In contrast to the situation in Commonwealth countries such as Canada and Australia, South Africa's participation in the Second World War has not been accorded a particularly significant place in the country's historiography. In part at least, this is the result of historiographical traditions which, although divergent in many ways, have a common denominator in that their various compelling imperatives have despatched the Second World War to the periphery of their respective scholarly discourses.

Afrikaner historians have concentrated on wars on their ‘own’ soil – the South African War of 1899–1902 in particular – and beyond that through detailed analyses of white politics have been at pains to demonstrate the inexorable march of Afrikanerdom to power. The Second World War only featured insofar as it related to internal Afrikaner political developments. Neither was the war per se of much concern to English-speaking academic historians, either of the so-called liberal or radical persuasion. For more than two decades, the interests of English-speaking professional historians have been dominated by issues of race and class, social structure, consciousness and the social effects of capitalism. While the South African War did receive some attention in terms of capitalist imperialist expansion, the Second World War was left mostly to historians of the ‘drum-and-trumpet’ variety. In general, the First and Second World Wars did not appear a likely context in which to investigate wider societal issues in South Africa.

‘GOD HAS TAKEN POWER FROM WHITE MEN THROUGHOUT THE WORLD’

EARLY on the morning of 5 September 1906, at a small asbestos mine in the northern Cape, six African workers entered the tent of their white foreman and his family. They assaulted the sleepers with stones, knobkerries, the leg of a chair and an ox-yoke. The foreman, Dirk Mans, died of his injuries eighteen hours later, while his son, Jan, who had been sleeping in another tent, ran away. Dirk Mans's wife also had a narrow escape. She woke up when a blow narrowly missed the head of her three-year-old child, who was sleeping in her bed. Both could flee in the general mêlée. Another victim, the well digger, William Swanepoel, was bludgeoned to death so ferociously that his skull ‘was entirely knocked out of shape [and] separated in halves’. The perpetrators tried to kill more whites, but dispersed in the ensuing confusion. The six men were tracked down by the police after several days. The Griqualand West Supreme Court in Kimberley sentenced four of the culprits to death; they were hanged in March 1907.

The ringleader of the Hopefield gang, Hendrik Bekeer, told the policeman who had followed his tracks for several days, that ‘he was glad to be caught, although he knew that his life would be at an end’. He could hardly wait to tell the prison warder that the group had planned to kill all whites in South Africa. In court, the eloquent Bekeer explained:

I admit that I am guilty. I, Hendrik Bikier [sic], laid hands on these two souls. I have a craving in my heart which must be made known to everyone. I admit that I am a worker of God. I confess to the Court and all the white people that I am placed here by the Lord, and that I do his will. … The time when the whites had the upper hand is past. This is for Africa alone, but God has taken power from white men throughout the world.

During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Portugal established a trading presence along the Upper Guinea Coast from Senegal to Sierra Leone. Emigrants from Portugal known as lançados – some of them Jews seeking to escape religious persecution – settled along the coast, where many of them married women from local communities. By the early sixteenth century, Luso-Africans, or ‘Portuguese’ as they called themselves, were established at trading centers from the Petite Côte in Senegal, south to Sierra Leone. Descendants of Portuguese immigrants, of Cape Verde islanders, and of West Africans, the Luso-Africans developed a culture that was itself a synthesis of African and European elements. Rich historical documentation allows a case study of the changing ways Luso-Africans identified themselves over the course of three centuries.

The earliest lançados established themselves along the coast as commercial middlemen between African and European traders and as coastal traders between Sierra Leone and Senegambia. Their position was formally discouraged by the Portuguese Crown until the second decade of the sixteenth century, but they nevertheless played an important role in trade with Portugal and the Cape Verde islands. Lançado communities were permanently settled on the Petite Côte, while in Sierra Leone and Rio Nunez much early commerce was in the hands of lançados who sailed there regularly from S. Domingos, north of present day Bissau. The offspring of these lançados and African women were called filhos de terra and were generally considered to be ‘Portuguese’.

Throughout the sixteenth century, the descendants of the lançados maintained close commercial ties with the Cape Verde islands. Cape Verdeans were themselves the offspring of mixed Portuguese and West African marriages. Sharing elements of a common culture and united by marriage and economic ties, mainland Luso-Africans and Cape Verdeans represented a socially complex and geographically dispersed community. Cape Verdeans, like mainland Luso-Africans, resolutely maintained that they were ‘Portuguese’, and both sub-groups employed the same essentially cultural criteria of group identification.

