The structure of indigenous trade in Central Africa makes it necessary to distinguish between three different types of trade. There is first the local trade from village to village within a given population. The goods exchanged are generally specialized products from local industry, and the exchange comes about because some villages possess supplies of raw materials which are not available to others, e.g. pottery clay, or because they are inhabited by specialists such as smiths or woodcarvers who are not available in others. This type of trade is conducted in local markets, and generally speaking, currency of some sort is in use. It is still alive today, and one can assume that it is very old, since such a system shows little dynamism. The necessities remain the same; the organization is simple and efficient.

The relations between a stranger who leaves his home to settle in a distant chiefdom in Sierra Leone and his landlord have for centuries been guided by customary rules. They are of interest to the anthropologist studying contemporary society, and to the historian who can sometimes elucidate from them otherwise obscure incidents in the past. In this article we describe the landlord-stranger relationship as it exists in Sierra Leone today, then give examples of how it has been applied at earlier periods.

The general lines of Kanuri history and its chronology have been known since Barth's visit to Bornu in 1851 and 1852. During his stay at Kukawa he collected both manuscripts and oral tradition and on his material most of our knowledge of the history of Bornu and Kanem is based.

Knowledge of the past is a highly valued commodity among the Gola of West Africa. ‘Setting things straight’ and ‘putting a proper form to things’ is a major preoccupation of this highly articulate people. There is no man among them worth his salt who is not ready at the slightest provocation to ‘make new ideas from old ones’ (ke djike dje yun gogo), or, more literally, to present ‘new ideas of the old people’. But there are many cultural restrictions and formal requirements which must guide the approach to things past. The past is considered to be the repository of all important sacred and secular knowledge, and the act of formal retrospection is the duty of qualified men of wisdom who are expected to apply their accumulated memories to the solution of problems confronting the living present.

The Basel missionaries, Ramseyer and Kühne, had this to say of Ashanti government in the reign of Kofi Karikari (1867–74):

…the reins of the Ashantee government are not exclusively in the hands of the king, nor does he possess unlimited power, but shares it with a council which includes, besides his majesty, his mother, the three first chiefs of the kingdom [Juabenhene, Bekwaihene, and Mamponghene], and a few nobles of Kumasi (Coomassie). This council is called ‘Asante Kotoko’, or the Ashantee porcupine, which means that like the animal of that name, nobody dare touch them.…It is this Kotoko council which rules the entire kingdom, and deals with the people, who must obey, whatever their own wishes or inclinations may be, in the most despotic way.…In important matters all the other chiefs of the kingdom are called together to discuss the case, but they are sure to vote in accordance with the view of the council, for who would dare to oppose the Kotoko?

Early in 1819 a two-man deputation from the London Missionary Society arrived in Capetown. They had been instructed by the Directors in London to investigate the conditions of the missionary establishment and to make recommendations which would halt its inward decay. John Campbell, the senior member, had only reluctantly accepted the appointment on the understanding that as soon as possible he would return to England. The second man was Dr John Philip, an Aberdeen minister, who, once convinced of the importance of his presence in southern Africa was to stay as Superintendent of the Society's missions. Until his retirement in 1842 he would champion many unpopular causes and be viewed by generations of South Africans as an uninformed, irresponsible, political meddler. He received much of this reputation because of his work for Hottentot emancipation, which culminated in the famous Fiftieth Ordinance. Only recently has it been possible to re-evaluate Philip's actions in this cause and thus counter the opinions of those historians who preserved the stereotype of Philip as a master intriguer.

Few anthropologists, I think, would question that the use of oral tradition as a historical source in tribal studies requires a knowledge of the part tradition plays in the society in which it occurs. Most would agree that oral tradition does not have a universal validity—it is not equally ‘true’ or equally ‘false’ in all tribal societies. Rather its historical content, where unequivocal historical evidence is lacking, has to be evaluated in the light of the contemporary social situations to which it is related. Since Malinowski, many anthropologists have tended to the view that traditions about the past express the reality of the present more than they record what actually happened in the past. Legends about the past, indeed, have often been described as ‘charters’ validating the present by attributing a respectable antiquity to its origins.

