Siyabonga Njica on Bloke Modisane’s research in East Africa

In this episode, Siyabonga Njica (Cambridge) joins guest host Elizabeth Price (Wisconsin) to discuss his JAH article on Bloke Modisane's unfinished history of the Maji Maji War, armed resistance against German colonial rule in East Africa from 1905–07.

 

Njica traces Modisane's trajectory from apartheid-era South Africa into exile, where Rockefeller Foundation support enabled his Maji Maji War project and drew him into a complicated relationship with Nyerere's postcolonial government and the emerging Dar es Salaam school of history—a relationship that illuminates broader tensions between Pan-Africanism and nation-building. The conversation also turns to methodological and ethical questions still confronting those who study the African past today: how to read the gaps and silences in historiography, who is authorized to write history, and what shifts when that inquiry extends beyond professional historians.