This article uses the copper mining town Tsumeb to examine urban infrastructure, ethnicity, and African political solidarities in apartheid Namibia. To translate apartheid to Namibia, South Africa re-planned Namibian towns to reinforce colonial divisions between two classes of African laborers: mostly Ovambo migrant laborers from northern Namibia and Angola and, secondly, ethnically diverse laborers from the zone of colonial settlement and investment, the Police Zone. Housing and infrastructure were key to this social engineering project, serving as a conduit for official and company ideas about ‘Ovambo’ and Police Zone laborers. Yet Africans’ uses of infrastructure and ethnic discourses challenged, and provoked debates about the boundaries of urban social and political belonging. Between the 1971–2 general strike of northern contract workers and the 1987 strike against the multinational Tsumeb Corporation Limited, which involved northern contract workers and community members, Africans built a political community that challenged both company and colonial state.

This article examines three incidents in the history of early colonial Natal in which colonial forces under Secretary for Native Affairs Theophilus Shepstone attacked subject chiefs, deposed them and seized their herds. These incidents, which presaged the later conflict with Langalibalele, constituted in local African terms ‘eating up’, a practice whereby a chief confiscated the property of a subject convicted of conspiring against him through witchcraft. Close examination of these incidents shows how the early colonial state's rule over African subjects was inevitably imbued with African understandings of power and authority.

Sil'on admet cette identification, la fréquence et la persistance du nom Dauma/Doma, depuis le XVe siècle (Maqrizi), jusqu'au XVIIe (Dapper), marque donc nettement l'importance du Doma dans le système politique Jukun/Kwararafa. En dépit de son èloignement à la fois de la côte et de l'axe soudanais, ce grand pouvoir africain, dont nous soupçonnons encore à peine le rôle, a été connu, au moins vaguement, par le monde extérieur….

On doit par contre écarter définitivement toute identification avec le Dahomey historique, qui n'a pu se constituer en Etat qu'au XVIIe siècle, comme ses traditions l'indiquent. En revanche l'ensemble ethnique aja apparait dans la documentation écrite dès 1539, pour le royaume d'Arida, puis en 1561 avec le nom de Povpovs, sur la carte de Bartholomeu Velho (pl. 203) et en 1570, avec la Costa Darida sur l'Atlas de Fernão Vaz Dourado (pl. 206). C'est en confrontant ces textes avec les traditions qu'on pourra éclairer les origines des peuples du Golfe du Benin.

Bien que l'île ait été connue des Arabes pendant le Moyen Age, et que sa découverte par les Portugais date de 1500, c'est seulement cette année-ci qu'en a été réalisée, par mes soins, la première histoire synthétique. Et pourtant le nombre d'ouvrages consacrés, en tout et en partie, au passé de Madagascar apparaît plus considérable que pour toute partie de l'Afrique Tropicale. Mais la division de l'île entre des peuples divers ne connaissant du passé que leurs propres ancêtres, et surtout le souci prédominant des Européens de retracer leurs propres aventures ont empêché longtemps la conception d'une histoire totale, que semblait cependant imposer l'unité géographique, linguistique, voire même ethnographique, de ce petit continent si original.

Le terme de ‘résistance’ est ambigu à cause de l'écho qu'il éveille dans l'esprit des Européens qui ont vécu la deuxième guerre mondiale. Des ‘mouvements de résistance’ se sont alors organisés dans les états vaincus. Fondés sur le droit des peuples à disposer d'eux-mêmes, sur le sentiment national et sur l'égalité civile, us s'opposaient à la domination étrangère qui limitait la souveraineté de l'État.

Challenging the Eurocentric belief that abolitionism was a top-down process issued by colonial powers, this article explores the emergence of personal and group strategies for the emancipation of Black enslaved people in Libya. During the late Ottoman period, Italian antislavery activities operated in Libya and established a mission in Benghazi to host manumitted children referred to as ‘Moretti’ (‘little Moors’). The goal was to make these Moretti a group of local people close to the Catholic Church and the Italian government. The failures of the missionaries to accomplish these aims reveal the strategies and trajectories of Moretti as they negotiated their role in society, especially after Italian occupation in 1911. Historical sources reveal an informal web of solidarity using antislavery societies and creating forms of urban and social autonomy. This article details actions of solidarity among Black enslaved persons that took place in late Ottoman and Italian colonial Libya, which challenges Eurocentric antislavery narratives.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the administration of the Transkei was instituted, codified and elaborated. The role of the headman was crucial: he was directly responsible to the magistrate, and his ward (‘location’) became the basic administrative unit. The headman's position was also profoundly ambiguous. He was at once a state official (responsible for enforcing new legal, economic and political relationships) and a spokesman for and defender of the inhabitants of his location.

