This essay interprets a classification of Africa's Bantu languages which used statistical tools guided by assumptions about farming and its chronology to analyze fresh vocabulary evidence. It shows a peeling movement from Cameroon's grassfields, into southern Cameroon, then along a savanna corridor through West Central Africa's rainforests, into the Savannahs, then to Southern Africa, the Great Lakes, and Indian Ocean coast. The clear sequence of movement masks methodological and historical factors. Language death, multilingualism, and the limits of vocabulary evidence restrain the classification's authority. ‘Transformations’ from food collecting to food producing or from no metals to full engagement with metals were mutable, unfolded at different speeds, and involved interactions with firstcomers. In Central Africa, Bantu speakers were often the first farmers and metal-users in the region but elsewhere they were commonly neither. Their arrivals did not immediately displace firstcomers. Computational methods can accommodate many of these issues.

This review article seeks to build bridges between mainstream African history and the more historically oriented branch of the ‘new’ economic history of Africa. We survey four central topics of the new economic history of Africa — growth, trade, labor, and inequality — and argue that the increased use of quantitative methods and comparative perspectives have sharpened views on long-term trajectories of economic development within Africa and placed the region more firmly into debates of global economic development. The revival of African economic history opens new opportunities for Africanist historians to enrich the interdisciplinary approaches they have taken to study questions of demography, poverty, slavery, labor, inequality, migration, state formation, and colonialism. These fruits, however, can only be reaped if the institutional boundaries between the fields of history and economic history are softened and both sides engage in greater mutual engagement. Our paper aims to move closer to a shared vision on the benefits and limitations of varying quantitative methods, and how these approaches underpin both more and less convincing narratives of long-term African development.

Almamy Maliki Yattara, en sa double qualité de traditionniste et d’arabisant, fut chargé par l’Institut des Sciences Humaines de Bamako d’accompagner W. A. Brown pendant ses recherches. Dans ses Mémoires, Yattara a laissé sur leurs enquêtes un témoignage saisissant, où transparaissent l’estime et la complicité existant entre deux personnes venues d’horizons si différents. On y voit également comment les curiosités et les approches du chercheur ont pu être influencées par les positionnements de son guide. Yattara décrit longuement leur quête des manuscrits arabes locaux qu’ils photographiaient inlassablement, dans un domaine de recherche où Brown joua un rôle de pionnier.

This article focuses on the gambling milieu in Nigeria between the late 1970s and early 1980s. I consider the moment when the Federal Military Government (FMG) banned gambling nationwide, and ask why it became such a divisive issue during this tenuous period in Nigeria's history. I argue that amid impending transitional elections to a democratic regime, gambling embodied three key tensions that saturated Nigerian political and civil society during this period: job creation, the state's relationship with private capital, and the division of political power. Additionally, I propose that examining gambling's recreational value alongside its functional significance opens new avenues for the study of the gambling phenomenon in Africa that move beyond ethical considerations.

Resistance to colonial rule is a dominant topic in the historical study of Africa. But resistance to attempted transfer of colonised peoples and territories, to promote peace in Europe, has not gained similar attention in African and colonial historiographies. This article looks at how rumours and reports of Nazi Germany's colonial demands in Africa, and the ambiguous reactions of British officials to them, shaped conversations among colonised peoples about their dignity under British colonialism and in intra-European diplomacy. The article argues that the prospect of Nazi rule and its spectre of slave-labour concentration camps for Africa's Western-educated elites, and other colonial subjects, bound these segments of colonial society closer to British, and French, imperialism than they relished at an uncertain, but critical moment in African and international history. They became the defenders of colonial systems they deplored, and opponents of a ruthless regime they feared.

Opening its general meeting on 27 December 1966, the state-sponsored National Union of Tanganyika Workers, known as NUTA, proposed a combative response to a presidential commission's investigation into mismanagement in the union. The union's general secretary also issued an azimio (resolution) that prefigured much of the socialist rhetoric and policy prescriptions that appeared a month later in Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere's Azimio la Arusha (Arusha Declaration) that refined his policy of African Socialism or Ujamaa. Although the NUTA azimio circulated widely and was submitted to the Arusha party meeting, it was excluded from both the record of that meeting and NUTA's own file of related material. This elision happened before its main author, NUTA general secretary Michael Kamaliza, was convicted of treason two years later. The suppression of NUTA's azimio offers a point of entry to investigate the diffuse agency of political rhetoric and the history of Nyerere's influential speech.

This article argues that street food was an essential part of the social reproduction of Mombasa's working class during the colonial period. Like in other expanding capitalist cities, as Mombasa grew, urban workers lived further from their place of employment, which meant they could not return home for their midday meal. Street-food vendors provided them lunch at low prices in convenient locations, and therefore reproduced the working day by provisioning the calories that bridged morning to afternoon. However, postwar municipal authorities also wanted to create a particular kind of urban society in which the ‘informal’ activities of street-food vendors did not fit, and tried to expel them from the city's streets. As these campaigns unfolded, an unresolved contradiction emerged between this elite view of Mombasa, and the reality that the services vendors provided were necessary for the reproduction of the city's economy.

Beginning in 1900, colonial railway departments in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Nigeria began turning to the Caribbean for skilled labor instead of hiring African workers. When West Indian railway workers began to arrive in West Africa, Africans were indignant, and they voiced their objections in newspapers. West Indians sometimes responded to these grievances with calls for racial unity, yet their appeals were inflected with colonial hierarchies. Such exchanges were centered on railway jobs, but they were also embedded in larger discussions about empire, race, and the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. I argue that these exchanges reveal the significance of colonial hierarchies and diasporic tensions in the intellectual history of pan-Africanism in early twentieth-century West Africa. The article draws on newspapers and archival research from West Africa, the Caribbean, and the UK.