Showing papers in "The Journal of African History in 1979"

Coping with the Contradictions: The Development of the Colonial State in Kenya, 1895–1914

Abstract: By drawing on the current Marxist debate about the nature of the capitalist state, this article argues that the colonial state was obliged to be more interventionist than the mature capitalist state in its attempts to manage the economy, since colonies were distinguished by the way in which they articulated capitalism to local modes of production. This posed severe problems of social control, since the capitalist sector required the preservation of indigenous social institutions while also extracting resources from them. In early colonial Kenya this problem was mitigated by a rough compatibility between the needs of settler capital and the patronage exercised by African chiefs within a peasant sector which was expanded to solve the colonial administration's initial need for peace and revenue. The peasant sector was not destroyed, rather it was represented in the state, which never ceased thereafter to be plagued by the conflicts between the two modes of production over which it presided.

On the Antiquity of Agriculture in Ethiopia

Abstract: From various kinds of evidence it can now be argued that agriculture in Ethiopia and the Horn was quite ancient, originating as much as 7,000 or more years ago, and that its development owed nothing to South Arabian inspiration. Moreover, the inventions of grain cultivation in particular, both in Ethiopia and separately in the Near East, seem rooted in a single, still earlier subsistence invention of North-east Africa, the intensive utilization of wild grains, beginning probably by or before 13,000 b.c. The correlation of linguistic evidence with archaeology suggests that this food-collecting innovation may have been the work of early Afroasiatic-speaking communities and may have constituted the particular economic advantage which gave impetus to the first stages of Afroasiatic expansion into Ethiopia and the Horn, the Sahara and North Africa, and parts of the Near East.

The problem of slavery in african studies

Abstract: In the past few years the study of slavery in different parts of Africa has been transformed from a neglected subject to one of the most fashionable.1 The volume and quality of empirical work makes it both possible and essential for new conceptual approaches to be developed, yet current syntheses and the questions most of the local studies are asking reflect weaknesses in the theoretical basis of the social sciences, as well as a peculiar anxiety about the subject of slavery itself. Moreover, Africanists have profited little from two decades of extensive research and debate on slavery in the Americas. By and large, Africanists and Americanists are studying slavery in isolation from one another, venturing into the others' territory only to make a point about their own. Americanists have found African slavery to be a conveniently benign foil against which the exploitation and degradation of American slavery stand out. Africanists have been anxious to dissociate slavery in Africa from its bad image in the Americas.2 Eager to call attention to the achievements of African kings and entrepreneurs, scholars have often refused to face the question of whether in Africa, as in most of the world, the concentration of wealth and power also meant exploitation and subordination. David Brion Davis has argued that in Western culture slavery has always posed a moral problem, a set of contradictions stemming from the duality of the slave as property and yet a person, as a living part of a society and yet an outsider. But the problem needed to be solved only after the development of capitalism, when it became necessary to understand and justify a new economic order, in which the complex rights in land of cultivators and the complex relations of subordination and reciprocity that they had had with their lords were transformed into private property and a market in labour power. The architects of the new economic framework, the political economists, and of the new moral order, the humanitarians, came to define slavery as a 'peculiar institution', both archaic and evil, and wage labour as no system at all, but simply the workings of the universal and self-propelling laws of the market, freed of the constraints of the tyranny and paternalism of the lord.3 For all the subsequent development of the social sciences,

The Methodology of Historical Climate Reconstruction and its Application to Africa

Abstract: This article deals with climatic reconstruction over a period of centuries, on the basis of indirect evidence found in historical and geographical sources. Histories, archives, local chronicles and journals of travellers and settlers contain references to lakes, landscapes, famines, droughts and floods, as well as occasional descriptions of climate and meteorological measurements. Such information can be combined with evidence from geology, palynology or the study of tree-rings to support hypotheses regarding climate and environment several centuries ago.This methodology is here described and used to reconstruct the trend of rainfall fluctuation in Africa over the past millennium. Two approaches are considered: the one seeks to determine absolute variation (thus assessing whether particular episodes were wetter or drier than today); the other focuses on short-term climatic anomalies (e.g. droughts) in which rainfall differed from the mean prevailing at the time, without seeking to relate them to present conditions.The results obtained from this study suggest that during the past millennium there have been two periods of relatively wet conditions in the semi-arid regions south of the Sahara: between the eighth and fourteenth centuries, and between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Evidence for these episodes, and for synchronous fluctuations elsewhere in Africa is presented in the text.

