Men and women, trained in the occupations of spinner, weaver, dyer, tailor and embroiderer, manufactured the renowned textile products of the Sokoto Caliphate, a nineteenth-century state in the central Sudan region of West Africa. The numerical distributions of men and women within these occupations were uneven, but not in accordance with the pattern described most frequently in the literature. Offered here is another, more detailed view of textile production. Women were not simply spinners but were also weavers and dyers. Uneven, too, were the geographical distributions of men and women workers. Men skilled in textile manufacturing were widely disseminated throughout the caliphate, as were women spinners; women skilled at weaving and dyeing, however, were concentrated mainly in the southern emirates of Nupe and Ilorin. Similarly, male entrepreneurs organized large-scale textile manufacturing enterprises in the north-central portion of the caliphate while enterprises created by women were located to the south.

New sources, the textile products of the caliphate, along with other contemporary evidence, reveal that women's work was more varied, more prominent, more highly skilled and more organized than previously thought. Comparative analyses along gender lines show that men's work and women's work were similar in the degree of training required and the levels of skill achieved. Labor, especially skilled labor, was critical to textile production if the caliphate was to maintain its external markets. But there were substantial differences in the degree to which men and women could mobilize and organize labor. A variety of social and political factors in caliphate society combined to assist men and hinder women in the organization and management of textile manufacturing.

By the mid-first millennium a.d., Middle Niger cities took the form of many separate mounds clustered together. Many of these mounds may have been settlements of specialists. This distinctive city form may have had its origin in segmented, but articulated, Late Stone Age communities in the southern Sahara. The Pulse Model is an attempt to reconstruct the circumstances of environmental change and interactions among these communities that encouraged occupational specialization. The model predicts the best locations to search for evidence of early specialization, namely the several north–south trending palaeochannels of the southern Sahara. There, groups increasingly concerned with intensification of production within separate microenvironments would nevertheless have been in close contact. Climate shifts over the past several millennia create a ‘pulse’ of population movements, or shifts of ecological adaptations, along these long corridors. However, adaptation to climate change and stress incompletely explains the emergence of specialization. Tradition, myths, legends and material reinforcements of divisions between present-day ethnic and artisan groups in the Middle Niger suggest the ways in which corporate identity may have been constructed and maintained in the very distant past. If corporate identity can emerge in a form that discourages conflict between groups, the result might be increasingly specialized responses to climate change and to the economic and social opportunities of early urbanism. There should be no sharp discontinuity between the emerging specialization of the last millennia b.c. and the earlier clustered urbanism of cities such as Jenne-jeno. Middle Niger urbanism is an intensification of prehistoric social dynamics, not a revolutionary process.

A history of food systems in Africa's Great Lakes region is presented using mostly historical linguistic sources, with help from archaeology and paleoecology. The paper moves beyond understanding the causes and consequences of iron-working as the most important feature of the period between c. 1000 b.c. and c. a.d. 500. I argue that a history of agriculture both gives context to changes in technology and introduces powerful new explanations for historical processes of settlement and occupational specialization that took place.

Between 1000 b.c. and 500 b.c., in the Great Lakes region, speakers of three of Africa's four major language families practiced distinguishable food-producing systems. Two groups, Central Sudanian and Sog Eastern Sudanian, depended mainly on growing cereals and raising livestock for their sustenance. The third group, the Tale Southern Cushites, gave decidedly greater emphasis to cattle but probably also grew grains. A fourth group, the Great Lakes Bantu, grew root crops, fished and raised cattle and grain. They inherited much of their knowledge of these techniques, other than cattle-raising, from earlier Eastern Highlands Bantu-speakers. But they incorporated cattle and some grains through longstanding contacts with the two Sudanian and the Southern Cushitic communities. The eclectic food system they thus created allowed them to carry their unified, complex food-producing system throughout the wide variety of environments that they encountered in the Lakes region. After c.a.d. 200 descendants of the Great Lakes Bantu refined this synthesis; they emphasized livestock raising inland from Lake Victoria, and mixed farmers spread throughout the Kivu Rift. Technological, demographic, ecological and sociological explanations of the technological evidence are offered.

