Showing papers in "The Journal of African History in 1992"

Afrikaner Nationalism, Apartheid and the Conceptualization of ‘Race’

Abstract: This paper analyses the ideological elaboration of the concept of race in the development of Christian-nationalist thought. As such, it contributes to our understanding of the ideological and theological justifications for apartheid. The paper begins by pointing to the relatively late moment (c. mid-1930s) at which Afrikaner nationalist ideologues began to address the systematic separation of blacks and whites. It takes its cue from a key address given by the nationalist leader, Totius, to the 1944 volkskongres on racial policy. Here, racial separation was justified by reference to scriptural injunction, the historical experience of Afrikanerdom and the authority of science. Each of these categories is then analysed with respect to the way in which the concept of race was understood and articulated. The paper argues that both scientific racism and distinctive forms of cultural relativism were used to justify racial separation. This depended on the fact that the categories of race, language and culture were used as functionally interdependent variables, whose boundaries remained fluid. In the main, and especially after the Second World War, Afrikaner nationalist ideologues chose to infer or suggest biological notions of racial superiority rather than to assert these openly. Stress on the distinctiveness of different 'cultures' meant that the burden of explaining human difference did not rest solely on the claims of racial science. As a doctrine, Christian-nationalism remained sufficiently flexible to adjust to changing circumstances. In practice, the essentialist view of culture was no less powerful a means of articulating human difference than an approach based entirely on biological determinism.

Early Missionaries and the Ethnolinguistic Factor During the ‘Invention of Tribalism’ in Zimbabwe

Abstract: There is evidence from across the disciplines that at least some of the contemporary regional names of African tribes, dialects and languages are fairly recent inventions in historical terms. This article offers some evidence from Zimbabwe to show that missionary linguistic politics were an important factor in this process. The South African linguist Clement Doke was brought in to resolve conflicts about the orthography of Shona. His Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects (1931) shows how the language politics of the Christian denominations, which were also the factions within the umbrella organization the Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference, contributed quite significantly to the creation and promotion of Zezuru, Karanga and Manyika as the main groupings of dialects in the central area which Doke later accommodated in a unified orthography of a unified language that was given the name Shona. While vocabulary from Ndau was to be incorporated, words from the Korekore group in the north were to be discouraged, and Kalanga in the West was allowed to be subsumed under Ndebele.Writing about sixty years later, Ranger focusses more closely on the Manyika and takes his discussion to the 1940s, but he also mentions that the Rhodesian Front government of the 1960s and 1970s deliberately incited tribalism between the Shona and the Ndebele, while at the same time magnifying the differences between the regional divisions of the Shona, which were, in turn, played against one another as constituent clans. It would appear then that, for the indigenous Africans, the price of Christianity, Western education and a new perception of language unity was the creation of regional ethnic identities that were at least potentially antagonistic and open to political manipulation.Through many decades of rather unnecessary intellectual justification, and as a result of the collective colonial experience through the churches, the schools and the workplaces, these imposed identities, and the myths and sentiments that are associated with them, have become fixed in the collective mind of Africa, and the modern nation states of the continent now seem to be stuck with them. Missionaries played a very significant role in creating this scenario because they were mainly responsible for fixing the ethnolinguistic maps of the African colonies during the early phase of European occupation. To a significant degree, these maps have remained intact and have continued to influence African research scholarship.

Ruling Relations: Rethinking State and Gender in South African History

Abstract: Although South African women's history has been growing in volume and sophistication over the past decade, the impact of gender analysis has yet to be felt in mainstream or radical historiography. One reason for this neglect is the way in which the categories of both ‘gender’ and ‘women’ have been conceived – with ‘women’ assumed to have a stable referent and ‘gender’ treated as synonymous with women. Those areas of social life where women are not immediately present have thus remained unreconstructed by the theoretical implications of gender. This is particularly the case with the history of ‘the state’.The article identifies and looks critically at the major paradigms of South African women's and gender history in terms of how the relationship between ‘the state’ and ‘women’ is implicitly or explicitly represented. It argues that the understanding of the category ‘women’ as socially and historically constructed (as evident in more recently published gender history) provides a way of moving beyond the more static or abstractly posed state-versus-women relationship. This requires too that ‘the South African state’ be understood not as unitary or coherent but as institutionally diverse with different objectives being taken up and produced as policy and practice. The project then becomes one of understanding South African state formation as a gendered and gendering process, of exploring the different institutional sites and ruling discourses in which gender identities and categories are constructed.

