The author reviews the developing uses of oral sources in recent Africanist history, and argues that the original expectations about ‘oral tradition’ derived from contemporary structural functionalism. Changing one's model of social action therefore entails a change in the evaluation of oral data, and some of the consequences, according to different social theories, are sketched out. In particular, the perspectives of P. Bourdieu can, with modifications, permit the development of systematic ethno-historiography.

Since completing my Ph.D. under John Fage in 1979 I have been working on critical editions of German, Dutch and French sources for the seventeenth-century history of West Africa. Many of these have been used uncritically, especially in the last twenty years. In my view it is wrong to cite such sources at all until one has at least attempted to establish the relationship between them. If one compares the whole corpus, one discovers a host of plagiarisms and other forms of interborrowing. At least half the Europeans who wrote about West Africa between 1500 and 1750 are known to have read the works of other authors. Using two chronological lists of publications which described the Ivory and Gold Coasts in this period, I seek to show that only a few can be regarded as purely ‘primary’ sources – mostly the ones which are least often cited.

The rise of the kingdom of Dahomey coincided with the growth of the slave trade in the area, and consequently has often served as a case study of the impact of the slave trade upon African societies. The article reviews the historiography of the rise of Dahomey, in an attempt to clarify the relationship between the nature of the Dahomian state and its participation in the slave trade. It considers, and refutes, the view that the rulers of Dahomey had originally intended to bring the slave trade to an end. It examines the militaristic character of the Dahomian state, and suggests that this is best understood as a consequence of increased warfare stimulated by the overseas market for war captives. Finally, it examines and partially endorses those views which have presented the political centralization of Dahomey as a constructive response to the problems of order posed by slave-raiding.

L'Historiographie se rapportant à la traite atlantique des esclaves en Afrique révèle deux tendances majeures. L'une est représentée par les travaux dont la préoccupation majeure est de quantifier les phénomènes démographiques engendrés par la traite. L'autre s'efforce au contraire d'évaluer ies conséquences de la traite dans le contexte global de l'évolution des formations sociales africaines à l'ère du capitalisme mercantile.

No problem has exercised Africanists for so long and so heatedly as the slave trade. Now that any difference of opinion as to its morality has ended, debate tends to concentrate on its economic and political aspects, particularly on its magnitude and regional characteristics. In the past few scholarly generations, sophisticated statistical manipulations have supplied more evidence, but it has been concentrated on the number of slaves who arrived in the New World. Nonetheless, dearth of evidence (sometimes total) regarding the other components of the trade has not seemed to discourage efforts to arrive at global figures and, by extension, to determine its effects on African societies.

The present paper asks why this should be so, and wonders how any defensible conclusions can ever be reached about almost any facet of the trade that can go beyond ideology or truism. It concludes that no global estimate of the slave trade, or of any ‘underdevelopment’ or ‘underpopulation’ it may have caused, are possible, though carefully constructed micro-studies might provide limited answers. Under the circumstances, to believe or advocate any particular set or range of figures becomes an act of faith rather than an epistemologically sound decision

This paper – which builds upon the author's previously published work on the forest kingdom of Asante (Ghana) – deals with the role of Komfo Anokye in Asante thought and history. The source materials and historiography pertaining to Komfo Anokye are critically reviewed, but the principal focus of the paper is on issues of cognition, belief and philosophy. Komfo Anokye's ‘place’ in Asante thought is analysed, and his meaning(s) identified with reference to Asante concerns about the nature of history, society and the human. The paper tries to go beyond epistemology and a ‘traditional’ reading of Asante religion and its practices to a hermeneutical interpretation of Komfo Anokye and the sense-meaning of Asante history. Philosophical and psychological issues are addressed in a historical context. The larger object of the paper is, by the example of Komfo Anokye and Asante history, to attempt to indicate a way forward for the Africanist historical enterprise in the understanding of meaning.

Salaga was one of the leading slave-markets of West Africa in the 1880s. The story of the slaves – where they came from, who brought them to Salaga, who bought them, and what happened to them afterwards – can be pieced together from the reports of a great variety of travellers, black and white, officials, soldiers, merchants and missionaries, of various nationalities, African and European. Thus, on the eve of the European occupation which put an end to it, it is possible to lift the veil that usually conceals the internal slave trade of pre-colonial Africa, and gain some idea of its scale and workings, and of the range of attitudes towards slavery and the slave trade.

This article offers a reassessment of Britain's decision to occupy Egypt in 1882. Research published since 1961, it is suggested, does not support the view put forward by Robinson and Gallagher in their celebrated book, Africa and the Victorians, that Britain intervened reluctantly to safeguard the Suez Canal in response to disorder in Egypt, or that she was led on by French initiatives. Moreover, the decision to occupy Egypt did not have the effect claimed by Robinson and Gallagher of precipitating the scramble for West and East Africa. It is argued instead that the causes of intervention lay in the metropole rather than on the periphery. British interests in Egypt were both important and expanding, and they were upheld by Conservative and Liberal governments in the period following the khedive's declaration of bankruptcy in 1876. This conclusion makes the Egyptian case less important in understanding the scramble for tropical Africa but more important in understanding late nineteenth-century imperialism. The occupation illustrates how the emergence of a particular configuration of economic and political forces in Britain found expression abroad after 1850; and it does so without invoking narrow or deterministic forms of historical explanation. Finally, it is suggested that the Egyptian case deserves a more prominent place in the study of theories of imperialism than it has received, because most of the ideas which enter modern scholarly discussion of this subject can be traced to the contemporary debate over the highly controversial decision taken by Britain in 1882.