Linguistic research has revealed a Bantu ‘substratum’ among the few ethnic relics of western Madagascar that survive in what became known as the Sakalava empire. Early in the 1600's, two Jesuits familiar with both sides of the Moçambique Channel, discovered that some 300 miles of western Malagasy littoral bore the name of Bambala and were inhabited by Bantu-speaking agriculturalists, whose idiom was only modified by Malagasy loans. Bambala's African colonies were sub-divided into riverain chiefdoms, the largest of which was Sadia, with some 10,000 inhabitants in 1617. From it, the Sakalava warriors fanned out in the 1620's, came into contact with the southwestern Maroserana dynasty and gave it an empire by 1690 stretching from St Augustine Bay to present-day Majunga.

Maroserana kings adopted two of Bambala's politico-religious institutions, while the empire-building gradually decimated the original Sakalava warriors and swept away Bambala's Bantu speakers by ± 1710. Pastoralists from north, south and east replaced the former agricultural peoples while retaining the name ‘Sakalava’. But, there is no doubt that the first Malagasy empire was an African creation, and doubly so since association with gold confirms anew the close links between the Maroserana and gold-bearing Mwene Mutapa.

This paper examines the 1938 cattle culling and sales in Gutu and Victoria reserves, colonial Zimbabwe. What began as a routine culling very quickly became a crisis of authority for the Native Affairs Department since critics of the Department forced an inquiry into the sales. The criticism and defence of the culling facilitated a debate on state and personal justice, as well as a dialogue about the proper behaviour towards Africans, settlers and animals. The critics of the cullings as well as the colonial officers all believed themselves to be experts in African affairs. Thus what began as a criticism of cattle culling revealed tensions within white society, and in particular the need to refashion boundaries of expertise and authority within the Native Affairs Department. A close examination of the scope and development of the ensuing commission of inquiry reveals the importance of etiquette to the colonial enterprise in colonial Zimbabwe.

John Dunn entered Zululand in 1857. He observed Zulu customs and law and he exploited Zulu soial institutions to his political and economic advantage. His accumulation of land, cattle, wives and clients made him one of the wealthiest men in the Zulu kingdom. Dunn manipulated and utilized his wealth to increase his status and influence. His privileged position with Cetshwayo, his alliances with many clans through marriage and his access to firearms made Dunn a powerful figure in the Zulu kingdom.

Dunn's varied career as a trader, labour recruiter, arms supplier and adviser underlines the freedom of political and economic action available to white frontiersmen operating in those zones that straddled the boundaries separating black African states from white colonial societies. The failure of the Zulu royal family to solve the succession question – the essential malaise that plagued the Zulu political system periodically throughout much of the kingdom's history and which, at times, threatened to destroy national unity – presented opportunities for white frontiersmen, like Dunn, to advance their careers. Dunn became involved in Zululand's internal affairs during a period of political turbulence and internecine warfare. The civil war of 1856 had killed off no less than eight potential heirs to the throne and sent Mpande's political career into permanent decline. But new rivalries between the royal princes Cetshwayo, Hamu and Zibepu emerged almost immediately. Cetshwayo used Dunn's assistance to secure his claim to the throne. Dunn's own economic interests prompted him to support Cetshwayo's political aspirations. The control of vital resources, strategic trade routes and firearms was a crucial factor in Cetshwayo's accession in 1873. John Dunn played a major role in providing the material foundations of Cetshwayo's power.

Wambu (Huambo) was one of the more important of the Ovimbundu Kingdoms of central Angola, the histories of some of which were treated in Part III of Umbundu Kinship and Character (1949) q.v.

The tradition of Wambu begins with Feti, the Adam of the Ovimbundu. Through the vaNganda it is definitely linked with the cattle-complex peoples of south-west Angola, and it is also connected with the ‘Jagas’ described by Battell. This latter link provides a chronological starting point early in the seventeenth century. Thus, beginning with the ‘Jaga’ Wambu Kalunga, the fourth king named, tradition and historical reference are followed through the reigns of twenty-five kings, until independence ended with the capture by the Portuguese forces of two strongholds and their capital town of Samisasa during the ‘Bailundu War’ of 1902. The chief occupation of the kings and the men of Wambu (as of practically of all the Ovimbundu Kingdoms) during most of this time, was raiding their neighbours, those of other tribes and those of European descent.

The writing of South African history has yet to catch up with many of the historiographical advances made north of the Limpopo. This is especially obvious in the tendency to view white and black states confronting one another in the pre-conquest era as irreconcilably hostile monolithic blocks. This essay attempts to examine the reality of that interaction by focusing on the eastern Transvaal republics and the Swazi in the mid-nineteenth century. The Swazi, it suggests, were not the integrated society that is often assumed, and were forced to enlist the support of Boer factions in the eastern Transvaal to survive internal dissensions and Zulu attack. The Transvaal republics themselves were similarly divided along constitutional, political and economic lines, with access to African resources, whether for labour, for hunting, or for military assistance, constituting a crucial determinant of political power. As a result a shifting kaleidoscope of factional relationships grew up, characterized by changing political alliances and by fissions from both parties concerned. Only once they were freed from the fear of Zulu invasion after 1852 were the Swazi able to proceed undisturbed with the process of internal consolidation, and to present a more unified front to their neighbours. For the Transvaal (by then the South African Republic) that process was postponed even longer, until after the civil wars of the early 1860s, and the discovery of gold a decade after that. Only then can one talk of the South African Republic or the Swazi as being states in any meaningful way.

