This article is a follow-up to that of Mr D. W. Phillipson published in this Journal in 1970, and to the six earlier lists compiled for the whole of sub-Saharan Africa by Dr B. M. Fagan. I have endeavoured to include here all radiocarbon dates for archaeological sites of the Iron Age and most of those of the end of the Stone Age in the eastern and southern part of Africa—that is from Ethiopia, the Upper Nile and the Congo Basin southward—which have been published or made available since the preparation of the former articles. Some of these dates are already included in recent numbers of the Journal Radiocarbon, or have been mentioned in publications elsewhere, as indicated in the footnotes. A large proportion of these new dates, however, have not yet been published, and are included here through the agreement of the various individual archaeologists and research bodies, all of whom I wish to thank for their cooperation. In particular, I am indebted to Mr David Phillipson for his willing assistance in providing a number of contacts and relaying information from southern Africa.

Two hypotheses are available for the origin of the Zimbabwe culture. A religious hypothesis attributes its development to an African society in isolation, placing it in the class of a primary state. In contrast, the trade hypothesis maintains that it was a secondary state resulting from the gold trade.

If the religious hypothesis is correct, then Zimbabwe would be an exception to all other known cases of primary state formation. The archaeological evidence points to a horticultural subsistence throughout the Iron Age sequence in the area and a small population until Period III/IV. On the other hand, all known primary states were based on large populations and intensive agriculture. It is more likely that Zimbabwe is a typical case of secondary state formation.

The stratigraphy on the Acropolis indicates that a social transition from Period II to III probably occurred at Zimbabwe and was not the result of an immigrant group, and the short chronology places this transition around A.D. 1250. The evidence available from Arab documents, trade imports and ancient mining demonstrates that trade existed well before then. Consequently, the evolution of the Zimbabwe culture was almost certainly due to the Arab gold trade.

Le terme Gaoga, qui figure fréquemment au centre des cartes anciennes de l'Afrique, se retrouve dans un seul texte, la ‘description de l'Afrique’, du diplomate marocain, Léon l'Africain, publiée en italien en 1550 par Ramusio. Relevant de fréquentes confusions avec la ville de Gao sur le Niger, certains africanistes en tirent la conclusion hâtive que le voyage de Léon se serait limité aux pays du Niger. Selon eux, le reste des notes ne ferait que reproduire des récits de caravaniers, plus ou moms fantaisistes. Pierre Kalck, ancien administrateur français, auteur d'une thèse de doctorat ès lettres sur l'histoire des règions qu'il a administrées, estime au contraire que le voyage de Léon du Bornou en Egypte fut bien effectué et qu'il a existé un Etat du nom de Gaoga, semblable aux grandes entités politiques africaines de l'époque. Il fait d'abord le point sur les hypothèses formées par ceux qui refusent la thèse simpliste d'une confusion Gao-Gaoga. Pour Barth, Gaoga était le nom, non d'une contrée, mais déune dynastie boulala installée à Yao (Yaoga) sur le lac Fitri. Pour Carbou, le Gaoga n'était autre que le Kanem, séparé du Bornou—Modat rappelait cependant que, d'après les notes mêmes de Léon, il ne pouvait s'agir que d'une région montagneuse: le Dar Zagaoua au nord du Darfour. Palmer voyait dans le Gaoga un pays situé sur l'oued Batha et peuplé par des réfugiés nubiens. Kaick se réfère, non seulement au passage spécialement consacré au Gaoga par Léon, mais aux mentions éparses, et parfois déformées, dans le reste du texte publié par Ramusio. Il établit que Léon, après avoir quitté le Bornou, a gagné le Darfour par la piste dite du treizième parallèle, puis a rejoint Assiout en haute Egypte par l'antique route caravanière dite des quarante jours (Darb al Arbaïn) qui passe par l'oasis de Kharga. Scion lui, le Gaoga, fondé au quinzième siècle par des réfugiés nubiens, s'étendait, lors du passage de Léeon vers 1512–1514, sur une superficie qui comprenait l'est du Tchad (Ouadaï, Salamat, Rounga), l'ouest du Soudan (Darfour) et le nord-est de la République Centrafricaine (Fertit). Le Ouadaï est encore aujourd'hui appelé Kouka (corruption de Gaoga) par les Teda du nord et ce terme de Kouka est conservé par un groupe ethnique du Tchad. Citant la découverte par Arkell, à Aïn Fara et à Ouri dans le Darfour, de vestiges nubiens chrétiens, Kalck estime que céest dans cette région montagneuse qui constituait l'ancien Gaoga que se trouve la solution de bien des énigmes de l'histoire de l'Afrique Centrale. Le texte de Léon, aussi bref soit-il, apparaît comme un premier fil conducteur.

