On 24 May 2006, Professor Emeritus of History Albert Adu Boahen passed away on the evening of his 74th birthday. The first Ghanaian to receive a Ph.D. in African history from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1959, and the first African to chair the Department of History at the University of Ghana in 1967, Adu Boahen was without a doubt Ghana's foremost historian and a distinguished statesman. His publishing career spanned some forty years, his works ranging from standard textbooks in use in Africa and the West to major interpretations of African history such as African Perspectives on Colonialism (1987), Mfantsipim and the Making of Ghana: A Centenary History, 1876–1976 (1996) and Yaa Asantewaa and the Asante–British War of 1900–1 (2003). A scholar–activist, he demonstrated a consistent opposition to dictatorial rule and military regimes that earned him stints in prison. In February 1988, on the platform of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, of which he was a fellow, he delivered three lectures under the title of ‘The Ghanaian Sphinx: Reflections on the Contemporary History of Ghana, 1972–1987’ that broke the ‘Culture of Silence’ of the oppressive Rawlings regime and inaugurated what has been termed the ‘second independence of Ghana’. Posthumously awarded the Order of the Star of Ghana on 30 June 2006 for distinguishing himself in academia and statesmanship, Boahen was given a grand state burial in July 2006. He served on the editorial board of the Journal of African History.

This article is a West African case-study of the nutritional history of everyday poverty. It draws on unusually rich statistical evidence collected in northeastern Ghana. In the 1930s, pioneer colonial surveys revealed that seasonal poor diet was pervasive, by contrast with undernourishment. They pave the way for constructing a new set of anthropometric data in Nangodi, a savanna polity where John Hunter completed a classic study of seasonal hunger in the 1960s. A re-survey of the same sections and lineages c. 2000, during a full agricultural cycle, shows a significant improvement in nutritional statuses, notably for women.

This article synthesizes metaphors and practices surrounding human and bovine milk and semen appearing in the James Stuart Archive of Zulu oral history. The King's control of the flow of milk in society was the source of his power and the mechanism by which he controlled the state. A fluent understanding of this Zulu political philosophy in the Stuart Archive opens up a rich and underutilized source of historical information for Zulu history that adds significantly to prior studies. Parallels to these images in the Great Lakes region suggest a ‘milk complex’ rather than the common perception of a ‘cattle complex’.

This article revisits the trope of the traffic in body parts in colonial and postcolonial Equatorial Africa. Current analyses, mostly written by anthropologists and sociologists, explain these rumors by the destructive integration of Africa in the world's economy and the commodification of the human body. While acknowledging their fertility, I argue that these approaches fail to understand how, during the colonial era, Europeans and Africans participated in the re-enchanting of the human body. The first part of the article examines Equatorial African conceptions of the body as central in the crafting of power and social reproduction, and reconstructs how these views were disturbed by colonial intrusion. The second part turns to European discourses and suggests that the colonial situation revealed significant contradictions in the western fiction of a modern disconnect between the body and power. The series of political and moral transgressions triggered by the conquest made apparent how Europeans themselves envisioned political survival as a form of positive exchange revolving around the body-fetish. The third section puts these ideas to the test of funeral practices to show how, in the colony, black and white bodies became re-sacralized as political resources. Building on these findings, the conclusion questions anthropologists' and historians' tendency to draw epistemic boundaries between western and African imaginaries.

This article examines memorial traditions and social identities in the Luapula Valley during the nineteenth century. In History on the Luapula, Ian Cunnison argued that most histories in the Luapula Valley were ‘personal’ renditions except for the ‘impersonal’ and general history of the Kazembe Kingdom. This article details how the impersonal history of the Kazembe Kingdom arose. Through the association of shrines and natural phenomena with the ancestral heroes that featured in the historical drama of the Kazembe conquests, a more general, universal and hegemonic history was rendered. The formulation and commemoration of this history sustained two Luapulan identities, a ‘Lunda’ migrant identity and a ‘Shila’ autochthonous identity, both of which proved to be solid foundations for the creation of ‘tribes’ in the colonial period.

This article examines the historical origins of one of urban Africa’s most visible contemporary problems, using Tanzania as a case study. The middle decades of the twentieth century are identified as a time when a pivotal shift occurred as labour scarcity gave way to over-supply, resulting in the emergence of enduring ‘structural’ unemployment. This was influenced by a combination of phenomena arising from the deepening impact of colonialism: including demographic growth leading to an increasingly youthful population, commoditisation and heightened African expectations influenced by socio-cultural and ideological factors. These were compounded by a shift in late-colonial labour policy towards stabilisation, which had the unintended effect of stymieing job creation. The latter part of the article describes the panicked response of the incoming African regime, faced with what they initially interpreted as a potentially insurrectionary class of urban unemployed. Closing remarks speculate on whether, in the longue durée, one may interpret unemployment in a more positive light as part of an ongoing wider historical transformation.

