Showing papers in "International Journal of African Historical Studies in 2015"

The Quest for Socialist Utopia: The Ethiopian Student Movement, C. 1960-1974

Abstract: The Quest for Socialist Utopia: The Ethiopian Student Movement, c. 19601974. By Bahru Zewde. Rochester, NY: James Currey, 2014. Pp. xvi, 299; glossary, bibliography, index. $90.00.The present work is a major contribution to the modern intellectual and political history of Ethiopia. Using an impressive range of sources and engaging a broad scholarly literature related to student radicalism, on the one hand, and the Ethiopian student movement and 1974 revolution, on the other, Bahru Zewde has produced a masterful and nuanced account of the origins, personalities, organizations, internecine debates, and tragic fates of the young intellectuals and activists who organized and led student opposition to the imperial regime. It is in some respects a sequel to the author's earlier Pioneers of Change, which examined the flourishing intellectual scene of the early twentieth century.1The introduction offers a systematic survey of the existing literature on student protest, Ethiopian and otherwise, with a focused critical response to Messay Kebede's recent Radicalism and Cultural Dislocation in Ethiopia, which treats that country's student movement from a different disciplinary perspective.2 Bahru contends that Messay is insufficiently attentive to the underlying structural or material causes of student discontent, overly invested in the Christian-centric Greater Ethiopia paradigm, and exceptionalist and presentist in his treatment of Ethiopian Marxism (pp. 7-9). These points are developed to varying degrees throughout the work. The introduction is followed by seven chapters and a summative conclusion. The first two chapters map the historical context. Chapter 1 offers a wide-ranging comparative survey of twentieth-century student movements and their politics, with a particular emphasis on 1968, which the author argues is of special import for understanding the Ethiopian variant of a global phenomenon. Chapter 2 introduces the general political, institutional, and intellectual setting of post-1941 Ethiopia, with an eye to understanding the genesis and antecedents of student dissent. The next three chapters present a narrative account of the development of student government, unions, and radical organizations through 1969/1970. In some respects the heart of the book, these chapters are rich in detail and adept in their navigation of the continuously developing complexities of student politics. Chapter 3 treats the early days of student unions in the 1950s and early 1960s, which were a fascinating moderate prelude to later developments. Chapter 4 takes up the leftward drift of student politics in the 1960s and the internal and external causes thereof. Chapter 5 treats the dramatic events of 1969, which the author terms "Ethiopia's 1968" (p. 153), focusing on the mass student protests at home and abroad, the hijacking of a domestic Ethiopian Airlines flight, and the murder of student union president Tilahun Gizaw and its bloody aftermath. Chapter 6 shifts the focus from the course of events to the elucidation of two key problematics addressed by student activists: the so-called nationalities question, which sought to define the ideal political relationship between Ethiopia's various ethnic groups, and the patriarchy question, which appears to have been rather less considered. Chapter 7 explores the relationships between the student organizations of the 1960s, their progeny Maison and the EPRP, and the Eritrean, Tigrayan, and Oromo liberation movements. …

Government of Development: Peasants and Politicians in Postcolonial Tanzania

Abstract: Government of Development: Peasants and Politicians in Postcolonial Tanzania. By Leander Schneider. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Pp. viii, 234; illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography. $75.00 cloth, $28.00 paper.As Government of Development was published in 2014, media and political life in Tanzania were consumed by allegations that very highly placed government officials looted vast sums from an escrow account established by government. Convincing Tanzanians these days that their government is good at anything other than facilitating theft by a political elite is tough sledding. Nevertheless, at this inauspicious moment Leander Schneider has made a persuasive case against the view that government serves the narrow material interests of particular elites. He makes his case by examining the government of Julius Nyerere during the 1960s and 1970s. One comes away from this book wondering whether the Tanzanian state has changed fundamentally since the 1970s, or whether the view that the state functions primarily in the service of a political elite is as illusory now as it was, according to Schneider, in the 1970s.Government of Development focuses on the campaign to resettle Tanzania's rural population in ujamaa villages. It is not a social history of ujamaa, but rather a tightly conceived study of the policies and actions of government. Like all studies of postcolonial Tanzania, it is affected by the limitations of the available documentary record, and in particular by the lack of availability of the papers of President Nyerere and most records of the ruling party. Nevertheless, the author uses an impressive range of sources to argue that the officials who implemented government policy shared a desire to defend their special status as experts in "development"; that in other respects, however, their interests, perceptions, and purposes were diverse; and that this diversity of commitments constituted a "historically specific assemblage of discourses and practices" that could be harnessed fully neither by any individual-even one as willful and intimidating as President Nyerere-nor by any social class or elite.The study begins with two chapters on the Ruvuma Development Association, an episode in rural resettlement whose origins predate ujamaa. Schneider argues that because RDA villages were settled by volunteers, they provided Nyerere with a model of how agrarian society could be reorganized inexpensively by "governing through freedom." Although the RDA inspired Nyerere, argues Schneider, it was closed down by government and party officials who were offended by the lack of deference shown them by RDA leaders. …

Introduction: Exploring Post-Slavery in Contemporary Africa

Abstract: IntroductionThis special issue examines the impacts and legacies of the slave trade, domestic slavery, and slave emancipation on social, political, and culturally constructed inequalities in Africa from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. Post-slavery usually refers to studies of the Americas and the Caribbean where slavery continued to have a deep impact on a variety of societies long after its legal abolition. Could this term be relevant to discuss the legacies of slavery on the African continent? American and African forms of slavery were certainly different and the translation of "post-slavery" from the American into the African context cannot be done uncritically. We address both the relevance of the notion of post-slavery as well as its limitations in African contexts through a number of empirically grounded contributions based on recent research.1The terms post-slavery, post-abolition, and post-emancipation share the hyphen in common. The hyphen in this context connects the past to the present, the work of the historian to the work of the anthropologist, the slave to the master. But the hyphen also indicates a temporal disruption or discontinuity. We must bridge the historical and the contemporary in order to understand the dynamics of emancipation in the past and the present. It is therefore fitting that this issue brings together historians applying anthropological fieldwork, as well as anthropologists applying historical archive research in a variety of cases from both West and East Africa. By presenting case studies with a broad geographical coverage, we address the question of why the legacies of slavery remain important in some societies but are on the wane in others.What is African Post-slavery?The term post-slavery was first used in the context of the American and Caribbean histories of slavery, but there too it is a recent term, first used in the last decade by literary studies scholars influenced by post-colonial studies. Prior to the introduction of post-slavery the terms emancipation and abolition were most used, often indistinctively and referring to the legal abolition of slavery, in the U.S. context.2 Emancipation in the U.S. context of nineteenth-century abolition debates is something "given by divine grace, " and thus not self-emancipation. The term still has these connotations, which explains why U.S. historians working on slavery use the term as synonymous with abolition. Our use of the term emancipation in this issue is derived from a more twentieth-century perspective of social action and process, while we will reserve abolition to refer to the legal dimension of the freeing of slaves only.For the purpose of our arguments below, we define slavery as a system of economic, social, cultural, and political inequalities among socially constructed categories of people within a society, created through sanctioned forms of legal or non-legal commoditization of human physical and mental capacities, leading to the loss of autonomy and self-ownership of those being commoditized. This definition distinguishes slavery from other systems of human exploitation. Slavery systems deprive the enslaved of certain rights (including potentially rights over their labor, lives, and bodies) while simultaneously and ipso facto generating rights-in-people for owners. These systems are legitimized by a variety of social norms and often legitimized by laws (including positive law, customary, and religious legal frameworks). Slavery systems are grounded in ideologies and enforced through techniques of physical and psychological abuse and violent coercion. They are sustained over time and generations through further commoditization and through biological and sociocultural reproduction. Although this description includes labor, we do not focus on the labor and economic production side of slavery.3 To us, slavery is not simply a lack of individual freedom to negotiate one's labor. …

The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia

Abstract: The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia. By Dane Kennedy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. ix, 353; illustrations, maps, comparative time line of African and Australian expeditions, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 cloth.More than half a century ago I had the pleasure to review Alan Moorehead's The White Nile, a book about the combative and exhilarating, though ultimately not completely successful, search for the origins of the White Nile. Since then, many books have appeared about these explorations, mainly biographies of the "great" men who carried out the expeditions. Dane Kennedy has put an entirely new spin on this substantial corpus of literature, eschewing the great man approach and instead organizing his study topically around issues that confronted all of the expeditions. To be sure, his book contains much detail on the explorers themselves, the David Livingstones, the Mungo Parks, and the Henry Stanleys, but here the narrative is about the nature of their expeditions, the problems they encountered, and what distinguished good exploring from bad work. To be specific, Kennedy focuses on the scientific work that was a crucial ingredient in exploring, the intermediaries that played such a vital role in success or failure, the gateways into the interior of Africa and Australia, and the professional evaluations in Britain that often frustrated the explorers and provided the basis at the time for accepting or rejecting the results of expeditions.The author's work deals entirely with British explorers and has a welcome and unusual comparative framework. It compares the work of explorers in Africa and Australia in the nineteenth century. Of course, as Kennedy concedes, the geographical contexts were markedly different. Explorations in Australia had as their purpose laying out the geographical and other dimensions for a colony that was open to British settlers. Africa, on the other hand, had yet to be partitioned though all of the explorers were well aware that the continent was likely to be parceled out among Europe's powerful nations.Inevitably, some of the findings are hardly novel. British expeditions relied heavily on African and Aboriginal intermediaries even though the British explorers were full of racist views of the African populations with whom they came in contact and even their own vital intermediaries. Still, we get the names of the most useful intermediaries, a welcome addition to the literature on explorers and expeditions. As the European partition became more imminent, the British expeditions took on a more militant quality. Henry Morton Stanley left a bloody trail as he shot his way through central Africa after he had made his reputation by finding David Livingstone. …

