African History Commons^™

The Usambara Knowledge Project: Place As Archive In A Tanzanian Mountain Range, Chris A. Conte

History Faculty Publications

The essay chronicles the early phases of a digital history project on landscape change in the mountains of eastern Tanzania. In collecting sources for a land and culture narrative, the project aims ultimately to create an archive that is locally produced in Tanzania and maintained by Utah State University Library's Special Collections and Archives division. The project draws on more than thirty early twentieth-century landscape photographs from the Usambara Mountains in northeastern Tanzania by Walther Dobbertin, a professional photographer living in German East Africa. In the fall of 2015, team members scouted the sites for repeat photographs. The following summer, …

Courting American Capital: Public Relations And The Business Of Selling Ivorian Capitalism In The U.S., 1960-1980, Abou B. Bamba

History Faculty Publications

This chapter is an invitation to reimagine the roles assigned to players in the history of capitalism on the global stage. It challenges aspects of the historiography of capitalism in the twentieth century, which tend to center on historical actors and institutions of the Global North. Even when actors in the Global South are discussed, it is usually to portray them as passive victims of an intractable system. By focusing on the Ivory Coast and its economic diplomacy toward the United States, I seek to destabilize this general picture.

Cameroon's Biya Is Africa's Oldest President: Assessing His 38 Years In Power, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Cameroon’s President Paul Biya celebrated his 88th birthday recently, making him the oldest president in Africa. He has been in power for 38 years. Birthday celebrations held across the country were met with protest by the opposition, demanding that he step down. So, how has he acquitted himself in office, and what has been his legacy for Cameroon?

President Paul Biya And Cameroon’S Anglophone Crisis: A Catalog Of Miscalculations, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

The historical literature on Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis traces its origin to the failure to implement the Foumban Constitutional Agreement. The current study adds a new perspective: Based on extensive field work in Cameroon and a variety of primary and secondary sources, this paper argues that Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis, which began in October 2016, degenerated into violence because of a catalogue of miscalculations made by President Paul Biya’s regime. It also argues that the crisis has had a devastating impact on the way of life in the Anglophone region. This paper concludes with recommendations on what needs to be done to …

“‘Curating Kisumu’ And ‘Curating East Africa’: Academic Collaboration And Public Engagement In The Digital Age”, J. Mark Souther, Meshack Owino

History Faculty Publications

This essay examines the origin, permutations, potentials, challenges, and implications of two successive, collaborative public history research, teaching, and learning projects undertaken by the Department of History at Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, and the Department of History and Archeology at Maseno University, Kisumu, Kenya between 2014 and 2018. The two projects explored how opportunities created by the mobile revolution in Africa could be leveraged to generate new ways of acquiring historical information and knowledge between students and faculty in universities separated by enormous distances and by disparate social, economic, and political experiences. Specifically, the projects examined how the cellphone …

Cameroon’S Relations Toward Nigeria: A Foreign Policy Of Pragmatism, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Existing literature argues that the tactics of Cameroon foreign policy have been conservative, weak and timid. This study refutes that perspective. Based on extensive and previously unused primary sources obtained from Cameroon’s Ministry of External Relations and from the nation’s archives in Buea and Yaoundé, this study argues that Cameroon’s foreign policy was neither timid nor makeshift. Its strategy was one of pragmatism. By examining the nation’s policy toward Nigeria in the reunification of Cameroon, the Nigerian civil war, the Bakassi Peninsula crisis and Boko Haram, the study maintains that, while the nation’s policy was cautious, its leaders focused on …

‘Mightier Than Marx’: Hassoldt Davis And American Cold War Politics In Postwar Ivory Coast, Abou B. Bamba

History Faculty Publications

Using the travels of Hassoldt Davis in Ivory Coast to explore the global Cold War in French West Africa in the 1950s, this article argues that the main line of confrontation in the postwar era did not always pit Americans against Russians. In many instances, the struggle for the mind and soul of Africans was between the Americans and the French. The study highlights the role of everyday technology in the expansion of the American informal empire. By focusing on Davis and the significance of low-tech artifacts, the article suggests that in our scrutiny of Cold War science/technology, we need …

Un Nouveau Miracle Économique Ivoirien?, Vincent Hiribarren, Abou B. Bamba

History Faculty Publications

Questions à Abou Bamba, associate professor d’Histoire et d’Etudes Africaines à Gettysburg College (Etats-Unis). Il est l’auteur de African Miracle, African Mirage: Transnational Politics and the Paradox of Modernization in Ivory Coast (Ohio University Press, 2016).

