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Despite its destructiveness, disaster clears the way to accomplish a set of goals. That was why the Gold Coast governor and officials welcomed the 1939 earthquake as an opportunity to rebuild Accra. However, mishandling their reconstruction plan proved disadvantageous. The aftermath of the disaster, including an unprecedented rehousing project, exacerbated urban discontent. How everyday urban residents responded to rehousing further exposed the weakness of the colonial state and gave momentum to nationalism. The paper introduces natural disasters and relief programs into the scholarly narratives that have demonstrated that anticolonial nationalism emerged from a chain of grievances from amongst colonial subjects, some of which were unfulfilled social and economic expectations. The experiences of rehousing following the earthquake powerfully informed local perspectives and contributed to the chain of events leading to formal decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The marginal case of the decolonisation of Comoros has gained little attention from historians of Africa. By tracing the evolution of the Mouvement de libération nationale des Comores (MOLINACO) around East Africa's Indian Ocean basin, this article explores the possibilities and constraints of anticolonial organisation among a diaspora population whose own existence was threatened by the more exclusive political order that emerged from the process of decolonisation. In Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Kenya, and Madagascar, MOLINACO's activities were shaped and limited by contested issues of racial identity, island genealogy, partisan alignment, and international priorities among both the Comorian diaspora and their 'host' governments. Through a transterritorial approach, this article examines the difficulties for minority communities in navigating the transition from empire to nation-state, while also illustrating the challenges MOLINACO faced in its ultimately unsuccessful attempt to impose that same normative model onto the archipelago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During Zimbabwe's struggle for national liberation, thousands of black African students fled Rhodesia to universities across the world on refugee scholarship schemes. To these young people, university student activism had historically provided a stable route into political relevance and nationalist leadership. But at foreign universities, many of which were vibrant centres for student mobilisations in the 1960s and 1970s and located far from Zimbabwean liberation movements' organising structures, student refugees were confronted with the dilemma of what their role and future in the liberation struggle was. Through the concept of the 'frontier', this article compares the experiences of student activists at universities in Uganda, West Africa, and the UK as they figured out who they were as political agents. For these refugees, I show how political geography mattered. Campus frontiers could lead young people both to the military fronts of Mozambique and Zambia as well as to the highest circles of government in independent Zimbabwe. As such, campus frontiers were central to the history of Zimbabwe's liberation movements and the development of the postcolonial state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have drawn on newspapers to illuminate the origins of modern nationalism and cultures of literacy. The case of Kiongozi (The Guide or The Leader) relates this scholarship to Tanzania's colonial past. Published between 1904 and 1916 by the government of what was then German East Africa, the paper played an ambivalent role. On the one hand, by promoting the shift from Swahili written in Arabic script (ajami) to Latinized Swahili, it became the mouthpiece of an African elite trained in government schools. By reading and writing for Kiongozi, these waletaji wa habari (bearers of news) spread Swahili inland and transformed coastal culture. On the other hand, the paper served the power of the colonial state by mediating between German colonizers and their indigenous subordinates. Beyond cooptation, Kiongozi highlights the warped nature of African voices in the colonial archive, questioning claims about print's impact on nationalism and new forms of selfhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies the contexts in which the idea of a separation of the Casamance from the rest of Senegal arose during the process of decolonization. The idea was an outgrowth of colonial representations forged since the end of the nineteenth century. It was first formulated by the French authorities in secret discussions with the representatives of the Casamance in the context of the 1958 referendum. It was taken over by local political leaders who saw it as a possible answer to the debates over representation that arose in the post-war process of democratization, and later by proponents of political mobilization at the sub-regional level after independence. By examining this little-known moment of possibility, the article shows that the claims of the current armed independence movement are in fact part of a longer, more ambivalent history in which a separatist imaginary of the Casamance took shape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ugandan colonial authorities carved Bugisu and Bukedi districts out of Mbale district in 1954, isolating Mbale town as a separate entity. With ethnic tensions escalating as independence approached, Gisu and Gwere fought for Mbale's ownership. Empowered by decentralisation, Bugisu District Council pressed the colonial state to declare Mbale part of Bugisu, viewing the town as key to the region's wealth, and providing a symbolic status similar to that enjoyed by Uganda's leading ethnic groups. Gisu activists reinvented tradition as a tool of political advocacy, exerting hyper-masculine power over Mbale's non-circumcising Gwere residents through forcible circumcision. Gisu reformulation of a cultural practice within an urban struggle challenges previous categorisations of the Mbale case as merely another local obstacle to Uganda's peaceful decolonisation. Evidence analysed in this article contributes to a new understanding of East Africa's uneasy transition to self-government, and to the role of ethnic competition within late-colonial mobilisations more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between Angolan guerrilla broadcasts and their effects on the Portuguese counterinsurgency project in their war to hold on to their African colonies. The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA's Angola Combatente) and National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA's Voz de Angola Livre) broadcasts allowed these movements to maintain a sonic presence in the Angolan territory from exile and to engage in a war of the airwaves with the Portuguese colonial state with whom they were fighting a ground war. First and foremost, it analyzes the effects of these rebel broadcasts on listeners, be they state or non-state actors. A reading of the archives of the state secret police and military exposes the nervousness and weakness of the colonial state even as it was winning the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 1961, Albert Luthuli, leader of the African National Congress (ANC), arrived in Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Journalists in Norway noted how apartheid crackdowns failed to poison the new laureate's ‘courteous’ commitment to nonviolence. The press never reported Luthuli's acceptance that saboteurs in an armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe (MK or Spear of the Nation), would now fight for freedom. Analyzing recently available evidence, this article challenges a prevailing claim that Luthuli always promoted peace regardless of state authorities who nearly beat him to death and massacred protesting women, children, and men. We uncover his evolving views of justifiable violence, which guided secret ANC decisions to pursue ‘some kind of violence’ months before his Nobel celebration. These views not only expand knowledge of ‘struggle history’, but also alter understandings of Luthuli's aim to emancipate South Africa from a system of white supremacy that he likened to ‘slavery’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Engaging debates around ethnic nationhood and knowledge production, this article examines the influence of Bible translation on corporate identity formation in Toro and Ituri (1900–40). It studies translations instigated by one individual to investigate textual agency wherever it leads. The translator Apolo Kivebulaya promoted adherence to Christianity as an inclusive and linguistically-plural global community. His translation for the Mbuti, which had limited circulation among its intended audience, shows an aspect of this global community at work, remaking the international image of the Mbuti. His earlier Runyoro-Rutoro translation, however, encouraged a local and political form of corporate identity in which translation and Old Testament stories helped to form an ethnic moral economy. In focusing upon Bible translation among the Toro and the Mbuti, the article moves from the politically influential Ganda, the focus of much historiography of Christianity in East Africa, and explains the roots of later revivalism and patriotism. [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]

