This study of the performance of the Niger Company, from surrender of the charter until its acquisition by Lever Brothers Limited, explores the ways in which the corporation organized both for stability and for change. Pooling agreements, contracts, negotiations with colonial governments and shippers aimed at defending the company's monopoly over river communications won before 1900. At the same time, company agents expanded the geographical area and the range of commercial operations into a wide variety of enterprises. Of these, the development of mining on the Bauchi Plateau and participation in the exploitation of northern Nigerian groundnuts were the most important and placed severe strains on the capacity of the firm's personnel, as well as on its working capital. The outbreak of war precipitated a crisis in the export of produce which was temporarily deferred by the exceptional profitability of raw commodities and tin concentrates. By 1919, the need for skilled personnel and greater amounts of capital compounded the difficulties arising from too great a reliance on river transport. The company assisted with railway construction and used the new system to meet commitments in its relationship with the mining companies; but it did not decide to restructure its operations in Nigeria to keep pace with changes brought about by railway communications, particularly at Lagos and Port Harcourt. The study, therefore, draws attention to the importance of technological adaptation in business performance, particularly in the case of an enterprise with a number of generalized functions in a rapidly changing tropical market.

Between 1952 and 1960, the British colonial government of Kenya waged a violent counter-insurgency campaign against the Mau Mau rebels. In this effort the regime was assisted by collaborators, known as loyalists, drawn from the same communities as the insurgents. Based primarily on new archival sources, this article sets out the history of loyalism, stresses the ambiguity of allegiances during the conflict and argues that loyalism was a product of the same intellectual debates that had spawned the Mau Mau insurgency. The article concludes by stressing the significance for postcolonial Kenya of this history.

Was feudalism a purely Western phenomenon? Is it a universal stage in man's history, emphasizing replacement of kinship by ties of personal dependence which further social development required? If it is neither a universal prerequisite nor yet exclusively Western, what are the conditions under which it is found? A host of such questions are raised by the consistent use both by historians and sociologists of the term ‘feudal’ as a description of the societies they are studying. Here I want to inquire into the implications and value of the concept as applied to African societies.

The Portuguese first sailed along the coast of what is now Ghana in 1471; thereafter regular trading relations were established at numerous ports of call between Axim and the Volta. The impact made by the newcomers upon local peoples with whom they came into direct or indirect commercial contact was marked. The creation of new maritime markets stimulated trade over wide areas, and the trend away from subsistence economies gained pace (so fortuitously producing conditions necessary for the subsequent development of the slave trade). Archaeological evidence from Southern Ghana bears witness to a sharp growth in urbanization in the sixteenth century; the numerous towns that arose show a pattern of settlement quite distinct from that of the earlier Iron-Age (‘paléonégritique’) agriculturalists.

The Muslim social movement known as the fergo Nioro provides a case of popular elaboration of the message of a leader of jihad. Umar Tal's call to holy war led to the conquest of Karta in the mid-1850s, and his call to hijra resulted in the migration of perhaps 20,000 Senegal-valley Fulbe to form a Muslim settler community. In the years after Umar's departure from Karta in 1859, military leaders and others in the Fulbe settler community sent envoys to recruit additional settlers from the Senegal valley. At least 16,000 and perhaps as many as 30,000 Fulbe responded to this recruitment effort and left Bundu, Futa Toro and the lower Senegal valley between 1862 and 1890. Two periods of more massive migration coincided with the residence at Nioro of Amadu Sheku, Umar's son and designated successor. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, a cholera epidemic swept up the Senegal valley, claimed thousands of victims, and encouraged Fulbe to leave the region for Karta. During the mid-1880s, French policies in the Senegal valley, notably the emancipation of slaves and moves to halt Fulbe raids in the lower Senegal valley, influenced the social movement.

In both periods of large-scale migration and at other times, the Umarian envoys constructed an appeal which elaborated and even transformed Umar's call to hijra. Umar's insistence on holy war was a dominant theme in all periods, and resonated with the young men who left the valley in hopes of accumulating wealth through warfare. His condemnation of French influence in the Senegal valley was also expressed in the Arabic letters delivered by envoys. Umar's emphasis on the cutting of social bonds was not emphasized, as Fulbe settlers sought to attract relatives and neighbors to the new Fulbe communities in Karta.

