The Kingdom of Dahomey has played a central role in our understanding of political organization in West Africa in the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Research has focused on two major questions: whether or not Dahomey possessed revolutionary qualities that allowed it to maintain order in this turbulent era, and the role of militarism in fostering stability. Mounting archaeological evidence from the Republic of Bénin can contribute to our understanding of Dahomean political dynamics over time. Spatial patterns in royal palace construction, materialized regionally and architecturally, are examined in this essay. These data suggest that Dahomey achieved real administrative advances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the expansion of regional control and the successful integration of a complex administrative hierarchy.1

Historical-comparative linguistics has played a key role in the reconstruction of early history in Africa. Regarding the ‘Bantu Problem’ in particular, linguistic research, particularly language classification, has oriented historical study and been a guiding principle for both historians and archaeologists. Some historians have also embraced the comparison of cultural vocabularies as a core method for reconstructing African history. This paper evaluates the merits and limits of this latter methodology by analysing Bantu pottery vocabulary. Challenging earlier interpretations, it argues that speakers of Proto-Bantu inherited the craft of pot-making from their Benue-Congo-speaking ancestors who introduced this technology into the Grassfields region. This ‘Proto-Bantu ceramic tradition’ was the result of a long, local development, but spread quite rapidly into Atlantic Central Africa, and possibly as far as Southern Angola and northern Namibia. The people who brought Early Iron Age (EIA) ceramics to southwestern Africa were not the first Bantu-speakers in this area nor did they introduce the technology of pot-making.

This article examines the complex and fluid relationship between Denkyira and Asante in the period c. 1660–1720 that saw the former supplanted by the latter as the leading power among the Twi-speaking Akan peoples of the central southern Gold Coast (Ghana). Dense oral traditions supplemented by a range of other materials are used to identify the site of the ancient Denkyira capital of Abankeseso, and to give an account of the settlements that served it and the gold resources that supported it. These same sources provide a detailed understanding of the reasons for defections from Denkyira to Asante, and how this process contributed to the first Asantehene Osei Tutu's epochal military victory over Denkyirahene Ntim Gyakari at Feyiase (1701). Asante policy towards defeated Denkyira is then discussed, and the legacy of the events described is considered. At a general level, this article makes a case for looking in detail and depth at the local conditions that gave rise to particular – and particularly complex – sociopolitical arrangements, and argues that studies of this kind can advance understanding of the formation and nature of polity and identity in precolonial Africa.

The origins of South Africa's distinctive welfare state lay in the late 1920s, not in the 1930s as has generally been suggested, and long predated the quite different turn to social welfare in late colonial Africa. For the National Party and Labour Party – partners in the coalition Pact Government of 1924–9 – non-contributory old-age pensions were a crucial pillar in the ‘civilized labour’ policies designed to lift ‘poor whites’ out of poverty and re-establish a clear racial hierarchy. Welfare reform was thus, in significant part, a response to the swartgevaar or menace of black physical, occupational and social mobility. African political elites, although distracted by other reforms at the time, were quick thereafter to protest at their exclusion from the nascent welfare system.

Between 1830 and 1880 copal was the major trade commodity from mainland Tanzania apart from ivory. Unlike ivory, copal was a product of a distinct environment, the lowland forests of the East African coastal hinterland. This region's copal was the best in the world for making high-value carriage varnish. It therefore found a ready market in the West, especially New England, whose traders brought cotton textiles to trade with East Africans for copal. The monopolization by hinterland polities of the copal–cloth trade nexus enabled them to consolidate politically as a sub-entrepôt of the Zanzibar commercial state. After 1880 a global demand for wild rubber, a product of far more diverse landscapes, posed a threat to the copal economy, and in part ushered in German colonialism. New colonial tax, labor and conservationist policies spelled the decline of the copal economy and its communities as they lost access to the coastal forests.

The Yangekori Rebellion was among the earliest extensive uprisings within Africa to be reported in European documents. This rebellion, which lasted for more than a decade, included domestic and market-bound slaves as well as free persons, all of whom became involved in promoting significant changes in traditional socioeconomic and political patterns. What made this rebellion unique and more informative for the present and for research relating to external slave trading and to rebellion within the diaspora, however, were its complex and local-based context, its multiple centers and its substantial involvement in a timely religious movement intent on transforming coastal society. Also instructive is the synergetic response that occurred among autocratic and otherwise quarrelsome rulers who were responsible for ending this rebellion, for re-establishing landholding patterns, and for defending themselves effectively against socioeconomic and political change.

