The Xhosa cattle-killing movement of 1856–7 cannot be explained as a superstitious ‘pagan reaction’to the intrusion of colonial rule and Christian civilization. It owes its peculiar form to the lungsickness epidemic of 1854, which carried off over 100,000 Xhosa cattle. The Xhosa theory of disease indicated that the sick cattle had been contaminated by the witchcraft practices of the people, and that these tainted cattle would have to be slaughtered lest they infect the pure new cattle which were about to rise.

The idea of the resurrection of the dead was partly due to the Xhosa belief that the dead do not really die or depart from the world of the living, and partly to the Xhosa myth of creation, which held that all life originated in a certain cavern in the ground which might yet again pour forth its blessings on the earth. Christian doctrines, transmitted through the prophets Nxele and Mhlakaza, supplemented and elaborated these indigenous Xhosa beliefs. The Xhosa and the Christian elements united together in the person of the expected redeemer Sifuba-sibanzi (the broad-chested one). The central beliefs of the Xhosa cattle-killing were neither irrational nor atavistic. Ironically, it was probably because they were so rational and so appropriate that they ultimately proved to be so deadly.

Historians of slavery in Africa have long struggled to recover the voices of enslaved people. In this article, an unusual set of sources found in Timbuktu (Mali) reveals the existence of a stratum of literate, Muslim slaves who wrote and received letters written in Arabic. These letters make it possible to probe the Islamic rhetoric used by Muslim slaves and ask how enslaved people who adopted Islam understood their faith. Did Muslim slaves arrive at different interpretations of Islam than those Muslims who were free? Using the correspondence of two slaves who worked as agents in their master's commercial activities in the Niger Bend and Central Sahara during the second half of the nineteenth century, this article demonstrates the extent to which Muslim slaves used appeals to their own piety in attempting to carve out a certain amount of social autonomy. For these Muslim slaves, Islam could be made to serve both spiritual and practical ends. And yet, this did not require slaves to interpret Islam in ways that rejected the legitimacy of slavery.

La peur de la domination de la tribu Ibo constitua l'une des raisons majeures pour la décision du Sud-Cameroun Britannique à voter en 1961 pour quitter le Nigéria complètement et de s'unir avec la République du Cameroun. Dès les années 1920, après que la Grande-Bretagne avait obtenu un mandat international sur un part de l'ancienne colonie allemande, elle le gouvernait comme apanage du Nigéria, et le développement, que ce soit économique ou culturel, était très tardif. Les indigènes faisaient concurrence à grande peine aux immigrants du Nigéria, surtout les Ibos, dont la résilience et l'ingéniosité dans le commerce, alliés à leur manque de modestie dans le succès, provoquaient l'envie. Les politiciens camerounais contribuaient aux stéréotypes ethniques en incitant des rumeurs fantasques. Certes, des autres rivalités importaient aussi, mais dans les élections de 1954, 1957 et 1959 le mécontentement avec les liaisons au Nigéria fut clairement associé aux sentiments anti-Ibo.

Information collected in the field and careful reading of Ibn Battuta's account of his travels does not support Delafosse's usually accepted opinion on Battuta's itinerary. Several pieces of evidence point towards the identification of Zaġari with Diara (Kingi) rather than with Dia (Masina). Such an itinerary would lead further to the west. Information given about the return journey seems also to indicate that Ibn Battuta's destination, Malli, should be located between the southern part of Bambuk and the upper Gambia rather than at the site of Niani.

The Vai of northwestern Liberia speak a Northern Mande language, fairly closely related to Manding. Previous attempts to date the breakaway of the Vai from their Manding homeland have been unconvincing. The most we can say is that they probably reached the coast more than 500 years ago. The leaders of the Mani or Kquoja invasion of Sierra Leone in the mid-sixteenth century almost certainly spoke a contemporary version of Vai.

There is little evidence of a direct connexion between the movement of the Vai towards the coast and that of the Ligbi towards eastern Ivory Coast, despite linguistic similarities. More probably the Vai entered present-day Sierra Leone in company with the Kono. Traditions that the Kono were ‘left behind’ sound misleading: it is more likely that the Kono, Vai and speakers of the now extinct ‘ Dama’ language formed a continuous band from eastern Sierra Leone to the sea, cutting off the Gola and Kisi from other Mel speakers. Later (perhaps before the mid-seventeenth century) this band must have been split by the westward movement of Southwestern Mande speakers.