Although invested with considerable powers, headmen had to remain responsive to popular pressures. In tracing the career of a single prominent headman, Enoch Mamba, this article demonstrates the possibilities and contradictions within the post. Mamba entered government employment in Idutywa as a clerk/interpreter; was appointed headman in 1893; and was dismissed – after attempting to unseat the magistrate – in 1896. Resilient and resourceful, Mamba won reinstatement by 1904; he served as a highly effective and occasionally authoritarian headman and as District and General Councillor until his death in 1916. He created and led one of the first pan-tribal political organizations in the Transkei and came to play an active role in the (Cape) SANC and the SANNC. As a politician, Mamba remained sensitive to rural issues and differed from urban-based politicians (like Rubusana, Pelem, Jabavu) in his populist and ‘Africanist’ accents.

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.

The 1915 Chilembwe Rising in Nyasaland had important political repercussions in the neighbouring colonial territory of Northern Rhodesia, where fears were raised among the Administration about the activities of African school teachers attached to the thirteen mission denominations then operating in the territory. These anxieties were heightened for the understaffed and poorly-financed British South Africa Company administration by the impact of the war-time conscription of Africans and the additional demands made by war-time conditions upon the resources of the Company. Reports of anti-war activities by African teachers attached to the Dutch Reformed Church in the East Luangwa District convinced both the Northern Rhodesian and the imperial authorities of the imperative need to strictly regulate the activities of its black mission-educated elite. Suspected dissident teachers were arrested, while others were diverted into military service where their activities could be more closely supervised. With the 1918 Native Schools Proclamation, the Administration laid down strict regulations for the appointment and employment of African mission teachers. The proclamation aroused the vehement opposition of the mission societies who, confronted by war-time European staff shortages, had come to rely heavily upon their African teachers to maintain their educational work. The emergence in late 1918 of the patently anti-colonial Watch Tower movement, which incorporated many African mission employees within its leadership, weakened the opposition of the missions, and served to consolidate the administration's perception of the African teachers as a dangerous subversive force. Strong measures were implemented by the administration soon after the end of the war, with large numbers of Watch Tower adherents being arrested and detained.

This article argues that medieval Arabic texts that were published in colonial northern Africa constitute as much a part of the history of colonialism and its legacy as that of the medieval centuries in which they were written. Using the publication history of a medieval Ibadi text and its French translations, I demonstrate how texts like it were edited, translated, and published not only for academic purposes, but also as contributions to the production of ‘useful’ colonial knowledge in Algeria. I begin with the first translation, published in 1878 alongside other ethnographic and historical studies funded by the colonial state. I then turn to the second translation, serially published between 1960–2 as its editors abandoned the country at the violent end of the colonial period. Finally, I address the Arabic editions published after independence, which recast it within a nationalist framework. Overall, I argue for the importance of addressing the colonial pasts of medieval texts in northern Africa.

Land tenure was at the center of the struggle between settlers and Khoisan on the colonial frontier during the eighteenth century. Different perceptions of land claims and differing patterns of land use prevented the possibility of mutual accommodation. Although pre-colonial hunters and herders co-existed in the Cedarberg region, the introduction of competition from settler pastoralism challenged the survival of both San and Khoikhoi patterns of subsistence. The fight for territory was rooted in competition over specific locations – sites endowed with resources such as permanent water, defensible shelter and ritual significance for the San. Colonial social structure supported settler land claims, eventually enabling successful occupation of a rugged region relatively isolated from the rest of the colony. In the last quarter of the century some Khoisan individuals worked within this system to make land claims of their own. Superior technology and a tightly woven social structure did not alter the basic features of the landscape, so colonists continued to subsist from transhumant pastoralism throughout the century.

In 1899 the Condominium Government was faced by administrative problems which, whatever their complexity in detail, fell into two broad divisions: those of the northern Sudan, and those of the Sudan south of the tenth parallel. Pacification was of course the first task everywhere; but even here there was a sharp contrast. In the north this was a politically urgent matter. The remote and heterogeneous tribes of the south, on the other hand, offered no political threat to the new government; and their pacification and administration would have been a heavy, perhaps a crushing, financial burden in the early years of the Condominium. The pacification of the south was therefore a process which lasted not for years but for decades; and the more constructive aspects of administration were correspondingly delayed. Moreover, in the north there was a recognizable foundation on which to build. The north was a part, if an outlying and culturally impoverished part, of the literate world of Islam; nor had it lost the traditions and techniques of ‘westernizing’ administration introduced during the Turco-Egyptian régime.

