Scholars of women and girls in African history, focusing on gender and power within religious or colonial (slavery) contexts, have drawn our attention to sexual violence against girls and women. Despite what historians of slavery and imperial violence have noted about their vulnerability and survival strategies in ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ contexts, questions remain about sexual predation and slavery in earlier periods. In the Mina (Gold) Coast, there is little known about the lived experiences of enslaved and ‘freed’ girls and women in the sixteenth century, and this is especially true for females held captive or in proximity to Portuguese slaving and gold trading bases of operation. Although only three inquisitional trials exist, sources which provide rare African female voices in the Portuguese colonial and evangelical world, their unprecedented baseline evidence for those under Portuguese slaving and religious authority tell us much about sexual violence, slavery, and religious orthodoxy.

This article examines state-society encounters in imperial Ethiopia through histories of exploitation and compromise. Focusing on the western province of Qellem, the article investigates Ethiopia's engagement with local rights claims over time, illustrating how the state was imagined, negotiated, and partially legitimated. The inherent incoherence within imperial state structures is traced back to the survival of nodes of indigenous power within territories conquered in the late nineteenth century. Peasant representatives, local elites, and Amhara governors and soldier-colonists engaged with the state to turn it to their benefit, or limit its excesses. Episodes of rebellion, withdrawal, and court arbitration punctuated a cycle of negotiation within which the role of the intermediary was key. Qellem experienced a state-making exercise that was contemporaneous with, and comparable to, the formation of European colonial states elsewhere on the continent. As such, this article provides a radical challenge to dominant historiographical perspectives on imperial Ethiopia.

This article studies the Ikoyi reservation in Lagos, Nigeria to assess changing relationships between the colonial state, urban space, and race between 1935 and 1955. Colonial authorities established reservations as special zones to house colonial officials and other white Westerners. The article shows that the Ikoyi reservation was a significant location where a wide range of actors contested relationships between statehood and race. These renegotiations contributed to making a late colonial state, a terminal form of colonial state in which explicitly racialised discourses of statehood and urban space were challenged while implicitly racialised standards and practices often persisted. Through a focus on Ikoyi, the article highlights the important relationships between segregationist projects and late colonial statehood.

The Middle East conflict has been identified as one of the most polarizing issues in the history of foreign relations of Nigeria during the First Republic (1960–6). The Christian-majority southern regions supported close relations with Israel, while the Muslim-majority Northern Region aligned with Arab states. The Sardauna Ahmadu Bello, Premier of the Northern Region, is remembered as particularly hostile to Israeli incursions in Nigeria. Reviewing new evidence from the Israel State Archives, this article introduces more complexity into portrayals of the Sardauna's positions. Contending with the enormous challenges of decolonization, the Sardauna continually vacillated in his approach to Middle East relations, weighing opportunities against drawbacks in establishing ties. Examining the more accommodating approach that the Sardauna adopted beyond the public eye, we gain new insights into his attempts to achieve political and economic objectives with regard to the Northern Region, while navigating the contentious political landscape of Nigeria's First Republic.

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Bissau-Guineans fought a bloody war for independence. Typical narratives of the war emphasize the ethnic dimension of the liberation struggle, with Balanta freedom fighters opposing Portuguese-allied Fulbe. This dominant narrative is open to question, as it ignores the war as a ‘social condition’, and the role that local circumstances played in determining collaboration with the Portuguese, fighting in liberation militaries, or fleeing to neighboring states for personal safety. Oral and archival evidence suggests a more nuanced perspective that blurs the binary nature of this dominant narrative along ethnic fault lines, viewed as either resistance or collaboration. The argument presented in this article allows us to move past defining the war along ethnic or regional lines, and instead urges a view of the conflict as a complex, fractured experience for all Bissau-Guineans, shaped by the particularities of local circumstances.

The article explores the political uses of the memory of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola's (MPLA's) heroic combatant Hoji ya Henda from the independence of Angola in 1975 to recent times. Based on extensive archival work in Luanda, the article maps the historical periods and circumstances during which the ruling regime invoked Henda's memory, noting how changes in the political system directly affected how his memory permeated the public domain, oscillating between presence, silence, replacement, and resurgence. In doing so, the article explores a dilemma in the study of memory, opposing historical continuity and active construction in memory-making. It concludes that even when subjected to political manipulation for several decades, the original memorialisation of national heroes such as Hoji ya Henda, although subject to historical circumstance, always retains its original mnemonic signifier in society. This signals an important nuance in entrenched debates concerning the opposition between history and the political construction of memory.