Historians of Africa have frequently claimed that the violence of colonial conquest, and the slaughter of fauna that accompanied it, was reproduced in the repression of anti-colonial and nationalist insurgencies. Indeed the vocabularies of hunting, tracking and killing often seeped into the practices of counter-insurgencies. Using interviews, archives, and most of ...

This article is not about a specific country or political party; it is about the process by which young men – some already established freedom fighters, others wanting to join the struggle – manage to cross borders and go on to another country to be mobilised or trained to infiltrate the country from which they came. At the district headquarters in Francistown, Bot...

E. P. Thompson's Whigs and Hunters has had an enormous impact on African historiography in its articulation of the relationship between property and law and the subsequent criminalization of customary practices. Some of the other themes in this book - indistinct bands of law-breaking peasants, people and animals, notions of the wild, and the near impossibility of c...