Sources of Conflict in Southern Africa, c. 1800–30: The ‘Mfecane’ Reconsidered*

Abstract: The so-called ‘mfecane’ has been explained in many ways by historians, but never adequately. Julian Cobbing has absolved the Zulu of culpability for ongoing regional conflicts, but his work is severely flawed in its use of evidence. Cobbing is incorrect to argue that the Delagoa Bay slave trade existed on a large scale prior to the disruptions beginning in 1817, and European slaving therefore cannot have been a root cause of political turmoil and change, as he claims. Cobbing correctly identifies European-sponsored slave-raiding as a major cause of violence across the north-eastern Cape Frontier, but his accusations of missionary involvement are false. Jeff Guy's interpretation of the rise of the Zulu kingdom based on environmental factors is inadequate because he examined only stock-keeping and not arable land use, which led him to false conclusions about demography and politics. In this paper I argue that the socio-political changes and associated demographic turmoil and violence of the early nineteenth century in southern Africa were the result of a complex interaction between factors governed by the physical environment and local patterns of economic and political organization. Increasing inequalities within and between societies coupled with a series of environmental crises transformed long-standing competition over natural resources and trade in south-eastern Africa into violent struggles.

Settler Farmers and Coerced African Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1936–46

Abstract: This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on the socio-economic impact of the Second World War on Africa. The focus is on the inter-relationship between the state, settler farmers and African labour in Southern Rhodesia. The war presented an opportunity for undercapitalized European farmers to enlist state support in securing African labour that they could not obtain through market forces alone. Historically, these farmers depended heavily on a supply of cheap labour from the Native Reserves and from the colonies to the north, especially Nyasaland. But the opportunities for Africans to sell their labour in other sectors of the Southern Rhodesian economy and in the Union of South Africa, or to at least determine the timing and length of their entry into wage employment, meant that settler farmers seldom obtained an adequate supply of labour. Demands for increased food production, a wartime agrarian crisis and a diminished supply of external labour all combined to ensure that the state capitulated in the face of requests for Africans to be conscripted into working for Europeans as a contribution to the Imperial war effort. The resulting mobilization of thousands of African labourers under the Compulsory Native Labour Act (1942), which emerged as the prize of the farmers' campaign for coerced labour, corrects earlier scholarship on Southern Rhodesia which asserted that state intervention in securing labour supplies was of importance only up to the 1920s. The paper also shows that Africans did not remain passive before measures aimed at coercing them into producing value for settler farmers.

Berbers and Blacks: Ibā ī Slave Traffic in Eighth-Century North Africa

Abstract: The aim of this article is to illustrate the process whereby certain Berber tribes during the eighth century A.D. substituted slaves from the Bilād al-Sūdān for Berber slaves from North Africa. From the outset, this conversion was influenced strongly, if not instigated, by Ibāḍī merchants until the slave trade became a predominantly Ibāḍī monopoly from the mid-eighth century onwards. The slave trade along the central Sudan route in particular provided the increase in the community's wealth and security, as well as the means for its establishment and expansion as a Muslim sect among diverse Berber tribes and, finally, as the origins for the subsequent, far-flung network of trans-Saharan trade.

