Hicks Dan. — The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution

Le jeu de mots est assez transparent pour ne pas avoir besoin d’être traduit en français. Le British Museum est brutal : résultat de l’accumulation d’œuvres d’art volées et acquises légalement à travers le monde, le British Museum est devenu en partie grâce à cette brutalité l’un des musées les plus célèbres de la planète. L’auteur, Dan Hicks, n’y va pas par quatre chemins : le British Museum, comme de nombreux musées du Royaume-Uni, perpétue une forme de violence coloniale en conservant et ..

Archives, the Digital Turn, and Governance in Africa

With the rise of information technology, an increasing proportion of public African archives are being digitized and made accessible on the internet. The same is being done to a certain extent with private archives too. As much as the new technologies are raising enthusiasm, they have prompted discussion among researchers and archivists, on subjects ranging from matters of intellectual property to sovereignty and governance. Digital archiving disrupts archival norms and practices, opening up a field of reflection relatively little explored by historians. This article therefore seeks to reflect on the digital turn of African archives as a subject for study in its own right, located at the crossroads of political and economic interests

Introduction

This book aims to suggest an analysis of the conflict that focuses on three crucial points. The first is related to space. It is now evident that the framework of the nation-state is too circumscribed and does not capture the complexity of the relations that came into being at local, national and international levels. In this regard, we find particularly penalising the conventional approach that tends to investigate WWI in Africa and the Middle East as two separate settings, a view that unfortunately is still prevalent. Also, WWI studies have tended to examine the conflict within the geographical contours created by the area studies paradigm. Adopted in the 1950s, the area studies model has been under scrutiny since the mid-1990s.73 The artificial disjuncture between Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and the Middle East reveals all its inadequacies when we deal with the Horn of Africa, an area strongly connected to the neighboring regions. Our choice to focus on a territory which stretches from Libya to Ethiopia and encompasses the Yemen and Middle East is an attempt to overcome this hiatus. Erasing the artificial lines that divide the Horn of Africa from the wider Red Sea region allows approaches that offer a greater understanding of the dynamics at work during WWI. Ours is only a partial attempt to address this methodological limit. But we are aware that Shar\u12bf Husayn\u2019s break with the Ottomans and the volatile situation in Yemen and along the Red Sea deserves more attention from scholars of African history

Why Researchers Should Publish Archive Inventories Online:The Case of the Archives of French Equatorial Africa

Abstract:This short report gives the rationale behind the creation of the websitehttps://archivescolonialesbrazzaville.wordpress.com/, dedicated to the colonial archives of French Equatorial Africa in January 2015. It is argued that researchers and archivists can build highly useful websites in Africa even with a limited Internet connection.</jats:p

From a Kingdom to a Nigerian State: the Territory and Boundaries of Borno (1810-2010)

This thesis examines the political space of Borno part of modern-day Nigeria from 1810 to 2010. It seeks to bridge the gap between precolonial, colonial and postcolonial history while studying the evolving concept of a Bornoan space in the longue durée. This research project highlights the continuity of the spatial framework of a nineteenth-century kingdom in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that the Bornoan space survived the European colonisation as the British manipulated the concept of the territory of Borno in their competition against other Europeans in Africa. European imperialism did not always destroy African polities but, in the case of Borno, favoured the reconstruction of a nineteenth-century territory within the Nigerian colony. It will be argued that the quest for territorial legitimacy led the British to constantly adapt their colonial administration to the previous nineteenth-century space as the colonial administration recycled the kingdom of Borno within the Nigerian framework. The creation of the province of Borno was thus based on the utilisation of some of its nineteenth-century borders and its concept of territoriality. Thus, Indirect Rule preserved the territory of Borno within colonial Nigeria. This last argument means that the Bornoan space was re-used and reconstructed by the colonial officials with the help of the Bornoan elite. The independent kingdom was no more but it could survive within British administration and scholarly writings. This attitude can explain why the British officials wanted to reunify German and British Borno in two United Nations plebiscites in 1959 and 1961. The Scramble for Borno which began at the end of the nineteenth century was thus not over before 1961. Postcolonial Nigeria directly inherited this administrative framework and territorial practices from its colonial predecessor. This last phenomenon can explain the creation of Borno State in 1976. However, this process came to an end in 1991 when Yobe State was carved out Borno. It will be argued that the Bornoan spatial identity is evolving and turning into a cultural phenomenon in the twenty-first century

Tournant archivistique et tournant numérique en Afrique

International audienceHistorien et enseignant au Kings’s College de Londres, Vincent Hiribarren a soutenu une thèse sur l’histoire du Bornou à l’Université de Leeds en 2012, publié en 2017 sous le titre A History of Borno: Trans-Saharan African Empire to Failing Nigerian State (Hiribarren 2017). Ses travaux s’inscrivent dans une perspective de longue durée pour retracer l’histoire de cette région ouest-africaine, située dans le nord-est du Nigéria, de l’époque moderne de l’empire du Bornou (xive–xixe siècle) jusqu’à l’histoire récente du groupe terroriste Boko Haram. Il mobilise des sources singulièrement diverses, entre histoire et anthropologie : archives, entretiens, données géographiques. La revue Sources a souhaité lui ouvrir les colonnes de ce premier dossier. Investi dans de nombreux projets de collectes et de numérisations archivistiques, il nous confie son expérience en matière d’histoire, d’archives et d’humanités numériques