In 1854, the Bank of Senegal was established using part of the compensation paid to former slave owners. The bank issued banknotes and provided modern financial services. Masaki analyzes the bank’s management and interrogates the widely accepted argument that merchants from Bordeaux controlled the bank to marginalize African merchants, concluding that the bank largely provided equitable service to this colony. Additionally, Masaki shows that the bank was a site of political struggles for the métis elites and suggests that the complexities of Senegalese society at the time made it difficult to assess the full scope of the bank’s operations.

In South-Central Africa, British mining companies shadowed colonial monetization in an assertive and coercive manner. In the emerging settler states, African money users were obliged to adjust to colonial money for the payment of tax and transactions. Yet they often found it difficult to obtain access to colonial currency. Company rule in the region was initially closely connected to the South African economy, but currencies separated as a result of South Africa’s economy building in the 1920s. Nyamunda and Mseba tell the story of the struggles of African money users in engaging with colonial currency.

Pallaver situates German East Africa within the framework of the broader East African region as a way to illuminate the processes of currency standardization in the colonial context. The monetary geography of the region was determined first by the circulation of the rupee and later by Great Britain’s interests to create a common currency for its East African colonies. Pallaver argues that transimperial, international, and regional contexts influenced currency circulation across and within colonies, drawing attention to forms of colonial money and their use by distinct groups, such as African laborers and Indian traders.

Research on Africa’s monetary history has tended to focus on the imposition of colonial currencies while neglecting the monetary upheavals which faced the colonial powers after the collapse of the gold standard during World War I. Gardner profiles three crises—in The Gambia, Kenya, and Liberia—resulting from shifting exchange rates between European currencies during the 1920s and 1930s. These three cases illustrate the degree to which colonial policies struggled to keep up with the economic turmoil affecting metropolitan states and bring Africa into the story of global monetary instability during the interwar period, which is often told only from a European perspective.

In the 1960s, the escudo zone, comprising Portugal and its African colonies, countered the trend of European decolonization. The Portuguese state reorganized monetary relations in the empire-state with the help of a new legal framework. The aim of this imperial economic reorganization was to establish a balance of payment relations which was expected to facilitate Portugal’s economic modernization and the country’s association with liberalizing economies in Western Europe that were experiencing rapid economic growth. However, the escudo zone soon became dysfunctional. Mata explains why the designs of economy building in a Portuguese empire-state could not be realized, given the trend toward independent political and economic development in Lusophone Africa.

Informality is growing with Africa’s rapid urbanization. Much like residents of other types of informal housing, backyard dwellers face overall poor living conditions and political marginalization. However, backyard residents are in an ambiguous legal area and have been far less politically active and organized to pursue their rights to adequate housing. Using a qualitative case study of backyard residents in three Cape Town neighborhoods, Harris, Scheba, and Rice bridge theories of infrastructural citizenship and collective action to shed light on how informality may undermine collective action, and they identify four factors influencing collective action.

Ethiopia has often been portrayed as a unique case of peaceful inter-religious relations. The country has, however, seen an increase in violence between religious communities over the last decades, something which has been interpreted within the prism of extremism. Analyzing inter-religious dynamics in Ethiopia, Østebø argues that the notion of extremism is an inadequate analytical tool, and proposes instead an alternative approach that explores how mutually constitutive developments within each of the main religious communities in Ethiopia together have contributed to exacerbate inter-religious tensions. In particular, Østebø suggests a typology consisting of the intersected processes of expansion, protection, and reclaiming of space.

While youths in Africa are often portrayed as peace spoilers, this view largely overlooks youths who have not (yet) turned to (post-) conflict violence. In order to deepen our understanding of the risks of conflict recurrence and the ways to prevent these risks from materializing, Kuppens and Langer argue that it is crucial to study the perspectives of non-violent youths in post-conflict countries. Through an essay-based study with secondary school pupils in post-conflict Côte d’Ivoire, they show that youths are concerned about issues of security, employment, and reconciliation, and yet, they look generally favorably upon the peace process and their role in it.

Conversations around transitional justice often focus on concepts of victimhood and perpetration. Such has been the case in Rwanda in the decades following the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi. However, even as Rwandans continue to observe state-led transitional justice reforms which divide them into victims and perpetrators, they simultaneously draw on state discourses of unity to carefully critique and re-work the language and practices which produce such divisions. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Berman illustrates how a new generation of Rwandan youth is transforming political ideology by creatively engaging the discourse of ubunyarwanda (Rwandanness) to forge inclusive post-genocide politics.

My first academic job in 1962 involved teaching a course on History of Civilization. We had a text that essentially involved Western Civilization with chapters on India, China, and Japan interspersed. Two years later, when I returned from my doctoral thesis research in Africa, my thesis supervisor, William Halperin, recommended me for a ten-week adult education group discussing William McNeill’s Rise of the West. I was stunned that in a history of Eurasia, McNeill devoted only five pages to Africa. The incorporation of Africa in world history has been slow. For many of us in that first generation to study African history in Europe and North America, the marginality of Africa in the study of history was sometimes what drew us to study it. (There were a small number of African-American historians who wrote about Africa, but they had little impact on history curricula outside the small world in which they operated.) As a graduate student, I did a field on the Expansion of Europe and was struck by the inferior quality of much that had been written about Africa, largely by missionaries and colonial administrators. Until the Foreign Area Fellowship Program sent me to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to “tool up” with Jan Vansina, I was oblivious to the work that scholars like Vansina, Oliver, and Curtin were doing. Once I began researching Africa, the excitement was that of creating a new field of historical research.