One of the most fascinating, if misunderstood, fundamentalist sects operating in Central Africa is the body whose members term themselves Jehovah's Witnesses, the fellowship whose corporate identity is the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, Incorporated, of Brooklyn, New York. Their British branch, the International Bible Students' Association, has struggled most with varieties of recalcitrant African material, and in this unrewarding enterprise operations have been directed into the Rhodesias and Nyasaland from South Africa.

The assumptions that Ndebele settlement was purely militarily orientated and that it was composed of a hierarchy of ‘regiments’ and ‘divisions’ or ‘provinces’ are false. The parallels between the Ndebele ibutho and the English regiment are so tenuous that the translation is best dispensed with. On the other hand, an Ndebele ibutho was, at least in one sense, a military organization which evolved over a number of years into a cluster of imisi (villages). These imisi were residential, essentially non-military, and composed by far the largest proportion of Ndebele settlement. The ‘division’ did not exist. Amhlope, Amakanda, Amnyama and Igapha were collective group concepts comprising imisi descended from four original or proto-amabutho created in the period before the migration of the Ndebele to the Matopos region. The sequence of creation of amabutho in the post-1850 period can roughly be determined, outbursts of ibutho formation usually coinciding with crises in the history of the kingdom. Amabutho created after the late 1860s such as Imbizo and Insuga disintegrated after the European conquest during the 1890s, whereas older, established imisi survive as concepts of allegiance to this day. A knowledge of how the Ndebele ibutho evolved is essential for a more complete understanding of the dynamics of Ndebele society at other levels, for example the way the chieftaincies (izigaba) and the great local lineages emerged, as well as the social and political context within which individuals sought to realize their ambitions. The unexpected way in which a closer look at the ibutho reveals much of the early literature on the Ndebele to be at best incomplete, at worst, caricature, but either way misleading, suggests that other nineteenth-century Nguni states may benefit from renewed historical examination.

This article continues the series started originally by Fagan and continued by Phillipson and Sutton. As before, the great majority of dates have been contributed by the archaeologists concerned, often in advance of their own publications, and I should like to express my grateful acknowledgement to all who have co-operated in this way, as also to Dr John Sutton for his kind assistance in the initial stages of preparation.

This article seeks to provide an interpretation of a strike by white policemen in Cape Town in 1918. It argues that this defensive dispute over wages and living conditions can best be understood not simply through an examination of service dissatisfaction in the urban police community, but by incorporating this episode into the larger picture of South African police development in the early decades of the present century. In this broader context, several factors seem general and influential: local social resentments over the terms of national police organization after Union; police practices and attitudes, especially in relation to the increasing recruitment of Afrikaners; the position of white working-class policemen in the ‘civilized labour’ stratification of Cape Town society; and, most visibly, the inflationary effect of the First World War on the living standards of poorly paid, disaffected and unorganized constables. It is argued that these converging pressures generated a severe crisis of work discipline in 1917 and 1918 which tipped the Cape Town police into a classical natural justice strike. While ordinary policemen were split between petitioners and younger, less hesitant radicals, there was considerable popular support for strikers’ claims, both within the Cape police body and the local white labour movement. The government used a strategy of provisional concessions to settle the dispute. In conclusion, it is suggested that the strike experience helped to strengthen associational bonds between lower-ranking policemen and that a commitment by the state to improved service conditions provided an anxious constabulary with a more secure ‘civilized labour’ identity in the post-World War I period.

The rhetoric of development served as a language for Sotho politicians from 1960–70 to debate the meanings of political participation. The relative paucity of aid in this period gave outsized importance to small projects run in rural villages, and stood in stark contrast to the period from the mid-1970s onwards when aid became an ‘anti-politics machine’ that worked to undermine national sovereignty. Examination of the democratic period in Lesotho from 1966–70 helps explain the process by which newly independent states gave up some of their recently won sovereignty, and how a turn to authoritarianism helped contribute to this process.

This article examines an Urdu travelogue written in 1901 to analyze the discursive frameworks by which Africa was rendered knowable to Indian settlers. As a vernacular ethnography written for a readership of Punjabi migrants associated with the Uganda Railway, the travelogue provides our earliest direct evidence of colonial Indian attitudes towards the peoples and landscapes of East Africa. Envisioning the region as at once an imperial and Islamic settlement zone, the travelogue documents the emergence of an ‘imperial-Islamicate’ discourse that incorporated both littoral and interior East Africa into an industrializing oceanic culture area.