Following the late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cavalry revolution in Senegambia, the horse and slave trade became a major sector of the desert-edge political economy. Black African states imported horses from North Africa and the western Sahara in exchange for slaves. Over time, under conditions of increasing aridity, the zone of desert horse-breeding was pushed south, and through crossbreeding with the small disease-resistant indigenous horses of the savanna, new breeds were created. Although the savanna remained an epidemiologically hostile environment for the larger and more desirable horses bred in North Africa, in the high desert and along the desert fringe, Black African states continued to import horses in exchange for slaves into the period of French colonial rule.

The evidence assembled on the horse trade into northern Senegambia raises the difficult issue of the relative quantitative importance of the Atlantic and Saharan/North African slave trades and calls into question the assumption that the Atlantic slave trade was the larger of the two. Most available evidence concerns the Wolof kingdoms of Waalo and Kajoor. It suggests that the volume of slaves exported north into the desert from Waalo in the late seventeenth century was probably at least ten times as great as the volume of slaves exported into the Atlantic slave trade. For both Waalo and Kajoor, this ratio declined during the first half of the eighteenth century as slave exports into the Atlantic markets increased. The second half of the eighteenth century saw an increase in predatory raiding from the desert which produced an additional flow of north-bound slaves. For Waalo and Kajoor – and probably for the other Black African states of northern Senegambia – the flow of slaves north to Saharan and North African markets probably remained the larger of the two export volumes over the eighteenth century. This northward flow of slaves continued strong after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and was only shut down with the imposition of French colonial authority.

As older ways of raising credit declined or were re-defined, the acquiring of loans from a specialized group of money-lenders flourished in colonial Western Nigeria. Money-lenders charged exorbitant interest and insisted on loan repayment at a fixed date. Borrowing from the modern banking system, the money-lenders prepared legal documents and required surety. Debt recovery was generally painful to defaulters; they were humiliated, harassed, and had their property confiscated. The practice generated many conflicts. The debtor was generally unhappy, especially if the money was used for consumption. Lenders cheated with high interest rates and other charges and promoted for their own ends indiscriminate lending to poor and vulnerable people. To minimize conflicts and protect debtors, the colonial administration decided to regulate the trade with ordinances, especially the Moneylenders' Ordinance of 1938 which set limits to interest and forced lenders to obtain licences. In general, lenders subverted the ordinance, creditors and debtors became more cunning as documents were falsified to protect lenders, and those who needed money continued to accept harsh terms.

The main interlacustrine kingdoms have been presented, on the evidence of their royal genealogies recalling up to thirty reigns, as stretching back to a ‘Chwezi’ period some five centuries ago. This view was promoted especially in the Kitara zone, comprising Bunyoro and regions to its south and, as a close linguistic grouping, extending to Nkore, Karagwe and Buhaya. Rwanda to the south-west and Buganda to the east, though each rather distinct, share some of the same cultural and traditional features. In the central Kitara zone it has been further argued that the ‘Chwezi’ period is represented by various impressive archaeological sites – hilltop shrines, notably at Mubende, with special and archaic objects; complex earthwork enclosures at Bigo and elsewhere; and the concentrated settlement nearby at Ntusi. Certain of these have been claimed as Chwezi royal capitals of ancient Kitara, and specific features have been compared with royal abodes of recent centuries. Such literal interpretation, let alone royalist manipulation, of oral traditions is now considered too simplistic; not only are the Chwezi generally regarded as gods or mythical heroes, but also the role of archaeology is now seen as something more positive than the mere verification of verbal evidence.

