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.

A recent authoritative review of developments in African historiography pointed to one 'kind of synthesis which has always seemed worthwhile undertaking’, the attempt to trace ‘an historic connexion between the last-ditch resisters, the earliest organisers of armed risings, the messianic prophets and preachers, the first strike-leaders, the promoters of the first cautious and respectful associations of the intelligentsia, and the modern political parties which (initially at least) have been the inheritors of European power’.

This article considers the marginalization of precolonial history from mainstream Africanist scholarship in recent decades, and argues that this can be understood in the context of a scholarly culture that attributes an exaggerated significance to the history of the twentieth century. The article highlights some of the work that continues to be done on Africa's deeper past, with a view to demonstrating the enormous value of such research in elucidating present-day issues. It also argues, however, that work on the modern period is preponderant, and that there is a clear tendency toward historical foreshortening, evidenced in recent scholarship on such topics as conflict and ethnicity.

In its ideal form, the Chewa family system is supposed to place considerable emphasis on the mother right, the avunculate, uxorilocal marriage, husband's subordination to wife's kin, and importance of female children as future reproducers of the lineage. In practice, however, there are a number of factors which have tended to mitigate the impact of these tendencies in the system, as far as men or husbands are concerned. Attention has been drawn to the fact that a number of important changes in the marriage contract, family residential patterns, exercise of domestic authority, and control or custody of children, have been the result of historical developments. There is therefore a need to understand these developments, even if the changes in the Chewa family system to which they led have not brought about a complete transformation of the system.

Several of these historical developments have been reviewed, as well as the features of patriliny to which they have given rise in several parts of central Malawi. They include the growth of the slave trade in the nineteenth century and the opportunity which this gave to some lineages to acquire women who could be married virilocally; the intrusion of patrilineal peoples like the Ngoni which increased the incidence of virilocal marriage and patrilineal descent; the spread of certain Christian missionary teachings that are in conflict with matrilineal principles of family organisation; and such developments of the colonial period as labour migrancy and cash-cropping which often impinged on relations between husband and wife and family life in general.

This article revisits the trope of the traffic in body parts in colonial and postcolonial Equatorial Africa. Current analyses, mostly written by anthropologists and sociologists, explain these rumors by the destructive integration of Africa in the world's economy and the commodification of the human body. While acknowledging their fertility, I argue that these approaches fail to understand how, during the colonial era, Europeans and Africans participated in the re-enchanting of the human body. The first part of the article examines Equatorial African conceptions of the body as central in the crafting of power and social reproduction, and reconstructs how these views were disturbed by colonial intrusion. The second part turns to European discourses and suggests that the colonial situation revealed significant contradictions in the western fiction of a modern disconnect between the body and power. The series of political and moral transgressions triggered by the conquest made apparent how Europeans themselves envisioned political survival as a form of positive exchange revolving around the body-fetish. The third section puts these ideas to the test of funeral practices to show how, in the colony, black and white bodies became re-sacralized as political resources. Building on these findings, the conclusion questions anthropologists' and historians' tendency to draw epistemic boundaries between western and African imaginaries.

In this Introduction to the Special Issue on Death in African History we explore issues raised by the existing literature and suggest ways forward for future research. Death has long been a central concern of social anthropological writing on African societies, and of the extensive literature on African belief systems. Until recently, however, little attention has been paid to the history of death practices in Africa in relation to demographic change, urbanization, the interventions of the colonial and postcolonial state and the availability of new technologies. We explore the ways in which these forces have contributed to re-inventions of practices and beliefs surrounding death which are both self-evidently ‘modern’ and yet also rooted in a much longer history.

The commercialization of peanuts on the Upper Guinea Coast began along the Gambia River in the early 1830s, expanded to southern Guinea and northern Sierra Leone in the late 1830s, and Senegal and Portuguese Guinea in the early 1840s. African cultivators and traders responded to the new marketing opportunities with remarkable swiftness, and everywhere peanut cultivation spread it occasioned far-reaching economic and social changes for the societies concerned. A rapidly growing demand for peanuts in France, together with favourable changes in French tariffs, greatly benefited French and Senegalese traders in competition with British and Sierra Leonean rivals. The consequence was that the former attained a dominant commercial position on the Upper Guinea Coast by the 1860s, an advantage that would be exploited in the achievement of French political hegemony over much of the area in the colonial partition which followed.

