Processes of expansion in central and eastern Africa, independently evidenced by linguistics, anthropobiology and archaeology, display such similar patterns that they may be regarded as facets of the same sequence of events. This paper develops mainly the anthropobiological evidence by using new methods of analysis based on multivariate distances. It ends with a coherent synthesis of the contributions of the three disciplines to the problems of Bantu expansion.

Linguistic research has revealed a Bantu ‘substratum’ among the few ethnic relics of western Madagascar that survive in what became known as the Sakalava empire. Early in the 1600's, two Jesuits familiar with both sides of the Moçambique Channel, discovered that some 300 miles of western Malagasy littoral bore the name of Bambala and were inhabited by Bantu-speaking agriculturalists, whose idiom was only modified by Malagasy loans. Bambala's African colonies were sub-divided into riverain chiefdoms, the largest of which was Sadia, with some 10,000 inhabitants in 1617. From it, the Sakalava warriors fanned out in the 1620's, came into contact with the southwestern Maroserana dynasty and gave it an empire by 1690 stretching from St Augustine Bay to present-day Majunga.

Maroserana kings adopted two of Bambala's politico-religious institutions, while the empire-building gradually decimated the original Sakalava warriors and swept away Bambala's Bantu speakers by ± 1710. Pastoralists from north, south and east replaced the former agricultural peoples while retaining the name ‘Sakalava’. But, there is no doubt that the first Malagasy empire was an African creation, and doubly so since association with gold confirms anew the close links between the Maroserana and gold-bearing Mwene Mutapa.

One of the units in which prices and exchange-rates are expressed by nineteenth-century travellers is the gold mithqal. This paper is an attempt to discover, and if possible to make some sense of, the various values of the gold mithqal at different times and places in West and North Africa during the nineteenth century.

The tendency of East African Bantu tribes to borrow cultural features from pastoral or semi-pastoral ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ peoples has often been observed, but thus far only two serious attempts have been made to explain this phenomenon. Herskovits first put forward the idea that the tribes of East Africa formed a ‘cattle complex’ epitomized and shaped by the ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ pastoralists. In a more limited study, LeVine and Sangree concluded that the proclivity of a Bantu tribe to borrow from a ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ group was dependent upon the relative population size of the peoples in question, the success or failure of the Bantu group in defending itself against attack, and the need of the Bantu to ally themselves with a ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ tribe.

The tentative history of relations between the Bantu Kikuyu and the ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ Masai established in this paper suggests that both these theories err. Beginning with the first meeting of the two tribes about 1750, the Masai inflicted great damage on the Kikuyu while both were resident on the plains near Mount Kenya. When the Kikuyu secluded themselves in the forests after about 1800, they began to experience a significant degree of success in warding off the Masai, without any need for allies. Yet borrowing went on almost without interruption throughout both periods.

The actual nature of that borrowing was very different from the process which Herskovits imagined. Rather than being influenced by the way in which cattle functioned in Masai society, the Kikuyu were much impressed with the Masai as militarists, and this is reflected by the fact that the Kikuyu borrowed far more from the Masai military system than from anything relating to cattle.

Gungunyane, paramount chief of the Shangana of Gazaland, 1884–95, was a very shrewd diplomat. A study of his diplomacy with Europeans suggests that his major goal was Shangana independence of action. From the beginning of his reign, Gungunyane was pressured to give concessions in both economic and political spheres. His capital was on the edge of the Rhodesian plateau until mid-1889, when the chief moved a large portion of his people as well as his capital southward to the Limpopo valley, Mozambique. This significant dislocation influenced later negotiations with Portugal. Although the chief was a strong personality, he was subject to pressures from his immediate—and in this case, warlike—African advisors. In negotiations with the British South Africa Company, the Mozambique Company and the Portuguese government, the African leader enjoyed the benefits of a fearful military reputation, a wide-reaching espionage system, and conflicts between British and Portuguese concession-seekers. A master of playing both ends against the middle to maintain his freedom of movement, Gungunyane found, nevertheless, that his diplomatic programme was undermined by Portuguese superiority in the use of firearms, disunity among the Shangana and their tributaries, and growing social disintegration caused by alcoholism, emigration, and European encroachment. His final military defeat by Portuguese forces in 1895 was not a true index of his talent as an African diplomat.

