The examination of the growth of canoe transport in Buganda in the nineteenth century is an aspect of the kingdom's history that has received little serious consideration to date. This paper focuses on the ways in which the canoe fleet, especially from the 1840s, was systematically developed and utilized in the extension of Ganda power and influence in the Lake Victoria region. The need to protect and promote commerce was one of the driving forces behind Buganda's diplomatic, military and technological policies in the second half of the nineteenth century. This was consistent with objectives of the kingdom that had endured since around the middle of the sixteenth century, although the scale of these objectives had expanded along with the kingdom's horizons. Yet recognition of this basic continuity should not detract from our appreciation of the degree to which the Ganda innovated to meet the challenges of long-distance trade, as well as the challenges to their control of the external environment. The presence of Ganda at Tabora, on the southern shore of Lake Victoria, and even at Zanzibar itself is indicative of the alacrity with which Kabaka Suna (c. 1830–56) and Kabaka Mutesa (1856–84) seized their opportunities and attempted to secure conditions perceived to be favourable to the ‘national interest’ far beyond territorial borders. Yet Ganda also failed to realize the full military potential of their canoes. Despite their considerable efforts, the success of the naval endeavour was never without qualifications, and it is one of the primary aims of this paper to analyze these deficiencies.

Early in the twentieth century, French and British colonial scholars developed rigid, descent-based models of African pastoral societies. These models emphasized stasis partly because the scholars relied on unrepresentative samples of the pastoralists' views of their own societies, and partly because the scholars simply misinterpreted data. By the 1970s anthropologists had radically revised these models, arguing that although pastoralists generally defined themselves in terms of descent, their societies were nevertheless quite dynamic. In their view, descent was an idiom of social discourse; while pastoral societies may have operated according to the idiom in the past, the economic changes brought about by colonialism had ruptured the connection between the ideology and social practice. More recently, historians have begun to argue that pastoral societies were also dynamic before colonialism, and that there was great flexibility in the ways pastoralists reckoned social identities.

This essay draws on evidence from the nineteenth-century western Sahara to argue that pastoral societies were dynamic long before the colonial period, and that many Saharans perceived their society in this way. This evidence was neglected by the early colonial scholars and many post-colonial anthropologists in favor of those descriptions that emphasized stasis. Saharan accounts that described social dynamism were often based on the explicitly Islamic model of the Prophet Muhammad and his diverse community of supporters. This model, then and throughout Islamic history, has offered the possibility of social improvement, and therein lies the explanation for why some Saharans interpreted society as static while others saw it as dynamic. Social models that fix groups into specific ranks according to descent serve the interests of those at the higher ranks, while dynamic models serve to legitimize social mobility.

For a number of years the historiography of Southern Africa has been dominated by a materialist framework that has focused upon modes of production and forms of socio-political organization as the determining factors in historical change. Those historians concerned with the history of women in pre-colonial societies – even those who have privileged gender relations in their analyses – have largely been content to construct women's history by applying the insights of socio-economic and political analyses of the past to gender dynamics, and by projecting the insights of anthropological analyses of present gender relations into the past. Some of these historians have concluded that until the arrival of capitalism no substantial changes in the situations, power or status of women took place within Zulu society, even during the period of systemic transformation known as the mfecane in the early nineteenth century.

More recently, Zulu gender history has become part of a larger debate connected to the changing political and academic milieu in South Africa. Representatives of a revived Africanist tradition have criticized materialist historians for writing Zulu history from an outsider's perspective and of focusing overly on conflict and power imbalances within the nineteenth-century kingdom in an effort to discredit contemporary Zulu nationalism. To counter this, historian Simon Maphalala has stressed the harmony of nineteenth-century Zulu society, the power advisors exercised in state government, and the lack of internal conflict. Maphalala also claims that women's subordinate role in society ‘did not cause any dissatisfaction among them’, and argues that ‘[women] accepted their position and were contented’. In recent constitutional debates many South African intellectuals including members of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (CONTRALESA), invoked this ‘benign patriarchy’ model of pre-colonial gender relations to oppose the adoption of gender-equality provisions in the new constitution. As Cherryl Walker has noted, the hegemonic definition of traditional gender relations to which such figures have made rhetorical appeals often masks not only the historicity of these relations but also hides dissenting opinions (often demarcated along gender lines) as to what those relations are and have been.

