Showing papers in "The Journal of African History in 1995"

Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa

Abstract: The paper re-examines principles of social organization in pre-colonial Equatorial Africa, suggesting that the imagery of ‘accumulation’ of ‘wealth in people’ is not wrong, but not flexible enough to encompass the centrality of knowledge in these societies. People were singularized repositories of a differentiated and expanding repertoire of knowledge, as well as being structured kin (as in the kinship model) and generic dependents and followers (as in the wealth-in-people model). We argue that social mobilization was in part based on the mobilization of different bodies of knowledge, and leadership was the capacity to bring them together effectively, even if for a short time and specific purpose. We refer to this process as composition and distinguish it from accumulation.The paper has three parts. The first substitutes an oral epic from southern Cameroon for an ethnography of the principles by which people pursued agendas and mobilized followings in their own political worlds. Colonial rule may have institutionalized pre-colonial political hierarchies, but it completely altered the terms for political mobilization. Hence the historical record is very limited for making inferences about how ‘wealth-in-people’ operated in action, under pre-colonial conditions. The second critiques the evolutionary assumptions about simple societies that still color the models of Equatorial societies. The third revisits the ethnography to illuminate the principles of composition. The conclusion makes inferences and suggestions with respect to aspects of pre-colonial social history.

New Linguistic Evidence and ‘The Bantu Expansion’

Abstract: New linguistic evidence about the classification of the Bantu languages does not support the current view that these languages spread as the result of a massive migration or ‘expansion’ by its speakers. Rather the present geographic distribution of Bantu languages is the outcome of many complex historical dynamics involving successive dispersals of individual languages over a time span of millennia and involving reversals as well as successes. This is as true for eastern and southern Africa, where a close correlation between the archaeological evidence documenting the diffusion of basic food-related technologies, including metallurgy and the spreading of Bantu languages has become an axiom, as it is elsewhere. The linguistic evidence concerning the dispersal of Bantu languages in these regions of Africa is completely incongruent with the archaeological record. The existing Bantu expansion hypothesis must be totally abandoned. The scrapping of the hypothesis will make room for more realistic and quite different interpretations and research hypotheses. For example, it follows that the local or regional contribution of speakers of other languages, autochthons and others, to the development of later cultures and societies was probably considerably greater than has hitherto been acknowledged and that the continuities in historical dynamics of all sorts between the Bantu-speaking parts of Africa and areas further north and west are greater than has been hitherto realized.

Wealth in People, Wealth in Things – Introduction*

Abstract: One of the guiding lodestones for social theorists and social historians across the entire theoretical spectrum has been ‘wealth’: the things people imbue with value, the caches they collect up by every means from prestation to predation, the performative displays they orchestrate, the treasures they store and eventually leave behind, and all the complex cultural constructions whereby such things are counted, praised and imagined as sources and instruments of power. Perhaps no other topic excites comparably and recurrently fresh interest, from the Marxian framework of capital to Veblen's ‘conspicuous consumption’, Schama's ‘embarrassment of riches’, Appadurai's ‘tournaments of value’ and Weiner's ‘dense objects’.

White Working-class Women and the Invention of Apartheid: ‘Purified’ Afrikaner Nationalist Agitation for Legislation Against ‘Mixed’ Marriages, 1934–9

Abstract: The South African white general election of 1938 was largely fought around a poster. The poster was published by the supporters of D. F. Malan's hard-line Afrikaner Nationalists, who were attempting to unseat the more pro-imperial United Party (UP) government of Hertzog and Smuts. The poster portrayed the alleged threat of ‘mixed’ marriages to Afrikaner women, and attacked the UP for failing to legislate against it. Rejecting J. M. Coetzee's contention that such racist manifestations can solely be understood in terms of the unconscious, the paper argues that shifting gender relations amongst Afrikaners were crucial to this agitation. As young Afrikaner women moved into industry on a large scale during the 1920s and 1930s, men experienced women's greater economic and social independence as a challenge to their authority. Nationalist leaders played successfully on this insecurity by appealing to men to ‘protect’ women against supposed black threats, including ‘mixed’ marriages. The particular campaign of 1938, however, backfired somewhat on the Malanites. The Hertzog and Smuts supporters were divided over the proposal for legislation. But even their liberal faction was against ‘mixed’ marriages; they simply did not see a law as the best way of preventing it. The UP responded to the Nationalist campaign by arguing that white women were being insulted by the mere suggestion that they would marry across the colour line. They used this particular strand of racism to mobilise white women and men against the Nationalists. But the whole affair ultimately smoothed the way for Malan to legislate against ‘mixed’ marriage after he came to power in 1948. The combined effects of both Nationalist and UP campaigns was to strengthen racist opinion about the issue. In order to avoid the divisions in his party on the marriage question, Hertzog handed it over to a Commission of Inquiry. The 1939 De Villiers Report recommended in favour of legislation, but was not acted on because of the break-up of the Hertzog–Smuts government. Yet this UP appointed commission was ultimately used by the Nationalist government as the basis of its own racist marriage legislation.

