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E. P. Thompson's Whigs and Hunters has had an enormous impact on African historiography in its articulation of the relationship between property and law and the subsequent criminalization of customary practices. Some of the other themes in this book – indistinct bands of law-breaking peasants, people and animals, notions of the wild, and the near impossibility of commonplace judicial murder in peacetime – have not been taken up. This article argues for a broader engagement with this book and to remind African historians that the many facets and eras of Thompson's scholarship should encourage a more flexible reading of his work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the activism of militant Catholic African students in France in the 1950s. Largely left out of the historiography of the period, they developed a unique perspective on Africa's future, informed by their dual (and often fraught) identity as Africans and Catholics. They undertook a strident campaign to convince French Catholics and the Church hierarchy of the necessity of decolonization, trying to change the Church from the inside. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on both archival research and oral interviews conducted in northern Namibia, this article traces the history of public flogging in Ovamboland throughout the twentieth century. In contrast to recent scholarship that views corporal punishment in modern Africa mainly through the lens of colonial governance, the article argues that because the South African colonial state never withdrew the power to punish from the region's traditional authorities, these indigenous leaders were able to maintain a degree of legitimacy among their subjects, who looked to the kings and headmen to punish wrongdoers and maintain communal norms. Finally, the article explores why nostalgia for corporal punishment remains a salient feature in Namibian society today, 25 years after the end of colonial rule. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses how scholarship has formulated human connections and ruptures over the Sahara. However, these formulations were, and still are, based in both physical and discursive realities that have been developed in Africa itself. The idea of a dividing Sahara is based on historical political divisions – despite a homogenous political culture in the region – and by locally developed notions of race and religion, brought about by trade and justified in Islamic religious discourse. The Saharan divide acquired a new reading in colonial historiography, which, in turn, informed scholarly work until well into the 1960s. I will suggest that both colonial and postcolonial research on the differences and connections between the Saharan shores are suffering from a civilisational bias towards North Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on a broad assessment of the scholarship on North-Western Africa, this article examines Saharan historiography with a particular view towards understanding how and why historians have long represented the continent as being composed of two ‘Africas’. Starting with the earliest Arabic writings, and, much later, French colonial renderings, it traces the epistemological creation of a racial and geographic divide. Then, the article considers the field of African studies in North African universities and ends with a review of recent multidisciplinary research that embraces a trans-Saharan approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The formative influence of colonial art education on modern art movements in Africa has not attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. Yet, European art teachers in the Gold Coast challenged colonial prejudice that Africans were incapable of mastering European aesthetic forms. This article analyses the art education provided at the Teacher Training College at Achimota School where pupils learned both to revalue African art forms and to draw and paint in European, representational art styles. Modern artists built on and reshaped what they had learned at Achimota in order to respond to changing social and political conditions. The last section of this article explores the impact of colonial art education on the work of two of the earliest modern artists in Ghana: Kofi Antubam and Vincent Kofi. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the intellectual life and organizational work of an Indian Muslim activist and journalist, M. O. Abbasi, a largely forgotten figure who nonetheless stood at the center of colonial-era debates over the public role of Islam in mainland Tanzania. His greatest impact was made through the Anjuman Islamiyya, the territory's leading pan-Islamic organization that he co-founded and modeled on Indian modernist institutions. The successes and failures of Abbasi and the Anjuman Islamiyya demonstrate the vital role played by Western Indian Ocean intellectual networks, the adaptability of transoceanic, pan-Islamic organizational structures, and, ultimately, the limits imposed on pan-Islamic activism by racial politics in colonial Tanzania. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article revisits the concept of islam noir (black Islam) crafted in the context of French rule of sub-Saharan Muslims. For the French colonial administration, islam noir connoted the idea of a degraded Islam tainted by animist practices and therefore different from the pure Islam practiced in Arab countries. This differentiation was a way to separate it from ‘Arab Islam’, which was considered a subversive model. This distinction was not entirely new for it had already a long history behind it. Arabic sources had often shown a high distrust of sub-Saharan Africans who converted to Islam; they never really enjoyed a status equal to that of Arab Muslims. After the end of colonial rule, the story still continues. The theme of a specific sub-Saharan Islam (African Islam) remained a convenient category that was used by scholars, regardless of old prejudices. In the latest period, some African intellectuals have also embraced this concept, conjoining it with the pride of blackness, as a kind of Islam de la négritude, while praising its orthodoxy. It is this long epistemological and taxonomical adventure of islam noir that is examined here. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reinforces the interpretation of numerous scholars who have highlighted the role of slave labor in groundnut production during the 'cashcrop revolution' in West Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also expands Jan Hogendorn's argument on the African initiatives involved in the expansion of groundnut production in colonial Northern Nigeria. In particular, it provides evidence of the key role of the emir of Kano (Abbas) and important merchants in the transition to groundnut cultivation and the significant use of slave labor by these large estate-holders. The article focuses mainly on the Fanisau unit of Kano. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]