Between 1580 and 1640 the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns strengthened the commercial partnership which previously existed with respect to the supply of Guinea slaves to the Spanish Indies. The conduct of the slave trade on the Upper Guinea Coast involved the active participation of the African chiefs, as well as the services of a considerable number of resident Portuguese traders, known as lançados. Before 1640, while Iberian unity prevailed, the main source of discord in the area lay in the fact that the Spanish slave ships, with the help of the lançados and the chiefs, were able to disregard the regulation that all ships loading slaves on the Upper Guinea Coast should pay duties at Santiago (Cape Verde islands), which the Portuguese used as the hub of their administration. After 1640 the restored Portuguese monarch attempted to exclude Spain from the commerce of the Upper Guinea Coast, and in the process, alienated the lançados and the African chiefs.

This paper attempts an outline of the Pan-African aspect of British colonial education policies during the inter-war years. In particular, it analyses the role of the missionary statesman, J. H. Oldham, in securing the adoption of a certain style of Negro education in the Southern States of America (one based on the work of the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes) both by the International Missionary Council and by the Colonial Office Advisory Committee on Education, of which he was a member. Oldham's interest in transferring the primarily agricultural and technical insights of the Hampton-Tuskegee model to Africa was developed in close collaboration with the Phelps-Stokes Fund of New York, and together they were responsible for directly exposing large numbers of missionaries and colonial officials to these emphases in the Southern States. The attempt to suggest the relevance to Africa of institutions which had long traditions of compromise with white supremacy in the American South inevitably cut across the Pan-African programmes of such New World Negroes as W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey, and had the effect of transplanting to the African continent some of the bitter disputes about the educational and political status of Negroes that had been common in America from the late nineteenth century conflict between DuBois and Booker T. Washington. While the article is primarily concerned with the formation of a missionary and Colonial Office consensus on the preferred Negro education for Africans, some attention is also paid to the extent to which the Hampton-Tuskegee model actually took root in Africa.

This paper reviews the results of the recent excavations at Igbo-Ukwu, from which large quantities of copper and bronze objects, glass and stone beads as well as highly decorated pottery were recovered. Although four out of five radiocarbon dates fall in the middle of the ninth century a.d., while the fifth one falls in the middle of the fifteenth century, other dating evidence—like the presence of European-type manila and beads, and the preservation of highly perishable materials—such as textiles, thread and wood fragments—seem to suggest a much later date. Consequently, until some concrete evidence can be produced to support the ninth century date, we cannot jettison the fifteenth century date, which seems to be corroborated by the evidence of the manillas and beads.

L'Historiographie se rapportant à la traite atlantique des esclaves en Afrique révèle deux tendances majeures. L'une est représentée par les travaux dont la préoccupation majeure est de quantifier les phénomènes démographiques engendrés par la traite. L'autre s'efforce au contraire d'évaluer ies conséquences de la traite dans le contexte global de l'évolution des formations sociales africaines à l'ère du capitalisme mercantile.

Le nom de la ville (qsâr) de Shingîti apparaît tardivement dans les documents médiévaux, au détour d'un texte portugais du début du seizième siècle, dans une liste de toponymes concernant l'Adrar de Mauritanie. Ce n'est qu'à partir du dix-septième et surtout du dix-huitième siècle que Shingîti acquiert une réputation dépassant les limites du Sahara occidental, plus alors par le renom de certains de ses savants et hommes de religion que par ses activités commerciales. A cette époque, comme durant la période médiévale, le principal centre commercial de l'Adrar est Wadàn, dont le destin est étroitement associé au commerce du sel de la Sebkha d'Idjîl, sans doute exploitée depuis les dixième ou onzième siècles.

Au début du dix-neuvième siècle, Wadân connaît un déclin définitif, sans doute en partie lié aux conflits factionnels opposant Idaw al-Hajj et Kunta, ces derniers devenant maîtres du qsâr et de la saline d'Idjîl dans le courant du dix-huitième siècle. Parallèlement, l'on assiste à un essor commercial de Shingîti: à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, l'importance économique et religieuse de la ville est attestée à travers le fait que l'ensemble du Sahara occidental est connu dans le monde musulman environnant sous le terme de trab ash-Shingîti, le ‘pays de Shingîti’, nom répandu à l'extérieur par les pèlerins qui se rendent à La Mecque et par les caravaniers qui fréquentent la ville. C'est sur cette brusque mutation des activités de la ville que nous nous interrogerons dans cet article en tentant de la replacer dans le contexte plus général de l'évolution des échanges sahariens au dix-neuvième siècle.

