From various kinds of evidence it can now be argued that agriculture in Ethiopia and the Horn was quite ancient, originating as much as 7,000 or more years ago, and that its development owed nothing to South Arabian inspiration. Moreover, the inventions of grain cultivation in particular, both in Ethiopia and separately in the Near East, seem rooted in a single, still earlier subsistence invention of North-east Africa, the intensive utilization of wild grains, beginning probably by or before 13,000 b.c. The correlation of linguistic evidence with archaeology suggests that this food-collecting innovation may have been the work of early Afroasiatic-speaking communities and may have constituted the particular economic advantage which gave impetus to the first stages of Afroasiatic expansion into Ethiopia and the Horn, the Sahara and North Africa, and parts of the Near East.

The historiography of Hausaland has laboured under a strong tradition of orthodoxy which recent secondary works have inherited from the more-or-less primary oral-cum-written sources. General cultural evidence (linguistic, ethnographic and archaeological) has been regarded as subsidiary, so that its potential for reconceptualization and for critical reevaluation of the conventional sources and orthodox interpretations has been missed. Instead, antiquarian approaches have been encouraged. Thus the view has persisted that Hausa as a cultural and linguistic entity has an antiquity running to several millennia, and also that it originated in the Sahara or around Aïr, whence it was pushed southward by desiccation or by Tuareg nomads. Contrarily, the clear message of linguistic geography and of Hausa's place within the Chadic family is that Hausa. expanded from east to west across the savanna belt of northern Nigeria. And the relative homogeneity of the language and culture within this vast zone indicates that the spread is quite recent (within the present millennium, say). It would have involved some assimilation, of previously settled peoples of the northern Nigerian plains, most of whom wouldl have spoken languages of the ‘Plateau’ division of Greenberg's Benue–Congo subfamily, of Niger-Congo.

This Hausaization, as it proceeded from its old bases in eastern Hausaland, would have been both a cultural and an ecological process, through which woodland would have been converted into more open and continuous savanna to support grain-cultivation and a denser peasant population. This process would have reached western Hausaland (Zamfara and Kebbi) around the middle of this millennium. Cattle – and Fulani herdsmen – would in time have played an important role in this cultural ecology (and in restricting the tsetse zones).

The old theory of a northern origin for the Hausa is bound up with the problem of Gobir in north-western Hausaland. Gobir's claim to be one of the original seven kingdoms (Hausa bakwai) is probably a late invention. Moreover, the common assumption that Gobirawa Hausa migrated from Aïr seems to derive from a misinterpretation of the written sources.

Finally the bakwai legends are reconsidered. Despite the scepticism of some modern critics, the legends appear to reflect, albeit in idealized form, a real historical development. They represent a foundation charter for the Hausa as a multi-state ethnicity, and enshrine the vague memory of how Hausaland and ‘Hausaness’ began from a series of small centres and hill-bases on its eastern side. Thus the interesting argument of Abdullahi Smith, that the Hausa people emerged long before state systems arose among them, is disputed. Rather, these should be seen as two facets of a single process during the present millennium.

All the many definitions and descriptions of the akori bead published in the last five hundred years have proved inadequate. They appear either pedantically narrow, so that only a hundred years later or a hundred miles away beads also unquestionably called akori by West Africans by their very existence disprove such ‘precise’ characteristics, or, the other extreme, so broad as to be historically useless and logically unsatisfactory. Since all the akori records must be viewed as historical sources more or less reflecting the real situation in the past, we can hardly blame their authors for the akori puzzle; there must have been something wrong in the naming mechanism, in the factual relationship between the word and the thing. It is the main point of this article that the akori phenomenon originated in the existence of various types of natural glass in North and West Africa. An archetypal human attraction to this strange and rare substance can be observed in several culturally very different areas of the world. Understandably, at a later stage people made talismans and beads of this presumably protective material, yet the primeval veneration paid only to the mysterious matter, now under a more sophisticated but basically accidental form, remained the same. It was primarily this matter alone which West Africans tried to discover, test and obtain in European-imported artificial glass after 1500. The complex akori ‘problem’ is a telling and fascinating historical and logical expression of contact between different cultures.

