This article seeks to explain how and why the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society (A.P.S.) came to support the South African Natives' Land Act of 1913 when African political opinion in South Africa opposed it. The reasons for the Society's position are sought in its predisposition in favour of segregatory policies, but also in several other political considerations including, it is suggested, its need to retain the support of the imperial government in the interests of its campaign against the British South Africa Company. The A.P.S.'s attitude emerged in its handling of the South African Native National Congress's deputation to England in 1914, and in its dispute with one of the deputation's members – Sol Plaatje – who remained in the country until 1917. The dispute intensified with the publication of Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa, whilst the direction of the A.P.S.'s policy of support for the South African government came to be challenged from within by two of Plaatje's supporters on the A.P.S.'s Executive Committee. Eventually, relations between the A.P.S. and the S.A.N.N.C, were broken off completely, and Plaatje's two supporters were voted off the Society's Executive Committee. Opposition to the Society's position over the Natives' Land Act continued to be expressed, however, in a committee set up to carry on Plaatje's campaign after his return to South Africa. One of the effects of this, and of the Society's activities generally in relation to the Natives' Land Act, was to emphasize its degree of isolation from currents of opinion that might have provided a new base of support at a time when it particularly needed this.

The period following the world slump saw increased British official interest in applying the new science of social anthropology to colonial problems. This paper looks at the eight years (1939–47) during which the distinguished South African anthropologist, Max Gluckman, held the post of Assistant Anthropologist and later Director at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Northern Rhodesia, and carried out field research among the Lozi of Barotseland. His post was also referred to as one in ‘functional’ or ‘applied’ anthropology, and the R.L.I, as a whole was intended to contribute to the solution of the urgent social problems thrown up by the growth of the mining industry. It is suggested that Gluckman's own shift in outlook from a belief in academic aloofness to a concern for active involvement with the administration, as well as being part of a wider change in attitudes, was also linked to his personal situation and to the unifying effects of the Second World War within N. Rhodesia. Gluckman was able to gain support for the ambitious research programme which was to put N. Rhodesia in the forefront of the post-war policy of organizing social research through local institutes, but his attempt to engage directly in practical affairs in N. Rhodesia proved disillusioning. Although the N. Rhodesian government continued to support the Institute and in theory welcomed Gluckman's offers of co-operation, it is shown that in practice little came of his attempts to apply either his specific knowledge of the Lozi or his general theoretical knowledge to administrative problems. Any influence he may have exerted on the colonial evolution of N. Rhodesia therefore remained indirect, but his position was one in harmony with the underlying trends towards decolonization.

This article examines the institution of blood partnership, first theoretically, and then with reference to northern Equatorial Africa and Dar al-Kuti, a Muslim slave-raiding and slave-trading state. Contemporary anthropologists described blood partnership schematically as the exchange of blood and of conditional curses between two individuals or groups for the purpose of guaranteeing co-operation. They also suggested that blood partnership created bonds analogous to kinship. Blood alliances were concluded almost exclusively between parties who were not related genealogically, and promoted security, co-operation and long-distance trade. They were particularly important among societies outside highly centralized states, where they provided the ideology and mechanism for wider action embracing unrelated groups. Northern Equatorial Africa was just such an area, and, in the nineteenth century at least, blood pacts were very common. The article looks at blood partnership in the region generally, pointing out how foreigners, Muslims as well as Europeans, adopted the institution as a means of allying themselves with local leaders. Muslim penetration of the region is examined, and the infiltration of the zariba system of the southwestern Sudan into Ubangi-Shari (in what is now the Central African Empire) is outlined. The second half of the article deals specifically with Dar al-Kuti. Oral testimony and written evidence are combined to present a picture of blood partnership among the Banda, the most important non-Muslim people included in the state. The analysis is then extended to show how Muslims in the region, mainly the Runga from the Chad basin, led by Kobur and then by al-Sanusi, used blood pacts to foster their political and economic ambitions among non-Muslim peoples south of the Islamic frontier.

