Showing papers in "The Journal of African History in 1999"

Pastoralism, patriarchy and history : Changing gender relations among Maasai in Tanganyika, 1890-1940

Abstract: DESPITE the substantial and significant body of scholarly work on changing gender relations among African peoples who are (or were) primarily cultivators, the gender relations of predominantly pastoralist peoples have been, with a few notable exceptions, curiously excluded from historical examination. Instead, despite work which has shown the complexities of trying to determine the ‘status’ of East African pastoralist women, pastoralist gender relations seem to exist outside of history and be immune to change. Earlier anthropological studies that addressed pastoral gender relations applied a synchronic model, analyzing them in terms of either the pastoral mode of production or pastoralist ideology. Harold Schneider, for example, contended that among East African pastoralists, men's control of livestock gave them control of women, who were ‘usually thoroughly subordinated to men and thus unable to establish independent identity as a production force’. In his rich ethnography of Matapato Maasai, Paul Spencer claimed that both male and female Maasai believe in ‘the undisputed right of men to own women as “possessions” ’. Marriage, in his view, was therefore ‘the transfer of a woman as a possession from her father who reared her to her husband who rules her’. Melissa Llewelyn-Davies' study of Loita Maasai women in Kenya corroborated Spencer's findings. Loita Maasai women perceived themselves, and were perceived, as ‘property’, to be bought and sold by men with bridewealth. Llewelyn-Davis argued that ‘elder patriarchs’ used their control of property rights in women, children and livestock to control the production and reproduction of both livestock and human beings. Similarly, in his symbolic analysis of pastoral Maasai ideology, John Galaty contended that Maasai men were the ‘real’ pastoralists, while Maasai women were negatively equated with lower status hunters, providing an ideological explanation for their lower status. Thus, whether they attributed their findings to material or ideological sources (or some combination of the two), few anthropologists questioned the ‘undisputed right’ of contemporary male pastoralists ‘to own women as possessions’.

'Changing traditions to meet current altering conditions' : Customary law, african courts and the rejection of codification in Kenya, 1930-60

Abstract: Scholars have argued that colonial states in British Africa codified previously fluid customary law, making it impervious to change. In Kenya, by contrast, administrators struggled against codification, from at least the I920s but with increasing ardor from the 1940s, for two broad reasons. First, they believed codification crystallized the law, preventing changes necessary in a period of rapid economic and social development. Through continual alteration of a fluid body of customary law, administrators could try to guide these changes and keep a firm hold over African life. Second, codification threatened to empower the judiciary in their ongoing struggles with the administration over the control of African dispute resolution. Keeping customary law unwritten helped exclude the judiciary from intra-African disputes, since without written codes only administrators (who 'knew' Africans) could decide customary law cases. In actual practice, the identification and use of customary law remained fluid. Administrators believed customary law lay in the shifting realm of 'public opinion', and sought details of the law in this ever evolving arena. Even when Europeans and Africans put customary law to paper, a review of court transcripts shows that African court elders continued to employ law situationally. The Kenya case suggests that while administrators and senior men did hope to use the law to resist challenges from women and juniors, they did not do so via codes of unalterable and unquestionable customary law. This also points out some of the real limits on colonial power. Rather than administrators using customary law to guide development, Africans made their own interpretations of customary law, either in their 'public opinion' or in the courts, the decisions of which administrators knew little.

