Showing papers in "The Journal of African History in 2023"

Moving Histories: Bantu Language Expansions, Eclectic Economies, and Mobilities

Abstract: Abstract This essay interprets a classification of Africa's Bantu languages which used statistical tools guided by assumptions about farming and its chronology to analyze fresh vocabulary evidence. It shows a peeling movement from Cameroon's grassfields, into southern Cameroon, then along a savanna corridor through West Central Africa's rainforests, into the Savannahs, then to Southern Africa, the Great Lakes, and Indian Ocean coast. The clear sequence of movement masks methodological and historical factors. Language death, multilingualism, and the limits of vocabulary evidence restrain the classification's authority. ‘Transformations’ from food collecting to food producing or from no metals to full engagement with metals were mutable, unfolded at different speeds, and involved interactions with firstcomers. In Central Africa, Bantu speakers were often the first farmers and metal-users in the region but elsewhere they were commonly neither. Their arrivals did not immediately displace firstcomers. Computational methods can accommodate many of these issues.

New Approaches to the Prison in African History - <i>L'Afrique en prisons: Sociétés, Espaces, Temps</i>. Edited by Frédéric Le Marcis and Marie Morelle. Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2022. Pp. 332. €25.00, hardcover (ISBN: 9791036204975).

Abstract: New Approaches to the Prison in African History - L'Afrique en prisons: Sociétés, Espaces, Temps. Edited by Frédéric Le Marcis and Marie Morelle. Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2022. Pp. 332. €25.00, hardcover (ISBN: 9791036204975).

Urbanism and Identity in East Africa

Abstract: belief meant keeping silent about mass atrocities and going along with ZANU’s line, as British High Commissioner Robin Byatt did, that it was ‘a Biafra-type situation’, which meant an internal, ‘ethnic’ conflict that Britain could not intervene in no matter how bloody (284). It is challenging to capture the sprawling, opaque messiness of Zimbabwe’s liberation war with its vast list of actors and multitude of rumours, and at times the book suffers for it. Unlike other similar works, which are respectively organised around a particular administration’s decisionmaking or the political intrigue of a city like Dar es Salaam, Scarnecchia’s book jumps across a dizzying number of institutions, locations, and personalities. At times it is hard to follow why diplomats and politicians thought in particular ways or made particular decisions. The book’s scope also leads to difficult choices. There were some notable omissions, including Third World diplomacy, particularly during the 1960s; ZAPU’s institutional and military history; and a clearer sense of how the diplomacy related to the war’s military events. Given the book’s source material is largely from US and UK archives, there’s also a limited engagement with frontline state perspectives — particularly Mozambique’s, which played the critical role in Mugabe’s rise to power and in hosting ZANU’s army-in-exile during the most intense period of the war. Ultimately, Race and Diplomacy provides an important contribution to the historiography of Zimbabwe’s liberation war as a history of Anglo-American diplomatic initiatives. In this regard, although the book’s central argument about race is more contingent than is claimed, by writing about race as an ideational construct Scarnecchia points the way to diplomatic historians of the late twentieth century for how histories of international relations during this era can be significantly enriched.

Developing Automobile Culture in Tanzania

Abstract: the ‘tendencies, orientations and virtualities’ involved in the production of urban space. For him, the move toward ‘urban society’ is a postindustrial, universal process of human life becoming more complex with dense ‘interrelated networks’ of relationships wherein the urban space produces a constant tension between homogenizing and differentiating forces. It would take far more space than this book review allows for me to explore, but as I read Making Identity I pondered how Lefebvre’s concept would, or would not, apply to Bagamoyo as it became an urban society, with tensions pulling toward localization and globalization at the same time. Likewise, Doreen Massey’s work on ‘a global sense of place’ would to my mind clearly resonate with Fabian’s analysis of cosmopolitanism and localization in Bagamoyo. Like Fabian, Massey was working to rethink ‘our sense of place’, to see it not simply as a defensive, reactionary attachment but as an ‘outward-looking’ strategy for engaging with the world, as Wabagamoyo often seem to have done over the period of time Fabian examines. But the book is already quite thick with references and empirical detail, so these are perhaps questions for someone else’s book. I have been engaging with the debates in which Fabian engages for 40 years, and yet I still learned much from Making Identity. The breadth, depth, and range of Fabian’s archival work is astounding, including extensive work in the UK, Germany, Tanzania, Zanzibar, and elsewhere, utilizing French, German, Swahili, and English-language documents. Fabian’s careful reading and deployment of archival evidence is masterful, backed by judicious use of oral interviews. It is a valuable contribution to African urban history on several fronts at once.

