La trypanosomiase ou maladie du sommeil existe a l'état endémique en Afrique tropicale et done en Côte d'Ivoire où elle a constitué de 1900 à 1945 un grave danger. La lutte contre cette endémie a connu deux périodes: la première periode de 1900 à 1938 est une phase de découvertes avec une tentative de lutte organisée en 1931, mais qui fut un échec; la deuxième période 1938–1945 fut plus fructueuse avec la création du Service général autonome de la maladie du sommeil qui parvint à circonscrire l'endémie. Plusieurs hypothèses ont été avancées pour expliquer la diffusion de la trypanosomiase pendant la période coloniale. On a mis en cause tour a tour la pacification et les déplacements de population. En réalité cette diffusion ne s'exerce que lorsque se produit des modifications profondes des milieux physiques et humains à la fois. En ce sens, la mise en valeur coloniale a joué un rôle de premier plan.

‘Khama & Co.’ was the attempt of an African monarch in colonial east-central Botswana to make his state's internal economy self-reliant through participation in commerce. The company was founded in 1910, and flourished, but the ‘Jousse Trouble’ in 1916 obliged the British imperial administration to dictate its closure. Pressures came from commercial interests well established elsewhere in southern Africa, which wished to subordinate African enterprise to white supremacy, and maybe to incorporate the Bechuanaland Protectorate within Southern Rhodesia or the Union of South Africa.

This article examines the evolution of dietary knowledge about French colonial Africa, from the 1920s to the early 1950s. More specifically, it focuses on efforts to quantify daily food intake by tracing the different meanings assigned to nutrition over time. While such statistics were used as early as the 1920s to evaluate the food consumption of populations most useful to the imperial economy, it was only after the Second World War that they became a means of measuring living standards according to universal metrics. This history invites us to reflect on how poverty in Africa came to be recognized as a problem, by showing that such a process has neither been based entirely on social reality nor on the knowledge produced to delineate privation. Rather it also emerged from the changing set of meanings associated with this knowledge.

The years 1871 to 1874 witnessed in Sierra Leone an expression of cultural ethno-centrism characterized by a revolt against attempts at Europeanization of Africans, by emphasis on racial difference and the need for developing the special attributes of the Negro race and of maintaining its distinctive culture. The immediate background to this new phenomenon was the tension which had existed between the native pastors and European missionaries of the Church Missionary Society over the control and management of the native pastorate, and the rampant sectarian rivalry in the colony. In the period under discussion, the tension within the C.M.S. erupted into an open controversy and assumed a wider significance when educated lay natives joined the issue on the side of the native pastors. Both native clerics and laymen saw as their chief opponents European missionaries who, so they charged, through a fierce sectarianism but common contempt for African customs and institutions, were doing grave harm to Africans by creating new divisions among them and by destroying the wholesome base of African society. They argued that reform was necessary, and was to be brought about through the agency of an independent African Church, of which they saw the native pastorate of the C.M.S. as a nucleus, and of a University, preferably secular, run by educated Negroes themselves. Though the movement was primarily cultural, it had the ultimate political objective of self-government, and part of its raison d'etre was preparing Africans towards this end.

West African participation in the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) grew considerably throughout the first half of the twentieth century. This article examines the causes and consequences of failed British and Saudi efforts to channel, regulate, and control the trans-Sahelian flow of pilgrims and enforce a regime of mobility along the Sahel and across the Red Sea. Focusing specifically on Red Sea ‘illicit’ passages, the study recovers the rampant and often harrowing crossings of dozens of thousands of West African pilgrims from the Eritrean to the Arabian coasts. It examines multiple factors that drove the circumvention of channeling and control measures and inscribes the experiences of West African historical actors on multiple historiographic fields that are seldom organically tied to West Africa: Northeast African regional history, the colonial history of Italian Eritrea, and the Red Sea as a maritime space connecting Africa with Arabia.

The terrain of Busoga and adjacent areas of eastern Uganda constituted a portion of the boundary of the broad Bantu speech community of southern, central, west-central and eastern Africa. By examining closely the settings and circumstances of contact between Bantu and non-Bantu in this portion of the ‘Bantu line’ between approximately 1500 and 1850, it is possible to see the complexity of the ‘face of contact’ between speech communities in eastern Uganda. The study reviews several different efforts to comprehend and represent the evolving contacts between Bantu-speakers in the Busoga area and, in particular, Luo-speaking immigrants. Over the long run, many groups associated with Luo immigration took over Bantu speech while gaining dominant statuses and positions within the largely Bantu-speaking communities in the area. The study distinguishes five distinctive and non-homologous zones within this narrow stretch of the Bantu borderland, emphasizing through comparative analysis the very local, immediate, and contextual character of contacts across speech boundaries. It brings forward the economic and political significance of the circumstances of contact, and locates patterns of resistance, flux, and reflux within the era following the linguistic incorporation of the ‘stranger’ Luo within Bantu speech communities. Indeed, some of the important population flows in Busoga appear to have developed out of reactions to elaborated forms of domination building over a number of years, rather than as instant expressions of boundary and cultural formation by the participants in the experience.

Ras Alula played a significant role in the political history of northern Ethiopia during the period between the Egyptian invasion in 1875 and the Italian defeat at Adwa in 1896. Alula became well-known in Ethiopia and Europe for his role in shaping his country's relations with its African neighbours and with European powers. But his role in the internal history of Ethiopia was no less significant. This son of a peasant managed to avoid the restricted local agrarian social ladder by becoming the best general of the Tigrean emperor Yohannes IV (1872–89). As the ‘king's man’, Alula's power was based on his position in the court and on the province (Eritrea) over which he was appointed. But the leading Tigrean families rejected him. When Yohannes died and Eritrea was lost to the Italians, Alula became the most powerful champion of Tigrean independence from the new Shoan emperor, Menilek II. A Tigrean court seemed to be his only opportunity to maintain his position of a ‘king's man’, without which he would have to return to the local agrarian social ladder. After four years of resistance to the new Shoan hegemony, Alula submitted to Menilek and was rewarded with the long-desired position of ‘the king's man’. His recognition of Menilek may be regarded as a fatal blow to Tigrean independence.

The present article explores crucial aspects of the Asante understanding and construction of their own historical experience. Specifically, it historicizes the royal oaths of the first two Asante rulers Osei Tutu (d. 1717) and Opoku Ware (d. 1750). These have long been understood to be fundamental elements in the working of Asante society and culture, but here they are situated precisely as historical testaments and mnemonics. Attention is paid to current debates on matters of emotion, affect and performance, but the focus of the article is an empirical and exemplary investigation of history-making among the Asante.

In the early colonial period the frontier towns of Kayes and Medine on the Upper Senegal River were home to a community of Muslim originaires of the four communes of Senegal. The article examines this group's efforts to establish and maintain a Muslim tribunal in Kayes, thus preserving a space for their privilege and identity within the French colonial system. But while their appeals to the colonial administration were successful in 1905, a 1912 revision of the legal system took away their privilege and made Muslim originaires constituents of native courts. The article provides context for understanding the Muslims' protests, as well as the administration's changing attitudes towards them. Whereas much of the literature on the originaires has focused on their status as assimilated Africans with voting rights, this article calls attention to their identity as Muslims.

Horses in themselves have little or no necessary military significance: in Part I of this article we saw how various quite unwarlike peoples possessed them. of fundamental significance, in transforming horses into war-horses, was good harness and equipment, and to carry this larger animals were preferable. Even against well-equipped cavalry, mainly infantry forces might prevail, if they were, like the Almoravids and the adherents of Usuman dan Fodio, sufficiently inspired. An important advantage of a horse, or better still several horses, was in providing a means of speedy escape. Horses were also valuable in slaving, a profitable occupation not only in the economic terms of human booty, some of whom might be sold for more horses, but also in demographic terms, a sort of compulsory immigration scheme. The use of horses in communications, as packanimals, in hunting, and for food, is discussed, though none was of outstanding significance in the Central Sudan. The employment of horses in agriculture seems to have been entirely lacking. Perhaps the most widespread use of horses was in festivals and celebrations; these displays of horsemanship, whether intentionally or not, helped train horses and riders. Good equipment was again vital, and sumptuary restrictions seem to have been directed more against overweening ostentation in this, than in the possession of horses. While horses were very widely esteemed, the most scrupulous among Muslims felt a certain hesitation about the propriety of riding a horse. Horses were found as a form of tribute, alms, bribes, and gifts of various kinds. In conclusion, the horse per se was more common, and less remarkable, in the Central Sudan than is sometimes suggested; it was the equipment of horses which made them effective weapons of war and statecraft.

Gungunyane, paramount chief of the Shangana of Gazaland, 1884–95, was a very shrewd diplomat. A study of his diplomacy with Europeans suggests that his major goal was Shangana independence of action. From the beginning of his reign, Gungunyane was pressured to give concessions in both economic and political spheres. His capital was on the edge of the Rhodesian plateau until mid-1889, when the chief moved a large portion of his people as well as his capital southward to the Limpopo valley, Mozambique. This significant dislocation influenced later negotiations with Portugal. Although the chief was a strong personality, he was subject to pressures from his immediate—and in this case, warlike—African advisors. In negotiations with the British South Africa Company, the Mozambique Company and the Portuguese government, the African leader enjoyed the benefits of a fearful military reputation, a wide-reaching espionage system, and conflicts between British and Portuguese concession-seekers. A master of playing both ends against the middle to maintain his freedom of movement, Gungunyane found, nevertheless, that his diplomatic programme was undermined by Portuguese superiority in the use of firearms, disunity among the Shangana and their tributaries, and growing social disintegration caused by alcoholism, emigration, and European encroachment. His final military defeat by Portuguese forces in 1895 was not a true index of his talent as an African diplomat.

