When taking over the editorship of History in Africa, the current editors foresaw several lines of development for the journal. The first one was to re-examine the inheritance of David Henige and build on this to keep the journal contemporary with new developments and trends in methodology and method, emerging technologies and the growing and changing availability of sources. Secondly, the editors felt that to comply with ever more stringent demands of academic quality control a full peer review system needed to be introduced, as well as action undertaken to make the journal visible in ranking systems. Thirdly, the editors decided that the journal was in need of a larger input from African scholars in Africa, to reflect developments in the continent better. Fourthly, it was decided that the paper version of the journal was in need of a more modern and professional look and format, enhancing readability, and falling into line with comparable journals, most specifically the sister journal African Studies Review.

The production of this third post-Henige issue has proven transition to be an ongoing process. All four points of development have been instituted, some with immediate results, others as a work in progress. Volume 37 (2010) saw the extension of the Editorial Board with several African members working in Africa, the consolidation of Henige's work with the publication of numerous articles inherited from him, and an agenda for further development. At the Annual General Meeting of the African Studies Association in San Francisco in 2010, two panels were organized to honor Henige and his work. Many of the contributions to these panels were included in volume 38 (2011), making it a Festschrift, definitively concluding the Henige era. The current issue of History in Africa is therefore the first regular issue under the regime of the new editorial team.

The maps of Africa produced in Europe on the eve of colonial partition and in the early decades of colonial rule purported to represent in a scientific manner what European explorers had “discovered.” Yet in reality they derived to a significant extent – albeit indirectly – from the spatial knowledge of Africans whom these explorers encountered. Whilst we do not possess many sources produced by the Africans themselves, it is possible to read the European accounts as potential depositories of African spatial knowledge and to consider how this knowledge may have been filtered in the process of cartographic production. Taking the German travellers and the important work of August Petermann in Gotha (in the period 1854-1878) as an illustration, the article analyses the difficulties a European faced when attempting to grasp Africa in spatial terms, the motivations and importance of African “informants,” and the transformation of “cartographic encounters” into maps. It also examines how some Africans responded to the growing market for geographical knowledge.

At a time of significant change in the in the practice of African history, this article is an appeal for a renewed respect for conventional historiography – referring both to careful acquaintance with earlier work and to the practice of historical analysis. Focusing on Rwanda, the argument is presented at four levels. First, it identifies four myths evident in recent presentations on Rwandan history. Second it assesses a work that avoids such assumptions by drawing on broader empirical sources than is the norm. It then examines a work that, while highlighting an important theme, neglects much of the historical work done on Rwanda over the past forty years. It concludes by proposing a way out of such “dead-end discourses.”

The existing body of literature on the origin of the Idepe-Ikale suggests a Benin provenance and an ethno-cultural identity for the generality of the Idepe-Ikale. This paper argues that this claim has largely been sustained by the excessive reliance on archival sources for the reconstruction Ikale pre-colonial history. It, therefore, draws primarily on evidence from praise poems and partly from historical linguistics and ethnography in its examination of the ethnic identity of the Idepe-Ikale, a major Ikale sub-group in southeastern Yorubaland. With this methodological shift, the paper establishes the fact that culturally and linguistically, the Idepe-Ikale are of the Yoruba ethnic stock rather than of Benin extraction. Thus, the paper casts doubts on the prevailing consensus on Idepe's Benin origin and identity and concludes that palace promoted and colonial-backed constructions of ethnic identities should be thoroughly scrutinised to correct mistaken notions about identity formation.

In 1947, the colonial government in British Cameroon established an Islamic court in the Grassfields to try cases involving the region's Muslim population, primarily comprised of Fulani and Hausa diaspora communities that had settled the area since the late nineteenth century. Colonial debates over the creation and purview of the court reveal uncertainties that permeated Indirect Rule's legal categories of native and non-native, or tribe and race, which were to be governed by customary and civil law, respectively. Comparing legal regimes in British Cameroon with Northern Nigeria, the homeland of “native” Hausa and Fulani, shows that Islamic law sat uneasily across the divide between customary and civil law. With the importation of the court to the Grassfields, where Fulani and Hausa transformed into “native foreigners,” the delineation between customary and civil law was rendered even more obscure, illustrating that it could never neatly correspond to constructions of race and tribe.

Alfons Vermeulen published a novel about his life in a Congo town as a trader in 1933 and also left drafts about the same subject for his memoirs when he died in 1965. This essay systematically compares both documents using the rules of evidence and concludes that although it does not appear to be so on the surface the novel distorts the evidence he adduces considerably more than the memoirs. At the same time though both documents are equally deeply affected by the spirit of the time of their composition. Hence the combined evidence of both documents together is not only richer but also more reliable than their separate use.

This article uses Muslim court records from Fes, Morocco, to challenge the concept of “Islamic slavery.” Analysis of legal actions containing references to domestic slaves for nearly six decades (1913-1971) uncovers an era of emancipation without public historical watersheds but rather with a subtle, gradual accumulation of changes in social processes. After discussing the background on slavery in Morocco and the limitations of “Islamic slavery,” notarized family court records are examined to demonstrate that slavery did not end as a consequence of official changes to laws (French or Moroccan), nor through masters granting their slaves legal manumissions. Rather, it is argued that domestic slavery ended at a staggered pace amid social, familial and personal changes more observable through attention to the dynamics across households and generations than to administrative policies or external legal forces.

