The Kingdom of Dahomey has played a central role in our understanding of political organization in West Africa in the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Research has focused on two major questions: whether or not Dahomey possessed revolutionary qualities that allowed it to maintain order in this turbulent era, and the role of militarism in fostering stability. Mounting archaeological evidence from the Republic of Bénin can contribute to our understanding of Dahomean political dynamics over time. Spatial patterns in royal palace construction, materialized regionally and architecturally, are examined in this essay. These data suggest that Dahomey achieved real administrative advances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the expansion of regional control and the successful integration of a complex administrative hierarchy.1

The origins of South Africa's distinctive welfare state lay in the late 1920s, not in the 1930s as has generally been suggested, and long predated the quite different turn to social welfare in late colonial Africa. For the National Party and Labour Party – partners in the coalition Pact Government of 1924–9 – non-contributory old-age pensions were a crucial pillar in the ‘civilized labour’ policies designed to lift ‘poor whites’ out of poverty and re-establish a clear racial hierarchy. Welfare reform was thus, in significant part, a response to the swartgevaar or menace of black physical, occupational and social mobility. African political elites, although distracted by other reforms at the time, were quick thereafter to protest at their exclusion from the nascent welfare system.

The ‘Lobi’ region in what is today southern Burkina Faso is frequently mentioned in historical accounts of gold mining in West Africa. However, little is known about the actual location of the gold mines or about the way gold mining and trade were organized in precolonial times. This article points out that some previous hypotheses about precolonial gold mining, trade and the sociopolitical organization of this region are flawed, partly because ‘Lobi’, as the name for both the region and its inhabitants, is misleading. In fact, the references to ‘Lobi’ merge two distinct gold-producing zones along the Mouhoun river, about 200 km from each other. The present-day populations of southern Burkina who have settled there since the eighteenth century do not know who was mining gold prior to their arrival, and many of them have not been involved in gold mining at all due to conceptions of gold as a dangerous substance.

This study examines Nyarroh, a woman chief situated at the cusp of colonial penetration in what is today southern Sierra Leone. Nyarroh ruled a large, strategically located town and its surrounding villages from about 1880 to 1914. The documents which outline her public life have not previously been explored, yet they reveal the flexibility of gendered notions of political power and leadership in the region. Her life story allows us to look backward to precolonial Mendeland and forward to the colonial era, to consider the extent to which women's leadership and prerogatives were maintained or re-invented through colonial penetration and the nascent colonial state.

The monarchies and other polities of precolonial Madagascar exerted a strong influence on each other. For this reason, in recent years it has become more interesting to trace their inter-relationship than to emphasize their autonomy. The Betsimisaraka kingdom, which flourished on Madagascar's east coast in the early eighteenth century, has generally been regarded as a polity standing rather outside the mainstream of state formation in Madagascar, not least because of the identity of its founder, the son of an English pirate. Research in European and South African archives demonstrates the close connection between the Betsimisaraka kingdom and the Sakalava kingdom of Boina.

Malagasy speakers probably formed the single largest native speech community among slaves dispersed into the western Indian Ocean between 1500 and 1900. In the eighteenth-century Mascarenes, Malagasy parlers (dialects) served as a contact language, understood both by persons born in Madagascar and by those with no direct ties to the island. Catholic missionaries working in Bourbon and Île de France frequently evangelized among sick and newly disembarked Malagasy slaves in their own tongues, employing servile interpreters and catechists from their ecclesiastical plantations as intermediaries in their ‘work of the word’. Evangelistic style was multilingual, in both French and Malagasy, and largely verbal, but was also informed by Malagasy vernacular manuscripts of Church doctrine set in Roman characters. The importance of Malagasy in the Mascarenes sets the linguistic environment of the islands off in distinctive ways from those of Atlantic slave societies and requires scholars to rethink the language and culture history of the western Indian Ocean islands, heretofore focused almost exclusively on studies of French and its creoles.