The paper traces the beginnings of human culture in Africa, its evolution and spread, and shows the feedback relationship that exists between biological evolution and culture. It is demonstrated how environment is the most important factor in producing variability at the food-gathering level, and the present-day regional differences in culture are shown to have been in existence for some 40,000 years. The history of the introduction and spread of domestication is summarized, and evidence is adduced to indicate that the diffusion of Iron Age economy in southern Africa was due as much to adaptation as to immigration, thus demonstrating a real and traceable continuity up to the present day.

The Iron Age sites known as Mapungubwe and Bambandyanalo on the farm Greefswald, 55 miles west of Messina in the northern Transvaal, South Africa, have aroused world-wide speculation ever since their discovery in the early 1930s. This international interest has been considerably stimulated by the publication of the second volume of the Mapungubwe report in late 1963. Much unnecessary confusion as to the significance of The Mapungubwe and Bambandyanalo sites has been caused by the long delay in the publication of this second volume, and this has made a critical leview of the Iron Age sequence in this desolate corner of the Middle Limpopo valley a matter of some urgency. The Greefswald sequence is of vital importance to South African history, for the sites have been held to show that the earliest Iron Age population of South Africa was non-Negro. In addition, they have been used to provide a fairly accurate indication of the date at which Bantu-speaking peoples first crossed the middle reaches o the Limpopo.

A large proportion of the slaves captured at sea by the British Royal Navy during the early nineteenth century were landed at Sierra Leone. Statistical data on the make-up of the Sierra Leonean population at this period is available from several sources, and it provides some interesting clues to the scope and size of the slave trade from different parts of Africa.

In his book Afro-Portuguese Ivories (Batchworth Press, London, n.d.), William Fagg established the identity of an interesting hybrid art-form in a number of ivory objects—spoons, forks, salt-cellars and horns—carved for European use and to European design, but fashioned according to the canons of the African artist. While certain that the carvers were Africans, Fagg is unable to assign them to any particular region, or even to be certain that they were working in Africa. His tentative conclusion is that three regions have a claim to be considered as the home of these ivories: the area around what is now Freetown in Sierra Leone, the Bakongo coast, and the old Slave Coast between Whydah and Lagos. Von Luschan's theory of a Benin origin is firmly ruled out. Among his three alternatives, Fagg inclines to the Slave Coast, and in particular to its Yoruba sector, because of stylistic affinities between the ivories and Yoruba carving. Such a hypothesis runs into serious chronological difficulties, for whereas many representational features of the ivory carvings suggest that they belong to the sixteenth century, the Portuguese did not frequent the Whydah—Lagos coast until the seventeenth century, and even then the trade was with Brazil, not Portugal.

Exposure to and invasion by parasitic organisms may play an important part among many other intrinsic factors that guide the evolution of animal forms. Trypanosomes, two species of which cause African sleeping sickness today, are blood parasites of great antiquity. Their presence in Africa at the time of the first stages of human evolution may have been of great consequence, at first acting as a discriminating agent between resistant and non-resistant types of hominids, and later also in shaping migration routes and settlement patterns. As a possible clue as to why man arose in Africa, the author postulates that trypanosomes may have precluded the development of certain ground-dwelling faunas, allowing certain more resistant primates to fill the empty ecological niches. Some of these primates, thus becoming ground-dwellers, became the precursors of the hominid branch. The evolution of T. gambiense and T. rhodestense, the two human parasites, and their development in the tsetse fly, are debated. The epidemiological aspects and patterns of the disease are examined under the changing climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and during later times, when Africa was opened up by Western exploration.

A study of the interaction between the aims of African rulers, the British and Gold Coast governments, and Wesleyan missionaries in Dahomey between 1843 and 1867 suggests that neither Africans nor Europeans made any consistent distinction, at this time, between the religious and secular aspects of British influence in Dahomey.

Wambu (Huambo) was one of the more important of the Ovimbundu Kingdoms of central Angola, the histories of some of which were treated in Part III of Umbundu Kinship and Character (1949) q.v.

The tradition of Wambu begins with Feti, the Adam of the Ovimbundu. Through the vaNganda it is definitely linked with the cattle-complex peoples of south-west Angola, and it is also connected with the ‘Jagas’ described by Battell. This latter link provides a chronological starting point early in the seventeenth century. Thus, beginning with the ‘Jaga’ Wambu Kalunga, the fourth king named, tradition and historical reference are followed through the reigns of twenty-five kings, until independence ended with the capture by the Portuguese forces of two strongholds and their capital town of Samisasa during the ‘Bailundu War’ of 1902. The chief occupation of the kings and the men of Wambu (as of practically of all the Ovimbundu Kingdoms) during most of this time, was raiding their neighbours, those of other tribes and those of European descent.

