Beginning in 1856 and ending in 1876, Portuguese colonial authorities in Mozambique registered almost 55,000 enslaved and freed Africans (libertos). The sources for these twinned registration processes are located in the national archives of Portugal and Mozambique. Fragments of the originals survive for only six of the ten districts of the colony, but contemporary copies exist for nearly all districts. Combined, they provide a unique opportunity to understand both the extent of slavery — as opposed to the export slave trade — and the process of abolition in late-nineteenth-century Mozambique. In this article we first describe the registers themselves, then focus on the registration of enslaved and freed Africans, the resistance of slaveholders, and the kinds of information that we can glean from the registers. We also explore the ways in which freed Africans were employed after registration and the extent to which being a liberto implied ‘freedom’. Finally, we consider how the registration led to new laws and policies in Portuguese Africa, opening a new era of European colonialism and imperial expansion.

Regionalizing pre-colonial Africa aids in the collection and interpretation of primary sources as data for further analysis. This article includes a map with six broad regions and 34 sub-regions, which form a controlled vocabulary within which researchers may geographically organize and classify disparate pieces of information related to Africa’s past. In computational terms, the proposed African regions serve as data containers in order to consolidate, link, and disseminate research among a growing trend in digital humanities projects related to the history of the African diasporas before c. 1900. Our naming of regions aims to avoid terminologies derived from European slave traders, colonialism, and modern-day countries.

In recent years, an increasing number of online archival databases of primary sources related to the history of the African diaspora and slavery have become freely and readily accessible for scholarly and public consumption. This proliferation of digital projects and databases presents a number of challenges related to aggregating data geographically according to the movement of people in and out of Africa across time and space. As a requirement to linking data of open-source digital projects, it has become necessary to delimit the entire continent of precolonial Africa during the era of the slave trade into broad regions and sub-regions that can allow the grouping of data effectively and meaningfully.

1994 has witnessed the demise of apartheid in South Africa, thus signaling the end of an era in the history of Africa—the long night of European colonial rule. This momentous event, and the challenging process of transformation that it has set in motion, vividly illustrate the power of the rubric chosen for this year's annual meeting, Africa Reconfigured. But the reconfiguration of Africa is certainly not something new. So on this occasion I propose to look back selectively at some aspects of that reconfiguration as it relates to the European mapping and consequent representation of Africa; the political configuration of Africa; and, finally, the future of Africa and African Studies.

“Where is Africa?” asks Ali Mazrui in a characteristically provocative dissection of European ethnocentric projections about the mapping and perception of Africa (Mazrui 1986, 23-4). To which we might add, “And what do we know about it from maps?” For as Peter Barber emphasizes in his discussion of the European discovery of Africa, “it should always be borne in mind that maps show only what their makers wished to show and not necessarily all that they actually knew” (Barber 1987, 37). Indeed, the history of mapping Africa reflects virtually all of the problems one is likely to face in examining the representation of Africa. Ancient knowledge of the continent was limited to the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Indian Ocean coasts, as well as the Nile Valley. Bound up with the acquisition of commercial information about the products of Africa, and then with the staking out of colonial claims from as early as the first Portuguese explorations down the Atlantic coast of the continent in the fourteenth century, Africa was arguably more thoroughly misrepresented than it was accurately mapped during the first millennium and a half of the Christian era.

The African presence in the Indian Ocean world represents one of the most neglected aspects of the global diaspora of African peoples. Yet very significant numbers of people of African descent today inhabit virtually all the countries of the western Indian Ocean littoral. It is evident, however, that African voices have been actively silenced in this diaspora both by the cultural contexts of their host societies and by the way in which the scholarly production of knowledge has reflected such cultural domination. Consequently, to get at the experiences of Africans in the Indian Ocean world and assess their sense of being of or belonging to Africa, we must look to popular culture. In this paper I examine some of the evidence for recollecting Africa in the Indian Ocean world, citing examples of music, song, dance, religion and healing, language, and folkways from both first generation diaspora Africans and their descendants. I conclude by cautioning us not to impose paradigms developed from the experience of Africans in the diaspora of the Atlantic world, with its particular forms of Euro-American racism and concomitant black responses.

Cet article examine des témoignages d’esclaves affranchis retrouvés dans les archives de l’amirauté britannique, dans celles des consulats ou des cours de justice de l’océan Indien occidental. À la différence des récits mieux connus concernant la traite atlantique, ces documents sont généralement brefs et ne sont pas directement produits par les esclaves africains eux-mêmes. Bien que difficiles à analyser, en raison de multiples strates de transcription, traduction et représentation, ces sources importantes permettent de mettre un visage sur les individus qui furent pris dans la tourmente de la traite en Afrique de l’Est au XIXe siècle. Ces témoignages font entendre la voix des Africains réduits en esclavage et fournissent des informations importantes sur les conditions de la capture, les déplacements des captifs, et certains aspects de la vie en esclavage. Nous montrons que ces sources sont d’une immense valeur en dépit de leurs limites, parce qu’elles nous offrent le meilleur aperçu dont nous disposons sur l’expérience vécue des Africains, hommes, femmes et enfants, qui furent victimes de la traite en Afrique de l’Est.

Almost as long as African studies has been a recognized intellectual enterprise in U.S. higher education, scholars have sought to establish its credentials as an academic pursuit and have debated its characteristics. To take the most obvious example, the home page of the African Studies Association (ASA) Web site (http://www.africanstudies.org/) declares, “The African Studies Association was founded in 1957 as a non-profit organization open to all individuals and institutions interested in African affairs. Its mission is to bring together people with a scholarly and professional interest in Africa.”

Is there an African Studies establishment in the United States? Of course there is. The academic study of Africa has mushroomed since the end of the Second World War as federal dollars were invested in graduate training programs so that the United States would be able to cope with the challenges posed by the coming to independence of former colonial territories in Africa from 1956 onward. Most of this money went to major research universities. Accordingly, the training in African Studies that evolved at these centers was rooted in the historical development of western academic disciplines, the history of race and power in America, and hegemonic control over the discourse on Africa in America.

During the nineteenth century Muqdisho experienced a significant revival in its fortunes after several centuries of gradual decline from its medieval heyday. While it remained on the periphery of the Omani empire on the coast of East Africa, steady commercial penetration of Indian merchant capital based at Zanzibar inexorably drew the entire Benaadir coast into the Omani orbit. Massive infusions of slave labour transformed agricultural commodity production in the Benaadir hinterland and created a new basis for ruling-class collaboration between town and country. At Muqdisho these external factors intertwined with established internal rivalries which were based on moiety competition and the traditional search for supporting alliances in the hinterland. The end result of this complex process was increased competition and tension between the town moieties that affected both the spatial segregation of the two quarters and enabled first Omani Zanzibar and then Italy to insinuate themselves into a dominant mediating position within the urban community. At the end of the century the urban culture of Muqdisho had also been influenced by the incorporation of a large slave population. While all of these changes indicate that Muqdisho was integrally a part of the wider coastal region of East Africa, other cultural evidence establishes no less that it was still uniquely Soomaali within that context.