Ancient and early Byzantine authors: Diodorus (II, 55), ‘Pseudo-Callisthenes’, Cosmas Indicopleustes and Procopius Caesarensis—mention the navigation of the Indian Ocean by ‘Ethiopians’ of the African Horn and the Axumite Kingdom in their own ships. The hoard of Kushana gold moneys found at Dabra-Dammo confirms this. The legend in the Kebra Nagast of Ethiopian military expeditions to India incorporates reminiscences about sea voyages to India by ancient Axumites.

The Indian Ocean is frequently depicted as a sphere of seamless connectivity, characterized by fluid and wide-ranging exchanges between traders, sea-farers, clerics, intellectuals, and authors. We seek to nuance this depiction by highlighting the importance of specific, place-bound social concerns that tempered these cosmopolitan performances of citizenship with more exclusionary dynamics. Our goal is to emphasize the importance of context, contingency, and circumstance in shaping and breaking new forms and practices of citizenship and its twin – exclusionary politics – on Africa's Indian Ocean littoral.

This paper considers the intensification of agriculture along racial lines in South Africa by looking at the history of one spring and nine miles of river valley. It illustrates how racial conflict included struggles over nature, and how whites and blacks had different perceptions and abilities regarding its exploitation.

The ‘Eye’ of Kuruman is a large spring in a semi-arid region. Tswana herders originally used it as a water hole. Their food production system was extensive, making use of wide areas rather than increasing output in a limited area. Pastoralism was more important than agriculture. Irrigation, introduced by representatives of the London Missionary Society, was not widely practiced away from the missions until a subsistence crisis during the 1850s. It continued after the crisis passed. However, households continued to operate with the logic of extensive production, fitting irrigation into the pre-existing system.

In 1885, tne British annexed the region as part of the Crown Colony of British Bechuanaland. They demarcated African reserves at springs and in river valleys, and grazing lands were opened for white settlement. The upper Kuruman valley was designated a Crown reserve and the Eye became a town site. Downstream were Tswana households which cultivated with less security than on a native reserve. Land alienation with rinderpest devastated stock keeping and caused a widespread famine at the turn of the century, yet Tswana cultivators did not greatly intensify their use of irrigable lands. More extensive methods endured and wage labor became the basis of support.

In the twentieth century under Union government, use of the Eye intensified, and access to the valley became segregated by race. After 1918 the municipality of Kuruman operated a modern irrigation project, and in 1919, evicted black cultivators living at the Eye. Blacks continued to live and garden at Seodin, five miles downstream, but suffered water shortages which made even their casual irrigation impossible. Political expediency dictated against their pressing for water rights. In the 1940s the Department of Native Affairs drilled boreholes, but these were not sufficient to sustain cultivation. In 1962, the policy of Apartheid mandated the removal of blacks from Seodin. Despite state aid, the whites-only irrigation project never developed into a commercial success.

During the century from 1760 to 1860 the territory of the present southern Katanga, eastern Angola and north-eastern Rhodesia lay to a great extent under the suzerainty of two powerful monarchs, Mwata Yamvo in the west and Kazembe in the east. Their common border was the Lualaba river. Both were Lunda by tribe: Mwata Yamvo was the senior in that it was from the capital of his kingdom, which had been in existence possibly for a century or more, that Kazembe's ancestor set out in the early eighteenth century to conquer east of the Lualaba. About 1740 he established his own capital near Lake Mweru in the lower Luapula valley.

The reasons for Dingane's attack on Lourenço Marques in 1833 may have been (a) the policy of expansion pursued by governor Ribeiro, which Machakane of Matola and perhaps Dingane himself may have tried to check, (b) lack of caution in treating Dingane, (c) perhaps also inability to meet Dingane's demands (this may have been due to economic difficulties after the partial breakdown of the slave trade in 1830), (d) the fact that Ribeiro probably maintained relations with Soshangana (which has been stressed by Lobato). Dingane seems to have regarded the governor as one of his subjects, although the Portuguese did not regard themselves as his subjects but as depending on MoÇambique.

In the period 1830–1838, the Zulu seem to have been more important for Lourenço Marques than any other Nguni group, as they were dominating many of the territories near it. In that period the Zulu empire included people of a language different from that of the majority, who do not seem to have been integrated into the Zulu nation through the national regimental system in the same way as Nguni groups subjected by the Zulu. In 1831–4 Zulu armies fighting near Lourenço Marques consisted of a few hundred Zulu warriors assisted by groups of auxiliaries (probably totalling 2,000–3,000 men) furnished by the local chiefs.