Yoruba Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo and Corporate Agency

Abstract: Yoruba Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo and Corporate Agency. By Wale Adebanwi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xvii, 295; illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography. $95.00.If Wale Adebanwi's Yoruba Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria were another biography of Obafemi Awolowo, one would be right to regard the exercise with a sense of being introduced to what is already familiar-especially since the late politician and nationalist left us rich, fairly definitive autobiographical documentations of his influential life. Fortunately for scholars of Nigerian and African politics, the book is much more than a biography of the late icon of Yoruba and Nigerian politics.In this well written monograph, Adebanwi accomplishes what few scholars dare to attempt: explore the long duree political evolution of a group through the instrumental agency of the group's most recognizable political player and symbol. When a similar individuated frame of analysis has been adopted in other contexts, the result has been that either the individual's symbolic and practical centrality to the group's political identity was subsumed by structural dynamics or the individual's political biography and agency were portrayed as transcending and determining the institutional and cultural universe of his/her group.Adebanwi's analysis avoids these errors. Instead, he shows that Yoruba ethnic and political consciousness informed and was in turn informed by the stature, ideas, and political symbolism of Obafemi Awolowo. The book also demonstrates that this mutual seepage between personal agency and group values has shaped the political strategies of those who have sought, since Awolowo's death in 1987, to reclaim and operationalize his legacy in order to advance the latter's famed egalitarian political prescriptions for Yorubaland and Nigeria.The evolution of ethnic political consciousness among the Yoruba, Adebanwi contends, mirrors the trajectory in other contexts-it was an elite project. There is, however, a major divergence, which is also one of the enduring insights of this work. The author persuasively argues that, in the Yoruba "lifeworld," elite politics should not be confused with elitism, as there is no contradiction between elite political interests and the aspirations of the Yoruba masses.Adebanwi states that, among the Yoruba, there is an expectational cultural universe requiring elite agents who invoke the Yoruba's collective identity as a source of legitimacy to become, like Awolowo, corporate agents-to use power and the institutions of governance "for the collective good" and in a way that "provides the tools (such as education, health services, etc.) for many other people to become members of the elite" (p. 13). Given that this is a variant of the much-analyzed ethos of responsible, paternal, and populist African big manhood, which is hardly unique to the Yoruba, Adebanwi's compelling argument would have been further strengthened by analytically inserting it into a wider continental discursive context. …

African Post-Slavery: A History of the Future *

Abstract: IntroductionThe term post-slavery refers to historical and social circumstances identifiable in contexts where slavery was a fundamental social institution and its legal abolition was followed by resilient legacies of past hierarchy and abuse. It is commonly used as an adjective, as in the expressions "post-slavery subjects," "post-slavery population," "post-slavery society," "post-slavery plantation," or "post-slavery literature."1 Although commonplace in studies of the Americas, it is less so-at least until recently-in Africanist research.Frederick Cooper, Thomas Holt, and Rebecca Scott distinguish between a "chronological" focus on the period that followed legal status abolition, and a focus on "the history of the category [slavery] itself" in their comparative volume on postemancipation societies. 2 They show that outlawing enslavement and the slave trade did not immediately bring about the emancipation of ex-slaves and their descendants. In a chronological sense post-slavery is a process that follows legal abolition and can be periodized according to various criteria, such as the gradual accession of ex-slaves to property rights or full citizenship. Post-slavery also refers to discursive changes in how slavery and freedom are conceptualized and represented. Baz Lecocq, in this issue, emphasizes the discursive nature of post-slavery. He defines post-slavery as "the creation of a present in reference to an active past which, by creating a particular discursive and narrative memory of that past, influences the present." The notion of "post-slavery," he adds, indicates that emancipation "ought to have happened," but has not.The modal verb "ought to" does not denote a merely temporal reference. Like postcolonial studies, post-slavery studies have a critical purpose: to expose the continuing legacies of a state of affairs that should have ended. They denounce the continuing legacies of slavery and are neo-abolitionist in intent.3 The abolitionist bias of most contemporary research in this field risks building a teleological argument that sees post-slavery as a stage that follows legal status abolition and leads to the inevitable, if sometimes slow, death of slavery. But framing our analysis in these terms may hinder our understanding of societies in which legal pluralism makes possible the simultaneous and tense coexistence of abolitionist ideologies, on the one hand, and worldviews in which slavery is seen as integral to the constitution of society, on the other. In such contexts we should try to explain the co-presence of slavery and post-slavery, and not the transition from the former to the latter.Discursive regimes about slavery in Africa are not unified. A post-slavery perspective is relevant to discursive fields in which slavery is thought of as an institution that should have ended following its abolition in colonial, national, and international law. Such contexts include the official discourse of the state, and the discourses of individuals and groups who have internalized an abolitionist ethos and agenda. They are less applicable in contexts where colonial abolition and international anti-slavery are regarded suspiciously as unwelcome interventionism in African affairs, or contexts where the echoes of these discourses are so faint that they hardly matter at all to people's everyday life. How can we make sense of the discourses of slavery that pervade these other contexts?The past has been experienced differently by different African social groups, and so too the present. Interpretations of the past are particularly contested in relation to ideas and institutions that were originally introduced under colonial regimes. Some African groups and individuals enrolled in colonial projects; others surreptitiously tried to turn them to their own ends. In most regions there was upfront resistance to the central tenets of colonial governance, including abolitionism.4 Some remote regions eluded the control of an understaffed and underfinanced colonial administration and existed as semi-autonomous social fields where precolonial hierarchies continued to operate. …

“Let the Red Terror intensify” : political violence, governance and society in urban Ethiopia, 1976–78.

Abstract: (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)The overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 left Ethiopia with a power vacuum to be filled and a revolution to be defined. When a council of low-ranking military officers, known as the Derg, took charge of the revolutionary process, its legitimacy was vehemently disputed by leftist civilian organizations, which drew their strength and political perspectives from the formidable Ethiopian student movement. By late 1976, a double helix of conflicts was rapidly engulfing urban Ethiopia-one strand was the confrontation between the military regime and its civilian opponents, the other the contest among the civilian left itself. In the following two years, thousands of Ethiopians, most of them young and many of them educated, lost their lives to competing campaigns of revolutionary terror. This violence was carried out in the name of the opposition Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP), or more commonly, of the military regime and those political organizations, led by the All Ethiopia Socialist Movement (Meison), that had allied themselves with the government. The Terror transformed not only the political but also the social and cultural landscapes of Ethiopia. No realm of urban life remained untouched by the period's violence.The Ethiopian Terror years have been written about and memorialized as a period of sustained state terror.1 The EPRDF's "Red Terror trials," which ran for the better part of two decades following the overthrow of the Derg 2 limited themselves to the prosecution of violence carried out in the name of the state and assumed considerable centralized control in their verdicts on senior government figures.3 Similarly, the "Ethiopian Red Terror Martyrs' Memorial Museum," which opened in Addis Ababa's Meskel Square in 2010, conveys a simple narrative of state perpetrators and civilian victims, with no regard to shifts in agency and mode of violence. Such conceptualizations are problematic, obscuring as much as they reveal. For not only do they marginalize or disregard the competing campaigns of revolutionary violence that defined the Terror, most notably the EPRP's sustained assassination campaign4; they also ignore the complex nature of the state's own violence, which underwent consequential changes as the agency of local actors and the control of the military regime shifted over time. State terror in revolutionary Ethiopia was the outcome of a process, not a constant state of affairs, and it showed itself in varying guises. The dynamics of violence that defined this process and the legacies that it bequeathed to state-society relations in Ethiopia for subsequent decades are the subject of this article.Following an initial phase dominated by paralyzing power struggles within the Derg, the development of revolutionary state terror in Ethiopia went through two interrelated but distinct stages. The first, beginning in February 1977, was a period of decentralization, in which the regime's adoption of new strategies of revolutionary violence-the arming of citizens, the institution of comprehensive search campaigns, and the convocation of so-called "mass-confession sessions"-decentralized the state's means of violence. This led to a plethora of localized reigns of terror. As a result of this process, the Ethiopian Terror was never merely a conflict between competing political groups. Its violence was as much bottom-up as it was top-down, produced by supra-local and local actors in synergistic but often distinguishable ways. It was reflective of local agendas as well as of the Terror's political master cleavage. The second stage, which began to emerge in July 1977, witnessed a re-assertion of the military regime's claims on the exercise of revolutionary violence, leading to an institutionalization and bureaucratization of violent practices that would define and indeed outlast the Derg's rule. This process of bureaucratization, whereby collective violence was normalized and brought under state control, has scarcely received any attention in the historiography of the Ethiopian revolution. …

