This essay argues that historians need to engage with the history of contemporary Africa both as a way of throwing new light on Africa's more remote past and as a way of understanding the present. The paper discusses two types of problem involved in such an enterprise. The first is the identification of the most fruitful themes for investigation. The second is the sources that may be used.

On the basis of identifying the likely geographic origins of African names extracted from the Sierra Leone Liberated African registers, this essay estimates the provenance of the transatlantic slave trade that drew on the Cameroons estuary between 1822 and 1837. The sample, drawn from six separate vessels, is broken down by age and sex category and constitutes about 7 per cent of all Africans who left from the region in these years. It makes possible analysis of changes over time, comparisons of age and sex with distance between embarkation point and likely provenance zone, as well as interaction between Old Calabar and the Cameroons regions in the supply of slaves. The great majority of the captives originated within 200 miles of the coast and within 120 miles of the modern border with Nigeria.

The history of the Black Volta region in what is currently south-west Burkina Faso and north-west Ghana has been marked by the agricultural expansion of Dagara-speaking groups. This article explores how and why these groups were able to expand at the expense of neighbouring segmentary societies such as the Phuo and the Sisala. Violence certainly played a role in their territorial expansion, but so did specific strategies of ritual appropriation of new territories. The Dagara system, with its characteristic fission of existing earth shrines and networks of interlinked shrines, allowed mobility and helped the migrants bring new territories under their ritual control. In addition, patriclans and matriclans as well as joking relationships, clan alliances and institutionalized friendship enabled the Dagara pioneers to recruit many new settlers within a short time. This was a crucial asset for the security of the newly founded settlements and the territorial encroachment on Phuo and Sisala lands. In addition, mobility was, and continues to be, supported by an explicit ethos of independence and autonomy. Focusing on the late pre-colonial periods, the article looks at different stages of Dagara expansion and the changing interethnic relations.

This essay traces economic and social change in early modern Morocco from the perspective of the leaders and followers of the Nās˙iriyya, one of the largest sufi orders in North Africa. It suggests that people's social strategies for gaining access to productive resources acted as an important locus of change. Donations to the order provided clients access to mediation, protection, enforcement, credit, supernatural power and political influence, but also made them increasingly dependent on Nās˙iri leaders. Major shifts in Morocco's political economy, however, refocused strategies of resource access and social mobility. Growing international trade encouraged commercialization, specialization and competition between groups for access to markets, political favors and tax breaks.

Writers dealing with the Herero of Botswana have tended mostly to deal with them as a single homogeneous whole. Concentrating on Ngamiland, this article outlines and discusses the arrival, at different times and for different reasons, of various groups of Herero into the territory. The article indicates that prior to the Herero–German war of 1904, the majority of Herero moved into Ngamiland on account of the activities of German colonizers and the Herero chief, Samuel Maharero. In Ngamiland, the Herero immigrants came to form a substantial source of support for the Batawana usurper, Sekgoma Letsholathebe. With the outbreak of the Herero–German war, Herero who had fled Namibia on earlier occasions now opposed the move of Samuel Maharero into Ngamiland, and found themselves supported by Sekgoma Letsholathebe. Following the deposition of Sekgoma in a coup, the position of Herero who had supported Sekgoma became increasingly tenuous and led to their move out of Ngamiland. Overall, the article presents a case study of the manner in which, in seeking to strengthen their positions within host communities, refugees of necessity come to be bound up in the internal politics of such communities.

The Sereer-Safèn occupied a defensible refuge zone in Western Bawol, where forests and sandstone ridges provided protection against Wolof monarchy. The Safèn were part of a larger ‘Sereer’ world that defined itself by opposition to Islam in the period from 1700 to 1914. This religious divide made the Sereer targets for enslavement by the Wolof, but Sereer religion was also linked to Safèn resistance to Islam, slavery and monarchy. Religion was interwoven with an ethnic boundary, which emphasized the incompatibility of Wolof and Sereer society. Safèn religion was centered on the village ‘shrine’ or xérém, which served as the focal point of ritual, justice, communication with the other world and defense.

