Studies of trans-Saharan trade have recently been revitalized, mainly through an exploration of local archives. These archives offer a further possibility: to investigate the link between local settlement and wider patterns of exchange. Material from southern Algeria and northern Mali suggests that oases were not viable without outside investment, that pastoral economies needed storage space and agricultural produce, and that intra-Saharan and trans-Saharan trade relied on each other. Hence, regional mobility and outside connections were not subsidiary but constitutive of the local, and local patterns of production and trans-Saharan commerce were aspects of the same system.

Early medieval wealth invested in southern Saharan agriculture and warfare tended to produce distinctive groups of dependent cultivators and professional warriors by the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Exchange surpassed initial limitations placed on it by rudimentary pastoral society through the development of the salt industry. The realization of a form of surplus readily convertible into a wide range of commodities was vital to the growth of specialized traders who, in turn, broadened the scope of economic and political activity. Growing professionalism and specialization brought with it new forms of social relations, in this case a variety of forms of dependence, as well as introducing a role for indigenous non-producers like clerics and scholars. An oasis like Awdaghust where warriors, cultivators and traders interacted was bound to experience the growing pains these changes produced.

This paper suggests how an understanding of these social and economic changes can help fill the gaps which still plague the history of Awdaghust. It argues that we need to examine the pieces of written and archaeological evidence we have in the light of the changing forms of agriculture practised in the area, the region's drying climate between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, and the making of the specialized merchant-clerical groups called zawāyā. Awdaghust thereby emerges not only as an international caravan terminus, but as a regional centre of agriculture and trade, especially the salt trade, controlled by local pastoralists. It was therefore able to outlive its so-called eleventh-century destruction by the Almoravids, and see its Znāga masters turn increasingly towards the salt trade and religion. But its fortunes also depended upon its large servile labour force and sufficient rainfall to support irrigated cultivation. By the fifteenth century, it would appear the drying conditions were severe enough to pose insurmountable problems, possibly even to provoke a slave rebellion said to have brought about Awdaghust's demise.

Shaykh Uways b. Muḥammad al-Barāwī (1847–1909) was an important leader of the Qādirīya brotherhood in southern Somalia, on Zanzibar, and along the East African coast from Kenya to Mozambique, and founded his own branch of Qādirīya, the Uwaysīya. Before his death in 1909 when he was assassinated by representatives of the rival Sālihīya brotherhood (under the leadership of Muḥammȧd 'Ȧbdallah Hasan, the ‘Mad Mullah’), Uways missionary activities were very considerable.

Uways' branch of the Qādiriya was probably behind certain episodes of Muslim resistance to European penetration into Buganda in the late 1880's, at the behest of Sayyid Barghash of Zanzibar. Indeed the relations between Shaykh Uways and successive rulers of Zanzibar, Barghash, Khalīfa, and Ḥamid b. Thuwaynī were very close. In 90's, certain Muslim elements in Tanganyika, in conjunction with the ṭarīqa, made trouble for the Germans in SE Tanganyika during the ‘Mecca Letters affair’ at Lindi in 1908. This episode revealed a division in the Tanganyika Muslim community.

The Uwaysīya was responsible for massive conversions to Islam in the coastal region, in inner Tanganyika, and on the Eastern fringes of the Congo at the end of the 19th and the beginning decades of the 20th centuries.

An intensive archaeological field research programme conducted between 1963 and 1969 in the Lake Chad region of Nigeria has established the outlines of a prehistoric chronological sequence for the area. The excavations at Daima form the key to this sequence which also includes excavated evidence from Bornu 38, Kursakata, Shilma, Yau, Ajere and Birnin Gazargamo together with surface information from 70 other sites. Twenty radiocarbon dates indicate settlement of the area from the end of the second millennium B.C. (or the last quarter of the second millennium if the dates are corrected to calendar years) to the sixteenth or seventeenth century A.D. Evidence of occupation earlier than the second millennium B.C. may have to be sought in the highlands south of the lake area.

In the firki clay plains, south of the lake, it may be possible to trace the evolution of a Late Stone Age pastoralist economy into an Iron Age cereal cultivator economy. In the undulating sandy country, west of the lake, village settlements focused around the Yobe River seem to have developed, in response to external stimulus, the urban civilization which historical sources indicate at Birnin Gazargamo by the sixteenth century A.D. The contrasting environments designated ‘Firki’ and ‘Yobe’ had an important influence on the character of human settlement indicated by the archaeological evidence.

