The emergence of scientific racism and the taking of heads and skulls in the nineteenth-century colonial wars in Southern Africa have received limited attention from historians. Closer examination of head-taking in colonial wars fought in the western parts of Xhosaland and the Cape Colony suggests that the rise of scientific racism alone does not explain the complex interplay between military discourse on Africans, atrocities committed, and commonplace racial attitudes. A detailed examination of the incidents of head-taking in the colonial conflicts against the Xhosa indicates the practice evolved over time, had several causes, and became an increasingly common part of the construction and re-enforcement of a racial identity and culture of domination by British and colonial soldiers. It also suggests that for the Xhosa, the taking of heads was a behaviour acquired from the British.

In a historiography that paints relations between chiefs and women as antagonistic, the history of the Nazaretha Church in Mtunzini, South Africa in the early twentieth century sheds light on conditions that allowed chiefs and women to find common ground. During the era of segregation, Mtunzini was, on one hand, subject to relatively less interference from white government officials, but, on the other, ravaged by social and economic change. In this context, the Nazaretha Church flourished thanks to the support of many chiefs and women. The religious community not only proposed new answers to related questions about health, healing, and morality, but it also afforded chiefs and women important social options amid rural decline and challenges to traditional authority.

This article argues for a thematic and periodization shift in the approach to the history of Congo's decolonization. It demonstrates how debates about cultural heritage and demands for cultural restitution became important aspects of Congolese interpretations of decolonization, and argues that they played an important role in the national and international politics that were central to the construction of the cultural sovereignty of the postcolonial Zairian state.

This article addresses how scholarship has formulated human connections and ruptures over the Sahara. However, these formulations were, and still are, based in both physical and discursive realities that have been developed in Africa itself. The idea of a dividing Sahara is based on historical political divisions – despite a homogenous political culture in the region – and by locally developed notions of race and religion, brought about by trade and justified in Islamic religious discourse. The Saharan divide acquired a new reading in colonial historiography, which, in turn, informed scholarly work until well into the 1960s. I will suggest that both colonial and postcolonial research on the differences and connections between the Saharan shores are suffering from a civilisational bias towards North Africa.

This article offers a revisionist perspective on the contested notion of Witold Lutosławski's authenticity as a modernist composer. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to musicology's increasingly nuanced narration of the story of musical modernism. The case is argued partly by relating Lutosławski's output to broader traditions in twentieth-century modernism, including musical representations of alienation, loss, violence, and nostalgia. Crucially, however, it is also argued by interpreting the more conventionally gratifying aspects of his pieces as something other than a hedonistic cop out. Adapting ideas from Michel Foucault, such passages are deemed heterotopian in function and interpreted in a wider-ranging sociohistorical context including Poland's responses to modernism and to Soviet Cold War oppression. The article's other main objective, therefore, is to interpret as heterotopian (and thus alternatively authentic) the expressive, structural and symbolic functions of passages in Lutosławski's works, thereby introducing Foucault's little-known idea to a wider audience of music scholars – given the concept's potential to contribute to critical explorations of a much wider diversity of musical texts and phenomena. Analysis of Lutosławski's Les espaces du sommeil for baritone and orchestra (1975) interconnects these strands.