The Journal of African History Podcast

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).

In this episode Elizabeth Jacob (Providence) joins editor Moses Ochonu (Vanderbilt) to discuss women's vital role in anticolonial struggles in Côte d'Ivoire and Francophone Africa, through acts both spectacular and mundane. Using the famous 1949 march of two thousand Ivorian women as an entry point, Jacob offers a groundbreaking application of the concept of public motherhood to contextualize the march in a stream of history, and interrogate the impacts and afterlives of women's activism and responses by male officials in the colonial bureaucracy and in the Parti Démocratique de Côte d'Ivoire (PDCI). The wide-ranging conversation also touches upon the work of exploring well known events and the joys of historical research. Jacob's open access article Militant Mothers: Gender and the Politics of Anticolonial Action in Côte d'Ivoire features in the November 2022 issue of the JAH.

Etana Dinka (James Madison) joins the JAH's Shane Doyle (Leeds) to discuss state-society encounters in western Ethiopia. Using the province of Qellem as a window, Dinka details processes of contesting, negotiating, and legitimizing the imperial state over a period spanning from 1908 through 1933. Drawing upon his reading of dynamics in Qellem, Dinka argues that the history of Ethiopian imperialism should be contextualized and studied alongside scholarships on contemporaneous European colonial endeavors in Africa. This groundbreaking approach challenges the metanarratives presented both by the Ethiopian grand tradition and Oromo historiographies. Dinka's open access article '"Eating A Country": The Dynamics of State-Society Encounters in Qellem, Western Ethiopia, 1908–33', appears in Volume 63, Issue 2 of The Journal of African History.

Laura Phillips (University of the Witwatersrand) joins JAH editor Marissa Moorman to discuss the entangled histories of minerals, politics, and capital in South Africa. Phillips interrogates the interplay between these forces by focusing on Ga-Mphahlele, a rural community in the northern platinum belt, over a period spanning from the late 19th century through the emergence of majority rule in 1994. Her analysis deepens existing understandings of the co-constitutiveness of political authority and mineral property, demonstrating how contingent and volatile this relationship could be. The story of platinum in Ga-Mphahlele diverges from better known stories of gold and diamonds, shaped in fascinating ways by geological realities, African land purchasing, property rights, and contests over chiefly authority. Phillips also honors the mentorship and scholarship of the late Philip Bonner. Phillips's open access article ‘Below the Land Deals: The Making of Mineral Property in Ga-Mphahlele, South Africa, 1880–1994' appears in Volume 63, Issue 1 of The Journal of African History.

Khaled Esseissah (Georgetown) speaks with Moses Ochonu about the life of Bilad Ould Mahmud, a 19th century enslaved Saharan Muslim whose renowned miracles, poetry, and Qur'an recitation enabled him to acquire Sufi sainthood without belonging to a Sufi order. Esseissah's scholarship unsettles longstanding historical narratives about the interplay between spiritual authority, race, and slavery in Saharan-Mauritanian society. Esseissah's article ‘Enslaved Muslim Sufi Saints in the Nineteenth-Century Sahara: The Life of Bilal Ould Mahmoud' appears in the November 2021 issue of the Journal of African History.

Daniel Domingues da Silva (Rice) and Edward Alpers (UCLA) join Moses Ochonu to discuss the process of building and interpreting a database of nearly 55,000 enslaved and freed Africans registered by Portuguese colonial authorities in Mozambique between 1856 and 1876. The conversation offers rich insights into the process of abolition, and possibilities for tracing deeper linkages between scholarships on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and later forms of colonial labor coercion. The article ‘Abolition and the Registration of Slaves and Libertos in Portuguese Mozambique, 1856–76' appears in the November 2021 issue of the Journal of African History.

How can the methods of historical demography help historians study the African past? Sarah Walters (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) talks to Shane Doyle about how her research uses parish registers in East, Central, and Southern Africa and to shed light on twentieth-century population trends, family formation, and broader societal change. Her article 'African Population History: Contributions of Moral Demography' appears in the July 2021 issue, and introduces the JAH Forum 'Population Change and Demography in African History'.

JAH author Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye (CNRS, IMAF-Aubervilliers) discusses her recent article on the history of rural radio in Mali with Marissa Moorman. Her article, “Radio and the Road: Infrastructure, Mobility, and Political Change in the Beginnings of Radio Rurale de Kayes (1980–early 2000s)”, appears in the March 2021 issue.