This article outlines recent developments in the archaeology of North Africa, and how our views have evolved in the four years since the previous survey. The principal changes, as such, are that in eastern North Africa, for the first time, sties have been found which fall between the Middle and Late Palaeolithic, thus beginning to close a disconcerting gap in the archaeological record; further evidence is available from the eastern and central Sahara that cattle may have been domesticated in North Africa at least as yearly as anywhere else in the world; and we now begin to have a picture of the complex series of local adaptations developed by Neolithic groups along the extreme western edge of the Sahara, which has hitherto been an archaeological vacuum. Research elsewhere in North Africa is devoted to fleshing out our still skeletal view of ways of life in the Late or Epipalaeolithic and, above all, in the Neolithic, when the use of domesticated plants or animals began to have its first effects on human societies. Archaeological research into the historical periods is less active, but parts of the central Sahara may reflect happenings in more active areas to the North, serving as refuges for the series of peoples displaced by the mainstream of history.

Linguistic studies are now advanced enough to allow us to sketch how Central Africa was settled by farmers who spoke western Bantu languages. From the second millenium B.C. onward, yarn-growers with neolithic tools spread in the rain-forests of the Cameroons. By adapting repeatedly to different environments they expanded over the whole forest area and also over the savannas and woodlands further south. These people were in search of optimal environments, quite willing to move to settle in favoured locales. Although they multiplied there, their expansion over such huge areas meant that their settlements remained very thinly scattered over Central Africa.

A thickening of settlement would only occur when new crops – the banana in the rain-forest, cereals in more open lands – allowed farmers to settle in most places. Iron-smelting was less important here than these new crops. These induced further population growth, densities rose and movements in search of the best unknown lands ceased. If the first settlement had only moderately inconvenienced the autochthones, the thickening of population led in time to their absorption, dependence on villagers, or emigration in search of ever-decreasing empty areas.

Obsidian hydration dating has been successfully applied to East African archaeological sites. Chemical sourcing of obsidian artefacts has documented long-distance movement of obsidian from the Central Rift valley. A date in the ninth or eighth century b.c. has been obtained for iron objects in the Er Renk District of the Southern Sudan. Tentative culture-historical sequences are available from excavations around the Sudd and in the Lake Besaka region of Ethiopia. Archaeological research has begun in the interior of Somalia. In northern Kenya, claims that Namoratunga II is an archaeo-astronomical site have been challenged. Excavations at Mumba-Höhle and Nasera have shed new light on the transition from the Middle to Later Stone Age in northern Tanzania perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. Knowledge of the Elmenteitan Tradition has been considerably advanced by excavations in south-western Kenya. Iron-smelting furnaces with finger-decorated bricks have been discovered in south-eastern Kenya, though not yet dated. New dates falling in the last few centuries have caused first millennium a.d. dates obtained previously for Engaruka to be rejected. Excavations at several sites on the East African coast indicate that the beginnings of coastal occupation from the Lamu archipelago to Mozambique fall in the ninth century a.d. In Malawi the Shire Highlands seem to have been settled around the tenth century a.d. Investigations of large smelting-furnaces in central Malawi indicate that they were used as concentrators of poor-quality iron ore. Excavations in rock-shelters on the southern edge of the Copperbelt have produced a culture-historical sequence spanning the last 18,000 years. The western stream of the Early Iron Age was established in the Upper Zambezi valley by about the mid fifth century a.d.

This paper examines the origin of the Askiya dynasty in Songhay, with an emphasis on the alliance between the militant ‘ulamā’ and the commanders of the northwestern province during the reign of Sonni 'Alī (1464–1492). The inadequacy of Sonni 'Alī's policy for dealing with the polarization in the cities, the increased role of the officers in these political matters, the rise of militant Islam and the division of the army: all these contributed to the downfall of the Sonni dynasty and the subsequent transfer of power to a regime inspired by Islam. The conflict in Timbuktu to which the ‘ulamā’ gave a religious justification precipitated the revolution. This revealed the importance of Islam as a factor of division, a motor for social action and political change. Indeed, many Muslim leaders had come to see themselves as members of a community worthy of ruling a predominantly non-literate country governed by a non-Muslim royalty. But for this they had to rely on the officers, and in particular Muḥammad Ture who, as a high official connected with both the main warring factions, could fulfil all the conditions for success. His victory introduced a new imperial era in the history of Islam in the Western Sudan.

