Much speculation has been devoted to the possible connexions between the different clusters of kingdoms in Africa. Scholars have been puzzled for over half a century by the similarities in organization and ideology between different African states. They have tried to explain them either as the product of the diffusion of a common pattern, the ‘Sudanic State’ or the ‘Sacral Kingship’, or by maintaining that similar functional needs led to parallel independent inventions in many different areas. In Central Africa the specific positions taken have been that the Katanga states diffused their model of government to the Lower Congo cluster, or, as I myself have claimed, that these were independent. Dittmer links the Lower Congo with Katanga, and derives the latter cluster itself from the interlacustrine and Ethiopian clusters

Recent excavations and radiocarbon dates provide evidence that the rich Ingombe Ilede burials date from the fourteenth/fifteenth centuries a.d., not from the ninth/tenth centuries as was previously supposed. There is thus little evidence for intensive trade between the Middle Zambezi and the Moçambique coast before ca. a.d. 1400.

The purpose of this essay has been twofold: first, to describe the wandering capitals of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ethiopia, and secondly, to offer an explanation for the pattern of movement.

Ethiopian wandering capitals possessed many of the characteristics that are often used to distinguish cities from other forms of settlement. Roving capitals were large and densely populated enough to qualify for city status, they performed an essentially urban role of administration, the capitals were heterogeneous socially, and representatives of the Ethiopian literati were present. The population of these capitals were for the most part only seasonally urban and seasonally rural. And yet, these capitals were not permanent.

The explanation offered may be succinctly summarized as follows. Initially, military motives prompted the Ethiopian éite to change their capitals from fixed to mobile settlements. These guerilla cities were adapted to in several ways. First, capitals moved to food supplies rather than supplies being moved to the capital. Secondly, capitals impoverished their current hinterlands. And thirdly, political integration of Ethiopia came eventually to depend on a mobile centre of polity. These three factors not only represent adaptations to nomadic capitals, but they in turn made a stabilization of capitals difficult. In other words, the very adaptations to the wandering capitals themselves had a feedback effect on the pattern of movement, and therefore contributed to a continuation of capital movement.

Dingane was ruler of Zululand and Natal for over a decade (1828–40) and incurred, by the murder of Piet Retief and his followers, the seemingly undying hatred of historians. Almost every commentator on this period of Zulu history has portrayed him as a man with hardly a redeeming quality: blood-thirsty, capricious, treacherous, self-indulgent, an absolute despot, an ingrate and an inveterate liar. What is remarkable about this consensus among historians is that Dingane, as will be shown subsequently, lacked all these unflattering attributes. Many reasons could be given for this grievous error on the part of scholars. Among these must be included their failure to resolve the glaring contradictions between the promises and actions of the Zulu king, and an inability to understand the dynamics of an alien society.

When the remnants of the Bapedi returned to their country after they had been driven from it by the Matabele, Sekwati strengthened the tribe so that attacks by the Boers, Zulus and Swazis were repulsed.

When Sekhukhune succeeded to the chieftainship in 1861, his attempts at expanding Bapedi influence caused the South African Republic to declare war in 1876.

After the annexation of the Transvaal by Great Britain, Sekhukhune resumed his empire building, and in March 1878 the Bapedi went on the warpath. Groups of hastily raised volunteers managed to contain the Bapedi in their strongholds, but after the failure of a British expedition in October 1878, offensive operations were abandoned until the end of the fever season in April–May 1879. Patrols were then once again active, when Sir Garnet Wolseley ordered a halt to all offensives; Sir Garnet himself arrived in the Transvaal in September 1879, and personally directed operations against Sekhukhune. A massive assault was made on the Bapedi stronghold on 28 November 1879; the Bapedi suffered a crushing defeat and the chief himself was captured.

