The established historical view of the Upper Guinea Coast is that this naturally forested region was at first peripheral to the Manding civilization of the savanna zone. The arrival of Europeans on the coast in the fifteenth century then engendered a southward shift in the centre of gravity of historical processes. The Atlantic trade, in which the savanna states were also deeply involved, gave coastal populations vastly expanded opportunities for wealth accumulation and social mobility. In spite of numerous attempts at political centralization, ‘frontier’ conditions persisted in the region up to – and perhaps after – the establishment of colonial states. These conditions have been held to account for the region-wide importance of cultural institutions which either facilitate social accommodation between heterogenous groups (e.g. Islam, Manding and European linguistic creoles, Manding clan names, and secret societies), or reflect such processes (e.g. bilateral kinship, patron–client relations, and pre-colonial urbanization).

This article explores political tensions between successive nineteenth-century rulers of the inland delta of the Niger in central Mali (the Fulbe Diina of Hamdullahi and the Futanke successors of al-Hajj Umar) and the pastoral interests of the Fulbe chiefdoms on their eastern periphery, in a region known as the Hayre. A close study of changing forms of local governance and natural resource management demonstrates that although different strategies were employed by the Fulbe and Futanke states to control the Hayre, the internal dynamics of the region can only partly be explained by the influence of these central powers.

This paper has attempted a new look at the course of the Tripoli-American War of 1801–5. The approach is, first, to avoid the beaten track and concentrate on the more obscure part of the story, namely, Tripoli's conduct of the war; and secondly, to attempt an explanation of Tripoli's success (or conversely America's failure) in a way that is different from the general American pattern. In this respect, emphasis has therefore been, not on the ineffectiveness of the American navy, but on three other important factors. These are: the moral and material support of the neighbouring Maghribi states for Tripoli's cause; the favourable international situation which helped Tripoli economically through the livestock trade with Malta; and thirdly, the contribution of Tripoli's navy, both as an instrument of warfare and as an economic asset. The paper concludes with an assessment of the international, dynastic, and political significance of the outcome of the war for Tripoli.

The idea that homosexuality is ‘un-African’ is widely regarded, at least among Western scholars, as a myth concocted during the colonial era. The evidence adduced to support this consensus is largely convincing, but it does not account for all the features of contemporary African leaders’ homophobic discourses. In particular, it does not account for differences between Christian and Muslim rhetorics with respect to a putative ‘African sexuality’. Historical, ethnographic, and literary evidence suggests these differences can be traced in part to the trans-Saharan slave trade, which gave rise to racialized sexual tropes of blacks and Arabs that circulated and continue to circulate on both sides of the Sahara. In Nigeria and perhaps elsewhere, it seems that sexual stereotypes of Arabs and black Africans derived from both the trans-Saharan trade and European colonial rule have been respectively, if unevenly, mapped onto Muslims and Christians, in a way that hinders national integration. This is so even when the leaders of both groups seem to be in agreement, as when they join forces to condemn homosexuality. To ignore such religious, racial, and sexual contradictions is to ignore some of the major cultural faultlines within contemporary African nation-states and the continent overall.

Human migration has played an important role in the construction or dissolution of states in southern Africa. With the coming of the colonial period there was an intensification of the process of migration, mainly for work. Such movements were premised on the uneven development of colonial economies in which some areas became suppliers of labour while others became labour markets. In the case of Swaziland, the migration of labour was dominated by male migrants as the existing labour markets offered more opportunities for men. This view has become a conventional interpretation of the disparity in the mobility of men and women within states or across borders. This article uses the experience of Swaziland to extend the discourse on why men dominated the migration currents in Swaziland during the colonial period. It points out that it is no longer useful to rely on purely economic explanations of why more men were migrating than women in colonial Swaziland. The argument pushes the frontier of analysis beyond economics and argues that a more significant explanation is to be found in the power relations at the homestead level, whereby men had the power to determine if and when women could migrate. The discussion shows that Swazi men, in collaboration with colonial administrators, employed different strategies to control the mobility of women. The intention of the men was to keep women in the rural areas and they used their power in the homestead and their influence on the colonial administration to create barriers against female migration to local and cross-border industrial centres.

The Indian Ocean is frequently depicted as a sphere of seamless connectivity, characterized by fluid and wide-ranging exchanges between traders, sea-farers, clerics, intellectuals, and authors. We seek to nuance this depiction by highlighting the importance of specific, place-bound social concerns that tempered these cosmopolitan performances of citizenship with more exclusionary dynamics. Our goal is to emphasize the importance of context, contingency, and circumstance in shaping and breaking new forms and practices of citizenship and its twin – exclusionary politics – on Africa's Indian Ocean littoral.