ON the morning of 12 January 1904, shooting started in Okahandja, a small town in German South West Africa, present-day Namibia. When the Herero–German war finally ended four years later, Herero society, as it had existed prior to 1904, had been completely destroyed. In the genocidal war which developed, the Herero were either killed in battle, lynched, shot or beaten to death upon capture, or driven to death in the waterless wastes that make up much of Namibia. Within Namibia, the surviving Herero were deprived of their chiefs, prohibited from owing land and cattle, and prevented from practising their own religion. Herero survivors, the majority of whom were women and children, were incarcerated in prison camps and put to work as forced labourers for the German military and settlers.

Over the years there have been a fair number of works dealing with the causes and effects of the Herero–German war of 1904–8. It has been argued that the loss of land, water, cattle and liberty, coupled with the activities of unscrupulous traders and German colonial officials, steered the Herero into launching a carefully planned, countrywide insurrection against German colonial rule. In brief, ‘in 1904, the Herero, feeling the cumulative and bitter effects of colonial rule in South West Africa, took advantage of the withdrawal of German troops from central Hereroland…and revolted’.

At the beginning of the twentieth century Muslim societies of northern Senegal and southern Mauritania moved slowly but surely into relations of accommodation with the French colonial regime. The process was led by marabouts, persons who combined various forms of Islamic learning and saintliness. It took the form of Sufi orders, often called ‘brotherhoods’, that became anchored in the emerging economy of the peanut basin in central Senegal. The accommodation permitted the marabouts and brotherhoods to develop considerable autonomy in the religious, economic and social spheres while surrendering the political and administrative domain to the French.

Of all these ‘paths to accommodation’ between Muslim societies and French colonial authorities, the one followed by Amadu Bamba Mbacke and the Murid movement is ostensibly the longest, the hardest, the most complete, and the most enduring. For these reasons the Murid movement has been much more fully studied – by Paul Marty of the colonial Muslim Affairs Bureau in the early twentieth century and by social scientists in recent decades.

The study of liquor provides an opportunity for re-examining relations between states and economies. Recent works in European social history have shown that liquor occupies an ambiguous space between economic, social and cultural production while studies of liquor in colonial Africa repeatedly raise the problem of how economic freedoms pertaining to liquor were constructed in relation to the perceived character of persons in society. More specifically, the notion of ‘European liquor’ in colonial discourse suggests that the liquor of colonial masters should be aspired to. ‘European liquor’ was repeatedly contrasted to indigenous brews of lower alcoholic content that were pronounced to be uncivilized and primitive. It implied that drinkers of sorghum beer, palm wine and other beverages fermented from African grains and fruits would progress to the ‘superior’ beverages of their colonial masters. Critically, it assumed that transition to the higher alcoholic content required the discipline of ‘European’ lifestyles. Gradualism, however, often gave way to expediency. Colonial regimes repeatedly set aside fears of the effect of ‘foreign’ liquor on African subjects in the interest of revenue and political gains. The importation of gin by the colonial authority in Ghana provided the regime with revenue for its administration; in colonial Nigeria and elsewhere, liquor was used by the state as a means of winning allies among chiefs.

The final ending of slavery in 1838 marked a radical break in the agrarian history of the Cape Colony. The liberated slaves could and did make use of the mobility that emancipation allowed them. This amounted to a real negotiation of the price of labour, for at various points in the nineteenth century the price of labour threatened the very profitability of farming. For the greater part of the century many landlords were led, in the words of one colonial official, ‘to look back…with something very like an envious eye, to the days in which slavery was tolerated by law, because then the slaveholder could command labour whenever it was needed.’

For the former slaveowners, the outcome was agricultural innovation and routine insolvency, and merchants came to have an increasingly important role in the rural political economy. But post-emancipation agrarian structures were not merely shaped by the incursion of merchant capital and the mobility of labour. The former slaveholders displayed a remarkable tenacity. Most significantly, Cape landlords were heirs to a carefully constructed political economy in which the rules governing the circulation of land and wealth were clearly defined in community and familial terms and in which the ties of credit ran both vertically and horizontally. This was a ‘moral community’ in which all were cushioned against the sometimes detrimental effects of participation in a market economy. It is for this reason that the intervention of English-speaking merchants, by not paying due regard to these rules, was of a qualitatively different kind. Community, in short, provides the backdrop against which much of the colony's agrarian history was played out.

This article seeks to provide a rather different interpretation of the post-emancipation Western Cape than is at present on offer.

