There are signs that the familiar bias towards research on the Later Stone Age of the southern Sahara and Sahel and on the Iron Age of other parts of West Africa is beginning to be redressed, although Nigeria and Ghana still furnish the vast majority of dates from the southern coastal states. Historical and protohistorical archaeology is becoming increasingly popular, and some areas, for example southern Mali, are receiving serious attention for the first time. Dates are now appearing in large numbers; this paper reports on 355 new radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dates.

Multi-disciplinary research has helped to clarify the Holocene environmental and cultural-stratigraphic sequence in several areas, including the Aïr and Ténéré in Niger and coastal Mauretania and Senegal. There is now strong evidence of a centre of copper metallurgy in the Azelik region of Niger in the 1st millennium b.c. which may well have facilitated the spread of iron working to Nigeria. At the same time, new dates from Mali may indicate a second diffusion route through the western Sahara. In Nigeria, new and early dates for the Nok culture are supported by thermoluminescence dating. Recent work on the later Metal Age of Senegal has permitted the description of four partially overlapping zones, and should soon lead to understanding of their internal and external relationships. Similarly, a substantial body of data has been accumulated, though not yet published, on the Iron Age of the Inland Niger delta. In the more southerly parts of West Africa, several new dates from just north of the forest refer to the emergence of the earliest Akan groups in Ghana and of Oyo in Nigeria. Previously reported dates from Ife and Benin have now been supplemented by a series of thermoluminescence dates.

This article deals with climatic reconstruction over a period of centuries, on the basis of indirect evidence found in historical and geographical sources. Histories, archives, local chronicles and journals of travellers and settlers contain references to lakes, landscapes, famines, droughts and floods, as well as occasional descriptions of climate and meteorological measurements. Such information can be combined with evidence from geology, palynology or the study of tree-rings to support hypotheses regarding climate and environment several centuries ago.

This methodology is here described and used to reconstruct the trend of rainfall fluctuation in Africa over the past millennium. Two approaches are considered: the one seeks to determine absolute variation (thus assessing whether particular episodes were wetter or drier than today); the other focuses on short-term climatic anomalies (e.g. droughts) in which rainfall differed from the mean prevailing at the time, without seeking to relate them to present conditions.

The results obtained from this study suggest that during the past millennium there have been two periods of relatively wet conditions in the semi-arid regions south of the Sahara: between the eighth and fourteenth centuries, and between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Evidence for these episodes, and for synchronous fluctuations elsewhere in Africa is presented in the text.

The sudden expulsion of the Xhosa across the Fish River in 1811–12 created a practical and conceptual crisis which the traditional political authorities were unable to resolve. Two commoners, Nxele and Ntsikana, emerged in this vacuum, each proposing his own solution to the problems posed by the white irruption. Although these responses were religious responses, they were neither irrational nor incomprehensible. Xhosa religion had long functioned as an instrument for the control of the material world. By incorporating selected Christian concepts with the Xhosa world-view, Nxele and Ntsikana were able to provide the Xhosa with acceptable explanations of past events and prescriptions for future action.

Nxele urged resistance and Ntsikana preached submission, but an examination of their personal histories shows that these final conclusions were more the product of exterior pressure than interior revelation. It may be suggested that the future reputations of the two men, like their past actions, will be determined more by the popular mood than by anything they themselves did or said.

Successive Europeans in south-east Tanzania looked for an ethnically based political authority under whom to live or with whom to work. Bishop Edward Steere of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa predicted the existence of very large tribal and linguistic ‘nations’ when this turned out not to be so, the UMCA missionaries who had settled at Masasi sought anxiously for some influential chief who could be represented as heading an ethnic polity; first German and then British administrators over-readily assumed that the chiefs whom they installed as akidas did in fact represent such ethnicities; finally, in the late 1920s, the British instituted historical research prior to the establishment of Indirect Rule, which was intended to reflect the ethnic and political complexity of the region. This European preoccupation with ethnicity bore little relation to the actualities of the region, which from the nineteenth-century incursions of the Yao, Makua and Makonde had constituted a mosaic of small, autonomous and ethnically mixed groupings. Nevertheless, certain African adventurers were able to take advantage of the European need for allies to build up their power, to become recognised as ‘chiefs’, and ultimately to become regarded as leaders of ethnicities. This was the case with Matola I and Matola II of Newala who between them developed their polity from a very small scattering of huts to a large and prosperous paramountcy. Within the Matola polity various social and cultural processes were at work to produce a common sense of identity, but these processes had not fully eroded the marks of the varying ethnic identities of those who belonged or submitted to the polity. The Indirect Rule inquiries, therefore, with their fanatical emphasis upon ethnicity as the only legitimate base for political authority had the result of dismantling the Matola polity and thereby destroying the only effective local nucleus of political consolidation.

This article seeks to explain how and why the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society (A.P.S.) came to support the South African Natives' Land Act of 1913 when African political opinion in South Africa opposed it. The reasons for the Society's position are sought in its predisposition in favour of segregatory policies, but also in several other political considerations including, it is suggested, its need to retain the support of the imperial government in the interests of its campaign against the British South Africa Company. The A.P.S.'s attitude emerged in its handling of the South African Native National Congress's deputation to England in 1914, and in its dispute with one of the deputation's members – Sol Plaatje – who remained in the country until 1917. The dispute intensified with the publication of Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa, whilst the direction of the A.P.S.'s policy of support for the South African government came to be challenged from within by two of Plaatje's supporters on the A.P.S.'s Executive Committee. Eventually, relations between the A.P.S. and the S.A.N.N.C, were broken off completely, and Plaatje's two supporters were voted off the Society's Executive Committee. Opposition to the Society's position over the Natives' Land Act continued to be expressed, however, in a committee set up to carry on Plaatje's campaign after his return to South Africa. One of the effects of this, and of the Society's activities generally in relation to the Natives' Land Act, was to emphasize its degree of isolation from currents of opinion that might have provided a new base of support at a time when it particularly needed this.