The papers in this special issue of the Journal were originally presented to a conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies under the joint auspices of the School and the British Social Science Research Council, in September 1981. The conference, which grew out of an earlier series of seminars run by the S.O.A.S. History Department, arose out of the editors' concern that the history of the family, which had become so lively and important an area of study in Europe and America since the 1960s, was being almost totally neglected in Africa; through the seminars, the conference and now the publication of a selection of the papers in the Journal we hoped to stimulate research on a range of questions which could be fruitfully explored in the African context, and which could possibly also feed into the wider historiography on the family in Britain, America and Europe.

For many of its formative years, the study of history was concerned in the main with the history of the dominant, of ‘great men’ and their institutions, states and government, armies, churches and culture. The history of the dominated, of ‘ordinary people’ was thought to be lost, for the majority of our ancestors left no obvious written record from which their lives could be re-created. From 1929, when Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre founded the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, this view has been increasingly challenged, and it is fair to say that today the past of ordinary people is at least as significant historiographically as that of famous leaders or powerful institutions.

Between 1866 and 1886 Arabized traders from the Nile River trafficked in slaves and ivory in the Mangbetu region of what is today north-eastern Zaire. These Nile traders opened the first direct long-distance trading contacts in the area. European travellers present during the period wrote accounts giving the impression to some modern historians that the traders did extensive damage to several small, welldeveloped Mangbetu kingdoms. These accounts do not furnish an accurate picture of the trader impact on the Mangbetu. The Mangbetu system of rule was less developed than the travellers supposed. At that time Mangbetu rule was still based largely on personality and kinship and not on bureaucracy, tribute, commercial monopoly, divine kingship, or any other institution often associated with strong African kingdoms. Moreover, the trader influence was weaker than the travellers supposed because the intruders were newcomers, operating at a great distance from the Khartoum market, who remained only a short time. Only from 1881 to 1885 did the Egyptian government have some success in regularizing the trade and subduing rebellious rulers. In early 1886 all northerners withdrew from the Mangbetu area as a result of the Mahdist crisis in the Sudan. At that point the Mangbetu kingdoms, and kingdoms built on the Mangbetu model, re-emerged relatively unchanged by the trader experience.

Two fatwā-s or legal opinions of the jurist al-Qābisī at Qayrawān about the year A.D. 1000 show the way in which the Law of Islam was used to protect the Muslim against the hazards of trans-Saharan trade with the Bilād al-Sūdan. Trade was to be conducted as far as possible in accordance with the Law, and approval was given to the establishment of Muslim communities in the Bilād al-Sūdān under the authority of a nāzir or ‘watchman’, with the consent of the pagan king of the country. The formation of Muslim communities on this legal basis, and their incorporation into the pattern of West African society, were important for the subsequent character of Islam in West Africa. Meanwhile, among the ‘stateless’ Berber peoples of the Western Sahara, the doctrines of the Malikite school were subject to a different interpretation by Ibn Yasln, which came into open conflict with the views of al-Qābisī when the Almoravids sacked the Muslim city of Awdaghast for submitting to the pagan king of Ghana. This conflict of attitudes to paganism remained a feature of West African Islam down to the twentieth century.

This review provides a new interpretative framework for the ‘Neolithic’ in East Africa. A seriation of pottery assemblages is used to delineate several archaeological traditions, the implications of which include rejection of the use of the terms ‘Neolithic’ and ‘Pastoral Neolithic’, and the demise of previous attempts at archaeological—linguistic correlations. Evaluation of the dating evidence brings into question the validity of early dates for domestic stock and cultivated crops in the region. A new model for the development of specialized herd management strategies in the Central Rift Valley is outlined. This model rests upon the definition of pastoralism as an ideological system rather than as a subsistence strategy. Finally, the archaeological evidence for the antecedents of the early pastoral communities of East Africa is examined and the ascription of some of these assemblages to the ‘aquatic civilization of Middle Africa’ is questioned.

One of the problems with interdisciplinary work is that the outsider to a discipline so often tends to join its discourse at points which seem irrelevant to its practitioners. The experience is not unlike that of the foreign visitor who watches with amazement and not a little sadness as the ‘natives’ abandon those items of their culture which seem to him to be of most value. And the ‘native’ has only impatience for advice to slow down the pace of change.

