In recent years, an increasing number of online archival databases of primary sources related to the history of the African diaspora and slavery have become freely and readily accessible for scholarly and public consumption. This proliferation of digital projects and databases presents a number of challenges related to aggregating data geographically according to the movement of people in and out of Africa across time and space. As a requirement to linking data of open-source digital projects, it has become necessary to delimit the entire continent of precolonial Africa during the era of the slave trade into broad regions and sub-regions that can allow the grouping of data effectively and meaningfully.

This article explores cartographic methods during the ninth and tenth century of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate, with a focus on the deformation of Sub-Saharan Africa in world maps produced during the early era. It reviews the preceding influences that factored into how ‘Abbasid cartographers understood and mapped out unknown regions alongside pieces of the folkloric fear that accompanied the idea of al-Wāq-Wāq, that is the uncharted and unknown areas of inland Africa south of the Sahara. By reviewing the methods and techniques of map making alongside information that circulated about al-Wāq-Wāq, this article offers a contribution to knowledge about cartographic practices during the ‘Abbassid era and reviews the work of prominent geographers alongside the deformations in their maps and social assumptions they carried about what and who rested within the interiors of Africa.

This article argues that historians will have a new understanding of northeast and east Africa if they recall the medieval meaning of the terms Zanj and Ahabish, or Habasha. Before the fifteenth century the term Zanj included the diverse populations of northeast Africa, so should not be exclusive of the populations of coastal east Africa. Likewise, Habasha or Ahabish was not confined to the peoples of the northern Horn but included the diverse peoples of coastal east Africa. Uncovering older meanings of Zanj and Ahabish helps to identify elusive groups of ancient northeast Africans referred to as northern Zanj, Zanj-Ahabish, Ahabish, and Damadim. For identification, this article presents three types of historical data overlooked in the sources. The first consists of the interchangeable names northern Zanj, Damadim, Ahabish, Zanj-Ahabish, and Zanj ed-Damadim to recast the term Zanj and identify the Damadim or Yamyam. The second is the broadly inclusive meaning before the fifteenth century of the term Habasha. The third is the reported eloquence in their Buttaa ceremony of the northern Zanj, and the institutional setting of the Buttaa within the Oromo Gadaa system.

Le pèlerinage de Mansa Musa, plus grand sultan du Mali, en 724/1324, est l’un des événements les plus célèbres du Moyen Âge africain. Le souverain est lui-même devenu, ces dernières années, une figure de l’histoire mondiale. Pourtant, des pans entiers de cet événement restent inconnus, notamment son voyage et séjour dans la péninsule Arabique. Cette étude se focalise sur son voyage depuis Le Caire vers La Mecque, à l’aller comme au retour, et à son séjour dans la ville sainte à l’occasion de son pèlerinage. Au travers de la présentation et de la discussion de nouvelles sources, j’apporte des éclairages nouveaux sur cet épisode fameux, dont la trame reste paradoxalement encore nébuleuse par endroits.

Two Armenian ecclesiastics from Jerusalem, Isaac and Dimothéos, visited Abyssinia in 1867–1869. The latter’s detailed account of their journey was promptly published, grandiloquently dedicated (with formal permission) to Queen Victoria. The journey has nonetheless received little attention from historians, and the reasons it was made have been poorly understood. An intention to seek release of Europeans imprisoned by King Tewodros (Theodore) of Ethiopia was overtaken by events, the captives’ release being achieved by an expedition from British India before the Armenians arrived. Emphasis was consequently placed on involvement with local politics and ecclesiastical intrigue, both of which are discussed in this paper.

During the 1970s and 1980s, southern African liberation movements lent rhetorical and sometimes material support to Central American guerilla groups. Such action represented both change and continuity within the previous decade’s non-aligned solidarities. This paper explores these connections and attempts to explain their significance on both sides of the ocean. It draws upon research in southern African and American archives in order to re-examine both spaces’ historiographies. Finally, it asks what these solidarities tell us about the nature of Cold War trans-oceanic linkages, fits them into debates over the nature of the discursive Atlantic, and ponders whether previous scholarship has effectively explored their significance.

Many scholars, African and otherwise, have excoriated G.W.F. Hegel for his dismissal of Africa from history and progress in his lectures on the philosophies of history and religion. This has been done by quoting his texts and setting his words in the context of his influence on nineteenth-century European imperialism and racism. A different approach informs this paper. I treat Hegel, a complicated person, as a working university academic with a career to make and an overriding desire to publicize his own thought. I provide biographical insights relevant to these matters, and go on to examine specific texts about Africa that Hegel either sought out or chanced upon, read, misread, excerpted, used, and misused in support of his theorizing and apriorism. Attention is paid throughout to the construction, recording, and dissemination of Hegel’s lectures, and to aspects of their reception and authority in the educational formation of selected modern African intellectuals. I argue that such persons and African studies more widely are still trying to come to grips with the long and enduring shadow cast by Hegel over both the past and present of the continent.

