The Journal of African History Podcast

John Aerni-Flessner on border violence amd diplomacy in Southern Africa

In this episode, John Aerni-Flessner (MSU) joins editor Moses Ochonu (Vanderbilt) to discuss the article, "Lesotho and the QwaQwa Ski Resort, 1975–82: Border Disputes and South Africa's Increasingly Deadly Responses," co-authored with Chitja Twala (Limpopo).

John details how a proposed ski resort in QwaQwa served as a site for adjoining Lesotho — despite its economic dependence and comparative military weakness — to hone a foreign-policy opposed to South African apartheid. He further details how this approach engendered brazen raids from the South African military, a harbinger of the escalating violence which would wash over the border states and within homelands and townships over the 1980s.

The conversation further explores the coming of age of postcolonial African diplomacy, novel strategies for securing documentary evidence in South Africa, and the value of collaborative work in historical research and writing.

The Open Access article is available here.

Peter Vale on the pre/history of DRC’s neoliberal moment

In this episode, Peter Vale (Harvard) joins editor Marissa Moorman (Wisconsin) to discuss his research on the political economy of early postcolonial Congo. He details how the Mobutu government charted a course between policies and rhetoric extolling economic nationalism, on one hand, and moves to promote financing and investment from abroad, on the other. Vale complicates conventional narratives of the periodization and drivers of neoliberal policies in the nation: he describes how Congolese thinkers, politicians, and publics interacted with and shaped processes of economic liberalization, privatization, and decentralization in the years before ballooning state debts, exacerbated by energy crises, led to the embrace of structural adjustment policies favored by lending institutions.

Vale’s open access article, entitled “Between Economic Nationalism and Liberalization: Ideas of Development and the Neoliberal Moment in Mobutu’s Congo, 1965–74,” features in issue 65/1 of the JAH.

Sarah Van Beurden on the work of historians in public debates

In this episode Sarah Van Beurden (OSU and SAR) joins editor Michelle Moyd (MSU) to discuss her History Matters piece, coauthored with Gillian Mathys (Ghent), unpacking the experience of working as historian experts engaged to write a report for a Belgian parliamentary commission tasked with examining the nation’s colonial past.

Van Beurden details both the challenges and opportunities presented by engaging in such fraught and expressly political work. She offers insights into the ways that the report’s authors confronted problematic but widely held assumptions about the past, its meaning, and the sorts of work that historians do. And she draws lessons from this work – and the legacy of similar historical commissions in Belgium dating back to the early twentieth century – to make a powerful case for the utility of professional historians engaging in public debates.

Van Beurden and Mathys’s open access article, entitled ‘History by Commission? The Belgian Colonial Past and the Limits of History in the Public Eye’, features in issue 64/3 of the JAH.

Sean Hanretta and Ousman Kobo on William A. Brown’s legacy

In this episode, Professors Sean Hanretta and Ousman Kobo join JAH editor Moses Ochonu to discuss the life and work of Professor William A. Brown. While he published little, Bill Brown’s landmark 1968 dissertation on the Caliphate of Hamdullahi, meticulous photographing of Arabic manuscripts in Mali, and decades of teaching and mentoring students at the University of Wisconsin Madison left a profound — if vastly under-acknowledged — impact on the ways that historians of Africa engage with sources and ideas. Brown’s commitments to emancipatory politics and epistemological rigor, moreover, offered an early and powerful critique of the Orientalist and anti-Black assumptions embedded in the production of much historical knowledge about West Africa, oral traditions, and Islamic intellectuals.

Brown’s life and work is the subject of the History Matters section in Volume 64, Issue 2 of The Journal of African History. In addition to the open access introduction by Kobo and Hanretta, ‘William A. Brown and the Assessment of a Scholarly Life’, the section features six contributions:

• ‘The Caliphate, the Black Writer, and a World in Revolution, 1957–69’ by Madina Thiam
• ‘A Hidden Repository of Arabic Manuscripts from Mali: The William A. Brown Collection’ by Mauro Nobili and Said Bousbina
• ‘Le témoignage d’Almamy Maliki Yattara sur W. A. Brown: Dr Brown through the Testimony of Almamy Maliki Yattara’ by Bernard Salvaing
• ‘William Allen Brown, Jr., 1934–2007: An Appreciation’ (forthcoming) by David Henry Anthony III
• ‘The Impact of Informal Mentorship: A Tribute to Professor William Brown’ (forthcoming) by Ousman Kobo

• ‘Egypt in Africa: William A. Brown and a Liberating African History’ by Sean Hanretta

Rebecca Grollemund and David Schoenbrun on interpreting Bantu language expansions

In this episode Rebecca Grollemund (Missouri) and David Schoenbrun (Northwestern) join editor Marissa Moorman (Wisconsin) to discuss recent insights and the continuing complexity of classifying five millennia of Bantu language expansions using statistics, computational methods, and other tools.

In the wide-ranging conversation, the authors make a powerful case for the utility of collaborative, multidisciplinary, and multigenerational scholarship, talk about the need to bring an eye for contingency to the big questions still surrounding the so-called Bantu-migration, and recount the joy and passion which the late Jan Vansina brought to this project and his scholarship in general.

Grollemund, Schoenbrun, and Vansina’s open access article, entitled ‘Moving Histories: Bantu Language Expansions, Eclectic Economies, and Mobilities’, features in the March 2023 issue of the JAH.