'The Character and Objects of Chaka': A Reconsideration of the Making of Shaka as 'Mfecane' Motor

Abstract: An important aspect of Julian Cobbing's radical critique of the ‘mfecane’ as the pivotal concept of the history of southern Africa in the nineteenth century is the claim that the image of Shaka-as-monster was an ‘alibi’ invented by Europeans in the 1820s to mask their slaving activities. Reconsideration of this claim reveals that it is based on the misuse of evidence and inadequate periodisation of the earliest representations of Shaka. Examination of the image of Shaka promoted by the Port Natal traders in the 1820s reveals that, with two highly specific exceptions which were not influential at the time, the traders' presentation of Shaka was that of a benign patron. It was only in 1829, after the Zulu king's death, that European representations began to include a range of ‘atrocity’ stories regarding Shaka. These were not invented by whites but drew on images of Shaka already in place amongst the African communities of southern Africa. These contemporary African views of Shaka and the ways in which they gave shape to the European versions are ignored by Cobbing, and this contributes to his failure to come to grips with past myth-making processes in their fullest complexity.

The Makings of a Tribe: Bondei Identities and Histories*

Abstract: Since the mid-nineteenth century, there have been several changes in the paradigms of ethnic identity in the area around the modern town of Muheza in north-eastern Tanzania Such differing tribal schemas have been correlated with differing presentations of history, and today several varying ideas of identity and history coexist This correlation, and coexistence, suggest that all discussions of history and identity are negotiations, in which individuals attempt to present ethnicity and history in ways which they perceive as consonant with their own interests: the creation of identity, and of history, is thus a process in which all are involved In such discussions, both immediate situation and wider social context influence how people talk about their ethnic identity and their history, so that political and economic changes have had considerable effect in reshaping identity, and thus history, in the area The relationship between identity and interest is, however, a two-way process Peoples' own previous understanding of identity and history may in turn affect their perception of their interests, so that the process is recursive, reacting back on itself: people are able to redefine themselves according to their interests, but this redefinition builds on previous constructs of history and identity

Elder Dempster and the Shipping Trade of Nigeria During the First World War

Abstract: Shipping, a vital element of maritime trade, has not hitherto received adequate attention in studies on Nigerian colonial economic history. This article therefore fills a gap in the literature by studying aspects of the shipping trade during the First World War, when shipping was indispensable for maintaining economic links between Britain and her colonies. Shipping in Nigeria revolved around the practices of the Elder Dempster Shipping Company, which enjoyed an undisputed monopoly of the trade throughout the war, and the reactions of the colonial government and private shippers to them.Scarcity of tonnage and higher freights were the chief features of shipping during the war. The allocation of shipping space, however, ranged the colonial government, the shipping company and the Combine (that is, big European) firms against non-Combine shippers. While Elder Dempster's allocation formula suited the government and the Combine firms, it was considered inequitable by other shippers. This arrangement reflected the community of interests between the colonial state and Big Business vis-a-vis smaller traders.The interests of the government and Elder Dempster were, however, incompatible on the question of ocean freights. Thus, high freights which boosted the firm's turnover were detrimental to the economic interests of the colonial state. The company's monopoly and the non-intervention of the Imperial government enabled it to have its way. Consequently, despite losses at sea, requisition by the Imperial government and rising running costs, Elder Dempster conducted a profitable business during the war. In achieving this, it also served the Imperial interest by effectively linking Nigeria with the metropolis.On the whole, wartime shipping conditions, particularly Elder Dempster's practical monopoly, were a departure from pre-war trends. There was a gradual return to normality in the early 1920s but the firm remained pre-eminent in the West African shipping trade.

Posthumous Questions for Karl Polanyi: Price Inflation in Pre-Colonial Dahomey

Abstract: The article analyses the determination of prices in the pre-colonial West African kingdom of Dahomey, principally with relation to the domestic economy, on the basis of detailed analysis of contemporary documentation. The influential study of Dahomey by Karl Polanyi (1966) posited pervasive state control of both overseas trade and the domestic economy, including prices, which Polanyi argued were set according to traditional notions of equity or equivalence rather than responding to supply and demand. These hypothesized stable prices were held to be reflected in the long-term stability of the exchange value of the local currency of cowry shells, at least prior to the ‘Great Inflation’ caused by excessive European imports of these shells in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although his account of the state's control and management of economic matters was in many respects inaccurate or exaggerated, Polanyi was correct in asserting that prices were subject to state regulation. However, it is shown that prices were nevertheless liable to short-term fluctuations which reflected market conditions, and overall suffered a massive increase during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, comparable in scale to the nineteenth-century ‘Great Inflation’, and likewise reflecting the uncontrolled increase in the money supply through European imports of cowries. Although these two periods of inflation were separated by a period of relative price stability between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, this was not restricted to Dahomey and should also be attributed to the operation of market forces rather than to the effectiveness of Dahomian economic administration. State intervention was probably more successful in holding down the wages of some groups of workers than in managing prices. Polanyi's insistence on the ‘non-market’ character of the Dahomian domestic economy is clearly untenable.

