This article examines Zambia's engagement with the Middle East conflict from 1964–73 as a window into the political strategies and ideological ambitions of Kaunda's government in the first decade of independence. At the start of independence, Kaunda's domestic agenda led him to establish ties with Israel and to advance a program for cooperative development based on Israeli technical assistance. However, broader international concerns, filtered through the struggle against white minority regimes in southern Africa, ultimately led Kaunda to embrace a leadership role in international protests against Israel's policies towards its neighboring states. Zambia's foray into Middle East diplomacy in the first decade of independence enables a focused examination of Kaunda's presence in the international arena, while also revealing the compromises he made in the face of conflicting interests. Zambia's role in the Middle East conflict highlights this era as a time of confidence and claim-making by African leaders, but also one of concessions.

After the restoration of French rule in Senegal in 1817 the Congregation of the Holy Ghost undertook spiritual responsibility for the colony. But its members were unable to make any serious impact on a community that remained only nominally Christian. Their work was reinforced by the ‘Ploërmel Brothers’ who took over the schools in the 1840s, and by the ordination of three Senegalese priests, David Boillat, Arsène Fridoil and Pierra Moussa. Inevitably the three priests were drawn into acrimonious controversy. Under instructions from Governor Bouet, they opened a school in competition with the Ploërmel brothers, who became their implacable enemies. Eventually it had to close and the three priests were successively removed from the colony. Thus ended a brief experiment in educational assimilation.

From 1942 to 1945, British and American armed forces attempted to eradicate malaria in Accra by dredging the sacred Korle Lagoon and spraying the city with pesticides. They also conducted experiments on the biting patterns of mosquitoes by using human subjects as bait. But, despite the extent of the anti-malaria campaign, it is largely forgotten by the inhabitants of Accra, and those who do remember it regard it as a nominal event in the history of the city. This article contrasts the official military history of the anti-malaria campaign with oral evidence to determine why the event fails to resonate in the collective memory of the residents of Accra.

This article explores the relationship between Angolan guerrilla broadcasts and their effects on the Portuguese counterinsurgency project in their war to hold on to their African colonies. The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA's Angola Combatente) and National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA's Voz de Angola Livre) broadcasts allowed these movements to maintain a sonic presence in the Angolan territory from exile and to engage in a war of the airwaves with the Portuguese colonial state with whom they were fighting a ground war. First and foremost, it analyzes the effects of these rebel broadcasts on listeners, be they state or non-state actors. A reading of the archives of the state secret police and military exposes the nervousness and weakness of the colonial state even as it was winning the war.

Research conducted into the demography of the Kingdom of Kongo some forty years ago, employing baptismal statistics left by missionaries, has been in need of revision thanks to challenges by more recent scholarship. This article revises the estimated population of Kongo by addressing these challenges, drawing on newly discovered documentary sources. Using this new evidence, the estimate for the kingdom's population in the mid-seventeenth century has been elevated from 509,000 to around 790,000. The original article's claims about levels of fertility and mortality have been retained. The article also addresses questions concerning the validity of missionary statistics and the impact of the slave trade, which was small before 1700 but then increasingly large thereafter, reaching very high levels by the early nineteenth century. While a quantitative estimate of the later population is not possible given the limitations of sources for this period, it is likely that the population of the kingdom fell as slave exports peaked.

The main trunk lines of the Rhodesian railway system were built under the aegis of Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company (BSA Co.) between 1890 and 1911. This article begins with an analysis of the motivations behind railway construction during this period. It argues that interpretations which set up a dichotomy between ‘Rhodes-as-imperialist’ and ‘Rhodes-as-capitalist’ are misconceived. Nevertheless, it shows how the motivations behind railway development took on a more narrowly economic and financial character after the fiasco of the Jameson Raid in 1896 put paid to Rhodes' sub-imperial ambitions.

There follows an analysis of the economic and financial foundations of the BSA Co.'s regional railway monopoly. The article charts how railway construction was sustained through the manipulation of the interlocking interests of the BSA Co. and the Witwatersrand; through the creation of a ‘group structure’ of railway companies; and through the triangular relationship which developed between the BSA Co., Paulings, the monopoly contractor, and d'Erlangers, the chief broker and underwriter of railway loan (debenture) capital.

