The 2020 volume of History in Africa is the eleventh produced by the current editorial team. It will also be the last, as we are handing over to a brand-new team, consisting of esteemed colleagues Lorelle Semley, Sandra Barnes, Bayo Holsey, and Egodi Uchendu.

The present article contributes to understanding of the Zimbabwe political institution of the southern portion of the Zambesi Valley based on the conceptualization of its population, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. We reconstruct the local perceptions of this institution by detecting information provided by local persons as recounted in Portuguese ethnographic documents. The original information underwent different types and degrees of translation and editing to reach the forms recorded in these documents. We present a critical process of recovering local voices, ideologies, and conceptualizations from written literal translations of excerpts of oral statements that can serve as a valuable methodological tool in expanding our understanding of the history of early African politics.

The kingdom of Allada in the seventeenth century was an important supplier of slaves for the trans-Atlantic trade, and also an object of Christian missionary activity, but the earlier history of its interactions with Europeans is poorly documented. It has previously been assumed that the first direct Portuguese contact with the Allada area occurred in 1553. However, recently discovered documents in Portuguese archives correct this view. These comprise two petitions to the King of Portugal from an ambassador of the King of Allada currently in Lisbon: although undated, the content of one of them enables it to be dated to either 1544 or 1555, more probably the former; given the time which the ambassador had already spent in Portugal, his original dispatch from Allada occurred in 1540/1541 or 1551/1552. The petitions document the Allada king’s interest in the establishment of a Christian church in his realm, as well as commercial relations.

This short essay introduces a set of five papers that examine the place Frederick Cooper’s scholarship occupies in the historiography of Africa.

Using the Tensions of Empire volume as a pivot point, this article traces Frederick Cooper’s work in relation to trajectories of historical materialism and cultural history over the past forty years. Highlighting Cooper’s contributions to both approaches, it points to a generative tension between these strands of his scholarship – as well as between his oeuvre and the arc of broader historiography on empire. Specific features of Cooper’s approach were key to the success of the Tensions of Empire collaboration, and attention to them can help recapture aspects of these historiographies that have become obscured over time.

This essay considers Frederick Cooper’s early scholarship on African slavery, which called for and modeled a practice of comparative historiography. His critique of the “absorption model” of African slavery, enabled by comparison with the Americas, anticipated important recent trends in the study of Atlantic slavery. Revisiting this critique helps us to understand key features of cultural continuity and change among enslaved people and can inform future research about gender and the Atlantic slave trade. In particular, it suggests the limitations of an analysis that separates the assumed African assimilation of enslaved women from the export mostly of men.

The article argues that the concept of “claims-making” has been an important and influential thread in the work of Frederick Cooper. It explores the utility and advantages – as well as the characteristic rigor – of this theory of social change and what it implies. It then turns to the potential limits of its adoption within Africanist historiography and African Studies more broadly.

This essay explores Frederick Cooper’s work on the history of capitalism, bringing together his histories of class struggles on the East African coast and his conceptual interventions into debates on Africa and the world economy. It argues that Cooper’s notion of the “peculiarities of capitalism” illuminates how conflicts over work, rights, and the labor process have shaped where capital went and what it did in Africa. The essay also considers how Cooper’s work might inform the emerging literature on race and capitalism in Africa, exploring in particular the history of tobacco capitalism in postcolonial Malawi.

Frederick Cooper’s first three books, published between 1977 and 1987, were written during African historians’ first sustained critical engagement with African archives and African voices. Cooper’s books were literally in the weeds with slave and free labor in East Africa, yet their importance went beyond the region. Read in sequence, we see how Cooper’s work was shifting toward studies of the metropole by the mid-1980s. Taken together we see how practices in the workplace shaped policies in Whitehall, that conditions on plantations and on docks caused a rethinking of how colonialists might most successfully exert control.

