Based on a broad assessment of the scholarship on North-Western Africa, this article examines Saharan historiography with a particular view towards understanding how and why historians have long represented the continent as being composed of two ‘Africas’. Starting with the earliest Arabic writings, and, much later, French colonial renderings, it traces the epistemological creation of a racial and geographic divide. Then, the article considers the field of African studies in North African universities and ends with a review of recent multidisciplinary research that embraces a trans-Saharan approach.

This article addresses how scholarship has formulated human connections and ruptures over the Sahara. However, these formulations were, and still are, based in both physical and discursive realities that have been developed in Africa itself. The idea of a dividing Sahara is based on historical political divisions – despite a homogenous political culture in the region – and by locally developed notions of race and religion, brought about by trade and justified in Islamic religious discourse. The Saharan divide acquired a new reading in colonial historiography, which, in turn, informed scholarly work until well into the 1960s. I will suggest that both colonial and postcolonial research on the differences and connections between the Saharan shores are suffering from a civilisational bias towards North Africa.

The emergence of scientific racism and the taking of heads and skulls in the nineteenth-century colonial wars in Southern Africa have received limited attention from historians. Closer examination of head-taking in colonial wars fought in the western parts of Xhosaland and the Cape Colony suggests that the rise of scientific racism alone does not explain the complex interplay between military discourse on Africans, atrocities committed, and commonplace racial attitudes. A detailed examination of the incidents of head-taking in the colonial conflicts against the Xhosa indicates the practice evolved over time, had several causes, and became an increasingly common part of the construction and re-enforcement of a racial identity and culture of domination by British and colonial soldiers. It also suggests that for the Xhosa, the taking of heads was a behaviour acquired from the British.

In a historiography that paints relations between chiefs and women as antagonistic, the history of the Nazaretha Church in Mtunzini, South Africa in the early twentieth century sheds light on conditions that allowed chiefs and women to find common ground. During the era of segregation, Mtunzini was, on one hand, subject to relatively less interference from white government officials, but, on the other, ravaged by social and economic change. In this context, the Nazaretha Church flourished thanks to the support of many chiefs and women. The religious community not only proposed new answers to related questions about health, healing, and morality, but it also afforded chiefs and women important social options amid rural decline and challenges to traditional authority.

Despite the recent proliferation of scholarship on the Mau Mau rebellion, little attention has been paid to the ‘propaganda war’ it generated. The absence is especially striking given the importance that both the British and Mau Mau fighters attached to success in the battle for the ‘hearts and minds’ of Kenya's African population. This article analyzes the production of colonial propaganda – and its reception by Africans – in the ‘Emergency’, revealing how its themes and strategies changed over the course of the 1950s. Despite vast resources pumped into this effort, both African and British testimonies reveal that this propaganda had only limited success until government forces gained the upper hand in the military war against Mau Mau in late 1954. After that point, the increased level of control in Central Province enabled officials to finally best the efforts of skilled Mau Mau propagandists.

This article examines squatter resistance to a World Bank-funded forest and paper factory project. The article illustrates how diverse actors came together at the sites of rural development projects in early postcolonial Kenya. It focuses on the relationship between the rural squatters who resisted the project and the political elites who intervened, particularly President Kenyatta. Together, these two groups not only negotiated the reformulation of a major international development program, but they also worked out broader questions about political authority and political culture. In negotiating development, rural actors and political elites decided how resources would be distributed and they entered into new patronage-based relationships, processes integral to the making of the postcolonial political order.

In many accounts, the Sharpeville emergency of 1960 was a key ‘turning point’ for modern South African history. It persuaded the liberation movements that there was no point in civil rights-style activism and served as the catalyst for the formation of the African National Congress's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. From the South African government's perspective, the events at Sharpeville made it imperative to crush black resistance so that whites could defend themselves against communist-inspired revolutionary agitation. African and Afrikaner nationalist accounts are thus mutually invested in the idea that, after Sharpeville, there was no alternative. This article challenges such assumptions. By bringing together new research on African and Afrikaner nationalism during this period, and placing them in the same frame of analysis, it draws attention to important political dynamics and possibilities that have for too long been overlooked.

This article argues for a thematic and periodization shift in the approach to the history of Congo's decolonization. It demonstrates how debates about cultural heritage and demands for cultural restitution became important aspects of Congolese interpretations of decolonization, and argues that they played an important role in the national and international politics that were central to the construction of the cultural sovereignty of the postcolonial Zairian state.