This paper is a contribution to the current debate about the origins of the scramble for West Africa. It analyses the internal dynamics of French expansion and argues that the crucial change in French African policy occurred not in 1882–3, as commonly assumed, but in 1879–80. The policies adopted at this time, although their roots can be traced back to the governorship of Louis Faidherbe in Senegal, were distinguished by a new willingness on the part of the government in Paris to establish political as well as economic claims to West African territory, and by its readiness to bear the financial and military burdens of territorial expansion. Changes in French domestic politics or foreign relations cannot adequately account for this transition from informal to formal expansion, nor can it be explained solely in terms of commercial agitation in France or West Africa. The influence of public opinion and of colonial agents on the formulation of policy was more significant, but the crucial decisions were taken by the policy-makers themselves, and in particular by Charles de Freycinet (Minister of Public Works and later Prime Minister) and Admiral Jean Jauréguiberry (Minister of Marine and Colonies). They, above all, were responsible for inaugurating the era of French imperialism in West Africa. The new imperialism was most apparent in the drive to create a vast territorial empire in the Sudanese interior. But it was also evident in the intensification of commercial rivalries along the West African coast, and the paper argues that French actions there in 1882–3 were the continuation of policies adopted three years before rather than immediate responses to the British occupation of Egypt or to the growth of popular support for African expansion. Accordingly, the beginnings of French imperialism in West Africa are advanced as the principal cause of the scramble.

Toute étude de la question du Haut-Nil doit aujourd'hui prendre pour point de départ l'ouvrage de M. G. N. Sanderson, England, Europe and the Upper Nile, 1882–1899. Rares sont sans doute les students of Africa qui n'ont pas encore eu entre les mains ce maître-livre: par l'ampleur de la documentation, le soin de l'analyse, l'ampleur de vues aussi, il s'est d'ores et déjà imposé comme un classique. A partir de l'époque de la révolte mahdiste jusqu'aux lendemains de Fachoda, on y suit, dévidé avec une clarté remarquable, l'écheveau des différentes politiques en présence sur le Haut-Nil: anglaise, française, italienne, allemande — sans oublier, bien entendu, celle de Léopold II.

From the sixteenth century until the coming of the Salazar regime, Portuguese control in the Zambezi basin rested on the prazos da coroa—grants of crown land. Portuguese acquisition of land and jurisdiction began with the establishment of the trading fairs in Mashonaland in the second half of the sixteenth century. Private titles first became common in the seventeenth century, when individual conquistadores, who had obtained concessions from chiefs in return for their help in local wars, sought official titles for their land from the Portuguese crown. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Crown tried to modify the terms of these grants and alter the character of the institution of the prazos. The prazo-holders successfully resisted these encroachments because their power rested on their followings of African slaves and clients, and on their control of local administration and their family alliances. In the nineteenth century their dependence on their African followings, coupled with increasing inter-marriage, greatly accentuated the African characteristics of the prazos. The most important of the prazo holders became the chiefs of newly emerging African peoples, and adopted the customs and beliefs associated with chieftainship. At the same time the disordered state of the Zambezi following the Ngoni invasions and the growth of the slave-trade eliminated the weaker families and concentrated power effectively in the hands of four major family groupings. The wars waged by the Portuguese government against these families lasted from the 1840s till teh end of the century. In spite of many victories, the internal feuds among the prazo families and the establishment of British administration in Central Africa brought about the end of their dominance. The prazos themselves survived into the twentieth century as units of fiscal and administrative policy.

Sekonyela's downfall is commonly attributed to his personal defects—to the love of war by which he alienated his neighbours, and to the rough treatment by which he alienated his own people, Conversely, Moshweshwe's rise to power is commonly attributed to his love of peace and to his benevolence.

This article does not seek to refute the traditional assessments of the characters of the two chiefs, but to suggest that as explanations for their diifering fortunes they are inadequate. Basically Sekonyela failed because, after 1829, he was poorer than Moshweshwe. The Tlokwa had to kill and consume many of their cattle during the first two years of the difaqane, and it seems that they never fully recovered their former prosperity. Moreoverj they suffered further heavy losses in the war with the Korana and their allies in the early 1840s. Sekonyela, therefore, was not in a position to attract and bind thousands of followers to himself by sustaining them. Hence, to a large extent, his raids on his neighbours' herds, and his unpopularity among his own people.

Moshweshwe, however, retained most of his cattle during the difaqane, and in 1829 conducted two richly rewarding raids against the Thembu. Thereafter his wealth far surpassed Sekonyela's, and it was mainly because of this that he was able to attract and hold so many followers.