Lord Carnarvon's scheme for a South African Confederation in the 1870s owed much more than has been generally recognized to influences emanating from Natal. Large employers of African labour recognized in the 1860s that the local population could not provide a cheap stable workforce and that immigrant workers from the African interior would be increasingly important to the prosperity of the colony. Theophilus Shepstone, Natal's Secretary for Native Affairs, used all the resources at his disposal to smooth the way for migrant labour. The development of diamond mining in Griqualand West and, to a lesser extent, gold mining in the Lydenburg district of the Transvaal diverted large numbers of African workers away from Natal and set off a frantic search for new sources of labour which underscored the importance of Moçambique and Central Africa as reservoirs of black labour. While planters, traders and officials in Natal worked to keep labour supply routes open between the Transvaal and Portuguese territory, officials in Griqualand West were recommending annexation of territories along the ‘missionary road’ in order to stop Transvaal Afrikaners from blocking labour supply routes from Central Africa. The revival of an active British campaign against the East African slave trade opened another potential source of African labour which Shepstone's former border agent Frederic Elton tried to divert to Natal while serving first as an assistant to Sir Bartle Frere and John Kirk in Zanzibar, and later as British Consul in Moçambique.

Shepstone arrived in London at a crucial point in the development of Carnarvon's thinking on southern African affairs and impressed him with his lucid analysis of the interrelation of African administration, economic development and labour supply. Carnarvon's plans for confederation reflected the advice which he was continously receiving from Shepstone and Elton. Their argument for confederation emphasized the essentially unitary nature of the developing southern African economy.

Oswald Pirow was an active and influential cabinet minister in the Hertzog administration in South Africa for more than a decade. Perhaps more than anyone else in office, Pirow shaped the new aggressive Union policies in external matters which stressed a ‘South Africa First’ ideology. Given a free hand by Hertzog, and as minister responsible for defence and transport, Pirow aimed to weaken the British connexion, enhance South Africa's image, and expand Union influence throughout ‘white’ Africa to the north. The agent charged to carry out these new policies was South African Airways, organized by Pirow in 1934 as Africa 's first national airline. As the Union 's ‘chosen instrument’, SAA was used by Pirow to challenge British paramountcy in the Rhodesias and East Africa, in direct conflict with Britain 's own struggling Imperial Airways. The rivalry was for routes and services, mail and passengers, and ultimately for prestige. By 1939, Pirow 's airline was established in operation from Kenya southward, and winning the struggle with its fleet of modern Junkers aircraft. Pirow was the promoter, the organizer and the hard bargainer with whom the British had to deal time and time again. For technical and financial reasons, Imperial Airways could seldom match Pirow 's ambitions, and on the eve of World War II, Pirow could claim great success for his air-minded policy. Only the coming of the war was to remove Pirow and his policy from the scene.

This article argues that trade rather than confrontation was the predominant theme of the early years of interaction between the Kikuyu and the British. It suggests that the Southern Kikuyu in particular enjoyed an important initial period of co-existence with the British, the economic basis of which was a rapid expansion in the 1890s of an already existing trade in agricultural produce with caravans moving along the road to Uganda. This development was, however, not universally welcome among the Southern Kikuyu, and there was a clash of interest between those concerned with an increased production of agricultural surplus, and those whose economic interests were centred on livestock. The death of Waiyaki removed from the scene the most influential trading elder and facilitated, from the areas previously under his influence, hostile opposition to the trading activities now centred upon the permanent fort of the Imperial British East Africa Company. The steady increase of food production encouraged the emergence of a number of Southern Kikuyu traders; this was particularly true for Kinanjui, who had established himself at a time when the military resources of the I.B.E.A. Co. were negligible and poorly organized. It is argued that Kinanjui's status can no longer be regarded as merely the result of assistance from the British. It was significant that the British did not at any time prior to 1900 deploy at Fort Smith a permanent garrison of troops. There existed instead a balance of military resources which made possible an important local arena of political activity between the Southern Kikuyu and the British. The Northern Kikuyu, by contrast, despite their longer-standing trading contacts with the coast, were denied similar opportunities by virtue of more positive policies of control directed initially towards revenue collection.

There was a basic similarity between the way in which Rhodesian colonial historians looked at the central Shona chimurenga (rising) of 1896 and T. O. Ranger's seminal Revolt in Southern Rhodesia 1896–7: both thought in terms of a pre-planned conspiracy led by religious authorities and a simultaneous outbreak on a given signal. Ranger' reconstruction of the organization of the chimurenga, however, depended partly upon the misreading and misquotation of the sources. In fact, the rising was neither pre-planned nor simultaneous. In the second quarter of 1896 limited resistance to European rule was being carried on in separate, unconnected outbreaks and some communities were thinking of starting a full-scale hondo (war); the threat of famine caused by locusts led certain central Shona leaders to contact the religious leader Mkwati in the Ndebele area, then in revolt against the Europeans, in search of locust medicine. News of European defeats transmitted by these contacts led to a full hondo in the Umfuli valley, which triggered a ‘ripple effect’ in which Shona communities resisted or collaborated as the news reached them. The element of religious leadership was limited and the element of central pre-planning non-existent. This makes the success and commitment of the local Shona communities all the more impressive, even though it was a traditionalist rather than a proto-nationalist rising.

