It is thought that the conquest of the Sudan by Muhammad Ali was motivated primarily by the legendary gold of the Sudan and by the need for manpower for the newly formed Nizam-I-Jadid (the new army). Because of Egypt's involvements in Syria and Arabia in the 1830s, the need for more funds and manpower for the army had increased considerably. The most promising areas for minerals, trade, and slave hunting bordered on the Ethiopian plateau. Those areas were inhabited by a mixed Hamitic and Negroid population, many of whom were Muslims and pagans. These people, although in many cases they did not realize it, were considered by some of the Ethiopian border lords to be their subjects, since the Ethiopian concept of a border was not that of a dividing line but of undefined areas stretching into their neighbours' lands.

The situation in Ethiopia in the first half of the nineteenth century was generally conducive to an Egyptian conquest. The internal wars which had been gaining momentum ever since the middle of the eighteenth century expedited the fragmentation of the country, weakened most of the important provincial rulers, and exhausted the population. The revival of Islam in the beginning of the nineteenth century had an immediate impact upon Ethiopia. Islam was spread in the interior by the trading caravans monopolized by Muslim merchants, and found many followers among the Galla tribes of Ethiopia. Moreover, the actual rulers of the country were the Galla chiefs who had been the guardians of the puppet emperors in Gondar since the end of the eighteenth century; and as they feared the growing pressure of Tigrean and Amhara Christian lords, they were ready, if necessary, to invite the Egyptians to enter Ethiopia. However, the reappearance of European powers in the Red Sea at the beginning of the nineteenth century not only facilitated the acquisition of quantities of firearms by Tigrean and Amhara lords, but above all curbed the expansionist tendencies of Egypt in the direction of Ethiopia. Thus, until the middle of the nineteenth century Egypt had only limited objectives in Ethiopia, namely to establish its authority over the mineral-rich areas on the slopes of the Ethiopian plateau and to control the caravan routes and the outlets of the seemingly rich Ethiopian trade. Nevertheless, the ground was prepared for the clash between Egypt and Ethiopia in the period of Khedive Ismail.

State-controlled cocoa marketing was introduced in the Gold Coast during the Second World War and has had lasting impact. Most accounts of this change have emphasized the influence of metropolitan interests and ideas more conducive to state involvement in colonial economies. Although they explain the new found metropolitan willingness to ‘supply’ financial and administrative backing for state-controlled economic institutions, they neglect the sources of the Gold Coast government’s ‘demand’ for those institutions. I argue that pressures on the government to mitigate domestic social conflict caused by volatility in the world economy are crucial to understanding the shift to controlled cocoa marketing.

Many of the characteristic strains of African Nationalism in South Africa, as were manifest during its peak in the 1950s, may be traced back to the historical situation on the Eastern Frontier of the Cape Colony in the early nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the Port Elizabeth–East London–Alice triangle remained a highly significant area for nationalist ideas and action, and this derived from the effects on the Xhosa of the Black–White confrontation which began here 150 years earlier. In the early part of the nineteenth century the fundamental competition for land and cattle led to White military and missionary actions which, coupled with the preaching of Christianity, promoted attitudes among the Xhosa which may be seen in all subsequent African Nationalism.

This paper challenges the conventional view that the 1907 miners' strike constituted a landmark in the history of Afrikaner employment in the Witwatersrand gold mining industry. According to this view, the participation of Afrikaners during the dispute, as first-time miners and strike-breakers, gained them a permanent and proportionally large niche in the industry, for the first time. In sharp contrast, this paper demonstrates that Afrikaners already constituted a substantial percentage of white underground workers, particularly as a discrete category of workmen, the miners, well before the strike had even begun

The Afrikaner miners lacked training and mining skills. Yet, like the overseas professional miners, most of whom were British-born, they were classed as skilled workmen, eligible for skilled wages. This anomaly occurred because the so-called skills of the overseas professional miners were fragmented by the labour practices peculiar to the Rand. The expertise of the foreign miner derived from his all-round capabilities and experience. These were exclusively defined to constitute his so-called skill, and hence his skilled wage. But on the Witwatersrand, the overseas professional miners were required to draw on only one of their numerous accomplishments in a ‘specialized’, but only semi-skilled, capacity. They were employed either as supervisors of Africans, who performed drilling tasks, or as specialist pit men doing a single pit task among many: pump minding, pipe fitting, timbering or plate laying. Such fragmentation of the foreign miners' a11-round skills facilitated the entry of lesser trained men as miners, notably the Afrikaners.