In terms of Marc Bloch's celebrated definition, the traditional interlacustrine Bantu kingdom of Bunyoro, in western Uganda, is ‘feudal’ in some respects but not in others. This is shown by a survey of Bunyoro's traditional political institutions, some of which tended to decentralize, others to centralize, political power and authority. Of the first, the most important were the considerable degree of independence enjoyed by the chiefs, and the largely self-sufficient community relationships of neighbourhood and kinship. Of the centripetal institutions, some linked the people to the kingship, others bound the chiefs to the king. Examples of both types are described. It is concluded that although traditional Bunyoro shared some features with European ‘feudal’ states, it also differed from them in important respects. Thus it would be misleading to refer to it, without a good deal of qualification, as a ‘feudality’.

In 1853, when the Cape Colony was granted representative institutions by the British Government, the franchise qualification allowed Coloured men to be placed on the voters' roll. To qualify for the franchise it was necessary to occupy, for twelve months, property valued at £25 or to earn a salary of £50, or a salary of £25 if board and lodging was provided. At the time, as in later years, there were many who regarded this qualification as low. Since the ultimate responsibility for the £25 franchise belonged to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, historians and others have come to see it as being the result of humanitarian influences. In fact the process that led to representative government, and with it the £25 franchise, was far more complex, involving as it did a series of interweaving class, national, colour and imperial considerations. Nevertheless, humanitarian influences need to be closely examined, for they reveal a relationship with the more significant structural factors and provide us with our most convenient starting-point.

The records of trading between Africans and Europeans on the Guinea Coast since antiquity raise issues the practical resolution of which has never ceased to occupy economic historians. The Herodotean inadequacies of dumb barter in Carthaginian goods and in gold dust were fully resolved only at the time of the eighteenth-century slave trade. In Senegambia and even on the Windward Coast, as we now know, the Royal African Company had still to go without an effective profit-and-loss accountancy. With the advent of the regular slave trade two new commercial devices had to be introduced by the Europeans. Both the ‘sorting’ and the ‘ounce trade’ sprang from the vital need for adjustment between the radically different trading methods of Europeans and Africans. And it was not so much a case of mutual adjustment, for of the two systems only one, the European, adjusted.

The study of modern Algerian history has encountered many difficulties, and a number of myths and misunderstandings have persisted. However, it is now possible to discuss certain problems with a reasonable chance of success. This article examines three such problems and tries to disengage some of the main themes of modern Algerian history. First, it examines the state of the country, both politically and economically, at the time of the French expedition of 1830. Secondly, it analyses the principal characteristics of European settlement and the ways in which it developed. Thirdly, it considers the nature of opposition to French rule and the reasons why the differences between the Muslim and nonMuslim communities grew larger.

Mwanga's persecution of the Christians in 1886 was an isolated event, but it set the seal of judgement on subsequent interpretations of his character, his policy and his reign. He was said to have an anti-Christian policy which could be variously ascribed to religious traditionalism, or the political danger of an organized Christian party, or external threats of European encroachment. But closer examination reveals two apparent anomalies. Most Christians were spared during the brief persecution, including many prominent leaders. And shortly afterwards these same Christians were given extraordinary powers which they exercised, with the Kabaka's warm approval, at the expense of the traditional chiefs. The conclusion reached is that while Mwanga had no very consistent policy, he did have a consistently strong motivation—the desire to achieve a secure position of authority independent of those powerful old chiefs who had placed him on the throne. In this he saw the ambitious young Christians as a useful ally. Thus, despite the persecution, during part of his reign Mwanga was, for his own purposes, not anti-Christian but pro-Christian.

The years 1871 to 1874 witnessed in Sierra Leone an expression of cultural ethno-centrism characterized by a revolt against attempts at Europeanization of Africans, by emphasis on racial difference and the need for developing the special attributes of the Negro race and of maintaining its distinctive culture. The immediate background to this new phenomenon was the tension which had existed between the native pastors and European missionaries of the Church Missionary Society over the control and management of the native pastorate, and the rampant sectarian rivalry in the colony. In the period under discussion, the tension within the C.M.S. erupted into an open controversy and assumed a wider significance when educated lay natives joined the issue on the side of the native pastors. Both native clerics and laymen saw as their chief opponents European missionaries who, so they charged, through a fierce sectarianism but common contempt for African customs and institutions, were doing grave harm to Africans by creating new divisions among them and by destroying the wholesome base of African society. They argued that reform was necessary, and was to be brought about through the agency of an independent African Church, of which they saw the native pastorate of the C.M.S. as a nucleus, and of a University, preferably secular, run by educated Negroes themselves. Though the movement was primarily cultural, it had the ultimate political objective of self-government, and part of its raison d'etre was preparing Africans towards this end.