African specialists on the history of the family seem to be entertaining a similar break with their past practices and present significant problems of orientation for the outside observer. The chief dissatisfaction appears to be with the legacy of the powerful generation of anthropologists who emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. They dealt with the organization of large corporate groups and interpreted action, belief and feeling in terms of a few principles derived from the structures of such groups.1 It has become an everyday criticism that this great work suffers from its ‘timelessness’, and of course historians have a professional interest in reiterating the point. More serious is the fact that the older constructs no longer seem to assist in analysing either the new problems that excite the historian aware of what his colleagues elsewhere are doing or the actual findings of new research.

To the outside observer – in this case an historian of Europe, whose bedtime reading consists of ethnologies of Africa, Papua-New Guinea, and the like – a confrontation with current research on Africa helps focus issues and problems in his own work and suggests a few points where common discussion might be fruitful.

This article first explains the importance of the history of smoking pipes for other historical questions, especially in West Africa, where pipe styles are used to date archaeological levels. A survey of the major theories about African smoking and pipes is presented. This is followed by a review of the published archaeological literature pertaining to smoking pipes found at various sites from around the continent. The various controversies surrounding African smoking customs are then looked at in the light of the available evidence. The most likely hypothesis is that cannabis was smoked in water pipes in eastern and southern Africa before the introduction of tobacco. Further research is called for to prove or disprove this hypothesis. Tobacco is shown to have been introduced to West Africa from eastern North America, most likely by the French coming to Senegambia, though possibly by Moroccans coming to Timbuktu.

During the nineteenth century Muqdisho experienced a significant revival in its fortunes after several centuries of gradual decline from its medieval heyday. While it remained on the periphery of the Omani empire on the coast of East Africa, steady commercial penetration of Indian merchant capital based at Zanzibar inexorably drew the entire Benaadir coast into the Omani orbit. Massive infusions of slave labour transformed agricultural commodity production in the Benaadir hinterland and created a new basis for ruling-class collaboration between town and country. At Muqdisho these external factors intertwined with established internal rivalries which were based on moiety competition and the traditional search for supporting alliances in the hinterland. The end result of this complex process was increased competition and tension between the town moieties that affected both the spatial segregation of the two quarters and enabled first Omani Zanzibar and then Italy to insinuate themselves into a dominant mediating position within the urban community. At the end of the century the urban culture of Muqdisho had also been influenced by the incorporation of a large slave population. While all of these changes indicate that Muqdisho was integrally a part of the wider coastal region of East Africa, other cultural evidence establishes no less that it was still uniquely Soomaali within that context.

It has been argued that the conquest of disease, particularly malaria, preceded and facilitated the spread of the European empires in Africa. The French experience shows the contrary. Even into the twentieth century surprisingly little use was made of quinine; death rates from malaria remained high. Yet the French empire expanded steadily. As the empire expanded, more and more use was made of indigenous troops. Africans recruited within the conquered territories were sent to conquer new territories. As the number of European combatants fell, so did the European death rate. Then, once the colonies were subjugated, communications and living conditions improved, making life healthier for Euopeans. The lowering of the death rate must therefore be ascribed to the expansion of the French empire rather than to the achievements of medical science.

Repatriated slaves and Christian missionaries introduced Christian marriage into colonial Lagos, and spread new values about polygyny and conjugal relationships and roles. Women among the educated elite strove to marry in church and conform to foreign marital norms, in part because Christianity, European education, and colonial legal and economic changes had altered their opportunities. When they embraced Christian marriage, elite women sacrificed the autonomy and economic independence of illiterate Yoruba women for the privileges associated with membership in the elite. As elite women experienced disappointment and vulnerability created by trying to conform to foreign ideals, some began rethinking aspects of Christian marriage, particularly the wife's economic dependence.

This paper attempts to gather together information on agricultural labour in the production of cash crops in Ghana. The transition from slave and other bonded labour in the nineteenth century to wage labour in the twentieth is explored. The nature of agricultural labour in palm oil is compared to that in the production of subsequent exports, such as rubber (produced primarily on plantations) and cocoa (produced on Ghanaian-owned smallholdings). The questions of conditions of service, recruitment and sources of labour are considered historically. The preference of workers for agricultural labour is discussed, and compared to recruitment for mining and other industry.

