Technologies of surveillance and coercion loom large in this issue of The Journal of African History, as do settler states and racial capitalism. Sarah Balakrishnan reveals that the practice of incarceration emerged in the Gold Coast before colonial rule, yet after European demand for enslaved people had declined along the coast. The act of jailing debtors or their dependents under the threat of sexual violence became the sanction for debt otherwise unpaid. While the practice emerged in the wake of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, it carried on under indirect rule. Across the continent in Kenya, as Keren Weitzberg demonstrates, the colonial state enforced racial segregation partly through the use of biometric identity cards, which placed those who held them within the racial hierarchy on which colonial capitalism relied. Analog, rather than digital, biometrics thus have a long history on the continent, where they have been used to police racial boundaries. Still, as Stephanie Quinn shows, boundaries between competing groups of African laborers in Namibia were never as defined as the apartheid government might have hoped. In spite of residential segregation and a system of contract labor that maintained distinctions between temporary laborers and long-term urban residents, Africans in the copper mining town of Tsumeb gradually created communities of solidarity, as represented in an historic strike in 1987. In Casamance on the eve of decolonization, solidarity was harder to come by, as Séverine Awenengo Dalberto demonstrates. Frantic political maneuvering won the support of political activists for continued union with Senegal — and with France — in the famous 1958 referendum that created the French Community. The Casamance leadership saw the ‘yes’ vote as a step towards autonomy — from Senegal. The French too readily promised a special status for Casamance; in the end they never delivered on that promise. The government of Senegal, of course, had no desire to do so; rather to the contrary. It fell to another generation of Casamançais to revive the push for autonomy in the face of a hostile state. Finally, drawing on Portuguese sources and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Linell Chewins and Peter Delius argue that the trade in enslaved labor from Delagoa Bay had more profound and earlier effects in the interior than previously realized. In particular, from the mid-seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, the trade played a greater role in state formation amongst Nguni-speakers than has been acknowledged. The ties between racial capitalism, violence, and community formation are deep and multiple.
A wave of recent work in African history, reviewed in these pages, drives that point home. Abou Bamba reviews Joël Michel's work on les Colonies de peuplement, which offers a comparative study of European settler colonies in nineteenth and twentieth-century Africa. The formation of the postcolonial state of Sudan lies at the heart of the work of Alden Young, reviewed by Christopher Vaughan, while Faeeza Ballim considers Bill Freund's analysis of the economics and politics of development in South Africa. Pushing further back in time, Jay Spaulding reviews another book on state formation, one that has garnered a great deal of scholarly attention, Michael Gomez's African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa. Several other historical realms are also taken up in the reviews, including water cultures in Kenya (Jeremiah Kitunda on Matthew Bender), the history of football in Mozambique (Eric Allina on Nuno Domingos), the cinema cultures of Tanzania (Glenn Reynolds on Laura Fair), and textiles in Southern Africa (Elizabeth Fretwell on Juliette Leeb-du Toit).
As ever, the editors thank our readership and wider community for their continued contributions and dedication to producing Africanist historical scholarship.
The Editors
