This essay examines issues of ageing and old age in Xhosa-speaking communities to c. 1860. Drawing primarily on records of the Wesleyan Methodist and London Missionary societies, the article examines the construction of Xhosa ageing, old age and death in missionary writings. The primary medium of missionary reflection was the figure of the ‘Abandoned Mother’, modelled on contemporary British metaphors, that represented yet another atrocity story for legitimating the mission enterprise and the emerging colonial regime. It also argues that there were fundamental contrasts in the images of ageing and dying between those of the Xhosa and those of the missionaries. Though older persons found certain themes in the Christian message attractive, they preferred the local cultural model of ageing, old age and death.

Using a combination of oral tradition and written documents, the authors show that Benin’s civil war was a fundamental transformation of political structure, and not simply an isolated struggle. Before 1640, Benin was centrally governed by its king with the assistance of a royally appointed administration. Difficulties in succession, coupled with changing trading patterns, allowed the administration to gain some independence and then to challenge the kings, taking away some power. The civil war matched different levels of the administration and the kings against each other, and transformed Benin from a centrally governed to a more collectively governed kingdom.

This essay examines the impact of the Atlantic slave trade on stateless societies, focusing on Balanta populations of present-day Guinea-Bissau. It demonstrates that some decentralized groups located on the ‘slaving frontiers’ of states managed not only to survive but also to thrive. In so doing, it shows how Balanta changed their settlement patterns and crop production techniques in response to threats posed by the slave raiding armies of Kaabu. From the mid-seventeenth century, Balanta produced and traded large quantities of paddy rice by organizing workers into age grades.

Most studies of the Columbian Exchange have not appreciated the significance of Africans in establishing plant domesticates in the Americas. African plants traversed the Atlantic as provisions aboard slave ships and slaves proved instrumental in their establishment in the New World as preferred food staples. This paper identifies the diverse crops domesticated in Africa, the intercontinental plant exchanges between Africa and Asia that occurred in the millennia before the Columbian Exchange and the role of African indigenous knowledge in establishing rice in the Americas.

The region of Souroudougou played a dynamic role in the regional slave trade of the western Niger Bend during the nineteenth century, supplying slaves to neighboring states. A number of mechanisms, termed here ‘indirect linkages’, connected sources of slaves in Souroudougou to the broader regional slave trade. These took the form of commercial activity by Muslim mercantile groups, banditry and alliances formed between neighboring states and local power brokers in Souroudougou. At the same time, the growing slave trade triggered important internal processes of change in the local social landscape, termed here the ‘espace de compétition’. In particular, heightened individual and group competition transformed established codes of behavior and social networks.

During the British colonial period a substantial young African population emerged in Dar es Salaam. Both colonial officials and African elders viewed this with dismay. They felt the resulting demoralisation of African youth posed a threat to both (African) authority and (colonial) order. However, measures aimed at addressing the ramifications of this phenomenon were mostly unsuccessful. Ironically, whilst British colonial policy aimed to keep African youth quiescent in rural, gerontocratic, tribal administrations, colonialism in fact provided the context in which both rapid urbanization and generational tension occurred. These continued to occur after independence; and it is argued that TANU politicians not only inherited the problems associated with the administration of the Tanganyikan capital, but that their responses were influenced by European and ‘elite’ African attitudes of the colonial era.

This article explores political tensions between successive nineteenth-century rulers of the inland delta of the Niger in central Mali (the Fulbe Diina of Hamdullahi and the Futanke successors of al-Hajj Umar) and the pastoral interests of the Fulbe chiefdoms on their eastern periphery, in a region known as the Hayre. A close study of changing forms of local governance and natural resource management demonstrates that although different strategies were employed by the Fulbe and Futanke states to control the Hayre, the internal dynamics of the region can only partly be explained by the influence of these central powers.

This article, based on a review of the relevant literature, argues that the analyses of Andrew Hubbell and Walter Hawthorne can be extended to a general interpretation of the impact of the slave trade on decentralized societies. First, decentralized societies usually defended themselves effectively, forcing slavers both to extend their networks further into the interior and to devise new ways of obtaining slaves. Second, agents of the slave trade were often successful in developing linkages within targeted societies that exploited tensions and hostilities within them. In the process, the prey often became predators, but predators that captured people like themselves.