The problems connected with Article XVII of the Wihalē (Uccialli) treaty of 1889 form one of the most important issues in the history of Ethiopian-Italian relations. The Italian government claimed that this Article made Ethiopia an Italian protectorate. There was, however, a significant discrepancy between the Amharic and Italian versions of the Article. Minīlik refused to accept the ‘protection’ of Italy; diplomacy failed to solve the conflict, and the battle of Adwa followed. The absolute independence of Ethiopia was then recognized. But the idea that Ethiopia was an Italian protectorate from 1889 to 1896 has nevertheless been maintained by Italian authors and generally accepted by most writers on Ethiopian history to this day.

A careful study of Italian-Ethiopian relations during the years preceding the Wihale treaty, as well as of the immediate circumstances under which it was signed, reveals that the Italian negotiator Antonelli, and not Minīlik or his interpreter Yosēf, was guilty of creating the imbroglio. Antonelli was not ignorant of the Amharic language, and he had personally worded the Italian draft, which changed an earlier offer by the Italian government to act as the Emperor's ‘postman’ into an obligation for him to conduct his foreign affairs through Italian channels. Since this change was not introduced in the Amharic version, which had equal authority, the conclusion must be that the ‘protectorate paragraph’ never had any validity whatsoever. The Italian protectorate was not terminated by the battle of Adwa. It had never existed.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century the affairs of northern Somalia were dominated by the politico-religious movement led by Muhammad Abdullah Hassan. The ‘Mad Mullah’, as he was styled by the British, proved to be an elusive adversary and at one time forced the British to evacuate their Somaliland Protectorate. The Italians too were concerned about the Mullah's dervishes, who disturbed the peace of Italy's two nominal protectorates, the sultanates of Obbia and the Mijertein, and of their colony in southern Somalia. At one time the Italians found a temporary solution to the problem by granting the Mullah the Nogal Territory in northern Italian Somaliland. For the Ethiopians the Mullah's movement posed a threat to their Empire's expansion eastward to the Indian Ocean because of its appeal for support from among the Ogaden Somalis. Although the Mullah's recruits were mostly Darod Somalis, for Somalis of other tribes he was not only the agent of a not always acceptable religious movement, but also the symbol of political revolt against foreign domination of any kind. Today the Mullah is regarded as a forerunner of contemporary Somali nationalism.

Almost a century ago, Edward W. Blyden evolved a philosophy of Africanism which foreshadowed many concepts of today's African intellectual leaders. Basing his system of thought on the notion that racial qualities were exclusive and complementary, he urged the African to cultivate his own qualities and avoid bad imitations of the characteristics of other races. A deep religiousness and close communion with nature had developed in Africa a humanitarian regard for social responsibilities and personal relations conspicuously absent in materialistic Europe. The African needed only to follow his natural instinct and to reaffirm his own values in order to regain his ancient sense of dignity and once again make his unique contribution to world culture.

The first white persons to settle permanently in Katanga, a highland plateau region geographically isolated from the low-lying Congo basin, were missionaries collectively styled Plymouth Brethren. They were preceded—along the geographical and commercial routes which linked Katanga to Bié and Benguela and to Mweru and Zanzibar—by David Livingstone, who visited the Upper Congo in 1871, and by Verney Lovett Cameron, who traversed the region three years later. Both British explorers reported that Katanga was a region rich in minerals, and therefore an area into which whites should advance. The Germans Paul Reichard and Richard Böhm, in 1884, and the Portuguese Hermenigildo Capelo and Roberto Ivens, in 1885, confirmed the earlier tales.

Moroccan nationalism began as a religious or cultural reformist movement based on Salafiya, a form of religious fundamentalism which arose in late nineteenthcentury Egypt as an effort to restore the original purity of Islam and the independence of the Muslim peoples. The Moroccan movement was first expressed in the 1920's by the foundation of the ‘free schools’ and the formation of secret discussion societies, neither of which represented more than a small, concerned elite and whose organization was rudimentary in the extreme. By 1934, it was transformed by events and hard experience into an essentially political and social reform movement which, while not yet a mass party, had become ‘national’ to the extent that it could demonstrate the support of important segments of Moroccan society and which had created a skeletal structure which the post-war movemen would flesh out.

The article represents part of the research for a book on the origins and rise of Moroccan nationalism, 1921–1943.