The third list of radiocarbon dates for Sub-Saharan Africa later than 1000 b.c. is considerably longer than its predecessors. As new laboratories commence operations, so more and more dates become available. During the last eighteen months, many more dates from Rhodesian Iron Age sites have been processed, where the earliest Iron Age peoples are now dated to the fourth century a.d. if not earlier. The Kalomo culture in Zambia is now securely dated. Iron smelting furnaces were being operated on the Witwatersrand in South Africa by a.d. 1000, and it is now known that Iron Age peoples were living by the Kuene river in Angola by the eighth century. Recent dates from Katanga have shown that there was a flourishing copper trade there by the same period. An important series of dates have been processed from Saharan Neolithic sites, indicating that the Sahara was suitable for pastoral peoples in the fourth century b.c. Another date for the Nok culture in Nigeria places the later stages of the culture in the third century a.d.

By a resolution of the Cambridge Radiocarbon Conference, all dates are now calculated relative to a.d. 1950.

For over nine hundred years the African inhabitants of South Central Africa engaged in the production and trading of gold. The attention of archaeologists and historians, however, has focused mainly on gold reef mining. By comparison, alluvial goldwashing has been neglected, although it was practised by Africans both before and after the period during which they exploited gold reef mines. Probably at its greatest volume between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the gold trade thereafter declined, but the mining and trading of alluvial gold continued to be relatively important in the nineteenth century in what is now north-eastern Rhodesia. Largely a seasonal activity, goldwashing was normally washing was increasingly subject to interference and attempted suppression as settlers sought t o exploit alluvial areas themselves and force Africans into wage labour. This attempted suppression did not always have the intended results but may be seen generally as part of the wider structural underdevelopment of the African peasantry and precolonial industries in Southern Rhodesia.

This essay treats the effects of acculturation on oral historical materials. Rather than addressing it as a matter of ‘contamination’, that is, as a question of extraneous data entering and distorting ‘pristine’ traditions, it is considered here to be a facet of the larger question of cultural assimilation – a case of the old and familiar constantly confronting and responding to the new and strange. Seen in this way, oral data continuously adopt and adapt whatever new, relevant and interesting materials come their way in not very different – though decidedly less visible – ways from those that written data have always done. This argument is illustrated by examples from various times and places, largely situations where missionaries, newly literate members, or colonial officials, perceptibly influenced the historical views of societies on their way to becoming literate.

In fact this phenomenon seems widespread enough to justify advancing a model that can be tested against specific cases. For our purposes, this model begins with the first meeting of oral and literate cultures, although we can fairly assume that an infinity of similar but unrecorded meetings of oral cultures also resulted in change. After this initial impetus, the constraints of colonial rule, the exigencies of independence, and the aims of modern academic oral historiography each contributed in some measure to this process of ongoing change. As a result, historians, whether primarily interested in the reliability of oral data, or in the process and effects of changes in them, must look to a wider range of sources than has been customary.

Queen Adelaide Province consisted of some 7,000 square miles of Rarabe Xhosa territory annexed by the British Cape colonial government in May 1835 during the Sixth Frontier War. The province was held only until the end of 1836 when it was abandoned under pressure from the imperial government, but it represented the first British attempt to extend direct control over a large body of formerly independent Africans. No such ambitious scheme had ever been attempted before in the Cape, and no such scheme was to be attempted elsewhere in Africa until the late nineteenth century.

Given its short-lived nature, Queen Adelaide Province has not been extensively analysed in any of the prominent histories of the eastern Cape. However, while the treatment is brief, its significance has been widely recognized. This early, temporary colonization of Xhosa territory has served as a lens through which to view colonial extension in the eastern Cape as a whole. In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century settler histories of George Cory and George McCall Theal, the annexation of Queen Adelaide Province represents a temporary advance within a much broader colonial progress. One episode in the epic attempt to extend colonial civilization across ‘Kaffraria’, expansion within the province was unfortunately thwarted by misguided Cape and metropolitan philanthropy. In W. M. Macmillan's liberal critique of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the disputes over the province between the land-hungry settlers, the strategically-minded Governor D'Urban and the humanitarian Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, are again viewed as part of a much broader struggle. But rather than Cory's struggle between civilization and savagery, this is seen as a contest between malicious and benign conceptions of colonialism. The province represents an early collision between, on the one hand, evangelical and humanitarian versions of cultural colonization that guaranteed Xhosa access to their land (a kind of trusteeship that Macmillan advocated for his own times) and, on the other hand, the practice of colonization founded upon settler-led conquest and dispossession.

In a recent study, Fred Cooper argues that strikes and other forms of labor protest had a clarifying effect on official thinking not only about labor policies but also about the aims and, ultimately, the viability of colonial rule. As Africans went on strike, from the Copperbelt to the docks of Mombasa and the Gold Coast Railway, to demand better wages and working conditions, colonial administrators first envisioned and then embraced the idea of an African working class and the possibility that African workers could be managed with the same kinds of labor codes and social welfare policies that obtained in Europe.

