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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]

It is well acknowledged that most African cities are inheritors of colonial systems of administration, legislation, policy and plans. In most of them, this inheritance has not changed, even though it is several decades after gaining independence. As a result, many scholars have tended to overemphasize the influence of the colonizers, precluding an analysis of the ability of indigenous populations to resist, reimagine and remake colonial visions of urban life. Invariably, customary tenure and traditional authority have been treated with some ambivalence in the literature on land in Africa and are often seen respectively as unregulated capital or associated with colonial repression holding back the ability of poor people to prosper. Based on archival and desktop research, this paper examines the ways in which indigenous expressions of urban life have both subverted and been subverted by the British colonial project in Eswatini since the colonial period. The paper argues that while many of the categories and divisions of (settler) colonial rule are still visible in Eswatini, the Swazis have engaged neo-customary practices through kukhonta system centred on the role of the chiefs to reimagine and remake urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies on colonial discourse have demonstrated that the speeches of freedom activists in colonial Africa served as sites of resistance. One key text type that has, however, been neglected in the critical literature on the discourse of emancipation is the national anthem of colonised states. To fill this gap, the present study examines the discursive enactment of resistance in the anthems of former British colonies in Africa, focusing on the transitivity framework in systemic functional linguistics. Semantic and structural parallelisms across the anthems are identified as evidence of a collective memory, a cultural trauma reconfigured and reconstituted to reclaim a positive identity and project a desirable postcolonial future. They also foreground the motif of freedom and legitimise the African as the owner of the reclaimed territory. These procedures articulate an anti-imperialist and anti-establishment stance that provides hope, strength and encouragement to an oppressed group. This paper extends the scholarship on the discursive enactment of resistance by focusing attention on a context underexplored in the literature. It also illustrates the (re)construction of relevant ideologies in national anthems to stimulate desirable, progressive attitudes among citizenry in African states. The paper is furthermore significant to decolonial research and highlights the role of language in political decolonisation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the role played by hypochondria, defined as the preoccupation with fears of having, or the idea that one has, a serious disease based on the person's misinterpretation of bodily symptoms, in the definition of buildings and urban spaces throughout the history of British presence in the tropics, with a special regard to the African continent. From the medical and hygiene experts to the army engineers and the establishment of Tropical Architecture the relationship with the climatic and health conditions of the tropical belt has triggered fears and anxieties that have often prevented the definition of solutions. This paper shows how the scientific attitude that has characterized the exploration and settlement of tropical areas has not been a steady process but rather a complex mix of fears, false truths, wrong beliefs and slow improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using nationally representative survey data from 34 countries, we assess the extent of intergenerational educational mobility for three-quarters of Africa's population, over four decades and by gender. We employ both transition probability matrices and regression-based estimates of intergenerational elasticities and correlation coefficients. We find that the educational status of parents is a strong determinant of their children's educational outcomes, but the strength of this link has diminished in Africa between 1960 and 1999, particularly since the 1980s. We also find that there are considerable differences between countries and by gender. Those in the Southern and Central African region and those with historical links to former British colonies experience relatively higher intergenerational mobility in education. Intergenerational educational mobility is less pronounced for daughters than for sons and mother's education is generally more strongly associated with children's educational attainment than fathers' education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses attempts by the colonial officials to transform African crop production in Botswana in the 1930s. From the early 1930s, the British colonial officials made some modest and largely insignificant attempts to improve crop production in Botswana. The key issues addressed here are the nature and extent of the initiatives undertaken, such as agricultural shows, co-operator farmer experimental plots and the diffusion of technology. The successes and failures of the programmes and whether these initiatives constituted a departure from earlier policy which many scholars and researchers have dubbed the ‘general neglect’ of the territory are examined. The paper also argues that the major shortcomings were insufficient funding, lack of concerted efforts, the selective nature of the programmes and incomprehensive and unsustainable crop production schemes that would have made a major impact. The article also makes an overview of the role of the chiefs in agricultural programmes and argues that it was the pastoral sector (cattle) rather than crop production which largely accounted for social differentiation in Botswana. The article also reveals the regional imbalances that characterised colonial interventions in the crop production sector. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fiscal decentralization has been a major theme in development policy in Sub-Saharan Africa since the 1980s. However, the hopes that decentralization will lead to greater accountability have often been disappointed. This paper uses evidence on the devolution of tax collection in British colonial Africa to argue that corruption in local governance in Africa has a long history. The devolution of authority over tax assessments to district officers and their delegates in the early colonial period resulted in widespread corruption. These problems were exacerbated when authority was devolved further to the local level in the 1940s, a pivotal decade in the development of the local authorities inherited by post-independence governments. This evidence indicates that the tendency for decentralization to lead to corruption at the local level is not limited to recent moves toward decentralization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Labour won power in 1945, it had no plans for dismantling the remaining colonial empire following Indian independence. Nevertheless, within a quarter of a century, the British and other European empires had been virtually wiped off the map. This paper examines parliamentary attitudes towards the colonial empire, and specifically Africa, in the decade during which the decolonisation policy was formulated. Covering the decade from the first post-war debate on the colonial empire in 1946 to the Ghana Independence debate of 1956, the paper analyses House of Commons records as a means of exploring how the forces driving decolonisation were articulated in Westminster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of this article is the development of the tax system of the Cape Colony from 1820 to 1910. This period was crucial for the introduction and diffusion of modern taxes, and the Cape constitutes an important case as the prime settler-colony in Africa. The article uses a new tax dataset and evidence from official documents to trace and explain the Colony's growing revenue problems during this period. It shows that few changes were made to the tax system from the annexation of diamond fields in 1877 until the end of the South African War in 1902 and that the public coffers mainly benefitted indirectly from the Colony's increased prosperity via railway earnings. This, it is argued, largely reflected the success of efforts by the mining industry to block the introduction of new taxes. The article emphasizes the unusual form of this resistance: instead of undertaking conventional lobbying activities, industry representatives obtained positions of policymaking authority in the Cape Colony's then still immature system of democratic institutions. Hence, it draws on the experience of the Cape to show that immature democratic institutions can hamper fiscal capacity-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1905 the Campos Rodrigues Observatory (CRO) was founded in Lourenço Marques (nowadays Maputo), the capital of Mozambique, by then part of the Portuguese overseas empire. In this paper the inception and early history of the CRO are analysed in the broader context of the interwoven history of the Portuguese and British empires in Africa, and specifically with respect to the scientific relations between Mozambique and South Africa. The equipment, personnel, practices and networks involved in the inception and early development of the CRO are brought into focus in order to illustrate the problems and strategies that shaped the establishment and functioning of this observatory, which was conceived essentially as a symbol of imperial stamina and colonial prowess. It is suggested that by providing a focal point for the development of scientific relations between Mozambique and South Africa, the CRO served both Portuguese ambitions for recognition as an imperial power and the emergence of South African nationalism. [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]

During the first years of the twentieth century, Christian missionaries tried to improve their efforts to bring the message of the Gospel to areas such as British Tropical Africa. The process stemmed from the World Missionary Conference in 1910 in Edinburgh, Scotland, where conference organisers used the then popular method of social surveys to determine the content of the conference. They continued to use surveys to determine the best ways to decide what the missionaries should do to improve their efforts in colonial areas. After the First World War, they applied for financial support to conduct surveys to determine how best to shape education in British colonial Africa. They thought their intentions were praiseworthy. The period of conquest had ended, and the British government and the missionaries expressed the desire to improve the lives of the indigenous peoples. This paper will explore three important questions. First, what benefits did they expect to receive from the surveys and how did the missionaries construct their surveys? Second, did the surveys enable the missionaries and the colonial officials to accumulate objective evidence on which they could make reasonable policy decisions? Third, did the surveys reveal the changes that were likely to affect local conditions? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper demonstrates how the tribal administrations in Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana), despite severe logistical, financial and personnel constraints, played a significant role in the provision of the much needed local services from as early as 1900. In some East and West African colonies this began only in the 1950s after the Second World War and towards independence. Moreover, the tribal administrations in Bechuanaland were able to do this in spite of constrains of inefficiency and conservatism of some Chiefs, and the ill-treatment of the subject tribes. Therefore, it is argued that the tribal administration in Bechuanaland had a developmental thrust which may explain the uniqueness of post-colonial Botswana, which took a completely different route to that of other Sub-Saharan African countries in terms of service delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of the British in Egypt during the British occupation (1882-1922) have generally focused on the lives and exploits of the upper- and middle-class Britons who served in the military or in the civil service. Drawing from private papers, census data, court archives and business records, this article describes the socio-economic space inhabited by non-official upper- and middle-class Britons as well as those from the lower middle and working classes within the hierarchical structure of Egypt's British community. It discusses the income levels of