The aim of this article is to illustrate the process whereby certain Berber tribes during the eighth century A.D. substituted slaves from the Bilād al-Sūdān for Berber slaves from North Africa. From the outset, this conversion was influenced strongly, if not instigated, by Ibāḍī merchants until the slave trade became a predominantly Ibāḍī monopoly from the mid-eighth century onwards. The slave trade along the central Sudan route in particular provided the increase in the community's wealth and security, as well as the means for its establishment and expansion as a Muslim sect among diverse Berber tribes and, finally, as the origins for the subsequent, far-flung network of trans-Saharan trade.

The Mahdist uprising of 1905–6 was a revolutionary movement that attempted to overthrow British and French colonial rule, the aristocracy of the Sokoto Caliphate and the zarmakoy of Dosso. The Mahdist supporters of the revolt were disgruntled peasants, fugitive slaves and radical clerics who were hostile both to indigenous authorities and to the colonial regimes. There was no known support among aristocrats, wealthy merchants or the ‘ulama. Thus the revolt reflected strong divisions based on class and, as an extension, on ethnicity. The pan-colonial appeal of the movement and its class tensions highlight another important feature: revolutionary Mahdism differed from other forms of Mahdism that were common in the Sokoto Caliphate at the time of the colonial conquest. There appears to have been no connection with the Mahdists who were followers of Muhammad Ahmed of the Nilotic Sudan or with those who joined Sarkin Musulmi Attahiru I on his hijra of 1903.

The suppression of the revolt was important for three reasons. First, the British consolidated their alliance with the aristocracy of the Caliphate, while the French further strengthened their ties with the zarmakoy of Dosso and other indigenous rulers. The dangerous moment which Muslims might have seized to expel the Europeans quickly passed. Second, the brutality of the repression was a message to slave owners and slaves alike that the colonial regimes were committed to the continuation of slavery and opposed to any sudden emancipation of the slave population. Third, 1906 marked the end of revolutionary action against colonialism; the radical clerics were either killed or imprisoned. Other forms of Mahdism continued to haunt the colonial regimes, but without serious threat of a general rising.

This paper discusses the history of the beef cattle industry in Southern Rhodesia between 1890 and 1938, but does so within the context of the world meat trade in order to examine the relationship between local and international capital. While certain entrepreneurs early recognized Southern Rhodesia as a potentially valuable beef cattle country, full realization of this hinged on breaking into the world meat market dominated by a few large cold storage companies, drawing on production based mainly in Argentina. Throughout these years, Southern Rhodesia faced at best indifference or at worst occasional outright hostility from such companies in its attempts to secure a place in the world market. Only Liebigs, who were primarily involved in meat extract requiring low-grade cattle, could be induced to operate in Southern Rhodesia.

The meat industry in Southern Rhodesia enjoyed certain advantages: land was extensive and cheap, labour power was produced and reproduced outside the capitalist sector, and there were stocks of indigenous cattle which were seized or purchased cheaply. But the industry also suffered from lack of capital, inadequate transport, the poor beef qualities of indigenous cattle, and disease. Despite state assistance from an early date, most Rhodesian ranchers proved incapable of rearing quality cattle for the world market. Once co-operative attempts by local capital had failed to secure markets for Southern Rhodesian cattle, further state involvement was necessary. Its limited resources obliged the state to try and attract, or seek partnerships with, international capital. However, the big companies remained uninterested, and Southern Rhodesia was obliged to settle for the Imperial Cold Storage Company which, although of overwhelming importance in southern Africa, was insignificant on a world scale. Contradictions in the state–I.C.S. Company relationship surfaced fairly quickly and in 1938 the local Cold Storage Commission was established.

