Showing papers in "The Journal of African History in 1986"

A New Look at the Later Prehistory of the Kalahari

Abstract: Until recently, the later prehistory of the Kalahari has remained almost unknown and, in consequence, the long and complex past of the peoples of this region has often been condensed into an ahistorical and timeless caricature when compared with events in neighbouring countries. The summary presented here attempts to rectify this situation by drawing upon data from over four hundred surveyed sites and information from detailed excavations carried out since 1975 at twenty-two selected localities in Botswana.Three important topics in southern African prehistory are addressed from the perspective of these investigations. The first topic is the introduction of sheep and cattle to the sub-continent between 2,000 and 2,500 years ago. The second is the origins and social dynamics of pastoralism during the Early Iron Age, and relates these developments to the formation of stratified socio-political systems around the fringes of the Kalahari towards the end of the first millennium A.D. The third topic is the relevance to current information on the later prehistory of the Kalahari of ethnographic accounts of herding and foraging societies gathered in this same region during the twentieth century.

The Victorians and Africa: A Reconsideration of the Occupation of Egypt, 1882

Abstract: This article offers a reassessment of Britain's decision to occupy Egypt in 1882 Research published since 1961, it is suggested, does not support the view put forward by Robinson and Gallagher in their celebrated book, Africa and the Victorians , that Britain intervened reluctantly to safeguard the Suez Canal in response to disorder in Egypt, or that she was led on by French initiatives Moreover, the decision to occupy Egypt did not have the effect claimed by Robinson and Gallagher of precipitating the scramble for West and East Africa It is argued instead that the causes of intervention lay in the metropole rather than on the periphery British interests in Egypt were both important and expanding, and they were upheld by Conservative and Liberal governments in the period following the khedive's declaration of bankruptcy in 1876 This conclusion makes the Egyptian case less important in understanding the scramble for tropical Africa but more important in understanding late nineteenth-century imperialism The occupation illustrates how the emergence of a particular configuration of economic and political forces in Britain found expression abroad after 1850; and it does so without invoking narrow or deterministic forms of historical explanation Finally, it is suggested that the Egyptian case deserves a more prominent place in the study of theories of imperialism than it has received, because most of the ideas which enter modern scholarly discussion of this subject can be traced to the contemporary debate over the highly controversial decision taken by Britain in 1882

Dahomey and the Slave Trade: Reflections on the Historiography of the Rise of Dahomey

Abstract: The rise of the kingdom of Dahomey coincided with the growth of the slave trade in the area, and consequently has often served as a case study of the impact of the slave trade upon African societies. The article reviews the historiography of the rise of Dahomey, in an attempt to clarify the relationship between the nature of the Dahomian state and its participation in the slave trade. It considers, and refutes, the view that the rulers of Dahomey had originally intended to bring the slave trade to an end. It examines the militaristic character of the Dahomian state, and suggests that this is best understood as a consequence of increased warfare stimulated by the overseas market for war captives. Finally, it examines and partially endorses those views which have presented the political centralization of Dahomey as a constructive response to the problems of order posed by slave-raiding.

Recent Archaeological Research and Dates from West Africa

Abstract: This article reports over 250 new radiocarbon dates relevant to recent archaeological research in West Africa. Thanks to the continuing trend towards series of dates from either single sites or groups of related sites, some major blanks on the archaeological map of West Africa have been replaced by well-dated regional sequences. An example is the Malian Sahara, where palaeoenvironmental and archaeological investigations at a large number of sites have clarified the relationship between Holocene climatic change and Late Stone Age occupation. Other areas that were largely archaeological unknowns until the research reported in this article was undertaken include the middle Senegal valley, the Inland Niger Delta, and the Bassar region in Togo. Other research included here reinterprets previously studied, ‘classic’ Late Stone Age sequences, such as Adrar Bous, Kintampo and Tichitt. There are also new dates and details for early copper in Niger and Mauritania which prompt a reconsideration of the true nature of this proposed ‘Copper Age’. Of particular significance to general reconstructions of West African prehistory is the documentation of regional and long-distance trade accompanying the emergence of complex societies along the Middle Senegal and Middle Niger in the first millennium A.D.The article begins with a brief commentary on calibration, in view of the recent publication of high-precision calibration curves. Several prevalent misconceptions of what calibration is and what it ought to do are addressed. We suggest that archaeologists and historians should routinely make reference to calibration in order to avoid misinterpreting radiocarbon results.