Scholarly and popular histories of Kenya largely agree that African Second World War veterans played a central role in the Kenya Land Freedom Army. Former African members of the colonial security forces have reinforced these assumptions by claiming to have been covert Mau Mau supporters, either after their discharge, or as serving soldiers. In reality, few Mau Mau generals had actual combat experience. Those who served in the colonial military usually did so in labor units or support arms. It therefore warrants asking why so many Kenyans accept that combat veterans played such a central role in the KLFA and in Kenyan history. Understanding how veterans of the colonial army have become national heroes, both for their wartime service and their supposed leadership of Mau Mau, reveals the capacity of popular history to create more useful and inclusive forms of African nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postwar politics in British-occupied Somalia is usually reduced to the activities of the Somali Youth League, the foremost anticolonial nationalist movement. However, by 1947, smaller associations, pejoratively nicknamed the pro-Italia, came together in an effort to return Somalia to Italy under international mandate. Drawing upon new archival sources, the article argues that this movement did not stem from arguments supporting colonial rule, but rather from objections to the nationalist agenda and military occupation. Closer attention to these voices sheds light on the deeper meanings of political alignment during the change of regime and enhances our understanding of political developments in postwar Somalia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction for the article "Religion and Nationalism in South Sudan - Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan By Christopher Tounsel. Durham" is presented, which is published in the September 23, 2022 issue of the periodical.

