Between the ninth and third millennia B.C. wetter conditions prevailed over most of Africa. Lakes and rivers were fuller and some of the internal basins were temporarily linked, especially in the ‘Middle African’ belt. This comprises the southern Sahara and Sahel, stretching from the Upper Niger to the Middle Nile, with a south-easterly extension into the Upper Nile basin and the East African rift valleys. This situation was exploited by people who developed a decidedly aquatic economy and culture. From their waterside camps and settlements archaeologists have recovered bones of fish and aquatic animals which these people ate, as well as the distinctive harpoon-heads carved from bone with which they obtained them, and also pottery, bearing peculiar decoration executed with fish-bones and water-shells, made in imitation of (fishing-) baskets. Boating and other cultural developments are deducible. The harpoons date back to 7,000 b.c. at least; the pottery dates back to more than 6,000 b.c. and was clearly an African invention. It reflects important developments in gastronomy and home life.

In the Kenya rift valley the main stage of Leakey's ‘Kenya Capsian’ culture is essentially the local manifestation of this far-flung ‘aquatic civilization’.

Its greatest extent was achieved during the wettest times of the seventh millennium b.c., and probably involved the expansion of Negroid peoples across this continent-wide savanna belt. Also explained perhaps is the extensive, though now fragmented, distribution of languages which Greenberg combines in his ‘Nilo-Saharan’ super-family. It is suspected that aspects of this ancient aquatic way of life may be maintained or reflected by latter-day isolated or ‘unclean’ lake or swamp communities. This subject has been largely neglected by African culture-historians.

Drier conditions in the late sixth and fifth millennia b.c. signalled a decline of this aquatic civilization and, in particular, broke its geographical continuity. Nevertheless, there was a qualified revival in many parts in the fourth and third millennia. In the Kenya rift this later phase seems to equate with the first stage of the ‘stone bowl cultures’. Around Lake Victoria a devolved relic survived until the eve of Bantu expansion about two thousand years ago. Other late or modified examples are known on the Nile and in the western Sudan. Generally, however, the viability and prestige of an aquatic way of life were undermined by the second millennium b.c. In the Sahara and Sahel as well as in the northerly parts of eastern Africa this decline was paralleled by the spread of pastoralism as a new basis of subsistence and prestige. Those who introduced cattle to Kenya from Ethiopia were Cushitic-speakers maintaining, significantly, a fish-taboo.

This subject should prove of considerable historiographical interest. The aquatic way of life flourished through Middle Africa at the very time when grain-agriculture and stock-raising were being pioneered in the Near East; and the slow spread of agriculture in Africa, sometimes considered an indication of ‘backwardness’, may be partly explicable by the very success of the aquatic life and of its distinct cultural tradition which was ascendant for a while across the widest part of the continent.

Sil'on admet cette identification, la fréquence et la persistance du nom Dauma/Doma, depuis le XVe siècle (Maqrizi), jusqu'au XVIIe (Dapper), marque donc nettement l'importance du Doma dans le système politique Jukun/Kwararafa. En dépit de son èloignement à la fois de la côte et de l'axe soudanais, ce grand pouvoir africain, dont nous soupçonnons encore à peine le rôle, a été connu, au moins vaguement, par le monde extérieur….

On doit par contre écarter définitivement toute identification avec le Dahomey historique, qui n'a pu se constituer en Etat qu'au XVIIe siècle, comme ses traditions l'indiquent. En revanche l'ensemble ethnique aja apparait dans la documentation écrite dès 1539, pour le royaume d'Arida, puis en 1561 avec le nom de Povpovs, sur la carte de Bartholomeu Velho (pl. 203) et en 1570, avec la Costa Darida sur l'Atlas de Fernão Vaz Dourado (pl. 206). C'est en confrontant ces textes avec les traditions qu'on pourra éclairer les origines des peuples du Golfe du Benin.

Only recently have historians devoted much attention to monetary developments in African history, primarily because the substantivist school of economic anthropology, which has argued that so-called western economic theory does not apply to African situations, has dominated the field. This view has been increasingly under attack in recent years, particularly by a new group of economic historians who have found many aspects of formal economic theory useful in the reconstruction of Africa's past. Marion Johnson's pioneering work on the gold mithqal and cowrie shell, for example, has documented the spread of a common currency over much of West Africa, throughout an area encompassed by Lake Chad in the east, the upper reaches of the Senegambia in the west, the southern Sahara in the north, and the region between the Volta basin and the Niger Delta in the south. The study of other currencies, including the copper rod standard of the Cross River basin in Nigeria and Cameroons, and the cloth money of the Senegambia, has demonstrated the importance of other standards besides cowries and gold, so that it is now known that virtually all of precolonial West Africa had economies sufficiently developed to require the use of circulating mediums of exchange and units of account. This breakthrough raises a number of important questions which seriously challenge, if not completely undermine, the predominant view that Africa's past, down to very recent times, has been subsistence oriented, non-market directed, and basically static.

