Showing papers in "The Journal of African History in 1993"

We Are What We Eat: Ancient Agriculture Between the Great Lakes

Abstract: A history of food systems in Africa's Great Lakes region is presented using mostly historical linguistic sources, with help from archaeology and paleoecology. The paper moves beyond understanding the causes and consequences of iron-working as the most important feature of the period between c. 1000 b.c. and c. a.d. 500. I argue that a history of agriculture both gives context to changes in technology and introduces powerful new explanations for historical processes of settlement and occupational specialization that took place.Between 1000 b.c. and 500 b.c., in the Great Lakes region, speakers of three of Africa's four major language families practiced distinguishable food-producing systems. Two groups, Central Sudanian and Sog Eastern Sudanian, depended mainly on growing cereals and raising livestock for their sustenance. The third group, the Tale Southern Cushites, gave decidedly greater emphasis to cattle but probably also grew grains. A fourth group, the Great Lakes Bantu, grew root crops, fished and raised cattle and grain. They inherited much of their knowledge of these techniques, other than cattle-raising, from earlier Eastern Highlands Bantu-speakers. But they incorporated cattle and some grains through longstanding contacts with the two Sudanian and the Southern Cushitic communities. The eclectic food system they thus created allowed them to carry their unified, complex food-producing system throughout the wide variety of environments that they encountered in the Lakes region. After c.a.d. 200 descendants of the Great Lakes Bantu refined this synthesis; they emphasized livestock raising inland from Lake Victoria, and mixed farmers spread throughout the Kivu Rift. Technological, demographic, ecological and sociological explanations of the technological evidence are offered.

The 1952 Jan Van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival: Constructing and Contesting Public National History in South Africa

Abstract: For all approaches to the South African past the icon of Jan Van Riebeeck looms large. Perspectives supportive of the political project of white domination created and perpetuate the icon as the bearer of civilization to the sub-continent and its source of history. Opponents of racial oppression have portrayed Van Riebeeck as public (history) enemy number one of the South African national past. Van Riebeeck remains the figure around which South Africa's history is made and contested.But this has not always been the case. Indeed up until the 1950s, Van Riebeeck appeared only in passing in school history texts, and the day of his landing at the Cape was barely commemorated. From the 1950s, however, Van Riebeeck acquired centre stage in South Africa's public history. This was not the result of an Afrikaner Nationalist conspiracy but arose out of an attempt to create a settler nationalist ideology. The means to achieve this was a massive celebration throughout the country of the 300th anniversary of Van Riebeeck's landing. Here was an attempt to display the growing power of the apartheid state and to assert its confidence.A large festival fair and imaginative historical pageants were pivotal events in establishing the paradigm of a national history and constituting its key elements. The political project of the apartheid state was justified in the festival fair through the juxtaposition of ‘civilization’ and economic progress with ‘primitiveness’ and social ‘backwardness’. The historical pageant in the streets of Cape Town presented a version of South Africa's past that legitimated settler rule.Just as the Van Riebeeck tercentenary afforded the white ruling bloc an opportunity to construct an ideological hegemony, it was grasped by the Non-European Unity Movement and the African National Congress to launch political campaigns. Through the public mediums of the resistance press and the mass meeting these organizations presented a counter-history of South Africa. These oppositional forms were an integral part of the making of the festival and the Van Riebeeck icon. In the conflict which played itself out in 1952 there was a remarkable consensus about the meaning of Van Riebeeck's landing in 1652. The narrative constructed, both by those seeking to establish apartheid and those who sought to challenge it, represented Van Riebeeck as the spirit of apartheid and the originator of white domination. The ideological frenzy in the centre of Cape Town in 1952 resurrected Van Riebeeck from obscurity and historical amnesia to become the lead actor on South Africa's public history stage.

The ‘House’ and Zulu Political Structure in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: The rise of the Zulu power in the early nineteenth century has conventionally been treated as the outstanding example of a contemporary southern African process of ‘state-formation’, which was associated with revolutionary social changes. This paper advances an alternative view, that there were strong continuities with established forms of chieftaincy in the region, and in particular that the Zulu political system was based on a traditional, pan-Nguni homestead form of organization.The Zulu homestead was divided into right and left sections, each with its own identity and destiny. This opposition was mapped into the layout of ordinary homesteads and royal settlements. It was carried through into the organization of regiments. The homestead and its segments provided both the geographical and the structural nodes of the society. The developmental cycle of the homestead ideally followed a set pattern, creating a fresh alignment of units in each generation. The points of segmentation were provided by the ‘houses’, constituted for each major wife and her designated heir. Each of these houses represented the impact, within the homestead, of relationships sealed by marriage with outside groups, whose leaders threw their weight behind particular factions in the political processes within the family.

