The Journal of African History Podcast

Journal of African History Podcast: Volume 66 Retrospective

What does a year of cutting-edge African history scholarship reveal about where the field is heading? In this special episode marking the close of Volume 66, The Journal of African History managing editor Samuel Severson sits down with the journal’s regional editors—Abou Bamba (reviews and History Matters), Michelle Moyd (East Africa), Moses Ochonu (West and North Africa), and Thula Simpson (Southern Africa)—for a wide-ranging conversation about the state of African history research in 2025.

Rather than simply rehashing articles, our editors dig into the deeper currents shaping the field: Which archives are scholars turning to? What new methodological approaches are emerging in response to Africa's rapidly changing present? How are questions of positionality, ethics, and the real risks scholars face when researching politically contentious subjects reshaping what it means to write African history today?

Whether you're a contributor to JAH, a reader tracking the field’s evolution, or simply curious about the behind-the-scenes work of shaping a major academic journal, this episode offers a rare glimpse into how scholarly conversations actually happen—and where African history is headed next.

Articles Referenced in this Episode:

HISTORY MATTERS

Colonialism, Governance, and Fisheries: Perspectives from Lake Malawi

Traditional Institutions and Cultural Heritage Law: The Case of Benin Bronzes

The New Instrumental Turn in Nigerian Historical Scholarship

Echoes of History: Legacies of the Benin Bronzes and Restitution within the Black Atlantic

RESEARCH ARTICLES

Africans Championed Free Trade: Violence, Sovereignty, and Competition in the Era of Atlantic Slave Trade

Diplomacy of Intimacy: Cameroonian Women’s Anticolonial Diplomacy with China in the Era of Decolonization

Women's Livelihood and Status Struggles in Tabora after the End of Slavery, 1920s–60

Decolonizing Archival Narratives: Exploring Digital Bias in the Catalogs of Portuguese-Colonized African Territories

Resurrecting the African Independent Pentecostal Church: Land, Education, and the Politics of Reconciliation during Kenya’s Decolonisation, 1952–69

Capitalist Flows and Working-Class Conditions: Colonial Labor Management and Racial Formations in Southeastern Africa, 1851–1900

Manly Machines and Homely Objects: Gender, Development and Divergent Radio Technologies in Late-Colonial Ghana and Zambia

The Voracious Frontier: Policing, War, and Mercantilism in Dutch South Africa, 1652–1830

African Correspondents in the Second World War in Burma: Reporting on Soldiers’ Experiences of Conflict, June–August 1945

Of “Akankyemaa” and Beyond: Gender and Mining Income Disruptions in Late Colonial Asante

Neo-Colonialism, Underdevelopment, and the Making of a Radical Pan-African and Leftist Economic Institute, 1970–80

Of Cattle and Community: Women’s History-telling in Western Uganda's Nanga Performances, 1900–Present

Making Violators: Employers and African Workers in Colonial Dakar, 1918–43

The Emergence of Social and Political Complexity in West Central Africa

Building Legacy: Sports, Kasarani Stadium, and Moi’s Transnational Populist Politics, 1978–87

“Sodabi Calamity Number One”: The Production of Palm Alcohol in Dahomey and its Repression, 1840–1975

Harambee Co-operative Savings and Credit Society: Wealth, Inequality, and Accumulation in 1970s Kenya

FEATURED REVIEWS

Ambiguous Echoes of the Colonial Partition: Alternative Futures from the Casamançais Past in Senegal

Intimate Archives and Anterooms

In this episode Mark Deets (AUC) joins editor Abou Bamba (Gettysburg) to discuss “Ambiguous Echoes of the Colonial Partition: Alternative Futures from the Casamançais Past in Senegal.” This featured review explores Séverine Awenengo Dalberto’s L’idée de la Casamance autonome (Karthala Edition, 2024) as well as the political controversy surrounding its publication. In the podcast, Deets further discusses his own work on the Casamance—notably his book A Country of Defiance (2023, Ohio University Press)—and offers insights on Senegalese politics, historical contingency, and the importance of academic freedom and solidarity as scholars delve into important but sensitive historical questions.

