From the 1920s the British government sought to manipulate the powerful new propaganda weapon of the cinema to the advantage of the Empire. Unsuccessful attempts were made to break the American stranglehold on the colonial cinema circuit which was thought to pose a threat to British commercial and political interests. Attempts to control what were seen as the harmful effects of the commercial cinema were made through strict censorship. The Colonial Office provided guidelines for policy and organization. South Africa set precedents for racial discrimination in censorship and segregation in viewing which were adopted in much of East and Central Africa. The Colonial Office and the British Film Institute were both anxious to see an experiment using the film in adult education. Progress was held back through lack of money until 1935 when the Carnegie Corporation decided to finance the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment, a project of the International Missionary Council. The B.E.K.E., an experiment in the production of films for the educational and cultural adjustment of Africans to western society, was conducted in East and Central Africa between 1935 and 1937, with the Colonial Office playing an advisory role. No permanent organization developed out of the B.E.K.E. due to lack of finance and lack of interest among the East African governments. When the British government created the Colonial Film Unit in 1939, its purpose was to make war propaganda films for the colonies. Later in the war, the work of the C.F.U. was extended to the making of instructional films, which became its main function once the war had ended.

Southern Africans configured missionaries as medical, bodily practitioners because of the meaning of ritual specialization in southern Africa. At the same time, ‘practicing medicine’ often meant minor surgery to missionaries, who lagged behind Europe's medical advances at the turn of the century. Whereas southern Africans located their well-being in the nexus of person and community, missionaries' surgery attacked this nexus. Surgery implied, and missionaries asserted, that healing derived from a resolution of interior somatic conflicts, in which troublesome body parts might be removed. A new way of speaking about certain kinds of physical pain was developed, whereby the body briefly became a total site for illness and healing. At the same time, Nonconformist evangelism demanded that individuals rid their interior selves of unsavory forces and extract themselves from those aspects of their communal lives which generated such influences. Because both Africans and missionaries moralized illness, and because some forms of surgery, like tooth-pulling, ‘worked’ for Africans, surgery marked a rite of passage to a new group of peers: Christians, who could recontextualize the catharsis of getting well.

This article is an effort to examine the way in which events during and, in some cases, before the nineteenth century shaped modern Senegambian society. It concludes:

(1) That the slave trade contributed to the development of military structures and to the polarization of Senegambian societies between a warrior élite and an industrious Muslim peasant population.

(2) That the change from the slave trade to legitimate commerce weakened the élites while strengthening the Muslim agriculturalists, who were able to accumulate guns and horses.

(3) That tensions between the two conflicting groups go back at least to the seventeenth century, and that after 1860 they led to a series of revolutionary struggles. The agents of this revolution were a series of charismatic religious leaders.

(4) That the course of this revolution was shaped by the involvement of European interests, and after 1854 increasingly by the incorporation of Senegambia in European spheres of influence.

(5) That this merely postponed certain changes. By the beginning of the colonial period, Islam was clearly dominant, and Senegambia's rural populations were heavily involved in the money economy.

The familiar mystique of African hunters was not a foregone conclusion to the practitioners, dependents, and leaders who created it. Late in the first millennium, Botatwe farmers’ successful adoption of cereals and limited cattle sustained the transformation of hunting from a generalist's labor into a path to distinction. Throughout the second millennium, the basis of hunters’ renown diversified as trade intensified, new political traditions emerged, and, eventually, the caravan trade and mfecane ravaged established communities. The story of Botatwe hunters reveals a longue durée history of local notables and the durability of affective, social dimensions of recognition in the face of changes in the material, political, and technological basis sustaining such status.

1. The few excavated sites with pottery in East Africa, apart from the coast, are confined to Western Uganda and the Central part of the Kenya Rift Valley.

2. Where absolute dating is impossible, relative dating by means of cultural introductions, viz., roulette decoration, the tobacco pipe, calabash pseudomorphs and graphite colouring must be used.

