The dates and circumstances of early references to Jenne have led historians to conclude that the city originated relatively late in time. It is widely believed that the city developed simultaneously with Timbuktu in the mid-thirteenth century as an artifact of trans-Saharan trade. Persistent oral traditions of the foundation of Jenne in the eighth century are generally discounted.

Recent archaeological excavations at the ancestral site of Jenne-jeno have established that iron-using and manufacturing peoples were occupying the site in the third century B.C. The settlement proceeded to grow rapidly during the first millennium a.d., reaching its apogee between a.d. 750 and 1100, at which time the settlement exceeded 33 hectares (82 acres) in size. The archaeological data are supported by the results of site survey within a 1,100-square-kilometre region of Jenne's traditional hinterland. During the late first millennium a.d., several nearby settlements comparable in size to Jenne-jeno existed, and the density of rural settlements may have been as great as ten times the density of villages in the hinterland today.

Evidence from excavation and survey indicates that Jenne participated in inter-regional exchange relations far earlier than previously admitted. The stone and iron in the initial levels at Jenne-jeno were imported from outside the Inland Delta; levels dated to c.a.d. 400 yield copper, presumably from distant Saharan sources. The importance of the abundant staple products of Jenne's rural hinterland, including rice, fish and fish oil, is examined in a reassessment of the extent of inter-regional commerce and the emergence of urbanism during the first millennium a.d. Jenne-jeno may have been a principal participant in the founding of commercial centres on the Saharan contact zone of the Bend of the Niger, rather than a product of the luxury trade serviced by those centres.

There is a general consensus among West African historians that the Island of Gold, known to Arab geographers as Wangara and to European cartographers as Palolus, refers to the Bambuk/Bure goldfields. This article examines the evidence for an alternative identification of the Island of Gold with the Inland Niger Delta, where the place name Wangara would be derived from Soninke long-distance traders (Wangara). Many of the details on the Island of Gold provided in the original sources can be shown to apply more convincingly to the Inland Niger Delta than to Bambuk/Bure. Until now, this hypothesis has not received serious consideration, partly because of the belief that the Inland Delta and its most important entrepot, Jenne, did not play a significant role in long-distance trade networks until the fourteenth century. This is contradicted by archaeological evidence for a major urban centre at Jenne-jeno by 900 a.d.

The existence in the later first millennium a.d. of the Soninke town of Jenne-jeno, and the oral traditions which maintain that the western Inland Delta was the heartland of the Soninke trade diaspora, combine to indicate that commerce along the Middle Niger was substantial by the early second millennium. Indirect confirmation of this trading activity is found both in al-Bakri's discussion of riverine trade routes along the upper Niger Bend and in al-Idrisi's account of the Wangara along the Middle Niger. The continuing identification of the Inland Niger Delta region as the Island of Gold from the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries implies that part of this trade involved gold. A possible early gold source in Lobi is suggested.

Many observers of Merina history have suggested that the organization of labour required to build and maintain irrigation works for paddy rice growing formed the basis of Merina monarchy. Though little direct evidence is available, inferences from land-use models and consideration of oral traditions and written accounts help to explain why irrigated riziculture became popular and how it spread through the central highlands to Imerina.

Rice had been cultivated on the east coast of Madagascar for centuries and reached Imerina through the southern plateau but the hydraulic technology of Merina paddy rice growing arose from local needs from the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries. As swidden farmers exhausted the forests, paddy rice cultivation and water management systems attending it became increasingly important. Though irrigated riziculture enhanced the value of co-operative labour among hitherto isolated groups within Imerina, it cannot be seen as the direct cause of the monarchy's authority. It is suggested instead that the sacredness of land and the accumulation of rights in newly irrigated land by those who controlled water hastened the evolution of a rigid social hierarchy which exalted a few and subjugated the rest.