In this episode, David Wilson (University of Strathclyde) joins guest host Ayodeji Adegbite (Brown University) to discuss the Open Access article, "Colonialism, Governance, and Fisheries: Perspectives from Lake Malawi," co-authored with Milo Gough, Bryson Nkhoma, Elias Chirwa, Charles Knapp, Tracy Morse, and Wapulumuka Mulwafu.

Wilson details how this article—situated at the intersection of environmental science and historical research—sheds light on both the history and contemporary dynamics of natural resource governance in Africa and beyond. He explains the development of two parallel fisheries regimes in late colonial Malawi: a colonial system marked by exclusionary, centralized decision-making, and an indigenous regime grounded in place-based knowledge, local customs, beliefs, and practices. The latter regime, led by Senior Chief Makanjira, yielded sustainable outcomes, in contrast to the colonial regime, which failed to achieve similar results.

The conversation further explores the methodological challenges faced by the authors, highlighting how knowledge hierarchies continue to shape natural resource management, and gives practical recommendations for collaborative models in natural resource governance across Africa.

Muoki Mbunga (Tufts University) joins East Africa editor Michelle Moyd to discuss his newly published open access article, “Who Deserves to Die? The Moral Logic of Mau Mau Killings in Colonial Kenya, 1952–56.” In their conversation, Mbunga details how his novel use of the captured documents of Mau Mau guerrillas enabled him to explore the ways that Kikuyu ritual and traditions were deployed and shaped by the realities of the asymmetrical conflict. By examining the perspectives of fighters themselves on why, who, and how to kill, Mbunga makes an important contribution to the rich historiography on the conflict in 1950s Kenya.

The open access article is available online and in print issue 65/3 of the JAH. 

In this episode, John Aerni-Flessner (MSU) joins editor Moses Ochonu (Vanderbilt) to discuss the article, "Lesotho and the QwaQwa Ski Resort, 1975–82: Border Disputes and South Africa's Increasingly Deadly Responses," co-authored with Chitja Twala (Limpopo).

John details how a proposed ski resort in QwaQwa served as a site for adjoining Lesotho — despite its economic dependence and comparative military weakness — to hone a foreign-policy opposed to South African apartheid. He further details how this approach engendered brazen raids from the South African military, a harbinger of the escalating violence which would wash over the border states and within homelands and townships over the 1980s.

The conversation further explores the coming of age of postcolonial African diplomacy, novel strategies for securing documentary evidence in South Africa, and the value of collaborative work in historical research and writing.

The Open Access article is available here.

In this episode, Peter Vale (Harvard) joins editor Marissa Moorman (Wisconsin) to discuss his research on the political economy of early postcolonial Congo. He details how the Mobutu government charted a course between policies and rhetoric extolling economic nationalism, on one hand, and moves to promote financing and investment from abroad, on the other. Vale complicates conventional narratives of the periodization and drivers of neoliberal policies in the nation: he describes how Congolese thinkers, politicians, and publics interacted with and shaped processes of economic liberalization, privatization, and decentralization in the years before ballooning state debts, exacerbated by energy crises, led to the embrace of structural adjustment policies favored by lending institutions.

Vale’s open access article, entitled “Between Economic Nationalism and Liberalization: Ideas of Development and the Neoliberal Moment in Mobutu’s Congo, 1965–74,” features in issue 65/1 of the JAH.

In this episode Sarah Van Beurden (OSU and SAR) joins editor Michelle Moyd (MSU) to discuss her History Matters piece, coauthored with Gillian Mathys (Ghent), unpacking the experience of working as historian experts engaged to write a report for a Belgian parliamentary commission tasked with examining the nation’s colonial past.

