This review article seeks to build bridges between mainstream African history and the more historically oriented branch of the ‘new’ economic history of Africa. We survey four central topics of the new economic history of Africa — growth, trade, labor, and inequality — and argue that the increased use of quantitative methods and comparative perspectives have sharpened views on long-term trajectories of economic development within Africa and placed the region more firmly into debates of global economic development. The revival of African economic history opens new opportunities for Africanist historians to enrich the interdisciplinary approaches they have taken to study questions of demography, poverty, slavery, labor, inequality, migration, state formation, and colonialism. These fruits, however, can only be reaped if the institutional boundaries between the fields of history and economic history are softened and both sides engage in greater mutual engagement. Our paper aims to move closer to a shared vision on the benefits and limitations of varying quantitative methods, and how these approaches underpin both more and less convincing narratives of long-term African development.

Most histories of East Africa's precolonial interior only give cursory attention to Islam, especially in histories of present-day west-central Tanzania and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Most converts to Islam in this context are usually viewed as ‘nominal’ Muslims. This article, by contrast, builds on recent scholarship on other regions and time periods that questions the conceptual validity of the ‘nominal’ Muslim. New converts necessarily questioned their social relationships, ways of living, and ritual practices through the act of conversion. On the shores of Lake Tanganyika, new converts were observable through the act of circumcision, dietary restrictions, abidance by some of Islam's core tenets, and the adoption and adaptation of certain phenomena from East Africa's Indian Ocean coast and islands. Interior populations’ conversion to Islam was bound up with broader coast-interior material, cultural, and religious exchanges.

JOHN FAGE and I met first in Cambridge in 1948 as graduate students at Cambridge University, each researching on topics in the history of the colonial period in Africa. Thereafter our ways parted. He became the first full-time history teacher at the recently founded University College of the Gold Coast. I went to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where my initial duty was to investigate what could be recovered of the pre-colonial history of East Africa that might be brought within the scope of academic study. We met next in 1952, when a London publisher suggested that we might join in writing a History of Africa in two volumes designed for the academic market. Following this initiative, we spent a fortnight of that summer, together with our wives and children, at my house in Buckinghamshire to discuss the possibilities, and this proved to be the beginning of a close professional collaboration which was to last for more than thirty-five years.

Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes. By STEPHEN HOWE. London and New York: Verso, 1998. Pp. x + 337. £22 (ISBN 1-85984-873-7); £15, paperback (ISBN 1-85984-228-3).

Stephen Howe's book is certainly, to date, the most comprehensive study on Afrocentrism. Its subtitle, Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes, makes quite clear its object of analysis. Divided into three parts, it dwells successively on ancestors of the movement and their influences, the new visions heralded by its members and, finally, today's orientations of Afrocentrism. They are introduced by a systematic presentation of Afrocentrism as a concept and as a space in which one finds a multiplicity of trends. But let us suppose that there is such a thing as Afrocentrism entertained by ‘blacks’, ‘Afro-Americans’, and ‘African-Americans’, since Howe uses these terms interchangeably and which, as he puts it, would reproduce in some of its expressions what Walker Connor called ‘ethnonationalism’. In his introduction, Howe summarizes its complexity and predicaments. As a matter of fact, this introduction exposes Howe's positions about Afrocentrism.

It frequently happens that the only information available on interrelationships and former movements of African peoples lies in their oral traditions and myths. In the myths it is difficult to disentangle symbolic from historical events and personalities, while, fascinating though it is to listen to an old man recounting the movements of his ‘ancestors’ countless generations earlier, one frequently wishes that there were some independent line of evidence against which his statements could be checked. Such an independent line of evidence is provided by the steadily accumulating data on the genetic Constitution of African peoples. The Nilotes provide an illustration of its usefulness, of its limitations, of the type of additional information required to extract the maximum from the data, and of the postulates necessary to do so.