Oswald Pirow was an active and influential cabinet minister in the Hertzog administration in South Africa for more than a decade. Perhaps more than anyone else in office, Pirow shaped the new aggressive Union policies in external matters which stressed a ‘South Africa First’ ideology. Given a free hand by Hertzog, and as minister responsible for defence and transport, Pirow aimed to weaken the British connexion, enhance South Africa's image, and expand Union influence throughout ‘white’ Africa to the north. The agent charged to carry out these new policies was South African Airways, organized by Pirow in 1934 as Africa 's first national airline. As the Union 's ‘chosen instrument’, SAA was used by Pirow to challenge British paramountcy in the Rhodesias and East Africa, in direct conflict with Britain 's own struggling Imperial Airways. The rivalry was for routes and services, mail and passengers, and ultimately for prestige. By 1939, Pirow 's airline was established in operation from Kenya southward, and winning the struggle with its fleet of modern Junkers aircraft. Pirow was the promoter, the organizer and the hard bargainer with whom the British had to deal time and time again. For technical and financial reasons, Imperial Airways could seldom match Pirow 's ambitions, and on the eve of World War II, Pirow could claim great success for his air-minded policy. Only the coming of the war was to remove Pirow and his policy from the scene.

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.

Jusqu'en 1965 l'on ne connaissait pratiquement rien de la préhistoire de République Centrafricaine, aucune recherche systématique n'y ayant jamais été effectuée. Deux notes parues en 1933 permettaient cependant de penser que ce pays possédait, comme ses voisins, un patrimoine préhistorique. La premiàre, de l'abbé Breuil, décrivait en deux pages unesérie de pierres taillées détenue par le Musée de l'Homme à Paris, recueillie sur le plateau de Mouka par une mission géologique dirigée par F. Delhaye; une autre collection de même provenance était déposée à la même époque au Musée de l'Afrique Centrale à Tervuren en Belgique, elle y demeurait malheureusement inédite jusqu'en 1969 où nous pouvions la voir et l'étudier. La seconde note due à la plume de Félix Eboué était consacrée à l'ethnographie mais le premier chapitre décrivait quelques objets en pierre trouvés dans le centre-est du pays au cours de travaux miniers ou de constructions de ponts.

This article considers the different ways that Marirangwe purchase area farmers understood and used their farmland, resources and opportunities. In the pioneer period from 1931 to the 1940s, Marirangwe farmers favored extensive use of their land and its resources. However, as labor and capital opportunities changed, land became for some an expendable commodity. By the 1950s, the farmers' ability to generate capital through land sales paralleled the arrival of squatters in the area. With the help of these squatters and revenue from land sales, Marirangwe farmers prospered. This development, however, did not signal a change from the extensive farming habits of the pioneer period but rather a brief, and generally prosperous, period of specialization.

Historians have frequently included the Bantu-speaking peoples of the eastern Kenya Highlands—Kikuyu, Embu, Mbere, Kamba, Meru, etc.—in the general migrations of the North Eastern Bantu from Shungwaya. The most authoritative statement in support of this view is set out in H. E. Lambert's The Systems of Land Tenure in the Kikuyu Land Unit: Part 1, History of the Tribal Occupation of the Land. However, only the Meru have oral traditions pointing to a Shungwaya origin, and chronological and linguistic evidence which Lambert presents himself suggests that the Meru experience may not be typical of this group of peoples. As evidence is lacking in their own traditions, proof of the migrations of the Kikuyu–Embu–Kamba from Shungwaya can only come from archaeology.

A rare document, the diary of a slave raider, offers a unique view into the sociopolitical situation at the turn of the nineteenth century in the colonial backwater of North Cameroon. The Fulbe chief in question, Hamman Yaji, not only kept a diary, but was by far the most notorious slave raider of the Mandara Mountains. This article supplements the data from his diary with oral histories and archival sources to follow the dynamics of the intense slave raiding he engaged in. This frenzy of slaving occurred in a ‘colonial interstice’ characterized by competition between three colonial powers – the British, the Germans and the French, resilient governing structures in a region poorly controlled by colonial powers, and the unclear boundaries of the Mandara Mountains. The dynamics of military technology and the economics of this ‘uncommon market’ in slaves form additional factors in this episode in the history of slavery in Africa. These factors account for the general situation of insecurity due to slave raiding in the area, to which Hamman Yaji was an exceptionally atrocious contributor. In the end a religious movement, Mahdism, stimulated the consolidation of colonial power, ending Yaji's regime, which in all its brutality provides surprising insight in the early colonial situation in this border region between Nigeria and Cameroon.