The Antecedents of the Interlacustrine Kingdoms

Abstract: The main interlacustrine kingdoms have been presented, on the evidence of their royal genealogies recalling up to thirty reigns, as stretching back to a ‘Chwezi’ period some five centuries ago. This view was promoted especially in the Kitara zone, comprising Bunyoro and regions to its south and, as a close linguistic grouping, extending to Nkore, Karagwe and Buhaya. Rwanda to the south-west and Buganda to the east, though each rather distinct, share some of the same cultural and traditional features. In the central Kitara zone it has been further argued that the ‘Chwezi’ period is represented by various impressive archaeological sites – hilltop shrines, notably at Mubende, with special and archaic objects; complex earthwork enclosures at Bigo and elsewhere; and the concentrated settlement nearby at Ntusi. Certain of these have been claimed as Chwezi royal capitals of ancient Kitara, and specific features have been compared with royal abodes of recent centuries. Such literal interpretation, let alone royalist manipulation, of oral traditions is now considered too simplistic; not only are the Chwezi generally regarded as gods or mythical heroes, but also the role of archaeology is now seen as something more positive than the mere verification of verbal evidence.Renewed archaeological research indicates that Ntusi was occupied from about the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries a.d. and that the earthworks, including Bigo, and the settlement on Mubende hill fall into the latter half of that span. This cultural grouping thrived on a combination of cattle-keeping and grain cultivation, as is especially clear at Ntusi on fertile ground in the midst of the Bwera grasslands. It may have been the growing strains of a delicately balanced economy as competition increased for cattle and the pastures which led to its eventual breakdown. During the last half-millennium Bwera has been a peripheral and lightly populated district between Bunyoro, Nkore and Buganda. It is difficult to imagine these later kingdoms developing directly out of a supposed ‘Chwezi’ one based at Ntusi and the Bigo constructions.Two periods of marked change are discernible therefore, one around the middle of this millennium, the other at its beginning. That earlier, mid-Iron Age, revolution witnessed the introduction of cattle on a large scale and the first intensive exploitation of the interlacustrine grasslands. Cattle becoming then an economic asset, it may be inferred that ownership of stock and defence of the pastures became sources of prestige and patronage, with obvious social, political and military implications. This situation opened opportunities for other specializations, including the production of salt for distant distribution. Traditions concerning gods and heroes, and the continuing popular chwezi cults, illustrate the changes and may also echo the cultural and economic importance of iron and its working among agricultural populations from before the pastoral revolution.

The Pulse Model: Genesis and Accommodation of Specialization in the Middle Niger*

Abstract: By the mid-first millennium a.d., Middle Niger cities took the form of many separate mounds clustered together. Many of these mounds may have been settlements of specialists. This distinctive city form may have had its origin in segmented, but articulated, Late Stone Age communities in the southern Sahara. The Pulse Model is an attempt to reconstruct the circumstances of environmental change and interactions among these communities that encouraged occupational specialization. The model predicts the best locations to search for evidence of early specialization, namely the several north–south trending palaeochannels of the southern Sahara. There, groups increasingly concerned with intensification of production within separate microenvironments would nevertheless have been in close contact. Climate shifts over the past several millennia create a ‘pulse’ of population movements, or shifts of ecological adaptations, along these long corridors. However, adaptation to climate change and stress incompletely explains the emergence of specialization. Tradition, myths, legends and material reinforcements of divisions between present-day ethnic and artisan groups in the Middle Niger suggest the ways in which corporate identity may have been constructed and maintained in the very distant past. If corporate identity can emerge in a form that discourages conflict between groups, the result might be increasingly specialized responses to climate change and to the economic and social opportunities of early urbanism. There should be no sharp discontinuity between the emerging specialization of the last millennia b.c. and the earlier clustered urbanism of cities such as Jenne-jeno. Middle Niger urbanism is an intensification of prehistoric social dynamics, not a revolutionary process.

Selling the Iron for Their Shackles: Wandala-Montagnard Interactions in Northern Cameroon

Abstract: The Muslim Wandala state controlled large areas of the plains south of Lake Chad between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries a.d. The Wandala also engaged in an extremely complex, and often hostile, set of relations with the inhabitants of the Mandara Mountains, which bordered their state to the south and closely adjoined successive Wandala capitals. These Wandala – montagnard relationships had diverse economic, ritual, political and military aspects. Their complexity appears to be due in large part to the fact that the Wandala and many of the montagnard groups share ethnic origins, and to the violent processes by which differentiation took place and the Wandala gained hegemony on the plains. These processes probably began with a Wandala use of trading advantages to gain access to the Kanuri market system and the subsequent use of products so obtained to expand their dominion.

The Invention of the ‘Tropical Worker’: Medical Research and the Quest for Central African Labor on the South African Gold Mines, 1903–36

Abstract: In 1903 the South African mining industry began recruiting African labor from Central Africa in order to shore up their labor supplies. From the outset, Central African recruitment was problematic, for Central African mine workers died at very high rates. The primary source of Central African mortality was pneumonia. In response to this high mortality the Union government threatened to close down Central African recruitment, a threat which they carried out in 1913. From 1911 to 1933, the mining industry fought to maintain, and then after 1913 to regain access to Central African labor. Of central importance in this struggle were efforts to develop a vaccine against pneumonia. While the mine medical community failed to produce an effective vaccine against pneumonia, the Chamber of Mines successfully employed the promise of a vaccine eventually to regain access to Central African Labor in 1934. The mines achieved this goal by controlling the terrain of discourse on the health of Central African workers, directing attention away from the unhealthy conditions of mine labor and toward the imagined cultural and biological peculiarities of these workers. In doing so the mines constructed a new social category, ‘tropical workers’ or ‘tropicals’. The paper explores the political, economic and intellectual environment within which this cultural construction was created and employed.

