In studying the early history of the West African states, one of the difficulties encountered is that of establishing a reasonably precise framework of chronology. Eighteenth-century Ashanti, however, would appear to be an exception to this in that the reigns of its kings are dated, although with some degree of variation, in all the standard works dealing with the area. Their authors, from this point of view, have followed either Thomas Edward Bowdich or Joseph Dupuis, both of whom were in Kumasi, the Ashani capital, in the early part of the nineteenth century. In their treatment of traditions and customs, the writings of Bowdich and Dupuis are of great interest and value; the chronologies of the two authors, however, although they contain major differences, can in neither case be regarded as reliable. Fortunately there are in existence written records, hitherto little used, which make it possible to draw up a new and amended chart of the reigns of the eighteenth-century kings, and which furthermore give rise to interesting questions. These are the records of the various European companies engaged in trade on the coast, notably the English Royal African Company (1672–1750), its successor the Company of Merchants trading to Africa (1750–1821), and the second Dutch West Indies Company (1674–1791). Their agents in the forts and settlements were much interested in local developments especially in so far as trade might be beneficially or adversely affected. As a part of their duties, they kept diaries of events and dispatched reports, often of a very detailed nature, to their Companies in London and Amsterdam.

The Bokoni settlement in Mpumalanga, South Africa is the largest known terraced site in Africa. The settlement consisted of intensively farmed terraced fields spanning 150 kilometres along the eastern escarpment. It flourished from around 1500 until the 1820s, after which it all but disappeared. This article first sets out to interpret the growing body of primarily archaeological Bokoni evidence from the perspective of economic history. Another, although secondary, goal of the article is to contribute to debates about the precolonial roots of African poverty. Accordingly, we outline the factors that may have facilitated the emergence of this region as a major food-producing area. We argue that Bokoni formed part of a decentralised social order that was built around the logic of production and was conducive to dynamic forms of accumulation. This decentralised, cooperative regional order was replaced in the early nineteenth century by a new order built around the logic of extraction and war. This new order militated against the development of decentralised intensive farming and emphasised instead the accumulation of military technology – most notably guns and the construction of military strongholds. As a result, the population of Bokoni plummeted and terraced farming fell into disuse in the region. These insights, we argue, call into question recent attempts to find the roots of African poverty in specific types of precolonial social arrangements.

This article, focusing on the operation and abolition of human sacrifice in eastern Yorubaland, examines a key aspect of the dialogue and conflict between Yoruba chiefs and their opponents – slaves, Christians and British colonialists – during the late nineteenth century. The exchange reflected the position of human sacrifice in the consolidation of economic inequalities and socio-cultural privileges. The article examines this controversy in the context of the broader changes of the era, including the ending of the Yoruba wars and the approach of colonial rule. It analyses the interaction of external and internal forces that produced the eventual demise of human sacrifice.

The district of Belā Shangul, in the northwestern corner of the present Governorate-General of Wallaggā, Ethiopia, has played a crucial role in the introduction of Islam in western Ethiopia. The present paper attempts to show how the commercial potential of Belā Shangul was the reason for the peaceful penetration of Islam in the region in the nineteenth century, thus creating the basis for the ready acceptance of the Mahdia by the Islamized ruling families of the region later. It is due to the considerable inroads that Islam had made in the region that the first Mahdist envoys were welcomed there, and that they could operate freely from 1882 onwards.

The paper further discusses the importance of Mahdist presence in the region, its impact on local society, and its attempts to penetrate the Oromo countries south and east of Belā Shangul. It argues that Mahdist rule over the region was effective until about 1890, and that the favourable attitude shown towards the Mahdia by the region's ruling families became more hostile mainly because of the harsh rule established in Belā Shangul by the Mahdist commander, Khalīl al-Khuzāni, and of the new militant Islam he introduced in the region. Khalīl's campaign of 1886 and Mahdist raids in 1888–90 further alienated the local rulers, who rebelled under the leadership of ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān of Belā Shangul proper. The reported cession of this district by the Khalifa to Menilek of Ethiopia must be seen in the political context of the time: the border district had become too burdensome for Omdurman to rule, yet its commercial and mineral resources made it too valuable to remain a no man's land.