Using the factors of family structure examined by Audrey Richards in a well-known essay, this article suggests that a more productive concept for the historical study of Central Africa than either the unique tribe or a group of societies identified by their rule of descent may be the lineage mode of production, in the restricted sense developed by P. P. Rey. Analysis of the organization of political, economic and ritual functions among the BaKongo, BaSuku, BaPende and other Zairean peoples shows the complementarity and flexibility of patrilateral and materilateral relationships. It is suggested that the greater ‘quantity’ of social structure exhibited by coastal peoples, as well as their matrilineal development, may result from the prolonged effects of the great Congo trade, especially the trade in slaves, modifying an old and generally bilateral system organized by networks of permanent matrimonial alliance. This system is characteristic of the Congo basin, Zimbabwe and Angola.

The rise of Lagos, which became the principal port of the ‘Slave Coast’ at the end of the eighteenth century, can only be understood by reference to the interaction between the European Atlantic trade and the indigenous canoe-borne trade along the coastal lagoons. European traders in the sixteenth century used the Lagos channel and the lagoon to approach the Ijebu kingdom, where slaves and cloth were purchased, but this trade lapsed in the seventeenth century. The Lagos settlement originated as a fishing hamlet, but was occupied as a military base by Benin around the end of the sixteenth century. Benin expansion to the west may have been designed to prevent European trade with Ijebu, in the interests of a Benin monopoly. Lagos remained formally subject to Benin until the nineteenth century, but the decline of Benin power in the eighteenth century left it effectively independent. European sources of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries attest trade in cloth and slaves passing along the lagoons through Lagos to Allada and Whydah in the west. Although this pattern of trade has been assumed to date back to pre-European times, it was more probably a consequence of the European presence, and more specifically of the westward drift of European interest along the coast from Benin after the sixteenth century. European traders began to show an active interest in the lagoon trade to the east of Allada in the early eighteenth century, and again began to explore the possibility of using the Lagos channel to bapproach the inland lagoons. Lagos developed as an Atlantic port from the 1760s, exporting slaves and Ijebu cloth, but its importance was limited by its remoteness from any major source of slaves. Its emergence as a major port in the late eighteenth century was due to the disruption of slave shipments from ports further west by military pressure from Dahomey, which led to the diversion of slave supplies eastward along the lagoons for shipment from Lagos.

Several recent studies have examined the impact of the First World War on the people, and rulers – alien and indigenous - of West Africa. Diverse societies responded in a variety of ways to a situation in which extraordinary demands from the colonial rulers - of which direct military recruitment was only one - were often accompanied by administrative and military contraction at the local level.

This paper examines the way in which wartime conditions in the Zouaragu (Zuarungu) and Bawku districts of what is now upper Ghana exposed the weakness of the indigenous administrative structure recently constructed by the British. Here, in many instances, chiefs had been imposed, or at least had had their powers qualitatively changed and substantially increased, in societies that were traditionally organized on a kinship basis. The War seemed to provide an opportunity for an overthrow of this structure, which had enabled many of the chiefs to establish harshly exploitative relations with their subjects. An upsurge of disobedience to chiefly orders was followed in the Bongo area by a land dispute which flared into disturbances in which a constable was killed. These disturbances and an incident in the neighbouring Bawku District were taken as a sign of revolt and ruthlessly crushed by a local administration intent on teaching an unforgettable lesson.

Governor Clifford in Accra anatomized the inadequacies of administrative control and condemned his officers' brutal response to the disturbances, but offered little in the way of suggestions for the reform of the chieftaincy system despite clear indications that local hostility was directed more against it than against colonial rule per se. Neither were reform proposals forthcoming from the Northern Territories administration. Thus the severity of the British response to popular opposition to chiefly power was a factor in enabling some chiefs to continue as ‘spoilers’ rather than ‘fathers’ of their people even after the introduction of formal Indirect Rule in the 1930s had nominally broadened popular participation in local administration.

