Twentieth-century Africa Research Articles

Afterword

Abstract What is at stake in exploring colonialism and print from the perspective of social history? This collection of articles shows how a social history perspective can tie together people, places, and themes that are often kept separate, opening new avenues of inquiry. As the editors argue in their introduction, by focusing on “the materiality of printing and the ground-level practices and “tactics” of production and circulation,” we can locate “histories of print within the world of comparative social analysis, rather than singularly within book, cultural, or intellectual history.” And, we might add, this in turn enables us to reach a deeper appreciation of the operation of colonial print and print’s place in the history of the modern world. In this short afterword, I would like to pull together some of the themes that stand out for me in this collection, and what they might suggest in terms of ways forward for research. My perspective is as a historian of print culture, and more particularly print media, in twentieth-century Africa.

Motor travel in Mozambique in the late 1920s and conquering space: reading Rufino’s photographic albums

ABSTRACT The rise of the automobile played a significant role in the transformation of how we see and experience landscapes. Likewise, motor cars were key to defining the shape of twentieth-century tourism. In colonial settings, cars can be understood as a technology of speed and power which helped to control people and space. Looking at early twentieth century Africa, this study analyses the arrival of the motor car in Mozambique and the role it played in shaping motorised landscapes and in tourism development. This article looks at a collection of photographic albums depicting the colony of Mozambique. Published in 1929, the volume contains more than 100 photographs that include cars. This article highlights three main narratives: (i) the illusion of ‘motoring landscapes’; (ii) the car’s contribution to the invention of the beach and scenic roads; and (iii) the role of the car in safaris and the domination of nature. These three narratives are aligned with wider official discourses and contribute to the idea of conquering African landscapes, critical both to colonialism as well as to tourism development.

The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean

In this book, Tessa Murphy examines the cultural, political, and economic transformations of “the Creole Archipelago,” an interconnected island grouping composed of Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, and Tobago. Murphy successfully demonstrates how this space evolved into a “center of broader imperial experimentation and contestation” during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (p. 4). However, this is not a story of imperial competition for political and commercial supremacy. Instead, Murphy persuades readers to rethink the history of the colonial Caribbean. Rather than portraying the Lesser Antilles as discrete national dominions, The Creole Archipelago recounts how these archipelagic borderlands were shaped by the interplay of Europeans, Indigenous Kalinagos, and free and enslaved African descendants. Murphy depicts the emergence of a culturally, politically, and religiously entangled archipelago connected to the Atlantic world but also molded by local dynamics and people. The author's meticulous analysis of multi-imperial sources from repositories in France, the United Kingdom, Martinique, Dominica, Grenada, and the United States allows her to elucidate the formation of this interconnected zone—a hub of new notions of colonial subjecthood, race, and dominion.The book is organized chronologically. After a chapter analyzing how treaty making between Indigenous Kalinagos and French and English colonists was critical in determining seventeenth-century Antillean geopolitics, chapter 2 examines the development of peculiar colonial spaces in Kalinago territories. Ordinary people from the French Antilles looked for opportunity and mobility on Kalinago islands, creating autonomous slave societies beyond imperial control. Chapter 3 analyzes how the Seven Years' War facilitated the development of an absentee plantocracy in the eastern Caribbean with direct connections to slave traders operating in Africa. The Creole Archipelago aligns perfectly with scholarship examining the role of Afro-descendants as legal subjects in the Atlantic world. In chapter 4, Murphy's masterful use of colonial correspondence as well as parish and land records allows her to demonstrate how the post–Seven Years' War eastern Caribbean—not nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa and Asia—became the epicenter of early debates and disputes over the rights and privileges of colonial subjects. While Great Britain challenged French Catholics' landownership rights in former Kalinago islands, French settlers and free Afro-descendants embraced British legal culture to protect their rights. Chapter 5 illuminates the relationship between the expansion of sugar plantations, marronage, and racialization in the Creole Archipelago. Murphy also invites us to reexamine the course of important events in Atlantic history. Chapters 6 and 7 explore the American and French Revolutions as episodes of civil and interimperial warfare.The Creole Archipelago joins recent studies that persuasively historicize colonial expansion in the Americas as a process of cross-cultural contact, diplomacy, and contestation. Moreover, the author paints a picture of Caribbean history that is much more intricate than narratives centered exclusively on mercantilism, the slave trade, and plantations. By exploring this space through the lenses of creolization and cultural symbiosis, Murphy makes significant contributions to the literature on imperial formations, race, and subjecthood. The Lesser Antilles were a contested space and served as a laboratory for colonial regulations on people of African descent, regulations that were subsequently implemented in places such as Saint-Domingue and Louisiana. Similarly, the legacy of French colonial society continued under British rule after the Seven Years' War, facilitating spaces of participation and opportunity for French Catholics, both white and free Afro-descendants. The Creole Archipelago also highlights the limitations of exploring turmoil during the Age of Revolutions as responses to political forces emanating from Europe, the 13 colonies, or even Saint-Domingue. In the Creole Archipelago, ordinary people forged alliances that responded more to local political conditions and personal interests than to metropolitan forces, loyalties, and ideologies.Given this journal's Latin American focus, this reviewer wonders whether more emphasis could have been placed on the role of Spanish people in the Creole Archipelago. Certainly, Murphy underscores how Spanish traders from Margarita, Cumaná, and Caracas patronized cacao markets in Saint Vincent. The author also points out the significance of Spanish troops in the French Revolutionary wars. Yet readers might be curious about the relationships between islands such as Tobago and Grenada and Spanish South America, and to what extent these interactions also shaped the Creole Archipelago. Nonetheless, these omissions do not undermine Murphy's sophisticated argument and important scholarly contributions in the least. By seriously considering Indigenous and Black agency, she is better able to portray the Lesser Antilles' complexity beyond the restrictive paradigms of the British West Indies and the French Antilles. The Creole Archipelago is an excellent book that questions established notions of subjecthood and empire “in order to understand the region in a way that would have made sense to those who lived there” (p. 16).

