Showing papers in "The Journal of African History in 1985"

Recent Archaeological Research and Dates From Central Africa

Abstract: Depuis la synthese precedente, les recherches archeologiques se sont developpees et diversifiees en Afrique Centrale.Pour la prehistoire, des recherches prometteuses sont effectuees sur les processus geomorphoiogiques au Congo, ce qui permettra de mieux comprendre les problemes poses par l'interpretation des vestiges decouverts dans les formations sableuses.Du Gabon a l'Angola, on assiste a un interet croissant pour les vestiges des populations qui exploitent la zone littorale depuis l'âge de la pierre recent et qui sont responsable de nombreux amas coquilliers.A l'interieur du continent, au Congo et au Rwanda, une serie de nouvelles dates se rapportent a l'âge de la pierre recent, sans qu'il soit possible de preciser les limites temporelles de ces industries.Dans la moitie sud du Cameroun et a l'est de la Centrafrique, divers temoignages indiquent que depuis au moins le dernier millenaire avant notre ere cette partie de la foret etait occupee par des populations sedentaires, utilisant de la ceramique, des haches polies et pratiquant sans doute une forme d'agriculture.La fonte du fer semble debuter dans la region de Yaounde vers le quatrieme siecle avant notre ere. A l'est, au Rwanda et au Burundi, la metallurgie du fer parait au moins aussi ancienne et l'on ne peut tout a fait exclure qu'elle soit meme beaucoup plus ancienne, mais cela reste controverse. Au Congo, un fourneau pour fondre le fer a pu etre date du cinquieme siecle de notre ere, tandis qu'un fourneau pour fondre le cuivre etait date du treizi`eme siecle de notre ere. Au Zaire, dans la region du Shaba, la fonte de ces metaux remonte au quatrieme siecle de notre ere.Enfin, des series systematiques de datations permettent d'esquisser durant l'âge des metaux les bases d'evolutions regionales au nord Cameroun, en Centrafrique, dans la cuvette centrale au Zaire, et au Rwanda.

Africans and Agricultural Production in Colonial Kenya: The Myth of the War as a Watershed

Abstract: This article examines the economic effects of the Second World War on African peasant producers in Kenya, and places the war years within the context of the colony's economic difficulties during the Depression. In the mid-1930s the Kenya government sought to encourage African production, particularly among the Kikuyu and Abaluhya, in order to bolster the fiscal base of the colonial state and to subsidize the survival of the settler farming community. Promotion of African agrarian production brought conflict with the settler farming sector, and generated a serious crisis in the political economy of Kenya. These antagonisms became sharper during the war, when, after the Japanese advance in S.E. Asia, the Allied war effort demanded greater production from Kenya's settler farmers. Assisted by high guaranteed prices, both settler and African production was able to expand during the war. Previous studies of the impact of the war in Kenya have underplayed the extent to which African producers were able to capitalise upon this economic boom. Easily able to by-pass official marketing channels, African peasants produced for the black market. By doing so during the mid-war drought and maize crisis of 1942–3, African producers were able to obtain very favourable prices. Emerging peasant households among the Kikuyu and Abaluhya were therefore economically strengthened by the circumstances of the war, as was the settler farming sector. Europeans and Africans in Kenya were set on a collision course, which was to culminate some seven years after the war in the Mau Mau rebellion.

Africa's Strategic Minerals During the Second World War

Abstract: Unprecedented wartime demands by Britain and the U.S.A for strategic minerals from abroad, coupled with the loss of valuable sources of supply in Eastern Europe and South East Asia to the Axis, greatly enlarged the volume of production and the pace of economic change in the mineral-rich zones of Africa. But the sharpest upsurge in output, which helped rescue a number of African export economies from the slough of depression, coincided with British rearmament several years before the war broke out; and production in most instances reached a crest two or three years before the war ended. In one sense the mineral regions of Africa between 1937 and 1945 provided a supreme example of the old mercantilist credo that colonies existed primarily to buttress the economies of the metropole in time of war. From another perspective, the war strengthened the hold of powerful multinational corporations on African mineral development and accelerated the absorption of new mining areas and labour supplies into the world capitalist system. A wide range of African metallic and non-metallic ores played a vital – and in some cases an indispensable – role in the Allied victory in 1945. But for the African peoples and countries most directly involved, the wartime upsurge had an uneven impact. Wage increases were in no way commensurate with the increased workloads nor with the pay scales for European miners. Except in the Union of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, where greater agricultural and industrial diversification was already in train, the expansion of the mining industries perpetuated enclave development. The reliance of the industrialized West on African strategic minerals during the war was a prelude to the even greater production boom and dependency of the Cold War period.