On 5 October 1905, Baia Bari of Gassin village went before the tribunal de province of Segu seeking a divorce from her husband, Tiemoko Boaré of Koila. Both Baia Bari and Tiemoko Boaré were Muslims. Baia Bari claimed that Tiemoko Boaré had mistreated her and that she was prepared to return the bridewealth. In addition, Baia Bari sought the return of 27,000 cowries she claimed Tiemoko Boaré had taken from her, although she did not present any ‘proof’. Tiemoko Boaré agreed to the divorce but denied having taken the money. The court pronounced the divorce and called for Tiemoko Boaré to recover the bridewealth he and his kin had provided to Baia Bari's kin. The court dismissed Baia Bari's claim for the return of 27,000 cowries, because she had failed to produce evidence of the alleged ‘loan’. Neither Baia Bari nor Tiemoko Boaré appealed the court's verdict.

How Baia Bari came to bring suit for divorce against her husband for mistreatment and how the provincial court, presided over by the leading African notables of Segu, saw fit to intervene in the domestic affairs of the Boaré household is the subject of this article. The data provided in the ‘Register of Civil and Commercial Judgements Rendered by the Provincial Court of Segu during the Third Quarter of 1905’ are not detailed enough for us to ‘hear’ Baia Bari's complaints about marital mistreatment. Nor does the register tell us anything about how the members of the court understood the evidence of mistreatment, which they accepted, and Baia Bari's claim for the return of 27,000 cowries, which they rejected. Despite the sparse annotation of this case, Baia Bari's legal action raises at least two questions. First, from where did the provincial court ‘receive’ the authority to intervene in the domestic affairs of the Boaré household? Second, why did Baia Bari turn to the provincial court to seek the dissolution of her marriage?

DESPITE the substantial and significant body of scholarly work on changing gender relations among African peoples who are (or were) primarily cultivators, the gender relations of predominantly pastoralist peoples have been, with a few notable exceptions, curiously excluded from historical examination. Instead, despite work which has shown the complexities of trying to determine the ‘status’ of East African pastoralist women, pastoralist gender relations seem to exist outside of history and be immune to change. Earlier anthropological studies that addressed pastoral gender relations applied a synchronic model, analyzing them in terms of either the pastoral mode of production or pastoralist ideology. Harold Schneider, for example, contended that among East African pastoralists, men's control of livestock gave them control of women, who were ‘usually thoroughly subordinated to men and thus unable to establish independent identity as a production force’. In his rich ethnography of Matapato Maasai, Paul Spencer claimed that both male and female Maasai believe in ‘the undisputed right of men to own women as “possessions” ’. Marriage, in his view, was therefore ‘the transfer of a woman as a possession from her father who reared her to her husband who rules her’. Melissa Llewelyn-Davies' study of Loita Maasai women in Kenya corroborated Spencer's findings. Loita Maasai women perceived themselves, and were perceived, as ‘property’, to be bought and sold by men with bridewealth. Llewelyn-Davis argued that ‘elder patriarchs’ used their control of property rights in women, children and livestock to control the production and reproduction of both livestock and human beings. Similarly, in his symbolic analysis of pastoral Maasai ideology, John Galaty contended that Maasai men were the ‘real’ pastoralists, while Maasai women were negatively equated with lower status hunters, providing an ideological explanation for their lower status. Thus, whether they attributed their findings to material or ideological sources (or some combination of the two), few anthropologists questioned the ‘undisputed right’ of contemporary male pastoralists ‘to own women as possessions’.

Omwene hango [the owner of the home] is the only person with true authority to discipline children. So, when your husband died, the authority of omwene hango died with him, and you were left alone.

HISTORIANS of gender have shown the importance of documenting and scrutinizing instances in which gender terminologies are invoked and employed. A compelling instance can be found in an examination of the widows of Maragoli. In this upland rural area of about two hundred square kilometers in western Kenya, the dynamic relations surrounding widowhood provide a useful opportunity to analyze the construction of feminine and masculine categories, as well as the political strategies that emerged out of these categories. Widows in this rural part of Kenya were certainly subject to the limitations imposed on them by the invocation of strict gender categorization – perhaps at this point in their lives more than any other. And yet, surprisingly, these widows were able to use such categories for their own purposes. By expressing their grief publicly – usually in ways that focused on their social and economic needs – Maragoli widows not only reinforced the importance of gender categories but also sought to redress their grievances through these very categories. What is important, though, is that they consciously presented themselves as ‘poor widows’, as idealized stereotypes of suffering females who were believed to become needy and helpless at the death of their husbands. They told their stories in ways calculated to solicit sympathy. And this usually worked to their advantage since it placed men in the difficult situation of having to defend their ‘ideal’ masculinity. Only by helping guarantee the economic livelihood and social status of bereaved widows could men uphold their own self-image. Thus the relationship between them was informed by a reciprocity that suggests that the widows were more than passive recipients of male charity. By presenting their grief publicly so as to solicit relief for their sufferings, widows were actively able to turn what men saw as stereotypical feminine behaviour – emotionality, helplessness and weakness – into strengths. That is, by consciously attempting to make men feel more ‘manly’, Maragoli widows were able – at least partially – to exploit existing gender roles to get what they needed.

