This Article follows in the series started by Fagan and continued for eastern and southern Africa by Phillipson, Sutton and Soper. The scope remains much the same, covering in time the later part of the Stone Age sequence as well as the Iron Age. Geographically, however, there are some changes: the Sudan has been excluded as it was covered by the recent review of North and West African dates, while a detailed chronological review of francophone Central Africa is in progress and therefore this region has been excluded.

The flowering of the Atlantic trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries caused many of the West African societies of the near hinterland to orient themselves increasingly toward the coast. This new focus created new geopolitical conformations. Given the nature of the stimulus, trade and politics went hand in hand and entrepreneurial ability could reap political rewards. These possibilities were greatest along the Gold Coast and in the Niger delta where the actual European presence was small in relation to the extent of the trade.

Such a trader cum political leader was John Kabes who, in a career spanning nearly forty years, established the paramount stool of Komenda, hitherto part of the inland state of Eguafo. Kabes began as a trader for the English (and sometimes for the Dutch) and gradually achieved political status which, however it may have been acquired, proved to be lasting because it was acceptable to existing political mores.

Such of Kabes's activities as are known suggest that his success sprang from his ability to wring advantage from the new exigencies of the time and place in ways which enabled him to acquire legitimacy as well as wealth and influence. Although Kabes's career is uniquely documented there is no reason to suppose that it was particularly unusual in its other facets. On this argument it can suggest ways in which other West African trade-derived polities, particularly in the Niger delta, may have coalesced.

Grâce aux recherches récentes, le nombre de dates C14 disponibles pour l'Afrique centrale s'est considérablement accru. Une synthèse critique de toutes les datations connues est présentée ici. Malgré une apparente bonne coïncidence entre les dates et les industries lithiques de la partie ouest, un examen minutieux montre la nécessité de redéfinir l'ensemble des industries lithiques généralement distinguées. Dans la partie est, le microlithique est daté d'avant 38.000 b.c., ce qui est plus ancien que ce que l'on supposait. L'existence de céramique associée à des haches polies, constituant peut-être un niveau néolithique, a pu être mis en évidence au Bas–Zaïre; il est daté des quatre derniers siècles avant notre ère. Au Zaïre, les données sur l'âge du fer ancien restent très fragmentaires; par contre au Rwanda, il est connu par une série de dates parmi les plus anciennes en Afrique de l'Est. Dans la partie ouest, à l'époque de l'âge du fer récent, quelques données permettent de suivre lea circuits commerciaux datés de l'époque du royaume de Kongo. La révision des dates du cimetière de Sanga aboutit à l'élaboration de la chronologie complète de l'âge du fer dans le dépression de l'Upemba au Shaba. Au Rwanda, la datation de sépultures royales a permis d'intéressantes confrontations avec les données de l'ethnohistoire. Ces nouveaux résultats, pour importants qu'ils soient, restent malheureusement fragmentaires et isolés.

Le site de Sanga, très important aussi bien du point de vue archéologique que linguistique, historique ou géographique, avait fait l'objet de fouilles en 1957 et 1958. Ces travaux avaient montré l'existence de trois ‘cultures’: Kisalienne, Mulongo et Red Slip, successives ou partiellement contemporaines et datées du VIII–IXe siècle. De nouvelles fouilles en 1974. ont permis d'établir la chronologie du cimetière dont l'utilisation s'étend au moins du VIII au XVIIIe siècle, avec une tradition kisalienne ancienne du VIII au Xe siècle, une tradition kisalienne classique du XI au XIVe siècle et une tradition Kabambienne (Mulongo+Red Slip) du XV au XVIIIe siècle; séquence confirmée par la datation du proche cimetière de Katongo. En 1974 la fouille de trois nouveaux sites, Kamilamba, Kikulu et Malemba Nkulu, a permis de mettre en évidence un âge du fer plus ancien que le kisalien ancien et permettra d'établir la séquence générale de l'âge du fer dans la région; une carte de répartition de plus de quarante sites a pu être dressée. Ces travaux reposent le problème de la localisation du noyau protobantou secondaire qu'une nouvelle et très intéressante théorie linguistique de Coupez, Evrard Ct Vansina fait s'étendre du nord de la zone interlacustre vers le sud. Cette théorie semble compatible avec nos connaissances actuelles pour l'archéologie et l'anthropologie. La nouvelle chronologie archéologique établie pour Sanga doit aussi étre mise en rapport avec les données de l'ethnohistoire relatives à l'origine de la royauté luba, origine que l'on faisait remonter à la période 1500–1600, mais qui pourrait être antérieure au XIIIe siècle. Différentes corrélations seraient alors possibles, mais il est jugé préférable d'attendre la fin des recherches en cours pour se prononcer plus avant.

