From the 1720s to the 1940s, parents in the kingdom and later colony of Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin) developed and sustained the common practice of girl fostering, or "entrusting." Transferring their daughters at a young age into foster homes, Dahomeans created complex relationships of mutual obligation, kinship, and caregiving that also exploited girls' labor for the economic benefit of the women who acted as their social mothers. Drawing upon oral tradition, historic images, and collective memories, Jessica Reuther pieces together the fragmentary glimpses of girls' lives contained in colonial archives within the framework of traditional understandings about entrustment. Placing these girls and their social mothers at the center of history brings to light their core contributions to local and global political economies, even as the Dahomean monarchy, global trade, and colonial courts reshaped girlhood norms and fostering practices.

In The Bonds of Kinship in Dahomey: Portraits of West African Girlhood, 1720–1940 (Indiana UP, 2025) Reuther reveals that the social, economic, and political changes wrought by the expansion of Dahomey in the eighteenth century, the shift to "legitimate" trade in agricultural products in the nineteenth century, and the imposition of French colonialism in the twentieth all fundamentally altered—and were altered by—the intimate practice of entrusting female children between households. Dahomeans also valorized this process as a crucial component of being "well-raised"—a sentiment that continues into the present, despite widespread Beninese opposition to modern-day forms of child labor.

Dr. Jessica Reuther is an associate professor of African and world history at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, USA. She came to Ball State after earning her PhD in African History from Emory University in Atlanta, GA, in 2016. Dr. Reuther is a historian of Africa, specializing in Atlantic West Africa and French West Africa from the 16th century to the present. She has conducted archival and oral history research in Benin, Senegal, France, Switzerland, and the United States.

You can learn more about her work here.

Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in post-independence Ghana.

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From the acclaimed author of 1177 B.C., a spellbinding account of the archaeological find that opened a window onto the vibrant diplomatic world of the ancient Near East In 1887, an Egyptian woman made an astonishing discovery among the ruins of the heretic king Akhenaten’s capital city, a site now known as Amarna. She found a cache of cuneiform tablets, nearly four hundred in all, that included correspondence between the pharaohs and the mightiest powers of the day, such as the Hittites, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed (Princeton University Press, 2025) tells the story of the Amarna Letters and the dramatic world of the Bronze Age they revealed. Blending scholarly expertise with painstaking detective work, Eric Cline describes the spectacular discovery, the fierce competition among dealers and museums to acquire the tablets, and the race by British and German scholars to translate them. Dating to the middle of the fourteenth century BCE and the time of Tutankhamun’s immediate predecessors, Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten, the Amarna Letters are the only royal archive from New Kingdom Egypt known to exist. In them, we learn of royal marriages, diplomatic negotiations, gift-giving, intrigue, and declarations of brotherly love between powerful rulers as well as demands made by the petty kings in Canaan who owed allegiance to Egypt’s pharaohs. A monumental achievement, Love, War, and Diplomacy transports readers to the glorious age of the Amarna Letters and the colonial era that brought them to light and reveals how the politics, posturing, and international intrigues of the ancient Near East are not so unlike today’s.

Eric H. Cline is professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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When the African Union was founded in 2002, it promised to deliver a more united, prosperous, and people-centred continent. Two decades later, Africa’s political landscape tells a more complex story: one of ambition and frustration, democratic progress and reversal, renewed activism, and enduring inequality. How far has the AU come in shaping “The Africa We Want”, and what does its evolving role reveal about power, governance, and the continent’s place in a rapidly changing world?

In this episode, CEDAR host Temitayo Odeyemi talks to Dr Adeoye Akinola about his new co-edited volume African Union and Agenda 2063: The Past, Present, and Future (UJ Press, 2025) to unpack what over two decades of continental politics teach us about Africa’s democratic future, regional integration, and global voice.

Adeoye O. Akinola is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg, where he leads the African Union Studies Unit. His research spans African political economy, governance, peace and security, and regional integration. His other publications include The Resurgence of Military Coups and Democratic Relapse in Africa (Palgrave 2024) and The Political Economy of Xenophobia in Africa (Springer 2018).

Temitayo Isaac Odeyemi is a Research Fellow in Democratic Resilience at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR). His research examines institutions, actors, and democratic engagement in Africa.

The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Election, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the forces that promote and undermine democratic government around the world.

