The Ogba are an Igbo-speaking group, situated in the extreme south-west of the Igbo area, in the modern Rivers State of Nigeria (though the maps in this book, which depict only the Ogba country itself, do not convey a very clear sense of its location). This history of the community, written by its current Eze (king), sets out to cover the entire sweep of its history, from ‘the origin of the Ogbas’ (attributed to the fourteenth century) to the colonial period (post-independence history being treated only cursorily). It is based mainly on local oral traditions, taken partly from colonial Intelligence Reports, but also including extensive new material collected by the author; some use is also made, for the colonial period, of contemporary documents from British and Nigerian archives, and for prehistory, of archaeological evidence.

The foundations of Afro-European relations were laid in the first one hundred or so years of contact, the period from the 1440s to at least the 1550s during which Portuguese activities in Guinea proceeded without grossly damaging interference from other European powers. From 1482 up to the final disaster of capture by the Dutch in 1637, the fort of Sáo Jorge da Mina was the principal base for official Portuguese activities, ‘Mina’ being the conduit for the most extensive sea-export of gold. Despite its economic value to the crown, and its international status as the symbol of the Portuguese claim to sovereignty over Guinea and monopoly of the sea-export trade of western Africa, the fort had probably less lasting influence on early Afro-European relations than had the less heralded, and even more poorly recorded, activities of private Portuguese traders in western Guinea. Nevertheless, the history of the fort, when Portuguese, deserves close attention, and these two volumes by Joseph Bato'ora Ballong-wen-Mewuda represent a brave attempt to provide an analytical account.

Randall Fegley's bibliographical compilation is clearly not among the best of the World Bibliographical Series. The objective of the collection is to present a solid guide of the country to the non-specialist, and compared to other volumes in the series, Fegley's work lacks polish and perspective. The volume is marked by spelling errors. Accents in French names and titles are most often ignored. Important authors' names are misspelled: Gilles Sautter becomes ‘Giles’ in the text and ‘Sautte’ in the index; Jean-Claude Willame becomes ‘Willaure’. Ironically, the listing of the latter's book, Patrimonialism and Change in the Congo, a political science essay on Zaïre, illustrates the mistake Fegley denounces in his preface (p. xiii) : most English-speaking readers confuse Zaïre and Congo. The well-known collection of essays edited by P. Gifford and W. R. Louis is wrongly entitled by Fegley as Transfers of Power in Africa, and presented as a single volume (p. 68). Some titles are also poorly categorized, like René Gauze's The Politics of Congo-Brazzaville. Gauze's 150-page text is devoted to Congolese politics during the colonial period, with a 50-page supplement on the decade 1962 to 1972 written by Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff. It is nevertheless classified only under ‘Post-colonial politics’ (p. 71). Jan Vansina's Paths in the Rainforest, best classified in pre-colonial history, is listed just once under ‘Politics, General’.

James Newman has given us an ambitious book. He explores three interlocking themes: a dialectic between the demography of human communities and the productive character of their environments; the roles of trade and politics in generating growth in political scale; and the development of cultural identities. The first three chapters review the emergence of hominids, the Stone Ages, and the transition to agriculture. Here we meet his sources: physical geography, archaeology, historical linguistics, the occasional human genetic datum and some documentary historical material (including mention of dynastic oral traditions). Newman handles most, though not all, of the best of the secondary literature in these fields. The second part of the book amplifies his central themes for each of the continent's conventional regions. At a total of 201 pages, the brevity of the text alone will appeal to undergraduate teachers.

Lesotho's 1979 Land Act was, at least in conception, a major innovative piece of legislation. This book therefore arouses expectations. In some areas the book does indeed fulfill expectations, but in others it will unfortunately leave the reader disappointed or misled.

The sub-title tells all for this extremely useful work. Included are citations to 884 honors papers, master's theses, and doctoral dissertations emanating from Benin (89 titles), Burkina Faso (119 titles), Congo (50 titles), Côte d'Ivoire (81 titles), Guinée (64 titles), Mali (207 titles), and Sénégal (274 titles), produced from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s. (Gabon is covered in similar fashion by Christopher Gray, History in Africa 21 (1994), 413–33, who lists 87 items for that country.) The entries are arranged by author within each country and each includes all the relevant bibliographical details as well as a set of key words. Only the proper names in the latter, however, are included in the work's two indexes (which might better have been combined, especially since some items – e.g. Nzema – are wrongly placed).

