Megan Vaughan

Kenneth Gray Mdala was born around 1880 in what was later to become Nyasaland and is now Malawi. It is that part of Africa through which Livingstone trod or was carried, defined for strangers by its long, thin lake lying in the Rift Valley and by the ravages of the slave trade. Mdala came from a chiefly family and belonged to an ethnic group known as the Yao, who were one of the agents of...

In August 1777 a crowd gathered in Port Louis, the capital of the Indian Ocean island of Ile de France (now Mauritius), for the execution of Benoît Giraud, otherwise known as ‘Hector the Mulatto’. Though the term ‘mulatto’ implied some ‘white’ parentage, Giraud was also described as a ‘free-born black’ from Martinique, an island on the...

On 1 June 1731, the Billy brothers, Guillaume and François, waved goodbye to their ship, the Diligent, as it set sail from Brittany. It was weighed down with Indian cloth, cowry shells from the Maldives, white linen from Hamburg, guns, ammunition and smoking pipes from Holland, kegs of brandy from the Loire Valley, and with the all-important supplies for the crew: firewood and flour,...

Vampires are not uncommon visitors to the villages of Malawi. Historically, they have adopted different guises – Catholic priests have often been subject to accusation, water engineers and medical workers, too. In the 1980s an impending visit by Princess Anne sparked rumours: what exactly had the British Royal Family fed on to become so wealthy? Children in a school near where I lived...

Is there a distinct social psychology of colonialism? Albert Memmi certainly thought so when he published The Coloniser and the Colonised in 1957. He was not the only one. Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban had appeared in 1950, and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks in 1952. And while Memmi had mixed feelings about Fanon, and Fanon had bitterly attacked Mannoni for his...