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Explores forgotten solidarity with African liberation struggles through the life of Black Chicagoan Prexy Nesbitt.

For many civil rights activists, the Vietnam War brought the dangers of US imperialism and the global nature of antiracist struggle into sharp relief. Martha Biondi tells the story of one such group of activists who built an internationalist movement in Chicago committed to liberation everywhere but especially to ending colonialism and apartheid in Africa.

Among their leaders was Prexy Nesbitt. Steeped from an early age in stories of Garveyism and labor militancy, Nesbitt was powerfully influenced by his encounters with the exiled African radicals he met in Dar es Salaam, London, and across the United States. Operating domestically and abroad, Nesbitt's cohort worked closely with opponents of Portuguese and white minority rule in Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. Rather than promoting a US conception of Black self-determination, they took ideas from African anticolonial leaders and injected them into US foreign policy debates.

The biography of a man but even more so of a movement, We Are Internationalists: Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberation (U California Press, 2025) reveals the underappreciated influence of a transformative Black solidarity project.

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The Future of Employment in Africa: Demography, Labor Markets and Welfare explores the major trends that will define the face of the sub-Saharan continent in the next three decades. The near doubling of Africa’s population by 2050 will lead to more than twenty million new job seekers entering the African labor market every year until then. Right now, Africa doesn’t seem able to offer jobs to this many people, resulting in possible unrest and intra-African or intercontinental migration flows, including to Europe. Climate change creates additional migratory pressure as it threatens the future of agriculture and livestock.

The author explores the opportunities for increased job creation in Africa. Fortunately, Africa has some major strengths. Africans excel in market-creating innovation: the ability to see market opportunities and innovations that others do not. Many Africans create their own jobs through micro and small enterprises. A young well-trained middle class, familiar with digital technologies, is emerging. Africa’s abundant natural resources attract global powers like China aspiring to secure access to critical raw materials. The author challenges pessimistic message about the continent and provides an optimistic view of Africa’s future.

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The Future of Employment in Africa: Demography, Labor Markets and Welfare explores the major trends that will define the face of the sub-Saharan continent in the next three decades. The near doubling of Africa’s population by 2050 will lead to more than twenty million new job seekers entering the African labor market every year until then. Right now, Africa doesn’t seem able to offer jobs to this many people, resulting in possible unrest and intra-African or intercontinental migration flows, including to Europe. Climate change creates additional migratory pressure as it threatens the future of agriculture and livestock.

The author explores the opportunities for increased job creation in Africa. Fortunately, Africa has some major strengths. Africans excel in market-creating innovation: the ability to see market opportunities and innovations that others do not. Many Africans create their own jobs through micro and small enterprises. A young well-trained middle class, familiar with digital technologies, is emerging. Africa’s abundant natural resources attract global powers like China aspiring to secure access to critical raw materials. The author challenges pessimistic message about the continent and provides an optimistic view of Africa’s future.

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After centuries of colonial rule, the end of Angola’s three-decade civil war in 2002 provided an irresistible opportunity for the government to reimagine the Luanda cityscape. Awash with petrodollars cultivated through strategic foreign relationships, President José Eduardo dos Santos rolled out a national reconstruction program that sought to transform Angola’s capital into what he considered to be a modern, world-class metropolis. Until funds dried up in 2014, the program—in conjunction with sweeping private investments in real estate—involved mass demolitions of vernacular architecture to make way for high-rise buildings, large-scale housing projects, and commercial centers. The program thus underestimated the values enshrined in the materials and designs of Luanda’s existing “informally” constructed neighborhoods, or musseques.

The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) explores the political significance of aesthetics in the remaking of the city. Dr. Claudia Gastrow’s archival and ethnographic work, which includes interviews with city planners, architects, nonprofit leaders, and urban dwellers, shows how government infrastructure projects and foreign-inspired designs came to embody displacement and exclusion for many. This, Dr. Gastrow argues, catalyzed a countermovement, an aesthetic dissent rooted in critically reframing informal urbanism as Indigenous—a move that enabled the possibility of recognizing the political potential of informal settlements as spaces that produce belonging.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The dynamic and interconnected ways Afghans and Iranians invented their modern selves through literature.