Komfo Anokye of Asante: Meaning, History and Philosophy in an African Society

Abstract: This paper – which builds upon the author's previously published work on the forest kingdom of Asante (Ghana) – deals with the role of Komfo Anokye in Asante thought and history. The source materials and historiography pertaining to Komfo Anokye are critically reviewed, but the principal focus of the paper is on issues of cognition, belief and philosophy. Komfo Anokye's ‘place’ in Asante thought is analysed, and his meaning(s) identified with reference to Asante concerns about the nature of history, society and the human. The paper tries to go beyond epistemology and a ‘traditional’ reading of Asante religion and its practices to a hermeneutical interpretation of Komfo Anokye and the sense-meaning of Asante history. Philosophical and psychological issues are addressed in a historical context. The larger object of the paper is, by the example of Komfo Anokye and Asante history, to attempt to indicate a way forward for the Africanist historical enterprise in the understanding of meaning.

Investigating Oral Tradition

Abstract: The author reviews the developing uses of oral sources in recent Africanist history, and argues that the original expectations about ‘oral tradition’ derived from contemporary structural functionalism. Changing one's model of social action therefore entails a change in the evaluation of oral data, and some of the consequences, according to different social theories, are sketched out. In particular, the perspectives of P. Bourdieu can, with modifications, permit the development of systematic ethno-historiography.

Coercion and Control in Nyasaland: Aspects of the History of a Colonial Police Force*

Abstract: This article examines the changing function of the Nyasaland police force between the 1890s and 1962. Initially, the police consisted of small groups of armed ex-soldiers, totally untrained in conventional police duties and employed by district officers in pressing labour and enforcing the payment of hut tax. In 1920, however, the authorities responded to the threat seemingly posed by the emergence of ‘dangerous classes’ – particularly labour migrants returned from the south – by forming a trained, centralized force, commanded in the Shire Highlands, though not elsewhere, by European police-officers. In the reorganized districts the police succeeded in protecting urban property. But so limited was the size of the force that the prevention and detection of crime was hardly attempted over the greater part of the country, while campaigns such as that against the Mchape witchcraft eradication movement foundered in the face of popular opposition.Substantial changes began in the mid-1940s in response to urbanization and the increasing complexity of police duties, coming to a climax in the 1950s as the colonial government struggled to maintain authority. At first the emphasis was on raising educational standards and improving conditions of service. But following the crisis of 1953, it switched to expanding police numbers and increasing the coercive power of the force; this process was accelerated in the aftermath of the 1959 emergency.Recruitment policies were influenced by the technical requirements of the authorities and by the ethnic stereotypes they evolved – a combination which resulted in the recruitment of a disproportionate number of Yao policemen in the first few decades and of more Lomwe and Chewa later. Policemen were attracted less by the rates of pay than by the privileges on offer. An inner corps of policemen spent their lives upholding colonial authority, but most could not be placed in a distinctive category of ‘collaborator’.

Judicial Regulation and Administrative Control: Customary Law and the Nuer, 1898–1954

Abstract: Administrative commitment to customary law among the Nuer wavered under British rule. Its value was first briefly appreciated as a means of obtaining the effective submission of the people to government authority. By igio dissatisfaction with the rate of progress of submission led provincial officials to abandon active involvement in the settlement of internal disputes among the Nuer, but in doing so they ceased to have any real contact with the peoples they tried to govern. Withdrawal from settlement of internal cases made it impossible for administrators to arbitrate external disputes between the Nuer and their neighbours. In the 1920s government supervision of the settlement of disputes once again became a central part of administrative policy, and by the end of that decade customary law and leaders were subordinated to government control. Innovations from the 1920s to the 1940s were concerned mainly with procedure and enforcement. By the last decade of Anglo-Egyptian rule in the Sudan the administration of law had become the main function of Nuer administration, and reforms in the legal procedure meant reforms in the administrative structure.

