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The Congo’s and Belgium’s shared past, present and future
By Eva Schalbroeck As a historian, I strongly believe in studying history for its own sake, rather than from today’s perspective. As someone who devours news from every type of media outlet, I cannot help but see the connections between the news on the Democratic Republic of Congo and my research on Belgian colonialism. Barely…
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9. The Victoria Falls hotel trolley
By Nicole Sithole This hand-propelled trolley system ran on interconnected rail tracks that skirt the iconic Victoria Falls Hotel in Zimbabwe. Since their debut in 1920, a substantial number of black African men pushed and pulled approximately two million white guests to various scenic points around the Victoria Falls. Plaques displayed under the preserved trolleys,…
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Book Review – The Night Trains by Charles van Onselen
Nicole Sithole reviews Charles van Onselen’s The Night Trains: Moving Mozambican Miners to and from South Africa, 1902-1955 (Jonathan Ball, 2019), £25.00. The Night Trains is a riveting account of the gruesome experiences of black men from the Sul du Save in Mozambique, on board ghostly night trains which transported them back and forth to…
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How to build powerful advocacy movements: lessons from the 1960s Ugandan women’s movement
By Livia Eva Karoui (@LiviaEva) On March 22, 1960, women from across Uganda arrived at the National Cultural Centre in Kampala for the Conference on the Status of Women in Relation to the Marriage Laws. They represented 12 of the 17 districts of Uganda and all its major religious denominations. They were white British women,…
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Can We Use the Colonial Archives to Do Non-Elite History?
By Akhilesh Karumchand Issur (@AkhileshIssur) History is much more than a sequential list of events; it is full of nuanced perspectives that are experienced, remembered, memorialised, and interpreted in various ways by different people. In need of remaining objective and precise, every historian is therefore confronted with the major challenge of supporting their claims about…
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