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Across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Atlantic African leaders confronted new challenges as the European demand for captive African labour transformed the political economy of the region and the experience of living within it. Among a range of new and remodelled strategies designed to protect their polities, West African leaders used alcohol diplomacy to facilitate political alliance, cross-cultural communication and economic exchange. This article draws on warehouse registers, European travelogues and joint-stock company correspondence to uncover Queen Tituba of Agona (c. 1638–1707) in her efforts to manage the English Royal African Company. By tracing her adroit use of alcohol, it reveals how West Africans repurposed English commodities to fit their own patterns of consumption and exchange. From funnelling diplomatic gifts of brandy into Akan-speaking political hierarchies to resolving disputes over rum, the queen drew on alcohol to fortify her rule against other coastal powers and navigate the demands of her own officials, subjects and enslaved labourers. She deployed alcohol in these ways despite, and because of, the pressures placed on her as a woman political leader. Essential to trade and ritual, yet morally fraught, Queen Tituba's use of alcohol upended the European hierarchies of race and gender that consigned West African women to the status of commodity rather than recognized them as strategic consumers. Following alcohol offers a way of unravelling the intersection between gender, consumption and authority in a period when the trafficking of enslaved African peoples fundamentally transformed Atlantic political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about two twentieth-century attempts to produce an edition of the famous Cosmography and Geography of Africa (1526) by Johannes Leo Africanus. One attempt was French, colonial, collaboratively authored, presentist and successful; the other was Italian, academic, single-authored, historicist and unsuccessful, in that it never appeared. Drawing primarily on unstudied archival material from several countries, I reconstruct the trajectories of each edition and its author(s), in an effort to understand more broadly the different ways in which scholarship was produced inside and outside universities in the period between the end of the First World War and the early 1960s. In other words, this is a comparative study of two 'repertoires', to borrow a term recently introduced by Rachel Ankeny and Sabina Leonelli: two institutional praxes embodying different understandings of the world, but also different material resources and codes of personal conduct. But this essay also attempts to say something about the Cosmography itself. One of Leo's greatest achievements was to reach out beyond his own world to adopt the language, ideas and culture of his Italian readers; this could only be fully grasped after the rediscovery of an early manuscript in 1931, which showed that the supposedly foreign, Italian elements of the book were not added later by others. It was precisely this feature, I argue, that was better reflected by the successful French edition than by the unsuccessful Italian one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in the late 1960s, the Nigerian and Ghanaian governments staged a series of massive forced removals of one another's nationals. The first was in Ghana in 1969, and the largest was Nigeria's 1983 deportation of over one million Ghanaians. A further expulsion from Nigeria happened in 1985, and smaller ones took place in the years that followed. Each was an enactment of the state's sovereign right to define its national community — and a devastating blow to the principle of free movement in Africa. Using records from Nigeria and elsewhere, 'Ghana Must Go' places the expulsions in the longer history of law and nationality policy in the British Empire. Mass expulsions were made possible by colonial-era jurisprudence that tied political membership to indigeneity, often through codified, neo-traditional 'customary' laws. The mass deportations of the 1960s–1980s were underwritten by this jurisprudence, even though their immediate causes lay in economic resentment, the failure of regional co-operation, and Ghana and Nigeria's rocky diplomatic relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article scrutinizes recent histories of colonial and international law that use metropolitan reactions to the 'scandals of empire' to project a reform-oriented version of European colonialism. In French West Africa, most scandals never reached the level of metropolitan debate; they hit dead ends in colonial bureaucracies. Analyzing one dead-end scandal, the M'Pésoba Affair, this article argues that colonial justice on the ground often adhered to a politics of expediency, not a reformist rule of law. To maintain their precarious grip on power, colonial administrators had to simultaneously appease their superiors, economic interests, and powerful African actors. Resolving the M'Pésoba Affair, for one, entailed navigating the complex entanglements of cotton production, chiefly