring in Africa, with neocolonialist strategies. The study relied on the realist theory to understand China’s intentions regarding its activities on the continent and on neocolonialism to explore any incidence of a new scramble. Secondary sources were employed to collect data for analysis. The study found that although some of the activities of China on the continent were questionable, they have been partially beneficial to the continent. Africa is not as vulnerable as perceived but has the capacity to leverage some of its resources to foster its development.

Diamonds, risk and insurance practices in British Africa, with an emphasis on the Gold Coast and Tanganyika

ABSTRACT The literature on diamond mining in colonial Africa has focused more on labour, production and cartel-style price fixing than on how theft threatened the wealth generated from this industry. To mediate diamond loss, companies subscribed to financial insurance. This article introduces security-as-insurance to complement the received meaning of (financial) insurance and invites scholars to see security-as-insurance, risk, and value as interlocked. Drawing on sources from Ghana, Tanzania and Kenya, this article argues that once diamonds were imbued with financial value, the distribution of this value was competed for via claims over diamondiferous lands, diamond stealing, and consequently counter-theft security practices plus trans-empire (financial) insurance intended to protect the stones against risk. Overall, this article historically traces how diamonds gained value in Africa, the competing claims over diamonds following discoveries in commercial quantities, and the insurance practices enforced to protect against losses, particularly via theft in colonial Ghana and Tanzania.

The crisis of French imperialism: debating military coups in Africa

Since 2020, the African continent has witnessed a series of nine successful military coups, prompting the narrative of a ‘return of coups’ and a ‘democracy backslide’. This article argues that this view is flawed: it is based on data that are both superficial and devoid of historical contextualisation. These putsches, instead, signal first and foremost the crisis of French imperialism in Africa, as they have mostly happened in former French colonies. This article also analyses how these coups differ from those of previous decades and from each other in terms of liberation aspirations and how they relate to the phenomenon of ‘choiceless democracies’.

The Margaret Wrong Memorial Fund, Late Colonial Development, and the Prizing of African Literatures, 1950–62

ABSTRACT: As scholars such as Caroline Ritter have recently demonstrated, late colonial development policy exercised significant influence on the print culture infrastructures of decolonizing African nations. The history of the Margaret Wrong Memorial Fund (MWMF) and its literary prize (1950–62) renders visible the influence of the ideology of late colonial development on this emergent field: while the positioning of language in the field was bound up in the metropolitan conferral of literary legitimacy on European languages (and, conversely, in African struggles to confer the same legitimacy on African vernaculars), the positioning of language in the surrounding field of power formed the site of a different kind of struggle regarding late colonial development in British Africa. Those members of the MWMF administrative committee who advocated after 1949 and through the 1950s for the inclusion of African vernaculars were appealing to the early twentieth-century ideology of Phelps-Stokeism, a theory of differentiated education for Africans that was based on a Social Darwinist assumption of racial inferiority. Associated with Wrong’s interwar and wartime work for the International Committee on Christian Literature for Africa and particularly with the late colonial development impulses of this work, the Phelps-Stokeist rationale for legitimizing African languages does not always line up neatly with African nationalist and anticolonial motivations for supporting vernaculars. The influence of late colonial development on the emergence of the postcolonial field of cultural production matters: the history of this field must be tracked via the metropolitan (British) welfare state and the emergent postwar development paradigm, both of which shaped debates about language, for instance, that have long been attributed to the influence of metropolitan publishers and the African nationalisms of figures such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, among other forces.

Exploring Black Writers’ Literary Strategies for Interdependence and Global Solidarity

This paper seeks to explore the techniques and strategies used by African and Afro-American writers to disseminate a sense of Black interdependence and solidarity on a global level. It will examine how Black authors are unceasingly using a planned strategy in their literary works to encourage Black people to envision a sustainable future for themselves. We contend that Black authors and critics are incessantly using the literary medium to inspire Black audiences to self-heal themselves from the trauma associated with European colonization of Africa in the bygone days and this issue is yet to receive a noteworthy observation in the literary field. Hence, this paper will examine various dimensions associated with the Black literary genre to explore more about the philosophies and strategies imbibed by Black writers to encourage their people to self-heal from their past while comprehending the significance of mutual interconnectedness. The select works this paper seeks to study comparatively are Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (2010), Alice Walker’s epistolary novel The Color Purple (2014), Rivers Solomon with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes’s fantasy fiction The Deep (2020), and Nnedi Okorafor’s science fiction Lagoon (2014). The frameworks used for this study are Postcolonialism, Africanfuturism, Afrofuturism, and African feminism which are treated as the vantage ground for this reading.