Based on a close reading of new archival material, this article makes a case for the adoption of an empirical, ‘sub-systemic’ approach to the study of nationalist and postcolonial politics in Zambia. By exploring the notion of popular ‘expectations of independence’ to a much greater degree than did previous studies, the paper contends that the extent of the United National Independence Party's political hegemony in the immediate post-independence era has been grossly overrated – even in a traditional rural stronghold of the party and during a favourable economic cycle. In the second part of the paper, the diplomatic and ethnic manoeuvres of the ruler of the eastern Lunda kingdom of Kazembe are set against a background of increasing popular disillusionment with the performance of the independent government.

The major concepts of nationalist political thought in Tanzania formed at the meeting point between local and international understandings of exploitation, and prescriptions for its removal. These ideas were given social form through a politics of enmity concerned with defining enemies of the nation and creating corresponding purge categories. Acquiring urban citizenship in Tanzania required the demonstrated commitment to fight exploitation for a party and state hostile to urban growth. While such ideas formed the boundaries of legitimate political debate, Africans struggling to lay claim to urban life appropriated nationalist idioms to lampoon official pieties and make sense of class differentiation in a socialist country.

This article opens with a retelling of colonial accounts of the ‘mania of 1911’, which took place in the Kamba region of Kenya Colony. The story of this ‘psychic epidemic’ and others like it would be recounted over the years as evidence depicting the predisposition of Africans to episodic mass hysteria. This use of medical and psychological language in primarily non-medical contexts serves to highlight the intellectual and political roles psychiatric ideas played in colonial governance. The salience of such ideas was often apparent in the face of increasing social tension, charismatic leadership and a proliferation of East African prophetic movements. This article addresses the attempts by the colonial authorities to understand or characterize, in psychological terms, a progression of African ‘rebellious types’ in society that often took the form of prophets and visionaries, but were diagnosed as epileptic, neurotic or suffering from ‘religious mania’.

This article examines three incidents in the history of early colonial Natal in which colonial forces under Secretary for Native Affairs Theophilus Shepstone attacked subject chiefs, deposed them and seized their herds. These incidents, which presaged the later conflict with Langalibalele, constituted in local African terms ‘eating up’, a practice whereby a chief confiscated the property of a subject convicted of conspiring against him through witchcraft. Close examination of these incidents shows how the early colonial state's rule over African subjects was inevitably imbued with African understandings of power and authority.

In the literature on African trade unions during decolonization and in the immediate post-independence period, two schools of thought can be distinguished: one is pessimistic about the unions' economic and political roles, and the other is optimistic. This study attempts to assess the role of autonomous teachers' trade unions in Anglophone Cameroon during the period 1959–72. The emergence, development and dissolution of these unions appears to have closely followed the region's political and educational reforms. It is argued that two main issues formed a constant source of conflict between the government and these unions, namely the preservation of trade union autonomy, and union demands for a substantial improvement in members' conditions of service.

Planned villagization is a recurrent feature in modern Africa. Apart from their official goals, which were missed in most cases, rural settlement schemes can be seen as attempts by colonial and postcolonial states to inscribe a new territorial order into the countryside. Taking a group of villages in northwest Zambia as an example, this article examines the process and impact of territorialization in a long-term and interactionist perspective. The result is a history of contestation about competing concepts of spatiality and sociality which opens new perspectives on the making of both locality and the nation state in Central Africa.

Discussions of women’s power in Africa often focus on how much the role of senior women is symbolic and how much is real. Studying the Kingdom of Kongo reveals that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries women initially exercised power indirectly through influence on male relatives. However, following the beginning of the civil war after 1665 women began to exercise more open and overt power, taking effective control of some sections of the country and working less through male relatives. However, elite Kongo women never took formal control of the state as they did in Ndongo and Matamba.

This article demonstrates that black British West Indians and black South Africans in post-First World War Cape Town viewed ‘American Negroes’ as divinely ordained liberators from South African white supremacy. These South-African based Garveyites articulated a prophetic Garveyist Christianity that provided common ideological ground for Africans and diasporic blacks through leading black South African organizations like the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA), the African National Congress (ANC) and the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU). This study utilizes a ‘homeland and diaspora’ model that simultaneously offers an expansive framework for African history, redresses the relative neglect of Africa and Africans in African diaspora studies and demonstrates the impact of Garveyism on the country's interwar black freedom struggle.