HISTORICIZING CHRISTIAN INDEPENDENCY: THE SOUTHERN AFRICAN PENTECOSTAL MOVEMENT c. 1908–60

Abstract: Scholarly study of Christian independency in southern Africa began with the publication of Bengt Sundkler's Bantu Prophets in 1948. A rich literature subsequently followed, much of it deploying his now classic typology of Ethiopian and Zionist Churches. Nevertheless, the historical study of independency has been limited. As one scholar has recently observed, historians have tended to focus on the Ethiopian-type churches, leaving the study of the Zionist-type to anthropologists and missiologists. The neglect of Zionist-type churches by historians meant that early studies on this form of Christianity were historically weak. Missiologists distorted the whole area of inquiry with theological concerns, at first raising the spectre of syncretistic heresy, and more recently making claims about indigenous authenticity. Anthropologists initially viewed independent churches as fascinating examples of cultural resilience. The movements were seen as sources of community, loyalty and security in the face of the atomising and anomic experience of urbanization; or as foci for ‘the process of modification and adaptation’ taking place throughout rural society. But anthropologists rarely paid attention to independency's origins. Where historians did engage with Zionist-type independency, they did so through the spectacles of nationalist historiography in order to demonstrate independency's supposed proto-nationalist character.By adopting an international and regional perspective, this article provides an account of the historical origins and early evolution of these churches. Where scholars in the past have tended to disaggregate the movement, essentializing its later racial and geographical boundaries, this paper will draw the early history of the movement together, illuminating its common origin and global character. The basic ingredients of this account have been available in the work of Walter Hollenweger, Jean Comaroff, Sundkler's later book, and more recently, studies by Jim Kiernan and David Chidester. Nevertheless, the historical implication that so-called African independent churches emerged out of the global pentecostal movement continues to be ignored.The purpose of demonstrating the origins of southern African pentecostalism is not to make the now commonplace historical and anthropological critique of authenticity, although those pursuing a theological agenda which distinguishes African Independent Churches as a separate category of Christianity would do well to pay heed to that critique. Neither is it assumed that analysis of origins explains the meaning and appeal of different southern African pentecostal movements and denominations. Rather, this paper demonstrates that pentecostalism is a global phenomenon: a collection of vital and powerful idioms about illness and healing, evil and purity which make striking resonances with peoples sharing common historical experiences of marginalization from established religion and from the values of twentieth-century industrial capitalism. At the same time pentecostalism has also exhibited a remarkable capacity to localize itself, taking on very distinct meanings in different local contexts. At the heart of this paper lies a comparative analysis of the radically different responses which the movement engendered from the South African and Southern Rhodesian states.

The king's afrikaners? enlistment and ethnic identity in the union of south africa's defence force during the second world war, 1939–45

Abstract: In contrast to the situation in Commonwealth countries such as Canada and Australia, South Africa's participation in the Second World War has not been accorded a particularly significant place in the country's historiography. In part at least, this is the result of historiographical traditions which, although divergent in many ways, have a common denominator in that their various compelling imperatives have despatched the Second World War to the periphery of their respective scholarly discourses. Afrikaner historians have concentrated on wars on their ‘own’ soil – the South African War of 1899–1902 in particular – and beyond that through detailed analyses of white politics have been at pains to demonstrate the inexorable march of Afrikanerdom to power. The Second World War only featured insofar as it related to internal Afrikaner political developments. Neither was the war per se of much concern to English-speaking academic historians, either of the so-called liberal or radical persuasion. For more than two decades, the interests of English-speaking professional historians have been dominated by issues of race and class, social structure, consciousness and the social effects of capitalism. While the South African War did receive some attention in terms of capitalist imperialist expansion, the Second World War was left mostly to historians of the ‘drum-and-trumpet’ variety. In general, the First and Second World Wars did not appear a likely context in which to investigate wider societal issues in South Africa.

Lambaréné, okoumé and the transformation of labor along the middle ogooué (gabon), 1870–1945

