A Talk by Peter Vale, Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
In mid-May each year, following the annual sorghum harvest, the heads of the Bayeke and Basanga of the southern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), known as Katanga, declare: tuye tukadie mukuba, “let’s go eat the copper.” But what does it mean to “eat” copper? This talk traces the evolution of this unique idea during the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods. In drawing together copper artifacts, oral accounts, colonial ethnographies, historical images, and postcolonial propaganda, this talk suggests that the “eating” of copper represents the deep material and conceptual tie between agriculture and mining in Central African environmental systems.

Indigenous miners consistently re-imagined modes of human engagement with the earth and its resources to foster new economic and ecological potentials. The historical persistence of this notion of “eating copper” underscores the profound cultural and economic attachments that have shaped Congolese communities’ relationships to extraction in a locale that has become the epicenter for global decarbonization and inequality initiatives.

Peter Vale is a historian of Africa, specializing in environmental systems, political economy, and empire to decolonization. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. His present book project, The Copper Eaters: Inventing Capitalism in Central Africa, asks why, despite persistent economic decline and devastating ecological consequences, Congolese (DRC) workers, residents, and officials have maintained such a deep attachment to a copper mining industry dominated by extractive, foreign capital. Drawing on community bulletins in Kiswahili, Kisanga, and French; interviews with miners and executives; and archives across seven countries, he traces the layering of social institutions, environmental knowledge, and political interests that have shaped Congolese expectations towards mineral extraction. He is also working on developing a second research project, tentatively titled Pan-African Skies, which will offer the first transnational history of African airlines.

A Talk by Folarin Ajibade, Assistant Professor of History, Florida State University
Hegeman 204  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk traces the sociocultural and political significance of urban gambling in Nigeria from the colonial to the contemporary period, exploring a critical moment of transition in Nigeria's history between the 1960s and the 1980s. Ajibade argues that during the first two decades of Nigeria's independence, popular gambling came to embody contentions in Nigerian civil society over the nature of the relationship between the Nigerian state and its urban masses. 

Folarin Ajibade is a historian of everyday life, with a regional focus on West Africa. He is broadly interested in the mundane and daily activities that urban Africans partake in, and engages with these activities as consequential and revelatory rather than as trivial pursuits. He received his PhD in African and African Diaspora History from New York University (NYU) in 2024, where he began working on his current manuscript, which is a history of the politics and profits of commercial gambling in urban Nigeria from the 1880s onward. Part of this work has been published in the Journal of African History.

A Talk By Elizabeth Ann Fretwell, Assistant Professor of African History, Old Dominion University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  1:00 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk traces the development of artisanal tailoring in mid-twentieth century Bénin, West Africa to show how everyday tailors served as important cultural and technological innovators. Drawing on evidence from apprenticeship, oral history, and archives, it explores the entanglement of materials, craft knowledge, and sartorial meaning in the creation of popular and enduring Béninois men’s styles. In doing so, it demonstrates how tailors helped fashion identities through clothes-making, giving form and expression to the political and social challenges of modernity, urbanization, and decolonization.

Elizabeth Ann Fretwell is Assistant Professor of African History at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. She has also taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon and at the University of Chicago where she received her PhD. Her research on material culture, technology, gender, and labor in French-speaking western Africa has appeared in Radical Historical Review, History and Technology, and Journal of Urban History. Her first book, Tailoring Identities: Craft, Technology, and Style in Bénin, is forthcoming with Indiana University Press.