THE recent debate about Iron Age Gao between John Hunwick and Dierk Lange within the pages of The Journal of African History has prompted the writing of this paper. Hunwick lamented the lack of archaeological research in the region, and hoped that the historical hypotheses which had been proposed would, one day, either be supported or refuted by archaeological work in conjunction with linguistic analysis. The limits of interpretation of the historical sources would appear to have been reached, and, as this author has recently conducted excavations and surveys at Gao, a contribution is offered to the debate based upon both the archaeological evidence recovered from these excavations, and from previous archaeological research which has been conducted in the Gao region.

ALTHOUGH slaves were the most common merchandise in the Portuguese-dominated opening period of the seaborne trade between Europe and Africa, relatively little conclusive information is available on their overall numbers. Even less is known about the distribution of these early exports of slaves in space and time, although these are two of the key factors in assessing the much debated societal impact of the early Atlantic slave trade and the role of slavery in West and West-Central African economic, social and political life.

BY the twentieth century, the southern Yoruba town of Abeokuta was integrated into the international economy both as an exporter of cash crops and an importer of manufactured products. It became one of the primary producing areas of cocoa and kola nuts in western Nigeria. Abeokuta's integration into the international economy had a profound effect on its local textile industry. As weavers gained access to European threads and dyers gained access to European cloth, relations of production were transformed. Both sets of producers became dependent on European trading firms for their raw materials and were thus brought squarely into the nexus of international trade. Dyeing, which was predominantly a women's industry, benefited substantially from this economic relationship. Dyers' access to cloth as well as credit from the European firms allowed them to become autonomous producers of tie-dyed cloth, adire, that was in great demand across Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Senegal and the Belgian Congo.

AMONG the most critical effects of labour migrancy on a labour reserve economy in southern Africa are the psychological and economic implications the dependence on migrants' earnings, and the prolonged absence of men at the labour centres, have for women. Lesotho is one such case. But Basotho women, for their part, developed various survival strategies in response to their social and economic predicament. Judy Kimble and Philip Bonner have pioneered the study of these responses, but they made no effort to look at the strategies of the women remaining at home. When scholarly attention has been given to the latter category of women, the focus has been on the period after 1940. This study, by focusing on the engagement of Basotho women in commercial beer-brewing and prostitution in Lesotho before the Second World War, intends to address this lacuna. An attempt will also be made to link the rise of these phenomena to social and economic changes in colonial Lesotho, particularly the deepening of dependency on the migrant labour system.

Ce livre est composé, outre d'une introduction originale qui tente de synthétiser l'approche générale, de sept articles de l'auteur parus entre 1988 et 1993.

‘Writing history’, claims Paul Landau in a revealing comment in his epilogue, ‘is an attempt to pin and mount lives on the page of a book, like butterflies or rose petals’ (p. 219). The generalization is sweeping, but the tropes aptly symbolize the type of history written in this book. This is a subtle, nuanced account of the intertwining of Christianity and politics in central Botswana from the 1850s to the 1940s. It is deeply informed by Foucauldian notions of power. Landau, moreover, is troubled by the implications of exercising power, through the very act of ‘pinning’ down lives.

A revised version of this well-known university textbook provides an opportunity to review some of the tendencies in African historiography since the publication of the original version in 1978 which marked ‘the coming of age of African history’ after 25 years of research. This new version is intended to reflect ‘a new level of maturity’ in African historiography with the publication of all the 16 volumes of the Cambridge History of Africa and the Unesco General History of Africa, of which only a few had appeared by 1978. The text has been ‘reworked, updated and expanded’; the book has been redesigned and reset, and the maps have been redrawn and new ones added.

In an era when innovation in money and its various market dynamics is advancing at unprecedented speed, Western heroic optimism about the potentials that are unleashed by the logics of the world monetary system is distinctly tinged with fear: of massive outstanding deficits, whirlwind destruction of smaller economies, a roller-coaster rise on Wall Street, and sheer inappositeness to large numbers of development challenges. Old financial institutions have to create new forms of credit to address, for example, the transformation of the former socialist economies or the restoration of war-torn societies and polities. The enormous power of formal finance and its equally enormous limitations, and the contentious set of regulatory frameworks that surround both, should stimulate a new round of scholarship about what used to be termed ‘finance capital’ in modern social history.