IN most African farming systems, hired workers provide only a small part of the total labor devoted to agricultural production, even today. By and large, farm labor in Africa is still family labor. However, during and after the colonial period, many Africans also ran agrarian enterprises on a scale and in a nexus of social relations far removed from the traditional picture of the smallholder cultivating land with family labor. In Cameroon, Duala and Bamileke entrepreneurs mobilized and incorporated labor for cash crop production, a process that necessitated changes in existing social and political institutions. This article explores these economic activities in their cultural context. It aims to show how specific social and cultural systems together framed or determined entrepreneurial activities and to explain why specific ethnic groups enjoyed – at least for a certain period – disproportionate success in adapting to the opportunities of colonial life. Geographically, the paper concentrates on the Mungo region in the Cameroon littoral, part of the Cameroon ‘fertile crescent’ (Fig. I). Since the beginning of the twentieth century this thinly populated region has been one of the country's most important agricultural centers and, as a result, has attracted a large number of immigrants. Between the 1880s and 1950s, despite fundamental differences in the social and economic organization of their respective ethnic groups, first Duala and then Bamileke entrepreneurs emerged as leaders in the region's agricultural development.

This paper joins a growing number of studies which aim to refine our understanding of the historical dimensions of African entrepreneurship. In development studies this new interest stems from a concern about the weakness of African private enterprise and its contribution to poor economic performance. Many authors see African entrepreneurs not so much as individuals but as social classes which are analyzed in their socio-economic and political context.

This article considers the Atlantic slave trade in relation to ‘extraversion’ in African history. Drawing especially on the work of Jean-François Bayart, it argues that slaving fit a long-term pattern in which elites drew on external connections in order to further their wealth and power at home. In doing so, they also opened their societies to new goods and ideas, thus bringing about cultural creolization. This is a different approach to the question of creolization than is commonly found among Americanist studies of Atlantic slavery, which tend to treat cultural change without consideration of politics. The concept of extraversion thus helps to link culture and political economy. Nevertheless, it also bears refinement. Recent scholarship on African involvement in the Atlantic slave trade – some of it detailed in this article – makes clear that extraversion may have reflected African agency, as Bayart insisted, but that it also entangled African societies in destructive relationships of dependency.

During the formative years of capitalist agriculture, white farmers in the Orange Free State relied on both legal and extra-legal means to create a docile labour force of African workers. Coercive laws were a necessary component in the overall process of fashioning a rural working class out of quasi-independent squatter communities. Yet, no matter how repressive, the legal system alone was not sufficient to ensure work-discipline and docility on the white-owned farms. Frustrated with their inability to force African farm labourers to work diligently and to prevent them from deserting the farms, white farmers frequently turned to indiscriminate violence to sow terror amongst the dispossessed African rural population. White vigilantes formed a kind of paramilitary wing of the white farming class. While the state authorities never officially sanctioned vigilantism, those white farmers who used violence to intimidate their African labourers had little to fear with respect to prosecution, let alone conviction. Yet despite all their efforts to break the will of rural Africans, white farmers lived in continued fear of ‘native risings’. Rural Africans, too, remembered: the shooting incidents that occurred in the Orange Free State were indelibly etched in the collective memory of the emergent rural working class.

The identity of the Sao to the south of Lake Chad has remained obscure despite the efforts of archaeologists, ethnographers and historians. To solve the problem, it is necessary to look at the historical circumstances in which they passed into legend as the ancestors of the present occupants of the region, namely the creation of the empire of Borno to the west and south of the lake in place of Kanem to the north-east. The conflicts involved in this creation lasted from the beginning of the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, and produced the main historical references to the Sao apart from oral tradition, always as enemies of the new rulers among the native population. The first applies to the fourteenth century, but all the others are from the contemporary record of the campaigns of Mai Idrīs Alauma by Ibn Furṭū in the sixteenth century, where we learn of the Sao-Gafata in the neighbourhood of the Bornoan capital Gazargamo, and of the Sao-Tatala on the flood-plain southwest of the lake. Elsewhere on the flood-plain, the various peoples are referred to by recognisably modern names: Ngama, Makari, Kotoko. It seems probable that in the work of Ibn Furṭū we find the last use of a term which the incoming Kanembu had originally used to describe all the inhabitants of their new Bornoan dominions, then employed as an adjective for each particular population, until with the suppression of the Sao-Gafata and Sao-Tatala it was abandoned except as the name of a legendary people ancestral to Kanuri and non-Kanuri groups alike. The most probable explanation of the term itself is that it meant ‘city’ or ‘city-dwellers’, describing the inhabitants of the walled villages or towns of the flood-plain as perceived by their conquerors the Sayfuwa rulers of Kanem-Borno at the outset of their imperial adventure.

