During the nineteenth century Muqdisho experienced a significant revival in its fortunes after several centuries of gradual decline from its medieval heyday. While it remained on the periphery of the Omani empire on the coast of East Africa, steady commercial penetration of Indian merchant capital based at Zanzibar inexorably drew the entire Benaadir coast into the Omani orbit. Massive infusions of slave labour transformed agricultural commodity production in the Benaadir hinterland and created a new basis for ruling-class collaboration between town and country. At Muqdisho these external factors intertwined with established internal rivalries which were based on moiety competition and the traditional search for supporting alliances in the hinterland. The end result of this complex process was increased competition and tension between the town moieties that affected both the spatial segregation of the two quarters and enabled first Omani Zanzibar and then Italy to insinuate themselves into a dominant mediating position within the urban community. At the end of the century the urban culture of Muqdisho had also been influenced by the incorporation of a large slave population. While all of these changes indicate that Muqdisho was integrally a part of the wider coastal region of East Africa, other cultural evidence establishes no less that it was still uniquely Soomaali within that context.

It has been argued here that the impression, given by most of the existing literature, of near-total state dominance over the economic sources of wealth in the Asante economy during 1807–83 is mistaken. Admittedly, there was a large and often thriving state sector in the export–import trade; the state had a share in the production of marketable goods; chiefs had the largest concentrations of slaves and slave-descendants; and inheritance taxes gave the state a powerful instrument for the appropriation of privately generated wealth. But the accumulation of evidence now suggests that the private sector, too, was a major force in the extra-subsistence economy: an economy which included a lively domestic trade, which has been given too little scholarly attention. It appears that it was possible for ordinary commoners to acquire wealth through both external and internal trade, and through production for both export and domestic markets. The widespread acquisition of slaves by commoners, for incorporation in their households, was both a measure of financial achievement and a critical means for enhancing it in future. Death duties amounted normally to a form of progressive taxation rather than to wholesale expropriation.

It is suggested that the private sector is most plausibly seen as comprising a relatively small number of producers and traders prosperous enough to be considered as members of the asikafoɔ, the wealthy, plus a mass of people supplying export markets on a small unit scale. It seems reasonable to assume that the strong position of commoners within the post-Atlantic slave trade economy of Asante, and their accumulation of slaves and other forms of wealth, involved a relative decline, at least compared to the second half of the eighteenth century, in the chiefs' share of foreign trade and general wealth. Such a shift, and in particular the emergence of small producers and traders as a major element in the export economy, provides support for Hopkins' interpretation of the nineteenth-century commercial transition in West Africa generally. One qualification to Hopkins' analysis is that, while it allowed for the large-scale application of slave labour within the ‘economy of legitimate commerce’ by former exporters of slaves, it did not explicitly envisage the widespread use of small numbers of slaves and pawns by small producers and traders.

The shift in the distribution of income had political consequences. The essay argues that it is necessary to revise the argument, put forward by Wilks, about the emergence of a ‘middle-class’ element in the political conflicts of the last years of Asante independence. In particular, the proposition that such a movement developed primarily amongst the members of a monopolistic state trading company is rejected. In any case, it was a mass of commoners, rather than an ‘organized middle class’, that took the decisive role in the uprising that overthrew Mensa Bonsu in 1883. It is suggested that this was the political climax of the ‘adaptive challenge’ presented by the ending of slave exports: a movement of export-producing commoners, poor and rich alike, against the centralizing monarchy's new and punitive measures to raise revenue. The commoners sought not to overthrow chieftaincy but to use its authority to amplify their protests. Finally, it is suggested that the 1883 rising was the start of a pattern of rebellion by export-suppliers, in alliance with chiefs, against what they saw as organized extortion: a pattern that was to recur in the cocoa hold-ups of the 1930s and the National Liberation Movement of the mid-1950s.

