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.

Research conducted into the demography of the Kingdom of Kongo some forty years ago, employing baptismal statistics left by missionaries, has been in need of revision thanks to challenges by more recent scholarship. This article revises the estimated population of Kongo by addressing these challenges, drawing on newly discovered documentary sources. Using this new evidence, the estimate for the kingdom's population in the mid-seventeenth century has been elevated from 509,000 to around 790,000. The original article's claims about levels of fertility and mortality have been retained. The article also addresses questions concerning the validity of missionary statistics and the impact of the slave trade, which was small before 1700 but then increasingly large thereafter, reaching very high levels by the early nineteenth century. While a quantitative estimate of the later population is not possible given the limitations of sources for this period, it is likely that the population of the kingdom fell as slave exports peaked.

Tropical forest regions in equatorial Africa are threatened with degradation, deforestation and biodiversity loss as a result of land-cover change. We investigated historical land-cover dynamics in unprotected forested areas of the Littoral Region in south-western Cameroon during 1975–2017, to detect changes that may influence this important biodiversity and wildlife area. Processed Landsat imagery was used to map and monitor changes in land use and land cover. From 1975 to 2017 the area of high-value forest landscapes decreased by c. 420,000 ha, and increasing forest fragmentation caused a decline of c. 12% in the largest patch index. Conversely, disturbed vegetation, cleared areas and urban areas all expanded in extent, by 32% (c. 400,000 ha), 5.6% (c. 26,800 ha) and 6.6% (c. 78,631 ha), respectively. The greatest increase was in the area converted to oil palm plantations (c. 26,893 ha), followed by logging and land clearing (c. 34,838 ha), all of which were the major factors driving deforestation in the study area. Our findings highlight the increasing threats facing the wider Littoral Region, which includes Mount Nlonako and Ebo Forest, both of which are critical areas for regional conservation and the latter a proposed National Park and the only sizable area of intact forest in the region. Intact forest in the Littoral Region, and in particular at Ebo, merits urgent protection.

This article examines the evolution of dietary knowledge about French colonial Africa, from the 1920s to the early 1950s. More specifically, it focuses on efforts to quantify daily food intake by tracing the different meanings assigned to nutrition over time. While such statistics were used as early as the 1920s to evaluate the food consumption of populations most useful to the imperial economy, it was only after the Second World War that they became a means of measuring living standards according to universal metrics. This history invites us to reflect on how poverty in Africa came to be recognized as a problem, by showing that such a process has neither been based entirely on social reality nor on the knowledge produced to delineate privation. Rather it also emerged from the changing set of meanings associated with this knowledge.

This essay focuses on the northeastern borderlands of the Central African Republic (CAR), an area that though formally part of a state is mostly left to its own devices. It has no single sovereign, but many people participate in the sovereign prerogative of enacting violence in such a way as to claim a right to determine how to live. These dynamics are particularly visible in the area's contests over armed conservation, my ethnographic and historical topic here. These sovereign claims take the form of denunciation: rallying people to take extreme measures against another whose egregious acts threaten fundamental values. In northeastern CAR, the value frequently fought for through denunciation is negative liberty—freedom from molestation for those who carve space for themselves by denouncing. In addition to excavating denunciation as a dynamics of sovereignty, this paper shows that the values motivating sovereign struggles can include not just autonomy—whether devoted to a principle of order or anarchy, as others have explored—but can also be devoted to creating exceptions for those who denounce, such that they are able to participate in projects and access terrains that extend beyond their place of residence without having to consistently abide by others’ rules. Denunciation is thus a dynamics of sovereign claim-making that can shape and mobilize solidarities that are in flux, rather than those calcified by the violent, exceptional decision of a unitary sovereign. Denunciation foregrounds relational and processual aspects of sovereignty and in so doing invites new comparisons.

Over the last few decades the number of radiocarbon dates available for West Central Africa has increased substantially, even though it is still meagre compared with other areas of the continent. In order to contribute to a better understanding of the Iron Age of this area we present and analyze a total of 22 radiocarbon dates obtained from sites from the island of Corisco (Equatorial Guinea). By comparing them with those from Equatorial Guinea, southern Cameroon, and coastal Gabon and Congo we intend to clarify the picture of the West Central African Iron Age and propose a more accurate archaeological sequence.

This article examines the way in which Christianity and Kongo religion merged to produce a syncretic result. After showing that the Kongo church grew up under the supervision and direction of Kongo authorities rather than missionaries, it will track how local educational systems and linguistic transformations accommodated the differences between the two religious traditions. In Kongo, many activities associated with the traditional religion were attacked as witchcraft without assigning any part of the traditional religion to this category. It also addresses how Kongo religious thinkers sidestepped questions of the fate of the dead and the virginity of Mary when harmonizing them would be too difficult.

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.