The western-educated Krio population of Sierra Leone participated in British imperial activity along the West African coast in the nineteenth century. Facing a far more complex ethnic configuration than their counterparts in Yorubaland, the Sierra Leoneans (Saro) in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, acquired much influence through the manipulation of class and ethnic relations. Though most Saro here had a modest education and were working-class, a few came to form the cream of the petty-bourgeoisie and were active in economic life and city administration. Potts-Johnson, arguably their most famous member, developed a flair for operating in his middle-class world, and also in the cultural orbit of the local and immigrant working-class. I. B. Johnson, another prominent Saro, lacked this quality. Though presenting a homogenous ethnic front, celebrated in the Sierra Leone Union and in church activity, Saro society was sharply polarized on class lines, a weakness not to be lost on the numerically superior and ambitious indigenous population. Faced with a choice, the indigenes opted for the avuncular Potts-Johnson, for whom they felt a greater social affinity than for the more distant I. B. Johnson. After Potts-Johnson, however, no Saro was to be allowed scope to develop a similar appeal.

Of geographical necessity the external culture contacts of Africa have been mainly by sea, and consequently in order to explain the areal differentiations apparent in the cultural history of the continent it would seem necessary to supplement research on the landward traditions of African societies by investigations into the cultural patterns of sea regions embracing the oceanic faces of the continent. In the macro-regional structure of Africa it is possible to recognize entities such as Mediterranean Africa, Atlantic Africa, and Indian Ocean Africa, which possess distinctive personalities that cannot be entirely understood by landward reference but find their true provenance in the cultural dynamics of wider maritime theatres of action. Thus many of the keys to the cultural history and character of the eastern face of Africa must be sought not in Africa itself but in the changing patterns of the Indian Ocean region of which this African zone forms an integral part. As a student of the historical geography of the Indian Ocean, I am concerned here with but one environmental element in the structure of this region and its significance to some aspects of pre-colonial African history.

In February of 1960, the most powerful cyclone in Mauritian history, Carol, made landfall. In its wake, the British colonial state embarked on a reconstruction effort that would reshape the island for decades to come. This study examines how Afro-descendant Creole Mauritians understood Carol at the moment of its landfall and produced social meaning in the reconstruction efforts that followed. It sheds light in particular on the construction of cités, ‘cyclone-proof’ housing estates meant to permanently shelter those left homeless, at a moment when questions of racial coexistence defined debates over the end of empire. It shows that the building of the cités and the prospect of home ownership they allowed would become important touchstones in contemporary Afro-Mauritian notions of belonging and permanence in a society structured by racial exclusion. In so doing, this essay emphasizes the importance of the natural world to narratives of diasporic community in the southwest Indian Ocean.

Informed by the notion of racial affinity, the European managers of the Church Missionary Society Niger Mission had required all black West Indians in their employ to make Africa their home. However, because the African posting involved a substantial devaluation in the material benefits to be derived from missionary service, West Indians vigorously objected to the idea of making Africa their home. They demanded instead to be perceived and treated as foreigners on the same footing as Europeans. Although they were subsequently defined as part of the expatriate workforce of the Mission, they were still denied parity with Europeans in the allocation of scarce benefits on the basis of racial considerations. Unresolved tensions over the redistribution of scarce resources led to the premature collapse of the West Indian scheme. This essay is an analysis of how the pursuit of socioeconomic self-interest affected the construction and representation of race and identity among the West Indians in the Niger Mission.

Over the course of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70), many people in the secessionist Republic of Biafra resorted to forgery, confidence scams, and other forms of fraud to survive the dire conditions created by Nigeria's blockade. Forgery of passes and other documents, fraudulent commercial transactions, and elaborate schemes involving impersonation and racketeering became common in Biafra, intensifying as the Biafran government's ability to enforce the law diminished. Using long-neglected legal records from Biafra's courts and tribunals, this study traces the process by which deception emerged as a practice of survival in wartime Biafra – a process with important implications for the growth of fraud (known as ‘419’ after the relevant section of the Nigerian criminal code) in reintegrated postwar Nigeria.

The main reference point for the chronology of the Bemba is their paramount chieftainship, Chitimukulu. A comparison of written records of traditions with the results of fieldwork in 1964–5 shows that it is impossible to determine the antiquity of this title with any precision, or to demonstrate any very clear connection with Luba or western Lunda history. There is however a strong probability that the Chitimukuluship was created some time in the seventeenth century, and it is certainly older than the eastern Lunda kingdom of Kazembe. There is no continuous genealogy of Chitimukulus before the end of the eighteenth century, but from this period it is possible to construct an approximate chronology of their reigns on the basis both of genealogy and of comparison between Bemba, Lunda and Portuguese sources. The first firm dates are supplied by Livingstone, in 1867 and 1872, and Giraud, in 1883. The chronology of Chitimukulu is compared, in two tables, with the chronology of other Bemba chieftainships and certain other chiefly dynasties in north-eastern Zambia and south-western Tanzania.