Working Conditions and Worker Responses on Nyasaland Tea Estates, 1930–1953

Abstract: The tea industry of southern Nyasaland employed intermittently a heterogeneous labour force of some twenty to thirty thousand and paid workers minimum wages of 7s. in 1930, rising to between 17s. 6d. and 20s. in 1953. A complex wage structure offered different rates to hoers, pluckers, factory workers and clerks. Thousands of children, butvirtually no women, were employed. Wages and working conditions were acknowledged to be unattractive, even by the industry itself, and compared favourably only with those offered in Portuguese East Africa. The initial viability of the plantation sector in the Shire Highlands was made possible by the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Lomwe from Portuguese East Africa. Lomwe workers, who sought assimilation and upward mobility, have been depicted as virtual slaves of the planters, but there is evidence of effective local, day-to-day and passive resistance on their part which left planters feeling impotent, unable to turn labour out on Sundays or in the rains or enforce unpopular thangata (labour rent) agreements, and obliged to reduce the daily tasks demanded of the worker. Confronted with an increasingly severe shortage of labour, which caused millions of pounds of tea to remain unpicked, planters began to improve working conditions on their estates, but this failed to resolve their labour problem or to dampen post-war militancy. Irresponsible actions by the British Central Africa Company increased tensions in Cholo which culminated in the serious riots of 1953 in which eleven people were killed. Government responded to this growing rural radicalism by repurchasing half of the million acres of freehold estate land which had initially been ‘bought’ from chiefs prior to the colonial occupation.

Measuring the Immeasurable: The Atlantic Slave Trade, West African Population and the Pyrrhonian Critic

Abstract: No problem has exercised Africanists for so long and so heatedly as the slave trade. Now that any difference of opinion as to its morality has ended, debate tends to concentrate on its economic and political aspects, particularly on its magnitude and regional characteristics. In the past few scholarly generations, sophisticated statistical manipulations have supplied more evidence, but it has been concentrated on the number of slaves who arrived in the New World. Nonetheless, dearth of evidence (sometimes total) regarding the other components of the trade has not seemed to discourage efforts to arrive at global figures and, by extension, to determine its effects on African societies.The present paper asks why this should be so, and wonders how any defensible conclusions can ever be reached about almost any facet of the trade that can go beyond ideology or truism. It concludes that no global estimate of the slave trade, or of any ‘underdevelopment’ or ‘underpopulation’ it may have caused, are possible, though carefully constructed micro-studies might provide limited answers. Under the circumstances, to believe or advocate any particular set or range of figures becomes an act of faith rather than an epistemologically sound decision

Semper Aliquid Veteris: Printed Sources for the History of the Ivory and Gold Coasts, 1500–1750

Abstract: Since completing my Ph.D. under John Fage in 1979 I have been working on critical editions of German, Dutch and French sources for the seventeenth-century history of West Africa. Many of these have been used uncritically, especially in the last twenty years. In my view it is wrong to cite such sources at all until one has at least attempted to establish the relationship between them. If one compares the whole corpus, one discovers a host of plagiarisms and other forms of interborrowing. At least half the Europeans who wrote about West Africa between 1500 and 1750 are known to have read the works of other authors. Using two chronological lists of publications which described the Ivory and Gold Coasts in this period, I seek to show that only a few can be regarded as purely ‘primary’ sources – mostly the ones which are least often cited.

Conflict and Power in Nineteenth Century Namibia

Abstract: In explaining how one Oorlam group, the Afrikaners, lost their hegemony in Namaland in the 1860s, this article examines the impact on this region of Oorlam migrations, trade with the Cape and the advent of Christian missionaries. The kinship-based social organization of Nama pastoralists was largely replaced by the ‘commando’ organization, introduced by the Oorlams. By the 1850s, production throughout Namaland was geared less to subsistence than to the demands of Cape traders for cattle, skins and ivory. Raiding and hunting, with imported guns and horses, supplanted local traditions of good husbandry. While foreign traders made large profits, commando groups were locked into a cycle of predatory and competitive expansion. By the early 1860s, such conflict had polarised; the Afrikaners and their allies (including Herero client-chiefs) confronted several Nama/Oorlam chiefs and an army raised by a Cape trader, Andersson. The ensuing battles were not, as has been claimed, a Herero ‘war of liberation’; instead, they marked the replacement of Afrikaner by European hegemony; the country was freer than ever before to be controlled by agents of merchant capital and colonialism.

The pedagogy of Porter: The origins of the Reformatory in the Cape Colony, 1882-1910

Abstract: This article explores the origins and nature of the reformatory in Cape colonial society between 1882 and 1910. Born in a period of economic transition, its concern was with the reproduction of a labouring population precipitated by colonial conquest. Unlike the prison and compound, which gained their distinctive character from the way in which they were articulated to an emerging industrial capitalist society, the reformatory was shaped by the imperatives of merchant capital and commercial agriculture. Although based on the English model, local social realities quickly began to mould the particular nature of the reformatory in the Cape Colony. Firstly, classification for the purposes of control came to mean segregation in a colonial context. secondly, the needs of commercial agriculture meant that in Porter there was a much greater stress on the apprenticing of inmates than there was in the internal operations of the British reformatory.