Technology, Trade and ‘A Race of Native Capitalists’: The Krio Diaspora of West Africa and the Steamship, 1852–95

Abstract: This article examines the impact of the introduction of the new technology of steam power into the West African trade in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the changes that the introduction of steampower was expected to lead to was the opening up of the trade to small-scale African traders such as the Krios. Many Krios did make use of the steamships to extend their trading activities and entered areas previously ignored. Many used the steamship services to develop a coastwise trade; others, particularly in the Niger Delta, used them to enter the export trade to Britain. Yet others pioneered the use of steam launches, particularly on the River Niger and along the Slave Coast. In time however, such Krios found their ability to utilize the opportunities provided by the steamships under assault, partly from the European traders' counter-attack and partly from the general depression in the West African trade – itself indirectly caused by the introduction of the steamship – that set in by the 1870s. By the end of the century the position of Krios in the export-import trade of West Africa was being severely squeezed, just as it was in other areas of West African life. For them, steam power did not prove to be the boon it had been anticipated as being.

The Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World, 1600–90: Estimates of Trends in Composition and Value

Abstract: Extending the approach of D. Eltis and L. C. Jennings to the seventeenth century, the author takes estimates for the decades 1623–32 and 1680–90 as the starting points for his discussion of trends in the composition and value of the Atlantic imports and exports of Western Africa. Contrary to prevalent opinion, he argues that at least from 1600 onwards the value of slave exports was two to three times higher than that of commodity exports, as measured according to the prices in America and Europe. However, during most of the century more imports were bartered in the commodity trade than in the slave trade, since the trading margin in the latter sector was considerably higher than in the former. The different margins go some way to explaining why the Portuguese concentrated on the slave trade from Angola between 1600 and 1635, which they could carry on with fewer European imports and more effectively protect, while the more efficient Dutch merchants achieved primacy in the competitive commodity trade of West Africa. The different margins also meant a very uneven distribution of imports over coastal regions. Owing to the predominance of Akan gold in the commodity trade, the Gold Coast drew an estimated fifty per cent of all imports at the beginning of the century and still accounted for 34 per cent at the end. Owing to its predominance in the slave trade, West-Central Africa drew 25 per cent of all imports throughout the century. The few available data on the composition of imports suggest that there may have been a shift from metal goods to textiles and a marked increase of Asian textiles and cowries. From 1593 on the Dutch may have initiated a shift in the gross barter terms of trade in favour of the African merchants which spread from the Gold Coast to other areas when the North-west Europeans obtained the major share in the Atlantic slave trade.

Empire State: Asante and the Historians

Abstract: I Social anthropologists pioneered scholarly research among many of the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. This was notably the case in the West African forest kingdom of Asante (now located in Ghana). The two major figures in this enterprise in Asante were R. S. Rattray (mainly in the 1920s) and M. Fortes (in the 1940s and beyond). Rattray's formidably large body of work reveals his priorities and the intellectual thrust of his concerns. He commenced with the language and discourse of Asante Twi, and with family, kinship and the structure of social relations; he moved on to a grounding of these basic issues in relation to belief, religion and artistic expression; and he concluded by outlining the constitutional framework of custom and law that he saw as being the indispensable enabling mechanism in defining Asante and in shaping its evolution. Rattray was a structural-functionalist avant la lettre, and he was claimed as such by his successor Fortes, who himself was a leading theorist and practitioner of that 'school' of British social anthropology. In effect, Fortes was Rattray's highly sympathetic and self-conscious heir among the Asante. Fortes took his own and his predecessor's findings and constructed from these a sophisticated and powerfully persuasive model of Asante society. Without doubt this was a signal advance in subtlety of understanding, and in the integration of the empirical data with theoretical insight. But it was also in its range of specific problems addressed, and in its overall intellectual focus — a rigorous development of Rattray's approach rather than any very radical departure from it.

