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This article argues that on the borderland between eastern DRC and Rwanda, the past and its representations have been constantly manipulated. The cataclysmic events in both Rwanda and Congo since the 1990s have widened the gap between partial and politicized historical discourse and careful historical analysis. The failure to pay attention to the multiple layers in the production of historical narratives risks reproducing a politicized social present that ‘naturalizes’ differences and antagonisms between different groups by giving them more time-depth. This is a danger both for insiders and outsiders looking in. The answer is to focus on the historical trajectories that shape historical narratives, and to ‘bring history back in’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing from both fictional and non-fictional sources, this article traces the way history was conceptualised in twentieth-century Ethiopia by secular educated elites, charting the changing power relations between Ethiopia's hegemonic historiographical paradigm and the alternative historical visions that challenged this ‘Great Tradition’ over the course of the century. While the Great Tradition extols Ethiopia's past and future glories, the counter-histories focused instead on the country's failure to develop and democratise. Against the interpretation that the counter-histories supplanted the Great Tradition in the late 1960s, the article examines them in terms of complementarity. The intellectual interventions of young student radicals in the late 1960s constitute a break, but not a drastic paradigm shift from the past. The Great Tradition had already been called into question by older generations of intellectuals, even if they proved unable or unwilling to translate their disillusionment into political action. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 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 integration of gender as a vibrant stream within African historical writing suggests a remarkable success story with many prominent historians and fresh thematics involved. Alongside an interest in subjectivities has emerged vigorous attention to the affective, emotions, and the senses. Why affect has emerged now matters. At the same time, new kinds of intellectual histories are burgeoning in the African field, frequently forwarding an unacknowledged masculinity. With the affective and the intellectual seemingly at odds with each other, it is crucial to seek ways to cross and combine them, while remaining alert to methodological perils and innovative forms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This piece considers the subfields of African gender and sexuality history, from the perspective of an unusual career path that has moved between higher education and activist work in Canada and Uganda, and included policy and public service work in the latter. Over the past few decades, African women's history has shifted from the margins of African historiography to the mainstream; scholars have subjected a wide range of topics to insightful gender analysis; and increasingly sophisticated studies of sexuality have emerged. This piece surveys these important developments and how they have played out in the classroom in relation to students’ shifting political and social sensibilities. It argues that, moving forward, scholars should devote more attention to the precolonial history of sexuality and develop creative methodologies for reconstructing that history, especially through engaging historical demography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For many scholars, the history of Africans in the Atlantic world only becomes visible at the juncture of the history of ‘the slave’. However, the sources upon which most of these studies are based, and the organization of the colonial archive more generally operate as something of a trap, inviting researchers to see how African slaves embraced or manipulated colonial institutions and ideas for their own purposes. This article focuses on methodological and conceptual meta questions that challenge how historians conduct African-Atlantic history, arguing that sources of the African past exist in the Americas, if only we are open to seeing them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the Atlantic slave trade in relation to ‘extraversion’ in African history. Drawing especially on the work of Jean-François Bayart, it argues that slaving fit a long-term pattern in which elites drew on external connections in order to further their wealth and power at home. In doing so, they also opened their societies to new goods and ideas, thus bringing about cultural creolization. This is a different approach to the question of creolization than is commonly found among Americanist studies of Atlantic slavery, which tend to treat cultural change without consideration of politics. The concept of extraversion thus helps to link culture and political economy. Nevertheless, it also bears refinement. Recent scholarship on African involvement in the Atlantic slave trade – some of it detailed in this article – makes clear that extraversion may have reflected African agency, as Bayart insisted, but that it also entangled African societies in destructive relationships of dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I focus on the historiography of Islam in West Africa while also reflecting upon and assessing existing scholarship in the broader field of the study of Islam in Africa. My position as an anthropologist who conducts historical research informs my perspective in evaluating the current state of the field and my suggestions for directions in which I think future research might move in order to advance our understanding of Islam and Muslim societies and the history of religious life in Africa more generally. [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]

A multi-sited, but nonetheless locally grounded, transnational history breaks with older modes of imperial history that treated Africa as little more than a setting for the history of colonizers. More recently, critical approaches to imperial history have pointed to, but not adequately pursued, the treatment of colonizer and colonized as coeval subjects of history and objects of analysis. Historians of Africa and the diaspora, however, moved beyond imperial history decades ago, and these fields provide important resources and models for transnational historians. Transnational history, nonetheless, always risks reproducing the boundaries between colonizer and colonized that it seeks to overcome. The need to think outside of empire from within a world structured by empires requires that historians embrace critical theory, but in a manner consistent with the groundedness of multi-sited historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

African history and world history each became substantial fields of historical study in the aftermath of the Second World War. African history organized rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, an era dominated by modernization-thinking. World history developed slowly until the 1990s, then quickly expanded and generated institutional homes in a time of globalization-thinking. This piece considers issues of time, scale, and scholarly diversity within the two fields. The conclusion argues that world historians should pay more attention to Africa and that African historians should do more to set the African past in a global context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Considering the scale of violence that has accompanied the crisis in eastern Congo, the avalanche of academic writings on the subject is hardly surprising. Whether it helps us better understand the region's tortured history is a matter of opinion. This critical article grapples with the contributions of the recent literature on what has been described as the deadliest conflict since the Second World War. The aim, in brief, is to reflect on the historical context of the crisis, examine its relation to the politics of neighboring states, identify and assess the theoretical vantage points from which it has been approached, and, in conclusion, sketch out promising new directions for further research by social scientists. A unifying question that runs throughout the recent literature on the eastern Congo is how might a functioning state be restored or how might civil society organizations serve as alternatives to such a state – but there is little unanimity in the answers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent debates on global and world history have largely been shaped in the Euro-American academy, an arrangement that appears to deepen the growing divide between metropolitan and African universities. This article takes a more optimistic view arguing that twenty years of post-apartheid life has enabled a freer flow of people and ideas across the continent. These new networks have sparked projects that explore inter-regional exchanges and transnational circuits within the continent. These developments coincide with the ‘rise of the south’ and present an opportunity for new styles of world history that take the global south as their matrix. This article examines a range of such projects and draws out their wider significance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Jan Vansina's Paths in the Rainforests (1990) provides an instructive example of progress in overcoming the continuing burden of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory in studies of precolonial Africa in both historiography and anthropology. This article focuses on a critical section of the book, which outlines social evolution and ‘the invention of matrilinearity’ in the area around the lower Congo, showing both the strengths and the weaknesses of Vansina's approach. [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]