This article analyses the ambivalent legacy of Pierre Verger in the Whydah Historical Museum (Benin). Created in the Portuguese fort once used for the Atlantic slave trade and transformed into a museum in 1967, it is dedicated to the history of the region and its cultural consequences. This article examines the distinction between the way Verger used his photographs as a tool for anthropological exploration and the reinterpretation of those pictures by way of an ideological discourse once they were fixed in a museological context.

This article examines Pierre Verger’s Notes sur le culte des Orisa et Vodun à Bahia, la Baie de tous les Saints, au Brésil et à l’ancienne côte des esclaves en Afrique and aims to investigate his position in relation to the study of religion, Vodun in particular, in the African context, and his contribution to the construction of an “African traditional religion” paradigm. In Notes sur le culte des Orisa et Vodun, Verger intended to make a comparative analysis of “African sources” and “Brazilian remnants” in order to ascertain what had survived the middle passage. This article seeks to highlight the innovative perspectives Verger introduced to the study of religions in Africa, perspectives that included a wide use of historical sources and a deep involvement in field research, and to point up his different methodological position on the two sides of the Atlantic. In Africa he sought pure tradition, while in Brazil he emphasized the modernity of the African religions that proved able to survive the Atlantic passage and resist the hegemonic powers of the New World.

The article describes volumes pertaining to slavery and the slave trade in the British Parliament House of Commons Sessional Papers of the eighteenth century, published by Sheila Lambert in 1975 but seldom used by historians of Africa and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In addition, the article provides an index for the eight volumes from 1788 to 1792 that concern the slave trade. The index is arranged according to the names of individuals who provided testimony to the House of Commons or who are referred to in the testimonies, as well as according to places in Africa and the Americas that are mentioned in the testimonies. There is also a list of tables that are included in the texts and a list of ships mentioned in the testimonies, which are referenced with respect to the ships in Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. The materials were assembled in connection with the campaign to abolish the British slave trade, which was eventually achieved in 1807. As is clear from the testimonies and statistical information, the enquiry into the slave trade is a valuable source of documentary material that is relevant to scholars studying the coastal regions of Atlantic Africa in the eighteenth century and the trans-Atlantic slave trade during the period when the British trade was at its height.

This article examines a previously overlooked publication titled The Indian Voice of British East Africa, Uganda and Zanzibar. Printed in Nairobi between 1911 and 1913, the Indian Voice has been dismissed by some scholars as “insignificant” in the wider context of Kenya’s militant press. As an important tool for discovering, exploring and analyzing the nature of racial hierarchies, diasporic identity and belonging, this article argues that the Indian Voice can be used to understand how “new kinds of self-representation” both emerged and dissolved in early twentieth-century East Africa. By contextualizing the historical significance of the newspaper, it demonstrates how the Indian Voice offers an invaluable means of generating new insights into the complex cultural and political formulations of Indian identities in diaspora. In doing so, this article contributes to remapping the historical perspective of East African Indians within the early colonial period.

This article suggests that colonial African historiography was shaped both by the textual forms and conventions associated with local historical knowledge and by the complex political interests which emerged under colonial rule. Based on a case study of two linked debates in the small Yoruba town of Ode Remo, the article argues that beyond narratives, local historical knowledge was also contained, sometimes opaquely, in a variety of other genres and practices. During the colonial period, traditionally segmented and distributed forms of knowledge were brought together in civic debates to constitute a more general history. But while historical accounts could be inflected under political pressure or even to reflect widespread local ambitions, the enduring presence of historical knowledge in textual forms used in everyday life meant that there nonetheless remained an overall sense of what was true within the community.

This article engages with existing scholarship that explores how colonial knowledge was constructed. Focusing on the region of Borno it will highlight the ways in which European officials collaborated with African elites when writing official histories of the region (1902–1960). These exchanges were indicative of both the ruling Kanemi dynasty’s efforts to assert their authority in Borno, as well as the efforts made by foreign colonial officials to advance their careers.

