Two hypotheses are available for the origin of the Zimbabwe culture. A religious hypothesis attributes its development to an African society in isolation, placing it in the class of a primary state. In contrast, the trade hypothesis maintains that it was a secondary state resulting from the gold trade.

If the religious hypothesis is correct, then Zimbabwe would be an exception to all other known cases of primary state formation. The archaeological evidence points to a horticultural subsistence throughout the Iron Age sequence in the area and a small population until Period III/IV. On the other hand, all known primary states were based on large populations and intensive agriculture. It is more likely that Zimbabwe is a typical case of secondary state formation.

The stratigraphy on the Acropolis indicates that a social transition from Period II to III probably occurred at Zimbabwe and was not the result of an immigrant group, and the short chronology places this transition around A.D. 1250. The evidence available from Arab documents, trade imports and ancient mining demonstrates that trade existed well before then. Consequently, the evolution of the Zimbabwe culture was almost certainly due to the Arab gold trade.

This study of horses, mainly in the central Sudan, presents impressions rather than a complete survey of the evidence. At the time when written records for the Sudan region begin,c. A.D. 1000, horses were evidently well established there. Their coming preceded the arrival of Islam. The first introduction of horses is sometimes attributed to nomads, such as the Zaghawa round Lake Chad, who, so the argument runs, used them to found larger and more militant states. Some evidence, however, suggests, although tentatively, that such nomadic immigrants were chiefly camel people, who enlarged their use of horses because these were more suitable than camels in the Sudan region, and because the horse was already there. Careful reading of the Bayajidda legend raises doubts as to whether it has anything to do with the introduction of the horse into Hausa, or into the Sudan as a whole. All this lends support to the idea that horses became established in the Sudan at a far earlier date, perhaps through trans-Saharan links recorded in the horse-chariots of rock art. Occasional references to wild horses suggest that survival and reproduction were not dependent on imported stock. Numbers of peoples, from Kaniaga in the west to Dar Tama in the east, possessed their own horses; many of these peoples were isolated from any network of trans-Saharan communication, and many were uninterested in large-scale state formation. These horses, apparently always very small, may perhaps be nicknamed the southern Sudanic breed. Larger horses, presumably directly or indirectly descended from later imports, are particularly associated with certain areas, especially Bornu/Mandara. The trans-Saharan trade in horses, admittedly of considerable importance, may have been given undue prominence by scholars who have overlooked the possibility of east-west trade–of horses arriving in Hausa, for example, from no further afield than Bornu. Acute illness and mortality among imported stock must also have influenced trade, and reduced the contribution of such animals to local herds and stables.

Information collected in the field and careful reading of Ibn Battuta's account of his travels does not support Delafosse's usually accepted opinion on Battuta's itinerary. Several pieces of evidence point towards the identification of Zaġari with Diara (Kingi) rather than with Dia (Masina). Such an itinerary would lead further to the west. Information given about the return journey seems also to indicate that Ibn Battuta's destination, Malli, should be located between the southern part of Bambuk and the upper Gambia rather than at the site of Niani.

The sultanate of Angoche on the Moçambique coast was founded probably towards the end of the fifteenth century by refugees from Kilwa. It became a base for Muslim traders who wanted to use the Zambezi route to the central African trading fairs and it enabled them to by-pass the Portuguese trade monopoly at Sofala. The Portuguese were not able to check this trade until they themselves set up bases on the Zambezi in the 1530s and 1540s, and from that time the sultanate began to decline. Internal dissensions among the ruling families led to the Portuguese obtaining control of the sultanate in the late sixteenth century, but this control was abandoned in the following century when the trade of the Angoche coast dwindled to insignificance. During the eighteenth century movements among the Macua peoples of the mainland and the development of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean laid the foundations for the revival of the sultanate in the nineteenth century.

Although the territory of the Kisama was involved in military conflicts with the Portuguese from the very beginning, because of its geographical situation it was not subjugated permanently until the twentieth century. A few chiefdoms, which are traceable through the centuries in the sources, played an important role (Ndemba, Kimone kia Songa, Kafushe Kambare, etc.). A number of different factors were favourable to the resistance of the Kisama. The Portuguese were never really interested in this province, apart from the safeguarding of shipping on the Kwanza. No mineral wealth tempted them there. Even the conquest of the salt mine of Ndemba was undertaken mainly to clear and secure the way to the hoped for silver mines of Cambambe. On the one hand, the great lack of water during the dry season made the provisioning of an army there difficult. On the other hand, at least in the Kwanza region, the dreaded tropical diseases were endemic. For the slave trade, the interior, especially Kasanje, was more profitable. Later, when the neighbouring Libolo increased in importance because of the new trade centres in the Ovimbundu territory (Bihe, Bailundu, etc.), Kisama remained off the beaten track. It is only now that the seclusion of this province, which has one of the game parks of Angola within its borders, will in all probability come to an end because of the discovery of a series of oil fields.

This article is an effort to examine the way in which events during and, in some cases, before the nineteenth century shaped modern Senegambian society. It concludes:

(1) That the slave trade contributed to the development of military structures and to the polarization of Senegambian societies between a warrior élite and an industrious Muslim peasant population.

(2) That the change from the slave trade to legitimate commerce weakened the élites while strengthening the Muslim agriculturalists, who were able to accumulate guns and horses.

(3) That tensions between the two conflicting groups go back at least to the seventeenth century, and that after 1860 they led to a series of revolutionary struggles. The agents of this revolution were a series of charismatic religious leaders.

(4) That the course of this revolution was shaped by the involvement of European interests, and after 1854 increasingly by the incorporation of Senegambia in European spheres of influence.

