While numerous reports in the ethnographic and historical literature on West African societies document the sale of kin into slavery during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, theorists of the trade have not dealt with the logic of selling close relatives. This article examines an instance of such sale among a Voltaic people, the Kabre, located in the hinterland of Dahomey and Ashanti, and attempts to theorize its meaning as a way of maneuvering between complementing sets of values, both human and material, that emerge at the intersection of the local Kabre ‘gift’ economy with the larger regional political economy of slaving. The essay thus examines Kabre prestational forms – and the complex conceptions of value, wealth, alienation and personhood that accompany them – and the ways in which they interacted with the currencies and slaving practices, and the distinctive forms of alienation these entailed, that entered the area during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Understanding such local forms and practices, however, requires us to depart from neoclassical modes of analysis like those typically employed by economic historians of the slave trade.

Le présent article fait la synthèse pour l'Afrique centrale des recherches archéo-logiques, et plus particulièrement des datations absolues, effectuées ces quatre dernières années. Comme les autres articles de cette série, seuls sont pris en considération les travaux se rapportant à la fin de l'âge de la pierre et à l'âge du fer. Eu égard à l'immensité de l'aire envisagée, l'archéologie apparaît, en dehors de quelques zones limitées, comme encore fort peu développée. Certains résultats récents méritent cependant d'être notés.

Au Cameroun on dispose maintenant de dates qui permettent pour la première fois de situer les débuts de la production de nourriture ainsi que l'apparition de la céramique dans la frange nord de la forêt équatoriale. Plus au sud, à Kinshasa, il a finalement été possible de dater l'âge du fer ancien. Vers l'est, au Rwanda, de nouvelles dates pourraient confirmer que l'âge du fer a débuté dans la région interlacustre un ou deux siècles plus tôt que ce que l'on admet généralement. Dans ce pays et au Burundi l'étude systématique des anciens fourneaux de fonte du fer a été poursuivie. L'apparition des vestiges caractérisant la seconde période de l'âge du fer doit également être reculée dans le temps. Au sud-est, à Lubumbashi, une date conduit à vieillir encore le début de la fonte du cuivre. Dans la dépression de l'Upemba la fouille de plusieurs sites et de nombreuses nouvelles datations permettent de suivre avec précision pendant près de deux millénaires l'évolution sociale, politique, économique et technique de cette important zone de peuplement. Un éclairage nouveau est ainsi porté sur l'origine de l'Etat luba. Différentes recherches en rapport avec les traditions orales et l'histoire récente ont aussi été effectuées au centre du Zaïre, en Angola, au Cameroun au Rwanda et au Tchad.

La diversité et la densité linguistiques exceptionnelles des hauts plateaux ou ‘Grassfields’ du Cameroun de l'Ouest, les découvertes archéologiques les plus récentes et l'ethnographie incitent à penser que cette région de l'Afrique a été peuplée de manière continue et relativement dense depuis plusieurs millénaires. Les paysages contemporains sont dérivés de la forêt biafréenne par déboisement. L'agriculture sur brûlis, la spécialisation régionale des productions et les vicissitudes de l'histoire de peuplement les ont modelés et leur ont imprimé la diversité qui les caractérise.

Recent archaeological research conducted west of Lake Turkana, Kenya has shed new light on the prehistory of eastern Cushitic and Nilotic speakers in East Africa. The Namoratunga cemetery and rock art sites, dated to about 300 B.C., are clearly related to the prehistory of Eastern Cushitic speakers. The newly defined Turkwell cultural tradition, dated to the first millennium a.d., is associated with eastern Nilotic prehistory. Lopoy, a large lakeside fishing and pastoralist settlement, is discussed in terms of eastern Nilotic prehistory. The archaeological data agrees with the independent findings of historical linguistics.