The View from Awdaghust: War, Trade and Social Change in the Southwestern Sahara, from the Eighth to the Fifteenth Century

Abstract: Early medieval wealth invested in southern Saharan agriculture and warfare tended to produce distinctive groups of dependent cultivators and professional warriors by the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Exchange surpassed initial limitations placed on it by rudimentary pastoral society through the development of the salt industry. The realization of a form of surplus readily convertible into a wide range of commodities was vital to the growth of specialized traders who, in turn, broadened the scope of economic and political activity. Growing professionalism and specialization brought with it new forms of social relations, in this case a variety of forms of dependence, as well as introducing a role for indigenous non-producers like clerics and scholars. An oasis like Awdaghust where warriors, cultivators and traders interacted was bound to experience the growing pains these changes produced.This paper suggests how an understanding of these social and economic changes can help fill the gaps which still plague the history of Awdaghust. It argues that we need to examine the pieces of written and archaeological evidence we have in the light of the changing forms of agriculture practised in the area, the region's drying climate between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, and the making of the specialized merchant-clerical groups called zawāyā. Awdaghust thereby emerges not only as an international caravan terminus, but as a regional centre of agriculture and trade, especially the salt trade, controlled by local pastoralists. It was therefore able to outlive its so-called eleventh-century destruction by the Almoravids, and see its Znāga masters turn increasingly towards the salt trade and religion. But its fortunes also depended upon its large servile labour force and sufficient rainfall to support irrigated cultivation. By the fifteenth century, it would appear the drying conditions were severe enough to pose insurmountable problems, possibly even to provoke a slave rebellion said to have brought about Awdaghust's demise.

The Trade in Gum Arabic : Prelude to French Conquest in Senegal

Abstract: From the late seventeenth century until the 1870s gum arabic from the southwestern corner of the Sahara was the most important trade good exported to Europe from Mauritania and Senegal. This article discusses the dynamics of the gum trading system based in Saint Louis du Senegal, and details the commercial crisis in which the French colony was mired in the late 1830s and 1840s. Pressure from French capital and from Faidherbe's military forces secured the dominance of the import-export houses, as African river traders and desert gum merchants lost the advantages of their market positions. By the 1870s the importance of the gum trade had been eclipsed by the rapid expansion of peanut cultivation.

From "death camps" to cordon sanitaire: the development of sleeping sickness policy in the Uele district of the Belgian Congo, 1903-1914.

Abstract: When sleeping sickness was discovered to be epidemic in the Congo Free State in 1904, the administration responded by attempting to implement public health measures which had evolved in Europe in relation to plague and cholera epidemics. These measures were to identify and isolate victims and suspected victims of the disease and to map out the infected and uninfected zones. This article describes the early sleeping-sickness campaign of the Belgian authorities in the Uele District of Province Orientale between 1904 and 1914, focusing on the formation of isolation camps or lazarets. Uele district had been identified as a potentially rich and uninfected zone to be protected from contamination by the establishment of a cordon sanitaire. Public health policy and practice during this period provides an example of attempted ‘social engineering’ on the part of a colonial authority. While sleeping sickness provided the major impetus for the gradual development of the colonial medical service by the 1920s, the early period between 1903 and World War I was particularly onerous for the African populations in the north-east. The public health policy was perceived by many Africans as one more element in the on-going conquest and exploitation of the region. Examples are provided to demonstrate the ways in which numerous sleeping-sickness regulations affected African societies in Uele.

