The slave trade in Angola, specifically in the district of Ambaca, transformed the social organization of its inhabitants at the grass-roots level by introducing an ever increasing quantity of coveted commodities and by providing credit in counterpart for pawnship. The trade provoked both the emergence of a new structure, the corporate matrilineage and the apparition of a new elite, when colonial chiefs coopted their commercial rivals, including local leaders who had efficiently used the assets of their corporate matrilineages to further their individual ambitions.

Recent scholarship on ‘neo-traditionalism’ and colonial governance in Africa has challenged assumptions about the ‘invention of tradition’ and the ability of the colonial state to create wholly innovative kinds of local authority. This article explores one episode in the development of the authority of Ali el Tom, probably the most famous ‘traditional’ ruler in Condominium Sudan. It suggests that Ali el Tom's authority was a creole product, which drew on local moral codes and colonial forms of authority, but was not fully part of either. The willingness of his people to accept this sometimes abusive authority relied on a partly illusory sense that it was familiar; but this willingness was not unlimited, and on occasion actions from below set limits to the invention of authority and tradition.

Current attempts at understanding ‘neo-traditionalism’ in Africa stress the limits of invention and warn against according too great a role to colonial intervention. Colonialism nevertheless remains important to our understanding of specific neo-traditionalisms, not only because it forced particular social and economic changes on to African communities but also because of the way that Africans appropriated colonial claims. This article explores how Igbo villages were re-imagined as a result of the complex relations between Igbo ‘sons abroad’ and their hometowns during the colonial period. Appropriating the colonizers' claims to bring ‘progress’, migrants attempted to achieve status and influence in the villages from which they had migrated. These strategies shaped not only how migrants perceived their connection with their village, but also perceptions of the village itself: it came to include the ‘sons abroad’ in a diasporic public sphere that was not in itself geographically defined, but existed through reference to the village.

The story of freedom fighter Jean Djonteu provides a new approach to the history of Union des populations du Cameroun (UPC) nationalism in the Grassfields and Mungo regions of Cameroon. Within the context of Baham, his village of origin, Djonteu's actions and tracts reveal his politico-spiritual reasons for joining the UPC militia in its revolutionary fight against Franco-Cameroonian state administration. UPC nationalism and village political culture formed a hybrid of political ideologies, or a ‘village nationalism’ articulating UPC anti-colonialism with Grassfields political concepts of nation and sovereignty that pre-dated European occupation. As this articulation disintegrated, Grassfields populations disengaged from state politics and turned inwards towards village political culture and spirituality rekindled by popular involvement in the UPC nationalist movement.

After World War II, African ex-servicemen in Kenya sought to maintain the socioeconomic gains they had accrued through service in the King's African Rifles (KAR). Looking for middle-class employment and social privileges, they challenged existing relationships within the colonial state. For the most part, veterans did not participate in national politics, believing that their goals could be achieved within the confines of colonial society. The postwar actions of KAR veterans are best explained by an examination of their initial perceptions of colonial military service. Indeed, the social and economic connotations of KAR service, combined with the massive wartime expansion of Kenyan defense forces, created a new class of Africans with distinctive characteristics and interests. These socioeconomic perceptions proved powerful after the war, often informing ex-askari action.

VAN Sittert's review article, which included coverage of my The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock and the Environment, 1770–1950 (Oxford, 2003), contained so many inaccuracies and misrepresentations that it is difficult to let it pass. These undermine many of the points he purports to make, on both small and substantive issues. The Journal of African History is one of our few journals of record and I would like to set the record straight. I have only limited space for this rejoinder, and it will be impossible to take up all relevant questions.

‘THE discipline of history’, E. P. Thompson once said, ‘is, above all, the discipline of context; each fact can only be given meaning within an ensemble of other meanings’. By disputing points of detail Beinart elides the original review's central criticism that the book suffers from the omission of the political economic context. I will address the contested details before restating the gist of the original critique and by so doing suggest that it still stands unanswered.

THE Anglophone literature has conceptualized the history of the African ‘space’ through two major approaches. Fine-grained reconstructions of land disputes have helped to illuminate colonial changes in the political and economic control over residential and productive units, and to assess the local (im)possibilities for Africans of accumulating landed property and/or penetrating the new plantation and market economy. More recently, environmental studies have encouraged historians to uncover how fundamental alterations in the relationships between communities and their physical environment have been shaping ancient and recent struggles for identities and socio-political resources. Meanwhile, renewed attention to cognitive notions of space by anthropologists on the one hand, and literary critics on the other, has delineated deep structuring principles in the ideological construction of space among Africans and colonizers. Few historians have followed through, however, and historicized such imaginaries. Among those who have done so, and have traced people's conceptual, commemorative and moral visions of land, fewer still have ventured beyond the boundaries of specific locales and societies. By reconstructing a longue durée history of the disruptions in both the physical and cognitive spaces of the Gabonese rainforest, Chris Gray's book stands as a major attempt to bridge these gaps.