Despite recent challenges, global and transnational approaches continue to provide valuable insight and novel perspectives for scholars of South African history. This chapter examines recent contributions to transnational histories of colonialism and empire in South Africa, before engaging in a detailed examination of global histories of antiapartheid. Drawing on sources from a range of international organisations, it examines three specific themes that highlight the possibilities for a global history of South Africa. The role played by the entangled discourses of humanitarianism and human rights, registered in the language of international organisations such as the United Nations, illuminates continuities and transformations in the framing of South African politics and social relations at a global level. An exploration of concepts of ‘solidarity’, central to antiapartheid campaigns around the world, moreover, can help to navigate global historical approaches away from Eurocentric tendencies. And the testimonies of individual activists provide a necessary reminder that global and transnational histories reveal the multiple perspectives, subjectivities and connections that shape local historical experiences. The final section of the chapter considers possibilities for the future development of these approaches.

This chapter analyses the Pan-African career of Nigerian scholar-technocrat, Adebayo Adedeji, who headed the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) between 1975 and 1991. The author also assesses his efforts at promoting economic development and regional integration across Africa, as well as his intellectual contributions to these two fields.

This chapter assesses the environmental and human rights activism of Kenyan Nobel peace laureate, Wangari Maathai, focusing especially on her Green Belt Movement.

This chapter examines the Pan-African career of Jamaica’s Dudley Thompson, a lawyer who put together the legal defence team that defended Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta from charges of being an instigator of the Mau Mau rebellion against British colonial rule in 1952. Thompson was also a founder member of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), and served as his country’s ambassador to Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana and Namibia.

This chapter examines one of the early champions of African democracy: the only black Nobel prize winner in economics, St. Lucia’s Fabian intellectual, William Arthur Lewis. She assesses Lewis’s economic theories, his role as the economic adviser to Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, and his calls for multi-party democracy in Africa’s diverse states.

This chapter explores the rise of the graphic narrative in Africa – starting with cartoons and comic strips and culminating in contemporary graphic novels and popular comics series. It outlines three key historical developments in the genre. It further argues that comic strips were vehicles for the colonial enterprise: they occurred in colonial journals and magazines in the 1930s/1940s and reflected colonial ideology through mimicry and racial stereotype. Second, cartoons and comics became important tools in anticolonial movements, such as in Nigeria in the 1950s/1960s and apartheid-era South Africa from the 1950s to the 1980s. Cartoons turned satire and mockery back on the colonizer, while comics were used to subvert the visual language of colonial oppression and to encourage resistance. Finally, didactic comics and graphic narratives (pamphlets, posters, and free-standing albums) have formed part of government policy and development work from the 1990s to the present day. This history has informed present day production. Contemporary graphic narratives combine rich local visual traditions with global trends to negotiate identity, politics, and social change. The chapter ends by examining four examples of more “serious” graphic novels, histories, and memoirs that are indicative, rather than representative, of the diversity of contemporary production.

Coetzee’s assimilation of photography in prose – through references to images, by way of ocular metaphors, or through an attentiveness to framing, point of view and lighting – owes a debt to a very early and enduring fascination with the camera. He grew up in a family in which photography was ubiquitous, with his mother, the family photographer, making a visual record of domestic life. The family photograph albums, now preserved in the Texas archive, are testimony to the way the family recorded their life across generations. In one of these albums, titled in Coetzee’s own handwriting ‘Photos Ancient and Modern’, there are pages full of photographs of the young Coetzee growing up. But the experience of the child being the object of the camera gaze was also inverted in at least one fascinating moment: it is a remarkable, imperfectly framed image of the mother, captioned ‘Snap of Mother, taken by John. 16th July 1942’. Already at the age of two years, if we take the caption at face value, we must assume that the young Coetzee was a photographer. In taking the Brownie camera – with which he was incessantly being snapped by his mother – into his own hands, the child reversed the roles and turned the lens back at the photographer.

This chapter applies the rent-conditional reform theory to the case of Nigeria across the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It illustrates how, under the banner of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Goodluck Jonathan’s government coupled company creation liberalization for would-be entrepreneurs with generous awards and support for strategically placed business magnates and interest groups. Once the price of oil began to fall, and the disintegration of the PDP’s elite coalition gathered pace, Jonathan’s government quickly jettisoned the reform initiative within the Corporate Affairs Commission to placate rapidly defecting business magnates. Following the election of Muhammadu Buhari, the business creation reform agenda was similarly manipulated to develop an alliance between his nascent government and the elite business class. Once that relationship was in place, and oil rents were recovering, generous privileges were once again afforded to key magnates, and corporate regulatory liberalization went into overdrive in 2016, culminating in 2020 with the reform of the thirty-year-old Companies and Allied Matters Act.