The Netherlands was almost the only country in Western Europe which took no share of Africa in the course of Partition. This is at first sight surprising. For centuries the Dutch had had a presence on the Gold Coast, while at the Cape they had created the most important white colony in sub-Saharan Africa. True, the Netherlands had given up both possessions before the Partition, but by that time the Dutch were the chief traders on the Congo estuary, which after all was a major flash-point giving rise to the Partition. Curiously enough, no one has sought to examine this seeming paradox. It is therefore the aim of this article to consider the relationship between Dutch commercial expansion and the origins of Partition, and to place this question in the context of the Netherlands' principal imperial interests, in South-East Asia.

Al-Ḥājj Muḥammad al-Amīn, often known as Momodu Lamine, was a Soninke leader, engaged in political and military activity on the upper Senegal and Gambia rivers in 1885–1887. This activity, culminating in clashes with the French, has sometimes encouraged an interpretation of his career in anti-European-colonialist terms. In fact, religion and local African politics may have been more important. This study examines his life before 1885, particularly his pilgrimage. Almost all the material comes from oral tradition, both that preserved in early French publications and that collected recently in West Africa.

Muḥammad al-Amīn was born about 1830 or 1840. He studied in various places in the Senegal region. Later he may have served with al-Ḥājj 'Umar. On his pilgrimage he travelled through Wadai; the report that he became a Sanūsī seems doubtful. He spent some time in the Middle East and renewed there his Tijānīya allegiance. He also apparently prepared for jihād. He may, though this is less clear, have shared in the apocalyptic expectancy of the time, centred on hopes of a Mahdi.

On his way home he passed through Timbuktu and Masina and came to Segu, capital of the Tokolor empire, then under Sultan Aḥmadu the son of al-Ḥājj 'Umar. Here Muḥammad al-Amīn stopped for several years, more or less under duress, and escaped several attempts on his life. These attempts are described in miraculous terms, and sometimes parallel other episodes in the legends of Muslim West Africa.

This clash between the returning pilgrim and the head of the Segu theocracy, both men devout Muslims, is curious. It resembles al-Ḥājj 'Umar's reception in Bornu on his way back from pilgrimage. The reasons for it, at least at present, can only be surmised. Muḥammad al-Amīn may have been suspected of meddling in the internal affairs of the Segu empire, for he had stopped for a considerable time in Masina, a dependency, before coming to Segu the capital. His activity in spreading the Tijānīya order, or his version of it, was resented. He may have claimed to be the spiritual heir to al-Ḥājj 'Umar; and/or he may have somehow slighted the memory of al-Ḥāajj 'Umar. He may have appeared as a Soninke patriot, championing his people against Tokolor overlordship; but the theme of tribal loyalties, though indubitably important, needs careful handling. About 1885, he returned to Goundiourou, his birthplace, near Kayes.

This is note will not deal with the evidence from glottochronology, which is the subject of Professor Armstrong's paper, nor with the evidence from linguistic borrowings, but with the inferences which may be drawn from the general linguistic configuration of Africa. It consists of a few miscellaneous observations, which are not intended to do more than stimulate interest in this line of inquiry.

The role of custom and tradition in the development of colonial rule in Africa has received little attention from scholars. Historians of colonial Kenya, particularly, have focused on the powerful transforming impact of the colonial state and economy and on the growth of opposition movements; they have had little to say about the processes through which previously autonomous societies negotiated their incorporation into the Kenya state. Yet by the 1920s and 1930s that state had acquired a substantial degree of popular legitimacy. ‘Customary’ institutions and rituals played an important part in the development of that legitimacy. This essay examines the institution of the genealogically defined ‘generation’ in the Embu-Mbeere area in colonial central Kenya and the ceremonies held in 1932 to mark the transition from one generation to the next. These ceremonies attracted considerable attention because they provided the occasion for the proclamation of rules, supported by the British administration, relating to the bitter issue of genital mutilation in female initiation. But this was not a crude case of the manipulation of custom. The attempt to reform female initiation was part of a larger process, of which the rituals of generation succession were elements, of building the ideological basis of a new ‘tribe’ in a society previously characterized by local autonomy and collective authority. As investigation of the succession ceremonies makes clear, the notion of a tribe dominated by appointed chiefs and identified with an exclusive territory lay at the centre of this ideology.