Mothers on the move: manyanos and the social history of transportation in a South African homeland township, 1963–1990

ABSTRACT Histories of bus boycotts and of the taxi business in apartheid South Africa have been told with male activists and taxi entrepreneurs as the protagonists. Women’s oral histories reframe transportation history to include the experiences of commuters. This article is a history of travel by African Christian women’s organizations (manyanos) in the township of Mdantsane. Township infrastructure presented barriers to these social organizations, but in the 1960s and 1970s manyanos adapted their mobility practices to attract members. The bus boycotts of the 1980s and the growth of the taxi industry were connected to protest against the apartheid order. However, this revolution in transportation had ambiguous consequences for commuters. As dissatisfied commuters in the late-apartheid urban landscape, manyano women continued to innovate travelling strategies to maintain local and long-distance connections. Their experiences show that commuters, as well as governments and transport-owners, shape the possibilities of urban travel in twentieth-century Africa.

"Sound of Friendship": Music Iconography in Twentieth-Century Africa–China Relations

This essay examines the role of music in twentieth-century Africa–China relations by analyzing musical performances' contribution to the production and circulation of knowledge about Africa in China through musical imagination. Drawing on archival and multimedia sources, this essay focuses on the figure of Zhu Mingying—an influential Chinese musician in the twentieth century—as a case study to analyze how African imagery is deployed and circulated in music making and marketing practices in China, as well as its implications for developments in Africa–China relations. This essay contributes to a growing body of scholarship on Africa–China relations that addresses the humanistic as opposed to popular metanarratives of trade, aid, security, and investment.