On Mentally Mapping Greater Asante: A Study Of Time And Motion

Abstract: This paper examines the way in which Greater Asante was ‘mentally mapped’, thereby enabling government to regulate the movement of couriers, and others, along the great-roads. Lacking clocks, speed was reckoned anthropometrically, by reference to dɔn: rhythmic walking at a normal pace. Computing this against the determinate parts of the day, from dawn to dusk, on which travel (as opposed to eating and resting) was customary, it became possible to estimate the location of a courier at a given point in time. Greater Asante was ‘mapped’ as a circle, the diameter of which was the Asante month of forty-two days (of travel). The circle embraced the most distant of the territories over which the Asantehene claimed authority; these were in fact more or less twenty days from the capital. That it also embraced, in the south, lands under the sea, was of no practical relevance. Superimposing the reckoning of travel times on the matrix of the forty-two days ‘imperium’, the Asante government was able to establish a (‘Monday’) timetable for the conduct of business. The record shows that it worked remarkably well. An understanding of ‘traditional’ practices and procedures has much importance for the understanding of ‘modern’ ones: the past is encapsulated in the present.

The Production and Export of Hides and Skins in Colonial Northern Nigeria, 1900–1945*

Abstract: Despite the seeming abundance of writings on the topic, the depth and breadth of the British raw materials trade with Africa is yet to be fully appreciated. There are commodities, such as cassava starch, animal and dairy products and other less prominent crops, whose exploitation under colonial rule has not been studied; and, with regard to the organization of the export trade, the relationship between the colonial state and metropolitan (industrial and merchant) capital has not been adequately defined. This paper examines the organization of the production and export of hides and skins in colonial Northern Nigeria both to fill a gap in the literature on colonial economic history and to raise questions about the true position of the colonial state vis-a-vis metropolitan capital. Relying on primary source materials, it confirms the importance of hides and skins as a commodity of the pre-colonial caravan trade; and shows that, upon the establishment of British rule over Northern Nigeria, the volume of production and export increased, reaching new and unprecedented peaks during the world wars. Colonialism had a tremendous impact on the hides and skins industry of Northern Nigeria. The colonial state forced the producers to adopt new procedures in flaying, trimming and drying hides and skins, and extended rules of control of markets, minimum standards and compulsory inspection to the industry. In the enforcement of these rules, the state practised double standards, treating African producers and European merchant companies differently. Finally, on the strength of the evidence from the controversy over export duties and railway freight charges, the paper agrees that European merchants and industrialists had unlimited access to, and sometimes prevailed on, the colonial state; but argues that the latter had autonomy in the taking of crucial decisions affecting the economy and commerce of the colony.

The Political Economy of Primary Railway Construction in the Rhodesias, 1890–1911

Abstract: The main trunk lines of the Rhodesian railway system were built under the aegis of Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company (BSA Co.) between 1890 and 1911. This article begins with an analysis of the motivations behind railway construction during this period. It argues that interpretations which set up a dichotomy between ‘Rhodes-as-imperialist’ and ‘Rhodes-as-capitalist’ are misconceived. Nevertheless, it shows how the motivations behind railway development took on a more narrowly economic and financial character after the fiasco of the Jameson Raid in 1896 put paid to Rhodes' sub-imperial ambitions. There follows an analysis of the economic and financial foundations of the BSA Co.'s regional railway monopoly. The article charts how railway construction was sustained through the manipulation of the interlocking interests of the BSA Co. and the Witwatersrand; through the creation of a ‘group structure’ of railway companies; and through the triangular relationship which developed between the BSA Co., Paulings, the monopoly contractor, and d'Erlangers, the chief broker and underwriter of railway loan (debenture) capital. Finally, two fundamental allegations made by critics of the railway policy of the BSA Co. are assessed: firstly, that debenture finance was a means of distributing disguised dividends to itself and its friends; secondly, that these disguised dividends were paid for by the settlers through exorbitant railway rates. The nature of debt within the railway monopoly, the functions of debenture finance and the imperatives which shaped rating policy are discussed. The allegations are revealed to be ill-founded. It is argued that the tensions between the settlers and the BSA Co., their interdependence notwithstanding, were rooted in conflicting perceptions of what the priorities and parameters of economic development should be.

