The articles in this special issue are revised versions of papers delivered in September 1978 at the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom conference on ‘Whites in Africa – Past, Present and Future’. The choice of conference topic aroused some controversy. Addressing himself to the ‘Pink ASAUK’, one correspondent enclosed a cutting from West Africa in which news of the forthcoming conference was ominously included on the same page as a report on ‘Freetown's Rubbish Plan’. The writer made two points: ‘Human beings are citizens, not colours or numbers as your hollow minds suggest’; ‘Now that Africa is nearly free from imperialism and exploitation…dishonest intellectuals from British universities are conspiring to draw a new map of Africa.’

For a brief period between about 1878 and 1886, European traders in Eastern Pondoland played an important role in the politics of the chieftaincy. In these years the formerly amicable relationship between the Mpondo chiefs and the Cape Colony broke down. An expansionist colonial government confiscated the Mpondo port at St Johns, took control of an area claimed by the paramountcy, and threatened the political independence of the chiefs. The traders, especially a few larger wholesale firms, allied themselves with the paramount in his struggle to regain his land and port. Some traders feared that colonial encroachments would affect the concessions they had obtained from the paramount and that customs duties charged by the Cape at Port St Johns would undermine their competitiveness. Others, faced with an acute trading depression in 1882–3, sought to increase their share of the Pondoland market and hoped that conflict between the Cape and the Mpondo would stimulate a new boom. The chiefs, on their side, were receptive to the political overtures of the traders. As traders penetrated the area, they began to lose control over production and became increasingly dependent on taxing trade and granting concessions. They had lost confidence in missionary scribes and looked to the traders to provide secretarial skills. Various groups of traders could also give aid in the prosecution of Mpondo diplomacy by supplying firearms, opening negotiations with the imperial authorities, and establishing a new port. The alliance was formed at a specific moment in the penetration of merchant capital into an independent African polity. It serves to illustrate that some traders were prepared to act independently of the colonial powers in order to protect their interests.

By drawing on the current Marxist debate about the nature of the capitalist state, this article argues that the colonial state was obliged to be more interventionist than the mature capitalist state in its attempts to manage the economy, since colonies were distinguished by the way in which they articulated capitalism to local modes of production. This posed severe problems of social control, since the capitalist sector required the preservation of indigenous social institutions while also extracting resources from them. In early colonial Kenya this problem was mitigated by a rough compatibility between the needs of settler capital and the patronage exercised by African chiefs within a peasant sector which was expanded to solve the colonial administration's initial need for peace and revenue. The peasant sector was not destroyed, rather it was represented in the state, which never ceased thereafter to be plagued by the conflicts between the two modes of production over which it presided.

One of the advantages of looking at white society in Southern Rhodesia is that it was a very simple society by contrast to South Africa and that its essential structures show up very clearly. This was certainly true of the business of producing models of African societies, customs and conduct. In South Africa there grew up a cluster of intellectual ‘experts’ on Africans – including a distinguished group of anthropologists. In South Africa, therefore, the connexion between the requirements of the white economy and the most influential models of African societies was complex and indirect. In Rhodesia there was no such tradition of indigenous social science. As a contributor to the Native Affairs Department Annual admitted in 1956, ‘of all areas in Africa Southern Rhodesia was the most backward in anthropological knowledge of its own indigenous peoples’. In Southern Rhodesia the men who administered Africans, mobilized them for employment and kept them working were also the men who produced the authorized versions of the African past, of African customs and of African ‘personality’.

The period following the world slump saw increased British official interest in applying the new science of social anthropology to colonial problems. This paper looks at the eight years (1939–47) during which the distinguished South African anthropologist, Max Gluckman, held the post of Assistant Anthropologist and later Director at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Northern Rhodesia, and carried out field research among the Lozi of Barotseland. His post was also referred to as one in ‘functional’ or ‘applied’ anthropology, and the R.L.I, as a whole was intended to contribute to the solution of the urgent social problems thrown up by the growth of the mining industry. It is suggested that Gluckman's own shift in outlook from a belief in academic aloofness to a concern for active involvement with the administration, as well as being part of a wider change in attitudes, was also linked to his personal situation and to the unifying effects of the Second World War within N. Rhodesia. Gluckman was able to gain support for the ambitious research programme which was to put N. Rhodesia in the forefront of the post-war policy of organizing social research through local institutes, but his attempt to engage directly in practical affairs in N. Rhodesia proved disillusioning. Although the N. Rhodesian government continued to support the Institute and in theory welcomed Gluckman's offers of co-operation, it is shown that in practice little came of his attempts to apply either his specific knowledge of the Lozi or his general theoretical knowledge to administrative problems. Any influence he may have exerted on the colonial evolution of N. Rhodesia therefore remained indirect, but his position was one in harmony with the underlying trends towards decolonization.

Oswald Pirow was an active and influential cabinet minister in the Hertzog administration in South Africa for more than a decade. Perhaps more than anyone else in office, Pirow shaped the new aggressive Union policies in external matters which stressed a ‘South Africa First’ ideology. Given a free hand by Hertzog, and as minister responsible for defence and transport, Pirow aimed to weaken the British connexion, enhance South Africa's image, and expand Union influence throughout ‘white’ Africa to the north. The agent charged to carry out these new policies was South African Airways, organized by Pirow in 1934 as Africa 's first national airline. As the Union 's ‘chosen instrument’, SAA was used by Pirow to challenge British paramountcy in the Rhodesias and East Africa, in direct conflict with Britain 's own struggling Imperial Airways. The rivalry was for routes and services, mail and passengers, and ultimately for prestige. By 1939, Pirow 's airline was established in operation from Kenya southward, and winning the struggle with its fleet of modern Junkers aircraft. Pirow was the promoter, the organizer and the hard bargainer with whom the British had to deal time and time again. For technical and financial reasons, Imperial Airways could seldom match Pirow 's ambitions, and on the eve of World War II, Pirow could claim great success for his air-minded policy. Only the coming of the war was to remove Pirow and his policy from the scene.

This article deals both with the political history and with the economy of European agricultural settlement in the Belgian Congo. It concludes that the role of settler farming in the life of the Congo was essentially political. The colonat was only marginal in a colonial economy long based on the extensive exploitation of African labour by industrial and commercial firms. European agriculture was able to compete neither with big business in labour recruiting, nor with African cultivators in price advantage. Settlers only survived with the benefit of government subsidies and a monopoly over some branches of production. White farming was maintained for political reasons both in peripheral regions of the colony, and on the fringes of the larger cities, but from i960 it was rapidly abandoned. In Rhodesia, under different ecological and historical circumstances, black industrial workers were fed by black agricultural workers. In the Belgian Congo it was the African peasant who fed the industrial worker, though for a mean return.