Infectious disease and concepts of public health, operating as societal metaphors, seem to have exercised a powerful influence on the origins and development of urban segregation in South Africa. Between 1900 and 1904 bubonic plague, threatening major centres, occasioned the mass removal of African urban populations to hastily established locations at the instigation of medical authorities and other government officials under the emergency provisions of the public health laws. Inchoate urban policy, under tentative consideration since the 1890s as economic development and social change began to stimulate black urban migration, was precipitated by this episode into specific legislation and permanent administration. Cape Town and Port Elizabeth were the two foci of this development in the Cape Colony, where the government locations at Ndabeni and New Brighton exemplify the process. These moves and the effort to consolidate them were to a large degree frustrated by practical administrative, legal, economic and human factors which have characterized the anomalies and contradictions of urban location policy ever since. A black ‘middle class’ resisted the loss of property rights and clung to aspirations of economic and social mobility or legal independence. Especially at Port Elizabeth, where independent peri-urban settlements proliferated, white officials and politicians laboured in an administrative and legal quagmire. White employers and black migrants proved only marginally amenable to location concepts modelled on the principles of quarantine. But ‘the sanitation syndrome’, equating black urban settlement, labour and living conditions with threats to public health and security, became fixed in the official mind, buttressed a desire to achieve positive social controls, and confirmed or rationalized white race prejudice with a popular imagery of medical menace. These issues of urban social order would be repeated again in connexion with such dire events as the 1918 influenza epidemic as the foundations of Union-wide policy and law were laid during and after World War I.

The paper re-examines principles of social organization in pre-colonial Equatorial Africa, suggesting that the imagery of ‘accumulation’ of ‘wealth in people’ is not wrong, but not flexible enough to encompass the centrality of knowledge in these societies. People were singularized repositories of a differentiated and expanding repertoire of knowledge, as well as being structured kin (as in the kinship model) and generic dependents and followers (as in the wealth-in-people model). We argue that social mobilization was in part based on the mobilization of different bodies of knowledge, and leadership was the capacity to bring them together effectively, even if for a short time and specific purpose. We refer to this process as composition and distinguish it from accumulation.

The paper has three parts. The first substitutes an oral epic from southern Cameroon for an ethnography of the principles by which people pursued agendas and mobilized followings in their own political worlds. Colonial rule may have institutionalized pre-colonial political hierarchies, but it completely altered the terms for political mobilization. Hence the historical record is very limited for making inferences about how ‘wealth-in-people’ operated in action, under pre-colonial conditions. The second critiques the evolutionary assumptions about simple societies that still color the models of Equatorial societies. The third revisits the ethnography to illuminate the principles of composition. The conclusion makes inferences and suggestions with respect to aspects of pre-colonial social history.

Exploring a range of studies regarding the ‘invention of tradition’, the ‘making of customary law’ and the ‘creation of tribalism’ since the 1980s, this survey article argues that the case for colonial invention has often overstated colonial power and ability to manipulate African institutions to establish hegemony. Rather, tradition was a complex discourse in which people continually reinterpreted the lessons of the past in the context of the present. Colonial power was limited by chiefs' obligation to ensure community well-being to maintain the legitimacy on which colonial authorities depended. And ethnicity reflected longstanding local political, cultural and historical conditions in the changing contexts of colonial rule. None of these institutions were easily fabricated or manipulated, and colonial dependence on them often limited colonial power as much as facilitating it.

New linguistic evidence about the classification of the Bantu languages does not support the current view that these languages spread as the result of a massive migration or ‘expansion’ by its speakers. Rather the present geographic distribution of Bantu languages is the outcome of many complex historical dynamics involving successive dispersals of individual languages over a time span of millennia and involving reversals as well as successes. This is as true for eastern and southern Africa, where a close correlation between the archaeological evidence documenting the diffusion of basic food-related technologies, including metallurgy and the spreading of Bantu languages has become an axiom, as it is elsewhere. The linguistic evidence concerning the dispersal of Bantu languages in these regions of Africa is completely incongruent with the archaeological record. The existing Bantu expansion hypothesis must be totally abandoned. The scrapping of the hypothesis will make room for more realistic and quite different interpretations and research hypotheses. For example, it follows that the local or regional contribution of speakers of other languages, autochthons and others, to the development of later cultures and societies was probably considerably greater than has hitherto been acknowledged and that the continuities in historical dynamics of all sorts between the Bantu-speaking parts of Africa and areas further north and west are greater than has been hitherto realized.

