The notion of capitalist relations in Ghanaian cocoa-farming is familiar, yet their development has been relatively little studied. In Amansie district, Asante, capitalist relations of production developed as a result rather than as a cause of the cocoa ‘take-off’, c. 1900–16. This paper examines their emergence, which occurred largely during the subsequent period of much slower growth and generally lower prices. The introduction and spread of regular wage-labour, the widening and deepening burden of rent on ‘stranger’ cocoa farms, the proliferation of ‘advances’, and the introduction of farm mortgaging are described, together with the accompanying decline of slavery, pawning, and other non-wage forms of labour. Colonial officials ineffectually deplored the growth of money-lending and, to a lesser extent, that of wage-labour. From the mid-1930s, however, the tendency towards greater separation of labour from control of the farm was partly reversed by a new insistence by northern labourers on the replacement of annual wage contracts by a managerial form of share-cropping. This demand was sustained against the opposition of farmowners and despite persistent unemployment, an achievement made possible by the migrants continued foothold in subsistence agriculture in their home areas. This case of migrant labourers successfully challenging the extension of wage relations raises questions concerning the relationships between commercial agriculture and ‘precapitalist’ social relations of production in Africa generally.

In 1916 the South African government received a request from the Imperial government for the provision of non-combatant African labour for work in France. Despite opposition from white opinion on both political and economic grounds, the South African Native Labour Contingent was formed and recruiting commenced. Although recruiting had the active support of African political leaders, it was not as successful as had been hoped. Distrust of the government's intentions was one important reason for this. The South African government had agreed to the Imperial government's request for labour only on the condition that S.A.N.L.C. units were to be kept segregated from both other military units and the French civil population, and numerous measures (particularly the construction of compounds) were devised to facilitate this. But in practice this proved impossible to implement properly, and South African officers did not have the degree of control over their units that had originally been envisaged. On the African side, there was a considerable amount of dissatisfaction with conditions, and in one incident thirteen Africans were shot dead by their own officers. When the South African government decided to bring the ‘experiment’ to an end early in 1918, many Africans suspected that the reasons for this were not purely military as was claimed. Service in the S.A.N.L.C. was of importance both in terms of the individual experiences of those Africans directly involved, but it acquired also a wider political and symbolic importance, attached particularly to the sinking of the transport, S.S. Mendi, in February 1917 with the loss of over 600 African members of the S.A.N.L.C.

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.

During the British colonial period a substantial young African population emerged in Dar es Salaam. Both colonial officials and African elders viewed this with dismay. They felt the resulting demoralisation of African youth posed a threat to both (African) authority and (colonial) order. However, measures aimed at addressing the ramifications of this phenomenon were mostly unsuccessful. Ironically, whilst British colonial policy aimed to keep African youth quiescent in rural, gerontocratic, tribal administrations, colonialism in fact provided the context in which both rapid urbanization and generational tension occurred. These continued to occur after independence; and it is argued that TANU politicians not only inherited the problems associated with the administration of the Tanganyikan capital, but that their responses were influenced by European and ‘elite’ African attitudes of the colonial era.

The origins of South Africa's distinctive welfare state lay in the late 1920s, not in the 1930s as has generally been suggested, and long predated the quite different turn to social welfare in late colonial Africa. For the National Party and Labour Party – partners in the coalition Pact Government of 1924–9 – non-contributory old-age pensions were a crucial pillar in the ‘civilized labour’ policies designed to lift ‘poor whites’ out of poverty and re-establish a clear racial hierarchy. Welfare reform was thus, in significant part, a response to the swartgevaar or menace of black physical, occupational and social mobility. African political elites, although distracted by other reforms at the time, were quick thereafter to protest at their exclusion from the nascent welfare system.

The study of Central African history is still in its infancy. Valuable indications can, however, be obtained by combining the study of oral traditions with that of Portuguese documentary evidence for events taking place near the coasts. It has long been known, for instance, that the overthrow of the powerful Songye rulers of the Luba country indirectly caused long-distance migrations, one of which, that of the Imbangala, came into contact with the Portuguese in Angola. Previous analyses of this migration have suggested that it culminated in the early seventeenth century. In this paper an attempt has been made to show that the Imbangala arrived in Angola much earlier, probably by the mid sixteenth century and certainly before 1575. This date indicates that the Luba invasion of Lunda, which was the direct cause of the migration, probably took place in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Finally, it has been tentatively suggested that the overthrow of Songye rule and the establishment of a new, expansionist Luba empire might have taken place as much as a century earlier, from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century.