Erica Fiah's neglected life is a very valuable source of information on African political thought and action in colonial Tanganyika. His mission education imbued him with strong Christian values and a belief in British culture and civilization. Coming to Tanganyika from Buganda he was always rather alienated from the local society and culture, and was therefore inclined to seek a political and social community with educated Africans throughout the territory, or with the traders and workers in Dar es Salaam. He too would have liked to be the ‘Mwalimu’ of the Tanganyikan people. In his relations with the colonial government he clearly went a step further than Martin Kayamba or the African Association of his day, who relied on maintaining and exploiting the paternalism of the Government and its patron–client relationship with Africans. Fiah's attitude was one of ‘loyal opposition’, which he expressed first through his own Garveyite association, in the 1930s, and then through his newspaper Kwetu, during the 1940s. Fiah sought to improve and change the existing system, taking more active steps than mere petitioning to make the Government fulfil its moral obligations. This led him into conflict with the African Association in 1936–8; later it also distanced him from the emerging nationalist movement which he had helped fertilize, but whose complete rejection of colonial rule was beyond his intellectual horizon. Fiah's life was not the failure it seemed but a central link in the political transformation of the people of Tanganyika.

Few African scholars have had such an impact on both North and West Africa as al-Maghīlī (d. 1503/4 or 1505/6). This biographical sketch begins by assessing his part in the theological debate preceding the persecution of the Jewish community at Touat (conventionally dated to 1492), which was largely instigated by him, and relates it to his unsuccessful campaign against the Banū-Waṭṭāş whom he opposed because of their incapacity to check the growth of Christian power and Jewish influence in Morocco. After his failure against the Banū-Waṭṭāş, al-Maghīlī went to the western Sudan, where in Air, Takidda, Kano, Katsina and Gao he exerted a more peaceful and scholastic influence as a great renovator of Islam. The death of his son at Touat led him to return there C. 1503, and to resume his active campaigning against the Jews and their influence until his death a year or two later.

This article seeks to redress the largely contemporary bias and technologically deterministic approach of agricultural historians of cotton in francophone West Africa. It does this by arguing that the expansion of cotton since the 1960s has depended upon major socio-economic and cultural changes in agrarian production systems during the colonial period as much as on technological innovations in the post-colonial period. The study focuses on the political–economic and socio-cultural processes behind the emergence of an export-oriented, commodity producing peasantry among the Senufo of northern Ivory Coast. A periodization of cotton development is presented in which the gradual dissolution of precolonial production units and the gestation of smaller social units with new economic needs is emphasized. This restructuring of agricultural production systems is related to a complex interplay of internal and external factors, notably coercive state policies, the monetization of Senufo society and the internalization of commodity relations, conflicts between social groups and the direct intervention of foreign agribusiness in the productive process. Despite low levels of cotton output during the colonial period, the resultant transformation of production relations was crucial to the contemporary intensification of cotton growing.

The problems connected with Article XVII of the Wihalē (Uccialli) treaty of 1889 form one of the most important issues in the history of Ethiopian-Italian relations. The Italian government claimed that this Article made Ethiopia an Italian protectorate. There was, however, a significant discrepancy between the Amharic and Italian versions of the Article. Minīlik refused to accept the ‘protection’ of Italy; diplomacy failed to solve the conflict, and the battle of Adwa followed. The absolute independence of Ethiopia was then recognized. But the idea that Ethiopia was an Italian protectorate from 1889 to 1896 has nevertheless been maintained by Italian authors and generally accepted by most writers on Ethiopian history to this day.

A careful study of Italian-Ethiopian relations during the years preceding the Wihale treaty, as well as of the immediate circumstances under which it was signed, reveals that the Italian negotiator Antonelli, and not Minīlik or his interpreter Yosēf, was guilty of creating the imbroglio. Antonelli was not ignorant of the Amharic language, and he had personally worded the Italian draft, which changed an earlier offer by the Italian government to act as the Emperor's ‘postman’ into an obligation for him to conduct his foreign affairs through Italian channels. Since this change was not introduced in the Amharic version, which had equal authority, the conclusion must be that the ‘protectorate paragraph’ never had any validity whatsoever. The Italian protectorate was not terminated by the battle of Adwa. It had never existed.