Contrary to Professor Carlo Giglio I maintain that article xvII of the Wihalē treaty was in the Italian text worded in such a way that it, if legally valid, limited Ethiopian sovereignty and created a relationship which in substance amounted to a protectorate. The Italian negotiator Antonelli who had drafted this text could hardly be ignorant of its implications, and by allowing it to remain unchanged at the same time as he signed a different Amharic version he created the imbroglio, whether he intended to do so or not, and whether he actually tried to hinder the notification of the protectorate or not.

On the other hand, once it is established that the Italian version of article xvII was void, then there is no basis whatsoever for the Italian claim to a protectorate over Ethiopia. Article XVII was the ‘act’ on which the notification and the acknowledgements were based. The latter are therefore legally meaningless without article xvII. De jure the protectorate did not exist. Since the Italian government failed to gain control over Ethiopia's foreign relations or internal affairs, the protectorate never came into any de facto existence either. Professor Giglio's proposition that an Italian protectorate over Ethiopia was legally established regardless of the validity of article XVII, and functioned from 1889 to 1896 is not tenable.

‘La course au clocher’, traduction du terme anglais de steeple-chase, fut introduite en France en 1834. D`s 1832 Alfred de Musset, dans ‘A quoi rêvent les jeunes filles’, Acte I, scène IV, donne une description précise de ce sport:

Avez-vous jamais vu les courses d'Angleterre?

On prend quatre coureurs—quatre chevaux sellés;

On leur montre un clocher, puis on leur dit: Ailez!

Il s'agit d'arriver, n'importe la manière.

L'un choisit un ravin—l'autre un chemin battu.

Celui-ci gagnera s'il ne rencontre un fleuve;

Celui-là fera mieux, s'il n'a le cou rompu.

Existing works on the colonial history of Northern Nigeria are generally agreed that the emirs who reigned during the colonial era were selected by traditional methods, that is to say, by kingmakers. This article attempts to show that in the case of Sokoto Province the emirs who were appointed during the period 1903–30, though they had traditional claims to their position, were chosen by the British and not by the kingmakers. It is suggested that during this period the British were so pre-occupied with the security of their rule that they would not leave the important function of selecting emirs to the kingmakers whom they still suspected could select anti-British princes as emirs. It is argued that this policy was largely dictated by the Administration's fear of Mahdism which, up to the end of the 1920s was seen as a real danger to British rule. Thus only overtly loyal princes were elevated to emirships, regardless of whether they had the kingmakers' support or not. The British were able to do this without causing serious political unrest because the emirates were basically ‘competitive monarchies’ which left the British room for manipulation. Finally, the article suggests that, as a result of increased confidence in the security of their rule and owing to the fact that unpopular chiefs had proved to be a liability to the government, in the early 1930s the British restored the kingmakers' right to elect emirs without overdue interference by administrative officers.

In earlier publications the present writer was at pains to emphasize that the state of Sinnār was not a mere confederation of nomadic Arab tribes; rather, it rested upon a firm agricultural base and was governed bureaucratically, while incorporating an ingeniously conceived system of nobility. This interpretation, though valid as far as it went, rested largely on evidence from riverain Sinnār and left little room for nomads. The present study, based primarily upon sources from the Sudanese rainlands, proposes that such a view of the place of herdsmen in the society of Sinnār is not well founded, and indeed that the habit of thought which perceives a sharp and enduring distinction between the peoples of ‘ the steppe and the sown’ – however appropriate in other contexts – does not pertain to Sinnār. The vision of rainland life which emerges from the sources here examined reveals a single society of herdsmen and cultivators, a society in perpetual metamorphosis within a framework of possibilities limited by ecology and custom. Ruling houses came and went; tribes grew, sundered and re-formed into new polities. Individuals and groups migrated freely, occasionally over vast distances, and changed their mode of livelihood whenever the opportunity for herding or the necessity for cultivating presented itself. All were subordinate to the state, whose continuity of authority in the long run overshadowed the more ephemeral corporate realities of the moment.

All the many definitions and descriptions of the akori bead published in the last five hundred years have proved inadequate. They appear either pedantically narrow, so that only a hundred years later or a hundred miles away beads also unquestionably called akori by West Africans by their very existence disprove such ‘precise’ characteristics, or, the other extreme, so broad as to be historically useless and logically unsatisfactory. Since all the akori records must be viewed as historical sources more or less reflecting the real situation in the past, we can hardly blame their authors for the akori puzzle; there must have been something wrong in the naming mechanism, in the factual relationship between the word and the thing. It is the main point of this article that the akori phenomenon originated in the existence of various types of natural glass in North and West Africa. An archetypal human attraction to this strange and rare substance can be observed in several culturally very different areas of the world. Understandably, at a later stage people made talismans and beads of this presumably protective material, yet the primeval veneration paid only to the mysterious matter, now under a more sophisticated but basically accidental form, remained the same. It was primarily this matter alone which West Africans tried to discover, test and obtain in European-imported artificial glass after 1500. The complex akori ‘problem’ is a telling and fascinating historical and logical expression of contact between different cultures.