Mother-Tongue Biblical Hermeneutics and the Pursuit of Ethnic Harmony in Ghana

Ethnic disharmony exists among the people of Ghana. What are the reasons for this? Ghana is an amalgamation of different ethnic groups, cultures, peoples and states to form one entity. The partition of Africa is mainly responsible for this, though there are other contributing factors. The project to partition Africa led, in large measure, to the erosion of the African identity. The 19th- and 20th-century European Christian mission to southern West Africa exploited this reality to their mission advantage. Unfortunately, the result seems to be counterproductive because the mission project, for the most part, produced a version of Christianity that failed to affirm the African identity. Concerned Africans, now on a mission to deconstruct the imperialist, European mission-constructed West African Christian identity, realise that biblical interpretation is one major source of this decolonial agenda. How does a mother-tongue reading of Ephesians 2 help decolonise Eυe Christianity and promote ethnic harmony in Ghana? Using mother-tongue biblical hermeneutics, this paper argues that the pursuit of ethnic harmony in Ghana is a decolonial hermeneutic with potential for fostering ethnic harmony in Ghana.

The Role of the Church in Iwhuruoha Development

Nigeria like other post-colonial states in Africa greatly suffered and suffocated from the pacification spree of colonialism. It was a most dreadful brutality which distorted and greatly disorganized the cultural bond of the people. All these were systematically orchestrated to achieve an economic objective. In fact, those who set out for colonialist imperialism in Africa and indeed Nigeria, were not engaged in an act of civilization nor the spread of enlightenment spirit. One of the lasting legacies of colonialism in Nigeria is the church. It was the handmaiden of colonialism that softened the mind of the people to embrace the values and ethos of capitalist imperialism. The spread of this consciousness was facilitated by western education. Education became a tool to enter and embrace the world of ‘civilization’. This study seeks to examine the role of the church in Nigeria, particularly in Iwhuruohna. It is a qualitative study and data collection relied solely on secondary sources. These include a review of existing literature, journals, magazines and visit to some research institutes like the Centre for Black and African Arts and Culture in Lagos and Claude Ake School of Government in University of Port Harcourt, Choba. It was discovered that contrary to ex isting position, the church has played significant roles in Nigeria and Iwhuruohna, especially in the production of human capital that have immensely facilitated, the development agenda in Iwhuruohna Ethnicity Nationality (IEN). Rt. Rev. V.A. Ogbonna, Bishop of Ikwerre Diocese of the Christ Army Church is one of such products of the church. We, therefore recommend that men like Bishop Ogbonna whose virtues served as building blocks for the development of their area should be emulated and cherished at all times.

Paper vis-à-vis Ground Marking

Cartography played a crucial role during the partitioning of Africa. Territorial boundaries were marked on maps by the colonial powers. However, in some cases, maps were not precise regarding the sites they referred to. Some colonial powers changed original maps by shifting their territorial limits, thus staking a claim to other powers’ territories. In areas where territorial questions from maps had not been sufficiently addressed during the colonial period, the distorted maps became a primary source of border disputes in the post-colonial period. The paper is built on the premise that the cartographic foundation of the Malawi-Tanzania border is knotty. Consequently, Malawi and Tanzania inherited contradictory cartography, each state selecting maps that suits her interests to defend her sovereign limits. Indeed, this has stoked the dispute that has dawdled for decades since independence.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Global Sociology and the Anti-racist Struggle for Democracy in Cuba (1931–1941)

AbstractDuring the 1930s and 1940s, W. E. B. Du Bois was not only interested in European colonialism in Africa, but he also approached the racial situation in the Americas, particularly Haiti, Brazil, and Cuba. In this article, I examine how Du Bois engaged strategically in a critique of racism in Cuba and the United States. I analyze how Du Bois discussed the Cuban color line as linked to colonial dispossession and explore the formation of the anti-colonial critique within global sociology. Du Bois’s letters, manuscripts, and field notes during his first visit to Cuba in 1941 reveal how, to a large extent, Du Bois shared the prevailing vision of Cuba as a society free from racism. Although Du Bois only partially captured how racism worked in Cuba, he constantly affirmed how the analysis of the Cuban color line implies dealing with the analysis of American imperialism. Thus, Du Bois’s approach to Cuba was fundamental in two senses. First, it led him to consider the contradictions between cultural integration and social and economic equality in a setting other than the United States. Second, Du Bois developed the fundamental place assigned to the critique of U.S. imperialism within global sociology. At the same time, Du Bois’s connection with Cuba elaborates the understanding of Du Bois’s global sociology.

The Camera and the Railway: Framing the Portuguese Empire and Technological Landscapes in Angola and Mozambique, 1880s-1910s.

Starting in the 1880s, Portugal invested in constructing railways in its African colonies, Angola and Mozambique. The aim was both to solidify Portuguese presence in territories disputed by other imperial nations and to facilitate exploration of the resources that imperial policymakers assumed existed in the colonial hinterland. To promote the perception that Portugal was an imperial nation, hundreds of photographs recorded the construction, inauguration, and operation of these new railways. Using a semiotics approach, this article analyzes photographs from various sources in Portugal to show how they helped create a novel technological landscape, underscoring the domestication of the territory and the civilization of its inhabitants by European rule, thus promoting it as a land of opportunity for European settlers. This focus adds to the debate claiming that photography was a crucial tool of empire serving European colonialism and imperialism in Africa.