Renewed archaeological research indicates that Ntusi was occupied from about the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries a.d. and that the earthworks, including Bigo, and the settlement on Mubende hill fall into the latter half of that span. This cultural grouping thrived on a combination of cattle-keeping and grain cultivation, as is especially clear at Ntusi on fertile ground in the midst of the Bwera grasslands. It may have been the growing strains of a delicately balanced economy as competition increased for cattle and the pastures which led to its eventual breakdown. During the last half-millennium Bwera has been a peripheral and lightly populated district between Bunyoro, Nkore and Buganda. It is difficult to imagine these later kingdoms developing directly out of a supposed ‘Chwezi’ one based at Ntusi and the Bigo constructions.

Two periods of marked change are discernible therefore, one around the middle of this millennium, the other at its beginning. That earlier, mid-Iron Age, revolution witnessed the introduction of cattle on a large scale and the first intensive exploitation of the interlacustrine grasslands. Cattle becoming then an economic asset, it may be inferred that ownership of stock and defence of the pastures became sources of prestige and patronage, with obvious social, political and military implications. This situation opened opportunities for other specializations, including the production of salt for distant distribution. Traditions concerning gods and heroes, and the continuing popular chwezi cults, illustrate the changes and may also echo the cultural and economic importance of iron and its working among agricultural populations from before the pastoral revolution.

This paper studies the effects of the coexistence of the manilla currency and British currency in south-eastern Nigeria, and the way in which this monetary situation created political tensions which eventually led to the redemption of the manilla. When British control of Southern Nigeria was formalized in 1900 and British currency introduced in the south-east in the following year, the inability of the colonial authorities to put into circulation adequate supplies of British coins, coupled with historically entrenched use of traditional currencies, compelled the colonial state to recognize the latter as legal tender. However, the continuing circulation of these currencies alongside British coins created financial and economic difficulties, causing the colonial state to adopt a number of legislative measures to eradicate them. While other traditional currencies capitulated to these measures, the manilla continued to be popular as a result of objective economic factors, and was strengthened by some of the very instruments designed to eliminate it.

Meanwhile, the constantly fluctuating exchange rate of the manilla was generating discontent. These fluctuations were caused primarily by the gyrations of the world market. Improved prices of palm products–the main sources of British currency in the economy of southeastern Nigeria–brought about the appreciation of the manilla. This caused hardship among wage-earners by reducing the exchange value and the purchasing power of their meagre and fixed income which had to be converted to manillas in order to buy food and other locally produced goods and services. Periods of depression, on the other hand, caused manilla depreciation as a result of a diminished inflow of British currency. This reduced the income of peasant producers, while increasing the purchasing power of workers. The ferments generated by fluctuating manilla values have remained, until now, unidentified causal links in the political movements in south-eastern Nigeria, including especially the women's movements of the 1920s.

The discontent intensified in the 1940s, when the influx of cash into the Nigerian economy caused by war-time military spending and the post-war commodity boom caused a continuous appreciation of the manilla. This development made life more difficult for workers, whose incomes were already being decimated by inflation. The resulting intensified political tension, as well as the existing obstacles to trade and smooth collection of taxes (also caused by unabating manilla fluctuations), made the demonetization of the manilla through redemption inevitable. With the elimination of the manilla, which had constituted a sub-system within the economic system of colonial Nigeria, the colonial state's economic control of Nigeria can be said to have been completed.

The Muslim Wandala state controlled large areas of the plains south of Lake Chad between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries a.d. The Wandala also engaged in an extremely complex, and often hostile, set of relations with the inhabitants of the Mandara Mountains, which bordered their state to the south and closely adjoined successive Wandala capitals. These Wandala – montagnard relationships had diverse economic, ritual, political and military aspects. Their complexity appears to be due in large part to the fact that the Wandala and many of the montagnard groups share ethnic origins, and to the violent processes by which differentiation took place and the Wandala gained hegemony on the plains. These processes probably began with a Wandala use of trading advantages to gain access to the Kanuri market system and the subsequent use of products so obtained to expand their dominion.

