After a moment that was characterized by a flurry of constitutional reforms and elections, coups have returned in some states in Western, Central, and Sahel regions in Africa. The rule of law and democratic governance have come under significant stress. A confluence of events – colonial legacies, uprisings, regional conflicts, term elongation, challenges to the dynastic style of leadership, and the rising incidence of coups – challenge the entrenchment of the rule of law in contemporary Africa. Focusing on the period between 2020 and 2023, the chapter asks: Against the background of recent coups, how should we analyze the rule of law in contemporary Africa? Is the decline of the rule of law and democratic governance in sub-Saharan Africa as a region overstated, given that the coups are concentrated in Francophone West and the Central Africa? How should we think of the role of geopolitical contestations and colonial linkages in unsettling democratic regimes and eroding the rule of law in Africa?

This chapter explores how the evolving disease environments of the tropics shaped free and forced migration patterns at English sites. The globalization of forced labor markets and trade were catalysts in the spread of yellow fever and falciparum malaria, diseases that originated in Africa and that disproportionately weakened or killed English migrants to the tropics. These were the two deadliest mosquito-borne fevers that the English encountered in the tropics. The ways in which the English understood and responded to evolving tropical disease environments and their differential effects on European and non-European populations contributed to the rise of enslaved majorities in the tropics and informed ideas about human difference that would coalesce into nineteenth-century racism. The chapter will also show how epidemiology made English footholds in the tropics much more precarious and dependent on non-Europeans than the English footholds in other more temperate zones of the empire. The chapter relies on case studies of disease outbreaks in the Caribbean, on the West African Gold Coast, and in Sumatra at key points in the seventeenth century.

Ephemeral conversations between enslaved people about the laws of slavery and freedom constituted an exchange of precious knowledge and legal know-how that shaped Black life and thought in the early Atlantic world. This chapter explores enslaved people's petitions to the crown for freedom on the basis that their enslavement was illegitimate to write a history of ideas among enslaved Black people about the illegitimacy of certain types of enslavements in the Spanish empire. These petitions are indicative of a rich landscape of ideas about freedom and slavery among free and enslaved Black people in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and their engagement with Castilian rules of law of slavery and freedom. They argued that they were legally free and that their freedom had been stolen from them. Pedro de Carmona, for example, protested in his petition in 1547 about the “great injury and disturbances (agravios y turbación) that have been done to my liberty.” The chapter traces how enslaved Black litigants accrued this know-how through their discussions with other enslaved and free Black people during their desperate pursuits to reclaim the freedom that had been stolen from them.

The rights of man and the citizen were in conflict in West African abolitionism because the universalism of the rights of man was not enforceable without encroaching on the sovereignty of African states. This chapter will explore the development of ideas of rights in the engagements between West Africa and the abolitionists and imperialists who intervened there across the nineteenth century. The three sections explore the forms of civil, political, and ‘universal’ rights that existed in West Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century; the ideas of rights that abolitionists developed in their antislavery interventions against the slave trade in West Africa; and the ideas of rights that emerged in debates over imperial citizenship in these colonies towards the end of the century. A multiplicity of rights regimes existed in overlapping and competing spaces as West Africa became a site for differentiating the civilizing mission and citizenship; duties and rights; and the boundaries of universal privileges and assertive versus paternalistic rights. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen may have laid out the theory for citizenship, law, and universal rights, but it was through the attempt to implement those ideas as universal that differentiation between basic rights and citizenship rights began to be articulated. That differentiation emerged through negotiations over the power to implement universal ideals in places like West Africa, which were undergoing their own revolutions in ideas of universal legal regimes and notions of citizenship, while maintaining political privileges for a subset of the population. In the process, European colonial governments came into conflict with each other and with African governments’ ideas of the universal moral values that conferred rights on their members.

Rice in West Africa is cultivated in different ecological, social, and agricultural settings. This chapter takes these diverse environments as the entry point for revisiting the history of the West Africa Rice Development Association (WARDA) and of rice research and breeding in the region. Irrigated rice emerged as a major environment of focus in the colonial period, primarily serving rice schemes in the dry zone of former French colonies Mali, Senegal, and northern Ivory Coast. Colonial projects excluded the humid uplands, a prominent rice environment across the forested zones of West Africa. Decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s initially implied a focus on national environments, followed by a regrouping into three main environments when WARDA was established in 1970. WARDA’s strategy excluded the humid uplands until the 1990s, although experts, including CGIAR advisors, argued early on for the importance of the humid uplands as a major environment for research and improvement. The chapter contrasts these findings with standard historical accounts of WARDA that highlight technical breeding capacity, a perspective fitting its radical policy change and rebranding in the 2000s.

Chapter 6 is concerned with the role of the West India Regiments in maintaining and expanding Britain’s African empire in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The particular focus is the 1873-74 Anglo-Asante War, the first colonial campaign to capture the British public’s imagination and one which made a household name of commanding officer Garnet Joseph Wolseley (1833-1913). The Asante were among Britain’s most consistent antagonists in the imperial theatre and held a long-standing place within European discourses of African ‘savagery’. Warfare against them was cast as an interracial struggle. However, the involvement of the West India Regiments complicated this picture and the chapter compares the depiction of the regiments’ soldiers with that of Britain’s Asante enemies and local Fante allies. It also considers the military role allotted to the West India Regiment soldiers as the campaign developed, including the fact that they were used as baggage-handlers for the White regiments during the final march on Kumasi and were not permitted to enter the Asante capital. This shows that the way in which their constrained martial image, such that they were neither White ‘soldiers’ nor African ‘warriors’, had consequences in the military field.

This chapter focuses on the depiction of the first African-Caribbean man to receive the Victoria Cross, Samuel Hodge (c.1840-68) of the 4th WIR. In 1866, Hodge was serving in West Africa when his unit was involved in an assault against a stockaded village close to the River Gambia. For his bravery in breaching the defences, he was awarded Britain’s highest military honour, though he died of his wounds in early 1868. Hodge appeared in The Capture of Tubabakolong, Gambia, 1866, by the English artist Louis William Desanges (1822-87). Desanges was best known for his paintings of Victoria Cross winners, which were among the most familiar depictions of contemporary warfare. As such, Desanges did much to visually express the growing middle-class militarism and patriotism that characterised mid-century Britain. The chapter analyses the depiction of Hodge by Desanges, comparing it with the imagery of other Victoria Cross heroes, as well as written accounts. It shows that with the steady Black soldier dominating the image of the West India Regiments, Hodge’s valour could only be represented in highly circumscribed ways.

The chapter explores Iran’s policy in West Africa through two very different relationships; those with Senegal and Nigeria. Senegal was identified early in the 1970s as a country that Iran would pursue a special relationship with. This political partnership was facilitated by the strong personal bonds developed between the two sets of leaders, which were shaped by their francophone backgrounds. The president of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor, in particular, shared a close bond with Empress Farah Pahlavi, and spoke eloquently about the inherent similarities between his philosophy of Négritude and Iran’s Iranité. On the other hand, Iran’s relationship with Nigeria was very pragmatic. Iran’s ambassador there, Shāhrokh Firuz, found himself frustrated by the rigidity of Iran’s policy, and the lack of freedom he had to explore new opportunities for Iran, not only in Nigeria, but also other countries in the region. These two relationships provide fascinating insights into Iran’s strategy in arguably the only part of Africa in which it had no immediately obvious security or strategic interests. The chapter explores what drove these relationships, and what each side gained from them.