With the rise of information technology, an increasing proportion of public African archives are being digitized and made accessible on the internet. The same is being done to a certain extent with private archives too. As much as the new technologies are raising enthusiasm, they have prompted discussion among researchers and archivists, on subjects ranging from matters of intellectual property to sovereignty and governance. Digital archiving disrupts archival norms and practices, opening up a field of reflection relatively little explored by historians. This article therefore seeks to reflect on the digital turn of African archives as a subject for study in its own right, located at the crossroads of political and economic interests.

This article explores archival practices and ownership of the largely Arabic manuscript collections at the Djenné Manuscript Library. From 2009 to 2017 grants from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme enabled the preservation of 8,520 manuscripts and digitization of about 400,000 folios. In a politically volatile environment like Mali, the future of historical research is mostly contingent on the availability of digital archives. While these archives enable research that otherwise could not be conducted, they also limit the research experience in situ and thus affect findings. For the manuscript owners, questions arise about digital imperialism.

This is a study of research and conservation activities into a newly rediscovered and opened regional archive in the Préfecture of Pointe-Noire in the Republic of Congo. The study illustrates the constraints attaching to complicated post-independence materials and the need for flexibility in approaching them. Begun as an initially well-defined project targeting a vanished colonial territorial archive, the work turned instead into the finding and reorganizing of an extremely valuable but dispersed post-independence archive. The article discusses the implications of such conditions for priorities in preservation measures and questions of digitization; it makes the case for a pragmatic approach.

The article examines from a global perspective the phenomenon of digital photographic archiving and questions its impact on African archives both on the continent and outside it. The authors deal with the multi-layered consequences of information technologies for African photographic archives, asking to what degree they have connected Africa to the world. They consider too how much access they have given Africans to materials that were previously either unknown to them, or beyond their reach. Finally, the article explores how much opportunity digitization offers to agents of African photographic archives, empowered by technological developments.

This article examines the digitization policy of Archives du Maroc (AdM), Morocco’s national archival institution, which was set up in 2011 and opened in 2013. Given its recent creation, the AdM lead us to question the particularity of digitization in archiving policies when included from the start rather than retroactively. Through an analysis of the creation and development of AdM as a public policy connected to national efforts at transparency and “good governance,” I argue that digitization has served as a way of performing modernity through technology and international standards, thus reinforcing the legitimacy of a nascent institution.

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

Asylum court records are a potentially important evidentiary basis for postcolonial African history. Asylum-seeking is a contemporary transnational iteration of a rich African petitioning tradition. In the contemporary era, the digitization of court records, and their dispersal as a function of the shifting division of work between ministries, courts, and related bureaucracies, presents a challenge to researchers. Digital record keeping may improve accessibility, but only if researchers are familiar with the technology and archival methods and practices accompanying digitization.

This brief introduction to a special section on Digital History in African Studies situates three articles on recent digital humanities initiatives among African historians within the broader histories of the use of digital methodologies in the study of Africa. In particular, it highlights the way that Africanist digital scholarship sits at the intersection of digital historical representation, community engagement, and academic research. While Africanist digital history builds on the work of a much broader digital humanities community, historians of Africa also draw on their discipline’s long history of methodological innovation to raise important questions about the potential contributions and limitations of digital technologies in academic research.

In early colonial Lagos, struggles over race, place and identity were played out over ownership of land, and ended with the displacement of sections of the indigenous population. “Africa for the Africans” combines texts and maps to narrate the history of 1860s Lagos. This article demonstrates how, with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), European colonial maps can be used to analyze the significance of changing urban spatial relationships in 1860s Lagos. Though much of this analysis employs GIS, it also leans heavily on other tools for making timelines, story maps and vector diagrams. This process of creating digital representations of the past also has pedagogical applications, as these methods can be extended to the classroom for undergraduates learning about African history.

The digitization of African materials has made it easier than ever for students to engage with primary source documentation and undertake original research. Digitizing sources and using digital sources to teach African history has great pedagogical value, but must be done ethically. This article suggests a model for collaborative and publicly-engaged scholarship, demonstrating the potential of transnational projects and shared knowledge production while maintaining sensitivity towards questions of the hegemony of the North. The study draws on experience of a virtual internship project between North American-based university students and the South African non-profit South African History Online (SAHO).

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