AMONG the most critical effects of labour migrancy on a labour reserve economy in southern Africa are the psychological and economic implications the dependence on migrants' earnings, and the prolonged absence of men at the labour centres, have for women. Lesotho is one such case. But Basotho women, for their part, developed various survival strategies in response to their social and economic predicament. Judy Kimble and Philip Bonner have pioneered the study of these responses, but they made no effort to look at the strategies of the women remaining at home. When scholarly attention has been given to the latter category of women, the focus has been on the period after 1940. This study, by focusing on the engagement of Basotho women in commercial beer-brewing and prostitution in Lesotho before the Second World War, intends to address this lacuna. An attempt will also be made to link the rise of these phenomena to social and economic changes in colonial Lesotho, particularly the deepening of dependency on the migrant labour system.

This article argues that the !Kora, an essentially Khoisan group in central South Africa, consisted not of hereditary tribes, but of people who had chosen a predatory, raiding way of life. It then traces the history of those !Kora who were based on the jungle-covered islands of the middle Orange river, concentrating particularly on the three wars that occurred between them and the Cape Colony: in 1832–4, when the !Kora were led by Stuurman, 1868–9, when they were under Piet Rooi and Jan Kivido, and the final episodes during 1879–80. Pointing out the difficulty that the colonial forces had in reducing the islands, it shows how the !Kora were able to raid up to 250 kilometers across the Bushmanland Flats, and thus make colonial subsistence over a wide area of the northern Cape Colony non-viable. Nevertheless, it argues that the way of life that the !Kora had chosen could not be sustained in face of the consolidation of colonial society, and describes the processes whereby they were destroyed.

Colonial forest reservation in the Benin Division of southern Nigeria was remarkably extensive, with reserves taking up almost 65 per cent of the Division by 1937. This paper explores both the various strategies employed by the colonial government in order to bring about large scale reservation and the role of reservation in changing land politics. In doing so, it provides nuanced insights into the interaction between the colonial government and local rulers under indirect rule. It shows that both Oba Eweka II (1914–33) and Oba Akenzua II (1933–79) supported reservation for strategic reasons, but also highlights the government's many underhand tactics in dealing with the Obas.

This article deals with the 1958 referendum that the French held in Niger to gain approval for the Fifth Republic and reorganization of their empire. It reassesses the French record in Niger, where more people voted ‘No’ – in favour of immediate independence – than in other territories, except Guinea. It does this on the basis of research on the history of the Sawaba movement, which led Niger's autonomous government until the plebisicite. It shows that the French forcibly intervened in the referendum to realize a ‘Yes’ vote and preserve Niger for their sphere of influence after independence in 1960. In detailing the violence and manipulation of the referendum and its aftermath, the article criticizes a revisionist viewpoint which disputed the significance of French intervention. The analysis draws on research on the Sawaba movement, benefiting from insights of social history into the grassroots forces in the nationalist movements of the 1950s. It discusses the historiography of Niger's referendum in relation to new archival sources and memoirs, drawing parallels with other territories, notably Guinea. It concludes that France's interventions in 1958 are crucial for understanding the long-term consequences of the transformations of the independence era.

This essay traces economic and social change in early modern Morocco from the perspective of the leaders and followers of the Nās˙iriyya, one of the largest sufi orders in North Africa. It suggests that people's social strategies for gaining access to productive resources acted as an important locus of change. Donations to the order provided clients access to mediation, protection, enforcement, credit, supernatural power and political influence, but also made them increasingly dependent on Nās˙iri leaders. Major shifts in Morocco's political economy, however, refocused strategies of resource access and social mobility. Growing international trade encouraged commercialization, specialization and competition between groups for access to markets, political favors and tax breaks.

This paper examines the internal disputes which the Ọyọ kingdom suffered during the eighteenth century, and which had as their ultimate issue a coup d'état in ca. 1796 which is traditionally held to mark the beginning of the disintegration of the kingdom. The troubles began with a conflict within the capital of the kingdom, between the Alafin (king) and the Ọyọ Mesi, a group of non-royal chiefs led by the Baṣọrun, and the first phase of the troubles culminated in 1754 in a seizure of power by the Baṣọrun. It is suggested that this struggle between the Alafin and his chiefs had its origins in competition for control of the new sources of wealth derived from the expansion of the kingdom. In 1774 the Alafin overthrew the Baṣọrun and recovered power in the capital by calling in the assistance of the subject towns of the kingdom. It is argued that this action proved fatal to the Ọyọ kingdom, by involving the rulers of the provincial towns in the political disputes of the capital and revealing the military impotence of the divided capital. In ca. 1796 the provincial rulers intervened at the capital on the other side, assisting the Baṣọrun to overthrow the Alafin. But the coalition of dissident metropolitan chiefs and dissident provincial chiefs immediately broke up, and many of the latter began to disregard the divided capital and make themselves independent.

