Short Abstract

This panel explores West African waterscapes, focusing on the interconnected worlds of rivers, lagoons and the Atlantic, and on how they have shaped mobility, livelihoods, political authority, cultural practices and environmental change across time.

Long Abstract

Focusing on West Africa, and particularly on the Gulf of Guinea, this panel explores the interconnected worlds of rivers, lagoons and the Atlantic. In many parts of the region, these environments form a continuous and shifting waterscape in which the boundaries between land and water are often porous. Social, economic and cultural life has long developed across these interconnected spaces rather than within clearly defined terrestrial or maritime worlds.

We invite interdisciplinary papers exploring how coastal, riverine and lagoon communities inhabited, used and imagined these waterscapes, and how these environments were transformed by changing political, economic, social and environmental conditions. Rather than reducing the coast to a site of commerce or extraction, the panel asks how mobility, labour, political authority, ritual, knowledge and material culture were shaped by interactions between rivers, lagoons, land and sea. How did people circulate along rivers and shorelines, across lagoons, and between islands, ports and hinterlands? Can we identify distinctive maritime or lagoon-based material cultures and social formations? How did coastal, riverine and lagoon populations understand and relate to the different bodies of water that surrounded them, and how did ideas about economy, nature, risk and development shape the ways in which these environments were understood and governed?

By bringing history into conversation with anthropology, geography, archaeology, environmental studies, oceanic history and the Blue Humanities, the panel asks what becomes visible when West African societies are approached from the water.

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