In this Introduction to the Special Issue on Death in African History we explore issues raised by the existing literature and suggest ways forward for future research. Death has long been a central concern of social anthropological writing on African societies, and of the extensive literature on African belief systems. Until recently, however, little attention has been paid to the history of death practices in Africa in relation to demographic change, urbanization, the interventions of the colonial and postcolonial state and the availability of new technologies. We explore the ways in which these forces have contributed to re-inventions of practices and beliefs surrounding death which are both self-evidently ‘modern’ and yet also rooted in a much longer history.

On the fiftieth anniversary of an ambiguous event – the referendum giving French Africans the choice of immediate independence or a new status within a ‘French Community’ – this article points to the alternative forms of political action which opened up at certain moments in African history and how, at other moments, some of those alternatives closed down. It assesses concepts, issues and arguments used in writing the history of Africa, now that the recent African past – spanning the last years of colonial rule and the years of independence – is becoming a focus of historical inquiry.

This study focuses on the ancient past of coastal Guinea's Rio Nunez region, a coastal rice-growing region virtually unexplored by studies of West African rice and rice farmers. It argues that coastal cultivators have adapted mangrove rice-farming systems in situ for approximately the past 1,000 years, a historical period pre-dating the European travelers' accounts on which the current literature heavily relies. Rather than diffusing from the interior, these specialized farming systems grew organically out of land-use systems. Using the comparative method of historical linguistics and cultural vocabulary, the study establishes different stages in coastal farmers' experimentation, adaptation and specialization in the coastal environment and approximates historical dates when the different stages occurred. And with botanical and biological studies of mangrove vegetation, the study distinguishes between the softer, spongy roots of white mangroves and hard, twisted roots of red mangroves. The interdisciplinary evidence reveals that knowledge of white mangroves was an early formative stage in cultivators' fabrication of coastal land-use systems. Lastly, from an examination of loanwords, the study discusses the important contributions made by Mande groups, who speak the Susu language in the Rio Nunez region, in intensifying mangrove rice-farming systems indigenous to the coast and extending them from zones of white to those of red mangroves. The interdisciplinary methods and sources enable the study to capture localized experimentation and innovation as continuous processes, thereby breaking with the current literature's emphasis on diffusion from the interior to the coast.

Traditional sources tell us relatively little about how Africans perceived death in the past. In some societies, however, changing attitudes towards mortality can be identified from the names which were given to babies. In Bunyoro almost a third of the names that were given during the colonial period referred to death. The declining frequency of death-related names from the 1940s offers significant insights into the impact of Christianity, education and population growth on the Nyoro's worldview. That death-related names did not re-emerge in the era of AIDS is a significant indication of how the pandemic has been viewed in western Uganda.

Small-scale societies, like Avatime in eastern Ghana, established, maintained and developed themselves in a range of ways, in spaces between large, centralized states, in West Africa in the precolonial era. This essay demonstrates the inclusivity and initiative (in terms of both economic entrepreneurship and bricolage) of this small group before its effective destruction by Asante in about 1870, and looks at the ways in which Avatime was reconstructed in the last third of the nineteenth century. In addition, issues of ethnicity and identity are broadly addressed, comparing Avatime's inclusivity with tropes of difference discussed in recent studies of small-scale societies in this journal.

This article raises the question of how scholars might make sense of well-known components of social organization in Africa in the absence of the increasingly criticized evolutionary and lineage models that once gave them meaning. In an effort to understand why our earliest glimpses into the distant Ganda past appear in the form of clan histories, the article examines the relationship between clanship, public healing and transformations in agricultural practices. Beginning around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ganda expanded upon earlier knowledge of banana cultivation to develop a land-intensive banana farming system. This process coincided with the transformation of previously territorial spirits into portable spirits capable of ensuring the health of disconnected groups of people. At the heart of these undertakings stood the ideology and practices of clanship, which furnished the conceptual bridge connecting transformations in agriculture and public healing. The webs of shrines situated on discontiguous clan lands created therapeutic networks that drew together communities whose leaders possessed a variety of skills, thus forging a powerful connection between clanship, collective health and the composition of knowledge.

Analysis of an inventory of 641 slaving voyages involving Mauritius and Réunion between 1768 and 1809 reveals that the Mascarene Islands were at the center of a substantial and dynamic regional slave trading network that also reached into the Americas in ways that raise questions about the relationship between the ‘worlds’ of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. The fact that colonial, as well as metropolitan, merchant capital underwrote Mascarene-based slave trading ventures raises additional questions about the role of locally generated and/or non-Western capital in financing the movement of slave, and ultimately ‘free’, labor throughout the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial world.

The elaborate mortuary rites of the Chitimukulu (the paramount chief of the Bemba people) attracted the attention of both colonial administrators and anthropologists in inter-war Northern Rhodesia. This paper examines the political and symbolic significance of these rites before turning to an analysis of accounts, by the anthropologist Audrey Richards, of the deaths of two ‘commoners’ in the 1930s. The paper argues that chiefly power resided less in the threat of death which was enacted spectacularly in the Chitimukulu's mortuary rituals than in the promise to create and protect life, located in the practices of quotidian life. This promise of the creation and protection of life was being progressively undermined by the conditions of colonial rule.

This article analyzes the multiple and failed efforts to codify customary marriage law over the course of the twentieth century in colonial Gabon. It argues that these efforts illuminate the discursive arenas in which the colonial state, the church and African political leaders struggled to demarcate power and control over wealth-in-women. In a time of sociopolitical crisis and change state, chiefs and other elite African men all become involved in attempts to conceptualize, codify and administer customary marriage law. The contested process of codification reveals disjunctures in the articulation of male political authority in colonial Gabon.

