For over nine hundred years the African inhabitants of South Central Africa engaged in the production and trading of gold. The attention of archaeologists and historians, however, has focused mainly on gold reef mining. By comparison, alluvial goldwashing has been neglected, although it was practised by Africans both before and after the period during which they exploited gold reef mines. Probably at its greatest volume between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the gold trade thereafter declined, but the mining and trading of alluvial gold continued to be relatively important in the nineteenth century in what is now north-eastern Rhodesia. Largely a seasonal activity, goldwashing was normally washing was increasingly subject to interference and attempted suppression as settlers sought t o exploit alluvial areas themselves and force Africans into wage labour. This attempted suppression did not always have the intended results but may be seen generally as part of the wider structural underdevelopment of the African peasantry and precolonial industries in Southern Rhodesia.

In a recent study, Fred Cooper argues that strikes and other forms of labor protest had a clarifying effect on official thinking not only about labor policies but also about the aims and, ultimately, the viability of colonial rule. As Africans went on strike, from the Copperbelt to the docks of Mombasa and the Gold Coast Railway, to demand better wages and working conditions, colonial administrators first envisioned and then embraced the idea of an African working class and the possibility that African workers could be managed with the same kinds of labor codes and social welfare policies that obtained in Europe.

Of course, the image of a working class applied only so far in Africa. Colonial officials never fully understood the way African workers lived or the place of wage employment in African society, and were dismayed when their newly acquired understanding of Africans as universal workers was challenged in the 1950s by former strike leaders who began to insist on Africans' rights to political autonomy. Nonetheless, as Cooper shows, the effects of recurrent, often highly effective, strikes were far-reaching. As officials confronted the financial and political implications of providing all Africans with social welfare benefits and economic development comparable to those of Europe, they decided it was time to abandon the imperial enterprise.

It is argued in this paper that what happened in the region of Katsina in c. 1492–3 was not a dynastic change, but the establishment of the institution of ‘kingship’. This ‘kingship’ did not grow out of local pre-existing institutions. Rather, it was imposed on the kinship-society by the leaders of the new (Wangara) community of Muslim clerics and traders. These leaders aimed probably at creating a Muslim state in Katsina. However, owing to the resistance of the indigenous population, they failed to achieve this. Therefore, a rapprochement with the indigenous paramount animistic ‘priest-chief’—the durbi—was attempted. This led to the establishment of an institutional structure defined as ‘dual’ or ‘contrapuntal paramountcy’. Within this institutional structure the durbi became responsible for choosing the sarki or ‘king’. As a consequence, the institution of ‘kingship’ took on some of the characteristics of a ‘sacred’ animistic ‘kingship’.

It is further suggested that the evolutionary process outlined for the region of Katsina was paralleled by similar processes in Yauri, Kano and Gobir, and possibly also Zaria. However, in Kano the institution of ‘kingship’ did not originate from within the new community of traders and clerics: rather, the Kano ‘kings’, whose power was traditionally circumscribed by that of the local ‘priest-chiefs’, tried to bring about revolutionary changes with the support of the Wangarawa. But they too apparently failed.

It is suggested, finally, that the rapprochement achieved with the animistic ‘priest-chiefs’ alienated the community of clerics and traders; i.e. the community which constituted in a sense the very power-basis of the Hausa ‘kings’. This in turn may explain in part the jihad of 1804.

Parliament passed in 1807 the act to illegalize (called prematurely to abolish) the slave-trade. A Vice-Admiralty Court where the Navy could bring captured slave-ships for condemnation was constituted in Freetown, the capital of the Colony of Sierra Leone. From 1819 international anti-slave-trade courts, the Courts of Mixed Commission, were constituted there too. Until 1864, when the last ship destined for the Atlantic slave-trade was condemned, slave-ships were regularly brought in and the slaves freed.

The Basel missionaries, Ramseyer and Kühne, had this to say of Ashanti government in the reign of Kofi Karikari (1867–74):

…the reins of the Ashantee government are not exclusively in the hands of the king, nor does he possess unlimited power, but shares it with a council which includes, besides his majesty, his mother, the three first chiefs of the kingdom [Juabenhene, Bekwaihene, and Mamponghene], and a few nobles of Kumasi (Coomassie). This council is called ‘Asante Kotoko’, or the Ashantee porcupine, which means that like the animal of that name, nobody dare touch them.…It is this Kotoko council which rules the entire kingdom, and deals with the people, who must obey, whatever their own wishes or inclinations may be, in the most despotic way.…In important matters all the other chiefs of the kingdom are called together to discuss the case, but they are sure to vote in accordance with the view of the council, for who would dare to oppose the Kotoko?