British Propaganda and the Mobilization of the Gold Coast War Effort, 1939-1945

Abstract: This article examines the nature and impact of the most extensive propaganda campaign mounted in a British West African colony during the Second World War. An avalanche of war information and appeals to the people of the Gold Coast was channelled through a new communications network which included radio broadcasting, information bureaux, and mobile cinema presentations. The innovative wartime publicity scheme was not enough to produce a completely voluntary war effort; however, the campaign was responsible for irreversibly changing mass communications techniques in the territory. The propaganda drive used in the war mobilization provided a pool of experienced propagandists and a successful structural model which proved valuable both to post-war governments charged with pre-independence political education, community development and public services, and, somewhat ironically, to anti-colonialist post-war party politics.

Islam in the Oral Traditions of Mali: Bilali and Surakata

Abstract: As a study of some Islamic factors involved in the construction of oral narrative by Manding bards, this article is chiefly concerned with two distinct cases in which griots have borrowed important legendary figures from the literature of Arabia. It is found that Bilali, described by traditional genealogists as progenitor of the ancient ruling branch of the Keita lineage, originated as Bilāl ibn Rabāḥ, a companion of Muhammad and the first mu'adhdhin. Genealogies or descent lists of early Malian rulers still contain names that have apparently survived from pre-Islamic times, but in most instances these early forebears of chiefly rank have been moved forward into the Islamic era and displaced as founding ancestors by figures like Bilali, who originated in Muslim Arab literature. Similarly, at the lower levels of the social hierarchy, major artisan classes like the blacksmiths and leatherworkers have adopted their own collective ancestors from Islamic tradition.In the case of Surakata, collective ancestor of Bambara and Mandinka griots, it is recalled that he began as Surāqa ibn Mālik, in Arab tradition an enemy of Muhammad who became an early convert to Islam, a conversion that seems to have had a special resonance in a West African setting where many people have made the same shift. Pre-Islamic themes in Manding oral tradition have in many cases been obliterated by the bards' preoccupation with Islamic subjects, particularly events from the life and times of the Prophet. However, despite the pervasiveness of Islamic themes, the blood motif found in some accounts of griot ancestry indicates that at least the essence of certain elements of pre-Islamic West African culture survives in Manding oral tradition.

The Moroccan Nationalist Movement: Istiqlal, the Sultan, and the Country

Abstract: The conventional view of the Moroccan nationalist movement argues that its success was rooted in the experience of the Second World War in Morocco. However, this overlooks the critical differentiation in popular response to nationalist ideas that developed over the period from 1926 to independence in 1956. Whereas the pre-war nationalist movement was urban-based, with a strong middle-class and Salafiyyist tradition behind it, and picked up support from other urban groups that suffered from the Great Depression in the 1930s, it consistently lacked the essential concomitant of a broad rural base. This was in part due to the effective control of rural areas maintained by the French administration, but also arose from the development of a new elite in rural areas that had a clear interest in acquisition and control of land. Although this group had antecedents that originated from pre-colonial times, it was the conditions of the Protectorate and the development of a money-based economy which allowed it to flourish while other aspects of indigenous economic activity declined. This group, which may be considered to constitute a ‘kulak’ class, thus had an evident interest in supporting the French Protectorate authorities, and little concern for nationalist aspirations, particularly since it was also closely associated with the French administration of rural areas through its role in the caidat. It was only when this elite found its economic interests threatened, and realized that the nationalist movement had the support of the Sultan, that its political concerns were redirected. This change occurred in 1947 with the Tangier speech, in which Mohammed V implicitly rejected French tutelage and, by inference, turned to the nationalist movement to support his dynasty. The speech coincided with the end of the consequences of the 1945 famine, which gave the nationalist movement its opportunity to extend its network into rural areas. It was this development, rather than the Second World War itself, that ensured the ultimate success of the Moroccan nationalist movement.

