The relations between a stranger who leaves his home to settle in a distant chiefdom in Sierra Leone and his landlord have for centuries been guided by customary rules. They are of interest to the anthropologist studying contemporary society, and to the historian who can sometimes elucidate from them otherwise obscure incidents in the past. In this article we describe the landlord-stranger relationship as it exists in Sierra Leone today, then give examples of how it has been applied at earlier periods.

The article questions the contention that, in the process of partition and the delimitation of borders in Africa, no account was taken of local conditions. The possibility of indirect African influence on the process is examined. At least some of the treaties concluded between Europeans and African rulers were genuine, and regarded as a contractual obligation by both sides. There were cases of African rulers seeking to promote their political interests by entering into an alliance with Europeans. Such treaties were sometimes utilized by European powers in their negotiations with rivals, to support their territorial claims. There were some attempts to define colonial borders so that they coincided with the frontiers of traditional African politics. Thus, treaties between African rulers and Europeans played a role in the process of the partition. In this connexion, it is important to remember that traditional African polities were often polyethnic, or encompassed only a segment of an ethnic group, and did not correspond to the modern European concept of ‘nation states’. There were also occasions in which questions regarding the local economy and communications were considered when borders were delimited. The considerations employed may have been wrong. But it seems necessary to modify the generalization that local circumstances were disregarded in the border-making process.

This paper is meant to be a contribution towards assessing the impact of the colonial experience upon Nyasaland, concentrating upon the decision-making processes involved in building the railways that served Nyasaland and the impact that they had upon Nyasaland's economy. In the early 1890s British metropolitan interests became alive to the strategic and commercial importance of Portuguese East Africa south of the Zambezi. To further British interests in the area, imperial decisions were taken to protect the British proxy there, the Mozambique Company. This protection included support for the Trans Zambesia Railway project. This support was calculated to protect British interests from American commercial threats, but the cost of the railway was placed upon the Nyasaland administration. Lumbered with the burden of the railway guarantees, Nyasaland's economy stagnated in the 1920s and African agricultural development was impeded. As a result, by the end of the twenties Nyasaland was being described as ‘the Cinderella of Africa’.

In the late 1920s a second major project was approved. This was the construction of the Zambezi bridge. Again, the decision to build this was not taken with the interests of Nyasaland in mind, but rather in order to provide steel orders for a stagnating British steel industry in 1929. The one possible moneymaker for the bridge and railway system, coal from Moatize, was prevented from being developed lest it compete with Welsh coal. And when the decision to build the bridge was made, it was decided that Nyasaland should pay.

This article examines the relationship between experiences and the physical and discursive constructions of space in colonial urban settings. African immigrants and the colonial regime imagined Douala's immigrant quarter, New Bell, as an African space but the actual meaning of this classification was highly fluid over time. Colonial ineffectiveness in approaching New Bell was evidenced by half-hearted and flawed surveillance efforts including the failed use of identity cards, informants and pass laws. Residents maintained a sense of autonomy within the space of New Bell, and remained largely ignorant or apathetic toward colonial law within the quarter, ultimately enabling the community to thrive.

The history of the London-based Natal Land and Colonisation Company is explored against the background of the evolving political economy of rural Natal. In the early years of the colony, white-controlled farming operations consistently failed. The landholdings of bankrupt colonists passed into the hands of a small group of men with capital. In 1861 this group activated its links with financiers in Britain to float the Natal Land and Colonisation Company. The Company ‘bought’ 250,000 acres of surplus lands from them in return for an injection of metropolitan capital into productive operations to be carried out on the remaining mainly coastal lands, or into further speculative activity. In fact, white-controlled farming activity in the interior continued to stagnate. Money which the Company loaned to white farmers in the 1860s, secured as mortgages on their farms, was not repaid, and the Company took over the lands of the bankrupt until in 1874 it controlled 657,000 acres in Natal. Anxious for a sizeable and more reliable source of income, the Company, in common with some colonists, concentrated on extracting rent from Africans, as yet the only successful farming population of the Natal interior. The increasing importance of this source of income to the Company was rudely interrupted in the 1890s by a fundamental shift in the Natal political economy. New mining centres in South Africa looked to Natal to furnish some of their needs for raw material and labour. The balance of economic and political forces favoured those who demanded labour, not rent, from Natal Africans. The Company switched its capital in good time out of renting land to African farmers and into renting and property development in the growing urban areas of white South Africa. Its properties were brought within the empire of the Eagle Star Insurance Company in 1948.