Tsetse Visions: Narratives of Blood and Bugs in Colonial Northern Rhodesia, 1931–9

Abstract: This article looks at different kinds of historical sources – colonial science and African rumours – and argues that both can be used to reconstruct the history of changing colonial policies, and African responses to them, for tsetse and game control in the Northern Province of Northern Rhodesia in the 1930s. These sources and the arguments I have developed from them can be read as separate and distinct historical narratives, but nevertheless each articulates a specific relationship between African farmers, shifting cultivation and wild animals. Each history discloses a vision of how best to control a dreaded disease, and each history describes a separate and distinct landscape in which Africans, insects and wild animals might best live together. Moreover, each source reveals the close links between African ideas about the forcible extraction of vital fluids and European ideas about sleeping sickness, insect vectors and deforestation.

Black ethnicities, communities and political expression in late Victorian Cape Town

Abstract: En 1994, le Parti National (PN) de M. de Klerk l'a remporte sur l'ANC dans seulement une des neuf provinces, le Cap occidental. La raison de ce succes reside dans le soutien que le PN a recu d'une large majorite des metis sud-africains. Nombreux s'inquietaient de la possibilite de perdre leur domicile et leur emploi en faveur des « Africains » et croyaient que l'ANC etait un pari specifiquement africain. Le succes de la campagne du PN s'appuyait sur l'existence de plusieurs identites de soi durables tout en leur conferant un nouveau contenu. L'A. tente d'expliquer l'emergence de differentes ethnicites noires et plus particulierement l'emergence de l'ethnicite metisse dans la colonie britannique du Cap et sa capitale Le Cap. A cause d'une franchise non-raciale peu elevee et d'une egalite (theorique) de tous devant la loi, Le Cap victorien permit l'expression politique noire formelle. Les differentes ethnicites noires ne furent pas le resultat inevitable de « cultures » differentes ou d'experiences historiques distantes. Elles ne furent pas non plus creees par des mobilisateurs ethniques de l'elite en reponse a la racialisation blanche et a la discrimination, comme le suggerait l'historiographie sud-africaine revisionniste. Les etiquettes, comme « metis » ou « indigene » ont pu etre imposees par les blancs et employees par les elites noires pour defier la politique etatique ou pour exiger des ressources. Mais les etiquettes continuent d'avoir un sens pour ceux qui veulent les mobiliser. Le contenu des ethnicites ne pouvaient pas etre purement « imagine » par les elites

‘Money with Dignity’: Migrants, Minelords and the Cultural Politics of the South African Gold Standard Crisis, 1920–33

Abstract: This paper takes as its point of departure a simple fact that has gone largely unnoticed in the historical and ethnographic literature of migrant mine labour: prior to 1933 mineworkers were paid in gold. It is argued that the ideas and practices associated with the control and transmission of metallic money were at the heart of the experience of migrant labour before the crisis and formed a major part of the self-definition of migrant gold miners during the 1920s. Moreover, both the practices and ideas of African mineworkers were reciprocally linked to the global political struggles taking place over the gold standard. From the First World War to the Christmas of 1932, the South African and Imperial states and mining capital were involved in a controversy over the form of the South African and international money supplies. Whilst in appearance an abstract and mysterious debate, the contest over the form of the money supply laid the foundations for a system of value that penetrated into the daily lives and politics of many southern Africans. Chief amongst these were hundreds of thousands of migrant mine-workers. Following from this, the paper posits a re-interpretation of the gold standard crisis. The turning point that coincided with the new year of 1933 was not merely an economic change; it constituted a major transformation of the form, value, velocity and politics of money throughout Southern Africa. Coincidently, the crisis was an economic and cultural transition for the mining industry itself and marked a dramatic re-definition of the terms of economic conflict between workers and managers. Finally, this paper calls for a new periodization of capitalist development in Southern Africa that meshes together the cultural and economic dimensions of historical processes in a manner that foregrounds the experience of the African working class.

Women's 'conservatism' and the politics of gender in late colonial Lesotho

Abstract: The triumph of the ‘conservative’ BNP over the ‘radical’ BCP in Lesotho's pre-independence elections has long been a source of contention among analysts. While many factors are seen to have contributed to the BCP defeat, one which consistently appears in passing or in footnotes is the ‘conservative’ inclination of Basotho women who, in 1965 comprised two-thirds of the electorate. Women's ‘conservatism’ is commonly accepted as a given, stemming from their purportedly natural domesticity, religiosity or love of tradition. This article examines the actual history of Basotho women in politics in the late colonial era (1920s–1965) and finds no empirical grounds for these assumptions. On the contrary, even the most ostensibly ‘conservative’ women often adopted non-traditional, self-emancipatory behaviour. In the context of a ‘modern’ colonial state with retrograde, often punitive policies towards women, such ‘conservatism’ was in fact rather progressive. On the other hand, Lesotho's self-proclaimed ‘radicals’ exhibited strong elements of male chauvinism, ignorance and contempt for women's needs. The implication for African nationalist or other radical politicians and sympathic academics is that failure to take serious account of women and gender can undermine political integrity and effectiveness.