Medical Legitimacy: Childbirth, Pluralism, and Professionalization in Nigeria's Faith-Based Aladura Birthing Homes

Abstract: Abstract In the wake of the Aladura (prayer people) religious movement of the late 1920s, a site of childbirth that relied primarily on faith healing emerged in Nigeria under the Christ Apostolic Church (CAC). This practice of faith-based delivery remained informal until 1959 when it evolved into a permanent structure with a professional guild of midwives, codified practices, and trained personnel. This article explores the advent of CAC's faith-based maternity practice, notably its faith home midwifery school, and how the faith home transformed its identity from the informal realms of religious healing to a recognized religious entity that offered primary maternity care based on the principles of faith healing. By examining the professionalization of Aladura faith homes, I highlight questions of legitimacy allocation in postcolonial Africa and how CAC navigated this process by courting legitimacy from state-backed institutions and sociocultural frameworks.

Intellectual Legacies, Political Morality, and Disillusionment: Connections Between Two Mozambique Research Institutions, 1976–2017

Abstract: Abstract States and institutions often narrate their histories in one of two ways: underscoring continuity with the past or proclaiming rupture from it. This article studies the case of two research institutions in independent Mozambique to show that the history of rupture that some postsocialist political and academic actors claim has a more complex history. That history is related to other African independence struggles and newly independent states and is also embedded in the shape of postsocialist life. Focused on a brief period in time and on two research institutes, this article sheds light on wider processes in African history related to institution building, postcolonial universities and education, and the networks of the global 1960s, as well as those of socialist states during the Cold War.

Editors’ Introduction

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The Quotidian Politics of a Love Story: Researching, Assembling, and Mobilizing the Lunda Legend in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract: Abstract The love story between Chibinda Ilunga and Lueji, one of the best-known legends of Central African history, recounts the genesis of the Mwant Yav dynasty of the Lunda polity. Previous discussions of the narrative pitted symbolic interpretations against historical findings. This article asks why the Lunda love story became so influential from the middle of the nineteenth century. Instead of being an exclusively Lunda genesis narrative, the love story represented the interests and narratives of societies brought together by the caravan trade in Kasai and eastern Angola, including Chokwe, Ambakista, Luba, and Imbangala, all of whom added components to the legend compiled by Portuguese explorer and diplomat Henrique Dias de Carvalho. The legend took on importance as diverse factions competed for political titles and trading profits. In the hands of Carvalho and his informants the love story became a tool to construct a Pax Lunda guaranteed by the Portuguese. By demonstrating the quotidian politics of the love story, the article suggests the utility in the historical contextualization of the telling of oral traditions to appreciate their multiple meanings.