Stereotypes of Past-Slavery and "Stereo-Styles" in Post-Slavery: A Multidimensional, Interactionist Perspective on Contemporary Hierarchies

Abstract: Several post-slavery societies in francophone West Africa may not quite be as "post" as the term suggests. Does the "post" refer to the two key moments of 1) legal abolition in 1898 (abolition of the economic institution of slave trade and markets), and 2) the 1905 French colonial abolition of domestic slavery as a societal system of organization? If it does, then what of the argument made by some scholars that the 1905 abolition hardly impacted existing social norms1 and that domestic slavery continued well into the twentyfirst century2 in certain areas and often among nomadic groups? The majority of scholars working on nomadic groups in different parts of francophone Sahel areas confirm this. My first argument then is that the term post-slavery reduces the possibility of including continuities, complexity, and diversity of past-slavery forms in present African contexts. It obfuscates even further, for example, the already existing amalgamation of an extreme variety of institutions of inequality (human trafficking, prostitution, human bondage, forced labor)-discursively referred to as "modern slavery"-and the persistence in some areas of historical forms of slavery.Rossi has proposed the following classification: continued forms of past-slavery (historical slavery); metaphorical uses of the strong language of slavery (metaphorical slavery); classification of people according to their place in a society that is impregnated with social practices and discourses recalling past-slavery (classificatory slavery); and relations whereby new forms of exploitation are interpreted as modern variations of slavery (modern slavery).3 This is a valuable analytical model to distinguish different legacies and discursive uses of the word "slavery" in post-slavery societies. However, this model helps us to deal only with discursive references to slavery in Africa. New analytical approaches are needed to examine the polymorphism of slavery as an institution in the past and present, and the polysemy of legacies of slavery not only as a discourse, but also as an embodied practice.This article proposes to extend the analytical tools available for grappling with categorical slavery in the Sahel. The notions of fields and stereo-styles central to this article are proposed to overcome and interconnect three hybrid aspects of the complexity encountered in post-slavery societies:1. Discursive anachronistic categories2. Legal and institutional pluralism3. Normative performances based on slavery habitusThe first hybrid aspect is discursive: both scholars and their informants feel that the available words, categories, and status positions often do no justice to performed identities in situated moments in time. The terminology can be either anachronistic or euphemistic and is used in voiced and/or silenced ways.The second aspect is legal and institutional pluralism: there are overlapping legal, political, and normative systems functional in the Sahel (see Eric Komlavi Hahonou and Benedetta Rossi in this volume).4 Legal pluralism is evident in many Sahelian countries, where citizens can chose among international human rights legislation (claiming universal equality for all groups), national courts with laic constitutions (not recognizing differences in social statuses related to the slave past), and local courts with Malikite interpretations of Muslim law (attributing more rights to those with freeborn status than to those with nonfreeborn status).5 To date, the interpretations of Maliki strands of Islamic legislation encourage criteria of distinction between classificatory social status groups, based on the slave past.6 This matters to the majority of villagers, who have easy access to an imam who can administer justice but not to international or national constitutional courts, because these are distant and expensive. Moreover, powerful elites may actually use the plurality of legal systems to their benefit and to reinforce their monopolies. …

A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women's Education

Abstract: A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women's Education. By Meghan Healy-Clancy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. Pp. xiv, 312; tables and figures, notes, bibliography, index; $29.50 paper, $29.50 E-book.Many scholars have written about the educated elite in KwaZulu-Natal, but Meghan Healy-Clancy provides us with an important new perspective on women's education through the history of the prominent Inanda Seminary. Drawing the narrative beyond apartheid, she demonstrates how ideologies and practices evolved over time as part of a longer stream of black women's education, social leadership, and gender struggles. She argues that educated women played the role of intermediaries between their families, missionaries, and the state since they were seen as politically safe agents of social reproduction. Of course, the women used this space and their education for their own purposes, and Healy-Clancy argues, Inanda served as a "critical site at which women cultivated these alternative possibilities" even through the apartheid years (p. 4).The book is organized chronologically in five chapters. Throughout the first three chapters, the author tells the story of Inanda as it unfolded in a broader, complex context. Chapter 1 provides the foundation for understanding Inanda's mission. Put succinctly, Healy-Clancy argues that "Inanda's mandate was the creation and perpetuation of exalted Christian domesticity" -in other words, American missionaries targeted female education to pump Christianity into the heart of African families and to create a self-perpetuating evangelical generation (p. 31).Chapter 2 situates the school within the social and political changes of colonial Natal, focusing on the struggle over Inanda students between fathers, Inanda authorities, and the state. Christian and non-Christian Zulu patriarchs faced diminishing political and economic power, and some young girls sought education at Inanda to escape patriarchal control. The colonial state generally upheld patriarchal control in these cases, clashing with Inanda staff. However, Healy-Clancy demonstrates that because the state agreed with the mission that educated girls were important to addressing problems with "traditional" African marriages, it promoted girls' education. Inanda rose to be the top girls' school and channeled graduates into the teaching, nursing, and social work professions. These professions correlated well with ideas about female respectability and nurturing power in South Africa's segregation period. This, the author argues in Chapter 3, allowed women to expand their public social influence, though they were generally restricted from politics. …

Escaping Slavery and Building Diasporic Communities in French Soudan and Senegal, ca. 1880–1940

Abstract: West Africa experienced extensive warfare and enslavement in the second half of the nineteenth century. Populations were scattered along the main slave trade routes in Western Sudan. This article analyzes how formerly enslaved populations used migration and diasporic practices to rebuild autonomous communities and social networks, and to overcome legacies of slavery away from their region of origin. This entailed renegotiations of kinship, marriage and religious practices in the Kayes region (Mali) and the Siin (Senegal) where stigmatization and vulnerability were deeply rooted in the history of slavery.

The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: The Kat River Settlement, 1829-1856

Abstract: The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: The Kat River Settlement, 1829-1856. By Robert Ross. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xvii, 340; illustrations, maps, diagrams, appendices, notes, bibliography. $99.00 cloth.The Borders of Race is the 128th volume in the Cambridge Press's prestigious African Studies Series. It is the third volume in the series by Robert Ross, emeritus professor of African History at Leiden University, after Adam Kok's Griquas (No. 21, 1976), and Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750-1870 (No. 98, 1999). One of the most prolific scholars on South Africa, particularly of the country's history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ross most recently co-edited the two-volume Cambridge History of South Africa (2009, 2011).In this case study, Ross focuses on a few hundred Khoekhoe families who settled in the Upper Kat River Valley, in the Eastern Cape in 1829, with the permission of the commissioner-general of the Eastern Province, Andries Stockenstrom. The Kat River Valley lay in the Ceded Territory between the Fish and Keiskamma Rivers, that is, the borderland between white settlement to the west and the amaXhosa and other black societies to the east. Like all good micro-histories, Ross's work places this small border settlement within a larger context, during a period that was, Ross argues, "both metaphorically and literally at the center of much of what was most significant in the creation of colonial South Africa" (p. 4). Because of the availability of a rare plethora of archival source material on the Kat River settlers, who enjoyed spectacular and nearly unrivalled agricultural success, Ross is able to "investigate the borders between the major socioeconomic and racial blocks, so as to see how the lines of division were created and controlled" (p. 8).In nine astutely detailed chapters Ross recounts the tumultuous history of the Kat River settlement. He begins his study by describing the Kat River Valley-its geography, its inhabitants, and its history as a borderland-in the years prior to the settlement. It is a rich history, beginning with an early San and Khoekhoe presence, followed by the arrival of different amaXhosa branches, some colonial renegades, colonial farmers, and livestock herders who moved in and out of the territory with the seasons, and the arrival of the first European missionaries. Chapter 1 concludes with a discussion of Ordinance 50 (1828), and the seizing of Xhosa land to form a neutral zone between the colony and the Xhosa, which took the name, the Ceded Territory. …