British Justice and the Native Tribunals of the Southern Gold Coast Colony

Abstract: As a result of the policy of indirect rule which British administrators introduced into the Colony of the Gold Coast at the turn of the twentieth century, customary courts, or what were called Native Tribunals, became important venues of adjudication for the indigenous population. As a result, however, of the powerful impact of British justice on the Colony, the judicial responsibilities, procedure, personnel and the nature of the customary law that these courts applied underwent profound changes. It was an excellent example of how important was the cultural interchange between European and African ideas during the colonial period, which, however, both academic lawyers and historians have neglected. The former have preferred to focus on the superior courts as venues of juridical interaction while the latter have focused far more on ‘what was said about change than what was said about order’. By looking, however, at this example of cultural interaction on a fundamentally popular level, we can see that this ‘transforming moment’ in the colonial situation can be seen neither as something ‘imposed’ on African society by colonial administrators nor as simply generating new mechanisms for privileged groups to take advantage of. The Native Tribunals never fully came up to what British administrators or African lawyers considered the highest standards of British rule of law. Nevertheless, their most important function was to popularize recourse to judicial institutions which increasingly adopted more and more of the features of the British legal system.

Textile Production and Gender in the Sokoto Caliphate

Abstract: Men and women, trained in the occupations of spinner, weaver, dyer, tailor and embroiderer, manufactured the renowned textile products of the Sokoto Caliphate, a nineteenth-century state in the central Sudan region of West Africa. The numerical distributions of men and women within these occupations were uneven, but not in accordance with the pattern described most frequently in the literature. Offered here is another, more detailed view of textile production. Women were not simply spinners but were also weavers and dyers. Uneven, too, were the geographical distributions of men and women workers. Men skilled in textile manufacturing were widely disseminated throughout the caliphate, as were women spinners; women skilled at weaving and dyeing, however, were concentrated mainly in the southern emirates of Nupe and Ilorin. Similarly, male entrepreneurs organized large-scale textile manufacturing enterprises in the north-central portion of the caliphate while enterprises created by women were located to the south.New sources, the textile products of the caliphate, along with other contemporary evidence, reveal that women's work was more varied, more prominent, more highly skilled and more organized than previously thought. Comparative analyses along gender lines show that men's work and women's work were similar in the degree of training required and the levels of skill achieved. Labor, especially skilled labor, was critical to textile production if the caliphate was to maintain its external markets. But there were substantial differences in the degree to which men and women could mobilize and organize labor. A variety of social and political factors in caliphate society combined to assist men and hinder women in the organization and management of textile manufacturing.

Economy within an Economy: the Manilla Currency, Exchange Rate Instability and Social Conditions in South-Eastern Nigeria, 1900–48

Abstract: This paper studies the effects of the coexistence of the manilla currency and British currency in south-eastern Nigeria, and the way in which this monetary situation created political tensions which eventually led to the redemption of the manilla. When British control of Southern Nigeria was formalized in 1900 and British currency introduced in the south-east in the following year, the inability of the colonial authorities to put into circulation adequate supplies of British coins, coupled with historically entrenched use of traditional currencies, compelled the colonial state to recognize the latter as legal tender. However, the continuing circulation of these currencies alongside British coins created financial and economic difficulties, causing the colonial state to adopt a number of legislative measures to eradicate them. While other traditional currencies capitulated to these measures, the manilla continued to be popular as a result of objective economic factors, and was strengthened by some of the very instruments designed to eliminate it. Meanwhile, the constantly fluctuating exchange rate of the manilla was generating discontent. These fluctuations were caused primarily by the gyrations of the world market. Improved prices of palm products–the main sources of British currency in the economy of southeastern Nigeria–brought about the appreciation of the manilla. This caused hardship among wage-earners by reducing the exchange value and the purchasing power of their meagre and fixed income which had to be converted to manillas in order to buy food and other locally produced goods and services. Periods of depression, on the other hand, caused manilla depreciation as a result of a diminished inflow of British currency. This reduced the income of peasant producers, while increasing the purchasing power of workers. The ferments generated by fluctuating manilla values have remained, until now, unidentified causal links in the political movements in south-eastern Nigeria, including especially the women's movements of the 1920s. The discontent intensified in the 1940s, when the influx of cash into the Nigerian economy caused by war-time military spending and the post-war commodity boom caused a continuous appreciation of the manilla. This development made life more difficult for workers, whose incomes were already being decimated by inflation. The resulting intensified political tension, as well as the existing obstacles to trade and smooth collection of taxes (also caused by unabating manilla fluctuations), made the demonetization of the manilla through redemption inevitable. With the elimination of the manilla, which had constituted a sub-system within the economic system of colonial Nigeria, the colonial state's economic control of Nigeria can be said to have been completed.