Research over the past five years or so indicates that in north-western and central Kenya and northern Tanzania pastoralism is much older than previously supposed. Radiocarbon dates from the central Rift valley and the Serengeti plains suggest the presence of domestic cattle by about the sixth millennium b.c. Early pottery traditions in the central Rift valley and around Lake Turkana have been more precisely identified. A continuing research project in the southern Sudan has revealed early pottery with possible northern affinities and rouletted pottery of the first as well as second millennia a.d. In north-western Tanzania, iron would still seem to have been smelted as early as the sixth century b.c. The use of iron, and perhaps of rouletted ware, by pastoral peoples in central Kenya is now dated to the late first millennium a.d. In Malawi, food-production would still seem to have been introduced early in that millennium, but the introduction of cattle has now been dated to the third or fourth century a.d., some centuries earlier than had previously been supposed. In Zambia, the surprisingly early dates for Situmpa pottery have apparently been confirmed. On the east coast, excavations at Hafun, Mogadishu and Manda have enabled more precise dating of the periods during which these ancient ports flourished, while a comprehensive survey programme has refined our knowledge of monumental sites along the Kenya coast.

This essay questions the generally held view that the northern Nguni were not involved in the slave trade. It is shown that elements of the Ngwane (Swazi), Ndwandwe (Gaza and Jere) and possibly Mthethwa (Zulu) confederations were involved in the sale of slaves captured in the hinterlands of Lourenço Marques and Inhambane. In the 1840s the terms of the slave trade turned against suppliers as British and anti-slavery activities caused a rise in slavers' overheads, a surfeit of saleable slaves on the coast and a consequent price drop. The export of slaves through Lourenço Marques and Inhambane became unprofitable as the two trading posts were unable to compete with the safer embarkation points north of the Zambezi. As the export of slaves from the coastal settlements south of the Zambezi declined, the trade from this area took on a new form as engagé labour for the Indian Ocean islands and as non-contracted and unprotected ‘migrant’ labour for Natal and Kimberley. Slave suppliers ceased to sell slaves for export through Lourenço Marques and Inhambane because far higher prices could be obtained from Transvaal Boers and from domestic purchasers. But it was the rise of domestic slavery in the Gaza state that finally ended the maritime export of slaves as by the 1860s, with the loss of labour through warfare and increasingly through migrant labour, it was more profitable to use slaves locally than to export them.

Domestic slavery in the Gaza state is treated as a dynamic social relationship in which the slave, as against the kinsman, had no rights and was consequently entirely dependent upon his master for his means of production and reproduction. It was this dependence which resulted in the extreme exploitation defined here as slavery. Slavery should not be seen merely in a functionalist sense as a form of socio-political incorporation aimed at expanding the size of the ruling group. In a society controlled by kinship rights and obligations, slavery provided a man with a means of accumulating wealth and attracting followers. Thus slave labour was realized in the form of repatriated wages; female children born of concubines provided their fathers with brideprices while male children had limited kinship rights and were therefore more exploitable than ‘legal’ offspring. Slave labour also released Gaza Nguni women from agricultural work and allowed them to concentrate on the child-producing and child-raising activities that ensured a putative Gaza Nguni ‘purity’ and, consequently, the perpetuation of the exploitative structure of Gaza society.

In a society that had no concept of ‘free’ labour, i.e. labour freed from its former means and relations of production, the distinction between slave and non-slave labour was often blurred, and a disadvantaged kinsman could hypothetically be materially worse off than a slave. Zulu and Swazi forms of servility are examined and are shown to have been only marginally different from Gaza slavery. From this it is deduced that Gaza slavery had its roots in the relations of production taken northwards from the Nguni area. Slavery is seen as a new and more exploitative social relationship that arose in response to the emergence of new forms of production in southern Mozambique.