disputes, Islamic policy, and interracial sexual relationships in a backwater of empire marked by anticolonial revolt and world war. Especially in moments of crisis, political constraints shaped the application of justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poor and marginalized people have always distributed the labour of mothering, among their extended kin networks, with friends and neighbours and within their communities. This essay argues that taking a long historical view on the distribution of infant-feeding as labour serves as a useful corrective to modern western or imperial models which reify exclusive breastfeeding in the mother–baby dyad, and opens up questions about how the work of feeding babies has played a role in generating and sustaining rigid gender binaries. The article excavates traces of information about the feeding practices of people in West Africa who are members of gender-segregated solidarity societies, from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. These institutions regulate much of economic and social life in the region, which incorporates parts of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, reflecting the endurance of institutions of social reproduction through widespread political change. Practices of infant-feeding show similar endurance, shaped more by economic necessity than political pressure. The article focuses on the experiences of West African men and women, along with the babies they feed with milk of all kinds, rice, palm oil and water. This mothering labour is part of a wider knowledge of the body which has been passed down among Africans and the African diaspora, and with which historians of labour, the body and emotions could usefully engage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article recommends the addition of new ethics standards to the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), an international certification scheme that regulates trade in the natural jewelry-quality diamond industry. Topics discussed include the origins of the international diamond trade, the efficacy of the KPCS, and synthetic diamonds and the jewelry market. Also mentioned are the De Beers monopoly, the West African civil wars, and ethical sourcing of diamonds.

Broadcasting archives have been being digitized in West Africa since the 2000s. Their digital transfer, presented as both a solution to their decay and a necessary step to take them into the new century, presents considerable challenges. This article, while emphasizing the historiographical value of the archives as sources and traces, argues that the processes they undergo, which also participate in these technical objects' afterlife, are connected to a long and circulatory history of cooperation in broadcasting. Located at the interface of past, present, and future, they also provide an opportunity to question certain geopolitical fracture lines, especially those of knowledge and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the economic, political and intellectual history of Western Africa. Topics discussed include African studies conducted in Brazil, investment of Brazilian higher education, public funding for young researchers and cooperation agreements signed between Brazilian universities. It further discusses seminars organized by researchers, relationship between Brazilian and foreign researchers, literary works on intellectual history, cultural heritage of West Africa and Brazilian historiography.

This article examines how the liberatory ideals of transnational projects could become codified in particular processes of thought, deed, and expression. During his term of service in Nigeria between 1960 and 1962 the Trinidadian union leader McDonald Moses mobilized a number of phenomena central to the transformative projects of the mid-twentieth century: the paramountcy of psychology to "true" transformation and change; the embrace of programmatic action; and the belief that both psychological transformation and programmatic action could be articulated through new and enlightened forms of expression. While histories that embrace a "cultural turn" tend to look for this expression in creative forms and artistic production, this article looks to daily administrivia as part of an explicitly political project that aimed to improve the lives of workers by changing their modes of organizing and, consequently, the culture of politics and labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article features a lecture which traced the radical tradition in the Caribbean Carnival and the history of cultural resistance, presented as a keynote address at the international conference "Caribbean Carnival cultures: Power performance and play" on May 21, 2017. Topics covered include the Carnival culture focusing on the West African religious, masquerade and music traditions, the rebellious urban poor, jamettes and masquerade as a form of resistance against European slavers.

The author of the book "African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early & Medieval West Africa" responds to several scholarly reviews of his book about the history of imperialism in West Africa during the Middle Ages.