This paper sets out to examine the interactions between African and white hunters in colonial Kenya in an effort to understand the nature of the confrontation between the competing cultural traditions of hunting under colonial conditions. It examines the major tradition of African hunting in eastern Kenya among African residents of Kwale, Kitui and Meru districts from oral and archival materials, arguing that the place of subsistence hunting in the economy of African farmers has been systematically denigrated in the colonial literature. Next, the various representatives of the European hunting tradition in Kenya are surveyed: sportsmen, travellers, settlers, and professionals. A preliminary assessment is made of their impact on game and the growing need for conservation. The history of the game and national park departments, which administered the hunting laws and were charged with the preservation of wildlife, is next described. The records of the colonial Game Department provide a key source for the reconstruction of the attempts to control African poaching and regulate European hunting in the interests of the preservation of game and the control of the colonial economy. At the end of the colonial era, with the emergence of a new sensibility to conservation, Kenya's gamekeepers engaged in a major, successful anti-poaching campaign in eastern Kenya's Tsavo Park. This was the climactic confrontation between the two cultures in their contest for control over Kenya's wildlife resources.

There has been some controversy as to the origins of the Asafo, the patrilineal military bands of the coastal Akan, and especially of the Fante, in Ghana. One view holds that the asafo system is indigenous to Fante society, the other that its development is in some way connected with the presence of Europeans on the coast from the end of the fifteenth century onwards. After an examination of the nature of the asafo system and of its patrilinealism, historical evidence relating to the asafo, the manceroes (young men), and town wards in Fante society is set out in some detail. It is concluded that the asafo system is probably indigenous in its origins, but that its development, particularly on the coast and among the Fante especially, has been much influenced by situations resulting from contact with Europeans.

It is widely believed that pre-colonial Africa south of the Sahara had no problem of poverty (and no beggars or ascetics) except in those few areas which already possessed intensive agriculture, literacy, world religions, and classes with stratified subcultures. This article uses the records of missionaries and evangelists living in nineteenth-century Yoruba towns to demonstrate the existence of paupers, beggars, ascetics and (with less certainty) charitable practices. It also considers the means by which the poor sought to survive. The article suggests that the absence of poverty from pre-colonial Africa is a myth and that the subject deserves fully study.

This article, which is in two parts, aims to establish expatriate business history as a necessary and important part of modern African history. Part I surveyed approximately fifty histories of European companies in West, Central and East Africa during the colonial period and drew attention to newly-discovered and little-known records. Part II begins by assessing the quality of the studies listed in Part I, and suggests ways in which the level of scholarship can be raised to meet standards set by professionally-written business history. The article then formulates and explores a number of propositions concerning the spatial distribution and changing size, structure, strategy and performance of expatriate business in Africa. It is argued that many of these propositions cut across established but inadequately supported views, and that the development of business history has wider implications for the study of the colonial history of Africa.

This paper is the first in a series summarizing, for the benefit of historians and archaeologists from other areas, the latest developments in radiocarbon dating for the later prehistory of western and northern Africa. These articles will appear every two years, alternating with similar surveys of eastern and southern Africa. A selection of more than 200 dates from those not previously published in this Journal is discussed, and dates obtained by thermoluminescence are quoted for the first time. It should be emphasized that most of the dates included are published in advance of full reports which are being prepared by the archaeologists concerned. The conclusions reached are therefore provisional and may well require modification in the light of a fuller examination of the related archaeological data.

There was a basic similarity between the way in which Rhodesian colonial historians looked at the central Shona chimurenga (rising) of 1896 and T. O. Ranger's seminal Revolt in Southern Rhodesia 1896–7: both thought in terms of a pre-planned conspiracy led by religious authorities and a simultaneous outbreak on a given signal. Ranger' reconstruction of the organization of the chimurenga, however, depended partly upon the misreading and misquotation of the sources. In fact, the rising was neither pre-planned nor simultaneous. In the second quarter of 1896 limited resistance to European rule was being carried on in separate, unconnected outbreaks and some communities were thinking of starting a full-scale hondo (war); the threat of famine caused by locusts led certain central Shona leaders to contact the religious leader Mkwati in the Ndebele area, then in revolt against the Europeans, in search of locust medicine. News of European defeats transmitted by these contacts led to a full hondo in the Umfuli valley, which triggered a ‘ripple effect’ in which Shona communities resisted or collaborated as the news reached them. The element of religious leadership was limited and the element of central pre-planning non-existent. This makes the success and commitment of the local Shona communities all the more impressive, even though it was a traditionalist rather than a proto-nationalist rising.

