In the wake of the South African war, the indenture and transport of over 63,000 Chinese men to gold mines in the Transvaal sparked a rush to supply smoking opium to a literally captive market. Embroiled in a growing political economy of mass intoxication, state lawmakers shifted official policy from prohibition to provision. Their innovation of an industrial drug maintenance bureaucracy, developed on behalf of mining capital in alliance with organized pharmacy and medicine, ran counter to local trends of policy reform and represents a unique episode for broader histories of modern narcotics regulation. This article considers the significance of this case and chronicles the contradictory interests and ideologies that informed political scrambles over legitimate opium uses, users, and profiteers. It shows how the state maintained its provision policy, for as long as it proved expedient, against varied and mounting public pressures – local and international – for renewed drug suppression. The argument here is that the state managed an epidemic of addiction on the Rand as an extraordinary problem of demography. It achieved this both through redefining smoking opium from intoxicant to mine medicine and through the legal construction of a ‘special biochemical zone’, which corresponded with the exceptional status and spatial segregation of a despised alien labour force.

In October 1934, a group of schoolgirls at Malangali School in Iringa Province, Tanganyika received doses of what the school headmistress thought was shark liver oil. Many girls began to spit and vomit the medicine, while others attempted to leave the school grounds to return home. Within three hours, several pupils had died and within three days, another 32 girls succumbed to the toxic draught. This article examines this little known and poorly understood tragedy through the lens of the scientific and social experimentation that occurred at Malangali School. As one of two government- run schools that enrolled girls, Malangali provided the colonial state with an opportunity to conduct a variety of experiments upon a captive audience. This article argues that the ‘discovery of colonial malnutrition’ in the interwar period not only depoliticized hunger but its emphasis on techno-chemical approaches to social and material problems led to tragedy.

This article argues that rural South African women's importance as spiritual actors in the period from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries stemmed from their ability to embrace hybrid spiritual identities that corresponded closely to the lived reality of African rural life, and that by embracing those identities, women expanded their roles as social healers. Professing a belief in Christianity did not prevent individuals from practicing as diviners, nor did it prevent Christians from consulting diviners to determine the causes of death or misfortune. Similarly, young women who converted to Christianity often maintained close ties to non-Christian families and bridged spiritual lives on the mission stations with life in their families. Over this time period, women became cultural mediators who borrowed, adopted, and combined spiritual beliefs to provide more complete answers to problems faced by rural African families in South Africa.

Postwar politics in British-occupied Somalia is usually reduced to the activities of the Somali Youth League, the foremost anticolonial nationalist movement. However, by 1947, smaller associations, pejoratively nicknamed the pro-Italia, came together in an effort to return Somalia to Italy under international mandate. Drawing upon new archival sources, the article argues that this movement did not stem from arguments supporting colonial rule, but rather from objections to the nationalist agenda and military occupation. Closer attention to these voices sheds light on the deeper meanings of political alignment during the change of regime and enhances our understanding of political developments in postwar Somalia.

This article examines events involving accusations of bloodsucking in the southwestern Sahara. French colonial archives allow researchers to identify specific cases in time and location; however, this article seeks to address but then move beyond histories of colonial governance. To highlight how communities in the Saharan desert dealt with crises provoked by environmental and social change, this investigation also relies on locally-produced written legal opinions and oral testimony. Emerging from these Saharan sources is one facet of how desert communities envisioned the enchantment of their social worlds and understood difficult periods caused by famine, weak economies, and domestic tensions.

This article presents the results of a corpus analysis of the information structure properties of il y a clefts (e.g. Il y a Claude qui chante ‘There is Claude who is singing’ / ‘Claude is singing’). I will show that il y a clefts and existential sentences introduced by il y a can express the same three information structure articulations. Furthermore, it will be argued that il y a clefts and existential sentences function as focus markers, and that this hypothesis is further supported by psycholinguistic findings concerning constructions related to il y a.

A special case of lexical contrast involves contrasting a hyperonym and a hyponym (as in clothes and socks), leading to the narrowing of the hyperonym's sense. However, not all hyperonym/hyponym pairs are amenable to contrast (e.g. ?animals and cats). While category prototype structure forms a strong motivating and constraining factor for hyperonym/hyponym contrast (e.g. Lehrer 1990), what is lacking in previous work is a systematic consideration of the co-hyponyms in real language use. To that end, data from the GloWbE corpus (Davies 2013) were used to investigate which terms for items of clothing (e.g. coat, bra, jeans) can be contrasted with their hyperonym (either clothes or clothing). While marginal members of the item of clothing category (e.g. belt, hat) have a stronger potential for contrasting with the hyperonym, even prototypical hyponyms (e.g. shirt, jeans) contrasted with clothes/clothing in at least some contexts. Language users can therefore manipulate category boundaries to meet their discourse needs, exploiting a range of dimensions of difference to create contrast. Many clothing terms were also found to contrast more readily with clothes than with clothing, suggesting that the meaning of clothes is generally narrower than that of its near-synonym clothing.