During the period of the Kenya Emergency (1952–1960), an assemblage of anticolonial forces waged war against the British colonial apparatus and its allies. Their notoriety would be crystallized in a single, enigmatic phrase: “Mau Mau.” Through considering the character of both contemporary and current framings, this article contends that Mau Mau exists as a historical method in itself, rather than simply as a phenomenon subjected to the analytical frameworks of historians. Mau Mau’s mythological dimension—something acknowledged in even its earliest formal studies—has rarely been focused upon in any sustained way that centers its implications for historical methodology. Yet it existed as a signifier set within enormous discursive webs and systems of information that people interfaced with in myriad ways. More concretely, understandings of and debates about Mau Mau drove human action through their articulation in realms such as (counter)insurgency, politics, and popular culture in geographically-disparate regions of the world. Approaching “events” such as Mau Mau in this fashion reveals the layout of these discursive webs and how they formed around flows of imperial capital, anticolonial resistance, and professional networks.

In the mid-1920s, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje toured the South African countryside showing films he brought from the Tuskegee Institute in the United States. Plaatje’s cinema tours complemented his educational talks on the status of Africans in the Union of South Africa alongside the material he collected for books, speeches and political tours. Focusing on the itinerant cinema as an element of fieldwork, our article asks what can be learned from approaching Plaatje’s research practices. We consider Plaatje’s methods of research in relation to conventional notions of social scientific fieldwork, which also relied on modern media but were often entangled in colonial projects that projected an image of African rural life. Drawing on letters, novels, and accounts of his film screenings, our essay argues for an interdisciplinary engagement with cinema practices in African history that is attentive to the uses of mass media in research and the pedagogical valences of itinerant film screenings. Considering Plaatje’s cinema alongside the value he attached to travelling and mobility, we argue that his cinema puts the field to work and inspires new practices of research in African Studies.

This article argues for a reorientation of African environmental history that incorporates localized ecophilosophies, racial ecologies, and environmental justice, and posits that doing so allows us to challenge the sociocultural and ecological implications of colonial and postcolonial environmental development more rigorously in East Africa. Focusing on Kenya, I argue that environmental justice-oriented histories of economic development elevate the subjectivities, cosmologies, and experiences of rural Kenyan populations rather than reducing the environment and its resources to their instrumental qualities On the Tana River, pastoral and riverine groups such as the Pokomo and Orma suffered and challenged the exigencies of water extraction in specific ways tied to their existing relationships with the local environment. By looking at the ways rural communities in arid regions framed their environmental relationships, we can begin to appreciate the specific modalities and cosmologies through which they resisted the imposition of cash crop agriculture and water development. The article demonstrates an interdisciplinary approach utilizing Black ecologies and environmental justice frameworks that restores vitality to the rural experience of imperialism and offers more rigorous critiques of global development dogmas under racial capitalism, particularly surrounding the omnipresent threat of ecocide driven by dispossession, resource extraction, toxicity, and climate change.

Scholars can elevate African voices as they recycle evidence from abandoned lines of research. This article discusses how to apply the confirmation and recycling methods of interdisciplinary research to engage with African historiologies. After reviewing contentious debates about Shungwaya from ca. 1955–2000, it draws on Mijikenda elder Thomas Govi’s descriptions of uganga and clanship (in a published collection of oral traditions) as a historiological theory for reimagining cross-linguistic collaborations, the formation of “stone towns,” and Islamic conversion in the settlement history of littoral East Africa.