This article examines how contestation between political parties, politicians, and their supporters shaped Guinea's decolonization from 1945 to 1961. The last region to resist the rise of Sékou Touré's PDG, the Fulbe-dominated Futa Jallon - as both a political space and representation of Fulbe culture - was at the center of strategic and intellectual struggles over the shape of the postcolonial Guinean state and society. What resulted from contestation was the general belief that the Fulbe and the Futa Jallon were divergent from the rest of Guinea, a fragment in the making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1968 and 1975, the leaders of white South Africa reached out to independent African leaders. Scholars have alternately seen these counterintuitive campaigns as driven by a quest for regional economic hegemony, divide-and-rule realpolitik, or a desire to ingratiate the regime with the West. This article instead argues that the South African government's outreach was intended to energise a top-down recalibration of the ideology of Afrikaner nationalism, as the regime endeavoured to detach its apartheid programme from notions of colonialist racial supremacy, and instead reach across the colour line and lay an equal claim to the power and protection of African nationalism. These diplomatic manoeuvrings, therefore, serve as a prism through which to understand important shifts in state identity, ideological renewal, and the adoption of new state-building models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the fraught history of officials' innovative uses of wildlife in socialist Tanzania, as they pursued both international and domestic agendas with the country's wild fauna. Internationally, officials sought to enhance Tanzania's reputation and gain foreign support through its conservation policies and diplomatic use of wild animals. Domestically, officials recognized the utility of wildlife for a number of nation-building agendas, ranging from national identity to economic development. However, internal contradictions riddled the wildlife economy, creating difficulty for government officials and party leaders when balancing socialist commitments with an effective, market-driven industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Southern Sudanese politicians of the 1950s and 1960s have been criticized for a rivalrous, divisive politics, which left the south disunited and vulnerable. While acknowledging that these men were a tiny, squabbling group, remote from those they sought to represent, this article suggests that they faced an impossible task. The demand to represent ‘the south’ did not come solely, or even largely, from the people who lived in the southern provinces: southern politics was heavily extraverted, pulled by the interests and prejudices of northern Sudanese, Egyptians, Britons, and others. Like other African nationalists of the time, southern Sudanese politicians struggled to weave together different levels of moral community, from the very local to the imagined nation. Yet they did so in uniquely unfavourable circumstances: subject to constant harassment and occasionally lethal violence, unable to secure political compromise, and without patronage resources. Representing the south gave these men space to talk about the increasingly desperate circumstances of those who lived in Sudan's southern provinces; but it gave them almost no space at all to negotiate a civic culture of southern politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In many accounts, the Sharpeville emergency of 1960 was a key ‘turning point’ for modern South African history. It persuaded the liberation movements that there was no point in civil rights-style activism and served as the catalyst for the formation of the African National Congress's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. From the South African government's perspective, the events at Sharpeville made it imperative to crush black resistance so that whites could defend themselves against communist-inspired revolutionary agitation. African and Afrikaner nationalist accounts are thus mutually invested in the idea that, after Sharpeville, there was no alternative. This article challenges such assumptions. By bringing together new research on African and Afrikaner nationalism during this period, and placing them in the same frame of analysis, it draws attention to important political dynamics and possibilities that have for too long been overlooked. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the perceived interdependence of territorial rights and social identity in colonial Kenya. In the early 1960s, attempts to win full autonomy for a narrow strip of Indian Ocean coastline – the Protectorate of Kenya – encouraged an exclusivist discourse of autochthony. To establish their historical ownership of the coast, both political thinkers who supported and decried coastal separatism emphasized the correlation of race, ethnicity, religion, and physical space. Through competing claims to ‘the soil’, all parties articulated a dually integrative and divisive language of citizenship. As a result, autochthony discourse exacerbated tensions within coastal society, fortified divergent visions of the postcolonial nation, and highlighted reductive definitions of the coast as either maritime or continental in orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The founders of the Zanzibar National Party can be understood as creole nationalists, who imagined their political authority as stemming from membership in a transnational Arab elite. But in the mid-twentieth century, prompted by the rising hegemony of territorial nationalism and by subaltern challenges informed by pan-Africanism, they crafted a new historical narrative that depicted their movement as having originated with indigenous villagers. Party leaders then related this narrative to Western scholars, whose publications helped reproduce the myth throughout the rest of the century. This article traces the genesis of this masquerade and asks what it implies about the nature of the creole metaphor and its supposed link to discourses of cosmopolitan hybridity. The conventional contrast between créolité and nativist essentialism is shown to be illusory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The nationalistic fervour that greeted Ghana's performances in the 2010 football World Cup in South Africa powerfully evoked memories of an earlier period in the history of the Ghanaian state that witnessed Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana, draw on the game as a rallying point for nation-building and pan-African unity. This article uncovers this history by analysing Nkrumah's overt politicisation of football in the late colonial and immediate postcolonial periods. This study not only makes a novel contribution to the growing historical and social scientific literature on what is arguably Africa's most pervasive