Highlights • We apply panel cointegration approach to the data covering 1893–2010 and four francophone West African countries. • We find a strong long-term relationship between tax revenue and international trade in these countries. • We find a strong long-term relationship between tax revenue in these countries and economy in European countries. • We find a strong long-term relationship between tax revenue in these countries and tax revenue in France. Abstract Which factors have driven fiscal revenue in Sub-Saharan Africa in the long run? We address this question by studying quantitatively the long-term relationship between fiscal outcomes, economic expansion and external dependency in four francophone West African countries – Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger and Senegal – between 1893 and 2010. Using panel co-integration modelling we find a long-term relationship between, on the one hand, tax revenue and local economic development, proxied by international trade, and, on the other hand, tax revenue and developments of the economy and taxation in the former colonizing power France. The results indicate that economic expansion has been a significant factor in driving the long-term development of tax revenue in West Africa, just as it was in historical Europe, but also point to the historical vulnerability and external dependency of the fiscal systems of the four West African countries. We suggest that the wider implication of these results is that they point to the importance of deepening our understanding of how domestic contexts interact with external economic and institutional external forces to shape African fiscal systems, in contrast to factors such as inter-state warfare that are ubiquitous in narratives of historical European taxation and state development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tony Harrison's "African poems" appear in the major poem sequence "The White Queen", from The Loiners (1970), and are set in a range of historical periods and locations in West Africa. The poems in the sequence stand alone but are also thematically interrelated, addressing in different ways the colonial confrontation between Europe and Africa. In "The Railroad Heroides", the second poem in the "The White Queen" sequence, the suicidal White Queen is holidaying in the Canary Islands, a Spanish colonial possession off the West African coast, and observing the relationships between a local African underclass and French soldiers on leave from Gabon, a former French colony in West Africa. My account examines the poem's activation of French and Spanish colonial histories in West Africa, and explores its political implications and its topical polemical circumstances. It registers correspondences between the rhetorical dimensions of the poem and contemporary political events and movements. Where critics have engaged with Harrison's politics, it is his class political analysis that has dominated the discussion, while his republican and humanist concern with colonialism remains under-appreciated. "The Railroad Heroides" is here discussed as a very fine example of a radical republican and anti-colonial poetic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the historical evolution of military recruitment in the Senegambia region. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, French military officers benefited from indigenous modes of conscription, recruitment, and training, employing the services of slave caste men and professional soldiers. It was only through a co-optation of local strategies, first through the procurement of military aid from slave-owning elites and later the offer to purchase enslaved men from local nobility and pay ceddo and sòfa warriors, that the French were able to build the West African military force known as the tirailleurs sénégalais. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1862 until 1874, John Holt lived on the island of Bioko (Fernando Pó), laying the groundwork for a company that would become one of the most influential trading houses in western Africa. During his time on the coast, Holt was almost continually ill with malaria and other tropical diseases, and his illnesses had a major impact on how he experienced and interpreted his life and work in Africa. This paper draws on Holt’s private papers, as well as merchant memoirs and the historiographies of medicine, hydrotherapy and masculinity to explore merchants’ views of illness and how they were deeply embedded in broader assumptions about manliness during a time of rapid imperial expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper traces the development of capitalism in England, the Americas, and West Africa over a long time period, 1450–1900. The developments in these major regions of the Atlantic Basin during the period were strongly interconnected and ultimately gave rise to the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy which integrated the major economies of the Atlantic world. The development of capitalism in the three specified geographical areas is analyzed in the context of the interconnected developments. Central to the historical analysis is a discussion of the contending conceptions of capitalism as a socioeconomic system. The paper shows that the original conception by Karl Marx, which identified free wage earners separated from their means of production and entrepreneurs who own those means of production as the defining elements, was generally accepted by supporters and critics for several decades; attempts to redefine began in the 1960s. The paper contends that, unlike the original Marxian conception, the new conceptions fail to capture precisely and accurately the dynamic elements which distinguish capitalism unambiguously from other forms of socioeconomic organization and do not facilitate a sharply focused historical investigation of its development over time. The employment of enslaved Africans in large-scale commodity