This chapter problematises popular and Orientalist discourses concerning ‘Islam and Peace’, recognising that both are heterogeneous and contested concepts in the fields of Islamic studies and moral philosophy. It proposes a more fruitful approach founded on systematic philosophical reflection on specific exemplars within their respective cultural and historical contexts.

On the Ethiopia–Somaliland border, harsh checkpoints imposed in 2015 relegated Somali kontarabaan (contraband) traders – mainly women – to precarious livelihoods. Beginning with an ethnographic description of crossing through these checkpoints, this chapter outlines a contradictory dynamic: Jigjiga, Ethiopia’s premier smuggling hub, has become the capital of a local government bent on hyper-securitizing its borders. Intensifying border security interventions and a wave of return-migration among the global Somali diaspora have made many local merchants viscerally aware of their marginality and immobility in contrast to people with foreign passports and government connections. For small-scale traders, Ethiopia’s borders tend to operate as dividers. For government-connected elites and diaspora returnees, the same borders often enable opportunities for business connections and mutually profitable alliances. This chapter uses this observation to critique what it calls the “connective cities, divisive borders” portrait of globalization. It explains the importance of thinking about borders and cities as interconnected spaces of daily life. It introduces the book’s main arguments: that African urbanites are active agents who work to refashion geopolitical borders and create opportunities from them, and that everyday practices of exchange and mobility in the city do not just produce urban space but also resonate more broadly into border management.

How did ordinary working people imagine their political communities and futures within displacement and conflict in Khartoum, and how did they try to turn these ideas into action? The introduction sets out the book’s key intervention in African intellectual histories, opening up working-class and displaced people’s political projects outside of print media and universities, built around exploitative jobs, surveillance, and everyday violence and racism within the war. Challenging current political analyses of modern African civil wars, it also explores its wider contributions to ideas of Blackness and racial identification in modern Sudanese and African histories, and to urban histories of displacement and refuge, setting intellectual history within its practical and time-consuming context of long bus rides, paperwork, jobs, and racist policing. The Introduction also outlines the methodological basis in a creative but fragmentary archive and competing translations and interpretations, setting out a structure for the following chapters.

Review of the inhumane practices of people in both New and Old Worlds prior to Columbian contact. Slave trading and cruelty were widespread, and slave trading was extensive. Most slaves were female, employed in domestic or agricultural environments (with little evidence of gang-labor), and came from a wide range of geographic areas and cultures. Most were born into slavery or were enslaved as a result of raids and wars in which many men on the losing side were killed. Slave markets existed across Eurasia, though in the pre-contact New World such markets were less common. After 1500, transatlantic trafficking came to draw exclusively on Africa or at least on Black people, probably because of the long isolation of the Americas from the rest of the world, and the inability of its Indigenous population to resist harmful pathogens from the Old World. Before 1820 migration to the New World was dominated by Africans rather than Europeans and by males (in contrast to the female-dominated slave populations of the Old World). White slaves were scarcely ever present in the New World.

The introduction describes some of the key features and the wide range of actors and activities that characterise the workings of a long-distance bus station in Accra, Ghana’s capital. It then presents two meanings of hustle that capture the station’s workings: as a noun, describing crowded, hectic, and potentially confusing situations; and as a verb, denoting precarious yet venturesome economic activities. Building on the ambivalences evoked by the different uses and perspectives of the term, it situates the significance of this study in relation to scholarly discussions of transport work, the ‘informal economy’, (auto)mobility, infrastructure, and urban social life. It then outlines the diversity of functions and types of Ghanaian bus stations, and concludes with a reflection on methodology, highlighting the value of a single-sited ethnographic approach to urban complexity and trans-local mobility, and an itinerary of the book’s chapters.