About 1867 Fulbe living in the Mandingo kingdoms of Tomani and Jimara on the south bank of the Gambia river revolted against their Mandingo landlords. Under their leader, Alfa Molo, the Fulbe went on to destroy the decadent Mandingo state system over much of the Gambia's south bank, and south into Portuguese Guinea, in one of the few determinative conquests in Gambia history. A new state emerged from this revolution which was based on the political dissatisfactions and ethnic consciousness of the Fulbe, its institutions moulded by the political skills and vigorous personality of Alfa's son, Musa Molo. Before 1867, the Fulbe living in the Gambia region were politically highly fragmented, having no tradition of centralized authority. Their dealings with other groups, both stranger and Fulbe, were highly particularized and characterized generally by either accommodation or flight.

During the inter-war years, there were frequent reports of desertion, youth labour and atrocious conditions on the sugar estates of Natal, South Africa. Sugar production, assisted by heavy state protection, was expanding rapidly; planters recruited vigorously amongst rural Africans in Transkei to replace Indian indentured workers. They also used their political muscle in order to prevent the extension of labour regulations in the mining industry to the sugar fields and could thus employ workers rejected from the mines on health grounds as well as youths. The conflict between mines and agriculture over labour in South Africa was resolved by non-regulation of agriculture as well as by the immobilization of labour tenants on farms. Officials in the departments of Health and Native Affairs, anxious to control social disruption and minimize fatalities, tried to regulate the sugar estates. The issue divided the state and the Native Affairs Department.itself. Agrarian interests, including English-speaking planters, became particularly powerful in the inter-war years, and officials had little success in controlling them.

But African youth labour was available not simply because there was a large demand, but also because there was a supply. Youths had to work in peasant communities. Although their work was embedded in a different social ethic, there is evidence to suggest that demands on them were increasing; some ‘ran away’ to the sugar fields. Chiefs and councillors wished to control youth and child migration both because of fears about their welfare and the need for herdboys. This pattern of migration became less common in the 1940s not only because production patterns on the estates changed, but also because of social changes in the rural areas. As in other contexts, the nature of the South African labour market was partly shaped through a process of struggle within and by rural communities.

There are good reasons why the remarkable outpouring of work on Southern African urban history that has taken place over the last twenty years has largely bypassed Malawi. To the overwhelmingly rural character of the Malawi economy must be added the weak impact of settler colonialism in the interwar period and hence the failure of Blantyre, one of the oldest colonial settlements in Central Africa, with a history going back to the foundation of the Blantyre mission in 1876, to develop as a substantial commercial centre. This feature was reinforced in turn by Sir Harry Johnston's decision, taken in 1891, to site the colonial capital at Zomba and by the construction in 1907 at Limbe, five miles from Blantyre, of the railway terminus for the protectorate.

Urban development in Malawi was therefore not concentrated on a single dominant commercial and administrative centre, as was the case in neighbouring Tanganyika. Rather it was split between three equally impoverished settlements, containing small populations ranging in size in 1945 from approximately 4,600 in Blantyre and Zomba to 7,100 in Limbe. Far more Malawians, in consequence, experienced urban culture as labour migrants in Johannesburg or Salisbury, where an estimated 10,000 Malawians were living in 1938, than they did working at home.

Quite possibly, Eva, born Krotoa, is the most written about African woman in South African historiography. Her name fills the journals of the Dutch East India Company almost from the very start of their little feeding-station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. She is known as a Khoena girl taken into Dutch commander Jan Van Riebeeck's household from the age of about twelve, who later became a key interpreter for the Dutch, was baptised, married Danish surgeon, Pieter Van Meerhoff, but then died as a drunken prostitute after his death. Yet her persona remains an enigma. As Christina Landman put it, ‘Krotoa is a story-generator’.

To conservative historians, Eva's life offers living proof that the Khoena were irredeemable savages. To black nationalist writers, such as Khoena historian, Yvette Abrahams, she personifies the widespread rape and abuse of black women by the invaders. Eva's chief biographer, V. C. Malherbe, forms a more neutral judgment by describing Eva as primarily ‘a woman in between’. Landman views her as an early synthesizer of African and Christian religious traditions. Carli Coetzee demonstrates how recent Afrikaans-speaking artists, poets and actors have constructed an image of Eva as the mother of the Afrikaner nation, a tamed African who acquiesced to Europeanness. She is often portrayed as yearning to return to her African roots, but without success.

