Using a combination of oral tradition and written documents, the authors show that Benin’s civil war was a fundamental transformation of political structure, and not simply an isolated struggle. Before 1640, Benin was centrally governed by its king with the assistance of a royally appointed administration. Difficulties in succession, coupled with changing trading patterns, allowed the administration to gain some independence and then to challenge the kings, taking away some power. The civil war matched different levels of the administration and the kings against each other, and transformed Benin from a centrally governed to a more collectively governed kingdom.

Most studies of the Columbian Exchange have not appreciated the significance of Africans in establishing plant domesticates in the Americas. African plants traversed the Atlantic as provisions aboard slave ships and slaves proved instrumental in their establishment in the New World as preferred food staples. This paper identifies the diverse crops domesticated in Africa, the intercontinental plant exchanges between Africa and Asia that occurred in the millennia before the Columbian Exchange and the role of African indigenous knowledge in establishing rice in the Americas.

State-controlled cocoa marketing was introduced in the Gold Coast during the Second World War and has had lasting impact. Most accounts of this change have emphasized the influence of metropolitan interests and ideas more conducive to state involvement in colonial economies. Although they explain the new found metropolitan willingness to ‘supply’ financial and administrative backing for state-controlled economic institutions, they neglect the sources of the Gold Coast government’s ‘demand’ for those institutions. I argue that pressures on the government to mitigate domestic social conflict caused by volatility in the world economy are crucial to understanding the shift to controlled cocoa marketing.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, European missionaries in southern Africa sought to establish their intellectual and moral authority over Africans and propagate the tenets of Christianity. Men like Jacob Döhne, Robert Moffat, John Colenso, Henry Callaway and others viewed a knowledge of African languages as key to disclosing ‘the secrets of national character’, to the translation and transmittal of ideas about the Christian ‘God’, and to accepting the ‘literal truth’ of the Bible. Africans, especially the Zulu king, Dingane, disputed these teachings in discussions about the existence of God, suitable indigenous names for such a being (including uThixo, modimo, and unkulunkulu), and his attributes (all-powerful, or merely old), arguing for the significance of metaphor rather than literalness in understanding the world.

During the early years of white administration in Southern Rhodesia, few whites spoke the local vernaculars. The state used those few, largely traders and farmers, to translate and interpret. Members of the Native Affairs Department were expected to learn ‘on the job’. However, by the early 1920s, poor language abilities in the civil services, combined with growing segregationist tendencies in the face of African competition, prompted the state to reconsider whites’ knowledge of the vernaculars. The issue raised important questions about defining the boundary between ‘natives’ and ‘civilized peoples’, interactions between white and African communities, and the long-term project for the state.

This essay explores conversion to the East African Revival as a way that Gikuyu women and men argued about moral and economic change. Rural capitalism in the 1930s and 1940s attacked the material basis of Gikuyu gender order by denying some men land. Familial stability was at stake in class formation: landless laborers could scarcely be respectable husbands. Rural elders and revivalists offered contending answers to the terrifying problem of gender trouble. Literate male elders at Tumutumu Presbyterian church used customary law and church bureaucracy to discipline young men and women. Revivalists, many of them women, talked: they confessed private sins vocally, cleansing themselves of sorcerous familial strife. Tumutumu’s debate over Revival played out as a contest between the oral politics of conversion and the bureaucratic power of church elders. Mau Mau continued the debate.