A New Survey of Radiocarbon and Thermoluminescence Dates for west Africa

Abstract: There are signs that the familiar bias towards research on the Later Stone Age of the southern Sahara and Sahel and on the Iron Age of other parts of West Africa is beginning to be redressed, although Nigeria and Ghana still furnish the vast majority of dates from the southern coastal states. Historical and protohistorical archaeology is becoming increasingly popular, and some areas, for example southern Mali, are receiving serious attention for the first time. Dates are now appearing in large numbers; this paper reports on 355 new radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dates.Multi-disciplinary research has helped to clarify the Holocene environmental and cultural-stratigraphic sequence in several areas, including the Air and Tenere in Niger and coastal Mauretania and Senegal. There is now strong evidence of a centre of copper metallurgy in the Azelik region of Niger in the 1st millennium b.c. which may well have facilitated the spread of iron working to Nigeria. At the same time, new dates from Mali may indicate a second diffusion route through the western Sahara. In Nigeria, new and early dates for the Nok culture are supported by thermoluminescence dating. Recent work on the later Metal Age of Senegal has permitted the description of four partially overlapping zones, and should soon lead to understanding of their internal and external relationships. Similarly, a substantial body of data has been accumulated, though not yet published, on the Iron Age of the Inland Niger delta. In the more southerly parts of West Africa, several new dates from just north of the forest refer to the emergence of the earliest Akan groups in Ghana and of Oyo in Nigeria. Previously reported dates from Ife and Benin have now been supplemented by a series of thermoluminescence dates.

Labour Supply and the Genesis of South African Confederation in the 1870s

Abstract: Lord Carnarvon's scheme for a South African Confederation in the 1870s owed much more than has been generally recognized to influences emanating from Natal. Large employers of African labour recognized in the 1860s that the local population could not provide a cheap stable workforce and that immigrant workers from the African interior would be increasingly important to the prosperity of the colony. Theophilus Shepstone, Natal's Secretary for Native Affairs, used all the resources at his disposal to smooth the way for migrant labour. The development of diamond mining in Griqualand West and, to a lesser extent, gold mining in the Lydenburg district of the Transvaal diverted large numbers of African workers away from Natal and set off a frantic search for new sources of labour which underscored the importance of Mocambique and Central Africa as reservoirs of black labour. While planters, traders and officials in Natal worked to keep labour supply routes open between the Transvaal and Portuguese territory, officials in Griqualand West were recommending annexation of territories along the ‘missionary road’ in order to stop Transvaal Afrikaners from blocking labour supply routes from Central Africa. The revival of an active British campaign against the East African slave trade opened another potential source of African labour which Shepstone's former border agent Frederic Elton tried to divert to Natal while serving first as an assistant to Sir Bartle Frere and John Kirk in Zanzibar, and later as British Consul in Mocambique.Shepstone arrived in London at a crucial point in the development of Carnarvon's thinking on southern African affairs and impressed him with his lucid analysis of the interrelation of African administration, economic development and labour supply. Carnarvon's plans for confederation reflected the advice which he was continously receiving from Shepstone and Elton. Their argument for confederation emphasized the essentially unitary nature of the developing southern African economy.

The Development of British Colonial Film Policy, 1927–1939, with special reference to East and Central Africa

Abstract: From the 1920s the British government sought to manipulate the powerful new propaganda weapon of the cinema to the advantage of the Empire. Unsuccessful attempts were made to break the American stranglehold on the colonial cinema circuit which was thought to pose a threat to British commercial and political interests. Attempts to control what were seen as the harmful effects of the commercial cinema were made through strict censorship. The Colonial Office provided guidelines for policy and organization. South Africa set precedents for racial discrimination in censorship and segregation in viewing which were adopted in much of East and Central Africa. The Colonial Office and the British Film Institute were both anxious to see an experiment using the film in adult education. Progress was held back through lack of money until 1935 when the Carnegie Corporation decided to finance the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment, a project of the International Missionary Council. The B.E.K.E., an experiment in the production of films for the educational and cultural adjustment of Africans to western society, was conducted in East and Central Africa between 1935 and 1937, with the Colonial Office playing an advisory role. No permanent organization developed out of the B.E.K.E. due to lack of finance and lack of interest among the East African governments. When the British government created the Colonial Film Unit in 1939, its purpose was to make war propaganda films for the colonies. Later in the war, the work of the C.F.U. was extended to the making of instructional films, which became its main function once the war had ended.

‘Chimurenga’: the Shona Rising of 1896–97

Abstract: There was a basic similarity between the way in which Rhodesian colonial historians looked at the central Shona chimurenga (rising) of 1896 and T. O. Ranger's seminal Revolt in Southern Rhodesia 1896–7: both thought in terms of a pre-planned conspiracy led by religious authorities and a simultaneous outbreak on a given signal. Ranger' reconstruction of the organization of the chimurenga, however, depended partly upon the misreading and misquotation of the sources. In fact, the rising was neither pre-planned nor simultaneous. In the second quarter of 1896 limited resistance to European rule was being carried on in separate, unconnected outbreaks and some communities were thinking of starting a full-scale hondo (war); the threat of famine caused by locusts led certain central Shona leaders to contact the religious leader Mkwati in the Ndebele area, then in revolt against the Europeans, in search of locust medicine. News of European defeats transmitted by these contacts led to a full hondo in the Umfuli valley, which triggered a ‘ripple effect’ in which Shona communities resisted or collaborated as the news reached them. The element of religious leadership was limited and the element of central pre-planning non-existent. This makes the success and commitment of the local Shona communities all the more impressive, even though it was a traditionalist rather than a proto-nationalist rising.