‘Morts Pour La France’; The African Soldier in France during the Second World War

Abstract: The involvement of African combatants in France from 1939 to 1945 probably surpassed the large mobilization of an earlier generation during the First World War. Carefully prepared ideologically and well received by the French public, Africans nevertheless paid a heavy price in lives and suffering as soldiers during the Battle of France and as prisoners of the Germans. Liberation brought a new set of tribulations, including discriminatory treatment from French authorities. These hardships culminated in a wave of African soldiers' protests in 1944–5, mainly in France, but including the most serious rising, the so-called mutiny at Thiaroye, outside Dakar, where thirty-five African soldiers were killed.The war's impact was ambiguous. Tragedies like Thiaroye sent shock waves throughout French West Africa, delegitimizing naked force as a political instrument in post-war politics and sweeping away an older form of paternalism. Yet while a militant minority were attracted to more radical forms of political and trade-union organization, most African veterans reaffirmed their loyalties to the French State, which ultimately paid their pensions.

Cross-Cultural Trade in World History . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. By Philip D. Curtin. Pp. xi + 293. £22.50 (£7.95 paperback).

Abstract: Philip Curtin has here produced a work that builds on his long-standing interest in African trade diasporas. It will be of use to Africanists in particular; first, because it shows the African specialist the similarities (of which some are surprisingly close) and differences between the cross-cultural commercial systems of Africa and the rest of the world; and second because a large section of the book deals with the trade connections between Asia and the West, along which some important goods flowed ultimately to Africa. Following an introductory chapter on trade diasporas, the subject matter is divided geographically. As befits the author's reputation, Africa is the first of the areas to be treated, in two chapters that are both clear and succinct. A chapter on ancient trade considers Mesopotamia, Assyrian traders in Anatolia, the Egyptians, Greeks, Phoenicians, and pre-Columbian trade in America. Further chapters cover Chinese trade in central and southeast Asia, 'Asian trade in Eastern Seas, 1000-1500', the coming of the Portuguese and the Dutch and English East Indian Companies, 'Asian traders in the era of the great companies', the Armenian community's overland trade, the North American fur trade, and 'the twilight of the trade diasporas'. A simple listing of the topics considered might make it appear that the subject matter is too broad for treatment in such a small compass. But Curtin is both judicious and deft in picking the salient points for treatment, and his comparisons are telling. African economic historians will find the information and analysis useful background, which I submit all should have, but in our over-specialized day only a few exceptionally well-read individuals actually do have. The prose style is good, making for pleasant as well as informative reading. The maps are handsome, and essential given the far horizons of the subject. Finally, the bibliography is thoroughly up to date.

The Beginnings of Girls' Education in the Native Administration Schools in Northern Nigeria, 1930-1945

Abstract: The existing works on the history of education in northern Nigeria are generally agreed that the main factor which hindered the spread and development of girls' education in the area during the colonial era was Muslims' opposition to female education. While it is not denied in this article that opposition to female education existed among Muslims, it is argued that this was not the main factor which retarded the advancement of girls' education during the period covered by this article. It is suggested that the British educational policy, which placed much emphasis on co-education, instead of building girls' schools, coupled with the parsimony with which the British administration spent money on girls' education, were mainly responsible for hindering the development of girls' and women's education in northern Nigeria during the colonial era. It is argued that the introduction of co-education made Western education for girls unappealing to many Muslim parents who otherwise would have sent their daughters to school if girls' schools had existed in sufficient numbers. The article attempts to show that this could not be realized as a result of the British administration's unwillingness to spend substantial sums of money on girls' education. It is also suggested that the preferential treatment accorded by the British administration to the aristocracy, in the recruitment of pupils for girls' schools and the W.T.C., was inimical to the advancement of girls' education generally.

