Even at this still early stage in the development of the chronostratigraphic framework in eastern Africa a number of important advances have been reported. As more attention is paid to the different responses of food producers to the variety of resources provided by the range of available environments then, and only then, will we be in a position to understand the diachronic processes which result in settlement aggregation and urban development.

In the Lake Nyanza region at the hub of the Sudanic and Guinea–Congolian regional vegetation centres, early dates for iron working are not yet convincing enough to demonstrate independent invention of iron working, but the region is almost certainly the most important diffusion source of the technique to the eastern and southern sectors of the sub-continent.

Currently available data from the Maasai–Somali region show clearly the early adoption of food production techniques and a capacity to absorb iron technology without necessarily abandoning pastoral production. This did not, however, mean a lack of development based on agriculture as the towns of the Somali coast with their advanced craft production clearly show. However, it is interesting that the urban development seems closely linked to the juxtaposition of the valuable agricultural resources provided by the Shabelle river running close to the coast and the marine resources of the littoral.

The Zanzibar–Inhambane floral mosaic provides a context for the spread southwards of the early farming communities and for the development of the coastal towns. Particularly important here appears to have been the combination of surface and arboreal forms of agriculture with the exploitation of marine resources. Links eastwards with the specialized floral communities of the Comoro archipelago and Madagascar were also fully established. The highlands of Madagascar experienced the expansion from the eleventh century a.d. onwards of a settlement system increasingly focused upon hydraulic agriculture which culminated in the powerful Merina kingdom and ultimately the present day capital of Antananarivo.

On the continent relatively little penetration into the Zambezian miombo woodland communities was achieved by the coastal urban dwellers. In the woodlands of the vast highlands of the interior different developmental trajectories of settlement systems occurred. Here food production cannot be shown to have become established earlier than the late first millennium b.c. But by the mid first millennium a.d. significant settlement hierarchies based on mixed cropping and cattle keeping were established on the Zimbabwe plateau and the margins of the Kalahari. These together with the incorporation of the opportunities presented by inter-regional exchange and the exotic trade goods penetrating from the coast ultimately gave rise to the powerful state formations of the Mapungubwe and Zimbabwe traditions.

Together these developments show a remarkable degree of regional articulation and it remains true that an adequate understanding of the processes giving rise to urbanism in any part of eastern Africa cannot be understood in isolation.

This review is a further development in the Journal of African History series of archaeological surveys away from the earlier radiocarbon date lists and towards regional examinations of recent archaeological evidence on food-producing societies. It is divided into two sections that examine respectively ‘Stone Age’ pastoralists in the drier west and ‘Iron Age’ agriculturalists in the better-watered east. Relations between food producers and hunter-gatherers are examined, particularly in the west, where it is becoming increasingly difficult to make meaningful distinctions between them in view of the variety of changes that took place roughly contemporaneously in both with the introduction of domestic stock. Several local sequences are beginning to suggest that socio-economic change took place within the framework of the local community rather than by the stereotypic, ethnic replacement model where Khoi succeeds San.

There is much new evidence on communities with an agricultural economic base. The earliest evidence is examined from southern Mozambique and the Transvaal, including traces of first-millennium mercantile trade and its regional antecedents. There are contradictions between different models proposed to explain interactions with residual hunter-gatherer communities and with the natural environment. A major theme of recent studies has been the development and use of models derived from structuralist analysis of the classic ethnography of the region. Such models have given a new understanding of settlement patterns but in several respects are still the subject of controversy.