The idea of a british imperial african army

Abstract: Britain maintained small colonial armed forces in the African territories for internal security and local defence. In four periods of international crisis, when the British Empire was faced with a shortage of military manpower, it was proposed that African troops be used in imperial roles outside Africa. These proposals were closely related to the increasing opposition by India to the Indian Army being used for imperial defence in Asia and the Middle East. During 1916–18 a parliamentary and press lobby in Britain clamoured for a ‘million black army’. In the years 1919–21 the War Office attempted to raise an African army for use in the Middle East. On both occasions the Colonial Office vigorously opposed these schemes and the crises were resolved without using African troops. The emergencies of 1939–42 changed Colonial Office policy. African troops were used in the East African campaign against the Italians, as labour units in the Middle East, and then, after 1943, as combatants in Asia where they fought as complete formations within the Commonwealth forces. At the end of the Second World War the Colonial Office wished to maintain a sizeable African army at Imperial expense. However, post-war defence cuts reduced the African armed forces although a small parliamentary and service lobby unsuccessfully urged that an African Army be created as an imperial instrument, and to take the place of the Indian Army.

Cushitic and Nilotic Prehistory: New Archaeological Evidence from North-West Kenya

Abstract: Recent archaeological research conducted west of Lake Turkana, Kenya has shed new light on the prehistory of eastern Cushitic and Nilotic speakers in East Africa. The Namoratunga cemetery and rock art sites, dated to about 300 B.C., are clearly related to the prehistory of Eastern Cushitic speakers. The newly defined Turkwell cultural tradition, dated to the first millennium a.d., is associated with eastern Nilotic prehistory. Lopoy, a large lakeside fishing and pastoralist settlement, is discussed in terms of eastern Nilotic prehistory. The archaeological data agrees with the independent findings of historical linguistics.

A History of Madagascar - Madagascar Rediscovered . By Mervyn Brown. London: Damien Tunnacliffe, 1978. Pp. x + 310. £7.95.

Abstract: The Victorians were very interested in Madagascar. They were attracted mainly by the apparent success of British missionaries working in the kingdom of Imerina. British scholars, most of them connected with the London Missionary Society, wrote extensively on every aspect of the island and its history. Since Madagascar's annexation by France in 1895, the English-speaking world has largely ignored this rich historical heritage. Mervyn Brown, a diplomat by profession, has set out to help rectify this neglect. In many respects he continues the best Victorian tradition of amateur scholarship, with its attendant merits and a few of its weaknesses. His purpose, he writes, is to rediscover the history of Madagascar' mainly but by no means exclusively through British eyes.' This he attempts to do in a series of chapters which are accurate and highly readable, but which do not really amount to a history of Madagascar. Half the book is devoted to the history of Imerina from about 1650 to 1895. There are also chapters on the geography of Madagascar; on the European pirates who once infested the island's coasts; and on the Robinson Crusoe-like adventures of Robert Drury. Each of theses chapters makes very good reading. Their inclusion, though, leaves little space for discussion of the history of Madagascar outside Imerina. The book inevitably invites comparison with Hubert Deschamps' Histoire de Madagascar. Unlike Professor Deschamps, Mr Brown succumbs to the temptation to tell the story of those peoples and periods which are served by rich source-material. He is therefore unable to challenge Deschamps as the author of the best general history of the subject, at least for those who are able to read French. On the other hand, Mr Brown has some notable successes in summarizing complex arguments. His account of the rise of the Merina kingdom, for example, is admirably clear. The book has very few mistakes apart from the usual quota of printing errors. It is a pity that the author's bibliography does not include any of the extensive literature in Malagasy, especially as we are told in the foreword that he speaks the language well. Specialists will find nothing new in the book, although the chapters on the church and the British missionaries constitute the best single account of that subject. The book is aimed at a wide readership, which it deserves.

Slaves, Commoners and Landlords in Bulozi, c. 1875 to 1906

Abstract: The much-researched history of Bulozi in the late nineteenth century is re-assessed here from a marxist viewpoint. A hereditary class of landlords owned the principal means of production and extracted rent in labour services and in kind from the direct producers. Tribute was also paid to the king and royal family, in recognition of the ultimate royal ownership of the means of production. Surplus was employed to increase leisure time, to indulge in conspicuous consumption, to raise the level of the productive forces through investment, and to maintain repressive political and ideological apparatuses. The main weight of oppression fell on the slaves, with free commoners in an ambivalent position. Slaves were both economically exploited and socially discriminated against, and their position was analogous but by no means identical to that of European serfs. The evolution of class struggle was greatly affected by articulation with capitalism and colonialism. The first contacts stimulated exploitation by providing a larger market and more effective means of repression, but the colonial state later intervened to abolish slavery in order to intensify the flow of migrant labour to the capitalist heartlands of southern Africa.