After recovery from his alarming accident at Bagamoyo at the end of 1889, Emin Pasha decided to enter the German service in East Africa. At the beginning of 1890 he was appointed the leader of an expedition into the interior of the continent. Part of Emin's instructions read as follows:

In accordance with instructions received by me from the Imperial Chancellor, and the arrangement made with Your Excellency, I have the honour to give you the following directions with regard to the mission undertaken by you:

(I) Your Excellency is to secure on behalf of Germany the territories situated south of and along the Victoria Nyanza Lake, from Kavirondo and the countries between Victoria Nyanza and Tanganyika up to the Muta Nzige and Albert Nyanza, so as to frustrate England's attempts at gaining an influence. I consider that the extension of the line from Kilimanjaro and the Kavirondo Bay to the north west, up to the frontier of the Congo State, constitutes the Anglo-German frontier. Any extension warranted by the circumstances of the sphere of influence just described would be regarded by me as redounding to Your Excellency's special merit.

Situated in the densely populated former North Nyanza District of western Kenya, Chavakali secondary school was the site where the colonial regime, the nationalist government, and international ‘developmentalists’ attempted to dictate the nature of education and by extension the place of the rural citizenry during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. This goal, however, was not easily achieved because ordinary Kenyans rejected the vocational-agricultural curriculum that school officials and development specialists championed as the ideal education program for rural communities. Chavakali students from Maragoliland, in particular, recognized the inherent contradiction of the Kenyan government's agriculture-as-development model continued from the colonial era – lack of land. Realizing how bankrupt the agrarian development model really was, they used their educational training to enter the wage labor sector on better terms than as simple laborers. Chavakali's nonsensical curriculum thus hardly produced the agrarian revolution that the state hoped would stabilize the countryside in the postcolony.

Based on both archival research and oral interviews conducted in northern Namibia, this article traces the history of public flogging in Ovamboland throughout the twentieth century. In contrast to recent scholarship that views corporal punishment in modern Africa mainly through the lens of colonial governance, the article argues that because the South African colonial state never withdrew the power to punish from the region's traditional authorities, these indigenous leaders were able to maintain a degree of legitimacy among their subjects, who looked to the kings and headmen to punish wrongdoers and maintain communal norms. Finally, the article explores why nostalgia for corporal punishment remains a salient feature in Namibian society today, 25 years after the end of colonial rule.

Zambia's unsuccessful coup attempt in 1980 was initiated by members of the country's intellectual and business elite, who had played a leading role in the postcolonial civil service and state bureaucracy, but who became disillusioned with the takeover of the state by the ruling party before and after the declaration of the one-party state in 1972. Among their number was Valentine Musakanya, one of those convicted for the coup attempt. Using Musakanya's biographical and other writings, this article explores his intellectual trajectory from head of the civil service to political prisoner. In so doing, it investigates the role of life writing in aiding understanding of the postcolonial political history of Africa.

In evaluating statistical information found in reports of European travellers, historians have not paid sufficient attention to the possibility that African states possessed reasonably competent fiscal systems. This is demonstrated by a study of the demographic information about the central highlands of Angola collected in the 1850s by the Hungarian traveller Lázló Magyar, who probably used oral fiscal records about the numbers of villages in the area to make a detailed series of population estimates.

Our study of the population data left by Magyar suggests that it is reliable and can be used to show population trends in central Africa from 1800 to 1900. Population appears to have increased rapidly in the central highlands during this period, probably because of the importation of slaves, while it decreased dramatically after 1850 in the lands of the Lunda empire to the east.

As late as 1960, in the hinterland of Gisaka (Rwanda), community life was strangely reminiscent of what we know of life in the early continental European manor. The Rwandese manor was largely self-sufficient. The relationships of the peasant to lord of the manor were of a privi legis nature. Competition for chiefly (or lordly) favours was keen. The necessity to court the chief had caused courtship to be institutionalized. The successful courtesans, usually of the nobility, attended the chief directly and were often part of the administrative staff of the manor.