The Occupation of the earth by Man has always been limited and conditioned by the natural environment of the various climatic zones he inhabits. Modern technology is giving him an increasing control over that environment, but in most parts of Africa, where the results of this control are only beginning to become significant, the influence of the factors of natural environment are still very apparent in the patterns of human settlement and history. The waterless desert is still an almost impossible human habitat, and the tropical forest, where the lush vegetation inhibits agriculture and pests and parasites endanger the life of Man and his domestic animals, has been colonized cautiously and frequently only under pressure.

The modern history of the Sudan is here considered as beginning with the Turco-Egyptian invasion of a.d. 1820. From this date written records begin to be available in quantity, in sharp contrast to the pathetic scraps which have survived for the preceding Fung Kingdom of Sennar. This transition is indeed so abrupt that it is easy to over-estimate the extent and solidity of historical knowledge for the modern period. In fact, there are still large tracts where scientific historiography has yet to begin, or where at best a few exploratory soundings have been made; and much of the field has until very recently been dominated by rather superficial ‘general surveys’ often written with an eye to the current political situation.

It is argued in this paper that what happened in the region of Katsina in c. 1492–3 was not a dynastic change, but the establishment of the institution of ‘kingship’. This ‘kingship’ did not grow out of local pre-existing institutions. Rather, it was imposed on the kinship-society by the leaders of the new (Wangara) community of Muslim clerics and traders. These leaders aimed probably at creating a Muslim state in Katsina. However, owing to the resistance of the indigenous population, they failed to achieve this. Therefore, a rapprochement with the indigenous paramount animistic ‘priest-chief’—the durbi—was attempted. This led to the establishment of an institutional structure defined as ‘dual’ or ‘contrapuntal paramountcy’. Within this institutional structure the durbi became responsible for choosing the sarki or ‘king’. As a consequence, the institution of ‘kingship’ took on some of the characteristics of a ‘sacred’ animistic ‘kingship’.

It is further suggested that the evolutionary process outlined for the region of Katsina was paralleled by similar processes in Yauri, Kano and Gobir, and possibly also Zaria. However, in Kano the institution of ‘kingship’ did not originate from within the new community of traders and clerics: rather, the Kano ‘kings’, whose power was traditionally circumscribed by that of the local ‘priest-chiefs’, tried to bring about revolutionary changes with the support of the Wangarawa. But they too apparently failed.

It is suggested, finally, that the rapprochement achieved with the animistic ‘priest-chiefs’ alienated the community of clerics and traders; i.e. the community which constituted in a sense the very power-basis of the Hausa ‘kings’. This in turn may explain in part the jihad of 1804.

In contrast to Dr G. N. Sanderson's belief that ‘down to the collapse of the Mahdist state itself, the Mahdist alliance was the central feature of Menelik's diplomacy’, this article shows that Ethiopia's détente with the Sudan after 1896 was only one part of a carefully constructed, non-committal foreign policy designed to protect Ethiopia against all foreseeable eventualities. If there were anything central in the minds of Ethiopian policy-makers, it could only have been their uncertainty about the outcome of the events which were rapidly reaching a crisis point in the Sudan. Menelik therefore chose not to commit himself to any one policy toward the Sudan until the complicated situation there ran its course. At the same time, he pursued a line of diplomacy in the east and the south which would consolidate his victory over the Italians and which would materially strengthen his Empire.

The Qāḍli ‘Iyāḍ in his biography of ‘Abdullāh b. Yāsīn confirms many details in al-Bakri's record of the rise of the Almoravids. His account differs in a few important respects, and furnishes new information which is valuable in reassessing the life of ‘Abdullāh b. Yāsīn. Since no insular ribāṭ is mentioned, its historicity is increasingly suspect, and in the light of Maghribī cosmological ideas it is better regarded as a myth, and not as a historical fact. This text is the earliest surviving one to mention the Dār al-Murābiṭīn of Wajjāj b. Zalwī al-Lamṭī.

The Qāḍī ‘Iyāḍ states that Jawhar, a character who appears to have been confused with Yaḥyā b. Ibrāhīm al-Gudālī, the Ṣānhaja chief who reputedly brought ‘Abdullāh b. Yāsīn to the Sahara, is none other than al-Jawhar b. Sakkum, the Gudāla jurist who was later executed by ‘Abdullāh b. Yāsīn. The cause of the execution appears to have been a combination of religious differences and a struggle for power, probably after the death of Yaḥyā b. Ibrāhīm al-Gudālī. This event may prove to have been a turning point in the Almoravid movement, the main reason for the dominance of the Lamtūna and the eventual withdrawal of the Gudāla from the Almoravid cause, possibly for their militant opposition to it. The confusion in the accounts over the early phase of the stay of ‘Abdullāh b. Yāsīn among the Ṣanhāja casts grave doubts as to how much reliance can be placed on them as historical evidence. The myth may be a good deal more than the ‘island story’.

In accordance with the secret Treaty of London of 26 April 1915, Italy entered the First World War in exchange for certain promises made to her by Great Britain and France. The treaty provided for concessions to Italy in Europe, the Mediterranean, Asia Minor, and Africa, but the concessions to which Great Britain and France agreed were not regarded by the Italians as the limit of their demands.

Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History. By DEREK NURSE and THOMAS J. HINNEBUSCH. Edited by THOMAS J. HINNEBUSCH, with a special addendum by GERARD PHILIPPSON. (University of California Publications in Linguistics, 121). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1993. Pp. xxxii+780. $80 (ISBN 0-520-09775-0).

Shanga. The Archaeology of a Muslim Trading Community on the Coast of East Africa. By MARK HORTON. (Memoirs of the British Institute of East Africa, 14). London: The British Institute in Eastern Africa, 1996. Pp. xvi+458. £75 (ISBN 1-872-56609-x).

Nurse's and Hinnebusch's Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History is the most comprehensive study yet done of Swahili history through linguistic analysis. It is an encyclopedic work representing many years of research by the authors and other scholars, and it focuses particularly on the emergence and evolution of the Swahili language. The massive and diverse evidence they marshal is, of course, almost entirely linguistic: as such they discuss four basal parameters of language relationship and change, namely lexis, morphology, phonology and tone. (The last two are treated together, and G. Philippson reviews the latter.)

A previously unused price series from the Liverpool Mercury provides new information about the early days of the palm oil trade. A boom in 1818 drove prices to their century high, only to be followed in the 1820s by a prolonged depression. The boom may have encouraged merchants to try to bring Bonny into the oil trade, as its development as an important oil port dates from this time. However the depression of the '20s did not prevent the continued expansion of the trade, which was also sustained during the better prices of the 1830s. This information does not affect Northrup's recent suggestion that the slave trade continued to expand in the 1830s, as his evidence is inconclusive and there is no comparable information on slave prices. Yet clearly both trades were carried on side by side at the time. This was not because their supply networks were different. Slaves and oil were both sent from Ibibioland, being peripheral to the main economic activity of that region, domestic agriculture and craftwork.

This article looks at a murder case which resulted from allegations of ‘ritual murder’ in the course of Nana Sir Ofori Atta's final funeral rites in Akyem Abuakwa, Ghana, in 1944. At the level of the Akyem state, the accusations came from an affronted section within the polity, the Amantow Mmiensa, who had been defeated by the Stool in the course of the 1932–3 disturbances arising from the Native Administration Revenue Ordinance but whose grievances against the Okyenhene were of greater antiquity. The accused were all descendants of past kings of Akyem. At the level of the Gold Coast state, the case provided an arena for some of the best lawyers in the country to use their mastery of colonial law to challenge the legal and hence colonial establishment both in Accra and in London. At the imperial level, opponents of the Labour Government both from the right and the left were able to use the case to belabour a weak Secretary of State for the Colonies both within and outside the House of Commons. The Governor, Sir Alan Burns, was ultimately confronted with an entirely legal if eccentric challenge to his authority in the Gold Coast, and serious assaults on his competence in London. The article argues that the case poisoned relations between Dr J. B. Danquah, the inspiration behind the defence case, and the colonial establishment in Accra so much that the constructive relationship between some of the intelligentsia and the Governor before 1944 was destroyed. This in turn influenced the nationalists' reception of the reformed 1946 constitution and the attitude of the administration to the United Gold Coast Convention.

The Basel missionaries, Ramseyer and Kühne, had this to say of Ashanti government in the reign of Kofi Karikari (1867–74):

…the reins of the Ashantee government are not exclusively in the hands of the king, nor does he possess unlimited power, but shares it with a council which includes, besides his majesty, his mother, the three first chiefs of the kingdom [Juabenhene, Bekwaihene, and Mamponghene], and a few nobles of Kumasi (Coomassie). This council is called ‘Asante Kotoko’, or the Ashantee porcupine, which means that like the animal of that name, nobody dare touch them.…It is this Kotoko council which rules the entire kingdom, and deals with the people, who must obey, whatever their own wishes or inclinations may be, in the most despotic way.…In important matters all the other chiefs of the kingdom are called together to discuss the case, but they are sure to vote in accordance with the view of the council, for who would dare to oppose the Kotoko?