Open research questions in African history and culture studies
53 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 3,138 African history and culture studies papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
By demonstrating the interplay between thematic meaning and stylistic form, this study establishes funeral tributes as a significant yet underexplored genre within African literary and cultural studies, where orality persists within writing as both aesthetic practice and cultural memory.
Written Orature and the Poetics of Grief: A Thematic and Stylistic Analysis of Nigerian-Yoruba Christian Funeral Tributes · 2026 · DOIThe four protagonists never quite cross the International Journal of Language and Literary Studies 135 When Prison Becomes Safer than Freedom: Mutual Entrapment in Prison Graduates threshold; Mawugbe leaves his audience with the open question of whether the institutions that built that threshold, and the citizens who learned to live within it, can be remade in time for the next generation to walk across it.
Our study did not focus on death itself, nor on funerals and bereavement practices within African communities, but rather on last wishes and their implications for the living. The study naturally lent itself to comparison with other cultures, such as Western and ancient Middle Eastern cultures.
Ra mufi ari tluriwi: Is the tradition of honouring a person’s final wishes still upheld in the context of a changing South African society? · 2026 · DOIScholars of contemporary Nigerian secu- rity governance have identified the structure of hybrid arrangements and mapped their post- colonial elaboration through the Civil War, the Structural Adjustment Programme, and the re- turn to democracy in 1999, but the historical pro- cess through which the socially embedded reci- procities sustaining those arrangements were produced has not been examined.
COERCION AND ITS LIMITS: COLONIAL POLICING, NON-COERCIVE IMPROVISATION, AND THE ORIGINS OF HYBRID CONFLICT MANAGEMENT IN NIGERIA'S MIDDLE BELT, 1920S–1960 · 2026 · DOIAbstract: In this article, I investigate the epistemically excluded young in Ifeanyi Menkiti's Afro-personhood, which has attracted a plethora of challenges, such as the epistemological requirement for being a person, but the epistemic exclusion of the young has not been adequately investigated due to conceptual failure regarding the term young .
AbstractThe matrilineal Yaawo of northern Mozambique are recognized as having had a tradition of female figures of spiritual and political authority, though little is known of their history.
Chiefs and Other Great Female Ancestors: Voice, Authority, and the Politics of Gendered Temporality in Northern Mozambique · 2023 · DOIThe analysis shows how the specific context examined recalibrates not just the social categories that often underlie feminist intersectional analysis but also gives us a complex view of power that interrogates CDA’s emphasis on top-down approaches to power, a binary conceptualization that does not account for the manifestations of the power-powerlessness dialectic within the same subject.
Examining gendered discourses from an African locale: towards an intrasectional feminist critical discourse analysis · 2023 · DOI23) in South Africa; however, little is known about her photographic practices and personal experience, not to mention her two Weimar women colleagues Else Hausmann (n.
Among some of the underpinning arguments of this book, Konadu points out that while individuals may not be representatives of culture and communities, those that play different roles "can offer integral wide-angle perspectives on the lives of cultural and community members and a protracted commentary on an evolving culture or society" (12).
Our Own Way in This Part of the World: Biography of an African Community, Culture, and Nation by Kwasi Konadu · 2020 · DOIWhile Duckworth’s ambivalently enunciated views on dirt respond to his personal eccentricity and undisguised quest for power and recognition, his campaigns, rather than mere asides to an eccentric colonial life, shed light on one of the most understudied dimensions of Nigerian colonial history – the political use of deviance.
E.H. Duckworth’s Clean-Up Lagos Campaigns: the political use of<i>ex</i>-<i>centric</i>colonial discourse on African dirt · 2018 · DOITracing a discussion regarding the terms ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ from an obscure court case in Nyasaland (contemporary Malawi) in 1929, to the Colonial Office in London, to colonial governments in eastern, central and southern Africa, this article demonstrates a lack of consensus on how the term ‘native’ was to be defined, despite its ubiquitous use.
