JOHN FAGE and I met first in Cambridge in 1948 as graduate students at Cambridge University, each researching on topics in the history of the colonial period in Africa. Thereafter our ways parted. He became the first full-time history teacher at the recently founded University College of the Gold Coast. I went to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where my initial duty was to investigate what could be recovered of the pre-colonial history of East Africa that might be brought within the scope of academic study. We met next in 1952, when a London publisher suggested that we might join in writing a History of Africa in two volumes designed for the academic market. Following this initiative, we spent a fortnight of that summer, together with our wives and children, at my house in Buckinghamshire to discuss the possibilities, and this proved to be the beginning of a close professional collaboration which was to last for more than thirty-five years.

Exploring a range of studies regarding the ‘invention of tradition’, the ‘making of customary law’ and the ‘creation of tribalism’ since the 1980s, this survey article argues that the case for colonial invention has often overstated colonial power and ability to manipulate African institutions to establish hegemony. Rather, tradition was a complex discourse in which people continually reinterpreted the lessons of the past in the context of the present. Colonial power was limited by chiefs' obligation to ensure community well-being to maintain the legitimacy on which colonial authorities depended. And ethnicity reflected longstanding local political, cultural and historical conditions in the changing contexts of colonial rule. None of these institutions were easily fabricated or manipulated, and colonial dependence on them often limited colonial power as much as facilitating it.

This article investigates the role of African colonial employees in the functioning of the colonial state in French West Africa. Case studies from the 1890s and early 1900s demonstrate that in the transition from conquest to occupation, low-level African colonial intermediaries continually shaped the localized meanings that colonialism acquired in practice. Well-placed African colonial intermediaries in the colonies of Guinée Française and Soudan Français often controlled the dissemination of information and knowledge in the interactions of French colonial officials with local elites and members of the general population. The contributions of these African employees to the daily operations of the French colonial state show that scholars have long overlooked a cadre of men who played a significant role in shaping colonial rule.

This article examines the relationship between experiences and the physical and discursive constructions of space in colonial urban settings. African immigrants and the colonial regime imagined Douala's immigrant quarter, New Bell, as an African space but the actual meaning of this classification was highly fluid over time. Colonial ineffectiveness in approaching New Bell was evidenced by half-hearted and flawed surveillance efforts including the failed use of identity cards, informants and pass laws. Residents maintained a sense of autonomy within the space of New Bell, and remained largely ignorant or apathetic toward colonial law within the quarter, ultimately enabling the community to thrive.

The Sereer-Safèn are a minority population in a predominantly Wolof and Muslim region. During the colonial period the Safèn were ruled by Wolof chiefs, who treated them as a conquered population. Until the First World War, Safèn resistance was based on preserving a separate religious and ethnic identity, symbolized by the village shrine and matrilineal descent. Conversion to Islam had its roots in the crisis created by military recruitment. When the Safèn were forced to give soldiers to the French, ‘maternal uncles’ used their authority over their ‘nephews’ to recruit soldiers. Today this act is remembered as a ‘betrayal’ that called into question the legitimacy of the matrilineal system of labor and inheritance. Conversion to Islam has been studied by focusing on long-term Islamization rather than the moment of conversion. Oral testimony from converts emphasizes changes in behavior, funeral rites, inheritance and patterns of labor and power in the village community.

The demise of Spanish colonialism in Central Africa has to be understood as part of the general process of African decolonization. In accepting the methodological framework proposed by some historians for studying the collapse of European domination in the continent, we can explain the independence of Equatorial Guinea, in 1968, as a result of the interaction between three different factors: international, metropolitan and colonial. This article delineates the decolonization of the only Spanish colony south of the Sahara, its main argument being that, in the case of Equatorial Guinea, the international factor – specifically, the role of the United Nations – is fundamental to the understanding of the timing, the actors' strategies and the results.

This paper explores the notion of fractals – structures that display a similar degree of complexity at whatever scale they may be viewed – in relation to investigating African history. A case study of developing ethnicities in the Mambila region of the Nigeria–Cameroon borderland is presented from a fractal perspective: five levels of the history of this region, covering different time, population and physical scales, as well as different objects of explanation for each, are explored. Our general conclusion is that the different scales, or levels, at which one may view history may contain features or imply generalizations that mask features found in, or generalizations implied by, other levels.