A series of articles on firearms in Africa published in the Journal of African History in 1971 raised a number of questions which have not been given adequate attention since those articles appeared. In the present paper an attempt is therefore made to shed some light on some of these questions in relation to West Africa in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the basis of import figures from England total imports during this period was estimated to be between 283,000 and 394,000 guns per annum, excluding imports into the Congo–Loango area which Phyllis Martin estimated to be about 50,000 yearly at this time. These guns went largely to the major slave exporting regions of West Africa, especially the Bonny trading area. The sellers of slaves showed a very strong preference for firearms, which is an indication of a strong connexion between guns and the acquisition of slaves. This reinforces the gun-slave cycle thesis. The evidence fails to support the idea that firearms were used primarily for crop protection in West Africa in the eighteenth century. If this were so it should have been reflected in the European goods demanded by sellers of agricultural commodities. It is likely, however, that the use to which firearms were put in West Africa changed after 1900. While the quality of firearms imported into West Africa during the period of this study was generally low, it would seem that those firearms largely served the purposes for which the African buyers purchased them.

The caravan route linking Benghazi and Wadai was probably the most important avenue of long-distance trade between the Mediterranean and the eastern Sudan in the late nineteenth century. It remained economically viable well after 1900, after commerce on routes further west had declined.

Beginning with the Mejabra trader from Jālū who first found a direct route from Cyrenaica to Wadai in 1809 or 1810, this article traces the history of the route in the nineteenth century with special reference to the effects of Wadaian policies on trans-Saharan commerce. The important role of the Mejabra and Zūwāyā merchants from Libya is also considered.

Fluctuating fortunes characterized trading activity along the route between its opening and the years after 1850. Beginning in the 1860s, however, commercial prospects improved steadily. Evidence suggests that the Sanūsīya Muslim brotherhood (ṭarīqa) was largely responsible for increased trade and prosperity along the route at this time. Because the order spanned the route's entire length, it solved many of the problems connected with long-distance commerce. It assured regular communication, relatively rapid transport, the creation of bonds of trust, a system of adjudication and arbitration, and an all-embracing structure of authority to maintain order and respect for judicial rulings. It functioned as a trading diaspora, but its members were not all of the same ethnic group. Rather, adherence to a single ṭarāqa bound merchants together and fostered the security necessary for the trade. The article concludes that the relationship between the brotherhood and commerce was symbiotic. The Sanūsīya sheltered commerce; in turn, the caravan trade brought wealth to the order and united its far-flung domains.

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.

It has long been generally supposed that the kingdom of Kongo suffered a severe decline in population due to the civil wars of the seventeenth century and the slave trade. These figures are derived from literary estimates made by travellers and missionaries of the time. New estimates of population can be obtained by combining the statistics of baptisms left by the missionaries who lived in Kongo with a reconstruction of the age structure of the kingdom. Use of these estimates permits more exact calculations for the period 1650–1700, which suggest a much lower population level—about 500,000—than the commonly accepted figure of two million. This discovery suggests that the postulated population disaster did not occur; instead, it seems that levels of population remained relatively stable, growing slightly throughout the period in question. In addition to revising estimates of population, it has been possible to use the available statistics to throw light on the age structure and vital rates that prevailed in Kongo in the late seventeenth century, as well as to examine certain factors that have impinged on population.