Uganda is a green and fertile country; a land of dense forests, banana gardens, and elephant grass; but there is, in the north-east corner, bordering Kenya and the Sudan, a district which for many months of the year is brown and dry. This is Karamoja. Karamoja forms a barrier between the abundance of Uganda and the sparseness of the desert and semidesert, which sweep from the Horn of Africa, across the north of Kenya, to the escarpment of the Rift Valley, which is the eastern boundary of Karamoja itself. The District, which is one and a half times the size of Wales but with a population of only 172,000, consists of wide, thorn scrub covered plains broken by large volcanic mountain masses. Across the plains the tribes of Karamoja, the Dodoth, the Jie, the Karamojong, and the Suk, herd their cattle. Cattle are the basis of their life and their culture. It is for their cattle that during the dry season they wander over the great plains in search of water and grass. It is for their cattle, to defend their pasture, and to increase the herds, that the tribes fight and steal from each other. Like many of Africa's cattle tribes they have not taken to westernization. They present for Uganda the problem, common to many African states, of a proud pastoral people who do not fit into the new Africa of nationalism, constitutional changes and subtle voting arrangements.

In May 1941, after the Italians' capitulation, the British immediately took over the administration of Eritrea for the duration of the war and until an international body could decide the former colony's future. From 1941 to 1950, the political direction of Eritrea remained uncertain until the U.N. commission reached its compromise solution. Ultimately, the Ethiopian Government contravened the U.N. agreement and unilaterally annexed Eritrea in 1962, which set in motion the present struggle for independence.

The British Military Administration, acting as an interim government, attempted with moderate success to create an atmosphere in which all people of Eritrea might have the maximum voice in determining their political future. From the end of the war through the arrival of the U.N. commission in February 1950, there was a flurry of political activity. Although initially five political parties were formed, which in time became splintered and re-emerged as other parties, two main groups could be distinguished along geographical boundaries: the lowlands versus the highlands, separatist Muslims versus irredentist Christians. The historical suspicion and aloofness between Orthodox and Muslims continued to divide Eritrean loyalties. Affiliation, however, with one or another political party was not observed strictly on geographical or religious grounds. A small number of educated Orthodox saw no advantage in Eritrea's incorporation into Ethiopia and thus formed a pocket of Christian separatists who would have undoubtedly obtained greater allegiance had not the Orthodox priesthood threatened excommunication for anyone not espousing the Unionist cause. On the other hand a small nucleus of Muslims, mostly chiefs and landed aristocracy, favored union with the government in Addis Ababa, for their feudalistic hold on the large number of Tigrai serfs (numbering three-fifths of all Muslims in Eritrea) would have been retained under Ethiopian rule.

By the end of 1946, there was widespread but unorganized anti-unionist sentiment; elections held in 1947 by the Four Power Commission showed that a small majority of all Eritreans opposed union. The anti-Unionist cause profited from Ethiopia's intimidation and terrorist interference, which was largely counter-productive; moreover, the irredentist argument failed to convince most Muslims and some Orthodox that Eritrea would prosper under the aegis of one of Africa's least developed countries. It seems clear that terrorism and intimidation were largely Unionist tactics and that the anti-Unionist campaign became popular not so much because of Italian contributions (which were far less than those of the Ethiopian Government to its irredentist cause) but rather because of the grass-roots nature of the Muslim movement.

Unfortunately, the future of Eritrea after two commissions and voluminous reports was decided in the international arena which failed to satisfy either side, but rather planted the seeds for future conflict.

By way of drawing attention to a neglected theme in West African history this article focuses upon southern Saharan society and the intellectual tradition of its scholarly (zawiya and insilimen) lineages. It is argued that societies of the southern Sahara have remarkably similar social, political and economic organizations and that the zawiya/insilimen scholars were therefore the product of comparable political and economic milieus. One result of this was that these scholars, at least by the late eighteenth century, seem to have evolved similar patterns of scholarship which emphasized two highly functional Islamic sciences, jurisprudence and mysticism. It is suggested that this intellectual tradition was shared with other scholars in the desert-edge economic region, and that as a result there existed a basic unity in the intellectual traditions of many western and central Sudanese Islamic communities which is distorted by distinctions between ‘militant’ and ‘quietist’ traditions of legal reform in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century West Africa.