It is suggested that the prehistory of this region merits far greater attention than it has yet received and that the presence in this area of settlement mounds, with substantial depths of deposit, offers a wonderful opportunity for large-scale excavation programmes. Further surface investigations would also be justified, however, as the writer suspects that more prehistoric sites remain to be located in the area.

This article reports over 250 new radiocarbon dates relevant to recent archaeological research in West Africa. Thanks to the continuing trend towards series of dates from either single sites or groups of related sites, some major blanks on the archaeological map of West Africa have been replaced by well-dated regional sequences. An example is the Malian Sahara, where palaeoenvironmental and archaeological investigations at a large number of sites have clarified the relationship between Holocene climatic change and Late Stone Age occupation. Other areas that were largely archaeological unknowns until the research reported in this article was undertaken include the middle Senegal valley, the Inland Niger Delta, and the Bassar region in Togo. Other research included here reinterprets previously studied, ‘classic’ Late Stone Age sequences, such as Adrar Bous, Kintampo and Tichitt. There are also new dates and details for early copper in Niger and Mauritania which prompt a reconsideration of the true nature of this proposed ‘Copper Age’. Of particular significance to general reconstructions of West African prehistory is the documentation of regional and long-distance trade accompanying the emergence of complex societies along the Middle Senegal and Middle Niger in the first millennium A.D.

The article begins with a brief commentary on calibration, in view of the recent publication of high-precision calibration curves. Several prevalent misconceptions of what calibration is and what it ought to do are addressed. We suggest that archaeologists and historians should routinely make reference to calibration in order to avoid misinterpreting radiocarbon results.

In the first part of this article a number of possible connexions between ‘the last-ditch resisters’ and the ‘earliest organizers of armed risings’, and later leaders of opposition to colonial rule in East and Central Africa, were explored. It was argued that African ‘primary’ resistance shaped the environment in which later politics developed; it was argued that resistance had profound effects upon white policies and attitudes; it was argued that there was a complicated interplay between manifestations of ‘primary’ and of ‘secondary’ opposition, which often overlapped with and were conscious of each other. Then the argument turned to a more ambitious proposition, namely that ‘during the course of the resistances, or some of them, types of political organization or inspiration emerged which looked in important ways to the future; which in some cases are directly and in others indirectly linked with later manifestations of African opposition’.

This article demonstrates that black British West Indians and black South Africans in post-First World War Cape Town viewed ‘American Negroes’ as divinely ordained liberators from South African white supremacy. These South-African based Garveyites articulated a prophetic Garveyist Christianity that provided common ideological ground for Africans and diasporic blacks through leading black South African organizations like the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA), the African National Congress (ANC) and the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU). This study utilizes a ‘homeland and diaspora’ model that simultaneously offers an expansive framework for African history, redresses the relative neglect of Africa and Africans in African diaspora studies and demonstrates the impact of Garveyism on the country's interwar black freedom struggle.

Between the years 1700 and 1820 the Ashantis of central Ghana fought a number of wars in nearly all the territories now comprising modern Ghana. Most interpretations of these wars have linked them with the European trade posts on the southern coast and the Muslim trade settlements in the north. The Ashanti wars were therefore either raids or attempts to open trade-routes to the trade-posts. These interpretations have been possible because writers have ignored the Ashanti expansionary movement before 1700, and have also been unable to interpret correctly the political significance of the institutions by which the Ashanti attempted to extend their rule into some of the conquered territories, and to integrate them into what the Ashanti conceived as ‘Greater Ashanti’—a political community incorporating the conquered Akan states under the rule of the Golden Stool, the supreme stool of Ashanti.

When, then, the pre-1700 Ashanti tradition and the introduction of Ashanti judicial, political and politico-religious institutions into some of the conquered territories are carefully considered, it becomes clear, in the writer's view, that the so-called Ashanti ‘empire’ should be divided into three categories of states: provinces, ‘protectorates’ and tributaries, on the basis of their political distance from Ashanti. The provinces—like the Ashantis mainly Akan-speaking peoples—were considered and treated as part of a Greater Ashanti ‘political structure’. The ‘protectorates’ were treated as allies or protected peoples according as economic or political circumstance dictated. The tributaries formed the economic and manpower base of the Ashanti expansion. But it must be noted that these relationships were fluid, and fluctuated with Ashanti military and political fortunes. Finally, the Ashanti political experiment was halted by the British and was therefore inconclusive. The student can, therefore, hardly reach rigid conclusions.

