This article sheds light on the effects that the unrest created by early twentieth-century colonial wars had on the increasing power of African colonial intermediaries in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast. By managing interpretation processes as well as developing a monopoly on the use of violence, interpreters, soldiers, clerks, and chiefs created what the officers called an ‘impenetrable hedge’. Analyzing how these different figures deployed their power, the article argues that there was historical continuity in the formation of the intermediaries and the methods employed by them between the years of the colonial wars and the later British administration. Despite their institutional role, however, precariousness remained a central facet of these agents’ experiences. The article shows that they were continually challenged at a grassroots level, and suggests that it was only through the use of coercion that they were able to maintain their position.

This article traces histories of the Kru in West Africa from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, arguing that divergent identities of fifteenth- to eighteenth-century Kru canoers became unified when that unified identity was necessary for maintaining political, economic, and cultural autonomy during and after the slave trade. In conjunction with earlier multilingual work on the Kru mariners of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article seeks to place the narrative of Kru identity and labor in a larger context of maritime history across the region at large. This article argues that the Kru relied on longstanding maritime traditions from localized groups to capitalize on the need for work and cash in a capitalist economy driven by growing European imperialism. The historical narrative of Kru maritime power shows how local and global identities in Atlantic Africa shifted in response to exploitation, blurring the lines between response and resistance.

Through their participation in an unequal Atlantic commerce, African merchants on the Gold Coast consciously transformed their dress in ways that expressed their cultural dynamism and economic success in an increasingly interconnected world. In discussing the web of cross-cultural commercial exchanges between Africa, Asia, and Europe, this article moves away from the tendency to regard Africans who adorned themselves in imported European clothing and textiles as ‘creole’ or ‘Europeanized’ elites. Labels like these not only assume the existence of an African cultural essence, but (inadvertently) deny the dynamism that has always characterized African cultures prior to the Atlantic economy. In the case of the Gold Coast, I examine how the Gã and Fante mercantile elite translated imported textiles and clothing into new cultural meanings, aesthetics and norms that emphasized family integrity, power as well as the ancestral, material and commercial value of inherited imported articles of adornment.

This article examines the means by which perceived threats of sleeping sickness epidemics were used to justify extensive population resettlement through the formation of ‘concentrations’ in Ulanga District, Tanganyika, between 1939 and 1945. Underlying this specious spatial reordering of communities were ulterior motives that interpreted and pushed broader colonial development agendas of social engineering. The prominent role of leading colonial officers, notably A. T. Culwick, is emphasised and reexamined, especially in relationship to paternalism and the coercive aspects of closer settlement. This article explores the nature of legitimised coercion, contested meanings of the League of Nations mandate, and tensions within the administration. Local resistance to concentration challenged colonial hegemony and the self-fashioned form of benign autocracy constructed by officials like Culwick, who relied on a projection of prestige for political authority in his district and among his peers. Concentration was therefore a contested and contingent process with dissent evidenced both against and within government.

In 1921 and 1924 Muhammadu Dikko, the emir of Katsina, traveled to Britain on a sightseeing trip, becoming the first emir or chief from Northern Nigeria to visit the British imperial metropole. This article analyzes the colonial relationship that put Dikko in the colonizers’ orbit and favor and paved the way for him to embark on the trips, the colonial logistics and networks that facilitated the journeys, Dikko's experiences and adventures in Britain, and, most importantly, his perspectives on British society, institutions, goods, and forms of leisure. I argue that Dikko, though constrained by serving as a prop in a colonial performance of power, used travel to Britain as a platform to advance metropolitan modernity as an aspirational if distant model of socioeconomic advancement and to give his peers and subjects in Northern Nigeria a textual reference for navigating colonial culture in relation to their own natal Islamo-Hausa cultural norms.

This article argues that rural South African women's importance as spiritual actors in the period from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries stemmed from their ability to embrace hybrid spiritual identities that corresponded closely to the lived reality of African rural life, and that by embracing those identities, women expanded their roles as social healers. Professing a belief in Christianity did not prevent individuals from practicing as diviners, nor did it prevent Christians from consulting diviners to determine the causes of death or misfortune. Similarly, young women who converted to Christianity often maintained close ties to non-Christian families and bridged spiritual lives on the mission stations with life in their families. Over this time period, women became cultural mediators who borrowed, adopted, and combined spiritual beliefs to provide more complete answers to problems faced by rural African families in South Africa.

This essay examines, through taxation, the relationship between British colonial administrators, Tswana Dikgosi (chiefs) and their subjects in the Bechuanaland Protectorate from 1899 to 1957. It argues that since Bechuanaland became a British territory through negotiations the Tswana rulers were able to protect their interests aggressively but with little risk of being deposed. Moreover, the Tswana succession system by primogeniture worked to their advantage whenever the British sought to replace them. Taxation was one arena where this was demonstrated. Although consultation between the Dikgosi, their subjects and the British was common, subordinate tribes sometimes fared badly under Tswana rule.

Exploring a range of studies regarding the ‘invention of tradition’, the ‘making of customary law’ and the ‘creation of tribalism’ since the 1980s, this survey article argues that the case for colonial invention has often overstated colonial power and ability to manipulate African institutions to establish hegemony. Rather, tradition was a complex discourse in which people continually reinterpreted the lessons of the past in the context of the present. Colonial power was limited by chiefs' obligation to ensure community well-being to maintain the legitimacy on which colonial authorities depended. And ethnicity reflected longstanding local political, cultural and historical conditions in the changing contexts of colonial rule. None of these institutions were easily fabricated or manipulated, and colonial dependence on them often limited colonial power as much as facilitating it.