British upper-middle-class lawyers, doctors, engineers, teachers, bankers, businessmen, clergymen and missionaries; lower-class clerks, artisans and policemen; and working-class tradesmen, railway workers and domestic servants in the context of both their Egyptian and British socio-economic environment. The research also seeks to illuminate some of the hardship, inequality and snobbery that working-class Britons encountered in Egypt. Throughout the analysis, comparisons between the income levels for similar occupations of the British in Egypt and their counterparts in Britain are used to discern possible motivations for their working abroad. Since little research has been done regarding the non-elite Britons in Egypt during the occupation and particularly concerning those from the lower classes, this effort aims to be a useful contribution to knowledge of British imperial history and the colonial experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the emergence of modern forms of football in southern Africa during the late nineteenth century. It focuses on Cape Town - 'the birthplace of South African sport as we know it today' 1 - and draws on comparative material from elsewhere in the region and overseas. It also locates events within wider social and political developments at a time when Britain sought to establish its supremacy through a federation of the South African colonies and republics. Central to the investigation is the need to discover more about the existence of a Cape football code and to ascertain the means by which William Milton championed rugby in the course of promoting a broader imperial sporting culture. In exploring the changes which occur, the article will pay attention to the stance of the press and take into account soccer's struggle for recognition; the establishment of parallel black football organisations, and the escalation in Afrikaner support for rugby. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several of Kenya's wildlife conservation areas were established from the late 1950s through efforts by the international conservationist lobby to decolonise African conservation programmes initiated by colonial administrations from the late nineteenth century. The prospect of African independence induced conservationists to look for ways to give Africans a stake in their own wildlife, with a view to securing the future of conservation under independent governments. Kenya's internal politics shaped these efforts on the ground, giving birth to community-controlled wildlife conservation projects such as game reserves. Although the government of independent Kenya had started to transform the conservation programme in favour of state-controlled wildlife areas by the late 1960s, the legacy of the community game reserves persists today. This paper analyses the impact of the internal politics of decolonisation on Kenya's wildlife conservation programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eppelsheimer's article examines Holocaust refugees' experiences in colonial Kenya. It draws attention to the autobiographical novels of German Jewish author Stefanie Zweig, as well as testimonies and memoirs of former Holocaust refugees who had fled to Kenya, and asks if and how refugees' own experiences of racial persecution informed their responses to colonial racism. This article illustrates how Zweig responded in aesthetic terms to her experience in colonial spaces. It does so by examining autobiographical aspects of Zweig's writings, highlighting the author's upbringing in multiple cultures, literary traditions and languages, and discussing Zweig's novels in the contexts of white British settler writing about Kenya, as well as the German 'Africa-novel'-—both of which have shaped the images and perspectives of Kenya among millions of readers. It examines such European colonialist perspectives and discourses in literary texts as well as testimonies. In so doing, it questions whether a text like Nowhere in Africa, which is about the experiences of a German Jewish refugee family in Kenya, contributes to the silencing of African voices and the obscuring of African history by colonial historiography and literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of the nineteenth century, British imperial doctors found that the glycerinated lymph they received from British-based pharmaceutical companies became inert, failing to protect colonial populations against smallpox. Colonial doctors and their British suppliers thus took a fresh look at the preservation media used for lymph as they discovered how different kinds of lymph reacted to 'tropical' climates. British lymph distributors like the Society of Apothecaries sought to maintain their economic hold and influence on the colonies, which provided them with significant commercial outlets to sell lymph, through exploring new modes of preserving lymph. Colonial doctors, however, used the issue to argue for the ability to locally produce vaccine, creating a more economical and dependable production line for the colonies. Building on scholarship on imperial climates, public health, and pharmaceutical manufacturing, I argue that together, colonial climates and local preferences forced calf vaccine lymph producers and users in Britain to redefine their ideas about what constituted smallpox vaccination. These issues affected where colonial lymph was produced and who benefited from lymph's economic power and scientific authority across international borders, exposing how the tropical colonial climate shifted how long-standing medical technologies were produced and distributed across international borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1845 Dahra Massacre, in which French troops killed hundreds of Algerians by 'smoking out' their cave refuges, instantly became (and remains) an emblematic case of colonial violence. In Britain, this atrocity came to stand for everything British colonialism supposedly was not, and thus buttressed the claim to British exceptionalism as having a supposedly 'better', less violent colonialism. And yet, such attacks on caves had featured regularly in nineteenth-century British warfare in southern Africa, smoke being supplemented by dynamite from the 1870s onwards, cumulating in the little-known but extensive cave dynamitings in MaShonaland 1896-1897. This article reconstructs that long history, describing not only how practitioners