‘Messing with Coloured People’: The 1918 Police Strike in Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract: This article seeks to provide an interpretation of a strike by white policemen in Cape Town in 1918. It argues that this defensive dispute over wages and living conditions can best be understood not simply through an examination of service dissatisfaction in the urban police community, but by incorporating this episode into the larger picture of South African police development in the early decades of the present century. In this broader context, several factors seem general and influential: local social resentments over the terms of national police organization after Union; police practices and attitudes, especially in relation to the increasing recruitment of Afrikaners; the position of white working-class policemen in the ‘civilized labour’ stratification of Cape Town society; and, most visibly, the inflationary effect of the First World War on the living standards of poorly paid, disaffected and unorganized constables. It is argued that these converging pressures generated a severe crisis of work discipline in 1917 and 1918 which tipped the Cape Town police into a classical natural justice strike. While ordinary policemen were split between petitioners and younger, less hesitant radicals, there was considerable popular support for strikers’ claims, both within the Cape police body and the local white labour movement. The government used a strategy of provisional concessions to settle the dispute. In conclusion, it is suggested that the strike experience helped to strengthen associational bonds between lower-ranking policemen and that a commitment by the state to improved service conditions provided an anxious constabulary with a more secure ‘civilized labour’ identity in the post-World War I period.

Coal, Crisis, and Class Struggle: Wankie Colliery, 1918–22

Abstract: Despite its pivotal economic position in Central Africa, the history of Zimbabwe's Wankie Colliery has scarcely been explored. Although the historical pattern of capital accumulation and class struggle on the colliery has yet to be traced in any detail, this article suggests that a useful starting point is the protracted labour crisis which convulsed the colliery in 1918. Attempts to expand output through intensified pressure on a dwindling supply of black labour soon established a vicious circle in which workers' health deteriorated rapidly. Hundreds of black miners were incapacitated by ‘tropical ulcers’. An ensuing commission of enquiry exonerated the colliery's management of any blame, but it is nonetheless significant for the light it casts on the British South Africa Company Administration's narrow conception of its role after the Privy Council decision depriving it of ownership of ‘unalienated’ land in the Colony. The article's last section examines the conflict between the colliery's management and organized white workers in the context of the racial division of labour. In doing so, it emphasizes the structural vulnerability of white labour in the colonial era.

A Thousand Years of East Africa . By John E. G. Sutton. Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa, 1990. Pp. 111. £8.00, paperback.

Abstract: jeopardizing marital relationships. Polygyny, often, though not universally, disliked by women, is a frequent cause of household instability. Such customs adapt ill to urban life. Although we are given the wider context for these women's lives, context on the individual level is very selective and we learn very little about their individual economic endeavours. The introduction tells us that household support largely depends upon women's trade (p. xi). Yet we get no precise detail on how it is some women can manage such trade but not others. The book is rich in information within a narrow focus but does not give us the comprehensive picture of women of Kisangani that its title suggests.

