Copper and its alloys were for centuries staples of the import trade of West Africa, first across the Sahara, then by sea after the opening up of the Guinea Coast. However, little attention has been paid to the reasons behind this ancient and sustained demand. Although the uses of copper were many and changed from time to time and from place to place, the evidence of written, archaeological and artistic sources suggests that they fall largely into four broad and overlapping categories: a medium or standard of exchange, ornamentation, insignia of rank and power, and objects of cult and magic in a narrower sense. The preference for copper and brass over other metals for many purposes appears to have been determined by magic and the ritual properties ascribed to it, as well as by scarcity and practical and aesthetic considerations. Myth and legend may help to elucidate the uses of copper and brass by fitting them into a cosmological framework: thus along the Middle Niger copper is explicitly linked with the génie de l'eau and with myths of creation, while in the Niger Delta brass is frequently associated with the water spirits.

Joseph Miller has argued that the ‘Jaga’ invasion of Kongo in 1568 was primarily an internal rebellion supported by people from Matamba or from Makoko and the Pool. In this article I suggest that the Jaga were more probably dislocated Kongo or Tio from the lower middle Kwango. They were the ancestors of the seventeenth-century ‘Muyaka’, who raided slaves for the Makoko market. Their invasion of Kongo probably began as slave raiding. It continued as an attempt to break the Makoko king's monopoly of slave trade outlets by gaining direct access to the European traders. The invaders succeeded in temporarily overthrowing Kongo for two reasons. Firstly, Kongo was generally ill adapted to withstand sudden invasion. Secondly, the Kongo ruling elite was divided while undergoing radical political and social change. The restoration of Kongo by Portuguese forces had two important consequences. Firstly, it confirmed and advanced the changes in the ruling elite which had begun in the early sixteenth century; it thereby laid the foundation for a monopoly of the throne by a slave-based patrilineal royal segment descended from Afonso I. Secondly, the restoration facilitated the development of a new cloth-trade route from Okango through São Salvador to Luanda which compensated the mani Kongo for his loss of coastal monopoly on slave exports. This new trade enabled Kongo to suvive economically and politically into the later seventeenth century.

When the British Oil Rivers Protectorate was established in 1885, the political independence of the Delta States came to an end. The European invasion of African sovereignty, which in effect began in 1849 with the appointment of a British Consul, was complete. Since trade and politics were so intimately linked within these states, which had for so long guarded the middleman trade in the interior, the fortunes of the middleman chiefs were bound to be affected by such a major political change. The material which has emerged from my study of John Holt in relation to his Delta trade in the period 1880–1910, suggests, however, that the economic power of the chiefs (as opposed to the rulers) was by no means so quickly affected as has usually been suggested. The deposition of King Ja Ja of Opobo in 1887 symbolizes the end of the political power of the Delta rulers. His middleman chiefs were able, however, to maintain their control of the middleman organization of trade for a few years longer. Similarly, in each of the other rivers (with the exception of Brass), while the ruler lost his power, his hierarchy of middlemen retained control of internal commerce until almost the turn of the century.

The flowering of the Atlantic trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries caused many of the West African societies of the near hinterland to orient themselves increasingly toward the coast. This new focus created new geopolitical conformations. Given the nature of the stimulus, trade and politics went hand in hand and entrepreneurial ability could reap political rewards. These possibilities were greatest along the Gold Coast and in the Niger delta where the actual European presence was small in relation to the extent of the trade.

Such a trader cum political leader was John Kabes who, in a career spanning nearly forty years, established the paramount stool of Komenda, hitherto part of the inland state of Eguafo. Kabes began as a trader for the English (and sometimes for the Dutch) and gradually achieved political status which, however it may have been acquired, proved to be lasting because it was acceptable to existing political mores.

Such of Kabes's activities as are known suggest that his success sprang from his ability to wring advantage from the new exigencies of the time and place in ways which enabled him to acquire legitimacy as well as wealth and influence. Although Kabes's career is uniquely documented there is no reason to suppose that it was particularly unusual in its other facets. On this argument it can suggest ways in which other West African trade-derived polities, particularly in the Niger delta, may have coalesced.

IT is a commonplace that British government in Uganda was, from its inception, essentially one of benevolent paternalism—just rule by kindly parents. It is also evident that, particularly in the final decade before independence, the dilemma of this policy lay in its conflict with a growing realization that the children would soon come of age. The political aspects of this dilemma are familiar. Its social and economic implications are perhaps less clear.

