This article examines the fraught history of officials' innovative uses of wildlife in socialist Tanzania, as they pursued both international and domestic agendas with the country's wild fauna. Internationally, officials sought to enhance Tanzania's reputation and gain foreign support through its conservation policies and diplomatic use of wild animals. Domestically, officials recognized the utility of wildlife for a number of nation-building agendas, ranging from national identity to economic development. However, internal contradictions riddled the wildlife economy, creating difficulty for government officials and party leaders when balancing socialist commitments with an effective, market-driven industry.

WRITING African History pays homage to Daniel McCall's pioneering text, Africa in Time Perspective: A Discussion of Historical Reconstruction from Unwritten Sources, published at the dawn of the era of modern African history in 1964. Surprisingly, given subsequent developments in the field, there has been no comparable text since, making this volume especially welcome. But it also bears a heavy burden if it is to become the authoritative text for the next generations of students and scholars. Does it meet this difficult test?

This article examines how contestation between political parties, politicians, and their supporters shaped Guinea's decolonization from 1945 to 1961. The last region to resist the rise of Sékou Touré's PDG, the Fulbe-dominated Futa Jallon – as both a political space and representation of Fulbe culture – was at the center of strategic and intellectual struggles over the shape of the postcolonial Guinean state and society. What resulted from contestation was the general belief that the Fulbe and the Futa Jallon were divergent from the rest of Guinea, a fragment in the making.

The Delegate for Africa: David Ivon Jones, 1883–1924. By Baruch Hirson and Gwyn A. Williams. London: Core Publications, 1995. Pp. x+272. £8.50, paperback (ISBN 897640-02-1).

S. P. Bunting: A Political Biography, new edition. By Edward Roux. Bellville: Mayibuye Books. 1993. Pp. 200. No price given, paperback (ISBN 1-86808-162-1).

Outsiders looking at the recent history of South African politics are apt to be struck by two conundrums. How can a nation that pushed the logic of ‘race’ as far as any society in history also have produced one of the world's most enduring non-racial political traditions? And how, in a period that has seen the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of communist parties throughout the world, has the South African Communist Party (SACP) not only survived but risen to power, in coalition with the African National Congress and the Congress of South African Trade Unions?

My aim is twofold. Highlighting the value and importance of African archives in the construction of postcolonial African histories, I first reject what I call ‘postcolonial African archival pessimism’: the argument that postcolonial African archives are too disorganized or ill-kept to be of much, if any, value in configuring postcolonial African histories. Second, primarily through petition and complaint letters, I examine how Ghanaian workers protested racist and abusive workplace environments, government malfeasance, stagnating wages, and unfair dismissals in Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana. These archival gems illuminate how workers made claims to and performances of citizenship and reminded the state of their importance, politically and practically, to building the Ghanaian project. From Ghanaian and British archives, I seek to complement histories that highlight the centrality of African workers — through their letters and feet — in articulating the contradictions and aspirations of postcolonial African states.

Historically, connections between southern Libya and northern Chad have always been close, if only due to the fundamental need for connectivity that characterises most Saharan economies. Drawing on so far mostly inaccessible archival records and oral history, this article outlines the implications of this proximity, arguing that it led to intimate entanglements within families and an ongoing confusion of property rights. This in turn resulted in increased rather than diminished hostility during the years of war that opposed the two countries, as people attempted to define uncertain boundaries, and were – and still are – competing for access to similar resources, moral, symbolic, social, and economic.

Madumo: A Man Bewitched. By ADAM ASHFORTH. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Cape Town: David Philip, 2000. Pp. vii+255. Rand 90 (ISBN 0-226-02971-9).

Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. By LUISE WHITE. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xvi+351. £31.50/$50 (ISBN 0-520-21703-9); £12.50/$19.95, paperback (ISBN 0-520-21704-7).

This article examines memorial traditions and social identities in the Luapula Valley during the nineteenth century. In History on the Luapula, Ian Cunnison argued that most histories in the Luapula Valley were ‘personal’ renditions except for the ‘impersonal’ and general history of the Kazembe Kingdom. This article details how the impersonal history of the Kazembe Kingdom arose. Through the association of shrines and natural phenomena with the ancestral heroes that featured in the historical drama of the Kazembe conquests, a more general, universal and hegemonic history was rendered. The formulation and commemoration of this history sustained two Luapulan identities, a ‘Lunda’ migrant identity and a ‘Shila’ autochthonous identity, both of which proved to be solid foundations for the creation of ‘tribes’ in the colonial period.

Christopher Wrigley's objections, in ‘The River God’, to my historical interpretation of some Mbona stories do not differ substantially from those of Luc de Heusch against Vansina. In essence, the allegation is that the historical information I think can be derived from those stories finds little support in the historical facts insofar as they are known to us. Or, put somewhat more mildly, even if my historical interpretation of the Mbona stories were correct, there is no way to ‘prove’ its correctness, not even to the lawyer's standard, ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, that Wrigley claims for his own exegesis. More concretely, he holds with M. D. D. Newitt, my earlier discussion partner, that there is little or no evidence for the existence of a Lundu kingdom at the time of the Zimba raids, just before A.D. 1600. He further maintains that the few seventeenth-century references known to us do not suggest that the Lundus were different in kind from other regional power-holders, whereas I claimed — and still claim — that between the 1580s and 1622 the Lundus managed — initially with the help of the Zimba — to organize a state system, which differed from neighbouring systems in that it was considerably more centralized and repressive.