In most of Africa there are written materials from the eras before colonialism that offer a view of the kinds of ideas, cultural life, and currents of political thought, as well as practices and events, that predate substantial European engagement. In the present-day South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, and bordering provinces and countries, there are no equivalent discursive materials that predate a European presence. With colonialism, much knowledge about the remote past was stitched up in imperial and colonial knowledge systems and recording practices. In this paper, we discuss what digital interventions and affordances offer in terms of researching the history of the material used as sources for the remote past, and of releasing that material from distorting or anachronistic colonial classifications and categories. We consider the capacities and significance of digital interventions in calling out sequestered and lost materials, in convening innovative new assemblages of material, in creating conditions conducive to the restoration of neglected details of provenance, in documenting the twists and turns involved in the shaping of materials into sources, and in formally recognizing the archival potential of materials, notably the writings of early African literati, long positioned as being something other than sources and as “not-archive.”

This paper analyzes the implications of ICT for the preservation of publicly owned digital records in Kenya. It examines both efforts to digitize traditional records and the issue of the preservation of born digital records. The study finds that there is a considerable lag between the rate at which the Kenyan government is digitizing its operations and that at which it is developing and implementing protocols and systems for preserving digitally born records. This will impact both historical research and national heritage in future.

African presidential powers fascinate: they have not only been extensively studied by political scientists, but they have also inspired novelists and filmmakers as much as they continue to attract the attention of journalists. Historians, however, have for a long time been rather disinterested in the issue. And yet, a question remains: upon independence, why did almost all African states adopt a presidential system of rule? This article reflects on the methodology and new questions a historical approach entails for the study of presidential powers in African postcolonial states. This article argues for the need to trace the origins of presidential powers, to depart from narratives of colonial legacies and exaggerated archetypes of African presidents, and to open new avenues for the conceptualization of both the decolonization process and the formation of postcolonial states in Africa.

Archives are loci of power where state (and archive creators’) hegemony is reproduced and sustained through the stories they allow to be told and the ones they suppress. However, this applies only to contexts in which archives actually exist and are organized. I argue that Morocco’s postcolonial history challenges Western notions of archives and begs for a conceptualization of “other-archives” in which silenced stories find their way to the public arena and resist authoritarian amnesia. Not only do other-archives liberate history (re)writing from archival hegemony, but they also open up space for an interdisciplinary study of history. Other-archives, as I theorize them, allow the inscription of the voices of the subaltern into the other-archival documents while also helping to decenter history and historiographical discourses by creating the need for historians to collaborate with specialists in other non-history-focused disciplines, such as cinema, literature, sociology, and political science. This article reveals how the existence and wide dissemination of other-archives within the context of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission’s work in Morocco (2004–2005) spurred transformative debates among Moroccan historians and incited them to push the boundaries of their discipline through the use of tārīkh al-zaman al-rāhin (history of the present).

European mobilizations of Africans for labor relied on the forgery that Africans can be harnessed into modern units of capitalist production only when organized into households led by wage-earning men supported by domesticated women. Between the 1930s and 1950s, Nigerian male labor migrants to Fernando Po and Gabon, as well as their wives, advanced diverse forgeries in response to the legibility protocols that European states used to control African migrants. Nigerian men used colonial documentation of their status as husbands to claim women’s bodies. Nigerian women used colonial documentation as wives and mothers to mask autonomy, illicit mobility, child trafficking, and sex work. This article develops a historical theory of forgery to explain how colonial legibility protocols and African manipulations of colonial documents constituted gendering practices. It focuses on the diverse documentary strategies women developed to evade colonial surveillance, including photographs to manufacture kinship and colonial court records to generate identities as temporary wives and fictive mothers. As European agents and African men strove to exploit women’s economic and sexual capacities, women used documentary and social forgeries to exploit fissures in colonial rule and create autonomous spaces of mobility and economic opportunity.

The so-called “Saharan Divide” separating sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa into distinct fields has a long and complicated history. Paradoxically, given its dense historiography, this divide is particularly pronounced in scholarship on the colonial period. This article proposes an approach to researching across this division, centered on research in multiple African archives, to build a “multi-local” understanding of colonial-era trans-Saharan Africa. This approach is illustrated by the story of Algerians who taught in colonial schools in Mauritania and French Soudan, and by the author’s discovery of this story in sites across northwest Africa. This approach can help scholars reconceptualize multi-sited research and reevaluate the Area Studies divisions that continue to structure knowledge of African history.