3. With the establishment of settled agricultural economies the variation of pottery forms increases.

4. An origin of pottery in Kenya cannot be accepted. The first pottery though is that of the Late Stone Age hunter-foodgatherers, and has simple forms.

5. The developed Elementeitan, Hyrax Hill and Gumban A wares of Kenya are part of an early, though isolated, complex of possible pre-Iron Age cultures.

6. The first true Iron Age pottery, the Dimple-based wares of Kenya and Uganda are part of a common Central African complex.

7. The roulette cord decoration appears in East Africa within the present millennium. Lanet, Bigo and Renge pottery wares all owe origins to the introduction.

8. The Lanet ware bears similarities to Hottentot pottery of Southern Africa and is dated to the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.

9. Bigo pottery was widespread over Western Uganda around a.d. 1500. Painted wares at chief sites. Basic forms and decoration continue in succeeding Western Uganda Kingdoms. Ritual ware developed.

10. Introduction of tobacco pipes, graphite wares and calabash forms by the late seventeenth century.

11. Copying of Banyoro graphite wares by neighbouring royal Uganda potters in last quarter of second millennium.

12. Evolution of a distinctive pottery, Entebbe Ware, amongst Lake Victoria hunter-fishing peoples.

The histories of pre-colonial states in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa have engaged scholars for more than a century. First encountered by Europeans in the 1860s during the search for the source of the Nile, these states and their rulers inspired both admiration and frustration in their visitors. On the one hand, explorers were impressed by the power of the rulers and the complexities of their bureaucracies, but on the other, they were annoyed by the apparent vacillation of the monarchs in responding to their demands. From the historian's perspective, these initial encounters soon led to questions about the origins and longevity of these states. Stories of origins were encapsulated in myths and legends that missionaries began to record around the turn of the twentieth century, while efforts to elicit lists of kings who had ruled each state introduced African leaders to European-style historiography.

Using newly available evidence, mainly from the Public Records Office (now the National Archive) in London, this article attempts to unravel the true extent of the role that British oil interests played in the decision of the British government to insist on a ‘One Nigeria’ solution in the Nigeria/Biafra conflict. While the official position of the British government was that its main interest in the Nigeria conflict was to prevent the break-up of the country along tribal lines, the true position was more complex. Evidence in this paper suggests that British oil interests played a much more important role in the determination of the British attitude to the war than is usually conceded. Specifically, Britain was interested in protecting the investments of Shell-BP in Nigerian oil. Furthermore, Britain was also at the time desperate to keep Nigerian oil flowing in order to mitigate the impact of its domestic oil shortfalls caused by the Middle East Six Day War. Supporting a ‘One Nigeria’ solution was considered its safest bet in order to achieve the above objectives.

The structure of indigenous trade in Central Africa makes it necessary to distinguish between three different types of trade. There is first the local trade from village to village within a given population. The goods exchanged are generally specialized products from local industry, and the exchange comes about because some villages possess supplies of raw materials which are not available to others, e.g. pottery clay, or because they are inhabited by specialists such as smiths or woodcarvers who are not available in others. This type of trade is conducted in local markets, and generally speaking, currency of some sort is in use. It is still alive today, and one can assume that it is very old, since such a system shows little dynamism. The necessities remain the same; the organization is simple and efficient.

This article has two related purposes. The first is to attempt a clarification of certain points raised by Professor Oliver in his article, ‘The Problem of the Bantu Expansion’, published in an earlier issue of this Journal, insofar as it concerns his discussion of the alternative theories of Professor Guthrie and the present writer regarding Bantu origins. The second and more general aim is to survey the basic assumptions of Guthrie's work on Bantu insofar as it relates to the same problem. In the course of the exposition, three types of evidence are considered: the internal Bantu linguistic evidence; the linguistic evidence external to Bantu, chiefly from West African languages; and the non-linguistic, chiefly geographic evidence.