The third list of radiocarbon dates for Sub-Saharan Africa later than 1000 b.c. is considerably longer than its predecessors. As new laboratories commence operations, so more and more dates become available. During the last eighteen months, many more dates from Rhodesian Iron Age sites have been processed, where the earliest Iron Age peoples are now dated to the fourth century a.d. if not earlier. The Kalomo culture in Zambia is now securely dated. Iron smelting furnaces were being operated on the Witwatersrand in South Africa by a.d. 1000, and it is now known that Iron Age peoples were living by the Kuene river in Angola by the eighth century. Recent dates from Katanga have shown that there was a flourishing copper trade there by the same period. An important series of dates have been processed from Saharan Neolithic sites, indicating that the Sahara was suitable for pastoral peoples in the fourth century b.c. Another date for the Nok culture in Nigeria places the later stages of the culture in the third century a.d.

By a resolution of the Cambridge Radiocarbon Conference, all dates are now calculated relative to a.d. 1950.

Queen Adelaide Province consisted of some 7,000 square miles of Rarabe Xhosa territory annexed by the British Cape colonial government in May 1835 during the Sixth Frontier War. The province was held only until the end of 1836 when it was abandoned under pressure from the imperial government, but it represented the first British attempt to extend direct control over a large body of formerly independent Africans. No such ambitious scheme had ever been attempted before in the Cape, and no such scheme was to be attempted elsewhere in Africa until the late nineteenth century.

Given its short-lived nature, Queen Adelaide Province has not been extensively analysed in any of the prominent histories of the eastern Cape. However, while the treatment is brief, its significance has been widely recognized. This early, temporary colonization of Xhosa territory has served as a lens through which to view colonial extension in the eastern Cape as a whole. In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century settler histories of George Cory and George McCall Theal, the annexation of Queen Adelaide Province represents a temporary advance within a much broader colonial progress. One episode in the epic attempt to extend colonial civilization across ‘Kaffraria’, expansion within the province was unfortunately thwarted by misguided Cape and metropolitan philanthropy. In W. M. Macmillan's liberal critique of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the disputes over the province between the land-hungry settlers, the strategically-minded Governor D'Urban and the humanitarian Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, are again viewed as part of a much broader struggle. But rather than Cory's struggle between civilization and savagery, this is seen as a contest between malicious and benign conceptions of colonialism. The province represents an early collision between, on the one hand, evangelical and humanitarian versions of cultural colonization that guaranteed Xhosa access to their land (a kind of trusteeship that Macmillan advocated for his own times) and, on the other hand, the practice of colonization founded upon settler-led conquest and dispossession.

Forced immigration from the Southwest Indian Ocean marked life at the Cape of Good Hope for over a century. Winds, currents, and shipping linked the two regions, as did a common international currency, and complementary seasons and crops. The Cape's role as a refreshment station for French, Portuguese, American, and Spanish slave ships proved particularly important in the development of a commerce linking East Africa, Madagascar, and the Mascarenes with the Americas. This slave trade resulted in the landing at the Cape of perhaps as many as 40,000 forced immigrants from tropical Africa and Madagascar. Brought to the Cape as slaves, or freed slaves subjected to strict periods of apprenticeship, these individuals were marked by the experience of a brutal transhipment that bears comparison with the trans-Atlantic Middle Passage. The history of the Middle Passage occupies a central place in the study of slavery in the Americas and plays a vital role in the way many people today situate themselves socially and politically. Yet, for various reasons, this emotive subject is absent from historical discussions of life at the Cape. This article brings it into the history of slavery in the region. By focusing on the long history of this forced immigration, the article also serves to underline the importance of the Cape to the political and economic life of the Southwest Indian Ocean.

This article examines an Urdu travelogue written in 1901 to analyze the discursive frameworks by which Africa was rendered knowable to Indian settlers. As a vernacular ethnography written for a readership of Punjabi migrants associated with the Uganda Railway, the travelogue provides our earliest direct evidence of colonial Indian attitudes towards the peoples and landscapes of East Africa. Envisioning the region as at once an imperial and Islamic settlement zone, the travelogue documents the emergence of an ‘imperial-Islamicate’ discourse that incorporated both littoral and interior East Africa into an industrializing oceanic culture area.

