Omwene hango [the owner of the home] is the only person with true authority to discipline children. So, when your husband died, the authority of omwene hango died with him, and you were left alone.

HISTORIANS of gender have shown the importance of documenting and scrutinizing instances in which gender terminologies are invoked and employed. A compelling instance can be found in an examination of the widows of Maragoli. In this upland rural area of about two hundred square kilometers in western Kenya, the dynamic relations surrounding widowhood provide a useful opportunity to analyze the construction of feminine and masculine categories, as well as the political strategies that emerged out of these categories. Widows in this rural part of Kenya were certainly subject to the limitations imposed on them by the invocation of strict gender categorization – perhaps at this point in their lives more than any other. And yet, surprisingly, these widows were able to use such categories for their own purposes. By expressing their grief publicly – usually in ways that focused on their social and economic needs – Maragoli widows not only reinforced the importance of gender categories but also sought to redress their grievances through these very categories. What is important, though, is that they consciously presented themselves as ‘poor widows’, as idealized stereotypes of suffering females who were believed to become needy and helpless at the death of their husbands. They told their stories in ways calculated to solicit sympathy. And this usually worked to their advantage since it placed men in the difficult situation of having to defend their ‘ideal’ masculinity. Only by helping guarantee the economic livelihood and social status of bereaved widows could men uphold their own self-image. Thus the relationship between them was informed by a reciprocity that suggests that the widows were more than passive recipients of male charity. By presenting their grief publicly so as to solicit relief for their sufferings, widows were actively able to turn what men saw as stereotypical feminine behaviour – emotionality, helplessness and weakness – into strengths. That is, by consciously attempting to make men feel more ‘manly’, Maragoli widows were able – at least partially – to exploit existing gender roles to get what they needed.

Radiocarbon dates published by southern African archaeologists since the last review in this journal (in 1980) illustrate an increasingly complex record of population movement and interaction. Substantial gaps in the distributions of dates reflect the ebb and flow of people in response to changing environmental and social circumstances. More interesting perhaps is the range of intergroup relations now emerging from the last two millennia with the appearance of pastoralists and agriculturalists. Radiocarbon dates, taken along with spatial and formal patterns in the archaeological record, show clearly that the distributions between hunters, herders and farmers and between Stone Age and Iron Age communities were blurred and flexible.

The professional Nigerian nationalist historiography which emerged in reaction against the imperialist Hamitic Hypothesis – the assertion that Africa's history had been made only by foreigners – is rooted in a complex West African tradition of critical dialogue with European ideas. From the mid-nineteenth century, western-educated Africans have re-worked European ideas into distinctive Hamitic Hypotheses suited to their colonial location. This account developed within the constraints set by changing European and African-American ideas about West African origins and the evolving character of the Nigerian intelligentsia. West Africans first identified themselves not as victims of Hamitic invasion but as the degenerate heirs of classical civilizations, to establish their potential to create a modern, Christian society. At the turn of the century various authors argued for past development within West Africa rather than mere degeneration. Edward Blyden appropriated African-American thought to posit a distinct racial history. Samuel Johnson elaborated on Yoruba traditions of a golden age. Inter-war writers such as J. O. Lucas and Ladipo Solanke built on both arguments, but as race science declined they again invoked universal historical patterns. Facing the arrival of Nigeria as a nation-state, later writers such as S. O. Biobaku developed these ideas to argue that Hamitic invasions had created Nigeria's proto-national culture. In the heightened identity politics of the 1950s, local historians adopted Hamites to compete for historical primacy among Nigerian communities. The Hamitic Hypothesis declined in post-colonial conditions, in part because the concern to define ultimate identities along a colonial axis was displaced by the need to understand identity politics within the Nigerian sphere. The Nigerian Hamitic Hypothesis had a complex career, promoting élite ambitions, Christian identities, Nigerian nationalism and communal rivalries. New treatments of African colonial historiography – and intellectual history – must incorporate the complexities illus-trated here.

One of the responses of the Transvaal gold mining industry to the economic crisis after the South African War of 1899–1902 was to import Chinese indentured mine labour. To facilitate this process and to integrate it with the overall demands and requirements of the industry, the mining companies established a recruiting and shipping company in 1904, known as the Chamber of Mines Labour Importation Agency. This short-lived company, which was characterized by a high degree of vertical integration, operated as recruiting and shipping agency in China, receiving agent in Natal and co-ordinating and advising agent in the Transvaal. Despite complex arrangements designed to exploit the Chinese labour market, the company was, generally speaking, successful in securing the requisite labour force of suitable size and quality for the Transvaal mines. However, it showed a longer-term susceptibility to competitive pressures in the northern Chinese labour market. The company was amalgamated with WNLA in 1908.