It is argued that Guthrie's assumption which underlies his theory of a central ‘nuclear’ area as the point of origin, namely that the linguistically most conservative area reveals the place of origin, is contrary to empirical evidence. It is rather the area of greatest internal divergence, in this case the north-western area, which points to the earliest differentiation and hence point of origin.

This paper explores some of the major methodological problems associated with the study of the history of the family in Africa. It sets out to explore the problem of the unit of analysis, concluding that the historian must be careful to distinguish between idealized family forms and the reality of family structures. Using both historical and contemporary examples from southern Malawi the paper explores this problem further by analysing the role of the matrilineage vis-à-vis the household over time.

Both oral and written sources specifically concerned with the history of the family tend to emphasize the formal structure of kinship relations and it is difficult to know how these relate to the facts of social and economic organization. Even using present-day evidence it is difficult to integrate cultural perceptions of kinship and family relations with realities – in particular with the economic realities, which may change much faster than cultural norms. In the final section of the paper it is suggested that the nearest we can get to a knowledge of the history of the family, avoiding the problems of ideology and the drawbacks of structural and evolutionary models, is to approach the subject ‘sideways’. By studying other institutions and relationships which impinge on family structures, we may get closer to defining the boundaries of these structures. This approach is illustrated using the example of chinjira - a non-kin-based relationship between women which exists in parts of southern Malawi. A study of chinjira indirectly demonstrates both the strength and the limits of kinship relations.

Excavations at the Zimbabwe (enclosure) of Manekweni, in southern coastal Mozambique, have shown that it belongs to the Zimbabwe Culture which was centred on the Rhodesian plateau. Occupation levels have been dated to between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries. The faunal evidence indicates that a section of the population benefited from intensive beef production through transhumant pastoralism on the seasonally-fluctuating fringes of tsetse fly infestation. The settlement pattern of Rhodesian Zimbabwe suggests that their siting was determined by the demands of a similar system of transhumance. This model provides a basis from which to begin to reconstruct some aspects of the economies of early Zimbabwe. It is already clear that Zimbabwe were not simply the products of long-distance trade; rather, their economies integrated farming and cattle-herding as well as gold production and foreign trade.

The archaeological study of African agricultural history has concentrated more on origins and the identification of crop remains than on farming techniques and ancient fields. The latter rarely survive, and even then may be of indeterminate age and apparently atypical, such as hillside terracing or irrigation systems. The subject has been further bedevilled by these unusual instances of preserved fields being regarded as relics of ‘intensive’ cultivation by ‘vanished civilizations’. However, a clearer understanding of African agriculture, through ethnographic and ecological approaches, reveals not only its basically extensive character but also the infinite variety of local specializations (or cultural–environmental adaptations, combining ancient African domesticates and introduced crops which have been ‘Africanized’). This provides a perspective for examining peculiarities of the present and past and claimed instances of ‘intensification’. Conversely the concept of specialization allows us to use, with caution, the preserved remains of old field systems to illustrate more typical ones. Many of the archaeological survivals were not so much ‘intensive’ as ‘over-specialized’, often in isolated and circumscribed situations, notably remote hills in both western and eastern Africa. A moderate example is Inyanga in eastern Zimbabwe with its extensive terraced hillsides of the later Iron Age. Here most of the terraces were not irrigated, but there are hints of complex seasonal arrangements and field techniques. A more extreme, even ‘ultra-specialized’ agricultural system, also of the later Iron Age, which was abandoned in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, is that of Engaruka in the northern Tanzanian rift. This was an essentially isolated and self-sufficient settlement in dry country, absolutely dependent on its exquisite irrigation devices. Eventually this community expired, as its soil was exhausted and its water supplies declined.

Finally, there are instances in nineteenth-century East Africa, and from earlier in West Africa, of more open cultural–economic systems producing a surplus for caravans, markets and towns. Technologically these have been no more accomplished or ‘intensive’ than the specializations discussed, but developmentally their achievement has been more effective.

