An estimated seven million people live as refugees in Africa today. While reports on refugee services abound, there are few studies of internal cultural dynamics among the displaced. This book is pre-eminent among these, with its insights the more urgent given the horrific recent increase in refugees in East Central Africa.

This special issue of Pedagogica Historica, a journal published from the University of Gent, presents a selection of eighteen papers from an international conference on the history of education held in Lisbon in 1993. The texts are in English and French, although there are no contributors from France or Britain. The contributions deal with general themes and European backgrounds as well as colonial experience. Six which relate to Africa will be briefly described here.

Language death, a widespread phenomenon in modern Africa does not entail that the speakers of a given language have no descendants only that those descendants cannot speak their parents' language. The same is true of the death of a culture, although this is often less clearly recognized. Thus within the boundaries of modern South Africa, there is virtually no-one who can speak the San, or Bushman, languages, which until two hundred years or less ago were flourishing, if only in pockets. Equally, there is now no-one who lives according to the hunter–gatherer lifestyle from which the San take their name.

This work is a fascinating hybrid. The first half (pp. 1–240) comprises an updated version of Madagascar Rediscovered, published by the same author in 1978, covering the history of Madagascar from a British perspective up to the French conquest of 1895. The justification for the 1978 work was twofold: the sparsity of modern literature in English on the history of Madagascar and the considerable, yet underrated, British influence there prior to 1895. The title of the book currently under review indicates a much more ambitious aim – that of presenting a general history of Madagascar. In this light, the revision only partially rectifies the bias of Madagascar Rediscovered.

Judging from the recent conference on Africa's Urban Past held at London's School of Oriental and African Studies, historians are increasingly – if somewhat belatedly – joining their colleagues in the social sciences in recognizing the continent's towns and cities as fruitful fields of research. While urban historians of North America and Europe have long regarded the built environment as a valuable source, the form of towns is only beginning to emerge as a topic of serious consideration in the African context. It is gratifying to note, therefore, that a number of contributors to the SOAS conference chose to focus on the ways in which both indigenous concepts of settlement and the physical organization of space have shaped Africa's urban centres as arenas of social, political and economic conflict. It is with these issues in mind that the reviewer approached this study of the architectural history of a people with a long tradition of urbanism and a highly nuanced terminology of settlement, the Akan of southern Ghana.

Anyone lucky enough to attend an Akan royal ritual is struck by the central role played by one or more, usually old, men who carry long staves with elaborate, often golden, finials. They, rather than the ruler, seem to do all the talking. The king's voice is often virtually a whisper (bokoo) and even when audible is intentionally rushed and even hesitant. People address the king through an individual okyeame just as the king speaks indirectly through an okyeame. They do not simply pass on messages; and this is very much more than oration through intermediaries. They speak eloquently; and the most revered akyeame use a striking poetic, allusive language of proverb and metaphor in which routine and contemporary discussion becomes universal and timeless.

During the last two decades, our knowledge of the Saharan palaeoclimates has improved enormously. Several long-term regional projects published their results, new methods of dating and of climate or vegetation reconstruction came on line, and (especially) causal models of global climatic mechanisms became much more sophisticated. Until now, however, there has been no synthesis of these advances in the vast Sahara. Robert Vernet has produced an admirable overview for the specialist and for members of ancillary disciplines such as history and archaeology. No comparable Saharan climate synthesis exists anywhere in the anglophone literature.