The origins of the Kambarin Beriberi and their conscious development of a corporate identity provides a valuable insight into the emergence of a Muslim mercantile class in the northern savanna region of Africa. Theoretical studies by Abner Cohen and others have drawn attention to the maintenance of economic and social diasporas which have permitted the creation of commercial monopolies, but the explanation that these diasporas have been ‘ethnic’ organizations has obscured a fundamental feature of their historical development. Not all Hausa have participated in the kola trade, nor have the majority of professional merchants resided along the commercial avenues outside of the Hausa homeland. As the case of the Kambarin Beriberi well documents, the origins of many traders who became identified as Hausa were as immigrants from other parts of Africa, and any understanding of the formation of commercial diasporas must consider the possible distinction between the various components of a trading system. Only then can a fuller understanding of the interaction between the different commercial segments be reached. The diasporas which Cohen has documented for the Hausa, and which others have analysed for the several Mande networks, represent but one level of commercial cooperation in the continental trade patterns of Africa. The fusion of such disparate groups as the Kambarin Beriberi and other Hausa merchants into a confederation of traders with common interests remains an important aspect of commercial development which has not been fully explored.

LE 31 Décembre 1957, paraissait au Journal Officiel de la Guinée Française, un arrêté signé de Keïta Fodéba, Ministre de l'Intérieur du gouvernement de la ‘;loi-cadre’, portant suppression sur le territoire de la Guinée de la ‘chefferie dite coutumière’. Nul ne conteste que, sans la suppression de la chefferie, le succès du ‘Non’ en Guinée, lors du référendum constitutionnel du 28 septembre 1958 n'eût pas été assuré. Quelques semaines après le référendum, M. Jacques Rabemananjara (aujourd'hui ministre du gouvernement de Madagascar), préfaçant le volume qui publiait le compte rendu de la ‘Conférence des Commandants de cercle’, tenue à Conakry les 25–26 juillet 1957, écrivait:

L'un des bastions du régime [colonial], son artillerie lourde, celle qu'il n'engage que dans les circonstances graves, s'appelle la féodalité africaine.

This article examines the changing function of the Nyasaland police force between the 1890s and 1962. Initially, the police consisted of small groups of armed ex-soldiers, totally untrained in conventional police duties and employed by district officers in pressing labour and enforcing the payment of hut tax. In 1920, however, the authorities responded to the threat seemingly posed by the emergence of ‘dangerous classes’ – particularly labour migrants returned from the south – by forming a trained, centralized force, commanded in the Shire Highlands, though not elsewhere, by European police-officers. In the reorganized districts the police succeeded in protecting urban property. But so limited was the size of the force that the prevention and detection of crime was hardly attempted over the greater part of the country, while campaigns such as that against the Mchape witchcraft eradication movement foundered in the face of popular opposition.

Substantial changes began in the mid-1940s in response to urbanization and the increasing complexity of police duties, coming to a climax in the 1950s as the colonial government struggled to maintain authority. At first the emphasis was on raising educational standards and improving conditions of service. But following the crisis of 1953, it switched to expanding police numbers and increasing the coercive power of the force; this process was accelerated in the aftermath of the 1959 emergency.

Recruitment policies were influenced by the technical requirements of the authorities and by the ethnic stereotypes they evolved – a combination which resulted in the recruitment of a disproportionate number of Yao policemen in the first few decades and of more Lomwe and Chewa later. Policemen were attracted less by the rates of pay than by the privileges on offer. An inner corps of policemen spent their lives upholding colonial authority, but most could not be placed in a distinctive category of ‘collaborator’.

This paper, building on the evidence of Bantu words for sheep, develops the hypothesis that livestock-keeping was introduced to southern Africa by people speaking Central Sudanic languages. It is suggested in particular that livestock may have been spread south from western Tanzania, one branch dispersing directly to southern Africa and another eastward to the Indian Ocean seaboard. It should be possible to test this hypothesis further as our knowledge of the languages involved, especially the Central Sudanic languages, grows.

This article, which is in two parts, seeks to establish expatriate business history as a necessary and important part of modern African history. Part I surveys some fifty histories of European companies in West, Central and East Africa during the colonial period, and draws attention to opportunities for research on newly-discovered or little known records. Part II will assess the scholarly quality of the studies listed here, and will formulate some propositions regarding the spatial and temporal evolution of the European firms, their organization and policies, and their profitability.