The Underground Route to Mining: Afrikaners and the Witwatersrand Gold Mining Industry from 1902 to the 1907 Miners' Strike

Abstract: This paper challenges the conventional view that the 1907 miners' strike constituted a landmark in the history of Afrikaner employment in the Witwatersrand gold mining industry. According to this view, the participation of Afrikaners during the dispute, as first-time miners and strike-breakers, gained them a permanent and proportionally large niche in the industry, for the first time. In sharp contrast, this paper demonstrates that Afrikaners already constituted a substantial percentage of white underground workers, particularly as a discrete category of workmen, the miners, well before the strike had even begunThe Afrikaner miners lacked training and mining skills. Yet, like the overseas professional miners, most of whom were British-born, they were classed as skilled workmen, eligible for skilled wages. This anomaly occurred because the so-called skills of the overseas professional miners were fragmented by the labour practices peculiar to the Rand. The expertise of the foreign miner derived from his all-round capabilities and experience. These were exclusively defined to constitute his so-called skill, and hence his skilled wage. But on the Witwatersrand, the overseas professional miners were required to draw on only one of their numerous accomplishments in a ‘specialized’, but only semi-skilled, capacity. They were employed either as supervisors of Africans, who performed drilling tasks, or as specialist pit men doing a single pit task among many: pump minding, pipe fitting, timbering or plate laying. Such fragmentation of the foreign miners' a11-round skills facilitated the entry of lesser trained men as miners, notably the Afrikaners.To become a miner, more specifically a supervisor, the Afrikaner needed only a brief period of specific instruction, which he acquired in one of several ways: through mine-sponsored experiments with unskilled white labour, rather than black; through the informal assistance of qualified miners; and through management-sponsored learner schemes intended to provide a core of compliant Afrikaner miners who would break the monopoly of skills and collective strength of the overseas professional miners. Such training enabled the Afrikaner to earn the compulsory, but readily available, blasting certificate, the award of which was confined to whites. Although most Afrikaners possessed this certificate, the hallmark of a skilled miner, they could not earn the customary white skilled wage because they were obliged to work under a System of contracts and not on day's pay.The incompetent Afrikaner miners nevertheless obtained billets easily, partly because of the industry's growth, but mainly because the overseas pioneer miners were decimated by the preventable occupational mining disease, silicosis: the locally born simply filled their places. The Afrikaners, of course, were also vulnerable to silicosis; but it was only from 1911 onwards that this gradually developing disease claimed them in significant numbers too.The overseas miners shunned the Afrikaners not only for ethnic reasons but also for material ones: they feared that the local miners, who were inefficient and had not been trained in the lengthy apprenticeships traditional in the industry, would undercut skilled wage rates. Management also scorned them because of their incompetence. Despite their relatively large numbers – they comprised at least one-third of the miners – the Afrikaners, who were unsuccessful, isolated and spurned, made little impact on the socio-economic and cultural fabric of the industry's work-force, either at the time of the 1907 strike or during its immediate aftermath.

Women's worth and wedding gift exchange in Maradi, Niger, 1907–89

Abstract: Wedding gift exchange from the turn of the century to the present has served as a medium through which women in the Maradi valley of Niger could assert their worth, create social ties and respond to a shifting political economy. Rather than exploring the implications of ‘bridewealth’ and ‘dowry’ in isolation, this paper sees wedding prestations as an ongoing and evolving dialogue in which women's roles and worth are contested, the nature of wealth is redefined and the terms of marriage are negotiated. The crisis in domestic labor which arose with the decline of slavery in the early decades of the century gave rise to informal unions through which the labor of junior women could be controlled. Women responded to these informal marriages by staging highly visible ceremonies which established the worth and standing of the bride. With the growth of an increasingly urban-centered commercial and bureaucratic economy, women have been drawn into a desperate ‘search for money’ to continue to meet their obligations in the gift economy. While the outward form of wedding gift exchange appears unchanged, the importance of cash to the acquisition of goods, services, and productive resources has radically altered both the content and the significance of gift exchange. Gifts no longer embody wealth in people derived from ability within an agro-pastoral economy. Instead they reveal the giver's access to the resources of the state and the market. Women's eroding position within the economy since 1950 has drawn them further and further into gift exchange, both in order to build a safety net in the form of exchange value stored in a woman's dowry and to secure the social ties which can ensure their continued access to increasingly contested resources.

Environmental Decline and Ecological Response in the Upper Senegal Valley, West Africa, From the Late Nineteenth Century to World War I

Abstract: The upper Senegal valley of West Africa, like other areas of Africa, experienced a period of acute environmental decline and intense ecological response by residents from the late nineteenth century until World War I. French colonial strategies caused considerable disruption and dislocation, benefitting in many ways the colonial agenda which sought to regulate labor flows. African responses to the widening crisis, including movement within the region, migration to the peanut basin and the coast, and enlistment in the war effort, often served colonial interests while sometimes directly exacerbating the environmental degradation, necessitating constant ecological adaptation. This study of an early period of intense and well-documented physical decline, and the various strategies developed by West Africans to survive and overcome obstacles, can shed light on current environmental policy debates and issues.

KonnurokusΣm: Kinship and Family in the History of the Oyoko KɔKɔɔ Dynasty of Kumase

Abstract: This paper is concerned with a vitally significant – but hitherto largely unrecovered – feature of the pre-colonial African past. Historians of Africa commonly pay conventional lip service to the idea that the structural and affective dimensions of kinship are of great, and even shaping, importance in the past of many of the societies that they study. However, such acknowledgements remain in the realm of generalization, and hardly any scholarship exists that seeks to historicize kinship in any detail. This paper tries to redress this situation. It goes beyond synchronic ethnographic commonplaces, and offers a historically documented analysis and interpretation of the operation of kinship within a specific pre-colonial context. The subject matter is the West African forest kingdom of Asante (Ashanti), now located within the Republic of Ghana. In specific terms, the paper addresses the structural characteristics and the interpersonal dynamics of kinship within the history of the Kumase Oyoko KɔKɔɔ abusua (the ruling dynasty of Asante) between, very broadly, the 1760s and the 1880s. The discussion is centred on the evolving history of relations between individuals – most centrally the Asantehene Kwaku Dua Panin and the Asantehemaa Afua Sapon – within a particular ɔyafunu koro (uterine group or stirp; ‘family’) that was a componential part of the royal dynasty. The core of the paper is an analytic reading of the konnurokusΣm , a complex dynastic conflict that involved the individuals named and that occurred in the 1850s. In sum, this paper argues that the reconstruction and analysis of the field of kinship relations within African societies – such as the example of pre-colonial Asante discussed here – places an extremely important, if hitherto neglected, tool in the hands of historians. The interpretation of events, the understanding of actions and motives, and the overall deepening of comprehension are all enriched by the use of this tool. The enrichment thereby attained – it is argued – pays appropriate and overdue attention to specifically indigenous readings of the Asante (and African) past.

Belief, Legitimacy And The Kpojito: An Institutional History Of The 'Queen Mother' In Precolonial Dahomey

Abstract: This article traces chronologically the rise and fall of the office of the kpojito, the female reign-mate to the kings of Dahomey. The women who became kpojito in the eighteenth century were central to the efforts of the kings to establish legitimacy and assert control over the kingdom's expanding territory. The office reached its zenith in mid-century when Kpojito Hwanjile and King Tegbesu gained office and effectively ruled in tandem, thereby solidifying an ideological model that persisted to the end of the kingdom. The model posited a balance of power between male and female, royal and commoner. Subsequently, powerful women of the king's household worked with ambitious princes to build coalitions to seize power at times of royal succession. When their efforts succeeded, the prince was installed as king and the woman as kpojito. By the nineteenth century, princes began to find alternative sources of support in their struggles for the kingship and alternative sources of guidance once enthroned. The royal family became more central in the state as princes and princesses replaced commoners in high offices. Even though alliances between princes and their fathers' wives continued, non-royal women within the palace were more constrained in their ability to wield power and the influence of the kpojito fell into steep decline.The institutional history of the kpojito is discerned through an analysis of religious change in Dahomey. Because the hierarchy of the gods was manipulated by the monarchy to reflect its changing conceptions of the nature of power, the history of religion represents an intellectual history of the ruling class. Central among the religious changes and cultural influences that had a probable impact on the office of the kpojito, and more broadly on the ability of women to exercise power in the state, were contacts with Europe and with Yoruba-speaking peoples. Those influences were associated with cultural and religious visions that promoted the individual, the male, and the royal.

The Path Of The Leopard: Motherhood And Majesty In Early Danhomé

Abstract: Etude des mythes du Dahomey d'origine dynastique, offrant une critique et un contre-recit a l'histoire officielle dynastique. Les premieres femmes de l'Etat, surtout les meres et les epouses des premiers dirigeants, s'opposent a ce contre-recit. Les histoires provocatrices de ces femmes non seulement ajoutent une importante dimension humaine a l'histoire du Dahomey mais aussi soulevent d'importantes questions methodologiques, concernant les evenements associes a leurs vies qui contredisent une bonne partie de ce qui a ete ecrit sur les origines du royaume. Au Dahomey, les evenements associes au commencement de la dynastie furent mythifies dans une fiction elaboree de la naissance et de l'inceste du leopard. Alors que les chercheurs s'interrogerent longtemps sur la veracite de ces dires, aujourd'hui, il manque encore une alternative coherente. A travers l'analyse des histoires de ces femmes royales, la constitution d'une nouvelle histoire des origines du royaume est possible

Warriors, Tributaries, Blood Money and Political Transformation in Nineteenth-Century Mauritania

