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.

Although the conventional image of the colonial medical encounter in Africa depicts a white, male, European doctor treating a black African patient, most of the actual deliverers of Western medicine in Africa during the colonial period were non-Europeans. In the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, British doctors formed only a small minority of Western medical practitioners. Most often, it was Syrian, Egyptian and Sudanese doctors, and Sudanese assistant medical officers, mosquito men, nurses, sanitary officers and midwives who delivered sanitary and medical services on behalf of the colonial state. Understanding the cultural exchanges, technology transfer and power relations involved in the operation of colonial medicine clearly requires careful study of the training, the role and the experiences of these non-European practitioners of Western medicine.

In this paper, one such group of medical practitioners is examined through a study of the Midwifery Training School or MTS, opened in Omdurman, Sudan in 1921. The MTS sought to create a class of modern, trained Sudanese midwives, out of, and in rivalry to, an entrenched class of traditional midwives, known as dayas. The analysis relies heavily on the papers of Mabel E. Wolff, founding matron of the MTS and her sister, Gertrude L. Wolff, who first arrived in Sudan to train nurses. Throughout the discussion, the name ‘Wolff’ alone designates Mabel, whose voice dominates their collective papers.

The Ghanaian forest was well settled by agricultural communities prior to the opening of the Atlantic trade in the late fifteenth century. The most prominent of these settlements were earthworks sites, construction of which began in the first millennium ce and continued until their abrupt abandonment prior to the mid-fifteenth century. In this article, previous archaeological data are evaluated in light of current research to provide a plausible alternative hypothesis for the history of the Akan, placing that history in a much broader and deeper context.

The Swahili community of modern Mombasa is composed of an amalgam of the descendants of the city's early ‘Shirazi’ settlers and more recent immigrant Swahili groups, most of which migrated south to Mombasa Island during or after the sixteenth century. It appears likely that the ‘Shirazi’. dynasty and its retainers were themselves derived from older Swahili settlements along the southern Somali coast.

After the ‘Shirazi’ polity was destroyed by. the Portuguese and their local allies in 1591–93, Mombasa's accretions of foreign Swahili gradually reorganized themselves into twelve mataifa or ‘tribes’. These twelve mataifa grouped themselves into two separate and sometimes hostile confederations, the Thelatha Taifa (The Three) and the Tisa Taifa (The Nine). Political unity was maintained by means of a loosely structured state system in which foreign dynasties of Omani Arabs, first the Mazrui and later the Busaidi, bridged the gap between the two confederations.

During the Mazrui period (approximately 1735–1837), Mombasa was an independent city-state which enjoyed political hegemony over much of the Kenya and north Tanzania coasts. Under Busaidi rule (1837–95) the city lost its independence and was incorporated in the Zanzibar Sultanate. Differences between the Thelatha Taifa and the Tisa Taifa slowly faded during the Busaidi period and have almost disappeared since 1900. Though precolonial social and political structure is still perceptible in the modern Swahili community of Mombasa, it has for the most part become vestigial.

This article suggests that differences in local political structures and credit protection regimes largely account for Bonny's displacement of Old Calabar as the principal slave port of the Bight of Biafra in the eighteenth century, despite Bonny's reputation for being particularly unhealthy for Europeans. We argue that this displacement occurred in the 1730s, several decades earlier than previously thought. We suggest that this was made possible by the early growth and consolidation of royal authority at Bonny. The use of state authority to enforce credit arrangements in Bonny proved more effective than the mechanisms adopted at its closest rival, Old Calabar, where, in the absence of a centralized political authority similar to the monarchy at Bonny, credit protection before 1807 was based on pawnship.

