David E. Skinner

NETWORK BUILDING AND POLITICAL POWER IN NORTHWESTERN SIERRA LEONE, 1800-65

The study of social, economic and political networks provides a new perspective on the history of northwestern Sierra Leone and neighbouring parts of Guinea during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article concerns the men and women of wealth, rank and power who built and maintained local and extensive networks focused on towns in northwestern Sierra Leone, Port Loko and Kambia, at two time periods, c. 1800 and c. 1865. These activities involved the production and exchange of resources; the migration, settlement and intermarriage of families; and the creation, expansion and fission of households, alliances and other groups. Network analysis illuminates major historical changes, such as the development of towns, kingdoms and interregional trade systems. Furthermore, it reveals the shifting nature of ethnic identities, particularly among the Mande. And finally, it helps to show how society in the northwest became more class differentiated as internal and external commerce expanded.

Conversion to Islam and the promotion of 'modern' Islamic schools in Ghana

AbstractThis article analyzes the transformation of Islamic education from makaranta (schools for the study of the Qurʾān) to what are called English/Arabic schools, which combine Islamic studies with a British curriculum taught in the English language. These schools were initially founded in coastal Ghana during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily by missionaries who had converted from Christianity and had had English-language education or by agents of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission based in London. The purposes of these schools were to provide instruction to allow young people to be competitive in the colonial, Christian-influenced social and economic structure, and to promote conversion to Islam among the coastal populations. New Islamic missionary organizations developed throughout the colonial and postcolonial eras to fulfill these purposes, and English/Arabic schools were integrated into the national educational system by the end of the twentieth century. Indigenous and transnational governmental organizations competed by establishing schools in order to promote Islamic ideas and practices and to integrate Ghanaian Muslims into the wider Muslim world.

Islam in Kombo: the spiritual and militant jihad of Fodé Ibrahim Silla Turé

The dynamic career of Fode Ibrahim Ture, known as Fode Silla in the literature about the Gambia River region, is the basis for an analysis of the development and influence of Islam during the second half of the nineteenth century. Fode Ture is one of several spiritual and militant Muslims who were identified by British and French officials as leaders of jihād movements that were impeding their control over political institutions and economic resources during the period of imperial expansion. The article examines Fode Ture’s relations with Muslim and non-Muslim communities and with British and French administrators and describes his efforts to create an Islamic state in Kombo andadjacent areas of Casamance. Although his goal is ultimately thwarted by European imperial advancement, his reputation as a great Muslim scholar and militant leader remains vibrant in the twenty-first century.

Sufism and Jihad in Modern Senegal: the Murid order (review)

on Ousmane Sembene’s historical films, Emitaï and Ceddo, which reveals the approximations and errors in the Senegalese director’s representation of various ethnic groups and historical periods. The collection is less sure-footed in the way it deals with the two research questions that require a specific engagement with film as film. For instance, the level of cinematic analysis in Baum’s chapter, cited above, is very disappointing: to describe the ‘flash-forward’ to an imagined African Catholic celebration in Ceddo as ‘an unnecessary distraction’ is to fail to engage sufficiently with the film’s aesthetic and intellectual agenda. A similar lack of engagement with issues of form, genre and aesthetic mark the chapters on Breaker Morant, Chocolat and Hotel Rwanda, amongst others: these chapters underline important historical issues but they have little to say about film as a medium for expressing such issues. However, many of the chapters are interested in exploring the explicitly cinematic nature of the works they are examining, and these are to my mind the most successful contributions to the volume. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these chapters are particularly strong on the evolving contexts determining the production and subsequent reception of a film in different locations and different periods: for Ralph Austen, the films Yeelen and Keïta, l’héritage du griot provide a striking illustration of the importance of understanding the conditions governing the construction of an imagined past; Robert Harms provides a fascinating discussion of various representations of the Atlantic slave trade; analysing the experimental film Proteus, Nigel Worden addresses the ways in which films can ask probing questions about the construction of historical memory; Carolyn Hamilton and Litheko Modisane intelligently trace the production and reception contexts of Zulu and Zulu Dawn; finally, David Moore’s chapter on Lumumba is exemplary in its analysis of other fictional, as well as historical, representations of the period in question, underlining the possibility and the limitations of different ways of imagining this history. These contributions are the best illustrations of the book’s inherently interdisciplinary project: for interdisciplinarity is a process that entails a willingness to learn from the expertise and the intellectual frameworks of others, not one that simply involves telling another discipline what it gets wrong. The editors’ decision to invite only historians to contribute to the volume might give the impression that analysis of the cinematic treatment of history is best left to historians, but the most significant contributions clearly reveal that our understanding of historical films is best enhanced when cinema is given equal billing to history.