This paper is a review of the course of research during the past decade into the history of indigenous metal working in sub-Saharan Africa. It comprises three sections: a summary of the chronology of early metallurgy and the spread of metal working; a description of African metal working in terms of mining, smelting and smithing, with particular emphasis on recent interpretations of the iron-smelting technology; and a conclusion summarizing the main developments and some lines of future enquiry. A glossary of technical terms used in this paper is appended.

The decline of the Creole or Fernandino planters of Fernando Póo came later and was less severe than has sometimes been said, while the indigenous Bubi inhabitants played a far greater role in the development of the cocoa economy than has usually been acknowledged. Social discrimination against Creoles and Bubi was of little significance. The re-direction of Fernandian exports to Spain from the 1890s had no negative effect on African producers, and Creoles and Spaniards united to fight tariff policies detrimental to their interests. Bubi suffered severely from land alienation, but they kept sufficient land to be able to participate fully in the cocoa boom. Creoles lost land through debt, but so did Spaniards. The beneficiaries of land transfers were black as well as white, and a map from around 1913 shows a roughly even mix of Spanish and Creole landowners. Black and white planters were united in every aspect of labour which involved relations with the authorities. Attempts to force poor Bubi into plantation labour collapsed quickly, and wealthy Bubi cultivators had little difficulty in finding labour to employ. Access to credit was equal for all landowners, and the evidence for Africans being more spendthift than Europeans is of dubious validity. The thesis of African decline becomes more plausible from the mid-1920s, due to Spanish immigration, the formation of joint-stock companies, and accentuated social discrimination, but the extent of that decline remains to be determined. The roughly tripartite equilibrium between Bubi, Creole and European cocoa producers in the early 1910s contrasts with descriptions of other cocoa-growing areas in western Africa, suggesting the need for a re-examination of the evidence for the Creole role in cocoa cultivation and for Creole economic decline from the 1890s in West Africa.

When combined, evidence from oral tradition, Arabic texts and archaeological sites indicates that ancient Mali's seat of government changed more than once during its imperial period from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. According to oral tradition, the town in which Sunjata spent his early years, and to which he returned from exile, was Dakajalan. This mansadugu or ‘king's town’ served as Sunjata's base of operations for his campaign against Sumanguru and may have continued for a time as both spiritual and military headquarters during the struggle for unification following the defeat of Soso. As Mande's core territory expanded into the beginnings of empire, the mansadugu was probably moved north-eastward, down the River Niger to take advantage of widening commercial opportunities and to govern an expanded population of imperial subjects who included large numbers of Muslims from the former Soninke territories. Niani was one of the oldest and most important cities of Mali, especially notable for its iron industry. If it served also as a political capital this would most likely have been in the sixteenth century under Niani Mansa Mamadu, a descendant of Sunjata's royal lineage.

The killing in May 1905 of Harry St. George Gait, a senior official of the Uganda Protectorate, has generally been treated in the literature as a political murder mystery. It can more usefully be seen as a window on two issues: the importance of clientship in relationships between agriculturalists and pastoralists in the kingdom of Ankole, and British reliance on pastoral allies to make real their power in Ankole. This paper suggests that Gait was killed by an agriculuralist frustrated by his own failure to advance in Ankole society; but that the repercussions of the killing were magnified by the fears and uncertainties of British officials on the spot over the reliability of their pastoralist allies. The British were, however, unable to dispense with these allies, and the crisis generated by Gait's death was resolved by a reaffirmation of the alliance between the British and the pastoralist elite, after the effective scapegoating of two minor chiefs.

