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  • 18 - Strategy in the Wars of Pre-colonial Sub-Saharan Africa

  • Edited by Isabelle Duyvesteyn, Universiteit Leiden, Beatrice Heuser, University of Glasgow
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Strategy
    Published online:
    06 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025, pp 369-383

  • Summary

    As noted by Richard Reid, African military history remains ‘perhaps the last bastion of the kind of distorted Eurocentric scholarship that characterised African studies before the 1960s’. This is especially true of the pre-colonial period, on account of both the dearth and the inherent limitations and biases of the sources available for study. The purpose of this contribution is to show that, in both tactical and strategic terms, African pre-colonial warfare was as complex as warfare in any other historical setting. We propose to substantiate our argument by exploring a number of regional case studies organised in a loose chronological order: warfare in the medieval empires of the Sahel, Asante warfare in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, Zulu and Ngoni warfare in southern Africa and east-central African warfare in the age of warlords. The driving questions that the collection proposes to address will be briefly explored in these different contexts, each of which highlights specific strategic dynamics and priorities.