Finally, two fundamental allegations made by critics of the railway policy of the BSA Co. are assessed: firstly, that debenture finance was a means of distributing disguised dividends to itself and its friends; secondly, that these disguised dividends were paid for by the settlers through exorbitant railway rates. The nature of debt within the railway monopoly, the functions of debenture finance and the imperatives which shaped rating policy are discussed. The allegations are revealed to be ill-founded. It is argued that the tensions between the settlers and the BSA Co., their interdependence notwithstanding, were rooted in conflicting perceptions of what the priorities and parameters of economic development should be.

This study assesses the agricultural sector under the government of Kwame Nkrumah as a dynamic Cold War front. After Ghana's independence in 1957, Nkrumah asserted that the new nation would guard its sovereignty from foreign influence, while recognizing that it needed foreign cooperation and investment. His government embarked upon a development program with an emphasis on diversifying Ghana's agriculture to decrease her dependence on cocoa. Meanwhile, both the United States and the Soviet Union sought to establish footholds in Ghana through agricultural aid, trade, and investments. In the first years of independence, the Ghanaian state encouraged smallholder farming and American investment. Later, in a sudden change of policy, the government established large-scale state farms along the socialist model. This article brings to light the ways that Ghanaians in rural areas engaged with and interpreted the increasingly interventionist agriculture projects and policies of Nkrumah's government.

The Northern Territories Protectorate and its people were located on the economic and political margins of Britain's Gold Coast Crown Colony (now Ghana) throughout the colonial period. The article examines how the region's peripherality allowed the Gold Coast Tsetse Control Department to carry out an extensive campaign of bush clearing and resettlement along northern river valleys from the 1930s to 1950s, with little supervision by the Gold Coast Medical Department or northern officials. Intended to control human and animal sleeping sickness and to meet the economic preferences of the colony's central administration, this campaign had the effect of greatly increasing the exposure of northern communities to another disease, onchocerciasis, causing widespread blindness and contributing to a serious public health crisis in the early independence era.

In northeast Congo, from c. 1890–1940, ritually-empowered militias of Bali Leopard-men, or anioto, killed people on behalf of local leaders to secure access to land, resources, and people and to keep rivals and subjects in check. Belgian colonial authorities portrayed the actions of anioto as an irrational disturbance, ignoring their political relevance. The contextualized study of colonial-era conflicts based on court hearings, in association with anthropological, historical, and material sources, gives insight into emic perspectives. As militias controlled by different leaders, they reflected human adaptability in dealing with social ills, performed judicial functions, and provided therapeutic relief through violence. Originating in the precolonial era, anioto adapted to various strategic needs throughout history. A study of different manifestations of anioto reveals the creative and amalgamating nature of institutional dynamism in northeast Congo. Better knowledge of this institutional history, based on studying conflicts from the past, may enrich our deeper understanding of the dynamics of conflicts in the present.

During the colonial period, the Yao formed the main source of recruits for the King's African Rifles Nyasaland (Malawi) battalions. Originally, the main reason for the large number of Yao volunteers was probably the simple fact that the recruitment office was near Yao areas. However, due to prevailing racial ideals the British colonial military interpreted this as a sign of a ‘martial spirit’. This led to active encouragement to enlist the Yao, which in turn made military service ever more attractive among this group. They became the ‘martial race’ of Nyasaland, a concept which continued to affect British recruitment policies until the Second World War.

Harriette Emily Colenso, oldest of the five children of the famous Bishop John Colenso of Natal, was born in Norfolk, England, in 1847, and died in Natal at the age of 85, after a life of outstanding activity and purpose. Although the average Natal colonist regarded her as fanatically prejudiced, even the local Natal Witness, the mouthpiece of colonial views, was forced to acknowledge her ‘personal and intellectual qualities’. At the height of her unpopularity in 1907, when she was defending Dinizulu, it wrote:

There is probably no person in the colony whose influence on the natives is greater, and there is none who, should she but exert her power in that direction could exercise a more pacifying effect upon the native mind. Miss Colenso is strongly endowed with the judicial faculty and … her grasp of the intricate points of trials and cases in which natives have been involved has often astonished able and experienced lawyers.