The anthropological and historical literature dealing with Africa abounds with references to a people called the ‘Hamites’. ‘Hamite’, as used in these writings, designates an African population supposedly distinguished by its race— Caucasian—and its language family, from the Negro inhabitants of the rest of Africa below the Sahara.

There exists a widely held belief in the Western world that everything of value ever found in Africa was brought there by these Hamites, a people inherently superior to the native populations. This belief, often referred to as the Hamitic hypothesis, is a convenient explanation for all the signs of civilization found in Black Africa. It was these Caucasoids, we read, who taught the Negro how to manufacture iron and who were so politically sophisticated that they organized the conquered territories into highly complex states with themselves as the ruling elites. This hypothesis was preceded by another elaborate Hamitic theory. The earlier theory, which gained currency in the sixteenth century, was that the Hamites were black savages, ‘natural slaves’—and Negroes. This identification of the Hamite with the Negro, a view which persisted throughout the eighteenth century, served as a rationale for slavery, using Biblical interpretations in support of its tenets. The image of the Negro deteriorated in direct proportion to the growth of the importance of slavery, and it became imperative for the white man to exclude the Negro from the brotherhood of races. Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1798 became the historical catalyst that provided the Western World with the impetus to turn the Hamite into a Caucasian.

On the fiftieth anniversary of an ambiguous event – the referendum giving French Africans the choice of immediate independence or a new status within a ‘French Community’ – this article points to the alternative forms of political action which opened up at certain moments in African history and how, at other moments, some of those alternatives closed down. It assesses concepts, issues and arguments used in writing the history of Africa, now that the recent African past – spanning the last years of colonial rule and the years of independence – is becoming a focus of historical inquiry.

The ‘mfecane’ is a characteristic product of South African liberal history used by the apartheid state to legitimate South Africa's racially unequal land division. Some astonishingly selective use or actual invention of evidence produced the myth of an internally-induced process of black-on-black destruction centring on Shaka's Zulu. A re-examination of the ‘battles’ of Dithakong and Mbolompo suggests very different conclusions and enables us to decipher the motives of subsequent historiographical amnesias. After about 1810 the black peoples of southern Africa were caught between intensifying and converging imperialistic thrusts: one to supply the Cape Colony with labour; another, at Delagoa Bay, to supply slaves particularly to the Brazilian sugar plantations. The flight of the Ngwane from the Mzinyathi inland to the Caledon was, it is argued, a response to slaving. But they ran directly into the colonial raiding-grounds north of the Orange. The (missionary-led) raid on the still unidentified ‘Mantatees’ (not a reference to MaNtatisi) at Dithakong in 1823 was one of innumerable Griqua raids for slaves to counter an acute shortage of labour among Cape settlers after the British expansionist wars of 1811–20. Similar Griqua raids forced the Ngwane south from the Caledon into the Transkei. Here, at Mbolompo in 1828, the Ngwane were attacked yet again, this time by a British army seeking ‘free’ labour after the reorganisation of the Cape's labour-procurement system in July 1828. The British claim that they were parrying a Zulu invasion is exposed as propaganda, and the connexions between the campaign and the white-instigated murder of Shaka are shown. In short, African societies did not generate the regional violence on their own. Rather, caught within the European net, they were transformed over a lengthy period in reaction to the attentions of external plunderers. The core misrepresentations of ‘the mfecane’ are thereby revealed; the term, and the concept, should be abandoned.

