EIHS Lecture: Labor, Spirit, and Sovereignty: Africa’s Great War

In writing histories of World War I, the pull of linear narrative is an ever-present temptation, holding out the promise of making the global conflict comprehensible. Yet under the surface of the war’s grand narratives are the many wayward histories that refuse to get in formation. The history of World War I in the African world can be, and often has been, written as military or political history, in which imposing order on unruly details and examples compensates for Eurocentric sidelining or exclusion of African and African descended peoples from the historiography. This lecture examines sites of unruliness and insurgency in African histories of the war by analyzing African refusals of European imperial extraction. Faced with war-driven colonial labor and tax demands, African peoples decried these unrelenting abuses in modes that drew on ancestral, spiritual, medicinal, and Biblical authority, gesturing towards sovereignty and political reconfiguration. Using examples from different parts of the African world, this lecture argues for understanding the war years as a temporal frame for recognizing and naming multimodal African insurgencies against imperial extractivism and violence.

Michelle Moyd is Associate Professor of History and Red Cedar Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University. She is the author of "Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa," published by Ohio University Press in 2014. Her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Radical History Review, Slavery and Abolition, and International Labor and Working Class History. She is currently working on The African World and the First World War, under contract with Cambridge University Press for the New Approaches to African History series.

This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.