This article reassesses the political alternatives imagined by African nationalists in the ‘first wave’ of Africa's decolonization through the lens of Cameroonian nationalism. After the proscription of Cameroon's popular nationalist movement, the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), in the mid-1950s, thousands of Cameroonian nationalists went into exile, most to Accra, where they gained the support of Kwame Nkrumah's Pan-African Bureau for African Affairs. The UPC's external support fed Cameroon's internal maquis (as UPC members called the underground resistance camps within the territories), rooted in culturally particular conceptions of freedom and sovereignty. With such deeply local and broadly international foundations, the political future that Cameroonian nationalists envisaged seemed achievable: even after the Cameroon territories' official independence, UPC nationalists kept fighting. But, by the mid-1960s, postcolonial states prioritized territorial sovereignty over ‘African unity’ and Ghana's support of the UPC became unsustainable, leading to the movement's disintegration.

The article adopts the approach of a group biography in discussing the careers and ambitions of early black South African doctors selecting both those trained abroad, and the first cohorts trained within South Africa who graduated at the Universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand from 1945–6. It focuses on the ambiguities involved, by looking at tensions between professional altruism and entrepreneurialism in pursuing a medical career, as well as that between self-interest and selflessness in attempting to balance the requirements of a medical practice against those involved in political leadership. The paper highlights the significance of the political leadership given by black doctors in the mid-twentieth century and indicates the price paid for this in loss of medical resources under the apartheid regime. Two annexes provide original data on the medical and political contributions of individuals.

Shipping, a vital element of maritime trade, has not hitherto received adequate attention in studies on Nigerian colonial economic history. This article therefore fills a gap in the literature by studying aspects of the shipping trade during the First World War, when shipping was indispensable for maintaining economic links between Britain and her colonies. Shipping in Nigeria revolved around the practices of the Elder Dempster Shipping Company, which enjoyed an undisputed monopoly of the trade throughout the war, and the reactions of the colonial government and private shippers to them.

Scarcity of tonnage and higher freights were the chief features of shipping during the war. The allocation of shipping space, however, ranged the colonial government, the shipping company and the Combine (that is, big European) firms against non-Combine shippers. While Elder Dempster's allocation formula suited the government and the Combine firms, it was considered inequitable by other shippers. This arrangement reflected the community of interests between the colonial state and Big Business vis-à-vis smaller traders.

The interests of the government and Elder Dempster were, however, incompatible on the question of ocean freights. Thus, high freights which boosted the firm's turnover were detrimental to the economic interests of the colonial state. The company's monopoly and the non-intervention of the Imperial government enabled it to have its way. Consequently, despite losses at sea, requisition by the Imperial government and rising running costs, Elder Dempster conducted a profitable business during the war. In achieving this, it also served the Imperial interest by effectively linking Nigeria with the metropolis.

On the whole, wartime shipping conditions, particularly Elder Dempster's practical monopoly, were a departure from pre-war trends. There was a gradual return to normality in the early 1920s but the firm remained pre-eminent in the West African shipping trade.

In his book, Africa; its peoples and their culture history, ethnographer G. P. Murdock has undertaken a tremendous interpretive task based upon a survey of the literature. Of consequence here is his thesis that

… agriculture was independently developed [at about 5000 B.C.] by the Negroes of West Africa. This was, moreover, a genuine invention, not a borrowing from another people. Furthermore, the assemblage of cultivated plants ennobled from wild forms in Negro Africa ranks as one of the four major agricultural complexes evolved in the entire course of human history … The invention of agriculture in Negro Africa is most probably to be credited to the Mande peoples around the headwaters of the Niger in the extreme western part of the Sudan, less than 1,000 miles from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

No general account of the archaeology of Ife has ever been published, although the demand for such an account has been increasing with the growing interest in the art of Ife. This paper attempts to fill the gap by providing a survey of the investigations which have been conducted there. The reader is also referred to a paper by William Fagg and the present author which attempts to summarize the reliable factual knowledge about Ancient Ife, inferring from the archaeological finds evidence of the materials which have not survived. So far as possible repetition here of material contained in that paper is avoided. Moreover, since the archaeologist who works on ethnohistoric problems has other means of investigation than the pick and shovel, this paper will refer to ethnographic accounts as well as to excavations.

The sudden expulsion of the Xhosa across the Fish River in 1811–12 created a practical and conceptual crisis which the traditional political authorities were unable to resolve. Two commoners, Nxele and Ntsikana, emerged in this vacuum, each proposing his own solution to the problems posed by the white irruption. Although these responses were religious responses, they were neither irrational nor incomprehensible. Xhosa religion had long functioned as an instrument for the control of the material world. By incorporating selected Christian concepts with the Xhosa world-view, Nxele and Ntsikana were able to provide the Xhosa with acceptable explanations of past events and prescriptions for future action.