To become a miner, more specifically a supervisor, the Afrikaner needed only a brief period of specific instruction, which he acquired in one of several ways: through mine-sponsored experiments with unskilled white labour, rather than black; through the informal assistance of qualified miners; and through management-sponsored learner schemes intended to provide a core of compliant Afrikaner miners who would break the monopoly of skills and collective strength of the overseas professional miners. Such training enabled the Afrikaner to earn the compulsory, but readily available, blasting certificate, the award of which was confined to whites. Although most Afrikaners possessed this certificate, the hallmark of a skilled miner, they could not earn the customary white skilled wage because they were obliged to work under a System of contracts and not on day's pay.

The incompetent Afrikaner miners nevertheless obtained billets easily, partly because of the industry's growth, but mainly because the overseas pioneer miners were decimated by the preventable occupational mining disease, silicosis: the locally born simply filled their places. The Afrikaners, of course, were also vulnerable to silicosis; but it was only from 1911 onwards that this gradually developing disease claimed them in significant numbers too.

The overseas miners shunned the Afrikaners not only for ethnic reasons but also for material ones: they feared that the local miners, who were inefficient and had not been trained in the lengthy apprenticeships traditional in the industry, would undercut skilled wage rates. Management also scorned them because of their incompetence. Despite their relatively large numbers – they comprised at least one-third of the miners – the Afrikaners, who were unsuccessful, isolated and spurned, made little impact on the socio-economic and cultural fabric of the industry's work-force, either at the time of the 1907 strike or during its immediate aftermath.

Many observers of Merina history have suggested that the organization of labour required to build and maintain irrigation works for paddy rice growing formed the basis of Merina monarchy. Though little direct evidence is available, inferences from land-use models and consideration of oral traditions and written accounts help to explain why irrigated riziculture became popular and how it spread through the central highlands to Imerina.

Rice had been cultivated on the east coast of Madagascar for centuries and reached Imerina through the southern plateau but the hydraulic technology of Merina paddy rice growing arose from local needs from the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries. As swidden farmers exhausted the forests, paddy rice cultivation and water management systems attending it became increasingly important. Though irrigated riziculture enhanced the value of co-operative labour among hitherto isolated groups within Imerina, it cannot be seen as the direct cause of the monarchy's authority. It is suggested instead that the sacredness of land and the accumulation of rights in newly irrigated land by those who controlled water hastened the evolution of a rigid social hierarchy which exalted a few and subjugated the rest.

The accounts of the Difaqane written in all the major histories of South Africa are based on three books which were written over fifty years ago: G. W. Stow, The Native Races of South Africa; D. F. Ellenberger and J. C. Macgregor, The History of the Bosuto; and especially the earliest, G. M. Theal, History of South Africa.

Certain contradictions exist between the story as told in these accounts and the evidence brought to light by the publication of the journals of Robert Moffat and David Livingstone. The object of this study is to reconstruct the events of the wars from the broadest possible evidence to give a more complete description, and thereby to test the revision implicit in the new information.

This revision is required properly to identify the participants in the battles which were observed by Europeans in the western Tswana lands, especially the battle at Dithakong. In the earlier histories all the battles were attributed to the ‘Mantatee’, a name properly applied to one group of Tlokwa ruled at the time by the regentess, MmaNthatisi. Now it is possible to show that these Tlokwa were never in the west, but restricted their migrations to the valley of the Caledon River. Nor can their enemies, the Hlubi of Mpangazita and the Ngwane of Matiwane, be blamed, for they too remained in the east. Rather, the victims of these three bands, the Sotho peoples of the Caledon valley, can be identified as the aggressors among the Tswana beyond the Vaal. Moffat identified the Phuting of Tshane and the Hlakwana of Nkgaraganye. Livingstone demonstrated the role played by Sebetwane and his Fokeng, and Thomas Hodgson implicated Moletsane, the Taung.

While many gaps in our information still exist, this reconstruction seems to justify the revision of the accepted account of the Difaqane.

