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By examining the historic settlement of the Balochi people from West Asia to East Africa, this article seeks to study and examine their past immigration patterns, presence and current socio-political situation as a minority Muslim population. The Balochi people are an Indo-European ethnic Sunni Muslim minority population located in a region currently shared and divided by modern Islamic republics of Iran in West Asia and Pakistan in South Asia. The Balochis have formed a significant part of the non-indigenous Muslim population in East Africa since the late 17th century. Yet, there is not much written on them as a distinct Sunni Muslim minority group originating from historic Iran (including parts of South Asia) to Africa. Being part of a larger project, this study will explore the chief reasons behind the immigration of the Balochis to the regions of East Africa and how did their presence affect the local population and vice versa. The hypothesis is that the Balochis were formerly welcomed by the indigenous and non-indigenous population of East Africa and established amicable relationships with them. Using the method of qualitative content analysis combined with historical analysis, this article highlights the reciprocal impacts of the Balochi immigrants and indigenous people of East Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies infrastructure development in the colony of German East Africa from the early 1890s to 1907. By focussing on questions of continuity and change in the transition phase from the precolonial era to German colonial rule, the article demonstrates that colonial road planning coexisted and often collided with established infrastructure systems. After 1891, colonial authorities sought to transform existing caravan paths into all-weather highways. The analysis applies an actor-centred approach to explain why almost all of these efforts failed. A focus on those actors being expected to construct or maintain (residents) and to use (transport workers) colonial roads reveals the non-compliance of colonial subjects, the persistence of African spatial practices, and the resulting contestation of colonial rule in everyday life. In this way, the article illuminates how Africans responded to European interventions which restructured space and how these responses complicated and frustrated colonial road works. Hence, the article challenges classical narratives of infrastructure as a 'tool of empire' and instead highlights the resilience of vernacular structures and their producers under colonial rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the origin, permutations, potentials, challenges, and implications of two successive, collaborative public history research, teaching, and learning projects undertaken by the Department of History at Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, and the Department of History and Archeology at Maseno University, Kisumu, Kenya between 2014 and 2018. The two projects explored how opportunities created by the mobile revolution in Africa could be leveraged to generate new ways of acquiring historical information and knowledge between students and faculty in universities separated by enormous distances and by disparate social, economic, and political experiences. Specifically, the projects examined how the cellphone revolution could reshape the production and dissemination of knowledge about important sites, places, events, and people in modern Africa. The essay examines the conception and permutations of the two projects; identifies and explores their potentials and challenges; and proffers thoughts and suggestions that may guide similar future endeavors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.)

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.)

This paper attempts to deconstruct the patriarchal anthropocentric masculinity represented by the adult elephant hunters in the metafictional African story within The Garden of Eden through the lens of animal sentience and the environmental history of East Africa during the time of the Maji-Maji war. Furthermore, by linking these two aspects to the process of the (re)writing of the story, the author argues that David’s effort to give a “voice” to both the nonhuman elephant and the environment of Africa mirrors another form of masculinity that is in contrast to his father’s patriarchal anthropocentric masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most histories of East Africa's precolonial interior only give cursory attention to Islam, especially in histories of present-day west-central Tanzania and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Most converts to Islam in this context are usually viewed as 'nominal' Muslims. This article, by contrast, builds on recent scholarship on other regions and time periods that questions the conceptual validity of the 'nominal' Muslim. New converts necessarily questioned their social relationships, ways of living, and ritual practices through the act of conversion. On the shores of Lake Tanganyika, new converts were observable through the act of circumcision, dietary restrictions, abidance by some of Islam's core tenets, and the adoption and adaptation of certain phenomena from East Africa's Indian Ocean coast and islands. Interior populations' conversion to Islam was bound up with broader coast-interior material, cultural, and religious exchanges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.)

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.)

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.)

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.)

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 develops a Gramscian approach to the governance of ‘informal’ economies through a historical study of International Labour Organization (ILO) programmes in East Africa. Drawing on Gramsci’s conception of the ‘subaltern’, the article highlights the ways in which the articulation of ‘informality’ in policy documents is coloured by broader struggles over the political organisation of labour. The article develops this argument through two case studies. The first examines the World Employment Programme mission to Kenya in the 1970s that popularised the concept of ‘informal’ labour. The second is a contemporary programme on apprenticeships in the informal economy that originated in Tanzania. [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]

The article examines the emergence, development and impact of Asian photographers living and working in Colonial and Independent East Africa. Particular focus is given to photographers that were a part of the South Asian diaspora that arrived in East Africa from the early nineteenth century onwards. Additional topics discussed include the photographic studios V. Parekh, Omar Said Bakor and Likoni Ferry Photos, Asian photography studios in Kenya and the book "Asians in East Africa: Images, Histories and Portraits," by Gijsbert Oonk.

