This article synthesizes metaphors and practices surrounding human and bovine milk and semen appearing in the James Stuart Archive of Zulu oral history. The King's control of the flow of milk in society was the source of his power and the mechanism by which he controlled the state. A fluent understanding of this Zulu political philosophy in the Stuart Archive opens up a rich and underutilized source of historical information for Zulu history that adds significantly to prior studies. Parallels to these images in the Great Lakes region suggest a ‘milk complex’ rather than the common perception of a ‘cattle complex’.

This article examines memorial traditions and social identities in the Luapula Valley during the nineteenth century. In History on the Luapula, Ian Cunnison argued that most histories in the Luapula Valley were ‘personal’ renditions except for the ‘impersonal’ and general history of the Kazembe Kingdom. This article details how the impersonal history of the Kazembe Kingdom arose. Through the association of shrines and natural phenomena with the ancestral heroes that featured in the historical drama of the Kazembe conquests, a more general, universal and hegemonic history was rendered. The formulation and commemoration of this history sustained two Luapulan identities, a ‘Lunda’ migrant identity and a ‘Shila’ autochthonous identity, both of which proved to be solid foundations for the creation of ‘tribes’ in the colonial period.

Based on a close reading of new archival material, this article makes a case for the adoption of an empirical, ‘sub-systemic’ approach to the study of nationalist and postcolonial politics in Zambia. By exploring the notion of popular ‘expectations of independence’ to a much greater degree than did previous studies, the paper contends that the extent of the United National Independence Party's political hegemony in the immediate post-independence era has been grossly overrated – even in a traditional rural stronghold of the party and during a favourable economic cycle. In the second part of the paper, the diplomatic and ethnic manoeuvres of the ruler of the eastern Lunda kingdom of Kazembe are set against a background of increasing popular disillusionment with the performance of the independent government.

Planned villagization is a recurrent feature in modern Africa. Apart from their official goals, which were missed in most cases, rural settlement schemes can be seen as attempts by colonial and postcolonial states to inscribe a new territorial order into the countryside. Taking a group of villages in northwest Zambia as an example, this article examines the process and impact of territorialization in a long-term and interactionist perspective. The result is a history of contestation about competing concepts of spatiality and sociality which opens new perspectives on the making of both locality and the nation state in Central Africa.

‘That rebellious youth’ alarmed colonial authorities and elders alike is increasingly an issue for historians. This article surveys the issue as an introduction to the two studies that follow. It considers both the creation of images of youthful defiance as part of a debate about youth conducted largely by their seniors and the real predicaments faced by young people themselves. Concern revolved around the meanings of maturity in a changing world where models of responsible male and female adulthood, gendered expectations and future prospects were all in flux. Surviving the present and facing the future made elders anxious and divided as well as united the young. The article concludes by suggesting a number of areas, including leisure and politics, where the voice of youth might be more clearly heard, and proposes comparisons – with the past, between racial groups and between ‘town’ and ‘country’ – that link the varied experiences of the young.

Staff petitions, sexual and disciplinary scandal and open riot pushed Buganda's leaders to close Budo College on the eve of Kabaka (King) Muteesa II's coronation. The upheaval at the school included a teachers' council that proclaimed ownership of the school, student leaders who manipulated the headmaster through scandal and school clubs and associations that celebrated affiliation over discipline. Instead of enacting and celebrating imperial partnership and order in complex, well-choreographed coronation rituals, the school's disruption delineated the fractures and struggles over rightful authority, order and patronage within colonial Buganda, marking out a future of tumultuous political transition.

This paper seeks to trace the origins of offences by youths as a distinct social concern in Lagos and examines the categorization of a group, the ‘juvenile delinquent’, by colonial administrators and welfare officers. While organized pickpocketing and prostitution by young people emerged as an issue in Nigerian newspapers in the 1920s, it was largely ignored by local administrators until the appointment, in 1941, of the first Social Welfare Officer. This led to the implementation of new administrative and judiciary machinery which combined two processes: it legislated ‘juvenile delinquency’ into existence as a clearly identifiable social problem; and criminalized a large portion of urban youth, especially female hawkers. The combination of these processes constitutes what can be called the invention of juvenile delinquency in Nigeria.