The tea industry of southern Nyasaland employed intermittently a heterogeneous labour force of some twenty to thirty thousand and paid workers minimum wages of 7s. in 1930, rising to between 17s. 6d. and 20s. in 1953. A complex wage structure offered different rates to hoers, pluckers, factory workers and clerks. Thousands of children, butvirtually no women, were employed. Wages and working conditions were acknowledged to be unattractive, even by the industry itself, and compared favourably only with those offered in Portuguese East Africa. The initial viability of the plantation sector in the Shire Highlands was made possible by the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Lomwe from Portuguese East Africa. Lomwe workers, who sought assimilation and upward mobility, have been depicted as virtual slaves of the planters, but there is evidence of effective local, day-to-day and passive resistance on their part which left planters feeling impotent, unable to turn labour out on Sundays or in the rains or enforce unpopular thangata (labour rent) agreements, and obliged to reduce the daily tasks demanded of the worker. Confronted with an increasingly severe shortage of labour, which caused millions of pounds of tea to remain unpicked, planters began to improve working conditions on their estates, but this failed to resolve their labour problem or to dampen post-war militancy. Irresponsible actions by the British Central Africa Company increased tensions in Cholo which culminated in the serious riots of 1953 in which eleven people were killed. Government responded to this growing rural radicalism by repurchasing half of the million acres of freehold estate land which had initially been ‘bought’ from chiefs prior to the colonial occupation.

The scholar interested in the early history of the interlacustrine area has an unusually large corpus of traditional evidence available. These sources are among the most detailed in tropical Africa and several full-scale works have been based on them. This paper seeks, through textual analysis, to demonstrate that some of the most important of these sources have been influenced by the content of earlier writings and by each other, and that their corroborative value is very small.

Three problems are of particular interest here—the alleged contemporaneity of Nakibinge of Buganda, Olimi Rwitamahanga of Bunyoro, and Ntare Nyabugaro of Nkore; the Biharwe eclipse and its ascribed dates; and the value for chronology of the accounts of Nyoro invasions southward. Emphasis on these aspects has meant that while the questions of the Bacwezi, the Nkore capitals, and the Nyoro tombs have been taken into account, specific attention has not been paid to them here.

The present paper seeks only to suggest possible alternatives to the presently accepted reconstruction of early interlacustrine history, and argues that the nature of our evidence, once divested of its synthetic accretions, precludes the development of comprehensive hypotheses. It is important at this stage to attempt a full reassessment of these traditional sources through comparative textual analysis and through the extensive use of archival documentation which may illuminate more clearly the milieu in which the traditional historiography of the interlacustrine region developed.

The present study is intended both as a substantive historical contribution, and as an illustration of the possibilities and the limitations of one particular type of historical inferences that can be drawn from language, namely, the study of words borrowed from one language into another. Two other basic linguistic sources for culture-historical conclusions are not considered here, those based on the relationships and distribution of languages as such, and those based on the reconstructed vocabularies of particular Ursprachen, that is, the ancestral speech-forms of specific groups of genetically related languages. These latter two methods are not excluded either for dogmatic or methodological reasons, but simply because they do not yield relevant results for the particular problems being considered, although they are very useful in other connexions. It should, however, be mentioned that, as will appear at a number of points in the discussion, a valid linguistic classification furnishes an indispensible framework for nearly all inferences drawn from linguistic data including the interlinguistic contact phenomena which are the subject of the present study.

Using previously unknown account books, found in archives in Peru, of three New Christian Portuguese slave traders on the Upper Guinea Coast, this article examines the extent and nature of African and Luso-African involvement in the Atlantic trade during the early seventeenth century. Beads, textiles, and wine that figured most prominently among Portuguese imports were traded predominantly by Luso-Africans. Meanwhile, slaves were delivered in small numbers by people from a diverse range of social backgrounds. This trade was not a simple exchange of imported goods for slaves, but was a complex one that built on pre-European patterns of exchange in locally-produced commodities.

During the early years of white administration in Southern Rhodesia, few whites spoke the local vernaculars. The state used those few, largely traders and farmers, to translate and interpret. Members of the Native Affairs Department were expected to learn ‘on the job’. However, by the early 1920s, poor language abilities in the civil services, combined with growing segregationist tendencies in the face of African competition, prompted the state to reconsider whites’ knowledge of the vernaculars. The issue raised important questions about defining the boundary between ‘natives’ and ‘civilized peoples’, interactions between white and African communities, and the long-term project for the state.

