Le site de Sanga, très important aussi bien du point de vue archéologique que linguistique, historique ou géographique, avait fait l'objet de fouilles en 1957 et 1958. Ces travaux avaient montré l'existence de trois ‘cultures’: Kisalienne, Mulongo et Red Slip, successives ou partiellement contemporaines et datées du VIII–IXe siècle. De nouvelles fouilles en 1974. ont permis d'établir la chronologie du cimetière dont l'utilisation s'étend au moins du VIII au XVIIIe siècle, avec une tradition kisalienne ancienne du VIII au Xe siècle, une tradition kisalienne classique du XI au XIVe siècle et une tradition Kabambienne (Mulongo+Red Slip) du XV au XVIIIe siècle; séquence confirmée par la datation du proche cimetière de Katongo. En 1974 la fouille de trois nouveaux sites, Kamilamba, Kikulu et Malemba Nkulu, a permis de mettre en évidence un âge du fer plus ancien que le kisalien ancien et permettra d'établir la séquence générale de l'âge du fer dans la région; une carte de répartition de plus de quarante sites a pu être dressée. Ces travaux reposent le problème de la localisation du noyau protobantou secondaire qu'une nouvelle et très intéressante théorie linguistique de Coupez, Evrard Ct Vansina fait s'étendre du nord de la zone interlacustre vers le sud. Cette théorie semble compatible avec nos connaissances actuelles pour l'archéologie et l'anthropologie. La nouvelle chronologie archéologique établie pour Sanga doit aussi étre mise en rapport avec les données de l'ethnohistoire relatives à l'origine de la royauté luba, origine que l'on faisait remonter à la période 1500–1600, mais qui pourrait être antérieure au XIIIe siècle. Différentes corrélations seraient alors possibles, mais il est jugé préférable d'attendre la fin des recherches en cours pour se prononcer plus avant.

A series of articles on firearms in Africa published in the Journal of African History in 1971 raised a number of questions which have not been given adequate attention since those articles appeared. In the present paper an attempt is therefore made to shed some light on some of these questions in relation to West Africa in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the basis of import figures from England total imports during this period was estimated to be between 283,000 and 394,000 guns per annum, excluding imports into the Congo–Loango area which Phyllis Martin estimated to be about 50,000 yearly at this time. These guns went largely to the major slave exporting regions of West Africa, especially the Bonny trading area. The sellers of slaves showed a very strong preference for firearms, which is an indication of a strong connexion between guns and the acquisition of slaves. This reinforces the gun-slave cycle thesis. The evidence fails to support the idea that firearms were used primarily for crop protection in West Africa in the eighteenth century. If this were so it should have been reflected in the European goods demanded by sellers of agricultural commodities. It is likely, however, that the use to which firearms were put in West Africa changed after 1900. While the quality of firearms imported into West Africa during the period of this study was generally low, it would seem that those firearms largely served the purposes for which the African buyers purchased them.

The survival of the Semitic-speaking, Muslim townsmen of Harär in the midst of animist Oromo (Galla) who migrated into the eastern highlands of modern Ethiopia in the late sixteenth century and settled as pastoralists is something of an anomaly, at least in the eastern Rift. Other pre-migration settlements of Muslim farmer-traders, presumably also speaking a southern Semitic language, appear to have been submerged and displaced. The Haräri's good fortune is not to be explained by their use of firearms and simple fortifications. Economic interdependence, the awe the newcomers felt for the town's saints and the greater cohesion of the townspeople probably played a greater role than mere self-defence.

A balance of power was needed, however, if the town was not to be swamped. This equilibrium seems to have been upset at the very time that the trade of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden was revived by Egypt in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Neither the succession to the amirate of pacifist princes nor the betrayal of the town to outsiders by the half-Oromo ruler, Amir Muhammad ibn Ali (1856–75), can correctly be blamed for this reverse although these are the excuses given in Haräri tradition. Rather, the repeated appeal to sections of the Oromo by factions within the town in struggles for the throne from the 1820s led to the Haräri becoming clients to neighbours who were still overwhelmingly animist herders little concerned with the commerce on which the townsmen's prosperity depended and little attracted to the titles and Muslim insignia with which the amirs rewarded those of the cultivating Oromo minority who paid taxes and rents in grain and supplied the town with other foodstuffs and its market with crops for export.