Lastly it appears that, pre-literate in areas where the history student is faced with an absence of the historian's usual materials, the analysis of institutions is probably one of the most fruitful approaches.

During the Second World War the British West African colonies supplied raw materials and manpower for the war effort. The small peacetime army of the Gold Coast increased to nearly 70,000 men, including technical and service corps, and was used in overseas campaigns. Most soldiers were drawn from the supposed martial peoples of the Northern Territories but recruiting was extended to Asante and the south in mid-1940. Although formal conscription was only applied to drivers and artisans, a large number of recruits were forcibly enlisted through a system of official quotas imposed on districts and through chiefs. Opposition to military service, especially for overseas compaigns, was widespread and is indicated by the attempts to evade recruiting parties and also the large number of desertions. In order to release labour for the military and also conserve scarce supplies of raw materials, some gold mines were closed. Wartime shortages, inflation and the lack of jobs after the war led to discontent in the Gold Coast but there is little evidence to indicate that this resulted in a significant number of ex-servicemen being drawn into political activity.

This article addresses how scholarship has formulated human connections and ruptures over the Sahara. However, these formulations were, and still are, based in both physical and discursive realities that have been developed in Africa itself. The idea of a dividing Sahara is based on historical political divisions – despite a homogenous political culture in the region – and by locally developed notions of race and religion, brought about by trade and justified in Islamic religious discourse. The Saharan divide acquired a new reading in colonial historiography, which, in turn, informed scholarly work until well into the 1960s. I will suggest that both colonial and postcolonial research on the differences and connections between the Saharan shores are suffering from a civilisational bias towards North Africa.

Although on the periphery of the war Gold Coast resources and manpower were mobilized for the imperial war effort. The educated élite and many traditional rulers were loyal and internal conditions, despite the withdrawal of personnel and troops, generally peaceful. Small-scale disturbances occasioned by the war occurred, the most serious in the Northern Territories. The direction and pattern of Gold Coast external trade changed; exports, with the exception of cocoa, contracted and the price of imports rose. Serious shipping shortages exacerbated difficulties. British ‘Combine’ firms increased their hold over Gold Coast commerce. A fall in government revenue held up public works, and railway construction was paid for by an export duty on cocoa. The war brought marked changes to the government fiscal system. Gold Coast troops were used in the West and East African campaigns and prepared for employment in the Middle East. Varying degrees of compulsion were used to recruit carriers and soldiers and resistance to this was widespread. Labour shortages and the withdrawal of whites provided new job opportunities for Africans. Cocoa and palm kernels were subject to imperial direction and control; Governor Clifford opposed the imperial preference scheme for palm kernels. Imperial wartime economic measures fuelled the nationalism of the NCBWA; the Gold Coast élite demanded political representation as a reward for wartime loyalty, while their economic resolutions attempted to displace European commercial interests strengthened during the war. Economic changes further weakened the position of traditional rulers; labour shortages provided wage labour with temporarily enhanced bargaining power. Post-war trouble from ex-servicemen was slight.

The kings of Dahomey in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries claimed to ‘own’ the heads of all their subjects. Contemporary European observers of the pre-colonial period understood this claim in terms of the king's exclusive (and arbitrary) right to inflict capital punishment, decapitation being the normal Dahomian method of execution. More recent Dahomian tradition, however, suggests a ritual aspect to the claim, connecting it with stories that the early king Wegbaja (the second or third ruler of Dahomey, but conventionally regarded as its true founder and the creator of many of its political and judicial institutions) prohibited the decapitation of corpses before burial, supposedly in order to prevent the misappropriation of the heads for use in the manufacture of ‘amulets’, or for ritual abuse by enemies of the deceased. The article argues, drawing upon contemporary European accounts of the pre-colonial period and ethnographic material from the neighbouring and related society of Porto-Novo as well as Dahomian traditions, that unlike many of the supposed innovations traditionally attributed to Wegbaja this prohibition of the decapitation of corpses is probably a genuine Dahomian innovation, even if its attribution specifically to Wegbaja is doubtful, but that its significance and purpose is misrepresented in Dahomian tradition. The decapitation of corpses in earlier times was probably related to the practice of separate burial and subsequent veneration of the deceased''s head as part of the ancestor cult of his own lineage. The suppression of this practice by the kings of Dahomey can be understood in terms of their desire (for which there is other evidence) to downgrade the ancestor cults of the component lineages of Dahomey, in order to emphasize the special status of the public cult of the royal ancestors, and more generally to concentrate or monopolize ritual as well as political and judicial power in the hands of the monarchy.