Successive Europeans in south-east Tanzania looked for an ethnically based political authority under whom to live or with whom to work. Bishop Edward Steere of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa predicted the existence of very large tribal and linguistic ‘nations’ when this turned out not to be so, the UMCA missionaries who had settled at Masasi sought anxiously for some influential chief who could be represented as heading an ethnic polity; first German and then British administrators over-readily assumed that the chiefs whom they installed as akidas did in fact represent such ethnicities; finally, in the late 1920s, the British instituted historical research prior to the establishment of Indirect Rule, which was intended to reflect the ethnic and political complexity of the region. This European preoccupation with ethnicity bore little relation to the actualities of the region, which from the nineteenth-century incursions of the Yao, Makua and Makonde had constituted a mosaic of small, autonomous and ethnically mixed groupings. Nevertheless, certain African adventurers were able to take advantage of the European need for allies to build up their power, to become recognised as ‘chiefs’, and ultimately to become regarded as leaders of ethnicities. This was the case with Matola I and Matola II of Newala who between them developed their polity from a very small scattering of huts to a large and prosperous paramountcy. Within the Matola polity various social and cultural processes were at work to produce a common sense of identity, but these processes had not fully eroded the marks of the varying ethnic identities of those who belonged or submitted to the polity. The Indirect Rule inquiries, therefore, with their fanatical emphasis upon ethnicity as the only legitimate base for political authority had the result of dismantling the Matola polity and thereby destroying the only effective local nucleus of political consolidation.

State-controlled cocoa marketing was introduced in the Gold Coast during the Second World War and has had lasting impact. Most accounts of this change have emphasized the influence of metropolitan interests and ideas more conducive to state involvement in colonial economies. Although they explain the new found metropolitan willingness to ‘supply’ financial and administrative backing for state-controlled economic institutions, they neglect the sources of the Gold Coast government’s ‘demand’ for those institutions. I argue that pressures on the government to mitigate domestic social conflict caused by volatility in the world economy are crucial to understanding the shift to controlled cocoa marketing.

The sultanate of Angoche on the Moçambique coast was founded probably towards the end of the fifteenth century by refugees from Kilwa. It became a base for Muslim traders who wanted to use the Zambezi route to the central African trading fairs and it enabled them to by-pass the Portuguese trade monopoly at Sofala. The Portuguese were not able to check this trade until they themselves set up bases on the Zambezi in the 1530s and 1540s, and from that time the sultanate began to decline. Internal dissensions among the ruling families led to the Portuguese obtaining control of the sultanate in the late sixteenth century, but this control was abandoned in the following century when the trade of the Angoche coast dwindled to insignificance. During the eighteenth century movements among the Macua peoples of the mainland and the development of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean laid the foundations for the revival of the sultanate in the nineteenth century.

At the opening of the nineteenth century, the colonial order in South Africa was most seriously challenged on the eastern frontier, dramatized in white rebellions and the successful Xhosa-Khoi war of 1799–1802. The colonial government of the Batavian Republic, administering the Cape between 1803 and 1806, was obliged to deal with this challenge. Despite formal liberal proclamations, the Batavians believed that it was necessary to expel the Xhosa east of the Fish river and subordinate the Khoi to the white farmers once again. Their rule continued to depend on local control by the white minority. During this period, the Xhosa remained in the territory claimed by the colony. The Batavians were unsuccessful in breaking or regulating the interrelationship of white and Xhosa which was the most significant factor in frontier dynamics. At the same time, due to divisions among the Xhosa, the weakness of the whites and the skill of Lodewijk Alberti, a frontier official, the colonial order was significantly re-stabilized.

The scholar interested in the early history of the interlacustrine area has an unusually large corpus of traditional evidence available. These sources are among the most detailed in tropical Africa and several full-scale works have been based on them. This paper seeks, through textual analysis, to demonstrate that some of the most important of these sources have been influenced by the content of earlier writings and by each other, and that their corroborative value is very small.

Three problems are of particular interest here—the alleged contemporaneity of Nakibinge of Buganda, Olimi Rwitamahanga of Bunyoro, and Ntare Nyabugaro of Nkore; the Biharwe eclipse and its ascribed dates; and the value for chronology of the accounts of Nyoro invasions southward. Emphasis on these aspects has meant that while the questions of the Bacwezi, the Nkore capitals, and the Nyoro tombs have been taken into account, specific attention has not been paid to them here.