Abstract: The middle of the nineteenth century witnessed the demise of a System of political power that had existed in the southern Mauritanian region of Brakna since the eighteenth century. Until the 1840s, tolls levied on the Senegal River gum trade had sustained the hegemony in southern Brakna of the Awlad al-Siyyid, an Arabic-speaking warrior group. Unlike more mobile warriors of the Saharan interior who depended for their livelihood on tribute extracted from nomadic pastoralists, the Awlad al-Siyyid had specialized in the control over a small area near the Senegal River, and over seasonal trading posts, known as escales, through which gum arabic was exported to the Atlantic economy. However, their increasing dependence on this trade allowed French administrators to manipulate relations among Awlad al-Siyyid chiefs by recognizing the taxing privileges of some while withholding recognition from others in a way that led, from the early 1840s on, to a bitter factional struggle within the group. The resulting conflict weakened the control of warriors over tributaries, harratin (freed slaves) and others, and caused a crisis within the political and social hierarchy of Brakna. An increasingly desperate struggle developed among Brakna warriors over a diminishing number of tributaries. This paper examines that struggle through the lens of an affair of diyya , or blood money, that emerged during the late 1840s and came to preoccupy all of the warrior groups and factions in the Brakna conflict. By competing for portions of the diyya owed to a small pastoral group as compensation for homicides, Brakna warriors, chiefs from neighboring regions and powerful tributaries in the process of repudiating their tributary status engaged in a symbolic duel that revolved around the increasingly unstable role of the warrior as a consumer of tribute and dispenser of ‘protection’.

Omphaloskepsis and the Infantilizing of History

Abstract: The value of work claiming to be historiographical depends crucially on how well it introduces new sources or kinds of sources, how innovative it is in its method, how persuasive it is in its engagement with the evidence, and how stimulating it is in its insights and challenges. Whatever else it accomplishes, it must take readers where they have not already visited. Only three of the eight chapters in Combing History have not already appeared in print. One of these deals with scholarly 'debate', the other two with the Johnson County cattle war in Wyoming in 1891-2. Despite this, and although only partly devoted to Africa, Combing History could be of interest to Africanists because it mimics the ' linguistic turn' in the study of history so single-mindedly. In this approach, also called postmodernism and other things and borrowed tout ensemble from literary criticism and linguistics, historians equate the study of the past with probing the habits of mind of the present-day observer. History becomes an unproblematic reference point and texts have many different interpretations, so that meaning does not inhere in the text but emerges again and again from how people read or experience the text. Thus the author is less important than the interpreter, the original less real than the reproduction, the laborious collection and evaluation of evidence less productive than self-absorbed introspection. Postmodernism sees itself as exposing the workings of power in history by showing how rhetorical forms are turned to political ends. This requires moving

Written in Characters of Blood? The Reign of King Cetshwayo ka Mpande, 1872-9

Abstract: Sir Bartle Frere, the British High Commissioner in South Africa 1877–80, depicted Cetshwayo ka Mpande, the Zulu king 1872–9, as a bloodthirsty monster. This article discusses the accuracy and justice of this depiction, and the nature of Zulu kingship. It shows that both Frere and the missionaries on whom he relied for evidence wished to bring the Zulu kingdom under British rule and thus had a strong motive for discrediting Cetshwayo. The fact that missionary testimony against Cetshwayo was particularly hostile and abundant at times when there seemed a real possibility of British annexation casts particular doubt on the value of this testimony. Missionaries misinterpreted and exaggerated much of the evidence, which, more dispassionately examined, appears to show that, while executions were common in the Zulu kingdom, Frere's account of the nature of Cetshwayo's reign was grossly overdrawn. The territorial chiefs of the country were responsible for many of the executions, and there is evidence that Cetshwayo attempted to ameliorate conditions. Nevertheless the tendency to attribute to him the methods of nineteenth-century British constitutionalism is unhistorical and culture-bound. Cetshwayo was a Zulu king in the tradition of his uncle Shaka, and ruled by fear and arbitrariness as well as by the law.

Educational Elite “Let us live for our children”: The Teachers' League of South Africa, 1913–1940. By Mohamed Adhikari. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press and Buchu Books, 1993. Pp. 204. No price given (ISBN 1-874863-07-5).

Abstract: anization brought in its wake disorder and violence that whites associated with shebeens and illicit liquor. The extension of the ' Durban System' to Springs in 1938 put new pressure on the municipality to suppress the sale of illicit liquor. But official repression engendered resistance, pushed brewers and their customers into the arms of the Communist Party and, in general, led to ' a more coherent and radical political consciousness' (p. 298). In the final essay on drinking on the Witwatersrand, Chris Rogerson examines the history of Johannesburg beerhalls and their relocation, in the early 1960s, in ways that reinforced the racial segregation of the city. The collection is complemented by essays on two areas of South Africa that have received little attention from labour historians. Pam Scully investigates the 'tot' system on the farms of the Western Cape at the end of the nineteenth century and Ruth Edgecombe analyses alcohol as an agent of social control in the Natal coal mines (1911—38). The editors have embellished the collection with a range of excellent maps and a useful index. Crush and Ambler have assembled a powerful cocktail of essays that, although it does not move much beyond the established paradigm, will nevertheless set new standards for the study of both liquor and labour in Southern Africa.

The Burden of Time Africa Since 1935: General History of Africa, Volume 8. Edited by Ali A. Mazrui. Paris: UNESCO; Oxford: Heinemann; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993. Pp. xxviii + 1025. FF 300 (ISBN 0435-948148).