The ‘migration’ of the Vai need not have involved a mass exodus or conquest. What was probably involved was the gradual creation of trade corridors, with a few Northern Mande speakers resident on the coast and a large number carrying salt, dried fish and other wares from the coast towards the head of the Niger. Although the corridors were eventually to some extent disrupted, the Vai language survived near the coast, because of its importance in trade and because links with the Manding were never entirely severed.

Namibian politics and society are today dominated by people who trace their descent from the settlements and homesteads of Ovamboland in southern Angola and northern Namibia. Yet, prior to 1915, and the defeat by South Africa of the German colonial army in German South-West Africa, very few Ovambo had settled in areas to the south of the Etosha Pan. In 1915, a Portuguese expeditionary army defeated Kwanyama forces in southern Angola, and unleashed a flood of refugees into northern Namibia. These refugees entered an area that was already overstretched. Since 1912 the rains had failed and, on account of the First World War, trade and migration had come to a standstill. As a result the area was experiencing its most devastating famine ever. Unable to find sanctuary in Ovamboland, thousands of people trekked southwards into central Namibia, an area which had only just come under the control of South Africa. The famine allowed for the easy entrance of South African military administrators and labour recruiters into Ovamboland and heralded the demise of Ovambo independence. By focusing on developments in the central Namibian town of Karibib between 1915 to 1916, the article explores the move of the Ovambo into central and southern Namibia. It traces the impact of war and drought on Ovambo societies, and follows Ovambo famine migrants on their route south into areas administered by the South African military administration. Discussion also concentrates on the reception and treatment of Ovambo famine migrants in the Karibib settlement, and argues that the refugee crisis heralded the establishment of Ovambo in modern central and southern Namibia.

The study of the history of Africa during World War I raises two major problems of synthesis and a host of smaller problems. First of all, the sheer diversity of the continent and the extremely uneven nature of its precolonial development, let alone the patchy and differentiated modes of imperial and colonial penetration, make it difficult to see its experience, even of so ostensibly cataclysmic an event as World War I, as a unified whole. Indeed, the diversity of the continent was mirrored in the diversity of its experience of the war, which combined the actual agony of the battlefield for many thousands of black troops both in Africa and in Europe at one extreme, with the undoubted uneventfulness of those same years for many others.

This article attempts to trace the origins of Mau Mau movement in Nakuru, the capital of the White Highlands, and to follow its development through the turbulent post-war years. Mau Mau here is seen as a distinct militant movement which advocated the use of violence in the anti-colonial struggle. It developed within the ranks of the Kikuyu Central Association whose moderate political strategy it rejected. It had a distinct social basis, both its leadership and its mass support coming from the ranks of the dispossessed urban Kikuyu lumpenproletariat. Mau Mau emerged, by 1952, as the dominant African political force at the cost of alienating most non-Kikuyu tribes, and intensifying divisions and hatreds within Kikuyu society. Although Mau Mau did not have definite plans for a large-scale guerrilla war when the State of Emergency was declared in October 1952, nor was it prepared for such a war, it was certainly developing along these lines. There was a large measure of continuity between pre-Emergency Mau Mau and the forces which were later engaged in the forest fighting. The forest fighting was primarily a response, not of the bewildered Kikuyu masses, but of an organized militant and violent movement. It is not suggested that Nakuru's model applies to other Kikuyu areas. On the contrary, it is suggested that the full story of Mau Mau in Kenya will be revealed only after a series of intensive local studies have been undertaken.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, European missionaries in southern Africa sought to establish their intellectual and moral authority over Africans and propagate the tenets of Christianity. Men like Jacob Döhne, Robert Moffat, John Colenso, Henry Callaway and others viewed a knowledge of African languages as key to disclosing ‘the secrets of national character’, to the translation and transmittal of ideas about the Christian ‘God’, and to accepting the ‘literal truth’ of the Bible. Africans, especially the Zulu king, Dingane, disputed these teachings in discussions about the existence of God, suitable indigenous names for such a being (including uThixo, modimo, and unkulunkulu), and his attributes (all-powerful, or merely old), arguing for the significance of metaphor rather than literalness in understanding the world.