Since 1969 archaeological, paleobotanical and ethnographic research in Kagera region, north-western Tanzania (Map 1), have contributed to a deep-time understanding of the ecological history of that region. The primary insight that develops out of this interdisciplinary research is that changes in the ecology of the region can be linked directly to the productive economy and the cultural values of its inhabitants. The development of iron technology and settled agricultural life are the primary components in understanding the environmental changes that arose in this region over the last two millennia or more. This paper provides an overview of the most salient observations derived from this research program. I will begin with a short review of the history of Iron Age settlement, technology and major alterations made to the environment that form the backdrop to the specific reconstructions of forest exploitation gleaned from charcoal excavated from iron-smelting furnaces and from reconstructions of vegetational changes based on palynology.

This paper is a contribution to the current debate about the origins of the scramble for West Africa. It analyses the internal dynamics of French expansion and argues that the crucial change in French African policy occurred not in 1882–3, as commonly assumed, but in 1879–80. The policies adopted at this time, although their roots can be traced back to the governorship of Louis Faidherbe in Senegal, were distinguished by a new willingness on the part of the government in Paris to establish political as well as economic claims to West African territory, and by its readiness to bear the financial and military burdens of territorial expansion. Changes in French domestic politics or foreign relations cannot adequately account for this transition from informal to formal expansion, nor can it be explained solely in terms of commercial agitation in France or West Africa. The influence of public opinion and of colonial agents on the formulation of policy was more significant, but the crucial decisions were taken by the policy-makers themselves, and in particular by Charles de Freycinet (Minister of Public Works and later Prime Minister) and Admiral Jean Jauréguiberry (Minister of Marine and Colonies). They, above all, were responsible for inaugurating the era of French imperialism in West Africa. The new imperialism was most apparent in the drive to create a vast territorial empire in the Sudanese interior. But it was also evident in the intensification of commercial rivalries along the West African coast, and the paper argues that French actions there in 1882–3 were the continuation of policies adopted three years before rather than immediate responses to the British occupation of Egypt or to the growth of popular support for African expansion. Accordingly, the beginnings of French imperialism in West Africa are advanced as the principal cause of the scramble.

In the inter-war years one major role for the Royal Air Force was imperial defence. The Air Staff further argued that air power, used in substitution for the Army, would provide a more economical and effective means of policing and subjugating unrest in the remoter and more inaccessible areas of the colonial empire in Asia and Africa. The first successful major operation by the R.A.F. in Somaliland in 1920 encouraged the extension of air policing to the troublesome Middle East. The R.A.F. saw the Sudan as an integral part of its Middle East operations and throughout the late 1920s and 1930s military aircraft stationed in Khartoum were used to deal with revolt in the Southern Sudan. Continued Army opposition to substitution led the R.A.F. to seek a role in the sub-Saharan colonies. The need for defence economies as a result of the Depression, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and unrest on the Copperbelt persuaded the authorities in both London and the colonies of the need for an Air Force presence in East and Central Africa.

The article presents a reassessment of the archaeological background for the prehistory of the Bantu movements. The differences between the Channelled wares of Central Africa and the Dimple-based wares of East Africa are demonstrated and the greater abundance of Dimple-based ware sites noted. In both cases the distribution is largely in areas suitable for primary cultivation such as river valleys and lakeside areas. It is suggested that both wares are derived from pottery traditions originating to the west of their eastern African distribution areas. Recent evidence would indicate that iron working spread to sub-Saharan Africa both from West Africa and also, via the East African coast, from the Red Sea, and that the earliest iron-using peoples in southern Africa were probably not all negroes. It is also suggested that a negro foraging population was perhaps present in Central Africa before the arrival of agriculture. On agricultural origins, it is noted that some agriculture existed in the Rift valley area by perhaps as early as 1000 b.c., though the main expansion of agriculture is postulated as being of western origin. In conclusion it would appear that the West African origins of Bantu genesis are more important than suggested by Oliver in Journal of African History, Volume VII, and almost certainly antedate the 2000 years timescale previously advanced.