The Muslim social movement known as the fergo Nioro provides a case of popular elaboration of the message of a leader of jihad. Umar Tal's call to holy war led to the conquest of Karta in the mid-1850s, and his call to hijra resulted in the migration of perhaps 20,000 Senegal-valley Fulbe to form a Muslim settler community. In the years after Umar's departure from Karta in 1859, military leaders and others in the Fulbe settler community sent envoys to recruit additional settlers from the Senegal valley. At least 16,000 and perhaps as many as 30,000 Fulbe responded to this recruitment effort and left Bundu, Futa Toro and the lower Senegal valley between 1862 and 1890. Two periods of more massive migration coincided with the residence at Nioro of Amadu Sheku, Umar's son and designated successor. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, a cholera epidemic swept up the Senegal valley, claimed thousands of victims, and encouraged Fulbe to leave the region for Karta. During the mid-1880s, French policies in the Senegal valley, notably the emancipation of slaves and moves to halt Fulbe raids in the lower Senegal valley, influenced the social movement.

In both periods of large-scale migration and at other times, the Umarian envoys constructed an appeal which elaborated and even transformed Umar's call to hijra. Umar's insistence on holy war was a dominant theme in all periods, and resonated with the young men who left the valley in hopes of accumulating wealth through warfare. His condemnation of French influence in the Senegal valley was also expressed in the Arabic letters delivered by envoys. Umar's emphasis on the cutting of social bonds was not emphasized, as Fulbe settlers sought to attract relatives and neighbors to the new Fulbe communities in Karta.

Throughout the twentieth century the British Colonial Office sought to limit the severity of corporal punishment and to regulate more closely its use in the colonies. This article has looked at one aspect of that policy involving the African Colonial Forces. Most military officers argued that corporal punishment was essential to maintain discipline, especially in times of war or active service. The Colonial Office sought to limit severely the circumstances in which corporal punishment could be administered but accepted that its use should be retained or revived during the two World Wars.

In the Second World War the arguments for retaining corporal punishment for African soldiers were increasingly denounced by officials and various humanitarian lobbies. African Colonial Forces had come under direct War Office control in September 1939 and during the war many African soldiers served overseas alongside British and other units; they also constituted part of an imperial order which, so propaganda increasingly proclaimed after the fall of Singapore, was opposed to racial discrimination. Corporal punishment based on racial terms was out of kilter in the war and was maintained only at the insistence of senior military men. Once the war was over the Colonial Office ordered that this ‘relic of discrimination’ should be ended.

The English-language literature on Algeria generated by the Algerian war of independence and continuing down to the present forms an intellectual as well as linguistic tradition apart from the much more voluminous literature in French. Despite the involvement of French and North African writers who have published in English, it is largely the creation of outsiders looking at the country from British and North American points of view, according to current fashions. The war of independence remains central to its concerns as the great transformer of a colonial into a national society, however that transformation is to be understood. The qualified approval of the nationalist cause by Alistair Horne contrasts sharply with Elie Kedourie's denunciation. Most judgements have been based on the outcome, the political, social and economic performance of the regime, considered as good or bad. Since the death of Boumedienne in 1978, they have tended to be unfavourable. Their largely secular analyses, however, have been called in question since 1988 by the rise of political Islam, which has called for a reappraisal of the whole subject of the war and its consequences. Such a reappraisal is still in the future. Meanwhile Ernest Gellner, in dispute with Edward Said over the question of Orientalism, has raised the matter of the role of Islam in the history of Algeria to a high level of generalization, at which the war itself may, paradoxically, return to the forefront of international scholarly concern.