Karamanli rule over Tripoli collapsed in 1835. But opposition to Yusef Pasha had been building up for over twenty years. Hassuna D'Ghies, the chief conspirator, visited England in the early 1820s and met the seventy-four year old Jeremy Bentham, then busily concerned in drawing up codes of law for Spain, Portugal, Greece and other newly independent states. He readily produced a code for Tripoli, to be introduced with the Pasha's consent or (should he refuse) by armed insurrection. Nothing came of their immediate project, but when D'Ghies returned to Tripoli he tried, during his brief period as Chief Minister, to govern according to Bentham's principles.

Starting with a small band of refugees, Mzilikazi built a personal military kingdom on the Zulu model at three successive locations in South Africa. His early successes might be attributed to the disturbances resulting from the Difaqane. Later, his strength was maintained by his ability to incorporate diverse peoples into his polity. The aggressive policy for which he is known was not maintained during those periods in which he felt secure, but rather when he was forced to migrate farther from his major enemy, the Zulu. Evidence supports the contention that his main aim was a search for security. His policies were successful against the threats from African enemies. Only with the coming of white men did they fail. The essential features of Mzilikazi's political system are described to show what he preserved of traditional Nguni practices, what he borrowed from Dingeswayo and Shaka, and what he modified to fit his particular circumstances.

The viability of Mzilikazi's developing polity is confirmed by his success in reconstructing his kingdom north of the Limpopo River. Without minimizing the traditional characterization of Mzilikazi as a warrior, a desolator and a tyrant, it is as a creative political administrator that his full stature can be appreciated.

During the first years of British rule at the Cape, a complacency, reinforced by a disregard for colonial conditions and by a disdain for day-to-day supervision, relegated land administration to a marginal function of the Cape Town and London governments. The first major change in the land code was made in 1812 by Governor Cradock, who wanted to obtain the loyalty of the Boer in order to ensure continued British overlordship of the colony, but from 1813 to 1828 and beyond, Government failed to develop an effective administrative system for processing the applications for land grants under the Cradock code. No check was made on the incompetent officials in Cape Town who were entrusted with transforming the decrees of government into a workable land alienation system. On occasion, London, which had but a fleeting interest in land policy in the period under review, imposed new restrictions on the administrative process in order to obtain some other goal. The persistent lack of constructive activity by the British suggests that they did much to prevent the Boer from identifying himself with the Cape Town government.

Research into the perspectives of both worker and consumer has shown the social history of Zulu washermen to be far more complex than was previously thought. Viewed from the standpoint of Zulu men, washing clothes was not a humiliating female task into which they had been coerced by adverse circumstances. Laundering recalled the specialist craft of hide-dressing in which Zulu males engaged as izinyanga, a prestige occupation that paid handsomely. These astute tradesmen, a number of whom may have come from artisanal families, recognized they could play a crucial role in the European household economy. ‘Craft conscious’, building on indigenous institutions and customs, they combined not merely to secure their position and bar entry into ‘the trade’, but also to impose standards of wages and regulate the labour given by the younger men. In this manner they became one, if not indeed the most, powerful group of African workmen in nineteenth-century Natal.

The social history of the AmaWasha guild compels a re-evaluation of notions regarding openness to change in traditional societies; indeed, it underscores their capacity for innovation. Moreover, it has a fundamental bearing on the structural nature and patterns of resistance of early black working populations in South Africa. This study indicates that there were intimate historical links between precolonial artisanal associations and subsequent worker organizations, activities and consciousness.

Few anthropologists, I think, would question that the use of oral tradition as a historical source in tribal studies requires a knowledge of the part tradition plays in the society in which it occurs. Most would agree that oral tradition does not have a universal validity—it is not equally ‘true’ or equally ‘false’ in all tribal societies. Rather its historical content, where unequivocal historical evidence is lacking, has to be evaluated in the light of the contemporary social situations to which it is related. Since Malinowski, many anthropologists have tended to the view that traditions about the past express the reality of the present more than they record what actually happened in the past. Legends about the past, indeed, have often been described as ‘charters’ validating the present by attributing a respectable antiquity to its origins.

