A critical examination of the forces behind Igbo acceptance of Christianity during the first decade of this century reveals that British military imperialism and other forms of colonial exploitation were in fact basic to the decision of many Igbo communities to embrace Christianity. The adoption of the Christian religion, especially by the male adults, may be seen as a clear method of adjusting to the new colonial regime in which Christianity offered visible social advantages. Communities which embraced the new religion believed that by associating with the Christian missionaries, they would perhaps escape various forms of colonial over-rule.

The expansion of British political authority in the Igbo country, therefore, widened the frontiers of missionary enterprise. And as the Christian missions found the Igbos remarkably receptive to missionary propaganda, each was more than anxious to exert its denominational influence on the people. Thus interdenominational rivalry, especially between the Roman Catholics and the Protestants, was acute. For various reasons, the Roman Catholic missionaries seem to have established a more preponderating influence than the other Protestant societies.

In colonial Southern Rhodesia, administrative officials often couched the rhetoric of ‘modernization’ in ethnic terms. They regarded immigrant Madheruka master farmers as the embodiment of modernization because they had been exposed to forces of modernization in their areas of origin, while both officials and immigrants alike regarded indigenous Shangwe as backward and primitive. This article argues that the construction of Madheruka and Shangwe ethnic identities dates primarily to the early 1960s, with the coming of immigrants and the introduction of cotton. Shangwe defined the immigrants as madheruka, a term whose origins lay in the eviction of the immigrants from crown land by colonial officials in the 1950s, while Madheruka termed the indigenous peoples shangwe, or backward. Each group perceived itself differently, however, Shangwe claiming that the term Shangwe referred to a place rather than to their ethnic identity and Madheruka claiming to belong to authentic Shona groups. The guerrilla war of the 1970s witnessed an attack on modernity as the guerrillas and their sympathizers regarded immigrant farmers as colonial collaborators.

Faced with a confusing range of fluid ethnicities when they conquered Kenya, colonial officials sought to shift conquered populations into manageable administrative units. In linking physical space to ethnic identity, the Kenyan reserve system assumed that each of these ‘tribes’ had a specific homeland. Yet the reserves in the central Kenyan highlands soon became overcrowded and socially restive because they could not accommodate population growth and private claims to land for commercial agriculture. Although colonial officials proclaimed themselves the guardians of backward tribal peoples, they tried to address this problem by creating mechanisms whereby surplus populations would be ‘adopted’ into tribes living in less crowded reserves. This article provides new insights into the nature of identity in colonial Kenya by telling the stories of two types of Kikuyu migrants who settled in the Meru Reserve. The first much larger group did so legally by agreeing to become Meru. The second openly challenged the colonial state and their Meru hosts by defiantly proclaiming themselves to be Kikuyu. These diverse ways of being Kikuyu in the Meru Reserve fit neither strict primordial nor constructivist conceptions of African identity formation. The peoples of colonial Kenya had options in deciding how to identify themselves and could assume different political and social roles by invoking one or more of them at a time and in specific circumstances.

In this paper we review radiocarbon dates which have become available over the past three years for the more recent archaeological sites south of the Cunene and Limpopo Rivers, assessing the determinations within the broader context of economy and society. For a framework, we make use of broad physiographic divisions of southern Africa, thus breaking from the artificial constraints of modern political divisions and allowing greater possibilities of synthesis

Within the set of new dates there are several fields in which recent radiocarbon determinations have been particularly important. The nature of hunting and gathering and herding communities in the arid western regions of the sub-continent is now more fully understood and more information is available about the succession of lithic industries in the south-western interior. In the south-eastern coastal areas the geographical extent of the earliest farming communities has been firmly dated. New determinations are beginning to provide a firmer chronology for the succession of ceramic industries in the east, and reassessment of the dating of the important sites of Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe demands a revision of concepts of early state development and trading contact with the east coast.

This article attempts to contribute towards an understanding of the rise of nationalism in Nigeria and in the Gold Coast by exploring a neglected theme, namely the economic policy of political organizations in the period between the two World Wars. Before about 1918 political organizations did not have a coherent economic policy. After World War I economic problems became more important, and political parties began to take account of them by formulating a programme of economic development. An attempt was made by a man named Tete-Ansa to implement this programme, but he proved unsuccessful. The persistence of economic discontent, together with the failure of moderate leadership, led to the rise of new leaders and to the development of a more radical policy at the close of the 1930's. It was this policy which won mass support, and which played a vital part in the achievement of independence after World War II.