This essay argues that historians need to engage with the history of contemporary Africa both as a way of throwing new light on Africa's more remote past and as a way of understanding the present. The paper discusses two types of problem involved in such an enterprise. The first is the identification of the most fruitful themes for investigation. The second is the sources that may be used.

As the exception on the continent, southern Africa has no Neolithic period. In the 1920s, when the term came to mean Stone Age with food production, Neolithic was dropped in South Africa for lack of evidence for farming or herding in Stone Age sites. But since the late 1960s many sheep bones have surfaced in just such sites. Now, the continued absence of a Neolithic may say more about the politics of South African archaeology than about its prehistory. This paper describes food production in the southern African late Stone Age and argues in favor of (re-)introducing the term Neolithic to the subcontinent.

Scholarly opinion on the conversion of the Kingdom of Kongo to Christianity has generally been that it was superficial, diplomatically oriented, impure, dangerous to national sovereignty or rejected by the mass of the population. This article argues that although Christianity in Kongo took a distinctly African form it was widely accepted both in Kongo and in Europe as being the religion of the country.

This was possible because Kongo, as a voluntary convert, had considerable leeway to contribute to its particular form of Christianity. Also, European priests were much more tolerant of syncretism in Kongo than in regions like Mexico, where colonial occupation accompanied the propagation of Christianity. Kongo's control over the theological content allowed the religion to gain mass acceptance while its control over the Church organization and finance allowed it never to be an instrument for foreign domination, in spite of Portuguese attempts to use it as a ‘fifth column’. When European priests arrived in Kongo during the Portuguese colonial occupation at the end of the nineteenth century, they rejected the local form of Christianity, thus ending its acceptance among Europeans as Christianity.

Pemba Peremba

Ukija na winda, hutoka na kilemba

Ukija na kilemba, hutoka na winda.

(Proceed cautiously in Pemba

If you come wearing a loin cloth, you leave wearing a turban

If you come wearing a turban, you leave wearing a loin cloth.)

Dress has historically been used as one of the most important and visually immediate markers of class, status and ethnicity in East African coastal society. As one of many forms of expressive culture, clothing practice shaped and gave form to social bodies. Examining transformations in dress and fashion illustrates, however, that boundaries between theoretically distinctive social categories were often vague in practice.

Archaeological evidence and historical accounts have been used to examine the impact of trade and ecology on the decline of West African iron industries. Environmental changes including an increasingly desiccating climatic shift and widespread deforestation as a direct result of fuel procurement over centuries of iron-smelting and European coastal exploitation, seriously affected the survivability of these industries. While the increasing importation of European iron bars and other manufactured goods necessitated a certain amount of technological innovation, the only viable long-term response and adaptation to the ecological devastation became the increased reliance on imported supplies of iron.

This part of the paper deals with the cowrie shells and their import into West Africa, and the cost of their transport in West Africa; with the cowrie currency area and its changes; with the oddities of cowrie arithmetic; and with the final decline of the cowrie currency. A second part will deal with the value of cowries at various times and places, and with cowrie economics.

This essay outlines a general framework for thinking about African ideas about proprietary rights and considers how this might produce insights into ideas about social relations.

Drawing largely on examples from East and Central Africa, and on an analysis of property disputes pursued to the Natal Native High Court, it is suggested that the development of a customary law came first to the ‘law of persons’ and then to the ‘law of property’. Ideas and disputes relating to land and to other forms of ‘old’ and ‘new’ property are all examined. Ideas about what were and were not commodities, and about different ways of dealing with kin and with strangers, are shown to be fundamental to the understanding of disputing behaviours and the meaning of customary norms. Disputes were not simply about ownership and value but about the changing boundaries of commodity status. Ideas about appropriate behaviour regarding the transactional order between kin concerning ‘old’ property (food and cattle) extended into the dealings between strangers about ‘new’ property (acquired with money through the market), whilst the ideas and practices of the market economy had a significant effect on the way ‘old’ property was dealt with among kin. The development of the customary law related to property also has a particular relevance in understanding generational conflict in Africa.

