This chapter illustrates both the site-relatedness of residential segregation in Dakar by the beginning of the twentieth century, and comparatively its inter-colonial, transnational facets. The chapter also examines the symbolic and actual relationship between toponymic issues and sanitary considerations in Dakar's urban planning, together with the process of dissemination of medical and planning ideas amongst the European colonising nations in Africa. The last issue is especially important in giving a more nuanced understanding how planning ideas and practices, such as residential segregation, were globally distributed. This is not only through the export of these ideas via bilateral channels (i.e., from the French métropole into the African brousse), but rather through a mediation upon multilateral and complex frontiers across nations, colonies and linguistic borders.

This chapter seeks to illuminate the embryonic local and the regional contexts in the creation of Dakar in the second half of the nineteenth century. This is against the metropolitan, colonial and indigenous backgrounds in matters of planning and architectural cultures. It goes beyond the discourse on colonial spatiality as an instrument for virtually complete domination, surveillance and control, and elaborates on the inherent ironies in the colonial planning projects. This is in terms of the grandiose urban visions as against the contemporary urban 'deathly sleep'; the torpedoing of colonial urban endeavours by infectious diseases; and the awkwardly-realised urban installations in neighbouring communes such as Saint-Louis and Bamako. Vernacular traditions of settlement organisation and built form are also provided side by side with colonial ones and occasionally compared.

Insights into the French architectural agenda as implemented in Dakar in the interwar period are the subject of this chapter. It seems that drawing on Hobsbawm's term 'the invention of tradition' is particularly useful for the analysis of the French colonial architectures in question, yet not without being aware of the historiography of this term and its problematic. Having been widely employed in historical and anthropological research regarding Africa, examples using 'invented tradition' from research in the arts and architecture of Africa are not abundant. These include almost exclusively references to French North Africa, particularly to the neo-Moorish buildings in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia (style arabisance). The contribution of this chapter therefore lies in continuing this line of thought by expanding on the reciprocal relations between colonial forms and ideologies, and in the transnational application of these relations, that is into the territories of sub-Saharan Africa as well.

This introductory chapter provides a background of relevant historiographies related to the topic of the book and its regional context, in terms of urban history, geography and colonial socio-politics. Laying out the main ideas that underline the book and its basic rationale, this chapter also expands on the period in question and the book’s structure.

This chapter argues how Ignatius Sancho’s oeuvre, his reception in the literary world, and his enduring legacy in the arts generate an important set of counter-representations to imperial representations of Black life. While providing an overview of the volume’s essays and its organization, this chapter argues how Sancho’s epistolary writing speaks to Black life-worlds beyond the British political terms of debates on equality and abolition. Although Sancho’s writings and presence in the public sphere have been absorbed into broader narratives of imperial power and prestige, his oeuvre and documentations of his influence (past and present) exhibit rare representations of Black life across a variety of social spaces, beyond the terms of servitude and enslavement. While many early public representations of Black life in England were translated for the racializing gaze of a predominantly white readership, Sancho’s self-representation through the arts (alongside subsequent critical and creative reception of his work) reveal complex patterns and particularities in African diasporic experiences in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

This chapter examines the theological and political ramifications of Sancho’s imaginings of the afterlife. While he doesn’t believe in Hell, Sancho uses the figurative language of infernal character to criticize chattel slavery, religious bigotry, and British colonialism. When he describes Heaven, meanwhile, Sancho projects himself and his readers into an ideal religious collective that includes American Quakers, enslaved West Africans, Roman Catholics, Hindus, and Muslim clerics, as well as fellow Anglican Protestants. Attending to Sancho’s notion of the afterlife reveals the distinctiveness of his religious thought among Black anti-slavery intellectuals. His pluralistic definition of religious virtue allows him to extend belonging further than his contemporaries – beyond co-religionists and even beyond the category of the Christian. Logics of mixture and mingling in Sancho’s letters enable him to enlarge divine love and salvation without universalizing belief, holding a multiracial and trans-denominational community together without eliding differences.

This chapter deals with the institutional history of Nuer Christianity and examines how various interconnections that were made possible through people’s movement across the frontierlands contributed to the development of churches and the circulation of Christian knowledge. It starts in the early twentieth century with the coming of missionaries to southern Sudan and explores the introduction of Seventh-day Adventism in the 1970s and the consequent emergence of Messianic groups out of the Adventist church since the 1990s. The chapter demonstrates how claims of biblical authenticity (that is, of being the ’true church’) fuelled schisms and institutional fragmentation. The chapter is concerned with both the history and proliferation of Messianic institutions in Gambella, and the ways in which Messianics thought about the history and biblical indexicality of their churches, as institutions that traced their roots to the Holy Bible.