No aspect of Brazilian relations with Africa deserves more attention than the study of the African in Brazil. The chroniclers described their types, qualities, virtues and defects in a few sweeping and stereotyped generalizations which, as was only natural, were no more accurate than their accounts of the Indians. But if the latter, from the beginning, had defenders of their liberty and a more extensive and careful protective legislation, the Negroes endured captivity for a long time without a voice being raised in their defence, except for Padre Antonio Vieira, who exhorted them to resignation in his sermons, and Padre Manuel Ribeiro da Rocha, who condemned the slave trade and proposed the liberation of slaves. Bishop Azevedo Coutinho, on the contrary, who was connected with land-owning interests, defended slavery as a ‘licit trade’, a ‘kind of commerce’ whose legitimacy had never been doubted among the nations since antiquity, and he attacked the ‘reformers of France’. The works written by Ribeiro da Rocha and Azevedo Coutinho are unique in the annals of the defence of liberty and of slavery.

This article has concentrated on the efforts made by the British colonial regime in Northern Nigeria to suppress the slave trade. It has shown that the slave trade disappeared gradually, in three phases. The first extended from 1900 to about 1908, the second lasted until about 1919, while the third continued until the disappearance of the slave trade at the end of the 1930s. The task of suppression was carried out by a variety of means: military, including the patroling of trade routes and policing of strategic locations; political and diplomatic, involving co-operation with other colonial powers in the area; and judicial, including arrest, prosecution and punishment of offenders. In all these efforts the colonial administration received assistance from the Native Authorities; by the third phase these Authorities and the Native Courts were the most active forces against slaving. The slave trade dealt to a very significant extent in children. In the environment in which the trade was conducted the dealers developed a range of tricks and subterfuges to evade detection by the law enforcement agencies. The long borders which the agencies had to patrol, the manpower problems which they faced, and the relative ease with which slaves could be obtained in times of adversity combined to make the struggle against slaving a protracted one. Time was not, however, on the side of the traders. Improvements in communications, a stronger administration, the growing effectiveness of patrols, and the deterrent effects of judicial action cut into and finally eliminated the slave trade.

Combining a set of grey literature and primary sources, this article analyses the rise and fall of the sultanate of Awsa, northeastern Ethiopia, between 1944 and 1975. Ali Mirah exploited the typical repertoires of a frontier regime to consolidate a semi-independent Muslim chiefdom at the fringes of the Christian empire of Ethiopia. Foreign investors in commercial agriculture provided the sultanate and its counterparts within the Ethiopian state with tangible and intangible resources that shaped the quest for statecraft in the Lower Awash Valley.

The rural rebellion and dissidence of Jilālī ibn Idrīs al-Zarhūnā al-Yūsufī, alias Bū Ḥimāra, was among the most debilitating of the crises to afflict the Moroccan central government (makhzan) during its final decade of freedom from formal French control. Bū Ḥimāra, falsely declaring himself to be Mawlay MuḤammad, older brother of the reigning sultan, and thereby rightful claimant to the Sharifian throne, held sway over much of the northeastern part of the country between 1903 and 1909. Though the rebellion never extended beyond this region, the makhzan's protracted attempts to stamp it out contributed significantly to Morocco's political instability and fiscal collapse. The movement, under Bū Ḥimāra's leadership, may be divided into two major phases: the first, lasting about six months, when the revolt had the character of a mass popular protest against the makhzan; the second, from late 1903 to 1909, when Bū Ḥimāra, with a reduced and fluid band of partisans, settled into the role of regional warlord, ruling over a petty state apparatus in the mountainous Northeast. During the longer second phase, his paramountcy was similar in form and objective to that of other regional strong men who carved out principalities in peripheral areas of the country, building their power on access to modern firearms in defiance of the makhzan. This paper argues that the success and tenacity of Bū Ḥimāra's dissidence was dependent on his ability to develop connexions with the wider world of European commerce: merchandise and commodities trade yielding customs revenue, importation of firearms, relations with Algerian businessmen, and mining concessions. These forms of external support are examined and evaluated, leading to the conclusion that Bū Ḥimāra's principal objective from late 1903 onward was not active rebellion but rather an effort to maintain his political and military captaincy over the Northeast, drawing on whatever external resources were available. Though he successfuly defied the government for several years, his increasing association with European commercial and mining interests undermined his popular support and ultimately led to his downfall.