Consular trade returns from Tripoli show a dramatic increase in the proportion of legitimate trade in trans-Saharan exports from the central Sudan in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This article focuses on Damergu, a Sahelian region located on the Tripoli–Kano route, and traces the reactions of North African merchants, local Tuareg rulers, and ordinary villagers to an increase and then an abrupt decline in trans-Saharan trade. North African merchants, who migrated to Damergu from Ghadames or from diaspora communities in Hausa towns, moved south after the decline of trans-Saharan trade in response to commercial opportunities in the savanna. A sharp rise in the importance of legitimate commerce in the Sahel upset the balance of power between two Tuareg groups, but the arrival of the French and the end of trans-Saharan trade eroded the power base of all Tuareg. The third group, villagers, responded to demand for new products by exchanging tanned goat skins and ostrich feathers for cheap European-made cloth and other imports. As trans-Saharan trade ended, they turned their full attention to exports of grain and animals, two forms of production and trade which had existed for some time before the boom in trans-Saharan trade. After 1900 the major change in trade patterns in these staple products was an about-face in the direction of exports corresponding to a secular decline in the desert-side economy. Whereas villagers had once taken millet primarily to Agadez, after 1900 they took progressively greater amounts south to Nigeria.

The survival of the Semitic-speaking, Muslim townsmen of Harär in the midst of animist Oromo (Galla) who migrated into the eastern highlands of modern Ethiopia in the late sixteenth century and settled as pastoralists is something of an anomaly, at least in the eastern Rift. Other pre-migration settlements of Muslim farmer-traders, presumably also speaking a southern Semitic language, appear to have been submerged and displaced. The Haräri's good fortune is not to be explained by their use of firearms and simple fortifications. Economic interdependence, the awe the newcomers felt for the town's saints and the greater cohesion of the townspeople probably played a greater role than mere self-defence.

A balance of power was needed, however, if the town was not to be swamped. This equilibrium seems to have been upset at the very time that the trade of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden was revived by Egypt in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Neither the succession to the amirate of pacifist princes nor the betrayal of the town to outsiders by the half-Oromo ruler, Amir Muhammad ibn Ali (1856–75), can correctly be blamed for this reverse although these are the excuses given in Haräri tradition. Rather, the repeated appeal to sections of the Oromo by factions within the town in struggles for the throne from the 1820s led to the Haräri becoming clients to neighbours who were still overwhelmingly animist herders little concerned with the commerce on which the townsmen's prosperity depended and little attracted to the titles and Muslim insignia with which the amirs rewarded those of the cultivating Oromo minority who paid taxes and rents in grain and supplied the town with other foodstuffs and its market with crops for export.

Though denigrated in the town's traditions, Amir Muhammad ibn Ali began the systematic proselytization of the surrounding Oromo and sought to induce more of them to cultivate crops for sale. Conversion and farming for the town's market, along with the appointment from the town of officials to replace the Oromo's elected officers, were the means by which, during the Turco-Egyptian occupation (1875–85), rulers with greater military resources obliged the confederation of the four great Oromo clans around the town (the Afran-Qallu) to adopt a way of life more in harmony with the interests of the townsmen. Despite the conquest of Harär and the surrounding Oromo and Somali by non-urban, Christian Ethiopians in the brief reign of Muhammad Ali's son, Amir Abdallahi (1885–7), the Islamic and mercantile legacy of the town was deeply enough rooted by then to flourish among the Afran-Qallu and to distinguish them, like the Haräri themselves, from their conquerors.

The early ʽAlawī state has repeatedly been described as heavy and efficient military government. In practice it functioned as a relatively loosely-knit tribute state. The achievement of its notable and long-lived second sultan Ismāʽil (1672–1727) was to shed the aegis of Fez, his economic metropolis, and set up an increasingly gigantic palace, beside a market town, as an independent political base. His central government there was characterized by minimal use of coin and minuscule central bureaucracy. For military support the sultan at first relied chiefly upon free troops, associated by fictional kinship with his most notable wife: later he relied increasingly upon black slave guards. But the motors of government at large were not imperial troops, whose functions were essentially deterrence and the hallmarking of government activity; they were provincial governors, bound to the sultan by ties of individual loyalty. These governors were responsible for the extraction of tribute destined for the palace.

