: In recent decades, ʿAjamī texts (African languages in Arabic script) have become an increasing source of analysis on the history of West African Islam. However, ʿAjamī texts are not just related to religious topics, and a focus on theology misses the everyday uses of languages such as Pulaar in Arabic script. Pulaar ʿAjamī has a long history for other means, one that is only now emerging in the historical archive. In the case of Fulbe (Pulaar-speaking) communities between the Futa Jallon highlands of Guinea and those who have moved to Dakar, ʿAjamī has played an important role in community relationships, with letters containing meeting notes, messages to relatives living far away, and providing news from home or abroad. ʿAjamī texts have also been used across Senegambia in a variety of languages and for a variety of purposes, including writing community histories or as part of Guinea-Bissau’s war for independence.

Machine Learning (ML) a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents an unprecedented opportunity to open and expand an egalitarian space in which African languages can find full expression as instruments of thought and cultural preservation. Thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP), knowledge and problem solving drawn from experience and innovation can be potentially sorted out to handle communication challenges like no other time in history. Technology is bringing down the “Tower of Babel” by letting multilingualism become the order of the day producing coherent and perfect speech in real time. The paper describes how we have developed a unique system to collect naturalistic, high-quality data for translating between, low-resource, data-scarce African languages. Utilizing a novel pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm, we have also developed AI-based NLP systems that utilize these data and perform significantly better than existing state-of-the-art systems. As an aside, we have used our NLP systems to develop a prototype for an African ChatGPT. The intent of this paper is to show that African environments (courtrooms, schools, hospitals, political spaces, entrepreneurial spaces, religious spaces etc.) are progressively becoming linguistically accessible to Africans in a manner never before thought possible.

This paper explores how Artificial Intelligence holds out the promise of advances that can improve the lives of people everywhere. In its contemporary and highly centralized form dominated by just a few corporations, the current AI landscape reproduces the exclusion of historically marginalized populations found in earlier digital media. By reversing these exclusions, we can help achieve a more equitable future for this technology and ensure that individuals and communities in Africa are adequately represented as well as are benefitting from AI. The Center for African Studies (CAS), in partnership with Stanford University’s Computer Science Lam Lab is working on feeding digitized historical documents into a decentralized Large Language Model (LLM) as an alternative to current-day ChatGPT models. The initial corpus is The African Times, a newspaper composed mainly of correspondence from interlocutors in West Africa, London, and the Caribbean. The LLM-based tool could be a thought partner for exploring sentiment and perspectives of communities that are frequently ignored in history.

This paper examines the life of Hafsa, who lived in Jenne and Timbuktu in the late eighteenth century. Very little is known about Hafsa, beyond a mention in a document written in Jamaica in 1834. Originally from Borno, Hafsa was born while her father was performing the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Later in life, she married a trader from Kong, whose mobilities and family networks sprawled across the western and central Sahel. In 1804, her son Abu Bakr was kidnapped and taken to Jamaica where he remained enslaved for three decades, and authored an autobiography mentioning his mother. This paper lingers upon the web of affective geographies and social relations that partially shaped Hafsa’s life. Such an investigation poses the challenge of moving beyond a history of Hafsa told through the men around her. On the other hand, through Hafsa’s story and networks, emerges an intimate cartography of the Sahel as an Atlantic-Saharan node.

Under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana won its independence from Britain on March 6, 1957, and embarked on a socialist economic, political, and cultural program. After some hesitation, they began forging ties with the Soviet Union and asked the Eastern power to construct a cotton textile mill in Tamale, Northern Ghana. Ultimately, the factory was never constructed. I dive into the debates and ideas surrounding the mill’s attempted construction and the political and international fallout from it. By scrutinizing this local event and moment – this Ghana-Soviet space, I take seriously historian David Engerman’s claim that the most illuminating global histories are intimately tied to local conditions and specifics. Through a serious engagement with archives outside of Africa and African capitols, I unearth the dialectics and discontents of global socialist ideological, scientific-technical, political-economic, individual, and state-to-state connections and ideas between West Africa and the global in the twentieth century.

What can decolonial histories look like, and how do questions of method and sources get us there? This essay explores recent historiographic trends in developing interdisciplinary methods and approaches to West African history that confront the problem of the colonial archive. Recently, the history and practice of artisanal crafts has drawn particular interest from a range of scholars across disciplines interested to think in ways that recenter local voices and forms of knowledge typically excluded through academic norms. My own work on the history of textiles in West Africa shows that research on textiles open pathways to histories of craft, of labor and technology, of gender, of local knowledge systems, and of sartorial expression. This paper also argues for a need to develop greater dialogue and collaboration between Africa-based scholars and students and those in the Americas, taking advantage of digital communication for greater exchanges, development of digital humanities and archive projects to engage audiences within and beyond the academy.

This presentation highlights one chapter of a book project, telling the story of African-born women who traversed West Africa from the 1950s to the 1970s. The women in focus, such as Cameroonian Esther Tanyi, amassed a distinct form of social, political, religious, and intellectual power as they navigated mid-20th-century Africa on behalf of Baha’ism—a religion founded in 19th-century Iran that emphasizes racial, cultural, and gender equity. The featured African-born women exemplified feminist action through maternal power (a form of “public motherhood”), nurturing their communities while demonstrating cultural influence and mobility in West Africa. Many of these women traveled as Baha'i pioneers—volunteers who relocated to teach the Baha'i religion and help establish communities, distinct from Christian missionaries. I focus on the theme of dreams to examine these women’s aspirations for upward social mobility and racial and cultural unity, both figuratively and literally. Using four of Esther Tanyi’s recollected nighttime dreams to frame the presentation, I explore how the lives of these women provide a historical perspective on how African women envisioned and pursued dreams of gender equity, racial harmony, and international peace—approaches that transcended their religious views and crossed both real and imagined cultural boundaries. These dreams inspired them to propose alternative messages and avenues for a more equitable world, reflecting the power of hope and aspiration in the face of adversity.