The purpose of these maps, like those of the total solar eclipses published earlier, is to enable a historian rapidly to identify an apparent reference in his sources to a solar eclipse, or to ascertain the moments at which eclipses might have been witnessed over specific areas in Africa. The originals have again been drawn to the scale of I: 10,000,000 by Mr A. K. Appleton, F.R.A.S., to calculations by Dr J. G. Porter, F.R.A.S., and represent precisely the same advance in accuracy compared with Oppolzer's charts. At the small scale at which these maps are here reproduced, however, it will generally be possible merely to arrive at approximate results; a more accurate assessment can be reached only by consulting copies of the originals, or, in some cases, by undertaking further calculations. Within these limits it is hoped that they will prove a useful indication of the possibilities of this type of evidence and will lead to the discovery of references that have not yet been published or reported.

A substantial minority, perhaps 15 per cent of all Xhosa, refused to obey the prophetess Nongqawuse's orders to kill their cattle and destory their cornl. This divided Xhosaland into two parties, the amathamba (‘soft’ ones, or believers) and the amagogotya (‘hard’ ones, or unbelievers). The affiliation of individuals was partly determined by a number of factors – lungsickness in cattle, political attitude towards the Cape Colony, religious beliefs, kinship, age and gender – but a systematic analysis of each of these factors in turn suggests that none of them was sufficiently important to constitute the basis of either party.

The key to understanding the division lies in an analysis of the indigenous Xhosa terms ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. ‘Softness’ in Xhosa denotes the submissiveness of the individual to the common will of the community, whereas ‘hardness’ denotes the determination of the individual to pursue his own ends, even at communal expense. Translated into social terms, the ‘soft’ believers were those who remained committed to the mutual aid ethic of the declining precolonial society, whereas the ‘hard’ unbelievers were those who sought to seize advantage of the new opportunities offered by the colonial presence to increase their wealth and social prominence. The conflict between the social and personal imperatives was well expressed by Chief Smith Mhala, the unbelieving son of a believing father, when he said, ‘They say I am killing my father – so I would kill him before I would kill my cattle.’ Certainly, the division between amathamba and amagogotya ran much deeper than the division between belief and unbelief, and the Xhosa, in conferring these names, seem to have recognized the fact.

West African participation in the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) grew considerably throughout the first half of the twentieth century. This article examines the causes and consequences of failed British and Saudi efforts to channel, regulate, and control the trans-Sahelian flow of pilgrims and enforce a regime of mobility along the Sahel and across the Red Sea. Focusing specifically on Red Sea ‘illicit’ passages, the study recovers the rampant and often harrowing crossings of dozens of thousands of West African pilgrims from the Eritrean to the Arabian coasts. It examines multiple factors that drove the circumvention of channeling and control measures and inscribes the experiences of West African historical actors on multiple historiographic fields that are seldom organically tied to West Africa: Northeast African regional history, the colonial history of Italian Eritrea, and the Red Sea as a maritime space connecting Africa with Arabia.

The Mīzāb is an Ibādī community consisting of seven cities clustered in an arid rocky region 350 miles south of Algiers. Having established these settlements nearly a millennium ago, the Mīzābīs, as the inhabitants came to be known, struggled against formidable environmental odds and managed not only to survive but to prosper. By the sixteenth century the Mīzāb had become an important northern Saharan market. During the following centuries, the Maghrib witnessed a remarkable movement of Mīzābī men to coastal cities where they attained prominence in a variety of professions while leaving their roots firmly implanted within their distant oasis community.

Following a brief historical background to settlement in the Mīzāb, this article sketches the ecological constraints of an urban community in a region virtually devoid of resources. It then traces the history of the commercial dispersion to the North during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and discusses the probable causes of emigration. The Mīzābīs were forced by environmental constraints to seek outside sources of support. Their rise to prominence in the Regency of Algiers may have been related to declining Saharan commerce and new commercial opportunities in the North. The organization and function of Mīzābī corporations in Algiers and other northern cities are described. Finally, this article relates an Ibāçī reform ethic to Mīzābī commercial success and concludes with some reflections on religious ideology and environmental demands as contributing factors to the long-term Mīzābī role in commerce.