Passages in the Life of a White Anthropologist: Max Gluckman in Northern Rhodesia

Abstract: The period following the world slump saw increased British official interest in applying the new science of social anthropology to colonial problems. This paper looks at the eight years (1939–47) during which the distinguished South African anthropologist, Max Gluckman, held the post of Assistant Anthropologist and later Director at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Northern Rhodesia, and carried out field research among the Lozi of Barotseland. His post was also referred to as one in ‘functional’ or ‘applied’ anthropology, and the R.L.I, as a whole was intended to contribute to the solution of the urgent social problems thrown up by the growth of the mining industry. It is suggested that Gluckman's own shift in outlook from a belief in academic aloofness to a concern for active involvement with the administration, as well as being part of a wider change in attitudes, was also linked to his personal situation and to the unifying effects of the Second World War within N. Rhodesia. Gluckman was able to gain support for the ambitious research programme which was to put N. Rhodesia in the forefront of the post-war policy of organizing social research through local institutes, but his attempt to engage directly in practical affairs in N. Rhodesia proved disillusioning. Although the N. Rhodesian government continued to support the Institute and in theory welcomed Gluckman's offers of co-operation, it is shown that in practice little came of his attempts to apply either his specific knowledge of the Lozi or his general theoretical knowledge to administrative problems. Any influence he may have exerted on the colonial evolution of N. Rhodesia therefore remained indirect, but his position was one in harmony with the underlying trends towards decolonization.

Le Colonat Agricole Européen au Congo-Belge, 1910–1960: Questions Politiques et Economiques

Abstract: This article deals both with the political history and with the economy of European agricultural settlement in the Belgian Congo. It concludes that the role of settler farming in the life of the Congo was essentially political. The colonat was only marginal in a colonial economy long based on the extensive exploitation of African labour by industrial and commercial firms. European agriculture was able to compete neither with big business in labour recruiting, nor with African cultivators in price advantage. Settlers only survived with the benefit of government subsidies and a monopoly over some branches of production. White farming was maintained for political reasons both in peripheral regions of the colony, and on the fringes of the larger cities, but from i960 it was rapidly abandoned. In Rhodesia, under different ecological and historical circumstances, black industrial workers were fed by black agricultural workers. In the Belgian Congo it was the African peasant who fed the industrial worker, though for a mean return.

The Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society and the South African Natives' Land Act of 1913*

Abstract: This article seeks to explain how and why the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society (A.P.S.) came to support the South African Natives' Land Act of 1913 when African political opinion in South Africa opposed it. The reasons for the Society's position are sought in its predisposition in favour of segregatory policies, but also in several other political considerations including, it is suggested, its need to retain the support of the imperial government in the interests of its campaign against the British South Africa Company. The A.P.S.'s attitude emerged in its handling of the South African Native National Congress's deputation to England in 1914, and in its dispute with one of the deputation's members – Sol Plaatje – who remained in the country until 1917. The dispute intensified with the publication of Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa, whilst the direction of the A.P.S.'s policy of support for the South African government came to be challenged from within by two of Plaatje's supporters on the A.P.S.'s Executive Committee. Eventually, relations between the A.P.S. and the S.A.N.N.C, were broken off completely, and Plaatje's two supporters were voted off the Society's Executive Committee. Opposition to the Society's position over the Natives' Land Act continued to be expressed, however, in a committee set up to carry on Plaatje's campaign after his return to South Africa. One of the effects of this, and of the Society's activities generally in relation to the Natives' Land Act, was to emphasize its degree of isolation from currents of opinion that might have provided a new base of support at a time when it particularly needed this.

The British and the Kikuyu 1890–1905: A Reassessment

Abstract: This article argues that trade rather than confrontation was the predominant theme of the early years of interaction between the Kikuyu and the British. It suggests that the Southern Kikuyu in particular enjoyed an important initial period of co-existence with the British, the economic basis of which was a rapid expansion in the 1890s of an already existing trade in agricultural produce with caravans moving along the road to Uganda. This development was, however, not universally welcome among the Southern Kikuyu, and there was a clash of interest between those concerned with an increased production of agricultural surplus, and those whose economic interests were centred on livestock. The death of Waiyaki removed from the scene the most influential trading elder and facilitated, from the areas previously under his influence, hostile opposition to the trading activities now centred upon the permanent fort of the Imperial British East Africa Company. The steady increase of food production encouraged the emergence of a number of Southern Kikuyu traders; this was particularly true for Kinanjui, who had established himself at a time when the military resources of the I.B.E.A. Co. were negligible and poorly organized. It is argued that Kinanjui's status can no longer be regarded as merely the result of assistance from the British. It was significant that the British did not at any time prior to 1900 deploy at Fort Smith a permanent garrison of troops. There existed instead a balance of military resources which made possible an important local arena of political activity between the Southern Kikuyu and the British. The Northern Kikuyu, by contrast, despite their longer-standing trading contacts with the coast, were denied similar opportunities by virtue of more positive policies of control directed initially towards revenue collection.

European Traders and the Mpondo Paramountcy, 1878-1886

Abstract: For a brief period between about 1878 and 1886, European traders in Eastern Pondoland played an important role in the politics of the chieftaincy. In these years the formerly amicable relationship between the Mpondo chiefs and the Cape Colony broke down. An expansionist colonial government confiscated the Mpondo port at St Johns, took control of an area claimed by the paramountcy, and threatened the political independence of the chiefs. The traders, especially a few larger wholesale firms, allied themselves with the paramount in his struggle to regain his land and port. Some traders feared that colonial encroachments would affect the concessions they had obtained from the paramount and that customs duties charged by the Cape at Port St Johns would undermine their competitiveness. Others, faced with an acute trading depression in 1882–3, sought to increase their share of the Pondoland market and hoped that conflict between the Cape and the Mpondo would stimulate a new boom. The chiefs, on their side, were receptive to the political overtures of the traders. As traders penetrated the area, they began to lose control over production and became increasingly dependent on taxing trade and granting concessions. They had lost confidence in missionary scribes and looked to the traders to provide secretarial skills. Various groups of traders could also give aid in the prosecution of Mpondo diplomacy by supplying firearms, opening negotiations with the imperial authorities, and establishing a new port. The alliance was formed at a specific moment in the penetration of merchant capital into an independent African polity. It serves to illustrate that some traders were prepared to act independently of the colonial powers in order to protect their interests.