Scholarly opinion on the conversion of the Kingdom of Kongo to Christianity has generally been that it was superficial, diplomatically oriented, impure, dangerous to national sovereignty or rejected by the mass of the population. This article argues that although Christianity in Kongo took a distinctly African form it was widely accepted both in Kongo and in Europe as being the religion of the country.

This was possible because Kongo, as a voluntary convert, had considerable leeway to contribute to its particular form of Christianity. Also, European priests were much more tolerant of syncretism in Kongo than in regions like Mexico, where colonial occupation accompanied the propagation of Christianity. Kongo's control over the theological content allowed the religion to gain mass acceptance while its control over the Church organization and finance allowed it never to be an instrument for foreign domination, in spite of Portuguese attempts to use it as a ‘fifth column’. When European priests arrived in Kongo during the Portuguese colonial occupation at the end of the nineteenth century, they rejected the local form of Christianity, thus ending its acceptance among Europeans as Christianity.

During the early and middle years of the nineteenth century a Creole elite emerged on the island of Fernando Po. The origins of this lay in the fact that for the thirty years after 1827 the island was at the centre of European political and economic interests in the Gulf of Guinea. The short-lived British occupation of Fernando Po, 1827–34, established the town of Clarence and brought to the island a number of settlers, and in particular ‘liberated Africans’, freed from slave ships captured by the Royal Navy. The situation they faced in Clarence and the treatment they received, not least once the British government withdrew and a succession of British traders attempted to run the town, led to the emergence of a homogeneous society out of the various ethnic groups they comprised. This society was to be transformed by the development of a palm oil trade on the island, particularly during the 1840s. This led to the emergence of a group of middlemen between the Bubi producers of the interior and the European traders who collected oil from Clarence, and concurrently, to the stratification of Clarence society into a trading elite and a group of labourers and servants. This trading elite was attracted to the work of the Baptist Mission in Clarence after 1841, and in particular saw the value of the Mission in giving itself a distinct identity. Over time this elite and the Baptists drew apart, but this was not before the interrelation of social stratification with the work of the Mission had produced a class of Creoles whose descendants – the Fernandinos – still survive as a distinct group in Equatorial Guinea today.

La diversité et la densité linguistiques exceptionnelles des hauts plateaux ou ‘Grassfields’ du Cameroun de l'Ouest, les découvertes archéologiques les plus récentes et l'ethnographie incitent à penser que cette région de l'Afrique a été peuplée de manière continue et relativement dense depuis plusieurs millénaires. Les paysages contemporains sont dérivés de la forêt biafréenne par déboisement. L'agriculture sur brûlis, la spécialisation régionale des productions et les vicissitudes de l'histoire de peuplement les ont modelés et leur ont imprimé la diversité qui les caractérise.

The archaeological study of African agricultural history has concentrated more on origins and the identification of crop remains than on farming techniques and ancient fields. The latter rarely survive, and even then may be of indeterminate age and apparently atypical, such as hillside terracing or irrigation systems. The subject has been further bedevilled by these unusual instances of preserved fields being regarded as relics of ‘intensive’ cultivation by ‘vanished civilizations’. However, a clearer understanding of African agriculture, through ethnographic and ecological approaches, reveals not only its basically extensive character but also the infinite variety of local specializations (or cultural–environmental adaptations, combining ancient African domesticates and introduced crops which have been ‘Africanized’). This provides a perspective for examining peculiarities of the present and past and claimed instances of ‘intensification’. Conversely the concept of specialization allows us to use, with caution, the preserved remains of old field systems to illustrate more typical ones. Many of the archaeological survivals were not so much ‘intensive’ as ‘over-specialized’, often in isolated and circumscribed situations, notably remote hills in both western and eastern Africa. A moderate example is Inyanga in eastern Zimbabwe with its extensive terraced hillsides of the later Iron Age. Here most of the terraces were not irrigated, but there are hints of complex seasonal arrangements and field techniques. A more extreme, even ‘ultra-specialized’ agricultural system, also of the later Iron Age, which was abandoned in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, is that of Engaruka in the northern Tanzanian rift. This was an essentially isolated and self-sufficient settlement in dry country, absolutely dependent on its exquisite irrigation devices. Eventually this community expired, as its soil was exhausted and its water supplies declined.

