The overthrow of the Sokoto empire at the beginning of this century was facilitated by the interplay of three major factors—the internal political situation of the empire which allowed too much autonomy to the constituent emirates, the rise of Mahdism in the eastern emirates, and European (British, French and German) competition leading to invasion. Each factor was a potential cause of instability, making the task of the invading forces much easier. This article is an attempt to examine the efforts of Hayatu ibn Sa'id, great grandson of Uthman dan Fodio, to transform latent feelings of expectations of the Mahdi in the Sokoto empire into a positive movement linked to the Sudanese Mahdiyya in the late nineteenth century. It also looks at the impact of Hayatu's activities on Adamawa.

Le terme Gaoga, qui figure fréquemment au centre des cartes anciennes de l'Afrique, se retrouve dans un seul texte, la ‘description de l'Afrique’, du diplomate marocain, Léon l'Africain, publiée en italien en 1550 par Ramusio. Relevant de fréquentes confusions avec la ville de Gao sur le Niger, certains africanistes en tirent la conclusion hâtive que le voyage de Léon se serait limité aux pays du Niger. Selon eux, le reste des notes ne ferait que reproduire des récits de caravaniers, plus ou moms fantaisistes. Pierre Kalck, ancien administrateur français, auteur d'une thèse de doctorat ès lettres sur l'histoire des règions qu'il a administrées, estime au contraire que le voyage de Léon du Bornou en Egypte fut bien effectué et qu'il a existé un Etat du nom de Gaoga, semblable aux grandes entités politiques africaines de l'époque. Il fait d'abord le point sur les hypothèses formées par ceux qui refusent la thèse simpliste d'une confusion Gao-Gaoga. Pour Barth, Gaoga était le nom, non d'une contrée, mais déune dynastie boulala installée à Yao (Yaoga) sur le lac Fitri. Pour Carbou, le Gaoga n'était autre que le Kanem, séparé du Bornou—Modat rappelait cependant que, d'après les notes mêmes de Léon, il ne pouvait s'agir que d'une région montagneuse: le Dar Zagaoua au nord du Darfour. Palmer voyait dans le Gaoga un pays situé sur l'oued Batha et peuplé par des réfugiés nubiens. Kaick se réfère, non seulement au passage spécialement consacré au Gaoga par Léon, mais aux mentions éparses, et parfois déformées, dans le reste du texte publié par Ramusio. Il établit que Léon, après avoir quitté le Bornou, a gagné le Darfour par la piste dite du treizième parallèle, puis a rejoint Assiout en haute Egypte par l'antique route caravanière dite des quarante jours (Darb al Arbaïn) qui passe par l'oasis de Kharga. Scion lui, le Gaoga, fondé au quinzième siècle par des réfugiés nubiens, s'étendait, lors du passage de Léeon vers 1512–1514, sur une superficie qui comprenait l'est du Tchad (Ouadaï, Salamat, Rounga), l'ouest du Soudan (Darfour) et le nord-est de la République Centrafricaine (Fertit). Le Ouadaï est encore aujourd'hui appelé Kouka (corruption de Gaoga) par les Teda du nord et ce terme de Kouka est conservé par un groupe ethnique du Tchad. Citant la découverte par Arkell, à Aïn Fara et à Ouri dans le Darfour, de vestiges nubiens chrétiens, Kalck estime que céest dans cette région montagneuse qui constituait l'ancien Gaoga que se trouve la solution de bien des énigmes de l'histoire de l'Afrique Centrale. Le texte de Léon, aussi bref soit-il, apparaît comme un premier fil conducteur.

The main trunk lines of the Rhodesian railway system were built under the aegis of Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company (BSA Co.) between 1890 and 1911. This article begins with an analysis of the motivations behind railway construction during this period. It argues that interpretations which set up a dichotomy between ‘Rhodes-as-imperialist’ and ‘Rhodes-as-capitalist’ are misconceived. Nevertheless, it shows how the motivations behind railway development took on a more narrowly economic and financial character after the fiasco of the Jameson Raid in 1896 put paid to Rhodes' sub-imperial ambitions.

There follows an analysis of the economic and financial foundations of the BSA Co.'s regional railway monopoly. The article charts how railway construction was sustained through the manipulation of the interlocking interests of the BSA Co. and the Witwatersrand; through the creation of a ‘group structure’ of railway companies; and through the triangular relationship which developed between the BSA Co., Paulings, the monopoly contractor, and d'Erlangers, the chief broker and underwriter of railway loan (debenture) capital.

Finally, two fundamental allegations made by critics of the railway policy of the BSA Co. are assessed: firstly, that debenture finance was a means of distributing disguised dividends to itself and its friends; secondly, that these disguised dividends were paid for by the settlers through exorbitant railway rates. The nature of debt within the railway monopoly, the functions of debenture finance and the imperatives which shaped rating policy are discussed. The allegations are revealed to be ill-founded. It is argued that the tensions between the settlers and the BSA Co., their interdependence notwithstanding, were rooted in conflicting perceptions of what the priorities and parameters of economic development should be.