The Nyasaland Tea Industry in the Era of International Tea Restrictions, 1933-1950

Abstract: The Tea Industry in the Cholo and Mlanje districts of southern Nyasaland emerged during the 1930s under the shelter of the International Tea Regulation Scheme of 1933 which restricted exports by the world's leading producers. In contrast to its East African neighbours, Nyasaland's Tea Industry was well organized locally by the Nyasaland Tea Association and was effectively represented in Britain by its London Committee. Though having to accept restrictions on the planting of new tea, which occasioned some local controversy, the industry, in common with other tea-producing countries, benefited from the rising prices of the 1930s for which the Tea Regulations were largely responsible. By 1938 tea had become one of Nyasaland's few profitable industries. A seeming further advantage was the bulk buying scheme, at guaranteed prices, organized by the British Ministry of Food which lasted throughout the 1940s, but the industry's wartime performance was sluggish as a consequence of poor growing seasons combined with serious shortages of manpower and fertilizer. As a poor quality, low price producer facing chronic labour shortages, which prevented millions of pounds of tea from being picked, Nyasaland greeted with hostility Imperial decisions to withdraw eastern Africa from the International Tea Scheme in 1948, to end bulk buying in 1950, and generally to encourage the free expansion of production. Nyasaland's tea planters were told that henceforth they must face open competition.

From hospitality to hostility: Ibadan and strangers 1830–1904

Abstract: The view that Ibadan society in the nineteenth century did not discriminate against strangers, irrespective of their origins in Yorubaland, is now firmly entrenched in the literature. To be sure, Ibadan, a new nineteenth-century Yoruba city-state, founded as a consequence of the political crises of the early decades of the century, did maintain an ‘open door’ policy to strangers, many of whom went there as adventurers, craftsmen and traders, hoping to acquire wealth and fame. This article, however, controverts the view that Ibadan society gave the strangers and the indigenes equal opportunities to wealth and power. It argues that all the key political offices went only to the Oyo-Ibadan group which dominated the city-state. Strangers were also not allowed to participate fully in the leading heights of the economy, with the result that most of the wealthy citizens were also of Oyo-Yoruba origin. In the 1890s discrimination against strangers was such that a number of moves were made to expel them. However, the British, who imposed colonial rule on Ibadan in 1893, were against the expulsion of strangers.

The Impact of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War on Portuguese and Spanish Africa

Abstract: In the present stage of research, it is easiest to discern the economic effects of war on the Iberian colonies. These were diverse in chronological, regional and sectoral terms, but the overall results were to tie the economies of the Portuguese and Spanish colonies more firmly to those of the metropoles. This did not exclude two processes pulling in other directions. Firstly, the foreign trade of the colonies persisted but was reoriented away from Europe and towards North America. Secondly, shortages and insecurity of transport led to a significant degree of import substitution and regional African trade in the colonies, in the fields of both industry and agriculture. The social impact of war resembled that in much of the rest of Africa, great hardships and labour pressures on the mass of the population, but windfall profits for a few, both black and white. The political consequences of the two conflicts remain most shadowy at present, but they appear to have heightened the covert struggle between pro-fascist and anti-fascist groups in a situation of strong repression, flaring up into open strife only in the Spanish territories in 1936.

World War II and Africa: Introduction

Abstract: Until the late 1970s the impact of the two world wars on Africa was a comparatively neglected area of its colonial history. In 1977 the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London drew attention to this neglect by organizing a symposium on the first of these two wars. A selection of the papers presented at that symposium was published in a special issue of this Journal in 1978. This proved to be a landmark in the study of the history of the First World War in Africa, which has since received much scholarly attention. By contrast, a survey written a few years ago of the Second World War in Africa could make relatively little use of original research. In 1983, however, the Academie Royale des Sciences d'Outre-Mer, Brussels, published a large collection of papers on the Belgian Congo in the Second World War, and in 1984 Richard Rathbone and David Killingray organized a further conference at S.O.A.S. on the impact on Africa of the Second World War. This elicited over thirty papers by scholars from Africa, Europe and North America; they not only provided extensive geographical coverage but also represented a wide variety of interests: political, economic, social and cultural. The conference organizers have since edited a selection of these papers in book form: the topics range from the impact of the war on labour in Sierra Leone to relations between the colonial government and Christian missions in southern Cameroons.