South Africa: Inventing the Nation

Abstract: South Africa: Inventing the Nation. By Alexander Johnston. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Pp. 354; map, notes, bibliography. $29.95 paper.It takes a courageous scholar to accept the assignment to try to understand the complex and unending process of building a South African nation out of the disparate parts of that land and its peoples. During most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries South Africa was governed by regimes that sought to emphasize the differences among its peoples. How can we expect that a mere quarter century of effort, even a harmonized effort, to unify such peoples can overcome the entrenched legacies of division and control? In short, there are more questions than answers about the state of nation-building in South Africa. The ongoing dilemma faced by national leaders is that "South Africa could not become a nation unless it was democratic and it could not democratize unless it was (or at least could pretend to be) a nation" (p. 1).What is more, there is hardly agreement on what sort of nation ought to be built and how best to fuse it together. Three forms of nation vie for attention in the current order: "an Afrikaner nation, which had to die in order that a democratic South African nation could be born; a civic nation, hastily improvised to provide a platform of legitimacy for constitutional democracy during the negotiations which brought apartheid to an end; and an African nation which is glimpsed but not fully articulated in the ideology of African nationalism ..." (p. 3). A running debate centers on grand issues-what does it mean to be African? Who qualifies as South African today? Is it possible to go beyond racial reconciliation and toward social cohesion? The optimism of Mandela's "rainbow nation" has long since passed, but a widely acceptable substitute for that vague design has eluded national leaders.To his credit, Alexander Johnston has plunged into the morass that is South African politics and he has left nothing outside his field of vision. His first part is a thorough examination of the demographic, spatial, socioeconomic, linguistic, and ethnic features that combine to make a profile of South Africa's peoples. During the Constitution drafting stages in the 1990s that diversity was recognized and encouraged. But there is a dark side to this diversity. South Africa must find a way of dealing with vertical (ethnic, religious, racial) divisions as well as horizontal (e.g., economic) ones. So what passes for a South African nation is an improvised one. Practically every issue of public policy poses a stress test for these obvious differences and disparities.Emerging from the crucible of the early 1990s were the making of a finessed constitution and a general agreement on the composition of the new state. In a way it was much like the U.S. Constitution in that there were as many unanswered questions and illdefined compromises as there were settled issues. It became the task of the African National Congress, clearly the most popular political party, to add meat to the bones of the state. …

Hidden in Plain Sight: Haratine in Nouakchott's "Niche-Settlements"

Abstract: IntroductionIs it possible to speak of degrees of invisibility? If so, the haratine of Nouakchott, the sprawling coastal capital of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, certainly count among the most invisible of tens of thousands of poor inhabitants scattered in its multiple shantytowns (kebbes).1 Haratine are mostly former slaves or their descendants; they constitute many of the city's migrants from rural areas as well as a first and second generation born and bred in urbanity. This paper focuses on a subgroup of these haratine-men, women, children who chose to live outside the more conspicuous kebbes and "popular" districts, and take up spaces between villas in prosperous neighborhoods. There is no formal name for these tiny groups, which by nature of their insertion into the fabric of wealthy communities are rendered socially invisible to their bidan ("Moorish") neighbors.2 Here, I refer to them as "niche-settlements"-niches that have become home to the "most invisible of the invisible" of Nouakchott's poor.3This study, although limited in its database, has three important goals.4 First, although the population at the heart of the paper is clearly linked with slavery,5 it is also poor and urban and to a large extent, feminized. I draw on literature beyond that normally associated with "slavery studies"-research directed at informal economies, gendered occupational strategies, and concepts of "vulnerability" for example, to help situate nichesettlements in the context of Nouakchott's urban history and development. I want to understand from haratine themselves how they exploit (or not) "legacies of slavery" to address that poverty, to reduce that vulnerability and simultaneously, to define "postslavery" through their individual lives.Second, this population is indeed "linked with slavery" but that in and of itself tells us little. Haratine living in other urban conditions are also "linked with slavery." Do nichesettlements reflect something particular about how their inhabitants see themselves vis-avis their "slave heritage"? Does the experience of living in these physical spaces, so intimately inserted in the lives of bidan neighbors, influence their sense of "identity" in distinct ways? Or more specifically, does it influence relations with their former masters? And how do the bidan neighbors regard the niche-settlements (as distinct, say, from their views of kebbes)? What is the nature of their interaction with "niche" occupants? Although these questions cannot all be answered with equal assuredness,6 my general argument is that the intimacy of haratine-bidan relations engendered by niche-settlement, as compared to other urban haratine settlement, is critical. And third, life for economically vulnerable haratine 'linked to slavery' is strongly determined by gender. But is it really the case that female haratine (hartaniyya) are best understood in terms of the dual-power structure of patriarchy and slavery, namely the male (re)imposition of traditional exploitative relations once largely rural, now overwhelmingly urban? Although an interpretation attractive to those in slavery studies (and indeed to many international audiences),7 how well does it hold up against life-history experiences of Nouakchott hartaniyya? In the dynamics of these evolving relationships (of race, class, and gender), I believe we can glimpse otherwise largely invisible aspects of Mauritania's "post-slavery society" in the making." Haratine " in History and Saharan SocietyThe haratine we meet here all acknowledge some degree of slave heritage, but their histories are by no means parallel or necessarily comparable.8 Not all haratine share this vision of their past or acknowledge the same degree of hierarchy among haratine from different socioeconomic groups, regions, and tribes.9 Even the term haratine (pl) [hartani (m)/hartaniyya (f)]10 has no agreed upon meaning, though the most recent work on the subject supports an interpretation meaning "mixed" or "non-pure. …

Immigrant Exclusion and Insecurity in Africa: Coethnic Strangers

Abstract: Immigrant Exclusion and Insecurity in Africa: Coethnic Strangers. By Claire Adida. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xv, 175; illustrations, maps, appendices, bibliography. $85.00.Despite their prominence in the popular culture and public memories of countries like Ghana, Nigeria, and Uganda, mass expulsions of immigrants and foreigners in Africa have received relatively little attention from political scientists. As a result, while the literature is full of case study research, there are few works that explore immigrant integration and exclusion in Africa in a broader, global context. Indeed, one of the most important contributions of this new book by Claire Adida is that it reformulates the growth of antiimmigrant sentiment not simply as a "South-to-North" problem manifest in Western Europe and the United States, but as a global issue equally affecting immigrants moving within the Global South. With Immigrant Exclusion and Insecurity in Africa, Adida offers a careful, methodologically robust study of the experiences of immigrant communities and their local receptions in three West African countries, ultimately concluding that much of what seems "common sense" about why some immigrants easily integrate into their local environment while others remain staunchly apart is wrong.The book revolves around a straightforward but effective research design, comparing the experiences of two large, visible immigrant communities with Nigerian origins (Hausa and Yoruba) in three different regional capital cities -Accra, Cotonou, and Niamey. Drawing on a combination of survey and interview data focused not only on immigrants but on members of their local "host" communities as well, Adida discovers a curious fact-immigrant communities with cultures more "similar" to that of their hosts (in terms of religion, particularly) tend to both actually retain stronger ties to their "homeland" and to be regarded as more foreign by their neighbors. Of course, scholars familiar with her individual cases are already well-aware of these specifics, noting that, for example, the ethnic identity "Hausa" in Ghana has long since come to be seen as a religious identity without overt "Nigerian" implications, while Yoruba traders in Ghana often maintain strong economic and cultural ties to their home cities. What sets Adida's work apart, then, is not her ethnography (of which there is relatively little), but rather her explanatory account of these differences buttressed by careful survey work and statistical analysis. Notably, she argues that what drives an immigrant community's experience of inclusion or exclusion (terms that, she acknowledges, are often problematically un-nuanced) are the economic incentives of community leaders, who benefit from controlling access to business opportunities and networks, as well as (in the case of immigrant leaders) protection from police and bureaucratic harassment. …

“Peace and order are in the interests of every citizen” : elections, violence and state legitimacy in Kenya, 1957-74.

Abstract: "I would like to appeal again to all the people of Kenya-of whatever tribe or area-to maintain the peace during the next few days and to ensure that this period passes by without violence or disorder."Sir Eric Griffiths-Jones, Acting Governor of Kenya, May 19631"The Government will not tolerate any form of intimidation, political thuggery or any form of violence against any person or persons during the elections."President Jomo Kenyatta, November 19692"Appealing for peace during next month's parliamentary elections, [President Kenyatta] said that elections were proof to the world that Kenya was an outstanding example of democracy."3The calls for peace, which routinely accompanied elections in late colonial and early independent Kenya, asserted a fundamental contrast: the ballot should be the antithesis of violence. That contrast-between violent disruption and the peaceful order of the election-was echoed in the bouts of self-congratulation following each of the six national (or near-national) elections held in Kenya between 1957 and 1974. A 1974 post-election editorial, phrased with an interesting concern for external opinion, noted approvingly that:The people have decided. And in the process of indicating their decision, the people of Kenya maintained their good image. They voted wisely and calmly, showing remarkable political maturity, respect for the law and for democracy.4Both pre- and post-election comments treated peace and order as synonyms, as well as evidence of electoral success. But neither the contrast between violence and elections, nor the association of peace and order, were entirely straightforward. As this essay will argue, violence was by no means entirely absent from any of these elections, and often appeared in the guise of order. Low-level violence was common, even endemic: the tearing of posters, intimidatory stone throwing or window breaking, shouted threats, the beating of candidates or their agents. And violence featured in a more subtle way, too: in multiple ways, some more striking than others, elections were dramatic performances of discipline and regulation, which constrained some kinds of political choices and political behavior while allowing others. These performances were linked-sometimes very apparently, sometimes in a more subtle way-to notions of legitimate violence."Today, the relationship between the state and violence is an especially intimate one," observed Max Weber, prefacing his argument that the distinguishing feature of "the state" is its "(successful) claim to a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force."5 His words suggest a certain wry weariness suitable to the Europe of 1919, but might also seem apposite for the late-colonial and postcolonial state in Africa. The assertion of a singular regime of violence was, after all, central to the idea of the rule of law that, as Richard Roberts and Kristin Mann have argued, "powerfully legitimized colonial rule" in Africa.6 But as Gregory Mann has shown for French West Africa, the idea of an "empire of law" co-existed uneasily with a "regime of exceptions," in which violence could be commonplace and effectively extra-legal.7 In Kenya, the ideal of a state monopoly of violence regulated by law came up against the extra-legal use of violence (whether by white settlers, chiefs' retainers, or labor recruiters) with uncomfortable frequency. Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale have suggested that officials in Kenya engaged in a lengthy struggle to replace "private oppression with state sanctions," in order to maintain the legitimacy of colonial authority.8 The challenge to colonial power (and to other kinds of power as well) posed by the Mau Mau insurgency of the 1950s tipped the balance in this struggle. The violence of the insurgents led directly to a massive increase in the resourcing of state violence-more police, more soldiers, more hangings, more prisons. And it led also to a particularly bloody period of extra-legal violence. …