It has long been held by historians of the Gold Coast and more recently by historians of slavery and emancipation in Africa that the formal abolition of slavery by the British colonial government in 1874 had little discernible impact on that institution per se or on the socio-economic and political status quo in the late nineteenth-century Gold Coast. This was so, it is argued, largely because the relatively benign nature of domestic slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast tended to minimize the demand for emancipation from among the servile population in the Gold Coast after formal emancipation in 1874. A wider survey of the available evidence and a reappraisal of official sources suggest, however, that not only is this view of the consequences of abolition misleading, but it has also helped to perpetuate some equally misleading myths concerning the nature and role of slavery and other forms of servitude in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast. What is demonstrated is that the servile response to abolition in the Gold Coast was much greater than historians have hitherto believed and that this was a spontaneous reaction on the part of this class against what were increasingly exploitative and oppressive forms of slavery and servitude in the nineteenth century. The latter, it is shown, was a prominent by-product of the process of socio-economic change in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast which has all but been ignored by historians, most of whom have been taken in by what is described as the official mythology of domestic slavery in the Gold Coast. This official mythology which was rooted in the belief that slavery and other forms of servitude in the Gold Coast were domestic or patriarchal in character and relatively benign in practice was, it is argued, simply an attempt to rationalize the retention of an institution which was essential to the operation of the system of legitimate trade in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast. The extent of the servile response to formal emancipation in 1874 was a surprise, however, to inexperienced British officials on the Gold Coast who had come to believe in their own mythology, so that abolition presented a short-lived crisis for the British colonial administration. Successive colonial administrations on the Gold Coast, therefore, were forced to all but nullify the operation of the abolition ordinances of 1874 until the advent of a colonial economy after 1900 made traditional forms of involuntary labour expendable.

The Gold Coast (modern Ghana) was severely attacked by the influenza pandemic of 1918–19. The disease was introduced by shipping along the southern coast and overland across the northern frontier. As was true elsewhere on the continent, the spread of influenza was greatly facilitated by the new colonial transportation network. Quarantines and other preventive measures were futile and therapy, African or British, could do no more than alleviate symptoms. Influenza struck the majority of the population, but mortality rates varied regionally and, to some extent, by occupation. Deaths were especially numerous in the far north. The influenza epidemic killed 100,000 or more people in less than six months and was almost certainly the worst short-term demographic disaster in the history of Ghana.

The article considers the changing pattern of kinship relations amongst the Kongo south of the Zaïre river and west of the plateau in the region once dominated by the nuclear Kongo kingdom. It argues that the normative pattern of kinship and family relationship was probably established in the early years of agricultural settlement by the ideology of the kanda, the exogamous matrilineal descent groups which controlled access to land. This ideology dominated family and kinship relationships as long as agricultural production was the dominant economic factor. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the evolution of the trade-based kingdom of Kongo modified the normative pattern established by the kanda, and in the late sixteenth century the acquisition of large numbers of slaves and the use of Christianity as a legitimating ideology effected more profound change. In particular, the elite developed a system of patrilineal descent categories which were used to control trade-based wealth and to organize political relationships. Freedom came to be related more to patrilineal descent category membership and less to kanda membership, whilst the economic and political position of all but the most eminent women deteriorated. When, in the late seventeenth century, changing patterns of trade caused the kingdom of Kongo to disintegrate, the Mwissikongo of the centre adopted a cognatic mode of descent which enabled them to control both agricultural and trade-based wealth. Certain eminent women seized the political opportunities afforded by the crumbling of male-dominated centres of power whilst the definition of slave and free became increasingly problematic. In the north-western province of Sonyo, increased trade-based wealth enabled the dominant patrilineal category to establish itself as a corporate group and to monopolize all positions of power. In the eighteenth century power disintegrated throughout the region and land again became the primary economic asset. The ruling elite sought legitimation in terms of the ideology and descent system of the kanda. The former slave groups sought to establish rights in the same way. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries all groups legitimized their holding of land, primarily in terms of the ideology of the kanda and secondarily in terms of the concept of Mbanza Kongo.

In February 1918 the Gold Coast Government, on orders from the British Colonial Office, seized the holdings of the Basle Mission Trading Company, a Swiss-based firm suspected of promoting pro-German sentiment and actions within the Colony. As a result of the growing sentiment towards trusteeship and the continuing resistance to non-British activities in the Gold Coast, the properties of the company were entrusted to the Commonwealth Trust Ltd, a British firm created for this purpose. The firm was committed to providing a portion of its profits to promoting philanthropic activities among the indigenous populations. The resources of the Trading Company, valued at £558,017 in the Gold Coast and £254,383 in India, were transferred to the Commonwealth Trust at no expense whatever to the latter.