The territorial expansion of the Sotho naturally brought them into conflict with the Tlokwa, and in 1853, after the British had indicated that they were not prepared to interfere in this dispute, Sekonyela was overwhelmed by Moshweshwe's superior forces.

Superficially, the nature of German rule in Togo differed from that of the other German colonies. For example, right from the start, it was administered by Imperial officials. It thereby escaped some of the worst abuses of Chartered Company rule. Again because of the peculiar nature fo the country—it was very small, not particularly suitable for European settlement and much of its agricultural land was already under peasant cultivation, to which it was best suited—Togo escaped the large-scale expropriation of the subject peoples' land that was characteristic of German rule elsewhere.

Starting with a small band of refugees, Mzilikazi built a personal military kingdom on the Zulu model at three successive locations in South Africa. His early successes might be attributed to the disturbances resulting from the Difaqane. Later, his strength was maintained by his ability to incorporate diverse peoples into his polity. The aggressive policy for which he is known was not maintained during those periods in which he felt secure, but rather when he was forced to migrate farther from his major enemy, the Zulu. Evidence supports the contention that his main aim was a search for security. His policies were successful against the threats from African enemies. Only with the coming of white men did they fail. The essential features of Mzilikazi's political system are described to show what he preserved of traditional Nguni practices, what he borrowed from Dingeswayo and Shaka, and what he modified to fit his particular circumstances.

The viability of Mzilikazi's developing polity is confirmed by his success in reconstructing his kingdom north of the Limpopo River. Without minimizing the traditional characterization of Mzilikazi as a warrior, a desolator and a tyrant, it is as a creative political administrator that his full stature can be appreciated.

This paper discusses the place of the Emperor Tewodros (1855–1868) in Ethiopian history and suggests that due to his policy of modernization, and to his ambition to transform Ethiopian society along modern lines, he is to be seen as the opener of the modern era. It is suggested, as well, that this concept of modernization and transformation may be applicable to other pre-colonial African rulers. Special reference is made to missionary sources. Catholic material from the Lazarist Mission is used to clarify and elaborate the reforming intentions of the early years of the reign; while, for the later years, they reveal modern dimensions to Tēwodros's foreign policy. Protestant material from the Chrischona Mission throws new light on the Emperor's personality, and elaborates his attempts at introducing foreign influence with a modernizing intention. It is also shown how the Protestant missionaries established a close relationship with the Emperor, which partially rested upon certain shared religious values. This led the missionaries to interpret his reforming ambitions primarily in terms of the Reformation princes of Europe. Finally, it is suggested that the Protestant missionary material has an important contribution to make in determining a major turning point in Tēwodros's career; a point from which his career began to decline, and the reforming intentions were increasingly neglected.

The arrival of European concession-seekers in Barotseland coincided with a period of internal instability in that kingdom. King Lewanika, fearing both enemies within the ruling class as well as Ndebele raids, decided to follow the example of his friend Khama of the Ngwato in seeking British protection. With considerable difficulty he prevailed upon a local missionary, François Coillard, to write a letter on his behalf requesting such protection.

It had already become clear that an important faction of the Lozi ruling class opposed the king's decision. Some of its members feared that his ‘protectors’ would make his overthrow that much more difficult; others were concerned that he more powerful white men would undermine the authority of the nation's traditional rulers. These suspicions received apparent confirmation when the representative who appeared to negotiate the concession proved to be an agent, not of Her Majesty's Government, but of the British South African Company. Thanks, however, to the ignorance of the missionaries who were interpreting for the court, as well as to the duplicity of Rhodes's agent himself, this distinction was successfully blurred. Opposition remained, however, until, at a critical moment in the negotiations, Khama's envoy threatened the council with harsh retribution if it refused to sanction the proposed treaty. In the face of this united stand of those who represented the power of the British government and its white associates and black collaborators, the National Council of Barotseland finally agreed to the concession, and, for better or worse, the Lozi found themselves under white ‘protection’.

This article deals with the evolution of centralized chieftainship in response to changing conditions in a part of Sierra Leone where such organized political controls had not previously been necessary. The transformation which characterized the last decades of the nineteenth century in the Mende chiefdoms of what is now Kailahun District was largely a response to war and invasion.

