Specialists in the history of West Africa disagree about the relative importance of slaves and other commodities in African exports. Examination of the rough statistical evidence that is available indicates that slave exports earned less foreign exchange for Africa than did the single most important other export through four of the five centuries of contact between sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. There were large regional differences in the pattern of African exports, and it was the dominance of gold in total African export which helped make the Gold Coast the focus of European rivalries in West Africa.

Between the ninth and third millennia B.C. wetter conditions prevailed over most of Africa. Lakes and rivers were fuller and some of the internal basins were temporarily linked, especially in the ‘Middle African’ belt. This comprises the southern Sahara and Sahel, stretching from the Upper Niger to the Middle Nile, with a south-easterly extension into the Upper Nile basin and the East African rift valleys. This situation was exploited by people who developed a decidedly aquatic economy and culture. From their waterside camps and settlements archaeologists have recovered bones of fish and aquatic animals which these people ate, as well as the distinctive harpoon-heads carved from bone with which they obtained them, and also pottery, bearing peculiar decoration executed with fish-bones and water-shells, made in imitation of (fishing-) baskets. Boating and other cultural developments are deducible. The harpoons date back to 7,000 b.c. at least; the pottery dates back to more than 6,000 b.c. and was clearly an African invention. It reflects important developments in gastronomy and home life.

In the Kenya rift valley the main stage of Leakey's ‘Kenya Capsian’ culture is essentially the local manifestation of this far-flung ‘aquatic civilization’.

Its greatest extent was achieved during the wettest times of the seventh millennium b.c., and probably involved the expansion of Negroid peoples across this continent-wide savanna belt. Also explained perhaps is the extensive, though now fragmented, distribution of languages which Greenberg combines in his ‘Nilo-Saharan’ super-family. It is suspected that aspects of this ancient aquatic way of life may be maintained or reflected by latter-day isolated or ‘unclean’ lake or swamp communities. This subject has been largely neglected by African culture-historians.

Drier conditions in the late sixth and fifth millennia b.c. signalled a decline of this aquatic civilization and, in particular, broke its geographical continuity. Nevertheless, there was a qualified revival in many parts in the fourth and third millennia. In the Kenya rift this later phase seems to equate with the first stage of the ‘stone bowl cultures’. Around Lake Victoria a devolved relic survived until the eve of Bantu expansion about two thousand years ago. Other late or modified examples are known on the Nile and in the western Sudan. Generally, however, the viability and prestige of an aquatic way of life were undermined by the second millennium b.c. In the Sahara and Sahel as well as in the northerly parts of eastern Africa this decline was paralleled by the spread of pastoralism as a new basis of subsistence and prestige. Those who introduced cattle to Kenya from Ethiopia were Cushitic-speakers maintaining, significantly, a fish-taboo.

This subject should prove of considerable historiographical interest. The aquatic way of life flourished through Middle Africa at the very time when grain-agriculture and stock-raising were being pioneered in the Near East; and the slow spread of agriculture in Africa, sometimes considered an indication of ‘backwardness’, may be partly explicable by the very success of the aquatic life and of its distinct cultural tradition which was ascendant for a while across the widest part of the continent.

This article continues the series started originally by Fagan and continued by Phillipson and Sutton. As before, the great majority of dates have been contributed by the archaeologists concerned, often in advance of their own publications, and I should like to express my grateful acknowledgement to all who have co-operated in this way, as also to Dr John Sutton for his kind assistance in the initial stages of preparation.

The widely accepted argument of Migeod, that the existence of polar morphological types among Mende men is evidence of an ancestral mixture of Mandingo and forest-dwellers, is examined and rejected. Despite the great probability that the ancestry of the Mende is indeed heterogeneous, neither Migeod's argument nor his data support his conclusions. The uncritical acceptance which the argument has had suggests that a general caveat is as important as the particular point.

Developments since 1968 in the study of the Zambian Early Iron Age are discussed, with emphasis both on the Lubusi site near Kaoma, which provides the first dated occurrence of Early Iron Age artefacts from western Zambia, and on material from the Eastern Province, which is closely related to contemporary finds from Malawi. Knowledge of the post-Early Iron Age archaeology of Zambia has hitherto been largely restricted to the Southern Province; here, for the first time, an archaeological evaluation of the later Iron Age of other regions has been attempted, and three major pottery traditions are described. In the northern and eastern areas the Luangwa tradition appears to have been established by the eleventh or twelfth century A.D., making a sharp typological break with the preceding Early Iron Age traditions. In the west, the Lungwebungu tradition shows a greater degree of continuity from the Early Iron Age, but in much of the Zambezi valley and adjacent areas it has been supplanted by the sharply-contrasting Linyanti tradition for which a Kololo origin is postulated. The inception of the Luangwa tradition is attributed to the arrival of a new population element ancestral to most of the peoples who inhabit northern and eastern Zambia today, but there is in the archaeological record of this region little discernible trace of later migrations associated with the state-formation process recalled in the extant oral traditions. The implications of these observations for the interpretation of both archaeological data and of oral traditions are discussed and tentative conclusions are proposed concerning the inter-relationship of these two methodologies.

