In this paper we review radiocarbon dates which have become available over the past three years for the more recent archaeological sites south of the Cunene and Limpopo Rivers, assessing the determinations within the broader context of economy and society. For a framework, we make use of broad physiographic divisions of southern Africa, thus breaking from the artificial constraints of modern political divisions and allowing greater possibilities of synthesis

Within the set of new dates there are several fields in which recent radiocarbon determinations have been particularly important. The nature of hunting and gathering and herding communities in the arid western regions of the sub-continent is now more fully understood and more information is available about the succession of lithic industries in the south-western interior. In the south-eastern coastal areas the geographical extent of the earliest farming communities has been firmly dated. New determinations are beginning to provide a firmer chronology for the succession of ceramic industries in the east, and reassessment of the dating of the important sites of Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe demands a revision of concepts of early state development and trading contact with the east coast.

The Iron Age sites known as Mapungubwe and Bambandyanalo on the farm Greefswald, 55 miles west of Messina in the northern Transvaal, South Africa, have aroused world-wide speculation ever since their discovery in the early 1930s. This international interest has been considerably stimulated by the publication of the second volume of the Mapungubwe report in late 1963. Much unnecessary confusion as to the significance of The Mapungubwe and Bambandyanalo sites has been caused by the long delay in the publication of this second volume, and this has made a critical leview of the Iron Age sequence in this desolate corner of the Middle Limpopo valley a matter of some urgency. The Greefswald sequence is of vital importance to South African history, for the sites have been held to show that the earliest Iron Age population of South Africa was non-Negro. In addition, they have been used to provide a fairly accurate indication of the date at which Bantu-speaking peoples first crossed the middle reaches o the Limpopo.

Poverty has a long history in Africa. Yet, the most conventional and influential history of African poverty is a very short one. As told by the World Bank, the history of poverty starts in the 1980s with the first Living Standard Measurement Study. This history of poverty by numbers is also a very narrow one. There is a disconnect between the theoretical and historical underpinnings of how academics understand and define poverty in Africa, and how it has been quantified in practice. While it is generally agreed that poverty is multidimensional and has certain time- and location-specific aspects, the shorthand definition for poverty is the dollar-per-day metric. This article reveals how particular types of knowledge about poverty have gained prominence and thus shaped the dominant interpretation of poverty in Africa. It argues that, based on other numerical evidence, the history of poverty in Africa could be radically different from the dominant interpretation today.

One of the crucial reasons for the failure of British policy in South Africa during the Reconstruction period was an acute shortage of African labour for the mines, which were therefore unable to support a large English-speaking immigrant community. According to the prevailing economic beliefs, there was a fairly rigid ratio between the numbers of unskilled coloured workers and of skilled white workers which the mines could employ, so that the scarcity of African labour did inhibit the mines from expanding their white labour force.

The reasons for this scarcity include the deplorable physical conditions in which labourers lived and worked, and the unusually large demands for African labour in other sectors of the economy. British policy also, inadvertently, put less pressure on Transvaal Africans to take industrial or agricultural employment. However, the scarcity of labour was noticeable not only within British South Africa, but more especially outside its borders, where Africans seem to have been more reluctant than usual to take employment in the mines. It is possible to argue that the shortage was caused partly by the disillusionment of the workers as a result of their experience of British administration, and partly by a fairly extensive determination to withhold labour until conditions were improved. Such an interpretation is compatible with the facts of the case, though impossible at this stage to prove.

Whatever the reasons for the scarcity, the result was the importation of Chinese labour to supplement the existing unskilled labour force. The well-documented complaints of the Chinese labour throw some light on the treatment of African labour. The Chinese also undercut the wages paid to Africans, who lost their commanding position as unconscious arbiters of the success of mining. Further, the Chinese were employed in terms of a very restrictive contract, whose terms were later extended to cover African labour as well, with the result that the industrial colour-bar was solidified at a time when white labour was in control of an unusually large area of employment.

This article illuminates the creative intellectual and social projects in which Mau Mau detainees were engaged. It draws on the private papers of Gakaara wa Wanjau, a Gikuyu writer who during his eight years of detention composed several plays, wrote ethnography and poetry, and carried on an extensive correspondence with his family. Gakaara and other detainees were doing more than defending a Mau Mau ideology. They were opening up new ways of doing Gikuyu culture, holding wives and children accountable, and representing themselves to a British public that could, they hoped, be brought round to their side.