*For a sampling of further works on Bantu language expansions and related social histories, see: C. Ehret, Southern Nilotic History: Linguistic Approaches to the Study of the Past (Evanston, 1971); J. Vansina, The Children of Woot: A History of the Kuba Peoples (Madison, 1978); D. Nurse and T. Spear, The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800-1500 (Philadelphia, 1985); J. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, 1990); C. Ehret, An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 BC to AD 400 (Charlottesville, 1998); D. L. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th century (Portsmouth, NH, 1998); K. Klieman, ‘The Pygmies Were Our Compass’: Bantu and Batwa in the History of West Central Africa, Early Times to C 1900 CE (Portsmouth, NH, 2003); J. Vansina, How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa to 1600 (Charlottesville, 2004); R. Gonzales, Societies, Religion, and History: Central-East Tanzanians and the World they Created, c. 200 BCE to 1800 CE (New York, 2009); C. Saidi, Women's Authority and Society in Early East-Central Africa (Rochester, NY, 2010); R. Stephens, A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900 (Cambridge, 2013); K. M. de Luna, Collecting Food, Cultivating People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa (New Haven, 2016); R. Jimenez, ‘“Slow revolution” in Southern Africa: household biosocial reproduction and regional entanglements in the history of cattle-keeping among Nguni-speakers, ninth to thirteenth century CE’, The Journal of African History, 61/2 (2020).

Elizabeth Jacob on public motherhood and anticolonial politics in Côte d’Ivoire

In this episode Elizabeth Jacob (Providence) joins editor Moses Ochonu (Vanderbilt) to discuss women's vital role in anticolonial struggles in Côte d'Ivoire and Francophone Africa, through acts both spectacular and mundane. Using the famous 1949 march of two thousand Ivorian women as an entry point, Jacob offers a groundbreaking application of the concept of public motherhood to contextualize the march in a stream of history, and interrogate the impacts and afterlives of women's activism and responses by male officials in the colonial bureaucracy and in the Parti Démocratique de Côte d'Ivoire (PDCI). The wide-ranging conversation also touches upon the work of exploring well known events and the joys of historical research.

Jacob's open access article Militant Mothers: Gender and the Politics of Anticolonial Action in Côte d'Ivoire features in the November 2022 issue of the JAH.

Etana Dinka on state-society relations within the Ethiopian empire

Etana Dinka (James Madison) joins the JAH's Shane Doyle (Leeds) to discuss state-society encounters in western Ethiopia. Using the province of Qellem as a window, Dinka details processes of contesting, negotiating, and legitimizing the imperial state over a period spanning from 1908 through 1933. Drawing upon his reading of dynamics in Qellem, Dinka argues that the history of Ethiopian imperialism should be contextualized and studied alongside scholarships on contemporaneous European colonial endeavors in Africa. This groundbreaking approach challenges the metanarratives presented both by the Ethiopian grand tradition and Oromo historiographies.

Dinka's open access article '"Eating A Country": The Dynamics of State-Society Encounters in Qellem, Western Ethiopia, 1908–33', appears in Volume 63, Issue 2 of The Journal of African History.

Laura Phillips on the making of mineral property and political authority in South Africa

Laura Phillips (University of the Witwatersrand) joins JAH editor Marissa Moorman to discuss the entangled histories of minerals, politics, and capital in South Africa. Phillips interrogates the interplay between these forces by focusing on Ga-Mphahlele, a rural community in the northern platinum belt, over a period spanning from the late 19th century through the emergence of majority rule in 1994. Her analysis deepens existing understandings of the co-constitutiveness of political authority and mineral property, demonstrating how contingent and volatile this relationship could be. The story of platinum in Ga-Mphahlele diverges from better known stories of gold and diamonds, shaped in fascinating ways by geological realities, African land purchasing, property rights, and contests over chiefly authority. Phillips also honors the mentorship and scholarship of the late Philip Bonner.

Phillips’s open access article ‘Below the Land Deals: The Making of Mineral Property in Ga-Mphahlele, South Africa, 1880–1994’ appears in Volume 63, Issue 1 of The Journal of African History.

Khaled Esseissah on Enslaved Muslim Sufi Saints in the 19th Century Sahara

Khaled Esseissah (Georgetown) speaks with Moses Ochonu about the life of Bilad Ould Mahmud, a 19^th century enslaved Saharan Muslim whose renowned miracles, poetry, and Qur’an recitation enabled him to acquire Sufi sainthood without belonging to a Sufi order. Esseissah’s scholarship unsettles longstanding historical narratives about the interplay between spiritual authority, race, and slavery in Saharan-Mauritanian society.

Esseissah’s article ‘Enslaved Muslim Sufi Saints in the Nineteenth-Century Sahara: The Life of Bilal Ould Mahmoud’ appears in the November 2021 issue of the Journal of African History.

Daniel Domingues da Silva and Edward Alpers on Abolition in 19th Century Mozambique

Daniel Domingues da Silva (Rice) and Edward Alpers (UCLA) join Moses Ochonu to discuss the process of building and interpreting a database of nearly 55,000 enslaved and freed Africans registered by Portuguese colonial authorities in Mozambique between 1856 and 1876. The conversation offers rich insights into the process of abolition, and possibilities for tracing deeper linkages between scholarships on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and later forms of colonial labor coercion. The article ‘Abolition and the Registration of Slaves and Libertos in Portuguese Mozambique, 1856–76’ appears in the November 2021 issue of the Journal of African History.