West Africa, prior to the twentieth century, has generally been considered a ‘white man's grave’. However, very few statistics have been published to support the generalization. New data on the problem of European mortality in West Africa are published here for the first time. The data, compiled from the records of the Netherlands Second West India Company, include population and death statistics for Europeans employed by the Company on the Gold Coast.

Between 1719 and 1760, the mortality rate was just under 20 per cent per year. This number is low in comparison with previously published estimates of mortality in West Africa. The data presented here may be the most extensive for the period of maritime contact which preceded the partition of Africa. The author suggests, on the basis of these statistics, that it may be necessary to consider revising European mortality estimates downward.

Sil'on admet cette identification, la fréquence et la persistance du nom Dauma/Doma, depuis le XVe siècle (Maqrizi), jusqu'au XVIIe (Dapper), marque donc nettement l'importance du Doma dans le système politique Jukun/Kwararafa. En dépit de son èloignement à la fois de la côte et de l'axe soudanais, ce grand pouvoir africain, dont nous soupçonnons encore à peine le rôle, a été connu, au moins vaguement, par le monde extérieur….

On doit par contre écarter définitivement toute identification avec le Dahomey historique, qui n'a pu se constituer en Etat qu'au XVIIe siècle, comme ses traditions l'indiquent. En revanche l'ensemble ethnique aja apparait dans la documentation écrite dès 1539, pour le royaume d'Arida, puis en 1561 avec le nom de Povpovs, sur la carte de Bartholomeu Velho (pl. 203) et en 1570, avec la Costa Darida sur l'Atlas de Fernão Vaz Dourado (pl. 206). C'est en confrontant ces textes avec les traditions qu'on pourra éclairer les origines des peuples du Golfe du Benin.

Recent studies by the historians of pre-colonial Africa have tended to assume that external trade has always led to the formation or enlargement of states, and was crucial for the continued existence of these states. An example where an uncritical application of the above ‘trade-stimulus hypothesis’ has led to some distortion of reality has been in the study of the Rozvi empire in Southern Rhodesia in the eighteenth century. Previous students of the Rozvi empire have claimed that the latter was such a loosely connected tribal confederacy that its internal power bases—given as military and religious—were politically so slender that on their own they could not have sustained whatever power the Rozvi ruler wielded. Instead, it is said that the main source of the power exercised by the Rozvi Mambo came mainly from the latter's ability to redistribute the profits of external trade, especially that of the gold trade of which he is said to have had a strictly enforced monopoly.

LES Anyi-Ndényé se trouvent à la bordure occidentale du monde akan, dont ils font partie. La langue qu'ils parlent, l'anyi, est différent du twi (ashanti etc.) et fort proche de la langue du Sefwi (Sayie) et de 1'Aowin (ou Awowin), provinces limitrophes du Ghana occidental. Cependant leur langage tambouriné utilise le twi et la majeure partie du vocabulaire politique, définissant le pouvoir et ses détenteurs, provient directement du twi, langue qui n'est connue aujourd'hui que d'une minorité.

The scholar interested in the early history of the interlacustrine area has an unusually large corpus of traditional evidence available. These sources are among the most detailed in tropical Africa and several full-scale works have been based on them. This paper seeks, through textual analysis, to demonstrate that some of the most important of these sources have been influenced by the content of earlier writings and by each other, and that their corroborative value is very small.

Three problems are of particular interest here—the alleged contemporaneity of Nakibinge of Buganda, Olimi Rwitamahanga of Bunyoro, and Ntare Nyabugaro of Nkore; the Biharwe eclipse and its ascribed dates; and the value for chronology of the accounts of Nyoro invasions southward. Emphasis on these aspects has meant that while the questions of the Bacwezi, the Nkore capitals, and the Nyoro tombs have been taken into account, specific attention has not been paid to them here.