The role of the ‘Lower Zambezi complex’ which developed out of Portuguese and African interaction is examined in the light of recent research in the Gwembe valley, an area of the Middle Zambezi on the far periphery of Portuguese penetration from the east coast. The origins of Lower Zambezi contacts with the peoples of southern Zambia are traced to the late seventeenth century and their development and expansion are examined, on the basis of oral tradition and written sources, through the reopening of Zumbo in 1862, the defeat of the Ndebele at the Kafue confluence around 1870 and the consequent establishment of permanent trading posts in the Gwembe, down to the late 1880s when the increasingly disruptive activities of the Chikunda and their muzungu leaders led to general and successful resistance against them in the form of an armed rising. The effects of the ‘Lower Zambezi complex’ are related to the development of political authority and the introduction of technical and cultural innovations in the Gwembe. Chikunda and muzungu activities are shown to have differed in their effects between the Gwembe and their much better-known and more destructive penetration of the Luangwa valley in the 1880s, partly because of the decentralized nature of Gwembe society.

This paper reinterprets the invasion of Songhay by the Sa'did Sultan Mulāy al-Mansūr's mercenaries led by the Pasha Judar. The battle of Tondibi in March 1591, and the subsequent defeat of the Askiya Isḥāq II, marked a turning point in both Moroccan and West African history. The paper assumes a strong relation between the invasion, the Mediterranean problems and the commercial needs of the Sa'did. Al-Mansūr wanted to regain control of the gold trade to stimulate the economy of his kingdom. However, his expeditionary forces got bogged down in the fly-infested southern swamps because of an unexpected protracted war of resistance led by the Askiya Nūḥu. Revolts in the cities and the countryside led to repression and the exile of a group of prominent ‘ulamā’ in 1594. The Moroccans also suffered from a lack of administrative coordination as demonstrated by the competition between the governor and the treasurer. All these problems culminated in a disaster. By 1612, unable to match the mobility of the resisters, the musketeers refused to do battle with the Songhay archers. Finally, the qā' id AH al-Talamsānī deposed the Pasha, and the Sultan began to lose control of his troops. As Songhay and Morocco experienced serious crises in the seventeenth century, Europe's domination of international trade became uncontested. The invasion swallowed up both the conqueror and the conquered.

The Vai of northwestern Liberia speak a Northern Mande language, fairly closely related to Manding. Previous attempts to date the breakaway of the Vai from their Manding homeland have been unconvincing. The most we can say is that they probably reached the coast more than 500 years ago. The leaders of the Mani or Kquoja invasion of Sierra Leone in the mid-sixteenth century almost certainly spoke a contemporary version of Vai.

There is little evidence of a direct connexion between the movement of the Vai towards the coast and that of the Ligbi towards eastern Ivory Coast, despite linguistic similarities. More probably the Vai entered present-day Sierra Leone in company with the Kono. Traditions that the Kono were ‘left behind’ sound misleading: it is more likely that the Kono, Vai and speakers of the now extinct ‘ Dama’ language formed a continuous band from eastern Sierra Leone to the sea, cutting off the Gola and Kisi from other Mel speakers. Later (perhaps before the mid-seventeenth century) this band must have been split by the westward movement of Southwestern Mande speakers.

The ‘migration’ of the Vai need not have involved a mass exodus or conquest. What was probably involved was the gradual creation of trade corridors, with a few Northern Mande speakers resident on the coast and a large number carrying salt, dried fish and other wares from the coast towards the head of the Niger. Although the corridors were eventually to some extent disrupted, the Vai language survived near the coast, because of its importance in trade and because links with the Manding were never entirely severed.

The present paper is one of a series of essays in the social history of the West African forest kingdom of Asante (presently situated in the Republic of Ghana). It concentrates on an examination of the phenomena of marriage and adultery in the Asante past, and it seeks to locate the fundamental subject of relations between the sexes within the broader framework of the superordinate relationship between the state and the social formation. Anthropological and historical work on Asante is reviewed in the light of these concerns, and an attempt is made to identify and to describe some of the crucial concepts and imperatives embedded in the ideology of the state. The argument is adduced throughout that the state was interventionist in relation to the social formation, and that it was the state that simultaneously defined the rules making for differentiation and presided over (and monitored) the rewards and penalties surrounding this process. The accumulation (the consumption) of women is interpreted as being one strand in the economics of power and differentiation; similarly, compensatory damages for adultery (ayɛfere sika) and the phenomenon of ‘child marriage’ (ɔyere akoda) are interpreted as indicators of the relations of power between men. The paper concludes with the presentation of a small sample of career histories; these are intended to convey some idea of the interventionist power of the state in peoples' lives. Underlying and informing the detailed matter of the paper is a general concern with the understanding of ideology and thought – an exercise in reconstruction that is a sine qua non for the writing of Asante (and African) social history.

