One major consequence of the different waves of migrations in Yorubaland up to the nineteenth century was the emergence of settlements in different places and at different times. Some of these settlements were naturally located close to one another, and, as they expanded, they had to struggle among themselves or with their host communities for the control of land and other resources, as well as seek to retain their separate identity. The desire for the control of land, exercise of dominance, as well as for separate identity, with its attendant benefits resulted in mutual distrust and antagonism and, in extreme cases, degenerated into open conflict. The cases of Ife and Modakeke, Oyo and Akinmorin, and Ogbomoso and Orile-Igbon are relevant examples.

The case of Ifon and Ilobu communities is especially peculiar. Different groups migrated into the same region at different times and settled there because of an availability of arable land for agricultural practice, availability of streams and rivers, relatively secured location, and perhaps the discovery of mineral resources like rock salt. Despite the close location of these two communities and the similarity in their customs and language, their relationship has not been cordial. The closeness of these two communities, perhaps a factor in their growth and expansion, resulted in the struggle for the ownership, control, and usage of land. It also resulted in a desire to seek or exercise dominance and separate community identities, with each having recourse to superior historical tradition. These developments have produced mutual distrust and antagonism, resulting in the desire of the communities to seek ways of asserting itself from the grip of domination.

Some of the late nineteenth century success of Liberia coffee, sugar, and other commodities can be attributed to the leasing of plantations to enterprising foreigners, although a few leading politicians did own successful farms … For most Americo-Liberians, the role of dirt farmer was decidedly beneath their station.

Yet the reasons for this apathy among most Americo-Liberians for agriculture, which prevailed up to the early 1870s, were not far to seek. The majority of them being newly emancipated slaves, who had in servitude in America been used to being forced to work, erroneously equated their newly won freedom with abstinence from labour.

Both arguments are inaccurate, yet the authors made essential contributions to the writing of Liberian history. J. Gus Liebenow became renowned within Liberian academic circles for his earlier book, Liberia: the Evolution of Privilege. In that book he analyzed the policy that enabled the minority Americo-Liberians (descendants of free blacks from the United States who founded Liberia in 1822), to monopolize political and economic power to the exclusion of the majority indigenous Africans for more than a century. M. B. Akpan dissected Liberia's dubious political history and concluded that Americo-Liberian authority over the indigenous population, was identical to the discriminatory and oppressive policy practiced by European colonizers in Africa.

Judging from a number of recent publications, the long-running debate over the origins of iron smelting in sub-Saharan Africa has been resolved… in favor of those advocating independent invention. For Gérard Quéchon, the French archeologist to whom we owe very early dates for iron metallurgy from the Termit Massif in Niger, “indisputably, in the present state of knowledge, the hypothesis of an autochthonous invention is convincing.” According to Eric Huysecom, a Belgian-born archeologist, “[o]ur present knowledge allows us … to envisage one or several independent centres of metal innovation in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Hamady Bocoum, a Senegalese archeologist, asserts that “more and more numerous datings are pushing back the beginning of iron production in Africa to at least the middle of the second millennium BC, which would make it one of the world's oldest metallurgies.” He thinks that “in the present state of knowledge, the debate [over diffusion vs. independent invention] is closed for want of conclusive proof accrediting any of the proposed transmission channels [from the north].” The American archeologist Peter R. Schmidt tells us “the hypothesis for independent invention is currently the most viable among the multitude of diffusionist hypotheses.”

Africanists other than archeologists are in agreement. For Basil Davidson, the foremost popularizer of African history, “African metallurgical skills [were] locally invented and locally developed.” The American linguist Christopher Ehret says

Africa south of the Sahara, it now seems, was home to a separate and independent invention of iron metallurgy … To sum up the available evidence, iron technology across much of sub-Saharan Africa has an African origin dating to before 1000 BCE.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the events, forces, realities, challenges and opportunities with which the Bafokeng community in the vicinity of Rustenburg was confronted during the course of the nineteenth century, especially with regard to the loss of their land and the way they responded to this dispossession. Much of the groundwork for their subsequent successful acquisition of land was laid during this period. These successes—and the good fortune of the Bafokeng that rich platinum deposits were later discovered on the land they obtained in this way—elevated them to a prominent position at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The status of the Bafokeng was emphasized when the former South African President Nelson Mandela, the Home Affairs Minister Mango-sutho Buthelezi, the South African first lady Zanele Mbeki, and the Lesotho Queen Mother were among the guests at the coronation of Leruo Moletlegi as kgosi or chief of the Bafokeng in 2003.