This article deals both with the political history and with the economy of European agricultural settlement in the Belgian Congo. It concludes that the role of settler farming in the life of the Congo was essentially political. The colonat was only marginal in a colonial economy long based on the extensive exploitation of African labour by industrial and commercial firms. European agriculture was able to compete neither with big business in labour recruiting, nor with African cultivators in price advantage. Settlers only survived with the benefit of government subsidies and a monopoly over some branches of production. White farming was maintained for political reasons both in peripheral regions of the colony, and on the fringes of the larger cities, but from i960 it was rapidly abandoned. In Rhodesia, under different ecological and historical circumstances, black industrial workers were fed by black agricultural workers. In the Belgian Congo it was the African peasant who fed the industrial worker, though for a mean return.

La ‘mise en valeur’ des colonies africaines pouvait-elle être entreprise par des sociétés auxquelles l'Etat attribuerait de grandes concessions foncières? La Commission des concessions coloniales, créée en juillet 1898, adopta ce principe de ‘colonisation moderne’, hâtivement mis en vigueur au Congo. Pour Madagascar et l'A.O.F. on prit le temps de larges consultations auprès des administrateurs et des milieux commerciaux; en dépit de l'avis favorable prononcé par la Commission, le ministre décida de surseoir à l'octroi de grandes concessions territoriales dans l'ouest africain, suivant en cela le gouverneur general Ballay. Les responsables locaux ne partagèrent point le mythe de la mise en valeur par les grandes sociétés, mythe auquel se tint aveuglément la Commission des concessions coloniales qui contrôlait au plan juridique le régime mis en place au Congo; c'est le gouverneur Merlin qui imposa la réforme de 1910–12. Des politiques et des affairistes – tels qu'Andre Lebon, Du Vivier de Streel, Binger, Guillain, – avaient fait passer un dessein nouveau d'action coloniale, mais la ‘mise en valeur’ sans cesse invoquée n'avait pas alors de contenu économique véritablement défini.

Britain maintained small colonial armed forces in the African territories for internal security and local defence. In four periods of international crisis, when the British Empire was faced with a shortage of military manpower, it was proposed that African troops be used in imperial roles outside Africa. These proposals were closely related to the increasing opposition by India to the Indian Army being used for imperial defence in Asia and the Middle East. During 1916–18 a parliamentary and press lobby in Britain clamoured for a ‘million black army’. In the years 1919–21 the War Office attempted to raise an African army for use in the Middle East. On both occasions the Colonial Office vigorously opposed these schemes and the crises were resolved without using African troops. The emergencies of 1939–42 changed Colonial Office policy. African troops were used in the East African campaign against the Italians, as labour units in the Middle East, and then, after 1943, as combatants in Asia where they fought as complete formations within the Commonwealth forces. At the end of the Second World War the Colonial Office wished to maintain a sizeable African army at Imperial expense. However, post-war defence cuts reduced the African armed forces although a small parliamentary and service lobby unsuccessfully urged that an African Army be created as an imperial instrument, and to take the place of the Indian Army.

From the 1920s the British government sought to manipulate the powerful new propaganda weapon of the cinema to the advantage of the Empire. Unsuccessful attempts were made to break the American stranglehold on the colonial cinema circuit which was thought to pose a threat to British commercial and political interests. Attempts to control what were seen as the harmful effects of the commercial cinema were made through strict censorship. The Colonial Office provided guidelines for policy and organization. South Africa set precedents for racial discrimination in censorship and segregation in viewing which were adopted in much of East and Central Africa. The Colonial Office and the British Film Institute were both anxious to see an experiment using the film in adult education. Progress was held back through lack of money until 1935 when the Carnegie Corporation decided to finance the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment, a project of the International Missionary Council. The B.E.K.E., an experiment in the production of films for the educational and cultural adjustment of Africans to western society, was conducted in East and Central Africa between 1935 and 1937, with the Colonial Office playing an advisory role. No permanent organization developed out of the B.E.K.E. due to lack of finance and lack of interest among the East African governments. When the British government created the Colonial Film Unit in 1939, its purpose was to make war propaganda films for the colonies. Later in the war, the work of the C.F.U. was extended to the making of instructional films, which became its main function once the war had ended.