The conservation and study of the variation in indigenous crop plants is an integral part of a crop improvement programme. Investigation of the manner in which the ‘observed’ distribution of the variation has developed is also essential in understanding how to direct the further evolution of the crop in the desired direction.

The overthrow of the Sokoto empire at the beginning of this century was facilitated by the interplay of three major factors—the internal political situation of the empire which allowed too much autonomy to the constituent emirates, the rise of Mahdism in the eastern emirates, and European (British, French and German) competition leading to invasion. Each factor was a potential cause of instability, making the task of the invading forces much easier. This article is an attempt to examine the efforts of Hayatu ibn Sa'id, great grandson of Uthman dan Fodio, to transform latent feelings of expectations of the Mahdi in the Sokoto empire into a positive movement linked to the Sudanese Mahdiyya in the late nineteenth century. It also looks at the impact of Hayatu's activities on Adamawa.

Le terme Gaoga, qui figure fréquemment au centre des cartes anciennes de l'Afrique, se retrouve dans un seul texte, la ‘description de l'Afrique’, du diplomate marocain, Léon l'Africain, publiée en italien en 1550 par Ramusio. Relevant de fréquentes confusions avec la ville de Gao sur le Niger, certains africanistes en tirent la conclusion hâtive que le voyage de Léon se serait limité aux pays du Niger. Selon eux, le reste des notes ne ferait que reproduire des récits de caravaniers, plus ou moms fantaisistes. Pierre Kalck, ancien administrateur français, auteur d'une thèse de doctorat ès lettres sur l'histoire des règions qu'il a administrées, estime au contraire que le voyage de Léon du Bornou en Egypte fut bien effectué et qu'il a existé un Etat du nom de Gaoga, semblable aux grandes entités politiques africaines de l'époque. Il fait d'abord le point sur les hypothèses formées par ceux qui refusent la thèse simpliste d'une confusion Gao-Gaoga. Pour Barth, Gaoga était le nom, non d'une contrée, mais déune dynastie boulala installée à Yao (Yaoga) sur le lac Fitri. Pour Carbou, le Gaoga n'était autre que le Kanem, séparé du Bornou—Modat rappelait cependant que, d'après les notes mêmes de Léon, il ne pouvait s'agir que d'une région montagneuse: le Dar Zagaoua au nord du Darfour. Palmer voyait dans le Gaoga un pays situé sur l'oued Batha et peuplé par des réfugiés nubiens. Kaick se réfère, non seulement au passage spécialement consacré au Gaoga par Léon, mais aux mentions éparses, et parfois déformées, dans le reste du texte publié par Ramusio. Il établit que Léon, après avoir quitté le Bornou, a gagné le Darfour par la piste dite du treizième parallèle, puis a rejoint Assiout en haute Egypte par l'antique route caravanière dite des quarante jours (Darb al Arbaïn) qui passe par l'oasis de Kharga. Scion lui, le Gaoga, fondé au quinzième siècle par des réfugiés nubiens, s'étendait, lors du passage de Léeon vers 1512–1514, sur une superficie qui comprenait l'est du Tchad (Ouadaï, Salamat, Rounga), l'ouest du Soudan (Darfour) et le nord-est de la République Centrafricaine (Fertit). Le Ouadaï est encore aujourd'hui appelé Kouka (corruption de Gaoga) par les Teda du nord et ce terme de Kouka est conservé par un groupe ethnique du Tchad. Citant la découverte par Arkell, à Aïn Fara et à Ouri dans le Darfour, de vestiges nubiens chrétiens, Kalck estime que céest dans cette région montagneuse qui constituait l'ancien Gaoga que se trouve la solution de bien des énigmes de l'histoire de l'Afrique Centrale. Le texte de Léon, aussi bref soit-il, apparaît comme un premier fil conducteur.

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.

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.

This article focuses on the historical and political factors that shaped Khwe (San) and Mbukushu ethnic identities and their interrelationship between 1938 and 1989 in west Caprivi, Namibia. While acknowledging the multi-authored nature of identity-building, the article demonstrates that the colonial and apartheid states made significant contributions to the construction of ethnicity in west Caprivi through veterinary interventions in the 1930s and apartheid policies regarding ‘Bushmen’ in the 1950s, and by securing Khwe collaboration during Namibia's liberation struggle in the 1970s and 1980s. These state interventions, together with Khwe and Mbukushu responses to them, also shed light on why land and political authority became so central to struggles between the two groups.

This study examines Nyarroh, a woman chief situated at the cusp of colonial penetration in what is today southern Sierra Leone. Nyarroh ruled a large, strategically located town and its surrounding villages from about 1880 to 1914. The documents which outline her public life have not previously been explored, yet they reveal the flexibility of gendered notions of political power and leadership in the region. Her life story allows us to look backward to precolonial Mendeland and forward to the colonial era, to consider the extent to which women's leadership and prerogatives were maintained or re-invented through colonial penetration and the nascent colonial state.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 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.