Imperialism, internationalism, and education in Africa: connected histories

ABSTRACT This text introduces the themed issue “Imperialism, Internationalism and Education in Africa: Connected Histories”. It provides an overview of the history of education in twentieth-century Africa, highlighting its major problems, themes, and actors. Arguing for a transnational and connected approach to this field of research, it also explains how the four papers included in the issue allow to address the multiple entanglements between educational internationalism and imperialism in the late colonial and early postcolonial period.

Burying “Zik of Africa”: The Politics of Death and Cultural Crisis

AbstractThis article uses the death and burial of one of the most important political leaders in twentieth-century Africa, and Nigeria's first and only ceremonial president, Rt. Hon. (Dr.) Nnamdi Azikiwe, to reflect on how and why the deaths and burials of significant persons in Africa represent occasions for the (re)production and management of cultural crises. It argues that the extant literature on the death of consequential persons in Africa either understates or overlooks the generalizability of the “essential contestability” of the material and immaterial relations of the past, present, and future provoked by such deaths. This is particularly visible when these relations are disturbed or challenged by the absence of the person and the process of their burial or reburial.

Ousmane Sembene (1923–2007)

Ousmane Sembene (1923–2007)1 Samba Gadjigo, Guest Editor (bio) and Jason Silverman (bio) [End Page 7] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 8] Ousmane Sembene was born in 1923 in Casamance, in southern Senegal. Expelled from school in the sixth grade, he was, at age 14, sent to Dakar where, while working as a laborer, he discovered literature, comic books, and movies. In 1944, Sembene was drafted into the French colonial infantry unit, an experience that broadened his horizons (he served in the Niger and the North African front), deepened his understanding of colonization, and served as the basis of his feature films Emitaï (SN, 1971) and Camp de Thiaroye (SN, 1988). After World War II, Sembene moved to Marseilles, where he found employment as a dockworker (a story he fictionalized in his first novel Black Docker [1956]) and soon became a forceful spokesperson within the radical arts and political movements of the region. A member of the French Communist Party and of the trade union Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), and a reader who studied Marx, Lenin, Neruda, Jack London, Birago Diop, Richard Wright, and Hemingway, the self-taught Sembene published his first poem in 1956, and before returning to Africa in 1960 published three successful novels. During a 1961 tour of Africa, then exploding with revolutionary fervor, creative possibility, and postcolonial backlash, this laborer-turned-writer recognized that African people could not be effectively reached through written literature in any language. Cinema, however, could tell the essential stories of Africa to the African people. Sembene chose to devote his energies to creating emancipating and restorative images for the African people. He enrolled in a filmmaking program at Moscow's Gorki Studios, returned to Dakar with a Soviet camera, and, in 1963, premiered the short Borom Sarret (SN, 1963), a film that transformed [End Page 9] Africa from a continent of media consumers into one with the potential to produce them. This was no historical accident; through the next forty years, Sembene remained keenly aware of these entwined roles as artist and revolutionary, working tirelessly to create powerful works infused with his deep sense of responsibility. After his first, award-winning feature La Noire de …/Black Girl (SN/FR, 1966), Sembene began building the literary and cinematographic legacy that today situates him as the "father of African cinema." Sembene was among the first filmmakers to "indigenize" cinema, forgoing Hollywood-style moviemaking for African narrative structures and aesthetics. He created his own production company, working independently of the European system that continues to dictate filmmaking practices in Africa today. Made under impossible circumstances using limited resources, Sembene's works, including Faat Kiné (SN, 2001) and Guelwaar (FR/DE/SN/US, 1993), won awards at festivals in Venice, Moscow, Los Angeles, Tunis, and Karlovy Vary. All of his feature films and major literary works have been translated into English, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese. "Africa is my audience," Sembene said, "while the West is my market." Sembene's introduction of genuinely African film aesthetics informed cinematic practice both in Africa and around the world, offering inspiration for other marginalized societies, whose members began to pick up cameras and tell their own stories. Sembene's career culminated with Moolaadé (SN/BF/MA/TN/CM/FR, 2004), an award-winner at the 2004 Cannes film festival. In addition to his film work, Sembene was one of Africa's most prolific and recognized writers, with seven of his ten published literary works, including God's Bits of Wood, translated into English and introduced to the curricula of high schools and universities throughout Africa. His literary and cinematic output leaves Sembene as perhaps one the most important figures of twentieth-century Africa, a folk hero and contemporary artist who, more than any other, succeeded both in capturing the complexities of African cultures and in looking forward to a more equitable society, and his forty years of creative output blazed a trail for generations of African, African-American, and African European writers, filmmakers, and scholars. "We will never be Arabs or Europeans," Sembene said. "We are Africans." [End Page 10] Samba Gadjigo Samba Gadjigo is the Helen D...