According to Yoruba traditions, the royal dynasties of all the principal kingdoms in the area were descended from the children of Oduduwa, the founder and first king of Lle Ife. This tradition implied, or could be represented as implying, that the various kingdoms formed a political unit, a ‘family’ of related dynasties. The article considers the political implicatins of the Yoruba traditions of origin, and seeks to relate the existence of certain variants of the tradition to the use of it for purposes of political propaganda. In particular, it is suggested that the tradition was manipulated and modified in an attempt to support the claims to paramountcy of the king of Oyo, when this kingdom became the most powerful state in the Yoruba area during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The case illustrates, it is argued, the intellectual problems involved in altering received traditions, and suggests the inadequacy of those views which see the process of the modification of traditions as a simple and unobtrusive response to changing political needs.

A principal role of the physical anthropologist has been the analysis of the human skeleton. Such analysis has traditionally utilized similarities in skeletal morphology and, in some instances, hypothetical racial affinities, to establish the biological relationships between populations. Established biological relationships are then assumed to reflect cultural affinities. As a result of this approach to the skeletal remains of Nubian populations, the culture history of Nubia has been explained in terms of type, hybridization, and atavism, rather than the more biologically and culturally meaningful units of variation, evolution and development. Our analysis of skeletal remains associated with Meroitic, X-Group and Christian cultural horizons in Sudanese Nubia has emphasized a bio-cultural approach to detectable patterns of mortality, skeletal growth and pathology. Rather than seeking to reconstruct cultural history from such biological evidence, this approach utilizes independently established evidence of culural adaptation as the principal environmental context within which these biological processes occur. From this conceptual framework, it becomes possible to gain new insight into the biological and cultural dynamics of variation, evolution and development within the Nubian corridor.

This article presents a picture of the changing character of the Nyassa Company at ground level, and it relates this to changes in the capital interests which controlled the company. In so doing it seeks to explain the undercapitalization which left the area economically undeveloped. During the first period of the company's existence, from 1894 to 1898, its publicly expressed aim was the economic development of Nyassa; but the directors were primarily concerned with financial speculation and the company's influence in Africa spread no further than isolated points on the coast. In the second period of its existence, from 1899 to 1914, the company became a conquering and occupying force; but the expense of overcoming the determined resistance of African political units, plus a more realistic appraisal of the area's economic potential, meant that by 1909 the aim of economic development had been abandoned and the company turned instead to expanding its role as a supplier of migrant labour. In 1913 migrant labour to South Africa ceased, the company changed hands, and shortly afterwards the European war found its way into the area. In the last period of the company's existence, from 1919 to 1929, with only ten years of the charter left since the Portuguese government refused to grant an extension, the principles of finance capital dictated that it was too late for profitable investment in realizing the early visions of extensive economic development. Instead, the company turned to raising the level of hut tax as a means of increasing revenue, and the administration was allowed to expand and intensify the abuses which it seems to have always practised.

The existing works on the history of education in northern Nigeria are generally agreed that the main factor which hindered the spread and development of girls' education in the area during the colonial era was Muslims' opposition to female education. While it is not denied in this article that opposition to female education existed among Muslims, it is argued that this was not the main factor which retarded the advancement of girls' education during the period covered by this article. It is suggested that the British educational policy, which placed much emphasis on co-education, instead of building girls' schools, coupled with the parsimony with which the British administration spent money on girls' education, were mainly responsible for hindering the development of girls' and women's education in northern Nigeria during the colonial era. It is argued that the introduction of co-education made Western education for girls unappealing to many Muslim parents who otherwise would have sent their daughters to school if girls' schools had existed in sufficient numbers. The article attempts to show that this could not be realized as a result of the British administration's unwillingness to spend substantial sums of money on girls' education. It is also suggested that the preferential treatment accorded by the British administration to the aristocracy, in the recruitment of pupils for girls' schools and the W.T.C., was inimical to the advancement of girls' education generally.