This article deals in detail with the various factors which affect the accuracy of radiocarbon dates. The familiar “error term” associated with each date and which caused so much confusion to users of radiocarbon dates in the early days of the method is derived from the statistical uncertainties of the measurements of radioactivity from which the date is calculated and is the only source of error which is capable of strict mathematical treatment. Other sources of error, as for example wrong attribution of the sample or human error in labelling, can be disastrously large on occasion, although they can usually be kept quite small. Errors arising from the effects of isotopic fractionation can be eliminated by the application of corrections based on mass spectrometric measurements of the stable carbon isotopes in the sample. However, it is now known that the most serious limitation on the accuracy obtainable by the radiocarbon method is set by the fact that the level of radiocarbon in the carbon exchange reservoir has not been constant in the past. Despite this limitation, however, the method is still the most important scientific aid to archaeological research to emerge since the end of World War II.

This article has two related purposes. The first is to attempt a clarification of certain points raised by Professor Oliver in his article, ‘The Problem of the Bantu Expansion’, published in an earlier issue of this Journal, insofar as it concerns his discussion of the alternative theories of Professor Guthrie and the present writer regarding Bantu origins. The second and more general aim is to survey the basic assumptions of Guthrie's work on Bantu insofar as it relates to the same problem. In the course of the exposition, three types of evidence are considered: the internal Bantu linguistic evidence; the linguistic evidence external to Bantu, chiefly from West African languages; and the non-linguistic, chiefly geographic evidence.

It is argued that Guthrie's assumption which underlies his theory of a central ‘nuclear’ area as the point of origin, namely that the linguistically most conservative area reveals the place of origin, is contrary to empirical evidence. It is rather the area of greatest internal divergence, in this case the north-western area, which points to the earliest differentiation and hence point of origin.

Excavations and fieldwork in and around Benin City in the years 1961–4 have established the outlines of an archaeological sequence. This sequence is based on radiocarbon dates for stratified deposits, on a statistical examination of pottery form and decoration, and on datable European imports. The sequence suggested by the evidence extends from about the thirteenth century A.D. to the present time, although the survival of locally found ground stone axes in Benin ritual indicates that the area may well have been inhabited since Late Stone Age times. There is evidence for the artistic use of copper and its alloys from at least the thirteenth century onwards, but it is not known how long it had already been in use. Smithed and chased tin bronzes were found in a thirteenth-century context, whereas cast leaded brass was found in use in a nineteenth-century context. There is little evidence for lost-wax casting in Benin in early times. The writer suggests that future archaeological work should make the origins and early development of the city a priority.