Between the world wars, Colonial Office decisions regarding Kenya were subject to two opposed pressures: while the settlers wrestled with officials for greater control of their own affairs, a body of pro-African reformers loudly protested every concession and lobbied for equal rights and an end to the colour bar. This humanitarian lobby was largely the creation of two former colonial servants, Dr Norman Leys and W. McGregor Ross. Working mainly through the Labour Party, these men broadcast their social democratic ethics and demonstrated that the colony's political economy was badly weighted against African progress. They were the precursors of a more full-bodied socialist approach to colonial reform which during World War Two began to permeate the imperial bureaucracy. Until African initiative became a major determinant of Colonial Office policy in the early 1950s, these critics, with their colleagues in religious and humanitarian groups, were able to hold the front against settler self-government in a few indirect ways. Their allegations that Africans had been unjustly deprived of land and that they received far less in services than they paid in taxes were officially corroborated by command papers in the thirties. By creating a body of pro-African opinion which could exert political pressure on the Colonial Office they discouraged official plans to surrender responsible government to the settlers. Their direct impact on the Colonial Office was simply to alienate officials. Records of the confrontations between these reformers and Whitehall reveal that during this period Colonial Office officials were not only powerless to initiate reform. They were also, with few exceptions, uninterested in reforming the colony's political economy.

Extending the approach of D. Eltis and L. C. Jennings to the seventeenth century, the author takes estimates for the decades 1623–32 and 1680–90 as the starting points for his discussion of trends in the composition and value of the Atlantic imports and exports of Western Africa. Contrary to prevalent opinion, he argues that at least from 1600 onwards the value of slave exports was two to three times higher than that of commodity exports, as measured according to the prices in America and Europe. However, during most of the century more imports were bartered in the commodity trade than in the slave trade, since the trading margin in the latter sector was considerably higher than in the former. The different margins go some way to explaining why the Portuguese concentrated on the slave trade from Angola between 1600 and 1635, which they could carry on with fewer European imports and more effectively protect, while the more efficient Dutch merchants achieved primacy in the competitive commodity trade of West Africa. The different margins also meant a very uneven distribution of imports over coastal regions. Owing to the predominance of Akan gold in the commodity trade, the Gold Coast drew an estimated fifty per cent of all imports at the beginning of the century and still accounted for 34 per cent at the end. Owing to its predominance in the slave trade, West-Central Africa drew 25 per cent of all imports throughout the century. The few available data on the composition of imports suggest that there may have been a shift from metal goods to textiles and a marked increase of Asian textiles and cowries. From 1593 on the Dutch may have initiated a shift in the gross barter terms of trade in favour of the African merchants which spread from the Gold Coast to other areas when the North-west Europeans obtained the major share in the Atlantic slave trade.

This article draws on archival sources and oral histories to describe changing post-colonial land management in the North Pare Mountains of Tanzania. The independent state transformed colonial institutions but did not maintain colonial common property regimes for water source, irrigation and forest management. Farmers responded by encroaching upon and dividing the commons. After 1967, Tanzania's socialist policies affected environmental conditions in North Pare indirectly by increasing the ambiguity and negotiability of resource entitlements. The material, social and cultural legacies of these processes include environmental change, declining management capacity and persistent doubt about the value of ‘conservation’.

In the belief that the results of this system of absolute dating are of considerable interest to historians and others concerned with the pre-colonial history of Africa, the Journal of African History has decided to publish from time to time lists of dates since c. 1000 B.C. which are being established for sub-Saharan Africa by the Radiocarbon (Carbon 14) method. (A description of this technique will be found in Professor F. E. Zeuner's Dating the Past.) The Rhodes-Livingstone Museum has kindly agreed to compile these lists for the Journal, and would be most grateful if those possessing relevant results could send a note of them to the Director, the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum, P.O. Box 124, Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia. The attention of readers is also drawn to the new dates for Southern Rhodesia published in the appendix to Mr Roger Summers'ps article in this number of the Journal.

