This paper has sought to examine the basis of capital accumulation in the Natal sugar industry from its beginnings in the late 1840s until the opening of Zululand for white settlement in 1905. It has traced the emergence of plantation production in the colony in the context of developments within the regional sugar market and the shifting patterns of the international trade. It has also sought to elucidate the weaknesses of this system which undermined and finally destroyed it in an extended crisis which lasted from the late 1860s until the turn of the century. Finally it has analysed the productive relations which emerged within this reconstructed industry, identifying the large units of production known as the miller-cum-planter concerns which combined central milling activities and extended areas of cane production in a form of monopolistic control which still profoundly affects the industry today.

Based on interviews with participants and witnesses, together with some documentation, the article describes the means and conditions by which Kimbanguist doctrines were introduced to Kisangani (Stanleyville) between 1945 and 1959, before the foundation of the Church of Christ on the Earth by the Prophet Simon Kimbangu as a national and international church. The special place in the covert theology of the Church of certain events in 1952, at the camp for Kimbanguist exiles in Lowa, is described. Discussion of ethnic rivalries during and after the foundation of the Church is related to the content of the oral traditions, which represent several political tendencies. The conclusion is that Kimbanguism in Upper Zaire differs from that of its place of origin in Lower Zaire in lacking roots in local culture and politics, and in having been primarily a product of nationalist sentiment after World War II.

Within twelve years of the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 the Transvaal was producing over one quarter of the world's annual output of gold. The Transvaal's emergence as a major gold producer took place at a time when global monetary relations were dominated by the operations of the gold standard. This article illustrates the impact of the Witwatersrand discoveries on the working of the international gold standard to 1914 and suggests that newly mined gold from South Africa eased international liquidity problems by facilitating an expansion of the gold base and money supplies without the dangers of inflation. Transvaal gold was shipped to London and sold in the City's bullion market. The establishment by South African mining companies of a complex London network of brokerage, insurance, refining and marketing facilities of gold is considered in detail. It is demonstrated that, when faced with a fixed price of gold and rising working costs on the Rand, the mining industry actively sought to minimize the marketing costs of gold in London to offset general cost inflation and to increase revenue. Finally, at the turn of the century, the Bank of England still occupied a hegemonic position in the international financial system, although, as this article shows, this hegemony was subject to periodic financial crises such as the collapse of Barings in 1890. The Bank‘s problems were thought to stem from a severe shortage of gold reserves. Recently, it has been argued that by the late 1890s British politicians and financiers encouraged the overthrow of the Kruger regime in the Transvaal in order to gain physical control over the Rand mines and thereby ease the Bank's shortages of gold. However, there are problems with this formulation and the article concludes with an alternative consideration of the complex relationship between the supplies of newly mined Transvaal gold, the international gold standard and the Bank of England's financial crises.

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.