Virtually all of the representations of Eva construct her as a helpless victim of vicious culture clashes. Today's racial consciousness, laced with assumptions of inevitable African/European hostility, is often read back into the historical record. Frustratingly large gaps in that record leave room for a wide range of interpretations, depending heavily on the subjectivities of the historian. Virtually all previous writers, however, have judged Eva primarily by the tragic circumstances of her death, while minimizing the considerable achievements of her earlier years.

It is well known that during the eighteenth century and most of the nineteenth century the problem of mortality limited the European presence in West Africa. Disease and death in appalling proportions plagued whites who settled along the coast. Phrases such as ‘the white man's grave’ popularized theories concerning survival in West Africa that were based mainly on race. The belief that black people by virtue of their race would fare better than whites in Africa affected certain historical events. Hence religious groups began to train blacks in the Caribbean for missionary work and then sent them to Africa, while other groups such as the American Colonization Society encouraged black people to emigrate back to Africa. The present study is a quantitative examination of the black population that emigrated to Liberia through the American Colonization Society from 1820 to 1843. Particular attention is given to their mortality experience.

Although a total of 4,571 emigrants arrived in Liberia during the 1820 to 1843 period, by the year 1843 only 1,819 emigrants were still living in the settlements. The overwhelming reason for the Liberian population decline, despite constant additions throughout the period, was a high death rate after arrival in Liberia. By examining the various characteristics of the population such as age, sex, place of origin, place of arrival and the like, a clearer picture of mortality in West Africa emerges. A picture which seems to have little relationship to race per se, but rather to the ways in which disease environments in isolated areas affect incoming populations.

The relationships between specific groups of women and men are explored during a formative period of urban nationalist politics, showing the failure of nationalists to incorporate women's demands, rather than the absence of women's struggles. It is important to view historical events as they occurred within larger processes of class formation and gender contestations, but it is no longer sufficient simply to prove the historical role of women in the nationalist movements themselves. Women's contributions still need to be written about, but gender history needs to be addressed as the relation between the sexes in order to avoid facile and rather confused accounts of class-and gender-defined struggles. This article first explores the Reformed Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union attempts to capitalize on an alliance with poorer women during the early 1950s. Secondly, new opportunities created by spatial and economic transformations in the urban economy in the 1950s are discussed in terms of a social mobility that led a minority of women to new social status. The Bus Boycott in 1956, led by the City Youth League, is then addressed as an event in nationalist history, but also as the interaction of women's class mobility and the violence which threatened it, either on a day-to-day basis or in the particular events of the Bus Boycott. The implications of these two separate events for the relationship of specific groups of women to nationalist politics, and nationalist historiography, are analyzed.

Between 1772 and 1780 Richard Miles, a servant of the Company of Merchants, kept detailed records of some 1,308 barters for slaves he made on the Gold Coast, along with a much smaller number of barters for gold and ivory. The lists provide indirect information about the Fante brokers with whom he dealt, and how they conducted their trade. The names that appear show that the Fante dealers at the waterside were numbered in the hundreds, and indicate that many of them operated on a small scale or sold slaves to supplement other forms of income. The fact that many of the élite, though friendly to Miles, preferred not to deal with him indicates a fear amongst them of becoming over-dependent on the Company of Merchants.

The lists, with their daily records of prices and price changes in trade ounces in all of the goods in Miles's assortments, illustrate how the Fante dealt with rapid changes in supply and demand by price alterations, by manipulating the content of assortments and by changing the value of the ounce of trade as against the ounce of gold.

It is generally accepted that Ibn-Ḥawqal crossed the Sahara and visited Awdaghost in 951/2 to be the first Arab geographer who reached the gates of bilād al-Sūdān. This is inferred from what he says about a cheque he saw in Awdaghost. A critical analysis of the references to this cheque suggests that it was a bill of debt owed by a trader from Sijilmāsa resident at Awdaghost to another trader from Sijilmāsa. The transactions between the two were part of the trans-Saharan trade, with one partner resident at Awdaghost and the other at Sijilmāsa. The bill must have been held by the creditor, whom Ibn-Ḥawqal could have met at Sijilmāsa.