Abstract: IN 1929, the French colonial administration's forced recruitment of labor for two road construction projects designed to create more effective transportation links between the town of Lambarene on the Middle Ogooue and the colonial post at Mouila on the Upper Ngounie led to food shortages in several parts of southern Gabon. A disturbing pattern had developed over the previous 15 years where colonial demands for labor led to disruptions in the seasonal cycle of agricultural production. Able-bodied men forced to gather forest products or work as porters to pay the head tax, or required to participate in the construction of colonial infrastructure projects, or even willingly employed as laborers in the growing timber industry, could not meet their traditional obligations to clear fields for women farmers during the long dry season (generally June to September), thus leading to poor harvests and food shortages. French officials at the end of the 1920s were especially anxious as the Fang populations in the northern portion of the colony had experienced severe famine several years earlier, partly due to male workers being recruited into the timber industry. Memories of famine occurring between 1916 and 1918 were also quite vivid among the peoples living along the Ngounie. Labor recruitment for the timber industry and colonial infrastructure projects remained a precarious enterprise at the outset of the 1930s. Yet by the 1940s, the most difficult segment of the Lambarene–Mouila road network – a 50 kilometer stretch through hilly, forested terrain south of Lambarene – was completed without resorting to forced labor and without the threat of food shortages. The intervening decade had witnessed the final stage of the transformation of Gabonese labor wrought by the French colonial presence, a transformation that broke the pre-colonial system of labor exploitation controlled by clan leaders. At the outbreak of World War II, the process had advanced to the point that there now existed a ‘labor market’ in the French Equatorial Africa federation integrated into the capitalist wage-earning sector and capable of accomplishing infrastructure projects without disastrous consequences for the local population. We argue that the predominance of the timber industry in Gabon placed these developments on a strangely ambiguous path when compared to the growth of capitalist wage-labor in other parts of the continent.

The evolution of ‘portuguese’ identity: luso-africans on the upper guinea coast from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century

Abstract: During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Portugal established a trading presence along the Upper Guinea Coast from Senegal to Sierra Leone. Emigrants from Portugal known as lancados – some of them Jews seeking to escape religious persecution – settled along the coast, where many of them married women from local communities. By the early sixteenth century, Luso-Africans, or ‘Portuguese’ as they called themselves, were established at trading centers from the Petite Cote in Senegal, south to Sierra Leone. Descendants of Portuguese immigrants, of Cape Verde islanders, and of West Africans, the Luso-Africans developed a culture that was itself a synthesis of African and European elements. Rich historical documentation allows a case study of the changing ways Luso-Africans identified themselves over the course of three centuries. The earliest lancados established themselves along the coast as commercial middlemen between African and European traders and as coastal traders between Sierra Leone and Senegambia. Their position was formally discouraged by the Portuguese Crown until the second decade of the sixteenth century, but they nevertheless played an important role in trade with Portugal and the Cape Verde islands. Lancado communities were permanently settled on the Petite Cote, while in Sierra Leone and Rio Nunez much early commerce was in the hands of lancados who sailed there regularly from S. Domingos, north of present day Bissau. The offspring of these lancados and African women were called filhos de terra and were generally considered to be ‘Portuguese’. Throughout the sixteenth century, the descendants of the lancados maintained close commercial ties with the Cape Verde islands. Cape Verdeans were themselves the offspring of mixed Portuguese and West African marriages. Sharing elements of a common culture and united by marriage and economic ties, mainland Luso-Africans and Cape Verdeans represented a socially complex and geographically dispersed community. Cape Verdeans, like mainland Luso-Africans, resolutely maintained that they were ‘Portuguese’, and both sub-groups employed the same essentially cultural criteria of group identification.

'Worries of the Heart': Widowed Mothers, Daughters and Masculinities in Maragoli, Western Kenya, 1940-60

Abstract: This article presents the gender norms and societal dynamics between men and widowed women in the Maragoli population in Western Kenya. Women are considered subservient to men and are expected to be emotionally and financially helpless. In turn men provide a home a family and a livelihood for their wives. According to this societal norm Maragoli wives are left without a livelihood when their husbands die. This article explains that Maragoli women present themselves as helpless grieving women who cannot support their families. In order to live up to societal expectations the patriarchal system supports the widows. This was an especially common problem in the mid 1900s due to forced manual labor that took men from their families leaving women to take advantage of the gender dynamics to survive.

Trading in slaves in bela-shangul and gumuz, ethiopia: border enclaves in history, 1897–1938

Abstract: Like other empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, expansion and slavery went hand in hand in Ethiopia, contrary to imperial justifications based on the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Ethiopian empire incorporated the northwestern border enclaves of Bela-Shangul and Gumuz into greater Ethiopia. Having obtained the subordination of the local Muslim warlords, the emperor then demanded tribute from them in slaves, ivory and gold. Slaves were used as domestics in the imperial palace at Addis Ababa and the houses of state dignitaries and as farm labor on their farms elsewhere in the country. Responding to the demands of the central government as well as their own needs, borderland chiefs raided local villages and neighbouring chiefdoms for slaves. Expanding state control thus led to intensified slave raiding and the extension of the slave trade from the borderlands into the centre of the empire in spite of Ethiopia's public commitment to end slavery and the slave trade as a member of the League of Nations. The end of slavery in Ethiopia only came with the Italian occupation in 1935.