Les grands voyages et les transferts intercontinentaux de plantes cultivées ont eu des répercussions extrêmement importantes sur le développement des civilisations par action directe sur la prospérité de leurs agricultures et sur leurs régimes alimentaires. Il n'est que de rappeler le rôle joué par la Pomme de terre dans les pays tempérés et par le Maïs dans la zone chaude, rôle de briseurs de famine et de disette.

No aspect of Brazilian relations with Africa deserves more attention than the study of the African in Brazil. The chroniclers described their types, qualities, virtues and defects in a few sweeping and stereotyped generalizations which, as was only natural, were no more accurate than their accounts of the Indians. But if the latter, from the beginning, had defenders of their liberty and a more extensive and careful protective legislation, the Negroes endured captivity for a long time without a voice being raised in their defence, except for Padre Antonio Vieira, who exhorted them to resignation in his sermons, and Padre Manuel Ribeiro da Rocha, who condemned the slave trade and proposed the liberation of slaves. Bishop Azevedo Coutinho, on the contrary, who was connected with land-owning interests, defended slavery as a ‘licit trade’, a ‘kind of commerce’ whose legitimacy had never been doubted among the nations since antiquity, and he attacked the ‘reformers of France’. The works written by Ribeiro da Rocha and Azevedo Coutinho are unique in the annals of the defence of liberty and of slavery.

Among all the African kingdoms to survive the Partition intact, Buganda is conspicuous for the way in which European overrule, so far from obstructing, positively accentuated the pattern of her pre-Colonial history. With regard to Buganda's political development, this continuity has already received a good deal of comment. Less emphasized, but intimately related to her internal continuity, is the perpetuation of Buganda's imperialist past, especially in the guise of Ganda participation in the extension of British influence throughout the Protectorate of Uganda.

After the end of the Pleistocene, sub-Saharan Africa seems to have been more receptive of than contributory to cultural progress in the Old World as a whole. By that time favourable localities in the subcontinent—the margins of lakes and watercourses, the sea coasts, the peripheral regions of the equatorial forest—were sometimes supporting nearly, or entirely, sedentary communities of hunting-collecting peoples who were enabled to live in this way due to the permanent presence of one or more staple sources of food: freshwater fish, water animals and plants, and sea foods; and forest foods (the Dioscoreas, Elaeis guineensis, and other oil-bearing plants), either perennial or capable of being stored. Evidence of such occupation is seen in the midden accumulations in both cave and open sites at this time. Populations could thus become more concentrated and an increase in density may be inferred, the limiting factor being the maximum that any one environment could support by intensified collecting methods (fig. I).

The unrestricted trade in arms and ammunition in East Africa in the late nineteenth century was one of the most important problems facing European administrators, missionaries, and traders.

Of the African states with which European Powers were in contact during the period of active competition on the Upper Nile, two in particular, the Empire of Ethiopia and the Mahdist State, were sufficiently sophisticated to transact their political and administrative business in writing and to maintain more or less systematic records. Thanks to the work of P. M. Holt, the nature and scope of the Mahdist archives are now well known, and it is evident that they can be expected to furnish a very detailed picture of the fiscal and military organization of the Mahdist State. The documentation of external affairs is necessarily much less abundant; in principle, the Mahdia could not entertain diplomatic relations with ‘the corruptions of this world ’—the existing political organisms which, whether frankly infidel or officially Muslim, had been rendered obsolete by the new dispensation. But this principle was gradually eroded by the exigencies of practical politics. The foreign correspondence of the early Mahdia is simply a series of minatory admonitions to the ‘enemies of God,’ summoning them to submit to the Mahdi; but as the universal aspirations of Mahdism were tacitly abandoned under the Khalifa, its external relations reverted to a more conventional form. Certain uncommitted Muslim states of the western (Nigerian) Sudan began to be considered as potential friends rather than as a part of the Mahdist dar al-harb.

The most striking religious phenomenon in the African continent today is the development of what are variously described as the separatist sects or independent churches, akin to prophet movements, largely indigenous in origin, and much more African in belief and practice than the churches founded by or in association with Christian missions. For want of a more succint and specific term we shall speak of African independent churches. Since Sundkler's pioneer study in 1948, an increasing volume of work has been done in this field, setting forth the diverse circumstances and causes, the manifold forms and African-wide distribution of this movement for spiritual autonomy and cultural integrity that may prove in the end to be a profounder counterpart of the development of political independence that holds the public attention for the present.