Africa, layer by layer.

Background and institutions

Genome studies show that the ancestors of all people living outside Africa today left the continent mainly between about 70,000 and 50,000 years ago (Nielsen 2017; Bergström 2021). Bones from Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria show Homo sapiens in Europe about 45,000 years ago (Hublin 2020). On today’s Swiss territory, most traces of early modern humans, such as those from the Kesslerloch cave near Thayngen, date from after the last ice age, around 15,000 years ago.

Critical reading

‘Out of Africa’ is often told as a single departure. Research now describes several waves, mixing with Neanderthals along the way (people outside Africa carry 1 to 2 per cent Neanderthal DNA) and a pan-African origin: the oldest fossils come from Morocco and Ethiopia, not from one ‘cradle’. Genetic data from Africa itself are still thin compared with Europe, which shapes what can be known.

Key sources

1. 12Hublin, Jean-Jacques et al. (2017). New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens. Peer-reviewed
2. 14Vidal, Céline M. et al. (2022). Age of the oldest known Homo sapiens from eastern Africa. Peer-reviewed
3. 21Nielsen, Rasmus et al. (2017). Tracing the peopling of the world through genomics. Peer-reviewed
4. 24Hublin, Jean-Jacques et al. (2020). Initial Upper Palaeolithic Homo sapiens from Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria. Peer-reviewed
5. 25Bergström, Anders et al. (2021). Origins of modern human ancestry. Peer-reviewed

Background and institutions

The oldest account, the Passion of the Martyrs of Agaunum, was written by Bishop Eucherius of Lyon around 440, some 150 years after the events it describes. The abbey of Saint-Maurice, founded on the site in 515 by the Burgundian king Sigismund, is one of the oldest monasteries in the West still in use. From the mid-13th century, beginning with a statue in Magdeburg Cathedral, Maurice was often shown as a Black African (Suckale-Redlefsen 1987).

Critical reading

Historians doubt that a whole legion of several thousand men was executed; David Woods (1994) traces how the story was assembled from older martyr traditions. ‘Theban’ points to Upper Egypt, and the Black image of Maurice says more about medieval European ideas of Africa, the crusades and imperial politics than about his origin. The Zürich legend of Felix and Regula was written down only centuries later.

Key sources

1. 107Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz / Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse (online). articles on colonialism, the Landsgemeinde, the Federal Charter, the Theban Legion and Christoph Burckhardt. Reference work
2. 117Suckale-Redlefsen, Gude (1987). Mauritius: Der heilige Mohr / The Black Saint Maurice. Scholarly book
3. 118Bindman, David & Gates, Henry Louis Jr. (eds.) (2010). The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. II, part 1 (Jean Devisse): From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood. Scholarly book
4. 151Woods, David (1994). The origin of the legend of Maurice and the Theban Legion. Peer-reviewed

Background and institutions

Al-Qarawiyyin began as a mosque founded by Fatima al-Fihri, a woman from Kairouan; teaching circles grew around it, and in 1963 it became part of Morocco’s state university system. The monastery of St. Gallen, founded in 719 on the site of the hermit Gallus’s cell, built up one of Europe’s great libraries; it still holds about 2,100 manuscripts and the Plan of St Gall, drawn around 820.

Critical reading

Whether al-Qarawiyyin is the ‘oldest university’ depends on the definition: the European university was a self-governing corporation, first in Bologna in 1088, while mosque colleges were organised differently. Measuring African and Islamic institutions against the European model is itself a habit historians question. This is a parallel only: no contact between Fez and St. Gallen in the 9th century is known.

Key sources

1. 22UNESCO World Heritage Centre (online). World Heritage List. Official, institutional
2. 43Bennison, Amira K. (2016). The Almoravid and Almohad Empires. Scholarly book

Background and institutions

The Federal Charter of 1291 is one of several alliances between valley communities; for centuries the Rütli oath and the Pact of Brunnen of 1315 counted as the founding. Only in 1891 did the Federal Council make 1291 the founding year; 1 August has been a public holiday since 1994. The text now cited as the Manden Charter was compiled from oral versions at a meeting of traditional communicators in Kankan, Guinea, in 1998.

Critical reading

Roger Sablonier (2008) reads the 1291 pact as a local peace agreement among regional elites, not the birth of a nation; William Tell is legend. Historians likewise treat the Kurukan Fuga text as oral tradition that received its present wording in the 20th century. Both ‘charters’ became founding memories in modern nation-building, in Switzerland in the 1890s and in Mali and Guinea after independence.