This article argues that emirs modernized and enhanced their authority through cooperation with Christian missions in the anti-leprosy campaign in colonial Hausaland in the 1930s. New documentary and oral sources detail how Native Administrations and Sudan Interior Mission workers together established leprosaria that were important beyond religious interaction. Emirs translated Islamic ideals of charity into governmental responsibility for medical welfare. The leprosy scheme brought together the elite and non-elite in ways that would previously have been unimaginable and took emirs' power to new reaches in an era of expanding native authority in Nigeria and throughout much of British Africa.

This article begins with a quotation from a local informant highlighting a perception in the Gambia/Casamance borderlands that there is a pattern linking the violence of the later nineteenth century with more recent troubles. It argues that there is some merit in this thesis, which is encapsulated in a concatenation of events: systematic raiding by Fodé Sylla led to the creation of a relatively depopulated colonial border zone which was later filled by Jola immigrants from Buluf to the southeast. In the perception of some, it is these immigrants who attracted the MFDC rebels. Mandinkas and Jolas of Fogny Jabankunda and Narang, and Karoninkas from the islands of Karone have therefore been largely unreceptive to appeals to Casamance nationalism. The article also argues that there are more twisted historical connections. Whereas in the later nineteenth century, the Jolas associated Islam with violent enslavement, they later converted en masse. Their attitude towards Fodé Sylla remained negative, whilst the Mauritanian marabout, Cheikh Mahfoudz, was credited with the introduction of a pacific form of Islam that valorized hard work and legitimated physical migration. This legacy has posed a further barrier to militant nationalism. Islam and violence remain linked, but the signs have been reversed.

The ‘Lobi’ region in what is today southern Burkina Faso is frequently mentioned in historical accounts of gold mining in West Africa. However, little is known about the actual location of the gold mines or about the way gold mining and trade were organized in precolonial times. This article points out that some previous hypotheses about precolonial gold mining, trade and the sociopolitical organization of this region are flawed, partly because ‘Lobi’, as the name for both the region and its inhabitants, is misleading. In fact, the references to ‘Lobi’ merge two distinct gold-producing zones along the Mouhoun river, about 200 km from each other. The present-day populations of southern Burkina who have settled there since the eighteenth century do not know who was mining gold prior to their arrival, and many of them have not been involved in gold mining at all due to conceptions of gold as a dangerous substance.

This study examines Nyarroh, a woman chief situated at the cusp of colonial penetration in what is today southern Sierra Leone. Nyarroh ruled a large, strategically located town and its surrounding villages from about 1880 to 1914. The documents which outline her public life have not previously been explored, yet they reveal the flexibility of gendered notions of political power and leadership in the region. Her life story allows us to look backward to precolonial Mendeland and forward to the colonial era, to consider the extent to which women's leadership and prerogatives were maintained or re-invented through colonial penetration and the nascent colonial state.

Tanzania's Ujamaa villagization campaign of 1973–6 was one of the greatest social experiments in postcolonial Africa. Occurring during a time of continuing hope for a better future for the nation, the experiment aimed to improve the lives of the majority of rural Tanzanians. Despite this noble intention, the attempt at rural modernization failed miserably in many respects. Discussions of these failures have tended to give prominence to tangible explanations, ignoring more nuanced and qualitative issues, including environmental concerns based on local cosmologies. In an attempt to fill this gap, the present article uses a case study of eastern Iraqwland in northern Tanzania to explore local articulations of the compulsory villagization campaign and to interpret them in light of ecological perspectives that were prevalent at the time in Iraqw village communities.

The law as a means of sociopolitical control in colonial states has gained significance as an issue in the recent historiography of Africa. This article discusses the making of a criminal case in colonial Kaoko, northwestern Namibia in the 1920s and 30s. It focuses on the problem of African voice and narrative and the ways in which they have been transformed into written evidence in the course of legal investigation. It demonstrates that the archival documents which emerged from this case require careful methodological scrutiny if they are to be used for the reconstruction of the region's past. It goes beyond colonial law as constituting a particular discourse to conceive colonial law as a space for intervention and agency for both colonized and colonizers. The central argument raised in the article is that while the South African administration in northwestern Namibia allegedly aimed at prosecuting culprits and securing evidence for their transgressions, men and women in Kaoko used colonial law as an arena for the negotiation of social and political issues. Concerned with the case's impact on the configuration of gender, the article shows how colonial law became both a site of male representation and power, and a space for female contestation of male claims to sociopolitical mastery.