Hoisting the banner of St George on the mountains of Rasselas seemed a good thing to most of Disraeli's countrymen in the spring of 1868. A British consul, a special agent of the Bombay government's Aden establishment, and a number of laymen and missionaries, among them British subjects, were rescued from a mountain prison, and Theodore, the apparently mad ruler of Abyssinia (as Ethiopia was then known), committed suicide. All this for a cost of something like £9,000,000. And, having marched his men to the top of the hill, Sir Robert Napier (soon to become Baron Napier of Magdala) marched them down again. Abyssinia remained chaotic but free, and British relations with it returned to normal, that is to say the Foreign Office ceased to regard it except under compulsion.

In 1938, African political leaders in Nyasaland began seeking direct African representation on the Legislative Council and also moved towards creating a nation-wide political organization. The simultaneous emergence of these two political strategies represented a rational African attempt to refine previous techniques in the face of changing circumstances. Hitherto, district-wide Native Associations had sought to influence directly the central government secretariat. At the same time these Associations had begun centralizing their activities, with the Representative Committee, in particular, acting as a national-type pressure group. From 1930, however, the government denied the Associations direct access to the centre of its administrative system and insisted that they work through the district chiefs. Some associationists now sought to create a national movement which could circumvent the chiefs and gain access direct to the central government. But the idea was not followed up. Only after Africans had spontaneously become united on a national level and had through unified action successfully opposed the European settler demand for a Central African Union, did a growing feeling emerge that a territorial organization offered a more promising way for solving African problems. In the meantime, the government was beginning to take greater action in the fields of economic

In 1862, al-Ḥājj ʿUmar Fūtī Tall (d. 1864) conquered a prominent Muslim polity of the Middle Niger valley, the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi. Several months earlier, he had penned a long polemical work, Bayān mā waqaʿa, where he outlined his conflict with Ḥamdallāhi's ruler, Aḥmad III (d. 1862), and presented a legal justification for his eventual conquest. Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar was one of several West African Muslim intellectuals who articulated a new vision of power in the region. These intellectuals linked legitimate political rule with mastery over Islamic knowledge that they claimed only they had. Yet these linkages between religious authority and political power remain understudied. Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar's Bayān offers one example of political theology in nineteenth-century West Africa. In this article, I trace his arguments and explain how he constructs his authority and claims to sovereignty in this work. In the process, I conceptualize two theoretical frameworks — the ‘political geography of belief’ and the ‘political theology of knowledge’ — to demonstrate how a careful engagement with Arabic sources can help develop new approaches to the study of Muslim communities in African history and beyond.

Recent research on twentieth-century Africa has been marked by a surge of interest in autobiographical narrative. While this development is generally praiseworthy, the knowledge it has produced has been uneven, in temporal as well as spatial terms. This article channels the current interest in personal experience and narrative to a place and time where resonances of the ‘common’ voice have been rather weak: the Republic of Guinea, across the final decades of the twentieth century. Foregrounding the autobiographical reflections of a local teacher in the country's southeastern forest region, it forges new perspectives on political subjectivity in Guinea's understudied provinces.

This contribution seeks to explore the potential for historical archaeology in Uganda. By reflecting on where the potential strengths of such an approach may lie it is suggested that the most effective contributions will be made where there is a significant breadth and depth of historical sources. However, in Uganda the emphasis has tended to be on archaeological sites with distant or even dubious historical associations. The situation is further complicated by the very active processes of history making that are currently taking place, particularly in association with ‘traditional’ spirit worship. Nevertheless there are a range of themes and contexts which could be explored through historical archaeology and there are also plentiful archaeological resources from the twentieth century. It is concluded that there is great potential for historical archaeology but that there needs to be a readjustment of the contexts and situations that are explored.

This study examines the surviving private correspondence from Echo Island (Jazīrat Abū Ranāt, formerly Abranarti), a small nineteenth-century agricultural community in the Shāīquiyya country of the northern Sudan. The central question addressed is a discordance between the preoccupations of the letters and the concerns manifested in the considerably larger literature of contemporary legal records surviving from the same community, a clash that finds resonance in the familiar historiographical rivalry between advocates of culturally autonomous consciousness and partisans of material or socioeconomic determinisms. It is suggested that the private correspondence from Echo Island may best be interpreted as a new technique of bond management in the microsociological sense that arose and flourished in an age when the community found itself compelled to respond to a colonial setting vastly larger in scale than what had previously prevailed. The world of subjective ideas evidenced in the correspondence ignored, probably deliberately, most of the pressing immediate concerns of the community revealed in the contemporary legal documents; however, it opened a new ‘mode of communication,’ a conceptual terrain across which members of the elite exercised their virtuosity in mutual manipulations of status.