The authors argue that, during the crucial decade of Songhay history which followed the death of Sunni Ali, Askiya Muḥammad pursued, sometimes quickly and sometimes hesitantly, three distinct ‘Islamic’ options, in contrast to the ‘received tradition’ which sharply differentiates between the reign of the last sunni's and the first of the askiyas. Askiya Muḥammad began his reign in alliance with the court clerics of the imperial capital in Gao, who were accustomed to ‘mixing’ Islamic and traditional practices. After his pilgrimage he sought out the advice of the radical Muslim scholar from the Sahara, al-Maghīlī. The strong positions of al-Maghīlī against the Jews and also the Musūfah, a Berber group strongly associated with Timbuktu, led the askiya to his third choice, the urbane and tolerant Islamic practice of the famous center of Muslim scholarship. The authors advance this as a new interpretation of predominantly old available evidence, and they suggest, on the one hand, the complexity and multiplicity of Islamic practices in the Niger Buckle region around 1500 A.D. and, on the other, the necessity of choice among the three options.

As a result of the policy of indirect rule which British administrators introduced into the Colony of the Gold Coast at the turn of the twentieth century, customary courts, or what were called Native Tribunals, became important venues of adjudication for the indigenous population. As a result, however, of the powerful impact of British justice on the Colony, the judicial responsibilities, procedure, personnel and the nature of the customary law that these courts applied underwent profound changes. It was an excellent example of how important was the cultural interchange between European and African ideas during the colonial period, which, however, both academic lawyers and historians have neglected. The former have preferred to focus on the superior courts as venues of juridical interaction while the latter have focused far more on ‘what was said about change than what was said about order’. By looking, however, at this example of cultural interaction on a fundamentally popular level, we can see that this ‘transforming moment’ in the colonial situation can be seen neither as something ‘imposed’ on African society by colonial administrators nor as simply generating new mechanisms for privileged groups to take advantage of. The Native Tribunals never fully came up to what British administrators or African lawyers considered the highest standards of British rule of law. Nevertheless, their most important function was to popularize recourse to judicial institutions which increasingly adopted more and more of the features of the British legal system.

For all approaches to the South African past the icon of Jan Van Riebeeck looms large. Perspectives supportive of the political project of white domination created and perpetuate the icon as the bearer of civilization to the sub-continent and its source of history. Opponents of racial oppression have portrayed Van Riebeeck as public (history) enemy number one of the South African national past. Van Riebeeck remains the figure around which South Africa's history is made and contested.

But this has not always been the case. Indeed up until the 1950s, Van Riebeeck appeared only in passing in school history texts, and the day of his landing at the Cape was barely commemorated. From the 1950s, however, Van Riebeeck acquired centre stage in South Africa's public history. This was not the result of an Afrikaner Nationalist conspiracy but arose out of an attempt to create a settler nationalist ideology. The means to achieve this was a massive celebration throughout the country of the 300th anniversary of Van Riebeeck's landing. Here was an attempt to display the growing power of the apartheid state and to assert its confidence.

A large festival fair and imaginative historical pageants were pivotal events in establishing the paradigm of a national history and constituting its key elements. The political project of the apartheid state was justified in the festival fair through the juxtaposition of ‘civilization’ and economic progress with ‘primitiveness’ and social ‘backwardness’. The historical pageant in the streets of Cape Town presented a version of South Africa's past that legitimated settler rule.

Just as the Van Riebeeck tercentenary afforded the white ruling bloc an opportunity to construct an ideological hegemony, it was grasped by the Non-European Unity Movement and the African National Congress to launch political campaigns. Through the public mediums of the resistance press and the mass meeting these organizations presented a counter-history of South Africa. These oppositional forms were an integral part of the making of the festival and the Van Riebeeck icon. In the conflict which played itself out in 1952 there was a remarkable consensus about the meaning of Van Riebeeck's landing in 1652. The narrative constructed, both by those seeking to establish apartheid and those who sought to challenge it, represented Van Riebeeck as the spirit of apartheid and the originator of white domination. The ideological frenzy in the centre of Cape Town in 1952 resurrected Van Riebeeck from obscurity and historical amnesia to become the lead actor on South Africa's public history stage.

