In an era when innovation in money and its various market dynamics is advancing at unprecedented speed, Western heroic optimism about the potentials that are unleashed by the logics of the world monetary system is distinctly tinged with fear: of massive outstanding deficits, whirlwind destruction of smaller economies, a roller-coaster rise on Wall Street, and sheer inappositeness to large numbers of development challenges. Old financial institutions have to create new forms of credit to address, for example, the transformation of the former socialist economies or the restoration of war-torn societies and polities. The enormous power of formal finance and its equally enormous limitations, and the contentious set of regulatory frameworks that surround both, should stimulate a new round of scholarship about what used to be termed ‘finance capital’ in modern social history.

This book is a collection of essays presented by Makerere University academicians at a Faculty of Arts conference held in April 1994 to commemorate the centenary of Uganda's foundation as a state. The papers are grouped broadly by discipline, separate sections covering history, philosophy, linguistics, literature and social and cultural studies.

This is the translation by L. Bouquiaux and Gloria Lex of Die zentralafrikanischen Wildbeuterkulturen (Studien zur Kulturkunde, 45: Wiesbaden, 1977). It deals successively with older theories about pygmies, the enumeration and classification of different groups of central African foragers, their ecology and economy, their transition from gathering to food production, their confrontation with farmers and their relations to sacred kingship. A critical evaluation of theories of culture change is also provided. This enumeration alone reveals how much the author is beholden to the points of view of Central European ethnology, even though he rejects the German Kulturkreislehre of P. W. Schmidt in which pygmy culture was treated as an, or as the, primordial human culture. This is despite the fact that Seitz stresses culture change, albeit of an orderly sort. But that does not detract from the fact, underlined in the preface to the translation (p. 12) that this is a very carefully documented reference work, an excellent entry into the forest of books about ‘pygmies’.

The core of this interesting book is an attempt to discern outlines of Kongo culture from the dictionaries left behind by the French mission to Kakongo between 1768 and 1776. These dictionaries, which are found in London, Paris, Rome, Besançon and Genoa, are both French to Kikongo and Kikongo to French and sometimes run to more than 700 pages, often containing examples of usage as well as the words themselves. Indeed, when one considers the seventeenth-century linguistic materials, such as the dictionary (utilized by Nsondé) and the catechism (not used) and the excellent modern dictionaries of Laman and Bentley, Kikongo is one of the rare African languages that can be effectively documented over a three-century period.

Knut S. Vikør's Sufi and Scholar on the Desert Edge is first and foremost a study of the founder of the Sanusiyya religious brotherhood, Muhammad b. ‘Ali al-Sanusi. It is a welcome addition to the existing literature on the Sanusiyya. Vikør's stated purpose is to locate al-Sanusi in his own religious and intellectual environment in order to separate the history of al-Sanusi and the order he founded from the Sanusiyya's later reputation as a highly politicised and anti-colonial institution. Like another recent work on the Sanusiyya, Jean-Louis Triaud's La légende noire de la Sanusiya, Sufi and Scholar seeks to explode certain myths about the early Sanusiyya, in this case the common belief that al-Sanusi was highly politicised and came into conflict with the political authorities in Fes, Mecca, Cairo and eventually Libya. In the intellectual sphere, Vikør also re-evaluates assumptions that al-Sanusi was dedicated to the jihad, and can be described as a neo-sufi and Islamic revivalist. The main source for the book is al-Sanusi's own writings, a rather neglected source which obviously provide crucial information on the book's main topic, al-Sanusi's personal religious and political outlook, a few surviving letters and then a wide range of contemporary and later European and Arabic sources.

The Waalo Kingdom's tradition of origin, also identified by the name of its principal hero Njaajan Njaay (N'Diadiane N'Diaye), is not one of the better-known narrative texts of the Western Sudan, simply because there is not much of it and few variants have circulated in print; among the latter is one collected by Brasseur in 1778 and published in Jean Boulégue, Le Grand Jolof (XIII–XVI siècle), in 1987 (absent from this volume's bibliography) and another by Bérenger-Fèraud in Recueil de Contes Populaires de la Sénégambie, 1885. The 975-line variant presented here is therefore a welcome addition to that modest but interesting body of oral literature. This one includes the original Wolof-language text and an annotated English translation by the author. Appendices include two genealogies of Njaajan Njaay, one translated from the Arabic, and another from Wolof.

Everett Jenkins' book is an admirable attempt to present a comparative chronology of events in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora. The volume is divided into five principal chapters, corresponding to the five centuries covered, each preceded by a brief introduction, and includes a short bibliography and guide to sources, as well as an extensive and comprehensive index. In addition to sections on Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, the author also includes useful sections on ‘related historical events’.