One of the guiding lodestones for social theorists and social historians across the entire theoretical spectrum has been ‘wealth’: the things people imbue with value, the caches they collect up by every means from prestation to predation, the performative displays they orchestrate, the treasures they store and eventually leave behind, and all the complex cultural constructions whereby such things are counted, praised and imagined as sources and instruments of power. Perhaps no other topic excites comparably and recurrently fresh interest, from the Marxian framework of capital to Veblen's ‘conspicuous consumption’, Schama's ‘embarrassment of riches’, Appadurai's ‘tournaments of value’ and Weiner's ‘dense objects’.

Endogamous artisan and musician groups are characteristic of over fifteen West African peoples, including the Manding, Soninke, Wolof, Serer, Fulani, Tukulor, Songhay, Dogon, Senufo, Minianka, Moors, and Tuareg. Castes appeared among the Malinke no later than 1300, and were present among the Wolof and Soninke, as well as some Songhay and Fulani populations, no later than 1500. All the West African castes ultimately developed from at most three centers, located among the Manding, Soninke, and/or Wolof. Migration is the key process explaining the current distribution of caste people. Formation of blacksmith and bard castes among the Manding may be related to the Sosso–Malinke war, described in the Sunjata epic, which led to the founding of the Mali empire. As they evolved over time, castes acquired secondary specializations or changed occupations, and moved up or down in rank relative to other social groups. Although marriage alliances took place within a caste or among a limited number of castes, castes did not form demographic isolates. Children of caste men and slave concubines had caste status, while free persons taken captive in war sometimes claimed to be caste members. Assimilation of local artisans to a caste may have occurred when caste institutions were first introduced into a given area.

This article provides a synthesis of the various studies which attempt to quantify the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Since the publication of Philip D. Curtin's pioneering estimates in 1969 (The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census), there have been numerous revisions of different sectors of the trade, and some scholars – notably J. E. Inikori and James Rawley – have argued that Curtin's global estimate for imports into the Americas is too low. When the revisions are examined carefully, however, it is apparent that Curtin's initial tabulation was remarkably accurate. The volume of exports from Africa across the Atlantic is here calculated at 11,698,000 slaves, while imports into the Americas and most other parts of the Atlantic basin are estimated to have been 9·8–9·9 million slaves – well within range of Curtin's original Census. Many of the revisions are based on shipping data by national carrier, rather than on series derived from estimated imports into different colonies in the Americas. Hence it is possible to substitute new data for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for many of the import-derived series used by Curtin. The results of these substitutions shift the distribution of slave exports over time but do not affect estimates of the relative scale of the trade by more than 2–3 per cent – hardly significant considering the quality of the data. Inikori and Rawley have failed to distinguish clearly between imports by colony and exports by national carrier; hence their global estimates have resulted in double counting. Further revisions are likely, nonetheless, but until the completion of detailed research comparable to the studies of David Eltis, Roger Anstey, Johannes Postma, and a dozen other scholars it is not possible to estimate the extent of future modifications. In the meantime, the current state of research on the volume of the Atlantic slave trade is summarized in a series of tables which analyse the export trade by time period, national carrier, and coastal origin. It is expected that the present synthesis will challenge historians to examine the impact of the slave trade on different parts of Africa, both to test the regional breakdown of slave exports and to assess the demographic, political, economic and social repercussions on Africa.

The purpose of this article is to promote the revival of African economic history. Poverty, the most pressing issue confronting the continent, has received world-wide publicity in recent years. Yet historians have continued to neglect the history of economic development, which is central to the study of poverty, in favour of themes that have their origins in the Western world rather than in Africa. However, there is now an exceptional opportunity to correct the balance. Unknown to most historians, economists have produced a new economic history of Africa in the course of the past decade. This article introduces and evaluates two of the most important contributions to the new literature: the thesis that Africa has suffered a ‘reversal of fortune’ during the last 500 years, and the proposition that ethnic fragmentation, which has deep historical roots, is a distinctive cause of Africa's economic backwardness. These arguments are criticized on both methodological and empirical grounds. But they are also welcomed for their boldness, their freshness and their potential for re-engaging historians in the study of Africa's economic past – not least because it is relevant to Africa's economic future.