Mauritius's unusual welfare state dates back to the introduction of non-contributory old-age pensions in 1950. This article examines the origins of this reform, focusing on the interactions between political actors in both Mauritius (local planters, political activists, and the colonial government) and London (the Colonial Office and Labour Party). Faced with riots among unorganised sugar estate workers in 1937, the colonial administration considered welfare reforms as part of a package intended to substitute for political change. The nascent Mauritian Labour Party used its links to the British Labour Party to apply additional pressure on the Colonial Office and, hence, the Governor in Mauritius. Welfare reform was stalled, however, by resistance from, initially, the governor and, later, the Colonial Office. It took partial democratisation in 1948 to push the local administration towards reluctant reform. The choice of tax-financed old-age pensions reflected the combination of a small and open economy, the absence of surplus land, poorly organised workers, and an effective state.

The Ounce as a unit in the West African trade was originally applied to the goods which could be exchanged on the Gold Coast for one ounce of gold; it was generally reckoned that such goods would cost about 40s. in Europe, or half the European value of the gold. Calculations based on actual transactions show that the prime cost of an Ounce of goods was sometimes lower than this, when a favourable assortment of goods had been chosen. In the 1760's and 1770's gold was no longer being exported from the Gold Coast, but was demanded as part of the price of slaves; an ounce of gold was then valued at two Ounces of trade goods. The price of gold had risen, partly owing to a local stoppage of trade, and perhaps also because of a permanent change in the direction of Ashanti gold exports.

At Whydah, the Ounce was not in use in the first half of the eighteenth century; values of goods, including cowries, the local currency, were expressed in terms of the quantity equivalent to one slave. By 1772 the Ounce had come into use at a value similar to that on the Gold Coast. The French selling cheap brandy, and the Portuguese selling cheap Brazilian tobacco, were able to operate at very low costs per Ounce.

The ‘slave-price’ rigsdaler of Christiansborg, with regular exchange rates both with gold and with cowries, forms a link between the Gold and Slave Coast systems.

A table of slave prices at various dates during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is given in terms of Ounces and other units.

The history of the Black Volta region in what is currently south-west Burkina Faso and north-west Ghana has been marked by the agricultural expansion of Dagara-speaking groups. This article explores how and why these groups were able to expand at the expense of neighbouring segmentary societies such as the Phuo and the Sisala. Violence certainly played a role in their territorial expansion, but so did specific strategies of ritual appropriation of new territories. The Dagara system, with its characteristic fission of existing earth shrines and networks of interlinked shrines, allowed mobility and helped the migrants bring new territories under their ritual control. In addition, patriclans and matriclans as well as joking relationships, clan alliances and institutionalized friendship enabled the Dagara pioneers to recruit many new settlers within a short time. This was a crucial asset for the security of the newly founded settlements and the territorial encroachment on Phuo and Sisala lands. In addition, mobility was, and continues to be, supported by an explicit ethos of independence and autonomy. Focusing on the late pre-colonial periods, the article looks at different stages of Dagara expansion and the changing interethnic relations.

In 1941, Prime Minister Godfrey Huggins of Southern Rhodesia presented a prescription for his colony's survival under white stewardship. ‘It is essential for the preservation of the European civilization,’ he wrote, ‘that the African should be advanced’. A decade later, the variables in this explicitly racial equation had been fleshed out, and black Southern Rhodesians were subjected to a revised and actively interventionist regime of governance – a regime that we would immediately recognize today as one of ‘development’. As such, it had much in common with the forms and strategies through which ‘development’ was pursued elsewhere in the late colonial world: its local theorists sought justification in the sciences of nature and society, while its political apologists claimed to be twinning moral uplift with the material improvement of those ‘natives’ supposedly entrusted to their civilized care.

This article explores the ways in which French colonial authorities met the life and death challenge represented by the re-emergence of yellow fever epidemics in Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal at a time when physicians knew very little about the etiology, diagnosis, transmission and treatment of most infectious and parasitic diseases. The discussion focuses on changing strategies and policies designed to address yellow fever threats, the attitudes and priorities of the authorities, the limits of ‘colonial medicine’ and the responses of people affected by sanitary measures. The article argues that because of the ignorance of the etiology and epidemiology of yellow fever, policies were misdirected and did not achieve their primary goals. Even after the introduction of germ theory, the gap between medical thinking and practice persisted for another decade. The African urban working class and underclass were the first victims of this state of affairs. The article also examines the conflict between the interests of public health, commerce and privacy rights.