This book is a collection of essays presented by Makerere University academicians at a Faculty of Arts conference held in April 1994 to commemorate the centenary of Uganda's foundation as a state. The papers are grouped broadly by discipline, separate sections covering history, philosophy, linguistics, literature and social and cultural studies.

This is the translation by L. Bouquiaux and Gloria Lex of Die zentralafrikanischen Wildbeuterkulturen (Studien zur Kulturkunde, 45: Wiesbaden, 1977). It deals successively with older theories about pygmies, the enumeration and classification of different groups of central African foragers, their ecology and economy, their transition from gathering to food production, their confrontation with farmers and their relations to sacred kingship. A critical evaluation of theories of culture change is also provided. This enumeration alone reveals how much the author is beholden to the points of view of Central European ethnology, even though he rejects the German Kulturkreislehre of P. W. Schmidt in which pygmy culture was treated as an, or as the, primordial human culture. This is despite the fact that Seitz stresses culture change, albeit of an orderly sort. But that does not detract from the fact, underlined in the preface to the translation (p. 12) that this is a very carefully documented reference work, an excellent entry into the forest of books about ‘pygmies’.

The core of this interesting book is an attempt to discern outlines of Kongo culture from the dictionaries left behind by the French mission to Kakongo between 1768 and 1776. These dictionaries, which are found in London, Paris, Rome, Besançon and Genoa, are both French to Kikongo and Kikongo to French and sometimes run to more than 700 pages, often containing examples of usage as well as the words themselves. Indeed, when one considers the seventeenth-century linguistic materials, such as the dictionary (utilized by Nsondé) and the catechism (not used) and the excellent modern dictionaries of Laman and Bentley, Kikongo is one of the rare African languages that can be effectively documented over a three-century period.

Knut S. Vikør's Sufi and Scholar on the Desert Edge is first and foremost a study of the founder of the Sanusiyya religious brotherhood, Muhammad b. ‘Ali al-Sanusi. It is a welcome addition to the existing literature on the Sanusiyya. Vikør's stated purpose is to locate al-Sanusi in his own religious and intellectual environment in order to separate the history of al-Sanusi and the order he founded from the Sanusiyya's later reputation as a highly politicised and anti-colonial institution. Like another recent work on the Sanusiyya, Jean-Louis Triaud's La légende noire de la Sanusiya, Sufi and Scholar seeks to explode certain myths about the early Sanusiyya, in this case the common belief that al-Sanusi was highly politicised and came into conflict with the political authorities in Fes, Mecca, Cairo and eventually Libya. In the intellectual sphere, Vikør also re-evaluates assumptions that al-Sanusi was dedicated to the jihad, and can be described as a neo-sufi and Islamic revivalist. The main source for the book is al-Sanusi's own writings, a rather neglected source which obviously provide crucial information on the book's main topic, al-Sanusi's personal religious and political outlook, a few surviving letters and then a wide range of contemporary and later European and Arabic sources.

The Waalo Kingdom's tradition of origin, also identified by the name of its principal hero Njaajan Njaay (N'Diadiane N'Diaye), is not one of the better-known narrative texts of the Western Sudan, simply because there is not much of it and few variants have circulated in print; among the latter is one collected by Brasseur in 1778 and published in Jean Boulégue, Le Grand Jolof (XIII–XVI siècle), in 1987 (absent from this volume's bibliography) and another by Bérenger-Fèraud in Recueil de Contes Populaires de la Sénégambie, 1885. The 975-line variant presented here is therefore a welcome addition to that modest but interesting body of oral literature. This one includes the original Wolof-language text and an annotated English translation by the author. Appendices include two genealogies of Njaajan Njaay, one translated from the Arabic, and another from Wolof.

Everett Jenkins' book is an admirable attempt to present a comparative chronology of events in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora. The volume is divided into five principal chapters, corresponding to the five centuries covered, each preceded by a brief introduction, and includes a short bibliography and guide to sources, as well as an extensive and comprehensive index. In addition to sections on Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, the author also includes useful sections on ‘related historical events’.

In some ways, The Origins of the South African War 1899–1902 is an awfully fat book for what has perhaps become an awfully thin and fatiguing subject. Do we really need yet another stab at J. A. Hobson on the Jameson Raid and the notion of the capitalist conspiracy war? Is there much to be gained from further deliberation over the 1896 Selborne Memorandum dealing with the crisis in South Africa? Despite Dr Smith's suggestion (p. x) that recent historiography of the South African War has been preoccupied more with the experience of that conflict than with its origins, the fact remains that modern English-language scholarship on the causes of the war, starting well over three decades ago with Robinson and Gallagher's Africa and the Victorians, continues to outweigh heavily writing on the actual conduct of hostilities between Britain and the Boer republics. We continue to know much more about the pre-war shenanigans between Milner and the Uitlanders than about the relationship between technology and strategy during 1899–1902 or the demographic consequences of an exhausting war. So, the question must be: does Iain Smith breathe new life into the enormously complex, broadly familiar, sometimes tedious, historical arguments over the origins of the South African War?

The latest monograph produced by the British Institute in Eastern Africa is essentially the report of Connah's archaeological work at the Later Iron Age site of Kibiro, which lies on the Ugandan shores of Lake Albert. The relatively rapid publication of this fieldwork (undertaken in 1989 and 1990) and the high production values evident in the volume (if one excuses the spelling mistakes on the back of the dust jacket) are to be congratulated. The volume is an attractive one, well illustrated throughout with a combination of photographs, figures and tables.

It is hard to put a single categorical label on Carmel Schrire's Digging Through Darkness. It is at once a chronicle of her personal development as an archaeologist and a critique of the colonial dialectic through which indigenous peoples and European invaders have come to be intertwined. Schrire, as a white South African woman, is a product of this process, adding texture to a skilfully written book interlaced with the kind of earthy irony often intrinsic to multi-cultural dialogue in southern Africa. The book ranges from panoramic discussions of European expansion and colonization to introspective essays on the contradictions of growing up Jewish in South Africa, ‘a minority within the larger white group ... [that] endure[d] the persistent effort of certain factions to ally with the Nazis’, while at the same time taking advantage of an entrenched, colour-coded caste system under which ‘the Jewish population cashed in the chips of their appearance’ (p. 30).

This expensive little book, originally a thesis for the University of Illinois, is an artless but sometimes perceptive account of certain library endeavours in British East and West Africa, based on archival and library research in Britain and the United States. It is not a history of libraries per se so much as a study of instances of external aid to the development of libraries beyond the sphere of teaching institutions. In the 1930s, one such source – as in so much of the English-speaking world – was the Carnegie Corporation. Grants to Kenya underpinned a system of circulating libraries, the depot for which was housed in the McMillan Memorial Library, Nairobi; membership was confined to whites until 1958. In Lagos, Alan Burns, as chief secretary, secured a grant to start an unsegregated but fee-charging library: in 1934 just 43 of its 481 members were African. The grant ended in 1935, but the library was still going forty years later.

This brief but welcome pamphlet is Professor Kimambo's ‘Exit lecture’ (his term) from the University of Dar es Salaam, where he was a senior lecturer in the Department of History from 1965 to 1969, became a full professor in 1970, spent the next thirteen years as Chief Academic Officer, and returned to History in 1983. It replaces the professorial Inaugural Lecture he never had time to prepare while CAO.

The first edition of Phyllis Martin's and Patrick O'Meara's collection under the simple title Africa appeared twenty years ago to meet the need which its editors, who teach in the African Studies Program at Indiana University, had felt for a multi-disciplinary introduction to the subject for undergraduates embarking for the first time on work relating to the continent. It has twenty-one chapters, each of which is written by an author – sometimes a pair of authors – who has lived and worked in Africa, some of whom have international reputations in their particular disciplines. These are arranged in four sections.