The Iron Age cultures of Northern Rhodesia have until fairly recently remained unknown, whilst work in Southern Rhodesia and in South Africa has revealed a long sequence in both those territories. Mr R. R. Inskeep undertook some excavations in 1958, and since 1959 Iron Age research has expanded considerably. Work has been concentrated in the Southern Province of the territory with the aid of a grant from the Nuffield Foundation, and a number of large scale excavations have been carried out. This paper gives an outline of our general conclusions as they appeared at the completion of the fieldwork.

Students of the history of North Africa in general, and of the history of the Jews there in particular, commonly think that a considerable proportion—one half or more—of the Jews who live, or until recently lived, in North Africa are descended from the Berbers, who prior to the Arab conquest formed the overwhelming majority of the population. In their opinion, these Jews were the offspring of tribes among which Jewish beliefs spread in the pre-Arab era and part of which actually embraced Judaism. This assumption, which seemingly answers the question as to the origin of the Jews who inhabited the North African hinterland, and especially the districts bordering on the Sahara, has gained such wide currency that the term ‘Berber Jew’ has been coined, i.e. Jew descended from Judaized Berbers. The proponents of this assumption apparently suppose that the stories of Jews, or Judaized people, living among Berber tribes, though describing events of the late Middle Ages or of modern times, reflect conditions precedent to the Muslim conquest of North Africa. In other words, the supporters of the theory of the Judaized Berbers think that this phenomenon cannot have originated in Muslim times since the new religion precluded every chance of Jewish proselytizing. If, therefore, Judaized people are found in Africa, even in recent times, they must be remnants of a religious movement going back to the period before the Arab conquest. In the view of the adherents of this theory, Judaism spread among the Berbers during the first centuries of the Christian era.

The three most important Arabic sources for the Empire of Mali at its height are Ibn Fadl-Allāh al-‘Umari, Ibn-Baṭṭüṭa, and Ibn-Khaldūn. These authors all had good opportunities to collect information on this remote empire. Al-‘Umarī, who wrote in 1342–9, reflects the impression that Mansä Müsā had left in Cairo during his pilgrimage. In all probability, he had not himself met Mansā Mūsā in person, but he had talked with people who had met the Sudanese emperor. One of his most important informants was ash-shaykh Abū-sa'īd ‘Uthmān ad-Dukkāli, who had lived in Mali for thirty-five years. Ibn-Baṭṭūṭa recorded his own tour through Mali from February 1352 to December 1353. This account by such an experienced traveller is a first-rate historical document. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa was travelling in a region that was well known to his own countrymen; indeed he met Moroccans all over the Sudan. He was, therefore, inhibited from exaggerating or introducing incredible stories of the sort that often occur in his accounts of remoter Countries.

The aim of the inquisitorial studies is often described as extending the frontiers of our knowledge; but the study of the remoter past of Black Africa is rather the discovery of islands in the ocean of our ignorance, or the sighting from afar of mountains protruding through the mists which obscure knowledge of what rivers and ridges lie between. Soon a rift in the clouds will make plain the valleys of which we had guessed—or reveal instead an unimagined landscape.

Was feudalism a purely Western phenomenon? Is it a universal stage in man's history, emphasizing replacement of kinship by ties of personal dependence which further social development required? If it is neither a universal prerequisite nor yet exclusively Western, what are the conditions under which it is found? A host of such questions are raised by the consistent use both by historians and sociologists of the term ‘feudal’ as a description of the societies they are studying. Here I want to inquire into the implications and value of the concept as applied to African societies.

In 1890 H. Carvalho published an oral tradition which told how Kinguri, a son of the Lunda chief Yala Mwaka, quarrelled with his sister Lueji and with her husband Kibinda Ilunga, a Luba who had taken over the government of the Lunda chiefdom. Kinguri migrated to Angola where he offered his services to a governor who was called Manuel. This governor used the immigrants as auxiliary troops to fight the Ngola. After the war he allowed Kinguri to settle near Ambaka. A few years later Kinguri emigrated and went to found the state of the Imbangala, better known as the kingdom of Kasanje, between the Lui and the Cuango.

