This article uses digital Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to visualize changing crop choice over time in nineteenth-century equatorial eastern Africa. It maps the locations of crops mentioned in early imperial sources, using contemporary cartographic representations of the region as a base. This enables a novel visualization of changing agricultural potential and vulnerability to climate variability over time. The maps contextualize the growth of commercial and political centers, a series of famines during years and seasons of below average rainfall, and the well-known environmental challenges of the early colonial period.

Unbeknownst to many in the fields of African history and archaeology, the South African archaeologist A. J. H. Goodwin conducted important research in Nigeria during the last decade of his life, from 1953 to 1957. Following work at the Yoruba town of Ile-Ife, Goodwin led the first systematic excavations in Benin City in 1954–55 and 1956–57. With little of this material ever published, this article outlines, analyzes, and discusses Goodwin’s archives at the University of Cape Town that pertain to his research at Benin City, which contain important unpublished information in reports, sketch maps, photographs, and correspondence. Using this material, the article reconstructs important dimensions of the town’s old palace landscape – including the locations and organization of compounds and shrines associated with past kings – and Goodwin and others’ excavations within it, situating this novel spatial and archaeological information within the larger landscape of the city.

The history of the KwaZulu-Natal region in the period under study has mostly been written round the evolution of a series of polities seen as more or less firmly bounded territorial “states.” This approach goes hand in hand with readings of recorded oral source materials as “oral traditions.” In this article, we reread the materials not simply as relayed historical accounts but as evidence of past discursive practices geared towards the navigation of change. This allows us to argue that a fundamental feature of the political order at this time was a degree of mobility and political flexibility that earlier studies hardly engage with.

In a posthumous publication in 1954, seven years after his death, Reuben Anywar became the second Acholi to publish a book. Acoli ki Ker Megi was released one year after Lacito Okech’s Tekwaro ki Ker Lobo Acholi. Unlike Okech, who received little education, Anywar was among the first northern Ugandan graduates of Makerere College. He became one of the first Black teachers at the prestigious Gulu High School and was the founder and original editor of Acholi Magazine. By the mid-1940s, Anywar was arguably the most towering intellectual in northern Uganda. Yet, existing works overlook his significance in knowledge production. This article seeks to rectify this oversight.