Key sources

1. 51Niane, Djibril Tamsir (1965). Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, trans. G. D. Pickett. Primary source
2. 52UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage (2009). Manden Charter, proclaimed in Kurukan Fuga. Official, institutional
3. 107Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz / Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse (online). articles on colonialism, the Landsgemeinde, the Federal Charter, the Theban Legion and Christoph Burckhardt. Reference work
4. 119Sablonier, Roger (2008). Gründungszeit ohne Eidgenossen: Politik und Gesellschaft in der Innerschweiz um 1300. Scholarly book

Background and institutions

Swiss involvement took several forms: city governments and private investors held shares in trading companies, merchants financed and insured voyages from French ports, textile firms supplied the indiennes used as trade goods, and Swiss families owned plantations in the Caribbean and Suriname that were worked by enslaved people. Swiss soldiers also served in the French force sent against the Haitian Revolution in 1802–03.

Critical reading

For a long time the official view was that a country without colonies or ports had no part in the slave trade. Research since the early 2000s (David, Etemad and Schaufelbuehl 2005; Fässler 2005) and studies commissioned by cities, such as Zürich’s in 2020, have overturned this. The figures remain estimates, because many business records are lost or still in private hands.

Key sources

1. 62SlaveVoyages (online). Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Museum, archive, data
2. 107Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz / Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse (online). articles on colonialism, the Landsgemeinde, the Federal Charter, the Theban Legion and Christoph Burckhardt. Reference work
3. 110David, Thomas, Etemad, Bouda & Schaufelbuehl, Janick Marina (2005). Schwarze Geschäfte: Die Beteiligung von Schweizern an Sklaverei und Sklavenhandel im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (French: La Suisse et l’esclavage des Noirs). Scholarly book
4. 111Fässler, Hans (2005). Reise in Schwarz-Weiss: Schweizer Ortstermine in Sachen Sklaverei. Scholarly book
5. 112Stettler, Niklaus, Haenger, Peter & Labhardt, Robert (2004). Baumwolle, Sklaven und Kredite: Die Basler Welthandelsfirma Christoph Burckhardt & Cie. in revolutionärer Zeit (1789–1815). Scholarly book
6. 113Brengard, Marcel, Schubert, Frank & Zürcher, Lukas (2020). Die Beteiligung der Stadt Zürich sowie der Zürcherinnen und Zürcher an Sklaverei und Sklavenhandel vom 17. bis ins 19. Jahrhundert (report for the City of Zürich). Official, institutional
7. 114Swiss National Museum (2024). colonial: Switzerland’s Global Entanglements (exhibition, Zürich 2024–25). Museum, archive, data
8. 115Swiss Finance Museum (online). The Transatlantic Slave Trade, part 2: the South Sea Company. Museum, archive, data
9. 116Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (2024). Burckhardt, Christoph. Reference work

Background and institutions

Burckhardt travelled for the African Association in London, founded in 1788 to explore the African interior, which hired him to reach the Niger from Cairo. To prepare, he studied Arabic and Islamic law in Aleppo. On the way he described Petra in 1812 and Abu Simbel in 1813, and in 1814 he made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He died in Cairo in 1817 before he could set out for the Niger.

Critical reading

‘First European to describe’ is a European yardstick: people living near Abu Simbel and Petra knew both places. Burckhardt’s journeys depended on guides, merchants and informants whose names his books rarely record, and they served British interest in African trade routes, which later fed into imperial expansion.

Key sources

1. 120Burckhardt, John Lewis [Johann Ludwig] (1819). Travels in Nubia. Primary source

Background and institutions

The Evangelical Mission Society of Basel was founded in 1815 and sent its first four missionaries to the Gold Coast in 1828; within a few years most of them had died. Andreas Riis moved the work to Akropong in 1835. From 1859 a mission trading company sold European goods and bought palm oil and later cocoa; from 1928 it traded as the Union Trading Company. When Britain expelled the German-speaking missionaries during the First World War, African congregations carried on; the Presbyterian Church of Ghana and the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon grew from them.

Critical reading

Peter Haenger (1997) shows that the mission long tolerated slavery and pawning among its own Gold Coast members, even after Britain banned slavery in the colony in 1874. Andrea Franc (2008) shows how mission trade linked Swiss chocolate to colonial cocoa. Jon Miller (2003) analyses the strict control the Basel committee kept over missionaries and African staff. Much of the work, from preaching to Johann Gottlieb Christaller’s Twi grammar and dictionary, relied on African catechists and scholars; the pastor Carl Christian Reindorf wrote the first history of the Gold Coast by a Ghanaian, published in Basel in 1895. How the 10,000 objects reached Basel, by gift, purchase or confiscation at conversions, is only partly researched.

