In his book Afro-Portuguese Ivories (Batchworth Press, London, n.d.), William Fagg established the identity of an interesting hybrid art-form in a number of ivory objects—spoons, forks, salt-cellars and horns—carved for European use and to European design, but fashioned according to the canons of the African artist. While certain that the carvers were Africans, Fagg is unable to assign them to any particular region, or even to be certain that they were working in Africa. His tentative conclusion is that three regions have a claim to be considered as the home of these ivories: the area around what is now Freetown in Sierra Leone, the Bakongo coast, and the old Slave Coast between Whydah and Lagos. Von Luschan's theory of a Benin origin is firmly ruled out. Among his three alternatives, Fagg inclines to the Slave Coast, and in particular to its Yoruba sector, because of stylistic affinities between the ivories and Yoruba carving. Such a hypothesis runs into serious chronological difficulties, for whereas many representational features of the ivory carvings suggest that they belong to the sixteenth century, the Portuguese did not frequent the Whydah—Lagos coast until the seventeenth century, and even then the trade was with Brazil, not Portugal.

In Northern Rhodesia under colonial rule, much land was alienated from the Plateau Tonga for occupation by European settlers who were mainly maize farmers. The expansion of African farming from the late 1920s, aided by the growing use of the plough and draught oxen, caused such settlers to demand the imposition of marketing controls. The government sought to introduce conservation measures to protect the lands of African farmers from wanton misuse, and in 1946 it introduced an Improved Farming Scheme (I.F.S.) to check overcultivation among the Plateau Tonga. The I.F.S., while nurturing a small group of privileged farmers, was to antagonize most African producers and gave rise to charges of collaboration with the colonial administration. The non-political activities of the Farmers' Associations formed by the Improved Farmers lent substance to these charges which in the 1950s emanated largely from the ranks of local supporters of the African National Congress (A.N.C.). By 1959, the I.F.S. had failed to meet the expectations of its members, thereby bearing out the doubts and fears of its critics. This was to throw into the lap of the local A.N.C. movement several wealthy and educated farmers who had hitherto taken no active interest in protest politics but who were now convinced they had been misled.

Salaga was one of the leading slave-markets of West Africa in the 1880s. The story of the slaves – where they came from, who brought them to Salaga, who bought them, and what happened to them afterwards – can be pieced together from the reports of a great variety of travellers, black and white, officials, soldiers, merchants and missionaries, of various nationalities, African and European. Thus, on the eve of the European occupation which put an end to it, it is possible to lift the veil that usually conceals the internal slave trade of pre-colonial Africa, and gain some idea of its scale and workings, and of the range of attitudes towards slavery and the slave trade.

M. G. Marwick has suggested that witchcraft accusations show where the tensions lie in the societies in which they occur. He also intimates that in Africa witchcraft accusations only occur between persons in close social contact. These ideas are borne out by an analysis of the cases of Efik witchcraft for which there is evidence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There witchcraft accusations for the most part involved relations by blood or marriage. But although G. I. Jones has suggested that the underlying tensions which provoke witchcraft accusations in the eastern areas of Nigeria today arise from a contracting economic situation, this was not true of Old Calabar in those days; its economy was in fact expanding under the stimulus of overseas trade. It was expansion which caused the tension, as successful business men acquired wealth and slaves, and therefore status, which contradicted their position in the traditional status system, based on age and place in lineage rather than wealth. At the highest political level these tensions manifested themselves in election disputes, where witchcraft accusations were made against candidates, in order that they take the poison ordeal and be eliminated from the election. Yet in the neighbouring states of Bonny and New Calabar, witchcraft accusations were rare. This may have been because the old descent groups had broken up, to be replaced by canoe houses, warring and trading organizations which owed their origin to the enterprise of their founders who were often slaves. Because the tensions in these societies were between competing unrelated individuals, aggression did not need to be covert. Instead rivalries could be fought in the open, as they were, Bonny and New Calabar being racked by violence and warfare.

