This paper takes as its point of departure a simple fact that has gone largely unnoticed in the historical and ethnographic literature of migrant mine labour: prior to 1933 mineworkers were paid in gold. It is argued that the ideas and practices associated with the control and transmission of metallic money were at the heart of the experience of migrant labour before the crisis and formed a major part of the self-definition of migrant gold miners during the 1920s. Moreover, both the practices and ideas of African mineworkers were reciprocally linked to the global political struggles taking place over the gold standard. From the First World War to the Christmas of 1932, the South African and Imperial states and mining capital were involved in a controversy over the form of the South African and international money supplies. Whilst in appearance an abstract and mysterious debate, the contest over the form of the money supply laid the foundations for a system of value that penetrated into the daily lives and politics of many southern Africans. Chief amongst these were hundreds of thousands of migrant mine-workers. Following from this, the paper posits a re-interpretation of the gold standard crisis. The turning point that coincided with the new year of 1933 was not merely an economic change; it constituted a major transformation of the form, value, velocity and politics of money throughout Southern Africa. Coincidently, the crisis was an economic and cultural transition for the mining industry itself and marked a dramatic re-definition of the terms of economic conflict between workers and managers. Finally, this paper calls for a new periodization of capitalist development in Southern Africa that meshes together the cultural and economic dimensions of historical processes in a manner that foregrounds the experience of the African working class.

This article examines how historians have approached the history of poverty in Africa before European colonisation. From an earlier focus on the emergence of class difference to more recent studies on the emergence of poverty, scholars have demonstrated the longevity of economic inequality in Africa. This historiography counters a linear view of the growth of economic inequality and the idea that poverty is a necessary corollary of wealth. The article then considers how historians have studied the meanings of poverty within particular societies to the nineteenth century allowing us to move beyond the inadequacy of quantitative data. It ends by arguing for more longue durée studies of poverty in Africa with a focus on the qualitative and on the internal dynamics of particular societies. This will improve our knowledge about how colonial rule changed the experience and reality of poverty for people across the continent and form a basis for comparative studies.

Tanzania's Ujamaa villagization campaign of 1973–6 was one of the greatest social experiments in postcolonial Africa. Occurring during a time of continuing hope for a better future for the nation, the experiment aimed to improve the lives of the majority of rural Tanzanians. Despite this noble intention, the attempt at rural modernization failed miserably in many respects. Discussions of these failures have tended to give prominence to tangible explanations, ignoring more nuanced and qualitative issues, including environmental concerns based on local cosmologies. In an attempt to fill this gap, the present article uses a case study of eastern Iraqwland in northern Tanzania to explore local articulations of the compulsory villagization campaign and to interpret them in light of ecological perspectives that were prevalent at the time in Iraqw village communities.

Throughout the socialist experiment between 1974 and 1992, the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) ran a network of internment camps officially known as reeducation centers. Established in remote rural sites to mentally decolonize wayward members of urban society and putative enemies of the socialist revolution, the camps became a dumping ground for unwanted citizens accused of all kinds of wrongdoing. Although the Frelimo leaders envisioned a pedagogical institution that would undo the damage of colonialism by transforming reeducatees into new social beings, the gap between the idea of rehabilitation and the reality of detention was abysmally wide. Austerity – the order of the day throughout the fifteen years of socialist experiment in Mozambique – conditioned and defined the organic functioning of reeducation camps. Unlike internment camps elsewhere, Mozambique's camps were not strictly regimented. The carceral regime that emerged not only set Mozambique's reeducation centers apart from camps elsewhere, they were also far from the technocratic moralism and panoptic ambitions of the ruling party.