This article analyzes an instance of collective panic about gangs of killers called Watu wa Mumiani (‘Mumiani People’) in Digo District, Kenya in 1945. Popularly believed to work for the colonial government, Watu wa Mumiani were said to abduct Africans from roads and kill them for their blood. I offer an interpretation of this episode in terms of the history of a medicine called Mumia, a nineteenth-century ritual called Mung'aro, regional strategies for surviving famine (including ‘pawning’ kin), and a wartime labor conscription campaign. Rather than emphasize the alterity of ‘vampires’ like Watu wa Mumiani, I show how the 1945 panic articulates concerns about powerful intermediaries, arguing that the stories told about them encode a history of concerns about predatory patrons, especially under conditions of ecological distress.

This article examines how contestation between political parties, politicians, and their supporters shaped Guinea's decolonization from 1945 to 1961. The last region to resist the rise of Sékou Touré's PDG, the Fulbe-dominated Futa Jallon – as both a political space and representation of Fulbe culture – was at the center of strategic and intellectual struggles over the shape of the postcolonial Guinean state and society. What resulted from contestation was the general belief that the Fulbe and the Futa Jallon were divergent from the rest of Guinea, a fragment in the making.

This paper reviews the present state of art historical research in Nigeria with a view to clearing the ground for a more accurate interpretation of the evidence. The ancient arts of Benin, Ife, Nok, Owo, Nupe and Igbo-Ukwu are discussed, among others, and suggestions offered that might shed more light on some of the problems created by the paucity of art historical data.

WRITING African History pays homage to Daniel McCall's pioneering text, Africa in Time Perspective: A Discussion of Historical Reconstruction from Unwritten Sources, published at the dawn of the era of modern African history in 1964. Surprisingly, given subsequent developments in the field, there has been no comparable text since, making this volume especially welcome. But it also bears a heavy burden if it is to become the authoritative text for the next generations of students and scholars. Does it meet this difficult test?

The travel literature of medieval Jewry may yield new information about the African past. The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, a case in point, throws light on the little-known eastern Sudan of the twelfth century. From the Itinerary may be reconstructed trade routes south from Alexandria to Christian Nubia, east from the Upper Nile Valley to southern Arabia and India, and west to the Fezzān and, ultimately, to the western Sudanic States. Commodities traded included wheat, raisins, figs, copper, salt, gold, precious stones, and slaves. These routes tied in with the better known trans-Saharan, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean networks of trade. Benjamin's Itinerary describes a spectrum of political development ranging from primitive Negroids south of Aswan and the tribal Beja and Rabīʻa Arabs to the more sophisticated Arab-controlled city-State of Aswan and the Christian kingdoms of Nubia. Benjamin mentions Christian Nubia only in passing, but indicates that ʻAiwa still flourished as a trading kingdom as late as 1170.

The paper examines the ‘Ibn Mashʿal episode’ in Moroccan history and explodes its myth. The episode was a non-event; there was no Jew involved, let alone his assassination. The story was false propaganda by al-Rashīd designed for rallying popular support behind his newly-established power. Its acceptance was assisted by the prevalent world-view. Two anonymous Englishmen visiting Morocco in the seventeenth century were the first to commit to writing the ‘national myth’, thus giving it its first seal of authority, which was later reinforced by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Moroccan chroniclers. The mock commemoration of this non-event, by serving as a regular reminder of the redeeming role of the ‘Alawī dynasty, helped to arouse and promote continuing loyalty to the throne. Various distortions have, however, crept into the basic substratum of al-Rashīd's mythical presentation.

The Delegate for Africa: David Ivon Jones, 1883–1924. By Baruch Hirson and Gwyn A. Williams. London: Core Publications, 1995. Pp. x+272. £8.50, paperback (ISBN 897640-02-1).

S. P. Bunting: A Political Biography, new edition. By Edward Roux. Bellville: Mayibuye Books. 1993. Pp. 200. No price given, paperback (ISBN 1-86808-162-1).

Outsiders looking at the recent history of South African politics are apt to be struck by two conundrums. How can a nation that pushed the logic of ‘race’ as far as any society in history also have produced one of the world's most enduring non-racial political traditions? And how, in a period that has seen the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of communist parties throughout the world, has the South African Communist Party (SACP) not only survived but risen to power, in coalition with the African National Congress and the Congress of South African Trade Unions?