Despite the recent proliferation of scholarship on the Mau Mau rebellion, little attention has been paid to the ‘propaganda war’ it generated. The absence is especially striking given the importance that both the British and Mau Mau fighters attached to success in the battle for the ‘hearts and minds’ of Kenya's African population. This article analyzes the production of colonial propaganda – and its reception by Africans – in the ‘Emergency’, revealing how its themes and strategies changed over the course of the 1950s. Despite vast resources pumped into this effort, both African and British testimonies reveal that this propaganda had only limited success until government forces gained the upper hand in the military war against Mau Mau in late 1954. After that point, the increased level of control in Central Province enabled officials to finally best the efforts of skilled Mau Mau propagandists.

Recent excavations and radiocarbon dates provide evidence that the rich Ingombe Ilede burials date from the fourteenth/fifteenth centuries a.d., not from the ninth/tenth centuries as was previously supposed. There is thus little evidence for intensive trade between the Middle Zambezi and the Moçambique coast before ca. a.d. 1400.

Historical-comparative linguistics has played a key role in the reconstruction of early history in Africa. Regarding the ‘Bantu Problem’ in particular, linguistic research, particularly language classification, has oriented historical study and been a guiding principle for both historians and archaeologists. Some historians have also embraced the comparison of cultural vocabularies as a core method for reconstructing African history. This paper evaluates the merits and limits of this latter methodology by analysing Bantu pottery vocabulary. Challenging earlier interpretations, it argues that speakers of Proto-Bantu inherited the craft of pot-making from their Benue-Congo-speaking ancestors who introduced this technology into the Grassfields region. This ‘Proto-Bantu ceramic tradition’ was the result of a long, local development, but spread quite rapidly into Atlantic Central Africa, and possibly as far as Southern Angola and northern Namibia. The people who brought Early Iron Age (EIA) ceramics to southwestern Africa were not the first Bantu-speakers in this area nor did they introduce the technology of pot-making.

The results of archaeological work on ruins of the Zimbabwe–Khami complex in Rhodesia are reassessed in the light of recent work. In order to provide a preliminary framework for further archaeological investigation, the surface architectural features of a large group of these ruins are analysed, and seven different styles of ruin discerned. These are interpreted as belonging to at least two separate but related cultural groups, the first extending over the whole country in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the second restricted to southern Matabeleland and flourishing during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a correlation of the archaeological and historical evidence, it is suggested that the decline of Zimbabwe and many smaller ruins belonging to the first cultural group may be linked with the rise of the Mwene Mutapa empire, in which little building in stone took place. The second cultural group and its ruins coincide with the Rozvi state ruled by the Changamire dynasty.

The pervasive co-ordinating role of the Mwari cult in the Rhodesian risings of 1896–7 is illusory. The cult does not appear to have been linked with the Rozvi empire, the attempts to recreate which Ranger saw as one of the objectives of the priesthood in 1896. The priests were Venda from south of the Limpopo, who had arrived in the Matopos during the middle third of the nineteenth century, and who were for the most part out of action during the risings. The Ndebele did not succumb to cult influence, not even between March and July 1896, but maintained their previous coolness towards the priests. They were led all along by their own chiefs who, in June 1896, made Nyamanda king in succession to Lobengula. This and the wish to drive away the Europeans were the inspirations behind the Ndebele rising. The Shona and Sotho groups who rose with the Ndebele in March came in as allies of the kingdom rather than as minions of the cult. The Shona who rose in June did so not in answer to cult bidding, but in response to European pressures and the opportunity provided by European difficulties in Matabeleland. They also were led by their chiefs. A major theme of the risings is disunity and fragmentation, with the Ndebele fighting a civil war, and some important Shona chiefs collaborating with the British South Africa Company. The Ndebele fell short of a united strategy, as to an even greater extent did the Shona: there was certainly no strategic linkage of the two risings. Not only have the co-ordinating roles of Mkwati and Kaguvi been exaggerated, but their places respectively in Ndebele and Shona society have been misunderstood. They were local figures subordinate to local political structures rather than purveyors of a forward-looking millenarianism. Both the Ndebele and Shona fought to preserve existing institutions and alliance structures. It is above all fallacious to seek in the events of those years a surge of Zimbabwean nationalism or proto-nationalism, which was only to develop this century.