production in the Americas was critical to the development of capitalism in England and in the Americas, but the adverse effects on West Africa’s economies held back the development of markets and the market economy and, ultimately, the development of capitalism in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The debate over whether Germany’s colonial policy toward the Herero and Nama constituted genocide suffers from two basic shortcomings: authors who are proficient in international criminal law (ICL) often have difficulties in getting the historical facts right, and historians with a good knowledge of primary sources lack knowledge about the evolving definition of genocide in ICL. As a result, the authors of many articles and books concerning the German atrocities committed against the Herero and Nama at the beginning of the 20th century either do not apply any precise definition of genocide at all or they quote the definition derived from the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, but without including the comprehensive jurisprudence about genocide that has emerged from international criminal tribunals. Because social science and history have not elaborated an undisputed and precise definition of genocide, this article proposes to apply the relatively narrow and precise ICL definition of genocide to the events in Germany’s South-West African colony at the beginning of the 20th century. This method sheds new light on some neglected aspects of Germany’s policy toward the Herero and Nama, which suddenly appear more important than those that until now have most frequently been regarded as genocidal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since its formation in 1975, The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has attained a mixed-bag of accomplishments in the area of peace and security. Despite its modest gains in this area, the capacity of the organization has been constantly challenged by emerging and recurring security threats in the West African region. These include jihadist terrorism, drug trafficking and the unconstitutional changes of government. Informed by a brief analysis on the theory of security regionalization, this paper assesses the progress of ECOWAS in resolving the aforementioned security challenges, and then determines how the organization could become more meaningful to regional and global security. The data acquired for the paper was gleaned through scholarly deductions and a vigorous review of ECOWAS’ security mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of aluminum's transformation from a precious to a commonplace metal over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries has frequently been told as a narrative about intrepid western chemists, whose discoveries made it possible for industrialized manufacturers to make the metal global. This paper questions both the singularity of that discovery and the inevitability of aluminum's global dominance as a 'modern' material of manufacture. It does so by considering the history of aluminum in West Africa and the ways in which artisans in that region domesticated the substance to an artisanal mode of production and developed quotidian chemical knowledge of it in the process. Considering aluminum from the perspective of West Africa suggests that aluminum may not have been discovered once, but many times, and that everyday material engagements can inspire forms of chemical knowhow that operate well beyond the bounds of the laboratory and industrial manufacturing plant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So far, academic contributions have widely framed football in Africa as a means for migration from a western point of view. At a time, they presented particular and one-dimensional understandings of transnational links in the realm of football migration between Africa and Europe. Macro-level perspectives which mostly focus on African exploitation and dependency and more recently those that take the players’ agency into account reproduce a Eurocentric view of the phenomenon, while disregarding its local perceptions in African settings. Thus, despite the recent shift from a macro- to a micro-level perspective there is still an analytical gap between the ambitions and experiences of migrating players and economic power relations at play on the one hand and the socio-cultural embedding of the transnational connections in football migration on the other. In order to understand why and how football mobilities are indeed linked to ‘the transnational’ in migration there is a need to localize the phenomenon and investigate how local understandings of migration and mobility are lived and expressed in a transnational sport like football. By taking data from fieldwork among West African football migrants, the paper thus shows the local embedding of transnational football migration practices in the West African context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public awareness of the African theatre in the Great War stems largely from C. S. Forester’s 1935 novelThe African Queen, and its subsequent 1951 film adaptation. Long thought to have been inspired by British activities on Lake Tanganyika, Forester’s novel more closely resembles events in Cameroon where German missionary Alphons Hermann attempted to sink HMSDwarfusing homemade torpedoes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gift-giving was an important feature of cross-cultural diplomacy in the complex political landscape of the early modern Gold and Slave coasts. The article examines gift-giving practices that European trading companies used toward African rulers and elites, relating them to European courtly diplomacy. Tracing the repertoire of gift objects, it argues that the very function ascribed to gifts required learning about another's rules, values, habits, or tastes. In consequence, a repertoire of gifts peculiar to the contact zone was established, consisting not least of