Was There A Regular Provincia Africa In The Second Century?, Daniel J. Gargola

History Faculty Publications

Scholars agree that Africa became a province after the destruction of Carthage in 146, but close examination of the evidence for the practice reveals that it is, at best, limited. Instead, the senate probably began to send magistrates to the region with any regularity at some uncertain point after the conclusion of the war against Jugurtha. This interpretation of the evidence brings Roman practice in Africa more into line with recent models of Roman imperialism in the second century, in which consuls and praetors were dispatched primarily to wage war, exert military pressure, or preserve Rome's position in an unstable …

Empire, Patronage And A Revolt In The Kingdom Of Kongo, Jelmer Vos

History Faculty Publications

This article argues that the famous Kongo uprising of 1913 epitomized a breakdown of patron-client relationships between the Portuguese colonial state, the Kongo rulers at São Salvador, and their local constituents. On the one hand, the colonial imposition of contract labor undermined a social contract that held the king of Kongo accountable to senior chiefs and their followers. The subsequent revolt against the incumbent ruler, Manuel Kiditu, is explained in moral economy terms as a collective response to the repudiation of the rules of social reciprocity by Kiditu and his assistants. On the other hand, a breakdown in relations of …

The Family Politics Of The Federation Of South African Women: A History Of Public Motherhood In Women’S Antiracist Activism, Meghan Healy-Clancy

History Faculty Publications

This article reexamines the roots of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW), the first national organization of women from all state-defined racial groups united against apartheid, founded in 1954. It argues that the deep history of public motherhood in southern Africa was what made FEDSAW possible: biological and symbolic motherhood had long been associated with responsibility for public social life in the region. Moreover, the article demonstrates that the first half of the twentieth century represented a time of profound transformation in the ways that women in southern Africa talked about and experienced motherhood. The influences of both missionary …

Adolescence Versus Politics: Metaphors In Late Colonial Uganda, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

This article discusses the British deployment of metaphors of adolescence in late colonial Uganda. Topics include the psychological, physiological, sociological and anthropological implications of a modern stage of adolescent life, the presence and persistence of ideas of adolescence in the country, and British engagement in developmental politics and institutions.

The Impact Of Kenya African Soldiers On The Creation And Evolution Of The Pioneer Corps During The Second World War, Meshack Owino

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Slander, Buzz And Spin: Telegrams, Politics And Global Communications In The Uganda Protectorate, 1945-55, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

Ugandans, from the earliest days of empire, did not simply receive information and messages from a distant Britain. Instead, with methods rooted in pre-colonial understandings of communications as establishing personal, affective, social closeness and reciprocities, they invested in education, travel and correspondence and built wide-ranging information and communications networks. Networked, they understood imperial institutions and pushed their own priorities via both official and unofficial channels. By the 1940s, political activists combined these information networks with the modern technologies of newspapers, telegrams and global press campaigns to destabilize colonial hierarchies. Generating slanderous allegations, repeating them to generate popular buzz, interpreting and …

Ugandan Politics World War Ii (1939-1949), Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

World War II shaped Uganda's postwar politics through local understandings of global war.¹ Individually and collectively Ugandans saw the war as an opportunity rather than simply a crisis. During the War, the acquired wealth and demonstrated loyalty to a stressed British empire, inverting paternalistic imperial relations and investing loyalty and money in ways they expected would be reciprocated with political and economic rewards. For the 77,000 Ugandan enlisted soldiers and for the civilians who grew coffee and cotton, contributed money and organizational skills, and followed the war news, the war was not a desperate struggle for survival. Ideological aspects …

Conceiving The Tanganyika-Zanzibar Union In The Midst Of The Cold War: Internal And International Factors, Ethan Sanders