This article examines the actions of the British Colonial Office and British business interests in the international marketing of cocoa from Ghana and Nigeria in the later 1930s, when problems in cocoa marketing were brought to head by the expatriate firms forming a ‘Pool’ and the farmers responding to this — and to a sudden fall in their terms of trade — with a ‘hold-up’, which was followed by a British commission of inquiry, and during the second world war and immediate post-war era, when the C.O. imposed a marketing system designed by the expatriate merchant firms and subsequently decided to make it into a permanent peacetime reorganization. The close contact between the CO. and British firms such as the United Africa Company and Cadbury Bros. is brought out, as is the support given by the officials to these companies before and during the war. A further theme is a certain antipathy displayed by the officials for African capitalists in general and cocoa traders in particular and the way in which the war-time scheme squeezed African and other non-British small cocoa-export firms in many cases out of business.

The war-time scheme convinced the C.O. that a peacetime system of fixed buying prices which were set well below the world price was desirable as a means of eradicating ‘middleman abuses’ and of building up large ‘stabilization funds’ to protect the cocoa farmers in future years when prices might fall. Continuation of the scheme was thus seen as an act of trusteeship. It was also attractive to the British Treasury because it maximized U.S. dollar earnings for Britain from the sale of West African cocoa. In contrast to interpretations put forward by some other historians, this article argues that the Colonial Office had close, day-to-day contact with the leading British firms involved, that it strongly supported the ‘Pool’ system before and during the early stages of the war, and that the post-war marketing structure was an outcome of the war-time scheme and not of the Nowell Commission report of 1938. Finally, having lost in an unequal struggle with the expatriate firms and the Colonial Office between 1937 and 1944, African international shippers of cocoa were permanently excluded.

Records of Ethiopian property dealings provide insights into the affairs of Ethiopian families. They suggest further, dynamic links between property and family. Amhara rules of descent and inheritance are ambilineal. Each person reckons their ancestry equally through their father and mother and inherits property the same way. Yet, without abandoning their profession of the principles of ambilineal descent and of equal partible inheritance, the Abyssinian nobility subverted these norms, thereby creating ‘families’ out of a welter of ramifying lineages, and ‘estates’ out of disintegrating holdings. Their devices included wills and marriage endowments which privileged one sibling at the expense of others. Another device was the alaqenat, an office which functioned as the head of a family and its affairs. The alaqenat, previously unreported in the Ethiopian literature, appears in a number of documents in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries, and the article uses it to trace the affairs of one noble family over a period of six generations. Further comments are made about the links between public office and notions of property. Finally, two wider spheres are addressed. In spite of its radical ambilineality Abyssinian society reveals tendencies common to other societies based on plough agriculture, tendencies towards greater class differentiation based on the accumulation of landed property. And, unlike most other historic societies professing Christianity, Abyssinian society is marked by frequent divorce and marital instability.

In most of Ethiopia the Galla preserved, to a great extent, their ‘democratic’ traditional social and political institutions until the twentieth century. However, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, one hears of five Galla centralized despotic monarchies in southwestern Ethiopia. It seems that this was the culmination of a long process by which the authority of the traditional officeholders among the Macha Galla was gradually strengthened. As the Macha became more sedentary, they were greatly influenced by the Sidama among whom they lived and by Muslim merchants from north Ethiopia who settled in the area from the beginning of the nineteenth century. The most famous among the Macha monarchies were Limmu-Enarea and Jimma-Kakka. It is believed that Enarea was established by Bofo (Abba Gomol), the son of Boku, in the first or possibly in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Jimma-Kakka emerged in the 1830s, after a number of Jimma tribes were united by Abba Jifar-Sana.

One is led to believe that the monarchical system was adopted by the Macha tribes in order that they might be better able to take advantage of the revival of trade between southwestern Ethiopia and the coast. Enarea and Jimma clashed continuously, from the late 1830s, over the issue of the revenue from this trade. Finally, in the third quarter of the century Jimma emerged triumphant and Enarea sank again to obscurity.

It is intriguing to speculate on the possible crucial influence of commerce, aided by Sidama tradition and Islam, on the emergence of the Macha Galla monarchies.

