That many studies in African and imperial history neglect women and gender is a commonplace. Using a case-study – the British Cape Colony and its frontier zones – this article attempts to demonstrate some consequences of this neglect. It argues, firstly, that it generates empirical inaccuracies as a result of the insignificance accorded to gender differentiation and to women themselves. Secondly, representations of women as unimportant, and men as ungendered, result in flawed analysis of both men and the colonial encounter. This view is argued in detail for two events: an 1825 slave rebellion and an 1856–7 millenarian movement. The article concludes that if gender and half the adult populace are marginalized in this way, the price is frequently interpretations which have limited purchase on the past.

It has been argued here that the impression, given by most of the existing literature, of near-total state dominance over the economic sources of wealth in the Asante economy during 1807–83 is mistaken. Admittedly, there was a large and often thriving state sector in the export–import trade; the state had a share in the production of marketable goods; chiefs had the largest concentrations of slaves and slave-descendants; and inheritance taxes gave the state a powerful instrument for the appropriation of privately generated wealth. But the accumulation of evidence now suggests that the private sector, too, was a major force in the extra-subsistence economy: an economy which included a lively domestic trade, which has been given too little scholarly attention. It appears that it was possible for ordinary commoners to acquire wealth through both external and internal trade, and through production for both export and domestic markets. The widespread acquisition of slaves by commoners, for incorporation in their households, was both a measure of financial achievement and a critical means for enhancing it in future. Death duties amounted normally to a form of progressive taxation rather than to wholesale expropriation.

It is suggested that the private sector is most plausibly seen as comprising a relatively small number of producers and traders prosperous enough to be considered as members of the asikafoɔ, the wealthy, plus a mass of people supplying export markets on a small unit scale. It seems reasonable to assume that the strong position of commoners within the post-Atlantic slave trade economy of Asante, and their accumulation of slaves and other forms of wealth, involved a relative decline, at least compared to the second half of the eighteenth century, in the chiefs' share of foreign trade and general wealth. Such a shift, and in particular the emergence of small producers and traders as a major element in the export economy, provides support for Hopkins' interpretation of the nineteenth-century commercial transition in West Africa generally. One qualification to Hopkins' analysis is that, while it allowed for the large-scale application of slave labour within the ‘economy of legitimate commerce’ by former exporters of slaves, it did not explicitly envisage the widespread use of small numbers of slaves and pawns by small producers and traders.

The shift in the distribution of income had political consequences. The essay argues that it is necessary to revise the argument, put forward by Wilks, about the emergence of a ‘middle-class’ element in the political conflicts of the last years of Asante independence. In particular, the proposition that such a movement developed primarily amongst the members of a monopolistic state trading company is rejected. In any case, it was a mass of commoners, rather than an ‘organized middle class’, that took the decisive role in the uprising that overthrew Mensa Bonsu in 1883. It is suggested that this was the political climax of the ‘adaptive challenge’ presented by the ending of slave exports: a movement of export-producing commoners, poor and rich alike, against the centralizing monarchy's new and punitive measures to raise revenue. The commoners sought not to overthrow chieftaincy but to use its authority to amplify their protests. Finally, it is suggested that the 1883 rising was the start of a pattern of rebellion by export-suppliers, in alliance with chiefs, against what they saw as organized extortion: a pattern that was to recur in the cocoa hold-ups of the 1930s and the National Liberation Movement of the mid-1950s.

The relationship between political power and religious authority has been a delicate one in Muslim societies. On the one hand, governments may attempt to silence religious authorities; on the other, they may themselves succumb to revolutions in the name of religion. More often governments have attempted to co-opt religious authorities as allies in exercising control or have worked directly in a power-sharing arrangement with them. In Songhay, as in several other states of pre-colonial Sudanic Africa, a more subtle balance was achieved between the ruling estate and the diverse body of scholars, mystics and holymen who made up the religious estate. The askiyas of sixteenth-century Songhay, while exercising full political power, saw it in their interest to maintain harmonious relations with these men of religion. Gifts in cash and kind, including slaves, grants of land and privilege, especially exemption from taxation, as well as recognition of rights of intercession and sanctuary, ensured their moral support and spiritual services and, importantly, protected rulers from their curse. Such a symbiosis was important for the stability of a large and ethnically diverse empire like Songhay, especially as regards its conquered western reaches, which were ethnically non-Songhay and had a strong Islamic cultural tradition. This delicate balance was upset by the Sacdian conquest of Songhay in 1591. Despite Moroccan assertions of Islamic legitimacy, religious authorities in Timbuktu were unsupportive, and harsh measures against them dealt a lasting blow to the equilibrium which had prevailed under the askiyas.