The fundamental reasoning underlying this paper is that, in seeking to advance our understanding of the material basis of political power in pre-colonial African polities, particular attention must be paid to the detailed reconstruction over time of the triumviral relationship between office, land and subjects. Acknowledgement is freely made of the fact that, for many (if not most) areas of Africa, this type of reconstruction is either exceptionally difficult or frankly impossible. This paper is concerned with the West African forest kingdom of Asante (Ghana) – a case evincing considerable institutional continuity and structural vigour, and one, moreover, sufficiently richly documented to permit the type and level of reconstruction posited. Specifically, and taking into account the substantial body of research already carried out on the general political history of Asante, this paper deals with patterns of authority over land and subjects as evidenced by the offices contained within the Manwere – one of the ten administrative/military fekuo of Kumase. The Manwere was created by Asantehene Kwaku Dua Panin (1834–67), and in seeking to account for the political imperatives underlying the foundation, the paper explores the context of the reign and the biography and career of the first Manwerehene, Kwasi Brantuo. Particular attention is paid throughout to the way in which the relationship between office, land and subjects within the Manwere was modified or otherwise altered by the nature of the political vicissitudes through which the Asante polity passed in the period between – broadly – the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Underlying the paper, and supplying context to its conclusions, is a general consideration of the philosophy of the Asante ethic concerning such matters as wealth and accumulation, the nature of authority, and the conceptualization of citizenship.

This article outlines recent developments in the archaeology of North Africa, and how our views have evolved in the four years since the previous survey. The principal changes, as such, are that in eastern North Africa, for the first time, sties have been found which fall between the Middle and Late Palaeolithic, thus beginning to close a disconcerting gap in the archaeological record; further evidence is available from the eastern and central Sahara that cattle may have been domesticated in North Africa at least as yearly as anywhere else in the world; and we now begin to have a picture of the complex series of local adaptations developed by Neolithic groups along the extreme western edge of the Sahara, which has hitherto been an archaeological vacuum. Research elsewhere in North Africa is devoted to fleshing out our still skeletal view of ways of life in the Late or Epipalaeolithic and, above all, in the Neolithic, when the use of domesticated plants or animals began to have its first effects on human societies. Archaeological research into the historical periods is less active, but parts of the central Sahara may reflect happenings in more active areas to the North, serving as refuges for the series of peoples displaced by the mainstream of history.

This article offers a new reconstruction of Bantu, Galla and Somali migrations in the Horn of Africa, with particular reference to the area between the Juba and the Tana rivers. It is suggested that Garre or proto-Garre Somali gained control of the area between the Juba and the Tana rivers before the Galla arrived in this area, and that in the process the Garre were responsible for pushing Bantu-speaking peoples back to the river Tana. However, it is also argued that the area initially controlled by Bantu-speaking peoples in the Horn of Africa was much more limited than is generally assumed. It is then suggested that around the sixteenth century the Orma Galla migrated to the coast from southern Ethiopia via the Lorian Swamp and the river Tana and not by the river Juba as is generally argued. The arrival of the Orma led to a further retreat of Bantu-speaking peoples towards the Sabaki river, and then to a retreat of the Somali northwards in the direction of the Juba river. In this way the nineteenth-century Somali drive southwards can be seen to some extent as a reconquest of land occupied earlier by them.

This article examines the impact of the introduction of the new technology of steam power into the West African trade in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the changes that the introduction of steampower was expected to lead to was the opening up of the trade to small-scale African traders such as the Krios. Many Krios did make use of the steamships to extend their trading activities and entered areas previously ignored. Many used the steamship services to develop a coastwise trade; others, particularly in the Niger Delta, used them to enter the export trade to Britain. Yet others pioneered the use of steam launches, particularly on the River Niger and along the Slave Coast. In time however, such Krios found their ability to utilize the opportunities provided by the steamships under assault, partly from the European traders' counter-attack and partly from the general depression in the West African trade – itself indirectly caused by the introduction of the steamship – that set in by the 1870s. By the end of the century the position of Krios in the export-import trade of West Africa was being severely squeezed, just as it was in other areas of West African life. For them, steam power did not prove to be the boon it had been anticipated as being.

Capital punishment in British colonial Africa was not just a method of crime control or individual punishment, but an integral aspect of colonial networks of power and violence. The treatment of condemned criminals and the rituals of execution which brought their lives to an end illustrate the tensions within colonialism surrounding the relationship between these states and their subjects, and with their metropolitan overlords. The state may have had the legal right to kill its subjects, but this right and the manner in which it was enacted were contested. This article explores the interactions between various actors in this penal ‘theatre of death’, looking at the motivations behind changing uses of the death penalty, the treatment of the condemned convicts whilst they awaited death, and the performance of a hanging itself to show how British colonial governments in Africa attempted to create and manage the deaths of their condemned subjects.

