Efforts to transform the lives of colonized women and girls were integral to Christian missionary efforts throughout the world. This study of the attempts by a Quaker mission, in what is now Western Province, Kenya, to remake African womanhood indicates the limited success missionaries had in this effort. As with most evangelical missions, “women's work for women” involved domesticating African women and girls. According to one missionary, the purpose of the Girls' Boarding School (GBS) was to teach girls to be “better wives and mothers.” This goal, however, was subverted by both the missionaries and the schoolgirls. While the curriculum was designed to teach girls to submit to male authority, the female missionary in charge of the school refused to do so herself. Furthermore, the schoolgirls manipulated missionaries and mission institutions to delay marriage and to control their choice of marriage partners. Graduates also used the skills learned at the GBS to cross gender and class boundaries, and contributed to the restructuring of Luhya society. Thus, while missionaries undoubtedly caused many dramatic changes in the lives of Luhya women and girls and in Luhya culture, we see that they were manifestly unsuccessful in controlling the nature of these changes.

The Bambatha Revolt in South Africa is one of the most often cited rebellions against taxation in colonial Africa. Most discussions of the revolt have emphasized its material and political causes: the added costs of the new tax and the difficulty African farmers had in finding the cash to pay it; long-standing grievances between white settlers and Africans over control of the best farm and grazing land in Natal and Zululand; and generalized unrest among the African population caused by colonial policies and by social and economic circumstances. This article underlines that these were all real concerns for Africans and predisposed at least some of the population to act violently when the new poll tax was first collected in 1906. However, material grievances alone do not supply a complete explanation for the revolt, and there were additional causes linked to spiritual beliefs held by many Africans at the time of the rebellion. Africans resisted the poll tax in part because they feared that the state had acquired more potentially destructive power over them via the census that preceded the tax. Based on rumors that reportedly circulated prior to the rebellion, many Africans attributed their misfortune at the hands of the colonial state to their ancestors' having turned their backs on them; and people fully expected a coming thunderstorm to punish them severely for their neglect. One way of placating the ancestors and of undermining the power of the colonial state was through active participation in the rebellion. Moreover, rebels were not merely reacting to state actions; they were acting in accordance with their own belief systems that suggested that the ancestors strongly supported their resistance and would allow them to prevail. Thus, the Bambatha revolt was not, as other historians have suggested, a last-ditch, hopeless attempt to strike a blow against the colonial state and die; rather, it was an armed revolt that was seriously intended to overthrow the colonial state both by force of arms and by the power of supernatural actors.

The scholars of Gabon have explained Bongo's political longevity by his corrupt appropriation of the country's economic resources. They have also attributed Bongo's long political survival to the creation of an impressive military machinery to repress rebellions, intimidate opponents, and discourage opposition to his regime. The objective of this article is to demonstrate that Bongo's political longevity is not due solely to his efficient use of economic and military resources. He was also able to establish domination over the symbolic sphere of Gabonese society. The manipulation of such religious institutions as Christianity, Freemasonry, and traditional secret societies allowed Bongo to gain control over the minds of the Gabonese by convincing die masses that he was die ideal leader for the country. Despite these manipulations, die Gabonese masses were able to use this very same symbolic system to challenge Bongo's regime and threaten the lives of members of his government.

The analysis of popular songs in post-independence Zimbabwe has received little attention. The few analyses that have been attempted remain fragmentary and notoriously insist on a uniform worldview for the singers. This tends to blur ideological differences in the sensibilities of the singer's response to the realities of independence. Moreover, an overemphasis on a homogenous perspective on independence by the singers also tends to underestimate the contradictory response in the songs of an individual singer. This article analyzes popular songs of Zimbabwe in the Shona, Ndebele, and English languages. It argues that although the popular songs occur within the context of celebrating independence, the state sought to control the extent to which singers could define the meaning of independence. But the plurality of the singers' responses, their refusal to conform to a single definition of the idea of independence, indicates what is distinctively “popular” in the songs.

Mission-African relations in Gbebe and Lokoja between 1858 and 1880 were different from what obtains in the literature for other precolonial Nigeria mission towns. Missionary practice was as intransigent, culturally imposing, and conflictual in these communities as in other mission towns, but local opposition and aversion to the missionaries and converts were not the defining character of their relationship. This difference is due both to certain peculiarities in the corporate character of Gbebe and Lokoja CMS missions and die particular sociopolitical and cultural milieu in the host communities. These factors attenuated die force of missionary ideological and religious assault and demoted religious conflicts between them to a secondary position. Thus, other critical nonconflictual contexts of mission-African relations assumed predominance in these communities. The character of the missions beclouded much of their patently adversarial aspects in the sight of their hosts. It also compelled the missionaries to engage in close secular interactions with the people. Moreover, exigent conditions of internal sociopolitical instability and external dangers of wars forced on the two sides faith-blind informal encounters. Furthermore, a heritage of integrative management of diverse immigrant founding groups in the young communities equipped them to be accommodative of the latterly arrived missionaries.