The three unsuccessful jihāds against the Wolof state of Kajoor are described as revival and reform movements among a people nearly universally professing Islam, but practising a syncretistic form. The traditional view that these were wars between ‘Pagans’ and ‘Muslims’ is seen as a reflection of the social and political isolation of the clerics as a community, an understandable but on closer examination misleading interpretation based on uncritical reading of clerical sources.

The assumptions that Ndebele settlement was purely militarily orientated and that it was composed of a hierarchy of ‘regiments’ and ‘divisions’ or ‘provinces’ are false. The parallels between the Ndebele ibutho and the English regiment are so tenuous that the translation is best dispensed with. On the other hand, an Ndebele ibutho was, at least in one sense, a military organization which evolved over a number of years into a cluster of imisi (villages). These imisi were residential, essentially non-military, and composed by far the largest proportion of Ndebele settlement. The ‘division’ did not exist. Amhlope, Amakanda, Amnyama and Igapha were collective group concepts comprising imisi descended from four original or proto-amabutho created in the period before the migration of the Ndebele to the Matopos region. The sequence of creation of amabutho in the post-1850 period can roughly be determined, outbursts of ibutho formation usually coinciding with crises in the history of the kingdom. Amabutho created after the late 1860s such as Imbizo and Insuga disintegrated after the European conquest during the 1890s, whereas older, established imisi survive as concepts of allegiance to this day. A knowledge of how the Ndebele ibutho evolved is essential for a more complete understanding of the dynamics of Ndebele society at other levels, for example the way the chieftaincies (izigaba) and the great local lineages emerged, as well as the social and political context within which individuals sought to realize their ambitions. The unexpected way in which a closer look at the ibutho reveals much of the early literature on the Ndebele to be at best incomplete, at worst, caricature, but either way misleading, suggests that other nineteenth-century Nguni states may benefit from renewed historical examination.

For a variety of reasons the extent, number and severity of Ndebele raids upon the Shona-speaking peoples have been greatly exaggerated in the past. Moreover most studies of the Ndebele have failed to take into account the fact that the Ndebele conquered an already well-established Shona state with an economy linked with the Indian Ocean trade. This article seeks to show that the bulk of Ndebele raiding before 1873 was a response to both the political and military threat of the Changamire Rozvi dynasty and to the economic needs of the state that had been taken over. Even so, Ndebele raids were limited in extent and duration, and the two decades after 1873 saw a steady revival of Shona strength. In spite of Ndebele raids aimed at preventing this process, the independent Shona strengthened themselves by re-arming and ‘alliances’, and were able to take part in the eventual overthrow of the Ndebele kingdom.

This article is a condensed version of a paper presented at the History Workshop, Gaborone, September 1973.

This article has argued that under António Salazar Portuguese colonial policy was altered from one which envisaged the ultimate growth and development of the African colonies to one which emphasized colonial stability. Between 1928 and 1930 he took steps to diminish the role of foreign capital in the colonies, weaken the influence of special interest groups, restrict Portuguese emigration to the colonies, and bring colonial autonomy to an end. As a result of these measures, Salazar ensured that metropolitan Portugal would be the chief beneficiary of the exploitation of the Portuguese colonies.

The outbreak of World War II is generally regarded as having had profound consequences for the future of the colonial world. These consequences are usually linked to such largely external factors as the signing of the Atlantic Charter, the participation of colonial subjects in Allied armies, and the demands made for political reforms by colonial officials and metropolitan political groups. Of equal importance for the rapid pace of political change ushered in by the war, however, were developments within the colonial territories themselves. For one thing, the world depression of 1929 lasted right up to the war in many African countries. A connexion can often be drawn between the ‘unfavourable terms of trade, the declining revenues … the pessimism of the period 1930–45’ and the emerging anti-colonial movement. In the case of certain countries, however, this general economic explanation must be broadened to take other factors into account. For example, in the Ivory Coast, the contradiction between African cash-crop agriculture on the one hand and, on the other, such colonial policies as forced labour and the indigénat which favoured European agriculture was also at the root of the discontent. In the Congo, the excessive demands made on the rural population to produce for the ‘war effort’—following upon similar exactions during the depression years—reinforced the oppressive apparatus of the colonial state and, in turn, heightened the discontent.