The present paper seeks only to suggest possible alternatives to the presently accepted reconstruction of early interlacustrine history, and argues that the nature of our evidence, once divested of its synthetic accretions, precludes the development of comprehensive hypotheses. It is important at this stage to attempt a full reassessment of these traditional sources through comparative textual analysis and through the extensive use of archival documentation which may illuminate more clearly the milieu in which the traditional historiography of the interlacustrine region developed.

Many observers of Merina history have suggested that the organization of labour required to build and maintain irrigation works for paddy rice growing formed the basis of Merina monarchy. Though little direct evidence is available, inferences from land-use models and consideration of oral traditions and written accounts help to explain why irrigated riziculture became popular and how it spread through the central highlands to Imerina.

Rice had been cultivated on the east coast of Madagascar for centuries and reached Imerina through the southern plateau but the hydraulic technology of Merina paddy rice growing arose from local needs from the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries. As swidden farmers exhausted the forests, paddy rice cultivation and water management systems attending it became increasingly important. Though irrigated riziculture enhanced the value of co-operative labour among hitherto isolated groups within Imerina, it cannot be seen as the direct cause of the monarchy's authority. It is suggested instead that the sacredness of land and the accumulation of rights in newly irrigated land by those who controlled water hastened the evolution of a rigid social hierarchy which exalted a few and subjugated the rest.

The tea industry of southern Nyasaland employed intermittently a heterogeneous labour force of some twenty to thirty thousand and paid workers minimum wages of 7s. in 1930, rising to between 17s. 6d. and 20s. in 1953. A complex wage structure offered different rates to hoers, pluckers, factory workers and clerks. Thousands of children, butvirtually no women, were employed. Wages and working conditions were acknowledged to be unattractive, even by the industry itself, and compared favourably only with those offered in Portuguese East Africa. The initial viability of the plantation sector in the Shire Highlands was made possible by the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Lomwe from Portuguese East Africa. Lomwe workers, who sought assimilation and upward mobility, have been depicted as virtual slaves of the planters, but there is evidence of effective local, day-to-day and passive resistance on their part which left planters feeling impotent, unable to turn labour out on Sundays or in the rains or enforce unpopular thangata (labour rent) agreements, and obliged to reduce the daily tasks demanded of the worker. Confronted with an increasingly severe shortage of labour, which caused millions of pounds of tea to remain unpicked, planters began to improve working conditions on their estates, but this failed to resolve their labour problem or to dampen post-war militancy. Irresponsible actions by the British Central Africa Company increased tensions in Cholo which culminated in the serious riots of 1953 in which eleven people were killed. Government responded to this growing rural radicalism by repurchasing half of the million acres of freehold estate land which had initially been ‘bought’ from chiefs prior to the colonial occupation.

The accounts of the Difaqane written in all the major histories of South Africa are based on three books which were written over fifty years ago: G. W. Stow, The Native Races of South Africa; D. F. Ellenberger and J. C. Macgregor, The History of the Bosuto; and especially the earliest, G. M. Theal, History of South Africa.

Certain contradictions exist between the story as told in these accounts and the evidence brought to light by the publication of the journals of Robert Moffat and David Livingstone. The object of this study is to reconstruct the events of the wars from the broadest possible evidence to give a more complete description, and thereby to test the revision implicit in the new information.

This revision is required properly to identify the participants in the battles which were observed by Europeans in the western Tswana lands, especially the battle at Dithakong. In the earlier histories all the battles were attributed to the ‘Mantatee’, a name properly applied to one group of Tlokwa ruled at the time by the regentess, MmaNthatisi. Now it is possible to show that these Tlokwa were never in the west, but restricted their migrations to the valley of the Caledon River. Nor can their enemies, the Hlubi of Mpangazita and the Ngwane of Matiwane, be blamed, for they too remained in the east. Rather, the victims of these three bands, the Sotho peoples of the Caledon valley, can be identified as the aggressors among the Tswana beyond the Vaal. Moffat identified the Phuting of Tshane and the Hlakwana of Nkgaraganye. Livingstone demonstrated the role played by Sebetwane and his Fokeng, and Thomas Hodgson implicated Moletsane, the Taung.

While many gaps in our information still exist, this reconstruction seems to justify the revision of the accepted account of the Difaqane.