This paper outlines four stages of the Bantu expansion: first, the initial push through the equatorial forest from the northern to the southern woodlands; second, the occupation of the southern woodland belt from coast to coast; third, the colonization of the Tanzania, Kenya and southern Somali coastline and of the northern sector of the lake region; fourth, the colonization south-wards, north-westwards and north-eastwards from this extended nucleus. The evidence for the first stage is largely linguistic and is likely to remain so. The outlines of the fourth stage can be established very largely from traditional evidence. It is for chronological data concerning the second and third stages that we can now turn hopefully to archaeology. In both these stages the Bantu expansion seems to have coincided fairly closely with the spread of the Iron Age; and, if the spread of the Iron Age through the area north of the southern woodlands can now be traced in something like the detail which we already have for Zambia and Rhodesia, the mystery of the Bantu expansion will have been largely unravelled.

The responses of the Khoisan peoples to the Dutch at the Cape of Good Hope in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have generally been dismissed summarily by historians. This article attempts to place their reactions into the broader framework of the receptivity of Late Stone Age society in South Africa to cultural innovation, and suggests that the usual dichotomy drawn between the rapid disintegration of the pastoral Khoi in the face of the Dutch settlers and the fierce resistance of the San hunter-gatherers is an oversimplification. There was little to distinguish cattleless Khoi from San, or San who had acquired cattle from Khoi, and both processes were at work both during and before the Dutch period in South Africa. The belief that the Khoi ‘willingly’ bartered away their cattle for ‘mere baubles’ is challenged, and it is maintained that the violence which punctuated every decade of the eighteenth century, and which culminated in the so-called ‘Bushman Wars’, were in large measure the Khoisan response to their prior dispossession by the Boers. On the other hand, the readiness of the Khoisan to acculturate to both the Dutch and the Bantu-speaking intruders, their relatively small population and loose social organization, meant that their ethnic identity virtually disappeared. Nevertheless their responses were more complex than is generally realized and resemble those of other colonized peoples. They were also to have a profound influence on the attitudes towards whites of Bantu-speakers on the Cape's eastern and northern frontiers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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.

It has come to be widely accepted that slavery prevailed on the African continent before the arrival of the Europeans, and this indigenous slavery is said to have facilitated the rise and progress of the Atlantic slave-trade. According to P. D. Rinchon, ‘from the earliest days of the trade, the majority of the Negroes were living in a state of servitude, and the native chiefs did not have far to seek for the human merchandise’. Daniel Mannix, in one of the most recent accounts of the Atlantic slave-trade, contends that ‘many of the Negroes transported to America had been slaves in Africa, born to captivity. Slavery in Africa was an ancient and widespread institution, but it was especially prevalent in the Sudan.’ In the opinion of J. D. Fage, ‘the presence of a slave class among the coastal peoples meant that there was already a class of human beings who could be sold to Europeans if there was an incentive to do so… So the coastal merchants began by selling the domestic slaves in their own tribes.’ The main purpose of this brief study is to test these generalizations with evidence taken from the Upper Guinea Coast—the region between the Gambia and Cape Mount.

By drawing on the current Marxist debate about the nature of the capitalist state, this article argues that the colonial state was obliged to be more interventionist than the mature capitalist state in its attempts to manage the economy, since colonies were distinguished by the way in which they articulated capitalism to local modes of production. This posed severe problems of social control, since the capitalist sector required the preservation of indigenous social institutions while also extracting resources from them. In early colonial Kenya this problem was mitigated by a rough compatibility between the needs of settler capital and the patronage exercised by African chiefs within a peasant sector which was expanded to solve the colonial administration's initial need for peace and revenue. The peasant sector was not destroyed, rather it was represented in the state, which never ceased thereafter to be plagued by the conflicts between the two modes of production over which it presided.

What was the indigénat? This article approaches this question via three arguments. First, a study of the indigénat (the regime of administrative sanctions applied to colonial subjects) challenges the idea that French West Africa formed part of an ‘empire of law’. Second, a dynamic spectrum of political statuses developed around the indigénat until its abolition in 1946. This spectrum is no less significant than one of its poles alone, that of colonial citizens. Third, the indigénat, its narrative of reform, and its relationship to law, bureaucracy, and authority illuminate the tensions between imperial rhetoric and colonial governance.