The Horse and Slave Trade Between the Western Sahara and Senegambia

Abstract: Following the late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cavalry revolution in Senegambia, the horse and slave trade became a major sector of the desert-edge political economy. Black African states imported horses from North Africa and the western Sahara in exchange for slaves. Over time, under conditions of increasing aridity, the zone of desert horse-breeding was pushed south, and through crossbreeding with the small disease-resistant indigenous horses of the savanna, new breeds were created. Although the savanna remained an epidemiologically hostile environment for the larger and more desirable horses bred in North Africa, in the high desert and along the desert fringe, Black African states continued to import horses in exchange for slaves into the period of French colonial rule.The evidence assembled on the horse trade into northern Senegambia raises the difficult issue of the relative quantitative importance of the Atlantic and Saharan/North African slave trades and calls into question the assumption that the Atlantic slave trade was the larger of the two. Most available evidence concerns the Wolof kingdoms of Waalo and Kajoor. It suggests that the volume of slaves exported north into the desert from Waalo in the late seventeenth century was probably at least ten times as great as the volume of slaves exported into the Atlantic slave trade. For both Waalo and Kajoor, this ratio declined during the first half of the eighteenth century as slave exports into the Atlantic markets increased. The second half of the eighteenth century saw an increase in predatory raiding from the desert which produced an additional flow of north-bound slaves. For Waalo and Kajoor – and probably for the other Black African states of northern Senegambia – the flow of slaves north to Saharan and North African markets probably remained the larger of the two export volumes over the eighteenth century. This northward flow of slaves continued strong after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and was only shut down with the imposition of French colonial authority.

Love for Three Oranges, or, The Askiya's Dilemma: The Askiya , al-Maghīlī and Timbuktu, c . 1500 a.d.

Abstract: The authors argue that, during the crucial decade of Songhay history which followed the death of Sunni Ali, Askiya Muḥammad pursued, sometimes quickly and sometimes hesitantly, three distinct ‘Islamic’ options, in contrast to the ‘received tradition’ which sharply differentiates between the reign of the last sunni's and the first of the askiyas. Askiya Muḥammad began his reign in alliance with the court clerics of the imperial capital in Gao, who were accustomed to ‘mixing’ Islamic and traditional practices. After his pilgrimage he sought out the advice of the radical Muslim scholar from the Sahara, al-Maghīlī. The strong positions of al-Maghīlī against the Jews and also the Musūfah, a Berber group strongly associated with Timbuktu, led the askiya to his third choice, the urbane and tolerant Islamic practice of the famous center of Muslim scholarship. The authors advance this as a new interpretation of predominantly old available evidence, and they suggest, on the one hand, the complexity and multiplicity of Islamic practices in the Niger Buckle region around 1500 A.D. and, on the other, the necessity of choice among the three options.

Reluctant Rebels Zimbabwe's Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices . By Norma Kriger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. x+303. £35; $54.50.

Abstract: Paraguayan model was abandoned and the great Jesuit tradition of secondary education in Europe reasserted itself in Zambia. This development is one of the principal themes in Father Carmody's well-documented study, in which material from Jesuit, church and national archives in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Ireland have been enriched by an extensive range of oral interviews. Carmody provides us with a perceptive analysis of Moreau's strength and limitations. The missionary's paternal identification with the Tonga included the veneration of their ancestors, as seen most notably in his address to a great crowd gathered at Monze's grave in August 1932. It also involved his denunciation as early as 1927 of those settlers who wanted only to exploit African labour. On the other hand, he refused to have English taught in his schools, although an ability to speak English was the most practical benefit that the Tonga perceived in primary education, and the French Jesuits at Chikuni habitually spoke English amongst themselves. Moreau's vision of a prosperous peasantry was set firmly against the urban ' detribalization' so powerfully being developed in the Copperbelt with its inevitable dominance over the country's future. Carmody also brings out clearly the crucial role of Maximilian Prokoph, the most notable of the Polish Jesuits who in the 1930s came to supplement and supplant the French pioneers. Prokoph's principal motive in moving towards secondary education was his desire to establish a place to prepare future seminarians, but his move had far wider political implications. He received little or no support from the colonial government, but by 1949 the secondary school was established, just at the moment when the expulsion of missionaries from China dramatically emphasized the importance of indigenous leadership in the church and when European settlers were seeking to entrench their political influence. For his expansion of secondary education, Prokoph enlisted the help of Irish Jesuits, and in the critical confrontation with the Federation, Irish hostility to British rule helped to align the church with African nationalists.

Sebatakgomo and the Zoutpansberg Balemi Association: The ANC, the Communist Party and Rural Organization, 1939–55

Abstract: Sebatakgomo — a migrant worker-based movement – was founded in 1954 and went on to play a central role in the Sekhukhuneland Revolt of 1958. It was launched from within the ANC, and a number of its leaders were also members of the Communist Party. This article explores the roles played by these wider political movements in the formation of Sebatakgomo. It argues that, while ANC networks and individuals within its central leadership made an important contribution, the rural presence of the ANC was fragmentary in this period and that its central organizational strategies had been effectively checkmated by an increasingly authoritarian state. It suggests that the crucial initial impetus and strategy behind Sebatakgomo came from Communist Party members living in a migrant world and trained in the Party's history and methods of organization. In particular Alpheus Maliba, who led the Zoutpansberg Balemi Association in the northern Transvaal in the early 1940s, provided a mentor and model for Flag Boshielo, who was the driving force in the establishment of Sebatakgomo. The article also suggests that the history of Sebatakgomo provides an example of the impact of Communist Party activists in transforming the ANC into a mass organization in the early 1950s.