Between 1929 and 1932 in a number of villages and towns throughout rural Asante, chiefs were ordering the arrest of all women who were over the age of fifteen and not married. A woman was detained until she spoke the name of a man whom she would agree to marry and the man in question paid a release fee. If the man refused, he too was imprisoned or fined up to £5. If he agreed, he paid a small marriage fee to the woman's parents and one bottle of gin. Based on the correspondence of colonial officials, customary court records and the life histories and reminiscences of women who were among the spinsters caught, this article explores gender and social change in colonial Asante by dissecting and contextualizing the round-up of unmarried women. It seeks to understand this unusual episode in direct state intervention into the negotiating of marriage and non-marriage as part of the general chaos in gender relations that shook Asante in the years between the two World Wars. This chaos, often articulated in the language of moral crisis was, more than anything, about shifting power relationships. It was chaos engendered by cash and cocoa, by trade and transformation. From 1921 to 1935, with cocoa well-established in many parts of Asante, women's roles in the cash economy were changing and diversifying. Many wives were making the move from being the most common form of exploitable labour during the initial introduction of cocoa to themselves exploiting new openings for economic autonomy. That women were beginning to negotiate their own spaces within the colonial economy precipitated a profound crisis in conjugal obligations in Asante - a crisis requiring drastic measures. The rounding up of unmarried women was one of several weapons used by Asante's chiefs in the struggle to reassert control over women's productive and reproductive labour.

While numerous reports in the ethnographic and historical literature on West African societies document the sale of kin into slavery during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, theorists of the trade have not dealt with the logic of selling close relatives. This article examines an instance of such sale among a Voltaic people, the Kabre, located in the hinterland of Dahomey and Ashanti, and attempts to theorize its meaning as a way of maneuvering between complementing sets of values, both human and material, that emerge at the intersection of the local Kabre ‘gift’ economy with the larger regional political economy of slaving. The essay thus examines Kabre prestational forms – and the complex conceptions of value, wealth, alienation and personhood that accompany them – and the ways in which they interacted with the currencies and slaving practices, and the distinctive forms of alienation these entailed, that entered the area during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Understanding such local forms and practices, however, requires us to depart from neoclassical modes of analysis like those typically employed by economic historians of the slave trade.

This article is concerned with the loss of their land to the whites by the September family and their struggle to regain it. Abraham (‘Holbors’) September, an exslave, was a member of the Baster community of the Gordonia settlement (1880–89) where he was the first person to lead water from the Orange River to irrigate land. The article traces the estabishment of the Gordonia settlement and the granting of land in it, and its government as part of British Bechuanaland (1889–95) and the Cape Colony (1895–). It discusses the historiography of the loss of land by Basters to whites, testing explanations of land loss by subsequent historians against written records and oral tradition, with attention to the role of ‘land lawyers’. Abraham September died in 1898. The remainder of the article focuses on the September family as a case-study of land loss. It deals with the administration of his estate – in the course of which his land was ‘sold’ to whites – from the different points of view of the official record and of oral tradition. It then outlines correspondence in the archives from 1920 through to the 1960s protesting against this land alienation as a failure to implement the will of Abraham September and his wife Elizabeth. It concludes with some comments on sources. Is the official record or oral tradition a more accurate reflection of what happened to the land of the September family?

In 1914 the Enugu Government Colliery and the construction of its railway link to the Biafran coast used slave-owning chiefs as labor recruiters. Although aware of slavery in the Nkanu clan area the state simply outlawed the slave trade and excessive treatment but left it to slaves to secure their ‘freedom’. Nkanu slavery was unusually pervasive, incorporating over half of some villages, with few opportunities for manumission or marriage to the freeborn. Severe ritualistic proscriptions excluded slave men from village politics. But forced labor destabilized slavery, causing unrest which reached crisis proportions in the fall of 1922. The revolt presents a unique opportunity for historical study of the goals, ideology and strategies of indigenous slave populations creating ‘freedom’ within the emergent colonial order.

When owners demanded slaves' wages, the slaves resisted and demanded full social and political equality with the freeborn. Slaves who remained in the village struggled to provision Enugu's urban working class. For both slavery hindered opportunities in the colonial economy. In retaliation owners evicted slave families, increased their labor requirements and unleashed a reign of terror, abduction and sacrifice of slave women and children. By the fall of 1922 local government collapsed forcing the state to develop a policy on emancipation. It is significant that this struggle converted the slaves from a scattered subordinate group of patrilineages to an aggressive and cohesive community.

