The Iron Age sites known as Mapungubwe and Bambandyanalo on the farm Greefswald, 55 miles west of Messina in the northern Transvaal, South Africa, have aroused world-wide speculation ever since their discovery in the early 1930s. This international interest has been considerably stimulated by the publication of the second volume of the Mapungubwe report in late 1963. Much unnecessary confusion as to the significance of The Mapungubwe and Bambandyanalo sites has been caused by the long delay in the publication of this second volume, and this has made a critical leview of the Iron Age sequence in this desolate corner of the Middle Limpopo valley a matter of some urgency. The Greefswald sequence is of vital importance to South African history, for the sites have been held to show that the earliest Iron Age population of South Africa was non-Negro. In addition, they have been used to provide a fairly accurate indication of the date at which Bantu-speaking peoples first crossed the middle reaches o the Limpopo.

In his book Afro-Portuguese Ivories (Batchworth Press, London, n.d.), William Fagg established the identity of an interesting hybrid art-form in a number of ivory objects—spoons, forks, salt-cellars and horns—carved for European use and to European design, but fashioned according to the canons of the African artist. While certain that the carvers were Africans, Fagg is unable to assign them to any particular region, or even to be certain that they were working in Africa. His tentative conclusion is that three regions have a claim to be considered as the home of these ivories: the area around what is now Freetown in Sierra Leone, the Bakongo coast, and the old Slave Coast between Whydah and Lagos. Von Luschan's theory of a Benin origin is firmly ruled out. Among his three alternatives, Fagg inclines to the Slave Coast, and in particular to its Yoruba sector, because of stylistic affinities between the ivories and Yoruba carving. Such a hypothesis runs into serious chronological difficulties, for whereas many representational features of the ivory carvings suggest that they belong to the sixteenth century, the Portuguese did not frequent the Whydah—Lagos coast until the seventeenth century, and even then the trade was with Brazil, not Portugal.

Wambu (Huambo) was one of the more important of the Ovimbundu Kingdoms of central Angola, the histories of some of which were treated in Part III of Umbundu Kinship and Character (1949) q.v.

The tradition of Wambu begins with Feti, the Adam of the Ovimbundu. Through the vaNganda it is definitely linked with the cattle-complex peoples of south-west Angola, and it is also connected with the ‘Jagas’ described by Battell. This latter link provides a chronological starting point early in the seventeenth century. Thus, beginning with the ‘Jaga’ Wambu Kalunga, the fourth king named, tradition and historical reference are followed through the reigns of twenty-five kings, until independence ended with the capture by the Portuguese forces of two strongholds and their capital town of Samisasa during the ‘Bailundu War’ of 1902. The chief occupation of the kings and the men of Wambu (as of practically of all the Ovimbundu Kingdoms) during most of this time, was raiding their neighbours, those of other tribes and those of European descent.

The records of trading between Africans and Europeans on the Guinea Coast since antiquity raise issues the practical resolution of which has never ceased to occupy economic historians. The Herodotean inadequacies of dumb barter in Carthaginian goods and in gold dust were fully resolved only at the time of the eighteenth-century slave trade. In Senegambia and even on the Windward Coast, as we now know, the Royal African Company had still to go without an effective profit-and-loss accountancy. With the advent of the regular slave trade two new commercial devices had to be introduced by the Europeans. Both the ‘sorting’ and the ‘ounce trade’ sprang from the vital need for adjustment between the radically different trading methods of Europeans and Africans. And it was not so much a case of mutual adjustment, for of the two systems only one, the European, adjusted.

The years 1871 to 1874 witnessed in Sierra Leone an expression of cultural ethno-centrism characterized by a revolt against attempts at Europeanization of Africans, by emphasis on racial difference and the need for developing the special attributes of the Negro race and of maintaining its distinctive culture. The immediate background to this new phenomenon was the tension which had existed between the native pastors and European missionaries of the Church Missionary Society over the control and management of the native pastorate, and the rampant sectarian rivalry in the colony. In the period under discussion, the tension within the C.M.S. erupted into an open controversy and assumed a wider significance when educated lay natives joined the issue on the side of the native pastors. Both native clerics and laymen saw as their chief opponents European missionaries who, so they charged, through a fierce sectarianism but common contempt for African customs and institutions, were doing grave harm to Africans by creating new divisions among them and by destroying the wholesome base of African society. They argued that reform was necessary, and was to be brought about through the agency of an independent African Church, of which they saw the native pastorate of the C.M.S. as a nucleus, and of a University, preferably secular, run by educated Negroes themselves. Though the movement was primarily cultural, it had the ultimate political objective of self-government, and part of its raison d'etre was preparing Africans towards this end.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century the affairs of northern Somalia were dominated by the politico-religious movement led by Muhammad Abdullah Hassan. The ‘Mad Mullah’, as he was styled by the British, proved to be an elusive adversary and at one time forced the British to evacuate their Somaliland Protectorate. The Italians too were concerned about the Mullah's dervishes, who disturbed the peace of Italy's two nominal protectorates, the sultanates of Obbia and the Mijertein, and of their colony in southern Somalia. At one time the Italians found a temporary solution to the problem by granting the Mullah the Nogal Territory in northern Italian Somaliland. For the Ethiopians the Mullah's movement posed a threat to their Empire's expansion eastward to the Indian Ocean because of its appeal for support from among the Ogaden Somalis. Although the Mullah's recruits were mostly Darod Somalis, for Somalis of other tribes he was not only the agent of a not always acceptable religious movement, but also the symbol of political revolt against foreign domination of any kind. Today the Mullah is regarded as a forerunner of contemporary Somali nationalism.

Moroccan nationalism began as a religious or cultural reformist movement based on Salafiya, a form of religious fundamentalism which arose in late nineteenthcentury Egypt as an effort to restore the original purity of Islam and the independence of the Muslim peoples. The Moroccan movement was first expressed in the 1920's by the foundation of the ‘free schools’ and the formation of secret discussion societies, neither of which represented more than a small, concerned elite and whose organization was rudimentary in the extreme. By 1934, it was transformed by events and hard experience into an essentially political and social reform movement which, while not yet a mass party, had become ‘national’ to the extent that it could demonstrate the support of important segments of Moroccan society and which had created a skeletal structure which the post-war movemen would flesh out.

The article represents part of the research for a book on the origins and rise of Moroccan nationalism, 1921–1943.