Journal of West African History

On the importance of place

2023-02-26T11:23:43-05:00

Amadou Hampate Ba and the Power of Time in the Social Reconstruction of West Africa

2021-02-24T08:49:07-05:00

Engaged for much of his life with the swell and ultimate ebb of the French colonial state in West Africa, Amadou Hampâté Bâ sought to reconstitute African societies apart from the destruction of the preceding century. Trained in ethnology by the colonial state, Hampâté Bâ studied oral histories of the area to gain a greater grasp on the power of local conceptions of social and political forms. At the same time, he fought against colonial depictions of static, unchanging colonial societies through a radical understanding of time. Embracing non-linear conceptions of the fluidity of human experience across eras, Hampâté Bâ instead proposed that West Africans look to the past to escape the present and reimagine the future. Hardly beholden to tradition, he extolled the virtues of continuity across the rupture of European modernism, pushing Africans away from European norms while universalizing African socio-political ideas. This new, solid structure offered the opportunity for innovation, growth, and change without the destruction of foreign domination.

‘‘The Native Court Way’’: Disputes over Marriage, Divorce and ‘Adultery’ in Colonial Courts in Abeokuta (Southwestern Nigeria), 1905-1960

2021-02-10T14:21:21-05:00

This article examines surviving native court records from 1905-1957 in Abeokuta, Southwest Nigeria to argue that what constituted marriage, marital rights and sexual access to wives was changing readily in this period of socio-economic and political change. In this period, Britain established the native court system, stressing African and British judges, to apply rigid ideas of native law and customs concerning marriage. Men and women—husbands, wives, lovers, fathers, uncles, aunties, brothers, sisters and in-laws—approached the native courts to negotiate conflict over marriage, divorce, seduction, adultery, and child custody. Rather than administering rigid legal judgements of what constituted legitimate marriage, judgements rendered by these courts provided manoeuvrability specifically for women to negotiate and contest marital status and relations.

Cross-Border Lives and the Complications of Postcolonial Citizenship: Migration, Belonging, and Alternative Geographies in the Borderlands of Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Senegal, 1958–1980

2021-04-14T10:36:23-04:00

This article argues that in the 1960s and 1970s, the postcolonial state in Guinea and the independence movement in Guinea-Bissau came to define national belonging through ideas of “sacrificial citizenship,” ideas which existed in sharp contrast by how borderland residents saw their own geographies. Borderland residents used the border to, for the most part, reject or ignore territorial concepts of national belonging, while informally putting forward their own geographic conceptions and networks. The history of cross-border migration and mobility during this period illustrates the incomplete nature of postcolonial ideas of citizenship and belonging, and the alternative communities and imaginaries that borderland residents developed after independence in opposition to the modern nation-state. These cross-border networks and spaces offer an example of the contestation of sovereignty and the nation-state in the decades immediately following the independence of West African states.

With Flags Waving: African Diasporic Agency in the 1960s ICFTU-Liberian Relationship

2021-03-24T11:44:56-04:00

In contrast to the usual story that ICFTU efforts in Africa were moribund by the mid-1960s, its connections to the Liberian CIO were increasing then, due largely to the efforts of black American, Caribbean, and African trade unionists who worked with or for the ICFTU. When European ICFTU officials hesitated for fear of upsetting the repressive Tubman government, ICFTU members from among the African diaspora expressed more optimism and consistently advocated for connecting directly with Liberian labor. They also made key visits to Liberia, either on their own or on delegations, and often distributed aid and provided training on the ground. While the ICFTU did not achieve all its desires there, demonstrating the difficulty in organizing labor in the face of government opposition, small gains did occur due primarily to the bottom-up pressure from black members among the lower ranks of the ICFTU, revealing consistent black agency in the ICFTU’s African activities in the 1960s.

Grimm Review of Wiemers

2022-04-21T18:37:00-04:00

Every Household Its Own Government: Improvised Infrastructure, Entrepreneurial Citizens, and the State in Nigeria Daniel Jordan Smith Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. 232 pp., $26.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780691229898

2022-05-05T20:41:44-04:00

Review of "Every Household Its Own Government: Improvised Infrastructure, Entrepreneurial Citizens, and the State in Nigeria"

Kwame Nkrumah: Visions of Liberation (review)

2022-07-26T12:23:15-04:00

Book Review Moral Economies of Corruption: State Formation and Political Culture in Nigeria by Steven Pierce

2022-08-15T12:46:23-04:00

Review of More Auspicious Shores

2022-10-02T13:16:36-04:00

Before the Anti-Homosexuality Bill: The Historical Contours of LGBT Organizing in Nigeria

2021-02-17T09:01:18-05:00

Existing scholarship on the causes of homophobia in contemporary Nigeria and on the relationship between religion and homophobia in Africa tend to dismiss LGBT activism in Nigeria as a movement so small as to be almost non-existent. We argue, however, that LGBT activism in Nigeria does exist, and that it has a history. And while religion has often been harnessed to serve homophobic policies, LGBT activists have also worked together with religious organizations to offer support to LGBT communities.