Inoculation for smallpox, the forerunner of vaccination, has had a long and variegated history. The earliest known descriptions of the practice in sub-Saharan Africa were given by African slaves in colonial America in the early and mid-eighteenth century. Subsequently it is mentioned in accounts from widely scattered parts of the continent. It seems to have been most extensively used in the Western and Central Sudan, Ethiopia and Southern Africa. Local diffusion patterns emerge from the evidence available at this time, but broader questions of origin must await further investigation. Similarly it is as yet impossible to assess its demographic impact in Africa although it clearly provided some defence against smallpox in spite of the risks involved.

This paper attempts to provide a frame of reference for evaluating the role of ordinary rural Africans in national movements, in the belief that scholarly preoccupation with élites will only partially illumine the mainsprings of nationalism. Kenya has been taken as the main field of enquiry, with contrasts and comparisons drawn from Uganda and Tanganyika. The processes of social change are discussed with a view to establishing that by the end of the colonial period one can talk of peasants rather than tribesmen in some of the more progressive areas. This change entailed a decline in the leadership functions of tribal chiefs who were also the official agents of colonial rule, but did not necessarily mean the firm establishment of a new type of rural leadership. The central part of the paper is taken up with an account of the competition between these older and newer leaderships, for official recognition rather than a mass following. A popular following was one of the conditions for such recognition, but neither really achieved this prior to 1945 except in Kikuyuland, and there the newer leaders did not want official recognition. After 1945 the newer leadership, comprising especially traders and officials of marketing co-operatives, seems everywhere to have won a properly representative position, due mainly to the enforced agrarian changes which brought the peasant face to face with the central government, perhaps for the first time. This confrontation, together with the experience of failure in earlier and more local political activity, resulted in a national revolution coalescing from below, co-ordinated rather than instigated by the educated élite.

The colonial authorities perceived Upper Volta as the most important labour reservoir in French West Africa. Koudougou, the most populous administrative subdivision of what was Upper Volta during the colonial period, was probably also the most densely settled. Various types of colonial labour policies are examined. These include forced labour in its forms of annual ‘prestations’ and longer-term, large-scale recruiting for major public works, as well as military conscription and the use of the ‘2è portion’ in the public and private sectors. Based on archival research in West Africa, this study traces changes in the size of the labour force and the impact of the forced extraction of labour on the African populations. Finally, the wider significance of colonial labour policies is analysed.

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.

The Swahili community of modern Mombasa is composed of an amalgam of the descendants of the city's early ‘Shirazi’ settlers and more recent immigrant Swahili groups, most of which migrated south to Mombasa Island during or after the sixteenth century. It appears likely that the ‘Shirazi’. dynasty and its retainers were themselves derived from older Swahili settlements along the southern Somali coast.

After the ‘Shirazi’ polity was destroyed by. the Portuguese and their local allies in 1591–93, Mombasa's accretions of foreign Swahili gradually reorganized themselves into twelve mataifa or ‘tribes’. These twelve mataifa grouped themselves into two separate and sometimes hostile confederations, the Thelatha Taifa (The Three) and the Tisa Taifa (The Nine). Political unity was maintained by means of a loosely structured state system in which foreign dynasties of Omani Arabs, first the Mazrui and later the Busaidi, bridged the gap between the two confederations.

During the Mazrui period (approximately 1735–1837), Mombasa was an independent city-state which enjoyed political hegemony over much of the Kenya and north Tanzania coasts. Under Busaidi rule (1837–95) the city lost its independence and was incorporated in the Zanzibar Sultanate. Differences between the Thelatha Taifa and the Tisa Taifa slowly faded during the Busaidi period and have almost disappeared since 1900. Though precolonial social and political structure is still perceptible in the modern Swahili community of Mombasa, it has for the most part become vestigial.

Although the conventional image of the colonial medical encounter in Africa depicts a white, male, European doctor treating a black African patient, most of the actual deliverers of Western medicine in Africa during the colonial period were non-Europeans. In the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, British doctors formed only a small minority of Western medical practitioners. Most often, it was Syrian, Egyptian and Sudanese doctors, and Sudanese assistant medical officers, mosquito men, nurses, sanitary officers and midwives who delivered sanitary and medical services on behalf of the colonial state. Understanding the cultural exchanges, technology transfer and power relations involved in the operation of colonial medicine clearly requires careful study of the training, the role and the experiences of these non-European practitioners of Western medicine.