Jeff Schauer, Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-Century Africa

Jeff Schauer, <i>Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-Century Africa</i>

Jeff Schauer. Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-Century Africa. African Histories and Modernities. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Pp. 300. $84.99 (cloth).

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FEDERATION, PARTNERSHIP, AND THE CHRONOLOGIES OF SPACE IN 1950s EAST AND CENTRAL AFRICA

AbstractThis article assesses the relationship between the imposed Central African Federation (1953–63) and the ways in which East and Central African thinkers and leaders conveyed and pursued the possibilities of decolonization. Existing literature on federalism in twentieth-century Africa fails to place regional projects in dialogue, studying in isolation East Africa and Central Africa, ‘utopian’ and oppressive regionalisms. But such clear dividing lines were not articulated in the four discursive ‘sketches’ of East and Central Africa that this article brings to light: those of anti-Federation organizations in Nairobi and Ndola in 1952; students at Makerere College (Kampala) in 1953; mobile Malawian activists in regional and pan-African forums around 1955–8; and East African party publicity representatives around 1958–60. At each of these critical moments, thinkers creatively constructed various relationships between geographical space and chronological change, through the lens of a broader, interdependent East and Central Africa, as a means to fend off perceived threats to a precarious advancement towards a democratic future. Attending to the evolution of these ideas shows not only how the Central African Federation placed material constraints on regional solidarity, but how ‘thinking regionally’ could support the case for national borders, even before decolonization.

Ousmane Sembene (1923–2007)

