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.

This article draws attention to the comparative lack of material on the origins of African nationalism in Zambia, and suggests a framework of analysis and possible future areas of research on the subject. In contrast with some other East and Central African territories, Zambia offered little or no primary resistance to the imposition of colonial rule, but in other respects the country resembled neighbouring territories in the first three decades of colonial rule. There is a need for further study of Watch Tower and the Welfare Associations, the former in the inter-war years, the latter in the 1940s. The Copperbelt from 1930 to 1950, with its problems of urbanization and the colour bar, is a vital factor setting Zambia apart from other tropical dependencies. Here, Africans were confronted with the determination of Europeans to retain political and economic power, whatever the policy declarations of the government. The politicization of the territory can be traced from here, and the role of the Bemba-speaking peoples as the spearhead of protest had its origin in their powerful position on the Copperbelt.

Various theories have been proposed concerning the homeland of the Nubian languages. Current historical and linguistic evidence suggests that it was in Kordofan or Darfur and that Nubian first entered the middle reaches of the Nile between A.D. 200 and 500. There it replaced Meroitic, which appears to have been spoken in the area for a long time. Meroitic may, but has not yet been proved to be a language of the Eastern Sudanic group. If so, the persistence of many cultural traits in the Sudan may be correlated with the stability of the Eastern Sudanic-speakers in the same area.

An inheritance dispute heard before one of the chiefs’ courts established in Asante under indirect rule illustrates the multivalent, dynamic character of social institutions at a time of economic and political transition. Litigated in 1951, the dispute raised questions about the meaning of ‘family’ and ‘belonging’, and their significance for people's access to wealth and their obligations to one another. Played out against a backdrop of potentially far-reaching social and political change in Ghana and beyond, cases such as this one suggest that terms such as ‘belonging’ and ‘family’ are best understood as labels for complex social processes, rather than facts that determine people's social identities and entitlements.

This article examines the experiences of immigrants from British and French West African colonies in the Accra lunatic asylum in the first half of the twentieth century. Placing particular emphasis on how immigrants got into and out of the asylum, the article argues that immigrants were marginalized and manipulated by colonial psychiatric institutions to a greater extent than non-migrant colonial subjects in Gold Coast. In making this argument, the article argues for the value of adding colonial origin and subjecthood to the racial and gendered perspectives that have dominated the history of health and medicine in Africa to date.

The article as a whole argues that the observations of Leo Frobenius in West Africa between 1907 and 1912, though they are commonly ignored by Anglo-American archaeologists and anthropologists, contain material which is of value to the historian of early twentieth-century West Africa. The author examines Frobenius's methods and observations in the light of his own statements (some of them in works which have not been translated into English or French) and suggests various outside sources which could be used to check the reliability of Frobenius's accounts.

The attitude of Anglo-American anthropologists is explained in terms of developments in anthropological theory since the First World War.

The article examines the defects of Frobenius's anthropological method, as exemplified by his work among the Kabré of North Togo shortly after their ‘pacification’ by the Germans; and suggests that the observations themselves may be more reliable than Frobenius's method would lead one to expect.

The article then considers Frobenius's archaeological method as exemplified by his work in Ife, argues that he was somewhat unscrupulous in forcing the sale of artefacts, and also, that by failing to keep adequate site records or even to supervise the digging himself, he destroyed a considerable amount of archaeological evidence at Ife. Historians should, however, study his work in Ife to note where such destruction has taken place, and what kind of evidence has been destroyed.

The article suggests outside sources, both oral and written, which might enable historians to check the veracity of Frobenius's account of his own method, and also the reliability of the observations themselves. Finally, it is suggested that an assessment of the reliability of his observations in Togo and Nigeria might be generally indicative of the reliability of his observation throughout West Africa in the period 1907–12.