This study goes beyond the ‘first and last appearance’ approach of cartographic historians to examine the social contexts in which the Kong Mountains were first depicted in and then eliminated from nineteenth-century maps of Africa. This history shows that the conventional periodization of the history of cartography into ‘decorative’ and ‘scientific’ phases is greatly exaggerated. We trace the mountains' origins to the geographer James Rennell and show how their purported existence served to support his arguments on the course of the Niger River at the turn of the nineteenth century. The enduring depiction of the Kong Mountains throughout the century illustrates the authoritative power of maps. This authority is based on the public's belief that cartographers are guided by an ethic of accuracy and are applying scientific procedures in mapmaking. Despite doubts about the existence of this mountain chain, the ‘extraordinary authority’ of maps helped to perpetuate an erroneous spatial image of West Africa until Binger's famous expedition in the late 1880s. With the publication of his travels and maps, Binger became the new authority on West African geography. His work altered the subsequent cartography of the region and substantially contributed to French empire-building.

This paper analyses the demography of nineteenth-century Madagascar in the light of the debate generated by the demographic transition theory. Both supporters and critics of the theory hold to an intrinsic opposition between human and ‘natural’ factors, such as climate, famine and disease, influencing demography. They also suppose a sharp chronological divide between the pre-colonial and colonial eras, arguing that whereas ‘natural’ demographic influences were of greater importance in the former period, human factors predominated thereafter. This paper argues that in the case of nineteenth-century Madagascar the human factor, in the form of the Merina state, was the predominant demographic influence. However, the impact of the state was felt through natural forces, and it varied over time. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Merina state policies stimulated agricultural production, which helped to create a larger and healthier population and laid the foundation for Merina military and economic expansion within Madagascar. From the 1820, the cost of such expansionism led the state to increase its exploitation of forced labour at the expense of agricultural production and thus transformed it into a negative demographic force. Infertility and infant mortality, which were probably more significant influences on overall population levels than the adult mortality rate, increased from 1820 due to disease, malnutrition and stress, all of which stemmed from state forced labour policies. Available estimates indicate little if any population growth for Madagascar between 1820 and 1895. The demographic ‘crisis’ in Africa, ascribed by critics of the demographic transition theory to the colonial era, stemmed in Madagascar from the policies of the imperial Merina regime which in this sense formed a link to the French regime of the colonial era. In sum, this paper questions the underlying assumptions governing the debate about historical demography in Africa and suggests that the demographic impact of political forces be re-evaluated in terms of their changing interaction with ‘natural’ demographic influences.

Queen Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba has recently been viewed as a usurper of the throne, largely because some contemporary documents describe her as such. But the issue of legitimacy to rule in Ndongo was a complex one, based not on a fixed constitution but a set of contradictory historical precedents which were cited to establish authority. Njinga managed to find such precedents to support her claims, which were further reinforced by her control of the chief military officials of the country. In so doing, she was able to establish her legitimacy and even became a precedent for female rule in the years that followed her death.

Endogamous artisan and musician groups are characteristic of over fifteen West African peoples, including the Manding, Soninke, Wolof, Serer, Fulani, Tukulor, Songhay, Dogon, Senufo, Minianka, Moors, and Tuareg. Castes appeared among the Malinke no later than 1300, and were present among the Wolof and Soninke, as well as some Songhay and Fulani populations, no later than 1500. All the West African castes ultimately developed from at most three centers, located among the Manding, Soninke, and/or Wolof. Migration is the key process explaining the current distribution of caste people. Formation of blacksmith and bard castes among the Manding may be related to the Sosso–Malinke war, described in the Sunjata epic, which led to the founding of the Mali empire. As they evolved over time, castes acquired secondary specializations or changed occupations, and moved up or down in rank relative to other social groups. Although marriage alliances took place within a caste or among a limited number of castes, castes did not form demographic isolates. Children of caste men and slave concubines had caste status, while free persons taken captive in war sometimes claimed to be caste members. Assimilation of local artisans to a caste may have occurred when caste institutions were first introduced into a given area.