This paper reports the S.O.A.S. conference on African chronology of July 1966. The poor quality of much of the published work in this field posed serious problems. An analysis of the data assembled indicates 13 years as the most probable value for an average length of reign, and 30 for an average dynastic generation. The conference was, however, impressed by the limitations of this method, and emphasized the need for a many-sided approach. Chronological reconstruction is best attempted on a wide regional base to make the fullest use of both cross-traditional tie-ups and dates fixed by documentary evidence.

Before the difaqane, warfare among the Sotho was usually little more than cattle-raiding. Some attacks were combined operations executed by all the fighting men of a chiefdom, but most were the exploits of a few adventurous individuals. The raiders would each be armed with a bunch of long spears, a knobkerrie and a light oxhide shield, and they would usually approach the enemy's cattle along river beds and through mountain kloofs, relying partly on surprise to achieve their ends. Occasionally the men who were guarding the herds would have prior warning of the attack, in which case they would be specially reinforced and would offer a spirited resistance, but more often they would be taken unawares, and they would then beat a hasty retreat and sound the alarm in the village: all the able-bodied men would thereupon join together in pursuit of the attackers in the hope of recovering their stock as it was being driven away. When the warriors of two chiefdoms clashed, they generally conducted their fighting at a considerable distance from each other, for their spears were more suitable for throwing than for stabbing, and their small shields were not designed to be impenetrable barriers in close conflict but to deflect missiles. If the two groups did come to grips with each other, the spears' bamboo handles could be broken and they could then be used for stabbing, but the most favoured weapon in this situation was the knobkerrie. Desperate battles, however, were rare, and in most of the Sotho's skirmishes their casualties were light.

The earliest substantial references we have to the reaction of Zulu to firearms date from the 1820s and they show that any previous contact with such weapons must have been slight. The diaries of the English traders who arrived in the kingdom in the latter part of the 1820s point to a widespread fear of firearms on the part of Shaka's subjects—a fear not necessarily related to the missiles the guns discharged, but to the noise and smoke they emitted when fired. Dingane, in a discussion on strategy with his councillors which Isaacs overheard in 1830, said that:

if the white people were to come here to fight us, they need not fire at us, as the report from their pieces would strike you with terror, and while you ran one way, the Malongoes (whites) would drive off your cattle the other.

In the eleventh to thirteenth century, Southern African Nguni-speakers made a counterintuitive choice to begin investing in large herds of cattle. Despite a long-standing knowledge of cattle, the earliest Nguni-speakers did not take to cattle-keeping as a way of life. Rather, the transition came as the result of changing social circumstances as households sought to manage the lifecycles of young men and reliably exploit their labor through gendered and generational expectations of decorum. Nguni-speakers grounded new concepts about cattle in older practices and norms regarding the social reproduction of young men. Agropastoralists situated cattle-keeping among the obligations young men faced after passing through initiation, giving cattle local salience. The transformation unfolded in gendered and generational household choices, but was shaped by the broad context of an increasingly interconnected Southern Africa.

Cape Town's black population of the early twentieth century actively pursued lifestyles that might be described as respectable. But respectability was expensive, and poverty —characterised by poor housing, ill health and shortened lifespans — stood in the way of some of its most essential elements: cleanliness, sexual restraint, sobriety, and the creation of nuclear and gendered households. Black respectability, therefore, could not simply replicate that of the dominant white bourgeoisie. Most challenging was the development of rampant black criminality, often seen by contemporary observers as the result of the failure of black women to realise respectable households. Even attempts on the part of the state to create respectable citizenries floundered, partly because these initiatives were incompatible with the policies of racial segregation. The state and the dominant bourgeoisie put their faith in the black elite as the standard-bearers of respectability, but the reality was that the respectability of the ‘superior’ class was frequently indistinguishable from those below, a consequence of the fact that the boundary between these classes was highly porous.