The Emerging Middle Class in Africa

Abstract: The Emerging Middle Class in Africa. Edited by Mithuli Ncube and Charles Leyeka Lufumpa. New York: Routledge, 2015. Pp. vii, 215; figures, tables, contributors, acknowledgements. $140.00 cloth, $50.95 paper.Since the turn of the century, Africa has enjoyed impressive levels of economic growth. Increasing numbers of observers have commented that a consequence of this growth has been the emergence of African middle classes. In April 2011, the African Development Bank's chief economist and vice-president Mthuli Ncube, Charles Leyeka Lufumpa, director of the Statistics Department, and Steve Kayizzi-Mugerwa, director of research coauthored "The Middle of the Pyramid: Dynamics of the Middle Class in Africa." This document has served as the foundation for an edited volume, The Emerging Middle Class in Africa (2015). Having assembled an impressive team of international researchers, the book explores the diverse characteristics of Africa's emerging middle class.Mthuli Ncube introduces the edited volume with an operational definition of what constitutes Africa's middle class. Eight thematic chapters and a conclusion follow this introduction. Ncube's introduction lays out the analytic approach that is first presented in the market brief. Like the earlier paper, the book uses an "absolute" definition that includes as members of the middle class those people with per capita daily consumption of $2.00 to $20.00. Ncube then disaggregates the middle classes into first the "floating class" that includes those people who consume between $2.00 and $4.00 a day. Second is the "lower middle class" whose members spend $4.00 to $10.00 a day. Finally, people in the "upper middle class" spend $10.00 to $20.00 a day. Ncube is careful to stress that a "vulnerable" population of 204 million people, or 63 percent of Africa's floating middle class, risk falling back into poverty. Having established the parameters for a definition of what constitutes the middle class, he suggests Africa's middle class reflects "a robust and growing private sector" (p. 3). The book's eight substantive chapters employ the absolute definition to explore how the African middle classes respond to specific issues.In Chapter 1, Charles Leyeka Lufumpa, Maurice Mubila, and Mohamed Safouance Ben Aissa argue that the middle class has enabled African economies to shift away from export-led growth to create dynamic domestic markets. Their essay considers how a large floating middle class is part of changes that might lead to sustainable socioeconomic development. In Chapter 2, Michael Lofchie provides a lengthy analysis of the political economy of Africa's emerging middle class. His essay notes middle class interests in political stability all the while they engage in enterprise development, comply with tax laws, accumulate savings, and make investments in the domestic economy. Lofchie's trenchant analysis describes overarching elements of the middle class and its "hourglass" configuration; how colonial continuities shaped societies, how post-independence economic policies favored failed import-substituting industrialization policies that contributed to chronic political economic weaknesses. …

Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa

Abstract: Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa. By Abena Dove OsseoAsare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. vii, 300; illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography. $35.00/£ 24.50 paper.In this book Abena Dove Osseo-Asare examines how medicinal plants became subjects of pharmaceutical research by looking at the long history of bioprospecting of six different African plants which she terms "bitter roots"-rosy periwinkle, Asiatic pennywort, grains of paradise, Strophanthus, Cryptolepis, and Hoodia. These plants literally taste bitter, but they also reflect a sometimes bitter and contested history. While these herbs have been commercialized globally, proven profitable, and in some cases gained international patents, the originators of such herbal remedies often remained unacknowledged, unknown, and thus uncompensated. Such inequities emerged due to global markets that favored the rich and powerful, and are perpetuated by scientific and legal regimes of the North. Consequently, African communities that seek acknowledgement and benefit sharing for medical knowledge must do so through international laws and patent licensing that require "proof' of their originality. This creates a number of "evidentiary problems," most obviously that much of local African medicinal knowledge has historically been transmitted orally rather than in writing. Yet Osseo-Asare challenges the basic premise that claims to originality should and can be obtained for medicinal plants or that "indigenous" knowledge is in fact local. By rejecting simplistic divisions between indigenous and biomedical knowledge, this work contributes to and complicates the literature on medical pluralism and indigenous knowledge.Osseo-Asare uses careful historical detective work in archives, botanical gardens, museums, African medicinal plant markets, and through oral interviews with healers and scientists, to demonstrate that knowledge and use of these bitter roots occurred in multiple places, in multiple ways and by a mix of people. For instance she shows that periwinkle, a common weed in Madagascar has pan-tropical distribution from Jamaica to the Philippines, while pennywort also from Madagascar, can be found in Ayurvedic medicines. Sometimes these herbal medicines find similar use globally as in the case of periwinkle as a folk remedy for diabetes, or completely differently as with grains of paradise. The latter from West Africa, had an early global distribution, being used as a spice in Europe since medieval times, and yet is used differently in places as close as Ghana and Nigeria and between men and women. Medicinal plants could be the specialized knowledge of healers, the folk medicine of grandmothers, adopted by European settlers, or the subject of laboratory testing by African and northern scientists. …

Power and Its Discontents: Anywaa's Reactions to the Expansion of the Ethiopian State, 1950-1991 *

Abstract: The modern Ethiopian state came into existence in the late nineteenth century after King Menilik of Shewa embarked on the twin tasks of unifying the historic Christian Abyssinian kingdom of the northern highlands, while expanding into the regions to the south, east, and west. Consolidating and governing the resulting empire fell to Menilik's successors, particularly Emperor Haile Selassie, who sought to institute a centralized imperial order from the 1930s until his demise in the 1974 revolution. Imperial rule under Haile Selassie and the contradictions it generated has received considerable scholarly attention, especially regarding the many local forms of protest that emerged against the Ethiopian state project.* 1 The Woyane revolt in the northern province of Tigray in 1943, rebellion in the southeastern province of Bale throughout the 1960s, and the peasant rebellion in the northwestern province of Gojam in 1967, are paradigmatic cases of "power and protest" in imperial Ethiopia. Popularized by the works of Gebru Tareke, these uprisings are typical of inconclusive agrarian revolts with inchoate local peasant consciousness, and in the Bale case, with a cross-border Somali dimension.2This article draws upon previously neglected archival documents, found in the regional headquarters of Gambella,3 to tell of a rather different kind of revolt in which the resilience of local identities has been more important than the notion of incohate "class consciousness" suggested by Gebru. This analysis of Gambella will emphasize the importance of culture in the center-periphery framework that has dominated our understanding of Ethiopian history since the late nineteenth century. As John Markakis notes, "the denigration of social and cultural accomplishments of societies in the periphery, and the expectation in the name of national integration that they should give place to the superior cultural accomplishments of the center," has been a recurrent feature of Ethiopia's center-periphery relations.4 This article reveals a strong cultural dimension to Anywaa resistance in Gambella through both the imperial and socialist periods. As we shall demonstrate, identity, rather than class, drove Anywaa protest against imperial and revolutionary violence in the process of state consolidation at the western margin of the Ethiopian polity.Gambella and Its InhabitantsThe Gambella region is located in western Ethiopia along its long border with South Sudan. It is a hot, lowland region at an altitude of only 500 meters with temperatures averaging 37 degrees Celsius. In 2007, the population of Gambella was 307,000. Five ethnic groups (referred to officially as "national minorities") coexist in Gambella: the Anywaa (21 percent of the population), the Nuer (46 percent), the Majang (4 percent), and the Opo and the Komo (1 percent each). Under imperial Ethiopian rule, and especially since the 1960s, migrants from the Ethiopian highlands and refugees from the Sudanese civil wars have also settled in Gambella. These internal migrants (27 percent of the population by 2007) refer to themselves as degegna (highlanders), or more prestigiously as habe sha, culturally identifying with the Ethiopian state and the Orthodox Church. The majority of highlanders came in the mid-1980s as part of the government's policy of resettling famine-affected people. Most are ethnic Amhara, Oromo, or Tigreans, but they also include various ethnic groups from southern Ethiopia. Regional politics has influenced changing identifications and alliances between the national minorities and the highlanders.The peoples of Gambella pursue differing livelihood strategies: the Anywaa are predominantly cultivators; the Nuer agro-pastoralists; and the highlanders are cultivators, but also comprise the majority of urban-dwelling traders and civil servants. Patterns of religious affiliation reinforce social boundaries. Most Highlanders adhere to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, while the Anywaa, Nuer, Majang, Opo, and Komo belong to various Protestant denominations (principally the Presbyterian Church) or local religions. …