Linchwe I and the Kgatla Campaign in the South African War, 1899-1902

Abstract: Although the importance of the African role in the South African War (1889-1902) is now recognized, this study of the Bakgatala ba ga Kgafela is the first to demonstrate an African perception of events and argue that the Kgatla initiated military action and pursued goals independent of a simple British vs. Boer formula. The war created major economic and political opportunities for the Kgatla, a people physically separated and colonially partitioned. Half the Kgatla lived in the Kgatla Reserve of the British-ruled Bechuanaland Protectorate, and the other half lived in the Saulspoort area of the western Transvaal under Boer rule. Their leader, Linchwe I (1874–1924), maintained his capital at Mochudi in the Protectorate and received only partial allegiance from the Saulspoort Kgatia. Soon after the war began, Linchwe involved his regiments actively in fighting alongside the British in the Protectorate and raiding on their own in the Transvaal in an effort to eliminate Boer settlement and political control in Saulspoort and other areas of the western Transvaal. Kgatia regiments also emptied Boer farms of cattle which, in addition to restoring the national herd decimated by the 1897 rinderpest, Linchwe used in establishing his political hold over the Saulspoort Kgatia. Protectorate officials were grateful for Kgatia support, but Linchwe disguised the extent and nature of Kgatia operations and concealed from the British his political objectives. Linchwe's campaign made possible in the years following the war the reunification of the Kgatia under his authority, the distribution of wealth among all his people and the reduction of colonial interference in the political lives of his people.

Tshekedi Khama and Opposition to the British Administration of the Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1926-1936

Abstract: African chiefs under colonial rule are conventionally described as collaborators. Those who failed to co-operate with their colonial masters were deposed. Tshekedi Khama, Regent of the Bangwato for his nephew, Seretse, from 1926 to 1950, does not fit this description. During the first ten years of his regency, he was almost continuously locked in conflict with the British on a whole range of issues both large and small. His sustained opposition to the British is the more remarkable in that he became regent at the age of merely twenty without having been specifically prepared for the governance of the largest of the Tswana states under British rule.This article explores the reasons for Tshekedi's opposition to the British and the way in which he conducted this opposition, and asks why the British did not depose him as they almost certainly would have deposed a chief who behaved remotely like him in one of their other African territories. It concludes that while Tshekedi basically accepted the colonial situation in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, he was determined that the British should make no inroads into the powers of the chiefs as determined at the end of the nineteenth century when his father Khama III had accepted British protection. He was also resolved to hand over the chieftaincy intact to his ward, Seretse. Furthermore Tshekedi, unlike most African chiefs of his day, was Western-educated, having attended Fort Hare, and believed that the function of the British Administration was to teach him ‘how to govern…not how to be governed’. He reacted strongly against measures that were imposed on him without consultation or explanation, especially, those which he suspected were designed to limit his power or might affect the welfare of his people. In opposing such measures, he employed both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ resources and was as skilful as any African nationalist of the time in mobilising press, parliament and public opinion in Britain in his support.While the British did consider deposing him, and in 1933 temporarily suspended him from office, they were confronted by the fact that there was no other leader in Gammangwato who would be accepted as a legitimate alternative by the Bangwato or who would be remotely as competent as he was. After ten years of wrangling with Tshekedi the British learnt that it was in their interests to collaborate with him. For the next decade Tshekedi and the Administration worked largely in harmony. It was only in the late 1940s that Tshekedi began to use his formidable intellectual powers and administrative experience to challenge the colonial system itself.