If the aim of British colonizers, Frederick Lugard wrote, was to civilize Africans ‘and to devote thought to those matters which…most intimately affect their daily life and happiness, there are few of greater importance than the constitution of native courts’. Moreover, he argued that only from native courts employing customary law was it ‘possible to create rudiments of law and order, to inculcate a sense of responsibility, and evolve among a primitive community some sense of discipline and respect for authority’. Britain had not the manpower, the money nor the mettle to rule by force of arms alone. Essentially, in order to make colonial rule work with only a ‘thin white line’ of European administrators, African ideas of custom and of law had to be incorporated into the new state systems. In a very real way, customary law and African courts provided the ideological and financial underpinnings for European colonial rule.

In Kenya from at least the 1920s, but especially in the 1940s and 1950s, administrators struggled with the question of how customary law could best be used in African courts. Prominent among their concerns was the codification of customary law, against which most administrators vigorously fought. British officials believed that reducing African custom to written law and placing it in a code would ‘crystalize’ it, altering its fundamentally fluid or evolutionary nature. Colonizers naturally harbored intentions of using the law to shape society (as Cooper has demonstrated for the Kenya coast) but a fluid, unwritten law provided much greater latitude to pursue these goals. It was necessary, as one administrator put it, to allow ‘changing traditions to meet current altering conditions’.

This case study of Kenya offers a different understanding of the history of customary law.

Scholarly study of Christian independency in southern Africa began with the publication of Bengt Sundkler's Bantu Prophets in 1948. A rich literature subsequently followed, much of it deploying his now classic typology of Ethiopian and Zionist Churches. Nevertheless, the historical study of independency has been limited. As one scholar has recently observed, historians have tended to focus on the Ethiopian-type churches, leaving the study of the Zionist-type to anthropologists and missiologists. The neglect of Zionist-type churches by historians meant that early studies on this form of Christianity were historically weak. Missiologists distorted the whole area of inquiry with theological concerns, at first raising the spectre of syncretistic heresy, and more recently making claims about indigenous authenticity. Anthropologists initially viewed independent churches as fascinating examples of cultural resilience. The movements were seen as sources of community, loyalty and security in the face of the atomising and anomic experience of urbanization; or as foci for ‘the process of modification and adaptation’ taking place throughout rural society. But anthropologists rarely paid attention to independency's origins. Where historians did engage with Zionist-type independency, they did so through the spectacles of nationalist historiography in order to demonstrate independency's supposed proto-nationalist character.

By adopting an international and regional perspective, this article provides an account of the historical origins and early evolution of these churches. Where scholars in the past have tended to disaggregate the movement, essentializing its later racial and geographical boundaries, this paper will draw the early history of the movement together, illuminating its common origin and global character. The basic ingredients of this account have been available in the work of Walter Hollenweger, Jean Comaroff, Sundkler's later book, and more recently, studies by Jim Kiernan and David Chidester. Nevertheless, the historical implication that so-called African independent churches emerged out of the global pentecostal movement continues to be ignored.

The purpose of demonstrating the origins of southern African pentecostalism is not to make the now commonplace historical and anthropological critique of authenticity, although those pursuing a theological agenda which distinguishes African Independent Churches as a separate category of Christianity would do well to pay heed to that critique. Neither is it assumed that analysis of origins explains the meaning and appeal of different southern African pentecostal movements and denominations. Rather, this paper demonstrates that pentecostalism is a global phenomenon: a collection of vital and powerful idioms about illness and healing, evil and purity which make striking resonances with peoples sharing common historical experiences of marginalization from established religion and from the values of twentieth-century industrial capitalism. At the same time pentecostalism has also exhibited a remarkable capacity to localize itself, taking on very distinct meanings in different local contexts. At the heart of this paper lies a comparative analysis of the radically different responses which the movement engendered from the South African and Southern Rhodesian states.