The problem raised in this paper is fundamentally that of the value of oral traditions used as historical sources. There is a tendency to accept them uncritically and thereby to perpetuate myths which a little critical investigation would have ended years before. The present writer has attempted to demonstrate that a historian dealing with traditional history must widen his field far beyond the oral traditions which are of immediate interest to him. Like other sources, comparisons with and the cross-checking of the traditions of other countries are essential factors in reconstructing the pre-colonial history of Africa. The results of such an exercise have been shown in this paper, the main purpose of which has been to trace and reassess the causes for the decline and fall of Bunyoro, by using not only the oral traditions of Bunyoro, as has been the practice hitherto, but also those of her neighbours such as Ankole, Buganda, Busoga, Kiziba and Ruanda. The results have shown that the effects of succession wars were less disastrous than is often believed. But the economic and territorial Josses, coupled with the persistent lack of able leadership, were more important than the so-called federalism of the Babito. For a semipastoralist population, cattle plagues may have been as disastrous as other factors. The British no doubt played a role, but it deserves less emphasis than it has hitherto received. By the time of their arrival Bunyoro had declined almost beyond recovery, and it is doubtful whether Kabarega could even have retained Toro. The British treatment of Bunyoro and Kabarega was typical of the reactions of colonial regimes against African resisters. Some of the questions raised in the concluding paragraphs regarding the possible future of Bunyoro had not the British intervened are perhaps too speculative. Nevertheless, they are worth asking, if the history of Bunyoro is to be seen in the right perspective.

The standard history of the German period in Tanzania has been seriously marred by imperial rivalries and excessive concentration on metropolitan aspects of German policy-making. In the period to 1907, which has heretofore been written off as a time of punitive expeditions and absence of administrative direction, the government in fact developed a secular state education service. The standard curriculum generated by the state was later adopted by missionary schools. The policy was controversial, and the strength of the administration's relatively pro-African position may be explained by the continuity of personnel, by the popularity of the secular schools, and by pessimism among officials as to whether white settlers could make an economic contribution commensurate with their political claims.

In the first part of this article a number of possible connexions between ‘the last-ditch resisters’ and the ‘earliest organizers of armed risings’, and later leaders of opposition to colonial rule in East and Central Africa, were explored. It was argued that African ‘primary’ resistance shaped the environment in which later politics developed; it was argued that resistance had profound effects upon white policies and attitudes; it was argued that there was a complicated interplay between manifestations of ‘primary’ and of ‘secondary’ opposition, which often overlapped with and were conscious of each other. Then the argument turned to a more ambitious proposition, namely that ‘during the course of the resistances, or some of them, types of political organization or inspiration emerged which looked in important ways to the future; which in some cases are directly and in others indirectly linked with later manifestations of African opposition’.

Since independence the countries of North Africa have been occupied almost exclusively with the establishment of a new society. An important part of this activity has been directed towards a solution to the problem of symbols and values: the construction of an image of themselves for their own contemplation and for export to the world outside. One aspect of this general problem of acculturation is concerned with interpretations of history and the evaluation of one's own place in historical evolution. Starting from the premiss that North African history has largely been a monopoly of French scholarship since 1830, contemporary historical writers in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have found it essential, before entering upon problems of historical interpretation, to rewrite their own history. Discovery of this first requisite has generated a spirit shared by all those writers preoccupied with this problem, however much they might disagree on solutions to it, which is best expressed by the phrase ‘décoloniser l'histoire’. The subject is vast, and I should like here only to indicate several of the problems, with their proposed solutions, so far treated by writers dealing with the history of Algeria.