This thesis is a family history of Silas Molema and his three children from the late 1880s to the late 1920s. The Molemas were a family of devout Methodists and educated chiefs in Mafikeng north of British Bechuanaland (part of the Cape colony in 1895) but they held extensive landholdings across the border in the Bechuanaland Protectorate. The thesis explores education, landholding and political office as strategies through which the Molemas attempted to maintain their position of class, status and power. Chiefs perceived formal annexation by Britain in 1885 also as opportunity to pursue greater self-determination, preserve the institutions of chiefly rule, and sustain respectable livelihoods. These aspirations had come to be experienced and understood as sechuana, which was a fluid reconstruction of tradition that helped Molemas and other Bechuana notables straddle incongruous cultural spheres along a racially and ethnically diverse colonial frontier. The thesis argues that nationhood was a key identification through which Molemas and other educated Bechuana saw themselves, and considers why they imagined their nation within the British Empire. The thesis also points to the various historical transformations and private entanglements that enmeshed various conceptions of nationhood into the everyday experience of the family as an emotive and socialising institution. These sentiments of nationhood profoundly shaped this family’s self-understanding, and mediated the choices children made about work, marriage and other significant relationships. The challenge to transfer inherited privilege across generations shaped identities, intersected with the reconfiguration of the local political economy, and impinged upon structural transformations in southern Africa.

This thesis examines the role of missionaries, the colonial government, and leprosy patients in the formation of leprosy settlements in Uganda, from the first inception of the settlements in 1927, until 1951 when the nature of leprosy control in Uganda changed, with the government appointment of a Protectorate leprologist and the creation of more treatment centres. It focuses on four leprosy settlements opened between 1930 and 1934 by the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the British and Irish Catholic Franciscan Missionary Sisters for Africa (FMSA) and Mill Hill Mission (MHM). Firstly, this thesis explores the ways in which the differing goals, ideologies, and resources of the Protestant CMS and the Catholic FMSA and MHM shaped the formation of and social environment within leprosy settlements in a highly Christianised and denominationally divided Uganda. Secondly, it examines the relationship between the CMS and Franciscan leprosy missions and the government, exploring the cooperation and conflict that their spiritual and medical priorities had upon the social lives of patients within Uganda’s leprosy settlements. Thirdly, this thesis assesses the extent to which missionaries consciously endeavoured to engineer a social environment for leprosy patients within settlements that conformed to their ideal of Christianised, modern African communities, as well the roles that healthy and leprous Ugandans chose to play in response to these attempts at social engineering. Missionaries and Ugandan leprosy patients had different priorities, but far from being passive receptacles of the ‘civilising’ mission, most leprosy patients were active agents in pursuing their own medical, social, and economic priorities through life in the settlements.

As the first analytic history of Ethiopian medicine, this thesis explores the interchange between the institutional development of a national medical network and the lived experiences of women as patients and practitioners of medicine from the years 1940-1975. Using birth and gender as mechanisms to explore the nation's public health history allows me to pursue alternative threads of enquiry: I ask questions not only about state activities and policy pursuits, but also about the relevance and acceptance of those actions in the lives of the citizenry. This thesis is also the first medical history of a non-colonial African country, opening up new questions about the role of non-Western actors in the expansion of Western medicine in the twentieth century. I explore the ways in which the exceptional history of Ethiopia can be couched in existing narratives of African modernity, medicine, and birth history. Issues of local agency and the creation of new social elites in the pursuit of modernity are all pertinent to the case of Ethiopia. Through both extensive archival research and oral interviews of nearly 200 participants in Haile Selassie's medical campaigns, I argue that the extent to which the imperial medical project in Ethiopia 'succeeded' was highly predicated on pre-existing conditions of gender, class, and geography.