Farmers, Randlords and the South African state: Confrontation in the Witwatersrand Beef Markets, c . 1920–1923

Abstract: The pervasive importance of gold mining in modern South Africa has become embedded in South African historiography. Despite this, little research has been done to ascertain its impact on the other major sector of the economy, agriculture. The gold mines had a profound effect upon one particular branch of agriculture – beef farming. The mines purchased large amounts of beef and were able to use their buying power to confront beef farmers in the marketplace. In the recession following the First World War, the mines were caught in a profitability crisis that was to lead to the Rand Revolt in 1922. One of the ways in which mining attempted to ease its position was by cutting back on the cost of the meat it supplied to its African labour force. This initially involved co-operation with a powerful cold-storage company, big ranchers and a number of smaller farmers to form a Meat Producers Exchange. This fragile alliance fell apart when farmers, themselves on the verge of bankruptcy, attempted to take control of the Exchange and raise beef prices. The farmers failed and in 1923 the exchange collapsed. The victory of the mining and cold-storage companies rested on a number of factors. Farmers were unable to organize effectively because of the defection of ranchers to the mines. Changing economic conditions in 1922 and 1923 permitted the mines to terminate their co-operation with beef farmers. Finally the mines were able to call upon the state for support. The state ensured the demise of the Exchange and the defeat of the beef farmers. In the process it showed itself capable of intervening decisively to protect the interests of certain sections of capital.

The Slaves of Salaga

Abstract: Salaga was one of the leading slave-markets of West Africa in the 1880s. The story of the slaves – where they came from, who brought them to Salaga, who bought them, and what happened to them afterwards – can be pieced together from the reports of a great variety of travellers, black and white, officials, soldiers, merchants and missionaries, of various nationalities, African and European. Thus, on the eve of the European occupation which put an end to it, it is possible to lift the veil that usually conceals the internal slave trade of pre-colonial Africa, and gain some idea of its scale and workings, and of the range of attitudes towards slavery and the slave trade.

'Soft' Believers and 'Hard' Unbelievers in the Xhosa Cattle-Killing

Abstract: A substantial minority, perhaps 15 per cent of all Xhosa, refused to obey the prophetess Nongqawuse's orders to kill their cattle and destory their cornl. This divided Xhosaland into two parties, the amathamba (‘soft’ ones, or believers) and the amagogotya (‘hard’ ones, or unbelievers). The affiliation of individuals was partly determined by a number of factors – lungsickness in cattle, political attitude towards the Cape Colony, religious beliefs, kinship, age and gender – but a systematic analysis of each of these factors in turn suggests that none of them was sufficiently important to constitute the basis of either party.The key to understanding the division lies in an analysis of the indigenous Xhosa terms ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. ‘Softness’ in Xhosa denotes the submissiveness of the individual to the common will of the community, whereas ‘hardness’ denotes the determination of the individual to pursue his own ends, even at communal expense. Translated into social terms, the ‘soft’ believers were those who remained committed to the mutual aid ethic of the declining precolonial society, whereas the ‘hard’ unbelievers were those who sought to seize advantage of the new opportunities offered by the colonial presence to increase their wealth and social prominence. The conflict between the social and personal imperatives was well expressed by Chief Smith Mhala, the unbelieving son of a believing father, when he said, ‘They say I am killing my father – so I would kill him before I would kill my cattle.’ Certainly, the division between amathamba and amagogotya ran much deeper than the division between belief and unbelief, and the Xhosa, in conferring these names, seem to have recognized the fact.

'Where Have all the Slaves Gone?' Emancipation and Post-Emancipation in Lamu, Kenya

Abstract: The legal emancipation of slaves in Zanzibar and on the Swahili coast of Kenya was enacted in 1907, but the measure was not enforced on Lamu Island until 1910. The slave-owners of Lamu were already in dire straits from the decline of their plantations on the mainland and from the changes accompanying colonial rule which, by contrast with Mombasa, left Lamu Island as an economic backwater. They were little inclined to co-operate with the provisions of the legislation and were actively abetted in this by some their slaves. Emancipation was therefore a more protracted process than in those parts of the coast where alternative opportunities had opened up for ex-slaves and for landowners. Those who were gradually liberated either emigrated elsewhere or entered into new forms of dependent relationships with the Afro-Arab aristrocracy. Meanwhile, slavery lingered on under the noses of British officials.