In 1890 H. Carvalho published an oral tradition which told how Kinguri, a son of the Lunda chief Yala Mwaka, quarrelled with his sister Lueji and with her husband Kibinda Ilunga, a Luba who had taken over the government of the Lunda chiefdom. Kinguri migrated to Angola where he offered his services to a governor who was called Manuel. This governor used the immigrants as auxiliary troops to fight the Ngola. After the war he allowed Kinguri to settle near Ambaka. A few years later Kinguri emigrated and went to found the state of the Imbangala, better known as the kingdom of Kasanje, between the Lui and the Cuango.

Analysis of an inventory of 641 slaving voyages involving Mauritius and Réunion between 1768 and 1809 reveals that the Mascarene Islands were at the center of a substantial and dynamic regional slave trading network that also reached into the Americas in ways that raise questions about the relationship between the ‘worlds’ of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. The fact that colonial, as well as metropolitan, merchant capital underwrote Mascarene-based slave trading ventures raises additional questions about the role of locally generated and/or non-Western capital in financing the movement of slave, and ultimately ‘free’, labor throughout the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial world.

The tradition of carnival-type street festivals and competitive dance troupes appears to be an old one in Luanda. In 1620, at the end of the most serious round of slave wars in Angola's history, political allegory and mimicry were included in the street processions celebrating the canonization of Saint Francis Xavier. In the nineteenth century the Creole community regularly adapted its public ceremonials to the shifting political and religious climate. In the age of white settlement, during the middle decades of the twentieth century, ‘native’ dance troops were officially encouraged until their potential nationalism was discerned. After independence, government tried to revive carnival for its own ends and according to its own calendar of state ceremonial. At one level the carnival continued to exorcise the fear of authority among the powerless. At another the political dimension was eclipsed by the competitive rivalries of local communities seeking identity and prestige. The structures continued to use the old ritual patterns of leadership with kings, queens, commanders and soldiers. Economic influence continued to be wielded by the great fishing families who invested important resources into conspicuous clothing and ceremonial feasting as they had done for centuries. The spectators responded at many different levels of appreciation.

This article argues that international aid to Rwandan refugees in Ngara district during decolonization unfolded as part of a broader project of nation-state formation and regulation – one that deeply affected local narratives of community and belonging. While there is an extensive scholarship on decolonization and nationalism, we know less about the history of the nation-state as a refugee-generating project, and the role of international aid agencies therein. The history of Rwandan refugees in Ngara district, Tanzania, reveals the constitutive relationship between nation-building and refugee experiences, illustrating that during decolonization local political imaginations congealed around internationally-reified categorizations of the ‘refugee’ and the ‘citizen’.

A recent school of historical thought has emerged, centred around the writings of Maurice Bloch, which asserts that the imperial Merina economy from the early nineteenth century became totally dependent upon slave labour. It claims that there was such an influx of slaves into Imerina that slave numbers rose dramatically and all free Merina were relieved from productive work to engage in essentially non-productive occupations, notably the military, imperial administration and commerce. This article, which traces the development of forced labour in Madagascar and examines the structure of labour under autarky, takes issue with this viewpoint. It emphasises not only that the slave population of Imerina in the nineteenth century was lower than asserted, but that Bloch misunderstands the nature of fanompoana which, from the adoption of autarky in the mid-1820s, formed the organizing principle of most sectors of the imperial Merina economy outside subsistence agriculture. The impoverishment of the Merina economy which was a root cause of autarky led to a great decline in slave-holding amongst peasants who were in consequence largely obliged to work their own ricefields, either alone, or alongside the few slaves they managed to retain. By contrast, the Merina elite increasingly monopolized available labour resources, slave and fanompoana. Fanompoana, traditionally a limited form of prestation to the crown, was radically restructured under autarky between 1825 and 1861. Far from being ‘unproductive’, the imperial army, the largest fanompoana institution, constituted a huge and elaborate commercial organization which was used to exploit the empire's resources and channel them to the imperial heartland. At the same time, fanompoana units comprising Merina soldiers and colonists established farms and engaged in commerce in the provinces. Finally, fanompoana labour was widely used on the east coast plantations, and especially in the attempt to forge an industrial revolution in Imerina. In sum, this article argues that fanompoana rather than slavery formed the basis of the imperial Merina economy under autarky, ad was a major factor contributing to the failure of autarkic policies.

