This article critically examines the antislavery activism of Francis P. Fearon, an African activist based in late nineteenth-century Accra. His correspondence with the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) provides a profound insight into the dynamics of African abolitionism. By analysing a collection of letters housed in the APS archive, this study sheds light on Fearon’s commitment to abolishing slavery, driven by his principled opposition to family separation. The article underscores Fearon’s active involvement in a network of African antislavery advocates who sought to disrupt the institution of slavery through legal challenges and international advocacy. This research extends the growing literature on African abolitionism, which primarily focuses on the efforts of African missionaries, educated elites, and grassroots movements, adding a new dimension by exploring the operations of a dedicated network committed to the abolitionist cause.

This study discusses the processes of increasing social malaise and an “oppositional mood” in the Cape Verdean island of Santo Antão, where growing frustration between 1975 and 1990 led to the building of massive political opposition against the single-party regime in the archipelago. Early scrutiny of the shortcomings of independent administration, anger about the installation of a new police force, resettlement schemes, a failed agrarian reform, regime violence to achieve that reform, and a generalised mood of decline in the second half of the 1980s, constitute different elements explaining the unrest in that island. Based on newly available, local archives as an innovative source, the interpretation of a remote Cape Verdean opposition island also addresses the potential of studying opposition against “winning parties” and regimes after independence in wider regional frameworks, referring to discontent and “oppositional mood” elsewhere in postcolonial (Lusophone) Africa.

In 1975, the Ugandan state established an Economic Crimes Tribunal to investigate and penalize smuggling, hoarding, overcharging, and other commercial malfeasance. In the coming years, innumerable Ugandans were arrested and charged with contravening the state's economic regulations. Prior observers have seen this as another instance of a capricious state, but in this article, I demonstrate the popular investment in economic regulation. Ugandans demanded better stewardship of money and things because they were aghast at the ungovernable world of commodities. For one thing, the inaccessibility of so-called “essential commodities” — sugar and salt, preeminently — impeded ethical expectations surrounding social reproduction, hospitality, and masculine respectability. More troubling, essential commodities were not completely unavailable; rather, they were available on exclusionary and confusing terms. Relative deprivation was more upsetting than absolute scarcity because it offended a sense of consumptive entitlement. As a result, it was not only the state that accused citizens of economic crimes. There were widespread accusations in which allegation and denunciation circulated among neighbors, families, and bureaucrats in an urgent effort to discipline commodities and people.

This paper constructs the intellectual histories of learned societies in Ghana to illuminate African agency in pursuing knowledge production and dissemination. Academics and politicians founded some of Africa’s first scientific societies in Ghana. Previous scholarship on scientific research and higher education in Africa has overlooked the role of disciplines-based learned societies and national academies. This paper contributes to that literature using a historical comparative approach to construct the histories of learned societies that emerged during the colonial and postcolonial periods to understand how such scientific associations contributed to research productivity. I advance two arguments based on case studies of three scientific societies. First, there is linearity in the evolution of learned societies. Second, the institutionalization of scientific communities along interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary lines provided flexibility and enabled learned associations to contribute relevant knowledge to the “developmental state” that the political leaders were constructing.

The central role of Gold Coast societies, ports, and cities in the emerging Atlantic circuit is critical to understanding the history of the Atlantic world. The study of the causes and effects of Gold Coast societies’ transition from African polities and economies to transatlantic entrepots and trading emporiums and their subsequent impact on the Americas has been the hallmark of Ray Kea's scholarship. Since the beginning of his career, Kea has been a significant contributor to the study of the African Atlantic, and the field's various debates and disciplinary evolutions. While many scholars of the Gold Coast recognize Kea's work as foundational to scholarship on the Gold Coast, engagement with his work has not been rigorous. Kea is often cited in bibliographies and aspects of his work have served as benchmarks for other forays into Gold Coast histories. However, there is a need to go beyond an appreciation for Kea as a trailblazer, passing reference of his scholarship, and bibliographic citation of his work to a more thorough and consistent discourse with his major ideas and propositions. Kea has been, for example, adept at integrating innovations and ideas in various disciplinary arenas. He dexterously applies Marxist and postmodernist theories, diverse historiographies of the Atlantic world, and conceptual tools to traditional archival and oral historical data in his analyses of Gold Coast and diasporic societies. This review essay argues for Kea's importance and the need for a deeper engagement with his work in the field by putting his work into conversation with both classic Atlantic historiographies and recent scholarship that has built off Kea's.

This paper examines the development of the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies (IAS), arguing that the landscape of decolonial epistemology is more complex than is often assumed. Drawing on new archival documents it maps out the different landscape of ideas regarding its decolonial origins — phase one (1948–50), phase two (1954–61), and phase three (1960–63) — not only to elucidate problems of defining what decolonial work should entail but also as a historical study of how people associated with the IAS contributed to defining and activating a decolonial project. It shows Nkrumah’s specific instrumentality to its emergence through an African-centred or “Afroepistemic” approach to African Studies. It also highlights how the decolonial imperative was shaped by different historical moments.

Godwin Mbikusita-Lewanika, the founding president of Zambia’s first nationalist organisation, is now remembered as a staunch supporter of colonial rule. Such figures are not uncommon and are often termed “loyalists,” a term that is usually understood in the literature as a fixed category that either dwindled in the face of racial oppression or was a choice shaped and hardened by conflict. Lewanika, however, moved easily between different sides, reinventing himself as an anticolonial nationalist, trade unionist, colonial loyalist, and Lozi traditional monarchist as circumstances warranted. The tumult of the mid-twentieth century opened up new opportunities and Lewanika seized roles that were not previously available. Biographies of anticolonial nationalists often argue they turned to political action when their education and ambitions clashed with the highly-circumscribed roles available under colonialism. Lewanika’s life was the opposite. He carved out a prominent place for himself in the colonial order and then in independent Zambia.

This article seeks to explain how Mau Mau combatants selected and killed their civilian targets. The central argument is that Mau Mau members shared a moral logic that informed whom they killed, how, and why they did it. This moral logic was partly based on traditional Kikuyu ethics of violence, which were widely held and traceable to the late nineteenth century. Yet it was also a logic born out of novel, albeit contested, ethical convictions that developed in the context of an asymmetrical anticolonial war in 1950s-Kenya. Using captured guerrilla documents and oral history interviews with Mau Mau veterans, the article analyzes the perceived offenses that civilians committed against Mau Mau, the motives of Mau Mau assailants, and the internal conflicts that arose regarding the killings of some civilians. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that the moral logic of Mau Mau killings was firmly rooted in a dialectical tension between longstanding Kikuyu ethics of violence and the harsh realities of waging an asymmetrical anticolonial war. It also shows that Mau Mau debates over who to kill formed part of a larger process of sacralization, whereby members of the movement reimagined what they deemed sacred, moral, and just measures for conducting the war.