Little attention has been paid to the great growth of trade in West Africa in the nineteenth century prior to the ‘economic revolution’ which began towards its close. As far as the export-import trade at the coast is concerned, British statistics show that between c. 1810 and c. 1850 the import of various manufactured staples increased by factors from at least 3 to as much as 50. The question arises as to how such a large increase in the volume of trade on the coast was financed in the absence of banking procedures. On the Senegal and Gambia and in the Niger delta, the traditional eighteenth-century practice by which visiting European merchants advanced credit to African brokers in goods continued. On the Gold Coast and at Sierra Leone and Lagos, however, a new class of local importers, of African as well as European origin, emerged and were able to secure credit from European exporters. But, though, less flexible than the newer system, the old system, with its tendency to monopoly on the part of both European traders and African brokers, seems to have permitted the greater expansion of credit. However, by the second half of the century, both systems were under strain and leading to conflicts over debts and jurisdiction, which are examined. Ultimately both were replaced by the European trading houses entering the interior trade through the use of paid agents, many of whom were recruited from among the new merchant class of Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Lagos.

During the early years of white administration in Southern Rhodesia, few whites spoke the local vernaculars. The state used those few, largely traders and farmers, to translate and interpret. Members of the Native Affairs Department were expected to learn ‘on the job’. However, by the early 1920s, poor language abilities in the civil services, combined with growing segregationist tendencies in the face of African competition, prompted the state to reconsider whites’ knowledge of the vernaculars. The issue raised important questions about defining the boundary between ‘natives’ and ‘civilized peoples’, interactions between white and African communities, and the long-term project for the state.

The present study is intended both as a substantive historical contribution, and as an illustration of the possibilities and the limitations of one particular type of historical inferences that can be drawn from language, namely, the study of words borrowed from one language into another. Two other basic linguistic sources for culture-historical conclusions are not considered here, those based on the relationships and distribution of languages as such, and those based on the reconstructed vocabularies of particular Ursprachen, that is, the ancestral speech-forms of specific groups of genetically related languages. These latter two methods are not excluded either for dogmatic or methodological reasons, but simply because they do not yield relevant results for the particular problems being considered, although they are very useful in other connexions. It should, however, be mentioned that, as will appear at a number of points in the discussion, a valid linguistic classification furnishes an indispensible framework for nearly all inferences drawn from linguistic data including the interlinguistic contact phenomena which are the subject of the present study.

Using previously unknown account books, found in archives in Peru, of three New Christian Portuguese slave traders on the Upper Guinea Coast, this article examines the extent and nature of African and Luso-African involvement in the Atlantic trade during the early seventeenth century. Beads, textiles, and wine that figured most prominently among Portuguese imports were traded predominantly by Luso-Africans. Meanwhile, slaves were delivered in small numbers by people from a diverse range of social backgrounds. This trade was not a simple exchange of imported goods for slaves, but was a complex one that built on pre-European patterns of exchange in locally-produced commodities.

During the colonial period, European officers undertook a series of campaigns in conjunction with African officials to regulate the severity of clitoridectomy and to alter the timing of female initiation in Meru, Kenya. While their efforts to ban the more drastic forms of clitoridectomy contributed to the government's stated objective of gradually eliminating the practice, this anti-clitoridectomy stance was compromised by their parallel efforts to enforce female initiation at an earlier age in order to combat abortion. Officers attributed the apparently high prevalence of abortion in Meru to the late age at which clitoridectomy took place. Whereas in other areas of central Kenya female initiation took place prior to puberty, in Meru, it was a pre-nuptial rite. Officers observed that as ‘custom’ prohibited uninitiated females from bearing children, unexcised girls who became pregnant most often obtained abortions. To eliminate the possibility of a girl being sexually mature but unexcised, administrators enforced measures requiring girls to be excised before puberty.

Southern Sudanese politicians of the 1950s and 1960s have been criticized for a rivalrous, divisive politics, which left the south disunited and vulnerable. While acknowledging that these men were a tiny, squabbling group, remote from those they sought to represent, this article suggests that they faced an impossible task. The demand to represent ‘the south’ did not come solely, or even largely, from the people who lived in the southern provinces: southern politics was heavily extraverted, pulled by the interests and prejudices of northern Sudanese, Egyptians, Britons, and others. Like other African nationalists of the time, southern Sudanese politicians struggled to weave together different levels of moral community, from the very local to the imagined nation. Yet they did so in uniquely unfavourable circumstances: subject to constant harassment and occasionally lethal violence, unable to secure political compromise, and without patronage resources. Representing the south gave these men space to talk about the increasingly desperate circumstances of those who lived in Sudan's southern provinces; but it gave them almost no space at all to negotiate a civic culture of southern politics.