State-controlled cocoa marketing was introduced in the Gold Coast during the Second World War and has had lasting impact. Most accounts of this change have emphasized the influence of metropolitan interests and ideas more conducive to state involvement in colonial economies. Although they explain the new found metropolitan willingness to ‘supply’ financial and administrative backing for state-controlled economic institutions, they neglect the sources of the Gold Coast government’s ‘demand’ for those institutions. I argue that pressures on the government to mitigate domestic social conflict caused by volatility in the world economy are crucial to understanding the shift to controlled cocoa marketing.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, European missionaries in southern Africa sought to establish their intellectual and moral authority over Africans and propagate the tenets of Christianity. Men like Jacob Döhne, Robert Moffat, John Colenso, Henry Callaway and others viewed a knowledge of African languages as key to disclosing ‘the secrets of national character’, to the translation and transmittal of ideas about the Christian ‘God’, and to accepting the ‘literal truth’ of the Bible. Africans, especially the Zulu king, Dingane, disputed these teachings in discussions about the existence of God, suitable indigenous names for such a being (including uThixo, modimo, and unkulunkulu), and his attributes (all-powerful, or merely old), arguing for the significance of metaphor rather than literalness in understanding the world.

Mali's Office du Niger was conceived on a monumental scale to produce cotton for the French textile industry after the First World War. Undaunted by the conspicuous absence of both manpower and a viable crop, Émile Bélime, the scheme's originator and presiding genius, believed colonial authorities could compel people from all over French West Africa to settle there. Under pressure from Paris, local administrators became his recruiting agents, forcibly resettling some 30,000 Africans by 1945, when the colonial ministry privately declared the scheme an unqualified failure. In 1960, France recycled the project as a prototype of disinterested aid to a developing country.

The use of people as pawns to underpin credit was widespread in western Africa during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This study examines where and when pawns were used in commercial transactions involving European slave merchants in the period c. 1600–1810. It is shown that European merchants relied on pawnship as an instrument of credit protection in many places, though not everywhere. Europeans apparently did not hold pawns at Ouidah (after 1727), at Bonny or on the Angolan coast. Nonetheless, the reliance on pawnship elsewhere highlights the influence of African institutions on the development of the slave trade.

During the early years of white administration in Southern Rhodesia, few whites spoke the local vernaculars. The state used those few, largely traders and farmers, to translate and interpret. Members of the Native Affairs Department were expected to learn ‘on the job’. However, by the early 1920s, poor language abilities in the civil services, combined with growing segregationist tendencies in the face of African competition, prompted the state to reconsider whites’ knowledge of the vernaculars. The issue raised important questions about defining the boundary between ‘natives’ and ‘civilized peoples’, interactions between white and African communities, and the long-term project for the state.

Census and other demographic data are used to estimate the volume of the illegal slave trade to Mauritius and the Seychelles from Madagascar and the East African coast between 1811 and c. 1827. The structure and dynamics of this illicit traffic, as well as governmental attempts to suppress it, are also discussed. The Mauritian and Seychellois trade is revealed to have played a greater role in shaping Anglo-Merina and Anglo-Omani relations between 1816 and the early 1820s than previously supposed. Domestic economic considerations, together with British pressure on the trade's sources of supply, contributed to its demise.

In the early colonial period the frontier towns of Kayes and Medine on the Upper Senegal River were home to a community of Muslim originaires of the four communes of Senegal. The article examines this group's efforts to establish and maintain a Muslim tribunal in Kayes, thus preserving a space for their privilege and identity within the French colonial system. But while their appeals to the colonial administration were successful in 1905, a 1912 revision of the legal system took away their privilege and made Muslim originaires constituents of native courts. The article provides context for understanding the Muslims' protests, as well as the administration's changing attitudes towards them. Whereas much of the literature on the originaires has focused on their status as assimilated Africans with voting rights, this article calls attention to their identity as Muslims.

The French in West Africa remained deeply ambivalent in regard to applying naturalization policies to their African subjects. Applying a distinction between ‘citizenship’ and ‘nationality’, this article traces the history of French colonial policy from 1789 through decolonization in the 1950s. Apart from the originaires of the four communes of Senegal, who had ill-defined rights of French citizenship without ever being considered French nationals, naturalization policy in West Africa became so restrictive that no more than sixteen individuals were granted French citizenship each year between 1935 and 1949. This article uses dossiers of naturalization cases from French West Africa.

This essay explores conversion to the East African Revival as a way that Gikuyu women and men argued about moral and economic change. Rural capitalism in the 1930s and 1940s attacked the material basis of Gikuyu gender order by denying some men land. Familial stability was at stake in class formation: landless laborers could scarcely be respectable husbands. Rural elders and revivalists offered contending answers to the terrifying problem of gender trouble. Literate male elders at Tumutumu Presbyterian church used customary law and church bureaucracy to discipline young men and women. Revivalists, many of them women, talked: they confessed private sins vocally, cleansing themselves of sorcerous familial strife. Tumutumu’s debate over Revival played out as a contest between the oral politics of conversion and the bureaucratic power of church elders. Mau Mau continued the debate.