Church Missionary Society missionaries arrived in the northern Sudan in 1899 with the goal of converting Muslims. Restricted by the Anglo-Egyptian government and by local opposition to their evangelism, they gained only one Muslim convert during sixty years of work. The missionaries nevertheless provided medical and education services in urban centers and in the Nuba Mountains, and pioneered girls' schools. Yet few of their Sudanese graduates achieved functional Arabic literacy, since missionaries taught ‘romanized Arabic', a form of written colloquial Arabic, in Latin print, that lacked practical applications. Thus the history of the CMS in the northern Sudan yields insights into issues of education, power and religious identity within a colonial context.

Research in the Northern Province of South Africa has revealed a most surprising new rock art find: a painting of a camel. This paper investigates how and why a camel came to be painted in the remote rock art of the Makgabeng hills. Analysis of archival material allows one to attribute the painting to a Northern Sotho artist who was active in the first decade of the twentieth century. The purpose of the painting is revealed in its context; it forms part of a collection of paintings which ridicule elements of ineptness in the ways of the new white intruders. We argue that this pointed humour helped the Makgabeng community to overcome some of the trauma of the displacement and violence which characterized the era of the first white settlement in northern South Africa.

Land tenure was at the center of the struggle between settlers and Khoisan on the colonial frontier during the eighteenth century. Different perceptions of land claims and differing patterns of land use prevented the possibility of mutual accommodation. Although pre-colonial hunters and herders co-existed in the Cedarberg region, the introduction of competition from settler pastoralism challenged the survival of both San and Khoikhoi patterns of subsistence. The fight for territory was rooted in competition over specific locations – sites endowed with resources such as permanent water, defensible shelter and ritual significance for the San. Colonial social structure supported settler land claims, eventually enabling successful occupation of a rugged region relatively isolated from the rest of the colony. In the last quarter of the century some Khoisan individuals worked within this system to make land claims of their own. Superior technology and a tightly woven social structure did not alter the basic features of the landscape, so colonists continued to subsist from transhumant pastoralism throughout the century.

This article is concerned with the historical construction of communities, cultures and identities in colonial Natal, in this case an Indian grouping that emerged from the heterogeneous collection of indentured workers imported between 1860 and 1911. Despite the difficulties of indenture, Indians set about re-establishing their culture and religion in Durban. The most visible and public expression of ritual was the festival of Muhurram, which played an important role in forging a pan-Indian ‘Indianness’ within a white and African colonial society. This was significant when one considers that the nationalist movement was in its formative stages and there was no national identity when indentured workers had left India.

This article traces the origins of the familiar quotation, ‘there is always something new coming out of Africa’. It demonstrates that the phrase was a proverb that originated in Greece no later than the fourth century BC. It charts the transmission of the phrase from Aristotle to the twentieth century, noting that Erasmus is the most important link in the Renaissance and that he may be responsible for the current form in which the phrase is used.

The article also shows that the meaning of the phrase was very different in ancient times from what it is today. Whereas ‘something new’ to Aristotle meant strange hybrid animals, current writers use the phrase with a sense of admiration.

In the 1890s and 1900s in the Transkei, South Africa, colonial relations were severely strained as Cape colonial officials attempted to constrain African men's hunting activities by systematically poisoning and shooting their dogs. For colonial foresters, such efforts were part of a larger strategy to ‘protect’ flora and fauna by controlling African environmental activities and mobility more thoroughly. Yet on the ground in many areas, state-sponsored dog-killing was drawn into more complex understandings of, and popular frustrations with, transformations in local landscapes and livelihoods during this period. As rural men and women responded to the particular changes in their local political ecologies arising from colonial wildlife preservation policies, they also located conflicts over state forestry and its policies of exclusion within broader popular experiences of political, economic and ecological subordination. In several communities, rumors and stories proliferated, connecting the killing of dogs to other official attempts to poison and bewitch Africans, their animals and their landscapes. Such stories were ways for people to express deeper concerns over the spreading influence of colonial power in their daily practices and its toll on local communities’ health and welfare.

