This review article seeks to build bridges between mainstream African history and the more historically oriented branch of the ‘new’ economic history of Africa. We survey four central topics of the new economic history of Africa — growth, trade, labor, and inequality — and argue that the increased use of quantitative methods and comparative perspectives have sharpened views on long-term trajectories of economic development within Africa and placed the region more firmly into debates of global economic development. The revival of African economic history opens new opportunities for Africanist historians to enrich the interdisciplinary approaches they have taken to study questions of demography, poverty, slavery, labor, inequality, migration, state formation, and colonialism. These fruits, however, can only be reaped if the institutional boundaries between the fields of history and economic history are softened and both sides engage in greater mutual engagement. Our paper aims to move closer to a shared vision on the benefits and limitations of varying quantitative methods, and how these approaches underpin both more and less convincing narratives of long-term African development.

In this wide-ranging conversation, six scholars of South Africa detail threads of continuity and change in the historiographies, popular memories, archives, research agendas, methodologies, and within the South African academy and historical professional since the end of formal apartheid in 1994.

This article studies the Ikoyi reservation in Lagos, Nigeria to assess changing relationships between the colonial state, urban space, and race between 1935 and 1955. Colonial authorities established reservations as special zones to house colonial officials and other white Westerners. The article shows that the Ikoyi reservation was a significant location where a wide range of actors contested relationships between statehood and race. These renegotiations contributed to making a late colonial state, a terminal form of colonial state in which explicitly racialised discourses of statehood and urban space were challenged while implicitly racialised standards and practices often persisted. Through a focus on Ikoyi, the article highlights the important relationships between segregationist projects and late colonial statehood.

The contents of this issue of the Journal of African History are presented in honour of the sixty-fifth birthday of Roland Oliver, Emeritus Professor of African History in the University of London and a founder editor of the Journal, by some of his former research students. The editors of the Journal are happy to be able to collaborate in this celebration, which provides a companion to the issue (vol. 27, 1986, no. 2) in honour of John Fage. On this occasion, they are most grateful to Professor Richard Gray and Dr Richard Rathbone, both of S.O.A.S., for their assistance.

This paper attempts to reassess the importance of the McKillop expedition of 1875 and also to re-examine Kirk's role in securing its withdrawal, which, according to the thesis associated with Coupland, was thought to have been crucial. This paper shows that Kirk did not secure McKillop's return, but that he played an important part in the formation of the policy that was adopted towards the expansion of Egypt in Africa, which was a direct result of the Egyptian invasion down the east coast. This invasion is placed not merely within the context of Ismail's designs in the Interlacustrine area but also of his designs in Somalia as well. The impact of the expedition is also considered, its effect on the slave-trade, on the religious attitudes of Muslims on the coast, and as a final factor stimulating the attempted formation of an East African Company.

It frequently happens that the only information available on interrelationships and former movements of African peoples lies in their oral traditions and myths. In the myths it is difficult to disentangle symbolic from historical events and personalities, while, fascinating though it is to listen to an old man recounting the movements of his ‘ancestors’ countless generations earlier, one frequently wishes that there were some independent line of evidence against which his statements could be checked. Such an independent line of evidence is provided by the steadily accumulating data on the genetic Constitution of African peoples. The Nilotes provide an illustration of its usefulness, of its limitations, of the type of additional information required to extract the maximum from the data, and of the postulates necessary to do so.