The dispossession of the land of the Bafokeng by white settlers from the end of the 1830s and the Bafokeng's attempts to regain this land should be seen against a number of important nineteenth-century trends. Firstly, there was the forfeiture to the white settlers of large tracts of land claimed by indigenous communities in European colonies in the nineteenth and earlier centuries. In southern Africa white settlers seized no less than 40. million hectares of land up to 1860 and another 107. million hectares during the next hundred years. A second important trend was the mineral revolution in the interior of southern Africa. Thirdly, the settlement of a large number of missionaries among African communities in this period also influenced the dynamics of the dispossession and acquisition of land.

There is a natural assumption that maps offer objective depictions of the world. The message of this book is that they do not, and that the innumerable ways in which they do not, serve to place maps as central and significant products of their parent cultures.

For [post-Columbus] cartographers, maps became ephemera, repeatedly redrawn to new information. The sea monsters and ornamental flourishes disappeared to make way for new landmasses of increasingly accurate shape.

Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed onto us by those who from the very beginning were eye-witnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.

Among the better-known medieval maps is the Hereford Mappa Mundi, ca. 1300, a striking example of historical and theological projection onto an image of the physical world. The map provides an abundance of European and Mediterranean detail, and is congested with familiar towns and cities from Edinburgh and Oxford to Rome and Antioch. It is onto this familiar terrain that all the significant historical and theological events are projected—the fall of man, the crucifixion, and the apocalypse. As for the rest of the world, the greater part of Africa and Asia blurs into margins featuring elaborately grotesque illustrations of prevailing myths and savage demonic forces.

Publishing in Africa remains so difficult an enterprise that many publishers have collapsed, their dreams disappearing with them. This is especially true of the print media, particularly newspapers and magazines. During the past century, many magazines and newspapers failed to establish a loyal readership, keep costs down, insure wide circulation, or turn a huge profit. Consequently, not many African magazines can be viewed as “successful.” Drum magazine, however, remains an exception.

In 1951 Drum, a magazine written for and by Africans, was established in South Africa. Drum enjoyed a great deal of success and is now widely recognized as having been a driving force in black South African culture and life throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In the South African historiography Drum has been thoroughly researched. The magazine's impact on South African journalism, literature, gender configurations, African resistance, and urban South African culture has been documented and often lauded by various scholars. Many former members of the South African edition's payroll, both editors and staff alike, have gone on to become successes in literature, journalism, and photography. Often such staff members credit Drum for directly shaping their careers and directly state this in their writings. Consequently, Drum is often associated only with South Africa. While Drum greatly influenced South Africa, its satel¬lite projects throughout Africa were no less important. These satellite projects cemented Drum's reputation as the leading magazine newspaper in Africa and each edition became fixtures in west African and east African societies.

The publication in these pages of an article by Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta on the Sephardic communities of the Petite Côte in the early seventeenth century represents a significant step forward in our understanding of the Jewish presence in west Africa. Using previously unreferenced material, Mark and Horta have filled out for the first time the nature of this community, and in particular provided valuable evidence as to the group's connections with Lisbon and Amsterdam.

This type of assiduous documentary research has long been needed for this topic. Although some Africanists have referred to the Jewish presence there, such references have tended to draw on the same few documentary sources. So though the work of Jean Boulegue, Antonio Carreira, and Nize Isabel de Moraes has been important in drawing the attention of Africanists to the Jewish presence in Senegambia, one can say that, in general, historians of the upper Guinea coast have not systematized the place of the Sephardim in discourses related to their area of study.