Zimbabwean historians have not yet fully assessed the interaction of two problematic identities, ethnicity and nationalism, to determine whether the two can work as partners and successfully co-exist. This essay argues that, in Bulawayo during the period studied, ethnicity co-existed with and complemented nationalism rather than the two working as polar opposite identities. Ethnic groups provided both the required leaders who became prominent nationalist figures and the precolonial history, personalities and monuments that sparked the nationalist imagination. From the 1950s, ethnic groups expanded their horizons and provided platforms from which emerging African nationalists launched their agenda. Understanding these interrelationships will reshape our understanding of the workings of these two identities in a cosmopolitan town.

The monarchies and other polities of precolonial Madagascar exerted a strong influence on each other. For this reason, in recent years it has become more interesting to trace their inter-relationship than to emphasize their autonomy. The Betsimisaraka kingdom, which flourished on Madagascar's east coast in the early eighteenth century, has generally been regarded as a polity standing rather outside the mainstream of state formation in Madagascar, not least because of the identity of its founder, the son of an English pirate. Research in European and South African archives demonstrates the close connection between the Betsimisaraka kingdom and the Sakalava kingdom of Boina.

When the Cold War broke out in Western Europe at the end of the Second World War, France was a key battleground. Its Cold War choices played out in the empire as well as in the métropole. After communist party ministers were ousted from the tripartite government in 1947, repression against communists and their associates intensified – both in the Republic and overseas. In French sub-Saharan Africa, the primary victims of this repression were members of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), an interterritorial alliance of political parties with affiliates in most of the 14 territories of French West and Equatorial Africa, and in the United Nations trusts of Togo and Cameroon. When, under duress, RDA parliamentarians severed their ties with the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) in 1950, grassroots activists in Guinea opposed the break. Their voices muted throughout most of the decade, Leftist militants regained preeminence in 1958, when trade unionists, students, the party's women's and youth wings, and other grassroots actors pushed the Guinean RDA to reject a constitution that would have relegated the country to junior partnership in the French Community, and to proclaim Guinea's independence instead. Guinea's vote for independence, and its break with the interterritorial RDA in this regard, were the culmination of a decade-long struggle between grassroots activists on the political Left and the party's territorial and interterritorial leadership for control of the political agenda.

Examples of chant, song and written propaganda from the mid-1950s are examined here in order to probe the debates and relationships which influenced the political future of the Ewe-speaking areas of southern British Togoland. While microstudies have been important in explaining sources of division between communities in these areas, propaganda provides a means of understanding the arguments, idioms and ideas about the state which brought many different people together behind the apparently peculiar project of Togoland reunification. The main source of tension within this political movement was not competing local or communal interests, but the unequal relationships that resulted from uneven provision of education. Written and oral propaganda texts, and the rallies where they were performed and exchanged, point to a surprisingly participatory and eclectic political culture, where distinctions between the lettered and unlettered remained fluid and open to challenge.

Malagasy speakers probably formed the single largest native speech community among slaves dispersed into the western Indian Ocean between 1500 and 1900. In the eighteenth-century Mascarenes, Malagasy parlers (dialects) served as a contact language, understood both by persons born in Madagascar and by those with no direct ties to the island. Catholic missionaries working in Bourbon and Île de France frequently evangelized among sick and newly disembarked Malagasy slaves in their own tongues, employing servile interpreters and catechists from their ecclesiastical plantations as intermediaries in their ‘work of the word’. Evangelistic style was multilingual, in both French and Malagasy, and largely verbal, but was also informed by Malagasy vernacular manuscripts of Church doctrine set in Roman characters. The importance of Malagasy in the Mascarenes sets the linguistic environment of the islands off in distinctive ways from those of Atlantic slave societies and requires scholars to rethink the language and culture history of the western Indian Ocean islands, heretofore focused almost exclusively on studies of French and its creoles.

Between 1952 and 1960, the British colonial government of Kenya waged a violent counter-insurgency campaign against the Mau Mau rebels. In this effort the regime was assisted by collaborators, known as loyalists, drawn from the same communities as the insurgents. Based primarily on new archival sources, this article sets out the history of loyalism, stresses the ambiguity of allegiances during the conflict and argues that loyalism was a product of the same intellectual debates that had spawned the Mau Mau insurgency. The article concludes by stressing the significance for postcolonial Kenya of this history.