We signed on as the new editorial team of History in Africa (HIA) without knowing that we all sat on the precipice of tumultuous times. After over a year of the COVID-19 pandemic, global unrest calling for a reckoning on racial justice, and events that exposed the limits and fragility of democratic institutions, we are reminded of the importance of how people experience, remember, and chronicle the past. It is a weighty and fortuitous time to think about our craft as historians and how we develop methods for analyzing and revisiting sources. How do we want to highlight our unique approaches as historians of Africa, and how do we want to push our field of African history and our discipline of history, more broadly, in new directions? We salute and thank the previous team of HIA editors – Jan Jansen, Michel Doortmont, John Hanson, and Dmitri van den Bersselaar – for their excellent stewardship of the journal over many years.

Regionalizing pre-colonial Africa aids in the collection and interpretation of primary sources as data for further analysis. This article includes a map with six broad regions and 34 sub-regions, which form a controlled vocabulary within which researchers may geographically organize and classify disparate pieces of information related to Africa’s past. In computational terms, the proposed African regions serve as data containers in order to consolidate, link, and disseminate research among a growing trend in digital humanities projects related to the history of the African diasporas before c. 1900. Our naming of regions aims to avoid terminologies derived from European slave traders, colonialism, and modern-day countries.

This article discusses the methodology behind the development of new tools of research for African history that are a user-friendly source for public engagement. The focus is on biographical profiles of West African people during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which is an innovative approach to social history. The representation of enslaved Africans has typically been numbers recorded in logs and accounts compiled by slave merchants and captains. Freedom Narratives is an open-source relational database that reveals the people who constitute those numbers.

This article examines the project to digitize and preserve the archives of the Mineworkers’ Union of Zambia and has two aims. The first aim is to discuss the process of cataloguing and digitizing an archive that has undergone significant deterioration, and the theoretical and practical challenges to achieving this. The second aim is to relate making this archive more accessible to questions of knowledge production. Despite its limitations, the value of this archive is that it is primarily composed of documents produced by Africans about the world as they saw it. These are not the records of external powers, colonial officials, or those studying African peoples.

The essay chronicles the early phases of a digital history project on landscape change in the mountains of eastern Tanzania. In collecting sources for a land and culture narrative, the project aims ultimately to create an archive that is locally produced in Tanzania and maintained by Utah State University Library’s Special Collections and Archives division. The project draws on more than thirty early twentieth-century landscape photographs from the Usambara Mountains in northeastern Tanzania by Walther Dobbertin, a professional photographer living in German East Africa. In the fall of 2015, team members scouted the sites for repeat photographs. The following summer, the project team began repeat photography and expanded the range of local collaborators to develop an oral history collection tied to the region’s landscape history. The essay lays out the problems, pitfalls, and successes of the preliminary collaborative work among academics, university students, archival specialists, and elders’ groups intent on collecting and preserving knowledge.

In 2016, with the support of a three-year National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Collaborative Research Grant to research and write a precolonial African history of family, generations, and gender, we began building the Bantu Ancestral Roots Database (BARD). BARD is a digital repository of word-roots related to gender and life stage practices from over sixty Bantu languages. We developed it to assist us in our analysis of this large corpus of data that we used to write histories of people’s material and ideological inventions that cover the longue durée across multiple regions. BARD allows researchers with internet access to search for terms by entering at least three consecutive phonemes. If phonemes exist in that sequence in any of the 64 Bantu languages that BARD holds, those words and their meanings appear as results. In this article, we discuss the usefulness and complexities of Digital Humanities (DH) as research tools. We explain our methodology and research process using three reconstructed word-roots pertinent to our research on family and generations. The three word-roots we examine invite scholars to probe how to recover deep connections and linkages between people’s pasts in Africa and its Diasporas, particularly in ways that move beyond histories of the slave trade and enslavement. As we developed our open-access website African Social History and Data Across Bantu Matrilineal Communities (ASH-DABMC) and our database, BARD, we gained greater insight into the meanings encoded in our data even as we faced challenges. We hope the discussion of our experiences will provide an intellectual framework and inspire others considering digital projects.

The “Grey Street Casbah and surrounding” is a closed Facebook group about the historically “Indian” neighborhood in downtown Durban, South Africa. It creates an informal archival repository and provides a new space to reify contemporary understandings of historical places within the Durban Central Business District. The informal nature of this space allows the layperson the ability to participate in historical inquiry and exhibits the diverse ways places in Durban are remembered and memorialized. In this paper, I argue the wealth of knowledge generated on informal online platforms, such as this Facebook group, should influence and inform historical interpretations of our urban pasts.

Mapping Senufo: Art, Evidence, and the Production of Knowledge – an in-progress, collaborative, born-digital publication – will offer a model for joining theories about the construction of identities and the politics of knowledge production with research and publication practice. In this article, we examine how computational methods have led us to reframe research questions, reevaluate sources, and reimagine the form of a digital monograph. We also demonstrate how our use of digital technologies, attention to iteration, and collaborative mode of working have generated fresh insights into a corpus of arts identified as Senufo, the nature of evidence for art-historical research, and digital publication. We posit that the form of a digital publication itself can bring processes of knowledge construction to the fore and unsettle expectations of a tidy, authoritative narrative.

Along the coast of the Republic of Guinea, the term “Baga” has been used to cover a large amalgamation of cultural groups, always previously misinterpreted. There are five dialect groups called Baga within the Temne language group. The question raised here concerns the etymology of the name Baga, as it has evolved in juxtaposition to the name Temne in Sierra Leone. It is an attempt to parse the intricate use of language to describe the historical and hierarchical relationship between these two segments of the same group.

The Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé arose during the Atlantic slave trade and has unmistakable Yorùbá influences. In the city of Salvador, the term nação ketu [Ketu nation] is used among the oldest temples in describing Yorùbá heritage. This has led some scholars to assume that the founders came from the Yorùbá kingdom by that name. This paper critically examines the idea of Kétu origins, taking as a case study the temple Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká, a national historic heritage site in Brazil that is recognized by UNESCO as a site of diasporic memory. The paper shows that the first generations of leadership were dominated by people from Ọ̀yọ́ and that the term ketu emerged not as an allusion to ethnic origins but perhaps as a metaphor for a heterogeneous cultural context in which Yorùbá speakers from disparate regions lived in close coexistence.

The Arabic manuscripts of Timbuktu have received considerable publicity during the past 25 years, yet their contents remain largely unknown. Since 2012, an inventory of nearly 350,000 Timbuktu manuscripts in private libraries has been underway, and the contents of those libraries are now accessible in the West African Arabic Manuscript Database (WAAMD). This analysis examines 31 of the 35 libraries and in addition to reporting on their contents, notes challenges in accessing incompletely identified works, and compares the manuscripts with other West African collections.

This article is a retelling of the Sharr Bubba Jihad as it unfolded in Kajoor (present-day Senegal) in which I attempt to set aright an instance of ontological violence in the existing secondary literature. I attempt to correct this first through an exposition of how the prevailing academic history is complicit in the continual colonization of African history. Secondly, I explain how Eurocentric discourses relegate African women to ancillary bearers of children, hewers of wood, and drawers of water. I further explain that the relationships between gender and authority in African histories do not align with the European “template” explaining the position and role of lingeer. Thirdly, I give the details of the Sharr Bubba Jihad in Kajoor through a rereading of the sources, making sure to name Lingeer Yacine Bubu, and contextualizing the role of the lingeer in Kajoor and the other Senegambian kingdoms.

Archival sources, especially correspondence between officials, have been critical to the reconstruction of the history of colonial territories. Minutes, confidential comments that informed the decisions transmitted in official correspondence (known as dispatches), though important, are often neglected. This paper highlights the value of minutes and demonstrates their optimal utilization through the lens of the career of J.E.W. Flood, a prolific middle level career officer at the Colonial Office. His minutes on various issues across the interwar period shed light on the undercurrents and debates among officials at Whitehall that shaped aspects of British imperial economic policy during the period.

This paper asks a methodological question: In what way can petitions written in the colonial period introduce us to the persona of the writers – that is, as against mainstream interpretation given to them as mere archival sources? Doesn’t the very nature of the petitions introduce us to the selfhood of those “caught up” in the often-mentioned “sophisticated” concepts of nationalism, politics, power, imperialism, urbanity, and colonialism? What, and how, do petitions tell us about the “interior version” of colonial society as seen in the individual? In an attempt at a deeper understanding of colonial Lagos, this paper examines an alternative feature of petitions as entry into the selfhood of colonial subjects rather than mainstream interpretations of the documents as qualitative exposition to “grand” historical phenomena. Selfhood as examined here is presented as it was constructed by petitions written in Lagos between 1940 and 1960 with a particular focus on three. Their deficiencies in “standards of grammar” notwithstanding, the words are also examined to allow for a demonstration of their qualities as texts: their meanings in singular and collaborative contexts, the gaps they exposed, the information they concealed, the disconnections in chronology they indicated, the “ethics” of grammar they “relegated” for more “substantial expose” of the self, the information they privileged the reader to hear, the identity they formed in the personas they constructed and the voice they generated. This paper suggests that these strands analyzed together affirm the textuality of petitions written by everyday people in colonial Lagos and that these point to the potentiality of such documents to further contribute to the substantial comprehension of the inner qualities of self-identity in Lagos and Nigeria’s colonial history.

In 2017, the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Firestone Memorial Library, Princeton University, acquired the papers of a British enslaver who operated in the region of greater Sierra Leone during the late-eighteenth century. This article offers an introduction to these papers for potential researchers. Focusing on two journals that cover Matthews’s time in the region between 1785 and 1787, it suggests three topics for which the collection might be of value to scholars of early-modern West Africa. These three topics are the local workings of the transatlantic slave trade in greater Sierra Leone; the production of European knowledge about Africa and Africans; and the history of the region immediately preceding the settlement of Freetown. In addition, this article includes four images of Sierra Leone. Black and white versions of these images were printed in 1791, but the watercolors are reproduced here for the first time.

The Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) is South Africa’s foremost non-teaching social science research body. In this paper, the author gives an overview of its records, recently uncovered in the institution’s building in Pretoria. To academics, policy makers, and all those interested in South Africa’s intellectual and institutional history, these records are important in seeking to understanding the HSRC itself and other apartheid institutions. In addition, exploration of its history can, amongst other things, help to shape policy in liberated South Africa towards higher educational and research institutions in the light of their historical legacy of apartheid and segregation. The author cautions that, as researchers embark upon exploring the history of the HSRC, they should avoid romanticizing it but rather confront its nuances and challenges head on.

This report describes the official photographic archives of Idi Amin’s government held by the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC). During his reign from 1971 to 1979, Idi Amin embraced visual media as a tool for archiving the achievements of populist military rule as his government sought to reorient Ugandans’ relationship with the state. Only a handful of the resulting images were ever printed or seen, reflecting the regime’s archival impulse undergirded by paranoia of unauthorized ways of seeing. The UBC’s newly opened collection of over 60,000 negatives from Amin’s photographers, alongside files at the Uganda National Archives, offers the first comprehensive opportunity to study the Ugandan state under Amin’s dictatorship through the lens of its own documentarians.