Abstract: Guek Ngundeng in 1927-9. Here we gain excellent insight into the nature of colonial 'pacification', and even are afforded a rare view from the 'other side', as Nuer resistance inexorably builds in response to the pressure of colonial domination. There is, moreover, a wealth of ethnographic information on Nuer society during the crucial early stages of colonial rule. Inevitably, perhaps, some of the papers contain highly esoteric materials in which only a few highly specialized scholars would be interested, but in general one cannot fault the editor's careful selection of documents. Throughout the volume, Johnson's editorial commentary contributes greatly to our fuller appreciation of the papers. His explanatory notes provide not only correctives and augmentations to the substantive data, but keen analytical observations as well. In composing the notes, Johnson relies heavily on his own extensive field experience in the Sudan, and the testimonies of his Nuer informants, together with his own broad familiarity with written materials on the Nuer, add valuable new dimensions to the documents. A number of contemporary photographs and several well-executed maps also are helpful. Beyond its insight into ground level imperialism, the volume will be of great value to those interested in the writings of Evans-Pritchard. Although generations of scholars have minutely examined his studies of the Nuer, Percy Coriat's earlier contributions have been largely unavailable to the general reader and therefore all but ignored. With the publication of this volume Johnson effectively rectifies this situation, and again his editorial notes allow Evans-Pritchard's theoretical arguments to be seen from an important new perspective. Finally, the volume contains a highly interesting depiction of the remarkable Percy Coriat himself. In an extensive biographical sketch, Johnson introduces us to this extraordinary, though enigmatic, colonial officer, who, while outwardly indifferent to academia, produced a body of writings that is in many ways insightful and scholarly. In some respects, Coriat emerges as a typically authoritarian colonial administrator, but at the same time manages to establish an astounding rapport with the Nuer, becoming fluent in their language, carousing and joking with Nuer friends through the night, and eventually marrying a Nuer woman (while simultaneously affianced to a woman back home). Intriguingly, Johnson even suggests that the effectiveness of Coriat's administration may have derived in part from Nuer acceptance of him as a sort of ' European earth-master'. One is rather disappointed, however, by Johnson's ultimate conclusion that Coriat's intimate relations with the Nuer were merely a product of the 'enforced isolation' of his stay in their remote country. Perhaps in a future project Johnson will attempt a fuller treatment and wider assessment of this complex and interesting man.

Ethiopia in History Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa . by John Sorenson. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 216. $40.00 (ISBN 0-8135-1972-1); $16, paperback (ISBN 0-8135-1973-X).

Abstract: Smith's writing is marked by modesty and a welcome lack of the defensiveness about colonial service which surfaces often in memoirs by former colonial officials. He is not trying to set the record straight for nai've historians who, having never experienced colonial Africa, cannot appreciate the realities and frustrations of colonial civil service. Of course, Smith's outlook is different partly because the bulk of his career came after decolonization. Indeed, Smith provides an interesting, though brief account of the transition away from colonial rule as it was experienced in a technical branch of civil service, where officers had to adjust to a new world of proposal writing and competitive project funding. Smith shows that budget constraints began to impede the work of the TPRI in the late 1960s, but does not blame them on African mismanagement. Overall, he portrays himself as having adjusted readily to life in independent Tanzania (though there are signs that he has chosen to minimize the tensions experienced by former colonial officials in the 1960s) and as having supported enthusiastically the Africanization of research staffs. Although Insect Man is free of the qualities which often make memoirs of colonial officials annoying reading, it shares with them a problem of perspective, for like other accounts of colonial civil service, it focuses primarily on the European experience in Africa. Smith dwells on the difficulties of maintaining a middle-class lifestyle and European cultural life in Africa, although (and this will come as a relief to the frequent reader of such memoirs who braces herself for condescending comments about the African help) the difficulties are not attributed to African incompetence, but rather to climate, a junior officer's limited income and the problems of frequently moving one's household great distances by sea and air. Smith is probably writing for non-African readers who will be intrigued, he imagines, to learn how an expatriate stays involved in sports and amateur theatricals, and manages to educate his children, while living for more than two decades in Africa. This would explain why Smith devotes so much space to tennis, mountaineering and social life, and so little space to his work. Apparently he assumes that his audience would have scant interest in the scientific details. However, had Smith envisaged himself writing for Africans and others who wish to learn about the history of health and disease in Africa, he might have chosen to make his work, in both Africa and the WHO, the centrepiece of his memoir. Because Smith obviously accumulated an extraordinary wealth of experience and knowledge about entomology, malaria and other tropical infections, he could contribute another book of enormous value on the practical problems and theoretical issues which confronted epidemiologists of his generation.

