Luise White

Separating the Men From the Boys: Constructions of Gender, Sexuality, and Terrorism in Central Kenya, 1939-1959

A decade of research on African women has raised serious questions about the kinds of historical reconstruction we do: when we study the men and women who made events do we look at them as groups of undifferentiated migrants and militants or do we see them as men and women whose behaviours were constructed and constrained by the times places and cultures in which they lived? Do we take gender as a given or do we ask how genders were constructed contested and maintained? Do we see the sexual division of labor as a cultural absolute or do we ask how it was arranged struggled over and rearranged? In recent years feminist historians have used the testimonies of individual women to question these categories and thus have given us a detailed picture of private life power relations and their relationship to political action. The use of mens life histories and autobiographies has not yielded the same kind of information. Mens lives are thought to take place in the public spheres of production politics and work. The conventional wisdom for twentieth-century Africa is that mens preferential access to political life wage labor and the cash economy meant that their lives were governed by class and economic interests not personal ones. Therefore most studies of African men particularly in the political arena have tended to make men seem monolithic and homogeneous either as resistors or collaborators; they have had factions but no personal reasons for joining them. Men were motivated by land shortages poverty and decreasing real wages but not by their qualms and anxieties about the changing rights and obligations of fatherhood. (excerpt)

Speaking with Vampires: Rumour and History in Colonial Africa

During the colonial period, Africans told each other terrifying rumors that Africans who worked for white colonists captured unwary residents and took their blood. In colonial Tanganyika, for example, Africans were said to be captured by these agents of colonialism and hung upside down, their throats cut so their blood drained into huge buckets. In Kampala, the police were said to abduct Africans and keep them in pits, where their blood was sucked. Luise White presents and interprets vampire stories from East and Central Africa as a way of understanding the world as the storytellers did. Using gossip and rumor as historical sources in their own right, she assesses the place of such evidence, oral and written, in historical reconstruction. White conducted more than 130 interviews for this book and did research in Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia. In addition to presenting powerful, vivid stories that Africans told to describe colonial power, the book presents an original epistemological inquiry into the nature of historical truth and memory, and into their relationship to the writing of history.

Guest Editors’ Introduction to Crime and Punishment Forum

Since 1985, the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida (UF) has hosted an annual conference named for Gwendolen M. Carter, the second president of the African Studies Association (1958–59) and later emerita at the University of Florida. Carter conferences have had diverse themes—for example, migration and displacement, conservation and sustainability, architecture and design. In 2016, we organized a Carter conference on crime and punishment in Africa which we called “Topics of Discipline.” We had initially wanted to examine the transnational traffics in drugs, ivory, and people, in part because we thought those topics would provide the most provocative discussion, and in part because we wanted to honor the memory of Stephen Ellis, a frequent visitor to UF whose work on crime inspired us and who passed away as we began to plan the conference. The 2016 conference was interdisciplinary; historians, anthropologists, and political scientists presented conference papers that addressed the issues of global markets and global migrations and the punishments endured by political prisoners in colonial and post-colonial Africa. There were eighteen conference papers, many of which challenged conventional notions of crime and punishment. Five of the six articles in this forum are from that conference. The authors all challenge the category of crime in ways for which we were unprepared when we organized this conference. These articles in particular showed us how unstable certain categories became in twentiethand twenty-first-century Africa; what separated crime from custom, for example, or magic from accumulation was not always clear to litigants and to the people who never set foot in a court of law. Status, many of these articles argued, was a matter of context and time and place. It could not always be defended in the home or in the courtroom. Each of these articles makes a significant contribution to a regional historiography, to be sure, but for our purpose what is most important about them is how they intervene in the study of crime in Africa.

The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe

AcknowlegmentsCharacters in Order of AppearanceA Note on Place NamesChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixNotesBibliographyIndex