This paper reviews the results of the recent excavations at Igbo-Ukwu, from which large quantities of copper and bronze objects, glass and stone beads as well as highly decorated pottery were recovered. Although four out of five radiocarbon dates fall in the middle of the ninth century a.d., while the fifth one falls in the middle of the fifteenth century, other dating evidence—like the presence of European-type manila and beads, and the preservation of highly perishable materials—such as textiles, thread and wood fragments—seem to suggest a much later date. Consequently, until some concrete evidence can be produced to support the ninth century date, we cannot jettison the fifteenth century date, which seems to be corroborated by the evidence of the manillas and beads.

In May 1961 a small group of men formed the Kabaka Yekka movement in the Kingdom of Buganda. Their simple objective was to unite the Baganda behind the throne, the symbol and guarantee of Buganda's separate identity. The great fear was that the election of a national Democratic Party government in the previous March had marked a decisive stage in the destruction of Buganda's special position within Uganda. Kabaka Yekka's appeal to Ganda loyalty was instantly successful, but it was not until the Kabaka's ministers agreed to accept membership of independent Uganda, and to support Kabaka Yekka in Buganda, that Kabaka Yekka could win popular support and deal effectively with the Democratic Party. But when Kabaka Yekka became an ‘official’ movement, its whole nature and function was changed. There had been differences at the beginning, but now the simple objective barely disguised the contradictions within the movement, while Kabaka Yekka became a means to personal promotion as well as the guardian of the ‘national’ interest. Above all, Kabaka Yekka now included the chiefs, who wanted to preserve the existing political and social arrangements within Buganda. So by February 1962 Kabaka Yekka had become the party for the Baganda and for the status quo within Buganda. It was a party which, because it was identified with the Kabakaship, was able to destroy the Democratic Party in elections for the Buganda Lukiko, and a party which, although in alliance with Dr Obote's Uganda People's Congress in national politics, had aroused sentiments and interests pointing ultimately, if not irrevocably, to Ganda separation.

For over nine hundred years the African inhabitants of South Central Africa engaged in the production and trading of gold. The attention of archaeologists and historians, however, has focused mainly on gold reef mining. By comparison, alluvial goldwashing has been neglected, although it was practised by Africans both before and after the period during which they exploited gold reef mines. Probably at its greatest volume between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the gold trade thereafter declined, but the mining and trading of alluvial gold continued to be relatively important in the nineteenth century in what is now north-eastern Rhodesia. Largely a seasonal activity, goldwashing was normally washing was increasingly subject to interference and attempted suppression as settlers sought t o exploit alluvial areas themselves and force Africans into wage labour. This attempted suppression did not always have the intended results but may be seen generally as part of the wider structural underdevelopment of the African peasantry and precolonial industries in Southern Rhodesia.

During World War I, Africans in Nyasaland were called upon to provide large numbers of soldiers and military labourers for the war effort in eastern Africa. Although a few willingly volunteered, many more objected, and some resisted. In this situation, colonial officals used force to secure the necessary manpower. Africans, therefore, called the conflict ‘the war of thangata’, referring to the growing colonial demands for taxes and for labour rent on European estates. The tasks which the soldiers and carriers were called upon to perform were equally likened to thangata, being ‘work which was done without real benefit’. So far from receiving rewards, Africans found that inadequate food, clothing, and medical care contributed greatly to the sufferings associated with a military campaign. Between 1914 and 1918 wartime manpower requirements, and war service, gave full meaning to colonial rule throughout the protectorate. The response to these demands and this suffering brought, in the form of both traditional and modern religious and social institutions, the first tentative stirrings of African nationalism in Nyasaland.

According to their ethnographers, the Bena of the Rivers in colonial Tanganyika emerged ‘from the shadows into the light of day’ when they undertook a great migration from the forested hills of the Iringa highlands to the treeless floodplain of the Kilombero valley in the late 1800's. The phrase had two meanings – on one level, it described the physical relocation of the Bena from the shadows of the forest to the open floodplain. On another level, ‘light of day’ was a metaphor for the remembered cohesion of a distinct Bena tribal identity, distinguishable from the ‘shadows’ of prior ethnic obscurity. The Culwicks considered the chief or mtema of this period, Ndaliwali, to be the founding ancestor of a new political lineage.

The defining moment for the emergence of the Bena of the Rivers was the Battle of Mgodamtitu in 1874, when neighboring Hehe attacked Bena settlements in the foothills and forced the Bena permanently out of the highlands and into the valley. Once they had taken up their new residence, the Bena absorbed the existing settlements of the western end of the valley into their kingdom. They did this initially ‘under the guise of protector’, wrote the Culwicks, but their goal was political control of the region. By 1890, they wrote, most of the Ndamba as well as several smaller valley groups had become subjects of the Bena chief.

The Battle of Mgodamtitu caused a ‘sudden and wholesale change’, according to the Culwicks, because Bena were forced to give up cattle keeping and take up rice cultivation; to learn the ways of the river and skillful use of canoes. They had previously looked down upon ‘rice and fish-eaters’, but after their migration they found that ‘there is but one crop really worth growing, and that is rice’.

Parliament passed in 1807 the act to illegalize (called prematurely to abolish) the slave-trade. A Vice-Admiralty Court where the Navy could bring captured slave-ships for condemnation was constituted in Freetown, the capital of the Colony of Sierra Leone. From 1819 international anti-slave-trade courts, the Courts of Mixed Commission, were constituted there too. Until 1864, when the last ship destined for the Atlantic slave-trade was condemned, slave-ships were regularly brought in and the slaves freed.

Forced immigration from the Southwest Indian Ocean marked life at the Cape of Good Hope for over a century. Winds, currents, and shipping linked the two regions, as did a common international currency, and complementary seasons and crops. The Cape's role as a refreshment station for French, Portuguese, American, and Spanish slave ships proved particularly important in the development of a commerce linking East Africa, Madagascar, and the Mascarenes with the Americas. This slave trade resulted in the landing at the Cape of perhaps as many as 40,000 forced immigrants from tropical Africa and Madagascar. Brought to the Cape as slaves, or freed slaves subjected to strict periods of apprenticeship, these individuals were marked by the experience of a brutal transhipment that bears comparison with the trans-Atlantic Middle Passage. The history of the Middle Passage occupies a central place in the study of slavery in the Americas and plays a vital role in the way many people today situate themselves socially and politically. Yet, for various reasons, this emotive subject is absent from historical discussions of life at the Cape. This article brings it into the history of slavery in the region. By focusing on the long history of this forced immigration, the article also serves to underline the importance of the Cape to the political and economic life of the Southwest Indian Ocean.

When the Cold War broke out in Western Europe at the end of the Second World War, France was a key battleground. Its Cold War choices played out in the empire as well as in the métropole. After communist party ministers were ousted from the tripartite government in 1947, repression against communists and their associates intensified – both in the Republic and overseas. In French sub-Saharan Africa, the primary victims of this repression were members of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), an interterritorial alliance of political parties with affiliates in most of the 14 territories of French West and Equatorial Africa, and in the United Nations trusts of Togo and Cameroon. When, under duress, RDA parliamentarians severed their ties with the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) in 1950, grassroots activists in Guinea opposed the break. Their voices muted throughout most of the decade, Leftist militants regained preeminence in 1958, when trade unionists, students, the party's women's and youth wings, and other grassroots actors pushed the Guinean RDA to reject a constitution that would have relegated the country to junior partnership in the French Community, and to proclaim Guinea's independence instead. Guinea's vote for independence, and its break with the interterritorial RDA in this regard, were the culmination of a decade-long struggle between grassroots activists on the political Left and the party's territorial and interterritorial leadership for control of the political agenda.

Queen Adelaide Province consisted of some 7,000 square miles of Rarabe Xhosa territory annexed by the British Cape colonial government in May 1835 during the Sixth Frontier War. The province was held only until the end of 1836 when it was abandoned under pressure from the imperial government, but it represented the first British attempt to extend direct control over a large body of formerly independent Africans. No such ambitious scheme had ever been attempted before in the Cape, and no such scheme was to be attempted elsewhere in Africa until the late nineteenth century.

Given its short-lived nature, Queen Adelaide Province has not been extensively analysed in any of the prominent histories of the eastern Cape. However, while the treatment is brief, its significance has been widely recognized. This early, temporary colonization of Xhosa territory has served as a lens through which to view colonial extension in the eastern Cape as a whole. In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century settler histories of George Cory and George McCall Theal, the annexation of Queen Adelaide Province represents a temporary advance within a much broader colonial progress. One episode in the epic attempt to extend colonial civilization across ‘Kaffraria’, expansion within the province was unfortunately thwarted by misguided Cape and metropolitan philanthropy. In W. M. Macmillan's liberal critique of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the disputes over the province between the land-hungry settlers, the strategically-minded Governor D'Urban and the humanitarian Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, are again viewed as part of a much broader struggle. But rather than Cory's struggle between civilization and savagery, this is seen as a contest between malicious and benign conceptions of colonialism. The province represents an early collision between, on the one hand, evangelical and humanitarian versions of cultural colonization that guaranteed Xhosa access to their land (a kind of trusteeship that Macmillan advocated for his own times) and, on the other hand, the practice of colonization founded upon settler-led conquest and dispossession.

In a recent study, Fred Cooper argues that strikes and other forms of labor protest had a clarifying effect on official thinking not only about labor policies but also about the aims and, ultimately, the viability of colonial rule. As Africans went on strike, from the Copperbelt to the docks of Mombasa and the Gold Coast Railway, to demand better wages and working conditions, colonial administrators first envisioned and then embraced the idea of an African working class and the possibility that African workers could be managed with the same kinds of labor codes and social welfare policies that obtained in Europe.

Of course, the image of a working class applied only so far in Africa. Colonial officials never fully understood the way African workers lived or the place of wage employment in African society, and were dismayed when their newly acquired understanding of Africans as universal workers was challenged in the 1950s by former strike leaders who began to insist on Africans' rights to political autonomy. Nonetheless, as Cooper shows, the effects of recurrent, often highly effective, strikes were far-reaching. As officials confronted the financial and political implications of providing all Africans with social welfare benefits and economic development comparable to those of Europe, they decided it was time to abandon the imperial enterprise.

The third list of radiocarbon dates for Sub-Saharan Africa later than 1000 b.c. is considerably longer than its predecessors. As new laboratories commence operations, so more and more dates become available. During the last eighteen months, many more dates from Rhodesian Iron Age sites have been processed, where the earliest Iron Age peoples are now dated to the fourth century a.d. if not earlier. The Kalomo culture in Zambia is now securely dated. Iron smelting furnaces were being operated on the Witwatersrand in South Africa by a.d. 1000, and it is now known that Iron Age peoples were living by the Kuene river in Angola by the eighth century. Recent dates from Katanga have shown that there was a flourishing copper trade there by the same period. An important series of dates have been processed from Saharan Neolithic sites, indicating that the Sahara was suitable for pastoral peoples in the fourth century b.c. Another date for the Nok culture in Nigeria places the later stages of the culture in the third century a.d.

By a resolution of the Cambridge Radiocarbon Conference, all dates are now calculated relative to a.d. 1950.

By the middle of the sixteenth century, Europeans had made themselves aware of the broad outlines of the Continents of Asia, Africa and America. Two hundred years later many of the most striking facts of the geography of the great land-masses had been revealed. In Asia, Siberia had been traversed, China mapped, and Tibet visited, while a vigorous trade was maintained with all the countries of the Eastern Seas. Most of the coast and many of the great lakes and rivers of the Americas had been charted, and flourishing European communities established from Lima to Quebec. Far more was known of Africa than its coastline: a large part of Ethiopia had been visited during the era of Portuguese influence at the beginning of the seventeenth century; Catholic missionaries had worked in the Eastern Sudan in the first decade of the eighteenth century; the Moorish geographers, Idrisi and Leo Africanus, both of whose works were constantly used by European cartographers, provided a succinct account of the citier and states of the Sahara and the Sudan; on the Upper Senegal the French had by 1750 successfully maintained for half a century a trading post over four hundred miles from the sea; in Southern Africa individual adventurers had penetrated deep into the hinterland of the Portuguese colonies in Angola and Mozambique, and of the Dutch settlement at the Cape.

This essay treats the effects of acculturation on oral historical materials. Rather than addressing it as a matter of ‘contamination’, that is, as a question of extraneous data entering and distorting ‘pristine’ traditions, it is considered here to be a facet of the larger question of cultural assimilation – a case of the old and familiar constantly confronting and responding to the new and strange. Seen in this way, oral data continuously adopt and adapt whatever new, relevant and interesting materials come their way in not very different – though decidedly less visible – ways from those that written data have always done. This argument is illustrated by examples from various times and places, largely situations where missionaries, newly literate members, or colonial officials, perceptibly influenced the historical views of societies on their way to becoming literate.

In fact this phenomenon seems widespread enough to justify advancing a model that can be tested against specific cases. For our purposes, this model begins with the first meeting of oral and literate cultures, although we can fairly assume that an infinity of similar but unrecorded meetings of oral cultures also resulted in change. After this initial impetus, the constraints of colonial rule, the exigencies of independence, and the aims of modern academic oral historiography each contributed in some measure to this process of ongoing change. As a result, historians, whether primarily interested in the reliability of oral data, or in the process and effects of changes in them, must look to a wider range of sources than has been customary.

One of the characteristic traits of a national culture is a distinctive historical folklore, which lauds the qualities and magnifies the deeds of national heroes and derides those of their opponents, domestic and foreign. Such a mythology is harmless enough if it is light and humorous in tone, if it is taken with a pinch of salt, and if it is offset by dispassionate teaching in the schools and universities and objective writing by the historians. But if the mythology itself is bitter and humourless, if it dwells upon grievances, if it is taken too seriously, and if it is propagated by teachers and writers, then the national outlook is liable to become diseased. In the extreme case, the capacity for formulating and pursuing a rational goal becomes vitiated by illusion. Duped by a romantic historical image, party, press and even pulpit advocate unwise and unjust policies, in the name of tradition.

This article is a study of Somali popular songs of the period 1960–90, which opened with the establishment of the Somali national state and ended with its collapse. It focuses on these songs as a discursive site in which a particular dilemma of the new Somali state clearly comes into focus, namely the desire to be ‘modern’, while at the same time turning to ‘tradition’ (i.e. a particular construction of Somali cultural authenticity and traditional religious morality) to mark and anchor a new Somali collective self-understanding and communal identity. The discursive push-and-pull of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ evident in the songs expresses itself specifically in debates about moral womanhood – that is to say, about what ‘good’ women should be like. Since the collapse of the state in 1991, Somali discourses about common public identity and gender norms have undergone dramatic change, with the sites of popular culture multiplying, especially outside of Somalia, and accessible through the internet. Although an interpretation of Islam that distances itself from Somali ‘tradition’ has been gaining importance as a source of legitimization, as is evident both in the struggle over the state in Somalia and in everyday life in Somalia and the diaspora, this is not a major concern in the Somali popular songs from the period after 1991.

It was born auspiciously this flag raised above us
We will not differentiate among any Somalis
Since none of us are closer to it than the others,
Let us be equal in front of our flag
(Waa samo ku dhalayoo calanka noo saaran
Soomaali oo dhan, kala sooci mayno
Uma kala sokeynno, ha loo sinnaado)
Somali popular song, articulating the hope of Somali unity and equality, sung by Faduumo Abdillaahi ‘Maandeeq’ in the early 1960s

This article considers the different ways that Marirangwe purchase area farmers understood and used their farmland, resources and opportunities. In the pioneer period from 1931 to the 1940s, Marirangwe farmers favored extensive use of their land and its resources. However, as labor and capital opportunities changed, land became for some an expendable commodity. By the 1950s, the farmers' ability to generate capital through land sales paralleled the arrival of squatters in the area. With the help of these squatters and revenue from land sales, Marirangwe farmers prospered. This development, however, did not signal a change from the extensive farming habits of the pioneer period but rather a brief, and generally prosperous, period of specialization.

Historians have frequently included the Bantu-speaking peoples of the eastern Kenya Highlands—Kikuyu, Embu, Mbere, Kamba, Meru, etc.—in the general migrations of the North Eastern Bantu from Shungwaya. The most authoritative statement in support of this view is set out in H. E. Lambert's The Systems of Land Tenure in the Kikuyu Land Unit: Part 1, History of the Tribal Occupation of the Land. However, only the Meru have oral traditions pointing to a Shungwaya origin, and chronological and linguistic evidence which Lambert presents himself suggests that the Meru experience may not be typical of this group of peoples. As evidence is lacking in their own traditions, proof of the migrations of the Kikuyu–Embu–Kamba from Shungwaya can only come from archaeology.

Jusqu'en 1965 l'on ne connaissait pratiquement rien de la préhistoire de République Centrafricaine, aucune recherche systématique n'y ayant jamais été effectuée. Deux notes parues en 1933 permettaient cependant de penser que ce pays possédait, comme ses voisins, un patrimoine préhistorique. La premiàre, de l'abbé Breuil, décrivait en deux pages unesérie de pierres taillées détenue par le Musée de l'Homme à Paris, recueillie sur le plateau de Mouka par une mission géologique dirigée par F. Delhaye; une autre collection de même provenance était déposée à la même époque au Musée de l'Afrique Centrale à Tervuren en Belgique, elle y demeurait malheureusement inédite jusqu'en 1969 où nous pouvions la voir et l'étudier. La seconde note due à la plume de Félix Eboué était consacrée à l'ethnographie mais le premier chapitre décrivait quelques objets en pierre trouvés dans le centre-est du pays au cours de travaux miniers ou de constructions de ponts.

Trade across the Cape frontier in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, and government attempts to regulate that trade, cannot be understood without first considering the role of Protestant missionaries as traders and bearers of European manufactured goods in the South African interior. From their arrival in 1799, missionaries of the London Missionary Society carried on a daily trade beyond the northern and eastern boundaries of the Cape Colony that was forbidden by law to the colonists. When missionaries of the Methodist Missionary Society arrived in the mid-1810s they too carried beads as well as Bibles to their mission stations outside the colony. Most missionaries were initially troubled by having to mix commercial activities with their religious duties. They were forced, however, to rely on trade in order to support themselves and their families because of the meagre material and monetary assistance they received from their societies. They introduced European goods among African societies beyond the Cape frontiers earlier and in greater quantities than any other enterprise until the commencement of the Fort Willshire fairs in 1824. Most importantly, they helped to bring about a transition from trade in beads, buttons and other traditional exchange items to a desire among many of the peoples with whom they came into contact for blankets, European clothing and metal tools and utensils, thus creating a growing dependency on European material goods that would eventually bring about a total transformation of these African societies.