Of course, the image of a working class applied only so far in Africa. Colonial officials never fully understood the way African workers lived or the place of wage employment in African society, and were dismayed when their newly acquired understanding of Africans as universal workers was challenged in the 1950s by former strike leaders who began to insist on Africans' rights to political autonomy. Nonetheless, as Cooper shows, the effects of recurrent, often highly effective, strikes were far-reaching. As officials confronted the financial and political implications of providing all Africans with social welfare benefits and economic development comparable to those of Europe, they decided it was time to abandon the imperial enterprise.

During World War I, Africans in Nyasaland were called upon to provide large numbers of soldiers and military labourers for the war effort in eastern Africa. Although a few willingly volunteered, many more objected, and some resisted. In this situation, colonial officals used force to secure the necessary manpower. Africans, therefore, called the conflict ‘the war of thangata’, referring to the growing colonial demands for taxes and for labour rent on European estates. The tasks which the soldiers and carriers were called upon to perform were equally likened to thangata, being ‘work which was done without real benefit’. So far from receiving rewards, Africans found that inadequate food, clothing, and medical care contributed greatly to the sufferings associated with a military campaign. Between 1914 and 1918 wartime manpower requirements, and war service, gave full meaning to colonial rule throughout the protectorate. The response to these demands and this suffering brought, in the form of both traditional and modern religious and social institutions, the first tentative stirrings of African nationalism in Nyasaland.

Parliament passed in 1807 the act to illegalize (called prematurely to abolish) the slave-trade. A Vice-Admiralty Court where the Navy could bring captured slave-ships for condemnation was constituted in Freetown, the capital of the Colony of Sierra Leone. From 1819 international anti-slave-trade courts, the Courts of Mixed Commission, were constituted there too. Until 1864, when the last ship destined for the Atlantic slave-trade was condemned, slave-ships were regularly brought in and the slaves freed.

When the Cold War broke out in Western Europe at the end of the Second World War, France was a key battleground. Its Cold War choices played out in the empire as well as in the métropole. After communist party ministers were ousted from the tripartite government in 1947, repression against communists and their associates intensified – both in the Republic and overseas. In French sub-Saharan Africa, the primary victims of this repression were members of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), an interterritorial alliance of political parties with affiliates in most of the 14 territories of French West and Equatorial Africa, and in the United Nations trusts of Togo and Cameroon. When, under duress, RDA parliamentarians severed their ties with the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) in 1950, grassroots activists in Guinea opposed the break. Their voices muted throughout most of the decade, Leftist militants regained preeminence in 1958, when trade unionists, students, the party's women's and youth wings, and other grassroots actors pushed the Guinean RDA to reject a constitution that would have relegated the country to junior partnership in the French Community, and to proclaim Guinea's independence instead. Guinea's vote for independence, and its break with the interterritorial RDA in this regard, were the culmination of a decade-long struggle between grassroots activists on the political Left and the party's territorial and interterritorial leadership for control of the political agenda.

In May 1961 a small group of men formed the Kabaka Yekka movement in the Kingdom of Buganda. Their simple objective was to unite the Baganda behind the throne, the symbol and guarantee of Buganda's separate identity. The great fear was that the election of a national Democratic Party government in the previous March had marked a decisive stage in the destruction of Buganda's special position within Uganda. Kabaka Yekka's appeal to Ganda loyalty was instantly successful, but it was not until the Kabaka's ministers agreed to accept membership of independent Uganda, and to support Kabaka Yekka in Buganda, that Kabaka Yekka could win popular support and deal effectively with the Democratic Party. But when Kabaka Yekka became an ‘official’ movement, its whole nature and function was changed. There had been differences at the beginning, but now the simple objective barely disguised the contradictions within the movement, while Kabaka Yekka became a means to personal promotion as well as the guardian of the ‘national’ interest. Above all, Kabaka Yekka now included the chiefs, who wanted to preserve the existing political and social arrangements within Buganda. So by February 1962 Kabaka Yekka had become the party for the Baganda and for the status quo within Buganda. It was a party which, because it was identified with the Kabakaship, was able to destroy the Democratic Party in elections for the Buganda Lukiko, and a party which, although in alliance with Dr Obote's Uganda People's Congress in national politics, had aroused sentiments and interests pointing ultimately, if not irrevocably, to Ganda separation.

