From a close analysis of African activities and actions in the Kenyan town of Nakuru from the 19205 to the 1960s, it is argued that living in towns tended to consolidate the identities of tribal groups and to exacerbate their differences. Contrasts between the urban responses of the Kikuyu, on the one hand, and the Western Kenyan tribes, the Luo and the Abaluhya, on the other, are analysed, and are related to differences in the tribal structures and in the political, economic and social changes that were taking place in their rural areas. By the early 1960s, the stage was set for open political competition between tribal groups.

BY the twentieth century, the southern Yoruba town of Abeokuta was integrated into the international economy both as an exporter of cash crops and an importer of manufactured products. It became one of the primary producing areas of cocoa and kola nuts in western Nigeria. Abeokuta's integration into the international economy had a profound effect on its local textile industry. As weavers gained access to European threads and dyers gained access to European cloth, relations of production were transformed. Both sets of producers became dependent on European trading firms for their raw materials and were thus brought squarely into the nexus of international trade. Dyeing, which was predominantly a women's industry, benefited substantially from this economic relationship. Dyers' access to cloth as well as credit from the European firms allowed them to become autonomous producers of tie-dyed cloth, adire, that was in great demand across Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Senegal and the Belgian Congo.

This piece considers the subfields of African gender and sexuality history, from the perspective of an unusual career path that has moved between higher education and activist work in Canada and Uganda, and included policy and public service work in the latter. Over the past few decades, African women's history has shifted from the margins of African historiography to the mainstream; scholars have subjected a wide range of topics to insightful gender analysis; and increasingly sophisticated studies of sexuality have emerged. This piece surveys these important developments and how they have played out in the classroom in relation to students’ shifting political and social sensibilities. It argues that, moving forward, scholars should devote more attention to the precolonial history of sexuality and develop creative methodologies for reconstructing that history, especially through engaging historical demography.

When I visited Mauritania in 1960 I expected to find similarities between the culture of the West Saharan societies and that indigenous to Southern Arabia. I was not disappointed. Amidst the distinctive regional culture of the Moors there are certain traits which are difficult to explain solely by an independent evolution in a remote, yet similar, environment. Professor R. B. Serjeant, himself a specialist in Southern Arabia, was also struck by the cultural similarities after he had seen our expedition film of life in the caravan towns of Chinguetti and Wadan. There appears to be a clear case for some cultural contact, but having postulated this it is extremely difficult to tabulate or classify it. This cultural contact does not concern Mauritania alone but includes those vast areas of the Sahara and the Sudan, to east and south, which lie astride the routes leading to the Arabian peninsula.

Professors Curtin and Vansina in a recent issue of this journal (V (1964), 2, pp. 185–208) have put us in their debt by synthesizing the available information on the sources of the nineteenth-century Atlantic slave trade. For the Cameroons Highlands, a source well represented in Koelle's Polyglotta Africana, we have some corrections to make and comments to add.

LES Anyi-Ndényé se trouvent à la bordure occidentale du monde akan, dont ils font partie. La langue qu'ils parlent, l'anyi, est différent du twi (ashanti etc.) et fort proche de la langue du Sefwi (Sayie) et de 1'Aowin (ou Awowin), provinces limitrophes du Ghana occidental. Cependant leur langage tambouriné utilise le twi et la majeure partie du vocabulaire politique, définissant le pouvoir et ses détenteurs, provient directement du twi, langue qui n'est connue aujourd'hui que d'une minorité.

This paper argues that interpretations which would view pre-colonial Akan political life as ‘normative’ and structured may be incorrect, at least in so far as stool succession is concerned. Contemporaneous evidence for this early period is at best sparse and at worst simply non-existent and seldom allows even tentative hypotheses. Rather, it is necessary to infer past practices from more recent data, whether this be observation of present behaviour or recent testimony about the past. In this case I have used the testimony presented at various stool and jurisdictional disputes during the colonial period for which records survive. These are generally, of course, ex parte statements and can be used only with caution. However, there is a surprising consensus throughout these records that both the principles and the patterns of stool succession and paramountcy in the pre-colonial period were variegated and even extemporaneous although, not surprisingly, there is much dispute about the reasons for this. On balance, this testimony suggests that a re-interpretation of early Akan political culture using a wider range of evidence is desirable.

Although this implies that the impact of colonial ‘indirect’ rule was not as profound as has often been supposed, I have not discussed this problem directly except as it bears on the quality of the data. Nor have I attempted to analyse the day-to-day dynamics of political life, either for the earlier period (which would be impossible on the evidence) or for the colonial period (which would be irrelevant for comparison). Nevertheless, within the restricted compass of stool succession and paramountcy the argument here is that colonial rule involved little fundamental change from earlier practices. If anything, it probably served to delimit a greater range of previous options by seeking to codify them.

A recent generalization on cropping and cultivation in Africa reduces the variety of environmental types to two: ‘savannahs’ and ‘forest and woodland’. Another work simplifies West African anthropology by introducing two regions linguistic in origin: the West Sudan and the Guinea Coast. The latter, misleadingly shown as the western portion of a ‘yam belt’ or ‘corridor’, includes the ‘forest’ and a small southern portion of the ‘savannah’. Such regional generalizations invite critical assessment of the relationships displayed between crops, agriculture and the environments. It is proposed to take one of these last as termed above: the ‘forest and woodland’.

