Abstract At the turn of the twentieth century, Portugal launched armed campaigns to subdue its African colonies, following the example of neighbouring powers. The Ovambo peoples of southern Angola mounted strong resistance to Portuguese encroachment. Lisbon’s anxieties were compounded by the German presence in South West Africa. In late 1914, the Ovambo seized upon the Portuguese military defeat by German forces to lead an unprecedented uprising. Portugal retaliated in mid-1915 with a large-scale campaign that employed systematic terror. These tactics caused a famine that killed tens of thousands and arguably constituted genocide. This article examines the 1915 campaign in southern Angola, focusing on the devastating impact of Portuguese repression. It reflects on the links between colonialism, violence, and genocide, and considers the political reverberations of this violence in metropolitan Portugal.

Abstract This article examines women’s storytelling and nanga (harp) performances in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury western Uganda to investigate how these songs shaped community identity and norms. Drawing on musical recordings, archival sources, and interviews, this article demonstrates that these performances functioned as important public histories, teaching audiences about past famines, droughts, climate change, and cattle events. These narratives both chronicled regional histories and provided the shared intellectual material from which community norms and a shared identity could be articulated. Extant scholarship has focused overwhelmingly on how male intellectuals contributed to ideas of race, nation, or ethnicity. This article thus provides an important alternative by showing how women produced histories that contributed to group identity—yet this historical production occurred through musical performances rather than in books, tracts, or petitions. In doing so, this article reintegrates western Ugandan women into narratives of imperial encounters and intellectual history.

Abstract This article sets out to explain why Nigeria was unable to prevent the loss of heritage objects in the 1960s and 1970s. Obvious answers to this question would include the limited enforcement capacity of the African state and the complacency of European and North American art dealers. “How Our Heritage Is Looted” argues, however, that a colonial legal category, namely “antiquity,” played a key role in creating an ineffective enforcement regime for cultural property theft. The mismatch between the ordinary meaning of the term “antiquity,” denoting a remnant of an ancient civilization, and the kinds of modern crafts that the state wanted to protect ultimately resulted in the inability of Nigeria’s colonial preservation statute to convey clear rules to customs officers and museum curators about what exporters could take out of the country. Nigeria’s heritage law thus constituted a project of legal meaning-making whose failure facilitated illicit commerce.

African Worldmaking on a Global Stage - The Ideological Scramble for Africa: How the Pursuit of Anticolonial Modernity Shaped a Postcolonial Order, 1945–1966 Frank Gerits. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023. Pp. xi + 304. $67.95, hardcover (ISBN: 9781501767913).

Abstract This piece troubleshoots an array of epistemological, political, and practical difficulties involved in public studies of colonial atrocities. It explores the deficiencies of the Commission on Colonialism backed by the Belgian parliament between 2020–22, and suggests pathways for facilitating a fuller accounting of colonial wrongs. The argument leverages the author’s experiences in investigating and publicizing the colonial massacre of Mozambican civilians in Wiriyamu in 1972, which culminated in a public apology from Portugal’s prime minister in 2022.

Universities, Apartheid, and Decolonisation - Uprooting University Apartheid in South Africa: From Liberalism to Decolonization Teresa Barnes. New York: Routledge, 2019. Pp. 173. $52.95, paperback (ISBN: 9780367786984); ebook (ISBN: 9781351141925). - Volume 65 Issue 1

Abstract This article focuses on the gambling milieu in Nigeria between the late 1970s and early 1980s. I consider the moment when the Federal Military Government (FMG) banned gambling nationwide, and ask why it became such a divisive issue during this tenuous period in Nigeria's history. I argue that amid impending transitional elections to a democratic regime, gambling embodied three key tensions that saturated Nigerian political and civil society during this period: job creation, the state's relationship with private capital, and the division of political power. Additionally, I propose that examining gambling's recreational value alongside its functional significance opens new avenues for the study of the gambling phenomenon in Africa that move beyond ethical considerations.

We are living in a time when social movements and individual and group consciousness demand a reckoning with the past.Monuments in different places around the globe have generated protests and some have been removed.In Cameroon, Namibia, Nigeria, and South Africa, activists, state representatives, and cultural workers have fought for the restitution of art and artifacts as well as human remains, all looted or purchased or removed in the context of conquest and colonialism.Some US universities have set up committees to study their institution's involvement with enslavement and the trade in enslaved people.And in Europe, cities like Rotterdam in the Netherlands commissioned a study of its colonial past and ties to enslaving and trading people in the centuries of the transatlantic slave trade.On the African continent, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Rwanda have held Truth Commissions to confront their more recent violent pasts and promote reconciliation.In this global context and responding to concern and criticism in Belgium about its colonial past, in 2020 the Belgian parliament established a 'special commission charged with examining the Congo Free State (1885State ( -1908) ) and the colonial past of Belgium in Congo (1908Congo ( -1960)), Rwanda and Burundi (1919-1962), its impact and the lessons that need to be drawn from this past'.The Belgian commission included twenty members of parliament representing a diversity of political opinion. 1 The commission initiated its work by naming a panel of ten experts to write a report.The panel included five historians (two Congolese at European universities and three Belgians at Belgian and US universities); three experts in transitional justice (one Rwandan jurist and two Belgians); and two representatives of the African diaspora in Belgium.The Commission charged them with drafting a wide-ranging report on the state of research (Belgian, Burundian, Congolese, and Rwandan) on Belgian colonialism; the availability and accessibility of public and non-state archives in Belgium, Burundi, Congo, and Rwanda; the degree of consensus on the Belgian colonial past; what significant research remained; and a survey of research on Belgium's colonial history in relation to the postcolonial period and particularly with relation to questions of racism, xenophobia, and intolerance.The report would inform the Commission's deliberations.This was a monumental task.Released in October 2021, the report is nearly seven-hundred pages long. 2 The commission held hearings, deliberated, and drafted recommendations.In December 2022, the Belgian parliament failed to find the political consensus necessary to endorse the Commission's recommendations: an official apology for colonial domination, exploitation, violence and atrocities; a national day of remembrance; a monument to victims of 'human zoos'; scholarships; and a national action plan against racism, among others.In this iteration of History Matters three authors take up the work of the 2020 Belgian parliamen-

Confinement and Politics in Uganda - Carceral Afterlives: Prisons, Detention, and Punishment in Postcolonial Uganda By Katherine Bruce-Lockhart. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022. Pp. 280. 36.95, paperback (ISBN: 9780821424780); ebook (ISBN: 9780821447741).

Bamako, March 1991. 100,000 protesters took to the street challenging Mali's military regime. Both men and women participated in six months of protests, their actions shaped by class, gender, and generation. The press, in its reporting, produced a specific, gendered, image of protest, involving young men protesters and their exceptional mères indociles (rebellious mothers) motivated to protest by the risk of bodily harm to their children.1