Blood Partnership in Theory and Practice: the Expansion of Muslim Power in Dar Al-Kuti*

Abstract: This article examines the institution of blood partnership, first theoretically, and then with reference to northern Equatorial Africa and Dar al-Kuti, a Muslim slave-raiding and slave-trading state. Contemporary anthropologists described blood partnership schematically as the exchange of blood and of conditional curses between two individuals or groups for the purpose of guaranteeing co-operation. They also suggested that blood partnership created bonds analogous to kinship. Blood alliances were concluded almost exclusively between parties who were not related genealogically, and promoted security, co-operation and long-distance trade. They were particularly important among societies outside highly centralized states, where they provided the ideology and mechanism for wider action embracing unrelated groups. Northern Equatorial Africa was just such an area, and, in the nineteenth century at least, blood pacts were very common. The article looks at blood partnership in the region generally, pointing out how foreigners, Muslims as well as Europeans, adopted the institution as a means of allying themselves with local leaders. Muslim penetration of the region is examined, and the infiltration of the zariba system of the southwestern Sudan into Ubangi-Shari (in what is now the Central African Empire) is outlined. The second half of the article deals specifically with Dar al-Kuti. Oral testimony and written evidence are combined to present a picture of blood partnership among the Banda, the most important non-Muslim people included in the state. The analysis is then extended to show how Muslims in the region, mainly the Runga from the Chad basin, led by Kobur and then by al-Sanusi, used blood pacts to foster their political and economic ambitions among non-Muslim peoples south of the Islamic frontier.

Nxele, Ntsikana and the Origins of the Xhosa Religious Reaction

Abstract: The sudden expulsion of the Xhosa across the Fish River in 1811–12 created a practical and conceptual crisis which the traditional political authorities were unable to resolve. Two commoners, Nxele and Ntsikana, emerged in this vacuum, each proposing his own solution to the problems posed by the white irruption. Although these responses were religious responses, they were neither irrational nor incomprehensible. Xhosa religion had long functioned as an instrument for the control of the material world. By incorporating selected Christian concepts with the Xhosa world-view, Nxele and Ntsikana were able to provide the Xhosa with acceptable explanations of past events and prescriptions for future action.Nxele urged resistance and Ntsikana preached submission, but an examination of their personal histories shows that these final conclusions were more the product of exterior pressure than interior revelation. It may be suggested that the future reputations of the two men, like their past actions, will be determined more by the popular mood than by anything they themselves did or said.

Towards a Less Orthodox History of Hausaland

Abstract: The historiography of Hausaland has laboured under a strong tradition of orthodoxy which recent secondary works have inherited from the more-or-less primary oral-cum-written sources. General cultural evidence (linguistic, ethnographic and archaeological) has been regarded as subsidiary, so that its potential for reconceptualization and for critical reevaluation of the conventional sources and orthodox interpretations has been missed. Instead, antiquarian approaches have been encouraged. Thus the view has persisted that Hausa as a cultural and linguistic entity has an antiquity running to several millennia, and also that it originated in the Sahara or around Air, whence it was pushed southward by desiccation or by Tuareg nomads. Contrarily, the clear message of linguistic geography and of Hausa's place within the Chadic family is that Hausa. expanded from east to west across the savanna belt of northern Nigeria. And the relative homogeneity of the language and culture within this vast zone indicates that the spread is quite recent (within the present millennium, say). It would have involved some assimilation, of previously settled peoples of the northern Nigerian plains, most of whom wouldl have spoken languages of the ‘Plateau’ division of Greenberg's Benue–Congo subfamily, of Niger-Congo.This Hausaization, as it proceeded from its old bases in eastern Hausaland, would have been both a cultural and an ecological process, through which woodland would have been converted into more open and continuous savanna to support grain-cultivation and a denser peasant population. This process would have reached western Hausaland (Zamfara and Kebbi) around the middle of this millennium. Cattle – and Fulani herdsmen – would in time have played an important role in this cultural ecology (and in restricting the tsetse zones).The old theory of a northern origin for the Hausa is bound up with the problem of Gobir in north-western Hausaland. Gobir's claim to be one of the original seven kingdoms (Hausa bakwai) is probably a late invention. Moreover, the common assumption that Gobirawa Hausa migrated from Air seems to derive from a misinterpretation of the written sources.Finally the bakwai legends are reconsidered. Despite the scepticism of some modern critics, the legends appear to reflect, albeit in idealized form, a real historical development. They represent a foundation charter for the Hausa as a multi-state ethnicity, and enshrine the vague memory of how Hausaland and ‘Hausaness’ began from a series of small centres and hill-bases on its eastern side. Thus the interesting argument of Abdullahi Smith, that the Hausa people emerged long before state systems arose among them, is disputed. Rather, these should be seen as two facets of a single process during the present millennium.