objects adapted into local practices and production. These processes of adaptation were influenced by the materiality of the objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Were precolonial state systems different to the European model? If so, how did these state systems vary, and do variations in system structure influence the frequency of war? In this article we assess the structure off international systems in nineteenth-century West Africa, Southeast Asia, and South Asia using new data on precolonial states that corrects for some of the biases in the existing Correlates of War state system membership data. We develop a framework to capture variation in political order above and below the state, and explore the similarities and differences between these systems and the European system we know and study. We then assess how rates of inter- and intra-state war varied across these systems. Our results suggest: (1) It is the nature of hierarchy (not so much anarchy) that varies across these systems; and (2) inter-state wars are more frequent, but less intense, in systems composed of decentralised states. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines the history of West African photographers, focusing upon the photography of the late 19th and early 20th-centuries. Particular focus is given to those who utilized the dry plate photographic technologies that were being used in Europe. Additional topics discussed include imperialism in Africa, the appropriation of European attire worn by Africans and the work of photographers including Adolphus Lisk-Carew. Details relating to photographic techniques and methods that were utilized during the 19th and 20th centuries

Underscoring the unique potential that this region has for the study of the African Diaspora, this article situates the slave trading fort on Bunce Island and the Sierra Leone hinterland in the wider context of Atlantic history. In doing so it underscores the need to view Atlantic exchanges within their specific cultural and historical settings, and to place them within the maritime Atlantic and capitalist world economies. The article further considers the conceptual and methodological challenges faced in tracing African continuities in the Diaspora and in evaluating change in African societies during the period of the Atlantic trade. Bunce Island's history and the trade relations represented present one of the better opportunities to delineate the paths through which enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas. This article examines the specific connections between this portion of Upper Guinea Coast and South Carolina. The importance of an interdisciplinary approach incorporating archaeological data in both the reconstruction of Africa's past and in providing a context for enslaved Africans in the Diaspora is underscored. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article details an incident that occurred in colonial West Africa just prior to the start of World War II. Disputing their pay and terms of service, 11 Sierra Leonean soldiers in the British army went out on strike, refusing to assemble for duty. Although they did not remain in protest long, their action drew disproportionately severe punishments. Focusing upon the so-called ‘gunners’ mutiny’, this piece queries the relative or situational nature of ‘radical’ ideas, ideals, and actions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a noteworthy essay entitled "The Operation Called Vergleichen (Comparison)" Joachim Matthes has drawn attention to the fact that studies which claim to compare particular phenomena from one's own culture (such as law or administration, for example) with those of an alien culture do not, strictly speaking, perform a real comparison. Instead, what takes place is (in his words) a "nostrification", that is, "an appropriation of the other in one's own terms" or conceptual assimilation. Even the ideal-type constructions of Max Weber seem largely to confirm this proposition. In principle, then, it ought to be quite hard to find studies which are not exposed to the charge of nostrification. In what follows works by Gerd Spittler are examined in some detail from this particular perspective. In the first instance Spittler investigated the specific problems encountered by the colonial administration in West African peasant states (1919-39), before examining if this problematic could be applied to the peasant state of Prussia in the 18th century. So, for example, he asked himself how a bureaucratic administration reliant on written documents resolved the problem of raising taxes on a body of untruly peasants who to a large extent communicated orally amongst themselves. Since in both cases Spittler relates the typical structures of an agrarian society to typical administrative structures, he attains a level of reflection where the '"One" can be translated into the "Other" and vice versa' (Matthes), and in this way he escapes the particular danger of nostrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the intriguing questions concerning the trans-Atlantic slave trade was why the West African interior did not supply more slaves to the slave trade than it did when, theoretically, the region had the capacity to fulfil the entire new world demand for enslaved labour. There have been numerous explanations put forth to explain this paradox. Using specific case studies, we argue that the combination of the policies of Muslim governments, Islamic commercial law and the workings of commercial diasporas limited the trade in enslaved individuals from the interior to the coast. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the authors talk about several topics discussed in the issue including study on the Correia Report by Alexander Keese, study on African women from the lower social classes in Angola by Mariana Candido, and study on West Africa's chronicle "Tarikh al-fattash" by Mauro Nobili and Mohamed Shahid Mathee.