‘That rebellious youth’ alarmed colonial authorities and elders alike is increasingly an issue for historians. This article surveys the issue as an introduction to the two studies that follow. It considers both the creation of images of youthful defiance as part of a debate about youth conducted largely by their seniors and the real predicaments faced by young people themselves. Concern revolved around the meanings of maturity in a changing world where models of responsible male and female adulthood, gendered expectations and future prospects were all in flux. Surviving the present and facing the future made elders anxious and divided as well as united the young. The article concludes by suggesting a number of areas, including leisure and politics, where the voice of youth might be more clearly heard, and proposes comparisons – with the past, between racial groups and between ‘town’ and ‘country’ – that link the varied experiences of the young.

WRITING African History pays homage to Daniel McCall's pioneering text, Africa in Time Perspective: A Discussion of Historical Reconstruction from Unwritten Sources, published at the dawn of the era of modern African history in 1964. Surprisingly, given subsequent developments in the field, there has been no comparable text since, making this volume especially welcome. But it also bears a heavy burden if it is to become the authoritative text for the next generations of students and scholars. Does it meet this difficult test?

Staff petitions, sexual and disciplinary scandal and open riot pushed Buganda's leaders to close Budo College on the eve of Kabaka (King) Muteesa II's coronation. The upheaval at the school included a teachers' council that proclaimed ownership of the school, student leaders who manipulated the headmaster through scandal and school clubs and associations that celebrated affiliation over discipline. Instead of enacting and celebrating imperial partnership and order in complex, well-choreographed coronation rituals, the school's disruption delineated the fractures and struggles over rightful authority, order and patronage within colonial Buganda, marking out a future of tumultuous political transition.

This essay rethinks the gender history and historiography of interwar sub-Saharan Africa by deploying the heuristic device of the ‘modern girl’ to consider how global circuits of representation and commerce informed this period of gender tumult. This device has been developed by a research group at the University of Washington to understand the global emergence during the 1920s and 1930s of female figures identified by their cosmopolitan look, their explicit eroticism and their use of specific commodities. Previous scholarship has suggested that a black modern girl imbricated in international circuits of images, ideologies and commodities only became visible in southern Africa in the post-Second World War period. Yet, analysis of the black newspaper Bantu World reveals the emergence of such a figure by the early 1930s. The modern girl heuristic helps to situate race as a key category of analysis in scholarship on women and gender in interwar Africa as contemporaries consistently debated her in racial terms. In South Africa, some social observers saw African young women’s school education, professional careers and cosmopolitan look as contributing to ‘racial uplift’. Others accused the African modern girl of ‘prostituting’ her sex and race by imitating white, coloured or Indian women, and by delaying or avoiding marriage, dressing provocatively and engaging in premarital and inter-racial sex. Cosmetics use was one of the most contentious issues surrounding the black modern girl because it drew attention to the phenotypic dimensions of racial distinctions. By analysing a beauty contest in Bantu World together with articles and letters on, and advertisements for, cosmetics, this essay demonstrates how, in white-dominated segregationist South Africa, the modern girl emerged through and posed challenges to categories of race and respectability.

Ce double numéro du Journal des Africanistes est issu d'un séminaire organisé entre 1999 et 2002 par l'équipe Afrique du laboratoire d'ethnologie et de sociologie comparative de l'Université de Paris 10 Nanterre. II regroupe 18 contributions d'anthropologues et d'historiens français qui interrogent à partir d'études de cas le fonctionnement du pouvoir local ou ‘le statut politique des localités en Afrique’ (p. 11)avec, en point de mire, deux objets principaux: la ville et la cité. Cette dernière fait l'objet d'une discussion théorique dans les deux chapitres introductifs de l'ouvrage. Jean-Jacques Glassner propose effectivement une recension fort utile des variations sémantiques de la notion de Cité-Etat sur différents continents à différentes périodes. Gilles Holder et Anne-Marie Peatrik s'interrogent pour leur part sur la Cité-Etat et la cité dans le contexte africain. Cette dernière associerait trois types d'espace: l'enceinte (matérielle ou symbolique), l'arrière-pays qui nourrit la cité, et ‘l'outre-pays’, néologisme proposé par les auteurs pour désigner des espaces non dépendants de la cité mais avec lesquels celle-ci entretient des liens économiques, politiques ou religieux (p. 14). Cette définition large permet aux auteurs ne pas opposer d'emblée ville et campagne et de pas dissocier a priori la ville de la cité et la cité de la Cité-Etat. Elle inclut donc des échelles d'analyse plus grandes et plus petites. On pourra en revanche s'étonner de l'absence d'une définition liminaire de la ville (proposée ensuite par différents auteurs), d'une bibliographie qui ne tient pas compte du renouvellement conséquent de l'histoire urbaine, notamment dans le monde anglophone, et de quelques cadrages chronologiques hasardeux (l'intérêt des historiens pour les villes d'Afrique a émergé au début des années 1980 et non au cours de la dernière décennie, p. 10).