The first decade of "European beer" in apartheid South Africa: the state, the brewers and the drinking public, 1962-72.

Abstract: THE study of liquor provides an opportunity for re-examining relations between states and economies. Recent works in European social history have shown that liquor occupies an ambiguous space between economic, social and cultural production while studies of liquor in colonial Africa repeatedly raise the problem of how economic freedoms pertaining to liquor were constructed in relation to the perceived character of persons in society.1 More specifically, the notion of 'European liquor' in colonial discourse suggests that the liquor of colonial masters should be aspired to. 'European liquor' was repeatedly contrasted to indigenous brews of lower alcoholic content that were pronounced to be uncivilized and primitive. It implied that drinkers of sorghum beer, palm wine and other beverages fermented from African grains and fruits would progress to the 'superior' beverages of their colonial masters. Critically, it assumed that transition to the higher alcoholic content required the discipline of 'European' lifestyles. Gradualism, however, often gave way to expediency. Colonial regimes repeatedly set aside fears of the effect of 'foreign' liquor on African subjects in the interest of revenue and political gains. The importation of gin by the colonial authority in Ghana provided the regime with revenue for its administration; in colonial Nigeria and elsewhere, liquor was used by the state as a means of winning allies among chiefs.2 The South African experience both resonates with, and differs from, that in West Africa. In the mining regions of South Africa before Union, liquor was used both as a source of tax and a means of controlling labour. In the ensuing decades, the inability of the state to police the laws gave rise to waves

Faithful daughter, murdering mother: transgression and social control in colonial Namibia.

Abstract: In 1938 or 1939, an uninitiated and unwed girl named Nangombe living in the Uukwaluudhi district of Ovamboland, northern Namibia, became pregnant. If mission and colonial accounts are to be believed, it was not an unusual occurrence at this time, but it had profound consequences for Nangombe and those close to her. By the 1930s, the belief that pre-initiation pregnancies boded ill fortune for clan, chief and community was highly contested, but it was far from extinct. When the chief discovered the pregnancy, he expelled Nangombe. She took refuge in a neighboring society and bore a daughter. While such infants were often killed at birth, Nangombe's was not. Mother and daughter returned home within the year. The chief, enraged by their reappearance, then expelled the entire family.The problems created by Nangombe's child caused tension in her household and the family was driven to begging for food. Nangombe's mother, seeing the catastrophes already caused by the presence of her illegitimate granddaughter and fearing that worse would come, urged her daughter to kill the child. Nangombe refused, while her mother continued to offer dire predictions that their lineage would be destroyed if the child were left alive. Finally, in July 1941, Nangombe gave into her mother's pressure and strangled her daughter. Her father and the local chief reported her act to colonial officials. The colonial government of South West Africa investigated and sent her to trial with her mother, who was charged as an accessory to murder.The nature of the case changed abruptly in the colonial capital of Windhoek. Instead of trying Nangombe for murder, the Supreme Court convened to decide whether she was insane, despite testimony from her village asserting that she was sane and that the murder had been a rational act. Her mother was transformed from a co-defendant to a witness to her daughter's physical and mental health. Nangombe was diagnosed as epileptic and, on this basis, committed to a native asylum in Fort Beaufort, South Africa. She remained there until 1946, when she was released and returned home. She lived out the rest of her life in relative anonymity, little noticed in the communities where she lived and invisible to the colonial administration – a far cry from the scrutiny and public interventions which attended her young adulthood.