This ethnography explores violence in relationships in Sierra Leone, using the ‘teeth and tongue’ metaphor to reveal the complex interplay between love and violence, particularly in gender dynamics. It examines how global agendas lead some states to extend regulatory control into intimacy, often perpetuating neo-colonial mechanisms. The study probes the clash between rigid state laws and the nuanced intricacies of lived experiences, analysing the impact of ostensibly impartial rights discourses. The book analyses the effects of external violence on relationships (Chapter 2), contemporary relationship dynamics in Freetown (Chapter 3), and critiques prevalent conceptualisations of love and violence phenomenologically (Chapters 4 and 5). It then examines the mediation and regulation of violence by households and communities (Chapter 6), state courts for adults (Chapter 7), and the legal treatment of minors (Chapter 8). The book traces the impact of new legislation on young men who were imprisoned and their partners (Chapter 9).

This chapter introduces the main arguments of the book by exploring the case of Kizito Mihigo, a well-known popular singer who was imprisoned, was released, and later died while in police custody. It discusses the idiom of the heart – or, more particularly, the need to transform the heart – as key to understanding post-genocide social life and urban young people’s attempts to navigate a difficult political terrain. Instead of reproducing theoretical binaries – resistance–domination, sound–silence, past–present – this chapter proposes looking to popular culture and Pentecostalism in order to understand the different ways young people in Kigali attempt to assert agency and make ‘noise’ despite a wider context of silence.

The commemoration on 6 March 2007 of the fiftieth anniversary of Ghana’s emergence from eighty years of British colonial rule exposed not only a bitter national divide over whom to credit with the nation’s founding, but also the possibility that a flawed ‘Grand Narrative’ of Ghana’s modern history is the source of this abiding threat to national unity. In marking the Golden Jubilee, the government of the day, led by President John Kufuor of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), honoured heroes of both the national and continental struggles for independence. On the national level, the NPP chose to celebrate the collective known in Ghanaian historical folklore as ‘The Big Six’, the leadership of the post-World War II United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) nationalist movement.

For many postcolonies, a national currency—like a constitution, flag, or passport—was a necessary accompaniment to independence. Money and credit were more than potent symbols of decolonization; they were means of constituting a new political order. This Introduction argues that the monetary regimes established in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania aimed to remake their independent societies, turning savings, loans, and other financial instruments into the infrastructure of citizenship and statecraft. These instruments tried to create a “government of value” in which personal interest and collective advance were aligned through mechanisms that were simultaneously ethical and economic, cultural and political. They did so because colonial subjects experienced empire as not only political domination but also a constraint on economic liberties. Yet, the ensuing decolonization was at best partial, not least because the value of national currencies depended on the accumulation of foreign money. Moreover, the independent political economy of East Africa created new inequalities and divisions. Struggles over money, credit, and commodities would animate a series of struggles between bankers and bureaucrats, farmers and smugglers in the coming decades. By detailing the notion of the “moneychanger state,” this chapter provides the conceptual frameworks to understand these conflicts in new ways.

This study explores a shared Black Atlantic world where the meanings of slavery and freedom were fiercely contested and claimed. Weaving together thousands of archival fragments, the book recreates the worlds and dilemmas of extraordinary individuals and communities in the long sixteenth century, while mapping the development of early modern Black thought about slavery and freedom. From a free Black mother’s embarkation license to cross the Atlantic Ocean to an enslaved Sevillian woman’s epistles to her freed husband in New Spain, an enslaved man’s negotiations with prospective buyers on the auction block in Mexico City, and a Black man’s petition to reclaim his liberty after his illegitimate enslavement, these actions were those of everyday and extraordinary individuals who were important intellectual actors in the early modern Atlantic world. They reckoned in their daily lives with laws and theological discourses that legitimized the enslavement of Black people and the varied meanings of freedom across legal jurisdictions. They discussed ideas about slavery and freedom with Black kin, friends, and associates in the sites where they lived and across vast distances, sometimes generating spheres of communication that stretched across the early modern Atlantic world. Their intellectual labor reimagined the epistemic worlds of the early modern Atlantic. This introduction provides an outline of the book’s main argument, methodology, and the six chapters and the coda that follow.

