The present article explores crucial aspects of the Asante understanding and construction of their own historical experience. Specifically, it historicizes the royal oaths of the first two Asante rulers Osei Tutu (d. 1717) and Opoku Ware (d. 1750). These have long been understood to be fundamental elements in the working of Asante society and culture, but here they are situated precisely as historical testaments and mnemonics. Attention is paid to current debates on matters of emotion, affect and performance, but the focus of the article is an empirical and exemplary investigation of history-making among the Asante.

In northeast Congo, from c. 1890–1940, ritually-empowered militias of Bali Leopard-men, or anioto, killed people on behalf of local leaders to secure access to land, resources, and people and to keep rivals and subjects in check. Belgian colonial authorities portrayed the actions of anioto as an irrational disturbance, ignoring their political relevance. The contextualized study of colonial-era conflicts based on court hearings, in association with anthropological, historical, and material sources, gives insight into emic perspectives. As militias controlled by different leaders, they reflected human adaptability in dealing with social ills, performed judicial functions, and provided therapeutic relief through violence. Originating in the precolonial era, anioto adapted to various strategic needs throughout history. A study of different manifestations of anioto reveals the creative and amalgamating nature of institutional dynamism in northeast Congo. Better knowledge of this institutional history, based on studying conflicts from the past, may enrich our deeper understanding of the dynamics of conflicts in the present.

Most scholarship on the military history of precolonial Africa focuses on state-level conflict, drawing on examples such as the Asante, Buganda, Zulu, and Kongo kingdoms. The current article instead examines connections between warfare and political history in the politically fragmented setting of nineteenth-century Busoga, Uganda, where a small geographical region hosted more than fifty micro-kingdoms competing as peer polities. Using sources that include a rich corpus of oral traditions and early archival documents, this article offers a reconstruction of military practices and ideologies alongside political histories of important Busoga kingdoms during the long nineteenth century. The article argues that routine political destabilization caused by competition between royal leaders, combined with shifting interests of commoner soldiers, continuously reconstituted a multi-polar power structure throughout the region. This approach moves beyond assessing the role of warfare in state formation to ask how military conflict could be a creative force in small-scale politics as well.

In December 1961, Albert Luthuli, leader of the African National Congress (ANC), arrived in Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Journalists in Norway noted how apartheid crackdowns failed to poison the new laureate's ‘courteous’ commitment to nonviolence. The press never reported Luthuli's acceptance that saboteurs in an armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe (MK or Spear of the Nation), would now fight for freedom. Analyzing recently available evidence, this article challenges a prevailing claim that Luthuli always promoted peace regardless of state authorities who nearly beat him to death and massacred protesting women, children, and men. We uncover his evolving views of justifiable violence, which guided secret ANC decisions to pursue ‘some kind of violence’ months before his Nobel celebration. These views not only expand knowledge of ‘struggle history’, but also alter understandings of Luthuli's aim to emancipate South Africa from a system of white supremacy that he likened to ‘slavery’.

This article examines Zambia's engagement with the Middle East conflict from 1964–73 as a window into the political strategies and ideological ambitions of Kaunda's government in the first decade of independence. At the start of independence, Kaunda's domestic agenda led him to establish ties with Israel and to advance a program for cooperative development based on Israeli technical assistance. However, broader international concerns, filtered through the struggle against white minority regimes in southern Africa, ultimately led Kaunda to embrace a leadership role in international protests against Israel's policies towards its neighboring states. Zambia's foray into Middle East diplomacy in the first decade of independence enables a focused examination of Kaunda's presence in the international arena, while also revealing the compromises he made in the face of conflicting interests. Zambia's role in the Middle East conflict highlights this era as a time of confidence and claim-making by African leaders, but also one of concessions.