At the start of the fifteenth century a.d. a group of patrilineal Bantu clans, collectively known as the Vakaranga, occupied in strength the south and south-west of what is now Southern Rhodesia. The population was mainly composed of small-scale peasant cultivators and cattle-breeders, who lived in modest, stockaded villages of thatched mud-huts and granaries, and who practised an ancestor-cult introduced by their forebears from the region of the Great Lakes—perhaps during the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Malagasy speakers probably formed the single largest native speech community among slaves dispersed into the western Indian Ocean between 1500 and 1900. In the eighteenth-century Mascarenes, Malagasy parlers (dialects) served as a contact language, understood both by persons born in Madagascar and by those with no direct ties to the island. Catholic missionaries working in Bourbon and Île de France frequently evangelized among sick and newly disembarked Malagasy slaves in their own tongues, employing servile interpreters and catechists from their ecclesiastical plantations as intermediaries in their ‘work of the word’. Evangelistic style was multilingual, in both French and Malagasy, and largely verbal, but was also informed by Malagasy vernacular manuscripts of Church doctrine set in Roman characters. The importance of Malagasy in the Mascarenes sets the linguistic environment of the islands off in distinctive ways from those of Atlantic slave societies and requires scholars to rethink the language and culture history of the western Indian Ocean islands, heretofore focused almost exclusively on studies of French and its creoles.

This article examines the history of debates around the creation of a ‘native village’ in Pietermaritzburg culminating in the construction of the city's first formal township. This, and the decision to locate the new township next to the city's main dump, have commonly been interpreted to corroborate Maynard Swanson's influential concept of the ‘sanitation syndrome’. Swanson first coined that term to explain the origins of racial segregation in Durban, but it struck a chord very widely, not only because it problematized science as metaphorical, but also because it shifted responsibility for the antecedents of apartheid onto urban, self-styled progressive English-speaking officials and voters. From the Pietermaritzburg evidence, however, I argue that the concept ‘sanitation syndrome’ now unhelpfully elides or oversimplifies a complex history. I thus question its continued utility as a critique of cultural racism within liberal or modernization discourses in the wider contemporary regional context.

It is argued that the Nilotic contribution to Bantu Africa consisted essentially in the infiltration of Early Iron Age communities practising a mainly agricultural economy in certain specially favourable environments by a new mode of food production in which cattle-keeping played an important part. This new way of life made possible the food-producing occupation of the drier parts of Bantu Africa, and the interaction between the new and old kinds of food-producers was the essential feature of the Later Iron Age. Wherever the new elements were present, settlement patterns became more dispersed, iron-working and pottery became the occupations of specialists, systems of inheritance changed from matrilineal to patrilineal forms, and political systems tended to become more centralized through the domination of settled cultivators by more mobile and warlike pastoral elites. Although chronological data for the Later Iron Age is as yet greatly inferior to that for the Early Iron Age, it seems likely that the process of Nilotic infiltration began during the last two or three centuries of the first millennium a.d., and spread southward through the centre of the subcontinent, so as to reach the western parts of Zambia and Zimbabwe by the tenth century. The subsequent interaction between the two kinds of food-production came about more gradually over two or three further centuries, and involved many varieties of local evolution in different areas. In southern Zaire, Zambia and Zimbabwe the local development of metallurgical techniques during this period was as significant as the introduction of pastoralism. But, overall, the Nilotic contribution provided the most essential features of the Later Iron Age.

French colonial history, during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, was marked by two significant developments—a steady devolution of executive power from Paris to administrators abroad, and the creation of the Ministry for the Colonies in 1894. The basic reason for these changes was simply pressure of work. As communications with an expanding empire improved, the tendency to over-centralize the management of colonial affairs placed an excessive burden on the colonial section of the Ministry for the Navy. The appointment of an Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies who was responsible to a variety of ministers in the 1880's had provided no solution to the volume of business brought from Africa and Asia by the cable and the mail-steamer. Indeed, the example of Algeria where officials had been closely bound to government departments in Paris since 1871 had showed that the formulation of coherent colonial policy under these conditions was too often frustrated by divided responsibilities and changing politicians. Towards the zenith of French expansion, therefore, a single ministry took charge of all, territories except North Africa; and its first task was to apply to other areas the framework of federal administration set up in Indo-China some eight years previously. No longer were the colonies dependent for directives on a sub-department of the French Navy that had founded and protected them. The heterogeneous posts and annexed territories were grouped, as far as pacification and diplomatic conventions would permit, under governors-general who were at once military pro-consuls of empire and civil representatives of republican presidents.

After World War II, African ex-servicemen in Kenya sought to maintain the socioeconomic gains they had accrued through service in the King's African Rifles (KAR). Looking for middle-class employment and social privileges, they challenged existing relationships within the colonial state. For the most part, veterans did not participate in national politics, believing that their goals could be achieved within the confines of colonial society. The postwar actions of KAR veterans are best explained by an examination of their initial perceptions of colonial military service. Indeed, the social and economic connotations of KAR service, combined with the massive wartime expansion of Kenyan defense forces, created a new class of Africans with distinctive characteristics and interests. These socioeconomic perceptions proved powerful after the war, often informing ex-askari action.