When the Cold War broke out in Western Europe at the end of the Second World War, France was a key battleground. Its Cold War choices played out in the empire as well as in the métropole. After communist party ministers were ousted from the tripartite government in 1947, repression against communists and their associates intensified – both in the Republic and overseas. In French sub-Saharan Africa, the primary victims of this repression were members of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), an interterritorial alliance of political parties with affiliates in most of the 14 territories of French West and Equatorial Africa, and in the United Nations trusts of Togo and Cameroon. When, under duress, RDA parliamentarians severed their ties with the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) in 1950, grassroots activists in Guinea opposed the break. Their voices muted throughout most of the decade, Leftist militants regained preeminence in 1958, when trade unionists, students, the party's women's and youth wings, and other grassroots actors pushed the Guinean RDA to reject a constitution that would have relegated the country to junior partnership in the French Community, and to proclaim Guinea's independence instead. Guinea's vote for independence, and its break with the interterritorial RDA in this regard, were the culmination of a decade-long struggle between grassroots activists on the political Left and the party's territorial and interterritorial leadership for control of the political agenda.

During World War I, Africans in Nyasaland were called upon to provide large numbers of soldiers and military labourers for the war effort in eastern Africa. Although a few willingly volunteered, many more objected, and some resisted. In this situation, colonial officals used force to secure the necessary manpower. Africans, therefore, called the conflict ‘the war of thangata’, referring to the growing colonial demands for taxes and for labour rent on European estates. The tasks which the soldiers and carriers were called upon to perform were equally likened to thangata, being ‘work which was done without real benefit’. So far from receiving rewards, Africans found that inadequate food, clothing, and medical care contributed greatly to the sufferings associated with a military campaign. Between 1914 and 1918 wartime manpower requirements, and war service, gave full meaning to colonial rule throughout the protectorate. The response to these demands and this suffering brought, in the form of both traditional and modern religious and social institutions, the first tentative stirrings of African nationalism in Nyasaland.

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.

In May 1961 a small group of men formed the Kabaka Yekka movement in the Kingdom of Buganda. Their simple objective was to unite the Baganda behind the throne, the symbol and guarantee of Buganda's separate identity. The great fear was that the election of a national Democratic Party government in the previous March had marked a decisive stage in the destruction of Buganda's special position within Uganda. Kabaka Yekka's appeal to Ganda loyalty was instantly successful, but it was not until the Kabaka's ministers agreed to accept membership of independent Uganda, and to support Kabaka Yekka in Buganda, that Kabaka Yekka could win popular support and deal effectively with the Democratic Party. But when Kabaka Yekka became an ‘official’ movement, its whole nature and function was changed. There had been differences at the beginning, but now the simple objective barely disguised the contradictions within the movement, while Kabaka Yekka became a means to personal promotion as well as the guardian of the ‘national’ interest. Above all, Kabaka Yekka now included the chiefs, who wanted to preserve the existing political and social arrangements within Buganda. So by February 1962 Kabaka Yekka had become the party for the Baganda and for the status quo within Buganda. It was a party which, because it was identified with the Kabakaship, was able to destroy the Democratic Party in elections for the Buganda Lukiko, and a party which, although in alliance with Dr Obote's Uganda People's Congress in national politics, had aroused sentiments and interests pointing ultimately, if not irrevocably, to Ganda separation.

This article attempts to investigate the role of women in rural society in Morocco, and by extension in the Muslim world of the Near and Middle East. It does so by examining the evidence thrown up by a major crisis, the Rif war of the 1920s. The mobilization and organization of tribal society by Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Karī;m (Abdelkrim) to fight the war against the Spanish and the French extended to women as well as men, involving them in new tasks under new laws. In the end, however, the evidence points not so much to a revolution in women's lives as to the activation for the purposes of war of a traditional ‘female space’. In so doing, it points to the real importance of the women's sphere in a society which was sexually strongly segregated, confirming the impression derived from studies of more literate, urban and aristocratic Muslim societies of North Africa and the Middle East.

