The identity of the Sao to the south of Lake Chad has remained obscure despite the efforts of archaeologists, ethnographers and historians. To solve the problem, it is necessary to look at the historical circumstances in which they passed into legend as the ancestors of the present occupants of the region, namely the creation of the empire of Borno to the west and south of the lake in place of Kanem to the north-east. The conflicts involved in this creation lasted from the beginning of the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, and produced the main historical references to the Sao apart from oral tradition, always as enemies of the new rulers among the native population. The first applies to the fourteenth century, but all the others are from the contemporary record of the campaigns of Mai Idrīs Alauma by Ibn Furṭū in the sixteenth century, where we learn of the Sao-Gafata in the neighbourhood of the Bornoan capital Gazargamo, and of the Sao-Tatala on the flood-plain southwest of the lake. Elsewhere on the flood-plain, the various peoples are referred to by recognisably modern names: Ngama, Makari, Kotoko. It seems probable that in the work of Ibn Furṭū we find the last use of a term which the incoming Kanembu had originally used to describe all the inhabitants of their new Bornoan dominions, then employed as an adjective for each particular population, until with the suppression of the Sao-Gafata and Sao-Tatala it was abandoned except as the name of a legendary people ancestral to Kanuri and non-Kanuri groups alike. The most probable explanation of the term itself is that it meant ‘city’ or ‘city-dwellers’, describing the inhabitants of the walled villages or towns of the flood-plain as perceived by their conquerors the Sayfuwa rulers of Kanem-Borno at the outset of their imperial adventure.

Trade across the Cape frontier in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, and government attempts to regulate that trade, cannot be understood without first considering the role of Protestant missionaries as traders and bearers of European manufactured goods in the South African interior. From their arrival in 1799, missionaries of the London Missionary Society carried on a daily trade beyond the northern and eastern boundaries of the Cape Colony that was forbidden by law to the colonists. When missionaries of the Methodist Missionary Society arrived in the mid-1810s they too carried beads as well as Bibles to their mission stations outside the colony. Most missionaries were initially troubled by having to mix commercial activities with their religious duties. They were forced, however, to rely on trade in order to support themselves and their families because of the meagre material and monetary assistance they received from their societies. They introduced European goods among African societies beyond the Cape frontiers earlier and in greater quantities than any other enterprise until the commencement of the Fort Willshire fairs in 1824. Most importantly, they helped to bring about a transition from trade in beads, buttons and other traditional exchange items to a desire among many of the peoples with whom they came into contact for blankets, European clothing and metal tools and utensils, thus creating a growing dependency on European material goods that would eventually bring about a total transformation of these African societies.

In the late nineteenth century the West African palm oil trade entered a period of difficulties, characterized mainly by a fall in prices from the early 1860s. Part of the reason for this lay in the introduction of regular steamship services between Britain and West Africa from 1852. As steam came to replace sail so the palm oil trade underwent major changes. These changes can be quantified fairly precisely. One effect of the introduction of steamers was the concentration of the British side of the oil trade once again on Liverpool, its original centre. Another effect was the increase in the number of West African ports involved in the trade. The most important impact was the increase in numbers of traders in oil trade from around 25 to some 150. The resulting increased competition in the trade led to amal-gamations becoming increasingly common – a process that culminated in the formation of the African Association Ltd in 1889. It was also to provide the context for the pressure exerted by some traders for an increased colonial presence in the 1880s and 1890s.

This paper sets out to examine the interactions between African and white hunters in colonial Kenya in an effort to understand the nature of the confrontation between the competing cultural traditions of hunting under colonial conditions. It examines the major tradition of African hunting in eastern Kenya among African residents of Kwale, Kitui and Meru districts from oral and archival materials, arguing that the place of subsistence hunting in the economy of African farmers has been systematically denigrated in the colonial literature. Next, the various representatives of the European hunting tradition in Kenya are surveyed: sportsmen, travellers, settlers, and professionals. A preliminary assessment is made of their impact on game and the growing need for conservation. The history of the game and national park departments, which administered the hunting laws and were charged with the preservation of wildlife, is next described. The records of the colonial Game Department provide a key source for the reconstruction of the attempts to control African poaching and regulate European hunting in the interests of the preservation of game and the control of the colonial economy. At the end of the colonial era, with the emergence of a new sensibility to conservation, Kenya's gamekeepers engaged in a major, successful anti-poaching campaign in eastern Kenya's Tsavo Park. This was the climactic confrontation between the two cultures in their contest for control over Kenya's wildlife resources.