By the middle of the sixteenth century, Europeans had made themselves aware of the broad outlines of the Continents of Asia, Africa and America. Two hundred years later many of the most striking facts of the geography of the great land-masses had been revealed. In Asia, Siberia had been traversed, China mapped, and Tibet visited, while a vigorous trade was maintained with all the countries of the Eastern Seas. Most of the coast and many of the great lakes and rivers of the Americas had been charted, and flourishing European communities established from Lima to Quebec. Far more was known of Africa than its coastline: a large part of Ethiopia had been visited during the era of Portuguese influence at the beginning of the seventeenth century; Catholic missionaries had worked in the Eastern Sudan in the first decade of the eighteenth century; the Moorish geographers, Idrisi and Leo Africanus, both of whose works were constantly used by European cartographers, provided a succinct account of the citier and states of the Sahara and the Sudan; on the Upper Senegal the French had by 1750 successfully maintained for half a century a trading post over four hundred miles from the sea; in Southern Africa individual adventurers had penetrated deep into the hinterland of the Portuguese colonies in Angola and Mozambique, and of the Dutch settlement at the Cape.

The original draft of this article started with a quotation from O. G. S. Crawford: ‘… Irrelevant theorizing has been the besetting sin of the local archaeologist from the earliest times, and it is time it stopped …’ and continued by giving a rather detailed description of some pottery and metal objects found during the 1957 excavations of the Iron Age cemetery discovered at Sanga on the northern shore of Lake Kisale (northern Katanga). Especially for an area like the (ex-Belgian) Congo, where very little work indeed has ever been done on the protohistoric pottery cultures, we thought it essential first of all to give objectively as close a description as possible of the material remains of these prehistoric communities.

Le royaume de Kongo fut fondé par des conquérants qui soumirent les populations autochtones de souche ambundu. D'ou vinrent-ils? Deux théories ont été élaborées à; ce sujet. La plus ancienne et celle qui est accepté par la plupart des historiens veut qu'ils soient venus de l'est, de l'outre-Kwango. Cette version fut d'abord celle de Ravenstein avant d'ê;tre reprise et popularisée par Van Wing. On la retrouve chez Soret, Cornevin, Baumann et Westermann, Oliver et Fage soit dans tous les ouvrages de synthèse actuels.

My excuse for presenting this summary of Ceŵa tradition and history is that the Ceŵa are a numerous and important people. Numerically they are the most important descendants of the Malawi (the Maravi or Maraves of Portuguese records); and the fact that the name of their ancestors has been adopted by the majority party in Nyasaland led by Dr Hastings Banda, himself a Ceŵa, is one of the indications of their political importance.

In 1800 the Itsekiri kingdom of Warri in the north-western corner of the Niger delta had a highly centralized government. In 1848, the king died, followed shortly by his two principal heirs, and a state of anarchy developed in which order was maintained largely through the balance held between the two largest descent groups or ‘Houses’. The latter part of the century saw the rise, and defeat by the British of Nana Olomu, possibly the greatest of the delta traders, whose power over the Itsekiri derived from his trading monopoly. One cannot divorce these striking changes in Itsekiri social and political structure from the trade in slaves and later in palm oil, for the Itsekiri were by profession the middlemen between the interior peoples—the Urhobo and Isoko and to some extent the Benin—and the European traders.

In 1899 the Condominium Government was faced by administrative problems which, whatever their complexity in detail, fell into two broad divisions: those of the northern Sudan, and those of the Sudan south of the tenth parallel. Pacification was of course the first task everywhere; but even here there was a sharp contrast. In the north this was a politically urgent matter. The remote and heterogeneous tribes of the south, on the other hand, offered no political threat to the new government; and their pacification and administration would have been a heavy, perhaps a crushing, financial burden in the early years of the Condominium. The pacification of the south was therefore a process which lasted not for years but for decades; and the more constructive aspects of administration were correspondingly delayed. Moreover, in the north there was a recognizable foundation on which to build. The north was a part, if an outlying and culturally impoverished part, of the literate world of Islam; nor had it lost the traditions and techniques of ‘westernizing’ administration introduced during the Turco-Egyptian régime.