Religion gave increased coherence to this state. This was not so much because of its association with literacy, as because it enabled the sultan, who needed religious prestige, to enhance his unremarkable claim to descent from the Prophet, by taking up the Islamic mantle of ‘Commander of the Faithful’. This was a forceful image for propaganda that could counter the close association between the palace and Moroccan Jewry. It could also validate demands for loyalty throughout the empire. A hard Islamic line was expressed in jihād, or holy warfare, against Christendom. The sultan's limited resources and his other military commitments prevented him from conducting active jihād much above the level of token confrontation. But there was also a moral jihād, waged, in so far as this was possible, by rejection of cultural and economic ties with Europe.

Liberia was fundamentally a maritime state in the nineteenth century, dependent on seaborne trade for its prosperity. Immigrant merchants and their descendants developed an extensive coasting trade in which they attempted to wrest the function of the collection and distribution of commodities from foreign competitors, thereby entering a long-established commercial system which antedated the foundation of Liberia. Small vessels manned by individuals resident along the coast and familiar with local conditions were better suited for the collection and distribution of goods than large foreign-owned merchantmen. This commercial advantage, coupled with an increase in foreign demand for Liberian palm oil and camwood early in the century and restrictions placed on African and foreign traders by the Liberian government, allowed Liberians to acquire a merchant fleet which consisted of at least 234 vessels during the century. To protect their involvement in the coasting trade, Liberians declared independence in 1847. Post-independence prosperity is indicated by the fact that Liberians owned at least 139 vessels between 1847 and 1871. However, in the last three decades of the century the Liberian coasting trade was destroyed by the depletion of camwood resources, the development of aniline dyes, the introduction of petroleum products, the competition of foreign-owned steam packets, and falling demand as a result of the general commercial recession of the period.

Between 1917 and 1921 Robert Williams and Company recruited labour from the Moxico Province of Angola for work in the Katanga copper mines of the Union Minière. The episode is one of the better documented in a period in which comparable recruiting operations were the mainstay of the industry, and provides a case study that is also a vehicle for the analysis of the significance of recruitment both as an instrument of industrial strategy and a determinant of worker behaviour. It is argued that recruitment is characteristic of a phase in the development of the colonial political economy marked by the use of highly unskilled labour intensive techniques of production in the dominant industry. It is a mechanism designed specifically to service such techniques through the regulation of the induced supply of short-term, unskilled labour. It is further argued that it is such regulation—realized as coercion—that gives recruitment its particularity as a determinant of worker behaviour, and this paper seeks to identify from the Angolan case the precise implications which this had for the workers themselves.

The kingdom of Dahomey is often presented as the classic instance of the operation of a royal monopoly of the Atlantic trade in West Africa. Detailed study establishes, however, that there was never any such royal commercial monopoly in Dahomey, although there were attempts to establish such a monopoly in the 1780s and in the 1850s. The kings of Dahomey enjoyed a number of commercial privileges, and controlled the distribution of the war captives taken by the Dahomian army, but they were never the sole sellers of slaves. There was always an important group of private merchants in Dahomey, who were mainly concerned with marketing the slaves imported into the kingdom from the interior. The replacement of the slave trade by the palm oil trade in the nineteenth century strengthened the position of the private merchants, since they were able to move into the production of oil as well as marketing it. The kings of Dahomey also engaged in the production of oil for export, but were not able to establish as complete control of the production of oil as they had exercised over the ‘production’ of slaves.