(5) That this merely postponed certain changes. By the beginning of the colonial period, Islam was clearly dominant, and Senegambia's rural populations were heavily involved in the money economy.

Although historians have examined the process of pre-colonial political integration, little attention has been paid to the complementary patterns of ethnic and cultural assimilation. The Chikunda, who were initially slaves on the Zambezi prazos, provide an excellent example of this phenomenon. Over the course of several generations, captives from more than twenty ethnic groups submerged their historical, linguistic, and cultural differences to develop a new set of institutions and a common identity. The decline of the prazo system during the first half of the nineteenth century generated large scale migrations of Chikunda outside of the lower Zambezi valley. They settled in Zumbo, the Luangwa valley and scattered regions of Malawi where they played an important role in the nineteenth-century political and military history of south central Africa.

This article attempts to assess within a broad traditional context the efforts of Lubosi Lewanika, ruler of Bulozi from 1878 to 1884, and again from 1885 to 1916, to find solutions to the problems facing the Lozi state during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

So far scholars of Lozi history have been primarily preoccupied with assessing Lewanika's career within the context of European penetration. Whereas it is true that the extension of British Protection to Bulozi and North-Western Rhodesia came finally to be based on the treaties with Lewanika, for the Lozi state and Lewanika himself this was a solution to only one of a number of problems. And indeed to some sections of Lozi society, Lewanika's accommodation of the forces of the ‘scramble’ was not his greatest achievement.

So far scholars of Lozi history have been primarily preoccupied with assessing Lewanika's career within the context of European penetration. Whereas it is true that the extension of British Protection to Bulozi and North-Western Rhodesia came finally to be based on the treaties with Lewanika, for the Lozi state and Lewanika himself this was a solution to only one of a number of problems. And indeed to some sections of Lozi society, Lewanika's accommodation of the forces of the ‘scramble’ was not his greatest achievement.

The Lozi central kingship had collapsed in the middle of the nineteenth century as a result of internal political instability, a serious succession crisis, and a military defeat by the Makololo. Before the establishment of any effective colonial control, however, Lewanika had succeeded in establishing a great degree of personal control, exalted Lozi kingship above the level of ordinary people, and extended Lozi influence to its widest limits.

Rinderpest, a highly contagious cattle disease which swept through southern Africa in 1896–7, has attracted little interest from historians. A more detailed consideration of its effect on a cattle-keeping peasantry within the context of an industrializing economy assists in illuminating some of the socio-economic and political forces operative in the 1890s.

The spread of rinderpest was acompanied by widespread suspicion and rumour. Some Europeans thought that the disease was spread by Africans. Many Africans, for their part, were convinced that rinderpest was a product of the white man's malice. Over large areas rinderpest was accepted with an attitude of fatalism and resignation. In Basutoland and East Griqualand, however, local leaders emerged who were willing to utilize grievances and rumours stemming from rinderpest for attempts at mobilization for the wider objective of revolt.

The loss of large numbers of cattle caused considerable social and economic distress in African communities. The transport system was paralysed in an economy dependent on the extensive use of the ox-wagon, and this resulted in price rises and profiteering in more remote areas. With the disappearance of the source of meat and milk Africans experienced considerable hardship and in some cases starvation. Forced into taking contingency action, activities ranged from planting vegetables to stock-thieving. Generally, however, the impoverishment of Africans caused by rinderpest contributed to the growing proletarianization of Africans and the process of labour migration. Rinderpest did not produce fundamental structural changes in Southern African society, but it did emphasize the processes which were to characterize industrial South Africa of the twentieth century.

Caught between schools of sociogy, historians of North Africa over the past twenty years have concetrated on the first century of European colonization, 1830–1930. The previous thousand years of the Muslim period remain enigmatic, their interpretation still heavily dependent upon the work of Ibn Khhaldūn. In conclusion to his volume of the 1952 edition of Ch.-A. Julien's Histoire de l'Afrique du Nord, R. Ie Tourneau characterized this ‘medieval’ period as one of political failure. With particular reference to Morocco, Gellner and more recently Abun-Nasr have, in their various ways, sought to explain an absence of effective government in terms of Ibn Khhaldūn's cyclical theory of the rise and fall of dynasties, taking the traditional Moroccan distinction between a Bilād al Makhzan and a Bilād al-Sība to represent the antithesis between the civilized and the primitive on which that theory rests. Islam is seen as a positive influence on behalf of central government. Neither scheme is satisfactory, perhaps because like Ibn Khhaldūn they are both too concerned with the central power. Taking North Africa as a whole, it seems better to begin with a division of authority in the pre-colonial period into the secular and the religious, the first represented by tribes and local lordships (as well as cities) and by the central government itself, the second by the men of religion, ‘ulamā’ and murābiṭūn. From a position protected by reverence and sustained by endowments, the latter operated as consultants rather than commanders, with the proviso that it was always open to the man of religion to use his prestige and wealth to step across into the realm of secular power. Progress from there to the top, on the other hand, was exceptional. The control of the central government was a great prize, and for that reason the system normally restricted competition by reserving it to the members of an exclusive group, whether a royal family as in Morocco and Tunisia or a regiment of soldiers as in Algiers. The overthrow of that ruling group was difficult, achieved in any given instance only after years of preparation. It is hard to infer a general rule. Islam was employed to justify the claimant as occasion offered, the justification(s) advanced becoming in the event an historical myth on behalf of the successful candidate and – his dawla, his dynasty or state. Any residual Islamic content inherent in the throne as distinct from its occupant can scarcely be isolated as an independent factor. In practice it may have amounted to little more than acceptance of government, whether Muslim or Christian, as a necessary evil.