This chapter discusses the subject of archives: what they are, how they are uniquely constructed and preserved, their importance for creating historiographies and scholarly traditions, how they are subject to human error, the consequences of said error, and alternative sources of historical records. These topics are explored primarily through the case study of Nigeria’s Colonial and National Archives. The chapter will explain how the Colonial Archives were used as tools to extend colonial power while also springboarding African historiography through consequential and highly problematic methods. Next, it will explore the transformation of the Colonial Archives into Nigeria’s National Archives, pioneered by Kenneth Dike at the University of Ibadan. This transformation fostered significant changes in Nigeria’s historiography, the details of which will be examined. The chapter will also address the many issues present within Nigeria’s National Archive. Finally, it will explore the alternative voices to the domineering Eurocentric frameworks in “modern” (colonial) African historiography. They include but are not limited to written documents from Northern Nigeria, such as the Kano chronicles, oral traditions from the Yoruba and Igbo peoples from Nigeria’s south and east, rituals, customs, festivals, and much more.

The introduction presents the methodology used in the book and offers a brief outline of Rwanda's pre-mid-nineteenth century history.

There is a tendency to treat African journalism fields as insignificant to scholarship unless the scholarly focus is on “improving” or “modernizing” them. This chapter argues against this tendency by arguing that African journalism is engaged in knowledge production and all its attendant politics. It argues that by taking a conflict such as Darfur as a locus, scholars can excavate the multiple discursive struggles over questions such as the role of African journalism, the place of African news organizations in global narrative construction about Africa, and the politics of belonging in which African journalists debate what it means to be African. Relying on field theory, postcolonial theory, and the sociology of knowledge, this chapter argues for a de-Westernization of journalism studies while cogently locating the origins of field theory in Algeria; thus connecting it not just to the colonial project but specifically locating field theory with a larger discourse of postcoloniality.

The introduction puts forward the argument that African military politics are essentially spatial. It provides the precondition to understanding how an African elite of presidents, diplomats, and bureaucrats from regional organizations has been ‘making room for war’ in the Sahel since 2012. We are urged here to move past conventional notions of social space as static and instead conceptualize it as relational and in flux. Space is (re-)created by actors as they shape and alter the relations amongst themselves. It is not a change in space, but a change of space. Based on an analysis of the literature debates on African military deployments, the introduction argues to foreground the politics surrounding these interventions over discussions about effectiveness. Actors negotiate who is ‘close’ or ‘distant’ to a security concern, who is a legitimate intervener, and who is included or excluded in a common military response. They do so by invoking naturalized narratives about space as the analysis shows of the many Sahel strategies or the comparison of the intervention in Mali to that in Afghanistan. From this departure point, the politics around African-led military deployments for the Sahel are analyzed throughout the book.

The introduction outlines the scope and parameters of the study and evaluates the historiography of child servitude in Senegal while pointing to the daunting challenges that researchers face in tackling this subject due to fragmented and spotty data. It begins by explaining the meaning of tutelle – a system of guardianship or wardship that emerged after 1848 when slavery ended in the French colonial empire. It associates guardianship with slavery and other forms of coercive labor systems such as engagement à temps or indentureship to which enslaved people, including children, were often subjected through the process of rachat or ransom from slavery. It posits that guardianship in Senegal was institutionalized servitude sanctioned by the colonial administration which spearheaded the distribution of liberated and orphaned children, formerly enslaved and free, to habitants – African and European merchants, traders, and residents, primarily in Saint-Louis – the most important and vibrant economic entity in urban Senegal. Of the habitants, the signares – mixed-race women (métis) – played a major role in shaping guardianship that subsequent chapters explore. The introduction ends with an outline of the chapters that encompass the social condition of children in tutelle in colonial Senegal from 1848 to 1910.