The Birth of an African Private Epistolography, Echo Island 1862–1901

Abstract: This study examines the surviving private correspondence from Echo Island (Jazīrat Abū Ranāt, formerly Abranarti), a small nineteenth-century agricultural community in the Shāīquiyya country of the northern Sudan. The central question addressed is a discordance between the preoccupations of the letters and the concerns manifested in the considerably larger literature of contemporary legal records surviving from the same community, a clash that finds resonance in the familiar historiographical rivalry between advocates of culturally autonomous consciousness and partisans of material or socioeconomic determinisms. It is suggested that the private correspondence from Echo Island may best be interpreted as a new technique of bond management in the microsociological sense that arose and flourished in an age when the community found itself compelled to respond to a colonial setting vastly larger in scale than what had previously prevailed. The world of subjective ideas evidenced in the correspondence ignored, probably deliberately, most of the pressing immediate concerns of the community revealed in the contemporary legal documents; however, it opened a new ‘mode of communication,’ a conceptual terrain across which members of the elite exercised their virtuosity in mutual manipulations of status.

«My friend the shylock»: money-lenders and their clients in south-western Nigeria

Abstract: As older ways of raising credit declined or were re-defined, the acquiring of loans from a specialized group of money-lenders flourished in colonial Western Nigeria. Money-lenders charged exorbitant interest and insisted on loan repayment at a fixed date. Borrowing from the modern banking system, the money-lenders prepared legal documents and required surety. Debt recovery was generally painful to defaulters; they were humiliated, harassed, and had their property confiscated. The practice generated many conflicts. The debtor was generally unhappy, especially if the money was used for consumption. Lenders cheated with high interest rates and other charges and promoted for their own ends indiscriminate lending to poor and vulnerable people. To minimize conflicts and protect debtors, the colonial administration decided to regulate the trade with ordinances, especially the Moneylenders' Ordinance of 1938 which set limits to interest and forced lenders to obtain licences. In general, lenders subverted the ordinance, creditors and debtors became more cunning as documents were falsified to protect lenders, and those who needed money continued to accept harsh terms.

Poor Whites White but Poor: Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa 1880–1940 . Edited By Robert Morrell. Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1992. Pp. xxiii + 224. £11.90, paperback.

Abstract: exploration is not woven into the bulk of the narrative or its conclusion. That we are left with a great deal of raw material is perhaps not surprising: Eirola's focus is primarily an account of 'what happened' in a region long shrouded in silence.' The book remains an indispensable reference source in the political historiography of the region. Hopefully it will enable future research to leaven the dough of what we now know — thanks to Eirola — with new inputs which are thematic, analytical, theoretical, critical and comparative.

‘Blundering and Plundering’: The Scramble for Africa Relived

Abstract: The success of Thomas Pakenham's The Scramble for Africa is already beyond question.1 The book was widely and favourably reviewed when it first appeared in December I99I; it has subsequently been translated as well as reprinted; and in I992 it received both the Alan Paton Award and W. H. Smith's Annual Literary Award.2 The author spent ten years studying his chosen subject and visited no fewer than twenty-two countries in Africa as well as undertaking archival research in Britain, France, Belgium and Germany. The result is a massive work of over 700 pages enlivened by numerous illustrations and presented in user-friendly print. Here, in the publisher's words, 'is a historical narrative on the grand scale, crosscut between Europe at the height of its power and Africa in its political infancy, covering a vast terrain and including a huge cast of characters, yet as vivid and fastmoving as a novel'.' The author himself claims to have written the first narrative account of the scramble in one volume since Scott Keltie published his study of partition a century ago.4 Well might self-styled professional historians catch their breath at the audacity of the undertaking and furrow their brows to see what they might learn from Pakenham's achievement. This is a book that seems to have everything: comprehensive research, extensive field work, and lively prose all brought to bear by an established author on one of the classic problems of modern African and imperial history. It sounds too good to be true; it is. It is not that the claims are false: the book is evidently the product of a serious commitment, and it undoubtedly provides a full and detailed narrative account of the scramble. It is the inference that is misleading. Despite the large scale of his study and the sustained labour that went into producing it, Pakenham has written a book that contributes nothing of significance to our understanding of the scramble. More damagingly, the work perpetuates and popularizes an outdated view of both African and imperial history. This outcome, however unintended, is particularly unfortunate in view of the achievements of the last generation of historians working in these fields of study, and it is a considerable setback to the efforts made by writers such as Basil Davidson to present a more informed view of Africa to the wider world. Given that the author's integrity and good intentions are

Jesuits in Zambia Conversion and Jesuit Schooling in Zambia. By Brendan P. Carmody S.J. (Studies in Christian Mission, vol. 4.) Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992. Pp. xxix+179. No price given.