The identification of the various sub-groups of the Yoruba offers a challenge to historians, particularly since large numbers of Yoruba-speaking people were deported into the African diaspora. In this contribution to Yoruba historiography, Adediran analyses the history of the western Yoruba sub-groups, especially those resident in République du Benin and also in Togo. This study expands upon Adediran's Ph.D. thesis (Awolowo University, 1980) and is based on oral traditions and archival materials, as well as an excellent grasp of the published literature.

An estimated seven million people live as refugees in Africa today. While reports on refugee services abound, there are few studies of internal cultural dynamics among the displaced. This book is pre-eminent among these, with its insights the more urgent given the horrific recent increase in refugees in East Central Africa.

This special issue of Pedagogica Historica, a journal published from the University of Gent, presents a selection of eighteen papers from an international conference on the history of education held in Lisbon in 1993. The texts are in English and French, although there are no contributors from France or Britain. The contributions deal with general themes and European backgrounds as well as colonial experience. Six which relate to Africa will be briefly described here.

Language death, a widespread phenomenon in modern Africa does not entail that the speakers of a given language have no descendants only that those descendants cannot speak their parents' language. The same is true of the death of a culture, although this is often less clearly recognized. Thus within the boundaries of modern South Africa, there is virtually no-one who can speak the San, or Bushman, languages, which until two hundred years or less ago were flourishing, if only in pockets. Equally, there is now no-one who lives according to the hunter–gatherer lifestyle from which the San take their name.

This work is a fascinating hybrid. The first half (pp. 1–240) comprises an updated version of Madagascar Rediscovered, published by the same author in 1978, covering the history of Madagascar from a British perspective up to the French conquest of 1895. The justification for the 1978 work was twofold: the sparsity of modern literature in English on the history of Madagascar and the considerable, yet underrated, British influence there prior to 1895. The title of the book currently under review indicates a much more ambitious aim – that of presenting a general history of Madagascar. In this light, the revision only partially rectifies the bias of Madagascar Rediscovered.

Judging from the recent conference on Africa's Urban Past held at London's School of Oriental and African Studies, historians are increasingly – if somewhat belatedly – joining their colleagues in the social sciences in recognizing the continent's towns and cities as fruitful fields of research. While urban historians of North America and Europe have long regarded the built environment as a valuable source, the form of towns is only beginning to emerge as a topic of serious consideration in the African context. It is gratifying to note, therefore, that a number of contributors to the SOAS conference chose to focus on the ways in which both indigenous concepts of settlement and the physical organization of space have shaped Africa's urban centres as arenas of social, political and economic conflict. It is with these issues in mind that the reviewer approached this study of the architectural history of a people with a long tradition of urbanism and a highly nuanced terminology of settlement, the Akan of southern Ghana.

Anyone lucky enough to attend an Akan royal ritual is struck by the central role played by one or more, usually old, men who carry long staves with elaborate, often golden, finials. They, rather than the ruler, seem to do all the talking. The king's voice is often virtually a whisper (bokoo) and even when audible is intentionally rushed and even hesitant. People address the king through an individual okyeame just as the king speaks indirectly through an okyeame. They do not simply pass on messages; and this is very much more than oration through intermediaries. They speak eloquently; and the most revered akyeame use a striking poetic, allusive language of proverb and metaphor in which routine and contemporary discussion becomes universal and timeless.

During the last two decades, our knowledge of the Saharan palaeoclimates has improved enormously. Several long-term regional projects published their results, new methods of dating and of climate or vegetation reconstruction came on line, and (especially) causal models of global climatic mechanisms became much more sophisticated. Until now, however, there has been no synthesis of these advances in the vast Sahara. Robert Vernet has produced an admirable overview for the specialist and for members of ancillary disciplines such as history and archaeology. No comparable Saharan climate synthesis exists anywhere in the anglophone literature.

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.