This essay argues that female participation in agriculture and limited seclusion in Maradi (Niger) today do not stem from the absence of agricultural slavery in the pre-colonial period but rather result from the resistance of the Katsinawa élite to the Islamic reforms of the Sokoto Caliphate and from the absence of rimji (plantation) slavery in the region. The abolition of slavery did not mark a watershed in the rise of seclusion, as M. G. Smith argues was the case in Nigeria, but rather triggered a series of reformulations of marriage and female hierarchy. Semi-legitimate and legitimate polygynous marriages permitted men and women of the wealthier classes to retain the labor of former female slaves as ‘concubines’ and later enabled them to use junior wives to perform the duties once carried out by slaves. Women countered the ambiguities of such marriages by asserting their worth through wedding ritual and later by adopting the veiling of élite women. As economic and cultural ties with northern Nigeria grew during the colonial and post-colonial periods, and as goods and services reduced some of the labor demands upon urban women, seclusion gained in popularity. By acquiescing to the dependency implicit in purdah women could protect themselves from the labor demands of others and could sometimes free themselves up to earn independent incomes of their own. Thus the recent adoption of seclusion in Maradi has not arisen out of a unilateral decision on the part of newly freed women to adopt seclusion as a sign of status, as Smith claimed for Northern Nigeria, but resulted instead from of a series of redefinitions, contestations and negotiations of marriage in which both men and women have been active.

The significance of dress in mediating social relations was deeply rooted in the Central African experience. In pre-colonial times, clothing, jewellery and insignia conveyed identity, status, values and a sense of occasion. Those with access to European trade cloth and second-hand clothes integrated them into their dress. Central Africans had a strong sense of the “politics of costume” long before new sources and ideas of clothing arrived with colonialism.

Brazzaville, the capital of French Equatorial Africa, then became the scene of opportunity, experimentation and choice. Foreign workers from West Africa, the French Antilles and the Central African coastal regions pioneered new styles which were quickly appropriated and adapted by other townspeople. Europeans, in their attire, also seemed to confirm the importance of dress and were a model for those who considered themselves évolués. In handing out clothing, European employers and missionaries had their own agenda, which was rejected by many townspeople as an autonomous fashion sense developed in Bacongo and Poto-Poto, the African districts of Brazzaville. With an entrenched monetary economy, cloth and clothing became widely available to all with cash. Styles, costs and values became issues of contention. Clothing not only symbolized change but became a vehicle for change.

In the late colonial period, the sources allow a deeper understanding of the relationship of dress to controversial social issues. Clothing became an arena for contesting and asserting class, gender and generational roles.

The professional Nigerian nationalist historiography which emerged in reaction against the imperialist Hamitic Hypothesis – the assertion that Africa's history had been made only by foreigners – is rooted in a complex West African tradition of critical dialogue with European ideas. From the mid-nineteenth century, western-educated Africans have re-worked European ideas into distinctive Hamitic Hypotheses suited to their colonial location. This account developed within the constraints set by changing European and African-American ideas about West African origins and the evolving character of the Nigerian intelligentsia. West Africans first identified themselves not as victims of Hamitic invasion but as the degenerate heirs of classical civilizations, to establish their potential to create a modern, Christian society. At the turn of the century various authors argued for past development within West Africa rather than mere degeneration. Edward Blyden appropriated African-American thought to posit a distinct racial history. Samuel Johnson elaborated on Yoruba traditions of a golden age. Inter-war writers such as J. O. Lucas and Ladipo Solanke built on both arguments, but as race science declined they again invoked universal historical patterns. Facing the arrival of Nigeria as a nation-state, later writers such as S. O. Biobaku developed these ideas to argue that Hamitic invasions had created Nigeria's proto-national culture. In the heightened identity politics of the 1950s, local historians adopted Hamites to compete for historical primacy among Nigerian communities. The Hamitic Hypothesis declined in post-colonial conditions, in part because the concern to define ultimate identities along a colonial axis was displaced by the need to understand identity politics within the Nigerian sphere. The Nigerian Hamitic Hypothesis had a complex career, promoting élite ambitions, Christian identities, Nigerian nationalism and communal rivalries. New treatments of African colonial historiography – and intellectual history – must incorporate the complexities illus-trated here.