It is argued that customary law was formed in the process of a dialogue between rulers and ruled during the colonial period. The colonial state impeded the development of individual tenure by the ‘invention’ of communal tenure but was ambivalent in response to attempts by younger men, and by women, to separate estates from the control of older males.

This paper examines three views which have been widely held about slavery and the slave trade in West Africa, and which have tended to mould interpretations of its history, especially for the period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. These are:

(1) That the institution of slavery was endemic in, and a natural feature of, indigenous West African society, so that when foreigners arrived in West Africa with a demand for slaves, West Africans were able immediately to organize an export trade in slaves on an ever-increasing scale.

(2) A contrary view, that it was the external demands for labour which led to a great growth of the institution of slavery in West Africa, and so corrupted its indigenous society.

(3) A view which may or may not be combined with (2), namely that the external demand for slaves became so considerable that there was a disastrous effect on its population.

Relevant evidence is touched upon from about the eleventh century onwards, and a fourth interpretation is developed which seems better to fit the economic and social realities which can be ascertained.

In essence this is that economic and commercial slavery and slave-trading were not natural features of West African society, but that they developed, along with the growth of states, as a form of labour mobilization to meet the needs of a growing system of foreign trade in which, initially, the demand for slaves as trade goods was relatively insignificant. What might be termed a ‘slave economy’ was generally established in the Western and Central Sudan by about the fourteenth century at least, and had certainly spread to the coasts around the Senegal and in Lower Guinea by the fifteenth century.

The European demand for slaves for the Americas, which reached its peak from about 1650 to about 1850, accentuated and expanded the internal growth of both slavery and the slave trade. But this was essentially only one aspect of a very wide process of economic and political development and social change, in West Africa. The data recently assembled and analysed by Curtin for the volume and distribution of the export slave trade do not suggest that the loss of population and other effects of the export of labour to the Americas need have had universally damaging effects on the development of West Africa. Rather, it is suggested, West African rulers and merchants reacted to the demand with economic reasoning, and used it to strengthen streams of economic and political development that were already current before the Atlantic slave trade began.

Without slaves from Africa, reported an early Portuguese source, ‘it is impossible to do anything in Brazil’ Although prior arrivals are suspected, the first known landing of slaves from Africa on Brazilian soil took place in 1552. In 1580, five years after the founding of Loanda and on the eve of Brazil's sugar boom, there were no fewer than 10,000 Africans in Brazil. Fifty years later, Pernambuco alone imported 4,400 slaves annually from Africa. It also contained 150 engenhos, or a third of the total sugar-mill and plantation complex in Brazil. In 1630, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) captured Pernambuco, and within a decade Portugal had abandoned Brazil to the Dutch. It was ultimately the decision of local settlers, the moradores, to fight the West India Company that led to restoration of Portuguese control in 1654. The Dutch retreat from Brazil, however, was secured through a joint Afro-Portuguese effort which gave the Black Regiment of Henrique Dias its colonial fame. If early settlement and a sugar-based economy could not have been sustained without the African labourer, neither could the Portuguese continue to hold Brazil without the African soldier. The subsequent evolution of Brazil is no less a story of Euro-African enterprise. Exploitation of gold and diamonds in the eighteenth century, pioneering shifts of population from the coast to the interior, dilution of monoculture, formation of mining states or advent of an abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century were all dependent on the same combination. The blend of race, language and culture in contemporary Brazil confirms this evolution.

This paper analyses the ideological elaboration of the concept of race in the development of Christian-nationalist thought. As such, it contributes to our understanding of the ideological and theological justifications for apartheid. The paper begins by pointing to the relatively late moment (c. mid-1930s) at which Afrikaner nationalist ideologues began to address the systematic separation of blacks and whites. It takes its cue from a key address given by the nationalist leader, Totius, to the 1944 volkskongres on racial policy. Here, racial separation was justified by reference to scriptural injunction, the historical experience of Afrikanerdom and the authority of science. Each of these categories is then analysed with respect to the way in which the concept of race was understood and articulated.