European Attitudes and African Realities: the rise and fall of the Matolac chiefs of south-east Tanzania

Abstract: Successive Europeans in south-east Tanzania looked for an ethnically based political authority under whom to live or with whom to work. Bishop Edward Steere of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa predicted the existence of very large tribal and linguistic ‘nations’ when this turned out not to be so, the UMCA missionaries who had settled at Masasi sought anxiously for some influential chief who could be represented as heading an ethnic polity; first German and then British administrators over-readily assumed that the chiefs whom they installed as akidas did in fact represent such ethnicities; finally, in the late 1920s, the British instituted historical research prior to the establishment of Indirect Rule, which was intended to reflect the ethnic and political complexity of the region. This European preoccupation with ethnicity bore little relation to the actualities of the region, which from the nineteenth-century incursions of the Yao, Makua and Makonde had constituted a mosaic of small, autonomous and ethnically mixed groupings. Nevertheless, certain African adventurers were able to take advantage of the European need for allies to build up their power, to become recognised as ‘chiefs’, and ultimately to become regarded as leaders of ethnicities. This was the case with Matola I and Matola II of Newala who between them developed their polity from a very small scattering of huts to a large and prosperous paramountcy. Within the Matola polity various social and cultural processes were at work to produce a common sense of identity, but these processes had not fully eroded the marks of the varying ethnic identities of those who belonged or submitted to the polity. The Indirect Rule inquiries, therefore, with their fanatical emphasis upon ethnicity as the only legitimate base for political authority had the result of dismantling the Matola polity and thereby destroying the only effective local nucleus of political consolidation.

The expansion of the Fante and the emergence of Asante in the eighteenth century

Abstract: This article attempts to assess the importance of Asante influence in the consolidation of the Fante in the eighteenth century. It shows at the outset that mis-translation of Willem Bosman's early eighteenth-century work has led to an erroneous conception of the Fante polities as being incapable of acting on common interests. Between 1700 and 1724 the Fante conquered surrounding states such as Asebu, Fetu, Cabesterra, Acron (Gomoa), and pockets of Etsi, and established a system of domination over trade on the coast thereafter. It is suggested that this development was not the result of Asante activities on the coast, but rather was linked with the presence of the English, who supplied firearms to the Fante. The Fante were constrained to maintain good relations with Asante because they were determined to be the exclusive middlemen for the slaves which came down from Asante and beyond. At the same time, however, the Fante, like other coastal states (e.g. Aowin, Wasa, Denkyera and Akyem), at times feared invasion by Asante and therefore protected themselves through a system of local political alliances.

The Mobilization of Labour and the Production of Knowledge: The Antiquarian Tradition in Rhodesia

Abstract: One of the advantages of looking at white society in Southern Rhodesia is that it was a very simple society by contrast to South Africa and that its essential structures show up very clearly. This was certainly true of the business of producing models of African societies, customs and conduct. In South Africa there grew up a cluster of intellectual ‘experts’ on Africans – including a distinguished group of anthropologists. In South Africa, therefore, the connexion between the requirements of the white economy and the most influential models of African societies was complex and indirect. In Rhodesia there was no such tradition of indigenous social science. As a contributor to the Native Affairs Department Annual admitted in 1956, ‘of all areas in Africa Southern Rhodesia was the most backward in anthropological knowledge of its own indigenous peoples’. In Southern Rhodesia the men who administered Africans, mobilized them for employment and kept them working were also the men who produced the authorized versions of the African past, of African customs and of African ‘personality’.

White Presence and Power in Africa

Abstract: The articles in this special issue are revised versions of papers delivered in September 1978 at the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom conference on ‘Whites in Africa – Past, Present and Future’. The choice of conference topic aroused some controversy. Addressing himself to the ‘Pink ASAUK’, one correspondent enclosed a cutting from West Africa in which news of the forthcoming conference was ominously included on the same page as a report on ‘Freetown's Rubbish Plan’. The writer made two points: ‘Human beings are citizens, not colours or numbers as your hollow minds suggest’; ‘Now that Africa is nearly free from imperialism and exploitation…dishonest intellectuals from British universities are conspiring to draw a new map of Africa.’

Man With a Mission: Oswald Pirow and South African Airways, 1933-1939

Abstract: Oswald Pirow was an active and influential cabinet minister in the Hertzog administration in South Africa for more than a decade. Perhaps more than anyone else in office, Pirow shaped the new aggressive Union policies in external matters which stressed a ‘South Africa First’ ideology. Given a free hand by Hertzog, and as minister responsible for defence and transport, Pirow aimed to weaken the British connexion, enhance South Africa's image, and expand Union influence throughout ‘white’ Africa to the north. The agent charged to carry out these new policies was South African Airways, organized by Pirow in 1934 as Africa 's first national airline. As the Union 's ‘chosen instrument’, SAA was used by Pirow to challenge British paramountcy in the Rhodesias and East Africa, in direct conflict with Britain 's own struggling Imperial Airways. The rivalry was for routes and services, mail and passengers, and ultimately for prestige. By 1939, Pirow 's airline was established in operation from Kenya southward, and winning the struggle with its fleet of modern Junkers aircraft. Pirow was the promoter, the organizer and the hard bargainer with whom the British had to deal time and time again. For technical and financial reasons, Imperial Airways could seldom match Pirow 's ambitions, and on the eve of World War II, Pirow could claim great success for his air-minded policy. Only the coming of the war was to remove Pirow and his policy from the scene.