In this paper, one such group of medical practitioners is examined through a study of the Midwifery Training School or MTS, opened in Omdurman, Sudan in 1921. The MTS sought to create a class of modern, trained Sudanese midwives, out of, and in rivalry to, an entrenched class of traditional midwives, known as dayas. The analysis relies heavily on the papers of Mabel E. Wolff, founding matron of the MTS and her sister, Gertrude L. Wolff, who first arrived in Sudan to train nurses. Throughout the discussion, the name ‘Wolff’ alone designates Mabel, whose voice dominates their collective papers.

Since 1969 archaeological, paleobotanical and ethnographic research in Kagera region, north-western Tanzania (Map 1), have contributed to a deep-time understanding of the ecological history of that region. The primary insight that develops out of this interdisciplinary research is that changes in the ecology of the region can be linked directly to the productive economy and the cultural values of its inhabitants. The development of iron technology and settled agricultural life are the primary components in understanding the environmental changes that arose in this region over the last two millennia or more. This paper provides an overview of the most salient observations derived from this research program. I will begin with a short review of the history of Iron Age settlement, technology and major alterations made to the environment that form the backdrop to the specific reconstructions of forest exploitation gleaned from charcoal excavated from iron-smelting furnaces and from reconstructions of vegetational changes based on palynology.

This article suggests that differences in local political structures and credit protection regimes largely account for Bonny's displacement of Old Calabar as the principal slave port of the Bight of Biafra in the eighteenth century, despite Bonny's reputation for being particularly unhealthy for Europeans. We argue that this displacement occurred in the 1730s, several decades earlier than previously thought. We suggest that this was made possible by the early growth and consolidation of royal authority at Bonny. The use of state authority to enforce credit arrangements in Bonny proved more effective than the mechanisms adopted at its closest rival, Old Calabar, where, in the absence of a centralized political authority similar to the monarchy at Bonny, credit protection before 1807 was based on pawnship.

Multiple, overlapping, and competing forms of authority contributed to the highly centralized Buganda kingdom. Their enduring salience, commonly considered characteristic of heterarchy, challenges our understanding of the early history of the kingdom. A map that specifies the location of 292 chiefs and authority figures in the capital reveals not only the critical importance of multiple forms of authority but also the development of those forms over several centuries. The allocation of space in the capital and other historical sources indicate that compromise and co-optation characterized the practice of power in the ancient kingdom: the king was surrounded, literally and figuratively, by others who curbed his authority.

The excavations in the Central Sudanese Neolithic settlement at Kadero resulted in the discovery of a large amount of skeletal remains of domestic animals: cattle, sheep, goats and dogs. Cattle pastoralism was of great economic importance for the Kadero population and it was supplemented by the herding of sheep and goats; the presence of dogs is closely associated with this pastoralism. Preliminary examination of plant impressions on potsherds reveals the presence almost exclusively of sorghum and two kinds of millet, which were most probably cultivated. This may explain the large number of grindstones found in the Kadero settlement. The pastoralism and possible cultivation at Kadero point to a much more developed food-producing economy practised by the Central Sudanese Neolithic population, compared to that of the Esh Shaheinab settlement. Food-production at Kadero was supplemented by food-gathering activities, among which the collecting of molluscs predominated, with hunting and fishing playing a less significant role.

The data yielded by the burial ground at Kadero, where the heavily prognathous inhabitants of the local settlement were buried, seem to indicate that the Neolithic Kadero population was an autochthonous one on the Upper (main) Nile. It is assumed that the domestic animals and, perhaps, also the cultivated cereals of the Neolithic Kaderans, as well as of other Central Sudanese populations, were adopted by the local food-gathering human groups following contact with other and alien peoples.