African Military Labour and the Building of the Office du Niger Installations, 1925–1950

Abstract: In 1926, the Governor-General of French West Africa issued a decree allowing local administrations to use a portion of the annual military draft as labourers on public works programmes. The only administrations to take full advantage of this decree was that of the French Soudan, where work had already begun on the first phase of the vast Niger irrigation scheme now known as the Office du Niger. During the next twenty-five years, more than fifty thousand so-called ‘second-portion’ workers from Soudan were assigned to the Office du Niger for a period of three years' service. Ironically, this new system of forced labour to exploit the irrigated land.

War and Economic Development: Settlers in Kenya, 1914-1918

Abstract: The First World War is perhaps the least studied period in the historiography of European settlement in Kenya. This paper reverses the previously held view of settler economic decline and disarray. Despite apparent problems of shipping shortages, closure of markets and loss of white manpower, settler products were grown and exported in ever-increasing quantities during the war years. The grain and livestock industries were stimulated by new wartime markets whilst plantation crops, chiefly sisal and coffee, continued the impetus of pre-war activity and substantial new planting took place. Prosperity and development, not reversal and decline, were the keynotes of the settler wartime economy. With this new evidence and understanding, it is possible to re-interpret much of the early history of colonial Kenya. The fundamental vulnerability and stuttering growth of white settlement before 1914 gave way to the gradual assertion of the settler economy over the African, with state support, during and after the war. But this assertion and growth was founded upon abnormal economic circumstances: on cheap and available labour, insatiable markets and a pre-occupied colonial state. The post-war crises of labour and market contraction, and the pre-eminence of the settler sector after 1920, therefore must be traced to this accelerated and artificial growth in the settler economy in 1914–18.

Origins of the AmaWasha: the Zulu Washermen's Guild in Natal, 1850–1910

Abstract: Research into the perspectives of both worker and consumer has shown the social history of Zulu washermen to be far more complex than was previously thought. Viewed from the standpoint of Zulu men, washing clothes was not a humiliating female task into which they had been coerced by adverse circumstances. Laundering recalled the specialist craft of hide-dressing in which Zulu males engaged as izinyanga, a prestige occupation that paid handsomely. These astute tradesmen, a number of whom may have come from artisanal families, recognized they could play a crucial role in the European household economy. ‘Craft conscious’, building on indigenous institutions and customs, they combined not merely to secure their position and bar entry into ‘the trade’, but also to impose standards of wages and regulate the labour given by the younger men. In this manner they became one, if not indeed the most, powerful group of African workmen in nineteenth-century Natal.The social history of the AmaWasha guild compels a re-evaluation of notions regarding openness to change in traditional societies; indeed, it underscores their capacity for innovation. Moreover, it has a fundamental bearing on the structural nature and patterns of resistance of early black working populations in South Africa. This study indicates that there were intimate historical links between precolonial artisanal associations and subsequent worker organizations, activities and consciousness.

La Traite Atlantique des Esclaves et ses Effets économiques et sociaux en Afrique: la Cas du Galam, Royaume de l'Hinterland Sénégambien au dix-huitième Siècle

Abstract: L'Historiographie se rapportant a la traite atlantique des esclaves en Afrique revele deux tendances majeures. L'une est representee par les travaux dont la preoccupation majeure est de quantifier les phenomenes demographiques engendres par la traite. L'autre s'efforce au contraire d'evaluer ies consequences de la traite dans le contexte global de l'evolution des formations sociales africaines a l'ere du capitalisme mercantile.

Oral Tradition Revisited - Oral Tradition as History. By Jan Vansina. London: James Currey, 1985. £19.50 (paperback, £8.50).

