The publication of Hamman Yaji's diary through the combined effort of J. H. Vaughan and A. H. M. Kirk-Greene is a rare and remarkable contribution that deserves commendation from all those interested in West African studies. An important merit of the publication is that the diary, which sheds light on various aspects of West African history, is now at the fingertips of a wider readership. The diary is a catalogue of events which Hamman Yaji (District Head of Madagali, northeastern Adamawa, 1902–27) regarded as important for the period 1912–27. Apart from numerous slave raids on the neighbouring non-Muslim communities, trade, religious observances, reciprocity, obligations and Hamman Yaji's relations with his Muslim neighbours and Europeans are recorded in detail.

The Association of African Universities was formed at Rabat in 1967. In1972 it held a workshop in Accra which resulted in Creating the African University: Emerging Issues of the 1970s (ed. T. M. Yesufu, Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1973). In 1992, the AAU commissioned the study under review, entrusting it to former vice-chancellors of Lagos and Zambia, and the founding rector of the Université de Bénin. The focus, on universities in tropical Africa, is narrower than the title implies, but of the eleven chapters three consider developments before 1960 and three more survey the next three decades. In part, then, this is a work of history (and certain admirably terse passages of historical summary suggest the hand of the professional historian). It does not, however, claim originality in this respect: inevitably, its earlier sections lean heavily on Ashby, and it has to be said that in general the study is based on a somewhat unsystematic selection of sources. The list of references is disfigured by errors and the index by omissions: it requires much effort to establish, for example, the substantial role of the U.S.A., not only through USAID but through such bodies as the International Council for Educational Development. Still, this is a judicious overview of a large, if depressing, subject, by eminent scholars who are not afraid to criticize their own colleagues as well as governments and outside agencies. ‘The failure of many African academics to fully appreciate the necessity to defend autonomy in the long-term interest of the academy was one of the most enduring legacies of the colonial situation’ (p. 95).

One of the great debates running through the first decades of academic research on West African history concerned the degree to which the unilateral ending of the Atlantic slave trade constituted a crisis for local societies and what link there was between this change and the imposition of formal European rule in the late 1800s. In its original form this debate has been over for some time. Most historians now agree that there was no long-term ‘crisis of transition’ on the West African coast in the early nineteenth century. Robin Law justifies the present volume by shifting attention to two secondary issues associated with the end of the slave trade: first, the transformations around inland production rather than coastal-dominated bulking and transport of vegetable exports; and second, the relationship of all these changes to the advent of colonialism. All the authors in this volume do discuss the connection between the end of the slave trade and internal systems of African production in the nineteenth century (including issues of indigenous slavery and gender relationships). Only a few concern themselves with colonial partition, although this becomes the main theme of Hopkins' concluding essay.

Peter Garlake's book is an admirable attempt to explicate the complexities and subtleties of Zimbabwean rock art. The development of his argument is well illustrated by 36 colour plates, some of startling clarity and beauty, and 185 black-and-white tracings that match well with the text, conveniently illustrating points as they are made. Although the book is a ‘digest’ (p. 9) of his Ph.D. thesis, the trajectory of his argument is well sustained.

Finding that very little of Richard Grove's history of European environmental thought deals with continental Africa, historians of Africa may decide against immersing themselves in its complex global sweep and intricate detail. They can absorb Grove's crucial lessons, however, by turning to his final one hundred pages, where he surveys colonial environmental thought and policy in India during the first half of the nineteenth century, and presents his conclusions about environmentalism and empire. In these pages, Grove draws together the numerous threads of his earlier chapters, which discuss European thinking about environmental change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the islands of St Helena, Mauritius and the Caribbean. Having followed his discussion of island environmentalism by tracing the evolution of British environmental thought in India during the period of East India Company rule, Grove concludes by arguing that ‘modern environmentalism ... emerged as a direct response to the destructive social and ecological conditions of colonial rule’ (p. 486).

This book will disappoint readers who expect an historical study of the environmental impact of Americo–Liberian settlement. It is, rather, a polemical survey of the environmental problems which have beset Liberia and a normative prescription for Liberia's environmental and political future.

The Wandalá community of northern Cameroon and adjoining portions of north-eastern Nigeria have a long tradition of state forms of government. In recent centuries, following conversion to Islam, they have composed an historiography in Arabic, an effort entailing the adaptation of alien characters to the names and titles of a language whose sound system differs considerably from the one for which the symbols were originally intended. Some individual examples of this literature have already been published, at least in translation, but with widely varying degrees of formality and precision. The volume reviewed here offers a critical edition and an accurate, persuasively annotated translation of all seventeen known Wandalá historical manuscripts in Arabic. Nine of the manuscripts are state chronicles that convey greater or lesser amounts of historical information arranged according to the remembered sequence of Wandalá monarchs. One composition is a dramatic patriotic epic, probably attributable to the days of the intrusive eastern warlord Rabih Fadl Allah at the dawn of the present century but couched in the form of a narrative of the defense of the Wandalá kingdom against an eighteenth-century invasion from Borno. Four documents are lists of local authorities at the south-eastern town of Mime. Two manuscripts list title officials of the central court together with some of their duties, while a third describes some of the tax obligations incumbent upon various groups of subjects.

Diamonds were discovered in Sierra Leone in 1930, and in 1934 sole mining rights were granted to the Sierra Leone Selection Trust (SLST), a subsidiary of the London-based Consolidated African Selection Trust, part of De Beers empire. In 1956, partly to restrict the increasingly prevalent illicit mining, and partly for political reasons, SLST opened part of its lease to mining by licensed miners under the Alluvial Diamond Mining Scheme (ADMS). The Sierra Leone government took over 51 per cent of the SLST shares in 1970, and a new company, the National Diamond Mining Company (NDMC), was formed. In 1980 SLST sold out to British Petroleum and left Sierra Leone.

Kwame Bediako is one of a new generation of West African Christian scholars, who confidently assert the essential ‘Africanness’ of African Christianity against all inclined to emphasize its foreignness. While deeply indebted to the first generation of African theologians of the 1960s, Bediako feels that they accepted too readily that Christianity was a foreign religion which needed to be ‘Africanized’ by incorporating elements from the traditional African religious heritage. It was the posing of this stark dichotomy – Christian or African? – which in Bediako's view led the Ghanaian Catholic priest Osofo Damuah to renounce Christianity and to found his own neo-traditional African, explicitly non-Christian, religious movement, ‘Afrikania’.