This article considers the different ways that Marirangwe purchase area farmers understood and used their farmland, resources and opportunities. In the pioneer period from 1931 to the 1940s, Marirangwe farmers favored extensive use of their land and its resources. However, as labor and capital opportunities changed, land became for some an expendable commodity. By the 1950s, the farmers' ability to generate capital through land sales paralleled the arrival of squatters in the area. With the help of these squatters and revenue from land sales, Marirangwe farmers prospered. This development, however, did not signal a change from the extensive farming habits of the pioneer period but rather a brief, and generally prosperous, period of specialization.

This paper examines the 1938 cattle culling and sales in Gutu and Victoria reserves, colonial Zimbabwe. What began as a routine culling very quickly became a crisis of authority for the Native Affairs Department since critics of the Department forced an inquiry into the sales. The criticism and defence of the culling facilitated a debate on state and personal justice, as well as a dialogue about the proper behaviour towards Africans, settlers and animals. The critics of the cullings as well as the colonial officers all believed themselves to be experts in African affairs. Thus what began as a criticism of cattle culling revealed tensions within white society, and in particular the need to refashion boundaries of expertise and authority within the Native Affairs Department. A close examination of the scope and development of the ensuing commission of inquiry reveals the importance of etiquette to the colonial enterprise in colonial Zimbabwe.

The paper outlines the impetus to, trajectory and impact of enclosure in the Cape Colony between the passing of the Fencing Act in 1883 and 1910. By increasing landowners' control over their environment, fencing enabled a suite of remedial measures that raised the productivity of the commercial small-stock sector. Fences also came to stand in the stead of the landowner in defending farms against human or animal trespass. The compartmentalization of the countryside into enclosures facilitated a more general re-ordering and re-assigning of humans and animals within it, resulting in a depersonalization of rural social relations. In all these ways the enclosure movement laid the ideological foundations for the hegemony of private property and the market economy in the countryside.

Madumo: A Man Bewitched. By ADAM ASHFORTH. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Cape Town: David Philip, 2000. Pp. vii+255. Rand 90 (ISBN 0-226-02971-9).

Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. By LUISE WHITE. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xvi+351. £31.50/$50 (ISBN 0-520-21703-9); £12.50/$19.95, paperback (ISBN 0-520-21704-7).

The power of the state to impose its self-produced categories of thought poses a major problem to Zimbabwe historiography which has often taken as unproblematic the relation between knowledge about, and control over, African societies as presented in the state's archives. This article challenges this hegemonic view of the colonial state, presenting an alternative interpretation of administrative reports on Buhera district. It shows how Buhera society became increasingly represented as the traditional, rural end of a rural-urban divide in colonial policy discourse, while, in reality, social life in the area became intimately linked to the urban economy of Salisbury.

In colonial Southern Rhodesia, administrative officials often couched the rhetoric of ‘modernization’ in ethnic terms. They regarded immigrant Madheruka master farmers as the embodiment of modernization because they had been exposed to forces of modernization in their areas of origin, while both officials and immigrants alike regarded indigenous Shangwe as backward and primitive. This article argues that the construction of Madheruka and Shangwe ethnic identities dates primarily to the early 1960s, with the coming of immigrants and the introduction of cotton. Shangwe defined the immigrants as madheruka, a term whose origins lay in the eviction of the immigrants from crown land by colonial officials in the 1950s, while Madheruka termed the indigenous peoples shangwe, or backward. Each group perceived itself differently, however, Shangwe claiming that the term Shangwe referred to a place rather than to their ethnic identity and Madheruka claiming to belong to authentic Shona groups. The guerrilla war of the 1970s witnessed an attack on modernity as the guerrillas and their sympathizers regarded immigrant farmers as colonial collaborators.

Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia. Edited by MICHAEL LAMBEK and ANDREW STRATHERN. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv+298. £45 (ISBN 0-521-62194-1); £15.95 paperback (ISBN 0-521-62737-0).