Rose Miyonga reports on the the ninth European Conference on African Studies (ECAS). The event, which brought together over 2,000 scholars from eighty countries, under the theme of ‘African Futures'. What emerged from this was a plurality of ways to conceptualise the future – of Africa and more generally – that led to an extremely rich conference programme, which stretched across time frames and spatial dimensions. Several Global History and Culture Centre students, staff and affiliates contributed to ECAS 2023.

PhD student Niels Boender had a chance to research for, and be part of, the Channel 4 and Al Jazeera documentary ‘A Very British Way of Torture’, also featuring Professor David Anderson. The documentary focuses on the use of torture by the British colonial authorities in Kenya against members of the anti-colonial Man Mau movement, and traces the historical research into official British attempts to cover this up. Niels reflects on the research here.

Until 1979, Britain contended with an avowedly segregationist element in its population, with complex but significant legacies. Located on the fringes of ‘Greater Britain’ in Southern Africa, 250,000 ‘Britons’ in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) justified white-minority rule, and rebellion against the Crown, using transatlantic discourses of white nationalism which had a significant impact on discussions regarding race and identity in the British metropole. Through Rhodesia’s experience and the discourses white Rhodesian propagandists produced, we can grasp the manner in which imperial nostalgia was transformed into transnational white nationalism, a discourse that continues to haunt present debates. Unravelling this must be one of the key tasks of global historians today, argues Niels Boender.