Finally, there are instances in nineteenth-century East Africa, and from earlier in West Africa, of more open cultural–economic systems producing a surplus for caravans, markets and towns. Technologically these have been no more accomplished or ‘intensive’ than the specializations discussed, but developmentally their achievement has been more effective.

Although Southern Rhodesia's settler minority won responsible government from Britain in 1923, it was on terms circumscribed by the interests of metropolitan accumulation. As the dependent partner, Southern Rhodesia was obliged to accept constitutional provisions seeking to guard against initiatives which might disturb that process. Consequently, the settler state found itself hamstrung when it tried to gain some say over how the railway system operated. It was even less successful when it turned its attention to base mineral mining, where a handful of large companies did pretty much as they pleased. Efforts to find overseas markets for cattle and tobacco were also unsatisfactory. Neither the state nor settler producers could obtain the terms they wanted. Accumulation proceeded on terrain designed and dominated by imperialism.

It is widely believed that pre-colonial Africa south of the Sahara had no problem of poverty (and no beggars or ascetics) except in those few areas which already possessed intensive agriculture, literacy, world religions, and classes with stratified subcultures. This article uses the records of missionaries and evangelists living in nineteenth-century Yoruba towns to demonstrate the existence of paupers, beggars, ascetics and (with less certainty) charitable practices. It also considers the means by which the poor sought to survive. The article suggests that the absence of poverty from pre-colonial Africa is a myth and that the subject deserves fully study.

Three main forms of agrarian change are shown to have occurred in the Ngwa region during the period covered in this article. The first was the adoption of a new hand-processing method for palm oil, which can be seen as a response to growing pressures on female labour resources as Ngwa farmers increased their export production of palm oil and kernels. The second was the adoption of cassava by women. This increased their workloads but helped them to fill a hungry-season gap in local food supplies. It formed part of a long-term trend of diversification within Ngwa agriculture. Finally, men began helping with cassava processing. Like their earlier entry into palm-oil processing, this move reflected not only a growing pressure on female labour resources but also a need for men to participate in processing if they were to claim a share of the saleable product. In the concluding sections of the article, gender relations are shown to have influenced farmers' patterns of saving and investment. An awareness of gender is seen to be relevant when considering both the issue of mechanisation and the history of other kinds of agrarian change.

The present paper is one in a series of essays on the political economy of the West African forest kingdom of Asante (Ashanti), now located in the Republic of Ghana. In general terms it surveys and explores aspects of the crucial issue of control over subjects and land within the Asante social formation. At the broadest level, it seeks to offer a description of fluctuations in the ability of central government in Kumase to mediate and to preside over the distribution of these resources between the foundation of the state in the early eighteenth century and the present day. It is argued that until approximately the middle of the nineteenth century the history of Asante is the history of the embedding, expansion and triumph of central government control. Thereafter, for a number of reasons that are discussed, matters changed. In terms of these changes the crucial decade was the 1880s, and the paper demonstrates how, in the closing stages and the immediate aftermath of the civil war (1883–8), a revolutionary reversal was effected in the general developmental thrust of Asante history. That is, at a meeting in Kumase in 1888, and at an oath-taking ceremony at Ahyiamu in the following year, the historic control of central government over subjects and land was challenged and substantially liquidated. That the implications of this revolutionary change were distorted in a number of ways was due to the imposition of British colonial rule at the close of the nineteenth century. The remainder of the paper attempts briefly to demonstrate how, in the twentieth century, and in the context of changing socio-political conditions, the battle over resources between central government in Kumase and its opponents remains a live and complex issue.