Rebel and Rule in Burundi, 1972 *

Abstract: Ten years after independence in 1962, a destructive watershed set the course of Burundi's future. Following a decade of fear, intrigue, and sporadic conflict, the country was stricken by consecutive events of destruction. First a localized, Hutu-supremacist rebellion struck in the south, before the Tutsi-dominated military state exacted extreme violence in response across the nation. The twin atrocities took their place in the chain of violence that bound the Great Lakes region across fifty years, each standing as an image of horror and outrage. The totality of the disaster of 1972 afflicted all within the country, and many throughout the region.There were curious lines of commonality between the violence of rebel and state in 1972, despite their diametrically opposed identities and circumstances. Their mirrored ethnic delineation was one such shared thread, and has been the dominant theme of passionate memory and sparse analysis over the last forty years. The genocidal character or intentions of each actor has been a contentious area of debate, and remains an issue of immense emotional, political, and legal significance.* 1 Yet ethnicity and the definition of genocide do not encompass all that there is to understand in this intricate moment of destruction. The similarities of process, for example, present a startling problem to be considered, as both rebel and state undertook their violence in twin modes, first as an act of wild and somewhat indiscriminate slaughter, and then as controlled, ordered elimination. Second, the methods adopted in the latter phase of violence share remarkable similarities of form, albeit conducted on a far divergent scale, that suggests a single conception of power, authority, and rule at the heart of early postcolonial Burundi. And finally, the representations of each act of violence, the denunciations and interpretations that defined how the behavior of rebel and state would be understood and remembered in various quarters for decades to come, similarly revolve around a shared vocabulary that reveals how violence itself was to be constructed as a social and political transgression within the emerging nation. Between the implicit meanings of acts of violence, expressed by their form and character, and the explicit constructions of political representations, a deeper understanding of the place of violence within the political struggles of postcolonial Burundi may be cautiously identified.In order to explore this tangled web of acts and interpretations, shared across two intertwined yet consecutive periods of violence, the narrative of historical events must be somewhat set aside, the better to see the interrelations and similarities that bound the complex of violence together. Therefore after a brief overview of the disaster, the analysis below adopts something of a ring structure, the literary device of chiasmus.2 We begin with a brief introduction to the representations of rebel violence as constructed by the propaganda of state, which was the frame through which the majority of the population and the world began to learn of the rebel uprising. The analysis then proceeds to contrast these representations with the action of "feral" rebel violence and the strategy behind it, before examining how the controlled violence that followed came to present a particular identity of rule to the population afflicted by it. The second part provides the equivalent discussion for the subsequent state violence, taking the same three approaches in reverse: beginning with the identity of rule represented in selective state practice, passing this through the initial indiscriminate actions taken in violent repression, and ending with a consideration of the representations of state violence that emerged among those that fled or lived under it. It is hoped that this mirrored order of presentation will clearly identify the relative triangulation of the three factors in each case, and also make evident the contrasts and continuities between the violence of rebel and state. …

"Freedom but Nothing Else": The Legacies of Slavery and Abolition in Post-Slavery Sierra Leone, 1928-1956 *

Abstract: In 1955, as the British government began preparations to transfer power to local elites in Sierra Leone, a series of strikes and riots swept across the country, originating in the unionized workforce of Freetown and culminating in mob violence in the southern regions of the Protectorate. Rioters targeted the railway, official colonial residences, and the farms and houses of chiefs and headmen, all symbols of the forced labor demands of the colonial government and rural elites and chiefs. Colonial investigators concluded that the unrest was the direct result of a failure to re-shape economic and social relations after the legal abolition of slavery in 1928. This paper traces two particular resonances of post-slavery history in Sierra Leone, from the abolition of slavery in 1928 to the riots around decolonization in 1955-56. The first was the state-led efforts to engineer a transition to freedom for ex-slaves that would keep them engaged as willing workers. The second was the ways in which Sierra Leonean elites sought to control the labor of the ex-slave classes by relegating them to the position of a marginalized "youth."Long-standing practices of exploitation of the labor of the "youth"-unmarried men, women, and children-as laborers, apprentices, and servants continued despite the legal abolition of so-called "domestic slavery" in 1928. The legislation was couched by a series of caveats allowing the colonial government, in collaboration with a small chiefly elite, to continue to coerce unpaid labor for infrastructure and development projects. The policy of indirect rule also allowed chiefs and other elites considerable latitude to profit from unpaid labor. This "communal labor" came under increasing criticism through the 1930s with a series of strikes and protest movements that challenged both the authority of Sierra Leonean elites to coerce labor as well as the British imperial notion that the African laboring classes needed to be forced to work. In the post-war period, "communal labor" was gradually replaced by "community development," a scheme that also relied on the coercion of labor.In the interaction between the colonial government and Sierra Leonean workers and political activists discourses drawn from the slave trade abolition period were used to press home political agendas and explain social relations in Sierra Leone. The prejudices of Europeans, forged in the pro-slavery rhetoric of the eighteenth century, are evident in colonial racist assumptions and superstitions about the need to force Sierra Leoneans to work. The paternalistic logic of abolition, which held that ex-slave classes were in need of "human development" to become functioning workers, was carried over into these development schemes. In response to these schemes, the ex-slave classes and those who campaigned on their behalf frequently raised the connection between imperial labor policies and indirect rule, and the earlier depredations of slave traders. Resistance to these labor policies was framed as a transnational resistance of Africans and the African Diaspora against exploitation with the links between Africa and her Diasporas reaffirmed through memorialization of the slave trade.The Logic of AbolitionSierra Leone was chosen in 1787 as the location for a radical slave trade abolitionist plan to establish a settlement of free Black colonists in Africa. The colony's backers believed that the colony would demonstrate how the African Diaspora could be re-settled in Africa and effectively transfer ideals of free trade, civilization, and Christianity to indigenous communities. This "Province of Freedom" would serve as an example to the rest of the world of how Africa could be integrated into global trade systems, without recourse to the trade in slaves. Despite its hopeful, almost utopian origins, by the onset of the nineteenth century, the settlement was beset by disease, hunger, and hostility from its neighbors.1 At this point, Zachary Macaulay was appointed Governor and promoted a system of apprenticeship to "civilize" the ex-slaves who formed the majority of the new colonists. …

Slavery, Emancipation, and Memory: Exploratory Notes on Western Ethiopia *

Abstract: IntroductionThe legacy of slavery is a complex web of social relations based on historical dependency, inequality, and transmitted racial stereotypes. As an institution, slavery is undisputed in the history of Ethiopia but is overshadowed by discourses about social stratification and feudalism.1 Slaves are outsiders who are regarded as property within the owner society that sanctions their status by judicial or other means.2 The master theoretically has total control over the slaves, which deprives the slaves of their history and dignity. In this respect it is different from feudal master-serf relations, typical of the gabbar-system,3 a prominent feature of the economic history of Ethiopia. The latter system was itself exploitative, yet it forced the landlord to provide a certain security against slave raiding from outside.4 It also tied the peasant to the land. As the Abyssinian Empire expanded into the southern peripheries, the people of the newly conquered lands were subjected to its feudal order. If the peasants were unable to pay their tribute, sometimes the landlord would also take children in return. 5 Therefore there is a line between feudalism and slavery in the Ethiopian context but to juxtapose "freedom" and "un-freedom" is insufficient to describe the difference between the two.6 As in other African contexts various terms describe the knotty variations of the systems of dominance and subjugation within the slavery complex.7 Especially in Ethiopia, with her historically highly diverse tenure systems, questions of tenure and production have to be analyzed in their local context. Hence modes of production and systems of subjection differ in different areas. While the modes of production of the Ethiopian highlands received much attention, the same topics have received considerably lesser analysis in the southern provinces.The Ethiopian-Sudanese borderlands have been heavily affected by slavery and all groups experienced slavery in one form or another. 8 Understanding the regional complexities of slavery and the trade in slaves will place the present-day intergroup relations in their historical context of power relations.In Ethiopia today, descendants of former slaves have received recognition and visibility in the political framework of "ethnic federalism" and have experienced reconfiguration of their identity.9 It is noteworthy though that it is their "ethnic identity" and not necessarily a slave identity that is being recognized. While slaves are often treated as people without history, in this article I argue that the history of slavery, in part, shapes the regional social memory. Therefore the trajectories of slavery become underlying patterns that frame the interaction of people in the region today.This study focuses on the Mao and Komo, both of whom were strongly affected by slavery. Although the article looks at the memories of the descendants of slaves, it also considers the ruling elites, or the slave-owning communities, all of which do now live together and, in principle, share equal powers and political responsibilities in the modern administrative system. Based on oral data the article provides perspectives on present regional social stratification related to feelings of marginalization, based on past experiences.I will proceed by briefly contextualizing the study of slavery in Ethiopia in general. I will then proceed to provide a background on the groups in focus and forms of regional slavery. Thereafter, the article provides a brief theoretical frame, placing the history of slavery in the context of social memory, and introduces the collected oral data on slavery. In lieu of a conclusion I will finally look at the sociopolitical role of the Mao and Komo in a post-slavery society in relation to the collected memories.Slavery in Ethiopian StudiesDespite the fact that slaves constituted Ethiopia's "most important export item" during nineteenth century, slavery has attracted relatively little study to date. …