The utilization of a relatively unused source, the Customs Bills of Entry, enables the structure of the British side of the West African palm oil trade to be studied in detail. Three main developments emerged in the period from 1830 to 1855 when the introduction of regular steamer services radically altered the trade. Firstly, Liverpool's pre-eminence as the main British palm oil port began to be challenged by Bristol and London; secondly, Britain's reliance on the Niger Delta as a source of supply appears to have proportionately declined, and thirdly, new traders entered the trade, especially after 1840, and challenged the hegemony of the older, established merchants. These structural changes suggest that the organization of the British side of the oil trade, hitherto controlled by a few large Liverpool traders, was breaking down from the 1840s and that this contributed to increased tension and rivalry among British traders in West Africa. This in turn helps to explain the development of the aggressive behaviour between British traders and African middlemen, noted in the Niger Delta in the 1860s, which led to the subsequent appeals for British imperial intervention.

Salt has been produced in Ghana since at least the sixteenth century at many coastal sites. By the nineteenth century commercial production was concentrated in the lagoons east of Accra, and especially at Songor Lagoon just west of Ada. Here the Ada Manche and the priesthood controlled production. Much salt consumed in Asante and further north came from Accra, Ningo and Songor, and an increasing proportion went up the Volta River by canoe. The share of salt trade in the hands of the Ada traders is reflected in their virtual monopoly of the river traffic and their settlement in trading communities along the river. The British attempted to regulate and tax the trade, but market forces were more important in determining price. Salt from Ada was generally preferred to imported salt and to salt from other local sources, but the alternative of imported salt helped regulate the local prices. The importance of Daboya as a source of salt seems to have been somewhat exaggerated. Salt from Ada continued to predominate in much of Ghana in the twentieth century, but the river traffic was gradually replaced by motor transport, and the hold of the Adas on the distributive network broken. Salt continued to be produced by traditional methods at Songor until quite recently. It is still produced by traditional means for a fairly wide sale at Keta Lagoon, east of the Volta.

Archaeological evidence and historical accounts have been used to examine the impact of trade and ecology on the decline of West African iron industries. Environmental changes including an increasingly desiccating climatic shift and widespread deforestation as a direct result of fuel procurement over centuries of iron-smelting and European coastal exploitation, seriously affected the survivability of these industries. While the increasing importation of European iron bars and other manufactured goods necessitated a certain amount of technological innovation, the only viable long-term response and adaptation to the ecological devastation became the increased reliance on imported supplies of iron.

The Netherlands was almost the only country in Western Europe which took no share of Africa in the course of Partition. This is at first sight surprising. For centuries the Dutch had had a presence on the Gold Coast, while at the Cape they had created the most important white colony in sub-Saharan Africa. True, the Netherlands had given up both possessions before the Partition, but by that time the Dutch were the chief traders on the Congo estuary, which after all was a major flash-point giving rise to the Partition. Curiously enough, no one has sought to examine this seeming paradox. It is therefore the aim of this article to consider the relationship between Dutch commercial expansion and the origins of Partition, and to place this question in the context of the Netherlands' principal imperial interests, in South-East Asia.

