We explore these questions from a variety of angles, rethinking space, slavery, politics, gender, and violence in African history, from the standpoint of intimate history. We analyze the potential and challenges of exploring kinship, friendship, and personal networks, to better understand broader historical phenomena. We discuss the transnational and affective geographies such research brings to light, and the sources it taps into, including family archives. Lastly, we analyze intimate methods of historical research, such as bringing our own lived experiences and memory, into our historical practice.

Our panel fuses insights and questions stemming out of several recent trends in African history. Scholars have sought to rewrite the histories of various communities “from within,” using analytical categories and epistemologies rooted in the historical actors’ own sense of self and of the world around them (Babou 2007, Kane 2016). In parallel, others have used the tools of micro-history or family history, to reveal ties connecting spaces, temporalities, or communities that appeared disconnected in the historiography, but that were connected in obvious ways in the worldviews and lives of the historical actors involved (Lindsay 2016, Oualdi 2020).

Madina Thiam explores the connected histories of trans-Atlantic slavery, Muslim pilgrimage, and long distance trade in the Sahel, through the intimate relationships of Hafsa, a Sahelian woman. Sara Hussein revisits the history of pan-Africanism and decolonization, through the friendship and family bonds that linked Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, and Egyptian intellectual Abdel Aziz Ishaak. Marius Kothor thinks through her own intimate engagement with Togolese political history, both as a historian of Togo, and a Togolese refugee who grew up in exile.

As methods of study, history from within, family history, and micro-history, inevitably and intimately pull the historian in. Putting these methods of historical inquiry in conversation under the umbrella of “intimate histories,” our panel leans into the “tricky work” they entail, requiring scholars to “balance intimacy with distance while at the same time being inquisitive to the point of invasiveness” (Lepore 2001). Intimate history can also be unsettling or uncomfortable to the scholars practicing it, particularly when they set out to write about historical topics they have intimate, at times traumatic, experience of (Hodes 2022). Yet, as we show, intimate history yields a granular understanding of connected spaces and geographies, structures of oppression, and political struggles.