Court records from 1905–6 offer a rare view of the status of women slaves in early colonial Northern Nigeria. It is shown that British officials found it easy to accommodate the aristocracy of the Sokoto Caliphate on the status of these women, despite British efforts to reform slavery. Those members of the aristocracy and merchant class who could afford to do so were able to acquire concubines through the courts, which allowed the transfer of women under the guise that they were being emancipated. British views of slave women attempted to blur the distinction between concubinage and marriage, thereby reaffirming patriarchal Islamic attitudes. The court records not only confirm this interpretation but also provide extensive information on the ethnic origins of slave women, the price of transfer, age at time of transfer, and other data. It is shown that the slave women of the 1905–6 sample came from over 100 different ethnic groups and the price of transfer, which ranged between 200,000 and 300,000 cowries, was roughly comparable to the price of females slaves in the years immediately preceding the conquest. Most of the slaves were in their teens or early twenties. The use of the courts to transfer women for purposes of concubinage continued until at least the early 1920s.

Two recent articles by Dr Mauny, inconclusive in themselves, since in the second he withdrew his earlier claim that the material of aggrey beads might be the coral-like marine growth Allopara subviolacea, inspired some independent inquiry into the question of aggrey beads. This inquiry followed three lines: (1) a re-examination of the published sources from the beginning of the sixteenth century into the nineteenth century; (2) local inquiries in Southern Ghana and, indirectly, in Western Nigeria; (3) an examination of actual beads, notably in collections in Ghana and in the British Museum. While a great deal more remains to be done, especially in following up the second and third lines of inquiry, some tentative observations may be of value, since it already appears possible to add something to the authoritative statements by Krieger and Naber on the subject.

The founders of the Zanzibar National Party can be understood as creole nationalists, who imagined their political authority as stemming from membership in a transnational Arab elite. But in the mid-twentieth century, prompted by the rising hegemony of territorial nationalism and by subaltern challenges informed by pan-Africanism, they crafted a new historical narrative that depicted their movement as having originated with indigenous villagers. Party leaders then related this narrative to Western scholars, whose publications helped reproduce the myth throughout the rest of the century. This article traces the genesis of this masquerade and asks what it implies about the nature of the creole metaphor and its supposed link to discourses of cosmopolitan hybridity. The conventional contrast between créolité and nativist essentialism is shown to be illusory.

Inoculation for smallpox, the forerunner of vaccination, has had a long and variegated history. The earliest known descriptions of the practice in sub-Saharan Africa were given by African slaves in colonial America in the early and mid-eighteenth century. Subsequently it is mentioned in accounts from widely scattered parts of the continent. It seems to have been most extensively used in the Western and Central Sudan, Ethiopia and Southern Africa. Local diffusion patterns emerge from the evidence available at this time, but broader questions of origin must await further investigation. Similarly it is as yet impossible to assess its demographic impact in Africa although it clearly provided some defence against smallpox in spite of the risks involved.

Analysis of an inventory of 641 slaving voyages involving Mauritius and Réunion between 1768 and 1809 reveals that the Mascarene Islands were at the center of a substantial and dynamic regional slave trading network that also reached into the Americas in ways that raise questions about the relationship between the ‘worlds’ of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. The fact that colonial, as well as metropolitan, merchant capital underwrote Mascarene-based slave trading ventures raises additional questions about the role of locally generated and/or non-Western capital in financing the movement of slave, and ultimately ‘free’, labor throughout the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial world.

La diversité et la densité linguistiques exceptionnelles des hauts plateaux ou ‘Grassfields’ du Cameroun de l'Ouest, les découvertes archéologiques les plus récentes et l'ethnographie incitent à penser que cette région de l'Afrique a été peuplée de manière continue et relativement dense depuis plusieurs millénaires. Les paysages contemporains sont dérivés de la forêt biafréenne par déboisement. L'agriculture sur brûlis, la spécialisation régionale des productions et les vicissitudes de l'histoire de peuplement les ont modelés et leur ont imprimé la diversité qui les caractérise.