History Faculty Publications

To what extent was international pressure placed on Nyerere and Karume to unify their two states in April 1964? The argument made is that even though Americans were initially very pleased with the outcome of the Union—because they thought it would help stem the spread of communism in the region—this was not a Western-initiated plan forced upon East African leaders. Indeed, the evidence shows that Americans were largely in the dark and in fact very frustrated by their lack of influence on the situation. Instead, the Union merely served as a confluence of African and American interests. The internal factors …

Tennessee’S Black Postwar Emigration Movements, 1866–1880, Selena Sanderfer

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Local Critiques Of Global Development: Patriotism In Late Colonial Buganda, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

Interviewed by an incredulous anthropologist in 1955, an elderly Paulo Lukongwa insisted that more than half a century of colonial development policies had brought almost nothing to his country. Writing was new and wonderful, he admitted, and he gave European colonizers credit for cars and bicycles that made travel faster. But otherwise, nothing was new. Martin Southwold, the young anthropologist, suggested that clocks were new, and Lukongwa pointed out that they’d had roosters to wake them up. Surely the gramophone was progress, Southwold asserted, and Lukongwa responded that when they had wanted music, they called people to play—and what was …

An Unconventional Challenge To Apartheid: The Ivorian Dialogue Diplomacy With South Africa, 1960-1978, Abou B. Bamba

History Faculty Publications

This article focuses on the dialogue diplomacy that Ivorian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny initiated in the late 1960s to engage apartheid South Africa. Although contemporary observers and subsequent scholars (have) derided the scheme as an act of acquiescence and even betrayal, I argue that Ivory Coast's dialogue diplomacy was neither accommodationist nor dependent on the prodding of neocolonial powers such as France. A Pan-Africanist extension of the home-grown neotraditional practice of Dialogue ivoirienne, the diplomatic initiative never got the backing of other African states. A close analysis of the Ivory Coast's maneuvers in the context of an increasing radicalization of …

Education And Literacy, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

Loram's definition of education as planned by the powerful for the social construction of useful and 'good' Africans, along with his implicit concerns about bad or disruptive literate individuals, represented the views of many educationists during the colonial era. Such views, moreover, survived the end of colonial rule, re-emerging at the centre of shifting debates over how educational institutions and pedagogies should either persist or be challenged. Social utility defined education, not its specific content in reading, arithmetic, religious faith, business, or gardening. Struggles over educational planning were less over whether it was a form of social control than over …

At The Edge Of The Modern?: Diplomacy, Public Relations, And Media Practices During Houphouët-Boigny's 1962 Visit To The United States, Abou B. Bamba

History Faculty Publications

Toward the end of the first decade after the decolonization of most African countries, there emerged a scholarly polemic about the weight of bureaucratic politics in the making of foreign policy in the Third World. A mirror of the reigning modernization paradigm that informed most postwar area studies and social sciences, the discussion unintentionally indexed the narcissism of a hegemonic discourse on political development and statecraft. Graham Allison and Morton Halperin—the original proponents of the bureaucratic model—implied in their largely U.S.-centric model that such a paradigm was not applicable to non-industrialized countries since the newly decolonized countries, for the most …

Triangulating A Modernization Experiment: The United States, France And The Making Of The Kossou Project In Central Ivory Coast, Abou B. Bamba

History Faculty Publications

Toward the end of the 1960s, authorities in the Ivory Coast decided to build the Kossou Dam, a hydro-electric dam on the Bandama River near the geographic center of the Francophone country. Initially conceived as a technopolitical measure to meet the growing energy demand of the most economically successful country of France's former colonies, the damming experiment soon emerged as a multipurpose regional development project aimed at correcting the regional disparities that tarnished the Ivory Coast's phenomenal economic growth.

This article focuses on the Kossou modernization experience and the sociopolitical transformations that it caused. I argue that the nationalist enthusiasm …

Mémoires Épistémiques Et Pouvoir D’Experts Dans Une Postcolonie Africaine: Le Cas De L’Usage Des Savoirs Africanistes Par L’Orstom En Côte D’Ivoire, Abou B. Bamba

History Faculty Publications

Partant du constat que l’Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer (ORSTOM) s’est impose par son travail de recherche appliquee comme le concepteur primordial de la planification du developpement en Cote d’Ivoire a la fin des annees soixante, cet article montre que la mobilisation du souvenir des discours institues en science (ou memoires epistemiques) par les chercheurs de l’ORSTOM y a joue pour beaucoup. En se reappropriant les savoirs africanistes laisses par leurs predecesseurs que leur acces privilegie a la “bibliotheque coloniale” a rendu possible, les orstomiens en poste dans la postcolonie ivoirienne ont reussi a supplanter non seulement …