A former major base of British colonialism, East Africa, has served as one of the testing grounds for what has been referred to as neo-colonialism. According to Kwame Nkrumah, neo-colonialism indicates that although ‘in theory’, a colony attains independence, ‘[i]n reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside’ (Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. London: Panaf Books, 2004 [1965]). This article challenges this image of neo-colonialism. Based on British documents of the late 1960s and early 1970s, most of which have become available to the public only in the last decade, and sources in East African libraries, it casts new light on British external relations with East Africa in the heady days of independence. These documents demonstrate that the new states of East Africa enjoyed a substantial degree of autonomy, that Britain's development aid was inconsistent and that Britain's involvement in the affairs of its former colonies was reluctant. These accounts reveal that the impact of British policy on newly independent states was actually limited, and thus the nature of Britain's relationship with its ex-colonies and the discourse of neo-colonialism are debatable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a report from a November 6-7, 2014 conference in Vienna, Austria on neocolonialism and African history. Topics of presentations delivered included the role of missionaries in the history of education in British West Africa, Cameroonian intellectuals, and strikes in Durban, South Africa during the 1960s and 1970s.

The article discusses the history of East African porters during the 1916 and 1917 Allied offensives of World War I using military songs and music of the period. The strategic importance of military mobility in the East African campaign is emphasized, the history of East African porters since the caravans of the 19th century is described, and information is offered on the importance of manpower for military logistics in an area without road or railway infrastructure. Differences in the military logistics of the Belgian, British, and German armed forces are examined and the working conditions and mortality of African porters are analyzed.

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.)

Taking the example of the Ismaʻilis in colonial South Asia and East Africa, this article examines some aspects of the complexities involved in the identity formation of communities seeking gradual redefinitions in a deterritorialised global context, reformulating notions of community membership in the process. The Ismaʻili case illustrates an intertwined history of the development of community identity, and a language of social service that became the hallmark of the community under a religious leadership that virtually redefined its position through a vigorous and increasing emphasis on the idiom of social commitment. At one level, this thrust marks a passage from the translocal to the global context, intelligible in terms of the conceptual rubric of global assemblages. At another level, the article also seeks to evaluate the nature of the community's diasporic experience in Africa. It suggests that the ideational framework and praxis of social service — and in more recent times grander developmental endeavours addressing the needs of both Ismaʻilis and non-Ismaʻilis across the world — both reflect, and are mutually constitutive of, more fundamental experiments with identity and repositioning of religious authority that the Ismaʻilis first witnessed in colonial South Asia and East Africa. This article is thus an effort to retrieve some of the continuities and ruptures in the historical process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on the conference "Bridging Histories of East and Central Africa" held from June 6-8 2013, organized by the Institut für Afrikastudien of the University of Bayreuth and the Centre for Areas Studies of the University of Leipzig. Topics discussed include ritual practices under colonial rule, historiographical borders in East and Central Africa, and social change.

Copyright of International Business & Global Economy is the property of Jagiellonian 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.)

During the months from October 1907 through March 1910, first Winston Churchill and then Theodore Roosevelt traveled through British East Africa on nearly identical routes. Both published a series of magazine articles and widely read books from their travels. At that time both were not only politicians but also popular authors who wrote and spoke on race, nation, and empire, and their travel accounts reflect these interests. This article analyzes the materials (visual, textual, published, and archival) produced from these travels to achieve two overarching objectives. One goal is to use these materials to understand how embodied encounters with and representations of imperial landscapes interact in mediating the performance of national and racial subjectivities. A second, more explicitly theoretical, purpose is to engage with the current “landscape debate” regarding representational and nonrepresentational approaches. Landscape's dual meaning as domain and scenery creates tension that can be productively explored through engagement with both representational and nonrepresentational approaches. I investigate how the tension between dwelling and scenery manifests in specific ways among different subjects in different contexts and reflect on what this might mean for integrating representational and nonrepresentational approaches to landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While German colonialism as an imperial system was once neglected by historians, this neglect was less acute in the case of the histories of individual German colonies. Yet here too, new perspectives on German colonial and postcolonial history, informed by an attention to global and transnational entanglements, might offer new insights. In this article, I take the controversy over Karl Roehl's translation of the Bible into Swahili as a case study. Viewed through the lens of a traditional imperial history, controversies during the interwar period over linguistics in general and Bible translation in particular between Britain and Germany replicated imperial rivalries; viewed from a global perspective, however, the Roehl Bible is revealing of the ways in which German colonial irredentism went alongside a continued German role in the transnational entanglements which helped to shape the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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]

The article presents a case study of the settlement of South Asian people in East Africa, with a focus on their status as entrepreneurial minority according to colonial law. An historical overview of the contact of South Asians with East Africa is presented, as well as an analysis of the history of East Africa. Topic discussed include legal status of settlers, cultural relationship between settlers and natives, and rights of minorities in post-colonial East Africa.