The pervasive co-ordinating role of the Mwari cult in the Rhodesian risings of 1896–7 is illusory. The cult does not appear to have been linked with the Rozvi empire, the attempts to recreate which Ranger saw as one of the objectives of the priesthood in 1896. The priests were Venda from south of the Limpopo, who had arrived in the Matopos during the middle third of the nineteenth century, and who were for the most part out of action during the risings. The Ndebele did not succumb to cult influence, not even between March and July 1896, but maintained their previous coolness towards the priests. They were led all along by their own chiefs who, in June 1896, made Nyamanda king in succession to Lobengula. This and the wish to drive away the Europeans were the inspirations behind the Ndebele rising. The Shona and Sotho groups who rose with the Ndebele in March came in as allies of the kingdom rather than as minions of the cult. The Shona who rose in June did so not in answer to cult bidding, but in response to European pressures and the opportunity provided by European difficulties in Matabeleland. They also were led by their chiefs. A major theme of the risings is disunity and fragmentation, with the Ndebele fighting a civil war, and some important Shona chiefs collaborating with the British South Africa Company. The Ndebele fell short of a united strategy, as to an even greater extent did the Shona: there was certainly no strategic linkage of the two risings. Not only have the co-ordinating roles of Mkwati and Kaguvi been exaggerated, but their places respectively in Ndebele and Shona society have been misunderstood. They were local figures subordinate to local political structures rather than purveyors of a forward-looking millenarianism. Both the Ndebele and Shona fought to preserve existing institutions and alliance structures. It is above all fallacious to seek in the events of those years a surge of Zimbabwean nationalism or proto-nationalism, which was only to develop this century.

Infectious disease and concepts of public health, operating as societal metaphors, seem to have exercised a powerful influence on the origins and development of urban segregation in South Africa. Between 1900 and 1904 bubonic plague, threatening major centres, occasioned the mass removal of African urban populations to hastily established locations at the instigation of medical authorities and other government officials under the emergency provisions of the public health laws. Inchoate urban policy, under tentative consideration since the 1890s as economic development and social change began to stimulate black urban migration, was precipitated by this episode into specific legislation and permanent administration. Cape Town and Port Elizabeth were the two foci of this development in the Cape Colony, where the government locations at Ndabeni and New Brighton exemplify the process. These moves and the effort to consolidate them were to a large degree frustrated by practical administrative, legal, economic and human factors which have characterized the anomalies and contradictions of urban location policy ever since. A black ‘middle class’ resisted the loss of property rights and clung to aspirations of economic and social mobility or legal independence. Especially at Port Elizabeth, where independent peri-urban settlements proliferated, white officials and politicians laboured in an administrative and legal quagmire. White employers and black migrants proved only marginally amenable to location concepts modelled on the principles of quarantine. But ‘the sanitation syndrome’, equating black urban settlement, labour and living conditions with threats to public health and security, became fixed in the official mind, buttressed a desire to achieve positive social controls, and confirmed or rationalized white race prejudice with a popular imagery of medical menace. These issues of urban social order would be repeated again in connexion with such dire events as the 1918 influenza epidemic as the foundations of Union-wide policy and law were laid during and after World War I.

One of the responses of the Transvaal gold mining industry to the economic crisis after the South African War of 1899–1902 was to import Chinese indentured mine labour. To facilitate this process and to integrate it with the overall demands and requirements of the industry, the mining companies established a recruiting and shipping company in 1904, known as the Chamber of Mines Labour Importation Agency. This short-lived company, which was characterized by a high degree of vertical integration, operated as recruiting and shipping agency in China, receiving agent in Natal and co-ordinating and advising agent in the Transvaal. Despite complex arrangements designed to exploit the Chinese labour market, the company was, generally speaking, successful in securing the requisite labour force of suitable size and quality for the Transvaal mines. However, it showed a longer-term susceptibility to competitive pressures in the northern Chinese labour market. The company was amalgamated with WNLA in 1908.