The Man Who Would Be Caliph: A Sixteenth Century Sultan's Bid For An African Empire, Stephen Cory

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Slavery-Era Disclosure And Atlantic Commerce, Keith R. Allen, Jelmer Vos

History Faculty Publications

Explores the connections between greater Atlantic Ocean commerce and those northern European businesses that invested in and profited from the slave trade, from the 16th century to 1888, the year that Brazil outlawed slavery - the last country in the Americas to do so. Presents the results of an in-depth case study of the predecessors of the Dutch bank ABN AMRO regarding their financial involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and its extensive commercial network in the Western Hemisphere, which was centered on the Americas.

Qu'est-Ce Que La Postcolonie? Contribution À Un Débat Francophone Trop Afrocentré, Abou B. Bamba

History Faculty Publications

Cet essai n’a rien d’une élaboration philosophique. Même si la question du titre fait songer à un Kant du « Was ist Aufklärung ? », un Sartre de Qu’est-ce la littérature ? ou encore à un Foucault de « Qu’est-ce que les lumières? ». Il a moins la prétention d’être un exercice théorique. Encore que les discussions sur la postcolonialité ne le sont guère que très rarement. Plutôt, ce texte est la contribution d’un américaniste, observateur de surcroît des sociétés et espaces publics francoafricains de l’après Deuxième Guerre mondiale ; contribution à un débat initié— il y a quelques temps …

'Subterranean Evil' And 'Tumultuous Riot' In Buganda: Authority And Alienation At King's College, Budo, 1942, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

Staff petitions, sexual and disciplinary scandal and open riot pushed Buganda's leaders to close Budo College on the eve of Kabaka (King) Muteesa II's coronation. The upheaval at the school included a teachers' council that pro-claimed ownership of the school, student leaders who manipulated the headmaster through scandal and school clubs and associations that celebrated affiliation over discipline. Instead of enacting and celebrating imperial partnership and order in complex, well-choreographed coronation rituals, the school's disruption delineated the fractures and struggles over rightful authority, order and patronage within colonial Buganda, marking out a future of tumultuous political transition.

Grandfathers, Grandsons, Morality, And Radical Politics In Late Colonial Buganda, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

Late in 1948, one of the radical Luganda newspapers in Buganda printed Dionizio Sifirwakange's rhetorical and distinctly aggrieved questions: "Has it become a crime for schoolchildren to evince patriotic sentiments? Why does the Government prohibit the assembly of the Bataka at the houses of their 'grandfathers'?"¹

Sifirwakange was complaining about the repressive response of the Kingdom of Buganda and its ally, the Protectorate of Uganda, to a political and social movement whose most visible adherents were the patriotic schoolchildren, along with other youth and men of all ages, who assembled by the thousands at the homes of their grandfathers …

Tickets, Concerts And School Fees: Money And New Christian Communities In Colonial Zimbabwe, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

It is worth exploring how this new identity emerged. In standard mission history narratives, European missionaries emphasized their own role and that of God, appealing for more funds from Europe and America within a heroic evangelical narrative which characterized missionaries as pioneers harvesting African people, like ripe grain, for Jesus. This theme has been echoed by African church historians who have tended to focus on church leadership and the ways officials overcame challenges and built institutions.² More recently, anthropologists and historians have emphasized how communities under pressure from colonial contact, conquest, and institutionalization found in Christianity a way of …

Force And Colonial Development In Eastern Uganda, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

This article explores why and how administrators and missionaries in Eastern Uganda came to associate progress and development with the need to whip, coerce, and imprison women, developing new institutions for the violent control of wives that went far beyond more common patterns of informal patriarchal control. New Native Courts took over from husbands in arranging for troublesome wives to be whipped. New mission associations of church, teachers’ and evangelists’ groups, and church men’s groups worked to establish Christian patriarchal control over wives who rejected husbands and Christ. Both officials and missionaries understood clearly that the government and missions needed …