Paper short abstract:

This paper references digital archives and women's memory as historical knowledge sources to reflect on the everyday lives of Liberian women in the 80s. Using the television program "Today’s Woman," I question the framings of womanhood and how these reflect the Liberian society of the time.

Paper long abstract:

The digital archives of the Liberia Broadcasting System (LBS) have become crucial to the understanding and articulation of aspects of Liberia's history that have been ignored by traditional historians and historiography. Existing scholarship on the history of Liberia is mostly nationalistic and masculinized. Much of the everyday life of Liberian women remains unknown outside discourses on the civil wars that ravaged the country. What’s more, African history and historiography still grapple with the sidelining of women’s history, thus rendering them passive to the development of many African countries. With current debates on digital archives and memory as other(ed) ways of knowing, this paper calls up these unconventional sources of popular and historical knowledge to reflect on the everyday lives of Liberian women. Focusing on the television program Today’s Woman, hosted by Jestina Gray in the 1980s, I question the definitions and framings of “today’s woman” in the 1980s, analyzing the contents and topics discussed in the program to reflect the Liberian society of the time. I also draw parallels from memories and experiences shared during key informant interviews with select women to support or query the ideals and framing of issues as representative of what women of the 80s would, could, or should look like. These archives, covering the period from 1981 to 1990, constitute a site for multiple mediations crucial to the adoption of rarely considered approaches to, and understandings of the Liberian society.

Paper short abstract:

This paper shows how historians can uncover ordinary colonial Nigerian women traders' experiences during the Second World War through government notices in local newspapers. Their exposure for "criminality" reveal that traders frequently opposed colonial economic encroachment and strangulation.

Paper long abstract:

Increasingly, newspapers have become a vital source for writing the political, social, cultural and intellectual history of African societies. They reveal the times they were printed in, act as purveyors of news or as contributors to political debates, and serve as repositories of “‘facts’, culture and knowledge” (Sawada 2011, 7). They also reveal individuals’ dynamics, interactions, and lives during a given period. Newspapers like the West African Pilot initiated by the United States-trained Nnamdi Azikiwe documented the activities and voices of those considered on the margins of history, such as non-literate girls and women. While their contestations appear sparsely in written records , they appeared more visibly, notably, in statistics, as part of an account of a small group of literate men, or fleetingly in the archives when they clashed with the more powerful—the colonial state, native authorities, or church institutions. Through an innovative use of newspaper contents, historians can illuminate colonial women’s elusive histories and perspectives. Government notices in local newspapers help establish the circumstances and conditions of these lives. Particularly, prosecution lists and radio broadcasts by the Inspector of Prices converted to text helps us tease out women traders’ conflicts with the colonial state over enforced economic strangulations during the Second World War. I show how historians can view and understand ordinary women’s resistance and survival during the Second World War through newspaper sources. The public exposure of women traders for their supposed criminality showcase their everyday opposition to encroachment into their traditional economic spaces.

Paper short abstract:

Albert Lubaki, a Congolese artist active in the 1920s-1930s in the Belgian Congo, had his work exhibited in Europe for almost a century. However, his personal story was obscured by colonial patrons. This paper proposes strategies to reconstruct his biography using alternative sources and methods.

Paper long abstract:

Albert Lubaki (c. 1896 – after 1939) was a Congolese watercolor painter working under European patronage. Since 1929, his artworks were widely exhibited in European salons, galleries, and museums. His personal story, unlike the “exoticism” of his artworks, did not, however, interest audiences and the patrons. Consequently, the information about his life is scarce, and his biography up to this day is incomplete, mainly consisting of place names and anecdotes.

This paper is going to explore different ways of approaching the collection of biographical information about people who lived in a not-too-distant past. Firstly, it will comment on the specificity of archival research and the lack of documents relating to Congolese individuals. Then, it will touch upon fieldwork as a means of attempting to fill the archival gaps by finding descendants of the artists. Lastly, it will examine how “researching around” can help us gain an understanding of what people in a similar position to the artist might have been doing, thereby constructing a sort of speculative social biography.

As a result, it is hoped to open a discussion into methods of historical anthropology and how a combination of archival research, fieldwork, and literature study could help us look through a new lens on a story that has remained largely unquestioned and unexplored.

Paper short abstract:

Writing histories of the everyday requires methodological creativity. Using empirical examples on the lives of ordinary people, this paper discusses approaches inspired by historical cultural analysis in order to bring a variety of different sources into a critical dialog with one another.