A aprovação de legislação específica no campo educacional brasileiro referente à inclusão de História da África e Cultura Afro-Brasileira nos diferentes níveis e modalidades de ensino a partir do ano de 2003, colocou-se tanto como um grande desafio quanto como um leque de possibilidades para a pesquisa em diferentes áreas do conhecimento no Brasil. Nesse contexto, e para contribuir com a política de ações afirmativas, a presente pesquisa tem como foco a história das Ciências na África, de modo a investigar práticas de conhecimento da natureza de comunidades africanas, entre os séculos XV e XVII, na região atualmente conhecida como África Ocidental - em particular, as extensões territoriais localizadas ao sul do Deserto do Saara, anteriormente conhecidas como Estados Sudaneses. Inicialmente, investigaremos o processo que culminou na inclusão da história da África no currículo escolar, procurando demonstrar que, apesar de esta ser uma importante conquista do movimento negro, o tratamento dado ao tema nas escolas permanece com lacunas importantes, notadamente no que se refere ao reconhecimento das culturas africanas como produtoras de conhecimento científico. De maneira mais geral, pretendemos analisar também como o continente africano comparece de modo muito limitado no universo da própria historiografia das ciências, mesmo em suas versões críticas ao eurocentrismo tradicional da disciplina. Finalmente, utilizaremos um conjunto de fontes portuguesas, compreendendo o período entre os séculos XV e XVII, que apresentam registros de técnicas e práticas de conhecimento de comunidades africanas e podem permitir uma espécie de \"reconstituição\" dos seus saberes (mesmo se analisado através do olhar europeu dos autores). A análise dessas fontes, com atenção voltada ao que podem contribuir para uma história das ciências na África, poderá ser ponto de partida para o desenvolvimento de projetos voltados ao ensino de História da África e Cultura Afro-Brasileira que envolvam não apenas professores de história, língua portuguesa ou artes, como é comum nas escolas, mas também professores de ciências. / The approval of an specific law from 2003 on the implementation of History of Africa and Afro-Brazilian Culture, within the different levels and modalities of teaching has been set as a great challenge, as well as a wide range of possibilities for researches in several areas of knowledge in Brazil. Within this context, and as a contribution to the affirmative actions policy, the present research has as it focus the history of Sciences in Africa in order to investigate practices of nature knowledge in African communities between XV and XVII centuries, in the region currently known as Western Africa - particularly those territory extensions set in the south of Sahara Desert, formerly called Sudanese States. Initially, we shall investigate the process that culminated with the inclusion of History of Africa within the school curriculum, trying to demonstrate that although it is an important achievement for Black Movement, the treatment given to this theme within the schools remains with important lacks, notedly in what refers to the recognition of African cultures as promoters of scientific knowledge. In general terms, we also intend to analyse how African Continent appears in a very limited way in the universe of historiography of Sciences, even within the critical versions against the traditional eurocentrism on this discipline. Lastly, we shall use a set of Portuguese sources, comprehending the period between XV and XVII centuries, which presents registers of techniches and knowledges practices of African communities, that can permit also a sort of \"reconstitution\" of their knowledge (even if it is analysed throughout the European authors\'s point of view). The analysis of the sources, with our attention directed to those ones that could contribute to the Hitory of Sciences in Africa, can be the starting point to the development of projects aimed to the teaching of History of Africa and Afro-Brazilian Culture, which involves not only History, Portuguese or Arts teachers, as generally seen in the schools, but also the Science teachers.

Esta tese traz uma análise da perspectiva africana na coleção História Geral da África (UNESCO). Para isto, baseia-se no exame da história institucional do projeto que lhe originou e da escrita da história ali presente, em seus oito volumes. Tais considerações levaram a definição da perspectiva africana como uma perspectiva que privilegia os fatores internos ao continente, em oposição aos externos, na explicação histórica, científica, da África. Ademais, constatou-se que esta perspectiva se diversifica, na História Geral da África (HGA), em três abordagens complementares da história da África: a) regionalismo; b) difusionismo intra-africano; c) sujeito africano. A partir de tal investigação, reflete-se sobre algumas consequências teóricas e metodológicas que tal perspectiva africana traz para uma visão científica contemporânea e tendencialmente pós-eurocêntrica da história da África. / This thesis presents an analysis of the African perspective in the project General History of Africa (UNESCO). It examines the institutional history of the project and the writing of history in this collection of eight volumes. Such considerations have led to the definition of the African perspective as a perspective that focuses on the internal factors of the continent, as opposed to external ones, in its scientific explanation of Africa history. In addition, this study concluded that this perspective unfolds into three complementary approaches of the General History of Africa (GHA): a) regionalism b) intra-African diffusionism c) African subject. This analysis provides the basis for a discussion on some theoretical and methodological outcomes that such an African perspective brings to a scientific view on the history of Africa that is contemporary and potentially post-Eurocentric.