Exposure to and invasion by parasitic organisms may play an important part among many other intrinsic factors that guide the evolution of animal forms. Trypanosomes, two species of which cause African sleeping sickness today, are blood parasites of great antiquity. Their presence in Africa at the time of the first stages of human evolution may have been of great consequence, at first acting as a discriminating agent between resistant and non-resistant types of hominids, and later also in shaping migration routes and settlement patterns. As a possible clue as to why man arose in Africa, the author postulates that trypanosomes may have precluded the development of certain ground-dwelling faunas, allowing certain more resistant primates to fill the empty ecological niches. Some of these primates, thus becoming ground-dwellers, became the precursors of the hominid branch. The evolution of T. gambiense and T. rhodestense, the two human parasites, and their development in the tsetse fly, are debated. The epidemiological aspects and patterns of the disease are examined under the changing climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and during later times, when Africa was opened up by Western exploration.

Cattle have been known in northern East Africa for a long time. A single people initiated the spread of cattle farther south through southern East Africa, and partly into southern Africa, at a time prior to the expansion of Bantu-speakers into these regions. This spread was not accompanied by knowledge of milking. The milking of cattle, although very likely practised by some northern East African peoples since a very early period, diffused to Bantu peoples after their advance into eastern and southern Africa was well under way. The practice was probably borrowed from Southern Cushites first by Bantu in northern Tanganyika and through them transmitted to the rest of the eastern and southern Bantu.

This article is concerned with the historical construction of communities, cultures and identities in colonial Natal, in this case an Indian grouping that emerged from the heterogeneous collection of indentured workers imported between 1860 and 1911. Despite the difficulties of indenture, Indians set about re-establishing their culture and religion in Durban. The most visible and public expression of ritual was the festival of Muhurram, which played an important role in forging a pan-Indian ‘Indianness’ within a white and African colonial society. This was significant when one considers that the nationalist movement was in its formative stages and there was no national identity when indentured workers had left India.

The Gold Coast (modern Ghana) was severely attacked by the influenza pandemic of 1918–19. The disease was introduced by shipping along the southern coast and overland across the northern frontier. As was true elsewhere on the continent, the spread of influenza was greatly facilitated by the new colonial transportation network. Quarantines and other preventive measures were futile and therapy, African or British, could do no more than alleviate symptoms. Influenza struck the majority of the population, but mortality rates varied regionally and, to some extent, by occupation. Deaths were especially numerous in the far north. The influenza epidemic killed 100,000 or more people in less than six months and was almost certainly the worst short-term demographic disaster in the history of Ghana.

By the mid-first millennium a.d., Middle Niger cities took the form of many separate mounds clustered together. Many of these mounds may have been settlements of specialists. This distinctive city form may have had its origin in segmented, but articulated, Late Stone Age communities in the southern Sahara. The Pulse Model is an attempt to reconstruct the circumstances of environmental change and interactions among these communities that encouraged occupational specialization. The model predicts the best locations to search for evidence of early specialization, namely the several north–south trending palaeochannels of the southern Sahara. There, groups increasingly concerned with intensification of production within separate microenvironments would nevertheless have been in close contact. Climate shifts over the past several millennia create a ‘pulse’ of population movements, or shifts of ecological adaptations, along these long corridors. However, adaptation to climate change and stress incompletely explains the emergence of specialization. Tradition, myths, legends and material reinforcements of divisions between present-day ethnic and artisan groups in the Middle Niger suggest the ways in which corporate identity may have been constructed and maintained in the very distant past. If corporate identity can emerge in a form that discourages conflict between groups, the result might be increasingly specialized responses to climate change and to the economic and social opportunities of early urbanism. There should be no sharp discontinuity between the emerging specialization of the last millennia b.c. and the earlier clustered urbanism of cities such as Jenne-jeno. Middle Niger urbanism is an intensification of prehistoric social dynamics, not a revolutionary process.