Violence and Political Advocacy in the Lost Counties, Western Uganda, 1930-64 *

Abstract: Violence is, among other things, a prompt for discourse. Violent deeds, when enacted in relation to an infrastructure that can interpret and publicize them, are a particularly powerful means of generating conviction and animating political action. By positioning themselves as victims of violence, subject peoples can show otherwise unremarked inequities to be unjust and inhumane. By pursuing latent antagonisms through violent means, activists can make hitherto interwoven human communities appear to be involved in a battle to the death. It is the power of spilt blood to heighten the seriousness of human conflict. Violent deeds can make complicated political problems into morality plays. In this essay I distinguish between two registers of violent behavior: evidentiary violence and classificatory violence. Evidentiary violence is reported, publicized, and discussed. It is fodder for petitions and demands for recompense. Evidentiary violence is the violence of victimhood: when chronicled and dramatized in reports and pleas, it helps cast political authorities as brutes. Its audience is an external organization-the state, the international community, the church, the empire-that can be moved to action to alleviate injustice. Classificatory violence, by contrast, is ordinarily unpublicized and unreported. Its audience is internal: it is the violence by which insiders are sorted from outsiders and natives are distinguished from interlopers. It is the violence by which human communities are stagemanaged and demographic constituencies are established. It is the work by which a people claim a particular tract of territory as their native homeland.This essay chronicles the changing architecture of political advocacy around the "lost counties" dispute in western Uganda. The lost counties were a vast territory that the British had carved out of the conquered kingdom of Bunyoro and handed to the kingdom of Buganda, their premier ally, in the late nineteenth century. British colonial administration was deliberately ignorant of the multi-linguistic diversity of Uganda's people. Guided by the philosophy of indirect rule, officials reinforced the supposedly traditional prerogatives of the kings of Buganda, Bunyoro, Toro, Ankole, and Busoga. Cultural minorities experienced this form of government as totalitarianism. In the lost counties and elsewhere in colonial Uganda, they got leverage over the architects of neotraditionalism by speaking in the historical idiom of abolitionism. They configured their language, their cultural life, and their history so to differentiate themselves from their African overlords, and with the evidence of their distinctiveness in view, they framed the homogenizing tactics of indirect rule as tyranny, a form of cultural and political violence. Abolitionism was for minority groups a powerful strategy of advocacy, for British officials were obliged to act to suppress slavery. Their rationale for imperial government, structured by late eighteenth and early nineteenth century debates over slave emancipation, burdened British officials to act as agents of abolition. In the hands of subject peoples in Uganda, abolitionist discourse attenuated the political and geographic distance between colony and metropole. It brought historic British ideals to bear in measuring the inequities of local colonial administration. It made the bargains that British officials had struck with African kings appear to be illicit, corrupt, and iniquitous.The logic of subaltern advocacy underwent a dramatic shift with Uganda's independence in 1962. Where in colonial Uganda subaltern petitioners could move British officials by the evidence of their oppression, after Uganda's independence they needed to take matters into their own hands. Uganda's new leaders were not obliged to uphold the civilizing promises of the British empire. There was no heroic history to appeal to, no humanitarian legacy to uphold. It was the narrowing of the space for political advocacy that gave rise to the violence that gripped the lost counties in the early 1960s. …

The Quest for Honor and Citizenship in Post-Slavery Borgu (Benin)

Abstract: IntroductionAre Persons Property? ask Margaret Davies and Ngaire Naffine in a legal debate about the fabrication of persons and things.1 This question is not only important in relation to child fosterage and adoption, human trafficking, forced prostitution, or other contemporary similar issues. It is a central question to the understanding of the ideology that justifies slavery and its legacies in post-slavery Africa. Indeed the abolition of African slavery by French and British colonial powers more than a century ago did not close the debate once and for all. One reason for that is the co-existence of competing legal norms. Some of this legal framework tolerates, encourages, legitimizes, or regulates slavery.2 The other reason is that the fabrication of persons and things is not only a matter of laws, but also of social norms.Neither slavery nor the discourses that legitimize it have been eliminated by legal means. In many contemporary African post-abolition societies, slaves' descendants are still considered as property. These moral considerations justify a series of discriminations against people of slave descent and impede their access to a variety of rights (e.g., access to land, marriage outside the group, access to religious and political office). In reaction to this situation, a number of anti-slavery social movements, NGOs, and associations of people of slave descent emerged recently and simultaneously in the Sahel and beyond, while the number of conflicts that oppose groups of slave descent to groups of noble or free descent is rising in a variety of contexts.3 These groups mobilize different strategies and tactics to challenge slavery and its legacies and to gain effective rights and access to resources.In contrast to most of the literature on African slavery and emancipation, this article brings current emancipatory struggles under the lens of citizenship.4 By citizenship, I mean a set of rights, privileges, obligations, and interdictions of people belonging in a political community (a religious group, an ethnic group, a nation-state, a municipality ...). I wish to expand the understanding of citizenship beyond its typical formal meaning as "national citizenship" in order to explore the rights and duties that slaves possessed or acquired in African slavery societies.5 Whereas "belonging in" refers to the position of the slave as a member of a group, "belonging to" alludes to the notions of ownership and property. I will therefore adopt hereafter a perspective that articulates citizenship with property.6Current debates about slavery in Northern Benin are closely related to the concept of property. In the Borgu region, Gando people-who are generally considered as slaves' descendants-have long been categorized as property. As a Fulani herder simply puts it:The Pullo [i.e., a Fulani herder] and the Gannunkeejo [i.e., Gando] are the same but the Pullo owns the Gannunkeejo.7The author of this claim of ownership is the son of a former Fulani slave holder. Although the slave of his father was freed about forty years ago, he claims that a Gando is defined as the property of a Fulani. How shall we understand such a claim to a man as property, in a post-slavery context?Gando people are no longer the dependants of any master in contemporary Borgu; they are free (with very few exceptions), they can dispose of themselves and have families, they have the full right to the fruits of their labor, they can possess things and are often wealthy (eventually richer than their former masters), they vote and even become political figures.8 How then can one speak of slavery in terms of property? This is certainly no longer "slavery." Yet, this view is not anachronistic or nostalgic. It not only reflects current understandings of reconfigured slave-master relations in contemporary Borgu, but also sheds light on continuities and ruptures in the meaning of the concept of property and the concept of slavery itself over time in West African post-slavery societies. …

The Second British Empire in the Crucible of the Twentieth Century

Abstract: The Second British Empire in the Crucible of the Twentieth Century. By Timothy H. Parsons. Critical Issues in World and International History. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Press, 2014. Pp. xii, 240, timeline, notes, bibliography, index. $38.00 cloth.Timothy Parsons has written a wide-ranging survey of the British Empire in the twentieth century rich in detail, and with one regional exception, in its comparative analysis of the impact of British rule on its foreign subjects. After an overview of the empire through World War I, the book is divided into chapters on the interwar period, the 1940s, "The Final Retreat from Empire, 1950-1970," and then "The Global Legacies of the British Empire." The book's scope extends from the West Indies to Malaya with most attention focused on developments in Africa and in India with respect not only to British policies and their justification, but also to local reactions to these policies. Throughout, Parsons is careful to note competing views and factions both within the British governments of the time and in the various regions of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, as well as when considering developments in Ireland and the West Indies.Several themes reappear. One, stressed at the beginning of the book when discussing the pomp surrounding the 1911 Durbar in India held to celebrate Britain's imperial power, is the inherent fragility of British rule and of imperial holdings generally as considered in hindsight. The intended impression of stability and power masked the underlying reality that the empire had already inspired resistance in many regions, opposition that would only expand as the decades wore on, especially since expected financial rewards from investments were often unmet. For Parsons, the end of empire, symbolized in the handing over of Hong Kong to China in 1997, discussed in his Introduction, has a feeling of inevitability fueled by the transformation of global power sectors and the relative decline of the British economy, especially after World War II.Much of his book thus traces British debates as to how officials should respond to local protests. Parsons discusses at length the Amritsar killings of 1919 and General Dyer's firm belief that force was the only means to impress Indians of British might and command obedience, set against fears that such actions further inflamed the resistance of subject peoples; a balance had to be struck between assertion of authority and encouragement of local cooperation. A strength of the book is Parsons's argument that Ireland's resistance to British rule served as an inspiration to peoples elsewhere with Indian revolutionary groups establishing themselves in the United States in the early twentieth century. Another is Parsons' inclusion of references to the role of women in African economies along with noting that West African farmers were far more efficient in their agricultural productivity than British-inspired schemes, a fact London and its colonial officials were often reluctant to acknowledge.Racial paternalism pervaded imperial administration. And, as Parsons notes at the end of the book, the granting of independence to many colonies, such as Ghana, did not lessen the dependence of such areas on their former rulers because their local economies and bureaucracies had never been developed to a level of self-sufficiency and sustainability, a pattern seen in former French possessions as well. Economic vulnerability, coupled with intensified nationalist feelings, led African rulers and their subjects to turn against the Indian residents who had long dominated local commerce, leading to mass immigration of Indians and Pakistanis to England from Africa and other possessions, along with a major West Indian influx as well that, as Parsons' notes, had a major impact of the British music scene in the 1970s and 1980s. These references to music attest to Parsons's awareness of the complexity of the imperial interactions. …