This article has concentrated on the efforts made by the British colonial regime in Northern Nigeria to suppress the slave trade. It has shown that the slave trade disappeared gradually, in three phases. The first extended from 1900 to about 1908, the second lasted until about 1919, while the third continued until the disappearance of the slave trade at the end of the 1930s. The task of suppression was carried out by a variety of means: military, including the patroling of trade routes and policing of strategic locations; political and diplomatic, involving co-operation with other colonial powers in the area; and judicial, including arrest, prosecution and punishment of offenders. In all these efforts the colonial administration received assistance from the Native Authorities; by the third phase these Authorities and the Native Courts were the most active forces against slaving. The slave trade dealt to a very significant extent in children. In the environment in which the trade was conducted the dealers developed a range of tricks and subterfuges to evade detection by the law enforcement agencies. The long borders which the agencies had to patrol, the manpower problems which they faced, and the relative ease with which slaves could be obtained in times of adversity combined to make the struggle against slaving a protracted one. Time was not, however, on the side of the traders. Improvements in communications, a stronger administration, the growing effectiveness of patrols, and the deterrent effects of judicial action cut into and finally eliminated the slave trade.

During the inter-war years, there were frequent reports of desertion, youth labour and atrocious conditions on the sugar estates of Natal, South Africa. Sugar production, assisted by heavy state protection, was expanding rapidly; planters recruited vigorously amongst rural Africans in Transkei to replace Indian indentured workers. They also used their political muscle in order to prevent the extension of labour regulations in the mining industry to the sugar fields and could thus employ workers rejected from the mines on health grounds as well as youths. The conflict between mines and agriculture over labour in South Africa was resolved by non-regulation of agriculture as well as by the immobilization of labour tenants on farms. Officials in the departments of Health and Native Affairs, anxious to control social disruption and minimize fatalities, tried to regulate the sugar estates. The issue divided the state and the Native Affairs Department.itself. Agrarian interests, including English-speaking planters, became particularly powerful in the inter-war years, and officials had little success in controlling them.

But African youth labour was available not simply because there was a large demand, but also because there was a supply. Youths had to work in peasant communities. Although their work was embedded in a different social ethic, there is evidence to suggest that demands on them were increasing; some ‘ran away’ to the sugar fields. Chiefs and councillors wished to control youth and child migration both because of fears about their welfare and the need for herdboys. This pattern of migration became less common in the 1940s not only because production patterns on the estates changed, but also because of social changes in the rural areas. As in other contexts, the nature of the South African labour market was partly shaped through a process of struggle within and by rural communities.

In recent years the impact of the Almoravid movement on the sahelian societies has been the object of some debate. Ancient Ghana seemed to be the most rewarding area of investigation, since al-Zuhrī (1154) and Ibn Khaldūn (end of the fourteenth century) suggested its ‘conquest’ by Almoravid forces. The evidence provided by these narrative sources has been disputed, but it could not be discarded.

A new field of investigation was opened by the discovery in 1939 of a number of royal tombstones in Gao-Sané close to the old capital of the Gawgaw empire. The dates of the epitaphs extend from the early twelfth to the late thirteenth century. However, none of the Arabic names given to the rulers of Gao-Sané seemed to correspond to any of the names provided in the chronicles of Timbuktu, the T. al-Sūdān and the T. al-Fattāsh. A closer look at the epitaphs shows that the third ruler of Gao-Sané, called ‘Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb and also Yāmā b. K.mā and who died in 1120, is in fact identical with Yama Kitsi mentioned in the chronicles. The available evidence suggests that by 1080 the local Berbers of Gao-Sané were able to seize power from the earlier Qanda/Kanta dynasty of Old Gao. This change of dynasty was certainly not the result of a military conquest, although it is likely that Almoravid propagandists contributed to arouse the religious fervour of the local Muslims in both Gao-Sané with its community of traders and Old Gao with its Islamic court members and dynastic factions. The clear message of the Gao epitaphs is that the new rulers of Gao-Sané, the Zāghē, tried to establish good relations with members of the former ruling clan resorting to a policy of intermarriage. By the middle of the thirteenth century the Zāghē rulers were so much integrated into the local Mandé society that they adopted the title Z.wā (Zā) which was originally the title of the Kanta rulers. Thus it would appear that in spite of the far-reaching dynastic effects resulting from the religious and political upheaval of the Almoravid period, there was no major incursion of Berber people into the kingdom of Gawgaw. Indeed, there are reasons to believe that the basic institutions of the original‘Mande’ society were destroyed only in the course of the fifteenth century, when Songhay warrior groups from the east under the leadership of the Sonni radically changed the ethnic set-up of the Middle Niger. In spite of these changes the Zarma, whose aristocracy descend from the Zā, preserve the tradition of their origin from Mali until the present day.