Contrary to the presumption that literary nationalism in the Global South emerged through contact with Europe alone, Reading Across Borders: Afghans, Iranians, and Literary Nationalism (University of Texas Press, 2024) demonstrates how the cultural forms of Iran and Afghanistan as nation-states arose from their shared Persian heritage and cross-cultural exchange in the twentieth century. In this book, Aria Fani charts the individuals, institutions, and conversations that made this exchange possible, detailing the dynamic and interconnected ways Afghans and Iranians invented their modern selves through new ideas about literature.

Fani illustrates how voluntary and state-funded associations of readers helped formulate and propagate "literature" as a recognizable notion, adapting and changing Persian concepts to fit this modern idea. Focusing on early twentieth-century periodicals with readers in Afghan and Iranian cities and their diaspora, Fani exposes how nationalism intensified—rather than severed—cultural contact among two Persian-speaking societies amidst the diverging and competing demands of their respective nation-states. This interconnected history was ultimately forgotten, shaping many of the cultural disputes between Iran and Afghanistan today.

Aria Fani is an associate professor and director of Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. He serves as the current deputy editor of Iranian Studies and is a co-investigator of the Translation Studies Hub at UW.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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In Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa (Cambridge UP, 2021), Kalle Kananoja tells the story of how pre-colonial communities throughout the west coast of Africa employed a wide range of medical and spiritual strategies to treat all kinds of diseases. In the sixteenth century, the arrival of European traders and colonists initiated an exchange of healing knowledge that moved across the Atlantic for the next three-hundred years. The initial links in this chain of exchanges were established by European settlers or visitors who, given the limited number of European doctors and medications available, sought the services of African healers whose methods were often seen as more suited and efficacious in the local environments. Missionaries, travelers and botanists also added to these exchanges by collecting and systematizing some of the knowledge they acquired from African informants.

By documenting the richness and mobility of African healing knowledge, Kananoja points that even though plants, remedies and practices from the Americas and Asia have been more widely studied, African contributions were equally significant. Africans also sought to learn from the practices, institutions and remedies that travelers brought back from Europe and other parts of the Atlantic world, and incorporated them into what was an already rich and diverse body of healing knowledge. Ultimately the prevalence of these exchanges illustrates not just the differences that existed between European and African understandings of disease and the human body, but also how much common ground there was between them. Kananoja compellingly argues that African healing knowledge should be seen as a rich and dynamic system, which was central to the emergence of an Atlantic world.

Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University.

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Virus Research in Twentieth-Century Uganda: Between Local and Global (Ohio UP, 2024) presents the stories of scientists at the Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI), a biomedical center founded in 1936. The book analyzes the strategies and conditions that allowed the institute to endure and thrive through successive political and scientific regimes of the interwar period, the postwar period, the transition to independence, the conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s, and the Museveni presidency. Julia Ross Cummiskey combines methods and themes from the history of medicine and public health, science and technology studies, and African studies to show that the story of the UVRI and the people who worked there transforms our understanding of the nature of local and international expertise and the evolution of global health research over the course of the twentieth century.

Global health is one of the chief areas in which African and foreign institutions interact today. Billions of dollars are invested in global health projects on the continent, many involving strategically selected “local partners.” In the discourse of these projects, local and global are often framed as complementary but distinct categories of people, institutions, traditions, and practices. But the history of biomedical research at the UVRI shows that these distinctions are unstable and mutable and that people and institutions have mobilized both categories to attract funding, professional prestige, and research opportunities. The book complicates the local/global binary that is implicit (and sometimes explicit) in many studies of colonial, international, and global health and medical research, especially in Africa. Moreover, it challenges assumptions about global health as an enterprise dominated by researchers based in the Global North and recenters the history of biomedicine in Africa.

Julia Ross Cummiskey is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the history of global health research, policy, and practice in Africa. Dr. Cummiskey interrogates the history of “global health”—what it is, how it came to be, its limitations, and its potential. She pursues projects that she believes will shed light on the broader history of East Africa and its connections to other parts of the world as well as projects that offer opportunities to inform the practice of global health research and interventions.

Dr. Cummiskey’s current project explores the changing ideas about health communication in modern East Africa, from top-down organized campaigns to commercial product promotion and informal channels for spreading information and misinformation. Tentatively titled Selling Health, this book will explore the different forms of communication that have been used to shape the Africans’ behaviors and consumption of products intended to (or purporting to) improve health in the 20th and 21st centuries.

You can learn more about her work here.

Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in Ghana.

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