This paper highlights analytical and historical commonalities between Belgian African anti-polygamy measures and the unusual practice of taxing urban un-married women. Secondly, it interprets the 1950s rebellion against this tax in Bujumbura in light of how the colonial category of femme libre and a 1950 antipolygamy law converged in the Muslim African community of Buyenzi. Colonial categories and camouflage, name-giving and name-calling, noise and silence are central to the interpretation.

Belgian African anti-polygamy attitudes and measures are first reviewed, including polygamous wife liberations in the Leopoldian period; the introduction of supplementary wife taxation in 1910; demographic anxieties from the 1920s; and post-World War II worries about ‘camouflaged polygamy’, leading to the passage of the anti-polygamy law in 1950. The published evidence of ‘camouflaged polygamy's’ noisiest critics, élite African ‘new men’ or évolués, suggests that polygamy was increasing in rural areas due to forced labour obligations, and becoming camouflaged in response to pro-natalist rewards for monogamy. A second section analyses the urban single women's tax in terms of the embarrassed silence surrounding this new form of moral taxation, which was introduced following legislation in the 1930s designed to better differentiate ‘customary’ space from urban sites of ‘evolution’. A third section draws on Buyenzi women's oral memories to reconstruct their noisy rebellion against the tax. The conclusion analyses these Muslim women's outrage in light of the contradictions of gaining municipal revenue through moral taxation, an urban surveillance process which necessitated naming the category of persons taxed. The etymology of the term femme libre demonstrates that polygamous wife and prostitute were associated categories in colonial thought from the Leopoldian period. Colonial authorities lost control over these categories in this atypical ‘extra-customary’ township super-imposed on a pre-colonial ‘customary’ community. The new African need for camouflaging plural wives, created by the strong urban expulsion powers of the 1950 anti-polygamy law, converged with the name-calling of the single women's tax, resulting in a local struggle to control the naming process. The category of women created by the tax coalesced around the sexual insult embedded in the tax's name, embarrassing colonial authorities into exemptions and inciting the men of their community into a tax rebellion.

DESPITE the substantial and significant body of scholarly work on changing gender relations among African peoples who are (or were) primarily cultivators, the gender relations of predominantly pastoralist peoples have been, with a few notable exceptions, curiously excluded from historical examination. Instead, despite work which has shown the complexities of trying to determine the ‘status’ of East African pastoralist women, pastoralist gender relations seem to exist outside of history and be immune to change. Earlier anthropological studies that addressed pastoral gender relations applied a synchronic model, analyzing them in terms of either the pastoral mode of production or pastoralist ideology. Harold Schneider, for example, contended that among East African pastoralists, men's control of livestock gave them control of women, who were ‘usually thoroughly subordinated to men and thus unable to establish independent identity as a production force’. In his rich ethnography of Matapato Maasai, Paul Spencer claimed that both male and female Maasai believe in ‘the undisputed right of men to own women as “possessions” ’. Marriage, in his view, was therefore ‘the transfer of a woman as a possession from her father who reared her to her husband who rules her’. Melissa Llewelyn-Davies' study of Loita Maasai women in Kenya corroborated Spencer's findings. Loita Maasai women perceived themselves, and were perceived, as ‘property’, to be bought and sold by men with bridewealth. Llewelyn-Davis argued that ‘elder patriarchs’ used their control of property rights in women, children and livestock to control the production and reproduction of both livestock and human beings. Similarly, in his symbolic analysis of pastoral Maasai ideology, John Galaty contended that Maasai men were the ‘real’ pastoralists, while Maasai women were negatively equated with lower status hunters, providing an ideological explanation for their lower status. Thus, whether they attributed their findings to material or ideological sources (or some combination of the two), few anthropologists questioned the ‘undisputed right’ of contemporary male pastoralists ‘to own women as possessions’.

There is evidence from across the disciplines that at least some of the contemporary regional names of African tribes, dialects and languages are fairly recent inventions in historical terms. This article offers some evidence from Zimbabwe to show that missionary linguistic politics were an important factor in this process. The South African linguist Clement Doke was brought in to resolve conflicts about the orthography of Shona. His Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects (1931) shows how the language politics of the Christian denominations, which were also the factions within the umbrella organization the Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference, contributed quite significantly to the creation and promotion of Zezuru, Karanga and Manyika as the main groupings of dialects in the central area which Doke later accommodated in a unified orthography of a unified language that was given the name Shona. While vocabulary from Ndau was to be incorporated, words from the Korekore group in the north were to be discouraged, and Kalanga in the West was allowed to be subsumed under Ndebele.

