The Journal of African History Podcast

• John Aerni-Flessner on border violence amd diplomacy in Southern Africa

  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.

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• Peter Vale on the pre/history of DRC’s neoliberal moment

  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.

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• Sarah Van Beurden on the work of historians in public debates

  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.

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• Sean Hanretta and Ousman Kobo on William A. Brown’s legacy

  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 ‘A Hidden Repository of Arabic Manuscripts from Mali: The William A. Brown Collection’ by Mauro Nobili and Said Bousbina ‘Le témoignage d’Almamy Maliki Yattara sur W. A. Brown: Dr Brown through the Testimony of Almamy Maliki Yattara’ by Bernard Salvaing ‘William Allen Brown, Jr., 1934–2007: An Appreciation’ (forthcoming) by David Henry Anthony III ‘The Impact of Informal Mentorship: A Tribute to Professor William Brown’ (forthcoming) by Ousman Kobo ‘Egypt in Africa: William A. Brown and a Liberating African History’ by Sean Hanretta

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• Rebecca Grollemund and David Schoenbrun on interpreting Bantu language expansions

  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).

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