This article draws attention to the scope and significance of the Registers of Liberated Africans, which were recently retraced in the Public Archives of Sierra Leone after a period of neglect. These registers, spanning the period between 1808 and 1819, provide details of the names and physical characteristics of the first groups of “recaptives” released at Freetown by royal naval patrols in the immediate aftermath of British abolition of the slave trade. This evidence, when combined with other categories of records generated by colonial administrators, offers a rare opportunity to reconstruct biographical information about enslaved Africans after their release from slaving vessels. The methodology discussed in this article demonstrates how nominal linkage across diverse categories of records surviving in Sierra Leone and Britain makes it possible to trace aspects of the subsequent movements of individuals after their cases had been adjudicated by the Vice Admiralty Court at Freetown.

The main purpose of this article is to explore the potential of the “List of Slaves unlawfully held in slavery by British Indian Subjects at Zanzibar & its Dependencies, who have been emancipated at the Consulate” for historical slavery studies. This list, a result of the first British-led manumission campaign against slave ownership along the east coast of Africa, is the most comprehensive list detailing slave ownership and slaves for the pre-colonial coastal society of East Africa. Despite of the importance and uniqueness, both this list and the campaign have not been yet fully analyzed. This article challenges to extract the data as much as possible from the list, not only sex ratio and ethnic origin of enslaved individuals, but also their identity and emotional status. Moreover, this article shows an aspect of slave ownership by British Indian subjects from the list.

This article takes an introductory excursion into newspaper sources for researching Nigerian children's history during the colonial period by analyzing and describing items including news, editorials, stories, photos, advertisements, columns, debates, features, and letters among others. It situates these newspaper sources within the context of the circumstances under which they were produced and the prevailing politics of identity, gender, and agency, on the one hand, and the interaction between the forces of “tradition” and “modernity” on the other. Instead of approaching children's experience from the well-established stand-points of disease, violence, delinquency and crime, this paper examines the following areas: children and education; children and motherhood; and children as consumers. These uncharted areas of Nigerian children's history render alternative and useful perspectives on agency and the centrality of childhood to colonial state's ideas of progress, civilization, modernity, and social stability.

The article explores the role of women, particularly non-Western educated Temne market women in shaping the socio-economic history of Britain's oldest colony in colonial West Africa. It addresses the neglect of women's participation in the economy of the colony inherent in the androcentric literature. The article also highlights the cultural foundations of Temne women's activism in colonial Freetown. It argues that the role played by various subjects and actors should be fully integrated in the historical literature of the Sierra Leone colony.

This article connects the colonial land ordinances and laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the changing meanings of property, to show both their impact, and how these developments resonated for the Ga-inhabitants of Accra and the Gold Coast Colony. The laws and African responses to them illustrate the ways in which property took on new meaning for a variety of groups. It also presents the framework for understanding why litigation, and the production of land claims became a central feature of land affairs in Accra with the continued development of the town. This analysis contributes to the existing literature on property rights in colonial Gold Coast by carefully considering the intricacies and nuances of land disputes in the colonial capital, and their intersection with larger transformations in land affairs.

This paper discusses the Arabic manuscripts deposited in Arewa House, one of the oldest public repositories in Nigeria and now holding 1,600 Arabic manuscripts.

This article introduces, reproduces, and contextualizes two letters written in 1938 from Edinburgh by Hastings Kamuzu Banda to Samuel C. Banda (Chief Mwase of Kasungu) and Ernest C. Matako. At the time Banda was studying in Edinburgh. The letters, from a period when sources on Banda are scarce, illuminate his political and educational thinking and his personal life and attitudes at the time. The article also discusses the archival context of the letters, which were found in the papers of Godfrey Wilson, the Director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute from 1938 to 1941. The copies were found in the course of research into the lives of the anthropologists Monica Wilson, née Hunter, and Godfrey Wilson.

The Jeremy Newman Papers are a new source for the study of colonial Kenya. The collection includes a variety of assorted documents, but most importantly, the transcripts of thirty-one interviews carried out by Newman in Machakos District in Kenya's Eastern Province in 1973 and 1974. Newman interviewed thirty members of the Kamba ethnic group – and one European setder – all of whom were born between approximately 1895 and 1920. The interviews range widely, touching on topics such as education, European settlement, politics, trade, the First and Second World Wars, Mau Mau, and especially the destocking episode of 1938.

This article is a critical assessment of the documentary sources of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) available at the Comintern Archives in Moscow. The organization was the key platform within the Comintern Apparatus to establish an African-Atlantic network of radical activists and organizations in Africa and the Caribbean during the first half of the 1930s. The article addresses the current status of available archival sources for assessing and analysing the objectives, intensity, extent and impact of the organization and its key activists, namely James W. Ford, George Padmore and Otto Huiswoud. It reflects on past and present presentations and evaluations of the ITUCNW's activities and provides a short outline of the chronological order of the organization. In addition, the transfer of its records from Hamburg to Moscow is discussed. The main emphasis is laid on the presentation of the various documentary sources available in Moscow, including reports, resolutions and correspondence.