Writing about sixty years later, Ranger focusses more closely on the Manyika and takes his discussion to the 1940s, but he also mentions that the Rhodesian Front government of the 1960s and 1970s deliberately incited tribalism between the Shona and the Ndebele, while at the same time magnifying the differences between the regional divisions of the Shona, which were, in turn, played against one another as constituent clans. It would appear then that, for the indigenous Africans, the price of Christianity, Western education and a new perception of language unity was the creation of regional ethnic identities that were at least potentially antagonistic and open to political manipulation.

Through many decades of rather unnecessary intellectual justification, and as a result of the collective colonial experience through the churches, the schools and the workplaces, these imposed identities, and the myths and sentiments that are associated with them, have become fixed in the collective mind of Africa, and the modern nation states of the continent now seem to be stuck with them. Missionaries played a very significant role in creating this scenario because they were mainly responsible for fixing the ethnolinguistic maps of the African colonies during the early phase of European occupation. To a significant degree, these maps have remained intact and have continued to influence African research scholarship.

Linguistic evidence strongly suggests that maize penetrated the interior of tropical Africa from the coastal regions, but the timing and mode of its introduction cannot be established. The commonly repeated assertion that the Portuguese brought maize to tropical Africa from the New World cannot be documented at this juncture, although they seem certainly to have had economic motives for doing so.

Maize was probably introduced to tropical Africa at more than one point and at different times. Maize was widely grown along the coast from the River Gambia to Sâo Tomé, around the mouth of the River Congo, and possibly in Ethiopia, in the sixteenth century. There is reference to it in all these places, in Zanzibar, and around the mouth of the River Ruvuma in the seventeenth century; and it was not only mentioned but described as an important foodstuff and a major provision for slave ships between Liberia and the Niger Delta during the same century.

Much less information is available for the interior, but it clearly seems to have been unknown in Uganda as late as 1861. Until well within the present century, it was neither a major export nor a mainstay of the diet in most of eastern and central tropical Africa, the bulk of the areas where it is now of major importance.

The South African white general election of 1938 was largely fought around a poster. The poster was published by the supporters of D. F. Malan's hard-line Afrikaner Nationalists, who were attempting to unseat the more pro-imperial United Party (UP) government of Hertzog and Smuts. The poster portrayed the alleged threat of ‘mixed’ marriages to Afrikaner women, and attacked the UP for failing to legislate against it. Rejecting J. M. Coetzee's contention that such racist manifestations can solely be understood in terms of the unconscious, the paper argues that shifting gender relations amongst Afrikaners were crucial to this agitation. As young Afrikaner women moved into industry on a large scale during the 1920s and 1930s, men experienced women's greater economic and social independence as a challenge to their authority. Nationalist leaders played successfully on this insecurity by appealing to men to ‘protect’ women against supposed black threats, including ‘mixed’ marriages. The particular campaign of 1938, however, backfired somewhat on the Malanites. The Hertzog and Smuts supporters were divided over the proposal for legislation. But even their liberal faction was against ‘mixed’ marriages; they simply did not see a law as the best way of preventing it. The UP responded to the Nationalist campaign by arguing that white women were being insulted by the mere suggestion that they would marry across the colour line. They used this particular strand of racism to mobilise white women and men against the Nationalists. But the whole affair ultimately smoothed the way for Malan to legislate against ‘mixed’ marriage after he came to power in 1948. The combined effects of both Nationalist and UP campaigns was to strengthen racist opinion about the issue. In order to avoid the divisions in his party on the marriage question, Hertzog handed it over to a Commission of Inquiry. The 1939 De Villiers Report recommended in favour of legislation, but was not acted on because of the break-up of the Hertzog–Smuts government. Yet this UP appointed commission was ultimately used by the Nationalist government as the basis of its own racist marriage legislation.

