Drawing on an extensive examination of primary sources, this paper considers the persistent tensions between state-led development and local agencies in Humera—a northwestern Ethiopian borderland—during the Derg regime. It explores how developmental projects in the contested borderlands have been shaped more by ideological showcase than by the pursuit of an efficient production system. As part of its agrarian reform, the Derg nationalized private commercial farmlands in Setit Humera and converted them into state farms. Employing peasant militia labor, a centralized administrative approach, and overlooking unique local conditions, the Derg launched the Humera State Farm not only for economic objectives but also to assert state authority in a politically contested frontier region. Despite substantial political attention, the state farm sparked multifaceted tensions and proved ineffective. Its final collapse in 1990 was ultimately driven by geopolitical conflict, as the farm became entangled in regional struggles involving the Tigray People’s Liberation Front and Sudan’s proxy actions against the Derg.

This article uses the idea of “fugitive science” to show how early twentieth-century writers and editors in colonial Freetown, Sierra Leone, repurposed eugenic ideas in their efforts to reform the British Empire. In the pages of West Africa’s most widely read newspaper, the Sierra Leone Weekly News, West African authors and editors reinterpreted eugenics to articulate political claims indirectly in the absence of substantive political power. They reworked transatlantic medical texts to cast local conditions of infant mortality as evidence of African racial degeneration under colonial rule in order to expose the contradictions of the ideology of sexual paternalism legitimizing imperial administration. These commentaries weaponized eugenics to frame polygyny as evidence of African paternal authority and political legitimacy. Some of these contributors transformed such sexualized discourse into organized politics when they formed the National Congress of British West Africa, which carried these claims into its 1920 meeting with the League of Nations.

This paper analyzes the use of rubu unpaid “traditional” labor in Toro District in western Uganda during the colonial period. It explores how the “traditional” roots of the unpaid labor system were negotiated and reinterpreted by African elites through their attempts to gain more control over the labor through wrangling over exemptions and commutations for the work which, then, shaped British responses to the forced labor regime. Chiefs managed rubu labor on the ground and wielded a lot of exploitative power. However, the British administration used intermediaries, luwalo inspectors, to monitor rubu labor and delimit the power of chiefs. This paper also investigates the growth of commutations from so-called traditional labor as a colonial revenue generator.

This article reconsiders the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) “Media Trial” that followed in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. While both the original trial (2000–03) and its appeal (2007) have been widely analyzed, most observers have approached it as a case against three media bosses. This article suggests that the Media Trial was not only invested in the line between press freedom and criminal hate speech and, in relation to Ferdinand Nahimana, not solely concerned with his role at “hate radio” station Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM). Drawing on trial transcripts, other court records, and press coverage of the trial, I show how the tribunal actively interrogated Nahimana’s status as a historian and his research and scholarship as part of its judicial process. As such, I argue that the Media Trial helped codify the notion that Rwandan history had become “deadly” before the genocide and that the Rwandan historical field would need to be fundamentally transformed.

In the years following independence, history-writing increasingly became a strategic instrument of nation-building and a means of constructing a “usable past.” Using the South African writer Bloke Modisane’s research on the Maji Maji War in Tanzania as its point of departure, this article examines how newly independent African states navigated the politics of historical production in the early postindependence period. Although deeply invested in African history, Modisane was not a formally trained historian and remained on the margins of the emerging Dar es Salaam School of History. His uneasy reception in Tanzania not only underscores the tension between Pan-African ideals and national imperatives, but the challenges faced by intellectuals working outside official or institutional structures. While he never completed his research to the point of publication, revisiting his experience reminds us that the history of African history was also shaped by incomplete, interrupted, and forgotten efforts to write the past.