Church Missionary Society missionaries arrived in the northern Sudan in 1899 with the goal of converting Muslims. Restricted by the Anglo-Egyptian government and by local opposition to their evangelism, they gained only one Muslim convert during sixty years of work. The missionaries nevertheless provided medical and education services in urban centers and in the Nuba Mountains, and pioneered girls' schools. Yet few of their Sudanese graduates achieved functional Arabic literacy, since missionaries taught ‘romanized Arabic', a form of written colloquial Arabic, in Latin print, that lacked practical applications. Thus the history of the CMS in the northern Sudan yields insights into issues of education, power and religious identity within a colonial context.

Jan Vansina's Paths in the Rainforests (1990) provides an instructive example of progress in overcoming the continuing burden of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory in studies of precolonial Africa in both historiography and anthropology. This article focuses on a critical section of the book, which outlines social evolution and ‘the invention of matrilinearity’ in the area around the lower Congo, showing both the strengths and the weaknesses of Vansina's approach.

This article focuses on the implications of an emir of Kano's decision to forbid women from inheriting houses and farms in 1923 and a successor's reversal of that policy in 1954. The earlier emir justified his policy by claiming that women inheritors were becoming prostitutes and the later one argued that women's re-enfranchisement would ameliorate the poverty of destitute elderly women. Both these events appear to have been radical innovations for their time and reflect continuous anxiety over women living outside of male control and a longer-term attack on women's public role. While the emirs' explanations do not fully comprehend the political logic of their decisions, both the proclamations and the way they were explained illustrate contradictions and ambiguities within Hausa conceptions of gender.

Zimbabwean historians have not yet fully assessed the interaction of two problematic identities, ethnicity and nationalism, to determine whether the two can work as partners and successfully co-exist. This essay argues that, in Bulawayo during the period studied, ethnicity co-existed with and complemented nationalism rather than the two working as polar opposite identities. Ethnic groups provided both the required leaders who became prominent nationalist figures and the precolonial history, personalities and monuments that sparked the nationalist imagination. From the 1950s, ethnic groups expanded their horizons and provided platforms from which emerging African nationalists launched their agenda. Understanding these interrelationships will reshape our understanding of the workings of these two identities in a cosmopolitan town.

The papers in this special issue of the Journal were originally presented to a conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies under the joint auspices of the School and the British Social Science Research Council, in September 1981. The conference, which grew out of an earlier series of seminars run by the S.O.A.S. History Department, arose out of the editors' concern that the history of the family, which had become so lively and important an area of study in Europe and America since the 1960s, was being almost totally neglected in Africa; through the seminars, the conference and now the publication of a selection of the papers in the Journal we hoped to stimulate research on a range of questions which could be fruitfully explored in the African context, and which could possibly also feed into the wider historiography on the family in Britain, America and Europe.

For many of its formative years, the study of history was concerned in the main with the history of the dominant, of ‘great men’ and their institutions, states and government, armies, churches and culture. The history of the dominated, of ‘ordinary people’ was thought to be lost, for the majority of our ancestors left no obvious written record from which their lives could be re-created. From 1929, when Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre founded the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, this view has been increasingly challenged, and it is fair to say that today the past of ordinary people is at least as significant historiographically as that of famous leaders or powerful institutions.