Le Mythe Parisien de la Mise en Valeur des Colonies Africaines à l'Aube du XXe Siècle: La Commission des Concessions Coloniales 1898–1912

Abstract: La ‘mise en valeur’ des colonies africaines pouvait-elle etre entreprise par des societes auxquelles l'Etat attribuerait de grandes concessions foncieres? La Commission des concessions coloniales, creee en juillet 1898, adopta ce principe de ‘colonisation moderne’, hâtivement mis en vigueur au Congo. Pour Madagascar et l'A.O.F. on prit le temps de larges consultations aupres des administrateurs et des milieux commerciaux; en depit de l'avis favorable prononce par la Commission, le ministre decida de surseoir a l'octroi de grandes concessions territoriales dans l'ouest africain, suivant en cela le gouverneur general Ballay. Les responsables locaux ne partagerent point le mythe de la mise en valeur par les grandes societes, mythe auquel se tint aveuglement la Commission des concessions coloniales qui controlait au plan juridique le regime mis en place au Congo; c'est le gouverneur Merlin qui imposa la reforme de 1910–12. Des politiques et des affairistes – tels qu'Andre Lebon, Du Vivier de Streel, Binger, Guillain, – avaient fait passer un dessein nouveau d'action coloniale, mais la ‘mise en valeur’ sans cesse invoquee n'avait pas alors de contenu economique veritablement defini.

Population in African History

Abstract: In April 1977 a diverse group of scholars met in Edinburgh to pool knowledge and ideas about the history of African population. In accordance with the modest Edinburgh custom, the organizers and editors have not put their names on the back of the collected papers. So let Christopher Fyfe, David McMaster and Grace Hunter be congratulated on a timely and successful enterprise, on the promptness (regrettably not matched by this reviewer) with which the papers have been given to the public, and on the low price which has been set upon them. There are here close on 200,000 words of photographed typescript, with notes, maps, graphs and tables. Granted that the binding will not survive rough handling, and granted also that publication was assisted by the Ministry of Overseas Development, the gap between the actual price and that which would have been demanded for a printed volume of this sort, unlikely to achieve mass sales, is so wide as to suggest that in academic publication the trend away from the conventional book is likely to accelerate. Taken together with the ASAUK collection which appeared in 1975,' the present volume may also indicate the beginning of an intellectual trend, such that population change is likely to succeed state-formation and external economic relations as the dominant theme of African historiography. Moreover, whereas the contributors to the earlier volume interpreted 'the population factor' very widely, ranging freely over such distant territories as ethnicity, linguistics and urban sociology, the Edinburgh conference had an exclusively historical orientation and was firmly focused on the twin themes of migration and natural increase, especially the latter. This trend may not be universally welcomed. In some quarters the very words 'population growth' are seen as a diversionary tactic, an excuse for the miseries which ought to be laid at the door of capitalist imperialism. There is some ground for this suspicious reaction, in that 'population studies' have undoubtedly had a strong malthusian bias, sometimes quite openly consisting of the search for means to prevent the poor from breeding to the point where they become an embarrassment to the rich. But historical demography, if not other kinds, ought to be especially welcomed on the left, because it must direct attention away from ruling-class concerns and towards the fundamental conditions of material life, and because it may be expected to illumine the mechanisms of the transitions from one mode of production to another. In any case, though few of the Edinburgh participants were marxians, they were anti-malthusians almost to a man. There was, it is true, one plea by a prehistorian for the superior merits of the 'equilibrium' achieved by the huntergatherers; but any nostalgic enthusiasm for that way of life would probably have been damped by the evidence assembled by his colleague Creighton Gabel who, in one of the most substantial contributions, showed that human life in the Pleistocene, though not necessarily brutish, was pitiably short. For the rest, nearly all the discussion started from the premiss that population growth was a good thing, both in its own right as a symptom of prosperity and as a precondition of general development. The assumption was clearly that shortage of people has in the past been a major constraint on economic growth; and there was interesting support for this in Polly Hill's study of the ' Kano Close-Settled