F. S. Malan's role, and the influence of the Cape ‘liberal’ tradition in the post-Union era, have been seriously under-estimated. As Minister of Mines and Industries and effective Minister of Native Affairs, Malan was responsible for the passage of a comprehensive system of labour legislation between 1913 and 1924, linked to a new initiative in ‘native policy’ in urban areas. The limitations of such an initiative must, however, not be lost sight of, for in the last analysis few of the Cape ‘liberals’ would have been prepared to face the full social and economic, let alone the political implications of a multi-racial society, and Malan was no exception. His initiative can best be seen as differing in tone rather than in substance from the politics of his colleagues. In his defence of the Cape franchise, Malan sought to defend African citizenship rights within a limited ‘political’ context. It was only during the brief period after 1918 that he attempted a settlement of race and industrial problems, but even then, as a Cape ‘liberal’, he never challenged the basis of the status quo in South Africa. Yet it is still true to say that he was ousted from party politics in the Union after 1924 largely because he persistently adhered to a different political tradition to that held by those who led both the SAP and the National Party.

The survival of the Semitic-speaking, Muslim townsmen of Harär in the midst of animist Oromo (Galla) who migrated into the eastern highlands of modern Ethiopia in the late sixteenth century and settled as pastoralists is something of an anomaly, at least in the eastern Rift. Other pre-migration settlements of Muslim farmer-traders, presumably also speaking a southern Semitic language, appear to have been submerged and displaced. The Haräri's good fortune is not to be explained by their use of firearms and simple fortifications. Economic interdependence, the awe the newcomers felt for the town's saints and the greater cohesion of the townspeople probably played a greater role than mere self-defence.

A balance of power was needed, however, if the town was not to be swamped. This equilibrium seems to have been upset at the very time that the trade of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden was revived by Egypt in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Neither the succession to the amirate of pacifist princes nor the betrayal of the town to outsiders by the half-Oromo ruler, Amir Muhammad ibn Ali (1856–75), can correctly be blamed for this reverse although these are the excuses given in Haräri tradition. Rather, the repeated appeal to sections of the Oromo by factions within the town in struggles for the throne from the 1820s led to the Haräri becoming clients to neighbours who were still overwhelmingly animist herders little concerned with the commerce on which the townsmen's prosperity depended and little attracted to the titles and Muslim insignia with which the amirs rewarded those of the cultivating Oromo minority who paid taxes and rents in grain and supplied the town with other foodstuffs and its market with crops for export.

Though denigrated in the town's traditions, Amir Muhammad ibn Ali began the systematic proselytization of the surrounding Oromo and sought to induce more of them to cultivate crops for sale. Conversion and farming for the town's market, along with the appointment from the town of officials to replace the Oromo's elected officers, were the means by which, during the Turco-Egyptian occupation (1875–85), rulers with greater military resources obliged the confederation of the four great Oromo clans around the town (the Afran-Qallu) to adopt a way of life more in harmony with the interests of the townsmen. Despite the conquest of Harär and the surrounding Oromo and Somali by non-urban, Christian Ethiopians in the brief reign of Muhammad Ali's son, Amir Abdallahi (1885–7), the Islamic and mercantile legacy of the town was deeply enough rooted by then to flourish among the Afran-Qallu and to distinguish them, like the Haräri themselves, from their conquerors.

The Tea Industry in the Cholo and Mlanje districts of southern Nyasaland emerged during the 1930s under the shelter of the International Tea Regulation Scheme of 1933 which restricted exports by the world's leading producers. In contrast to its East African neighbours, Nyasaland's Tea Industry was well organized locally by the Nyasaland Tea Association and was effectively represented in Britain by its London Committee. Though having to accept restrictions on the planting of new tea, which occasioned some local controversy, the industry, in common with other tea-producing countries, benefited from the rising prices of the 1930s for which the Tea Regulations were largely responsible. By 1938 tea had become one of Nyasaland's few profitable industries. A seeming further advantage was the bulk buying scheme, at guaranteed prices, organized by the British Ministry of Food which lasted throughout the 1940s, but the industry's wartime performance was sluggish as a consequence of poor growing seasons combined with serious shortages of manpower and fertilizer. As a poor quality, low price producer facing chronic labour shortages, which prevented millions of pounds of tea from being picked, Nyasaland greeted with hostility Imperial decisions to withdraw eastern Africa from the International Tea Scheme in 1948, to end bulk buying in 1950, and generally to encourage the free expansion of production. Nyasaland's tea planters were told that henceforth they must face open competition.

Ijo oral traditions were generally remembered by elders and a small number of specialists, such as priests and drummers. All members of an Ijo community were also expected to know the traditions of origin of their lineage and Ibe. The institutions and rituals for the ancestors (kings and founders of lineages) also served as concrete reminders of the past.