A revised estimate of the value of trans-Saharan trade in the nineteenth century suggests that, so far from declining, the caravan traffic between North Africa and the Western Sudan increased before the period of colonial partition. Evidence for this revision comes from French diplomatic and geographical missions in the 1850's and 1860's and from the Tripoli and Moroccan consulate records. In round figures the import of European goods across the desert routes and the export of ivory, ostrich plumes, gold dust and lesser items was probably not less than £1,500,000 in 1875—a peak year, after which there was a slow decline, as various factors, including recession in the European markets and the political conquest of Western Sudan, interrupted trade. The prices for European goods and Sudan produce in the early 1860's illustrate the differentials which enabled African traders to make their profit.

Late in 1907 a missionary from Kisserawe in German East Africa complained of a spate of ngoma ritual dances among the Zaramo people. In particular he singled out an ngoma conducted by women to ameliorate a drought that was threatening that year's maize crop. As the women danced around a well, dressed as men and brandishing muskets, they appealed for rain from ‘their god’. Several aspects of this ngoma make it remarkable. It occurred following the Majimaji uprising in German East Africa, which the Germans put down with such violence as to make war as a tactic of resistance unpopular if not untenable. The ngoma was attended by Christian and non-Christian African women alike, suggesting a purpose whose expediency cut across competing belief systems. Finally, although cross-dressing was an aspect of certain Zaramo rituals, the symbolic appropriation of men's social roles by dress and wielding of weapons made this ngoma anomalous and suggests that the participants were consciously and purposefully reshaping gender roles at this time. The timing and symbolism of the ngoma make it clear that it was a reaction to the threat of famine, which had become a recurrent aspect of Zaramo life by 1907 and a symptom of ongoing rural social change ushered in by colonial rule. The larger question is whether changing perceptions of gender roles intersected with the Majimaji war (1905–7), and whether Majimaji had an underlying meaning for rural Tanzanian societies that has escaped the attention of historians. If so, it suggests that the prevailing conception of Majimaji needs to be questioned and re-examined.

When combined, evidence from oral tradition, Arabic texts and archaeological sites indicates that ancient Mali's seat of government changed more than once during its imperial period from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. According to oral tradition, the town in which Sunjata spent his early years, and to which he returned from exile, was Dakajalan. This mansadugu or ‘king's town’ served as Sunjata's base of operations for his campaign against Sumanguru and may have continued for a time as both spiritual and military headquarters during the struggle for unification following the defeat of Soso. As Mande's core territory expanded into the beginnings of empire, the mansadugu was probably moved north-eastward, down the River Niger to take advantage of widening commercial opportunities and to govern an expanded population of imperial subjects who included large numbers of Muslims from the former Soninke territories. Niani was one of the oldest and most important cities of Mali, especially notable for its iron industry. If it served also as a political capital this would most likely have been in the sixteenth century under Niani Mansa Mamadu, a descendant of Sunjata's royal lineage.

Faced with a confusing range of fluid ethnicities when they conquered Kenya, colonial officials sought to shift conquered populations into manageable administrative units. In linking physical space to ethnic identity, the Kenyan reserve system assumed that each of these ‘tribes’ had a specific homeland. Yet the reserves in the central Kenyan highlands soon became overcrowded and socially restive because they could not accommodate population growth and private claims to land for commercial agriculture. Although colonial officials proclaimed themselves the guardians of backward tribal peoples, they tried to address this problem by creating mechanisms whereby surplus populations would be ‘adopted’ into tribes living in less crowded reserves. This article provides new insights into the nature of identity in colonial Kenya by telling the stories of two types of Kikuyu migrants who settled in the Meru Reserve. The first much larger group did so legally by agreeing to become Meru. The second openly challenged the colonial state and their Meru hosts by defiantly proclaiming themselves to be Kikuyu. These diverse ways of being Kikuyu in the Meru Reserve fit neither strict primordial nor constructivist conceptions of African identity formation. The peoples of colonial Kenya had options in deciding how to identify themselves and could assume different political and social roles by invoking one or more of them at a time and in specific circumstances.