This paper highlights analytical and historical commonalities between Belgian African anti-polygamy measures and the unusual practice of taxing urban un-married women. Secondly, it interprets the 1950s rebellion against this tax in Bujumbura in light of how the colonial category of femme libre and a 1950 antipolygamy law converged in the Muslim African community of Buyenzi. Colonial categories and camouflage, name-giving and name-calling, noise and silence are central to the interpretation.

Belgian African anti-polygamy attitudes and measures are first reviewed, including polygamous wife liberations in the Leopoldian period; the introduction of supplementary wife taxation in 1910; demographic anxieties from the 1920s; and post-World War II worries about ‘camouflaged polygamy’, leading to the passage of the anti-polygamy law in 1950. The published evidence of ‘camouflaged polygamy's’ noisiest critics, élite African ‘new men’ or évolués, suggests that polygamy was increasing in rural areas due to forced labour obligations, and becoming camouflaged in response to pro-natalist rewards for monogamy. A second section analyses the urban single women's tax in terms of the embarrassed silence surrounding this new form of moral taxation, which was introduced following legislation in the 1930s designed to better differentiate ‘customary’ space from urban sites of ‘evolution’. A third section draws on Buyenzi women's oral memories to reconstruct their noisy rebellion against the tax. The conclusion analyses these Muslim women's outrage in light of the contradictions of gaining municipal revenue through moral taxation, an urban surveillance process which necessitated naming the category of persons taxed. The etymology of the term femme libre demonstrates that polygamous wife and prostitute were associated categories in colonial thought from the Leopoldian period. Colonial authorities lost control over these categories in this atypical ‘extra-customary’ township super-imposed on a pre-colonial ‘customary’ community. The new African need for camouflaging plural wives, created by the strong urban expulsion powers of the 1950 anti-polygamy law, converged with the name-calling of the single women's tax, resulting in a local struggle to control the naming process. The category of women created by the tax coalesced around the sexual insult embedded in the tax's name, embarrassing colonial authorities into exemptions and inciting the men of their community into a tax rebellion.

The most fruitful approaches to the study of slave resistance in the New World have involved examination of the slaves' struggles to create and control institutions of community and kinship in the face of planters' attempts to suppress local social reproduction altogether. Africanists who would attempt similar analysis of rebellious slave consciousness are hampered by the tradition of functionalist anthropology which dominates studies of African culture, especially Miers and Kopytoff's thesis of the integrative nature of African slavery. By contrast, more class-oriented approaches to studies of African slave resistance assume too stark a division between the consciousness of slaves and the consciousness of masters. It is suggested that Gramsci's concepts of hegemony and contradictory popular consciousness can be used to reconcile the cultural sensitivity of the first approach with the concern of the second for issues of domination and struggle. Thus a more nuanced view of slave consciousness might be reached.

The case studied involves resistance to the rapid rise of sugar plantations on the northern Tanzania coast in the late nineteenth century. Miers and Kopytoff's model of the ‘reduction of marginality’ is modified to accommodate a process of conflict, as slaves struggled to gain access to institutions of Swahili prestige and citizenship and as their masters struggled to exclude them. Analysis of a large-scale slave rebellion in 1873 reveals that the consciousness of the rebels was couched in the local ‘traditional’ language of a moral economy of patrons and clients. Although this language was expressive of some of the hegemonic ideas of the emergent planter class, it was also openly rebellious. It expressed neither a slave class-consciousness nor simply the ideology of the dominant planter class but was instead a contradictory consciousness of the type that Gramsci discerned in other movements of agrarian rebellion.

