The name ‘Iron Age’ has been given to a complex of post-Stone Age cultures in Southern Rhodesia. The cultures themselves vary very considerably but all are characterized by the use of iron for tools and weapons. Unlike the sequences in Europe and the Near East, that of south Central Africa shows no copper or bronze-using stage between the stone and iron-using phases and even the Neolithic seems to be missing from this part of the world.

The fourth radiocarbon list contains many new and important dates. Only isolated readings are still available from West Africa, but some later Iron Age sites have recently been dated. The first samples for the Kenya Highlands date food production in that region to the first millennium b.c., while important dates from Uganda confirm the traditional datings of Bigo and Bweyerore. Samples from Kilwa on the Tanzanian coast are somewhat at variance with other dating evidence.

Dates for the Angola Iron Age range between a.d. 760 and the fifteenth century, while the Leopard's Kopje industry of Rhodesia has been dated for the first time.

The list is completed with many isolated dates from all parts of the subcontinent.

Toute étude de la question du Haut-Nil doit aujourd'hui prendre pour point de départ l'ouvrage de M. G. N. Sanderson, England, Europe and the Upper Nile, 1882–1899. Rares sont sans doute les students of Africa qui n'ont pas encore eu entre les mains ce maître-livre: par l'ampleur de la documentation, le soin de l'analyse, l'ampleur de vues aussi, il s'est d'ores et déjà imposé comme un classique. A partir de l'époque de la révolte mahdiste jusqu'aux lendemains de Fachoda, on y suit, dévidé avec une clarté remarquable, l'écheveau des différentes politiques en présence sur le Haut-Nil: anglaise, française, italienne, allemande — sans oublier, bien entendu, celle de Léopold II.

The historical role of European farming in Southern and Central Africa has received a great deal of attention among scholars over the years. A striking consensus exists in the Scholarly literature, namely that the success or failure of European farming in Southern Africa was to a large extent dependent upon the colonizers' access to and control over cheap labour, which they in turn could only access through strong support of the colonial state. Yet, these propositions have so far not been systematically and empirically tested. This article is a first attempt to do that by analysing the ‘wage-burden’ European settler farmers faced. The wage-burden is identified by measuring wage shares (total amount paid in the form of wages as a share of total profits) on European farms in colonial Africa. Based on archival documents, we construct time-series for value of output, transportation costs, investments in agriculture, and wages paid for the European tobacco and tea sector in colonial Malawi. Our results contradict both previous research on settler colonialism in Africa and the historiography of Nyasaland. Our estimates show that settler farming did not collapse in the 1930s as commonly assumed. On the contrary, the value of production on both tobacco and tea farms increased significantly. And so did the settler farmers' capacity to capture the profits, which was manifested in a declining wage share over time. In contrast with previous research, we argue that the declining wage share cannot be explained by domestic colonial policies but rather through changes in regional migration patterns, and global commodity markets. Migration patterns had a significant impact on the supply of farm labour and global commodity markets influenced value of production. Market forces rather than colonial policies shaped the development trajectory of settler farming in Nyasaland.

The article examines the factors which influenced Tiv initiative and response in the development of the Nigerian export production of benniseed or sesamum indicum. A trade hitherto largely ignored, it has been overshadowed by the Bohannans' classic account, with its emphasis on the subsistence aspect of Tiv economy. It is therefore presented both as a case study of the development of an African export commodity and as a contribution to the broader field of socio-economic history of the colonial era.

A drastic decline of aboriginal populations has been an important by-product of European commercial and imperial expansion in many parts of the world. Europeans have been aware of this phenomenon from the early days of Spanish exploration and conquest when Fray Bartolome de las Casas deplored the rapid collapse of Indian populations in the Caribbean. The problem still seemed acute in the nineteenth century. For example, the young Charles Darwin, describing the decline of the Australian Aborigines, placed most of the blame on alcoholism, introduced diseases, and the loss of hunting grounds. But these factors did not fully explain what appeared to be the impending extinction of a variety of peoples. ‘Besides these several evident causes of destruction,’ he wrote,

there appears to be some more mysterious agency at work. Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we find the same result.

