This article is an interpretive biography of Kwame Tua (c.1865–1950), one of millions of Africans born into an independent society that was overtaken by colonial conquest and overrule. Kwame Tua was from Asante, now in the republic of Ghana, and held the ascriptive status of a royal servant (ahenkwaa) who might have expected a specialist career as a royal hornblower. He was musically very gifted. However, after ruinous civil wars in the 1880s, the Asante king was sent into exile in 1896, and from 1901 to 1957 his kingdom was a British Crown Colony. This article discusses Kwame Tua's responses to these radically altered circumstances and his efforts to forge a place and identity for himself between the new imperial order and his Asante inheritance. It is argued throughout that the pursuit of detail is all in such a study so that we can get as close as possible to the personality of the individual in interaction with the times he lived through.

This article, a companion piece to that on Kwame Tua, traces the life history of his elder full brother Kwasi Apea Nuama (c.1862–1936) as he too sought purchase and place in the new colonial order in Asante. Temperamentally a very different man from his brother, Kwasi Apea Nuama set out to make himself indispensable as the interpreter of Asante history and custom to the uncomprehending British. Both brothers, then, were mediators or translators between the old and new worlds in which they found themselves. Their heyday was the often anarchic early colonial period. Thereafter, and most especially after the British restored the office and some of the prerogatives of Asante kingship, their influence fell away. They found themselves caught between a colonial order that had little further need of their services, and a restored Asante polity that demonized them as collaborators.

We have no plausible evidence to suggest that the Yorùbá and the Bààtonu are not autochthonous populations of the territories identified as homelands for them south and west of the confluence of the rivers Niger and Benue. This article uses tangible linguistic and cultural data to question hypotheses of migration from the Middle East, with echoes of Semitic heritage. On the one hand, cognate elements that are clearly identifiable argue for an enduring historical relationship between these two peoples; on the other, probative elements that are shared with other peoples and cultures in the sub-region rule out any suggestion of a conspiracy among all of them to migrate from the Middle East to West Africa in some discoverable historical past.

Sarah Ann Glover (1785–1867) believed that singing was for the public good and Samuel Àjàyí Crowther (1809–91) thought that speech tones should be preserved in writing. Their stories illustrate that diversity in thought may encounter obstacles, but can ultimately shape human consciousness. While this shows a positive side of missionary work, bringing people and ideas together, the transmission of Glover's and Crowther's ideas was mediated by the overlapping political, social and cultural hegemonies of the colonial era. Crowther was celebrated in the English-speaking world as evidence that the civilizing agenda – and colonialism – was good for all involved, but his orthographic approach was credited to the missionary linguist Johann Gottlieb Christaller. Glover's innovations in music education have been misattributed to John Curwen and Zoltán Kodály. Drawing evidence from ethnographic work, field recordings, language surveys and literature from a variety of disciplines, this article asks the question: why is do-re-mi the preferred heuristic for Yorùbá speech tone? Glover's and Crowther's physical paths never crossed, but their ideas did, converging in a remarkable inter-continental and trans-disciplinary synthesis. The do-re-mi heuristic resists the pitch-height paradigm used in formal linguistics (low-mid-high). In a culture where drums can speak, it is unsurprising that a musical model filled a void in the (European) concept of what a language could be.

This article is about women's labour in nineteenth-century Abẹ́òkúta, in present-day south-west Nigeria. It is based on primary research which explores women's economic independence and its intricate connection to the indigenous institution of polygyny. By examining the institution from the perspective of Anglican Church Missionary Society evangelists, it also demonstrates how indigenous culture conflicted with the newly introduced Christian religion and its corresponding Victorian bourgeois ideals of the male breadwinner and the female homemaker. It investigates the extent to which missionaries understood women's work in the Yorùbá context, their representations of the practice, their attempts to halt female labour and their often unsuccessful efforts to extricate their congregations and their own families from these local practices. It argues that European Christian principles not only coloured missionary perceptions of women's labour, but influenced their opinions of the entire Yorùbá matrimonial arrangement.