accepted the dynamitings largely unquestioned, but also asking how at the time the British claim to exceptionalism was sustained despite the more than apparent resemblances to foreign cases. Apologists of empire did not cover up the violence but rather defended it; what they chose to remain silent on were the foreign analogies – concealed comparability was key to successfully sustaining British exceptionalism. Given the continued influence of exceptionalist arguments in public debate and historiography, this article finally makes a case to more forcefully place histories of British colonial violence next to those of other empires in an explicitly transimperial framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, accumulation has become a curiously neglected concept in imperial history. Despite this, it remains a powerful heuristic for understanding the drives, dynamics, and effects of modern imperialism. Juxtaposing early Marxist conceptualizations of accumulation with some formative historiographic debates about colonial knowledge in Africa and Asia, I argue that accumulation can provide a better account of the 'lumpy' spatiality of empire than the currently predominant model of the network. Its advantages stem from it being a concept inherently concerned with the relationship between appropriation and accrual. Using accumulation to frame the study of empire foregrounds the relationships between spaces of extraction and dispossession, and sites of aggregation and accretion. The lens of imperial networks struggles to attend to places of disconnection and asymmetries of power. In contrast, the concept of accumulation was developed precisely to better understand uneven distributions and the production of inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the widespread use of the British colonial Blue Books as a statistical source, there has been little investigation of their reliability. This article compares retail price reports in the Blue Books with annual averages constructed from weekly market reports published in four colonial African newspapers. It finds that the Blue Books can sometimes be an unreliable guide to staple prices, with the median error in the order of 25%, though some series are reasonably accurate and some are very inaccurate. Estimating annual averages was complicated by high price volatility and seasonality. In a simulation, the article shows that colonial officials would have usually needed to gather price quotations reasonably frequently in order to be likely to obtain accurate annual averages. A new effort to find non-official sources for prices, especially for staples, and for the early colonial period, would help to refine estimates of living standards and agricultural market dynamics in colonial Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tambookie, the San name for abaThembu, was adopted by the British for the area north of the eastern Cape colonial boundary in the 1820s. By the 1830s, all those who lived in this liminal zone had become snared in the trap of conquest – none perhaps as inexorably as Maphasa, chief of the amaTshatshu, a Thembu clan. Unstable colonial policy and successive failed attempts to control the Tambookie frontier between 1830 and 1850 buffeted Maphasa. After the eighth frontier war, the British singled out his people serving on them a proclamation that sought to destroy their political power and group identity. In an effort to understand the position of Maphasa and the destruction of his people, this article explores the making of the Tambookie frontier and discusses the chief's vulnerability in his relations with the Moravian missionaries, the Thembu paramount and the British. The story of Maphasa amplifies the history of the north eastern frontier and raises questions for the crisis in African authority in the mid-nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent scholarship has shown how conceptualisations of religion were not a given but the site of historical conflict in the creation of nation-states. In light of this insight, it is time to revisit the history of Britain's political engagement with the phenomenon of nationalism during the era of decolonisation. One important but under-studied case involves Britain's relationship with Muhammad Idris ibn al-Mahdi al-Sanusi (1889-1983) and the Sanusi brotherhood during the Second World War, a crucial phase in the evolution of Anglo-Libyan relations. Although the assessment of military exigencies and the calculation of strategic interests played an important part in determining Britain's attitude towards the Sanusi they do not tell the whole story. British support of Idris was also premised on the adaptability of the Sanusi Order and the probable reformulation of the role of Islam in the context of an emerging nation-state. By charting the evolution of the pro-Sanusi, pro-Idris case within British circles, this article highlights the interesting interaction between orientalism, religion and nationalism that shaped Anglo-Sanusi relations during the Second World War. While historians have long recognised the links between orientalism and formal imperialism there were also interesting connections between orientalism and nationalism that deserve equal consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of the twentieth century, Lake Victoria faced an unprecedented decline: From a symbol of biodiversity, Africa's largest lake evolved into a highly degraded habitat. What were the underlying mechanisms of this? Common explanations focus on the introduction of the Nile perch in the 1950s and 1960s and the consequential damage to the lake. This article argues, however, that this introduction must be read against the background of the long-term schemes of resource utilisation deployed by the institutions of the British Empire. The introduction of the Nile perch was not an isolated event but was embedded in a longer process of exploring, utilising and modifying the lake. In this process, the colonial institutions deliberately ignored the many well-founded scientific warnings of an introduction in favour of a modification of the lake. Thus, this modification, presented as legitimate, symbolically reflects the effort of the institutions of the British Empire to control and optimise natural resources and stands in a long series of interventions in natural habitats. Overall, this multi-perspective analysis of Lake Victoria's