Meanwhile, there is almost a complete absence of reference to the Jewish presence in west Africa among historians of the Sephardim. There are perhaps two overriding explanations for this lacuna. For one thing, these communities were comparatively small and did not have an extended lifespan, and it is of course natural that historians of the Sephardim should concentrate on the most important communities of the diaspora. For another, we suspect that the absence of their commentary on this subject is not entirely unrelated to fears as to what might be uncovered, since it is notorious that one of the major activities of Europeans in Africa at this time was slaving. The implication of a significant number of Sephardim being involved in this activity would not sit comfortably with the traditional interpretation of many historians of the Sephardim that their subjects were, essentially, victims of persecution, and that, where they were slave owners, they treated their charges much better than did Christians.

Epigraphic evidence is a virtual terra incognita for Africanists; few of our sources have come down to us from the past quite so directly. This is in contrast to many other parts of the world, where dealing with inscriptions falls squarely within historians' purview. Where such evidence exists, it tends to exist in very large quantities. For example, for Ur III dynasty, of circumscribed length and extent (2112-2004 BCE, southern Mesopotamia) at least 50,000 texts have been published and tens of thousands more are known to exist. Even larger numbers exists for what is now India, although admittedly covering both a much larger area and a much longer period of time. One estimate is that more than 90,000 have been discovered. Nearly everything we think we know about the Maya civilization is derived from the numerous stelae that have been discovered there. The same applies to the pre-Islamic political entities in south Arabia. And so on. In contrast, the materials included in the work under review represent almost the entire corpus for sub-Saharan Africa.

This embarrassment of riches outside Africa involves another embarrassment as well. Despite heroic efforts, many of these inscriptions—a majority for some areas—are attracting dust rather than scrutiny; as a result many of the interpretations built on the edited and published ones are potential prey to the evidence in those as yet unexamined.

The so-called epitaphs of Gao have not wanted for study—study carried out largely by French orientalists looking for sources more congenial to their first fields of study, but harking back to Heinrich Barth, who at least had the excuse of being unaware of the inscriptions. The present work escapes this faute de mieux aspect; its author has been at work on them for nearly forty years and did not come to them from a sense of misplaced desperation.

During the early nineteenth century, European travelers and residents in east Africa wrote of an important pastoralist society, called Loikop, that dominated the plains of the Rift Valley, and whose divisions included, among others, the rapidly expanding Maasai. These pastoralists were described in detail by three missionaries: Johann Ludwig Krapf, Johannes Rebmann, and Jakob Erhardt. Their various journals, letters, and published articles, written during the 1840s and 1850s, are widely recognized as the earliest documentary evidence for Maasai and Parakuyo history. But they have often been neglected, and sometimes deliberately shunned, in favor of later written or oral sources, perhaps because their views of pastoralist history, including the idea of a pastoralist Loikop community, seem rather incongruous when compared to those of more recent vintage.

This skepticism was fueled partly by the fact that during the course of the nineteenth century, Maasai expanded dramatically, demolishing and absorbing other Loikop sections; eventually, Maasai pastoralist identity superseded and erased that of Loikop. By the time of European colonial conquest, the term “Loikop” carried negative connotations, and scholars from this point forward had difficulty in seeing any other valid meaning for the term. This essay is devoted to making the case for restoring the idea of Loikop pastoralists in our narratives of east African history. In many ways, it is a response to John Berntsen's “The Enemy Is Us: Eponymy in the Historiography of the Maasai,” published in 1980.

Modern Egypt, the site of Africa's earliest state, lies near the crossroads of two other continents, and has had historic interactions with all its neighboring regions. This alone would make it an ideal place to study historical population biology. Egypt can also be conceptualized as a linear oasis in the eastern Sahara, one that traverses several regions of Africa. An oasis can be a way station or serve as a refugium, as well as be a place of settlement with its own special biological and cultural adaptive strategies. Both of these perspectives—crossroads and oasis/refugium—can be expected to provide insight into the processes that could have affected the Nile valley's populations/peoples. From these vantage points this presentation will examine aspects of what might be called the historical genetics of the Nile valley, with a focus on the Y chromosome. The time-frame is the late pleistocene through holocene; within this there are different levels of biocultural history. Of special interest here is patterns of north-south variation in the Egyptian Nile valley.