This paper is a contribution to the current debate about the origins of the scramble for West Africa. It analyses the internal dynamics of French expansion and argues that the crucial change in French African policy occurred not in 1882–3, as commonly assumed, but in 1879–80. The policies adopted at this time, although their roots can be traced back to the governorship of Louis Faidherbe in Senegal, were distinguished by a new willingness on the part of the government in Paris to establish political as well as economic claims to West African territory, and by its readiness to bear the financial and military burdens of territorial expansion. Changes in French domestic politics or foreign relations cannot adequately account for this transition from informal to formal expansion, nor can it be explained solely in terms of commercial agitation in France or West Africa. The influence of public opinion and of colonial agents on the formulation of policy was more significant, but the crucial decisions were taken by the policy-makers themselves, and in particular by Charles de Freycinet (Minister of Public Works and later Prime Minister) and Admiral Jean Jauréguiberry (Minister of Marine and Colonies). They, above all, were responsible for inaugurating the era of French imperialism in West Africa. The new imperialism was most apparent in the drive to create a vast territorial empire in the Sudanese interior. But it was also evident in the intensification of commercial rivalries along the West African coast, and the paper argues that French actions there in 1882–3 were the continuation of policies adopted three years before rather than immediate responses to the British occupation of Egypt or to the growth of popular support for African expansion. Accordingly, the beginnings of French imperialism in West Africa are advanced as the principal cause of the scramble.

The arrival of European concession-seekers in Barotseland coincided with a period of internal instability in that kingdom. King Lewanika, fearing both enemies within the ruling class as well as Ndebele raids, decided to follow the example of his friend Khama of the Ngwato in seeking British protection. With considerable difficulty he prevailed upon a local missionary, François Coillard, to write a letter on his behalf requesting such protection.

It had already become clear that an important faction of the Lozi ruling class opposed the king's decision. Some of its members feared that his ‘protectors’ would make his overthrow that much more difficult; others were concerned that he more powerful white men would undermine the authority of the nation's traditional rulers. These suspicions received apparent confirmation when the representative who appeared to negotiate the concession proved to be an agent, not of Her Majesty's Government, but of the British South African Company. Thanks, however, to the ignorance of the missionaries who were interpreting for the court, as well as to the duplicity of Rhodes's agent himself, this distinction was successfully blurred. Opposition remained, however, until, at a critical moment in the negotiations, Khama's envoy threatened the council with harsh retribution if it refused to sanction the proposed treaty. In the face of this united stand of those who represented the power of the British government and its white associates and black collaborators, the National Council of Barotseland finally agreed to the concession, and, for better or worse, the Lozi found themselves under white ‘protection’.

This article deals with the evolution of centralized chieftainship in response to changing conditions in a part of Sierra Leone where such organized political controls had not previously been necessary. The transformation which characterized the last decades of the nineteenth century in the Mende chiefdoms of what is now Kailahun District was largely a response to war and invasion.

Prior to the 1880s, ‘Upper-Mendeland’ had been little more than a loose conglomeration of petty chiefdoms made up of groups of tiny self-sufficient villages, united only by loose kinship ties and in common defence in time of danger. Increasing military pressures from within and from without forced these autonomous groups, depending on secret societies and kinship ties for social control, to give way to larger and better-organized chiefdoms with powerful leaders, tributary towns, and in some cases the beginnings of genuine administrative structures. Some of these transformed chiefdoms, such as Luawa and Dia, underwent decisive innovation in remarkably short periods of time. Powerful war-leaders were able to forge strong central controls over their military organizations, and in turn over the political units which they dominated. In some cases these innovations approached those of a bureaucratized state.

In 1959 C. C. Wrigley published ‘The Christian revolution in Buganda’. an important essay summarizing a decade of intensive research into Buganda politics during the nineteenth century. There he demonstrated how ‘Ganda society had undergone, immediately before the advent of British imperial power, a genuine revolution, which had brought about drastic changes in ideology and in the structure as well as the personnel of government and that as a result of these [and other] changes it was uniquely fitted to cope with the new situation which confronted it in the last years of the nineteenth century’. This essay seeks to reconstruct an intriguing attempt made by the Bakungu client-chiefs who triumphed in that ‘Christian revolution’ to perpetuate their power in the Buganda kingdom by making further institutional changes during the second decade of the twentieth century. But first it is necessary to discuss the general factors shaping political relationships between these client-chiefs and their European rulers during the first and third decades of this century. In this it is possible to take account not only of several secondary sources published since the appearance of Wrigley's article nearly ten years ago, but also of certain primary materials which have recently come to light.