The much-researched history of Bulozi in the late nineteenth century is re-assessed here from a marxist viewpoint. A hereditary class of landlords owned the principal means of production and extracted rent in labour services and in kind from the direct producers. Tribute was also paid to the king and royal family, in recognition of the ultimate royal ownership of the means of production. Surplus was employed to increase leisure time, to indulge in conspicuous consumption, to raise the level of the productive forces through investment, and to maintain repressive political and ideological apparatuses. The main weight of oppression fell on the slaves, with free commoners in an ambivalent position. Slaves were both economically exploited and socially discriminated against, and their position was analogous but by no means identical to that of European serfs. The evolution of class struggle was greatly affected by articulation with capitalism and colonialism. The first contacts stimulated exploitation by providing a larger market and more effective means of repression, but the colonial state later intervened to abolish slavery in order to intensify the flow of migrant labour to the capitalist heartlands of southern Africa.

Lord Carnarvon's scheme for a South African Confederation in the 1870s owed much more than has been generally recognized to influences emanating from Natal. Large employers of African labour recognized in the 1860s that the local population could not provide a cheap stable workforce and that immigrant workers from the African interior would be increasingly important to the prosperity of the colony. Theophilus Shepstone, Natal's Secretary for Native Affairs, used all the resources at his disposal to smooth the way for migrant labour. The development of diamond mining in Griqualand West and, to a lesser extent, gold mining in the Lydenburg district of the Transvaal diverted large numbers of African workers away from Natal and set off a frantic search for new sources of labour which underscored the importance of Moçambique and Central Africa as reservoirs of black labour. While planters, traders and officials in Natal worked to keep labour supply routes open between the Transvaal and Portuguese territory, officials in Griqualand West were recommending annexation of territories along the ‘missionary road’ in order to stop Transvaal Afrikaners from blocking labour supply routes from Central Africa. The revival of an active British campaign against the East African slave trade opened another potential source of African labour which Shepstone's former border agent Frederic Elton tried to divert to Natal while serving first as an assistant to Sir Bartle Frere and John Kirk in Zanzibar, and later as British Consul in Moçambique.

Shepstone arrived in London at a crucial point in the development of Carnarvon's thinking on southern African affairs and impressed him with his lucid analysis of the interrelation of African administration, economic development and labour supply. Carnarvon's plans for confederation reflected the advice which he was continously receiving from Shepstone and Elton. Their argument for confederation emphasized the essentially unitary nature of the developing southern African economy.

This article argues that trade rather than confrontation was the predominant theme of the early years of interaction between the Kikuyu and the British. It suggests that the Southern Kikuyu in particular enjoyed an important initial period of co-existence with the British, the economic basis of which was a rapid expansion in the 1890s of an already existing trade in agricultural produce with caravans moving along the road to Uganda. This development was, however, not universally welcome among the Southern Kikuyu, and there was a clash of interest between those concerned with an increased production of agricultural surplus, and those whose economic interests were centred on livestock. The death of Waiyaki removed from the scene the most influential trading elder and facilitated, from the areas previously under his influence, hostile opposition to the trading activities now centred upon the permanent fort of the Imperial British East Africa Company. The steady increase of food production encouraged the emergence of a number of Southern Kikuyu traders; this was particularly true for Kinanjui, who had established himself at a time when the military resources of the I.B.E.A. Co. were negligible and poorly organized. It is argued that Kinanjui's status can no longer be regarded as merely the result of assistance from the British. It was significant that the British did not at any time prior to 1900 deploy at Fort Smith a permanent garrison of troops. There existed instead a balance of military resources which made possible an important local arena of political activity between the Southern Kikuyu and the British. The Northern Kikuyu, by contrast, despite their longer-standing trading contacts with the coast, were denied similar opportunities by virtue of more positive policies of control directed initially towards revenue collection.

La ‘mise en valeur’ des colonies africaines pouvait-elle être entreprise par des sociétés auxquelles l'Etat attribuerait de grandes concessions foncières? La Commission des concessions coloniales, créée en juillet 1898, adopta ce principe de ‘colonisation moderne’, hâtivement mis en vigueur au Congo. Pour Madagascar et l'A.O.F. on prit le temps de larges consultations auprès des administrateurs et des milieux commerciaux; en dépit de l'avis favorable prononcé par la Commission, le ministre décida de surseoir à l'octroi de grandes concessions territoriales dans l'ouest africain, suivant en cela le gouverneur general Ballay. Les responsables locaux ne partagèrent point le mythe de la mise en valeur par les grandes sociétés, mythe auquel se tint aveuglément la Commission des concessions coloniales qui contrôlait au plan juridique le régime mis en place au Congo; c'est le gouverneur Merlin qui imposa la réforme de 1910–12. Des politiques et des affairistes – tels qu'Andre Lebon, Du Vivier de Streel, Binger, Guillain, – avaient fait passer un dessein nouveau d'action coloniale, mais la ‘mise en valeur’ sans cesse invoquée n'avait pas alors de contenu économique véritablement défini.