Debates over the ‘Zimba’ period of Zambesian history prompt a new consideration of the mythical element in oral traditions. The work of Matthew Schoffeleers on Mbona, presiding spirit of a famous rain-shrine in southern Malawi, is exploited in order to cast doubt on his reconstruction of sixteenth/seventeenth-century political history. It is suggested that Mbona was the serpentine power immanent in the Zambesi; that reports of his ‘martyrdom’ at the hands of a secular ruler are versions of an ancient and widespread myth of the lightning and the rainbow, whose opposition establishes the due alternation of the seasons and the generations; that his journey to, and subsequent flight from, Kaphiri-ntiwa, scene of the Maravi Creation myth, is a variant of the visit made to the sky by Kintu, the ‘First Man’ of Ganda tradition, who introduced sex and death to middle-earth. It is not very likely that such stories attest the rise of a great military state c. 1600 and the ensuing suppression of religious institutions.

Comparative mythology (which does not have to be technically ‘structuralist’) has positive as well as negative uses for the historian. The peoples of southern Uganda, Zaire, Zambia and Malawi appear to share a common heritage of religious thought and practice and there must be a historical basis for this cultural affinity. At the same time, differences between the myths reflect recent political divergence: whereas successful states such as those of the Ganda and Luba became more secular, the Mbona cult alone survived the disasters that overwhelmed southern Malawi in the nineteenth century.

On admet généralement que la diffusion du fer dans la savane joignant le Nil à l'ouest africain à hauteur du lac Tchad a été un puissant facteur de civilisation, mais les considérations sur ce thème s'appuient davantage sur des analogies ou sur des survivances culturelles, des traditions ou des comparaisons ethnologiques que sur des documents archéologiques et historiques correctement mis en place.

Although historians have examined the process of pre-colonial political integration, little attention has been paid to the complementary patterns of ethnic and cultural assimilation. The Chikunda, who were initially slaves on the Zambezi prazos, provide an excellent example of this phenomenon. Over the course of several generations, captives from more than twenty ethnic groups submerged their historical, linguistic, and cultural differences to develop a new set of institutions and a common identity. The decline of the prazo system during the first half of the nineteenth century generated large scale migrations of Chikunda outside of the lower Zambezi valley. They settled in Zumbo, the Luangwa valley and scattered regions of Malawi where they played an important role in the nineteenth-century political and military history of south central Africa.

The final ending of slavery in 1838 marked a radical break in the agrarian history of the Cape Colony. The liberated slaves could and did make use of the mobility that emancipation allowed them. This amounted to a real negotiation of the price of labour, for at various points in the nineteenth century the price of labour threatened the very profitability of farming. For the greater part of the century many landlords were led, in the words of one colonial official, ‘to look back…with something very like an envious eye, to the days in which slavery was tolerated by law, because then the slaveholder could command labour whenever it was needed.’

For the former slaveowners, the outcome was agricultural innovation and routine insolvency, and merchants came to have an increasingly important role in the rural political economy. But post-emancipation agrarian structures were not merely shaped by the incursion of merchant capital and the mobility of labour. The former slaveholders displayed a remarkable tenacity. Most significantly, Cape landlords were heirs to a carefully constructed political economy in which the rules governing the circulation of land and wealth were clearly defined in community and familial terms and in which the ties of credit ran both vertically and horizontally. This was a ‘moral community’ in which all were cushioned against the sometimes detrimental effects of participation in a market economy. It is for this reason that the intervention of English-speaking merchants, by not paying due regard to these rules, was of a qualitatively different kind. Community, in short, provides the backdrop against which much of the colony's agrarian history was played out.

This article seeks to provide a rather different interpretation of the post-emancipation Western Cape than is at present on offer.

One of the more stimulating aspects of working in the field of African studies is the co-operation between scholars of related disciplines such as is not always found among those working in other parts of the world. Historians have been outstanding in promoting this co-operation and it was therefore gratifying to read Michael Mason's paper in the Journal, in which he uses and comments upon the work of geographers in developing his thesis that the Middle Belt of Nigeria may have been an area of sparse population before slave raiding during the nineteenth century. His paper is well documented, closely argued and apparently authoritative. However, there are several points on which we would take issue with Mason, some of which are so fundamental that it would be unfortunate in our view if they were absorbed into the historical literature unchallenged. It is not our purpose in raising these matters to spark off a fruitless ‘intertribal’ war; it is rather to offer constructive criticism to the advantage of historians, geographers and others.

Archibald Dalzel, the author of The History of Dahomey, was born in Scotland in 1740. Unable to practise the medical profession in which he had been trained, he entered the service of the Committee of Merchants Trading to Africa (African Committee) in 1763 as Surgeon, and was posted to Cape Coast in West Africa. There he started slave trading, which remained his only stable employment until his death in 1811. Despite the apparent ease with which profit could be gained from the slave trade during that period, and despite the energy and optimism which he put into his ventures, Dalzel was never a success. He was twice declared a bankrupt and died a disappointed man. The only monument which he left behind and by which he is still remembered is his brilliant compilation on the History of Dahomey.