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.

When combined, evidence from oral tradition, Arabic texts and archaeological sites indicates that ancient Mali's seat of government changed more than once during its imperial period from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. According to oral tradition, the town in which Sunjata spent his early years, and to which he returned from exile, was Dakajalan. This mansadugu or ‘king's town’ served as Sunjata's base of operations for his campaign against Sumanguru and may have continued for a time as both spiritual and military headquarters during the struggle for unification following the defeat of Soso. As Mande's core territory expanded into the beginnings of empire, the mansadugu was probably moved north-eastward, down the River Niger to take advantage of widening commercial opportunities and to govern an expanded population of imperial subjects who included large numbers of Muslims from the former Soninke territories. Niani was one of the oldest and most important cities of Mali, especially notable for its iron industry. If it served also as a political capital this would most likely have been in the sixteenth century under Niani Mansa Mamadu, a descendant of Sunjata's royal lineage.

In nineteenth-century Egypt Circassian females were mostly kept in the harems of wealthy Turks, the concubines of ‘middle class’ Egyptians generally were Abyssinians, while male and female Negro slaves were used for domestic service by almost all layers of Egyptian society. In addition to domestic service, black slaves were used as soldiers by Egypt's rulers and, contrary to the prevalent assumption, as agricultural workers on the farms of the Muḥammad Alī family and elsewhere in Upper Egypt and during periods of prosperity and shortage of labour also in Lower Egypt. Apparently there were at least 30,000 slaves in Egypt at different times of the nineteenth century, and probably many more.

White slaves were brought to Egypt from the eastern coast of the Black Sea and from the Circassian settlements of Anatolia via Istanbul. Brown and black slaves were brought (a) from Darfur to Asyūṭ, directly or through Kordofan; (b) from Sennar to Isnā; (c) from the area of the White Nile; (d) from Bornu and Wadāy via Libya and the Western Desert; (e) from Abyssinia and the East African coast through the Red Sea. The slave dealers in Egypt were mainly people from Upper Egypt and the Oases, beduin and villagers of the Buḥayra province. They were divided into dealers in black and in white slaves and organized in a guild with a shaykh. Cairo was the great depot of slaves and the centre of the trade, but a very important occasion for trading in slaves was the annual mawlid of Ṭanṭā.

Official measures taken against the slave-trade were among the important causes for the final disappearance of slavery in Egypt. These were, amongst others, the appointment of foreigners, mainly British, as governors of the Sudan and commanders of special missions to suppress the trade; two Anglo-Egyptian conventions, of 1877 and of 1895, for the suppression of slavery; and, from 1877 on, the establishment of offices and later a special service for the fight against the trade and for the manumission of slaves. However, were it not for the internal development of Egyptian society, these measures could never have succeeded; this is illustrated by the tremendous obstacles they encountered and their ineffectiveness for a long time. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century most of these impediments vanished. In addition to the Mahdist revolution and the reconquest of the Sudan, the most important change was the emergence of a free labour market as a result of accelerated urbanization and the collapse of the guild system. At the same time a small but important section of Egyptians had changed their attitudes towards slavery as a result of their cultural contact with Europe.

This paper reinterprets the invasion of Songhay by the Sa'did Sultan Mulāy al-Mansūr's mercenaries led by the Pasha Judar. The battle of Tondibi in March 1591, and the subsequent defeat of the Askiya Isḥāq II, marked a turning point in both Moroccan and West African history. The paper assumes a strong relation between the invasion, the Mediterranean problems and the commercial needs of the Sa'did. Al-Mansūr wanted to regain control of the gold trade to stimulate the economy of his kingdom. However, his expeditionary forces got bogged down in the fly-infested southern swamps because of an unexpected protracted war of resistance led by the Askiya Nūḥu. Revolts in the cities and the countryside led to repression and the exile of a group of prominent ‘ulamā’ in 1594. The Moroccans also suffered from a lack of administrative coordination as demonstrated by the competition between the governor and the treasurer. All these problems culminated in a disaster. By 1612, unable to match the mobility of the resisters, the musketeers refused to do battle with the Songhay archers. Finally, the qā' id AH al-Talamsānī deposed the Pasha, and the Sultan began to lose control of his troops. As Songhay and Morocco experienced serious crises in the seventeenth century, Europe's domination of international trade became uncontested. The invasion swallowed up both the conqueror and the conquered.

