I feel I should make clear that the ethnicity data in my article were intended only to shed light on the question of sex ratio. They do not provide an accurate reflection of the ethnic make-up of the eighteenth-century French slave trade, nor even of the trade to Saint Domingue. For this reason, I would hesitate to compare them, as Professor Lovejoy does, to Patrick Manning's projections based on decennial samples of plantation papers. The relatively high proportion of Hausa, Nupe and Voltaic slaves that Lovejoy remarks on was caused by the preponderance of post-1780 sources in my sample.

A study of the interaction between the aims of African rulers, the British and Gold Coast governments, and Wesleyan missionaries in Dahomey between 1843 and 1867 suggests that neither Africans nor Europeans made any consistent distinction, at this time, between the religious and secular aspects of British influence in Dahomey.

This article reconstructs the controversies following the release of the figures from Nigeria's 1963 population census. As the basis for the allocation of seats in the federal parliament and for the distribution of resources, the census is a valuable entry point into postcolonial Nigeria's political culture. After presenting an overview of how the Africanist literature has conceptualized the politics of population counting, the article analyses the role of the press in constructing the meaning and implications of the 1963 count. In contrast with the literature's emphasis on identification, categorization, and enumeration, our focus is on how the census results informed a broader range of visual and textual narratives. It is argued that analysing the multiple ways in which demographic sources shape debates about trust, identity, and the state in the public sphere results in a richer understanding of the politics of counting people and narrows the gap between demographic and cultural history.

The western-educated Krio population of Sierra Leone participated in British imperial activity along the West African coast in the nineteenth century. Facing a far more complex ethnic configuration than their counterparts in Yorubaland, the Sierra Leoneans (Saro) in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, acquired much influence through the manipulation of class and ethnic relations. Though most Saro here had a modest education and were working-class, a few came to form the cream of the petty-bourgeoisie and were active in economic life and city administration. Potts-Johnson, arguably their most famous member, developed a flair for operating in his middle-class world, and also in the cultural orbit of the local and immigrant working-class. I. B. Johnson, another prominent Saro, lacked this quality. Though presenting a homogenous ethnic front, celebrated in the Sierra Leone Union and in church activity, Saro society was sharply polarized on class lines, a weakness not to be lost on the numerically superior and ambitious indigenous population. Faced with a choice, the indigenes opted for the avuncular Potts-Johnson, for whom they felt a greater social affinity than for the more distant I. B. Johnson. After Potts-Johnson, however, no Saro was to be allowed scope to develop a similar appeal.

Through their participation in an unequal Atlantic commerce, African merchants on the Gold Coast consciously transformed their dress in ways that expressed their cultural dynamism and economic success in an increasingly interconnected world. In discussing the web of cross-cultural commercial exchanges between Africa, Asia, and Europe, this article moves away from the tendency to regard Africans who adorned themselves in imported European clothing and textiles as ‘creole’ or ‘Europeanized’ elites. Labels like these not only assume the existence of an African cultural essence, but (inadvertently) deny the dynamism that has always characterized African cultures prior to the Atlantic economy. In the case of the Gold Coast, I examine how the Gã and Fante mercantile elite translated imported textiles and clothing into new cultural meanings, aesthetics and norms that emphasized family integrity, power as well as the ancestral, material and commercial value of inherited imported articles of adornment.

The article studies the contexts in which the idea of a separation of the Casamance from the rest of Senegal arose during the process of decolonization. The idea was an outgrowth of colonial representations forged since the end of the nineteenth century. It was first formulated by the French authorities in secret discussions with the representatives of the Casamance in the context of the 1958 referendum. It was taken over by local political leaders who saw it as a possible answer to the debates over representation that arose in the post-war process of democratization, and later by proponents of political mobilization at the sub-regional level after independence. By examining this little-known moment of possibility, the article shows that the claims of the current armed independence movement are in fact part of a longer, more ambivalent history in which a separatist imaginary of the Casamance took shape.

Zambia's unsuccessful coup attempt in 1980 was initiated by members of the country's intellectual and business elite, who had played a leading role in the postcolonial civil service and state bureaucracy, but who became disillusioned with the takeover of the state by the ruling party before and after the declaration of the one-party state in 1972. Among their number was Valentine Musakanya, one of those convicted for the coup attempt. Using Musakanya's biographical and other writings, this article explores his intellectual trajectory from head of the civil service to political prisoner. In so doing, it investigates the role of life writing in aiding understanding of the postcolonial political history of Africa.

Based on both archival research and oral interviews conducted in northern Namibia, this article traces the history of public flogging in Ovamboland throughout the twentieth century. In contrast to recent scholarship that views corporal punishment in modern Africa mainly through the lens of colonial governance, the article argues that because the South African colonial state never withdrew the power to punish from the region's traditional authorities, these indigenous leaders were able to maintain a degree of legitimacy among their subjects, who looked to the kings and headmen to punish wrongdoers and maintain communal norms. Finally, the article explores why nostalgia for corporal punishment remains a salient feature in Namibian society today, 25 years after the end of colonial rule.

Situated in the densely populated former North Nyanza District of western Kenya, Chavakali secondary school was the site where the colonial regime, the nationalist government, and international ‘developmentalists’ attempted to dictate the nature of education and by extension the place of the rural citizenry during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. This goal, however, was not easily achieved because ordinary Kenyans rejected the vocational-agricultural curriculum that school officials and development specialists championed as the ideal education program for rural communities. Chavakali students from Maragoliland, in particular, recognized the inherent contradiction of the Kenyan government's agriculture-as-development model continued from the colonial era – lack of land. Realizing how bankrupt the agrarian development model really was, they used their educational training to enter the wage labor sector on better terms than as simple laborers. Chavakali's nonsensical curriculum thus hardly produced the agrarian revolution that the state hoped would stabilize the countryside in the postcolony.