In 2010, the Kenyan government annulled national census results due to concerns that Somalis in the country had been over-counted. This article traces the genesis of this recent demographic dispute, which held important implications for the distribution of political power. It shows that African leaders inherited long-standing practices laid down by the colonial state, which was unable to obtain a reliable count of the number of people in Kenya or render its Somali subjects into a countable, traceable population. In regions where expansive Somali networks had long predated British rule, colonial authorities only loosely enforced the concept of a permanent population. By yielding to this reality, colonial officials developed governance techniques that should not be mistakenly portrayed as state ‘failures’. These policies call into question the applicability of James C. Scott's concept of ‘legibility’ to Kenya. They also suggest that recent demographic controversies cannot be reductively blamed on ‘illegal’ immigration.

Three raw materials were essential to Iron Age peoples in South Central Africa: iron, copper and salt. This paper discusses some of the archaeological evidence for the development of regional and long-distance trade in these commodities during the earlier Iron Age. A distinction is drawn between regional trade in items for which there is local demand, and longer distance commerce in raw materials, which may have been conducted with the aid of some standardized units of monetary significance.

The big question for future research is that of assessing the degree to which the more sophisticated centres of metallurgy and trade affected those societies, living outside the immediate area, whose technologies and economies were less highly developed.

Even at this still early stage in the development of the chronostratigraphic framework in eastern Africa a number of important advances have been reported. As more attention is paid to the different responses of food producers to the variety of resources provided by the range of available environments then, and only then, will we be in a position to understand the diachronic processes which result in settlement aggregation and urban development.

In the Lake Nyanza region at the hub of the Sudanic and Guinea–Congolian regional vegetation centres, early dates for iron working are not yet convincing enough to demonstrate independent invention of iron working, but the region is almost certainly the most important diffusion source of the technique to the eastern and southern sectors of the sub-continent.

Currently available data from the Maasai–Somali region show clearly the early adoption of food production techniques and a capacity to absorb iron technology without necessarily abandoning pastoral production. This did not, however, mean a lack of development based on agriculture as the towns of the Somali coast with their advanced craft production clearly show. However, it is interesting that the urban development seems closely linked to the juxtaposition of the valuable agricultural resources provided by the Shabelle river running close to the coast and the marine resources of the littoral.

The Zanzibar–Inhambane floral mosaic provides a context for the spread southwards of the early farming communities and for the development of the coastal towns. Particularly important here appears to have been the combination of surface and arboreal forms of agriculture with the exploitation of marine resources. Links eastwards with the specialized floral communities of the Comoro archipelago and Madagascar were also fully established. The highlands of Madagascar experienced the expansion from the eleventh century a.d. onwards of a settlement system increasingly focused upon hydraulic agriculture which culminated in the powerful Merina kingdom and ultimately the present day capital of Antananarivo.

On the continent relatively little penetration into the Zambezian miombo woodland communities was achieved by the coastal urban dwellers. In the woodlands of the vast highlands of the interior different developmental trajectories of settlement systems occurred. Here food production cannot be shown to have become established earlier than the late first millennium b.c. But by the mid first millennium a.d. significant settlement hierarchies based on mixed cropping and cattle keeping were established on the Zimbabwe plateau and the margins of the Kalahari. These together with the incorporation of the opportunities presented by inter-regional exchange and the exotic trade goods penetrating from the coast ultimately gave rise to the powerful state formations of the Mapungubwe and Zimbabwe traditions.

Together these developments show a remarkable degree of regional articulation and it remains true that an adequate understanding of the processes giving rise to urbanism in any part of eastern Africa cannot be understood in isolation.