Well into their rule, at a time when South Africa was increasingly perceived as a police state, the Nationalists, the party of apartheid, depended for the implementation of their policies on structures and personnel inherited from previous governments. Even in the South African Police, the institution most associated with the country's authoritarian reputation, key developments of the early apartheid decades originated in and cannot properly be understood without reference to the preceding period. A legacy of conflict between pro- and anti-war white policemen after 1939 was particularly significant. Concentrating on the careers and views of illustrative officers, notably members of the Special Branch, rather than on ‘the police’ in abstraction, this article analyses the complexities and continuities in the South African state's handling of domestic dissent in the years before and after the apartheid election of 1948.

This article explores the strategies of emancipation of former Tuareg slaves (iklan) in the Gao region of northern French Sudan (present-day Mali) during the late 1940s and 1950s. In the wake of the war effort and shifting colonial policy, and in spite of colonial tolerance toward vestiges of slavery, iklan engaged in local and long-distance migrations aimed at achieving emancipation. The article argues that the most successful spatial strategies were new migratory patterns in the Gao region through which iklan appropriated productive resources (herds and pastures) that were previously controlled by their ex-masters. More than labor migrations to cities, these local trajectories destabilized Tuareg hierarchies, forcing colonial administrators to address demands of the iklan emancipation movement.

In the Islamic history of tropical Africa, prayer has often played an important, sometimes even a decisive, part. The functions of prayer may be ceremonial, instrumental (directed to the achievement of specific objectives), and disciplinary. In the military context the two latter are particularly significant. The discipline of Muslim prayer is strict, and has sometimes underpinned military discipline.

This is the second list of radiocarbon dates for sub-Saharan Africa which are considered to be of interest to historians and others working on the pre-colonial history of Africa. The first list was published in vol. II, no. I, of the Journal.

The emergence of scientific racism and the taking of heads and skulls in the nineteenth-century colonial wars in Southern Africa have received limited attention from historians. Closer examination of head-taking in colonial wars fought in the western parts of Xhosaland and the Cape Colony suggests that the rise of scientific racism alone does not explain the complex interplay between military discourse on Africans, atrocities committed, and commonplace racial attitudes. A detailed examination of the incidents of head-taking in the colonial conflicts against the Xhosa indicates the practice evolved over time, had several causes, and became an increasingly common part of the construction and re-enforcement of a racial identity and culture of domination by British and colonial soldiers. It also suggests that for the Xhosa, the taking of heads was a behaviour acquired from the British.

Anlo is in South-East Ghana. During the pre-colonial period she made herself thoroughly hated by her neighbours. Thanks to this unpopularity, when Denmark and later Britain decided to subdue Anlo, each found ready allies amongst Anlo' s neighbours.

In 1850 Britain ‘acquired’ jurisdiction over Anlo from Denmark. This proved a false start. Britain withdrew in 1859. In 1874, however, jurisdiction was resumed. Even now the extension of jurisdiction was piecemeal. Initially only the coastal area within the range of the artillery of the fort at Keta was under any semblance of jurisdiction. Anlo tended to ignore the colonial administration. In 1885 and 1889 there was armed resistance which took some time to crush.

Nevertheless, this time British jurisdiction had come to stay. Over the years it extended in scope and intensity. By 1890 when Britain had demonstrated her ability to enforce compliance with her laws, Anlo became a regular part of Britain's colony of the Gold Coast.

This article uses demographic data from nineteenth-century Angola to evaluate, within a West Central African setting, the widely accepted theory that sub-Saharan Africa's integration within the Atlantic world through slave and commodity trading caused significant transformations in slavery in the subcontinent. It specifically questions, first, whether slaveholding became more dominant in Angola during the last phase of the transatlantic slave trade; second, whether Angolan slave populations were predominantly female; and third, whether slavery in Angola expanded further during the cash crop revolution that accompanied the nineteenth-century suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. Besides making a significant contribution to understanding the demographic context of slavery in the era of abolition, the article aims to display ways in which historians can use the population surveys the Portuguese Empire carried out in Africa from the late eighteenth century.

This article, largely on the basis of in-depth research in archives in Lisbon, provides an account of the trading systems linking Delagoa Bay to its southern hinterland. Within this framework we argue that the role of the slave trade has been previously underestimated. There is evidence that the booming demand for slaves in Brazil and on the Mascarene Islands hit this region with force. The scale of that trade is difficult to establish because it was, by and large, illicit and so not systematically recorded. There are indications of a significant trade prior to 1823 and a substantial one after that date. There is also evidence that northern Nguni groups, including the Zulu kingdom, were deeply involved in this trading system. The main sources of captives, however, were militarily weak societies, like the Tembe, which lived closer to the Bay.