Valleys of the Niger

Abstract: Exhibition catalogues have long been a major avenue of publication for art historians, not only because it is part of their duties to organize exhibitions but also because catalogues allow them to include far more illustrations than academic journals or presses do. Also, catalogues are usually printed in higher runs than ordinary academic publications. The intended audience is appreciably larger, consisting of both the public which visits the exhibition and academics who will use the catalogue as a reference work. This huge book is the catalogue for an exhibition which opened in Paris in 1993, and which will be shown from 1994 to 1996 in Bamako, Ouagadougou, Lagos, Niamey, Nouakchott and Conakry. This is remarkable because it is the first time that a major exhibition has been specifically designed to be shown in a number of African countries and put together by a collaborative effort involving their museums. But perhaps its most remarkable feature is that the exhibition is not designed to show off art objects but is concerned with the history of these areas and especially how this is being reconstructed through the interplay of material objects and other sources. The goal of the catalogue is to provide a ' state of the question' in that regard, which explains its size (over, 1,000 standard pages), the number of authors involved (over 40), as well as the circumstance that the text is expressly designed as much for African as for European audiences. Along with the exhibition, and its mini-exhibition clones, this catalogue constitutes a signal effort to bring the results of academic research to large numbers of the people whose history this is.

Trans-Saharan Slave Trade The Human Commodity: Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade. Edited by Elizabeth Savage. London: Frank Cass, 1992. p. 279. £25 (ISBN 0-7146-3469-9).

Abstract: The section on post-1985 in South Africa (for this is really a history of the Republic, not of Southern Africa) is much too focused on white politics. Astoundingly, Oliver Tambo, President of the ANC throughout these years, does not even get a mention. The significance of the ungovernability campaign, the civics, and the UDF is not addressed. There is no sense of ANC politics of the period, its ambivalent relationship to the UDF and COSATU, or the factors forcing the Lusaka leadership to claim credit for grassroots successes which it did not initiate nor entirely condone. It was these things which make this period so fascinating, and so significant for other resistance movements, such as the Palestinian intafada. The post-1985 period is presented here as one damn thing after another, with no time to pause for real assessment. Without the photograph, it would be easy to blink and miss Chris Hani's death; even with the photograph, its significance is obscure. The story comes to no conclusion; it simply stops. The same is true of the revised sections on the mfecane. The chapter consists of a lot of events, largely the actions of individual leaders of men, and not much sense of analysis. The chapter is, frankly, boring, and misses the excitement of the recent work reassessing what (or even if) the mfecane was, and how it can be understood. I will continue to suggest that my students read Omer-Cooper, because it has a good index, a clear layout, a straightforward style, and some nice pictures. It will not challenge their preconceptions, nor will it force them to think. And, sadly, for all these reasons, they will probably continue to love it.

Escaping the Tyranny of Theory A Modern Economic History of Africa. Volume I: The Nineteenth Century. By Tiyambe Zeleza. Dakar: CODESRIA, 1993. Pp. vii + 501. $30; £21.50, paperback (ISBN 2-86978-027-3).

Abstract: exceedingly difficult historical problem whose discussion must combine the study of a vast amount of technical, economic and political material. McLane's article is clearly an extension of her excellent previous work on the competition between Bordeaux and Marseilles firms in colonial Senegal. But the result here is disappointing. Although the article is well-researched, it does not cite the critical Public Works (Travaux Publics) series of the French National Archives, Section Outre-Mer. McLane follows the classical argument that the Senegal River route was sacrificed because of the loss of influence of St Louisien commercial interests over to French interests focused on peanut production and export in the Dakar—Rufisque—Kaolack region. She gives the argument a new twist by associating the supporters of the river route with Bordeaux commercial houses, and the supporters of the railway with Marseilles firms, particularly CFAO. If this was the case, however, why would Deves et Chaumet (a major Bordeaux commercial house) or Merle and Neveu (a commercial house based in Senegal and associated with Bordeaux) have proposed in 1880, and again in 1893-96, building a railway towards the Sudan ? McLane states that Governor-General Roume was associated with Marseilles interests and therefore opposed to improving the river route, and that in Paris 'the Committee of Colonial Public Works frequently served as a convenient burying ground for projects the ministry did not wish to oppose directly' (p. 109). Yet in 1904, both Roume and the Committee on Public Works concluded that there was a potential for improving the river, and approved a number of works, such as the completion of the building of beacons along the river. Overall, McLane does not discuss whether improvements to the river were technically feasible. Yet the Mathy report of 1904 (not quoted by McLane) showed that dredging the river bed and destroying natural silts could have an adverse effect on the river's level, and that any work to regularize the river's irregular flow would be so extensive that further studies were necessary. As for work on the estuary of the Senegal River, Anfreville de la Salle deemed its success 'uncertain' {Notre vieux Senegal, Paris, 1909, p. 157), and in retrospect, the rapid silting and blocking of the estuary in the 1910s, noted by McLane, seem to confirm this opinion. The article by Edward Peter Fitzgerald, 'Economic constraints on the continuation of colonial rule in French colonial Africa. The problem of recurrent costs' is excellent. It focuses on a neglected theme of French decolonization: the ' recurrent costs' (operating costs) of post-war French public investments (FIDES and others) in Africa. As French public investments multiplied, so did recurring costs associated with them. Given Africa's rapidly expanding population, it became clear that French investments could not generate enough economic activity to cover their cost. If France kept its African empire, therefore, it would be locked into a cycle of ever-increasing deficits. The study is intriguing and has obvious implications for today, but one wishes that the author had discussed whether there were alternative investment strategies. While public works are expensive in the long run, investments in crop improvements, for example, have low recurring costs.