African rural entrepreneurs and labor in the cameroon littoral

Abstract: IN most African farming systems, hired workers provide only a small part of the total labor devoted to agricultural production, even today. By and large, farm labor in Africa is still family labor. However, during and after the colonial period, many Africans also ran agrarian enterprises on a scale and in a nexus of social relations far removed from the traditional picture of the smallholder cultivating land with family labor. In Cameroon, Duala and Bamileke entrepreneurs mobilized and incorporated labor for cash crop production, a process that necessitated changes in existing social and political institutions. This article explores these economic activities in their cultural context. It aims to show how specific social and cultural systems together framed or determined entrepreneurial activities and to explain why specific ethnic groups enjoyed – at least for a certain period – disproportionate success in adapting to the opportunities of colonial life. Geographically, the paper concentrates on the Mungo region in the Cameroon littoral, part of the Cameroon ‘fertile crescent’ (Fig. I). Since the beginning of the twentieth century this thinly populated region has been one of the country's most important agricultural centers and, as a result, has attracted a large number of immigrants. Between the 1880s and 1950s, despite fundamental differences in the social and economic organization of their respective ethnic groups, first Duala and then Bamileke entrepreneurs emerged as leaders in the region's agricultural development. This paper joins a growing number of studies which aim to refine our understanding of the historical dimensions of African entrepreneurship. In development studies this new interest stems from a concern about the weakness of African private enterprise and its contribution to poor economic performance. Many authors see African entrepreneurs not so much as individuals but as social classes which are analyzed in their socio-economic and political context.

THE DECLINE OF THE CAPE GENTRY, 1838– c . 1900

Abstract: The final ending of slavery in 1838 marked a radical break in the agrarian history of the Cape Colony. The liberated slaves could and did make use of the mobility that emancipation allowed them. This amounted to a real negotiation of the price of labour, for at various points in the nineteenth century the price of labour threatened the very profitability of farming. For the greater part of the century many landlords were led, in the words of one colonial official, ‘to look back…with something very like an envious eye, to the days in which slavery was tolerated by law, because then the slaveholder could command labour whenever it was needed.’ For the former slaveowners, the outcome was agricultural innovation and routine insolvency, and merchants came to have an increasingly important role in the rural political economy. But post-emancipation agrarian structures were not merely shaped by the incursion of merchant capital and the mobility of labour. The former slaveholders displayed a remarkable tenacity. Most significantly, Cape landlords were heirs to a carefully constructed political economy in which the rules governing the circulation of land and wealth were clearly defined in community and familial terms and in which the ties of credit ran both vertically and horizontally. This was a ‘moral community’ in which all were cushioned against the sometimes detrimental effects of participation in a market economy. It is for this reason that the intervention of English-speaking merchants, by not paying due regard to these rules, was of a qualitatively different kind. Community, in short, provides the backdrop against which much of the colony's agrarian history was played out. This article seeks to provide a rather different interpretation of the post-emancipation Western Cape than is at present on offer.

Representation, structure and agency: Divorce in the French Soudan during the early twentieth century.

Abstract: ON 5 October I905, Bala Bari of Gassin village went before the tribunal de province of Segu seeking a divorce from her husband, Tiemoko Boare of Koila. Both Baia Bari and Tiemoko Boare were Muslims. Baia Bari claimed that Tiemoko Boare had mistreated her and that she was prepared to return the bridewealth. In addition, Baia Bari sought the return of 27,000 cowries she claimed Tiemoko Boare had taken from her, although she did not present any 'proof'. Tiemoko Boare agreed to the divorce but denied having taken the money. The court pronounced the divorce and called for Tiemoko Boar6 to recover the bridewealth he and his kin had provided to Baia Bari's kin. The court dismissed Baia Bari's claim for the return of 27,000 cowries, because she had failed to produce evidence of the alleged 'loan'. Neither Baia Bari nor Tiemoko Boare appealed the court's verdict.1 How Baia Bari came to bring suit for divorce against her husband for mistreatment and how the provincial court, presided over by the leading African notables of Segu, saw fit to intervene in the domestic affairs of the Boare household is the subject of this article. The data provided in the 'Register of Civil and Commercial Judgements Rendered by the Provincial Court of Segu during the Third Quarter of I 905 ' are not detailed enough for us to 'hear' Baia Bari's complaints about marital mistreatment. Nor does the register tell us anything about how the members of the court understood the evidence of mistreatment, which they accepted, and Baia Bari's claim for the return of 27,000 cowries, which they rejected. Despite the sparse annotation of this case, Bala Bari's legal action raises at least two questions. First, from where did the provincial court 'receive' the authority to intervene in the domestic affairs of the Boare household? Second, why did Baia Bari turn to the provincial court to seek the dissolution of her marriage ?2