The Longue Durée in the Heart of Darkness

Abstract: When Henry Stanley made his daring journey down the Zaire in I877 the riverain people naturallv resisted what appeared to be an invasion fleet. Having shot his way through, he pleaded that otherwise he and his company would have been stewed; had he not heard the attackers calling out the word for 'meat', which had 'but slight dialectic difference in many languages'?' The episode serves to illustrate three leading themes of Jan Vansina's book, the latest and greatest of his contributions to African history. First, this was the beginning of the destruction of equatorial society, about wvhich he writes wvith sorrow and anger in his penultimate chapter. Secondly, Stanley displayed the common European horror of the rainforest and 'the filthv vulturous ghouls who inhabit it' ;2 and one of Vansina's main purposes is to remov e this prejudice once for all, pointing out that the forest is not impenetrable (except close to roads, where the undergrowth revels in the light) and not inimical, and seeking to show that its people lived bv a v-enerable but constantly evolving tradition which has much to teach the world. Thirdly, Stanley hinted at the possibilities and pitfalls of comparative linguistics, one of the principal tools by which Vansina seeks to lay the tradition bare: the word nyama does mean 'meat' on the banks of the Zaire as wvell as on the Swahili coast, but it also means 'animal ', and perhaps wvhat the people were shouting was 'beasts'! In this book the author returns to wThat may be called the classical age of African studies. After decades in wvhich the micro-dissertation has been the academic norm, he does ethnology on the scale of Frobenius and Baumann and philology on the scale of Westermann and Johnston, but wvith much more knowledge as well as greater sophistication. On the linguistic side he builds on the massive labours of IMalcolm Gjuthrie (and the reader wx-ho wsants to followv the argument in detail will need access to Comparatiue Bantu) but, besides disagreeing w7ith many of his inferences, he has added much nexv data, some of it his own compiling. It is clear, in fact, that we have to do xvith a prodigious scholarly achievement, of Nhich this densely packed book displays only a part. At times indeed the reader has a sense of being hurried through a rich landscape wvhere he wvould prefer to linger. However, there are numerous infilling and summarising articles" and a second Xvolume (on Habitat, Economy and Society) is already on the waN; there will also be, as is only proper, a French edition. The first part of his story has been fairlv orthodox for some time now and was outlined by Vansina in this Journal a few years ago.1 The first people to speak a

South Africa's Economy - Studies in the Economic History of Southern Africa . Volume Two: South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland . Edited by Z. A. Konczacki, Jane L. Parpart and Timothy M. Shaw. London: Frank Cass, 1991. Pp. xvii + 290. £35 (paperback £19.50).

Abstract: Events in South Africa, hence in southern Africa, have moved at such a disorienting pace over the past few months as to make their orderly analysis within an historical perspective a daunting challenge. Add this collection's attempt to adopt in its analysis a ' pluralistic' approach to the clash of ideologies fighting it out over the last generation of South African scholarship, and you have a formidable agenda for any book. Not surprisingly, the earlier chapters, dealing with the eras before the turbulent end of the 1980s, are the more successful (any analysis of the period after mid-1989 being dated before it is in print). The editors have brought together a group of authors representative of the ideological spectrum. Their chapters dovetail nicely into a logical framework, but are of uneven quality. Chapter 1, 'The beginnings of modern South African society' (Leonard Guelke), and especially chapter 3, 'The making of the rural economy' (Timothy Keegan), are excellent brief summaries of economic developments that recent research has afforded. Keegan's is a model of synthesis of the great body of research over the past generation. He traces the patterns of British accumulation and the relegation of the Boers to the economic leavings, all of it based on the integration of the Africans into the economy on terms of trade which dictated the hopelessness of their position. Similarly, Alan Jeeves's chapter on 'Migrant labour, 1920—1960' demonstrates compellingly how state mechanisms were used to keep labour flowing to farm and mine in their never-ending competition with industry (although not all that successfully in the case of farms, he shows, until the mid-1960s and the establishment of a proper influx-control enforcement bureaucracy).

Nile Waters The Waters of the Nile: Hydropolitics and the Jonglei Canal, 1900–1988. By Robert O. Collins. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1990. Pp. xxii+441. £45.

Abstract: the absence of any discussion of consciousness, and insofar as Morton's critique of Cooper stems from the latter's speculations on this very issue. In addition to eight pages of poorly reproduced photographs, there are two dozen excellent maps prepared by the author on a Macintosh computer. One would gladly tolerate the esthetic shortcomings of computer-generated graphics in exchange for having such a generous supply of useful maps in an affordable paperback edition. But this volume carries a hefty price that justifies neither the poor quality printing nor the apparent lack of any copy-editing.

Atlantic System Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System. Edited by Barbara L. Solow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. viii + 355. £35; $39.50.