Little attention has been paid to the great growth of trade in West Africa in the nineteenth century prior to the ‘economic revolution’ which began towards its close. As far as the export-import trade at the coast is concerned, British statistics show that between c. 1810 and c. 1850 the import of various manufactured staples increased by factors from at least 3 to as much as 50. The question arises as to how such a large increase in the volume of trade on the coast was financed in the absence of banking procedures. On the Senegal and Gambia and in the Niger delta, the traditional eighteenth-century practice by which visiting European merchants advanced credit to African brokers in goods continued. On the Gold Coast and at Sierra Leone and Lagos, however, a new class of local importers, of African as well as European origin, emerged and were able to secure credit from European exporters. But, though, less flexible than the newer system, the old system, with its tendency to monopoly on the part of both European traders and African brokers, seems to have permitted the greater expansion of credit. However, by the second half of the century, both systems were under strain and leading to conflicts over debts and jurisdiction, which are examined. Ultimately both were replaced by the European trading houses entering the interior trade through the use of paid agents, many of whom were recruited from among the new merchant class of Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Lagos.

Because information about the livelihoods of indigenous groups in Africa is often missing from colonial records, the presence of such people usually escapes attention in quantitative estimates of colonial economic activity. This is nowhere more apparent than in the eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Colony, where the role of the Khoesan in Cape production, despite being frequently acknowledged, has been almost completely ignored in quantitative investigations. Combining household-level settler data with anecdotal accounts of Khoesan labour, this article presents new estimates of the Khoesan population of the Cape Colony. Our results show that the Khoesan did not leave the area as a consequence of settler expansion. On the contrary, the number of Khoesan employed by the settlers increased over time, as the growth of settler farming followed a pattern of primitive accumulation and drove the Khoesan to abandon their pastoral lifestyle to become farm labourers. We show that, in failing to include the Khoesan population, previous estimates have overestimated slave productivity, social inequality, and the level of gross domestic product in the Cape Colony.

During the colonial period, European officers undertook a series of campaigns in conjunction with African officials to regulate the severity of clitoridectomy and to alter the timing of female initiation in Meru, Kenya. While their efforts to ban the more drastic forms of clitoridectomy contributed to the government's stated objective of gradually eliminating the practice, this anti-clitoridectomy stance was compromised by their parallel efforts to enforce female initiation at an earlier age in order to combat abortion. Officers attributed the apparently high prevalence of abortion in Meru to the late age at which clitoridectomy took place. Whereas in other areas of central Kenya female initiation took place prior to puberty, in Meru, it was a pre-nuptial rite. Officers observed that as ‘custom’ prohibited uninitiated females from bearing children, unexcised girls who became pregnant most often obtained abortions. To eliminate the possibility of a girl being sexually mature but unexcised, administrators enforced measures requiring girls to be excised before puberty.

Despite its basic importance for an understanding of African History, the Atlantic slave-trade still remains one of the most unexplored aspects of modern African development. Except for a few pioneer works, there have been no systematic studies of numbers, origins, mortality, routes and volume of traffic. The present study is based on archival material in Brazil and is an exploration in depth of one major route, the West African to Rio de Janeiro shipping route in the period 1795–1811. During this time some 170,000 African slaves were shipped from Africa, suffering a mortality rate of 95 per thousand.

The historiography of Hausaland has laboured under a strong tradition of orthodoxy which recent secondary works have inherited from the more-or-less primary oral-cum-written sources. General cultural evidence (linguistic, ethnographic and archaeological) has been regarded as subsidiary, so that its potential for reconceptualization and for critical reevaluation of the conventional sources and orthodox interpretations has been missed. Instead, antiquarian approaches have been encouraged. Thus the view has persisted that Hausa as a cultural and linguistic entity has an antiquity running to several millennia, and also that it originated in the Sahara or around Aïr, whence it was pushed southward by desiccation or by Tuareg nomads. Contrarily, the clear message of linguistic geography and of Hausa's place within the Chadic family is that Hausa. expanded from east to west across the savanna belt of northern Nigeria. And the relative homogeneity of the language and culture within this vast zone indicates that the spread is quite recent (within the present millennium, say). It would have involved some assimilation, of previously settled peoples of the northern Nigerian plains, most of whom wouldl have spoken languages of the ‘Plateau’ division of Greenberg's Benue–Congo subfamily, of Niger-Congo.

This Hausaization, as it proceeded from its old bases in eastern Hausaland, would have been both a cultural and an ecological process, through which woodland would have been converted into more open and continuous savanna to support grain-cultivation and a denser peasant population. This process would have reached western Hausaland (Zamfara and Kebbi) around the middle of this millennium. Cattle – and Fulani herdsmen – would in time have played an important role in this cultural ecology (and in restricting the tsetse zones).

