A companion to African history 9780470656310, 047065631X, 9781119063575, 9781119063506

Table of contents :
Content: Notes on Contributors ix1 Introduction: Identities and (Mis)Representations 1William H. WorgerPART I THE PERSONAL 132 Tracing the Roots of Common Sense about Sexuality in Africa 15Marc Epprecht3 Masculinities 35Stephan F. Miescher4 Colonialism, Christianity, and Personhood 59Nimi Wariboko5 Settler Societies 77Nicola Ginsburgh and Will JacksonPART II WOMEN'S ROLES IN INSTITUTIONS OF POWER 936 Women, Authority, and Power in Precolonial Southeast Africa: The Production and Destruction of Historical Knowledge on Queen Mother Ntombazi of the Ndwandwe 95Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu7 Love, Courtship, and Marriage in Africa 119Nwando Achebe8 Slavery and Women in Africa: Changing Definitions, Continuing Problems 143Claire C. RobertsonPART III FAMILY AND COMMUNITY 1619 Kinship in African History 163James L. Giblin10 Ethnicity in Southern Africa 179Michael R. Mahoney11 Ethnicity and Race in African Thought 199Jonathon Glassman12 Islam in African History 225Sean Hanretta and Shobana Shankar13 Refugees in African History 247Brett ShadlePART IV AFRICANS AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT 26514 Science in Africa: A History of Ingenuity and Invention in African Iron Technology 267Peter R. Schmidt15 Africa and Environmental History 28Gregory H. Maddox16 Health and Medicine in African History 307Karen E. Flint17 Wealth and Poverty in African History 329Morten JervenPART V AFRICANS AND THE WORLD 35118 The Idea of the Atlantic World from an Africanist Perspective 353Walter Hawthorne19 Swahili Literature and the Writing of African History 367Ann Biersteker20 Africa and the Cold War 383Timothy Scarnecchia21 The Horn of Africa from the Cold War to the War on Terror 401Awet T. WeldemichaelPART VI AFRICAN SELF?REPRESENTATIONS 41922 The Art of Memory and the Chancery of Sinnar 421Jay Spaulding23 Apartheid Forgotten and Remembered 431Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger24 Cultural Resistance on Robben Island: Songs of Struggle and Liberation in Southern Africa 459Neo Lekgotla laga Ramoupi25 African Historians and Popular Culture 483Charles AmblerIndex 501

Citation preview

A Companion to African History

BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO HISTORY

“Any library owning … Blackwell Companions will be a rich library indeed.” Reference Reviews This series provides sophisticated and authoritative overviews of the scholarship that has shaped our current understanding of the past. Each volume comprises between twenty‐five and forty essays written by individual scholars within their area of specialization. The aim of each volume is to synthesize the current state of scholarship from a variety of historical perspectives and to provide a statement on where the field is heading. The essays are written in a clear, provocative, and lively manner, designed for an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers. BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO WORLD HISTORY These Companions tackle the historiography of thematic and regional topics as well as events in World History. The series includes volumes on Historical Thought, the World Wars, Mediterranean History, Middle Eastern History, Gender History, and many more. Editors include J. R. McNeill, Peregrine Horden, Merry E. Wiesner‐ Hanks, Lloyd Kramer, and other leading scholars. www.wiley.com/go/whc BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO EUROPEAN HISTORY This series of chronological volumes covers periods of European history, starting with Medieval History and continuing up through the period since 1945. Periods include the Long Eighteenth Century, the Reformation, the Renaissance, and 1900 to 1945, among others. www.wiley.com/go/ehc BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO BRITISH HISTORY This branch of the Blackwell Companions to History series delves into the history of Britain, with chronological volumes covering British history from 500 ce to 2000 ce. Volume editors include Pauline Stafford, Norman Jones, Barry Coward, and more. www.wiley.com/go/bhc BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO AMERICAN HISTORY Including thematic and chronological volumes on American history as well as a sub‐series covering the historiography of the American presidents, this strand of the Blackwell Companions series seeks to engage with the questions and controversies of U.S. history. Thematic volumes include American Science, Sport History, Legal History, Cultural History, and more. Additional volumes address key events, regions, and influential individuals that have shaped America’s past. www.wiley.com/go/ahc

A COMPANION TO AFRICAN HISTORY Edited by

William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe

This edition first published 2019 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe to be identified as the author(s) of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Office(s) John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Office 101 Station Landing, Medford, MA 02155, USA For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Names: Worger, William H., editor. | Ambler, Charles, editor. | Achebe, Nwando, 1970– editor. Title: A companion to African history / edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, Nwando Achebe. Description: 1st edition. | Hoboken, NJ : Wiley Blackwell, 2019. | Series: Blackwell companions to history | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018016967 (print) | LCCN 2018026788 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119063575 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119063506 (ePub) | ISBN 9780470656310 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Africa–History. | Africa–Civilization. | Africa–Social conditions. Classification: LCC DT14 (ebook) | LCC DT14 .C653 2019 (print) | DDC 960–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018016967 Cover Image: Vessel with rainmaking wands, Mumuye peoples (?), Nigeria, Collection of Fowler Museum at UCLA. Photograph by Don Cole. Cover Design: Wiley Set in 10.5/13pt Galliard by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India

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Contents

Notes on Contributors 1 Introduction: Identities and (Mis)Representations William H. Worger

ix 1

Part I The Personal

13

2 Tracing the Roots of Common Sense about Sexuality in Africa Marc Epprecht

15

3 Masculinities Stephan F. Miescher

35

4 Colonialism, Christianity, and Personhood Nimi Wariboko

59

5 Settler Societies Nicola Ginsburgh and Will Jackson

77

Part II Women’s Roles in Institutions of Power

93

6 Women, Authority, and Power in Precolonial Southeast Africa: The Production and Destruction of Historical Knowledge on Queen Mother Ntombazi of the Ndwandwe Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu 7 Love, Courtship, and Marriage in Africa Nwando Achebe

95 119

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contents

  8 Slavery and Women in Africa: Changing Definitions, Continuing Problems143 Claire C. Robertson Part III Family and Community

161

  9 Kinship in African History James L. Giblin

163

10 Ethnicity in Southern Africa Michael R. Mahoney

179

11 Ethnicity and Race in African Thought Jonathon Glassman

199

12 Islam in African History Sean Hanretta and Shobana Shankar

225

13 Refugees in African History Brett Shadle

247

Part IV Africans and Their Environment

265

14 Science in Africa: A History of Ingenuity and Invention in African Iron Technology Peter R. Schmidt

267

15 Africa and Environmental History Gregory H. Maddox

289

16 Health and Medicine in African History Karen E. Flint

307

17 Wealth and Poverty in African History Morten Jerven

329

Part V Africans and the World

351

18 The Idea of the Atlantic World from an Africanist Perspective Walter Hawthorne

353

19 Swahili Literature and the Writing of African History Ann Biersteker

367

20 Africa and the Cold War Timothy Scarnecchia

383

21 The Horn of Africa from the Cold War to the War on Terror Awet T. Weldemichael

401



contents

vii

Part VI African Self‐Representations

419

22 The Art of Memory and the Chancery of Sinnar Jay Spaulding

421

23 Apartheid Forgotten and Remembered Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger

431

24 Cultural Resistance on Robben Island: Songs of Struggle and Liberation in Southern Africa Neo Lekgotla laga Ramoupi 25 African Historians and Popular Culture Charles Ambler

459 483

Index501

Notes on Contributors

Nwando Achebe, the Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History, is an award‐winning historian at Michigan State University. She is founding editor‐ in‐chief of the Journal of West African History. Achebe received her PhD from University of California, Los Angeles, in 2000. In 1996 and 1998 she was a Ford Foundation and Fulbright‐Hays Scholar‐in‐Residence at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Her research interests involve the use of oral history in the study of women, gender, and sexuality in Nigeria. Her first book, Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900–1960 was published in 2005, and her second book, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe (2011), which won three book awards (Aidoo‐Snyder, Barbara “Penny” Kanner, and Gita Chaudhuri), is a full‐length critical biography of the only female warrant chief and king in British Africa. Achebe has received prestigious grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Wenner‐Gren, Woodrow Wilson, Fulbright‐Hays, Ford Foundation, World Health Organization, and National Endowment for the Humanities. Charles Ambler is professor of history and dean of the graduate school at the University of Texas at El Paso. He has recently coedited Drugs in Africa (2014) and is the author of a number of articles on mass media and popular culture in Africa, including “Popular Films and Colonial Audiences,” in the American Historical Review. In 2010 he was president of the African Studies Association. Ann Biersteker is associate chair of the African studies program at Michigan State University. She is the author of two books on Swahili poetry, a Swahili textbook, and numerous articles on African literatures. She is currently working with

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colleagues on an edition of Utendi wa Tambuka and a study of Daiso, an endangered Tanzanian language. Nancy L. Clark is a professor and dean emeritus at Louisiana State University. She is the author of Manufacturing Apartheid: State Corporations in South Africa (1994), and the coauthor with William H. Worger of South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (1996), and the two‐volume Africa and the West (2010). Marc Epprecht is head of the Department of Global Development Studies, Queen’s University, Canada. He is the author of several studies of the history of gender and sexuality in Africa, including the award‐winning Hungochani (2004), which focused primarily on male–male sexuality in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Lesotho. He is currently working on an eco‐health history of Edendale–Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Karen E. Flint is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Her first book is Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948 (2008). She is interested in issues of health, nutrition, globalization, and more recent food sovereignty movements. James L. Giblin is a professor of African history at the University of Iowa. Among his publications are A History of the Excluded: Making Family a Refuge from State in Twentieth‐Century Tanzania (2005) and Maji Maji: Lifting the Fog of War (coedited with Jamie Monson, 2010). Nicola Ginsburgh recently completed her PhD thesis in the School of History at the University of Leeds, and is currently teaching fellow in the history of Africa at the University of Warwick. Her thesis is entitled “White Workers and the Production of Race in Southern Rhodesia, 1910–1980.” Jonathon Glassman is professor of history at Northwestern University. He is the author of Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856‐1888 (1995), and of War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (2011). Sean Hanretta is associate professor of history at Northwestern University. His book Islam and Social Change in French West Africa: History of an Emancipatory Community, was published in 2009. He works on the intellectual, religious, and cultural history of modern West Africa. Walter Hawthorne is a professor of African history and chair of the History Department at Michigan State University. His areas of research specialization are Upper Guinea, the Atlantic, and Brazil. He is particularly interested in the history of slavery and the slave trade. Much of his research has focused on African agricultural practices, religious beliefs, and family structures in the Old and New Worlds. His first book, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations



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along the Guinea‐Bissau Coast, 1400–1900 (2003), explores the impact of interactions with the Atlantic, and particularly slave trading, on small‐scale, decentralized societies. His most recent book, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade 1600–1830 (2010), examines the slave trade from Upper Guinea to Amazonia Brazil. Will Jackson is associate professor in imperial history at the University of Leeds. His research covers the social history of colonial migration, mental ­illness, and the family in East and southern Africa. His first book, Madness and Marginality: The Lives of Kenya’s White Insane, was published in 2013. He has since edited, with Emily Manktelow, Subverting Empire: Deviance and Disorder in the British Colonial World (2015). He is currently working on a book provisionally titled “Lost Colonists: Settler Failure in Southern Africa, 1880–1939.” Morten Jerven is Chair of Africa and International Development at the Centre for African Studies at Edinburgh University, professor in development studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, and visiting professor in economic history at Lund University. He has a PhD in economic history from the London School of Economics and is the author of Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What To Do about It (2013) and Africa: Why Economists Got it Wrong (2015). His current work, The Wealth and Poverty of African States: Economic Growth, Living Standards and Taxation in Africa Since the 19th Century, is due to be published in 2019. Gregory H. Maddox is a specialist in African and environmental history. He holds a BA from the University of Virginia and a PhD from Northwestern University. He has coedited two collections, Custodians of the Land: Environment and History in Tanzania (with James Giblin and Isaria N. Kimambo, 1996), and In Search of the Nation: Histories of Authority and Dissidence from Tanzania (with James Giblin, 2005). His translation of Mathias Mnyampala’s The Gogo: History, Customs, and Traditions from Swahili (1995) was a finalist for the African Studies Association’s Text Prize in 1997. His most recent scholarly books are Practicing History in Central Tanzania: Writing, Memory, and Performance (with Ernest M. Kongola, 2006), Sub‐Saharan Africa: An Environmental History (2006), and The Demographics of Empire (coedited with Karl Ittmann and Dennis D. Cordell, 2010). He is currently professor of history and dean of the graduate school at Texas Southern University. Michael R. Mahoney is an associate professor of global studies and politics and government at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin, as well as director of the global studies program there. He is the author of The Other Zulus: The Spread of Zulu Ethnicity in Colonial South Africa (2012), as well as of articles on various aspects of southern African history. He is currently working on a history of unemployment in Botswana.

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Stephan F. Miescher is associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Making Men in Ghana (2005) and coeditor of Modernization as Spectacle in Africa (with Peter J. Bloom and Takyiwaa Manuh, 2014) and Gender, Imperialism, and Global Exchanges (with Michele Mitchell and Naoko Shibusawa, 2015). He is completing the monograph, A Dam for Africa: The Volta River Project and Modernization in Ghana, and coproducing the film Ghana’s Electric Dreams (dir. R. Lane Clark). Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu is an executive director at the South African Democracy Education Trust, professor of history at the University of South Africa, and a member of UNESCO’s Scientific Committee on the General History of Africa multivolume series. Neo Lekgotla laga Ramoupi is senior lecturer in history at Wits University’s School of Education, Johannesburg, South Africa. He is also part‐time director and head of programs at the African Institute for Knowledge and Sustainability, a recently founded global African organization, based in South Africa, devoted to the appropriation of knowledge produced on Africa to generate emancipatory solutions for Africa’s sociocultural, political, economic, and environmental sustainability. He was a postdoctoral fellow of the African Humanities Programme of the American Council of Learned Society in 2016–2017. His PhD from Howard University (2013) is the basis for his forthcoming book A Culture History of Robben Island: “Inzingoma Zo Mzabalazo Esiqithini!” (Struggle Songs from the Island). Before his doctoral studies he was a researcher and oral historian at the Robben Island Museum in Cape Town (2000–2003). Claire C. Robertson is professor emerita of history and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the Ohio State University. She has published over 60 articles and eight books, pursuing her interests across Africa in Ghana and Kenya and the Atlantic in Saint Lucia. Since retirement in 2012 she has continued writing and raising funds to help AIDS orphans and rural women in Kenya, as well as for the ASA Women’s Caucus, one of her long‐term involvements. Timothy Scarnecchia is an associate professor of history at Kent State University. He is the author of The Urban Roots of Democracy and Violence in Zimbabwe: Harare and Highfield, 1940–1964 (2008) and his current book project is entitled “Cold War Race States: Rhodesia, Zimbabwe and the Defense of Race, 1960–1985.” He has also published articles and book chapters on Cold War diplomatic relations in southern Africa based on archives in the UK, the USA, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Brett Shadle is professor of history and core faculty in the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought at Virginia Tech. He is author of “Girl Cases”: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890–1970 (2006) and The Souls of White Folk: White Settlers in Kenya, 1900–1920s (2015). He is currently



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researching the history of refugees in Africa, with a book project underway focusing on refugees who fled Ethiopia after the Italian invasion of 1935. Peter R. Schmidt is professor of anthropology and African studies at the University of Florida and Extraordinary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He has conducted archaeological, ethnographic, and heritage research in Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Gabon, and Eritrea. He is cofounder of the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at the University of Dar es Salaam, the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Asmara, Eritrea, and the Human Rights and Peace Institute at Makerere University, Uganda. He has held teaching posts at these institutions as well as at Brown University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology at Keliniya University, Sri Lanka. His most recent books are Community Archaeology and Heritage in  Africa: Decolonizing Practice (coedited with Innocent Pikirayi, 2016) and Community‐Based Heritage in Africa: Unveiling Local Development and Research Initiatives (2017). Shobana Shankar is associate professor of history at Stony Brook University. Her research focuses on religious and intellectual politics in West Africa and in African–Indian relations. Her book, Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c.1890–1975, was published in 2014. Jay Spaulding is emeritus professor of history at Kean University. He has taught as a visitor at Columbia University and Michigan State University, and given guest lectures at Khartoum University and the University of Bergen. He is a cofounder of the Sudan Studies Association and the author of The Heroic Age in Sinnar (1985) and numerous other studies in Northeast African history. Nimi Wariboko is the Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics at Boston University. He has won several awards for his academic excellence and has published over 20 books. Awet T. Weldemichael is a Queen’s National Scholar in African History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He has published on Northeast Africa during the Cold War, including his 2016 book Third World Colonialism and Strategies of Liberation: Eritrea and East Timor Compared, and is currently working on the contemporary political economy of conflict in the Horn. William H. Worger is professor of history at University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of South Africa’s City of Diamonds: Mine Workers and Monopoly Capitalism in Kimberley, 1870–1905 (1987), and coauthor with Nancy L. Clark of South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (1996), and the two‐volume, Africa and The West (2010).

Chapter One

Introduction: Identities and (Mis)Representations William H. Worger

This book grew organically. Rather than start with a list of conventional “trios” – social/economic/political, precolonial/colonial/postcolonial, chronological/regional/thematic  –  we began by asking a talented group of scholars researching, writing, and teaching African history to contribute chapters on topics that they considered most relevant, most intriguing, and most exciting for themselves for the state of the field today and for the future, at least for the next 10 years or so. The depth and breadth of work contained in these chapters captures those enthusiasms. The title of this introduction, “Identities and (Mis)Representations,” reflects a common theme that emerged individually and organically in each of the chapters. A focus on Africans as ordinary people, actors in their own lives, and full of the same complicated sets of motives, responses, desires, and emotions that affect all of us in our own lives becomes clear throughout the collection. But with this focus comes a caution – that often we know too little about Africa and Africans because we still fail to use many sources readily available in vernacular languages, that often we fail to include the speakers of those languages as our colleagues and not just as our sources, and that often we still fail to write for audiences composed of the people that we study. And, in particular, we still have to struggle with countless misrepresentations of Africa and Africans. Listening to an National Public Radio commentator reporting from Nairobi on the 2017 Kenyan elections and the “need to understand” that A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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democratic elections dated back only 10 years in a country that had won its independence more than half a century before, and that all political conflict was based in fundamental “tribal differences,” is a reminder that our scholarly work far too often has had little wider impact beyond academia. Why else do we need a website ironically named “Africa is a Country” to remind us that Africa is made up of 54 different countries with myriad cultures, especially when we have thousands of troops positioned in secret US military bases throughout the African continent, unknown even to members of the US administration? The chapters in this book demonstrate the energy with which scholars in their everyday lives combat stereotypes, often with little success, but with relentless determination all the same. The book is divided into six sections, with boundaries that are not hard and fast but that often overlap and are porous. There is a movement from the most individual to wider connections, to community, nation, and the world, but this is not assumed to be a one‐way process, and that sense of the cross‐cutting nature of history will become clear in reading the chapters individually and collectively. Some of the chapters offer detailed case studies restricted in time and/or place, and most reflect on issues continent‐wide, though with illustrative examples provided so that the analyses are always well founded in a body of studies.

Part I: The personal In Part I the authors of the four chapters examine the ways in which Africans see themselves as individuals, in relationship to each other and to society at large. Overcoming the stereotypes engendered under colonialism, Africans now weigh the meanings of sexuality, masculinity, and race on their own terms. The most intimate identities through sexuality and sexual practices is the subject of Marc Epprecht’s chapter, both in a historical context and as it relates to fundamental contemporary issues of sexual rights, sexual health, and human rights (Chapter 2). Epprecht provides an overview of European accounts written primarily in the nineteenth century that sought to identify African sexual practices, often perceived at the time as differing from those of Europeans and as representing the backwardness and “savagery” of societies conceived as being in need of European control and improvement. He then moves on to consider the ways in which Africans sought to counter, by arguing against in writing and by acting out in practice, the heritage of colonial norms of heterosexuality carried over into the era of independence by state actors within Africa as well as by international organizations such as the World Health Organization and the World Bank. In Chapter 3 Stephan F. Miescher takes the topic of sexuality a step further through his examination of African men’s understanding of themselves as masculine. He provides a close reading of studies written since the 1990s that examine the issue of men and masculinity: What do these terms mean? How have they been applied? How has being a man changed in Africa over the past 100 years?



introduction: identities and (mis)representations

3

His chapter discusses conceptual issues, focusing especially on the differences articulated by recent scholars between terms such as “masculine,” “masculinity,” and “manhood” and on the multitude of ways in which colonialists and colonialism sought to remake men, especially through missionary‐controlled education and wage labor, and the ways in which Africans responded to their changing social and economic situations. Turning to African views of themselves as subjects of colonial rule, Nimi Wariboko examines how self‐perceptions changed through encounters with Christianity and with colonialism in Chapter 4. Wariboko focuses in particular on three issues he identifies as most important in the literature he surveys: the “weight of blackness” and the development of “‘rationalistic’ competitive individualism,” both formed especially during the colonial era, and “how precolonial African personhood shapes the postcolonial Christian world after enduring the weight of blackness under colonialism and after passing through the dogged efforts of colonial mission to make it Western.” He concludes by arguing that, as a result of these encounters, psychological duality has been “enforced” in many “individuals whose personhood is both African and not African … There is now an other within the African self.” In Chapter 5, Nicola Ginsburgh and Will Jackson examine the mirror situation of the white colonists who identify as both European and African. These “white Africans” have the conviction that they can become “truly African” as well as “remain apart,” echoing the phenomenon of dual identity discussed in Wariboko’s chapter. Looking especially at Algeria, Portuguese Africa, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, and Kenya, the authors argue that there was a distinct attitude toward Africanness under white rule in the settler colonies that aimed to erase the indigenous presence through a cult of separation. Yet it is now commonplace for one settler group, white South Africans, to refer to themselves as African, as a way of appropriating what during the apartheid era they had repudiated as the “Third World” and yet now embrace as part of their newly found identity in the Global South. The chapter raises questions of what it means to be a settler, a migrant, and indeed an African, especially in continuing struggles over environmental resources in these countries.

Part II: Women’s roles in institutions of power In Part II, the three authors re‐examine the ways in which African women have been seen historically through institutions of power, and they overturn many preconceptions of the subordination of women. In two chapters, by Nwando Achebe and Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, analysis of work in African languages that has not previously been consulted, provides an important key to understanding women’s ability to wield considerable power. Ndlovu’s examination of “Women, Authority, and Power in Precolonial Southeast Africa” (Chapter  6) provides a fascinating example of the use of indigenous

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language sources to shed completely new light on an area and period in South African history that has previously made very little use of such sources. Ndlovu uses a case study, that of Queen Mother Ntombazi of the Ndwandwe people who, like other women in the Zulu and other southern African kingdoms, were full participants in power and politics. He argues that knowledge of Ntombazi, oral and written, was deliberately scrubbed from the historical record by nineteenth‐ century cultural brokers, and that this erasure, this intentional forgetting, was perpetuated in twentieth‐century historical novels written in the vernacular, which identified Ntombazi as a cruel witch and instead celebrated Shaka as a national icon in an era when Africans were subjected to white racism and oppression. Readers of this chapter too will have different experiences of comprehension, because Ndlovu leaves all his quotes from isiZulu (which include versions of the language from the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries) in the vernacular, believing that the closest understanding can come only if we appreciate the languages of expression. But, as an aid to comprehension for all, he ensures that the paragraphs in which the isiZulu quotes are embedded themselves explain the material quoted. Nwando Achebe in her chapter on “Love, Courtship and Marriage in Africa” (Chapter 7) investigates the history of an emotion – love – and a relationship – marriage – which are often written about in transactional terms by scholars of Africa, both in the past and in the present. Achebe sketches out a new path, starting with analysis of the vocabulary of love, loving, sexual attraction, and courtship, the words themselves used in indigenous languages throughout Africa. And she discusses the various practices by which people courted one another, how they developed their relationships, and how they married in various ways, including woman‐to‐woman marriages. Her chapter concludes with an extensive discussion of sources, what she refers to as the Love, Courtship, and Marriage Archive, including examples of Nigerian love literature, poems, songs, and academic studies. Claire Robertson’s chapter on “Slavery and Women in Africa” starts by showing how more recent studies of women and slavery in Africa have overturned many stereotypes about women and about slavery (Chapter  8). Such studies have shown that the predominance of men in the Atlantic slave trade had more to do with the value of women in production in Africa and less with European assumptions about men’s supposed higher capacity for agricultural labor, and also demonstrate that slavery was more a continuum of various ­statuses of being unfree and not just a single immutable status defined by chattel slavery. Robertson also examines the ways in which slaveholding changed during colonialism – ending in some societies, continuing in others, taking on new forms in yet others – and concludes with a discussion of the problem of contemporary slavery in a world in which women often lack access to key resources and are particularly vulnerable to the downsides of the world market



introduction: identities and (mis)representations

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economy. She finishes with the comment that in the world today there are millions of slaves, nearly all of them women. In other words, while African women had negotiated their terms of slavery in the past, today slavery has become gendered more than ever.

Part III: Family and community African communities were organized according to many different principles, whether through kinship, ethnicity, race, religion, or, in the recent past, nation. The chapters in Part III demonstrate that these categories were flexible rather than fixed, and that Africans defined themselves and others in ways that protected and enhanced their communities. Rather than existing in static formations, communities were fluid and adaptable. James Giblin begins his chapter on kinship in a modest way, suggesting that you may be tempted to skip it, as with most book chapters on kinship, and then shows us exactly why and how central kinship is to understanding African relationships from historic times to the contemporary world of WhatsApp (Chapter  9). For historians in particular, Giblin makes the case that understanding kinship – as relationships, as discourse, and as a cultural construction rather than simply as a matter of biological descent – provides a way to understand the creative ways in which people define themselves and others. The key contribution of Giblin’s examples of his own research, and his discussion of the work of others, is to separate kinship from the arid discussions of older anthropological texts and “background” chapters in history dissertations, and to show it as a living, breathing, and vital part of daily life, full of rich information for social historians. In Chapter 10 Michael Mahoney, like Giblin, tackles what might seem a well‐ worn concept in African studies – ethnicity – but with his focus on southern Africa he also breathes new life into the term. In particular, he demonstrates the ways in which Africans themselves used ethnicity as a source of pride and a feeling of belonging, rather than to label and divide. His examination of the scholarship brings into focus especially work done in sociolinguistics and archaeology as well as in history, and also emphasizes the importance of language as source material – narratives, figures of speech, and much else – in explaining how and why people identify themselves and others. But Mahoney’s discussion of ethnicity is not limited to Africans; he extends his examination of South Africa to include discussion of the development of ethnic identities by whites, Indians, and “coloureds” in that country’s fraught history, especially during the apartheid years. He concludes with a discussion of ethnicity in the rest of southern Africa – Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe – and warns that in the future ethnicity may play a significant role in social discontent, signaled already by the rise of xenophobia in South Africa.

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Jonathan Glassman moves the discussion of ethnicity into the recent past in Chapter 11, examining the development of ethnicity and race in African thought since the late 1950s. He focuses on modern differences created by Africans as well as Europeans: “Ethnicity, race, and nationalism are cognate phenomena, difficult if not impossible to distinguish in analytically coherent ways; their protean forms often morph into one another in processes that it is the historian’s task to trace.” He argues that racial entanglements, especially in Rwanda and Zanzibar, produced cases where locals wrote their own narratives of superiority. For example, the Tutsi produced narratives of superiority over Hutu bumpkins, and Arab narratives assumed a superiority over blacks with the legacy of slavery central to discourses of difference in Islamic societies. In other words, there were widespread discourses of civilization and barbarity not just between Europeans and Africans but also within African societies. Looking more closely at Islamic societies, Sean Hanretta and Shobana Shankar in Chapter 12 trace how European authors identified Islam in Africa as a specific branch of a religion and one that for them carried connotations of backwardness and insularity, disconnected from the wider world of Islam and its believers. These authors sought to “know, name, and control African religions,” particularly with the assistance of Christian missionaries. Hanretta and Shankar also show the ways in which African Muslim scholars, in their writing and especially in their vocabulary and terminology, reflected a much more cosmopolitan view of Islam which reached well beyond Africa and influenced the naming of things and places by Europeans. Recent scholarly work has included social history as distinct from history written self‐consciously as part of religious studies or colonial management. Some of the work discussed relates to the intellectual history of Islam as distinct from a transactional approach, but most of it focuses on attempts to write social histories of African Muslims and to connect the study of Islam with other interpretive categories such as class, gender, and, most recently, race and sexuality. Islam framed not only religious beliefs but also a community. Finally, Brett Shadle draws our attention to the sad emergence of another significant community: refugees. In Chapter 13, “Refugees in African History,” Shadle raises questions about a new community formed through instability and necessity. By the end of 2015, there were 4.4 million refugees in Africa, yet we know little about their history. How can we define refugees as a field of study? Can we accept a strict legal category of refugee while also accepting that there are many ways in which people experience being a refugee. There are many questions about the social relationships that people maintained even while crossing borders, and about how people make choices about where to go. Rather than being seen as people who are driven by currents of violence and misfortune like a flow of water, refugees should be viewed as agents of their own change. How do they shape their own identity? How do they tell their stories? Who listens to them? And, relating to the other chapters in this section, how do refugee communities define themselves?



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Part IV: Africans and their environment In Part IV, all the authors argue strongly for a multidisciplinary approach to African history to examine the ways in which Africans used sophisticated technologies to bring innovation, production, and health to their societies. Utilizing the work of archaeologists, linguists, and scientists, we can now understand the material as well as the intellectual wealth of the continent. Peter Schmidt’s chapter on African iron technology presents a fascinating case of ancient African scientific innovation and recent European scholarly forgetting through a very personal gaze. He describes himself as an archeologist who writes African history, and who believes that “archeology is one of the few ways in which we can write the ancient history of Africa.” He argues that scholars such as Philip D. Curtin and others mistook scale for complexity, and failed to notice how small producers could attain much greater levels of sophistication in their production techniques than the larger blast furnaces of the West. What is particularly engrossing about his work are the details about how exactly, as an archeologist, he investigated the material evidence for East African iron smelting, and how he enlisted the assistance of other scholars in scientific fields to recreate the small furnaces of 100 years ago and more and to reproduce the techniques used. Nevertheless, he argues that the failure of nonspecialist scholars to get involved with untangling the complicated details of historical arguments, who instead use bland generalizations, results in a “denial of African scientific accomplishment, [which] warns us that the postcolonial era in Africa is also a time when the attitudes and prejudices of colonial representation are alive and well.” In Chapter  15, “Africa and Environmental History,” Greg Maddox likewise supports a multidisciplinary approach, arguing that scholars who have drawn from fields such as historical linguistics and archaeology can demonstrate the ways in which Africans, living in a continent often described as having a difficult and frequently changing environment, domesticated crops and introduced new production techniques in agriculture well before similar practices elsewhere in the world. The work he discusses counters the image of a disease‐ridden and harsh land in which people are largely victims of their environment, a view still too prevalent in popular and scholarly studies of the continent. Maddox concludes his chapter by pointing to two areas that will take on increasing significance in future study: the use of evidence resulting from human genome mapping to read back into the history of human and environmental change in Africa; and the impact of rapid climate change upon the future of African environments. In Chapter 16 Karen Flint looks at “Health and Medicine in African History” by using the Ebola outbreak of 2014–2015 as a lens on the role of health and medicine in Africa. Flint argues that the earlier historiography, which focused on the triumphal role of Western medicine and the hero figures of European medicine in Africa, has been supplanted by an examination of how European intervention instead had a detrimental impact on African health and demography.

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In fact, Africans had worked successfully with the environment for centuries to control, or at least moderate, the impact of diseases such as sleeping sickness. Flint’s chapter is wide ranging, including sections on the political economy of health, the sociocultural history of medicine, African therapeutics, biomedicine, as well as discussion of medical discourses on Africa and Africans as the “other.” Concluding this section, Morten Jerven in Chapter 17, “Wealth and Poverty in African History,” poses the common question that dominates recent literature: “Why is Africa poor?” Using “a wealth of new historical data [that] has been unearthed, collated, and organized” since the first decade of the twenty‐first century, much of it from colonial archives and especially from military files, Jerven argues that scholars now understand that “the boundary of investigation is pushed backwards to allow the evaluation of trajectories of economic development across the colonial and postcolonial period.” These longer time perspectives enable us to see that growth has been recurring in African economies (i.e., it is not all downhill), and that periods of economic growth are not new in Africa. Looking at history through a broad perspective, and incorporating scientific and quantitative sources, we can see that the wealth or poverty of the continent was not intrinsic or irrefutable.

Part V: Africans and the world Africa has often been characterized as isolated from the rest of the world other than through the slave trade. In Part V, the authors demonstrate quite the opposite, for Africans influenced the worlds of the Atlantic as well as of the Indian Ocean, and still play a significant role in geopolitical tensions over security and resources. In Chapter 18 Walter Hawthorne focuses on the development of an Africanist perspective  –  that is, one stressing African agency  –  in the development of the concept of an Atlantic world made by black people and incorporating all sides of the Atlantic: Europe, North America, South America, and Africa. He notes that the work done by the first generation of Atlantic scholars, W. E. B. Du Bois and others, established African history as a scholarly discipline in the United States (albeit limited to the historically black colleges and universities), well before the emergence of African history as a field of study distinct from imperial or colonial history in 1950s Britain. He discusses at some length the significance of the Trans‐Atlantic Slave Trade Database (Voyages) (www.slavevoyages.org), begun in 2006, which continues to grow and, as of 2016, holds detailed information about at least 36,000 slaving voyages. The information contained in this database, Hawthorne explains, illuminates not just the numbers of slaves traded, but their origins, gender, age, and much more right down to the individual level. Scholars’ use of such a database, combined with research in other archives, especially those found in more local collections throughout the Atlantic world, has enabled them to, as Hawthorne demonstrates, breathe new life into analyses of African agency.



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On the other side of the African continent, Africans were also part of the culture of the Indian Ocean, as noted by Ann Biersteker in Chapter 19, “Swahili Literature and the Writing of African History.” Her very comprehensive chapter discusses works in Swahili ranging from the chronicles of coastal city states to contemporary poetry and prose. All forms of written and spoken expression in Swahili are included  –  narrative poetry, sung poetry, histories, ethnographies, autobiographies, biographies, and travelogues – many of them produced in the mid‐ to late nineteenth century and solicited and collected by German colonial officials and missionaries. Considering the rarity of written African‐language sources available in the precolonial period, Biersteker’s work is important for providing us with a wide‐ranging account of what has been written, and what scholars have written about the texts. And she also addresses the contemporary development of the ways in which Swahili has become a language used internationally by a worldwide scholarly community, although, as she points out, there has been no study as yet of the Kiswahili texts written by such leading figures of twentieth‐century Kenyan politics as Harry Thuku and Jomo Kenyatta. Bringing us into the complexity of the twentieth century, Timothy Scarnecchia approaches study of the Cold War from the point of view of Africans and the African continent in Chapter 20, “Africa and the Cold War.” He argues that, in some ways, the Cold War provided Africans with strategic advantages and flexibility. “The availability of an alternative to Western colonialism and capitalism gave African nationalists and intellectuals a new way to reorganize their tenuous connections to the masses of peasants and urban workers in the colonies they had promised to liberate from colonialism.” Socialism and international communism offered ways to cover up class and ethnic divisions between elites and masses and they could develop a shared identity against a common enemy – Western imperialism. The Cold War also gave African states some leverage at the United Nations. Yet Scarnecchia sees the continuing impact of the Cold War on African states as worrisome, especially in Liberia, Sierra Leona, Congo, and Cote d’Ivoire. He sees the legacy of the Cold War continuing and growing, with secret US military bases and soldiers throughout Africa fighting a new “war” on terrorism, whereby the United States sees Islam as a threat. Continuing the examination of Cold War tensions, Awet Weldemichael takes Scarnecchia’s conclusions further in a case study, “The Horn of Africa from the Cold War to the War on Terror.” Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States, in the name of a “war on terror,” established various military outposts in the Horn of Africa, while France, Germany, Japan and China have been “trying to position themselves for the upcoming global rivalry over a region of rising geopolitical significance and resources.” At the same time, regional actors have been pursuing their own agendas in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, as during the Cold War era, escalating tensions in the area. Two centuries after piracy in North Africa led to the first US military intervention on the African continent, piracy has again become a concern for American commerce.

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Part VI: African self‐representations Finally, in Part VI we examine ways in which Africans have represented themselves, through writing documents, creating a choral tradition of resistance, or publishing their own life stories. As expressed through social activities or formal documentation, these sources provide historians with their most valuable keys – literal and aural – to understand the history of the continent. In Chapter 22 Jay Spaulding provides us with a case study of the “art of memory” in seventeenth‐century Sinnar, part of what is the modern state of the Sudan, posing the question of how state scribes in the Muslim kingdom of Sinnar in the late 1700s developed an elaborate system of royal documents when there was no apparent history of writing in the kingdom. His chapter examines the way in which complicated documents meticulously committed to memory could be recalled orally for centuries after their initial preparation, and also how their structural elements provided the basis for the development of written documentation later on, at a time when the rulers of Sinnar chose that form of documentation. In Chapter 23 Neo Lekgotla laga Ramoupi likewise focuses on a case study – of songs sung by political prisoners on Robben Island, especially in the 1960s. For Ramoupi song is embedded in African culture and is an essential element of the prisoner experience. Again and again on the island, prisoners subjected to all sorts of controls and privations, expressed themselves individually and as a community through song. And they used these songs to express shared beliefs about key events in all their lives: land, the wider physical and social environment, social justice, and history. In these songs too can be found the histories of people (like Robert Sobukwe) and organizations (like the Pan Africanist Congress) that have been forgotten, erased, or simply overlooked because they were not the “winners” in politics. And, above all, the history of struggle fought continent‐wide against white colonialism: iZwe Lethu! Thina abantwana be Afrika Sikhalela ilizwe, ilizwe Lethu Lathathwa ngabamhlophe Umkhokheli wethu, Sobukwe! Sobukwe! Bua le APLA Sifuna iAPLA engene eSouth Afrika Ukulwa namabhunu! iAPLA ezo khulula South Africa iAPLA ezo khulula umhlaba we amaAfrika!

The land belongs to us! We, the children of Africa We are crying for the land, our own land That was taken by the Boers/whites Our leader, Sobukwe! Sobukwe! talk to APLA We want APLA to enter South Africa To fight the Boers! APLA is going to liberate South Africa APLA is going to liberate the land Of the African People!

In Chapter  23, “Apartheid Forgotten and Remembered,” Nancy Clark and William Worger discuss the limits of South African academic scholarship written during the past half century, and the potential for new work that relies primarily



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on stories told by ordinary people about their experiences under apartheid, and on utilizing the vast amounts of information that exist for those scholars who have expertise in vernaculars. What is striking about academia in South Africa postapartheid is that, rather than experiencing the growth of new scholarship as it occurred, for example, at such universities as Makerere and Dar es Salaam in the 1960s and 1970s, historical work has largely reverted to the Afrikaner/English divide of the early years of apartheid. The advances of social history in the 1970s and 1980s have largely been forgotten. If history as an academic discipline is not to be forever irrelevant to the majority of the population, its future in South Africa has to be the responsibility of a new generation of authors whose work has found publication primarily in the autobiographies discussed in the second half of the chapter. The issues of relevancy and responsibility can also be seen in the questions asked and the materials used by Ndlovu and Ramoupi, themselves among the leaders of this new generation. Moving from the perspective of a case study to a continental gaze, Charles Ambler concludes the volume with an examination of popular culture writ large from the study of sport to that of concert parties, from clothing and fashion to Nollywood and YouTube (Chapter 25). Ambler reminds of what has not been written – why, for example, there has been so little written on the extraordinary volume of titles known collectively as Onitsha Market Literature? Is this why Nwando Achebe has to remind us to write a history of emotion in Africa? Is this where study of WhatsApp and of lineage, as James Giblin tells us, will provide opportunities for examining the history of individual and community relationships in the future? Though Ambler suggests that a focus on popular culture has been one way to balance the male focus of most studies of political history, there is still a bias toward studies of activities in which primarily males engage, especially the sports literature. But, with the range of activities outlined in his chapter and the insights provided by the contributors to this book, perhaps we can envisage a future range of studies that are not limited to transactional relationships but that engage fully with evidence about and discussion of the ways in which individuals and communities love and play as well as the ways in which they hate and kill. As noted at the beginning of this introduction, A Companion to African History aims to capture the enthusiasms of practicing historians, and to encourage similar enthusiasms in a new generation of scholars. The plural case is intentional. There is no one way to write history. Imagination is key. And it is up to historians to capture and reflect in their work the imaginations of their subjects.

Part I

The Personal

Chapter Two

Tracing the Roots of Common Sense about Sexuality in Africa Marc Epprecht

Broad claims about sexuality played a role in the formation of an identity of Africanness which continues to have important policy implications in diverse fields including public health and human rights. The “Scientific Statement … on Homosexuality” prepared by the Ministry of Health of Uganda in February 2014 is a recent important example. Commissioned by President Yoweri Museveni, the statement offers a succinct précis of scientific knowledge primarily focused on the nature versus nurture debates over the causes of homosexuality. The statement quickly became notorious internationally. Two sentences were particularly problematic for giving credence to stereotypes of African culture and homosexuality that have historically been used to justify discriminatory laws and vigilante violence: “African cultures had contained sexual vices. Maybe we need to revisit them to contain the present explosion of overt and coercive homosexual activity with the exploitation of our young children” (Republic of Uganda, Ministry of Health 2014: 8). This was exactly the justification Museveni needed to sign the egregious Anti‐Homosexuality Bill into law.1 Colleagues have elsewhere vigorously challenged the “Scientific Statement” with comprehensive overviews of global sexuality research and reflection upon the likely negative health outcomes of the new law (Academy of Science of South Africa 2015; Bailey et al. 2016).2 In this chapter, I want to concentrate on the historical aspects of its findings. I shall not attempt a historical reconstruction of how actual sexual practices changed over time, although studies that do so provide critical context. A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Rather, I ask how the idea that exclusive heterosexuality was a defining and admirable aspect of African cultures became so strongly commonsensical and entrenched in scientific discourse that authors do not feel the need to cite any sources to back their assertions. How do these authors, among many others, know what they claim to know about sexuality in Africa? Is there something in that history of knowledge production that, if made visible, can help us move the public debates beyond the current impasses that so evidently exacerbate injustices, ill health, poverty, and human suffering related to sexuality? In the first section, I introduce four notes of caution about our ability to know about sexuality anywhere, but particularly under the conditions that prevail in much of Africa. I then summarize key findings from my own research into the intellectual and cultural construction of “heterosexual Africa” (Epprecht 2008, 2013), with new insights drawn from an emerging literature on sexualities in Africa by African scholars, artists, and activists. I conclude that careful historical research can contribute to the promotion of human rights and sexual health.

Four notes of caution The “Scientific Statement … on Homosexuality” does not cite any historians or historical documents from Africa to support its main claims about history and culture, namely, that homosexuality has existed in Africa since time immemorial, but that African cultures strictly controlled it along with all other forms of “sexual exhibitionism” and “vice.” “Almost universally,” the authors assert without naming their sources of information, “they contained homosexual practice to such a point that overt homosexuality was almost unheard of” (Republic of Uganda 2014: 3–4). The “Scientific Statement” acknowledges the influence of Christianity and Islam in Africa and that social attitudes change over time, but it does not see these religions as having had any particular effect on traditional values in relation to this topic. The stability of the heterosexual norm has come undone only in very recent times (“present fad,” “present explosion”), primarily, the “Scientific Statement” implies, as a result of the “increasing influence of Western culture,” which presents homosexuality as a socially acceptable choice (Republic of Uganda 2014: 5). The one work cited that refers to African evidence in fact explicitly contradicts these claims. Colonizing African Values is a hard‐hitting exposé of the contemporary role of the US Christian right in aggressively promoting its homophobic and Islamophobic ideology in Africa. The author of that study is also the only African among all the authorities cited by the “Scientific Statement”, albeit, strangely, he is not identified by name. To correct that omission, Kapya Kaoma is a Zambian theologian who cites my work (Kaoma 2012: 1; Epprecht 2004) to support his argument that traditional African societies were more diverse and tolerant of sexual and gender diversity than contemporary homophobes allow. This point is also made abundantly elsewhere (e.g., Murray and Roscoe 1998; Morgan and Wieringa 2005; Nkabinde 2009; Gaudio 2009; Tamale 2011; and many of the entries



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focused on Africa in Chiang, forthcoming). My first note of caution is thus that commonsense claims or assumptions about sexualities in Africa remain highly disputed, and that we as researchers need to be alert to the political contests that are deeply, often implicitly, embedded even in the most assured‐sounding scientific language. A second note of caution hinges on the level of abstraction that we can safely, and should strategically, aim for in the interpretation and presentation of our research. This chapter, indeed this book, abstracts from often isolated case studies over long stretches of time and across diverse intellectual traditions to an entire continent. There is a long and ignoble history of such abstraction feeding into “Dark Continent” stereotypes and their almost equally unhelpful inversions. To appear to follow in that tradition is thus a big risk, especially in such a condensed format. I have chosen to take it in the belief that the risk can be partially mitigated by attention to complexity and with cautionary statements and footnotes like this one.3 The risks of narrow specificity or of overstating local exceptionalism are at least as great, in my view. Those are apparent as well in the abstractions implied by choice of vocabulary. Local terminologies for non‐normative sexualities, in an important example, do not translate well over either distance or time. Indeed, they often carry meanings that are inimical to human dignity and sexual health (such as derogatory ethnic identities or hints of violence, the occult, or exploitation). Similarly, terms developed in the West do not resonate in many African contexts, creating new tensions (e.g., Africans performing sexual orientation and gender identity to Western expectations in order to meet immigration officials’ or donor requirements). While some African intellectuals and activists are embracing the word “queer” as a strategic way to build unity and extend networks, that word also sits uncomfortably with an ostensible imperative of queer theory. How can anyone who claims to respect feminist and postcolonial critiques of knowledge production (as queer theory does) impose a term that is understood by and useful to well‐educated, globally connected actors (like queer theorists) but that is alien and alienating to people in the village or on the street? No consensus has yet been reached, notwithstanding eloquent attempts (e.g., Massaquoi 2013; Ekine and Abbas 2013; Matebeni 2014). A third note of caution: in all the literature discussed here nothing remotely approaches what we today would consider ethical and rigorous scientific research until (generously) Pierre Hanry’s survey of Guinean high school students (Hanry 1970). Prior to that, salacious hearsay, erotic fiction lifted from Arabic sources, pure speculation, and/or sexual fantasy (real in the author or imputed to the audience) appear to be the main sources of information. As one notable example from an era where one might have expected better, the psychologist Carl Jung generated a theory about African women’s emotional and sexual stability after a safari from Mombasa to Egypt under military escort, during which, by his own admission, he spoke to only a single African woman (Jung 1963: 245). Well into the age of AIDS, massive surveys of Africans’ knowledge, attitudes, practices, and

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beliefs did not even ask about masturbation, anal sex, or oral sex, whether homosexual or heterosexual (Caldwell, Caldwell, and Quiggin 1989). And while there has unquestionably been an explosion of bold, high‐quality, high‐integrity research since the 1990s, we still know remarkably little about actually existing sexualities. In short, we cannot take the following accounts as reliable descriptions of how Africans really expressed their sexuality behind closed doors. These documents should be seen as building blocks of a stereotype that many people over a long period of time came to believe was true, erotic, necessary to their identity and health, and even patriotic. That stereotype probably still affects many people’s understanding of their sexuality, and certainly affects the legal and policy parameters within which sexual choices can be made.4 Were it not challenging enough to sift through the inherited racist and heteropatriarchal ideologies for evidence, deeper epistemological and ontological issues bedevil sexuality studies even in the most densely theorized (best‐funded, technologically advanced) research milieux like North America. A persuasive case can be made, for example, that cybersex is better for public health, the environment, and the economy than “real sex,” but what does that do to our understanding of human nature? Do we all agree what real sex is? Can we tell with certainty whether an erection or vaginal moistness indicates physical lust, emotional need, financial calculation, or pharmaceutical intervention? Does that affect our categorizations of sexual orientation? Do new words and technologies designed to hive off “pure” scientific meaning observed in hormonal reactions, genetic codes, and such really avoid the political or cultural baggage that adheres to pre‐existing vocabularies and silences? Sexologists often claim that they can and do address such questions. Others remain skeptical, however, and we may legitimately wonder how politically helpful it is to be raising such concerns when even the most basic research has yet to be done in much of Africa, and people’s lives are at stake in an immediate way and by way of a wide range of crises. This then brings me to my final note of caution: current conflicts over sexual rights, citizenship and/or belonging, and cultural integrity are extremely important to resolve. But they still need to be understood in the context of several other quite enormous existential questions arising from changing, and often deteriorating, material conditions of life. Can we really talk about sexualities without referencing the expanding gap between rich and poor, global climate change, emergent diseases, rapid demographic transitions, and the “limits to growth” debates? The dramatic rise of technologies like genetic engineering, surveillance, social media, and artificial intelligence are meanwhile shifting the consensus on some fundamental concepts about humanness and human needs. And does the proliferation of pornography affect the ways in which we relate to each other as teachers or students, as scholars, as citizens, and as human beings? I concede that these discussions need to be left for another time. These cautions nonetheless should be kept in mind when we ask where the “Scientific Statement’s” certainties (and anxieties) about heterosexuality in Africa come from.



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The age of “discovery” (and diversity) The first written accounts of African societies south of the Sahara come from Muslim travelers or observers of African slaves in the Middle East from as long ago as the ninth century ce (255 ah). Scholarly assessments in English are scarce, and run the gamut from respectful meditations upon cultural difference (as Muhammad (1985) saw them) to exoticizing claims of Africans’ “immense potency and unbridled sexuality” (Lewis 1990: 94). Documents from Timbuktu interpreting the Qur’an to adjudicate domestic disputes or “Advising Men on Sexual Engagement with their Women” from the eighteenth century or earlier are certainly suggestive of a more robust sexual and romantic culture than subsequent puritanical movements would approve – including how to give one’s wife an orgasm “to the point of madness in intensity” (Farouk‐Alli and Mathee 2008: 183–187). On the east coast, a long tradition of Somali and Swahili literature in Arabic script, plus Sufi jurisprudence making reference to Omani and Persian precedents, is also suggestive of a grain of truth in the stereotype that Islam on the coast was in practice more relaxed about discreet sexual transgressions than pastoralist cultures of the interior (Murray and Roscoe 1997; Haberlandt [1899] 1998). “Hebephilic” relationships (men with pubescent boys) in the Maghreb, Egypt, and Sudan were contained, to use the language of the “Scientific Statement,” often by legalistic distinctions around slave status (see also Gadelrab 2016, specifically on Egypt and with reference to sex with male slaves). European travelers began publishing their observations as they ventured southwards along the west coast and established trading relationships with Africans along the way. Accounts were frequently exaggerated, sensationalized, moralistic, and self‐serving. They nonetheless documented a basic truth: African societies tended to place an extremely high value on heterosexual marriage and reproduction. People acquired status in the community largely through marital ties and children. But marriage came in many forms. Perhaps making the biggest impression on Europeans were polygynous households with wives of varying status, some of whom husbands made available to visitors as a gesture to smooth trade relations. Such practices gave rise to a cultured and commercially influential caste of mixed‐race women along the West African coast (the signares), whose erotic mystique lingers to today.5 Elsewhere in Africa public nudity, highly sexualized music and dancing, and gender bending or other “lewd” rituals were commonplace practices that were observed to stand, sometimes uneasily, beside stern patriarchal or state controls over young people’s sexuality.6 Exceptions to heterosexual norms, including ritual celibacy and incest, did not go unnoticed. Sir Richard Burton’s grand overview of world sexuality, for example, refers to a Portuguese document from 1558 that claimed “unnatural damnation” (meaning, male–male sex) to be esteemed among the Kongo people, as well as a “prostitute corps” used by the male‐identified female warriors of Dahomey, the Amazons (Burton 1885: 10. 246–247). Andrew Battell, who lived

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among the Imbangala (in modern‐day Angola) in the 1590s, was similarly disapproving, both of the male cross‐dressers and of “women witches … [who] use unlawfull lusts betweene themselves in mutuall filthinesse” (cited in Purchas 1613: 513). On the other side of the continent, Jesuits took note of homosexual relationships among Abyssinian elites as well as princesses who indulged their carnal desires irrespective of their marital status (Belcher 2013). Images of African polymorphous perversity and flexible gender systems then found their way into European middlebrow culture in the eighteenth century, including in ostensibly realistic novels like Sade’s Aline et Valcour. Sade ([1795] 1990) is notable in part because he drew upon an extensive library of firsthand accounts from Africa, and for the way in which he contrasts the lusty bisexuality of his African and Africanized characters with the prudish sensibilities of the bourgeois European traveler (Epprecht 2007). Europeans and Arabs, I should stress, were not the only people pondering African cultures in the precolonial era  –  a sophisticated literature existed in Ge’ez, the written language of the Amharic people of the Habesha (Abyssinian, Christian) empire. While the Ethiopian Orthodox Church today is one of the strongest homophobic voices on the continent, Wendy Belcher (2015) has ­discovered a thoughtful meditation on female–female sensual desire written in Ge’ez in 1672 by a pious African woman for an African audience. Could this document be interpreted as an expression of African intellectual and spiritual independence from the Portuguese Jesuits then asserting their influence over the Amharic elites? A similar argument might be made in the case of Kimpa Vita (Beatrice of Kongo) in the early eighteenth century. Under the image of a black‐ skinned Jesus and saints, and sporting a beard in at least one depiction, Kimpa Vita advocated Christian chastity and personal moral responsibility in order to cleanse the nation of the pernicious influence of the Portuguese Catholics and their slave‐trading allies. She was burned at the stake for her efforts (Thornton 1998; Brockman, n.d.).

The age of “science” Recognition of shared humanity with Africans, and of cultural diversity including a wide array of different sexual and gender arrangements within Africa, gave way in European accounts over the course of the nineteenth century to racist stereotypes. These tended to be expressed in two main ways: overt contempt in social Darwinist or Hegelian terms, or “noble savage” lyricism. At both extremes, the consensus hardened that blacks needed whites to protect or nurture them through the challenges of modernity. Indeed, as bad as morals could be as a consequence of an excess of natural virility and concupiscence under primitive conditions, they invariably grew worse as Africans became “demoralized” or “detribalized” by the expanding cash economy and the influence of ill‐behaved foreigners. This recommended more and better (scientific) colonial administration.7



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The apparent rarity of overt homosexual relationships among African subjects not only confirmed the “close to nature” theory, but further justified colonial interventions against corrupting external influences. The governor of Uganda Harry H. Johnston made this point when he claimed that the “vicious propensities” of the king of Buganda (said to have been learned from Muslim traders) “disgusted even his negro people” (Johnston 1904: 685). The need to protect naive African men from predatory Chinese mine workers sparked a minor political crisis in South Africa in 1906 (Harris 2004). Sir Frederick Jackson (1930: 326), a colonial official in Kenya and Uganda, also praised “the good sense of the natives and their disgust” at the bestial vices practiced by “orientals.” And so on. Africans’ natural heterosexuality, according to the emerging scientific homophobia, was one of the few unambiguously positive things to be said about African morals and character. As Sir Richard Burton put it: “the negro and negroid races to the South ignore the erotic perversion” (1885: 10. 205; 2. 56). Burton’s opus, like the work of his equally phantasmagoric French contemporary “Jacobus X” (1893, 1937), was an important contribution to the emerging science of “sexology.” In that paradigm, sexuality was like any other phenomenon. It could be categorized and explained in relation to knowable and predictable natural laws, from which universal lessons could be learned and transferred across cultural barriers. Sexology, and subsequently anthropology and ethnopsychiatry, thus offered a means to apply knowledge about non‐European peoples back home in Europe (Lyons and Lyons 2004). That goal for some researchers was quite clear. They were not so much interested in non‐Europeans per se, and certainly not in titillation (so they claimed); rather, they wondered how knowledge of other cultures could be used to fix problems related to sexual or gender dysfunction either in Europe itself or among Europeans charged with administering the empire. Particularly after World War I, doubts about the solidity of Western civilization fed the anxiety. What could Africans teach a Europe threatened by moral decline from mass warfare, industrial capitalism, atheism, communism, alcohol abuse, and feminism? To missionaries like Henri Junod ([1915] 1962), Africans’ sterling but fragile heteronormativity provided a rhetorical inspiration. The emergence of male–male relationships among Tsonga migrant laborers in the South African mines was, to Junod, a shameful blot not on Tsonga men so much as on whites who had created the corrupting conditions. Female sexuality was another area of anxiety in interwar Europe on which African patriarchy offered edifying lessons, notably, what to do about women’s orgasms. Marie Bonaparte was an influential French psychiatrist in the 1930s who, apparently influenced by the up‐and‐coming Kenyan anthropologist Jomo Kenyatta, argued that African women were emotionally more balanced than European women because they practiced clitoridectomy. This operation supposedly reduced the destabilizing effect of selfish female desire emanating from the clitoris, hence allowing mature African women to be sexually satisfied through penetration by their husbands (no other stimulation being necessary or presumably possible).

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European women – and Bonaparte volunteered herself – could emulate Africans to their and their husbands’ mutual benefit (Frederiksen 2008). In other cases, same‐sex practices among Africans came to the rescue of anxious Europeans. German scholars in the 1920s found evidence among so‐called primitive people in Namibia and Angola that they published to disprove the belief that homosexuality was caused by cultural decadence, especially, as the Nazis claimed, among Jews and communists. For opponents of fascism like Kurt Falk ([1923] 1998), Bushmen who masturbated each other offered a proof, of sorts, that Hitler was wrong. Africans were not passive bystanders to the emerging scientific paradigm but actively contributed to it as they came into the public sphere as scholars, artists, and polemicists. A high percentage of Africans who did so were men like Kenyatta who were educated in Christian mission schools. Their assertions of sexual propriety in traditional African culture thus reflected a complex mix of their personal understanding of cultural norms (sometimes learned from elders, sometimes through European ethnographies), their socialization as Christians (who must abhor sexuality outside a very narrow band of respectability), their education in pseudoscience (as outlined earlier), and their political incentives to demonstrate Africans’ humanity to a skeptical or even hostile European audience. To persuade or shame the colonialists into respecting Africans, African dignity had to be demonstrated and measurable according to standards that the colonialists could understand. Innumerable examples illustrate this striving by African male authors to be acknowledged as men in terms that even racists could admire: as heterosexually virile, able to control and to provide for women, and able to exercise wise restraint when called upon. Many of the most heroic, and tragic, protagonists of the first generations of African novelists published in English exhibit these characteristics. In the social sciences, meanwhile, customs and practices formerly denounced by European missionaries as immoral were valorized for their functionality in creating stable, harmonious cultures. Kenyatta was a pioneer of that genre ([1938] 1961), emphasizing the very strict etiquette governing adolescent thigh sex and the role of female circumcision in ensuring girls’ transition to adulthood. Evidence of exceptions to the norms appears in some cases to have been consciously repressed by African scholars or research assistants desiring to preserve respectability. Matory (2005), among numerous other examples, discusses ritual male–male anal sex that was deliberately hushed up by Yoruba colleagues. But why would scholars continue to ignore or suppress evidence that contradicted the pseudoscientific arguments about race and sexuality long after these had been refuted? Here too we see a complex interplay of motives. Some did in fact note nonheterosexual practices and customs in traditional settings without “explaining” them by reference to foreigners or the corrupting effects of urbanization (the aforementioned Falk, for example). In most cases, however, such mentions came in passing, and in euphemistic or speculative language that was



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easily overlooked (Kirby 1942 revealed male–male sexual orientation among the Ovambo under the title “A Secret Musical Instrument,” for example). Rarely did the analysis in such cases challenge the heteronormative paradigm. On the contrary, authors tended to explain exceptions to the norm as occult, as the result of women’s frustration in polygynous households, as holding relationships to preserve kinship claims over inheritance, or as youthful preparation for heterosexual marriage. This is not to suggest that these scholars were wrong in stressing the heteronormativity of African cultures, only that they may have lacked sufficient skepticism of the potential discrepancy between what informants said and what people actually did. European researchers may also have been trying to protect “their” people or their colonial administrations from scandal by suppressing embarrassing evidence. I find it remarkable, for example, that a widespread culture of male–male sexuality among Tutsi elites that sparked a major political event in 1920s Burundi (the deposition of the king by the Belgians) is scarcely alluded to in the ethnography prior to Jacques Maquet’s study (Maquet 1961; Des Forges 2011). Or were researchers guarding their own reputations as serious and patriotic scholars? During the Cold War homosexuality was widely thought of as frivolous at best, and possibly as evidence of either the researchers’ own homosexuality or (and?) their communistic sympathies. And let us not underestimate the lingering appeal of a romanticized Africa for theorists aiming to critique aspects of modern life in Europe or America. Carl Jung scored points against anxious, “homosexualized” Europeans with a rosy description of African women’s untroubled heterosexuality (Jung 1963). A similar unspoken agenda may have been a factor in the rise of “heterosexual African AIDS,” which disregarded men who have sex with men and downplayed homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia as factors in the transmission of HIV in Africa. Heterosexual African AIDS was a powerful metaphor in the anti‐homophobia struggle in North America and Europe, a whole continent of innocent victims to offset the stigma of “the gay plague” (Patton 1999). As I shall discuss in the next section, this sometimes resulted in self‐censorship but also, probably more commonly, a lack of interest in questioning inherited heterosexist assumptions about African identity.

The age of coming out and the backlash To what extent did scientific discourse impact the ways in which people lived their sexuality in Africa? Directly, probably zero. Indirectly, however, it contributed to an ideological framework for the growing power of colonial regimes. As such it helped to justify a whole raft of laws, native administration systems, health policy, educational initiatives, wage scales, consumer product marketing, and urban planning that over time shifted the political, economic, social, and material grounds upon which Africans made sexual decisions. Some doors were opened (cash was good for that), others closed (land shortage, poverty); some old ways of

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doing things became impossible or shameful, while new ways came into being; some body parts or partners gained erotic qualities, while others lost them. Thus, while few Africans will have ever read or even heard of Richard Burton or Sigmund Freud et  al., colonial regimes were to a significant extent influenced by those men’s presumptions and claims. Heterosexual Africa may not have been real, empirically, but it had sufficient heft as an idea to drive alternative sexual arrangements deep into the shadows. The partial unravelling of the “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 1997) of heterosexual Africa is generally thought to have started in South Africa. White South Africans were the first gay rights activists in the Western sense, and they have produced by far the most scholarship on non‐normative sexuality on the continent. Secrets such as lesbian‐like mummy–baby relationships among African girls and women and male–male “marriages” among criminal gangs and migrant mine workers began to be revealed from the 1950s (e.g., Lanham and Mopeli‐Paulus 1953; Blacking 1959; van Onselen 1976; Gay 1985; Mathabane 1986; Moodie 1988). By the 1990s this had become a veritable flood of fiction, memoirs, academic research, documentary film, plays, and other representations of black Africans expressing their sexual agency and gender identities in diverse and autonomous ways (notably, Achmat 1993; Gevisser and Cameron 1994; Nkoli 1994; Nkabinde 2009). This literature, plus the urgent public health imperative of HIV/AIDS, stimulated a smaller but noteworthy coming out elsewhere on the continent, including my own work in Zimbabwe (Epprecht 1998, 2004) but also Teunis (1996), Niang et  al. (2003), and M’baye (2013) in Senegal; Serhane (2000) in Morocco; Jeay (1991) in Mali; Camara (1997) in Guinea; Gaudio (2009) in Nigeria; Bocahut and Brookes (1998) in Côte d’Ivoire; Lorway (2006: 2014) in Namibia; and Tadele (2012) in Ethiopia, among many others discussed in collections and critical overviews spanning a wide range of academic disciplines, styles, and quality.8 The growing visibility of LGBTI in public discourse has sometimes been taken to indicate an increase in the frequency of homosexual practices. There may be a grain of truth in this in the form of transactional or comfort sex linked to deteriorating conditions in prison, to a growing population of street kids and other people marginalized by the economic malaise of the past few decades, and to the influence of gay‐friendly Western popular culture or HIV education that stresses personal responsibility of care (Nguyen 2005). No credible study, however, supports the claim that a conscious recruitment drive is underway to lead Africans away from their natural and historical path. Yet, as Uganda’s “Scientific Statement” demonstrates, that claim often justifies a backlash against sexual minorities and their allies. Reaction against representations of African sexuality that disrupt the myth of heterosexual exclusivity can be traced back almost to the beginning of their appearance in the age of coming out. Kenyatta’s sarcasm about European “friends of Africa” is broadly aimed but his bald statements about the superiority of Gikuyu



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sexual mores make it clear that defending a sharply defined heterosexuality was an important element of his nationalism. Claims that African men were being corrupted by sodomistic Europeans go back to at least the 1950s (Fanon [1952] 1967; Diop 1960), and in the case of Cameroun seem to have inspired a tough new law against homosexuality in 1970 (Nyeck 2013). In the sphere of public health, researchers who complicated the emerging “heterosexual African AIDS” narrative in the mid‐1980s were ignored, mocked, or tarred with the innuendo of racism (Oppong and Kalipeni (2004), notably, attacking an American scholar for wondering about “hidden bisexuality” in Africa). In at least two known cases, researchers received death threats, presumably from state officials who disapproved (see Wilson Carswell, cited in Epprecht 2008; and Kocheloff 2006). The case of Rotimi Fani‐Kayode from the 1980s is also worth noting. The Nigerian‐ born photographer gained an international reputation for his work celebrating black male homosexuality but he never showed his homoerotic work in Nigeria for fear of his family’s safety (Williams 2015). An African nationalism that made white men’s predation upon African men and boys a central metaphor is generally dated from the early 1990s. Winnie Mandela, at the time, notably defended herself against kidnapping and murder charges by alleging that she was merely protecting a vulnerable African boy from the lust of a white minister (Holmes 1994). In the years that followed, many African leaders made or implied a similar existential threat to African cultural integrity coming from the West either directly, through sex tourists, rapists, and gay‐positive propaganda, or indirectly, through donor pressures to provide education about same‐sex sexuality in the fight against HIV. The backlash against sexual minorities has by now reached the point where even to point out Western sources for the new homophobia can be construed as racist (that is, as denying African agency for creating its own prejudices independently of the West). The situation in some African countries has grown fraught with danger (Jjuuku 2013; Thoreson 2014), including the reputational risk for young African scholars taking up the research (Msibi 2014; Tadele 2015). Yet, at the same time, the backlash is proving a powerful stimulus to new research, creative thinking, and public activism (e.g., Nyanzi 2014; van Klinken and Chitando 2016; Chitando and van Klinken 2016; Namwase and Jjuuku 2017; Kaoma 2017; and Chiang, forthcoming). Are we on the cusp of a new age of sexuality studies?

Discussion and conclusion How does the foregoing help us to think of ways to move discussions about sexual rights and sexual health forward? It allows us, first, to make a critical assessment of the “Scientific Statement … on Homosexuality” from Uganda’s Ministry of Health, and other documents or policy initiatives that assert or imply an essentially heterosexual African culture. We can see that the “containment” and

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“homosexuality is unAfrican” claims in fact have a pedigree stretching back to some deeply racist authors. They were promoted, sometimes unthinkingly, by a wide range of people and institutions in pursuit of diverse objectives other than scientific veracity (prurience, religious proselytization, colonialism, respectability, national liberation, anti‐homophobia AIDS activism in the West, etc.). Knowing where some of the common sense on this issue actually comes from alerts us to the need for more careful research on sexualities in Africa, as indeed the “Scientific Statement” acknowledges. That said, we should not undervalue the research that already exists but which the authors of the “Scientific Statement” did not consider. That so much of it is by non‐African or white South African authors is an obvious problem for several reasons. But African scholars from around the continent are increasingly engaging in ways that are not just rich in empirical details but also politically quite powerful. One suspects that is precisely why the authors of the statement “neglected” to identify the one African author whose work they cite. Leaving Kapya Kaoma’s name out (and, indeed, any of the other Ugandan social scientists I have discussed) allows readers to infer that Africans are not contributing to the evidence‐ based side of the debate and that, at least tacitly by their supposed lack of interest, they are united in their opposition to supposedly Western cultural colonialist impositions like sexual rights. This is patently not true. Whether historical research is a good place to invest time and energy in the struggles for sexual rights and sexual health is open to debate. The World Bank makes a persuasive case that the focus is more strategically placed on developing economic arguments and targets. The same might be argued for tapping into Africans’ spirituality through the rereading of sacred texts. Perhaps traditional leaders can be co‐opted through the language of Ubuntu. Trusted public health officials might expand the realm of the possible by taking the edge off politicized language. There is also a strong case to be made that litigation in well‐ targeted cases can open the door to wider challenges to repressive laws and cultural practices, and that the African Union, for all its problems, holds considerable potential for change. In my own view, these are all promising paths. Neglecting the history, however, can lead to dangerous missteps, as clearly happened in the case of the “Scientific Statement.” The harder we work to make it impossible for the history of sexual and gender diversity in Africa to be so ignored, the better we can challenge ill‐conceived interventions such as Uganda’s Anti‐Homosexuality Act.

Acknowledgments I thank colleagues and friends at the “State of the Art of Sexuality Research” workshop in Naivasha, February 2015, for their generous and astute suggestions, and the funders of that event and Queen’s University for enabling me to participate.



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Notes 1 Considerable critical commentary on these events comes from within Uganda. For one example see Big Eye (2018), reposting a Freedom and Roam Uganda statement of 2014. The Coalition of African Lesbians, an observer organization at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, also produced some thoughtful responses, for example, https://caladvocacyblog.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/so‐i‐read‐the‐scientific‐report‐ on‐homosexuality‐in‐uganda‐and‐i‐have‐questions (accessed September 22, 2015). 2 An enormous body of knowledge on human sexuality and how best to protect against sexually transmitted infections is available online. The science, I should stress, overwhelmingly supports the positive connection between public health and human rights as advocated by, for example, the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, and the World Bank (see, e.g., Beyrer et al. 2011). Continentally, perhaps the most important network providing resources and linking sexuality researchers and activists is African Men for Sexual Health and Rights (www.amsher.org), with many others promising diverse approaches to the issues, for example, through legal challenges and reforms (see the Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa (www.the‐isla.org/about‐us‐2). 3 Let me stress that important distinctions have been made between discrete African cultures and across the different colonial borders. Hayes (2000) and M’baye (2013), for example, complicate the narrative I am proposing with evidence from francophone West and North Africa. Conversely, scholars may wish to query the oft‐assumed strict cultural divide of the Sahara. 4 Again, a significant body of scholarship supports this argument. New sexualities linked to gender, ethnic, racial, national, and other identities were “discoursed” into being in relation to changes in the political economy (White 1990; Jeater 1993; Harries 1994; McClintock 1995; Hunter 2010, among many others). See also Ratele (2014) for an important analysis of how homophobia shores up hegemonic African masculinity in contemporary South Africa, and Hendriks (2014) on how stereotypes of African sexuality affect the fantasy lives of European men in the Democratic Republic of Congo, many years after formal colonialism ended. Also of note from Hendriks’s work is how, even after 15 months of intimate social contact with only five men from his own cultural background, he still felt unable to comment with any certainty on the men’s actual sex lives as opposed to their fantasies. 5 Nostalgia for these “famously beautiful women” is part of the tourism package for Saint Louis (http://www.saintlouisdusenegal.com/english, accessed January 19, 2015), and for Gorée (personal observation). 6 See Bleys (1995) for an extensive overview of the literature in many languages that places Africa in context with studies from other parts of the non‐European world. 7 The extremely rich historiography linking this scientific paradigm to gender, sexuality, and imperialism is ably explored by Stoler (2002) and in the essays on transnational sexualities introduced by Canaday (2009). I am grateful to Aminata M’baye for sharing her close study of the scientific debates in France as applied to colonial Senegal, and for reminding me to reread Jacobus X (1893, 1937) and Armand Corre (1894), unpleasant as that was to do. 8 Among others, Morgan and Wieringa (2005); Rwanika (2006); Hoad (2007); Morgan, Marais, and Wellbeloved (2009); Tamale (2011); Ekine and Abbas (2013); and Nyeck and Epprecht (2013).

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Nyanzi, Stella. 2014. “Queer Pride and Protest: A Reading of the Bodies at Uganda’s First Gay Beach Pride.” Signs 40(1): 36–40. Nyeck, S. N. 2013. “Mobilizing against the Invisible: Erotic Nationalism, Mass Media and the ‘Paranoid Style’ in Cameroon.” In Sexual Diversity in Africa: Politics, Theory and Citizenship, edited by S. N. Nyeck and Marc Epprecht, 151–169. Montreal: McGill‐ Queen’s University Press. Nyeck, S. N., and Marc Epprecht, eds. 2013. Sexual Diversity in Africa: Politics, Theory and Citizenship. Montreal: McGill‐Queen’s University Press. Oppong, Joseph R., and Ezekiel Kalipeni. 2004. “Perceptions and Misperceptions of AIDS in Africa.” In HIV/AIDS in Africa: Beyond Epistemology, edited by E. Kalipeni, S. Craddock, J. R. Oppong, and J. Ghosh, 47–57. Oxford: Blackwell. Patton, Cindy. 1999. “Inventing African AIDS.” In Culture, Society, and Sexuality: A Reader, edited by Richard Parker and Peter Aggleton, 387–404. London: UCL Press. Purchas, Samuel. 1613. Purchas: His Pilgrims or Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discovered from the Creation until This Present. London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone. Ratele, Kopano. 2014. “Hegemonic African Masculinities and Men’s Heterosexual Lives: Some Uses for Homophobia.” African Studies Review 57(2): 115–130. Republic of Uganda, Ministry of Health. 2014. “Uganda: Scientific Statement from the Ministry of Health on Homosexuality.” https://www.pambazuka.org/food‐health/ uganda‐scientific‐statement‐ministry‐health‐homosexuality, accessed February 21, 2018. Rwanika, Drocella Mwisha. 2006. Sexualité volcanique. Paris: L’Harmattan. Sade, D. A. F. [1795] 1990. “Histoire de Sainville et de Léonore” (ch. 35 of Aline et Valcour). In Sade: Œuvres, vol. 1, ed. M. Delon. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Serhane, Abdelhak. 2000. L’amour circoncis. Paris: Éditions EDDIF. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tadele, Getnet. 2012. “Sexuality and Rights: Men Who Have Sex with Men in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.” In African Responses to HIV/AIDS: Between Speech and Action, edited by Segun Ige and Tim Quinlan, 177–208. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu‐Natal Press. Tadele, Getnet. 2015. “Despair and Optimism: Researching and Publishing Sexuality in Ethiopia.” Unpublished paper presented at the conference on “State of the Art of Sexuality Studies,” Naivasha, Kenya. Tamale, Sylvia, ed. 2011. African Sexualities: A Reader. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press/ Fahamu Books. Teunis, Niels. 1996. “Homosexuality in Dakar: Is the Bed the Heard of a Sexual Subculture?” Journal of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Identity 1(2): 153–169. Thoreson, Ryan Richard. 2014. Transnational LGBT Activism: Working for Sexual Rights Worldwide. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Thoreson, R. R., and S. Cook, eds. 2011. Nowhere to Turn: Blackmail and Extortion of LGBT People in Sub‐Saharan Africa. New York: IGLHRC. Thornton, John. 1998. The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Donna Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Klinken, Adriaan, and Ezra Chitando, eds. 2016. Public Religion and the Politics of Homosexuality in Africa. Abingdon: Routledge



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Chapter Three

Masculinities Stephan F. Miescher

Since Luise White (1990) called on Africa’s historians to gender men, the study of men and masculinities has become an established subfield within the historiography on gender in Africa. The earliest works focused on southern Africa (Morrell 1998a, 2001a) but then expanded across the continent (Lindsay and Miescher 2003; Ouzgane and Morrell 2005; Broqua and Doquet 2013a). A growing number of scholars based at African institutions, particularly in South Africa, have contributed to this new knowledge. Since most of them are not historians, they have foregrounded contemporary perspectives.1 Historical studies on masculinities have focused on the twentieth century, particularly the colonial era. Some have dealt with transnational and transcultural connections, the adoption and rejection of outside influences (Miescher 2009; Broqua and Doquet 2013b). Only a few have examined the precolonial period: looking at the history of male honor (Iliffe 2005) and analyzing the transformation of Africa’s gender systems since the nineteenth century (McKittrick 2003; Mbah 2013, 2015). These historical studies, most of them social histories, have addressed a variety of themes: conceptual issues like multiple masculinities and hierarchies among them; Africa’s flexible gender systems; the legacy of the African big man; the colonial remaking of African men through missionary societies, education, and wage labor; urban gangs; intersections of state, gender, and age; gendered development; postcolonial interventions and anxieties; and sexualities. In this chapter, I shall examine each of these themes by discussing a select group A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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of works. The chapter does not aspire to be comprehensive but seeks to introduce some of the most compelling studies written in English (for works in French, see Broqua and Doquet 2013a; Uchendu 2008a).

Conceptual issues Raewyn W. Connell’s (1995) theoretical interventions have been pathbreaking for the study of masculinities. Most important has been her insight about the multiplicity of masculinities in any given historical context and the potential for a hierarchy within them, with different levels of masculine privilege. Connell’s concept of “hegemonic masculinity,” although attractive as way to unpack the hierarchy and power relations between different forms of masculinity, has proved to be more controversial in African contexts. The concept of hegemonic masculinity was first formulated by the sociologists Tim Carrigan, R. W. Connell, and John Lee (1985), and subsequently refined and popularized by Connell (1995; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). The concept implies a hierarchy of masculinities that includes different levels of masculine privilege. Hegemonic, subordinate, and marginalized masculinities represent various abilities to enjoy the patriarchal dividend, that is, the advantage men gain from the subordination of women. Yet not all types of masculinity have equal power and legitimacy in society. Connell argues that at any given time one form of masculinity is “culturally exalted” and hegemonic, being defined “as the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of legitimacy of patriarchy” (1995: 77). While scholars working on Africa have embraced the idea that masculinity may have multiple meanings within a society and that power relations affect which definitions become normative, they have wrestled with the notion of hegemonic masculinity (Broqua and Doquet 2013b). Most historians of southern Africa have accepted the model that one form of masculinity is hegemonic in terms of power and masculine privilege (Morrell 1998a, 2001a). In a broad survey Robert Morrell (1998b) identified changing hegemonic masculinities for blacks and whites in South Africa. Early in the early twentieth century Afrikaner and English settler masculinities merged into one hegemonic white masculinity (Morrell 2001b). An older, rural‐based African masculinity had been transformed by the 1950s, through urbanization and wage labor, into a new black (nonwhite), urban masculinity, with its culture celebrated by Drum magazine (Clowes 2005). This black masculinity was a working‐class masculinity “in which men lost jobs, lost their dignity and expressed their feelings of emasculation in violent ways” (Morrell 1998b: 630). Other historians have been more critical of Connell’s approach, since it does not ­recognize situations, like those of (post)colonial Africa, where competing notions of masculinity, of local and foreign origins, have coexisted without any of them becoming dominant and hegemonic (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994; Miescher and Lindsay 2003). Didier Gondola suggests that



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two types of hegemonic masculinities were at play among youth gangs in colonial Kinshasa, “each one entangled in a maze of relationships that engendered multiple subordinate masculinities.” He calls one European (imperial) masculinity, with évolué (civilized African) as its subordinate, and the other Yankee (tough guy), with Yuma (dupe, sucker) as its subordinate (Gondola 2016: 9–10). The concept of hegemonic masculinity has had some salience in studies on contemporary Africa (Shefer et al. 2007; Morrell, Jewkes, and Lindegger 2012). Kopano Ratele (2011) has embraced the notion of hegemonic masculinity to theorize sexual prowess as central to heterosexual manhood and anxiety over same‐sex practices in postcolonial Africa. However, Ratele is less concerned with the change of masculinities over time, and thus with the concept’s applicability to historical work. Similarly, Akosua Adomako Ampofo and John Boateng note for contemporary Ghana that a number of masculinities may coexist and that a “particular version of masculinity has supremacy and greater legitimacy in society” (2011: 423). They suggest that modernization and liberal feminism have not led to enhanced rights for women. Rather, “new hegemonic masculinities are emerging, making it important to understand not only how such identities are transmitted intergenerationally, but also how they are (re)invented and contested” (Ampofo and Boateng 2011: 423). Their study focuses on those who do not live up to these hegemonic values, and thus practice and represent alternative masculinities, such as the banyan‐basia (man‐woman) (see Dankwa 2011) and the Kojo‐basia (female Kojo) (see Geoffrion 2013). Egodi Uchendu emphasizes the plurality of African masculinities and uses the concept to show how colonialism undermined “non‐patriarchal hegemonic masculinities” (2008b: 13). Lisa Lindsay and I have developed a framework for historical studies of African masculinities. We distinguish between masculinity and manhood. Masculinity, conceptualized in broader and more implicit terms, refers to “a cluster of norms, values, and behavioral patterns expressing explicit and implicit expectations of how men should act and represent themselves to others” (Miescher and Lindsay 2003: 4). Ideologies of masculinity, like those of femininity, are cultural and historically constructed; their meanings are contested and in the process of being renegotiated within the context of power relations. Manhood refers to “indigenous notions explicitly related to men’s physiology, often recognized in terms of male adulthood” (Miescher and Lindsay 2003: 5). Exploring historical constructions of masculinities, we offer three distinct and overlapping methodological perspectives: a focus on discourses, on practices, and on formations of identities and subjectivities. First, masculinity studies need to examine how discourse  – produced by institutions and individuals – express the cultural ideals and expectations of those considered to be masculine. Were there hierarchies between different notions of masculinity, and did they change? How were these gender discourses articulated through other social categories like age, seniority, wealth, and ritual authority? Second, understandings of masculinity can be explored as expressions of social practice within concrete historical contexts. Relevant to this is the insight

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that practice not only reproduces but can transform a gender system. Finally, notions of masculinity are reflected in individual experiences, in the formation of identities and subjectivities (Miescher and Lindsay 2003: 7–8; for a succinct application of this framework see Miescher 2015).

African gender systems Scholars have explored African gender systems and identified cases of female masculinities. Ifi Amadiume (1987) offers a coherent theory of a flexible African gender system in her ethnographic study about the Nnobi people of Igboland in southeastern Nigeria. Amadiume’s intervention has been fruitful beyond African studies (Boris 2007), because it separates gender from biological sex and thus enables the possibility of multiple gender positions that can be occupied by women – the focus of her study – as well as by men. The Igbo social categories of “male daughter” and “female husband” can be conceptualized as a form of female masculinity, whereby women occupy roles and status positions that are usually the privilege of and defined by men (Miescher and Lindsay 2003). Nwando Achebe also suggests that in precolonial Igboland gender was flexible and fluid, “allowing women to become men and men to become women.” This created a unique situation with “Igbo female masculinities such as female husbands and female sons and male femininities such as male priestesses” (Achebe 2011: 23). The biography of Ahebi Ugbabe of Nsukka exemplifies the possibilities and limits of the Igbo gender system. Ahebi was a slave married to a deity, then a runaway and a sex worker before taking responsibilities reserved for men, thus performing female masculinities: first by becoming a colonial headman, then a warrant chief and a female king. Ahebi’s final transformation was unprecedented, for she lived in a society that did not have any kings. She overstepped her authority as female king when she brought out her own masquerade in 1939. Since the ability to control a masked spirit remained the privilege of a full man, Nsukka male elders confiscated her masquerade. Although Ahebi appealed to the British colonial authorities, the latter supported the Nsukka male gerontocracy. This episode revealed “Igbo’s society resolve about the extent to which female gender transformation would be allowed to materialize” (Achebe 2011: 206). Building on her study about generation, Christianity, and colonialism in Ovamboland (present‐day northern Namibia; McKittrick 2002), Meredith McKittrick (2003) outlines the precolonial gender system in nineteenth‐century Ovambo matrilineal societies. There were two dominant masculinities: one based on fatherhood, the other on elite status reached through initiation. Fathers reproduced dominant masculinity by ushering “young men into full male adulthood through the redistribution of livestock” (McKittrick 2003: 34). Dominant fatherhood masculinity was open to all males as they grew older. Yet there were differences among fathers of similar ages as a consequence of the second dominant masculinity, which was defined by having gone through initiation. While female



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initiation was universal, male initiation was restricted to the sons of elites. Male initiates had exclusive privileges. They performed ritual practices like the annual rainmaking ceremony, regardless of their age. Only initiated men served as military leaders and joined the ranks of omalenga (royal advisers). After acquiring more wives, more cattle, and better farms, initiated men became the “paragon of masculinity,” while other men found themselves grouped with wives and children (McKittrick 2002: 42). These multiple masculinities created tensions. Nineteenth‐ century Ovambo societies went through a process of centralization. Political leaders took on positions as kings. Some of them embodied a “supermasculinity” by having “greater share of ‘masculine’ wealth” (McKittrick 2003: 36). They had larger herds than other senior men and attracted more clients, both male and female. This stratification was contested, leading to revolts. Long‐distance trade and the introduction of firearms created a cycle of warfare and hierarchies. The desire for imported commodities like horses, guns, and clothing replaced a need for wealth in people. Starting in the 1880s, famines led to high mortality and generational tension. Fathers were no longer able to devote resources to their sons. For many, “the trapping of elite masculinity” moved beyond their reach (McKittrick 2003: 39). In his work on gendered identity formation, Ndubueze Mbah (2013, 2015) explores the construction and transformation of masculinities in precolonial Ohafia, the only matrilineal Igbo society. In Ohafia ufiem (masculinity) was a “historical definition of power” in the sense that attaining full manhood “vested social power in some men, denied social privileges to other men, and did not enable men to exercise power over women until the early colonial period” (Mbah 2013: 2). The few men who achieved ufiem did so through hard work; they had to prove themselves as warriors through igbu ishi (to cut head). Warriors who brought back human heads were awarded the ufiem title, signifying the attainment of respectable manhood; they were celebrated by the performance of the iri‐aha (war dance). Men who failed to cut head were considered ujo (weak); they embodied a subordinate masculinity. The production of slaves for the Atlantic trade symbolized “heads” cut by warriors. In the nineteenth century, acquiring wealth through “legitimate trade,” in palm kernels and kola nuts, was also understood as a form of cutting head. In the twentieth century, achievements like academic credentials, automobiles, modern houses, and civil service retirement, became new markers of attaining ufiem. Women were not powerless in precolonial Ofahia. They were the breadwinners and performed masculinities, even warrior masculinity, but they lost status under colonialism. Multiple masculinities coexisted in Ofahia between 1850 and 1920. In addition to warriors, yam farmers, hunters, medicine men, wealthy merchants, fathers, husbands, and male political leaders strove for the accomplishment to cut head, both “physically and symbolically” (Mbah 2013: 302). They reinforced the hegemony of warriors over subordinate forms of masculinity. Men who did not accomplish ufiem suffered ridicule and victimization. Mbah suggests that colonialism did not destroy the Igbo gender system but led to its adaptation (see Miescher 2005).

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Big men The figure of the African “big man” has enjoyed a powerful continuity in African history. In equatorial Africa, big men surrounded themselves with wives, married and unmarried sons, younger brothers, children, and other dependants. Their large households became “key colonizing groups” around which villages and chiefdoms formed (Iliffe 1995: 94). During the Atlantic slave trade, paradoxically, big men in western Central Africa sold people to acquire imported goods like cloth, rum, and guns, and to attract more people (Miller 1988). In the West African forest (now southern Ghana), abirempon (big men) were crucial for state formation. With the help of unfree labor, big men entrepreneurs cleared the land, founded villages, and created centers of prosperity that attracted free settlers. From the fifteenth century onward, some of these estates became the capitals of the Akan states (Wilks 1993). In eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century Asante, the most prominent Akan state, rich men accumulated gold, land, wives, and slaves. Making contributions to the state, they publicly displayed their wealth in front of the Asantehene (king) who conferred upon them the obirempon title (McCaskie 1995). Upon their death, rich men could not dispose of their wealth freely; most of their property went to the state. By the late nineteenth century, some Asante big men sought refuge in the British Gold Coast colony to protect their wealth from death duties. After the British exiled the Asantehene in 1900, these rich men became the dominant class in Kumasi, displaying their wealth through “lavish consumption of alcoholic drinks” (Akyeampong 1996: 56). In twentieth‐century Kwawu, Asante’s former subject state, successful traders showed off by building storied houses and spreading their riches among local communities. Money, and not people and wives, became decisive for the big man status. This money, however, had to be shared (Miescher 2005). Lisa Lindsay (2003) has documented a change in the big man ideal in Yorubaland. While in the late nineteenth century seniority and a large household – wealth in people – were crucial, a different model emerged in the twentieth century. New big men were “associated in the public mind with personal significance, generosity, and self‐reliance and power; but they also reflected values associated with education, such as Christianity, literacy, and public spiritedness” (Lindsay 2003: 47; Barber 1991). Railway men who invested their wages in their Yoruba hometowns by supporting relatives became big men. The big man status endured into the independence era as members of cosmopolitan elites, military strongmen, and bandleaders. An early case study is David William Cohen and Atieno Odhiambo’s (1992) portrayal of S. M. Otieno’s life and legacy. Otieno was a cosmopolitan man, an influential lawyer who had entered a cross‐ethnic, companionate marriage. After he died unexpectedly and intestate, a legal struggle between his widow and Luo patrilineal kin revealed the contested implications of this modern big man status in 1980s Kenya. Alicia Decker (2014) has analyzed the extremely violent repercussions of military masculinity under Idi



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Amin  –  Uganda’s big man and brutal 1970s dictator  –  to examine women’s survival strategies. Bob White (2008) has explored the politics of Congolese popular dance music under the quintessential postcolonial big man: Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko. Popular and political cultures shared the “common idiom of big‐man leadership” (White 2008: 14). Inspired by Mobutu, leaders of Rumba dance bands embraced the big man figure and adopted his “aesthetic of authority by playing on the imagery of military strongmen to assert their power as artists” (White 2008: 7). Women could also become big, another articulation of female masculinity – as Emmanuel Akyeampong (2000) has argued for female traders in the coastal cities of colonial Ghana.

Remaking men under colonialism The forces of colonialism remade African men. Prominent in this process were mission societies (Hunt 1999; McKittrick 2002), European‐style schools (Summers 2002), and the introduction of wage labor, particularly migrant labor, which led to generational struggles. Seeking to create a stable workforce in the postwar years, British and French colonial officials took an active interest in African men as workers and in women’s roles in reproducing industrial labor (Cooper 1996; L. White 1990). In nineteenth‐century Ghana, the Basel Mission founded separate communities with distinct gender rules and established educational institutions to transform male converts into a new kind of men: monogamous husbands who privileged their children over their matrikin, and who were devoted to their work and church communities as loyal colonial subjects. My book Making Men in Ghana shows how a group of men, born in the early twentieth century and with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, dealt with different and conflicting notions of masculinity, those promoted by the Presbyterian Church (successor of the Basel Mission) and those dominant in their Kwawu hometowns. None of these masculinities became hegemonic in these men’s lives. Rather, they created their own synthesis by aspiring to Akan ideals of senior masculinity and big man status, while also drawing on missionary teachings (Miescher 2005). Teacher‐catechist A. K. Boakye Yiadom authored two autobiographies. One presents a streamlined version of his professional career, the other a detailed account of his travels, work, relationships with women, and family obligations. The latter documents how he struggled to accommodate arrangements with his polygynous relationships, adhering to the Akan ideal of adult masculinity, like providing for his wives and children, and to fulfill his responsibilities as a teacher‐catechist, maintaining the appearance of a monogamous Christian marriage, which was crucial to the ideals of a Presbyterian masculinity. An analysis of these texts, in addition to interviews, reveals different layers of his subjectivity and sense of self as a male elder (Miescher 2005, 2006). My book historicizes personhood and subjectivity by exploring, in retrospect, reconstructions of stages in the life cycle in which men negotiated between competing forms of masculinity (Miescher 2005).

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Across colonial Africa, labor migration transformed what it meant to be man. For Shangaans migration moved the “process of learning a masculine identity” (Harries 1994: 158) from the rural areas of southern Mozambique to the industrial mines of South Africa’s Witwatersrand. Migration “remapped generational relation” (McKittrick 2002: 11), since junior men struggled with seniors about who was to control their wages. Men’s access to wage labor became the key to marriage and adulthood. In South Africa, where rural areas had been devastated by drought and rinderpest, Zulu men turned to migration to earn bridewealth. Upon returning, they often defied elders’ authority, violating local norms (Carton 2000). In southwestern Nigeria, steady paychecks changed gender identities among railwaymen. Yoruba women have a long history of economic independence from men. Married couples did not pool resources. Yet, railwaymen took on more domestic expenses like food and school fees. During labor disputes, they deployed the notion of the male breadwinner and demanded family allowances from employees and colonial officials (Lindsay 2003). Railwaymen and their wives were active agents in reformulating the precise meaning of the male breadwinner, either as one who supported his wife or as one who still counted on her earning. Men and women performed gender to achieve specific ends (Lindsay 2007). In  southeastern Nigeria, young men went to the Enugu Government Colliery to earn money for bridewealth. Once married, they used their wages to acquire titles in rural societies and become senior men. Colonial employers called miners “boys.” Challenging this infantilization, miners went on strike in 1937 and demanded family wages, improved housing, and no corporal punishment. Miners’ identities were complex. Perceived as big men in their villages, they fulfilled older conventions by marrying multiple wives and dispensing their income. Acting as modernizers, they contributed toward “development” by building schools and maternity homes (Brown 2003a, 2003b). In South Africa’s migrant labor economy, masculinity and violence were closely connected (Morrell 1998b). In late nineteenth‐century Natal, violence was prevalent among Indian indentured laborers toiling in the sugar plantations and living in single‐sex compounds. Those who married brought labor compound violence into their domestic lives, which were further complicated by sharing crowded quarters with unmarried men. Denied entry into settler society, Indian men developed an “indentured masculinity,” which reflected their harsh conditions and the violence they lived under (Vahed 2005). In the male environment of the Witwatersrand gold mines, violence was ubiquitous. Black and white miners shared a notion of masculinity that celebrated physical strength and courage. Different sports – rugby for white Afrikaners, stick fighting for blacks from the Transkei  –  served as sites of male socialization (Morrell 1998b; Mager 1998). Interpersonal, often violent, conflicts dominated the miners’ lives. White supervisors used beatings of African subordinates to maintain the racial hierarchy. Black miners considered the lack of respect for their own seniority emasculating and humiliating. One of them told the 1913 Crown Mines Commission, “We are not children, we are men” (Breckenridge 1998: 682).



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Urban gangs Scholars have looked at the intersection of urban gangs and masculinities in different settings across twentieth‐century Africa. Violence, especially sexual violence toward women, is a recurring theme in these works, which draw on extensive oral and archival research. An early example is Clive Glaser’s studies (1992, 2000) on the masculine identity of tsotsis, a male subculture with its own language on South Africa’s Witwatersrand during the 1940s and 1950s. Tsotsis were second‐generation permanently urbanized youths who had minimal connections to the countryside. Their parents had grown up within the rural age‐grade system that permitted adolescent boys to explore their sexuality and to assert their independence, while still reinforcing generational hierarchies. In the urban setting, this generational hierarchy broke down; the gang replaced the age cohort without elder supervision. There were some continuities between city and countryside: boys were expected to be independent and competent fighters outside the household, while girls stayed close to home, acquiring domestic skills. Tsotsis needed money to attract women and for their conspicuous consumption. Since they despised wage labor, the centerpiece of a respectable urban black masculinity, tsotsis resorted to criminal activities like stealing and gambling. Inspired by American gangster movies, they developed their own clothing style which featured tight‐fitting zoot trousers along with floppy overcoats, wide‐brimmed hats, and flashy ties. Tsotsis regarded women as their property. They selected their girlfriends and used them as “ornaments and showpieces” to display their masculinity and enhance their prestige (Glaser 1992: 56). They subjected township women to astonishing levels of sexual violence. In this gang culture, male power and control were “underpinned by rape and the threat of rape” (Glaser 2000: 4). Tsotsi violence was not only directed toward women; rival gangs and victims of robberies became targets of violent attacks. Tsotsis, as well as the Soweto gangs of the 1960s and 1970s, were expressions of a “young urban masculinity” (Glaser 2000: 4). Migrants to the Witwatersrand formed gangs that were ethnically based; they included youth and adults. Male Basutho migrants working in the mines founded the Marashea gangs (“Russians”) in 1947 (Kynoch 2001, 2005). Since the apartheid state lacked resources to control urban areas designated for black settlements, gangs filled this void. Two rival Marashea factions, Matsieng and Matsekha, became notorious for their collective violence. They fought with each other, with other ethnically organized groups, with tsotsis, and with the police. The support of mine workers was crucial. Basutho men joined the gangs for physical security and access to women who provided beer, sex, and dancing. Many Basutho women did not join voluntarily; they were kidnapped or had to accept membership through boyfriends. Unattached females, exploited as an economic resource, faced sexual violence and were forced into prostitution but received protection. Marashea paid the fines of women arrested for illegal beer brewing. Members

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could not leave unless they were old or returned to Lesotho. Marashea formed a male‐dominated society with strict rules and a martial character. Sesotho culture, language, and dress was key to Marashea identity. Marashea masculinity, similar to that of the tsotsis, celebrated “fighting prowess and the domination of women” (Kynoch 2005: 43). Secondary masculine ideals included miners’ pride in the “arduous and demanding nature of work underground” (Kynoch 2001: 260). Rural practices like the authority of elders and respect for custom, what Morrell (1998b) calls “African masculinity,” resonated with the Marashea too. A recent book sheds light on masculinity, youth, and violence in the townships of Kinshasa during the 1950s and 1960s. Didier Gondola (2016) explores the emergence of “tropical cowboys,” male urban youth who fashioned themselves after the popular figure of Buffalo Bill Cody and appropriated the North American Wild West: imagery as mediated by the Hollywood western, originally introduced by missionaries. Youth who embraced the “cult of the cowboy” emerged in other colonial cities too (Burton 2001). In Kinshasa, the gangs of Bills developed their own subculture and argot. Seeking to make a living in an oppressive milieu, they engaged in a quest for manhood (in the sense of becoming a man) through daring acts, body building, marijuana smoking, magical protection, and sexual violence, like abducting women for the purpose of rape. Bills struggled over streets, names, and girls. Gondola examines how a certain representation of the North American West engendered among Kinshasa’s youth a notion of masculinity based on the construction of a new “vernacular violence.” The marginalization of large segments of youth forged a “culture of liminality” and “interstices created by colonial neglect,” which became the background for the formation of this new type of Yankee masculinity (Gondola 2016: 3). Urban youth drew on precolonial discursive practices and notions of masculinity that included the proverbial big man (reformulated as Grand Bill), oratory skills, and exclusive access to mystical powers. They reacted against Belgian colonialism, which had emasculated and infantilized African men. Bills engaged with and challenged the missionary project that had brought new ways of marking the transition from boyhood to manhood through evangelization, education, training, and labor. Bills, Gondola suggests, created a performative style and survival strategies with a lasting impact. Kinshasa’s contemporary youth gangs, which have emerged since Mobutu’s fall, can be seen as successors of the Bills. Gondola’s theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich book shows how historical work on African masculinities has come of age.

The gendered elder state In her pioneering work on twentieth‐century Kenya, Lynn Thomas (2003) looked at the state’s gendered concerns in regard to female bodies and reproductive practices, including genital cutting, abortion, pregnancy, and birthing. Expanding the temporal frame, Emily Osborn (2011) has explored the household as the



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center for a gendered state formation in Kankan‐Baté in the West African savanna from the period of the slave trade to French colonial rule. Building on these works, Paul Ocobock (2017) focuses on the intersection between statecraft and male gender to tell two interrelated stories: boys becoming men and the state coming of age. British officials deployed their authority by drawing on local practices of age and masculinity – a process Ocobock calls the “elder state” (2017: 4). In Kenyan societies, male initiation, marked by circumcision, indicated the transition from childhood to adulthood. During seclusion and healing, male initiates received instruction and socialization. Leaving seclusion, they remained in an interstitial phase: they became warriors. Eventually these young men formed a new age group and reached adulthood. Missionaries and colonial ethnographers noted the power African elders wielded over young men. Once colonial officials understood the initiation process, they sought to alter it. In partnership with African chiefs and elders, they manipulated initiation so as to discipline young men and push them into wage labor. They tried to change the initiation frequency, to lower the circumcision age, to shorten seclusion, and to restrict warriors’ activities. Missionaries offered an alternative form of male initiation that medicalized circumcision and replaced instructions about customary practices with catechism, literacy, and vocational training. While missionaries, at times with state support, sought to outlaw girls’ initiation (Thomas 2003), they performed male initiation at their stations. The state’s engagement with initiation went beyond circumcision. Through a joint effort by colonial officials and African elders, initiation was shortened in the Rift Valley to guarantee a flow of wage laborers to settler estates and mines. Earlier initiation brought challenges. Younger initiates claimed the rights of adult masculinity: having sex, drinking alcohol, leaving home, getting married, owning land, and accumulating livestock. These changes made fathers and elders anxious: male youth might not only leave villages for wage labor but neglect their family responsibilities (Mutongi 2007). Such manipulations of initiation, Ocobock (2017) argues, became crucial for the elder state to assert itself. The British in Kenya, unlike the French in West Africa (Osborn 2011), recognized the power of gender – making men and women – to make the state.

Development During the postwar period, British and French colonial governments intensified their development initiatives to legitimize their empires in Africa and rebuild their metropolitan economies. Such development interventions were gendered. Looking at development discourses, practices, and lived experiences among the Maasai in Tanzania since the 1930s, Dorothy Hodgson has tracked how being Maasai became a masculine category. For British officials, “‘real’ Maasai were pastoralists, warriors, and nomads, all of which were perceived as male pursuits” (Hodgson 2001: 14). Since only men were “real” Maasai, development policies

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were geared toward them. Until the 1950s, British officials had been reluctant to introduce development measures that would change Maasai culture and their pastoralist status. This led to the Maasai’s isolation in a separate reserve, shielding them from wage labor and European‐style education. A shift happened in the early 1950s. The colonial government launched the Maasai Development Project, which sought to modernize their economy by building water supplies, clearing bush infested with tsetse fly, and experimenting with grazing controls and fodder production (Hodgson 2001: 102). Targeting men as cattle experts, the project encouraged them to sell their animals for cash. These policies had gendered implications; they “reinforced the rights of men as individual owners of cattle and heads of household, thereby disenfranchising women from their formerly shared rights over cattle” (Hodgson 2003: 217). Development initiatives seeking to “improve” African agriculture had a gendered dimension too. In Zambia’s Northern Province, British officials ­ ­promoted the “progressive farmer.” This male figure implied a “rejection of ‘backward’ citemene [slash‐and‐burn] method of cultivation, and commitment to full‐time, settled agriculture” (Moore and Vaughan 1994: 115). Moreover, it entailed the assumption of a certain lifestyle. A progressive farmer would separate himself from his larger kin network, build a brick house, educate his children, and have a wife eager to learn about domesticity. A progressive farmer would be “modern without being too urbanized” (Moore and Vaughan 1994: 115). Progressive farmers, however, had their own ideas of what to do with the colonial state’s financial and technical assistance. On the other side of the continent, the French also had grand plans of how to shape West African men into suitable agricultural workers. The largest agricultural development project was the Office du Niger, launched by the French in the Sudan during the 1930s and continued by the Malian postcolonial government. African forced labor built the office. French colonial technocrats sought to turn these men, who frequently felt like slaves, into modern farmers. The postwar era brought the abolition of forced labor and a shift to mechanization which created African wage laborers. Laura Ann Twagira (2014) examines a gendered technological culture that bridged the colonial and the postcolonial period at the Office du Niger. She distinguishes between smallholder farmers and cosmopolitan workers. Drawing on oral research, she shows how African wage laborers, as technological agents, shaped their own engagements with modern agricultural technology. The two forms of male work related to what it meant to be a male farmer and what it meant to be a man working with technology. The men who operated industrial machines claimed esoteric technological knowledge that resembled the secrets of the Mande blacksmith. Administrators, farmers, and workers agreed that the Office was linked with masculinity and technology. Yet, they disagreed about what type of men. Twagira’s focus on technology is one of the innovative fields within African historiography (see Hecht 2012; Mavhunga 2014).



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Postcolonial interventions and anxieties Since the mid‐2000s, as historians have turned to postindependence Africa (Cooper 2008), works on masculinities, often embracing a transnational frame, have dealt with the era of modernization and nation building (see Bloom, Manuh, and Miescher 2014). Establishing the new nation of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah pursued a gendered agenda. His vision of an “African personality,” a set of tenets that was modern and that predated colonial rule, promoted “‘new’ men and women” (Plageman 2014: 248). Ghana’s “new man” was a loyal citizen, dedicated to the country’s prosperity, to moral standards, and to women and children. He pursued education, refrained from adultery and violence, and was committed to Ghana’s cultural virtues. Shunning laziness, he was infused with the “spirit to work hard and learn fast,” as Nkrumah noted, and would contribute to the nation’s well‐ being (Plageman 2014: 248). Ghana’s Workers’ Brigade became a privileged site for creating such new men and women. The brigade, seeking to reform an urban youth that was considered soft, advocated setting up rural work camps where its members engaged in mechanized farming (Ahlman 2012). Young men received academic and vocational training and learned technical skills like operating tractors. The brigade embraced an aspect of female masculinity. A few of its female members broke out of the conventional gendered division of labor and performed masculine activities such as construction work and tractor driving. When Jeffrey Ahlman asked his interview partners about the brigade, many emphasized the “masculinization of women’s work” (2012: 98). The Ghanaian state celebrated female brigade members performing masculine tasks as evidence that women had the same opportunities in nation building as men. The brigade launched its own dance band, which symbolized government‐sponsored cultural modernization. Nkrumah’s cultural politics prioritized Ghanaian popular music like highlife over foreign genres like rock and roll, which was not always welcomed by musicians and audiences. The Ghana Arts Council tried to convince musicians and their audiences to follow the “African personality” mandate by embracing highlife, specific dance styles, and national dress (kente, fugu). The state press promoted musicians as role models for Ghana’s new man (Plageman 2013, 2014). Analyzing the local press, another cultural history explores debates over gender, generation, and wealth in Dar es Salaam during the 1960s. Looking at government campaigns against cosmopolitan dress styles like miniskirts, wigs, and bellbottoms, which were deplored as an expression of an urban decadence, Andrew Ivaska (2011: 117) identifies a “crisis of masculinity” among young urban men in Tanzania. Male youth appropriated official bans on indecent dress to take out their anger on fashionable “city girls,” secretaries, schoolgirls, and other independent women, who became targets of violence. Tanzania was not in isolated case. In Uganda, strongman Idi Amin, seeking to shore up his legitimacy, launched a campaign against women’s “indecent” dress which led to gender‐based

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violence (Decker 2014). The Tanzanian press criticized urban women for achieving social mobility through illicit ways, especially sex. Sexual politics at the University College, Dar es Salaam, echoed the gendered dynamics of the “anti‐mini” campaigns. Male students accused female students of preferring the company of wealthy “sugar daddies.” Generational tensions played out between elite big men  –  in local parlance ’nizers, those benefiting from the Africanization of government and business – and male students who considered themselves better educated but disadvantaged. The tabloid press, appealing to young working‐class men, printed “street stories” that circulated rumors about big men’s “sexual shenanigans” with city girls (Ivaska 2011: 200). While the latter were portrayed as sexual predators who sucked men dry and then faced violent consequences (like being stripped naked), the former cut an ambivalent figure. The “textual ’nizers,” though flaunting their wealth and power, still embodied a “compelling masculine model” owing to their command of material resources and a desirable lifestyle (Ivaska 2011: 203). Bachelors, writing to editors, criticized city girls’ access to salaried jobs while deploring the inflated bridewealth, which benefited elders and delayed their own marriage prospects.

Sexualities Earlier studies about African sexualities, long the domain of anthropologists, presented the sexual practices of Africans as other and distinct from that of Europeans (Arnfred 2004). Since the 1990s, partly in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, scholars have sought to historicize African sexualities and to decolonize their approaches (Epprecht 2009; Musisi 2014). Some works have been attentive to gender and masculinities, and have mined unusual sources like the “Dear Dolly” advice columns in Drum (Mutongi 2000). Rachel Jean‐Baptiste (2014) examines the discourses and practice of heterosexuality in colonial Libreville, a town founded by the French in Equatorial Africa in 1849. Unlike earlier work, which foregrounded the economic and power dimensions of marriage, Jean‐Baptiste is more attuned to sexual desire and love as units of analysis (see Cole and Thomas 2009). Drawing on colonial administrative sources, court records, and oral sources, she follows the conjugal and sexual lives of Libreville’s inhabitants and looks at processes of “urban becoming” (Jean‐Baptiste 2014: 6), and explores how men and women gave meaning to their urban lives. She unpacks how men “who settled without wives struggled to marry and build households,” thereby attaining adult masculinity (Jean‐Baptiste 2014: 11). Like Ivaska (2011), but for an earlier period, Jean‐Baptiste complicates the meanings of gender, generation, wealth, and culture in an African city. Being a man, she argues, “was not a normative act of biology but negotiated along a spectrum of marital status, and sexuality, access to wealth, ethnic differentiation, and generation.” Men in colonial Libreville were not a “unified category of historical actors in fixed categories,” like elders, chiefs, elite men, and young



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men (Jean‐Baptiste 2014: 221–222); rather, men’s and women’s recollections of sexual relations reveal how they organized and lived their sexuality within and outside marriage. This is not a story of men trying to control women but one of negotiation and compromise. Carina Ray (2015) investigates interracial sexual relationships between African women and European men in colonial Ghana, as well as between African men and European women in the metropole. In one instance, she makes important observations about the unequal access to white and black women’s bodies and contested masculinities. While African seamen’s relationships with white women in British seaports became the focus of race riots in 1919, British men in the Gold Coast sought the company of local women without taking responsibility for the outcomes of these relations. Responding to the race riots in Britain, the Gold Coast Leader published articles and letters that were highly critical of Europeans having local concubines. Commenting on this “white peril,” Gold Coast writers blamed European men for morally corrupting young African women. Not only did these critics turn the colonial civilizing discourse on its head, but Gold Coast men offered themselves “as the moral stewards of the nation and its women, in contradistinction to dissolute European men” (Ray 2015: 204–205). By questioning the moral superiority of British imperial masculinity, they challenged the colonial project and presented a nationalist alternative. Similarly, contestations over interracial sex in interwar Gabon revealed gendered tensions, debates about women’s respectability, and the cracks in French colonial rule (Jean‐Baptiste 2014). By the postwar period, the interracial marriages of nationalist politicians like Joe Appiah of Ghana, Eduardo Mondlane of Mozambique, Leopold Senghor of Senegal, Agostinho Neto of Angola, and Seretse Khama of Botswana were not only causing sensation and controversy, particularly in the settler colonies of southern Africa, but were introducing a new generation of African leaders – men who challenged the racialized colonial order by loving and marrying across the color line (Ray 2015). There is a fast‐growing scholarship on the meanings and politics of same‐sex practices in sub‐Saharan Africa (Gevisser and Cameron 1994; Morgan and Wieringa 2005; Nyeck and Epprecht 2013). While most of these studies focus on the contemporary period (but see Epprecht 2004), there is an awareness of historical change, an attention to gender, and a commitment to challenge the notion of “heterosexual Africa” (Epprecht 2008; Gaudio 2014). Earlier work (Moodie 1988, 1994; Harries 1990, 1994) on the “mine marriages” in South Africa’s Witwatersrand, where migrant miners engaged the sexual and domestic services of junior men as their “wives,” has been challenged. Dunbar Moodie (1988, 1994), who interpreted these mine marriages as resistance to proletarianization and urbanization, was not interested in whether miners actually preferred same‐ sex relations and thus embraced a nonstandard masculinity. Other labor historians dismissed same‐sex relations in South African mines and prisons as a product of or response to the oppressive capitalist migrant labor system (van Onselen 1984;

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Breckenridge 1990). Such interpretations neglected the “production and history of desire” (Achmat 1993: 95). Revisiting the evidence about mine marriages, Marc Epprecht (2004) has been more attentive to gendered subjectivities. In colonial Kenya, country boys, particularly prior to initiation, were well versed in sexual play with each other. They took these experiences with them to the all‐male reformatories, established for delinquent youth. At reform schools, sexual relationships brought pleasure and companionship in what was otherwise a harsh environment; they were organized on the basis of age and involved a sexual economy. Older boys, deploying their authority, not only initiated sex but claimed a right over juniors’ bodies. Boys who were hungry exchanged sex for food. When a boy gained weight, others suspected that he was offering sex (Ocobock 2017). The arrival of European and North America sexual categories like gay and lesbian, as well as a global human rights discourse, had an impact on African sexualities (Nyeck and Epprecht 2013). Foregrounding the story of gay activist Linda Ngcobo, Donald Donham (1998) notes how a transnational flow of concepts led to the re‐reconceptualization of male–male sexuality in South Africa. When Linda grew up in 1960s Soweto, he thought of himself as a girl and was treated as such by his parents. The following decade, a network of boys who dressed as girls had emerged in Soweto. They took the passive role in sex with male migrants. By the 1990s, the situation had changed with the founding of gay rights organizations and the inclusion of sexual orientation into the nondiscrimination policies championed by the African National Congress. Men in same‐sex relations increasingly adopted the label “gay,” leading to the formation of new masculinities. Linda, who embraced a gay identity and a new sense of gender, noted: “Before, I thought I was a woman. Now I think I’m a man” (Donham 1998: 13). In regard to black “gays” living in small towns and rural areas across contemporary South Africa, Graeme Reid (2013) suggests that they combine elements of a global identity with local ideas around gender and sexuality. In male same‐sex relations, Zulus maintain a gendered distinction between a masculine iqenge and his feminine partner, iskihesana. This gender binary is central to the organization of gay life in Zulu communities. In northern Nigerian cities, ‘yan daudu, men who act like women, occupy a liminal space, which they share with prostitutes and bori practitioners (Hausa spirit possession) (Gaudio 2009). ‘Yan daudu had sex with more masculine men, some of whom were married and belonged to respectable Muslim society. Since the 1990s, when Rudolf Gaudio conducted his ethnographic research, the situation for ‘yan daudu has been transformed. The introduction of sharia (Islamic law), as well as public responses to a global LGBT human rights discourse, has led to the closing of spaces where ‘yan daudu used to gather, to increased sexual violence, and to additional marginalization (Gaudio 2009). Such controversies around a global LGBT rights discourse, like the anti‐mini campaigns, are the latest attempt at rejecting foreign gender norms, an opposition framed in moral terms which protects “traditional” African values and rejects Western imperialism (Broqua and Doquet 2013b).



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Conclusion This chapter has tracked the emergence of historical studies on masculinities in Africa by foregrounding a variety of topics: conceptual issues, a flexible African gender system, African big men, the remaking of men under colonialism, urban gangs, the gendered elder state, development, postcolonial interventions and anxieties, and sexualities. Other themes such as violence, race, bodies, age and generation, and economic status have also been dealt with throughout the chapter. Still, the list of themes and works discussed here are far from complete. Missing are more detailed elaborations on masculinities within warfare (Iliffe 2005; R. Reid 2012) and on gun technology (Macola 2016), masculinities and leisure (Fair 2001), as well as a more in‐depth discussion of masculinities in relation to commodities, consumption, and business practices (Burke 1996), which has recently been analyzed in a study on beer, male sociability, and corporate culture in South Africa since the 1960s (Mager 2010). Another body of scholarship that deserves further attention includes studies about anticolonial struggle, nationalism, and politics. For a long time men, and by extension masculinities, were the implicit focus of resistance studies and nationalist historiography. Feminist historians documented the contribution of women to African resistance – most famously the Aba Women’s War of 1929 (Van Allen 1976; Mba 1982) – and addressed how African nationalism was gendered (Geiger 1997). Women who played an active role in the anticolonial struggle of Guinea had to act like men (Schmidt 2002). An insightful analysis unpacks how Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa were sexist and supportive of women’s participation. Men’s experience – their emasculation by the apartheid regime – was normative. Men who spoke for the black community had to regain their lost manhood through struggle (Magaziner 2011). Women’s place in the movement was either to become “one of the boys,” as Mamphela Ramphele noted (Magaziner 2011: 48), or to take on the role of the African mother. Thembisa Waetjen (2004) looked at discourses on masculinity and nationalism in South Africa’s Inkatha Freedom Party. Its leader, Chief Buthelezi, evoked the figures of the Zulu migrant worker acting as breadwinner and father and of the Zulu warrior remaining loyal to king and “tradition.” Buthelezi’s nation‐building discourse constructed the identities of worker and warrior as “essential aspects of Zulu masculinity.” Ethnic nationalism would not increase ordinary men’s power but rather would prepare them to accept subjugation under the modern nation‐state, while presenting this “order as a new manifestation of an older, traditional way of life” (Waetjen 2004: 92). More work lies ahead for historians interested in exploring African masculinities. There is a new intellectual history that addresses topics like pan‐Africanism (Allman 2013; Ahlman 2017), West African intellectuals (Newell 2013) and Islamic leaders (Babou 2007), Qur’anic learning (Ware 2014), and East African racial thought (Glassman 2011). Such a revitalization of intellectual history raises

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questions about masculinity, though they are, as Nancy Hunt (2014: 339) notes, “rarely acknowledged as such” (but see Magaziner 2011). This new intellectual history would be enriched by questions raised within recent gender scholarship on “the affective” – works on love, friendship, and intimacies (Hunt 2014: 344). I remain curious as to how gender and masculinities could inform future studies that look at the longue durée in African history: by exploring continuities like big men, cultural heroes, and charismatic leaders and by examining more deeply the implications of a flexible gender system. We still have insufficient knowledge of how precolonial African societies constructed and practiced masculinities and of how African men and women lived with and performed such gendered ideals. Revisiting oral source collections like the oral traditions about the Rwandan Nyiginya kingdom compiled in the 1950s (see Watkins 2014), mining archival holdings in languages other than English (at the Vatican, in Portugal, in Arabic text libraries), and deploying the tools of historical linguistics (De Luna 2012) would be great starting points. In regard to nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Africa, unearthing “tin‐trunk literacies” of ordinary Africans (Barber 2006), their personal letters, diaries, and other autobiographical writings; reading neglected print sources in African and colonial languages (Muoria‐Sal et al. 2009; Barber 2012; Glassman 2011; Newell 2013); and exploring oral archives of African songs (Chikowero 2015) promise to open up numerous avenues that offer rich insight into the discourse, practices, and experiences of masculinities.

Note 1 Two collections on South Africa mainly look at the constructions and expressions of masculinities since the end of apartheid (G. Reid and Walker 2005; Shefer et al. 2007). Contributors to Uchendu’s (2008a) volume call for critical studies of men (Ratele), unpack forms of violence in Kenya (Kabaji; Onyango), investigate men’s religious and sexual socialization in Morocco and Togo (Dialmy; Koudolo), and examine political masculinity in postcolonial Africa (Mouiche).

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Geoffrion, Karin. 2013. “‘I Wish Our Gender Could Be Dual’: Male Femininities in Ghanaian University Students.” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 53 (209–210): 417–443. Gevisser, Mark, and Edwin Cameron, eds. 1994. Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Glaser, Clive. 1992. “The Mark of Zoro: Sexuality and Gender Relations in the Tsotsi Subculture on the Witwatersrand.” African Studies 51(1): 47–67. Glaser, Clive. 2000. Bo‐Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935–1976. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Glassman, Jonathon. 2011. War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gondola, Ch. Didier. 2016. Tropical Cowboys: Westerns, Violence, and Masculinity in Kinshasa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Harries, Patrick. 1990. “Symbols and Sexuality: Culture and Identity on the Early Witwatersrand Gold Mines.” Gender & History 2(3): 318–336. Harries, Patrick. 1994. Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Labors in Mozambique and South Africa, c.1960–1910. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Hecht, Gabrielle. 2012. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Urban Uranium Trade. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hodgson, Dorothy L. 2001. Once Intrepid Warriors: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Cultural Politics of Maasai Development. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hodgson, Dorothy L. 2003. “Being Maasai Men: Modernity and the Production of Maasai Masculinities.” In Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, edited by Lisa A. Lindsay and Stephan F. Miescher, 211–229. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Hunt, Nancy Rose. 1999. A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hunt, Nancy Rose. 2014. “The Affective, the Intellectual, and Gender History.” Journal of African History 55(3): 331–345. Iliffe, John. 1995. Africans: History of a Continent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iliffe, John. 2005. Honour in African History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ivaska, Andrew. 2011. Cultured States: Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar es Salaam. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jean‐Baptiste, Rachel. 2014. Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon. Athens: Ohio University Press. Kynoch, Gary. 2001. “‘A Man among Men’: Gender, Identity, and Power in South Africa’s Marashea Gangs.” Gender & History 13(2): 248–272. Kynoch, Gary. 2005. We Are Fighting the World: A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947–1999. Athens: Ohio University Press. Lindsay, Lisa A. 2003. Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southeastern Nigeria. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Lindsay, Lisa A. 2007. “Working with Gender: The Emergence of the ‘Male Breadwinner’ in Colonial Southwestern Nigeria.” In Africa After Gender?, edited by Catherine M. Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Stephan F. Miescher, 241–252. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lindsay, Lisa A., and Stephan F. Miescher, eds. 2003. Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

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Macola, Giacomo. 2016. The Gun in Central Africa: A History of Technology and Politics. Athens: Ohio University Press. Magaziner, Daniel R. 2011. “Pieces of a (Wo)man: Feminism, Gender and Adulthood in Black Consciousness, 1968–1977.” Journal of Southern African Studies 37(1): 45–61. Mager, Anne. 1998. “Youth Organizations and the Construction of Masculine Identities in the Ciskei and Transkei, 1945–1960.” Journal of Southern Africa Studies 24(4): 633–667. Mager, Anne Kelk. 2010. Beer, Sociability, and Masculinity in South Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mavhunga, Clapperton Chakanetsa. 2014. Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mba, Nina Emma. 1982. Nigerian Women Mobilized: Women’s Political Activity in Southern Nigeria, 1900–1965. Berkeley: Institute of International Studies. Mbah, Leonard Ndubueze. 2013. “Emergent Masculinities: The Gendered Struggle for Power in Southeastern Nigeria, 1850–1920.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Michigan State University. Mbah, Ndubueze L. 2015. “Matriliny, Masculinity, Contested Gendered Definitions of Ethnic Identity and Power in Nineteenth‐Century Southeastern Nigeria.” In Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives, edited by Jan Bender Shelter, 233–264. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. McCaskie, Thomas. C. 1995. State and Society in Pre‐colonial Asante. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McKittrick, Meredith. 2002. To Dwell Secure: Generation, Christianity, and Colonialism in Ovamboland. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. McKittrick, Meredith. 2003. “Forsaking Their Fathers? Colonialism, Christianity, and Coming of Age in Ovamboland, Northern Namibia.” In Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, edited by Lisa A. Lindsay and Stephan F. Miescher, 33–51. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Miescher, Stephan F. 2005. Making Men in Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Miescher, Stephan F. 2006. “‘My Own Life’: A. K. Boakye Yiadom’s Autobiography – The Writing and Subjectivity of a Ghanaian Teacher‐Catechist.” In Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self, edited by Karin Barber, 27–51. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Miescher, Stephan F. 2009. “Masculinities and Transcultural Perspectives in African History.” In Gender in Trans‐it: Transcultural and Transnational Perspectives, edited by Martina Ineichen et al., 69–83. Zurich: Chronos. Miescher, Stephan F. 2015. “‘Called to Work for the Kingdom of God’: The Challenges of Presbyterian Masculinity in Ghana.” In Bildung  –  Selbst(Bild)  –  Geschlechterbilder, edited by Kerstin Bueschges, 219–247. Münster: LIT Verlag. Miescher, Stephan F., and Lisa A. Lindsay. 2003. “Introduction: Men and Masculinities in Modern African History.” In Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, edited by Lisa A. Lindsay and Stephan F. Miescher, 1–29. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Miller, Joseph C. 1988. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Moodie, Dunbar, with Vivienne Ndatshe and British Sibuyi. 1988. “Migrancy and Male Sexuality in South African Gold Mines.” Journal of Southern African Studies 14(1): 228–256.



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Moodie, Dunbar, with Vivienne Ndatshe. 1994. Going for Gold: Men, Mines and Migration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Moore, Henrietta L., and Megan Vaughan. 1994. Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890–1990. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Morgan, Ruth, and Saskia Wieringa, eds. 2005. Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men and Ancestral Wives: Female Same‐Sex Practices in Africa. Johannesburg: Jacana. Morrell, Robert, ed. 1998a. “Masculinities in Southern Africa.” Special issue, Journal of Southern African Studies 24(4). Morrell, Robert. 1998b. “Of Boys and Men: Masculinity and Gender in Southern African Studies.” Journal of Southern African Studies 24(4): 605–630. Morrell, Robert, ed. 2001a. Changing Men in Southern Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Morrell, Robert. 2001b. From Boys to Men: Settler Masculinity in Colonial Natal, 1880–1920. Pretoria: Unisa Press. Morrell, Robert, Rachel Jewkes, and Graham Lindegger. 2012. “Hegemonic Masculinity/ Masculinities in South Africa: Culture, Power, and Gender Politics.” Men and Masculinities 15(1): 11–30. Muoria‐Sal, Wangari, Bodil Folke Frederiksen, John Lonsdale, and Derek Peterson. 2009. Writing for Kenya: The Life and Works of Henry Muoria. Leiden: Brill. Musisi, Nakanyike. 2014. “Gender and Sexuality in African History: A Personal Reflection.” Journal of African History 55(3): 305–315. Mutongi, Kenda. 2000. “‘Dear Dolly’s’ Advice: Representations of Youth, Courtship, and Sexualities in Africa, 1960–1980.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 33(1): 1–23. Mutongi, Kenda. 2007. Worries of the Heart: Widows, Families, and Community in Kenya. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Newell, Stephanie. 2013. The Name to Power: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press. Nyeck, S. N., and Marc Epprecht, eds. 2013. Sexual Diversity in Africa: Politics, Theory, Citizenship. Montreal: McGill‐Queen’s University Press. Ocobock, Paul. 2017. An Uncertain Age: The Politics of Manhood in Kenya. Athens: Ohio University Press. Osborn, Emily Lynn. 2011. Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule. Athens: Ohio University Press. Ouzgane, Lahoucine, and Robert Morrell, eds. 2005. African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Plageman, Nate. 2013. Highlife Saturday Night: Popular Music and Social Change in Urban Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Plageman, Nate. 2014. “The African Personality Dances Highlife: Popular Music, Urban Youth, and Cultural Modernization in Nkrumah’s Ghana, 1957–1965.” In Modernization as Spectacle in Africa, edited by Peter J. Bloom, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Stephan F. Miescher, 244–267. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ratele, Kopano. 2011. “Male Sexualities and Masculinities.” In African Sexualities: A Reader, edited by Sylvia Tamale, 399–419. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press.

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Ray, Carina E. 2015. Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana. Athens: Ohio University Press. Reid, Graeme. 2013. How To Be Real Gay: Gay Identities in Small‐Town South Africa. Durban: University of KwaZulu‐Natal Press. Reid, Graeme, and Liz Walker, eds. 2005. Men Behaving Differently: South African Men Since 1994. Cape Town: Double Storey Books. Reid, Richard. 2012. Warfare in African History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmidt, Elizabeth. 2002. “‘Emancipate Your Husbands!’ Women and Nationalism in Guinea, 1953–1958.” In Women in African Colonial Histories, edited by Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakayinke Musisi, 305–326. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Shefer, T., K. Ratele, A. Strebel, N. Shabalala, and R. Buikema, eds. 2007. From Boys to Men: Social Constructions of Masculinity in Contemporary Society. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. Summers, Carol. 2002. Colonial Lessons: Africans’ Education in Southern Rhodesia, 1883–1940. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Thomas, Lynn M. 2003. The Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Twentieth‐Century Kenya. Berkeley: University of California Press. Twagira, Laura Ann. 2014. “‘Robot Farmers’ and Cosmopolitan Workers: Technological Masculinity and Agricultural Development in the French Soudan (Mali).” Gender & History 26(3): 459–477. Uchendu, Egodi, ed. 2008a. Masculinities in Contemporary Africa. Dakar: CODESRIA. Uchendu, Egodi. 2008b. “Introduction: Are African Males Men? Sketching African Masculinities.” In Masculinities in Contemporary Africa, edited by Egodi Uchendu, 1–17. Dakar: CODESRIA Vahed, Golam. 2005. “Indentured Masculinity in Colonial Natal, 1860–1910.” In African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present, edited by Lahoucine Ouzgane and Robert Morrell, 239–256. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Van Allen, Judith. 1976. “‘Aba Riots’ or Igbo ‘Women’s War’? Ideology, Stratification, and the Invisibility of Women.” In Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change, edited by Nancy Hafkin and Edna Bay, 59–85. Stanford: Stanford University Press. van Onselen, Charles. 1984. The Small Matter of a Horse: The Life of “Nongoloza” Mathebula, 1867–1948. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Waetjen, Thembisa. 2004. Workers and Warriors: Masculinity and the Struggle for Nation in South Africa. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ware, Rudolph T. III. 2014. Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Watkins, Sarah. 2014. “Iron Mothers and Warrior Lovers: Intimacy, Power, and the State in the Nyiginya Kingdom, 1796–1913.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara. White, Bob W. 2008. Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance Music in Mobutu’s Zaire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. White, Luise. 1990. “Separating the Men from the Boys: Constructions of Gender, Sexuality, and Terrorism in Central Kenya, 1939–1959.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 23(1): 1–25. Wilks, Ivor. 1993. Forests of Gold: Essays on the Akan and the Kingdom of Asante. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Chapter Four

Colonialism, Christianity, and Personhood Nimi Wariboko

The crucial impact of colonialism and Christianity on African personhood is a double one. It is a received (precolonial) being‐with and a modernist (European capitalist) consciousness: “two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (Du Bois 1989: 5). The dialectic of African personhood oscillates between subjectivity fashioned by an African sense of communion and individualistic orientation, being African yet feeling Western, and yearning for native Africanness but grasping at alien European cosmopolitanism. Africans labor under the weight of a crisis of personhood, self‐identity, and a split self that is a legacy of Christianity and colonialism. When Christianity and colonialism arrived in Africa, Africans already had their own well‐rounded personhood, but they worked against this to refashion it. A notion of relational personhood was central to life in African community long before the intrusion of Christian missionaries and colonialism. The affirmation of a person as being‐with, being in communion with others, was not just important in relation to infrastructure nor was it just necessary to the good life: it was the very center of a flourishing life. This personhood  –  one that is central to the production and reproduction of life – was framed in terms of a vision of meaningful order in the cosmos. To act reasonably toward the good life was to act in accordance with this meaningful order. Under the dual influence of colonialism and Christianity, African personhood was something to be refashioned by altering the A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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traditional worldview and social imaginary. Christianity and colonialism also altered African patterns of consumption, modes of exchange, and the cultivation of land; they shaped desires, created a taste for European attire, and worked to develop disciplined bodies and pious hearts for Western ideals. The new personhood was to come largely through a total transformation of everyday life. The idea that personhood could be (re)constructed through the physicality of everyday life was something that was taken seriously by both missionaries and colonialists. For them, rejiggered African personhood would construct subjects and subjectivity as fitting signifiers of an internal acceptance of God and empire (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997: 218–220). For centuries Christianity and colonialism squeezed Africans on every side, trying to make them subjects of God and empire. Both empires – the empire of the spirit and the empire of the European powers – attempted to claim Africans for themselves. And this squeezing forced Africans to fight against both in order to forge a new African personhood. Their battle was and still is a triple struggle, with three antagonists: one (being‐with) presses them from origins, another (Christianity) blocks their path toward the benefits of the past, and the third (European modernist) supports the second in blocking the road but drives them onto an entirely different path, to the place of split identity. These struggles and encounters contribute to the formation of African personhood in the twenty‐first century as an other within. This chapter is a study of the encounters between African personhood and missionary Christianity and colonialism. Encounter is the ur‐theme of personhood: a person becomes a person in their encounters with other persons in  their community (Tillich 1954: 78). In the community that was created in the “long conversation” and confrontation between Africans and Europeans (as missionaries and colonial administrators), between tradition and “civilization,” between domination and resistance, encounters occurred in multiple registers and in the intimacies of everyday African life. What kind of African personhood was forged or perceived by the African and European actors in the dialectics of the encounters? I shall seek the answers to this question through three lenses. First, I shall provide an analysis of the “weight of blackness” as borne by Africans during colonialism and the colonial Christian mission. This involves an examination of some of the linkages between race, colonialism, Christianity, and African selfhood (basic humanity). Scholars such as Waibinte Wariboko adopt this approach to explain the impact of colonialism and Christianity on African personhood. He draws his examples principally from the Church Missionary Society (CMS) mission in West Africa. His overall conclusion is that the encounter led to the degradation of the worth of the African self (W. Wariboko 2011). Second, I shall offer a brief study of the formation of African subjects of God and empire founded on “rationalistic” competitive individualism. The work of John and Jean Comaroff is exemplary in this regard. The Comaroffs argue that



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African personhood as it emerged in Tswana, South Africa, during the colonial era, was a working out of British personhood on African soil over a span of a “long conversation” focused on the black body in everyday practices (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997). Finally, I shall examine the philosophical basis of the traditional African notion of personhood (a form of being‐with or relationality), and use it to interrogate the impact of Africa’s encounter with Christianity and colonialism on African personhood. The object is to understand how precolonial African personhood shapes the postcolonial Christian world after enduring the weight of blackness under colonialism and after passing through the dogged efforts of colonial mission to make it Western.

Christianity, colonialism, and the weight of blackness My goal here is to present a portrait of African personhood during the colonial mission (that is, the work of European sociopolitical, economic, and religious subjugations of Africans in the era of colonialism) as a weight of blackness that Africans had to endure. During the period of colonialism and missionary Christianity the encounters between Africans and whites were characterized by unrelenting aesthetic and racial judgments that portrayed black skin as debased. Christianity and colonialism “positioned Christian [and modern identities] fully within European (white) identity and fully outside the identity of [Africans]” (Jennings 2010: 33; parentheses original). Africans could forge their identities only as they bore the enormous weight of their skin color. The weight of blackness is the burden of socially imposed sufferings on Africans, the sense of the weight of race made palpable by the intensification of suffering imposed by the external forces of racialized colonial power and colonial mission. We should pay particular attention to how the heavy weight of blackness affected Africans’ sense of self and how Europeans displayed black personhood disrespectfully across many registers of interracial social interactions. It appears that under colonialism and missionary Christianity almost all black–white encounters were forced to bear the load of race and racism. For example, the weight was felt in sacred Christian spaces, on black women’s pudenda, on black male bodies, and in the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic evaluation of blackness. One fateful Sunday in 1754 in South Africa, a 16‐year‐old slave named Jephta van de Caab, carrying his master’s coat and parasol, entered a church when whites were still in it and in doing so brushed against some white men, including the Lord Fiscal and other high government officials. Jephta was “punished exemplarily as a deterrent to other similar vile scoundrels” and was “severely scourged with rods on his bare back” (Vernal 2011: 14). He was punished, according to Fiona Vernal, because he had contravened a law, which demanded that slaves be particularly careful as to how they entered sacred Christian spaces: “On Sundays and holidays, the slaves are forbid [sic] to come into the church or porch at the

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end of the Divine Service or as the congregation are going out, or from making noise or committing any wantonness during church time, on pain of, if caught in the fact, being severely flogged.”1 The bodies of nonwhites like Jeptha were surveilled and forced to conform to certain comportments as demanded by social and physical boundaries between them and white bodies in colonial society. Nonwhites who transgressed the color boundaries were sometimes executed by being broken on the wheel or on a cross (gibbet). Colonialism or Christian mission was not only about organizing bodies, but was also about facilitating phallic power over the black women’s vaginas. In August 1727 a 32‐year‐old white knegt, Theunis Roelofsz van Christaainsand, raped a Khoikhoi woman named Crebis, drove an iron bolt into her vagina, put buttermilk into it, and murdered her son Casper, who tried to protect her honor. As a black woman in eighteenth‐century Cape Colony, South Africa, Crebis had little protection from abuse by white people. When the case went to trial, her rapist won, as the court accepted his account of the case, whereby he argued that he did not rape her, or violate her with an iron bolt, or put buttermilk into her vagina. The testimonies of two Asian slaves who witnessed the brutal rape and testified on her behalf did not count in this so‐called Christian society dominated by the Dutch (Penn 2014). Dutch colonialism and Reformed Church Christianity constituted a heavy weight on blacks during this period. The Christian colonialists, often working in cohort with the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost‐Indische Compagnie, or VOC) did not think much of the worth of Africans. In the trial, Roelofsz, a servant of VOC, drew on crude representations of Africans, especially African women, for his defense. He argued that he did not rape Crebis, but rather offered her an iron bolt and tobacco, and she chose tobacco. This was a subtle reference to the image of African women as lustful that he hoped would resonate with the European judge of the case. Well over a hundred years before this trial Europeans in South Africa propagated the view that Khoikhoi women would expose their pudenda to visitors for small gifts or that these African women possessed an abnormally long nymphae (labia minora) (Penn 2014: 14–15). They also portrayed African men as possessing unusually large and permanently erect penises. According to Nigel Penn, European travel literature of this time, when discussing the inhabitants of Africa, commonly attributed to Africans, in general, a promiscuous sexuality. African women, in particular, were portrayed as being sexually insatiable and immoral. As a number of authors have pointed out this deliberate denigration of Africans was not unconnected with attempts to justify the increasing enslavement of Africans by Europeans. The depiction of African women as being more sexually voracious than African men is partly explicable by the fact that writers of such descriptions, who were themselves males, saw women as being more “other” than men. (Penn 2014: 14–15)



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The violent penetration of the black Crebis by the white Roelofsz, with his fleshy phallus and the phallic iron bolt, and the descriptions of African sexuality with their foci on the black woman’s sexual organs, were aspects of racism and its discursive practice of representing Africa as a body to be penetrated at will by colonial forces. Such discourses and practices render the African body open, inviting the domination and intrusion of others or of powers (spirits). The discourse of Western imperial ventures in Africa emphasized connections between domination and the opening of the body, accenting Africa as an open feminine body being penetrated by masculine Western powers. As Anne Norton remarks, Colonies were established by the desire for and the penetration of other, the “opening up” of the body politic. The discourse of colonialism personified both empire and the colony (and imperialists and colonies) in terms of open and closed, masculine and feminine. The colonized were read as open, identified either as feminine or as open, penetrable, male bodies. (Norton 2002: 18–19)

To portray the African body as an open body (or one that surrenders totally to the powers that are beyond the self) is to set it against the grain of the Western conception of personhood, against the European understanding of sovereign, autonomous personhood. At the individual level, as argued by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, modernity understands sovereignty as closeness. The closed body (not subject to intrusions or violations by others) living in a closed material existence (that is, not penetrated by spirits) is a precondition of freedom and the sheltering and flourishing of the mind (Norton 2002: 17–19). So the obsession with the denigration of the black body as open and penetrable was one way of placing African personhood below Western personhood, which in turn created the imperious need to refashion it. Colonialism and colonial mission paid special attention to the African body as a way of distorting or transforming African personhood to suit their vision of what Africans should be. The surfaces of black bodies, their consumption and coverings, habits and practices, were subject to European gaze and control. The presentation of black bodies in the public, their intake and output, and their coverings had to become signs of Western or Christian forms and essences. Africans must be compelled to present their bodies and public comportment as indices of their belonging to modern civilization. First and foremost, according to the logic of domination of colonialism and the disciplinary regime of Christianity, Africans had to be transformed into law‐abiding subjects. This started with the insistence that black bodies regard white bodies as imbued with prestige and authority – as we saw in Jephta’s case. Violence, quick and brutal force, meted out on black bodies was a central principle of the colonial domination of Africa and a crucial part of the racial scale of personhood, which placed European personhood at the apex and African personhood at the bottom.