This thesis studies print culture in colonial Lagos against the background of the public sphere, and brings together a variety of English-language and Yoruba-language newspapers. Such an approach allows for highlighting the practicalities of newspaper production and foregrounding the work accomplished by newspapermen in a changing 'information environment' and political context. It offers insights into Lagos politics, contributes to the history of the educated elite, and to more global histories of communication. Using newspapers as well as archival records, and focussing on events that strikingly reveal dynamics in the public sphere, this thesis narrates a nuanced history of a discursive field which was, amongst other things, central for Lagos politics. This thesis complicates a Habermasian notion of the public sphere as an open discursive space, and not only highlights that the public sphere was an arena of contested meanings, but also illustrates axes along which the composition of this social structure was negotiated. When newspapers emerged in the late nineteenth-century, discussions in the press were largely restricted to the elite. The economy of recognition that was at play in the public sphere was to change in the 1920s. This thesis highlights how newspapermen and contributors sought to carve out niches for themselves in the public sphere in new ways and how their becoming a speaker in this discursive field was challenged and contested. It highlights the nuanced ways in which newspapermen and contributors convened publics through their papers: how they did so around particular issues, in distinction from each other, and how they adapted the convening of publics to new political dynamics in the 1940s. This thesis gives insight into the complex relationship between English-language and Yoruba-language newspapers, and moreover illustrates how the practicalities of the newspaper business were coming to bear on dynamics in the public sphere.

The main motivation of this thesis is to contribute to the literature on the macroeconomic effects of foreign aid flows. It consists of four empirical papers, investigating the two main channels through which aid flows impact the recipient economy: (i) the fiscal sector, and (ii) the real exchange rate. The first paper is concerned with the impact of aid on government expenditure, domestic revenues and borrowing. It uses a traditional fiscal response framework with annual data for Ethiopia. The second paper also focuses on the fiscal sector but uses a recently compiled quarterly fiscal dataset and the cointegrated vector autoregression methodology. The main result arising from both papers is the strong correlation between aid inflows and domestic borrowing, possibly as a strategy to smooth unpredictable and volatile aid inflows. Aid is positively correlated with government expenditures, but there is little evidence of tax displacement. There is also evidence of aid heterogeneity, as grants and loans induce different effects. The third paper assesses the impact of foreign aid on the Ethiopian real exchange rate, which is a common measure of external competitiveness. It uses a quarterly macroeconomic dataset and applies two distinct methodologies: (i) single-equation cointegration models, and (ii) an unobserved components model. The results do not provide support for the ‘Dutch disease' hypothesis. The fourth paper investigates the extent to which foreign aid is ‘absorbed' and ‘spent'. The empirical analysis uses a panel of 25 African low-income countries and applies recently developed panel cointegration techniques. The findings suggest that aid is fully spent while absorption is higher than previously estimated.

No description available.

This thesis consists of three stand-alone papers. It examines the economic and political effects of natural resources in Africa. In the first paper, we investigate the effect of mining activity on subnational economic development by using satellite data on night lights as a measure of economic development. We find that mineral production and discovery improves local economy. However, we do not observe (strong) general equilibrium effect beyond the confines of a district. In the second paper, we test the link between natural resources and multiethnic power sharing coalitions in Africa. We find that resource discoveries and rising commodity prices increase the probability of representation at the executive branches of government. Our finding supports the idea that resource discoveries and rising commodity prices provide rulers with more revenues to expand the state cabinet sizes; hence they build broader multi-ethnic coalitions. In the third paper, we investigate the association between natural resources and intra-state local armed conflict in Africa. We find that natural resource discoveries do not trigger armed conflict in Africa at the local level. Consistent with the finding in the first paper (positive economic effect) and second paper (positive political effect), resource discovery appears to reduce the likelihood of armed conflict by increasing the opportunity cost of joining armed rebellion.

Esta tese traz uma análise da perspectiva africana na coleção História Geral da África (UNESCO). Para isto, baseia-se no exame da história institucional do projeto que lhe originou e da escrita da história ali presente, em seus oito volumes. Tais considerações levaram a definição da perspectiva africana como uma perspectiva que privilegia os fatores internos ao continente, em oposição aos externos, na explicação histórica, científica, da África. Ademais, constatou-se que esta perspectiva se diversifica, na História Geral da África (HGA), em três abordagens complementares da história da África: a) regionalismo; b) difusionismo intra-africano; c) sujeito africano. A partir de tal investigação, reflete-se sobre algumas consequências teóricas e metodológicas que tal perspectiva africana traz para uma visão científica contemporânea e tendencialmente pós-eurocêntrica da história da África. / This thesis presents an analysis of the African perspective in the project General History of Africa (UNESCO). It examines the institutional history of the project and the writing of history in this collection of eight volumes. Such considerations have led to the definition of the African perspective as a perspective that focuses on the internal factors of the continent, as opposed to external ones, in its scientific explanation of Africa history. In addition, this study concluded that this perspective unfolds into three complementary approaches of the General History of Africa (GHA): a) regionalism b) intra-African diffusionism c) African subject. This analysis provides the basis for a discussion on some theoretical and methodological outcomes that such an African perspective brings to a scientific view on the history of Africa that is contemporary and potentially post-Eurocentric.