Shortly after South African College, the predecessor of today's University of Cape Town, opened its doors in 1829 faculty members found that they had a problem. In one meeting of the Faculty Senate alone, four students were brought up on charges that one had been ‘fighting and noisy’, another ‘fighting – kicking open the door of the Messenger's Room’, another ‘writing on the Professor's desk with chalk’ the words ‘Ziervogel is a vagabond’ as well as ‘threatening the messenger with his fist’, and another ‘idle, insolent & insubordinate in writing class’ who, in replying to a reprimand from the writing master, said: ‘You may go to the Devil’. Several others were noted in the records as absent from class and lying about it. Moreover, the young college had only two dozen or so books, but already nine of them had been ‘mutilated by tearing out the leaves & c’. And virtually all the means for securing property from theft – ‘various locks, claps and staples’ – had been ‘broken in the College, apparently by some of the Students.’ So intractable had the students become, in fact, that the college authorities constructed a small one-room prison with no windows on campus, which they called the ‘Black Hole’, in which to confine offenders who could be identified and condemned. Students were regularly sentenced to terms of three or four hours per day without bread or water, usually in the early evening, the number of days depending on the severity of the offense.

Students at South African College engaged in violence and intimidation of all sorts in the first half of the nineteenth century. They attacked professors and townspeople in Cape Town, preyed on each other, stole and destroyed property, and continually disrupted the operations of the college. These were not boys striving to become upstanding citizens, yet in the end they did for the most part, largely because in organizing campus violence some SAC students produced a reputation for leadership and a constituency that followed them. And that reputation proved useful later in securing positions in the city's merchant houses and in the colonial government. Later in the century, however, the violence subsided and was replaced with different means by which to produce a reputation for leadership, mainly structured competitions among students in a debating society, in sports and for high rankings in the examinations offered by the University of the Cape of Good Hope. What I wish to argue here is that the social relations created among students at South African College were important to forming elites in each successive generation. Moreover, it is important to know how these social relations were formed – mostly in competitions among students which centered around acts of violence, at first physical and later symbolic.

The early ʽAlawī state has repeatedly been described as heavy and efficient military government. In practice it functioned as a relatively loosely-knit tribute state. The achievement of its notable and long-lived second sultan Ismāʽil (1672–1727) was to shed the aegis of Fez, his economic metropolis, and set up an increasingly gigantic palace, beside a market town, as an independent political base. His central government there was characterized by minimal use of coin and minuscule central bureaucracy. For military support the sultan at first relied chiefly upon free troops, associated by fictional kinship with his most notable wife: later he relied increasingly upon black slave guards. But the motors of government at large were not imperial troops, whose functions were essentially deterrence and the hallmarking of government activity; they were provincial governors, bound to the sultan by ties of individual loyalty. These governors were responsible for the extraction of tribute destined for the palace.

Religion gave increased coherence to this state. This was not so much because of its association with literacy, as because it enabled the sultan, who needed religious prestige, to enhance his unremarkable claim to descent from the Prophet, by taking up the Islamic mantle of ‘Commander of the Faithful’. This was a forceful image for propaganda that could counter the close association between the palace and Moroccan Jewry. It could also validate demands for loyalty throughout the empire. A hard Islamic line was expressed in jihād, or holy warfare, against Christendom. The sultan's limited resources and his other military commitments prevented him from conducting active jihād much above the level of token confrontation. But there was also a moral jihād, waged, in so far as this was possible, by rejection of cultural and economic ties with Europe.

WITH the publication of these two volumes, the historical study of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa has reached its maturity. Drawing on five decades of scholarship since the professionalization of African history, and the long traditions of Islamic and African studies before that, these works – one the first truly usable textbook survey of the field, the other the first comprehensive reference – are both a successful culmination of what has gone before and guides to the paths ahead. In some cases the authors' and editors' careers are virtually synonymous with the field as a whole, as with the late Nehemia Levtzion, and all are among the acknowledged authorities on their specialties. David Robinson, author of Muslim Societies in African History, is one of the few who have established themselves as authorities on both the precolonial and colonial periods, and his work is central to active debates in each subfield. The individual and collective stature of Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels, editors of The History of Islam in Africa, along with that of the twenty-two other contributors, makes the authority of the volume unprecedented.

It is often suggested that the work of E. P. Thomson played a pivotal role in shaping South African historical writing and provided the foundations for a new school of social history. Thompson's writings – often refracted through many other texts – were one influence amongst many. This article, drawing on my own experiences of key moments of individuals and institutions, argues that the decisive and central role that is ascribed to his work does not accord with much more complex and localised realities. The article touches on numerous other influences that shaped the research and writing of succeeding cohorts of historians. It also suggests that while The Poverty of Theory was an influential publication, it did not initiate new forms of research and writing, but rather contributed to debates that were already well underway. In conclusion, the usefulness of the category of social history is disputed, as in the South African context it lends to a lazy lumping together of a very diverse selection of historians and needs to be rethought or replaced.

In the wake of the South African war, the indenture and transport of over 63,000 Chinese men to gold mines in the Transvaal sparked a rush to supply smoking opium to a literally captive market. Embroiled in a growing political economy of mass intoxication, state lawmakers shifted official policy from prohibition to provision. Their innovation of an industrial drug maintenance bureaucracy, developed on behalf of mining capital in alliance with organized pharmacy and medicine, ran counter to local trends of policy reform and represents a unique episode for broader histories of modern narcotics regulation. This article considers the significance of this case and chronicles the contradictory interests and ideologies that informed political scrambles over legitimate opium uses, users, and profiteers. It shows how the state maintained its provision policy, for as long as it proved expedient, against varied and mounting public pressures – local and international – for renewed drug suppression. The argument here is that the state managed an epidemic of addiction on the Rand as an extraordinary problem of demography. It achieved this both through redefining smoking opium from intoxicant to mine medicine and through the legal construction of a ‘special biochemical zone’, which corresponded with the exceptional status and spatial segregation of a despised alien labour force.