This article examines the activism of militant Catholic African students in France in the 1950s. Largely left out of the historiography of the period, they developed a unique perspective on Africa's future, informed by their dual (and often fraught) identity as Africans and Catholics. They undertook a strident campaign to convince French Catholics and the Church hierarchy of the necessity of decolonization, trying to change the Church from the inside.

‘It has constantly been asserted that the determining principle … should be the welfare of the natives.’

GEORGE LOUIS BEER, American Colonial Delegate to the Paris Peace Conference.

In the early 1960s, when a majority of African countries were gaining independence, the training of personnel capable of implementing nation-building projects became imperative for new African governments, even though higher education opportunities on the continent remained scarce. In a context of competition with the former colonial powers and the USSR, the United States decided to set up scholarship programs for the training of postcolonial African elites. Through the analysis of one of these programs, the African Scholarship Program of American Universities (ASPAU), this article will show that in addition to the Cold War motivations of the US government, pan-African connections and university initiatives were essential in laying the groundwork for the project of educating Africans in the United States. It also highlights the too often overlooked role played by African leaders and academics in the concrete realization, reappropriation, and questioning of overseas training projects.

After the restoration of French rule in Senegal in 1817 the Congregation of the Holy Ghost undertook spiritual responsibility for the colony. But its members were unable to make any serious impact on a community that remained only nominally Christian. Their work was reinforced by the ‘Ploërmel Brothers’ who took over the schools in the 1840s, and by the ordination of three Senegalese priests, David Boillat, Arsène Fridoil and Pierra Moussa. Inevitably the three priests were drawn into acrimonious controversy. Under instructions from Governor Bouet, they opened a school in competition with the Ploërmel brothers, who became their implacable enemies. Eventually it had to close and the three priests were successively removed from the colony. Thus ended a brief experiment in educational assimilation.

From 1942 to 1945, British and American armed forces attempted to eradicate malaria in Accra by dredging the sacred Korle Lagoon and spraying the city with pesticides. They also conducted experiments on the biting patterns of mosquitoes by using human subjects as bait. But, despite the extent of the anti-malaria campaign, it is largely forgotten by the inhabitants of Accra, and those who do remember it regard it as a nominal event in the history of the city. This article contrasts the official military history of the anti-malaria campaign with oral evidence to determine why the event fails to resonate in the collective memory of the residents of Accra.

This study examines Nyarroh, a woman chief situated at the cusp of colonial penetration in what is today southern Sierra Leone. Nyarroh ruled a large, strategically located town and its surrounding villages from about 1880 to 1914. The documents which outline her public life have not previously been explored, yet they reveal the flexibility of gendered notions of political power and leadership in the region. Her life story allows us to look backward to precolonial Mendeland and forward to the colonial era, to consider the extent to which women's leadership and prerogatives were maintained or re-invented through colonial penetration and the nascent colonial state.

Using some examples from recent writing on West Africa, this article suggests that the failure of African historians to appreciate fully the importance of the West Indies in generating British imperial policy in the Atlantic tropics has led to serious distortions and errors of interpretation. For economic, ideological, and historical reasons, Britain's interest in the West Indies greatly exceeded her interest in West Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century. Her extensive Caribbean involvement and her ideological commitment to the successful outcome of slave emancipation powerfully influenced her policy in West Africa. In assessing the motives which generated imperial actions in the tropical Atlantic and in evaluating the impact of those actions upon Africa, it behooves historians to develop a broader, trans-Atlantic comprehension of the roots of British imperial policy.

The conservation and study of the variation in indigenous crop plants is an integral part of a crop improvement programme. Investigation of the manner in which the ‘observed’ distribution of the variation has developed is also essential in understanding how to direct the further evolution of the crop in the desired direction.

An important document in the Dutch Archives casts new light on the Kongo–Portuguese War of 1622, usually seen as a signal defeat for Kongo. This document shows that, after the Portuguese victory over Kongo at the Battle of Mbumbi, there was a second battle in which Kongo forces were victorious, and they in fact began the process of re-occupying lands the Portuguese had absorbed in earlier expansion. In addition, the document reveals the origins of a plan, conceived in Kongo, to form an alliance with the Dutch in order to attack Luanda and drive the Portuguese from Angola, a plan that was realized not in 1624 but in 1641.

This article focuses on the historical and political factors that shaped Khwe (San) and Mbukushu ethnic identities and their interrelationship between 1938 and 1989 in west Caprivi, Namibia. While acknowledging the multi-authored nature of identity-building, the article demonstrates that the colonial and apartheid states made significant contributions to the construction of ethnicity in west Caprivi through veterinary interventions in the 1930s and apartheid policies regarding ‘Bushmen’ in the 1950s, and by securing Khwe collaboration during Namibia's liberation struggle in the 1970s and 1980s. These state interventions, together with Khwe and Mbukushu responses to them, also shed light on why land and political authority became so central to struggles between the two groups.