Abstract: After all but 25 years, Jan Vansina has produced a largely new version of his classic treatise, first published in French in 1961. During these years the study of pre-colonial African history has gone from weakness to strength and thence to decline. In 1961 the Journal of African History was in its second year, having in its first year published two articles by Vansina summarizing the methods employed and the conclusions reached during his five-year study of the Bakuba. De la tradition or ale appeared in time to influence nearly all of the academically sponsored research into traditional history which emanated from European and American universities during the 1960s and 1970s, when most African research students were trained abroad and spread their enthusiams for ethnohistory to both their supervisors and their fellow-students. 'All that is needed,' wrote Colin Newbury in his review of the first edition, 'as quickly as possible, is a massive collection of tradition and critical annotation and interpretation along the lines suggested by Dr Vansina. No collector can afford to miss reading this lucid guide, before commencing his share of the task.' For a time, all seemed set fair. We had Vansina's own work on Rwanda (1961) and Burundi (1972). For Uganda we had Karugire on Nkore (1971), Kiwanuka on Buganda (1972), Cohen on Busoga (1972) and Lamphear on Jie (1976). For Kenya we had Ogot on the Southern Luo (1967), Muriuki on the Kikuyu (1974), and for Tanzania Kimambo on the Pare (1969), Feierman on the Shambaa (1974) and Willis on the Fipa (1981). For Zambia there was Roberts on the Bemba and Mainga on the Lozi (both 1973) and for Zimbabwe, Beach on the Shona (1980). For Madagascar there was Delivre on Merina (1974), and for Angola, Miller on the Mbundu (1976). For Zaire, Vansina published his mature interpretation of Kuba history in 1978, which was followed by Reefe on the Luba and Harms on the Bobangi (both in 1981). West Africa, with its larger endowment of written sources, including anciently recorded oral tradition, developed its own rather more polytechnic genre of ethnohistory, which resulted in fewer monographs but nevertheless in the establishment of an ethno-historical dimension clearly visible in the great works like Person's Samori (1968-75), Wilks' Asante in the Nineteenth Century (1975), Law's Oyo Empire (1977), and Perrot's Anyi-Ndenyi (1982). Behind each of these published works, and doubtless behind a large number of research theses still unpublished, there lies a collection of traditional texts, more or less professionally recorded, usually on tape, and mostly aiming at the kind of standards advocated by Vansina or at least as near to them as the finance available to reseach students would allow. Some attempt has been made to identify the full range of witnesses, to elicit their testimony without leading questions, and to transcribe and translate interview material while still close enough to the scene to put supplementary questions. The interpretative studies, which are all that have been published, have mostly been at least partially discerning of the political and social considerations which determine what traditional evidence shall survive from one generation to the next, and what shall be allowed to disappear from folk

John Donnelly Fage

Abstract: T H E CONTENTS of this issue of the Journal of African History are presented in honour of the sixty-fifth birthday of J. D. Fage, Emeritus Professor of African History in the University of Birmingham and a founder editor of the Journal, by some of his colleagues, erstwhile colleagues and former students in the Centre of West African Studies at Birmingham. Those who have shared in the writing of this collective tribute are grateful to the present Editors for readily agreeing to the use of the. Journal for its publication, and in particular to Mr Christopher Fyfe of the University of Edinburgh, who generously undertook the preparation of their material for the Press and has served as joint-editor of this issue. John Fage was schooled at Tonbridge and read history at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where the two Parts of his Tripos were separated by five years' service in the Royal Air Force. That service instigated his interest in African history. He was trained as a pilot in Southern Rhodesia, and subsequently served in other parts of southern Africa, in East Africa and in Madagascar as well as places further east. After his return to Cambridge in 1945, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the achievement of self-government in Southern Rhodesia, was appointed to a bye-fellowship at Magdalene, and began to lecture on European expansion into Africa. In 1949 he was appointed to a lectureship in history at the recently established University College of the Gold Coast. By 1952 he had been promoted senior lecturer and was acting as head of his department, and in 1955 he was appointed to the chair of history in the College. His Introduction to the History of West Africa first appeared in 1955 and his Atlas of African History in 1958. In 1959, following a six-months tenure of the Paul Knaplund visiting professorship at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, appeared Ghana : a Historical Interpretation, a volume which was to be reprinted nearly a quarter of a century later. During those years in Ghana, John Fage's interests had turned to what was then called the indigenous history of Africa. Classical Greek and Latin, medieval Arabic and more modern European written accounts of Africa were utilized as sources for this history as opposed to their use as sources for the history of Islam, or of European penetration of Africa. In default of sufficient written material, archaeological and linguistic findings were drawn on, and use was made of the oral traditions which social anthropologists had reported, but whose value for historical reconstructions could be exploited only through the skill of historians. Through his research and teaching at Legon, John Fage helped mightily in shifting the emphasis of African historical studies backward in time from the colonial period — that phase 'sixty or at most eighty years', as he was later to write, 'in a period of recoverable history ten or more times as long'. In 1959 John Fage moved to a lectureship in the history of Africa at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where Roland Oliver was among his closest colleagues. Together they published in 1962 the Penguin Short History of Africa which was eventually to run to six editions (with a seventh now in preparation) and has been made available in ten translations. They became joint editors of the Journal of African History launched in i960,

