The problem raised in this paper is fundamentally that of the value of oral traditions used as historical sources. There is a tendency to accept them uncritically and thereby to perpetuate myths which a little critical investigation would have ended years before. The present writer has attempted to demonstrate that a historian dealing with traditional history must widen his field far beyond the oral traditions which are of immediate interest to him. Like other sources, comparisons with and the cross-checking of the traditions of other countries are essential factors in reconstructing the pre-colonial history of Africa. The results of such an exercise have been shown in this paper, the main purpose of which has been to trace and reassess the causes for the decline and fall of Bunyoro, by using not only the oral traditions of Bunyoro, as has been the practice hitherto, but also those of her neighbours such as Ankole, Buganda, Busoga, Kiziba and Ruanda. The results have shown that the effects of succession wars were less disastrous than is often believed. But the economic and territorial Josses, coupled with the persistent lack of able leadership, were more important than the so-called federalism of the Babito. For a semipastoralist population, cattle plagues may have been as disastrous as other factors. The British no doubt played a role, but it deserves less emphasis than it has hitherto received. By the time of their arrival Bunyoro had declined almost beyond recovery, and it is doubtful whether Kabarega could even have retained Toro. The British treatment of Bunyoro and Kabarega was typical of the reactions of colonial regimes against African resisters. Some of the questions raised in the concluding paragraphs regarding the possible future of Bunyoro had not the British intervened are perhaps too speculative. Nevertheless, they are worth asking, if the history of Bunyoro is to be seen in the right perspective.

A recent authoritative review of developments in African historiography pointed to one 'kind of synthesis which has always seemed worthwhile undertaking’, the attempt to trace ‘an historic connexion between the last-ditch resisters, the earliest organisers of armed risings, the messianic prophets and preachers, the first strike-leaders, the promoters of the first cautious and respectful associations of the intelligentsia, and the modern political parties which (initially at least) have been the inheritors of European power’.

One of the most striking features of the African nationalist movement is the great effort that was made to safeguard the freedom of the press. As British subjects, most of whom were trained in Britain, educated Africans assumed that they were entitled to enjoy a free press, which was an essential ingredient in the British political tradition. Their newspapers were almost unavoidably highly critical, and colonial administrators sought to control them. A variety of factors contained official repressive enthusiasm, and these provide the key to the relatively small number of press prosecutions and the seeming reluctance to enforce press legislation. The situation is illustrated from the history of the early nationalist newspaper press in former British West Africa.

African voters played an important part in many electoral divisions of the Cape Colony between 1884 and 1910. Traditional leaders, particularly headmen, exercised some influence, but declined in the period under review. Ministers of religion, school-teachers and others of the new strata created by colonial society were given a leading role, but in the absence of patronage they were limited to persuasion, and decisions on candidates to support were taken collectively, often at mass meetings that included a wider polity than those on the voters' roll. Ad hoc African electoral committees were formed to bring candidates to the notice of the politically conscious and to implement decisions once these were taken. White candidates established committees of their own and sometimes these overlapped with the African committees. African electoral agents employed by candidates played an important part in running a campaign. The network created by these African committees provided the basis for territory-wide organizations.

For sixty-one years, from 1895 to 1955, the area known as the Transkeian Territories was the scene of an ‘experiment’ in local government based on district councils of elected members under the chairmanship of White magistrates. These councils were essentially advisory, and initiated proposals for expenditure on a range of parochial matters such as the building and maintenance of roads and bridges, water conservation, postal services and fencing. The twenty-six district councils were integrated into the United Transkeian General Council, or Bunga, which met annually in Umtata, and which was composed of delegates from the District Councils and the magisterial District Chairmen. The General Council operated engineering and agricultural departments, and spent considerable sums on soil and water conservation.

Anlo is in South-East Ghana. During the pre-colonial period she made herself thoroughly hated by her neighbours. Thanks to this unpopularity, when Denmark and later Britain decided to subdue Anlo, each found ready allies amongst Anlo' s neighbours.

In 1850 Britain ‘acquired’ jurisdiction over Anlo from Denmark. This proved a false start. Britain withdrew in 1859. In 1874, however, jurisdiction was resumed. Even now the extension of jurisdiction was piecemeal. Initially only the coastal area within the range of the artillery of the fort at Keta was under any semblance of jurisdiction. Anlo tended to ignore the colonial administration. In 1885 and 1889 there was armed resistance which took some time to crush.

Nevertheless, this time British jurisdiction had come to stay. Over the years it extended in scope and intensity. By 1890 when Britain had demonstrated her ability to enforce compliance with her laws, Anlo became a regular part of Britain's colony of the Gold Coast.

The article examines administrative policy in Idoma (Northern Nigeria) as a response to two dilemmas confronting the colonial power: (1) how to reconcile a persistent, even if varyingly intense, commitment to indirect rule with a desire for institutional change; (2) how to reconcile a synthesis of the two with the longrange objective of normative change, including ‘progress’ and ‘administrative efficiency’. While normative change remained a long-range colonial objective, institutional change assumed the highest short-range priority.