Ousmane Sembene (1923–2007)1 Samba Gadjigo, Guest Editor (bio) and Jason Silverman (bio) [End Page 7] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 8] Ousmane Sembene was born in 1923 in Casamance, in southern Senegal. Expelled from school in the sixth grade, he was, at age 14, sent to Dakar where, while working as a laborer, he discovered literature, comic books, and movies. In 1944, Sembene was drafted into the French colonial infantry unit, an experience that broadened his horizons (he served in the Niger and the North African front), deepened his understanding of colonization, and served as the basis of his feature films Emitaï (SN, 1971) and Camp de Thiaroye (SN, 1988). After World War II, Sembene moved to Marseilles, where he found employment as a dockworker (a story he fictionalized in his first novel Black Docker [1956]) and soon became a forceful spokesperson within the radical arts and political movements of the region. A member of the French Communist Party and of the trade union Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), and a reader who studied Marx, Lenin, Neruda, Jack London, Birago Diop, Richard Wright, and Hemingway, the self-taught Sembene published his first poem in 1956, and before returning to Africa in 1960 published three successful novels. During a 1961 tour of Africa, then exploding with revolutionary fervor, creative possibility, and postcolonial backlash, this laborer-turned-writer recognized that African people could not be effectively reached through written literature in any language. Cinema, however, could tell the essential stories of Africa to the African people. Sembene chose to devote his energies to creating emancipating and restorative images for the African people. He enrolled in a filmmaking program at Moscow's Gorki Studios, returned to Dakar with a Soviet camera, and, in 1963, premiered the short Borom Sarret (SN, 1963), a film that transformed [End Page 9] Africa from a continent of media consumers into one with the potential to produce them. This was no historical accident; through the next forty years, Sembene remained keenly aware of these entwined roles as artist and revolutionary, working tirelessly to create powerful works infused with his deep sense of responsibility. After his first, award-winning feature La Noire de …/Black Girl (SN/FR, 1966), Sembene began building the literary and cinematographic legacy that today situates him as the "father of African cinema." Sembene was among the first filmmakers to "indigenize" cinema, forgoing Hollywood-style moviemaking for African narrative structures and aesthetics. He created his own production company, working independently of the European system that continues to dictate filmmaking practices in Africa today. Made under impossible circumstances using limited resources, Sembene's works, including Faat Kiné (SN, 2001) and Guelwaar (FR/DE/SN/US, 1993), won awards at festivals in Venice, Moscow, Los Angeles, Tunis, and Karlovy Vary. All of his feature films and major literary works have been translated into English, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese. "Africa is my audience," Sembene said, "while the West is my market." Sembene's introduction of genuinely African film aesthetics informed cinematic practice both in Africa and around the world, offering inspiration for other marginalized societies, whose members began to pick up cameras and tell their own stories. Sembene's career culminated with Moolaadé (SN/BF/MA/TN/CM/FR, 2004), an award-winner at the 2004 Cannes film festival. In addition to his film work, Sembene was one of Africa's most prolific and recognized writers, with seven of his ten published literary works, including God's Bits of Wood, translated into English and introduced to the curricula of high schools and universities throughout Africa. His literary and cinematic output leaves Sembene as perhaps one the most important figures of twentieth-century Africa, a folk hero and contemporary artist who, more than any other, succeeded both in capturing the complexities of African cultures and in looking forward to a more equitable society, and his forty years of creative output blazed a trail for generations of African, African-American, and African European writers, filmmakers, and scholars. "We will never be Arabs or Europeans," Sembene said. "We are Africans." [End Page 10] Samba Gadjigo Samba Gadjigo is the Helen D...

Rural livelihoods and agricultural commercialization in colonial Uganda: conjunctures of external influences and local realities

Rural livelihoods and agricultural commercialization in colonial Uganda: conjunctures of external influences and local realities

"No one may starve in the British Empire": Kwashiorkor, Protein and the Politics of Nutrition Between Britain and Africa.

SummaryThroughout the twentieth century it was widely assumed that African diets were grossly deficient in protein, that childhood protein deficiency was a natural result of this generalised diet and that a relative lack of meat and milk went some way to explaining African economic underdevelopment. This article explores why these conclusions took hold; the European deification of animal protein in previous centuries; structural changes to African diets and food economies under colonial government; and the political value of such a consensus. Unlike elsewhere in the world, where deficiency was removed from the exceptionalism of tropical medicine, protein malnutrition was constructed as a particularly African concern. Focusing this discussion on the history of the severe childhood deficiency, kwashiorkor, this article explores how the politically informed othering of African nutrition came to direct, or misdirect, the medicine of malnutrition in twentieth-century Africa.

Military consequences of cultural perceptions: The Spanish army in Morocco, 1912–1927

ABSTRACTThis article examines the impact of cultural perceptions on military operations, using the history of the Spanish army in Morocco as a case study. Emphasizing what they regarded as the fundamentally non-Western character of indigenous North African warfare, top Spanish officers initially doubted the applicability of European military methods in Morocco. They also erroneously attributed a “native” quality to military practices that Europeans themselves had brought to the Maghreb, such as the razzia in its modern, colonial form. Cultural prejudices about Moroccan capabilities contributed to the massive rout of Spanish forces in 1921 near the Rifian settlement of Anwal (Annual)—the greatest defeat of any colonial army in twentieth-century Africa. After Anwal, the Spanish army’s dominant cultural conceptions evolved, as influential officers increasingly championed the viability of European military methods in North Africa, took steps to “de-exoticize” the Moroccan enemy, and stressed similarities rather than differences between Spaniards and Moroccans. Although traditional prejudices persisted, the cultural conceptions of prominent officers became more nuanced and less negative, facilitating relatively successful counterinsurgency and military occupation.