The practice of commendation was usual; homage was paid with the identical gesture as in Europe, and the functional equivalent of the don annuel appeared in the form of an institution called kubaka inkike (‘to repair the enclosure’).

The editors of this volume affiliate their mission with an amplified and heightened sense of history that has swept Africanist scholarship in the post-independence era. They claim to take historical archaeology in Africa in a new direction by beginning the process of constructive interaction between history and archaeology (pp. 27-8). An intended component of their project is to create ‘alternative histories rooted in explicitly African sources’ (p. 16). They further raise our anticipation that the volume will examine the disjuncture between the practice of archaeology and contemporary life on most of the continent. This is a noble sentiment, yet the contributors fail to draw on African scholars who attempt to make archaeology pertinent to daily African lives. The editors' insistence on African representations in writing the past is poignantly contradicted by the paucity of African authors in their volume fourteen years after Peter Robertshaw's A History of African Archaeology was faulted for its failure to include more than two (non-white) African contributors. This practice largely restricts knowledge production to hegemonic Western perspectives and subverts the book's primary rhetorical theme of giving ‘voice’ to silenced African pasts. The cost of the paperback – $70 – also hinders access to African readers and their capacity to engage issues that arise in the fourteen chapters, three of which focus on West Africa, three on East Africa, one on North Africa and five on southern Africa.

The article studies the contexts in which the idea of a separation of the Casamance from the rest of Senegal arose during the process of decolonization. The idea was an outgrowth of colonial representations forged since the end of the nineteenth century. It was first formulated by the French authorities in secret discussions with the representatives of the Casamance in the context of the 1958 referendum. It was taken over by local political leaders who saw it as a possible answer to the debates over representation that arose in the post-war process of democratization, and later by proponents of political mobilization at the sub-regional level after independence. By examining this little-known moment of possibility, the article shows that the claims of the current armed independence movement are in fact part of a longer, more ambivalent history in which a separatist imaginary of the Casamance took shape.

The Sanford Exploring Expedition was Henry Shelton Sanford's main financial interest in Africa. Sanford established the Expedition in 1886 to foster trade development along the upper Congo. Possessing special State concessions granted by Leopold II of Belgium, Sanford's company founded settlements at Kinshasa, Matadi, South Mancagues, Luebe and Equator, and brought the first commercial steamer over the cataracts to Stanley Pool. This steamer, the Florida, proved of little value, yet a second steamer, the New York, was purchased in 1887. Lt. Emory H. Taunt was the principal company agent, the administrator in Africa; William S. Parminter was second in authority. Delays caused by damages to the Florida and hardships in establishing trading settlements on the Congo drained the company's capital. In 1888 Sanford tried to interest various American businessmen—A. H. Alden, George H. Alden, Charles B. Flint, John D. Rockefeller, H. M. Flagler and others—in investing in the expedition. His attempt failed, and after brief negotiations with an English financier, M. Rilneff, the Sanford board made agreements with a Belgian firm. In December 1889 the Sanford Exploring Expedition merged with a Belgian organization, becoming the Société Anonyme Beige pour i'Industrie et Commerce du Haut Congo. Sanford retained a minor interest in the company, but his stock was sold by his widow shortly after his death.

Through their participation in an unequal Atlantic commerce, African merchants on the Gold Coast consciously transformed their dress in ways that expressed their cultural dynamism and economic success in an increasingly interconnected world. In discussing the web of cross-cultural commercial exchanges between Africa, Asia, and Europe, this article moves away from the tendency to regard Africans who adorned themselves in imported European clothing and textiles as ‘creole’ or ‘Europeanized’ elites. Labels like these not only assume the existence of an African cultural essence, but (inadvertently) deny the dynamism that has always characterized African cultures prior to the Atlantic economy. In the case of the Gold Coast, I examine how the Gã and Fante mercantile elite translated imported textiles and clothing into new cultural meanings, aesthetics and norms that emphasized family integrity, power as well as the ancestral, material and commercial value of inherited imported articles of adornment.