This study goes beyond the ‘first and last appearance’ approach of cartographic historians to examine the social contexts in which the Kong Mountains were first depicted in and then eliminated from nineteenth-century maps of Africa. This history shows that the conventional periodization of the history of cartography into ‘decorative’ and ‘scientific’ phases is greatly exaggerated. We trace the mountains' origins to the geographer James Rennell and show how their purported existence served to support his arguments on the course of the Niger River at the turn of the nineteenth century. The enduring depiction of the Kong Mountains throughout the century illustrates the authoritative power of maps. This authority is based on the public's belief that cartographers are guided by an ethic of accuracy and are applying scientific procedures in mapmaking. Despite doubts about the existence of this mountain chain, the ‘extraordinary authority’ of maps helped to perpetuate an erroneous spatial image of West Africa until Binger's famous expedition in the late 1880s. With the publication of his travels and maps, Binger became the new authority on West African geography. His work altered the subsequent cartography of the region and substantially contributed to French empire-building.

The effect of recent radiocarbon dates from North Africa has largely been to extend the principal phases of prehistory back in time. The Middle Palaeolithic now seems to be essentially beyond the range of the radiocarbon technique, at least in the Eastern part of North Africa, although it may persist later in the West, and, throughout North Africa (with the sole exception of Cyrenaican Libya), there remains a disturbing hiatus between the Middle Palaeolithic and the subsequent Late Palaeolithic bladelet industries. The latter now seem to appear at about 20,000 B.c. over most of non-Saharan, North Africa, and may eventually be found to be earlier. Some of the earliest such occurrences may well be associated with domestication of plants (in Egypt) and of animals (in Algeria). If so, this will necessitate serious reconsideration of our concepts of the ‘Neolithic’. In any case, a true Neolithic appears in parts of the Southern Sahara as early as the eighth millennium B.C., and is widespread in the area by the seventh millennium. Curiously, the beginnings of the Neolithic are much later in the neighbouring and more luxuriant areas (the Nile Valley, the Mediterranean littoral and the Maghreb) than they are in the desert. Less research has been done on the final prehistoric and early historic periods, but, in the North, the invention of the Libyan alphabet and, in the South, the later Iron Age of Chad both seem earlier than had been thought.

The rise of the legitimate trade in palm oil in the nineteenth century is often described as following (or due to) a decline in the overseas slave trade. In fact in the most important oil producing region, the Bight of Biafra, the palm oil trade expanded well in advance of any decline in the slave trade and the suppression of the slave trade occasioned no marked increase in the rate of palm oil export growth. It would appear that the direct and indirect effects of the slave trade in this region had created economic conditions which enabled its small farmers to respond so rapidly to external demand for palm oil. The failure to understand the relationship between the slave and the palm oil trades is a result of misunderstanding the relationship between these oil producers and the coastal middlemen.

The ingredients for economic development were certainly present in the Yoruba country in the nineteenth century: land was available; labour was cheap and some of the towns like Ibadan were well placed for trade. But for this economic growth, militarism was a double-edged weapon. The needs of a military state, such as Ibadan, certainly gave it tremendous impetus; trade, agriculture, arts and crafts developed in response to the demands of the military, who constituted the new leadership. But in the final analysis all these economic activities needed peace for their full development; Ibadan, by the very nature of its birth and its commitment to military ideals and military solutions to the problems confronting the Yoruba country, could not, however, guarantee this peace. On the contrary, in its struggle for power and leadership within that country, it took actions which jeopardized the chances of peaceful economic development in Ibadan and other parts of the Yoruba country. Moreover the intermittent warfare, which characterized this country generally in the nineteenth century, injected an element of discontinuity into its economic growth, and placed some constraint on lasting economic development. The fact that agriculture, trade and industry still flourished in the Yoruba country, particularly in Ibadan, can therefore only be regarded as a pointer to the country's economic potentialities, rather than as an evidence of normal economic growth. But with the restoration of peace at the end of the century, and the introduction of British rule, Ibadan and the rest of the Yoruba country were poised for rapid economic development.

