A recent school of historical thought has emerged, centred around the writings of Maurice Bloch, which asserts that the imperial Merina economy from the early nineteenth century became totally dependent upon slave labour. It claims that there was such an influx of slaves into Imerina that slave numbers rose dramatically and all free Merina were relieved from productive work to engage in essentially non-productive occupations, notably the military, imperial administration and commerce. This article, which traces the development of forced labour in Madagascar and examines the structure of labour under autarky, takes issue with this viewpoint. It emphasises not only that the slave population of Imerina in the nineteenth century was lower than asserted, but that Bloch misunderstands the nature of fanompoana which, from the adoption of autarky in the mid-1820s, formed the organizing principle of most sectors of the imperial Merina economy outside subsistence agriculture. The impoverishment of the Merina economy which was a root cause of autarky led to a great decline in slave-holding amongst peasants who were in consequence largely obliged to work their own ricefields, either alone, or alongside the few slaves they managed to retain. By contrast, the Merina elite increasingly monopolized available labour resources, slave and fanompoana. Fanompoana, traditionally a limited form of prestation to the crown, was radically restructured under autarky between 1825 and 1861. Far from being ‘unproductive’, the imperial army, the largest fanompoana institution, constituted a huge and elaborate commercial organization which was used to exploit the empire's resources and channel them to the imperial heartland. At the same time, fanompoana units comprising Merina soldiers and colonists established farms and engaged in commerce in the provinces. Finally, fanompoana labour was widely used on the east coast plantations, and especially in the attempt to forge an industrial revolution in Imerina. In sum, this article argues that fanompoana rather than slavery formed the basis of the imperial Merina economy under autarky, ad was a major factor contributing to the failure of autarkic policies.

The tradition of carnival-type street festivals and competitive dance troupes appears to be an old one in Luanda. In 1620, at the end of the most serious round of slave wars in Angola's history, political allegory and mimicry were included in the street processions celebrating the canonization of Saint Francis Xavier. In the nineteenth century the Creole community regularly adapted its public ceremonials to the shifting political and religious climate. In the age of white settlement, during the middle decades of the twentieth century, ‘native’ dance troops were officially encouraged until their potential nationalism was discerned. After independence, government tried to revive carnival for its own ends and according to its own calendar of state ceremonial. At one level the carnival continued to exorcise the fear of authority among the powerless. At another the political dimension was eclipsed by the competitive rivalries of local communities seeking identity and prestige. The structures continued to use the old ritual patterns of leadership with kings, queens, commanders and soldiers. Economic influence continued to be wielded by the great fishing families who invested important resources into conspicuous clothing and ceremonial feasting as they had done for centuries. The spectators responded at many different levels of appreciation.

This article examines the actions of the British Colonial Office and British business interests in the international marketing of cocoa from Ghana and Nigeria in the later 1930s, when problems in cocoa marketing were brought to head by the expatriate firms forming a ‘Pool’ and the farmers responding to this — and to a sudden fall in their terms of trade — with a ‘hold-up’, which was followed by a British commission of inquiry, and during the second world war and immediate post-war era, when the C.O. imposed a marketing system designed by the expatriate merchant firms and subsequently decided to make it into a permanent peacetime reorganization. The close contact between the CO. and British firms such as the United Africa Company and Cadbury Bros. is brought out, as is the support given by the officials to these companies before and during the war. A further theme is a certain antipathy displayed by the officials for African capitalists in general and cocoa traders in particular and the way in which the war-time scheme squeezed African and other non-British small cocoa-export firms in many cases out of business.

The war-time scheme convinced the C.O. that a peacetime system of fixed buying prices which were set well below the world price was desirable as a means of eradicating ‘middleman abuses’ and of building up large ‘stabilization funds’ to protect the cocoa farmers in future years when prices might fall. Continuation of the scheme was thus seen as an act of trusteeship. It was also attractive to the British Treasury because it maximized U.S. dollar earnings for Britain from the sale of West African cocoa. In contrast to interpretations put forward by some other historians, this article argues that the Colonial Office had close, day-to-day contact with the leading British firms involved, that it strongly supported the ‘Pool’ system before and during the early stages of the war, and that the post-war marketing structure was an outcome of the war-time scheme and not of the Nowell Commission report of 1938. Finally, having lost in an unequal struggle with the expatriate firms and the Colonial Office between 1937 and 1944, African international shippers of cocoa were permanently excluded.

The ‘mfecane’ is a characteristic product of South African liberal history used by the apartheid state to legitimate South Africa's racially unequal land division. Some astonishingly selective use or actual invention of evidence produced the myth of an internally-induced process of black-on-black destruction centring on Shaka's Zulu. A re-examination of the ‘battles’ of Dithakong and Mbolompo suggests very different conclusions and enables us to decipher the motives of subsequent historiographical amnesias. After about 1810 the black peoples of southern Africa were caught between intensifying and converging imperialistic thrusts: one to supply the Cape Colony with labour; another, at Delagoa Bay, to supply slaves particularly to the Brazilian sugar plantations. The flight of the Ngwane from the Mzinyathi inland to the Caledon was, it is argued, a response to slaving. But they ran directly into the colonial raiding-grounds north of the Orange. The (missionary-led) raid on the still unidentified ‘Mantatees’ (not a reference to MaNtatisi) at Dithakong in 1823 was one of innumerable Griqua raids for slaves to counter an acute shortage of labour among Cape settlers after the British expansionist wars of 1811–20. Similar Griqua raids forced the Ngwane south from the Caledon into the Transkei. Here, at Mbolompo in 1828, the Ngwane were attacked yet again, this time by a British army seeking ‘free’ labour after the reorganisation of the Cape's labour-procurement system in July 1828. The British claim that they were parrying a Zulu invasion is exposed as propaganda, and the connexions between the campaign and the white-instigated murder of Shaka are shown. In short, African societies did not generate the regional violence on their own. Rather, caught within the European net, they were transformed over a lengthy period in reaction to the attentions of external plunderers. The core misrepresentations of ‘the mfecane’ are thereby revealed; the term, and the concept, should be abandoned.

Gustav Preller (1875–1943), a prolific and popular South African historian, is the man largely responsible for shaping many of the key myths of Afrikaner nationalism. One of these is the concept of the Great Trek, an interpretation of the nineteenth-century movement of Boers into the interior. It is Preller's written and visual version of this social movement that has been the dominant one for the last seven decades. Preller worked with a variety of media including books, newspapers, magazines, drama and film, and always produced works that sold in significant numbers. Yet despite his obvious impact and importance, Preller has been the subject of little research. This article attempts to assess Preller's work in relation to questions concerning the cultural fabrication of nationalisms. It asks how Preller did his popularizing work: what techniques, conventions, narrative formulas and social languages did he deploy in his work and whence did he derive these cultural resources? For Preller, one of the most crucial themes in his work had to do with how people recalled the past and more importantly how one could get them to ‘enact’ this memory in their own lives. Much of his work can be read as a search to find strategies of storing the past in forms which would make popular sense. He relied heavily on oral history and he also familiarized himself with popular forms of both oral and written storytelling which in turn inform his work. In 1916 he became involved in filming De Voortrekkers and these visual skills became a key ingredient in all of his ventures. His interest in the visual also informed his frequent use of the physical objects of the past as vehicles for popularizing his views. Another tactic that Preller followed was to explore and ‘colonize’ the institutions of popular leisure which he then remoulded in his nationalist enterprises. The article concludes with a detailed consideration of one of Preller's historical short stories.