Church Missionary Society missionaries arrived in the northern Sudan in 1899 with the goal of converting Muslims. Restricted by the Anglo-Egyptian government and by local opposition to their evangelism, they gained only one Muslim convert during sixty years of work. The missionaries nevertheless provided medical and education services in urban centers and in the Nuba Mountains, and pioneered girls' schools. Yet few of their Sudanese graduates achieved functional Arabic literacy, since missionaries taught ‘romanized Arabic', a form of written colloquial Arabic, in Latin print, that lacked practical applications. Thus the history of the CMS in the northern Sudan yields insights into issues of education, power and religious identity within a colonial context.

Jan Vansina's Paths in the Rainforests (1990) provides an instructive example of progress in overcoming the continuing burden of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory in studies of precolonial Africa in both historiography and anthropology. This article focuses on a critical section of the book, which outlines social evolution and ‘the invention of matrilinearity’ in the area around the lower Congo, showing both the strengths and the weaknesses of Vansina's approach.

This article illuminates the creative intellectual and social projects in which Mau Mau detainees were engaged. It draws on the private papers of Gakaara wa Wanjau, a Gikuyu writer who during his eight years of detention composed several plays, wrote ethnography and poetry, and carried on an extensive correspondence with his family. Gakaara and other detainees were doing more than defending a Mau Mau ideology. They were opening up new ways of doing Gikuyu culture, holding wives and children accountable, and representing themselves to a British public that could, they hoped, be brought round to their side.

This article focuses on the implications of an emir of Kano's decision to forbid women from inheriting houses and farms in 1923 and a successor's reversal of that policy in 1954. The earlier emir justified his policy by claiming that women inheritors were becoming prostitutes and the later one argued that women's re-enfranchisement would ameliorate the poverty of destitute elderly women. Both these events appear to have been radical innovations for their time and reflect continuous anxiety over women living outside of male control and a longer-term attack on women's public role. While the emirs' explanations do not fully comprehend the political logic of their decisions, both the proclamations and the way they were explained illustrate contradictions and ambiguities within Hausa conceptions of gender.

Zimbabwean historians have not yet fully assessed the interaction of two problematic identities, ethnicity and nationalism, to determine whether the two can work as partners and successfully co-exist. This essay argues that, in Bulawayo during the period studied, ethnicity co-existed with and complemented nationalism rather than the two working as polar opposite identities. Ethnic groups provided both the required leaders who became prominent nationalist figures and the precolonial history, personalities and monuments that sparked the nationalist imagination. From the 1950s, ethnic groups expanded their horizons and provided platforms from which emerging African nationalists launched their agenda. Understanding these interrelationships will reshape our understanding of the workings of these two identities in a cosmopolitan town.

Two series of migrations have left a profound imprint on the cultures of western central Africa: those of the Jaga who began a spectacular career with the sudden capture of the Kongo kingdom in 1569, and those of the Lunda and related peoples in central and eastern Angola. The amplitude of the Jaga migration was recognized from the beginning, whilst the scope of the Lunda migrations has not been fully realized as yet. So much is known about the latter invasions that the huge movement is subdivided into submigrations, so that the general perspective has been lost. It is this second set of migrations which was led by Kinguri, a Lunda prince who left his country after its capture by the Luba. In our opinion Kinguri's successor contacted the Portuguese around 1610, which leaves an interval following the Jaga arrival great enough to warrant the view that two invasions were involved. If so, the coincidence of two major population movements following each other so shortly in time is still remarkable and begs further investigation.

