In the seventeenth century, Europeans on the Gold Coast took gold pawns as security for debt, but from the early eighteenth century, they turned increasingly toward the use of human pawns. This shift was the result of a transformation in levels of demand for gold amongst African sellers, most notably the Asante, who began to secure control over local gold sources from c. 1700. The change in demand for gold was accompanied by a rise in slave prices on the West African coast, but it was the indigenous system of debt recovery that proved crucial to the success of European trade.

Recent literature has emphasised the political and economic opportunities afforded to peoples living in African borderlands by the existence of permeable inter-state boundaries. This article examines the history of the Darfur-Chad borderland under colonial rule and finds that serious risks existed for those attempting to circumvent state authority in order to take advantage of such opportunities. State-led attempts to control these borders, though always incomplete, were often characterised by considerable violence. The limits of state power did not therefore straightforwardly translate into an accommodation with border societies. That said, this was also a border zone characterised by complex interaction and negotiation between state and local forms of regulation, and by multiple forms of sovereignty. This led to the emergence of plural and hybrid forms of authority, now repeatedly observed in studies of contemporary African borderlands, but rarely fully historicised.

This article argues that the emergence of Chagga political identity on Mount Kilimanjaro in the 1940s and 1950s can best be understood as a product of intensive debates over the control of natural resources and the nature of chiefly authority. As a result of perceived threats to the land and water resources of the mountain and resentment of the role of the chiefs in these issues, grassroots activists adopted a language of unity using the ethnic term ‘Chagga’ – a moniker long used by the colonial state but eschewed by the general population. With the rise of a paramount chieftaincy in 1951, the term shifted from being a symbol of colonial rule to one of common identity and resistance against the encroachment of the colonial state in local affairs.

The nationalistic fervour that greeted Ghana's performances in the 2010 football World Cup in South Africa powerfully evoked memories of an earlier period in the history of the Ghanaian state that witnessed Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana, draw on the game as a rallying point for nation-building and pan-African unity. This article uncovers this history by analysing Nkrumah's overt politicisation of football in the late colonial and immediate postcolonial periods. This study not only makes a novel contribution to the growing historical and social scientific literature on what is arguably Africa's most pervasive popular cultural form but also deepens our understanding of one of the continent's most significant political figures.

Young activists who took part in South Africa's Black Consciousness movement challenged the apartheid status quo with their bold calls for black psychological liberation. This article uses new evidence to elucidate the work these youthful activists did in health and economic projects in the rural Eastern Cape that, in part, upheld certain customs. The article also brings young professional women into the history of African youth, arguing that the involvement of professional black female activists changed the way activists and villagers perceived the abilities and roles of young black women.

Jan Vansina's Paths in the Rainforests (1990) provides an instructive example of progress in overcoming the continuing burden of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory in studies of precolonial Africa in both historiography and anthropology. This article focuses on a critical section of the book, which outlines social evolution and ‘the invention of matrilinearity’ in the area around the lower Congo, showing both the strengths and the weaknesses of Vansina's approach.