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The British colonial administrator Harold Monday Douglas, who worked in eastern Nigeria from 1897 to 1920, ruled with great brutal force, as if to remind blacks daily of white supremacy. He forced Igbo chiefs and villagers to provide labor for colonial road projects. When they refused he destroyed their houses, farms, and crops, and further punished them in violent ways. On several occasions his brutal actions caused the death of Igbo leaders. He would order the public flogging of Nigerian workers, young men, and chiefs. On one occasion, according to Toyin Falola (2009: 29), “He beat a government interpreter, a Nigerian, to a state of unconsciousness.” This kind of brutal attack on African personhood derived its impetus from the European racial scale and from the firm belief of its adherents that no degree of degradation of Africans by whites would ever call into question the superiority and unassailable moral high ground of white personhood. Lord Frederick Lugard, the well‐known colonial administrator in Nigeria, argued that authoritarianism was necessary to civilize Africans, even if its implementation led to the death of Africans. He wrote in 1915: “I do not regret the loss of life among aggressors, for these people hold life so cheap that the only way to prevent a recurrence of the outbreak is to make them understand that it will be severely dealt with.”2 According to this bizarre logic, the death of Africans who resisted the colonial invasion and the penetration of their body politic by alien forces does not count for anything: the criminal acts of whites were justified because their African victims, with their cheap regard for life, asked for them. Lugard went further to suggest that European criminals were created with such distinctive moral fiber that acts of cruelty performed by them against Africans would never weaken their moral constitution. He argued that British officers like Douglas faced no moral danger because they would not fall “prey to that subtle moral deterioration which the exercise of power over inferior races produces in men of a different type and which finds expression in cruelty” (Lugard 1922: 132). If all this sounds far‐fetched, recall that colonial powerhouses like Lord Lugard believed that the European presence in Africa in the forms of Christianity, colonialism, and commerce was salvific, that is, geared to bringing order to chaos, civility to “savages,” progress to Africa, and above all redemption to perishing black souls. If cruelty was not driven by a delusional colonial messianic complex, it was certainly moved by deliberate, callous attempts to keep Africans poor and their personhood etiolated. One would have difficulty finding a better exemplum of such callousness than the collaboration and conspiracy between missionaries, colonial authorities, and colonial settlers in the Belgian Congo. As documented in Avenir Colonial Belge on October 30, 1921, Jules Renguin, the minister of colonies, had a meeting with Catholic missionaries to work out an agreement between them that would keep Africans subjected to Belgium. He instructed them to work only for the interests of Belgium, and to use their interpretation of the Bible to facilitate this objective:



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Let us have the courage to confess that you have not come here to teach Africans what they already know. Your role essentially consists in facilitating the job for administrators and manufacturers. This therefore is to say that you will interpret the gospel in the way that best serves our interests in this part of the world.3

Perhaps most reprehensible in this document were the specific instructions that the minister of colonies gave the missionaries on how to achieve the goals of subsuming African to Belgian interests. He set out a plan to perpetuate the poverty of Africans through religious subterfuge and calculated misinterpretation of the Sermon on the Mount: Among other things, you will see to it to make our “savages” lose interest in the material wealth their soil and subsoil are brimming with, in order to avoid that being interested in, they bloody not compete with us, and dream of evicting us some day. Your knowledge of the Scriptures easily will help you find passages which recommend and get people to love poverty. For instance, passages like “Blessed are the poor, for the kingdom of heavens belongs to them”; and “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” You will therefore do everything so that Blacks may be afraid of becoming rich in order to deserve Heaven. (quoted in Ayedze 2009: 200)

This brings us to the discursive control of Christian missionaries and colonialism over Africans. Christian missionaries and colonial authorities firmly framed how Africans themselves and the rest of the world should interpret, evaluate, and accept blackness and African personhood. The following section bridges the historical approach to African personhood under colonialism and Christian missionary activity (as exemplified by Waibinte Wariboko) and the historical‐ anthropological method (as exemplified by the Comaroffs).

African personhood and Western discursive practices The control of discursive practices over African identity revolved around the common conceptual constant of race and racism. Within these practices whiteness was exalted and blackness denigrated. Both agents of the colonial state and of Christian missions, in their “civilizing mission” quest, cast aspersions on African personhood as a foil for an imagined new Euro‐African personhood. Africans were considered only as potential persons, and as requiring the graces of the civilizing mission under the aegis of Christianity and the colonial state to attain full personhood (W. Wariboko 2011: 40–41). Both church agents (black and white) and officers of the colonial state expressed these views: they all denigrated African personhood even as in many cases they worked assiduously to serve Africans faithfully.

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Let us hear from some of them. First, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first black bishop of the Church of England stated: The “Dark Continent” is properly applied to Africa. The inhabitants of a great portion of it are very ignorant, being illiterate, unlettered, untaught; all what they know is what was got by tradition from their forefathers, and handed down from generation; they are therefore rude, barbarous, unmerciful, [and] superstitious.4

White missionaries enunciated similar views. For instance, Father Lutz, the founder of the Spiritan mission to Igboland wrote in a letter to his nephew: “All those who go to Africa as missionaries must be thoroughly penetrated with the thought that the Dark Continent is a cursed land, almost entirely in the power of the devil.”5 Almost nothing was spared in their condemnation of Africa. A CMS representative inveighed against Ganda domestic architecture in 1902: There was no home among them and their houses were an outward symbol of that sad fact. They were round, very dark inside, having only those opening; there were no partitions beyond those made by hanging bark clothes … It could not be a wholesome life. (quoted in Isichei 1995: 83)

Joseph Chamberlain, the British secretary of state for the colonies, described Africa as characterized by “practices of barbarism, of slavery, of superstition, which for centuries have desolated the interior of Africa” (W. Wariboko 2013: 143). These views of the inferiority of Africans pervaded the missionary and colonial worlds, as Waibinte Wariboko observes: First, white supremacy from the outset of European involvement in Africa was constitutive, not additive to the makings of the civilizing mission. Second, because the desire to enthrone whiteness was constitutive to the makings of the civilizing mission from the outset, antiblack discourses in knowledge production about Africa and Africans were integral, not marginal, to the European empire‐building project in the continent. Finally, the constructions of race and the civilizing mission were firmly rooted in attempts to rationalize the global social and psychological domination of non‐European populations during the age of European expansion. (2013: 140)

The denigration of African personhood was not only a celebration of white supremacy, but also a consequence of the phallic will‐to‐power which must open Africa’s interiors for the masculine European gaze to penetrate her: “For by portraying the real Africa as a dark recess, much akin to a bodily interior, it suggested that there was an intrinsic value in laying it bare to the probing eye of the European observer” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 90). To know Africa in this way was also to feminize it, allowing its supposedly seductively helpless sub‐personhood to be subjugated and mounted by the manly European super‐personhood. In the nineteenth century this kind of discursive practice became clinically extended



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to  –  mapped and sedimented onto  –  the body of a real black woman, Sara Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus” who was exhibited at circuses as a “wild” woman. When she eventually died in Paris in 1815, European biologists examined her vagina meticulously for signs of aberrations, and declared that her labia minora were excessive and hence she was subhuman. According to the Comaroffs, European missionaries, colonialists, and scientists reduced Africa to the body of a black female yielding herself to white male discovery. This mytheme … was repeated in both the poetry of romantic naturalists and the sober prose of missionary crusaders … The feminization of the black “other” was a potent trope of devaluation. The non‐European was to be made as peripheral to the global axes of reason and production as women had become at home. Both were vital to the material and imaginative order of modern Europe. Yet both were deprived of access to its highest values. (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 104–105; see also Comaroff and Comaroff 1997)

Overall, this discursive regime worked to enact white privilege in Africa, placing whites essentially in a godlike position over African lives and creating a huge power distance between whites and blacks. Europeans considered themselves as superior masters and full human beings and Africans as helpless servants and only potential human beings. “Part of the self‐image of the European in Africa was his prescriptive right to have black servants” (Ranger 1997: 600). During colonial times, it was very normal to see Europeans (missionaries and colonialists) on a journey carried on hammock by black men. According to Terence Ranger, there was no impulse toward brotherhood in colonial Christianity (Africa). “For most Europeans the favoured image of their relationship with Africans was that of paternal masters and loyal servant. It was an image transferred to industrial [and public] employment.” (Ranger 1997: 600). With such a huge power distance it was not a huge step to declare that the subalterns do not have any organizational or managerial capabilities. Lord Lugard stated that the African “lacks the power of organization and is conspicuously deficient in the management and control alike of men or business” (1922: 70). That is, the European person and personhood were capable of leading and commanding themselves and others, but the African person and personhood were not. As the faces of the brutal, authoritarian European masters, the colonial district and resident officers exemplified this administrative philosophy in their dealings with Africans. In their exalted positions they were like gods, father figures, or ancestral spirits. More pompous and dictatorial than the district officer, the resident officer in his domain was answerable to no one. The wronged African could sometimes “appeal” from the district officer to the resident officer, but with the latter there was no recourse. His rulings were “settled in heaven” and were questioned only at dire personal risk and at the risk of the “wrath of hell fire” (Dudley 1973: 38).

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This administrative model certainly did not take African personhood seriously, but not all European missionaries or colonial officers were racists or enjoyed debasing African personhood. There were moments of affirmation of what is African amid the overwhelming climate of denigration. There were evangelists and colonialists who were different from Lugard, Douglas, Renquin, and the scientists who examined the reproductive organs of black women for signs of their subhumanity. One was Bishop John William Colenso, who worked to superimpose or construct Christian and Western civilizations in Africa on the foundation of native African logic. In the mid‐nineteenth century Colenso, the first Anglican bishop of Natal in South Africa, translated the New Testament and portions of the Old Testament into isiZulu, fought for the rights of Africans and against the injustice done to blacks, even against his good friend Theophilus Shepstone, an administrator of native affairs who ruled the colony for 30 years. In terms of the impact of his work on African personhood, however, there was no substantive difference between Colenso and Lugard. Their ways and attitudes, though substantially different, eventually worked to undermine African personhood, coalescing in the telos of refashioning African ways of life to suit the logics of capitalist accumulation and colonialism. Colenso’s theology, which posited universal salvation on the basis of a common religious consciousness available to all peoples, denied that any particular identity (even Jewish) is of importance to God or mattered theologically. In this discursive framework, African identity or personhood was displaced in favor of a universal one. But, as William Jennings points out: “Colenso’s universalism undermines all forms of identity except that of the colonists” and was blind to the dispossession of families, the driving of Africans off their lands and into wage labor (2010: 145). As he puts it, Colenso’s universalism is another form of colonialism’s reconfiguration of the earth: Colenso’s universalism was the other side of his colonialism. His ability to conceptualize a God who is not only beyond but in some sense opposed to the strictures of Jewish identity draws life from colonialist abilities to universalize the earth, that is, to free life from the strictures of particular ways of God of life. Of course, missionary life is by its proper nature boundary crossing, but his universalist vision reduces the power and presence of the very things it claims to grasp, the particularities of African peoples. He resolves those particularities into signposts for potential development. (Jennings 2010: 146)

The history of Christianity’s relationship with African personhood is a complicated one. The translation process started by missionaries like Colenso and the Western education Africans received from Christian missionaries eventually helped to disrupt and deconstruct the colonialist hegemony. Lamin Sanneh thus argues that mission furnished nationalism with the resources necessary to its rise and appeal [success], whereas colonialism came upon nationalism as a conspiracy. At the heart



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of the nationalist awakening was the cultural ferment [pride] that missionary translations and the attendant linguistic research stimulated. We might say with justice that mission begot cultural nationalism. (2009: 144)

Translation and missionary education opened up a space for indigenous self‐ understanding and resistance to the absolutizing image of Western superiority, even as they worked to translate “native worlds into the old worlds of Europe, that is, into colonialist worlds” (Jennings 2010: 157). In their study of Tswana the Comaroffs show that this bigger form of translation was forged through a “long conversation” between indigenous culture and Western culture as played out in everyday forms of life.

Everyday assaults on African personhood The notion of personhood that both colonialists and Christian evangelists brought to Africa was that of autonomous, competitive, right‐bearing individuals seeking to maximize their well‐being, and was heavily invested in visions of heroic transformation of the universe (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 61–62). African personhood was considered as its obverse (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997: 371). Not only did colonialists and missionaries claim that Africans lacked the social structures to develop a propertied, right‐bearing personhood, but as “savages” they lacked “reason,” the required level of intellectual development on which the European notion of personhood rested (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997: 372). It was therefore the burden of whites to transform the Africans into enlightened, right‐bearing, right‐minded, self‐interested, and reasoning human beings. This they sought to achieve through dogma, revelation, and everyday forms of colonizing culture. This is what the Comaroffs call the “long conversation” between missionaries and colonialists on the one hand and Africans on the other, and it was directed at passing an alien subjectivity and selfhood on to Africans (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997: 250–251). The quotidian practices of colonialism and colonial Christianity, aimed at refashioning African personhood in every way possible, focused on the black body to carefully manage the linkages between bodily politics and body politic (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997: 374). As the Comaroffs remark: If the body personal was metonymic of body politic, the reformation of the second might follow from the refashioning of the first. What is more, this objective, the reworking of bodily practices, was best achieved by intervening in the mundanities of [African] life. (1997: 374)

Ordinary life became the site of struggles for African personhood. As missionaries and colonialists focused on the myriad things the black body had to do, to conform to, or to reject within the colonial disciplinary regime, African personhood and its

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indigenous philosophical underpinnings came under severe attack. Yet Africans did not completely lose their ingrained indigenous notion of personhood.

Crisis of African personhood: From the traditional to hybrid forms In spite of the spirited efforts of colonialists and missionaries to reconstruct African personhood along the lines of Western personhood, the precolonial notion of personhood survived to shape African worlds both under colonialism and in the postcolonial era. In this section, I examine the indigenous philosophical notion of personhood as another way of gauging the impact of colonialism and Christianity on African personhood. It would be impossible to analyze the conceptions of personhood in all African communities.6 I will, therefore, draw on Kalabari‐Ijo (Niger Delta, Nigeria) as an example to make my case.7 The Kalabari understanding of personhood rests on communion, but holds in tension the particularity of being (personal distinctiveness) and the commonality of human nature (ontological equality). It is a relational personhood that accents inclusiveness, mutuality, and communion. This understanding derives from an ontology that manages to avoid the usual extremes in Western philosophy. On the one hand, it opposes a simple sort of metaphysical ontology that reduces all conceptions of personhood to a changeless common substance. On the other hand, it avoids a radical kind of relational ontology that takes the human as totally relationally constituted or socially constructed. The African ontology of personhood thus avoids the Scylla of metaphysics as well as the Charybdis of social ontology. It attempts to establish a sort of relational ontology on the basis of nonfixed substance. Being is not a changeless substance (ousia) but as it relates to (i.e., substance‐in‐relation). Being is an active and open form that is continually adjusting and improvising its relation to other being, to nonbeing, and to the world. The power of being is an active relational principle, a substance that is shared by all human beings and that connects all things and persons. Thus a person exists by being in communion with others, in sharing this communalizing power. Put differently, it is in relatedness that being a person consists. John Mbiti captures this relational principle of personhood with his now famous statement: “I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am” (Mbiti 1969: 108, 109, 117). The statement adequately captures the notion of the ekstasis of communion which makes the individual unique, indispensable, and irreplaceable as part of the active and open relational existence and experience that is the African community. So personhood is being‐with, being‐in‐communion, or person‐in‐communion. This relational notion of personhood is deeply marked by becoming. The being of a person is derived not only from relatedness, but also from intended becoming, its telos. The Kalabari person is believed to be continually growing toward an ideal so as to fully actualize their potentialities, to become all that they can be, to



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become the perfect, complete person (krakra tombo). This ideal is a synthetic one, which is reached by bringing what is culturally good, true, and beautiful into firm relation with the life of a person. This state of perfection has meaning only in its subsumption under the overarching concern of the preservation and promotion of the community’s well‐being. It is clear from this understanding of personhood that the self is not individuated apart from or before communion. The community and the experience of communion contribute something significant to both the identity and the self‐definition of the individual. Relationship and fellowship are constituents of identity and are fundamentally constitutive of personhood. There is a profound recognition that the being of personhood derives from interpersonal relations and that relations derive from being a person. The Kalabari notion of personhood is deeply imbricated in its traditional ethical system. One of the important tasks of the system is to support and nudge the ecstatic movement of human beings toward one another and toward beyond‐ human nature and the divine realm. This nudging is not just about sustaining the relationality that frames personhood. There is a developmental aspect to both particularity (individual distinctiveness) and relations in the notion of personhood. In Kalabari, personhood can be developed only when an individual and their capabilities combine with the resources of a social world (relation) to create, sustain, or transform a society. The good of each person depends on relationship with others. Relationships with others enable individuals to mix their capabilities with social resources in order to develop and sustain their particularity so that their prospects in life are not diminished or harmed. The development and sustenance of their particularity through the nexus of relationships encompass two senses: negative and positive. In one sense, it means that their community should not diminish their possibilities and acceptable choices; in the other, it means that the community is not to deprive or withhold from them what is due to them (and that includes social contexts that they need to shape their particularity) and not to refuse to act to improve their situation in life so that they can contribute their best to the community’s well‐being. The community in Kalabari is conceived as the proper place in which individuals can amalgamate their capabilities and capacities with the resources of the social world in order to develop their personhoods. A person’s being could be more complete and more perfect in kind by giving and receiving inputs, qualities, and characteristics from the communal milieu. The paramount moral goal of the person is to contribute their best to the well‐being of the community, and the community’s aim is to let the individual be all that they can be, develop all their capabilities and capacities so that their personhood is not diminished or threatened but enhanced. This notion of personhood (person always as person‐in‐communion) has tremendous influence on how African worlds were shaped. We shall now examine how personhood shaped the precolonial (traditional) community and then what

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has happened to this relationship in the postcolonial world, in the African worlds after the advents of colonialism and missionary Christianity. In traditional African society the promotion of the well‐being of the community was basically about the protection and prolonging of life. Life was seen as the continual maintenance of the bond of communion (harmony) between all five segments of community (gods/spirits, community, family, persons, and nature) so that the vital force, the spiritual stuff that sustains all lives remains at its strongest in the community. The life of the community consisted in its relationships and sociality. Relationships make possible the preservation and continuation of the existence of the community. This focus on harmony did not obviate or diminish attention to the person. The person is the key to the set of the relationships that is the community’s life and its paramount good. The person and community were so interwoven that one could not talk of the welfare of one without automatically implying the other. Not only were person‐in‐communion or being‐togetherness the form the community took, but a person also could not exist without the community. This notion of personhood that so shaped and structured the traditional world is fast changing. The cumulative effect of the weight of blackness suffered by Africans under colonialism and various attempts by the colonial state and colonial Christian mission to transform African personhood to fit the autonomous, self‐ interested individual have weakened the bond between individuals and their societies. In the 1970s Peter Ekeh wrote an insightful essay on the existence of two publics: the communal and the civic. In his thinking the communal or ethnic public is considered moral and beloved, while the other public is amoral, hostile, and largely hated. With the communal public, which recognizes the worth of their personhood and citizenship, the individual feels a sense of citizenship and membership in the community. The individual is morally linked to the society and sees their duties as moral obligations to benefit and sustain a community of which they are a member. The civic public, however, which was primarily imposed by colonialism with its apparatus of coercion, refuses to recognize the worth or citizenship of the individual, and has no moral link with the individual. The individual, steadily attacked by the colonial and postcolonial state, is alienated from the state and their attention is focused more on the primordial public, such as kin and ethnic groups, which are independent of the state. Unlike the attitude of cooperation in the primordial realm, the attitude toward the civic realm is purely materialistic and exploitative, and the individual experiences no moral urge to give back to the civic realm in return for its benefits. In fact, the individual is obliged to draw resources from the civic public for the benefit of the primordial community (Ekeh 1990, 1975). In a sense this development of the two publics is a result of an imposition of an alien personhood that did not establish vital and sustainable linkages between personhood and community, which had existed in the traditional society. Some might argue that Africans in traditional societies were too narrowly bound to



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small territories for their notion of personhood to work in the expansive communities created by Christianity and colonialism. This assertion is not always correct. There are many ways to refute it, one of which is found in Paul Landau’s work on colonial South Africa. Landau has demonstrated that colonial mission and the colonial state unduly privileged ethnicity as the primary way of understanding identity in Africa. Africans, he argues, were animated by a consciousness that went beyond tribes. The tribalization of identity was part of the governance and dominance mechanisms used to control Africans and to dampen mass political mobilization (Landau 2010). In any case, today personhood and community have so drifted apart that the links between them, even at the communal or ethnic level, have largely broken down. In the violent and rapacious world of postcolonial Africa, individuals now pursue their well‐being to the detriment of their communities. Indeed, in Africa individuals and the state have drifted apart and the apparatuses of state, which have refused to recognize individuals’ worth or citizenship, have steadily attacked them. The terms of exchange between the state and the individual, between state and society, are ill defined and are often antagonistic. The individual, or rather personhood, is alienated from the state (society) and the individual’s attention is focused more on the self and its life projects, to which communal relationships have become largely peripheral. The interests of individuals are increasingly set against their primordial communities. The elites now brazenly divert government funds meant for their communities, or even internally generated monies for community projects, into their personal coffers. The “civilizing mission” and the articulation of Western personhood with indigenous African personhood have given rise to complex forms of personhood. The encounters between the colonial state and Christianity on the one hand and the traditional social ontology of personhood on the other have resulted in hybrid and strange forms of individual–community relations. This is the crisis of personhood in Africa in the wake of colonialism and Christianity, and it is one that is exacerbated by postindependence politics and some of the practices of the postmissionary African church. The differences in moral practices that defined Ekeh’s split publics have all but evaporated, engendering another kind of twoness. There are now the individual (private/social) sphere and the public sphere, which actually maps a tripartite ethical terrain: core, margin, and submargin. More accurately, we have a core– margin–submargin structure of personhood, which is a product of the conflation of the two ideals of African and Western personhood. The core consists of competitive, self‐interested individualism. The margin is comprised of communal values, the remnants of the communal‐relational personhood. The submargin is the associational values that connect individuals to cross‐cutting institutions and collectives beyond the ethnic groups. The core–margin relation is not fixed but dynamic. For example, in social interactions communal orientation might move down into the submargin or rise up to the core position.

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Conclusion The crucial impact of colonialism and Christianity on African personhood is a double one, “two unreconciled strivings.” The effect of the transformation of African personhood is visible in the fundamental orientation of individuals to their communities. The connection has changed from an “I–thou” relation to an “I‐it” relation. And the same forces that gave rise to this transformation have also enforced a psychological duality on many Africans, have split the “I” from within for individuals whose personhood is both African and not African. These are Africans that both do and do not belong to Africa (either communal or civic) and the West. There is now an other within the African self. But, in my view, the nature of African personhood in the future will not be determined by the opposition between the two forces but by their combination.

Notes 1 “Letter from Fiscal Denyssen to Sir John Cradock,” March 16, 1813, RCC, 9, 154; CAR, Kaapse Plakkaatboek [1754], 3, 1–16, quoted in Vernal (2011: 12). 2 Lugard to Colonial Office, May 29, 1915, NAI, CSO 26/33/28160; see also Falola (2009: 31). 3 “Les deviors des missionaires dans notre colonie,” Avenir Colonial Belge (October 30, 1921), quoted in Ayedze (2009: 199). 4 G3A3/1890/140, S. A. Crowther, “Difficulties on the Way of Missionary Work on the West Coast of Africa,” August 1890 (emphasis original), quoted in W. Wariboko (1998: 11). 5 C. S. Sp. 191/A/5, MS, Biography of Father Lutz by Father Ebenrecht, fol. 35, quoted in Isichei (1995: 82). 6 For a general introduction to African philosophy relating to personhood, see Coetzee and Roux (1998: 149–185, 292–305, 317–336); Wiredu (2004: 324–342). 7 This discussion is drawn from Wariboko (2008).

References Ayedze, Kossi A. 2009. “Poverty among African People and the Ambiguous Role of Christian Thought.” In Religion and Poverty: Pan‐African Perspectives, edited by Peter J. Paris, 193–212. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coetzee, P. H., and A. P. J. Roux, eds. 1998. The African Philosophy Reader. London: Routledge. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 1991. Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, vol. 1 of Of Revelation and Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 1997. The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, vol. 2 of Of Revelation and Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crowther, S. A. 1890. “Difficulties on the Way of Missionary Work on the West Coast of Africa.” August. G3A3/1890/140.



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Du Bois, W. E. B. 1989. The Souls of Black Folks. New York: Penguin Books. Dudley, B. J. 1973. Instability and Political Order. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press. Ekeh, Peter. 1975. “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 17(1): 91–112. Ekeh, Peter. 1990. “Social Anthropology and the Two Contrasting Uses of Tribalism in Africa.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32(4): 660–670. Falola, Toyin. 2009. Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Isichei, Elizabeth. 1995. A History of Christianity in Africa from Antiquity to the Present. London: SPCK. Jennings, Willie James. 2010. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven: Yale University Press. Landau, Paul. 2010. Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1440–1948. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Lugard, Lord Frederick. 1922. The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. London: William Blackwood. Mbiti, John S. 1969. African Religions and Philosophy. New York: Praeger. Norton, Anne. 2002. Bloodrites of the Post‐structuralists: Word, Flesh and Revolution. New York: Routledge. Penn, Nigel. 2014. “Casper, Crebis, and the Knegt: Rape, Homicide and Violence in Eighteenth‐Century Rural Western Cape.” South African Historical Journal 66: 611–634. Ranger, Terence. 1997. “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” In Perspectives on Africa, edited by Roy Richard Grinker and Christopher Steiner, 450–461. Oxford: Blackwell. Renquin, Jules. 1921. “Les deviors des missionaires dans notre colonie.” Avenir Colonial Belge (October 30). Sanneh, Lamin. 2009. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, rev. ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Tillich, Paul. 1954. Love, Power, and Justice: Ontological Analyses and Ethical Applications. London: Oxford University Press. Vernal, Fiona. 2011. “Discourse Networks in South African Slave Society.” African Historical Review 43(2): 1–36. Wariboko, Nimi. 2008. The Depth and Destiny of Work: An African Theological Interpretation. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Wariboko, Waibinte E. 1998. Planting Church Culture at New Calabar: Some Neglected Aspects of Missionary Enterprise in the Eastern Niger Delta, 1865–1918. San Francisco: International Scholars. Wariboko, Waibinte. 2011. Race and the Civilizing Mission: Their Implications for the Framing of Blackness and African Personhood, 1800–1960. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Wariboko, Waibinte. 2013. “Missionaries.” In Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, 2nd ed., vol. 3, edited by Patrick L. Mason, 139–145. New York: Macmillan. Wiredu, Kwasi, ed. 2004. A Companion to African Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Chapter Five

Settler Societies Nicola Ginsburgh and Will Jackson

“White Africans”: the term is loaded with mystification and pathos. In its combining of racial identity and geographical belonging, it carries both the conviction that people of European descent can become truly African, as well as the countervailing doubt that – in the anomalous quality of their continued whiteness – they must remain apart. It is unsurprising, then, that the term attracts controversy at the same time as it replicates that element of ambivalence so characteristic of settler culture in Africa. Today, the term conveys the anachronism of any self‐ identification that derives from the settler colonial past. But, while many of those citizens of African states with European ancestry may avoid the idea of themselves as “African,” those that do (whether or not they preface the term with “white”) typically enjoy access to worlds beyond Africa, as well as privileges within it, that the vast majority of black Africans do not. In 1993, on the cusp of a nonracial universal franchise, South Africa’s Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) attempted to resolve the question of whether nonindigenous peoples could be accepted as African. PAC general secretary Benny Alexander distinguished “two strains” of African, the first comprising those who “historically cannot be traced out of Africa,” the second comprising whites and Asians “whose only home and sole allegiance” was to the continent (Sparks 1995). Alexander was attempting to extricate his organization from a controversy over the “one settler, one bullet” slogan, then current in militant circles. His logic is tortuous – not all whites were “settlers,” according to Alexander, only those who did not identify with A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Africa – but it does raise the serious question of the degree to which Europeans continue to appropriate certain elements of “Africa” for their enrichment and self‐identification while protecting themselves from harsher realities. While, at base, we might define settlers as all those migrants with the intention and the opportunity to stay – to make themselves “at home” – we can hardly view the settler in isolation from the supporting social and political structures that helped determine whether those ambitions were fulfilled. In other words, there can be no talk of settlers without a corresponding attention to settler states. Nor can we contemplate “the settler” without some consideration of those peoples whose prior occupation of the land the settler undermined. Frequently, settler colonies have been discussed within analyses of imperialism or colonialism more broadly. As recent theoretical work has shown, however, settler colonialism needs to be understood as a particular social‐historical formation in its own right. Whereas colonialism is traditionally understood as a relationship premised upon the exploitation of an indigenous majority by an alien minority, settler colonialism, as Patrick Wolfe argued, is centred on a logic of elimination (Wolfe 2006). According to Lorenzo Veracini, colonialism seeks to reproduce itself to enable continued exploitation while settler colonialism is geared toward its own annihilation – to erase the indigenous presence altogether (Veracini 2011). It is a formula that works best when applied to what were once called the “white dominions” – those territories settled by anglophone migrants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that subsequently won the right to rule themselves: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. South Africa is often included in that list but it stands apart, not merely because a minority of the country’s white settlers were British or because South Africa left the Commonwealth in 1960, but because in South Africa whites never exceeded 20 percent of the total population.1 Indeed, African settler colonies are marked by their comparative inability to erase the indigenous presence. Yet the failure to exterminate African populations should not indicate an absence of a genocidal impulse within African settler mentalities. The implications of this are several. First, fantasies of extermination were shaped and curtailed by dependence upon indigenous labor. Starkly racialized social hierarchies were contrived: Africans would do the work. In this, the African settler colonies are closer, typologically speaking, to India than they are to Canada or New Zealand. (Nor should we forget the presence of missionaries, travelers, and colonial administrators – the nonsettler personnel of the settler state – who did as much to shape the futures of the settler colonies as they did those of the nonsettler colonies.) Second, settlers, sensitive to their demographic minority status, attempted to create uniquely enclavic cultures in which the need to differentiate “white” from “native” was intensely felt. The copresence of European immigrants and black Africans, however, meant that this differentiation was never achieved, hence the particular anxious quality of race in the African settler states. Elimination, according to Wolfe, involved not just physical erasure but also biological assimilation, through state‐sanctioned projects of child removal and



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intermarriage.2 Settlers in Africa could not tolerate racial mixing; miscegenation remained the central frame for understanding – or denying – the fluidity of race. That denial was manifest in a cult of separation. The legally sanctioned alienation of land from Africans, the demarcation of native reserves, the control of subject peoples’ movement through technologies of registration and surveillance all served to constitute “the native” through the manipulation of space. Subject to an array of legal, political, and economic sanctions that located them outside the settler body politic, indigenous populations were routinely imagined as living beyond the boundaries of civilization. Across central and southern Africa the idea that Africans were inherently rural and tribal was a central prop in legitimizing migrant systems of labor that allowed Africans to be paid at single men’s wages. Settlers felt keenly the colonial distaste toward “detribalization” but at the same time pursued economic and political policies that made “traditional” African society untenable. Third, unlike the so‐called white dominions, African settler states were never able to pull clear of the metropole. Their lack of numbers meant that settlers remained dependent on the European powers that sponsored them. To be sure, South Africa was accorded dominion status in 1910. Its considerable mineral wealth ensured that South Africa was penetrated by large‐scale international capital to such an extent that its racial regime was perpetuated by investment from within the very nation‐states  –  Great Britain and the United States of America – whose publics were most visible in expressing popular opposition to its injustice. Therefore, just as African settler colonies combined aspects of both the colony and the settler colony, so decolonization in these contexts requires its own analytical framework. Settler colonies and the European nations from whence their settlers came separated tortuously and incompletely. Legacies of empire in independent African states remain entwined with those of the old imperial powers. Of all the settler states in Africa, South Africa went furthest in breaking from the constraints of metropolitan rule and from the burdens of imperial and international norms regarding the treatment of “native” peoples. Decolonization consequently arrived latest here. Only Algeria had a settler population of comparable proportions but here too the “native” remained in the majority. Other settler colonies had fewer settlers still. In Northern Rhodesia, Kenya and South West Africa European populations failed to reach 100,000. Elsewhere, settlers seldom accounted for more than 5 percent of a colony’s total population. In light of wider migratory patterns, Africa was never able to sustain an appeal as a settler destination to match the popularity of the Americas or Australasia. The combined Portuguese migration to Angola and Mozambique was dwarfed by the near 1.5 million migrants who traveled to Brazil in the 100 years after 1850 (Bender 2004). Germany’s only settler colony, South West Africa, lasted only 30 years, and was populated at its peak by just 14,000 settlers. Above all, settlers in Africa were weak. Their ambitions were fantastical, and their visions of the future mortgaged

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to the rigidity of their racial thinking. Indeed, their histories might well be thought of in terms of an unraveling; of the gradual marooning of “white men’s countries” beneath the twentieth century’s historical tides. It would be a mistake, however, to equate that weakness with historical insignificance. Precisely because they were able to mobilize the resources of their sponsor European nation‐states, settlers had a transformative effect on African political structures, environments, and social institutions. Settlers made the difference between protracted, violent decolonization and (relatively speaking) smoother transitions. Settlers complicated the ideological arithmetic of empire. They reached down deeper into the colonized ground than other colonial ­personnel. Despite – or because of – their limited numbers, their importance was profound. Settler colonialism in Africa has a 500‐year history and its defining characteristics vary over time. Portuguese activity in modern‐day Mozambique dates from 1505 when a trading and refueling station was founded at Sofala on the Indian Ocean coast. At the same time, France established its own trading post, the Bastion de France, on the Algerian coast. The Dutch began the colonization of modern‐day South Africa in 1652 with the establishment of a refreshment station at Table Bay. All these nascent settlements serviced other ends, specifically commercial expansion – in the Mediterranean for the French and in the Far East for the Dutch and Portuguese. Nowhere in these places were settler societies envisaged from the start. At Sofala, settlement proceeded only fitfully as the commercial value of the Zambezi Valley came to be understood at the same time as competitor Arab trading networks were disrupted or displaced. While it is meaningful to speak of a Portuguese settler population by the mid‐seventeenth century, it is important to recognize that African chiefs continued to hold considerable sway. Those Portuguese who did prosper, moreover, did so largely beyond the control of Lisbon, their success due primarily to their involvement in local African politics. The lack of any meaningful military or administrative structure meant that Portuguese settlers accumulated power largely on their own account. Not until the establishment of a bureaucratic state in the later nineteenth century did a coordinated settler colony emerge (Newitt 1973; Isaacman and Isaacman 1976). The French conquest of Algeria was similarly haphazard. Explicable in part as an attempt by the French king Charles X to bolster his popular support, in part as the culmination of a diplomatic wrangle between the dey of Algiers and the French consul, and in part as an attempt to pre‐empt British maritime ascendancy over the Mediterranean, the French invasion in 1830 was never intended as the founding of a settler colony. Limited at first to the coastal cities of Algiers, Oran, and Bône, the French took over 40 years to spread themselves throughout the Algerian hinterland. While settlement proceeded apace, from 37,000 in 1840 to 412,000 in 1880, only half these migrants were French. Spaniards, Italians, and Maltese comprised the rest. Only from the late nineteenth century onward did these diverse groups come to share in a common settler identity as Algerians.3



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To the south, the initial impetus for settlement at the Cape of Good Hope had been to service ships of the Dutch East India Company en route to and from the eastern seas. That early Dutch settlement crossed traditional African grazing grounds; when conflict broke out between the Dutch and the Khoikhoi in 1659, the Dutch commander Jan van Riebeeck decided to lay out a boundary from the mouth of the Salt River at the north of Table Bay to the eastern flank of Table Mountain. Composed in part of the natural barrier afforded by the Liesbeek River, in part of a wooden stockade, and in part of a purposively planted hedge of bitter almonds, this first and formative settler frontier speaks eloquently of the fact that, while settlers strove always to insinuate themselves into Africa, they exerted no less energy on keeping Africa – and specifically, Africans – out. Such a defensive, laager mentality is most frequently associated with South Africa’s Afrikaner population but it is no less applicable to settlers of British, French, or German descent and represents, moreover, one of the big continuities traceable from the seventeenth century to the twenty‐first. Definitions of society, as Raymond Williams has noted, involve relationships and institutions (Williams 1976). If settler societies are premised upon the differentiation between settler and native (whether the latter be eliminated or not), it follows that a settler society can be taken as given only once racialized forms of governance (institutions) and sociabilities (relationships) have come to exist. These pertained unevenly and inconsistently. Race concretized with variable pace and intensity (Cahen 2012). Through the nineteenth century, Africa loomed ever larger in Europe’s popular consciousness. The abolition of slavery, the cultural dissemination of explorer’s travels, and the rise of missionary activity on the continent made the “white African” thinkable in the first place. At the same time, both in Europe and in colonial Africa the idea of society was being increasingly qualified by race. On the ground, the civic institutions that structured settler society rose to prominence, first, in the mobilization of violence and, later, to pre‐empt the erosion of racial boundaries. Settler militias were the formative social institution of the frontier. In Algeria, the first colons were children of France’s military occupation. During its first 40 years the colony lacked the legal apparatus of the modern settler colonial state but the process of pacification militarized the settler mind  –  and traumatized Algeria’s Arab and Berber inhabitants. Dutch‐ and French‐descended settlers in South Africa became entangled in African wars. Until 1834 slavery was the keystone institution shaping settler society at the Cape but it was complicated and to some extent subverted by the relationships that developed between masters and slaves and between both these groups and the state (Ross 1983; Shell 1994; Dooling 2007). Relationships distorted the settler colonial ideal. Settlers looked to the state to enforce their various interests; the domestic bourgeoisie pushed for preferable market regulations; workers demanded protection from cheap African labor; and farmers relied on the allocation of fertile land and state subsidies, as well as the

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inhibition of African producers. Racial ideology was never homogeneous but was refracted through a prism of competing interests. While, to a great extent, legislation did operate in line with settler demands, not least in the coerced mobilization of African labor (Berman 1990), it also reflected a growing commitment on the part of metropolitan governments toward the humane treatment of “native” peoples (Lester and Dussart 2014). By the later nineteenth century, advances in communication technology were recasting the terms according to which settler colonization would proceed. Ships – from the mid‐1800s under steam – brought sub‐Saharan Africa closer to Europe. The development of railway systems created new opportunities for movement and migration, opening up the hinterland to the coast and creating new opportunities for the evasion as well as the exercise of social control. At the same time, advancements in medical science, including the discovery of antimalarial quinine prophylaxis in 1840, eased anxieties concerning the impossibility of whites living in tropical and semitropical climes. The mobility of the high imperial age, however, was not a “white man’s” preserve. Settlers shared migratory networks with no less mobile racial others. Chinese immigrants in South Africa labored beside Africans and Europeans (Bright 2013). In Kenya Indian immigrants outnumbered whites (Aiyar 2015). In Algeria only through processes of acculturation did immigrant non‐French Europeans – from Italy, Majorca, Spain, and Malta  –  earn inclusion as colons. Challenged by the polyglot character of their colonies, settler advocates in Africa and Europe lobbied for stringent, racially exclusive restrictions on entry into the colony and on social and political privileges within it (Lake and Reynolds 2008). Most settler states imposed restrictive immigration policies to prevent white “undesirables” from entering settler colonies. Endeavoring to uphold this dichotomy, settler authorities worked hard to socially engineer their settler populations and to instill in them the necessary mentality and aptitude to rule (Shadle 2015). The mining of gold in South Africa from 1886, copper in Northern Rhodesia, phosphate in Algeria, and diamonds in German South West Africa spurred the super‐exploitation of indigenous land, labor, and mineral wealth. It also brought hundreds of thousands of new would‐be settlers into the settler colonies. Social as well as geographic topographies were dramatically reshaped. Where mineral deposits were found cities sprang up. The old archetypal settler farmer became anachronistic practically overnight. At the same time, private companies (in British East Africa,4 Mozambique, and Southern Rhodesia) built quasi‐state structures (including the raising of police and military forces) dedicated to the coercion of labor and the exploitation of land and mineral wealth. By the 1920s, more than 70 percent of the pieds noirs in Algeria were city dwellers (Stora 2001). A few hundred would‐be aristocrats in Kenya were as nothing to the millions of urban working whites populating the towns and cities of southern Africa. On the South African Highveld the intensification of mineral extraction, compounded by successive waves of agricultural depression, ripped the ties that bound those Afrikaners with control of land to those without.



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Between 1904 and 1911 the number of whites living on the Witwatersrand increased by almost 50 percent (Callinicos 1977: 28). In the port cities, Durban, Cape Town, Luanda, and Delagoa Bay, they were joined by new arrivals: Argentinean cattlemen, Armenians, Americans, and the euphemistically labelled “continental women,” as well as men who found in the illegal trade of liquor, hides, and horn some compensation for lack of social standing (MacDonald 2014; Hyslop 2014). While Kenya has retained a lasting image as an aristocrat’s colony, most settler states struggled to reconcile the reality of social differentiation within the white population with an image of unfettered wealth and privilege. The Carnegie Commission of 1929–1930 found that over 300,000 Europeans in South Africa were living below “white” standards of living. Known collectively as degredados, Portugal’s typical colonial migrants were drawn from the lowest strata of Portuguese society: criminals, prostitutes, the destitute, and orphans (Coates 2001; Bender 2004). Algeria also became known for its impoverished “petit blancs,” popularized by Albert Camus who chronicled what he saw as mental as well as material degradation (Strachan 2013). Like many poorer settlers across Africa, pieds noirs undoubtedly lived a privileged lifestyle compared to the indigenous majority, but most settlers were salaried urban workers rather than wealthy landowners and pieds noirs were certainly no better off than they would have been in France; 72 percent earned around 15 to 20 percent less than their French counterparts, despite sharing a similar cost of living (Stora 2005). The socialization of new immigrants was always a worry for settler regimes, but in the twentieth century the figure of the “poor white” provoked particular concern; poor whites were believed to be more likely to engage in miscegenation and to live, eat, socialize, and work with other unsavory elements without regard to the propriety of race (Bundy 1983; Morrell 1992; Errante 2003; Yedes 2003). In nonsettler societies – in India, for example – the poor, the elderly, and the sick could be transferred “home” to Europe. In the African settler colonies, bound to the fantasy of white indigeneity, repatriation was problematic (Jackson 2013). The poor white problem thus emerges as one of the great unifying themes common to all the settler states in Africa where the project to uplift the deviant and the degenerate emerged as a vital part of settler ideology: only if requisite standards of whiteness were maintained could the settlers’ claim to be guiding Africans from backwardness to civilization be maintained. With their far greater numbers, it seemed obvious to the architects of settler societies that “native” populations would inevitably fill the lower social orders. Urbanization, however, meant the proletarianization not only of Africans but of immigrant Europeans as well. This produced a profound contradiction for white workers, many of whom had been radicalized by their experiences of industrial struggle in the metropole and who in the early twentieth century saw themselves as part of an international white working class (Hyslop 1999).

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In Africa, white workers felt themselves threatened from all sides – by the forces of global capital from above and by black and “colored” workers from below. It is unsurprising, then, that white worker militancy provoked a mixed response by the state. In 1922 the South African authorities deployed the army and police against miners striking to uphold the color bar, leaving hundreds dead. Over the following two decades, however, both South Africa and Southern Rhodesia implemented Industrial Conciliation Acts, formalized color bars, reserved particular jobs for whites, and prohibited black trade unions in order to placate white demands and institutionalize skin color privilege over African workers (Alexander 2000; Krikler 2005). Despite the protection of color bars, however, the fear of undercutting or replacement by indigenous laborers remained a constant feature of white workers’ existence, intensifying from the mid‐twentieth century with the growth of manufacturing industries that demanded skilled workforces in numbers that could not be filled by the white population at superficially inflated rates of pay. In Rhodesia, Doris Lessing noted that “many of the white artisans are right to be afraid”: Many of them are poor human material; not only are their standards of skill very low, but they are degraded by their attitude towards the Africans, who are, after all, their fellow workers. Faced with competition from Africans, who are avid for education and new skills, with all the irresistible energy of a suppressed people, they know they will go to the wall unless protected: white trade‐union policy is in essence to protect that section of the white workers who intend to rely not on their skills or their industry or their education, but on the colour of their skins. (Lessing 1996: 87)

Lessing’s commentary here goes beyond a merely economic account. “Poor human material” intimates a lack of mettle (or, as imperialists saw it, “character”). While some employers regarded their white laborers with disdain, white workers themselves saw their own presumed characteristics  –  skilled labor and hard work – as foundational qualities of their race. Whereas nineteenth‐century writers had agitated over the possible degeneration of Europeans on contact with Africans, Lessing saw poor whites as degraded by their racial insecurity. For settlers, however poor, race was non‐negotiable  –  because their position of (relative) advantage depended on it. As work on the psychology of settler rule in Africa has shown, that inflexible commitment to an ideology of racial difference generated particular kinds of anxiety and foreboding (Krikler 1993; Swart 2009; Jackson 2013a, 2013b; Shadle 2015). What needs to be further explored are the ways in which this particular psychology contributed to the quality and extent of settler violence. Consider, for example, the following account of a manslaughter trial held in Kenya in 1934: A European woman and four Africans were convicted of manslaughter after having beaten five Africans so severely that one died. After the beatings the Africans were



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locked in a [storeroom] for the night; the next day the farm owner said, “I cannot allow baboons to be placed in my car,” and the men were obliged to walk to Kitale some seventeen miles away, arriving in a state of collapse. The European woman was ill and her husband dying; in consequence she was awarded a light sentence of one year. The husband, a former Indian Army major, had arrived in Kenya in 1920 and the years since then had been ones of financial struggle and of declining health; the violence was the outcome. (Clayton and Savage 1974: 174)

Violence reflected failure; financial struggle and declining health resulted in what Lessing referred to as racial degradation. The stress of the settler’s struggle to succeed spilled over into random acts of violence, perpetrated upon – one might be tempted to think – whichever “native” was nearest to hand: a universal hate object. In fact, the kinds of social situations in which violence flared up are themselves significant. The dispersal of alienation and anxiety through the settler population was highly variegated: the projecting of settlers’ fears onto Africans was itself structured by the peculiar contradictions of class, culture, and respectability in the settler colony. Significantly, the case that comes closest to the exterminatory syndrome associated with Wolfe’s “elimination” thesis is that of the continent’s shortest‐lived settler colony: German South West Africa. While some historians have linked the massacres of the Herero in 1904 to the genocide of the Jews during World War II, an alternative framing might connect genocidal violence in South West Africa to an earlier “poor white problem” within Europe itself (Zimmerer 2007; Conrad 2013). Settlement overseas offered one way to improve national population stocks “at home.” If the killing of the Herero anticipates the killing of the Jews, both are anticipated by the prior identification of the work‐shy and the unfit within Europe itself throughout the nineteenth century. Nineteenth‐century work camps in Germany were part of a program of social engineering that had its mirror in the clearance of African land to make way for the German settler. The anachronism of the settler colony – that saw redemption from industrialization in honest manual work  –  was reflected in the fantasies of the work colonies in both Europe and southern Africa (Roos 2011). Certainly, this improving impulse was not limited to Germany. It is evident in the French use of Algeria as a depot for rebels following the 1848 Revolutions, in the organized emigration of impoverished children by the British to the Cape in the 1840s (and to Southern Rhodesia 80 years later), and in the settlement of ex‐service personnel in Kenya in the wake of World War I (Duder 1993; Boucher 2014). The designs of Portuguese authorities to rid the metropole of unwanted elements meant that poor whites formed the backbone of settlement in Angola and Mozambique, both of which were incorporated into Portugal’s wider global system of penal exile that lasted into the mid‐twentieth century. While the Namibian case comes closest to the eliminations of indigenous ­peoples in New Zealand, Australia, and North America, comparable episodes of

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exterminatory violence can be found across the continent, from the French suppression of Algerian resistance in the 1840s to the Eastern Cape frontier wars to the pacification of the Nandi in British East Africa in the 1900s. Settlers in Africa did not succeed in reducing indigenous peoples to social marginality, but the genocidal impulse can nonetheless be clearly discerned, not least in the anticipatory consciousness by which settlers steeled themselves for native rebellion. Despite their attempts to keep themselves apart from Africans, settlers in Africa could not help but encounter on a daily basis the very phenomena that settler culture had constructed as carriers of contagion and objects of disgust. At the same time, settlers could never forget their professed historical role as bearers of peace and progress and as role models for civilization. Few took seriously the idea that Africans would develop sufficiently to render the settlers’ own position in Africa irrelevant but they were bound nonetheless to repeatedly and publicly profess the imperial mantle of a civilizing mission, not least because, so long as they remained minorities, settlers remained dependent on their “home” nations for ideological replenishment no less than for material support. This state of dual dependence – on populous African populations on the one hand and on metropolitan powers on the other – was the perennial feature of the settler colonies in Africa. That dual dependence also explains the implications of the settler colonies for Europe itself. It is an axiom of the new imperial history that metropole and colony be envisaged within a single analytical field. But the African settler colonies implicated the metropolitan powers in the unraveling of their empires in ways that colonies without settlers did not do. The experiences of Algeria, Angola, German South West Africa, Kenya, Mozambique, and Southern Rhodesia brought the empire home, to London, Paris, Lisbon, and Berlin in decisive and particular ways. Histories of white Africans are necessary, then, to any understanding of “Europe” itself. The French concept of assimilation reflected this interpenetration. Unlike British imperial ideology, the French considered their colonial possessions as indivisible from France itself. While in the British experience it was the rule of racial difference that legitimated the unequal distribution of power, for the French assimilation held out the future prospect of creating French men and women from colonized populations. In Algeria that prospect was flawed, first, by the undeniable reality of cultural difference (North Africa was not France and could not be rendered as such, regardless of the extent to which indigenous culture was denigrated or disavowed) and, second, by the no less uncompromising insistence on the part of the settlers that France without Algeria was unthinkable. The Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) represents the culmination of these antagonistic forces. Notably, of the 984,000 Europeans in Algeria at the start of the war, over 80 percent had been born in the colony. Since the start of the century, and markedly since World War I, meanwhile, a coherent French Algerian identity had taken root. Hence, the apparent contradiction of an increasing



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indigenization of the European settlers alongside an intensification of their attachment to a “home” elsewhere. The fragility of the settlers’ position here is key. Settlers’ claims to belong in Algeria were negated always by the presence of “native” Muslim Algerians. Only the idea that Algeria was in fact a part of France could make settlers feel at home there. The war dispelled that myth. But, beyond the collapse of the settler colony, the Algerian war reverberated through the subsequent histories of both Algeria and France. So mutually entangled had the two become that their pulling apart created legacies of profound and lasting human loss. During the war itself, 300,000 mostly Muslim Algerians died. Millions were displaced. Torture was routine (Horne [1977] 2006). But it was the very conceptual premise of the French possession of Algeria – that, in the words of François Mitterand in 1954, “Algeria is France” – that determined both the intractable nature of the conflict and the nature of its repercussions for the postcolonial nation‐state. As was also the case in Kenya, Rhodesia, and the Portuguese colonies, an anticolonial struggle contained its own inner conflict (Finnegan 1993; Kriger 2008; Branch 2009). At independence, the Harkis, Algerians who found themselves on the French side of the war, were massacred in their tens of thousands. Many of those who survived fled to France, unwelcome reminders of a history that the French themselves preferred to forget. In Vincent Crapanzano’s words, the Harkis were like figures in a Greek tragedy, “betraying and betrayed, abandoned, ostracised and exiled to an alien land where they would always remain strangers” (Crapanzano 2011: 4). They were joined by 1 million settler refugees and over 2 million conscripted French soldiers. Today, the legacy of France’s overseas empire has little to do with Vietnam and the South Pacific and everything to do with Algeria and the Muslim world (Shepard 2006). Of the British settler colonies, it is Southern Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 that is most closely comparable to the Algerian settlers’ steadfast denial of decolonization (White 2015). Here, too, it is the settler presence that explains the violence of the anticolonial struggle. Unlike the French in Algeria, however, the British were not prepared to lend the settlers military support. In part, that reflects the degree of self‐determination that Southern Rhodesia already enjoyed; in part it reflects a straightforward matter of timing: by 1965 British policymakers had reconciled themselves to the conversion of their empire to a commonwealth and the realignment of British interests through European integration and the American alliance. By 1965 white minority rule was, to large sections of British popular opinion, anachronistic. Yet more significant, British policy in southern Africa was shaped by the earlier experience of the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya. Militarily, that conflict had been won but its contribution to the dawning political realization that metropolitan and settler interests were no longer compatible was profound. The popular disclosure of beatings, torture, and summary execution in the course of the British counterinsurgency, meanwhile, fatally undermined the credibility for mobilizing an armed

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intervention on behalf of settlers who refused to accept (or perhaps did not yet understand) the new ideological climate of the postwar world. It has been a central theme of this chapter that settler communities in Africa were weak: anxious, ideologically anachronistic, torn by competing demands, and unable to attract enough settler migrants to constitute independent nation‐states. During the period of decolonization, however, a clear divergence becomes apparent. In Algeria, Mozambique, and Angola, settlers left en masse. In the anglophone colonies, “white flight” was a much more protracted affair, with many moving to South Africa from Kenya, Southern Rhodesia, and elsewhere on the continent. For those who remained, retaining British citizenship ensured a right to belong combined with the luxury to leave. At the same time, the number of international expatriates (in Kenya in particular) has increased significantly. Theirs is a cosmopolitan cultural and political intuition but their relations with black Africans are framed nonetheless by their status as resource‐rich outsiders (McIntosh 2016). While outlier figures dominate media interest (consider the homicide trial of Thomas Cholmondeley in Kenya or the murder of Eugène Terre’Blanche in South Africa), far more complicated continuities of colonial (or “neocolonial”) power persist. Tourist travel, international development, and media discourse each present hugely significant constellations of power and knowledge that not only have their roots deep in the settler colonial past but have today transformed what were once the pioneer and prospector towns of the settler colonies – Nairobi and Johannesburg in particular – into major regional hubs for the transformation of the continent itself. Scholarship on settler societies, meanwhile  –  our own emphasis on urbanization notwithstanding – has begun to signal a return to what remains the keystone of the settler colonial dispensation: land (Beinart 2008; Foster 2008; Hughes 2010; Neumann 2013). Today, struggles over environmental resources pit local communities against powerful competitors both within the state and beyond the nations’ borders. The construction, control and consumption of the African environment – indeed the very idea of the African environment itself – now raise new questions over what it means to be a settler, a migrant, and indeed an African.

Notes 1 South Africa had the largest settler population, in both absolute and relative terms, rising from 250,000 in 1870 to 1.5 million in the 1920s and to over 3 million by 1960, but it never exceeded 21 percent of the population. 2 A considerable literature has developed on policies and practices of assimilation across settler societies. See, for just two examples, Haskins (2005) and Ellinghaus (2006). 3 In part this was due to the progressive extension of citizenship, first to Algeria’s Jews in 1870, then to Algerian‐born children of foreign migrants in 1889. Until the 1930s it was the European settlers who were known as Algerians; Arabs and Berbers were known as indigènes. 4 British East Africa was not renamed Kenya until 1920.



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Foster, Jenny. 2008. Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Haskins, Victoria K. 2005. One Bright Spot. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Horne, Alistair. [1977] 2006. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962. London: Macmillan. Hyslop, Jonathan. 1999. “The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself ‘White’: White Labourism in Britain, Australia, and South Africa Before the First World War.” Journal of Historical Sociology 12(4): 398–421. Hyslop, Jonathan. 2014. “‘Undesirable Inhabitant of the Union’ … ‘Supplying Liquor to Natives’: D. F. Malan and the Deportation of South Africa’s British and Irish Lumpen Proletariat, 1924–1933.” Kronos 40(1): 178–197. Isaacman, Allen, and Barbara Isaacman. 1976. “The Prazeros as Transfrontiersmen: A Study in Social and Cultural Change.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 8(1): 1–39. Jackson, Will. 2013a. Madness and Marginality: The Lives of Kenya’s White Insane. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jackson, Will. 2013b. “Dangers to the Colony: Loose Women and the ‘Poor White’ Problem in Kenya.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 14(2). Kriger, Norma. 1988. “The Zimbabwean War of Liberation: Struggles within the Struggle.” Journal of Southern African Studies 14(2): 304–322. Krikler, Jeremy. 1993. “Social Neurosis and Hysterical Precognition in South Africa: A Case Study and Reflections.” South African Historical Journal 28(1): 63–97. Krikler, Jeremy. 2005. White Rising: The 1922 Insurrection and Racial Killing in South Africa. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lake, Marilyn, and Henry Reynolds, eds. 2008. Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lessing, Doris. 1996. Going Home. London: Harper Perennial. Lester, Alan, and Fae Dussart. 2014. Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth Century British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacDonald Andrew. 2014. “Forging the Frontiers: Travellers and Documents on the South Africa–Mozambique Border, 1890s–1940s.” Kronos 40(1): 154–177. McDermott Hughes, David. 2010. Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape and the Problem of Belonging. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McIntosh, Janet. 2016. Unsettled: Denial and Belonging among White Kenyans. Berkeley: University of California Press. Morrell, Robert, ed. 1992. White but Poor: Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa, 1880–1940. Pretoria: University of South Africa. Neumann, Roderick. 2013. “Churchill and Roosevelt in Africa: Performing and Writing Landscapes of Race, Empire and Nation.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103(6): 1371–1388. Newitt, M. D. D. 1973. Portuguese Settlement on the Zambesi: Exploration, Land Tenure and Colonial Rule in East Africa. London: Longman. Roos, Neil. 2011. “Work Colonies and South African Historiography.” Social History 36(1): 54–76.



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Ross, Robert. 1983. Cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Shadle, Brett. 2015. Souls of White Folk: White Settlers in Kenya, 1900s–1920s. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Shell, Robert. 1994. Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press. Shepard, Todd. 2006. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sparks, Alistair. 1995. Tomorrow Is Another Country: Inside Story of South Africa’s Road to Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stora, Benjamin. 2001. Algeria, 1830–2000: A Short History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stora, Benjamin. 2005. “The ‘Southern’ World of the Pieds‐Noir: References to and Representations of Europeans in Colonial Algeria.” In Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies, edited by Carolyn Elkins and Susan Pedersen, 225–241. New York: Routledge. Strachan, John. 2013. “From Poverty to Wretchedness: Albert Camus and the Psychology of the Pieds‐Noirs.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 14(2). Swart, Sandra. 2009. “The Terrible Laughter of the Afrikaner: Towards a Social History of Humour.” Journal of Social History 42(4): 889–917. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2011. “Introducing.” Settler Colonial Studies 1(1): 1–12. White, Luise. 2015. Unpopular Sovereignty: Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, Raymond. 1976. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: HarperCollins. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8(4): 387–409. Yedes, Ali. 2003. “Social Dynamics in Colonial Algeria: The Question of Pieds‐Noirs Identity.” In French Civilisation and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race, edited by Tyler Stovall and Georges Van Den Abbeele, 235–250. Plymouth, NH: Lexington Books. Zimmerer, Jürgen. 2007. “Colonial Genocide: The Herero and Nama War (1904–1908) in German South Africa and Its Significance.” In The Historiography of Genocide, edited by Dan Stone, 323–343. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Further Reading Elkins, Caroline, and Susan Pedersen, eds. 2005. Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies. New York: Routledge.

Part II

Women’s Roles in Institutions of Power

Chapter Six

Women, Authority, and Power in Precolonial Southeast Africa: The Production and Destruction of Historical Knowledge on Queen Mother Ntombazi of the Ndwandwe Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu This chapter focuses on the role of powerful and authoritative African women who participated in mainstream networks of power and politics in the area now referred to as the province of KwaZulu‐Natal. They exercised their power during two distinct periods – preconquest and during colonial times – but they had to contend with male cultural brokers, intellectuals, and ideologues who controlled the production of knowledge. Rival monarchies such as the Ndwandwe and the Zulu did not need military strategies and sophisticated weapons of the day to destroy each other. They also employed cultural brokers and ideologues to achieve their aims and objectives. The resulting battles for minds meant that the word, and later the pen, was mightier than the assegai and the shield. To prove this point, I will pay particular attention to Queen Mother Ntombazi of the Ndwandwe. In his book Emperor Shaka the Great (1979: xxxiii) Mazisi Kunene notes that Queen Mother Ntombazi was “one of the politically most influential women of the pre‐Shakan and Shakan eras.” Probably one of the best‐known powerful women of the region was Queen Regent Mantathisi of the Batlokwa, who assumed power during the turbulent years in southern Africa, in the period 1815–1824 (Etherington 2001). The Batlokwa warrior queen regent, together with her contemporaries, Queen Mother Ntombazi of the Ndwandwe, Queen Regent Mnkabayi of amaZulu and later, Queen Regent Novimbi okaMsweli also of amaZulu,1 challenged misconceptions propagated through feminist discourse that African women – as victims of A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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patriarchal oppression since time immemorial  –  did not exercise power and authority in their respective societies. Jordan Ngubane asserts: There were other great luminaries in the galaxy of female stars. Ntombazi among the Ndwandwe ordered her son, Zwide, to behead the princes he conquered in the battle. She stuck their heads on pegs and displayed them in a special hut where she kept the state medicines of the mighty Ndwandwe people. Mnkabayi kaJama once commanded the Zulu army and was an effective kingmaker. Across the Drakensburg, there was the great and dreaded Mantantisi of the Batlokwa, the mother of Sigonyela. A brilliant and fearless general, she spread terror, destruction and carnage over much of what later was to be Southern Transvaal and the Orange Free State. (Ngubane 1976: 134)

I have also raised similar issues in a chapter in relation to Regent Queen Mnkabayi ka Jama (Ndlovu 2008). Using isiZulu language, izibongo, and oral traditions as major sources of information in constituting world sense, mapping historical changes, and interpreting the social structure of the Zulu Kingdom, I argue that Regent Queen Mnkabayi exercised considerable power and authority as a very senior member of the Zulu royal house (Ndlovu 2008).2 Another powerful woman whose character is captured by existing oral traditions and izibongo is Queen Nandi kaMbengi, King Shaka’s mother. Kunene argues that she was one of most famous women in Zulu history, not only because she was King Shaka’s mother but also on account of her own personal qualities (Kunene 1957). Though Ngubane claims that Queen Mother Ntombazi ordered her son, Zwide ka Langa, to behead rivals of the Ndwandwe monarchy, which include amaZulu, this chapter shows that this was not so. The chapter also highlights that both izibongo zika Ntombazi and oral traditions of the Ndwandwe, including the oral traditions of the queen mother of the Ndwandwe, were obliterated by their rivals, amaZulu. The chapter analyzes why they did this and considers the fact that the oral traditions of her contemporaries, Regent Queen Mnkabayi and Queen Nandi among others, are readily available today. For example, izibongo zika Nandi, as composed by Magolwane kaMkhathini Jiyane, reads as follows: uSomnqeni uMathanga kawahlangani, Ahlangana ngokubona umyeni uGedegede lwasenhla nenkundla Uphoko‐phalala kuMaqhwakazi Angibonanga uphoko ukuphalala Umboni wamabhungez’ uSontanti uSontanti onjengowakwaGwazana Udl’ ubisi lwenkomo enezimpondo Ukwesaba abayisengayo Intombi kaMbengi weNguga



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kaSoyengwase kaMaqamede uXebe woMhlathuze Mfaz’ ontangade zingamadoda Uyishaye yanyus’ iSabiza Obengabafana base Nguga Abeza beluhayizana!3

Izibongo zika Nandi captures the complex three‐pronged relationship between mother (Nandi), father (Senzangakhona), and son (Shaka). Like her contemporary and sister‐in‐law, Regent Queen Mnkabayi, Queen Nandi had indeed a masculine character that imbongi alludes to as “uSomnqeni,” “uSontanti,” and “mfazi ontangade zingamadoda.” The prefix “so” in isiZulu represents a male while the prefix “no” is used if this is not the case, and therefore the first line, “uSomnqeni,” should read “uNomnqeni.” Nandi was a powerful woman of iron will. These qualities are revealed in izibongo zika Nandi, and therefore African women are not perennial weaklings as is often observed in various literatures. Yes, she was masculine but this does not qualify her as a “savage” woman as some of the white colonizers, travelers, writers, and amateur historians would like us to believe (Isaacs 1936). She was extrovert, suspicious in nature, and quarrelsome in fighting for her rights and was neither passive nor submissive to Prince Shaka’s father, and hence imbongi says of her “uGedegede lwasenhla nenkundla” (Kunene 1957). Perhaps this was an account of her bitterness about life, which had not treated her very kindly; together with her son, she was unceremoniously ejected from esiKlebeni (the royal palace) by Senzangakhona, the Zulu monarch. The line “Uyishaye yanyus’ iSabiza” depicts the tough life faced by both mother and son who did not have the support of the Zulu monarch. Though homeless, Queen Nandi did all she could do to protect her young son, showering him with love, tenderness, and care. Later the Mthethwa monarchy, under Dingiswayo, offered shelter to both mother and son (Kunene 1967;4 Vilakazi 1939). We do not have empowering oral traditions that provide us with analytical tools that will enable us to reconstruct the life history of Queen Mother Ntombazi. What we have are representations constructed by Zulu cultural brokers and ideologues in precolonial times. There is a growing literature on women, power, and society in Africa. In The Cultural Unity of Black Africa, the Senegalese writer Cheik Anta Diop (1978) provides an insight into African warrior queens in defense of their respective nations (see also Van Sertima 1985). He observes that most societies that are not European are mainly matrilineal, that is, the lines of descent are traced through the mother. Hence Diop’s observation that “it is the man who brings dowry to the woman” (1978: 11). This proves, if proof were needed, that the women in these old societies had rights that were respected. John Henrik Clarke takes the view that in Africa the woman’s place was not only with her family but she often ruled nations with unquestioned authority. Many African women were great militarists and on occasion led armies in battle.

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Long before they knew of the existence of Europe, Africans had developed a way of life whereby men were secure enough to let women advance as far as their talents would take them (Clarke 1984: 123). During the rise of the great dynasties in Egypt, Kush, and Ethiopia, African women made impressive strides and some became heads of state. Diop notes that during the entire period of the pharaohs in Egypt African women enjoyed complete freedom, in contrast to the segregated lives experienced by European women of antiquity and classical times, whether Greek or Roman (Clarke 1984; Diop 1978). Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt (1505–1485 bce), the first warrior queen in African history, ruled Egypt for 21 years in spite of the enmity and intrigue of her stepson and his adherents; her reign was a calm interlude between the old Egypt, still bound to the Nile Valley, which kept peace with its neighbors, and the new mightier Egypt of war and conquest that was still to come. One of African’s warrior queens, Queen Makeda of what is now known as Ethiopia is better known in history as the queen of Sheba. There are conflicting interpretations of her life in many books including the Bible, the Talmud, and the Qur’an. She also features in the legends of Syria, Israel, Egypt, and Ethiopia. Her fight was more diplomatic than military. In southern Africa the warrior queen Ndzinga of Angola never accepted the Portuguese conquest of her country and was always on the military offensive. Other warrior queens included Madame Tinubu of Nigeria, Kaipkire of the Herero, and Yaa Asantewa, the queen mother of the Ashanti (Clarke 1984). Onaiwu Ogbomo observes that a number of hints in the oral tradition and documents from all regions of the African continent show that its people were once matriarchal. Now 80 percent of Africa live within some form of patriarchy. While some writers have argued that matriarchy was invented by males to demonstrate the failure of female rule, Ogbomo contends that what happened in Africa was that oral traditions as relayed by men from generation to generation began for each community where males began to rule. Rather than discrediting matriarchies, African oral tradition mostly ignored them. According to him, true matriarchy includes (1) female rule; (2) matrilinealism, that is, tracing relationship through the mother; (3) matrilocality, whereby related females dominated settlements, adult males being mostly strangers; and (4) a pantheon of goddesses (Ogbomo 2005: 354–356). As an example, we no longer worship, speak, or write about our goddesses in southern Africa even though their rich oral traditions exist in the present. AmaZulu, or Africans in South Africa, no longer worship the goddess Nomkhubulwana. As Kunene correctly points out, Nomkhubulwana is the goddess of change, continuity, and ultimate balance of life. Ceremonies in honor of her activated positive forces of growth during precolonial times. In a world devastated by natural forces such as droughts, famine, and flooding, Nomkhubulwana intervened to restore the balance and to activate the forces of rebirth and growth for she, as the giver of rich life to the community, represents the seed of being (Kunene 1981). Hence, there is nothing superstitious or irrational about the concept of rebirth, as colonial discourse on African cosmology would have us believe.



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Zulu cultural brokers and the obliteration of Queen Mother Ntombazi’s image Queen Mother Ntombazi of the Ndwandwe was one of the most powerful queen mothers in southeastern Africa, the area now referred to as KwaZulu‐Natal. She was probably born during the mid‐eighteenth century and was effectively in charge of the Ndwandwe kingdom ruled by her son Zwide. Not much is written about her, and existing oral traditions seem to portray negative images about her. But this should not deter those who are interested in knowing the meaning, the power, and the authority yielded by a queen mother in any given precolonial African society. The Ndwandwe kingdom was the dominant force from 1750 to 1820 in what is now KwaZulu‐Natal. The kingdom’s role has been neglected because its history has been overshadowed and obliterated by the successor Zulu state. Historians who study the pre‐Shakan and post‐Shakan period, including myself, are of the view that, in our quest to liberate the African voice and to recover our neglected precolonial history, the Ndwandwe should be at the epicenter of such history. In this regard, the Zulu Kingdom emerged as one of several important African states during this era. But it was the product rather than the cause of a long period of political upheaval, the so‐called Mfecane, which was allegedly fermented by the “bloodthirsty” King Shaka ka Senzangakhona. In most historical texts, Mzilikazi kaMashobane Khumalo is usually seen as a migrant and refugee from the Zulu Kingdom. More accurately, he moved away to escape upheavals caused by the wars between the Ndwandwe, Mthethwa, and Zulu monarchies. Others are of the view that the career of his kingdom was far more disruptive than that of the Zulu empire, but I do not think this is necessarily the case. Also, the powerful Gaza kingdom under Soshangane in southern and central Mozambique is another state that has been neglected in South African history, even though it exercised considerable influence on the history of what are now the Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces in South Africa. In terms of the geographical area that this kingdom occupied, it was the biggest of the African states of this period. Since both Mzilikazi and Soshangane were related to the Ndwandwe, my argument is that the Ndwandwe were connected with the migrations into southern Africa during precolonial times and therefore it is critical to study and write their history. These issues are discussed in most of the historical novels that are important in producing historical knowledge on Queen Mother Ntombazi. They will be analyzed later in this chapter. The cultural obliteration and destruction of Queen Mother Ntombazi’s image and status occurred immediately after King Zwide was defeated by his perennial rival King Shaka in the early 1820s. Because both Shaka and Zwide were prototypes who believed in militaristic expansion through conquering other polities, I believe that Ogbomo’s argument about the production of knowledge by male ideologues can be extended to cultural brokers and intellectuals representing the ruling Zulu elites. After the defeat of the Ndwandwe kingdom, the Zulu elites

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made it a point to erase historical knowledge about the Ndwandwe. This also explains why nineteenth‐century oral traditions characterize Queen Mother Ntombazi of the Ndwandwe in exceedingly negative terms. Oral traditions on Queen Mother Ntombazi are scarce. The existing ones emphasize what turns out to be a chilling two‐dimensional image. While oral tradition and izibongo of women with rare ability, such as Regent Queen Mnkabayi and Regent Queen Mantathisi the warrior queen of Batlokwa, are well preserved and accessible in vernacular languages, that is, in both isiZulu and Sesotho, it is inexplicable why izibongo zika Ntombazi are not readily available in the present (Ndlovu 2008, 2017). It is also worth noting that existing oral traditions about her emphasize a violent and chilling image. She is often portrayed as a cruel, domineering queen mother, a sorcerer who issued a standing order to the Ndwandwe army to behead her son’s arch‐rivals after each battle. In his historical epic Emperor Shaka the Great, Kunene uses oral traditions to describe her: Zwide was the king of the Ndwandwes of the Nxumalos. He was son of the frightful Queen Ntombazi. In a house set aside for the purpose She put the skulls of many famous victims. Everywhere along the walls gazed the skulls of once great‐men … Queen Ntombazi was, like a wizard, feared by her own children. It was she who egged Zwide on to interminable battles. She made him pursue all victims into their fortresses of stone. Never before in Nguniland was known such a disgrace. (Kunene 1979: 70–71)

Zuluist cultural brokers, ideologues, and knowledge producers who operated in precolonial times obviously played a central role in the construction of oral traditions that promoted negative stereotypes about Queen Mother Ntombazi and the Ndwandwe monarchy. These destructive images were later used by Kunene, Ngubane, and others in the production of historical knowledge about the queen mother. Apparently she kept the decapitated heads of rival monarchs in her royal household to serve as proof that her beloved son’s reign was not threatened. These oral traditions were recorded by James Stuart5 in October 1921, when he interviewed Socwatsha ka Phaphu, who asserted the following about “Indhlu kaNtombazi kaLanga”: Indhlu yake ya y’akisa okwezindhlu zonke nje. uZwide ke, u beti, um’ e bulele ‘inkosi enye, kuqunyw’ ikanda layo, li yo panyekw’ emsamo kwa Ntombazi. Onk’ amakos’ a ye w’ ahlula, wa ye w’nze njalo. uZwide, amakanda u wa lengisa nje, ku kon’ inkata ye‐mp’ emsamo. U ya ba qonela. U ya wa nyatela. Kutiwa kwa ku nga ngeni muntu ku leyo‐ndhlu. U bet’ o ngenayo, e sa fak’ ikanda nje, a juluk’ a be manzi, ati minci, a‐we pansi, ngoba ku leng’ izinhloko za makosi lap’ emsamo. Se ku isiga, lap’ umuntu ebizw’ e sendhlini‐ umntwana, ingabe uyise, noma umnewabo ini‐ u‐ti: “Kade ngi ku biz’ u nge‐zi ngob’ u‐ti ngi nge ngene lapho endhlini, ngob’



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u kwa Ntombazi ka Langa, lapa ku nga ngenwa? A ngi ngene kona lapo, ngi ku tshaye!” Babuze‐ke a ba ng’aziyo, ba‐ti: “Ha(w)u! Kwa Ntombazi lapa, kwa ku nga ngenwa, ini?” Se be tata lona leli elikade li kulunywa.6

The second part of Socwatsha ka Phaphu’s testimony is about the queen mother’s royal house which was supposedly a den of occult practices, and it is also about the Zulu proverb specifically referring to the queen mother of the Ndwandwe. Stuart also published Socwatsha ka Phaphu’s version about “Indhlu kaNtombazi kaLanga” 15 years after collecting the testimony. The passage quoted here is also published as a very short chapter in uTulasizwe (Stuart 1936: 46), one of Stuart’s isiZulu primers, which were later extensively used in teaching isiZulu language and literature. Subsequently, the queen mother has been represented in oral traditions collected by Stuart as irrational, superstitious, and worthy of destruction. The existence of occult practices and alleged widespread of witchcraft practice within the Ndwandwe royal house as elaborated by Stuart might perhaps be linked to the relentless historic obsession of Europeans with the alleged widespread practice of witchcraft in Africa. In this discourse African women are often portrayed as sorcerers with no ethical regard for the well‐being of the broader society, hence the views expressed in the last three lines of the oral traditions on Ntombazi. Apparently, there exists an isiZulu saying based on the inaccessibility of Ntombazi’s quarters, “Ha (w) u! Kwa Ntombazi lapa, kwa ku nga ngenwa, ini?” Security to the royal household was very tight, in particular where the king, queen, and queen mother resided, and this is still the case today. John Wright (1989), Carolyn Hamilton (1998), and others have analyzed the strength and weaknesses of Stuart’s systematic collection of African oral traditions. I shall not repeat their convincing arguments about the importance of Stuart’s work in relation to writing the precolonial history of southern Africa. I have also commented elsewhere about the use of historical novels by African intellectuals who made a conscious decision to use vernacular to write their own stories (Ndlovu 2017). In all the prefaces of his isiZulu primers, Stuart acknowledges the important role of his “informants” or of public intellectuals, such as Socwatsha ka Phaphu, as active producers of knowledge about African societies (see also Wright 2015). He also highlights the obvious fact about his work – that it is not definitive – as he has just scratched the surface. In this regard, note the following standard paragraph in the preface of his ­isiZulu primers: Izindaba‐ke, ne zinganekwane, ne zibongo, ne ziga, nani‐nani, konk’ o ku butane lapa, na kwe ziny’ izincwadi e zi kanye na le, kwa tatwa ku Bant’ abamnyama. Le nhlanganisela eyabo. Izinhlobonhlobo ze zindab’ ezilibazisayo ne zihlekisayo, ezivusayo ne zisizayo, zigcwele kubona, kakulu kwa badala. Okuningi, o ku sal’ emuva. (Stuart 1936: 5)

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Socwatsha ka Phaphu, in his oral testimony recorded in the James Stuart Archives, emphasized that: KwaZulu izindaba ezindala bezingaxoxwa, ngob’ [umuntu] esekela igazi lake lingacitheki … umuntu kwaZulu wayehlala esekele igazi lake. Ngoba umuntu ukhuluma ngomlomo nje uzakufa, ngoba kuthiwa ukhuluma lokhu, wa ku thathaphi. (Stuart 1936: 5)

He asserts that freedom of speech was curtailed within the Zulu Kingdom. He emphasizes that it is difficult to dabble in politics that dares to question the authority of those in power. The implications are that supporters of the rival Ndwandwe monarchy, as Zulu subjects after Shaka ka Senzangakhona had defeated Zwide ka Langa, were not free to express their views. Socwatsha ka Phaphu’s oral testimony may also explain the scarcity of oral traditions relating to Queen Mother Ntombazi, including the fact that existing Zulu oral traditions are extremely negative toward the Ndwandwe kingdom. If Socwatsha ka Phaphu’s oral testimony is contextualized within the broader precolonial history of southeastern Africa, one might agree with Wright, who posits that the history of the Ndwandwe kingdom is one of the great casualties of the particular circumstance in which southern Africa’s precolonial pasts were narrated and written from the 1820s onward. According to Wright (2008, 2010), the break‐ up of the Ndwandwe kingdom under King Sikhunyane ka Zwide, after its defeat under King Shaka ka Senzangakhona in 1826, destroyed its ruling elite and ruptured the processes by which memories of the kingdom’s past were being transmitted orally by intellectuals linked to the elite. This is also reflected in the lines of izibongo zika Shaka: “Ntonga emmnyama kaMjokwane; Ize noZwide kwabakwaNdwandwe, Ize noNomhlanjana kaZwide, Ize noSikhunyana kaZwide” (Cope 1968: 113). Furthermore, Wright contends that King Zwide ka Langa and the Ndwandwe kingdoms were occasionally mentioned in white settler historical writings from the 1820s onward, but always very briefly and in passing, and usually as role players in the rise and expansion of the Zulu Kingdom. Mostly the references were often confusing, to one or other of three particular episodes: the wars fought in the late 1810s between Zwide ka Langa and Dingiswayo ka Jobe, king of the Mthethwa and patron of the young Prince Shaka; the wars fought around 1819 to around 1820 between Zwide and Shaka, wars that were portrayed as having ended in defeat of the Ndwandwe by the Zulu; and the battle fought in 1826 between the Zulu and a revived Ndwandwe polity under Sikhunyane ka Zwide. Furthermore, Bhambatha Benedict Wallet Vilakazi, the Zulu scholar and intellectual, did not mention a single word about the queen mother of the Ndwandwe in his 1939 isiZulu historical novel on Dingiswayo ka Jobe, even though her son, King Zwide, features prominently in the novel (Vilakazi 1939). Moreover, Vilakazi, like other authors, dwells extensively on the battle between amaZulu and the Ndwandwe that took place around 1820.



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The various texts occasionally made references to the role played by the Ndwandwe monarchy in the early 1820s in driving away the people under the leadership of Mzilikazi kaMashobane who went on to form the core group of the amaNdebele kingdom in Zimbabwe, though more and more, as the century progressed, this expulsion was attributed to the Zulu under King Shaka. Another group of Ndwandwe, which had broken away from Zwide’s rule in about 1820 under the leadership of Soshangane kaZikode, went on to establish what the Gaza kingdom in southern and central Mozambique became (Wright 2008: 217–219; Vilakazi 1939). Furthermore, Wright argues that, in order to address these apparent shortcomings, we also need to consider archaeological evidence in our quest to understand the precolonial history of the powerful Ndwandwe monarchy (Wright 2008, 2010).

The production of literary texts on queen mother Ntombazi John Wright (2010) did not seem to be aware that throughout the twentieth century creative African writers fortified ideological views about the Ndwandwe polity by using existing oral traditions. These Zuluist literary representations were carried out by, among others, Joyce Jessie Gwayi, A. H. Dladla, Moses Ngcobo, Kunene, and Vilakazi. I shall focus my attention on the first three authors. All these historical novels include dialogue between the characters, and are written in the vernacular of isiZulu. Dladla’s historical novel, titled uNtombazi, is the only one which features Queen Mother Ntombazi as the leading character (Dladla 1979). Ngcobo’s novel, entitled Qhude Manikiniki, is based on the 1820 epic battle between the amaZulu and Ndwandwe monarchies polities (Ngcobo 1977). Gwayi’s novel is entitled Shumpu and was published in 1974 (Gwayi 1974). Kunene published his historical epic on King Shaka in 1979 (Kunene 1979). These historical novels and epic, underpinned by a Zuluist narrative, provided valuable primary evidence and served as historical sources in the production of historical knowledge on Queen Mother Ntombazi during the twentieth century. But it should be highlighted that Gwayi was married to Moses Ngcobo and was a nurse by profession. As a result, there is doubt as to whether she authored her novels (Mayekiso 1985). I have expressed my views elsewhere about the use of historical novels by African intellectuals who take a conscious decision to use the vernacular to write their own stories (S. M. Ndlovu 2017; see also Burness 1976). In Shumpu Joyce Gwayi, whose isiZulu historical novel relies on oral traditions, points out that “Shaka fought and killed Zwide and therefore obliterated everything that could revoke his memory [including that] of his Ndwandwe tribe” (Mayekiso 1985). In his epic on Emperor Shaka the Great, Kunene also acknowledges this point: Only Zwangendaba returned with the depleted army. Ahead of him Shaka sent a section of his own army

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Who, by singing Zwide’s victory songs, lured Zwide’s army to their defeat. The Mbonambi and Siphezi regiments set Zwide’s capital in flames, Sending the troublesome ruler to flee for his life. Thus was avenged by the many people and rulers Whom Ntombazi had kept for ridicule in her house. It was this macabre house that was kept intact; Here the Zulus ceremonially buried all Zwide’s victims, Performing all rites appropriate to them From every direction anthems of victory were sung. The regiments shouted their battle call: “Zulu Power is eternal From the lands of the setting sun.” (Kunene 1979: 172–173)

Kunene’s ideological battle call “Zulu power is eternal” influences various authors’ viewpoints on the relationship between the Ndwandwe and amaZulu and is part of the dominant archive that privileges the power and authority of the Zulu Kingdom. In order to emphasize this battle call, the written versions of oral traditions on Queen Mother Ntombazi create a picture of a sadistic female monarch. Though the isiZulu literary texts by Gwayi, Ngcobo, and Dladla pass as historical novels and drama, the use of historical events and characters, imagination, and creative language by the authors in constructing their narrative structure and storyline is apparent. These historical novels are often prescribed for students at secondary schools and universities and hence have influenced a large number of students throughout the years up to the present. They are still prescribed for students who study African literature at various universities in South Africa. With respect to the history of the Ndwandwe polity, these literary texts rigidly follow the very negative viewpoints and narrative as reflected by Socwatsha ka Phaphu. As a result, Regent Queen Ntombazi is portrayed by Gwayi, Ngcobo, Kunene, and Dladla through misogynistic metaphors, allegories, and other symbolic representations as an irrational sorcerer and superstitious demagogue engaged in mindless violence and devoid of any form of humanity. She is depicted as a savage, an uncouth barbarian, a scheming, evil‐hearted umthakathi (witch). The queen mother is further characterized in animalistic terms as a domineering control freak, as a potent snake that used human body parts for muthi and to cast a bad spell through ukucwiya (the dismemberment of bodies), which involves cutting off the victim’s body parts. Furthermore, the publications represent Ntombazi as a reincarnation of the devil, who manipulated her son King Zwide to attack and maim innocent victims from certain clans and monarchies so that the devil could expand his kingdom and rule southeastern Africa unchallenged. To illustrate the point and to identify Ntombazi with irrationality and witchcraft, Gwayi attributes the following words in a scene to the queen mother, “uma kubonakala ukuthi uGodongwane (uDingiswayo) uyasehlula ngezikhali esikhathini esizayo mina bengicabanga ukuba simthakathe Nxumalo.” But Zwide dismisses his mother’s irrational advice which is based on superstitious belief.



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He reasons that, in order to curtail the power of the Mthethwa, he should adopt effective military strategies. Hence Zwide’s perceptive observation: Usho ukuthi, mama, nami kuzomele ukuba ngiphenduke umthakathi ningakaze ngizwe nokuzwa ukuthi ubaba wake wawusebenzisa umuthi wokubulala omunye umuntu … Ubaba (Langa) wasakha lesizwe ngokusebenzisa izikhali. Nami ngizosebenzisa zona ngize ngiphumelele ezifisweni zami. (Gwayi 1974: 15–17)

But in her preface to Shumpu Gwayi informs us that she created the dialogue, which is not drawn from historical texts: Cishe ukuba lendaba iyiqiniso, njengoba bengafakaza abazaziyo ezomlando. Mina engikwenzile ukuguqula lapha nalaphaya. Ngabuye ngajobelela okuncane engikususa ekhanda. Engizothanda ukukuphawula nje phakathi kwezinto engiziguqulile yilokhu: eqinisweni isiphetho sikaZwangendaba sehlukile kulesi esikulencwadi. (1974: 7)

The title Shumpu uses strong and emotive language which has strong connotations of violent action linked to beheading and decapitation. Though Gwayi informs her readers that, though his fate does not correspond to existing historical fact, Zwangendaba is an important character in both her and Dladla’s texts for he, like Nxaba, Mzilikazi, and Soshangane, defines what might be referred to in historical terms as the “Ndwandwe diaspora.” Then a chief of the Jele section of the Ncwangweni, Zwangendaba was attacked by King Zwide and subsequently left the area around the early 1800s. He and his group finally settled around East Africa (present‐day border between Malawi and Tanzania border and also Zambia), with Zwangendaba as a ruler of the Ngoni (Chondoka 2017; Wright 2008, 2010). The Khumalo polity also features prominently in these literary works. Gwayi (1974: 79) informs readers that the Ndwandwe and the Khumalo polities were related through intermarriage, thus “uNompethu wayengenye yamadodakazi kaZwide, endele kuMashobane, inkosi yesinye sezizwe zakwaKhumalo ezintathu. Indodana yabo yokuqala kwakunguMzilikazi.” Both Gwayi and Ngcobo assert that Mashobane was King Zwide’s son‐in‐law and that Mzilikazi kaMashobane was his grandson. They also allege that both Mashobane and Mzilikazi were victims of the Ndwandwe royal household, having been slaughtered by Zwide. In one of scenes, Ngcobo, concurring with Gwayi, claims the following about a crestfallen Queen Mother Ntombazi who mourned the death of Mzilikazi: Wethuka uNtombazi ngoba esekhumbula ukufa kukaMashobana. Indodana yakhe lena [Zwide] yaya le eNgome yafika yamnqumela khona. Wabona ukuthi sekuphindile okwenzeka kumkhwenyana wakwakhe; manje ibuza (ngo)Mzilikazi nje ngoba n(a) ye seyimbulele yalithi shumpu ikhanda lakhe. Kwamdabukisa nje ukuthi selokhu kusile ubengakayi endlini yakhe yamakhanda. Ukuba nje ubeyile ubezofika alibone

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ikhanda lomntanomntanakhe. Nelika Mashobane wazibonela yena indodana yakhe lena ingasho lutho ngokuthi isiye yayomnquma le… “ngithuswa ukuthi mahlwumbe uMzilikazi umbulele” … (aphendule uZwide) … “kanti‐ke uhlushwa lubala nje. Akwenzile (uMzilikazi ngokuhlangana noShaka) kubi kakhulu kunalokhu okukuhluphayo. Ngokubona kwami bekungcono khona impela ukuba bengimbulele, sikhale kube kanye kwedlule.” (Ngcobo 1977: 61)

Dladla’s drama uNtombazi (1979), unlike Gwayi’s historical novel, does not have a preface. This is also the case with Ngcobo’s dialogical historical novel Qhude Manikiniki, which is about the famous and tumultuous battle between the military forces and warriors manned by Shaka and Zwide (Ngcobo 1977). Additionally, instead of including izibongo zika Ntombazi (for she is the main character), Dladla publishes an excerpt of izibongo zika Dingiswayo, whom the Zuluist Dladla, Gwayi, and Ngcobo revered immensely. The last line of izibongo zika Dingiswayo ka Jobe, the Mthethwa monarch, refers to Ntombazi but through the image of Dingiswayo represented as “Ilanga limdodoza, Elaphum’amakhwez’abikelana, NakwaNtombazi nakwaLanga.” Dladla uses this approach because he has to grapple with the fact that izibongo zika Ntombazi, unlike those of her contemporaries Mnkabayi and Nandi, do not exist in either written or spoken form. These oral texts have been completely obliterated from the collective memory by the cultural brokers and ideologues who sided with the amaZulu. Moreover, and on a different note, it is worth highlighting that Mnkabayi and other female monarchs of the Zulu Kingdom are not included in the official genealogy of the Zulu kings. The silence about Mthaniya, Mnkabayi ka Jama, and okaMsweli Mzimela as leaders of the Zulu Kingdom is deafening. Why were these senior female leaders excluded from and not represented in the genealogy of the Zulu kings? This is intriguing and puzzling, because izibongo and oral traditions, as rich archives, identify these female leaders as worthy Zulu monarchs. Ogbomo has argued that, rather than discrediting matriarchies, African oral tradition mostly ignores them, in this instance by excluding female leaders from official genealogies. Furthermore, Dladla’s, Gwayi’s, and Ngcobo’s literary narratives are explicitly underpinned by excessive sympathy and empathy for Dingiswayo ka Jobe, the Mthethwa monarch who was Zwide’s arch‐enemy. He is positively portrayed as a caring figurehead who molded the young Prince Shaka. These authors’ representations of Queen Mother Ntombazi also depended very much on oral traditions in relation to the battles between the Ndwandwe, the Mthethwa, and amaZulu. As characters, Dingiswayo and Shaka loom large in these isiZulu literary works which capture the military attacks, possibly two or three, launched by the expansionist Ndwandwe monarchy against the Zulu Kingdom with the aim of destroying it as a rising rival center of power in the period 1819–1820. The three authors also emphasize that mother and son, Zwide and Ntombazi, were very close to



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each other, as Shaka too was close to his mother, Nandi, who was offered shelter by the Mthethwa after they were evicted by King Senzangakhona. Oral traditions explaining the rise of the Zulu empire at the expense of the powerful Ndwandwe monarchy became an ideological tool used in the hands of Gwayi, Dladla, and Ngcobo to dismiss all those who posed a real threat to the rise of the Zulu empire and to portray them as tyrants and enemies worthy of being wiped off the face of the earth. Writing during the twentieth century under the oppressive rule of white South Africa, nationalistic Zulu authors highlighted a growing preoccupation with history. This was a continuation of Zulu ethnic nationalism, which began to appeal more strongly to the African elite through various institutional forms,one of which was the Zulu Society, formed in 1930. One of the society’s major aims was to preserve and promote the culture and customs of the “Zulu nation.” In this regard, and 45 years later, Gwayi, Dladla, and Ngcobo set out in search of heroes in order to explain their immediate past, and in Dingiswayo and Shaka they found such historical figures. Frustrated and embittered by racism and oppressive rule by the apartheid regime, these African authors turned to the cultural symbolism of the Zulu monarchy to redress to their grievances. At the end of the 1880s the Zulu Kingdom only had a notional existence. Its military power had been destroyed and the majority of its subjects turned into laborers; its leadership was fragmented and its social cohesion and administrative capacity broken. But this decline in the political power of the Zulu monarchy did not denote the end of its cultural and symbolic importance. By carefully analyzing existing oral traditions, these authors soon became conscious of the fact that if King Shaka did not hinder the progress of the expansionist Ndwandwe state, his importance and reputation as a nation builder and a founder of the mighty Zulu empire might have taken a different direction. Ideologically, Vilakazi, Gwayi, Dladla, and Ngcobo are pro‐Zulu nationalists and virulently against the Ndwandwe polity, for it posed a threat to the rise of the great empire and King Shaka’s rule. This viewpoint, though expressed in texts that pass as historical fiction, attests to the view that by the 1810s, if not before, the Ndwandwe monarchy, now under King Zwide ka Langa, was beginning to feel that its ability to maintain not only its sphere of influence but also the integrity of the kingdom itself were under threat. Within the core region of the kingdom, one of its responses was to tighten its hold over men of fighting age through the system of enrolling them into state‐controlled amabutho. Wright (2008, 2010) argues that it is likely at this stage the Ndwandwe were becoming better organized for warfare than any of their neighbors, including both the Mthethwa and the Zulu. This was partly because of rivalries which were developing in the early nineteenth century between the Ndwandwe and expansionist neighbors (Wright 2008). Furthermore, Wright observes that Philip Bonner (1983) had used evidence gained from the James Stuart Collection, together with oral testimonies collected from a number of Swazi “informants,” to provide a searching account of the origins, expansion, and

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rivalries of the Swazi and the Ndwandwe polities. Bonner’s analysis led him to reach the radical conclusion that it was highly likely that that Zwide, rather than  Dingiswayo of the Mthethwa, was the “real prototype of Shaka” (Wright 2008: 222). The following lines from izibongo zika Zwide ka Langa may attest to Bonner’s observation that Zwide was the real prototype of Shaka as far as their expansionist policies, strategies, and tactics of uniting different polities under their rule are concerned. Zwide ka Langa is linked to the royal house at kwa Nobamba and also assumes the potent ancestral powers and spiritual guidance of Jama and Mageba who are both King Shaka’s forebears and ancestors: Inakaz’ emnyama yakiti kwa Nobamba Ehamb’ ibang’ amacala O qamise iDukumbane, e li ku Ncinci U njenge hlaba e li ku Sidubela. O wa pot’ intamb’ ende, umnta ka Jama, O wa pot’ intamb’ ende, wa‐ya pezulu, Lapa ne zituta zako Mageba zi ngayi ku‐fika, Za(w)uti zi ya kwela, z’ apuka’ amazwanyana. (Stuart 1925: 50)

Stuart further notes that Grout, in his Grammar of the Zulu Language, published in 1859, included izibongo Zamakhosi, who had passed away, which also highlighted similarities between the two kings Shaka and Zwide, in relation to the ancestral powers of King Shaka’s forefather Jama. As a result, izibongo zika Zwide ka Langa reads: Yizwa‐ke, Nkosi! Ndwandwe wa bade! Sihlope si ka Gumede! Mandond’ esihle! Nig sa libele nga buza lapa sezibulweni. Ma si pot’ igoda, Mandi ka Jama, Si‐y’ ezulwini, lapa ne zituta zi ngeyi ku‐fika, Zobe zi ya kwela, z’apuk’ amazwanyana. (Stuart 1925: 50)

The following lines from izibongo zika Shaka may attest to Bonner’s observation that Shaka was the real prototype of Zwide as far as their militaristic tendencies were concerned: UBholokoqa bazalukanisile, Zalukanisiwe uNoju noNgqengenye, EyakwaNtombazi neyakwaNandi; Yayikhiph’ ishoba libomvu, Ikhishwa elimhlophe lakwaNandi. (Cope 1968: 89)

While Dladla identifies Matiwane, the Ngwane monarch, as the initial target for the Ndwandwe to fulfill their expansionist tendencies and against whom to test their



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military strength, including the use of witchcraft, Gwayi identifies Zwangendaba as Zwide’s main target in implementing newly devised military strategies which were adapted from the formidable Dingiswayo’s battle plans. Ngcobo’s plot differs from the other two authors’ in that he does identify the Khumalos (Mashobane and Mzilikazi), Zwide’s clansmen, as initial targets for expansionism. But the three authors agree on one issue: they all directly identify Dingiswayo, who had ruled since the 1790s, and Shaka as the main targets because they threatened the rising power of the Ndwandwe. According to Ngcobo, the two were also anointed as victims of witchcraft and candidates for beheading in order for their body parts to be used for muthi by Ntombazi. This meant that, after beheading, their skulls were displayed in the queen mother’s official residence. On this theme, Ngcobo writes that, during one of endless conversation with his mother, Zwide alludes to the fact “(umchilo) kuzokuba ngowekhanda lakhe lomfana kaSenzangakhona (Shaka), mama. Nokho usezohlala isikhathi eside ulenga ezintongweni zendlu yakho. Kayikho into esingayenza kuyena singakamtholi uGodongwane (Dingiswayo) okunguyena acashe ngaye” (Ngcobo 1977: 31). In one of the scenes, a concerned King Dingiswayo confronts an extremely worried King Shaka, whom Ngcobo informs us was ruling the Zulu empire under the lordship of Dingiswayo: “Nyambose,” kukhuleka uShaka, “Zulu,” kuvuma uDingiswayo emamatheka. Lenkosi yamaZulu (uShaka) yiyona ayithanda kunawo wonke amakhosi ayebusa ngaphansi kwakhe … ‘nanxa sisephansi kwalo ifu elimnyama lokuzingelwa nguZwide ngizokuthi siyaphila, Ndaba … Mayelana nekhanda lakho bewungakweza lutho Jama? … Ikhanda lakho nawe uZwide uyalifuna njengoba efuna elami. Uma ngizwa uzimisele impela ukuba ngawo womabili ayohlobisa ngawo indlu kanina (uNtombazi) … Sewuzwile‐ke Zulu (Shaka), ukuthi ifu elimyamalisisibekele sobabili, ikhanda lakho nawe liyafuneka kwaNongoma … Engikweluleka khona ukuba uhlale uqaphele ukuze lingayi khona ngempela; ufuze mina engiselokhu nje ngiqaphele. (Ngcobo 1977: 25–27)

The claim that Mashobane and Mzilikazi were connected to the Ndwandwe is historically accurate, but the authors of isiZulu literary texts deliberately sought to change, to embellish, to diminish, to add, and to distort history and generally to take advantage of poetic license for the sake of their art. Gwayi’s, Dladla’s, and Ngcobo’s claim that guillotined heads belonging to Matiwane, Mashobane, Mthimkhulu ka Bhungane, and Zwangendaba, among others, were to be found at Queen Mother Ntombazi’s palace is historically inaccurate. Other candidates to have been beheaded would have included Mbonambi of the Mabhudu polity, Sokhulu of the Nqobeka polity, and Nxaba and Dingiswayo of the Mthethwa polity; but we also know that Zwangendaba, Nxaba, and Mzilikazi were part of the precolonial Ndwandwe diaspora (Ngoni) which settled in present‐day Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe (see Chondoka 2017; Wright 2008, 2010).

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Since we do not have a record or an archive of izibongo zika Ntombazi, we can analyze izibongo zika Zwide to verify whether Zwide’s army did carry out the hideous deed of collecting decapitated heads after defeating their enemies. This usually characterizes izibongo Zamakhosi. For example, izibongo are also indications of the public explanations of King Dingane’s actions toward whites as invaders, and of the rationale for his extermination of Piet Retief and his party. There are different explanations from izibongo and oral traditions for this event (see Ndlovu 2017). Like Carolyn Hamilton’s seminal doctoral thesis on King Shaka, I suggest that the initiative taken by Gwayi, Ngcobo, and Dladla, who used historical novels and drama to construct a particular Zuluist image of the queen mother of the Ndwandwe and her erstwhile rivals from the expansionist Mthethwa and Zulu polities, not only question the distinctions between the fields of politics, history, and literature but also challenge divisions implicit within each discipline. Such distinctions exist within academic historical writings between historical texts, oral traditions, and accounts of travelers, missionaries, and colonial officials. Within the field of literature, distinctions are drawn between poetry, drama, and novels. Again, like Hamilton, I query the distinction between historiography and these sources. As she argues, An understanding of historiographical practice … as well as a clear picture of the history of the image of Shaka, is a precondition for the evaluation of sources for, and the conduct of research on, Shakan times. The ideas that early European sources are untrustworthy and should not be used by scholars, and that African sources on Shakan times are absent, are simply untenable. (Hamilton 1998: 31)

An unquestioning acceptance of a division between African and European sources ignores what is similar or comparable in them (the representation of the Ndwandwe polity and the influential role of Ntombazi, the powerful queen mother). These representations overlap regardless whether they are articulated by white academics, Zulu nationalists as authors of historical novels or drama in vernacular, African public intellectuals narrating oral traditions, white settlers as missionaries, or travelers and traders recording their observations. There are commonalities in these various texts, yet each is informed by its own logic and generates its own images and historical insights.

In defense of queen mother Ntombazi In terms of African religion and belief systems, most African societies did not (and still do not) keep the human body parts of dead people in their places of abode in full view as trophies for all to see, nor did they keep body parts in secret. The bodies of deceased humans (and their parts) are buried under the earth, for they belong in the underworld of the Ancestors (KwaBaphansi). Their earthly



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spirits remain underground, and do not go up to heaven or the sky, as in the Christian religion. Though it is claimed by authors that Queen Mother Ntombazi was a cruel sorcerer who carried out the evil deed of ukucwiya and kept the decapitated heads of rival monarchs at her royal palace, both Ntombazi and Zwide would have known the dangers of keeping the body parts of other monarchs in their midst. They would be forever haunted by restless spirits as earthly representatives of the guillotined heads that were supposedly kept elawini by uNtombazi. The subjects and relatives of these decapitated monarchs would have made life difficult for the Ndwandwe royal house, for, according to African custom, they would congregate at Ntombazi’s royal palace to perform the ukubuyisa ceremony or ritual which is part of the belief system of African peoples in southeast Africa. This ritual or ceremony gave rise to proverbs/izaga such as “Akudlozi lay’ endlini layeka kwabo; akudlozi lingayi kwabo” and “Idlozi liyabekelwa.” These proverbs may also be heard with the noun “ithonga” substituted for “idlozi.” The restless spirits of the deceased had to be eventually buried and join the world of aBaphansi (the Ancestors). The fact is that the democratic government in South Africa has faced challenges as families and relatives of those who have passed away in exile during the struggle for national liberation want their bodies to be repatriated and reburied in South Africa. To a large extent, one can argue, regardless of the poetic and creative license exercised by the authors of the isiZulu literary texts, Zwide and Ntombazi were not so dehumanized that they ceased to adhere to existing belief systems and religion whereby a human being must aspire to be ultimately united with the earth where his or her ancestors reside, and not to be separated from it. The emphasis of African societies was and still is the continuity of life after death and therefore ancestors (belonging to the world of both the perpetrator and the victim) would not have made it possible for the queen mother of the Ndwandwe to carry out the hideous deed of beheading monarchies and keep their body parts in her royal house for whatever reason. According to Kunene, African religion and belief systems postulate that all members of the family past, present, and future must be consolidated to form one continuous family. By family is meant primarily the members who trace their ancestry to one common Ancestor. The concept does not end there but is extended ideologically to include the whole human society so that society is the sum total of many families and not of individuals (Kunene 1981). Would the queen mother have been so dehumanized and evil that she did not belong to any form of religion or belief system? Actually, Dladla answers this question in his drama when the Ndwandwe monarchy and royal household confirm their belief in uMvelinqangi (the supreme creator) umdali wezulu nomhlaba (before the advent of Christianity in southern Africa). This becomes apparent in Dladla’s storyline when Ntombazana, King Zwide’s sister and Queen Mother Ntombazi’s rebellious daughter, who has fallen in love with King Dingiswayo, the arch‐enemy of the Ndwandwe, discuss the pros and cons of ukucwiya. In this

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scene, Ntombazana is being manipulated by her conspiratorial royal family who try to convince her to deceive and kill her lover: Zwide: Sikubizile lapha nomame Ntombazana, Mntakababa uLanga. Sikubizele udaba olungelula kakhulu ngoba lubelethe inkalakatha yesenzo esibucayi. Uzokuchazela umame…kumele uzinikele ngenxa yombuso kababa uLanga (ongasekho‐and an ancestor), nagenxa yakhe umame wethu uLangakazi (Ntombazi). Ntombazana: Ngiyezwa mnewethu okushoyo. Noma ngethuka nje kodwa mangisho ukuthi ngizimisele ukwenza konke okusemandleni ami obufazane amancane. Ngiyethemba futhi kakusiyo into embi ngoba kangihambisani nolunya kanye nokubulala abantu abanganacala. Ntombazi: Wena njengomntanami akubone ubone ulunya ezenzweni zami ngingunyoko ngikuzala. Noma ngabe kukhona wena okubiza ngobubi ezenzweni zami, ngifuna ukwenze. Phela Ntombazana mntanami, ukuze uphembe ubuhle kumele usebenzise ububi. Name kumele ngisebenzise ububi ukuze ngizuzele indodana yami nomfowenu uZwide ubukhosi bazozonke izizwe. Ntombazana: Ngiyezwa mame, kepha kangizenzi ngadalwa kanjalo. uMvelingqangi wangidala nesihawu. Ngiyaye ngethuka sezehla nje izinyembezi… Zwide: Wakhuluma kamnandi mntakababa uLanga… Ntombazi: …Manje ke Ntombazana, nakhu ozokwenza, uzokuya kwaMthethwa, uzohamba noNombuso kaMalusi…Lokhu uzokwenza ngokucwiya uDingwisayo. Ngifuna wenze sengathi uyamqoma kanti phinde Ntombazana: Hawu Mame! Into enjalo pho? (Dladla 1979: 20–21)

The shocked Princess Ntombazana is torn between the demands of her manipulative mother and her unquestionable love for King Dingiswayo. Nevertheless, it becomes apparent that the family, notwithstanding their belief in uMvelingqangi, also believe in ancestral spirits in the form of Langa, Zwide’s and Ntombazana’s deceased father, whose earthly presence is referred to in this scene. This emphasizes the continuity of life after death, as has always been the case in African societies throughout the African continent. Surely, both Ntombazi and Zwide, as responsible and knowledgeable leaders, would have known the dangers of ukucwiya and of keeping the body parts of other monarchs in their midst. They would be forever haunted by the restless spirits of amathonga/amadlozi (the earthly representatives of these severed human heads purportedly kept elawini by uNtombazi). Therefore, much as it is claimed by Zuluist ideologues and cultural brokers that Queen Mother Ntombazi was a cruel sorcerer who carried out the evil deed of ukucwiya in terms of African religion and belief systems, Gwayi, Dladla, and Ngcobo contradict themselves by constantly informing us in their narratives that both Queen Mother Ntombazi and Zwide, her beloved son, had soul because they believed in uMvelingqangi7 and the spiritual powers of the Ancestors (aBaphansi) as earthly spirits who operate in the underworld. Kunene, in his epic



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on Shaka, the great Zulu emperor, however, does not ascribe such religious beliefs to the Ndwandwe monarchy but only to the Zulu monarchy. We also have to take into account that no one can keep a number of deceased human bodies in a closed room (ilawu) without facing problems of public health and hygiene. We know that physiologists, as medical practitioners, apply chemical processes in well‐equipped laboratories to counter such problems so as to be able to continue with their work. Perhaps, as the literary works claim, Ntombazi the sorcerer had supernatural powers to survive the suffocating stench of decomposing human parts, which might cause deadly epidemics and disease. Medicinal practitioners, traditional healers, and diviners who operated within the Ndwandwe polity would surely have advised the royal house about the dangers posed by such a practice. Besides, the best practice and standard rule was (and still is) that human body parts are not used for muthi through witchcraft. The claim that mother and son were sorcerers who dabbled in witchcraft is unconvincing. By using indigenous knowledge systems, both the indigenous traditional healers and medicinal practitioners had the interests of the society at heart. The destructive effects of diseases and epidemics that occurred during precolonial times, including those caused by natural disasters such as droughts and famine are well recorded in various oral traditions, for example, the great seventeenth‐century famine, flooding, and drought were referred to in these traditions as indlala kaMadlantuli. In African belief systems, the goddess Nomkhubulwana would intervene and restore the balance and activate the forces of rebirth. Therefore, if there had been a major epidemic and health hazard within the Ndwadwe polity, we would know about it as it would have been recorded and preserved through oral traditions. But the Ndwadwe or Nxumalos still exist and live in large numbers in the present‐ day KwaZulu‐Natal province and Swaziland.

Conclusion The narrative structure of the historical novels is really focused on the forever changing dynamics within the Ndwandwe and the Zulu monarchies. In these texts, which are based on oral traditions, Queen Mother Ntombazi has been represented as an irrational, superstitious witch who carries out destructive deeds. The allegations of occult practices and of witchcraft within the Ndwandwe monarchy may be linked to the relentless historical obsession among colonialists that witchcraft was widely practiced in Africa. In this discourse African women are often represented as cruel sorcerers who have no ethical regard for the well‐being of the broader society. Hence their images have to be destroyed. This has led to the destruction of historical knowledge in that the Ndwandwes’ historical archive on Ntombazi, which is also defined by izibongo zika Ntombazi, does not exist. These historical novels, which also contribute to the production of historical knowledge, were also largely informed by the sociopolitical values and beliefs

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systems of African societies. The character of Queen Mother Ntombazi is admonished, chastised, and demolished by Zulu nationalist authors for the apparent support she gave to her son King Zwide, the upstart who dared to challenge King Shaka. Implicit in the authors’ Zuluist narrative is the idea that a strong African leader, in the person of King Shaka, is the missing link in the contemporary politics of apartheid South Africa. According to Gwayi, Dladla, Ngcobo, and Kunene, King Shaka was a standard bearer for civilization, social cohesion, and progress. His perceptive diplomatic policies and endeavors, including initiatives for accommodating expansionist British colonial power, were perceived as the political strategies of a genius. King Shaka’s attempt to unite the various African kingdoms, chiefdoms, and different clans under the system of a divine kingship was an empowering move – a mission that would benefit African peoples by creating a dynamic indigenous life, politics, and military vitality which would pose a serious deterrent to European expansionism (see also Ndlovu 2017). According to Ngcobo, Gwayi, and Dladla, female African leaders both traditional and modern are not qualified to become leaders of their respective societies. This is quite extraordinary, considering that during the time period these historical novels were published gender inequality, oppression, racism and racial discrimination was not regarded as a norm by the patriots fighting for the struggle for national liberation in South Africa. As the then popular slogan about majority rule emphasized, “we are fighting for a non‐racial, non‐sexist, democratic South Africa.” According to these authors, female leaders such as Ntombazi and Mnkabayi do not represent an embodiment of democratic values, but they also misrepresent represent inspiring role models and a symbolic hope not only for the empowerment of women but also for their total liberation from all negative perceptions and oppressions. Dladla, Ngcobo, and Gwayi fail dismally to capture an expression of survival that portrays day‐to‐day experiences of women whose goal is to live life to the fullest despite anything that is thrown their way. Elsewhere, I have argued that in the decades leading up to the white conquest of King Cetshwayo’s army in 1879, women were recognized, and even revered, for their important contribution to various African societies (Ndlovu 2008). This was the norm because African societies believed in progressive humanism underscored by Ubuntu, a progressive humanist philosophy which proclaims “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu,” that one’s humanity is being enriched by another’s; in other words, to be human is to affirm one’s humanity by recognizing humanity of others. On this basis we learn to establish humane, respectful relations with them, and as humans we are linked to a wider universe and spiritual world. Ubuntu as a philosophy promotes human sympathy, human rights, social justice, love, a willingness to share, and forgiveness. The viewpoints of Dladla, Gwayi, and Ngcobo and of their narratives simply reflected their experiences as individuals caught up in historical processes defined by the race conflict, prejudice, and political oppression meted by the apartheid regime. They use the various images of Ntombazi, Zwide, Dingiswayo, and Shaka



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to examine power and authority, control and domination, conquest and rule, dissent and suppression, rebellion and destruction. In this regard history has meanings in the present and hence has an ideological agenda. As an example, by pushing a genealogical Zuluist ideology the authors portrayed Queen Mother Ntombazi and King Zwide in extremely negative terms. As a counterpoint, and to democratize the production of historical knowledge in South Africa, we need to write an Africanist history of the present‐day KwaZulu‐Natal province that goes beyond the confines of the rise of the Zulu Kingdom in the 1820s. In short, we need to rescue the history of pre‐Shakan times by focusing on, among others, Queen Mother Ntombazi and the Ndwandwe monarchy so as to challenge any idea that women should remain buried in the dustbin of history. But the question still remains, who is Queen Mother Ntombazi? The irony is that the deceased mother of King Zwelithini, the present Zulu king, is a Ndwandwe. I am still searching for Queen Mother Ntombazi’s pre‐colonial archive which, unlike those of Queen Nandi and Regent Queen Mnkabayi, was destroyed by male cultural brokers and ideologues. All what we have is a twentieth century archive in the form of historical novels, drama, and epics.

Notes 1 She was in charge of the Zulu Kingdom after her son, King Dinuzulu, who during the nineteenth century, was incarcerated on the island of St. Helena. He was held for 10 years by the British colonizers. 2 See also various testimonies and izibongo zikaMnkabayi in the James Stuart Archives (JSA) at the Killie Campbell Library, Durban, University of KwaZulu‐Natal (Ndlovu 2008). 3 See Kunene (1967: 96–97); Vilakazi (1946: 46–55). Kunene (1979: xvii) argues that Queen Nandi possessed a strong will and sense of authority. She was far from being an obedient, domestic, and subservient woman. She not only attended the Zulu National Assembly (umkhandlu), but court historians tell us that she constantly confronted men in the assembly. These qualities did not endear her to Senzangakhona, the Zulu monarch. For a different interpretation see Ngubane (1976: 131–134). 4 Various dates have been given for Mazisi Kunene’s MA thesis. In my interview with him upon his return to South Africa in 1993, he told me that he did not obtain his master’s degree, completed in 1957, until 1967 because of his departure from South Africa into exile in England in 1959. 5 On James Stuart and his role in recording African oral tradition see Wright (2015) and Hamilton (1993). 6 Evidence of Socwatsha ka Phaphu recorded by James Stuart, October 3, 1921, James Stuart Collection, File 58, notebook 22, 1–2, JSA, Killie Campbell Library, Durban, University of KwaZulu‐Natal. 7 White missionaries were forever at pains to explain to their African Christian converts that uMvelingqangi was not equivalent to the white man’s God, who was also depicted as supernatural.

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References Bonner, P. 1983. Kings, Commoners and Concessionaires: The Evolution and Dissolution of the Nineteenth‐Century Swazi. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Burness, D., ed. 1976. Shaka: King of the Zulu in African Literature. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press. Chondoka, Y. A. 2017. The Zwangendaba Mpenzeni Ngoni: History and Migrations, Settlements and Culture. Lusaka: Academic Press. Clarke, J. H. 1971. “The Black Woman: A Figure in World History,” parts 1–3. Essence (May), 42–43. Clarke, J. H. 1984. “African Warrior Queens.” In Black Women in Antiquity, edited by I. Van Sertima, 123–124. London: Transaction. Cope, T., ed. 1968. Izibongo: Zulu Praise‐Poems, collected by James Stuart. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Diop, C. A. 1978. The Cultural Unity of Black Africa. Chicago: Third World Press. Dladla, A. H. 1979. uNtombazi. Pretoria: J. L. Van Schaik. Etherington, N. 2001. The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815–1854. London: Pearson. Gwayi, J. 1974. Shumpu. Pretoria: J. L. Van Schaik. Hamilton, C. 1993. “Authoring Shaka: Models, Metaphors and Historiography.” Unpublished doctoral thesis, Johns Hopkins University Hamilton, C. 1998. Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention. Cape Town: David Philip. Isaacs, N. 1936. Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa. Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society. Kunene, M. 1957. “An Analytical Survey of Zulu Poetry Both Traditional and Modern.” Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Natal. http://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za/ handle/10413/5433, accessed March 27, 2018. Kunene, M. 1979. Emperor Shaka the Great: A Zulu Epic. London: Heinemann. Kunene, M. 1981. Anthem of the Decades: A Zulu Epic Dedicated to the Women of Africa. London: Heinemann. Mayekiso, A. C. T. 1985. “The Historical Novels of Jessie Joyce Gwayi.” Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Zululand. Ndlovu, S. M. 1998. “‘He Did What Any Other Person in his Position Would Have Done to Fight the Forces of Invasion and Disruption’: Africans, the Land and Contending Images of King Dingane (‘the Patriot’) in the Twentieth Century, 1916–1950s.” South African Historical Journal 38: 99–143. Ndlovu, S. M. 2008. “A Reassessment of Women’s Power in the Zulu Kingdom.” In Zulu Identities: Being Zulu, Past and Present, edited by B. Carton, J. Laband, and J. Sithole, 111–121. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu‐Natal Press. Ndlovu, S. M. 2017. African Perspectives of King Dingane ka Senzangakhona: The Second Monarch of the Zulu Kingdom. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ngcobo, M. 1977. Qhude Manikiniki. Pretoria: J. L. Van Schaik. Ngubane, J. 1976. ‘Shaka’s Social, Political and Military Ideas.” In Shaka: King of the Zulu in African Literature, edited by D. Burness, 127–164. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press.



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Ogbomo, O. W. 2005. “Women, Power and Society in Precolonial Africa.” In African Culture and Civilization, edited by S. A. Ajayi, 354–380. Ibadan: University of Ibadan Press. Stuart, J. 1925. Ukulumetule. London: Longman, Green. Stuart, J. 1936. uTulasizwe. London: Longman. Van Sertima, I., ed. 1985. Black Women in Antiquity. London: Transaction. Vilakazi, B. W. 1939. uDingiswayo ka Jobe. London: Sheldon Press. Vilakazi, B. W. 1946. “The Oral and Written Literature in Nguni.” Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of the Witwatersrand. Wright, J. 1989. “The Dynamics of Power and Conflict in the Thukela‐Mzimkhulu Region in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: A Critical Reconstruction.” Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of the Witwatersrand. Wright, J. 2008. “Rediscovering the Ndwandwe Kingdom.” In Five Hundred Years Rediscovered: Southern African Precedents and Prospects, edited by N. Swanepoel, A. Esterbuysen, and P. Bonner, 217–239. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Wright, J. 2010. “Turbulent Times: Political Transformations in the North and East, 1760s–1830s.” In From Early Times to 1885, vol. 1 of The Cambridge History of South Africa, edited by C. Hamilton, B. Mbenga, and R. Ross, 211–252. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, J. 2015. “Socwatsha kaPhaphu, James Stuart and Their Conversations on the Past, 1897–1922.” Kronos: Southern African Histories 41(1): 142–165.

Chapter Seven

Love, Courtship, and Marriage in Africa Nwando Achebe

In the 2015 Columbia Pictures film Concussion, the love interest of Will Smith’s character, Dr. Bennet Omalu, is a Kenyan nurse, Prema, whom he eventually marries. However, the film does not actually show them falling in love. It does not show their courtship. Instead, it shows a rather lackluster proposal of marriage by Dr. Omalu, who does not get down on one knee or kiss his future bride passionately as one might expect of a couple getting married (indeed he does not kiss her at all); instead, he presents Prema with a gift of land, where he imagines they will build their future home and then suggests that there is a good chance that they will fall in love after they marry. In the year 2015, it would appear that Hollywood, like the scholarship produced by and through the Global North gaze, remains uncomfortable representing African amorous love. With the not so subtle suggestion that a gift of land is enough to sustain an African marriage, Hollywood is indeed, falling in line with the received trope of an African woman who is bought by and sold to the highest bidder for her productive and reproduction labor. But I have gotten ahead of myself. Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas’s compilation Love in Africa (2009) advances the same “provider love” trope. The editors argue that their volume is positioned to fill a lacuna – the silencing of love as a category of exploration and analysis in Africa – in the field of African women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Their volume is conceptualized as a corrective. By pulling together eight chapters set in different parts of Africa that tackle themes as varied as how love relationships A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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are characterized in Africa, premarital exchanges of gifts for sex, the impact of various media on the way in which African men and women imagine love, and African marital relationships encumbered by infidelity, the editors hope to begin a much needed scholarly conversation about love in Africa. The editors provide a working definition for love – “the sentiments of attachment and affiliation that bind people to one another” (Cole and Thomas 2009: 2) – which is employed by each contributor in their assessment of how Africans experience love. However, much of the compilation, like the Hollywood film Concussion, feature chapters that look at African love through a provider love lens – that is, love based on one party’s (the man, who is a kind of “sugar daddy”) ability to provide financially for the other, implying that, while Africans might be enamored with the idea of romantic love, love in Africa more accurately arises out of economic and social circumstance. In short, the reader comes away from the text with the impression that Africans do not have the capability or capacity to feel or express romantic or amorous love. Mark Hunter’s recent book Love in the Time of AIDS (2010) also employs the lens of provider love in his analysis of love in the time of AIDS in a South African municipality. Nonetheless, to assume that Africans do not love romantically or amorously is to cast what amounts to an inappropriate and prejudicial Eurocentric gaze upon African modes of loving and desire. The reality is that on the surface African love and loving may appear different from the way in which individuals in the Global North express love, but that does not mean that Africans are incapable of communicating and experiencing amorous or romantic love for one another. They have done so from time immemorial, and this chapter reveals the way Africans show love, court one another, marry, and have families.

The language of love in Africa Verbal expressions of love from West, East, and South Africa At this point, it is perhaps appropriate to illustrate, with a series of examples from different parts of the continent, the idea and/or concept of love, loving, and courtship in the African context. I am convinced that all 3,000 languages, and thus peoples, inhabiting the continent of Africa, have words for amorous or romantic love.1 This suggests that the idea or concept of affectionate or passionate love has never been foreign to African peoples. Among the over 35 million Igbo people of eastern Nigeria and Cameroon, for instance, the word for “love” or “to love” is ịfụ na anya – which literally translates into “to see you with my eyes.” “I love you” in the same language is afụm gị naanya, literally, “I see you with my eyes.” Thus, to the Igbo people, love is not fickle, it is not flighty, and it is not to be taken lightly. To feel amorous love for another is to really see that person with one’s eyes. It is suggestive of a deep feeling of knowing, of feeling, of seeing, and of accepting, a person in all of his or her imperfections. The Yoruba of southern Nigeria and Benin Republic, who also number over 35 million, have



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exact words to express amorous or romantic love. For them, “love” is ife, “to love” is iferan, and “I love you” is mo fe e.2 In the East African country of Kenya, the over 6 million Gikuyus express love reflexively, as in “to love one another,” nι̃ngwendete, rather than the sentiment “to love.” A Gikuyu woman would say, nι̃ aramwendire, meaning “she saw him and loved him.” A young Gikuyu man would say the same, nι̃ aramwendire, meaning, “he saw her and loved her.” There is also the expression nι̃mendaine in Gikuyu, which means “they loved one another.”3 Thus, the Gikuyu, like the Igbo, have expressions for the action of love. Then there is the general word for love, wendo, in Gikuyu. The word wendo can refer to parental love; God’s love is wendo wa Ngai; and amorous love, with which this chapter is concerned, is expressed in the phrase nι̃aingι̃re nι̃ wendo or nι̃atonye nι̃ wendo, meaning “they have been possessed by love.” The Gikuyu also have a descriptive phrase for courtship love, which is wendo wa kuurana. The word kuurana means “courting” or “to court.” Furthermore, the Gikuyu word for “lover” or “loved one” is mwendwa. Another word for “lover,” but referencing a romantically flirtatious person, is kι̃ũ mbi.4 In the East African national and vehicular language, Kiswahili, “I love you” or “I am in love with you,” is nakupenda. “They are in love” or “they love one another” is wanapendana; and wanamapenzi is “they have love for each other.” In Kiswahili, there is also the word mapenzi, which also expresses romantic love. In the same language, the word for “lover” is mpenzi, and for lovers wapenzi. A “lover” is also referred to as kipusa and mpenda. Mpendwa means “loved one.”5 In the southern part of the continent, in South Africa, the word for “love” or “to love” among the Zulu is ngiyakuthanda. The Ndebele express love by saying niyakutanda. The Xhosa say ndiyakuthanda or thando iwam, meaning, “my love.” Sepedi, Sesotho, and Setswana express romantic love similarly. They say ke a go rata. So do SiSwati and Tshivenda. They express love as ngiyakutsandza. And, last but not least, Xitsonga uses ndzakurhandza (Women24 2012).

Proverbs about love Chinua Achebe writes that “proverbs are the palm‐oil with which words are eaten” (1992: 4). Passed down from one generation to the next for centuries, they are an integral part of everyday speech and culture in Africa. Proverbs are used to illustrate ideas, bolster arguments, and communicate advice, and they also act as messages of motivation, solace, and festivity. Thus, beyond specific words for expressing amorous or romantic love in different African languages, adages or proverbs have survived from different parts of Africa, which relay ideas about love, what it means to be in love, and general wisdoms about amorous or romantic love from a distinctive African point of view. I shall share several of these proverbs from different parts of Africa.

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The Oromo and Amhara of Ethiopia have an adage that “when one is in love, a cliff becomes a meadow.” This proverb speaks to the fact that love has a way of helping to soften challenges and to make life and living brighter, as well as to make the world and everything in it seem wonderful. The people of Burundi in eastern Africa express it like this: “where there is love, there is no darkness.” In the western part of the continent, the Hausa of Niger and Nigeria share the following wisdom about love. They say, “when a heart gives orders, the body becomes a slave,” that is, a person who loves is a slave to love: when one is in love, one loses all control of one’s emotions and one’s body does what one’s heart orders. Kiswahili expresses a wisdom about love in the proverb “true love is not in a mirror; it is in the heart,” which means that it does not matter how one looks: love is not about physical beauty but about emotional and amorous beauty. The southern African Sotho of Lesotho, are even more direct in their expression of this wisdom: “love does not rely on physical features.” The Zulu of South Africa represent a similar sentiment in the adage “love, like rain, does not choose the grass on which it falls”; in other words, we do not choose whom we fall in love with, but love chooses us. The Ganda of Uganda put it like this: “he who loves, loves you with your dirt” (Hodari and Yvonne McCalla 2009). The Akan of Ghana and the Gikuyu of Kenya impart the following wisdom about love: “love does not listen to rumors” and “people who love one another do not dwell on each other’s mistakes.” Love must be nurtured and treated tenderly, as in the adage from the Congo, “love is like a baby: it needs to be treated tenderly.” The Bakongo of Congo express the intensity of heartbreak that follows unrequited love in the proverb, “to love someone who does not love you is like shaking a tree to make the dew drops fall.” The Baule of the western African country of Côte d’Ivoire, express similar sentiments in the adage “if a woman does not love you, she calls you ‘brother.’” African proverbs also relate with poignancy what love is not. Consider the Gikuyu proverb: “to be smiled at is not to be loved.” African love is not flighty or fickle; it is in the eye of the beholder, as expressed in this Ganda proverb: “the one who loves an unsightly person is the one who makes him beautiful.” The Tswana of Namibia and southern Africa express the inevitability and uncontrollability of love when they say, “love is a despot who spares no one.” The Sudanese also express the desperateness of love, the total uncontrollability of one’s emotions when one is in love in the adage “love makes a man blind and deaf.” Two Malagasy proverbs caution about how love should be: “let your love be like the misty rain, coming softly but flooding the river,” and “do not be so in love that you cannot tell when it is raining.” There are actually African proverbs that warn against the provider‐type love that writers from the Global North have ascribed to Africans. An Egyptian proverb proclaims, “if you marry a monkey for its wealth, the money goes and the monkey remains.” Last but not least, the Kiswahili language of eastern Africa has an insightful saying that “a letter from the heart can be read on the face.” This idea



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of the expressiveness of African love through the vehicle of letters is also expressed by the Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Venda, and Ndebele of South Africa, and I discuss this in the next section.

African love beads and love letters Words and proverbs are not the only vehicle for communicating love in Africa. In Togo, Ghana, and Benin, when a woman wants to communicate her availability and interest to male suitors, she wears highly colorful and visible waist beads – in some parts of Nigeria, these are called jigida – and plays with them flirtatiously while engaging the object of her love in conversation and other types of interaction. Indeed, waist beads are still worn in various parts of Africa by women with the aim of flirtation. Beads are believed to have the power to invoke or provoke desire. Some African women are known to lace their beads with fragrances which are irresistible to the opposite sex. In many parts of Africa, women also wear different shapes of beads during sexual intimacy to enhance and elevate sexual intensity for herself and her lover. African love beads can be likened to the wearing of provocative lingerie by women in the Global North. Moreover, in Africa, wives playfully used the rattling of their waist beads to communicate times of fertility to their lovers. For centuries, the Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Venda, and Ndebele of South Africa have employed colorful, delicately designed beads to communicate their love in beaded “love letters.” All traditional Zulu beadwork, except for items used for ritual purposes, were used in some way or other to communicate messages of amorous love, courtship, and marriage. These beaded love letters are messages given by southern African maidens to their lovers as symbols of their love and affection. The isiZulu word ukuqoma means “to date.” When a Zulu maiden is ready to start dating she makes a beaded love letter, which is a short love story in beaded form that expresses her feelings for and devotion to her loved one. This traditional white‐beaded letter or necklace, called ucu, is given to a boyfriend, whereupon he presents it to his father as confirmation that he is dating a woman. Once the young man’s father receives the ucu, he sends members of his extended family to bring the young woman to him, and she stays with her boyfriend’s family for a week. On arrival at her boyfriend’s home, the young woman hoists a white cloth, which remains hoisted for the duration of her stay. This is a signal to the community that she is dating someone in that household. The young man’s father, accompanied by members of his extended family, journeys to the young woman’s home to let them know that they need not worry about the whereabouts of their daughter, that she is safe and well with them, and that she is officially dating their son. This dating or courtship process often spreads over several months and is simply a first step to courtship, which may or may not lead to marriage. The use of beads as love letters is also a form of amapasi, or an

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identity document, which identifies a given male as a maiden’s intended, thus serving to ward off other men; by wearing the love letter, these young men signal that they are unavailable to other women. Each bead color in a Zulu love letter conveys a different message. White, for instance, is a symbol of hope, purity, and true love. Black symbolizes grief and loneliness, as in unrequited love. Yellow is used as a symbol of wealth, or the lack thereof: it captures the sentiment that all will be well with love, even if there is no wealth. Green is a symbol of lovesickness and jealousy: it expresses the idea of “becoming as thin as a blade of grass from pining.” Blue is the color of faithfulness. It lets a potential love interest know that the person is willing to fly through the blue skies to win them. Turquoise is an impatient kind of love. It articulates the fading hope that an intended will propose. Red symbolizes intense love and longing, such as in “my heart bleeds with love for you.” Pink calls attention to the poverty of a potential love interest and warns that if he does not start saving he may not have enough money to pay lobola, or bride price. Brown is the color of mother earth; it expresses the hope that, like the earth, the maiden expects to produce a new life. And, last but not least, if a maiden composes her love letter with striped beads, she is expressing doubt in the fidelity of her love interest. She is in essence saying that he is like the ntothoviyane, or striped grasshopper, which springs from bush to bush (Dube 2009).6

A tradition of love Love and sex in the African pantheon The ancient Egyptian religious pantheon is rife with deities that identify with, while representing and expressing, the sentiment of love, loving, sexuality, intimacy, and seduction. The deity Bes, for instance, is the god of music, dance, and sexual pleasure. He is said to represent all good things in life. Egyptians also worshipped the goddess Hathor the personification of joy, amorous love, and motherhood. One of Egypt’s most beloved deities, Hathor was also the goddess of the sky, beauty, and music. Then there was Bastet. Depicted as a lioness warrior goddess, and as a cat goddess, she is the deity in charge of felines, love, sexuality, protection, perfume, beauty, and dance. Likewise, the ancient Egyptian god Min was the deity in charge of sexuality, reproduction, love, and sexual pleasure. A god of sexual potency, he is depicted in the overtly sexually suggestive pose of holding on to his erect phallus. In the western part of the continent, the water spirit Mami Wata is sometimes associated with love and lust. As is the Yoruba goddess Oshun, renowned for her beauty, who is likewise occasionally connected with love, eroticism, intimacy, beauty, wealth, and diplomacy. The Yorubas also worship the goddess Olokun, who represents beauty, the arts, culture, poetry, love, marriage, femininity, and fertility.



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African folktales, legends, and traditions of creation A folktale about love, regrettably from an unknown region of West Africa, survives in published form and stands as a noteworthy example of an African tradition of love passed down from generation to generation. It goes something like this. There was once a childless couple, who prayed that God would give them a child. Many planting seasons passed without the woman conceiving, and then finally after many moons, they had a daughter. As an only child, the girl was spoiled by her parents: she was given anything and everything that she wanted. She grew into a beautiful woman and was wooed by several rich men who asked for her hand in marriage on behalf of their sons. But each time the young woman said no. She insisted that she would only marry a young man of her own choice, to whom she was attracted and for whom she felt love. So many years passed, and the beautiful woman did not marry. Then one sunny afternoon, her eyes locked with the eyes of a strapping young man, who was playing an instrument and advancing toward her. Her physical attraction to him was instantaneous, and she declared that he was the one her heart desired. She rushed to him, fell into his arms, and proclaimed, “I love you, and I will marry you.” The young man professed his love for her as well: “I love you also, and it is because of you that I have come. I shall make arrangements and then I will come and fetch you.” However, the young woman, who had waited many years for her true love responded, “No, whether you are ready or not, I will go with you now.” The couple argued about this, but in the end the young man agreed: “Very well, if you will not wait, get ready and we will go” (Berry 1991: 98–100). And so the woman eloped with the man of her desire and thus began their story of love and intrigue. There are numerous African folktales that speak of love – not the love of a parent for a child, or the love of God, or the protector–provider type of love that scholars and filmmakers alike in the Global North celebrate as African, but an amorous type of love. And, like the folktale, these tales have been handed down orally from one generation to the next, some of them going back to the very beginning of time, while others are more recent. In the next few paragraphs, I share a sampling of these traditional love stories and at the same time point the reader to a body of folklore for further exploration. The king of the Jukun Kwararafa kingdom (in present‐day Nigeria) had a daughter who collected firewood from the forest every day. One day she was confronted by a leopard, which terrified her, transfixing her to the spot, but before she could run away the leopard metamorphosed into a handsome young man. The princess was immediately smitten and mesmerized by this young man’s splendor, and as a result visited him many times. Soon, according to the tradition, the two decided to get married. Once the princess’ parents learned about their daughter’s love for the young man, they wanted to meet him. A few days later, the princess took them into the forest, where her handsome suitor once again appeared as a leopard, putting the terrified king and queen to flight. However, the love‐struck

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princess was undeterred. She continued to visit her “prince” and their love blossomed.and was consummated. Many months later the princess then gave birth to a baby boy whom they named Abutu Eje (“Leopard” in Igala). Abutu Eje had a granddaughter named Ebulejonu (shortened to Ebule), meaning “woman” (Ebule) “that became chief or king” (Jonu). Ebule, the first and last female king, was said to have reigned in the sixteenth century. The king had a counterpart, a prime minister of sorts, called the Achadu. According to tradition, the Achadu was an outsider, an Igbo hunter of “slave” origin called Acho Omeppa, who was captured and brought before the female king Ebulejonu. King Ebule, entranced by Acho, decided to spare his life and, to the horror of her subjects, befriended this man of lowly status. Her appalled subjects thus branded him with the name “Achadu” (Acho the slave). Nevertheless, King Ebulejonu was steadfast in her love for the Igbo “slave,” Acho Omeppa, whom she later married (N. Achebe 2011: 62–63). A Ugandan tradition of creation is also an expression of amorous love. The first man, Kintu, lived alone on earth with a cow for his nourishment. One day, Gulu, ruler of the sky, sent his daughter, Nambi, to earth. When she saw Kintu, she fell in love with him. The couple decided to get married, but Nambi’s family was against the union. They considered Kintu of inferior status. They presented Gulu with several challenges, each designed so to prove his worth. First, Gulu took Kintu’s cow to heaven so that Kintu had to journey to heaven to retrieve it. Once there, Gulu imprisoned Kintu and forced him to eat enough food to feed 100 people. A smart and savvy Kintu ate some of the food, and then buried the rest in a hole in the floor. He then asked Gulu’s servants to take away the empty plates. Gulu then presented Kintu with a copper ax with which to split rocks for firewood. Kintu accomplished this by breaking off splinters from one of the already cracked rocks. Gulu presented Kintu with a fourth test to prove his worthiness. This time, he asked him to fill a waterpot with dew. Kintu did not know what to do, but then lifted the pot, to find that it was already full. Gulu’s final test was to ask Kintu to identify which of the several seemingly identical cows grazing the fields was his. Gulu assured Kintu that if he was able to identify his cow, he could marry his daughter. Kintu befriended a bee which helped him identify his cow from among Gulu’s herd. The bee also pointed to three calves which Kintu’s cow had birthed when it was in heaven. Thus, Kintu was able finally to win over Gulu with his cleverness, and the latter blessed his marriage to Nambi (Lynch 2004: 58–59). The last story takes us to the East African country of Kenya. There was once a lake of cold water, to which many animals came to drink, especially at night. But no human ever came to the lake at night; if they did, the animals would kill them. There was a rich man who had a beautiful daughter. The man said that he would give his daughter’s hand in marriage only to a man who was able to stay all night in the cold pool of water. The rich man’s daughter was in love with a poor young man, who loved her dearly as well. The poor man informed his mother that he



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would take on the challenge of spending the night in the lake, so that he could marry his love. The poor man’s mother was against this, because she was convinced that he would either die of hyperthermia, or would be eaten by wild animals. But the young man knew that this would be his only chance to prove to the rich man that he truly loved his daughter. He thus sent word to the girl’s father informing him that he would take on his challenge. The rich man sent his servants with the poor man to make sure that he completed the challenge. The poor man’s mother, unbeknownst to him, also went along, and she climbed a tree 40 paces from him and made a fire there. Seeing the fire, the wild animals kept away from the lake. When morning finally came, the young man trekked to the rich man’s house to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The rich man refused to concede, instead insisting that the fire on the hill, 40 paces from the lake, had warmed him, which was why he was able to survive the night in the cold water. The aggrieved man took the case to a judge. Before he passed judgment, the judge asked for a pot of cold water. Once this was brought before him, the judge walked 40 paces from the pot and lit a fire. He then announced to all present that he would wait a little until the water was warm. The spectators observed that the fire was so far away it would never warm the pot. The judge then concluded that there was no way the young man could have warmed himself with a fire that was 40 paces away. The judge thus decided in favor of the poor young man, who married the rich man’s daughter and they lived happily ever after.7

African courtship traditions Love walks, love flights, love festivals, and wife abductions Moving away from the realm of folktale and legend, the expression of love in Africa can be seen in the various traditions of courtship of the different peoples of Africa. The Luyias of Kenya, have a practice known as kuvolidza – literally to speak into, or to persuade – which is the term for courtship. Before dusk, after coming from the farm or market, while the elders were most likely at siesta, young Luyias would often hang out; and if a young man spied a young woman he liked he would join her on her walk. If the young woman was willing, she could be persuaded to go off with the young man to a concealed area, where she would not only listen to, but be swayed by, his seductive talk. And, if she fell for his seductive talk, that was officially how a girl let the young man know that she was available, and that she was ready to be persuaded to take the short or long walk to marriage. By participating in these love walks, couples could be expected to fall in love with each other. This courtship would be considered successful if the young woman actually fell in love and the young man managed to persuade her that he could not live without her. In this case, the young woman would take flight – which the Luyias refer to as kuvahira, “growing wings” or taking “winged flight” – during which she would disappear late at night to her would‐be lover’s home because she, or more

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appropriately they, could not help themselves. The young man would encourage her to stay, not just for the night but until people discovered that she was gone. These flights could often last up to a month. While this flight was recognized by the Luyias as legitimate and thus as a step the young man was expected to complete before he could marry her, the young man was considered indebted to the young woman’s family until he paid her bride price. In Luyia culture, bride price was expected to be paid bit by bit, and was never ever paid in its entirety, in order to disabuse any potential suitor of the misguided impression that he somehow owned his wife. Wives were never owned.8 The Wodaabe Fula of the West African country of Niger stage an annual courtship celebration called the Gerewol festival, in which the men of the community dress up in beautiful outfits, decorate their bodies and faces, and stage elaborate song and dance performances to woo and win a potential bride. At the end of the festival, it is the Wodaabe Fula women who get to choose a man of their liking, who once chosen is then granted permission to officially woo and court his would‐be bride in earnest. After this courtship period, if the woman is willing, she then consents to marry her suitor. Niger is not the only West African country that observes this practice. The northwest African country of Morocco has a similar courting tradition which takes place during their Imilchil marriage festival. Like the Gerewol festival, the Imilchil marriage festival is held every year. It is a festival of singing, dancing, and feasting which is supported by a good dose of suggestive flirting and socializing – all with the intent to woo a potential partner (Lane 2011). In Mupuland, as in other regions of the Jos Plateau, Nigeria, courtship or mat kwam, which commences several years before a marriage, is often finalized with “wife abduction”, or “stealing.” A few days after the “abduction”, the “kidnappers” (oftentimes the groom‐to‐be and his friends) send word to the parents of the young woman to assure them that their daughter has not met a bad fate but has merely been kidnapped. On receiving this information, the young woman’s father feigns annoyance and initially refuses to accept the gifts or mbi byang map (usually a locally woven piece of cloth, called fwat) offered. Once the parents of the bride‐to‐be’s “anger” has subsided – usually after a few days or weeks – food and goat meat are prepared by the groom’s family and offered to the young woman’s family.9 There is a romantic element to wife abduction, which can in some ways be viewed as an elopement of lovers (if the young woman goes willingly). Moreover, the ability of the would‐be bridegroom to steal or abduct his future bride is regarded by society as a show of machismo. For, in kidnapping his future bride, the young bridegroom displays his ability to forcibly take away that which belongs to another, and at the same time makes the statement that he is not averse to using force to protect his bride.10 Besides, a bride who is forced into marriage can employ her customary right to run away from that marriage into the arms of a suitor of her choice.



