Early medieval wealth invested in southern Saharan agriculture and warfare tended to produce distinctive groups of dependent cultivators and professional warriors by the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Exchange surpassed initial limitations placed on it by rudimentary pastoral society through the development of the salt industry. The realization of a form of surplus readily convertible into a wide range of commodities was vital to the growth of specialized traders who, in turn, broadened the scope of economic and political activity. Growing professionalism and specialization brought with it new forms of social relations, in this case a variety of forms of dependence, as well as introducing a role for indigenous non-producers like clerics and scholars. An oasis like Awdaghust where warriors, cultivators and traders interacted was bound to experience the growing pains these changes produced.

This paper suggests how an understanding of these social and economic changes can help fill the gaps which still plague the history of Awdaghust. It argues that we need to examine the pieces of written and archaeological evidence we have in the light of the changing forms of agriculture practised in the area, the region's drying climate between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, and the making of the specialized merchant-clerical groups called zawāyā. Awdaghust thereby emerges not only as an international caravan terminus, but as a regional centre of agriculture and trade, especially the salt trade, controlled by local pastoralists. It was therefore able to outlive its so-called eleventh-century destruction by the Almoravids, and see its Znāga masters turn increasingly towards the salt trade and religion. But its fortunes also depended upon its large servile labour force and sufficient rainfall to support irrigated cultivation. By the fifteenth century, it would appear the drying conditions were severe enough to pose insurmountable problems, possibly even to provoke a slave rebellion said to have brought about Awdaghust's demise.

As a study of some Islamic factors involved in the construction of oral narrative by Manding bards, this article is chiefly concerned with two distinct cases in which griots have borrowed important legendary figures from the literature of Arabia. It is found that Bilali, described by traditional genealogists as progenitor of the ancient ruling branch of the Keita lineage, originated as Bilāl ibn Rabāḥ, a companion of Muhammad and the first mu'adhdhin. Genealogies or descent lists of early Malian rulers still contain names that have apparently survived from pre-Islamic times, but in most instances these early forebears of chiefly rank have been moved forward into the Islamic era and displaced as founding ancestors by figures like Bilali, who originated in Muslim Arab literature. Similarly, at the lower levels of the social hierarchy, major artisan classes like the blacksmiths and leatherworkers have adopted their own collective ancestors from Islamic tradition.

In the case of Surakata, collective ancestor of Bambara and Mandinka griots, it is recalled that he began as Surāqa ibn Mālik, in Arab tradition an enemy of Muhammad who became an early convert to Islam, a conversion that seems to have had a special resonance in a West African setting where many people have made the same shift. Pre-Islamic themes in Manding oral tradition have in many cases been obliterated by the bards' preoccupation with Islamic subjects, particularly events from the life and times of the Prophet. However, despite the pervasiveness of Islamic themes, the blood motif found in some accounts of griot ancestry indicates that at least the essence of certain elements of pre-Islamic West African culture survives in Manding oral tradition.

The view that Ibadan society in the nineteenth century did not discriminate against strangers, irrespective of their origins in Yorubaland, is now firmly entrenched in the literature. To be sure, Ibadan, a new nineteenth-century Yoruba city-state, founded as a consequence of the political crises of the early decades of the century, did maintain an ‘open door’ policy to strangers, many of whom went there as adventurers, craftsmen and traders, hoping to acquire wealth and fame. This article, however, controverts the view that Ibadan society gave the strangers and the indigenes equal opportunities to wealth and power. It argues that all the key political offices went only to the Oyo-Ibadan group which dominated the city-state. Strangers were also not allowed to participate fully in the leading heights of the economy, with the result that most of the wealthy citizens were also of Oyo-Yoruba origin.

In the 1890s discrimination against strangers was such that a number of moves were made to expel them. However, the British, who imposed colonial rule on Ibadan in 1893, were against the expulsion of strangers.

When sleeping sickness was discovered to be epidemic in the Congo Free State in 1904, the administration responded by attempting to implement public health measures which had evolved in Europe in relation to plague and cholera epidemics. These measures were to identify and isolate victims and suspected victims of the disease and to map out the infected and uninfected zones. This article describes the early sleeping-sickness campaign of the Belgian authorities in the Uele District of Province Orientale between 1904 and 1914, focusing on the formation of isolation camps or lazarets. Uele district had been identified as a potentially rich and uninfected zone to be protected from contamination by the establishment of a cordon sanitaire. Public health policy and practice during this period provides an example of attempted ‘social engineering’ on the part of a colonial authority. While sleeping sickness provided the major impetus for the gradual development of the colonial medical service by the 1920s, the early period between 1903 and World War I was particularly onerous for the African populations in the north-east. The public health policy was perceived by many Africans as one more element in the on-going conquest and exploitation of the region. Examples are provided to demonstrate the ways in which numerous sleeping-sickness regulations affected African societies in Uele.

The existing works on the history of education in northern Nigeria are generally agreed that the main factor which hindered the spread and development of girls' education in the area during the colonial era was Muslims' opposition to female education. While it is not denied in this article that opposition to female education existed among Muslims, it is argued that this was not the main factor which retarded the advancement of girls' education during the period covered by this article. It is suggested that the British educational policy, which placed much emphasis on co-education, instead of building girls' schools, coupled with the parsimony with which the British administration spent money on girls' education, were mainly responsible for hindering the development of girls' and women's education in northern Nigeria during the colonial era. It is argued that the introduction of co-education made Western education for girls unappealing to many Muslim parents who otherwise would have sent their daughters to school if girls' schools had existed in sufficient numbers. The article attempts to show that this could not be realized as a result of the British administration's unwillingness to spend substantial sums of money on girls' education. It is also suggested that the preferential treatment accorded by the British administration to the aristocracy, in the recruitment of pupils for girls' schools and the W.T.C., was inimical to the advancement of girls' education generally.