The Area Studies paradigm that emerged in the United States in the late 1950s surely fostered research on parts of the world that had traditionally been neglected in academia, such as the African continent. However, this paradigm also had its shortcomings. Among these shortcomings, there is the tendency to disconnect North Africa from the rest of the continent. Recent works on trans-Saharan connections are a testimony of the potential of studying African history across the Sahara and from a continental perspective. This article demonstrates this potential by presenting a large corpus of Arabic manuscripts concerning West African history held in two of the most important libraries of Morocco: The Bibliothèque Royale Hasaniyya / al-Khizāna al-Ḥasaniyya and the Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du Maroc / al-Maktaba al-Waṭāniyya li-l-Mamlakat al-Maghribiyya.

This paper is the first part of a detailed historical assessment of historical scholarship and training at the Department of History of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. It examines the growth and development of the Department since the inception of the University in 1962. It discusses the pioneer academic staff of the Department and subsequent people that taught in the Department over the years. The paper shows that the Department of History at Ife has excelled in all areas of historical scholarship over the years and that its professors and other scholars have contributed immensely to the reconstruction of African past. This is done through brief but succinct profiling of the professors and their professorial inaugural lectures as well as other scholars affiliated with the Department. The paper concludes that the Department of History at the Obafemi Awolowo University is a force to reckon with in the comity of schools of history in sub-Saharan Africa.

The paper explores the internal dynamics of knowledge production at the University of Zimbabwe. I introduce the term epistuicide to refer to situations where a people destroy their own knowledge systems. I use this term in contrast to what have been called epistimicides—that is, the killing of a peoples’ knowledge systems by another. In this paper, I demonstrate how the history of the Economic History Department is a classic case of epistuicide, as a flipside to epistimicides. It is a history of not only unrecognized effort but also of how internal dynamics and systems derail rather than promote knowledge production. From its inception, the Department of Economic History faced onslaughts which heightened in the new millennium. Admittedly, there are pockets of successes to record, such as the expansion of the teaching of the discipline to secondary schools and growing recognition of economic historians locally.

Through an ethnographic telling of a curriculum reform project, this short contribution seeks to elucidate developments in the Department of History at the University of the Free State in South Africa. It touches on questions of transformation – both demographic and intellectual, what historical knowledge is valued, decolonization and international engagement, and it ends with some prognoses for the future.

This article discusses the manner in which Zimbabwe’s faltering economy affects the functioning of the National Archives of Zimbabwe (NAZ). It also looks at the NAZ access regimes, ethical and professional issues, and their ramifications on archivist-researcher relations. It observes that the conflict of interest between the mandate of archivists to preserve and conserve archives and researchers’ need for access to archives at the NAZ occasionally complicates researcher-archivist interaction. This is because, as professionals and government employees, archivists must follow ethical standards and archival regulations governing the preservation, conservation, and access to archives, even if the same access guidelines and archival practices are not always in the best interests of researchers. This article uses the term “archivists” to explicitly refer to the NAZ staff members who assist researchers at the control desk by identifying, retrieving, and acquiring photocopies of required archives/documents, whilst the term “researchers” refers to both academic and non-academic users of the archives. The issues discussed in this article are pertinent to professional archivists as well as local and foreign researchers, both seasoned and junior, who want to do research at the NAZ and other African archives.

Since Namibian independence in 1990, historians have increasingly made use of Namibian archives to explore the history of the German and South African occupation. Researching the recent past is, however, much more difficult, considering the absence of a SWAPO archive and an embargo on governmental files of thirty years. But now, thirty years after independence, the files from the postcolonial administrations are set to gradually open up. In anticipation of this new chapter of Namibian history, this article examines the state of various archives in Namibia and offers a number of observations that may be of use to scholars who are interested in consulting them.