Between 1929 and 1932 in a number of villages and towns throughout rural Asante, chiefs were ordering the arrest of all women who were over the age of fifteen and not married. A woman was detained until she spoke the name of a man whom she would agree to marry and the man in question paid a release fee. If the man refused, he too was imprisoned or fined up to £5. If he agreed, he paid a small marriage fee to the woman's parents and one bottle of gin. Based on the correspondence of colonial officials, customary court records and the life histories and reminiscences of women who were among the spinsters caught, this article explores gender and social change in colonial Asante by dissecting and contextualizing the round-up of unmarried women. It seeks to understand this unusual episode in direct state intervention into the negotiating of marriage and non-marriage as part of the general chaos in gender relations that shook Asante in the years between the two World Wars. This chaos, often articulated in the language of moral crisis was, more than anything, about shifting power relationships. It was chaos engendered by cash and cocoa, by trade and transformation. From 1921 to 1935, with cocoa well-established in many parts of Asante, women's roles in the cash economy were changing and diversifying. Many wives were making the move from being the most common form of exploitable labour during the initial introduction of cocoa to themselves exploiting new openings for economic autonomy. That women were beginning to negotiate their own spaces within the colonial economy precipitated a profound crisis in conjugal obligations in Asante - a crisis requiring drastic measures. The rounding up of unmarried women was one of several weapons used by Asante's chiefs in the struggle to reassert control over women's productive and reproductive labour.

The historical and social science literature is divided about the importance of metropolitan blueprints of colonial rule for the development of colonial states. We exploit historical records of colonial state finances to explore the importance of metropolitan identity on the comparative development of fiscal institutions in British and French Africa. Taxes constituted the financial backbone of the colonial state and were vital to the state building efforts of colonial governments. A quantitative comparative perspective shows that pragmatic responses to varying local conditions can easily be mistaken for specific metropolitan blueprints of colonial governance and that under comparable local circumstances the French and British operated in remarkably similar ways.

The major concepts of nationalist political thought in Tanzania formed at the meeting point between local and international understandings of exploitation, and prescriptions for its removal. These ideas were given social form through a politics of enmity concerned with defining enemies of the nation and creating corresponding purge categories. Acquiring urban citizenship in Tanzania required the demonstrated commitment to fight exploitation for a party and state hostile to urban growth. While such ideas formed the boundaries of legitimate political debate, Africans struggling to lay claim to urban life appropriated nationalist idioms to lampoon official pieties and make sense of class differentiation in a socialist country.

The East African ivory trade is an ancient one: East African ivory is soft ivory and is ideal for carving, and was always in great demand. It figures prominently in the earliest reference to trading activities on the East African Coast. But the great development came in the nineteenth century when an increased demand for ivory in America and Europe coincided with the opening up of East Africa by Arab traders and European explorers. The onslaught on the ivory resources of the interior took the form of a two-way thrust—from the north by the Egyptians who penetrated into the Sudan and Equatoria, and by the Arabs from the east coast of Africa. The establishment of European protectorates and a settled administration in the 1890s ended this exploitation.

During the nineteenth century ivory over-topped all rivals in trade value— even slaves. The uses of ivory were wide and novel—it played the same part in the nineteenth century as do plastics in the mid-twentieth—but it was always a much more expensive article.

Linguistic studies are now advanced enough to allow us to sketch how Central Africa was settled by farmers who spoke western Bantu languages. From the second millenium B.C. onward, yarn-growers with neolithic tools spread in the rain-forests of the Cameroons. By adapting repeatedly to different environments they expanded over the whole forest area and also over the savannas and woodlands further south. These people were in search of optimal environments, quite willing to move to settle in favoured locales. Although they multiplied there, their expansion over such huge areas meant that their settlements remained very thinly scattered over Central Africa.

A thickening of settlement would only occur when new crops – the banana in the rain-forest, cereals in more open lands – allowed farmers to settle in most places. Iron-smelting was less important here than these new crops. These induced further population growth, densities rose and movements in search of the best unknown lands ceased. If the first settlement had only moderately inconvenienced the autochthones, the thickening of population led in time to their absorption, dependence on villagers, or emigration in search of ever-decreasing empty areas.

This article deals with climatic reconstruction over a period of centuries, on the basis of indirect evidence found in historical and geographical sources. Histories, archives, local chronicles and journals of travellers and settlers contain references to lakes, landscapes, famines, droughts and floods, as well as occasional descriptions of climate and meteorological measurements. Such information can be combined with evidence from geology, palynology or the study of tree-rings to support hypotheses regarding climate and environment several centuries ago.