This essay considers the life and career of the leading Mozambican intellectual of the early twentieth century, João dos Santos Albasini (1876–1922). A journalist and political activist, Albasini took advantage of the political space opened by Portugal's First Republic (1910–26) to challenge the articulation of colonial policy with respect to citizenship, land alienation, labor conscription and opportunities for education and economic participation. As a founding member of the Grêmio Africano, a Lourenço Marques social group and political lobby, he helped launch the group's newspapers, O Africano (1908–19) and O Brado Africano (1918–74). With the Grêmio newspapers as his vehicle, he sharply contrasted colonial and Republican ideals with the racism and injustice Mozambicans faced in the colonial capital of Lourenço Marques (today Maputo). The Portuguese deemed Albasini a worthy opponent, in part because of his ability to employ Portugal's most revered cultural symbols with an ironic twist.

The essay considers two sets of questions. The first set relates to the definition and analysis of issues Albasini highlighted and pursued. What was Albasini's political and social vision of possible choices within this seemingly fluid era? How does one recover and interpret Albasini's vision and style? Are their meaning and value to be found within the discourses of class struggle, ethnicity, assimilation and nationalism? To what extent did Albasini's vision shape contestation of political and social policy in colonial Mozambique in the critical first quarter of the twentieth century?

A second set of questions confronts Albasini's place in local society and his legacy. Who comprised the Grêmio Africano? What was it about João dos Santos Albasini that inspired Grêmio members and subsequent generations of Mozambicans to view him as a beacon? What did the rest of the local population think about Albasini, during his lifetime and after? What was his impact, and how did it relate to the broader issues of politics, historical agency and identity in early twentieth-century southern African history?

This article examines the history of akpeteshie (local gin) in Ghana from its illicit origins and widespread distillation in the 1930s to about 1967, when the Convention People's Party – seen as the ‘champion’ of the akpeteshie industry – was overthrown. Akpeteshie distillation proliferated when temperance interests succeeded in pressuring the colonial government into raising tariffs on imported liquor in 1930, just before the onset of a world-wide depression. Urban and rural workers, unable to afford expensive imported gin, became the patrons of akpeteshie. For urban workers, akpeteshie came to underpin an emerging popular culture.

Akpeteshie distillation threatened the colonial government's prior dependence on revenue from imported liquor, raised the specter of crime and disorder, compromised colonial concerns about urban space, exposed the weakness of colonial rule and eventually led the British government into the embarrassing diplomatic position of seeking an alteration of the Saint Germain Convention of 1919 that had banned commercial distillation of spirits in the African colonies.

By the 1940s, akpeteshie had emerged as an important symbol of African grievances under colonial rule. It became entwined in nationalist politics from the 1940s, and its legalization was one of the first legislative acts passed by the independent Ghanaian government. But the overwhelming African support for akpeteshie as an indigenous drink aside, the drink conjured images of class and popular protest that divided Ghanaian society and would unnerve independent African governments. As a cheap drink, akpeteshie became associated with the working-class experience, reflecting the social inequities within Ghanaian society and the undelivered promises of the independence struggle.

This essay is both a reinterpretation of the place of the French West African railway strike in labor history and part of an exploration of its effects on politics and political memory. This vast strike needs to be studied in railway depots from Senegal to the Ivory Coast. Historians need both to engage the fictional version of the strike in Ousmanne Sembene's God's Bits of Wood and avoid being caught up in it. Interviews in the key railway and union town of Thiès, Senegal, suggest that strike veterans want to distinguish an experience they regard as their own from the novelist's portrayal. They accept the heroic vision of the strike, but offer different interpretations of its relationship to family and community and suggest that its political implications include co-optation and betrayal as much as anticolonial solidarity. Interviews complement the reports of police spies as sources for the historian. The central irony of the strike is that it was sustained on the basis of railwaymen's integration into local communities but that its central demand took railwaymen into a professionally defined, nonracial category of railwayman. The strike thus needs to be situated in relation to French efforts to define a new imperialism for the post-war era and the government's inability to control the implications of its own actions and rhetoric. Negotiating with a new, young, politically aware railway union leadership in 1946 and 1947, officials were unwilling to defend the old racial wage scales, accepted in principle the cadre unique demanded by the union, but fought over the question of power – who was to decide the details that would give such a cadre meaning? The article analyzes the tension between the principles of nonracial equality and African community among the railwaymen and that between colonial power and notions of assimilation and development within the government. It examines the extent to which the strike remained a railway strike or spilled over into a wider and longer term question of proletarian solidarity and anticolonial mobilization.

This paper considers the intensification of agriculture along racial lines in South Africa by looking at the history of one spring and nine miles of river valley. It illustrates how racial conflict included struggles over nature, and how whites and blacks had different perceptions and abilities regarding its exploitation.

The ‘Eye’ of Kuruman is a large spring in a semi-arid region. Tswana herders originally used it as a water hole. Their food production system was extensive, making use of wide areas rather than increasing output in a limited area. Pastoralism was more important than agriculture. Irrigation, introduced by representatives of the London Missionary Society, was not widely practiced away from the missions until a subsistence crisis during the 1850s. It continued after the crisis passed. However, households continued to operate with the logic of extensive production, fitting irrigation into the pre-existing system.