It was from this man that Ibn-Ḥawqal recorded the information about the ruler of the Ṣanhāja in the southern Sahara, and probably also about his relations with Ghana and other Sudanese polities. Another valuable piece of information, about the abandoned route from Ghana to Egypt, was collected in the oases of Egypt. Also, the detailed list of Berber tribes inhabiting the area between Tadmekka and Air could have been obtained in North Africa, rather than at Awdaghost, because communications in the Sahara were more frequent between north and south than between west and east.

Ibn-Ḥawqal's description of the Sahara is stereotypic and adds nothing to what earlier geographers had to say, and the same applies to his words concerning Awdaghost itself. Towns and kingdoms in the Sudan mentioned by Ibn-Ḥawqal had already been recorded earlier by al-Yaʻqūbī, Ibn al-Faqīh and al-Masʻūdī. For a traveller who crossed the Sahara, Ibn-Ḥawqal's information is rather poor, but if he collected his information north of the Sahara, as this paper suggests, his labours as an inquisitive geographer are praiseworthy.

This article is concerned to show some of the dimensions of political activity amongst the Kenya Maasai in the first half of this century. Primarily, the focus is not on the ‘traditional’ Maasai, but on the small but not insignificant educated group who, despite the restrictions of the Maasai Reserve, participated in the growth of Kenya's modern African politics. Certain crucial events in East Africa—the circumcision crisis, independency in church and school, and the search for higher education—are shown to have important Maasai counterparts. At the same time, some of the stubbornest administrative and missionary problems presented in the development of Maasailand are examined within a historical perspective, and with the aid of Maasai oral materials where possible.

In 1926, the Governor-General of French West Africa issued a decree allowing local administrations to use a portion of the annual military draft as labourers on public works programmes. The only administrations to take full advantage of this decree was that of the French Soudan, where work had already begun on the first phase of the vast Niger irrigation scheme now known as the Office du Niger. During the next twenty-five years, more than fifty thousand so-called ‘second-portion’ workers from Soudan were assigned to the Office du Niger for a period of three years' service. Ironically, this new system of forced labour to exploit the irrigated land.

The tendency of East African Bantu tribes to borrow cultural features from pastoral or semi-pastoral ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ peoples has often been observed, but thus far only two serious attempts have been made to explain this phenomenon. Herskovits first put forward the idea that the tribes of East Africa formed a ‘cattle complex’ epitomized and shaped by the ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ pastoralists. In a more limited study, LeVine and Sangree concluded that the proclivity of a Bantu tribe to borrow from a ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ group was dependent upon the relative population size of the peoples in question, the success or failure of the Bantu group in defending itself against attack, and the need of the Bantu to ally themselves with a ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ tribe.

The tentative history of relations between the Bantu Kikuyu and the ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ Masai established in this paper suggests that both these theories err. Beginning with the first meeting of the two tribes about 1750, the Masai inflicted great damage on the Kikuyu while both were resident on the plains near Mount Kenya. When the Kikuyu secluded themselves in the forests after about 1800, they began to experience a significant degree of success in warding off the Masai, without any need for allies. Yet borrowing went on almost without interruption throughout both periods.

The actual nature of that borrowing was very different from the process which Herskovits imagined. Rather than being influenced by the way in which cattle functioned in Masai society, the Kikuyu were much impressed with the Masai as militarists, and this is reflected by the fact that the Kikuyu borrowed far more from the Masai military system than from anything relating to cattle.

Most analyses of apartheid labor policy focus on the regulation of the labor market rather than the industrial workplace. Instead, this article investigates the administration of South Africa's 1953 Native Labour (Settlement of Disputes) Act to examine shop-floor control rather than influx control. The article argues that in response to the threat of African trade unionism, apartheid policymakers in the Department of Labour addressed the problem of low African wages and expanded the use of ‘works committees’. By shifting the debate about capitalism and apartheid away from influx control and migrant labor, and towards industrial legislation and shop-floor conflict, the article places working-class struggle at the center of an analysis of apartheid.