Grâce aux recherches récentes, le nombre de dates C14 disponibles pour l'Afrique centrale s'est considérablement accru. Une synthèse critique de toutes les datations connues est présentée ici. Malgré une apparente bonne coïncidence entre les dates et les industries lithiques de la partie ouest, un examen minutieux montre la nécessité de redéfinir l'ensemble des industries lithiques généralement distinguées. Dans la partie est, le microlithique est daté d'avant 38.000 b.c., ce qui est plus ancien que ce que l'on supposait. L'existence de céramique associée à des haches polies, constituant peut-être un niveau néolithique, a pu être mis en évidence au Bas–Zaïre; il est daté des quatre derniers siècles avant notre ère. Au Zaïre, les données sur l'âge du fer ancien restent très fragmentaires; par contre au Rwanda, il est connu par une série de dates parmi les plus anciennes en Afrique de l'Est. Dans la partie ouest, à l'époque de l'âge du fer récent, quelques données permettent de suivre lea circuits commerciaux datés de l'époque du royaume de Kongo. La révision des dates du cimetière de Sanga aboutit à l'élaboration de la chronologie complète de l'âge du fer dans le dépression de l'Upemba au Shaba. Au Rwanda, la datation de sépultures royales a permis d'intéressantes confrontations avec les données de l'ethnohistoire. Ces nouveaux résultats, pour importants qu'ils soient, restent malheureusement fragmentaires et isolés.

It has long been generally supposed that the kingdom of Kongo suffered a severe decline in population due to the civil wars of the seventeenth century and the slave trade. These figures are derived from literary estimates made by travellers and missionaries of the time. New estimates of population can be obtained by combining the statistics of baptisms left by the missionaries who lived in Kongo with a reconstruction of the age structure of the kingdom. Use of these estimates permits more exact calculations for the period 1650–1700, which suggest a much lower population level—about 500,000—than the commonly accepted figure of two million. This discovery suggests that the postulated population disaster did not occur; instead, it seems that levels of population remained relatively stable, growing slightly throughout the period in question. In addition to revising estimates of population, it has been possible to use the available statistics to throw light on the age structure and vital rates that prevailed in Kongo in the late seventeenth century, as well as to examine certain factors that have impinged on population.

The early ʽAlawī state has repeatedly been described as heavy and efficient military government. In practice it functioned as a relatively loosely-knit tribute state. The achievement of its notable and long-lived second sultan Ismāʽil (1672–1727) was to shed the aegis of Fez, his economic metropolis, and set up an increasingly gigantic palace, beside a market town, as an independent political base. His central government there was characterized by minimal use of coin and minuscule central bureaucracy. For military support the sultan at first relied chiefly upon free troops, associated by fictional kinship with his most notable wife: later he relied increasingly upon black slave guards. But the motors of government at large were not imperial troops, whose functions were essentially deterrence and the hallmarking of government activity; they were provincial governors, bound to the sultan by ties of individual loyalty. These governors were responsible for the extraction of tribute destined for the palace.

Religion gave increased coherence to this state. This was not so much because of its association with literacy, as because it enabled the sultan, who needed religious prestige, to enhance his unremarkable claim to descent from the Prophet, by taking up the Islamic mantle of ‘Commander of the Faithful’. This was a forceful image for propaganda that could counter the close association between the palace and Moroccan Jewry. It could also validate demands for loyalty throughout the empire. A hard Islamic line was expressed in jihād, or holy warfare, against Christendom. The sultan's limited resources and his other military commitments prevented him from conducting active jihād much above the level of token confrontation. But there was also a moral jihād, waged, in so far as this was possible, by rejection of cultural and economic ties with Europe.

The kingdom of Dahomey is often presented as the classic instance of the operation of a royal monopoly of the Atlantic trade in West Africa. Detailed study establishes, however, that there was never any such royal commercial monopoly in Dahomey, although there were attempts to establish such a monopoly in the 1780s and in the 1850s. The kings of Dahomey enjoyed a number of commercial privileges, and controlled the distribution of the war captives taken by the Dahomian army, but they were never the sole sellers of slaves. There was always an important group of private merchants in Dahomey, who were mainly concerned with marketing the slaves imported into the kingdom from the interior. The replacement of the slave trade by the palm oil trade in the nineteenth century strengthened the position of the private merchants, since they were able to move into the production of oil as well as marketing it. The kings of Dahomey also engaged in the production of oil for export, but were not able to establish as complete control of the production of oil as they had exercised over the ‘production’ of slaves.

In Northern Rhodesia under colonial rule, much land was alienated from the Plateau Tonga for occupation by European settlers who were mainly maize farmers. The expansion of African farming from the late 1920s, aided by the growing use of the plough and draught oxen, caused such settlers to demand the imposition of marketing controls. The government sought to introduce conservation measures to protect the lands of African farmers from wanton misuse, and in 1946 it introduced an Improved Farming Scheme (I.F.S.) to check overcultivation among the Plateau Tonga. The I.F.S., while nurturing a small group of privileged farmers, was to antagonize most African producers and gave rise to charges of collaboration with the colonial administration. The non-political activities of the Farmers' Associations formed by the Improved Farmers lent substance to these charges which in the 1950s emanated largely from the ranks of local supporters of the African National Congress (A.N.C.). By 1959, the I.F.S. had failed to meet the expectations of its members, thereby bearing out the doubts and fears of its critics. This was to throw into the lap of the local A.N.C. movement several wealthy and educated farmers who had hitherto taken no active interest in protest politics but who were now convinced they had been misled.