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.)

The article discusses escaped slaves' development of diasporic communities in French colonial Soudan (Sudan), or Mali, and Siin, or Senegal, circa 1880 through 1940. An overview of the migration of fugitive slaves from Kayes, Mali to Senegal, including through offering map of the migration route, is provided.

This article draws attention to a trend in which military deployments as part of peacekeeping missions have triggered army mutinies in some West African countries. It explains how participation in peacekeeping missions created new material grievances and a sense of injustice amongst the peacekeepers, which under certain conditions sparked domestic mutinies. These uprisings in West Africa follow a history of military disobedience in the region, and the article places them in the context of long-standing tensions within military organizations. Mutinies often symbolize and intensify divisions within armed forces, which can lead to further instability even after the mutiny is resolved. Therefore, it is important for those interested in building and maintaining effective militaries to understand the ways in which deployments and peacekeeping participation can contribute to unrest within the armed forces. The article draws on interviews with former mutineers, including peacekeepers, and others military personnel in West Africa, as well as media reporting, including public statements made by mutineers, academic writing, and archival research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pilgrimage routes from West Africa provided channels for cultural and spiritual exchange between West African and Middle Eastern Muslims, and facilitated religious exchanges. Some of these exchanges were orthodox in nature; others, such as Sufi beliefs and practices, were more popular in their appeal. This article examines the ways thatTijāniyya tāriqaleaders and disciples spread their beliefs and practices along thehajjroutes during the colonial period. Since this period saw the transformation of boundaries and borders, thehajjcould be perceived more as a “state affair,” as its routes moved within the boundaries of the new empires or fluctuated between the new colonial empires. The article focuses on theTijāniyya tāriqa, mainly because thistāriqawas relatively new (established around the beginning of the nineteenth century) and as such serves as a good case study for the spread oftāriqaaffiliations through thehajjroutes from West Africa during the colonial period. This article also examines the role of thehajjforTijāniWest African Muslims who settled in Jerusalem in the same period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on prostitution in West Africa during British colonization. Topics mentioned include the sexual attraction men had for Nigerian women, the fact that no legislation prohibited prostitution in that region, and the social status of prostitutes. The author adds that the increasing venereal disease infections and crimes at that time and the international critics of the British Empire led the British authorities to halt prostitution in the region.

This article explains why the Guinean state remained resilient to armed conflicts following military intervention in politics. The military establishment has been heavily involved in Guinean politics for nearly three decades during which time it has exhibited varied political behavior. This protracted military involvement in Guinean political affairs presented a threat to Guinea’s stability in a region where large-scale armed conflicts are often associated with military intervention in politics. This article explores the linkages between military behavior in politics and political stability by using a model derived from ethnic and identity literature. It concludes that by adopting an ethnic group-like behavior, the Guinean military played a vital role in maintaining political stability during the period between 1984 and 2010. This is in contrast to findings in recent studies where military intervention in West African politics is strongly linked with the onset of large-scale civil conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a response to the reviews of the author's book "Slavery & the Culture of Taste," wherein he clarifies some misunderstandings raised by some reviewers including his book desire to link enslavement and taste. Topics discussed include reasons why the book concentrated on slavery in the West African coast rather than the interior, how the 18th century was a transformative moment for modern society and culture and the role of the politics of identity on slavery.