The attempt to introduce an element of Indirect Rule into Northern Rhodesia after 1930 highlighted the extent to which the prestige and local influence of chiefs had been reduced by the loss of political and economic power and religious control. In Bembaland the evangelical work of the White Fathers, who were established in the centre of the area from 1898, contributed to the decline of the chiefs' spiritual authority. The principal mission station of the area was separated from the local Bemba chiefdom of Ituna by a grant of concession from the British South Africa Company, and up to 1914 the religious superior was given the powers of a native chief over the inhabitants of the mission. Within the concession, the economic, political and religious association between villagers and missionaries paralleled the network of relationships which had existed in the chief's capital village. In other missions in Bembaland, chiefs were obliged to admit the establishment of mission stations as a result of a Company policy of granting zones of influence with rights of evangelization to individual missionary societies. The influence of these missions was propagated mainly through the work of itinerant catechists who entered into dialogue with village headmen and established a chain of prayer houses and regular instruction throughout the woodland communities. Attempts at resistance by both chiefs and headmen were largely ineffectual, and by 1930 the White Fathers had, with government approval, achieved considerable influence in Bembaland. During the next decade, this influence was to diminish as colonial policies brought about political and social changes in which the mission had only an ancillary part to play.

In May 1941, after the Italians' capitulation, the British immediately took over the administration of Eritrea for the duration of the war and until an international body could decide the former colony's future. From 1941 to 1950, the political direction of Eritrea remained uncertain until the U.N. commission reached its compromise solution. Ultimately, the Ethiopian Government contravened the U.N. agreement and unilaterally annexed Eritrea in 1962, which set in motion the present struggle for independence.

The British Military Administration, acting as an interim government, attempted with moderate success to create an atmosphere in which all people of Eritrea might have the maximum voice in determining their political future. From the end of the war through the arrival of the U.N. commission in February 1950, there was a flurry of political activity. Although initially five political parties were formed, which in time became splintered and re-emerged as other parties, two main groups could be distinguished along geographical boundaries: the lowlands versus the highlands, separatist Muslims versus irredentist Christians. The historical suspicion and aloofness between Orthodox and Muslims continued to divide Eritrean loyalties. Affiliation, however, with one or another political party was not observed strictly on geographical or religious grounds. A small number of educated Orthodox saw no advantage in Eritrea's incorporation into Ethiopia and thus formed a pocket of Christian separatists who would have undoubtedly obtained greater allegiance had not the Orthodox priesthood threatened excommunication for anyone not espousing the Unionist cause. On the other hand a small nucleus of Muslims, mostly chiefs and landed aristocracy, favored union with the government in Addis Ababa, for their feudalistic hold on the large number of Tigrai serfs (numbering three-fifths of all Muslims in Eritrea) would have been retained under Ethiopian rule.

By the end of 1946, there was widespread but unorganized anti-unionist sentiment; elections held in 1947 by the Four Power Commission showed that a small majority of all Eritreans opposed union. The anti-Unionist cause profited from Ethiopia's intimidation and terrorist interference, which was largely counter-productive; moreover, the irredentist argument failed to convince most Muslims and some Orthodox that Eritrea would prosper under the aegis of one of Africa's least developed countries. It seems clear that terrorism and intimidation were largely Unionist tactics and that the anti-Unionist campaign became popular not so much because of Italian contributions (which were far less than those of the Ethiopian Government to its irredentist cause) but rather because of the grass-roots nature of the Muslim movement.

Unfortunately, the future of Eritrea after two commissions and voluminous reports was decided in the international arena which failed to satisfy either side, but rather planted the seeds for future conflict.

In Northern Rhodesia under colonial rule, much land was alienated from the Plateau Tonga for occupation by European settlers who were mainly maize farmers. The expansion of African farming from the late 1920s, aided by the growing use of the plough and draught oxen, caused such settlers to demand the imposition of marketing controls. The government sought to introduce conservation measures to protect the lands of African farmers from wanton misuse, and in 1946 it introduced an Improved Farming Scheme (I.F.S.) to check overcultivation among the Plateau Tonga. The I.F.S., while nurturing a small group of privileged farmers, was to antagonize most African producers and gave rise to charges of collaboration with the colonial administration. The non-political activities of the Farmers' Associations formed by the Improved Farmers lent substance to these charges which in the 1950s emanated largely from the ranks of local supporters of the African National Congress (A.N.C.). By 1959, the I.F.S. had failed to meet the expectations of its members, thereby bearing out the doubts and fears of its critics. This was to throw into the lap of the local A.N.C. movement several wealthy and educated farmers who had hitherto taken no active interest in protest politics but who were now convinced they had been misled.