Roger Casement's role as Irish patriot has obscured his role as Congo reformer. Travelling in the interior of the Congo in 1903 as British consul, Casement gathered evidence that enabled the British government to attack the Congo State on grounds of maladministration. He did not however regard mere diplomatic action as sufficient to redress the wrongs of King Leopold's rubber trade. Convinced that only a humanitarian crusade could abolish the evils of the Leopoldian regime, Casement inspired E. D. Morel to found the Congo Reform Association. Through his dual capacity of civil servant and humanitarian, he attempted, in his own words, to choke off King Leopold ‘as a “helldog” is choked off’. His apocalyptic vision of evil in the Congo may have been exaggerated, but his influence was of the first magnitude in bringing about Belgium's annexation of the Congo in 1908.

The importance of the Christian states of Nubia in medieval times has hitherto been under-estimated by historians of Africa. There is now sufficient information to show that they played a significant part in the history of the Nile valley for some 800 years. Not only did the existence of Christian states impose a barrier to the expansion of Islam, but the Dongola kingdom at least was at times an important force in the politics of the area.

The recent campaign of excavations made necessary by the building of the Aswan dam has provided much new information about the material culture of the period, and shows a much higher artistic and social development than earlier emphasis on ecclesiastical monuments had suggested. Nubia is now seen to have had a highly developed civilization with considerable urban development. Detailed study of the pottery has made possible more precise dating of buildings and objects, as well as showing periods of increased and decreased trade with Egypt.

The discovery of important frescoes in the cathedral at Faras makes it possible to study the artistic development, and also adds new material for a study of the eastern, particularly Persian, influences already suspected in Nubian art. Information about domestic life is made available by the excavations at Debeira West, the first predominantly domestic site to have been excavated, whose material remains provide new evidence on diet, crafts and agriculture.

In 1916 a warlord named Oorlog – ‘war’, in Afrikaans – moved into the Kaokoveld in the far north-west of what is now Namibia, and drove off the original inhabitants. Shortly after, Oorlog was formally recognized as a chief by the newly established South African administration and elevated to the highest position of power in the Kaokoveld. This article, through investigating how Oorlog came to be elevated to this position of power, explores issues of colonial governance and personal relationships. By focusing on the micropolitics of the Kaokoveld, it emphasizes how interpersonal relationships – not bureaucratic structures – were of crucial importance in the establishment and maintenance of early colonial rule in Africa.

Ancient and early Byzantine authors: Diodorus (II, 55), ‘Pseudo-Callisthenes’, Cosmas Indicopleustes and Procopius Caesarensis—mention the navigation of the Indian Ocean by ‘Ethiopians’ of the African Horn and the Axumite Kingdom in their own ships. The hoard of Kushana gold moneys found at Dabra-Dammo confirms this. The legend in the Kebra Nagast of Ethiopian military expeditions to India incorporates reminiscences about sea voyages to India by ancient Axumites.

In 1950, a young man named Ayo Salako went to work for the Nigerian railway as a casual laborer. He hoped to be like his father, a locomotive driver who had worked for the railway from 1916 to his death thirty-four years later. Indeed, Ayo Salako became a successful railwayman, climbing the career ladder to locomotive driver, transferring to a number of different stations and retiring with a pension in 1987. Although the two generations of men both made long, continuous careers in railway employment, Ayo Salako was rather different from his father in terms of his domestic life. The elder Salako had parlayed his employment success into a polygamous marriage and the maintenance of a farm and patron–client relations in his hometown of Ogbomosho. His son, in contrast, married his current wife only after the dissolution of a previous marriage, visited Ogbomosho infrequently and retired in Ibadan rather than in his patrilineal hometown. During his career he saw himself as a modernizer, involved with industrial technology, well-traveled within the country, monogamous, and building a life and educating his children in the booming towns of post-war Nigeria.

Ayo Salako's young adulthood during the 1940s and 1950s coincided with important economic, social and political transformations in Nigeria and throughout Africa. The Second World War and the end of the depression brought economic expansion and a new wave of government interventionism. Cities were swollen with migrants looking for cash and the independence from elders that came with it. African railways expanded to meet new demands for transport and their work forces were among the largest and most politically active on the continent. Faced with imperial financial pressures and widespread African dissent, officials were turning to new policies for the colonies. Ambitious planners attempted to rationalize peasant agriculture to increase production, stabilize wage labor to improve efficiency, reshape African cities to make them less ‘disorderly’ and mold African family life to conform more closely to a bourgeois European image.

During the century from 1760 to 1860 the territory of the present southern Katanga, eastern Angola and north-eastern Rhodesia lay to a great extent under the suzerainty of two powerful monarchs, Mwata Yamvo in the west and Kazembe in the east. Their common border was the Lualaba river. Both were Lunda by tribe: Mwata Yamvo was the senior in that it was from the capital of his kingdom, which had been in existence possibly for a century or more, that Kazembe's ancestor set out in the early eighteenth century to conquer east of the Lualaba. About 1740 he established his own capital near Lake Mweru in the lower Luapula valley.