Studies of the politics of urban African communities in South Africa have focused on the sporadic manifestations of mass protest, identifying formal labour and political organizations as the prime agents of mobilization. Whilst some recognition has been accorded to the role played by vigilance and civic associations in contributing to the growth of community politics, Advisory Boards and other government-created institutions have been portrayed as ‘collaborationist’ bodies, and those serving on such Boards dismissed as ‘stooges’. Looking beyond the political rhetoric that has surrounded the Advisory Boards, the historical reality has been more complex. Although Advisory Boards lacked legitimacy, and were often powerless in policy terms, even progressive political organisations were prepared to use these ‘institutions of the oppressor’ to further their aims in the 1940s and 1950s. This case study of the politics of the New Brighton Advisory Board demonstrates the way in which such institutions provided a platform (albeit a limited one) from which African communities might be mobilized around the everyday issues of urban life. In this way, the Advisory Board contributed to the formation of a strong political tradition in the Port Elizabeth township. This tradition was appropriated by different political groups and used to mobilize the African community around a variety of social, economic and political issues affecting the township.

The article explores a neglected aspect of West African history, namely the historiography of ‘stateless’ peoples in north-western Ghana. At the same time, it is a contribution to the recent debate on the role of history in the construction of new ‘tribal’ identities in Africa in the colonial and post-colonial periods. After discussing local oral patrician accounts of migration and settlement, and the historical imagination of colonial officers, I analyse histories of tribal origins written recently by Dagara intellectuals, which draw upon hypotheses, evidence, tropes and narrative models from both colonial and indigenous sources. The concern is not with a conventional history of ideas, but with showing how authors with new requirements and interests can fuse disparate elements into new accounts of the past whose underlying intentions differ considerably from those of their sources. More specifically, the article discusses the claims of intellectuals' and villagers' stories with reference to different underlying political agendas, suggesting that they constitute different historiographic genres appealing to different audiences. The former are basically concerned with establishing the Dagara as a political community within a modern state, the latter with providing charters for local boundaries and rights.

Although studies of both state ‘urban native’ policy and African life on the Witwatersrand in the 1940s have increased in volume and sophistication over the last decade, these two themes have generally been treated discretely in the literature. While a regional focus has yielded a complex and differentiated picture of urban African politics and culture, studies of the state still tend to miss this complexity by focusing on the ‘view from above’, from the vantage point of central state institutions.

This article draws together these two separate historiographical threads to examine state policy from the perspective of local state officials, those individuals most intimately concerned with day-to-day administration of urban African communities in the rapidly industrialising Witwatersrand of the 1940s. Through the narrative of a deep personal antagonism between an African politician in the Witwatersrand location of Brakpan and a white administrator, the article explores the intersection of two microcosms: the world of the Afrikaner intellectual, educated in the tradition of ‘volkekunde’ and thereby claiming expert knowledge of the African, and the real worlds of the Africans the expert claimed to know—themselves shaped by new, radical currents in the changing wartime urban context. Using the Brakpan case study, the article also shows that in contrast to the national government's fumbling indecision in the face of the urban crisis, it was the municipalities which agitated for state control over all Africans, tighter influx and efflux controls and the more efficient distribution of African labour between different economic sectors. In voicing their discontent with state policy and in their policy improvizations, local officials anticipated much in the apartheid order of the 1950s.

Despite his important political and literary activities, Blatta Gäbrä Egzi'-abehēr is almost unknown to scholars of Menilek's Ethiopia. This historical period is not particularly well researched, and the author stands out as one of the few Ethiopian intellectuals to have written such an important number of literary works focused on nationalistic and anti-Italian feelings. The Amharic/Ge'ez text under discussion, his letter to Menilek written in 1899, is a remarkable document from this point of view because it reveals a strong opposition to colonialism and the Italian occupation of Eritrea. This document is one of the first Ethiopian sources to testify to the growing nationalism and the growth of concepts of unity and independence. It allows us to consider more carefully the beginning of an Ethiopian secular ideology of the modern state. And such an ideology must be placed in the colonial context. The letter to Menilek raises some important questions regarding the new source material in the late nineteenth century available to historians of modern Ethiopia. A translation of the text is given as well as a comment on its historical significance.