During the British colonial period a substantial young African population emerged in Dar es Salaam. Both colonial officials and African elders viewed this with dismay. They felt the resulting demoralisation of African youth posed a threat to both (African) authority and (colonial) order. However, measures aimed at addressing the ramifications of this phenomenon were mostly unsuccessful. Ironically, whilst British colonial policy aimed to keep African youth quiescent in rural, gerontocratic, tribal administrations, colonialism in fact provided the context in which both rapid urbanization and generational tension occurred. These continued to occur after independence; and it is argued that TANU politicians not only inherited the problems associated with the administration of the Tanganyikan capital, but that their responses were influenced by European and ‘elite’ African attitudes of the colonial era.

This article examines the economic effects of the Second World War on African peasant producers in Kenya, and places the war years within the context of the colony's economic difficulties during the Depression. In the mid-1930s the Kenya government sought to encourage African production, particularly among the Kikuyu and Abaluhya, in order to bolster the fiscal base of the colonial state and to subsidize the survival of the settler farming community. Promotion of African agrarian production brought conflict with the settler farming sector, and generated a serious crisis in the political economy of Kenya. These antagonisms became sharper during the war, when, after the Japanese advance in S.E. Asia, the Allied war effort demanded greater production from Kenya's settler farmers. Assisted by high guaranteed prices, both settler and African production was able to expand during the war. Previous studies of the impact of the war in Kenya have underplayed the extent to which African producers were able to capitalise upon this economic boom. Easily able to by-pass official marketing channels, African peasants produced for the black market. By doing so during the mid-war drought and maize crisis of 1942–3, African producers were able to obtain very favourable prices. Emerging peasant households among the Kikuyu and Abaluhya were therefore economically strengthened by the circumstances of the war, as was the settler farming sector. Europeans and Africans in Kenya were set on a collision course, which was to culminate some seven years after the war in the Mau Mau rebellion.

This article tracks the historical processes that shaped human waste management practices in Majunga, Madagascar from the city's founding in the mid-eighteenth century to contemporary times. Moving beyond colonial urban histories of sanitation, this article charts the meanings, strategies, and work practices Majunga residents employed to deal with predicaments of waste in everyday life. I argue that the particular material configuration of the colonial sanitation infrastructure in Majunga required new forms of labor — especially maintenance work — which city dwellers evaluated through existing moral norms. With the construction of French colonial sanitation infrastructures and the new labor regimes they necessitated, waste management became a key vector through which notions of difference were negotiated over the early- to mid-twentieth century. Shifting emphasis away from colonial infrastructure as disparity and onto moments of reception can contribute fresh insights not only on the histories of African cities, but also to histories of technology in the Global South.

European trade in slaves from at least the seventeenth century, and in palm oil during the nineteenth century, has become established as a crucial factor in the development of states in the Niger Delta. However, there is already a dangerous tendency to see these external factors as the only forces responsible for the creation of states in the area. Oral traditional evidence is marshalled to show that internal long-distance trade with these states as focal points existed before European trade. Internal long-distance trade consisted of (i) a north-to-south axis mainly for the supply to the states of agricultural produce, for which salt and fish were exchanged; and (ii) an east-to-west axis between these states and places as far west as Lagos and the Ijebu country for trade in specialist goods produced in various localities.

It is therefore stressed that the discussion of the admittedly great influence of European trade on the internal development of states in the Niger Delta needs to be qualified by an understanding of the prior existence of these states in some form, and of the internal long-distance trade that might have exercised similar great influence in the distant past.

Multiple, overlapping, and competing forms of authority contributed to the highly centralized Buganda kingdom. Their enduring salience, commonly considered characteristic of heterarchy, challenges our understanding of the early history of the kingdom. A map that specifies the location of 292 chiefs and authority figures in the capital reveals not only the critical importance of multiple forms of authority but also the development of those forms over several centuries. The allocation of space in the capital and other historical sources indicate that compromise and co-optation characterized the practice of power in the ancient kingdom: the king was surrounded, literally and figuratively, by others who curbed his authority.