The murids: surveillance and collaboration

Abstract: The A. suggests that the path to accommodation of Amadu Bamba and the Murids may have been less long and tortuous than the standard literature suggests. The conventional historiography makes the entire period (1895-1912) of Bamba's exile, in three different locations, into a time of opposition, followed by a rather intensive collaboration (1912-27) from the founder's return to Baol until his death. The A. argues that the pattern of relationship - a simultaneous combination of close surveillance by the French, constant communication between the two sides, and collaboration in the economic development of the peanut basin - was established by the early twentieth century and remained consistent for the rest of Bamba's life. He suggests that this pattern was also applied to the other marabouts and brotherhoods, and that it originated to a large extent in changes in practice in the colonial administration. The Government General of French West Africa had more resources, confidence and knowledge than its predecessor in Senegal. It also developed, in the form of its plan to take over Mauritania, a new model of relations between Muslim authorities and European rule. Bamba's ability to survive the harsh years of exile and the effort to break his spirit, along with the pedagogy which he developed and refined over the years, gave him and his order a kind of protection from accusations of collaboration. His survival enabled the Murids to pursue accommodation with increasing intensity. The accommodation which he and his followers developed with the colonial administration put the seal on a new practice of relations between Muslim and colonial authorities.

East African Coastal History

Abstract: Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History. By DEREK NURSE and THOMAS J. HINNEBUSCH. Edited by THOMAS J. HINNEBUSCH, with a special addendum by GERARD PHILIPPSON. (University of California Publications in Linguistics, 121). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1993. Pp. xxxii+780. $80 (ISBN 0-520-09775-0). Shanga. The Archaeology of a Muslim Trading Community on the Coast of East Africa. By MARK HORTON. (Memoirs of the British Institute of East Africa, 14). London: The British Institute in Eastern Africa, 1996. Pp. xvi+458. £75 (ISBN 1-872-56609-x). Nurse's and Hinnebusch's Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History is the most comprehensive study yet done of Swahili history through linguistic analysis. It is an encyclopedic work representing many years of research by the authors and other scholars, and it focuses particularly on the emergence and evolution of the Swahili language. The massive and diverse evidence they marshal is, of course, almost entirely linguistic: as such they discuss four basal parameters of language relationship and change, namely lexis, morphology, phonology and tone. (The last two are treated together, and G. Philippson reviews the latter.)

The road of the man called love and the sack of sero: the herero–german war and the export of herero labour to the south african rand

Abstract: This article suggests how oral histories can retain memories of important aspects of the past which have been totally ignored in contemporary accounts or later historical studies. It shows that in Herero oral history in northeastern Namibia, the phrase 'Ondjira ja Korusuvero' (The Road of Love, or rather, The Road of the Man called Love), which refers to the export of labour to the South African mines, is central to an understanding of the origins of the Herero-German war (1904-1908). Similarly, in Herero oral history in northwestern Botswana, 'Ekutu ra Sero' (The Sack of Sero) refers to labour recruitment to the mines in South Africa, as well as to social circumstances in the immediate aftermath of the war. The article discusses the validity of the arguments presented in these oral histories and presents archival material that substantiates Herero oral accounts of the origins of the war. It argues that Herero oral histories offer a sophisticated analysis of the causes and the impact of the war. Notes, ref., sum

The prophet's 'war against whites' : shepherd stuurman in namibia and south africa, 1904-7