The editors of this volume affiliate their mission with an amplified and heightened sense of history that has swept Africanist scholarship in the post-independence era. They claim to take historical archaeology in Africa in a new direction by beginning the process of constructive interaction between history and archaeology (pp. 27-8). An intended component of their project is to create ‘alternative histories rooted in explicitly African sources’ (p. 16). They further raise our anticipation that the volume will examine the disjuncture between the practice of archaeology and contemporary life on most of the continent. This is a noble sentiment, yet the contributors fail to draw on African scholars who attempt to make archaeology pertinent to daily African lives. The editors' insistence on African representations in writing the past is poignantly contradicted by the paucity of African authors in their volume fourteen years after Peter Robertshaw's A History of African Archaeology was faulted for its failure to include more than two (non-white) African contributors. This practice largely restricts knowledge production to hegemonic Western perspectives and subverts the book's primary rhetorical theme of giving ‘voice’ to silenced African pasts. The cost of the paperback – $70 – also hinders access to African readers and their capacity to engage issues that arise in the fourteen chapters, three of which focus on West Africa, three on East Africa, one on North Africa and five on southern Africa.

During Zimbabwe's struggle for national liberation, thousands of black African students fled Rhodesia to universities across the world on refugee scholarship schemes. To these young people, university student activism had historically provided a stable route into political relevance and nationalist leadership. But at foreign universities, many of which were vibrant centres for student mobilisations in the 1960s and 1970s and located far from Zimbabwean liberation movements’ organising structures, student refugees were confronted with the dilemma of what their role and future in the liberation struggle was. Through the concept of the ‘frontier’, this article compares the experiences of student activists at universities in Uganda, West Africa, and the UK as they figured out who they were as political agents. For these refugees, I show how political geography mattered. Campus frontiers could lead young people both to the military fronts of Mozambique and Zambia as well as to the highest circles of government in independent Zimbabwe. As such, campus frontiers were central to the history of Zimbabwe's liberation movements and the development of the postcolonial state.

The role of custom and tradition in the development of colonial rule in Africa has received little attention from scholars. Historians of colonial Kenya, particularly, have focused on the powerful transforming impact of the colonial state and economy and on the growth of opposition movements; they have had little to say about the processes through which previously autonomous societies negotiated their incorporation into the Kenya state. Yet by the 1920s and 1930s that state had acquired a substantial degree of popular legitimacy. ‘Customary’ institutions and rituals played an important part in the development of that legitimacy. This essay examines the institution of the genealogically defined ‘generation’ in the Embu-Mbeere area in colonial central Kenya and the ceremonies held in 1932 to mark the transition from one generation to the next. These ceremonies attracted considerable attention because they provided the occasion for the proclamation of rules, supported by the British administration, relating to the bitter issue of genital mutilation in female initiation. But this was not a crude case of the manipulation of custom. The attempt to reform female initiation was part of a larger process, of which the rituals of generation succession were elements, of building the ideological basis of a new ‘tribe’ in a society previously characterized by local autonomy and collective authority. As investigation of the succession ceremonies makes clear, the notion of a tribe dominated by appointed chiefs and identified with an exclusive territory lay at the centre of this ideology.

As late as 1960, in the hinterland of Gisaka (Rwanda), community life was strangely reminiscent of what we know of life in the early continental European manor. The Rwandese manor was largely self-sufficient. The relationships of the peasant to lord of the manor were of a privi legis nature. Competition for chiefly (or lordly) favours was keen. The necessity to court the chief had caused courtship to be institutionalized. The successful courtesans, usually of the nobility, attended the chief directly and were often part of the administrative staff of the manor.

The practice of commendation was usual; homage was paid with the identical gesture as in Europe, and the functional equivalent of the don annuel appeared in the form of an institution called kubaka inkike (‘to repair the enclosure’).

The Sanford Exploring Expedition was Henry Shelton Sanford's main financial interest in Africa. Sanford established the Expedition in 1886 to foster trade development along the upper Congo. Possessing special State concessions granted by Leopold II of Belgium, Sanford's company founded settlements at Kinshasa, Matadi, South Mancagues, Luebe and Equator, and brought the first commercial steamer over the cataracts to Stanley Pool. This steamer, the Florida, proved of little value, yet a second steamer, the New York, was purchased in 1887. Lt. Emory H. Taunt was the principal company agent, the administrator in Africa; William S. Parminter was second in authority. Delays caused by damages to the Florida and hardships in establishing trading settlements on the Congo drained the company's capital. In 1888 Sanford tried to interest various American businessmen—A. H. Alden, George H. Alden, Charles B. Flint, John D. Rockefeller, H. M. Flagler and others—in investing in the expedition. His attempt failed, and after brief negotiations with an English financier, M. Rilneff, the Sanford board made agreements with a Belgian firm. In December 1889 the Sanford Exploring Expedition merged with a Belgian organization, becoming the Société Anonyme Beige pour i'Industrie et Commerce du Haut Congo. Sanford retained a minor interest in the company, but his stock was sold by his widow shortly after his death.

This is note will not deal with the evidence from glottochronology, which is the subject of Professor Armstrong's paper, nor with the evidence from linguistic borrowings, but with the inferences which may be drawn from the general linguistic configuration of Africa. It consists of a few miscellaneous observations, which are not intended to do more than stimulate interest in this line of inquiry.