This article suggests that differences in local political structures and credit protection regimes largely account for Bonny's displacement of Old Calabar as the principal slave port of the Bight of Biafra in the eighteenth century, despite Bonny's reputation for being particularly unhealthy for Europeans. We argue that this displacement occurred in the 1730s, several decades earlier than previously thought. We suggest that this was made possible by the early growth and consolidation of royal authority at Bonny. The use of state authority to enforce credit arrangements in Bonny proved more effective than the mechanisms adopted at its closest rival, Old Calabar, where, in the absence of a centralized political authority similar to the monarchy at Bonny, credit protection before 1807 was based on pawnship.

This article examines the origins and dynamics of Aberewa, an anti-witchcraft movement that rose to prominence in the Akan forest region of Asante and the Gold Coast (Ghana) in 1906–10. It suggests that while the political, social and economic changes of the early colonial period acted as a catalyst for its widespread expansion, Aberewa emerged from an earlier cult called Sakrabundi that was already moving from the savanna into the northern reaches of the Asante empire by the 1880s. The ritual trajectory and popular appeal of Sakrabundi and Aberewa are explored within the context of the ambivalent relationship between the Akan peoples and their northern savanna neighbours. An argument is made for the need to consider witchcraft and anti-witchcraft in Africa as historical processes rather than as a set of structural beliefs and practices.

This article explores the relationship between slave emancipation and the spread of Islam in early colonial French Buguni (southern Mali). It examines the reconstitution of village communities in the wake of violence and enslavement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and documents the ways in which widespread mobility and trans-local social processes fostered the emergence of new forms of religious identification and practice. It demonstrates that many of the region's first Muslims were returning slaves whose conversion was a cultural consequence of slavery. Oral accounts of village histories of Islam are used in reconstructing a history that has left few traces in the archival record.

This article examines the trade in wild rubber that emerged in Upper Guinée, in the colony of Guinée Française, at the end of the nineteenth century. Guinée's rubber boom went through two phases. The first, from the 1880s to 1901, was dominated by local collectors and Muslim traders who directed the trade to the British port of Freetown, Sierra Leone. In the second phase, 1901–13, expatriate merchant houses entered the long-distance trade and, with the help of the colonial state, reoriented the commerce to Conakry, port city and capital of Guinée. The Guinée case offers an alternative perspective to that provided by the better studied rubber markets of Central Africa and South America, and contributes to scholarly debates about export economies, colonial rule and social change. In Guinée, local production and commercial networks maintained significant influence in the market throughout the rubber boom, thwarting colonial efforts to control the trade. The colonial state proved particularly challenged by the practice of rubber adulteration, whereby local collectors and traders corrupted rubber with foreign objects to increase its weight. While the trade exposes the limits of colonial power, rubber also played a largely overlooked role in the social and economic transformations of the period. Evidence suggests that profits from the rubber trade enabled peasants, escaped slaves and former masters to alter their circumstances, accumulate wealth and rebuild homes and communities destroyed during the preceding era of warfare and upheaval.

This essay discusses British discourses and efforts to regulate social policy in both urban and rural areas in late colonial Tanzania. It focuses mainly on questions of social security and especially on the vague concept of social welfare and development, which after the Second World War became a favoured means of expressing a new imperial commitment to colonial people. The British were very reluctant about implementing international standards of social security in Tanganyika, mainly due to the insight that the cost of providing European-scale benefits could not be borne by the colonial regime in such a poor territory. They were far more enthusiastic in pursuing a policy of social development, embodied in social welfare centres and various other schemes. It is argued that in Tanzania, this policy remained focused on peasantization rather than on proletarianization and was characterized by a disconnection between Colonial Office mandarins in London, attempting to create bourgeois, respectable African middle classes, and colonial officials in Tanganyika, seeking to maintain the political legitimacy of the chiefs and headmen. Most Africans ignored rather than challenged many of these state efforts. However, the nationalist party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) under Julius Nyerere believed in these programmes and continued such dirigiste and poorly financed improvement schemes after independence.