Between 1898 and 1923, a series of disputes erupted among fishing communities in the British Gold Coast Colony (modern-day Ghana) following the introduction of larger and more productive sea fishing nets. All along the coast, fishers debated the environmental and economic consequences of adopting the nets, which debates shifted across African and colonial forums. Focusing on these disputes, this article interrogates the ways in which sites of fishing innovations and experimentation became sites of intense conflict and negotiation throughout the Gold Coast Colony as different groups debated and contested technological change. In the process, voices advocating for caution within the fishing industry were effectively marginalised through the manoeuvring of net advocates while the introduction of colonial arbitration within the realm of fisheries offered new challenges to the authority of African leaders within the marine space.

How should we understand 1970s Kenya, with its combination of inequality and relative political stability? This article offers a new perspective on that by following the early history of the Harambee Co-operative Savings and Credit Society—the most prominent of many such societies that grew in those years. The rise and crisis of this co-operative provides evidence of mismanagement and the pursuit of personal advantage—but also suggests that civil servants saw the importance of enabling wider accumulation. As a result, the lowest-paid employees of government could see through Harambee—and other co-operatives—a possible, if precarious, route to a future as property-owners. That possibility helps explain both the institutional strength of Kenya’s provincial administration (whose employees were the members of Harambee Co-operative) and how a substantial number of Kenyans could develop a sense of themselves as citizens with a stake in the political system.

This article explores changes and continuities in the lives and perspectives of Black South Africans at the beginning of the twentieth century, as portrayed in the Setswana-language newspaper Koranta ea Becoana. In studies of African responses to British colonization, scholars have tended to focus on evidence of nascent African nationalism in the English writings of Africans, but Koranta and other vernacular sources indicate that Africans during 1890–1910 were equally concerned with celebrating and preserving their various cultural and political traditions, advocating for a multiethnic liberalism that would not oblige them to choose between becoming either “Black Englishmen” or disenfranchised “Natives.”

This work explores the travels of Ugandan Enoch Olinga, as an example of a person who enjoyed connections with global minorities across national boundaries and as a unique lens into the Black international experience in the mid-twentieth century. I examine his internationalist experiences through the lens of emotions to emphasize different dynamics of global racial identities and transnational diasporic connections during the 1950s–1970s, an era of decolonization and civil rights movements. I argue that Olinga, a prominent Baha’i who traveled worldwide during this era, advocated for unification among global minorities by emphasizing common racial and cultural heritages and expansive concepts of a politicized kinship. Through the Baha’i Cause, he articulated his own ideas about striving for global harmony and racial unity, with a connection to Africa serving as the linchpin. Emotional analysis provides insights into how Olinga invoked diverse notions of family and kin to arouse particular emotions amongst people of color both within and beyond the unity offered by the Baha’i Faith.

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.

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.