In December 1896, barely a year after annexation by the Cape Colony, rebellion erupted in the former Crown Colony of British Bechuanaland. Joining forces in the Langeberg Mountains, Tlhaping and Tlharo resisted a large government force for nearly eight months. This paper examines the origins of the rebellion. Its first section provides a brief sketch of the rebellion. Then, much greater detail, the long-standing grievances of the Tlhaping and Tlharo are discussed. These seem to have arisen mainly out of competiton for land and the concomitants of white administration. While for the people the latter meant taxes, police and new laws, for the chiefs, the imposition of a new legal system together with the arrival of Christianity, meant a diminution of authority.

In the third section, the white man's own mounting frustration and the activities of one farmer in particular are examined. The high price of land had precluded many former filibusters from purchasing land; annexation of the territory by the Cape seems to have stimulated them to encourage rebellion so that new lands might become available.

The following section returns to the Tlhaping and Tlharo, and deals with new grievances and pressures which became acute immediately before the rebellion. These included acute distrust of the Cape Colonial goverment, further fears of loss of land, and anxiety concerning threats to their growing involvement in a market economy. Finally the consequences of a rinderpest epidemic coupled with dynastic politics appear to have tipped the scales in favour of rebellion.

According to their ethnographers, the Bena of the Rivers in colonial Tanganyika emerged ‘from the shadows into the light of day’ when they undertook a great migration from the forested hills of the Iringa highlands to the treeless floodplain of the Kilombero valley in the late 1800's. The phrase had two meanings – on one level, it described the physical relocation of the Bena from the shadows of the forest to the open floodplain. On another level, ‘light of day’ was a metaphor for the remembered cohesion of a distinct Bena tribal identity, distinguishable from the ‘shadows’ of prior ethnic obscurity. The Culwicks considered the chief or mtema of this period, Ndaliwali, to be the founding ancestor of a new political lineage.

The defining moment for the emergence of the Bena of the Rivers was the Battle of Mgodamtitu in 1874, when neighboring Hehe attacked Bena settlements in the foothills and forced the Bena permanently out of the highlands and into the valley. Once they had taken up their new residence, the Bena absorbed the existing settlements of the western end of the valley into their kingdom. They did this initially ‘under the guise of protector’, wrote the Culwicks, but their goal was political control of the region. By 1890, they wrote, most of the Ndamba as well as several smaller valley groups had become subjects of the Bena chief.

The Battle of Mgodamtitu caused a ‘sudden and wholesale change’, according to the Culwicks, because Bena were forced to give up cattle keeping and take up rice cultivation; to learn the ways of the river and skillful use of canoes. They had previously looked down upon ‘rice and fish-eaters’, but after their migration they found that ‘there is but one crop really worth growing, and that is rice’.

Some effects of the expansion in European commerce and of developments in colonial policy in Angola are explored through a study of the relationship of the black chief Kabuku Kambio with the Portuguese during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. By the 1870s the growth of ‘legitimate’ trade along the rivers Lukala and Kwanza was attracting the settlement of an increasing number of European colonists and traders. in the concelho of Cambambe the feira of Dondo, situated on the right bank of the Kwanza, briefly became the most important commercial centre of the interior. In these years much of the trade flowing between Dondo and other points was regulated by Kabuku, ruler of the largest and most powerful chiefdom, or sobado, in the conceiho. Kabuku's aggressive attempts to extend his dynastic authority and to profit from the increasing volume of trade entering the concelho involved him in a series of violent conflicts with rival chiefs and with European settlers. At first the extension of his power was facilitated by the military and administrative weakness of the Portuguese. By the mid-i880s however a more vigorous colonial policy, supporting the expansion of Portuguese power and commercial interests in the interior of Angola caused Kabuku's power to wane. After 1890 he succumbed to the pressure of white political and economic dominance in the Kwanza region. Following Kabuku's death the sobado itself may have suffered extinction through an outbreak of sleeping sickness around 1900.

African voters played an important part in many electoral divisions of the Cape Colony between 1884 and 1910. Traditional leaders, particularly headmen, exercised some influence, but declined in the period under review. Ministers of religion, school-teachers and others of the new strata created by colonial society were given a leading role, but in the absence of patronage they were limited to persuasion, and decisions on candidates to support were taken collectively, often at mass meetings that included a wider polity than those on the voters' roll. Ad hoc African electoral committees were formed to bring candidates to the notice of the politically conscious and to implement decisions once these were taken. White candidates established committees of their own and sometimes these overlapped with the African committees. African electoral agents employed by candidates played an important part in running a campaign. The network created by these African committees provided the basis for territory-wide organizations.