Abstract: ‘GOD HAS TAKEN POWER FROM WHITE MEN THROUGHOUT THE WORLD’EARLY on the morning of 5 September 1906, at a small asbestos mine in the northern Cape, six African workers entered the tent of their white foreman and his family. They assaulted the sleepers with stones, knobkerries, the leg of a chair and an ox-yoke. The foreman, Dirk Mans, died of his injuries eighteen hours later, while his son, Jan, who had been sleeping in another tent, ran away. Dirk Mans's wife also had a narrow escape. She woke up when a blow narrowly missed the head of her three-year-old child, who was sleeping in her bed. Both could flee in the general melee. Another victim, the well digger, William Swanepoel, was bludgeoned to death so ferociously that his skull ‘was entirely knocked out of shape [and] separated in halves’. The perpetrators tried to kill more whites, but dispersed in the ensuing confusion. The six men were tracked down by the police after several days. The Griqualand West Supreme Court in Kimberley sentenced four of the culprits to death; they were hanged in March 1907.The ringleader of the Hopefield gang, Hendrik Bekeer, told the policeman who had followed his tracks for several days, that ‘he was glad to be caught, although he knew that his life would be at an end’. He could hardly wait to tell the prison warder that the group had planned to kill all whites in South Africa. In court, the eloquent Bekeer explained:I admit that I am guilty. I, Hendrik Bikier [sic], laid hands on these two souls. I have a craving in my heart which must be made known to everyone. I admit that I am a worker of God. I confess to the Court and all the white people that I am placed here by the Lord, and that I do his will. … The time when the whites had the upper hand is past. This is for Africa alone, but God has taken power from white men throughout the world.

Linguistic evidence and historical reconstruction

Abstract: A Green Place, a Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the Fifteenth Century. By David Lee Schoenbrun. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann: Oxford: James Currey, 1998. Pp. xiv+301. £40 (ISBN 0-325-00041-7); £15.95, paperback (ISBN 0-325-00040-9).An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400. By Christopher Ehret. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia; Oxford: James Currey, 1998. Pp. xvii+354. £35 (ISBN 0-8139-1814-6).Recently several historical reconstructions based on linguistic evidence and dealing with ancient times have been published in African history. In 1998 alone there are the two books reviewed here as well as a major work by Gerda Rossel. Linguistic sources contribute much to the recovery of aspects of the past, which would otherwise remain out of reach, and the standard methodologies of historical linguistics are well known to readers of this journal. Yet in practice many historians remain all too often disconcerted by such studies because they have great difficulty in evaluating them: i.e. in linking assertions made to the evidence provided and so to establish the credibility of such statements. This is not just because many historians are unfamiliar with linguistic evidence but because all the evidence necessary for evaluation is usually not available in the work studied, and often enough authors do not clearly indicate where it can be found. Indeed sometimes it is not available at all. In such cases one has to take the statements made by the authors on faith: one believes the author or not. That is clearly unacceptable. For is it not a fundamental rule in history writing that assertions must be substantiated and hence evidence must be cited or provided? Any work without substantiation cannot be considered to be a work of history at all.

The making of history in colonial Haute Volta : Border conflicts between two Moose chieftaincies, 1900-1940

Abstract: This article retraces the occupation of land during the first decades of the twentieth century in the northern part of the province of Sanmatenga, Burkina Faso. Drawing on a number of cases of conflict over land during the 1920s and 1930s along the border separating the Moose chieftaincies of Piugtenga and Ratenga, it is demonstrated that this land occupation is to be understood in terms of multiple projects and multiple actors. In the process, the chieftaincy of Piugtenga expanded and the territory effectively under ritual control of firstcoming' population groups was enlarged. At the same time, actors directly involved in the conflicts secured and extended their own, their descendants and/or their larger kin group's claims to land. Contrary to what is often assumed, colonial rule was not solely disruptive in its consequences for local social organization. While many movements to the northern aire-refuge were motivated by the wish to escape colonial exactions, the dispersion of population did not necessarily entail social and political disruption. First, the establishment of Moose institutions in the aire-refuge preceded colonial control of the region. Second, the land-use pattern laid out should be interpreted in terms of kin-group-based 'pools of territories' rather than in terms of 'atomized' production units. It thus becomes possible to understand that people today hold rights in land at several geographically dispersed places. The basis for these rights was established in the struggles over land discussed in this article. Local actors are shown to have responded actively to the circumstances created by colonial rule. Instead of having been passive objects in a history driven by colonial forces, they continued to pursue their own agendas, sometimes subverting colonial authority.