Quite possibly, Eva, born Krotoa, is the most written about African woman in South African historiography. Her name fills the journals of the Dutch East India Company almost from the very start of their little feeding-station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. She is known as a Khoena girl taken into Dutch commander Jan Van Riebeeck's household from the age of about twelve, who later became a key interpreter for the Dutch, was baptised, married Danish surgeon, Pieter Van Meerhoff, but then died as a drunken prostitute after his death. Yet her persona remains an enigma. As Christina Landman put it, ‘Krotoa is a story-generator’.

To conservative historians, Eva's life offers living proof that the Khoena were irredeemable savages. To black nationalist writers, such as Khoena historian, Yvette Abrahams, she personifies the widespread rape and abuse of black women by the invaders. Eva's chief biographer, V. C. Malherbe, forms a more neutral judgment by describing Eva as primarily ‘a woman in between’. Landman views her as an early synthesizer of African and Christian religious traditions. Carli Coetzee demonstrates how recent Afrikaans-speaking artists, poets and actors have constructed an image of Eva as the mother of the Afrikaner nation, a tamed African who acquiesced to Europeanness. She is often portrayed as yearning to return to her African roots, but without success.

Virtually all of the representations of Eva construct her as a helpless victim of vicious culture clashes. Today's racial consciousness, laced with assumptions of inevitable African/European hostility, is often read back into the historical record. Frustratingly large gaps in that record leave room for a wide range of interpretations, depending heavily on the subjectivities of the historian. Virtually all previous writers, however, have judged Eva primarily by the tragic circumstances of her death, while minimizing the considerable achievements of her earlier years.

In 1950, a young man named Ayo Salako went to work for the Nigerian railway as a casual laborer. He hoped to be like his father, a locomotive driver who had worked for the railway from 1916 to his death thirty-four years later. Indeed, Ayo Salako became a successful railwayman, climbing the career ladder to locomotive driver, transferring to a number of different stations and retiring with a pension in 1987. Although the two generations of men both made long, continuous careers in railway employment, Ayo Salako was rather different from his father in terms of his domestic life. The elder Salako had parlayed his employment success into a polygamous marriage and the maintenance of a farm and patron–client relations in his hometown of Ogbomosho. His son, in contrast, married his current wife only after the dissolution of a previous marriage, visited Ogbomosho infrequently and retired in Ibadan rather than in his patrilineal hometown. During his career he saw himself as a modernizer, involved with industrial technology, well-traveled within the country, monogamous, and building a life and educating his children in the booming towns of post-war Nigeria.

Ayo Salako's young adulthood during the 1940s and 1950s coincided with important economic, social and political transformations in Nigeria and throughout Africa. The Second World War and the end of the depression brought economic expansion and a new wave of government interventionism. Cities were swollen with migrants looking for cash and the independence from elders that came with it. African railways expanded to meet new demands for transport and their work forces were among the largest and most politically active on the continent. Faced with imperial financial pressures and widespread African dissent, officials were turning to new policies for the colonies. Ambitious planners attempted to rationalize peasant agriculture to increase production, stabilize wage labor to improve efficiency, reshape African cities to make them less ‘disorderly’ and mold African family life to conform more closely to a bourgeois European image.

Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600–1850. By JAMES L. A. WEBB JR. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Pp. xxvi+227. £40.95 (ISBN 0-299-14330-9); £17.95, paperback (ISBN 0-299-14334-1).

In contrast to the desert itself, the Sahara as subject of historical (re)construction is currently displaying signs of health and vitality. It is enticing historians into a range of theoretical and methodological domains deriving from other disciplines, and simultaneously attracting scholars from other disciplines to play out their own explorations around its contours. For a space which seems to have no difficulty occupying well-delineated and identified areas in every genre of cartographical representation, the Sahara is surprisingly difficult to ‘locate’ in academic discourse. Its identity, in current parlance, is a popular focus of speculation and debate, challenging conventional notions of its location, both in time and in space. One of these challenges is engagingly articulated in the recent publication of economic historian James Webb Jr. His Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600–1850, invites wider participation in this ‘search for the Sahara’ and in so doing, encourages broader understanding of just where ‘Saharan studies’ and in particular Saharan history and Saharan society stand in these so-called post-colonial times.