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The investigation period Courtship is followed by a period of investigation, which can stretch for months on end. Among the Igbo of eastern Nigeria, this process is called iju ase, or asking questions. Questions are asked to make sure that the family that each young adult is marrying into is hardworking and honest. Families also check to see if the family of their potential in‐laws have genetic disorders that may be passed down to their children; for instance, parents want to find out if there is a history of leprosy, epilepsy, or sickle cell anemia. The focus of the investigation among the Bajju of southern Zaria, Nigeria, is almost identical.11 In polyandrous Nigeria, the investigation process is particularly focused on making sure that partners are marrying exogamously. Once partners have been approved, bride price, bride service, or bridewealth is negotiated. There are as many words for this institution as indigenous languages in Africa. To the Igbo of eastern Nigeria, bride price is ego nwanyi. The Yoruba of southern Nigeria call it owo ori, literally, money, to signify that both destinies are intertwined. They also call it idawo, which means that the community has been joined together.12 The Kagoro of the northern Nigerian Plateau call it dukia.13 Bride price, bride service, or bridewealth is recognized by numerous ethnic groups all over Africa, including the Wolof of Senegal and Gambia, who call it waarugal, implying one’s duty. The Sotho, Xhosa, and Tswana of southern Africa call it mahadi, mvulamlomo, and lobola respectively. The Moghamo of the Cameroon Grassfields call it ikap mba nwan (compensation for a future child); the Balla of Zimbabwe call it chiko; the Tonga of southern Zambia also call it chiko and muyumusho; and the Bemba of the same country call it nsalamu. Last but not least, the Ngoni of southeast‐central Africa have two words for it, mfuko and malowolo. Bride price could take the form of cowries, brass rods, or whatever constituted the people’s monetary system. Goats and cattle were regarded as bridewealth; and bride service involved a series of work obligations performed by the bridegroom and his family for the family of the bride. Each was a symbol, a small token, to acknowledge that the future children of the union would belong to the man and his lineage and bear his name. If bride price, bridewealth, or bride service were not paid or fulfilled, the children born of the union would belong to the mother’s lineage and bear her name. I have argued in a previous study that a more fitting term for this institution would be child‐price (or wealth or service), since the token presentation of gifts or service by the bridegroom and his family does not signify the buying or selling of a woman’s productive or reproductive labor, as some scholars have suggested (N. Achebe 2011: 39–40). The ethnographers Edwin Smith and Andrew Dale, who worked among the Balla of Zimbabwe, illuminate this point: The goods given by or on behalf of the bridegroom to the classmen and parents of the bride are called the chiko … To us it may seem to be a matter of buying and

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selling, but the Balla would repudiate any such ideal … The woman is not bought. Her husband does not acquire proprietary rights in her … The chiko is more properly regarded as a compensation to the girl’s clan, a return to parents and guardians for the expense they have incurred in her rearing, the seal of a contract which she is to become the mother of the man’s children, and a guarantee of good treatment … The chiko is an acknowledgment that the marriage is an honorable one. (Smith and Dale 1920: 48–49; emphasis added)

After bride price, bridewealth, or bride service has been paid or fulfilled, the couple get married. Marriage marks the joining of two lineages, two bloodlines; and the celebration is performed and witnessed by the community. Despite regional differences in culture and language, the practice of marriage in Africa adheres to this principle; and most marriages on the continent are monogamous and exogamous.

Types of marriages There are several types of marriages in Africa. The first and most important is marriage by traditional law and custom. All Africans, irrespective of nation or tongue, culture or religion, engage in this kind of marriage, which is typically marked by elaborate celebrations of feasting and merrymaking by the entire community. If an African couple is Christian, they will have an additional marriage according to the Christian church and its laws. This marriage occurs only after the couple has been married according to traditional law and custom. Then there is court or registry marriage, where a couple produces witnesses and go before a judge. If a couple is Muslim, then they will marry according to Islamic law. Islamic law allows a man to marry up to four wives as long as he loves and treats them all equally. It is the custom of Islamic Swahili and Hausa women to adorn themselves with intricate henna patterns before their wedding. Among the Hausa and other groups in West Africa, these are called lali. Lali and henna designs are applied to signify the bride’s beauty, sensuality, womanhood, and worth. Africans also have a fifth type of marriage called woman marriage or woman‐ to‐woman marriage. Distributed throughout Africa – among West African communities of the Igbo, Kalabari, Yoruba, Ekiti, Buni, Akoko, Yagna, Nupe, Ijaw, and Fon; South African communities of the Venda, Lovedu, Pedi, Hurutshe, Zulu, Basotho, Phalaborwa, Narene, Koni, and Batswana; East African communities of the Gikuyu, Luo, Kuria, Iregi, Kenye, Suba, Simbiti, Ngoreme, Gusii, Kipsigis, and Kamba; and North African communities of the Nuer, Dinka, and Shilluk – this type of marriage is when a wealthy woman, otherwise referred to as a female husband, who in most cases cannot give birth, marries another woman who then has sex with a male lover or lovers in order to have children for her female husband. The children of these unions bear the name of the female husband/ father. The marriage is neither amorous nor lesbian in nature.



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Among the northernmost group of Nigerian Igbo and the southern Nigerian Yoruba; the Tongu, Anlo, and Ada of Ghana; and the Moghamo of Cameroon there existed a unique marriage form whereby a deity could marry a human being. An evolution of the woman‐to‐woman marriage, deity‐to‐human marriage enabled a male or female deity to demand, through a diviner or intermediary, that a young woman be betrothed to him or her, in a process variously called igo mma ogo (becoming the in‐law of a deity) among the Igbo; eru orisha among the Yoruba, Nigeria; trokosi among the Tongu, Ghana; fiashidi among the Anlo, Ghana; woryonyor among the Ada, Ghana; and iweik nwighe (wife of deity) among the Mogamoland of Cameroon (N. Achebe 2003). These deity‐to‐human unions were realized so that the deity could protect and extend the privileged status of in‐law to her or his human betrothed and family. Africans practiced two types of polygamy, namely, polygyny and polyandry. These unions represented an elevated form of marriage. Polygyny is when a man marries many wives. He can, however, do this only if can afford it. Polyandry is when woman marries many husbands. The occurrence of polyandry worldwide is rare. It is concentrated mainly in the Himalayan areas of South Asia and sporadically distributed in Africa, Oceania, and Native American populations. Polyandry is generally found in areas that boast difficult physical environments and high populations. These high populations impose extreme pressures on agricultural systems of their environments. Therefore, polyandry works to limit population growth and to ensure the coherence of agricultural estates in these areas. Theorists suggest that the institution is more often found in societies in which women hold a relatively high social status. There are essentially two forms of polyandry: fraternal polyandry, in which a group of brothers share a wife; and nonfraternal polyandry, in which a woman’s husbands are not related. Nonfraternal polyandry is the type of polyandry that exists in Africa. Polyandry occurs in the northern Nigerian regions of Irigwe, Kadara, Malabu, Jirai, Chawai, Katab, Rukuba, and Abisi (Piti), and in some small pockets of the Sudan, Benin Republic, Congo, Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Kenya (among the Turkana and Massai).

Love, courtship, and marriage archive The love, courtship, and marriage African archive is not as robust as one would expect. However, there are places where beginner researchers could start their search.

Onitsha market chapbooks/literature In the early 1950s and 1960s a unique chapbook or pamphlet literature, called Onitsha Market Literature, emerged in eastern Nigeria and became a flourishing literary phenomena in West Africa. The explosion of this literature coincided with

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the growth of literacy; the movement of large numbers of people from villages to towns; and an increase in printing presses owned and operated by Nigerians. These chapbooks were essentially how‐to advice and moral discourse manuals from an indigenous Nigerian point of view. The authors concerned themselves overwhelming with matters of the heart, producing a slew of spellbinding books about love and love lost, with titles as varied and varied as How to Get a Lady in Love, The Voice of Love, Public Opinion on Lovers, Love in the Real Sense, The Disappointed Lover, Love with Tears, Tears of Love, The Art of Love in Real Sense, The School of Love and How to Attend It, A Journey into Love, and Alice in the Romance of Love. The following is a fuller list: J. Abiakam, How to Write and Reply Letters for Marriage J. Abiakam, Engagement Letters and How to Know a Girl to Marry J. Abiakam, How to Speak to Girls and Win Their Love A. O. Agunanne, Love Is Immortal Ugochukwu Eman Ajokuh, The Chains of Love C. N. Aririguzo, Miss Comfort’s Heart Cries for Tonny’s Love D. A. Azoh, A Colourful Wedding and a Happy Home G. P. Chidia, Marry with Love B. A. Chinaka, How to Speak and Write to Girls for Friendship G. Egemonye, Broken Engagement J. N. C. Egemonye, Disaster in the Realms of Love Eddy Ekesiobi, True Love (1st edition) Eddy Ekesiobi, True Love (2nd edition) C. O. D. Ekwensi, When Love Whispers K. C. N. Eze, How to Write Love Letters and Win Girls Love for Friendship Justin Ezimora, The Lady that Forced Me To Be Romantic T. O. Iguh, Agnes the Faithful Lover T. O. Iguh, Alice in the Romance of Love T. O. Iguh, The Disappointed Lover T. O. Iguh, Join in the Romance of True Love T. O. Iguh, Love at First, Hate at Last T. O. Iguh, The Prize of Love T. O. Iguh, The Sorrows of Love C. W. Kpaluku, Beautiful Adanma in Crazy Love N. O. Madu, Miss Rosy in the Romance of True Love Adele Madumere, The Way to Make Friends with Girls Adele Madumere, Love Infallible Highbred Maxwell, Public Opinion on Lovers Highbred Maxwell, “Before Ladies Every Boy Student Is Handsome and Before Boys All Girls Are Angels” N. O. A. Njoku, Guide to Marriage N. O. A. Njoku, How to Write Letters: “Love Is a Warm Affection”



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N. O. A. Njoku, How to Write Love Letters G. Nwankwo, G., Tragic Love and the Woman from Nowhere C. G. Nwosu, Miss Cordelia in the Romance of Destiny R. I. M. Obioha, Between Love and Obedience R. I. M. Obioha, Friendship between Boys and Girls R. I. M. Obioha, Friendship between Boys and Girls and How to Make It N. Odioh, N., Edith in the Flower of Love O. A.Ogali, Agnes the Faithful Lover O. A. Ogali, Caroline the One Guinea Girl O. A. Ogali, Veronica My Daughter R. Oguanobi, Two Friends in the Romance of Runaway Lover M. Chidi Ohaejesi, How to Write Love Letters and Win Girls’ Love (95 Love Letters and How to Compose Them) B. A. Oji, Passport to a Happy Life R. Okonkwo, How to Make Friends with Girls R. Okonkwo, The Game of Love O. Olisa, Elizabeth My Lover J. K. Onwudiegwie, The Bitterness of Love J. K. Onwudiegwie, The Miracles of Love R. Richards, How to Marry a Good Girl and Live in Peace with Her Speedy Eric, The Art of Love in Real Sense Speedy Eric, Mabel the Sweet Honey that Poured Away F. N. Stephen, A Journey into Love F. N. Stephen, A Woman’s Pride Is Her Husband F. N. Stephen, Be Careful: Salutation Is Not Love F. N. Stephen, Beautiful Maria in the Act of True Love F. N. Stephen, Beautiful Maria in the Act of True Love: “Emman and Maria” F. N. Stephen, How to Get a Lady in Love F. N. Stephen, How to Get a Lady in Love and Romance with Her F. N. Stephen, How to Make Love F. N. Stephen, The School of Love and How to Attend It F. N. Stephen, The Temple of Love E. Uba, Romance in a Nutshell E. Uba, The Broken Heart A. O. Ude, The Nigerian Bachelor’s Guide

Littattafan soyayya: Northern Nigeria “love literature” in Hausa In the ancient city of Kano in northern Nigeria, a quiet feminist literary revolution is unfolding. Written in Hausa by young Muslim Hausa women, these cheaply printed books, numbering in the thousands, with unauthorized covers of Nollywood starlets, feature plots by authors who write against the grain of their conservative Islamic society. The women authors showcase plots revolving around

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amorous love – poor girl meets and falls passionately in love with a prince – to those involving child marriage and quick divorce. Like their Onitsha Market Literature predecessors, these novellas also serve an educational purpose, advising first wives, for instance, on how to behave when a husband takes a second wife. One of littattafan soyayya’s most recognized authors is Hadiza Nuhu Gudaji. So popular are Gudaji’s novellas that she is a regular guest on northern Nigerian radio talk shows, meting out advice to her numerous admirers. Another popular novelist is Balaraba Ramat Yakubu, a veteran founder of the movement, who holds the distinction of being one of the few novelists who have had a novel translated into English. The novella, Sin Is a Puppy that Follows You Home, was translated from Hausa by Aliyu Kamal for Indian publishers, who subsequently turned it into a Bollywood movie. The blurb describes the novella as “an Islamic soap opera complete with polygamous households, virtuous women, scheming harlots, and black magic” (Faul 2016).

Novels, short stories, and love poems Beyond Onitsha Market Literature, there is a sprinkling of literature by African novelists that deal in some capacity or other with amorous love and relationships. In these novels, novellas, short stories, and poems, the unfolding of amorous love is seen from an indigenous African perspective. From Cyprian Ekwensi to Chinua Achebe, to Mariama Bâ, to Elechi Amadi, to Efua Sutherland, to Ama Ata Aidoo, these first‐generation African writers produce fiction that presents Africans engaged in amorous love. Then there are the younger African writers, Kiru Taye being one of the most prolific, who are identified as romance authors. The following list is a good starting point for African novels: Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease Oyindamola Affinih, A Tailor‐Made Romance Ama Ata Aidoo, African Love Stories Elechi Amadi, The Concubine OlaAwonubi, Love’s Persuasion Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter Abimbola Dare, When Broken Chords Sing Cyprian Ekwensi, Jajua Nana Sifa Gowon, A Taste of Love Chioma Iwunze‐Ibiam, Finding Love Again Unoma Nwankwor, When You Let Go Amra Okolo, Black Sparkle Romance Tolulope Popoola, Nothing Comes Close Efua Sutherland, The Marriage of Anansewa Kiru Taye, A Valentine Challenge Kiru Taye, An Engagement Challenge



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Kiru Taye, Her Protector Kiru Taye, His Princess Kiru Taye, His Strength Kiru Taye, His Treasure Amina Thula, Elevator Kiss African writers have also documented diverse expressions of love in short story form. The stories document new love, old love, love lost, and forbidden love, and in so doing debunk the ubiquitous myth of African provider love. Short stories about African romantic love include: Chinua Achebe, Marriage Is a Private Affair Ama Ata Aidoo, African Love Stories: An Anthology Todd Stewart Chilembo, Crossing the Luumbu River: A Thrilling African Love Story Ainehi Edoro, Celebrate Valentine’s Day with African Love Stories! Helen Fallon, African Love Stories: A Collection from African Women Writers Olola Olabode Ogunlana, Yoruba Love Stories “Pompey: An African Love Story” Taboo Love: Short Stories from Africa There is also an indigenous tradition of oral love poems, which dates back several centuries. Particularly well known are the Swahili love poets. In the African tradition, poetry is performed and in many instances sung, so I shall discuss love poetry and songs together. The African love poems discussed here originate from all parts of the continent. They express passion and sensuality, romance and sexual attraction, love gained and love lost; they are performed to set the mood for romance and amorous love, to mourn the loss of a lover. “Close to Her Husband” (Uganda, Acholi) is about love lost. The Acholi perform this lament during the Guru Lyel feast, which is held many months after the funeral of a lover, partner, and spouse.14 “Balwo” (Somalia) means sorrow, but these poems express a different kind of sorrow – the sorrow of unhappy, unrequited love, described in striking and unusual imagery.15 The Baakiga, cattle herders of the Ugandan mountains, give us the poem “Eye of the Calf,” which draws upon imagery of their cattle, the foods they grow, and the natural vegetation of their homeland, expressed in a voice of love.16 With lines like “Oh, you are like a kilt which a young dandy set out to choose; Oh, you are like a costly ring for which thousands were paid,” the Somali love poem “Her Lover” expresses the amorous exchanges of romantic love.17 Another poem, “Lime of the Forest” (Ethiopia, Amhara), evokes a combination of natural, religious, and courtly imagery in praise of a lover,18 while “My Mwananazi” (Kenya, Swahili), first recorded in the 1860s in the Islamic tradition, is sung in praise of a dutiful wife.19 “Nyagumbe Refuses” is a Chopi love poem from southern

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Mozambique, which is often sung at weddings. In the poem/song the young bride Nyagumbe and her groom playfully ask one another “why do you refuse?” They respond, “my heart is the love of refusing.”20 With the words, “Young lady, you are a mirror that must not go out in the sun,” an Igbo love poem “To a Young Lady,”21 from eastern Nigeria, evokes a series of metaphors in praise of the beauty and goodness of a young Igbo lover. Last but not least are perhaps two of the most famous love poems in Africa – the Swahili “Serenade”22 and “Serenade II” (Kenya, Swahili). They tell the story of an epic hero, Liyongo, who is advised to listen, not sing, to her suitors: “O lady, be calm and cry not out but attend to your suitors patiently, listen patiently to them who have climbed up to your window, lest those passing along the road may see.”23 Then there are the compilations of African love poems that have been edited by scholars and these include Anderson (2004), Chipasula (2009), Foster (1974), Knappert (1972), Fox (1985), and Schonstein (2014). In the musical realm, Africans have produced and continue to produce love songs. From the ngoma singers of Tanganyika to the traditional Igbo love ballads of Ezigbo Obiligbo Igbo, to Africa’s more contemporary performers, musical declarations of romantic adoration abound in African music. These songs include: 2Face Idibia (now 2Baba), “African Queen” (Nigeria) 2Face Idibia (now 2Baba), “If Love Is a Crime” (Nigeria) 2Face Idibia (now 2Baba), “True Love” (Nigeria) 9ice, “Wedding Day” (Nigeria) Adol ft. Fragrance, “Your Love” (Nigeria) Ary, “Teu Grande Amor” (Angola) Asa, “Be My Man” (Nigeria) Ay.com, “Pass Me Your Love” (Nigeria) Banky W, “I Adore You” (Nigeria) Banky W, “Till My Dying Day” (Nigeria) Banky W, “Yes/No”(Nigeria) Blackmagic, “Repete” (Nigeria) Bob Alash ft. Paul Play, “Ako Ati Abo” (Nigeria) Bollie, “You May Kiss The Bride” (Ghana) Bracket, “Ada Owerri” (Nigeria) Bracket, “Yori Yori” (Nigeria) Brenda Fassie, “Vul’Indlela” (South Africa) Brymo, “Good Morning” (Nigeria) D’Banj, “Fall In Love” (Nigeria) Daasebre Gyamena, “Obaa Ben Ni” (Ghana) Dare Art Alade, “With This Woman” (Nigeria) Davido, “Ekuro” (Nigeria) Don Tom, “My Wify” (Nigeria)



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Dr. Sid, “Something About You” (Nigeria) Duncan Mighty, “Obianuju” (Nigeria) E. T. Mensah, “All For You” (Ghana) Efya, “Forgetting Me” (Ghana) Eldee, “You Are The Only One” (Nigeria) Ezigbo Obiligbo Igbo, “Adamma” (Nigeria) Ezigbo Obiligbo Igbo, “Nwanyi Oma” (Nigeria) Faze ft. Niyola, “All Of My Days” (Nigeria) Faze, “I’m in Luv” (Nigeria) Faze, “Share My Heart” (Nigeria) Femi, “Never Felt A Love” (Nigeria) Fena Gitu, “African King” (Kenya) Flavour, “Oyi” (Nigeria) Fuse ODG, “Only” (Ghana) Gbenga Ogundeyi, “Ololufe Mi” (Nigeria) GT the Guitarman, “Truly” (Nigeria) Igbo Traditional, “Mmiri Malu mu” (Nigeria) Iyanya, “Love Truly” (Nigeria) J Martins, “Stay With Me” (Nigeria) Jeremiah Gyang, “In Love With you” (Nigeria) Jeremiah Gyang, “The Only One” (Nigeria) Jeremiah Gyang, “You’re My Fire” (Nigeria) Josphat Somanje, “Handibvume” (Zimbabwe) K.O ft. Nandi Mngoma, “Skhanda Love”(South Africa) Kaysha, “Don’t Change” (Democratic Republic of Congo) Kojo Antwi, “Bor Mi Nkomo Der”(Ghana) Kojo Antwi, “Dade Anomomaa” (Ghana) Kojo Antwi, “Me Dware” (Ghana) Kwabena Kwabena, “Me Ye” (Ghana) Kwabena Kwabena, “Odo Kor Nia Odo Wor” (Ghana) Lara George, “Rest Of My Life” (Nigeria) Longombas, “Queen” (Kenya) Loyiso, “Dali Wami” (South Africa) Luralph, “Iwo Ni” (Nigeria) M.I., “One Naira’”(Nigeria) Malaika,”Never Change My Mind” (South Africa) Maurice Kirya, “Never Been Loved Before” (Uganda) MOG, “Wedding Day” (Kenya) Morachi, “Marry Me” (Nigeria) Naeto C., “5&6”(Nigeria) Naeto C. & Flavour, “Helele” (Nigeria) Neli Uchendu, “Love Nwantinti,” (Nigeria) Nikki Laoye, “Never Felt This Way Before” (Nigeria)

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Obiora Obiwon, “Obi Mu O” (Nigeria) Obrafour, “Heavy” (Ghana) Ofori Amponsah, “Odwo” (Ghana) Ofori Amponsah, Barosky, King Khoruz, Kofi Nti, “Puduo” (Ghana) OJB, “Lover’s Anthem” (Nigeria) Olamide,“Melo Melo” (Nigeria) P‐Square, “Ifunanya”(Nigeria) P‐Square, “I Love You” (Nigeria) P‐Square, “No One Like You” (Nigeria) Pat Thomas, “Odo A Medo Wo” (Ghana) Paul KoDairo, “Angel Of My Life” (Nigeria) Paul Play, “Angel Of My Life” (Nigeria) Praye, “Wodin” (Ghana) Prodigy, “My Type Of Girl” (Nigeria) Rosemary Njage, “Darling” (Kenya) Sammy Okposo, “I Do” (Nigeria) Sangare Oumou, “Sigi Kourouni” (the Little Marriage Stool) (Mali) Sarkodie, “Baby” (Ghana) Shola Allison, “Eji Owuro” (Nigeria) Styl Plus, “Olufunmi” (Nigeria) Sunny Nneji, “Oruka” (Nigeria) Terry G, “This Love” (Nigeria) The Soil ft. Khuli Chana, “Susan” (South Africa) Theo of Mafikizolo, “Umphathe Kahle” (South Africa) Tiwa Savage ft. Don Jazzy, “Eminado” (Nigeria) TJ, “Elewe Ukwu” (Nigeria) Tmax,”Oko Ati Iyawo” (Nigeria) Tosin Martins, “Olo Mi” (Nigeria) Tshala Muana, “Nasi Nabali (I am Married Now)” (Democratic Republic of Congo) Wande Coal, “Olulofe” (Nigeria) Wutah, “Kotosa” (Ghana) Wutah, “I Do” (Ghana) Wutah, “Esikyire (Don’t Change Your Style)” (Ghana) X Project, “Aye Mi” (Nigeria)

African scholarship There has emerged some scholarship on love in Africa in recent times. In these scholarly writings, the authors have explored amorous love in historical perspective, mining evidence from early travelers’ logs and the colonial archive. These works include N. Achebe (2016), Adeagbo (2016), Belcher (2016), Cassidy (1991), Cole and Thomas (2009), Currier (2012), Decker (2015), Finck (1899), Finnegan (2015), Fossungu (2014), Fourie (2008), Hanley (2010), Hoad (2007), Hunter



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(2010), Mbiti (1973), Mojola (2014), Mpongo (2011), Munro (2012a, 2012b), Oloka‐Onyango (2015), Tamale (2011), Weeks, Heaphy, and Donovan (2001), and Zabus (2013).

Notes 1 For examples of how to “Say, I Love You in 54 African Languages,” see http:// abovewhispers.com/2016/02/13/say‐i‐love‐you‐in‐54‐african‐languages, accessed May 30, 2016. 2 Conversation with Dr. Folu Folarin Ogundimu, Associate Professor of Journalism, Michigan State University, East Lansing, January 11, 2015. 3 Email correspondence with Wangui wa Goro, social critic, researcher, and translator, January 15, 2015. 4 Email correspondence with Mı c̃ ere Gı t̃ hae Mũ go, Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence, Department of African American Studies, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, January 19, 2015. 5 Email correspondence with Mı c̃ ere Gı t̃ hae Mũ go, January 19, 2015. 6 See also http://earthafricacurio.com/african‐crafts/zulu‐love‐letters‐wholesale‐prices, accessed May 28, 2016. 7 See “The Fire on the Hill,” http://www.english‐for‐students.com/The‐Fire‐on‐ The‐Hill.html, accessed July 25, 2016. 8 Email correspondence with Jean Ngoya Kidula, Professor of Music and Ethnomusicology at the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, University of Georgia, January 11, 2015. 9 Interview with Umar Danfulani, Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria, July 21, 2011; Dakwol Musa Mwansat, interviewed by Mathais Dadwak Bakzak, Jiblik/Dukup, Plateau State, Nigeria, December 18, 1985, in Mathais Dadwak Bakzak, “Mupuland from Earliest Times to circa 1960,” unpublished BA thesis, Department of History, University of Jos, 1985, 116. 10 Interview with Umar Danfulani, 2011. 11 Families investigate whether a prospective spouse is hardworking and can produce sufficient food to feed his family. They are interested in whether there is a history of illness such as epilepsy, leprosy, or sickle cell anemia. See McKinney (1992: 76). 12 Conversation with Folu Ogundimu, Lansing, Michigan, May 8, 2008. Bride price, bride service, or bridewealth is recognized by numerous ethnic groups all over Africa, including the Wolof, who call it waarugal (implying one’s duty); the Sotho, who call it mahadi; the Xhosa, who call it mvulamlomo; the Tswana, who call it lobola; the Moghamo, who call it ikap mba nwan (literally, compensation for future child); the Balla and Tonga, who call it chiko; the Bemba, who call it nsalamu; and the Ngoni, who call it mfuko and malowolo. 13 NAK, Zarprof. 220, no. 23/1930, “No Title,” 6. 14 African Poems, Oral Poetry from Africa, http://www.africanpoems.net/relationships/ close‐to‐her‐husband, accessed August 5, 2016. 15 African Poems, Oral Poetry from Africa http://www.africanpoems.net/relationships/ balwo, accessed August 5, 2016. 16 African Poems, Oral Poetry from Africa http://www.africanpoems.net/relationships/ eye‐of‐the‐calf, accessed August 5, 2016.

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17 African Poems, Oral Poetry from Africa http://www.africanpoems.net/relationships/ her‐lover, accessed August 5, 2016 18 African Poems, Oral Poetry from Africa http://www.africanpoems.net/relationships/ lime‐of‐the‐forest, accessed August 5, 2016. 19 African Poems, Oral Poetry from Africa http://www.africanpoems.net/relationships/ my‐mwananazi, accessed August 5, 2016. 20 African Poems, Oral Poetry from Africa http://www.africanpoems.net/relationships/ nyagumbe‐refuses, accessed August 5, 2016. 21 African Poems, Oral Poetry from Africa http://www.africanpoems.net/praise/to‐a‐ young‐lady, accessed August 5, 2016. 22 African Poems, Oral Poetry from Africa http://www.africanpoems.net/relationships/ serenade, accessed August 5, 2016. 23 African Poems, Oral Poetry from Africa http://www.africanpoems.net/relationships/ serenade‐ii, accessed August 5, 2016.

References Achebe, Chinua. 1992. Things Fall Apart. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Achebe, Nwando. 2003. “Igo Mma Ogo: The Adoro Goddess, Her Wives and Challengers  –  Influences on the Reconstruction of Alor‐Uno, Northern Igboland, 1890–1994.” In “Revising the Experiences of Colonized Women,” special issue, Journal of Women’s History 14(4): 83–104. Achebe, Nwando. 2010. “When Deities Marry: Indigenous ‘Slave’ Systems Expanding and Metamorphosing in the Igbo Hinterland.” In African Systems of Slavery, edited by Stephanie Beswick and Jay Spaulding, 105–133. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Achebe, Nwando. 2011. The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Achebe, Nwando. 2016. “Woman‐to‐Woman, Polyandrous, and Child Marriage: Expressions and Contestations of Marriage Rights in Colonial and Independent Nigeria.” In Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties: Global Perspectives on Marriage, Crisis, and Nation, edited by Hanan Kholoussy and Kristin Celello, 170–191. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Adeagbo, Oluwafemi. 2016. “‘Love Beyond Colour’: The Formation of Interracial Gay Men’s Intimate Relationships in Post‐Apartheid South Africa.” National Identities 18(3): 241–264. Anderson, P. R. 2004. In the Country of the Heart: Love Poems from South Africa. Johannesburg: Jacana. Belcher, Wendy Laura. 2016. “Same‐Sex Intimacies in the Early African Text Gädlä Wälättä P̣eṭros (1672): Queer Reading an Ethiopian Woman Saint.” Research in African Literatures 47(2): 20–45. Berry, Jack, ed. and trans. 1991. West African Folktales. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Cassidy, Michael. 1991. The Politics of Love. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Chipasula, Frank M. 2009. Bending the Bow: An Anthology of African Love Poetry. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Cole, Jennifer, and Lynn M. Thomas, eds. 2009. Love in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.



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Cole, Jennifer, and Lynn M. Thomas. 2009. Love in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Currier, Ashley. 2012. Out in Africa: LGBT Organizing in Namibia and South Africa. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Decker, Corrie. 2015. “Love and Sex in Islamic Africa: Introduction.” Africa Today 61(4): 1, 10, 112–113. Dube, Hlenge. 2009. Zulu Beadwork: Talk with Beads. Denver, CO: Africa Direct. Faul, Michelle. 2016. “Romance Novellas by Women in Nigeria Challenge Traditions.” August 17. http://bigstory.ap.org/3fc0caa13ac3e08225b, accessed March 2, 2017. Finck, Henry T. 1899. Primitive Love and Love‐Stories. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Finnegan, Ruth. 2015. “The Voices of Women in Africa. Love, Marriage, Slavery, Apartheid.” Storia delle Donne: Concepire, Generare, Nascere 10(1): 11–28. Fossungu, Peter Ateh‐Afac. 2014. Africa’s Anthropological Dictionary on Love and Understanding: Marriage and the Tensions of Belonging in Cameroon. Oxford: African Books Collective. Foster, J. L. 1992. Love Songs of the New Kingdom. Austin: University of Texas Press. Fourie, Corlia. 2008. Romances to Remember: South Africans in Love. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau. Fox, M. 1985. The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Hanley, M. 2010. Affirming Love, Avoiding AIDS: What Africa Can Teach the West. Philadelphia: National Catholic Bioethics Center. Hoad, Neville Wallace. 2007. African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hodari, Askhari Johnson, and Yvonne McCalla. 2009. Lifelines: The Black Book of Proverbs. New York: Broadway Books. Hunter, Mark. 2010. Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South Africa. Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press. Knappert, Jan. 1972. A Choice of Flowers, Chaguo la Maua: An Anthology of Swahili Love Songs. London: Heinemann. Lane, Megan. 2011. “The Male Beauty Contest Judged by Women.” BBC, January 20. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world‐africa‐12215138, accessed March 7, 2018. Lynch, Patricia Ann. 2004. African Mythology A to Z. New York: Facts on File. Mbiti, John S. 1973. Love and Marriage in Africa. London: Longman. McKinney, Carol V. 1992. “Wives and Sisters: Bajju Marital Patterns.” Ethnology 31(1): 75–87. Mojola, Sanyu A. 2014. Love, Money, and HIV: Becoming a Modern African Woman in the Age of AIDS. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mpongo, Nombeko. 2011. Whisper Not: 15 Africans Speak Out on Life and Love Beyond HIV. Cape Town: Openly Positive Trust. Munro, Brenna M. 2012a. South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Munro, Brenna M. 2012b. Homosexual Tropes and LBGTI Strategies of Visibility South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Oloka‐Onyango, J. 2015. “Debating Love, Human Rights and Identity Politics in East Africa: The Case of Uganda and Kenya.” African Human Rights Law Journal 15(1): 28–57. Schonstein, Patricia. 2014. Heart of Africa! Poems of Love, Loss and Longing. Cape Town: African Sun Press. Smith, Edwin W., and Andrew Murray Dale. 1920. The Ila‐Speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia. London: Macmillan. Tamale, Sylvia. 2011. African Sexualities: A Reader. Oxford: Pambazuka Press. Weeks, Jeffrey, Brian Heaphy, and Catherine Donovan. 2001. Same Sex Intimacies: Families of Choice and Other Life Experiments. London: Routledge. Women24. 2012. “20 Ways to Say I LOVE YOU: Learn How to Say the Magical Phrase in 20 African Languages.” http://www.women24.com/LoveAndSex/LoveAndMarriage/ 20‐ways‐to‐say‐I‐LOVE‐YOU‐20120215, accessed July 5, 2016. Zabus, Chantal J. 2013. Out in Africa: Same‐Sex Desire in Sub‐Saharan Literatures and Cultures. Oxford: James Currey.

Chapter Eight

Slavery and Women in Africa: Changing Definitions, Continuing Problems Claire C. Robertson

Consideration of women and slavery in Africa has overturned many inaccurate stereotypes about slavery and women. In 1983 Robertson and Klein challenged the dominance of stereotypes established in the slavery literature by scholars of male plantation slavery in the United States and the Caribbean, chattel slavery practiced by Europeans, with the publication of Women and Slavery in Africa. African historians such as Lovejoy (2007) and Nwokeji (2001) established that the sex ratios predominating in the Atlantic slave trade, in which normally two‐ thirds of those exported from Africa were male, were determined primarily by socioeconomic conditions in Africa, which prioritized the demand for female slaves. Europeans’ higher demand for male labor reflected assumptions about men’s higher capacity for agricultural labor, and made for a symbiotic relationship expressed in the usual sex ratio, which varied depending on local conditions in Africa (Nwokeji 2001). Moreover, historians of African slavery have now generally assimilated the concept, pioneered by Kopytoff and Miers (1977), of slavery as a continuum of statuses rather than one thing, abandoning the dominance of chattel slavery as definitional of all slavery. Chattel slaves can be defined as having no property rights but being property themselves (i.e., they can be sold), as having no personhood before the law, and as having been removed from natal kin relations. However, even studies of chattel slavery have for some time questioned aspects of this definition, given evidence of slaves reconstituting kin relationships fictively or A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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biologically and securing limited property rights, for instance. In Africa, however, more slavery systems can be termed lineage, or assimilative. Highly varied economic structures meant that in a few areas – the Sahel, Zanzibar clove plantations, southern Nigerian palm oil plantations – and mainly in the nineteenth century, varieties of chattel slavery were practiced (in South Africa from the seventeenth century on whites practiced chattel slavery of Africans and others). More common and less onerous forms of lineage or assimilative slavery reflected a general African practice of increasing the free members of a society through biological reproduction and of assimilating members acquired first by enslavement, unlike chattel systems aimed at creating a permanent underclass supplying cheap labor. The characteristics of lineage slavery were fundamental to the high valuation of women as slaves in much of Africa. The process of enslavement for those captured or sold into slavery was usually brutal. The treatment of those subsequently assimilated into their owners’ societies generally reflected their degree of assimilation, the limits of assimilation within a society, and its progress over their lifetime. Many African societies practicing slavery (most did not) had no second‐generation slavery. The continuum of disadvantaged statuses within African societies included pawnship at the lesser end, whereby junior members of debtor lineages, usually female, were lent to a creditor’s household, where their labor secured the loan by paying the interest on it. With repayment they were supposed to return to their own lineage, but in practice they often married their creditor or a member of his or her lineage, with forgiveness of the debt serving as the customary bridewealth payment to her lineage. Also at the less oppressive end of the continuum were (usually male) clients who were technically unfree before customary law but who had complete freedom of movement, to marry, and to own property (even slaves) themselves, in exchange for a form of sharecropping or a monthly or yearly payment to the owner. Precolonial slavery in Africa, then, often did not conform to a typical chattel slavery model but was highly varied, especially for women. In many societies “free” women did not have full rights; gradations of servitude existed such that the statuses of free, freed, pawned, indentured, junior wife, concubine, maidservant, “free” worker, dependent, and slave shaded into each other and/or represented different stages in a woman’s life or of assimilation into a new society. Often the status of a nominally “free” but junior female was in practice indistinguishable from that of a female slave, at least in terms of the work that they did. Given that even during early colonialism, when slavery was still commonly practiced (Cooper 1997), age was still more important than gender in determining authority and privileges (Robertson 1984), the assertions of those enslaved as children that they were treated like free persons make sense. Gradations in status are clear in the synthesis of the structural and socioeconomic implications for women of slavery made by Robertson and Klein (1983), who concluded that there were more female slaves held in Africa than male



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because of (1) primarily, their high reproductive (defined as domestic work) and productive (for commodity production) labor value and, secondarily, for their biological reproductive function; (2) their value in relation to replacing the extensive labor expected of freewomen, who consequently often were the primary users, supervisors, and owners of women slaves; (3) their value in expanding the numbers of lineage members, especially in a situation of low population exacerbated by the Atlantic slave trade and within patrilineal systems, where assimilation as junior wives or concubines was easier than in matrilineal ones; (4) women’s higher vulnerability to enslavement than men because of liabilities within socioeconomic structures; and (5) colonial emancipation favoring men since women were more likely to have been assimilated within lineages, their status as slaves masked as relatives. Women had more difficulty getting money to achieve self‐ emancipation, were reluctant to leave their children, and did more of the labor‐ intensive unskilled work, while men secured more skilled wage labor. Most subsequent case studies have supported these generalizations which demonstrate the higher utility of women than men slaves.1 If, historically, African forms of slavery were highly varied, those variations manifested themselves for women and girls particularly in the work that bondwomen did, in the gendered division of labor, in the forms and degrees of assimilation in various societies, in the rights of slave women, especially regarding property ownership, in the varied cultural influences of women slaves, and in the differing treatment of chattel and lineage slaves. These aspects are considered in the discussion that follows. The work of female slaves, both domestic and in commodity production, has usually been underestimated. Domestic work often has not been considered to be work. Some have assumed that all women’s work was/is domestic, with no economic value. Therefore, women’s slavery has not been seen as a labor system but rather as a method of recruiting concubines or of increasing the population and influence of lineages. However, the understanding of the economics of African social systems has been substantially furthered by the study of women and slavery, and has in turn influenced the breaking of stereotypes in the study of slavery elsewhere. There was high variation in the types of work done by women slaves, from mining gold in the Gold Coast and Madagascar (Campbell 2007), to many routinized labor‐intensive horticultural tasks, to processing cloves on Zanzibar, to trading independently or helping women traders, to making thread for male weavers, to highly diversified household tasks involved in processing and cooking food, doing laundry (Jordan 2007), house cleaning, cultivating gardens and fields, taking care of children and the elderly, and often compulsory sexual relations, which for many women was sex work. Some owners farmed out slaves as prostitutes, gave them away as booty to loyal soldiers, profited from their involvement in trade, and/or used them as bridewealth to secure wives. Along with their function as pawns, all of these were economic uses, although female slaves were also valued socially to a greater or lesser extent depending on the society.

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The high value of women’s work not only meant that prices for women slaves in African markets usually were higher than for male slaves, but also that their emancipation was fiercely opposed in many cases, as documented by Burrill and Roberts (2010) and Austin (1994), and could be accompanied by a fair amount of domestic violence against women when men tried to coerce free female labor. Wealth in precolonial Africa usually depended on how much labor a person or lineage controlled, and therefore was counted in people: family, dependents, clients, slaves, wives, children. Landownership was not usually private (Ethiopia’s feudal system was an exception) but depended on the capacity to use it, that is, the amount of labor available to work it, which in turn determined the amount of disposable surplus available to reward supporters or to sell, key elements of power. Most precolonial labor‐intensive horticultural labor was done by women, as well as most household tasks (Law 1995; Martin 1995). Slave women’s labor replaced and/or supplemented the labor of freewomen, which was considerable and essential to societal survival. A sex‐segregated division of labor made women slaves primarily the helpers of women owners or supervisors. Slavery is a labor system above all, and is not mitigated by the sexual uses of slaves but exacerbated by them. For women, slavery often involved sex work, not only as prostitutes, although that was relatively common in urban chattel slavery. It is widely recognized that compulsory sexual relations were characteristic of most forms of slavery for women. Enslaved women and girls were frequently raped or otherwise subjected to compulsory sexual relations, especially in the slave trade. Forced or asymmetrically consensual, the sexual relations of women slaves could be a route to advancement, as when they bore children to the owner or a member of his lineage and were assimilated by becoming a junior wife or concubine. Paradoxically, given the usual sexualized Euro‐American stereotype that slave women, especially in harems, were primarily valued for sex and biological reproduction, one situation where a slave woman’s sexuality might not have been valued was in harems. From North African harems to the multitudes of rulers’ wives in places like Dahomey or Kano, it seems that secluded slave women were more likely to be household drudges than sex slaves (Nast 2005; Ennaji 1999; Klein 2007), protected along with their free cohorts from random sexual impositions by their seclusion and the authority of the ruler. The North African Barbary Coast pirate slave trade, which largely coincided with the Atlantic slave trade, enslaved perhaps a million Europeans over its history and provided a few concubines to royal harems (Davis 2003), but slave narratives from women suggest that most of these women performed domestic rather than sex work (Baepler 1999). In general, slavery in Muslim nations involved a wide range of statuses for male slaves, ranging from royal adviser to galley slave, but these were less varied for females. Differing social structures were largely determinant of assimilative processes in lineage slavery. West African empires such as Asante, Dahomey, and the Sokoto Caliphate practiced slavery on a large scale as a core element of their society, and exported many slaves. They often established slave villages, meaning that many



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slaves were effectively segregated from freed persons. However, many coastal and decentralized societies had small‐scale lineage slavery primarily with the intention of incorporating more people into their society. Both matrilineal and patrilineal societies often found women slaves to be more easily assimilable, structurally and socially. Girls’ socialization to be obedient to their elders, especially men, made them easier to control. In patrilineal societies slave women became junior wives, who were usually free once they had borne a child to the owner or a member of his family. That child was free, since most slavery was only for one generation, and freed slaves and/or their children expanded the numbers of free people. In some societies those with slave ancestry bore a permanent stigma but just as often they did not. In Kano and Dahomey some slave women bore heirs to the throne and achieved freedom, eminence, and power in so doing (Nast 2005; Bay 1998; Mack 1990). In matrilineal societies freewomen determined descent and lineal affiliation, but male dominance was often still a factor and men might opportunistically take slave wives to create de facto patrilineages to their own advantage, since slave women usually lost their own lineage affiliation with their enslavement. This successful strategy could give a man control over not only his sisters’ sons but also his slave wives’ children. Therefore, the malleability of kin connections in Africa could maximize the desirability of owning women slaves. One of the more astonishing aspects of women and slavery in Africa for those wedded to stereotypical Western notions of chattel slavery is that in many African lineage systems slaves, including women, could own property. This was more common for women in West Africa than elsewhere. Eastern and southern African precolonial kinship systems were more likely than central and western African systems to treat women as male property, but in West Africa freewomen had property rights for the most part; some freewomen not only owned slaves but traded them, and occasionally slave women owned slaves, as in coastal Senegal, the Gold Coast, Bissau, and southern Nigeria (Robertson and Klein 1983; Brooks 1976, 1983; Havik 2007). Some North African privileged slave concubines owned slaves (Trout Powell 2012). Although slave men were more likely to have the resources to own slaves, some women of slave origin achieved this status, especially those who rose to royal status in Dahomey (Bay 1998). Sometimes it was a more successful strategy to better oneself through buying slaves than it was to purchase one’s own freedom in systems where slavery resembled clientage and slaves had a fair degree of autonomy. Before and after the British abolition of slavery in the Gold Coast (1874) some women actually expanded their slave ownership, buying young girls used for domestic and trade purposes, according to Adu‐Boahen (2009, 2010, 2011). Elsewhere, as in Mozambique, elite women could own slaves (Rodrigues 2008); in dominantly Muslim countries Muslim law allowed women to own property including slaves. Candido (2012) delineated class differences between women slaves in Benguela, where elite concubines commanded the labor of poor domestic slaves, who were more likely to be subjected to sexual violence.

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The institution of woman‐to‐woman marriage, which is widespread in Africa, allowed some prosperous women to become “husbands” and to take junior women as wives by paying the bridewealth or buying a female slave, thereby creating a de facto matrilineage within a patrilineal system, or by raising children who belonged to their deceased husband’s lineage. Clearly, African kinship and legal variations, especially with regard to women and slavery, do not follow the chattel slave model, both in the types of work women did and in their mutable status. That could vary over their lifetimes from enslavement in youth to childbearing and freedom in maturity, and occasionally to wealth when trading brought the ownership of slaves. If most African women slaves were ultimately assimilated into their owners’ societies, one might expect them to have had a substantial cultural influence. That influence, as well as their capacity to develop an autonomous slave culture, depended on such factors as their housing, numbers, and positions within a society; the nature of their work activities; cultural attitudes; and their degree of assimilation and autonomy of action. In general, chattel slaves were less able to influence wider society. For instance, chattel slavery as practiced in South Africa by white settlers against local peoples varied from place to place depending on whether or not, for instance, slaves were involved primarily in domestic tasks or in agricultural labor. Their cultural impact on white society was severely limited by racism. Woodward (2002) emphasized the high limitations on slave autonomy posed for women chattel slaves at the Cape, who mostly did domestic work and consequently had no opportunity based on separate space to organize collective resistance or to develop or maintain a specific material culture. Assimilative slavery could diminish the possibility of forming a separate slave culture, and/or increase slave women’s cultural influence depending on the situation. For example, Brooks (1976, 1983), Mouser (1983), Greene (1997), MacCormack (1983), and Candido (2012) describe how in coastal West and west Central Africa women who were or had been slaves, some of whom achieved business success and therefore owned slaves themselves, often founded new lineages with stranger men, which ultimately became influential as cultural intermediaries with the outside world. Bay (1998) and Obichere (1978) described women slaves who rose in the Dahomean royal palace to become concubines and sometimes queen mothers, when their sons became rulers. Large cultural diversity within the palace arose from the presence of women slaves of many different ethnicities, while cross‐ethnic marriages could also have a strong political impact for alliances. At a less exalted level, Eastman (1987) described how inland slave women who were exported to East African coastal households influenced their Arabized owners culturally, while Strobel (1979) elaborated on a slave women’s culture in Mombasa as embodied in women’s dance groups, but also noted that slave women tried to transcend their status through assimilative behavior and hypergamy. Kenyon (2009) described how important slave women and their descendants were culturally and politically to efforts by the Condominium government to



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establish colonies in underpopulated areas of Sudan, while Diawara (1989) pointed to the often ignored essential contributions of slave women to preserving oral traditions and to cultural production as griottes in Mali. If assimilated slaves could have a positive influence, realistic assessment of slavery’s processes and consequences for women in Africa, as well as its changes over time, including the impact of the Atlantic slave trade in particular, are still necessary. While moving to their final destinations in Africa, slaves most often experienced much brutal oppression. The harrowing account by Toledano (1981) of the rape, pregnancy, and forced abortion of a Circassian slave girl taken to Cairo by slave dealers in the mid‐nineteenth century is not unique. Missionary accounts and court records provide documentation for South Africa, in particular, of the extreme maltreatment of female chattel slaves (Woodward 2002; Scully 1997). Abrahams (1996) amply illustrated the perils of European captivity for Sara Bartman, a woman whose body was exhibited in Britain and France while she was alive and, against her wishes, after she died at a relatively young age. While it is customary to assume that women slaves in assimilative systems were better treated – and some did achieve power and wealth – some sources critique that formulation. Shields (2009) described the particularly high vulnerability of women traders in Yorubaland to being kidnapped into slavery, the competition posed by importing many male Hausa slaves who entered into trade and industry, and the increase in child labor as the nineteenth century progressed. She noted the violent treatment of both free and enslaved women, including their sexual exploitation. Consequently, many women fled to missions or to Lagos when the cost of redemption increased; they were also vulnerable to re‐enslavement if they managed to achieve manumission. McMahon (2012) also emphasized the many perils for women and children, in particular in nineteenth‐century East Africa, that often eventuated in re‐enslavement, which is confirmed by Swema’s experiences, as analyzed by Alpers (1983). The liminality induced by slave ancestry (lack of protection by a free lineage), famine, and economic crisis made some women and children especially likely to be enslaved and re‐enslaved (see also Wright 1993). The youth of many female slaves, even in systems most advantageous to them, could factor into maltreatment from a contemporary perspective now, given that beating children was routine in some societies and that age brought authority for both free and enslaved women. Then we need to consider the gendered impact of African slave exports. There were several substantial export slave trades affecting Africa, which had differing sex ratios for the enslaved, with more women exported than men across the Sahara, to the Middle East, and possibly into the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trades, while more men were exported in the transatlantic trade. Bush (2008) had perhaps the most optimistic reading of slave women’s experiences of the Middle Passage when she stressed their abilities to form new social networks and to transmit culture. Any societal practice involving the systematic subjugation of individuals who were deprived of rights, even temporarily, is liable to corruption

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by systems that are more oppressive and that may enslave them permanently. The transatlantic slave trade could affect local societies such that some began slaving that had not had slavery before, that women had to do more of men’s work, that polygyny intensified with the absence of more men (Manning 1981; Thornton 1983), and that local slavery became more like chattel slavery, for instance, as described by Miller (1988) in Angola. Ritualized “slavery,” which Achebe (2010) questions as having originally been a form of slavery, could become more oppressive and did in Igboland. Under the pressure of the Atlantic slave trade, the Igbo Aro oracle condemned more persons to slavery for minor infractions and profit (Ekejiuba 1972). Curto (2003) documented the life of Nbena, an Angolan free woman enslaved through a woman slave’s trickery, sold by an African owner, but paradoxically freed under the Portuguese concept of “original freedom.” More generally, females who were supposed to be pawns sometimes ended up, contrary to legal custom, as trade slaves who were exiled permanently from their own people. Nonetheless, in Sudan, as shown by Sikainga (1996), noblewomen could own slaves according to sharia law, and therefore could, and in at least one case did, get involved in slave trading. It is therefore dangerous to try to generalize about women and slavery, even regionally, in Africa, for external and internal factors could influence changes in forms of slavery practiced within a society. Slavery is based on violence against persons, which of course has an impact on the self‐image and other aspects of identity of those enslaved. Mandala (1990) considered the impact of enslavement on women slaves’ sense of identity in looking at the shattering effects of being kidnapped by foreign traders in the lower Tchiri Valley. Ogbomo (1997) also factored in considerations of identity while examining the impact on gender relations of slave raiding on the Owan of Nigeria. Robertson (2003) argued that African women, enslaved or not, based a strong part of their identity on their capacity for work, which was also valued when men chose wives. This aspect of identity went with them to the Americas, and found expression in slave narratives. Aspects of slave women’s identity involving seeking freedom and marital respectability can be seen in many African slave narratives. Robertson (1983), Wright (1983), and Strobel (1979) described the aspirations of African slave women in West and East Africa to achieve respectability by making a legal marriage in which bridewealth was paid. The problem was that slave women had no natal lineage members to receive it. Full assimilation would have meant that the owner’s lineage would receive it but, since a bondwoman’s partner normally belonged to the owner’s lineage, that lineage could not accept bridewealth, given issues of incest. Strobel (1979) stressed Mombasa slave women’s efforts to assert freedom and respectability through arranging their own marriages. Wright (1983) questioned the effectiveness of assimilation, given that Bwanikwa, a slave whose history she analyzed, felt that only emancipation would bring full assimilation. McDougall (1998) used oral history to reconstruct the story of Fatma Barka, a twentieth‐ century Moroccan slave woman who, despite a highly varied life characterized by



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the vicissitudes of both slavery and freedom, developed and valued a sense of self. Scully (1997) claimed that slave emancipation in the Western Cape of South Africa was connected to both culture and identity and imbricated with notions of family relations. More scholarly attention to slave women’s dress and music, as in Strobel (1979), might bring to light more information about identity.2 While there have been valiant and successful efforts to demonstrate change over time in precolonial slavery systems in Africa, such as those documented by Greene (1996), Deutsch (2007), Achebe (2010), and Chanock (1982), these efforts are made difficult by a scarcity of written sources; they work best where there is a rich oral history. The later days of precolonial forms of slavery in Africa are most fully documented. With the imposition of colonial rule, established in most of Africa in the late nineteenth century, written and oral sources became more abundant. They facilitated a boom in studies of the impact of emancipation. One of the primary British justifications for the imposition of colonial rule was to end slavery. The British abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1834 and used their navy to interdict slave shipments from West Africa, in particular.3 Racism inflected their abolition movement (Robertson 2013), and therefore slaves freed from the ships they impounded were normally not allowed to return home but were sent to be converted by missionaries in Sierra Leone, hence Freetown’s name. Often the first ordinance the British promulgated with the establishment of colonial rule outlawed slavery. However, their efforts regarding female slaves fell far short of their goal, vitiated both by local resistance in the form of claims that women slaves were relatives like junior wives or concubines when these tried to achieve freedom by complaining to colonial courts, and by colonial officers’ reluctance to interfere in “domestic arrangements,” which they normally left to the local courts in indirect rule. Thus, Sikainga (1995) documented the tendency in Sudan for the sharia courts to deny slave women’s manumission efforts, given the valuable productive and reproductive roles of women slaves, while McDougall (2007) found similarities between Mauretania and Sudan in this regard, which have allowed women’s slavery to continue, as has Ruf (1999). Getz and Clarke (2011) used graphic history illustrations, or cartoons, to convey the history recovered from court records of Abina, a Gold Coast slave who was enslaved after the imposition of colonial rule and who then sought and achieved her freedom through the court. Deutsch (2007) tracked women slaves through court records from German East Africa (now Tanzania), who in the late nineteenth century fled to missions or used the courts to claim their freedom. Lovejoy (1988) demonstrated how, despite a supposed commitment to the abolition of slavery, British officials in northern Nigeria collaborated with local influential men to continue slave concubinage into at least the 1920s, probably in exchange for male cooperation in indirect rule. Women slaves also encountered problems with emancipation precisely because of assimilative tendencies within many societies and/or male dominant customary

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social arrangements. Women were reluctant to leave their free children, who usually belonged to their free fathers, often their owners. While in some areas, as in the French West African Sahel, thousands of male slaves abandoned their owners for urban migration or to return home after emancipation, females usually stayed where they were. In late colonial slavery mostly young girls were enslaved, who often did not remember their homes or have the means to return. Many freed women, who were successfully integrated into their owners’ societies, did not return to their natal societies. Cases were common where slave owners claimed ownership of “freed” women’s children as a mechanism to keep the women and to expand their lineages, an explanation that was more often than not accepted by the courts and was even applicable in chattel slavery areas. Scully (1997) stated that in the Western Cape in South Africa both slaves and owners saw slavery through the lens of gender relations, which shaped slaves’ access to freedom. Strobel (1979) demonstrated that the main area of contestation between slave owners and women slaves was the right to arrange their own marriages; the courts did not recognize that right for at least 20 years after the 1907 British proclamation abolishing slavery. Nonetheless, some women fled with their children to Christian mission stations, where their stories were sometimes recorded. In Eweland in the Gold Coast, Greene (2011) documented the emancipation of a couple connected to Christian conversion at a mission station, which resulted not only in the husband freeing the wife but also his other slaves. However, in East Africa the mid‐ to late nineteenth‐century state of widespread insecurity meant that it was sometimes better to belong to an owner capable of defending the household rather than to be a free person without a patron for protection. Escaped slaves were routinely captured and re‐enslaved by others. Whereas in West Africa some slave women, like the Dahomean “Amazons,” could even be soldiers (Bay 1998), nineteenth‐century East African women’s vulnerability to enslavement and re‐enslavement under conditions of widespread raiding and warfare demonstrates that emancipation could worsen the situation of both high‐ and low‐status freewomen. The colonialists refused to recognize the authority of female rulers, weakening the status of all women in some societies, while imposing Victorian laws that made women male property. That some women slaves were freed through appeals to colonial courts was exceptional. Colonial furthering of cash crop production increased the demand for women’s agricultural labor. Cooper (1997) and Roberts (1984) showed that, in the absence of forced labor by women slaves in southern Niger, men pressured their wives to do more horticultural work and looked for mechanisms to increase and enforce their labor obligations to their husbands. Indeed the emancipation of slaves did not work as it should have in Africa, and could even worsen freewomen’s status. Moreover, colonialism played a strong role in perpetuating contemporary slavery, especially for women. That said, older forms of servitude in Africa have now generally disappeared, with occasional holdovers like the shrine slaves, trokosi, in Ghana, young girls who



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serve the priests of local gods. Given by their families to the shrine priests in hopes of securing benefits like helping members escape punishment for crimes, they provide sex and domestic work. This institution violates Ghana’s constitution and signing of various international conventions outlawing slavery, but it is widely condoned (Aird 1999). In the modern world trokosi slavery is seen primarily as a human rights issue, as shown by Boateng (2001) and Gbedemah (2005). Such ritualized forms of servitude have a long history in West Africa and are uncommon now. Beswick and Spaulding (2010) maintain that modern forms of slavery in Africa have ancient roots. Mack (1990) situated Kano slave concubinage in the context of modern household workers. However, women’s systemic social and economic liabilities were worsened by colonialism and are furthered by neocolonialism (Lawrance and Roberts 2012). Thus, such liabilities have been exacerbated in many cases, making women more likely to be enslaved in new ways, especially through the global trafficking in women (Adepoju 2005; Gramegra 1999; Bales 1999; Lawrance and Roberts 2012). Modern slavery for African women and others usually entails employment in sex, factory, or domestic work around the world. The physical mobility of African women improved with colonial rule (within new borders) as a result of the suppression of raiding and local warfare, enabling some women to become long‐distance traders, for instance. Currently that also means that women frequently leave home in search of better economic opportunities, as men do. Women from West Africa have been enslaved after crossing the Sahara to go to Europe, kidnapped from Senegal into Mauretania, or enslaved from East Africa as servants in societies surrounding the Indian Ocean. Some have found themselves in the United States without passports or recourse when employers abuse them. The main cause of slavery that links the precolonial status of African women to the contemporary situation is women’s systematic lack of access to key resources and their lower status and lack of opportunities in their societies, as documented in Lawrance and Roberts (2012). Like the economies of most African countries, women’s vulnerabilities make them targets for the downside of the world market economy, unable to protect themselves in the face of the depredations of multinational corporations and their local clients. They do not have to be quiet, however. In the Niger Delta women have led the charge to demand that the oil economy share its profits by helping to develop the region (Turner and Brownhill 2004). In New York some escape in the hope that the authorities will help them, despite their illegal immigrant status (strict immigration laws enable the continuation of slavery). Women resist new forms of enslavement however they can. How can contemporary slavery be defined? Inflected strongly by male dominance, enabled by illegality and rapid transport, and created by increasingly impoverished neocolonial economies in a context of multinational corporate dominance, slaves are disposable people, as described by Bales (1999) – without rights, removed from kin links, and mostly female. Employers have no investment

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in their survival, given that they have not been bought and that replacing them is easy when the poor working conditions wear them out. Unlike most past forms of slavery, victims are often lured into precarious situations, although sometimes impoverished families will sell their daughters. Male dominance is key in supporting all forms of contemporary slavery. The typical slave now is female, including in new forms of wage slavery where mainly female factory workers, often immigrants, are paid nominal wages and forced to meet quotas. Unlike free workers, they are locked down at work and in dormitories like US prison workers, and farmed out to businesses at substandard wages. The literature on modern slavery, whose victims are even more disproportionately female, often fails to consider the gendered implications of this fact. There are millions of slaves in the contemporary world; slavery is condoned in many ways and in many places. Slavery has changed, and most slaves are women. Slavery is now gendered female worldwide, including in Africa.

Notes 1 Several exceptions include Lovejoy (2005), who acknowledges that Sokoto (northern Nigeria) concubines in harems were valued for their domestic labor, but says that it was their value for biological reproduction that primarily boosted their price. Miller (2008) made his first foray into analysis of women’s slavery by rejecting any agency among slave women and stating that they were valued primarily for their biological and social reproduction of lineages. 2 See also Olatunji and Hunt (2012), the bulk of whose contributions are on Africa. 3 To contextualize British abolition: among the African colonial powers, the French first abolished slavery in 1794, while Caribbean slave uprisings (self‐emancipation) in Haiti, St. Lucia, and Guadeloupe preceded that date. During the wars surrounding the French Revolution and Napoleon’s advent, the British took many islands from the French through naval supremacy and reimposed slavery as their first act there. Napoleon legalized African slavery in French territories once again in 1802, which was finally abolished in 1848 with another revolution. In the Caribbean only Haiti succeeded in keeping freedom but it suffered vengeful French and US reparations that permanently harmed its economy.

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McMahon, Elizabeth. 2012. “Trafficking and Re‐enslavement: The Social Vulnerability of Women and Children in Nineteenth‐Century East Africa.” In Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experiences of Women and Children in Africa, edited by Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts, 29–44. Athens: Ohio University Press. Miers, Suzanne, and Igor Kopytoff, eds. 1977. Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Miers, Suzanne, and Richard Roberts, eds. 1988. The End of Slavery in Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Miller, Joseph C. 1988. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Miller, Joseph C. 2008. “Domiciled and Dominated Slaving as a History of Women.” In The Modern Atlantic, vol. 2 of Women and Slavery, edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, 284–312. Athens: Ohio University Press. Mouser, Bruce L. 1983. “Women Slavers of Guinea‐Conakry.” In Women and Slavery in Africa, edited by Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, 320–339. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Nast, Heidi. 2005. Concubines and Power: Five Hundred Years in a Northern Nigerian Palace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nwokeji, G. Ugo. 2001. “African Conceptions of Gender and the Slave Traffic.” William and Mary Quarterly 58(1): 47–67. Obichere, Boniface. 1978. “Women and Slavery in the Kingdom of Dahomey.” Revue d’Histoire d’Outre‐Mer 66: 5–20. Ogbomo, Onaiwu. 1997. When Men and Women Mattered: A History of Gender Relations among the Owan of Nigeria. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Olatunji, Ojo, and Nadine Hunt, eds. 2012. Slavery in Africa and the Caribbean: A History of Enslavement and Identity. London: I. B. Tauris. Roberts, Richard L. 1984. “Women’s Work and Women’s Property: Household Social Relations in the Maraka Textile Industry of the Nineteenth Century.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26(2): 229–250. Robertson, Claire C. 1984. Sharing the Same Bowl: A Socioeconomic History of Women and Class in Accra, Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Robertson, Claire. 2003. “Femmes esclaves et femmes libres de l’Afrique à l’Amérique: travail et identité.” Cahiers des Anneaux de Mémoire (Nantes) 5: 123–146. Robertson, Claire. 2013. “Racism, the Military, and Abolitionism in the Late Eighteenth‐ and Early Nineteenth‐Century Caribbean.” Journal of Military History 77(2): 433–462. Robertson, Claire C., and Martin A. Klein, eds. 1983. Women and Slavery in Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Robertson, Claire, and Marsha Robinson. 2008. “Re‐modeling Slavery As If Women Mattered.” In The Modern Atlantic, vol. 2 of Women and Slavery, edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, 253–283. Athens: Ohio University Press. Rodrigues, Eugenia. 2008. “Female Slavery, Domestic Economy and Social Status in the Zambezi Prazos during the Eighteenth Century.” In Women in the Portuguese Colonial Empire: The Theatre of Shadows, edited by Clara Sarmento, 31–50. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Ruf, Urs Peter. 1999. Ending Slavery: Hierarchy, Dependency and Gender in Central Mauritania. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript.



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Scully, Pamela. 1997. Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823–1853. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Shields, Francine. 2009. “Those Who Remained Behind: Women Slaves in Nineteenth Century Yorubaland.” In Identity in the Shadow of Slavery, edited by Paul Lovejoy, 164–183. New York: Continuum. Sikainga, Ahmad A. 1995. “Shari’a Courts and the Manumission of Female Slaves in the Sudan.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 28(1): 1–23. Sikainga, Ahmad A. 1996. Slaves into Workers: Emancipation and Labor in Colonial Sudan. Austin: University of Texas Press. Strobel, Margaret. 1979. Muslim Women in Mombasa. New Haven: Yale University Press. Thornton, John. 1983. “Sexual Demography: The Impact of the Slave Trade on Family Structure.” In Women and Slavery in Africa, edited by Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, 39–48. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Toledano, Ehud. 1981. “Slave Dealers, Women, Pregnancy and Abortion: The Story of a Circassian Slave Girl in Mid‐Nineteenth Century Cairo.” Slavery & Abolition 2(1): 53–68. Trout Powell, Eve. 2012. Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Turner, Terisa E., and Leigh Brownhill. 2004. “Why ‘Women Are at War with Chevron’: Nigerian Subsistence Struggles against the International Oil Industry.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 39(1–2): 63–93. Woodward, Wendy. 2002. “Contradictory Tongues: Torture and the Testimony of Two Slave Women in the Eastern Cape Courts in 1833 and 1834.” In Deep Histories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa, edited by Wendy Woodward, Patricia Hayes, and Gary Minkley, 55–83. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wright, Marcia. 1983. “Bwanikwa: Consciousness and Protest among Slave Women in Central Africa, 1886–1911.” In Women and Slavery in Africa, edited by Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, 246–267. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Wright, Marcia. 1993. Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life‐Stories from East/Central Africa. New York: Lilian Barber Press.

Part III

Family and Community

Chapter Nine

Kinship in African History James L. Giblin

You may be tempted to skip this chapter. Historians and historically minded ­students rarely get excited by kinship. Often they are intensely interested in matters associated with family and kinship, such as gender, sexuality, and generational conflict. Yet they seem much less interested in plain vanilla kinship – whom people think of as family, how they interact with them, and the moral weight they attach to their family relationships. But, if you are thinking of African people in the past without thinking about kinship, you are missing a vital source of their identity and focus of their energies. You miss the social space where African women and men have most often made a difference in their world; you miss their intimate concerns and dilemmas; you miss a volatile matrix of love, desire, hatred, and jealousy. And of course in the current day you miss the reason why so many Africans were early adopters of WhatsApp! If you doubt me, think about those mobile phone conversations you’ve overhead in African bars and minibuses. How many of them are between family members? If, like me, you are a historian who tries to imagine themselves back into the minds and bodies of African people in the past, you ­cannot skip over kinship. My interest in kinship grew out of personal experience in Tanzania, particularly my involvement through both research and family life with people who come from the region of Iringa and speak the quite similar languages of Kihehe and Kibena. Throughout Tanzania they are known as the wanyalukolo, or wanyalu. This ancient Bantu word (Ehret 1998: 149) provides an entryway into some of A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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the issues which I address below. Literally, wanyalukolo means “people of the clan” (in Kihehe/Kibena lukolo means “clan”). Yet, when I recently asked a speaker of Kibena to define the term in English, she said that it means “the related people.” Indeed, it is the sense of relatedness, rather than the connection with a particular kind of corporate group, that is more prominent in modern usage. Although wanyalukolo can certainly denote the fellow members of a patrilineal grouping that is believed to share descent, it is supremely stretchable. It can denote separate Bena or Hehe identities but also mark commonality between them, creating regional identity within a larger Tanzanian nation. In Tanzania’s largest city, Dar es Salaam, it appears in the names of commuter buses and shops, appealing to people from Iringa for their business. It can be used by people who do not come from Iringa with affection and humor. Yet sometimes it is used in disparagement, particularly when Tanzanians associate wanyalu with parochialism and lack of ambition, the very qualities that in English might be called “clannishness.” These examples lead to several points that I wish to make throughout this chapter. Kinship is both relationships and discourse; both are adaptable and are used with great creativity to achieve inclusion as well as exclusion. One can extend terms of kinship to cover persons not related by descent, and can also make them analogies that describe quite different social institutions. But there is a twist to this tale that I’ve seen when doing historical research: often, when asked to tell about their own lives, wanyalu men and women provide highly individualized autobiographies. They may have grown up in large families, created thriving ­families of their own, and have copious knowledge of genealogy. And yet they tend to portray themselves as solitary wanderers in a challenging and often hostile world. This leads me to a final, perhaps unexpected, theme about kinship: it ­coexists with, and indeed fosters, sharply defined individuality.

Individual creativity and kinship Kinship has never been as important to historians as to anthropologists, for whom it has provided a crucial source of insight into their core concern with the relationship between nature and culture. As understandings of that relationship have changed in recent decades, however, anthropologists have shifted decisively toward understanding kinship as a cultural construction rather than as a product of biological descent (Carsten 2000). This transition has dampened their inclination to regard kinship as self‐enclosed systems, and increased their concern with aspects of culture, such as gender, that are closely associated with kinship. This shift toward “constructivism” – “the proposition that any relationship constituted in terms of procreation, filiation, or descent can also be made postnatally or performatively by culturally appropriate action” (Sahlins 2013: 2) – has encouraged considerable reflection among anthropologists about the state of kinship studies (Sahlins 2013; Ensor 2011; Read 2007; Carsten 2004, 2000; Peletz 1995).



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Although we cannot do justice here to the broad scope of their reflections, we can touch upon some issues that are important for historians who wish to think about kinship as a context for historical agency. Anthropologists have become uncomfortable with the “formalism of much of the literature on kinship” (Carsten 2000: 14), which leaves them “removed from the most obvious facts of actual lived experiences of kinship” (Carsen 2004: 8). More and more they ask how kinship is “shaped by the ordinary, everyday activities of family life” (Carsten 2004: 6). Yet, while they have embraced kinship as product of culture, they have not entirely abandoned the view that biological descent creates relationships that are “given by birth and unchangeable” (Carsten 2000: 14). While Janet Carsten, for example, argues for kinship studies that include the “intimate domestic arrangements and the behavior and emotions associated with them,” her view does not exclude biological descent. Kinship should be understood, she contends, as “composed of various components  – substance [such as blood], feeding, living together, procreation [and] emotion” (Carsten 2000: 17, 34). This approach, it seems to me, has much to offer historians of Africa. As Carsten points out, a focus on the “‘everyday’ – small, seemingly trivial, or taken‐for‐granted acts” (2000: 18) involves process and specific human actors, the very elements that allow historians to tell good stories. It is a focus, moreover, that foregrounds women. It also frees kinship from confinement by assumptions about static tradition and ascribed status. It enables historians to think of kinship as a dynamic, malleable social context that both accommodates and is changed by agency and conflict. It does not, however, discount knowledge of biological descent, which of course is cherished throughout Africa. Nevertheless, problems remain. One concerns the degree to which kinship resists transformation by human agency and external influences such as environmental conditions. A second issue is whether kinship constrains the development of individuality and consequently the expression of individual agency. Scholars continue to regard kinship as a conservative social institution characterized by long‐term continuity and resistance to change. The archaeologist Bradley Ensor has argued, for example, that systems of kinship restrain individuals from flouting “behavioral norms” associated with family. He argues that kinship is not “merely an ideological ‘language’” which individuals violate willy‐nilly. Adherence to norms of kinship, he argues, is demonstrably strong. His most ­persuasive evidence comes from American Indian societies (Ensor 2011: 211, 214). Similarly, a recent comparative study of kinship in East Africa finds ­unexpectedly strong long‐term continuity in bridewealth arrangements, divorce, property rights, relations between co‐wives and the “extent of gerontocracy” (Mulder et al. 2001: 1062). These arguments suggest that attitudes, behaviors, and moral expectations associated with the everyday routine of family life restrain innovation. Prominent anthropologists have argued that they also constrain the formation of individuality.

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Marcel Mauss, Carsten points out, believed that among the Pueblo Indians “personhood … could not be separated from clanship, and was not a vehicle for individual conscience.” Mauss held that “the role [of the Pueblo person] is really to act out … the prefigured totality of the life of the clan” (quoted in Carsten 2004: 85). A similar approach was applied to the Tallensi people of Ghana by Meyer Fortes, who argued that only their men attained full personhood, and then only in death (Carsten 2004: 89). Recently, Marshall Sahlins has returned to this issue. He defines “a ‘kinship system’ [as] a manifold of intersubjective participations [or] … mutualities of being”: “Kinsmen are persons who belong to one another, who are parts of one another, whose lives are joined and interdependent” (Sahlins 2013: 20, 21). Inhabiting such systems is “the ‘dividual’ person … ‘who is divisible’ and also ‘not distinct’ in the sense that aspects of the self are variously distributed among others.” Among such persons reigns “a notion of personhood where kinship is not simply added to bounded individuality, but where ‘relatives are perceived as intrinsic to the self’” (Sahlins 2013: 19, 22). The contrasts between “bounded” and “unbounded” personality types that grow out of these approaches map conveniently, Carsten (2004: 87) reminds us, onto distinctions “between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern,’ or the ‘West’ and the ‘other.’” Yet, both she and Sahlins suggest that dismissing the notion of “unbounded” personhood may betray a Western‐centric viewpoint. Discomfort with it, they say, may stem from a taken‐for‐granted Western notion of the person as autonomous possessor of rights and legal liabilities. Indeed, historians would be unwise to disregard anthropologists’ appreciation of the immense diversity of institutions, attitudes, and behaviors that have been fostered by human cultures. Nevertheless, for many historians formulations such as “mutuality of being” and “dividuality” of persons are likely to remain elusive. They are unlikely to subscribe, for example, to interpretations of marriage that accept “the ‘dual unity’ of spouses, their immanence in one another” (Sahlins 2013: 48). With their almost instinctual inclination (sources permitting) to disaggregate ideas of collective action and reveal individual agency, historians are likely to resist understandings of any social institution that blur the boundaries between individual and collective identities. Admittedly, the source materials available for the study of the African past are often less revealing of individual agency than historians would wish. Yet  they are not any more likely to testify persuasively to the pre‐eminence of ­collective identity. If we return to Sahlins’s discussion of “mutuality of being,” we find many of his examples arresting. Yet, historical sources allow us to read them in ways that are suggestive of more bounded individuality. For example, he illustrates “the ‘dual unity’ of spouses” by noting the “prescriptions and prohibitions placed on women when their husbands are … outside the community” (Sahlins 2013: 48). In Iringa, accounts of precisely this sort of mwiko (Kiswahili), or taboo, are told by many women who were married during the colonial period when their region was a major source of migrant labor. Reflecting on their husbands’ long absences



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from home, they described many forms of misbehavior or carelessness that could bring misfortune and injury upon their absent spouses. Yet, were such beliefs the product of unbounded personhood, or might they be instead an expression of the moral obligations of kinship that fully “bounded” individuals chose to respect or violate? Sahlins’s “mutuality of being” is a deeply resonant idea, but from my historian’s perspective it is better understood not as unbounded personhood but rather as a moral code which by turns is honored and transgressed. In Iringa, one needn’t probe far into stories from the era of labor migration to see that men feared being abandoned by wives during their absence (as they sometimes were), while women (with even more reason) feared that their absent husbands would find new wives and never return home. One transgression of kinship mutuality described by Sahlins is “the consumption or penetration of the body of the other with the intent to harm” (2013: 59). This will be familiar to anyone in Tanzania, where no form of witchcraft is better attested historically, or more commonly discussed in the current day, than biashara ya masharti. This Kiswahili phrase may be rendered as “business with strings attached.” It means achieving prosperity through Faustian bargains with witches who, in return for their services, demand great sacrifice, usually involving the murder of one’s child or another relative. Sahlins calls such practices “negative kinship,” but the phrase seems misleading if taken to mean that they stand outside the realm of kinship. Belief in such powers is intrinsically related to the treacherous nature of living‐in‐kinship. For as much as kinship provides mutuality, ­reciprocity, and solidarity, it also produces betrayal and disappointment, especially when trusted kin make (or are judged to make) their individual interests and aspirations paramount. I would argue that such highly volatile interaction  – ­ now marked by support and succor, and later by meanness and rejection – makes personhood bounded. By experiencing this quality of living in kinship, ­everyone learns that even one’s closest kin cannot share one’s fate. The moral weight attached to relations of kinship and their inseparability from fears of witchcraft provide reason, I believe, to doubt an understanding of kinship that once had considerable influence among historians. Although this view has taken various forms, at base it regards kinship as a combination of social relations and ideology that reproduces structural oppositions defined by gender or generation, thereby creating material inequality (Peletz 1995: 353–354). It implies that a given constituency (perhaps older men) acts in concert on the basis of shared interests. This interest group may then be thought to develop ideologies of gerontocracy or patriarchy which makes the welfare of the entire community appear dependent on their primacy. Formulated as it once was as the “lineage mode of production,” this approach to kinship has little influence on historians today. Yet it may continue to inform understandings of patriarchy and gerontocracy that remain influential. It should be tested against historical evidence of everyday living in kinship. As the following section will illustrate, everyday experience brings into play the great variety of obligations and expectations found in many

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African forms of kinship. They weigh heavily on every individual and criss‐cross lines of gender and generation. They raise the question of whether the resolution of the moral dilemmas of kinship can produce consistent bias (in favor of male elders who hoard wealth, for example, and against the young men who need it to marry). Indeed, such explanations of persistent inequality need to be considered alongside another enduring reality of kinship. For millennia (Ehret 1998: 159– 160), family life has been marked by an intense and deeply intimate fear of the bodily and spiritual harm that may be inflicted through malevolent magic by ­persons who feel neglected.

Kinship as a life of negotiation For many years I have known several siblings whose father, Mohamedi, was an important African businessman in Iringa during the 1950s. He died in 1959, but their mother, Mwanaisha, lived until 2006. Her household in Njombe, one of the principal towns of Iringa Region, was for me a favorite destination. Mohamedi and Mwanaisha married about 1930 and had 10 children. Their business success came despite discrimination and denial of opportunities, which frustrated all African entrepreneurs in the colonial period. It allowed them to educate their children, one of whom rose to national prominence in government while others also followed professional careers. Two aspects of their enterprises particularly interested me (Giblin 2005). The first was their dispersal across a wide region in a pattern that followed the vital arteries of the colonial economy. To map their farms and hoteli (small eateries with simple accommodation for travelers) would be to map the main routes of labor migration across southwestern Tanganyika. They farmed market crops such as rice and potatoes in widely separated micro‐ environments while maintaining hoteli for migrant laborers. Their businesses were integrated, of course, because the farms supplied food to the hoteli. The second notable aspect of their business was their reliance on kinship. The wide dispersal of operations made trust a paramount consideration. Mwanaisha and her co‐wives supervised the farms and hoteli, while Mohamedi created a network of trusted associates by recruiting young men from households headed by men of his own patrilineal clan, or lukolo. (His own children he kept in school, a far‐sighted decision in view of the many opportunities that opened up for educated men and women after national independence in 1961.) Meanwhile, Mwanaisha and her co‐wives pursued their own opportunities, growing food and market crops in their fields and gardens while keeping their own cattle. Mwanaisha gained a position of influence not only within her own patrilineal clan, but also within that of her husband. On both sides of her large family network she became the go‐to expert on family history, genealogy, and protocols for venerating ancestors. As a result, when one of her brothers‐in‐law wished to marry her following her husband’s death, she was prepared to refuse, for she was neither isolated nor vulnerable as widows in virilocal societies are often imagined to be. Relying on her



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own influence, assistance from educated children, and the support of a wide ­network of kin, she retained control of her house and fields until her death. The story of Mohamedi and Mwanaisha helps us address issues raised in the preceding section. It reveals spouses as fully bounded persons, each of whom lived in kinship independently, building overlapping but separate family networks. It is important to emphasize the effort invested in constructing networks, for their lukolo, or patrilineal clans, were not ready‐made corporate bodies. The clan was a field of potential relationships that could be made useful if much talk and action were invested to bring them to life. In effect, Mohamedi and Mwanaisha created networks whose core consisted of subsets of patrilineal clans. Men had an advantage in creating family networks because they enjoyed more mobility than women, whose responsibilities as mothers kept them closer to home. They could engage in network building by attending funerals and weddings and by regularly visiting relatives. This activity should be understood as work, and it puts in a different light the lingering stereotype of the always absent rural African male who leaves farming to his wives. Yet the outcome of such travel, which was a reputation for sociability, reliability, trustworthiness, and generosity, could also be the achievement of women who in their own homes also earned a reputation for hospitality. Another point to be drawn from their story concerns the instrumental value of talk about kinship, and how it was used in particular circumstances. The discourse of family, and particularly the terms of address used by Mohamedi and Mwanaisha in their interaction with kin, conveyed specific calibrations of obligation, seniority, and authority. These qualities were crucial in constructing an entrepreneurial ­network which possessed hierarchy, yet maintained respect for mutual responsibilities, including the crucial obligation to keep family affairs private. Such kinship‐based networks permitted ambitious people like Mohamedi and ­ Mwanaisha, who stood little chance of obtaining bank loans or government licenses, to nurture a business unnoticed by the colonial authorities and in the shadow of the colonial economy. Historians’ lack of interest in kinship, I think, may sometimes stem from a belief that family is removed from the spheres of political and economic change that most concern them. Here, however, we have an example of African people who, as they sought opportunity in a discriminatory colonial economy, relied on kinship as critically important social capital. While I was fascinated by their interaction with the colonial economy, it was only when I asked Mwanaisha about her youth and marriage with Mohamedi that I began to see the extraordinary complexity of her experience in kinship. Her parents, she explained, had both died when she was a child. As a result, she was raised by her paternal grandmother, who lived in the household of her brother’s son. His name was Maleva. Mohamedi was the son of Maleva. He had surely honed his own networking skills while watching his father, for as a well‐known healer Maleva often traveled to treat patients and to seek new medicines and techniques. As the children of a brother and sister, Maleva and the mother of Mwanaisha were binamu, or cousins. Children of binamu are considered siblings,

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so when Mohamedi decided to marry Mwanaisha they had first to sever this ­relationship. “Because I was married to my brother,” explained Mwanaisha, “at the time of the marriage they had to provide the ndumula lukolo [Kibena, meaning ‘cutting the ties of clan’].” This meant sacrificing a chicken and a sheep in apology to the ancestors because marriage would now override the relationship between the siblings. While marriage between them may have angered the ancestors, binamu and the children of binamu were preferred marital partners, and there are many examples of such marriages in the family history of Mwanaisha and Mohamedi. It might be supposed that such an arrangement would reduce the amount of bridewealth due from Mohamedi, but Mwanaisha said that her ­husband in fact provided unusually substantial bridewealth. Similarly, it might be thought that a woman married by the son of her guardian would be in a highly dependent position, but instead their marriage created a dense web of cross‐cutting obligations. I cannot fully describe here the weft and warp of relationships created by their marriage, but, to take only one example, Mwanaisha’s father‐in‐law was also her mjomba, or mother’s brother, a position that entailed great responsibility for her welfare. Women in virilocal cultures are often thought to enter perilous circumstances or even servility when they leave their natal homes for the homesteads of their husbands. Undoubtedly such lamentable outcomes occurred in the past and ­continue to do so. The story of Mohamedi and Mwanaisha shows, however, that the range of outcomes made possible by kinship is broad. They lived kinship that had less to do with ascribed status than with contingency, for theirs was a world where speech and action made and unmade relationships while creating m ­ ultitudes of opportunities and possibilities. The next section looks at a few studies by historians that reveal similar contingency and creativity within kinship.

Kinship in some recent works of African history A chapter of this length cannot provide a comprehensive account of kinship in historical studies of Africa. Instead, the following highly selective discussion concentrates on three aspects of the history of kinship. First, it considers studies that demonstrate agency within kinship in particular historical circumstances. Second, it considers studies that consider how kinship can be seen to interact with other institutions in the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries. Finally, it considers how discourses of kinship are extended beyond the bounds of family and applied to other venues of social life. Although this chapter cannot do it justice, the field of historical linguistics has revealed a dynamic history of change in kinship over the longue durée (Vansina 1990; Ehret 1998; Schoenbrun 1998; Ruel 2002; Gonzales 2009). A recent ­contribution to this field by Christine Saidi (2010) makes a particularly daring argument. She doubts what she calls “the patriarchal myth,” or assumption that African gender relations have for millennia been “frozen into a patriarchal mode.”



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She recovers numerous traces of women’s authority from the distant past, including “sororal” groups among speakers of Bantu languages in east Central Africa during the first millennium ce that “consisted of adult sisters and their mother, with their mother’s sisters and their adult daughters.” These groups constituted the core, she believes, of village communities (Saidi 2010: 2, 75). In this and other ways, Saidi’s work suggests that women such as Mwanaisha, who through kinship had many opportunities to gain influence and security, were likely as common in the African past as domineering patriarchs. Another recent study that describes women’s use of kinship to obtain positions of influence is Emily Lynn Osborn’s (2011) history of the Kankan region of ­eastern Guinea. Osborn traces interaction between “households” and political authority from the seventeenth century. Particularly interesting is her account of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when a new political culture arose in an area that had previously suffered war and depopulation. This was a culture of inclusiveness, and the way in which Osborn describes its emergence is intriguing. She argues that women contributed to rebuilding their families and communities by accepting marriage with newly arrived migrants who settled down with their wives’ families. In this way they both respected norms of responsibility for kin while also transforming kinship itself. For, while previously virilocal marriage had been the norm, now women “put into reverse marital practices.” These women exercised socially innovative agency while conforming to norms of behavior expected of wives and mothers. By rebuilding families, moreover, they benefited themselves, for “the household continued to offer women the clearest path to achieving a degree of informal prestige and power … women who served as the marital linchpin between powerful host families … and new migrants … could use their position to influence social and political processes” (Osborn 2011: 56, 66). Osborn does not share Saidi’s view that patriarchy is a myth; instead, she believes that the women of Kankan acted within a context of male gerontocracy (Osborn 2011: 65). Closer in spirit to Saidi, though located in a very different time and political context, is Brett Shadle’s (2006) study of Gusiiland in colonial Kenya. Shadle argues, much like Osborn, that women welcomed marriage because it afforded respectability and opportunities to exercise agency. His sensitivity in this respect reminds us why so many young women in the modern day are not merely willing but desperate to marry. For, while he recognizes the great variety in marriage practices across Africa, he asserts that the Gusii women who sought to be married and maintained stable marriages “should be regarded as less the exception than the rule.” “Women became adults only upon marriage,” he writes, and “only when widowed could rural women expect to be without a husband” (Shadle 2006: 227). Shadle takes a particularly broad view of “female agency” (2006: xxx), pointing out that one of the expectations women had of husbands was emotional fulfillment. Indeed, his entire book is marked by an uncommon appreciation for the full personhood of Gusii men and women, for he sees that

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their motivations are many and not necessarily consistent. This perspective influences his reading of court cases involving marital and domestic disputes, leading him to the conclusion that women, with surprising frequency, found support from their own families when seeking divorce. This is the point at which he diverges from Emily Osborn. Where Osborn accepts the existence of male gerontocracy, Shadle argues memorably against the view that Gusii society is structured around oppositions between youth and elders: “fathers and sons were not always at each others’ throats, neither did seniors always act as a cabal. Much social instability resulted from seniors refusing to work toward common goals” (2006: xxix). Shadle’s use of court records to study marriage and family in colonial Kenya introduces us to the ways in which kinship may interact with the bureaucratic state and other modern institutions. It also introduces a problem of historical method. I say this because I suspect that African readers of “Girl Cases” would likely be surprised by its silence about efforts to use family connections in order to influence judges. Undoubtedly this silence is attributable to the nature of his documentary sources, for Shadle is a highly perceptive historian. Authors of written case records would not, after all, wish to mention the backroom pleading and outright bribing that precede judgments. Similar limitations in the documentary record are probably at work in Richard Roberts’s (2005) study of early colonial courts in Mali. His finding that litigants often preferred courts run by French officials hints that they may well have lacked confidence in African judges to whom they were not related. In an eyewitness report by the anthropologist Thomas Beidelman (2012), however, we see clearly the role of kinship in colonial courts. His account of rural Tanganyikan courts in the last years of colonial rule describes vividly the “pressures of kinship.” They undermined the impartiality that British officials expected of courts, helping to create what Beidelman calls a “landscape of colonial illusion and delusion.” Any Tanzanian today would recognize these late‐1950s courts. Judges were both susceptible to bribery and acutely sensitive to the pleading of relatives. They were lenient with fellow family members, harsh in their treatment of other ethnic groups, and willing to take the claims of family obligation into account. In one case between mother and daughter, the court found the sexually explicit language in which the daughter denounced her mother reprehensible, yet showed an almost equally strong disapproval of the mother for bringing an intimate dispute into public view. “Such verbal abuse between parent and child,” Beidelman says of the court’s opinion, “was so shameful that truly decent people would have kept matters quiet.” Another dispute involved an apparently unmarried beer brewer who accused her male cousin of refusing to pay for a drink. Some knowledge of the emotions associated with such relationships helps to explain why this trivial complaint wound up in court. The dispute was likely sparked by the man feeling that his cousin owed him a free drink, possibly smoldered because the woman resented her cousin’s unwillingness to marry her, and was probably inflamed by his failure to gain the support of one of his most intimate relatives,



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his father’s sister. As it happened, she was both the mother of the complainant and her brewing partner. The court failed to reach a judgment, probably because the judge was related to both cousins and feared appearing to favor either of them (Beidelman 2012: 184, 188–189, 192, 194). A somewhat similar situation, suggests Elke Stockreiter (2015), prevailed in the Islamic kadhi courts of late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century Zanzibar. Highlighting “the social embeddedness of the Islamic court system,” Stockreiter points out that kinship and other social networks influenced the courts: “Women and men from lower social strata drew on personal networks and relationships in order to … achieve a favorable outcome.” Kadhi were predisposed to be receptive to informal pleas for assistance because they had been trained in a juridical tradition that mandated “support of the weak, defined in terms of social status and gender [that] enabled the marginalized to challenge the established social hierarchy in the kadhi’s courts.” Stockreiter’s study extends far beyond the use of family ties to influence courts. She tells a broader story of turbulent change in kinship following the abolition of slavery as former slaves and former masters both claimed and denied kinship with each other. Hers is a story, too, of how mila (to use the Kiswahili word for traditional “custom” that encompasses the morality of kinship) finds accommodation with another “underlying moral discourse … [an] Islamic social discourse about female protection and a legal discourse about fault.” Her highly nuanced story of resourceful women and men leaves Stockreiter unwilling to characterize Zanzibari society as patriarchal (Stockreiter 2015: 84, 86, 88, 165, 197–198). Elisabeth McMahon’s (2013) study of Pemba, one of the islands of Zanzibar, also demonstrates the centrality of kinship in the lives of slaves and former slaves. Slaves created families not only among themselves but also through relationships with masters. They fashioned three distinct forms of kinship: “blood kinship … most commonly found among parents and their children,” marriage, and “networked,” or “fictive,” kinship. For the generation that passed from enslavement to postabolition freedom, McMahon shows, living in kinship meant ceaseless strategizing and negotiating. Being married, situated in a network of children and relatives, and recognized as a member of a clan were all immensely valuable sources of status, security, and rights in property. McMahon’s observation that creating new families allowed men and women to become “lineage founders” provides an unexpected insight into the problem of personhood within kinship. Many of these “founders” would have been predominantly first‐generation slaves who, before being torn from their natal families, had surely learned stories of the founders of their clans. No living person, of course, had ever seen such founders, but stories of them provided an idealized image of personhood that the enslaved could emulate as they sought honor and respect (McMahon 2013: 196, 209). This important work from Zanzibar highlights the instrumental value of kinship for individuals who encountered institutions of slavery and colonial and Islamic courts. Another example of kinship shaping an encounter with an

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unfamiliar institution is provided by Kathleen Smythe’s (2006) study of Catholics in Ufipa, a region of western Tanzania. Smythe emphasizes the importance within family life of the socialization of the young. In Fipa culture, she shows, children and youth passed through successive stages of maturation as they progressed toward adulthood. These stages were marked by changes in sleeping locations. The young first slept with parents, later with grandparents, and finally with young people of the same age and gender. The boarding schools built by Catholic evangelists could be understood as part of the same process of socialization. As a result, Smythe argues, European missionaries were integrated into Fipa society as “parent and grandparent figures.” Through this deployment of “family ideals,” Fipa communities naturalized these unfamiliar newcomers and found a discursive context whose familiarity gave them an advantage in dealing with them. The Catholic missionaries gained status, but found themselves held to new expectations and obligations, for they “became part of the web of relations within Fipa families.” As always in family life, disappointment with unfulfilled expectations was inevitable. Smythe shows that Fipa Catholics categorized missionary discrimination, celibacy, and their general obtuseness as instances of failure to respect the obligations of kinship (Smythe 2006: xxx). The works discussed here provide examples of the creative use of kinship in a variety of historical periods and circumstances. They reveal the importance of ­kinship as a resource in encounters with unfamiliar institutions. Kinship could also be valuable in the creation of new institutions. I close with two examples, both from Uganda, that show how institution building might involve stretching the language of kinship to create new understandings through analogy (Strathern 1992: 2; Sahlins 2013: 15). The first is Rhiannon Stephens’s (2013) history of motherhood. Stephens is most interested in the discursive character of motherhood: “As a cultural form, as a social relationship, and as a key element in political charters, motherhood took an ideological form that was both internally consistent and enduring over generations … But it was by no means unchanging. People adapted their ideology of motherhood as they faced new challenges and possibilities.” By analogy they stretched motherhood beyond women’s role in biological reproduction to the realm of politics. Initially, the “ideal form of motherhood was for a woman to have many children.” By the end of the first millennium ce, however, Ugandan societies were extending the concept. Now “motherhood was viewed as an institution for creating networks of relationships and mutual obligation that cut across dominant patrilineal divides.” “A woman’s ability to convert motherhood into instrumental power,” Stephens explains, stemmed partly from gaining the position of mother of a political noble, and partly from her own political skills (Stephens 2013: 6, 12, 13). The political arena in which these Bagandan mothers acted was larger and more hierarchical than the comparatively tiny stage on which women like Mwanaisha negotiated their lives of kinship in Iringa. Nevertheless, I would suggest that their skills and talents were not fundamentally different.



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A similar perspective marks the history of clans in Buganda by Neil Kodesh (2010). It takes him back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, before the emergence of Buganda’s famous state. In this pre‐state period, argues Kodesh, Buganda witnessed extraordinary social innovation that was facilitated by kinship. He proposes that, as bananas became the main Bagandan food, conflict over land devoted to banana groves intensified. At that juncture, spirit mediums were particularly well prepared to alleviate conflict, for their work required travel and made them known and respected in widely scattered communities. It was they who knit together dispersed communities by giving them a common identity. This process of unification, Kodesh argues, created “publics,” or “knowledge communities,” that were capable of stimulating innovation precisely because the mediums drew together bodies of specialized knowledge held by different groups. What cemented these groups together was kinship. Older understandings of descent now became the foundation of new clan identities: “The language and practices of clanship [emerged] as the disembodied life forces of deceased leaders were transformed from ancestral ghosts into … the founders of clans.” The formation of clans, in turn, allowed banana farmers to “establish widely recognized connections with ancestors,” which became the basis of long‐term claims to land (Kodesh 2010: 68–69, 79, 93, 96). Like Stephens, Kodesh goes to the heart of the anthropological debate about kinship as product of nature or culture. From Stephens we learn that motherhood was both a biological role and a social ­construct. From Kodesh we learn why genealogy has been a cherished form of knowledge for the Bagandan people, and also why the Bagandan clans are not the product of genealogy but rather of innovative speech and social agency.

Conclusion The preceding discussion cannot do justice to the many studies that address ­family and kinship in Africa. A fuller historical account of African kinship would draw heavily on historical linguistics, utilize a vast corpus of ethnography, consider a much broader range of twentieth‐century social history, and incorporate a growing literature on African families of the twenty‐first century. Certainly we would ask how kinship assists African people as they respond to challenges ranging from HIV/AIDS and neoliberalism to urbanization and globalization (e.g., Therborn 2004; Dilger 2008). The few studies that I have discussed serve to show, however, that historians’ understandings of family and kinship have moved decisively away from structuralism and reflect a growing doubt about patriarchy. Increasingly, historians see kinship as a complex interweaving of relationships (only some of which are created by biological descent), daily practice, and discourse which creates moral obligation. While it may well be true that the routine of family living and the gravity of the normative values attached to familial relationships slow change and ensure continuity, historical research demonstrates that kinship ­relations are adaptable and resilient. They provide models for thinking about a variety of dilemmas and practical means of dealing with them.

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Too often, the source materials available to historians of Africa do not allow much insight into African individuality. Even so, some of the studies discussed here plainly reveal the imprint of individual agency. They show, I believe, that living in African kinship has produced men and women who possess sharply defined personhood and the skills of interpersonal negotiation needed to achieve their ambitions. So the next time you find yourself on a rattling commuter minibus hopelessly stuck in traffic, look around and ask yourself: Aren’t those passengers juggling text‐message conversations on multiple mobile phones practicing old skills of kinship in twenty‐first‐century Africa?

References Beidelman, T. O. 2012. The Culture of Colonialism: The Cultural Subjection of Ukaguru. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Carsten, Janet. 2000. “Introduction: Cultures of Relatedness.” In Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship, edited by Janet Carsten, 1–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carsten, Janet. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dilger, Hansjörg. 2008. “‘We Are All Going to Die’: Kinship, Belonging, and the Morality of HIV/AIDS‐Related Illnesses and Deaths in Rural Tanzania.” Anthropological Quarterly 81(1): 207–232. Ehret, Christopher Ehret. 1998. An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 b.c. to a.d. 400. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Ensor, Bradley E. 2011. “Kinship Theory in Archaeology: From Critiques to the Study of Transformations.” American Antiquity 76(2): 203–227. Giblin, James L. 2005. A History of the Excluded: Making Family a Refuge from State in Twentieth‐Century Tanzania. Oxford: James Currey. Gonzales, Rhonda M. 2009. Societies, Religion, and History: Central‐East Tanzanians and the World They Created, c.200 bce to 1800 ce. New York: Columbia University Press. Kodesh, Neil, 2010. Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. McMahon, Elisabeth. 2013. Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa: From Honor to Respectability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mulder, Monique Borgerhoff, Margaret George‐Cramer, Jason Eshleman, and Alessia Ortolani. 2001. “A Study of East African Kinship and Marriage Using a Phylogenetically Based Comparative Method.” American Anthropologist, N.S. 103(4): 1059–1082. Osborn, Emily Lynn. 2011. Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule. Athens: Ohio University Press. Peletz, Michael G. 1995. “Kinship Studies in Late Twentieth‐Century.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 343–372. Read, Dwight W. 2007. “Kinship Theory: A Paradigm Shift.” Ethnology 46(4): 329–364. Roberts, Richard. 2005. Litigants and Households: African Disputes and Colonial Courts in the French Soudan, 1895–1912. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Ruel, Malcolm. 2002. “The Structural Articulation of Generations in Africa.” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 42(165): 51–81.



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Sahlins, Marshall. 2013. What Kinship Is – And Is Not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Saidi, Christine. 2010. Women’s Authority and Society in Early East‐Central Africa. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Schoenbrun, David Lee. 1998. A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Shadle, Brett L. 2006. “Girl Cases”: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890–1970. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Smythe, Kathleen R. 2006. Fipa Families: Reproduction and Catholic Evangelization in Nkansi, Ufipa, 1880–1960. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Stephens, Rhiannon. 2013. A History of Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stockreiter, Elke E. 2015. Islamic Law, Gender, and Social Change in Post‐Abolition Zanzibar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1992. Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies. New York: Routledge. Therborn, Göran, ed. 2004. African Families in a Global Context. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. Vansina, Jan. 1990. Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Chapter Ten 

Ethnicity in Southern Africa Michael R. Mahoney

In the history of southern Africa, as elsewhere, ethnicity has often been a source of pride and a feeling of belonging, but it has also sometimes been a source of shame and of conflict, ranging from minor disagreements to massacres. Ethnicity has been a factor throughout the history of the region, from the Zulu Kingdom (for example) including and excluding the different peoples it conquered, to white conquerors manipulating ethnicity often quite explicitly and self‐consciously for the purpose of dividing and ruling their African subjects, to postcolonial Africans struggling to find a place for both ethnic self‐assertion and national unity. Since ethnicity is a universal phenomenon, it figures in the history of every southern African country: Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe. Ethnicity does not matter only for Africans: it also matters for the region’s residents who are of European, Asian, or mixed descent. Ethnicity overlaps with race, kinship, political affiliation, and a whole host of other social phenomena. It is, at bottom, political, even though it involves some of the most basic aspects of any person’s sense of self, which transcend political differences. For the purposes of this chapter I shall be defining ethnicity broadly as a sense of identity and belonging to a named group of people based on a belief in that group’s common ancestry, culture, and language. This ethnic identity may be asserted by individuals themselves, or it may be assigned to them by others, or both. Ethnicity is just one possible form of identification (others include gender, A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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class, race, religion, ability, political affiliation, and so on) that any individual might claim at any time, and many people may even assert multiple ethnic identities (Cornell and Hartmann 2007). Researchers who study the phenomenon should be careful not to reify these abstract concepts and should not assume that any identity is a concrete thing that exists beyond acts of identification (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). Ethnicity is usually what people are talking about when they refer to “tribalism” in Africa. Though the terms “tribe” and “tribalism” are commonly used throughout the world, including in Africa, when talking about Africa, I shall follow scholarly convention here by using “ethnicity” instead. This is mainly to avoid the implication that ethnicity in Africa is fundamentally different from ethnicity in Europe or any other part of the world. Above all, whether we are talking about ethnicity or tribalism, the phenomenon itself is not enough to explain anything and must itself be explained (Lowe 1997). Given the enormity of this topic and of the scholarly literature that has examined it, this chapter will of necessity be selective rather than exhaustive in its approach, and idiosyncratic to boot. I will make many arguments here, but the two main ones are, first, that ethnicity has been a factor throughout southern African history and not just since European contact, and, second, that ethnic groups in southern Africa and elsewhere have always had conflicting tendencies toward both inclusion and exclusion.

Theoretical starting points The most important scholarly work on this subject to date has been the 1989 ­collection of essays entitled The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Vail 1989). Edited by Leroy Vail, the late renowned historian of Mozambique, the book dealt head‐on with a subject that was either taken for granted (and thus left unexamined) by the media, by government, and by society in general, or generally dismissed as a distraction by academics, government officials, and activists more concerned with national or class liberation or nation building. The contributors to the book were building on the pioneering essay by the Zimbabwean historian Terence Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” which argued that during the colonial period in Africa traditions were radically reformed, and sometimes even invented outright, by white officials and missionaries and by African chiefs and elders and Christian converts. These changes tended to come at the expense of the colonized in general, and especially chiefs’ subjects, women, and youth (Ranger 1983). In the introduction to The Creation of Tribalism, Vail synthesized the various contributors’ arguments to come up with a model of the creation of tribalism very similar to Ranger’s. European colonizers, and later white‐dominated governments in settler regimes such as South Africa and Rhodesia, insisted that Africans were above all “tribal” and did everything in their power to emphasize the ethnic



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differences between themselves. European missionaries contributed to this effort through the educational systems and academic research, which they dominated, including the codification of African languages in dictionaries and grammars. Much of this work was also done by African Christians, who wanted to improve their legitimacy in the eyes of their non‐Christian African neighbors. African chiefs cooperated in order to shore up their authority in the face of the upheavals of colonization and urbanization, as did African elders and men in general, for the same reasons. Even some elder women promoted a vision of ethnicity that was disadvantageous to them as women but accorded higher status to them as elders (Vail 1989). Ranger and the many contributors to various aspects of African tradition, including ethnicity, were not timeless, but rather were created by colonial officials, missionaries, African “traditional” elites, and “modernizing” African Christians during the colonial era. As a result, the contributors to Vail (1989) tended to favor an instrumentalist interpretation of ethnicity. Instrumentalists argue that ethnic attachments are constantly being created and recreated and manipulated to serve particular political ends. For decades, a major debate in the study of ethnicity has been that between instrumentalism and primordialism. Primordialism is the belief that ethnic (or nationalist) attachments are very old and fundamental, existing in our very genes and the languages we learn as ­children, not to mention the culture that infuses our daily lives. Ethnic attachments are thus irrational and apolitical in origin. As many scholars have noted, instrumentalism and primordialism are not necessarily mutually exclusive: primordial attachments create a potential for instrumentalist ethnic mobilization. However, the danger, as far as instrumentalists are concerned, is that a focus on primordialism can obscure the instrumental aspects of politicized ethnicity. Conversely, to focus exclusively on instrumentalism risks reducing ethnic attachment to its political implications, obscuring the reasons for the success of ethnic appeals, and blinding us to the contentions within ethnic groups, not to mention implying that ethnic attachments are necessarily bad, leaving us to wonder why ethnic appeals resonate in the first place (Sisk 1996). The most successful effort in African studies to transcend some of the limitations of both primordialism and instrumentalism has been the historian John Lonsdale’s theory of political tribalism and moral ethnicity. For Lonsdale, moral ethnicity is the arena of contention defined by primordial ethnic attachments. It determines who may legitimately participate in political disputes within an ethnic group, as well as how those disputes are to be pursued. While moral ethnicity may set a limit on the possible outcomes of political disputes, it does not completely determine those outcomes. Political tribalism is any rhetoric that equates belonging to an ethnic group with support of particular political points of view. If you do not support a certain point of view, then it follows that the legitimacy of your belonging to the group is called into question. The relationship between ethnicity and politics can sometimes be characterized by moral ethnicity, while at other

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times it may be characterized by political tribalism (Lonsdale 1992). More recently, Lonsdale and his fellow East African historian Derek Peterson have developed the notion of “ethnic patriotism,” the definition of which largely overlaps with that of “political tribalism,” but it better conveys the ethnic pride that is usually used to legitimate certain kinds of ethnopolitical appeals (Lonsdale 2009; Peterson 2012).

Ethnicity in precolonial Southern Africa One major criticism of Ranger’s and Vail’s approach has been that their research implies that these processes of invention or creation only took place during the colonial period when ethnicity and other aspects of African tradition had long histories of change even before European colonizers arrived on the scene (Atkinson 1994; Guyer 1996). With very few exceptions, such as the Qamu chiefdom of colonial Natal (Lambert 1995) and the Kavirondo “tribe” of colonial Kenya (Southall 1970), most ethnic groups of the colonial and postcolonial eras descend from groups of the same name that existed in precolonial times. However, though the names of the groups have deep histories, it is less certain that those groups have always been ethnic groups. Some scholars, such as Phillip Bonner, John Wright, and Carolyn Hamilton, have argued that the groups existing before the wave of political consolidation that hit southern Africa in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were kin or lineage groupings. Others, such as W. D. Hammond‐Tooke, have countered that these were primarily political groupings (Hammond‐Tooke 1991). Lineages (kin groupings) and chiefdoms (political groupings) seem to have been distinct even in oral traditions that speak of the earliest strata of precolonial history, though the distinction might be blurred by the fact that the leadership of a chiefdom was identified by the lineage to which they belonged. Bonner, Wright, and Hamilton are right to emphasize how often people of different lineages from their chiefs developed fictive kinship claims to argue that they were indeed related. However, oral traditions offer numerous examples of people belonging to one lineage but pledging allegiance (Zulu khonza) to a chiefdom of another lineage without making fictive kinship claims, and the terms for “lineage” (Zulu uhlanga) and “chiefdom” (Zulu ubukhosi) are different in most Southern Bantu languages. Regardless of whether chiefdoms were lineage groupings or political groupings, they were not ethnic groups per se. This is not, however, to say that they had no ethnic content whatsoever. The sense of common ancestry that is characteristic of lineages, and of real and fictive kinship claims of chiefly families and at least some of their subjects, is also one of the defining characteristics of ethnicity. When it comes to cultural and linguistic ties, the Southern Bantu languages have a prefix (the cognates se‐ in the Sotho‐Tswana languages and isi‐ in the Nguni languages) that refers to the culture and/or language of a people. That this prefix was often attached to the names of precolonial polities suggests that those polities were also culturally and linguistically distinctive.



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The relationship between lineage groupings and ethnic groupings has long been gendered. Vail (1989: 15) quotes a Tswana proverb, “women have no tribe,” to show that ethnicity has largely been a men’s affair throughout African history, for various reasons. Most southern African societies are exogamous, ­patrilineal, and patrilocal, meaning that women tend to be outsiders in the communities in which they live. Men have also tended to monopolize long‐distance travel, putting themselves more often in situations where ethnic distinctions become salient. Elizabeth MacGonagle’s (2007) study of the Ndau, who straddle the border between Zimbabwe and Mozambique, challenges this depiction somewhat by showing how active women were in the promotion of ethnic identity through the cultural education of children and through their roles as healers, spirit mediums, and occasionally chiefs. At the same time, when the Ndau were ruled for a time by the Gaza Nguni, men tended to assimilate to the Nguni ­identity, while women promoted the Ndau identity (MacGonagle 2007). From the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, in Portuguese‐ruled Mozambique, the Chikunda ethnicity emerged among men in the exclusively male warrior slave class created by the Portuguese (Isaacman and Isaacman 2004). In the recent past of the Tonga, further south on the border between South Africa and Mozambique, migrant labor has caused men to tend to assimilate to the neighboring Zulu identity, while women have tended to resist this and instead cling to their old Tonga identity (Webster 1991). By contrast, in Manyika society, also on the border between Zimbabwe and Mozambique, lineage membership gave more power to men (though it gave some power to women as well), while power was more evenly distributed between men and women in the broader realm of ethnicity (Schmidt 2015). The muddled relationship between ethnicity, lineage, and political affiliation has meant that even recent scholarship on ethnicity in precolonial southern Africa has occasionally reached contradictory conclusions about the very existence of ethnicity during this early era. MacGonagle’s (2007) study of the Ndau shows quite clearly that the process of social construction of ethnicity that Ranger and Vail and others described so effectively for the colonial period was also going on during the precolonial era. For example, the Ndau language is a classic example of the aphorism related to the linguist Max Weinreich by an anonymous interlocutor: “A language is a dialect with an army and navy” (Bright 1997: 469). The line between language and dialect is very blurry and has more to do with social and political realities than with linguistic ones. Is Ndau an independent language in its own right or merely a dialect of Shona? Weinreich’s aphorism might be given an African gloss: “A language is a dialect with its own king.” MacGonagle shows how Ndau ideas of their own linguistic and cultural unity and distinctiveness from the (other) Shona go back to the precolonial era. The same goes for the manipulation of kinship identity, which united various clans under the royal lineage and downplayed links with lineages beyond the Ndau kingdom. Both the linguistic and kin elements of the distinctive Ndau ethnic identity were maintained by the

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Ndau during periods when they were ruled by outsiders, such as the Mutapa and Gaza Nguni states (MacGonagle 2007). Paul Landau’s (2010) similarly longue durée study of South Africa, conversely, argues that precolonial polities in the region were not ethnic groups, or even kin groups for that matter. Whereas “ethnic group” and “tribe” tend to connote a certain exclusivity, Landau goes to great lengths to show how inclusive and diverse these polities actually were. This is most obvious when one examines the period of the Mfecane, or Difaqane, the southern African upheavals of the early 1800s. Frequent warfare killed off the ruling elites and created streams of refugees. Power came through people, and chiefs could not afford to be too particular about whom they brought into the fold. The first Europeans to visit southeastern Africa and the interior highlands came at this time, providing rich descriptions of African societies in states of severe flux. However, through detailed analysis of these sources, oral traditions, archaeology, and historical linguistics, Landau shows that inclusiveness was not a new policy for a desperate situation. Like other scholars such as David Beach and Norman Etherington, Landau sees a long history of cycles of political centralization and fragmentation in the region. Unlike most other scholars, however, Landau does not draw a contrast between large multiethnic states and small, stable, homogeneous chiefdoms: it was openness all the way down (Landau 2010). Of course, this flexibility cut both ways. Landau emphasizes the ease with which people could enter other polities; recent work by Garzarelli and Keeton (2014) shows that it was likewise easy (though by no means cost‐free) for precolonial southern Africans to leave the polities to which they belonged, often to go and found new ones. It is perhaps telling that Landau focuses almost entirely on entrances but discusses exits hardly at all, even though each entrance into one polity must necessarily involve an exit from another one. Voluntary or involuntary exits from polities are just one example of acts of differentiation. Some other examples from precolonial southern Africa come from the Zulu Kingdom. While the Zulu elite were inclusive toward some of the people that they conquered or otherwise absorbed, they excluded and denigrated others among their subjects, calling them the Lala (Hamilton and Wright 1990). Even some of those who were offered inclusion by the Zulu, such as the Qwabe, rejected it for the most part (Mahoney 2012). Sociolinguistics offers some ways to conceptualize the coexistence of inclusion and differentiation when it comes to identity, whether that identity be political, kin‐based, or ethnic. For example, Heinz Kloss (1967) developed the notion of abstand (distancing) and ausbau (expanding) languages. Linguistic abstand involves differentiating a linguistic variety from others, often consciously. Ausbau, on the other hand, is linguistic inclusion, emphasizing commonalities between different but closely related linguistic varieties. Despite the positive connotations of “inclusion” here, for Kloss ausbau usually involved the transforming of what might be considered an independent language into a mere dialect of a dominant



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standard language, as happened with Provençal and French, Allemannisch and German, and Sardinian and Italian, to name just a few examples. Similarly, Robert Le Page and Andrée Tabouret‐Keller (1985) argued that all linguistic utterances could be seen as “acts of identity.” Depending on how one speaks, what language or linguistic register somebody uses, one could be either emphasizing their ­commonality with another person or emphasizing their distinctiveness. Indeed, the same linguistic act of identity could (and usually does) at the same time assert commonality with one group of people and difference from another. These sociolinguistic approaches have many implications for the study of ­precolonial southern Africa. First, they show that inclusion and exclusion can, and indeed must, coexist. Scholars must be on the lookout for both and examine their interplay. Second, the act of identification, whether assigned or asserted, is done through culture, and language above all. The almost universal multilingualism and cultural hybridity that has characterized southern Africa apparently throughout its history should not lead us to ignore the fact that at certain moments ­people engage in what Le Page and Tabouret‐Keller call “focusing” and Kloss calls “abstand”: choosing one particular form of cultural expression instead of others for the purpose of saying, in effect, “I am this and not that.” Without this “focusing,” cultural differences would never emerge, but history has shown that they have emerged frequently, even in the precolonial past. Similar arguments may help us interpret the ambiguous evidence of archaeology and historical linguistics, so crucial for understanding the earliest history of the region. For example, if languages are related to one another, it follows that they descended from a common ancestor language whose speakers differentiated over time. The closer the linguistic relationship the more recent the divergence; the more distant the linguistic relationship the longer the passage of time since the divergence. By measuring degrees of linguistic relatedness, historical linguists have been able to come up with family trees of African languages and to suggest original homelands and patterns of migration and interaction (Ehret 2000). Similarly, human artifacts tend to come in certain styles that co‐occur: certain ways of designing pots may be common in a certain area for a certain period of time and may coincide with certain ways of designing houses, and so on. Archaeologists refer to these co‐occurring styles of artifacts as assemblages and, more broadly, as cultures or traditions. Do these “cultures” or “traditions” represent ethnic groups? Can a historical linguist’s “proto‐languages” be linked with an archaeologist’s “cultures”? Can they both be tied to specific ethnic groups existing today, or at least to the ancestors of those ethnic groups? Few debates about early history are as contentious as the one regarding the relationship between linguistics, archaeology, and ethnicity. W. D. Hammond‐Tooke, for example, makes several arguments against scholars identifying archaeological “cultures” with specific ethnic groups: (1) “ethnicity” as a concept is too vague; (2) it requires knowledge of social context, which archaeologists too often lack; (3) it can exist only in multiethnic yet politically and socially integrated environments; (4)

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material artifacts do not necessarily reflect ethnic self‐identification; (5) uniformity in material culture is as likely to be due to cross‐cultural borrowing as to ethnic homogeneity; and (6) distinctiveness in material culture was not necessary for drawing social boundaries when population densities were low and great spaces separated different social groups (Hammond‐Tooke 2000). While archaeologist Sian Jones’s treatment of the issue does not deal specifically with southern Africa, she makes several arguments that effectively counter Hammond‐Tooke’s. She is aware of how archaeology has been used and abused for political purposes by different ethnic and national groups today, but she cautions against seeing archaeological research into the history of ethnicity as an impossible task. Ethnic identification, she argues, is a human universal and likely emerged at the same time as cultural distinctiveness in material culture. Archaeologists have tools to distinguish between interethnic borrowing and intraethnic commonalities, and even the most extensive borrowing cannot erase ethnic difference. Perhaps most importantly, archaeologists now have a view of ethnicity as constantly evolving, subject to internal dispute, and inclusive as well as exclusive – a more flexible view that fits better with the archaeological evidence (Jones 1997). Roger Blench makes similar arguments about linking together linguistics, archaeology, and the study of ethnicity in Africa in particular. The task is difficult, it must be approached with a great appreciation for nuance, and few debates can be decisively settled, but this kind of research is nevertheless possible and even necessary (Blench 2006).

Ethnicity under white rule in Southern Africa The fact that ethnicity has a deep precolonial history in southern Africa does not mean that Ranger, Vail, and, more recently, Landau are wrong to see the colonial period as the time when “the creation of tribalism” took place. Responding to critics who accused him of ignoring the precolonial era, Ranger conceded that “the invention of tradition” also took place in the precolonial period, but argued that the colonial period saw much more profound transformation over a short period of time, creating the situation that we are living with today, even in postcolonial Africa (Ranger 1993). Like Ranger, Landau argues that tradition and tribalism since European conquest have become more rigid and exclusive than they were before, exacerbating conflict in southern Africa (Landau 2010). Part of this is because Europeans came to nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century southern Africa with their own racialized notions of ethnicity: “tribe” was something innate, essentially distinctive, and unchanging. One was either this or that, forever. However, another reason why Europeans promoted rigid and exclusive tribal identity was because they quite self‐consciously sought to divide and rule Africans and to legitimate racial segregation and political, legal, and economic subordination on the basis of Africans’ supposedly greater “traditionalism” (Welsh 1971; Mamdani 1996). Chiefs, elders (including elder women), and men in general bought into this because it reinforced their own power based on supposedly



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unchanging tradition. Christian Africans likewise accepted “tribalism” because it emphasized their links with their non‐Christian fellow Africans. Given the long history of ethnic conflict in Africa and the way in which it undermined struggles against white rule and, later, contributed to political instability and bloodshed in postcolonial Africa, Ranger, Vail, Landau, and others could be forgiven for focusing on the divisive aspects of ethnicity. However, ­ethnicity has just as often involved coalition building across even narrower categories of identification. Already in the 1950s, anthropologist James Clyde Mitchell was showing how urban “tribalism” brought together different groups that often feuded in the rural areas from which they came. There were feuds in the urban areas too, but the feuding groups, the urban tribes, were larger (Mitchell 1956). More recently, Daniel Posner, like Mitchell a specialist in Zambia, is only one of the most prominent proponents of a coalition‐building view of ethnic mobilization in Africa and elsewhere: ethnic coalition building, Posner and others have argued, is easier than other types when potential coalition members have similar languages and cultures (Posner 2005). The formation of ethnic groups did not just unify Africans as much as it divided them; it also sometimes unified them in ways that Africa’s white rulers did not want. For example, in colonial Natal (1843–1910), the creation of tribalism involved colonizers promoting Africans’ identification with the dozens of chiefdoms in the colony, not with the larger Zulu identity that Natal Africans shared as a legacy of the precolonial past. The colonizers’ strategy succeeded for most of the colonial period, mainly because the Zulu Kingdom had created many enemies among the peoples it had conquered. Ironically, the Europeans’ ouster of the Zulu king in 1879 actually served to promote the spread of Zulu ethnic identification. As anthropologist Max Gluckman noted in 1940, “this opposition [between Africans and whites] has heightened allegiance to the chiefs, and especially the Zulu kingship. The sentiment about the king grows, helped by his lack of power, for he has no power to abuse” (Gluckman 1940: 44). The delayed impact of the worst consequences of colonization left Natal Africans seeking someone to save them, and the superpowered Zulu king of their imaginations was that person. Young male migrant workers, with their experience of wider ethnic categories in Johannesburg, promoted this new Zulu ethnic identity upon their return. Chiefs accepted this in the face of pressure from their subjects. Zulu ethnic identification was one of the foundations of the Zulu rebellion in 1906. The rebellion was crushed, but Zulu ethnicity was firmly established as a symbol of African unity and anticolonial resistance (Mahoney 2012). The history of Zulu ethnicity after 1906 fits better with the narrative established by Ranger, Vail, and Landau, demonstrating that the social and political implications of ethnic identification can change over time. While leading Zulu politicians at first demonstrated a solid commitment to African unity through their involvement in the African National Congress (ANC) (from 1912) and the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (from 1919), in the 1920s and 1930s

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the Zulu sections of these organizations broke away and pursued more localized and conservative agendas. These Zulu leaders, often prominent businessmen themselves, increasingly turned against African radicalism and cooperated instead with chiefs, the Zulu king, and white missionaries and government officials. This tendency culminated in the career of Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, a Zulu chief who participated in the widely condemned apartheid Bantustan system as the head of government of KwaZulu homeland. Buthelezi also founded what became the Inkatha Freedom Party, a movement opposed to the radicalism of the ANC, leading to an ANC–Inkatha civil war in the 1980s and 1990s which killed thousands on both sides, with Inkatha enjoying covert support from the apartheid government (Marks 1986; Maré and Hamilton 1987). On a more local level, ordinary Zulu men and elder women with no status except as men and/or elders increasingly embraced Zulu ethnicity and social and political conservatism as a way to preserve that status (Marks 1989; Hassim 1993; La Hausse de Lalouvière 2000). In its broad outlines, the case of the Zulus parallels that of other African ethnic groups in South Africa and to some extent the whole region. This is not surprising considering the cross‐border ethnic and economic ties (especially participation in the migrant labor system) that are so common in southern Africa, as well as the fact that Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland were all British colonies, while Namibia was ruled for 75 years by South Africa and received many Afrikaner and South African British immigrants. Mozambique would be something of an exception. On the one hand, Mozambicans too were closely tied into the migrant labor system in South Africa and were very much influenced by both the top‐ down and the bottom‐up promotion of ethnic identity that occurred in both Kimberley and Johannesburg (Harries 1994). On the other hand, Mozambique’s Portuguese rulers pursued a policy of assimilation that provided legal equality to a tiny minority of black Mozambicans while subjecting the vast majority to a homogeneous legal system called the indigenato, which created labor conditions bordering on slavery. Unlike the British, the Portuguese had little interest in the diversity of customary law, though they did recognize African chiefs and identified blacks primarily as the subjects of those chiefs. Also unlike the British, the Portuguese hardly relied at all on “tradition” and “tribalism” to maintain their rule, leaning quite heavily on force and coercion instead. As a result, while ethnic differences have had some salience in both colonial and postcolonial Mozambique, they have been less important than race, class, and regional differences in politics there (O’Laughlin 2000). One of the main consequences of white rule in southern Africa was that it brought to the region two non‐African racial groups (whites and Asians) and created a third group (people of mixed race), with all three groups being themselves ethnically diverse. The largest and best‐known white ethnic group in Africa is the Afrikaners, and their history illustrates some of the principles of inclusion and exclusion I have discussed here. The ancestry of Afrikaners includes people of



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Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, British, African, and Asian ancestry. At the same time, Afrikaners have historically defined themselves in opposition to other ethnic groups, pretending that there were clear boundary lines when those lines were in fact quite blurred. The most obvious distinction Afrikaners have made has been between themselves and “nonwhites” of various races, but for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the distinction between Afrikaners and white English‐speaking South Africans was just as salient and bitterly conflict‐ridden (Giliomee 2003), although some historians have cautioned against reading these distinctions back to the Great Trek (1834–1854) and before (Etherington 2001). Instead, Vivian Bickford‐Smith (1995) has identified late‐Victorian Cape Town as a particularly important crucible for the establishment of black, white, coloured, South African British, and Afrikaner identities in South Africa. Economic expansion and competition, growing social stratification, and imported “scientific” European ideas of race and nation all combined to fuel this process. Socially and economically dominant South African British whites established the hierarchy with themselves at the top. Afrikaner and coloured identities were shaped both by their subordination to the British and by their desire not to fall to the level of the blacks below. Even the blacks who found themselves at the bottom of the hierarchy embraced the racial identification that was the basis of their exclusion. In each case, though, Afrikaner, coloured, and black self‐assertion existed alongside assimilationist anglophilia in those groups (Bickford‐Smith 1995). Curiously, while much has been written about the histories of black, white, coloured, and Afrikaner identities, the history of English‐speaking white South African ethnic identity per se has received scant scholarly attention. Indian history in South Africa has been particularly underserved by historians, but its lack of integration into broader histories of the region has been an even bigger problem. A steadily growing body of literature on the subject now includes a few surveys (Jain 1999; Dhupelia‐Mesthrie 2000). Like Africans, whites, and coloureds, Indians have formed a racial category in southern Africa despite great internal diversity. Class, caste, and above all religious diversity figure most prominently in the historiography, but Indians were also historically very ethnically diverse. While most of the “passenger Indian” elite were northerners, especially Hindi and Gujarati, the bulk of the indentured majority were southerners, especially Tamil. Because of this ethnic and linguistic diversity, South African Indians relied heavily on lingua francas to facilitate communication among themselves. Varieties of Hindi served this purpose at first, but are moribund today. In the late 1800s Natal Indians played a major role in the development of Fanakalo, a pidgin Zulu that was once widely used by people of all races throughout the region but is now largely confined to the mines and to interactions between white or Indian employers and their African employees (Mesthrie 1989). English has been the first language of most South African Indians for several decades now, and, despite the early dominance of Tamil and Telugu and the recent rise of schools that teach those languages, they are virtually extinct in South Africa (Mesthrie 2002). Like

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South African coloureds, Indians have both suffered and benefited from formal and informal racial orders that subordinated them to whites but privileged them above blacks. Few situations would be more conducive to the development of internal solidarity and a strong sense of distinctiveness in relation to their fellow South Africans.

Ethnicity in postcolonial South Africa White rule ended more recently in southern Africa than in any other part of the continent, mainly because the white population was at its largest and most entrenched there. Whereas most of Africa was independent by 1960, black majority rule in southern Africa was achieved only between 1966 (Botswana) and 1994 (South Africa). While southern Africa’s white rulers tried hard to promote African ethnic allegiances in order to undermine African nationalist movements, those nationalist struggles generally succeeded in creating greater black solidarity, and far less interethnic conflict, than in the rest of Africa. In other words, black–white conflict was a very effective vehicle for black unity. In southern Africa, only Mozambique has experienced a postcolonial civil war, and only Lesotho has had a successful military coup d’état. This is not, however, to say that there has been no ethnic conflict in southern Africa, just that it has been much more muted than elsewhere. Typically, at the national level racial or national identity have replaced ethnicity as inclusive identities, rendering ethnicity more exclusive in national politics even as it continues to be more inclusive at the local level. Many academics and nonacademics alike have held up Botswana as an African success story, and have often attributed that success to Botswana’s great ethnic homogeneity. There are, however, two main problems with this argument. First, Botswana’s ethnic homogeneity is in many ways very similar to Somalia’s, but the two countries could hardly be more different when it comes to civil strife. In both cases, subethnic categories existed that could, and in Somalia’s case did, form the basis of intense domestic conflict. Somalia’s deep traditions of feuding, its more predatory colonial regime, which prevented the emergence of inclusive indigenous elites, its colonial division into two separate territories ruled by two different colonial powers, and its role in Cold War power politics all help to explain the difference (Samatar 1997). Second, while Botswana is more ethnically homogeneous than most countries in Africa or, indeed, the world, it is still ethnically diverse to some degree. Botswana’s Bushmen have long campaigned, with international support, against exclusive and paternalistic government policies, not to mention generalized informal prejudice. Similarly, even Bantu‐speaking agriculturalists like the Kgalagadi and the Kalanga have chafed against Tswana supremacy. In all these cases, success has been limited but at the same time sufficient to prevent the escalation of conflict. Botswana’s ethnic minorities have for the most part not relied on a simple oppositional ethnicity to further their political goals.



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Instead, they have pragmatically deployed a host of less confrontational strategies: international alliances with nongovernmental organizations, the embrace of minority rights discourse as opposed to any kind of separatism, and cultivation of political and economic linkages with sympathetic members of the Tswana establishment (Motzafi‐Haller 1994; Solway 1994; Van Binsbergen 1994; Werbner 2002; Wilmsen 2002; Pelican and Maruyama 2015). Lesotho and Swaziland have much in common with Botswana. Though all three countries are dominated by ethnic groups that actually have more people living in South Africa, segments of those ethnic groups managed to avoid incorporation into South Africa through judicious alliances with missionaries and elements in the British government. Nevertheless, labor migration and other economic ties have meant that these countries cannot be examined in isolation from South Africa. Thus, in regards to Lesotho, one can speak of ethnic exclusion based on various Sotho subgroups within the country (Khalanyane 2012) while, at the same time, seeing even the Lesotho Sotho as an ethnic minority within the South African political and socioeconomic system (Harris 1988). But there are differences between the three countries. The discovery of diamonds in Botswana has greatly lessened Botswana’s dependence on labor migration to South Africa, in stark contrast to Lesotho and Swaziland. Also, the Tswana chiefs and the Sotho king have been politically marginalized for the most part, while the Swazi king is still essentially an absolute monarch. Already, 30 years ago, in an article that seems amazingly prescient in the light of later developments, historian Hugh MacMillan argued that this situation developed through the process of decolonization. The Swazi kings, royal family, and aristocracy deftly manipulated Swazi tradition and  Swazi ethnic mobilization against both Boer settlers and a Zulu minority that  promoted African nationalism and labor activism, all factors that had no ­analogues in Botswana or Lesotho (MacMillan 1985). Of all the countries in southern Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe have probably experienced the greatest levels of violence since the end of white rule, in 1975 and 1980, respectively. As we have seen, the nature of Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique meant that race, class, and region were more important political categories than ethnicity was. Still, Mozambique’s main liberation movement, FRELIMO, often identified “tribalism” as a major problem and went so far as to abolish chiefship in the country. After independence, the 1977–1992 Mozambican civil war certainly had an ethnic component, with FRELIMO accusing their opponents, RENAMO, of being narrowly tribally based (in the central and northern parts of the country), while RENAMO accused FRELIMO of hiding its own tribal favoritism (toward the southern groups) behind a rhetoric of national unity. Though both arguments had some truth to them, in practice the situation was far more complicated: the political orientations of the members of, say, the Maconde of the north have always been diverse, and Mozambicans’ attitudes toward FRELIMO cannot be easily reduced to either support or opposition (Cahen 1999, 2000; Virtanen 2005). In Zimbabwe, the most notable case of

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ethnic conflict was the Gukurahundi, a government action during the mid‐ 1980s, in principle against regime opponents, although in practice it seems that many people who were killed were Ndebele, who were assumed to be opponents simply by virtue of their ethnicity. Shona–Ndebele conflict had a long history in Zimbabwe even before the Gukurahundi, from the Ndebele king Mzikilazi’s crossing of the Limpopo in the late 1830s to the divisions that tore apart the liberation movement. However, political divisions among the majority Shona have an even deeper history and are painfully obvious today, and have often involved interethnic coalitions on both sides of any divide. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to determine the specific salience of ethnicity as opposed to a whole host of other factors (Muzondidya and Ndlovu‐Gatsheni 2007; Ndlovu‐ Gatsheni 2012). The history of postcolonial ethnicity in Namibia has paralleled that in other southern African countries in many ways. Like Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe, Namibia has one ethnic group, the Ovambo, which makes up half or more of the country’s total population. Moreover, as in the other cases, this apparent ethnic unity covers up substantial subethnic diversity and even conflict. Since independence Namibia has tried to forge national unity through the classic strategy of multiethnic countries worldwide: nation building through government propaganda in the media, schools, and museums. The results have been mixed (Schildkrout 1995). Like the liberation movements in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique, Namibia’s SWAPO strongly criticized chiefship during the liberation struggle but, like the ANC in South Africa and ZANU‐PF in Zimbabwe and unlike Mozambique’s FRELIMO, ended up forging strong alliances with chiefs after independence (Friedman 2005). As in Botswana, Namibia’s most notable postcolonial ethnic conflicts have been between the Bantu‐speaking majority and the Khoisan/colored minority, including, inter alia, the Damara, Nama, coloreds, San, and the Rehoboth Basters, who together constitute more than a fifth of Namibia’s population and whose memberships shade into one another. For example, many San fought on the South African side during the Namibian War of Independence, while the Rehoboth Basters tried to declare independence rather than accept Namibian rule after South Africa withdrew. Tensions linger, and Namibia’s Khoisan/coloreds suffer from substantial political exclusion and economic disadvantage. They have turned to indigenous rights rhetoric, while SWAPO has often questioned their loyalty to the nation (Forrest 1994; Widlok 1996; Kjæret and Stokke 2003; Lee 2003; Taylor 2008). Finally, the end of apartheid in South Africa has in some ways fractured and in some ways focused ethnic identities there. One of the most important developments in postapartheid South Africa has been the emergence of a cosmopolitan, multiracial, English‐speaking middle class. The growing dominance of English, the decline of state support for minority languages, and the emigration of many Afrikaans speakers have all seriously eroded Afrikaner ethnic identity (Giliomee 2014), although during the apartheid era many white Afrikaans



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speakers were already rejecting Afrikaner ethnic identity as it was conventionally defined (Louw‐Potgieter 1988). Though similar processes have affected black ethnicities such as the Zulu, class limits black access to English‐speaking cosmopolitan identity, and township residents who try to do so risk certain local exclusion for not necessarily guaranteed privilege and acceptance by other English speakers (Rudwick 2008). The rise of the “Zulu clique” under Jacob Zuma’s presidency from 2009 to 2018 has raised the specter of ethnic conflict in a country that has enjoyed relative ethnic peace for some 20 years. However, anthropologist Hylton White sees a new and different kind of ethnic politics emerging here. Views of ethnic groups as discrete populations with shared culture and language are becoming harder to maintain in mixed urban environments, and traditional authorities are becoming increasingly irrelevant in a black South African population that became majority urban in the early 2000s. In this urban environment, crime and unemployment and underemployment are the biggest concerns. Zuma’s Zuluness was more about making him relatable to the average black South African, and about raising the possibility that one could achieve personal prosperity and security through some kind of ethnically grounded relationship with Zuma’s state (White 2012). White sees a troubling potential here for growing authoritarianism, but he does not mention another troubling prospect: ethnic conflict. By focusing on the inclusiveness of this new Zulu identity, White is perhaps making the opposite mistake to that which Ranger, Vail, and Landau made in focusing so much on the exclusiveness of ethnicity. One senses in South Africa in particular, and in southern Africa in  general, that the region’s success in containing growing social discontent cannot last forever. When major explosions start happening, one wonders what role ethnicity might play in them.

Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the help provided by my research assistant, Cecelia Ward of Ripon College, in putting together the bibliography upon which this review essay is based.

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Marks, Shula. 1986. The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism, and the State in Twentieth‐Century Natal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Marks, Shula. 1989. “Patriotism, Patriarchy, and Purity: Natal and the Politics of Zulu Ethnic Consciousness.” In The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, edited by Vail, Leroy, 225–234. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mesthrie, Rajend. 1989. “The Origins of Fanakalo.” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 4: 211–240. Mesthrie, Rajend. 2002. “Language Change, Survival, Decline: Indian Languages in South Africa.” In Language in South Africa, edited by Rajend Mesthrie, 161–176. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, James Clyde. 1956. The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social Relationships among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Motzafi‐Haller, Pnini. 1994. “When Bushmen Are Known as Basarwa: Gender, Ethnicity, and Differentiation in Rural Botswana.” American Ethnologist 21: 539–563. Muzondidya, James, and Sabelo Ndlovu‐Gatsheni. 2007. “‘Echoing Silences’: Ethnicity in Post‐colonial Zimbabwe, 1980–2007.” African Journal on Conflict Resolution 7: 275–297. Ndlovu‐Gatsheni, Sabelo. 2012. “Rethinking Chimurenga and Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe: A Critique of Partisan National History.” African Studies Review 55: 1–26. O’Laughlin, Bridget. 2000. “Class and the Customary: The Ambiguous Legacy of the ‘Indigenato’ in Mozambique.” African Affairs 99: 5–42. Pelican, Michaela, and Junko Maruyama. 2015. “The Indigenous Rights Movement in Africa: Perspectives from Botswana and Cameroon.” African Study Monographs 36: 49–74. Peterson, Derek. 2012. Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival. New York: Cambridge University Press. Posner, Daniel. 2005. Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ranger, Terence. 1983. “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 211–262. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ranger, Terence. 1993. “The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of Colonial Africa.” In Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth‐century Africa, 62–111. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rudwick, Stephanie. 2008. “‘Coconuts’ and ‘Oreos’: English‐speaking Zulu People in a South African Township.” World Englishes 27: 101–116. Samatar, Abdi Ismail. 1997. “Leadership and Ethnicity in the Making of African State Models: Botswana versus Somalia.” Third World Quarterly 18: 687–708. Schildkrout, Enid. 1995. “Museums and Nationalism in Namibia.” Museum Anthropology 19: 65–77. Schmidt, Heike. 2015. “Shaming Men, Performing Power: Female Authority in Zimbabwe and Tanzania on the Eve of Colonial Rule.” In Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives, edited by Jan Bender Shetler, 265–289. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Sisk, Timothy D. 1996. Power Sharing and International Mediation in Ethnic Conflicts. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press. Solway, Jacqueline. 1994. “From Shame to Pride: Politicized Ethnicity in the Kalahari, Botswana.” Canadian Journal of African Studies 28: 254–274.



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Southall, Aidan. 1970. “The Illusion of Tribe.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 5: 28–50. Taylor, Julie. 2008. “Post‐apartheid ‘Tribalism’? Land, Ethnicity, and Discourses on San Subversion in West Caprivi, Namibia.” African Studies 67: 315–338. Vail, Leroy, ed. 1989. The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Van Binsbergen, Wim. 1994. “Minority Language, Ethnicity, and the State in Two African Situations.” In African Languages, Development, and the State, edited by Richard Fardon and Graham Furniss, 142–188. London: Routledge. Virtanen, Pekka. 2005. “Tradition, Custom, and Otherness: The Politics of Identity in Mozambique.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 12: 223–248. Webster, David. 1991. “Abafazi Bathonga Bafihlakala: Ethnicity and Gender in a KwaZulu Border Community.” African Studies 50: 243–271. Welsh, David. 1971. The Roots of Segregation: Native Policy in Colonial Natal, 1845–1910. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Werbner, Richard. 2002. “Cosmopolitan Ethnicity, Entrepreneurship and the Nation: Minority Elites in Botswana.” Journal of Southern African Studies 28: 731–753. White, Hylton. 2012. “A Post‐Fordist Ethnicity: Insecurity, Authority, and Identity in South Africa.” Anthropological Quarterly 85: 397–427. Widlok, Thomas. 1996. “Ethnicity in the Post‐apartheid Era: A Namibian ‘San’ Case Study.” In Ethnicity in Africa: Roots, Meanings, and Implications, edited by Louise de la Gorgendiere, Kenneth King, and Sarah Vaughan, 147–166. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wilmsen, Edwin. 2002. “Mutable Identities: Moving beyond Ethnicity in Botswana.” Journal of Southern African Studies 28: 825–841.

Chapter Eleven

Ethnicity and Race in African Thought Jonathon Glassman

Ethnicity, race, and nationalism are cognate phenomena, difficult if not impossible to distinguish in analytically coherent ways; their protean forms often morph into one another in processes that it is the historian’s task to trace. All three terms refer to modes of categorizing humanity into discrete communities rooted in ideas of shared descent, the element of shared descent being imagined with greater or lesser degrees of explicitness. (“Nationalism” is usually understood as a p ­ olitical movement that demands a sovereign state or some other form of discrete polity for the ethnic group.) Yet, although this understanding is now widespread among historians and historically minded social scientists, historians of Africa have faced particular obstacles in coming to embrace it. Those obstacles stemmed from Africanists’ immersion in nationalist paradigms that have presumed fundamental differences between the three phenomena. Nationalism, championed as an inherently progressive force, was contrasted with ethnic (or “tribal”) allegiances that threatened to disrupt the civic order of the newly emerging nation‐states. Race was defined in narrow terms that hewed to the dynamics of white supremacy and its pan‐Africanist response. As scholars of Africa confronted the limitations of these assumptions, their debates about ethnicity and ethnic politics, tellingly, ­paralleled debates about nationalism in other literatures. In particular, students of African ethnicity have struggled to find ways to reconcile the apparent modernity of ethnic politics with ethnicity’s enduring power to stir what seem like primordial passions. A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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For most of the twentieth century, Africanist studies of all three phenomena were dominated, directly or indirectly, by the inescapable facts of colonial white supremacy and colonial subjects’ efforts to forge a pan‐African racial consciousness with which to confront it: as W. E. B. DuBois famously predicted in 1903, the century’s central question was the line between white and black. Pan‐ Africanism was the bedrock assumption of the continent’s most prominent nationalisms; all imagined full membership in the new territorial nations in terms of race. If this was not exactly “civic” nationalism as the latter is usually understood, it was nevertheless a logical political move in the fight against colonialism. Outside South Africa, where debates over the place of racial minorities commanded a high profile within the pro‐democracy movements even before the imposition of apartheid (Lodge 1983; Gerhart 1978), the political perils of racial nationalism did not become widely apparent until East African governments’ anti‐Indian actions in the 1970s (Shack and Skinner 1979; Twaddle 1975; ­ Brennan 2012). But if it made sense in political terms, in intellectual terms the fixation on the colonial state and pan‐Africanist responses to it had the effect of closing off certain avenues of inquiry. As Crawford Young observed 30 years ago, most authors did not simply take nationalism as their topic of study; they also took it as an unarticulated paradigm, one that shaped their prevailing assumptions (Young 1986). The struggle for African nation‐states, where citizens were bound together by a common racial identity within the borders of the erstwhile colonial territories, was assumed to be a natural response to colonialism. Alternative ways that Africans imagined postcolonial political communities (for example, communities built within global structures of empire) were given scant attention (Cooper 2014; Mann 2006). And among studies that restricted themselves to pan‐ Africanist territorial nation‐statism, most focused on events and organizations rather than on the genesis of ideas. Historians seemed to assume that racial consciousness occurred naturally or arose automatically from Africans’ collision with the colonial state. Such assumptions were in accord with the self‐presentation of the nationalists themselves, who believed that their ideological labors had merely revealed the immanent truth of racial unity or (to use one of their favorite locutions) had “awakened” the dormant nation from its slumbers. In recent years historians have paid closer attention to the projects and processes by which African intellectuals forged ideas of racial solidarity. New World pan‐Africanists were major influences. But, not surprisingly, African intellectuals also owed much to what they learned from colonial educators, for whom racial identification (often called “race pride”) was a form of modernity to be encouraged among colonial subjects (Zachernuk 2000; Wilder 2005; Brennan 2006; important earlier studies include Langley 1973; Appiah 1992). Similar assumptions shaped inquiries into forms of collective thought other than what conventionally pass for “race” or “nation”: forms that, during the first half of the twentieth century, were usually called “tribe.” If African racial solidarity,



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mobilized to agitate for the creation of nation‐states that hewed to the contours of the colonial territories, was assumed to be the rational mode of modern political development, then modes of imagining collectivities on a lesser scale must be aberrations, inimical to progress. These assumptions were not peculiar to Africa: almost by definition, it was common to study ethnicity against a background in which the solidarities of the nation‐state were regarded, implicitly or explicitly, as the rational norm (Chapman, McDonald, and Tonkin 1989). But such obstacles to historical analysis seemed especially formidable to the academic historians who first turned their attention to Africa in mid‐century. They were famously highlighted by John Fage, in a text that was to become something of the academic guild’s founding charter. In his 1965 inaugural lecture as one of Britain’s first professors of African history, Fage focused on remarks broadcast on the BBC in which Hugh Trevor‐Roper, Regius Professor at Oxford, gratuitously repeated Hegel’s notion that Africa had no history (Fage 1965).1 To be sure, Trevor‐Roper had conceded, Africa had a past. But the “unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes” are hardly the stuff of historical change (Trevor‐Roper 1965, quoted in  Fage 1965: 2). In the future, once they had adopted nation‐state forms learned from the West, Africans might have a proper history, but up to now, all has been darkness. In this Hegelian vision, Africans’ addiction to the primordial solidarities of tribe stood for all that had prevented them from creating stable civil orders. Refuting this canard became a central mission of Africanist historians, who favored such topics as the states and empires of the precolonial past. Pace Trevor‐Roper and his ilk, they noted, Africans had long been embarked on the journey to ­transcend the inherited solidarities of tribe or ethnicity, having even built incipient nation‐states in places like the Asante Kingdom. Indeed, had it not been for the irruption of colonial conquest, Africans might have completed the journey long since.2 Although such “kings and princes” scholarship left intact the conventional ­distinction between tribe and nation, on other matters Trevor‐Roper’s notions were already outdated. Those notions had been commonplace among colonial thinkers, as well as among the missionaries and explorers who had preceded them. Basing their understanding on what they thought they knew of Europe’s own ancient history of tribal migrations, they believed that Africans had lived in d ­ iscrete tribal units whose political and cultural attributes were fixed in the solidarities of common descent. According to this view, the continent’s past – Trevor‐Roper’s tribal “gyrations”  –  consisted of the movement of those units across the landscape, sometimes colliding and sending each other careening as balls on a pool table (to use a now ubiquitous metaphor): although a tribe might on occasion be destroyed in the process, the fundamental units remained as discrete and self‐­ contained as billiard balls, each with a distinct color. But by the 1960s, scholars recognized that the forms of collectivity that most mattered in Africans’ lives were either far smaller than the tribal units recognized by colonial administrators (e.g., family, clan, village, age set), or cut across ethnic boundaries altogether (religious

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brotherhood, healing cult, church, urban credit association). Many of the “tribes” observable at mid‐century had been the product of recent projects of ethnic amalgamation or fragmentation, undertaken by various actors, African and ­ European. Most fundamentally, scholars understood that allegiances to those tribes were rarely the determining identities colonial rulers imagined. Africans’ collective identities were multiple, shifting, and overlapping; allegiances felt to tribe, if they existed at all, were only one among many and were rarely the most significant (Southall 1970).

Instrumentalism and constructivism In the 30 years following Fage’s lecture, most historical treatments of ethnicity grew from these insights. Three overlapping literatures can be delineated, representing not so much different interpretations as different emphases of subject matter. Important work by urban anthropologists in the 1950s and 1960s, mostly in southern Africa, demonstrated that a sense of ethnic solidarity often became accentuated in the colonial towns, where people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds met and interacted. This research contributed to a growing understanding of the situational nature of ethnic identity: far from being immanent in discrete cultures or the vestiges of antiquated practices that had persisted in isolated rural areas, ethnic identities generally arose through the creation and maintenance of social and political boundaries. Hence they were likely to express interactions that arose in new social settings, such as those created by colonial capitalism. Ethnic solidarities were often undergirded by networks of kinship and clientele that Africans had constructed to help cope with the disruptions of life occasioned by labor migration and the quest for other economic opportunities (Mitchell 1956; Epstein 1958; Cohen 1969). Other studies examined the situation at the rural end of such networks, where contests over land, labor, and other material resources often depended on one’s ties to the tribal structures of authority maintained by colonial indirect rule (Watson 1958, including the useful ­overview in Max Gluckman’s foreword). Subsequent scholars amplified these insights (e.g., Willis 1992; Amselle and M’Bokolo 1985; see also Berry 1993 for a masterful synthesis). Several carried the analysis forward in time, explaining how struggles for access to limited economic resources controlled by the postcolonial state – and for protection in times of acute insecurity – unfolded within patrimonial networks commanded by “big men” who mobilized regional loyalties while playing what Cameroonians called “the politics of the belly” (Bayart 2009; Ekeh 19903). Connected to this literature on networks, but different in focus, were studies of the colonial concept of “customary law” and its impact on ethnic thought. Before conquest, legal procedures had typically been fluid, ambiguous, and subject to endless disputation. That changed under colonial indirect rule, in which state‐appointed chiefs allocated resources and adjudicated disputes according to



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their interpretations of “tribal custom.” The efficiency of this system required that “customary law” be codified for its application in the chiefs’ “native courts.” In the 1980s several authors argued that the resulting legal codes enshrined ­structures of neo‐tribal authority and rendered them impervious to challenges from subalterns, notably women and junior men (e.g., Chanock 1985). But this interpretation soon received an important revision. Sara Berry noted that codification did not lead to the decline of disputes over legal custom but, if anything, made such disputes more contentious. The result was not necessarily a hardening of tribal authority but something more profound: for many ordinary Africans, the interpretation of tribal legal traditions was transformed from a relatively recondite matter of historical dispute to something that could determine the facts of everyday material existence (Berry 1993: ch. 2). Under indirect rule, vital questions of marriage, inheritance, land, political office, taxes, and much else could hinge on a determination of which tribal collectivity one belonged to, how that tribe’s ­customs were to be interpreted, who had authority under those customs, and what form that authority took. The more such customs were disputed, the more salience they assumed in people’s lives. A certain degree of instrumentalism characterized these literatures: both focused on how social actors used affinities of culture and region to craft strategies in the realms of economics, law, or politics. Instrumentalism also characterized a third literature, which made direct arguments about the colonial politics of tribe making. Like the studies of networks and customary law, these highlighted the role of British indirect rule. But, rather than ask simply how social and economic issues affected the relative strength of ethnic claims, these authors advanced arguments about the creation of ethnic categories in the first place. Deriving their language from Terence Ranger, many wrote of the “invention of tribes.”4 Key actors were African political entrepreneurs who sought to make the structures of indirect rule work for them and their constituents: it was they, for example, who engaged in the processes of amalgamation and fragmentation by which new “tribal units” were constantly made and unmade during the colonial era. Some of the studies produced in this vein suggested that colonial officials consciously crafted tribes as a strategy of divide and rule. But the best of them acknowledged the active involvement of African actors. As John Iliffe wrote in an exemplary study of the process in interwar Tanganyika, colonial rulers wrongly believed that Africans belonged to tribes, and Africans, in turn, “created tribes to function within the colonial framework” (1979: 318). This emphasis on the strategic instrumentalizing of ethnic sentiments demolished once and for all the notion that African tribes were fixed and timeless, part of the natural realm. Yet, by the early 1990s, some historians were shying away from the language of instrumentalism and “invention.” In his introduction to a widely read collection, Leroy Vail (1989) noted that instrumentalist scholarship often paid insufficient attention to the intellectual creativity of ethnic entrepreneurs. Vail’s critique showed the influence of the “constructivist” turn in the

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study of nationalism, especially Benedict Anderson’s (1983) focus on the intellectual projects of “imagination” that went into the creation of nations. Those projects were typically literary, including the suppression or amalgamation of dialects to create and promulgate standard national or (in Africa) tribal languages. Another common literary project was the composition of historical narratives, crafted to demonstrate the deeply rooted character of the tribe or nation. Under colonialism such narratives justified the authority of tribal chiefs and enhanced opportunities for middle‐class figures allied to them. But the integrity of the tribe also appealed to a much larger number of ordinary men who, in southern Africa, engaged in ongoing labor migration for much of their working lives. Reinforced structures of tribal authority promised such men effective mechanisms for control over the wives and daughters they left behind in the countryside and (what was very much connected) control over their family farms. Tribalism often had its strongest appeal among men (Vail 1989). “Constructivism” soon emerged as the consensus view in studies of African ethnicity, and in many ways it remains so. Its most enduring influence lay in its close attention to African intellectuals. In this regard, the constructivists built on precedents exemplified by Iliffe, who had focused on subaltern intellectuals, largely self‐taught, who put their imaginative efforts to the work of conjuring ethnic constituencies, often composing historical narratives to do so. (For a valuable recent collection see Peterson and Macola 2009.) But, in other ways, Vail and many of the self‐styled constructivists reproduced some of the instrumentalist assumptions of the older literature, and it would be misleading to describe their interpretations as a departure. Most critically, they assigned an overly determining role to the colonial state and its agents. In their analyses, indirect rule was the necessary condition for ethnogenesis, and key intellectuals were the European missionaries, anthropologists, and district commissioners most directly involved in its construction. African intellectuals participated only as auxiliaries: mission‐ educated “intermediaries” or “cultural brokers” (as Vail described them) who translated the Western idea of tribe into locally understandable terms. Such constructivism, in short, was but another kind of instrumentalism; it depicted ethnic thought as having been designed to fit the material exigencies of colonial rule. Vail in fact rejected any interpretation that did not root ethnic thought primarily in the pursuit of material or political gain. Other scholarship, for example, described how the promise of a community based on the transcendent truths of common descent and unchallenged gender authority offered psychological comfort to southern Africans whose lives had been profoundly disrupted by permanent labor migration. (I will return to this literature below.) Yet Vail dismissed such “neo‐primordial” scholarship as tainted by the calumny of African “irrationality.” Ethnogenesis, he insisted, was part of the “modernizing process” (Vail 1989; his views are shared by many of his contributors). Despite their attention to intellectual history, then, many of the constructivists considered an unnecessarily narrow range of African ethnic thinkers. (The 1950s



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anthropologists had a broader view, highlighting for instance the imaginative work of illiterate or semi‐literate songwriters and dance leaders (Mitchell 1956).) They also took a limited view of those thinkers’ powers of imagination. Vail’s insistence that African tribalism was founded on material “rationality” was not merely a reaction to the calumnies of Hegel and Trevor‐Roper. It also reflected the persistence of the instrumentalist habit of probing ethnic phenomena for signs that they were masks for something more real, something rooted in the more “objective” facts of political economy. Such a habit was precisely what constructivism should have helped scholars overcome. Its persistence is indicative of a pervasive problem in the literatures on ethnicity and race, shared alike by old‐ school primordialists and their instrumentalist critics: a tendency by which “ethnically, racially and nationally named populations” are “construed as entities and cast as actors” (Brubaker 2009: 28). The sociologist Rogers Brubaker calls such a priori assumptions “groupism.” He also uses the label “substantialism”: the habit of bestowing upon named categories the substance of actually constituted collectivities that engaged as such in social action. Brubaker instead advocates approaching ethnic categories not as reflections of objectively constituted “groups” (be those groups tribes, as in old‐school primordialism, or economic or political interests, as in much of the instrumentalist literature), but as ways of making sense of the world. Such an approach does not involve descending to a postmodernist denial of connections between language and social fact. Rather, it focuses attention precisely on those connections: it prompts inquiry about the historical processes by which ethnic forms of apprehending the world sometimes succeed in constituting groups, in taking on substance (Brubaker 2009). In studies of African history, most instrumentalist assumptions – assumptions concerning the social groups that tribes “really” represented and the social tensions that were “masked” by tribalism – were derived, logically enough, from the literature on African social history that had gained in depth and richness throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Among the strengths of that literature was its attention to the varied forms of colonial power and African resistance. But, as Frederick Cooper and others have observed, that same strength constituted one of its central weaknesses, for it tended to overprivilege the cliché of colonial encounter, that is, its starting point was the assumption that a Manichean collision between colonizers and Africans determined how the latter perceived their universe and imagined their political communities in the twentieth century. By the 1990s the cliché was being decentered by a growing number of studies that revealed the extent to which the colonial experience was shaped by forces and conflicts internal to African societies, including many that had continued, under changed circumstances, from before conquest. Even the new colonial social structures themselves had been forged, in many cases, by Africans as much as by Europeans, in particular by African middle figures who took active roles in the negotiations and improvisations from which colonial social formations emerged. (Indirect rule itself, so often treated as the cockpit in which colonial power fashioned tribes and tribal

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tradition, was more properly understood as an institution in which African ancestors generated power for the state (Fields 1985).) Such scholarship demonstrated that colonialism was in many ways a joint creation, and that to speak of two discrete and opposing realms, “colonial” and “African,” can be misleading (Cooper and Stoler 1997; for “cliché” see Hunt 1999). Yet, outside this subtle literature on social history, the cliché of colonial encounter remained entrenched, sustained by the nationalist paradigm noted above. In the study of ethnicity, in particular, it discouraged many authors from recognizing that African ethnic thought was more than simply a reflection of colonial social structures. In short, many of the constructivists were not constructivist enough; they underestimated African thinkers’ ability to imagine ethnic communities in terms that did not simply express a conception of their place within colonial economic and political structures or the play of colonial domination and African response. By avoiding consideration of the “nonrational” aspects of ethnic ideologies (by which they meant rationalities not tied to the search for demonstrable material gain), the constructivists unnecessarily limited the power of their analysis. This stood in contrast with a social science literature, rejected by Vail, that focused precisely on those elements of ethnic and nationalist ideologies that encouraged people to regard ethnic bonds as “primordial attachments” that stemmed from “the assumed ‘givens’ … of social existence,” chiefly those one was born to. Such attachments commanded loyalties that lay beyond ordinary rationales of personal material gain, or “beyond reason” (Geertz 1973; Connor 1993). Scholars who focused on them were often anthropologists or social psychologists who asked how the rhetoric of primordialism worked to enhance the power of ethnic appeals, including how it resonated with everyday practices and rituals. Despite the caricature of their views sometimes advanced by critics, few of these “neo‐primordialists” denied the historicity of such discourses. (After all, the core of the constructivist critique, that “ethnicities have a history” and are the “products of human thought and action,” should be axiomatic (Chrétien and Prunier 1989; Yeros 1999: 1).) In fact, primordialist concerns have suggested useful lines of historical inquiry: How were such modes of thought created over time, and by whom? What locally inherited concepts and images did they draw on, and how did such images enhance the ideologies’ appeal to ordinary people? In other words, the neo‐primordialists raised questions that are ideally suited for constructivist historical analysis. The two positions “need not be mutually exclusive,” and the choice between them can be paralyzing (Brubaker 2004: 85; for a magisterial survey of the neo‐primordialist literature see Horowitz 1985).

Beyond modernism If the constructivists underestimated the range of African ethnic thought, at the same time they overestimated ethnic entrepreneurs’ ability to conjure at will new forms of collective tradition. Like all peoples, Africans’ abilities to imagine communities



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of collective descent were limited by intellectual content that had been passed on to them from previous generations, including inherited historical narratives. In one sense these limitations were imposed by instrumental considerations: for ethnic appeals to evince a popular response, they had to resonate with patterns of thought that were already present. But, more fundamentally, figures such as the early twentieth‐century Zulu politicians who crafted new historical narratives lionizing the figure of Shaka had themselves been formed by conflicted intellectual histories that long predated colonial conquest (Hamilton 1998). In a sweeping essay from 2003, Thomas Spear described a growing literature on ethnic traditions that acknowledged such limitations and at the same time explored the breadth of sources, including inherited sources, on which Africa’s neo‐traditionalist thinkers and activists drew (Spear 2003). To draw attention to such deep histories is not to revert to the idea that “tribalism” was an earlier stage of social organization out of which Africans had yet to fully evolve. It does not upset the instrumentalists’ observation that twentieth‐ century tribal politics were products of twentieth‐century contexts, including the colonial state and the territorial nation‐state. But, at the same time, it leaves open the possibility that precolonial Africans had also imagined communities in terms of shared descent, even if those terms differed from the tribes of the modern era. A century or more before educated Christians imagined an enlarged “Zulu” category, for example, the conquest state ruled by Shaka and his successors created and enforced ethnic distinctions between conquered chiefdoms, based on genealogical metaphors of proximity to and distance from the royal house. (Far from incorporating all subjects as amaZulu, as the Zulu nationalists later claimed, these distinctions excluded all but the royal family from that status (Wright and Hamilton 1996).) Among Ewe speakers of southeastern Ghana, ideas of insider and outsider were linked to membership in constellations of patriclans that were constantly shifting and that never corresponded to the broader notion of Eweness created in the twentieth century (Greene 1996). Moreover, even studies of specifically twentieth‐century ethnicity have demonstrated how, by taking account of precolonial intellectual inheritances – be those ideas about common descent or other modes of imagining community – much can be gained by writing modern histories that are not excessively modernist. Relevant inherited discourses included culturally specific modes of debating community authority and belonging, even when such debates did not focus on creating and policing in‐group and out‐group boundaries. In a major intervention, John Lonsdale (1992) described how discourses that were later deployed in expressions of Gikuyu ethnic politics had been rooted historically in forms of argument over civic virtue: the prerogatives and responsibilities of male householders; the rights and duties of wives, daughters, and sons; the mutual obligations of patrons and clients. In the first half of the twentieth century, as they suffered from the effects of settler colonialism – especially dispossession of land and livestock and the effects of migrant labor and acute stratification – Gikuyu speakers used

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these discursive terms in bitter arguments over how to be a virtuous citizen in colonial society and in the postcolonial Kenyan nation many hoped to create. By the 1950s, pressed by the colonial state, those arguments led to violence. British authorities called the violence “Mau Mau” and told the world that it stemmed from primordial impulses of Gikuyu tribal atavism. In reaction to such racist pronouncements, most subsequent scholars stressed instrumentalist factors (e.g., Maloba 1993) or simple nationalist dichotomies (Rosberg and Nottingham 1966).5 Lonsdale, in contrast, described how twentieth‐century actors on all sides of Gikuyuland’s internal political divides created discourses that, by adopting inherited modes of moral disputation, lent political debates dimensions that seemed rooted in existential questions that were worth killing and dying for. Such disputes yielded a shared sense of Gikuyuness (aided to a great extent by the active labors of intellectuals such as Jomo Kenyatta). But this was not a sense of Gikuyuness that focused on posing distinctions with other ethnic groups or on creating ethnic rivalry. It was, rather, what Lonsdale called “moral ethnicity,” a sense of participating in a shared “moral arena for political debates” and of subscribing to a shared language of civic virtue. Lonsdale carefully distinguished moral ethnicity from “political tribalism,” projects that imagined closed and unified tribal communities competing with others for advantage, typically in contests for political power and material resources in the framework of emerging or established nation‐states. (In non‐ African settings this is generally called ethnic nationalism.) The politicians who engaged in such projects worked to mobilize tribal constituencies in part by invoking the same inherited concepts of moral discipline (especially gender discipline) as figure in the debates described by Lonsdale. But the ends were quite different. Nor did moral ethnicity automatically give rise to political tribalism. Gikuyu ethnic thinkers were capable of great flexibility; this becomes clear when considering how intellectuals from the university‐educated to the barely literate worked to turn ideas derived from Gikuyu moral discourse to projects that aimed at building a multiethnic postcolonial nation‐state. Similar stories can be told from other parts of the continent, such as how Nnamdi Azikiwe was simultaneously a father of Igbo ethnic identity and of Nigerian civic nationalism (van den Bersselaar 1998). Studies of postcolonial politics have suggested how moral codes derived from local village life are deployed to judge the excesses of national leaders; in contexts where the norms of nation‐state politics have not achieved hegemony, it is the village (to paraphrase one of Chinua Achebe’s classic novels) that says “no” (Achebe 1966; see also Ekeh 1975). The history of Zulu ethnic politics covers the entire spectrum. Zulu patriots early in the twentieth century, such as John Dube and Albert Luthuli, saw no contradiction between advocating the African National Congress’s message of a nationwide civic democracy and championing moral codes that they derived from reconstructed narratives of Zulu state building, including codes of honor, reputation, and gender discipline. But by the final quarter of the century politicians invoked those same



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moral codes to fight for Zulu separatism, thus fracturing two generations of political tradition (Marks 1989; Cope 1993; La Hausse de Lalouvière 2000; Waetjen 2004). Much of the subtlety of Lonsdale’s study arose from his close attention to a rich literature on precolonial modes of governance. That literature informed his understanding that Gikuyu ideas about political authority constituted open discursive fields rather than closed codes of behavior restricted to delimited in‐ groups; hence he was able to take cognizance of locally specific forms of cultural expression without assuming the presence of ethnic “groups” as units of social action. As in many parts of the continent, Gikuyu discourses of civic virtue emerged on an expanding frontier of plentiful land and a relatively thin distribution of people, where pioneers composed communities through processes that were open and incorporative. Such processes were so widespread that Igor Kopytoff, in a seminal essay, described them as elements of a continent‐wide “cultural ecumene” with deep historical roots (Kopytoff 1987). The details varied, but in general they involved the crystallization of new communities around founding homesteaders who were later remembered as chiefs. These big men and their immediate retainers, claiming prestige as firstcomers on what was remembered as previously uninhabited or untamed land, drew others into their circle through the creative deployment of fluid, absorptive ideologies of kinship. (That the land in fact was often already inhabited carried implications to which we shall return.) It was those kinship ideologies, which expressed community solidarities and hierarchies through the idiom of genealogy, that were later retranscribed as tribe. But most precolonial cases looked quite different. One striking difference was the flexibility and portability of these concepts: as the community’s founding or core families expanded or moved, gathering new followers and shedding old ones, or as the core families were replaced by others, firstcomer status and fictive genealogical seniority changed hands accordingly. Thus, although these communities retained an “ethnic” name (often simply taken from that of the founding chief or his family), their shifting, open nature was the very opposite of the deeply rooted, closed character that ethnic entrepreneurs, African and European, later attributed to “tribes.” It would be more accurate to describe them, simply, as chiefdoms, with all the ambiguity and informality that label implies. (Examples of such cases can be found in Ambler 1988; Landau 2010.) But in many instances, the genealogical metaphors that were used to imagine the ties between chiefs and their followers would have significant afterlives. Such scholarship on precolonial history contributed to a growing trend in critical anthropological theory that has addressed the misleading nature of the ethnographic unit of analysis. For anthropologists, the problem was tied up with once prevalent functionalist assumptions by which each ethnic “culture” was approached as a self‐contained unit whose operations could be understood without regard to broader contexts such as the colonial state or the global economy, let alone the influence of ideas and individuals from neighboring “cultures.” Those assumptions

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were already being challenged in the 1970s by historians who applied ideas derived from Latin American dependency theory to investigate how African ­societies had been integrated into global political economies since the time of the Atlantic slave trade. Other scholarship, which focused explicitly on political ­cultures, revealed that precolonial landscapes were characterized not by discontinuous series of discrete cultural groups but by interlocking “chains” or “braids” of societies, or by broad and overlapping ecumenes (Amselle 1985). The ideas of governance that characterized the elements of these braids were embedded within broad discursive fields, such as those described above. David Schoenbrun (2006), exploring the challenges of writing African histories of the longue durée, describes such discursive fields as “enduring bundles of meaning.” They might also be described simply as “traditions,” so long as we remember that traditions are never handed down unchanged from generation to generation and are never closed to influence from outside the chain of transmission (see Vansina 1990). But, if these “bundles of meaning” were not handed down in fixed form within closed ethnic groups, how were they reproduced from generation to generation? Steven Feierman (1990) addressed that question in a history of political discourse in northeast Tanzania, a region that boasts an unusually rich literature documenting the cultural and political fluidity of the precolonial century and the distortions introduced by reading that history in terms of discrete “tribes” or “ethnic groups.” The focus of Feierman’s study – language by which power was evaluated in terms of “healing the land” and “harming the land” – is the kind of locally specific moral discourse that Lonsdale might characterize as “moral ethnicity.” Feierman asked how that language was able to persist throughout a 150‐year period, despite multiple profound transformations in the region’s political economy. The answer lay in the agency of intellectuals, a category he conceptualized in ways that were at once more precise than in the constructivist literature and more capacious. Feierman noted that, even in societies lacking literacy, certain people were recognized for their specialized skills in intellectual guidance and leadership. In Shambaai, as in many parts of the continent, such figures included specialists who were respected as public healers. Drawing on Anthony Giddens’s concept of the “competent speaker” who follows linguistic (or cultural) rules yet creates new forms at the same time, Feierman showed how healers innovated new expressions of Shambaa discourse to meet new circumstances (Feierman 1990; language on “competent speakers” on p. 13). (In this regard, Feierman’s study of healers paralleled a rich literature on so‐called prophets in east and southern Africa.) By focusing on figures who specialized in intellectual traditions other than those introduced by Western literacy, Feierman showed how continuity in local political discourses withstood the circulation of novel discourses that would seem, at first glance, to challenge the old ones. It was through healers that ideas derived from Islam, Christianity, and Western ideologies of abolitionism and democracy became entangled in local arguments about “healing the land.” Similar entanglements appear in



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studies that, unlike Feierman’s, focus explicitly on ethnic politics, in which entrepreneurs of tribal politics can be seen incorporating ideas that were global in provenance. The moral precepts of Sufi religious scholars, Old Testament stories of national redemption, missionary teachings about sin and gender comportment, pan‐Africanist ideas of uplift, and Western‐derived ideas about modernity and socialism all became entangled in local arguments over ethnically defined civic virtue (Peel 2000; Peterson 2004; see also many of the works hitherto cited). The cultural materials that political entrepreneurs crafted into ethnic appeals were not handed down by intellectuals alone. Locally compelling discourses of civic virtue, public healing, and political authority were also reproduced in the arenas of everyday practice, or what sociologists call habitus: “practices and representations that are regular without reference to overt rules” which reproduce “unexamined assumptions about what is reasonable and unreasonable” (Bentley 1987: 28). Such practices could be quite mundane, for example categories of preferred or taboo foods or forms of dress and ornamentation, yet nevertheless be invoked as markers of unbridgeable alterity. Others, however, were weighted with moral implications. Economic practices could produce the most pronounced awareness of contrasts with communities that did not share one’s own values: in the absence of political tribalism, the sense of difference and otherness was sometimes greatest when communities that specialized in pastoralism, foraging, or ­settled agriculture contemplated communities that did not. Most significant for our purposes are practices related to kinship and reproduction, for they lay at the heart of a consciousness of what it meant to belong to a community of shared descent. These included not only marriage practices but also routines of daily life that encoded ideals of gender comportment, such as the language of hlonipha, by which Zulu‐speaking women were expected to show deference to husbands and in‐laws, and the rites of initiation, including circumcision, by which children were made fully responsible (and fully gendered) members of the community. Such rites were often echoed in the public ceremonies by which political authorities were confirmed, thus enhancing those authorities’ power. Many of the most significant elements of habitus were reproduced within the household, in settings where women’s roles were equal if not greater than men’s. (There is good reason that the most fundamental element of habitus is known in many languages as the “mother tongue.”) So, although, as noted above, modern political tribalism was largely a matter of concern to men, women were nevertheless important in creating the cultural raw material from which it was crafted. This is perhaps most apparent in the vital realm of kinship. To the extent that membership in an ethnic community stemmed from valid birth or marriage into it, women exerted active agency, notwithstanding men’s frequent efforts to curtail it. The marriage strategies of widows, divorcées, and other single women could play significant roles in shaping the boundaries between insiders and outsiders (Glassman 1995: ch. 4; Greene 1996; Chauveau 1987:

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141–145; Salamone 1974: 106–113). But, as ethnic belonging became a matter of tribal politics, women’s roles shifted. Asante provides an example. In the nineteenth century, the emerging sense of Asante ethnic belonging, though linked to the state, was rooted, at the level of the everyday, in membership in particular matrilineages. In this and other matters, writes Jean Allman (2000), key roles were played by sisters and mothers, and in particular by powerful figures usually described in English as “queen mothers.” During the twentieth century, however, Akan men, collaborating with British authorities, remade ideologies of Asante national belonging in ways that sidelined the roles of queen mothers and other women. Yet mothers and sisters remained significant players in the reproduction of Akan matrilineages. And it is at that level, Allman suggests, that the appeals of modern Asante ethnic politics resonate with “values and symbols and rhythms” inherited from the precolonial past, thus evoking a sense of deep historical continuity (Allman 2000: 110). The meaningful practices of habitus lie at the heart of matters that instrumentalists once dismissed as the concern only of an ahistorical “primordialism.” Because they are typically reproduced in intimate personal interactions, especially in child‐rearing, to most people they seem timeless, inherited from time immemorial. That does not mean, however, that they are immune to historical analysis. Even practices that have in fact persisted over an extended longue durée (for example, the genealogical idioms that occupy so central a place in many African cultural practices) can be investigated historically despite the lack of written records, through methods such as historical linguistics. Others, including economic specializations whose practitioners believe them to be rooted in creation, can be historically dated, often to surprisingly recent times (Spear and Waller 1993).6 And even when we cannot pinpoint the historical origins of a particular practice, its shifting role in ethnic thought – including the ways it is used by ethnic entrepreneurs – can be traced in time. Social scientists have long observed that if we wish to make sense of the peculiar power of ethnic appeals, we must pay attention to “primordial” issues. Historical actors surely did so. When politicians in southern Africa spoke of the promises of renewed, ethnically pure communities, they did not speak primarily about material threats to land and labor but about existential threats to migrant laborers’ status as fathers, husbands, men. One must come to grips with such rhetoric, and the anxieties it elicits, if one is to understand, especially, the violence often associated with ethnic politics. Yet, at the same time, one should guard against assuming that violence is caused by such anxieties alone; that would be to replace an instrumentalist determinism with a discursive one. Ethnic tensions animated by “primordial” anxieties are ubiquitous in the world; large‐scale ethnic violence, however, is relatively rare. Pogroms take place at moments of intense social encounter where violent meanings of belonging and exclusion are remade on the spot. But the prolonged cycles of killing that have wracked places like Rwanda, Burundi, or Darfur could be sustained only by concerted political work to construct



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climates of fear (Fearon and Laitin 2000; Glassman 2011; Straus 2006). Political entrepreneurs have also focused on reproducing memories of such v­ iolence and, in places like 1960s eastern Nigeria, made them central to a consciousness of ­collective victimhood.7

Racial entanglements The literature described above demonstrates how twentieth‐century intellectuals fostered new forms of ethnic thought by bringing inherited discourses of difference into entanglement with newly imported ones. The results of those entanglements were almost as varied as their multiple sources. Yet, when they became politicized, the most common result was some form of ethnic nationalism or political tribalism: a politics in which ethnic communities were imagined as vertical social divisions, each a “tribe” or “nation,” ideally distinct from the others, an “incipient whole society.” When deployed in state politics, colonial or postcolonial, such thinking resulted in demands for regional favors or reparations, or, in extreme cases, movements of secession or irredentism (Horowitz 1985). But some of the century’s most disruptive instances of ethnic politics took a ­different form, in which communities were imagined not as tribes but as what some have described as races. I refer here not to the products of colonial white supremacy and the pan‐Africanist response, ideologies whose impact on African thought has been more complex than was once recognized (Pierre 2013; Lee 2014; Ray 2015). Rather, I refer to distinctions drawn within African populations themselves. The best‐known examples were in Rwanda and Zanzibar, where tensions resulted in violent uprisings in the late 1950s and early 1960s against the dominant Tutsi and Arab elites, respectively. In both cases, ethnic difference was imagined explicitly as a matter of blood descent and bodily markers. Equally ­significant, ethnic categories in these cases were imagined not as vertical divisions or separate whole societies – that is, not as “tribes” – but as horizontal strata, linked to one another in a contested hierarchy that shaped society overall. This resemblance to the racial hierarchies most familiar in the West helps explain why many observers have described these cases, and others like them, as instances of “race.” Historians reject the notion that divisions between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda or between “Africans” and “Arabs” in Zanzibar were fixed and primordial. Instead, they emphasize historical processes of racialization, the play of intellectual and political projects that invested ethnic distinctions with racial meanings – meanings, that is, that emphasized explicit ideas of hierarchy and bodily descent. Many accounts characterize the political entrepreneurs who engineered these tensions primarily as the students or partners of colonial rulers, or focus on the colonials themselves. So, for example, the Tutsi elite learned from Belgian missionaries that they were descended from exogenous and racially superior stock (“Hamites”), and Zanzibar Arabs learned from the practices of British rule that, as “non‐natives,” they deserved material and political privileges not fit for uncivilized

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peoples whose origins lay on the continental mainland (for both cases see Mamdani 2001). Such narratives are not so much incorrect as incomplete; like some of the instrumentalist literature on tribalism, they underestimate the contributions of African thinkers and inherited discursive content. As in the other instances ­discussed earlier, the racialization of African ethnic thought did not arise from the simple importation of Western ideas but was a product of intellectual entanglement. To be sure, the ideas of race science were an unmistakably Western import. But even among colonial rulers race science had only marginal influence; colonial racisms were informed by a wide variety of ideologies other than the biological. Much more significant were concepts of barbarism and civilization, specifically, historicist concepts, dating from the Enlightenment, that charted the stages by which discrete peoples progressed from one to the other. (Trevor‐Roper’s remarks were rooted in precisely such notions of history as “purposive movement.”) Those ideas had undoubted impact on African thinkers, who learned them in colonial schools and via governing practices. But parallel ideas existed in many indigenous discourses. In polities like Rwanda and Zanzibar, where the Europeans found what they considered a “native ruling race” already in charge, colonialists did not simply invent the practices of racial difference on which they came to rely; rather, as Jan Vansina writes of Rwanda, they “adopted a practice they found on the spot and the terminology they used to express it derived from the speech of the local elites” (2004: 138). Rwanda’s racial distinctions had emerged, slowly and unevenly, during the expansion of the kingdom after 1700. By the 1880s, society had become polarized between elite herding lineages with close ties to the ruling dynasty, who adopted the honorific “Tutsi,” and the farming families from which they drafted menial labor and whom they disdained as “Hutu”: boors, uncivilized bumpkins. Colonial rule hardened those divisions, strengthening the powers of Tutsis as a class over non‐Tutsi subordinates. Missionary schools encouraged Tutsi to interpret dynastic histories in terms of the then fashionable “Hamitic hypothesis,” which attributed the arts of state building and military conquest in sub‐Saharan Africa to a civilizing race of intruders from the north. But the resulting narratives were written mostly by Tutsi (not Belgian) literati, adepts in the traditions of both oral literature and Western historiography who drew on accounts that had originated in the nineteenth‐century Rwandan royal courts. These histories of Tutsi racial conquest were later taken up by subaltern Hutu intellectuals, who recast them as tales of racial oppression (Vansina 2004; C. Newbury 1988; D. Newbury 2009). Similar processes of intellectual entanglement have been charted in colonial Zanzibar and the Anglo‐Egyptian Sudan (Glassman 2011; Idris 2001; Powell 2003; Sharkey 2003). In these and other settings, Western teachings were but one strand among many that African thinkers wove into historical narratives of racial difference. While the scientific language learned in colonial classrooms was novel, other racial concepts had local equivalents, including the language of ­difference via descent and the inherited nature of civilization and barbarism.



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The most extensively studied African examples of civilizational discourses derived many of their core ideas from the Islamic Middle East and North Africa. Rich literary sources from Sudanic West Africa document racial ideas that equated barbarism and unbelief with ancestral origins in the Bilad al‐Sudan, the land of the blacks – ideas that, conversely, prompted Sudanic state builders to imagine Arab ancestries for themselves. Under colonial rule, those discourses meshed with European racial ideas, including historicist concepts that attributed governing skills to the more “civilized” among colonial subjects (Hall 2011). The expediency that prompted colonial regimes’ reliance on governance through “native states,” such as the Hausa emirates of northern Nigeria, was thus supplemented by civilizational discourses that local historical narratives seemed to confirm. The emirates were ruled by the descendants of Fulbe jihadists who justified their social and political superiority by a belief that they had deeper genealogical roots in Islam than their Hausa subjects; indeed, they believed that their paternal ancestors were Arabs, companions of the Prophet. These civilizational discourses, tightly imbricated with discourses of descent, appealed to the parallel notions of Nigeria’s new British overlords (Ochonu 2014; see also sources discussed in Glassman 2015). In regions with a long experience of Islam, the prestige of Arab ancestry often meshed with the core concept of jahiliya, the period of “ignorance” or “barbarism” that preceded the revelation of the Qur’an and whose qualities stain all who have not yet been brought into the faith, to foster a particular kind of civilizational discourse that was disdainful of practices and people deemed to be of autochthonous origin (Hiskett 1994: vii–xx). But those concepts were not imported into an intellectual vacuum any more than the historicist ideas later imported from the West. On the Swahili coast, in the Hausa emirates, and in southern Sudan, they became entangled with ancient motifs that attributed civilizing processes to exogenous intruders. The discourses of civilization, barbarism, and racial difference introduced from the Islamic Near East lay like palimpsests on a substrate of earlier ideas. The legacy of slavery was central to discourses of difference in the Islamic societies discussed above. Unbelief had been the classic justification of enslavement in Islam, and Muslim state builders in the Sudan had long enslaved captives both for export across the Sahara and for local use. But wars of conquest provided temptations to apply post facto determinations of who might properly be regarded as Muslim. Hence conquerors deemed entire geographic regions as Dar al‐Harb, the land of warfare and unbelief, and their entire populations as zunuj, enslavable barbarians. These ideas were not uniformly accepted; generations of Muslim scholars debated them. Yet even the sternest critics accepted that conversion did not erase slave status; on the contrary, no matter how pious, the slave’s servile status stemmed from “original nonbelief,” that is, the paganism of her ancestors. The practice of slavery, in other words, reproduced and reinforced discourses that enshrined barbarism as an element of descent (Hall 2011; Glassman 2015). And, although Islam

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provided an unusually powerful cultural and legal discourse for limning the ­distinctions between civilization and barbarism, such outcomes were not restricted to Islamic slave societies. Any society with widespread and long‐lasting institutions of slavery might produce discourses of inherited difference that continued to “nourish a kind of everyday racism” vis‐à‐vis slave descendants long after abolition (Botte 2000: 11). By contrast, where slavery was only incidental, it left only vague memories, usually in the form of unequal ties of kinship between “junior” slave and “senior” master lineages (Kopytoff and Miers 1977). But even in such places slave descendants might continue to be stigmatized because of their ancestry. In Ghana, suspicion of slave ancestry can still prevent appointment to an Akan chieftaincy (Greene 2011; Bellagamba, Greene, and Klein 2013). One need not look only at centralized states or slave societies to find discourses of inherited civilization and barbarism. They can be found in settings throughout the continent, as can signs of their incipient racialization and their entanglement with more explicit racial discourses introduced from the West or the Arab Middle East. Most widespread is a set of historical motifs that distinguish between autochthons and immigrants, part of the ancient language of frontiers and pioneers discussed above. Those remembered as pioneers did not always arrive on an empty landscape, and, depending on their relative numbers and power, they would have had to establish relations with communities already present. The nature of those relations was reflected in historical narratives and associated social and ritual practices, in which the earliest residents and their descendants were regarded as autochthons whose origins tied them to the earth in a primal way and invested them with an inherited ability to control the land’s fertility (e.g., Izard 1985). The most pronounced instances included settings where farmers engaged in ongoing economic and social relations with hunting and gathering specialists (the so‐called Bushmen and Pygmies of southern and central Africa, respectively), whom all believed represented the territory’s earliest inhabitants, in a set of ideas that meshed with the evolutionary historicism of European observers (Klieman 2003; Glassman 2015). Understandably, modern authors often go out of their way to refute colonial era interpretations that depicted such categories as vestiges of ancient racial conquests along the lines of the old Hamitic myths. But the categories themselves were significant in precolonial thought, even if they did not necessarily exist as “groups” in a “substantialist” (let alone biological) sense. And, while we might not wish to describe them with the word “race,” we should recognize the family resemblance. In recent years, discourses of autochthony and exogeny have become racialized through entanglement with the politics of the territorial nation‐state, giving rise to discourses and practices (including the expressive, nonutilitarian violence characteristic of pogroms (Glassman 2011)) that link foreigners with inbred qualities of barbarism and disease. Several scholars have charted how such politics reflect the impact of postcolonial political economies and contemporary globalization (Geschiere 2009; Nyamnjoh 2006). But some also emphasize the legacy of



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“precolonial configurations of first‐comers and late‐comers” (Lentz 2006: 14; see also Dozon 1997). The literature is especially rich on Ivory Coast and South Africa; xenophobia in the latter, a land only recently freed from a racist regime that had made insidious efforts to engineer divisions of tribe and nation, has especially captured the world’s attention.8 Both countries were once considered textbook examples of pan‐African civic nationalism; the anti‐immigrant violence that has gripped them suggests that Africa’s postcolonial nationalisms, like nationalisms elsewhere, are susceptible to being transformed from inclusive discourses of liberation to discourses that exclude in terms of the explicit solidarities of descent. These contemporary issues are demanding attention from African studies scholars at the very moment that historians are distancing themselves from the nationalist paradigms in which our subfield was born and are fully recognizing the genealogical links and porous boundaries between ethnicity, race, and nation. They also come at a time when historians of modern Africa are paying greater attention to the precolonial past. As we have seen, the literature on African ethnicity was until recently overwhelmingly modernist, in both its approach and its chronological focus, to the extent that many authors even suggested that ethnic thought was entirely a twentieth‐century phenomenon. We now understand that although colonialism and the nation‐state introduced new ideas and novel socioeconomic contexts, modern ethnic politics also reflected an entanglement with pre‐existing ways of thinking about community and difference, including patterns that drew categories based on metaphors of descent. This understanding is part of a broader recognition of the need to challenge assumptions about the significance of the colonial moment in Africa’s cultural and intellectual history and to ask whether colonial power was as overwhelming as an earlier generation had assumed. Profound as the changes wrought by conquest were, they could not force Africans to leave all their previous history behind.

Acknowledgments This chapter was written while on a fellowship at the National Humanities Center that was made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Thanks also to Janet Ewald, Sandra Greene, Bruce Hall, Colleen Kriger, John Lonsdale, Derek Peterson, and David Schoenbrun.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Trevor‐Roper soon became a bête noire throughout the Africanist literature. Asante remained an enduring example of such nationalist history (McCaskie 1992). Ekeh extended such analysis back into the era of the Atlantic slave trade. They typically cited Ranger (1983), which, however, mostly concerned traditions ­surrounding British rule rather than African tribes. But the latter themes appear in Ranger’s other writings, including Ranger (1991).

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5 The latter was a pioneering study of Kenyan nationalism that, despite its title, avoided discussing the Mau Mau war altogether. 6 See also the contentious literature on hunters and foragers (discussed later). 7 Igbo responses to the 1966 northern pogroms contributed to the secession of Biafra. For another example see Malkki (1995). 8 The literature is vast. Examples include Gary‐Tounkara (2008); Ouédraogo and Sall (2008); Losch (2000); Marshall‐Fratani (2006); Neocosmos (2006); Nyamnjoh (2006); and Hassim, Kupe, and Worby (2008).

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Ranger, Terence. 1991. “Missionaries, Migrants and the Manyika: The Inention of Ethnicity in Zimbabwe.” In The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, edited by Leroy Vail, 118–150. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ray, Carina. 2015. Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana. Athens: Ohio University Press. Rosberg, Carl, and John Nottingham. 1966. The Myth of Mau Mau. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Salamone, Frank A. 1974. Gods and Goods in Africa: Persistence and Change in Ethnic and Religious Identity in Yauri Emirate, North‐Western State, Nigeria. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files. http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ms12‐019, accessed March 4, 2018. Schoenbrun, David. 2006. “Conjuring the Modern in Africa: Durability and Rupture in Histories of Public Healing Between the Great Lakes of East Africa.” American Historical Review 11: 1403–1439. Shack, William, and Elliott P. Skinner, eds. 1979. Strangers in African Societies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sharkey, Heather. 2003. Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo‐ Egyptian Sudan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Southall, Aidan W. 1970. “The Illusion of Tribe.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 5: 28–50. Spear, Thomas. 2003. “Neo‐traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa.” Journal of African History 44: 3–27. Spear, Thomas, and Richard Waller, eds. 1993. Being Maasai: Ethnicity and Identity in East Africa. London: James Currey. Straus, Scott. 2006. The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Trevor‐Roper, H. R. 1965. The Rise of Christian Europe. London: Thames & Hudson. Twaddle, Michael, ed. 1975. Expulsion of a Minority: Essays on Ugandan Asians. London: Athlone Press. Vail, Leroy. 1989. “Introduction: Ethnicity in Southern African History.” In The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, edited by Leroy Vail, 1–19. Berkeley: University of California Press van den Bersselaar, Dmitri. 1998. In Search of Igbo Identity. Leiden: Leiden University. Vansina, Jan. 1990. Paths in the Rainforests. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Vansina, Jan. 2004. Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Waetjen, Thembisa. 2004. Workers and Warriors: Masculinity and the Struggle for Nation in South Africa. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Watson, William. 1958. Tribal Cohesion in a Money Economy: A Study of the Mambwe People of Northern Rhodesia. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wilder, Gary. 2005. The French Imperial Nation‐State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Willis, Justin. 1992. Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda. Oxford: Clarendon Press.



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Wright, John, and Carolyn Hamilton. 1996. “Ethnicity and Political Change Before 1840.” In Political Economy and Identities in KwaZulu‐Natal, edited by Robert Morrell, 15–32. Durban: Indicator Press. Yeros, Paris, ed. 1999. “Introduction: On the Uses and Implications of Constructivism.” In Ethnicity and Nationalism in Africa, edited by Paris Yeros, 1–14. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Young, Crawford. 1986. “Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Class in Africa: A Retrospective.” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 103: 421–495. Zachernuk, Philip S. 2000. Colonial Subjects. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Chapter Twelve

Islam in African History Sean Hanretta and Shobana Shankar

Religion, Islam, Africa: problematic terms In recent decades historians and scholars of religion have challenged the analytic utility of the term “religion” (Smith 1962; Asad 1993, 2003; Dubuisson 2003). They note the very particular European political and social projects that generated the idea that there is a category of beliefs and practices common to many societies that could be called religion. Exhaustion over the interreligious warfare of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Enlightenment valorization of a certain kind of procedural rationalism, the desire of states to exert control over certain forms of power and to relegate others to a subordinated and depoliticized private faith, and the colonial production of images of backward alien cultures all contributed to the meanings European writers gave to the term. “Religion,” they suggest, bears the mark of these historical processes. The Reformation and Counter‐Reformation made techniques of interpreting scripture, styles of worship, and the self‐application by the individual to himself or herself of what Foucault has called “pastoral power” – the moral supervision of the quotidian life of subjects – central to debates over religion and thus central to how religion was imagined in the abstract (Foucault [1979] 1999). By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the term increasingly carried connotations of backwardness for many social scientists and grand narratives about historical progress emerged which imagined “reason” gradually gaining ground on and eventually A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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eliminating religion. When, by the late 1900s, such predictions had come to seem unconvincing, the adequacy of the underlying concepts was increasingly called into question. Many analysts have thus argued that to use “religion” as if it were a self‐evident term that labeled a category of phenomena and that could allow one to talk about the “history (politics, sociology, etc.) of religion” is misleading at best, a tacit enforcing of certain stereotypes at worst. Religion has played an important role in European ways of imagining Africa through the interplay of similarity and difference – Africans are frequently depicted as especially religious in ways that both knit them into the community of the human but also make their religions the means of marking them as different. Particularly when it separates ideas about the invisible, the spiritual, or the otherworldly from the totality of social and political life, the concept of “religion,” for these critics, both distorts the histories of people outside Europe and, ironically, becomes a justification for discrimination when others fail to conform to a particular, arbitrary, line of demarcation. It is commonplace even today, for instance, to hear that “Islam” and “African religions” “lack” a sense of separation of “church” and state. Such dynamics were clearly at work during the era of colonial rule in Africa. The European drive to know, name, and control African religions – all as part of empire – transformed the very notion of religion as a general concept of academic interest and as a name for specific belief systems. The field of comparative religion emerged out of debates concerning whether all humans (and some animals) shared belief in unseen powers and the divine, as well as efforts to classify peoples according to their beliefs (Chidester 1999). Religious differences, between Europeans and their colonized subjects, and among the colonized, informed seminal studies in the social sciences and linguistics, frequently contributing in decisive ways to the emergence of ethnic communities (such as the Yoruba, the Bakongo, or the Tsonga) and the forms of colonial rule that took such communities as units of administration. Western (Judeo‐Christian) trained scholars of religion tended to interpret African and other indigenous religions in relation and reaction to practices and ideas taking shape in the metropole. Religious difference was not only critical to European scholarly discourses: Christian missionary translation of the “foreign” into familiar religious terms produced the very language and sources historians of religion use (Landau 1995). Within the field demarcated by “religion,” “Islam” has carried particular conceptual baggage that adds extra complexity to its usefulness as an analytic term. Insofar as Christian thinkers and Christian‐identified states perceived in Islam an opponent fundamentally different in order and seriousness from, say, “traditional” African, American, or Asian religions. Islam in general came to be considered as part of a specific branch of religion, the “world religions” (or, in older formulations, the “Axial religions”). This category itself was deeply connected to Europe’s imperial expansion and its concomitant efforts to organize and classify the world’s peoples (Masuzawa 2005). In their efforts to refute the civilizational superiority



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of Europeans, Muslims also shaped this idea of Islam as a totality (Aydin 2017). Islam came to be seen as a comprehensive “worldview,” a total (or totalizing) system in which worship, law, social custom, personal psychology, political ­culture, and ethics were all coordinated and specified. European colonialists constructed Islam in Africa as quite distinct from how they imagined indigenous African religions, and often also from Islam as it was practiced elsewhere. To an extent, these constructions overlapped with those of many Muslim intellectuals themselves, who understood their own religion in abstract comparative terms. Islamic concepts like dın̄ (faith), aqı ̄da (doctrine), and ‘ibāda (worship), for instance, had shifting degrees of semantic intersection with evolving European notions of religion. Muslim intellectuals’ translation of their analytic terms into the framework of “religion” typically took place within the context of some larger project of social documentation and control by an emerging administrative‐scholarly class (Zaman 2002; Hallaq 2001). Many of the social and religious categories that had been produced and used within the Muslim world long before Europeans’ arrival in Africa helped established some of the Europeans’ imperial taxonomies – though not without transformation and distortion. Several African societies developed vocabularies to describe “professional” Muslims (karamoko, inesleman, modi, modibo, etc.). Like the ‘ulamā’ of the Arabic‐speaking world  –  and translated as such locally when writing in Arabic – these classes generated their own self‐conscious sense of what it meant to be Muslim and what Islam was, and this influenced Europeans. Muslim intellectuals on both sides of the Sahara had long participated in dense networks exchanging ideas and joining conversations that extended through the Middle East, South Asia, and beyond (Kane 2016). Colonial agents took what distinctions in space and population that scholars did make and turned them into sharp boundaries, delineating sub‐Saharan Africa as home to a unique form of Islam. The Arab geographical designation of the “Bilad al‐Sudan” (Land of the Blacks), for instance, as meaning the area south of the Sahara and their distinction between bidān (white) and sūdān (black) greatly influenced distinctions that the French drew in their territories between Islam maure (Moorish Islam) and Islam noir (Black Islam). In northern Nigeria, texts written in the Hausa language in Arabic script (known as ajami texts) dating to before the twentieth century show locals using terms to describe categories of people in the terms of the wider geography of the Muslim world – in addition to Nassarawa (Christians), other groups were Rumawa (Byzantines), Maguzawa (Magians, i.e., a protected group of fellow monotheists), and kāfir (infidels) (Last 1980). With British rule in 1900, these distinctions tended to be reduced to two – Muslims and “pagans.” Both the French and the British regarded Islam as a crucial component of their global empires (Robinson 1999; Shankar 2014b), and they considered Muslim Africans as superior to and more modern and civilized than “pagan” Africans – but often also as more threatening. Here too the contribution of African Muslims to these conceptualizations was significant: the Caribbean‐born intellectual Edward Blyden, for instance,

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acted as a conduit into the Atlantic world for certain West African Muslims’ sense of their own civilizing mission (Hanretta 2018). In all these cases, then, the terms “Islam” and “African” were intricately connected to specific historical processes. Colonial thinking about Muslim Africans was also influenced by missionary activity. Some Euro‐American Christian missionaries supported the European colonization of Africa by representing the continent as the next battleground between Islam and Christianity, and colonial military conquest also played a significant role in shaping the definitional contours of Islam as a religion (Cooper 2006; Sharkey 2008; Shankar 2014b). After the Sepoy Mutiny in India in 1857 and the Sudanese Mahdiyya’s uprising in the 1880s, both against the British, and the resistance to France in Algeria coordinated by “Sufi” networks, Europeans began contrasting pacifist or moderate (read as modern) Muslim Africans to dangerous or “fanatical” ones. Insofar as imperial rule was thought to depend on the cultivation of metropolitan scientific expertise about culture and religion, French and British administrators believed they knew best how to classify and contain Muslims  –  and, indeed, knew better than African Muslims themselves how to define Islam. The kind of “orientalist” training that the British had developed in India informed the “everyday” context of colonial conquest so that terms like jihād (struggle) and Mahdi (redeemer, usually in the end times) appeared in European sources written by scholar‐administrators. They defined jihād, for example, in a narrow way as violent warfare, so that “jihadism” became a distinct brand of religion rather than a concept within it, and one that was considered outside the bounds of acceptable political dissent. The end of colonialism brought a major shift in how these issues were approached, though many of the analytic concepts themselves persisted. Historians of the 1960s, celebrating precolonial Africa, especially as “useful” history for new states, approached Islam in Africa as having fostered forms of proto‐nationalism and thus providing a tool for Africans’ integration into a “wider” community (Fisher 1973). Similar claims were made for Christianity (Hastings 1997), and in some circles a certain colonial era tendency to separate “Islamic Africa,” as somehow less authentically African and/or more removed from Westernization, from other regions persisted. In the broader scholarship on Islam, challenges to colonial approaches came from many directions, including the critiques, developed by Edward Said and his followers, of European representations of Islam. Less radically, Marshall Hodgson’s distinction between Islamic and what he called “Islamicate” – that which was related “not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non‐ Muslims” – provided a way to discuss the features and patterns that had emerged in many parts of the world without assuming a cultural determinism (Hodgson [1961] 1974: 59). At the same time, Hodgson’s idea of a properly Islamic core defined by personal piety as distinct from cultural life imposed on Islam a European Protestant model of religion, while the idea of the “Islamicate” could too easily



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allow for a revival of orientalist assumptions that anything done by a Muslim or in a Muslim society necessarily related to Islam (Ahmed 2015). Talal Asad’s sense of Islam as a “discursive tradition,” in which debating what Islam is constitutes a field of social power that can itself be analyzed, helped scholars move away from ahistorical descriptions of Islam even as it often unintentionally foregrounded the agency of those who saw themselves as upholding orthodoxy (Asad [1986] 2009). Nonetheless, these approaches have helped generations of scholars avoid once widespread mistakes – reading events through the lens of a timeless “tradition,” a bias toward textual sources in the interpretation of behavior and experience, collapsing Muslim individuals into an undifferentiated group, and treating Islam as an anthropomorphized agent in historical events – and therefore to produce more careful, nuanced, and responsible accounts. In the end, we can say that the terms used by Africans and Muslims to talk about what Europeans call religion have deep histories, histories that preceded colonial rule, came to be entangled with it, and now bear some of its legacies. “Islam in Africa” is thus a useful phrase only if scholars probe the assumptions fundamental to this phrase – who and what defines Islam, where Africa is, and why historicity matters. But what is clearly untenable is the assumption that “religion” has a stable universal meaning as a category of human social and personal life and that this category contains an equally stable unproblematic entity, “Islam,” which can be the central subject of a coherent history, in Africa or elsewhere.

Major currents of research Perhaps the soundest measure of the usefulness of any analytic category is how well it helps to raise questions that would not otherwise be asked and to make connections that would not otherwise be made, without creating a hermetic body of scholarship interesting only to its practitioners. In this sense, “Islam in Africa” has been mostly successful. Key questions in African history more broadly – patterns and consequences of trade (long distance and local), state formation, urbanization, social and political belonging, strategies of accumulation and social differentiation, the development of personal and community therapeutics, and many others – have all been profitably illuminated by focusing on various aspects of Islam. These contributions have, in practice, examined various, not necessarily connected, phenomena: Arabic literacy as a practical tool for merchants, particularly trading diasporas, and bureaucrats; the master–disciple relationship of Sufi spiritual instruction as a form of social solidarity; Islamic law as a resource for state centralization; Muslimness as a site for mobilizing resistance to European colonialism; and the value of textual and oral traditions as repositories of wisdom or healing techniques. A concomitant effect has been the privileging of social historical and political lenses. Even questions that would seem to be deeply connected to religion as such – conversion, for instance – provided opportunities to illuminate broader social questions such as the scale of community organization, the acceptance of pluralism, and aspirations for ethical universalism (Horton 1971).

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An important early exception was Humphrey Fisher’s (1973) “intellectualist” explanation for conversion to Islam which stressed the attractiveness of aspects of the theological content of the faith itself as much as any pragmatic benefits the conversion may have brought. Fisher paid particular attention to frontiers of religious interaction. Framing relations in terms of either the presence or absence of tension allowed him to see in religion one of the central dynamics of West Africa’s long‐term history. The multiplicity of religions and of attitudes toward Islam provided, in Fisher’s model, a constant source of anxiety for some Muslim scholars who sought to convert non‐Muslims, to define terms for accommodation, or to improve the quality of faith of their co‐religionists who may have accommodated themselves too much to others’ sensibilities. David Robinson (1999) refined this metanarrative, approaching Islam as a flexible cultural structure that could be adapted to local conditions while acting as a transformative agent itself. One important current of intellectual history has examined African Muslims’ responses to the definitions, attitudes, and frameworks that Europeans developed during and after the colonial period. Colonial power depended on defining and classifying religion, but the power of naming and differentiating did not belong exclusively to Christian European colonialists. The colonial analytic division of Islam into peaceful and violently reactionary forms, for instance, had a deep effect on how Muslim Africans saw their own religious priorities. Sufi brotherhoods such as the Muridiyya in Senegal and the Tijaniyya espoused new priorities – including devotional and spiritual practice – as part of their development of “paths of accommodation” with empire (Robinson 1999; Stewart 1997). After independence this made it possible for opponents of Sufism to brand them as collaborators (Kobo 2012). The division between Muslims and “pagans,” used by the British and French, also became stronger during the colonial era, in part as a result of Christian evangelism among non‐Muslims; the polarization has engendered more Muslim reflection on piety and proselytization as responses to the changed religious landscape (Shankar 2016; Soares 2016). Colonial politics necessarily engendered a debate among Muslims about the nature of jihād, with its broad range of meanings increasingly tied to political considerations of war and peace as defined by Euro‐American powers. To take the example of Hausa kirari (praise poetry), poems from the early colonial period in northern Nigeria laud specific leaders for vowing to wage jihād against the British but omit their eventual surrender in contemporary performances of the lyrics (Umar 2006: 91). In the cases of Amadu Bamba in Senegal or the Ahmadiyya in Ghana, however, practitioners consciously defined jihād as a pacifist struggle, a struggle of the soul or of the pen (Babou 2007; Hanson 2017). In a similar vein, “reform” has become imprisoned to the teleological framework through which insider and outsider analysts alike have come to read transformations in Muslim politics and theology over the last two centuries (Soares 2014). This is a particularly revealing case. The global popularity of ideas of modernity and modernization have intersected two specifically Muslim discourses:



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the sense that religious life must periodically be renewed (tajdı̄d) and reformed (islāh), and the sense that political subordination to Europe reflected a civilizational crisis that required systemic reforms. As a result, most Muslims worldwide consider themselves engaged in some sort of process of reform, however much they may also consider themselves to be in keeping with longstanding local or global traditions. Western scholars operating with a Weberian or more generally post‐Reformation model of Christian modernization have seized on local discourses of reform, privileging one very specific and not always representative version  –  the austere, rationalistic, text‐based puritanism of certain movements centered in the Middle East – and have constructed an ahistorical genealogy of “reformism” that remobilizes older models of “mixture” and “purification,” recontextualizing everything from the Islamic modernism of Muḥammad ‘Abduh and Rashı̄d Riḍā in Egypt to Usuman dan Fodio and Sheik Abubakar Gumi in Nigeria to bona fide Saudi Wahhabis. Only recently has the conceptual and terminological confusion connected to this misleading picture begun to be untangled (Lauzière 2016). A plethora of local studies of purist thought suggest that a wide range of global, regional, and local forces have shaped shifts in the kinds of knowledge valued, the way Islam is conceptualized, and what compromises scholars and their followers are willing to make with institutions and practices that they perceive to be hostile to Islam (Loimeier 2011; Kane 2003; Thurston 2016; Kobo 2012). Other forms of intellectual history have attracted increasing attention from scholars but are often neglected by nonspecialists These include important work on pragmatic and pacifist ethics (often associated with the teachings of the West African scholar al‐Ḥ ā jj Salim Suwari) by Ivor Wilks and Lamin Sanneh, as well as works on Islamic healing (Wilks 2000; Sanneh 2016; Last 1988; Masquelier 2012). Few have taken up the history of science, environmentalism, or the rise of the “developmentalist” or “gatekeeper” state in terms of the influence of Islam on them or of their effects on Muslims. One exception is the scholarship on Islam in South Africa, where the end of apartheid and the transition to democracy have made the Muslim minority more visible and active in matters relating to law, education, economy, and the press (Vahed and Vawda 2008; Haron and Buccus 2009; Moosa 2010; Tayob 2011. Without question, however, the majority of effort has gone into developing new social histories of African Muslims. Social history is often associated with a set of rubrics of difference, that is, social categories shaping individual and communal experiences that constitute a domain of investigation. Four of these categories – race, class, gender, and sexuality – attract most scholarly attention and have provided the lens for some of the most important research on Islam in Africa in recent decades. The category of “class” has, of course, its own complicated story in African studies, but research into Muslims’ roles as merchants, the importance of Islam as a source of connection for new arrivals in growing cities, and competing ethical claims about the seductions of materialism and the generosity of the pious have all provided important alternatives to conventional labor history or the

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history of the poor. Boubacar Barry and Martin Klein each contributed to an interpretation of the nineteenth‐century jihād reform movements that imagined Muslim merchant‐scholar families in the role of a revolutionary bourgeoisie (Barry 1988; Klein 1972). Slavery has perhaps been more central to the scholarship than any other socioeconomic institution. Scholars have examined the role of Islam in legitimating slavery, in moderating it, and in abolishing it – or at least in reducing its social legacies (Lovejoy 2011; Ware 2014; Hanretta 2009; Clarence‐Smith 2006; Searing 2006; Hawthorne 1999). Rudolph Ware and Paul Lovejoy have both pointed to the different ways in which Islam contributed to political resistance to the slave trade – in Ware’s account by imbuing the learned body with a sacred character inimical to captivity and in Lovejoy’s through the political revolutions of the nineteenth century – in ways that shaped the availability of slaves and perhaps contributed to antislavery movements throughout the Atlantic (Ware 2014; Lovejoy 2016). The connections between Islam and slavery figured heavily in European minds in the nineteenth century, of course, and the rhetorical power of that association helped to bring about colonialism (McDougall 2002). The transatlantic slave trade gave rise to a Muslim diaspora within the broader African diaspora, sometimes with important political consequences (Reis 1995; Gomez 2005). Gender has often suffered from being analyzed through orientalist lenses that foreground women’s passivity in the face of assumed political, social, economic, and familial subordination. But in the last two decades, with an important turning point marked by Barbara Cooper’s landmark Marriage in Maradi in 1997, Muslim women have featured in historical narratives as active shapers of their own lives and worlds (Masquelier 2009; Cooper 1997; Hanretta 2008a) and scholarship on their experiences has forced reconsideration of groups and institutions that were previously thought to be well understood (e.g., Buggenhagen 2012). Gendered perspectives – ones that examine the way in which gender roles are constructed in society and how they relate to other forms of power – have also become more prioritized. Michael Gomez locates gender relations in early and medieval West African empires as a critical site for the formation and reformation of categories of racial, class, and political difference in interactions between Muslim and non‐ Muslim populations over many centuries, well before contact with Europeans (Gomez 2018). Gomez’s work builds on the two most recent additions to the social‐historical scene: race and sexuality. If scholars have struggled to decide whether religion is a constructed category that has distorted the analysis of African cultures and of Islam, the category of race has posed similar yet even more vexing difficulties. While the social construction of race is now accepted, only recently have scholars begun to recover the ways Africans themselves generated racial discourses and how these were entangled with Islam. The antiracial language of many core Islamic texts, including the Qur’an, could generate both a passive



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refusal to accept racial distinctions and a more activist stance opposing racism. Hall’s landmark work on the development of racial thinking among Muslims in the southern Sahara and Sahel regions of West Africa has established the circulations of tropes of racial difference in West Africa through religious stories and the classical theory of climes (Hall 2011). Some Muslim scholars in the Sahel responded to local political and economic processes  –  particularly those connected to the slave trade – by weaving these tropes into claims about ancestry, lineage, and status into beliefs about collective inferiority. Hall’s study complements others that demonstrate that race cannot be understood purely as a European category of thought (Glassman 2011; Jeppie 2001; Sharkey 2008; Jok 2007; El Hamel 2013). Most recent is the attention being paid to the interconnections between Islamicate culture, the social uses of Islamic thought, and the construction of sexuality as a social category. Rudolf Gaudio – whose earlier work on ’yan daudu in Nigeria exposed a variety of sexual identities in a region known for its Islamic conservatism – has drawn attention to the ways that race, religion, and sexuality became entangled during the long era of the trans‐ Saharan slave trade (Gaudio 2014). Gaudio’s work is explicitly framed as an intervention into the debates over the relationship between North Africa and sub‐Saharan Africa, a crucial question insofar as it opens up to debate the very definition of “African history” and its racial predicates. For “Africa” itself has never been a neutral geographic term (Mudimbe 1988), long having been intertwined with definitions of race and religion in complex ways. Islam gradually and mostly peacefully drifted and diffused into sub‐Saharan Africa from Egypt, the Maghreb, and Arabia until the seventeenth century such that the “desert fringe” (Webb 1994; Austen 2010), the Horn, and the Swahili coast of eastern Africa have long been treated as frontiers of the Muslim world. Early approaches adopted a kind of cultural‐ ecological determinism and portrayed the African communities in these areas as passive receivers of Islam, resulting in teleological and unidirectional models such as J. Spencer Trimingham’s idea of distinct and progressive “minority,” “court (elite),” and “majority” phases and Humphrey Fisher’s scheme of quarantine, mixture, and reform (Trimingham 1962; Fisher 1973). Well‐to‐do traders, political leaders, and clerical elites were thus the key agents of change and most key events took place in cities and trading entrepôts. Actual research in this vein, however, was often quite nuanced and helped account for the place of Islam in areas as diverse as the Mali Empire and the Swahili coast and brought to light the contributions of centers of scholarly knowledge in places like Timbuktu and Katsina. Fisher’s suggestion that Africans were attracted to Islam for theological reasons made their intellectual activity the decisive act of transformation even if it took for granted the greater desirability of Islam. In this it reflected the legacy of colonial constructions of the Islamic modern as contrasted with African “tradition.”

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Close histories of contact zones, however, show that a variety of local political, economic, and social forces shaped the ways in which people became Muslim and these forces pushed in multiple directions – relations between Muslims and non‐ Muslims were complicated and hardly static and not always driven by Muslim elites. In medieval Nubia, for instance, diplomatic relations between Christians and Muslim Arabs were patterned on regional models that predated Islam (Spaulding 1995); in Ethiopia, where Islam developed in the shadow of Christianity (Abbink 1998), Islam grew modestly from the seventh century as the religion of the discriminated and marginalized; in twentieth‐century South Africa, Indian Muslims used international connections to form an Arabic study circle to create a community that fused Muslim and minority sensibilities (Jeppie 2011). The locus of change also shifted between rural and urban areas, sometimes in tension with one another but sometimes as sites of distinct and complementary Muslim communities. While environmental factors, such as, for example, the ­barrier that tsetse flies posed to slave raiders and empire builders on horseback, had important economic and political consequences, religion rarely traveled as part of a package that could be blocked. Cultural encounters took place not only on ecological transition zones or in untamed borderlands but within states and kinship groups. Indeed, Islam could provide an important resource in the rewriting of kinship ideology that often made it most valuable on very intimate levels. One difficulty has been untangling geography as a social force and the representational politics of geography within Africans’ own discourses. Historians have documented the significance of the direction of prayer, its effects on local space, and the role it plays in origin accounts or family histories of migration. But this too has been variable: Arabia became more important politically in more recent times as a result of modern geopolitical alignments (Hunwick 1996), bringing with it debates over cultural and linguistic Arabization. Scholarly networks connecting Al‐Azhar in Cairo, the popularity of Gamal Abdel Nasser as a stalwart against Western domination, and the increasing availability of mechanized transportation and state sponsorship in facilitating pilgrimage all enhanced the prestige of the Mashriq, the East. But, as the famous case of Swahili claims of origin in the Shiraz of Iran suggest, what counts as the East is as much a matter of local cultural politics as of any hardwired religious significance. Indeed, in Mara Leichtman’s study of African responses to the Lebanese diaspora as a catalyst for Shi‘ism’s growth, the global may be more of an important signifier than Arabia or the East (Leichtman 2015). African Muslims have often sharply contested claims of Muslim Arab cultural superiority, and nationalists like Ahmadu Bello in northern Nigeria in the 1960s cultivated “eastern” relationships with non‐Arab Muslim nations like Pakistan and Iran in pursuit of a global Islamic modernism. Even pilgrimage could be as much a way of destabilizing identities, reconfiguring geography, and defining sovereignty as it was a reflection of a stable sacred landscape (O’Brien 1999; Lecocq 2012; Mann 2014).



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A similar shift has taken place in work on interactions between African Muslims and Christians. In the historiography of precolonial Africa, competition between Muslims and Christians in Buganda or the Horn, for example, represented a struggle for elite patronage, sometimes for the control of space. Studies of the colonial period assumed a natural tension between European and African Christian missionaries as “bridgeheads” of empire (Ayandele 1966; Beidelman 1982) and Muslim traders and rulers as each struggled for the hearts and minds of the masses. Newer studies suggest a far more nuanced relationship between Christians and Muslims in Africa, which from the nineteenth century was a unique “theatre of engagement” (Walls 1999). Even without conversion, Muslims in Senegal understood Christian power in the terms of global geopolitics and technology – in the nineteenth century, Christians were considered masters of the sea (Robinson 1999). Muslims in northern Nigeria certainly saw Christians as in command of  “worldly affairs,” leading to their self‐perception as morally and spiritually superior (Umar 2006; Shankar 2014b). Outside the political realm, Muslims and Christians held theological and intellectual conversations and contestations that richly informed the practice of both religions. Crucial in this interaction were African Christian missionaries (Walls 1999; Peel 2000), whose interests only sometimes aligned with those of European colonialists (Everill 2012; Cooper 2006). Competition for converts was a driving factor (Everill 2012), but Christian and Muslim Africans shared interests that went beyond the pragmatic and were focused on prophecy and millennialism, which were priorities heightened by impending colonial conquest (Shankar 2014b). Common characteristics of modern variants of Islam and Christianity surely became more pronounced as their practitioners interacted. One of these characteristics was the missionary impulse. Although Islam was a “world religion,” like Christianity, British colonial officials remarked that they had thought Muslim missionaries did not exist until they received applications from the heterodox Indian Muslim sect, the Ahmadiyya, seeking to undertake evangelism in western Africa (Hanson 2017) in the 1910s. Christian missions had influenced the Ahmadiyya’s evangelical mission, which spread from West Africa into other parts of the continent quite quickly. The attraction of Islamic internationalist networks for Muslim politicians such as Jawara and Jammeh of Gambia arguably was rooted in their understanding and earlier adherence to mission Christianity (Darboe 2004; Janson 2013). Certainly, the explicit effort of Sir Ahmadu Bello of independent Nigeria to convert non‐Muslims to Islam was a direct influence of colonial era Christian missionaries. The “civilizing” uses of religion transferred from colonial to postcolonial politics. The shared missionary drive by Muslims and Christians should not be understood as wholly coercive, even if it has a colonizing agenda, for another characteristic that emerged in religious interaction was a renewed emphasis on and the provision of personal and communal care. Among the Khatmiyya Sufi brotherhood in northeastern Africa, Islamic and local indigenous forms of

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healing had intersected before the arrival of Catholic medical missionaries; the Khatmiyya, especially women leaders known for their healing prowess, did not reject the new Christian modes of healing but instead incorporated them into their plural system (Bruzzi and Zeleke 2015). Modernization or modernity in this case did not mean choosing Western over Islamic or traditional modes of healing but rather recognizing a wider diversity of options, including nonsecular and secular forms. Too much emphasis has been placed on Muslim resistance to Christian and secular Western modes of education and medical work. New research suggests that Christian institutions, prioritizing Arabic and other languages of Islam as well as cooperation with Muslim elites, often became sites where identification with Islam increased (Cooper 2006; Shankar 2014b). The interaction of Islam and Christianity also fundamentally changed in individual and communal experiences of conversion. Conversion to Islam often entailed migration, changes in social status, and new ethnic and occupational status (Levtzion 1978; Haour and Rossi 2010), but historians have found few individual conversion narratives. The conversion narrative as a unique form of Christian missions certainly changed the importance placed upon personal stories of converts to Islam, which gained more popularity with modern media and ­cultural national movements, especially in the late colonial and early postcolonial eras (Darboe 2004). Conversion also began to constitute a site for debating indigeneity versus foreignness, as in colonial and postcolonial Ivory Coast (Miran 2006). Most significantly, the rise of mass conversion can be linked to moments of eschatological or political urgency, felt either by Christians or Muslims in their confrontation from as different political locations as the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia in the nineteenth century to northern Nigeria in the twentieth (Ahmed 2006; Abba 1981). Surely, these types of rituals are political acts, but they should also be understood in the broader history of Islamic reform, the leaders of which sometimes used the recentness and superficiality of conversion as a call to cleanse spiritually the practice of Islam in culturally mixed and newly converted communities (Østebø 2009; Loimeier 2011; Wario and Ben Amara 2014).

Neoliberalism: new vistas, old problems? In the last three decades social scientists have dedicated increasing attention to the effects of what many have come to call “neoliberalism.” Following from the insights of the historian Michel Foucault, scholars have noted the way that a new ideology, which takes a particular image of market behavior (one that privileges competition and innovation rather than exchange) as the commonsense, natural state of all human affairs, has dramatically affected how questions of politics, economic inequality, and social ethics are handled in many parts of the world (Foucault 2008). Neoliberal ideology has meant that many issues that had previously been part of political discussions and contestation have become questions of



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technocratic management. Poverty, for example, ceases to be a question of the unequal distribution of wealth and becomes a matter of economic “development,” to be tackled by finding the right policies, interventions, and technologies to yoke competition to social improvement. Some caution is warranted here: James Ferguson (2010) has urged scholars of Africa to pay attention to the difference between, on the one hand, what goes by the name of neoliberalism in the Global North (new subjectivities and forms of governance connected to hypertrophied capitalism) and has provided the context for much recent social theory, and, on the other hand, what has transpired in Africa in the wake of assaults on state welfare systems and economic sovereignty. Nonetheless, it is clear that the extremes of economic disparities in Africa and a widespread delegitimation of classical narratives of modernization have had an impact on ethics and social imaginaries. While much of this research has focused on economics, social life, well‐ being, and politics, insofar as this represents a major shift in morality it has great consequences for religious life. Neoliberalism has recently provided an important framework for thinking about changes in religion, globally and within African societies particularly. On the one hand, religious relationships become themselves competitive, as leaders seek followers and followers evaluate their leaders in terms of the outward signs of their grace (Soares 2005). On the other hand, they can also entail a transformation in the ethical meaning of worship and devotion, sometimes explicitly, such as with the emergence of the “prosperity gospel” of some Christian churches, though more often implicitly for Muslims. Some scholars have suggested that many new religious movements in the last few decades can be understood as responses to this neoliberal tendency to demoralize (both in the sense of reducing morale and in the elimination of moral discussions in deliberations over policy) (Achille Mbembe, interviewed in Spivak 2007). As with any ideology, neoliberalism also affects the intellectual agendas of scholars, particularly as universities themselves become subjected to its transformative demands. But it would be a mistake to assume that these effects have been direct, much less uniform; the connections have been more subtle and largely reflect deep consonances rather than overt ideological influence. The dominance of social historical approaches has, for instance, had unexpected or at least unintended ideological consequences. Insofar as their primary objects of analysis are social categories and the ways they are used, reproduced, and inhabited by actors, such histories necessarily give rise to discussions of agency and its relationship to structure. The valorization of social actors and the conceptual clearing of spaces for social action lends itself to social theories that celebrate public spheres and civil societies and that adopt individual behavior and local knowledge as lenses for evaluating broad dynamics. Social histories have thus largely generated the “usable knowledge” demanded by regimes of power in the era of structural adjustment and nongovernmental organizations. In this they reflect the fragmentation of knowledge into different technologies

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of governing (governing the self, governing others) that then become the object of academic investigation in other disciplines. In certain respects, this has facilitated the emergence of comparative perspectives that rightly reject colonial stereotypes about Africa. The rise, rather than disappearance, of religiosity as part of the neoliberal order no longer surprises scholars; the African continent  –  north and south of the Sahara  –  once represented as a less secular and more culturally backward region than others, does not look altogether different from South and Southeast Asia or pockets of North America, for that matter. Islam, however, tends to remain a problematic category. It is seen as generative of civil societies and public spheres, but in the current geopolitical landscape these are as often indexed as sources of threat or evidence of backwardness as they are of social progress and adaptability. This view of Islam, while echoing continuities from the colonial to postcolonial periods, defines the terms of debate, so that studies come to be structured around dichotomies of schism/unity, dissent/suppression, and disorder/plurality, while African states (colonial and postcolonial) are judged variously for their ability to control or ­contain this disorder or for failing to allow for dissent or listen to legitimate grievances. Neoliberal priorities in scholarship privilege the dynamism of a minority, unless it is to view Islam as a weapon for the weak, the majority, or nonmilitant actors. They also promote a neo‐orientalism in what constitutes sources on Islam in Africa – writings and sermons of male religious leaders in prominent positions have become most important in recent studies of groups like Al Shabab, Boko Haram, and Tablighi Jamaat while non‐elites become the domain for the discussion of taste, affect, and aesthetics. Studies of Islam’s conflicted relationship with various forms of “the public” have eclipsed the interior and spiritual dimensions of religious life. The persistent motif of such studies is the tension between a particular slice of social life – media, law, health, and so on, as if these constituted autonomous terrains of analysis  –  and the broader society that gives it context. Inheriting the structure/agency dichotomy typical of earlier social history, the new analysis tends to arrange this dichotomy so that structures are evaluated for the constraints they impose upon the experimentation, innovation, and freedom of agents; agents “negotiate” situations, draw creatively on “repertoires,” and “contest” received categories. Ironically, the relatively passive role that categories like “repertoires” and “traditions” play in these formulations reflects the opening up of a gulf between much social scientific work and any sense of historical trajectories. At their best, important studies of, for instance, media (Larkin 2008; Schulz 2011) have shown both how new technologies (cassette tapes, loudspeakers, television broadcasts, the Internet) can be put to old uses and also how they contribute to a democratization of authority that can disrupt older patterns. But just as frequently studies with a focus on “media” as a phenomenon can sometimes tend toward a presentism that cuts recent developments off from the long history of struggles over the transmission of knowledge, a story that includes the promotion



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(or restriction) of literacy, the trade in books, transformations in the exercise of spiritual authority, and the reproduction of social inequalities (Goody 1971; Hall and Stewart 2010; Reese 2004). The production of Islamic knowledge – studied holistically from the paper and other materials of recording to the social relations “around the text” – can reveal much about the vibrant symbology and sociology of African societies (Brigaglia and Nobili 2017). Similarly, in this new framing, political economy becomes the analysis of economic institutions. Important work has been done on the role of Islam in shaping legal contracts and thus the organization of trade (Lydon 2010), with the question in the background being whether or not religion hindered capitalist transformations in the Muslim world (Kuran 2011). It is worth emphasizing that this is one of the few areas in which Islam in Africa and economic history have intersected in recent studies. Legal history more generally has taken the law from its often aloof perch and returned it to the broader fabric of society, using contestations within and over courts to open up new vistas on the complex changes in African social life of the last century (Jeppie, Moosa, and Roberts 2010). The important and growing field of security studies has, of course, had much to say about Islam in Africa. Though sometimes remobilizing older orientalist tropes about the “problem” of religion and the state in Islam, the best of this work illuminates the ways in which ordinary Muslims’ lives in much of West and East Africa have been interpolated by both violent insurgencies and the global “war on terror,” while relations with governments reflect the legacies of colonial and postcolonial efforts to coopt religious leaders to serve the interests of corrupt and extractive regimes (Kendhammer 2016; Eltantawi 2017; Thurston 2017). Still, the technocratic isolation of tactics (terrorism), strategies (loose, decentralized networks), and putative objectives (an Islamic state, a revived “caliphate”) from specific contexts of growing economic inequality, social precariousness, transnational capital flows, arms trading, bank fraud, and geopolitical gamesmanship is more noticeable in much of this literature than perhaps anywhere else. Such approaches lead one to imagine, for instance, that it is simply a coincidence that many of the sites most associated with nodes in the networks of global jihād and the laundering of terrorist funds are also the sites of some of the most exuberant neoliberal innovation and of the most extreme financialization of the economy (Davis and Monk 2007).

Possible future directions The diversification of studies into aspects of African Muslims’ lives that has characterized the last two decades of scholarship presents both opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, approaches to historical research that accept the fragmentation of social life are often well placed to engage with a range of interdisciplinary endeavors, such as media studies, global health, human rights, and security studies. These are important projects both in the academy and in public

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discourse more generally. If history is to remain relevant as a discipline, it needs to participate in those conversations. Even within the “fragmented” domains of thematic scholarship, there are certain glaring lacunae in our knowledge. As mentioned above, certain topics of pressing global concern, such as environmental history or the history of science, have yet to incorporate lessons from African Muslim thought or practice. One way of overcoming the obstacles to such a reintegration of Islam into the mainstream of African history is through a recentering of the intellectual and ­cultural questions that concerned scholars like Fisher but without assuming the centrality or sufficiency of religion as an analytic category or texts as a uniquely privileged source. Islamic ethical discourse in Africa has a long tradition of questioning the equation of development with material wealth and of challenging the cynical or overly pragmatic exercise of power (Hanretta 2008b; Shankar 2014a; Sanneh 2016). Rumors and other non‐elite discourses reflect an attentiveness to what is shown (including a subtle distinction between display and transparency) and what is hidden in ways that offer the tools for a critique of corruption, of global inequality, and of the pseudo‐sovereignties of the postcolonial geopolitical order. Historical perspectives are also well placed to push back against the neoliberal assumptions reflected in the very dismemberment of the social that enables the recompositional projects of much interdisciplinary and social scientific work – such as with work on the role of Muslims as a force for national integration (Anthony 2000). An attentiveness to Muslim cultural production – art, music, literature – can provide more polyvalent foundations for an examination of a range of human historical dynamics. Louis Brenner’s (2001) work on Muslim education in Mali was, many agree, too dichotomous in its opposition between esoteric and rationalistic epistemologies and too mechanistic in its portrayal of the relationship between French and Muslim debates about reform. But it remains an exemplary effort to grasp the deep structures within a broad range of discourses. Other ambitious projects – such as Christopher Wise’s efforts to compare West African Sufi philosophy to deconstruction, or Nasrin Qader’s excavation of ethical stances in North and West African narrative techniques – remind us that Muslims have lives beyond the narrowly political or the concretely social (Wise 2009; Qader 2009). There is still much for historians of Africa – and not just of Islam – to learn from texts like the Tārı̄kh al-Sūdān or novels like Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure ambiguë. To consider the latter, what do our models of Islam and the state have to say to Kane’s scene in which the chief of the Diallobe, on his deathbed, summons the people of his community and asks them to pardon him individually for any specific wrong he may have committed against them and collectively for “the great misdeed stemming from my office as chief” – that is to say, for the inherent misdeed of having been chief (Kane [1961] 1972)? The integration of such materials, as well as songs, films, poetry, painting, and so on, into our research and – even more – our teaching can provide a powerful antidote



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to the decompositional and neo‐orientalist gaze that configures Muslim Africa as a source of problems. To be sure, these materials often confound the image of a document‐poor Africa that still haunts much teaching about the continent, an image that helps reinforce Muslims’ marginality or their exoticness. But such images have begun to break down more generally, through the salutary scholarship on “tin trunk” literacy, for instance. A greater obstacle has been that scholars of Islam in Africa have only occasionally provided the interpretive scaffolding that can help integrate such materials not into histories of Muslim communities per se, but into histories of communities of Africans, however defined.

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Chapter Thirteen

Refugees in African History Brett Shadle

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), at the end of 2015 there were some 4.4 million refugees in Africa (UNHCR 2016). Refugee camps rise out of dusty, unused corners of the continent like obscene oases. Host nations sometimes welcome refugees, sometimes harass them, sometimes chase them back across borders. Many refugees do their best to escape the tentacles of the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and government bodies and laws that constitute the modern “refugee regime.” Refugees find many ways to survive, even thrive, through their wits and energy, creating new relationships and negotiating the refugee regime as best they can. Despite the vast attention given to contemporary African refugees by NGOs, governments, and scholars of refugee studies, we know little about the history of refugees on the continent. While scholars of Europe and Asia have begun – albeit very recently – to explore the history of refugees (Gatrell 2013), with only a few exceptions historians of Africa have yet to join them. Yet it is a rich topic, with significant implications for other aspects of African history and for understanding contemporary refugee crises. What follows is less a state of the field as the outlining of a field still being formed. I begin by exploring how we might define “refugee” as an object of study, and then suggest some general questions that might guide us in trying to understand the history of refugees. From there, I give examples of how such questions could be pursued, looking at eastern Africa from the mid‐1800s A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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through World War I, colonial era bureaucratic “management” of refugees, and the movement of people during and after the liberation wars of southern Africa.

Who is a refugee? To encounter refugee studies for the first time is to be surprised by the field’s ongoing identity crisis. Scholars have developed methodologies for studying refugees, have created centers and journals dedicated to refugee studies, and try to ameliorate the condition of refugees around the world. Yet it is a matter of confusion as to who exactly the subject of research are. Too often in refugee studies, scholars find themselves, intentionally or otherwise, working with definitions that come from the “refugee regime” itself – the conventions and laws, the UNHCR, the humanitarian NGOs. “Refugee” as a bureaucratic tag becomes “refugee” as a unit of analysis: a legal category becomes a sociological or historical one. Hathaway (2007: 350), for example, argues that refugees constitute “a relatively clearly defined category of persons … who share the bond of, at the very least, a common legal status” to the extent that we can talk about a “refugee experience.” Malkki (1995a: 496), in contrast, points to the “extraordinarily diverse historical and political causes” behind forced migration, which “involve people who, while all displaced, find themselves in qualitatively different situations and predicaments.” As such, she argues, “refugee” lacks “analytical usefulness … as a label for a special, generalizable ‘kind’ or ‘type’ of person or situation”: there simply cannot be any single “refugee experience.” In a sense, both sides of this argument have merit, because they begin from entirely different premises. For someone involved in protecting refugee rights, it makes sense to emphasize those who, under international law, hold such rights. For those more concerned with studying refugees’ daily lives, how refugees themselves understand and experience being a refugee (and, indeed, if “legal” refugees even consider themselves to be refugees), lumping all refugees together makes less sense.1 We can, I believe, accept a strict legal category of “refugee” for the purpose of defending the rights of those who claim refugee status, yet at the same time in our research use broader, messier, but ultimately more revealing approaches to the objects of our analysis. One stream of research suggests that we pay closer attention to webs of social relationships among those we might term “refugees” (Marx 1990; Lubkemann 2008). Englund’s (2002) masterful study of people’s movement across the Mozambique–Malawi border during war and peacetime is especially helpful in this regard. What was critical in the lives of those he studied were the social relationships that people brought with them from Mozambique, the relationships they had previously had in Malawi, the new relationships they created, and how these relationships changed over time: The subjects of this study went into exile as persons enmeshed in relationships, and the processes by which they experienced their displacement were indeterminate because of the myriad relationships which they carried with them. Their relationships were shaped, as both before and after displacement, by historical contingencies. (Englund 2002: 4)



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Recent research also emphasizes refugee agency. Consider the often used imagery of “flows” of refugees, a “trickle” or a “flood” of refugees “pouring” across border. When a river overflows its banks, it does not choose where to go. Gravity and the topography determine its path, its future. So too, it seems, a “flood” of refugees. Too often, journalists and academics alike portray refugees as having no agency, mindlessly fleeing, in whatever direction, and seeking shelter somewhere, anywhere. Yet refugees do make choices. I would suggest that, rather than studying some singular category of “refugee,” we instead study seeking refuge as a process: through a need to preserve one’s (biological and/or social) life, one leaves a home, alone or with others, to begin the process of creating or renegotiating social relationships in a place of relative security and promise. This approach has several advantages. It is not based on the idea of the refugee as a solitary individual in the midst of blind flight away from something, though neither does it ignore those who flee under a shower of bullets and bombs. It requires us to consider change over time and to recognize that one’s identity is not necessarily fundamentally and perpetually altered by migration. It does not presume any easy integration into a new community for, despite regular talk of an African “tradition of hospitality,” refugees are easily exploitable and are readily exploited. It allows for the study of refugee camps as communities that residents have a role in shaping, that change over time, and that (despite often dehumanizing conditions and bureaucratic heartlessness) are places where people discover, invent, and negotiate interpersonal and communal social relationships – and where legal status as “refugee” is only one among many types of identities. It does not impose the identity of “refugee” on someone who may reject such identity, nor does it override local definitions of “refugee.”2 Nor does it deny that individuals may actively adopt the label of “refugee.”

Research questions I offer here a series of questions, grouped under four broad themes, that I believe may prove productive in our attempts to write the history of refuge seeking in Africa. They have been informed by the work of many other scholars, and I claim no originality.

Processes of seeking refuge Perhaps at the most basic level, we must inquire into the processes of seeking refuge, (re)negotiating relationships, and (in some cases) return. Why and how do people decide to seek refuge? What are the processes by which migrants are allowed into a community, and how do their sex, age, levels of desperation or strength, and so on influence their reception? In what ways does their presence shape local communities? How and by whom have refuge seekers been mobilized (for political support, for guerrilla armies)? Why and how do people decide that they wish to and can return to their homes? How do returnees create or recreate

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communities, and how are ideas of home, gender, community, leadership, and so on shaped by migration and return? How are they received by community ­members who did not leave?

Identity, historical memory and narrative How do refuge seekers tell and create their histories? To what extent is migrancy remembered or forgotten? What language do people use to mark a refuge seeker, and to what extent do refuge seekers adopt, reject, or reinterpret such identities? Do groups and individuals in exile (on the continent or overseas) create narratives of loss and oppression, and/or of a time of heroic suffering from which a new community will emerge? Who are the intellectuals in refugee camps (Ranger 1994)? How can we use refugees’ words – autobiographies, poetry, media, interviews, and as filtered through government, missionary, and NGO reports  –  as sources to write the history of refugees, and history as understood by refugees?

The refugee regime What are the colonial and precolonial antecedents to the postcolonial “refugee regime”? What are the bureaucratic forms that the refugee regime has taken in Africa, and how have various actors (international and local NGOs, missionaries, African and European government officials, “host communities,” and refugees themselves) shaped the various refugee regimes? What are the histories of “humanitarianism” in Africa, and how do those histories intersect with those of refugees? In what ways have African refugees shaped the international history of humanitarianism, decolonization, Cold War competitions, and the United Nations? How and by whom is knowledge created about “the refugee”? How do we write the history of a refugee camp?

Sovereignty, citizenship, and belonging How has the reception, definition, and treatment of refuge seekers differed between “stateless” societies, chieftaincies, kingdoms, colonial states, and postcolonial nations? How do ethnic, national, religious, and racial identities influence refugee history? How do refuge seekers complicate, undermine, or reinforce political sovereignty, identity, and legal and affective notions of belonging? How have states used (actual or the image of) refugees to pursue ideological, developmental, and geopolitical goals, to define who belongs and who does not? I have certainly not exhausted the list of questions that scholars might pose for the history of refugees, but these do point to some of the paths that we might follow. In the remainder of the chapter, I draw on the works of other scholars and on primary sources to explore what histories of African refugees might look like. The



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sections that follow are not meant to be an overview of the history of refuge seeking  –  we still know far too little to undertake this. Instead, each section takes particular time periods, regions, and themes that I find to be suggestive.

Eastern Africa, 1850s–1920s Refuge seeking in eastern Africa has a long history, which is often linked with warfare and environmental disasters. Between the 1850s and 1920s refuge seeking became exceedingly common (in different places and at different times). Thousands of individuals left their homes as a result of warfare and the expansion of the slave trade. Beginning in the 1890s, waves of environmental and epidemiological disasters struck: rinderpest, jiggers, smallpox, locusts, and famines. As communities began to recover in the early 1900s, large swaths of southern Tanganyika (colonial Tanzania) broke out in warfare  –  Maji Maji, both a war against German colonialism and the result of very localized tensions and histories. The Germans crushed resistance with utter brutality, often employing scorched earth policies. Giblin notes that if one image predominates among residents of Njombe (southern Tanzania) about these years, “it is the image of desperate flight before advancing armies.” Those living slightly east recall it as “the time of running” or “the time of dispersal” (Giblin 2005: 37). With the outbreak of World War I, many parts of German East Africa became battlefields, forcing people from their homes to avoid war and conscription, and to seek food after armies had raided their granaries (Maddox 1990). How, where, and with whom people sought shelter varied widely. Larger polities, always hungry for more people, often welcomed refuge seekers. Migration from hunger and warfare in southeast Tanzania could mean “abandoning one’s village for the nearest thicket, or moving many miles to inaccessible areas,” or to areas where cassava was abundant, or to the coast to seek wage labor (Becker 2010). Given the human networks that criss‐crossed political and environmental boundaries, it was the odd family that did not have someone they could turn to. Waller recounts the story of a Maasai man, Tima, whose father had “saved the life of a Meru [who live near Mt Kenya] during a raid,” after which they became blood brothers. Later, when Maasailand was torn apart by disease and warfare, the Meru man “sponsored [Tima’s family’s] entry into his community and provid[ed] them with land and shelter” until they could return to the plains (Waller: 1988: 97–98). Only the most desperate fled with little sense of where to go. Despite the general desire to take on new dependents and kin across most of eastern Africa, migrants had to think carefully about where to go. Kamba refuge seekers in the 1890s often skirted Embu areas for more distant Gikuyuland: better to risk a longer trek than to be met by well‐fed but notoriously unwelcoming Embu (Ambler 1988: 44–48). Refugees were readily accepted in places like the  southern shores of Lake Baringo, as agricultural laborers to supply passing caravans (Anderson 2002: 32). Elsewhere, more successful farmers preferred to

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continue trading their surplus than to share it with starving refugees. As elephants were hunted out, and the demand for slaves increased along the coast, areas that formerly supplied ivory now turned to supplying bodies. This meant that refuge seekers who may previously have been welcomed as temporary clients or ­permanent kin might now be sold off as slaves. In Giblin’s phrase, this could be “the price of refuge” (1996: 140). The later histories of Kenya and Tanzania have been shaped by the movements of people in these years. Refugees could have substantial impact on their host communities. Adults retained their modes of thinking and of speaking, their rituals and their moral codes, and sometimes highly valuable skills (Waller 1984; cf. Gewald 2002). The infusion of new customs and ideas might be welcomed, or they might mark the stranger as an outsider, perhaps a dangerous one. In numbers, refugees could alter cultures. In the early 1890s the western parts of Arusha welcomed large numbers of Maasai dispersed by war and rinderpest. Their impact, Spear writes, “is still apparent in the greater prominence of Maasai culture in western Arusha today,” compared to eastern parts (Spear 1997: 46). Migrants who settled among their hosts could also serve as cultural brokers between their new and old communities, perhaps serving as hosts for later refugees (Waller 1993). Some who sought refuge at early British outposts remained when others returned to their homes. Perhaps having lost contact with family during the social dislocations of these years, some individuals “settled down permanently, becoming part of these small Muslim societies” (Ambler 1988: 139). Mixing with other unattached individuals, they formed the nucleus of Kenya’s inland urban centers. Some refuge seekers managed to find their way back to their former homes, but the psychic toll of flight must have been enormous. They were not simply starting another growing season, but trying to recreate their communities (cf. Peterson: 2004). Not all kin and neighbors returned with them, and some returned with new relatives or dependents. What, we must ask, were the mental and emotional costs paid by returned refugees? With children, spouses, parents, siblings dead or settled in a distant land, or with fates unknown, how did individuals cope with daily life? They created new families and new communities, but were they haunted by the knowledge that peace was fragile, that bonds between kin could be broken (cf. Kershaw 1997; Vaughn 1987)? How might returnees’ ideas of the wider world have been changed by their travels and their exposure to new cultures, and how did this translate into cultural and political change in the colonial era (Waller 1988; cf. Peterson 2004)?

Colonialism and refugee management The expansion of European imperialism in the late nineteenth century introduced new reasons for Africans to leave their homes. Tales of bloody conquest, or perhaps the taste of European savagery, caused many people to seek shelter away from colonial “peace.” There is also plentiful evidence of people crossing colonial



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borders to escape forced labor, heavy taxes, and oppressive political rule. At the same time, the colonial period marks the beginning of the modern refugee regime in Africa: that strange mix of humanitarianism, suspicion of refugees, desire to control refugee bodies, and international intervention and legal norms. At times, European administrators and settlers undertook the provision of famine relief for Africans. Already in the early 1890s, missionaries in Ethiopia successfully raised funds in Sweden to support some 800 families who had left their homes because of famine (Pankhurst and Johnson 1988: 65). Of particular importance to understanding the modern refugee regime, colonial states also constructed what were the first refugee camps on the continent. Among the enduring images of the South African War (1899‐1902) are the concentration camps, into which the British military herded thousands of their Afrikaner enemy. Yet there were also many people – white and black – who came willingly to British lines to escape warfare. By mid‐1900 the army had established “refugee camps” to protect the white “hands‐uppers” from being commandeered by Afrikaner forces. Until March 1901, authorities treated those who had willingly come to British lines better than those who had been forced to the camps (“undesirables”). According to one medical officer, the former were “bona fide refugees who have come in for protection from Boers.”3 Throughout the conflict, British reports usually spoke of “refugee camps,” only occasionally using “concentration camp.” This use of “refugee” is worthy of inquiry: What did “refugee” mean in bureaucratic and popular discourse? How did the naming of internees shape policy, if at all? And how did “refugees” view themselves? Military officials also ordered the removal of African farmers who might (voluntarily or not) assist the enemy. British officials first housed them in whatever town at which they arrived, or simply unloaded them at railways stations to fend for themselves (Kessler 2012: 78). Africans who gathered near military bases and white concentration camps were eventually taken over by the Department of Refugees. By June 1901, military officials had determined that operating two sets of camps, segregated racially, was too much for one office. It was also clear that officials saw African refugees differently from “legitimate” white refugees and internees. Thus, with the establishment of the Native Refugee Department, the “first consideration” was to be “the supply of native labour to the Army” (quoted in Warwick 1983: 149; see also Mohlamme 2001). Economy was the watchword of the day for the camps, as African were expected to grow or pay for their own food, while their housing and medical care were far inferior to what was provided in the white camps. Money earned outside the camp was used for clothes and blankets, which were essential to survival. While the military proclaimed African refugees to be happy and grateful, letters of protest and desertion from the camps suggest otherwise. South African officials created new camps a dozen years later, this time in freshly conquered German South West Africa (Namibia). The 1890s through World War I were not happy years in southern Angola: the concentration of firearms in the east led to raiding in the west, followed by a series of environmental

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and epidemiological disasters, and the final, brutal push by the Portuguese to extend their colonial reach. Refugees from the fighting fled into a region already stretched to or past its limits. Hospitality was refused, and people died along the roadsides. The South African army, which had relatively quickly swept the Germans from power, soon had to take steps to deal with refugees and famine victims. Officials viewed refugees through the lenses of labor, humanitarianism, and a distrust of the poor. Herero laborers had deserted their German employers early in the war, leaving the economy in desperate straits. The Native Affairs Department agreed that food should be provided to the starving, but noted that the “grant of rations in these circumstances is liable to grave abuse by Natives who are not bona fide seekers of work” (quoted in Gewald 2003: 223). Care would have to be taken to not feed the lazy, unworthy refugees; soon, Ovambo refugees roamed several northern settlements, some of them dying in the streets. It was in this context that, in September 1915, the military established a refugee camp at Karibib, a railway town. The Karibib camp was, in the beginning, only a slight improvement on living in the streets. Latrines were poor, the rudimentary and overcrowded hospitals were spread across the town in sheds and warehouses, and no housing was provided to those not in need of immediate medical care. Within a few months, bureaucratization came to Karibib, with sanitation inspectors, barbed wire and thorn bush enclosures to regulate movement, and a centralized kitchen. Still, the provision of labor remained a primary concern. Through 1916, as conditions in Ovamboland improved, the number of refugees slowed, and Karibib “became more and more of a labour depot as opposed to a refugee centre. In effect, the camp became a depot to which weakened labourers, particularly railway workers, were returned and replaced by others who had recovered their strength” (Gewald 2003: 234). At least by the 1930s, rhetoric regarding refugees, and their encampment, had begun to more closely resemble that used in today’s refugee regime. As Everill (2013) argues, the target of British humanitarianism shifted in the 1930s from “the slave” to “the refugee.” In the nineteenth century, Britain’s official policy toward Africa was wrapped up in the humanitarian impulse of ending slavery and the slave trade (though in practice officials were rarely fire‐breathing abolitionists). During its 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, the Italian government took up this rhetoric, using the continued existence of slavery in the African kingdom as justification for the war. Rather than grant the Italian aggressors the moral high ground, the British government began reshaping the object of the oppressed African, the victim in need of succor. It was increasingly the refugee from the war that loomed large in the British mind. Everill marks the Italo‐Abyssinian war as the point when “the African refugee” supplanted “the African slave” as one of the primary embodiments of the poor benighted African. As we look more closely at events on the ground, it is clear that British officials did not always count humanitarianism as their first duty (Wilkin 1980; Kagwanja



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2004). When Eritrean deserters (from the Italian army) and defeated Ethiopian leaders, soldiers, and civilians began appearing near the Kenyan frontier, officials sought immediately to preserve the integrity of the international boundary. One of the first memoranda circulating within the government thus discussed who should be allowed over the border: “As previously decided the border will be closed to refugees who will be refused permission to enter.”4 Although Britain had signed no international treaties affirming their duties toward refugees, humanitarian sentiment (including the “white man’s burden”) meant that policy later became rather more liberal. One district officer reported that he had admitted refugees who could produce “satisfactory evidence that if they were not afforded Asylum in Kenya they would be in imminent danger of annihilation or other severities.”5 These could be considered people deserving of protection. Those who simply wished to avoid Italian rule, or who had fled the fighting but had no specific reason to fear persecution, would be turned away. As a member of the Colonial Office argued, there was no reason for the government of Kenya to be “burdened” financially in the support of people who had no compelling reason to leave their homelands.6 Compared to camps in South Africa and Southwest Africa, those in Kenya seem closer to contemporary refugee camps. The primary concern was not so much with creating laborers but with the control of movement and provision of services. In the first, military‐run, camps, the commandant recommended the use of barbed wire and a well‐placed machine gun to control refugees. When civilian officials took over from the army, they thought the gun unnecessary but retained the emphasis on isolation, observation, and control. After initially being housed near the border, the Ethiopians were transferred to Isiolo, a dusty trading and administrative center on the edges of the more densely populated central Kenya. With the outbreak of war with Germany, the administration moved them again, to Taveta near the Tanganyika border, with their nearest neighbor a European‐ run sisal plantation. Visits by outsiders were strictly limited. As in contemporary “protracted refugee situations,” British officials were caught between the desire that the refugees not reside long on Kenyan soil, and the need to provide the infrastructure to keep refugees more than simply alive. As the upper administration told the camp commandant in 1939, it should be made clear to the refugees that it is not the intention that their camp in this Colony should continue indefinitely, and that the choice offered to them is not between returning to Abyssinia and living on in the camp with food supplied to them, but between returning to Abyssinia and making a livelihood in some other part of the world at present unknown.7

(The defeat of the Italians eventually permitted the refugees to return to Ethiopia.) In the meantime, however, humanitarianism required the state to cater for the refugees. In the first settlements, this meant tents, latrines, food, and basic ­medical

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care. As time passed, however, the camps began to look more permanent, to be more carefully planned, and to provide a variety of social services. At Taveta, administrators took great care to ensure that the new site was disease‐free (reams of paper were used in discussions of mosquito‐breeding points) and had plentiful water. Concrete homes were built for European staff and hospitals, while refugees would be housed in mudbrick shelters rather than tents. Medical staff were seconded to the camp, and a missionary offered education and handicraft courses. Nonetheless, humanitarianism only went so far. As one Foreign Office mandarin put it in regard to other Ethiopians who had fled to Somaliland, “These refugees are an unmitigated nuisance.”8

Southern African liberation wars and after The declining years of colonialism introduced a new set of factors that shaped refugee history. Power struggles, before or after the handover of state power, left thousands with few options other than migration – Rwanda and southern Sudan are classic examples. Over the next decades, many struggles over the state or other internal conflict convinced millions of Africans to seek shelter elsewhere, either within or across national borders. Early on, African governments often reacted in a relatively welcoming manner (or at least with limited hostility) toward those who crossed their borders. Indeed, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) introduced the “Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa” in 1969, which offered a more expansive definition of “refugee” than did the United Nations (UNHCR 2006, 2016). Yet, as many African economies contracted in the 1970s and 1980s, citizens often looked askance at refugees who soaked up too many state resources and filled too many local jobs (or at least appeared to) (Rosenthal 2015). Politicians too might find it useful to stir up xenophobia against the refugee, the other against whom the citizen could be defined. Refugees themselves might use their time in exile to create their own new national identities. And, while the roots of the modern refugee regime lay in the colonial period, the past 50 years have witnessed an unprecedented flourishing of local and international NGOs involved in refugee issues in Africa, and the mushrooming of camps meant to warehouse refugees. A look at southern Africa migration illuminates these themes. With brutal wars of liberation against white minority regimes in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Angola, followed by often equally brutal civil wars, tens of thousands of southern Africans found it wise to migrate to areas of relative security. Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Congo, and Kenya (and later Angola and Mozambique) all served as havens. All these governments were trapped (to varying extents) between the competing desires of supporting liberation movements, tracking noncitizens within their borders, maintaining their own citizens’ well‐ being, and, for the frontline states, defending their borders against hostile regimes.



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Accepting political activists and militants proved a nation’s pro‐liberation stance, but, like any good modern state, government authorities usually tried their best to identify and regulate refugees. Kenya issued “prohibited immigrant” papers, which, despite the name, were required to be held by refugees who wished to move about the country freely. The Tanzanian government welcomed refugees if they were allied with one of the recognized liberation movements. Should a southern African have a falling out with the party leadership and be expelled from the group, however, he or she was subject to deportation. When the Portuguese surrendered their empire, the Kenya government placed great pressure on Mozambican refugees to return home, regardless of their relationship with the new ruling party, FRELIMO. Those who refused to leave lost (at least temporarily) access to governmental and NGO assistance. Tague (2015b) similarly demonstrates how international organizations also saw working with refugees as a positive and visible, if indirect, means of opposing white minority regimes. Many NGOs, as well as both Cold War camps, directed special attention to refugee education, in the hopes that students would soon return home to build new, friendly, black‐majority governments. One means to keep track of refugees was concentrated settlements. In the 1960s and 1970s Botswana, Tanzania, and Zambia all passed restrictive new laws meant to regulate rather than protect refugees, although it appears that these were rarely enforced (Rutinwa 2002). Each of these states, however, did try to herd refugees into camps. For host governments and liberation movements, camps were extremely useful. Botswana, for example, sought to prevent South African and Rhodesian/Zimbabwean refugees from staging cross‐border raids, ones that sparked retaliatory attacks by white forces (Southall 1984). It was better to keep refugees in a centralized location, ready to be shipped north to Zambia. Tanzania used rural settlements to direct Mozambican refugee labor toward agricultural and infrastructural development (Tague 2015a). Liberation movements too appreciated camps as a means to train guerrillas, to collect would‐be militants, to provide education to followers, and  –  through their domination of physical space and the distribution of food, medicine and other resources  –  to control people, and to create nations in miniature, nations in exile (Williams 2011a, 2015; Makanya, 1994; cf. Malkki 1995b). Operating refugee camps – which could contain a mixture of people under arms, newly arrived recruits, students, and other civilians – allowed liberation movements to stake a claim to international humanitarian resources and to ideological superiority over the refugee‐producing white minority states. As Williams (2015) has shown, such camps can become central parts of new states’ historical, nationalist, through‐the‐fire narrative – although former residents of those camps continue to produce their own powerful counternarratives. In all cases, of course, refugees in and from southern Africa had their own ideas about where they should go, and why, and what their role in liberation movements should be. Much as the Tanzanian government and liberation movement

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leaders wished to keep refugees under tight party control, many tired of sitting in camps, chafed under their leaders’ authoritarianism (and seemingly well‐off lifestyles), or saw their personal dreams melting away. Some slipped across the border to Kenya, setting up in Nairobi where they enjoyed the availability of NGO ­support and the sometimes lax enforcement of immigration controls (Hawley 1970; Williams, 2011b). Nor were refugees willing to fulfill the quiet, humble, grateful role that many agencies expected of them. Namibian students in Nairobi demanded an increase in the cost of living allowance, protested an alleged misuse of funds by the Joint Refugee Services of Kenya (JRSK), and refused to provide personal information to social workers.9 Refugees could become aggressive, even violent, in demanding their promised financial support from NGOs (Tandon 198410). In some areas NGO‐sponsored education was directed primarily toward the liberal arts and professions, in large measure because so few refugees were interested in trade schools. Moreover, while the refugee regime requires much more study, we must note that most people did their best to avoid interaction with host governments and NGOs. Indeed, many self‐settled migrants positively rejected the label of refugee. As Hansen (1979, 1981) discovered in rural Zambia in the early 1970s, Angolans much preferred to live away from camps, even if it meant a lower standard of living. People settled with or near families with whom they had some kind of social relationship. Migrants also found many ways of creating new social relations: some Angolan women divorced their husbands to marry Zambian men, thus staking much stronger claims in their new surroundings (Spring 1979). At times, people were forced to stretch the limits of acceptable social practice – one man took shelter in the village his sister had married into, normally a breach of etiquette. But getting caught up in the bureaucracy, becoming a solitary body subjected to paternalistic dictates and the whims of guards and far‐off clerks and officials, appealed to few. Perhaps only one‐third of Angolan refugees lived in Zambian camps, and those were primarily people who were unable to draw on or to create social relationships with Zambians (Hansen 1979; cf. Brinkman 1999). Local power brokers often welcomed these migrants. In 1980s Zambia, chiefs found migrants from Angola and Zaire to be loyal followers, and protected them from government directives that all refugees be sent to camps (Freund and Kalumba 1986). One chief “decreed that nobody should be referred to as a refugee in his area; they are all simply (his) people” (Bakewell 2004; cf. Tague 2015a). Yet we can well imagine that, were circumstances to change – with increased pressure from the central government or a reduction in resource availability  –  the chief might well have quickly labeled these people as refugees. Indeed, chiefs in eastern Zimbabwe in the 1990s were happy to accept Mozambican refugees since they were so easily exploitable, could be settled on land the chiefs wished to claim, and could be compensated for their labor at a lower rate than Zimbabwean nationals would accept (McDermott Hughes 1999).



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Sources For much of the precolonial and colonial years, historians of refugees draw on sources similar to those of other historians of Africa: traveler accounts, colonial and missionary archives, interviews. Oral histories collected by previous scholars reveal much about refuge seeking, although few of these have been made widely available. The growth of humanitarian and nongovernmental organizations in the postcolonial years meant the proliferation of written sources, although access to them may be limited and may require travel to a number of different NGO headquarters. Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre and the Refugee Council Archive at the University of East London each has collections of published and unpublished material on refugee history, mostly dating from the 1970s. Many UNHCR publications are readily available online,11 although they must of course be approached critically (Crisp 1999). As we reach the 1970s and 1980s, the availability of refugee voices increases dramatically. Interviews with former refuge seekers and their hosts provide critical material to complement that produced by governments and NGOs, as Rosenthal (2015) and Williams (2015) have shown. Interviews with refugees, especially those who have been encamped for decades, are potentially invaluable in the writing of, for example, the life history of a refugee camp. The ethics of such research, however, are delicate (Mackenzie, McDowell, and Pittaway 2007). For scholars based in Europe, North America, and Australia, communities of “resettled refugees” may be excellent sources; many have an online presence and community and cultural centers (Besteman 2016). Refugees also produce their own written records. A genre of refugee memoirs and biographies has emerged that provide a welcome, if complicated and mediated, source for scholars and students alike (Dau 2007; Eggers 2006; Deng, Deng, and Ajak, 2005; Umutesi 2004; Janzen and Janzen 2000: ch. 1). Qaabatu Boru and his colleagues have since 2008 published a refugee‐run online newspaper out of Kakuma (https://kanere.org).

Conclusion The history of refuge seeking in Africa is, as I hope I have shown, rich and in need of much greater scholarly attention. Refuge seekers have helped to shape Africa’s political, cultural, and economic histories, in both subtle and overt ways. Few regions in Africa have neither offered refuge nor witnessed the out‐migration of people seeking safe ground. For over 100 years, the movement of people has driven debates over the nature of the state, of belonging, of ideological goals and humanitarian responsibilities. Not of least importance, the study of African refugees may help us better understand contemporary Africa. As has been witnessed in South Africa in recent years, refuge seekers are not always met with open arms. Xenophobic violence all too often is directed at Mozambicans and Zimbabweans who have

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crossed b ­ orders in search of safety and better lives. How might a history of refuge seeking in southern Africa help us place these reactions in longer narratives, of exiles and refugees during the liberation struggles, of those who fled violence of European settlers, of the wars of the Zulu expansion? How might a study of refugees illuminate ideas of belonging, of political power, of generosity, as well as of hostility to the other, that must be germane to current events? Similarly, can operatives in the refugee regime ever succeed in improving the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people languishing in camps, if scholars do not help them understand the historical context in which they operate?12 We would do well to link the long, rich history of refuge seeking with today’s refuge seekers who, regardless of the challenges they face, never cease to write their own pasts, their own futures.

Acknowledgments I extend my thanks to Christian Williams and Bill Worger for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter, and to Dane Kennedy and the attendees at the Culture and Conflict conference at the Library of Congress, where I presented some of the ideas developed here.

Notes 1 Not incidentally, if we follow Hathaway, refugees cannot exist as a focus of study until legislation has created the category of refugee: historians of the pre‐1951 world will be left with rather little to contribute to refugee studies. 2 This is one of the difficulties in research on refugees: if a person flees her home, settles someplace new, marries, raises a family, takes part in local ceremonies, and so on, can we still study her as a refugee? For example, in her study of Burundians in Tanzania, Malkki (1995b) contrasts Hutu in a refugee camp (who actively embraced and developed their identity as refugees) with those in a nearby town (who actively rejected the label of refugee, and explored various means of integrating themselves locally). She describes both groups, however, as refugees. For the purposes of tracking changes over time, this makes sense: how did refuge seekers deal with life in Tanzania? But is it accurate, or fair, to label as refugees people who had left Burundi a decade before? At what point do we accept individuals’ self‐identification and daily experiences and study them not as refugees, but as ex‐refugees, or something else? Certainly, legal and bureaucratic refugee policies remained relevant to the town‐dwellers’ lives, but these were hurdles to overcome, and we should hesitate to allow state‐imposed categories to define our analytic categories. Studying refugeeness as a process allows us to avoid the trap of thinking of individuals as either refugee or citizen. 3 Dr. J. S. Haldane, “Memorandum on the rations in the concentration camps,” November 1901, in African (South), No. 687, Correspondence [March 4, 1901, to February 14, 1902] relating to Refugee Camps in South Africa. July 1902, p. 89. National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom, MS Selected Colonial Office Files on Africa. http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/3fPn9, accessed July 23, 2014.



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4 DO Lokitaung to Officer in Charge, King’s African Rifles, Lokichoggio, October 11, 1935, Kenya National Archive (KNA), DC/LOK/6/13. 5 Officer in Charge, Turkana, to Chief Secretary, June 28, 1937, KNA, DC/LDR/1/1/51. 6 J. A. Calder, Colonial Office, to Foreign Office, March 4, 1937, KNA, DC/ LDR/1/1/51. This policy continued even after Ethiopia’s liberation: “There may be occasions when considerations of common humanity may render the affording of a temporary asylum to refugees unavoidable. Such cases, however, should be few” (L. A. Weaving, for Chief Secretary, to Officer in Charge, Northern Frontier, January 22, 1942, KNA, DC/ISO/2/3/8). 7 Quoted in Chief Secretary to Provincial Commissioner, Coast, January 10, 1940, KNA, PC/COAST/2/26/1. 8 Future of Ethiopian refugees in British Somaliland, British National Archive, FO 371/23375/4349. 9 Namibian Students in Nairobi to Regional Representative, Office of the United Nations Commissioner for Namibians, Zambia, March 12, 1974; Minutes of the JRSK Council Meeting, March 27, 1974; Report by Acolia Simon‐Thomas, May 29, 1974, all in KNA, AMP/1/19. 10 It is not clear in this instance if Tandon is speaking just of Ugandans, but there is anecdotal evidence of former liberation movement refugees making strong demands at the office of the JRSK. 11 http://www.unhcr.org/en‐us/resources‐and‐publications.html, accessed March 13, 2018. 12 I write these words at a time when antirefugee rhetoric has become increasingly loud, and the Trump administration seeks to bar the admission of refugees from, among other places, Libya, Sudan, and Somalia. One hopes that further research on refugee history will serve to blunt the uninformed fear of and vile xenophobia toward refuge seekers that afflicts so many of my fellow citizens.

References Ambler, Charles. 1988. Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism: The Central Region in the Late Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. Anderson, David M. 2002. Eroding the Commons: The Politics of Ecology in Baringo, Kenya, 1890s–1963. Oxford: James Currey. Bakewell, Oliver. 2004. “Repatriation: Angolan Refugees or Migrating Villagers?” In Refugees and the Transformation of Societies: Agency, Policies, Ethics and Politics, edited by Philomena Essed, Georg Frerks, and Joke Schrijvers, 31–41. New York: Berghahn. Becker, Felicitas. 2010. “Sudden Disaster and Slow Change: Maji Maji and the Long‐ Term History of Southeast Tanzania.” In Maji Maji: Lifting the Fog of War, edited by James Giblin and Jamie Monson, 295–321. Leiden: Brill. Besteman, Catherine. 2016. Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brinkman, Inge. 1999. “Violence, Exile and Ethnicity: Nyemba Refugees in Kaisosi and Kehemu (Rundu, Namibia).” Journal of Southern African Studies 25: 417–439. Crisp, Jeff. 1999. “Who Has Counted the Refugees? UNHCR and the Politics of Numbers.” New Issues in Refugee Research, Working Paper 12, UNHCR, Geneva. http://www.unhcr.org/3ae6a0c22.pdf, accessed December 1, 2015.

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Dau, John Bul, with Michael Sweeney. 2007. God Grew Tired of Us. Washington, DC: National Geographic. Deng, Benson, Alphsonsion Deng, and Benjamin Ajak, with Judy Bernstein. 2005. They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan. New York: PublicAffairs. Eggers, Dave. 2006. What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. New York: Vintage Books. Englund, Harri. 2002. From War to Peace on the Mozambique–Malawi Borderland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press / International African Institute. Everill, Bronwen. 2013. “The Italo‐Abyssinian Crisis and the Shift from Slave to Refugee.” Slavery & Abolition 35: 1–17. Freund, Paul J., and Katele Kalumba. 1986. “Spontaneously Settled Refugees in Northwestern Province, Zambia.” International Migration Review 20: 299–312. Gatrell, Peter. 2013. The Making of the Modern Refugee. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gewald, Jan‐Bart. 2002. “‘I Was Afraid of Samuel, Therefore I came to Sekgoma’: Herero Refugees and Patronage Politics in Ngamiland, Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1890–1914.” Journal of African History 43: 211–234. Gewald, Jan‐Bart. 2003. “Near Death in the Streets of Karibib: Famine, Migrant Labour and the Coming of Ovambo to Central Namibia.” Journal of African History 44: 211–239. Giblin, James. 1996. “The Precolonial Politics of Disease Control in the Lowlands of Northeastern Tanzania.” In Custodians of the Land: Ecology and Culture in the History of Tanzania, edited by Gregory Maddox, James L. Giblin, and Isaria N. Kimambo, 127–151. Oxford: James Currey. Giblin, James. 2005. A History of the Excluded: Making Family a Refuge from State in Twentieth‐Century Tanzania. Oxford: James Currey. Hansen, Art. 1979. “Once the Running Stops: Assimilation of Angolan Refugees into Zambian Border Villages.” Disasters 3: 369–374. Hansen, Art. 1981. “Refugee Dynamics: Angolans in Zambia, 1966–1972.” International Migration Review 15: 175–194. Hathaway, James C. 2007. “Forced Migration Studies: Could We Agree Just To ‘Date’?” Journal of Refugee Studies 26: 349–369. Hawley, Rev. Edward A. 1970. “Refugees in Kenya Formerly Affiliated with Liberation Movements.” Unpublished paper. Kagwanja, P. 2004. “Unwanted in the ‘White Highlands’: The Politics of Civil Society and the Making of a Refugee in Kenya, 1902–2002.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois. Kershaw, Greet. 1997. Mau Mau from Below. Oxford: James Currey. Kessler, Stowell. 2012. The Black Concentration Camps of the Anglo‐Boer War, 1899–1902. Bloemfontein: War Museum. Janzen, John M., and Reinhild Kauenhoven Janzen. 2000. Do I Still Have a Life? Voices from the Aftermath of War in Rwanda and Burundi. Lawrence: University of Kansas. Lubkemann, Stephen C. 2008. Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mackenzie, Catriona, Christopher McDowell, and Eileen Pittaway. 2007. “Beyond ‘Do No Harm’: The Challenge of Constructing Ethical Relationships in Refugee Research.” Journal of Refugee Studies 20: 299–319.



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Maddox, Gregory. 1990. “Mtunya: Famine in Central Tanzania, 1917–1920.” Journal of African History 31: 181–197. Makanya, Stella Tandai. 1994. “The Desire to Return: Effects of Experiences in Exile on Refugees Repatriating to Zimbabwe in the Early 1980s.” In When Refugees Go Home, edited by Tim Allen and Hubert Moskink, 126–166. Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Malkki, Liisa H. 1995a. “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 495–523. Malkki, Liisa H. 1995b. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marx, Emanuel. 1990. “The Social World of Refugees: A Conceptual Framework.” Journal of Refugee Studies 3: 189–203. McDermott Hughes, David. 1999. “Refugees and Squatters: Immigration and the Politics of Territory on the Zimbabwe‐Mozambique Border.” Journal of Southern African Studies 25: 533–552. Mohlamme, J. S. 2001. “African Refugee Camps in the Boer Republics.” In Scorched Earth, edited by Fransjohan Pretorius, 110–121. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau. Pankhurst, Richard, and Douglas H. Johnson. 1988. “The Great Drought and Famine of 1888–1892 in Northeast Africa.” In The Ecology of Survival: Case Studies from Northeast African History, edited by Douglas H. Johnson and David M. Anderson, 47–70. London: Lester Cook. Peterson, Brian J. 2004. “Slave Emancipation, Trans‐local Social Processes and the Spread of Islam in French Colonial Buguni (Southern Mali), 1893–1914.” Journal of African History 45: 421–444. Ranger, Terence. 1994. “Studying Repatriation as Part of African Social History.” In When Refugees Go Home, edited by Tim Allen and Hubert Moskink, 279–295. Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Rutinwa, Bonaventure. 2002. “Asylum and Refugee Policies in Southern Africa: A Historical Perspective.” Unpublished paper presented at a South African Regional Poverty Network workshop on “Regional Integration, Migration, and Poverty,” Pretoria. https://sarpn. org/EventPapers/april2002_imp/rutinwa/page3.php, accessed March 1, 2018. Rosenthal, Jill. 2015. “From ‘Migrants’ to ‘Refugees’: Identity, Aid, and Decolonization in Ngara District.” Journal of African History 56: 261–279. Southall, Roger. 1984. “Botswana as a Host Country for Refugees.” Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 22: 151–179. Spear, Thomas. 1997. Mountain Farmers: Moral Economies of Land and Agricultural Development in Arusha and Meru. Oxford: James Currey. Spring, Anita. 1979. “Women and Men as Refugees: Differential Assimilation of Angolan Refugees in Zambia.” Disasters 3: 423–428. Tague, Joanna. 2015a. “Before Asylum and the Expert Witness: Mozambican Refugee Settlement and Rural Development in Southern Tanzania, 1964–1975.” In African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights, edited by Iris Berger, Tricia Redeker Hepner, Benjamin N. Lawrance, et al., 38–56. Athens: Ohio University Press. Tague, Joanna. 2015b. “American Humanitarianism at the End of Portugal’s African Empire.” Portuguese Journal of Social Science 14(3). http://pjss.iscte‐iul.pt/index. php/pjss/article/view/208, accessed March 1, 2018.

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Tandon, Yash. 1984. “Ugandan Refugees in Kenya: A Community of Enforced Self‐reliance.” Disasters 8: 267–271. Umutesi, Marie Béatrice. 2004. Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire. Translated by Julia Emerson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). 2006. OAU Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa. http://www.unhcr.org/ uk/about‐us/background/45dc1a682/oau‐convention‐governing‐specific‐aspects‐ refugee‐problems‐africa‐adopted.html, accessed March 1, 2018. UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). 2016. Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2015. http://www.unhcr.org/576408cd7.pdf, accessed March 1, 2018. Vaughn, Megan. 1987. The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth‐ Century Malawi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waller, Richard. 1984. “Interaction and Identity on the Periphery: The Trans‐Mara Maasai.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 17: 243–284. Waller, Richard. 1988. “Emutai: Crisis and Response in Maasailand, 1883–1902.” In The Ecology of Survival: Case Studies from Northeast African History, edited by Douglas H. Johnson and David M. Anderson, 73–112. London: Lester Cook. Waller, Richard. 1993. “Acceptees and Aliens: Kikuyu Settlement in Maasailand.” In Being Maasai: Ethnicity and Identity in East Africa, edited by Thomas Spear and Richard Waller, 226–257. Oxford: James Currey. Warwick, Peter. 1983. Black People and the South African War, 1899–1902. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilkin, D. 1980. “Refugees and British Administrative Policy in Northern Kenya, 1936–1938.” African Affairs 79: 510–530. Williams, Christian A. 2015. National Liberation in Post‐colonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Christian A. 2011a. “Living in Exile: Daily Life and International Relations at SWAPO’s Kongwa Camp.” Kronos 37: 60–86. Williams, Christian A. 2011b. “Ordering the Nation: SWAPO in Zambia, 1974–1976.” Journal of Southern African Studies 37: 683–713.

Part IV

Africans and Their Environment

Chapter Fourteen

Science in Africa: A History of Ingenuity and Invention in African Iron Technology Peter R. Schmidt

Whilst the exploits of the conqueror and the intrigues of the demagogue are faithfully preserved through a succession of ages, the persevering and unobtrusive efforts of genius, developing the best blessings of the Deity to man, are often consigned to oblivion. David Mushet, quoted in Smiles (1864)

When David Mushet was writing a century and a half ago, he referred to the extraordinarily important invention of preheating in European iron smelting. His concern then parallels my views now about the scientific and technological history of Africa  –  that the invention of preheating and its importance have been consigned to oblivion. It is ironic that one of the most important inventions in the history of pyrotechnology has been pushed to the dim recesses of historical discourse in North America, Europe, and Africa. That this has happened over a very short period of 30 years in African history marks a major difference between Africa and the West. There may well be another explanation in the quick disappearance of preheating in Africa from historical recognition: the revelation of a similar invention in Africa 1,500 years earlier than in Europe that poses a fundamental threat to European views of African technologists as primitive ritualists (Schmidt 1996). I have spent five decades as an archaeologist writing African history, as archaeology is one of the few ways in which we can write the ancient history of Africa. From my first days of graduate study, I was taken aback by what appeared to be A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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facile assumptions about the backwardness of African technology (Schmidt 1997). I found that assumptions about the primitive qualities of technology in Africa inform all levels of thinking, from popular misconceptions to scholarly misrepresentations that arise from the certainty of popular myth. There are several explanations for these misperceptions. The first is the mistaken European idea that scale equals complexity. The second originates from metallurgical historians who thought that African iron technology was a survival of the earliest European experiences. A third explanation is that eminent historical scholars uncritically accepted the myth of technological inferiority. The historian Phillip Curtin, for example, erred when he accepted the idea that Africa lagged behind Europe: Technology, however, is an aspect of culture where rational judgment is possible. If technology is broadly defined as the body of knowledge and skill about the means of producing goods and services, then each technique can be measured by its effectiveness in serving the desired end … In the field of technology – and, one is tempted to add, in that field alone – it is possible to make rough estimates of the degree of advancement achieved by different cultures. Limiting our judgment to technology alone, it is clear that African culture lagged behind that of Western Europe in the nineteenth century. The historian’s task, however, remains: how great was this lag, and how is it explained historically? There is no serious problem in understanding why progress might be slow in the far south, toward the tip of the African continent. That part of the world was obviously the end of the road. (Curtin 1964: 24)

I was not satisfied with accepting untested assumptions about how Africa lagged behind Europe, and so from the inception of my research into Africa’s ancient past I was determined to be sensitive to how science and technology are represented. Thus my research in East Africa embarked upon a very different line of thinking – examining scientific evidence for signs of African invention heretofore masked by assumptions of backwardness. Moreover, my charge as a historian was to examine the validity of the historian’s task as Curtin saw it, not to examine the reasons for an imagined technological lag. I now want to examine how erroneous ideas about the scientific experience of African technologists arose in Western thinking. The first was the error of colonial observers who judged African advancement using scales of production. For example, small African iron‐smelting furnaces were dwarfed by the large contemporary blast furnaces of Europe and hence were viewed as inferior, without any scientific evidence to sustain this conclusion. The second error arose out of the community of metallurgical historians who cast African iron technology as a survival of the ancient past, fixing African technologists as unchanging and incapable of invention. In other words, stasis characterized Africa: “The EIA [Early Iron Age] phase has persisted in Africa until the present day but is fast dying out” (Tylecote 1976: 47).