This paper considers several questions in the economic prehistory of Ethiopia. Who domesticated the banana-like ensete, the food plant which in parts of southern Ethiopia forms a monoculture? Was the ensete cultivated in ancient Egypt? Was it once cultivated extensively in northern Ethiopia as a food plant? Did the Semites, who invaded Ethiopia from South Arabia, starting about 1000 B.C., introduce the plough to Ethiopia and first develop cereal-plough agriculture there?

The Sidama peoples of southern Ethiopia are viewed as likely candidates in ensete domestication. The evidence for ensete cultivation in ancient Egypt is weighed and judged inconclusive. The cultivation of ensete for food in northern Ethiopia is viewed as recent. The suggestion is made that cereal-plough agriculture pre-dated the Semitic invasions. The ancient Cushitic inhabitants of northern Ethiopia are seen as having been in an excellent position for contacts with countries at the north end of the Red Sea, particularly Egypt, whence wheat and barley and the plough could have been introduced.

This essay questions the generally held view that the northern Nguni were not involved in the slave trade. It is shown that elements of the Ngwane (Swazi), Ndwandwe (Gaza and Jere) and possibly Mthethwa (Zulu) confederations were involved in the sale of slaves captured in the hinterlands of Lourenço Marques and Inhambane. In the 1840s the terms of the slave trade turned against suppliers as British and anti-slavery activities caused a rise in slavers' overheads, a surfeit of saleable slaves on the coast and a consequent price drop. The export of slaves through Lourenço Marques and Inhambane became unprofitable as the two trading posts were unable to compete with the safer embarkation points north of the Zambezi. As the export of slaves from the coastal settlements south of the Zambezi declined, the trade from this area took on a new form as engagé labour for the Indian Ocean islands and as non-contracted and unprotected ‘migrant’ labour for Natal and Kimberley. Slave suppliers ceased to sell slaves for export through Lourenço Marques and Inhambane because far higher prices could be obtained from Transvaal Boers and from domestic purchasers. But it was the rise of domestic slavery in the Gaza state that finally ended the maritime export of slaves as by the 1860s, with the loss of labour through warfare and increasingly through migrant labour, it was more profitable to use slaves locally than to export them.

Domestic slavery in the Gaza state is treated as a dynamic social relationship in which the slave, as against the kinsman, had no rights and was consequently entirely dependent upon his master for his means of production and reproduction. It was this dependence which resulted in the extreme exploitation defined here as slavery. Slavery should not be seen merely in a functionalist sense as a form of socio-political incorporation aimed at expanding the size of the ruling group. In a society controlled by kinship rights and obligations, slavery provided a man with a means of accumulating wealth and attracting followers. Thus slave labour was realized in the form of repatriated wages; female children born of concubines provided their fathers with brideprices while male children had limited kinship rights and were therefore more exploitable than ‘legal’ offspring. Slave labour also released Gaza Nguni women from agricultural work and allowed them to concentrate on the child-producing and child-raising activities that ensured a putative Gaza Nguni ‘purity’ and, consequently, the perpetuation of the exploitative structure of Gaza society.

In a society that had no concept of ‘free’ labour, i.e. labour freed from its former means and relations of production, the distinction between slave and non-slave labour was often blurred, and a disadvantaged kinsman could hypothetically be materially worse off than a slave. Zulu and Swazi forms of servility are examined and are shown to have been only marginally different from Gaza slavery. From this it is deduced that Gaza slavery had its roots in the relations of production taken northwards from the Nguni area. Slavery is seen as a new and more exploitative social relationship that arose in response to the emergence of new forms of production in southern Mozambique.

Since the start of archaeological investigation in Rhodesia, isolated sherds of imported Chinese ceramics have been found in the important Iron Age ruins of Zimbabwe, Khami and Dhlo Dhlo. More recently, abundant finds of both Chinese and European glazed wares have occurred in excavations of early Portuguese trading stations within Rhodesia. All such imports are here redescribed from an examination of the finds and from a detailed study of the early excavator's reports. As a result, some important early misdescriptions and misunderstandings become apparent. The dating evidence provided by the imports is therefore also re-examined.