This methodology is here described and used to reconstruct the trend of rainfall fluctuation in Africa over the past millennium. Two approaches are considered: the one seeks to determine absolute variation (thus assessing whether particular episodes were wetter or drier than today); the other focuses on short-term climatic anomalies (e.g. droughts) in which rainfall differed from the mean prevailing at the time, without seeking to relate them to present conditions.

The results obtained from this study suggest that during the past millennium there have been two periods of relatively wet conditions in the semi-arid regions south of the Sahara: between the eighth and fourteenth centuries, and between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Evidence for these episodes, and for synchronous fluctuations elsewhere in Africa is presented in the text.

This article examines the way in which Christianity and Kongo religion merged to produce a syncretic result. After showing that the Kongo church grew up under the supervision and direction of Kongo authorities rather than missionaries, it will track how local educational systems and linguistic transformations accommodated the differences between the two religious traditions. In Kongo, many activities associated with the traditional religion were attacked as witchcraft without assigning any part of the traditional religion to this category. It also addresses how Kongo religious thinkers sidestepped questions of the fate of the dead and the virginity of Mary when harmonizing them would be too difficult.

Studies of slavery in Africa during the period of the Atlantic slave trade have largely ignored questions of how political processes affected enslavement during the period and also the extent to which notions of who could be enslaved were modified. Documentation for the kingdom of Kongo during the 1500s to 1800 allows us to explore how the trade was sustained and the social and political dynamics behind it. In a state that consistently exported large numbers of slaves throughout the period of the trade, kings of Kongo at first observed quite a pronounced distinction between foreign-born captives subject to enslavement and sale in the Atlantic trade and freeborn Kongos who were largely proctected from enslavement and sale overseas. In time, however, the distinctions that separated foreign-born and Kongos fell apart as later political authorities and others disregarded such distinctions and all Kongos became subject to enslavement and sale overseas. This was a product of internal Kongo conflicts, which witnessed the collapse of institutions and the redefinition of polity, what it meant to be a citizen or freeborn, and who could be enslaved.

It has been argued that forced labour in British West Africa did not extend to recruitment for commercial companies. One case that appears to have been overlooked is that of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast where, at various times between 1906 and 1924, recruitment for the privately-owned gold mines of the Tarkwa-Prestea area was associated with government recruitment for public works—itself on the shadowy borderline between ‘communal’ and ‘forced’ labour.

Organized recruitment for the mines was adjudged necessary because of the reluctance of local labour to work underground. The independent attitudes of even recruited labour led the mines to associate their requests for organized recruitment with pressure for much tighter labour discipline, including bringing suits for breach of contract under criminal law and the introduction of a pass law and compound system. However, these schemes were rejected by the government.

The period of greatest government assistance to mine recruitment, 1920–4, ended when the high death rate among labourers at the mines was revealed and the government suspended recruitment. It is the contention of this paper that the high death rate was due not only to poor health conditions at the mines, but also to forced recruitment in a situation where there was considerable voluntary labour migration. Under these circumstances the chiefs were obliged to supply the weaker members of the community.

In Angola, climatic instability contributed to maintaining a precarious balance between food resources, population and disease long before the nineteenth century. Periods of exceptionally irregular rainfall, lasting several years, were preceded or accompanied by plagues of locusts which caused famines at least once every decade. The coastal lowland and the extreme south were especially vulnerable. Prolonged hunger crises led to malnutrition, lowered resistance to disease and epidemic outbreaks, especially of smallpox. A rhythm of drought and smallpox can be discerned in Angola, at least since the seventeeth century. From the 1830s the gradual decline of the overseas slave trade and rise of commerce in raw materials and cash crops brought important demographic changes. These contributed to the worsening famines and epidemic crises of the late nineteenth century. Commercial instability and rural depopulation hindered the growth of Portuguese plantation prosperity. Soon after, however, similar crises aided Portuguese military conquest in Angola by weakening African ability to mobilize effective resistance. In the twentieth century malnutrition continued to be the most widespread problem of Angola's Africans and on occasion it drove them to revolt.

The most fruitful approaches to the study of slave resistance in the New World have involved examination of the slaves' struggles to create and control institutions of community and kinship in the face of planters' attempts to suppress local social reproduction altogether. Africanists who would attempt similar analysis of rebellious slave consciousness are hampered by the tradition of functionalist anthropology which dominates studies of African culture, especially Miers and Kopytoff's thesis of the integrative nature of African slavery. By contrast, more class-oriented approaches to studies of African slave resistance assume too stark a division between the consciousness of slaves and the consciousness of masters. It is suggested that Gramsci's concepts of hegemony and contradictory popular consciousness can be used to reconcile the cultural sensitivity of the first approach with the concern of the second for issues of domination and struggle. Thus a more nuanced view of slave consciousness might be reached.