When the Royal Niger Company attempted to establish its authority in the Asaba hinterland in the 1880s, the existing town societies in the area provided the foundations of a resistance movement which became known as the Ekumeku. In 1900 the area came under the direct administration of the British government. British rule led to regulations against aspects of the people's religious and political practices and to the establishment of native courts, and provided a shelter under which missionary activities flourished. All these were considered by the people as inimical to their traditional way of life. This situation provoked a consolidation of the Ekumeku forces and galvanized the movement into action. Between 1902 and 1910 the Ekumeku offered a courageous and prolonged resistance to British rule in the Asaba hinterland.

In spite of this enduring consistency in opposing the establishment of European rule, the Ekumeku movement was not investigated along relevant lines primarily because it was much misunderstood in official circles, which took its external manifestations for its essence. This paper attempts, from oral and written sources, a study of the actual nature of the Ekumeku as a resistance movement, its organization, its responses to the challenges posed by European encroachment on the Asaba hinterland and its sources of strength which gave it its resilience.

In addition to administrative measures, legal enactments, special town laws and prosecution in the native courts, it is shown that the colonial administration relied heavily on the use of armed force to destroy the movement.

The second part of this article opens with a general caveat about the use and misuse of linguistic evidence. Guthrie, on the other hand, presented his data in a way which leaves subsequent scholars free to arrive at their own interpretations. The complexity of his data makes it difficult to achieve a necessary overview, however, and a stylized grid is therefore proposed, enabling the relative distribution of individual items of Common Bantu vocabulary to be plotted and compared. This is particularly important in the case of cultural vocabulary, where geographical distribution is normally related to levels of historical origin or diffusion. Groups of these vocabulary grids, based on Guthrie's corpus of data and his referential zones, are assembled and presented for the following semantic areas: fishing and watercraft, metal-working, pottery, livestock and cultivation (including cereals). Much of the remainder of the article is devoted to an exposition of the way in which these grids may be interpreted historically, including the need to distinguish—as far as possible—between likely cognates and likely loan-words. Attention is drawn to the possibilities (i) that Bantu languages may have begun to diverge substantially in linguistic terms before they began to move widely apart from their secondary and tertiary nucleus south of the forest, and (ii) that there may have been a differential layering, or overlapping waves, of Bantu expansion in the east.

At the opening of the nineteenth century, the colonial order in South Africa was most seriously challenged on the eastern frontier, dramatized in white rebellions and the successful Xhosa-Khoi war of 1799–1802. The colonial government of the Batavian Republic, administering the Cape between 1803 and 1806, was obliged to deal with this challenge. Despite formal liberal proclamations, the Batavians believed that it was necessary to expel the Xhosa east of the Fish river and subordinate the Khoi to the white farmers once again. Their rule continued to depend on local control by the white minority. During this period, the Xhosa remained in the territory claimed by the colony. The Batavians were unsuccessful in breaking or regulating the interrelationship of white and Xhosa which was the most significant factor in frontier dynamics. At the same time, due to divisions among the Xhosa, the weakness of the whites and the skill of Lodewijk Alberti, a frontier official, the colonial order was significantly re-stabilized.

When the French government introduced military conscription into the A.O.F. in 1912, the Guinean colonial authorities saw the measure as a means of training a local administrative corps to replace the traditional chieftaincy, through whose military defeat the conquest of Guinea had very largely been effected. However, the chiefs had by no means disappeared by 1914, and wartime demands for recruits were too massive to be supplied without their assistance. Their help was bought with promises to consolidate their authority in peacetime. Although able to marshal recruits, the chiefs seem to have been unable to prevent large-scale desertions before the moment of embarkation for France; village populations could also avoid conscription by overland migration out of the A.O.F. The colonial authorities therefore felt constrained to offer substantial inducements, mainly concerning improved social status vis-à-vis the chiefs, to the individual recruits. These contradictory policies were compounded by the recruitment drive of Blaise Diagne in 1918, which involved a further promise to recruits of improved status vis-à-vis the French authorities. The return of ancien combattants to Guinea was marked by outbreaks of strike action among workers in Conakry and along the railway line; by riots in demobilization camps; and by rejection of or agitation against chiefly power in the home cantons to which they dispersed. The anciens combattants did not form a coherent or organized political movement, but remained a conspicuous social grouping between the wars. Although they appear to have been strongly influenced by their experience of war and by contact with French socialists, their conflict with the chiefs seems to have counted for more with them than any confrontation with the French.

