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The British press, public and parliament are not generally thought to have played a significant role in the process of Britain’s decolonisation in Africa. Neither do most studies of the broad British metropolitan experience foreground the importance of African nationalism. This article begins to challenge both of these views by providing an assessment of the significance of the British press’s rather sensational treatment of an incident of late-colonial violence in the context of an African demonstration in Blantyre, Nyasaland, in 1960. African activists exploited the British press presence in Blantyre as a means of advancing the nationalist cause and fighting the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. British correspondents responded positively for a variety of ideological, political, personal, situational and institutional reasons. In addition, by 1960, the British press recognised the strength of African nationalism in the context of African violence and agitation across that continent in preceding months and years. Its critical articles, which interlocked with British parliamentary proceedings and specific sets of historical concerns, had important effects among two core readerships: sections of the white settler communities of the Federation, and the British Government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The African Union is emerging as a prominent actor in election assistance and observation. Considering the continued centrality of the electoral process to democracy-building efforts in Africa, African continental and regional organisations are increasingly monitoring elections and taking the lead in election observation processes across the continent. This paper contributes to the African agency literature by showing how agency is operationalised and implemented through international election observation. Focusing on Malawi's recent electoral history (2004–2020), this paper argues that the African Union is institutionalising its election observation protocols and challenging the dominant position of western international actors, through enacting the role and agency of continental and regional actors. It critically assesses the African Union's ability to undertake these efforts and how it has addressed elections, and the politics surrounding them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes as its subject the fact that digital archival production – of existing materials and born-digital records – has collapsed in contemporary South Africa, and it offers some arguments about why it is important to reverse this process. The current situation can be explained by the fact that digitisation has been widely described as a form of intellectual imperialism, a characterisation that echoes influential strands of postcolonial theory and South African nationalism. The reasons for this unusual understanding lie in the difficult history of the last major digitisation effort, the Mellon-funded collaboration between Aluka and the Digital Imaging Project of South Africa (DISA). The paper reconstructs that project in some detail in an effort to understand what went wrong, arguing that in place of the geopolitical explanation that many participants adopted, most of what went wrong was much more narrowly technological. Yet, the same technological issues have already been great assets to South African researchers, holding out the promise of solutions to some pressing local difficulties of digital preservation and archival assembly. The last section of the paper takes up some of the reasons why scholars need to take digital record-keeping much more seriously than they have to date – chief amongst these being the fertile possibilities of forgery and impersonation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While the employment of child labour in the Cape Colony under slavery is well known, the same cannot be said for the post-emancipation period, despite the hinge masters and servants ordinance of 1841 governing the new free labour market legitimating employment of two categories of child labour: those indentured by their parents, and ‘destitute children’ indentured by the state. Both groups left paper trails. That of destitute children is easier to follow because they had to advertised in the press, but a few scattered sets of contracts of ‘indenture of apprenticeship by parents’ (IAP) survive in the archives of the colonial magistrates. The article offers a close reading of the destitute children advertisements and IAP contract archive for one such magistracy: that of Colesberg in the Great Karoo in the second half of the 19th century. It traces patterns in the aggregate demography, form and features of the more than 250 IAP contracts signed in the magistracy over this period to demonstrate the gendered nature of child indenture, its relation to and dampening effect on adult wage rates, and its contributions to reproducing proletarian households in the commercialising pastoral economy of the Great Karoo. In so doing, it troubles two prevailing assumptions about the post-emancipation Cape labour market: that settler employers dictated the terms of exchange through coercion, and that the proletarian household was a haven from such exploitation. It detects evidence for both the patrimonial exchange and parental exploitation of proletarian children. Finally, the article offers a corrective to the scholarship on the invention of colonial childhood in the final quarter of the 19th century, based exclusively on the white middle-class experience of the south-western Cape, by suggesting that post-emancipation black childhood was without formal education or indolent adolescence, but rather an apprenticeship in labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, on the