This study of horses, mainly in the central Sudan, presents impressions rather than a complete survey of the evidence. At the time when written records for the Sudan region begin,c. A.D. 1000, horses were evidently well established there. Their coming preceded the arrival of Islam. The first introduction of horses is sometimes attributed to nomads, such as the Zaghawa round Lake Chad, who, so the argument runs, used them to found larger and more militant states. Some evidence, however, suggests, although tentatively, that such nomadic immigrants were chiefly camel people, who enlarged their use of horses because these were more suitable than camels in the Sudan region, and because the horse was already there. Careful reading of the Bayajidda legend raises doubts as to whether it has anything to do with the introduction of the horse into Hausa, or into the Sudan as a whole. All this lends support to the idea that horses became established in the Sudan at a far earlier date, perhaps through trans-Saharan links recorded in the horse-chariots of rock art. Occasional references to wild horses suggest that survival and reproduction were not dependent on imported stock. Numbers of peoples, from Kaniaga in the west to Dar Tama in the east, possessed their own horses; many of these peoples were isolated from any network of trans-Saharan communication, and many were uninterested in large-scale state formation. These horses, apparently always very small, may perhaps be nicknamed the southern Sudanic breed. Larger horses, presumably directly or indirectly descended from later imports, are particularly associated with certain areas, especially Bornu/Mandara. The trans-Saharan trade in horses, admittedly of considerable importance, may have been given undue prominence by scholars who have overlooked the possibility of east-west trade–of horses arriving in Hausa, for example, from no further afield than Bornu. Acute illness and mortality among imported stock must also have influenced trade, and reduced the contribution of such animals to local herds and stables.

Articles by Vansina and Birmingham in the J.A.H. have explored the possibility of deriving the chronology of state-formation in central Africa from the date when warrior armies known as Imbangala (also, erroneously, as ‘Jaga’) appeared in Angola. This article, drawing on new traditions collected in Angola during 1969, shows that the figures described by the oral histories are permanent named titles in systems of positional succession and perpetual kinship; they therefore contain no implicit chronology based on assumed human life spans. The new evidence suggests that many years elapsed between the origin of one Imbangala title in the nascent Lunda empire and its successors' appearance on the coast. Although documents establish the Imbangala presence in Angola as early as 1563, this date reveals little about preceding events in Katanga, which may have taken place many decades, or even centuries, earlier. Finally, by extending the methodological techniques developed for the Imbangala traditions to published Lunda histories, it is suggested that the Luba and Lunda kingdoms may have passed through several periods before the stage previously assumed to have initiated the development of states in central Africa. The article concludes by suggesting that formation of (probably very small-scale) states began much earlier than previous analyses have demonstrated.

Information collected in the field and careful reading of Ibn Battuta's account of his travels does not support Delafosse's usually accepted opinion on Battuta's itinerary. Several pieces of evidence point towards the identification of Zaġari with Diara (Kingi) rather than with Dia (Masina). Such an itinerary would lead further to the west. Information given about the return journey seems also to indicate that Ibn Battuta's destination, Malli, should be located between the southern part of Bambuk and the upper Gambia rather than at the site of Niani.

Three lines of evidence regarding the Funj prior to the rise of the Sinnār Sultanate about 1500 have been considered. Shilluk tradition remembers the Funj as the previous inhabitants of the present Shilluk homeland, while many of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visitors to Sinnār were told that the Funj came from the White Nile. While neither set of traditions should be accepted without question, the fact that they tend to confirm each other lends weight to both.

In the Shilluk country, the early Funj seem to have lived on elevated settlement mounds, and perhaps the putative Funj homeland should be extended to include the region in which these mounds are found. That would suggest that the Funj culture centred primarily along the White Nile approximately between Renk and Malakal, but the possibility of a homeland even more broadly defined need not be excluded.

Archaeological evidence derived from pottery finds on the White Nile mounds may be interpreted to imply that the Funj were a southern Nubian people, an hypothesis that must be weighed against alternatives that would suggest an unknown or even Meroitic cultural identity. The presence of red brick structures along the White Nile south of the generally accepted borders of the Sultanate, as well as in the capital itself, tends to support the ‘Nubian’ hypothesis. Further research concerning the Funj language and the archaeological cultures south of the latitude of Sinnār should help resolve these ambiguities; many aspects of government and society in the Sinnār Sultanate are clarified by considering the era a Nubian Renaissance.