Literature is rife on British rule in Africa, along with its exploitation, violence, and the destruction of indigenous structures. However, the prevalence of sexual violence in this context often remains overlooked. This history is rarely mentioned in British colonial historiography, making it difficult to find African voices that address sexual violence endured by subjects in British West Africa. Employing data from the archives, including rarely used petitions and court records which bear evidence of cases of sexual misconduct by British officers in the Southern Protectorate of Nigeria, I uncover the voices, experiences, and bravery of African women who spoke out against sexual atrocities inflicted upon them. I argue that brutality and intimacy were innate to colonialism itself: sexual violence was a manifestation of the will to dominate. British rule, based on power, coercion, and submission required direct, intimate contact with subjects to maintain subjugation. By examining how women—often-marginalized in colonial Nigeria—came forward in their petitions, I not only uncover unsettling accounts of sexual violence but locate often-silenced voices of subjects as survivors of horrific acts perpetrated against them.

The increased visibility of LGBT+ human rights politics in Africa has shifted the paradigms of gender and sexuality on the continent and in ways that compel pertinently new questions about what the stakes are for making and unmaking sexual citizenship in the neocolonial state. In postcolonial Ghana, there are currently ongoing attempts to further deepen laws that historically criminalized non-heteronormative erotic and gendered subjectivities and practices. These paradigmatic shifts are evidenced by the emergence of an alliance of heteronationalist organizations, known as the National Coalition for the Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values. An organization that is anti-LGBT+ human rights politics, it is alleged that it is also funded by conservative donors with ties to Western evangelical churches. Hence, the question “is queer the new gender” is provoked in this presentation to illuminate how the neoliberalization of gender through gender mainstreaming projects engendered the contexts of resistance to LGBT+ visibility. I show how the restriction of gender to women delimited queer possibility and in ways that continue to be palpable in Ghana’s contemporary moment.

Focusing on the second half of the 20th century, this paper details the dynamic ways in which changing spiritual beliefs coincided with the intensification of agricultural production, resulting in profound changes to the region’s landscape. Cherno Muhammadu Baba Jallow (c. 1890-1996) was a prominent cleric and farmer in the Gambia’s north bank province. He enabled more farmers to gain access to new agricultural land. Clerics such as Jallow either converted or forcibly evicted non-Muslim jinns and spirits from the surrounding forests by waging a jihād against them. This spiritual conquest was essentially a defeat of the environment. Large-scale deforestation due to the clearing of new agricultural lands became a dominant trend in the last five decades of the century. Clerics such as Jallow also cultivated large millet, maize, peanut and rice farms. Jallow also established a large orchard of fruit trees, bred livestock, and embraced “modern” methods of farming.

The Senegal Liberations Project (SLP) is a digital history initiative that has digitized nearly 50 years of self-liberations of enslaved people in Senegal. These liberations are documented in a colonial-era source, the Registers of Liberation, which spans from 1857 to 1903. Taken together, the Registers document the liberation of more than 28,000 people. One of the advantages of the SLP is that it makes these records accessible in a digital format, enabling researchers to look for patterns that may be less evident when each case is considered individually. This paper takes up the potential of this project and incorporates climate information in order to understand how environmental factors interacted with the agency of the enslaved people who sought freedom. Utilizing historical climate data such as precipitation records, as well as annual climate patterns (seasonality), this paper provides a first look at both how environmental approaches can shed light on the end of slavery in West Africa as well as how the Registers can be utilized for new insights on this era in West African history.

This paper explores sources for reconstructing histories of the underground in West Africa. Studies of tunnels, caves, graves, fracking, and hydrological engineering—pioneered by geographers and anthropologists—have challenged two-dimensional theories of state and corporate power. These issues are of particular interest to historians of Africa, where the capacity of the colonial and post-colonial state to conduct geological surveys was weak. At the same time, the continent is home to diverse regional traditions of mining and well digging that have rendered the subsoil knowable, calculable, and subject to competing use rights for centuries prior to colonial rule. I bring the critical geography of volumetric sovereignty into conversation with archival sources and oral traditions from Mauritania, Senegal, and Guinea to ask what the underground helps us understand about regional histories of science, pre-colonial governance, corporate power, and environmental futures in Africa.

During the final months of 1984, a volcanologist concluded that carbon dioxide from magma degassing under Cameroon’s Lake Monoun had percolated to the lake’s bottom that August, producing a layer of pent-up gas that killed 37 people. Two years later, the much larger Lake Nyos produced a plume of gas that asphyxiated over 1,700 people and 5,000 livestock. As survivors and local communities navigated this catastrophe, military units, relief workers, journalists, and scientists flooded to the region in official capacities. This broad range of people responded to the disaster in myriad ways, revealing different cultural impulses in deciphering its meaning. Through the concept of “latent violence,” this paper explores the intersection of the earth’s capacity to produce harm, the role of global science and media in analyzing such harm, local African ways of knowing and explaining environmental malevolence, and the power of states to withhold or dispense their resources and attention.