The present paper seeks only to suggest possible alternatives to the presently accepted reconstruction of early interlacustrine history, and argues that the nature of our evidence, once divested of its synthetic accretions, precludes the development of comprehensive hypotheses. It is important at this stage to attempt a full reassessment of these traditional sources through comparative textual analysis and through the extensive use of archival documentation which may illuminate more clearly the milieu in which the traditional historiography of the interlacustrine region developed.

Only recently have historians devoted much attention to monetary developments in African history, primarily because the substantivist school of economic anthropology, which has argued that so-called western economic theory does not apply to African situations, has dominated the field. This view has been increasingly under attack in recent years, particularly by a new group of economic historians who have found many aspects of formal economic theory useful in the reconstruction of Africa's past. Marion Johnson's pioneering work on the gold mithqal and cowrie shell, for example, has documented the spread of a common currency over much of West Africa, throughout an area encompassed by Lake Chad in the east, the upper reaches of the Senegambia in the west, the southern Sahara in the north, and the region between the Volta basin and the Niger Delta in the south. The study of other currencies, including the copper rod standard of the Cross River basin in Nigeria and Cameroons, and the cloth money of the Senegambia, has demonstrated the importance of other standards besides cowries and gold, so that it is now known that virtually all of precolonial West Africa had economies sufficiently developed to require the use of circulating mediums of exchange and units of account. This breakthrough raises a number of important questions which seriously challenge, if not completely undermine, the predominant view that Africa's past, down to very recent times, has been subsistence oriented, non-market directed, and basically static.

The British reduction of Lagos in 1851, their establishment of a semi-protectorate under the consuls, and the annexation of 1861 were due to a complex of causes, partly British, partly African: the movement to suppress the slave trade and to prevent its revival under the guise of contract labour; the encouragement of legitimate trade; the need to protect British and immigrant interests; missionary ambition; French rivalry; the rift in and subsequent weakness of the monarchy; the disordered state of the interior; the Dahomean threat to Abeokuta. Benjamin Campbell, the first substantive consul, laid the foundations of British rule, while his short-lived successors Brand and Foote helped to persuade the British Government that it was desirable and feasible to effect the transition to a colony. The consular decade at Lagos was a time of change which foreshadowed many of the issues of the Partition and was the first step in the making of Nigeria.

Two necessary conditions for the existence of New World slavery and the slave trade are an acute labour shortage and an elastic supply of coerced labour. Though the former condition has been the mainstay of hypotheses on slavery where high land/labour ratios were viewed as causal determinants, less attention has been given to the role of labour supply responses. This paper joins these conditions in a model which postulates that labour demand stemming from open resource pressures induced a politico–economic supply response in West Africa. The model shows a derived demand for labour evolving over time into a specific demand for slaves as entrepreneurs sought the lowest cost method of expanding the production of agricultural staples. Free and indentured labour were both characterized by inelastic supply, but the supply of slaves was elastic due to factors discussed within a vent for surplus framework. African governments and private traders responded to the new effective demand from the Americas with improved organization which widened the pre-existing market for slaves. The desire for imported goods, with firearms especially significant, plus various technical changes in transport, money, and credit all combined to ensure the further development of the slave trade and the continued maintenance of a longrun elastic supply pattern

The three unsuccessful jihāds against the Wolof state of Kajoor are described as revival and reform movements among a people nearly universally professing Islam, but practising a syncretistic form. The traditional view that these were wars between ‘Pagans’ and ‘Muslims’ is seen as a reflection of the social and political isolation of the clerics as a community, an understandable but on closer examination misleading interpretation based on uncritical reading of clerical sources.

Le terme de ‘résistance’ est ambigu à cause de l'écho qu'il éveille dans l'esprit des Européens qui ont vécu la deuxième guerre mondiale. Des ‘mouvements de résistance’ se sont alors organisés dans les états vaincus. Fondés sur le droit des peuples à disposer d'eux-mêmes, sur le sentiment national et sur l'égalité civile, us s'opposaient à la domination étrangère qui limitait la souveraineté de l'État.

Analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dahomean history reveals, not the existence of an absolute despotism, but the presence of a complex and institutionalized political process responsive to the needs and demands of Dahomeans from every part of the country. Each year at Xwetanù (Annual Customs), Dahomean officials met to discuss and decide administrative, military, economic, and diplomatic policies of the nation. In the mid-nineteenth century an obvious polarization developed as two groups, the Elephant Party and the Fly Party, sought to mould foreign policy. The Elephant Party, composed of the Crown, the wealthiest Creole traders, and the highest male military officials, advocated continuing the established practice of capturing and exporting slaves. Therefore, the Elephant Party wanted to destroy Abeokuta, an African rival and threat to slave raiding, and to resist England, a European obstacle to the trans-Atlantic shipment of slaves. After 1840, as slaving became more difficult and as the palm oil trade emerged as an alternative to the slave trade, the Fly Party rose to challenge the goals of the Elephant Party. Comprised of the Amazon army, shrine priests, middle-level administrators, Dahomean entrepreneurs, and trade officials (groups who were unwilling to pay the costs of a major war and who were eager to gain access to the profits of ‘legitimate’ international trade), the Fly Party counselled peaceful co-existence with Abeokuta and restored commercial relations with England. Eventually, the Fly Party was able to gain ascendancy over the Elephant Party. By 1870 the great Creole traders had suffered severe economic reverses, the Crown and the high military officers were divided over the question of Abeokuta, and members of the Fly Party had obtained positions of political and economic dominance within the country. Thus, the economic and military transformations which affected all of West Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century evoked political polarizations, coalitions, and realignments in the nation of Dahomey.

Brunschwig and Crowder have argued that many West African states on the eve of European annexation were on their way towards independent modernization and westernization, and that modernization was frustrated rather than accelerated by European rule. The paper examines the applicability of this argument to the particular case of the Egba state of Abeokuta in Western Nigeria.

In Abeokuta, European religious and political ideas had gained an early foothold through the return of liberated Egba slaves from Sierra Leone and the arrival of Christian missionaries. The new, westernized élite of converts and repatriates developed ambitions for the transformation of Abeokuta into a ‘Christian, civilized’ state. Scope for the realization of these ambitions was found through co-operation with the traditional élite, particularly in the Egba United Board of Management of 1865–74 and the Egba United Government of 1898–1914. Both these organizations suffered from the incompatibility between the essentially conservative aims of the traditional élite and the modernizing ambitions of the new élite. The Egba United Board of Management was dependent for its success solely upon the support of the traditional élite, and therefore ceased to function when the chiefs lost interest in its cause. The Egba United Government succeeded in laying lasting foundations for a modern administration in Abeokuta, but in order to achieve this had to rely on British military support against internal opposition and on British financial backing for their more ambitious projects. Through its military and financial dependence on the British, Abeokuta gradually became politically dependent, so that its formal political independence was largely illusory for at least five or six years before the final British annexation in 1914.

The assumptions that Ndebele settlement was purely militarily orientated and that it was composed of a hierarchy of ‘regiments’ and ‘divisions’ or ‘provinces’ are false. The parallels between the Ndebele ibutho and the English regiment are so tenuous that the translation is best dispensed with. On the other hand, an Ndebele ibutho was, at least in one sense, a military organization which evolved over a number of years into a cluster of imisi (villages). These imisi were residential, essentially non-military, and composed by far the largest proportion of Ndebele settlement. The ‘division’ did not exist. Amhlope, Amakanda, Amnyama and Igapha were collective group concepts comprising imisi descended from four original or proto-amabutho created in the period before the migration of the Ndebele to the Matopos region. The sequence of creation of amabutho in the post-1850 period can roughly be determined, outbursts of ibutho formation usually coinciding with crises in the history of the kingdom. Amabutho created after the late 1860s such as Imbizo and Insuga disintegrated after the European conquest during the 1890s, whereas older, established imisi survive as concepts of allegiance to this day. A knowledge of how the Ndebele ibutho evolved is essential for a more complete understanding of the dynamics of Ndebele society at other levels, for example the way the chieftaincies (izigaba) and the great local lineages emerged, as well as the social and political context within which individuals sought to realize their ambitions. The unexpected way in which a closer look at the ibutho reveals much of the early literature on the Ndebele to be at best incomplete, at worst, caricature, but either way misleading, suggests that other nineteenth-century Nguni states may benefit from renewed historical examination.

Using some examples from recent writing on West Africa, this article suggests that the failure of African historians to appreciate fully the importance of the West Indies in generating British imperial policy in the Atlantic tropics has led to serious distortions and errors of interpretation. For economic, ideological, and historical reasons, Britain's interest in the West Indies greatly exceeded her interest in West Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century. Her extensive Caribbean involvement and her ideological commitment to the successful outcome of slave emancipation powerfully influenced her policy in West Africa. In assessing the motives which generated imperial actions in the tropical Atlantic and in evaluating the impact of those actions upon Africa, it behooves historians to develop a broader, trans-Atlantic comprehension of the roots of British imperial policy.