Histories of advertising in Africa focus on the postwar and postcolonial periods. This essay examines an innovative marketing campaign in South Africa's eastern Cape in the 1930s. The campaign reveals congruence and conflict between increased marketing of consumer goods to African households and the contemporaneous growth of women's home improvement societies. The newspaper Umlindi we Nyanga used testimonials and written competitions to sell its Ambrosia brand of tea to rural women. Advertisers and consumers drew on local meanings of tea consumption and debates about feminine respectability to present tea-drinking women as ‘intelligent’ and ‘wise mothers’. The emphasis on intelligence linked tea to literacy, in part because text-based consumer culture offered rural women a way to visibly consume socially respectable goods. The essay concludes with a close examination of two testimonials written by leaders of home improvement societies, which hint at the contradictions implicit in the commercialization of the ‘wise mother’.

This article explores radio broadcasting and monitoring by and about Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) leader John Garang during Sudan's second civil war, focusing on the core period of Radio SPLA broadcasting (1984–91). Through oral history, memoirs, and international monitoring reports, the article analyzes radio conversations between Garang and his critics — northern Sudanese, southern Sudanese, and international — to argue that radio battles directly shaped the struggle for political authority between Garang and the Sudanese government, and within the SPLM/A elite. Radio allowed Garang to speak to a dispersed audience within and beyond Sudan, presenting an alternative history of Sudan, publicizing his vision of a New Sudan, and asserting his pseudo-sovereign control of SPLM/A-held territory. However, Radio SPLA did not exist in a vacuum; Garang's rivals responded on government and international radio to criticize his leadership in targeted, personal terms. Radio thus powerfully mediated between personal, national, and international politics during the SPLM/A's liberation struggle.

This article studies infrastructure development in the colony of German East Africa from the early 1890s to 1907. By focussing on questions of continuity and change in the transition phase from the precolonial era to German colonial rule, the article demonstrates that colonial road planning coexisted and often collided with established infrastructure systems. After 1891, colonial authorities sought to transform existing caravan paths into all-weather highways. The analysis applies an actor-centred approach to explain why almost all of these efforts failed. A focus on those actors being expected to construct or maintain (residents) and to use (transport workers) colonial roads reveals the non-compliance of colonial subjects, the persistence of African spatial practices, and the resulting contestation of colonial rule in everyday life. In this way, the article illuminates how Africans responded to European interventions which restructured space and how these responses complicated and frustrated colonial road works. Hence, the article challenges classical narratives of infrastructure as a ‘tool of empire’ and instead highlights the resilience of vernacular structures and their producers under colonial rule.

On 24 December 1949, two thousand women marched on the prison at Grand Bassam in protest of the detention of militants of the Parti Démocratique de Côte d'Ivoire (PDCI). Considered the first mass demonstration by West African women against French colonial rule, the march on Grand Bassam was a watershed moment in the Ivoirian anticolonial movement. Though party officials have framed women's activism as a political ‘awakening’, women's militancy was in keeping with longstanding practices of public motherhood, whereby women's status as caregivers — both biological and symbolic — authorized their moral interventions in community life. Maternal authority enabled a variety of powerful political tactics, yet in an Ivoirian anticolonial context dominated by elite negotiations, it also circumscribed women's activism. This article examines the women's march on Grand Bassam as a case study for understanding the possibilities and limits of women's participation in the Ivoirian anticolonial movement.

Between the judicial reorganizations of 1924 and 1941, the colonial tribunals in Dahomey heard more than two hundred cases of rape. Teenage or younger girls engaged in street hawking were the most common victims of rape who reported their assaults to these tribunals. Many of the cases stand out because market women played the dominant role in transforming girl hawkers’ experiences of sexual assault into formal grievances. The history of sexual assault in colonial Africa has largely focused on how ‘customary’ and colonial courts have or have not punished the crime of rape. This approach privileges masculine authorities’ views of sex, consent, and gender violence. This article focuses on the investigative processes in cases of sexual assault. In doing so, two gendered histories emerge: firstly, a history of elder female caregiving to girls suffering the aftereffects of sexual assaults and, secondly, a history of the vulnerability of hawkers to quotidian sexual violence.

This article scrutinizes recent histories of colonial and international law that use metropolitan reactions to the ‘scandals of empire’ to project a reform-oriented version of European colonialism. In French West Africa, most scandals never reached the level of metropolitan debate; they hit dead ends in colonial bureaucracies. Analyzing one dead-end scandal, the M'Pésoba Affair, this article argues that colonial justice on the ground often adhered to a politics of expediency, not a reformist rule of law. To maintain their precarious grip on power, colonial administrators had to simultaneously appease their superiors, economic interests, and powerful African actors. Resolving the M'Pésoba Affair, for one, entailed navigating the complex entanglements of cotton production, chiefly disputes, Islamic policy, and interracial sexual relationships in a backwater of empire marked by anticolonial revolt and world war. Especially in moments of crisis, political constraints shaped the application of justice.

Challenging the Eurocentric belief that abolitionism was a top-down process issued by colonial powers, this article explores the emergence of personal and group strategies for the emancipation of Black enslaved people in Libya. During the late Ottoman period, Italian antislavery activities operated in Libya and established a mission in Benghazi to host manumitted children referred to as ‘Moretti’ (‘little Moors’). The goal was to make these Moretti a group of local people close to the Catholic Church and the Italian government. The failures of the missionaries to accomplish these aims reveal the strategies and trajectories of Moretti as they negotiated their role in society, especially after Italian occupation in 1911. Historical sources reveal an informal web of solidarity using antislavery societies and creating forms of urban and social autonomy. This article details actions of solidarity among Black enslaved persons that took place in late Ottoman and Italian colonial Libya, which challenges Eurocentric antislavery narratives.