The Audience Experience of Colonial Cinema

Abstract: and global oncology. It is instructive for grounding theories of responsive health systems in cancer management. Mika’s plea for the incorporation of East African expertise in the historiography of biomedicine and cancer patient care is necessary and timely. Mika convincingly presents the social aspects of care, which may be a missing link in the pursuit of quality cancer care in East Africa and beyond; citing, for example, the UCI’s relative success in pediatric lymphoma research and care services, even amidst the disruptions of Idi Amin’s regime, due to the remarkable consistency and sustained patient follow-up facilitated by the staff’s cultural expertise. The implications for institutional policy and decisionmaking when it comes to local practices of oncology are self-evident. Similarly, the book effectively illustrates how linkages of local health systems to global (international) systems, through corporate and state actors defines — and limits — health justice. Mika is correct to note how access to expensive state-of-the-art cancer diagnosis and treatment technology and expertise helps to define the unequal global health system. Mika argues that ‘global oncology’must be a humanitarian exercise that mitigates economic injustice and inequalities in prevention, treatment, and palliation of cancers (141). The language and presentation of the book are accessible for diverse audiences interested in medical history, African history, the historiography of biomedicine in Africa, and global health. Mika offers an important contribution to health systems research and the emerging fields of anthropologies of cancer and medical and health humanities, by linking social science research and the history of medicine. Health policy makers, those interested in cancer care in the Global South, and researchers in science technology studies will also find the book informative. It presents the lived experience of suffering due to cancer and coping with the disease with sufficient consideration of cultural norms. It adequately balances ethical neutrality while safeguarding against ethical indifference, and draws on essential clinical knowledge to present a comprehensive description of realities in the emergent cancer epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. The book is a captivating resource for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary researchers and health care providers, and is enlightening reading for anyone interested in the history of medicine and global health justice.

AFH volume 64 issue 1 Cover and Front matter

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Performing the Struggle Against Apartheid

Abstract: Tyler Fleming’s book provides an account of the first production of ‘King Kong’ — a musical theatre production based on the life of the boxer Ezekiel Dlamini — in 1959. This musical rankled the apartheid state partly because it affirmed the aspirations of a Black urban class against an official state narrative which preferred a Black rural population. As a story of Black urban life that crossed over for mainstream white audiences, and became part of the canon and lore of South African theatre and popular music, the play stands as a landmark in South African cultural history. Fleming’s wellresearched study considers the ways in which the multiracial production confronted petty apartheid legislation. The author offers an abundance of empirical detail on the play’s production, its human and sociopolitical context, and furthers our understanding of African participation in cultural trends — in this case, musical theatre — by invoking Paul Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’ to argue for a multiplicity of perspectives on cultural production. Yet Fleming’s narrative exegesis remains firmly within the discipline of social history, at the expense of accounting for broader theoretical implications of the work. Chapter One considers the story of the character whose life is fictionally depicted in the play — the middling South African boxer Ezekiel Dlamini, whose fortunes and mishaps featured in local news and who died tragically by suicide in 1957. Dlamini’s story inspired a group known as the Union of South African Artists, which had been established earlier in the 1950s to support emerging Black creatives and advocate for better working conditions. Chapter Two picks up their story, tracing — from news and other sources — ways in which the leaders and members of the Union of South African Artists developed the play. It also includes fascinating detail about the organization’s work, such as efforts to secure royalties for Solomon Linda’s evergreen tune ‘Mbube’ (1939), popularised by the Weavers as ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ (1951). The union suffered a blow in 1954, when its founder and patron, the British cleric, Father Trevor Huddleston, was recalled to England. Yet Huddleston’s massive popularity in South Africa also ensured that his farewell event raised enough revenues for the union to acquire premises at the famous Dorkay House in downtown Johannesburg. Chapter Three considers King Kong’s popular reception in the media and, in the process, reads the production for the germs of shared nationhood and the potential for multiracialism in South Africa during the first decade of apartheid rule. This is the story that Fleming sketches in broad strokes, intercut with closely observed empirical examples. Ultimately, he argues that King Kong was critical for how it performed the potential for multiracial and more harmonious futures. As other studies have argued, perhaps, Black popular music, theatre, and cinema promised the possibility of a ‘better’ life (in the material sense) in early apartheid South Africa. We might say that King Kong in this sense rode on the cumulative impact of both cinema and jazz, placing the production into a longer genealogy made vivid in the work of scholars of colonial popular culture since Veit Erlman.

