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Recent scholarship has traced the impacts of the Haitian Revolution around the Atlantic world, yet there has been almost no scholarly attention to the legacies of the Haitian Revolution in Africa. This article examines circulations of the history of the Haitian Revolution in the newspapers of Sierra Leone and Nigeria between 1890 and 1920. Influenced heavily by the narrative and poetic styles of the nineteenth century, West African intellectuals usually adhered to a Romantic emplotment of the revolution. They also drew on this history to inform their own nationalist and Pan-Africanist politics. I argue that the particular form of the newspaper allowed West African intellectuals to weave together a unique range of materials as they crafted their narratives. By combining their political ideas with works by prominent nineteenth-century writers, they reframed their pasts and imagined their futures anew. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1900s, an obscure Portuguese colony in the equatorial Atlantic rose as the world's leading cocoa producer. Cocoa from the island of Sao Tome was grown on large plantations with indentured labor and high technological inputs. This technoscientific system, to control both plants and people, became the model for making an industry-suited cocoa, and the material evidence of the moral and economic virtues of the colonial plantation. Experts played a crucial role in building and putting into circulation such a system. Sao Tome's cocoa expertise, along with its labor and racial relations, landscape patterns, and imperial imaginaries, contributed to the colonization of other African territories, namely the German Cameroons. This article agues that commodities and their technological histories can help bring to light the transnational and transcolonial features that are embedded at the core of empire building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the social conditions of African women civilians while living in military space in French West Africa (FWA) between 1945 and 1960. The author discusses the history of the French National Gendarmerie, explores how the presence of African women within the gendarmerie bases impacted military routine, and examines the social context of colonial paternalism.

This article explores the movement of African university students from French West Africa to France during the last years of French colonial rule (1946–60). The author argues that the act of traveling between these spaces at a time when the new French Union supposedly produced greater equality within the imperial system allowed students to point out their continued inequalities, despite their so-called elite status. Indeed, the Atlantic voyages themselves were often a key place of protest, where young people symbolically connected their material circumstances (often forced to travel in third or fourth class) to the greater disparities within the colonial system. At the same time, French authorities viewed this movement as both necessary and dangerous – allowing the next generation of African leaders to study in France, but also enabling them to connect with a growing anti-colonial diaspora centered in Paris. The administration interpreted student political organization as a problem stemming from the psychological difficulties these young people faced in their adjustment to life in France. Such analyses resulted in policies designed to ease the transition on a local scale, but rarely acknowledged the deeper, systemic roots of political protest. Students, in contrast, increasingly saw themselves as part of a wider movement, particularly as events in Indo-China and Algeria revealed the power of anti-colonial nationalism. Joining, and often critiquing, their own nationalist movements, these young people used their transitory status to help bring down the structure that could not completely contain them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]