Britain maintained small colonial armed forces in the African territories for internal security and local defence. In four periods of international crisis, when the British Empire was faced with a shortage of military manpower, it was proposed that African troops be used in imperial roles outside Africa. These proposals were closely related to the increasing opposition by India to the Indian Army being used for imperial defence in Asia and the Middle East. During 1916–18 a parliamentary and press lobby in Britain clamoured for a ‘million black army’. In the years 1919–21 the War Office attempted to raise an African army for use in the Middle East. On both occasions the Colonial Office vigorously opposed these schemes and the crises were resolved without using African troops. The emergencies of 1939–42 changed Colonial Office policy. African troops were used in the East African campaign against the Italians, as labour units in the Middle East, and then, after 1943, as combatants in Asia where they fought as complete formations within the Commonwealth forces. At the end of the Second World War the Colonial Office wished to maintain a sizeable African army at Imperial expense. However, post-war defence cuts reduced the African armed forces although a small parliamentary and service lobby unsuccessfully urged that an African Army be created as an imperial instrument, and to take the place of the Indian Army.

Two fatwā-s or legal opinions of the jurist al-Qābisī at Qayrawān about the year A.D. 1000 show the way in which the Law of Islam was used to protect the Muslim against the hazards of trans-Saharan trade with the Bilād al-Sūdan. Trade was to be conducted as far as possible in accordance with the Law, and approval was given to the establishment of Muslim communities in the Bilād al-Sūdān under the authority of a nāzir or ‘watchman’, with the consent of the pagan king of the country. The formation of Muslim communities on this legal basis, and their incorporation into the pattern of West African society, were important for the subsequent character of Islam in West Africa. Meanwhile, among the ‘stateless’ Berber peoples of the Western Sahara, the doctrines of the Malikite school were subject to a different interpretation by Ibn Yasln, which came into open conflict with the views of al-Qābisī when the Almoravids sacked the Muslim city of Awdaghast for submitting to the pagan king of Ghana. This conflict of attitudes to paganism remained a feature of West African Islam down to the twentieth century.

Between the years 1700 and 1820 the Ashantis of central Ghana fought a number of wars in nearly all the territories now comprising modern Ghana. Most interpretations of these wars have linked them with the European trade posts on the southern coast and the Muslim trade settlements in the north. The Ashanti wars were therefore either raids or attempts to open trade-routes to the trade-posts. These interpretations have been possible because writers have ignored the Ashanti expansionary movement before 1700, and have also been unable to interpret correctly the political significance of the institutions by which the Ashanti attempted to extend their rule into some of the conquered territories, and to integrate them into what the Ashanti conceived as ‘Greater Ashanti’—a political community incorporating the conquered Akan states under the rule of the Golden Stool, the supreme stool of Ashanti.

When, then, the pre-1700 Ashanti tradition and the introduction of Ashanti judicial, political and politico-religious institutions into some of the conquered territories are carefully considered, it becomes clear, in the writer's view, that the so-called Ashanti ‘empire’ should be divided into three categories of states: provinces, ‘protectorates’ and tributaries, on the basis of their political distance from Ashanti. The provinces—like the Ashantis mainly Akan-speaking peoples—were considered and treated as part of a Greater Ashanti ‘political structure’. The ‘protectorates’ were treated as allies or protected peoples according as economic or political circumstance dictated. The tributaries formed the economic and manpower base of the Ashanti expansion. But it must be noted that these relationships were fluid, and fluctuated with Ashanti military and political fortunes. Finally, the Ashanti political experiment was halted by the British and was therefore inconclusive. The student can, therefore, hardly reach rigid conclusions.

Lastly it appears that, pre-literate in areas where the history student is faced with an absence of the historian's usual materials, the analysis of institutions is probably one of the most fruitful approaches.

This article explores the dreams recorded by Ruben Um Nyobe in 1958, shortly before his death during the struggle which the Union des Populations du Cameroun waged against the terms which the French and their local allies sought to impose on Camerounese independence. The struggle should not be categorized in the inflationary rhetoric of African ‘revolutions’. Rather, it should be viewed as a movement of resistance and assertion within the colonial arena, where European authorities controlled certain strategic points while African communities maintained predominance at other locations. In this connection it is important to understand the importance which African communities in southern Cameroun attached to the world of the invisible and the ‘economy of the night’. It was in the invisible world that Africans, and especially those who were considered to be leaders and therapists in their societies, had sought to manipulate the ‘economy of the day’ and the strategic points controlled by the colonial economy and administration since the late 19th century. In this context, the dreams and annotations of Um Nyobe become significant, not as an expression of sexual preoccupations or the residual psychological orientations of his society, but as historical evidence: signs and statements of his effort to control the day, direct the struggle, and bring healing to his community, and acts of political as well as cultural significance. The colonial regime framed and affected the lives of its subjects, even to the point of consciousness and dreams, but at the same time the subjects fashioned their own space, refashioned their institutions, reinterpreted the actions of the regime and continually undermined its authority.