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]

Contacts between Arabia and the East African Coast, which have marked the history of the western part of the Indian Ocean since ancient times, have often involved the migration of individuals and groups of people who have contributed to the shaping of the Swahili society. However, details of group migrations from Arabia (even comparatively recent) remain to this day largely unexplored as to their causes, the impact the newcomers had on the East African societies, and their material and cultural contribution to the Swahili coastal centres. It has also never been assessed how long it took an Arab migrant group to become fully integrated into their new socio-economic environment. This paper tries to answer some of these questions by illustrating a migration that took place in the late nineteenth century and involved almost the entire South-Arabian qabila of the ʿUmar Bā ʿUmar, originally settled in and around Ghayl Bā Wazīr, some 30 km inland from the ports of Mukalla and Shihr. This group left the Hadhramaut in the 1880s and eventually settled in Brava, a coastal city of Southern Somalia, c. 1890. The first mention of their presence in East Africa is found in the judicial records of Brava, which have been preserved for the period 1893–1900. The events that marked the subsequent period, up to the present, have been reconstructed through personal observations by the author and oral information collected mainly in Brava, which the ʿUmar Bā ʿUmar left when the outbreak of the civil war in Somalia forced them to return to their original home town in the Hadhramaut. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information about several papers discussed at a conference held March 22-23, 2012 at Oxford University, Oxford, England on links between East Africa in the Indian Ocean World is presented. Topics include the archaeological links between East Africa and the Indian Ocean world, and its impact on the international trade during the second millennium AD. Several Sealinks Project's, an international archaeological project, members, researchers and students presented research paper at the conference.

The article discusses the preservation of historical sources and archival materials related to liberation struggles in east and southern Africa in the latter half of the twentieth century. It examines the management of these archives by political parties, such as the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa and the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF). Topics include the role of national archives in managing these sources and the physical security and digitization of archival materials.

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.

Several articles are presented on the topic of research regarding the British Empire during World War II. The articles discuss research on Great Britain's campaign in East Africa in 1940 and 1941, the aftermath of World War II and the war's impact on colonialism, and the activities of Allied forces in Iran between 1941 and 1945.

This article uses the life of Rasoah Mutuha, a Quaker convert in western Kenya during the twentieth century, to explore the way female Quakers in East Africa participated in pastoral ministry. As an Abaluhya woman living in a patriarchal society, Rasoah maintained an ordinariness to her life: getting married, raising children and farming. However, she was also well educated for her time and sought to become part of the professional ministry of this 'Friends' church brought from the United States, a goal which directly contradicted gender norms for her society. The diverse documentation of Rasoah's story shows how she and others have reinterpreted her life over a fifty-year period to represent shifting paradigms of gender and religion in African history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, anthropology has paid much attention to the concept of identity. Identity politics is a shifting and complex area, but the trick is to claim the right identity at the right time. This article discusses some of the issues associated with this topic on the coast of East Africa. The quotation in the title is a phrase I often heard when a student studying Swahili in the early 1960s. The East Coast was considered to be different from the rest of East Africa - otherwise known as 'up-country' - because it had a long history and impressive material remains as well as a written language with its own literature. What it did not have, unlike the rest of East Africa, were 'tribes'. In the postcolonial period, 'tribalism' has provided a popular and simplistic explanation in the mass media for the conflicts and wars in Africa. Historians, political scientists and anthropologists have argued, however, that modern 'tribalism' does not represent indigenous polities but rather the fall-out from the introduction of modern political systems and conflicts over resources. Given all of these factors, why, in the late twentieth century, should there have been calls for the Swahili to be recognised as a 'tribe'? Seeking answers to this question takes us to an old debate - who are the waSwahili? - sometimes phrased as 'Is there such an entity as the Swahili?' In the first section of this article, I consider the arguments of those who have maintained that the Swahili are not a single people, and in the second discuss the contrary case. The third section considers some of the reasons for such differences in approach, including historiography, identity politics, and the relative positions of authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discussion on the history of Italian fascism in East Africa. It is noted that Italian perspectives on the public recognition of fascist history underwent a change between the 1970s and 2007, due in part to the 1974 publication of a biography of Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. The biography was written by Italian historian Renzo De Felice, the article states. Descriptions are given of the differences between German and Italian perspectives on the history of fascism in Italy and East Africa.

The concept of bridging the digital divide between Africa and the rest of the world draws symbolically on nineteenth century diffusion theories of linear progress and twentieth‐century theories of modernization and development. This paper examines information and communication technology (ICT) policies and public‐access postings on . Bongoland evokes a quality of life that is hectic, frustrating, and slightly crazy. Where the language of policies envisions that technology will improve life in Bongoland, users’ postings suggest that technology reinforces regional hierarchies. This essay argues that, despite the disarticulation of past and present at narrative levels in policy, the past and the present emerge as related in Bongonians’ online postings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]