The Journal of African History Podcast

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.

Sarah Walters on African Historical Demography

How can the methods of historical demography help historians study the African past? Sarah Walters (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) talks to Shane Doyle about how her research uses parish registers in East, Central, and Southern Africa and to shed light on twentieth-century population trends, family formation, and broader societal change.

Her article 'African Population History: Contributions of Moral Demography' appears in the July 2021 issue, and introduces the JAH Forum 'Population Change and Demography in African History'.

Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye on rural radio and infrastructure in Mali

JAH author Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye (CNRS, IMAF-Aubervilliers) discusses her recent article on the history of rural radio in Mali with Marissa Moorman. Her article, “Radio and the Road: Infrastructure, Mobility, and Political Change in the Beginnings of Radio Rurale de Kayes (1980–early 2000s)”, appears in the March 2021 issue.