In keeping with the law in place in the Colony of Ashanti in 1928, Dr Benjamin Knowles was tried and convicted for the murder of his wife without the benefit of a jury trial or the assistance of legal counsel. His trial and sentencing to death created outrage in both colonial Ghana and the metropole, and placed a spotlight on the adjudication of capital crimes in the colony. Inevitably, there were calls for reform of a system that could condemn an English government official to death without the benefit of the right to trial by a jury of his peers and counsel of his choice. Shortly after the Knowles trial, the colonial government did open up Ashanti to lawyers, and introduced other changes in the administration of criminal justice, but continued to refuse the introduction of jury trial. Nevertheless, the lasting impact of the Knowles trial was to make criminal adjudication in Ashanti, if anything, more lenient than the other area of colonial Ghana, the Gold Coast Colony.

This article examines Zambia's engagement with the Middle East conflict from 1964–73 as a window into the political strategies and ideological ambitions of Kaunda's government in the first decade of independence. At the start of independence, Kaunda's domestic agenda led him to establish ties with Israel and to advance a program for cooperative development based on Israeli technical assistance. However, broader international concerns, filtered through the struggle against white minority regimes in southern Africa, ultimately led Kaunda to embrace a leadership role in international protests against Israel's policies towards its neighboring states. Zambia's foray into Middle East diplomacy in the first decade of independence enables a focused examination of Kaunda's presence in the international arena, while also revealing the compromises he made in the face of conflicting interests. Zambia's role in the Middle East conflict highlights this era as a time of confidence and claim-making by African leaders, but also one of concessions.

Research conducted into the demography of the Kingdom of Kongo some forty years ago, employing baptismal statistics left by missionaries, has been in need of revision thanks to challenges by more recent scholarship. This article revises the estimated population of Kongo by addressing these challenges, drawing on newly discovered documentary sources. Using this new evidence, the estimate for the kingdom's population in the mid-seventeenth century has been elevated from 509,000 to around 790,000. The original article's claims about levels of fertility and mortality have been retained. The article also addresses questions concerning the validity of missionary statistics and the impact of the slave trade, which was small before 1700 but then increasingly large thereafter, reaching very high levels by the early nineteenth century. While a quantitative estimate of the later population is not possible given the limitations of sources for this period, it is likely that the population of the kingdom fell as slave exports peaked.

This article explores the relationship between Angolan guerrilla broadcasts and their effects on the Portuguese counterinsurgency project in their war to hold on to their African colonies. The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA's Angola Combatente) and National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA's Voz de Angola Livre) broadcasts allowed these movements to maintain a sonic presence in the Angolan territory from exile and to engage in a war of the airwaves with the Portuguese colonial state with whom they were fighting a ground war. First and foremost, it analyzes the effects of these rebel broadcasts on listeners, be they state or non-state actors. A reading of the archives of the state secret police and military exposes the nervousness and weakness of the colonial state even as it was winning the war.

During the colonial period, the Yao formed the main source of recruits for the King's African Rifles Nyasaland (Malawi) battalions. Originally, the main reason for the large number of Yao volunteers was probably the simple fact that the recruitment office was near Yao areas. However, due to prevailing racial ideals the British colonial military interpreted this as a sign of a ‘martial spirit’. This led to active encouragement to enlist the Yao, which in turn made military service ever more attractive among this group. They became the ‘martial race’ of Nyasaland, a concept which continued to affect British recruitment policies until the Second World War.

In northeast Congo, from c. 1890–1940, ritually-empowered militias of Bali Leopard-men, or anioto, killed people on behalf of local leaders to secure access to land, resources, and people and to keep rivals and subjects in check. Belgian colonial authorities portrayed the actions of anioto as an irrational disturbance, ignoring their political relevance. The contextualized study of colonial-era conflicts based on court hearings, in association with anthropological, historical, and material sources, gives insight into emic perspectives. As militias controlled by different leaders, they reflected human adaptability in dealing with social ills, performed judicial functions, and provided therapeutic relief through violence. Originating in the precolonial era, anioto adapted to various strategic needs throughout history. A study of different manifestations of anioto reveals the creative and amalgamating nature of institutional dynamism in northeast Congo. Better knowledge of this institutional history, based on studying conflicts from the past, may enrich our deeper understanding of the dynamics of conflicts in the present.

Harriette Emily Colenso, oldest of the five children of the famous Bishop John Colenso of Natal, was born in Norfolk, England, in 1847, and died in Natal at the age of 85, after a life of outstanding activity and purpose. Although the average Natal colonist regarded her as fanatically prejudiced, even the local Natal Witness, the mouthpiece of colonial views, was forced to acknowledge her ‘personal and intellectual qualities’. At the height of her unpopularity in 1907, when she was defending Dinizulu, it wrote:

There is probably no person in the colony whose influence on the natives is greater, and there is none who, should she but exert her power in that direction could exercise a more pacifying effect upon the native mind. Miss Colenso is strongly endowed with the judicial faculty and … her grasp of the intricate points of trials and cases in which natives have been involved has often astonished able and experienced lawyers.