When I was in Ghana last year, Dr Danquah very kindly allowed me to read and make notes on an early Minute Book belonging to the Working Committee of the United Gold Coast Convention. I thought it was very interesting, for it covered the years 1947–51 when discontent with colonial rule came to a head, and produced first the U.G.C.C.—as it is easier to call it—and then its radical offspring, the Convention People's Party. The Minute Book was carefully, clearly written; it runs parallel to the early part of Nkrumah's Autobiography (ch. 5 to 12)—itself a valuable source of information—and it confirms, adds to and occasionally corrects the account given by Nkrumah of these interesting years when the colonial administration was beginning to retreat and the nationalists to advance. Moreover, in its beginning lay its end: the two chief protagonists in 1947 were Dr J. B. Danquah and Dr Kwame Nkrumah; and, thirteen years later, they were still opposed, as rival candidates for the presidency of the new republic.

Although studies of both state ‘urban native’ policy and African life on the Witwatersrand in the 1940s have increased in volume and sophistication over the last decade, these two themes have generally been treated discretely in the literature. While a regional focus has yielded a complex and differentiated picture of urban African politics and culture, studies of the state still tend to miss this complexity by focusing on the ‘view from above’, from the vantage point of central state institutions.

This article draws together these two separate historiographical threads to examine state policy from the perspective of local state officials, those individuals most intimately concerned with day-to-day administration of urban African communities in the rapidly industrialising Witwatersrand of the 1940s. Through the narrative of a deep personal antagonism between an African politician in the Witwatersrand location of Brakpan and a white administrator, the article explores the intersection of two microcosms: the world of the Afrikaner intellectual, educated in the tradition of ‘volkekunde’ and thereby claiming expert knowledge of the African, and the real worlds of the Africans the expert claimed to know—themselves shaped by new, radical currents in the changing wartime urban context. Using the Brakpan case study, the article also shows that in contrast to the national government's fumbling indecision in the face of the urban crisis, it was the municipalities which agitated for state control over all Africans, tighter influx and efflux controls and the more efficient distribution of African labour between different economic sectors. In voicing their discontent with state policy and in their policy improvizations, local officials anticipated much in the apartheid order of the 1950s.

This is a topic which I discussed in a series of five lectures given under the auspices of the Program of African Studies at Boston University, in April 1961. It had previously been the theme of a seminar conducted during two terms in 1960–1 at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Montreal.

The middle of the nineteenth century witnessed the demise of a System of political power that had existed in the southern Mauritanian region of Brakna since the eighteenth century. Until the 1840s, tolls levied on the Senegal River gum trade had sustained the hegemony in southern Brakna of the Awlad al-Siyyid, an Arabic-speaking warrior group. Unlike more mobile warriors of the Saharan interior who depended for their livelihood on tribute extracted from nomadic pastoralists, the Awlad al-Siyyid had specialized in the control over a small area near the Senegal River, and over seasonal trading posts, known as escales, through which gum arabic was exported to the Atlantic economy. However, their increasing dependence on this trade allowed French administrators to manipulate relations among Awlad al-Siyyid chiefs by recognizing the taxing privileges of some while withholding recognition from others in a way that led, from the early 1840s on, to a bitter factional struggle within the group. The resulting conflict weakened the control of warriors over tributaries, harratin (freed slaves) and others, and caused a crisis within the political and social hierarchy of Brakna. An increasingly desperate struggle developed among Brakna warriors over a diminishing number of tributaries. This paper examines that struggle through the lens of an affair of diyya, or blood money, that emerged during the late 1840s and came to preoccupy all of the warrior groups and factions in the Brakna conflict. By competing for portions of the diyya owed to a small pastoral group as compensation for homicides, Brakna warriors, chiefs from neighboring regions and powerful tributaries in the process of repudiating their tributary status engaged in a symbolic duel that revolved around the increasingly unstable role of the warrior as a consumer of tribute and dispenser of ‘protection’.