AFH volume 64 issue 1 Cover and Back matter

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Caught between the Union Jack and the Nazi Swastika: African Protests over Ambiguous Status under British Imperialism and Potential Transfer to Nazi Colonialism

Abstract: Abstract Resistance to colonial rule is a dominant topic in the historical study of Africa. But resistance to attempted transfer of colonised peoples and territories, to promote peace in Europe, has not gained similar attention in African and colonial historiographies. This article looks at how rumours and reports of Nazi Germany's colonial demands in Africa, and the ambiguous reactions of British officials to them, shaped conversations among colonised peoples about their dignity under British colonialism and in intra-European diplomacy. The article argues that the prospect of Nazi rule and its spectre of slave-labour concentration camps for Africa's Western-educated elites, and other colonial subjects, bound these segments of colonial society closer to British, and French, imperialism than they relished at an uncertain, but critical moment in African and international history. They became the defenders of colonial systems they deplored, and opponents of a ruthless regime they feared.

Neglected Historiography from Africa: The Case for Postindependence Journals

Abstract: In December of 1962, at the First International Congress of Africanists, near the end of his speech outlining the new demands and promises of African history learning, teaching, and research in postindependence Africa, Nigerian historian Kenneth O. Dike, also president of the congress, reminded his audience of yet another crucial task that African scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds needed to pursue with urgency, namely the publishing of journals specializing in history. At the time, Dike had several years’ experience on the editorial board of the Journal of the Nigerian Historical Society. It, along with the Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, were the only journals across West Africa ‘specializing exclusively in African history, and associated with university institutions’. Dike lamented the fact that ‘material on West African history alone was scattered in well over 100 periodical publications issued in many mutually distinct parts of the world in seven or eight different languages’ and that many of these articles had not undergone a thorough peerreview process to filter out ‘defective material’. Who better to lead the academy in this endeavor than scholars from Anglophone and Francophone West Africa themselves, he noted. President Kwame Nkrumah, in one of the opening speeches at the Accra congress, which has been described as an intellectual offshoot of the First All-African Peoples’ Conference, suggested that while ‘Africa has been the question mark of history’, the time had come to rewrite and broadly disseminate

Politics and Music in Colonised South Africa

Abstract: The Spirit of Resistance in Music and Spoken Word of South Africa’s Eastern Cape explores the social history of Black South African musical and oral poetry traditions that emerged in the Eastern Cape in the context of colonisation, missionisation, and urbanisation. Michie historicizes these two auditory and oral forms as they evolved as transcripts of both Black protest and cultural adaptation in the wake of two centuries of dispossessive war and law in South Africa. The book documents the Eastern Cape roots of South Africa’s distinctive liberation and protest arts, as well as the country’s globally recognised harmonics and melodies, which have become standard in the South African singing and creative canons. As with Black American music such as blues and jazz, the Black South African sound owed a good deal to the protracted daily struggles of colonial subjects, who over two centuries, vocalised their laments, celebrations, and protests through song and poetry. Michie focuses on the Eastern Cape’s musical and cultural specificities as they shaped, and were in turn shaped by, the region’s experience of colonisation, and especially Christianisation. The book shows how Eastern Cape indigenous music forms were transformed by the arrival of European Christianity as both a message and cultural genre, which also became in turn a path to economic advancement via the medium of Western education. The Spirit of Resistance provides a comprehensive account of the long journey of African auditory response to the colonial encounter. Michie recounts the familiar story of the Christian impact on African life and the resultant emergence of indigenous African Christianity, and the musical lineages that it would give rise to during the nineteenth century and how these were transformed by the transformations of Black life by urbanisation in the twentieth century. This included the development of hymnal and, later, political ‘standards’, such as ‘Nkosi Sikelela iAfrica’ in the tradition of Christian choral music, and the subsequent emergence of more modern genres such as kwela, South African jazz, mbaqanga, and the militant chants of itoyi-toyi, which were ubiquitous during the struggle against apartheid. Michie’s account is a cast of familiar players, for those who are acquainted with the story of the emergence of the class of African Christian educated elites and their role in the emergence of

Urbanism and Identity in East Africa - Making Identity on the Swahili Coast: Urban Life, Community, and Belonging in Bagamoyo By Steven Fabian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. <i>xxvi</i> + 343. $126.00, hardcover (ISBN: 9781108492041); $32.99, paperback (ISBN: 9781108710046); $32.99, e-book (ISBN: 9781108581929).

Abstract: Urbanism and Identity in East Africa - Making Identity on the Swahili Coast: Urban Life, Community, and Belonging in Bagamoyo By Steven Fabian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xxvi + 343. $32.99, e-book (ISBN: 9781108581929).

Administering the KwaZulu Bantustan

Abstract: this social engineering strategy out: while most did not remember any particular films, they did remember the lessons in agriculture, health practices, and morality. By the 1950s, colonial officials began to take African critiques of colonial films more seriously, giving greater priority to narrative style and aesthetics, and involving more Africans in film production. As Ndanyi argues, ‘by protesting against badly produced instructional films, African audiences inspired a national dialogue about changes in cinema production’ (128). Instructional Cinema offers a glimpse into the making of colonial cinematic cultures; Ndanyi puts colonial Kenya into dialogue with other areas of the continent and deftly weaves examples from Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US into his study. In addition, he highlights underexplored themes in studies of colonial cinema in Africa of labor, masculinity, childhood, and the gendered dynamics of film production and colonial education. Ndanyi’s economical and elegant writing style and excellent use of images make this book a pleasurable read. While provocative and largely convincing, Ndanyi does leave the reader wanting more. While examples are drawn from multiple regions, with greater emphasis on the larger population concentrations in central and western Kenya, the reader is left to wonder: how ‘national’ was the debate about cinematic production? Were there regional variations in the response to instructional films based on diverse religious, linguistic, and cultural audiences? What did vernacular presses say about colonial films? Who was involved in these film productions? Ndanyi is to be credited for his variety of sources; yet engagement with a wider range of oral interviewees, particularly women, as well as closer analysis of the films themselves and integration of vernacular sources would have enriched an already fascinating study. For undergraduates, this book offers an accessible and enjoyable introduction to the world of cinema in colonial Kenya. For scholars of African history and colonial film history, this book demonstrates the ‘bidirectional’ nature of instructional films in ‘educating’ colonial subjects and the value of studying the active role of Africans in the translation, appropriation, and production of colonial cinematic cultures.

New Approaches to the Prison in African History

Abstract: Reid — Stapleton ’ s British West African Soldiers contributes substantially to how we understand, reconceptualize, theorize, recast, and reinterpret the centrality of the African colonial soldier in the European imperial project. Non-specialist readers in military history will benefit from, among others, Stapleton ’ s insights on colonial racism and ethnocentrism in Africa, religion and the imperial project

Moving Histories: Bantu Language Expansions, Eclectic Economies, and Mobilities

Abstract: Abstract This essay interprets a classification of Africa's Bantu languages which used statistical tools guided by assumptions about farming and its chronology to analyze fresh vocabulary evidence. It shows a peeling movement from Cameroon's grassfields, into southern Cameroon, then along a savanna corridor through West Central Africa's rainforests, into the Savannahs, then to Southern Africa, the Great Lakes, and Indian Ocean coast. The clear sequence of movement masks methodological and historical factors. Language death, multilingualism, and the limits of vocabulary evidence restrain the classification's authority. ‘Transformations’ from food collecting to food producing or from no metals to full engagement with metals were mutable, unfolded at different speeds, and involved interactions with firstcomers. In Central Africa, Bantu speakers were often the first farmers and metal-users in the region but elsewhere they were commonly neither. Their arrivals did not immediately displace firstcomers. Computational methods can accommodate many of these issues.

Humanitarianism in a Cold War Hot Spot

Abstract: In recent decades, historians, political scientists, and development experts have demonstrated how humanitarian intervention has eroded state sovereignty and even basic governmental rationality in a variety of countries in the Global South. Jeremy Rich’s book builds off of this literature to examine a nation-state that is arguably more of a ‘political assemblage’ than a cohesively bound, fully sovereign country: the Republic of Congo, renamed ‘Zaire’ in 1971, and currently referred to as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). However, Rich’s Protestant Missionaries and Humanitarianism in the DRC adds significant complexity to previous studies. Rich considers nation-building not by a government or indigenous social movement, but rather by a faith-based humanitarian aid organization — the Congo Protestant Relief Agency (CPRA) — whose leaders and volunteers formulated idiosyncratic and ideologically inconsistent strategies for contributing to and strengthening national reconstruction in Congo. Rich’s work stands in sharp contrast to previous analyses of humanitarian assistance and multilateral aid, as these mainly examine the work of foreign governments and global, secular institutions. Instead, he presents the approaches and worldviews of a missionary society and its aid workers who worked to both reimagine and shore up political stability, governmental legitimacy, and administrative functionality in a newly decolonized Africa. Rich concludes that CPRA’s work in early independence-era Congo marked ‘a watershed period in humanitarianism in Africa during the Cold War’ (7). He accomplishes this by deftly illustrating the dramatic exit of colonial government-sponsored missionary societies and their charitable wings and their replacement by a new iteration of humanitarian agent: faith-based relief organizations. While these new intercessors could be influenced by political agendas emanating from the Global North, much like their predecessors, Rich shows how committed they were to the principles of African self-determination. All relief provision and assistance in postcolonial spaces in the 1960s was to some degree political. Cold War rivalries, former colonial powers attempting to reinforce their prestige, domestic leftist insurgencies, and other political developments reified, misconstrued, or manipulated faith-based and other forms of humanitarian assistance in Congo, turning beneficence into the furtherance of some form of power. Even if neutrality was the stated aim of a humanitarian mission (and it often was not), the activities associated with relief provision or technical assistance directly affected governance, and therefore the survival of different political communities. In this highly precarious

Bridging the Gap with the ‘New’ Economic History of Africa

Abstract: Abstract This review article seeks to build bridges between mainstream African history and the more historically oriented branch of the ‘new’ economic history of Africa. We survey four central topics of the new economic history of Africa — growth, trade, labor, and inequality — and argue that the increased use of quantitative methods and comparative perspectives have sharpened views on long-term trajectories of economic development within Africa and placed the region more firmly into debates of global economic development. The revival of African economic history opens new opportunities for Africanist historians to enrich the interdisciplinary approaches they have taken to study questions of demography, poverty, slavery, labor, inequality, migration, state formation, and colonialism. These fruits, however, can only be reaped if the institutional boundaries between the fields of history and economic history are softened and both sides engage in greater mutual engagement. Our paper aims to move closer to a shared vision on the benefits and limitations of varying quantitative methods, and how these approaches underpin both more and less convincing narratives of long-term African development.

Neglected Historiography from Africa: The Case for Postindependence Journals

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Politics and Music in Colonised South Africa - <i>The Spirit of Resistance in Music and Spoken Word of South Africa's Eastern Cape</i> By Lindsay Michie. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. Pp. 298. $110.00, hardcover (ISBN: 9781498576208); $45.00, e-book (ISBN: 9781498576215).

Abstract: Politics and Music in Colonised South Africa - The Spirit of Resistance in Music and Spoken Word of South Africa's Eastern Cape By Lindsay Michie. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. Pp. 298. 45.00, e-book (ISBN: 9781498576215). - Volume 64 Issue 1

A Cold War City

Abstract: system; the party-state had to abandon the assumption of an ‘oily’ socialist economy and instead find more obviously minimalist ways to survive (185). Grace’s account of the inner workings of oil barter in the Tanzanian Petroleum Development Corporation is an interesting and novel contribution to this history, though there is surely more to say about how the ‘self-reliance’ of government officials in the 1970s became a key ingredient of a new catch-as-catch-can capitalism in the 1980s. Grace’s conclusion offers a condensed but suggestive tour of the dramatically different auto world of the 1990s and 2000s: endless snaking foleni ( jams), deadly car crashes, and misafara (quasi-militarized government convoys that stop all traffic for miles and hours). Three decades of cheap oil and liberalized imports (most recently of cheap motorcycle taxis from China) have ensured that urban Tanzania is utterly choked by private transport, while the endless construction projects of the Magufuli administration (2015–21) will only put more wheels on the road. And yet elements of the previous machinic complex remain, from the rough communalism of the minibus (predictably demonized by Western planners) to the general frustration that the rich travel in private, air-conditioned comfort while the poor commute cheek to jowl. Like other recent works, African Motors retrieves the histories of 1970s and 1980s — as well as the deeper histories of African ingenuity — and gives them a new salience. As the planet confronts the limits of endless, petrol-dependent growth, African Motors shows us a different history of automobility, enriching our ability to think the car, development, and even modernity itself otherwise.

Politics of Disaster: Earthquake, Rehousing, and Confronting Colonial Rule in Accra (Gold Coast/Ghana), 1939–45

Abstract: Despite its destructiveness, disaster clears the way to accomplish a set of goals. That was why the Gold Coast governor and officials welcomed the 1939 earthquake as an opportunity to rebuild Accra. However, mishandling their reconstruction plan proved disadvantageous. The aftermath of the disaster, including an unprecedented rehousing project, exacerbated urban discontent. How everyday urban residents responded to rehousing further exposed the weakness of the colonial state and gave momentum to nationalism. The paper introduces natural disasters and relief programs into the scholarly narratives that have demonstrated that anticolonial nationalism emerged from a chain of grievances from amongst colonial subjects, some of which were unfulfilled social and economic expectations. The experiences of rehousing following the earthquake powerfully informed local perspectives and contributed to the chain of events leading to formal decolonization.

Medical Legitimacy: Childbirth, Pluralism, and Professionalization in Nigeria's Faith-Based <i>Aladura</i> Birthing Homes

Abstract: Abstract In the wake of the Aladura (prayer people) religious movement of the late 1920s, a site of childbirth that relied primarily on faith healing emerged in Nigeria under the Christ Apostolic Church (CAC). This practice of faith-based delivery remained informal until 1959 when it evolved into a permanent structure with a professional guild of midwives, codified practices, and trained personnel. This article explores the advent of CAC's faith-based maternity practice, notably its faith home midwifery school, and how the faith home transformed its identity from the informal realms of religious healing to a recognized religious entity that offered primary maternity care based on the principles of faith healing. By examining the professionalization of Aladura faith homes, I highlight questions of legitimacy allocation in postcolonial Africa and how CAC navigated this process by courting legitimacy from state-backed institutions and sociocultural frameworks.

Intellectual Legacies, Political Morality, and Disillusionment: Connections Between Two Mozambique Research Institutions, 1976–2017

Abstract: Abstract States and institutions often narrate their histories in one of two ways: underscoring continuity with the past or proclaiming rupture from it. This article studies the case of two research institutions in independent Mozambique to show that the history of rupture that some postsocialist political and academic actors claim has a more complex history. That history is related to other African independence struggles and newly independent states and is also embedded in the shape of postsocialist life. Focused on a brief period in time and on two research institutes, this article sheds light on wider processes in African history related to institution building, postcolonial universities and education, and the networks of the global 1960s, as well as those of socialist states during the Cold War.