Recent revisions of estimates for the volume of the trans-Atlantic slave trade suggest that approximately 11,863,000 slaves were exported from Africa during the whole period of the Atlantic slave trade, which is a small upward revision of my 1982 synthesis and still well within the range projected by Curtin in 1969. More accurate studies of the French and British sectors indicate that some revision in the temporal and regional distribution of slave exports is required, especially for the eighteenth century. First, the Bight of Biafra was more important and its involvement in the trade began several decades earlier than previously thought. Secondly, the French and British were more active on the Loango coast than earlier statistics revealed. The southward shift of the trade now appears to have been more gradual and to have begun earlier than I argued in 1982. The greater precision in the regional breakdown of slave shipments is confirmed by new data on the ethnic origins of slaves. The analysis also allows a new assessment of the gender and age profile of the exported population. There was a trend toward greater proportions of males and children. In the seventeenth century, slavers purchased relatively balanced proportions of males and females, and children were under-represented. By the eighteenth century, west-central Africa was exporting twice as many males as females, while West Africa was far from attaining such ratios. In the nineteenth century, by contrast, slavers could achieve those ratios almost anywhere slaves were available for export, and in parts of west-central and south-eastern Africa the percentage of males reached unprecedented levels of 70 per cent or more. Furthermore, increasing numbers of slaves were children, and again west-central Africa led the way in this shift while West Africa lagged behind considerably.

This review of the literature on the demography of the slave trade provides a context to assess the revisionist interpretation of David Eltis, who has argued recently that the slave trade and its suppression were of minor importance in African history. It is shown that Eltis' economic arguments, based on an assessment of per capita income and the value of the export trade, are flawed. The demography of the trade involved an absolute loss of population and a large increase in the enslaved population that was retained in Africa. A rough comparison of slave populations in West Africa and the Americas indicates that the scale of slavery in Africa was extremely large.

Until recently, the later prehistory of the Kalahari has remained almost unknown and, in consequence, the long and complex past of the peoples of this region has often been condensed into an ahistorical and timeless caricature when compared with events in neighbouring countries. The summary presented here attempts to rectify this situation by drawing upon data from over four hundred surveyed sites and information from detailed excavations carried out since 1975 at twenty-two selected localities in Botswana.

Three important topics in southern African prehistory are addressed from the perspective of these investigations. The first topic is the introduction of sheep and cattle to the sub-continent between 2,000 and 2,500 years ago. The second is the origins and social dynamics of pastoralism during the Early Iron Age, and relates these developments to the formation of stratified socio-political systems around the fringes of the Kalahari towards the end of the first millennium A.D. The third topic is the relevance to current information on the later prehistory of the Kalahari of ethnographic accounts of herding and foraging societies gathered in this same region during the twentieth century.

Some 170 references to drought and disease along the south-western coast of Central Africa between 1550 and 1830 suggest that climatic and epidemiological factors motivated the farmers and herders of West-Central Africa in historically significant ways. Nearly all references come from documentary sources and so bear primarily on conditions in the drier and less fertile areas near Luanda and to the south, where African reactions would have been strongest.

While minor shortages of rain occurred too frequently to receive much explicit attention in the documents, longer droughts spread more widely every decade or so and attracted notice. Major periods of dryness, extending for seven years or more and touching all parts of the region, occurred perhaps once each century and produced comments throughout the documentation.

Localized minor droughts hardly disrupted the lives of Africans, who had presumably devised agricultural and pastoral strategies to take account of such ordinary climatic variation. Two-or three-year rainfall shortages produced banditry and warfare that often attracted Portuguese military retaliation. Major droughts disrupted polities and societies and hence coincided with major turning points in West-Central African history in the late sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries. In the earlier case, agricultural failures produced the famed ‘Jaga’ or Imbangala warriors, who elevated pillage to a way of life and who joined the Portuguese in establishing the Angolan slave trade. The later, protracted drought from 1784 to 1793 coincided with the historic peak of slave exports from West-Central Africa.