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Such thinking about a continuous, unchanging, and primitive technology is interwoven with the related notion that African iron technology was an appropriate analogy to explain the earliest European iron production! Perhaps the most depreciating mode of European thought was the idea that the European bloomery process (a specific process of reducing iron ore to iron) is the best model for what happens during African iron smelting, despite the fact that African “survivals” are used to explain early iron smelting in Europe. This is a projection of a European scientific experience onto Africa – a kind of imperial scientific paradigm. This has two consequences: (1) all iron technologies in Africa are represented as mostly similar to the European bloomery model, with insufficient concern for and attention to the significance of abundant differences that are so important for assessing change over time and space; (2) homogenization in this manner erases the capacity to see or to accept innovation and invention in African science, one of the most persistent and pernicious ideas to influence African history (Schmidt 2001).

Examining historical ideas This short history about how the erasure of African invention and innovation formed the backdrop to my research, starting in 1970 at the Rugomora Mahe site in Katuruka village, Buhaya (Kagera Region of northwestern Tanzania). Excavations there revealed significant numbers of iron‐smelting furnaces with a plethora of physical remains dating to the Early Iron Age – circa 500 bce to 600 ce (Schmidt 1978). Right from the first test sounding, I faced the need to explain the chemical and physical properties of industrial debris I excavated. To accomplish this, I enlisted the collaboration of Don Avery in the Department of Physics at Brown University. Avery was widely known for his expertise in thermodynamics and the invention of metal alloys, not to mention his considerable experience with experimental iron smelting. I enlisted his assistance in my desire to understand how iron technology developed locally, how it met physical challenges as well as economic challenges, and how it fitted into local social and political life. Avery and I made no assumptions about the presence or absence of complexity. He was sympathetic to my goal to document local technology in deep time, tracing out the development and various changes the technology experienced over the last two millennia or more – quite contrary to the untested assumption that technology never changed in Africa. In other venues (Schmidt 1981, 1995, 1997; Schmidt and Avery 1983; Schmidt and Childs 1985a, 1995, 1997) I explain how, through a process of dogged question asking and serendipity, we observed that bits and pieces of significantly transformed blowpipes – called tuyeres – were slag covered, vitrified (glassy), and reduced (black). As we puzzled over the significance of these characteristics, we concluded that the blowpipes were inserted inside ancient furnaces dating back about 2,000 years. We reasoned that insertion of tuyeres inside a bellows‐driven, forced‐air furnace would have led to different thermodynamics in the furnaces – resulting from

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the preheating of the air blast and leading to a more efficient iron‐smelting process. The technological challenges, however, of using clay blowpipes inside a high‐temperature iron‐smelting furnace are formidable, calling for a sophisticated manipulation of appropriate heat‐resistant materials. It is inconceivable that ancient technologists would have gone to the considerable trouble required to develop such a technology unless it resulted in significant improvements in productivity. Blowpipes inserted deep inside a furnace require highly refractory, i.e., heat‐resistant clay that will not melt during exposure to high temperatures. Technologically, this is a very demanding requirement as clay with the correct properties – a high proportion of alumina – is often rare, difficult to locate, and difficult to prepare and use appropriately. It appeared that the ancient iron smelters to the west of Lake Victoria went to considerable pains and trouble to obtain sufficiently refractory clay that would allow tuyeres to be inserted inside a furnace. There were myriad simpler alternatives for blowpipe applications (Kense 1983), such as pipes terminating in the wall of the furnace, single pipes pointed downward from the tops of furnaces, and multiple pipes inserted inside large natural‐draft furnaces operating at lower temperatures, as among the Fipa of southwestern Tanzania (see Barndon 1996, 2001; Mapunda 1995). None of these treatments and other alternatives confer the very significant technological advantages to be gained by meeting the challenges of using refractory tuyeres inside a furnace. The upshot of these multiple observations was the hypothesis that tuyeres inserted inside a smelting furnace using a forced‐air draft would preheat the air blast, thus increasing the fuel efficiency of the furnace and creating the operating conditions within the furnace at which iron is produced at higher reducing temperatures. We knew that the hypothesis was testable, for former iron smelters in Kagera Region had shared that in the early twentieth century they had inserted their tuyeres into a conical smelting furnace. We arranged to test the preheating hypothesis among living iron smelters in Nyungwe village in the former Kiziba kingdom of Kagera Region in 1976 (Schmidt and Avery 1978). Observations were subsequently repeated through multiple experiments or replications in 1979 and 1984 (Schmidt 1981, 1997; Schmidt and Avery 1978, 1983; Schmidt and Childs 1985a, 1995, 1996; McNeil, Muhly, and Schmidt 1988). The results of the initial field observations attracted global attention when they were published in Science (Schmidt and Avery 1978), and this was followed immediately by a story in Time magazine that concluded with the observation that this was “a discovery that will help to change scholarly and popular ideas that technological sophistication developed in Europe but not in Africa” (Time 1978: 80). Our findings were heralded as a revolutionary development in the science of technology. Theodore Wertime, an eminent scholar of the history of technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), commended the work and featured its presentation at a Smithsonian Institution workshop in 1979 (Avery 1982).



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In our initial publications of our ethnoarchaeological studies of iron technology, we made several key points, some of which we elaborated upon in subsequent publications and upon which I shall refocus attention here (Avery and Schmidt 1986, 1996). First was our observation that “preheating would permit the attainment of much higher furnace temperatures and better fuel economy than was obtainable in cold blast European bloomeries” (Schmidt and Avery 1978: 1086); we also noted that Tylecote, a British metallurgical historian, had argued that even a minimal increase of 100 °C resulted in enormous gains made in nineteenth‐century blast furnaces with “inefficient [rough] pipe stoves” (Tylecote 1965: 340). We examined popular scientific notions about “primitive” iron smelting as articulated in a respected metallurgical history: “the highest temperature that could be reached in a primitive smelt appears to have been about 1,200 degrees,” an assumption linked to the idea that “smelting iron ore at that temperature yields not a puddle of metal but a spongy mass mixed with iron oxide and iron silicate” (Maddin, Muhly, and Wheeler 1977: 122). This is a concise description of the bloomery process. Several other key observations were also featured, notably the preheating temperature and the thermodynamic consequences of preheating. The amount of preheating was thought to be 600 °C or possibly higher, and the temperatures in the combustion zone exceeded 1800 °C – a conclusion reached by virtue of the fact that Pt‐PtRh (10% Rhodium) thermocouples rated at 1820 °C melted directly inside the oxidizing combustion zone. Given this condition, we did not emphasize the obvious  –  that our highest interior temperature measurements (about 1600 °C – were beyond the hotter oxidizing zone and clearly within the reduction zone where smelting actually occurs. We concluded that the preheating led to high smelting temperatures, significantly above the 1200–1300 °C of typical European bloomery furnaces used to characterize African iron technology. Also important was our observation that the chemical reduction of iron occurred under circumstances unlike that of a bloomery furnace – with slag masses undergoing a carbon boil (manifest as bubbles of carbon monoxide [CO] on top of the slag), resulting in iron precipitating out of solution to form large crystalline masses. The presence of fine carbonaceous particles from burned swamp reeds contributed to the production of carbon steel. In the years following the initial publication, we came to understand the need for additional explanations and clarifications, and so refined and modified our descriptions of these innovative processes.

How ethnoarchaeology contributed to indices that assess ancient preheating During our study of preheating in a living setting, we also gathered extensive information about tuyere and furnace materials and their performance. We used this evidence to read and better characterize the material signatures of preheating.

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This required extensive studies of the physical characteristics of tuyeres and comparative studies of clays and their firing properties, with hundreds of test trials held at MIT (Childs 1986, 1988, 1989). These ancillary studies yielded several useful indices for assessing the presence of preheating in antiquity. Most important was the proportion of different physical changes on the tuyere exteriors. Meticulous measurements of multiple tuyeres after each of nine smelts indicated that the physical changes on the tuyeres are characterized by a 1.5 : 1 transform ratio, a material fingerprint manifest as two‐thirds of the pipe lengths coated with slag and vitrification (SV) and one‐third of the pipes with black or reduced clay (R). These are the most diagnostic features of a preheating tuyere (Schmidt 1997). Once we knew that preheating was a thermodynamic probability in the recent past, we then needed to learn more about the processes that had led to its invention in the deep past. To diagnose deep time practices, we used the material fingerprints observed during our ethnoarchaeological studies to examine archaeological materials, comparing them and detailing similarities and differences. Such rigorous comparisons allowed us to assess how the technologies had changed over time and to what degree they retained continuities. Such comparative exercises require a lot of archaeological inquiry and fine chronological control. Excavation of several large industrial sites followed to glean important evidence about the characteristics of iron smelting over time: how it evolved, how and why various changes occurred, and the physical evidence to substantiate change and continuity (Schmidt 1981; Schmidt and Avery 1983; Schmidt and Childs 1985a, 1996). Since our initial hypothesis for preheating was based on fragmentary archaeological evidence – bits and pieces of tuyeres – it was important to document well‐ preserved intact blowpipes to confirm our assumption about the chemistry and location of slag, vitrification, and reduction on ancient tuyeres. It was not until our third major industrial excavation at the KM3 site that such evidence was revealed (Schmidt 1981, 1983, 1997; Schmidt and Childs 1985a). An Early Iron Age site replete with multiple furnaces from different time periods and distinct activity areas for different technological processes (e.g., preparing iron ore), the KM3 site provided the smoking gun that substantiated ancient preheating. The presence of an intact 39 cm long tuyere with identical attributes (S, V, and R) to tuyeres from recent furnaces underwrites the idea that ancient iron smelters inserted tuyeres inside their furnaces, preheating the air blast (Figure 14.1). Thus, the archaeological evidence intersected with the ethnoarchaeological observations to affirm the development of an important ancient invention. While these affinities between the ancient past and recent times suggest continuity in process through time, iron technology is also marked by a series of innovations over time. For example, the mid‐second‐millennium ce use of swamp grass in the furnace pit and construction of furnaces with refractory slag reflect different ideas about labor investment and significantly different resource uses that conserve forests.



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Figure 14.1  A 39 cm long tuyere from the KM3 site with the attributes associated with

preheating, e.g. (left to right) slag covered, vitrified, and reduced.

We dated the intact tuyere at the KM3 site to the latter part of the third century ce – critical evidence supporting ancient preheating. While we were preparing these results for publication (Schmidt 1981; Schmidt and Avery 1983), a leading scholar in African metallurgical studies, Nicholas van der Merwe joined Avery to write: To prove the prehistoric occurrence of the Buhaya smelting procedure … requires the presence of refractory slag, tuyeres wetted by slag on the outside for a considerable length, and a bloom with a microstructure that can only be achieved in fluid slag. (van der Merwe and Avery 1982: 154; emphasis added)

The excavation of the KM3 tuyere – the most elusive of these proofs – completed our cycle of documentation for preheating. Because there were multiple furnaces at KM3, each with multiple C14 dates, this was an ideal context in which to examine the development of preheating at a fine‐grained level. To this end, we examined all the tuyere fragments, closely studying their macro‐physical attributes to gain a sense of possible ancient experimentation with materials that occurred during the first half of the first millennium ce. The results of scientific analyses of these archaeological materials provide important insights into how ancient African technologists experimented with materials until they came to painstaking, successful invention – concrete evidence for the application of the scientific method, which has been consistently ignored by those who proffer contrary opinions about preheating in ancient Africa. We found that over a 150 year period the iron smelters in the vicinity of Kemondo Bay experimented with different clay sources for blow pipes (Figure 14.2).

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UGANDA

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Figure 14.2  Map of Kemondo Bay and nearby Early Iron Age industrial sites.

We see this experimentation manifest in two different manners: (1) the proportion of exterior tuyere transformations over time, and (2) the frequency of tuyere breakage that occurred in dated furnaces. As earlier mentioned, our ethnoarchaeological studies provided a set of standards by which we could assess the use of preheated tuyeres in the past: SV @ 33 percent to R @ 22 percent (1.5 : 1 ratio) for multiple tuyeres used to preheat a Haya type furnace. When we examined tuyere fragments from the KM, KM2, and KM3 sites near Kemondo Bay, we found some fascinating differences. Before 200 ce at KM2, tuyere fragments had a SV frequency of 34 percent, a level consistent with successful preheating. This frequency increased to 42 percent in the post‐200 period, with laboratory evidence showing high‐grade refractory clays and thus suggesting that the smelters continued to experiment and look for even more superior clays. The experience of neighboring smelters at KM3, however, is strikingly different: only 23 percent of the tuyere fragments showed SV in the pre‐200 period, quite different from our observational index. Since the clays were chemically the same at KM2 and KM3, it appears that the KM3 smelters failed to master other nuances of the process. But in the post‐200 period the KM3 experimentation shows quick mastery of preheating – perhaps a sharing of knowledge or another social‐political alignment allowing for shared resources. The other primary archaeological index used to measure experimentation drew from the physical characteristics of blowpipes that had shattered or broken while inside a furnace. It is possible to read the difficulties iron smelters experienced when they inserted blowpipes inside furnaces. We assessed in‐furnace breakage by the presence of broken edges of blowpipes that were slag‐covered and vitrified. If such attributes were present on broken edges, then the tuyeres broke while inside the furnace. As we examined the frequency of breakage over time, patterns became clear: the rates of breakage were high at the beginning of experimentation, as



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smelters struggled to master the challenges of using blowpipes inside their furnaces. Through time the rates of breakage at KM3, for example, declined significantly until it reached 12 percent, indicating that the smelters had mastered the right clay chemistry to resist the intense furnace temperatures – commonly 1250–1300 °C on the outside tuyere walls and up to 1900 °C on the tuyere tips. We already knew from physical evidence on the tuyeres that the KM3 smelters quickly mastered preheating in the post‐200 period – an observation affirmed by the low breakage rates. The material fingerprints show clearly that the ancient smelters experimented with different clays until they found clay that met high‐temperature requirements. At the neighboring KM site, the clay sources remained inadequate, with high breakage rates throughout the pre‐ and post‐200 ce period. This indicates an absence of refractory clay, a conclusion confirmed by our analysis that it was clay normally used for pottery (Childs 1988, 1989). The record at the KM2 site was different from the two other sites, with the record showing mixed success, but ultimately a failure to achieve during the post‐200 ce period the success of the KM3 smelters, who outstripped their neighbors at KM2. These differences are instructive, for they point to variable success rates based on access to refractory clay sources and the use of adequate tempering materials (inclusions added to the clay to compensate for thermal shock). My collaborator in these studies, S. Terry Childs, convincingly argues that different access to excellent clay resources is an index to social‐political power, with the KM3 smelters possibly restricting access to key clay resources (Childs 1986, 1989). One of the most remarkable characteristics of these studies is that over more than 100 years we can trace out how ancient smelters systematically experimented with different clays until they got the results they were looking for – refractory tuyeres that were able to withstand high furnace temperatures. This is the scientific method at work among the ancients  –  the observation of materials in high‐temperature settings and physical changes in materials used until they obtained the desired results. This science is no different from what occurs when a bench scientist tests materials in a laboratory. While the African smelters were not wearing white lab coats, their protocols were not so different from those of modern science. In spite of these major findings for African technological ingenuity and invention in antiquity, most historians and anthropologists remain unaware of their importance. Their salience was buried by inattention to these critical archaeological discussions and by misrepresentations and silence about some of the technical arguments about preheating calculations, matters that I shall take up shortly.

What is preheating? A short history of preheating may be helpful before I take up some of the technical arguments about the African science. The history of preheating, one of the most important industrial inventions of the modern era, is obscured by historical forgetting, partly abetted by scores of later, related inventions building on the first

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stroke of genius. We must dig deep into the obscure archives of written history to understand the story behind this distinctive invention that revolutionized the productive capacity of smelting furnaces in mid‐nineteenth‐century Britain (see Hyde 1977). The story starts with a Scotsman, James Beaumont Nielson, who in 1828 patented the first preheated blast furnace after three years of experimentation (Smiles 1864). In an 1864 article about the invention by Nielson, Daniel Smiles quotes contemporary industrialists of the nineteenth century. Their assessments are poignant and were made in the context of an industry they knew well: “Mr. Jessop, an extensive English iron manufacturer, declared it to be ‘of as great advantage in the iron trade as Arkwright’s machinery was in the cotton‐spinning trade’” (Smiles 1864). Smiles also consulted the contemporary Encyclopædia Britannica to capture the views of the time, for example, that preheating “has effected an entire revolution in the iron industry of Great Britain.” If we return to the Encyclopædia Britannica today, we learn from a more retrospective view that Use of the hot blast tripled iron output per ton of coal and permitted the profitable recovery of iron from lower‐grade ores. It also made possible the efficient use of raw coal and lower grades of coal instead of coke and permitted the construction of larger smelting furnaces.1

The principal theme that emerges in these few sentences is elevated efficiency – in fuel consumption, use of low‐grade ores, use of raw and low grades of coal (rather than coke), and increase in scale of production. These multiple attractions drew immediate conversion to an invention that transformed European industry. Once it caught on in Europe, especially when applied to the Bessemer and then the Siemens processes, the preheating invention had revolutionary implications, with iron production increasing by as much as 300 percent. The historical contingencies of the invention in Europe, however, are different from those in Africa. Over a period of several hundred years before the nineteenth century, European iron smelters built larger and larger furnaces, hoping to increase productivity. Larger quantities of iron were the result, but not greater productivity. By historical chance, preheating came along at the time of these massive furnaces. The result was larger volumes of iron produced more efficiently with significantly lower fuel consumption. Large furnaces came to define European ingenuity and technological domination. The African invention appeared during a historical moment when furnaces were much smaller – two meters high with an internal volume of perhaps half a cubic meter. The result was greater productivity, yet furnace sizes expanded only modestly. The serendipity that had so influenced the course of preheating in Europe was absent in Africa, where the invention worked brilliantly within the productive setting of the time, just as the European invention worked so well within its setting.



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Reprising objections Not long after our initial publications (Schmidt and Avery 1978; Avery and Schmidt 1979; Avery 1982), there were affirmations of the preheating hypothesis. Prominent among them was van der Merwe’s endorsement in the American Scientist: “In this furnace, a preheated hot air blast permitted temperatures as high as 1,700 °C and yielded direct blooms of medium‐ to high‐carbon steel” (van der Merwe and Avery 1982). Figure 14.3 was captioned: This cross section of a Buhaya furnace shows air entering the furnace through the tuyere. Heated within the tuyere, the air passes through the combustion zone where the iron bloom forms, and then may either flow up the stack or back out of the furnace around the tuyere as the bellows are pulled up. Far less iron is lost in the slag in the Buhaya process than in the Mediterranean bloomery furnace, because the preheated air in the Buhaya furnace permits higher temperatures and thus more reduction of the iron. (van der Merwe and Avery 1982: 153)

STACK FLOW

FURNACE WALL COMBUSTION ZONE BACK FLOW INDUCED ASPIRATED AIR BELLOWS

T

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Figure 14.3  Partial profile of a Haya furnace showing how waste heat circulates back

along the tuyere before exiting the furnace.

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Despite this, once the material proof for preheating in antiquity was presented (Schmidt 1981; Schmidt and Avery 1983; Schmidt and Childs 1985a), attacks on preheating began. The first two came from scholars unfamiliar with iron smelting (Eggert 1987) or unfamiliar with African technological history (Rehder 1986). Both ignored the basic principles of our findings and used comparative models drawn from Europe and experimental studies  –  an approach that tries to force African technology into a Western mold. One challenge of apparent credibility came from an industrial metallurgist (Rehder 1986, 1996) who designed industrial cupola furnaces (Avery also designed furnaces as an industrial consultant). Though he had no experience analyzing indigenous technologies, he did not hesitate to weigh in with his limited industrial background and all of its embedded assumptions to make pronouncements on the adequacy of the African preheating argument and its ancillary evidence. It is informative that he did not reference or acknowledge the archaeological evidence that substantiated how early technologists had struggled over several centuries to find the right refractory clays. He was the first of several critics to ignore this critical component of the argument. He also set the scene for other critics who piggybacked on his points, reiterating his modern industrial observations in an uncritical manner. Rehder asserted that thermocouples used to measure temperatures inside the tuyeres were inadequate to the task because “air picks up very little heat by radiation and … solids [e.g., tip of a thermocouple] absorb heat readily by radiation” (Rehder 1986: 236). He went on to argue that radiant temperature from the walls and incandescent charcoal inside the furnace affected the thermocouple readings, making them higher than the surrounding air. This critique noted that effective shielding would be necessary to reduce the radiant temperatures. This observation prompted us to point out that this is precisely what Avery did during the field observations – attach a shield after the initial melting of the platinum– rhodium thermocouples (Avery and Schmidt 1986). Subsequently, this discussion of thermocouple shields was ignored, illustrating how “experts” selectively dismiss critical observation to push forward their objections: attention to detail does not matter (e.g., Alpern 2005). Other objections arose from Rehder’s industrial experience and reading of the experimental literature. He claimed that our readings of blast zone temperatures at 1800 °C and above were not unusual and did not require preheating. To make his point, he cited experimental smelting from Europe, specifically the experiments Tylecote conducted with a small Roman‐like shaft furnace that maintained 1600 °C temperature in a very small combustion zone (Tylecote, Austin, and Wraith 1971: 351; Rehder 1986: 353). Several issues arise from this comparison: These observations pertain to a very small furnace that used a continuous air blast directed at a tiny blast zone – an altogether different structure and process that is comparatively inappropriate. This typifies fundamentally incorrect assumptions derived from very specific and limited laboratory experiments applied to the African experience. Moreover, these counterclaims on blast zone temperature



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miss the point. It is impossible to smelt iron in the blast zone; rather, it is smelted in a contiguous reduction zone; the more important observation is that the reduction zone  –  beyond and above the blast zone  –  operated at significantly higher temperatures than the typical European bloomery furnace. Avery and I responded with detailed explanations of the methods we had employed during our field studies, as well as walking through the thermodynamic calculations, making them transparent (Avery and Schmidt 1986, 1996). Our explanations were ignored. The Rehder critique was later repeated uncritically when, in a review of metallurgy in Africa, Miller and van der Merwe (1994), in a baffling reversal of the latter’s earlier 1982 position wrote, “Their arguments have been criticized vigorously, particularly on thermodynamic grounds,” a position that pointedly ignores our 1986 response to Rehder’s mistaken analyses and draws on unpublished, inaccessible sources (e.g., Killick 1988), the content of which we can only guess.

Reification of objections Perhaps the most powerful illustration that scientific evidence on behalf of preheating is not examined with scholastic rigor appears in the comments of a prominent critic, the archaeo‐metallurgist David Killick (1996). His description of how we came to the preheating hypothesis ignores our extensive narratives about the stages of investigation: While monitoring a reconstruction of traditional Haya iron smelting technology, Peter Schmidt and Donald Avery were intrigued by the high temperatures measured inside the furnace. In Avery’s judgment, the temperatures were much higher than should have been attainable by the use of unheated blast. He therefore proposed that preheating of the blast must have occurred. (Killick 1996: 150)

As noted earlier, the preheating hypothesis arose out of our analysis of the tuyere fragments, and its testing then occurred in a Buhaya field setting. Such fundamental confusion about the origins of the hypotheses ignores our reports and adds a level of imagination that sows doubt about the objectivity of other arguments about the Haya technology. Another mistake is the assertion that we claimed that the “preheated blast … was first employed in Africa, possibly as early as the last first millennium bc” (Killick 1996: 249). Never have we argued, either explicitly or by inference, that preheating dates to the late first millennium bce. In fact, our archaeological investigations have fixed significant attention on the dating of preheating, finally determining that it dates to the early first millennium ce (Schmidt 1981, 1983; Schmidt and Childs 1985a), again suggesting that our evidence has not been studied. Such a fundamental error signals a disingenuous manipulation of the facts and treats our evidence outside of chronology. Killick’s (1996) discourse is mostly a reprise of the points made by Rehder (1986). He reviews and affirms the thermocouple observations, ignoring our 1986

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Figure 14.4  A schematic drawing of temperature readings along the axis of a tuyere,

originally published in Schmidt and Avery (1978). This temperature profile was a focus of critics, who overlooked the fact that it was impossible to measure temperatures in the oxidizing blast zone without melting thermocouples rated at 1820 °C.

response to Rehder, and concludes that “the curves of temperatures measured at intervals within the tuyere therefore cannot be accepted as evidence for preheating” (Killick 1996: 251). We earlier and conclusively answered this derivative conclusion when we discussed how thermocouples were shielded from radiant heat (Avery and Schmidt 1986, 1996). Moreover, both Rehder and then Killick miss the importance of a temperature curve first published in 1978 (Figure 14.4), arguing that the peak temperatures are in the oxidizing blast zone, found to operate at 1600 °C or more in some small European experimental furnaces. Killick repeats Rehder’s (1986) observation that, as tuyeres erode in length, the peak temperature shows no change – thus “these temperatures do not imply preheating of the air blast” (Killick 1996: 253). This is one of the most significant oversights in the Rehder–Killick view. Because the blast zone is commonly operating at 1820 °C in the Haya furnace (measured by optical pyrometer and, initially, Pt‐PtRh (10 percent rhodium thermocouple), it was impossible to measure the peak temperatures in the oxidizing blast zone using chromel–alumel thermocouples (rated to approximately 1600 °C). Importantly, the “peaks” on the graph are not inside the oxidizing zone “but just behind it … slightly further inside the furnace” (Avery and Schmidt 1996: 272). The key observation in this case is the descending “tails” on the curves – the trailing off of the temperature curves that mark the reduction zone. To clarify what happens with the relationship between the blast zone (much larger than the tiny one cubic centimeter area found in the European experimental furnaces) and the reduction zone, we provided a cross‐sectional view of the furnace, using the documented furnace diameter and connecting the curves (dotted lines) in a mirror image (Figure 14.5).

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Figure 14.5  Isotherms inside a Haya smelting furnace, using the interior furnace

dimensions and a mirror image of the profile in Figure 4.

This profile vividly illustrates that Killick’s fixation on the blast zone temperatures misses the point and “masks the much more important observation that the temperatures beyond it in the reducing zone are higher than expected, about 1375–1500 °C” (Avery and Schmidt 1996: 271; emphasis original). The important temperatures in Figure 14.5 are those between points A and B, the reduction zone where iron is smelted. The curves show that the temperatures in this zone gradually decrease over time with the progressive melting of the tuyeres, precisely what we might expect under such conditions. The advantage of high temperatures in this zone is that more iron can be reduced from the slag, another expression of efficiency in this preheated furnace. In contrast, reducing conditions in non‐preheating iron‐smelting furnaces can be reached only at temperatures below 1300 °C, which leads to the significant loss of iron to slag and also requires a high‐grade iron ore or special processing (Avery and Schmidt 1996). Sustained and elevated reducing temperatures of 1375–1500 °C in the reduction zone cannot be obtained without preheating. In these exchanges, a key recognition emerged about how the Haya scientific principles work when Killick agreed that Rehder had bungled his discussion of the Haya iron‐smelting process. Drawing on his industrial background, he also missed the observation that Haya bellows do not result in a laminar flow in the tuyeres (laminar flow lacks lateral mixing or disturbance, like inside a pipe). Using principles of laminar flow, he then examined Avery’s calculations about the dwell time of air along the tuyere wall during the push–pull function, leading to preheat temperatures. Using these common industrial assumptions, Rehder calculated that the amount of preheating in a Haya blowpipe could be no more than 21 °C,

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a claim that he believed demolished the preheating observations. His error arises from the false assumption that a Haya furnace is similar to an industrial furnace, in which the air flow is laminar – a continuous flow of air across a smooth heated surface. Heat calculations for such airflow are conventional to thermodynamics, but they do not apply to a technology that does not have laminar air flow but rather has turbulent air flow. We explained this phenomenon: the bellows in the Haya process are valveless and operate as aspirators in the bell‐shaped tuyere ends. The result is a reverse flow of air through the tuyere, with the initial aspiration drawing additional air into the tuyere on the reverse stroke, the air flow slows down and reverses, thus pulling hot gases into the end of the tuyere and carrying air back towards the entrance. It is easy to observe this process when the tuyere ends melt and sag – the reverse flow is obvious when the drooping bits of melting clay sway back and forth. (Avery and Schmidt 1986: 355; see also 1996: 242)

One of the most important and ingenious attributes of reverse air flow in the Haya process is that the air flow is turbulent. The turbulence arises from the push–pull action of the two drum bellows alternating at a rate of 480 strokes per minute. This means that, once the air enters the tuyere chamber, it dwells on the hot tuyere wall for an instant and is then ripped off by the reverse bellows stroke; it then again advances down the pipe with the next air blast, repeating this process. To reprise the process: As the air flow progresses down the tuyere and dwells on the clay wall to take on heat, it is then ripped off and mixed with new air – heating it; the preheated air continues down the pipe, repeating this heating– mixing process several times until it finally enters the blast zone at a higher temperature than ambient air from outside the furnace, adding simultaneously to a higher temperature in the reduction zone of the furnace. This is a very different process from that on which Rehder based his erroneous calculation, illustrating the dangers of projecting Western industrial experiences onto African technology. Oddly, in their 1994 overview of metallurgy in Africa, Miller and van der Merwe (1994: 23) repeat Rehder’s mistake when they observe: “The only experimental evaluation of this pre‐heating hypothesis [see Schmidt and Childs 1985b] suffered from the same problems in measuring the air temperature in tuyeres as the field reconstruction and is not considered a valid test.” The authors cite Rehder’s critique plus a laboratory experiment with a mechanically produced continuous air flow into the tuyeres, air flow conditions that are radically different from the turbulent air flow in Haya tuyeres used with drum bellows. Once again, the absence of discussion about the details of the Haya process announces a disregard for the substantive attributes of the technology discussed in our responses to critics. As Trouillot (1995) observes, silence is a formidable tool in scholarly life when used to diminish ideas that run counter to accepted orthodoxy.



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Despite its false assumptions, the significant disparity between Rehder’s calculation and ours pushed us in two advantageous directions: (1) to reconsider and recalculate the amount of preheating; and (2) to bring clarity to precisely how the process works. Using the turbulent air flow model, Avery’s revised calculations project a preheating temperature from 141 to 323 °C, a preheating advantage that accounts for a low to high range of push–pull events in a tuyere (Avery and Schmidt 1996).2 There is no way to know precisely how many phases of dwell time occur during the turbulence, so Avery cautiously posited a low and a high end (one to three dwell times). These calculations from an applied thermodynamics expert deeply familiar with the process did not satisfy Killick. He could not refute them on thermodynamic grounds, but he concluded that “the case for preheated blast in the Haya furnace … is not proven” (Killick 1996: 256). He also claimed that Avery was making an arbitrary conclusion based on mystifying calculations, “mathematical models of dubious relevance” (Killick 1996: 252). Commenting on this failure to understand his calculations and the assumptions upon which they are based, Avery said, after reading Killick’s review before its publication, “He does not understand thermodynamics and nothing I say can convince him otherwise” (personal communication, July 10, 19953). The matter has rested there without further interchange.

Where are we now? To illustrate some of the misunderstandings that have arisen in historical circles about ancient African science of this genre, let us turn to a detailed overview of the origins of African iron production by Stanley Alpern (2005), published in History in Africa. After devoting a voluminous amount of attention to the origins of iron‐making knowledge in Africa, Alpern avoids a conversation about preheating and settles for vague and highly ambiguous, even misleading, language that typifies superficial reactions, such as “They [Schmidt and Avery] were disputed on a number of points by other scholars” (Alpern 2005: 88). Oddly, the majority of papers cited in the accompanying footnote are by Schmidt and his collaborators, with several of the so‐called disputing scholars also referenced but not examined. Preheating is explored not for its significance, nor is there examination of the important issues that arise from previous errors made by critics. Alpern risks close scrutiny by other historians when during his gloss he suggests that historians are incapable of understanding the technical arguments about preheating: “For non‐ specialists the argumentation in this controversy is recondite” (Alpern 2005: 88) – in  other words, the arguments I have made here are beyond the capacity of someone of ordinary scholastic knowledge to comprehend. This patronizing ­perspective on fellow historians captures how most so‐called specialists also treat the subject: it is too esoteric for nonspecialists to understand and therefore they should simply accept the authority of the “experts” on the matter. Alpern settles for a default ­position by quoting David Killick: “‘the case for preheated blast in

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the Haya furnace is … not proven,’ but neither, it would seem, is it disproven” (Alpern 2005: 88). One comes away from this disengaged narrative with a sense that preheating is not proven rather than not yet disproven. In the scientific method, if a scientist fails to disprove a hypothesis, then it stands as viable until such time as contrary evidence disproves it. Given the scientific method, the preheating hypothesis remains even more viable today: convincing material evidence has been marshaled that supports preheating in ancient and recent African settings (see Schmidt 1997). While the hypothesis has been questioned, we have successfully presented evidence for the period of invention as well as changes in the technology over time. No evidence has been presented to deny that preheating was invented in Africa a millennium and a half ago and continued to be an important part of the technological repertoire until the last century. No one has conducted laboratory experiments in an authentic setting (where turbulent air flow occurs) to gather empirical evidence that may challenge preheating. Thus, the hypothesis stands as sound and evidence‐ based. This is the correct scientific view on this important historical matter. African history suffers when historians encounter such ambivalence and reluctance to disentangle the complexities of critical debates. It shuns historical responsibility by glossing complexity and avoiding close analysis of important historical findings. I reject Alpern’s idea about our incapacity to understand the basic premises of the arguments without technical mentoring. There is no place for such condescension in narratives about African history. It is crucial that all historians understand and embrace the important arguments that pertain to the technological history of the continent. We should accept nothing less than a technologically knowledgeable cadre of African historians. “Expert” pessimism, unfortunately, sets the tone for others who, knowing less about the particulars of the debate, dare not comment and dare not use the archaeological and ethnoarchaeological evidence diagnostic of preheating for fear of being labeled as supporters of a “questionable” study. This shunning of engagement is illustrated when archaeologists fail to examine their tuyeres and other evidence to assess the possible presence of preheating. One illustration of this phenomenon suffices: A large number of broken tuyeres, which were fused in pairs, were observed at all the studied smelting sites. Such tuyeres were heavily corroded with slag at the tips, unequivocally demonstrating that they played a part in the smelting process. Irrespective of their heavy fragmentation and the fact that we do not know the original length of the tuyeres, some of them had between 5 and 15 cm of vitrification. This shows that such tuyeres were placed deep into the furnace. Schmidt (2001) has argued that such a practice preheated the air, resulting in the production of blooms with high carbon content. However, the question of such preheating is highly debatable, with some archaeologists denying its possibility on physical grounds (Rehder 1986). (Chirikure 2006: 146)



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An examination of this passage reveals some of today’s working assumptions about preheating in archaeological circles. We do not learn why there is a debate or anything about the substance of the debate. Rather, we learn, incorrectly, that “some archaeologists” deny the possibility on physical grounds – when in fact the inappropriate analyses of an industrial engineer are cited. This failure to discuss the substance of the preheating argument and then to inaccurately deny it on “physical grounds” typifies the facile positions that have arisen about preheating in Africa. This kind of scholastic gloss misleads historians and lay people into thinking that the matter has been scientifically decided.4 The insidious quality of such treatments leads to a wariness about even mentioning preheating. Rather than examine the tuyeres for the frequency of vitrified and slagged pieces and their ratio to reduced pieces  –  using the indices painstakingly developed from field studies – comparisons are eschewed out of an apparent concern that such analyses will brand the archaeologist as a follower of the “preheating school.” Will historians, those of our audience who are supposedly recondite, want to dig deeper into the issues? Will other archaeologists, perhaps now fearing academic silencing by the “expert” voices, be bold enough to apply the analyses to their materials? There is little evidence of either development thus far.

Conclusion Who would have expected that one of the most important observations about the history of African science and technology – the invention of preheating – would be diminished to the point of virtual disappearance over the last 30 years? Those familiar with the history of Western representations of African history may not find this surprising, given how misrepresentations of Africa have been a major issue in the writing of African history. It is appalling, however, that this happened within one academic generation during the 1980s and 1990s – not during the nineteenth century when racist denials were common in the Western world. Central to this erasure of important findings is an entrenched determination to maintain the idea that an ancient European technology explains African iron technology (see Schmidt 2001). This is coupled with a continuing capacity to misunderstand, misrepresent, and ignore key observations that explain how this technological innovation works, followed by silence toward responses that successfully counter criticism. Such reactions hold an accompanying but unspoken belief that nothing of significance originated in the history of African scientific discovery. This is a profoundly disquieting story for African history. The alarming silences that have ensued compel scholars of all persuasions to re‐examine arguments in support of ingenuity and invention in African technology as well as to examine critically the points and language used to deny innovation. I reprise here the arguments made against invention and ingenuity, and unveil how the critics who adopt such positions repeatedly fail to listen to or to understand

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empirical and theoretical arguments. I show how critical archaeological evidence has been purposefully ignored when it unambiguously demonstrates how experimentation with materials occurred over an extended period of more than a century. This evidence shows the painstaking development of an invention that has very significant technological implications – preheating of the air blast in an African iron‐smelting furnace. Finally, I share how authoritarian “expert” pronouncements are used as a form of scholarly silencing, suppressing any mention of a technological invention now painted as controversial. The strong determination to dismiss and suppress key findings aligns with prejudices inherited from the colonial era. This denial of African scientific accomplishment warns us that the postcolonial era in Africa is also a time when the attitudes and prejudices of colonial representation are alive and well.

Notes 1 http://www.britannica.com/biography/James‐Beaumont‐Neilson, accessed March 8, 2018 (emphasis added). 2 In 1997 I generalized the temperature ranges to about 300 °C. 3 Avery’s response was formulated when reading the review a year before its publication. Killick studied with Avery during his graduate studies at Yale. 4 It is also of interest that the original preheating studies are not cited. Instead, a derivative article (Schmidt 2001) that discusses the homogenization of African iron technology by European scholars is used as the source.

References Alpern, S. B. 2005. “Did They or Didn’t They Invent it? Iron in Sub‐Saharan Africa.” History in Africa 32: 1–94. Avery, D. H. 1982. “The Iron Bloomery.” In Early Pyrotechnology: The Evolution of the First Fire‐Using Industries: Papers Presented at a Seminar on Early Pyrotechnology Held at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, and the National Bureau of Standards, Gaithersburg, Maryland, April 19–20, 1979, edited by T. A. Wertime and S. F. Wertime, 205–214. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Avery, D. H., and P. R. Schmidt. 1979. “A Metallurgical Study of the Iron Bloomery, Particularly As Practiced in Buhaya.” Journal of Metals 31: 14–20. Avery, D. H., and P. R. Schmidt. 1986. “The Use of Preheated Air in Ancient and Recent African Iron Smelting Furnaces: A Reply to Rehder.” Journal of Field Archaeology 13(3): 354–357. Avery, D. H., and P. R. Schmidt. 1996. “Preheating: Practice or Illusion.” In The Culture and Technology of African Iron Production, edited by P. R. Schmidt, 267–276. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Barndon, R. 1996. “Fipa Ironworking and Its Technological Style.” In The Culture and Technology of African Iron Production, edited by P. R. Schmidt, 73–96. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.



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Barndon, R. 2001. “Masters of Metallurgy – Masters of Metaphors: Iron Working among the Fipa and the Pangwa of SW‐Tanzania.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Bergen. Chirikure, S. 2006. “New Light on Njanja Iron Working: Towards a Systematic Encounter between Ethnohistory and Archaeometallurgy.” South African Archaeological Bulletin 61(184): 142–151. Curtin, P. D. 1964. The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Actions, 1780–1850. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Eggert, M. K. 1987. “On the Alleged Complexity of Early and Recent Iron Smelting in Africa: Further Comments on the Preheating Hypothesis.” Journal of Field Archaeology 14(3): 377–382. Childs, S. T. 1986. “Style in Technology: A View of African Early Iron Age Iron Smelting through Its Refractory Ceramics.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston University. Childs, S. T. 1988. “Clay Resource Specialization in Ancient Tanzania: Implications for Cultural Process.” In Ceramic Ecology Revisited, edited by C. Kobb, 1–31. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports. Childs, S. T. 1989. “Clays to Artifacts: Resource Selection in African Early Iron Age Iron Making Technologies.” In Pottery Technology: Ideas and Approaches, edited by G. Bronitsky, 139–164. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Hyde, C. K. 1977. Technological Change and the British Iron Industry, 1700–1870. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kense, F. J. 1983. Traditional African Iron Working. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Killick, D. J. 1988. “A Comparative Perspective on African Ironworking Technologies.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Chicago. Killick, D. J. 1996. “On Claims for ‘Advanced’ Ironworking Technology in Precolonial Africa.” In The Culture and Technology of African Iron Production, edited by P. R. Schmidt, 247–266. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Maddin, R., J. D. Muhly, and T. S. Wheeler. 1977. “How the Iron Age Began.” Scientific American 237: 122–131. Mapunda. B. B. B. 1995. “An Archaeological View of the History and Variation of Ironworking in Southwestern Tanzania.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Florida. McNeil, P., F. Muhly, and P. Schmidt. 1988. The Tree of Iron. Providence, RI: Foundation for African Prehistory and Archaeology. Miller, D. E., and N. van der Merwe. 1994. “Early Metal Working in Sub‐Saharan Africa: A Review of Recent Research.” Journal of African History 35(1): 1–36. Rehder, J. E. 1986. “Use of Preheated Air in Primitive Furnaces: Comment on Views of Avery and Schmidt.” Journal of Field Archaeology 13(3): 351–353. Rehder, J. E. 1996. “Use of Preheated Air in Primitive Furnaces: Comment on Views of Avery and Schmidt.” In The Culture and Technology of African Iron Production, edited by P. R. Schmidt, 234–239. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Schmidt, P. R. 1978. Historical Archaeology: A Structural Approach in an African Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Schmidt, P. R. 1981. The Origins of Iron Smelting in Africa: A Complex Technology in Tanzania. Research Papers in Anthropology No. 1. Providence, RI: Brown University. Schmidt, P. R. 1995. “Using Archaeology to Remake African History.” In Making Alternative Histories, edited by P. Schmidt and T. Patterson, 118–147. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press.

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Schmidt, P. R. 1996. “Cultural Representation of African Iron Production.” In The Culture and Technology of African Iron Production, edited by P. R. Schmidt, 1–28. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Schmidt, P. R. 1997. Iron Technology in East Africa: Symbolism, Science, and Archaeology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Schmidt, P. R. 2001. “Resisting Homogenization and Recovering Variation and Innovation in African Iron Smelting.” Mediterranean Archaeology 14: 219–228. Schmidt, P. R., and D. H. Avery. 1978. “Prehistoric Culture and Complex Iron Smelting in Tanzania.” Science 201: 1085–1089. Schmidt, P. R., and D. H. Avery. 1983. “More Evidence for an Advanced Prehistoric Iron Technology in Africa.” Journal of Field Archaeology 10(4): 421–434. Schmidt, P. R., and S. T. Childs. 1985a. “Innovation and Industry during the Early Iron Age in East Africa: KM2 and KM3 Sites in Northwest Tanzania.” African Archaeological Review 13: 53–96. Schmidt, P. R., and S. T. Childs. 1985b. “Experimental Iron Smelting: The Genesis of a Hypothesis with Implications for African Prehistory.” In African Iron Working, Ancient and Traditional, edited by P. Shinnie and R. Haaland, 121–141. Bergen: Norwegian University Press. Schmidt, P. R., and S. T. Childs. 1995. “Ancient African Iron Production.” American Scientist 83(6): 524–533. Schmidt, P. R., and S. T. Childs. 1996. “Actualistic Models for Interpretation of Two Early Iron Age Sites in Northwestern Tanzania.” In The Culture and Technology of African Iron Production, edited by P. R. Schmidt, 186–233. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Schmidt, P. R., and S. T. Childs. 1997. “Les hauts‐fourneaux de Brousse.” La Recherche 299: 54–58. Smiles, S. 1864. Industrial Biography: Iron‐Workers and Tool‐Makers. https://archive. org/details/industrialbiogr06smilgoog, accessed March 13, 2018. Time. 1978. “Africa’s Ancient Steelmakers: the Haya Were Centuries Ahead of European Metallurgists.” Time 112(13): 80. Trouillot, M. R., 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Tylecote, R. F. 1965. “Iron Smelting in Pre‐industrial Communities.” Journal of the Iron and Steel Institute 203: 340–348. Tylecote, R. F. 1976. A History of Metallurgy. London: Metals Society. Tylecote, R. F., J. M. Austin, and A. E. Wraith. 1971. “The Mechanism of the Bloomery Process in Shaft Furnaces.” Journal of the Iron and Steel Institute 209: 342–363. van der Merwe, N. J., and D. H. Avery. 1982. “Pathways to Steel: Three Different Methods of Making Steel from Iron Were Developed by Ancient Peoples of the Mediterranean, China, and Africa.” American Scientist 70(2): 146–155.

Chapter Fifteen

Africa and Environmental History Gregory H. Maddox

The fields of African history and environmental history both emerged within the discipline of history in the Western academy in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The subjects had, of course, been around for much longer, but it was not till then that the discipline itself finally came to acknowledge that history was more than the deeds of dead great men and to explore sources beyond the documentary record. Both fields sought to uncover agency in subjects that had most often been treated as objects, and both emerged in contexts that seemed to require that scholars of the past participate in the struggles of the present. Despite the similar circumstances of their birth, African environmental history has brought its own distinctive approach to the concerns of environmental history. African environmental history shares with the broader field of environmental history its focus on the autonomy of the natural world and the place of humanity as but one species in that world, but it also explores the struggles of human communities to create the conditions for survival. African environmental history seeks to give agency to both nature and humanity as mutually constructing each other. Environmental history, broadly, has focused on several themes. Perhaps most notably, historians have emphasized the ways in which human societies have changed and often degraded environments. Following the work of the Annales historians, many have also sought to explicate the deep interconnectedness between human societies and environment (Braudel 1972; Le Roy Ladurie 1971). Following Alfred Crosby, among others, many also focus on humans as biological A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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entities in constant interaction with the rest of the biological world (Crosby 1986). Environmental historians also explore conceptions of the natural world within specific cultural and intellectual contexts. As such, environmental historians seek “a place for stories,” in William Cronon’s phrase, that integrates these factors (Cronon 1992). As befits fields born in the 1960s, this first intersection between African and environmental history occurred around the issue of European expansion and domination over Africa as well as the rest of the world. In 1968 Philip Curtin, one of the earliest practitioners of African history in the United States, published an article that argued that Africans became the labor force of choice in tropical New World colonies because of their resistance to tropical diseases such as malaria and yellow fever that European expansion had brought, as well as to other Old World diseases such as smallpox (Curtin 1968). Alfred Crosby expanded this critical insight into his works on the remaking of environments across the globe as a result of what he termed the “Columbian Exchange” (Crosby 1973, 1986). Crosby’s works have become a touchstone for global environmental history,1 and, while he perhaps paid less attention to Africa than to other parts of the world, others have usefully mined his insights. Curtin’s focus on the disease environments in Africa and the constant process of coevolution between disease‐causing organism and host and vector points to one of the most important themes of African environmental history: the long struggle to survive in difficult and changing environments (Curtin 1985, 1998, 2001).2 James Webb has taken up Curtin’s perspective on the importance of disease environments and pushed it back to show how malaria shaped the distribution of human population in Africa and called forth genetic adaptations that enabled a greater likelihood of survival in areas that were home to the mosquitoes carrying the disease‐causing parasite (Webb 2005, 2009). John Ford, in one of the pioneering works of the field, examined the relationship between tsetse‐ fly‐borne trypanosomaisis, which causes sleeping sickness in humans and livestock, and settlement and land use patterns in East Africa (Ford 1971). James Giblin followed up with detailed examinations of how African societies sought to manage exposure to the vectors carrying the disease through environmental manipulation (Giblin 1990). The emphasis on adaptation to the environment and on shaping of the environment seen in the histories of disease and environment carries through into longer‐term histories of humanity and the natural world. To some extent African environmental history stands environmental history on its head. As Cronon points out, environmental history has often taken the form of a declensionist narrative that chronicles the destruction of nature by the encroachment of human civilization (Cronon 1992: 1352). African environmental history often takes a more constructive approach, emphasizing the way in which humanity and environment mutually shape one another. In the longest perspective, this vantage point draws on the fact that African environments actually shaped humanity in its earliest



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forms. The evolution of species ancestral to humans and of modern humanity all took place within Africa (Stringer and McKie 1996). This long‐term perspective leads to a deeply environmental view of the course of human history in Africa. The most important scholars of this deep history combine archaeology with historical linguistics to hypothesize about the ways in which, over the course of tens of thousands of years, human communities in Africa developed technologies to survive in its varied environments and cultures that allowed the transmission of this hard‐won knowledge across generations. They view long‐term climate change as an integral and even causal agent in this process. The linguistic historian Christopher Ehret’s work presents the most comprehensive picture of this process (Ehret 1998, 2002). Ehret draws on the painstaking work of archaeologists in discovering the evidence of both human material cultures and the gradual development of the technologies they created to ensure their survival, and in several instances has goaded them to examine assumptions about African backwardness in the process (Clark and Brandt 1984; Sutton 1996). Ehret’s most important insights come in the area of the development of food production in Africa. He used linguistic evidence to link the very scattered evidence produced by archaeology on the development of food production into a more coherent picture. He emphasized not diffusion from the ancient Near East as many had thought to be the case, given the paucity of evidence in the past, but the development of food production techniques within African environments, drawing on local plant and animal resources. In many cases his suggestive conclusions led to new research that substantiated his broad findings. Using linguistic and archaeological evidence, Ehret suggested that cattle were domesticated in Africa before they arrived from the Near East. Work in southern Egypt has provided signs that domesticated cattle appeared 8,000 years ago and spread across the Sahel thereafter (Wendorf, Close, and Schild 1985). The disease environment which seems already to have included trypanosomaisis, however, apparently blocked the spread of cattle, keeping them in the more arid savannas. Only about 3,000 years ago does evidence emerge of cattle keeping in eastern Africa south of northern Kenya (Gifford‐Gonzalez 1998, 2000). Further, Ehret’s work has helped push back the timeline and diversify our understanding of plant domestication in Africa. Ehret sees at least three major areas of domestication in Africa, all leading to different “traditions” of agriculture. In the forest savanna borderlands, he argues that yam cultivation became a staple that expanded across Africa from west to east and gradually through the forested regions of West and Central Africa. In the central Sahel, he argues that communities domesticated sorghum as well as kept cattle. In the Ethiopian highlands, millet and teff developed as main crops. Plant domestication did not occur overnight, and represented a long process spread over at least centuries. African cultivators also eventually supplemented their own crops with others from outside Africa in the Old World, especially from Asia. The “Monsoon Exchange” brought

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rice, bananas, and domesticated fowl like chickens to Africa while it took sorghum and millets and African cattle to Asia. Ehret’s strength here is his willingness to draw a big picture over long timescales out of diverse evidence. In some respects his conclusions represent suggestions for further research; the exact modalities of the broad changes he describes remain subject to verification by other forms of evidence. In addition, while his broad picture adheres to environmental contours in locating regions for domestication and the potential spread of technologies, it presents a rather static picture of the interaction between human societies and the world around them. Others have developed a more dynamic view of the relationship between environment and human activity. The archaeologist Roderick McIntosh has developed perhaps the most evocative approach to the dynamics of environmental change and human activity. Drawing on the work of many collaborators, McIntosh has integrated landscape and landscape change into a history of change and urbanization in the Niger Bend region of the Sahel in West Africa. With Susan Keech McIntosh, he has shown how the development of very early urban centers along the Inner Niger Delta both coincided with agricultural intensification based on African rice as well as millets, and responded to cycles of climate change (McIntosh 1997, 1998). Most importantly, he postulates that urban social structure in the region responded to wetter and drier periods in the Sahel as populations moved south during the dry phases and north during the wet phases (McIntosh 1993). He calls this dynamic a “pulse model,” and it has applicability outside the Inner Niger Delta. McIntosh’s integration of environmental variability as a dynamic factor in human history has been taken up by other scholars (see the essays in McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000). While scholars have generally assumed that the extensive nature of food production in sub‐Saharan Africa limited the long‐term effect of humanity on African landscapes until recent centuries, some have also begun to look at the interplay of human action and climate variability on landscapes. Sharon Nicholson pioneered the analysis of climate variability by analyzing the annual level of flood in the Nile Delta as an indicator of rains in East Africa (Nicholson 1976, 1981). Her work has led other scholars to attempt to relate historical phenomena to climate variability, such as George Brooks’s work on conflict in the Sahel (Brooks 1993). The archaeologist Peter Schmidt has taken this one step further in postulating that a rapid expansion of iron production in the Great Lakes region of Africa in the centuries around the beginning of the Current Era resulted in widespread deforestation of a large area west of Lake Victoria, Nyanza, and after about the seventh century ce a sharp decline in population. He uses not only archaeological evidence to show the extensive use of wood types in creating the fuel for smelting, but also pollen records derived from cores taken in lake beds and sedimentary evidence. After the decline in population in the area west of the lake, forests regrew, and in the fourteenth century populations in the region began to



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increase as farmers adopted new varieties of bananas as staple crops and iron smelting became more efficient in its fuel use. By the nineteenth century, however, forest cover had declined to the point where iron was imported into the region (Schmidt 1997). David Schoenbrun has sought to reconstruct the history of landscape and cultural change in the Great Lakes region, focusing not just on ironworking but on changing food production technologies against a backdrop of climate variability. He argues that the spread of bananas and plantains as staple crops allowed for a dramatic remaking of land use in the region. Banana production allowed for denser population in well‐water areas along the lakes and in highland zones. Stock rearing then concentrated in the lowlands, where it competed with rain‐fed grain for access to the best land. He suggests that societies in the lakes region integrated these different ecological zones through social differentiation, perhaps leading to the stratified societies that existed in the region such as Rwanda, Bunyoro, and Buganda (Schoenbrun 1990, 1993a, 1993b, 1994, 1998). Changing technology in food production over the long term is also the focus of James McCann in his work on Ethiopia (McCann 1995). McCann examines the development of plow agriculture in the highlands of Ethiopia. In general, animal‐traction‐based plowing did not exist in sub‐Saharan Africa outside of the northeastern quadrant consisting of the Ethiopian Highlands and Nilotic Sudan. Both the presence of trypanosomaisis and other diseases and the thinness of many African soils inhibited the spread of plow agriculture. In the Ethiopian highlands, the combination of relatively regular rainfall with cooler temperatures in the highlands meant that plowing on terraced land became established in the last centuries before the Current Era. McCann goes on to argue that plow agriculture came to define Ethiopian civilization, and that areas in highlands suitable for the system became integrated into the highland social order. The broader system, though, was subject to shocks from climate variation, with McCann arguing that the region in the long run was caught in “Malthusian scissors” that limited population growth. The intensification indicated by the use of plow agriculture was not the only form that existed in sub‐Saharan Africa. Esther Boserup famously argued, using primarily African evidence, that, rather than being locked in Malthus’s cycle of demographic boom and bust, population growth provided the conditions for technological innovation to increase agricultural productivity (Boserup 1965). In many regions of Africa, agriculture remained extensive as population densities stayed low, and farmers frequently relied on shifting fields to ensure fertility (Jacobs 2003). However, intensification occurred in areas where productive land or land suitable for specific crops came to be in short supply. In West Africa, rice cultivation led to complex systems designed to ensure access to floodplains for cultivation. Farmers also grew African rice using dry‐land techniques that required intensive labor inputs to ensure adequate supplies of moisture (Carney 2001; Richards 1985). Walter Hawthorne has argued that the

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era of the Atlantic slave trade saw intensification of production in seaside lagoons as people sought refuge from violence and increased their use of iron implements in production (Hawthorne 2003). Intensification also occurred in highland regions, especially in eastern Africa. Mountains and highlands running from Ethiopia to South Africa generally receive more rainfall than the surrounding lowlands. In many cases, such as Mounts Kilimanjaro, Meru, and Kenya, soils on the mountains also proved more fertile than those of lowlands. These uplands quickly came to host dense populations, especially after the spread of banana cultivation as a staple crop sometime before the beginning of the second millennium of the Current Era. Intricate irrigation systems came into existence on many of these highlands, managed by local collaborative institutions, and farmers kept at least some livestock in pens at the home sites to ensure a supply of manure for the bananas. These well‐watered areas operated in a system that linked communities across ecological zones. Households often had fields in different areas to ensure supplies of grain as well as bananas, and either owned cattle herds that grazed in the lowlands or traded with cattle herders for access to cattle for their homesteads (Widgren and Sutton 2004). Intensification also occurred in cases where access to water in arid regions allowed the possibility of agricultural production. The archaeological site of Engaruka in northwestern Tanzania reveals an intricate irrigation system that channeled water down the slope of the Rift Valley onto fields spread across the drier lowlands. The system operated for several centuries before the seventeenth century when it was abandoned, possibly as a result of the expansion of Maasai pastoralists into the region (Sutton 1984, 2004). Around Lake Baringo in Kenya, likewise located in an arid region, demand for food for caravans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sparked the development of an irrigation system drawing on the waters of the lake (Anderson 1988, 2002). If African societies showed a long‐term ability to adapt to many different environments, they especially displayed it after the advent of the Columbian Exchange. With extensive trade links across the Sahara to North Africa and along the Indian Ocean coast to Southwest and South Asia, Africa had never been isolated from the rest of the world. The advent of direct contact with Europe along the Atlantic coast and then into the Indian Ocean marked as big a change for African societies as it did for the rest of the world. Of course people made up Africa’s biggest contribution to the Columbian Exchange. Upwards of 13 million Africans left the continent involuntarily between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. The advent of trade both in captives and in other commodities shifted wealth and power in western Africa toward the coast and away from the Sahara. Although it was spread out both over time and geographically, the loss of population dramatically reduced population growth in parts of the region (Manning 1990). Africa’s participation in the Columbian Exchange was otherwise not as dramatic. Africans adopted New World crops with alacrity. In particular, maize and cassava spread rapidly after the sixteenth century. Both crops fitted into existing



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cultivation systems, giving African farmers more flexibility in crop choices. Maize, which generally requires more moisture than the African grains of sorghum and millet, also had a shorter growing season and often higher yields. African farmers experimented with maize varieties and developed their own varieties, bred for their environments. Many areas, especially in the more arid regions, continued to rely on sorghums and millets (McCann 2004). Slave traders seem to have encouraged the production of cassava as the root stored well on the transatlantic voyage. It fitted into yam cropping systems, as did other types of yams introduced into Africa during this time (Manning 1990). One of the more interesting elements of the exchange is the possibility that African farmers, brought to the Carolinas as slaves, introduced or at least used their experience to make possible the expansion of rice cultivation on plantations there (Carney 2001). The importance of African diseases in the Columbian Exchange has been noted above. Malaria and especially yellow fever played large roles in the decimating indigenous American populations and limiting the growth of European populations in the tropics (McNeill 2010). These same diseases also limited the ability of Europeans to settle in tropical Africa. These disease environments did not, however, stop Europeans from colonizing the one neo‐Europe on the continent, the extreme southern tip at the Cape of Good Hope. Beinart and Coates have compared the settlement of South Africa beginning in the seventeenth century to the settlement of the colonies that became the United States. As in the New World, the Dutch settlers at the Cape found a population relatively isolated from the rest of the world. The arid region surrounding the Cape had limited the expansion of agriculture into the region and the denser populations and Old World diseases that came with it. Dutch settlers set about creating their neo‐Europe by beginning wheat and grape cultivation, importing sheep, and driving local populations from the land, assisted by a demographic collapse of the Khoi San‐speaking peoples of the area. Settler expansion famously reached an early limit at the Fish River which roughly marked a boundary between the region where Africans grew African crops and environments not suited to them. This rough, permeable boundary would hold until the nineteenth century (Beinart and Coates 1995; Elphick 1977). The nineteenth century saw the coming of direct European rule over most of the African continent. This expansion had political, economic, and even, in a way, moral causes but, as many have argued, it was very much shaped by environmental constraints and possibilities. Richard Grove has most famously argued that European expansion was shaped not just by a drive to take control of people and resources but also by a conservationist ethic that sought to conserve the natural world as well as exploit it. Such perspectives meant overriding the claims and practices of peoples and states in favor of what Europeans thought was the superior knowledge produced by Western science (Grove 1995, 1997). The immediate transition to imperial rule, however, did not result in conservation but in destruction. In the first half of the nineteenth century “legitimate

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commerce” expanded as European demand for captive labor declined. African societies across the continent began to export raw materials and agricultural commodities both to Europe and to Asian markets. In addition, exports of natural resources and animal products such as ivory expanded. Scholars who have studied these transitions have tended to focus on the disruptive nature of this commercial expansion. In one of the most influential studies of a region during this transition Helge Kjekshus argues that African societies in what became first German East Africa and then British Tanganyika had generally developed agricultural and pastoral systems that “controlled” their environments and limited the risk of famine. He suggests that the expansion of the slave and ivory trade in the area in the nineteenth century, and then European conquest in the last two decades, disrupted these control mechanisms and brought population decline (Kjekshus 1977). Mike Davis has elaborated this perspective to argue that the late nineteenth century saw what he calls a “late Victorian holocaust” as European expansion caused the death and destruction not only of conquered states and societies but also of finely tuned local systems of environmental management (Davis 2001). While the imperial project fundamentally sought to destroy the autonomy of African societies and to integrate them economically and politically into a global imperial order, colonial states as they came to be established also sought to restructure African landscapes radically. Much of this reimagining was based on an economic vision of African resources feeding metropolitan economies and African labor becoming both producers and consumers in the global economy. As such, colonial regimes followed paths toward those goals in part determined by environment. In parts of the continent where disease environments allowed for Europeans to survive without extensive landscape modification, European settlers often controlled large estates and tried to use the force of the colonial state to force Africans to become cheap labor for their enterprises. Regions holding exploitable raw materials, especially minerals, also saw enclave development using cheap African labor, with the added complication of the necessity of ensuring adequate supplies of food for the workforce. Most African colonies, though, saw colonial regimes attempt to encourage commodity production by African farmers and herders for market. Many colonies contained more than one of these types of areas, and, as a number of scholars have pointed out, colonial policies on resource management developed in a context of imperial institutions that sought to find best practices through much communication across imperial boundaries (Fairhead and Leach 1998; Hodge 2007; Tilley 2011). Perhaps the most profound change for African landscapes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the opening up of large parts of the continent to more rapid transportation, not just of people but of goods as well. Starting in southern African, colonial regimes invested heavily in transportation infrastructure, most notably in railways. Most lines sought to connect perceived areas of export production with ports. In South Africa railways linked the gold and diamond regions with both export–import hubs and sources of labor and



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food for that labor. Railways, steam power on some rivers and lakes, and roads and motorized transport remade transportation networks that had previously relied on porterage and human and sail power on water. Trade and human networks “snapped” to these new modes of transport. Likewise, these networks continued the extractive orientation of trade that had developed in the nineteenth century; they ran from the interior to the coast and hardly ever linked colonies ruled by different imperial powers, a phenomenon that remains true for the most part up to the present (Maddox 1998). The development of the transportation infrastructure had the intended effect of expanding production for markets, especially for exports. In the very early years of colonial rule, such production often took the form of continuing precolonial practices of resource extraction on a grander and more destructive pace. Ivory exports led to the decimation of elephant herds, and rubber tapping in the Central African rainforest increased dramatically (Harms 1987). Such production occurred both because colonial states encouraged settler estates where possible, and because African producers responded to the possibilities of new markets, often in ways not foreseen by colonial officials. Cocoa production expanded in the Gold Coast and elsewhere in West Africa (Hill 1970; Hart 1982) and coffee production in several parts of East Africa (Mbilinyi 1976; Weiss 2003) despite official indifference or opposition. Likewise, the production of food crops for growing colonial urban areas sometimes conflicted with colonial concerns about local food supplies in rural areas (Monson 1991). The expansion of production led, by the early twentieth century, to a growing concern with sustainability in African agriculture as practiced by both African farmers and European settlers. Such concerns became part of regular discourse among colonial officials in the 1930s, informed in part by American experiences during the Dust Bowl era, but fears about “unscientific” African farmers and “greedy” European settlers “mining the soil” date back to at least the late nineteenth century (Anderson 1984; Beinart 1984; Grove 1989). In settler colonies such as Kenya and South Africa colonially inspired conservation efforts focused first on supporting settler agriculture, often by trying to limit African access to land in the name of conservation. Elsewhere, in the 1930s efforts focused on improving soil conservation efforts through imposing often labor‐intensive efforts at changing agricultural practices (Anderson and Grove 1987). The end of World War II saw a major expansion in colonial efforts promote what came to be known as development. These efforts included increased spending on research about African environments and efforts to invest in productive growth. The French constructed a massive irrigation project on the Niger River after the war to promote cotton production. While cotton failed to become a large export, the project found a function as African farmers began to produce rice, mostly for local markets (van Beusekom 2002). The British Groundnut Scheme sought to grow peanuts on mostly empty land in Tanganyika and Nigeria using military surplus equipment. The project failed miserably because the land,

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though underutilized by “primitive” African agriculture, in fact had no water supplies (Hogendorn and Scott 1983). Many other projects, great and small, often failed; the ones that succeeded did so most often when African farmers and herders found their own ways to use the resources that such projects brought, and commonly called forth resistance from communities asked to, in the words of a colonial official in Tanganyika, “undertake significant increases in labour for no apparent gain.”3 If control over the productive processes in agricultural and pastoral production often served as a flash point for conflict, control over land and access to its resources did so even more. Conflict over access to resources took three basic forms: alienation of land for settler estates or extractive industry; conservation of resources, especially forest resources that limited local communities’ access to them; and preservation of wilderness and wildlife. All three forms relied on violence by colonial states and their independent successors for their achievement. Alienation of land for white settlement begins, of course, in South Africa in the 1700s. The idea that “idle” or ill‐used land existed in large quantities in Africa, though, became part of the drive for colonial expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century, bolstered in part by white South Africans’ claims that their expansion in the first half of the nineteenth century had been into primarily empty land. Such claims were not true in South Africa or anywhere else in the continent. European appropriation of land occurred against the resistance of African communities. Eventually settlers controlled much of the land in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Kenya, and existed in smaller numbers in Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), the Belgian Congo, and a few of the French colonies. African resistance to land loss fueled uprisings in Zimbabwe (Alexander 2006; Alexander, McGregor, and Ranger 2000) and Kenya (Anderson 2005; Throup 1987). In Tanganyika, a post‐World War II effort to expand settler estates around Mount Meru became a catalyst for nationalist agitation (Spear 1997). While the legacy of white settlement and resistance have continued to define struggles over land in South Africa and Zimbabwe to this day, such issues remain important as in the last decade African states have taken to selling or leasing land to foreign interests for food production and to collaborating in removing existing communities from their often long‐held territories. Forest lands also became a major site of contention over the course of the colonial era and beyond. As Fairhead and Leach have shown, European conceptions of African forests began often with a serious misconception and proceeded on the basis of a need to ensure the profitable exploitation of forest resources (Fairhead and Leach 1998). European scientists and administrators often assumed that the forests they found in the rainforest belt and on mountain ranges had recently come under threat with the expansion of wasteful exploitation by African farmers. They set about to “conserve” forest resources by restricting African access to forests and regulating exploitation (Conte 2004; Fairhead and Leach 1998; Sunseri 2009). Fairhead and Leach argue that African landscapes at the beginning of the



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colonial era represented the result of centuries of human residence and exploitation within particular environments. In many cases, human action had promoted the spread of tree cover in areas where naturally occurring fires during the dry season would have prevented their growth (Fairhead and Leach 1996; McCann 1997). In other areas, African communities used fire to control bush growth that harbored disease‐carrying insect vectors to promote both animal and human survival (Ford 1971; Giblin 1990). Efforts to separate human activity from forests often led to both threats to forest survival and the spread of disease (Hoppe 2003). At the same time, protecting forested areas became the centerpiece of the largest and most influential environmental movement in postcolonial Africa, the Green Belt movement in Kenya, led by the Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai. The movement focused not just on the loss of green space in a rapidly expanding Nairobi but also on the degradation of rural people’s lives due to loss of forests. It promoted planting trees to replace lost forests for use as well as to protect green space (Maathai 2006). Perhaps no image is more evocative of Africa than that of its wildlife, often portrayed moving spectacularly through a virgin wilderness. It should come as no surprise that behind these images lies a great deal of struggle. As in America and the rest of the world, humans created wilderness (Cronon 1996). In eastern and southern Africa especially, the drive to create preserved areas that would become national parks came not just from a conservation ethic but also from a desire to preserve hunting grounds for Europeans in the early days of colonial rule. At first, these efforts often focused on managing elephant herds for ivory, but they expanded as knowledge of the necessity of habitat preservation came into being (MacKenzie 1989; Steinhart 2005). In East Africa, the great rinderpest epidemic of the 1890s not only wiped out the herds of African pastoralists but decimated much of the game animals of the greater Serengeti ecosystem. Pastoral peoples were forced to move to agricultural areas and the new colonial cities, often as impoverished laborers, in an effort to garner resources to rebuild their herds. In the absence of their herds and their management of pasture through burning, bush expanded that harbored tsetse fly, making it impossible for pastoralists to return to many of the areas they had previously occupied. As a result, when the Germans and British began to create game reserves in the region, they took much of the region to be unoccupied since time immemorial. They framed attempts by pastoralists and farmers to return to their lands as encroachment on the newly created wildernesses. Creating these reserves became a constant struggle with Africans trying to reclaim ancestral resources and Europeans decrying them as poachers and farmers bent on “deforestation” of the regions (Århem 1985; Neumann 1998). The process in southern Africa was similar, with the great national parks developing in areas that were less hospitable to white settlement. South Africa itself lost much of its biodiversity by the early twentieth century because of white hunting and the loss of habitat to mechanical agriculture (MacKenzie 1989). The South

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African state created the largest national park in the area, Krueger, in a region that hosted tsetse fly and malaria (Carruthers 1995). In the second half of the twentieth century, international organizations replaced colonial states as the advocates for continuing preservation efforts. At the same time, postindependence governments have recognized the value of conservation as a generator of both foreign exchange through tourism and, increasingly, payments for conservation and as means to preserve biodiversity. The ability of state or quasi‐state actors to successfully engage in conservation, however, has varied greatly. While states have often successfully defended the borders of preserved areas against encroachment by local communities, they have had less success in controlling poaching, especially of high‐value products of wildlife such as ivory and rhino horn. Conflict between local communities that feel deprived of access to grazing, water, and farming land has occurred constantly. States and international organizations have developed a number of programs to enlist local communities in conservation and to give them benefits. These community conservation efforts have themselves been embroiled in conflict as the goals of local communities and conservationists often differ radically (Adams and McShane 1996; Brockington 2002; Galvin et al. 2002; Perkin 1995). As independence came to African nations from the 1950s onward, concerns over African environments grew. The postcolonial era has seen mostly the continuation of the trends established during the colonial era. First, land use and agricultural productivity have generally expanded, growing at least enough to feed the vast majority of the population in most years. The expanded use of technology, including mechanization and fertility enhancement of soils, have driven the expansion. Population has continued to grow, putting pressure on land availability in some countries. Most of the population growth has occurred in urban areas, however, indicating the ability of most parts of the continent to produce enough food to feed this population. In some regions, wildlife conservation efforts have expanded as tourism becomes a growing economic sector. In others, the lack of tourism has put extreme pressure on conservation efforts. All of these trends face large challenges in the future. While population growth has moderated in recent decades, Africa continues to have the fastest‐growing population of any region in the world. Theoretically, continued adoption of improved technology means that African states could grow enough food to feed themselves; this growth has and will put pressure on the environment, causing landscape change and loss of biodiversity. Climate change further complicates the picture. The warming of global temperatures will cause changes in weather patterns and most likely greater instability in those patterns. The ability of African communities to adapt to their environments as they have done for thousands of years will be put to the test. Two particular foci then should animate the future of environmental history. One looks backwards toward the biological adaptation of humanity and the rest of the natural world to changing environmental conditions. The mapping of the



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human genome holds the promise of new therapies to treat human disease, but it also allows a more sophisticated understanding of the origins, movements, and interactions of human populations on long timescales (Bryc et al. 2010; Campbell and Tishkoff 2008; Tishkoff and Kidd 2004; Tishkoff et al. 2009). The integration of this new type of evidence is still in its infancy, and for the most part it has tended to confirm the conclusions of historians working with linguistic and archaeological evidence, but it has the potential to greatly strengthen conclusions about early African history. The second focus looks forward to the fate of Africa’s environments in an age of rapidly changing climate. One of the great claims of environmental history is that it is firmly rooted in a longue durée approach to the existence of human societies on the earth. Nowhere is this type of history more necessary and more revealing than in Africa. Human societies, born in the natural world, recreating environments, and being shaped them have existed longer on the continent than anywhere else. Understanding the environmental history of Africa requires coming to terms not with Hegel’s antithesis of history, not with an Africa devoid of human influence, but with the very real way humans made Africa.

Notes 1 See also the works William McNeill and J. R. McNeill: McNeill (1976, 2010); McNeill and McNeill 2003. 2 Most famously, John Iliffe (1995: 1) called Africans humanity’s “frontiersmen,” who “colonized” especially difficult environments. 3 Tanzania National Archives 42245/1, L. M. Heaney to Member for Local Government, June 10, 1953.

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Chapter Sixteen

Health and Medicine in African History Karen E. Flint

In December 2013, in Guinea near the borders of Sierra Leone and Liberia, a toddler became infected with and died from the Ebola virus. Within a matter of weeks the virus infected his family members and spread to his neighbors. As people died, distant relatives and friends who came to pay their respects became infected in turn. They sought treatment from healers and at medical facilities both near and far, and a disease that had historically been confined to rural tropical areas further south on the continent spread to the massive urban area of Monrovia, Liberia. From there it gained greater mobility and claimed more victims. A  zoonotic disease  –  transmitted from animals (in this case fruit bats) to humans – Ebola’s main transmission was and is human‐to‐human contact. The disease is transmitted only from contact with a symptomatic person or infected corpse, though more recent evidence shows that male survivors may be able to pass on the disease through sexual transmission. By May 2015, when the disease had largely subsided, there had been some 27,000 confirmed and suspected cases and over 11,000 deaths, 507 of whom were health workers (WHO 2015). Ebola’s impact was far greater than the virus itself. Fear of the disease meant that people avoided clinics, while other clinics closed down out of fear or from the lack of health workers, and limited health resources were diverted to treating Ebola. As the UN Secretary General noted, “more people are dying in Liberia from treatable ailments and common medical conditions than from Ebola” (United Nations 2014). Only when white missionaries and doctors began seeking treatment in A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Europe and the United States did the rest of the world seemed to awake to the possibilities of a global pandemic and to mount a more vigorous global response. The Ebola outbreak of 2014–2015 exposed what many Africans, medical anthropologists, and social medical historians already knew about the stark state of West Africa’s “public” health. Indeed, these scholars could have anticipated many of the challenges that would emerge in this latest Ebola crisis. The history of health, healing, and medicine in Africa is important for providing a context for current health‐care dilemmas. But it also complicates narratives that accept or expect Africa to be a place of disease, and contributes more broadly to African and medical history. Such histories show how indigenous medical cultures helped Africans to mediate and challenge ecological, political, and social change from the precolonial to the postcolonial period; how disease not only impacted morbidity and mortality rates but also shaped economies, societies, and cultures; and that medicine was an important site of encounter, contestation, and cultural exchange between Africans and between Africans and others. African and social historians of health and medicine helped challenged conventional notions that science and medicine are objective and universal. Instead, they situate medicine (generally biomedicine) in its context, showing how it not only reflects but also helps to shape its local environment. Africanists have demonstrated not only how biomedicine is practiced in Africa but also how Africans themselves have changed biomedicine globally. This chapter explores scholarship in this field from the 1970s to the present, and indicates how scholars may contribute to the relatively new fields of global health and historical epidemiology. In 1974 David Patterson made a plea for a new type of medical history of Africa. Until this time, biomedical history in Africa had largely been described in heroic terms – with the likes of Albert Schweitzer and the defeat of pathogens in European laboratories. Visiting or settler medical practitioners, rather than historians, wrote about the impact of tropical diseases on European populations while largely ignoring or disparaging Africans and African medicine. Patterson (1974) urged historians to examine biomedicine’s impact on and reception by Africans. While African historians challenged the altruistic discourse of biomedicine in Africa, their attention remained largely biomedical in orientation. Some African scholars (primarily political economists of health) examined how social, political, and economic factors from slavery, colonialism, Cold War politics, the implementation of structural adjustment programs, globalization, and issues of corruption and graft changed and impacted African health. Others, largely anthropologists and social‐cultural historians, focused on understanding African medicine and African ways of knowing the body and illness. This divide between those who study biomedicine and diseases in Africa and those writing on African therapeutics has decreased as more recent literature focuses on medical pluralism (the encounter of two or more medical cultures). In some ways, histories of health and healing in Africa have mirrored global attitudes and interventions in Africa itself. During the 1970s and 1980s, when health campaigns aimed at boosting broad primary



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care intervention, historians and anthropologists sought broad explanations that explored how over time social, economic, and political institutions shaped the disease environment and contributed to the availability of health services and therapeutic choices. With the acceleration of the HIV/AIDs epidemic and neoliberal influences, international financial institutions demanded that African governments cut back on their public funding of primary health‐care initiatives. Philanthropic organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carter Center stepped in to a certain extent, but in an effort to be more ­economical they focused on singular or vertical campaigns to eradicate diseases – ­targeting malaria, HIV/AIDs, tuberculosis, guinea worm, trachoma, and river blindness. Likewise, many scholars came to focus on the histories of specific diseases and practices, and the impact of these on African patients. It seems, however, that many scholars (like biomedical practitioners) deemed medical pluralism more of a nuisance than as something that could be harnessed and utilized for the benefit of local populations. While this chapter seems to organize authors into “camps” or “schools,” most historians utilize a variety of tools of analysis that defy easy ­classification. I have suggested a few loosely categorized “schools” while acknowledging overlaps and aberrations.

Political economists of health In the 1970s and 1980s, political economists of health greatly expanded how historians approached and understood malnutrition, disease, and mortality within the African context and how disease impacted economies and history. By contextualizing the etiology of disease within broader social, political, and economic spheres, scholars demonstrated how African health and demographics were often negatively impacted by trade, the imposition of colonial law, urban planning, and industrialization. John Ford (1971) demonstrated how European rule, far from being benevolent or benign, furthered the spread of sleeping sickness by destroying local ecological controls and by forcing Africans to move into tsetse‐fly‐infested regions. Hartwig and Patterson (1978) argue that Europeans (albeit inadvertently) made colonialism’s initial years (1890s–1930s) some of the deadliest. Disease ­vectors spread with the creation of roads, railroads, irrigation canals, migrant labor, and military recruitment. Similarly, Megan Vaughan (1987) demonstrated how colonialism’s social, political, and economic disruptions had real but unequal health consequences during the 1949 Malawi famine. In this case, migrant labor enabled many men to escape the ravishes of hunger while women and children left behind, with little access to the cash economy, bore the brunt of suffering. In South Africa, Randall Packard (1989) found that the mining industry’s economic priorities contributed to the rapid spread of tuberculosis in unventilated mines and, as they sent infected men home, in the countryside. Only when the industry had a hard time recruiting healthy workers did they investigate the possibility of changing practices and pursuing better health care and nutrition in the rural areas.

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Overall, political economists of health focused on larger capitalist forces, their ability to influence people’s access to clean water, and their overall health. This focus replaced earlier medical writings which either ignored African health or assumed that African illness and malnutrition stemmed from poor habits or failed adaptations to colonialism, or resulted from the malpractices of African “witch” doctors. Despite this important corrective, political economists of health were critiqued for viewing Africans as inactive subjects at the mercy of larger structural forces. How did Africans respond and possibly resist biomedicine and the discourses that it created about Africa and Africans? How did Africans explain the increase in epidemics and epizootics that accompanied colonialism? How did these experiences change their own medical practices and beliefs? Biomedically oriented political economists of health tended to downplay or ignore African therapeutics let alone medical pluralism. But scholars also began to question how biomedicine itself was a product of culture and how the culture of imperialism and racism impacted and shaped knowledge of Africans and tropical diseases. The social history of medicine complicated the story and addressed many of these questions, but historians like Shula Marks (1997) and Lynn Schumaker (2011), reflecting on the trajectory of medical history in Africa, assert that the political economy of health was and is an important part of our understanding of health outcomes, and should not be left behind in the wake of social constructivism.

Social‐cultural history of medicine Much of the social history of health and medicine acknowledges the importance of larger structural causes of ill health, while also highlighting the role played by social determinants (such as status and relationships). They ask how culture and society shaped understandings of the body, illness, and health. The social‐cultural history of medicine did not only offer a critique of the dominant classes but also sought to explain how medicine was used to shape wider social and cultural ideas that supported the ruling classes’ interests. The idea that medicine is a social‐­ cultural institution emerged from anthropologists’ study of non‐biomedical medical cultures like African therapeutics, also referred to as folk, indigenous, vernacular, ethno, popular, or local medicines. Early British structural functionalists of the 1930s – like Evans‐Pritchard (1937) and Krige (1947) – initially cast African therapeutics under the rubrics of magic, witchcraft, and religion. In what seemed radical for the time, they sought to prove the rationality and function of Africans’ medical beliefs and practices. Yet, in their search for authenticity and “tradition,” they tended to render them as ahistorical. Later social historians and medical anthropologists firmly connected these practices to African ideas of health and healing, highlighting their fluidity and dynamism in the face of white rule, medical pluralism, and globalization. Medical anthropology and social history sought to understand how healers healed social relations, and how “tradition”



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changed but was sometimes manufactured and shaped by unexpected forces and participants. Social constructivists investigated how, when, and where traditions and medical cultures (be they African therapeutics or biomedicine) changed over time and were constructed by African and non‐African populations.

African therapeutics African therapeutics long remained the domain of anthropologists who very much influenced later historians writing about African healing cultures. Initially, scholars sought to reconstruct past African beliefs and medical practices with the aim of demonstrating the logic and viability of African public health, particularly as it mirrored biomedicine (Maier 1979; Pankhurst 1990; Waite 1992a). Scholars like Steve Feierman (1979) and Gloria Waite helped to reframe and expand notions of what constituted African medicine or therapeutics. Africans rooted ideas of health and wellness within the body and the physical and social environment which included territorial spirits and ancestors. Waite argued that African “public health” should include “rainmaking, identification of sorcerers, and control of infectious diseases, as well as public sanitation works and health education” (Waite 1992b: 213). Feierman (1995) urged the integration of healers and therapeutics into a broader history that connected African experiences of disease and epizootics with political conquest and anticolonial movements. Healer‐led revolts  –  from Nyabingi of Rwanda, Maji Maji of Tanganika, Nehanda and Kaguvi of Rhodesia, to Makanna and Mlenjeni of the Cape Colony – should be interpreted as the intertwining of healing, politics, and public health. More recent scholarship has investigated the political and social role of healers in the precolonial period. Such studies certainly show why early colonists approached healers warily, but also why African rulers both lauded and feared them. As powerful individuals, healers could lend legitimacy to rulers but also critique and challenge them. Healers performed functions of public health, and grounded people in a sense of purpose or “tradition” that enabled them to adapt to new economies and environments. My own work shows the role healers and medicine played in the foundational stories of the Zulu Kingdom and how kings and chiefs used them to provide public health, adjudicate crimes such as witchcraft and theft, mediate succession disputes, and buttress their political power (Flint 2008). James Sweet (2013) tells a story of Alvarez, a Benin healer sold into captivity and taken to Brazil, where he helped other African captives adapt to their new environment at the same time as he also challenged Portuguese rule. Sweet speculates that this healer initially threatened the political stature of the Dahomey king, prompting his sale. Kodesh (2010) shows how Bugandan healers helped local populations transition to permanent settlement necessitated by intensive banana farming. By unmooring territorial spirits and making them portable, healers enabled settlement that legitimated clan membership and connected them to the larger Bugandan empire. Given the links between witchcraft, medicine, and

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power from the precolonial to the present era, it is not surprising that many Africans used the language of sorcery to describe those who had political and economic power. (Shaw 1997; West 2005). Such connections influenced how European settlers and governments approached the issue of witchcraft and healers, whom they called witch doctors. Not only did healers lead anticolonial movements but their very existence confirmed an alternative and viable way of understanding the world. They administered justice and empowered the very structures and governments that Europeans hoped to weaken.

Biomedicine as a tool of empire and social constructivists African historians have examined the various ways in which biomedicine contributed both intentionally and inadvertently to colonialism. Biomedicine aided colonial expansion in Africa by enabling European bodies to better survive the tropics, by giving colonists social controls to punish the colonized and to control labor, by creating a healthier and more “efficient” workforce, and by creating new medical knowledge that legitimized and promoted racialized ideas about health, disease, and bodies. Some of these ideas were then used to legally and morally enforce public health measures that sanctioned segregation. This enabled colonists to blame Africans for (and thus ignore) poor sanitary conditions, undernourishment, and the overwork that led to sickness and death. Daniel Headrick’s (1981) Tools of Empire placed medicine firmly in the imperial arsenal alongside other technological advancements such as steamboats, armaments, and the telegraph. The disease environment of Africa had proven deadly to traders, missionaries, explorers, and colonists, and quinine seemed pivotal in allowing European penetration of the continent. This Andean bark thus enabled colonialism by healing the bodies of invading colonists, while European colonialism in India and Indonesia enabled its mass production and wide distribution. Later historians contested the direct connection between quinine and colonialism, though not the wider argument regarding the role of medicine. Frantz Fanon (1967), a St. Martinique psychologist, understood medicine as a “tool of empire” early on when he wrote about the explicit ways in which the French employed medicine during the Algerian War of Independence. He witnessed how biomedical doctors used “truth serums” on Algerian captives, and were expected to repair bodies broken by torture and the minds of the torturers so that they could continue. The French banned the treatment and selling of biomedical substances to the enemy, thus inflicting painful and preventable death by sepsis and tetanus. Other scholars examined how biomedicine advanced and secured colonial power in less explicit ways. Historians identified “tropical” medicine as a tool of empire in its initial enclavist approach, meaning that its primary concern was for the health of European administrators, troops, and traders (Farley 1991). The field of tropical medicine, developed during the late 1890s, identified the parasite‐vector mechanism and



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sought to limit disease transmission through environmental controls. Advantages gained from tropical medicine remained underutilized in the African population until after 1920, when Europeans, alarmed by African ill health, implemented more widespread public health measures. This belated public health effort was then evidenced as colonialism’s supposed civilizing mission, which Patrick Manson, founder of the London School of Tropical Medicine speculated, “will conciliate and foster the native” (1900: 192). Medicine and healing, as early missionaries discovered, could open a dialogue with Africans who otherwise remained uninterested (Landau 1996; Cooper 2006; Shankar 2014). Tropical medicine emphasized and reinforced notions of the tropics as dangerous places of disease where radical measures might be necessary for health intervention. Historians argued that public health became a powerful tool used by colonists to assert social control and enforce segregation in the urban areas. European ideas of health and disease, and what constituted effective public health measures, let alone proper medicine, evolved during the colonial period. Initially, colonists and biomedical practitioners blamed illness on the climate and the local environment. These ideas, coupled with miasmatic theory, an earlier idea that disease was carried and caused by “bad air,” led Europeans to seek local cures and to prefer architectural styles that emphasized ventilation (i.e., elevated houses and large unscreened windows). As ideas about germ theory and connections between parasites and disease emerged with tropical medicine, Europeans regarded Africans as a source of contagion and as carriers of disease. Public health measures enabled colonists to move Africans into urban segregated locations or settlement camps. Maynard Swanson (1977, 1983) coined the term “sanitation syndrome” to refer to the white fear that associated Africans with squalor, disease, and crime and the medical rationalization used to legally segregate whites from Africans and Asians and to restrict them from the more desired and commercial areas of southern African cities. Sanitary segregation later led to racial segregation based on other, nonmedical, grounds and helped the dominant classes to erect a social order that promoted their own interests. Maynard Swanson pointed out that the heightened anxiety of epidemics allowed more radical and coercive measures to take place in the name of public health. Fellow historians proved this connection between epidemics and social change during other episodes involving yellow fever, cholera, sleeping sickness, and bubonic plague in both French and British African colonies (Curtin 1985; Lyons 1992; Ngalamulume 2004; Echenberg 2002, 2011). Swanson’s analysis of the discourse that accompanied epidemics also foreshadowed the social constructivists who came along in the 1990s and later. Megan Vaughan’s Curing Their Ills (1991) highlights the rise of multiple and sometimes competing colonial discourses that used the language of science to socially construct Africans as the other. The production of such discourses parlayed social ideas about Africans that were already prevalent in European culture into “scientific knowledge,” hence lending legitimacy to colonialism on a number of levels. Vaughan shows how such discourses changed over time and differed

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depending on the context and between missionaries and different types of ­biomedical practitioners. The discipline of psychology, for instance, was used as a rational for locking up individuals deemed insane or (occasionally) Africans leading anticolonial movements, but it was also used to pathologize African culture at large. Thus anticolonial movements such as those in Madagascar in 1947 and the Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s were blamed on “deculturation” and a collective psychological instability (Vaughan 1991; Mahone 2006). The discipline also fluctuated between physical and cultural explanations of how the “African mind” was different from the “European mind” (Carothers 1953). For the most part, however, European discourse on race came to favor cultural explanations. Diana Wylie (2001), for instance, shows how white South African officials and scientists blamed African hunger and malnutrition on an African culture that was more obsessed with cattle as property rather than as food. Such discourses, combined with concerns about creating dependency and discouraging employment, seemed to justify state inaction during periods of acute hunger. Other social constructivists (Butchart 1998; Jochelson 2001), influenced by Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci, examined the construction of disease and medical discourse and how Europeans described African bodies and knowledge, often using them as a foil to build notions of European middle‐class respectability. Many of these social historians painted biomedicine and its practitioners and interventions as largely negative and complicit in colonialism. Scholars then begun to ask if this was always true, whether social control were not the goal but perhaps an unintended consequence? Was biomedicine always damaging to the African population, or did it have a positive impact on African health? What of Africans who trained and served as biomedical practitioners? Were they always working at the behest of colonialism? And what about European or colonial scientists: were they a monolithic group? Did some challenge colonial rule? How might Africans have contributed to discourses on scientific racism or to scientific knowledge itself? Could one really generalize so broadly about biomedicine and the colonial experience? Scholars have shown that, while some colonists may have manipulated medicine for social control, others seemed to genuinely care (Bell 1999; Thomas 2003). Though most benefits to African health did not occur until after the 1920s, Ngalamulume (2004) points out that some public health interventions meant to protect European settlers in the late nineteenth century, which were based on inaccurate scientific information, in fact led to improved sanitation for all residents of St. Louis, Senegal. Other research shows that, while early vaccination campaigns were notoriously unreliable given early serum’s susceptibility to the heat, technological improvements and better outcomes convinced many Africans to try them. The same is true of smallpox vaccines; colonists did not eradicate smallpox, but they did control and limit its spread. They also created surveillance and ring vaccination methods that were later used by the World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate the disease (Schneider 2013). African



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biomedical practitioners also played an important role in delivering biomedicine and gaining greater compliance (Marks 1994; Iliffe 1998; Hunt 1999; Digby and Sweet 2002). Early on a number of scholars challenged the binaries that set colonial medicine in opposition to traditional medicine, particularly those examining medical pluralism. More recently, Helen Tilley (2011) has shown the various ways in which colonial scientists working on issues of health, the environment, and nutrition both dissented from and challenged the foundation of colonial rule and racial science. Like Vaughan, she shows that scientists did not homogenize Africa, but saw it as a complex organism that needed to be studied on a case‐by‐case basis. Indeed, some of these scientists came to appreciate, adopt, and advocate indigenous practices and knowledges. Medical pluralism, particularly as viewed from an African perspective, provides a better approach for understanding African therapeutic and biomedical interaction.

Medical pluralism Medical pluralism recognizes the coexistence of two or more medical cultures and that different communities have varying ways of understanding the body and disease and thus different approaches to health and healing. Its study is not necessarily new, though it initially focused only on interactions of biomedical and vernacular medicine in colonial times despite Africans historically utilizing various therapeutic options within and between African cultures. Scholars of medical pluralism focused on four main areas. (1) Anthropologists sought to understand how patients and their families made therapeutic decisions in a medically plural society. (2) Scholars sought to understand Africans’ various responses to biomedicine from widespread acceptance of certain types of medical practices such as anti‐yaws shots to resistance to amputation, quarantines, and hospitalization. (3) Scholars questioned the premise of bounded medical “systems,” and asked what makes something a part of one medical culture and not another. (4) Recognizing that such boundaries were porous, scholars asked how and what type of cultural exchange and influence may have occurred between communities. Realizing that two‐thirds of the world’s population received their health care from “traditional” healers and medicine, a World Health Organization report called for the promotion and development of “traditional” medicine and its integration with “modern” medicine for primary care delivery (WHO 1978). This reflected changes in India and China where primary care had already incorporated local medicines, and the experiences of WHO leaders like the Nigerian psychologist Dr. T. A. Lambo, who also sought to integrate traditional practitioners into his own treatments. The main challenge to integration, both today and then, was convincing biomedical practitioners of the value of traditional therapies. Anthropologists took up this effort in a number of different ways. John Janzen (1978), seeking to understand how medical decisions were made in a plural

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t­ herapeutic society, found that such decisions rested less on the patient and doctor than on the “therapeutic management group,” that is, on one’s kinship network. A person’s tendency for illness and recovery often reflected the status of his or her therapeutic management group, with widows and divorced women faring the worst. He also showed that an individual’s inclusion in a certain medical culture did not preclude cross‐referrals and consultations between medical “traditions,” even within a single case of illness. This showed that Africans deemed varying therapies to be compatible, and consulted another medical practitioner on the basis of new symptoms or the failure of past therapies (Janzen 1987; Jacobson‐ Widding and Westerlund 1989). Increasingly, scholars have focused on the importance of case studies for understanding illness and treatment at the patient level (Prins 1989; Silla 1998; Fassin 2007; Livingston 2005, 2012). This highlights not only obstacles to treatment, but also the complicated decision making that takes place, and the fact that many Africans utilize more than one medical culture simultaneously. This problematizes universal health solutions or technological fixes floated by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and governments which assume a medical table rasa. During the recent Ebola outbreak people made therapeutic decisions as usual, utilizing a variety of different therapeutic options and changing their behavior as the disease and epidemic progressed. Likewise, the spread of Ebola slowed down with the greater involvement of local community leaders, reconsideration of local cultures and histories, and citizen involvement. Historically, African reaction to the introduction of biomedicine depended on how it was offered and by whom, on its perceived effectiveness and similarity to local therapies, and on the perceived origin of the disease. For example, many Africans assumed that white doctors should treat a “white” disease like syphilis. At other times biomedical use was related to the charisma of the biomedical doctor or to his or her conformity to local ideas about strong medicine. In Natal, South Africa, one doctor gained greater compliance by preparing a liquid form of “blue” quinine. The liquid form and the terrible taste, combined with it turning the urine blue, convinced Africans to purchase this medicine rather than take the free government tablets (Flint 2008). Dawson (1987) shows that in the 1920s anti‐ yaws injections became popular because they worked rapidly – clearing up painful skin lesions within days, so much so that when a more effective liquid remedy became available Africans refused to drink it. Nancy Rose Hunt (1999) investigates the medicalization of childbirth in the Belgian Congo which saw biomedically supervised births rise from 1 percent in 1935 to 43 percent in 1958. African biomedical practitioners (doctors, medical aids, nurses, and “dressers”) acted as cultural brokers to champion, negotiate, interpret, and challenge biomedicine, eventually increasing African acceptance and compliance with biomedical treatment. The voluntary adoption or use of some biomedical practices reflects both the openness of African therapeutics and specific circumstances rather than what colonial officials hoped was an African recognition of biomedicine’s superiority.



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At the same time, many Africans remained skeptical of biomedicine, in part because of biomedical failures and forced compliance. Thus when early vaccines initially failed and led people to contract the very ailment they were meant to prevent, Africans wondered if in fact they had not been injected with the disease. Africans saw biomedicine used as a tool of empire (as described by Fanon or Swanson), and wondered why Europeans criminalized vernacular healers and medical practices as illnesses proliferated. Luise White (2000) suggests that colonial era African rumors about blood‐sucking whites who violently attacked and/ or killed Africans and drained their blood emerged as a response to an alien medical system that employed blood transfusions and used chloroform in childbirth. In essence, rumors and fantastic stories may not be real but they reflect back real social, political, and economic concerns. This can be seen in the West African rumors that Ebola was really a conspiracy to conceal the nefarious activities of northern and West African governments (Epstein 2014). Skepticism about Ebola’s existence in this area was the result of a history of colonial biomedicine that had coercively enforced attendance at sleeping sickness treatment centers and, more recently, by hostility to and the failures of national governments and their inability to meet community needs (Bannister‐Tyrrell et al. 2015). Scholars of medical pluralism show not only that patients chose different types of medical therapies and healers, but that practitioners themselves borrowed terms, practices, and the materia medica of other cultures. Despite acknowledging a plurality of medical cultures, Ernst (2002) argues that scholars tended to contrast “traditional” medicine to “modern” biomedicine, and that discussions of “hybridity” tend to assume stable entities. She and others emphasize that medical cultures or boundaries are never stable but instead are constantly in flux. This raises a number of questions about the porousness of medical cultures, where one medical culture ends and another begins, whether and why borders exist, and who polices them. In some cases, biomedicine and colonial law determine borders; in others it is patients and healers (Buchhausen and Roelcke 2002; Flint 2008). Luedke and West (2006) show how healers evoked borders and border crossings to reference power and to cultivate confidence in their clients. Mirroring a wider historiography that examined how non‐Europeans participated in cross‐cultural appropriations and borrowings, scholars looked for African agency within medical exchange. Roberts (2011) shows that West Africans, for instance, embraced a number of tropical medicinal plants from Asia and the Americas, but never showed an interest in cinchona, the tree used to make quinine. Osseo‐Asare (2014) examines the adoption of a number of African plants by various global communities that date back to the medieval period. In some ways, medicine has been like food, a commodity that has been tested, rejected or traded, and innovated upon by outsiders. Sometimes populations copy the original use; at other times they are worked seamlessly into local flavors and cuisines. Yet, as Osseo‐Asare shows, determining the “origins” of herbal medicines has taken on new and important weight in an age of international patents and demands for

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benefit sharing. Attributing herbal medicinal use to a particular community, ­however, is complicated if not somewhat specious. Besides the obvious “evidentiary” disadvantage of many African communities, Osseo‐Asare’s work shows that African medicinal plants moved, often simultaneously, among different peoples and in multiple places, challenging the idea that “indigenous” knowledge is in fact local. For instance, she shows that periwinkle, a common weed in Madagascar, has pan‐tropical distribution from Jamaica to the Philippines, while pennywort, also from Madagascar, can be found in Ayurvedic medicines. Sometimes these herbal medicines find similar use globally, as in the case of periwinkle as a folk remedy for diabetes, or completely different uses, as with grains of paradise, which is used differently in places as close as Ghana and Nigeria and between men and women. She also counters the idea that scientific bioprospecting was and is the domain of the Global North, and shows how independent African governments and postcolonial African scientists tested and innovated upon herbal remedies to be marketed globally. Finally Heaton (2013) shows how African psychiatrists influenced the practices of global psychology by introducing the notion of transcultural counseling. T. A. Lambo and other Nigerian psychiatrists sought to categorize mental illnesses as universal and physical, not racial or cultural, and also to recognize the importance of culture in the manifestation of symptoms and for delivering effective care. Governments or NGOs may not recognize the variety of African medical cultures and beliefs that are practiced alongside biomedicine, but Ebola has shown again that medical pluralism was and is a reality for most Africans. This plurality of medical experiences includes varying degrees of access to formal and informal biomedical centers, practitioners, and merchants, as well as to religious and indigenous healers. There are mission centers like the ELWA Hospital in Monrovia, Liberia, which buy their medicines in the Netherlands and use foreign doctors and staff in their hospital alongside local persons and nurses (who may then run informal clinics out of their homes). Yet, Liberians who seek biomedical drugs on the informal market or even from pharmacies must contend with often unreliable and ineffective pharmaceuticals that are past their due date, counterfeited, or contaminated. Likewise, government clinics are often ill equipped and understaffed. And then there are African healers  –  religious, herbal, and/or spiritual intermediators who have long tended to the health and well‐being of the African population. These last groups are not always benign or helpful, or for that matter less expensive, though they may offer services on credit. Still, they tend to be more accessible, culturally appropriate, and trusted and may have access to herbal remedies. Biomedical approaches are also not infallible; some seem to work better than others for certain ailments. In the case of Ebola a biomedical protocol was essential to stop the spread of the disease and, given the state of “public” health in the region, global interventions were clearly necessary. Yet there is also a clear need to link the global with the local, to find ways to elicit local input, cooperation, and participation and to both recognize and better empower cultural intermediaries



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and those with cultural capital who can help mediate various medical practices and ways of knowing. The Ebola epidemic demonstrated how such intermediaries were initially missing from government and NGO plans, and how their inclusion helped contribute to the end of the outbreak (Onishi 2015). Future historians will surely examine the successes and failures of the 2014–2015 Ebola crisis in the hope that the world can prevent or at least better control future zoonotic epidemics.

Reconstructing histories of health, healing, and medicine in Africa Students and historians wishing to reconstruct histories of biomedicine, medical pluralism, or vernacular therapeutics in Africa will find a variety of types of available sources – from material culture and historical linguistics to oral and written sources of biomedical personnel, missionaries, travelers, anthropologists, colonial officials, and Africans themselves. Finding historical information about biomedicine often proves easier than unearthing the specifics of African therapeutics, which usually appear (with some exceptions) as anecdotal and accompanied by a disparaging tone and terms like “witchcraft,” “witch doctors,” or “superstition.” More recently, historians have made use of oral histories to learn about biomedicine and vernacular medicines, and have interviewed medical practitioners – biomedical and “traditional” – as well as patients themselves about their encounters (Flint 2008; Livingston 2012; Osseo‐Asare 2014; Patterson 2015). Reconstructing precolonial medical history in Africa has its own challenges. Utilizing historical linguistics and archaeology requires special skills, but consulting historical dictionaries and making use of archaeological findings can prove fruitful. Oral traditions, often fantastical, are critiqued for telling us more about the period of record than the period under study and must be used with care. Ethiopians, Nubians, Egyptians, and some Islamic communities in North, West, and East Africa left written documents that describe health and medicine prior to European contact. Much written information regarding African health and healing, however, comes from outsiders, predominantly Muslim traders and, in the later period, European traders who interacted with Africans along the coasts from the 1450s onward. Oral traditions from the ancient kingdom of Mali tell of the important role that kings and blacksmiths played in public health (Maier 1979), while historical linguistics reveals common medical traditions like the poison ordeal in southern and central Africa (Waite 1992a). Archaeology dates medical paraphernalia such as medicine containers, cupping horns, surgical tools, enemas, and snuff spoons, and African artworks sometimes depict the use of such paraphernalia and medicinal plants as well as various medical conditions and diseases. Skeletal remains can give us insights into Africans’ nutritional levels and to their various surgeries or bone settings. James Sweet also has shown how information on health and healing in precolonial Africa can be gleaned from diasporic sources.

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For the colonial and postcolonial period, one can access a number of different types of sources, which are often easier to cross‐reference. Colonial governments collected a variety of information on biomedical practices and African responses to those practices, as well as the local disease environment. Prior to World War I, colonial medical services sought primarily to control epidemics, and thus African medical records tend to concentrate on cities, plantations, and mining communities. The extension of a health infrastructure and m ­ edical research centers increased the availability of morbidity and mortality statics. These came from government health departments, institutions, organizations, bureaus, and sometimes government commissions and surveys. Thus the African Research Survey, commissioned in 1929 to discover how “modern” scientific knowledge had been applied to problems in British Africa, also details African therapeutics and agricultural and nutritional practices. Furthermore because colonial states viewed witchcraft as disruptive to the social and political order, they also documented criminal cases regarding healers and witchcraft; these sources can be found within magisterial and court documents and commissions. Biomedical practitioners and researchers also left a slew of records in scientific and medical journals, reports of the day, and institutes such as London and Liverpool’s School of Tropical Medicine, the Pasteur Institutes of Paris and Lille, and Robert Koch’s Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin. Such sources do not require special skills to read. They often include “scientific” and medical ideas as well as qualitative information regarding the various ways in which Africans responded to biomedical interventions and the scientific and medical cultural and racial biases of biomedicine. In South Africa, some heads of traditional healing associations also read the South African medical journals and wrote letters to the editor. Fortunately many of these published sources have now been digitized and others are available via microfilm. Private archives relating to tropical medicine, such as those of the Wellcome Institute or the School of Tropical Medicine in London have collections of books, journals, and manuscripts concerning issues of health in Britain and its empire. Other records can be found in private collections. Missionary records enable historians a glimpse of the types of biomedical services missionaries offered, how Africans reacted to missionaries and their medicines, and African belief systems and therapeutic practices. Missionaries observed both African medical practitioners and practices keenly as they sought to understand the inner workings of African culture. Such records can be found as published memoirs or in private institutions and libraries. For instance, the American Board of Missionaries papers held at Harvard University are on microfilm, while a missionary society like SIM in Fort Mill, South Carolina, houses the papers of a number of previous missionary societies, consolidated by SIM, dating back to the nineteenth century, including the Soudan Interior Mission which began work in West Africa in 1893 (Shankar 2014; Cooper 2006).



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Anthropologists, initially hired by colonists in the 1930s, sought to understand the problem of witchcraft, and then became interested in understanding African notions of health, disease, and therapeutics. While such studies are mere snapshots of history and often reflect the biases of anthropologists of the time, an accumulation of such sources tends to offer insights into how African therapeutics have changed historically and have continued. Most of these studies are published, though sometimes it is worth consulting the original notes of such anthropologists. In my own work examining African–Indian relations in South Africa I  found the notes of Helen Kuper’s assistant (housed at UCLA’s Special Collections) much more detailed and actually different from what Kuper published (Kuper 1960). Finally, I recommend interviewing healers and patients or observing healing practices firsthand. While such observations and testimonies reflect the present, they also show continuities with the past. With my own research, I interviewed Indian healers who had been involved in “African” traditional medicine for several generations. I collected family and individual histories. I also talked with African healers formally and informally about “Indian” substances that they used, and asked several to prepare special “protective” medicines that I knew were culturally specific. I also spent time observing clients who came to Indian “chemist” shops to find out who they consulted and for what purpose. Given past anthropologists’ and colonial officials’ general lack of interest in Indian–African relations, this was one of the only means of collecting information about this kind of medical exchange and to discover that Indians had actively participated in and shaped South Africa’s traditional medical culture. In addition to generating one’s own archives through interviews and observation, there are other private “archives” to discover. This requires footwork if not also a personal place to store newly discovered records. In one case I asked the Natal Pharmaceutical Society if I could come and look at some of their records. They had recently moved to a new building but managed to find some yellowed minutes of the society from 1908 to 1923 on the floor of a closet. Julie Parle (2007) relayed a similar story in which a query for sources addressed to a former psychiatric hospital turned up a single European Patient Case Book and Staff Punishments Record. The rest of the records had been burned or thrown out following a renovation. Why these particular records had been chosen to survive may just have been happenstance. But it also points to the problems of preservation. A case needs to be made for keeping such private and government records, for if historic materials are not d ­ eposited in archives they can easily be misplaced or destroyed. Finally, now that Google and Hathi Trust have begun to digitize historical books, the digitization of government blue books and commissions would open up research to students worldwide and at the same time preserve otherwise crumbling inventories.

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Conclusions The study of health and medicine is clearly a vibrant field with room for growth. Africanists are needed to contribute in particular to the budding field of global health. Emerging in the 2000s along with other globalization studies and initiatives, global health includes a mixture of public health, international health, and tropical medicine. Like the WHO, founded in 1946, the field of global health recognizes that health issues and diseases like Ebola can easily cross national boundaries, require global surveillance and intervention, and quickly outstrip the capacity of a state. Global health centers, programs, and initiatives, however, are based primarily in high‐income countries and respond to health challenges in mostly middle‐ to low‐income countries. Participants of the Global North seem motivated primarily by concerns for global security, medical humanitarianism, and the expansion of biomedical services and markets. Given global disparities, one might say that this makes sense and at times there is a need to invoke the resources of the world. Yet, as the Ebola outbreak makes clear, this movement could not fix the underlying structural issues of the epidemic – two of the three affected countries were still recovering from civil war – and a broken health‐care system lacked the laboratory, surveillance, and health‐care services necessary to diagnose, track, and treat the disease. Likewise, global health governance systems like the WHO did not coordinate transnational efforts until early July, three and a half months after the first confirmed case of Ebola. Furthermore local governments, international NGOs, and the WHO alienated populations by banning bush meat; blaming victims for contracting the disease through cultural ignorance; ignoring the cultural importance of burial practices; failing to provide food and the necessary supplies to treat victims; using coercion to enforce quarantines and reporting of cases; and insisting on a top‐down public health message that often ignored traditional authorities and healers. Such alienation provoked local resistance, made containment difficult, and delayed treatment  –  with deadly consequences (Wilkinson and Leach 2015). While some contributing factors to Ebola’s spread were unique to the virus itself, many more reflect longstanding political and economic challenges, structural inequalities, and issues associated with medical pluralism. Medical anthropologists and historians can be particularly useful in reminding global health practitioners that universal or biomedical solutions cannot be applied without consideration for the sociocultural, political, economic, and historical context. During the Ebola epidemic, medical anthropologists practiced outbreak anthropology. Fairhead (2014) published an open source article on local burial practices that unwittingly spread the disease. He explained that the dead had to have a “good death” so they could continue as ancestors. Funerary rites required contact with highly contaminated bodies, including touching, washing, and oiling the bodies of the dead and also the travel and burial of “unmarried” women’s bodies at their maternal homes. Other anthropologists worked with Doctors Without



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Borders and WHO, while others intervened in an ad hoc manner. Historians wrote about the history of cordon sanitaires, which were tried in West Africa during the Ebola epidemic, to show where these worked or did not work and why. Certainly historians can learn from medical anthropologists in pursuing advocacy and public scholarship, and in making their work more accessible to practitioners of global health by writing blogs and articles for reputable media outlets and medical journals. Likewise medical historians or historical epidemiologists could be useful to global health by examining the histories of past global health initiatives in Africa (Webb and Giles‐Vernick 2013). Historical epidemiologists can help current global health efforts by studying the conditions under which diseases tend to flourish and rebound. For instance, Packard (2007) shows how Swaziland, which was almost malaria free by the late 1950s, became reinfected as the sugar cane industry set up plantations in the Lowveld and attracted Mozambican labor, but then did not properly maintain irrigation canals or provide adequate housing, thus effectively reintroducing malaria to the area. Iliffe (2006) has similarly written a comprehensive and accessible history of the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Such studies, as James Webb (2013) points out, are useful but often depend on the study of epidemiology. Webb suggests that there needs to be greater training for historians and that they need to publish their work in medical journals. Either way, medical historians need to find a wider audience, one that reaches beyond historians, in order to influence biomedical practitioners who work within Africa and in global health and those who make health policy.

References Bannister‐Tyrrell, Melanie, Charlotte Gryseels, Alexandre Delamou, et al. 2015. “Blood as Medicine: Social Meanings of Blood and the Success of Ebola Trials.” Lancet 385(9966): 420. Bell, Heather. 1999. Frontiers of Medicine in the Anglo‐Egyptian Sudan, 1899–1940. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Buchhausen, Walter, and Volker Roelcke. 2002. “Categorising ‘African Medicine’: The German Discourse on East African Healing Practices, 1885–1918.” In Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800–2000, edited by Waltraud Ernst, 76–94. London: Routledge. Butchart, Alexander. 1998. The Anatomy of Power: European Constructions of the African Body. London: Zed Books. Carothers, J. C. 1953. The African Mind in Health and Disease. Geneva: World Health Organization. Cooper, Barbara. 2006. Evangelicals in the Muslim Sahel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Curtin, Philip. 1985. “Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning in Tropical Africa.” American Historical Review 90: 594–613.

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Dawson, Marc. 1987. “The 1920s Anti‐Yaws Campaigns and Colonial Medical Policy in Kenya.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 20(3): 417–435. Digby, Anne, and Helen Sweet. 2002. “Nurses as Cultural Brokers in Twentieth‐Century South Africa.” In Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800–2000, edited by Waltraud Ernst, 113–129. New York: Routledge. Echenberg, Myron. 2002. Black Death, White Medicine: Bubonic Plague and the Politics of Public Health in Colonial Senegal. Oxford: James Currey. Echenberg, Myron. 2011. Africa in the Time of Cholera: A History of Pandemics from 1817 to the Present. New York: Cambridge University Press. Epstein, Helen. 2014. “Ebola in Liberia: An Epidemic of Rumors.” New York Review of Books (December 18). http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/12/18/ebola‐ liberia‐epidemic‐rumors, accessed March 8, 2018. Ernst, Waltraud. 2002. Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800–2000. London: Routledge. Evans‐Pritchard, E. E. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fairhead, James. 2014. “The Significance of Death, Funerals and the After‐Life in Ebola‐ Hit Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia: Anthropological Insights into Infection and Social Resistance.” https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/123456789/4727, accessed March 8, 2018. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press. Farley, John. 1991. Bilharzia: A History of Imperial Tropical Medicine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fassin, Didier. 2007. When Bodies Remember, Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Feierman, Steven. 1979. “Changes in African Therapeutic Systems.” Social Science & Medicine 13B: 277–284. Feierman, Steven. 1995. “Healing as Social Criticism in the Time of Colonial Conquest.” African Studies 54(1): 73–88. Flint, Karen. 2008. Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948. Athens: Ohio University Press. Ford, John. 1971. The Role of the Trypanosomiases in African Ecology: A Study of the Tsetse Fly Problem. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hartwig, G. W., and D. Patterson, eds. 1978. Disease in African History: An Introductory Survey and Case Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Headrick, Daniel. 1981. Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Heaton, Matthew. 2013. Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization and the Globalization of Psychiatry. Athens: Ohio University Press. Hunt, Nancy Rose. 1999. A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Iliffe, John. 1998. East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iliffe, John. 2006. The African AIDS Epidemic: A History. Athens: Ohio University Press. Jacobson‐Widding, Anita, and David Westerlund. 1989. Cultural, Experience and Pluralism: Essays on African Ideas of Illness and Healing. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.



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Janzen, John. 1978. The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire. Berkeley: University of California Press. Janzen, John. 1987. “Therapy Management: Concept, Reality, Process.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1: 68–84. Jochelson, Karen. 2001. The Colour of Disease: Syphilis and Racism in South Africa, 1880–1950. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kodesh, Neil. 2010. Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Krige, J. D. 1947. “The Social Function of Witchcraft.” Theoria 1: 8–21. Kuper, Hilda. 1960. Indian People of Natal. Westport, CT: Greeenwood. Landau, Paul. 1996. “Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith.” Journal of African History 37(2): 261–281. Livingston, Julie. 2005. Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Livingston, Julie. 2012. Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Luedke, Tracy, and Harry West. 2006. Borders and Healers: Brokering Therapeutic Resources in Southeast Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lyons, Marinez. 1992. The Colonial Disease: A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, 1900–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mahone, Sloan. 2006. “The Psychology of Rebellion: Colonial Medical Responses to Dissent in British East Africa.” Journal of African History 47: 241–258. Maier, Donna. 1979. “Nineteenth‐Century Asante Medical Practices.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 21: 63–81. Manson, Patrick. 1900. “A School of Tropical Medicine.” Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute 31: 192. Marks, Shula. 1994. Divided Sisterhood: Race, Class, and Gender in the South African Nursing Profession. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press / New York: St. Martin’s Press. Marks, Shula. 1997. “What’s Colonial about Colonial Medicine” Social History of Medicine 10(2): 205–219 Ngalamulume, Kalala. 2004. “Keeping the City Totally Clean: Yellow Fever and the Politics of Prevention in Colonial Saint‐Louis‐Du‐Senegal, 1850–1914.” Journal of African History 45: 183–202. Onishi, Norimitsu. 2015. “As Ebola Ebbs in Africa, Focus Turns from Death to Life.” New York Times (January 31). Osseo‐Asare, Abena Dove. 2014. Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Packard, Randall. 1989. White Plague, Black Labor: The Political Economy of Health and Diseases in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Packard, Randall. 2007. The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pankhurst, Richard. 1990. The Medical History of Ethiopia. Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press. Parle, Julie. 2007. States of Mind: Searching for Mental Health in Natal and Zululand, 1868–1918. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu‐Natal Press. Patterson, David. 1974. “Disease and Medicine in African History: A Bibliographical Essay.” History in Africa 1: 141–148.

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Patterson, Donna. 2015. Pharmacy in Senegal: Gender, Healing and Entrepreneurship. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Prins, Gwyn. 1989. “But What Was the Disease?” Past & Present 124: 167–171. Roberts, Jonathan. 2011. “Medical Exchange on the Gold Coast during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Canadian Journal of African Studies 45(3): 480–523. Schneider, William. 2013. “The Long History of Smallpox Eradication: Lessons for Global Health in Africa.” In Global Health in Africa: Historical Perspectives on Disease Control, edited by Tamara Giles Vernick and James Webb. Athens: Ohio University Press. Schumaker, Lynn. 2011. “History of Medicine in Sub‐Saharan Africa.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine, edited by Mark Jackson, 285–301. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shankar, Shobana. 2014. Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c.1890–1975. Athens: Ohio University Press. Shaw, Rosalind. 1997. “The Production of Witchcraft/Witchcraft as Production: Memory, Modernity, and the Slave Trade in Sierra Leone.” American Ethnographer 24(4): 856–876. Silla, Eric. 1998. People Are Not The Same: Leprosy and Identity in Twentieth‐Century Mali. Oxford: James Currey. Swanson, Maynard. 1977. “The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900–1909.” Journal of African History 18(3): 387–410. Swanson, Maynard. 1983. “‘The Asiatic Menace’: Creating Segregation in Durban, 1870–1900.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 16: 401–421. Sweet, James. 2013. Domingues Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Thomas, Lynn. 2003. Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tilley, Helen. 2011. Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. United Nations. 2014. “Secretary‐General’s Remarks to the Security Council on Ebola.” Press statement, September 18. https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/ statement/2014‐09‐18/secretary‐generals‐remarks‐security‐council‐ebola, accessed March 8, 2018. Vaughan, Megan. 1987. The Story of an African Famine in Twentieth‐Century Malawi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vaughan, Megan. 1991. Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Waite, Gloria. 1992a. A History of Traditional Medicine and Health Care in Precolonial East Central Africa. New York: Edwin Mellen. Waite, Gloria. 1992b. “Public Health in Precolonial East‐Central African.” In The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa, edited by Steve Feierman and John Janzen, 212–234. Berkeley: University of California Press. Webb, James. 2013. “Historical Epidemiology and Infectious Disease Processes in Africa.” Journal of African History 54: 3–10. Webb, James, and Tamara Giles‐Vernick, eds. 2013. Global Health in Africa: Historical Perspectives on Disease Control. Athens: University of Ohio Press. West, Harry. 2005. Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.



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Chapter Seventeen

Wealth and Poverty in African History Morten Jerven

Recent modern mainstream economic research on Africa has focused predominantly on explaining its relative lack of material wealth and on unearthing the cause of its seemingly chronic monetary poverty. Such a comparative perspective suffers from some weaknesses and shortcomings. This needs to be addressed by historical inquiry into the wealth and poverty of African nations. In this chapter I shall first provide a review of the contemporary economics and economic history literature, and then review the available evidence on relative wealth and poverty within the African continent, before finally looking at and suggesting interpretations of trajectories of income and wealth.

History matters? Why is Africa poor? This has been the central research question for much recent empirical work in economics and economic history (Acemoglu and Robinson 2010). In the mainstream literature it has largely been taken as a given that the answer to the question involves explaining relative poverty measured as lower GDP per capita “today” in African countries, compared to GDP per capita in other places, such as Germany and Canada. The empirical literature has found systematic correlations between plausible causes that could harm economic performance today – such as incidence of malaria, exports of slaves, and colonial regimes (for a review see Jerven 2015). Models that seek to quantify these historical events, and A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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to isolate cause and effect, have argued that these and other historical events have determined the relative wealth and poverty of African countries as well as vis‐à‐vis the rest of the world. While the methods are new, some of these answers cohere with well‐known hypotheses in African history. The contributions have been ­cautiously welcomed as a “new economic history of Africa” (Hopkins 2009), yet  its (a)historical approach has also been forcefully criticized for presenting a “compression of history” (Austin 2008). It was often lamented that economists ignored Africa’s past when analyzing the causes of its economic performance (Manning 1987; Hopkins 1986). This was most evident perhaps in the debates on why Africa was growing slowly in the 1980s and 1990s, where one camp of scholars, mainly economists, argued that the disappointing economic performance in the 1980s and 1990s was internal to African economies. The position was most strongly associated with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and most clearly expressed in the Berg Report, issued by the World Bank in 1981 (World Bank 1981). According to the report, the causes of unsatisfactory economic performance were chiefly inappropriate economic policies. More specifically, excessive state intervention in the economy was judged to be the policy mistake, and ­consequently the policy reform enforced through structural adjustment lending prescribed liberalization and privatization, as encapsulated in what was called the Washington Consensus. On the other side, the externalist position argued that the IMF and World Bank diagnosis underplayed the strength of external factors in determining economic fortunes and that it overestimated the potential ­efficiency of markets in African economies. Disregarding what would have been the correct diagnosis, the internalist interpretation proved more influential and formed the basis for the treatment prescribed by structural adjustment in the 1980s and 1990s. According to the available evidence, these decades did not see any marked improvement in economic performance, and perhaps even the contrary. The political scientist Nic van De Walle (2001) summarized the two decades (1979– 1999) as the “politics of permanent crisis,” whereas the economist William Easterly (2001) summed up the same period as the “lost decades” and concluded that, despite policy reform, there was no growth. The lack of success in reforming led to change in some of the thinking around what matters for economic growth and therefore determines wealth and poverty in the long run. The paradigm changed from “getting the prices right” to “good governance,” reflecting a change in perspective from emphasizing the set of polices to the implementation and adherence to these policies. Concurrently, there was a parallel movement in the empirical work on economic growth by economists. Elsewhere I have described this as the first and the second generations of economic growth literature (Jerven 2015). Following the seminal publication of a model that used cross‐country regressions with global data sets on growth in GDP per capita, and looked for correlations with other



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variables such as educational attainment, number of assassinations, black market currency rates and more, a literature developed that was aiming to find the global “determinants of growth” (Barro 1991; Jerven 2011a). When Barro had checked and controlled for a lot of different variables, one central finding remained. There was a large and significant African continent “dummy variable.” A dummy variable takes the value 1 or 0; in this case it took the value 1 if the country was situated on the African continent and 0 if it was not. In the regressions, the dummy variable remained significant. Barro’s interpretation of the dummy was that the analysis had not yet fully captured the characteristics of a “typical” African country (Barro 1991: 437). Thus, a scholarly search for the right variables began and, while over the course of a decade of research many correlates with slow growth were found, the African dummy variable proved stubborn to remove. I have labeled the literature that shares this motivation the “quest for the African dummy” (Jerven 2011a; see also Englebert 2000) and, as I have argued elsewhere (Jerven 2015), the quest was ultimately both unsuccessful and highly influential. In a review of the empirical growth literature,1 Durlauf and colleagues referred to this scholarly production over the following decade as a “growth regression industry” (Durlauf, Johnson, and Temple 2005: 599). As early as 1998, Pritchett observed that the growth experience of most developing countries had been ­characterized by instability rather than stable growth and warned that the “exploding economic growth literature” was “unlikely to be useful” (Pritchett 1998: 3–4). The general growth regression literature has been described as disappointing; one assessment concluded that the “current state of the understanding about causes of economic growth is fairly poor” and that “we are in a weak position to  explain why some countries have experienced economic growth and others not” (Kenny and Williams 2001: 15). Whereas the ultimate outcome of the search for causes of slow growth in Africa was inconclusive, an unintended consequence was the idea that African economies were captured in a chronic failure of growth became an accepted stylized fact within economics. Ultimately, this led to growth econometricians, equipped with new models and data sets, searching for the cause of lack of income instead of lack of growth. The main contenders in the empirical literature searching for a root cause of underdevelopment can be organized in three chronological strands according to whether they emphasize the negative effect of initial conditions particular to Africa’s geographical characteristics, the decisive impact of the slave trade, or the effects of the European colonization, as summarized in Battacharyya (2009) and Nunn (2009).2 Many of the contributions are variations of the same argument: that a particular historical event or factor endowment led to a particular institutional constellation that has had lasting economic effect. The big question in the literature remains which of these historical events had the decisive impact and, secondly, through which transmission channels it continues to have an effect. A divisive issue in the economics literature is the relative importance of institutions

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and geography or, as was succinctly phrased in debate, “institutions rule” (Rodrik, Subramanian, and Trebbi 2002) versus “institutions don’t rule” (Sachs 2003). The list of factors and variables are growing and, at times, they are in conflict with each other. However, they are also often listed as a growing body of evidence that indicates that “history matters.” A historian might reply: Which one? It appears that the approaches to the past are quite different between economists and ­historians.

Approaching the African past: historians versus economists The argument that Africa’s root of underdevelopment lies in its engagement with the West, and more specifically Europe, is not new (Rodney 1974). Nor has it gone unappreciated that the geography or factor endowments of Africa have been particularly challenging (Austin 2008). For historians and economic historians, it might be hard to accept that arguments that are not new seem to gain another level of influence, solely it seems, because they are delivered by econometric ­techniques. Moreover, it might be frustrating that new sets of concepts are not engaging already accumulated knowledge and concepts that are accepted in the discipline. One example is the pair of “extractive” and “productive institutions” set up in colonies, which according to Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001, 2002), should explain relative income per capita today. That result, subject to caveats about the quality of the data, may be econometrically robust to 95 percent statistical significance, but it does not cohere very well (or even engage) with the existing categories of colonies in African historiography where the distinctions between settler and peasant colonies have been very important. For example, Bowden, Chiripanhura, and Mosley (2008) compiled wage data, poverty data, and real wage data for three settler economies (South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya) and three peasant economies (Ethiopia, Uganda, and Ghana) and compare long‐term trends in trajectories and levels in living standards. Their main contribution was to challenge the thesis by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) that suggest that higher levels of European settlement led to more ­productive institutions that predict better economic outcomes today. On the ­contrary, higher levels of poverty and lower wages (in particular) were observed in the settler economies. As mentioned, economic historians of Africa previously lamented that economists took 1960 as their starting point, as if events preceding this point in time had no effect on current development (Hopkins 1986; Manning 1987: 50; Austin 2007: 12). There was an informal division of labor between the disciplines: economists studied the post‐1960 period, while historians were mainly occupied with the pre‐1960 period. Some time ago, Ellis (2002) issued a call for historians to write “the history of contemporary Africa,” which partly reflects that 1960 is becoming a more distant part of the past. The disciplines are thus finally intersecting, if only in terms of the time period studied.



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There may therefore be good reasons to be excited about the fruits of cross‐ disciplinary work. But there is also good cause to be aware of the potential for conflict and misunderstandings.3 Historians and economists differ in the types of questions they are interested in, how evidence is dealt with, the role of theory and models or, to put it simply, there are important methodological differences between economists and historians. I have discussed the main differences in approach between economists and historians as they interpret social and economic change in the African past elsewhere (Jerven 2011a); here I attempt to survey some of the new empirical work that has been motivated by the explicit or implicit aim of testing them. I am not referring here to competing big tests, such as a different type of specification that shows that it was the prevalence of malaria or of tsetse fly, the absence of cereal crops, the numbers of slave exports, or the numbers of settlers that has the largest explanatory power in a regression framework. I am thinking about the work that seeks to “decompress” history, and particularly work that seeks to move beyond explaining “today” as a static explained by some historical “event” some time ago, but rather seeks to analyze political and economic change and to explain trajectories of development. Of course, it is difficult to decide whether these large narratives and their accompanying regression results are genuinely testable – it is not clear to me, for instance, first of all, whether they are making a theoretical claim such as “private property rights are important” or a historical claim such as “the failure of the king of Kongo to formalize private property rights for farmers explains why Angola is poor today.” In a critical review of the “reversal of fortune thesis” (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2002), Austin (2008) suggested that it may already be the most discussed contribution to the study of the economics of growth and development since Arthur Lewis’s (1954) model of development, with unlimited supplies of labor. The comparison is instructive. In a dual sector model Lewis postulated that there was an untapped labor supply in the rural agricultural sector, and from this he derived a possible model for future economic development. This model has been applied empirically to explain particular African historical economic developments, such as in Barber’s study of Rhodesia (1961). That specific application of the model was subject to a sharp and still relevant critique by Arrighi: Barber exemplifies the ideological bent of the anti‐historical approach which is the essence of modern economics. For in economics assumptions need not be historically relevant. In fact, they are often plainly untrue and recognized as such. Historical processes fall into the background and are summarized by statistical series of ex‐post data, the “stylized facts” as they are sometimes called, which by themselves reveal nothing about causation. Thus, all that Barber takes from the complex historical process which we have been analyzing are a series of real wages and a series of rates of African participation in the labour market. Causal relations, on the other hand, are not derived from historical analysis, but are imposed from without, that is, through a priori analysis: and a set of assumptions which yields the stylized facts is

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held to have explanatory value, irrespective of its historical relevance. But since there will be normally many such sets, this methodology leaves room for considerable arbitrariness of choice and therefore mystifications of all kinds. In view of this, the low scientific standards attained by modern “development economics” should surprise nobody. (1970: 227)

How do the recent contributions from development economics compare to classic models such as the model of unlimited supplies of labor? The Lewis model used a few simple stylized facts to gain insights and to derive policy implications regarding conditions for future economic development. The model was logically deduced from assumptions. These assumptions could be argued to hold or not, and the model could be deemed applicable or inapplicable to specific empirical studies. It was not offered as a grand explanation of historical development patterns, induced from empirical “evidence,” or presented as the outcome of a “natural experiment,” unlike many of the recent contributions from the new economic history of Africa. Despite development economists’ repeated declaration of the mantra “history matters,” there persists a serious neglect of the qualitative historical literature and the historiographical lessons drawn from the discipline of African history, to the extent that some historians may regret what was called for in the first place. In the words of Robert Jenkins: when faced with studies by economists who use history mainly as a source of data with which to advance unsubtle hypotheses concerning the causes of developmental outcomes, those who had earlier called for scholars to pay more attention to history may regret ever having voiced such a plea, and find themselves revisiting the proverb about being careful what one wishes for. (Jenkins 2006: 7)

The concern about compression of history is not only a disciplinary quibble on what constitutes a correct approach to history but may also have significant implications for policy. History certainly matters, but perhaps those cases where difficult historical legacies were overcome, even temporarily, could offer sources of useful policy advice. It would be very likely that a historian, and in particular an economic historian, would find it difficult to disagree with the proposition that history matters for political and economic outcomes. Partly because of this recognition, there are PhD candidates in North American economics departments who combine the use of economic models with careful archival work to further knowledge of Africa’s material past. And because of that we have accumulated some new evidence and knowledge; in particular we have more quantitative evidence on the colonial period than was available before.

What do we now know that we did not know before? African economic history is experiencing a renaissance (Austin and Broadberry 2014). One of the early and central contributors to African economic history, A. G. Hopkins (2009), called the new surge of literature on material change in



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African economies the “new economic history of Africa.” According to Hopkins, this new literature had appeared largely unbeknownst to historians, having originated in North American economics departments. Hopkins noted several shortcomings in the historical approach, yet invited historians to engage with the research. These seminal papers succeeded in shifting the focus in development economics from associating growth with policy, and turning attention toward the historical causes of wealth and poverty among nations (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012). Whether this new economic history of Africa is conceptually and methodologically coherent with the “old economic history” of Africa has been hotly debated (Jerven 2011a). In particular, there was an exchange as to whether the new contributions should be called “causal history” (Fenske 2010) or whether the methods result in what Austin called a “compression of history” (Austin 2008). It is, however, beyond doubt that the seminal papers published more than a decade ago had an impact on the sheer amount of empirical work done in African economic history in recent times. The contribution of this short section is to take stock of the many empirical contributions since the mid‐2000s. A wealth of new historical data has been unearthed, collated, and organized – a lot of it from colonial archives but some of it also from other sources such as military files recording the heights of soldier recruits and trading companies recording prices and wages. The new estimates of levels and trends in wages, growth, living standards, and taxes have, to date, been presented in a piecemeal fashion. This new empirical work has not yet been synthesized, and it is time to start thinking about how this new knowledge changes conventional knowledge, and to assess how this decade of research has challenged and refined those big research questions posed a decade or more ago. The question has also gained some impetus from contemporary development in African economies. Africa has moved from being depicted as the “hopeless continent” to being described as the hopeful continent that is on the rise (Jerven 2015). In turn, there is an increasing demand for knowledge on the material history of change in Africa. Focus is shifting from explaining chronic growth failure in the so called “bottom billion” (Collier 2008) toward research that can shed light on the role of states in fostering industrial change, and situating the current period of economic growth, or “Africa rising,” in the history of economic growth in African economies. The availability and the character of poverty numbers and economic statistics have shaped the historical analysis of poverty and growth in sub‐Saharan Africa. Quantitative economic histories of economic growth are written using time series data on economic growth. In this case year zero has been 1960. The availability of this evidence in part explains why economists have focused on the postcolonial period. If one writes histories of poverty, using the dollar per day metric, year zero has been 1990. Both are, of course, artificial starting points, but data availability restricts us to this time frame and to the kinds of questions that can be investigated.

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This history of poverty in sub‐Saharan Africa has been shaped by definitions of poverty and the availability of information that fits those definitions. The narratives of economic growth in African economies change dramatically if the starting point of 1960 in the history of economic growth in Africa is rejected. Notions such as “chronic growth failure” and the “bottom billion” would not hold if we were to remove the short time horizon. Similarly, narratives of trends in living standards in Africa are shaped by the current configuration of what constitutes poverty knowledge, particularly at the World Bank, and what does not. That may be a mistake because the short history of poverty by numbers in Africa is characterized by gaps and inaccuracies in the underlying data, and because it fails to contextualize the history of poverty in the 1990s and 2000s in a longer time perspective, and thereby persistent chronic poverty became the “imagined fact” that prompted the narrative on Africa and poverty. One of the central challenges is to connect the colonial period to the postcolonial period. When this is done, there is a conspicuous absence in the central narrative of the economic history of twentieth‐century Africa. In previous analytical models, the postcolonial period has been treated as an “outcome” (and a dismal one), whereas a historical event in the colonial or the precolonial period has been treated as a root cause of this outcome. The aggregate pattern, particularly in terms of poverty and growth – though it is also evident in taxation measures – is a prolonged period of growth from the 1890s into the 1970s. This gave way to widespread failure and decline in the 1980s, followed by two decades of expansion since the late 1990s. Thus, it seems increasingly evident that growth failure in the postcolonial period has taken up undue space in explanations of African economic development. The old pattern in the literature was to regard the postcolonial period as a dismal outcome, as represented by a low GDP per capita today, which should be explained by a colonial or precolonial event or variable. With new data sets, the boundary of investigation is pushed backwards to allow the evaluation of trajectories of economic development across the colonial and postcolonial period.

Historical national accounts I have argued that the interest in African economic history in recent influential economic research was motivated not by an interest in history as such, but by the fact that history provided the instrumental variables that econometric techniques needed to explain Africa’s relative poverty today. It combined evidence from the very recent past (typically GDP per capita today) with evidence capturing some historical event (slave exports, colonial settlers, and geographical variables) to find a root cause of the relative underdevelopment of African economies. Thus, this analysis of economic growth in Africa gave the impression that African economics have been stuck in zero growth equilibrium for centuries.