Prior to the 1880s, ‘Upper-Mendeland’ had been little more than a loose conglomeration of petty chiefdoms made up of groups of tiny self-sufficient villages, united only by loose kinship ties and in common defence in time of danger. Increasing military pressures from within and from without forced these autonomous groups, depending on secret societies and kinship ties for social control, to give way to larger and better-organized chiefdoms with powerful leaders, tributary towns, and in some cases the beginnings of genuine administrative structures. Some of these transformed chiefdoms, such as Luawa and Dia, underwent decisive innovation in remarkably short periods of time. Powerful war-leaders were able to forge strong central controls over their military organizations, and in turn over the political units which they dominated. In some cases these innovations approached those of a bureaucratized state.

In the period before the rise of Emperor Theodore, the provinces in Ethiopia tended to behave like independent entities. Shoa was one of the more successful provinces in this respect. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a strong independent nationalism had developed in Shoa which threatened to stand in the way of national unity. This was not favoured by Emperor Theodore, who therefore strove to destroy provincial independence and unite all the provinces under an effective central government.

For a long time it was thought that Theodore had an easy task with Shoa, defeating her in a single combat and thereafter completely pacifying the country. Recent researches have revealed that this was not the case. Theodore did not gain an easy victory over a timid enemy. On the contrary, he met with a strong and determined resistance from the Shoan kingdom. He did in the end succeed in conquering it, but he did so only after a vigorous campaign which lasted five months. His final victory was affected by two related factors which seriously weakened the morale of the Shoan soldiers. The first was the sudden death of the king of Shoa at the height of the campaign. The second factor was that the heir to the Shoan throne was a boy of ten years, and incapable of giving effective leadership in the war against the emperor. Shoan resistance collapsed with the capture of the heir and of a number of the leading personalities in the kingdom. The emperor established his own administration in the conquered territory, which he hoped would effectively execute imperial policy there.

The administration was, however, unable to pacify the conquered territory, and the period of imperial control was spent suppressing one rebellion after another. On two occasions during this period, Theodore had to go down to Shoa himself to strengthen imperial attacks on the rebels. Although the Emperor managed to gain a hard-won victory over the rebels on the first occasion, he could not make any headway on the second occasion, and eventually he left the country in the hands of the rebels. Thus, in spite of all his efforts, Theodore never succeeded in gaining complete control over Shoa, and by the time he died in April i868, Shoa had already regained her independence.

It is still assumed today that Sheikh Mohammad Abdille Hassan's rebellion between 1899 and 1920 in British Somaliland only made an impact in northern and central Somalia. In fact, however, the rebellion also influenced both the southernmost Somali and the administration of the Jubaland Province of the East Africa Protectorate. Anticipation that the rebellion would spread southwards, though unwarranted, led nevertheless to exaggerated fears and ultimately deterred further British involvement in that part of the Protectorate. These fears were not wholly unjustified, for the Jubaland Somali were inspired by Sheikh Mohammad's defiance of alien authority and probably wished to emulate him where possible. Furthermore, there was increasing contact between Mohammad Abdille Hassan's agents and the Juba region. However, it was the actual migration towards the Juba of Marehan who had fought with Sheikh Mohammad that had the most important impact on that area. Sheikh Mohammad's jihads also encouraged other Somali sections to migrate southwards. These migrations were largely responsible for the growing instability south of the Juba. They led to a large increase in the number of guns available and also encouraged inter-tribal fighting. Essentially Sheikh Mohammad's influence was political rather than religious. This distinction becomes clearer on examination of the spread of the Salihiyya tariqa as compared to those areas which were involved in political unrest.

Shaykh Uways b. Muḥammad al-Barāwī (1847–1909) was an important leader of the Qādirīya brotherhood in southern Somalia, on Zanzibar, and along the East African coast from Kenya to Mozambique, and founded his own branch of Qādirīya, the Uwaysīya. Before his death in 1909 when he was assassinated by representatives of the rival Sālihīya brotherhood (under the leadership of Muḥammȧd 'Ȧbdallah Hasan, the ‘Mad Mullah’), Uways missionary activities were very considerable.

Uways' branch of the Qādiriya was probably behind certain episodes of Muslim resistance to European penetration into Buganda in the late 1880's, at the behest of Sayyid Barghash of Zanzibar. Indeed the relations between Shaykh Uways and successive rulers of Zanzibar, Barghash, Khalīfa, and Ḥamid b. Thuwaynī were very close. In 90's, certain Muslim elements in Tanganyika, in conjunction with the ṭarīqa, made trouble for the Germans in SE Tanganyika during the ‘Mecca Letters affair’ at Lindi in 1908. This episode revealed a division in the Tanganyika Muslim community.