A rare document, the diary of a slave raider, offers a unique view into the sociopolitical situation at the turn of the nineteenth century in the colonial backwater of North Cameroon. The Fulbe chief in question, Hamman Yaji, not only kept a diary, but was by far the most notorious slave raider of the Mandara Mountains. This article supplements the data from his diary with oral histories and archival sources to follow the dynamics of the intense slave raiding he engaged in. This frenzy of slaving occurred in a ‘colonial interstice’ characterized by competition between three colonial powers – the British, the Germans and the French, resilient governing structures in a region poorly controlled by colonial powers, and the unclear boundaries of the Mandara Mountains. The dynamics of military technology and the economics of this ‘uncommon market’ in slaves form additional factors in this episode in the history of slavery in Africa. These factors account for the general situation of insecurity due to slave raiding in the area, to which Hamman Yaji was an exceptionally atrocious contributor. In the end a religious movement, Mahdism, stimulated the consolidation of colonial power, ending Yaji's regime, which in all its brutality provides surprising insight in the early colonial situation in this border region between Nigeria and Cameroon.

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.

This article is a study of Somali popular songs of the period 1960–90, which opened with the establishment of the Somali national state and ended with its collapse. It focuses on these songs as a discursive site in which a particular dilemma of the new Somali state clearly comes into focus, namely the desire to be ‘modern’, while at the same time turning to ‘tradition’ (i.e. a particular construction of Somali cultural authenticity and traditional religious morality) to mark and anchor a new Somali collective self-understanding and communal identity. The discursive push-and-pull of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ evident in the songs expresses itself specifically in debates about moral womanhood – that is to say, about what ‘good’ women should be like. Since the collapse of the state in 1991, Somali discourses about common public identity and gender norms have undergone dramatic change, with the sites of popular culture multiplying, especially outside of Somalia, and accessible through the internet. Although an interpretation of Islam that distances itself from Somali ‘tradition’ has been gaining importance as a source of legitimization, as is evident both in the struggle over the state in Somalia and in everyday life in Somalia and the diaspora, this is not a major concern in the Somali popular songs from the period after 1991.

It was born auspiciously this flag raised above us
We will not differentiate among any Somalis
Since none of us are closer to it than the others,
Let us be equal in front of our flag
(Waa samo ku dhalayoo calanka noo saaran
Soomaali oo dhan, kala sooci mayno
Uma kala sokeynno, ha loo sinnaado)
Somali popular song, articulating the hope of Somali unity and equality, sung by Faduumo Abdillaahi ‘Maandeeq’ in the early 1960s

This article considers the different ways that Marirangwe purchase area farmers understood and used their farmland, resources and opportunities. In the pioneer period from 1931 to the 1940s, Marirangwe farmers favored extensive use of their land and its resources. However, as labor and capital opportunities changed, land became for some an expendable commodity. By the 1950s, the farmers' ability to generate capital through land sales paralleled the arrival of squatters in the area. With the help of these squatters and revenue from land sales, Marirangwe farmers prospered. This development, however, did not signal a change from the extensive farming habits of the pioneer period but rather a brief, and generally prosperous, period of specialization.

Historical writing on the coloured community of South Africa has tended to accept coloured identity as given and to portray it as fixed. The failure to take cognizance of the fluidity of coloured self-definition and the ambiguities inherent to the process has resulted in South African historiography presenting an over-simplified image of the phenomenon. The problem stems partly from an almost exclusive focus on coloured protest politics which has had the effect of exaggerating the resistance of coloureds to white supremacism and largely ignoring their accommodation with the South African racial system. Furthermore, little consideration has been given to the role that coloured people themselves have played in the making of their own identity or to the manner in which this process of self-definition shaped political consciousness. This is particularly true of analyses of the period following the inauguration of the Union of South Africa in 1910, a time when the legitimacy of coloured identity was not in any way questioned within the coloured community and when coloured protest politics was dominated by one body, the African Political Organization (APO).

Jusqu'en 1965 l'on ne connaissait pratiquement rien de la préhistoire de République Centrafricaine, aucune recherche systématique n'y ayant jamais été effectuée. Deux notes parues en 1933 permettaient cependant de penser que ce pays possédait, comme ses voisins, un patrimoine préhistorique. La premiàre, de l'abbé Breuil, décrivait en deux pages unesérie de pierres taillées détenue par le Musée de l'Homme à Paris, recueillie sur le plateau de Mouka par une mission géologique dirigée par F. Delhaye; une autre collection de même provenance était déposée à la même époque au Musée de l'Afrique Centrale à Tervuren en Belgique, elle y demeurait malheureusement inédite jusqu'en 1969 où nous pouvions la voir et l'étudier. La seconde note due à la plume de Félix Eboué était consacrée à l'ethnographie mais le premier chapitre décrivait quelques objets en pierre trouvés dans le centre-est du pays au cours de travaux miniers ou de constructions de ponts.