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Copyright of History in Africa: A Journal of Method is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

“Bereft, Selfish, and Hungry” is a history of “the poor” as a concept in East Africa in the Common Era. It shows how people speaking Greater Luhyia languages reconceptualized poverty as they settled new lands, interacted with other communities, and dealt with social and political change. Their notions of the poor ranged from connecting them with bereavement to associating them with selfishness; from an early emphasis on want to later ideas of deceit. Paying attention to these changes in different, yet related, historical speaker communities allows us to see the dynamism in Greater Luhyian economic thought. This article thus makes the case for writing longue durée histories of vernacular ways of knowing in oral societies. Doing so requires drawing on methods from other disciplines. In this case, comparative historical linguistics allows for the reconstruction of words and their meanings to different proto-languages, whether proto-Greater Luhyia or its descendant languages. Those words and meanings can then be contextualized with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnographic descriptions. Through this approach, we learn a great deal about how people in eastern Uganda and western Kenya historically conceived of the poor and how those ideas changed over time, well before the advent of colonialism, Christianity, and capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reopens debate and discussion about the so-called Abushiri Uprising of 1888. Previous scholars have examined the origins of the rebellion, or the motivations of its participants. This article focuses upon the way in which the rebellion unfolded along the central East African coastline. As a means of interpretation, it looks at the influence of local factors such as the significance of place, and the attachments of particular groups towards place, on the rebels’ behavior and the outcome of the uprising. This local framework permits scholars to situate events more accurately in larger narratives of anti-colonial resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Historical accounts of colonial science and medicine have failed to engage with the Colonial Office's shift in focus towards the support of research after 1940. A large new fund was created in 1940 to expand activities in the colonies described as fundamental research. With this new funding came a qualitative shift in the type of personnel and activity sought for colonial development and, as a result, a diverse group of medical and technical officers existed in Britain's colonies by the 1950s. The fact that such variety existed amongst British officers in terms of their qualifications, institutional locations and also their relationships with colonial and metropolitan governments makes the use of the term 'expert' in much existing historical scholarship on scientific and medical aspects of empire problematic. This article will consider how the Colonial Office achieved this expansion of research activities and personnel after 1940. Specifically, it will focus on the reasons officials sought to engage individuals drawn from the British research councils to administer this work and the consequences of their involvement for the new apparatus established for colonial research after 1940. An understanding of the implications of the application of the research council system to the Colonial Empire requires engagement with the ideology promoted by the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) and Medical Research Council (MRC) which placed emphasis on the distinct and higher status of fundamental research and which privileged freedom for researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using primary sources (oral tradition, archival materials, archaeological evidence, 19th century European explorers’ and missionaries’ accounts) and secondary sources (historical, anthropological, archaeological, etc.), this article reevaluates, in a historical perspective, the decline and diminishment in political power and scale as well as in population and landmass of Bunyoro-Kitara, the earliest kingdom in East Africa’s lake region. It concludes that, contrary to the conventional wisdom proffered by 19th century Europeans and sanctified by Makerere University scholarship, the kingdom declined essentially because of the extraordinary errors of judgment and incompetence of most of its rulers from the close of the 17th century to the close of the 19th century, devastating deceases (human and animal), and brutal British conquest resulting in the death of thousands of individuals and loss of territory. By 1900 the kingdom’s population had declined by about four-fifths and landmass by about two-thirds. No major African kingdom experienced such an enormous outcome. Herein lies the fascination with this subject. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following the elections of 2007, there was a significant increase in public expressions of secessionist feeling on the Kenya coast. During 2010 and 2011, one manifestation of this was the emergence of the Mombasa Republic Council (MRC), which demands independence for the coastal region. The language of secessionism is historical, and revisits the vivid political debates of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when politics in coastal Kenya revolved successively around two constitutional issues. The first was the possibility that the Ten-Mile Strip, nominally the sovereign territory of the Sultan of Zanzibar, might not become a part of independent Kenya; the second was the ‘regionalist’ constitution of 1963–4. This article explores the way that people now retell the history of earlier debates, and argues that these retellings suggest both the power and the plasticity of claims to historical knowledge, and that they reveal a profound fault line within ‘secessionist’ opinion, which separates those who claim political primacy on the basis of autochthony from those who locate their claim to independence in the language of colonial-era treaties. Such divisions are important, because they shape the way that secessionist arguments are framed, and the potential for secessionist politics to undermine the unity of the Kenyan state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the discursive construction of visual imaginations of Italian East Africa through visual and textual materials associated with fascist colonial civil aviation from 1934 through 1940. Analysis of materials produced by Ala Littoria, the fascist regime's main airline, reveals discursive strands and themes that contributed to the deeply modern depiction of Ethiopia, Italian Somaliland, and Eritrea (the constituent colonies within Italian East Africa) as 'natural' landscapes that could be accessed, consumed, and dominated through the air, and in particular through aviation technology and the institution of a colonial civil aviation network in East Africa. Aviation was as a hybrid technology that contributed to the discursive, and therefore material, imaginative construction of Italian East Africa through aviation's material and technological basis as well as its visual representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about several papers discussed at a workshop entitled "Developing Africa: Development Discourse(s) in Late Colonialism," held at the University of Vienna in Vienna, Austria from January 13-15, 2011, is presented. Topics include women development experts, indigenous resistance to development in British East Africa, and the Mourides, Senegalese adherents of an Islamic Sufi order. Speakers included David Simon, Odile Goerg, and Robert Shenton.