Abstract: the author explains, but he squeezes it well, showing distinctions between seasonal and permanent middens. In the present, he sees the Maasai as the exception proving the rule — a people not dependent on others for grain. Past societies as seen at Kadero in Sudan, or further north along the Nile, were seemingly less specialized. Therefore one can argue for the quite recent appearance of nomadism. But what about peoples further west in the Sahara, or at Adrar Bous in Tenere where there were no states until relatively recently ? Is there a possibility that peoples emerged much earlier, with a Maasai-like economy, able to domesticate cattle, but in a once-richer environment not needing any relationship with grainproducers ? Perhaps somebody will be able to argue such a case, but in the meantime Karim Sadr's position has much to commend it. He extracts the maximum from the archaeological record, and seems able to document increased specialization on a timetable commensurate with state-formation.

Emancipation Debate The Slave Question: Liberty and Property in South Africa. By R. L. Watson. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1991. Pp. xi + 271. $42; £23.

Abstract: Historians of slavery at the Cape of Good Hope are accustomed to complaining that the importance of slavery, and the colonial period in general, for the creation of modern South Africa is not sufficiently recognized. It is therefore a strange experience to have to complain that a book puts too much weight on slavery. Watson's book is an examination of the emancipation movement at the Cape of Good Hope. As such, it is novel, fascinating and valuable. This is just about the first work to offer a full-scale and rounded description of the arguments deployed in a nineteenth-century Cape political debate, and it does so very well. The abolitionist pamphlets of the Rev. William Wright and of Thomas Miller provide the core of the anti-slavery case, backed up by a variety of newspaper and missionary writings. As such they are solidly within the bounds of contemporary debate in Britain and North America. Indeed, as Watson argues, they are surprisingly lenient on Cape slavery. Even so, there was considerable antiabolitionist writing, mainly in the newspaper De Zuid-Afrikaan, directed against, in particular, Miller's pamphlet. Watson is thus able to present the full width of the debate. He also discusses the membership of the one abolitionist society, the Cape of Good Hope Philanthropic Society, which was concerned to purchase the emancipation of deserving, mainly female, slaves. As might be expected, the society drew most of its members from the largely English Cape Town mercantile community, thus accentuating the cleavage between them and the Dutch-speaking farmers of the Swartland and Boland.

Guinea's Other Suns: The African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture. By Maureen Warner-Lewis. Dover, Massachusetts: The Majority Press, 1991. Pp. xxii + 207. £9.95, paperback.

Abstract: The four brief essays in this volume are all useful and insightful although, for the most part, not highly ambitious. David Birmingham thus introduces us to two Angolan novelists, Antonio de Asis Junior and Artur Pestana ('Pepetela') well worth knowing whether or not they truly represent ' a tradition of fiction which sheds a richer light than any social science has yet mastered' (p. 21). Robin Law, at somewhat greater length and certainly with more research, surveys a body of fictional writing on the kingdom of Dahomey which extends from Aphrah Behn in 1688 to Bruce Chatwin in 1982. The ideological constructions and historical distortions which Law uncovers are not surprising but the range of black and white writers included makes for very interesting reading. Angela Smith, the only nonhistorian in the group, also offers the briefest piece, on the ' almost schizophrenic' narrator's voice in Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The analysis here is trenchant, but one wishes it had been extended to the historiographic problems presented by what is precisely through its literary power the canonical indigenous account of Africa's confrontation with colonialism. Finally, T. C. McCaskie's discussion of '[Ayi Kei] Armah's The Healers and Asante History' represents the most serious — and thus problematic — contribution to this volume. The problem is that the writing of both Armah and McCaskie himself tends to very complex, abstruse and sometimes heavy-handed philosophizing. The meeting of the two in one essay might thus appear a formula for disaster, which is certainly the case in a few passages here. Nonetheless, McCaskie does, from his own research, provide an excellent narrative of the biography at the center of Armah's novel. At a more abstract level he also makes a good plea for Armah's ambitions (while recognizing the major flaws in execution) and thus should convince even the most empiricist of our guild that the act of writing African history cannot be separated from the dilemmas of power inherent in African experiences of both the past and present.