Employing an innovative methodological toolkit, Doing Conceptual History in Africa provides a refreshingly broad and interdisciplinary approach to African historical studies. The studies assembled here focus on the complex role of language in Africa’s historical development, with a particular emphasis on pragmatics and semantics. From precolonial dynamics of wealth and poverty to the conceptual foundations of nationalist movements, each contribution strikes a balance between the local and the global, engaging with a distinctively African intellectual tradition while analyzing the regional and global contexts in which categories like “work,” “marriage,” and “land” take shape.

List of Maps, Figures and Tables                            
Acknowledgements
Notes on Language

Introduction: Theories and Methods of African Conceptual History
Rhiannon Stephens and Axel Fleisch

Chapter 1. ‘Wealth’, ‘Poverty’ and the Question of Conceptual History in Oral Contexts: Uganda from c. 1000 C.E.
Rhiannon Stephens

Chapter 2. Conceptual Continuities: About ‘Work’ in Nguni
Axel Fleisch

Chapter 3. Tracking the Concept of ‘Work’ on the North Eastern Cape Frontier, South Africa
Anne Kelk Mager

Chapter 4. Understanding the Concept ‘Marriage’ in Afrikaans during the Twentieth Century
Marné Pienaar

Chapter 5. Male Circumcision among the Bagisu of Eastern Uganda: Practices and Conceptualizations
Pamela Khanakwa

Chapter 6. The Concept of ‘Land’ in Bioko: ‘Land as Property’ and ‘Land as Country’
Ana Lúcia Sá

Chapter 7. Conceptualizing ‘Land’ and ‘Nation’ in Early Gold Coast Nationalism
Pieter Boele van Hensbroek

Chapter 8. An Untimely Concept: Decolonization and the Works of Mudimbe, Mbembe and Nganang
Pierre-Philippe Fraiture

Index