popular cultural form but also deepens our understanding of one of the continent's most significant political figures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses the struggle between the temperance and wine interests in South Africa during three phases: 1890–1920, 1920–48 and 1948–65. It argues that divergent outcomes were rooted in a combination of differential levels of internal cohesion and the configuration of the political arena within which the protagonists manoeuvred for advantage. Conflicting interests within the wine industry hindered collective action, whereas the temperance movement derived strength from its decentralized modes of operation and international connections. The latter pioneered mass action alongside the art of lobbying. After 1948, the wine industry turned the tables by cementing a special relationship with the National Party, while tapping into popular nationalism, youth culture, and emergent consumerism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1972 a British commission arrived in Rhodesia to test how acceptable the latest and most comprehensive proposals to end Rhodesia's rebellion were to its entire people. Africans rejected the proposals in overwhelming numbers. Such powerful opposition was attributed to the African National Council, said to be a new and spontaneous organization, but in fact the creation of the banned political parties. This article examines the political agitation during the Pearce Commission's visit to show how commonplace the layers of political affiliation, substitution, and deception were in the groups that both supported and opposed the proposals in 1970s Rhodesia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the relationship between understandings of youth sexuality and mobility, and racial nationalism in late colonial Tanganyika through a history of dansi: a dance mode first popularized by Tanganyikan youth in the 1930s. Dansi's heterosocial choreography and cosmopolitan connotations provoked widespread anxieties among rural elders and urban elites over the mobility, economic autonomy, and sexual agency of youth. In urban commercial dancehalls in the 1950s, dansi staged emerging cultural solidarities among migrant youth, while also making visible social divisions based on class and gender. At the same time, nationalist intellectuals attempted to reform dansi according to an emerging political rhetoric of racial respectability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reassesses the political alternatives imagined by African nationalists in the 'first wave' of Africa's decolonization through the lens of Cameroonian nationalism. After the proscription of Cameroon's popular nationalist movement, the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), in the mid-1950s, thousands of Cameroonian nationalists went into exile, most to Accra, where they gained the support of Kwame Nkrumah's Pan-African Bureau for African Affairs. The UPC's external support fed Cameroon's internal maquis (as UPC members called the underground resistance camps within the territories), rooted in culturally particular conceptions of freedom and sovereignty. With such deeply local and broadly international foundations, the political future that Cameroonian nationalists envisaged seemed achievable: even after the Cameroon territories' official independence, UPC nationalists kept fighting. But, by the mid-1960s, postcolonial states prioritized territorial sovereignty over 'African unity' and Ghana's support of the UPC became unsustainable, leading to the movement's disintegration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Propaganda from Biafra and pro-Biafran rhetoric generated by its supporters drew heavily on ideas of modernity. This continued a pattern of associations rooted in colonial-era policies and ethnic stereotypes, and also represented a deliberate rhetorical strategy aimed at both internal and external audiences. During the second half of the Nigeria-Biafra War, the concept of race assumed an increasingly prominent role in both Biafran and pro-Biafran discourse, in part because of the diminished persuasiveness of Biafran claims about Nigeria's genocidal intentions. Arguments about race dovetailed with established claims about modernity in ways that persist today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zimbabwean historians have not yet fully assessed the interaction of two problematic identities, ethnicity and nationalism, to determine whether the two can work as partners and successfully co-exist. This essay argues that, in Bulawayo during the period studied, ethnicity co-existed with and complemented nationalism rather than the two working as polar opposite identities. Ethnic groups provided both the required leaders who became prominent nationalist figures and the precolonial history, personalities and monuments that sparked the nationalist imagination. From the 1950s, ethnic groups expanded their horizons and provided platforms from which emerging African nationalists launched their agenda. Understanding these interrelationships will reshape our understanding of the workings of these two identities in a cosmopolitan town. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins with a quotation from a local informant high-lighting a perception in the Gambia/Casamance borderlands that there is a pattern linking the violence of the later nineteenth century with more recent troubles. It argues that there is some merit in this thesis, which is encapsulated in a concatenation of events: systematic raiding by Fodé Sylla led to the creation of a relatively depopulated colonial border zone which was later filled by Jola immigrants from Buluf to the southeast. In the perception of some, it is these immigrants who attracted the MFDC rebels. Mandinkas and Jolas of Fogny J abankunda and Narang, and Karoninkas from the islands of Karone have therefore been largely unreceptive to appeals to Casamance nationalism. The article also argues that there are more twisted historical connections. Whereas in the later nineteenth century, the Jolas associated Islam with violent enslavement, they later converted en masse. Their attitude towards Fodé Sylla remained negative, whilst the Mauritaniari marabout, Cheikh Mahfoudz, was credited with the introduction of a pacific form of Islam that valorized hard work and legitimated physical migration. This legacy has posed a further barrier to militant nationalism. Islam and violence remain linked, but the signs have been reversed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) and the struggle over communism in relation to the Cold War in Guinea. RDA is an interritorial alliance of political parties with affiliations in French West and Equatorial Africa whose parliamentarians severed their ties with the Parti Communiste Français (PCF). Guinea's vote for independence culminated struggle for control of the political agenda of grassroots activists.