In Angola, climatic instability contributed to maintaining a precarious balance between food resources, population and disease long before the nineteenth century. Periods of exceptionally irregular rainfall, lasting several years, were preceded or accompanied by plagues of locusts which caused famines at least once every decade. The coastal lowland and the extreme south were especially vulnerable. Prolonged hunger crises led to malnutrition, lowered resistance to disease and epidemic outbreaks, especially of smallpox. A rhythm of drought and smallpox can be discerned in Angola, at least since the seventeeth century. From the 1830s the gradual decline of the overseas slave trade and rise of commerce in raw materials and cash crops brought important demographic changes. These contributed to the worsening famines and epidemic crises of the late nineteenth century. Commercial instability and rural depopulation hindered the growth of Portuguese plantation prosperity. Soon after, however, similar crises aided Portuguese military conquest in Angola by weakening African ability to mobilize effective resistance. In the twentieth century malnutrition continued to be the most widespread problem of Angola's Africans and on occasion it drove them to revolt.

La trypanosomiase ou maladie du sommeil existe a l'état endémique en Afrique tropicale et done en Côte d'Ivoire où elle a constitué de 1900 à 1945 un grave danger. La lutte contre cette endémie a connu deux périodes: la première periode de 1900 à 1938 est une phase de découvertes avec une tentative de lutte organisée en 1931, mais qui fut un échec; la deuxième période 1938–1945 fut plus fructueuse avec la création du Service général autonome de la maladie du sommeil qui parvint à circonscrire l'endémie. Plusieurs hypothèses ont été avancées pour expliquer la diffusion de la trypanosomiase pendant la période coloniale. On a mis en cause tour a tour la pacification et les déplacements de population. En réalité cette diffusion ne s'exerce que lorsque se produit des modifications profondes des milieux physiques et humains à la fois. En ce sens, la mise en valeur coloniale a joué un rôle de premier plan.

Joseph Miller has argued that the ‘Jaga’ invasion of Kongo in 1568 was primarily an internal rebellion supported by people from Matamba or from Makoko and the Pool. In this article I suggest that the Jaga were more probably dislocated Kongo or Tio from the lower middle Kwango. They were the ancestors of the seventeenth-century ‘Muyaka’, who raided slaves for the Makoko market. Their invasion of Kongo probably began as slave raiding. It continued as an attempt to break the Makoko king's monopoly of slave trade outlets by gaining direct access to the European traders. The invaders succeeded in temporarily overthrowing Kongo for two reasons. Firstly, Kongo was generally ill adapted to withstand sudden invasion. Secondly, the Kongo ruling elite was divided while undergoing radical political and social change. The restoration of Kongo by Portuguese forces had two important consequences. Firstly, it confirmed and advanced the changes in the ruling elite which had begun in the early sixteenth century; it thereby laid the foundation for a monopoly of the throne by a slave-based patrilineal royal segment descended from Afonso I. Secondly, the restoration facilitated the development of a new cloth-trade route from Okango through São Salvador to Luanda which compensated the mani Kongo for his loss of coastal monopoly on slave exports. This new trade enabled Kongo to suvive economically and politically into the later seventeenth century.

A. G. Hopkins has observed that where new plants and seeds were adopted it was because they were seen as useful additions to the existing range of foods, or because they were regarded as good substitutes to the crops they displaced. This view is confirmed by a close study of the changing food patterns on the Lower Niger since 1520. Prior to 1919, cassava was hardly cultivated on the Lower Niger even though it was widely grown in the neighbouring Niger Delta. This was essentially because the people of the Lower Niger did not consider cassava as a good substitute for yams. However, after 1900 the Lower Niger became the scene of wars of resistance against the imposition of British rule. These wars not only resulted in a constant disruption of the agricultural activities of the local people, they also caused food shortages. The situation was worsened by the First World War and by the pandemic of influenza of 1918–19 which drained the nation's productive capacity and caused an unprecedented food scarcity. Under the circumstances, the people of the Lower Niger were constrained to accept cassava, at least as a supplement to the dwindling stocks of food. And as soon as it was realized that the new crop enjoyed a number of advantages over yams, its cultivation rapidly spread to all parts of the Lower Niger where it began to threaten the older staples. The speed with which this innovation was adapted clearly points to the degree of the food crisis that accompanied the pandemic influenza of 1918–19.