This article outlines the approach to the writing of South African legal history being taken in a book in progress on the South African legal system between 1902 and 1929. It suggests that legalism has been an important part of the political culture of South Africa and that, therefore, an understanding of legal history is necessary to a comprehension of the South African state. It offers a critique of the liberal notion of the rule of law as a defence against state power, arguing that in the South African context ideological and legitimising explanations of law should be de-emphasised in favour of an approach which emphasises the instrumental nature of law in relation to state power. Elements of the existing legal and historical literature are briefly reviewed.

The basic orientation is to consider the South African legal system as essentially a post-colonial British system rather than one of ‘Roman-Dutch law’. The study is divided into four parts. The first looks at the making of the state between 1902 and 1910 and considers the role and meaning of courts, law and police in the nature of the state being constructed. The second discusses ‘social control’. It considers the ideological development of criminology and thought about crime: the nature of ‘common law’ crime and criminal law in an era of intensified industrialisation; the development of statutory criminal control over blacks; and the evolution of the criminalising of political opposition. The third part considers the dual system of civil law. It discusses the development of Roman-Dutch law in relation to the legal profession; and outlines the development of the regime of commercial law, in relation to contemporary class and political forces. It also examines the parallel unfolding of the regime of black law governing the marital and proprietal relations of blacks, and embodied in the Native Administration Act of 1927. The final segment describes the growth of the statutory regime and its use in the re-structuring of the social order. It suggests that the core of South African legalism is to be found in the emergence of government through the modern statutory form with its huge delegated powers of legislating and its wide administrative discretions.

Local studies are sorely needed in South African historiography in order to illuminate relations between dominators and dominated as the colonial political economy was restructured in the wake of the mineral discoveries of the late nineteenth century. Stellenbosch farmers had to confront, for the first time since emancipation, the implications of the proletarianization of the underclass of the Western Cape. In the context of an expanding economy and diversified labour market, labourers left, or threatened to leave, farm employment. Farmers now recognized that the control and power which they had exercised over labourers was a matter of open conflict. This was a time of depression and uncertainty for farmers who faced competition in their overseas markets, the ruining of their vineyards by phylloxera and what they perceived as insubordination and disloyalty by farm labourers at home. The criminal records of the Resident Magistrate provide the lens through which the article examines the changing dynamics of labour relations on the farms of Stellenbosch district between 1870 and 1900. A comparative perspective helps to inform the analysis of the meaning of theft, arson and assault in rural Stellenbosch. For a time labourers were able to exploit a measure of leverage against the farmers, but this was not to last, and by the early 1900s the tide had again turned in favour of the dominant class.

This article offers a translation of M. C. Adeyẹmi's book, A History of Old and New Ọyọ, completed in Yoruba in 1914. The original text comprises 32 pages, divided into ten short chapters, six of which treat the history of Ọyọ from the origins to 1914. The remaining four chapters examine cultural and political institutions. The translation retains the flavour of the original text which stems from a tradition of Yoruba oral historiography. M. C. Adeyẹmi was trained by the C.M.S., and had a Bachelor of Arts degree in education at Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone. Between 1911 and 1942, he combined the functions of educationalist and missionary. His short book, which refers to no published or unpublished written work, is based on Ọyọ oral traditions describing the major developments in the political history of Ọyọ. The author did not moralise on wars and the collapse of the Ọyọ empire, nor did he use the book as a means of propagating Ọyọ hegemony in Yorubaland.

The book is significant in many ways: it is a representative example of Ọyọ traditions as they existed at the beginning of this century; it complements Johnson's The History of the Yorubas where both describe the same event; it is very useful for understanding how ‘traditional’ historians study society; and it provides new information on Ọyọ in the nineteenth century and on some cultural features of the Yoruba.