modification contributes to questions of nature utilisation in colonial contexts and sheds light on the general relationship between man and nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complexities of business in Africa are illustrated through the case study of economic and business development of the different countries. By the time decolonisation brushed across Africa from the late 1950s, South Africa enjoyed political independence under white rule, controlling a viable economy based on mineral and industrial capitalism. This article shows the change in a powerful state-capitalist nexus from mining to the industry to ethnic or race-based 'empowerment'. Contesting nationalisms between Afrikaners and loyal British imperial sympathisers, constituted the rationale for inward-looking economic policies for national economic development. The formation of unstable coalitions for market co-ordination managed market distortion to faci-litate the development of the leading modern industrial economy in Africa, while the rest of independent Africa experimented with central planning, socialism and state-capitalism. This study illustrates the peculiarity of capitalist development in Africa, specifically South Africa, considering the particular institutional contexts and broad business environment in which business acts strategically. South African business proactively engaged in a dynamic state/business relationship from national capitalism under minority rule, to an unstable balance of majority black capitalism, socialist worker welfare capitalism and tribal communalism. The manifestation of an unstable but unique state-business nexus involving market and non-market elements, adds innovation to the VoC framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cape San were not eliminated by outright killing only. The commercial stock-farming economy on the north-eastern frontier of the Cape Colony created a demand for labour. Those Cape San who survived the physical destruction of their communities were regularly compelled into forced labour to meet the needs of the frontier stock-farming economy in this region. The majority of those who became forced labourers were children. This article presents an analysis of the forced removal of Cape San children amid the broader exterminationist campaign of the late eighteenth century. The eliminationist agenda of the British colonial period during the early nineteenth century is also considered. Cape San child transfers to trekboer society continued apace following British occupation of the Cape. Legal measures were introduced to regulate the system of Cape San child transfers by officially establishing San child apprenticeship. The article presents the case for recognizing the important contributory role of child confiscation in the genocide inflicted on the Cape San. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes the formation and work of the ‘Elliot’ Commission on Higher Education in West Africa (1943–45) to reconsider the roots of British colonial development. Late colonial universities were major development projects, although they have rarely been considered as such. Focusing particularly on the Nigerian experience and the controversy over Yaba Higher College (founded 1934), the article contends that late colonial plans for universities were not produced in Britain and then exported to West African colonies. Rather, they were formed through interactions between agendas and ideas with roots in West Africa, Britain and elsewhere. These debates exhibited asymmetries of power but produced some consensus about university development. African and British actors conceptualised modern education by combining their local concerns with a variety of supra-local geographical frames for development, which included the British Empire and the individual colony. The British Empire did not in this case forestall development, but shaped the ways in which development was conceived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work presented here is in the form of a case study that connects currencies with merchants in Sierra Leone from the early fragmentary British presence in 1787 to wide-scale colonisation late in the century. Through accounts from archival research, it traces particularly early examples of monetary instabilities prior to formal colonial rule as well as the first attempts made by the British to regulate indigenous currency systems and standardise them into a homogeneous currency system. Through a monetary perspective, the article shows that colonial authorities did not succeed in having full control over the currencies nor did local ways of using them determine their circulation but merchants, who were responsible for shipping specie to the region, also had a degree of control over the circulation of currencies. As such, the article provides very interesting—and complex—cases that emerged from the interfaces in situ among indigenous populations, merchant companies, international traders, settler communities and British colonial officials. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the wave of independence in Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the British government sought not only to maintain influence in former colonies but also to expand it in the rest of the continent. One lever of influence was news media. The British government encouraged and subsidized London-based media to expand in Africa to block the Soviets, forestall competitors, and preserve British influence in a classic example of media imperialism. The Reuters news agency used a secret subsidy to greatly expand its Africa coverage and sign up new national governments as clients. Anglo-Canadian newspaper millionaire Roy Thomson, who sought a peerage, cooperated closely with the government as he invested heavily in African newspapers and television systems and journalism training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses three aspects of air power in South Africa during the period between the two world wars, each one intermeshing with debates about what kind of political and social space the Union could claim for itself beyond its borders on the continent. First, during the First World War and in its immediate aftermath the advance of air power raised the question of how the tense relations between Afrikaners and English speakers would be influenced by this new technology. Second, aviation