THE ‘NATIVE’ UNDEFINED: COLONIAL CATEGORIES, ANGLO-AFRICAN STATUS AND THE POLITICS OF KINSHIP IN BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA, 1929–38 · 2005 · DOIThe essay critically reviews the extant scholarly literature on children and work in the pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods and concludes that child labor is either underresearched or undertheorized to the detriment of our understanding of gender, patriarchy, agency, the formation of worker and political consciousness, capital accumulation, and the state.
(2) Specifically, I suggest that changing cosmological beliefs and everyday routines underlie this reassessment of twin rituals and that these changes need to be examined (Beidelman 1997).
If ritual songs of obscenity and abuse have become a familiar topic in Africanist ethnography since Evans-Pritchard's first discussion of their ‘canalising’ functions in 1929, few studies have paid sufficient attention to the socio-political and discursive contexts of the song texts themselves.
In the early reviews and studies, from the 1930s to the 1960s, interest was focused on such qualities as the supernatural influences on Chaka, the conflict between fate and freedom, and the extent to which Chaka is given human qualities which are lacking in the traditional image of the king as a bloodthirsty tyrant (Gerard 118-20).
When this happened, the mikiri lost vitality, 55 although what has happened to them since has not been reported in detail. 6s When lgbo women with their Women's War forced the colonial administrators to recognize their presesce, their brief "visibility" was insufficient to shake these assumptions.
3D 2 D 3D 2 D 3D 2 D / - k d - f f - k d-e g - k d - f T h e two main sample groupings are Samples a-e and Samples g-k, with Sample f fluctuating between them. Samples a-e, the inferior 3D performers, represent the non-school-attending group and include illiterates and post school both black and white. Samples g-k, the superior 3D perceivers, contain the school-attending group, black and white. Sample f which falls with the inferior 3D performers for depth cues of size and perspective and with the superior 3D performers in pictures where overlapping of the objects occurs, consists of white school children a t the beginning of primary school. I n addition to demonstrating the grouping of samples for 3D perceptual Downloaded by [University of Alberta] at 05:50 01 January 2015 196 J O U R N A L OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY consistency, Figure 4 illustrates a point which has already been made with respect to the data in Table 1, viz., superimposition depth cues lead most frequently to 3D perception. Intersample differences in depth perception are such as lead to the grouping of samples into a non-school-attending group and a school-attending group containing in each case both black and white samples. T h e school-going group are superior 3D perceivers but their responses depend far more on the type of depth cue prescribed in the picture than do those of the non-schoolattending group. 2. Intersample Differences in D e p t h Perception for Photographs Percentage number giving 3D responses to Question 3 on Picture 12 (antelope nearer hunter) are listed for samples taking this test (Table 7).
P 1-6 P 1 P 2-3 P 4-6 P 7-11 P 7 P 8-9 P10-11 Candidates were asked the following questions while viewing each picture : 1. Hunting Scene: (Pictures 1-6, 12) a. W h a t do you see? b. W h a t is the man doing? c. Which is nearer the man, elephant or antelope? 2. Flying Bird Scene: (Pictures 7-11) a. W h a t do you see? b. Which is nearer the man, elephant or bird? In response to Question 1 in both scenes, candidates were required to identify each object in each picture, viz., man, assegai, elephant, tree, hill, antelope on Picture 1. I n the “hunting scene,” if a candidate reported that the man was aiming or throwing the spear without specifying his quarry, an additional question was asked to clarify whether he was aiming at elephant or antelope. I n the majority of cases, this additional question was unnecessary.
<p>The study explores the monetization of Edo language films, a vital yet underexplored segment of Nigeria’s Nollywood, with a specific focus on Benin language films produced in Edo State.
By moving beyond traditional semiotic readings and instead emphasizing embodied, affective, and ecological dimensions of trauma and resistance, this analysis engages with critical post-liberal methodologies that remain underexplored in current literary scholarship.