The Northern Territories Protectorate and its people were located on the economic and political margins of Britain's Gold Coast Crown Colony (now Ghana) throughout the colonial period. The article examines how the region's peripherality allowed the Gold Coast Tsetse Control Department to carry out an extensive campaign of bush clearing and resettlement along northern river valleys from the 1930s to 1950s, with little supervision by the Gold Coast Medical Department or northern officials. Intended to control human and animal sleeping sickness and to meet the economic preferences of the colony's central administration, this campaign had the effect of greatly increasing the exposure of northern communities to another disease, onchocerciasis, causing widespread blindness and contributing to a serious public health crisis in the early independence era.

This article analyzes an instance of collective panic about gangs of killers called Watu wa Mumiani (‘Mumiani People’) in Digo District, Kenya in 1945. Popularly believed to work for the colonial government, Watu wa Mumiani were said to abduct Africans from roads and kill them for their blood. I offer an interpretation of this episode in terms of the history of a medicine called Mumia, a nineteenth-century ritual called Mung'aro, regional strategies for surviving famine (including ‘pawning’ kin), and a wartime labor conscription campaign. Rather than emphasize the alterity of ‘vampires’ like Watu wa Mumiani, I show how the 1945 panic articulates concerns about powerful intermediaries, arguing that the stories told about them encode a history of concerns about predatory patrons, especially under conditions of ecological distress.

This study assesses the agricultural sector under the government of Kwame Nkrumah as a dynamic Cold War front. After Ghana's independence in 1957, Nkrumah asserted that the new nation would guard its sovereignty from foreign influence, while recognizing that it needed foreign cooperation and investment. His government embarked upon a development program with an emphasis on diversifying Ghana's agriculture to decrease her dependence on cocoa. Meanwhile, both the United States and the Soviet Union sought to establish footholds in Ghana through agricultural aid, trade, and investments. In the first years of independence, the Ghanaian state encouraged smallholder farming and American investment. Later, in a sudden change of policy, the government established large-scale state farms along the socialist model. This article brings to light the ways that Ghanaians in rural areas engaged with and interpreted the increasingly interventionist agriculture projects and policies of Nkrumah's government.

This article reconsiders the political organization of Fante, a leading state of the Gold Coast, during the seventeenth century, mainly on the basis of contemporary European records. It questions the conventional depiction of Fante as lacking any effective central authority, showing that the Brafo (head of state) in fact exercised significant power. However, there were recurrent conflicts, both between the Brafo and other chiefs in the capital, and between the capital and the provinces. These tensions are situated within the context of growing European trade in gold and slaves, and endemic local warfare, which generated new resources that upset the existing balance of power.

Historians have drawn on newspapers to illuminate the origins of modern nationalism and cultures of literacy. The case of Kiongozi (The Guide or The Leader) relates this scholarship to Tanzania's colonial past. Published between 1904 and 1916 by the government of what was then German East Africa, the paper played an ambivalent role. On the one hand, by promoting the shift from Swahili written in Arabic script (ajami) to Latinized Swahili, it became the mouthpiece of an African elite trained in government schools. By reading and writing for Kiongozi, these waletaji wa habari (bearers of news) spread Swahili inland and transformed coastal culture. On the other hand, the paper served the power of the colonial state by mediating between German colonizers and their indigenous subordinates. Beyond cooptation, Kiongozi highlights the warped nature of African voices in the colonial archive, questioning claims about print's impact on nationalism and new forms of selfhood.

The paper examines the ‘Ibn Mashʿal episode’ in Moroccan history and explodes its myth. The episode was a non-event; there was no Jew involved, let alone his assassination. The story was false propaganda by al-Rashīd designed for rallying popular support behind his newly-established power. Its acceptance was assisted by the prevalent world-view. Two anonymous Englishmen visiting Morocco in the seventeenth century were the first to commit to writing the ‘national myth’, thus giving it its first seal of authority, which was later reinforced by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Moroccan chroniclers. The mock commemoration of this non-event, by serving as a regular reminder of the redeeming role of the ‘Alawī dynasty, helped to arouse and promote continuing loyalty to the throne. Various distortions have, however, crept into the basic substratum of al-Rashīd's mythical presentation.

The travel literature of medieval Jewry may yield new information about the African past. The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, a case in point, throws light on the little-known eastern Sudan of the twelfth century. From the Itinerary may be reconstructed trade routes south from Alexandria to Christian Nubia, east from the Upper Nile Valley to southern Arabia and India, and west to the Fezzān and, ultimately, to the western Sudanic States. Commodities traded included wheat, raisins, figs, copper, salt, gold, precious stones, and slaves. These routes tied in with the better known trans-Saharan, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean networks of trade. Benjamin's Itinerary describes a spectrum of political development ranging from primitive Negroids south of Aswan and the tribal Beja and Rabīʻa Arabs to the more sophisticated Arab-controlled city-State of Aswan and the Christian kingdoms of Nubia. Benjamin mentions Christian Nubia only in passing, but indicates that ʻAiwa still flourished as a trading kingdom as late as 1170.