This essay examines issues of ageing and old age in Xhosa-speaking communities to c. 1860. Drawing primarily on records of the Wesleyan Methodist and London Missionary societies, the article examines the construction of Xhosa ageing, old age and death in missionary writings. The primary medium of missionary reflection was the figure of the ‘Abandoned Mother’, modelled on contemporary British metaphors, that represented yet another atrocity story for legitimating the mission enterprise and the emerging colonial regime. It also argues that there were fundamental contrasts in the images of ageing and dying between those of the Xhosa and those of the missionaries. Though older persons found certain themes in the Christian message attractive, they preferred the local cultural model of ageing, old age and death.

This study analyzes the marriage patterns in accounts of ‘founder strangers’ and ‘first-comers’. By telling whether and when a child from a marriage between a Muslim and a warrior was successful or not, the accounts reveal the social code of the political elites in the Western Sudan in the period c. 1600–c. 1850. This social code expressed the elites’ concern with legitimizing their political autonomy as well as with reproducing their ruling position in a context of increasing warfare and growing reformist Islam. This social code structured accounts of both matrilineal warrior rulers and patrilineal Muslim rulers. Though methodologically rooted in classical approaches, historiographically this study contributes not only to recent research on state formation in Kaabu (present-day Guinea-Bissau) and Kankan (present-day Guinea), but also offers an approach to the Sunjata epic that hints at a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century origin of most of the epic as we know it. These fresh insights may shed new light on the history of the Mali Empire and its aftermath, and on processes of state formation in the Western Sudan in general.

In December 1961, Albert Luthuli, leader of the African National Congress (ANC), arrived in Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Journalists in Norway noted how apartheid crackdowns failed to poison the new laureate's ‘courteous’ commitment to nonviolence. The press never reported Luthuli's acceptance that saboteurs in an armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe (MK or Spear of the Nation), would now fight for freedom. Analyzing recently available evidence, this article challenges a prevailing claim that Luthuli always promoted peace regardless of state authorities who nearly beat him to death and massacred protesting women, children, and men. We uncover his evolving views of justifiable violence, which guided secret ANC decisions to pursue ‘some kind of violence’ months before his Nobel celebration. These views not only expand knowledge of ‘struggle history’, but also alter understandings of Luthuli's aim to emancipate South Africa from a system of white supremacy that he likened to ‘slavery’.

This article examines the history of efforts to create a standard written language in western Kenya. In the 1940s, the Luyia Language Committee worked to standardise one Luyia language out of a set of diverse, distinct, and yet mutually intelligible linguistic cultures. While missionaries worked to imbue translations with ideals of Christian discipline, domestic virtue, and civilisation, local cultural entrepreneurs took up linguistic work to debate morality, to further their political agendas, and to unite their constituents. Rather than subsume linguistic difference, these efforts at standardisation reveal the dynamism of oral communities, and how they encouraged a culture of competitive linguistic work. Examination of these efforts challenges previous historians' insistence on the role of linguistic consolidation in the making and unmaking of political communities in colonial Africa.

During the first half of the twentieth century, deep structural changes occurred in the South African countryside. While farming became an important pillar of the national economy, more and more people left the land in search of better lives in towns and cities. This article examines agricultural education, an early avenue of state intervention in farming, to elucidate how officials and groups of farmers navigated the ‘agrarian question’ by trying to define the roles that men, women, blacks, and whites played in the sector's restructuring. I argue that agricultural planning was inextricable from ideologies and politics of segregation, a factor that historiography has not systematically taken into account. By comparing interventions in the Transkei and Ciskei with those in the Orange Free State, this article illuminates the interrelations between rural planning and segregation, as well as how they were complicated by delineations of class and gender.

The marginal case of the decolonisation of Comoros has gained little attention from historians of Africa. By tracing the evolution of the Mouvement de libération nationale des Comores (MOLINACO) around East Africa's Indian Ocean basin, this article explores the possibilities and constraints of anticolonial organisation among a diaspora population whose own existence was threatened by the more exclusive political order that emerged from the process of decolonisation. In Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Kenya, and Madagascar, MOLINACO's activities were shaped and limited by contested issues of racial identity, island genealogy, partisan alignment, and international priorities among both the Comorian diaspora and their ‘host’ governments. Through a transterritorial approach, this article examines the difficulties for minority communities in navigating the transition from empire to nation-state, while also illustrating the challenges MOLINACO faced in its ultimately unsuccessful attempt to impose that same normative model onto the archipelago.

This article focuses on the Italian community in Malawi, one of the smallest immigrant minority groups in Central Africa, but by no means the least important. Using the records of the Custodian of Enemy Property housed in the National Archives of Malawi, it suggests that, in the light of the Italian experience, there is need to modify the conventional view of the white farming sector as being uniformly inefficient and incapable of survival other than through the active support of the colonial state. At a time between the wars when capitalist farming as a whole was in deep depression, Ignaco Conforzi succeeded for reasons largely unconnected with the intervention of the state, in creating a highly profitable, diversified agricultural empire which survived the Second World War virtually intact. Through his influence, an Italian community was created, linked to Conforzi by a variety of economic and family ties and drawn largely from the same small area of central Italy from which he himself had come. Like members of other ethnic groups, these immigrants were constantly balancing their multiple identities – as whites, as farmers or mechanics, as Italians or as natives of a particular district in Italy. Between the mid-1930s and the mid-1940s external and internal forces combined to transform them into a classic minority, ‘singled out…for differential and unequal treatment’ but from the late 1940s onwards those who were regarded by the colonial authorities as conforming to European standards were reabsorbed within the wider settler community. Overall, however, they tended to be more skilled and, crucially, less heavily reliant on the state than were British settlers and it is these factors that explain their relative success.

A study of the interaction between the aims of African rulers, the British and Gold Coast governments, and Wesleyan missionaries in Dahomey between 1843 and 1867 suggests that neither Africans nor Europeans made any consistent distinction, at this time, between the religious and secular aspects of British influence in Dahomey.

Discussions about ‘direct’ administration and ‘indirect’ administration, with regard to French and British colonial policies, are less important than the question of who—local leaders or colonial administrators—had power over the lives of Africans. Monthly reports written by heads of subdivisions, the smallest French administrative units in a colony like Oubangui-Chari, are the most important written source of information for the day-to-day events of an area. They are also a source for the point of view of the administrator, often quite different from the point of view of chiefs and villagers. The European often sees himself as the central figure and colonial administrative problems as the central issues for everyone. African memories of the same period indicate that the European may have been considered less important by African peasants than their chief, whether the chief had a legitimate traditional basis or not, and that administrative issues were considered less important than certain local problems unknown to the European. This study of Félix Eboué and Raymond Sokambi, an administrator and a chief in Oubangui-Chari, shows that an attempt to examine perceptions of power—one basis for power—is a way to understand relations between the colonial administration and African society.

E. P. Thompson's Whigs and Hunters has had an enormous impact on African historiography in its articulation of the relationship between property and law and the subsequent criminalization of customary practices. Some of the other themes in this book – indistinct bands of law-breaking peasants, people and animals, notions of the wild, and the near impossibility of commonplace judicial murder in peacetime – have not been taken up. This article argues for a broader engagement with this book and to remind African historians that the many facets and eras of Thompson's scholarship should encourage a more flexible reading of his work.

I feel I should make clear that the ethnicity data in my article were intended only to shed light on the question of sex ratio. They do not provide an accurate reflection of the ethnic make-up of the eighteenth-century French slave trade, nor even of the trade to Saint Domingue. For this reason, I would hesitate to compare them, as Professor Lovejoy does, to Patrick Manning's projections based on decennial samples of plantation papers. The relatively high proportion of Hausa, Nupe and Voltaic slaves that Lovejoy remarks on was caused by the preponderance of post-1780 sources in my sample.

The article examines administrative policy in Idoma (Northern Nigeria) as a response to two dilemmas confronting the colonial power: (1) how to reconcile a persistent, even if varyingly intense, commitment to indirect rule with a desire for institutional change; (2) how to reconcile a synthesis of the two with the longrange objective of normative change, including ‘progress’ and ‘administrative efficiency’. While normative change remained a long-range colonial objective, institutional change assumed the highest short-range priority.

Institutional change involved a pendular course of development: on the one hand, cultivation of strong chieftaincy and centralization based on the Fulani model; on the other, ‘democratization’, rooted first in traditional Idoma constitutionalism, and finally in Western notions of majoritarian local government. These developments are traced through three historical phases. (1) 1908–1930: occupation, pacification, boundary adjustment, and the quest for an indigenous leadership; (2) 1931–1945: systematic implementation of, and subsequent retreat from, the policy of Indirect Rule; (3) Post-World War II: centralization and ‘democratization’ of the Idoma Native Authority or local government establishment. Paradoxically, ‘democratization’ promoted the centralization of authority in Idoma.

By 1960, when Nigeria became independent, it could fairly be said that the colonial power's culminating exercises in institutional change were successful. Politically and administratively, Idoma was centralized as never before. That it had yet to experience the efficiency which might have resulted from longrange normative change did not detract from that achievement.

The institutional framework imposed upon Niger in 1946, tended to function according to traditional political concepts, norms, notions and values. Hence the distinction established in this paper between ‘traditionalist’ (UNIS/BNA) and ‘modern’ political parties, refers to the degree of reliance upon this traditional culture and also to the degree to which party-leaders were able to manipulate the norms, notions, etc., of the traditional political systems, in order to gain influence within the new institutional framework. The French Administration, functioning largely as an indigenous chieftaincy, was to a certain extent forced to interfere in politics, since an electoral victory for a ‘modern’ political party (i.e. the évolués) would have to be interpreted—according to the logic of traditional political theory—as a loss of the ‘force’, ‘power’ or ‘luck’, without which the French could no longer be regarded as the legitimate rulers of Niger.

If the French finally decided to collaborate with the évolués (and in the process disentangled themselves from the ‘chieftaincy-model’), it was because the évolués constituted the only group capable of grasping the intricate problems of economic development and of running a modern state.