This article examines how historiography makes its objects and includes critical reflections on the epistemological frames that have shaped historical representations of Central African states and social structures. The article examines the seductive quality of migration narratives; mythical features of some classical models, creating order from reduced totalities; historiographic burdens imposed by questionable anthropological models of kinship and matrilineal descent; and asks if the prevalence of dual regimes of priest and king is a product more of ideology than history. The article argues for increasing recognition of the value in political studies of data relating to religion and art.

Southernmost Africa (here meaning South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland) provides an excellent opportunity for investigating the relations between farming, herding and hunting-gathering communities over the past 2,000 years, as well as the development of societies committed to food production and their increasing engagement with the wider world through systems of exchange spanning the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. This paper surveys and evaluates the archaeological research relevant to these communities and issues carried out in the region since the early 1990s. Among other themes discussed are the processes responsible for the emergence and transformation of pastoralist societies (principally in the Cape), the ways in which rock art is increasingly being incorporated with other forms of archaeological data to build a more socially informed view of the past, the analytical strength and potential of ethnographically informed understandings of past farming societies and the important contribution that recent research on the development of complex societies in the Shashe-Limpopo Basin can make to comparative studies of state formation.

This article investigates Ewe engagement with British administrative policy via the story of a chieftaincy dispute in Ho, British Mandated Togoland, that erupted when Britain attempted to amalgamate two neighboring chieftaincies, Ho-Dome and Ho-Bankoe, by deploying a model with an ‘ethnic stamp’, that of the neighboring Akan states. Colonial-era chieftaincy has received substantial scholarly attention. This article argues that the relationship between the models deployed to reorganize chiefly power and the roles of protagonists is just as significant as the layered conflicts within chieftaincies and their respective clans. Two responses to ‘Akanized’ amalgamation are investigated: the petitions of its opponents, and the rituals developed by chiefs, priests and peasants to herald the amalgamations.

The history of the imperial/colonial elite's preoccupation with saving a handful of specific ‘game’ species in reserves has come to stand for the relationship of all classes with all wild animals in both South Africa and the wider world of the British empire. The result is a narrative of process and periodization flawed in general and false in the specific case of the Cape Colony/Province, where economics rather than ideology was both the primary motor of game conservation and the mediating factor in human relationships with wild animal species. Here the general trend across the century from 1850 to 1950 was, contra MacKenzian orthodoxy, towards private not public ownership of game propelled by a rural rather than an urban elite. Public ownership was instead restricted to ‘vermin’ species in which the state created a market in which it became the chief consumer. The Cape's great tradition was refracted through its customary permissive legislation to yield a myriad of small traditions at the regional or local level. Rather than an argument for Cape exceptionalism, its wild animal history is a caution against glib generalizations from the elite archive and an indication of the need to broaden prevailing ‘game reserve history’ to include the full range of human and animal inhabitants as agents rather than as residual analytical categories in any narrative.

Most analyses of apartheid labor policy focus on the regulation of the labor market rather than the industrial workplace. Instead, this article investigates the administration of South Africa's 1953 Native Labour (Settlement of Disputes) Act to examine shop-floor control rather than influx control. The article argues that in response to the threat of African trade unionism, apartheid policymakers in the Department of Labour addressed the problem of low African wages and expanded the use of ‘works committees’. By shifting the debate about capitalism and apartheid away from influx control and migrant labor, and towards industrial legislation and shop-floor conflict, the article places working-class struggle at the center of an analysis of apartheid.

The editors of this volume affiliate their mission with an amplified and heightened sense of history that has swept Africanist scholarship in the post-independence era. They claim to take historical archaeology in Africa in a new direction by beginning the process of constructive interaction between history and archaeology (pp. 27-8). An intended component of their project is to create ‘alternative histories rooted in explicitly African sources’ (p. 16). They further raise our anticipation that the volume will examine the disjuncture between the practice of archaeology and contemporary life on most of the continent. This is a noble sentiment, yet the contributors fail to draw on African scholars who attempt to make archaeology pertinent to daily African lives. The editors' insistence on African representations in writing the past is poignantly contradicted by the paucity of African authors in their volume fourteen years after Peter Robertshaw's A History of African Archaeology was faulted for its failure to include more than two (non-white) African contributors. This practice largely restricts knowledge production to hegemonic Western perspectives and subverts the book's primary rhetorical theme of giving ‘voice’ to silenced African pasts. The cost of the paperback – $70 – also hinders access to African readers and their capacity to engage issues that arise in the fourteen chapters, three of which focus on West Africa, three on East Africa, one on North Africa and five on southern Africa.

The appearance of these two books marks the continuation of what has been a veritable resurgence of interest in Ugandan history in the last decade or so, facilitated in part by the relative stability provided by Yoweri Museveni's presidency. The renaissance dates to the early and mid-1990s: while scholars of a more senior generation published work which seemed to encapsulate several decades' thinking on the region – Christopher Wrigley and Jean-Pierre Chrétien foremost among them – a new generation turned its attention to Uganda in a manner that had not been possible since the 1960s. A number of doctoral theses produced by European and North American scholars during the 1990s have progressed into monograph form or given rise to flurries of articles. Holly Hanson's book is part of that wave; Gardner Thompson's research was undertaken a little earlier, but the Ph.D. thesis that forms the basis of his book was completed at the beginning of the 1990s. While not all of this work has been concerned with Buganda, it is clear that the kingdom continues to loom large in the scholarly imagination. The centrality of Buganda in Ugandan history is a theme which has linked together much of the work of the last decade, in terms of the nature of the precolonial kingdom, its relationship with the British and its role in the protectorate, and later independent nation, of Uganda. Other critical issues have been raised, too, such as the need to revisit both the precolonial and the colonial pasts, and discontinuity, in terms of understanding the degree to which the colonial ‘moment’ was as disruptive as it was transitory.