It has long been held by historians of the Gold Coast and more recently by historians of slavery and emancipation in Africa that the formal abolition of slavery by the British colonial government in 1874 had little discernible impact on that institution per se or on the socio-economic and political status quo in the late nineteenth-century Gold Coast. This was so, it is argued, largely because the relatively benign nature of domestic slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast tended to minimize the demand for emancipation from among the servile population in the Gold Coast after formal emancipation in 1874. A wider survey of the available evidence and a reappraisal of official sources suggest, however, that not only is this view of the consequences of abolition misleading, but it has also helped to perpetuate some equally misleading myths concerning the nature and role of slavery and other forms of servitude in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast. What is demonstrated is that the servile response to abolition in the Gold Coast was much greater than historians have hitherto believed and that this was a spontaneous reaction on the part of this class against what were increasingly exploitative and oppressive forms of slavery and servitude in the nineteenth century. The latter, it is shown, was a prominent by-product of the process of socio-economic change in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast which has all but been ignored by historians, most of whom have been taken in by what is described as the official mythology of domestic slavery in the Gold Coast. This official mythology which was rooted in the belief that slavery and other forms of servitude in the Gold Coast were domestic or patriarchal in character and relatively benign in practice was, it is argued, simply an attempt to rationalize the retention of an institution which was essential to the operation of the system of legitimate trade in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast. The extent of the servile response to formal emancipation in 1874 was a surprise, however, to inexperienced British officials on the Gold Coast who had come to believe in their own mythology, so that abolition presented a short-lived crisis for the British colonial administration. Successive colonial administrations on the Gold Coast, therefore, were forced to all but nullify the operation of the abolition ordinances of 1874 until the advent of a colonial economy after 1900 made traditional forms of involuntary labour expendable.

Two series of migrations have left a profound imprint on the cultures of western central Africa: those of the Jaga who began a spectacular career with the sudden capture of the Kongo kingdom in 1569, and those of the Lunda and related peoples in central and eastern Angola. The amplitude of the Jaga migration was recognized from the beginning, whilst the scope of the Lunda migrations has not been fully realized as yet. So much is known about the latter invasions that the huge movement is subdivided into submigrations, so that the general perspective has been lost. It is this second set of migrations which was led by Kinguri, a Lunda prince who left his country after its capture by the Luba. In our opinion Kinguri's successor contacted the Portuguese around 1610, which leaves an interval following the Jaga arrival great enough to warrant the view that two invasions were involved. If so, the coincidence of two major population movements following each other so shortly in time is still remarkable and begs further investigation.

Migration was a crucial component of the spatially uneven formation of labour markets and export-oriented economies in colonial Africa. Much of this mobility was initiated by migrants themselves rather than by colonial authorities. Building on analytical concepts from economic history and migration theory, this study explains the changing composition and magnitude of one such uncontrolled migration flow, from Ruanda-Urundi to Buganda. Migrants’ mobility choices – when to migrate, for how long, and with whom – proved highly responsive to shifting economic opportunity structures on the sending and receiving ends. Initially, large differences in terms of land and labour endowments, socio-economic structures, and colonial interventions, combined with substantial scope for price arbitrage, created large spatial inequalities of opportunity and strong incentives for circular male labour migration. Over time, however, migration contracted as opportunities in Ruanda-Urundi and Uganda converged, not in the least as a result of large-scale mobility itself.

Since independence the countries of North Africa have been occupied almost exclusively with the establishment of a new society. An important part of this activity has been directed towards a solution to the problem of symbols and values: the construction of an image of themselves for their own contemplation and for export to the world outside. One aspect of this general problem of acculturation is concerned with interpretations of history and the evaluation of one's own place in historical evolution. Starting from the premiss that North African history has largely been a monopoly of French scholarship since 1830, contemporary historical writers in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have found it essential, before entering upon problems of historical interpretation, to rewrite their own history. Discovery of this first requisite has generated a spirit shared by all those writers preoccupied with this problem, however much they might disagree on solutions to it, which is best expressed by the phrase ‘décoloniser l'histoire’. The subject is vast, and I should like here only to indicate several of the problems, with their proposed solutions, so far treated by writers dealing with the history of Algeria.

This paper builds upon the author's previously published work on the forest kingdom of Asante (Ghana). It deals generally with the issue of death in Asante history and culture, and more specifically with the meanings of the mortuary rituals surrounding the deaths of Asantehenes. These issues are addressed in relation to the extensive anthropological literature concerning the cross-cultural meaning of death. The paper then concentrates on an analysis of the meaning of the very fully documented events that surrounded the death and interment of the Asantehene Kwaku Dua Panin in 1867. These are analysed in relation to cultural norms and historical practices, and the conclusion sets out to locate the meaning of the Asantehene Kwaku Dua Panin's death within the broader framework of Asante historical experience.