Horses in themselves have little or no necessary military significance: in Part I of this article we saw how various quite unwarlike peoples possessed them. of fundamental significance, in transforming horses into war-horses, was good harness and equipment, and to carry this larger animals were preferable. Even against well-equipped cavalry, mainly infantry forces might prevail, if they were, like the Almoravids and the adherents of Usuman dan Fodio, sufficiently inspired. An important advantage of a horse, or better still several horses, was in providing a means of speedy escape. Horses were also valuable in slaving, a profitable occupation not only in the economic terms of human booty, some of whom might be sold for more horses, but also in demographic terms, a sort of compulsory immigration scheme. The use of horses in communications, as packanimals, in hunting, and for food, is discussed, though none was of outstanding significance in the Central Sudan. The employment of horses in agriculture seems to have been entirely lacking. Perhaps the most widespread use of horses was in festivals and celebrations; these displays of horsemanship, whether intentionally or not, helped train horses and riders. Good equipment was again vital, and sumptuary restrictions seem to have been directed more against overweening ostentation in this, than in the possession of horses. While horses were very widely esteemed, the most scrupulous among Muslims felt a certain hesitation about the propriety of riding a horse. Horses were found as a form of tribute, alms, bribes, and gifts of various kinds. In conclusion, the horse per se was more common, and less remarkable, in the Central Sudan than is sometimes suggested; it was the equipment of horses which made them effective weapons of war and statecraft.

In 1800 the Itsekiri kingdom of Warri in the north-western corner of the Niger delta had a highly centralized government. In 1848, the king died, followed shortly by his two principal heirs, and a state of anarchy developed in which order was maintained largely through the balance held between the two largest descent groups or ‘Houses’. The latter part of the century saw the rise, and defeat by the British of Nana Olomu, possibly the greatest of the delta traders, whose power over the Itsekiri derived from his trading monopoly. One cannot divorce these striking changes in Itsekiri social and political structure from the trade in slaves and later in palm oil, for the Itsekiri were by profession the middlemen between the interior peoples—the Urhobo and Isoko and to some extent the Benin—and the European traders.

When the remnants of the Bapedi returned to their country after they had been driven from it by the Matabele, Sekwati strengthened the tribe so that attacks by the Boers, Zulus and Swazis were repulsed.

When Sekhukhune succeeded to the chieftainship in 1861, his attempts at expanding Bapedi influence caused the South African Republic to declare war in 1876.

After the annexation of the Transvaal by Great Britain, Sekhukhune resumed his empire building, and in March 1878 the Bapedi went on the warpath. Groups of hastily raised volunteers managed to contain the Bapedi in their strongholds, but after the failure of a British expedition in October 1878, offensive operations were abandoned until the end of the fever season in April–May 1879. Patrols were then once again active, when Sir Garnet Wolseley ordered a halt to all offensives; Sir Garnet himself arrived in the Transvaal in September 1879, and personally directed operations against Sekhukhune. A massive assault was made on the Bapedi stronghold on 28 November 1879; the Bapedi suffered a crushing defeat and the chief himself was captured.

La ‘mise en valeur’ des colonies africaines pouvait-elle être entreprise par des sociétés auxquelles l'Etat attribuerait de grandes concessions foncières? La Commission des concessions coloniales, créée en juillet 1898, adopta ce principe de ‘colonisation moderne’, hâtivement mis en vigueur au Congo. Pour Madagascar et l'A.O.F. on prit le temps de larges consultations auprès des administrateurs et des milieux commerciaux; en dépit de l'avis favorable prononcé par la Commission, le ministre décida de surseoir à l'octroi de grandes concessions territoriales dans l'ouest africain, suivant en cela le gouverneur general Ballay. Les responsables locaux ne partagèrent point le mythe de la mise en valeur par les grandes sociétés, mythe auquel se tint aveuglément la Commission des concessions coloniales qui contrôlait au plan juridique le régime mis en place au Congo; c'est le gouverneur Merlin qui imposa la réforme de 1910–12. Des politiques et des affairistes – tels qu'Andre Lebon, Du Vivier de Streel, Binger, Guillain, – avaient fait passer un dessein nouveau d'action coloniale, mais la ‘mise en valeur’ sans cesse invoquée n'avait pas alors de contenu économique véritablement défini.

Gumbu du Sahel (Mali) est un gros village (environ 5.000 habitants) d'agriculteurs sédentaires, situé à la limite Nord de la zone de culture sèche du mil, au contact des Maures pasteurs nomades du Sahara. Il occupe le centre d'une cuvette sablonneuse relativement fertile qui permet, sur des terres fumées par les troupeaux des éleveurs, une production excédentaire de mil et de coton destinée traditionnellement à l'échange avec les nomades.