Radical historians criticizing leaders of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union have focused on their petty bourgeois origins. This article argues that although most organizers of the later 1920s did not derive from the working class, neither were they able to base themselves securely within the petty bourgeoisie. Instead, like lower-middle-class Africans in general, they were being forced ever further from the white bourgeoisie and ever closer to the black masses. This was apparent in all spheres of life – economic, political, cultural, social and ideological – and was also increasingly evident in protest. As racially oppressed men and women subject to proletarianization and engaged in struggle, ICU leaders do not fit neatly into schemas which stress the bourgeois nature of the petty bourgeoisie.

In the inter-war years one major role for the Royal Air Force was imperial defence. The Air Staff further argued that air power, used in substitution for the Army, would provide a more economical and effective means of policing and subjugating unrest in the remoter and more inaccessible areas of the colonial empire in Asia and Africa. The first successful major operation by the R.A.F. in Somaliland in 1920 encouraged the extension of air policing to the troublesome Middle East. The R.A.F. saw the Sudan as an integral part of its Middle East operations and throughout the late 1920s and 1930s military aircraft stationed in Khartoum were used to deal with revolt in the Southern Sudan. Continued Army opposition to substitution led the R.A.F. to seek a role in the sub-Saharan colonies. The need for defence economies as a result of the Depression, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and unrest on the Copperbelt persuaded the authorities in both London and the colonies of the need for an Air Force presence in East and Central Africa.

Malaria was a major health problem in Swaziland during the colonial period. Prior to the commencement of vector control measures in the late 19405 annual outbreaks of malaria occurred during the summer and autumn months from December to May. These seasonal epidemics incapacitated large numbers of Swazis as well as a few Europeans. During most years the epidemic was limited to the lower regions of the country and was marked by relatively few deaths. In other years, however, the annual epidemic spread throughout the country and was accompanied by a high rate of mortality especially among young children. Colonial medical opinion ascribed these major epidemics to abnormally heavy rainfall and increased vector breeding. Yet they were also a product of long-term trends in the Swaziland political economy – the semi-proletarianization of Swazi herdsmen/cultivators and the subordination of Swazi economic interests to those of South African and local European capital - which produced a state of nutritional vulnerability among many Swazi families. This, vulnerability in combination with short-term economic crises, such as the worldwide depression of the early 19305, and drought, gave rise to famine conditions which greatly increased the severity of subsequent outbreaks of malaria, as seen in the histories of the major epidemics of 1932 and 1946.

The compound system that was to become a striking feature of most mining enterprises in Southern and Central Africa was first introduced in the diamond mines at Kimberley. In the period of open mining (1871–1884), Africans lived in open compounds, which gave them the freedom to spend their leisure time where they pleased. In the period of underground mining (beginning in 1885), Africans were isolated from the surrounding town in closed compounds. The closed compounds of the De Beers Consolidated Company were soon regarded as models of social welfare and aspects of their system were copied at other mining centres in Africa. However, this article questions this model for the period before 1903, when there was a complete reconstruction of the compound system and a great improvement in living conditions. Before 1903 the health and mortality record of Kimberley's closed compounds was as bad, in some cases worse, than its imitators to the north in a comparable period of development. In the period of open mining African miners died of sanitation-related diseases. However, when they were forced to live in closed compounds, lung diseases, and in particular pneumonia, which was directly attributable to overcrowded accommodation, poor diet and inadequate protection against major changes in temperature, became the greatest killer on the diamond fields. It is argued here that closed compounds were more models of labour control than of social welfare before 1903. The role and functions of the De Beers convict station are compared with the advantages mining companies derived from closed compounds. Managerial ideology about compound philanthropy is called in question, and it is shown how the closed compound system contributed towards the creation of a disciplined work force, part of which was permanently resident in Kimberley.