In 1951, British colonial administrators in Tanganyika initiated the Masai Development Plan (MDP), a five-year plan whose seemingly innocuous objectives were to build more water supplies, clear tsetse infested bush and experiment with grazing controls and fodder production in a small pilot scheme. But the project was the product of broader British agendas to reassert the legitimacy of empire and rebuild the post-war economy at home and abroad. These modernization agendas reflected a shift in the racialized ethnic premises undergirding the colonial project. Whereas early colonial rule and development had depended on the creation, maintenance and exploitation of ethnic distinctions to institute indirect rule, ethnic differences were now perceived as barriers to modernization. Ethnic groups like Maasai, who had been the target of protectionist sentiments in prior years, were now the focus of heightened attempts by the state to coerce them to adopt modern economic ways. Ironically, however, ethnic differences were both disavowed and reinforced by the plan, for although it was designed to overcome cultural barriers by economic means, it was framed, as its title suggests, by ethnic assumptions about what problems ‘the Maasai’ (as opposed to other ethnic groups) faced in terms of their development.

Despite its claims to merely address technical problems, the MDP was therefore deeply intertwined with colonial imperatives to order, control and compel the progress of their most unruly subjects. At issue were the land, labor, livestock and livelihoods of Maasai people, as well as contested visions of poverty, prosperity and progress. As such, the project served to facilitate, justify and consolidate the expansion of state control into numerous realms of Maasai life and its implementation became the site of deep contestation between administrators and Maasai. Designed in part to build confidence among Maasai in government and development, the project backfired, failing to meet its own objectives and, more ominously, fueling anti-colonial mobilization.

The consensus among many analysts of the Nigeria–Biafra War is that the conflict cannot be reduced to a mono-causal explanation. The tragedy that befell the West African country from 1966 to 1970 was a combination of many factors, which were political, ethnic, religious, social, and economic in nature. Yet the conflict was unduly cast as a religious war between Christians and Muslims. Utilizing newly available archival materials from within and outside Nigeria, this article endeavours to unravel the underlying forces in the religious war rhetoric of the mainly Christian breakaway region and its Western sympathizers. Among other things, it demonstrates that, while the religious war proposition was good for the relief efforts of the international humanitarian organizations, it inevitably alienated the Nigerian Christians and made them unsympathetic to the Biafran cause.

The rise of Lagos, which became the principal port of the ‘Slave Coast’ at the end of the eighteenth century, can only be understood by reference to the interaction between the European Atlantic trade and the indigenous canoe-borne trade along the coastal lagoons. European traders in the sixteenth century used the Lagos channel and the lagoon to approach the Ijebu kingdom, where slaves and cloth were purchased, but this trade lapsed in the seventeenth century. The Lagos settlement originated as a fishing hamlet, but was occupied as a military base by Benin around the end of the sixteenth century. Benin expansion to the west may have been designed to prevent European trade with Ijebu, in the interests of a Benin monopoly. Lagos remained formally subject to Benin until the nineteenth century, but the decline of Benin power in the eighteenth century left it effectively independent. European sources of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries attest trade in cloth and slaves passing along the lagoons through Lagos to Allada and Whydah in the west. Although this pattern of trade has been assumed to date back to pre-European times, it was more probably a consequence of the European presence, and more specifically of the westward drift of European interest along the coast from Benin after the sixteenth century. European traders began to show an active interest in the lagoon trade to the east of Allada in the early eighteenth century, and again began to explore the possibility of using the Lagos channel to bapproach the inland lagoons. Lagos developed as an Atlantic port from the 1760s, exporting slaves and Ijebu cloth, but its importance was limited by its remoteness from any major source of slaves. Its emergence as a major port in the late eighteenth century was due to the disruption of slave shipments from ports further west by military pressure from Dahomey, which led to the diversion of slave supplies eastward along the lagoons for shipment from Lagos.