Abstract: some are valuable summaries of current practice in a particular area, such as Kenneth Hill's on estimation from deficient data, others seem unnecessarily heterodox. For example, Clyde Mitchell's study of child mortality in 1950s urban Zambia uses complex scaling techniques to produce an index of socio-economic status and in doing so aggregates income and education. However, many recent studies of child mortality suggest that it is important to look at such factors separately. Similarly, Patrick Ohadike's account of social organization and demography in Zambia labours long and confusingly over the rather obvious relationship between the prevalence of marriage and fertility, while engaging neither with Bongaarts and Potter's standard work on proximate determinants, nor with the huge literature on fertility and social organization orchestrated by Jack Caldwell and Ron Lesthaeghe. Maybe more stimulating for the historian in this second section are thoughtful pieces on women's migration and child labour, respectively by Sharon Stichter and Karen Hansen, and useful illustrations of technical approaches to mapping and spatial autocorrelation. Probably the richest material for the non-quantitative historian is to be found in the case studies. Rita Headrick's superb summary of the state of knowledge of the historical demography of French Equatorial Africa is particularly helpful for those illiterate in French. It also demonstrates the value of techniques of projecting trends backwards from the first censuses of the 1950s and 1960s described by Hill. Sabakinu Kivuli, perhaps more than any of the other contributors, successfully marries the national and local level, in a study of worker mortality in the Zairean town of Matadi. By focusing on a social group, rather than a demographically defined population, Kivuli also gives concrete form to the suggestive comments made about posing the 'problem of human reproduction correctly' (p. 329). This is a valuable book for anyone interested in the historical demography of Africa, or in Zambia. However, with the emphasis almost wholly on technique and sources, it is easy to lose sight of history. Few pieces directly suggest how new historical insight can be gained; one exception being David Beach's use of data from annual reports to propose an alternative regional categorization of colonial (and pre-colonial) Zimbabwe. While this is clearly not the intent of the collection, what is absent is convincing explanation of the phenomena so carefully identified and assessed. The tools are provided, but the job itself remains to be done.

Women Migrants - Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in South Africa, 1900–1983 . By Belinda Bozzoli with the assistance of Mmantho Nkotsoe. London: James Currey; Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1991. Pp. xi+292. £35 (paperback £9.95).

Abstract: of being undercut by cheaper unorganized workers from the moment of its own successes in the 1930s, the whole thrust of the union's politics depended on the powerful personality of Solly Sachs. Charismatic union leaders are not always very successful at rearing up worker-leaders to succeed them. Berger takes note of the fact that the GWU heritage was largely dissipated. White women workers became more conservative and their daughters moved out of factory work. The situation of African workers in a following generation was quite different, for instance having little interest in the cultural activities for which the GWU was noted. Berger has much material on the changing economic situation of women workers. Her account also benefits from her extensive interviews. She was successful in getting an account of the earliest attempts to organize women in the 1920s from Fanny Klenerman, who herself recalled 'Pickaxe Mary' Fitzgerald, pre-World War I labour leader. She presents a composite picture of African garment workers who entered the industry in the 1950s of considerable sociological value. Of women who had known much hardship but appreciated the opportunities of factory labour, only a handful had ever been actively politicized or acquired any liberating consciousness through work. Far more research should still be done, however, on women as workers in other sectors of the economy, especially in the household and on the farm. Moreover, Berger is far too sanguine about the ease with which heroic episodes of the past have been integrated into current trade union practice. Jeremy Baskin's recent Striking Back points to the weaknesses of the COSATU federation in this regard. The GWU and the Food & Canning stories perhaps offer more of a model for the mobilization of women into general struggles than a guide for efforts at empowerment as women. The issues Berger raises will undoubtedly become more significant over time as the South African workforce becomes ever more differentiated and women workers more self-consciously able to struggle for their particular needs. She illustrates well her assertion that the proletarianization of women is a different story than the proletarianization of men. Their effective organization will always have to take account of that, as this clear and wellresearched account indicates.

Family Survivors - Tears of the Dead: The Social Biography of an African Family . By Richard Werbner. (International African Library.) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, for the International African Institute; Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1991. Pp. xi+211. £30.

Abstract: revolutionary party in Zimbabwe drew its core support from unmarried youths who, in turn, used their alignment with the 'comrades' to assert independence from rigid parental authority. Similarly, women sometimes called upon guerrillas to intervene directly in domestic affairs, for example to restrain wife-beaters or to validate the behavior of females who played leadership roles outside the household. Finally, peasants at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder unleashed resentments against wealthier, educated neighbors, for example by accusing them of being witches or government informers. Far from acting as a united and self-conscious social class, peasants in Zimbabwe displayed a mosaic of motivations for participation in the independence war. The merit of the Kriger analysis is to draw attention to neglected gender, generational and other conflicts in order to arrive at a broad and rich construction of peasant consciousness.

Haya Christians Conversion to Greater Freedom? Women, Church and Social Change in Northwestern Tanzania under Colonial Rule . By Birgitta Larsson. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Studia Historica Upsaliensia 162. Pp. 230.