Nxele urged resistance and Ntsikana preached submission, but an examination of their personal histories shows that these final conclusions were more the product of exterior pressure than interior revelation. It may be suggested that the future reputations of the two men, like their past actions, will be determined more by the popular mood than by anything they themselves did or said.

Based on a close reading of new archival material, this article makes a case for the adoption of an empirical, ‘sub-systemic’ approach to the study of nationalist and postcolonial politics in Zambia. By exploring the notion of popular ‘expectations of independence’ to a much greater degree than did previous studies, the paper contends that the extent of the United National Independence Party's political hegemony in the immediate post-independence era has been grossly overrated – even in a traditional rural stronghold of the party and during a favourable economic cycle. In the second part of the paper, the diplomatic and ethnic manoeuvres of the ruler of the eastern Lunda kingdom of Kazembe are set against a background of increasing popular disillusionment with the performance of the independent government.

Consular trade returns from Tripoli show a dramatic increase in the proportion of legitimate trade in trans-Saharan exports from the central Sudan in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This article focuses on Damergu, a Sahelian region located on the Tripoli–Kano route, and traces the reactions of North African merchants, local Tuareg rulers, and ordinary villagers to an increase and then an abrupt decline in trans-Saharan trade. North African merchants, who migrated to Damergu from Ghadames or from diaspora communities in Hausa towns, moved south after the decline of trans-Saharan trade in response to commercial opportunities in the savanna. A sharp rise in the importance of legitimate commerce in the Sahel upset the balance of power between two Tuareg groups, but the arrival of the French and the end of trans-Saharan trade eroded the power base of all Tuareg. The third group, villagers, responded to demand for new products by exchanging tanned goat skins and ostrich feathers for cheap European-made cloth and other imports. As trans-Saharan trade ended, they turned their full attention to exports of grain and animals, two forms of production and trade which had existed for some time before the boom in trans-Saharan trade. After 1900 the major change in trade patterns in these staple products was an about-face in the direction of exports corresponding to a secular decline in the desert-side economy. Whereas villagers had once taken millet primarily to Agadez, after 1900 they took progressively greater amounts south to Nigeria.

When sleeping sickness was discovered to be epidemic in the Congo Free State in 1904, the administration responded by attempting to implement public health measures which had evolved in Europe in relation to plague and cholera epidemics. These measures were to identify and isolate victims and suspected victims of the disease and to map out the infected and uninfected zones. This article describes the early sleeping-sickness campaign of the Belgian authorities in the Uele District of Province Orientale between 1904 and 1914, focusing on the formation of isolation camps or lazarets. Uele district had been identified as a potentially rich and uninfected zone to be protected from contamination by the establishment of a cordon sanitaire. Public health policy and practice during this period provides an example of attempted ‘social engineering’ on the part of a colonial authority. While sleeping sickness provided the major impetus for the gradual development of the colonial medical service by the 1920s, the early period between 1903 and World War I was particularly onerous for the African populations in the north-east. The public health policy was perceived by many Africans as one more element in the on-going conquest and exploitation of the region. Examples are provided to demonstrate the ways in which numerous sleeping-sickness regulations affected African societies in Uele.

Three main forms of agrarian change are shown to have occurred in the Ngwa region during the period covered in this article. The first was the adoption of a new hand-processing method for palm oil, which can be seen as a response to growing pressures on female labour resources as Ngwa farmers increased their export production of palm oil and kernels. The second was the adoption of cassava by women. This increased their workloads but helped them to fill a hungry-season gap in local food supplies. It formed part of a long-term trend of diversification within Ngwa agriculture. Finally, men began helping with cassava processing. Like their earlier entry into palm-oil processing, this move reflected not only a growing pressure on female labour resources but also a need for men to participate in processing if they were to claim a share of the saleable product. In the concluding sections of the article, gender relations are shown to have influenced farmers' patterns of saving and investment. An awareness of gender is seen to be relevant when considering both the issue of mechanisation and the history of other kinds of agrarian change.

The caravan trade, a strong chain binding Barbary, the Sahara, and the Negro territories together, was of very remote antiquity. Mauny and Lhote have convincingly shown that as early 1000 B.C. chariots were being drawn across the Sahara along two main routes: a western route from Morocco through Zemmour and Adrar to the banks of the Senegal and the Niger, and a central route from Tripoli through Cydamus (Ghadames), Ghat, and Hoggar to Gao on the Niger. By the fifth century B.C., the desert traffic—mainly in animals such as monkeys, lions, panthers, and elephants, in precious stones like carbuncles, emeralds and chalcedony, and in slaves— had become so important that ‘the Carthaginians began their great Sahara expeditions in an effort to cut out all intermediaries and to get into direct contact with the source of the riches in which they traded’. Three centuries later the Saharan trade was centred on the Tripoli-Fezzan-Bornu route (the Garamantian route) and constituted one of the main sources of the riches of Carthage. The phenomenal development of this desert traffic did not take place, however, until the introduction of the camel into Tripolitania by the Romans probably in the first century A.D. The rapid spread of the camel throughout Barbary and into the Sahara and beyond was begun by the Arabs and the Berbers. The process seemed to have gathered momentum and reached its climax during the Hilalian invasions in the middle of the eleventh century.

This article reconstructs the trajectory of the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute (KNII) to shed light on the politics of socialist education in 1960s Ghana. On the basis of archival evidence, it explores the changing role of the institute in the making of Nkrumahism as public discourse and documents the evolving relationship between the universalism of Marxism-Leninism and the quest for more local political iconographies centred on Nkrumah's life and work. Secondly, the article analyses the individual motivations and experiences of a sample of foreign lecturers. The article suggests that ideological institutes offer insights into the processes by which official ideologies were created and disseminated, a foil through which to interrogate the usages and appropriation of social sciences education, and a window onto the multiple ways in which local and foreign agents negotiated their identities and political participation in African socialist experiments.

This article excavates the imperial origins behind the recent turn towards digital biometrics in Kenya. It also tells the story of an important moment of race-making in the years after the Second World War. Though Kenya may be considered a frontier market for today's biometrics industry, fingerprinting was first introduced in the early twentieth century. By 1920, the Kenyan colonial government had dictated that African men who left their reserves be fingerprinted and issued an identity card (known colloquially as a kipande). In the late 1940s, after decades of African protest, the colonial government replaced the kipande with a universal system of registration via fingerprinting. This legislative move was accompanied by protests from members of the white settler community. Ironically, the effort to deracialize Kenya's identification regime only further normalized the use of biometrics, but also failed to fully undermine associations between white male exceptionalism and exemption from fingerprinting.

L'etude des conséquences de l'émancipation des esclaves est d'une grande importance pour la comprehension de l'histoire du travail en Afrique occidentale. Le système social des Soninké de la haute vallée du Sénégal, comme pour beaucoup de peuples sahéliens à l'époque précoloniale, reposait largement sur l'esclavage. L'apparition des migrations de travail chez les Soninké, cependant, s'explique beaucoup moins par l'abolition de l'esclavage que par la disparition progressive du commerce esclavagiste en Sénégambie au dix-neuvième siècle. En effet, c'est alors que furent substitutés à la traite intérieure les migrations saisonnières des jeunes Soninké. Ces migrations, traditionnellement orientées vers le commerce en Gambie, furent détournées vers la production d'arachide dans cette même région, probablement sous l'influence des trafiquants d'esclaves Soninké. Quant à l'émancipation, elle ne créa nullement un exode chez les esclaves nouvellement libérés mais elle permit leur entrée dans la courant des migrations saisonnières. Dans ce sens, l'abolition de l'esclavage fut un phénomêne important dans l'histoire du travail en Afrique occidentale. De plus, elle suscita des transformations dans 1'organisation du travail familial chez les Soninké, qui résultèrent en un surcroît de migrants.

En conclusion, l'histoire des Soninké illustre l'importance de la question des migrations traditionnelles pour la compréhension des migrations modernes en Afrique occidentale, rappelant en cela l'histoire des migrations de travail en Europe, qui furent elles aussi les héritières de courants plus anciens de mobilité géographique.

This paper is an attempt to study the economic foundations of one African state; Masina in the interior delta of the Niger south of Timbuctu, a short lived jihad state of the nineteenth century, has been chosen because it is relatively well-documented, literate, and followed an established pattern of Islamic taxation. Some attention is paid to the special needs of public expenditure in an Islamic theocracy; the system of taxation is examined, and it is shown that the revenue from the pastoral sector was probably greater than that from trade. Each section of the economy, pastoral, cultivating, fishing and trade is considered, and some attempt is made at estimating the scale of trade. Finally the process of state formation is discussed; it is suggested that there was little change in the means of production, but radical changes in the relations of production. Religious, military and fiscal aspects of the state were intimately interconnected, with Islam providing the ideological basis. Lack of foreign exchange was a continuing weakness, and the state ultimately went down in military defeat because of its inability to import firearms.

The purpose of this essay is to discuss a number of aspects relating to the client and captive labour force in the Bida emirate in the immediate pre-colonial period. Using data collected in surveys of 1611 captive and client villages in the 1930s, it has been possible to estimate the origins of a large part of this force and to establish the different periods of its recruitment. Comments are made regarding the role of this labour force in the pre-colonial economy of Nupe, on the position of slaves and clients in the society of the emirate, and on the effects of the extensive population transfer on the ethnic demography of Nupeland. It is hoped that this essay will contribute to the contemporary discussion regarding indigenous slavery in Africa, and will lead to an accelerated abandonment of simplistic notions concerning the nature of African economy and society in the late nineteenth century.