This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on the socio-economic impact of the Second World War on Africa. The focus is on the inter-relationship between the state, settler farmers and African labour in Southern Rhodesia. The war presented an opportunity for undercapitalized European farmers to enlist state support in securing African labour that they could not obtain through market forces alone. Historically, these farmers depended heavily on a supply of cheap labour from the Native Reserves and from the colonies to the north, especially Nyasaland. But the opportunities for Africans to sell their labour in other sectors of the Southern Rhodesian economy and in the Union of South Africa, or to at least determine the timing and length of their entry into wage employment, meant that settler farmers seldom obtained an adequate supply of labour. Demands for increased food production, a wartime agrarian crisis and a diminished supply of external labour all combined to ensure that the state capitulated in the face of requests for Africans to be conscripted into working for Europeans as a contribution to the Imperial war effort. The resulting mobilization of thousands of African labourers under the Compulsory Native Labour Act (1942), which emerged as the prize of the farmers' campaign for coerced labour, corrects earlier scholarship on Southern Rhodesia which asserted that state intervention in securing labour supplies was of importance only up to the 1920s. The paper also shows that Africans did not remain passive before measures aimed at coercing them into producing value for settler farmers.

The rise of Lagos, which became the principal port of the ‘Slave Coast’ at the end of the eighteenth century, can only be understood by reference to the interaction between the European Atlantic trade and the indigenous canoe-borne trade along the coastal lagoons. European traders in the sixteenth century used the Lagos channel and the lagoon to approach the Ijebu kingdom, where slaves and cloth were purchased, but this trade lapsed in the seventeenth century. The Lagos settlement originated as a fishing hamlet, but was occupied as a military base by Benin around the end of the sixteenth century. Benin expansion to the west may have been designed to prevent European trade with Ijebu, in the interests of a Benin monopoly. Lagos remained formally subject to Benin until the nineteenth century, but the decline of Benin power in the eighteenth century left it effectively independent. European sources of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries attest trade in cloth and slaves passing along the lagoons through Lagos to Allada and Whydah in the west. Although this pattern of trade has been assumed to date back to pre-European times, it was more probably a consequence of the European presence, and more specifically of the westward drift of European interest along the coast from Benin after the sixteenth century. European traders began to show an active interest in the lagoon trade to the east of Allada in the early eighteenth century, and again began to explore the possibility of using the Lagos channel to bapproach the inland lagoons. Lagos developed as an Atlantic port from the 1760s, exporting slaves and Ijebu cloth, but its importance was limited by its remoteness from any major source of slaves. Its emergence as a major port in the late eighteenth century was due to the disruption of slave shipments from ports further west by military pressure from Dahomey, which led to the diversion of slave supplies eastward along the lagoons for shipment from Lagos.

The kingdom of Kush (Meroe) represents one of a series of early states located within the Middle Nile. At its greatest extent controlling more than 1,000 km. of the Nile valley from northern Lower Nubia to Sennar on the Blue Nile, its scale, longevity and cultural achievements are remarkable (Fig. 1). While its origins in the early millennium b.c. and its demise around the fourth century a.d. still remain obscure, it is one of the earliest and most impressive states yet found south of the Sahara. This notwithstanding, the place of the Kushite state and its civilization within the history of sub-Saharan Africa remains far from clear.

The early development of complex societies in the Middle Nile within the frontiers of the modern republic of Sudan raises many questions concerning the role of external influences and cultural contacts on the region. The ever present shadow of Pharaonic Egypt looms large in most studies, and very close links are still maintained between Meroitic (and Nubian) studies and Egyptology. One result of the undoubted Egyptocentrism which has for so long dominated research in the region has been the neglect of many research areas likely to be of interest to archaeologists and historians working elsewhere in Africa. The political structuring and organisation of power within the Kushite state still remain little studied, while little interest has been shown in trying to contextualize it, either in relation to later kingdoms of the Middle Nile or indeed in the history of state development in Sudanic Africa as a whole. All too often it seems still implied, if not explicitly stated, that the early development of social/political complexity in the region, with the rise of Kerma, Napata and Meroe and their attendant cultural achievements, may be largely explained by, and understood in terms of, Egyptian models: ‘secondary states’ on the margins of a great civilization, unique within, and effectively unconnected with, other regions of sub-Saharan Africa.