This article surveys a number of recent attempts to explain Ganda receptivity to change during the last hundred years, and suggests that the supposed Ganda ‘urge to excel’ was as much a result of modernization as its principal cause. The article also stresses that modernization in Buganda has proved an extremely patchy business, but that before any serious attempt can be made to relate the patches to more general theories it is necessary to tackle a variety of prior problems. Among those requiring especial attention in Buganda are political ideologies articulated by particular interest groups, the economic fortunes and misfortunes of political agitators, and certain unintended consequences of particular shifts in British colonial policy.

The three unsuccessful jihāds against the Wolof state of Kajoor are described as revival and reform movements among a people nearly universally professing Islam, but practising a syncretistic form. The traditional view that these were wars between ‘Pagans’ and ‘Muslims’ is seen as a reflection of the social and political isolation of the clerics as a community, an understandable but on closer examination misleading interpretation based on uncritical reading of clerical sources.

This article examines the possible relevance to Africa of the recent contribution to the history of industrialization in western Europe made by a group of historians of the family using statistical demographic techniques, especially ‘family reconstitntion’, developed by Peter Laslett at Cambridge. It is suggested that in particular the work of David Levine on eighteenth-century England yields a hypothesis about a link between ‘proto-industrialization’ and increased population growth which may be applicable, in a suitably modified form, to black Africa.

The article focuses particularly on the mechanism of widened income opportunities for young people lowering the age of marriage. Levine concentrates especially on the lowering of the marriage age of women causing enhanced fertility per wife. The modified form of the hypothesis suggested for black Africa would focus more on the reduction of the age of marriage for men and on the transition from polygyny to monogamy, the latter especially producing increased fertility per individual wife.

Amid assumptions of a hegemonic Igbo Christian identity, conversions to Islam began in the late 1930s in the Igbo territory of south-east Nigeria – the only region in the country that was not touched by the nineteenth-century Islamic jihad and subsequent efforts to extend the borders of Islam in Nigeria. Four decades after the emergence of Islam in the Igbo homeland, and with the mixed blessings of a civil war, Igboland began to manifest clear evidence of indigenous Muslim presence. A key aspect of this article is how one can be both Igbo and Muslim. It considers the complex interplay of religious and ethnic identities of Igbo Muslims (including the mapping of religious values onto ethnic ones) until the 1990s, when Igbo Muslims began to disentangle ethnicity from religion, a development that owes much to the progress of Islamic education in Igboland and the emergence of Igbo Muslim scholars and clerics. Igbo reactions to conversions to Islam and the perceived threat of these conversions to Igbo Christian identity also receive some attention in this article.

Nicholas Crispe (1598–1666) played a very important part in the developing of English trading contacts with West Africa in the seventeenth century. He obtained a commanding position within the African company in 1628 and did much to secure the company's reconstitution on a sounder basis in 1631. From 1631 until 1644 Crispe was the driving force behind the trade and, in particular, directed and largely financed the successful English entry into the gold trade of the Gold Coast, where permanent English factories with resident traders were established for the first time and a fort was started at Kormantin. After the Restoration he tried to regain his former position, but was unsuccessful, though his membership of the Company of Adventurers did give him some influence on the trade. Other members of the family were also involved in the African trade, sometimes in a significant way, over the same period.

Senegal was unique in French West Africa for the nature and extent of electoral institutions that operated in its colonial towns. In the 1870s, Third Republic France elaborated on earlier short-lived policies by re-establishing local assemblies and a legislative seat for Senegal in Paris. Although histories of modern politics focus on Blaise Diagne's 1914 election to the French National Assembly, a local assembly called the General Council held greater power over economic and political matters affecting the colony between 1870 and 1920. This article reconsiders the history of urban politics in colonial Senegal by examining the ways that the métis (mixed race population) used the General Council as their field of engagement with French officials, sometimes facilitating the consolidation of French rule but at other times contesting colonial practice.

In 1960, amidst the most violent period of protest since conquest, the Southern Rhodesian government implemented a new Vagrancy Act alongside a range of repressive legislation. The Act's origins lay in a particular analysis of the social origins of unrest. It was unprecedented in promising not to exclude and criminalise ‘vagrants’ but to rehabilitate them as productive urban citizens. By presenting the Act as reformist and progressive, the government sought legitimacy for its actions. In fact, the Vagrancy Act was deeply punitive, underlining the tensions between reform and repression in settler social engineering. African leaders and Africans targeted by the Act saw it as a means of humiliating and criminalising those denied a livelihood by the settler political economy. In rejecting the Act, they invoked different models of citizenship to those on offer from the state. The Vagrancy Act ultimately met its demise at the hands of the Rhodesian Front, whose analysis of African protest made no space for the possibilities of reformist social engineering.