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A longer time perspectives makes it clear that growth has been recurring in African economies (Jerven 2011a). New GDP estimates for the colonial period, and historical proxies for GDP growth, such as terms of trade, show that periods of economic growth are not new in Africa, and thus seek to place the recent decades of “Africa rising” in historical perspective. There is considerable regional variation but the presence of pockets of robust growth, in some places from the late 1890s and lasting well into the 1970s, actually puts recent research into a new perspective. The growth literature has been unduly influenced by the so‐called lost decades of the 1980s and the 1990s. This ahistorical perspective is worth correcting, particularly because it opens new research avenues, such as a comparative political economy of growth perspective from the colonial period, the postcolonial period, and more recent growth since the 2000s. A general misconception is that our knowledge by numbers in the postcolonial period is overrated and this is mirrored in underrating the numerical basis of knowledge for the colonial period. The GDP estimates for the postcolonial period depend on a lot of assumptions to make up for the missing data (Jerven 2013b); the levels of GDP, in particular, are subject to large errors (Jerven 2015). There is relatively consistent data on government revenues and expenditures for the colonial period, as well as fairly reliable data on exports and imports, at least for the goods that left through ports (but less so for trade across internal borders). In one paper Jerven (2014b) uses these data to estimate GDP growth for the Gold Coast, offering a new GDP series for colonial Ghana for the period 1891–1957. What are the broader implications of these time series? Current databases on GDP for sub‐Saharan Africa only go back to 1960 or 1950. Extending the data series for Ghana and for other countries in sub‐Saharan Africa will be of analytical benefit for several reasons. First of all, it is of great importance which year is treated as year zero in any investigation. A striking example of the power of data sets and the importance of starting points comes from the debate on global warming. Maslin (2004: 40) argues that it took so long to notice global warming because of weaknesses in the global mean temperature data set. From the viewpoint of the 1970s, it looked like the temperatures had been falling since the 1940s, but the current data set, covering 1860–2010, shows that the temperatures are indeed on a rising trend. Similarly, while growth in Ghana slowed down in the 1960s, the general pattern in sub‐Saharan Africa was growth in the 1960s and the 1970s (Jerven 2011a, 2014a). In previous analysis, this growth has seemed like a short blip before the onset of stagnation and decline from the late 1970s. An expanded data set – with coverage for Ghana and beyond  –  provides a different perspective. First, it becomes easier to understand the current rise of Africa. Growth has been and is compatible with imperfect institutions, but sustained growth and diversification remain an elusive goal. Second, the availability of a GDP series for Ghana and for other countries allows a quantifiable perspective on the political economy of growth in colonial Africa. Recent work has quantified changes in real wages and

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living standards in Ghana and elsewhere (Austin, Baten, and Moradi 2007); as of the time of writing, it has been difficult to assert whether rates of change in living standards, observed improvements in heights, or trends in fiscal spending and taxation are simple correlates of economic growth, or whether different political economies (settlers versus peasants colonies) determined a particular distribution of rents and economic growth in the colonial era (Bowden, Chiripanhura, and  Mosley 2008). These valuable prospects for comparative work on African colonies and colonies in other regions will be possible as verifiable estimates of population and GDP become available for scholars of economic history and ­students of the history of development. In one sense, estimating GDP growth for colonial Ghana does not show us anything that is completely unexpected. The way in which the series is constructed for GDP is driven primarily by what happens in external trade (which we know increases rapidly for Ghana) and by the expansion of the public sector, and we know that the colonial administrations expanded in this period as well. When growth is computed this way, we may expect to see growth in practically all African colonial economies. However, care must be taken when interpreting the series. Interesting as it is, it is still based on the relatively limited available data. It has been argued that the level estimates that are derived from such sparse data cannot be readily compared with areas where more data are available (Jerven 2012), but it has also been pointed out that growth estimates are better than the level estimates (Blades 1980). As previously mentioned, estimates of contemporary GDP per capita in Africa and Ghana vary considerably according to the methods, data, and benchmark years that are in use (Jerven 2013a, 2013b).4 A key question in the literature on the cash crop revolution in general has been how to interpret the visible aggregate export data. How do they relate to development in the whole economy? Basic models of economic development used to assume that the opportunity cost of modern sector growth was zero. In the vent for surplus model both land and labor are assumed to be abundant (Myint 1958). In the classical dual economy model proposed by Arthur Lewis (1954) the basic assumption is that marginal productivity of labor is zero in the “traditional” or “rural” economy. In such a setting the modern sector growth was an absolute benefit. However, it was not true that the marginal productivity of labor was low or close to zero. In contrast, the vent for surplus model does not make assumptions about labor productivity, but instead assumes that there is excess capacity of land and labor, and thus the external market opportunity appears as a vent for surplus. Recent empirical quantitative research on the Gold Coast has supported the interpretation that export growth was associated with a net benefit and that until the 1920s, in particular, there was no trade‐off between food production and cocoa production (Moradi, Austin, and Baten 2013: 22). This is not the consensus in studies on other countries. Scholarship has, in different ways, contested these assumptions and by extension the analysis using these models. Most importantly, it has been pointed out that labor was abundant only



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seasonally and very scarce in certain periods (and more so in areas outside of the forest belt), that the production of exports involved both innovation and capital (investment in new technologies), and that the opportunity costs were not zero (food quality and security, labor division, and manufacturing all changed considerably) (Tosh 1980). These and other empirical contributions all remind us that when we see aggregate modern sector growth it is not equivalent to observing aggregate economic growth. Thus, the assumptions made in these estimates do not hold indefinitely for Ghana; they need to be qualified for some countries and rejected for others. In short, these quantitative studies need to be supported by other evidence that can give us information about what happens in the unrecorded economy. For Ghana, the GDP series brings support to the argument that the manifest growth in production, exports, imports, and increases in living standards in Ghana and other nonsettler economies in sub‐Saharan Africa during this period may be contradicting the claims put forward in the work of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001, 2002) and of Nunn (2007, 2008) and others who have suggested different variations of the proposition that these economies were stuck in a slow‐growth equilibrium during this period as a consequence of institutions. Certainly, this growth period was not indefinitely sustained in Ghana, but it should nevertheless indicate that the prevailing institutions in this period, be they rules of taxations, property rights, or general rule of law, were not incompatible with economic growth. Other work on various areas in the less developed regions of the world may confirm or reject whether Ghana was an exception or typical case of this period. Alexander Gerschenkron suggests that if estimates from quantitative data “are at variance with what we should expect from general historical knowledge, they should be rejected” (quoted in Platt 1989: 1). Thus, while this GDP series was prepared with parsimonious data and assumptions, it coheres with other findings. This points the way forward for other efforts of quantifying economic change in colonial Africa.

Wages and poverty: from roots of poverty to trajectories of living standards There is a long history of poverty in Africa. However, the most influential narrative of African poverty is a very short one. The history of Africa by numbers as told by the World Bank starts in the 1980s with the first Living Standards Measurement Study. It is also a very narrow one. In general, there is a disconnection between the theoretical and the historical underpinnings of how we understand and define poverty in Africa and how it has been quantified in practice. This chapter reviews how particular types of poverty knowledge have gained prominence and thus shaped the historical narrative of poverty in Africa. It summarizes recent work on living standards. New sources on real wages and evidence from anthropometric research provide perspectives on trends and relative levels of ­living standards between the 1890s and the present. This raises the possibility that

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the narrative of African poverty that was born in the 1980s is a historical anomaly. Such a perspective may also offer a better perspective from which to reach a historical comparative verdict on the more recent “Africa rising” narrative. First, there is nothing phenomenally new about growth in African economies; and, second, since evidence of economic growth leading to poverty reduction during the recent period is weak, the period of growth and poverty reduction may compare unfavorably to growth in the 1960s or even in the colonial period. Bowden, Chiripanhura, and Mosley (2008) compiled wage data, poverty data, and real wage data for three settler economies (South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya) and three peasant economies (Ethiopia, Uganda, and Ghana), and compared long‐term trends in trajectories and levels in living standards. Their main contribution is to challenge the thesis by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) that suggests that higher levels of European settlement led to more productive institutions that predict better economic outcomes today, and that, on the contrary, higher levels of poverty, and in particular lower wages, were observed in the settler economies. Their investigation shows that real wages stagnated in the settler economies, whereas in the peasant economies (Uganda and Ghana) real wages rose markedly from the 1910s into the 1970s. A similar pattern, without separating settler and peasant colonies, is found by Bourguignon and Morrison (2002) using a large database of compiled household surveys. They note that “in 1950, only 12 percent of world inhabitants with incomes of less than half the world median income lived in Africa. By 1992, 30 percent did” (Bourguignon and Morrison 2002: 739). A long‐term historical reading of poverty in Africa would raise questions about viewing poverty as an “African” structural problem, a point supported by Rönnbäck’s (2014) analysis of living standards in the precolonial Gold Coast. Real wages are calculated by comparing annual nominal wages with the cost of goods that workers consumed at a given time. This process involves a series of assumptions and calculations (about annual household labor, consumption, income, and purchasing power) to determine if a representative household could meet its daily subsistence requirements. The argument is that when income was not enough to meet these requirements poverty is present. This method calculates household income from the records of colonial ledgers. These ledgers typically reflected daily wages, though they could be reported as averages or in terms of minimums and maximums.5 Still following Allen (2005), price data are then compiled for a “bare‐bones” subsistence basket of goods – the absolute minimum daily requirements (calories, protein, fuel, and other goods) for an adult male. It is then assumed that an average family of two adults and two to three children would require three of these consumption baskets, the equivalent of a household subsistence basket. Historical prices are compiled from a variety of sources (company books, trade statistics, government records) in order to calculate how much this household basket of goods would have cost at any given time. These figures are compared to the household incomes calculated above to determine a household’s



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subsistence ratio. A ratio of one indicates that household income is exactly what was required to purchase a household subsistence basket. Estimates less than one indicate that the household income was not enough to meet needs (poverty), while a figure greater than one indicates that the household is better off. Standardizing income and needs in this way allows comparison of well‐being across both time and distance. Frankema and van Waijenburg (2011) use this approach in their analysis of living standards in eight British African colonies from 1880 to 1940. Specifically, they argue that real wages exceeded subsistence levels for this period and that wages in a selection of the colonies studied actually exceeded those in major Asian cities. Further, the authors highlight that a divergence of paths has occurred not only between Africa and these comparable Asian locations but also within the African continent. They point to the different paths that led to present‐day poverty and challenge the argument that colonial institutions and path dependency are at the root of poverty in sub‐Saharan Africa. Making direct reference to, among others, Nunn (2007, 2008) and Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001, 2002), Frankema and van Waijenburg (2011) gather evidence that poverty was more of an Asian problem than an African one until relatively recent times. In making this argument, they take a step to decompress history and to provide the nuance that a more diligent reading of history allows.

Anthropometrics and living standards A more direct way of measuring living standards is to draw on the tools of anthropometrics, or the collection of measurements and statistics relevant to the human body. Specifically, researchers have used mean adult height as a measure of well‐being in a society by highlighting that stunted adult height is a result of the deprivation of essential needs in childhood. Such methods are prefaced on the argument that height is a measure of one’s physical quality of life and that it is positively impacted by the quantity and quality of childhood nutrition, housing, sanitation, and medical care. Conversely, conditions of childhood poverty (such as disease and physical labor) expend nutrients and have the ceteris paribus effect of stunting growth (Moradi 2009). This method pre‐empts the critique that genetics impact height by using average population height and by pointing to the fact that height is normally distributed across a population. Thus, when one aggregates to the population level, the influence of genetics is cancelled out. One fact that is relevant here is that large height differences have been found to be more prevalent between rich and poor people from the same ethnic group than between rich elites of different groups (Austin, Baten, and Moradi 2007). At the macro‐ level, it is suggested that the genetic pool can be assumed to be fairly constant given the relatively short period of time that such studies typically focus on (Moradi 2009).

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It is suggested that the use of average height as a measure for quality of life has a variety of advantages. First, because height is an outcome (rather than an input, like income) of well‐being, this method does not discriminate between different varieties of input (avoiding the need to standardize consumption baskets) or make any assumptions about basic minimum requirements. The primary point of interest is whether an individual’s condition was sufficient to meet their needs. Further, height measures are applicable to the diverse socioeconomic conditions of developing countries (hunters, pastoralists, subsistence farmers, urban laborers) and thus facilitate comparison across groups. Mean height is also sensitive to inequality in that, as a consequence of the diminishing returns of nutritional input on height, redistribution from rich to poor will raise the mean population measure. Finally, it is suggested that height data allow for statistical insight into historical periods for which other measures of poverty are lacking (Moradi 2008). Such methods are generally restricted to relative measures of well‐being. Specifically, mean adult heights are compared for different birth cohorts. If one group has a greater mean height than another, well‐being is assumed to have increased through an improvement in overall well‐being, a reduction of inequality, or both. The most readily available height data prior to the Living Standards Measurement Study are typically found in documents associated with the slave trade or colonial armies. Of course, these samples are not random and they may not always be representative. A preference for physically fit (taller) slaves could skew the sample mean, and military enlistment was often voluntary, paid, and subject to minimum height requirements. Austin, Baten, and Moradi (2007) analyze regional inequality in Ghana from 1880 to 2000 and find that living standards improved during colonial times and then regressed after the economic crisis of the 1970s. In doing so, they employ data from a variety of times and sources. First, attestation forms facilitated the estimation of average heights for those born between the 1880s and 1920s. To account for minimum height requirements, the authors applied truncated regressions using a maximum likelihood estimator in order to establish mean heights that are closer to representative for the population. They then compared these averages with data taken from the 1987–1988 Ghana Living Standard Survey and Demographic Health Surveys (DHSs) from 1988, 1993, 1998– 1999, and 2003 in order to evaluate the development of regional differences in Ghana over time. Moradi (2008, 2009) follows a similar methodology in refuting the notion that contemporary poverty is rooted in colonial legacies. Using records from colonial armies, he argues that Ghana and Kenya experienced significant improvements in health and well‐being as measured by average population height. Moradi compares improvements in this metric with data from other developing countries to demonstrate that Ghana and Kenya were outperforming comparable international countries during colonial times (1920s–1970s).



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Evidence from Taxation It is beyond doubt that taxes matter for economic development and state formation. Not only is there an obvious link between the capacity of state to collect taxes and its ability to deliver development outcomes such as expenditures and investments, but, more subtly, there is indirect evidence supported by theory that there is some stimulation of economic and political development through taxation because it strengthens the contract between citizen and state (Besley and Persson 2014). There has been a longstanding, if sometimes disappointingly vague, conversation in development economics and development studies about how governance and institutions matter (Jerven 2015). Studying the institutions that tax and measure how much they collect seems like an obvious way to pin down a question of potentially great importance. How have African states evolved over time? This chapter addresses the prominent, and sometimes disappointingly vague, debate in the social sciences on the role and persistence of institutions. Studying the fiscal institutions of African states provides an easily observable and measurable way of tracing the evolution of institutions through the precolonial, colonial, and postindependence eras. Frankema (2011) provides an investigation into revenues and expenditures in British Africa from 1880 to 1940. Evaluating the divergence of fiscal policies in British West Africa and East Africa, he calculates gross public revenues and tax burdens for eight colonies. This information is compiled from colonial blue books and other archives, though it is not made explicitly available in the article. Frankema bases his tax burden measure on the fiscal revenue (per capita) divided by the daily wage of an adult male worker (2011: 139). This equates to the average number of male working days required to offset the tax burden imposed on the population for eight British colonies. Building on this, Frankema and van Waijenburg (2011) compare fiscal policies in British and French colonial Africa from 1880 to 1940 (Table 17.1). Using data from various colonial records, the authors highlight that local conditions tended to trump metropolitan blueprints for colonial governance. The sample of countries covered is greatly increased from the previous article and is also organized according to colonizer’s identity, African region, and other geographical circumstances. A significant finding of this article is that gross revenue per capita correlated negatively with the proportion of direct taxes levied on the population in colonial Table 17.1  Number of countries in comparison of fiscal policies in British and French colonial Africa, 1880–1940. East Africa

Britain France

6 4

West Africa

4 8

Source: Frankema and van Waijenburg (2011).

Other

1 5

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Africa. The authors conclude that, when states were able to raise sufficient capital through other means (taxing trade, for example), governments imposed relatively low direct taxes. One shortcoming of this research is that it details only a select number of years between 1880 and 1940 (1911, 1920, 1925, 1929, 1934, and 1937), providing snapshots in time from which to infer trends rather than consistent and transparent time series data. Trends in taxation are not uniform, and some countries follow distinct paths. Before the continent‐wide data sets on levels and trends in taxation in African countries across the twentieth century, many questions remain unanswered. A database by Albers, Jerven, and Suesse (2016) presents measures of the fiscal capacity of African states in the twentieth century. A general continent‐wide trend in taxation (subject to a lot of country variation) indicates increases in taxation from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the 1960s and into the 1970s before declining in the 1980s. There is a marked increase in the late decades through the 2010s, yet this increase is driven more by indirect taxes than by direct taxes. The trends in taxation seem to support what is indicated in studies of growth and living standards across the twentieth century.

Concluding remarks Since the late 1990s, African economic history has experienced a renaissance. A literature that quantifies development trends in colonial Africa has emerged in response to seminal contributions arguing that the colonial experience explains why some countries are poor today and others are not. We now have estimates of fiscal capacity, GDP growth, and real wages, and anthropometric measures of living standards. The literature has taken advantage of the existence of colonial records, and generally point to an external‐market‐led GDP growth that supported the expansion of fiscal states and were associated with improvements in real wages and human development as measured by stature.6 The seminal literature focused on establishing relationships between historical events and income levels today. This focus is a result of one basic data constraint. Estimates of national income and economic growth for African economies were available only back to 1950. As noted, this has resulted in the economic growth literature, which has been evaluating long‐run economic performance, often using evidence from the very recent past. Typically, the literature has focused on explaining variation in income per capita today, thus asserting causal relationships across time periods without being able to account for different trajectories of economic development, which results in what has been called a compression of history. Certainly, it would be an improvement to focus on explaining trajectories of African economic growth rather than the lack of economic growth. The literature on African economic development has already moved away from a compression of history toward focusing on analyzing and evaluating trajectories of economic development during the colonial and postcolonial period in Africa.



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Recently, there have been efforts to provide historical national accounts data for a range of African economies. Particularly for the Gold Coast and Ghana, there is mounting direct and indirect evidence of periods of economic expansion and increases in living standards during the colonial period. Moradi (2008, 2009) uses anthropometric measures and reports that heights (taken from army recruits for both world wars) in cohorts born between 1905 and 1920 outgrew the cohorts born between 1880 and 1893 “by an astonishing 2 cm on average implying a considerable improvement in the physical quality of life” (Moradi 2008: 1113). Frankema and van Waijenburg (2011) collect nominal wages from colonial records and use price data from the same sources to get a measure of real wage developments. They find that real wages started growing in the 1910s and grew rapidly in the 1920s, and that growth was sustained into the 1960s. Bringing further supporting evidence of widespread economic development in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in the Gold Coast rather than a narrow export expansion, Austin (2008) argues that the expansion in production of cash crops did not cause a net deficit in food production in the area, and that the increase in output was accompanied by considerable capital investment, in form of planting and clearing land for cocoa. Moreover, Jedwab and Moradi (2011) have shown that cocoa production was stimulated by infrastructural investment, particularly in railroads, thus indicating that central government and large‐scale capital investment played a conducive role in this period of expansion. In sum, there is mounting evidence that questions whether colonial Ghana was stuck in a low‐level equilibrium. While a country study like this is not an explicit test of the causality suggested in the cross‐country studies literature, it suggests that further research can establish whether the claims that institutions had a causal effect on economic growth are consistent with trajectories of economic and institutional change. A new description of growth and development since the nineteenth century underlines the need for new analytics. In his study of poverty in Africa John Iliffe (1987) speaks of conjunctural and structural causes of poverty. Conjunctural causes of poverty are events – failed harvests, disease, and so on – that cause a sudden change, whereas structural causes of poverty are changes in the political economy, such as property rights regimes or institutions of taxation. The analysis of trends in economic growth, taxation, and living standards can identify the relative importance of these types of factors, and thereby allow a return to assessing the relative importance of “policy” versus “shocks,” in order to explain recurring growth in African economic history (Jerven 2011a). Moreover, the combined availability of longer time trends on growth, taxes, and living standards allows for comparisons of the political economy of growth in the waves of external‐ market‐led growth in the colonial period, growth in postindependence states, and finally growth in the poststructural adjustment period. Both the concepts and the source material of this new empirical work focus on states and state records. My forthcoming book will focus on the central themes

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and questions that these state records can answer  –  and other issues such as ­agricultural productivity, land relations, and gender are largely missing, and that perhaps the colonial period has been given undue focus. One of the central lines of my previous research (as summarized in Jerven 2013b) is that what is visible in the state records varies across time and space. That may perhaps be viewed as a weakness of these studies. As a starting point, one should view the state record itself as a kind of fingerprint of the state and its activities: the record is in itself a lens through which we can gauge state activity and capacity. The statistical record that has been collected, systematized, and synthesized does provide a quantitative basis to challenge and to shape existing narratives on African economic development from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century. To push the boundary further, future research should move toward the use of other data sources to expand the new economic history beyond the colonial period and the use of the colonial records.

Notes 1 See Jerven (2011a, 2015) for a review of the contributions that focus on explaining slow growth in African countries. 2 The seminal contributions for each strand are Bloom and Sachs (1998), Nunn (2008), and Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001, 2002) respectively. 3 See the debate between Hopkins (2011), Jerven (2011b), and Fenske (2011) in Economic History of Developing Regions. 4 For an analysis of how GDP per capita in contemporary Ghana almost doubled ­following a change in the base year from 1993 to 2006, see Jerven and Duncan (2012). 5 See, for example, Frankema and van Wiejenburg (2012), de Zwart (2013) and Rönnbäck (2014). When the latter is the case, the standard practice is to calculate a log‐normal distribution of wages that is biased toward the minimum and to work out a daily average from there. Allen’s (2005) assumption of a six‐day working week and 52 working weeks a year is generally adhered to in calculating an annual income 6 Summarized here, but explored at length in Jerven (forthcoming).

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Jerven, Morten. 2014a. “A West African Experiment: Constructing a GDP Series for Colonial Ghana, 1891–1950.” Economic History Review 67(4): 964–992. Jerven, Morten. 2014b. Economic Growth and Measurement Reconsidered in Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia, 1965–1995. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jerven, Morten. 2015. Africa: Why Economists Got It Wrong. London: Zed Books. Jerven, Morten. Forthcoming. The Wealth and Poverty of African States: Economic Growth, Living Standards and Taxation in Africa Since the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jerven, Morten, and Magnus Ebo Duncan. 2012. “Revising GDP Estimates in Sub‐ Saharan Africa: Lessons from Ghana.” African Statistical Journal 15: 12–24. Kenny, Charles, and David Williams. 2001. “What Do We Know About Economic Growth? Or, Why Don’t We Know Very Much?” World Development 29(1): 1–21. Lewis, Arthur. 1954. “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour.” Manchester School 22(2): 139–191. Manning, Patrick. 1987. “The Prospects for African Economic History: Is Today Included in the Long Run?” African Studies Review 30: 49–62. Maslin, Mark. 2004. Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moradi, Alexander. 2008. “Confronting Colonial Legacies: Lessons from Human Development in Ghana and Kenya, 1880–2000.” Journal of International Development 20(8): 1109–1110. Moradi, Alexander. 2009. “Towards an Objective Account of Nutritional Health in Colonial Kenya: A Study of Stature in African Army Recruits and Civilians, 1880–1980.” Journal of Economic History 69(3): 719–754. Moradi, Alexander, Gareth Austin, and Jörg Baten. 2013. “Heights and Development in a Cash‐Crop Colony: Living Standards in Ghana, 1870–1980.” African Economic History Working Paper Series No. 7/2013. https://www.aehnetwork.org/wp‐ content/uploads/2016/01/AEHN‐WP‐7.pdf, accessed March 26, 2018. Myint, H. 1958. “The ‘Classical Theory’ of International Trade and the Underdeveloped Countries.” Economic Journal 68(270): 317–337. Nunn, Nathan. 2007. “Historical Legacies: A Model Linking Africa’s Past to Its Current Development.” Journal of Development Economics 83: 157–175. Nunn, Nathan. 2008. “The Long‐Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 123: 139–176. Nunn, Nathan. 2009. “The Importance of History for Economic Development.” Annual Review of Economics 1(1): 65–92. Platt, D. C. M. 1989. Mickey Mouse Numbers in World History: The Short View. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Pritchett, Lant. 1998. Patterns of Economic Growth: Hills, Plateaus, Mountains, and Plains. Washington, DC: World Bank. Rodney, Walter. 1974. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Rodrik, Dani, Avind Subramanian, and Fancesco Trebbi. 2002. “Institutions Rule: The Primacy of Institutions over Geography and Integration in Economic Development.” NBER Working Paper 9305. http://www.nber.org/papers/w9305.pdf, accessed March 26, 2018.

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Rönnbäck, Klas. 2014. “Living Standards on the Pre‐colonial Gold Coast: A Quantitative Estimate of African Laborers’ Welfare Ratios.” European Review of Economic History 18(2): 185–202. Sachs, Jeffrey D. 2003. “Institutions Don’t Rule: Direct Effects of Geography on Per Capita Income.” NBER Working Paper 9490. http://www.nber.org/papers/w9490. pdf, accessed March 26, 2018. Tosh, John. 1980. “The Cash‐Crop Revolution in Tropical Africa: An Agricultural Reappraisal.” African Affairs 79(314): 79–94. van de Walle, Nicolas. 2001. African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979–1999. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. World Bank. 1981. Accelerated Development in Sub‐Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action. Washington, DC: World Bank.

Part V

Africans and the World

Chapter Eighteen

The Idea of the Atlantic World from an Africanist Perspective Walter Hawthorne

For historians, the term “Atlantic World” is useful for conceptualizing a geographic territory that encompasses the parts of Europe, North America, South America, and Africa that border a common ocean. Rather than looking at these regions in isolation, historians of the Atlantic, who can be called Atlanticists, examine interactions among them. These interactions began in the fifteenth century with European explorations down the coast of Africa. Toward the end of the century, European sailors reached the Americas. In the centuries that followed, advances in navigation and ship technologies meant that people, goods, and ideas could cross the ocean with increasing speed and in increasing volume. The birth and growth of Atlantic exchange had dramatic effects on cultures, societies, politics, and economics. As I have written elsewhere, the Atlantic became a “world” in the sense that “processes of historical change in one part of that region reverberated throughout the rest, affecting change thousands of kilometers away” (Hawthorne 2010a: 6; see also Eltis 1999). This is to say that places on both sides of the ocean became one. Hence, the early modern history of Lisbon, Luanda, and Rio de Janeiro; London, Cape Coast Castle, and Jamaica; and Nantes, Whydah, and Saint‐Domingue could not be understood without a focus on their interconnectedness. Transoceanic linkages determined the direction of economies, shaped cultures and identities, affected religious practice, and altered political landscapes. For historians, a point of contention has been identifying the catalysts of historical change in the Atlantic World. From one perspective, Europeans shaped A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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this world. They controlled most of the vessels that traversed the ocean from the fifteenth century onward. They spread diseases that devastated populations native to the Americas. They colonized territories in the Americas. They purchased enslaved people on the coast of Africa and in so doing sparked warfare on a scale not seen before on the continent. They shipped these slaves from Africa to the Americas. And in the Americas Europeans forced Africans and their descendants to produce crops such as sugar, cotton, rice, and tobacco, much of which was exported to Europe. It was Europe that benefited most from Atlantic exchange; indeed, Atlantic exchange was in large part responsible for Europe’s rapid economic and military growth in the early modern period (Rodney 1973; Wallerstein 1974; Inikori 2002). Let’s call the above a world systems perspective. And let’s be clear that, from it, Africans do not appear as historical actors: they are acted upon, and their role in shaping events is minimal. They are victims, at least principally. Europeans became a people with a history, while Africans became a people without history. What, then, would be an Africanist perspective of the Atlantic World? From an Africanist perspective, the making of the Atlantic World unleashed great violence on Africa, its people, and its diaspora in the Americas. And, to be sure, Africanists are concerned with exploring this violence and its implications for individuals and societies. But, from an Africanist perspective, Africans participated in the making of an Atlantic nexus by shaping economies, societies, politics, and particularly cultures. Thus Africanists speak of the Black, or African, Atlantic, by which they mean a region in which dynamic ideas, values, and cultural characteristics rooted in Africa became prevalent. Africanists are concerned with tracing the movements of Africans across the ocean (and sometimes back), determining with precision the origins of Africans who found themselves in diaspora in the Americas, and exploring how the cultural assumptions Africans carried with them shaped experiences, often for generations to follow. Africanists focus, as well, on how Africans, on their continent, on ships, and in Europe and the Americas, melded ideas they embraced from elsewhere to forge new identities, create new sorts of communities and models for statecraft, and devise new forms of cultural expression. And they are concerned with how the descendants of Africans in diaspora rethought ideas from Africa to forge and reforge images of who they were. In short, an Africanist perspective on the Atlantic World considers African agency – the capacity of Africans and their descendants to make choices and to shape historical processes – in geographic spaces that spanned an ocean and were created and defined by voyages across that ocean. Many generations of historians studied the Atlantic before an Africanist perspective of the region was embraced widely. Europeanist scholars who focused on British, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch imperial history penned the first studies of the ocean. Their research was, by definition, transatlantic in orientation. But these scholars dealt with what Bernard Bailyn calls “the formal structure of imperial governments, not with the lives of the people who lived within these



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governments, and they concentrated on the affairs of single nations” (2005: 5). These were not, therefore, Atlantic World histories, since they were not concerned with the communities that spanned the ocean. Bailyn credits journalist Walter Lippmann with first conceptualizing the idea of an “Atlantic community” when, in 1917, he wrote of the “profound web of interest which joins together the western world” (Lippmann, quoted by Bailyn 2005: 7). By Western world, Lippmann meant the Allied powers of Europe and the United States. However, isolationist tendencies following World War I meant that Atlantic World history would not become a popular line of inquiry, in Bailyn’s thinking, until the years immediately before World War II. What Bailyn and others focused on the development of the idea of an Atlantic World miss are the contributions of African American intellectuals. And, indeed, a look at the writings of these intellectuals indicates that they developed a conception of the Atlantic World before Lippmann. In 1909 W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of a “distinct nexus between Africa and America which, though broken and perverted, is nevertheless not to be neglected by careful study.” Du Bois went on to lament that, because of a dearth of source material, it was not possible at the time to “trace the social history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of such Negro tribes as furnished material for the American slave trade.” But he provided a “broad outline” of African influences on black family formation in North America (DuBois 1908: 9). In so doing, he laid the foundation for studies concerned with the capacity of Africans and their descendants to make choices and to shape historical processes in a world defined by transatlantic voyages. Du Bois influenced other black intellectuals including Arthur Schomburg, John Bruce, Leo Hansberry, and Carter G. Woodson, who were his contemporaries. Schomburg created a documentary collection for the study of African and African diaspora history, which is the foundation of New York Public Library holdings that are named for him today. Historically black colleges and universities followed, amassing materials that generations have drawn on for the study of Africa and its diaspora. To stimulate interest in the subject, Schomburg joined with Bruce to create the Negro Society of Historical Research in 1911. Four years later Woodson started the Association of the Study of Negro Life and History, and the next year he launched the Journal of Negro History. And Woodson himself became a prolific historian, writing about African and Africa diaspora history (Holton 2007). As the historian Pero G. Dagbovie observes, Woodson adopted an “Afrocentric perspective reminiscent of Du Bois” by describing the positive racial qualities of blacks on both sides of the ocean and celebrating African culture and the black American culture that was rooted in it (2010: 100). Woodson went on to become Dean of Liberal Arts at Howard University. There he sought to integrate African history into the university’s curriculum. This inspired Hansberry who, as faculty at Howard, launched the African civilization course in the history department in 1922. Before then, African history had not been taught at any university in the United States. In the

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United States the birth of African history as a field of study grew from attempts to forge connections between Africa and its diaspora (Dagbovie 2015; Browman and Williams 2014: 357; Gershenhorn 2007: 172). In the first quarter of the twentieth century, other black intellectuals, some at black colleges and others working outside the academy, were influenced by Woodson, Du Bois, Schomburg, Hansberry, and Bruce. But racism and Eurocentrism dominated the established history departments, so the study of Africa and of its connections to the Americas did not spread beyond black institutions. Further, the study of African history was hindered by European colonialism in Africa, which was justified in part by the racist belief that Africa was a continent without history; without complex political systems, economies, and cultures; and in need of European guidance to develop. Black intellectuals wrote to counter these views, but they were accepted widely in other circles (Shepperson 1974: 294; Manning 2003). From the 1930s through World War II, the next generation of black Atlantic scholars cast a broader geographic net, exploring the experiences of people in the African diaspora in South America. For the most part, these scholars grounded their work in detailed ethnographic and anthropological research in the Americas. The study of African history was largely ignored, and colonialism, racism, and Eurocentrism continued to restrain the flourishing of this field of inquiry. But some struggled against the tide. Melville J. Herskovits and Lorenzo Dow Turner were important figures, both of whom served for a period on the faculty at Howard University. Herskovits’s early work, some of which he published in the Journal of Negro History, and his watershed The Myth of the Negro Past delved into both African history and the history of the slave trade to argue that those enslaved in Africa and brought to the Americas came from one broad “cultural zone.” In the Americas, Africans managed to reproduce elements of their culture, he argued, and “cultural survivals” persisted (Herskovits 1941). Herskovits, then, took an Africanist perspective by emphasizing cultural connections across the ocean. Turner was equally influential. His early research focused on antislavery sentiment, and was published by a branch of Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Later Turner focused on African survivals in the Gullah language of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia and on similar survivals or retentions in Brazil, noting, like Herskovits, a nexus between the Americas and Africa (Turner 1949; Wade‐Lewis 1992: 394). However, many rejected Herskovits’s and Turner’s claims, arguing that the uniqueness of black cultures in the Americas resulted from functional adaptations to oppression and was not rooted on the other side of the ocean (Platt 1991). Following World War II, scholars, particularly in the United States, became interested in studying the non‐Western world and turned to area studies analyses. To be sure, part of the reason for the shift came as the result of efforts by the United States to better understand and manage the world in the midst of the Cold War. However, it was also the product of the fall of European colonialism in Africa and of the GI Bill in the United States. The former began in 1958 when



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Ghana claimed independence from Great Britain. In 1960 seventeen other colonies declared their independence from European colonial rule. The latter brought the children of working‐class families of various backgrounds and skin colors into the academy, where some of them set about looking for their ancestors’ contributions to history. Hence, from 1958 to 1978, the number of social history PhDs written in the United States quadrupled, overtaking political history as the central area of graduate studies. It was during this period that interest in African history expanded from black colleges and universities and became a more broadly accepted subject (Vansina 1994: 112–113). And, indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s, the study of Africa flourished. During this period Africanist scholars were focused for the most part on events and processes on the continent itself. This is largely because Africanists sought to debunk the Eurocentric, racist, and colonial notion that to study Africa was to study, in the words of Hugh Trevor‐Roper, the “unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe” (quoted in Vansina 1994: 123). At the same time, Africanist historians sought to give emerging African states a proud or “usable” past upon which to build new nations. Africanists, therefore, largely turned inward, exploring notions of African statecraft and resistance, while stressing that Africans were active agents who shaped their own history. However, some Africanists were influenced by trends in North American history and, therefore, turned their attention outward from Africa to the Atlantic and the slave trade. In the period before and immediately following World War II, studies of the volume of the slave trade were spurious, having grown out of guesswork from the nineteenth century. The historian Philip D. Curtin sought to redress this problem with an empirically grounded study. His Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census derived an estimate for the overall volume of the trade and estimates for exports from particular regions of Africa and imports into particular regions of the Americas (Curtin 1969). Though Curtin’s work was clearly Atlantic in scope, it did not spark much interest in the cultural traditions of the Africans who were taken to the Americas. Rather, Census became a foundation for studies of long‐distance trade, the link between that trade and state development becoming a concern of Africanists interested in the internal economic and political history of the continent. Meanwhile historians concerned with slavery in the Americas focused on questions of profitability, slave demography, and mortality rates. When they researched slaves themselves, their African origins were not much considered. Rather, scholars saw slaves as workers, comprising a particular class within peculiar societies that were also divided along racial and gender lines. And such was thrust of the historiography for decades. As Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan wrote, “Slaves worked. When, where, and especially how they worked determined, in large measure, the course of their lives” (1991: 3). Such analyses did not take an Africanist perspective on the Atlantic World, since they were not concerned with African agency in geographic spaces created and defined by voyages across an ocean.

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But, as in previous decades, African American scholars pushed in a different direction. Important in this regard were George Shepperson and Joseph E. Harris who began to employ the term “African diaspora,” Shepperson first mentioning it in a 1965 paper presented in Dar es Salaam. As Shepperson would later write, he was interested in broadening the growing field of African studies. He feared that if it were cast “in the narrow, continental‐restricted sense” it would “become isolationist,” thereby separating the study of Africans in their homelands from “the kindred study of the African diaspora – and vice versa” (Shepperson 1974: 300; see also Manning 2003). In many ways, Shepperson and Harris were on the cutting edge of a major historiographical shift, one that would abandon an area studies approach to Africa and resurrect Du Bois’s notion of a “distinct nexus between Africa and America” (1908: 9). The same sort of historical shift was slowly unfolding outside of the United States as well, as scholars like Pierre Verger described and provided photographic evidence detailing Nigeria’s and Benin’s cultural influence in Bahia, Brazil (Verger 1968; see also Araújo 2013). Back in the United States, the role of black activists in encouraging a new direction for African diaspora history was important. The 1960s were a volatile time on campuses across the United States. Black students demanded the teaching of African and African American history and the creation of black studies programs – and they were interested in particular approaches to these subjects. As Sterling Stuckey wrote in 1969, “Thanks to the pressures emanating from the civil rights movement and carried to the universities by black students, scholars are likely to become increasingly interested in the relationships between Afro‐Americans and Africans.” He continued: “The old way of looking at Afro‐American history, one which tended to underplay or ignore altogether the role of nationalism and African consciousness among black people in America, cannot long remain respectable or productive from a scholarly point of view” (Stuckey 1969: 4–9). And Stuckey himself was leading the charge to look at history in a new way. In 1968 he published “Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery,” in which he developed the thesis that through the study of folk songs and tales it becomes evident that slaves were able to fashion a life style and set of values – an ethos – which prevented them from being imprisoned altogether by the definitions which the larger society sought to impose. This ethos was an amalgam of Africanisms and New World elements. (Stuckey 1968: 418)

Like Herskovits and Turner, Stuckey saw a single generalized African culture that informed black culture in the Americas. Herskovits and Turner wrote of African cultural survivals; Stuckey wrote of Africanisms. But as the study of Africa’s past blossomed at universities in the 1970s it became possible to move beyond a generalized view of Africa and to consider the particularities of African cultures in regions Curtin had identified as central to slave raiding and trading. Thus, in 1976 Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price argued in The Birth of African American



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Culture: An Anthropological Perspective that Africans in the Caribbean cannot be said to have shared a single culture since they were drawn from multiple cultural and linguistic groups. They went on to develop a model of “creolization” in which the roots of African cultures in the Americas were said to lie in the cooperative efforts of the enslaved to create a new society based on multiple African and American traditions. That is, they argued that Afro‐Caribbean cultures were hybrids created in the Americas under the oppressive structures of the Middle Passage and American slave systems (Mintz and Price 1976). Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, demographic and economic historians continued to examine the slave trade, undertaking more detailed and far‐reaching projects. The most important was spearheaded by David Eltis, Stephen D. Brehrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, who assembled The Trans‐ Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD‐ROM (Eltis et al. 2000). The database contained information about 27,233 Atlantic slave ship voyages from 1595 to 1866 (Eltis et al. 2000). After more data collection, the team launched the website Voyages: The Trans‐Atlantic Slave Trade Database (www.slavevoyages.org/ voyage) in 2006. The site has grown, and today holds information about almost 36,000 slaving voyages. The Voyages database has provided scholars with a tool with which to make advances in crafting histories of the Atlantic. At a macro‐level, Voyages has given us the best estimate of the overall size of the Atlantic slave trade (12.5 million Africans were embarked on slaving vessels, of whom 10.7 million survived the Atlantic passage and were disembarked). The database has also demonstrated better than any other scholarship changes in the Atlantic slave trade over time and across space, and has revealed much about the numbers of slaves shipped by particular European and American carriers. But the project’s greatest importance is centered on its meso‐ and micro‐level uses. On the site, scholars and the general public can specify time periods and determine how many slaves were shipped from broad regions of Africa (Senegambia, Windward Coast, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, west Central Africa, and Southeast Africa). And they can determine how many slaves arrived in regions across the Atlantic (mainland North America, Spanish mainland Americas, Caribbean, Europe, and Brazil). Voyages shows that west Central Africa was the greatest exporter of slaves (5.6 million shipped from its shores) and that Brazil was the greatest importer (5.5 million disembarked there). By comparison, mainland North America received 472,000 slaves, the islands comprising the British Caribbean 2.7 million, and the French Caribbean 1.3 million. And users can narrow their searches to particular African ports where slaves were embarked and Atlantic ports where they were disembarked. Finally, they can focus on individual slave ship voyages and learn how many slaves were on board, how long the journey took, how many died in the Middle Passage, and much more. At the macro‐, meso‐, and micro‐levels, the database also has information about gender ratios, deaths, and age category (child and adult).

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For those taking an Africanist perspective on the Atlantic, Voyages has been important because users can determine how regions and individual ports on either side of the ocean became single, unified geographic entities over time. To this end, Voyages shows that in the nineteenth century most of the Africans shipped to Rio de Janeiro arrived from west Central Africa. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most slaves landed in Bahia arrived from the Bight of Benin. A sizable percentage of the slaves disembarked in South Carolina and Georgia from 1751 to 1800 were embarked in Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a majority of slaves landed on Jamaica had been loaded in the Bight of Biafra. Other parts of the Americas were connected to multiple regions of Africa, receiving slaves from a range of ports or experiencing shifts in slaving patterns over time. With such information available in an online database, scholars have been able to develop a much more nuanced Africanist view of the Atlantic. They have challenged earlier studies of African slavery in the Americas that ignored slaves’ African origins and that dwelled exclusively on their gender, class, and/or racial status. No longer do historians write about work and work alone defining slaves’ lives. And no longer do they write of generalized African slaves arriving in Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Jamaica, South Carolina, and other parts of the Americas. Rather, they write of slaves from particular African regions who carried with them particular cultural assumptions. In other words, scholars have moved from studies of Africanisms to studies of elements of Upper Guinean, Lower Guinean, West Central African, and Southeast African cultural traditions, which were ­recreated or rethought or combined with other traditions to form something new in the Americas. Further, scholars have been able to draw on other sorts of data, combine it with data from Voyages, and derive an even more nuanced Africanist view of the Atlantic. Among those sources have been plantation inventories of slaveholders’ possessions including slaves, runaway slave advertisements, arrest records, records from the Catholic Church (most especially lists of baptisms, marriages, and deaths), records from international courts, and records from the Inquisition. Many of these sources are found only in French, Portuguese and Spanish South America, and the Caribbean, which is where the overwhelming majority of African slaves were shipped. So it is upon these (predominantly Catholic) regions that much of the innovative work taking an Africanist view of the Atlantic has focused. Importantly, each of these bodies of sources contains information about individual slaves. And, when those slaves were from Africa, the sources often note the ethnic or language group with which they were connected. Documents containing information about ethnicity and language have allowed scholars to refine studies of African cultural elements in the Americas by identifying the localities in Africa where people were enslaved and the specific cultural elements they brought to regions of the Americas from those localities. With the release of her CD‐ ROM, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall showed scholars how to extract data about African



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ethnicities and langauges and how to make that data searchable and widely available (Hall 1999). Scholars who have followed have made clear through database and primary source websites such as Slave Biographies (www.slavebiographies. org), Liberated Africans (www.liberatedafricans.org), and Slave Societies Digital Archive (www.vanderbilt.edu/esss) that slaves frequently used identifiers such as Yoruba, Mandinka, Balanta, Igbo, Wolof, Bambara, Fula, Hausa, and Kongo, and conceptualized their relationships, resisted oppression, worshipped, made food choices, married, raised children, played music, and dressed in ways that were informed by the cultures of which they were a part on the other side of the ocean. In my own work, I have combined data from the Voyages website with data from planation inventories and Catholic Church baptismal and inquisition records to explore the lives of Upper Guinean slaves in the states of Maranhão and Pará, Brazil, in the second half of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Voyages shows that a majority of slaves who arrived at these states’ ports from 1751 to 1800 were embarked at two ports in West Africa – Bissau and Cacheu. Who, I wondered, were those slaves? Did they come from state‐based communities that practiced Islam and were located deep in the interior of West Africa or from coastal communities that were politically decentralized and subscribed to more localized religious belief systems? To answer these questions, I turned to plantation inventories produced between 1751 and 1800. Representatives of the Portuguese colonial administration in Maranhão wrote them for the purpose of recording for tax and inheritance purposes the possessions, including slaves, that free residents owned at the time of their deaths. The recorders of the inventories listed the names, ages, marriage partners, children, skills, illnesses, and, importantly, ethnicities of slaves (Hawthorne 2010a). After putting information from dozens of inventories into a database and running statistical analyses, I was able to determine from recordings of ethnicities that, from 1751 to 1800, most African slaves who were in Maranhão hailed from a small section of the Upper Guinea coast. That discovery helped me put other data in context. For example, in church records from the period priests complained of slaves wearing amulets, something very common among Upper Guineans from the coastal zone. In Maranhão, as in the coastal reaches of Upper Guinea, people thought amulets offered protection from a great variety of harms. Priests in Maranhão labeled this and other slave practices “witchcraft.” And their descriptions of this “witchcraft” were similar to descriptions of religious practices that were recorded by European traders and priests in Upper Guinea in the same period. Among the practices that I identify on both sides of the ocean were worshiping at shrines, sacrificing animals to spirits who affected people’s daily lives, visiting powerful people who had the power to heal, and explaining harms to individuals or communities as acts perpetrated by a dangerous few who forged pacts with nefarious spirits. Throughout my study, I document the abuses Upper Guinean slaves suffered at the hands of their owners in Brazil. And I recognize that New World slavery produced ruptures in the lives of enslaved peoples. But I

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argue that it also allowed for continuities. Where Upper Guineans in Maranhão and Pará were able to recreate cultural forms, they did so (Hawthorne 2010a). Judith Carney (2001) takes a similar approach in much of her work. Carney is interested in enslaved Africans’ agricultural practices and culinary traditions in the Americas. In Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, she argues that no matter which ethnic groups they derived from, farmers in Upper Guinea shared an indigenous African knowledge system, which was central to their cultural identity. Carney goes on to examine what she sees as the recreation of Upper Guinean agricultural technologies in coastal South Carolina and Georgia and parts of South America, particularly with regard to rice. What is important about her argument, which is known as the black rice thesis, is its insistence that African slaves shaped agricultural practices that were central to export economies. The labor slaves undertook to produce a commodity crop on their masters’ fields, Carney’s thesis proposes, derived from knowledge developed in particular parts of Africa: enslaved Africans transferred “an entire agricultural complex of rice seeds, farming techniques, and milling” from one side of the ocean to the other (Carney 2001: 167; see also Carney and Rosomoff 2009). Scholars taking an Africanist perspective on the Atlantic have also looked at cultural, economic, and social practices elsewhere in the Americas. They have examined Wolof, Serer, Mandingo, Fulani, and other African influences on ­cattle herding in South America and the Caribbean (Sluyter 2012). They have explored the application of specific African agricultural technologies to the ­production of sugar, maize, millet, yams, and indigo in North America (Knight 2010). They have examined how African slaves in Cuba and Brazil drew on military techniques and organizational strategies from Yoruba areas of Lower Guinea when staging uprisings against slave masters (Barcia 2014; Graden 2014). And they have c­ onsidered the ways in which women of color in Cuba and Brazil were, in the nineteenth century, Atlantic subjects who drew on “African cultural norms about slavery, freedom and gender” to pattern their work and their family lives (Cowling 2013: 122). The best of the studies taking an Atlantic perspective have, following João José Reis, recognized that “Africans refused to be treated as a homogeneous, uniform group of human beings. Each had a history and genealogy that supported and reinforced his or her ethnic awareness in exile” (Reis 1993: 154). And they have also considered that Africans in the Americas adapted to new situations, embraced new identities, innovated new ways of doing things, and were shaped by the power dynamics of the societies in which they found themselves. To this end, John Thornton examines the ways in which some African cultural elements were “hard” and resisted change and others were “soft” and transformed rapidly in the Americas. Thornton acknowledges that the transfer of millions of Africans to the Americas did little to preserve community. Enslaved Africans often found themselves among people quite different from themselves. In some places, the result was the emergence of “multicultural stews” or “a bewildering combination of



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methods of religious practice, ranging from Christian to purely African, and with ample mixtures of both” (Thornton 2012: 313–314, 459). A study that has taken a similar approach is James Sweet’s Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (2011). Sweet’s research is based on a large Inquisition case that he discovered in Lisbon. From it, he tells the transatlantic story of an African healer who applied his skills and built large followings on the continent, in several parts of Brazil, and in Portugal. He did this despite being swept up in the slave trade and hounded by authorities who feared his brand of “witchcraft.” Sweet’s microhistory tells a story that illustrates a larger picture of the importance of African knowledge in the broad Atlantic World. It also shows how categories – be they ethnic, religious, or racial – that often show up in primary source material and are deployed by scholars today did not strictly define and limit Africans’ actions in the Atlantic. Ethnic, religious, and racial categories were to be negotiated, deployed strategically, and manipulated. Thus, Álvares moved back and forth from being Jeje, Côbu, Nâgo, Mina, and Angolan to a generalized African over the course of his life (Sweet 2011). Sweet’s study is part of a growing body of Africanist studies of the Atlantic that explore through biography and autobiography how African slaves and their descendants manipulated systems of oppression as best they could, shaping their own lives and the lives of many of the people they encountered (Lindsay and Sweet 2014; Law and Lovejoy 2007; Lovejoy 2006; Hawthorne 2010b). Like Sweet, Stefania Capone also challenges us to think about the ways in which “African” identities and cultural forms changed in the Americas and often became sites for America‐specific political clashes. Her subject is the Brazilian religion Candomblé, which clearly has roots in religious beliefs brought by slaves from Africa. But Capone charts how Candomblé houses struggled over time and among themselves to be recognized as protectors of religious purity, which many define as being most “authentically” Nagô (Yoruba). Complicit in these struggles, Capone argues, have been anthropologists who joined the houses to study them and who defined notions of purity. Capone’s work is clearly Africanist in its orientation; it is concerned with African agency and a religion that was forged out of connections across the ocean. That religion transformed in Brazil; people who embraced it added elements from elsewhere and adapted it to a unique and changing political and cultural landscape (Capone 2010). And the changing nature of cultural survivals, cultural recreations, Africanisms (or whatever one wants to call the lasting influences of that Africans had on the Atlantic World) is a central concern of Africanist scholars. Africanists who study the Atlantic have also stressed that the ocean should not be seen as a place in which Africans moved only in one direction – from east to west. Africans on the African continent adapted political, economic, social, and cultural structures as they interacted with people from beyond their shores, were exposed to new ideas, and imported goods from Europe and the Americas. And it was sometimes Africans themselves who moved back and forth across the ocean bringing

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those ideas and goods with them. They were sailors, merchants, administrators, and soldiers (Hawthorne 2010b). Thus in a study that looks at multidirectional transatlantic movements, Roquinaldo Ferreira argues, “Brazilian history is an integral part of Angolan history, and vice‐versa” (Ferreira 2012: 246). Similarly, Robin Law and Kristin Mann develop the idea of an “Atlantic community” in describing linkages and influences between Brazil and Africa. They are interested in African slaves shipped from Lower Guinea to Bahia and African freed people who went from Brazil back to parts of Lower Guinea. Both groups, they argue, looked “across the Atlantic to define their identity and way of life.” Law and Mann show how slaves in Bahia treasured Yoruba cloth from Lower Guinea because it came from their homeland (or the homeland of their parents), and how Yoruba cults became central to slave life in Bahia as well. Conversely, freed slaves who returned from Brazil to Africa drew on elements from the other side of the ocean to create a “distinctively ‘Brazilian’ way of life” through their dress, the style of their houses, and their religious observances, all of which had a dramatic impact on politics, culture, and economies in Lower Guinea (Law and Mann 1999: 314–315). An Africanist perspective on the Atlantic is, then, one that considers the role of Africans in forging communities that stretched across an ocean – an ocean across which people moved in many directions. This perspective does not ignore power relations, violence, and exploitation. It emphasizes the horrors of Atlantic slavery and recognizes that the system allowed some spaces for Africans to exercise agency. Where they could, Africans did so, creatively recreating and transforming ideas rooted in particular African cultures in ways that have had a lasting influence on the world we live. I myself can attest to this. I am a white Southern male, but my family’s food traditions, as I learned, have roots stretching across the ocean to West Africa. For example, my family places a particular value on things like black‐ eyed peas, which I have consumed over the past 50 years every January 1 to bring good luck. Other foods I eat, the music I listen to, and my understanding of the concept of freedom owe much to Africa and to the Africans who brought particular understandings of life with them from across the ocean. At the start of the twentieth century, African American scholars recognized the Atlantic as a place shaped by Africans – as opposed to Europeans alone. African American scholars challenged the orthodoxy and pressed for understandings of the Atlantic in which Africans were central. In the past several decades, their vision has become a reality as an Africanist perspective of the Atlantic has become more widely accepted.

References Araújo, Ana Lúcia. 2013. “Pierre Fatumbi Verger: Negotiating Connections between Brazil and the Bight of Benin.” Luso‐Brazilian Review 15(1): 113–133. Bailyn, Bernard. 2005. Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.



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Barcia, Manuel. 2014. West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba: Soldier Slaves in the Atlantic World, 1807–1844. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berlin, Ira, and Philip Morgan, eds. 1991. The Slaves Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas. London: Frank Cass. Browman, David L., and Stephen Williams. 2014. Anthropology at Harvard. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Capone, Stefania. 2010. Searching for Africa in Brazil: Power and Tradition in Camdomblé. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Carney, Judith A. 2001. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carney Judith A., and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff. 2009. In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cowling, Camilia. 2013. Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Curtin, Philip D. 1969. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Dagbovie, Pero Gaglo. 2010. “‘Among the Vitalizing Tools of the Racial Intelligentsia, of Course, the Most Crucial Was Words’: Carter G. Woodson’s ‘The Case of the Negro’ (1921).” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 3: 81–112. doi:10.1353/jsr.0.0031. Dagbovie, Pero Gaglo. 2015. What Is African American History? Cambridge: Polity Press. Du Bois. W. E. B. 1908. The Negro American Family. Atlanta: Atlanta University Press. Eltis, David. 1999. “Atlantic History in Global Perspective.” Itinerario 23: 141–161. doi:10.1017/S0165115300024815. Eltis, David, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, eds. 2000. The Trans‐Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD‐Rom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferreira, Roquinaldo. 2012. Cross‐Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gershenhorn, Jerry. 2007. Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Graden, Dale T. 2014. Disease, Resistance, and Lies: The Demise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Brazil and Cuba. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press. Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo, ed. 1999. Databases for the Study of Afro‐Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1699–1860: Computerized Information from Original Manuscript Sources. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Hawthorne, Walter. 2010a. From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600 to 1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hawthorne, Walter. 2010b. “Gorge: An African Seaman and His Flights from ‘Freedom’ Back to ‘Slavery’ in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Slavery & Abolition 31: 411–428. doi:10.1080/0144039X.2010.504534. Herskovits, Melville J. 1941. The Myth of the Negro Past. New York: Harper Bros. Holton, Adalaine. 2007. “Decolonizing History: Arthur Schomburg’s Afrodiasporic Archive.” Journal of African American History 92: 218–238. Inikori, Joseph E. 2002. Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Knight, Frederick C. 2010. Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo‐American World, 1650–1850. New York: NYU Press. Law, Robin, and Pal Lovejoy, eds. 2007. The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in African and America. Princeton: Markus Wiener. Law, Robin, and Kristin Mann. 1999. “West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast.” William and Mary Quarterly 56(2): 307–334. Lindsay, Lisa A., and John Wood Sweet. 2014. Biography and the Black Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lovejoy, Paul. 2006. “‘Freedom Narratives’ of Transatlantic Slavery.” Slavery & Abolition 32: 91–107. Manning, Patrick. 2003. “Africa and the African Diaspora: New Directions of Study.” Journal of African History 44: 487–506. doi:10.1017/S0021853703008569. Mintz, Sidney W., and Richard Price. 1976. The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Boston: Beacon Press. Platt, Anthony M. 1991. E. Franklin Frazier. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Reis, João José. 1993. Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rodney, Walter. 1973. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle‐L’Ouverture. Shepperson, George. 1974. “The Afro‐American Contribution to African Studies.” Journal of African History 8: 281–301. doi:10.1017/S0021875800015899. Sluyter, Andrew. 2012. Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the Atlantic World, 1500–1900. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stuckey, Sterling. 1968. “Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery.” Massachusetts Review 9(3): 417–437. Stuckey, Sterling. 1969. “Relationships between Africans and Afro‐Americans.” Africa Today 16: 4–9. Sweet, James. 2011. Domingos Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Thornton, John K. 2012. A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Lorenzo Dow. 1949. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vansina, Jan. 1994. Living with Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Verger, Pierre 1968. Flux et reflux de la traite des negres entre le Golfe de Bénin et Bahia de Todos os Santos du XVIIe au XIXe siècle. The Hague: Mouton. Wade‐Lewis, Margaret. 1992. “The Impact of the Turner/Herskovits Connection on Anthropology and Linguistics.” Dialectical Anthropology 17: 391–412. doi:10.1007/ BF00243918. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press.

Chapter Nineteen

Swahili Literature and the Writing of African History Ann Biersteker

And it is a fact remarked by the Natives themselves that while the Dialect of Lamu and its congeners, which are so interestingly discussed in this Book, are affected by the Swahilis at large as affording a mine and a mould for the forms and expressions of most Swahili Poetry, and while the Zanzibar group to the South has furnished a lingua franca, and a terminology for Trade,  –  the Mombassian or Kimvita is the Dialect considered by all others the best fitted for accurate statement and grave discussion – the Swahili for Prose, par excellence. Taylor (1915: ix)1 The utendi is both religious and secular, entertaining and didactic, appealing to the senses and to reason, history and poetry  –  and it is mostly a bias entrenched in Western intellectual history and perpetuated through research which has prevented us from seeing these correlations. Vierke (2011: 439) All interesting literature is born in that moment when you are not sure if you are in one place with one culture. Yoko Tawada, quoted in Grimes (2014: 5)

Swahili literary genres and conventions, as well as numerous and diverse specific Swahili literary works, have intrigued and inspired a wide range of writers on African history. While early writers on East African history considered only the A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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chronicles of Swahili city‐states, more recently scholars have begun to write about other narrative genres as well as about Swahili narrative poetry (tendi or tenzi), sung poetry (nyimbo), and poetry composed in the mashairi genre. Historians have also turned to ethnographies, local histories, the more recent genre of autobiographical writing in Swahili, and the Swahili novel, although literary works may, of course, be problematic when they are read as documents. An understanding of both literature and history informs some of the most insightful works that address significant issues in African history as well as issues that are central to Swahili literary history. While a few recent scholars of Swahili literary history have studied older works from Kenya, most historians who have written about Swahili literature have drawn upon examples from postcolonial Tanzania and have discussed topics that are specific to Tanzanian history. Their works present models for future comparative scholarship to address a broader range of historical topics. As many scholars have explained, the texts that have come to be known as the Swahili chronicles, prose narratives about specific Swahili city‐states, are problematic as sources for a variety of reasons (e.g., Pouwels 1993; see also Prins 1958).2 Their inaccuracies are obvious and they are, for the most part, genealogies of ruling families. In addition, the language and circumstances of their composition raise questions about the motives for their creation. Citing Allen (1982, 1993) and Nurse and Spear (1985), Wynne‐Jones argues that These tales, rather than reflecting a historical narrative to be read literally, are more often now construed as thematic charters for the towns, establishing longevity for issues of importance to urban Swahili of the moment, such as the importance of the exotic in establishing elite status, and particularly a concern with familial association with the Islamic heartlands. (2010: 412)

She also suggests that For the colonial officers who became the authors of these indigenous histories, the contents – emphasizing foreign origins and the deeds of glorious sultans – fitted well with their preconceptions about the narrators. As possessors of complex urban pasts with a web of links to the wider Islamic worlds, the Swahili claims to Arabo‐Persian heritage were more easily reconciled with colonial assumptions than if these urban people had claimed full‐blooded African descent. Likewise, for the Swahili, scholarly interest in their past offered the opportunity for a certain amount of social maneuvering, as the status afforded by Arab ancestry was desirable in the stratified racism of the colonial regime. (Wynne‐Jones 2010: 412)

The earliest chronicles are those of Kilwa. The two extant Kilwa chronicles are in Arabic and Portuguese, but Elias Saad (1979) has argued that the sources for both may be competing Swahili versions. The most accessible version of the Kilwa Chronicle is that included in Freeman‐Grenville (1962: 34–49). This version is also known as Kitab al‐Sulwa.3 Strong (1895) first published this version in Arabic



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and provided an English summary and analysis. De Barros (1945–1946: 1.323–328) published a Portuguese version of the chronicle and Theal (1898–1903) translated this version into English. More recent chronicles are those of Lamu, Pate, Mombasa, and Ngazija. Shaibu Faraji bin Hamed al‐Bakariy al‐Lamuy’s (1938) Lamu Chronicle was edited and translated by William Hichens. The translation ends with the statement “Written down by Saleh at the command of the Governor Abdallah bin Hamed,” but the final sentence in the Swahili version, “Maneno haya yote tumenakili” (All of these words we have copied), suggests that this manuscript was copied from an earlier text. Tolmacheva (1993) has edited the Pate Chronicle based on the extant versions and editions of it. Omar and Frankl (1990) published the Mombasa Chronicle, and Said Bakari bin Sultani Ahmed’s (1977) version of the Ngazija Chronicle was edited and translated by Lyndon Harries. The Kitab al Zanuj (1957), a chronicle in Arabic, narrates the history of the northernmost Swahili communities. Eugeniusz Rzewuski (1991–1992) discusses narratives about the Tungi Sultanate in what is now northern Mozambique. Nurse’s “Historical Texts from the Swahili Coast” provides the basis for linking poetic and prose historical narratives by including examples of each with translations (Nurse 1994). He includes Bajuni/Kitikuu and Siu/Kisiyu narrative poems in the dialects as well as examples of the Bajuni/ Kitikuu vave genre and prose historical narratives in Mwini/Chiimwini and Bajuni/Kitikuu. There are also suggestions that there were chronicles of other city‐states (see Prins 1958 and Hollis 1900). Despite their limitations, scholars have found the chronicles useful for the study of Islam in East Africa (Patterson 2009) and for the study of Swahili knowledge of geography (Tolmacheva 1995). Based on her research at Vumba Kuu, Wynne‐Jones (2010) argues that The evidence of archaeology at Vumba Kuu does not simply “disprove” [the histories collected by Hollis]; rather, it gives an insight into the ongoing process of historical memory and the process of forgetting Vumba Kuu’s humble past while commemorating an ideal past that worked for the present. Through a focus on this dynamic p ­ rocess, and particularly the ways that it was bound up in material practices, the different periods of Vumba’s past are brought together into a continual process of becoming, or negotiating Swahili identity as constituted in different time periods. Thus, we may see a disjuncture between the histories as presented to, and understood by, Hollis, and the past as it was laid down in the archaeological record: the history of everyday life. The archaeological record allows a reassessment of the histories as artifacts; the claims of the Vumba elite are cast as aspirational, using history as a means of creating a certain identity to move into the twentieth century. (2010: 408–409)

In a footnote Wynne‐Jones raises intriguing questions: Some aspects of Hollis’ transcription may have become a little confused with the history of Vumba. The origin dates given for the Nabahani dynasty at Pate and the Sultans at Vumba are both given as ad 1204 (600 ah); in the Vumba case the ­subsequent

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dynastic list does not contain enough names for it to carry through to the Sultans of known date in the seventeenth century. Rather, it seems that the Vumba date may have been conflated with that of Pate, either by Hollis himself in error, or by his informants who were aware of the better‐known histories of Nabahani dominance. (2010: 408–4094)

Perhaps Hollis did make a misleading or possibly telling error, but studies of the Swahili chronicles have not considered that these texts may well have circulated among the multilingual elites within East Africa. There have been no comparative studies of chronicles even though examples of such narratives about polities from northern Mozambique to southern Somalia have been studied. There has been little consideration of the transmission of texts between Swahili city‐states although we know, on the basis of texts confiscated by the Portuguese, that such exchanges occurred in the early eighteenth century (e.g., see Omar and Frankl 1994; Lynn 2005) and had probably also taken place earlier given what we know about contacts between these communities. On the basis of the work of Bang (2012) and others (e.g., Biersteker 1996), it is clear that texts, including poetic eulogies and prose and poetic wasiya (testaments), were widely and broadly exchanged in eastern Africa and beyond from the mid‐ to the late nineteenth century as well as during the twentieth century. There is considerable evidence of an extensive exchange of texts to promote Islamic learning (e.g., Farsy 1989; Abdulaziz 1996). It is also clear that by at least the early nineteenth century political arguments were exchanged between some of the Swahili city‐states (Abdulaziz 1977; Biersteker and Shariff 1993; Feidel and Shariff 1986). Similarities between the Swahili chronicles suggest the possibility of exchanges of chronicles between city‐states; alternatively, the relative universality of narratives of genealogy or origins and their use by elites to establish their legitimacy may explain aspects of the history of the Swahili chronicles. While chronicles, once produced after solicitation by outsiders, may have been exchanged between the elite of Swahili city‐states, there is no evidence of how they might have been used within the Swahili communities. Fictional or actual genealogies could have been used for various purposes within communities or by families or clans, but there is no evidence that chronicles or similar types of narratives were used more widely within Swahili‐speaking communities to establish legitimacy or anything else. During German colonial rule in East Africa officials collected and solicited a wide range of texts from Swahili speakers. “Scribblemania”5 might well be used to describe the volume of this material and it could be said, as Assia Djebar did of writing about the conquest of Algeria, “their publication will form a pyramid to hide the initial violence from view” (1993: 45). But the Germans even solicited poems in Swahili that documented the violence of the conquest of what became German East Africa (see examples in Miehe et al. 2002). Geider (2002) distinguishes between four prose genres in Swahili dating from this period: historiography, ethnography, biography, and travelogue. He links the



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four by referring to them as “habari texts” and observes that “habari texts rarely show a clear‐cut division into individual genres” (Geider 2002: 259). Geider argues that early writers of travelogues and ethnographies, such as that of Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari ([1903] 1981) “did not simply pursue the interests of the colonial initiators and editors but used their writings for their own ends as well” (Geider 2002: 262). He says of those who later published ethnographic “habari texts” in the newspaper Mambo Leo: The writers of the habari texts in Mambo Leo all worked in a double‐bind situation: On one hand, they had a specific interest in describing single ethnic units and sub‐ groups as well as places and eminent personalities of their local home areas. On the other hand, authors did not write in their own ethnic language but used Swahili instead, which already functioned as a lingua franca but was being developed into a standardized language by the colonial authorities, and promoted not least by Mambo Leo itself. Information was automatically intended for both readerships, the local one (if swahiliphone) and the readers in the entire Tanganyika territory and East African region who also simultaneously maintained and transcended their local particularities. (Geider 2002: 267)

Geider also discussed the East African Literature Bureau series which began in 1948, Masimulizi na Desturi ya Afrika ya Mashariki (Customs and Traditions in East Africa). According to Geider, these 50–80‐page monographs generally described “the origins, migrations and interrelationships of ethnic groups and sub‐groups, contact with the Arabs and the arrival and establishment of European rule” (2002: 268).6 Writers in Swahili have produced a wide range of histories since the late colonial period. Some of these have been edited and translated in publications that credit the authors more fully and that give greater attention to context. These editions include Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari’s The Customs of the Swahili People: The Desturi za Waswahili of Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari and Other Swahili Persons, edited and translated by J. W. T. Allen (Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari [1903] 1981). A second example is Mathias Mnyampala’s Historia, Mila na Desturi za Wagogo wa Tanzania, edited and translated by Gregory H. Maddox as The Gogo: History, Customs, and Traditions (Mnyampala 1995). Maddox also worked with Ernest Kongola to produce Practicing History in Central Tanzania: Writing Memory, and Performance (2006). Another example is Shetler (2003). Kandoro’s Mwito wa Uhuru (1961) may be the most official early Tanganyika Africa National Union (TANU) history of the formation of the party, but as Hunter (2012: 372) notes there have been at least two additional Swahili published histories of TANU (Barongo 1966; Ulotu 1971; Hunter 2012: 372). Hunter’s study is of an unpublished work, “The History and Affairs of TANU in Region and Districts, 1954–1967,” a text that, Hunter argues, was most likely written by Lameck Bogohe, one of the founding members of TANU (2012: 369). In his preface to Mwito wa Uhuru,

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Julius Nyerere called upon TANU members to write histories of the party and seems to have envisioned a participatory history project: Moja ya upungufu wetu katika TANU ni kwamba hatujaandika historia ya TANU. Kwa kweli hakuna mtu mmoja ambaye aweza kusema kwamba yeye anajua historia yote ya TANU. Kila mmoja wetu anajua sehemu tu ya mambo yaliyofanyika na ­kuifikisha TANU hapo ilipo. Bwana Kandoro katushinda wote na pia katushinda kwa kuandika yale ambayo yeye anayakumbuka. Wakipatikana wengine kama yeye na kuandika yale ambayo wao wanayakumbuka, tutakuwa tumechukua hatua ya kwanza kukusanya na kuandika historia ya TANU(ii). (Nyerere 1961: ii; emphasis original) One of our lacks in TANU is that we have not yet written a history of TANU. Truly there is no one person who is able to say that he/she knows the entire history of TANU. Each one of us knows just a part of what took place and what got TANU to where it is today. Bwana Kandoro has defeated all of us and he has defeated us by writing that which he remembers. If others like him are found and they write what they remember, we will have taken the first step in gathering and writing the history of TANU. (author’s translation)

During the late colonial period Swahili writers produced a wide range of a­ utobiographies and biographies (for a useful overview see Topan 1997). The most well known of these are Shaaban Robert’s autobiography and his biography of Siti binti Saad (Robert 1966, 1967). Topan observes that Robert extols the character and industry of Siti in the biography, and, in this sense, the book follows the wasifu tradition of not being a critical evaluation of Siti’s life, but a didactic, admiring account of how an African woman, who had no formal education, achieved success. (1997: 300)

Historians who have studied Swahili texts have been attentive to the use of local sources as well as to the status of the authors of these texts. In social histories concerned with regions where literacy was restricted and limited, written texts are inherently problematic as they were accessible only to the elite. The volume of these ethnohistories and editions of them attests to the appeal of prose narratives to both academic and nonacademic historians, but there is ample evidence that Swahili writers have preferred the poetic genre to convey and transmit information about the past; they continue to use the poetic genre to comment on current events (Askew, 2016). There is considerable evidence of the use of poetic texts both within and between Swahili communities. The tumbuizo (songs) of the legendary hero Fumo Liyongo are well known within many Swahili‐speaking communities



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and may be among the earliest examples of Swahili literature (Liyongo Working Groups 2004). In her comprehensive and insightful study of the Swahili poem “Utendi wa Haudaji” Vierke writes: Rather than being part of theological discourses of the wanavyuoni, or Islamic scholars, tendi are a more easily accessible sort of “edification literature” composed for a wider public, and used in festive, profane contexts, which, given the all‐permeating nature of religion, are never really profane in a strict sense. (2011: 438–439)

Feidel and Shariff’s (1986) article about a poem by the Siu poet Kibabina ­illustrates the potential of the study of Swahili poetry for the study of other aspects of East African history. The poem, which was composed around 1865, memorializes recent and earlier resistance to Omani rule, chastises the Siu elite who have allied with Zanzibar, and by doing so encouraged further resistance. Saavedra Casco’s Utenzi, War Poems, and the German Conquest of East Africa: Swahili Poetry as Historical Source (2007) is usefully read with Kala Shairi, the collection edited by Miehe et al. (2002). Research for these two works took place simultaneously, but the authors were not in touch with one another. Kala Shairi is a meticulously edited anthology that includes English translations of all of the extant poems in Swahili that were written about the German conquest. The collection includes poems that were solicited by the German authorities as well as Hemedi Abdullah al‐Buhry’s much more critical poem, which was hidden in a family collection and shared only within Swahili communities until shortly before independence, and Abdulkarim Jamaladini’s poem about the Maji movement. Saavedra Casco’s work also pays particular attention to the latter two poems and is based both on analysis of the poems and on research he conducted in Tanzania, particularly with family members of each of the poets. In the mid‐1890s William Taylor, a Church Missionary Society (CMS) ­missionary in Mombasa, may have been the first to collect Swahili sung poetry (nyimbo),7 as well as the poems, including the political verse, of Muyaka bin Haji. More recently historians and ethnomusicologists have studied the performance genre taarab, in which nyimbo are sung with orchestral accompaniment. Notable studies of taarab include Laura Fair’s (2001) study of the songs, the performances of Siti binti Saad, and Kelly Askew’s (2002) study of taarab performance in Tanzania. Fair argues persuasively that An examination of Siti binti Saad’s life history and her musical style provides c­ oncrete illustrations of some of the ways in which formerly servile members of island society worked to undermine the ideological and practical divisions that existed between slave and free‐person, Arab and African and to create a somewhat cohesive cultural identity as Zanzibaris. (2001: 170)

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Askew considers how taarab in performance “constitutes a powerfully effective mode of dispute negotiation” (2002: 24) and demonstrates that Competing representations of the nation are performed in everyday practice by musicians, cultural officers, local politicians, coastal wedding guests, high‐ranking politicians, poets, traffic police, Swahili language experts and a host of constituencies that jointly comprise the socio‐political entity of Tanzania. (2002: 293)

More recently Askew has written about political commentary in Tanzanian newspaper poetry. She compares poems published in newspapers about Kaiser Wilhelm II, King George V, and Julius Nyerere, and argues that the poems offer “poetic ethnographies of the Tanzanian state even as they offer partial biographies of a German emperor, a British king and an Africa president”(2014: 533). Askew provides elegant translations of works by the poet Abdilatif Abdalla, and introduces readers to the wealth of commentary on political and social issues provided by the thousands of poems published over the last 125 years in Swahili newspapers. Kai Kresse is one of the few scholars who has considered Swahili ­intellectual practices. Consideration of literary genre and examination of specific poems by Ahmed Sheikh Nabhany and Ahmad Nassir Juma Bhalo are key to his arguments in Philosophising in Mombasa: Knowledge, Islam, and Intellectual Practice on the Swahili Coast (2007). In his article “Knowledge and Intellectual Practice in a Swahili Context: ‘Wisdom’ and the Social Dimensions of Knowledge,” Kresse (2009) compares the Ramadan lectures of Sheikh Abdilahi Nassir and an utenzi (narrative poem) by Ahmad Nassir Juma Bhalo. To the best of my knowledge, James Brennan and Emily Callaci are the only historians who have written about prose fiction in Swahili. Brennan’s study of Shafi Adam Shafi’s Haini (2003) suggests the value of considering Swahili novels in the study of African history. Shafi is both a novelist and a journalist and was himself imprisoned in Zanzibar after the assassination of Abed Karume in 1972. Brennan observes: Inevitable scenes of torture and abuse are parlayed by Adam Shafi’s main protagonist Hamza and other characters into a formidable internal confidence, a confidence born of both suffering and a gradual realization of authentic understanding of human motivations that propel Zanzibar’s complicated political history and combative identity politics. (2010: 6)

In her study of dancehall politics Emily Callaci (2011) draws upon popular fiction published in Tanganyikan newspapers, as well as upon news articles, opinion pieces, self‐help articles, advertisements, and letters to the editor. The geographer Garth Myers discusses Shafi’s earlier novel Kasri ya Mwinyi Fuad (1978), along



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with Said Ahmed Mohamed’s Asali Chungu (1989), as examples of texts that promote “dominant scripts of revolutionary Zanzibar” (Myers 2000: 436): Kasri ya Mwinyi Fuad drives home the dominant script’s key themes: the (geo) graphic inequalities of pre‐revolutionary Zanzibar justified and caused the revolution; the oppressors were an alien, Arab elite with loose morals, and a racist hatred of Africans; and a self‐aware group of Africans united behind the righteous cause of their liberation. (Myers 2000: 437)

There are numerous other historical novels and plays in Swahili, including Shafi’s Kuli (2005), about the 1948 dockworkers strike in Zanzibar, and Ebrahim Hussein’s Kinjekitile (1970), about the Maji Maji movement, and Kwenye Ukingo wa Thim (1988), about the Wambui Otieno case and ethnicity, gender, class, and race in Kenya. William Mkufya’s 2004 novel Ua la Faraja (2004) is in some senses a history of the AIDS epidemic as it traces the spread of the disease and its effect on the lives of neighbors in an economically diverse community near Dar es Salaam. With the exception of a few studies, most work by historians has been about the literature of German East Africa/Tanganyika/Tanzania. Kresse (2009) has written extensively on intellectual discourse around coastal Kenya and Prestholdt (2008) discusses the poetry of Muyaka bin Haji. As Prestholdt notes: Muyaka was a poet who, because of his social liminality as a celebrated but chronically poor public figure, was obsessed with the social and material distinctions between wealth and poverty. His work constitutes the largest surviving body of poetry by a Swahili composer in the early nineteenth century, and his reflections on the themes of wealth, poverty, and materiality were important references in Mombasa public discourse from the 1830’s until at least the 1880s. (2008: 37)8

Despite the significance of Prestholdt’s and Kresse’s works, major Kenyan historical texts that were composed in Kiswahili have not been studied by historians. Examples of such texts include Harry Thuku’s essays in Tangazo,9 Gakaara wa Wanjau’s “Roho ya Kiume na Bidii kwa Mwafrika,”10 and Jomo Kenyatta’s (1969) shocking speech in Kisumu when he publicly humiliated Oginga Odinga at the opening of a hospital.11 In addition, no one has considered the intellectual connections between Tanzanian and Kenyan Swahili writers, or the generations of university‐educated Kenya writers who wrote politically charged fiction, drama, and poetry in Kiswahili – much less the Kenyan Swahili‐speaking government officials and educators who awarded Abdilatif the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature and kept his Sauti ya Dhiki (1973) on the secondary school syllabus in Kenya while he lived in exile in Tanzania, and who similarly kept Alamin Mazrui’s Kilio cha Haki (1981) on the syllabus in Kenya while he was imprisoned. As a result, transnational, broader socialist/progressive discourse may not have received the attention that it merits.

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Mohamed Kassim (2008) also reminds us of Swahili literature from Somalia, while Jan Blommaert, Johannes Fabian and Vincent A. de Rooij have made texts in Shaba Swahili/Kingwana available.12 There are also Swahili texts from Mozambique as well as publications in Swahili in Oman.13 Bonate (2010) found 782 nineteenth‐century documents in Arabic script in provincial archives in Mozambique. The documents were written in Swahili and other Bantu languages and, according to Bonate, “represented an official correspondence between local African rulers and the Portuguese administrators during the nineteenth century” (2010: 255). The letters concerned relationships between local rulers and Portuguese officials, but also discussed “the Nguni invasion,” the slave trade, and the nineteenth‐century wars following which the Portuguese established control over the region (Bonate 2010: 255). Bonate notes that “Several letters were ­written by female African Muslim rulers from the coastal regions under Swahili cultural and economic influences” (2010: 255). Andrew Eisenberg has called for “a dynamic intellectual discourse on the Swahili coast as a cultural nexus of Africa and the Indian Ocean world” (2012: 575). I agree, but suggest that we should perhaps look even more widely and over longer time frames. Kassim’s (2008) study of Dada’s poetry in Chimwiini ­indicates that poems by a nineteenth‐century woman are being studied in Somali diaspora communities today. We know so little about the history of the circulation and exchange of Swahili texts and even less about the use of texts in education and for other purposes. We assume that most of the early tendi were based on Arabic models, but often we do not know what those models were. For centuries multilingual and multiliterate speakers of Swahili have drawn upon the rich history of Swahili literature and the vast array of international languages and literatures that they have encountered. Their literature challenges us to acknowledge this history and these encounters, to expand our horizons, and to embrace our shared language, its literature, and its most intriguing history. Swahili literature has provided invaluable and diverse sources to historians and other scholars. Writers about Swahili and East African history have also engaged positively with both elite and subaltern writers of a wide variety of texts in Swahili. This is not to deny that there were examples of intellectual dishonesty (see the examples provided in Biersteker and Plane 1989) or to dismiss the impact of a lengthy and oppressive colonial history. It is simply to acknowledge that historians and others have read and heard the works of Swahili writers and performers and have promoted these works. As a result, an international intellectual community is emerging for whom Swahili is the primary language. The annual University of Bayreuth Swahili Colloquium is one example, the Tanzanian Studies Association a second. Clearly this work is related to efforts such as the Local Intellectuals strand of the journal Africa. Most essential to this community are scholarly and artistic works in Swahili that are accessible to East African audiences, artistic works such as the film produced by Kelly Askew, Poetry in Motion: 100 Years of Zanzibar’s Nadi Ikhwan Safaa (2015), and scholarly works



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such as Laura Fair’s Historia ya Jamii ya Zanzibar na Nyimbo za Siti binti Saad (2013) and Aldin Mutembei’s UKIMWI katika Fasihi ya Kiswahili, 1982–2006 (AIDS in Swahili Literature, 1982–2006) (2009). Fair’s work is a revision and expansion of her work on Siti binti Saad in Pastimes and Politics (2001). Appendices provide the lyrics to all of Siti binti Saad’s known songs and a chronological list of songs and composers. Mutembei’s methodologically groundbreaking and inspirationally sensitive and thoughtful work traces the ­history of Tanzanian thought about AIDS through a close study and comparison of over 100 poems about AIDS published in Tanzanian newspapers during this period. He considers poems by well‐known poets as well as those by ordinary newspaper contributors. One of the earliest names for AIDS in Swahili was “Juliana,” a woman’s name and also the name of a type of textile traded illegally from Uganda. Mutembei traces the various ways in which women were blamed for transmission of the disease as well as the ways in which discussion of the disease changed the norms of public discourse on sexuality in Swahili. His discussion of stigmatization is particularly sensitive and nuanced. UKIMWI katika Fasihi ya Kiswahili, 1982–2006 is a work focused on intellectual history that “explores gender in crucial intimate dimensions” (Mutembei 2009: 344) in precisely the ways recently called for by Nancy Rose Hunt (2014), especially in its consideration of poetry by women. Mutembei considers poems such as Magreti Clemens’s “Tujihadhari na Ukimwi” (Let’s Avoid HIV/AIDS), Emily H. L. Mkupete’s “Tupunguze Zinaa” (Let’s Reduce Adultery), and Bi. Salama Yusuph’s “Ukimwi Hauna Dawa” (HIV/AIDS Has No Cure) (Mutembei 2009: 132, 134, 135), which answer poems by men blaming women for the epidemic. He also uses these poems by women to discuss the impact of the ­epidemic on the Swahili language in terms of speaking openly about sexuality.

Notes 1 Taylor’s advocacy for Kimvita was unsuccessful but his preference for the prose genre has been shared by many who write about Swahili texts. 2 Prins discusses chronicles that are missing as well as those that are extant. 3 According to Saad (1979) and Strong (1895), the extant copy of the Kitab al‐Sulwa is MS Or. 2666 in the British Museum. 4 Wynne‐Jones credits Wilson (1980: 1) for this. 5 This is Blair’s (1993: 44) translation of the term that Assia Djebar (1993) uses to describe writing in French about the conquest of Algeria. Useful bibliographies are provided by Geider (2002) and Pike (1986). 6 A significant work produced in Arabic during the 1940s was Al‐Amin bin ‘Ali Al Mazru’i’s The History of the Mazru’i Dynasty of Mombasa (1995). 7 In an earlier work I argued that Taylor collected these songs, which provided Islamic responses to his Christian hymns, so as to try to persuade the CMS to publish his hymns. I also published the response poems and translated them (Biersteker 1996: 217–265).

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8 I would add that Muyaka’s reflections on issues of power have also had an impact on subsequent writers. For example, major writers of the mid‐twentieth century rewrote a number of Muyaka’s poems (Biersteker 1996), and the epigraph to Abdilatif Abdalla’s Sauti ya Dhiki, the most influential twentieth‐century collection of poetry, is from a poem by Muyaka. 9 Wa’Njogu (2004) discusses Tangazo. 10 English and Gikuyu versions in translation were published in the author’s prison diary (Wa’Njogu [1983] 1986). It is not known if any copies of the original Swahili version survived. 11 The speech was delivered on October 25, 1969, and is available at http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=WmWx3eB4oqg, accessed March 23, 2018. 12 See Archives of Popular Swahili at http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/index.html, accessed March 23, 2018. See also de Rooij (2005) and Blommaert (1995). 13  Ibrahim Noor Shariff has recently drawn up a list (personal communication).

References Abdulaziz, Mohamed H. 1977. Muyaka: Nineteenth Century Swahili Popular Poetry. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau. Abdulaziz, Mohamed H. 1996. “The Influence of the Qasida on the Development of Swahili Rhymed and Metred Verse.” In Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, edited by Stefan Sperl and C. Shackle, 411–428. Leiden: Brill. Al‐Amin bin ‘Ali Al Mazru’i. 1995. The History of the Mazru’i Dynasty of Mombasa. Translated by J. McL. Ritchie. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy. Allen, James de Vere. 1982. “The ‘Shirazi’ Problem in East African Coastal History.” Paideuma 28: 9–27. Askew, Kelly. 2002. Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Askew, Kelly. 2014. “Tanzanian Newspaper Poetry: Political Commentary in Verse.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 8(3): 515–537. Askew, Kelly. 2016. “Everyday Poetry from Tanzania: Microcosm of the Newspaper Genre,” in African Print Cultures: Newspapers and Their Publics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Derek R. Peterson, Emma Hunter, and Stephanie Newell; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 179–233. Bang, Anne K. 2012. “Zanzibari Islamic Knowledge Transmission Revisited: Loss, Lament, Legacy, Transmission – and Transformation.” Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies 38(3): 419–434. Barongo, E.B.M. 1966. Mkiki Mkiki wa Siasa Tanganyika. Dar es Salaam: East African Literature Bureau. Biersteker, Ann. 1996. Kujibizana: Questions of Language and Power in Nineteenth‐ and Twentieth‐Century Poetry in Kiswahili. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Biersteker, Ann, and Mark Plane. 1989. “Swahili Manuscripts and Study of Swahili Literature.” Research in African Literature 20(1): 449–472. Biersteker, Ann, and Ibrahim Noor Shariff. 1993. Mashairi ya Vita vya Kuduhu: War Poetry in Kiswahili Exchanged at the Time of the Battle of Kuduhu. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.



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Blair, Dorothy. 1993. Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Blommaert, Jan. 1995. “A Shaba Swahili Life History: Text and Translation.” Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere 42: 73–103. Bonate, Liazzat J. K. 2010. “Documents in Arabic Script at the Mozambique Historical Archives.” Islamic Africa 1(2): 253–257. Brennan, James R. 2010. “Haini (Traitor): Imprisonment, Exile, and Revanchism after the Zanzibar Revolution.” Paper presented at the ASAUK Annual Conference, Oxford University, October 17. Callaci, Emily. 2011. “Dancehall Politics: Mobility, Sexuality, and Spectacles of Racial Respectability in Late Colonial Tanganyika 1930s–1961.” Journal of African History 52(3): 365–384. de Barros, João. 1945–1946. Da Asia. 4 vols. Lisbon: Regia Officina Typografica. de Rooij, Vincent A. 2005. “Popular Swahili Texts in Books and Articles: An Annotated Bibliography.” http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/elsewhere.html, accessed March 9, 2018. Djebar, Assia. 1993. Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade. Translated by Dorothy Blair. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Eisenberg, Andrew J. 2012. “Hip‐Hop and Cultural Citizenship on Kenya’s ‘Swahili Coast.’” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 82(4): 556–578. Fair, Laura. 2001. Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post‐abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945. Athens: Ohio University Press. Fair, Laura. 2013. Historia ya Jamii ya Zanzibar na Nyimbo za Siti binti Saad. Translated by Kimani Njogu. Nairobi: Twaweza Communications. Farsy, Abdallah Salih. 1989. Baadhi ya Wanavyoni wa Kishafi wa Mashariki ya Afrika/The Shafi’i Ulama of East Africa, ca. 1830–1970, translated and edited by Randall L. Pouwels. Madison: University of Wisconsin African Studies Center. Feidel, Jan, and Ibrahim Noor Shariff. 1986. “Kibabina’s ‘Message about Zanzibar’: The Art of Swahili Poetry.” Research in African Literature 17(4): 496–524. Freeman‐Grenville, G. S. P., ed. 1962. The East African Coast: Select Documents from the First Century to the Early Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Geider, Thomas. 2002. “The Paper Memory of East Africa: Ethnohistories and Biographies Written in Swahili.” In A Place in the World: New Local Historiographies from Africa and South Asia, edited by Axel Harneit Sievers, 255–288. Leiden: Brill. Grimes, William. 2014. “Using the Foreign to Grasp the Familiar.” New York Times (April 26), section C, 1, 5. Hollis, A. C. 1900. “Notes on the History of the Vumba, East Africa.” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 30: 275–297. Hunt, Nancy Rose. 2014. “The Affective, the Intellectual, and Gender History.” Journal of African History 55(3): 344. Hunter, Emma. 2012. “The History and Affairs of TANU: Intellectual History, Nationalism, and the Postcolonial State in Tanzania.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 45(3): 365–383. Hussein, Ebrahim. 1970. Kinjeketile. Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press. Kandoro, Saadan. 1961. Mwito wa Uhuru. Dar es Salaam: Black Star. Kassim, Mohamed M. 1995. “Islam and Swahili Culture on the Banadir Coast.” Northeast African Studies 2(3): 21–37. Kassim, Mohamed M. 2008. “‘Dhikr Will Echo from All Corners’: Dada Masiti and the Transmission of Islamic Knowledge.” Bildhaan 2(1): 104–120.

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Kitab al Zanuj. 1957. Somalia, Scritti Vari Editi ed Inediti, vol. 2. Edited by E. Cerulli. Rome: A Cura dell’ Administrazione Fiduciaria Italiana dell’Somalia. Kresse, Kai. 2007. Philosophising in Mombasa: Knowledge, Islam, and Intellectual Practice on the Swahili Coast. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kresse, Kai. 2009. “Knowledge and Intellectual Practice in a Swahili Context: ‘Wisdom’ and the Social Dimensions of Knowledge.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 79(1): 148–167. Liyongo Working Group. 2004. The Liyongo Songs: Poems Attributed to Fumo Liyongo. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe. Lynn, Ashley Ridgway. 2005. “Early Written Kiswahili History and Translation of Kiswahili in Arabic Script.” Unpublished master’s thesis, Yale University. Maddox, Gregory H., with Ernest Kongola. 2006. Practicing History in Central Tanzania: Writing, Memory and Performance. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Miehe, Gudrun, Katrin Bromber, Said Khamis, and Ralf Grosserhode, eds. 2002. Kala Shairi: German East Africa in Swahili Poems. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe. Mkufya, William. 2004. Ua la Faraja. Dar es Salaam: Mangrove. Mnyampala, Mathias. 1995. The Gogo: History, Customs, and Traditions [Historia, Mila na Desturi za Wagogo wa Tanzania]. Edited and translated by Gregory H. Maddox. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Mohamed, Said Ahmed. 1989. Asali Chungu. Nairobi: East African Publishers. Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari. [1903] 1981. The Customs of the Swahili People: The Desturi za Waswahili of Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari and Other Swahili Persons. Edited and translated by J. W. T. Allen. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mutembei, Aldin K. 2009. UKIMWI katika Fasihi ya Kiswahili, 1982–2006 [AIDS in Swahili Literature, 1982–2006]. Dar es Salaam: Taasisi ya Taaluma ya Kiswahili, Chuo Kikuu cha Dar es Salaam. Myers, Garth. 2000. “Narrative Representations of Revolutionary Zanzibar.” Journal of Historical Geography 26(3): 429–448. Nurse, Derek. 1994. “Historical Texts from the Swahili Coast.” Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere 37: 47–85. Nurse, Derek, and Thomas Spear. 1985. The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800–1500. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nyerere, Julius Kambarage. 1961. “Maoni.” In Saadani Abdu Kandoro, Mwito wa Uhuru. Dar es Salaam: Black Star. Omar, Yahya Ali, and P. J. L. Frankl, eds. 1990. “The Mombasa Chronicle.” Afrika und Ubersee 73: 101–128. Omar, Yahya Ali, and P. J. L. Frankl. 1994. “A 12th/18th Century Swahili Letter from Kilwa Kisiwani (Being a Study of One Folio from the Goa Archives).” Afrika und Ubersee 77: 263–271. Patterson, Molly Benjamin. 2009. “South Arabian Maritime Expansion and the Origins of East African Islam 1200–1500.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Pike, Charles. 1986. “History and Imagination: Swahili Literature and Resistance to German Language Imperialism in Tanzania, 1885–1910.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 19(2): 201–233.



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Pouwels, Randall L. 1993. “Reflections on Historiography and Pre‐Nineteenth‐Century History from the Pate ‘Chronicles.’” History in Africa 20: 263–296. Prestholdt, Jeremy. 2008. “The Social Logics of Need: Consumer Desire in Mombasa.” In Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globaliúzation, 34–58. Berkeley: University of California Press. Prins, A. H. J. 1958. “On Swahili Historiography.” Journal of the East African Swahili Committee 28(2): 26–40. Robert, Shaaban. 1966. Maisha Yangu na Baada ya Miaka Hamsini. Dar es Salaam: Thomas Nelson. Robert, Shaaban. 1967. Maisha ya Siti binti Saad: Mwimbaji wa Unguja. Dar es Salaam: Thomas Nelson. Rzewuski, Eugeniusz. 1991–1992. “Origins of the Tungi Sultanate (Northern Mozambique) in the Light of Local Traditions.” Orientalia Varsovenia 2: 193–213. Saad, Elias. 1979. “Kilwa Dynastic Historiography: A Critical Study.” History in Africa 6: 177–207. Saavedra Casco, José A. 2007. Utenzi, War Poems, and the German Conquest of East Africa: Swahili Poetry as Historical Source. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Said Bakari bin Sultani Ahmed. 1977. The Swahili Chronicle of Ngazija. Edited and translated by Lyndon Harries. Bloomington: African Studies Program, Indiana University. Shafi, Shafi Adam. 1978. Kasri ya Mwinyi Fuad. Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House. Shafi, Shafi Adam. 2003. Haini. Nairobi: Longman. Shafi, Shafi Adam. 2005. Kuli. Nairobi: Longhorn. Shaibu Faraji bin Hamed al‐Bakariy al‐Lamuy. 1938. “Khabari Lamu” [The Lamu Chronicle]. Edited and translated by William Hichens. Bantu Studies 12: 1–32. Shetler, Jan Bender. 2003. Telling Our Own Stories: Local Histories from South Mara, Tanzania. Leiden: Brill. Stigand, C. H. 1915. A Grammar of Dialectic Changes in the Kiswahili Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strong, S. Arthur. 1895. “The History of Kilwa.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 27(2): 385–430. Taylor, William. 1915. “Introduction.” In C. H. Stigand, A Grammar of Dialectic Changes in the Kiswahili Language, vii–xi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Theal, George M. 1898–1903. Records of South‐Eastern Africa. 7 vols. London: W. Clowes. Tolmacheva, Marina. 1993. The Pate Chronicle. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Tolmacheva, Marina. 1995. “Essays in Swahili Geographical Thought.” Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere 42: 1–40. Topan, Farouk. 1997. “Biography Writing in Swahili.” History in Africa 24: 299–307. Ulotu, Abubakar Ulotu. 1971. Historia ya TANU. Dar es Salaam: East Africa Literature Bureau. Vierke, Clarissa. 2011. On the Poetics of the Utendi: A Critical Edition on the Nineteenth Century Swahili Poem “Utendaji wa Haudaji” Together with a Stylistic Analysis. Vienna: LIT Verlag.

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Wa’Njogu, J. Kiarie. [1983] 1986. Mwandı͂ki wa Mau Mau Ithaamır͂ io‐inı ͂ [Mau Mau Writer in Detention]. Nairobi: Heinemann. Wa’Njogu, J. Kiarie. 2004. “Language and Multiparty Democracy in a Multiethnic Kenya.” Africa Today 50(3): 55–73. Wilson, Thomas H. 1980. The Monumental Architecture and Archaeology of the Central and Southern Kenya Coast. Mombasa: National Museums of Kenya. Wynne‐Jones, Stephanie. 2010. “Remembering and Reworking the Swahili Diwanate: The Role of Objects and Places at Vumba Kuu.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 43(3): 407–427.

Further Reading Allen, J. W. T., ed. 1971. Tendi: Six Examples of a Classical Verse Form with Translation and Notes. Nairobi: Heinemann. Allen, James de Vere. 1982. “Traditional History and African Literature: The Swahili Case.” Journal of African History 23: 227–236. Allen, James de Vere. 1993. Swahili Origins. London: James Currey. Bonate, Liazzat J. K. 2008. “The Use of the Arabic Script in Northern Mozambique.” Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 45(1): 133–142. Fouéré, Marie‐Aude. 2012. “Reinterpreting Revolutionary Zanzibar in the Media Today: The Case of Dira Newspaper.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 6(4): 672–689. Geiger, Susan. 1996. “Tanganyikan Nationalism as ‘Women’s Work’: Life Histories, Collective Biography and Changing Historiography.” Journal of African History 37(3): 465–478. Giblin, James L. 2006. A History of the Excluded: Making Family a Refuge from State in Twentieth‐Century Tanzania. Athens: Ohio University Press. Hunter, Emma. 2009. “In Pursuit of the “Higher Medievalism: Local History and Politics in Kilimanjaro.” In Recasting the Past: History and Political Work in Modern Africa, edited by Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola, 149–167. Athens: Ohio University Press. Maddox, Gregory H., and James L. Giblin, eds. 2005. In Search of a Nation: Histories of Authority and Dissidence in Tanzania. Athens: Ohio University Press. Pouwels, Randall L. 1992. “Swahili Literature and History in the Post‐structuralist Era.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 25(2): 261–283. Reese, Scott Steven, ed. 2004. The Transmission of Learning in Islamic Africa. Leiden: Brill. Rzewuski, Eugeniusz. 1991. “Mother Tongue / Father Tongue Convergence: On Swahilization and Deswahilization in Mozambique.” In Akten des 7. Essener Kolloquiums über “Minoritätensprachen /Sprachminritäten,” vom 14–17.6.1990 an der Universität Essen, edited by J. R. Dow and T. Stolz, 267–305. Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer. Sayyid Abdalla bin Ali Nasir. 1977. Al Inkishafi: Catechism of a Soul. Translated and edited by James de Vere Allen. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau. Vierke, Clarissa. 2014. “Akihipatia Kalamu: Writing Swahili Poetry in Arabic Script.” In Arabic Script in Africa: Studies in the Use of a Writing System, edited by Meikal Mumin and Kees Versteegh, 319–339. Leiden: Brill.

Chapter Twenty

Africa and the Cold War Timothy Scarnecchia

Historians of the Cold War tend to approach the Cold War in Africa as a series of crises from the point of view of the Cold War powers themselves rather than from the perspective of Africans. Given this approach, it is therefore not surprising that the agency of African leaders toward the Cold War powers has generally been assessed through a balance sheet of winners and losers determined by who survived challenges from rivals and who succeeds in staying in power. Such Cold War crises tend to involve responses to internal or external military threats, usually involving neighboring states, that required Cold War support, or internal coup d’états that involved support from Cold War powers to determine the survival of one regime over a threatening group, with the latter often supported by another Cold War power. Given such macro‐level views of the Cold War in Africa, it is worth asking whether or not the more recent notion of a global cold war history succeeds in presenting the more lasting implications of these crises in African history. For example, when the Americans, Soviets, or Chinese got themselves involved in competition over the allegiances of African ruling parties, does it matter much in global cold war histories whether or not such parties had local legitimacy? And, if so, can it be assumed that such legitimacy derived mainly from Cold War rationalizations? Fortunately, there are many new historical projects underway to examine the relationship of ideological commitments to various Cold War powers and the way African political elites used such ideologies to advance their own particular agendas. One of the top A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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African leaders who saw himself shaping the diplomatic fates of African states during the Cold War was the Tanzanian president, Julius Nyerere, who played a significant role in African Cold War diplomacy (Pallotti 2011; Lal 2015). Having stated how important it is to avoid a “crisis”‐centered approach to Africa in the Cold War, it remains difficult to ignore how the historical narrative of the Cold War in Africa is shaped by such an approach. Such accounts usually begin with the post‐World War II political landscape in Africa, the “second colonial occupation” that led most European nations to invest heavily in their African colonies after the war, and the contradictions of European commitments to their African empires once they were confronted by anticolonial nationalist movements determined to fast‐forward decolonization (Cooper 2002). The availability of an alternative to Western colonialism and capitalism gave African nationalists and intellectuals a new way to reorganize their tenuous connections to the masses of peasants and urban workers in the colonies they had promised to liberate from colonialism. As Odd Westad observes, socialism and international communism often offered a convenient way to cover up the class and ethnic divisions between elites and restive masses, allowing for new revolutionary definitions of “we the people,” defined primarily in terms of a shared identity created during the fight against a common enemy – Western imperialism (Westad 2005; Mann 2005). The National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalist party in Egypt were two of the first to turn this anticolonial movement into a successful radical project of national socialism in the 1950s in Africa, but there were many more to follow. (Chamberlin 2014) The FLN’s successes against the French and the settler colon population in Algeria provided inspiration throughout sub‐Saharan Africa. The FLN’s successes also demonstrated the validity of an indigenous national liberation movement seeking assistance from Cold War and regional sources, and using these sources to challenge what previously seemed an insurmountable French colonial power (Connelly 2003). Nasser’s success at promoting the nationalization of European interests in Egypt, as during the Suez Canal crisis of 1956 – when the United States and the Soviet Union actually agreed for their own reasons to support Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal against the wishes of the French and the British – showed that there were alternatives to either remaining committed to former colonial powers or becoming a client state of the Soviets (Schmidt 2013: 42). The 1955 Bandung Conference led by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, President Sukarno of Indonesia, and Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast (Ghana) alerted the Cold War powers to an effort by powerful “third world” nations to work together to develop the nonaligned movement (NAM) as an alternative to Cold War “puppet states” in the future (Lee 2010; Byrne 2013). The Suez Crisis also showed how important the post‐World War II United Nations had become as a diplomatic space for non‐Western powers to shape world events beyond the dictates of European colonial interests.



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As Cold War conflicts shifted from Europe to the newly defined “third world” in the early 1960s, it is important to note that the influence of proxy wars and liberation movements in Africa was not limited to the local and regional. The intrigues of liberation movement funding and training also bled into the diplomatic world of powerful “first‐world” and “second‐world” states. These new movements, such as the FLN in Algeria, those fighting the Portuguese in southern and West Africa, as well as the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa began to build networks of support that used the leverage of Soviet, Chinese, and Eastern Bloc support to challenge American and European dominance of the United Nations and other international organizations. Throughout the Cold War, then, there developed a kind of feedback loop that translated the deadly warfare on the continent into a new power for African states at the United Nations. This diplomatic power challenged the ability of American and European states to maintain old alliances against the Soviet Union outside of the European theater, which in turn made it difficult for the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to continue their support for Portugal and the white settler states in Africa by the mid‐1970s. The biggest challenge was South Africa and, as Ryan Irwin has argued, the international challenges against apartheid forced the Americans in particular to rethink their notion of a world order based on historic ties to European and white imperial diasporas (Irwin 2012). As Roland Burke has argued, by the 1970s the new African bloc had formed alliances with Middle Eastern, Asian, and Latin American representatives at the United Nations to challenge Western interventions in Africa and elsewhere and also to challenge the use of “human rights” by Western powers to censure and at times intervene in African states during the 1970s (Burke 2010). This important shift in emphasis also opened up an opportunity for apartheid South Africa to find common ground with other African states against Western criticisms over human rights abuses (Miller 2016).

The first Congo crisis Before the African bloc in the United Nations began to gain traction, the post‐ World War II constellation of world powers were severely tested in the Congo between 1960 and 1964. This first Congo Crisis became the archetype of future African Cold War conflicts, not so much for the intensity of the conflict but because it showed many future African leaders the limited options facing leaders who sought out the assistance of the Soviet Union and who made the mistake of not keeping the Americans close. The Congo Crisis revolved around two very different Cold War issues. The first was the ability of the new Congolese leaders after independence on June 30, 1960, to maintain its colonial borders after an immediate secession of the Katanga Province under the leadership of Moise Tshombe. The Katanga Province was economically and strategically essential to the Congo given the heavy amount of mining wealth generated in the province. Belgian, French, other European, and American mining companies were supportive of the Katanga

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secession, as were European settlers and mining interests in the Central African Federation and South Africa. The second Cold War issue developed out of the Katanga secession, when Congolese president Patrice Lumumba called for international assistance to pressurize Katanga to return to the nation‐state. Snubbed by the United States, Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union for assistance. Once it became clear that the Soviets were willing to support Lumumba, the Belgians, the Americans, and the Katangan leadership began to undermine Lumumba and by January 1961 the Belgians and Katangans had intercepted Lumumba and had assassinated him. The Eisenhower administration had agreed to “eliminate” Lumumba but the Belgians and Katangans did so first (Borstelmann 2001; Stockwell 1984). When the world received confirmation of Lumumba’s death in February 1961, African nationalists throughout Africa immediately viewed Lumumba as a martyr for African nationalism, who had been killed because he stood up to Western interests that were, even with the promises of decolonization, clearly still prepared to enforce their will on new African states (Namikas 2013; Gerard and Kuklick 2015). During the Congo Crisis, the general secretary of the United Nations, the Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld, was committed to the idea of reunifying the Congo and to resolving the Katanga secession issue. At first the Soviets and other socialist countries were extremely critical of Hammarskjöld and the United Nations’ role in the Congo, believing that Hammarskjöld was doing the bidding of the Belgians, the Americans, and others with mining interests there. In fact, Hammarskjöld took considerable risks by deploying a UN international armed force authorized to fight against the Katanga forces (and the many Western mercenaries employed by Tshombe). Hammarskjöld was killed in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia in September 1961, as he was attempting to personally negotiate to end the conflict while UN troops fought battles with the Katangans. The crash was attributed to pilot error at the time, but many still believe that Hammarskjöld’s plane was shot down by forces aligned against him and the United Nations’ mission, most notably among the French and Central African mercenaries defending white settler rule in Central Africa (Williams 2011; Stahn and Melber 2014). Following Hammarskjöld’s death, the Kennedy administration and the European powers who had previously remained lukewarm about committing resources to the UN military effort began to support the UN forces more earnestly (Namikas 2013). Ultimately, the United Nations defeated Katanga’s forces and brokered a negotiated settlement that brought Tshombe into the Congolese government. From an African perspective, there were many lessons to be learned from this first Cold War conflict. It had shown how Tshombe, who represented for pan‐Africanists the worst example of a sell‐out of African solidarity, had managed to receive military and financial support from a wide range of international backers even as he fought against a newly independent nation and the United Nations. This was a lesson that many national liberation armies took to heart from the early 1960s through the 1970s.



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The early Congo Crisis showed the Cold War to be an unwelcome reality that distorted the decolonization process, but at the same time it also offered African liberation groups and junior military officers new opportunities for international backing and resources of war that would not have been considered possible in the 1950s. The ability of the Americans to invest in Joseph Mobutu’s leadership and to create an American client state in the Congo by 1965 demonstrated to the rest of Africa how powerful the United States could be when it felt that a particular African state was strategically important enough to receive substantial foreign and military aid. Following the dramatic Congo Crisis, other African leaders were quick to build a case for the strategic importance of their own state, with varying degrees of success. The next three decades provided ample opportunities for African leaders to leverage their strategic importance in exchange for American aid. Another important lesson from the Congo Crisis for African leaders was that the Soviet Union was not in a position in the early 1960s to provide substantial or decisive military and economic aid to African countries. Kwame Nkrumah and Sékou Touré found this out in Ghana and Guinea, respectively, as did pro‐ Lumumbaists in the Congo, who established their base under the leadership of Antoine Gizenga in the eastern Congo at what was then Stanleyville (now Kisangani). Gizenga’s followers found the Soviets incapable of providing substantial military support to them in their fight against the US‐backed government in the capital Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). In fact, as Sergey Mazov argues, the Americans were always in the driver’s seat in this period, while the “Soviets watched from the sidelines as events in the Congo unfolded according to the US scenario” (Mazov 2010: 177). However, by 1963 and 1964 the rivalry between China and the Soviet Union provoked both communist countries to support new rebel movements in eastern and central Congo. According to the historian Lise Namikas, Pierre Mulele’s rebellion in Kwilo Province, and then Christophe Gbenye’s Counseil National de Liberation, known popularly as the “Simbas” movement in Stanleyville, were first seen as undeserving of Soviet aid, but once the Chinese began to support the Simbas with arms the Soviets followed suit (Namikas 2013: 194–195). This support, along with general discontent over the Congolese state, helped the Simbas to take over Stanleyville on August 5, 1964, and led to the setting up of the People’s Republic of the Congo. This set in motion a Cold War confrontation that brought in the Americans on the side of the Belgians and the Katangans, who first used mercenary forces to combat the Simba forces from the south. Realizing that the mercenary army was not able to defeat the Simbas, despite brutal tactics, the United States and Belgians orchestrated direct military intervention on November 24, 1964. Operation Dragon Rouge involved US cargo planes airlifting Belgian paratroopers into Stanleyville in order to free the remaining Western hostages being held by the Simba forces. The rescue was dramatic and deemed successful, but in the aftermath the Congolese military carried out extensive killings of the Simba forces and

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their supporters. Namikas reflects on how what was sold in the Western media as a successful “humanitarian intervention” had actually provided useful cover for direct Western foreign intervention to finish off a potential communist foothold in the mineral‐rich Congo. In the aftermath, “between ten thousand and twenty thousand Congolese lives were taken in retribution by the government troops in Stanleyville” (Namikas 2013: 208). These dramatic events were not lost on African nationalists involved in their own national liberation struggles elsewhere and showed, as in the first Congo Crisis, the perils involved for those movements that were willing to rely solely on Soviet or Chinese military support. Events in the 1970s, particularly in Ethiopia and Angola, had very different results, as the Soviets had by then developed the capacity to send more sophisticated weapons and also training personnel  –  and to finance Cuba’s military to provide soldiers – in support of those African states they saw as capable of reproducing a revolution based on a Soviet model, and as a way to build Soviet influence in the world. Similarly, by the early 1970s the détente between the United States and China meant that they were more often aligned against proxy Soviet forces in Africa for the remainder of the Cold War (Westad 2005; Shubin 2008, Nation 1984; Gleijeses 2013).

Southern Africa during the Cold War For an example of how the Cold War in Africa was not only defined by crisis situations, proxy wars, and diplomatic brinkmanship, it is worth looking at how Cold War interests helped to define and shape southern African politics in the 1970s and 1980s. The newly independent nations in southern and Central Africa faced a different challenge from that of their West African pan‐African role models. Unlike Ghana, the key states of Tanganyika (later Tanzania following the incorporation of the United Republic of Zanzibar in April 1964) and Zambia confronted neighboring states where white‐settler‐controlled governments refused to move toward majority rule. Zambia and Tanzania faced not only the powerful South African apartheid state but also the less militarily powerful but still destructive white minority government in Rhodesia, and the uncompromising Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique (DeRoche 2016). Unlike other European colonial powers, who had previously accepted the inevitability and benefits of decolonization, Portugal had no intention of turning power over to the African majority in their colonies. Similarly in Rhodesia, rather than negotiate majority rule with the British, the white minority government there, who were still legally under British control, made a unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) in November 1965. From this point on, the region’s newly independent African states did their best to promote either negotiations toward majority rule in settler states, or, when these proved ineffective, movements of national liberation against the Rhodesians, the Portuguese, or the South Africans. Cold War interests shaped these conflicts



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in many ways. The first influence from the early 1960s onwards was the availability of arms and military training for southern African liberation movements from the Soviets, Chinese, Eastern Bloc countries in Europe, as well as Egypt, Algeria, and the independent states of sub‐Saharan Africa – most notably Nigeria. Tanzania and Zambia hosted such movements in training camps where they could receive support directly from the Chinese or Soviets. The Western powers in the Cold War also had their arm twisted in the early 1960s to continue to support the Portuguese in particular, as a member of NATO, in their counter‐insurgency war against nationalist armies in Angola and Mozambique. In exchange for access to airbases in the Portuguese Azores Islands, where “75–80 percent of US military air traffic to Europe was routed” (Muehlenbeck 2012: 103), the Americans primarily, and their NATO allies, helped to arm Portugal’s colonial armies with napalm, helicopter warships, and ammunition to fight what became Portugal’s “Vietnam” in Africa. The turning point in this major Cold War proxy war came with the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974, which was in large part precipitated by the unpopularity among Portuguese soldiers and young officers of fighting in Africa to maintain colonial possessions. After the revolution, dates were set to allow for independence in Angola, Mozambique, and the influential Guinea‐Bissau in 1975 – the latter where Amilcar Cabral’s revolutionary strategies inspired insurgencies throughout Africa (Cabral 1973). This relatively sudden announcement of independence caused a crisis in regional power relations, as Western Cold War powers worked with their regional allies to support their own factions in the Angolan case in hopes of putting a pro‐Western government in power in Luanda before independence in 1975. As the date of independence approached, different Cold War powers promised support for various Angolan factions. The National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) received support from China, Zambia, and the United States; the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) received assistance from Zaire, the United States, and South Africa; and the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) received direct assistance from the Soviet Union. The MPLA’s most significant support, however, came from a large commitment of Cuban troops and advisers who successfully assisted the MPLA in its victory over the other two factions and who protected the MPLA as the ruling Marxist revolutionary party at independence and since then. Gleijeses indicates that there were 36,000 Cuban troops in Angola during 1975–1976, and a peak of 55,000 Cuban troops in 1988 (Gleijeses 2013: 516). Likewise in Mozambique, where there was less factionalism in the nationalist movement, given the Mozambique Liberation Front’s (FRELIMO) earlier successes, the Soviets and the Chinese helped FRELIMO come to power. It was, however, the significant commitment of troops from Cuba and military supplies from the Soviet Union  –  with US$6 billion worth of military hardware sold to Angola between 1976 and 1988, but only 10–15 percent of this paid for by the Angolans (Gleijeses 2013: 515) – that

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brought the Americans to focus on southern Africa and made the Cold War a “hot war” for at least the next 20 years (Shubin 2008). The show of power in Angola by the Soviets and the Cubans became a preoccupation of the Americans, still smarting from the humiliations of defeats in Vietnam and Angola by Soviet‐backed liberation movements. In 1976 President Gerald R. Ford’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, took a direct role in southern African diplomacy to try hold back the tide of Soviet and Cuban expansion in the region. One of the contingencies of the Angolan victory for the MPLA, at least from the perspective of the Americans and the South Africans, was that during the Angolan Civil War of 1975 Kissinger had promised covert aid to South Africa and UNITA. The United States Congress, however, emboldened by the American defeat in Vietnam and the unpopularity of future proxy wars, had cut the funding for Kissinger’s and the CIA’s plans to shape the outcome in Angola (Stockwell 1984). The South Africans were angered by the Americans’ decision, as they had committed troops and a large amount of military hardware to the conflict on the understanding that the Americans would do the same. After UNITA and the South Africans were defeated by the MPLA and the Cuban soldiers with Soviet weapons, the South Africans were forced to retreat in order to concentrate their efforts on protecting South West Africa (later Namibia) from the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO), another liberation movement with training and military support from the Soviets, who could now cooperate from bases in a pro‐Soviet Angola. The ANC’s military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), or MK, could now train in Angola as well, which also posed a threat to South Africa’s apartheid state. Kissinger’s 1976 intervention in southern Africa was therefore a dramatic shift in Cold War alliances for the United States. Preoccupied with the possibility that the Cubans and Russians might repeat their Angolan efforts in Rhodesia, Kissinger urged the presidents of the Frontline States (FLS) to bring to the negotiating table a unified Zimbabwean nationalist leadership that could guarantee the support of the “boys with the guns” who were at the same time spending perhaps more time fighting each other in the training camps in Zambia, Tanzania, and Mozambique than fighting the Rhodesians (Sadomba 2011; Mhanda 2011). The task of unifying the guerrilla armies under a single leadership was daunting, but it was recognized as the best chance to avoid another Angola where three different liberation armies had access to regional and external support. By October 1976, after much arm twisting and threats to remove support for the guerrilla armies by the FLS presidents, the Patriotic Front (PF) was formed by an agreement between Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). In a sense, Kissinger’s pressure on the regional powers to avoid a Cuban‐backed factional war in Rhodesia helped Mugabe consolidate his political power within ZANU. After the failed Geneva talks in 1976, both ZANU and ZAPU returned to waging separate ­military campaigns against the Rhodesians, with Nkomo’s ZAPU army based in



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Angola and Zambia receiving military aid from the Soviets. ZAPU forces also trained alongside the South African ANC’s MK forces in Angola. ZANU’s army was based in Tanzania and Mozambique and received support mostly from China and eastern European sources. Kissinger’s southern African diplomacy also relied on South African pressure on Ian Smith and his UDI government to agree to a future majority rule in two years’ time in return for ending international sanctions against Rhodesia. The South Africans pressurized Smith by threatening to end their continued military and economic assistance, and in return the South African regime hoped to regain some much needed international respect given that 1976 was the same year as the Soweto uprisings, in which South African police and military had killed and injured hundreds of schoolchildren protesting apartheid educational policies. That the South Africans were willing to apply pressure on Smith’s regime to negotiate with African liberation movements demonstrates how Cold War interests often trumped the longstanding racial solidarity across the spectrum of white settler states in Africa. The Rhodesian and South West Africa (Namibia) conflicts allowed South Africa to renegotiate bilateral relations with the FLS and with the Americans. These new relations were actively sought out by the South Africans to increase South African legitimacy as an African state and not a colonial or settler state, a process that had begun in the early 1960s (Miller 2016; Irwin 2012). After coming to power in 1980, Robert Mugabe was very popular among Western leaders, including with the Conservative Party leader and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who saw Mugabe’s transition to civilian leader as a major success for British foreign policy. After all, Mugabe had agreed to a constitution that protected white Rhodesian property rights. He had also accepted the British offer to retrain and rebuild an integrated Zimbabwean National Army made up of former soldiers from the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA), and the Rhodesian army. US president Ronald Reagan’s administration invited Mugabe to the White House in 1981 where he congratulated Mugabe for being an example of racial reconciliation that could serve as a model for South Africa. The South African government was not pleased with the suggestion, however, and in keeping with their destabilization efforts elsewhere in southern Africa the South Africans worked to undermine Mugabe’s rule. By 1982 and 1983 there were clear signs that the South Africans were training Zimbabweans to help destabilize the regions dominated by the Ndebele ethnic groups, which represented about 20 percent of the Zimbabwean population. Mugabe’s response to this provocation was to deploy a newly commissioned 5th Brigade of the Zimbabwe National Army, which had been trained by the North Koreans. The 5th Brigade carried out extensive crimes against civilians living in these regions, and over a period of a few months in early 1983 thousands of civilians were killed, wounded, and tortured (CCJP [1997] 2009).

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This period, known as the Gukurahundi from the provocative name Mugabe had given the operation (a reference to hard rains that allow wheat to grow, implying that the 5th Brigade would act harshly to rid the country of ex‐ZIPRA dissidents so that the new nation would prosper) involved waves of different types of attacks on Ndebele politicians and civilians from 1983 to 1987, when a unity accord was signed between Nkomo’s defeated ZAPU and the ruling ZANU–PF party. Estimates of the number of civilians killed are in the range of 10,000 to 20,000 over the entire period (CCJP [1997] 2009) Many of the casualties were politicians and supporters of ZAPU, which the ruling party, ZANU, wanted to destroy partly because of old rivalries and partly out of a desire to create a one‐ party state that could alter the 1979 constitution. In assessing this internal attack on ZAPU by ZANU, it is important to consider the extent to which the Cold War facilitated the Gukurahundi. Continued Cold War interests worked to rationalize these state crimes against civilians within a context where Western powers wanted to support Mugabe’s new state because he was perceived to be working in their interests, and because he had not permitted either the Soviets or the Cubans to assist the ANC’s MK to operate from Zimbabwe (Scarnecchia 2011). Mozambique is an example in southern Africa where the pragmatic politics of its leaders should have trumped Cold War violence but failed to do so. FRELIMO had been successful in liberating areas of Mozambique from the Portuguese before 1975. After independence there was no viable party competing against FRELIMO that the Western states could directly support as they had supported the FNLA and UNITA in Angola. Following Mozambican independence, however, the Rhodesian military began to work with former Portuguese intelligence officers to recruit and create an insurgent group, the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO), to fight against FRELIMO and to help destabilize Mozambique, which made it easier for the Rhodesians to cross the border into Mozambique and strike at ZANU’s ZANLA military bases there (Saunders and Onslow 2012). After Zimbabwe’s independence, the Rhodesians turned the control of RENAMO over to the South African military and intelligence services. South Africa increased RENAMO’s resources and used it to destabilize Mozambique in the early 1980s. In March 1984 Mozambique’s pragmatic leader, Samora Machel, signed an accord with the South Africans in which FRELIMO promised to prohibit the ANC’s MK to operate from Mozambique in exchange for South African promises to end their covert support for RENAMO. The accords showed the difficulties anti‐apartheid solidarity created for the FLS members (Saunders 2011). In the end the accords were not kept up, as right‐wing groups in the United States as well as the South Africans continued to support RENAMO even as reports of its terror tactics were reported internationally (Vines 1991: 49–50). Like the dynamics in other regions, the post‐Cold War RENAMO may have originated as a creation of the Rhodesians and South Africans, but it eventually transformed itself into a type of military organization that became more and more



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common in the 1990s – a group that saw its external support evaporate after the Cold War but that still managed to recruit local militias who were motivated to protect their own local rights against a postindependence state that was seen as corrupt and out of touch with local demands. As William Reno notes, RENAMO’s transformation during the late 1980s and early 1990s pointed toward new types of post‐Cold War rebel groups in Africa. Such groups “were not focused on gaining outside recognition as the sole ‘official’ liberator of the country: The field of possible foreign backers was more diverse and was not focused on a common idea of African liberation” (Reno 2011: 63). In some ways African conflicts in the 1990s began to resemble those of the first Congo Crisis in 1960, when Tshombe managed to hold out with a diverse collection of strange and deadly bedfellows. Most importantly, RENAMO’s experience demonstrates how an organization survived both during and after the Cold War, first with international state funding and then with private sources of funding from right‐wing groups in the United States and from shadow economy sources, substantiating the pernicious nature of “destabilizing” efforts in African states in the last decade of the Cold War. As Carolyn Nordstrom argues, the corruption and informal networks of black market trade that originated in the distribution of Cold War aid had, by the end of the Cold War, given rise to extensive networks of profiteering suppliers of weapons of war to keep RENAMO and other groups going long after the Cold War powers had turned their attention elsewhere (Nordstrom 2004: 210). As historians look more closely at these years in southern Africa, the balance sheet of Cold War influences on the region is increasingly being assessed beyond the strong ideological contexts of anti‐apartheid and anti‐imperialist thinking of the previous decades (Byrne 2013). The work of some historians, particularly that of Piero Gleijeses on Cuban, Soviet, South African, and American competition over Angola, makes a strong case that the Cuban intervention in Angola was the tipping point in a region where the future of white minority rule had looked fairly solid just prior to the 1974 Portuguese revolution and Cuban and Soviet intervention on the behalf of the MPLA (Gleijeses 2003, 2013). Others remain less sanguine about the decisive role of Cuba’s military in bringing an end to South Africa’s apartheid government (DeRoche 2014). Still other new studies examine the extent to which the guerrilla and/or refugee camp experience worked to shape the collective experiences and memories of this period. Christian Williams has examined this important question in relation to MK and SWAPO camps in Angola during the 1970s and 1980s, showing that experiences in these camps were much less romanticized than had been the case when sympathetic Westerners visited the camps and wrote about them in a positive light. The experience of soldiers from diverse backgrounds demonstrate a mixture of positive and negative experiences that remain important for understanding how liberation war experiences continue to influence politics in Africa (Williams 2015; White and Larmer 2014; Collier 2012). The disciplinary role of liberation movements may have had a more lasting impact for African politics in southern Africa than the purported

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socialist and egalitarian ideologies that often masked abusive leadership, particularly toward female combatants in the camps (Southall 2013; Bratton 2014). The fight over political control in Angola did not end in 1975. UNITA, in particular, continued to gain support from western and South African sources to try and defeat the MPLA. The fighting continued into the 1980s, and again the Cuban military leadership and soldiers were able to defeat the South African campaign against the MPLA and SWAPO by 1987. Regrettably, Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA continued to fight a civil war that lasted into the 2000s, causing extreme suffering for Angolans caught up in the conflict. As in the Horn of Africa example discussed below, or the wars of Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s, the end of the Cold War created conditions for the continuation of conflicts that had their origins in earlier Cold War contexts and interventions (Piot 2010). The years of Cold War conflict shaped governments that emphasized military spending and the authoritarian rule that had developed within the liberation movements during the Cold War. Increasingly, nonstate actors took on the role of Cold war allies, maintaining the flow of weapons in exchange for local resources or access to world markets for the drug trade or other forms of the shadow economies (Nordstrom 2004). Similarly, as Danny Hoffman has argued, just as the lines between legitimate state‐sponsored war and the new “war machines” of the post‐ Cold War powers are blurred, so too are those between international, regional, and local influences over these war machines as they have consumed local populations in numerous conflicts over the past 25 years (Hoffman 2011).

Shifting Cold War support in the Horn of Africa Perhaps the most egregious example of Cold War influence on local and regional conflicts occurred in the Horn of Africa. Decolonization of the region had seen the Italians and British giving up their protectorates and colonies to form the Republic of Somalia in 1960. The United Nations had incorporated Eritrea, also a former Italian colony, into a federation with Ethiopia in December 1950. Within a few years of federation, the Eritrean Liberation Front had organized to fight for independence from Ethiopia. These shifts in sovereignty early in the Cold War had serious repercussions later, especially in the 1970s and 1980s when the Cold War became a ‘hot war’ in the Horn of Africa, just as it had done in southern Africa. One important turning point in the Horn came after the Ethiopian coup against the pro‐US government of Emperor Haile Selassie in August 1974, and Selassie’s death at the hands of Mengistu Haile Mariam’s forces in August 1975. Mengistu’s Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police, and Territorial Army, commonly referred to as the Derg, first purged the conservative and old guard politicians who had worked in Selassie’s regime. The terror continued and consumed the Marxist left wing of the Derg and many of the national political elite (Zwede 2001). As the Ethiopian revolution began to stall by 1976–1977,



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and with the transition from the Ford to Carter administration, the United States became increasingly uneasy with their Cold War ally Mengistu, and, as Westad observes: “to the Carter administration, with its emphasis on human rights as a guiding principle in foreign policy, the Ethiopian regime stood out as a sore spot from the moment the new president entered the White House” (Westad 2005: 260). In 1977 the United States decided to withdraw military support for Mengistu at a time when the Somali leader Siad Barre was threatening to invade Ethiopia to take over the contested Ogaden region of Ethiopia, the home of many ethnic Somali. As in Angola, Castro committed military advisers and troops to assist Mengistu and the Ethiopians against the Somalis. However, unlike in Angola, the Cubans found themselves tied to Soviet planning to a much greater extent in Ethiopia (Gleijeses 2013: 46). Not trusting the Ethiopian military to successfully defend themselves against the Somali army, the Cubans and the Soviets took control of the campaign that successfully pushed the Somalis out of Ethiopian territory. The United States felt obligated to respond directly to Soviet inroads into Ethiopia. In addition, the Americans believed that Soviet actions in the Horn jeopardized the détente between the Soviet Union and the United States that had been built in the early 1970s on issues such as nuclear arms control and easing tensions over eastern Europe. Cold War conflicts in the Horn and Southern Africa risked undermining the progress made on other fronts (Mitchell 2016). As Odd Westad has pointed out, the Soviets did not see their support of the MPLA in Angola and their support for Mengistu’s regime in Ethiopia as any more provocative than US interventions in Latin America against socialist governments in Chile, for example (Westad 2005: 283). The right wing of the Carter administration’s National Security Council succeeded in advocating for the arming of Siad Barre’s Somali forces to help counter a pro‐Soviet Ethiopia. Most notable in the 1980s, however, was the sharp decline of the Somali state under Barre’s dictatorship, which had become almost entirely dependent on foreign aid. At the same time, Barre’s regime diverted much of the US foreign aid in the 1980s in order to maintain his patronage system (Reno 2011: 188). Somalia, the gatekeeper state of the colonial and postcolonial period, collapsed after the Cold War and morphed into a statelessness that saw power in the hands of warlords who could convert foreign aid into power and weapons. Thus, starting in the early 1990s as the Cold War ended, a process began that saw power eventually shift to nonstate actors who continue to challenge international notions of state authority and legitimacy. The United States also supported the Eritreans against the Ethiopians, which helped move that long war of attrition in favor of the Eritreans and led to the creation of a new postcolonial state in 1993. This support eventually produced the political leadership that forced Mengistu out of power in the early 1990s, leading to a post‐Cold War pro‐American authoritarian regime in Ethiopia. The demise of the Derg and Mengistu at the end of the Cold War led to victory for the Eritreans and those Ethiopians oppressed by Mengistu’s rule, but at an extremely

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high cost for the civilian populations in the region, given the politics of food relief during the devastating droughts of the 1980s and early 1990s (Little 2003; de Waal 2009). By 1993 the human costs of this Cold War conflict in the Horn were very high, as “tens of thousands of civilians had been killed and hundreds of thousands had starved to death as warlords diverted food supplies to buy weapons and increase their power” (Schmidt 2013: 156). The “Black Hawk Down” incidents in 1993 in Somalia, in which the Clinton administration found itself faced with worldwide media images of dead American soldiers dragged through the streets of Mogadishu and no clear exit strategy or mission there, is often cited as an example of the inability of the Americans to intervene in post‐Cold War Africa. Such handwringing, which was followed by an apologetic rationalization for the lack of American involvement in Rwanda during the genocide in 1994, fulfilled an American neo‐conservative view of the 1990s whereby the Americans were incapable of acting in a world engulfed by violence unleashed by the end of the Cold War order (Kaplan 1994). This argument conveniently ignores the fact that the Americans and their European allies in Paris and London continued to meddle and to compete with each other in Africa. For example, it can be argued that the Clinton administration avoided interventions in Rwanda to stop the genocide because of US support for Paul Kagame’s Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front army, as they were succeeding in taking over the country during the genocide and defeating the French‐backed Hutu regime in Kigali. The ramifications of this conflict soon spilled over into the eastern Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo), which led to one of the African continent’s longest and most deadly conflicts (Turner 2007). It is therefore also possible to view the tragedy of Rwanda, and by extension the Congo wars, through the lens of Anglo‐American competition with France in Rwanda and the Great Lakes region (Kroslak 2008).

Conclusion The history of the Cold War in Africa, briefly summarized here, can therefore be summed up as the ability of the superpowers to “tolerate” conflicts and proxy wars in Africa – conflicts sufficiently far away from Europe or North America but which led to the killing of large numbers of African soldiers and civilians, and to long‐lasting impacts on state politics following decolonization. After four decades of support from various Cold War powers, many African states went into a tailspin of corruption and ineffective state institutions that left them vulnerable to civil wars and rebel movements that transformed the African landscape. The West African examples of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and then Côte d’Ivoire saw long civil wars from the time of the Cold War into the post‐Cold War period – most dramatically illustrated in the rapid demise of Mobutu’s Zaire and the beginnings of long wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all demonstrate the transformations away from state‐centered and global Cold War interests to local militias



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with extensive networks connecting them with international criminal and noncriminal business and military interests. It is important to consider how Cold War foreign aid created the climate for these criminal networks to develop, and how such aid flows in turn became vehicles for accumulation by local, national, and international elites. The “resource wars” of the 1990s may therefore need to be interpreted as the continuation of processes that developed over years of extensive Cold War foreign aid. The more recent rise of jihadist groups in Mali and the Sahel, as well as in Somalia in the early decades of the twenty‐first century, may have closer links to the way in which the Cold War influenced these regions than is generally assumed, and thus have become yet another way to organize young men and women in a political economy of war. As Danny Hoffman suggests, “it is in the configuration of the labor of war, and the waging of war as labor, that West Africa might be at the leading edge of global developments” (2011: 254). Rather than viewing the Cold War as something that happened to Africa from World War II to the 1990s, we should consider how Cold War legacies continue to influence events in Africa. Given the heavy price Africans paid for the proxy wars and violent liberation wars that occurred during the Cold War, it is not surprising then that such legacies and influences did not end abruptly with the same celebratory finality compared to the Cold War in Europe.

References Borstelmann, Thomas. 2001. The Cold War and the Color Line: America’s Race Relations in the Global Arena. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bratton, Michael. 2014. Power Politics in Zimbabwe. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Burke, Roland. 2010. Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Byrne, Jeffrey. 2013. “Africa’s Cold War.” In The Cold War in the Third World, edited by Robert J. McMahon, 101–123. New York: Oxford University Press. Cabral, Amilcar. 1973. Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral. New York: Monthly Review Press. CCJP (Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace). [1997] 2009. Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace: A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980–1988. Cape Town: Jacana. Chamberlin, Paul Thomas. 2014. “The Cold War in the Middle East.” In The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War, edited by Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Craig Daigle, 178 –192. London: Routledge. Collier, Delinda. 2012. “A ‘New Man’ for Africa? Some Particularities of the Marxist Homem Novo within Angolan Cultural Policy.” In De‐centering Cold War History: Local and Global Change, edited by Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney and Fabio Lanza, 187– 206. London: Routledge. Connelly, Matthew. 2003. A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post‐Cold War Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Cooper, Frederick. 2002. Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Waal, Alex. 2009. Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. DeRoche, Andrew, ed. 2014. “H‐Diplo Roundtable Review of Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991 (2013).” 15(411). https://issforum.org/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable‐XV‐41.pdf, accessed March 9, 2018. DeRoche, Andrew. 2016. Kenneth Kaunda, the United States and Southern Africa. London: Bloomsbury. Gerard, Emanuel, and Bruce Kuklick. 2015. Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gleijeses, Piero. 2003. Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Gleijeses, Piero. 2013. Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hoffman, Danny. 2011. The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Irwin, Ryan. 2012. Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaplan, Robert. 1994. “The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease Are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet.” Atlantic 273(2): 44. Kroslak. Daniela. 2008. The French Betrayal of Rwanda. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lal, Priya. 2015. African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, Christopher J., ed. 2010. Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives. Athens: Ohio University Press. Little, Peter. 2003. Somalia: Economy without State. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mann, Michael. 2005. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mazov, Sergey. 2010. A Distant Front in the Cold War: The USSR in West Africa and the Congo, 1956–1964. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Mhanda, Wilfred. 2011. Dzino: Memories of a Freedom Fighter. Harare: Weaver Press. Miller, Jamie. 2016. An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and Its Search for Survival. New York: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, Nancy. 2016. Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Muehlenbeck, Philip. 2012. Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders. New York: Oxford University Press. Namikas, Lise. 2013. Battleground Africa: Cold War in the Congo: 1960–1965. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nation, Craig, and Mark Kauppi, eds. 1984. The Soviet Impact in Africa. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Nordstrom, Carolyn. 2004. Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty‐First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.



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Pallotti, Arrigo. 2011. “Tanzania and the Decolonization of Rhodesia.” Afriche e Orienti 13: 215–231. Piot, Charles. 2010. Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reno, William. 2011. Warfare in Independent Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sadomba Wilbert Z. 2011. War Veterans in Zimbabwe’s Revolution: Challenging Colonialism and Settler and International Capitalism. London: James Currey. Saunders, Chris. 2011. “The Ending of the Cold War and Southern Africa.” in The End of the Cold War and the Third World: New Perspectives on Regional Conflicts, edited by Artemy Kalinovsky and Sergey Radchenko, 263–276. London: Routledge. Saunders, Chris, and Sue Onslow. 2012. “The Cold War in Southern Africa, 1976–1990.” In The Cambridge History of the Cold War, edited by Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, 222–243. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scarnecchia, Timothy. 2011. “Rationalizing Gukurahundi: Cold War and South African Foreign Relations with Zimbabwe, 1981–1983.” Kronos 37: 87–103. Schmidt, Elizabeth. 2013. Foreign Interventions in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shubin, Vladimir. 2008. The Hot “Cold War”: The USSR in Southern Africa. London: Pluto Press. Southall, Roger. 2013. Liberation Movements in Power: Party and State in Southern Africa. London: James Currey. Stahn, Carsten, and Henning Melber. 2014. Peace Diplomacy: Global Justice and International Agency: Rethinking Human Security and Ethics in the Spirit of Dag Hammarskjöld. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stockwell, John. 1984. In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story. New York: W. W. Norton. Turner. Thomas. 2007. The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality. London: Zed Books. Vines, Alex. 1991. Renamo: Terrorism in Mozambique. London: James Currey. Westad, Odd Arne. 2005. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, Luise, and Miles Larmer, eds. 2014. “Mobile Soldiers and the Un‐national Liberation of Southern Africa.” Special issue, Journal of Southern African Studies 40(6). Williams, Christian A. 2015. National Liberation in Post‐colonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnology of SWAPO’s Exile Camps. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Susan. 2011. Who Killed Hammerskjold? The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa. New York: Columbia University Press. Zwede, Bahru. 2001. A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991. London: James Currey.

Chapter Twenty-One

The Horn of Africa from the Cold War to the War on Terror Awet T. Weldemichael

Stretching along the African coasts of the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Indian Ocean from Sudan to Kenya and including Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia, Northeast Africa, also known as the Horn of Africa, occupies an area of prime geostrategic significance. Its coveted location has, however, been the cause of as much – if not more – pain as gain to the region. More specifically, the region has experienced the Cold War and the US‐led global war on terror (GWT) in uniquely turbulent ways. During the Cold War, rival powers competed to have an upper hand in the region by financially and militarily propping up their local clients, often to the grave detriment of the vast majority of the people and the long‐term stability of those countries. In the ongoing war on terror, the West – and more specifically the United States – has made considerable financial, material, and technical resources available to the war effort that Washington has been generously doling out to regional allies who have assumed important counterterrorism roles or served other stabilizing purposes. Although important roles are thus delegated to regional partners, the United States has retained the prerogative to unilaterally and pre‐emptively neutralize actual or potential threats across the region. Besides an intelligence base it quietly operates inside Mogadishu, and possibly other subsidiary stations across the country, the United Stated has numerous assets at its disposal for expeditious action  –  the military base in Djibouti, a drone station in Ethiopia, the US Navy’s Central Command (CENTCOM) A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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naval base in Bahrain and other warships active in the waters adjoining the Horn of Africa (Scahill 2011; Prestholdt 2013). In the process of these two major phases of world history, that is the Cold War and the GWT, external forces helped aggravate existing, homegrown local rivalries and conflicts or altogether engineered them in pursuit of their respective interests. This chapter broadly outlines the key actors and interests at play in the Horn of Africa since World War II, going into considerable detail in some areas in order to illustrate the patterns and to highlight the complexity or importance of some developments to the broader narrative. It will show that there were homegrown rival actors and conflicting interests in the region that piggybacked on  –  and opted to be clients of  –  external interests in order to advance their respective positions vis‐à‐vis their local rivals. Northeast Africa has been far from being a pawn, passively waiting on the receiving end of great power interests. As Elizabeth Schmidt (2013) demonstrates, during the Cold War, as in the ongoing war on terror, local actors battled their differences out, aligning themselves with foreign actors or identifying their interests with bigger powers far away in order to improve their position vis‐à‐vis their local rivals. Although foreign interventions have proved to be far more ­devastating, the big powers found themselves in a tangled web of interdependence and almost as much beholden to their small regional allies as the other way around. Those dynamics only intensified during the war on terror. First, a brief overview of the strategic significance of the Horn of Africa and Cold War interests and their dynamics in the region is in order.