offered new methods of control of the African majority and other recalcitrant groups. Third, the progress in aviation technology, compounded by the international tensions in the 1930s and European armed intervention in East Africa, alerted white South Africans to the perils of their diminished geographical isolation at the southern tip of the continent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The independence of African colonies generally turned imperial heroes into unwanted memories of a bygone age. However, half a century later, the pantheon of European heroes of the colonial era seems to be enjoying a new lease of life in sub-Saharan Africa under the impulse of a variety of factors linked to local religious beliefs, global tourism or new approaches in the construction of post-colonial national identities. This article argues that the rebirth of imperial heroes in Africa reveals a deep process of renegotiation of nation-building narratives, moving away from post-colonialism and towards a post-racial form of cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The story of the ‘Scramble for Africa’ goes deeper than the mere arbitration of boundaries and the partition of colonies and territories. Less well understood are the complex ways in which Atlantic-based commercial capitalism and imperialism generated new sources of African wealth at regional and district levels and yet simultaneously aggravated intra-ethnic trade rivalries and personal aggrandizement by warlords, which led in turn to both African inter-state violence and armed anti-colonial insurrections on the Côte d'Ivoire/Gold Coast frontier that frustrated European territorial conquest and efforts towards political stabilization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article demonstrates that the Church of Scotland did not seek to undermine the Central African Federation from the moment of its foundation in 1953. This misconception derives from many of the church's missionaries in the region who demonstrated open disdain for the Federation throughout its existence. They were upset that it had been imposed by the white settlers of Central Africa and the British government over the objections of the indigenous Africans. The church, however, did not follow its missionaries. Instead, it sought to make the federal scheme work for all concerned. The Reverend George MacLeod, perhaps the most visible church leader of the twentieth century, played an important role in trying to make the Federation function between 1953 and early 1959. It was not until after the declaration of the Nyasaland Emergency in March 1959 that the church passed a deliverance demanding an autonomous, African-run Nyasaland, at the behest of MacLeod's Committee Anent Central Africa. Deliverances are resolutions presented to the commissioners of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. The commissioners listen to the deliverances and then choose to accept, reject, add to, or amend each of them. Deliverances accepted, or passed, by the General Assembly become law. These laws determine how the Church of Scotland operates. This divergence between the Church of Scotland and its missionaries before the Emergency resulted from the Church's sense of historical obligation to protect the indigenous peoples of Nyasaland from the possibly deleterious consequences of rapid decolonisation. Afterwards, the church focused on protecting the Africans from the federal government by setting them free from the British Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the controversy around the suppression of the Langeberg Rebellion and subsequent punitive indenture of the ‘Bechuana rebels’, a serious episode of colonial violence which, like many others, has been forgotten. In recovering this episode, I argue that such controversies were crisis points in wider attitudes towards empire and colonial relationships. The article focuses on what the debate reveals about the articulation of four imperial ‘principles’ that those challenging the punishment argued had been undermined: ‘freedom’, ‘protection’, ‘civilisation’ and ‘justice’. By comparing reactions in Britain and southern Africa, I demonstrate that these values, evoked as if universally understood, were configured in ways that spoke to the specificities of different colonial sites and that their meanings differed, even within what may be described as ‘humanitarian’ networks, across places of Empire. I argue that violent episodes, such as the Bechuanaland controversy, created ruptures that exposed these discrepancies and contradictions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Kenyan Witchcraft Ordinances, passed by the British administration in 1909 then revised in 1918 and 1925 represented an attempt by the colonial government to control the punishment of a variety of magical practitioners. This article examines how successfully they were applied in Nyanza. Administrators and judges were forced to recognise their own ignorance of what constituted an offence and leave definitional control of witchcraft in the hands of local people, especially after 1933 when Native Tribunals were authorised and actively encouraged to hear most of the cases. There remained a fundamental incompatibility between the “cognitive map” that underpinned beliefs in the power of magic and a colonial rational–legal judicial system that relied on empirical evidence. Despite indications to the contrary, British officials persisted in their claim that such “superstitions” would naturally decline with the advance of education. In this context the colonial mindset had a lesser claim to reality than belief in the power of magic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Twenty years after the publication of John MacKenzie's Empire of Nature, his characterisation of sport hunting tourism as a symbol of elite and imperial privilege remains strong. Using the example of two white hunters from New Zealand and their trip to Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in 1926, this article elaborates upon MacKenzie's brief mention of hunters in Africa from cultures other than Britain. In particular, the article argues that ‘home’ hunting cultures—in this case of New Zealand—need to be considered thoroughly when examining meanings of hunting tourism, and, second, that hunting trips could serve a range of purposes beyond the notion of reinforcing colonial rule. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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In his influential account of post-colonial melancholia, Paul Gilroy suggests that contemporary reports of violence in Southern Africa reveal Britain's inability to work through its grim history of imperialism and colonialism. Gilroy's study links recent discussions of tragic Southern African themes to Enoch Powell's ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968. However, it does not mention Powell's critique of Britain's ‘post-imperial nostalgia’ in a speech about Rhodesia later that year. This is not entirely surprising – the Conservative Central Office did not disseminate Powell's call for Britons to move beyond sentimental attachment to ‘kith and kin’ in Rhodesia, and Rhodesian sympathisers in the Conservative Monday Club attempted to work around Powell's refusal to support the ‘White Commonwealth’. Moreover, Powell opposed non-white ‘communalism’ whether he was emphasising the importance of the British Empire to English identity or challenging the ‘harmful myth’ of empire as an English nationalist. Consequently, this article uses archival material relating to the Monday Club and the Rhodesian Ministry of Information in order to document three of the main strands of post-colonial melancholia that apply to Powellite figures on the right who defended (white) minority rule in Rhodesia and/or demonised (non-white) minority cultures in the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

'All things are for sale in Port Said', said Madame. Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed (1890) At the beginning of the twentieth century, Port Said was four days from Marseilles ... four days to meet up with this Tower of Babel where Egyptians, Arabs, Greeks, Maltese, Cypriots, Levantines, Syrians, and Tripolitanians mixed and where they took ocean liners by storm... Valerie Nicolas, Directrice de l'Alliance Francaise de Port-Said, in Marie-Laure Crosnier-Leconte et al., Port-Said: Architectures XIXe-XXe siecles (2006) In 1912, the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), a Protestant voluntary society, decided to open a depot for the global distribution of its Bibles in the Egyptian city of Port Said. Located at the northern terminus of the Suez Canal, Port Said was a fuelling centre for steamships and welcomed travellers sailing between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and between Europe and Asia. The concentration of resources in Port Said made practical sense for the BFBS, whose leaders favoured a business model of efficiency and mass marketing while proclaiming a mission to share the Bible with the world. Yet, Port Said also had a romantic appeal for the BFBS, whose leaders repeatedly emphasised the city's proximity to historic lands of the Bible. This article surveys the activities of the BFBS in Port Said from the late nineteenth century until the outbreak of the Suez Crisis in 1956 and shows how this work impinged upon several different kinds of history, notably the history of books (including reading, publishing, and translation); of travel during an 'Age of the Sea'; and of Christian missions and evangelical thought. Connecting British imperial and modern Middle Eastern history, the article also ties the BFBS at Port Said to larger events occurring in Egypt and the region upon Israel's debut in 1948. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did the British march up the Nile in the 1890s? The answers to this crucial question of imperial historiography have direct relevance for narratives and theories about imperialism, in general, and the partition of Africa in the nineteenth century, in particular. They will also influence our understanding of some of the main issues in the modern history of the whole region, including state developments and resource utilisation. This article presents an alternative to dominant interpretations of the partition of Africa and the role of British Nile policies in this context. It differs from mainstream diplomatic history, which dominates this research field, in its emphasis on how geographical factors and the hydrological characteristics of the Nile influenced and framed British thinking and actions in the region. Realising the importance of such factors and the specific character of the regional water system does not imply less attention to traditional diplomatic correspondence or to the role of individual imperial entrepreneurs. The strength of this analytical approach theoretically is that it makes it possible to locate the intentions and acts of historical subjects within specific geographical contexts. Empirically, it opens up a whole new set of source material, embedding the reconstruction of the British Nile discourse in a world of Nile plans, water works and hydrological discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the politics of literacy in late colonial Sudan. Drawing upon hitherto untapped archival sources in English and Arabic, it focuses on two key questions: What were the purposes and uses of literacy in the eyes of colonial authorities? What means were used to spread literacy skills among Sudanese people? Positioning these issues in the context of British imperial policy in Africa, it is argued that mixed teams of British and Sudanese educationists came to view literacy as a central tool to foster social progress and political modernity. The analysis puts special emphasis on literacy campaigns and follow-up literature as experimental means used to promote and perpetuate Arabic literacy in Northern Sudan. Examining both 'nationwide' and provincially based magazines, it highlights their multifaceted role as pedagogic materials, vehicles of political, cultural and ideological representations, social networks, as well as public platforms of expression for young Sudanese literates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on African nationalism and mass nationalism in the 1960s in colonial Zimbabwe, formerly known as Rhodesia. Using oral testimonies, the author focuses on the several non-elite Zimbabwean political activists, including Obed Mutezo, Mordikai Hamutyinei, and Oliver Muvirimi Dizha. The political parties the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress (SR-ANC), the National Democratic Party (NDP), and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) are also examined.