Writers dealing with the Herero of Botswana have tended mostly to deal with them as a single homogeneous whole. Concentrating on Ngamiland, this article outlines and discusses the arrival, at different times and for different reasons, of various groups of Herero into the territory. The article indicates that prior to the Herero–German war of 1904, the majority of Herero moved into Ngamiland on account of the activities of German colonizers and the Herero chief, Samuel Maharero. In Ngamiland, the Herero immigrants came to form a substantial source of support for the Batawana usurper, Sekgoma Letsholathebe. With the outbreak of the Herero–German war, Herero who had fled Namibia on earlier occasions now opposed the move of Samuel Maharero into Ngamiland, and found themselves supported by Sekgoma Letsholathebe. Following the deposition of Sekgoma in a coup, the position of Herero who had supported Sekgoma became increasingly tenuous and led to their move out of Ngamiland. Overall, the article presents a case study of the manner in which, in seeking to strengthen their positions within host communities, refugees of necessity come to be bound up in the internal politics of such communities.

This article builds upon previous work on the impact of ransoming on processes of captivity, enslavement, and slavery in West Africa. Ransoming is defined as the release of a captive prior to enslavement in exchange for payment. It was a complicated process with no guarantee of success. This article examines the responses of families of captives to the failure of ransom negotiations. The ability to respond to failed ransom negotiations and the type of response chosen was dependent on the political climate and the resources available to those seeking the release of a captive.

Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600–1850. By JAMES L. A. WEBB JR. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Pp. xxvi+227. £40.95 (ISBN 0-299-14330-9); £17.95, paperback (ISBN 0-299-14334-1).

In contrast to the desert itself, the Sahara as subject of historical (re)construction is currently displaying signs of health and vitality. It is enticing historians into a range of theoretical and methodological domains deriving from other disciplines, and simultaneously attracting scholars from other disciplines to play out their own explorations around its contours. For a space which seems to have no difficulty occupying well-delineated and identified areas in every genre of cartographical representation, the Sahara is surprisingly difficult to ‘locate’ in academic discourse. Its identity, in current parlance, is a popular focus of speculation and debate, challenging conventional notions of its location, both in time and in space. One of these challenges is engagingly articulated in the recent publication of economic historian James Webb Jr. His Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600–1850, invites wider participation in this ‘search for the Sahara’ and in so doing, encourages broader understanding of just where ‘Saharan studies’ and in particular Saharan history and Saharan society stand in these so-called post-colonial times.

Of the African states with which European Powers were in contact during the period of active competition on the Upper Nile, two in particular, the Empire of Ethiopia and the Mahdist State, were sufficiently sophisticated to transact their political and administrative business in writing and to maintain more or less systematic records. Thanks to the work of P. M. Holt, the nature and scope of the Mahdist archives are now well known, and it is evident that they can be expected to furnish a very detailed picture of the fiscal and military organization of the Mahdist State. The documentation of external affairs is necessarily much less abundant; in principle, the Mahdia could not entertain diplomatic relations with ‘the corruptions of this world ’—the existing political organisms which, whether frankly infidel or officially Muslim, had been rendered obsolete by the new dispensation. But this principle was gradually eroded by the exigencies of practical politics. The foreign correspondence of the early Mahdia is simply a series of minatory admonitions to the ‘enemies of God,’ summoning them to submit to the Mahdi; but as the universal aspirations of Mahdism were tacitly abandoned under the Khalifa, its external relations reverted to a more conventional form. Certain uncommitted Muslim states of the western (Nigerian) Sudan began to be considered as potential friends rather than as a part of the Mahdist dar al-harb.

The first white persons to settle permanently in Katanga, a highland plateau region geographically isolated from the low-lying Congo basin, were missionaries collectively styled Plymouth Brethren. They were preceded—along the geographical and commercial routes which linked Katanga to Bié and Benguela and to Mweru and Zanzibar—by David Livingstone, who visited the Upper Congo in 1871, and by Verney Lovett Cameron, who traversed the region three years later. Both British explorers reported that Katanga was a region rich in minerals, and therefore an area into which whites should advance. The Germans Paul Reichard and Richard Böhm, in 1884, and the Portuguese Hermenigildo Capelo and Roberto Ivens, in 1885, confirmed the earlier tales.

For geographers and others working on contemporary development issues in Africa, the historical perspective is of considerable significance. Such topics as the incidence and form of indigenous slavery and slave-trading in pre-colonial times are particularly pertinent to modern-day studies of population and rural development, and work published by historians is read with interest by researchers outside the discipline. Thus, some years ago, discussion was generated between geographers and historians on the impact of slave raiding in Nigeria's ‘Middle Belt’, initially stimulated by a paper in the Journal of African History. As the subsequent debate illustrated, the relationship between modern population density and settlement patterns and pre-colonial slavery is a fascinating one.

In a recent article David Richardson revised estimates of the volume and African regional distribution of the eighteenth-century British slave trade. Richardson calculated that British slave vessels sailing between 1698 and 1807 – to the year of Abolition – embarked 3,052,509 slaves on the African coast. This figure falls at the midpoint between lower-bound estimates made by Curtin in 1969 and upper-bound estimates published by Inikori seven years later. Further, Richardson provided historians with the first extended year-by-year series of British slave exports; and he separated the trading data of the three principal British slaving ports of Liverpool, London and Bristol, which comprised 50, 28 and 18 per cent of the trade, respectively.