The kingdom of Luba Lomami was enlarged and strengthened by the conquest of Kalala Ilunga at an unknown date before the end of the sixteenth century. It became a large but not dominant state. The expansion of Luba Lomami is generally considered to have occurred in the early eighteenth century, as a delayed consequence of the Kalala Ilunga conquest. In this it is said to have been paralleled by the expansion of Lunda. Unlike Lunda, however, it is supposed to have suffered from severe structural deficiencies. These, it has been argued, inhibited its further expansion and, in the mid-nineteenth century, caused it to disintegrate.

It is suggested here, however, that the expansion of Luba Lomami did not occur until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. This expansion coincided with the extension of the Bisa trading system into the chiefdoms south-east of Luba Lomami and was designed to capture this trade. Later conquests in the south may have been related to the development of Nyamwezi and Bihe trading systems. However, the principal motive for further expansion was the need to capture new sources of ivory and, to a lesser extent, slave-yielding lands. Luba Lomami's success can be attributed to its proximity to the Bisa trade route, its relatively centralized political structures, the availability of viable areas of expansion, and the existence of suitable mechanisms to incorporate the conquered chiefdoms. In the first half of the nineteenth century Luba Lomami subjected most of the area between the Lubilash and Lake Tanganyika and between the forest and the copper belt.

In about 1870 the terms of the long-distance trade turned against Luba Lomami. New traders arrived carrying guns. Luba Lomami could not match the new techniques for it no longer had the resources with which to purchase guns. Its own resources of ivory and slaves were exhausted. It could no longer obtain supplies by expansion, for the traders were carving out new states on its periphery, and it was itself becoming subject to slave raids and encroachment. This external pressure weakened the political structures. Rival brothers sought the aid of mercenary traders to promote their cause. The ideological basis of the state was undermined. In a desperate attempt to obtain guns the emperors began to raid for slaves amongst their own people. The empire disintegrated and, in about 1890, the rump of the state became tributary to the trader-state of Msiri.

The peoples of south-eastern Nigeria have been involved in trade for as long as there are any records. The archaeological sites at Igbo-Ukwu and other evidence reveal long distance trade in metal and beads, as well as regional trade in salt, cloth, and beads at an early date. The lower Niger River and its Delta featured prominently in this early trade, and evidence is offered to suggest a continuity in the basic modes of trade on the lower Niger from c. A.D. 1500 to the mid-nineteenth century. An attempt to sketch the basic economic institutions of the Igbo hinterland before the height of the slave trade stresses regional trading networks in salt, cloth, and metal, the use of currencies, and a nexus of religious and economic institutions and persons. It is argued that while the growth of the slave trade appears to have been handled without major changes in the overall patterns of trade along the lower Niger, in the Igbo hinterland a new marketing ‘grid’, dominated by the Arochuku traders, was created using the pre-existent regional trading networks and religious values as a base.

The responses of the Khoisan peoples to the Dutch at the Cape of Good Hope in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have generally been dismissed summarily by historians. This article attempts to place their reactions into the broader framework of the receptivity of Late Stone Age society in South Africa to cultural innovation, and suggests that the usual dichotomy drawn between the rapid disintegration of the pastoral Khoi in the face of the Dutch settlers and the fierce resistance of the San hunter-gatherers is an oversimplification. There was little to distinguish cattleless Khoi from San, or San who had acquired cattle from Khoi, and both processes were at work both during and before the Dutch period in South Africa. The belief that the Khoi ‘willingly’ bartered away their cattle for ‘mere baubles’ is challenged, and it is maintained that the violence which punctuated every decade of the eighteenth century, and which culminated in the so-called ‘Bushman Wars’, were in large measure the Khoisan response to their prior dispossession by the Boers. On the other hand, the readiness of the Khoisan to acculturate to both the Dutch and the Bantu-speaking intruders, their relatively small population and loose social organization, meant that their ethnic identity virtually disappeared. Nevertheless their responses were more complex than is generally realized and resemble those of other colonized peoples. They were also to have a profound influence on the attitudes towards whites of Bantu-speakers on the Cape's eastern and northern frontiers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The recent thesis propounded by Fisher and Rowland regarding the role of firearms in the Central Sudan requires considerable modification. While one must concede that the observable effects of firearms in the nineteenth century were not profound, this statement must be qualified to account for the incipient revolution in military technology, army organization, and political structure that occurred in many of the Central Sudanese states in the last quarter of the century. The relative ease with which European imperial powers conquered these states has tended to obscure from historians the dynamics of internal change that became manifest during the last decades of their independent existence.