Chronological distortions alleged to characterize Ijo traditions are shown to derive from a failure to take a sufficient number of samples of the various traditional sources and types.

Analysed for content, Ijo traditions of origin suggest a number of centres of dispersion. Instead of migrations from the hinterland, a fringe belt occupied by Ijo and hinterland peoples is revealed. Bronzes discovered at a number of sites indicate early contacts with Benin and other neighbours. But these bronzes as well as the dispersion centres call for archaeological investigation.

This essay draws on documents relating to a single extraordinary episode, and on supporting materials, to illustrate aspects of the mentalités of slaves, slave-owners, and Protectors of Slaves in the British South African colony of the Cape of Good Hope. The narrative follows the story of a slave, Mey, who was harshly beaten twice within six days in 1832. Mey, and several other slaves who had been whipped for the same offence, accepted the first punishment; Mey complained about the second, which he alone suffered, to a colonial official called the Protector of Slaves. The Protector vigorously investigated the complaint. Mey's master, Hendrik Albertus van Niekerk, co-operated only reluctantly with the investigation. As the Protector pursued the case, van Niekerk suddenly brought it to an end by manumitting Mey, giving cash compensation to the other slaves he had whipped, and paying legal fines.

The behaviour of each of the men fails to conform to the roles conventional wisdom has prepared for masters, slaves, and colonial officials. The essay demonstrates that the men were not eccentric, but that they were both rational and representative of their class. Mey acted as he did because the slaves had developed a ‘moral economy of the lash’ and because the second beating fell outside the boundaries of acceptable punishment by those standards. The Protector prosecuted van Niekerk with determination because he believed the punishment had been brutal and capricious and because Mey was a good slave who had been wronged. Hendrik Albertus freed Mey and compensated the other slaves because he refused to accept the legitimacy of the Protector. He settled the case before he was forced to visit the Protector's office or face Mey in court. To have honored the law and to have answered Mey's charge directly would have been to dishonor himself. He would have compromised the power and authority on which his honor as a slave-owner rested. Hendrik Albertus valued his honor more highly than one slave and a few pounds Sterling.

Almost a century ago, Edward W. Blyden evolved a philosophy of Africanism which foreshadowed many concepts of today's African intellectual leaders. Basing his system of thought on the notion that racial qualities were exclusive and complementary, he urged the African to cultivate his own qualities and avoid bad imitations of the characteristics of other races. A deep religiousness and close communion with nature had developed in Africa a humanitarian regard for social responsibilities and personal relations conspicuously absent in materialistic Europe. The African needed only to follow his natural instinct and to reaffirm his own values in order to regain his ancient sense of dignity and once again make his unique contribution to world culture.

A partir de sources orales et d'archives foncières, fiscales et administratives, cet essai sur la propriété africaine rend compte des pratiques foncières, résidentielles et sociales d'un groupe de commerçants africains qui investirent, durant la période coloniale, les quartiers européens de Ouagadougou et de Bobo-Dioulasso en Haute-Volta. La comparaison de ces villes inégalement insérées dans les circuits de l'économie coloniale renseigne sur les marges de manœuvre de ces commerçants, et notamment de leurs aptitudes à jouer des différentes réglementations foncières alors en vigueur. Au-delà des comportements collectifs qui révèlent généralement un double investissement résidentiel (centre européen/quartiers africains), les stratégies individuelles témoignent des liens fréquents entre l'assise foncière des propriétaires, leur envergure sociale et leur rôle politico-administratif.

The Nandi protest of 1923 is examined in its Kenya-wide context and is seen to be the result of the increased pressures brought to bear on Kenya Africans in this period—pressures for African land, labour and taxes, which greatly affected the Nandi as well as other peoples. The Nandi political protest to colonial policies in this period, in contrast to that of the Kikuyu, however, focused on the traditional leadership of the Nandi orkolyot, or ritual expert, and, as such, mirrors the relative lack of socio-cultural change in Nandi before 1923, and the continuing viability of the traditional Nandi economy and political structure. Squatting, which began in this period, is seen as a key factor contributing to this viability, at the same time as it presented new threats to Nandi economic independence, which the political protest centred on orkoiyot Barserion attempted to counter. An examination of the Nandi protest of 1923, therefore, also contributes to an understanding of the political expression of that sector of the African population which has often been ignored in studies of the origin of political protest in Kenya.