During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Portugal established a trading presence along the Upper Guinea Coast from Senegal to Sierra Leone. Emigrants from Portugal known as lançados – some of them Jews seeking to escape religious persecution – settled along the coast, where many of them married women from local communities. By the early sixteenth century, Luso-Africans, or ‘Portuguese’ as they called themselves, were established at trading centers from the Petite Côte in Senegal, south to Sierra Leone. Descendants of Portuguese immigrants, of Cape Verde islanders, and of West Africans, the Luso-Africans developed a culture that was itself a synthesis of African and European elements. Rich historical documentation allows a case study of the changing ways Luso-Africans identified themselves over the course of three centuries.

The earliest lançados established themselves along the coast as commercial middlemen between African and European traders and as coastal traders between Sierra Leone and Senegambia. Their position was formally discouraged by the Portuguese Crown until the second decade of the sixteenth century, but they nevertheless played an important role in trade with Portugal and the Cape Verde islands. Lançado communities were permanently settled on the Petite Côte, while in Sierra Leone and Rio Nunez much early commerce was in the hands of lançados who sailed there regularly from S. Domingos, north of present day Bissau. The offspring of these lançados and African women were called filhos de terra and were generally considered to be ‘Portuguese’.

Throughout the sixteenth century, the descendants of the lançados maintained close commercial ties with the Cape Verde islands. Cape Verdeans were themselves the offspring of mixed Portuguese and West African marriages. Sharing elements of a common culture and united by marriage and economic ties, mainland Luso-Africans and Cape Verdeans represented a socially complex and geographically dispersed community. Cape Verdeans, like mainland Luso-Africans, resolutely maintained that they were ‘Portuguese’, and both sub-groups employed the same essentially cultural criteria of group identification.

The paper outlines the impetus to, trajectory and impact of enclosure in the Cape Colony between the passing of the Fencing Act in 1883 and 1910. By increasing landowners' control over their environment, fencing enabled a suite of remedial measures that raised the productivity of the commercial small-stock sector. Fences also came to stand in the stead of the landowner in defending farms against human or animal trespass. The compartmentalization of the countryside into enclosures facilitated a more general re-ordering and re-assigning of humans and animals within it, resulting in a depersonalization of rural social relations. In all these ways the enclosure movement laid the ideological foundations for the hegemony of private property and the market economy in the countryside.

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.

The article analyses the determination of prices in the pre-colonial West African kingdom of Dahomey, principally with relation to the domestic economy, on the basis of detailed analysis of contemporary documentation. The influential study of Dahomey by Karl Polanyi (1966) posited pervasive state control of both overseas trade and the domestic economy, including prices, which Polanyi argued were set according to traditional notions of equity or equivalence rather than responding to supply and demand. These hypothesized stable prices were held to be reflected in the long-term stability of the exchange value of the local currency of cowry shells, at least prior to the ‘Great Inflation’ caused by excessive European imports of these shells in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although his account of the state's control and management of economic matters was in many respects inaccurate or exaggerated, Polanyi was correct in asserting that prices were subject to state regulation. However, it is shown that prices were nevertheless liable to short-term fluctuations which reflected market conditions, and overall suffered a massive increase during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, comparable in scale to the nineteenth-century ‘Great Inflation’, and likewise reflecting the uncontrolled increase in the money supply through European imports of cowries. Although these two periods of inflation were separated by a period of relative price stability between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, this was not restricted to Dahomey and should also be attributed to the operation of market forces rather than to the effectiveness of Dahomian economic administration. State intervention was probably more successful in holding down the wages of some groups of workers than in managing prices. Polanyi's insistence on the ‘non-market’ character of the Dahomian domestic economy is clearly untenable.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 paper attempts to reassess the general significance of the Thembu church by setting it in its political context. It examines the early career of Nehemiah Tile and the origins of this earliest of independent churches in southern Africa. In the 1880s Tile was not only the leader of the church, but also the chief figure behind a movement of political protest which sought to free Thembuland from Cape magisterial control. After his death, the church continued, and whites saw it as a real threat to their interests. But in the late 1890s the history of the church became increasingly obscure. There is some evidence to suggest that the church was less completely ‘tribal’ than usually maintained. The paper concludes that the church should be seen both as an expression of African reaction to the imposition of white rule on the Cape eastern frontier and as an element in the development of African nationalism.

Mali's Office du Niger was conceived on a monumental scale to produce cotton for the French textile industry after the First World War. Undaunted by the conspicuous absence of both manpower and a viable crop, Émile Bélime, the scheme's originator and presiding genius, believed colonial authorities could compel people from all over French West Africa to settle there. Under pressure from Paris, local administrators became his recruiting agents, forcibly resettling some 30,000 Africans by 1945, when the colonial ministry privately declared the scheme an unqualified failure. In 1960, France recycled the project as a prototype of disinterested aid to a developing country.

An important aspect of Julian Cobbing's radical critique of the ‘mfecane’ as the pivotal concept of the history of southern Africa in the nineteenth century is the claim that the image of Shaka-as-monster was an ‘alibi’ invented by Europeans in the 1820s to mask their slaving activities. Reconsideration of this claim reveals that it is based on the misuse of evidence and inadequate periodisation of the earliest representations of Shaka. Examination of the image of Shaka promoted by the Port Natal traders in the 1820s reveals that, with two highly specific exceptions which were not influential at the time, the traders' presentation of Shaka was that of a benign patron. It was only in 1829, after the Zulu king's death, that European representations began to include a range of ‘atrocity’ stories regarding Shaka. These were not invented by whites but drew on images of Shaka already in place amongst the African communities of southern Africa. These contemporary African views of Shaka and the ways in which they gave shape to the European versions are ignored by Cobbing, and this contributes to his failure to come to grips with past myth-making processes in their fullest complexity.

The career of Martinez provides a guide to the economic and political fortunes of the Brazilians in the coastal States of the Bight of Benin in the eighteen-forties, fifties, and early sixties. The first phase of his career took place while the Brazilian slave trade was still at its height; the second phase covered the successful Brazilian adaptation to the new commercial patterns involved in the introduction of the palm oil trade; the third phase took place when Brazilian commerce was in decline following increased British intervention and growing contact between European merchants and the African States. The graph of his political influence follows exactly that of his commercial affluence. In the early eighteen-forties he was a prominent figure in the confused politics of the Bight. In the late forties he was as influential in Dahomey as Francesco Felix De Souza had been in the previous decade. At the end of his life his importance had declined so much that he was unable to prevent the King of Dahomey entering into an agreement which would have dealt a final blow to his commercial position.

The much-researched history of Bulozi in the late nineteenth century is re-assessed here from a marxist viewpoint. A hereditary class of landlords owned the principal means of production and extracted rent in labour services and in kind from the direct producers. Tribute was also paid to the king and royal family, in recognition of the ultimate royal ownership of the means of production. Surplus was employed to increase leisure time, to indulge in conspicuous consumption, to raise the level of the productive forces through investment, and to maintain repressive political and ideological apparatuses. The main weight of oppression fell on the slaves, with free commoners in an ambivalent position. Slaves were both economically exploited and socially discriminated against, and their position was analogous but by no means identical to that of European serfs. The evolution of class struggle was greatly affected by articulation with capitalism and colonialism. The first contacts stimulated exploitation by providing a larger market and more effective means of repression, but the colonial state later intervened to abolish slavery in order to intensify the flow of migrant labour to the capitalist heartlands of southern Africa.

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’.