Suakin Architecture The Coral Buildings of Suakin: Islamic Architecture, Planning, Design and Domestic Arrangements at a Red Sea Port . By Jean-Pierre Greenlaw. London: Kegan Paul International, 1995. Pp. 132. £45 (ISBN 0-7103-0489).

Abstract: fossil snail-shells; and layer 5 (> 100 cm.) at the base of the section and composed of harder and more compact sediment which was not described. Thirty-five of the recorded wares were found in layer 2 (10-50 cm.) and 19 in layer 4 (55-100 cm.). Unfortunately, all the archaeological material excavated from these different sedimentary units has been lumped together into a single and unique occupation, as if the settlement was inhabited only once, and thus generating an intricate pattern of clusters of pots which is far from congruent with the context of the finds. If the site's stratigraphic sequence is considered as composed of two distinct periods of prehistoric settlement, it appears that the recorded distribution of vessels may have resulted from palimpsests of successive episodes of seasonal occupation by mobile prehistoric groups, who may have abandoned some of their wares several times on the same place. These wares were afterward buried and protected by deposits of sediments carried by running water during rainy seasons and/or wadi floods. It can even be suggested that the settlement may simply have been flooded several times, a hypothesis which may make sense of the erratic distribution of thousands of ostrich eggshell beads found throughout the site sedimentary matrix.

Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government . By Nicholas Thomas. Oxford: Polity Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 238. £45 (ISBN 0-7456-0871-X); £12.95, paperback (ISBN 0-7456-1215-6).

Abstract: Root' —the African contribution to the peopling of Mexico. The second set of papers looks at the so-called ' Turks' in Argentina, immigrants who came primarily from Morocco and the Levantine territories of Lebanon and Syria. A significant proportion of Moroccan immigration into Argentina between 1875 and 1930, when the doors were closed, came from the Jewish communities of North Africa, some of whom had Iberian ancestry. One of the articles on Argentinian attitudes to these 'Turkish' and 'Jewish' Africans is in English, though the volumes are otherwise in Spanish. They are greatly to be welcomed and the organisers are to be congratulated.

The Beta Israel of Ethiopia The Evolution of the Ethiopian Jews: A History of the Beta Israel (Falasha) to 1920. By James Quirin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Pp. xviii + 336. $36.95 (ISBN 0-8122-3116-3).

Abstract: essay emphasizing how in the Western Sudan, the closing down of first the Atlantic trade and then later the decline of North African markets caused a fall in market prices and led to the absorption of more slaves in the local economy. His interesting data on slave populations, the number of traded slaves, their origins, and their destinations are mostly for the period from the 1880s to the First World War. Ann McDougall discusses slaves and salt production and distribution in late nineteenthcentury western Sudan, while Beverly Mack emphasizes the importance of women in the northbound slave trade from Hausaland (and argues convincingly that the jihad had severe negative consequences for many women, slave and non-slave alike, in that region). The Mack essay and Abdullahi Mahdi's on the aftermath of the jihad as a contributor to the transSaharan slave supply complement each other. Two other complementary essays are Douglas Johnson's on private slave armies in the southern Sudan, and Gerard Prunier's on military slavery in the period 1820—85. During this time recruitment of black slaves for the Egyptian army was first a military necessity and then an embarrassment, ultimately discontinued after the strangling of supply by the Mahdist revolt. Robert Collins' 'Nilotic slave trade: past and present', focuses on slavery and slave acquisition in the southern Sudan. A short mention in this essay of how the 'low reproductive rate of the Baqqara, especially, was an important dynamic for them to seize the more fertile Dinka women' (p. 156) provoked this non-demographer reviewer to wonder whether reality ever lies behind myths of differing degrees of female fecundity among ethnic groups. John Wright contributes a specific study of the Wadai-to-Benghazi slave route, the practicality of which benefited from the control imposed by the SanusT Suff from the 1840s. It was not easy for European or Turkish authorities to keep this route under surveillance, contributing to its rise in importance during the nineteenth century. Daniel Schroeter's essay on the slave trade to Morocco is an important contribution. It argues that historians have underestimated the number of slaves coming to Morocco, principally to Marrakesh, while at the same time overestimating their monetary value. Schroeter suggests that the numbers involved are eight to 14 times higher than previous calculations. Ralph Austen continues his valuable attempts at a tentative census of the number of slaves taken from Africa by Muslims. His calculations point to radical volatility in the trade, due mainly to changing conditions of supply. (He does not, incidentally, utilize Schroeter's figures for Morocco.) Austen extends his census of the trade to provide preliminary information for slaves employed in agriculture, mining and political/military activity in the receiving areas. The final essay is another installment of Joseph Miller's slavery bibliographies, this one containing items on Muslim slavery and slaving published since 1900. Miller's huge commitment of time to these very complete bibliographies is again apparent. His effort is a fitting conclusion to a valuable volume that extends our knowledge of the trans-Saharan slave trade and the conditions surrounding it.