This paper traces the process of the decline of African middlemen in Eastern Nigeria from wealthy entrepreneurs of the late nineteenth century to petty traders after 1930. Four phases are identified in their decline. During the first phase, 1900–5, the middlemen lost only the political control of their trading areas but benefited commercially. The establishment of colonial rule expanded their market. And with the reluctance of expatriate firms to move into the interior, the continued ignorance of the natives of the actual prices of their produce and of imported goods, and the encouragement from the colonial administrators, African middlemen prospered.

These advantages were lost during the second phase, 1905–16. As the firms began to move inland from 1905, they traded with the natives and fostered a new group of smaller and dependent middlemen. The middlemen's market began to contract and their wealth declined. Their fortunes worsened during the third phase, 1916–30. With the opening of the Eastern Railway to traffic in 1916 and the increased construction of roads during this period, the firms intensified their penetration of the interior, swallowing up what remained of the middlemen's market. The introduction of produce inspection in Eastern Nigeria in 1928 added more hardships for the middlemen, putting many out of business. And by 1930 the trust system, upon which most middlemen depended after 1916 for raising their trading capital, collapsed, leaving most of them impoverished.

Thus, after 1930 African middlemen were no more than petty traders, trading with little capital and making marginal profit. They became incapable of challenging the expatriate firms in the import–export trade as their predecessors had done in the nineteenth century. The firms employed various trade malpractices to ensure that the African traders retained this status until the 1940s.

In the discussion of the reliance which should be placed on the Igbo-Ukwu radiocarbon dates, it is necessary to make certain that what evidence we have is correctly used. The precise locations of the samples used for dating are recalled and possible sources of error discussed. Consideration is given to the arguments for a date later than that suggested by the radiocarbon dates, stemming from the state of preservation of the textiles, the character of the beads, the pottery evidence, analogies with the presumed dating of Ife and Benin, the quantity and the source of the copper, and what is known of pre-European trading patterns in West Africa. The latter is probably the most serious objection to a very early date, but the question will only be settled with the acquisition of more archaeological evidence.

The institutions of slavery, slave raiding and the slave trade were fundamental in the rise and expansion of the Keira Sultanate of Dār Fūr. The development of a long-distance trade in slaves may be due to immigrants from the Nile, who probably provided the impetus to state formation. This process may be remembered in the ‘Wise Stranger’ traditions current in the area. The slave raid or ghazwa, penetrating into the Baḥr al-Ghazāl and what is now the Central African Republic, marked the triumph of Sudanic state organization over the acephalous societies to the south.

The slaves, who were carefully classified, were not only exported to Egypt and North Africa, but also served the sultans and the title-holding elite as soldiers, labourers and bureaucrats. In the latter role, the slaves began to encroach on the power of traditional ruling groups within the state; the conflict between the slave bureaucrats and the traditional ruling elite lasted until the end of the first Keira Sultanate in 1874.

This article explores the history of the creole South Sudanese Arabic language from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. It analyses the historical evidence of language use in the light of insights drawn from linguistic studies of creolisation to argue that South Sudanese Arabic became an innovative and necessary means of communication among multiple actors within new fields of interaction. The article argues that these fields of interaction were both the product and the arena of local state formation. Rather than marking the boundary of the state, the spread of this creole language indicates the enlarging arenas of participation in the local state. The development and use of South Sudanese Arabic as an unofficial lingua franca of local government, trade, and urbanisation demonstrates that communication and negotiation among local actors has been central to the long-term processes of state formation in South Sudan.

This article surveys the latest archaeological research and dating results for West Africa. For the Iron Age, recent fieldwork has been spread widely: especially noteworthy is that bearing on the history of ancient Ghana and Mali. Work on the Late Stone Age appears by contrast to have been rather patchy lately, although various palaeoecological researches continue to improve our understanding of the changing environments affecting West African populations over the last 10,000 years. In south-central Niger, moreover, remains of copper-smelting by a stone-using community are dated to around 2000 B.C. From the same region, as also from northern Ghana, comes further evidence for the inception of the Iron Age during the first millennium b.c.

The article is prefaced by some critical comments on the citing and interpretation of radiocarbon datings in historical discussions, and on the meaning of ‘corrected’ and ‘calendar dates’.