Between 1808 and 1862, officers primarily from the British navy liberated approximately 175,000 enslaved Africans from transatlantic slavers. Information on more than half of this group has survived in bound ledger books. Based on the assessment of extant data for more than 92,000 Liberated Africans whose information was copied in at times duplicate and triplicate form in both London- and Freetown-based registers, this essay explores the pitfalls and possibilities associated with using the Registers for Liberated Africans as sources for historical analysis of the slave trade. The article explains the relationship of multiple copies of the registers to each other, demonstrates the link between the African names they contain and ethnolinguistic identities, argues for crowd-sourcing – drawing on the knowledge of the diasporic public and not just scholars – and, finally, shows the importance of such an approach for pre-colonial African history.

Throughout the 1920s, British officials in London and Accra dedicated considerable time and bureaucratic energy to the planning and construction of Takoradi harbor, an ambitious project that, they expected, would revolutionize the Gold Coast’s economic prospects. But by 1930, their efforts had created a structure beset with constructional defects, considerable flaws, and financial shortcomings. This article seeks to explain the sizeable gap separating Takoradi-envisioned from Takoradi-realized by examining the massive paper record compiled during the harbor’s planning and construction. Demonstrating that the structure was born largely from illusion, affect, and a particular version of “common sense” thinking, it encourages historians to not only give further attention to the detailed, and often overwhelming, corpus of blueprints, reports, and correspondence that such projects engendered, but to use them to reflect upon the ways in which colonial statecraft actually sought to limit, rather than expand, the knowledge it had at its disposal.

This text on the Wiriyamu massacre of 1972 in Mozambique uses fieldwork and archival materials to address its historical context, the methods used to collect data for the narrative, the trajectory that the narrative took to reach the pages of The Times of London, the contest that ensued over its veracity, and its eventual acceptance as true by all parties concerned. The text concludes that both the context as well as the construction of the massacre narrative was much more complex and nuanced than the extant literature suggests. Its revelation too was governed by a series of factors, some directly related to the story and the timing of its arrival in London, and others entirely disconnected from the text of the massacre as received by The Times of London. The text discusses in the end how both the preponderance of evidence and a change in regime in Portugal among other factors delivered the narrative safely for all to agree on its veracity as a common text.

The passage of Britain’s 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act increased the levels of funding for social welfare projects such as housing in its colonies and mandates. This state of the archives article provides an overview of holdings on African housing construction in Dar es Salaam found in the British and Tanzania National Archives. It highlights archival records that outline housing research, official development plans, proposed housing schemes, and the actual results of these schemes. It also discusses some unexpectedly relevant files that were found by broadening search terms.

Establishing a comparison between so-called “Latin” America and “Portuguese-speaking” Africa may well prove useful in highlighting certain major differences between those countries of America and Africa having undergone early colonization. But the main difference will not concern the hundred and fifty years between the independences of the early nineteenth and those of the late (1974-1975) twentieth century. It will lie in the very nature of the states created, on the one hand, by independences without decolonization - the colonial (Latin) states - and, on the other hand, by independence with decolonization - the decolonized (African) states: states, that is, which are differently embedded into colonialities of power. But such a comparison will also help to bring out certain common features stemming from the “longue durée” of Iberian colonizations. One such feature, despite the distance involved, is the Creole issue: the persistence and political importance of social milieus stemming from the first age of colonization. Although those old colonial elites were pre-capitalist - in the sense of not accumulating via the capitalist mode of production - they were, however, fully integrated into the merchant capitalist world-system.

Historically subaltern groups envisage new possibilities for the creation of community museums and exhibits. This seems to be particularly true of the Global South and, even more so, of Sub-Saharan Africa and the African diaspora to Southern America – two regions of the world where, when it concerns ethno-racial minorities and social movements, presential museums and “actual” archives have more often than not been poorly funded, ill-equipped, and underscored. This article teases out the process of creating such a digital museum that focuses on African and Afro-Brazilian heritage. It is a technological and political experiment that is being developed in a country experiencing a process of rediscovery and of the patrimonialization of a set of elements of popular culture, within which “Africa” as a trope has moved from being generally considered a historical onus to (Western-oriented) progress to become a bonus for a country that is discovering itself both multiculturally and as part of the powerful group of BRIC nations (Brazil/Russia/India/China).