The concern of this paper is briefly to reassess a number of questions concerning our perceptions of the Kushite state, which also have implications for our understanding of the long-term history of early states within the Middle Nile and their relation to other parts of Sudanic Africa.

Lord Carnarvon's scheme for a South African Confederation in the 1870s owed much more than has been generally recognized to influences emanating from Natal. Large employers of African labour recognized in the 1860s that the local population could not provide a cheap stable workforce and that immigrant workers from the African interior would be increasingly important to the prosperity of the colony. Theophilus Shepstone, Natal's Secretary for Native Affairs, used all the resources at his disposal to smooth the way for migrant labour. The development of diamond mining in Griqualand West and, to a lesser extent, gold mining in the Lydenburg district of the Transvaal diverted large numbers of African workers away from Natal and set off a frantic search for new sources of labour which underscored the importance of Moçambique and Central Africa as reservoirs of black labour. While planters, traders and officials in Natal worked to keep labour supply routes open between the Transvaal and Portuguese territory, officials in Griqualand West were recommending annexation of territories along the ‘missionary road’ in order to stop Transvaal Afrikaners from blocking labour supply routes from Central Africa. The revival of an active British campaign against the East African slave trade opened another potential source of African labour which Shepstone's former border agent Frederic Elton tried to divert to Natal while serving first as an assistant to Sir Bartle Frere and John Kirk in Zanzibar, and later as British Consul in Moçambique.

Shepstone arrived in London at a crucial point in the development of Carnarvon's thinking on southern African affairs and impressed him with his lucid analysis of the interrelation of African administration, economic development and labour supply. Carnarvon's plans for confederation reflected the advice which he was continously receiving from Shepstone and Elton. Their argument for confederation emphasized the essentially unitary nature of the developing southern African economy.

Local and long-distance labour migrants were an important element in commercial groundnut farming along the Gambia river during the mid-nineteenth century, well before colonial partition. Seasonal and periodic circulation of migrant farmers had prior equivalents in the movements of traders across the Western Sudan, especially those associated with slaving. Traders were important in the development of groundnut cultivation and the initiation of migrant farming, when they realized the groundnut trade could be a valuable replacement for the abolished slave trade. In the pre-colonial era migrant farmers payed ‘custom’ to local rule for the land they farmed. This arrangement eventually gave way to a system of shared labour-time with individual host farmers in return for land. This change was accelerated by the abolition and decline in domestic slavery, which provided a new pattern for the Strange Farmer system. Thus the mobility of population in the Western Sudan, together with the evolution of the Strange Farmer system, provided vital marginal inputs of labour in an area of low population densities and facilitated the development of groundnut farming during the era of legitimate trade.

From the late seventeenth century until the 1870s gum arabic from the southwestern corner of the Sahara was the most important trade good exported to Europe from Mauritania and Senegal. This article discusses the dynamics of the gum trading system based in Saint Louis du Senegal, and details the commercial crisis in which the French colony was mired in the late 1830s and 1840s. Pressure from French capital and from Faidherbe's military forces secured the dominance of the import-export houses, as African river traders and desert gum merchants lost the advantages of their market positions. By the 1870s the importance of the gum trade had been eclipsed by the rapid expansion of peanut cultivation.

A reassessment of the institution of pawnship in Africa for the period from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century tightens the reference to situations in which individuals were held as collateral for debts that had been incurred by others, usually relatives. Contrary to the assumptions of some scholars, pawnship was not related to poverty and enslavement for debt but rather to commercial liquidity and the mechanisms by which funds were acquired to promote trade or to cover the expenses of funerals, weddings, and religious obligations. A distinction is made, therefore, between enslavement for debt and pawnship. It is demonstrated that pawnship characterized trade with European and American ships in many parts of Atlantic Africa, but not everywhere. While pawnship was common north of the Congo River, at Gabon, Cameroon, Calabar, the interior of the Bights of Biafra and Benin, the Gold Coast, and the upper Guinea coast, it was illegal in most of Muslim Africa and the Portuguese colony of Angola, while it was not used in commercial dealings with Europeans at Bonny, Ouidah, and other places.

This Article follows in the series started by Fagan and continued for eastern and southern Africa by Phillipson, Sutton and Soper. The scope remains much the same, covering in time the later part of the Stone Age sequence as well as the Iron Age. Geographically, however, there are some changes: the Sudan has been excluded as it was covered by the recent review of North and West African dates, while a detailed chronological review of francophone Central Africa is in progress and therefore this region has been excluded.