Abstract: Traditionally, Kikuyu women participated in domestic production the care of the family, agricultural production and trading but they could not own land nor did they have political power. From 1908 Kiambu women were forced to build roads and to carry timber from the forests. They protested loudly, and Harry Thuku defended their rights in 1921—2. No wonder the women were actively involved in the 1922 riots which occurred following his arrest. Mary Nyanjiru, who was shot by the British during the riot, is described by Presley as ' the mother of female political protest in Kenya'. But others might make claims for Sioutune wa Kathuke, a Kamba woman who was deported to an island south of Mombasa by the colonial government in 1912, who used the kilumi dance to propagate her protest message against colonial policies in Machakos, in the same way that the Kiambu women were in the 1930s to use the muthiringo songs to protest against deplorable labour conditions on European coffee farms. Also, McKatilile, the courageous Giriama woman who was deported to Kisii and later banished to Kismayu for her stance against colonial land alienation policies prior to the First World War, deserves mention as a leader of protest. Women's evolution into nationalist fighters is one of several transformations discussed in the book. Starting as labour protests in the 1920s, militancy resulted in the formation of women's political organizations in the 1930s and by 1940 women were active nationalists in the Kikuyu Central Association. They raised funds and provided facilities for girls' education. From then onwards women were formally included in Kenya's political parties. The Kenya African Union (KAU), Mau Mau, Kenya African National Union (KANU) and Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU) all had a women's wing. But we are told nothing at all about the women's wing in the KAU. In the Mau Mau movement, women served as recruiters, organizers, spies, soldiers and prisoners of war, thus marking the full transformation of women's political roles. In this story of women's roles in the nationalist movement, the old division between the moderates and the radicals is revealed again, except that the author draws all her oral evidence from the radicals and none from the loyalist women. Also missing from the study (perhaps because the author was more interested in female radicalism) is a discussion of the effect of the redirection of women's household labour into wage labour. More research is needed on this important aspect of economic transformation. The author also omits from her study attempts that were made by Kiambu males to control their women who were trading in Nairobi. Kikuyu male elders and political activists in Kiambu combined to try to stop their women from going to Nairobi to trade. They feared they would lose the economic control over their women, and that would be tantamount to losing control over their sexuality. Women's transformation in Kenya is not complete. Economic and political empowerment is still to be achieved and the women of Kenya would benefit immensely from reading Cora Presley's book which provides both models and ideals.

Portrait of Bȏne - Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870–1920. By David Prochaska. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. xix+328; 25 illustrations. £27.50.

Abstract: in the Niger bend (3500/2800 B.P.) and Senegambia (2800 B.P.) and adoption of Oryza sativa in the sixteenth century. In East Africa and Madagascar, O. sativa and japonica probably came from South Asia through Arab expansion in the eighth and ninth centuries. Groundwater lifting systems in a number of places are described in this volume. These include those of the Nile Valley (sdqya, tabut and tanbusha), described by de Sainte Marie, Hausa shadoof gardens (described by Raynaut) and the foggara of Ahaggar (Bernus). Gravity systems occur widely within East Africa. A map (from B. Berthelot, Maitrise de I'eau en Afrique de I'Est: des systemes d'irrigation au Kenya et en Tanzanie [Paris, 1987]) locates some thirty societies that have 'une civilisation dite \"aquatique\"', including Njemps (Baringo), Marakwet, Sonjo, Chagga, Taita and Engaruka. Across Africa, irrigation takes a range of forms and supports relatively high densities of people, despite the spread of cash cropping under colonial governments. To Marzouk this suggests that the importance of such intensive systems in long-distance pre-colonial trade deserves more attention, and she sketches the historical background to irrigation in West Africa. Slaves allowed significant investment in irrigation infrastructure (what Brookfield would call 'landesque capital'), for example deep wells or the underground galleries of foggaras. The development of irrigation systems has also been influenced by past patterns of trade and economy. In West Africa, animal traction appeared in the nineteenth century on the routes of Islamic pilgrims, while colonial expansion drastically shifted the main axes of trade. One might add to this the importance of the caravan trade to irrigation at some sites in East Africa. It is a great pity that this collection was so timed that it does not engage directly with debates in English about the history of agriculture in Africa and also about intensification (see, for example, J. McCann, 'Agriculture in African history', J. Afr. Hist., XXXII [1991]). Marzouk raises the question of territorial organization and control, and the nature of irrigating societies. It would be very interesting to see a further discussion of the distinction that John Sutton has drawn between specialized and intensive systems. There is a clear need for francophoneanglophone co-operation in this area. This collection offers three things. First, it provides a series of interesting and important accounts of indigenous farmer-managed irrigation in Africa. Second, it gives an insight into the scope and descriptive strength of francophone research on rural Africa. Third, it gives rather depressing evidence on a remarkable lack of communication between anglophone and francophone scholars engaged in such studies: too often, it seems, still prisoners in geographical terms at least of colonial geographies and the language divisions of Africa.