On 10 June 1894, the British Government, after much hesitation and heart-searching, was finally compelled by circumstances to declare a protectorate over the native kingdom of Buganda. Later in the same year the country between the coast and Buganda on the caravan route up from the coast passed from the control of the Imperial British East Africa Company to that of the Acting Commissioner in Uganda, who was empowered to establish stations in it, under European officers.1

This paper is a comparative study of the impact of colonial rule on two African societies, the Gbaya and the pastoral Fulani, inhabiting the Adamawa Plateau in central Cameroon. The main discussion focuses on the difficulties experienced by the French in their attempts to administer these two politically uncentralized and geographically mobile peoples. Geographical mobility was not the result of population pressure or other ecological constraint but was a political strategy and means of dispute regulation frequently employed by these societies living in a lightly populated region. Conflicting with this structural tendency towards mobility in both societies was the French policy of regroupement, the concentration and resettlement of subject peoples in stable villages. Examination of the historical record reveals that despite more or less stringent attempts on the part of the colonial powers to restructure Gbaya and pastoral Fulani societies along more politically amenable lines, these societies have changed little in this respect up to the present day and continue to pose the same problems of administration for the modern government of the United Republic of Cameroon.

A wide range of contact with other peoples has tended to produce variety and divergence in Igala traditions concerning the origin of the kingship. To select one or other of these traditions for special emphasis, as was done in the past, is to misrepresent the nature of the corpus as a whole. Analysis of this complex body of tradition can be simplified by concentrating on three problems, the problem of divergence, the question of chronology, and the need to distinguish between the historical and the political functions of oral tradition. Divergence in Igala tradition reflects divisions within the clan system on which Igala political structure is based. But these differences of emphasis can be resolved if the time span covered by the legends is properly understood. These traditions open with a mythical or quasi-mythical period in which events are placed without reference to their sequence in time. Mythical thought is concerned with structure in the abstract, with form rather than with process. Thus it is argued that the early period of Igala history, where most of the divergence occurs, demonstrates the interaction of different principles of political growth and change, the time span being defined conventionally by associating each major development with one reign or generation. Dating from archaeological and ethnographic material suggests that a much longer time span is involved in Igala history than might be indicated by a superficial analysis of the oral traditions, based on genealogical counting.

Research in the Northern Province of South Africa has revealed a most surprising new rock art find: a painting of a camel. This paper investigates how and why a camel came to be painted in the remote rock art of the Makgabeng hills. Analysis of archival material allows one to attribute the painting to a Northern Sotho artist who was active in the first decade of the twentieth century. The purpose of the painting is revealed in its context; it forms part of a collection of paintings which ridicule elements of ineptness in the ways of the new white intruders. We argue that this pointed humour helped the Makgabeng community to overcome some of the trauma of the displacement and violence which characterized the era of the first white settlement in northern South Africa.

In explaining how one Oorlam group, the Afrikaners, lost their hegemony in Namaland in the 1860s, this article examines the impact on this region of Oorlam migrations, trade with the Cape and the advent of Christian missionaries. The kinship-based social organization of Nama pastoralists was largely replaced by the ‘commando’ organization, introduced by the Oorlams. By the 1850s, production throughout Namaland was geared less to subsistence than to the demands of Cape traders for cattle, skins and ivory. Raiding and hunting, with imported guns and horses, supplanted local traditions of good husbandry. While foreign traders made large profits, commando groups were locked into a cycle of predatory and competitive expansion. By the early 1860s, such conflict had polarised; the Afrikaners and their allies (including Herero client-chiefs) confronted several Nama/Oorlam chiefs and an army raised by a Cape trader, Andersson. The ensuing battles were not, as has been claimed, a Herero ‘war of liberation’; instead, they marked the replacement of Afrikaner by European hegemony; the country was freer than ever before to be controlled by agents of merchant capital and colonialism.

This essay examines, through taxation, the relationship between British colonial administrators, Tswana Dikgosi (chiefs) and their subjects in the Bechuanaland Protectorate from 1899 to 1957. It argues that since Bechuanaland became a British territory through negotiations the Tswana rulers were able to protect their interests aggressively but with little risk of being deposed. Moreover, the Tswana succession system by primogeniture worked to their advantage whenever the British sought to replace them. Taxation was one arena where this was demonstrated. Although consultation between the Dikgosi, their subjects and the British was common, subordinate tribes sometimes fared badly under Tswana rule.