This article examines the late colonial performances of Adolphe Kisimba, a Congolese producer and performer who toured his show Mu Kongo – Mu Belgique to Belgium in early 1959. Developed under the auspices of the Belgian colonial state, this multimedia spectacular featured sketches, songs, a magic lantern light show, and a satirical “reverse ethnography” film of Belgian culture as narrated by Kisimba. This article traces Kisimba’s trajectory through state-sponsored shows such as Changwe Yetu, Spectacles Populaires, and the idiosyncratic Mu Kongo – Mu Belgique and argues that staged performance, and the international mobility that this art form inherently enables, served as a contested space in which Central Africans sought to redefine colonial hierarchies and through which they envisioned new professional horizons. The overlooked histories of Kisimba and late colonial African artists like him, this article suggests, offer new insights into African cultural negotiations and global outlooks before independence.

This article examines the formation of the first Luanda elites by exploring the trajectories of the members of the family configuration established by the matrimony formed by Juan de Viloria and Isabel de Oliveira in the early 1590s. By analyzing the evolution of the intricate web of interests that structured the Viloria family configuration between the 1590s and 1720s, the article probes how the early Luanda elites generated and mobilized social, economic, political, or symbolic resources that allowed them to establish ongoing partnerships with African, metropolitan, and Luso-Brazilian actors.

Dans cet article, nous abordons la connaissance géographique de l’Afrique centrale aux 16e–18e siècles. Notre attention est portée sur les références aux lacs Zembre et Zaïre dans les sources écrites et cartographiques des 16e et 17e siècles. L’hypothèse avancée ici est qu’il s’agirait des lacs Tumba et Maï-Ndombe (ex-“Léopold II”) situés en amont de la région comprise entre le fleuve Congo et le Bas-Kasaï, en République démocratique du Congo. Malheureusement, ces indications géographiques ont été perdues par les différents auteurs anciens qui associaient ces lacs au Nil et à la région est-africaine. Ce nouvel éclairage sur cette énigme cartographique permet de souligner que l’espace géographique compris entre le confluent du fleuve Congo et la rivière Kasaï était connu au royaume Kongo, puis en Europe, avant les explorations de l’époque moderne qui ont conduit à la colonisation de l’Afrique centrale.

The British invasion of the Zulu kingdom in January 1879, the imposition of British colonial rule from 1880 onwards, and the subsequent undermining of the Zulu royal family and the destruction of the kingdom from the 1880s to the early twentieth century have received attention in numerous historical publications and dissertations. While the primary focus of these studies is on how the British colonists placed the primary members of the Zulu royal family such as King Cetshwayo kaMpande and King Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo under siege, none has explored the impact of the British hostility toward other senior members of the Zulu royal family, such as Prince Ndabuko kaMpande and Prince Shingana kaMpande. Only Robert R. R. Dlomo and Jeff Guy have made brief references to these issues in their biographies of Kings Cetshwayo and Dinuzulu and Harriette Colenso. It will be shown below that the incarceration of Shingana and Ndabuko alongside their nephew, Dinuzulu, from 1889 to 1898, and the re-arrest, trial, and banishment of Shingana to kwaThoyana near Amanzimtoti from 1910 to 1911, and the re-arrest, retrial, conviction, and banishment of Dinuzulu to Middelburg from 1911 to 1913 were part of the British efforts to completely destroy the senior section of the Zulu royal family popularly known as the Usuthu.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Portugal launched armed campaigns to subdue its African colonies, following the example of neighbouring powers. The Ovambo peoples of southern Angola mounted strong resistance to Portuguese encroachment. Lisbon’s anxieties were compounded by the German presence in South West Africa. In late 1914, the Ovambo seized upon the Portuguese military defeat by German forces to lead an unprecedented uprising. Portugal retaliated in mid-1915 with a large-scale campaign that employed systematic terror. These tactics caused a famine that killed tens of thousands and arguably constituted genocide. This article examines the 1915 campaign in southern Angola, focusing on the devastating impact of Portuguese repression. It reflects on the links between colonialism, violence, and genocide, and considers the political reverberations of this violence in metropolitan Portugal.