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 Milo Gough, University of Oxford; Bryson Nkhoma, Mzuzu University; Elias Chirwa, Mzuzu University; David Wilson, University of Strathclyde; Charles Knapp, University of Strathclyde; Tracy Morse, University of Strathclyde; Wapulumuka Mulwafu, Mzuzu University

Traditional Institutions and Cultural Heritage Law: The Case of Benin Bronzes L. Amede Obiora, University of Arizona

The New Instrumental Turn in Nigerian Historical Scholarship Moses Ochonu, Vanderbilt University

Echoes of History: Legacies of the Benin Bronzes and Restitution within the Black Atlantic Cresa Pugh, The New School

RESEARCH ARTICLES

Africans Championed Free Trade: Violence, Sovereignty, and Competition in the Era of Atlantic Slave Trade Ana Lucia Araujo, Howard University

Diplomacy of Intimacy: Cameroonian Women’s Anticolonial Diplomacy with China in the Era of Decolonization Caitlin Barker, Boston College

Women's Livelihood and Status Struggles in Tabora after the End of Slavery, 1920s–60 Felicitas Becker, Ghent University; Salvatory Nyanto, University of Dar es Salaam

Decolonizing Archival Narratives: Exploring Digital Bias in the Catalogs of Portuguese-Colonized African Territories Agata Błoch, Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History; Guillem Martos Oms, University of Barcelona and National Archives of Catalonia; Clodomir Santana, Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History

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

Capitalist Flows and Working-Class Conditions: Colonial Labor Management and Racial Formations in Southeastern Africa, 1851–1900 Abikal Borah, San Diego State University

Manly Machines and Homely Objects: Gender, Development and Divergent Radio Technologies in Late-Colonial Ghana and Zambia Peter Brooke, University of Oxford

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

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

Of “Akankyemaa” and Beyond: Gender and Mining Income Disruptions in Late Colonial Asante David Damtar, University of Oxford

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

Of Cattle and Community: Women’s History-telling in Western Uganda's Nanga Performances, 1900–Present Caitlin Cooke Monroe, University of Northern Colorado

Making Violators: Employers and African Workers in Colonial Dakar, 1918–43 Rachel M. Petrocelli, Santiago Canyon College

The Emergence of Social and Political Complexity in West Central Africa John Thornton, Boston University

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

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

Harambee Co-operative Savings and Credit Society: Wealth, Inequality, and Accumulation in 1970s Kenya Justin Willis, Durham University; Radha Upadhyaya, University of Nairobi; Eric Njuguna Kamau, British Institute in Eastern Africa

FEATURED REVIEWS

Ambiguous Echoes of the Colonial Partition: Alternative Futures from the Casamançais Past in Senegal Mark Deets, The American University in Cairo Review of Séverine Awenengo Dalberto's L'idée de la Casamance autonome: Possibles et dettes morales de la situation coloniale au Sénégal

Intimate Archives and Anterooms Khwezi Mkhize, Duke University Review of Joel Cabrita's Written Out: The Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.