The Journal of African History Podcast

Sep 12 2024 11 ep. 23 mins 28
The Journal of African History Podcast artwork

The Journal of African History Podcast highlights interviews with historians whose work has appeared in The Journal of African History, a leading source of peer-reviewed scholarship on Africa’s past since its creation in 1960. Hosted by journal editors and occasional guest hosts, episodes include discussions on how scholars find and interpret sources for African history, how authors’ research contributes to debates among historians, and how Africanist scholarship can add much-needed context to broader social and political debates.

  History  Science  Education
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Peter Vale on the pre/history of DRC’s neoliberal moment

Sep 12 2024 18 mins  
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 conventi

Sarah Van Beurden on the work of historians in public debates

Dec 29 2023 26 mins  
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 opportu

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

Aug 21 2023 30 mins  
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 Ma

Rebecca Grollemund and David Schoenbrun on interpreting Bantu language expansions

Feb 17 2023 36 mins  
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 co

Elizabeth Jacob on public motherhood and anticolonial politics in Côte d’Ivoire

Nov 06 2022 23 mins  
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 c

Etana Dinka on state-society relations within the Ethiopian empire

Sep 23 2022 18 mins  
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 Ethio

Laura Phillips on the making of mineral property and political authority in South Africa

Jun 17 2022 19 mins  
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 major

Khaled Esseissah on Enslaved Muslim Sufi Saints in the 19th Century Sahara

Jan 28 2022 30 mins  
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, rac

Daniel Domingues da Silva and Edward Alpers on Abolition in 19th Century Mozambique

Jan 28 2022 34 mins  
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 be

Sarah Walters on African Historical Demography

Sep 03 2021 16 mins  
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 Popula