The case studied involves resistance to the rapid rise of sugar plantations on the northern Tanzania coast in the late nineteenth century. Miers and Kopytoff's model of the ‘reduction of marginality’ is modified to accommodate a process of conflict, as slaves struggled to gain access to institutions of Swahili prestige and citizenship and as their masters struggled to exclude them. Analysis of a large-scale slave rebellion in 1873 reveals that the consciousness of the rebels was couched in the local ‘traditional’ language of a moral economy of patrons and clients. Although this language was expressive of some of the hegemonic ideas of the emergent planter class, it was also openly rebellious. It expressed neither a slave class-consciousness nor simply the ideology of the dominant planter class but was instead a contradictory consciousness of the type that Gramsci discerned in other movements of agrarian rebellion.

A history of food systems in Africa's Great Lakes region is presented using mostly historical linguistic sources, with help from archaeology and paleoecology. The paper moves beyond understanding the causes and consequences of iron-working as the most important feature of the period between c. 1000 b.c. and c. a.d. 500. I argue that a history of agriculture both gives context to changes in technology and introduces powerful new explanations for historical processes of settlement and occupational specialization that took place.

Between 1000 b.c. and 500 b.c., in the Great Lakes region, speakers of three of Africa's four major language families practiced distinguishable food-producing systems. Two groups, Central Sudanian and Sog Eastern Sudanian, depended mainly on growing cereals and raising livestock for their sustenance. The third group, the Tale Southern Cushites, gave decidedly greater emphasis to cattle but probably also grew grains. A fourth group, the Great Lakes Bantu, grew root crops, fished and raised cattle and grain. They inherited much of their knowledge of these techniques, other than cattle-raising, from earlier Eastern Highlands Bantu-speakers. But they incorporated cattle and some grains through longstanding contacts with the two Sudanian and the Southern Cushitic communities. The eclectic food system they thus created allowed them to carry their unified, complex food-producing system throughout the wide variety of environments that they encountered in the Lakes region. After c.a.d. 200 descendants of the Great Lakes Bantu refined this synthesis; they emphasized livestock raising inland from Lake Victoria, and mixed farmers spread throughout the Kivu Rift. Technological, demographic, ecological and sociological explanations of the technological evidence are offered.

The Early Iron Age people appear to have been responsible for the introduction into Zambia of pot-making, metallurgy and, less certainly, food production. Recent research has greatly increased the known number of Early Iron Age sites in Zambia and a number of regional variants have been defined, based largely on the typology of the associated pottery. Radiocarbon dates suggest that these groups are all to be dated to the first millennium a.d. and that they are contemporary with, and related to, the earliest known Iron Age in Rhodesia and some East African sites. It is suggested that the Early Iron Age people slowly spread into eastern Africa from an area west of Lake Tanganyika during the first few centuries a.d. Some related sites are known from this westerly region. This hypothesis can be compared with Oliver's interpretation of Guthrie's linguistic evidence; but the use of archaeological and linguistic arguments together is impossible until proof is available that the Early Iron Age people spoke Bantu languages.

This paper is a review of the course of research during the past decade into the history of indigenous metal working in sub-Saharan Africa. It comprises three sections: a summary of the chronology of early metallurgy and the spread of metal working; a description of African metal working in terms of mining, smelting and smithing, with particular emphasis on recent interpretations of the iron-smelting technology; and a conclusion summarizing the main developments and some lines of future enquiry. A glossary of technical terms used in this paper is appended.

From the early 1940s Gusiiland (Kenya) underwent a series of transformations that pushed bridewealth to unheralded levels. As a result, many young couples could not afford a proper marriage and eloped. Some fathers forced their daughters into marriages with men wealthy enough to give cattle; many of these women ran off instead with more desirable men. In the hundreds of resulting court cases, Gusii debated the relative weight to be given to bridewealth, parental approval and female consent in marriage. Young people did not reject marriage, but fought against senior men who would ignore women's wishes. Gusii court elders usually agreed with fathers and husbands but also believed that female consent did carry some significance.