By the middle of the sixteenth century, Europeans had made themselves aware of the broad outlines of the Continents of Asia, Africa and America. Two hundred years later many of the most striking facts of the geography of the great land-masses had been revealed. In Asia, Siberia had been traversed, China mapped, and Tibet visited, while a vigorous trade was maintained with all the countries of the Eastern Seas. Most of the coast and many of the great lakes and rivers of the Americas had been charted, and flourishing European communities established from Lima to Quebec. Far more was known of Africa than its coastline: a large part of Ethiopia had been visited during the era of Portuguese influence at the beginning of the seventeenth century; Catholic missionaries had worked in the Eastern Sudan in the first decade of the eighteenth century; the Moorish geographers, Idrisi and Leo Africanus, both of whose works were constantly used by European cartographers, provided a succinct account of the citier and states of the Sahara and the Sudan; on the Upper Senegal the French had by 1750 successfully maintained for half a century a trading post over four hundred miles from the sea; in Southern Africa individual adventurers had penetrated deep into the hinterland of the Portuguese colonies in Angola and Mozambique, and of the Dutch settlement at the Cape.

This essay interprets a classification of Africa's Bantu languages which used statistical tools guided by assumptions about farming and its chronology to analyze fresh vocabulary evidence. It shows a peeling movement from Cameroon's grassfields, into southern Cameroon, then along a savanna corridor through West Central Africa's rainforests, into the Savannahs, then to Southern Africa, the Great Lakes, and Indian Ocean coast. The clear sequence of movement masks methodological and historical factors. Language death, multilingualism, and the limits of vocabulary evidence restrain the classification's authority. ‘Transformations’ from food collecting to food producing or from no metals to full engagement with metals were mutable, unfolded at different speeds, and involved interactions with firstcomers. In Central Africa, Bantu speakers were often the first farmers and metal-users in the region but elsewhere they were commonly neither. Their arrivals did not immediately displace firstcomers. Computational methods can accommodate many of these issues.

Forced immigration from the Southwest Indian Ocean marked life at the Cape of Good Hope for over a century. Winds, currents, and shipping linked the two regions, as did a common international currency, and complementary seasons and crops. The Cape's role as a refreshment station for French, Portuguese, American, and Spanish slave ships proved particularly important in the development of a commerce linking East Africa, Madagascar, and the Mascarenes with the Americas. This slave trade resulted in the landing at the Cape of perhaps as many as 40,000 forced immigrants from tropical Africa and Madagascar. Brought to the Cape as slaves, or freed slaves subjected to strict periods of apprenticeship, these individuals were marked by the experience of a brutal transhipment that bears comparison with the trans-Atlantic Middle Passage. The history of the Middle Passage occupies a central place in the study of slavery in the Americas and plays a vital role in the way many people today situate themselves socially and politically. Yet, for various reasons, this emotive subject is absent from historical discussions of life at the Cape. This article brings it into the history of slavery in the region. By focusing on the long history of this forced immigration, the article also serves to underline the importance of the Cape to the political and economic life of the Southwest Indian Ocean.

Trade across the Cape frontier in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, and government attempts to regulate that trade, cannot be understood without first considering the role of Protestant missionaries as traders and bearers of European manufactured goods in the South African interior. From their arrival in 1799, missionaries of the London Missionary Society carried on a daily trade beyond the northern and eastern boundaries of the Cape Colony that was forbidden by law to the colonists. When missionaries of the Methodist Missionary Society arrived in the mid-1810s they too carried beads as well as Bibles to their mission stations outside the colony. Most missionaries were initially troubled by having to mix commercial activities with their religious duties. They were forced, however, to rely on trade in order to support themselves and their families because of the meagre material and monetary assistance they received from their societies. They introduced European goods among African societies beyond the Cape frontiers earlier and in greater quantities than any other enterprise until the commencement of the Fort Willshire fairs in 1824. Most importantly, they helped to bring about a transition from trade in beads, buttons and other traditional exchange items to a desire among many of the peoples with whom they came into contact for blankets, European clothing and metal tools and utensils, thus creating a growing dependency on European material goods that would eventually bring about a total transformation of these African societies.

One of the characteristic traits of a national culture is a distinctive historical folklore, which lauds the qualities and magnifies the deeds of national heroes and derides those of their opponents, domestic and foreign. Such a mythology is harmless enough if it is light and humorous in tone, if it is taken with a pinch of salt, and if it is offset by dispassionate teaching in the schools and universities and objective writing by the historians. But if the mythology itself is bitter and humourless, if it dwells upon grievances, if it is taken too seriously, and if it is propagated by teachers and writers, then the national outlook is liable to become diseased. In the extreme case, the capacity for formulating and pursuing a rational goal becomes vitiated by illusion. Duped by a romantic historical image, party, press and even pulpit advocate unwise and unjust policies, in the name of tradition.