Ancestors occupy a central place in African cosmologies and social practices. The death and the remembrance of Lt-Col. Adekunle Fajuyi, the Military Governor of Western Nigeria who was killed during a military coup in 1966, is used in this essay to critique the assumptions in the literature about ancestors, by linking the recent dead with the long dead in a lineage of ancestral practices. I focus on the ways in which Fajuyi's death was used in constructing ethno-national memory and history in the context of 21st-century challenges faced by the Yoruba in national politics, particularly in relation to unequal ethno-regional relations. Here, I attempt to historicize commemoration as a ritual of ethno-national validation.

This paper examines the origin of the Askiya dynasty in Songhay, with an emphasis on the alliance between the militant ‘ulamā’ and the commanders of the northwestern province during the reign of Sonni 'Alī (1464–1492). The inadequacy of Sonni 'Alī's policy for dealing with the polarization in the cities, the increased role of the officers in these political matters, the rise of militant Islam and the division of the army: all these contributed to the downfall of the Sonni dynasty and the subsequent transfer of power to a regime inspired by Islam. The conflict in Timbuktu to which the ‘ulamā’ gave a religious justification precipitated the revolution. This revealed the importance of Islam as a factor of division, a motor for social action and political change. Indeed, many Muslim leaders had come to see themselves as members of a community worthy of ruling a predominantly non-literate country governed by a non-Muslim royalty. But for this they had to rely on the officers, and in particular Muḥammad Ture who, as a high official connected with both the main warring factions, could fulfil all the conditions for success. His victory introduced a new imperial era in the history of Islam in the Western Sudan.

Despite his important political and literary activities, Blatta Gäbrä Egzi'-abehēr is almost unknown to scholars of Menilek's Ethiopia. This historical period is not particularly well researched, and the author stands out as one of the few Ethiopian intellectuals to have written such an important number of literary works focused on nationalistic and anti-Italian feelings. The Amharic/Ge'ez text under discussion, his letter to Menilek written in 1899, is a remarkable document from this point of view because it reveals a strong opposition to colonialism and the Italian occupation of Eritrea. This document is one of the first Ethiopian sources to testify to the growing nationalism and the growth of concepts of unity and independence. It allows us to consider more carefully the beginning of an Ethiopian secular ideology of the modern state. And such an ideology must be placed in the colonial context. The letter to Menilek raises some important questions regarding the new source material in the late nineteenth century available to historians of modern Ethiopia. A translation of the text is given as well as a comment on its historical significance.

Following the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of the Sudan, British unwillingness either to annex the territory or to allow its reincorporation with Egypt was given expression in the Anglo-Egyptian Agreement of 1899, under the terms of which Britain and Egypt were to rule jointly. But the ' Condominium Agreement' was in reality a device by which Britain managed and Egypt paid for the Sudan's administration. The central figure in that administration was the Governor-General, who, although formally appointed by the ruler of Egypt, was the nominee of the British government.

The development of the Governor-Generalship from its inception until the resignation of Sir John Maffey in 1934 owed less to the formal arrangements set down in the Condominium Agreement than it did to relations between the Sudan Government and successive British representatives in Cairo, and to changes in the Governor-General's own position within the Sudan Government. He remained pre-eminent throughout the period under review, but by 1934 his relative independence of Cairo was balanced by the power, within the Sudan Government, of a Council of senior officials.

This article reinforces the interpretation of numerous scholars who have highlighted the role of slave labor in groundnut production during the ‘cash-crop revolution’ in West Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also expands Jan Hogendorn's argument on the African initiatives involved in the expansion of groundnut production in colonial Northern Nigeria. In particular, it provides evidence of the key role of the emir of Kano (Abbas) and important merchants in the transition to groundnut cultivation and the significant use of slave labor by these large estate-holders. The article focuses mainly on the Fanisau unit of Kano.

No historian of Africa can be indifferent to the fact that alone in Africa south of the Sahara the East African coast possesses a link between history and archaeology in its own medieval mints and also in coins imported from other lands during the past two thousand years. Its history is poorly documented, and its archaeology is still to a great extent in the stage of record and survey; the numerous finds of Chinese porcelain and other imported ceramics can at present only be assigned within a bracket of at smallest fifty years: but in the coin finds there is a key for the future establishment of a precise chronology for all of these.