This article examines the inter-relationship between psychiatry and sex, both fertile fields within the recent historiography of colonialism and empire. Using a series of case files pertaining to European patients admitted to the Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi during the 1940s and 1950s, this article shows how sexual transgression among colonial Europeans precipitated, and was combined with, mental distress. Considering psychiatric treatment as a form of social control, the article investigates a number of cases in which a European patient had been perceived to have transgressed the normative sexual behaviour codes of settler society in Kenya. What these files suggest is that transgressive sexuality in Kenya was itself framed by indices, as insistent as they were uncertain, of gender, race and class. While psychiatry as social control has some degree of purchase here, more valuable is an attempt to discern the particular ways in which certain forms of sexual behaviour were understood in diagnostic terms. Men who had sex with Africans, we see, tended to be diagnosed as 'depressed' on arrival at the hospital but were judged to be mentally normal consequently. Women, by contrast, were liable to be diagnosed as psychopathic, a diagnosis, I argue, that helped to explain the uniquely transgressive status of impoverished European women living alone in the margins of white society. Unlike white men, moreover, women did not have to have sex with non-Europeans to transgress sexual codes: this is because female poverty was a sexual problem in a way that male poverty decidedly was not. Poor white women were marked by uncertainty over their sexual behaviour-and dubious racial identity in its turn-and the problem of social contamination was described by reference both to the polluted racial ancestry of an individual and to the prospective contamination of healthy racial stocks. This article aims to address current historical debates around sex and empire, 'white subalternity' and the social history of psychiatry and mental health. All names have been changed to protect patient anonymity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British administrative elite in Sudan represented the Khartoum Police Strike of 1951 as a 'mutiny', the result of a combination of both outside provocation and of the character failings of both Sudanese policemen and their British officers. This article will demonstrate that these convenient interpretations concealed a series of wider tensions within the colonial state itself, between modernising legal professionals and colonial administrators who cherished their personal control over the police. These tensions dictated debates about the status of the police in the build up to the strike, and the manner in which the heavily politicised enquiry into it was conducted. The Sudan Political Service employed an 'otherisation' of Sudanese culture to argue that the country was unsuited for a modern system of policing. Meanwhile, Sudanese policemen and other nationalists attempted to seize from the British the values of 'civil' policing that the colonisers preached but rarely practised. Nevertheless, in spite of the identification of the police strikers with other branches of the nationalist and labour movement, their own association with the government ensured that support for the strike was only limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1843 William Sammons founded the peculiarly named Sam Sly's African Journal (1843-1851) in Cape Town. Claiming to be a 'register of facts, fiction, news, literature, commerce and amusement', the African Journal was a hybrid newspaper and literary and satirical periodical aimed at an Anglophone immigrant readership. Studies of the press have emphasised its role as a discursive agent in forming imagined communities of identity, but this has tended to focus on isolating nations or localities rather than noting the global context. However, recent scholarship on the British Empire has moved beyond nationally focused histories towards examining metropole and colony within the same mutually constitutive frame. This article draws on the conception of the circulation of newspapers as a significant means for negotiating geographies of identity in the empire, but seeks to broaden the focus beyond networks of competing official, humanitarian and settler discourses. This involves examining the materiality of the colonial press - its local and global circulation and readership, and the nature of its diverse content ranging from imaginative literature, to letters and editorials - to shed light on how the African Journal's readers negotiated their identity, cultural attachment and respectability as colonists of British descent poised on the empire's periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Established in 1902, the West African Medical Staff (WAMS) brought together the six medical departments of British West Africa. Its formation also followed the foundation of schools of tropical medicine in London and Liverpool. While the 'white' dominions were at the centre of Joseph Chamberlain's ambitions of erecting a system of imperial preference, the tropical colonies were increasingly tethered to the future security and prosperity of Greater Britain. Therefore, politicians and businessmen considered the WAMS and the new tropical medicine important first steps for making Britain's West African possessions healthier and more profitable regions of the empire. However, rather than realising these goals, significant structural barriers, and the self-interest and conservatism this helped breed among medical officers, made the application of even the most basic public health measures extremely challenging. Like many policies emanating from Whitehall during this period, what made the WAMS and the new tropical medicine thoroughly imperial was nothing accomplished in practice, but the hopes and aspirations placed in them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the nature of physical education in late-19th and early-20th century Great Britain in pubic and private elementary schools, preparatory schools, boys' grammar schools and girls' schools. It discusses how the students that attended these schools during this time would later serve as imperial administrators in Tanganyika and as a result much of what they experienced would serve as the basis for the physical education that would be taught there. The article examines the types of activities that were part of the British physical education curriculum and explores the influence it had on British-ruled Tanganyika and later on Tanzania.

The article presents an examination of the influence that British physical education and athleticism ideology had on the Tanganyikan society during the 1920s and 1930s. The article explores the channels through which the development of the British games culture in Tanganyika occurred including in schools, sports clubs and imperial society. The article examines how Great Britain's colonial administration pursued various avenues of cultural imperialism with physical education and games culture being one specific form.

The article examines the philosophy of education in Great Britain in the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly that of the elite private schools known as public schools, and how that philosophy was installed in the educational systems of Great Britain's colonies. The emphasis on both the physical and moral benefits of sports stressed by those schools is seen as one of the basic tenets of that philosophy, which stressed the development of a student's character more than the acquisition of knowledge. Colonial administrators of the period are cited in which this idea is explicitly stated. Accounts of education in British colonies in Africa are given to support the contention that the African students of the period had exactly the opposite view of their schooling, placing the acquisition of academic credentials far ahead of sports.

After the loss of their American colonies and prior to the settlement of the land which became known as Australia, the British Government intended to found a penal settlement in South West Africa at the mouth of the Orange River. The main proposer of this scheme, Edward Thompson, died before the plan was put into action. This article asks the counterfactual question of what might have happened, had Thompson lived to give a very different story of the voyage to 'Das Voltas'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]