Improving knowledge about African historical demography is essential to addressing current population trends and achieving deeper understanding of social, economic, and political change in the past and present. I use census and parish register data from Tanganyika to address the origins of twentieth-century population growth, to describe how major changes in fertility and child mortality began in the 1940s, and to emphasise the significance of the large rise in fertility between the 1940s and 1970s. Through this work and my wider survey of parish registers in Malawi, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia, I consider the relationships between power, evidence, and meaning in these data sources. Alongside the macro gaps in Africa's population history are significant microsilences — lacunae in the sources and data which reflect the hegemonic structures within which they were produced. I suggest a moral demography approach to their analysis, borrowing from the reflexive and dialectic method found in studies of moral economy.

La décolonisation de l'Afrique Equatoriale Française présente cette particularité que l'initiative en venue des pouvoirs coloniaux, métropolitains et locaux, qui ont su contrôler de bout en bout le mouvement d'émancipation politique. Ce n'est pas que les Africains aient subi passivement cette évolution. L'analyse des forces sociales montre deux groupes n'ont pas étée en mesure d'intervenir efficacement et durablement sur la scène politique: l'une, la chefferie, apparaît comme une force déclinante dans la conjoncture 1940–1960, ruinée à la fois par l'éevolution économique, les transferts de revenus au sein de la population africaine, l'affirmation de valeurs nouvelles; l'autre, la masse ouvrière, était trop émietté, en termes de localisation et d'organisation, pour mener une action autonome. Ce fut done à la classe montante, la petite-bourgeoisie, qu'échut le rôle politique moteur du côté africain: mais, dans les conditions particulières de l'A.E.F., cette classe ne fut pas capable, ni peut-être désireuse, d'élaborer une idéologic et des pratiques anti-impérialistes ou même seulement anti-colonialistes.

During the period of the European Scramble for Africa, many African rulers, conscious of the military superiority of the European Powers, resorted to the use of diplomacy in a desperate but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to maintain the independence of their dominions. This approach was demonstrated in Futa Jallon's resistance to French expansion.

Among the methods of resistance used by the Alimamies of Futa were the rejection of the European version and interpretation of treaties, the grant of support to other African resistance movements, and the exploitation of Anglo-French rivalry. The Alimamies also exploited the lack of unity in French administrative organization in West Africa and the complexity of Futa's political constitution. Their resistance, marked by a considerable degree of duplicity, was facilitated by France's dependence on a policy of peaceful expansion towards Futa in contrast to its aggressive approach in many other areas of West Africa. Eventually, Fula resistance collapsed, largely because of the disintegration of the indigenous state, which enabled France to intervene and establish its authority over Futa with remarkable ease, using only a minimum of force.

The history of cocoa production in Western Nigeria is an example of a successful innovation in the Schumpeterian sense of the term—a new productive activity which, when adopted by a number of producers, leads to economic growth and structural change within a given institutional and social context. Cocoa growing spread in Western Nigeria through the efforts of migrant farmers, many of whom relied on traditional, non-economic institutions, such as the lineage or ethnic community, to mobilize the economic resources they needed to establish cocoa farms. From an examination of the activities of migrant farmers in three Yoruba states—Ibadan, Ife and Ondo—it is argued that the spread of cocoa farming probably strengthened these traditional institutions. At the same time, it has effected significant changes in the volume, organization and geographical distribution of rural economic activity in Western Nigeria.

The killing in May 1905 of Harry St. George Gait, a senior official of the Uganda Protectorate, has generally been treated in the literature as a political murder mystery. It can more usefully be seen as a window on two issues: the importance of clientship in relationships between agriculturalists and pastoralists in the kingdom of Ankole, and British reliance on pastoral allies to make real their power in Ankole. This paper suggests that Gait was killed by an agriculuralist frustrated by his own failure to advance in Ankole society; but that the repercussions of the killing were magnified by the fears and uncertainties of British officials on the spot over the reliability of their pastoralist allies. The British were, however, unable to dispense with these allies, and the crisis generated by Gait's death was resolved by a reaffirmation of the alliance between the British and the pastoralist elite, after the effective scapegoating of two minor chiefs.