Subject(s) to control: post-war return migration and state-building in 1970s South Sudan

ABSTRACTThis article looks at the history of post-war state-building in South Sudan through a study of one of the region’s many return migration projects. South Sudan was arguably the subject of the first state-led mass repatriation campaign of twentieth-century Africa, after the first civil war that escalated in 1963 and ended in 1972 with the Addis Ababa Agreement. Using archival material from the newly reformulated South Sudan National Archives in Juba, this paper examines this comparatively forgotten post-war return and reconstruction project in South Sudan from 1969 to 1974. In this period, civil war ideas, staff, and techniques were recycled into an apparently benevolent and ‘peace-building’ project of Relief, Repatriation and Rehabilitation. The returns management project set out where the returning citizens of Sudan should go, how they should settle, live, and relate to the state. This study argues that this project developed and entrenched particular wartime state ideas of its imagined South Sudanese population, and the nature of its compact with its society. It argues for a longer view of the continuities of war- and peacetime population control, as a way to explore postcolonial ideas of ‘good government’. The return and resettlement period also demonstrates the South Sudanese populations’ expanding repertoire of engagement as post-war citizens: return migration and resettlement projects are good opportunities for people to reformulate their skills and tactics of negotiating, approaching, cheating, and avoiding a ‘new’ state.

Africa between Gandhi and Nehru

The author’s interest in Africa’s relations with India goes back to his doctoral thesis at Oxford University, published under the title of Towards a Pax Africana. The impact of India upon twentieth century Africa has a special place for Gandhi’s strategies of civil disobedience and Nehru’s principle of nonalignment. Gandhi’s satyagraha (soul force) inspired African political figures as diverse as Nobel laureate Albert Luthuli of South Africa and Ivorian president Houphouet-Boigny. Nehru’s ideas about what used to be called “positive neutralism” helped to shape African approaches to foreign policy in the entire post-colonial era. The essay, published almost two decades ago, explored these historical dimensions in this prescient analysis.

Islamic Reform in Twentieth-Century Africa, written by Roman Loimeier

Islamic Reform in Twentieth-Century Africa, written by Roman Loimeier

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA AND EUROPE: RECIPROCAL COMPARISONS

ABSTRACTRecent advances in historical national accounting have allowed for global comparisons of GDPper capitaacross space and time. Critics have argued that GDPper capitafails to capture adequately the multi-dimensional nature of welfare, and have developed alternative measures such as the human development index. Whilst recognising that these wider indicators provide an appropriate way of assessing levels of welfare, we argue that GDPper capitaremains a more appropriate measure for assessing development potential, focussing on production possibilities and the sustainability of consumption. Twentieth-century Africa and pre-industrial Europe are used to show how such data can guide reciprocal comparisons to provide insights into the process of development on both continents.

‘Tracking, tracking and more tracking was their motto’: bush tracking and warfare in late twentieth-century Southern Africa

Tracking, the skill of following a subject by signs left behind in the environment, dominated the experience of state forces and insurgents during Southern Africa’s late twentieth-century guerilla conflicts; particularly in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from 1965 to 1980 and South African occupied South-West Africa (now Namibia) from 1966 to 1989. Rhodesian and South African forces emphasised tracking to locate and eliminate their elusive enemies, and learned that the only way to do this was by using horses, motor vehicles or helicopters to gain ground. Both security forces established tracking training institutions and specialist tracker units. However, only the South Africans were able to create large and highly effective tracking units in the context of a specific environment and the mobilisation of indigenous communities. In response, insurgents in both conflicts shifted their activities to areas less conducive to tracking and developed anti-tracking techniques. Despite the failure of these counter-insurgency campaigns to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the civilian African majority, their attempts to use tracking to engage insurgents can provide useful lessons.