Very rare sherds of Chinese celadons are virtually the only imported ceramics found in the later deposits at Zimbabwe, and at five other sites. These may be correlated with finds from J. S. Kirkman's excavations in trading settlements of the East African coast, and are dated certainly earlier than the sixteenth century. The finds from four other sites, the most important being the Khami and Dhlo Dhlo ruins, consist mainly of Chinese blue-and-white porcelains and their European imitations. They correlate well with finds not only from the seventeenth and early eighteenth century Portuguese trading stations in Rhodesia, but also with finds from contemporary deposits at Fort Jesus, Mombasa. The precise dating of the Khami and Dhlo Dhlo ruins within this period, as suggested by the imports, shows Khami to belong to the early seventeenth century with Dhlo Dhlo a century later. The divergence between the Khami, Dhlo Dhlo and Portuguese imported ceramics and those of Zimbabwe is sufficiently striking to suggest strongly that Zimbabwe was of negligible trading power by the time the Portuguese penetrated the interior in the sixteenth century. Evidence bearing on this, particularly from the 1958 Zimbabwe excavations, is discussed in detail.

Glass beads and glass are the only other imports to survive in Central African archaeological contexts and are of considerably less chronological value than the ceramics. They are, however, also considered, as are the pattern and extent of the trade with the interior evidenced by these imports.

Using a set of oral testimonies, together with military, intelligence, and administrative reports from the 1960s, this article re-examines the shifta conflict in Kenya. The article moves away from mono-causal, nationalistic interpretations of the event, to focus instead on the underlying socioeconomic dynamics and domestic implications of the conflict. It argues that the nationalist interpretation fails to capture the diversity of participation in shifta, which was not simply made up of militant Somali nationalists, and that it fails to acknowledge the significance of an internal Kenyan conflict between a newly independent state in the process of nation building, and a group of ‘dissident’ frontier communities that were seen to defy the new order. Examination of this conflict provides insights into the operation of the early postcolonial Kenyan state.

Bambuhu (called Bambouk by the French) was a principal source of the gold that made West Africa famous in the Muslim world north of the Sahara from the tenth century onward—and later among the Europeans. Much of the European activity on the Senegambian coast between the end of the fifteenth and the end of the nineteenth century was attracted by the promise of wealth from the ‘gold mines’ of Bambuhu. (Actually the gold came from alluvial ores near the surface rather than deep, hard-rock mines.) Yet today the Republic of Mali, which includes Bambuhu, neither mines nor exports significant quantities of gold. The gold deposits still exist; but the gold content of the ore is not uniform, and the quantity of ore at one place is not great enough to justify a large investment in extraction plants. The evidence available suggests that gold could formerly be mined by hand only because the opportunity cost of labour was formerly very low in the second half of the dry season. With the increased labour mobility of recent decades, the opportunity cost of mine labour in Bambuhu has risen to the point of making gold mining unprofitable.

Developments since 1968 in the study of the Zambian Early Iron Age are discussed, with emphasis both on the Lubusi site near Kaoma, which provides the first dated occurrence of Early Iron Age artefacts from western Zambia, and on material from the Eastern Province, which is closely related to contemporary finds from Malawi. Knowledge of the post-Early Iron Age archaeology of Zambia has hitherto been largely restricted to the Southern Province; here, for the first time, an archaeological evaluation of the later Iron Age of other regions has been attempted, and three major pottery traditions are described. In the northern and eastern areas the Luangwa tradition appears to have been established by the eleventh or twelfth century A.D., making a sharp typological break with the preceding Early Iron Age traditions. In the west, the Lungwebungu tradition shows a greater degree of continuity from the Early Iron Age, but in much of the Zambezi valley and adjacent areas it has been supplanted by the sharply-contrasting Linyanti tradition for which a Kololo origin is postulated. The inception of the Luangwa tradition is attributed to the arrival of a new population element ancestral to most of the peoples who inhabit northern and eastern Zambia today, but there is in the archaeological record of this region little discernible trace of later migrations associated with the state-formation process recalled in the extant oral traditions. The implications of these observations for the interpretation of both archaeological data and of oral traditions are discussed and tentative conclusions are proposed concerning the inter-relationship of these two methodologies.

This article, based on private papers as well as missionary and government records, examines the development of missionary contact with the Tswana peoples from the first settlement at Dithakong in 1816 to the establishment of a formal British Protectorate. The author seeks to analyse the nature of ‘missionary imperialism’ as a consequence not only of missionary motives and methods—still less as the accidental interest of individual missionaries—but also as the product of practical missionary experience and frustration in African circumstances.