The old theory of a northern origin for the Hausa is bound up with the problem of Gobir in north-western Hausaland. Gobir's claim to be one of the original seven kingdoms (Hausa bakwai) is probably a late invention. Moreover, the common assumption that Gobirawa Hausa migrated from Aïr seems to derive from a misinterpretation of the written sources.

Finally the bakwai legends are reconsidered. Despite the scepticism of some modern critics, the legends appear to reflect, albeit in idealized form, a real historical development. They represent a foundation charter for the Hausa as a multi-state ethnicity, and enshrine the vague memory of how Hausaland and ‘Hausaness’ began from a series of small centres and hill-bases on its eastern side. Thus the interesting argument of Abdullahi Smith, that the Hausa people emerged long before state systems arose among them, is disputed. Rather, these should be seen as two facets of a single process during the present millennium.

After a brief survey of the organization of Guthrie's Comparative Bantu, consideration is devoted to the putative prehistorical interrelationships of the Bantu languages, in the light of Guthrie's and subsequent scholarship. The intended ‘introductory’ nature of Guthrie's work is stressed, his comprehensive survey covering only 28 Test Languages (among over 350). Recent criticisms of and divergences from Guthrie's prehistorical conclusions are considered, together with the inadequacy of the ‘genealogical tree’ approach. The apparent contradiction of Guthrie by Henrici and Heine in particular is shown to be less substantial than at first appears: maps based on the work of all three confirm the remoter relationship of NW. Bantu to the remainder, and also a basic East-West division (but with Luba and Bemba occupying an intermediate position). It seems probable that some NW. languages are to be traced directly to a proto-language in the Cameroun area, rather than to Guthrie's Katangan nucleus, but this means only that Guthrie cast his net too wide, not that his whole thesis is false. It is recommended that the use of the term ‘Proto-Bantu’ be clarified by use of the term ‘Proto-Bantu 1’ for an original NW. nucleus, ‘Proto-Bantu 2’ for a secondary nucleus S. of the Congo forest, and ‘Proto-Bantu 3’ for a tertiary (and overlapping) nucleus to the east of 2. An amended version of Guthrie's sequence of Bantu linguistic expansion is proposed, although attention is drawn to the hazards of necessarily basing this on the evidence of modern Bantu languages only. Henrici's statistical treatment of Guthrie's data assists in distinguishing temporal from spatial distance among the Test Languages.

Mwanga's persecution of the Christians in 1886 was an isolated event, but it set the seal of judgement on subsequent interpretations of his character, his policy and his reign. He was said to have an anti-Christian policy which could be variously ascribed to religious traditionalism, or the political danger of an organized Christian party, or external threats of European encroachment. But closer examination reveals two apparent anomalies. Most Christians were spared during the brief persecution, including many prominent leaders. And shortly afterwards these same Christians were given extraordinary powers which they exercised, with the Kabaka's warm approval, at the expense of the traditional chiefs. The conclusion reached is that while Mwanga had no very consistent policy, he did have a consistently strong motivation—the desire to achieve a secure position of authority independent of those powerful old chiefs who had placed him on the throne. In this he saw the ambitious young Christians as a useful ally. Thus, despite the persecution, during part of his reign Mwanga was, for his own purposes, not anti-Christian but pro-Christian.

Southern Sudanese politicians of the 1950s and 1960s have been criticized for a rivalrous, divisive politics, which left the south disunited and vulnerable. While acknowledging that these men were a tiny, squabbling group, remote from those they sought to represent, this article suggests that they faced an impossible task. The demand to represent ‘the south’ did not come solely, or even largely, from the people who lived in the southern provinces: southern politics was heavily extraverted, pulled by the interests and prejudices of northern Sudanese, Egyptians, Britons, and others. Like other African nationalists of the time, southern Sudanese politicians struggled to weave together different levels of moral community, from the very local to the imagined nation. Yet they did so in uniquely unfavourable circumstances: subject to constant harassment and occasionally lethal violence, unable to secure political compromise, and without patronage resources. Representing the south gave these men space to talk about the increasingly desperate circumstances of those who lived in Sudan's southern provinces; but it gave them almost no space at all to negotiate a civic culture of southern politics.