This article explores the origins and nature of the reformatory in Cape colonial society between 1882 and 1910. Born in a period of economic transition, its concern was with the reproduction of a labouring population precipitated by colonial conquest. Unlike the prison and compound, which gained their distinctive character from the way in which they were articulated to an emerging industrial capitalist society, the reformatory was shaped by the imperatives of merchant capital and commercial agriculture. Although based on the English model, local social realities quickly began to mould the particular nature of the reformatory in the Cape Colony. Firstly, classification for the purposes of control came to mean segregation in a colonial context. secondly, the needs of commercial agriculture meant that in Porter there was a much greater stress on the apprenticing of inmates than there was in the internal operations of the British reformatory.

Small-scale societies, like Avatime in eastern Ghana, established, maintained and developed themselves in a range of ways, in spaces between large, centralized states, in West Africa in the precolonial era. This essay demonstrates the inclusivity and initiative (in terms of both economic entrepreneurship and bricolage) of this small group before its effective destruction by Asante in about 1870, and looks at the ways in which Avatime was reconstructed in the last third of the nineteenth century. In addition, issues of ethnicity and identity are broadly addressed, comparing Avatime's inclusivity with tropes of difference discussed in recent studies of small-scale societies in this journal.

My excuse for presenting this summary of Ceŵa tradition and history is that the Ceŵa are a numerous and important people. Numerically they are the most important descendants of the Malawi (the Maravi or Maraves of Portuguese records); and the fact that the name of their ancestors has been adopted by the majority party in Nyasaland led by Dr Hastings Banda, himself a Ceŵa, is one of the indications of their political importance.

Pre-European ironworkers in Central Africa reached a high standard of metallurgical skill, culminating in the production of beautiful ceremonial objects and instruments which show a Congo origin and inspiration. Many of these specimens, especially hoes, were traded over enormous distances. One can probably detect three phases of ironworking in Northern Rhodesia:

(1) The Earliest Period (c. a.d. 0 to ? a.d. 1000). Little is known about these earliest settlers, associated with channelled and stamped ware. Slag and tuyère fragments occur, and simple forms of weapons were probably made. Acculturation of Later Stone Age peoples took place.

(2) The Middle Period (c. ? a.d. 1OOO to a.d. 1740). Iron was still extremely rare, and iron objects are normally associated with some functional purposes. Coiled iron bangles occur, and a few ceremonial objects including gongs are rarely found; at Lusitu and in Southern Rhodesia, they are more common. The Chewa/Maravi migration brought in new ideas and tool forms around a.d. 1500.

(3) The Late Period (a.d. 1740–1900). Over the more northerly portion of the territory, there was considerable standardization of iron tool forms and techniques, which found their origin in Luba country, and were carried over the Luapula into Northern Rhodesia by repeated migrations. These forms survived to the present day when they are now dying out, and many ceremonial pieces have lost their ritual value.

This article re-evaluates the jihād of Usuman dan Fodio. It first traces the history of the age-old Sudanic pattern of royal tolerance, and sometimes encouragement, of learned Muslims without the implementation of their demands for reform. Then it shows that Usuman and the sarki of Gobir at first interacted according to this pattern. But, finding this relationship unsatisfactory and unlikely to produce the reforms he desired, Usuman sought to remain on cordial terms with the court but intensified his appeal to the people of Hausaland and possibly his criticisms of the existing political and social orders. He attracted followers, not so much because they sympathized with his religious goals, as because in his person and in his criticisms their own discontent with Hausa government and society could find expression. Usuman's eventual conflict with the sarkuna did not arise because he actively sought or plotted it; it arose because the sarkuna felt compelled to abandon their hitherto concessive relations with Usuman in order to attempt to contain his appeal, to undermine his authority, and finally to threaten the existence of his community. An analysis of the conduct of the jihzād bears out an emphasis on Usuman's preference for peaceful pressure, on his lack of planning for a war, and on his many-sided relationship with his followers. The necessity of justifying a war he had not sought, together with the largely secular interests of his followers, gave a tone to the jihād not totally in keeping with its avowed aims. However, because Usuman's leadership was essential, he managed to overcome the many factors which militated against its unity.