Pub Date : 2023-02-27DOI: 10.1017/S0021853723000038
Carlos Fernandes
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.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-23DOI: 10.1017/S002185372300018X
Laura Phillips
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.
{"title":"Administering the KwaZulu Bantustan","authors":"Laura Phillips","doi":"10.1017/S002185372300018X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S002185372300018X","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43358366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-22DOI: 10.1017/S0021853723000063
Devin Smart
Abstract This article argues that street food was an essential part of the social reproduction of Mombasa's working class during the colonial period. Like in other expanding capitalist cities, as Mombasa grew, urban workers lived further from their place of employment, which meant they could not return home for their midday meal. Street-food vendors provided them lunch at low prices in convenient locations, and therefore reproduced the working day by provisioning the calories that bridged morning to afternoon. However, postwar municipal authorities also wanted to create a particular kind of urban society in which the ‘informal’ activities of street-food vendors did not fit, and tried to expel them from the city's streets. As these campaigns unfolded, an unresolved contradiction emerged between this elite view of Mombasa, and the reality that the services vendors provided were necessary for the reproduction of the city's economy.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-21DOI: 10.1017/S0021853723000154
B. A. Mulemi
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Pub Date : 2023-02-21DOI: 10.1017/S0021853723000178
G. Njung
Reid — Stapleton ’ s British West African Soldiers contributes substantially to how we understand, reconceptua-lize, 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
{"title":"West African Soldiers during the Colonial Era","authors":"G. Njung","doi":"10.1017/S0021853723000178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853723000178","url":null,"abstract":"Reid — Stapleton ’ s British West African Soldiers contributes substantially to how we understand, reconceptua-lize, 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","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46537572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-20DOI: 10.1017/S0021853723000166
Garth Myers
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.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-20DOI: 10.1017/s0021853723000099
Valmont Edward Layne
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
泰勒·弗莱明(Tyler Fleming)的书讲述了1959年第一部音乐剧《金刚》(King Kong)的制作过程。《金刚》是一部基于拳击手以西结·德拉米尼(Ezekiel Dlamini)生平的音乐剧。这部音乐剧让这个种族隔离的国家耿耿于怀，部分原因是它肯定了城市黑人阶级的愿望，而不是偏爱黑人农村人口的官方叙事。作为一个黑人城市生活的故事，它跨越了主流白人观众，成为南非戏剧和流行音乐的经典和喜爱的一部分，该剧是南非文化史上的一个里程碑。弗莱明的研究充分考虑了多种族生产面对狭隘的种族隔离立法的方式。作者提供了丰富的关于戏剧制作的经验细节，它的人类和社会政治背景，并通过引用保罗·吉尔罗伊的“黑色大西洋”来论证文化生产的多样性观点，进一步加深了我们对非洲参与文化趋势的理解——在这种情况下，音乐剧。然而，弗莱明的叙事训诂仍然牢牢地留在社会历史的学科范围内，而牺牲了对更广泛的理论含义的解释。第一章讲述了剧中虚构人物的故事——南非中级拳击手Ezekiel Dlamini，他的命运和不幸曾在当地新闻中报道，并于1957年不幸自杀身亡。德拉米尼的故事启发了一个名为南非艺术家联盟(Union of South African Artists)的组织，该组织成立于20世纪50年代早期，旨在支持新兴的黑人创意人士，并倡导改善工作条件。第二章讲述了他们的故事，从新闻和其他来源追溯了南非艺术家联盟的领导人和成员发展这部戏剧的方式。书中还包括了该组织工作的有趣细节，比如为所罗门·琳达的长歌《Mbube》(1939年)争取版税所做的努力，这首歌被织工乐队改编为《今夜的狮子沉睡》(1951年)。1954年，当工会的创始人和赞助人，英国牧师特雷弗·哈德尔斯顿神父被召回英国时，工会遭受了打击。然而，赫德尔斯顿在南非的巨大人气也确保了他的告别活动为工会筹集了足够的收入，使其能够在约翰内斯堡市中心著名的多尔凯大厦(Dorkay House)购置场地。第三章考察了《金刚》在媒体上的受欢迎程度，并在此过程中解读了在种族隔离统治的第一个十年中，共同国家地位的萌芽和南非多种族主义的潜力。弗莱明用粗线条勾勒出了这个故事，中间穿插着密切观察的实证例子。最后，他认为《金刚》对于如何实现多种族和更和谐未来的潜力至关重要。正如其他研究认为的那样，也许黑人流行音乐、戏剧和电影在种族隔离早期的南非预示着“更好”生活(在物质意义上)的可能性。我们可以说，从这个意义上说，《金刚》受到了电影和爵士乐的累积影响，把这部作品放到了一个更长的谱系中，在维特·厄尔曼(Veit Erlman)以来的殖民流行文化学者的作品中生动地表现出来。
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Pub Date : 2023-02-20DOI: 10.1017/s0021853723000075
Andrew Ivaska
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.
{"title":"A Cold War City","authors":"Andrew Ivaska","doi":"10.1017/s0021853723000075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021853723000075","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":47244,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47293825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-17DOI: 10.1017/S0021853723000191
Charlotte Walker-Said
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
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Pub Date : 2023-02-17DOI: 10.1017/S002185372300004X
Oliver Coates
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