This essay outlines a general framework for thinking about African ideas about proprietary rights and considers how this might produce insights into ideas about social relations.

Drawing largely on examples from East and Central Africa, and on an analysis of property disputes pursued to the Natal Native High Court, it is suggested that the development of a customary law came first to the ‘law of persons’ and then to the ‘law of property’. Ideas and disputes relating to land and to other forms of ‘old’ and ‘new’ property are all examined. Ideas about what were and were not commodities, and about different ways of dealing with kin and with strangers, are shown to be fundamental to the understanding of disputing behaviours and the meaning of customary norms. Disputes were not simply about ownership and value but about the changing boundaries of commodity status. Ideas about appropriate behaviour regarding the transactional order between kin concerning ‘old’ property (food and cattle) extended into the dealings between strangers about ‘new’ property (acquired with money through the market), whilst the ideas and practices of the market economy had a significant effect on the way ‘old’ property was dealt with among kin. The development of the customary law related to property also has a particular relevance in understanding generational conflict in Africa.

It is argued that customary law was formed in the process of a dialogue between rulers and ruled during the colonial period. The colonial state impeded the development of individual tenure by the ‘invention’ of communal tenure but was ambivalent in response to attempts by younger men, and by women, to separate estates from the control of older males.

This article focuses on the Italian community in Malawi, one of the smallest immigrant minority groups in Central Africa, but by no means the least important. Using the records of the Custodian of Enemy Property housed in the National Archives of Malawi, it suggests that, in the light of the Italian experience, there is need to modify the conventional view of the white farming sector as being uniformly inefficient and incapable of survival other than through the active support of the colonial state. At a time between the wars when capitalist farming as a whole was in deep depression, Ignaco Conforzi succeeded for reasons largely unconnected with the intervention of the state, in creating a highly profitable, diversified agricultural empire which survived the Second World War virtually intact. Through his influence, an Italian community was created, linked to Conforzi by a variety of economic and family ties and drawn largely from the same small area of central Italy from which he himself had come. Like members of other ethnic groups, these immigrants were constantly balancing their multiple identities – as whites, as farmers or mechanics, as Italians or as natives of a particular district in Italy. Between the mid-1930s and the mid-1940s external and internal forces combined to transform them into a classic minority, ‘singled out…for differential and unequal treatment’ but from the late 1940s onwards those who were regarded by the colonial authorities as conforming to European standards were reabsorbed within the wider settler community. Overall, however, they tended to be more skilled and, crucially, less heavily reliant on the state than were British settlers and it is these factors that explain their relative success.

This article explores the dreams recorded by Ruben Um Nyobe in 1958, shortly before his death during the struggle which the Union des Populations du Cameroun waged against the terms which the French and their local allies sought to impose on Camerounese independence. The struggle should not be categorized in the inflationary rhetoric of African ‘revolutions’. Rather, it should be viewed as a movement of resistance and assertion within the colonial arena, where European authorities controlled certain strategic points while African communities maintained predominance at other locations. In this connection it is important to understand the importance which African communities in southern Cameroun attached to the world of the invisible and the ‘economy of the night’. It was in the invisible world that Africans, and especially those who were considered to be leaders and therapists in their societies, had sought to manipulate the ‘economy of the day’ and the strategic points controlled by the colonial economy and administration since the late 19th century. In this context, the dreams and annotations of Um Nyobe become significant, not as an expression of sexual preoccupations or the residual psychological orientations of his society, but as historical evidence: signs and statements of his effort to control the day, direct the struggle, and bring healing to his community, and acts of political as well as cultural significance. The colonial regime framed and affected the lives of its subjects, even to the point of consciousness and dreams, but at the same time the subjects fashioned their own space, refashioned their institutions, reinterpreted the actions of the regime and continually undermined its authority.