The Uwaysīya was responsible for massive conversions to Islam in the coastal region, in inner Tanganyika, and on the Eastern fringes of the Congo at the end of the 19th and the beginning decades of the 20th centuries.

Following the establishment of the city-state of Abeokuta, the Egba and Owu returned to the forms of government known and respected before the retreat from the north, each township running its own affairs and reclaiming old prerogatives. This urban parochialism proved increasingly cumbersome after the death of Sodeke, when, without effective central leadership, the Ogboni and Ologun manœuvred for political predominance.

These difficulties were compounded after mid-century as the tempo of economic and cultural change quickened in southern Yorubaland. The Egba were intent on establishing themselves as commercial middlemen between the coast and interior. On the one hand, they were thus drawn into the ever-widening focus of European economic and political influence and demands radiating from Lagos. On the other, seeds of change were planted at Abeokuta itself: European merchants, missionaries, and Saros, who were soon promoting new economic forms and demanding political expression.

The formal appearance of the Saros as political contenders in 1860 coincided with the breakdown of the uneasy Yoruba peace. Their first bid for power was consequently unsuccessful, and, as the war progressed, the military became the controlling political force. In fact civil government came close to vanishing completely during the next five years, a point of near-anarchy being reached, and with deteriorating relations with Lagos.

In 1959 C. C. Wrigley published ‘The Christian revolution in Buganda’. an important essay summarizing a decade of intensive research into Buganda politics during the nineteenth century. There he demonstrated how ‘Ganda society had undergone, immediately before the advent of British imperial power, a genuine revolution, which had brought about drastic changes in ideology and in the structure as well as the personnel of government and that as a result of these [and other] changes it was uniquely fitted to cope with the new situation which confronted it in the last years of the nineteenth century’. This essay seeks to reconstruct an intriguing attempt made by the Bakungu client-chiefs who triumphed in that ‘Christian revolution’ to perpetuate their power in the Buganda kingdom by making further institutional changes during the second decade of the twentieth century. But first it is necessary to discuss the general factors shaping political relationships between these client-chiefs and their European rulers during the first and third decades of this century. In this it is possible to take account not only of several secondary sources published since the appearance of Wrigley's article nearly ten years ago, but also of certain primary materials which have recently come to light.

This paper attempts an outline of the Pan-African aspect of British colonial education policies during the inter-war years. In particular, it analyses the role of the missionary statesman, J. H. Oldham, in securing the adoption of a certain style of Negro education in the Southern States of America (one based on the work of the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes) both by the International Missionary Council and by the Colonial Office Advisory Committee on Education, of which he was a member. Oldham's interest in transferring the primarily agricultural and technical insights of the Hampton-Tuskegee model to Africa was developed in close collaboration with the Phelps-Stokes Fund of New York, and together they were responsible for directly exposing large numbers of missionaries and colonial officials to these emphases in the Southern States. The attempt to suggest the relevance to Africa of institutions which had long traditions of compromise with white supremacy in the American South inevitably cut across the Pan-African programmes of such New World Negroes as W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey, and had the effect of transplanting to the African continent some of the bitter disputes about the educational and political status of Negroes that had been common in America from the late nineteenth century conflict between DuBois and Booker T. Washington. While the article is primarily concerned with the formation of a missionary and Colonial Office consensus on the preferred Negro education for Africans, some attention is also paid to the extent to which the Hampton-Tuskegee model actually took root in Africa.

The responsibility for the retention of the British Protectorates during the period leading up to Union lay more with Lord Selborne than with the British government as a whole. Governemental dealings (both Conservative and Liberal) with the Protectorates up to the era of Lord Selborne had been consistently heedless of the interests of the Africans involved.

The key to the change in policy seems to have been Selborne's dealings with the Basutos. The High Commissioner, from the time of his first exposure to them until years after his departure, continually evidenced the highest regard for the Basutos' intellect, accomplishments and military prowess. Through the vehicle of the National Council, he had a real chance to learn what the nation was thinking, wishing or fearing. Through correspondence with local traders and missionaries (notably the Rev. Jacottet), Selborne had become convinced, by the eve of the National Convention, that the Protectorates, whatever the outcome of the native franchise question, must be withheld from the Union if the current African restlessness, especially in Basutoland, were not to be transformed into outright rebellion. The virtual denial of native representation by the Convention provided Selborne with a plausible and strong reason for doing so. In the face of determined opposition by the Convention, Selborne stood firm, and was backed up by the Colonial office for fear, among other reasons, that he would resign if it did not.