Linguistic studies are now advanced enough to allow us to sketch how Central Africa was settled by farmers who spoke western Bantu languages. From the second millenium B.C. onward, yarn-growers with neolithic tools spread in the rain-forests of the Cameroons. By adapting repeatedly to different environments they expanded over the whole forest area and also over the savannas and woodlands further south. These people were in search of optimal environments, quite willing to move to settle in favoured locales. Although they multiplied there, their expansion over such huge areas meant that their settlements remained very thinly scattered over Central Africa.

A thickening of settlement would only occur when new crops – the banana in the rain-forest, cereals in more open lands – allowed farmers to settle in most places. Iron-smelting was less important here than these new crops. These induced further population growth, densities rose and movements in search of the best unknown lands ceased. If the first settlement had only moderately inconvenienced the autochthones, the thickening of population led in time to their absorption, dependence on villagers, or emigration in search of ever-decreasing empty areas.

Scholarly opinion on the conversion of the Kingdom of Kongo to Christianity has generally been that it was superficial, diplomatically oriented, impure, dangerous to national sovereignty or rejected by the mass of the population. This article argues that although Christianity in Kongo took a distinctly African form it was widely accepted both in Kongo and in Europe as being the religion of the country.

This was possible because Kongo, as a voluntary convert, had considerable leeway to contribute to its particular form of Christianity. Also, European priests were much more tolerant of syncretism in Kongo than in regions like Mexico, where colonial occupation accompanied the propagation of Christianity. Kongo's control over the theological content allowed the religion to gain mass acceptance while its control over the Church organization and finance allowed it never to be an instrument for foreign domination, in spite of Portuguese attempts to use it as a ‘fifth column’. When European priests arrived in Kongo during the Portuguese colonial occupation at the end of the nineteenth century, they rejected the local form of Christianity, thus ending its acceptance among Europeans as Christianity.

The present paper is one in a series of essays on the political economy of the West African forest kingdom of Asante (Ashanti), now located in the Republic of Ghana. In general terms it surveys and explores aspects of the crucial issue of control over subjects and land within the Asante social formation. At the broadest level, it seeks to offer a description of fluctuations in the ability of central government in Kumase to mediate and to preside over the distribution of these resources between the foundation of the state in the early eighteenth century and the present day. It is argued that until approximately the middle of the nineteenth century the history of Asante is the history of the embedding, expansion and triumph of central government control. Thereafter, for a number of reasons that are discussed, matters changed. In terms of these changes the crucial decade was the 1880s, and the paper demonstrates how, in the closing stages and the immediate aftermath of the civil war (1883–8), a revolutionary reversal was effected in the general developmental thrust of Asante history. That is, at a meeting in Kumase in 1888, and at an oath-taking ceremony at Ahyiamu in the following year, the historic control of central government over subjects and land was challenged and substantially liquidated. That the implications of this revolutionary change were distorted in a number of ways was due to the imposition of British colonial rule at the close of the nineteenth century. The remainder of the paper attempts briefly to demonstrate how, in the twentieth century, and in the context of changing socio-political conditions, the battle over resources between central government in Kumase and its opponents remains a live and complex issue.

Malaria was a major health problem in Swaziland during the colonial period. Prior to the commencement of vector control measures in the late 19405 annual outbreaks of malaria occurred during the summer and autumn months from December to May. These seasonal epidemics incapacitated large numbers of Swazis as well as a few Europeans. During most years the epidemic was limited to the lower regions of the country and was marked by relatively few deaths. In other years, however, the annual epidemic spread throughout the country and was accompanied by a high rate of mortality especially among young children. Colonial medical opinion ascribed these major epidemics to abnormally heavy rainfall and increased vector breeding. Yet they were also a product of long-term trends in the Swaziland political economy – the semi-proletarianization of Swazi herdsmen/cultivators and the subordination of Swazi economic interests to those of South African and local European capital - which produced a state of nutritional vulnerability among many Swazi families. This, vulnerability in combination with short-term economic crises, such as the worldwide depression of the early 19305, and drought, gave rise to famine conditions which greatly increased the severity of subsequent outbreaks of malaria, as seen in the histories of the major epidemics of 1932 and 1946.