The article focuses on the examination of examples of chant, song and propaganda from the mid-1950s that influenced the political future of southern British Togoland. The propaganda provide a means of understanding the arguments, ideas and idioms that unite different people behind the reunification project of Togoland. The main source of tension within this political movement was about the unequal relationships that resulted from uneven educational provision.

The article explores the concepts of exploitation, urban citizenship and blood enemies in the nationalist political thought in Tanzania from 1958 to 1975. Exploitation and its removal are associated with the process of defining enemies and constructing purge categories. Acquiring urban citizenship required a demonstrated commitment to fight exploitation. The changes in nationalist thought and rhetoric under the Tanganyika African National Union government are traced and explained.

The article addresses the attempts by the colonial authorities to understand or characterize, in psychological terms, a progression of African "rebellious types" in society. They often took the form of prophets and visionaries, but were diagnosed as epileptic, neurotic, or suffering from "religious mania." The article presents a retelling of colonial accounts of the "mania of 1911," which took place in the Kamba region of Kenya Colony.

The article argues for the adoption of an empirical, sub-systemic approach to the investigation of nationalist and postcolonial politics in Zambia. The extent of the United National Independence Party's political hegemony immediately after independence has been grossly exaggerated. The diplomatic and ethnic strategies of the ruler of the eastern Lunda kingdom of Kazembe are examined against the backdrop of rising popular discontent with independent government's performance.

Focuses on the story of freedom fighter Jean Djonteu which provides a new approach to the history of Union des populations du Cameroun (UPC) nationalism in the Grassfields and Mungo regions of Cameroon from 1957-71. Politico-spiritual reasons of Djonteu for joining the UPC militia and its revolutionary fight against Franco-Cameroonian state administration; Formation of hybrid political ideologies with UPC nationalism and village political culture; Disengagement of the Grassfields populations from state politics and turned inwards towards village political culture and spirituality.

Contributes to the critique of a particular historiographical construction of the rural socio-intellectual world of the Afrikaner, which portrays that world as narrowly Calvinist and culturally circumscribed, with rigidly patrolled racial borders. Investigation of the world of Bushveld Boer through the work of Eugène Marais and Christiaan Frederick Louis Leipoldt; Evidence that the practical workings of agrarian race relations allowed for a measure of cultural osmosis; Facilitation of Afrikaner interest in African and traditional healing practices; Afrikaner interest in the paranormal and psychic; Historians' probing of the image of a monolithic, Calvinist past.

Analyzes how the pursuit of socioeconomic self-interest affected the construction and representation of race and identity among the West Indians in the Niger Mission. Requirement made by the European managers of the Church Missionary Society Niger Mission for all black West Indians in their employ to make Africa their home; West Indians' demand to be treated and perceived as foreigners on the same footing as Europeans; Denial of parity with Europeans in the allocation of scarce benefits on the basis of racial considerations; Unresolved tensions over the redistribution of scarce resources that led to the premature collapse of the West Indian scheme.

Examines issues pertaining to class, conflict and nationalism in urban areas of Malawi, with emphasis on Blantyre. Background information on Blantyre; Details on the economic conditions in Malawi; Reference to the nature of urbanization in Malawi; Information on the population of Malawi.

Focuses on Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) women's relational constructions of nationalism in 1950s. Women's role in Tanganyikan nationalism; Life histories of women activists; Political mobilization of women; Administration's response to the growing popularity of TANU in 1957; Attempt to promote and control the integration of ethnic cultures into a national culture.

Examines the role of poor women in formation of nationalist political movement in Salisbury, Rhodesia from 1950-1956.