This article illuminates the creative intellectual and social projects in which Mau Mau detainees were engaged. It draws on the private papers of Gakaara wa Wanjau, a Gikuyu writer who during his eight years of detention composed several plays, wrote ethnography and poetry, and carried on an extensive correspondence with his family. Gakaara and other detainees were doing more than defending a Mau Mau ideology. They were opening up new ways of doing Gikuyu culture, holding wives and children accountable, and representing themselves to a British public that could, they hoped, be brought round to their side.

Capital punishment in British colonial Africa was not just a method of crime control or individual punishment, but an integral aspect of colonial networks of power and violence. The treatment of condemned criminals and the rituals of execution which brought their lives to an end illustrate the tensions within colonialism surrounding the relationship between these states and their subjects, and with their metropolitan overlords. The state may have had the legal right to kill its subjects, but this right and the manner in which it was enacted were contested. This article explores the interactions between various actors in this penal ‘theatre of death’, looking at the motivations behind changing uses of the death penalty, the treatment of the condemned convicts whilst they awaited death, and the performance of a hanging itself to show how British colonial governments in Africa attempted to create and manage the deaths of their condemned subjects.

This article reconstructs the forgotten past of the Gnawa who, over many generations, productively negotiated their forced presence in Morocco to create acceptance and group solidarity. The diaspora of black West Africans in Morocco, the majority of whom were forcefully transported across the Sahara and sold in different parts of Morocco, shares some important traits with the African trans-Atlantic diaspora, but differs at the same time. There are two crucial differences: the internal African diaspora in Morocco has primarily a musical significance and it lacks the desire to return to the original homeland. This diaspora is constructed positively around the right to belong to the culture of Islam, unlike the construction of the African American diasporic double consciousness. Black consciousness in Morocco exists in analogy to the Berber consciousness or the Arab notion of collective identity; it does not constitute a contradiction with itself. Black Moroccans perceive themselves first and foremost to be Muslim Moroccans and only perceive themselves secondarily as participants in a different tradition.

Recent research on twentieth-century Africa has been marked by a surge of interest in autobiographical narrative. While this development is generally praiseworthy, the knowledge it has produced has been uneven, in temporal as well as spatial terms. This article channels the current interest in personal experience and narrative to a place and time where resonances of the ‘common’ voice have been rather weak: the Republic of Guinea, across the final decades of the twentieth century. Foregrounding the autobiographical reflections of a local teacher in the country's southeastern forest region, it forges new perspectives on political subjectivity in Guinea's understudied provinces.

Ancestors occupy a central place in African cosmologies and social practices. The death and the remembrance of Lt-Col. Adekunle Fajuyi, the Military Governor of Western Nigeria who was killed during a military coup in 1966, is used in this essay to critique the assumptions in the literature about ancestors, by linking the recent dead with the long dead in a lineage of ancestral practices. I focus on the ways in which Fajuyi's death was used in constructing ethno-national memory and history in the context of 21st-century challenges faced by the Yoruba in national politics, particularly in relation to unequal ethno-regional relations. Here, I attempt to historicize commemoration as a ritual of ethno-national validation.

This article seeks to situate local oral traditions on Samori Touré within the contexts of both internal African empire building and French colonial conquest. It takes into account the experiences of the vanquished on the periphery of Samori's empire in an effort to reassess his legacy. It argues that local traditions not only provide a corrective to the nationalist historiography on Samori, they also complicate the notion of ‘resistance’ by demonstrating internal dissent and even rebellion against Samorian rule at a time of Samori's vaunted ‘primary resistance’ to French conquest. Finally, this article concludes by providing a contemporary reading of the southern Malian historical landscape, rooting local Samorian history and politics in particular ‘sites of memory’.

Using newly available evidence, mainly from the Public Records Office (now the National Archive) in London, this article attempts to unravel the true extent of the role that British oil interests played in the decision of the British government to insist on a ‘One Nigeria’ solution in the Nigeria/Biafra conflict. While the official position of the British government was that its main interest in the Nigeria conflict was to prevent the break-up of the country along tribal lines, the true position was more complex. Evidence in this paper suggests that British oil interests played a much more important role in the determination of the British attitude to the war than is usually conceded. Specifically, Britain was interested in protecting the investments of Shell-BP in Nigerian oil. Furthermore, Britain was also at the time desperate to keep Nigerian oil flowing in order to mitigate the impact of its domestic oil shortfalls caused by the Middle East Six Day War. Supporting a ‘One Nigeria’ solution was considered its safest bet in order to achieve the above objectives.

The Nigerian police discovered dozens of corpses at a shrine in Anambra State, in southeastern Nigeria, in 2004. There were suggestions in the many newspapers covering the story that these were evidence of what Nigerians call ‘ritual murders’. In fact, the corpses almost certainly were of people who had died elsewhere and been removed to the shrine only subsequently. However, the revelation that senior political figures had attended the Okija shrine and sworn oaths there drew attention to an informal politics in which traditional shrines credited with powers of life and death may play an important role, of interest even to national politicians. Discerning why this is so entails considering the long-term effects of the colonial policy of Indirect Rule and the subsequent development of a clandestine political system in which local religious institutions sometimes play an important role.

After an ill-fated religious revival, the Sufi teacher Yacouba Sylla and his followers became wealthy and politically influential in post-Second World War Côte d'Ivoire. They argued for an understanding of democratization and development that defined both ideas in terms of their community's own mystical experiences and world-historical significance, rather than in terms of modernity. As a way of making sense of their own past and defending their place in an increasingly tense political environment, these efforts achieved their most explicit articulation in a powerful story about Yacouba Sylla's refusal of a gift from Ivoirian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny.