Project MUSE®: History in Africa - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/290
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in History in Africa.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 32 (2005) through current issueLatest Articles: History in AfricaTWOProject MUSE®History in Africa1558-27440361-5413Latest articles in History in Africa. Feed provided by Project MUSE®African History and the Thingly Past: A Yoruba Example
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983283
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In “People Without Things” Severin Fowles described the tendency in social science (including history) to bury things but privilege human actors as “the tyranny of the subject.”1 The practice of marginalization of things in history was also described by anthropologist Daniel Miller as “the beginning of things- suppressed” which can be located in the religions that ascribed wisdom to those spiritual figures who had suggested that materiality represented “the mere apparent, behind which lies that which is real.”2 This voice was echoed by Leif Jerram when he observed that materiality has been marginalized by scholars through “a casual vocabulary and a vigorous a priori epistemological holism.”3 Like Daniel Miller
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/290/image/coversmallAfrican History and the Thingly Past: A Yoruba Example2026-02-13text/htmlen-USAfrican History and the Thingly Past: A Yoruba Example2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®1214922026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13Steering the Nation? Drivers, Nationalism, and the Writing of History
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983284
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A mere five months after independence at the heart of Kwame Nkrumah’s own constituency, Ga people gathered in Bukom Square in Central Accra for an inauguration of representatives – a new set of leaders who promised to restore resources, respect, and opportunity to Ga people and to push back on the perceived onslaught of migrants into the new national capital after independence. This new group – the Ga-Adangbe Shifimo Kpee – while not a political party, per se, represented a powerful political challenge to Kwame Nkrumah, his Convention People’s Party (CPP), and the promise of an independent and united Ghana.In his book, Politics in Ghana, 1946–1960, Dennis Austin provided the following description of the Ga Shifimo
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/290/image/coversmallSteering the Nation? Drivers, Nationalism, and the Writing of History2026-02-13text/htmlen-USSteering the Nation? Drivers, Nationalism, and the Writing of History2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®897972026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13African and Asian Writings from Mozambique: Uncovering Indigenous Records in a Portuguese Colonial Archive
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983285
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The concept that colonial archives enhance Western colonial power by othering, excluding, occulting, or silencing indigenous voices has become critical to historians of Africa and colonialism in the last three decades. Colonial archives can be approached as repositories of historical sources crucial for history writing and as active political agents within Western power frameworks.1 In this context, the question of how, or even if, traces of indigenous voices might be retrieved from colonial records has become an important topic. Some scholarship tends to see colonial archives as mere reflections of Western conceptions, to the point of suggesting the impossibility of indigenous voices taking hold in European
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/290/image/coversmallAfrican and Asian Writings from Mozambique: Uncovering Indigenous Records in a Portuguese Colonial Archive2026-02-13text/htmlen-USAfrican and Asian Writings from Mozambique: Uncovering Indigenous Records in a Portuguese Colonial Archive2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®1477212026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13Archival Patchwork: Stitching Social Relationships in Colonial South Africa
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983286
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What does “method” mean to humanistically inclined historians? As a graduate student I watched my friends in the social sciences learn and apply named approaches to their research: quantitative and statistical analysis, experiments, survey design, qualitative studies, and ethnography, for instance. These approaches are, of course, applicable to historical inquiry. I felt, though, that there was no singular name for what I was learning to do: sit in an archive, open a big book, read, turn a page, and read some more. I learned languages and associated paleographies for the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. I navigated finding aids and distinct government policies for accessing materials in five
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/290/image/coversmallArchival Patchwork: Stitching Social Relationships in Colonial South Africa2026-02-13text/htmlen-USArchival Patchwork: Stitching Social Relationships in Colonial South Africa2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®1249002026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13A Note on Photographic Archival Collections on Northern Ghana
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983287
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At a time when material and digital sources increasingly coexist, the aim of this note is to provide a preliminary mapping of archives that held photographic material (both digitized and nondigitized) related to northern Ghana – many of which have received little scholarly attention to date. Regular updates are essential, as archives are today digitized at an increasingly rapid pace.1 This note aims, therefore, to offer a preliminary (and necessarily partial) contribution – one that, it is hoped, will form part of a growing series of notes on the topic. Precisely because digitized materials are continually being updated, it is essential to track and periodically map these resources to grasp the evolving
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/290/image/coversmallA Note on Photographic Archival Collections on Northern Ghana2026-02-13text/htmlen-USA Note on Photographic Archival Collections on Northern Ghana2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®738522026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13The Century’s Firstborn: Intimate History in the Aftermath of Nineteenth-Century Islamic Revolutions in Central Mali
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983288
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“My entire family’s history is tied to that of Maasina … and the wars that tore it apart.”1“It is time to break the formidable psychological charge that weighs upon this episode in Mali’s history.”2It was on a Thursday that Mamadu Caam gathered with several witnesses, including one of his sons and a trusted neighbor, in Mopti (Mali), to seal the terms of his daughter’s marriage contract. The year was 1962, and Hawaly – Caam and his wife Kumba Barri’s eldest – was to be wedded soon. The document Caam drew that day featured a binding clause addressed to Hawaly’s betrothed. “I notified him,” Caam stated, “that I would not grant him my daughter’s hand in marriage unless he complies with the following condition: if he
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/290/image/coversmallThe Century’s Firstborn: Intimate History in the Aftermath of Nineteenth-Century Islamic Revolutions in Central Mali2026-02-13text/htmlen-USThe Century’s Firstborn: Intimate History in the Aftermath of Nineteenth-Century Islamic Revolutions in Central Mali2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®1342742026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13Aɖaʋatram (Madness Has Led Me Astray): Ritual Archives and Ewe Identities on the Ghana–Togo Borderlands
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983289
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The inherited colonial borders in many parts of Africa separate families and peoples from their material and spiritual sources of livelihood, such as land, ritual sites, objects, and officiants.1 The division of Nyive, a community of Ewe-speaking people, into Ghana Nyive and Togo Nyive by the Ghana–Togo border separated Ghana Nyive from important ritual drums, such as Aɖaʋatram (madness has led me astray) and the custodians of the drum in Togo Nyive.2 What makes the Nyive case more interesting is that one of the taboos of Aɖaʋatram is that it does not cross a river, and the international border that separates Ghana Nyive and Togo Nyive is the Tɔdze, a river.3Yet even though the border caused disruption, people
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/290/image/coversmallAɖaʋatram (Madness Has Led Me Astray): Ritual Archives and Ewe Identities on the Ghana–Togo Borderlands2026-02-13text/htmlen-USAɖaʋatram (Madness Has Led Me Astray): Ritual Archives and Ewe Identities on the Ghana–Togo Borderlands2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®694212026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13Towards a Dramatization of the Anglo-Ijebu Conflict of 1892: Creating a Script
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983290
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The Anglo-Ijebu conflict of 1892 is well represented in the historiography of the British conquest of Nigeria. The event forms part of the broader theme of late-nineteenth-century European imperialism underlain by economic considerations, and the attendant failure of African resistance leading to the establishment of colonial rule.1 For all practical purposes, the conquest of the Ijebu in 1892 opened the way for the imposition of the Pax Britannica in Yorubaland.2 This article examines the potential and significance of dramatizing the episode as another medium of contributing to the historiography on the subject.The Ijebu, the African party to the conflict, are a Yoruba subgroup located astride Lagos and Ogun
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/290/image/coversmallTowards a Dramatization of the Anglo-Ijebu Conflict of 1892: Creating a Script2026-02-13text/htmlen-USTowards a Dramatization of the Anglo-Ijebu Conflict of 1892: Creating a Script2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®2352322026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13Editors’ Introduction: New Histories from the Margins of the Archive
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983291
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It is fitting that our final volume as the History in Africa editorial team features articles that reconceptualize classic archival sources and reimagine new forms of narrating the past.While there is a new order of threats to the teaching of history’s full, rich narrative, African and African diaspora archives have long been problematic sites of knowledge production. Even with the increased interest in decolonizing sources of knowledge, scholars and archivists of African and African diaspora studies have had to revisit that concept. Because the drive to decolonize knowledge can reinscribe colonial dynamics, this newer decolonial scholarship emphasizes collaboration and practice-based approaches.1 Toyin Falola’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/290/image/coversmallEditors’ Introduction: New Histories from the Margins of the Archive2026-02-13text/htmlen-USEditors’ Introduction: New Histories from the Margins of the Archive2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®233262026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13The Century’s Firstborn: Intimate History in the Aftermath of Nineteenth-Century Islamic Revolutions in Central Mali – ERRATUM
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983292
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This manuscript was published with the abstract translation missing. The abstract translation has now been added to the original manuscript and is given below:RésuméEn 1864, Oumar Taal, l’une des figures les plus influentes de l’Afrique occidentale du XIXe siècle, périt dans le Macina (Mali), une région qu’il avait conquise deux ans auparavant. Les historien•nes ont étudié les fondements politiques et intellectuels de la dernière conquête de Taal, mais non ses ramifications au sein des familles. En explorant les migrations et les mariages de l’époque coloniale dans ma propre famille au Mali, je propose l’histoire intime comme mode d’enquête et d’écriture historiques pour élucider les conséquences de la guerre. Je
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/290/image/coversmallThe Century’s Firstborn: Intimate History in the Aftermath of Nineteenth-Century Islamic Revolutions in Central Mali – ERRATUM2026-02-13text/htmlen-USThe Century’s Firstborn: Intimate History in the Aftermath of Nineteenth-Century Islamic Revolutions in Central Mali – ERRATUM2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®40402026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13