There are signs that the familiar bias towards research on the Later Stone Age of the southern Sahara and Sahel and on the Iron Age of other parts of West Africa is beginning to be redressed, although Nigeria and Ghana still furnish the vast majority of dates from the southern coastal states. Historical and protohistorical archaeology is becoming increasingly popular, and some areas, for example southern Mali, are receiving serious attention for the first time. Dates are now appearing in large numbers; this paper reports on 355 new radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dates.

Multi-disciplinary research has helped to clarify the Holocene environmental and cultural-stratigraphic sequence in several areas, including the Aïr and Ténéré in Niger and coastal Mauretania and Senegal. There is now strong evidence of a centre of copper metallurgy in the Azelik region of Niger in the 1st millennium b.c. which may well have facilitated the spread of iron working to Nigeria. At the same time, new dates from Mali may indicate a second diffusion route through the western Sahara. In Nigeria, new and early dates for the Nok culture are supported by thermoluminescence dating. Recent work on the later Metal Age of Senegal has permitted the description of four partially overlapping zones, and should soon lead to understanding of their internal and external relationships. Similarly, a substantial body of data has been accumulated, though not yet published, on the Iron Age of the Inland Niger delta. In the more southerly parts of West Africa, several new dates from just north of the forest refer to the emergence of the earliest Akan groups in Ghana and of Oyo in Nigeria. Previously reported dates from Ife and Benin have now been supplemented by a series of thermoluminescence dates.

A. G. Hopkins has observed that where new plants and seeds were adopted it was because they were seen as useful additions to the existing range of foods, or because they were regarded as good substitutes to the crops they displaced. This view is confirmed by a close study of the changing food patterns on the Lower Niger since 1520. Prior to 1919, cassava was hardly cultivated on the Lower Niger even though it was widely grown in the neighbouring Niger Delta. This was essentially because the people of the Lower Niger did not consider cassava as a good substitute for yams. However, after 1900 the Lower Niger became the scene of wars of resistance against the imposition of British rule. These wars not only resulted in a constant disruption of the agricultural activities of the local people, they also caused food shortages. The situation was worsened by the First World War and by the pandemic of influenza of 1918–19 which drained the nation's productive capacity and caused an unprecedented food scarcity. Under the circumstances, the people of the Lower Niger were constrained to accept cassava, at least as a supplement to the dwindling stocks of food. And as soon as it was realized that the new crop enjoyed a number of advantages over yams, its cultivation rapidly spread to all parts of the Lower Niger where it began to threaten the older staples. The speed with which this innovation was adapted clearly points to the degree of the food crisis that accompanied the pandemic influenza of 1918–19.

Historians who have studied the rise of African opposition to colonialism in Northern Rhodesia have concentrated largely on the development of political parties and their campaigns for political rights. This paper explores some of the social and cultural elements of the popular movement against British rule through an examination of challenges to restrictions on the production and consumption of alcoholic beverages. In Northern Rhodesia as in much of British-ruled east, central and southern Africa, the colonial government banned the consumption by Africans of all European-type alcoholic drinks and placed tight restrictions on the brewing and sale of grain beers. In the immediate postwar period racially discriminatory alcohol regulations emerged as a highly emotional issue and remained so despite liberalization of the restrictions on beer and wine. But the focus of popular anger was the municipal grain beer monopolies and attempts on the part of the authorities to stamp out an illegal beer trade conducted by women brewers. Beginning in the mid-1950s this anger erupted in a series of protests and boycotts directed against municipal beerhalls. The protesters, many of whom were women, opposed the exclusion of Africans from a potentially lucrative sector of trade as well as the supposedly immoral and degrading characteristics of the beerhalls. Examination of the struggle over the beerhalls illuminates some of the diverse and contradictory sources and objectives of popular political expression during this period and in particular sheds light on the interplay among issues of race, class and gender in the nationalist movement.