Sisal growing spread rapidly in East Africa during the 1920s and 1930s to become one of the most important export crops in both Kenya and Tanganyika. The sisal industry nevertheless suffered severely from the low prices and erratic commodity markets which characterized the depression. Producers blamed the merchants and merchants blamed the market, but the sisal growers began increasingly to look for ways to bring marketing under their own control in the hope of securing a better return. During the Second World War, state control over the sisal trade enabled producers, through their powerful growers' associations, to exert a greater influence over marketing than ever before. They used this and the dramatic wartime change in market conditions, firstly, to improve the price paid them by the Ministry of Supply and, secondly, to try to consolidate their control over marketing after the war when government purchase ended. In this way they were actively supported by the Colonial Office but vigorously opposed by the London-based merchants and their client growers in East Africa. After a long struggle the independent producers failed to gain the complete control they wanted, but nevertheless considerably strengthened their own hand and reversed a trend towards greater metropolitan control over the sisal industry which had developed during the thirties. Producers could not single-handedly stabilize the market for their commodity, but through concerted action they were able to improve their return from it. The study raises questions about the assumptions behind both liberal and Marxist interpretations of imperial trade and shows that in the case of one of East Africa's most important exports relations between producers and traders were more complex than has been assumed.

Between 1900 and 1925 the British Government evolved a policy concerning agricultural development in West Africa by which expatriate-owned plantations, especially for oil palms, were excluded. This prohibition created as many problems as it solved, for the Nigerian Government in particular faced the problem of competition in the international palm-oil and kernel market from plantations in South-east Asia and the Belgian Congo. In the 1920s the Nigerian Government went to considerable effort to entice British capitalists to invest in palm-oil processing (but not production), but to no avail. In the 1930s the Government concentrated on trying to rehabilitate the oil-palm industry by encouraging the establishment of small, native-owned plantations, improving native methods of oil extraction and controlling the quality of palm-oil and kernel exports. This policy was beset with difficulties of finance, inadequate research and the effects on land tenure systems. It failed, and the Nigerian palm-oil export industry lost its place in the world market.

British trusteeship does not appear to have been a positive policy as far as economic development was concerned. It created a dilemma which the colonial authorities were not equipped to solve in the economic and political context of the inter-war period.

Weyane was a spontaneous, localized peasant uprising with limited objectives. It occurred in 1943 because several disaffected social groups in the eastern part of Tigrai believed that they could defeat or at least extract substantial concessions from a weak transitional government. The multiplicity of objectives roughly correspond to the divergent interests of the participants: the sectarian nobility wanted a greater share in the regional reallocation of power, the semi-pastoral communities of the lowlands were interested in pre-empting feudal incorporation, and the highland cultivators wanted to terminate the excessive demands of officialdom and militia. The convergence of these forces made Weyane possible; the disorganization of the ruling strata and the subsequent defection of a segment of the territorial nobility enormously enhanced the peasants' capacity for collective action. But this very heterogeneity comprised the peasants' objectives. The revolt lacked a coherent set of goals, nor did it have a specific program for social action. The rebels attacked neither the legitimacy of the monarchy nor the ideological basis of the Ethiopian aristocracy. In the end, Weyane buttressed the feudal order, and was probably instrumental in strengthening Ethiopia's neo-colonial link with the West. In the aftermath of rebellion, the Tigrai nobility did get its rights and prerogatives recognized, to the same extent that the nobility in the other northern provinces did. The government undercut the nobility's political autonomy, but paid the price of reinforcing their social position. On the other hand, in reaction to Weyane, the state destroyed the social basis of clan authority and autonomy, and reduced the Raya and Azebo to landless peasants. Weyane marked the end of conflict between centrifugal and centralizing forces, but did not eliminate the social roots of popular protest.