HYDROCOLONIAL MEMORY, GENDERED TRAUMA AND QUEER ERASURE IN KOLEKA PUTUMA’S COLLECTIVE AMNESIA · 2025 · DOIThis article reconstructs women’s lives within the caravan networks that linked Central Africa to the Indian Ocean in the late nineteenth century, focusing on Kisangani (Stanley Falls) and its hinterland (today DRCongo) – a profoundly understudied region in research about the history of slavery.
Between marriage and slavery: women, social mobility, and the making of Ngwana power in late-nineteenth-century Central Africa · 2025 · DOIIn a book spanning five long chapters, author Joan Kee argues that an understanding of the ‘global majority’ in the art world cannot be merely about ‘including’ under-recognised artists, but must f.
Particularly, the belief in witchcraft among Malawian elites’ warrants closer scrutiny, especially since existing literature and local discourse on the impact of witchcraft tend to largely focus on rural and less educated groups in the population.
Power, Politics, and the Supernatural: Exploring the Role of Witchcraft Beliefs in Governance for Development · 2024 · DOIFurthermore, it justifies the assertion that African women should be studied based on their realities, devoid of foreign interpretations alien to the peculiar features in Nigerian societies.
However, this representation of the Niger Delta is deemed too schematic and misleading since it does not account for oil production's complicated local and human issues.
Most-cited papers in African history and culture studies
- Historical Legacies and African Development · Journal of Economic Literature · 2020 · 136 citations
- When group representations serve social change: The speeches of Patrice Lumumba during the Congolese decolonization · British Journal of Social Psychology · 2003 · 112 citations
- Marikana, turning point in South African history · Review of African Political Economy · 2013 · 87 citations
- Cars Out of Place: Vampires, Technology, and Labor in East and Central Africa · Representations · 1993 · 65 citations
- Camp Abolition: Ending Carceral Humanitarianism in Kenya (and Beyond) · Antipode · 2021 · 60 citations
- ‘Our Strike’: Equality, Anticolonial Politics and the 1947–48 Railway Strike in French West Africa · The Journal of African History · 1996 · 47 citations
- Harnessing the ‘hustle’: struggle, solidarities and narratives of work in Nairobi and beyond Introduction · Africa · 2021 · 45 citations
- Contemporary functions of <i>ilobolo</i> (bridewealth) in urban South African Zulu society · Journal of Contemporary African Studies · 2014 · 43 citations
- Laborers, Migrants, Refugees · Migration and Society · 2020 · 37 citations
- “You Rise Up … They Burn You Again”: Market fires and the urban intimacies of disaster colonialism · Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers · 2020 · 33 citations
Most recent work
- Afrobeats, Moral Disengagement and the Cultural Politics of Online Fraud: The Difference Between a Twitch and a Wink Is Vast · Deviant Behavior · 2026
- Frottage: friction, intimacy and rethinking African Diasporas · Safundi · 2026
- From Wounds to Words: A Constructivist Case Study of Narrative Self-Reconstruction After Childhood Trauma in Shaka Senghor’s <i>Writing My Wrongs</i> · Journal of Constructivist Psychology · 2026
- Rethinking postcolonial justice: <i>Issakaba</i> and the role of vigilante power in Nigerian cinema · Journal of Contemporary African Studies · 2026
- Labour struggles in southern Africa 1919-1949: new persepctives on the Industrial Commercial Workers' Union (ICU) · Human Science Research Council SA · 2026
- Ikoka’s Monetization Blueprint · The International Journal of Social Sustainability in Economic, Social, and Cultural Context · 2026
- COERCION AND ITS LIMITS: COLONIAL POLICING, NON-COERCIVE IMPROVISATION, AND THE ORIGINS OF HYBRID CONFLICT MANAGEMENT IN NIGERIA'S MIDDLE BELT, 1920S–1960 · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- The triad of exploitation: Migration, remittance pressures and the politics of survival in transnational spaces · Transitions Journal of Transient Migration · 2026
- Vigilantismus in Sphären sozialer Nähe: Zur Emergenz der Strafpraxis urbaner Koglweogo-Gruppen in Burkina Faso · Sociologus · 2026
- An African Ethics of Shame · Theoria · 2026
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