The sultanate of Angoche on the Moçambique coast was founded probably towards the end of the fifteenth century by refugees from Kilwa. It became a base for Muslim traders who wanted to use the Zambezi route to the central African trading fairs and it enabled them to by-pass the Portuguese trade monopoly at Sofala. The Portuguese were not able to check this trade until they themselves set up bases on the Zambezi in the 1530s and 1540s, and from that time the sultanate began to decline. Internal dissensions among the ruling families led to the Portuguese obtaining control of the sultanate in the late sixteenth century, but this control was abandoned in the following century when the trade of the Angoche coast dwindled to insignificance. During the eighteenth century movements among the Macua peoples of the mainland and the development of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean laid the foundations for the revival of the sultanate in the nineteenth century.

This article seeks to situate local oral traditions on Samori Touré within the contexts of both internal African empire building and French colonial conquest. It takes into account the experiences of the vanquished on the periphery of Samori's empire in an effort to reassess his legacy. It argues that local traditions not only provide a corrective to the nationalist historiography on Samori, they also complicate the notion of ‘resistance’ by demonstrating internal dissent and even rebellion against Samorian rule at a time of Samori's vaunted ‘primary resistance’ to French conquest. Finally, this article concludes by providing a contemporary reading of the southern Malian historical landscape, rooting local Samorian history and politics in particular ‘sites of memory’.

In 1881, Andrew Gontshi became the first black law agent in the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope and thus South Africa's first black lawyer. Records of court cases argued by Gontshi and his fellow black law agents provide a rich new archive for understanding the political sensibilities of the nineteenth-century Eastern Cape, where Gontshi practiced law and participated in the development of new forms of political organization, as well as the meaning of law to black intellectuals. In both law and politics, Andrew Gontshi employed procedural tactics to hold the state accountable to its own formalities. In Gontshi's world, law provided not a source of justice but a set of tools that could be used to advance a political agenda. Gontshi's story thus prompts a reconsideration of law's place in the intellectual tradition of South Africa's liberation struggle.

The contribution made by accountancy historians to the historiography of imperial over-rule underlines the need for attention to financial records. This is especially true for the example of Northern Nigeria, where Lugard's successors initiated consolidated tax assessment based on wealth and administration of emirate finances through treasuries. The economic and political results of this decentralization were expansion of personnel and emoluments, confusion over funding for central and provincial departments and financial underpinning for regional autonomy.

Repatriated slaves and Christian missionaries introduced Christian marriage into colonial Lagos, and spread new values about polygyny and conjugal relationships and roles. Women among the educated elite strove to marry in church and conform to foreign marital norms, in part because Christianity, European education, and colonial legal and economic changes had altered their opportunities. When they embraced Christian marriage, elite women sacrificed the autonomy and economic independence of illiterate Yoruba women for the privileges associated with membership in the elite. As elite women experienced disappointment and vulnerability created by trying to conform to foreign ideals, some began rethinking aspects of Christian marriage, particularly the wife's economic dependence.

Recent research on the territorial cults of Central Africa allows us to arrive at some tentative general patterns. The historical development of territorial cults has been worked out most fully for Malawi. Here it seems to be agreed that there was an essentially similar early cultic pattern among the proto-Chewa, the proto-Mang'anja and the proto-Tumbuka. Cults dedicated to the High God and tended by spirit wives were widely diffused. Much of the religious history of Malawi can be seen in terms of the differing relationships of these cults with incoming political authorities, producing a richly various situation.

It is not clear whether this sort of analysis can be applied to the wealth of material available on Shona territorial cults, even though the initial comparisons are suggestive. It is plain, however, that the most interesting recent work on these territorial cults suggests other dynamics of change. Shona cult history is not merely a matter of inter-relationships between cults and kings, but also very much a matter of the working out of built-in conflicts within cultic systems themselves. The much more dynamic view which it is now necessary to hold of the operations of Shona religion makes a great deal more sense of nineteenth and twentieth-century data than the previous centralized and hierarchical analysis.