The horn of Africa before and during the Cold War Although the Horn of Africa has historically been a place of intense African and Asian economic, political, and cultural interfacing, the region’s global strategic significance soared following two developments far afield. The 1869 opening of the Suez Canal connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, which then linked with the Indian Ocean through the narrow choke point around the Horn of Africa, at the Bab‐el‐Mandeb. This maritime shortcut between Europe and Asia was nearly 4,000 miles and two travel weeks shorter than the prior route of circumnavigating the southern tip of the African continent. The discovery of oil across the Middle East during the first three decades of the twentieth century had an incremental effect on the significance of the Horn of Africa in several respects. First, the supply of European (and later of US) energy needs from these oilfields intensified trade and transportation through the Red Sea. The ongoing expansion of economic and commercial interactions between Asia and the West not only kept the importance of the Horn of African maritime trade routes on a steady rise but also heightened the security imperative in the adjoining lands. The imperative of securing the Horn of Africa had taken a new form since World War II, as the United States made the grand strategic decision to bar rival



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foreign forces or hostile domestic ones from setting foot in the Middle East and parts of Northeast Africa. Washington needed secure bases from which to closely monitor the region and quickly deploy forces should the need arise. Facing the Middle East across the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa became ideal for such a commitment besides its own value in the prevailing geostrategic rivalry between the American and Soviet superpowers. The end of the Cold War did not end or in any way reduce the region’s significance. If anything, epochal terror attacks on the United States in September 2001 gave the region a renewed prominence in Washington’s strategy of fighting terror globally. Let us briefly look into how the Cold War played itself out in the Horn of Africa before moving on to examine the war on terror.

Cold war interests and dynamics Before their defeat in World War II, the Italian colonial administration in Eritrea seem to have realized the unique – but as of yet unexplained – attributes of the mountain ranges around the capital Asmara to attract and transmit radio signals around the globe. They built a basic radio communication facility in Asmara, Radio Marina, which fell to the Allies in 1941. No sooner did the Americans discover this advantage than they started using it and developing what was a basic radio communication base into a state‐of‐the‐art intelligence‐gathering facility, intercepting the radio signals of allies and foes alike, far and near. Monitoring radio traffic between the Axis powers yielded priceless payback in October 1943, when the German high command gave the Japanese ambassador in Berlin a thorough briefing of German wartime positions, plans, and capabilities in Europe. When the ambassador radioed Tokyo with these sensitive German military secrets, they were intercepted and decoded in Asmara, and used to inform Allied planning for the Normandy landings (Wrong 2005). This intelligence asset grew in importance with the end of the war and the onset of the Cold War between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States. In 1943 US defense strategists had concluded that avoiding another Pearl Harbor‐type attack on US soil and defending US interests abroad required the country to acquire overseas bases from which it could thwart physical threats before they reached America itself or jeopardized its overseas interests (Leffler 1999). As World War II drew to a close, American predictions that such a strategy would severe the wartime US–Soviet alliance proved accurate as both the United States and the Soviet Union resorted to their respective versions of geopolitical expansion. In reply to a State Department request to explain Soviet foreign policy and behavior, an American diplomat in Moscow, George Kennan, sent the historic “long telegram,” which concludes that the American and Russian systems could not peacefully coexist unless one were to cordon off the other from the rest of the world (Kennan 1946). For nearly half a century after that, US foreign policy

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pivoted around containing the Soviet Union within overlapping tiers of alliances and military bases to check its physical expansion and to filter out its ideological influence beyond its borders. Moscow seized every opportunity to break out of Washington’s envelopments, in some cases successfully striking military, diplomatic, and economic alliances in regions of vital interest to the United States (Gaddis 2005; McMahon 2003). The Horn of Africa was one of several regions in the Third World where consequential superpower rivalry played itself out by proxy through local contenders. Beyond the intelligence asset that it presented, the Horn of Africa grew to form a part of United States’ Southern Tier around the USSR and to pre‐empt the latter from setting foot in the wider Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. In June 1948 US Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) decided to bar any rival force from setting foot in the Middle East region and compromising their access to its oil resources. The JCS planned to secure the area through the delivery of military and economic aid to the countries of the region. Preparing for any eventuality, they recommended securing rights beforehand for the United States to expand and build facilities from which American forces could be deployed quickly when necessary. That decision only strengthened the pre‐existing significance of the Radio Marina spy station in Asmara to the United States’ long‐term interests. Accordingly, the JCS identified Eritrea as a territory of indispensable strategic value. Admiral William Leahy thus wrote in 1948 to the Secretary of Defense: “The Joint Chiefs of Staff would state categorically that the benefits now resulting from operation of our telecommunication center in Asmara … can be obtained from no other location in the entire Middle East–Mediterranean area … Therefore, United States rights in Eritrea should not be compromised” (Marcus 1983: 84). Against this global backdrop, the victors of World War II deliberated on the fate of the former Italian colonies: Italian Somaliland and Eritrea in the Horn of Africa and Libya in North Africa. The powers agreed fairly quickly to restore Italian rule in Somaliland for a 10‐year period to prepare the people of that territory for independence. Upon independence in 1960, this former Italian colony joined British Somaliland in a voluntary merger to form the Somali Republic (Lewis 2002). Eritrea was not fortunate and its misfortune can be traced to the curse of its geographical location, Ethiopia’s claim to it, and disagreement among Eritreans about their political future. Access to the sea  –  either through Eritrea, Djibouti, or Somalia  –  became a pressing foreign policy concern for Ethiopia, newly liberated from nearly six years of Italian Fascist occupation. In a June 1942 letter that Emperor Haile Selassie wrote to the British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, Ethiopia laid claim to Eritrea on the grounds that it had a right to access to the sea for purposes of self‐defense (because Eritrea had been a gateway for foreign invasion), and because of historic ties between the two territories (Trevaskis 1975; Tesfai 2001; Zewde 1992). The British did not take Selassie’s claims seriously, nor did he count on their recognition or acquiescence. Given British attempts to subordinate Ethiopia to their own



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long‐term interests and noticing the declining fortunes of Great Britain, mainly vis‐à‐vis the rising global power that the United States had become, Haile Selassie went over the heads of the British and took his claim to the United States. In January 1945 the emperor flew to Egypt to meet President Roosevelt to impress on him, among other things, Ethiopia’s need for access to the sea and to seek “US support for the return of Eritrea [to Ethiopia] to provide a solution to this need” (Spencer 2006: 159). The United States initially turned down Ethiopia’s claim on the grounds that the former Italian colonies had the right to self‐determination and independence, so long as they could, in the words of US secretary of state James F. Byrnes, “give assurance that the Italian colonies will not be developed … for the military advantage of anyone” (Yohannes 1991:79–80). Inexperienced and divided, the Eritrean political elite could not give this guarantee. Whereas some of their divisions were homegrown, the insurmountable ones were Ethiopian‐induced (Tesfai 2001; Trevaskis 1975). Through deceit, intimidation, and terror, Ethiopia managed to divide Eritreans along ethnic, regional, and religious lines, and to present their divisions as falling short of that needed guarantee.1 Instead, Ethiopia sought a quid pro quo arrangement with the United States, whereby the latter would back Ethiopia in its claim to Eritrea, and Ethiopia would in turn allow the United States to keep the Radio Marina base in Asmara and to provide other facilities that served American strategic interests in the region (Spencer 2006). To clinch that deal, Ethiopia cleverly proposed a southern counterpart to the United States’ Northern Tier, one of America’s cordons around the Soviet Union, as a backup in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East (Spencer 2006). In the words of former Ethiopian foreign minister Aklilu Habtewold, “Haile Selassie’s diplomacy exploited the Cold War by openly staking the future and fortune of Ethiopia on the side of the Western powers … in return for a ‘deal’ on Eritrea” (quoted in Selassie 1989: 35). The United States’ acceptance of this Southern Tier practically sealed the future of the ethnic Somali region of Ethiopia called the Ogaden, and that of Eritrea. Private American economic interests are likely to have contributed to US backing of Ethiopia’s claim to the two territories. Having received an exclusive concession for petroleum exploration in vast parts of southeastern Ethiopia (mainly in the Ogaden) in 1944, Sinclair Oil Corporation is on record as early as September 1945 lobbying the US Department of State on behalf of Ethiopia. In return for US engineering of Eritrea’s association with Ethiopia at the United Nations General Assembly in 1950, Ethiopia sent an elite battalion of the Imperial Bodyguard to fight alongside US forces in Korea and granted Washington a base in Asmara (called Kagnew Station after that battalion) and a facility in Massawa (Spencer 2006).2 For the subsequent two and a half decades, American access to these facilities remained the heftiest bargaining chip for Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia until technological advances made Kagnew Station redundant and a military coup removed the emperor (Farer 1976). Aligning with the United States

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also earned Ethiopia the reincorporation of vast expanses of the Ogaden in 1948. And by 1954 Great Britain had handed the Haud and the Reserve areas to Ethiopia, only retaining for the Somalis their traditional grazing rights – but even that was lost six years later (Selassie 1980; Bradbury 2008). In the meantime, however, the US–Ethiopian alliance and the resolution of the Eritrean question – as far as the international community was concerned – had thwarted the Soviet Union’s express desire to establish itself in one or all of the former Italian colonies. In trying to go toe‐to‐toe with the United States, Moscow attended the 1955 founding conference of the Non‐Aligned Movement in Bandung, Indonesia, staking its fortunes with the decolonizing world. Although Kagnew Station remained Haile Selassie’s key bargaining chip in his relations with the United States since signing of their agreement in 1953, the generous Soviet overtures to Ethiopia reinforced US commitment to Ethiopia with economic and financial aid (Ottaway 1982). Moscow maintained an interest in Ethiopia and the Horn, but did not make a breakthrough in the region until the 1969 coup d’état in Somalia inaugurated a bellicose military government, which resurrected an older complication. Long before independence, the Somali Youth League had championed a pan‐ Somali nationalism and engineered an immediate union of the British and Italian Somalilands upon their independence in 1960 (Abuhakema and Carmichael 2010; Barnes 2007). Nevertheless, as a result of the unequal and hasty merger, “the nation was divided and the nation‐state incomplete” (Bradbury 2008: 23). Somali Youth League’s vision remained particularly incomplete as long as large swaths of Somali‐inhabited territories remained outside of the newly inaugurated Somali Republic: French Somaliland (present‐day Djibouti), the Ogaden (in present‐day Ethiopia), and the British‐held Northeastern District (in present‐day Kenya). Independent Somalia took it upon itself to “liberate” and unify these territories. This irredentist Greater Somalia project was at the heart of Somali– Kenyan and Somali–Ethiopian disputes in the 1960s and 1970s (Lewis 2002; Barnes 2007). Failing to get the attention and support of world powers to outweigh and overpower Ethiopia, Somalia resorted to fighting Addis Ababa through proxy wars. Whereas the Eritrean independence movement offered Mogadishu its first opportunity to indirectly weaken Ethiopia (Weldemichael 2013–2014), it also stoked the legitimate grievances of the Ogadeni and Oromo peoples and resumed its support of their armed insurgency against the central government in Addis Ababa. After a decade‐long erosion of the UN‐sanctioned Ethio‐Eritrean federation, which weakened Eritrean autonomy, the Eritrean independence movement erupted into a 30‐year armed struggle in 1961. That independence war itself was heavily affected by the unfolding of superpower rivalry in the region. Besides widespread Arab sympathy and support, the Eritrean nationalist struggle quickly gained the support of left‐leaning countries and movements around the world. Whereas the United States and its allies firmly and consistently rejected



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Eritrean aspirations for separation from Ethiopia, Eastern Bloc supporters and sympathizers of the Eritrean cause proved to be opportunistic. After the mid‐ 1970s ideological shift in Ethiopia, the Soviet Union and its allies lent substantial economic, military, and personnel support to the military government in order to crush the Eritrean independence movement (Selassie 1980; Yohannes 1991; Weldemichael 2013). In September 1974 a military junta called the Derg overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie, ejected the United States after the latter wavered over delivering much needed military hardware, and aligned Ethiopia with the Soviet Union, which had long been eager to have Ethiopia in its camp (Halliday and Molyneux 1981; Saivetz and Woodby 1985; Patman 1990). With a demoralized and underequipped military of about 50,000, the Derg was handicapped to confront Ethiopia’s internal rebellions (Tareke 2009). After two years of warming up to one another, Ethiopia and the Soviet Union signed a secret military assistance agreement in December 1976 (Korn 1986; Henze 1991). Ethiopia, accordingly, received dozens of tanks and other heavy weapons in March 1977, and about 100 more followed in April (Korn 1986). Watching Ethiopia fast closing the gap in armaments and fearful that Soviet support was going to jeopardize its designs for the long‐shelved Greater Somalia project, the Somali Republic invaded the Ogaden, the Somali‐speaking part of Ethiopia, in 1977 (Tareke 2009). This open aggression legitimized and increased Ethiopia’s arms shipment from its new eastern backers. Mogadishu unleashed the Somalia‐based Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF) guerrillas to ­infiltrate the Ogaden in late May, and in July regular Somali troops crossed the border into Ethiopia (Halliday and Molyneux 1981: 246). Between September and October Ethiopia imported more Soviet heavy weapons, went on a large‐ scale military recruitment, and received several high‐ranking Soviet and Cuban military advisers. Ethiopia launched its counteroffensive, composed of 100,000 newly recruited militias (Zemecha‐733 1982) and, supported by about 12,000 Cuban troops on the front, Yemeni technicians and experts from Aden, and Soviet advisers and hardware (Zemecha‐716, n.d.). The offensive lasted from late January to early March 1978. Somalia was pushed back in defeat. On March 9, it announced its complete withdrawal from Ethiopia, and the WSLF withdrew from the towns to resort to guerrilla warfare (Henze 1991: 150; Tareke 2009). While Cuban forces remained to guard Ethiopian borders with Somalia in the east, almost all of the newly arrived weaponry and newly trained manpower turned their attention on Eritrean nationalists in the north. Several rounds of large‐scale offensives failed to crush the nationalists; even then, the possibility that the latter would ultimately prevail did not cross the minds of the Ethiopian military government (Weldemichael 2009). The Soviets established themselves in Ethiopia by displacing the United States through unrestrained military support. The spiraling counterinsurgency war in mainland Ethiopia and in Eritrea ensured continued Soviet relevance in that

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country. Their preponderance in Ethiopia, however, cost the Soviets their position in Somalia, which they had to trade for the former, when the United States reluctantly stepped in. Nevertheless, lukewarm US support could not save the Somali military government of General Mohamed Siyad Barre from the combined consequences of external defeat, domestic repression, and clan politics. Government counterinsurgency against secular clan‐based and ­religious‐centered insurgencies turned into a war of attrition, destroying in the process the country and the rickety sociopolitical fabric that had held it together. In January 1991 the government collapsed with the flight of the military dictator but neither the domestic forces nor international interventions (unilateral or multilateral, i.e., by the United Nations) could stabilize and hold the country together. Four months later, Eritrean and Ethiopian insurgents jointly defeated the Soviet‐backed government in Addis Ababa, setting the stage for Eritrea’s formal independence in 1993.

The horn of Africa and the global war on terror The end of the Cold War transformed the global geostrategic significance of Northeast Africa but did not diminish it. Although the victory of Eritrean and Ethiopian insurgents and amicable relations between the two countries was a ­welcome reprieve, the void in the aftermath of the collapse of the Somali government coincided with other developments in the region and beyond to retain the international community’s apprehensive interest in the Horn of Africa. The region became an important theatre of the US‐led global war on terror. Although there is a longer history of Islamist militancy and terrorism in Sudan, this chapter concerns itself with the post‐Cold War period. It can be plausibly argued that counterterrorism in the Horn of Africa started much earlier than 2001, although the events of September 11 let led to its dramatic escalation to a war with expansive scope and renewed intensity (Prestholdt 2013). Shortly after coming to power through a military coup d’état in June 1989, General Omar Al‐ Bashir of Sudan showed his true Islamist colors with his principal ideological backer coming out of the shadows. Hassan al‐Turabi, the founding leader of the Sudanese chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan Al‐Muslimun), rolled out the regional Islamist agenda of their newly formed National Islamic Front (NIF). Until 1996, Sudan hosted the notorious Al‐Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, who had been rendered redundant in Afghanistan after Soviet withdrawal and been forced out of Saudi Arabia (Carney 2005; Collins 2008). Four of Sudan’s neighbors – Egypt, Uganda, Ethiopia, and newly independent Eritrea  –  quickly struck a joint deal with the United States, hence they became Washington’s frontline states, to contain Khartoum’s Islamist thrust. After several unilateral and joint endeavors failed to either dislodge the NIF regime or compel it to drastically alter its course, the United States branded the country as a state sponsor of terror and imposed economic sanctions that barred American companies or



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companies with investments from or in the United States from doing business in or with Khartoum (Burr and Collins 2003). The withdrawal of Western interests from the Sudanese oil sector made room for large‐scale, almost monopolistic, Chinese investment. Containment of Khartoum’s Islamism then turned into active support of its breakup along the already disputed north–south divide, culminating in the birth of an independent South Sudan in 2011. Meanwhile, continued lawlessness in Somalia since the fall of the government of Siyad Barre in January 1991 offered terrorists from the region and from afar a staging ground for or a transit point to or from their targets. Nevertheless, the Islamist threat in Somalia was not new. It dates back to the diverse opposition to the increasingly sectarian and corrupt Barre military government in the immediate aftermath of Somalia’s loss of the 1977–1978 war with Ethiopia over the Ogaden. The more the Somali state spiraled into corruption, clan‐based politics, and decay, the more Somali Islamists came under Wahhabist influence in the 1980s and 1990s. Many were either actively enlisted in global jihadism or had their localized activities financed from such outside sources (Marchal 2004; Hansen 2013). State collapse gave these dynamics a free rein that also threatened Somalia’s neighbors, mainly Ethiopia, which launched numerous declared and undeclared surgical operations against them inside Somalia from the early 1990s. That threat spread further out into the region with the June 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Somalia was used as a transit point for the attackers, and later some were granted safe passage; at least one of them, Fazul Abdullah Mohamed, found shelter there among Somalia’s Islamists. The capacity of local Islamists grew significantly after 2001 when Afghanistan‐trained and experienced jihadists returned home (Marchal 2004; Menkhaus 2005). After the US invasion dislodged the Taliban, who had harbored Al‐Qaeda, the latter sought an alternative base of operations elsewhere and the United States aggressively tried to monitor and restrict terrorist movement. In an effort to prevent Somali and non‐Somali terrorists fleeing Afghanistan from setting foot in Somalia, which had been without a government for a decade, the United States sought a base from where it could keep a close eye on the waters around the Horn of Africa. The Department of Defense enthusiastically received Eritrea’s overtures for such a service, but the State Department blocked it on account of Eritrea’s domestic measures – mainly government incarceration of two local staff of the US Embassy in Asmara (Giorgis 2014). Washington then turned to Djibouti, where, for the first time in their long history of rivalry in Africa, US and French forces shared a base. Camp Lemonnier is home to one of the largest regiments of the French Foreign Legion stationed in Djibouti since its independence from France in 1977. Djibouti has since become host to the highest number of foreign military bases in the continent. The United States, the European Union (and some of its individual members like Germany), Japan, and recently China (to the chagrin of the United States) have active military bases with different status of force agreements and mandates. So diverse and overlapping are these that local conspiracy theorists

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claim that the bases have nothing to do with their stated goals, and that powerful countries are instead trying to position themselves for the upcoming global rivalry over a region of rising geopolitical significance and resources.3 In 2002 the United States set up the Combined Joint Taskforce–Horn of Africa under United States Central Command with a forward base in Djibouti in order to monitor the waters around the tip of the Horn of Africa and to launch counterterrorism operations (Prestholdt 2013; Scahill 2013). The once exclusively US Combined Task Force 150 was also reconstituted as a coalition of ­willing (mostly Western) allies in counterterrorism surveillance and operations in the same region. None, however, prevented the young Somali jihadists who had been fighting alongside the Taliban and Al‐Qaeda from finding their way back into Somalia. Once in Somalia, they gradually coalesced with other local Islamists on the ground and collectively constituted a reliable and influential arm  –  if a minority – of the disparate Islamic courts in Mogadishu, which had been slowly merging to form the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) (Barnes and Hassan 2007; Marchal 2011; Hansen 2013). Bent on eliminating the UIC and the young (literally, al‐shabaab in Arabic) militants, the United States turned down the UIC’s invitation to come into Somalia to look for and to interrogate any suspects of the 1998 embassy bombings. Meanwhile, the UIC grew increasingly stronger with its defeat of its rivals and complete control of Mogadishu in June 2006 (Barnes and Hassan 2007). Although the Somali capital experienced a semblance of stability for the first time since 1991, UIC strength in Mogadishu portended wider instability elsewhere in the country. After US attempts to subvert the UIC failed, Washington’s prodding of Addis Ababa to dislodge the Islamists and Addis Ababa’s own eagerness to do so converged to send Ethiopian tanks rolling into Mogadishu for the first time in December 2006. But not before UIC’s threat first hit Baidoa, the seat of the internationally backed transitional government. In mid‐September 2006 a massive suicide bomb went off near the parliament building, targeted at the interim president who had just addressed the parliamentarians and was on his way out.4 Similarly, the more stable semi‐autonomous Puntland in the northeast had grown increasingly uneasy about rapid UIC gains closing in on its southern border and is believed to have appealed for Ethiopian help in containing that menace. With the flight of the top leadership of UIC (to neighboring countries) ahead of the Ethiopian advance and the disarray of those remaining, the previously less visible Al‐Shabaab took the center stage as champions of resistance against foreign occupation as Harakat Al‐Shabaab Al‐Mujaheddin. Ethiopia’s open and direct military intervention in the Somali capital renewed perennial anti‐Ethiopian sentiment among many Somalis. To contain those sentiments, the United States and Ethiopia scrambled to internationalize Ethiopia’s military presence and convinced Uganda (and Burundi) to spearhead a hastily organized African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) in January. More than two years of occupation and urban warfare culminated in the withdrawal in 2009 of the Ethiopian army, which was



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responsible for the bulk of security operations and the target of ceaseless Al‐Shabaab attacks. Between Ethiopian withdrawal and AMISOM’s consolidation and taking of the initiative, Al‐Shabaab found itself in the unprecedented position of administering vast swathes of Somali territory. In the midst of heightened internal friction, Roland Marchal (2011: 5) concluded that “betting on any splits [within Al‐Shabaab] is an illusion under the current circumstances despite divergent agendas on the military strategy, policies towards the population and attitude in front of the international humanitarian community.” The group similarly celebrated its control of territory as a sign of its strength and gains, when in reality it only foreshadowed its weakening and splintering, which have lately brought it to the brink of complete demise. Al‐Shabaab’s fortunes started to wane under the heavy burden of holding and administering territory, sustained external pressure, and unending internal fissures. Shortly after it openly pledged allegiance to Al‐Qaeda, Al‐Shabaab faced a streak of military losses to Somali government troops and AMISOM. That was because, among other things, AMISOM started rolling its tanks out to every corner where Al‐Shabaab fighters were holed up, and the latter lacked heavy and medium artilleries and ammunition to put up an effective challenge. Al‐Shabaab’s military setbacks contributed to and were made worse by the serious financial and logistical problems that continue to plague it. Its own excessive extortion of local businesses and AMISOM’s indiscriminate bombing of Bakaara Market in Mogadishu shrank that lucrative open market and reduced the revenue that it generated for Al‐Shabaab. International pressure forced ships to almost completely shun the port of Kismayo, which had been another lucrative source of income to the group, as was charcoal export, which the UN Security Council also banned. Finally, the killing of Al‐Qaeda’s point man in the Horn of Africa, Fazul Abdullah Mohamed, in June 2011 is likely to have cut off  –  or severely restricted – whatever external financing remained. This cascade of problems worsened the divide within Al‐Shabaab between those considered nationalist and those who sought to pursue a global agenda. Relations with Al‐Qaeda and foreign fighters in their midst was a divisive and deadly extension of the nationalists–globalists divide. There had been a simmering divergence with regard to ideology and strategy within the Al‐Shabaab leadership (International Crisis Group 2010). Although the foreign fighters and their like‐minded Somalis had conceded to the nationalist elements and seemed to have accepted a “Somalia first” approach, the losses they suffered in the hands of government/AMISOM offensives revived that rivalry (Hansen 2013; Weinstein 2011). Many high‐ranking leaders blamed the then Al‐Shabaab leader, Ahmed Abdi Godane (also known as Mukhtar Abu‐Zubayr), for military incompetence and detested his reclusive leadership and ruthless approach to dissent. That allegedly led to Al‐Qaeda seeking to replace Godane and to give more powers to the foreign fighters. In the ensuring tensions, which were made worse by Osama bin Laden’s rejection of Godane as a regional Al‐Qaeda leader and promotion of

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Fazul to that position, Godane had Fazul eliminated and with it shrank external support. The killing of a more formidable Al‐Qaeda operative, Saleh Ali Nabhan, in a 2009 US drone strike had already dealt Al‐Shabaab’s external links a blow. There was also another important bone of contention among the Somali leaders of Al‐Shabaab that nearly came out into the open with the 2011 famine that hit Northeast Africa, with far more devastating impact on Somalia. Although Al‐ Shabaab had proven much more inclusive in the sense that it appealed to Somalis across clan lines, or at least tried to, clan persisted as a key component in its decisions or consequences, which came to a head during the famine. The worst‐hit areas in the unfolding famine were the neighboring Bay and Bakool regions in central Somalia. Powerful Al‐Shabaab leaders from that region, mainly Mukhtar Robow Ali “Abu Mansur” and his close‐knit circle, wanted to ease their policies toward aid agencies to deliver humanitarian relief to the affected as did others like Sheikh Abdulrahman Sanay (Al‐Shabaab governor of Lower Shabelle). Godane and his men, however, feared that Western aid organizations would spy on them and opted to continue shutting them out. This difference, coupled with the pre‐ existing ones, led to Mukhtar Robow deciding to pull forces loyal to him out of Moghadishu. To avert splintering of the organization and face total defeat in isolation, the rest of the leaders pulled out altogether in August. But many Al‐Shabaab fighters from the area dissolved into the civilian population and went on waging an urban guerrilla war. Relieved from the responsibilities of administering and securing territory, Al‐Shabaab became a worse menace, striking at times and in places of its choosing and depriving the government of a sense of security and stability. Soon afterwards, Al‐Shabaab sought to piggyback on long‐running, low‐intensity conflicts in Puntland (the northeast region of Somalia) and along the Somali– Kenyan border in the south. Given the rampant poverty, unemployment, and cynicism in these regions, Al‐Shabaab’s daring militancy, financial compensations or promises thereof, and deceitful tactics sufficiently excited the young into joining its ranks. It repositioned itself in Puntland’s Galgala Mountains by capitalizing on a long‐running disaffection over government neglect as well as for control and distribution of resource, hence Al‐Shabaab in the Northeast. Puntland forces have been single‐handedly facing off Al‐Shabaab in this rugged terrain, and at the time of writing, the self‐governing region has turned down an appeal of the UN‐ backed African Union Mission to establish itself there. The theater in the south has been even more complicated and grim because of Al‐Shabaab’s bloody internal scuffles and its daring forays into Kenya. With a stronghold in the port city of Kismayo, Al‐Shabaab launched several cross‐border raids into Kenya that, coupled with Kenyan interests in staking claim to the Somali pie, led to the invasion of October 2011. Dubbed Operation Linda Nchi, the first Kenyan military intervention in Somalia dislodged Al‐Shabaab from Kismayo but neither defeated it nor secured the Kenyan–Somali border or Kenyan citizens, as Al‐Shabaab staged several attacks inside Kenya. Meanwhile, the combination of its losses, its stretching too thin, and its unresolved internal fissures led to



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Al‐Shabaab’s implosion in April 2013. A group dubbed “moderates,” led by ­veteran jihadists  –  among them Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, Ibrahim Haji Jama Mi’ad al‐Afghani, and Mukhtar Robow Ali “Abu Mansur” – split from the Godane‐led purportedly hardline core after a fierce fight that left several of  the dissidents killed on the spot or pursued and eliminated after the fact (Ahmed 2013). Having survived its biggest internal challenges, the main Al‐Shabaab faction then carried out its threats of retaliation against Kenya. Only the most recent and egregious ones are mentioned here. In September 2013 its fighters raided the upmarket Westgate Mall in the heart of Nairobi, killing over 60 civilians and injuring many more. Less than two years later, in April 2015, Al‐Shabaab elements raided a university dormitory in the border town of Garissa, killing more than 140 members of that university community.5 The staging of such daring operations is typical of organizations facing internal fracturing because they demonstrate their continued survival, attract continued external support, and appeal to potential local recruits. Its subsequent and continued activities and threats in Kenya’s northeastern and coastal provinces have benefited from and are coalescing with pre‐existing discontent in the region. Unexplained targeted assassinations and extra‐judicial killings of prominent – if controversial – Kenyan Muslims have only helped to inflame the situation and to perpetuate the sense of impunity. Nothing seems to stop the Islamist group’s downward spiral, however. Whereas the splinters either gave themselves up, were captured by government forces, or went into hiding and were hence effectively neutralized, the Godane faction faced further woes when repeated US raids finally succeeded in eliminating its leader in September 2014, and leading figures are either surrendering to  the government or have been killed in action. All these developments may lead some to conclude that complete defeat of Al‐Shabaab is inevitable, but its ideology is far from been defeated, as the structural sociopolitical and economic environment that enabled it to thrive remains intact.

Conclusion Just as global powers sought to dominate the Horn of Africa for its strategic value, rival regional actors pursued their respective interests by capitalizing on and maximizing the local dividends of their alliance with more powerful external forces. Local interests and actors clashed with each other while either actively confronting foreign actors or just as actively partnering with external forces, all with the aim of improving their positions at home and around the region. For their part, the rival camps of the Cold War fought their rivalry out in the Horn of Africa in heated battles through local proxies. The global war on terror did not dramatically alter this basic premise as it reintroduced tactical and strategic calculations to global and regional actors that were common during the Cold War, and accordingly rebranded the same old actors as either allies or foes. The political economy of conflict and

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especially of counterterrorism has taken on a life of its own, with regional countries pursuing draconian policies at home in the name of counterterrorism, aligning themselves with the powerful to outperform their regional rivals, and making substantial economic, material, and technical gains from that alliance. Meanwhile, long‐running regional rivalries have come to a head at the time of writing, culminating in the chaos in Yemen with potentially dire consequences to the Northeast African countries across the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Intense rivalry between Israel and countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council led by Saudi Arabia, on the one hand, and with Iran and its local allies, on the other, has recently reached epic proportions. Iran‐backed Shiite insurgents – the Houthis – in northern Yemen, with the support of the ousted former president Ali Abdellah Saleh’s army, swept across vast parts of the country, driving away the weak post‐Saleh government. A Saudi‐led coalition of Sunni Muslim countries and Israel immediately responded in March 2015 with ongoing large‐scale aerial bombardment of Houthi‐held territories. Whereas Sudan vowed to join the Sunni coalition early on, Eritrea promptly and uncharacteristically made clear its distance from Iran and the Houthi uprising. Shortly afterwards the Eritrean president made a sudden and unannounced trip to Saudi Arabia – possibly summoned by the Saudi king – after which Arab news outlets reported that coalition forces had landed in southern Eritrean coastal areas in preparation for an amphibious onslaught on the Yemeni insurgency. Unconfirmed sources are even suggesting that Asmara may have acquiesced to American use of Eritrean territory in the same area. It would not be surprising for the United States to want a coastal strip in southern Eritrea given that Djibouti had officially asked American forces in Obock to vacate their station there in order to make room for the incoming Chinese military base. Meanwhile, a large‐scale reverse migration seems to be in the offing, with many Somalis who had illegally found their way into Yemen fleeing the war there and returning to their native homeland. All Somali regional authorities – in Somaliland, Puntland, and Mogadishu – have started receiving thousands of returning Somalis. Yemeni diplomats have also visited these Somali regions to secure their cooperation in providing shelter for fleeing Yemenis. Unable to provide for their own citizens, Somali authorities have launched an appeal for external assistance in receiving returning Somalis and housing displaced Yemenis. The curse of the region’s geopolitical resource goes on, to a large extent because local powers have repeatedly failed to use the region’s unique assets in the best interests of the peoples and countries of the region.

Notes 1 Between October 1949 and February 1950, for example, Trevaskis recounts 18 Unionist‐perpetrated assassinations against their political rivals as well as numerous cases of arson attacks and rifle assaults on supporters of the Independence Bloc, and ransacking of their properties.



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2 The US role in linking Eritrea’s political future with Ethiopian interests is best captured in the oft‐cited quote from the speech of Secretary of State Dulles: “From the point of view of justice, the opinions of the Eritrean people must receive consideration. Nevertheless, the strategic interests of the United States in the Red Sea basin and considerations of security and world peace make it necessary that the country has to be linked with our ally, Ethiopia” (quoted in Selassie 1980: 58). 3 The United States, since the mid‐2000s, and the European Union and other individual countries from 2008 onwards, have deployed their naval forces in Somali waters on counterpiracy missions, which is outside the scope of this chapter. 4 There are conflicting views as to who could have staged such a daring attack. Whereas President Abdulahi Yusuf blamed it on Al‐Qaeda, the head of the UIC, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, immediately countered that claim, instead accusing Ethiopia for being behind the bombing in order to justify its planned invasion of the whole country. Although it was not the first time Ethiopia had militarily intervened in Somalia, Ethiopia had already amassed a large number of its troops inside Somali territory before the bombing. 5 Al‐Shabaab’s retaliatory attacks had also taken place in the Ugandan capital Kampala in 2010 for that country’s leading role in the African Union Mission since 2007. Surprisingly, however, Al‐Shabaab’s actual or attempted attacks inside Ethiopia have been few and far between, even though the latter has played a much more salient role in the state of affairs in its beleaguered neighbor.

References Abuhakema, Ghazi, and Tim Carmichael. 2010. “The Somali Youth League Constitution: A Handwritten Arabic Copy (c.1947?) from the Ethiopian Security Forces Archives in Harär.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 4(3): 450–466. Ahmed, Majid. 2013. “Al‐Amriki and Foreign Fighters in Showdown with Al‐Shabaab Leader.” Sabahionline, April 30. http://sabahionline.com/en_GB/articles/hoa/ articles/features/2013/04/30/feature‐01, accessed July 1, 2013; also available at http://allafrica.com/stories/201305010475.html, accessed March 17, 2018. Barnes, Cedric. 2007. “The Somali Youth League, Ethiopian Somalis and the Greater Somalia Idea, c.1946–48.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 1(2): 277–291. Barnes, Cedric, and Harun Hassan. 2007. “The Rise and Fall of Mogadishu’s Islamic Courts.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 1(2): 151–160. Bradbury, Mark. 2008. Becoming Somaliland. London: Progression. Burr, J. Millard, and Robert O. Collins. 2003. Revolutionary Sudan: Hassan al‐Turabi and the Islamist State, 1989–2000. Brill: Leiden. Carney, Timothy. 2005. “The Sudan: Political Islam and Terrorism.” In Battling Terrorism in the Horn of Africa, edited by Robert Rotberg, 119–140. Cambridge, MA: World Peace Foundation. Collins, Robert O. 2008. A History of Modern Sudan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Farer, Tom J. 1976. War Clouds on the Horn of Africa: A Crisis for Detente. New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Gaddis, John Lewis. 2005. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin Books.

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Giorgis, Andebrhan Welde. 2014. Eritrea at a Crossroads: A Narrative of Triumph, Betrayal and Hope. Houston: Strategic Book Publishing. Halliday, Fred, and Maxine Molyneux. 1981. The Ethiopian Revolution. London: Verso. Hansen, Stig Jarle. 2013. Al‐Shabaab in Somalia. The History and Ideology of a Militant Islamist Group, 2005–2012. New York: Columbia University Press. Henze, Paul B. 1991. The Horn of Africa: From War to Peace. New York: St. Martin’s Press. International Crisis Group. 2010. “Somalia’s Divided Islamists.” Africa Briefing No. 74, Nairobi/Brussels, May 18. https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/horn‐africa/somalia/ somalia‐s‐divided‐islamists, accessed March 9, 2018. Kennan, George. 1946. “861.00/2–2246: Telegram. The Charge in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State.” Moscow, February 22. http://www.gwu. edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/documents/episode‐1/kennan.htm, accessed March 9, 2018. Korn, David A. 1986. Ethiopia, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Leffler, Melvyn P. 1999. “The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–1948.” In American Foreign Policy: Theoretical Essays, edited by G. John Ikenberry, 111–138. New York: Longman. Lewis, I. M. 2002. A Modern History of the Somali. 4th ed. Athens: Ohio University Press. Marchal, Roland. 2004. “Islamic Political Dynamics in the Somali Civil War.” In Islamism and Its Enemies in the Horn of Africa, edited by Alex de Waal, 114–145. Addis Ababa: Sharma Books. Marchal, Roland. 2011. “The Rise of a Jihadist Movement in a Country at War: Harakat al‐Shabaab Al Mujaheddin in Somalia.” http://spire.sciencespo.fr/hdl:/2441/5ncvgn cesl8n4a0rpg5k3c1j5p/resources/art‐rm2‐1.pdf, accessed March 9, 2018. Marcus, Harold G. 1983. The Politics of Empire: Ethiopia, Great Britain, and the United States, 1941–1974. Berkeley: University of California Press. McMahon, Robert J. 2003. The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Menkhaus, Kenneth J. 2005. “Somalia and Somaliland: Terrorism, Political Islam and State Collapse.” In Battling Terrorism in the Horn of Africa, edited by Robert Rotberg, 23–47. Cambridge, MA: World Peace Foundation. Ottaway, Marina. 1982. Soviet and American Influence in the Horn of Africa. New York: Praeger. Patman, Robert G. 1990. The Soviet Union in the Horn of Africa: The Diplomacy of Intervention and Disengagement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prestholdt, Jeremy. 2013. “Fighting Phantoms: The United States and Counterterrorism in Eastern Africa.” In Lessons and Legacies of the War on Terror: From Moral Panic to Permanent War, edited by Gershon Shafir, Everard Meade, and William J. Aceves, 127– 156. New York: Routledge. Saivetz, Carol R., and Sylvia Woodby. 1985. Soviet–Third World Relations. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Scahill, Jeremy. 2011. “The CIA’s Secret Sites in Somalia.” Nation (July 12). Scahill, Jeremy. 2013. Dirty Wars. The World Is a Battlefield. London: Serpent’s Tail. Schmidt, Elizabeth. 2013. Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



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Selassie, Bereket Habte. 1980. Conflict and Intervention in the Horn of Africa. New York: Monthly Review Press. Selassie, Bereket Habte. 1989. “Eritrea and the United Nations” and Other Essays. Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press. Spencer, John H. 2006. Ethiopia at Bay: A Personal Account of the Haile Selassie Years. 2nd ed. Hollywood, CA: Tsehai. Tareke, Gebru. 2009. The Ethiopian Revolution: War in the Horn of Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tesfai, Alemseged. 2001. Aynefelale: Eritrea 1941–1950. Asmara: Hidri. Trevaskis, G. K. N. 1975. Eritrea: A Colony in Transition, 1941–1952. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Weinstein, Michael A. 2011. “Somalia: Al‐Shabaabʼs Split and Its Absorption of Hizbul Islam.” Intelligence brief. Garowe Online, January 9. Weldemichael, Awet T. 2009. “The Eritrean Long March: The Strategic Withdrawal of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), 1978–1979.” Journal of Military History 73(4): 1231–1271. Weldemichael, Awet T. 2013. Third World Colonialism and Strategies of Liberation: Eritrea and East Timor Compared. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weldemichael, Awet T. 2013–2014. “African Diplomacy of Liberation: the Case of Eritrea’s Search for an ‘African India.’” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 4(212): 867–894. Wrong, Michela. 2005. I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation. New York: HarperCollins. Yohannes, Okbazghi. 1991. Eritrea, a Pawn in World Politics. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Zemecha‐716. n.d. “YeItio‐Soviet YeGara Komite YeWetaderawi Gudayoch Huneta” [Conditions of the Ethio‐Soviet Committee on Military Affairs]. Ethiopian Ministry of Defense Headquarters, Addis Ababa. Zemecha‐733. 1982. “Ke 1967–1982 Megabit dres Yetesera YeHayle Ghembata” [Recruitment of Forces Conducted from 1967 until March 1982]. October 18 (Ethiopian calendar). Ethiopian Ministry of Defense Headquarters, Addis Ababa. Zewde, Bahru. 1992. A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1974. Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press.

Part VI

African Self‐Representations

Chapter Twenty-Two

The Art of Memory and the Chancery of Sinnar Jay Spaulding

The adoption of literacy by any culture has profound implications for that ­community’s sense of historical time and collective memory (Ong 2002). The transition has sometimes been conceptualized in starkly dichotomous terms as a decisive and definitive transition out of an essentialized state of “orality” into one of “literacy” (Goody 1977). More sophisticated analysis would recognize the historically contingent implications of potentially numerous modes of limited literacy, and acknowledge the possibility that under some circumstances the cultural passage into literacy may be reversed (Goody 1968). The Sudan is one of the best conceivable settings in which to pursue this theme. It has a very long tradition of centralized state society. Over the millennia a number of these polities have ­chosen to embrace writing, in diverse languages both native and imported, usually for a limited number of fairly specific purposes.1 Episodes of literacy gave way to intervals without writing, and then to newly literate periods governed by different cultural auspices. Historical interpretation of these transitions is difficult, not only because the languages of ancient literacy are not always perfectly known, but also because comprehension of the nonliterate periods requires the reconstruction of diverse preliterate worlds, visible at best via oblique glimpses through the examination of oral literature, customary tradition, archaeology, faith, and art. The last interregnum between literate regimes in the Sudan was the transition out of the fourteenth‐century world of medieval Christian Nubia into the early modern A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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age of Islamic Sudanese realms such as the Funj kingdom of Sinnar (c.1500–1821). The age is “dark” to historians in the sense that it generated no extensive indigenous written documentation, but it was nevertheless a highly creative age of ­massive and dramatic political and cultural resurgence – a Nubian Renaissance.2 The government of the Funj kingdom, in turn, is not known to have created written documents over the first half of the history of the kingdom; it is clear, moreover, that this was a deliberate choice, for documents written by foreigners were present, and were handled appropriately, from the beginning.3 The circumstances compel a historian to assume that alternative, nonliterate, methods for the conduct of government prevailed. The burden of the present chapter is to expose the legacy of one of these nonliterate administrative technologies of the Funj kingdom. The intellectual laboratory within which this investigation takes place, and much of the source literature upon which it rests, are the surviving Arabic charters (singular hujja, plural hujaj) from Sinnar, of which about 50 are extant.4 No existing document antedates 1700. However, it was said in the eighteenth‐century literature that some actions taken at that time confirmed previous grants that had been made several generations before by Sultan Badi b. Rubat (reigned 1054/1644–1645 to 1092/1681) (Spaulding and Abu Salim 1989: 42–43).5 There is no direct proof that Badi II recorded any of his grants in writing, but circumstantial evidence suggests that the introduction of written documents in Arabic might indeed have been a logical part of a broader historical transition presided over by him. It was Badi II who brought the hitherto perambulatory capital of the Funj to rest at Sinnar, founded the great monumental palace complex of packed earth that would dominate the conduct of Funj politics for an age to follow, and constructed the royal mosque that gave tangible expression to the realm’s Islamic loyalties. His reign also witnessed the opening of the realm to foreign influences through commerce, royally administered but staffed largely by Arabic‐speaking foreigners. Sudanese individuals took advantage of the opening of the realm to travel and to study abroad, returning with books in Arabic and ideas in a more conventionally Islamic idiom (Spaulding 2007). It was a cultural setting in which royal acts recorded in Arabic writing might well have originated. Be that as it may, by century’s end, when the extant literature of government documents in Arabic begins, Sinnar had become a populous, rich, and cosmopolitan city. Sultan Badi’s huge new palace complex of the later seventeenth century was probably the physical setting in which the Funj kingdom’s chancery for producing Arabic documents was created.6 It was there, over the remaining century and a half of the history of Sinnar, that about a dozen Islamic holy men trained as royal scribes produced the sultans’ extant charters.7 They wrote with reed pens, using ink made from lampblack, gum arabic, and other local ingredients, on heavy, high‐quality imported paper.8 But, since their activities were new, it is important to note that they took place within a much older institution, one that may well have imposed some of its own traditions upon the scribes’ working practices.



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Long before Sinnar became the capital of the Funj kingdom, it had been home to an institution known as the “treasury” (Arabic khazina).9 Sultan Badi’s new seventeenth‐century palace complex, among other things, absorbed and incorporated the older treasury institution. The treasury housed and disbursed both goods collected as taxes and exotic luxury items imported via the royally sponsored trade abroad. It manufactured and stored weapons and military gear such as suits of chain mail and horse armor. It was staffed largely by slave officials, who maintained their own unique ways of preserving knowledge; for example, they seem to have used a non‐Arabic system of written numerical notation to perform calculations using the quinary system and strings of beads both as an abacus and to store numerical data.10 It is a likely hypothesis that these demanding skill sets were probably inculcated and preserved over the centuries by an elaborate and disciplined system of unwritten training, all but invisible to the historian but undoubtedly palpable in the atmosphere surrounding the new corps of late seventeenth‐century Arabic chancery scribes. The central treasury was administered by a high court official entitled karalrau in Funj. Each province of the kingdom had its own resident branch of the treasury institution, and the provincial treasurer reported directly to the karalrau and not the local provincial governor. It is likely that members of the new corps of Arabic scribes were sometimes dispatched to serve in the provinces in case of need; for example, at the northern provincial court of Qarri one could find a scribe named ‘Abd al‐Salam, a son of the eminent khatib of the Sinnar mosque, ‘Abd al‐Latif (Spaulding and Abu Salim (1989: 388, Document 50).11 Perhaps the scribal vocation also appeared as a stairway to advancement toward the capital in the hearts of ambitious provincial hopefuls; unfortunately, most of the sultan’s scribes are known only by name and sometimes by handwriting, their respective backgrounds and personalities being unknown. But the understanding that there existed established institutional connections and exchange of personnel between the central chancery and the courts of the provinces allows the introduction into consideration of a new group of provincial scribes, some of whom reveal another important aspect of the scribal profession of the long eighteenth century.12 During the Funj era the people of Sinnar were Muslims, an allegiance that assumed a number of fairly distinct practical commitments. One of these, and perhaps the most important from the perspective of a social historian, was a ubiquitous small‐scale, locally rooted rural Sufi organization based upon the charisma of a resident holy family.13 By fortunate coincidence, near the end of the Funj era a contemporary scholar compiled an anthology of prominent holy men, most, though not all, of whom belonged to this tradition (Hasan 1974; Abu Salim 1982). Examination of the scribes who prepared charters, particularly though not exclusively the provincial scribes, reveals highly significant family links to a n ­ umber 14 of contemporary family brotherhoods. It would be fair to infer that all the scribes, whatever their personal backgrounds might be, probably allowed themselves to be guided, to a greater or lesser extent, by the prevailing ethos established by the family brotherhoods.

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In bureaucracy, originality is not a virtue; modern officials keep acres of approved boilerplate on file for instant retrieval and deployment, and scribes of ages past also possessed techniques to maintain the formal standards of their craft. The study of the formal characteristics of documents is the discipline of diplomatic, practiced in the European and Islamic traditions and elsewhere. Diplomatic analysis of the Sinnar charters reveals a sequence of 14 standard elements; most or all are present in each intact charter, and usually in the same order.15 One question that may be asked of the charter literature is the origin of its formal structure: Was it borrowed from one or more potential donor cultures or was it created independently in the seventeenth‐century Sudan? The northeast quarter of the African continent has produced a number of governments that created charters whose political and social functions broadly resembled those from Sinnar. Could these chancery traditions perhaps have served as models for the scribes of Sinnar? The answer is in every case negative. One conspicuously plausible donor culture would be the older medieval Nubian tradition of the Sudan itself; however, the recent work of Giovanni Ruffini conclusively demonstrates that radical formal and conceptual differences divide the medieval charters from those of the Funj (Ruffini 2012: 156–157).16 Adjoining imperial Ethiopia created charters long before those of Sinnar, but they too bear little resemblance to the literature of the Funj kingdom (Huntingford 1965). The extant charters from Borno and the adjoining central Sudanic region are even less similar (Palmer 1967). Charters from Dar Fur are numerous and display more similarity to the Sinnar charters than do most; however, they too fail to provide a convincing donor model (Abu Salim 1975; O’Fahey and Abu Salim 1983). The reason for rejection of Funj borrowing from all these literatures is in every case similar: a Sinnar charter is considerably more sophisticated in terms of diplomatic form than anything found elsewhere in the region. No other Northeast African chancery tradition even comes close. The Islamic heartlands offer a second literate universe of plausible cultural donors. Certainly Sudanese intellectuals of the Funj era enjoyed intimate contact with Egypt, the Holy Cities, and other influential Islamic cultural centers, and are known to have borrowed books and ideas. Among other things, the intellectual traditions of the heartlands included a very elaborate set of rules for the creation of any document that possessed legal content; these rules were enshrined and very widely disseminated in a common genre of handbooks for scribes called shurut, designed to guide writers of official documents.17 Moreover, scribes who worked for Islamic chanceries had access not only to the shurut literature of universal discourse, but also to much more elaborate manuals that laid out the specific protocols governing the appropriate forms for all manner of government documents. Representative of the tradition, and highly relevant as a fifteenth‐century Egyptian work popular long thereafter throughout the region, was the Kitab Subh al‐A‘sha of al‐Qalqashandi, a handbook of diplomatic which, in a dozen‐odd generous volumes, taught a prospective scribe exactly how to create virtually any sort of



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government document in the established Islamic chancery tradition (al‐Qalqashandi 1913–1919).18 Suppose, for example, one is obliged to address the issues of ­protocol raised by the coronation oath of a Christian Nubian king? (Holt 1990).19 Yet al‐Qalqashandi, despite his intimate familiarity with late medieval Nubian monarchy, would not have helped a Sudanese chancery scribe of the Funj era, for missing from his comprehensive compendium of document forms was the highly distinctive Sinnar charter. Having considered and rejected all the most plausible prior and contemporary donor cultures, one may conclude that the Sinnar charter was probably not borrowed at all but was rather conceived and created by the chancery of the Funj kingdom itself. A historian working in the age of electronic teleprompters and e‐publishing, or even the recent era of paper note cards and photocopied manuscripts, must make a deliberate, reasoned effort to understand previous times in which these aids to the preservation and conveyance of information did not yet exist. For example, when Europeans of the Renaissance period looked back upon their own beloved age of classical antiquity, they observed orators who could speak in public for several hours without notes and later dictate the same speech to a scribe. In the literature of antiquity they also discovered how such feats of intellectual retention were accomplished; data to be preserved and presented was carefully arranged and deposited in the rooms of a pre‐prepared imaginary architecture, from which the information could be retrieved by a visualized walking tour of the imaginary but subjectively familiar mansion. This technique became known as the “art of memory.”20 The art of memory, when rediscovered by Renaissance Europeans, could then be put to practical use for suitable intellectual projects such as learning Chinese.21 The idiom of Islam practiced by Sudanese family brotherhoods rested upon a base of literacy, conspicuously scripture and law.22 In both cases, however, the conceptual divide between “literacy” and “orality” was bridged or blurred by actual practice; many devout individuals committed scripture to memory, while, according to Islamic law, documents at best may assist the memory of the appropriate living witnesses whose sworn oral testimony is binding (Wakin 1972). Within the intellectual traditions of the family brotherhoods who set the tone for the contemporary practice of precolonial Islam, the higher forms of esoteric knowledge were usually preserved orally, to be transmitted from the wise to suitably prepared receptive individuals on appropriate occasions. Valuable truths were rarely committed to writing, because any literate fool could read a book! The intact charters from Sinnar all possess the same structural elements, usually displayed in a single fixed order. However, no two are formally identical; indeed, the minor differences in phrasing are very numerous. It is therefore unlikely that new charters were prepared by copying and adapting from a written standard model. Rather, it is probable that the template upon which the scribes drew was one created and preserved in their collective memory, as one more genre of

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v­ aluable esoteric knowledge, in this case secular, that should not be widely distributed among those outside the approved cadre of scribes.

Conclusion One may infer that the Sinnar charter was probably an independent Sudanese invention of the later seventeenth century. The model upon which its formal structure and essential features were based was created and preserved orally among the official corps of authorized scribes as a memorized chancery template, a form of cultural archiving characteristic of both the Sudanese Sufi tradition of knowledge and – insofar as the latter is known – and the usages of the older slave bureaucracy of the Sinnar treasury.

Notes 1 For an introduction to the kingdoms of the precolonial Sudan see Adams (1977) and Edwards (2004). For the adoption of limited literacy at times within this state tradition see Abdalla (1974) and Shinnie (1978). A study introducing the written literature in Nubian is Ruffini (2012). 2 An historiographical setting for the transitional age may be found in Kapteijns and Spaulding (1991). Specific historical studies of the period are Spaulding (2010 and 2011). 3 For contemporary evidence and a discussion see Spaulding and Abu Salim (1989: 1–5). 4 Most are available, with English translations and notes, in Spaulding and Abu Salim (1989). See also Bjørkelo and Abu Shouk (1992) and McHugh (2003). 5 This is a confirming charter issued by Sultan Badi IV in 1145/1732–1733. For the reign of Sultan Badi b. Rubat, see O’Fahey and Spaulding (1974: 57). Dates are given for both Islamic and Western calendars, in that order; an Islamic year often spans two Western years. 6 The palace was abandoned and partly destroyed during the civil wars that brought down the kingdom at the dawn of the nineteenth century. An appreciation by the Austrian traveler Eduard Freiherr von Callot, was made in 1831: “But the old castle of the kings of Sinnar, in which the forefathers of the last king Badi VII held court, towers over everything. The royal castle consists of two thick, lofty, rectangular, four‐story towers and still has a multitude of supporting structures extending over a wide area. All construction is carried out with fired brick. The upper half of one of the towers has partly collapsed. Gigantic heaps of rubble and debris surround this once‐majestic structure. Here and there thick, leafy acacias shade the lesser ruins, and even the heights are overgrown with weeds” (Spaulding, n.d.). 7 The attested scribes who wrote sultanic charters (in Spaulding and Abu Salim 1989) are Muhammad ‘Abd al‐Ghani (Documents 2, 4, 5, and 7), Muhammad b. al‐Faqih Ahmad (Document 6), Ya‘qub (‘Abd al‐Raziq Muhammad) Hamiran (Document 9), his son Ibrahim (Documents 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 24) and his grandson Khidr (Documents 25, 28, 32, 40), ‘Ali b. al‐Faqih Adam (Document 23), Muhammad



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9

10 11

12

13

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walad ‘Ali (Document 30), Ahmad al‐Warraq (Document 33), Daf‘Allah b. Barri (Document 35), Ahmad al‐Makki (Documents 38, 39), and Faqih Muhammad al‐ Hajj (Document 42). A court scribe who copied a Qur’an destined as a royal gift to a holy man in the provinces was ‘Abd Allah b. Muhammad (Document 11). The scribe who produced the document published by McHugh (2003: 59), “A Document of Personal Exemption,” was Ahmad b. ‘Umar. The scribe who wrote the charter published by Bjørkelo and Abu Shouk (1992: 39), “A Sultanic Charter from Sinnar,” is identified by them as Ibrahim Ya‘qub ‘Abd al‐Raziq Muhammad Hamiran; this is certainly p ­ lausible, but the present author reads Ibrahim, son of the previously listed witness al‐Faqih al‐‘Ajami – thus Ibrahim b. al‐Faqih al‐‘Ajami. No study has been made of the surviving examples of the paper on which charters and other Funj government documents were written. A pioneering exploration of the Sudanese trade in paper via Egypt is Walz (1985). A Yemeni traveler during the early sixteenth‐century reign of the first Funj sultan, ‘Amara Dunqas, reported the seat of the royal treasury at Sinnar, the site of the future capital (Hillelson 1935). For the historical interplay between mobile and fixed c­ apitals in the Northeast African context, and between mobile capitals and fixed royal economic institutions, see Spaulding (2011). For a discussion and sources see Spaulding (2007: 43–45). For the ubiquity of quinary computational systems in precolonial Africa see Zaslavsky (1999). A second possible example might be Muhammad b. al‐Hajj ‘Ammara, the scribe of Documents 54 and 55; he may have been a son of a prominent royal court figure of the earlier eighteenth century. Al‐Hajj ‘Ammara appears in the biography of Khalil b. al‐ Rumi in the famous compendium of the lives of Sudanese holy men, the Tabaqat (1978: 202–205; hereafter Tabaqat). The provincial scribes who appear in Spaulding and Abu Salim (1989) are (…) al‐Din (Document 44), al‐Hajj al‐Sayyid Rahma (Document 46), Abu Bakr Muhammad (Document 47), Faqih al‐Nur b. al‐Faqih ‘Ubayd (Document 48), ‘Abd al‐Salam b. al‐khatib ‘Abd al‐Latif (Document 50), Faqih ‘Awad Allah b. al‐Hajj Dahawi (Documents 51, 58), Idris b. al‐Hajj Muhammad Abu’l‐Ma‘ali (Document 53), Muhammad b. al‐Hajj ‘Amara (or ‘Ammar) (Documents 54, 55), al‐Bashir b. al‐Faqih Hasab Allah b. Bahr (Document 56), Zuruq b. Muhammad al‐Nur ‘Ubayd (Document 59), Muhammad Nur b. al‐Hajj ‘Abd al‐Rahman Asid (Document 60), ‘Ali b. al‐Faqih Qurashi (Document 62), ‘Ali b. ‘Awad (Document 63), ‘Umar b. (…) ‘Abd al‐Rahman (Document 64), Qurashi b. Hasan (Document 65), and Ahmad “The Copiest” (al‐nasikh) (Document 66). It has been customary in Sudan studies to label these small‐scale, rural Sufi organizations of the precolonial era “family tariqas” (brotherhoods), largely to distinguish them from nineteenth‐century colonial age movements such as the Tijaniyya, Sanusiyya, Khatmiyya, or Ansar, which were much larger organizations that followed quite different intellectual agendas within the wider Islamic context. Most of the smaller, older organizations had considered themselves Qadiriyya by tradition. At this point in historiography the most perceptive, sympathetic discussion of the older brotherhoods remains Trimingham (1965). Useful insights specifically from the Shaiqiyya country may also be found in Karrar (1992). A historian’s linguistically grounded perspective may be found in Spaulding (2004).

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14 Conspicuously, the father of the provincial scribe ‘Abd al‐Salam, the Sinnar court khatib ‘Abd al‐Latif, had earned his place in the Tabaqat (pp. 300–301). The southern provincial scribe Ahmad b. ‘Umar (McHugh (2003: 59), “A Document of Personal Exemption”) identified himself as a disciple of the eminent holy man Muhammad al‐Turayfi (Tabaqat, pp. 337–339). Muhammad Nur (Spaulding and Abu Salim (2007), Document 60) was the son of the equally prominent holy man ‘Abd al‐ Rahman Asid (Tabaqat), pp. 282–285. Qurashi b. Hasan (Spaulding and Abu Salim (2007), Document 61) identified himself as an offspring of Muhammad b. ‘Isa Suwwar al‐Dhahab (Tabaqat, pp. 348–349); the holy man was also the ancestor of a recent Sudanese military strongman. 15 An extended discussion of each element of a Sinnar charter may be found in the introduction to Spaulding and Abu Salim (2007: 1–31). 16 Examples may be found in Salih (1978: 221–238). 17 For an introduction to the shuruut literature and its practical applications, see Wakin (1972). 18 The present author has used this edition, preserved in the New York Public Library; he thanks the library. 19 Holt’s study rests upon al‐Qalqashandi (1913–1919). 20 For an introduction to the Renaissance rediscovery of classical techniques, see Yates (1966). 21 For the use of the art of memory to facilitate mastery of the Chinese language by an early modern European missionary, who left a written description of his memorization methods, see Spence (1983). 22 A general sense of literacy in the late Funj era may be inferred from the register of works cited by the Tabaqat (pp. 418–419).

References Abdalla, Abdelgadir Mahmoud, ed. 1974. Studies in Ancient Languages of the Sudan. Khartoum: Khartoum University Press. Abu Salim, Muhammad Ibrahim. 1975. Al‐Fur wa’l‐ard: Watha’iq tamlik. Khartoum: Institute of African and Asian Studies, University of Khartoum. Abu Salim, Muhammad Ibrahim. 1982. Tabaqat wad Dayf Allah: Al‐dhayl wa’l‐takmila. Khartoum: Institute of African and Asian Studies, University of Khartoum. Adams, William Y. 1977. Nubia: Corridor to Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press. al‐Qalqashandi. 1913–1919. Kitab subh al‐a‘sha. Cairo: Matba’a al‐Amiriyya. Bjørkelo, Anders, and Ahmad Ibrahim Abu Shouk. 1992. “A Sultanic Charter from Sinnar.” Sudanic Africa 3: 29–40. Edwards, David N. 2004. The Nubian Past: An Archaeology of the Sudan. London: Routledge. Goody, Jack, ed. 1968. Literacy in Traditional Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, Jack. 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. London: Cambridge University Press. Hasan, Yusuf Fadl, ed. 1974. Kitab al‐tabaqat fi khusus al‐awliya’ wa’l‐salihin wa’l‐ ‘ulama’ wa’l‐shu‘ara’ fi’l‐sudan. 2nd ed. Khartoum: University of Khartoum Press.



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Hillelson, Samuel. 1935. “David Reubeni, an Early Visitor to Sennar.” Sudan Notes and Records 16: 55–66. Holt, P. M. 1990. “The Coronation Oaths of Nubian Kings.” Sudanic Africa 1: 5–9. Huntingford, G. W. B. 1965. Land Charters of Northern Ethiopia. Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Haile Selassie University. Kapteijns, Lidwien, and Jay Spaulding. 1991. “The Orientalist Paradigm in the Historiography of the Late Precolonial Sudan.” In Golden Ages, Dark Ages: Imagining the Past in Anthropology and History, edited by Jay O’Brien and William Roseberry, 139–151. Berkeley: University of California Press. Karrar, Ali Salih. 1992. The Sufi Brotherhoods in the Sudan. London: Hurst. McHugh, Neil. 2003. “A Document of Personal Exemption from the Kingdom of Sinnar.” Sudanic Africa 14: 55–60. Mohamed Salih, Ali Osman. 1978. “The Economy and Trade of Medieval Nubia.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. O’Fahey, R. S., and M. I. Abu Salim. 1983. Land in Dar Fur: Charters and Related Documents from the Dar Fur Sultanate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Fahey, R. S., and J. L. Spaulding. 1974. Kingdoms of the Sudan. London: Methuen. Ong, Walter J. 2002. Orality and Literacy. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Palmer, H. R. 1967. Sudanese Memoires; Being Mainly Translations of a Number of Arabic Manuscripts Relating to the Central and Western Sudan. London: Frank Cass. Ruffini, Giovanni R. 2012. Medieval Nubia: A Social and Economic History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shinnie, Peter L. 1978. “The Ancient Languages of the Northern Sudan.” In Aspects of Language in the Sudan, edited by Robin Thelwall, 82–96. Coleraine: New University of Ulster. Spaulding, Jay, ed. and trans. n.d. “The Sudanese Travels of Eduard Freiherr von Callot, 1831.” www.kean.edu/~jspauldi/VONCALLOT2.HTML, accessed March 10, 2018. Spaulding, Jay. 2004. “Classical Medieval Nubian and the Mahas Diaspora.” Islam et Sociétés au Sud du Sahara 17–18: 81–84. Spaulding, Jay. 2007. The Heroic Age in Sinnar. Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press. Spaulding, Jay. 2010. “The Iron King: A Reconsideration of the Tunjur.” In Sudan’s Wars and Peace Agreements, edited by Jay Spaulding, Stephanie Beswick, and Richard A. Lobban, 163–176. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Spaulding, Jay. 2011. “Urbanization and Ironworking in the Nubian State Tradition.” In The Growth of Non‐Western Cities: Primary and Secondary Urban Networking, c.900–1900, edited by Kenneth R. Hall, 155–169. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Spaulding, Jay, and Muhammad Ibrahim Abu Salim, eds. 1989. Public Documents from Sinnar. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Spence, Jonathan D. 1983. The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. London: Penguin Books. Trimingham, J. S. 1965. Islam in the Sudan. London: Frank Cass. Wakin, Jeanette A. 1972. The Function of Documents in Islamic Law. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Walz, Terence. 1985. “The Paper Trade of Egypt and the Sudan in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” In Modernization in the Sudan, edited by M. W. Daly, 29–48. New York: Lilian Barber Press. Yates, Frances. 1966. The Art of Memory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Zaslavsky, Claudia. 1999. Africa Counts: Number and Pattern in African Culture. 3rd ed. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Apartheid Forgotten and Remembered Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger

Apartheid, literally meaning apartness, and pronounced apart‐hate, was the name for the policy and practice of white supremacy through which the National Party ruled South Africa from 1948 until 1994.1 The origins of the policy  –  and its implementation – have been highly contested, and the consequences for South Africa since 1994 even more so, but always in separate conversations, racially and ethnically distinct, reflecting the profound impact of institutionalized racism on South Africa past and present. When Hendrik Verwoerd made his first speech to the South African Senate in 1948, he linked apartheid in theory and practice to the previous policies of segregation that had been enforced nationally since the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910: there is nothing new in what we are propagating, nor have we made any claim that there is anything new in it. The claim we have made is that we are propagating the traditional policy of Afrikanerdom, the traditional policy of South Africa and of all those who have made South Africa their home … whether it is called segregation or by the clear Afrikaans word apartheid.2

The laws underpinning segregation that he would have had in mind would have included the South Africa Act of 1909, which racially restricted elected members of Parliament (House and Senate) to “British subject[s] of European descent”; the Mines and Works Act of 1911 which restricted all skilled jobs in the A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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mining industry to whites; the Natives’ Land Act of 1913, which limited o ­ wnership of 93 percent of the land area of South Africa to whites (who made up 22 percent of the population); the Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923, which required that Africans live in segregated sections of all urban areas and not be allowed to purchase freehold property therein; the Native Administration Act of 1927, which established administrative (rather than civil) law as primary in all areas inhabited by Africans and made it a criminal offense punishable by heavy fine or a year in prison for anyone (though no whites were ever prosecuted) who “utters any words or does any other act or thing whatever with intent to promote any feeling of hostility between Natives and Europeans”; the Immorality Act of 1927 which made sex between whites and Africans a criminal offense (again, only Africans were ever prosecuted); and the Representation of Natives Act of 1936, which placed the few Africans entitled to vote on the basis of their property holdings on a separate roll from that of all other voters. Despite the fact that all of these laws were still in force when we first visited South Africa in the mid‐1970s, the government claimed that apartheid was over, a thing of the past, and that the essential divide in the country was between “first‐ world” and “third‐world” societies. What then explained the elaboration of the segregation laws into rigidly enforced separate amenities by race, the different entrances to post offices, the separate busses, the separate trains, or, in the case of Cape Town, the separate carriages depending on which suburb you were traveling to? And, above all, what explained the geographic separation of landownership, with African possession of any land outside certain strictly circumscribed rural areas legally prohibited, and the lack of voting rights for any person of color? Apartheid had indeed, in Verwoerd’s own words, constructed “something new” on the foundation of segregation. Many of the individuals in power in the mid‐1970s – people like John Vorster, prime minister from 1966 to 1978 and state president from 1978 to 1979, born Balthazar Johannes in 1915 but who preferred to go by the English version of his name, and P. W. Botha, born Pieter Willem in 1916, Vorster’s minister for defense from 1966 to 1978, and then successively prime minister from 1978 to 1984 and state president from 1984 to 1989 – had been instrumental in developing the legislation that underpinned apartheid. Such legislation included the 1949 self‐ explanatory Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act; the 1950 Population Registration Act, which established mechanisms for classifying all residents of South Africa as either “Whites,” “Coloureds,” or “Natives” and allocating or removing legal rights (to the vote, most importantly) on the basis of those classifications; the 1950 Immorality Act, which made it illegal for people from different races to have sex with one another (not just whites and Africans as under the Immorality Act); the 1950 Group Areas Act, which retroactively defined spaces within South Africa as belonging to one or other classified group and in practice excluded Africans, or Natives in the then contemporary usage, of owning and being entitled to legal permanent residence in any urban area; and the 1950 Suppression of Communism



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Act, which banned the South African Communist Party, made being a communist subject to criminal prosecution, and defined, among a variety of ways, being a communist as including any person who engaged in an act which aims at bringing about any political, industrial, social or economic change within the Union by the promotion of disturbance or disorder, by unlawful acts or omissions or by the threat of such acts or omissions or by means which include the promotion of disturbance or disorder, or such acts or omissions or threat

– which could, but did not necessarily, include “the encouragement of feelings of hostility between the European and non‐European races of the Union.”3 The practical measure used to enforce these and many other laws introduced in the 1950s and operative throughout the 1970s and well into the 1980s was the enforcement of the pass laws, regularized nationally in 1952 by the Native Laws Amendment Act and the Orwellian‐titled Abolition of Passes and Co‐ordination of Documents Act. Under these two acts, and various subsequent revisions, every day in every part of South Africa, which we like everyone else witnessed, tens of thousands of black South Africans were stopped by the police and asked to show their passes, documents which listed their racial classification as well as their employment history, and identified whether they had permission, based on their employment status, for being where they were. Those without the documents, or without proof of current employment, were arrested, sometimes whipped, often imprisoned, and exiled back to where they were “supposed” to live until their labor was needed by the migrant system that underpinned South Africa’s rural and urban economies, with their endless need for a constant supply of cheap and compliant workers – ultimately a pipe dream and the most fundamental contradiction for state efforts to create permanent white supremacy. What we want to do in this chapter is to discuss how, since 1994, apartheid has been written about in South Africa, how it has been remembered, and how it has been forgotten, who has done the remembering, and who has done the forgetting. Because of the continuing relevance of the historiography of apartheid to around the early 1990s, we shall start with a survey of that work, focus first on the forgetting, and then on the remembering, and talk about the ways in which the separateness of apartheid, inherited from and perpetuating colonialism, continues to divide South Africa and South Africans.

Removing the black voice The most detailed and powerful analyses of apartheid and its introduction and impact were written by those most affected by the new laws, just as had been the case under the preceding policies of racial segregation enforced nationally since the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Most of this speech took place in the public and political sphere, since South Africa’s universities were racially segregated in the 1950s, just as they had been since their inception, and academic

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analyses were almost without exception white‐authored (the exceptions mainly related to linguistic analyses of African languages). There was a vibrant periodical and newspaper culture in the 1950s through which black authors could express their views about a wide range of topics, from sport to music to detailed analyses of the harshest impact of apartheid laws breaking up families and forcing people, including especially children, to work under onerous conditions. Drum magazine was particularly prominent, employing a range of talented authors such as Henry Nxumalo, Todd Matshikiza, Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, and Es’kia Mphahlele, and the photographer Peter Magubane. There were also newspapers targeted at black audiences like the World and the Guardian (later renamed the New Age). But the most powerful speech came in the form of the political statements, sometimes made from the dock, by leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) such as Nelson Mandela (especially his presidential speech for the Transvaal Branch in 1953), Oliver Tambo, and Albert Luthuli, as well as by the leader of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) Robert Sobukwe and by Moses Kotane of the South African Communist Party, banned since 1950. The PAC‐ organized Sharpeville demonstration of March 21, 1960, which was violently repressed by the police, and the subsequent banning by the government of the ANC and the PAC, together with censorship restrictions placed on individuals, organizations, and print media, largely removed black voices from public discourse about politics in South Africa. All the individuals mentioned above were, by the mid‐1960s, either in prison, in exile, or dead and their speeches and writings were banned in South Africa. Banned meant they could not be read or quoted. The extension of such censorship over a wide spectrum of writing meant that even the works of insightful critics of white racism in South Africa prior to apartheid, like Sol Plaatje and A. T. Nzula,4 among others, could not be read by South Africans throughout almost the entire period of apartheid.5 The absence of these individuals from what was deemed by the state to be legitimate discourse within South Africa meant also the absence of a core argument – the role of race, specifically white supremacy, in propelling and underpinning apartheid – in debates about politics and history during the apartheid era. The ANC Youth League in its 1944 manifesto noted that “The White race … had invested itself with authority and the right to regard South Africa as a White man’s country” (ANC 1944). Mandela linked the struggle against apartheid in South Africa with that against colonialism in the rest of the world when he argued in 1953 that “there is nothing inherently superior about the herrenvolk [master race] idea of the supremacy of the whites” in South Africa, it was the same as had been used to rule “in China, India, Indonesia, and Korea, American, British, Dutch and French Imperialism … [now] completely and perfectly exploded” (Mandela 1953). For Sobukwe the problem for South Africa in 1959, as it was for all still colonized societies, was “the ruling White minority,” but he expected that would be overcome, “by 1963, or even by 1973 or 1984,” in South Africa as in the rest of the African continent (Sobukwe 1959: 48).



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White conversations about black actions Many white South Africans now, and then, claimed that they did not know of apartheid’s worst policies and practices, or that, even if they did know a bit in passing, they did not know of the worst excesses of the police state – the government death squads in particular, which assassinated opponents of apartheid from the early 1970s (and perhaps earlier) right up to the beginning of majority rule in April 1994. Claims of not knowing ring hollow, especially because of what people could witness on a daily basis in the streets, unless they chose not to look or to see, and because of what they could read even in a strictly censored press, where stories critical of the government were literally blacked out (as with a black permanent marker pen), or left with empty newsprint by editors showing what official censors had required of them. But what of white scholars who were more intent than the average citizen on analyzing the historical trajectory of twentieth‐ century South Africa? The academic scholarship written about apartheid within South African universities reflected the views of white scholars, especially after the removal of the few blacks with appointments in South African universities. The 1959 Extension of University Education Act (referred to by Afrikaner scholars more accurately as the 1959 Separate Universities Act), prohibited “open universities,” such as the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town (universities that had admitted some black students) from admitting students labeled “nonwhite”; the latter would now be educated in separate universities set up on a racial basis for African, Colored, and Indian students but employing primarily Afrikaner faculty: at Ngoye in Zululand for Zulu speakers, at Durban for Indians, at Turfloop in Northern Transvaal for Sotho and Tswana speakers, at Belleville in the Cape for Coloreds, and at Fort Hare for Xhosa speakers.6 With the establishment of these separate institutions, the few black scholars who had found academic employment, primarily teaching African languages and literature, were excluded. A. C. Jordan, who had taught African languages at the University of Cape Town since 1945, left South Africa on a one‐way exit visa in the early 1960s; Robert Sobukwe, who had lectured in African languages at the University of the Witwatersrand from 1954 onward, was imprisoned in 1960 and spent the rest of his life in detention or under house arrest; Archie Mafeje, whose appointment to a post at the University of Cape Town in 1968 was rescinded under pressure from the government, spent almost his entire career in exile from South Africa. The most prominent writer on South African historiography in the early years of apartheid, F. A. van Jaarsveld, noted in his 1964 collection of essays, The Afrikaner’s Interpretation of South African History, that “the advocates and apologists of ‘apartheid’ on historical grounds” were sociologists and theologians (van Jaarsveld 1964: 151).7 He divided white historians between those who wrote in Afrikaans (and taught in Afrikaans‐language universities: Stellenbosch, Pretoria, Potchestroom, and the Free State) and those who wrote in English and taught in

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English‐language universities (University of Cape Town, Rhodes, Witwatersrand, and the University of Natal, Durban and Pietermaritzburg campuses). Their historical writing in terms of choice of topic and interpretation reflected their political differences: the Afrikaners focused on the history of the Great Trek in the 1830s, when thousands of Afrikaans speakers, accompanied by their black servants, sought to escape British colonialism by moving into the interior of South Africa, and the South African War of 1899–1902, when the British conquered the two internal states resulting from the trek, interpreting both events from the viewpoint of people who considered themselves persecuted on the basis of their nationality and who in the twentieth century had built a nationalist movement that culminated in political victory in the 1948 election and the establishment of the apartheid state. The English speakers by contrast, in van Jaarsveld’s analysis, adopted a tone of blame and regret in their analyses of what had gone wrong in twentieth‐century South African politics. The blame lay on Afrikaners and what were seen as their nineteenth‐century frontier attitudes being extended into a twentieth‐century modernizing economy, to the detriment of the latter. The regret lay in the failure of British imperial authorities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to rein in and control Afrikaner nationalism. Van Jaarsveld’s English contemporaries, he wrote, “confronted with the Afrikaner’s nationalism and racial policies … [sought] to explain who the Afrikaner is and what one may expect of him.” Their work was full of “disappointment at the present” and “visions of impending catastrophe” (van Jaarsveld 1964: 146). It still is. Looking to the future of South African historical writing, van Jaarsveld wrote that the “main field of study will be ‘causes of the South African Revolution’”: “If the somber predictions of internal revolution and external pressure are realized,” “if the optimistic belief in the success of apartheid should become a happy reality then no doubt the praises will be sung of the Afrikaner’s far‐seeing vision and sacrifices” (van Jaarsveld 1964: 154). Two iconic texts first published in 1969 reflected clearly the white dichotomy identified by van Jaarsveld: Five Hundred Years: A History of South Africa, edited by C. F. J. Muller, which recounted “the activities and experiences, over a period of nearly five hundred years, of the White man in South Africa” (Muller 1969: ix8) and the two‐volume Oxford History of South Africa whose “central theme of South African history is interaction between peoples of diverse origins, languages, technologies, and social systems, meeting on South African soil” (Wilson and Thompson 1969: v).9 Muller described South Africa as “a white power in a black continent,” “guided by white intellect and enterprise but for a long time … dependent on non‐white labour,” where “the main concern now is whether less than four million white South Africans [counting Afrikaans and English speakers together] can maintain their supremacy against the more than 300 million black inhabitants of Africa who are supported by many other nations” (Muller 1969: xi). B. J. Liebenberg (1969) ascribed the success of the allied Herenigde Nasionale



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Party (Reunited National Party) and the Afrikaner Party in 1948 to its taking place in a context in which “racial integration would inevitably cause the White minority to lose power,” where “the idea of apartheid or separate development … attracted the White electorate,” and was “a victory for Afrikaner nationalism” (Liebenberg 1969: 426). He considered the “social legislation” (Population Registration Act, Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, Group Areas Act, etc.) introduced in first decade of apartheid as an extension of previous attempts “to solve the colour question”: Apartheid in public spaces was naturally not new because there had been separate buses, separate railway coaches, separate benches in public parks and separate bathing facilities and beaches for the different races long before 1948. The innovation was that what had previously been custom had now become a written law. (Liebenberg 1969: 428, 429)

More contentious, in Liebenberg’s view, were the laws to enforce “political apartheid” by putting Colored voters on a separate roll from whites. Steps taken to eliminate any representation for African voters in South Africa – the few enfranchised because of their property ownership had been allowed to vote for whites to represent them – and to lay the basis for self‐governing states in the small rural areas set aside for them (Transkei, Ciskei, etc.) were “a positive aspect” of “apartheid as a policy of separate development” (Liebenberg 1969: 430). Apartheid was, for Afrikaner politicians like J. G. Strijdom, “synonymous with ‘white domination,’” though Verwoerd, whom Liebenberg considered “more than anyone else … the architect and driving force behind the policy of apartheid,” was also “more than anyone else … responsible for transforming this policy of apartheid from a merely negative policy of domination and repression (baaskap) into a positive policy of separate development which aimed at ‘fairness to each and justice to all’” (Liebenberg 1969: 427, 428).10 Muller, like van Jaarsveld, foresaw two opposed futures for South Africa: either going “the same way as ancient Carthage” and disappearing “completely after seven hundred years of progress and prosperity,” or “develop[ing] into one of Africa’s chief spreaders of Western ideas, at a time when Western powers had declined in Africa and elsewhere” (Liebenberg 1969: 478). Despite or perhaps because of their reference to “interaction” – a process and noun which seemed to have no actors or action – the contributors to the Oxford History, especially volume 2 which focused on the period 1870–1966 (Wilson and Thompson 1971), fitted van Jaarsveld’s description of English‐language scholarship. The author commissioned to write the chapter on the period including apartheid, an Afrikaner and not an academic (he was a newspaper editor), believed the political victory of Afrikaner nationalism in 1948 was due to its race policies, that is, white supremacy, and added that apartheid “had its positive side as well, and it was the achievement of Dr. Verwoerd … that he gave to the theory a philosophic basis and content,” most clearly reflected, it seems, in his vision of

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“the ultimate emergence of some sort of commonwealth of states in South Africa” (de Villiers 1971: 402, 414).11 The one variant on van Jaarsveld’s account of English speakers’ interpretations was the essay by the sociologist Leo Kuper who argued that “the implementation of apartheid which dominated political action and race relations after 1948 was in the nature of a counter‐revolution by whites.” Still not a revolution by Africans as the actors, but rather “to the increasing mobilization of force against opposition … The counter‐revolution was directed to the control of social change, in the interests of white domination, by monopoly of the constitutional means of change” (Kuper 1971: 459). In other words, Kuper alluded in a somewhat opaque manner to growing African resistance to the strictures of both segregation and apartheid. Apartheid censorship, however, prevented all South Africans, white and black, from reading Kuper’s analysis of the actions of black critics of apartheid. Oxford University Press, ultimately supported by the editors of the Oxford History, though opposed by Kuper himself, removed his chapter from the South African edition on the basis that Legal opinion on the chapter by Leo Kuper … was to the effect that it infringed South African law in many respects, mainly by references to books and articles dealing with African Nationalism, policy statements of the African National Congress, and statements by African leaders. (Wilson and Thompson 1971: v)

Under these accepted “rules” of apartheid, or acquiescence, Africans could not be written about for a South African readership, or write about themselves because, as the Oxford History editors noted about themselves and their contributors: We live, or have lived, in a caste society, and we are all white. This last imbalance occurs because in South Africa today few Africans, or Asians, or Coloured people have the opportunity for unfettered research and writing; and those who have the training and opportunity are for the most part occupied with other commitments … Analysis … by African and Coloured historians, economists, and anthropologists … are long overdue. (Wilson and Thompson 1969: vi, xiii)

The historiography of apartheid began to change in the 1970s and 1980s, through the influence of interpretive approaches that stressed the role of economics in general and capitalism in particular in determining the way in which white supremacy developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In these analyses race was not absent, indeed practically all the texts focused primarily on black actors, but the emphasis was on showing how policies that had a core racial component – conquest, segregation, and apartheid – served the needs of big business in mining and farming, especially for cheap labor. Three key texts written in the 1970s marked out distinct approaches for the next two decades. Rick Johnstone’s Class, Race and Gold (1976), which analyzed the development of the gold industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in terms of its



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dependence on cheap black labor to produce enormous profits; Colin Bundy’s The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (1979), which examined the ways in which initiatives taken by African farmers in the late 1800s were defeated by white industrialists and farmers intent on turning them into migrant laborers; and Charles van Onselen’s two‐volume set of essays, Studies in the Social and Economic History of Witwatersrand, 1886–1914 (1982), which focused on the social history of urban areas. These works were the tip of the iceberg, with an enormous number of studies being published in the 1980s, many of them elaborations of work which first saw print in a series of key collections coedited by Shula Marks: Economy  and Society in Pre‐industrial South Africa (Marks and Atmore 1980), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture, and Consciousness, 1870–1930 (Marks and Rathbone 1982), and The Politics of Race, Class, and Nationalism in Twentieth‐Century South Africa (Marks and Trapido 1987). Several relatively commonplace arguments (but new for South African historiography) constituted the core of the revisionist approach. First, mining, manufacturing, and farming were capitalist enterprises whose owners sought to maximize their profits. Second, central to the maximization of profits in all sectors of the economy, but especially in mining and farming, was the need for cheap labor. Third, in workplace struggles race was used intentionally by employers to divide workers and to create hierarchical systems of production in which whites were guaranteed privileged access to ownership and to supervisory and skilled positions. Fourth, in order to secure a constant supply of cheap labor over and above minimum needs so that in cases of worker strikes extra supplies would always be available, Great Britain engaged in a massive process of colonial conquest in the late nineteenth century aimed at meeting the labor needs of the diamond and gold industries, in the course of which Africans were deprived of most of their land and subjected to onerous taxes in order to produce a constant supply of black migrant workers. Fifth, the combination of these economically based processes underpinned the development of segregation in twentieth‐­ century South Africa and, by extension, of apartheid. Above all, the revisionists stressed the importance of local struggles, between employers and workers, colonizers and colonized, in accounting for the specific forms of racial rule and oppression in South Africa. And in these struggles blacks – Africans, Coloreds, and Indians – took very active roles. The natural progression of this work led to an examination of the social costs and struggles of communities under apartheid. Interest in social history gained momentum in the 1980s, stemming from the pioneering work of van Onselen and fueled by the conferences held at the University of the Witwatersrand organized by the History Workshop. Historians, political scientists, sociologists, and geographers sent students and research assistants into the townships and the countryside of South Africa to excavate the history of those who had been silenced. The transcripts of many of those interviews (well over 1,000), under the

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auspices of the African Studies Center, today are held at the Wits university library and formed the basis of many important studies including those by van Onselen (1996), Bonner (1983), Keegan (1988), Bozzoli (1991), Moodie (1994), and others. Their work uncovered the many strategies employed by Africans to survive during apartheid and before; they rendered Africans as actors rather than as objects, and opened up exciting avenues for further research.12 Unfortunately, since 1994 much of this work has been abandoned, with the exception of Bonner’s longstanding study of Johannesburg’s townships (see Bonner and Segal 1998; Bonner and Nieftagodien 2001, 2008; and Bonner, Nieftagodien, and Mathabatha 2012). In the grip of the democratic transition, the voices of these actors had presumably been heard and many social historians turned away from the apartheid past. Still, for all the intellectual excitement of this work, which effectively dominated academic discussion about South African history for two decades and left the works of white liberals and Afrikaners alike largely unread for a generation, there were still (with one or two exceptions) no black contributors, and much of the work rendered Africans as people to be studied and perhaps engaged as  research assistants because of their language skills, but not as potential ­colleagues to be welcomed to the profession (see especially Worger 1991; Desai and Bohmke 1997).

Forgetting But what happened to historical analysis of apartheid after the end of National Party rule and the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994? Did van Jaarsveld’s 1964 prediction that “If the somber predictions of internal revolution and external pressure are realized,” then the “main field of study will be ‘causes of the South African Revolution?’” (1964: 154). Did the Oxford History editors’ concern that the long overdue “analysis … by African and Coloured historians, economists, and anthropologists” get resolved (Wilson and Thompson 1969: xiii)? To start with the last question first, the simple answer is no. Twenty years after the formal end of apartheid, black scholars (meaning African, Colored, and Indian scholars from South Africa) of history employed in South African universities constituted well under 10 percent of professional historians in the country. The professoriate remained much as it had been for the past century, overwhelmingly white males whose academic training and specialization were in researching and teaching South African history (see Worger 2014). There was not a single South African‐born African full professor of history in the country. What this meant for the practice of history was the near complete absence of university scholars who had experienced life under apartheid and who had the language expertise to fully utilize the vast amount of sources available in indigenous languages. What about the other question – the main field of study being the causes of the South African revolution? In some ways one might have expected that the



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biggest contribution of the revisionist scholars to the postapartheid history of South Africa would have been to utilize their analytical approaches and research skills to investigate the origins and development of apartheid in much the same revealing ways as they had the history of industrial development, manufacturing, and race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After all, the government and private records for the apartheid period that had largely been off‐ limits to researchers during the apartheid era were now much more accessible in the postapartheid period. The state archives reduced their closed period from up to 100 years or more to just 20 years. All the records of the National Party and of most of its leaders became publicly accessible for the first time. And mining company records, available in partial and inconsistent ways during the apartheid years, could potentially have been opened up to broad examination if the scholarly demand had been there. But in a strangely appropriate way – since it had been the Oxford History editors and contributors who had initially borne most of the wrath of the revisionist critique of white liberal history  –  the comment of Wilson and Thompson about black scholars in the 1960s – that “those who have the training and opportunity are for the most part occupied with other commitments” (1969: vi)  –  applied to the revisionists in 1990s South Africa. Many hoped to influence government policy in South Africa but found few opportunities in the black majority ANC, and instead aligned with the Democratic Alliance Party, which was always likely to be the perpetual opposition party much like the Progressive Federal Party before it.13 The social historians who had worked hard to study the repercussions of apartheid on South African society approached the question of the “revolution” with greater effort. Many of the township studies of the 1980s continued, especially with a focus on resistance and the efforts and contributions of Africans outside of the organizational structures of the liberation movement. As these studies demonstrated, the effort to dislodge the government was primarily driven by the South African population, although the ANC eventually brokered the change.14 Unfortunately, as the hopes of the transition have soured, the focus of much of this work has turned away from an examination of the popular movement against apartheid and toward denunciations of the ANC and the ANC liberation narrative.15 In an especially strange twist, the chair of the History Workshop, Noor Nieftagodien recently called for greater access to government records from the apartheid period, not to learn more about apartheid but rather because “archived documents might reveal more about “what happened in transition,” including any “dirty deals” that took place behind the scenes and whether these established a template for what came after. There has been much speculation, he continued, about whether Nelson Mandela “sold out” in meetings with state officials; “whether economic deals were struck that allowed existing powers to remain intact”; and whether and how far the security apparatus managed to infiltrate the ANC. It is also sometimes assumed that one reason why current politicians get away with so much is because they know the secrets of their rivals. Scholars should

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now get a chance to test the truth or falsehood of all these claims: “understanding transition can help us understand South Africa today,” said Professor Nieftagodien” (Reisz 2017). In some recent work, apartheid has even come to be seen with some nostalgia for a system that was “well organized”! (Dlamini 2009: 4). Another more promising area of historical inquiry has blossomed since 1990: cultural history. As with the historical discipline generally, many historians have moved away from political and economic concerns entirely and are borrowing from sociologists, geographers, and anthropologists to study the cultures that arose under apartheid. Studies of sports, movies, leisure, religion, language, and music have provided a much richer view of South African life and generally introduce Africans as actors rather than as the objects of culture. Nevertheless, in most cases, because of the quotidian nature of these studies, there is little analysis of the overall impact of apartheid on culture. With the exception of works on protest songs or art, much of this work isolates culture from politics.16 In practice, academic historical analysis of apartheid post‐1994 largely reverted to the two groups of historians whose work had been overturned in the 1970s and 1980s – the Afrikaners and the English liberals. In postapartheid South Africa whites by and large are the only people who have enough money to buy books, and so it was not surprising that the works that most appeal to this audience are those which, for the Afrikaner section, suggest that apartheid was not all bad and had positive ideals and outcomes, and for English‐speaking whites, suggest that they were not to blame in the past nor should they be held responsible in the future for the clear economic advantages held by whites in postapartheid South Africa. For this audience, forgetting is a very appealing feature of the historical texts that they buy. The most prolific Afrikaner historian, Hermann Giliomee has also been one of the most influential in current historiography. He has, in his own account, moved from being an enthusiastic supporter of apartheid in his youth to being perceived as a “snake in the grass” by National Party‐supporting historians in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, to his current role of leading Afrikaans‐language proponent for formerly white universities, Stellenbosch in particular (Giliomee 2016). In his historical accounts of apartheid he has emphasized Afrikaners’ search for “white survival and justice,” most clearly in a multiauthored text written for university students (Giliomee 2014). Instead of the emphasis on “white supremacy” as the driving force behind apartheid found in Giliomee (2016), we have a mix of ahistorical arguments, false binaries, and imagined idealistic origins. With regard to the ahistorical, Giliomee argues that apartheid must be weighed up in light of how people viewed it in the years 1948 to 1958, when the policy was in place … [and] not what most political leaders and commentators have done since 1994 … to judge apartheid according to the liberal values which only began to find acceptance on a wide basis in the 1990s. (2014: 434)

Leaving aside the odd dating (1948–1958 – a typo?), and the general problem of moral relativism, to make the argument as Giliomee does, one must ignore



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everything written and spoken by critics of segregation and apartheid, especially by members of the ANC Youth League in the 1940s and by Nelson Mandela and others in the 1950s (all quoted earlier). Giliomee also presents the reader with curious and ahistorical binaries such as: “Rapid racial integration could have taken place, or the country could, for the greatest part of 25 years, have experienced a reasonable measure of stability. There is no way, however, that both these two things could have happened” (Giliomee 2014: 446). Here the key word is “stability.” Stability for whom? What form of stability? Are political assassinations and police death squads part of stability? Giliomee does refer somewhat generally to black suffering under apartheid but it is all very generic and very impersonal, with his reference to the damage done to the country (whose?) rather than to individuals: Apartheid cost the country dearly, especially in the form of poor quality education for black, coloured and Indian children; an unproductive labour force; a lack of skills; and a large turnover of workers as a result of the enormous scope of migrant labour. (2014: 444–445)

As with the earlier work of Afrikaner historians, blacks remain largely objects of history, not people who through their own struggles helped create the course of events. And, just as Verwoerd argued that apartheid was an attempt to create separate development, not a way to enable whites to rule blacks, Giliomee in his stress on the origins of apartheid as tied up with religious ideas of justice in the 1930s, and with the development of separate political institutions for Africans (the bantustans being a way to compensate them for having lost political rights in the 87 percent of South Africa under white rule), provides an intellectual cover for both the rise and the expansion of white supremacist rule post‐1948.17 Whereas Giliomee harks back to the National Party defenses of apartheid in the 1960s, David Welsh (1971) disinters the English‐speaking liberal scholarship of the 1960s to which he had himself contributed with his first book on the origins of segregation in nineteenth‐century Natal. As Giliomee notes approvingly and without irony in a blurb for Welsh’s 2009 book, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, “This is liberal history at its best.” The first two chapter titles signal the core argument: “Afrikaner Nationalism and the Coming of Apartheid” (i.e., it’s all about the Afrikaners); “The Black Experience: A Prelude to Apartheid” (where again blacks are objects, people who suffer, because of the impact of “three interrelated issues … security, land and labour,” essentially imperialism and farming). What about a reverse order – labor, land, and control – as suggested by the revisionist historians, nearly all of whose work is absent from Welsh’s bibliography? There is in Welsh’s index no reference to De Beers Consolidated Mines or to the Anglo‐ American Corporation. There is no discussion of the impact of apartheid on the economic and social life of ordinary people. It is as though nothing had been written, or at least read, between 1969 and 2009 (Welsh 2009).18

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Like the work of Giliomee and Welsh, Saul Dubow’s recent study Apartheid, 1948–1994 (2014) focuses primarily on politics to the exclusion of economics and social history, deals primarily with white actors, and engages with some dubious “what if” theories reminiscent of Giliomee’s flawed binaries. Dubow aims to be more provocative, however, rather than apologetic. For example, he speculates that if the ANC had not committed to the violent overthrow of the government in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the Nationalist Party government might not have outlawed all protest organizations and initiated the construction of a police state (Dubow 2015). Raising the question of whether the ANC was somehow responsible for the subsequent creation of the South African police state completely ignores Mandela’s famous speech at the Rivonia trial where he carefully laid out the history of ANC activities and their failed attempts to initiate peaceful change. And, like the other liberal historians, Dubow lays the blame for apartheid squarely on Verwoerd (read Afrikaners); but, rather than resurrecting the old arguments about the Afrikaner “frontier” mentality and religious justifications, he argues that apartheid was the by‐product of Verwoerd’s ambition to create an empire of his own within the Native Affairs Department (Dubow 2014: 60). There is no mention of the economic benefits for whites – Afrikaners and English alike – of apartheid policies. Dubow’s critique, speculative and unconvincing, has nevertheless gained popularity among white South African historians. Although South African academia has failed to develop that coterie of “African and Coloured historians, economists and anthropologists” who could provide a different context for our understanding of apartheid, scholarship in the twenty‐ first century has nevertheless expanded through different mediums, giving voice to a broader population than that within the academic community. Life stories, in particular autobiographies, have blossomed through new outlets for publication including online publications, blogs, and even Facebook posts. As one review of the field states, “Individual’s stories have become a legitimate aspect of making new national history” (Jayawardane 2008). These voices are no longer silent and they remember their own apartheid experiences.

Remembering Since 1990, many South Africans have described their own apartheid experiences through their autobiographies. Especially prominent are those of politicians including Nelson Mandela, F. W. de Klerk, and many others who focus on the political intrigue and present justifications for their actions (Mandela 1994; de Klerk 1998; Heunis 2007; Eglin 2007). As Tom Lodge (2015: 687) has noted, however, we get very little of their personal lives or the context in which they made their decisions; instead most of these works are heavy on justification with a touch of insider gossip. There are also the works by South Africa’s journalists, noteworthy for their style and their ability to tell a story but often gliding over the



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gritty realities of daily life in favor of the more sensational aspects of apartheid (Pauw 1997; Sparks 2016). Memoirs by the military combatants on both sides abound, along with what Neelika Jayawardane calls the “My Apartheid Boyhood” genre, in which mainly white male authors recount their innocent childhoods free from the knowledge of apartheid (Manong 2015; Van der Walt 2008; Coetzee 1998; MacRae 2012). Nevertheless, what is strikingly different in the autobiographies as opposed to the academic postapartheid scholarship is the shift of focus away from the motivations of whites in implementing apartheid to the impact and effect of apartheid on communities and individuals. While Giliomee, Welsh, Dubow, and others focus on explaining the intent and actions of white politicians, primarily describing Africans as the objects of these actions, the autobiographies reverse the lens and give us a microscopic view of the painful consequences of apartheid’s policies and actions. While the form of autobiographical narrative is rapidly changing, including online blogs, Facebook pages, auto‐ethnographies, oral recordings, and so on, South Africans in the postapartheid era have eagerly embraced the genre and their stories have been published through old and new avenues. The most interesting – and least touted – are the stories told by the unknowns recounting their everyday experiences. Although these stories are obviously subjective by definition, and they can only present an individual narrative rather than a comprehensive, contextual view of apartheid, they demonstrate a central truth of life under apartheid: their lives were defined by their race. And they explain the impact of apartheid on the totality of a life. Alongside a depiction of the grim realities and daily pleasures of a very difficult human existence, these stories demonstrate how the best efforts of hardworking Africans could be derailed by the smallest of injustices under apartheid. The remaining discussion will focus on the life stories of five South Africans. Sindiwe Magona and Letitia Stuurman, both born in 1943, witnessed the beginning of apartheid and experienced the impact of its policies throughout most of their lives until the end of apartheid in 1994 (Magona 1990; Stuurman 1995). Tlou Setumu, Jamela Robertson, and Fred Khumalo were all born in the 1960s (Setumu 2011; Robertson 2007; Khumalo 2006). Some grew up in townships; most were moved from rural to urban locations and eventually to the townships. One family resided in a “homeland,” forced to renounce citizenship in South Africa. Some were lucky enough to grow up with their parents but few were able to keep their own families together as the pass laws and the Group Areas Act together conspired to keep them apart. Education was not the panacea for advancement in all cases, primarily because their families were often too impoverished to pay the fees. And, even with the proper training and qualifications, job reservation and lack of resources often stymied such plans. How were these relatively “ordinary” South Africans affected by apartheid? Those who have been fortunate enough to be in a position to write and to publish their life stories are by definition already exceptional, and yet their stories can

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stand in for the less fortunate. There is little remarkable about their circumstances other than the fact that they survived those circumstances. To be clear, each author wrote of their childhood as happy: “childhood, by its very nature, is a magic‐filled world, egocentric, wonderfully carefree, and innocent. Mine was all these things and more” (Magona 1990: 4). This, despite the fact that few lived with both parents, or even with either parent. Either one or both parents worked in a city, to which they were not allowed to bring their families (Magona 1990: 15; Khumalo 2006: 33; Robertson 2007: 4; Stuurman 1995: 1). Later, when they became adults, the pattern would be repeated with their own children. In the cities, their mothers turned to selling prepared food or liquor “illegally as she did not have a permit for selling anything from her home” (Magona 1990: 26). In the rural areas, “without good rains and harvests, [mother] was literally left with nothing, absolutely nothing to live on” (Setumu 2011: 48). Where they lived determined much about their lives, yet their residence was restricted by apartheid laws. As Tlou Setumu recounts, “A place to stay was an important factor that determined one’s fortunes in the big city. You couldn’t just go there without knowing where you would be put up” (2011: 76). And, even with residential rights, Africans were continually shifted from place to place. As a child, Sindiwe Magona first moved from a rural village to Blaauvlei, a “location” of corrugated iron shacks; then to a new location, Zwelitsha, where each plot holder built their own house; and, under the slum clearance policies of the 1950s, to one of the massive townships engineered by the apartheid government, Guguletu: The windswept, treeless miles from anywhere township, they were told was their home. Our Pride, Guguletu, the powers that be would have the gall to baptize it, openly declaring to all skeptics their unwavering pursuit: the destruction of African family life, communal life, and all those factors that go toward the knitting of the very fabric of a people. (Magona 1990: 85)

When Jamela Robertson first traveled from her small village near Tzaneen to Mamelodi in Pretoria, she concurred: “Unlike in Dan Village where everyone minded everyone else’s business, in Mamelodi it seemed to be ‘a man for himself’” (2007: 34). Some were moved from the multiracial neighborhoods such as Butts Location in Aliwal North, as Letitia Stuurman remembered: “In 1958 we had to move. The government didn’t want white and ‘non‐white’ people to be mixing in the towns so they forced blacks to live in the locations” (1995: 22). Of course not all experiences were horrible. Fred Khumalo remembers finally moving to his family’s own home in a brand new township in the early 1970s with “a palpable sense of joy in the air. Everything about the township – the neat rows of four‐roomed brick houses, the tarred roads – was new” (Khumalo 2006: 42). The catch was that the township – Mpumalanga – was within the KwaZulu homeland, was paid for by the South African government, and that “by moving here we had, by law, renounced our South African citizenship” (Khumalo 2006: 43). The



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township was built as a labor reservoir, adjacent to the South African town of Hammarsdale which employed cheap labor from Mpumalanga in the textile factories. This was part of grand apartheid, and the vision of “separate development” that would later result in the removal of over 3.5 million South Africans to the ethnically determined apartheid “homelands” (see Surplus People’s Project 1983). But for those who could not survive in the countryside or find housing in the cities or in the homelands, the infamous single‐sex hostels housed workers for the mines, factories, and municipalities, and there were even female quarters for nurses and domestic workers. Tlou Setumu landed in one of the hostels in Pretoria as a last resort and described them as institutions designed to separate workers from the local communities: The high walls that enclosed the hostels separated the inmates from the surrounding community both physically and socially. Besides the fact that almost all of the hostel dwellers came from the rural “homelands,” the hostels themselves completely isolated men from township life. As a result of this isolation, relations between the hostel dwellers and the township community were usually not harmonious … This type of tension fitted well into the plans of the National Party government, in which people had to be separated so that they could be hostile to each other. After all, the unity of the black people was the last thing the apartheid government wanted to see. (Setumu 2011: 78)

It is clear that Africans understood that the government created by design residences that undermined African communities, whether in one of the massive townships like Guguletu or Mamelodi, in an ethnically separated homeland like KwaZulu, or in the impersonal hostels of every white town or city. Apartheid’s grand design was thorough and transparent. While these autobiographies can explain the comprehensive impact of apartheid, what they reveal even more clearly is how one incident or misstep could completely transform a life in which there was absolutely no margin for error. Being in the wrong place could land one in jail, or missing one rent payment could lead to years of homelessness. The turning points in these lives moved on an apartheid axis that was unforgiving. For these authors, education was an important key to a better life, and all of them were able to excel in their schoolwork. Nevertheless, their success did not guarantee their future. Fred Khumalo, now a famous journalist and author, was given perhaps the greatest opportunity after graduation: a full scholarship to medical school. But this was not his goal. He had already become sensitive to his country’s political situation and sought a career as a journalist. Despite his high grades and qualifications, he was routinely turned away from journalism programs and was ultimately given no financial aid when he finally gained admission to Technikon Natal. It seemed that, while the government was ready to finance his career as a doctor, a career as a journalist was not a path it was going to encourage. After graduation, Khumalo struggled to find a publication that would hire him.

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But he was fortunate in that history overtook apartheid South Africa and he has since become one of the country’s leading journalists. Others were not so lucky. Tlou Setumu’s family lived in the rural northern part of the country and survived on whatever his mother could grow on a small plot of land. Their home was built of mud; they literally had nothing. But when Setumu graduated from high school – at the top of his class – he was offered a temporary teaching position at a local school. The idea was that over a couple of years he would save his money, go to university, and qualify as a full‐time teacher. Yet, when his temporary position ended, he found that he had saved nothing: “the underlying poverty in my family meant that the few rands that I earned were reduced to nothing because each and every aspect at home needed to be taken care of by that meager amount” (Setumu 2011: 68). Nevertheless, he gained a scholarship to the University of the North and traveled there to register, only to be undone by the bureaucracy of apartheid education. There is tragic frustration in his account of the situation: I joined a long queue outside the campus and slowly moved with my large bag, approaching the caravans where the officials did the registration… I took out the letter which indicated that I was a bursary holder… one of the officials just said: “Here we only want cash money.” … I went to the nearest public phone at the post office where I dialed the bursary section … The lady who answered said there was nothing she could do because the person who was dealing with the bursaries was in a meeting. I realized there was no way I was going to be helped and I dropped the phone with bitterness … There I stood motionless, not knowing what to do next. Time was moving on and I was increasingly becoming concerned about what was going to happen to me in the next few hours. I knew nobody in Turfloop, and if I was not admitted to the university, where was I going to sleep? That was the immediate problem. The bus [home] was leaving Polokwane at about two o’clock in the afternoon, so I had to take that into consideration in the process of deciding what I was going to do next … This led me to decide to go back home. Yes, indeed … the registration period at universities came to an end and my dream of being a university student evaporated like dew in the rising sun. (Setumu 2011: 75–76)

A simple misunderstanding and no legal place to sleep changed the course of a life. Although Setumu eventually completed a BA, MA, and PhD over the course of the next 20 years, he had to survive as an itinerant worker and teacher in the meantime, and was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown in his mid‐twenties. One phone call could have made a huge difference, but under apartheid Africans seldom had access to a second chance. A combination of cruelty and poverty also ended Jamela Robertson’s education. After accompanying a friend to the hospital and thereby missing a two‐hour study period at school, she and her friend were flogged by the principal. Rather than continue with additional punishment, at the age of 16 she left school. She believed at the time that she could resume her education at another school, but a



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relative who had been paying her school fees died, and she had no resources to continue her final year of school (Robertson 2007: 86–92). What followed was an escape to Johannesburg and an attempt to continue her education through a clerical college in Johannesburg. But, after she graduated, “at each and every door that I knocked on asking for clerical work, I was told the jobs were reserved for whites” (Robertson 2007: 175). Women like Sindiwe Magona who had earned ther teaching credentials, were ultimately forced to work as domestic “servants” in white homes because they could not find jobs or qualify for urban residence because of the legal strictures of apartheid. Mention should also be made of the long‐term impact of Bantu Education, Verwoerd’s attempt to curtail black aspirations. Sindiwe Magona, who was born in 1943, had already finished much of her schooling by the time Bantu Education was fully implemented, but she noted the change: “Those students who were from the old stream were faring much, much better than the products of this exclusively African system” (1990: 72). According to Bantu Education goals, students were taught such subjects as housework and gardening although with important limitations: Incredible though it may sounds, it is the truth: in this urban environment, where a few students had electricity at home, we were being taught to use irons heated on the stove. The stove itself was a wood or coal burner. As far back as I can recall, mother has always had a Singer sewing‐machine. Granted, a manually operated one … and here I was, learning to sew a garment using needle and thread. Talk about “keeping the native in her proper place”! White and even coloured schools had modern appliances. (Magona 1990: 67)

While it has been argued that overall literacy rates improved under Bantu Education, this system also undereducated generations of Africans while directing a steady stream of racist invective at the students (Robertson 2007: 81–83). Indeed, apartheid levied a heavy toll on African physical and mental health. While these authors escaped the worst dangers of apartheid, they were certainly aware of them. Almost anyone – and sometimes everyone – in their lives were the victims of police violence. As Fred Khumalo recounts, even obtaining the necessary passbook to allow his father to live and work in the city was a humiliating ordeal. His father was forced to undergo a genital “inspection” by a white official who “prob[ed] his penis and testicles with a stick” in front of all the other men in the hall: “Outside the hallowed confines of the Native Affairs offices, black men never spoke about their experiences at the Pipi Office as it was called … they couldn’t joke about what happened [there]” (Khumalo 2006: 27–28). This pass, gained through such humiliation, was thereafter used to effect continuing control over blacks. Police raids “with no other objective than to arrest people whose passes were ‘wrong’ or who had forgotten their passes at home” were commonplace, while “police presence in the township had absolutely no correspondence to the committing of criminal acts” (Magona 1990: 87).

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Blacks who were ordinarily granted rights to be in a city still could not be found outside after curfew “even if you were in a car you were not supposed to drive right through Aliwal North if you were black” (Stuurman 1995: 21). Jamela Robertson’s experience of being arrested for not carrying a pass nearly ended in tragedy for her; it most certainly did for others. She and her schoolmates were arrested during lunch time in a park in Johannesburg for not having their passbooks. They were loaded into the police van, threatened with deportation to a “homeland,” and jailed in John Vorster Square for the weekend. While there, they learned that they would be held for the weekend “for the entertainment” of the guards. Although she was spared, she noticed that “every now and then a policeman out of uniform would open the cell and pick a girl or two … hours later the girls would be returned either crying or looking sheepish” (Robertson 2007: 149–150). Even worse, she heard people screaming in pain in the middle of the night, “flying from some storeys above us and crushed way down below … followed by a deadly silence” (Robertson 2007: 150). The worst of apartheid was the creation of a police state to enforce its vision. The most subjective but perhaps most lasting legacy of apartheid was the psychological impact on society. As a small child, Jamela Robertson prayed every night to God to make her white. Indeed, she found the lesson in her own home: It was a picture of heaven and hell… The queue for black people proceeded straight to hell: a pit of fire with the devil, a hefty naked black man with a tail and horns, standing right in the middle of the fire, holding a huge fork and grilling the poor black souls who were falling into the pit one after another. (Robertson 2007: 36–37)

By the time Sindiwe Magona was a teenager, she understood my own impuissance … our voicelessness, meticulously designed by the powers that be; our forever being blamed for the untenable conditions others [had] imposed on us; and the squandering, the systematic extinguishing of the breath of a people by rank bigotry and evil incarnate. (Magona 1990: 79)

In some cases, the continual overall stress of apartheid and its unending frustration drove many South Africans toward mental illness and worse. Both Setumu and Robertson write of periods in which they could no longer cope and suffered breakdowns. Setumu was hospitalized for six months, suffering a nervous breakdown brought on by his inability to find work and therefore support his mother, and the guilt he suffered from these failures (Setumu 2011: 103–109). Robertson, having endured an abusive relationship and the loss of two children, also broke down. “I felt like a walking empty shell and often I’d find myself floating in and out of reality” (2007: 209). Both of these people had set forth with great hopes in life after enjoying happy childhoods and excelling in school, yet repeated frustration and discrimination laid them low. Khumalo writes of another affliction, criminal activity: “Gangsterism and crime are part of township life. Not because



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black people are inherently criminal but because they are driven to crime out of desperation” (2006: 100). The danger of recasting history through the perspective of current feelings of disillusionment or resentment, is that the past will not only be distorted or forgotten but that it will be forgiven. While many South Africans today suffer deeply, they should not be led to believe that the country’s past was something other than unjust and cruel. The people who lived through apartheid persevered and led full lives in spite of apartheid. Yet the threat of the state, and the possibilities for arrest, harm, and worse were always present. Freedom from those fears is not inconsequential. As Letitia Stuurman wrote upon revisiting the township where she grew up: I went back again this year – it’s 1994 – and there is quite a big change. The apartheid is finished … Blacks can buy houses now in town. It was really funny to see black children playing in the streets and going to cafes in the evening … The police are very friendly, not like before … Even the white police, they’re not like the olden days when it was really bad and you didn’t know what you did, right or wrong. (Stuurman 1995: 33–34)

To acknowledge such change, history must be truthful.

Conclusion Some South Africans have suggested that a remembering/forgetting dichotomy is too crude, that “realities, of course, were a little more complex,” and have argued “that beyond the dynamics of remembering and forgetting, a more profound characterization of the struggle in social memory is one of narrative against narrative, story against story” (Harris 1999). We disagree and we agree. Arguing that a remembering and forgetting dichotomy is too crude is all too appealing to white South Africans who now, above all, want to focus their criticisms on the shortcomings of the ANC and to delete from memory what happened while white supremacy was in vogue. But we do agree that the real future for history in South Africa lies in the stories told by those most heavily affected by apartheid. Few if any of these have been incorporated into the works produced by the historical profession in South Africa. Likewise, almost none of the stories told in the course of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings have been addressed despite the fact that the hundreds of thousands of pages of testimony available online provide historians with a resource richer than any available during the apartheid era. When historians use all these sources instead of complaining about the “failure” of the TRC to establish the full “truth,” as if that was ever its aim or that such a task could be accomplished, and instead of complaining about the supposed lack of materials documenting the apartheid years when vast amounts of written material are available that were not available 20 years ago and, more than that, there are

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millions of living witnesses to apartheid willing to tell their stories if anyone will listen, then we may well have a fundamentally new history of South Africa told and heard and written.

Notes 1 Listen to Hendrik Verwoerd pronounce the word at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vPCln9czoys, accessed March 14, 2018. 2 South Africa Senate Debates, September 3, 1948, quoted in Hepple (1967: 111). 3 Suppression of Communism Act, 1950, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Suppression_ of_Communism_Act,_1950, accessed March 14, 2018. 4 Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa: Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion went out of print soon after its publication in 1916 and did not become widely available until its republication in 1982 (Plaatje [1916] 1982). A. T. Nzula’s Forced Labour in Colonial Africa was published in Russian in 1933 and was not available in an English edition until 1979, when it was banned in South Africa (Nzular [1933] 1979). 5 The most useful analysis of state control of writing and publication in South Africa is Merrett (1994). 6 For the reference to the 1959 Act as the Separate Universities Act, see Liebenberg (1969: 430). For a useful analysis of the role of separate universities see Hefferan (2017: 195–214). 7 The books he considered most important for advocacy and apology were all written in Afrikaans and included G. Cronjé’s’n Tuiste vir die Nageslag (1945), Afrika Sonder die Asiaat (1946), Regverdige Rasse‐apartheid (1947), and Voogdyskap en Apartheid (1948), and N. J. Rhoodie and H. J. Venter’s Die Apartheidsgedagte:’n Sosio‐historiese Uitensetting van sy Onstaan en Ontwikkeling (1960). For a critical analysis of Cronjé’s ideas about race see Coetzee (1991: 30), in which he argues that Cronjé in the period 1945–1948 was “crazy” and that the electorate “which bought the package offered by Cronjé and his friends, besides being deceived or self‐deceived, was also for a time crazy, or at least crazed.” 8 Africans (termed “Natives”) are discussed in an appendix written by a “professor of Bantu languages.” 9 Though now dated, the most useful text on Afrikaner history and historians is Smith (1989); see also Thompson (1985). A similar text to Smith, dated but still useful, which deals primarily with English writers on South African history is Saunders (1988). 10 For an informative personal view of the ways in which Afrikaner historians under apartheid often viewed their academic work as needing to support the political aims of the National Party, see Giliomee (2016). 11 See also Spence and his argument: “From 1948 onwards the elevation of apartheid into a symbol of survival for Afrikaner nationalism made domestic policy a crucial factor in governing South Africa’s relations with the outside world” (Spence 1971: 478). 12 For an historical overview of the History Workshop, see Bonner (1994). On a postapartheid assessment of the future of the field see Cobley (2001). 13 On the disappointed political hopes of white academics in black majority‐ruled South Africa see in particular the scathing critique of Desai Bohmke (1997).



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14 For a good overview of much of this literature see Sapire (2013). 15 See works by Giliomee (2016), Anthony Butler (2017), and Johnson (2015), among others. Also see further work criticizing the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Posel and Wits History Workshop (1999). 16 See for example, among others, the works of Paul La Hausse on alcohol (1989), Peter Alegi on sports (2004), Annie Coombes on visual art (2003), David B. Coplan on music (1988), Keyan Tomaselli on film (2016) and Njabulo Ndebele on literature (2006, 2007). 17 In a section of his book The Afrikaners: Biography of a People subtitled “A Christian and Generous Political Approach,” Giliomee’s first sentence goes: “The peculiar feature of apartheid as an ideology was its attempt to reconcile the demands for white survival and justice” (2003: 461). 18 Two historiographical studies published before Welsh wrote his book demonstrate well the wealth of materials on which he could have drawn: Cobley (2001) and Stolten (2006).

Further reading Alegi, Peter. 2004. Laduma! Soccer, Politics and Society in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu‐Natal Press. ANC (African National Congress). 1944. ANC Youth League Manifesto. http://www. ancyl.org.za/docs/political/1944/ANC%20Youth%20League%20Manifestoq.pdf, accessed March 10, 2018. Azania, Malaika Wa. 2014. Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation. Johannesburg: Jacana. Barnard, Niel. 2015. Secret Revolution: Memoirs of a Spy Boss. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Bonner, Philip. 1983. Kings, Commoners and Concessionaires: The Evolution and Dissolution of the Nineteenth‐Century Swazi State. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Bonner, Philip. 1994. “New Nation, New History: The History Workshop in South Africa, 1977–1994.” Journal of American History 81(3): 977–985. Bonner, Philip, and Noor Nieftagodien. 2001. Kathorus: A History. Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman. Bonner, Philip, and Noor Nieftagodien. 2008. Alexandra: A History. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Bonner, Philip, Noor Nieftagodien, and S. Mathabatha. 2012. Ekurhuleni: The Making of an Urban Region. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Bonner, Philip, and Lauren Segal. 1998. Soweto: A History. Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman. Bozzoli, Belinda. 1991. Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in South Africa, 1900–1983. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Bundy, Colin. 1979. The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry. Berkeley: University of California Press. Butler, Anthony. 2017. Contemporary South Africa. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chikane, Frank. 1988. No Life of My Own: An Autobiography. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Chimeloane, Rrekgetsi. 1998. The Hostel‐Dwellers: A First Hand Account. Cape Town: Kwela Books.

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Cobley, Alan. 2001. “Does Social History Have a Future? The Ending of Apartheid and Recent Trends in South African Historiography.” Journal of Southern African Studies 27(3): 613–625. Coetzee, J. M. 1991. “The Mind of Apartheid: Geoffrey Cronjé (1907–).” Social Dynamics 17(1): 1–35. Coetzee, J. M. 1998. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. New York: Penguin Books. Coombes, Annie E. 2003. History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press. Coplan, David B. 1988. In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre. London: Longman. De Klerk, F. W. 1998. The Last Trek – A New Beginning: The Autobiography. New York: Macmillan. De Kock, Eugene. 1998. A Long Night’s Damage: Working for the Apartheid State. Johannesburg: Contra Press. de Villiers, René. 1971. “Afrikaner Nationalism.” In South Africa 1870–1966, vol. 2 of The Oxford History of South Africa, edited by Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, 365–423. London: Oxford University Press. Desai, Ashwin, and Heinrich E. Bohmke. 1997. “The Death of an Intellectual, the Birth of a Salesman: The South African Intellectual during the Democratic Transition.” Debate 3: 10–34. Dlamini, Jacob. 2009. Native Nostalgia. Johannesburg: Jacana. Dubow, Saul. 2014. Apartheid 1948–1994. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dubow, Saul. 2015. “Were There Political Alternatives in the Wake of the Sharpeville‐ Langa Violence in South Africa, 1960?” Journal of African History 56(1): 119–142. Eglin, Colin. 2007. Crossing the Borders of Power: The Memoirs of Colin Eglin. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball. Feinstein, Anthony. 2011. Battle Scarred: Hidden Costs of the Border War. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Giliomee, Hermann. 2003. The Afrikaners: Biography of a People. London: Hurst. Giliomee, Hermann. 2014. “Apartheid: A Different Angle.” In A History of South Africa, edited by Fransjohan Pretorius, 434–447. Pretoria: Protea Boekhuis. Giliomee, Hermann. 2016. Hermann Giliomee, Historian: An Autobiography. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Grinker, David. 2014. Inside Soweto: Memoir of an Official 1960s–1980s. Johannesburg: Eastern Enterprises. Harris, Verne. 1999. “‘They Should Have Destroyed More’: The Destruction of Public Records by the South African State in the Final Years of Apartheid, 1990–1994.” Paper presented at the TRC: Commissioning the Past Conference, University of the Witwatersrand, June 11–14. Hefferan, Anne. 2017. “The University of the North and Building the Bantustans, 1959– 1977.” South African Historical Journal 69(2): 195–214. Hepple, Alexander. 1967. Verwoerd. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Heunis, Jan. 2007. The Inner Circle: Reflections on the Last Days of White Rule. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball. Hirson, Baruch. 1995. Revolutions in My Life. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Ho, Ufrieda. 2011. Paper Sons and Daughters: Growing Up Chinese in South Africa. Johannesburg: Picador Africa.



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Jayawardane, M. Neelika. 2008. “Memoirs Take a Daring Turn in South Africa.” Symposium Magazine. http://www.symposium‐magazine.com/memoirs‐take‐a‐ daring‐turn‐in‐south‐africa, accessed March 14, 2018. Johnson, R. W. 2015. How Long Will South Africa Survive? The Looming Crisis. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball. Johnstone, Rick. 1976. Class, Race and Gold: A Study of Class Relations and Racial Discrimination in South Africa. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Keegan, Timothy. 1988. Facing the Storm: Portraits of Black Lives in Rural South Africa. London: Zed Books. Khumalo, Fred. 2006. Touch My Blood: The Early Years. Johannesburg: Umuzi. Kuper, Leo. 1971. “African Nationalism in South Africa, 1950–1964.” In South Africa 1870–1966, vol. 2 of The Oxford History of South Africa, edited by Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, 424–476. London: Oxford University Press. La Hausse, Paul. 1989. Brewers, Beerhalls, and Boycotts: A History of Liquor in South Africa. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Liebenberg, B. J. 1969. “From the Statute of Westminster to the Republic of South Africa, 1931–1961.” In 500 Years: A History of South Africa, edited by C. F. J. Muller, 408– 439. Pretoria: H. & R. Academica. Lodge, Tom. 2015. “Secrets and Lives: South African Political Biography.” Journal of Southern African Studies 41(3): 687–697. MacRae, Ian. 2012. Under Our Skins: A White Family’s Journey through South Africa’s Darkest Years, London: Simon & Schuster. Madikizela‐Mandela, Winnie. 2014. 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69. Johannesburg: Picador Africa. Magona, Sindiwe. 1990. To My Children’s Children. Cape Town: David Philip. Magubane, Bernard. 2010. My Life and Times. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu‐ Natal Press. Makhoere, Caesarina Kona. 1988. No Child’s Play: In Prison under Apartheid. London: Women’s Press. Malan, Magnus. 2006. My Life with the SA Defence Force. Pretoria: Protea Books. Mandela, Nelson. 1953. “No Easy Walk to Freedom: Presidential Address by Nelson R. Mandela to the ANC (Transvaal) Congress.” September 21. http://www.sahistory.org. za/archive/no‐easy‐walk‐freedom‐presidential‐address‐nelson‐r‐mandela‐anc‐ transvaal‐congress‐21‐septemb, accessed March 14, 2018. Mandela, Nelson. 1994. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Boston: Back Bay Books. Manong, Stanley. 2015. If We Must Die: An Autobiography of a Former Commander of uMkhonto we Sizwe. Cape Town: Nkululeko Press. Marks, Shula, and Anthony Atmore. 1980. Economy and Society in Pre‐industrial South Africa. London: Longman. Marks, Shula, and Richard Rathbone. 1982. Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture, and Consciousness, 1870–1930. London: Longman. Marks, Shula, and Stanley Trapido. 1987. The Politics of Race, Class, and Nationalism in Twentieth‐Century South Africa. London: Routledge. Mattera, Don. 2010. Memory Is the Weapon. Oxford: African Perspectives.

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Mbali, Fanele. 2012. In Transit: Autobiography of a South African Freedom Fighter. Dartford: Xlibris. Mbeki, Govan. 1991. Learning from Robben Island: The Prison Writings of Govan Mbeki. London: James Currey. McRae, Donald. 2012. Under Our Skin: A White Family’s Journey through South Africa’s Darkest Years. New York: Simon & Schuster. Merrett, Christopher. 1994. A Culture of Censorship: Secrecy and Intellectual Repression in South Africa. Cape Town: David Philip. Mgxashe, Msolisi. 2006. Are You with Us? The Story of a PAC Activist. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Moodie, Dunbar. 1994. Going for Gold: Men, Mines and Migration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mphalhlele, Letlapa. 2003. Child of This Soil: The Life of a Freedom Fighter. Cape Town: Kwela. Muller, C. F. J. 1969. Five Hundred Years: A History of South Africa. Pretoria: H. & R. Academica. Naidoo, Jay. 1990. Coolie Location. London: SA Writers. Ndebele, Njabulo. 2006. Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu‐Natal Press. Ndebele, Njabulo. 2007. Fine Lines from the Box: Further Thoughts about Our Country. Cape Town: Umuzi. Ngculu, James. 2009. The Honor to Serve: Recollections of an Umkhonto Soldier. Cape Town: David Philip. Nzula, A. T. [1933] 1979. Forced Labour in Colonial Africa. London: Zed Press. Pauw, Jacques. 1997. Into the Heart of Darkness: Confessions of Apartheid’s Assassins. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Plaatje, Sol. [1916] 1982. Native Life in South Africa: Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion. Johannesburg: Ravan Press Posel, Deborah, and the Wits History Workshop. 1999. The TRC Report: What Kind of History? What Kind of Truth? Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand. Reisz, Matthew. 2017. “Academics Push South Africa to Open Apartheid‐Era Archives.” Times Higher Education (August 28). https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ academics‐push‐south‐africa‐to‐open‐apartheid‐era‐archives, accessed March 10, 2018. Resha, Maggie. 1991. My Life in the Struggle: Mangoana O Tsoara Thipa Ka Bohaleng. London: SA Writers. Robertson, Jamela. 2007. Not Woman Enough. Cape Town: New Voices. Sachs, Albie. 2015. The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sapire, Hilary. 2013. “Township Histories, Insurrection and Liberation in Late Apartheid South Africa.” South African Historical Journal 65(2): 167–198. Saunders, Christopher. 1988. The Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Race and Class. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble. Setumu, Tlou. 2011. His Story Is History: Rural Village Future through the Eyes of a Rural Village Boy. Pretoria: Unisa Press. Slovo, Joe. 1995. Slovo: The Unfinished Autobiography. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Smith, Ken. 1989. The Changing Past: Trends in South African Historical Writing. Athens: Ohio University Press.



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Sobukwe, Robert. 1959. “My Idea of Africa in 1973.” Drum (November). Sparks, Allister. 2016. The Sword and the Pen: Six Decades on the Political Frontier. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Spence, Jack. 1971. “South Africa and the Modern World.” In South Africa 1870–1966, vol. 2 of The Oxford History of South Africa, edited by Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, 477–527. London: Oxford University Press. Stadler, Koos. 2016. Recce: Small Team Missions behind Enemy Lines. Oxford: Casemate. Stolten, Hans Erik, ed. 2006. History Making and Present Day Politics: The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute. Stuurman, Letitia. 1995. Lettie’s Story: Growing Up Black in Aliwal North. Johannesburg: Heinemann. Surplus People’s Project. 1983. Surplus People’s Project Report: Forced Removals in South Africa. 5 vols. Cape Town: Surplus People’s Project. Thompson, Leonard. 1985. The Political Mythology of Apartheid. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tomaselli, Keyan. 2016. Cinema of Apartheid: Race and Class in South African Film. London: Routledge. Van der Walt, Nico. 2008. To the Bush and Back: A Story about the Last Phase of the South African Border War as Experienced by a Junior Officer of 32‐Battalion. Pretoria: N. van der Walt. van Jaarsveld, F. A. 1964. The Afrikaner’s Interpretation of South African History. Cape Town: Simondium. van Onselen, Charles. 1982. Studies in the Social and Economic History of Witwatersrand, 1886–1914. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. van Onselen, Charles. 1996. The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894–1985. New York: Hill & Wang. Warman, Janice. 2014. The Class of ’79: The Story of Three Fellow Students who Risked Their Lives to Destroy Apartheid. Johannesburg: Jacana. Welsh, David. 2009. The Rise and Fall of Apartheid. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball. Wilson, Monica, and Leonard Thompson, eds. 1969. South Africa to 1870. Vol. 1 of The Oxford History of South Africa. London: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Monica, and Leonard Thompson, eds. 1971. South Africa 1870–1966. Vol. 2 of The Oxford History of South Africa. London: Oxford University Press. Wolvaardt, Pieter. 2005. A Diplomat’s Story: Apartheid and Beyond, 1969–1998. Alberton, South Africa: Galago. Worger, William H. 1991. “White Radical History in South Africa.” South African Historical Journal 24(1): 145–153. Worger, William H. 2014. “The Tricameral Academy: Personal Reflections on Universities and History Departments in ‘Post‐Apartheid’ South Africa.” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 38(1): 193–216.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Cultural Resistance on Robben Island: Songs of Struggle and Liberation in Southern Africa Neo Lekgotla laga Ramoupi

April 5, 2000 Ntate Elias Mzamo Tours Department Dear Ntate Elias, I am writing this letter to request you to participate with us on a Stone Quarry Project that we are doing with UCT History students on Monday afternoon April 10, 2000: 14h00. We in the Research Unit will be hosting a group of students on the island. And it would be valuable to have one of the ex‐political prisoners who have worked on the stone quarry to join us so that these history students could ask questions and hear directly from your own experiences. We would greatly appreciate it if you can join us for the afternoon. (Figure 24.1) Ke A Leboga Ntate, Neo Ramoupi Researcher Robben Island Museum

A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Figure 24.1  Ntate Elias Mzamo at the Stone Quarry on Robben Island, explaining to a

group of students how they used to mine and break stones at this quarry in the early 1960s.

Review of related literature Robben Island maximum security prison  –  the Alcatraz of the South African state – off the Cape coast in Cape Town was the symbol of the African liberation struggle in southern Africa in the last 30 years of white minority and apartheid rule in Africa. In 1980 O. R. Tambo, the longest‐serving president of the African National Congress (ANC), made this point about the eminence of Robben Island when he declared that “the tragedy of Africa, in racial and political terms, [has been] concentrated in the southern tip of the continent – in South Africa, Namibia, and, in a special sense, Robben Island” (Tambo 1987: 199, quoted in Coetzee 2000: iii). Following the Sharpeville massacre of March 21, 1960, the apartheid state in South Africa incarcerated most of the leadership and membership of the political organizations of southern Africa, including political activists from Namibia’s SWAPO and Botswana, in the prison on Robben Island. A few of the leaders of the liberation movements of southern Africa who escaped this political imprisonment left South Africa via neighboring countries like Lesotho and Botswana, and fled into 30 years of political exile in the United Kingdom, Tanzania, and Namibia,



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among the many countries where southern African political parties and organizations were welcomed and assisted in setting up their headquarters. Whilst all the African liberation movements of southern Africa  –  African National Congress (ANC), Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC), Non‐ European Unity Movement (NEUM), South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO), Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), and the Liberal Party (LP) were represented in Robben Island prison, this chapter focuses on a critical examination of the role of songs sung by the political prisoners who belonged to the PAC, particularly in the first decade of political imprisonment under apartheid rule in twentieth‐century southern Africa, the 1960s. The decade was marked by the historic Sharpeville massacre of Monday, March 21, 1960; and it was the most brutal period of the incarceration of African and black men on Robben Island. It was this decade, in particular, that made Robben Island maximum security prison the most notorious political prison for those whom the apartheid state deemed dangerous to the security of the state.1 Why focus on the PAC’s experiences of Robben Island? Miriam Makeba answers this question best. As news of the life prison sentences of the leadership of the African liberation movements were broadcast, Makeba, who was in exile, responded with a song (Makeba 2000, Makeba 1988, and Belafonte 2012): Nanku, nanku, nank’ uSobukwe Nanku entolongweni Nanku, nanku, nank’ uMandela Nanku entolongweni Nanku, nanku, nank’ uSisulu Nanku entolongweni Balele pha kwaNongqongqo, Balele pha entolongweni Yini, yini, yini ama‐Afrika ? Yini, yini, yini ama‐Afrika ?

Here, here, here is Sobukwe, Here in prison Here, here, here is Mandela Here in prison Here, here, here is Sisulu Here in prison They are sitting alone in prison They are sitting alone in prison What is it, what is it the African people? What is it, what is it the African people?

The factual accuracy of this song by Mama Africa, as Makeba became affectionately known the world over, is very significant. The literal meaning of the song is that “Freedom fighters of our struggle are sleeping in the prisons/ There is Sobukwe in prison/ There is Mandela in prison / There is Sisulu in prison / What is it Africans? What is it Africans!?” The melody of this song is emotional: when Rolihlahla Nelson Mandela and many other leaders of the ANC were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, the president of the PAC, Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe, was already in prison on Robben Island after being sent there in May 1963 and the Sobukwe Clause was keeping him indefinitely in this prison.2 The 1960s were the lowest point in the southern African liberation struggle, which was why Mama Africa asked the poignant question “Yini, yini, yini ama‐Afrika, / Yini, yini, yini ama‐Afrika? (What is it Africans? What is it Africans?

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Thus, in a sense, the 1960s bear witness to two political trials that are of ­ istorical significance in the history of African liberation in South Africa; first, it h was the trial of the Africanist Sobukwe and others for the Sharpeville massacre of March 1960, in which Sobukwe was found guilty of incitement that caused the Sharpeville shootings and sentenced to three years in Pretoria and surrounding jails; when Sobukwe’s three‐year sentence ended, he was flown from Pretoria to Robben Island prison in May 1963, where he was incarcerated indefinitely under the Sobukwe Clause. Second, and almost three years after Sobukwe’s initial imprisonment came the Rivonia trial of 1963–1964, at which Mandela and his coaccused, who became known as the Rivonia trialists, were found guilty of attempting to overthrow the apartheid state; they were sentenced to life imprisonment and flown to Robben Island, arriving on a cold winter morning on June 13, 1964 (Mandela 1994: 367–370). Both the Sobukwe and PAC trial of 1960 and the Mandela and ANC trial of 1963–1964 caught the attention of the world and of the liberation struggle movements in Africa and the African diaspora. But the African liberation struggle of South Africa, Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe, and the PAC – and by extension, Bantu Steve Biko and the BCM – are nowhere to be found in any meaningful historical writing. Even the historians and anthropologists heard Makeba sing: Nanku, nanku, nank’ uSobukwe Nanku entolongweni Nanku, nanku, nank’ uMandela Nanku entolongweni Nanku, nanku, nank’ uSisulu Nanku entolongweni

Here, here, here is Sobukwe, Here in prison Here, here, here is Mandela Here in prison Here, here, here is Sisulu Here in prison.