This article examines the potential of an unconventional method in applied history – the pop-up museum – for analyzing relationships between history and memory and producing meaningful histories of African pasts. Specifically, we assess our application of this tool to accounts of events surrounding the Fante Confederation of 1868–1873 in the Central Region of modern-day Ghana. By utilizing a pop-up museum exhibit in the field, we determined that the construction of a meaningful history of the Fante Confederation requires the apperception of “durable bundles” – continuities between collective memory and history that also serve as survivals from the mid-nineteenth century to contemporary society. Our original sources and interlocutors in common identified themes of “unity” and “development” as particularly meaningful durable themes. We posit that these shared themes can serve as points of attachment for contemporary Fante speakers to work with histories of the Fante Confederation, and propose them as motifs around which relevant histories can be built in this case. Finally, in reflecting on our experience, we hypothesize that this model of applied history may be useful in other situations as well.

Regional distinctions such as “East” and “Central” Africa have been constructed, originally very much from an outsiders’ perspective. Different East and Central African historiographies reflect – and reproduce – these distinctions. However, the inhabitants of those spaces never stopped crossing and entangling them. Likewise, this section approaches East and Central Africa empirically as a space of historical entanglement. Moreover, the authors question the traditional divide between both regions epistemologically, by transferring research perspectives from one region’s historiography to the other. They thus illustrate that bridging histories of East and Central Africa can reveal histories that would otherwise remain hidden or marginal.

The key role of the Nyamwezi in the nineteenth-century caravan trade of East and Central Africa is well known. The convergence of rapid change in Unyamwezi, a region connecting areas of economic specialization, is more obscure. The development of agro-pastoralism in Unyamwezi was an adaptation and an opportunity forged by (unequal) partnerships between the Nyamwezi commercial elite and Tutsi immigrants. Patron-client relationships reflected prevailing economic and political forces, reversing the pattern of pastoral dominance in the Great Lakes region. Two different agro-ecological, sociological and political regions – the East African woodland savannah and the Great Lakes zone – were interlinked in a trans-regional cattle, salt, and labor economy intertwined with global capitalism. Human mobility stimulated change but so too did movements of livestock, diseases, agricultural regimes, and ecological boundaries.

This article applies a translocal approach in order to make sense of the internal dynamics in the Muslim community of colonial Bujumbura. The establishment of the community and its religious evolutions – from a practical living of Islam to Qadiriyya Sufism to Islamic Reform – are interpreted in regard to, on the one hand, religious tendencies in East African Islam and, on the other hand, processes of integration, marginalization, and exclusion in an urban, colonial and Burundian context. An answer to the social needs and challenges on the local level was found in religious intensification and a widening of the geographical scope, drawing on age-old connections across East and Central Africa.

“The Manyema” are people who have roots in what is today known as eastern Congo and who moved towards the East African coast – and often back – since the time when their area of origin was under African-Arab domination. In separated East and Central African historiographies, the Manyema received only marginal attention so far. Tracing this highly mobile group across East and Central Africa discloses how Manyema actors, in relation to colonial and postcolonial contexts, have negotiated their mobility and identity across East and Central Africa as a single space.

This article discusses how the (post)colonial museum in Tervuren helped to create an artificial separation between “East” and “Central” Africa on both sides of Lake Tanganyika, while in reality this was and still is a zone of encounter. The exclusion of the “Arab” was twofold. First, East African objects were not exhibited. Second, “Eastern” material culture that was collected in Central Africa, became represented as imported traces of “barbary,” only highlighting the “civilizing mission” of European colonization.

In recent years, several attempts to revitalize Area Studies have concentrated on oceans as the unifying force to create regions. In this respect, the Indian Ocean has become a prime example to show how economic as well as cultural flows across the sea have contributed to close connections between its shores. However, by doing so, they not only seem to create a certain, rather homogeneous, Indian Ocean space, they often also lead to a conceptual separation between “coast” and “hinterland,” similar to earlier distinctions between “African/Arab” or “East/Central Africa.” In this contribution, so-called “Arab” traders who settled along trade routes connecting the East African coast to its hinterland will serve as an empirical ground to explore and challenge these boundaries. Tracing maritime imaginaries and related materialities in the Tanzanian interior, it will reflect on the ends of the Indian Ocean and the nature of such maritime conceptualizations of space more generally. By taking the relational thinking that lies at the ground of maritimity inland, it wishes to encourage a re-conceptualization of areas that not only replaces a terrestrial spatial entity with a maritime one, but that genuinely breaks with such “container-thinking” and, instead, foregrounds the meandering, fluid character of regions and their complex and highly dynamic entanglements.

This article focuses on the uses of the archive in contemporary Zimbabwe by individuals and families making claims to chieftaincy. A reading of the colonial archive on chieftainship histories reveals that there is an information gap especially for some years. For instance, from the 1960s to the present, there are relatively few documents specifically relating to the subject of chiefs and headmen in Zimbabwe. As a result, researchers working on chieftainships, hired historians, and claimants to chieftaincy face a frustrating challenge of limited sources. This article analyzes the sources that hired historians use to write chieftaincy claims reports in Zimbabwe for their clients. It also explores the use of oral evidence to complement or counter the narratives offered through colonial documents, and it also recommends the use of alternative sources on chieftaincy, both within and beyond the repositories of the National Archives of Zimbabwe (NAZ).

This archival research report details the uses and disuses of UNESCO’s Paris archives of its General History of Africa. By looking in detail at what African historians have been doing as well as writing, we can reach a better understanding of the reality of African history writing in the immediate postcolonial era. That means taking into account the complexity of the archive; and using J.F. Ade-Ajayi’s archive in Ibadan as an example we can see that the vast Paris collection of material relating to the writing of the General History of Africa is complemented by documents scattered across different archives.