Beginning in 1856 and ending in 1876, Portuguese colonial authorities in Mozambique registered almost 55,000 enslaved and freed Africans (libertos). The sources for these twinned registration processes are located in the national archives of Portugal and Mozambique. Fragments of the originals survive for only six of the ten districts of the colony, but contemporary copies exist for nearly all districts. Combined, they provide a unique opportunity to understand both the extent of slavery — as opposed to the export slave trade — and the process of abolition in late-nineteenth-century Mozambique. In this article we first describe the registers themselves, then focus on the registration of enslaved and freed Africans, the resistance of slaveholders, and the kinds of information that we can glean from the registers. We also explore the ways in which freed Africans were employed after registration and the extent to which being a liberto implied ‘freedom’. Finally, we consider how the registration led to new laws and policies in Portuguese Africa, opening a new era of European colonialism and imperial expansion.

Nous avons choisi d'étudier une région restreinte d'Afrique et une période limitée pour mieux pouvoir poser et tenter de résoudre des problèmes qui nous semblent au cœur même de toute réflexion sur l'histoire de la traite des Noirs: l'origine ethnique des captifs, la proportion d'hommes et de femmes, la mortalité, les rythmes annuels, le rapport entre l'offre africaine et la demande européenne. Nous avons essayé de montrer que tous ces problèmes, trop souvent abordés en ordre dispersé, sont en réalité inextricablement liés.

In 1963, unrest in Sudan's three southern provinces (today's South Sudan) escalated into a civil war between the government and the Anya-Nya rebellion. The subsequent eight years of violence has hitherto largely escaped scrutiny from academic researchers and has remained a subject of popular imagination and politicised narratives. This article demonstrates how this history can be explored with greater nuance, thereby establishing a local history of a postcolonial civil war. Focusing on the garrison town of Torit, our research reveals a localised and personalised rebellion, made up of a constellation of parochial armed groups. This new history also demonstrates how these parties built upon experiences from imperial conquest and colonial rule when entrenching violent wartime practices such as mass displacement and encampment, the raising of local militias and intelligence networks, and the deliberate starvation of civilians — all common methods in subsequent wars.

One of the most puzzling and fascinating of all resistance movements is that known as the revolt of the menalamba. It occurred over a wide area of central Madagascar, mostly in the kingdom of Imerina, in the two years following the French invasion of Madagascar in 1895. The most mysterious aspect of the rising has always been the question of who, if anyone, was its leader. The official version, that reported by the French government in Madagascar, was that the movement was inspired or directed by a number of magnates at the old Merina court. The published evidence is so ambiguous as to have obliged every subsequent author to accept this version, although there was considerable doubt expressed as to its truth at that time. Recent research in previously unopened archives has thrown new light on the question.

The Kangere cliché is widespread in the Great Lakes region of Zaire (Lakes Kivu and Tanganyika), where the Bembe, Fulero, Havu, Lega, Nyindu, Shi, Vira and others live. This cliché has been collected since the 1910s by missionary and colonial administrator researchers. Later it has been heavily used and interpreted in different ways. Thus certain modern scholars have made Kangere the first ‘king’ of the region and the ‘father’ of all bami, that is, the ‘kings’ of various ancient kingdoms existing on the shores of the Great Lakes, including Rwanda and Burundi! Their single aim was to refute the ‘Hamitic myth’.

In fact, the Kangere cliché is woven together from different elements taken from various ethnic groups of the region. Its elements were ordered at the same time that they were collected, in the course of the 1910s and the 1920s. They constitute an African response to the preoccupation of the colonial administration of those years: the creation of vast ethnic groups and politically and administratively viable entities. Whites wanted tribes, and blacks created them; whites wanted great chiefs, and blacks created them, the bami.

In their interpretation of the Kangere cliché, these researchers quite simply confused, erroneously, the ‘bwami symbol’ of personalized power (which existed in the area, and which chiefs of different ethnic groups possessed) with the ‘bwami state’ or kingdom, of recent, colonial creation.