Institutional change involved a pendular course of development: on the one hand, cultivation of strong chieftaincy and centralization based on the Fulani model; on the other, ‘democratization’, rooted first in traditional Idoma constitutionalism, and finally in Western notions of majoritarian local government. These developments are traced through three historical phases. (1) 1908–1930: occupation, pacification, boundary adjustment, and the quest for an indigenous leadership; (2) 1931–1945: systematic implementation of, and subsequent retreat from, the policy of Indirect Rule; (3) Post-World War II: centralization and ‘democratization’ of the Idoma Native Authority or local government establishment. Paradoxically, ‘democratization’ promoted the centralization of authority in Idoma.

By 1960, when Nigeria became independent, it could fairly be said that the colonial power's culminating exercises in institutional change were successful. Politically and administratively, Idoma was centralized as never before. That it had yet to experience the efficiency which might have resulted from longrange normative change did not detract from that achievement.

The standard history of the German period in Tanzania has been seriously marred by imperial rivalries and excessive concentration on metropolitan aspects of German policy-making. In the period to 1907, which has heretofore been written off as a time of punitive expeditions and absence of administrative direction, the government in fact developed a secular state education service. The standard curriculum generated by the state was later adopted by missionary schools. The policy was controversial, and the strength of the administration's relatively pro-African position may be explained by the continuity of personnel, by the popularity of the secular schools, and by pessimism among officials as to whether white settlers could make an economic contribution commensurate with their political claims.

This paper attempts to provide a frame of reference for evaluating the role of ordinary rural Africans in national movements, in the belief that scholarly preoccupation with élites will only partially illumine the mainsprings of nationalism. Kenya has been taken as the main field of enquiry, with contrasts and comparisons drawn from Uganda and Tanganyika. The processes of social change are discussed with a view to establishing that by the end of the colonial period one can talk of peasants rather than tribesmen in some of the more progressive areas. This change entailed a decline in the leadership functions of tribal chiefs who were also the official agents of colonial rule, but did not necessarily mean the firm establishment of a new type of rural leadership. The central part of the paper is taken up with an account of the competition between these older and newer leaderships, for official recognition rather than a mass following. A popular following was one of the conditions for such recognition, but neither really achieved this prior to 1945 except in Kikuyuland, and there the newer leaders did not want official recognition. After 1945 the newer leadership, comprising especially traders and officials of marketing co-operatives, seems everywhere to have won a properly representative position, due mainly to the enforced agrarian changes which brought the peasant face to face with the central government, perhaps for the first time. This confrontation, together with the experience of failure in earlier and more local political activity, resulted in a national revolution coalescing from below, co-ordinated rather than instigated by the educated élite.

Dans un remarquable article consacré à la négritude au XIXe siècle; Robert W. July a montré le rôle de précurseur joué par Edward W. Blyden.

‘Bien qu'il ne possédait aucun des avantages de la linguistique moderne ni de l'analyse biologique, archéologique et chimique, Blyden s'efforça de démontrer la présence nègre en Egypte et la contribution nègre à l'ancienne civilisation de la vallée du Nil.’

In the first part of this article a number of possible connexions between ‘the last-ditch resisters’ and the ‘earliest organizers of armed risings’, and later leaders of opposition to colonial rule in East and Central Africa, were explored. It was argued that African ‘primary’ resistance shaped the environment in which later politics developed; it was argued that resistance had profound effects upon white policies and attitudes; it was argued that there was a complicated interplay between manifestations of ‘primary’ and of ‘secondary’ opposition, which often overlapped with and were conscious of each other. Then the argument turned to a more ambitious proposition, namely that ‘during the course of the resistances, or some of them, types of political organization or inspiration emerged which looked in important ways to the future; which in some cases are directly and in others indirectly linked with later manifestations of African opposition’.

The purpose of these maps, like those of the total solar eclipses published earlier, is to enable a historian rapidly to identify an apparent reference in his sources to a solar eclipse, or to ascertain the moments at which eclipses might have been witnessed over specific areas in Africa. The originals have again been drawn to the scale of I: 10,000,000 by Mr A. K. Appleton, F.R.A.S., to calculations by Dr J. G. Porter, F.R.A.S., and represent precisely the same advance in accuracy compared with Oppolzer's charts. At the small scale at which these maps are here reproduced, however, it will generally be possible merely to arrive at approximate results; a more accurate assessment can be reached only by consulting copies of the originals, or, in some cases, by undertaking further calculations. Within these limits it is hoped that they will prove a useful indication of the possibilities of this type of evidence and will lead to the discovery of references that have not yet been published or reported.

Since independence the countries of North Africa have been occupied almost exclusively with the establishment of a new society. An important part of this activity has been directed towards a solution to the problem of symbols and values: the construction of an image of themselves for their own contemplation and for export to the world outside. One aspect of this general problem of acculturation is concerned with interpretations of history and the evaluation of one's own place in historical evolution. Starting from the premiss that North African history has largely been a monopoly of French scholarship since 1830, contemporary historical writers in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have found it essential, before entering upon problems of historical interpretation, to rewrite their own history. Discovery of this first requisite has generated a spirit shared by all those writers preoccupied with this problem, however much they might disagree on solutions to it, which is best expressed by the phrase ‘décoloniser l'histoire’. The subject is vast, and I should like here only to indicate several of the problems, with their proposed solutions, so far treated by writers dealing with the history of Algeria.