The absence of European administration from Bechuanaland for much of the nineteenth century gives a rare opportunity to study the effects of missionary activity on African life and polity, less complicated than usual by secular pressures and influences. And the lack of economic attraction in Bechuanaland allows a close examination of the incentives to empire. But it is likely that the trend apparent in missionary attitudes and work in Bechuanaland will be repeated in other areas, as for example in Ndebeleland and Malawi.

The missionary role in Bechuanaland was largely determined by the organization and attitudes of Tswana society; missionary methods had to be adjusted accordingly, and eventually included an appeal to the British government to intervene and reduce resistant Tswana authority. This was in the logic of the missionaries' experience. In this light of missionary history, a new importance is found for the agitation on the British government from 1882 and the definition of the Convention of London in 1884.

This article investigates the role of Sufi networks in keeping Durban's ‘Zanzibari’ community of African Muslims together and developing their response to social change and political developments from the 1950s to the post-apartheid period. It focuses on the importance of religion in giving meaning to notions of community, and discusses the importance of the Makua language in maintaining links with northern Mozambique and framing understandings of Islam. The transmission of ritual practices of the Rifaiyya, Qadiriyya, and Shadhiliyya Sufi brotherhoods is highlighted, as is the significance of Maputo as a node for such linkages. The article discusses change over time in notions of cosmopolitanism, diaspora, and belonging, and examines new types of interactions after 1994 between people identifying themselves as Amakhuwa in Durban and Mozambique.

The period following the world slump saw increased British official interest in applying the new science of social anthropology to colonial problems. This paper looks at the eight years (1939–47) during which the distinguished South African anthropologist, Max Gluckman, held the post of Assistant Anthropologist and later Director at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Northern Rhodesia, and carried out field research among the Lozi of Barotseland. His post was also referred to as one in ‘functional’ or ‘applied’ anthropology, and the R.L.I, as a whole was intended to contribute to the solution of the urgent social problems thrown up by the growth of the mining industry. It is suggested that Gluckman's own shift in outlook from a belief in academic aloofness to a concern for active involvement with the administration, as well as being part of a wider change in attitudes, was also linked to his personal situation and to the unifying effects of the Second World War within N. Rhodesia. Gluckman was able to gain support for the ambitious research programme which was to put N. Rhodesia in the forefront of the post-war policy of organizing social research through local institutes, but his attempt to engage directly in practical affairs in N. Rhodesia proved disillusioning. Although the N. Rhodesian government continued to support the Institute and in theory welcomed Gluckman's offers of co-operation, it is shown that in practice little came of his attempts to apply either his specific knowledge of the Lozi or his general theoretical knowledge to administrative problems. Any influence he may have exerted on the colonial evolution of N. Rhodesia therefore remained indirect, but his position was one in harmony with the underlying trends towards decolonization.

While archaeology and linguistics provide an important basis for the reconstruction of the early history of those parts of eastern Africa inhabited by pastoral societies, oral traditions also can make a valuable contribution. In this paper an examination of the traditions of the Turkana of north-western Kenya reveals an often remarkably sophisticated rendering of complex processes of origin and migration. Moreover, those traditions also embody insights into basic factors concerning the development and spread of pastoralism in East Africa that the methodologies of other disciplines have only recently begun to identify.

Turkana traditions suggest that their society had not just one, monolithic ‘origin’, but rather what might be seen as a whole series of them. Highly dramatic and memorable tales of genesis provide vivid idioms of socio-political identity and also contain fundamental cosmological messages. But they also correspond to important stages of change in the development of the Turkana community, and, as such, they (together with less ‘formal’ traditions associated with them) provide vital historical information.

The factors which combined to enable the Turkana to carry out their vast and rapid territorial expansion are identified. For instance, one early tradition suggests a fundamental change in their pastoral system – the acquisition of Zebu cattle-while others emphasize important commercial contacts which provided a steady flow of iron-ware and grain. Still others trace the development of the office of Great Diviner, revealing how it became a primary focus of economic and cultural redefinition and corporate identity as alterations to the earlier generation-set system occurred. Another tradition provides a glimpse of Turkana expansion from the point of view of peoples absorbed by it.