In the inter-war years one major role for the Royal Air Force was imperial defence. The Air Staff further argued that air power, used in substitution for the Army, would provide a more economical and effective means of policing and subjugating unrest in the remoter and more inaccessible areas of the colonial empire in Asia and Africa. The first successful major operation by the R.A.F. in Somaliland in 1920 encouraged the extension of air policing to the troublesome Middle East. The R.A.F. saw the Sudan as an integral part of its Middle East operations and throughout the late 1920s and 1930s military aircraft stationed in Khartoum were used to deal with revolt in the Southern Sudan. Continued Army opposition to substitution led the R.A.F. to seek a role in the sub-Saharan colonies. The need for defence economies as a result of the Depression, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and unrest on the Copperbelt persuaded the authorities in both London and the colonies of the need for an Air Force presence in East and Central Africa.

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.

Court records from 1905–6 offer a rare view of the status of women slaves in early colonial Northern Nigeria. It is shown that British officials found it easy to accommodate the aristocracy of the Sokoto Caliphate on the status of these women, despite British efforts to reform slavery. Those members of the aristocracy and merchant class who could afford to do so were able to acquire concubines through the courts, which allowed the transfer of women under the guise that they were being emancipated. British views of slave women attempted to blur the distinction between concubinage and marriage, thereby reaffirming patriarchal Islamic attitudes. The court records not only confirm this interpretation but also provide extensive information on the ethnic origins of slave women, the price of transfer, age at time of transfer, and other data. It is shown that the slave women of the 1905–6 sample came from over 100 different ethnic groups and the price of transfer, which ranged between 200,000 and 300,000 cowries, was roughly comparable to the price of females slaves in the years immediately preceding the conquest. Most of the slaves were in their teens or early twenties. The use of the courts to transfer women for purposes of concubinage continued until at least the early 1920s.

The article presents a reassessment of the archaeological background for the prehistory of the Bantu movements. The differences between the Channelled wares of Central Africa and the Dimple-based wares of East Africa are demonstrated and the greater abundance of Dimple-based ware sites noted. In both cases the distribution is largely in areas suitable for primary cultivation such as river valleys and lakeside areas. It is suggested that both wares are derived from pottery traditions originating to the west of their eastern African distribution areas. Recent evidence would indicate that iron working spread to sub-Saharan Africa both from West Africa and also, via the East African coast, from the Red Sea, and that the earliest iron-using peoples in southern Africa were probably not all negroes. It is also suggested that a negro foraging population was perhaps present in Central Africa before the arrival of agriculture. On agricultural origins, it is noted that some agriculture existed in the Rift valley area by perhaps as early as 1000 b.c., though the main expansion of agriculture is postulated as being of western origin. In conclusion it would appear that the West African origins of Bantu genesis are more important than suggested by Oliver in Journal of African History, Volume VII, and almost certainly antedate the 2000 years timescale previously advanced.

Two recent articles by Dr Mauny, inconclusive in themselves, since in the second he withdrew his earlier claim that the material of aggrey beads might be the coral-like marine growth Allopara subviolacea, inspired some independent inquiry into the question of aggrey beads. This inquiry followed three lines: (1) a re-examination of the published sources from the beginning of the sixteenth century into the nineteenth century; (2) local inquiries in Southern Ghana and, indirectly, in Western Nigeria; (3) an examination of actual beads, notably in collections in Ghana and in the British Museum. While a great deal more remains to be done, especially in following up the second and third lines of inquiry, some tentative observations may be of value, since it already appears possible to add something to the authoritative statements by Krieger and Naber on the subject.

The founders of the Zanzibar National Party can be understood as creole nationalists, who imagined their political authority as stemming from membership in a transnational Arab elite. But in the mid-twentieth century, prompted by the rising hegemony of territorial nationalism and by subaltern challenges informed by pan-Africanism, they crafted a new historical narrative that depicted their movement as having originated with indigenous villagers. Party leaders then related this narrative to Western scholars, whose publications helped reproduce the myth throughout the rest of the century. This article traces the genesis of this masquerade and asks what it implies about the nature of the creole metaphor and its supposed link to discourses of cosmopolitan hybridity. The conventional contrast between créolité and nativist essentialism is shown to be illusory.