Key sources

1. 108Purtschert, Patricia & Fischer-Tiné, Harald (eds.) (2015). Colonial Switzerland: Rethinking Colonialism from the Margins. Scholarly book
2. 114Swiss National Museum (2024). colonial: Switzerland’s Global Entanglements (exhibition, Zürich 2024–25). Museum, archive, data
3. 121Haenger, Peter (1997). Sklaverei und Sklavenemanzipation an der Goldküste. Scholarly book
4. 122Franc, Andrea (2008). Wie die Schweiz zur Schokolade kam: Der Kakaohandel der Basler Handelsgesellschaft mit der Kolonie Goldküste (1893–1960). Scholarly book
5. 123Miller, Jon (2003). Missionary Zeal and Institutional Control: Organizational Contradictions in the Basel Mission on the Gold Coast, 1828–1917. Scholarly book
6. 124mission 21 (online). Basel Mission Archives. Museum, archive, data
7. 125Debrunner, Hans Werner (1991). Schweizer im kolonialen Afrika. Scholarly book

Background and institutions

France founded the Foreign Legion in 1831 for foreign volunteers, who were sent above all to conquer Algeria. Switzerland banned recruitment for foreign service in 1859, and its Military Penal Code of 1927 made serving in a foreign army a crime; Swiss legionnaires who came home could be tried. The Legion fought in nearly all of France’s colonial wars, from Algeria to Morocco, Madagascar and Indochina.

Critical reading

Christian Koller (2013) shows that most Swiss joined out of poverty, unemployment or a wish to escape, not out of colonial conviction, and that the Legion was nonetheless a key instrument of conquest and repression, as in Algeria from 1954 to 1962. Swiss memory of mercenary service focuses on earlier centuries and on the Papal Guard; the colonial chapter is rarely told. The estimate of 15,000 to 30,000 Swiss is wide because enlistment records are incomplete.

Key sources

1. 107Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz / Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse (online). articles on colonialism, the Landsgemeinde, the Federal Charter, the Theban Legion and Christoph Burckhardt. Reference work
2. 109Purtschert, Patricia, Lüthi, Barbara & Falk, Francesca (eds.) (2012). Postkoloniale Schweiz: Formen und Folgen eines Kolonialismus ohne Kolonien. Scholarly book
3. 114Swiss National Museum (2024). colonial: Switzerland’s Global Entanglements (exhibition, Zürich 2024–25). Museum, archive, data
4. 125Debrunner, Hans Werner (1991). Schweizer im kolonialen Afrika. Scholarly book
5. 126Rossinelli, Fabio (2022). Géographie et impérialisme: de la Suisse au Congo entre exploration géographique et conquête coloniale. Scholarly book
6. 152Koller, Christian (2013). Die Fremdenlegion: Kolonialismus, Söldnertum, Gewalt 1831–1962. Scholarly book

Background and institutions

Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), born in Môtier in the canton of Fribourg, taught at the academy of Neuchâtel from 1832 and moved to the United States in 1846, where he founded Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. In 1850 the photographer J. T. Zealy made 15 daguerreotypes of seven enslaved people for him, among them Renty and his daughter Delia, to support his theory of separately created ‘races’.

Critical reading

Brian Wallis (1995) and Molly Rogers (2010) read the images as instruments of ‘scientific’ racism, made without consent. In 2019 Tamara Lanier, who traces her family to Renty, sued Harvard over the images. In Switzerland, the communes around the Agassizhorn have declined to rename the peak; Neuchâtel renamed a square instead, in 2019, after Tilo Frey.

Key sources

1. 111Fässler, Hans (2005). Reise in Schwarz-Weiss: Schweizer Ortstermine in Sachen Sklaverei. Scholarly book
2. 127Wallis, Brian (1995). Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes. Peer-reviewed
3. 128Barbash, Ilisa, Rogers, Molly & Willis, Deborah (eds.) (2020). To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes. Scholarly book
4. 129Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University (1850). Daguerreotype, Renty, frontal (J. T. Zealy), label “Renty, Congo, on plantation of B. F. Taylor, Columbia, S.C.”. Museum, archive, data
5. 148Ville de Neuchâtel (2018). Un espace à la mémoire de Tilo Frey (press release). Official, institutional

Background and institutions

The imperial decree of 1853 gave the Geneva company 20,000 hectares on condition that it built villages for Swiss settlers. Few settlers came, and most left; the company became a large landowner that leased its land to Algerian sharecroppers, and it lasted until 1956. Henry Dunant managed one of its estates and then founded a mill company at Mons-Djémila, which went bankrupt in 1867 and left him in debt.