Continuity and Change: Egypt and North Africa in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: IN AN article published in I982 on the subject of modernization in nineteenthcentury North Africa,' I used the history of Egypt in the nineteenth century as a scheme for the history of the Maghrib in the same period. I did so because of Muhammad 'All, the Albanian soldier in the service of the Sublime Porte who turned Egypt from a province of the Ottoman empire into an empire of his own, notoriously by the adoption of European techniques. His career, spanning the first half of the century, could thus be taken to represent a first stage in the modernization of the Middle East, in which those techniques were employed to enhance the power of the monarch beyond what was possible with the traditional resources of the Middle-Eastern state. Because of Muhammad 'All's achievements in this respect, Egypt could also be allowed to stand for a second stage, associated with the name of his grandson the Khedive Isma'il and rather more complex, in which the European principle of constitutional monarchy challenged that of absolutism, while the country fell into the economic clutches of the West. In the third stage, which I called the age of Cromer, it fell into Europe's political clutches as the strategic calculations of the Powers shifted towards direct control at the beginning of the scramble for Africa; as far as Egypt was concerned, the increase in the technical efficiency of government was offset by the exclusion of Egyptians from the direction of affairs. Taking this sequence as typical of the nineteenth century over a much wider area, it provides a scheme for the history of the Maghrib most obviously in the case of Tunisia. There, the first half of the century culminated in the reign of Ahmad Bey, a Tunisian counterpart of Muhammad 'Ali; the quarter-century from I 856 to I 88 I was distinguished by the career of the reforming minister Khayr al-Din (Kheireddine), intertwined with the creation of an International Financial Commission for the management of the foreign debt; while the final twenty years saw the imposition of the French Protectorate parallel to the establishment of British control over Egypt. The scheme is less clearly applicable to Libya, where the political and economic failures of Yiusuf Pasha Karamanli led in I835 to the reabsorption of the country into the Ottoman empire, and to its development as a province of Istanbul down to the Italian invasion of I 9 I I. In Morocco the primary drive for greater royal power continued out of the first into the second half of the century, when it came into political and economic conflict with Europe, but survived until I9I2 because the Powers could not agree upon Morocco's fate.2

Abdul Njai: Ally and Enemy of the Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau, 1895–1919

Abstract: The protracted subjugation by the Portuguese of Guinea-Bissau was made possible by Abdul Njai and his army of auxiliary troops. Njai became an ally of the Portuguese in the mid-1890s and continued his support for the Portuguese conquest until about 1915. He provided logistical support, and served both as a commander in the Portuguese army and as a recruiter of African troops. Oral as well as written sources indicate that Njai was directly responsible for the successful campaigns fought against the strongholds of resistance to Portuguese authority. As a reward for his services, the Portuguese granted Njai political authority over Oio province. Thus Njai became a kind of ‘warrant chief’ in an area where his only legitimacy was based on force rather than traditional affiliation. Portuguese control remained limited even after 1915 and Njai governed his region as he pleased. African communities in Oio and elsewhere in Guinea-Bissau feared and respected this warlord more than the Portuguese. He thus became a threat to Portuguese colonial officials in Guinea-Bissau as well as their French counterparts in neighbouring Senegal. The Portuguese therefore turned on their erstwhile ally and, after unsuccessful attempts to bring him to heel through negotiation, mounted an expedition which resulted in his capture and deportation in 1919.

History of Botswana . By Thomas Tlou and Alec Campbell. Gaborone and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984. Pp. 278. £7.95 (paperback).

Abstract: transfer from the West to African peasantries, while also stressing the role of internally generated innovation. Together, they stand as a tribute to the remarkable school of historians who have emerged from the ex-Belgian territories, and whose work is often poorly known in the Anglo-Saxon world. Bogumil Jewsiewicki is greatly to be commended for making this collection available so quickly, even if the cheap production directly from the typed text has resulted in a fairly high density of misprints.