Makeba, in exile in New York was welcomed and assisted in her musical career by Harry Belafonte, but she could not afford to just sing about the African struggle in her homeland or just about Mandela and the ANC, excluding Sobukwe and the PAC. It is when Africans live outside their homeland that they become pan‐ Africanist; as an African myself, and having lived in Washington DC, I understand how the ideals of pan‐Africanism envelop one, and I think that is what happened to Makeba when she wrote and sang this song. This chapter seems to consciously bring back into focus the Sobukwean and PAC contribution – mostly unacknowledged – to the South African struggle. The contributions of the PAC political prisoners on Robben Island prison were just as important in liberating the country as those of ANC, BCM, NEUM, LP, and SWAPO political prisoners on the island. I shall relate the cultural resistance and songs of Robben Island through the thinking of Sobukwe to the larger pan‐ African tradition and in the African diaspora. This has been the major weakness of most of the well‐known studies on Sobukwe (e.g., Pogrund 1990, 1991). Pogrund’s work on Sobukwe is important in that he has helped to alert historians of liberation struggles of South Africa to the need for research on minority



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perspectives within the history of the African liberation movements. Through the activism of Sobukwe and the PAC, I would like to emphasize that many remarkable individuals who were denied the right to participate fully in South African society still contributed to the development of ideas, and 24 years from the ­liberation of South Africa  –  and on the fortieth anniversary of the death of Sobukwe in 2018 – these ideals are still being put into practice by the generations of black South Africans activists and politicians who were not even born when Sobukwe was on Robben Island. Sobukwe is critically important to African liberation as a whole because he identified himself and the African struggle in South Africa with the larger continental Pan‐Africanist movement of the late 1950s onwards. Theoretically, pan‐Africanism is important because the intellectual challenge of postapartheid scholarship in South Africa, particularly an African scholarship, should embrace both African and pan‐Africanist theories and frameworks. Throughout the entire modern era, specifically the past 100 years, from the ­creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 to the inauguration of the first African president of South Africa in May 1994, writings with perspectives that had their origins in African and pan‐Africanist thought were marginalized in favor of colonial and apartheid perspectives. Reversing the marginalization of the African and pan‐African view, Robben Island songs employ the concept of pan‐Africanism as the umbrella under which all other perspectives coalesce to frame and explore culture and specifically the role that the songs of the freedom fighters played on Robben Island. The chapter takes as its starting point the assertion by Lawrence Levine (1977) that it is time for historians to expand their own consciousness by examining the consciousness of those whom they have hitherto ignored or neglected, including the cultural history of a community of African and black political prisoners incarcerated on Robben Island. This body of oral history interviews embodies the culture that the African majority and black people forged and nurtured within the framework of colonial and racist South Africa: they formed and maintained kinship networks, made love, raised and socialized children, built communities and religions, and created a rich expressive culture in which they articulated their feelings, hopes, and dreams. Through this intangible cultural history, the African and black majority in South Africa have produced original creations that reflect their ownership of their struggle history. This African knowledge production, in the medium of the African languages, was of their own making. And that is the most critical contribution of my study to the scholarship, which has proudly embraced both African and pan‐Africanist theories to frame the methodology of this chapter. The songs of African and black South Africans are only one part of a people’s culture. As Levine noted, “It is not all of culture, it is not all action. It is one way of handling some things, but only one way, appropriate only to certain circumstances at certain times” (1977: xiv). The activities during this era will be viewed

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from the perspectives of the rich body of songs created and sung in South Africa during the period 1960–1991. I draw on Amiri Baraka’s (LeRoi Jones) groundbreaking Blues People: Negro Music in White America, in which he states: “there was a body of music that came to exist from a people … and that throughout that music’s development, it had continue[d], and express[ed] itself, as the fragile property of a powerless and oppressed People” (Baraka 1963: iv–x). Hence the Robben Island songs I examine are not treated in isolation but are examined and analyzed along with the wealth of written primary and secondary sources that also document this historical epoch. Further, I am guided by Baraka’s insight that: As I began to get into the history of the music, I found that this was impossible without, at the same time, getting deeper into the history of the people. That it was the history of the people as text, as tale, as story, as exposition, narrative, or what have you, that the music was scored, the actually expressed creative orchestration, reflection, of life, our words, the libretto, to those actual, lived lives. That the music was an orchestrated, vocalized, hummed, chanted, blown, beaten, scatted, corollary confirmation of the history. And that one could go from one to the other, actually the inside to the outside, or reverse, and be talking about the same things. That the music was explaining the history as the history was explaining the music, and that both were expressions of and reflections of the people! (Baraka 1963: ix)

Song has always been, and continues to be, at the heart of humanity’s journey and has occupied a central position in the life of African and black people in southern Africa. Songs have preserved many elements of African culture throughout the African experience from time immemorial, before the African’s encounter with Europeans, through the African experience in slavery, which in the United States of America became the black experience, and through the colonial and apartheid periods in southern Africa. In a region where white minority rule attempted to eradicate not only African culture but also the African’s essential humanity, botho/ ubuntu (humaneness) African and black southern Africans held on to and developed their songs as a way of resisting, protesting, remembering, enduring, celebrating, subverting, loving, and ultimately triumphing.3 The research problem of this chapter is highlighted by Shirli Gilbert (2007). While a significant body of scholarship exists on the broader subject of African and black South African songs and music, there has as yet been little investigation of how African liberation movements used songs and music during the struggle inside South Africa.4 In addition, little detailed research has been conducted on freedom songs (Makky 2007), the ubiquitous but largely informal and unprofessionalized genre that was (and still is) probably the dominant musical medium of popular political expression. Given the indispensable presence of freedom songs at mass gatherings, celebrations, funerals, protests, and myriad public events in South Africa, this is a significant gap (Gilbert 2007). This critical gap in South African scholarship does not exist in most African countries, for example,



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Zimbabwe and Kenya (Pongweni 1981–1982; Kinyatti 1980). The use of songs as historical sources is a glaring gap in South African historiography, and presents an exciting area of scholarship to pursue (Gray 1994).5 Fran Buntman’s thesis and later book (Buntman 1997, 2003) focuses on the same period as this chapter. Buntman has made a very important contribution to the prison literature on Robben Island, and is by far the most contemporary work on the subject of Robben Island and political imprisonment in the twentieth ­century. My research on the subject has been inspired by her work. Buntman’s emphasis is the resistance tactics that were used by the political prisoners to ­combat and challenge the prison authorities. She achieves this by showing the power and strength of the freedom fighters’ resistance and how a number of these former political prisoners took up important roles in postapartheid government, business, and academe, including the presidency of the country (Mandela) and ruling party (ANC). My only criticism of Buntman’s study is that, while she discusses prisoner resistance, she does not address their cultural resistance, which is a nerve center of any resistance. Buntman “examines the role of education, culture, and sport as vital instances of resistance” (Buntman 2003: 69), but she discusses only education and sport, and says very little about culture. In the few cases that relate to culture she brackets them, implying that they are outside her scope on Robben Island and that they are not part of her content (Buntman 2003: 66). Buntman relates very little on culture beyond “young men playing musical instruments” and “in the more bleak and difficult moments, people sought cultural or intellectual stimulation and found it” (Schadeberg 1994: 62–63, quoted in Buntman 2003: 69). Buntman mentions culture and music in just five pages (pages 66–70), and sporadically elsewhere. This exclusion means there is a gap to be filled in the scholarship. My interest in the cultural history of the political prisoners stems from three years of interviewing former political prisoners in groups about their lived and shared experiences of Robben Island. During these meetings, from their arrival, when they met one another, through their encounter with the space of their incarceration to their departure after days of interviews, these black men – young and old – would break into a song. Witnessing these experiences was the most overwhelming experience for all of us, including these former Robben Islanders for singing and song transported them back in time to prison and their incarceration on the actual site. The Robben Island Museum Memories Project’s objective was to collect, document, and archive the history of political imprisonment in South Africa, in particular Robben Island, which had also been designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. This chapter benefits from the works of Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, two of the world’s outstanding political theoreticians on the question of national liberation struggle (Fanon [1952] 1967: vii).6 Cabral’s linkage of culture with national liberation struggle was quite clear (Cabral 1973: 59): “One can argue

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that any attempts to clarify the true role of culture in the development of the ­liberation movement can make a useful contribution to the broad struggle of the people against imperialist domination.” Further, Cabral noted how the masses escaped cultural domination (Cabral 1973: 61): “It is also the result of the effectiveness of cultural resistance of the people, who when they are subjected to political domination and economic exploitation find that their own culture acts as a bulwark in preserving their identity.” Cabral saw the need to return to the source as a basis for struggle once one was willing to move beyond the individual to the collective expression of the people as it is the objective of the subject of “Cultural Resistance on Robben Island Songs” (Cabral 1973: 63). Alex La Guma, the South African activist from Cape Town, writes about “Culture and Domination”: Colonial power cannot impose a complete cultural occupation. The majority of the people retain their identity and are the one entity really able to preserve and create it – that is, they can make history. A people’s cultural manifestations, including their literature, oral and written, their songs and poetry, reflect this resistance, reflect the various stages of development of the anti‐imperialist movement. (La Guma 1976: 51)

Bernice Johnson‐Reagon (1975) provides a focal argument that is absolutely familiar in the African and the southern African context: “The mass meetings always started with freedom songs. Most of the meeting was singing. Songs were the bed of everything”; “freedom songs are one of the best records we have of the transformation of consciousness in the ordinary people, the masses, who took part in the movement” (Johnson‐Reagon 1975, quoted in Seeger and Reiser 1989: 24). Johnson‐Reagon notes: “When you get together at a mass meeting you sing the songs which symbolize transformation, which make that revolution of courage inside you” (quoted in Seeger and Reiser 1989: 82). Three scholar‐activists on culture, resistance, and liberation  –  Steve Biko, Thabo Mbeki and James C. Scott – provide me with entry points into narrating the Robben Island songs of the 1960s. Biko writes: Nothing dramatises the eagerness of the African to communicate with each other more than their love for song and rhythm. Music in the African culture features in all emotional states. … Battle songs were a feature of the long march to war in the olden days … In other words with Africans, music and rhythm were not luxuries but part and parcel of our way of communication. Any suffering we experienced was made much more real by song and rhythm. There is no doubt that the so‐called “Negro‐Spirituals” sung by Black slaves in the States as they toiled under oppression were indicative of their African heritage. (Biko 1978: 43–44)

Reflecting on the African liberation struggle of South Africa, both internally and in exile, Thabo Mbeki says in an interview:



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At no time has the liberation movement not been singing. At no time has the ­liberation movement not been dancing. Everywhere, culture becomes a very central and a very important element in this act of rebellion, in this act of assertion that we are human. (Mbeki 2000: inside back cover)

In his book Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts James Scott offers definitions of both “public transcripts” and “hidden transcripts,” which contribute to the cultural history on Robben Island Prison specifically, and to the genre of the struggle songs in South Africa generally (Scott 1990). The songs I examined can be considered both as public transcripts and as hidden transcripts. Scott defines public transcripts as “open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate,” clarifying in a footnote: Public here refers to action that is openly avowed to the other party in the power relationship, and transcript is used almost in its juridical sense … of a complete record of what was said. This complete record, however, would also include ­nonspeech acts such as gestures and expressions. (Scott 1990: 2)

The hidden transcript is the opposite of the public transcript in that it “characterizes discourse that takes place ‘offstage,’ ‘beyond direct observation by power holders’”: The hidden transcript is thus derivative in the sense that it consists of those offstage speeches, gestures, and practices that confirm, contradict, or inflect what appears in  the public transcript. What is certainly the case is that the hidden transcript is produced for a different audience and under different constraints of power than the public transcript. (Scott 1990: 4–5)

My argument is that these Robben Island songs are both public transcripts and hidden transcripts on the basis of my understanding that on Robben Island and elsewhere African and black people sang their songs in public and in the presence of the police who were the power holders, which makes these songs public transcripts. The songs also become hidden transcripts when those imprisoned and others outside the prisons sang the songs in their cells after hard labor and in political meetings where the power holders were absent. What carries more weight is the fact that the songs were sung mainly in the medium of the indigenous African languages of southern Africa, and that made the songs overwhelmingly hidden transcripts, even when they were sung in the presence of the warders and police in prisons and elsewhere in the country. These power holders could not understand the messages in the songs because they were expressed in languages that they did not understand.

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Robben island songs: experiences of PAC political prisoners in the post‐Sharpeville Era, 1960–1969 The pan‐Africanist Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe, together with a generation of African and black men – young and old – belonging to the PAC movement, were the first to flood the prison on Robben Island in the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre.

PAC: A short history The Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania was formed in Orlando, Soweto, on April 3, 1959,7 when Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe, at the time a full‐time lecturer (language assistant) in the Department of Native Languages at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, led a group of the Africanists within the African National Congress (ANC) and walked out on the grounds that the ANC was abandoning the Program of Action and that the ANC was under the influence of the communists, who were mainly whites. The PAC was unapologetically African, more energetic, and more radical than the ANC. Their motto became “iZwe Lethu!  –  The Land Belongs to Us” (Sobukwe 1976, 1978). The song “Sobukwe” is one of the songs of the African liberation movements that I heard sung by former political prisoners of Robben Island many times during their reference groups meetings, when I was an oral historian and researcher at the museum on Robben Island (2000–2003). Sobukwe iZwe Lethu! Thina abantwana be Afrika Sikhalela ilizwe, ilizwe Lethu Lathathwa ngabamhlophe Umkhokheli wethu, Sobukwe! Sobukwe! Bua le APLA Sifuna iAPLA engene eSouth Afrika Ukulwa namabhunu! iAPLA ezo khulula South Africa iAPLA ezo khulula umhlaba we amaAfrika!

The land belongs to us! We, the children of Africa We are crying for the land, our own land That was taken by the Boers/whites Our leader, Sobukwe! Sobukwe! talk to APLA8 We want APLA to enter South Africa To fight the Boers! APLA is going to liberate South Africa APLA is going to liberate the land Of the African People!

Sharpeville Massacre and Human Rights Day in Postapartheid South Africa The South African Black Consciousness poet Don Mattera explains the lightning speed with which Sharpeville happened. His response was the composition of this poem:



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Nobody told us what it was that would happen and in no time Sharpeville came. However, it just didn’t come, it stayed with me in my consciousness, it stayed in my psyche. I wrote a poem:

Day of thunder, day of blood in the dusty streets of Sharpeville … while my people sang “Return Africa, oh Africa return.” Bitter was that day in the dusty streets of Sharpeville. (Mattera 2007: 5)

Sharpeville happened on a Monday and the following day on Tuesday, March 22, 1960, the New York Times published an account of the massacre in South Africa and called it “The Tragedy at Sharpeville” (New York Times 1960a). It was primarily in places outside Johannesburg, in the townships of Sharpeville, Evaton, and Langa Township in Cape Town, that the PAC president Robert Sobukwe’s call to Africans to defy the pass laws of the apartheid government received mass support. At Sharpeville police fired on the crowd that had assembled peacefully, killing 69 and injuring hundreds; in Cape Town and later in Soweto rioting broke out (New York Times 1960b, 1960c). As a result of Sharpeville, “a national state of emergency was proclaimed for the first time in the history of South Africa, and more over a thousand black and white leaders were rounded up and sent to ­prisons and police camps around the country” (Nkosi 1962: 7). Those who escaped arrest fled into exile. The following month, on April 8, 1960, the apartheid government banned both the PAC and the ANC. The historic and brutal event in Sharpeville that broadcast apartheid South  Africa globally was the single most important entry point for my research to narrate songs as a cultural resistance, starting in the mainland before incarcerations. It is a notion that was fortified by the observation of a PAC intellectual, Motsoko Pheko: “After Sharpeville Africans could no longer hold political meetings or publicly discuss their national affairs. But it soon became clear that their aspirations could not be banned. New freedom songs were sung” (1984: 104). One of the Sharpeville songs goes as follows (Pheko 1984, 101): Ngalonyaka ka 1960 sahambela kwa Ntsasana Amapasi sawashiya nabafazi emakhaya Impendulo zimbumbulu, impendulo yakukufa Sinombuzo Velevutha, Sinombuzo weVostere Elogazi lamaAfrika siyabuza layaphi na? Sadutyulwa eSharpeville, Sadutyulwa nakwa Langa.?

In 1960 we went to the police stations We left our passes with our women at home. The settler police answer To our action was bullets. They killed us. We have a question to put to you, Verwoerd. We have a question to put to you, Vorster. What happened to the blood of the African people? We are asking, where did their blood go? We were shot in Sharpeville And in Langa? (Pheko 1984: 101)

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The consequences of the shooting in Sharpeville was that some of the political prisoners on Robben Island in the 1960s were PAC members who had been imprisoned for the Sharpeville protests in the areas around Johannesburg, in the African townships of Soweto and Mamelodi, and countrywide. The apartheid regime and police deemed these prisoners to be members of the PAC even when they were not. Poqo was the underground armed military wing of the PAC, ­during the 1960s, but both the police and the prison guards on Robben Island called all political prisoners no matter their political ideology Poqos (poqo means “pure” in isiXhosa). The significant PAC majority on Robben Island after Sharpeville is made clear by Indres Naidoo, who writes in his autobiography, Island in Chains: Ten Years on Robben Island: Ours was a cell of political prisoners, six convicted as ANC and forty‐four as members of the PAC. We were all very tense, unsure what to do after the warders had disappeared, so most of us simply stripped and got into our beds. (Naidoo 1982: 67)

Naidoo, an Indian South African freedom fighter, was one of the first volunteers for Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), or Spear of the Nation, the military wing of the ANC; he was imprisoned on Robben Island for 10 years, from 1963 (Naidoo 2000). He was the first former political prisoner I interviewed on Robben Island in July 2000  –  my first year as an oral historian at Robben Island Museum (Naidoo and Wilcox 2000).9 The community of political prisoners’ love of music was ever present, according to Naidoo. He felt that the songs were particularly popular among the prisoners when they were sung in the African languages. The most exciting of all were the songs specially composed on the island, semi‐political songs about life in South Africa. Naidoo “will never forget the loveliness, the sadness and the strength of those special Robben Island songs” (Naidoo 1982: 223–224). Most of the PAC political prisoners coming to Robben Island prison in the early 1960s had had their consciousness awakened by both the Sharpeville massacre and the African liberation and independence struggles. A few examples will help illustrate this point. Njongonkulu Ndungane, the former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, writes in his autobiography, A World with a Human Face: A Voice from Africa, about the momentous events that were taking place in the 1960s, which would eventually lead to the independence of many states across the continent of Africa. Ndungane was imprisoned on Robben Island in August 1963 for a three‐year sentence “for furthering the aims of a banned organization, the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania” (Ndungane 2003: 2). Vusi Nkumane and Mxolisi “Bra Ace” Mgxashe of the PAC were both arrested and sent to Robben Island in 1963. In Nkumane’s oral recollections and in Mgxashe’s autobiography, Are You with Us? The Story of a PAC Activist both



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describe the influence of the African liberation and independence literature that they read in Johannesburg and Langa, Cape Town, respectively: This explains how and why I joined politics and then of course, we had a lot of literature, especially from Ghana. You know the voice of Africa. So Kwame Nkrumah was very influential at the time. And Julius Nyerere, so, and those were  Pan Africanists and we also listened to these African radio stations. (Nkumane 1999) Reading about the founding fathers of Pan‐Africanism, in particular, really removed the scales from our eyes. Dr. WEB Du Bois is sometimes celebrated as the “father of pan‐Africanism,” even though Henry Sylvester‐Williams, a barrister from Trinidad who once practiced in Cape Town, the first black advocate to do so, first conceived the idea. (Mgxashe 2004: 71)

The most provocative rationale for the pan‐Africanist ideals and for joining the  PAC was provided by Dikgang Moseneke, who was the youngest political prisoner, at 15 years, to be imprisoned on Robben Island. Moseneke is a recently retired Deputy Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court in South Africa: “As history has shown, the last thirty years [1960–1990] really has been resistance through children” (Moseneke 1993: 158). He explains: Well, I was a member of the African Students Union of South Africa, which unbeknown to me was a PAC wing. But also remember this was in the 1960s. The PAC was a glamorous liberation movement. It had pulled off Sharpeville, remember. It was the PAC Founding Fathers, who had said to the people, “Leave your passes at home. Walk to the police station. Tell them you don’t carry passes and dare them to arrest you.” … So I joined. (Moseneke 1993: 157; see also Maughan 2015)

Moseneke writes in his memoir, My Own Liberator: A Memoir (2016), about music on Robben Island: Some comrades started a choral music society. It held its choir practices on Saturday mornings. So ambitious was this project the choirmaster procured music scores of famous composers. On one occasion the choir tackled Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus2 from The Messiah and JP Mohapeloa’s “Hamba Kahle.” Some folks, particularly from eMonti and eBaai,10 preferred singing jazz. Boet Welcome Duru and Norman Ntshinga wrote and sang Afro‐Jazz pieces … Another welcome musical sound was from the trumpet of Gaby Magomola, an Africanist activist from the Randfontein on the West Rand. He loved to press his trumpet against the prison bars of cell C4 and he would blow a storm into the sunset. He would do a solo of ‘Lakutshon’ ilanga’ to the pleasure of many of us as we nodded in recognition of the timeless folk song. On another day, Gabby would infuse so much passion into his rendition of ‘Hamba Kahle’ that our hearts

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would be full. The trumpet notes filled the quite sunset air hovering over sections A, B, C and D. (Moseneke 2016: 120–121)

My Own Liberator won the Non‐fiction Book Award at the National Humanities of Social Sciences in 2018, and it was so good to see the continuing of the triumph of the human spirit in Moseneke, now 69 years old. The main aim of my research on Robben Island was to provoke people, especially the black (Africans, “coloreds,” and Indians) majority in South Africa about the other political prisoners who belonged neither to the PAC or to the ANC who contributed to the liberation struggle of South Africa. One such was Neville Alexander, who when he died in August 2012 was a professor at the University of Cape Town and who did pioneering work in the field of language policy and planning in South Africa from the early 1980s via organizations such as the Project for the Study of Alternative Education (Alexander 2006, 2011a). Alexander belonged to the Non‐European Unity Movement (NEUM) and was imprisoned on Robben Island for 10 years in the early 1960s. He was incarcerated in the famous B‐section of the prison, together with Mandela; Clarence Makwetu of the PAC (who became the PAC President in South  Africa’s historic 1994 elections); Saths Cooper, Strini Moodley, and Nchaupe  Mokoape of the BCM; and members of the famous SASO‐Nine (South  African Students’ Organization)  –  to name a few (Alexander 1994) (Figure 24.2). Alexander describes the experiences of political prisoners and relates them to songs and singing in South Africa in general. When he arrived on Robben Island he related how they sang songs while they were awaiting trial on the mainland before they were sentenced to Robben Island prison (Alexander 2011b): The tradition of male singing in South African prisons struck me very forcibly. From social psychological and individual psychological angle, why men sing and why they sing so beautifully. There were two types of singing, love songs that people sang; in all the languages; English, Afrikaans, but mainly in African languages. Second, what struck me was African traditional singing. Not modern European singing, that didn’t exist because all the prisoners were all black, whether African, Indian or Coloureds. They were black. The traditional singing was very African, male voices. And because I came from the Eastern Cape I knew that singing. Vusi Mahlasela’s way of singing. One of the earliest songs that I was taught was a migrant labour song “Ndihamba ndedwa eGoli”[I go alone to the city of gold – Johannesburg]. It was a mixture of this modern singing but also migrant labour. That helped me to come to understand the mentality, psychology of singing in prison. When we got to Robben Island, it had assumed a quite different, much more meaningful image for me; in this sense that people sang not only to show solidarity with each other; that notion that “siyavuma” [we sing from the same sheet, as it were] togetherness that affected me with the singing; the solidarity that come from singing together and because of the oppression, brutality of prison, of protesting that brutality.



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Figure 24.2  (Left to right) Gaby Cheminals, Clarence M. Makwetu (former president

of the PAC), Grant Shezi, Ramoupi, Faud Adams, and Oupa Makhalemele (RIM interviewing team) at the Lime Quarry B‐Section Reference Group, 2002. The second was songs of nostalgia, and that sense of longing. The kind of songs that people sang when they were already in prison, no longer awaiting trial, were in some ways different. Songs of youth that reminded them of home; they sang in African languages, isiXhosa, or isiZulu and sometimes in Sesotho and Setswana. I never heard while I was in Robben Island that kind of singing. Beautiful singing! Pascal Ngakane used to sing beautifully, most of his songs were in Setswana or Sesotho. Another was Skotta, was a PAC guy; he used to lead us in songs at the quarry; and that’s from him that I learnt to sing Shosholoza song. Andrew Mlangeni, one of the Rivonia trialist guys, was a good singer. And there was Fikile Bam, a judge now. Fiks, as he was called, had this beautiful voice and used to sing in the morning as we woke up.

A thread that runs through my Robben Island scholarship is of a people’s history – social history, which does not situate leadership at the forefront of history‐ making. To make this point, the theme of songs and cultural history provided me with the opportunity to give the limelight to those hundreds of freedom fighters and activists of our struggle who were not leaders. But one leader who was an exception to this rule was Govan Mbeki, one of the Rivonia trialists and the father of the former president Thabo Mbeki; Mbeki was a leader who played music and songs, and who had his own guitar in the prison. Music clearly was a love of his life. Mbeki talks about organizing

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concerts for birthdays or for the end of the year, and we would sit at the windows and sing songs or recite poems. A range of music came through those windows … I had a guitar in prison … I played the guitar quite a lot, at first with Neville Alexander and then with a group of other prisoners. (quoted in Bundy 2012: 30; see also Desai 2012: 22)

In my 2011 interview with him, Alexander (2011b) spoke about Mbeki’s love for music and for the guitar which he was still learning to play, and Colin Bundy writes in his biography of Govan Mbeki that: Music was another source of pleasure. In 1973 Mbeki acquired a guitar – and as he wrote to his grandson Karl Mbeki in 1980 – “I don’t play it well but I get a great deal of satisfaction from the little I can manage to play.” (Bundy 2012: 135)

There is an evocative passage in Mbeki’s interview with Bridget Thompson where he discusses their music making: discuss musical forms and melodies, ranging from Xhosa folksongs and lullabies, through compositions by Tiyo Soga and Tyamzashe, to tangos and waltzes, jazz by Count Basie and the Dark Town Strutters – and more. Music involved others. “Now I used to play the lead guitar, there were three of us … the bass, now it was Don Davis; you know he picked the bass strings of the guitar at the upper end. And then Neville, Neville Alexander, [and] then he used to start … We played all sorts of things. (Govan Mbeki, interviewed by Bridget Thompson, in Bundy 2012: 135)

For the pan‐Africanists African independence was paramount. That is why these PAC political prisoners felt compelled in prison to celebrate when an African country, Kenya, gained its independence in 1963. In his autobiography, Hell‐Hole Robben Island, Moses Dlamini, a PAC political prisoner who was on the island from 1963 to 1966, writes that “it had been a hectic day and it was Kenya’s Independence Day. We had earlier decided that that evening we were going to hold some commemoration of this important occasion in Africa’s ­history” (Dlamini 1984: 40). Dlamini’s group of about 60 men was returning from the stone quarry where they were crushing stones. After being counted by the warders they were marched into the cell and locked up: We collapsed back on our blankets trying to imagine how it was in Kenya at that time, for soon the Union Jack was going to be lowered and the Kenyan flag hoisted. They rested for about two hours and one comrade called them to order: We all sat up. He asked us to sing a revolutionary song. I began it. It was an old nationalist song which had been sung by our grandfathers during the passive resistance campaigns:



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Thina sizwe esintsundu, Sikhalela izwe lethu. Elathathwa ngaba mhlophe; Maba uyeke umhlaba wethu Abantwana be‐Afrika, Bakhalela izwe labo, Elathathwa ngaba mhlophe; Maba uyeke umhlaba wethu

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We the black nation, We cry for our land, Which was taken by the whites; Let them leave our land. The children of Africa, Cry for their land, Which was taken by the whites; Let them leave our land.

As we sang it, I could see that the morale of the comrades was going up. When we repeated it again, we seemed to have been rejuvenated. After calling out our motto of “Service, Suffering and Sacrifice,” we saluted and amid shouts of “Long live the independence of Kenya,” “Long live African unity,” “Forward Ever, Backwards Never,” the short ceremony ended. (Dlamini 1984: 40–41) Sedick Isaacs explains that for him it was the radicalization of the PAC that drew him to the party (Figure 24.3). Isaacs was caught up in the mobilization for the anti‐pass campaign of the PAC in Cape Town: The Pan Africanists had just slipped away from the African National Congress in 1959 and they were more energetic, more radical. And I was also energetic and radical, and I thought that would be a good organization for me. I got very involved with it at the time. (Isaacs, quoted in Wieder 2008: 84; see also Desai 2012: 83)

Isaacs was imprisoned on the island in 1964 after he was arrested for teaching people in Cape Town how to make bombs to overthrow the apartheid regime;

Figure 24.3  Ramoupi interviews Sedick Isaacs at the Stone Quarry site on Robben

Island, 2001; Faud Adams is shown on camera, with Grand Shezi on the background.

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he was sentenced to Robben Island for 12 years. Perhaps there is no PAC political prisoner with such a colorful profile as Isaacs; after he established a library and introduced a Dewey Decimal system of classification, he became the librarian on the island. After prison Isaacs completed two PhDs, one in Epidemiology at the University of Cape Town and the other in biostatistics at Marburg in Germany; as a professor he lectured in biomedical engineering at Cape Town, and was made a fellow of the Royal College of Statisticians. He retired in 2005, after which he tutored university students and taught mathematics at schools in the township of Khayalitsha, outside Cape Town, every Saturday (Isaacs 2011, 2012). When I interviewed him in Cape Town Isaacs had just published his autobiography Surviving the Apartheid Prison: Robben Island: Flash Backs of an Earlier Life (2010), in which he writes about some of the songs they sang on the island where he also labored at the blue stone quarry (Isaacs 2010): Then Mgabela[Malcomess Konditi] broke into a song. I still remember that song having heard it thousands of times during my years of forced labour in the quarry. Everybody in the Span joined in the song, except me, simply because I could not sing never mind I didn’t know the words. The song had a deep African rhythm and the lead singer singing at a higher octave wove a melody into the basic rhythm. Although I did not understand its meaning then, the tone was mournful and full of yearning yet with a strong element of hope. It reminded me a little, not so much the music but the emotion of Dvorak’s New World. (Isaacs 2010: 92–93)

In a section on art and music in a chapter about Isaacs in Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island, the many positive aspects of being on Robben Island are extolled: It gave me a sense of achievement and a sense of living to the utmost. I tried to help make the community as normal as possible … We had music competitions, too. We had, I think, the most significant music competition, or not a competition, an achievement. We had an 80‐person choir that practised the Hallelujah chorus. I bought three versions of it since my release. I listen to it – and I cannot detect the real grandeur; the real magnificence in these, the effect that was produced there on the island. People like Tshumi Ntutu and Bulisi Qengaleka were the choir masters and they took them through various phases of practice after school. Solomon Mabuse was the trumpeter and they finally produced that magnificent piece of music for a Christmas function – and I think it was so wonderful. Of course, I am prejudiced. When I listen to it I would say nothing beats it. I even still hear those sounds which they produced; just a bit of this Hallelujah chorus. Although I can’t sing, I know the words. (Isaacs, quoted in Desai 2012: 89–90)

Another colorful PAC Robben Islander in this era was Gaby Magomola who in his autobiography, Robben Island to Wall Street, shares his musical dream from before his imprisonment in 1962, which he did not relinquish on Robben Island.



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Before his arrest Magomola had already been taking both theory and practical music lessons at the famous Dorkay House in Johannesburg. Dorkay had trained some of South Africa’s best musicians, like Hugh Masekela, Kippie Moeketsi, and Abdullah Ebrahim (then called Dollar Brand), whom he had the privilege of meeting. He was inspired enough on the island to apply to the University of South Africa to register for preliminary and advanced courses in music theory; a year later he was awarded a diploma in music theory from the university. This musical training and qualification enabled him to teach music to scores of political prisoners on the island both music theory and harmony. For stationery they used discarded cement paper which was abundant on the island from the construction activity (Magomola 2009: 164). Magomola shows how music could also be a coping mechanism, for singing melodies and harmonies relieved their pain and provided them with opportunities to learn to breathe well. One song was: Umzima lo mthwalo Woyisa amadoda Andikhathali noba kunjani Sizimisele inkululeko

This burden is heavy Heavy even for men like us I don’t care what it is like We’re determined for our freedom. (Magomola 2009. 142)

The hard labor at the old stone quarry and elsewhere on the island provided the content and lyrics for one particular important song, “Umzima lomthwalo” (This burden is heavy). Magomola titled one of the chapters of his autobiography just that, underlining its significance. He describes their daily sufferings and tribulations at the quarries, but does not think that all physical suffering cannot be explained in words. They coped with the drills the best way they knew how, determined not to succumb. They formulated their own linguistic code to enable them to communicate with and to converse with each other safe from detection: With subtle gestures, facial expressions, jerks, twitches, sighs, exclamations, utterances and singing, we spread our messages without the warders being any the wiser. To relieve the pain, we sang melodies which softened the brunt of that unbearable hard labor, making it less so. Also, the songs and harmonies gave us a chance to breathe, thus helping us conserve some energy. (Magomola 2009: 142)

Conclusion In the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa on March 21, 1960, a massive number of African and black males were incarcerated in prisons. The majority of these – young and old – ended up at Robben Island maximum security prison very quickly. Throughout the 1960s, this prison continued to incarcerate those whose crime had been to fight the apartheid system to liberate South Africa from white minority rule. The PAC and its president, Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe,

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were also at the forefront of this African liberation struggle in southern Africa. This chapter is a social justice history that brings from the margins of history to the center the political prisoners of the PAC whose history has been marginalized in the narratives of political imprisonment on Robben Island, and uses their cultural history and songs to shed light on their cultural resistance in the prison environment. The PAC, and Sobukwe, played an equally important role in the task of liberating South Africa and the region as the political prisoners of the ANC, BCM, NEUM, LP, and SWAPO, who were on Robben Island with them. Their story, like all others, deserves to be told and known.

Acknowledgments When I joined the Robben Island Museum in January 2000, I met Ntate11 Elias Mzamo and Ntate Sindile Mngqibisa working as tour guides. Mzamo and Mngqibisa had been PAC political prisoners on Robben Island in the early 1960s. Both were in their sixties and are isiXhosa language speakers originating from the Eastern Cape. When we met and I told them that I was from Pretoria, they communicated with me in my language, Setswana, for the whole time that I was working on the island. They had learned it from their fellow inmates who came from Pretoria, including Dikgang Moseneke. The focus on the African language left an indelible mark in my consciousness, and I dedicate this chapter to these two men.

Notes 1 This chapter constitutes a chapter in a book that the author is writing on the cultural resistance of the African liberation movements. It does not focus on a particular political movement, party, or organization in the history of struggle in southern Africa; to focus on one organization in itself significantly reduces the struggle history, especially as many of the activists were involved in solidarity with African liberation struggles over decades (Minter 2004). 2 The General Law Amendment Bill, which became the General Law Amendment Act No. 37 of 1963, Hansard (Official Report of Debates in Parliament in South Africa), vol. 6, col. 4652, April 24, 1963. 3 Archbishop Desmond Tutu explains: “Ubuntu … speaks of the very essence of being human. [We] say … ‘Hey, so‐and‐so has ubuntu.’ Then you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, ‘My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.’ We belong in a bundle of life. We say, ‘A person is a person through other persons’” (Tutu 2015). 4 Major works on the broad subject of African and black South African music include Andersson (1981), Ballantine (1984), Coplan (1985), Erlmann (1991), and Ballantine (1993). 5 I am grateful to Dr. Robert Edgar for photocopying relevant parts of this study while on sabbatical leave at the University of Cape Town. See also Gray (2004), Deacon (1994), Rioufol (1999), Solani (2000), Coombes (2003), Stapleton (1993, 1994).



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6 I am grateful to Dr. Mabeko‐Tali for drawing my attention to Fanon’s works during my doctoral studies at Howard University. Literature on Fanon was part of the course I took with Dr. Mabeko‐Tali on the history of pan‐Africanism, which provided thought‐provoking debates. 7 April was deliberately chosen, for it was the day that Jan Van Riebeeck’s arrival in the Cape was commemorated. 8 Azanian People’s Liberation Army. 9 I am grateful to both Naidoo and Wilcox, a president of the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa, for reminding me, at the start of my Africanist historical journey, how important a work for South Africa this recording and archiving of their accounts of Robben Island’s political imprisonment was. 10 eMonti and eBaai (the correct spelling is eBhayi) are the cities of East London and Port Elizabeth, respectively, in South Africa. 11 “Ntate” means father in Setswana, my mother‐tongue; it is a term of respect for elderly men.

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Sobukwe, Robert. 1978. Speeches of Mangaliso Sobukwe: 1949–1959. Dar es Salaam: Pan‐ Africanist Congress of Azania. Solani, Noel. 2000. “Representation of Robben Island History, 1997–2000.” Unpublished master’s dissertation, University of Western Cape. Stapleton, Timothy Joseph. 1993. “Maqoma: Xhosa Resistance to the Advance of Colonial Hegemony (1798–1873).” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Dalhousie University. Stapleton, Timothy Joseph. 1994. Maqoma: Xhosa Resistance to Colonial Advance, 1798–1873. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Tambo, Oliver. 1987. Preparing for Power. London: Heinemann. Tutu, Desmond. 2015. “Striving for Ubuntu.” http://www.tutufoundationusa. org/2015/10/06/striving‐for‐ubuntu, accessed March 23, 2018. Wieder, Alan. 2008. Teacher and Comrade: Richard Dudley and the Fight for Democracy in South Africa. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Chapter Twenty-Five

African Historians and Popular Culture Charles Ambler

During the late 1980s and early 1990s historians of Africa began for the first time to give substantial attention to the historical study of popular culture. Influenced by the broad “cultural turn” in humanities scholarship, Africanists shifted focus. Historians may have been among the more reluctant to embrace experimentation with topics and approaches, but the excitement and optimism that accompanied the collapse of apartheid South Africa freed historians to experiment. The vibrant popular movements that were so prominent during this period, with their frequent engagement with song, dance, and public art, seemed to demand that scholars pay attention to culture in new ways that were consistent with popular experience. The end of apartheid also opened up archives and ended restrictions on research that only encouraged the new interest in culture. It may have also been the case elsewhere on the continent that the study of popular culture provided a measure of relief from the pessimistic narratives of political repression and economic decline that characterized many African countries during this period. Observing, amid civil conflict and economic privation, the remarkable cultural resilience and vibrancy of many African communities, historians began to look for similar phenomena in the past – and in particular the colonial past. Influenced by the work of historians like Eugene Genovese, whose study of “the world the slaves made,” documented the role of custom and popular culture in sustaining African American communities under slavery, historians also began to broaden their understanding of resistance to incorporate cultural practice (Genovese 1975). A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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A pioneer in this effort was Terence Ranger, the most prominent historian of African resistance. His 1975 book, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890–1970, in somewhat fragmentary form, traced the development and reinvention of the Beni ngoma from dances that expressed the nascent anticolonial sentiments of the new class of clerks to a popular pastime among wage laborers across East and Central Africa (Ranger 1975). Historians clearly did not know quite what to make of Ranger’s highly original study, recognizing that there was clearly almost nothing like it (Wright 1977; Hartwig 1977). An examination of the citation record for the book in Google Scholar shows relatively few references to the book during the decade following its publication, and most of those were to narrow studies of music or dance. It was more than 15 years before scholars took up the approaches and themes that Ranger suggested, and then often with reference to the influential theoretical interventions of James Scott (1990). In the interim, Leroy Vail and Landeg White published what was then a distinctive article which explored the role of song in liberation struggles in Mozambique (Vail and White 1983). Although it cites Ranger’s early work on African resistance, it includes no reference to Dance and Society. This is less surprising than it might seem. Vail and White’s study focused largely on the text of the songs as an entrée into the ideology of popular rebellion. With typical prescience, Ranger was less interested in extracting specific meanings from the contents of the Beni dance than he was in understanding the role of dance organizations in creating cohesion among those involved. At the same time, his approach evoked some of the work on resistance published in the 1960s by Ranger and colleagues loosely associated in the so‐called Dar es Salaam school (Ranger 1968; Denoon and Kuper 1970). While the tendency of scholars to label a wide range of African movements and organizations, notably independent churches, as oppositional may have been problematic, that literature did focus attention on popular experience and culture. The anthropologist Johannes Fabian had made the case for the inclusion of charismatic African churches and other similar movements in an article on “Popular Culture in Africa” (Fabian 1978). In this overview, he signaled an interest in the work of popular artists in Zaire that would result 20 years later in his important study, Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire, but otherwise his main contribution in this piece was to document the paucity of work on popular culture, and in particular any work with a historical dimension (Fabian 1997). Certainly, early ethnologists, anthropologists, and other students of African cultures had provided accounts of elements of “traditional culture” (should it be labeled “popular”?) in ethnographies, but there was little systematic scholarly documentation of the emergence of new popular forms of culture, such as the paintings that Fabian had begun to study, the exciting music scene that developed in postwar West Africa, and the popular publishing industry based in Onitsha in southeastern Nigeria (Obiechina 1973). African studies, and African history in particular, were still very much engaged in establishing the legitimacy of the discipline and in documenting histories for newly



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independent nations. Against that backdrop and in the context of neocolonialism and the persistence of white supremacist regimes in southern Africa, any scholars exploring research into popular culture faced the specter of triviality, or even complicity in the colonial project. In a blistering attack on the urban sociologists associated with the Rhodes‐ Livingstone Institute and their work on social change on the Zambian Copperbelt, Bernard Magubane charged that these scholars documented the social, economic, and cultural lives of urban Africans within a seemingly neutral framework of “acculturation” or “Westernization” (Magubane 1971). Magubane argued, persuasively, that the accounts of life in Copperbelt communities found in this work failed to situate the experiences of Africans and African communities in the historical trajectory of colonial conquest, exploitation, and resistance. These accounts were snapshots, divorced from historical, social, and political context: “Instead of treating the colonial system as an essential dimension of the new social structure,” Magubane asserted that these European scholars “tended to take it for granted, or to assume that its general characteristics are known” (Magubane 1971: 419). Detailed descriptive accounts focused on individual Africans rather than on communities or urban areas, and presented their activities without analytical reference to the commercial markets in which their lives were deeply embedded. In Magubane’s reading, urban Africans emerged in this literature as deeply engaged in a process of “Europeanization” (or its apparent mirror image, “detribalization”) in which commodities and activities defined as European or Western were sharply distinguished from those associated with “traditional society.” And the emergence of consumer cultures in the Copperbelt towns (and by extension elsewhere in Africa) were described without acknowledgment of the fact that these Africans were living in highly racially stratified societies. These studies, in Magubane’s view, included “no image of the colonial social structure,” and their authors had “an unconscious ideological and psychological disposition to vindicate the cultural supremacy of whites over Africans” (Magubane 1971: 420, 423). Magubane directed his most stinging criticism at J. Clyde Mitchell’s classic examination of the Kalela dance, the Copperbelt manifestation of the Beni dance that Ranger was to explore two decades later (Mitchell 1956). Magubane’s article triggered a ferocious academic debate, the main result of which was to entrench a broad commitment to an explicitly engaged scholarship that approached twentieth‐century history from the perspective of the expansion of global colonial capitalism and that reflected the persistence of white domination in southern Africa. There was nothing in Magubane’s analysis that would have precluded the study of popular culture, but it was nevertheless clear that such work should be connected to the embedded structures of domination that Magubane alluded to and which scholars of race and industrial development in southern Africa in particular focused attention on. Magubane’s critique of the preoccupation with Europeanization that he argued was central to much of the Copperbelt scholarship also pointed to the question of “authenticity,” which

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would be a central concern of the scholars who, beginning in the 1980s, began to give serious attention to popular culture in African society and history. The pivotal moment in the cultural turn in Africanist scholarship was the publication in 1987 of the anthropologist Karin Barber’s lengthy examination of the “Popular Arts in Africa,” commissioned by the Social Science Research Council (Barber 1987). As the title indicates, this state‐of‐the‐art overview focused almost exclusively on artistic expression, but its impact on Africanist scholars, including historians, extended beyond that into the broader realm of popular culture. In her introduction, Barber pointed first to the relative paucity of scholarship on the popular arts, a point reinforced in her notes and bibliography. A great deal of the work that she discussed in this still remarkable article are unpublished papers, dissertations, reports, and studies in highly specialized journals. But in themselves they documented a rapidly emerging interest in topics related to popular arts and culture. Barber’s own publications, focusing initially on Yoruba popular theater, would be among the most significant (Barber 2000). This rising interest was hardly surprising, as Barber pointed out, given the “sheer, undeniable assertive presence” of contemporary popular culture and arts forms as “social facts” (Barber 1987: 1). Citing what she described as Ranger’s pioneering work on popular dance, she also underscored the importance of studies of popular culture as part of a broader shift away from a focus on formal politics and individual political leaders as the engines of historical change. Thus, studies of the popular arts represented an opportunity to explore the lives and thought of “ordinary people” who were otherwise often “invisible and inaudible” (Barber 1987: 3). Those individual political leaders were, of course, almost exclusively male. Implicitly, at least, research into popular culture represented an opportunity to incorporate women into the narrative of modern African history. Ranger had, in a very brief appendix, drawn explicit attention to the absence of women in his own research into dance societies and had summarized new research by the historian Margaret Strobel that documented women’s groups on the East African coast who performed dances that very closely resembled those of the all‐male Beni groups (Ranger 1975: 167–170; Strobel 1976). Yet in her essay Barber scarcely mentioned women as a distinct category, and she did not address gender at all. Subsequently, scholars have frequently examined the gender implications of popular culture – although research continues to pay substantially greater attention to men than women. The publication of Barber’s essay gave the field a legitimacy that allowed a new generation of scholars to shake off concerns about triviality and to investigate a growing range of culture topics. This upsurge of interest did not provoke a great deal of explicit theoretical discussion (see Barber 1997; Becker 2012), but key questions emerged, implicitly and explicitly, in Barber’s original essay and in the diverse collection of studies of popular culture that followed this pivotal moment. The central issue turned on perspective: Was popular culture to be examined through studies of separate forms of artistic expression? Or should scholars focus



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on popular culture expression in particular communities or societies? In much of the work that Barber discussed the focus was in fact on the particular indigenous art form – specific genres of music, dance, theater, and other media. Now scholars, like Phyllis Martin in her study of leisure in colonial Brazzaville, looked at the role of popular culture in historically specific contexts (Martin 1995). In books like Martin’s the focus shifted away from analysis of particular popular culture genres to the ways in which the production and consumption of popular culture defined or explained the nature of communities. Running through this tension between “the popular” and “culture” is the question of authenticity. Local artistic work was by definition indigenous. In community studies of popular culture indigeneity is a more porous category. Young people in West African towns in the 1940s and 1950s, for example, eagerly read popular fiction that was written by local authors and published locally, as well as imports. And local writers were often very much influenced by imported books and films. Although studies of popular culture forms frequently stressed their syncretism, popular culture as Barber defined it appeared to exclude “traditional” culture, in effect erecting a boundary between explicitly “modern” popular culture and traditional cultural practice – the latter implicitly defined as rural as opposed to urban, as static and as noncommercial. Studies that focused on popular culture practice in communities have generally suffered from a similar urban bias. And, if this scholarship did often have the virtue of conveying a sense of the lived experience of popular culture, it frequently subordinated the creative history of popular culture to larger social, economic, and political projects. Boys and young men, and girls as well, might turn out in their exuberant thousands to play soccer. Many more thousands of passionate fans lined the playing fields and filled the bleachers to cheer their teams. Yet readers of studies of African sport might conclude that Africans participated as players and fans so that scholars could study ethnicity, class, or gender. Phyllis Martin’s study of colonial Brazzaville broke new ground in its integrated historical exploration of these phenomena in an African city, and the book remains a signal achievement. Martin, however, was deeply influenced by currents in European and American social history that constructed popular leisure and pastimes as forms of “social control,” effectively tools of state and class domination, or as theaters of struggle between powerful interests and ordinary people. Certainly, Martin carefully documents the efforts of the government, the church, and business to shape and regulate popular leisure and culture. She also shows how ordinary Africans often resisted those efforts through those same activities. Even as research on popular culture and popular arts in Africa has grown dramatically, a number of the issues that surfaced in Barber’s analysis remain central to understandings of historical work on popular culture in Africa. Most powerfully enduring is the notion that popular culture, rather than being an intrinsic topic of importance, represented a “way in.” Scholars could evade the taint of triviality by studying popular culture as a means to explore other critical historical

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themes such as ethnicity and class and gender divisions, which might otherwise have been difficult to examine. As Barber stressed, Ranger had himself argued that the study of Beni represented an opportunity to “decode” otherwise impenetrable social, political, and cultural phenomena. Barber went to some length to stress that the emerging scholarship on African popular arts transcended the evolutionary models of progressive movement from “folk” culture to “high” art. Yet, in her assertion that the popular arts were in some sense by definition modern, Barber implicitly reinforced the categorical distinction between “traditional” cultural forms and popular culture that still persists – in scholarship if not in fact. Even if Barber’s essay emphasized new as opposed to traditional forms of expression, subsequent work by her and others continues to focus on authenticity – and the historical work that explores the history of popular culture, however scattered, has tended to draw a sharp line between cultural forms that are defined as “traditional” and typically rural and those that are associated with modern African society and are typically urban. During most of the twentieth century African societies remained predominantly rural, but new and growing cities became centers for vibrant popular cultures. In towns like those along the West African coast, in South Africa, or by mid‐century in the industrial mining zones in Congo and Zambia migrants and locals, women and men, ordinary people and emerging elites assembled vibrant cultural worlds that mixed features of the heritage of their communities of origin and elements of cultures of other African and non‐African societies in a creative local mix that found diverse expressions. These in turn spread across class, ethnic, and geographical lines in a complicated swirl. Observers often dismissed these new styles of music, performance, and dress as inauthentic and as unsuccessful efforts to mimic European culture. Yet, very quickly, cultural forms like the Beni dances described by Terence Ranger became distinctive and inescapable elements of African urban life. In the early decades of the twentieth century urban Africa exploded with new forms of popular music. Choirs and bands experimented with new sorts of instruments and gave distinctive local readings to new styles – many with American and African American origins. In South Africa Christian churches supported singing groups that developed new genres of sacred song, inspired in part by the legendary tour of the African American Jubilee Singers. These performances in turn crossed over into the new kind of secular popular music that was bubbling up in South Africa’s African townships. In the period before World War II phonographs became sufficiently cheap and available that this music could be recorded, widely disseminated, and then played over and over again. In West Africa, this was the era of the emergence of concert party theater in the coast towns of what was then the Gold Coast (Cole 2001). In venues that often also featured shows of American and British films, troupes of performers played music and put on plays and skits – often with topical themes that spoke to the rapid social changes that members of the audience experienced. These shows were



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regularly promoted on posters and reported on in the local newspapers that targeted the more affluent and educated African populations of West African towns. But scholars largely ignored fascinating figures like “the Two Bobs,” who were stars of the performance circuit. It wasn’t historians but musicologists and specialists in theater who pioneered serious study of the history of concerts and of popular music. They began with an interest in the contemporary forms of African drama and music and traced their origins and evolution. They were more concerned with documenting these phenomena as artistic forms or as indicators of social change and stress than with their histories in the context of emerging diverse and vibrant popular cultures. And they often justified the research in terms of what it could say about supposedly deeper, more important issues. Catherine Cole, in her pathbreaking work on Ghanaian concert party theater, drew attention to the unsettling phenomenon of blackface performance in concert parties in the interwar years (Cole 2001). Concert party blackface performance undoubtedly had its origin in the distinctly “American” films that featured Al Jolson and others, and has been the subject of some considerable scholarly discussion. Yet the Ghanaian writer Kwabena Bame pronounced it “no big deal” from the perspective of Ghanaian performers and audiences (Bame 1985). His comment underscored the importance of describing and interpreting popular culture generally in historically specific terms defined essentially by those who performed and those who sat – or stood and shouted – in the audiences. Beginning in the interwar period, distinctive regional forms of popular music like highlife in West Africa and Congolese rumba reverberated across urban Africa and into the countryside. But it was not until the publication in 1985 of In  Township Tonight!, the musicologist David Coplan’s exciting study of the musical and theatrical performance landscape of South African cities, that African popular music began to attract serious scholarship (Coplan 1985). In a series of linked essays that covered South African urban history from the foundation of Johannesburg and the surrounding Witwatersrand industrial region to the 1970s, Coplan began the process of giving African history an aural dimension. In his chapters on black Johannesburg especially, Coplan succeeded in weaving the sounds of popular song and dance into the vibrant culture life of communities like Sophiatown – without obscuring the realities of the oppressive and often brutal political and economic regime. Coplan broke through the boundary between customary and popular music, tracing the movement and evolution of Sotho music into the cities and back to the countryside (see also Coplan 1994). In the pages of this pivotal study, music and performance emerge woven into the fabric of local and regional popular culture rather than as distinctive, reified “art forms.” Popular music developed into a small industry after World War II. As record players became more widely available, a growing number of bands produced albums. It was still rare for individuals to own phonographs, but they became commonplace in bars and dancehalls, permitting the new music to extend beyond individual performances. New pop sounds, blending local and imported styles,

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provided the soundtrack for nationalist ferment, especially in West Africa. A number of scholars have pointed to the overt political content in some popular tunes, but there has been relatively little examination of the ways in which the diverse political movements, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, embraced emerging popular culture. Christopher Waterman’s study of Nigerian popular music, musicians, and performance is one of a relatively small number of books that successfully conveys the cultural landscape of politics during that period (Waterman 1990). Marissa Moorman’s book on the “social history of music and nation” in Angola is perhaps the only work by a historian that directly connects the history of political struggle to music in all its dimensions and merges the contours of popular politics and popular culture (Moorman 2008). In teaching, African historians have often turned to fiction to express these cultural contours to students. The essays in Jean Hay’s collection African Novels in the Classroom directly address what the historian contributors might collectively have characterized as the great challenge of conveying the social and cultural feel of African communities (Hay 2000). My own essay (Ambler 2000) in that book focuses on the depiction of immediate postcolonial Nairobi in Meja Mwangi’s Down River Road (Mwangi 1976). This vivid picture of the lives of marginal women and men living in slums certainly provides rich documentation of sharp divisions of wealth and power and of conflict across racial and class lines. But Down River Road also offers a lively pop culture landscape surfacing in destitute neighborhoods, workplaces, and bars. The Nigerian novelist Chris Abani has revealed the complex cultural mix that characterized African cities even more vibrantly in his remarkable 2004 work Graceland. The action jumps back and forth between rural eastern Nigerian in the 1980s and the megacity Lagos, where the young protagonist pursues a marginal career as an Elvis impersonator. Yet there is no suggestion in Abani’s prose that this is evidence of “westernization,” but rather there is a striking cosmopolitan quality in which it is difficult to determine exactly what one might call authentic. This was nothing new. In an extraordinary article, “Roots in Reverse,” Richard Shain traced the complicated evolution of Senegalese pop music and the pop music culture associated with it. In the first decades of the twentieth century Senegalese musicians began listening to Cuban salsa – itself a musical form rooted in West Africa. Before long, local bands were performing Cuban classics and Senegalese salsa (Shain 2002). The complex flows of cultural impulses that Shain traced became more complicated and accelerated rapidly during the second half of the twentieth century (Adamu 2006). In these circumstances, with the rapid spread of movies, phonograph records, and print materials (and, later, radio, television, and video and digital technologies), artistic forms from a variety of sources mixed in with local artistic expression to challenge a pervasive scholarly model of a single‐direction “cultural imperialism” associated with modernization theory and, later, equally with the radical critiques of it (Ambler 2001). In a pioneering article, the anthropologist Brian Larkin described the history and enduring popularity of Bollywood



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films in northern Nigeria. Although the Indian fantasies that appeared on screen were seemingly worlds apart from the Muslim societies of northern Nigeria, passionate film fans refashioned these films to speak to their own lives, and ultimately spun off locally written and published fiction and eventually even video films (Larkin 1997, 2008). Although popular culture is often defined in scholarship as a collection of expressive categories – from television shows to popular music, to murals, and so forth  –  these artistic expressions came to life for people and communities in public spaces – and in the recent past sometimes virtual spaces. The record player (or later the cassette or CD player) blared music that might be Congolese rumba, or American country music, or hip hop, but the appreciation and understanding of it and the dance styles of those that enjoyed it were products of specific public encounters. Just like the Nigerian moviegoers who wove Hausa tales through Indian movies, African youths in the Congo or South Africa or Kenya gave meaning to the music they were listening to in terms of their own cultural sensibilities and in dynamic relationship with a diverse mashup of other forms – the paintings on walls and minibuses, cheap fiction, Hollywood films, and fashion. Because certainly, as everywhere else in the world, Africans made their own bodies the sites for artistic expression  –  from hairstyles, to body art, to jewelry and of course clothing. In her chapter, “Dressing Well,” Phyllis Martin captured the pleasure that obtaining nice clothes and wearing them gave people in colonial Brazzaville’s neighborhoods (Martin 1995: 154–172). A number of scholars have explored clothing in African societies, but few have succeeded as well as Martin in conveying the sheer pleasure of dressing up and of the ways in which clothing styles matched up with musical styles or film as elements of a broader popular culture (Hendrickson 1996). These processes of cultural connection and understanding occurred continually in public squares, in churches, in meetings, and at athletic events, but there was probably no richer site of popular culture engagement than the myriad bars, beer halls, and drinking venues that were ubiquitous features of modern life, at least in non‐Muslim Africa. Although these were by no means exclusively male, men and masculinity predominated. The vibrant cultural life of drinking was largely obscured, though, by the preoccupations of colonial officials, and scholars who studied colonialism, with social and political control, health, and revenue (Willis 2005). The pages of publications like Drum magazine offered the larger public a glimpse of the vibrant cultural worlds associated with the illegal drinking establishments, or shebeens, that were commonplace features of the South African urban landscape. That element of Africa’s worlds of drink remained obscure in the scholarship, and for the most part still does (Mager 2010). Although drinking was perhaps the most important leisure activity across much of Africa, scholarly studies of the consumption of alcohol remained focused on the relationship of drinking to the apparatus of control or subservient to investigation of larger questions than

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the contours of popular culture. Historians of Europe and the United States had begun to explore the roles that taverns and cafes played in the social and cultural life of societies (Barrows and Room 1991), but that perspective was largely absent from the limited scholarship on alcohol in Africa. Africanists remained focused, understandably, on the profound negative effects of alcohol regulation and consumption. Most of the very limited research that had been undertaken concerned southern Africa, where the profits from beer sales were used systematically to perpetuate white domination – “Drinking in a Cage,” as it was described by the historian Paul La Hausse (1982). In the introduction to our 1992 collection Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa, my fellow editor Jonathan Crush and I attempted to point to the important place of drinking and drinking establishments in the cultural life of the subcontinent, but the individual contributions only rarely conveyed glimmers of the cultural vibrancy of even the most regimented beer halls (Ambler and Crush 1992). The chapters looked instead at how drinking illustrated the fault lines of race, class, and gender, at how the state and employers used alcohol regulation to reinforce colonial domination and to promote the social and political aims of the state, and finally how the production and consumption of alcohol became the sites of various forms of resistance (Crush and Ambler 1992). Emmanuel Akyeampong’s study of the history of alcohol in Ghana marked a striking break with this earlier work because of its focus on popular culture and because it situated drinking practices in historical context (Akyeampong 1996). Akyeampong certainly gave serious attention to the highly controversial history of alcohol regulation in colonial Ghana, but he produced a narrative in which the history of drinking unfolded from the perspective of Ghanaians, connecting it to customary practices and beliefs and conveying a vivid picture of drinking venues as centers of cultural practice. Subsequently, there have been a number of important books on alcohol in Africa, including Justin Willis’s justly praised social history of alcohol in East Africa (Willis 2002), but none of these has matched Akyeampong’s success in conveying the texture of drinking practices or in defining a popular cultural space. Drinking practices did not figure in Laura Fair’s rich examination of culture and community in Muslim Zanzibar in the first half of the twentieth century (Fair 2001). Yet, in its incorporation of culture and cultural practices as diverse as the taraab music performed by women’s groups and young men’s participation in soccer as integral elements of social and political change, it resembles Akyeampong’s work. Fair was particularly successful in challenging the supposed boundaries between indigenous practices like taraab and those that were in some sense imported – notably soccer. In a highly suggestive article on boxing in Ghana, Akyeampong also directly contested this distinction in a narrative that linked the persistence and reinvention of the traditional sport of bukom and the introduction of European boxing (Akyeampong 2002). This same tension marks the emerging work on print media in popular culture. It was not until the era of World War II that there was widespread literacy in



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Africa, but various forms of print, including newspapers, pamphlets, and books, formed a critical element in the lives of residents of urban areas in West Africa and South Africa and among Christian communities. Beginning in the nineteenth century, pioneer African editors and journalists produced newspapers that published not only the news – but also fiction, poetry, and accounts of local events. Historians have made substantial use of newspapers as source materials, but only recently  –  notably with the work of Stephanie Newell  –  have the newspapers themselves, and the readerships that surrounded them, become subjects of study as aspects of popular culture (Newell 2013). Newspaper publishers often tried to expand revenue by publishing a wide range of other materials, and scholars have in the last two decades uncovered a great deal of previously unknown material  –  what Karin Barber and her colleagues have called Hidden Histories (Barber 2006). Important though that material is, it was certainly substantially overshadowed in volume by the publications of the various mission presses. As literacy expanded and as Christian populations grew, mission printers put out increasing amounts of educational materials, collections of Bible stories, and scripture. As Isabel Hofmeyr has shown in The Portable Bunyan, other than the Bible itself no religious text was more ubiquitous than versions of The Pilgrim’s Progress – in a myriad of languages and formats (Hofmeyr 2004). Although largely ignored today, this tale (and other religious stories) were read, reread, and repeated, spreading widely, in its various elements, in the culture of Christian communities and spilling out beyond. This is a reminder that popular culture was by no means exclusively secular, as the audience embrace of Indian movies in northern Nigeria illustrates. In the last several decades Pentecostal movements across the continent, as Birgit Meyer has shown, have had huge influence in producing not only specific artistic forms, such as films, but in shaping broader cultural experience (Meyer 2015). Johannes Fabian made this case directly in arguing that new religious movements like Jamaa in the Congo should be understood as elements of popular culture (Fabian 1978). Although it was often refashioned for particular African audiences and often became deeply embedded in popular belief, The Pilgrim’s Progress was, of course, a cultural import. Before World War II African readers had relatively few home‐ produced options and the growing numbers of those with sufficient literacy turned as often to imports as to the limited supply of local publications. Stephanie Newell has told the unlikely tale of the enormous popularity in West Africa (and elsewhere in the British empire) of the British romance novelist Marie Corelli, who continued to attract African readers into the 1960s, decades after her death (Newell 2002). In the postwar years Corelli faced considerable competition from the cheap novels and fiction pamphlets – the so‐called market literature associated especially with the eastern Nigerian town of Onitsha. The Onitsha authors wrote directly for this new audience, especially urban youth, borrowing the plot devices and style of romance novels and of the Hollywood films that were increasingly popular. Unfortunately, there is still no historical

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account of this cottage writing and publication industry or of the reading culture that surrounded it (but see Obiechina 1973). Thirty years after Karin Barber pointed to the paucity of scholarship on African popular arts and culture in her pivotal state‐of‐the‐art review of the field, substantial gaps remain in our understanding of the history of modern African popular culture. There has been a rapid growth of publication around topics related to popular culture, but little of it has been historical and much turns on theoretical questions in cultural and literary studies. A scan of the contents of the Journal of African Cultural Studies, where a great deal of the scholarship on popular culture appears, reveals a substantial emphasis on content analysis and the contemporary politics of language. Otherwise, scholars continue to approach popular culture as a means of understanding social and political structure and change rather than for its intrinsic value – notwithstanding its obvious and striking importance for the millions of people who engaged with it in its many forms. Thus, we have scattered studies of the role of radio in promoting political ideas, fomenting violence, or building community – but no historical examination of radio as a mass medium and arbiter of popular culture since the late 1950s – at the moment of decolonization – when the introduction of transistor technology made radios widely available. The 1950s were also the golden age of cinema in Africa. The first film shows took place in African cities in the early years of the twentieth century, not long after the original film shows in Europe. During the interwar years theaters opened to cater to urban audiences and mobile cinemas introduced film into rural areas, where local residents who had migrated to towns and back had already developed a taste for film shows (Ambler 2011). African audiences quickly developed a passion for the silent films starring Charlie Chaplin and later, as sound technology was introduced, for the westerns and gangster films that were Hollywood staples (Fair 2018). In one of the very small number of book‐length study of movies in Africa, the historian James Burns has shown how Southern Rhodesia, like a number of colonial governments, attempted to use film to promote the imperial project (Burns 2002). But film programs focusing on didactic movies that were supposedly made to appeal to local audiences still had to include Hollywood entertainment films if they were to attract audiences. As Laura Fair’s (2018) important new social history of cinema in Tanzania shows, by the 1950s, European and American films had become staple elements of urban popular culture across the continent, spilling over beyond the filmgoing population, influencing clothing, speech, and also the work of local writers and artists. Independence in the 1960s triggered a remarkable cultural outpouring, with much of the work highly politically engaged. The books of some of the great novelists of that period, like Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o gained substantial readership and became staples in school syllabuses, but the films directed by artistic luminaries like Sembene Ousmane were rarely seen by Africans. It was very rare for a local film to be released commercially, let alone gain a wide



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audience (Gugler 2003). With the economic decline and rise in crime of the 1970s, theaters closed and the African filmgoing culture largely disappeared. In the 1980s, with the introduction of cassette technology, small video dens sprang up in cities and even small towns across the continent, giving movies a new lease of life – with westerns and gangster films superseded by action and martial arts movies, many of which were produced in Hong Kong. By the late 1980s, local entrepreneurs in Nigeria, Ghana, and elsewhere had acquired camcorders and were making videos of weddings and other celebrations. Soon they started making movies. In 1992 the Nigerian businessman Kenneth Nnebue filmed and released on videocassette an Igbo‐language movie, Living in Bondage. This low‐budget tale of the horrific consequences of unbridled greed was soon a sensation, with thousands of copies sold and video pirates cashing in. Realizing that he had a huge hit on his hands, Nnebue financed the production of a version subtitled in English, and Living in Bondage was quickly being sold and watched in video dens and homes all across southern Nigeria and elsewhere in West Africa. After this success Nnebue moved into English‐language movies with a second big hit, Glamour Girls. By then, many others had taken the plunge into film‐making, and the Nigerian film industry, Nollywood, took off. Within a decade, only the United States and India were producing more films than Nigeria. The products of Nollywood were being watched not only across Nigeria but throughout West Africa and among the West African diaspora. By 2010 a satellite television station based in South Africa was beaming Nigerian movies across the continent 24 hours a day seven days a week, and passionate fans of Nigerian movies could be found all around the continent and overseas watching Nollywood movies in makeshift theaters, in bars and shops, and in homes. A small group of scholars initiated serious study of Nollywood – working against elite popular opinion which at first saw these films as unsophisticated trash (Okome and Haynes 1995; McCall 2004). Now Nollywood studies is a small industry. There are special issues of journals and a series of articles and books. Yet most of this work focuses on close analysis of the films themselves – not on the place of these films in popular culture (Barrot 2008; Haynes 2010; Garritano 2014). Lagos was the center of the new industry, but soon films were also being produced in cities across Nigeria and in Ghana. Nollywood offshoots also sprang up in cities like Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in East Africa, but the Nigerian industry expanded on a scale that overshadowed any other. Nollywood films are everywhere in Nigeria – advertised on billboards and on posters that sometimes seem to cover every surface. The entertainment sections in the local press are filled with stories about new films and about leading directors and actors. These are Nigeria’s biggest celebrities. Fan magazines spring up and disappear. Some of the most popular actors have their own small media empires. Radios and boom boxes play songs promoted in the latest hit movie. The most popular films come up constantly as reference points in discussions – about family life, the behavior of politicians, or

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fashion. A recent collection of essays edited by Mahir Saul and Ralph Austin, Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty‐First Century, makes an effort to place Nollywood in historical perspective, implicitly as a vibrant, indigenous, and authentic form in contrast to imported films  –  yet Hollywood was one very important source of inspiration for Nollywood filmmakers, few if any of whom had ever seen the classics of African cinema and quite a few of whom had never been inside a movie theater (Saul and Austin 2010). Nollywood films have pushed imports right off the shelves, dramatically upending the long‐established dominance of foreign movies. In an era supposedly marked by globalization, where media giants dominate world markets, a distinctive local product has defied the trend. Something more has happened than a simple popular thirst for local culture, however. At the same time that Nollywood took over the film marketplace, Nigeria’s youth has largely abandoned Nigerian‐style pop music in favor of imported hip hop music, or local variants of it – a trend reinforced by the soundtracks of Nollywood films. No sharp distinctions between local and imported products can do justice to the rich mixtures of African popular cultures. There’s a complicated if unwritten history here, involving the movement of styles around the continent, drawing in imported elements and in turn contributing to popular cultures that are sometimes global and sometimes “glocal” (Salm 2010). Some of the work that is best capturing this history focuses on place and charts the histories of popular culture from the point of view of those who create and consume it (Ivaska 2011). Didier Gondola’s book on Kinshasa, Tropical Cowboys, does a particularly effective job of pulling together diverse elements of popular culture into a historical narrative. As Gondola states, this is an unorthodox popular culture “exploring the grayish areas, those hard‐to‐read places, the in‐between zones where culture meets crime, dream meets drama, and resistance becomes a double‐edge sword that liberates as much as it oppresses” (Gondola 2016). What emerges here especially is the vitality of popular culture, something that is important in people’s lives and that is treasured for its pleasure and for its fun.

References Abani, Chris. 2004. Graceland. New York: Picador. Adamu, Abdalla Uba. 2006. Transglobal Media Flows and African Popular Culture: Revolution and Reaction in Muslim Hausa Popular Culture. London: African Studies Association. Akyeampong, Emmanuel. 1996. Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c.1800 to Recent Times. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Akyeampong, Emmanuel. 2002. “Bukom and the Social History of Boxing in Accra: Warfare and Citizenship in Precolonial Ga Society.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 35: 39–60. Ambler, Charles. 2000. “Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road.” In African Novels in the Classroom, edited by Jean Hay, 177–190. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.



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Ambler, Charles. 2001. “Popular Films and Colonial Audiences: The Movies in Northern Rhodesia.” American Historical Review 106: 81–105. Ambler, Charles. 2011. “Projecting the Modern Colonial State: The Mobile Cinema in Kenya.” In Film and the End of Empire, edited by Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe, 199–223. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan for the British Film Institute. Ambler, Charles, and Jonathan Crush. 1992. “Alcohol in Southern African Labor History.” In Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa, edited by Jonathan Crush and Charles Ambler, 1–55. Athens: Ohio University Press. Bame, Kwabena. 1985. Come to Laugh: African Traditional Theatre in Ghana. New York: Lilian Barber Press. Barber, Karin. 1987. “Popular Arts in Africa.” African Studies Review 30: 1–78. Barber, Karin, ed. 1997. Readings in African Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barber, Karin. 2000. The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in Theater. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barber, Karin, ed. 2006. Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barrot, Pierre, ed. 2008. Nollywood: The Video Phenomenon in Nigeria. Oxford: James Currey. Barrows, Suzanne, and Robin Room, eds. 1991. Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History. Berkeley, University of California Press. Becker, Heike. 2012. “Anthropology and the Study of Popular Culture: A Perspective from the Southern Tip of Africa.” Research in African Literatures 43: 17–37. Burns, James. 2002. Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe. Athens: Ohio University Press. Cole, Catherine. 2001. Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Coplan, David B. 1985. In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre. New York: Longman. Coplan, David B. 1994. In the Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa’s Basotho Migrants. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crush, Jonathan, and Charles Ambler, eds. 1992. Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press. Denoon, Donald, and Adam Kuper. 1970. “Nationalist Historians in Search of a Nation: The ‘New Historiography’ in Dar es Salaam.” African Affairs 69: 329–349. Fabian, Johannes. 1978. “Popular Culture in Africa: Findings and Conjectures.” Africa 48: 315–334. Fabian, Johannes. 1997. Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fair, Laura. 2001. Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post‐abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945. Athens: Ohio University Press. Fair, Laura. 2010. “Songs, Stories, Action!” In Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty‐ First Century, edited by Mahir Saul and Ralph Austin, 108–130. Athens: Ohio University Press. Fair, Laura. 2018. Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth‐ Century Urban Tanzania. Athens: Ohio University Press.

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Garritano, Carmela. 2014. “Introduction: Nollywood – An Archive of African Worldliness.” Black Camera 5: 44–52. Genovese, Eugene. 1975. Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon Books. Gondola, Ch. Didier. 2016. Tropical Cowboys: Westerns, Violence, and Masculinity in Kinshasa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gugler, Joseph. 2003. African Film: Re‐imagining a Continent. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hartwig, Gerald W. 1977. “Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890–1970: The Beni Ngoma.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 9: 357–360. Hay, Jean, ed. 2000. African Novels in the Classroom. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Haynes, Jonathan. 2010. “A Literature Review: Nigerian and Ghanaian Videos.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 22: 105–120. Hendrickson, Hildi, ed. 1996. Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post‐colonial Africa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hofmeyr, Isabel. 2004. The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ivaska, Andrew. 2011. Cultured States: Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar es Salaam. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. La Hausse, Paul. 1982. “Drinking in a Cage: The Durban System and the 1929 Riots.” Africa Perspective 20: 63–75. Larkin, Brian. 1997. “Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 67: 406–440. Larkin, Brian. 2008. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McCall, John C. 2004. “Juju and Justice at the Movies: Vigilantes in Nigerian Popular Videos.” African Studies Review 47: 51–67. Mager, Anne. 2010. Beer, Sociability, and Masculinity in South Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Magubane, Bernard. 1971. “A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Colonial Africa.” Current Anthropology 12: 419–445. Martin, Phyllis. 1995. Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyer, Birgit. 2015. Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mitchell, J. Clyde. 1956. The Kalela Dance. London: Rhodes‐Livingstone Papers No. 27. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Moorman, Marissa. 2008. Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola from 1945 to Recent Times. Athens: Ohio University Press. Mwangi, Meja. 1976. Going Down River Road. London: Heinemann. Newell, Stephanie, ed. 2002. Readings in African Popular Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Newell, Stephanie. 2013. The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press. Obiechina, Emmanuel N. 1973. An African Popular Literature: A Study of Onitsha Market Pamphlets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



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Okome, Onookome, and Jonathan Haynes. Cinema and Social Change in West Africa. Jos: Nigerian Film Corporation, 1995. Ranger, Terence. 1968. “Connexions between ‘Primary Resistance’ Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism in East and Central Africa.” Journal of African History 9: 437–454, 631–642. Ranger, Terence. 1975. Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890–1970: The Beni Ngoma. London: Heinemann. Salm, Steven J. 2010. “Globalization and West African Music.” History Compass 8: 1328–1339. Saul, Mahir, and Ralph Austin, eds. 2010. Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty‐First Century: Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution. Athens: Ohio University Press. Scott, James. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shain, Richard. 2002. “Roots in Reverse: Cubanismo in Twentieth‐Century Senegalese Music.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 35: 83–102. Strobel, Margaret. 1976. “From Lelemama to Lobbying: Women’s Associations in Mombasa, Kenya.” In Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change, edited by Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay, 183–211. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Vail, Leroy, and Landeg White. 1983. “Forms of Resistance: Songs and Perceptions of Power in Colonial Mozambique.” American Historical Review 88: 883–919. Waterman, Christopher. 1990. Jùjú: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Willis, Justin. 2002. Potent Brews: A Social History of Alcohol in East Africa, 1850–1999. Athens: Ohio University Press. Willis, Justin. 2005. “Drinking Power: Alcohol and History in Africa.” History Compass 3: 1–13. Wright, Marcia. 1977. “Dance and Colonialism in Eastern Africa.” Journal of African History 18: 146–147.

Index

Note: The page locators of illustrations are indicated in italic type. Abakiga see Bakiga people Abani, Chris, Graceland, 490 abortion, 149 Abrahams, Yvette, 149 Abyssinia, 20 academic scholarship anthropology see anthropology kinship see kinship studies modernist, 59, 60, 205–207, 216–217 social science, 206 see also historiography; universities Acemoglu, Daron, 332, 339, 340 Achebe, Chinua, 121, 208, 494 Achebe, Nwando, 11, 38, 150 Acholi people, 135 Adomako Ampofo, Akosua, 37 Adu‐Boahen, Kwabena, 147 Afghanistan, 408, 409

African American historians, 355–359, 364 African churches, 484, 488 African culture see popular culture, African African diaspora archives, 355, 361 connections, 356 cultural survivals, 356 history of, 355–356 liberation movements, 462 Muslim, 232 numbers, 357 South American, 356 African Muslims, 6, 226–228, 230 in politics, 235 relations with Christians, 235 social histories, 231–232 women, 232

A Companion to African History, First Edition. Edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

502 African National Congress (ANC), South Africa, 187, 192, 208, 461 anti‐discrimination policies, 50 banning, 434, 469 and Cold War, 385, 390 and communism, 468 liberation narrative, 441 military wing, 390, 470 political speeches, 434 post‐apartheid, 441 security infiltration, 441 war with Inkatha Freedom Party, 188 youth see ANC Youth League African nationalism, 25, 51, 68–69, 191, 200–201 literature, 438 martyrs, 386 see also African National Congress (ANC) African personhood, 59–74, 166, 171 colonial administration and, 68, 74 colonial Christianity and, 60, 61–69, 73, 74 and community, 60, 70–73 complexity, 73 crisis of, 70–74 degradation of, 60 idealized, 173 legal, 143 and masculinity, 41 ontology, 61, 70, 73 precolonial, 3, 61, 71 African religious beliefs and practices the dead, 98, 110–112, 114, 115n7, 322 and ethnic politics, 211 healing, 210–211, 311, 318 love and courtship, 124 and medicine see indigenous medicine African Research Survey, 320 Africans, dual psychology of, 3 see also African personhood African technologies, 7 agricultural see agricultural techniques iron smelting see iron smelting, ancient East African

index

African Union, 26 African Union Mission, 411, 412, 415n5 Afrikaner people, 81, 188–189 ancestry, 188–189 ethnic identity, 192–193 Great Trek, 189, 436 landownership, 82 masculinities, 36 nationalism, 436–437, 452n11 sport, 42 Afro‐Caribbean culture, 358–359 agricultural techniques, 46, 293–294, 297, 300, 362 see also pastoralism Ahebi Ugbabe of Nsukka, 38 Ahmadiyya sect, 230, 235 AIDS see HIV/AIDS Akan culture, 122, 212, 216 Akan states, 40 see also Asante kingdom Akyeampong, Emmanuel, 41, 492 Al‐Azhar University, Cairo, 234 Al‐Bashir, Omar, 408 Albers, Thilo, 344 alcohol consumption, 21, 40, 45, 491–492 Alexander, Benny, 77–78 Alexander, Neville, 472–473, 474 Algeria, 79, 80, 85 decolonization, 88 mining, 82 Muslims, 87 nationalism, 384: see also Algerian War of Independence white settlers, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86–87 Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), 86–87, 312 Allen, Robert, 340 Allman, Jean, 212 Alpern, Stanley, 283–284 Alpers, Edward A., 149 Al‐Qaeda, 408, 411, 415n4 al‐Qalqashandi, 424–425 Al‐Shabaab, 410–413, 415n5 Álvares (Alvarez), Domingos, 311, 363 Amadiume, Ifi, 38



index

Amadu Bemba, 230 AmaZulu see Zulus Ambler, Charles, 490, 492 American Indians, 131, 165, 166, 295 Amharic culture, 20 Amin, Idi, 41, 47 Ancient Egypt, 97, 124 ANC Youth League, 434, 443 Anderson, Benedict, 204 Anglican Church, 66 Angola, 22, 98, 388 Cold War, 389–391, 393, 394 decolonization, 88 music, 490 national liberation movements, 389–391 refugees, 253–254, 258 slavery, 150 white settlers, 79, 85, 88 anthropology, 21, 65, 359, 363 of ethnic identity, 164–166, 187, 202, 205, 209–210 medical, 310–311, 315–316, 321, 322–323 of popular culture, 484, 486 urban, 202 anthropometrics, 341–342, 345 apartheid era, South African, 3, 11, 192, 431–453, 473 African resistance, 434, 438, 440, 444, 461–478: see also Southern African liberation movements bantustans, 437, 443, 447 black townships, 439, 440, 445, 446–447, 450–451, 469 censorship, 434, 435, 438 and Christianity, 61–62 and the Cold War, 385 Communism, 432–433 education, 435, 442, 445, 447, 449 emasculation of men, 50 end of, 192–193, 433, 440, 441 historiography, 10–11, 433–434, 435–444 journalism, 444–445, 447–448 labor migration, 433, 447 land ownership, 432

503

legislation, 431–433, 435, 437 memoirs of, 444, 445–451 miscegenation, 432 National Party see National Party of South Africa 1948 elections, 436–437 parliamentary representation, 431, 432, 437 pass system, 433, 445, 449–450, 469 police state, 449–450 racial classification, 432 and sport, 42 universities, 433, 435 and Zulu nationalism, 188 Arabs, 213, 215, 234, 368 see also Islam archaeology of ancient technology, 267–268, 291 of ethnic identity, 185–186 of food production, 291, 292–293 of medicine, 319 present‐day experiments see living archaeology scientific analysis, 273 see also ethnoarchaeology Arrighi, Giovanni, 333–334 Arusha, Tanzania, 252 Asad, Talal, 229 Asante kingdom, 40, 146, 201, 212 Askew, Kelly, 373, 374 Poetry in Motion, 376 Atlantic slave trade, 4, 8, 357, 359–360, 362 abolition, 151 Africanist perspective, 360, 362–363 and African wealth, 40 ethnicities, 360–361 and food production, 294, 295 and gender, 39, 40, 143, 149 historical sources, 359–361 impact on women, 149 Islamic diaspora, 232 Middle Passage, 149, 359 numbers, 357, 359 ports, 359, 360, 361 slave origins, 359, 360

504 Atlantic world, the, 8, 294, 353–364 Africanist perspective, 354–364 definition, 353 and European trade, 353–354 interactions, 353, 363–364 slaves, 354, 363: see also Atlantic slave trade worlds system perspective, 354 Austin, Gareth, 146, 333, 335, 342, 345 Austin, Ralph, 496 Avery, Don, 269, 273, 278, 279, 283, 286n2 Baartman, Sarah, 67, 149 Badi II, Sultan of Sinnar, 422, 423, 426n5 Baganda people, 174–175 Bahia, Brazil, 358, 360, 364 Baidoa, Somalia, 410 Bailyn, Bernard, 354–355 Bakari, Mtoro bin Mwinyi, 371 Bakiga people, 136 Bales, Kevin G., 153 Balla people, 129 Bame, Kwabena, 489 Bandung Conference (1955), 384, 406 Bang, Anne K., 370 Baraka, Amiri, 464 barbarism, concept of, 6, 66, 201, 214, 215–216 Barber, Karin, 486–487, 488, 493 Barber, William J., 333–334 Barka, Fatma, 150–151 Barre, Siyad, 395, 408, 409 Barro, Robert, 331 Barry, Boubacar, 232 Basel Mission, Ghana, 41 Basotho people, 43, 122 Batswana people, 122 Battacharyya, Sambit, 331 Battell, Andrew, 19–20 Baule people, 122 Bay, Edna, 148 Beatrice of Kongo, 20 Beidelman, Thomas, 172 Beinart, William, 295

index

Belcher, Wendy, 20 Belgian colonialism, 44, 63–64, 213 Belgian Congo, 63–64 Bello, Sir Ahmadu, 234, 235 Berg Report, 330 Berlin, Ira, 357 Berry, Sara, 203 Biafra, secession of, 217n7 biblical translation, 68, 226 Bickford‐Smith, Vivian, 189 “big men,” 40–41, 202, 209 Biko, Steve, 51, 462, 466 biomedicine, 308, 310, 312–317 African skepticism, 317 historical sources for, 319 as tool of empire, 312–315, 317 bisexuality, 20 Black Consciousness Movement, South Africa, 51 Blench, Roger, 186 Blyden, Edward, 227–228 Boakye Yiadom, A. K., 41 Boateng, John, 37 Bogohe, Lameck, 371 Bollywood film industry, 134, 490–491, 495 Bonaparte, Marie, 21–22 Bonate, Liazzat, 376 Bonner, Philip, 107–108, 182, 440 Borno, Sudan, 424 Boru, Qaabatu, 259 Boserup, Esther, 293 Botha, P. W., 432 Botswana, 190–191, 257 see also Setswana language; Tswana people Bourguignon, François, 340 Bowden, Sue, 332, 340 Brazil, 356, 362, 363, 364 Portuguese migration, 79 slave trade destination, 358, 359, 360, 361 syncretic religion, 363 Brazzaville, Congo, colonial, 487, 491 Brennan, James, 374 Brenner, Louis, 240



index

bride‐price (bridewealth), 124, 128–130, 139n12, 148 amount of, 48, 170 and slavery, 150 British colonialism, 45–46, 87, 151, 208 fiscal policies, 343 indirect rule see indirect rule and Islam, 227 see also individual colonies British East Africa, 82, 86, 89n4 Brooks, George, 292 Brubaker, Rogers, 205 Buganda, 21, 174–175, 311, 235 Bundy, Colin, 439 Buntman, Fran, 465 Burke, Roland, 385 Burns, James, 494 Burrill, Emily, 146 Burton, Sir Richard, 19, 21 Burundi, 23, 212, 260n2 Bush, Barbara, 149–150 Bushmen of southern Africa, 190, 216 Buthelezi, Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha, 51, 188 Byrnes, James F., 405 Cabral, Amilcar, 389, 465–466 Callaci, Emily, 374 Cameroun, 25 Camus, Albert, 83 Candido, Maria, 147 Candomblé, 363 Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, 81, 295 Cape Colony, 62, 81, 85, 148, 152, 311 Cape Town, South Africa, 189, 432, 435, 436, 475 Capone, Stefania, 363 Caribbean islands, 143, 154n3, 359, 360, 362 Carnegie Commission of Investigation (1929–1930), 83 Carney, Judith, 362 Carrigan, Tim, 36 Carsten, Janet, 165, 166 Casco, Saavedra, 373 cash crops, 338, 345

505

cocoa, 297, 345 coffee, 297 cotton, 297 groundnuts, 297–298 rice, 297 Castro, Fidel, 395 cattle, 39, 46, 129, 168 domestication, 291 for food, 294 see also tsetse fly Central African rainforest, 297 Chamberlain, Joseph, 66 child labor, 149 Childs, S. Terry, 274 China, Republic of, 387, 388 Chinese medicine, 315 Christianity, 3, 16, 20, 22, 41, 111 African converts, 152, 187 and “civilizing mission,” 65–67, 73 modernization, 231 see also Anglican Church; African churches; Dutch Reformed Church; missionaries, Christian; Pentecostal movements; Roman Catholicism; Society of Jesus circumcision, 45 female see clitoridectomy civil conflict, 190–192, 212 clans, 168–169, 207, 311 American Indian, 166 and identity, 175 Clarke, John Henrik, 97 Clarke, Liz, 151 climate change, 7, 291–292, 300, 301 see also environmental variability clitoridectomy, 21, 22 Coates, Peter, 295 Cohen, David William, 40 Cold War, 9, 23, 190, 383–408 crises, 383–393 and foreign aid, 397, 404 ideologies, 383–384 nonaligned movement, 384 proxy wars, 385, 389, 396 United States involvement see under United States

506 Cole, Catherine, 489 Cole, Jennifer, 119–120 Colenso, Bishop John William, 68 colonialism, 7, 20–21, 41–42, 295–298 Belgian, 44, 63–64, 213 and biomedicine, 312–315 British see British colonialism and cash crops, 152 and Christianity, 3, 20, 45, 60–74: see also missionaries “civilizing mission,” 65–67, 73, 313 commodity production, 296 concept of barbarism see barbarism, concept of Dutch, 62, 80, 295 education, 67–68, 214 end of see decolonization environmental effects, 295–296 and ethnic identity, 180–181, 186 export economies, 296 fiscal policies, 343–344 forced labor, 46 French see French colonialism game reserves, 299 gendered, 41–42, 45–46 German see German colonialism legal codes, 203 Portuguese see Portuguese colonialism postwar investment, 384 postwar development policies, 45–46, 297–298 pseudoscience, 22, 23–24, 27n5 and race, 61–63, 186 and slavery, 151 somatic, 63, 69 taxation, 343–344 trade, 337–338 Colonizing African Values, 16 Columbian Exchange, 290, 294–295 Comaroff, Jean, 60–61, 67, 69 Comaroff, John, 60–61, 67, 69 Commonwealth, British, 78, 87 computation systems, precolonial, 423, 427n10 Concussion (Peter Landesman), 119, 120 Congo, 122, 493

index

Cold War see Congo Crisis (1960–1964) colonial, 63–64 independence, 385 Katanga province, 385–386 mining potential, 385, 386 Simbas, 387 see also Democratic Republic of the Congo Congo Crisis (1960–1964), 385–388 Connell, Raewyn W., 36 conservation, environmental, 295, 297, 298–300 and tourism, 300 see also sustainability Cooper, Barbara, 232 Cooper, Frederick, 205 Coplan, David, In Township Tonight!, 489 Corelli, Marie, 493 Côte d’Ivoire, 24, 122, 217, 236, 396 counterterrorism, 401, 408, 410, 414 see also global war on terror (GWT) Crapanzano, Vincent, 87 Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, The (Vail), 180–181 contributors, 180, 181 Crebis, rape and murder of, 62–63 creolization, 359, 363 Cronon, William, 290 Crosby, Alfred, 290 Crosby, William, 289 Crowther, Bishop Samuel Ajayi, 66 Crush, Jonathan, 492 Cuba, 362, 490 Cold War, 389, 393, 395, 407 Curtin, Philip D., 7, 268, 290 Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, 357, 358 Curto, José C., 150 customary law, 144, 188, 202–203 cybersex, 18 Dagbovie, Pero G., 355 Dahomey, 19, 147, 148 Dale, Andrew, 129–130 dance, 484, 485 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 47, 48, 164, 409



index

Darfur region, Sudan, 212, 424 databases economic, 337, 344 household surveys, 340 slave trade, 8, 359–361 Davis, Mike, 296 Dawson, Marc, 316 De Barros, João, 369 Decker, Alicia, 40–41 decolonization, 88, 356–357, 384 de Klerk, F. W., 444 Democratic Republic of the Congo, 396 demography, African, 294, 295, 300 and food production, 293 see also migration; urbanization Deutsch, Jan‐Georg, 151 development economics, 333–335, 344, 345 see also GDP per capita; taxation Diawara, Mamadou, 149 Difaqane see Mfecane Dingiswayo ka Jobe, 97, 102, 106, 108 Diop, Cheik Anka, 97, 98 disease epidemics, 313, 322–323 and burial practices, 322 cordon sanitaires, 323 Ebola see Ebola epidemic (2014–2015) diseases, in Africa, 290–291, 312, 314 Ebola see Ebola epidemic (2014–2015) environments, 290 malaria, 290, 295, 300, 312, 323 trypanosomiasis, 290, 291, 293 yellow fever, 290, 295 yaws, 315, 316 see also vaccinations divorce, 134, 165, 172, 258 Djebar, Assia, 370, 377n5 Djibouti, 401, 404, 406, 409–410 Dladla, A. H., 103, 108 uNtombazi, 106, 111–112 Dlamini, Moses, 474 domestication of animals and plants, 291–292 domestic work, 49, 154n1, 447, 449 skills, 43 by slaves, 145, 146, 147, 148, 153

507

domestic violence, 146 dominions, 78, 79 Donham, Donald, 50 Dorkay House, Johannesberg, 477 Douglas, Harold Monday, 64 Drum magazine, 36, 434, 491 Du Bois, W. E. B., 8, 200, 355 Dubow, Saul, 444 Durlauf, Steven, 331 Dutch colonialism, 62, 80, 295 Dutch East India Company, 62, 81 Dutch Reformed Church, 62 East African Literature Bureau, 371 East Africa, 200, 492 colonial, 82, 86, 89n4, 151 epidemics, 299 refugees, 251–256 see also individual countries Easterly, William, 330 Eastman, Carol, 148 Ebola epidemic (2014–2015), 7–8, 307–308, 318–319, 322 areas affected, 307 conspiracy theories, 317 evolving therapies, 316, 318 global intervention, 318–319 and medical pluralism, 318, 322 and public health, 308 transmission, 307 economic development, 333, 337, 344 postwar colonial policies, 45–46, 297–298 and taxation, 343 economic growth, 8, 329–331, 335–338 instability of, 331, 337 starting points, 335, 336, 344 economic history, African, 330–339, 344–345 data, 335, 337, 339, 340 methodology, 333, 334 time perspectives, 332, 335, 336 economic institutions, 332, 343 economists, 331–333 Eden, Anthony, 404 education, colonial, 22, 67–68

508

index

education, Islamic, 240 Egypt, 384, 508 ancient see Ancient Egypt Eisenberg, Andrew, 376 Ekeh, Peter, 72 Ellis, Stephen, 332 emancipation of slaves, 151–152, 154n3 and assimilation slavery, 151–152 enforcement, 151 Western Cape, 151, 152 and women, 151–152 Englund, Harri, 248 enslavement, process of, 144, 149, 150, 152 and assimilation, 144, 148 contemporary, 153 Ensor, Bradley, 165 environmental variability, 7, 289–301 and conflict, 292 deforestation, 292–293, 299 and demography, 292, 296 and food production, 292–293 human adaptation, 290–291, 292, 300 and landscapes, 292 Epprecht, Marc, 50 Eritrea, 394, 403, 404–405, 408 independence movement, 406–407 war on terror, 408, 414 Ernst, Walthraud, 317 Ethiopia, 24, 122, 293, 404–405 claim to Eritrea, 394–395, 404–405 Cold War, 394–396, 404–407 Derg military junta, 394, 395, 407 famine, 396 imperial charters, 424 Islam, 234 1935 invasion, 254 refugees, 253 war on terror, 408 see also Abyssinia Ethiopian Orthodox Church, 20 ethnicity, 5–6, 179, 199–218 creation of, 180–181, 186 definitions, 179–180, 181 and identity see ethnic identity and nationalism, 199 precolonial, 182

scholarship, 180–193 slave, 360 in southern Africa, 179–183 and violence, 212 see also race ethnic politics, 207, 208, 209, 210, 213 ethnic identity, 5, 179–180, 202–206 constructivism see social constructivism and gender, 183 instrumentalism, 181, 204, 205 linguistic, 185 multiple, 180 political use of see ethnic politics primordial, 206 situational, 202 slave, 360–361 urban, 187, 193 ethnoarchaeology, 269–275 Ehret, Christopher, 291, 292 Everill, Bronwen, 254 evolution, 290–291 Fabian, Johannes, 484, 493 Fage, John, 201 Fair, Laura, 373, 377, 492, 494 Fairhead, James, 298–299, 322 Falk, Kurt, 22 Falola, Toyin, 63 Fanakalo language, 189 Fani‐Kayode, Rotimi, 25 Fanon, Frantz, 312, 465 Feidel, Jan, 373 Feierman, Steven, 210, 311 female genital mutilation see clitoridectomy feminism, 37 Ferguson, James, 237 Ferreira, Roquinaldo, 364 Fipa culture, 174, 270 Fisher, Humphrey, 230, 233–234 folk music, 358 folktales, 125–127 food production, 291, 292–293, 294 and climate change, 293 and land use, 293, 294, 296 irrigation, 294, 297

staples, 291–292, 293–294, 295 technology see agricultural techniques for urban consumption, 297 forced labor, 46, 152, 253 forced migration, 248, 249–250 see also refugees Ford, John, 290, 309 forests in Africa, 298–299 conservation, 298–299 decline, 292–293, 299 Fortes, Meyer, 166 Foucault, Michel, 225, 236 Frankema, Ewout, 341, 343, 345 freedom songs, 464–468, 470–475, 484 freed slaves, 147, 364 Freeman‐Grenville, G. T. P., 368 Freetown, Sierra Leone, 151 FRELIMO, 191, 192, 389 French colonialism, 80, 86 and Islam, 227 and development, 297 fiscal policies, 343 masculinities, 45, 46, 48 and slavery, 152, 154n3 Funj people, 422 Funj kingdom see Sinnar, kingdom of Gabon, 49 Garissa University, 413 Garzarelli, Giampaolo, 184 Gaudio, Rudolf, 50, 233 Gaza kingdom, Mozambique, 99, 103 GDP per capita, 329, 330, 336, 337 data sets, 337–339 historical estimates, 336, 337, 346n4 variable methodology for, 338 Geider, Thomas, 370–371 gender flexibility, 20, 35, 38, 41, 50 gender studies, 35–52 gender systems, African, 38, 47 precolonial, 38–39 genetics, 300–301 genocide, 85–86, 396 Genovese, Eugene, 483 German colonialism, 79, 251 see also individual colonies

index

509

German East Africa, 151, 251, 296, 370 German South West Africa, 79, 82, 85, 253–254 Germany, 79, 85, 329 gerontocracy, 38, 171, 172, 165 colonial support for, 38 ideologies, 167 Gerschenkron, Alexander, 339 Getz, Trevor R., 151 Ghana, 166, 207, 342, 492 colonial see Gold Coast colony economy, 336–337, 338–339, 342, 345 independence, 47, 357 masculinities, 37, 40, 47 music, 489 precolonial, 340 slavery, 153, 216 Giblin, James, 251, 252 Gilbert, Shiri, 464 Giliomee, Hermann, 442–443, 453n17 Gikuyu people, 24–25, 121 and colonialism, 207–208 ethnic politics, 207, 208, 209 Gizenga, Antoine, 387 Glaser, Clive, 43 Gleijeses, Piero, 389, 393 global health, 239, 308, 322–323 governance systems, 322 initiatives, 307, 318–319, 322, 323 global war on terror (GWT), 9, 401–402, 408–413 Gluckman, Max, 187 Godane, Ahmed Abdi, 411, 412 Gold Coast colony, 40, 49 economic data, 297, 337, 338, 345 musical entertainment, 488–489 slavery, 145, 151, 152 gold mining, 42, 82, 145, 296, 438, 439 Gomez, Michael, 232 Gondola, Didier, 36–37, 44 Tropical Cowboys, 496 Greene, Sandra E., 152 Grout, Lewis, 108 Grove, Richard, 295 Gudaji, Hadiza Nuhu, 134

510 guerrillas, 257, 390, 393, 407 urban, 412 Guinea, 24, 364, 387 Ebola epidemic, 307 slave trade, 360, 361–362 Guinea‐Bissau, 361, 389 Gwayi, Joyce Jessie, 103, 109 Shumpu, 103, 104, 105 habitus, 211–212 Habtewold, Aklilu, 405 Hall, Bruce S., 233 Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo, 360–361 Hamilton, Carolyn, 101, 110, 182 Hammarskjöld, Dag, 386 Hammond‐Tooke, W. D., 182, 185–186 Hansberry, Leo, 355 Hanry, Pierre, 17 Hansen, Art, 258 harems, 146, 154n1 Harris, Joseph E., 358 Hartwig, Gerald W., 309 Hathaway, James C., 248 Hatshepsut, Queen of Egypt, 98 Hausa people, 122, 130, 132, 149 Hausa states, 215 Hawthorne, Walter, 293–294 Hay, Jean, African Novels in the Classroom, 490 Haya iron‐smelting technology, 269, 277, 284 processes, 269, 273–274, 277, 280, 281–282 disputes over, 279–281, 284–285 Headrick, Daniel, Tools of Empire, 312 health, 7–8, 307–323 African contributions, 8, 308 environmental impact, 308 global see global health primary care, 308–309, 315 public see public health see also diseases, in Africa; medicine Hegel, G. W. F., 201 hegemonic masculinity, 36–40 “big man” status, 40–41 herbal medicines, 317–318

index

Herero people, 85, 254 Herskovits, Melville J., 356, 358 Myth of the Negro Past, 356 heterosexual norms, 2, 21, 23, 15–16 and cultural stereotypes, 16–17, 18, 21 Hichens, William, 368 historical epidemiology, 308, 323 historical novels, 103–107, 110, 112, 113–115 and Queen Mother Ntombazi, 99, 102, 103–104, 106–107, 110–111 and tribalism, 204, 207 historiography, 110, 235 Africanist, 356–359, 360–361, 362, 364, 483–486, 492 Swahili, 370 traditions, 214, 332 sources see historical sources for African history see also individual historians HIV/AIDS, 23, 25, 120, 309, 323, 377 HIV transmission, 23, 27n2, 309 in literature, 375, 377 Hodgson, Dorothy, 45 Hodgson, Marshall, 228–229 Hoffman, Danny, 394, 397 Hofmeyr, Isabel, 493 Hollis, A. C., 369–370 homoeroticism, 25 homophobia, 16, 20, 21, 25, 27n4 homosexuality, 15, 16–17, 19–25, 49–51 African debate, 15, 22, 24 gender binaries, 50 legislation against, 15, 25, 26 lesbianism, 20 and popular culture, 24 religious influence, 16 and transgender, 50 see also bisexuality Hopkins, A. G., 334–335 Horn of Africa, 401–415 Cold War, 394–396, 403–408 geographical area, 401

Islam, 233, 235 oilfields, 402, 405 strategic significance, 402–404, 408 US military presence, 401–403 war on terror, 9, 408–413 see also individual countries human genome, 300–301 human rights, 385, 395 see also torture Hunt, Nancy Rose, 52, 316, 377 Hunter, Emma, 371 Hunter, Mark, Love in the Time of AIDS, 120 Hussein, Ebrahim, 375 Hutu group, 213, 214, 260n2 identity, tribalization of, 73 Igbo society, 38, 39, 120, 208 colonial oppression, 63 love poems, 136 marriage customs, 128, 131 slavery, 150 Iliffe, John, 203, 204, 323, 345 Imbangala people, 20 immigration policies, 17, 82, 258 and contemporary slavery, 153 India, colonial, 83, 228, 312, 315 film industry see Bollywood film industry Indian migrants, 42, 82, 200, 435, 443 as employers, 189 ethnic diversity, 189 and medicine, 321 Muslim groups, 234, 235 Indian Ocean world, 8, 9, 19, 294, 376 slave trade, 149, 153 indigenous languages, 3–4, 96–97, 163–164 bible translation, 68 codification, 101–102, 108, 181, 182 as cultural resistance, 466, 473, 478 dialects, 183, 204 words for “love,” 120–121 Zulu see isiZulu language see also linguistics

index

511

indigenous medicine, 308, 310, 311, 315, 318 traditional healers, 169, 310–311 see also African religious beliefs and practices; herbal medicines; medical pluralism; witchcraft indirect rule, 151, 203, 205–206 and tribalism, 203, 205–206 initiation, ritual, 19, 38–39, 45, 211 Inkatha Freedom Party, South Africa, 51, 188 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 330 Iran, 234, 414 Iringa region, Tanzania, 163, 166–167, 168 iron smelting, ancient East African, 7, 268, 269–277 compared to European bloomery process, 269, 271, 277, 279 ethnoarchaeology of, 269–275, 279, 284 Eurocentric assumptions, 268–269, 278, 282, 285 dating, 272, 273, 279 origins, 267–269 preheating, 270–271, 274, 277–278, 283 calculations, 279, 281–283 and furnace thermodynamics, 269–270, 271 history of, 275–276 material proofs for, 272, 275, 278, 280 raw materials, 269–270 technological sophistication, 267, 269–275 Irwin, Ryan, 385 Isaacs, Sedick, 475–476 Surviving the Apartheid Prison, 476 isiZulu language, 4, 68, 96–97, 101, 108, 121 literary texts, 102, 103–104, 111 love proverbs, 122 oral tradition, 96, 100–101 primers, 101–102

512

index

Islam in Africa, 6, 16, 19, 215, 225–241, 369 analytic divisions of, 228, 230 Black, 227 conversion, 230, 236 definitions, 227–229 education, 240, 370 European constructions, 227, 228–229 interaction with Christianity, 233–236 jihad, 228, 230, 232, 239: see also jihadists and literacy, 229, 238–239, 422 medicine, 319 and mission, 235 and neoliberalism, 238, 239 pilgrimage, 234 precolonial, 425 reform, 230–231, 234 Shi’ite, 234 and slavery, 215–216, 232 see also Muslim intellectuals; Muslim societies and terrorism, 239 as worldview, 226–227 see also Muslim intellectuals; Muslim societies; Sufism Islamic law, 147, 150, 173, 229, 425 Italo‐Abyssinian War (1935–1936), 254–255 Ivaska, Andrew, 47 ivory, export of, 297 Ivory Coast see Cöte d’Ivoire Jackson, Sir Frederick, 21 James Stuart Archives, 102, 107 Janzen, Jean, 315 Jayawardane, Neelika, 444 Jean‐Baptiste, Rachel, 48 Jedwab, Rémi, 345 Jenkins, Robert, 334 Jennings, William, 68 Jerven, Morten, 337, 346n6 Jesuits, 20 jihadists, 215, 397, 409, 410, 413 Johannesburg, 187, 188, 440, 489 political protests, 450, 469, 470 see also Witwatersrand, South Africa

Johnson‐Reagon, Bernice, 466 Johnston, Harry H., 21 Johnstone, Rick, 438–439 Jones, Sian, 186 Jordan, A. C., 435 Journal of African Cultural Studies, 494 Journal of Negro History, 355, 356 Jung, Carl, 17, 23 Junod, Henri, 21 Kagera region, Tanzania, 269, 270–271 Kagnew Station, Ethiopia, 405, 406 Kalabari‐Ijo people, 70–71 Kala Shairi anthology, 373 Kampala, Uganda, 415n5 Kandoro, Saadan, 372, 373 Kane, Cheikh Hamidou, L’Aventure Ambigue, 240 Kankan region, West Africa, 45, 171 Kano, 132, 147, 153 Kaoma, Kapya, 16, 26 Karibib refugee camp, Namibia, 254 Kassim, Mohamed, 376 Katanga Secession, 385–386 Keeton, Lyndal, 184 Kemondo Bay archaeological sites, 273, 274 Kennan, George, 403 Kenya, 1–2, 50, 82, 252, 342 ancient irrigation systems, 294 colonial, 45, 79, 84–85: see also British East Africa decolonization, 88 folktales, 126–127 Green Belt movement, 299 independence, 474–475 languages, 121 refugee hosts, 252, 255, 257, 258 white racism, 84–85 white settlement, 298 see also Gikuyu people; Mau Mau Rebellion; Swahili culture Kenyatta, Jomo, 21, 22, 24–25, 375 nationalism, 25, 208, 375 speeches, 375 Kenyon, Susan, 148



index

Khatmiyya brotherhood, 235–236 Khoikhoi people, 62, 81 Khoisan people, 192, 295 Khumalo, Fred, 445, 446, 447, 449, 450–451 Khumalo people, 105 Kibabina, Siu poet, 373 Killick, David, 279–280, 283–284, 286n3 Kilwa chronicles, 368–369 Kimpa Vita, 20 Kinshasa, 37, 44 kinship, 5, 163–176, 182, 211–212 East African, 163–164, 165, 209 economic importance, 168–169 ideologies, 209, 234 negotiation, 168–169, 173 sororities, 170–171 and witchcraft, 167 see also clans kinship studies, 165–166, 170–176 Kismayo, Somalia, 411, 412 Kissinger, Henry, 390 Kiswahili, 121–122, 167, 173 texts, 9, 375–377 Kitab Subh al‐A‘sha (al‐Qalqashandi), 424–425 Kjekshus, Helge, 296 Klein, Martin A., 143, 145–146, 232 Kloss, Heinz, 184–185 Kodesh, Neil, 175, 311 Kongo people, history of, 19 Kopytoff, Igor, 143, 209 Kresse, Kai, 374, 375 Kumasi, Ghana, 40 Kunene, Mazisi, 104, 111, 115n4 Emperor Shaka the Great, 95, 96, 98, 100, 103–104, 112–113, 115n3 use of oral tradition, 100, 103 Kuper, Leo, 438 KwaZulu‐Natal, 95, 99, 115, 188, 446, 447 labor, 144–146 rural productivity, 338 seasonal, 338–339 slave see slavery

513

wages see wages see also child labor; forced labor; labor migration labor migration, 183, 191, 202, 204 colonial, 42, 45, 82, 167, 168 southern Africa, 21, 42–43, 49–50, 83, 191, 204, 433 Lagos, Nigeria, 490, 495 La Guma, Alex, 466 La Hausse, Paul, 492 Lambo, T. A., 315, 318 Lamu Chronicle, 369 Landau, Paul, 73, 184, 186 landownership, 82, 146, 209, 432 language, 5, 184–185, 211 indigenous see indigenous languages see also Fanakalo language; linguistics; Kiswahili Larkin, Brian, 490–491 Latin American dependency theory, 210 Law, Robin, 364 Lawrance, Benjamin N., 153 Leach, Melissa, 298–299 Lee, John, 36 Leichtman, Mara, 234 Lentz, Carola, 216–217 Le Page, Robert, 185 Lesotho, 44, 190, 191 see also Sotho people Lessing, Doris, 84 Levine, Lawrence, 463 Lewis, Arthur, 333, 334, 338 LGBTI in AFrica, 24, 50 see also bisexuality; homosexuality Liberia, 307, 394, 396 Libreville, Equatorial Africa, 48–49 Liebenberg, B. J., 436–437 Lindsay, Lisa, 37, 40 linguistics, 170–171, 184–186, 291 Lippmann, Walter, 355 literacy, 132, 372, 421, 449, 492–493 Arabic, 229, 422 and Islam, 238–239, 241: see also Muslim intellectuals living archaeology, 270, 271–272 Living in Bondage (Nnebue, 1992), 495

514

index

Lodge, Tom, 444 Lonsdale, John, 181, 207, 208, 209 Love in Africa (Cole & Thomas), 119–120 love and courtship, language of, 4, 120–139 folktales, 125–126 lovebeads, 123–124 poems, 122, 134–135 proverbs, 121–123, 136 scholarship, 119–120, 138–139 Lovejoy, Paul, 143, 151, 154n1, 232 Luedke, Tracy, 317 Lugard, Lord Frederick, 64, 67 Lumumba, Patrice, 386 Luthuli, Albert, 208, 434 Luyia people, 127–128 Maasai Development Project, 46 Maasai people, 45–46, 251, 252, 294 Maathai, Wangari, 299 MacGonagle, Elizabeth, 183 Machel, Samora, 392 Mack, Beverly, 153 MacMillan, Hugh, 191 Maddox, Gregory H., 371 Mafeje, Archie, 435 Magolwane kaMkhathini Jiyane, 96 Magomola, Gaby, 471–472, 476 Robben Island to Wall Street, 476–477 Magona, Sindiwe, 445, 446, 449, 450 Magubane, Bernard, 485 Maji Maji Rebellion, 251, 311, 373, 375 Makeba, Miriam, 461, 462 Makeda (Queen of Sheba), 98 Making Men in Ghana (Miescher), 41 Malawi, 248 colonial see Northern Rhodesia Mali, 24, 46, 172, 240 Malkki, Liisa, 248, 260n2 Mambo Leo newspaper, 371 Mandala, Elias, 150 Mandela, Nelson, 434, 441, 443 autobiography, 444 president of South Africa, 440 Rivonia trial, 444, 462 on Robben Island, 461, 472 Mandela, Winnie, 25

Mann, Kristin, 364 Manson, Patrick, 313 Mantathisi, Queen Regent of the Batlokwa, 95, 96, 100 Manyika people, 183 Maquet, Jacques, 23 Maranhão, Upper Guinea, 361–362 Marashea gangs, Witwatersrand, 43–44 Marchal, Roland, 411 Marks, Shula, 310 marriage, 4, 19, 41, 119, 127–131 archives, 131–132 deity‐to‐human, 131 economic arrangements, 42, 119, 120 and female agency, 171 forced, 128 and kinship, 168–169 religious influences, 41, 130 and slavery, 152 see also bride‐price (bridewealth); divorce; harems; kinship; love and courtship, language of; polygamy; woman marriage Martin, Phyllis, 487, 491 masculinities, 2–3, 35–52 colonial, 41–42 concepts, 3, 36, 37–38 elite, 38–39 female, 38, 41, 47: see also gender flexibility hierarchical, 36, 39–40: see also hegemonic masculinity and labor migration, 42 military, 39, 40–41 multiple, 38–39 postcolonial, 37, 47 scholarship, 35–52 urban, 36, 43: see also urban gang culture white African, 36 Maslin, Mark, 337 mass media print see newspapers radio see radio Matory, J. Lorand, 22 matriarchy, 98, 106

matrilinear societies, 38–39, 148, 212 Mau Mau Rebellion, 87–88, 208, 314 Maus, Marcel, 166 Mazov, Sergey, 387 Mbah, Ndubueze, 39 Mbeki, Govan, 473–474 Mbeki, Thabo, 466–467, 473 Mbiti, John, 70 McCann, James, 293 McDougall, E. Ann, 150–151 McIntosh, Roderick, 292 McIntosh, Susan Keech, 292 McKittrick, Meredith, 38 McMahon, Elizabeth, 149, 173 Meyer, Birgit, 493 Mfecane, 99, 184 medical journals, 320, 323 medical pluralism, 308, 309, 315–319, 320, 322 plant exchanges, 317–318 medical theories, 313 see also medical journals medicine, 7–8, 82, 236, 307–323 childbirth, 316 European interventions, 7, 236, 308–309, 312–315 herbal, 317–318 indigenous see indigenous medicine pluralism see medical pluralism tropical see tropical medicine see also biomedicine; diseases, in Africa; historical epidemiology; human genome; medical theories; public health memory, collective, 421, 425–426 memory, art of, 425–426, 428n21 Mengistu Haile Mariam, 394, 395 metallurgy, 279, 282 see also iron smelting, ancient East African Mgxashe, Mxolisi, 470–471 Miers, Suzanne, 143 migration European, 79 environmental, 291, 293 forced, 248, 249–250

index

515

labor see labor migration see also immigration policies; settler societies Miller, Duncan E., 279, 282 Miller, Joseph C., 150, 154n1 mining, 42, 82, 309 gold see gold mining Mintz, Sidney W., 358–359 miscegenation, 19, 49, 79, 432 missionaries, Christian, 230, 253, 313, 320 African, 236 and cultural colonialism, 41, 45, 64–74, 228 and Islam, 228 missions, Christian, 65, 152, 320, 493 runaway slave havens, 149, 152 Mitchell, James Clyde, 187, 485 Mitterand, François, 87 Mkufya, William, 375 Mnkabayi kaJama, Queen Regent of amaZulu, 95, 96, 97, 100 Mobutu Sese Soko (Joseph), 41, 387 Mogadishu, Somalia, 396, 401, 410, 411 Mohamed, Fazul Abdullah, 409, 411–412 Mohamed, Said Ahmed, Asali Chungu, 375 Mombasa slavewomen, 148, 150 Monrovia, Liberia, 307, 318 Monsoon Exchange, 291–292 Moodie, Dunbar, 49 Moorman, Marissa, 490 Moradi, Alexander, 342, 345 moral ethnicity, 181–182, 208, 210 Morgan, Philip, 357 Morocco, 24, 128 Morrell, Robert, 36, 44 Morrison, Christian, 340 Moseneke, Dikgang, 471–472, 478 Mozambique, 79, 85, 135–136, 188, 376 civil conflict, 190, 191, 248, 389, 392–393 Cold War, 389, 392 decolonization, 88 Portuguese rule, 188, 388 refugees, 248, 257, 258 see also FRELIMO Mugabe, Robert, 390, 391

516 Mukhtar Robow Ali, 412 Muller, C. F. J., 436, 437 Museveni, Yoweri, 15 Mushet, David, 267 music, 465, 488–489 classical, 476, 477 popular, 488–489 recorded, 488, 489 as resistance, 10, 461–478 sacred, 488 see also song Muslim Brotherhood, 408 Muslim intellectuals, 226, 424 Muslim societies, 6, 10, 238 European perspectives, 6 law see Islamic law slavery, 146, 150 see also African Muslims Mutumbei, Aldin, 377 Muyaka bin Haji, 375, 378n8 Mwangi, Meja, Down River Road, 490 Myers, Garth, 374–375 Mzilikazi kaMashobane Khumalo, 99, 103, 105, 109, 192 Naidoo, Indres, 470 Nairobi, Kenya, 88, 258, 299, 409, 490 Namibia, 22, 24, 38, 192 German rule see German South West Africa South African rule, 188, 390 Namikas, Lise, 387, 388 Nandi kaMbengi, Queen, 96 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 234, 384 Natal, South Africa, 42, 187, 436 Natal Pharmaceutical Society, 321 nationalism, 51, 199–200, 204, 208, 213, 217 Afrikaner, 437–438, 452n11 Somali, 406 Zulu see Zulu nationalism see also African nationalism; tribalism national liberation movements, 191–192, 388–391 see also individual movements national parks, 299–300

index

National Party of South Africa, 431, 440, 441, 436–437 defenses of apartheid, 442, 443 segregation policies, 431–433 see also apartheid era, South African National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), 389, 390, 394 Native Americans see American Indians Ndau people, 183–184 Ndebele people, 103, 121, 123, 192, 391, 392 Ndungane, Njongonkulu, 470 Ndwandwe kingdom, 4, 95, 99–100, 106, 107, 109 defeat by Shaka, 102, 103–104 disputed brutality, 96, 100, 109–110, 111 European references, 102 royal security, 101 see also Ntombazi, Queen Mother of the Ndwandwe; Zwide kaLanga, King of the Ndwandwe Ndzinga, Queen of Angola, 98 Negro Society of Historical Research, 355 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 384 neocolonialism, 153, 484 neoliberalism, 236–239 Newell, Stephanie, 493 newspapers, 48, 371, 374, 377, 434, 493 censorship, 435 online, 259 as source material, 371, 374, 493 see also individual newspapers and journals New York City, 153, 462 New York Public Library, 355, 428n18 New York Times, 469 Ngalamulume, Kalala, 314 Ngcobo, Linda, 50 Ngcobo, Moses, 103 Qhude Manikiniki, 103, 106, 109 Ngoni people, 105, 109, 129, 13n12 Ngubane, Jordan, 96, 100 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 494 Nicholson, Sharon, 292



index

Nieftagodien, Noor, 441 Nielson, James Beaumont, 276 Niger, 128 Niger Delta, 153, 292 Nigeria, 128, 132, 389 Christian–Muslim relations, 234 colonial, 42, 63, 64, 151, 227 gender flexibility, 50 homophobia, 25 Islam, 227 popular culture, 490, 491, 494, 495: see also Nollywood urban, 50 see also individual peoples Nile Delta, 292 Nkomo, Joshua, 390 Nkumane, Vusi, 470, 471 Nkrumah, Kwame, 47, 384 Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Benjamin, 208 Nnebue, Kenneth, 495 Nnobi people, 38 Nollywood film industry, 495–496 nonaligned movement, 384 Non‐European Unity Movement (NEUM), South Africa, 461, 462, 472 non‐governmental organizations (NGOs), 316, 322 and refugees, 247, 250, 256, 257, 258 Nordstrom, Carolyn, 393 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 385 Northern Rhodesia, 79, 82, 298, 309 Norton, Anne, 63 novelists, African, 22, 102, 133–135, 494 bias, 107 use of oral tradition, 103, 107 see also individual novelists novels, African, 103–115, 132–133 historical see historical novels Novimbi okaMsweli, Queen Regent of amaZulu, 95 Ntombazi, Queen Mother of the Ndwandwe, 4, 95–96, 99–115 historical sources for, 100 negative portrayal, 100, 104, 109, 110–112

517

Nubia, medieval kingdom of, 234, 421, 424, 425, 426n1 Nunn, Nathan, 331, 339 Nurse, Derek, 369 Nwokeji, G. Ugo, 143 Nyerere, Julius, 372, 384, 471 Nzula, A. T., 434 Obichere, Boniface, 148 Ocobock, Paul, 45 Odhiambo, Atieno, 40 Ogaden, Somalia, 405–406, 407 Ogbomo, Onaiwu, 98, 150 Ohafia, Nigeria, 39 Oman, 376 Onitsha Market Literature, 11, 131–132, 484, 493–494 Organisation of African Unity, 256 Osama bin Laden, 408, 411 Osborn, Emily L., 44–45, 171, 172 Osseo‐Asare, Abena Dove, 317–318 Otieno, S. M., 40 Ovambo people, 38–39, 192, 254 Oxford History of South Africa, 436, 437, 441 Packard, Randall, 309, 323 pan‐Africanism, 200, 462, 463, 474 Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), 77, 469, 471 Robben Island prisoners, 461, 462, 468, 470, 474–476, 477 Sharpeville, 434, 460, 468–470 Pará, Brazil, 361 Parle, Julie, 321 pastoralism, 19, 45–46, 135, 211, 294, 299 see also cattle patriarchy, 36, 95–96, 98, 170–172 and colonialism, 37 ideology, 167 and masculinities, 36–37 myth, 170–171 and sexuality, 19, 21 Patterson, David, 308, 309 peasant economies, 332, 338, 340

518

index

Pemba, Zanzibar, 173 Penn, Nigel, 62 Pentecostal movements, 493 People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, 389, 390 personhood, 59, 63, 69, 70–71, 166–167 African see African personhood Pheko, Motsoko, 469 photography, 25, 434 Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan), 493 piracy, 9, 146 Plaatje, Sol, 434 poaching, 300 poetry, 135–136, 370, 372–374, 376–377 Pogrund, Benjamin, 462–463 political tribalism, 181–182, 201–202, 213 polygamy, 19, 23, 131 popular culture, African 11, 483–496 Caribbean, 358–359 cinema, 494–495 concert party theater, 489 definition, 491 dress, 491 drinking venues, 491, 492 Europeanization, 485–486, 488 fiction, 487, 491 and gender, 486 historiography, 484–496 and nationalism, 490 resilience, 483 Portugal, 389 Portuguese colonialism, 20, 79, 80, 376, 188, 388 and ethnicity, 183, 188 Jesuits, 20 record‐keeping, 361 rivalry with Arabs, 80 settlers, 83, 85 slavery, 150 slave trade, 20 see also individual Portuguese colonies Posner, Daniel, 187 postmodernism, 205 poverty, 8, 329–346 comparisons, 341 definitions, 336, 340

explanations of, 329–332 European colonization, 331 geography, 331 institutions, 331–332 slave trade, 331 and good governance, 330 postcolonial, 335–336 and subsistence ratios, 340–341 Prestholdt, Jeremy, 375 Price, Richard, 358–359 prices, 146, 335, 340, 345 primordialism, 181, 205, 206, 212 Pritchett, Lant, 331 prostitution, 43, 50, 145, 146 proverbs, African, 101, 121–123 psychology, 314, 318 public health, 18, 26, 311, 313, 314 and colonial control, 313–314 HIV/AIDS see HIV/AIDS and segregation, 312, 313 traditional African practices, 311 and tropical medicine, 313 vaccinations, 314–315, 317 see also disease epidemics Puntland, Somalia, 410, 412 Qader, Nasrin, 240 queer theory, 17 quinine, 82, 312, 316, 317 race, 6, 20–21, 42, 61, 200, 233 and colonialism, 49, 61, 199–200, 208 science see scientific racism and sexual stereotypes, 21–23, 26 see also ethnic identity; miscegenation; racial superiority narratives race riots, 49 racialization, 213–214, 216 racial superiority narratives, 6, 20, 42, 63, 84 see also apartheid era, South African racism, 148, 151, 216, 431 colonial, 4, 61, 63, 65, 214, 310, 368 East African, 200, 208 and historiography, 356, 357



index

and Islam, 233 scientific see scientific racism South African see apartheid era, South African radio, 1, 134, 471, 494 Radio Marina intelligence base, Asmara, 403, 404, 405 railways (railroads), 42, 82, 296–297, 345 port connections, 296 see also transportation Ramphele, Mamphela, 51 Ranger, Terence, 67, 180, 181, 203, 217n4 criticisms, 182, 186 Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 484, 486, 488 rape, 43, 44, 62–63, 149 Ratele, Kopano, 37 Ray, Carina, 49 Reagan, Ronald, 391 refugee camps, 247, 253–258, 393 refugee regimes, 247, 248, 250, 252, 255, 260 refugees, 6, 247–261, 414 acceptance of, 251–252 and agency, 249 and colonialism, 252–256 definitions, 248, 256 enslavement, 252 historical sources, 250, 259 identity documents, 257 humanitarian relief, 253, 254 and identity, 250, 260n2 impact on hosts, 252, 256, 414 legal status, 260n1 motivation, 249 NGOs, 247, 250, 256, 257, 258 numbers, 247 returning, 249–250, 252, 414 refugee studies, 247–248, 259 Rehder, J. E., 278, 279–280, 281–282, 283 Reid, Graeme, 50 Reis, João José, 362 religions, 225–227, 230–231, 237, 493 see also African religious beliefs and practices; Christianity; Islam Renaissance, 425

519

RENAMO, 191, 392–393 Renguin, Jules, 64–65 Reno, William, 393 Rhodesia pre‐1980 see Southern Rhodesia post‐1980 see Zimbabwe Riebeeck, Jan van, 81 Rivonia trial (1963–1964), 444, 462 Robben Island, 10, 459–461, 465 cultural resistance, 461–467, 471–473, 476 museum, 465 prisoners, 460, 461, 462, 468, 470, 473, 474–477, 475 stone quarries, 460, 473, 475 Robert, Shaaban, 372 Roberts, Jonathan, 317 Roberts, Richard L., 145, 153, 172 Robertson, Claire, 143, 144–145, 150 Robertson, Jamela, 445, 446, 448–449, 450 Robinson, David, 230 Roman Catholicism, 20, 64, 66, 174, 236 church records, 360–361 romantic love see love and courtship, language of Ronnback, Klas, 340 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 405 Rosenthal, Jill, 259 Ruffini, Giovanni, 424 Rwanda, 6, 212, 213, 214, 396 Saad, Elias, 368 Sade, Marquis de, 20 Aline et Valcour, 20 Sahlins, Marshall, 166, 167 Said, Edward, 228 Saidi, Christine, 170–171 Saleh, Ali Abdellah, 414 Sanneh, Lamin, 68–69, 231 Saudi Arabia, 408, 414 Saul, Mahir, 496 Schmidt, Elizabeth, 402 Schmidt, Peter R. Haya iron smelting, 269–280, 283 Nyanza deforestation, 292–293 Schoenbrun, David, 210, 293

520 Schomburg, Arthur, 355 Schumaker, Lynn, 310 scientific racism, 213–215 Scott, James C., 466, 467, 484 Scully, Pamela, 151, 152 segregation, racial, 18, 186, 312, 313 legislation, 431–432 see also apartheid era, South African Selassie, Haile, 394, 404, 405, 407 Senegal, 23, 235, 490 Senzangakhona, King of the Zulu, 97 Sesotho language, 122, 129, 182, 473 Setswana language, 122, 129, 182, 473, 478 settler societies in Africa, 77–88, 295–297, 332 and Cold War, 388–389 demography, 78, 89n1 dependence on indigenous labor, 78, 82 identification with Africa, 77, 78 immigration restrictions, 82 and metropolis, 86 militia, 81 miscegenation, 79 racial policies, 78–81, 84: see also apartheid era, South African urbanization, 83 Setumu, Tlou, 445, 446, 447, 448, 450 sexuality, 2, 15–27 categorizations, 18, 27n7 control of, 19, 21 history, 16–25, 48–49 scholarship, 15, 17–18, 19, 23, 25–27 terminology, 17, 18 see also bisexuality, heterosexual norms; homosexuality; LGBTI in Africa; masculinities; queer theory Shadle, Brett, 171–172 Shafi Adam Shafi, 374 Haini, 374 Kasri ya Mwinyi Fuad, 374, 375 Kuli, 375 Shain, Richard, 490 Shaka ka Senzangakhona, King of the Zulu, 4, 95, 96–97, 107

index

as legendary leader, 114, 207 struggle with Zwide, 99, 102, 103 Shambaai, Tanzania, 210 Shariff, Ibrahim Noor, 373, 378n13 Sharpeville massacre, 434, 444, 460, 461, 462, 469 commemoration, 468–469 shebeens, 491 Shepperson, George, 358 Shepstone, Theophilus, 67 Shields, Francine, 149 Sierra Leone, 151, 307, 364, 396 Shona people, 192 shrine slaves, 152–153 Sikainga, Ahmad A., 150, 151 Sinnar, kingdom of, 10, 422–426 bureaucracy, 423, 424, 426 chancery, 422–423, 425 historical sources, 422, 424 Islamic loyalty, 422, 423 Muslim brotherhoods, 423, 425, 427n13 royal palace, 422–423, 426n6 scribes, 422–425, 426, 427n11, 427n12, 428n14 treasury, 423, 426, 427n9 Siti binti Saad, 372, 373, 377 slaveholding, 4, 146–148 precolonial, 146–147 slavery, 81, 143–154, 216 abolition see emancipation of slaves abuses, 361 agricultural knowledge, 362 Arab narratives of, 6, 215–216 assimilation, 144, 148 chattel, 143–144, 147, 148 and concubinage, 147 contemporary, 4, 151, 153–154 cultural resistance, 483 domestic, 145, 147 escape from, 152 export, 149–150 freedom see freed slaves gendering, 4–5, 39, 143–154 historiography, 143–144, 148–152, 357 justifications, 215–216 lineage, 144, 145, 146–147



index

multiculturalism, 362–363 music, 358 plantation, 143 precolonial, 143–145 and property ownership, 147 religious see shrine slaves sex work, 145, 146, 153 stereotypes, 143 types, 143–144, 147 uprisings, 362 and women, 143–144, 148–152 see also Atlantic slave trade; enslavement, process of; slaveholding; wage slavery slave villages, 146–147 Smiles, Daniel, 276 Smith, Edwin, 129–130 Smith, Ian, 391 Smythe, Kathleen, 174 Sobukwe, Robert, 434, 435, 461–463, 468, 477–478 sociological approaches, 310‐311, 485 Socwatsha ka Phaphu, 100–101, 102 social constructivism, 164, 204–20, 311, 3146 social history, 35–36, 205–206, 231, 237, 238, 473 medicine, 310–311 popularity, 357, 439 Sofala, Mozambique, 80 Somalia, 190, 394, 404, 395, 410 Cold War, 395, 396, 407–408 colonial, 190, 394 failure of governance, 409 literature of, 135, 376 war with Ethiopia, 406, 407 Somali Youth League, 406 song, 10, 205, 464 as cultural resistance, 10, 461–478, 484 folk songs, 358 love songs, 136–138 religious, 377n7 Soshangane kaZikode, King of Gaza, 99, 103 Sotho people, 43, 122 Soudan Interior Mission, 320

521

sources for African history, 1, 110, 151, 215, 319–322 anthropology notes, 321 charters, 422, 424 colonial archives, 335, 343 digitization, 321 European, 110 household surveys, 340 interviews, 321, 439–440, 463 inventories, 360, 361 limitations, 175, 319 literature, 375–376 military records, 342 memoirs, 320, 444, 445 newspapers, 371, 374, 493 and novelists, 103, 107, 110 oral tradition, 96, 100–102, 151, 319, 463–464 preservation, 321 social media, 444 songs, 463, 464–465 state records, 172, 340, 343, 345, 441 South Africa, 11, 79, 81, 441 Afrikaner/British divide, 11, 189: see also South African War apartheid era see apartheid, South African biodiversity, 299 Cold War, 385, 391 colonial, 80: see also Union of South Africa and Commonwealth, 78 as dominion, 78, 79 ethnic identity, 5, 187–189, 193, 217 gay rights activists, 23 immigration, 82, 88: see also settler societies in Africa Indian migrants, 189–190, 234, 321 migrant labor, 21, 42, 49–50, 191 mineral extraction, 82, 309: see also Witwatersrand, South Africa Muslims, 231, 234 political parties, 441 postapartheid, 441–442, 468–469 postcolonial, 190–193, 217 urbanization, 193

522

index

South Africa (cont’d ) whites, 3, 5, 21, 23, 77–78, 298 xenophobia, 5, 216, 259–260 Zulu nationalism, 187–188, 193, 208 South Africa Act (1909), 431 South African War, 253, 436 southern Africa, 5, 179, 193, 256–257, 464–466 black majority rule, 190 Cold War, 388–394 labor migration, 21, 42–43 49–50, 83, 191, 204, 433 mixed‐race population, 188, 189–190 pre‐colonial, 182–186 see also individual countries southern African liberation movements, 460, 464, 465–466 Southern Rhodesia, 83, 84, 298, 333, 388 decolonization, 88 Unilateral Declaration of Independence, 87, 388, 391 South Sudan, 409 South West People’s Organisation see SWAPO Soviet Union Cold War, 386, 387, 389, 404, 407–408 and Horn of Africa, 404, 407–408 rivalry with China, 387 and southern Africa, 386, 387, 389 wartime alliance with USA, 403 Soweto, South Africa, 391, 469 Spear, Thomas, 207, 252 sport, 42, 487, 492 Stanleyville (Kinsangani), Congo, 387 Stephens, Rhiannon, 174 Stockreiter, Elke, 173 Strijdom, J. G., 437 Strobel, Margaret, 148, 150, 151, 152, 486 Strong, S. Arthur, 368–369 structural adjustment policies, 345 structural‐functionalists, 310 Stuart, James, 100, 101, 102, 107 isiZulu primers, 101 Stuckey, Sterling, 358 Stuurman, Letitia, 445, 446, 451 Sudan, 148–149, 150, 421, 428n22

Chinese investment, 409 division, 409 Islamism, 408–409 Sufism, 423, 425, 426 see also Nubia, medieval kingdom of; Sinnar, kingdom of Suez Canal, 384, 402 Suez Crisis (1956), 384 Sufism, 19, 211, 228–230, 240 brotherhoods, 230, 235–236, 423, 425 Sudanese tradition, 423, 425, 426 Sukarno, 384 sustainability, 297 Swahili culture, 9, 130 and Arab ancestry, 368 Islamic, 369, 370 language see Kiswahili literature see Swahili literature scholars, 368–369, 372, 376–377 Swahili literature, 19, 136, 367–378 biography, 372 chronicles, 368–370 ethnographies, 371 histories, 368, 371–372 Mambo Leo, 371 poetry and song, 370, 372–374 political, 375 prose genres, 370–371 Swanson, Maynard, 313 SWAPO, 192, 390, 393, 394, 460, 461 Swaziland, 191, 323 Sweet, James, 311, 319 Domingos Álvares, 363 Table Bay, South Africa, 80 Tabouret‐Keller, Andrée, 185 Tague, Joanna, 257 Tallensi people, 166 Tambo, Oliver R., 434, 460 Tanganyika, 136, 167, 168, 203, 298 civil conflict, 251 environmental problems, 296, 297–298 law courts, 151, 172–173 literature, 375 see also German East Africa

Tanganyika Africa National Union (TANU), 371–372 Tanzania, 45, 47, 167, 174, 294, 494 and African nationalism, 389 British colonial period see Tanganyika Cold War, 388 German colonial period see German East Africa precolonial, 210 refugee hosts, 252, 257 wanyalu, 163–164 Taveto refugee camp, Kenya, 255–256 taxation, 336, 338, 343–344 Taylor, William, 373, 377n1, 377n7 technology, 7, 18, 46, 82 agricultural see agricultural techniques ancient iron‐smelting see iron smelting, ancient East African Thatcher, Margaret, 391 Theal, George M., 369 Thomas, Linda, 44 Thomas, Lynn, 119–120 Thompson, Bridget, 474 Thompson, Leonard, 438, 441 Thornton, John, 362–363 Tilley, Helen, 315 Toledano, Ehud, 149 Tonga people, 183 Topan, Farouk, 372 torture, 87, 312, 374, 391 tourism, 300 transatlantic slave trade see Atlantic slave trade transgender, 50 translation, linguistic biblical, 68–69, 226 Kiswahili, 369, 372, 373, 374 poetry, 373, 374, 378 transportation networks, 42, 82, 296–297, 345 trans‐Saharan trade, 233, 294 Trevor‐Roper, Hugh, 201, 214, 217n1, 357 tribalism, 200–209 artificial creation, 203–204 response to colonialism, 200–204, 208

index

523

see also ethnicity; ethnic identity Trimingham, J. Spencer, 233 trokosi slavery, 152–153 tropical medicine, 312–313, 320 Trouillot, Michel‐Rolph, 282 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Africa, 451 tsetse fly, 46, 234, 299, 300, 309 Tshombe, Moise, 385, 386 Tsonga people, 21 tsotsi subculture, 43 Tswana people, 122 Turner, Lorenzo Dow, 356, 358 Tutsi elites, 6, 23, 213, 214, 396 Tutu, Desmond, 478n3 Twagira, Laura Ann, 46 Tylecote, R. F., 271, 278 Ubuntu, 114 Uchendu, Egodi, 37 Ufipa region, Tanzania, 174 Uganda, 47–48, 174–175, 415n5 anti‐homosexual legislation, 15, 26 colonial, 21 creation myths, 126 public health statements, 15, 24, 25–26 war on terror, 408, 410 Union of Islamic Courts, Mogadishu, 410 Union of South Africa, 21, 24, 62, 431 see also Cape Colony Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) see Soviet Union United Nations (UN) , 9, 307, 384, 385 Cold War interventions, 386, 405 Korean War, 405 United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), 247, 259 United States, 9, 16, 355–358, 403, 409 Carter administration, 394 Clinton administration, 396 Cold War involvement, 385 Central Africa, 386, 387–388 Horn of Africa, 394–396, 404–407, 415n2, 415n3 southern Africa, 389, 390, 392, 394 Ford administration, 390

524

index

United States (cont’d ) and human rights, 395 military bases in Africa, 2, 401, 405 Reagan administration, 391 war on terror, 401–402, 408–410 University of Cape Town, 435, 436 University of Natal, 436 University of Witwatersrand, 435, 436, 439–440, 468 universities, 104, 237, 413 historical scholarship, 8, 11, 355, 357, 358 South Africa, 433, 435–436, 440, 442, 448, 452n6 see also individual universities urban gang culture, 43–44, 47 urbanization, 43, 83–84, 187, 193, 488 utenzi poems, 373, 374 Vail, Leroy, 180, 203, 204, 205, 206, 484 The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, 180–181, 183 Vansina, Jan, 214 van de Caab, Jephta, 61–62 van der Merwe, Nicholas, 273, 277 van De Walle, Nic, 330 van Jaarsveld, F. A., 435, 436 van Onselen, Charles, 439 van Waijenburg, Marlous, 341, 343, 345 Vaughan, Meghan, 309 Curing Their Ills, 313–314 Veracini, Lorenzo, 78 Verger, Pierre, 358 Verwoerd, Hendrik, 431, 432, 437–438, 443, 444 Vierke, Clarissa, 373 Vilikazi, Benedict Wallet, 102, 107 violence, 42, 43–44, 145, 212–213 against women, 43–44, 47–48, 145, 146 Vorster, John, 432 Voyages database, 359–361 Vumba Kuu, Kenya, 369–370 wages, 42, 335, 337–338, 339–340 calculations of, 340, 345 distribution, 346n5

peasant economies, 332, 340 settler economies, 332, 340 rates, 42, 79, 154, 345 wage slavery, 154 Waite, Gloria, 311 Waller, Richard, 251 Ware, Rudolph, 232 Wariboko, Waibinte, 60, 66 Washington Consensus, 330 Waterman, Christopher, 490 Webb, James, 290, 323 Weinreich, Max, 183 Welsh, David, 443 Wertime, Theodore, 270 West, Harry, 317 Westad, Odd, 384, 395 West African empires, 146–148, 232 West African Sahel, 152, 233, 291, 292 Western Sudan region, 215 White, Bob, 41 White, Hylton, 193 White, Landeg, 484 White, Luise, 35, 317 white Africans, 3, 77–78, 298 see also settler societies in Africa Wilks, Ivor, 231 Williams, Christian A., 257, 259 Williams, Raymond, 81 Willis, Justin, 492 Wilson, Monica, 438, 441 Wise, Christopher, 240 witchcraft, 104, 109, 113, 167 anthropology of, 321 European attitudes to, 101, 113, 312, 320, 361 link with healing, 310, 311–312, 320, 363 prosecutions, 320 Witwatersrand, South Africa, 42–43, 49, 82–83 homosexuality, 49–50 violent gangs, 43 university see University of Witwatersrand Wodaabe Fula people, 128 Wolfe, Patrick, 78



index

woman marriage, 130, 148 women, 3–4, 19, 21, 44, 114 changing roles, 211–212 and colonialism, 39, 152 and dance, 486 global trafficking of, 153–154 labor, 145: see also domestic work motherhood, 174 poets, 376 polygynous households, 19, 23 powerful, 95–115, 126 rights, 37 and slavery, 4–5, 143–154 violence against, 43–44, 47–48, 145, 146 see also gender flexibility; harems; matrilinear societies; prostitution Woodson, Carter G., 355 Woodward, Wendy, 148 World Bank, 26, 330, 336, 339, 342 World Health Organization (WHO), 314, 315, 322 World War I, 251, 253, 254 World War II, 85, 403, 492–493 Wright, John, 101, 102, 103, 107, 182 Wright, Marcia, 150 Wylie, Diana, 314 Wynne‐Jones, Stephanie, 368, 369 xenophobia, 5, 216, 259–260 Yemen, 414 Young, Crawford, 200 Yoruba culture, 124, 363, 486 in the Americas, 363, 364 masculinities, 22, 40, 42 romantic love, 120–121, 124 Zaire, 41, 258, 398, 484 Zambia, 257, 258, 389 Cold War, 388, 391 colonial, 46, 485 Copperbelt, 485 ZANU‐PF, 192, 392 Zanzibar, 213, 374–375, 492

525

Arabs, 213–214 Islamic courts, 173 merge with Tanganyika, 388 Zimbabwe, 23, 258 civil conflict, 191–192, 298, 391–392 pre‐1980 see Southern Rhodesia Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), 390–391 see also ZANU‐PF Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), 390–391, 392 zoonotic diseases, 307 Zulu empire, 99, 107, 109 see also Zulu kingdom Zulu historical narratives, 99, 104, 106–109, 113–115, 207 oral traditions, 101, 102, 106 portrayal of Queen Mother Ntombazi, 103–104, 111–112, 113–114 Zuluist ideology, 100, 103, 110, 112, 114, 115 see also Zulu nationalism Zulu kingdom, 4, 95, 99, 102, 106, 107 defeat of Ndwandwe, 102, 103–104 role of healers, 311 see also kwa‐Zulu Natal; Shaka ka Senzangakhona, King of the Zulus Zulu nationalism, 110, 114, 207 separatism, 209–209 in South Africa, 107, 187–188, 193, 208 see also Zulu historical narratives Zulus, 42, 50, 51, 98 culture, 109, 111, 123 ethnic identity, 183, 187, 207 language see isiZulu language see also Zulu historical narratives Zulu Society, 107 Zuma, Jacob, 193 Zwide kaLanga, King of the Ndwandwe, 99, 102, 108 defeat by Shaka, 99, 102, 103 relationship with Queen Mother Ntombazi, 96, 99, 100, 104–105, 106–107

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