Critical reading

Claude Lützelschwab (2006) shows that the land had been confiscated from Algerian communities after the French conquest, so the company profited directly from colonial dispossession. The story of the Red Cross is usually told without this colonial business background. In May 1945, Sétif became the site of a massacre in which French forces killed thousands of Algerians after a demonstration.

Key sources

1. 130Lützelschwab, Claude (2006). La Compagnie genevoise des Colonies suisses de Sétif (1853–1956): un cas de colonisation privée en Algérie. Scholarly book
2. 131Université de Genève, Campus (online). Le rêve genevois d’une colonie algérienne. Official, institutional
3. 132Dunant, Henry (1862). Un souvenir de Solférino. Primary source

Background and institutions

The Mission vaudoise sent Paul Berthoud and Ernest Creux to the north of the Transvaal in 1875; their station Valdezia was followed by Elim, where a hospital opened in 1899, and by work in Lourenço Marques, today’s Maputo. Under the name Swiss Mission in South Africa it ran schools, hospitals and a printing press in Tsonga.

Critical reading

Patrick Harries (2007) shows how the missionaries’ linguistic and ethnographic work helped define ‘the Tsonga’ as one people and one language, a category that colonial and later apartheid administrations used, for instance for the Gazankulu homeland. At the same time, mission schools educated a generation of African leaders, among them Eduardo Mondlane, founder of Mozambique’s liberation movement FRELIMO. African evangelists such as Yosefa Mhalamhala led much of the early work.

Key sources

1. 133Harries, Patrick (2007). Butterflies & Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa. Scholarly book
2. 134Junod, Henri-Alexandre (1912–1913). The Life of a South African Tribe, 2 vols. Primary source

Background and institutions

Alfred Ilg (1854–1916) trained as an engineer at the Federal Polytechnic in Zürich and went to Shewa in 1879, where Menelik was then king. He built water pipes, bridges and buildings, advised on foreign affairs and received the railway concession in 1894; the Imperial Ethiopian Railway Company was founded in Paris in 1896. The line reached Dire Dawa in 1902 and Addis Ababa in 1917. Ilg left Ethiopia in 1907 and died in Zürich.

Critical reading

Ilg served an African sovereign, not a colonial power, which makes him unusual among Swiss in Africa. Older biographies cast him as the European who ‘modernised’ Ethiopia; more recent work stresses Menelik’s own strategy of hiring foreign experts to strengthen his state against colonial pressure, and the Ethiopian officials and workers who carried out the projects. Financing the railway with French capital also gave France leverage over Ethiopia.

Key sources

1. 90Jonas, Raymond (2011). The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire. Scholarly book
2. 135Biasio, Elisabeth (2004). Prunk und Macht am Hofe Menileks: Alfred Ilgs äthiopische Sammlung im Völkerkundemuseum der Universität Zürich. Museum, archive, data

Background and institutions

The Swiss National Exhibition ran in Geneva from May to October 1896 and drew about two million visitors. Next to the ‘Swiss village’, an idealised Alpine village built as a symbol of the nation, an impresario staged the ‘black village’ with people recruited in West Africa, who had to perform their daily life in front of the public.

Critical reading

Patrick Minder (2011) and Rea Brändle (2013) show how such shows staged a contrast between ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’ that confirmed Swiss self-images. The performers were contracted workers, and their successful lawsuit shows that they defended their rights. Most of their names and later lives are unknown.

Key sources

1. 108Purtschert, Patricia & Fischer-Tiné, Harald (eds.) (2015). Colonial Switzerland: Rethinking Colonialism from the Margins. Scholarly book
2. 109Purtschert, Patricia, Lüthi, Barbara & Falk, Francesca (eds.) (2012). Postkoloniale Schweiz: Formen und Folgen eines Kolonialismus ohne Kolonien. Scholarly book
3. 136Minder, Patrick (2011). La Suisse coloniale: les représentations de l’Afrique et des Africains en Suisse au temps des colonies (1880–1939). Scholarly book
4. 137Brändle, Rea (2013). Wildfremd, hautnah: Zürcher Völkerschauen und ihre Schauplätze 1835–1964. Scholarly book
5. 138Université de Genève, Campus (online). Quand Genève accueillait des zoos humains. Official, institutional

Background and institutions

Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich on 5 February 1916. Its evenings included ‘chants nègres’, masks by Marcel Janco and readings of African and Oceanian poetry; Tristan Tzara collected such texts as ‘Poèmes nègres’, mostly from missionaries’ and ethnologists’ publications.