In 1885, tne British annexed the region as part of the Crown Colony of British Bechuanaland. They demarcated African reserves at springs and in river valleys, and grazing lands were opened for white settlement. The upper Kuruman valley was designated a Crown reserve and the Eye became a town site. Downstream were Tswana households which cultivated with less security than on a native reserve. Land alienation with rinderpest devastated stock keeping and caused a widespread famine at the turn of the century, yet Tswana cultivators did not greatly intensify their use of irrigable lands. More extensive methods endured and wage labor became the basis of support.

In the twentieth century under Union government, use of the Eye intensified, and access to the valley became segregated by race. After 1918 the municipality of Kuruman operated a modern irrigation project, and in 1919, evicted black cultivators living at the Eye. Blacks continued to live and garden at Seodin, five miles downstream, but suffered water shortages which made even their casual irrigation impossible. Political expediency dictated against their pressing for water rights. In the 1940s the Department of Native Affairs drilled boreholes, but these were not sufficient to sustain cultivation. In 1962, the policy of Apartheid mandated the removal of blacks from Seodin. Despite state aid, the whites-only irrigation project never developed into a commercial success.

Although nationalism in Tanzania, as elsewhere in Africa, has been criticized for its shortcomings, and a ‘Dar es Salaam School’ has been charged with succumbing to its ideological biases, few historians have revisited or questioned Tanzania's dominant nationalist narrative – a narrative created over 25 years ago. Biographies written in aid of this narrative depict nationalism in the former Trust Territory of Tanganyika as primarily the work of a few good men, including ‘proto-nationalists’ whose anti-colonial actions set the stage and provided historical continuity for the later western-oriented ideological work of nationalist modernizers.

The life history narratives of women who became activists in the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) in the 1950s disrupt this view of progressive stages toward an emerging nationalist consciousness which reflected and borrowed heavily from western forms and ideals. They suggest that Tanganyikan nationalism was also and significantly the work of thousands of women, whose lives and associations reflected trans-tribal ties and affiliations, and whose work for TANU served to both construct and perform what nationalism came to signify for many Tanzanian women and men. Women activists did not simply respond to TANU's nationalist rhetoric; they shaped, informed and spread a nationalist consciousness for which TANU was the vehicle.

Neither ‘extraordinary’ individuals (the usual subjects of male biography) nor ‘representative’ of ‘ordinary people’ (often the subjects of life histories), TANU women activists' lives reveal the severe limitations of the dichotomous characterizations of traditional biographical forms. Together, their narratives constitute a collective biographical narrative of great significance for our understanding of nationalism and nationalist movement in the former Tanganyika.

Southern Africans configured missionaries as medical, bodily practitioners because of the meaning of ritual specialization in southern Africa. At the same time, ‘practicing medicine’ often meant minor surgery to missionaries, who lagged behind Europe's medical advances at the turn of the century. Whereas southern Africans located their well-being in the nexus of person and community, missionaries' surgery attacked this nexus. Surgery implied, and missionaries asserted, that healing derived from a resolution of interior somatic conflicts, in which troublesome body parts might be removed. A new way of speaking about certain kinds of physical pain was developed, whereby the body briefly became a total site for illness and healing. At the same time, Nonconformist evangelism demanded that individuals rid their interior selves of unsavory forces and extract themselves from those aspects of their communal lives which generated such influences. Because both Africans and missionaries moralized illness, and because some forms of surgery, like tooth-pulling, ‘worked’ for Africans, surgery marked a rite of passage to a new group of peers: Christians, who could recontextualize the catharsis of getting well.

The relationships between specific groups of women and men are explored during a formative period of urban nationalist politics, showing the failure of nationalists to incorporate women's demands, rather than the absence of women's struggles. It is important to view historical events as they occurred within larger processes of class formation and gender contestations, but it is no longer sufficient simply to prove the historical role of women in the nationalist movements themselves. Women's contributions still need to be written about, but gender history needs to be addressed as the relation between the sexes in order to avoid facile and rather confused accounts of class-and gender-defined struggles. This article first explores the Reformed Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union attempts to capitalize on an alliance with poorer women during the early 1950s. Secondly, new opportunities created by spatial and economic transformations in the urban economy in the 1950s are discussed in terms of a social mobility that led a minority of women to new social status. The Bus Boycott in 1956, led by the City Youth League, is then addressed as an event in nationalist history, but also as the interaction of women's class mobility and the violence which threatened it, either on a day-to-day basis or in the particular events of the Bus Boycott. The implications of these two separate events for the relationship of specific groups of women to nationalist politics, and nationalist historiography, are analyzed.