The distinguishing feature of the Malagasy slave trade in the nineteenth century was the co-existence of two competitive slave networks, the one feeding Malagasy slaves to meet the demand of long-distance and regional markets in the western Indian Ocean, and the other channelling Malagasy war captives and East African slaves on to the markets of Imerina. The export of slaves from Madagascar had long existed, but the import of slaves was a new and distinctly nineteenth-century phenomenon, the result of the rise of the Merina empire, whose economy was based on a huge, unremunerated and servile labour force. As the empire expanded, so its labour requirements grew, to conflict sharply with the increasing demand for labour on the neighbouring plantation islands as they shifted over to the production of sugar. Creole merchants found themselves obliged to find alternative labour supplies, and from the 1830s they were moving rapidly down the west coast of Madagascar, where they purchased slaves from chiefs independent of Merina control. Until the outbreak of the Franco-Merina war of 1882–5, the slave-trade networks remained remarkably stable, despite local rivalries. This was due largely to the presence of the Arab Antalaotra, an experienced body of middlemen, and the Indian Karany who supplied the capital for the trade. The war effectively broke the power of the Merina regime, and as the imperial economy crumbled, so security of trade collapsed across the island. Though the disruption of legitimate commerce initially spurred the slave trade, it also strengthened creole calls for French intervention. This occurred in 1895, and the following year the French authorities abolished slavery in Madagascar. This, and the effective military occupation of the island by the French, reduced the Malagasy slave trade to a trickle by the first years of the twentieth century.

European mining companies in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast failed because they were unable to solve the problem of ‘primitive accumulation’. Their failure to solve the problem of primitive accumulation was attributable to a variety of factors, including financial manipulations by ‘share-pushers’ and ‘concession-mongers’, managerial and technological inadequacies, and the refusal of the colonial state to employ that degree of force which would have been necessary to overcome the resistance by Africans to the sale of their labour-power to the mines. The resistance mounted by African gold diggers was such that they not only refused to sell their labour-power to the mines, but also out-produced the European mining companies for most of the period under review, while those few Africans who did sell their labour-power to the mines formed a small and highly transient labour force which engaged in a largely individualistic form of resistance characterized by their consistent refusal to work at the pace demanded by management, and to turn over to management the entirety of their day's output. Thus not only did the resistance of Africans contribute to the failure to solve the problem of primitive accumulation, and to the consequent weakness of the European mining companies, but conversely the weakness of the European mining companies contributed to the structuring of the mines'labour force, and to the forms of resistance waged by mineworkers.

The study of migrant labour in Africa has tended to emphasize social form rather than historical context. This study of the immense migrant labour force that worked the Northern Nigerian tin mines is placed in the context of the ongoing subsumption of labour and existing social relationships by capital. Colonial conquest was required for the establishment of tin mining in Nigeria on a capitalist basis to serve the industrial needs of the West. Pre-colonial social organization prevented the release of sufficient labour for this purpose. After conquest, a migrant labour force was built up in conjuncture with a growing reserve army of labour by means of cash taxation, penetration of the market, weakening of slavery and state use of forced labour. In the second decade of the twentieth century there was substantial pressure from mineowners for the colonial regime to institute Rhodesian-style labour recruitment methods, but this was ultimately rejected because of the costs involved, the desire to encourage cash crop growth and the overarching aim of social stability. As a result, it was largely market forces which threw up the pool of labour that worked the mines, notably from the cash crop poor parts of Northern Nigeria and neighbouring French colonies. Initially, migrant labour was the most satisfactory option for many Northern Nigerian peasants, whose wages earned most in the pre-World War I era. The purchasing power of a miner's wage tended to decline, but social forces continued to throw up cheap labour. In World War II, the state instituted forced labour to mine tin, but the scheme was expensive, unproductive and opposed by business. The 1940s represented the nadir of worker poverty and the war was followed by a period of heightened social and political resistance to capital and the state. The tin mines both helped to cause and profited from the decay of the older mode of production in Northern Nigeria.