Critical reading

The Dada Africa exhibition at Museum Rietberg in 2016 examined how Dada’s enthusiasm mixed admiration with colonial stereotypes, and how the objects and texts reached Europe through colonial collecting. The African artists and singers whose work inspired Dada mostly remain unnamed.

Key sources

1. 107Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz / Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse (online). articles on colonialism, the Landsgemeinde, the Federal Charter, the Theban Legion and Christoph Burckhardt. Reference work
2. 139Burmeister, Ralf, Oberhofer, Michaela & Tisa Francini, Esther (eds.) (2016). Dada Africa: Dialogue with the Other (Museum Rietberg, Zürich / Berlinische Galerie). Museum, archive, data

Background and institutions

Ethiopia had joined the League of Nations in 1923. After Italy invaded in October 1935, the League imposed limited sanctions, without an oil embargo. Haile Selassie spoke in Geneva on 30 June 1936; on 4 July the Assembly voted to lift the sanctions. The emperor spent his exile in Bath, England, until 1940.

Critical reading

The speech is remembered as a turning point in the failure of collective security before the Second World War. It also mobilised the African diaspora: in London, C. L. R. James and Amy Ashwood Garvey founded the International African Friends of Abyssinia in 1935. How the host country Switzerland positioned itself towards Italy’s conquest can be traced in the Swiss diplomatic documents (Dodis).

Key sources

1. 99Sbacchi, Alberto (1985). Ethiopia under Mussolini: Fascism and the Colonial Experience. Scholarly book
2. 140United Nations Archives Geneva (online). League of Nations archives (Assembly records, 1936). Museum, archive, data

Background and institutions

Switzerland joined the UN only in 2002 and was not bound by its sanctions. After the London gold pool collapsed in 1968, the three big Swiss banks bought a large share of South African gold and resold it through Zürich. In 2000 the Federal Council commissioned a national research programme on Swiss–South African relations, NFP 42+; its final report by Georg Kreis appeared in 2005.

Critical reading

In 2003 the Federal Council restricted researchers’ access to files on Swiss companies’ dealings with South Africa, and critics, among them anti-apartheid groups and churches, argued that this prevented a full account. Kreis (2005) and Sandra Bott (2013) show that official ‘neutrality’ largely served business interests, while the government condemned apartheid in words. Many company archives remain closed.

Key sources

1. 106Thompson, Leonard (2014). A History of South Africa, 4th ed. Scholarly book
2. 141Kreis, Georg (2005). Die Schweiz und Südafrika 1948–1994: Schlussbericht des NFP 42+. Scholarly book
3. 142Bott, Sandra (2013). La Suisse et l’Afrique du Sud, 1945–1990: marché de l’or, finance et commerce durant l’apartheid. Scholarly book
4. 143Diplomatic Documents of Switzerland (Dodis) (online). Documents on Swiss foreign relations. Museum, archive, data

Background and institutions

Charles Bonnet led the University of Geneva’s excavations at Kerma from 1977; the work later passed to new teams, including from the University of Neuchâtel, and since 2012 the mission has been Swiss–French–Sudanese. A museum opened at Kerma in 2008 to show the statues found in 2003.

Critical reading

Excavating Kerma from 1913 to 1916, the American archaeologist George Reisner took it for the seat of Egyptian governors; the Geneva teams showed that it was the capital of an independent African kingdom. The case shows how colonial-era assumptions shaped archaeology. Many finds from Reisner’s dig are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Key sources

1. 28Bonnet, Charles & Valbelle, Dominique (2006). The Nubian Pharaohs: Black Kings on the Nile. Scholarly book
2. 36Emberling, Geoff & Williams, Bruce Beyer (eds.) (2021). The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia. Scholarly book
3. 145Mission archéologique suisse-franco-soudanaise (online). Kerma – Doukki Gel. Museum, archive, data

Background and institutions

From 1960 the Swiss diplomats Olivier Long and Raymond Probst carried messages between the French government and the Algerian provisional government (GPRA). The first talks at Évian in May 1961 failed; secret meetings followed, and the second Évian conference ended with the accords of 18 March 1962. During the talks the Algerian delegation stayed near Geneva and was flown to Évian by Swiss army helicopters.

Critical reading

Long’s book (1988) is a participant’s account, and the Swiss documents in Dodis allow it to be checked. Switzerland’s ‘good offices’ also served its own interest in a role as neutral mediator. The accords did not end the violence at once: the OAS terror campaign continued, and many harkis, Algerians who had served in the French army, were killed or fled to France.

Key sources

1. 100Stora, Benjamin (2001). Algeria, 1830–2000: A Short History. Scholarly book
2. 105Connelly, Matthew (2002). A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post–Cold War Era. Scholarly book
3. 143Diplomatic Documents of Switzerland (Dodis) (online). Documents on Swiss foreign relations. Museum, archive, data
4. 144Long, Olivier (1988). Le dossier secret des Accords d’Évian: une mission suisse pour la paix en Algérie. Scholarly book

Background and institutions

Kofi Annan studied at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva in 1961–62 and joined the World Health Organization there in 1962. After heading UN peacekeeping from 1993 to 1996, he became the first UN Secretary-General from sub-Saharan Africa and the first from the UN’s own staff. He founded the Kofi Annan Foundation in Geneva in 2007, died in Bern on 18 August 2018 and is buried in Accra.

Critical reading

As head of peacekeeping, Annan was responsible for UN operations when the world failed to stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the massacre of Srebrenica in 1995; he later acknowledged these failures publicly. His later initiatives, such as the Millennium Development Goals and the ‘responsibility to protect’, drew on those experiences.

Key sources

1. 146The Nobel Prize (online). Kofi Annan, Biographical. Official, institutional
2. 147Kofi Annan Foundation (online). About Kofi Annan. Official, institutional

Background and institutions

Tilo Frey worked as a teacher in Neuchâtel and later headed a school for girls. A member of the Radical (FDP) party, she was active in local politics before serving one term in the National Council, from 1971 to 1975. Swiss women had won the federal vote in February 1971; the last canton, Appenzell Innerrhoden, followed only in 1990 after a court ruling.

Critical reading

For decades her story was barely known outside Neuchâtel; the 2019 renaming of the Espace Louis-Agassiz made her visible and linked two histories of ‘race’ in Swiss science and politics. Accounts of 1971 that celebrate the first women in parliament rarely mention that one of them was of African descent.

Key sources

1. 148Ville de Neuchâtel (2018). Un espace à la mémoire de Tilo Frey (press release). Official, institutional
2. 149Le Temps (2019). A Neuchâtel, Tilo Frey remplace Louis Agassiz. Journalism

Background and institutions

Between 2021 and 2023, eight Swiss museums researched the Benin objects in their collections together with researchers from Nigeria, in the Benin Initiative Switzerland coordinated by Museum Rietberg in Zürich; the results were published in 2024. The collections had grown through purchases on the art market, often decades after 1897.

Critical reading

Being bought later does not make an object clean: its path usually leads back to the looting of Benin City. The debate about returns also asks to whom objects should go; in 2023 a Nigerian presidential decree named the Oba of Benin as owner of returned objects, which prompted new discussions in European museums. Decisions are made museum by museum, together with Nigerian partners.

Key sources

1. 67Digital Benin (2022). Digital Benin: a catalogue of objects from the Kingdom of Benin in museums worldwide. Museum, archive, data
2. 91Hicks, Dan (2020). The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. Scholarly book

Background and institutions

The kgotla is both the meeting place and the assembly of a Tswana community, where the kgosi hears disputes and consults on public matters; customary courts based on it are recognised in Botswana’s law, and the Ntlo ya Dikgosi (House of Chiefs) advises parliament. Landsgemeinden once existed in many central and eastern Swiss cantons; Nidwalden, Appenzell Ausserrhoden and Obwalden abolished theirs between 1996 and 1998.

Critical reading

Both are often romanticised as pure grassroots democracy. Historically both excluded many: the kgotla was long a men’s forum under hereditary leaders, and women in Appenzell Innerrhoden could vote at the Landsgemeinde only from 1991. Comparing them is a parallel, not a link, and should not turn either into a model of ‘original’ democracy.

Key sources

1. 107Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz / Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse (online). articles on colonialism, the Landsgemeinde, the Federal Charter, the Theban Legion and Christoph Burckhardt. Reference work
2. 150Schapera, Isaac (1938). A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom. Primary source