Copyright of Historische Zeitschrift is the property of De Gruyter 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 essay explores the production of industrially sponsored, West African educational films, focusing on the years that witnessed piecemeal decolonization in the region. It argues that the links between the cultural Cold War and Cold War culture are especially vivid in this context: West Africa was the site of discrepant forms of colonization that still managed to share the general governmental mandate of teaching with nonfiction film, and it was increasingly the subject of corporate-sponsored cinematic experiments in Cold War cultural diplomacy. By emphasizing the region's rich natural resources as well as its human diversity, these experiments helped to strengthen the Negritude movement, paving the way for a particular type of postindependence indigenous media-making that prized the geographical and cultural characteristics of individual West African countries while simultaneously establishing some of the conditions for a lasting and "unofficial" imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the experiences of mentally ill Nigerian migrants during the colonial era. Migrant Nigerian ‘lunatics’ faced different circumstances depending on what type of migrant they were and where they fell ill. Those in the UK tended to be repatriated for medical reasons, while those within the West African region rarely returned home because of financial considerations. Nigerian pilgrims to Mecca are noticeably absent from the discourse as are procedures associated with the relationship between migration and mental illness, despite the fact that they made up a large and constant flow of migrants from Nigeria during the colonial period. By putting these transnational individuals at the centre of analysis, this article provides a comparative perspective that reveals contingencies of psychiatric biopower that are often subsumed in narratives that focus on the activities of specific colonial asylums within individual colonial states. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reports on a conference on storytelling in West Africa, held in Accra, Ghana, from October 18-20, 2012. Topics of discussion included the relationship of storytelling, oral tradition, and history, the social influence of stories from such African ethnic groups as the Esan, Laimbwe, and Ewe, and Ghanaian music style known as Hiplife.

Security Sector Reform (SSR) has developed into a key component of international peacebuilding agendas. However, there is a lack of sufficient knowledge of the advantages and drawbacks of different reform processes. This study offers a comparative analysis of two post-war states with diverse approaches to the reconstruction of the national armed forces after a civil war: Sierra Leone after the 1999 Lomé Peace Accord, where the competing warring parties were integrated into a single force; and Liberia following the 2003 Accra Peace Agreement, where the old army was disbanded and a new force was recruited and built from scratch. The findings show that each approach was associated with distinct benefits and risks during the implementation process. However, the outcomes are also similar in many important respects, and raise questions about the long-term sustainability of these reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Perhaps no image is more fraught with contradiction than that of the black mother, often seen as embodying power and vulnerability at the same time. Based upon field and archival research in West Africa, I propose the concept of public motherhood as a broader definition of women’s authority and influence. The secondary feminist literature often examines motherhood within three frameworks, identified here as biological, sociohistorical and discursive. This article highlights the contribution of black feminist and Africanist scholars whose attention to race, class and empire expands upon the general scholarship on motherhood in innovative ways. The concept of public motherhood builds upon all of these writings by recognising the intellectual dialogue among them and then placing Africans at the centre of new ways of understanding power relationships between women and men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origins of modern schooling in early nineteenth-century Africa have been poorly researched. Moreover, histories of education in Africa have focused largely on the education of boys. Little attention has been paid to girls’ schooling or to the missionary women who sought to construct a new feminine Christian identity for African girls. In the absence of personal accounts of African girls’ schooling from that period, this paper draws on a slim body of 71 letters written by women and girls associated with one British mission society in Sierra Leone between 1804 and 1826 to suggest a fluid and at times contradictory construction of gender and racial identity, which sits at odds with the ideology of domestic femininity that the missionaries sought to impart through girls’ schooling. The handful of letters written by African women and girls also casts doubt on the assumed subservience of black subjects to white officialdom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the acceptance of Catholicism in the islands of Cape Verde off the coast of West Africa based on the analysis of Portuguese texts of the late 18th and early 19th century. Topics discussed include the historical geography of the Cape Verde islands in the 18th and 19th centuries, the influence of racial mixing and the concept of miscegenation on the spread of Catholicism in the region during this time, and the interaction between the concepts of religion and civilization in these Portuguese texts.