Paper long abstract:

Writing histories of Africa that reveals the everyday lives of people beyond the public eye remains a challenge. It requires methodological flexibility and creativity to bring a variety of different sources into a critical dialog with each other. This paper provide an insight into methodological approaches inspired by the perspective of historical cultural analysis (Lindner/Wietschorke). Empirical examples from my own research on the colonial history of Africa are used to present readings and the interplay of different types of sources and materials. Looking at sources on unregistered “associations” and urban culture in Belgian Congo, we get an idea how ordinary men and women playfully usurped the posturing of the educated elite and formulated own subjectivities and claims. Furthermore, the combined analysis of notebooks and letters in personal archives, administrative documents, police records, novels and various media articles enables us to trace the lives of individuals and their attempts to overcome everyday hurdles and boundaries. The numerous documents on the recruitment, repatriation and forged papers of African seamen in the French Empire enable us to grasp the daily room for manoeuvre and the biographical trajectories of ordinary, yet mobile, workers. Police reports and court cases can reveal that bullets smuggled by seamen were not necessarily used for anti-colonial rebellion, but to earn a living for the family who remained ashore or to exhibit their social status.

Paper short abstract:

The paper emphasizes the significance of colonial students as a valid starting point in newer methodologies of West African history.

Paper long abstract:

During the previous century, a notable number of students from British West African colonies pursued education at British universities, referred to as colonial students. This decision was driven by the anticipation of decolonization, recognizing that hitherto local West African educational institutions lacked sufficient funding to produce an adequately educated workforce for colonies on the brink of gaining independence.

This paper urges Africanists to interrogate the obscure histories of colonial students as part of the methodology of West African histories. It emphasises the importance of crossing archival colour lines to utilise data from newspapers, letters, memos, police records, minutes of meetings, official government communiques, college records, among others into a comprehensive document that sheds considerable light on the interests, activities, and legacies of hitherto elusive colonial students who helped make independent West Africa.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a methodology developed to explore midwives’ everyday practices of care in Sudan (1899-1970s), using materials ranging from oral history interviews and archival collections to family documents, songs, poems, short stories and novels, collected under conditions of an ongoing war.

Paper long abstract:

My paper addresses the panel’s challenging issue of finding methodologies apt for writing histories of the everyday by presenting the case of midwives' practices of care in Sudan from 1899 to the 1970s. Such practices have been rarely documented so far, which forms part of a more general neglect of the history of women’s everyday working practices, especially with professions that have long been considered to be marginal. In this sense, the history of midwifery is an extraordinary challenge, all the more so in a context where historiography is still limited and/or very focused on established, ostensibly ‘large’ aspects. The Sudanese historiography has indeed been focusing on political leaders or, in the medical field, on doctors, besides studying the country’s medical system as a whole. Given this low level of previous documentation, I will discuss how I have been collecting data, with special consideration of the conditions imposed by war in study areas, an aspect of vital importance in today’s Sudan. My method of mobilizing data resources includes interviews with the oldest living generation of midwives and nurses, in addition to doctors, unionists and others who have worked with them, as well as archival material from administrative and missionary collections in the UK and WHO archives in Geneva. But I also make use of newspapers, visual material from families, and social media posts focusing on Sudan. A further type of material is composed of songs, poems, short stories and novels that reflect on midwives’ historical experiences.

Paper short abstract:

Street naming has a rich dossier of the past. It however, constitutes one of the neglected aspects of sources and methodology in the reconstruction of history in Nigeria.

Paper long abstract:

Street naming has a rich dossier of the past. It, however, constitutes one of the neglected aspects of sources and methodology in the reconstruction of history in Nigeria. In the post-colonial era, Nigerian cities are still in the process of reframing their colonial history of street naming. This paper argues that contestation over street naming has followed the trajectory of historiographical patterns, namely; nationalist historiography, coloniality and decoloniality. Many urban areas and local authorities were eager to revisit their local histories on street naming. Some progress has been made over the last two decades in terms of decolonial awareness. In the final analysis, this paper submits that street naming as integral component of local histories and sources of historical reconstruction, continued to serve as a tool of control of over urban landscapes, symbols of power and site of contestations.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores non-indexed place names in Zanzibar, particularly names of daladala stops, as living repositories of past histories sustained through everyday practices. It highlights how these names shape and are shaped by social processes beyond national symbolism and state-level politics.

Paper long abstract:

In response to the methodological challenge of writing histories of the everyday, this paper proposes non-indexed place names as repertoires that allow us to understand the past through its traces in the present and take into account “the physical and metaphysical worlds in which the subjects and objects of our inquiries thrive(d)” (Ochonu 2015: 289).

In urban Zanzibar, place names often hold stories and relations, at times even moral judgements related to past activities in a certain place. The names of daladala (public minibuses) stops present a particularly interesting case as there is no state authority in Zanzibar that regulates the naming of the stops. Their names are not found on maps; they have emerged out of situated historical circumstances and are sustained through ongoing everyday naming practices. The fact that there has been little to no state intervention into the practice of naming daladala stops in Zanzibar, opens up observations of social processes that reach beyond national symbolism and state-level identity politics.

This paper traces such present histories along two examples and thus contributes to the call for extending “the scope of critical urban toponymy by moving beyond the archive and the map to consider the daily “life” of [place] names” (Rose-Redwood et al. 2018: 16). Ultimately, the names and the histories they hold (may they refer to material objects, plants, moral discourses, spirit worlds or famous personalities) are intrinsically related to the places they denote, forming a unique assemblage that I argue is worth exploring ethnographically.