In colonial Southern Rhodesia, administrative officials often couched the rhetoric of ‘modernization’ in ethnic terms. They regarded immigrant Madheruka master farmers as the embodiment of modernization because they had been exposed to forces of modernization in their areas of origin, while both officials and immigrants alike regarded indigenous Shangwe as backward and primitive. This article argues that the construction of Madheruka and Shangwe ethnic identities dates primarily to the early 1960s, with the coming of immigrants and the introduction of cotton. Shangwe defined the immigrants as madheruka, a term whose origins lay in the eviction of the immigrants from crown land by colonial officials in the 1950s, while Madheruka termed the indigenous peoples shangwe, or backward. Each group perceived itself differently, however, Shangwe claiming that the term Shangwe referred to a place rather than to their ethnic identity and Madheruka claiming to belong to authentic Shona groups. The guerrilla war of the 1970s witnessed an attack on modernity as the guerrillas and their sympathizers regarded immigrant farmers as colonial collaborators.

This article attempts to contribute towards an understanding of the rise of nationalism in Nigeria and in the Gold Coast by exploring a neglected theme, namely the economic policy of political organizations in the period between the two World Wars. Before about 1918 political organizations did not have a coherent economic policy. After World War I economic problems became more important, and political parties began to take account of them by formulating a programme of economic development. An attempt was made by a man named Tete-Ansa to implement this programme, but he proved unsuccessful. The persistence of economic discontent, together with the failure of moderate leadership, led to the rise of new leaders and to the development of a more radical policy at the close of the 1930's. It was this policy which won mass support, and which played a vital part in the achievement of independence after World War II.

In nineteenth-century Egypt Circassian females were mostly kept in the harems of wealthy Turks, the concubines of ‘middle class’ Egyptians generally were Abyssinians, while male and female Negro slaves were used for domestic service by almost all layers of Egyptian society. In addition to domestic service, black slaves were used as soldiers by Egypt's rulers and, contrary to the prevalent assumption, as agricultural workers on the farms of the Muḥammad Alī family and elsewhere in Upper Egypt and during periods of prosperity and shortage of labour also in Lower Egypt. Apparently there were at least 30,000 slaves in Egypt at different times of the nineteenth century, and probably many more.

White slaves were brought to Egypt from the eastern coast of the Black Sea and from the Circassian settlements of Anatolia via Istanbul. Brown and black slaves were brought (a) from Darfur to Asyūṭ, directly or through Kordofan; (b) from Sennar to Isnā; (c) from the area of the White Nile; (d) from Bornu and Wadāy via Libya and the Western Desert; (e) from Abyssinia and the East African coast through the Red Sea. The slave dealers in Egypt were mainly people from Upper Egypt and the Oases, beduin and villagers of the Buḥayra province. They were divided into dealers in black and in white slaves and organized in a guild with a shaykh. Cairo was the great depot of slaves and the centre of the trade, but a very important occasion for trading in slaves was the annual mawlid of Ṭanṭā.

Official measures taken against the slave-trade were among the important causes for the final disappearance of slavery in Egypt. These were, amongst others, the appointment of foreigners, mainly British, as governors of the Sudan and commanders of special missions to suppress the trade; two Anglo-Egyptian conventions, of 1877 and of 1895, for the suppression of slavery; and, from 1877 on, the establishment of offices and later a special service for the fight against the trade and for the manumission of slaves. However, were it not for the internal development of Egyptian society, these measures could never have succeeded; this is illustrated by the tremendous obstacles they encountered and their ineffectiveness for a long time. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century most of these impediments vanished. In addition to the Mahdist revolution and the reconquest of the Sudan, the most important change was the emergence of a free labour market as a result of accelerated urbanization and the collapse of the guild system. At the same time a small but important section of Egyptians had changed their attitudes towards slavery as a result of their cultural contact with Europe.