Van Beurden details both the challenges and opportunities presented by engaging in such fraught and expressly political work. She offers insights into the ways that the report’s authors confronted problematic but widely held assumptions about the past, its meaning, and the sorts of work that historians do. And she draws lessons from this work – and the legacy of similar historical commissions in Belgium dating back to the early twentieth century – to make a powerful case for the utility of professional historians engaging in public debates.

Van Beurden and Mathys’s open access article, entitled ‘History by Commission? The Belgian Colonial Past and the Limits of History in the Public Eye’, features in issue 64/3 of the JAH.

In this episode, Professors Sean Hanretta and Ousman Kobo join JAH editor Moses Ochonu to discuss the life and work of Professor William A. Brown. While he published little, Bill Brown’s landmark 1968 dissertation on the Caliphate of Hamdullahi, meticulous photographing of Arabic manuscripts in Mali, and decades of teaching and mentoring students at the University of Wisconsin Madison left a profound — if vastly under-acknowledged — impact on the ways that historians of Africa engage with sources and ideas. Brown’s commitments to emancipatory politics and epistemological rigor, moreover, offered an early and powerful critique of the Orientalist and anti-Black assumptions embedded in the production of much historical knowledge about West Africa, oral traditions, and Islamic intellectuals.

Brown’s life and work is the subject of the History Matters section in Volume 64, Issue 2 of The Journal of African History. In addition to the open access introduction by Kobo and Hanretta, ‘William A. Brown and the Assessment of a Scholarly Life’, the section features six contributions:

• ‘The Caliphate, the Black Writer, and a World in Revolution, 1957–69’ by Madina Thiam

‘Egypt in Africa: William A. Brown and a Liberating African History’ by Sean Hanretta

In this episode Rebecca Grollemund (Missouri) and David Schoenbrun (Northwestern) join editor Marissa Moorman (Wisconsin) to discuss recent insights and the continuing complexity of classifying five millennia of Bantu language expansions using statistics, computational methods, and other tools.

In the wide-ranging conversation, the authors make a powerful case for the utility of collaborative, multidisciplinary, and multigenerational scholarship, talk about the need to bring an eye for contingency to the big questions still surrounding the so-called Bantu-migration, and recount the joy and passion which the late Jan Vansina brought to this project and his scholarship in general.

Grollemund, Schoenbrun, and Vansina’s open access article, entitled ‘Moving Histories: Bantu Language Expansions, Eclectic Economies, and Mobilities’, features in the March 2023 issue of the JAH.

*For a sampling of further works on Bantu language expansions and related social histories, see: C. Ehret, Southern Nilotic History: Linguistic Approaches to the Study of the Past (Evanston, 1971); J. Vansina, The Children of Woot: A History of the Kuba Peoples (Madison, 1978); D. Nurse and T. Spear, The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800-1500 (Philadelphia, 1985); J. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, 1990); C. Ehret, An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 BC to AD 400 (Charlottesville, 1998); D. L. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th century (Portsmouth, NH, 1998); K. Klieman, ‘The Pygmies Were Our Compass’: Bantu and Batwa in the History of West Central Africa, Early Times to C 1900 CE (Portsmouth, NH, 2003); J. Vansina, How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa to 1600 (Charlottesville, 2004); R. Gonzales, Societies, Religion, and History: Central-East Tanzanians and the World they Created, c. 200 BCE to 1800 CE (New York, 2009); C. Saidi, Women's Authority and Society in Early East-Central Africa (Rochester, NY, 2010); R. Stephens, A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900 (Cambridge, 2013); K. M. de Luna, Collecting Food, Cultivating People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa (New Haven, 2016); R. Jimenez, ‘“Slow revolution” in Southern Africa: household biosocial reproduction and regional entanglements in the history of cattle-keeping among Nguni-speakers, ninth to thirteenth century CE’, The Journal of African History, 61/2 (2020).