Though denigrated in the town's traditions, Amir Muhammad ibn Ali began the systematic proselytization of the surrounding Oromo and sought to induce more of them to cultivate crops for sale. Conversion and farming for the town's market, along with the appointment from the town of officials to replace the Oromo's elected officers, were the means by which, during the Turco-Egyptian occupation (1875–85), rulers with greater military resources obliged the confederation of the four great Oromo clans around the town (the Afran-Qallu) to adopt a way of life more in harmony with the interests of the townsmen. Despite the conquest of Harär and the surrounding Oromo and Somali by non-urban, Christian Ethiopians in the brief reign of Muhammad Ali's son, Amir Abdallahi (1885–7), the Islamic and mercantile legacy of the town was deeply enough rooted by then to flourish among the Afran-Qallu and to distinguish them, like the Haräri themselves, from their conquerors.

Infectious disease and concepts of public health, operating as societal metaphors, seem to have exercised a powerful influence on the origins and development of urban segregation in South Africa. Between 1900 and 1904 bubonic plague, threatening major centres, occasioned the mass removal of African urban populations to hastily established locations at the instigation of medical authorities and other government officials under the emergency provisions of the public health laws. Inchoate urban policy, under tentative consideration since the 1890s as economic development and social change began to stimulate black urban migration, was precipitated by this episode into specific legislation and permanent administration. Cape Town and Port Elizabeth were the two foci of this development in the Cape Colony, where the government locations at Ndabeni and New Brighton exemplify the process. These moves and the effort to consolidate them were to a large degree frustrated by practical administrative, legal, economic and human factors which have characterized the anomalies and contradictions of urban location policy ever since. A black ‘middle class’ resisted the loss of property rights and clung to aspirations of economic and social mobility or legal independence. Especially at Port Elizabeth, where independent peri-urban settlements proliferated, white officials and politicians laboured in an administrative and legal quagmire. White employers and black migrants proved only marginally amenable to location concepts modelled on the principles of quarantine. But ‘the sanitation syndrome’, equating black urban settlement, labour and living conditions with threats to public health and security, became fixed in the official mind, buttressed a desire to achieve positive social controls, and confirmed or rationalized white race prejudice with a popular imagery of medical menace. These issues of urban social order would be repeated again in connexion with such dire events as the 1918 influenza epidemic as the foundations of Union-wide policy and law were laid during and after World War I.

The attempt to introduce an element of Indirect Rule into Northern Rhodesia after 1930 highlighted the extent to which the prestige and local influence of chiefs had been reduced by the loss of political and economic power and religious control. In Bembaland the evangelical work of the White Fathers, who were established in the centre of the area from 1898, contributed to the decline of the chiefs' spiritual authority. The principal mission station of the area was separated from the local Bemba chiefdom of Ituna by a grant of concession from the British South Africa Company, and up to 1914 the religious superior was given the powers of a native chief over the inhabitants of the mission. Within the concession, the economic, political and religious association between villagers and missionaries paralleled the network of relationships which had existed in the chief's capital village. In other missions in Bembaland, chiefs were obliged to admit the establishment of mission stations as a result of a Company policy of granting zones of influence with rights of evangelization to individual missionary societies. The influence of these missions was propagated mainly through the work of itinerant catechists who entered into dialogue with village headmen and established a chain of prayer houses and regular instruction throughout the woodland communities. Attempts at resistance by both chiefs and headmen were largely ineffectual, and by 1930 the White Fathers had, with government approval, achieved considerable influence in Bembaland. During the next decade, this influence was to diminish as colonial policies brought about political and social changes in which the mission had only an ancillary part to play.

Between the world wars, Colonial Office decisions regarding Kenya were subject to two opposed pressures: while the settlers wrestled with officials for greater control of their own affairs, a body of pro-African reformers loudly protested every concession and lobbied for equal rights and an end to the colour bar. This humanitarian lobby was largely the creation of two former colonial servants, Dr Norman Leys and W. McGregor Ross. Working mainly through the Labour Party, these men broadcast their social democratic ethics and demonstrated that the colony's political economy was badly weighted against African progress. They were the precursors of a more full-bodied socialist approach to colonial reform which during World War Two began to permeate the imperial bureaucracy. Until African initiative became a major determinant of Colonial Office policy in the early 1950s, these critics, with their colleagues in religious and humanitarian groups, were able to hold the front against settler self-government in a few indirect ways. Their allegations that Africans had been unjustly deprived of land and that they received far less in services than they paid in taxes were officially corroborated by command papers in the thirties. By creating a body of pro-African opinion which could exert political pressure on the Colonial Office they discouraged official plans to surrender responsible government to the settlers. Their direct impact on the Colonial Office was simply to alienate officials. Records of the confrontations between these reformers and Whitehall reveal that during this period Colonial Office officials were not only powerless to initiate reform. They were also, with few exceptions, uninterested in reforming the colony's political economy.