It is clear from the evidence presented in this article that the increasing use of firearms intensified the tendencies toward bureaucratization and the centralization of power in the states of the Central Sudan. The creation of regular standing armies, the formation of slave musketeer units commanded by slave officers, and the progressive devaluation of feudal institutions in favour of bureaucratized political and military structures, were the distinguishing characteristics of this period. Although history is irreversible, it is interesting to ponder the possible alternative outcomes of this nascent revolution. Its directions were clear, its destination unknown. In this article we have argued that these developments in politico-military organization did in fact represent a new departure which, if permitted to run its course, would have radically affected the subsequent history of the Central Sudan. It is our contention that the Fisher-Rowland thesis underestimates and misinterprets the nature of these changes.

The Dutch share in the Atlantic slave trade has been assessed largely by means of speculation. This article relies extensively on documents of the Dutch West Indian Companies (WIC), which maintained a dozen or more trading stations on the Guinea Coast, and became the principal agents of the Dutch slaving activities. For approximately 16 years (1630–1795), the Dutch played a substantial role in the Atlantic slave trade. Based on the combined criteria of available documentary evidence and fluctuating techniques of the trade, the Dutch slave trade has been outlined in three successive stages, viz. the monopoly of the first WIC (1630–74), the monopoly of the second WIC (1675–1734), and the free trade period (1735–95). Information on the first period is scarce, leaving much to speculation, but for the years after 1675 a reliable assessment is possible.

On the whole, the Dutch share constituted about 10 per cent of the overall Atlantic slave trade. Annual averages (calculated by decades) ranged from less than a thousand to over 6,000 slaves. During selected years in the 1630s and 1640s, the Dutch may have become the single most active slave trading nation, but toward the end of the seventeenth century the Dutch trade stagnated while other nations drastically increased their volume. When the WIC began to relinquish its monopoly of the slave trade (1730), the volume of the Dutch trade increased until it reached its peak during the 1760s and early 1770s. As a result of the American Revolutionary War and the ensuing Anglo-Dutch war, Holland's participation in the slave trade virtually came to a halt. Feeble efforts to revivie the trade in subsequent decades failed as a result of the unstable political situation in Europe following the revolution in France and also due to the movement to suppress the slave trade.

The sultanate of Angoche on the Moçambique coast was founded probably towards the end of the fifteenth century by refugees from Kilwa. It became a base for Muslim traders who wanted to use the Zambezi route to the central African trading fairs and it enabled them to by-pass the Portuguese trade monopoly at Sofala. The Portuguese were not able to check this trade until they themselves set up bases on the Zambezi in the 1530s and 1540s, and from that time the sultanate began to decline. Internal dissensions among the ruling families led to the Portuguese obtaining control of the sultanate in the late sixteenth century, but this control was abandoned in the following century when the trade of the Angoche coast dwindled to insignificance. During the eighteenth century movements among the Macua peoples of the mainland and the development of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean laid the foundations for the revival of the sultanate in the nineteenth century.

Little attention has been paid to the great growth of trade in West Africa in the nineteenth century prior to the ‘economic revolution’ which began towards its close. As far as the export-import trade at the coast is concerned, British statistics show that between c. 1810 and c. 1850 the import of various manufactured staples increased by factors from at least 3 to as much as 50. The question arises as to how such a large increase in the volume of trade on the coast was financed in the absence of banking procedures. On the Senegal and Gambia and in the Niger delta, the traditional eighteenth-century practice by which visiting European merchants advanced credit to African brokers in goods continued. On the Gold Coast and at Sierra Leone and Lagos, however, a new class of local importers, of African as well as European origin, emerged and were able to secure credit from European exporters. But, though, less flexible than the newer system, the old system, with its tendency to monopoly on the part of both European traders and African brokers, seems to have permitted the greater expansion of credit. However, by the second half of the century, both systems were under strain and leading to conflicts over debts and jurisdiction, which are examined. Ultimately both were replaced by the European trading houses entering the interior trade through the use of paid agents, many of whom were recruited from among the new merchant class of Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Lagos.