For a decade the Swiss Government protested against the confiscation of the Company as a violation of the rights of a neutral nation. In the same years the Commonwealth Trust encountered such financial difficulties that it was unable to supply any support at all for its philanthropic commitments.

By 1928 continuing international pressure, including a Swiss threat to submit their claim for arbitration before the League of Nations, led the British to restore the properties to the Trading Company owners, compensating them with £250,000 for losses suffered during the decade. The Commonwealth Trust was also reimbursed for the surrender of the properties, bringing the total cost of the restoration to £305,000.

The irony of the entire episode is that the total cost of the resolution was assigned to the Gold Coast colonial treasury, absorbing one-fourth of the total Gold Coast reserve fund. Gold Coast Council members protested that the original decision and its reversal were made by the British Government, and their consequences ought not to become burdens on the Gold Coast. Such protests were unavailing. Thus the project undertaken on the principle of trusteeship resulted in no benefit whatsoever to the indigenous population; rather the colony paid dearly for the privilege of being the object of trusteeship policy.

Until the Second World War, at least, tropical Africa constituted harsh and difficult terrain for Western capitalism — a region where financial loss, erosion of the capital base and ignominious failure were as likely for the expatriate or metropolitan firm as profitability or growth of turnover. This simple fact has been obscured in recent years both by the practice of business history which, in Africa as elsewhere, tends to concentrate upon the relative handful of enterprises which prospered and survived, and by dependency/underdevelopment theory which stresses Western capital's penetration into, and its re-ordering of, non-capitalist societies. That many European firms failed to make an effective entry, however, deserves to be reiterated, and the reasons for lack of success need closer investigation if acceptable conclusions are to be drawn about the character and consequences of European business activity in Africa. Such are the aims of the present article, which evaluates the brief history of twenty-two British companies set up to engage in rubber production in East Africa shortly before the First World War. It seeks to answer two questions — how is their presence to be explained and, more importantly, what factors frustrated their ambitions ? — and hopes to illustrate comparative international aspects of British corporate activity and investment. The failure of British rubber-planting initiatives in East Africa, it will be argued, was the obverse, and indeed a direct consequence, of successful British rubbercultivation in South and South-East Asia.

Records of Ethiopian property dealings provide insights into the affairs of Ethiopian families. They suggest further, dynamic links between property and family. Amhara rules of descent and inheritance are ambilineal. Each person reckons their ancestry equally through their father and mother and inherits property the same way. Yet, without abandoning their profession of the principles of ambilineal descent and of equal partible inheritance, the Abyssinian nobility subverted these norms, thereby creating ‘families’ out of a welter of ramifying lineages, and ‘estates’ out of disintegrating holdings. Their devices included wills and marriage endowments which privileged one sibling at the expense of others. Another device was the alaqenat, an office which functioned as the head of a family and its affairs. The alaqenat, previously unreported in the Ethiopian literature, appears in a number of documents in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries, and the article uses it to trace the affairs of one noble family over a period of six generations. Further comments are made about the links between public office and notions of property. Finally, two wider spheres are addressed. In spite of its radical ambilineality Abyssinian society reveals tendencies common to other societies based on plough agriculture, tendencies towards greater class differentiation based on the accumulation of landed property. And, unlike most other historic societies professing Christianity, Abyssinian society is marked by frequent divorce and marital instability.

Following the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of the Sudan, British unwillingness either to annex the territory or to allow its reincorporation with Egypt was given expression in the Anglo-Egyptian Agreement of 1899, under the terms of which Britain and Egypt were to rule jointly. But the ' Condominium Agreement' was in reality a device by which Britain managed and Egypt paid for the Sudan's administration. The central figure in that administration was the Governor-General, who, although formally appointed by the ruler of Egypt, was the nominee of the British government.

The development of the Governor-Generalship from its inception until the resignation of Sir John Maffey in 1934 owed less to the formal arrangements set down in the Condominium Agreement than it did to relations between the Sudan Government and successive British representatives in Cairo, and to changes in the Governor-General's own position within the Sudan Government. He remained pre-eminent throughout the period under review, but by 1934 his relative independence of Cairo was balanced by the power, within the Sudan Government, of a Council of senior officials.