On 24 May 2006, Professor Emeritus of History Albert Adu Boahen passed away on the evening of his 74th birthday. The first Ghanaian to receive a Ph.D. in African history from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1959, and the first African to chair the Department of History at the University of Ghana in 1967, Adu Boahen was without a doubt Ghana's foremost historian and a distinguished statesman. His publishing career spanned some forty years, his works ranging from standard textbooks in use in Africa and the West to major interpretations of African history such as African Perspectives on Colonialism (1987), Mfantsipim and the Making of Ghana: A Centenary History, 1876–1976 (1996) and Yaa Asantewaa and the Asante–British War of 1900–1 (2003). A scholar–activist, he demonstrated a consistent opposition to dictatorial rule and military regimes that earned him stints in prison. In February 1988, on the platform of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, of which he was a fellow, he delivered three lectures under the title of ‘The Ghanaian Sphinx: Reflections on the Contemporary History of Ghana, 1972–1987’ that broke the ‘Culture of Silence’ of the oppressive Rawlings regime and inaugurated what has been termed the ‘second independence of Ghana’. Posthumously awarded the Order of the Star of Ghana on 30 June 2006 for distinguishing himself in academia and statesmanship, Boahen was given a grand state burial in July 2006. He served on the editorial board of the Journal of African History.

This article examines the historical origins of one of urban Africa’s most visible contemporary problems, using Tanzania as a case study. The middle decades of the twentieth century are identified as a time when a pivotal shift occurred as labour scarcity gave way to over-supply, resulting in the emergence of enduring ‘structural’ unemployment. This was influenced by a combination of phenomena arising from the deepening impact of colonialism: including demographic growth leading to an increasingly youthful population, commoditisation and heightened African expectations influenced by socio-cultural and ideological factors. These were compounded by a shift in late-colonial labour policy towards stabilisation, which had the unintended effect of stymieing job creation. The latter part of the article describes the panicked response of the incoming African regime, faced with what they initially interpreted as a potentially insurrectionary class of urban unemployed. Closing remarks speculate on whether, in the longue durée, one may interpret unemployment in a more positive light as part of an ongoing wider historical transformation.

The major concepts of nationalist political thought in Tanzania formed at the meeting point between local and international understandings of exploitation, and prescriptions for its removal. These ideas were given social form through a politics of enmity concerned with defining enemies of the nation and creating corresponding purge categories. Acquiring urban citizenship in Tanzania required the demonstrated commitment to fight exploitation for a party and state hostile to urban growth. While such ideas formed the boundaries of legitimate political debate, Africans struggling to lay claim to urban life appropriated nationalist idioms to lampoon official pieties and make sense of class differentiation in a socialist country.

In the literature on African trade unions during decolonization and in the immediate post-independence period, two schools of thought can be distinguished: one is pessimistic about the unions' economic and political roles, and the other is optimistic. This study attempts to assess the role of autonomous teachers' trade unions in Anglophone Cameroon during the period 1959–72. The emergence, development and dissolution of these unions appears to have closely followed the region's political and educational reforms. It is argued that two main issues formed a constant source of conflict between the government and these unions, namely the preservation of trade union autonomy, and union demands for a substantial improvement in members' conditions of service.

Discussions of women’s power in Africa often focus on how much the role of senior women is symbolic and how much is real. Studying the Kingdom of Kongo reveals that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries women initially exercised power indirectly through influence on male relatives. However, following the beginning of the civil war after 1665 women began to exercise more open and overt power, taking effective control of some sections of the country and working less through male relatives. However, elite Kongo women never took formal control of the state as they did in Ndongo and Matamba.

This essay rethinks the gender history and historiography of interwar sub-Saharan Africa by deploying the heuristic device of the ‘modern girl’ to consider how global circuits of representation and commerce informed this period of gender tumult. This device has been developed by a research group at the University of Washington to understand the global emergence during the 1920s and 1930s of female figures identified by their cosmopolitan look, their explicit eroticism and their use of specific commodities. Previous scholarship has suggested that a black modern girl imbricated in international circuits of images, ideologies and commodities only became visible in southern Africa in the post-Second World War period. Yet, analysis of the black newspaper Bantu World reveals the emergence of such a figure by the early 1930s. The modern girl heuristic helps to situate race as a key category of analysis in scholarship on women and gender in interwar Africa as contemporaries consistently debated her in racial terms. In South Africa, some social observers saw African young women’s school education, professional careers and cosmopolitan look as contributing to ‘racial uplift’. Others accused the African modern girl of ‘prostituting’ her sex and race by imitating white, coloured or Indian women, and by delaying or avoiding marriage, dressing provocatively and engaging in premarital and inter-racial sex. Cosmetics use was one of the most contentious issues surrounding the black modern girl because it drew attention to the phenotypic dimensions of racial distinctions. By analysing a beauty contest in Bantu World together with articles and letters on, and advertisements for, cosmetics, this essay demonstrates how, in white-dominated segregationist South Africa, the modern girl emerged through and posed challenges to categories of race and respectability.