In 1967, European and Katangese mercenaries revolted against the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) intervened to try to have the rebels peacefully leave the DRC. Katangese troops who fled to Rwanda with white mercenaries were forced by the Organization of African Unity and the Rwandan government to return to the DRC, where they were eventually executed. White mercenaries, under the protection of the ICRC and Rwanda, ultimately escaped Mobutu's wrath. Congolese and Rwandan leaders skillfully employed the ideal of African sovereignty and humanitarian rhetoric with its Western and African allies to ensure their consolidation of power.

A critical examination of the forces behind Igbo acceptance of Christianity during the first decade of this century reveals that British military imperialism and other forms of colonial exploitation were in fact basic to the decision of many Igbo communities to embrace Christianity. The adoption of the Christian religion, especially by the male adults, may be seen as a clear method of adjusting to the new colonial regime in which Christianity offered visible social advantages. Communities which embraced the new religion believed that by associating with the Christian missionaries, they would perhaps escape various forms of colonial over-rule.

The expansion of British political authority in the Igbo country, therefore, widened the frontiers of missionary enterprise. And as the Christian missions found the Igbos remarkably receptive to missionary propaganda, each was more than anxious to exert its denominational influence on the people. Thus interdenominational rivalry, especially between the Roman Catholics and the Protestants, was acute. For various reasons, the Roman Catholic missionaries seem to have established a more preponderating influence than the other Protestant societies.

The last twenty years have seen a series of studies dealing, at least in part, with the nineteenth-century history of slavery at the East African coast. Each has, in its own way, focused on transformations associated with changing patterns of accumulation in the nineteenth century. If there has been a general theme it is of the increasing constraints placed upon slaves and the increasing demands made on them, as owners sought to reorganize labour time and processes to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by the rapid expansion of commerce from the 1830s. While Morton has attacked Cooper's ‘hegemonic’ perspective and accused him of presenting slavery as benign and static, both are agreed on a basic trend: the increasingly commercial orientation of slave-based agriculture considerably diminished slave autonomy between 1820 and 1890. Recently, Glassman has offered a study which is decidedly non-hegemonic in perspective, and has revealed the ways in which marginal members of society appropriated and sought to reinterpret the ideology through which they were subordinated. Yet he too describes the increasing circumscription of slave autonomy in response to the demands of new kinds of production – in his case, the sugar plantations of the Pangani valley.

The paper reviews the history of the concepts used to depict poverty in Africa. “Pauperism” is a legal concept, deriving from early modern law in Britain, which frames individual situations, places the paupers under specific rights and duties, and was applied in early colonial situations. Percentile is a economic-demographic concept, implying class difference, indexed to measurable or imputed monetary income, which became an instrument of government in the colonial world mainly after 1945, moving into the international comparative world after the era of independence. In the neoliberal era after 1989, the concept of precarity, and a focus on realizable assets rather than income, has taken higher profile than an emergent replacement for the comparative-percentile approach, sometimes now depicted as “living on $2 a day”. The paper indicates the conceptual and political implications and challenges of each of these depictions.

Students of the history of North Africa in general, and of the history of the Jews there in particular, commonly think that a considerable proportion—one half or more—of the Jews who live, or until recently lived, in North Africa are descended from the Berbers, who prior to the Arab conquest formed the overwhelming majority of the population. In their opinion, these Jews were the offspring of tribes among which Jewish beliefs spread in the pre-Arab era and part of which actually embraced Judaism. This assumption, which seemingly answers the question as to the origin of the Jews who inhabited the North African hinterland, and especially the districts bordering on the Sahara, has gained such wide currency that the term ‘Berber Jew’ has been coined, i.e. Jew descended from Judaized Berbers. The proponents of this assumption apparently suppose that the stories of Jews, or Judaized people, living among Berber tribes, though describing events of the late Middle Ages or of modern times, reflect conditions precedent to the Muslim conquest of North Africa. In other words, the supporters of the theory of the Judaized Berbers think that this phenomenon cannot have originated in Muslim times since the new religion precluded every chance of Jewish proselytizing. If, therefore, Judaized people are found in Africa, even in recent times, they must be remnants of a religious movement going back to the period before the Arab conquest. In the view of the adherents of this theory, Judaism spread among the Berbers during the first centuries of the Christian era.