The paper argues that both scientific racism and distinctive forms of cultural relativism were used to justify racial separation. This depended on the fact that the categories of race, language and culture were used as functionally interdependent variables, whose boundaries remained fluid. In the main, and especially after the Second World War, Afrikaner nationalist ideologues chose to infer or suggest biological notions of racial superiority rather than to assert these openly. Stress on the distinctiveness of different ‘cultures’ meant that the burden of explaining human difference did not rest solely on the claims of racial science. As a doctrine, Christian-nationalism remained sufficiently flexible to adjust to changing circumstances. In practice, the essentialist view of culture was no less powerful a means of articulating human difference than an approach based entirely on biological determinism.

This article explores the imaginative meanings of Mau Mau which white and black protagonists invented out of their fearful ambitions for the future of Kenya. Within the general assumptions of white superiority and the need to destroy Mau Mau savagery, four mutually incompatible European myths can be picked out. Conservatives argued that Mau Mau revealed the latent terror-laden primitivism in all Africans, the Kikuyu especially. This reversion had been stimulated by the dangerous freedoms offered by too liberal a colonialism in the post-war world. The answer must be an unapologetic reimposition of white power. Liberals blamed Mau Mau on the bewildering psychological effects of rapid social change and the collapse of orderly tribal values. Africans must be brought more decisively through the period of transition from tribal conformity to competitive society, to play a full part in a multi-racial future dominated by western culture; this would entail radical economic reforms. Christian fundamentalists saw Mau Mau as collective sin, to be overcome by individual confession and conversion. More has been read into their rehabilitating mission in the detention camps than is warranted, since they had no theology of power. The whites with decisive power were the British military. They saw the emergency as a political war which needed political solutions, for which repression, social improvement and spiritual revival were no substitute. They, and the ‘hard-core’ Mau Mau detainees at Hola camp who thought like them, cleared the way for the peace. This was won not by any of the white constructions of the rising but by Kenyatta's Kikuyu political thought, which inspired yet criminalised Mau Mau.

Gustav Preller (1875–1943), a prolific and popular South African historian, is the man largely responsible for shaping many of the key myths of Afrikaner nationalism. One of these is the concept of the Great Trek, an interpretation of the nineteenth-century movement of Boers into the interior. It is Preller's written and visual version of this social movement that has been the dominant one for the last seven decades. Preller worked with a variety of media including books, newspapers, magazines, drama and film, and always produced works that sold in significant numbers. Yet despite his obvious impact and importance, Preller has been the subject of little research. This article attempts to assess Preller's work in relation to questions concerning the cultural fabrication of nationalisms. It asks how Preller did his popularizing work: what techniques, conventions, narrative formulas and social languages did he deploy in his work and whence did he derive these cultural resources? For Preller, one of the most crucial themes in his work had to do with how people recalled the past and more importantly how one could get them to ‘enact’ this memory in their own lives. Much of his work can be read as a search to find strategies of storing the past in forms which would make popular sense. He relied heavily on oral history and he also familiarized himself with popular forms of both oral and written storytelling which in turn inform his work. In 1916 he became involved in filming De Voortrekkers and these visual skills became a key ingredient in all of his ventures. His interest in the visual also informed his frequent use of the physical objects of the past as vehicles for popularizing his views. Another tactic that Preller followed was to explore and ‘colonize’ the institutions of popular leisure which he then remoulded in his nationalist enterprises. The article concludes with a detailed consideration of one of Preller's historical short stories.

From various kinds of evidence it can now be argued that agriculture in Ethiopia and the Horn was quite ancient, originating as much as 7,000 or more years ago, and that its development owed nothing to South Arabian inspiration. Moreover, the inventions of grain cultivation in particular, both in Ethiopia and separately in the Near East, seem rooted in a single, still earlier subsistence invention of North-east Africa, the intensive utilization of wild grains, beginning probably by or before 13,000 b.c. The correlation of linguistic evidence with archaeology suggests that this food-collecting innovation may have been the work of early Afroasiatic-speaking communities and may have constituted the particular economic advantage which gave impetus to the first stages of Afroasiatic expansion into Ethiopia and the Horn, the Sahara and North Africa, and parts of the Near East.