institutional, ideological, and intellectual politics of producing historical and social science knowledge in Africa, was prepared as the keynote address for the Conference on 'Historical and Social Science Research in Malawi: Problems and Prospects' held in Zomba in June 2000 from which the papers in this special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies are drawn. It is reproduced here in the format in which it was presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In much of southern Africa, migrancy has for generations been incorporated into the livelihoods systems of millions of rural families. The regional dimensions vary but, particularly where there was very inequitable division of land between racial groups during the era of white minority regimes, the dependence of rural households on migrants' remittances is fundamental to their survival. From a structural perspective, the impact of such migration has often been characterised as creating worker-peasants and farmerhousewives. The impact of these patterns on agricultural productivity and the environment is frequently deemed to be very negative, from a variety of theoretical and policy perspectives. Because the patterns are predicated on migrants retaining rights to rural land in rural areas, arguments are often made that migrants should lose their land rights, thereby being forced to choose either to be 'committed farmers' or 'permanent urbanites'. This paper argues that such views are frequently based on development narratives about the problems caused for agriculture by migrancy which ignore, or misunderstand crucial aspects of the relationship between migrants and the land. This paper attempts to analyse these narratives, and to offer an alternative perspective on the issue, drawing on empirical research in Zimbabwe and literature on migrants and agriculture in various African countries. To some extent, concerns about migrants and their links to the land derive from particular scholastic traditions associated with social science approaches to the study of the southern African region. The literature on rural-urban migration and rural-urban linkages in the form of land holdings for most of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, for a variety of reasons, is much less likely to view migrants' attachment to their land as problematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the implications of the border on the control of East Coast Fever in colonial Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The outbreak of the disease in Rhodesia in 1901 caused much anxiety among Portuguese veterinary officials, who were concerned that the disease could cross the border into their territory and destroy their livestock industry. Resultant efforts to control this and other livestock diseases in these colonies were often accompanied by racial application of veterinary policies which benefited Europeans at the expense of Africans. East Coast Fever, together with the 1896–97 Rinderpest epidemic, thus contributed immensely to the development of veterinary science, the burgeoning functions of the colonial state, and the relations between state and subject in rural areas. Hence, through an examination of English and Portuguese colonial documents, this paper argues that the existence of East Coast Fever in Zimbabwe, and the impossibility of sealing the border to prevent cattle mobility, raised alarm, and contributed to the expansion of veterinary services in central Mozambique. This article contributes to debates on the significance of borders in shaping historical processes, but complicates border studies by demonstrating that the border was powerful not because it was restrictive but because it was porous. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the political aftershocks of September 11, powerful interests in the United States and Britain have proposed the development of national systems of biometric identification and registration. For much of the last century, South Africans have lived with such a biometric order, and in recent years the democratic state has begun to invest in a massive scheme of digital biometrics for the delivery of benefits and the elimination of fraud. This HANIS system has been preceded by a massive project of digital biometric grant delivery that affects millions of people throughout the country. These systems are changing the nature of the state, and the relationship between private individuals and the commercial domain. For the countries considering a move from the decentralised order of paper-based identification to the new world of digital biometrics, there is much to be learned from a close study of contemporary South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to compare two major African cities in terms of the development and breakdown of racial segregation. There is a deliberate attempt to understand Durban through a comparative look at Abidjan, a port city of roughly equivalent size. The chief features of Durban's historical development are reviewed before the article turns to an equivalent examination of Abidjan's history. Abidjan, like Durban, was subjected to colonial policies that emphasised racial segregation in a way that blended with international ideas about the modern city. The actual process that unfolded historically was, however, in some significant respects different and the moulding of segregation less successful. After independence, a conception of functional (but not racial) segregation was dominant in Abidjan but it broke down due to economic and social forces from the 1970s. As a result, Abidjan became a less segregated city, with lessons perhaps for its richer South African counterpart. However, current trends suggest elements of convergence in urban society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]