Central African History

Abstract: For many years teachers and students of Central African history have laboured under the disadvantage of possessing no adequate introductory text on the region. Jan Vansina's classic Kingdoms of the Savanna (Madison, 1966) deals only with the pre-colonial history of part of the region and has now been largely superseded by more recent research, much of it initiated by Vansina himself. Aspects of Central African History, edited by T. O. Ranger (London, 1968), whatever its original merits, no longer serves either as a source of reliable factual information or as an introduction to issues of modern historiographical concern. Even David Birmingham's attractive collection of chapters from the Cambridge History of Africa, while of great use in elucidating patterns of change prior to the 1870s, is silent on developments thereafter. While historians in East Africa have had available the three-volume Oxford History (Oxford, 1963, 1965, 1976) and historians in West Africa the two-volume Longman History,* complemented by A. G. Hopkins's Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973), teachers hoping to provide their students with an overview of Central African history have been forced to recommend a hotch-potch of national histories and detailed monographs in default of more adequate introductions. All this has changed with the appearance of these two volumes, edited by Birmingham and Martin. 'The first major integrated history of one of the largest regions of the tropical world', as the blurb for once accurately proclaims, the Longman History of Central Africa succeeds triumphantly in filling the yawning gap. As befits our straitened times, it is little more than half the length of the Longman History of West Africa — a reduction in scale particularly noticeable in the absence of thematic chapters dealing with such regional issues as intellectual and religious change, disease, demography and the impact of the two world wars. But it is attractively produced, reasonably priced, generally readable in style and up-to-date in content. A joint British-American production, in striking contrast to the History of West Africa which was edited in Nigeria and written largely by contributors working in West African universities, the History of Central Africa betrays in places a certain external vision unresponsive to the complexities of the African experience. But the contributors are among the most lively and knowledgeable practitioners in the field, and it is only in certain individual chapters that one regrets the editors' decision not to extend their net more widely. Unlike the

Prehistoric Landscapes Frontiers: Southern African Archaeology Today . Edited by M. Hall, G. Avery, D. M. Avery, M. L. Wilson and A. J. B. Humphreys. (Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology 10). Oxford: British Archaeological Reports S.207, 1984. Pp. 379. £18.00 including postage.

Abstract: During the past fifteen years there has been a major increase in the tempo and quality of research into the later archaeology of Africa south of Limpopo. In this region intensive studies are now being undertaken and old assumptions queried on a scale and with a methodological rigour unparalleled in other parts of the continent. This volume provides prompt and well-presented publication of forty-one papers read at the biennial conference of the Southern African Association of Archaeologists in Gaborone in 1983. All the contributions deal with the periods conventionally known as the Late Stone Age or the Iron Age. The sub-title is particularly apposite: the papers provide a clear and remarkably readable view of the major concerns and current interests of forty-five of the region's most active archaeologists. One of the most striking features of the volume is what it does not contain. None of the contributions is an account of an excavation. Although most papers are illustrated, there is not a single drawing or photograph of a portable artefact and (almost) no detailed discussion of such objects' typology. Instead, there are twelve accounts of intensive regional studies, mostly based on controlled survey, with the emphasis on illustrating patterns of resource-exploitation in a prehistoric landscape rather than on an individual site. The primary interest here is in evidence for mobility, with use of different resources on a seasonal basis or by distinct populations. No fewer than eleven further papers are concerned with the methodology of faunal analysis and interpretation. A smaller but equally important group of contributions discusses the use of space on 'Iron Age' archaeological sites in the light of Adam Kuper's work {Wives for Cattle, London, 1982) on the organization of domestic and ritual space among southern Bantu-speaking peoples. Other papers deal with ethnoarchaeology, wear on stone tools and theoretical views on the expansion of farming peoples. If a general criticism may be made on the whole range of archaeological endeavour illustrated by this volume, it is that the pendulum may have swung too far: some contributors' feet hardly touch the ground and too few have ideas firmly based on the archaeological remains buried beneath it. Many of the authors are clearly aware of this and will doubtless soon turn to excavating tests and foundations for the important reappraisals they here put forward. Meanwhile, there is no better introduction than this book to current developments in the study of southern African archaeology.

Xhosa History - The House of Phalo . By J. B. Peires. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1981. Pp. x + 281. Paperback; £8.95 from Third World Publications, Birmingham.

Abstract: It is the third section, on twentieth-century colonialism, which is perhaps least satisfactory. The years after 1950 are dealt with in about thirty pages, and little attempt is made to relate crucial economic developments to the turbulent politics of the period. Moreover, while the decision to make 1968 the concluding date is perhaps explicable in terms of the difficulty of handling the rapidly changing recent past, one might have hoped for something rather more substantial by way of conclusion than two very general and somewhat vapid paragraphs. Nevertheless, this is an illuminating and provocative introductory text.