In 1903 the South African mining industry began recruiting African labor from Central Africa in order to shore up their labor supplies. From the outset, Central African recruitment was problematic, for Central African mine workers died at very high rates. The primary source of Central African mortality was pneumonia. In response to this high mortality the Union government threatened to close down Central African recruitment, a threat which they carried out in 1913. From 1911 to 1933, the mining industry fought to maintain, and then after 1913 to regain access to Central African labor. Of central importance in this struggle were efforts to develop a vaccine against pneumonia. While the mine medical community failed to produce an effective vaccine against pneumonia, the Chamber of Mines successfully employed the promise of a vaccine eventually to regain access to Central African Labor in 1934. The mines achieved this goal by controlling the terrain of discourse on the health of Central African workers, directing attention away from the unhealthy conditions of mine labor and toward the imagined cultural and biological peculiarities of these workers. In doing so the mines constructed a new social category, ‘tropical workers’ or ‘tropicals’. The paper explores the political, economic and intellectual environment within which this cultural construction was created and employed.

The rise of the Zulu power in the early nineteenth century has conventionally been treated as the outstanding example of a contemporary southern African process of ‘state-formation’, which was associated with revolutionary social changes. This paper advances an alternative view, that there were strong continuities with established forms of chieftaincy in the region, and in particular that the Zulu political system was based on a traditional, pan-Nguni homestead form of organization.

The Zulu homestead was divided into right and left sections, each with its own identity and destiny. This opposition was mapped into the layout of ordinary homesteads and royal settlements. It was carried through into the organization of regiments. The homestead and its segments provided both the geographical and the structural nodes of the society. The developmental cycle of the homestead ideally followed a set pattern, creating a fresh alignment of units in each generation. The points of segmentation were provided by the ‘houses’, constituted for each major wife and her designated heir. Each of these houses represented the impact, within the homestead, of relationships sealed by marriage with outside groups, whose leaders threw their weight behind particular factions in the political processes within the family.

This study examines the surviving private correspondence from Echo Island (Jazīrat Abū Ranāt, formerly Abranarti), a small nineteenth-century agricultural community in the Shāīquiyya country of the northern Sudan. The central question addressed is a discordance between the preoccupations of the letters and the concerns manifested in the considerably larger literature of contemporary legal records surviving from the same community, a clash that finds resonance in the familiar historiographical rivalry between advocates of culturally autonomous consciousness and partisans of material or socioeconomic determinisms. It is suggested that the private correspondence from Echo Island may best be interpreted as a new technique of bond management in the microsociological sense that arose and flourished in an age when the community found itself compelled to respond to a colonial setting vastly larger in scale than what had previously prevailed. The world of subjective ideas evidenced in the correspondence ignored, probably deliberately, most of the pressing immediate concerns of the community revealed in the contemporary legal documents; however, it opened a new ‘mode of communication,’ a conceptual terrain across which members of the elite exercised their virtuosity in mutual manipulations of status.

Sebatakgomo — a migrant worker-based movement – was founded in 1954 and went on to play a central role in the Sekhukhuneland Revolt of 1958. It was launched from within the ANC, and a number of its leaders were also members of the Communist Party. This article explores the roles played by these wider political movements in the formation of Sebatakgomo. It argues that, while ANC networks and individuals within its central leadership made an important contribution, the rural presence of the ANC was fragmentary in this period and that its central organizational strategies had been effectively checkmated by an increasingly authoritarian state. It suggests that the crucial initial impetus and strategy behind Sebatakgomo came from Communist Party members living in a migrant world and trained in the Party's history and methods of organization. In particular Alpheus Maliba, who led the Zoutpansberg Balemi Association in the northern Transvaal in the early 1940s, provided a mentor and model for Flag Boshielo, who was the driving force in the establishment of Sebatakgomo. The article also suggests that the history of Sebatakgomo provides an example of the impact of Communist Party activists in transforming the ANC into a mass organization in the early 1950s.