Policing Colonial Nigeria Imperial Policing: The Emergence and Role of the Police in Colonial Nigeria 1860–1960 . By Philip Terdoo Ahire. Buckingham: The Open University Press, 1991. Pp. xvii+165. £25.

Abstract: Philip Ahire here offers a radical interpretation of the history of the Nigerian Police Force (NPF). He deploys the tools of the student of political economy effectively to justify his two central theses: that colonialism was all about the political subjugation and economic exploitation of the governed by the governors; and that the members of the NPF were a most useful tool in the realization of that goal. He identifies two 'phases' in the development of Nigerian policing; the militaristic, covering the period i860 to 1914; and the civil, from 1914 to i960. It might have been better to see these two as distinct ' modes' of policing rather than as sequential phases, for his own account suggests that they went side-by-side throughout the colonial period (and even beyond). But Ahire is a sociologist, not an historian, and this may explain some of the inexactitudes to be found in the text. There is a tendency for Ahire to select his facts to suit his ideological orientation and to justify his theses. This is especially evident in his treatment of the Native Authority Police Forces which existed in many parts of colonial Nigeria and which were administered separately from the NPF. The political relationship between the NPF and the Native Authority forces was a problem throughout the colonial period. Ahire analyses this through a discussion of the views of Inspectors-General C. W. Duncan, Major A. Saunders and Col A. S. Mavrogordato on the secondment scheme that permitted NPF officers to serve with Native Authority forces; but he misrepresents the views of Duncan, claiming that he entirely opposed the scheme, and then seems to confuse Duncan's opinions with those of Major Saunders (who was virtually the only Chief Commissioner who objected to the scheme). The quotation from Mavrogordato (p. 101 note 40) also fails to represent adequately the subtlety of that officer's position on the matter.

Occupations at Tegdaoust - Tegdaoust V: une concession médiévale à Tegdaoust: implantation, évolution d'une unité d'habitation . Par Denise Robert-Chaleix. (Mémoire No. 82.) Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1989. Pp. 287. FF 246.

Abstract: the past twenty years. In their press release the publishers boast that the new edition 'incorporates the newest research in African history', but there is little evidence of this. The choice of documents reveals a close relationship with a paradigm that continues to wrestle with the ghost of Trevor Roper. In his preface to volume I Collins expresses the hope that the collection would help to combat the prejudices of 'skeptics' who still refuse to acknowledge that Africa has a history worthy of study. Surely it would have been more fruitful to ignore this school and accommodate the interests of those who have raised challenging questions about the role of gender, labour, class and ecology in the making of African history. Extremely few are the documents that address these concerns, of which the eminent professor is not totally unaware, as his recent study of The Waters of the Nile: Hydropolitics and the Jonglei Canal, igoo-ig88 (Oxford, 1990) testifies. African nationalism, an important focus of these texts, is no longer being studied simply through the activities of leading nationalists and imperial officials, as the rich body of literature on the decolonization period in Kenya demonstrates. Social histories of peasantries and urban dwellers must be catered for in anthologies that seek to address the rise of African nationalism. Another reservation is the three-volume format of the new edition. Collins is correct in stating that Africa cannot be studied as an undifferentiated entity, hence the multi-volume presentation. However, the teaching of African history at the undergraduate level in North America the main market that the publishers must have in mind tends to be at odds with this principle. Regional histories of the continent are less common than introductory survey courses on the history of Africa, where the lone specialist in the department is expected to teach the history of the continent (normally 'sub-saharan Africa'), from Olduvai to Boipatong. It seems, therefore, that a single anthology covering all the regions has a potentially larger market than the regional collections; it is unlikely that teachers will recommend the purchase of all three volumes for a survey course, given the constraints of time and price. But for those able to offer regional surveys to undergraduates, there is no better text on the market.

Kingsley: Complexity and Complicity Mary Kingsley Imperial Adventuress. By Dea Birkett. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992. Pp. xxvi + 213. £25.00.

Abstract: continued allegiance to the monarchy, or the extent to which royal service could be pressed upon them. Again, one cannot avoid the impression that market forces have rapidly and permanently eroded the claim of royalty to command labour, despite the continuing attempts by rival authorities to manipulate monarchical symbols in order to enhance their control over the workforce. More importantly, she fails to demonstrate convincingly the linkage between the renewal of royal burials in Sakalava land after their prohibition during the colonial and immediate post-colonial eras and the achievement, implicit in the title of the book, of true independence. Whilst much of the volume concentrates on aspects of agricultural production, migration and the division of labour in the north-west of Madagascar, it does not set the economy of the region in a national or international perspective. Within the Malagasy context, it only partly grapples with the traditional inter-regional economic and political tensions that are currently paralysing the island, and which in historical terms are linked strongly to regional loyalties such as those demonstrated by royal devotees to the Sakalava Bemihisatra monarchy. It also fails to address the key issues underlying the ability of Madagascar, as an ex-colonial Third World country on the periphery of the international economy, to achieve real independence. Despite such criticisms, this remains an important book. Its two main themes are well researched and meticulously recorded and it constitutes a valuable contribution to the badly neglected study of non-plateau peoples in Madagascar. It will be welcomed by all interested in Malagasy history and society.