M. G. Marwick has suggested that witchcraft accusations show where the tensions lie in the societies in which they occur. He also intimates that in Africa witchcraft accusations only occur between persons in close social contact. These ideas are borne out by an analysis of the cases of Efik witchcraft for which there is evidence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There witchcraft accusations for the most part involved relations by blood or marriage. But although G. I. Jones has suggested that the underlying tensions which provoke witchcraft accusations in the eastern areas of Nigeria today arise from a contracting economic situation, this was not true of Old Calabar in those days; its economy was in fact expanding under the stimulus of overseas trade. It was expansion which caused the tension, as successful business men acquired wealth and slaves, and therefore status, which contradicted their position in the traditional status system, based on age and place in lineage rather than wealth. At the highest political level these tensions manifested themselves in election disputes, where witchcraft accusations were made against candidates, in order that they take the poison ordeal and be eliminated from the election. Yet in the neighbouring states of Bonny and New Calabar, witchcraft accusations were rare. This may have been because the old descent groups had broken up, to be replaced by canoe houses, warring and trading organizations which owed their origin to the enterprise of their founders who were often slaves. Because the tensions in these societies were between competing unrelated individuals, aggression did not need to be covert. Instead rivalries could be fought in the open, as they were, Bonny and New Calabar being racked by violence and warfare.

Several centuries after firearms had been introduced, they were still of little importance in Ethiopia, where cavalry continued to dominate warfare until the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, they were much sought after by local leaders ambitious to secure their autonomy or to grasp supreme authority. The first of these warlords to make himself emperor, Tēwodros (1855–68), owed nothing to firearms. However, his successors, Yohannis IV (1872–89) and Minīlik (d. 1913), did. Both excelled in their mastery of the new technology and acquired large quantities of quick-firing weapons. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, possession of firearms — principally the breech loading rifle — had become a precondition for successfully contending for national leadership. Yet the wider revolution associated (as in Egypt) with the establishment of a European-style army did not follow. Nor was rearmament restricted to the following of the emperor. Despite the revival of imperial authority effected by Yohannis and Minīlik, rifles and even machine-guns were widely enough spread at the turn of the century to reinforce the fragmentation of power long characteristic of the Ethiopian state. Into the early twentieth century, it remained uncertain if the peculiar advantages of the capital in the import of arms would be made to serve centralization.

Although the territory of the Kisama was involved in military conflicts with the Portuguese from the very beginning, because of its geographical situation it was not subjugated permanently until the twentieth century. A few chiefdoms, which are traceable through the centuries in the sources, played an important role (Ndemba, Kimone kia Songa, Kafushe Kambare, etc.). A number of different factors were favourable to the resistance of the Kisama. The Portuguese were never really interested in this province, apart from the safeguarding of shipping on the Kwanza. No mineral wealth tempted them there. Even the conquest of the salt mine of Ndemba was undertaken mainly to clear and secure the way to the hoped for silver mines of Cambambe. On the one hand, the great lack of water during the dry season made the provisioning of an army there difficult. On the other hand, at least in the Kwanza region, the dreaded tropical diseases were endemic. For the slave trade, the interior, especially Kasanje, was more profitable. Later, when the neighbouring Libolo increased in importance because of the new trade centres in the Ovimbundu territory (Bihe, Bailundu, etc.), Kisama remained off the beaten track. It is only now that the seclusion of this province, which has one of the game parks of Angola within its borders, will in all probability come to an end because of the discovery of a series of oil fields.