This introduction maps out the local, national, regional and world-historical implications and motivations for Arming Black Consciousness. It begins with an examination of Khotso Seatlholo and his motivations for joining and leading the Soweto Uprising in 1976. It then moves to a discussion of how little we know about the armed wings of the Black Consciousness Movement, suggests some reasons why and engages with Steve Biko and his coyness around the question of armed struggle. The introduce then proceeds to map out the importance of the Haitian Revolution to the theoretical concept of the Black Radical Tradition and African Liberation Struggles. This is a perspective that is not engaged with much in the literature on the liberation struggles in Africa so some detail is given to its intricacies here. This is followed by a brief literature review on Black Consciousness, armed struggle, Black Power and some engagement with the Cold War. The introduction closes by discussing the importance in centring Black women in these narratives of revolution, makes some interventions around methodology and then discusses the various sources used to construct this narrative.

Set in Africa’s most populous Muslim country, the book takes on a paradox: colonial governance in Northern Nigeria entailed indirect rule through Muslim intermediaries and caliphate institutions; yet, the state insisted on its secularity. In unravelling this puzzle, the book offers a provocative account of secularism as a contested yet contingent mode of governing and religious difference. Drawing on detailed archival research, the book illustrates constitutional struggles triggered by the colonial state’s governance of religion and interrogates its legacy in the postcolonial state. The book illuminates the dynamic interplay between law, religion, and power in the political context of the modern state’s unique emergence from colonial processes.

This chapter provides the core argument and engages with concepts and theories relevant to the book. It begins with a comprehensive literature review of the turn to the local within transitional justice. While local transitional justice mechanisms are supposed to better align with the needs and priorities of affected populations, often these programs are measured against their own goals, or normative expectations of transitional justice, which overlooks how individuals and communities navigate these programs in multiple and diverse ways. This book examines different types of agency of Sierra Leoneans in what I refer to as recognised and unrecognised local transitional justice processes. Using Fambul Tok as an example of a recognised local transitional justice program, the book explores how various types of agency are involved in constructing and shaping local TJ programs, often resulting in a range of unintended consequences. This book builds upon scholarship in a range of disciplines including peace and conflict studies, anthropology, development, politics and social and legal studies. Ultimately, the book argues that justice does not happen to or for people, but that is an act in and of itself. It illustrates how local programs and processes actually work in practice.

This book brings together African histories of consumption with their actors, performances, and spaces to explore how the dressed body serves as the point of contact between personal, very local experiences, and the broader global context. It draws on the author’s long-term anthropological research in Zambia and the Africanist and dress scholarship that frames it. Past and present across most of Africa, people have been and remain passionate about how they appear in public, and Zambia is no exception. Clothing helps people make history and socio-cultural change just as much as history helps drive their new dress practice and fashion cultures. Exploring the dress and fashion scene in relation to changes in the political and social setting reveals a surprising range of issues that have endured across history in Zambia. They converge on the dressed body and make the significance of a well-dressed appearance the heart of that story.

Political science has long claimed that African political systems are dysfunctional because they are too embedded in social and material relations. This assumption informed the rise of the World Bank’s good governance agenda in the late 1980s. This chapter situates this technocratic vision of how to fix African politics in a longer ‘epistocratic’ political tradition that emphasises the knowledge-based, epistemic dimensions of governance. In this context, the Lagos model, developed first in Lagos state, southwest Nigeria, and then extended to nearby Oyo and Ekiti, was celebrated by donors as an example of ‘home grown good governance’, where governance reforms were not imposed by donors through conditionality but actively adopted by the government itself. By tracing how this domesticated version of the good governance agenda was contested in the twenty-first century electoral competition, this book re-evaluates the social, material and epistemic dimensions of good governance. This chapter offers a brief overview of the history of good governance in Nigeria. It then considers the methods and methodologies we can use to study competing conceptions of good governance, connecting the empirical study of politics ‘on the ground’ to more theoretical debates in political theory, before summarising the key contributions of the book.