This article argues for the importance of ‘literary materialism’ in colonial African understandings of respectability. It draws attention to a particular form of acquisitiveness that placed value on the materiality of literary things. That is, literary objects – books, journals, magazines, notebooks, diaries and encyclopaedia volumes – were valued for their material and physical qualities as well as for their use in imparting ‘knowledge’. They had the capacity, in Bourdieu's terms, to display cultural capital. My focus is Akinpelu Obisesan, a voluminous diarist whose life spanned the entire colonial period in the Yoruba city of Ibadan. The article first re-examines Obisesan's early years of diary writing, particularly how the activity related to his professional identity as a clerk, and then goes on to reconstruct the fraught circumstances that surrounded his purchase of the Encyclopaedia Britannica between 1928 and 1931. Obisesan struggled to pay his debt for the encyclopaedia, and all the time used his diary to confess his dire financial state. Ultimately, his claim to the cultural capital that the encyclopaedia embodied was undermined by his lack of economic resources.

Ruination has recently received much attention as a defining aspect of the materiality of modernity. Less attention is given to the processes of regeneration that occur within sites of ruination. In this article, we examine how processes of ruination and regeneration are folded into each other, by looking at the materiality of a single site, a small village in the vicinity of Dakar, Senegal. By building the University of the African Future at Sébikotane, the Senegalese president has sought to rekindle the spirit of excellence that inspired education at the École normale William Ponty in a Pan-African spirit. As part of a larger plan for urban expansion, the site of Sébikotane has inspired hope for development. Examining how the different temporalities of utopian modernism and Afro-nostalgia intersect in the ruined site, this article reflects on the ruination of African futures on a site of ever renascent utopian infrastructures.

By considering the lifespan of a garden, this article investigates the myriad spatial practices of forgetting and remembering the colonial and postcolonial pasts that people apply to their urban surroundings in Mahajanga, Madagascar. In the heart of an ancient residential and commercial neighbourhood in this multi-ethnic Indian Ocean port city sits the Jardin Ralaimongo. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, I explore the trajectory of the garden to elucidate the ways in which different socio-political groups have drawn on this site to negotiate differences, frame collective memories, and stake their claims to the urban landscape. I show how, as city inhabitants have reworked the spaces of the garden, so too has the park itself – its layout, material artefacts and location within the city – constrained the possibilities of what can be remembered and silenced, and who can be bound to one another, in contemporary times. Over its hundred-year history, this site has been founded, forgotten and reincarnated as a memorial to a succession of revered leaders, thus serving as a kind of spatial register of the historical socio-political changes that have given rise to the city. This article suggests that the deterioration of colonial-era architectural forms through long-standing neglect and abandonment may be understood as an active spatial practice of effacing some dimensions of the past, while the subsequent recuperation of deserted public spaces by certain groups is an effort to position themselves as legitimate residents and express their attachment to the city.

Research on the significance of the mobile phone and internet in transnational family relationships shows that these media provide direct platforms for negotiating remittances. My interest in this article is not so much in how they are used to coordinate and channel money home as in their appropriation to meet expectations of reciprocity. The article draws from field narratives collected among Cameroonians in Germany and in Cameroon to reveal contestations over what can be described as legitimate consumption within the Cameroonian transnational social sphere. Underlying the arguments in this article is my observation that direct communication within the Cameroonian transnational sphere is beset by so much mistrust, discontent and uncertainty that remitters must specify what they are remitting money for. Healthcare in Cameroon is considered an expenditure that is worthy of migrants' financial support.

There is a long history of migration among low-income families in sub-Saharan Africa, in which (usually young, often male) members leave home to seek their fortune in what are perceived to be more favourable locations. While the physical and virtual mobility practices of such stretched families are often complex and contingent, maintaining contact with distantly located close kin is frequently of crucial importance for the maintenance of emotional (and possibly material) well-being, both for those who have left home and for those who remain. This article explores the ways in which these connections are being reshaped by increasing access to mobile phones in three sub-Saharan countries – Ghana, Malawi and South Africa – drawing on interdisciplinary, mixed-methods research from twenty-four sites, ranging from poor urban neighbourhoods to remote rural hamlets. Stories collected from both ends of stretched families present a world in which the connectivities now offered by the mobile phone bring a different kind of closeness and knowing, as instant sociality introduces a potential substitute for letters, cassettes and face-to-face visits, while the rapid resource mobilization opportunities identified by those still at home impose increasing pressures on migrant kin.