Using new interpretations of oral traditions written in older documents, this article changes the origin of complex societies and larger kingdoms. Showing that the Kingdom of Kongo, presently believed to be the origin of large kingdoms actually achieved it status by conquering an existing kingdom, called Mpemba, the author reassigns both the date and origin point of kingdom level polities there. The author further points to new interpretations of documentary evidence to demonstrate that Mwene Muji and Kulembembe, located to the east and south of Kongo were also early large scale polities at a date as early as Kongo.

This study, constructed with the use of the hitherto little-consulted personal archives of Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi, 1929–2014, one of the pioneer historians from Africa, explores his emergence as a historian who fervently believed in the value of working in collaboration with colleague historians committed to the promotion of the history of Africa. It discusses the impact of his unique role in the furtherance of cooperation as demonstrated both by his work in global institutions, including universities in Africa, UNESCO and the International African Institute, and his publications. It concludes with a commendation of his contribution to the development of historiography in Africa.

This article explores the Detached Papers of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, an underused sub-series within The National Archives’ T 70 collection. These records offer a unique and detailed insight into the British administration of West African forts, and the lives of enslaved people forced to work in these fortifications. While the Royal African Company has been the subject of extensive scholarship, the Company of Merchants – its successor – remains understudied. Through letters, minute books, fort lists, and financial records, the Detached Papers, recently catalogued at item level for the first time, provide a critical and untapped source on the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, revealing overlooked narratives of local relationships, familial networks, and the operational structures that underpinned the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. This article focuses on three key areas to exemplify the importance of these records for future research: the cultural and political life of the Fante; the networks and influence of Company Governor Richard Miles; and the identities and experiences of enslaved people in British-controlled forts. By engaging with the fragmentary nature of these records, the article interrogates archival silences to surface the submerged histories of exploitation, agency, and survival within the archives of enslavement.

Rise Up1is the successor to the Fitzwilliam’s exhibition Black Atlantic, reviewed in a previous issue of ABRD (Carson 2024). Like the first exhibition it combines artefacts and texts from museum, archive and library collections with new art works which interrogate and interpret the history and ongoing legacies of slavery, resistance and emancipation in Britain and the Black Atlantic. Both exhibitions owe much to the University of Cambridge’s ‘Legacies of Enslavement’ project.2 They tackle head on issues around national, university, institutional and individual entanglement with the slave trade and plantation slavery, questioning how to react in the present to profits and investments from the outrages and abuses of the past.

In rural Uganda, pregnant women struggle to access clinical care because of limited access to transportation and other barriers to travel, including delays in the maintenance and modernization of rural road infrastructure. This article analyses one community-led effort to address these gaps by providing free motorbike transport to pregnant women during labour. The programme is considered alongside broader trends in global health funding, in particular the rise of ‘appropriate technologies’, or the promotion of cheap, adaptive and flexible interventions that stand in contrast to an earlier focus in international health on building and modernizing state infrastructures for all. Drawing on anthropological studies of infrastructure, this article explores how qualities such as flexibility, improvisation and collaboration may radically expand healthcare infrastructure while also creating conditions of uneven use and inconsistencies of access that expose the limitations of targeted interventions. In its focus on the political and relational nature of infrastructures, this article highlights how healthcare projects are dependent as much on access to ‘hard’ healthcare resources (ambulances, medical technology) as they are on historically rooted, deeply localized and unevenly accessed webs of relations that shape access and connection to such resources, and that extend beyond clinical spaces.

The preservation of vernacular architecture in Təgray, Ethiopia, faces significant challenges due to factors such as conflict, ‘modernization’, socio-economic pressures, and environmental degradation. These issues have accelerated the transformation of this architectural heritage landscape, underscoring the need for innovative conservation strategies. This field study, conducted between January and August 2024, combines archival research with advanced 3D documentation technologies to propose a preservation framework. It highlights the limited access to archives from previous studies and expeditions, which are often stored in European and North American institutions. While increased digitization has improved this situation, it still hinders local scholars, authorities, and communities from effectively contributing to science-based conservation efforts in the region. Greater access to these archives would significantly benefit the growing movement of community-driven conservation activities. By integrating archival data with 3D documentation techniques, a comprehensive understanding of vernacular architecture can be achieved, encompassing its historical development and enabling the formulation of effective preservation strategies. This approach allows for detailed insights into construction methods, spatial organization, and the cultural significance of buildings, enhancing conservation efforts and ensuring the preservation of architectural heritage for future generations. The research demonstrates that sustained access to archival information, combined with advanced 3D technologies, significantly enhances the accuracy of documentation, spatial analysis, and restoration planning for Təgray’s architectural heritage. Moreover, these advanced documentation technologies function as dynamic archives, refining the precision of earlier architectural records and facilitating more effective community outreach and application. The study also underscores the importance of collaboration among heritage professionals, archivists, technology developers, and local communities to ensure sustainable and comprehensive preservation initiatives.

In this article I endorse the contention that humour presents a window onto the complicated social relationships and consciousness of speakers and listeners. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, I observe that improvised joking and the telling of standard jokes have proliferated over the past three decades. I suggest that we can understand both forms of humour as bids to construct intimate interpersonal relations, based on mutuality, in times of increased precarity. There are, nonetheless, important differences between these forms of humour. In Bushbuckridge, a long tradition of spontaneous and improvised joking between certain categories of persons stood at the very heart of kinship. The association of such joking with intimacy was evident in the general rule that one was only allowed to joke, particularly about sexual matters, with persons one was allowed to see naked. By engaging in such joking, villagers reinforced mutuality with kin, upon whom they relied for social security. By contrast, the (re)telling of standard jokes is a fairly recent practice. Unlike in joking between kin, the original composers of the jokes are anonymous and the butt of the jokes are fictitious third persons. This insulates listeners from direct embarrassment and the teller from retaliation. These jokes were told between male peers, and commented on the diminished status of men in contemporary times. By telling standard jokes, men provoked ‘laugher out of place’, in a bid to re-establish sociality in moments of distress and extend mutuality beyond the domains of kinship networks.

The notion of ‘concrete Sape’ constitutes the central heuristic tool of this study. Inspired by the Congolese elegant art of dressing (La Sape) – a form of ostentatious elegance in contexts of precarity – it refers here to strategies of urban display and the simulation of state order through spectacular constructions in contexts marked by war or post-crisis. Much like the body of the sapeur, which masks social fragility under the guise of appearance, the concrete-clad city showcases an image of an urban modernity that hides inequalities, political instability and the structural weaknesses of the state. This metaphor enables a joint analysis of the logics of simulacra, extraversion, violence and legitimation at play in the political economy of concrete. This study is rooted in a comparative ethnography of the post-crisis real-estate boom observed in Kinshasa and Brazzaville since the 2010s. It combines direct observations, a photographic corpus of public and private buildings, participation in real-estate fairs, and over thirty semi-structured interviews and informal conversations. By bridging urban studies and the socio-anthropology of politics, it sheds light on the mechanisms of simulacra, violence and political legitimation embedded in the economy of concrete and construction in Central Africa, both within and beyond post-conflict contexts.

As we were finalizing the publication of Paul Richards’ article, ‘A novelist among the anthropologists: Barbara Pym and The International African Institute’,1 we were delighted to receive an invitation to the unveiling of a blue plaque to Barbara Pym in Pimlico, London, and a celebration (part concert, part religious service, part tributes from celebrity admirers).