Since independence the countries of North Africa have been occupied almost exclusively with the establishment of a new society. An important part of this activity has been directed towards a solution to the problem of symbols and values: the construction of an image of themselves for their own contemplation and for export to the world outside. One aspect of this general problem of acculturation is concerned with interpretations of history and the evaluation of one's own place in historical evolution. Starting from the premiss that North African history has largely been a monopoly of French scholarship since 1830, contemporary historical writers in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have found it essential, before entering upon problems of historical interpretation, to rewrite their own history. Discovery of this first requisite has generated a spirit shared by all those writers preoccupied with this problem, however much they might disagree on solutions to it, which is best expressed by the phrase ‘décoloniser l'histoire’. The subject is vast, and I should like here only to indicate several of the problems, with their proposed solutions, so far treated by writers dealing with the history of Algeria.

Migration was a crucial component of the spatially uneven formation of labour markets and export-oriented economies in colonial Africa. Much of this mobility was initiated by migrants themselves rather than by colonial authorities. Building on analytical concepts from economic history and migration theory, this study explains the changing composition and magnitude of one such uncontrolled migration flow, from Ruanda-Urundi to Buganda. Migrants’ mobility choices – when to migrate, for how long, and with whom – proved highly responsive to shifting economic opportunity structures on the sending and receiving ends. Initially, large differences in terms of land and labour endowments, socio-economic structures, and colonial interventions, combined with substantial scope for price arbitrage, created large spatial inequalities of opportunity and strong incentives for circular male labour migration. Over time, however, migration contracted as opportunities in Ruanda-Urundi and Uganda converged, not in the least as a result of large-scale mobility itself.

It has long been held by historians of the Gold Coast and more recently by historians of slavery and emancipation in Africa that the formal abolition of slavery by the British colonial government in 1874 had little discernible impact on that institution per se or on the socio-economic and political status quo in the late nineteenth-century Gold Coast. This was so, it is argued, largely because the relatively benign nature of domestic slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast tended to minimize the demand for emancipation from among the servile population in the Gold Coast after formal emancipation in 1874. A wider survey of the available evidence and a reappraisal of official sources suggest, however, that not only is this view of the consequences of abolition misleading, but it has also helped to perpetuate some equally misleading myths concerning the nature and role of slavery and other forms of servitude in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast. What is demonstrated is that the servile response to abolition in the Gold Coast was much greater than historians have hitherto believed and that this was a spontaneous reaction on the part of this class against what were increasingly exploitative and oppressive forms of slavery and servitude in the nineteenth century. The latter, it is shown, was a prominent by-product of the process of socio-economic change in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast which has all but been ignored by historians, most of whom have been taken in by what is described as the official mythology of domestic slavery in the Gold Coast. This official mythology which was rooted in the belief that slavery and other forms of servitude in the Gold Coast were domestic or patriarchal in character and relatively benign in practice was, it is argued, simply an attempt to rationalize the retention of an institution which was essential to the operation of the system of legitimate trade in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast. The extent of the servile response to formal emancipation in 1874 was a surprise, however, to inexperienced British officials on the Gold Coast who had come to believe in their own mythology, so that abolition presented a short-lived crisis for the British colonial administration. Successive colonial administrations on the Gold Coast, therefore, were forced to all but nullify the operation of the abolition ordinances of 1874 until the advent of a colonial economy after 1900 made traditional forms of involuntary labour expendable.

In 1967, European and Katangese mercenaries revolted against the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) intervened to try to have the rebels peacefully leave the DRC. Katangese troops who fled to Rwanda with white mercenaries were forced by the Organization of African Unity and the Rwandan government to return to the DRC, where they were eventually executed. White mercenaries, under the protection of the ICRC and Rwanda, ultimately escaped Mobutu's wrath. Congolese and Rwandan leaders skillfully employed the ideal of African sovereignty and humanitarian rhetoric with its Western and African allies to ensure their consolidation of power.

The paper reviews the history of the concepts used to depict poverty in Africa. “Pauperism” is a legal concept, deriving from early modern law in Britain, which frames individual situations, places the paupers under specific rights and duties, and was applied in early colonial situations. Percentile is a economic-demographic concept, implying class difference, indexed to measurable or imputed monetary income, which became an instrument of government in the colonial world mainly after 1945, moving into the international comparative world after the era of independence. In the neoliberal era after 1989, the concept of precarity, and a focus on realizable assets rather than income, has taken higher profile than an emergent replacement for the comparative-percentile approach, sometimes now depicted as “living on $2 a day”. The paper indicates the conceptual and political implications and challenges of each of these depictions.