The Life and Times of Cupido Kakkerlak

Abstract: Cupido Kakkerlak's story provides a concrete example of Khoi experience under the impact of colonization at the beginning of the nineteenth century. During his first forty years or so he lived on Boer farms, learned a sawyer's skills, accumulated a little property and reared a family. In 1800, probably as a result of frontier disturbances at the time, he went to the village of Graaff-Reinet. There, in 1801, he met missionaries of the London Missionary Society and was converted. Casting his lot with the mission, he moved with his family to Algoa Bay and was based at Bethelsdorp until 1815. During this period he practised his trade as a sawyer at the same time as he gained prominence in mission work. In 1813 he served as John Campbell's ‘travelling director’ during a trip to the interior that lasted almost nine months. Campbell's proposals – that a number of new stations be established – made heavy demands on mission personnel and other resources. Six ‘native assistants’ were appointed, one of whom was Cupido. In 1817, after a short sojourn among the Griqua, he undertook a mission to the still nomadic Kora near the Harts River. Six years later, when difficulties both in and outside the mission society had multiplied, his services were abruptly terminated. He was then over sixty years of age. For frontier Khoi, hopeful of a new dispensation in the wake of the 1799–1802 war, the L.M.S. missionaries had provided an undreamt-of opportunity. In the interaction between missionary and Khoi, in the first stages of the mission project, Cupido played a leading part.

Farmers, Herdsmen and the State in Rainland Sinnār

Abstract: In earlier publications the present writer was at pains to emphasize that the state of Sinnār was not a mere confederation of nomadic Arab tribes; rather, it rested upon a firm agricultural base and was governed bureaucratically, while incorporating an ingeniously conceived system of nobility. This interpretation, though valid as far as it went, rested largely on evidence from riverain Sinnār and left little room for nomads. The present study, based primarily upon sources from the Sudanese rainlands, proposes that such a view of the place of herdsmen in the society of Sinnār is not well founded, and indeed that the habit of thought which perceives a sharp and enduring distinction between the peoples of ‘ the steppe and the sown’ – however appropriate in other contexts – does not pertain to Sinnār. The vision of rainland life which emerges from the sources here examined reveals a single society of herdsmen and cultivators, a society in perpetual metamorphosis within a framework of possibilities limited by ecology and custom. Ruling houses came and went; tribes grew, sundered and re-formed into new polities. Individuals and groups migrated freely, occasionally over vast distances, and changed their mode of livelihood whenever the opportunity for herding or the necessity for cultivating presented itself. All were subordinate to the state, whose continuity of authority in the long run overshadowed the more ephemeral corporate realities of the moment.

African Prehistory - The Earlier Prehistory of Eastern and Southern Africa . By D. W. Phillipson. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1977. Pp. xii + 324. 100 figs. and maps. £10.50 (£4.90 paperback).

Abstract: Phillipson's aim in this book is to summarize and synthesize the mass of archaeological data now available for the last ten thousand years in Africa, from Ethiopia to the Cape. He sees his primary task as constructing a temporal and regional framework, based on radiocarbon dates and changes in stone tools and pottery styles. From the same material he also seeks to detect movements of ideas and people, migrations and influences. Phillipson concentrates throughout on the artefacts: as one example, thirty-six pages are devoted to variations in Early Iron Age pottery and two paragraphs to the corresponding 'social and political systems'. As a secondary source of information, linguistic evidence, particularly the work of Christopher Ehret, is used extensively and to strong effect. Oral traditions are mentioned but scarcely used; by his definition, historical information is almost entirely excluded. The particular strengths of the book lie in the areas in which Phillipson has conducted his own field work: the last hunter-gatherers of Zambia, the first farmers of the North Kenya plains, the Early Iron Age as a whole, the survival of stone-using groups into the last millennium. By comparison Phillipson has little to say and no new thoughts to offer on Meroe, Aksum, the Christian kingdoms of Nubia or the cities of the East African littoral. Rock art, the only aspect of culture to be given a chapter to itself, is poorly served: the old stylistic typologies have entirely outlived their usefulness. Phillipson is not at ease in treating the more complex societies. Great Zimbabwe is considered in purely archaeological terms. The states of Zambia, Zaire and Angola and the Interlacustrine kingdoms receive no mention, presumably because little archaeological work has been done on them. None the less Phillipson's range is extremely wide every site of any significance receives at least a paragraph, and he is completely reliable and up to date: indeed, as far as Kenya is concerned, the volume appeared before many of the primary sources to which it refers. The bibliography alone will make many students' lives a great deal easier. The only significant omissions I spotted were that Phillipson has chosen not to accept fully Wandibba's ordering of the early 'pastoral neolithic' pottery of Kenya a particularly intransigent field that has defied previous attempts at classification while the work of Beach, Mudenge and other historians who have worked on Shona traditions is ignored. Khami remains a Rozvi capital. But this is symptomatic of the general neglect of oral sources. Phillipson's intention is to present his work as a 'coherent narrative'. He eschews all discussion of archaeological concepts, methods, strategy, analysis. He shows little interest in other theoretical debates on, for example, social change or state formation. The basic assumptions of traditional archaeology go unquestioned. Pottery types equate with people. Changes in pottery represent movements of people. Movements are generated by population pressures. Where changes are known from other sources and are not reflected in the pottery, they were introduced by 'small groups of people' the 'ruling clan'. Phillipson is an empirical archaeologist of great skill and sensitivity. He believes that the full meaning inherent in all properly excavated and described data can be extracted and presented simply and directly. Where it is obviously ambiguous, Phillipson presents alternative interpretations, but he probes no deeper. In such circumstances the data can and will only say simple things about technology, or direct responses to environment.