The ‘three-party system’ of Dahomey consists of a trio of regional fiefs, created by MM. Apithy, Maga, and Ahomadegbe in the early fifties. The development and persistence of regionalism can be attributed to a low level of economic change, an unusually high level of educational provision, a considerable diversity of ethnic groupings, and an exceptionally rapid process of enfranchisement.

Formal political organizations appeared in 1945 and 1946 in response to the constitutional innovations brought about by the Constituent Assemblies in Paris. Between 1946 and 1951 territorial politics were dominated by the Union Progressiste Dahoménne, a loosely structured body which, while claiming ‘mass’ membership, had many of the same leaders as pre-war élite associations and adopted a similar philosophy with regard to colonial reform. There was little attempt to ‘mobilize’ the hinterland or to get the support of the unenfranchised. The institutional arrangements of the period did not compel politicians to strive in either direction. They did encourage the consolidation of the personal authority of the deputy, over both his political associates and the voting public.

Regional parties were set up in and after 1951. Their creation was occasioned by a sudden, fivefold increase in the electorate, the granting of a second National Assembly seat to the territory, and a split within the U.P.D. leadership over the renomination of Apithy, deputy from 1946 to 1951.

Northern politicians, led by Hubert Maga, exploited the division within the U.P.D. and exploited also northern resentment over the party's indifference to the region. The northern component of the regional system came into existence (the G.E.N.D.—later M.D.D.), and was quickly followed by a south-eastern ‘bloc’, the undisputed property of Apithy. In the mid-fifties a third party, the U.D.D., appeared, to absorb the residual elements of regional (and urban) support left outside the Maga and Apithy fiefs.

Sisal growing spread rapidly in East Africa during the 1920s and 1930s to become one of the most important export crops in both Kenya and Tanganyika. The sisal industry nevertheless suffered severely from the low prices and erratic commodity markets which characterized the depression. Producers blamed the merchants and merchants blamed the market, but the sisal growers began increasingly to look for ways to bring marketing under their own control in the hope of securing a better return. During the Second World War, state control over the sisal trade enabled producers, through their powerful growers' associations, to exert a greater influence over marketing than ever before. They used this and the dramatic wartime change in market conditions, firstly, to improve the price paid them by the Ministry of Supply and, secondly, to try to consolidate their control over marketing after the war when government purchase ended. In this way they were actively supported by the Colonial Office but vigorously opposed by the London-based merchants and their client growers in East Africa. After a long struggle the independent producers failed to gain the complete control they wanted, but nevertheless considerably strengthened their own hand and reversed a trend towards greater metropolitan control over the sisal industry which had developed during the thirties. Producers could not single-handedly stabilize the market for their commodity, but through concerted action they were able to improve their return from it. The study raises questions about the assumptions behind both liberal and Marxist interpretations of imperial trade and shows that in the case of one of East Africa's most important exports relations between producers and traders were more complex than has been assumed.

Le royaume de Kongo fut fondé par des conquérants qui soumirent les populations autochtones de souche ambundu. D'ou vinrent-ils? Deux théories ont été élaborées à; ce sujet. La plus ancienne et celle qui est accepté par la plupart des historiens veut qu'ils soient venus de l'est, de l'outre-Kwango. Cette version fut d'abord celle de Ravenstein avant d'ê;tre reprise et popularisée par Van Wing. On la retrouve chez Soret, Cornevin, Baumann et Westermann, Oliver et Fage soit dans tous les ouvrages de synthèse actuels.

One of the principal objectives of foreign settlements in nineteenth-century West Africa was the establishment of extensive regular trade with Africans, especially residents of the distant, fabled interior. The attainment of this goal, however, proved very difficult. The most spectacular success was achieved by the British settlement at Sierra Leone, which in the early 1820s managed to establish substantial regular trade with the distant hinterland. Its early efforts to achieve this objective, however, were unsuccessful. Until 1818 the development of long-distance trade with the hinterland was impeded by the desultory nature of such efforts, Sierra Leone's opposition to slave trading, competition from established coastal marts, obstructions caused by intermediate states and peoples, and the weaknesses and limitations of the Colony's policy towards commerce and the interior. By 1821, however, the marked decline of the Atlantic slave trade in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, the active co-operation of Futa Jallon and Segu, two major trading states in the hinterland, and certain other important developments in the Colony and the interior, combined to establish such trade on a regular basis.