In 1938 or 1939, an uninitiated and unwed girl named Nangombe living in the Uukwaluudhi district of Ovamboland, northern Namibia, became pregnant. If mission and colonial accounts are to be believed, it was not an unusual occurrence at this time, but it had profound consequences for Nangombe and those close to her. By the 1930s, the belief that pre-initiation pregnancies boded ill fortune for clan, chief and community was highly contested, but it was far from extinct. When the chief discovered the pregnancy, he expelled Nangombe. She took refuge in a neighboring society and bore a daughter. While such infants were often killed at birth, Nangombe's was not. Mother and daughter returned home within the year. The chief, enraged by their reappearance, then expelled the entire family.

The problems created by Nangombe's child caused tension in her household and the family was driven to begging for food. Nangombe's mother, seeing the catastrophes already caused by the presence of her illegitimate granddaughter and fearing that worse would come, urged her daughter to kill the child. Nangombe refused, while her mother continued to offer dire predictions that their lineage would be destroyed if the child were left alive. Finally, in July 1941, Nangombe gave into her mother's pressure and strangled her daughter. Her father and the local chief reported her act to colonial officials. The colonial government of South West Africa investigated and sent her to trial with her mother, who was charged as an accessory to murder.

The nature of the case changed abruptly in the colonial capital of Windhoek. Instead of trying Nangombe for murder, the Supreme Court convened to decide whether she was insane, despite testimony from her village asserting that she was sane and that the murder had been a rational act. Her mother was transformed from a co-defendant to a witness to her daughter's physical and mental health. Nangombe was diagnosed as epileptic and, on this basis, committed to a native asylum in Fort Beaufort, South Africa. She remained there until 1946, when she was released and returned home. She lived out the rest of her life in relative anonymity, little noticed in the communities where she lived and invisible to the colonial administration – a far cry from the scrutiny and public interventions which attended her young adulthood.

Like other empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, expansion and slavery went hand in hand in Ethiopia, contrary to imperial justifications based on the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Ethiopian empire incorporated the northwestern border enclaves of Bela-Shangul and Gumuz into greater Ethiopia. Having obtained the subordination of the local Muslim warlords, the emperor then demanded tribute from them in slaves, ivory and gold. Slaves were used as domestics in the imperial palace at Addis Ababa and the houses of state dignitaries and as farm labor on their farms elsewhere in the country. Responding to the demands of the central government as well as their own needs, borderland chiefs raided local villages and neighbouring chiefdoms for slaves. Expanding state control thus led to intensified slave raiding and the extension of the slave trade from the borderlands into the centre of the empire in spite of Ethiopia's public commitment to end slavery and the slave trade as a member of the League of Nations. The end of slavery in Ethiopia only came with the Italian occupation in 1935.

IN 1929, the French colonial administration's forced recruitment of labor for two road construction projects designed to create more effective transportation links between the town of Lambaréné on the Middle Ogooué and the colonial post at Mouila on the Upper Ngounié led to food shortages in several parts of southern Gabon. A disturbing pattern had developed over the previous 15 years where colonial demands for labor led to disruptions in the seasonal cycle of agricultural production. Able-bodied men forced to gather forest products or work as porters to pay the head tax, or required to participate in the construction of colonial infrastructure projects, or even willingly employed as laborers in the growing timber industry, could not meet their traditional obligations to clear fields for women farmers during the long dry season (generally June to September), thus leading to poor harvests and food shortages. French officials at the end of the 1920s were especially anxious as the Fang populations in the northern portion of the colony had experienced severe famine several years earlier, partly due to male workers being recruited into the timber industry. Memories of famine occurring between 1916 and 1918 were also quite vivid among the peoples living along the Ngounié. Labor recruitment for the timber industry and colonial infrastructure projects remained a precarious enterprise at the outset of the 1930s. Yet by the 1940s, the most difficult segment of the Lambaréné–Mouila road network – a 50 kilometer stretch through hilly, forested terrain south of Lambaréné – was completed without resorting to forced labor and without the threat of food shortages. The intervening decade had witnessed the final stage of the transformation of Gabonese labor wrought by the French colonial presence, a transformation that broke the pre-colonial system of labor exploitation controlled by clan leaders. At the outbreak of World War II, the process had advanced to the point that there now existed a ‘labor market’ in the French Equatorial Africa federation integrated into the capitalist wage-earning sector and capable of accomplishing infrastructure projects without disastrous consequences for the local population. We argue that the predominance of the timber industry in Gabon placed these developments on a strangely ambiguous path when compared to the growth of capitalist wage-labor in other parts of the continent.