The Gender Politics of the Namibian Liberation Struggle

Abstract: The Gender Politics of the Namibian Liberation Struggle. By Martha Akawa. Basel, Switzerland: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2014. Pp. xvi. 230; illustrations, maps, appendices, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth.Martha Akawa's exploration of gender in the Namibian Liberation Struggle is a welcome addition to the historiographies of the country and the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles of late Cold War southern Africa. Based on her doctoral thesis, the book examines how Namibian, primarily Owambo, women confronted the double repression of apartheid and traditional patriarchy through their participation in SWAPO's armed struggle. Akawa argues that women sought racial and gender liberation and equality by inhabiting masculinized spaces, positions, and occupations during the Struggle; however, despite SWAPO's egalitarian rhetoric, women have been forced back into traditionally feminine and disempowered roles in independent Namibia. Ultimately, the struggle for national independence subsumed and inhibited women's efforts to liberate themselves from patriarchy. In the country's proverbial and seemingly eternal coda, a luta continua for Namibian women.The Gender Politics of the Namibian Liberation Struggle critically re-thinks the somewhat stale nationalist historiography of Namibia and anti-colonial struggles produced in the early 1990s as well as SWAPO's totalizing Grand Narrative of its Liberation Struggle. Akawa does not shrink from challenging SWAPO's official version of events, which she does by illuminating the party leadership's ambivalent attitudes towards women and disparities between SWAPO's official positions and actions during exile and since independence. The book's six chapters reveal the variety of roles women played in SWAPO's campaign, the challenges they faced, SWAPO's contradictory depictions of women, and the struggles of women in contemporary Namibia. She makes these arguments most convincingly in the three chapters exploring SWAPO's visual representations of women, the sexual politics of life in exile camps, and the gender politics of education in exile. The author's excellent use of oral sources and personal recollections, including her analyses of struggle songs and poems, provide a clear voice for Namibian women in a historically male-dominated story.The book's clear and explicit emphasis on women's roles in the armed struggle injects a new dynamism to a body of scholarship that has been somewhat slow to grow in the last ten to fifteen years. …

Awad El Djouh and the Dynamics of Post-Slavery *

Abstract: IntroductionWhat is post-slavery? Post-slavery can (and usually does) refer to the process of renegotiation of social positions of freedom and constraint in the aftermath of the legal abolition of slavery. This process is, however, generally referred to as emancipation, as explained in the introduction to this special issue. In this article I search for a more nuanced meaning of post-slavery, which I believe is more than a synonym for emancipation.The newly negotiated positions of emancipation are brought about by the social and cultural institutionalization of these positions. In these processes, control over future generations of people of slave descent by future generations of originally free people is brought about through the continued albeit indirect control over labor through control over productive land and social space. Another form of control is the endurance of racial systems of social inclusion and exclusion, typical of most post-slavery societies in the Americas. This, however, does not necessarily hold for other post-slavery societies, especially in Africa, although it is a possible repertoire of power there as well. Another noted form of control, especially in African societies, is the creation and acceptance of slave genealogies and family structures. The latter is an especially revolutionary development, as slaves were not supposed to have either, which at once brings slave descendants into the fold of free society, but paradoxically directly forms an instrument to recognize slave descendants over the generations. These forms of control are essentially forms of control over the memory and history of slavery that are in turn brought about by processes of remembrance and historification, leading to encoded patterns of political, cultural, social, and economic interactions, thoughts, and behaviors. This brings me to the essence of what post-slavery is: historical discourse.What does the "post" in post-slavery mean? "Post" acts as a disruptive temporal marker. It indicates that previously valid meanings and understandings marked by the signifier following "post" cannot be lifted over a marker event. This indicates a definitive change from past to present. But of course it is not as simple as that. While "post" is intended to mark a rupture, it also does the opposite. It also functions as a reminder that what the "post" refers to is in fact not yet over, not yet fully in a closed past. This is because the meanings and understandings (sometimes transformed) of the subject that is taken to now be "post," to be over, remains the point of reference in an implicit appreciation made of these meanings in what is seen as "the present" of that particular subject, embodied in a discursive past. The appreciation of this point of reference is largely created in institutionalized forms of historical discourse. Thus, "post-slavery" is a mode of historicity in the sense Francois Hartog gave that term: the way a society treats its past and acts upon it, and the way it treats and acts upon historical times.1 It is the creation of a present in reference to an active past that, by creating a particular discursive and narrative memory of that past, influences the present. These situations, in which past and present collapse onto each other, or are invoked one in the other, have been described by Saadi Nikro as anachronic tensions, a term I adopt here to describe the discursive workings of the historical regime of postslavery.2Abolition is the temporal marker that divides history into a slavery and postslavery situation. Abolition is used here not as a law adopted in a specific moment, but rather as a moral abolition, an "ought to be abolished." The "post" in post-slavery is a reminder that, despite its legal abolition, the after effects of slavery can still largely determine social, economic, and even political relations within a society. These can thus be studied as social phenomena in the context of a slavery past. …

Special issue: Violence in the contemporary political history of Eastern Africa

Abstract: IntroductionThe articles gathered in this issue of the International Journal of African Historical Studies focus on the role of violence in the consolidation of state power in eastern Africa, from the late 1950s into the early 1980s.1 These were critical years in the modern history of the region, witnessing the transition from colonial rule to the Cold War, a period of decolonization during which the external relations of all countries in eastern Africa underwent dramatic change, and a phase in which new African governments strove to establish their political base, their bureaucratic and executive authority, and their legitimacy. The contributions here highlight and exemplify how collective violence permeated these political developments, in some cases coming to define the character of national or local political authority. The five articles exemplify the diversity of violence in the modern history of four countries-Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Burundi. Political authority, legitimacy, and violent contestation are the three themes that bind these five case studies together.Authority, Legitimacy, and ViolenceHistorians of eastern Africa have long been conscious of the importance of violence in structuring and consolidating the authority of states and other polities in the region, even before the colonial conquests of the late nineteenth century.2 Below the level of the state, the predation of bandits and brigands destabilized political authority through violent tactics that were remarkably consistent across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.3 The establishment and maintenance of colonial government structures from the end of the nineteenth century, coinciding with the militarized expansion of Ethiopia's own imperialism, gave rise to new modes of warfare and introduced new technologies of violence. New rapid-fire ballistic weapons adjusted the symmetry of "traditional" conflict, leading to dramatic and rapid changes in the tactics of warfare, as exemplified in the kingdom of Buganda,* * 4 and vividly demonstrated in British colonial "punitive expeditions" during the period of conquest.5 This was a prelude to adjustments of scale and intensity in the dynamics and logistics of conflict, as seen in the campaigns of the First World War fought in eastern Africa between 1914 and 1918.6African societies adopted, integrated, and adapted these new forms of warfare and new technologies of violence over the twentieth century, sometimes in reaction against colonial oppression and control, sometimes in mimicry of colonial violent authority, and sometimes even as auxiliaries to colonial enterprise, participating as collaborators in and beneficiaries of the violence of colonial rule.7 Over the first half of the twentieth century, the colonial states of eastern Africa shared with the Ethiopian state a desire and intent to monopolize the use of coercive force, making it a determinant of authority, its permissions becoming a symbol of legitimacy. "Truculent" and unruly African peoples on the periphery of the state were "disarmed" by colonial authorities8 or "punished" by their Ethiopia rulers9 in very similar ways, garrisons being set down to "keep the peace" and to control the extent and forms in which non-state actors might deploy violence on their own behalf.10 As late as 1957, colonial authorities were forcibly disarming African communities whose violent behavior was considered a threat to "order."* 11 By the time nationalist protest emerged across the region to challenge the legitimacy of colonial rule, the forces of coercive violence were dominated by the state and could be deployed to contain and disperse protest. This might take relatively passive forms, in the policing of peaceful urban protests for example,12 but at its most aggressive, as in the British counterinsurgency against the Mau Mau uprising, state violence was a brutally powerful and blunt instrument with which to wield authority.If control of violence became functional to state authority by the 1950s, seen in the use of judicial violence (the punishment of prisoners, and, ultimately, the sanction of state executions) and in the deployment of armed police and soldiers to contain dissent,13 its legitimacy came at the same time to be increasingly questioned. …