This paper charts the rise and transformation of biography as a form of Africanist history writing. Biography in African history, as in other fields, has included attention to nationalist heroes as well as the lives of slaves, women, and other subalterns. Recently, some Africanist historians have embraced transnational life histories, particularly those situated in the “black Atlantic” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some themes, methods, and limitations of such biographies are discussed in relation to the author’s own project on a nineteenth century immigrant to West Africa.

This paper deals with aspects of the still relatively neglected history of African medicinal plants. The core of the paper is a discussion in tabular form of the plants collected in the West African forest kingdom of Asante in 1817 by Henry Tedlie, a member of the well known English mission led by Thomas Bowdich. More generally, the paper considers episodes in the accumulation of Akan, Asante, and African plant specimens by Europeans, and the eventual classification of these in a western authorized botanical taxonomy that is now in worldwide use. The gathering of potentially medicinal plants is a little studied facet of European global expansion, from exploration to colonialism and beyond, and of the sovereign scientific orthodoxy that became established alongside it. The paper frames and discusses relevant details of this process over the longue durée, from pre-Linnaean taxonomies to current controversies over bioprospecting.

This study juxtaposes the observations and interpretations of a twenty-first-century ethnographer with those of nineteenth-century Christian missionaries to rethink interpretations of the practice of gender in precolonial West Africa. The article uses the evolving relationship between an ethnographic researcher and a group of contemporary female ancestral masquerade chiefs to reflect on the ways in which generations of missionaries and scholars have interpreted the gendered construction of power. It critiques previous writers for assuming sex and gender in Yoruba culture to be fixed, and argues for a more fluid interpretation of the gendered identities of the observer and subject being observed.

Despite its present ethnic federalism, Ethiopian history has been marked by provincial or cultural identities, which twentieth century notions of identity have obscured. This essay gives three major reasons why ethnicity is not an effective lens to understand Ethiopia’s complex history. One, there is no agreement among either popular and academic writers on what ethnic identities in Ethiopia represents, either currently or historically. Two, a focus on ethnicity obscures the rationale behind the actions of the state and key actors during the nineteenth century. Three, an ethnic lens brings much needed scholarly attention away from key moments in the nineteenth century.

Drawing on the Islamic court records of Brava, a small Indian Ocean port city on the southern Benadir coast of Somalia, dating from the period 1893–1900, this essay analyzes the legal agency and economic roles of the women of Brava and sheds new light on social (especially family) relations in this town. The qāḍī’s court records give evidence of married women’s fully recognized (even if qualified) legal personhood and their full-fledged financial and economic agency. The free, married women of Brava of this period contributed fully and autonomously to the economic endeavors of their families and also interacted with non-related businessmen in and beyond Brava. They also had the legal and social capacity to defend their interests in court and to get a fair hearing in accordance with the law. Given that both Somali women’s history and East African legal history suffer from a scarcity of concrete evidence for this time-period, the aspects of everyday life in Brava that come into view in the town’s qāḍī’s court records are of great interest.

Many early records in West Africa arise from missionary accounts. While they may contain rich ethnographic data, this detail should be approached only after analysis and consideration of the authors of the sources in question. In early Sierra Leone, important data was recorded on behalf of the English evangelical Church Missionary Society, but the missionaries reporting on the ground comprised an insufficiently studied group of German-speaking Pietist Lutherans originating from central and northern Europe. This article analyzes the authors of this information in order to approach their accounts with a better appreciation of existing bias and to better engage with how diverse sociocultural perspectives affect the historical record.

This article presents an analysis of the diaries of Barthélémy Boganda, priest and later politician in French Equatorial Africa. So far unknown, these diaries, stored in the archives of the French Spiritans, shed light on earlier stages of Boganda’s life, on which fewer sources are available. The article first discusses the broad historical background of colonialism in French Equatorial Africa and the significance of Barthélémy Boganda as an historical figure, also comparing him with other leaders of Africa’s decolonization struggles. It then analyses the nature of his diaries and their different entries and argues that it is through this source material that one can better understand the complexity of his person and the historical depth of his attitudes, thoughts and action.

There is growing scholarly interest in the history of postcolonial Africa. However, this study entails several methodological challenges, including insufficient availability of archival materials. A multi-archival strategy offers one solution to the challenge of locating new documentary sources. In this paper, I suggest that nonconventional archives such as the National Archives of the United States should be explored in historical studies of postcolonial African countries, including smaller countries like Rwanda. Focusing on the political events that occurred in Rwanda in January 1961 that led to significant changes in the country, this paper demonstrates how American archival materials can enhance our understanding by shedding light on what existing colonial archives have not revealed.

This paper discusses an emerging problem in Ghana and its implications for Ghana’s archives and historical writing. It explains why some important documents intended for state and institutional archives eventually find their way back into public circulation – some have even been used to wrap roasted food! The paper provides methodological insights to historians and researchers and perhaps warnings too that they should consider alternative sources to archives in their quest for information on Ghana; for after all some researchers on Ghana have come across some amazing documents and historical evidence among the food vendors on Ghana’s streets.

The article describes the Bureau of African Affairs Collection. First it introduces the history of the archive by examining the crucial events that influenced its state and accessibility. Then, it describes the contents of the collection, underlying its importance for the study of Kwame Nkrumah’s domestic and foreign policies and African nationalism at a continental level. The documents included in the Bureau of African Affairs Collection provide unique insights into both Nkrumah’s foreign and domestic policies. In particular, they include invaluable information on his Pan-African policy. Moreover, the documents shed new light on the presence of African liberation movements in Ghana in the period 1957 to 1966. Thus, this Collection can attract scholars interested in both Ghanaian history as well as the history of Pan-Africanism and African nationalism at a continental level.

This article presents a fieldwork report conducted by the authors to locate certain manuscripts – namely copies of the chronicle titled Tārīkh al-Fattāsh – listed in recent catalogues of Islamic manuscripts from Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana published by the al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation and prepared by Bābā Yūnus Muḥammad. Unfortunately, after ten days of enquiry in the two countries, it became evident that the catalogues are inaccurate and that at least some of the manuscripts described do not exist.