Ugandan colonial authorities carved Bugisu and Bukedi districts out of Mbale district in 1954, isolating Mbale town as a separate entity. With ethnic tensions escalating as independence approached, Gisu and Gwere fought for Mbale's ownership. Empowered by decentralisation, Bugisu District Council pressed the colonial state to declare Mbale part of Bugisu, viewing the town as key to the region's wealth, and providing a symbolic status similar to that enjoyed by Uganda's leading ethnic groups. Gisu activists reinvented tradition as a tool of political advocacy, exerting hyper-masculine power over Mbale's non-circumcising Gwere residents through forcible circumcision. Gisu reformulation of a cultural practice within an urban struggle challenges previous categorisations of the Mbale case as merely another local obstacle to Uganda's peaceful decolonisation. Evidence analysed in this article contributes to a new understanding of East Africa's uneasy transition to self-government, and to the role of ethnic competition within late-colonial mobilisations more broadly.

This article analyzes an instance of collective panic about gangs of killers called Watu wa Mumiani (‘Mumiani People’) in Digo District, Kenya in 1945. Popularly believed to work for the colonial government, Watu wa Mumiani were said to abduct Africans from roads and kill them for their blood. I offer an interpretation of this episode in terms of the history of a medicine called Mumia, a nineteenth-century ritual called Mung'aro, regional strategies for surviving famine (including ‘pawning’ kin), and a wartime labor conscription campaign. Rather than emphasize the alterity of ‘vampires’ like Watu wa Mumiani, I show how the 1945 panic articulates concerns about powerful intermediaries, arguing that the stories told about them encode a history of concerns about predatory patrons, especially under conditions of ecological distress.

This article examines how historians have approached the history of poverty in Africa before European colonisation. From an earlier focus on the emergence of class difference to more recent studies on the emergence of poverty, scholars have demonstrated the longevity of economic inequality in Africa. This historiography counters a linear view of the growth of economic inequality and the idea that poverty is a necessary corollary of wealth. The article then considers how historians have studied the meanings of poverty within particular societies to the nineteenth century allowing us to move beyond the inadequacy of quantitative data. It ends by arguing for more longue durée studies of poverty in Africa with a focus on the qualitative and on the internal dynamics of particular societies. This will improve our knowledge about how colonial rule changed the experience and reality of poverty for people across the continent and form a basis for comparative studies.

Cape Town's black population of the early twentieth century actively pursued lifestyles that might be described as respectable. But respectability was expensive, and poverty —characterised by poor housing, ill health and shortened lifespans — stood in the way of some of its most essential elements: cleanliness, sexual restraint, sobriety, and the creation of nuclear and gendered households. Black respectability, therefore, could not simply replicate that of the dominant white bourgeoisie. Most challenging was the development of rampant black criminality, often seen by contemporary observers as the result of the failure of black women to realise respectable households. Even attempts on the part of the state to create respectable citizenries floundered, partly because these initiatives were incompatible with the policies of racial segregation. The state and the dominant bourgeoisie put their faith in the black elite as the standard-bearers of respectability, but the reality was that the respectability of the ‘superior’ class was frequently indistinguishable from those below, a consequence of the fact that the boundary between these classes was highly porous.

The paper reviews the history of the concepts used to depict poverty in Africa. “Pauperism” is a legal concept, deriving from early modern law in Britain, which frames individual situations, places the paupers under specific rights and duties, and was applied in early colonial situations. Percentile is a economic-demographic concept, implying class difference, indexed to measurable or imputed monetary income, which became an instrument of government in the colonial world mainly after 1945, moving into the international comparative world after the era of independence. In the neoliberal era after 1989, the concept of precarity, and a focus on realizable assets rather than income, has taken higher profile than an emergent replacement for the comparative-percentile approach, sometimes now depicted as “living on $2 a day”. The paper indicates the conceptual and political implications and challenges of each of these depictions.

Poverty has a long history in Africa. Yet, the most conventional and influential history of African poverty is a very short one. As told by the World Bank, the history of poverty starts in the 1980s with the first Living Standard Measurement Study. This history of poverty by numbers is also a very narrow one. There is a disconnect between the theoretical and historical underpinnings of how academics understand and define poverty in Africa, and how it has been quantified in practice. While it is generally agreed that poverty is multidimensional and has certain time- and location-specific aspects, the shorthand definition for poverty is the dollar-per-day metric. This article reveals how particular types of knowledge about poverty have gained prominence and thus shaped the dominant interpretation of poverty in Africa. It argues that, based on other numerical evidence, the history of poverty in Africa could be radically different from the dominant interpretation today.

This article examines the evolution of dietary knowledge about French colonial Africa, from the 1920s to the early 1950s. More specifically, it focuses on efforts to quantify daily food intake by tracing the different meanings assigned to nutrition over time. While such statistics were used as early as the 1920s to evaluate the food consumption of populations most useful to the imperial economy, it was only after the Second World War that they became a means of measuring living standards according to universal metrics. This history invites us to reflect on how poverty in Africa came to be recognized as a problem, by showing that such a process has neither been based entirely on social reality nor on the knowledge produced to delineate privation. Rather it also emerged from the changing set of meanings associated with this knowledge.