Those engaged in studying the history of West African coastal communities find themselves confronted with two different classes of material —historical sources, which are mainly written records produced by Europeans who visited or resided for short periods in the area; and anthropological sources, which are mainly local African oral tradition. There is a natural tendency for historians and for anthropologists each to confine themselves mainly to the class of material they understand best and to use the other, if they use it at all, uncritically and without regard to the interdependence of these two sources. The written sources were produced by people who knew little or nothing about the societies they were describing, and they can only become meaningful if seen against the ethnographic background. The African traditions on the other hand, if used alone, are no substitute for historical records. They are not concerned with an absolute time scale and can only be placed in the right historical perspective if they can be correlated with dated historical records. Neither class is capable of standing by itself; they have to be taken together and used to correct, check, and amplify each other. In addition, the written records have other faults of their own, notably the mesmerizing effect which can be achieved by an arresting statement once it has been recorded in print. The more frequently the statement is recorded the more authoritative it becomes. Captain Adams, for example, in his Sketches taken during ten voyages to Africa made a guess at the number of slaves exported annually from the Rio Real, and this figure of 20,000 was accepted uncritically and repeated by almost every subsequent writer on the slave trade in the Bight of Biafra. When it is possible to take them together, however, a great many of the apparent differences between these two classes of material disappear. The African traditions at times provide more accurate historical detail than the written sources, while some of the latter are shown to be more legendary in character than the African and subject to just the same processes of compression and the same dependence on ‘structural time’.

The Funj Sultanate was the most easterly of the chain of Muslim dynastic States which at one time stretched south of the Sahara through Bilād al-Sūdān. Founded early in the sixteenth Christian century (tenth Hijri¯; century) by a king traditionally called ‘Amāra Dūnqas, its centre was on the Blue Nile, around the town of Sennar (Sinnār).

The name of John Hawley Glover is not often included among the founders of Nigeria. In fact, when he left Lagos in 1872 after fifteen years' service in the region he may well have felt that he had been dismissed under a cloud. Yet in the 1870s Glover was regarded as one of Britain's greatest African proconsuls. It was said that he was the most successful African negotiator since Maclean, that he was as well known in West Africa as Livingstone in the east. After Yoruba was brought under British control in the 1890s, Sir Gilbert Carter said he had only fulfilled what Glover had attempted over a quarter of a century before.

On 10 June 1894, the British Government, after much hesitation and heart-searching, was finally compelled by circumstances to declare a protectorate over the native kingdom of Buganda. Later in the same year the country between the coast and Buganda on the caravan route up from the coast passed from the control of the Imperial British East Africa Company to that of the Acting Commissioner in Uganda, who was empowered to establish stations in it, under European officers.1

Harriette Emily Colenso, oldest of the five children of the famous Bishop John Colenso of Natal, was born in Norfolk, England, in 1847, and died in Natal at the age of 85, after a life of outstanding activity and purpose. Although the average Natal colonist regarded her as fanatically prejudiced, even the local Natal Witness, the mouthpiece of colonial views, was forced to acknowledge her ‘personal and intellectual qualities’. At the height of her unpopularity in 1907, when she was defending Dinizulu, it wrote:

There is probably no person in the colony whose influence on the natives is greater, and there is none who, should she but exert her power in that direction could exercise a more pacifying effect upon the native mind. Miss Colenso is strongly endowed with the judicial faculty and … her grasp of the intricate points of trials and cases in which natives have been involved has often astonished able and experienced lawyers.

‘It has constantly been asserted that the determining principle … should be the welfare of the natives.’

GEORGE LOUIS BEER, American Colonial Delegate to the Paris Peace Conference.