Pre-colonial Setting Research Articles

Prelude to Colonialism

This study is a portrayal of Moroccan Muslims and Jews by European travellers, journalists, experts and diplomats from the latter half of the nineteenth century until the transformation of Morocco in 1912 into a colonial entity under French and Spanish protectorates. In this pre-colonial setting, we catch a glimpse of a traditional society and its gradual, albeit partial, evolution towards modernity among the Jews as well as an understanding of Europe’s economic, political and cultural penetration into the Sharifian Empire, which for hundreds of years preserved its independence when many Islamic societies capitulated to foreign domination. What were the major challenges confronted by Morocco in the pre-colonial era? Did Muslims and Jews conform to or reject modernisation brought by European culture? What were the socioeconomic conditions and the juridical status of the Jews vis-à-vis the Muslim majority? These are some of the main concerns of our investigation.

Editors' Note

Editors' Note

See No Evil Write No Evil: Sexual Deviance In African Literature During Colonialism

This paper argues that writers of African literature during colonialism differed in their portrayal of sexuality, particularly that which was considered deviant by nature, because of their need to build an ‘upright’ African image, no matter how artificial this was. The paper looks at how the political environment dictated sexual expression amongst characters and that the urban setting was more candid in its narrative style. There was also a total blackout on homosexuality between characters and where this took place, it was presented as something that was alien to the African culture in general and to the personality in particular. Writers who depicted pre-colonial settings limited sexuality to procreation and as a comment to the African’s link with the ancestors. There is also a correlation between the geographic location of texts and the degree of sexual expression that the writer engages in. As such the paper argues that sexual deviance is depicted as a matter of geography over and above thematic concerns.

Female Cleansing of the Community. The Momome Ritual of the Akan World

The paper provides a description of a female ritual aimed at cleansing the community in moments of impending crisis. The ceremony, known as momome in its Sefwi variant, is discussed by positioning the meaning of the choreographic props used in the performance (dresses, spatial dispositions and movements, chromatic symbolism, metaphoric acts, use of therapeutic herbs, songs) within the wider cultural framework of the Akan world of West Africa. The historical transformations of the ceremonial occurrence in the course of the twentieth century are examined closely to show that even though the performance has—informants claim and pre-colonial sources confirm—not been altered significantly, the timing and motives have. The momome, held in response to wars and epidemics in the pre-colonial setting, in the course of the twentieth century was increasingly evoked in moments of crisis (illness, deposition, death) of prominent figures of the chiefly establishment. The paper evaluates the ideological autonomy of the ceremony—presented by some analysts as a "ritual of inversion"—and comes to the conclusion that institutional politics has had a major influence in promoting and containing the various forms of supernatural protection sought in the course of the twentieth century.

How to Say Things with Guns: Military Technology and the Politics of Robinson Crusoe

How to Say Things with Guns:Military Technology and the Politics of Robinson Crusoe Christopher F. Loar (bio) As for the gun it self, he would not so much as touch it for several days after; but would speak to it, and talk to it, as if it had answer'd him, when he was by himself; which, as I afterwards learn'd of him, was to desire it not to kill him.1 Friday may understand Robinson Crusoe's gun better than Crusoe does. In the scene noted in the epigraph above, although Friday is innocent of the gun's inner workings, he sees something that Crusoe has missed: Crusoe's power to dispense violence, rather than cultural authority or friendship, has started Friday down the path towards civility and virtue. Conversely, Crusoe's disavowal of his own violence reverberates throughout the novel, from his escape from the Barbary captivity to his trip across the Pyrenees at the novel's end. But his disavowal is particularly pronounced in the novel's precolonial settings: Africa and Crusoe's Caribbean island. In the scenes of colonial encounter and technological power, Daniel Defoe uses Crusoe and his gun to explore the operations of violence in politics, as well as the ways in which the ideology of British liberty veils that violence. Crusoe's weapons serve as a figure for the violence and warfare that lurk at the foundational moment of sovereignty as well as of the ideology of liberty that makes sovereignty's violence tolerable. [End Page 1] Though many scholars have noted the prominence of violence in Defoe's Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), identifying the particular significance of that violence has proved elusive. Once considered an exemplification of Lockean theory, the novel has more recently been understood in relation to postcolonial theory or critical race studies.2 This shift in focus is propelled in part by the increasingly visible connections between seventeenth-century political theory and imperial practices. John Locke's Second Treatise, with its defence of labour and enclosure as that which confers ownership of land and property, is highlighted in Britain's defence of its management of colonies and plantations. The connection between contemporary political theory and imperial practice is nowhere clearer than in the novel's setting—the late seventeenth-century Caribbean, where French and British settlers sought to cultivate land that appeared, to their eyes, essentially unused by the inhabitants, the Caribs.3 Thus previous criticism that sought to locate Robinson Crusoe in the tradition of Locke and Hobbes has been confronted by a newer criticism that locates the novel's central problems in the birth of a violent British empire. But few scholars have pointed out the specific ways in which Defoe's first novel connects the violence of its colonial setting with the political controversies in the imperial centre. Among those who have examined the novel's connection of colonial violence and [End Page 2] British politics, Manuel Schonhorn and Carol Kay offer the most provocative accounts. Schonhorn links the novel to a shift in Defoe's political orientation towards sympathy with royalism and sovereignty, seeing the island as an experimental setting for those ideas.4 Kay, on the other hand, sees Defoe's novel as an engagement with the fraught nature of contractual relationships, and downplays the importance of absolute sovereignty on Crusoe's island as simply a brief and transitional phase of political development.5 These approaches both have merit, but neither entirely accounts for the novel's unexpected linkage of violence and technology with scenes of contract and consent in a text that strongly emphasizes the island as a space of cultural and political contact. I will argue that Robinson Crusoe offers a meditation on the scene of colonial encounter and its disturbance of British political thought, and that Crusoe's colonialism stands in a synecdochal relationship to politics more generally. I will examine Defoe's first novel in light of a question posed by Michel Foucault: Are "military institutions, and the practices that surround them—and in more general terms all the techniques that are used to fight a war— ... the nucleus of political institutions?"6...

A Political History of Uganda

An introduction and six chapters, treating: the precolonial setting (1500-1860), the beginning of religio-political polarisation (1860-1900), coalescence and differentiation (1900-1921), the administrative framework (1921-1960), a house divided against itself (1945-1960), and triumph of hope over experience? (1960-1971). 4 Appendices: Documents on Bunyoro's lost countries - Minutes of the 7th conference of the Katikiros and secretaries-general of Uganda and their advisers (Jinja, August 15-17, 1961) - The 18 points given by the Uganda army under Major General AMIN in justification for taking over powers of government on 25th January 1971.