The term “Mina,” when encountered as an ethnic designation of enslaved Africans in the Americas in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, has commonly been interpreted as referring to persons brought from the area of the “Gold Coast” (“Costa da Mina” in Portuguese usage), corresponding roughly to modern Ghana, who are further commonly presumed to have been mainly speakers of the Akan languages (Fante, Twi, etc.) dominant on that section of the coast and its immediate hinterland. In a recently published paper, however, Gwendolyn Hall has questioned this conventional interpretation, and suggested instead that most of those called “Mina” in the Americas were actually from the “Slave Coast” to the east (modern southeastern Ghana, Togo, and Bénin), and hence speakers of the languages nowadays generally termed “Gbe” (though formerly more commonly “Ewe”), including Ewe, Adja, and Fon. Given the numerical strength of the “Mina” presence in the Americas, as Hall rightly notes, this revision would substantially alter our understanding of ethnic formation in the Americas.

In further discussion of these issues, this paper considers in greater detail than was possible in Hall's treatment: first, the application of the name “Mina” in European usage on the West African coast itself, and second, the range of meanings attached to it in the Americas. This separation of African and American data, it should be stressed, is adopted only for convenience of exposition, since it is very likely that ethnic terminology on the two sides of the Atlantic in fact evolved in a process of mutual interaction. In particular, the settlement of large numbers of returned exslaves from Brazil on the Slave Coast from the 1830s onwards very probably fed Brazilian usage back into west Africa, as I have argued earlier with respect to the use of the name “Nago” as a generic term for the Yoruba-speaking peoples.

In this paper I attempt to review critically the historical thought of Isaria Kimambo through time by examining a selected number of his publications and manuscripts. The paper also incorporates comments from his peers and colleagues, as well as his own assessment. In conclusion, the paper appeals to historical institutions and organizations in the developing world (including the Department of History, University of Dar es Salaam and the Historical Association of Tanzania) to cultivate a culture of awarding outstanding historians for the purpose of promoting creativity, commitment, and devotion to the discipline.

Isaria Ndelahiyosa Kimambo turned 72 years of age in 2003, For half his lifetime Kimambo has served the Department of History of University Dar es Salaam and the Historical Association of Tanzania (HAT). Established in 1964, the Department of History is one of the oldest departments in the University, which started in 1961 as a college of the University of London. In 1963 this became the college of the University of East Africa, based at Makerere, Uganda, and in 1970 it became a full-fledged University. HAT, which became a non-governmental organization in 2000, was born in 1966, with Kimambo as one of the founding members.

Kimambo joined the Department of History in 1965, when he was in his third year of doctoral studies at Northwestern University. In 1967 he successfully defended his dissertation entitled “The Political History of the Pare People to 1900,” which was based on research he conducted in Upare in northeastern Tanzania. In 1969 he became the Head of History Department, the first indigenous Head, taking over from Terence O. Ranger, who left the Department and joined the University of California at Los Angeles as Director of African Studies.

It is hard to imagine so many contrasts united in one person, as are united in the Abyssinian character. Their character is like the nature around them-where precipices, cliffs, mountains and plains alternate among one another, and cold is mixed with tropical heat. If I allow myself a rather free comparison, this is how I would characterize the Abyssinian. He is talented and receptive, like a Frenchman. With his practicality, with the way he deals with those he has conquered and his governmental abilities, he is like an Englishman. His pride is like that of a Spaniard. By his love for his faith, his mildness of character and tolerance, he is like a Russian. By his commercial abilities, he is like a Jew. But in addition to all these characteristics, he is very brave, cunning, and suspicious (Seltzer 2000:73).

For us, Abyssinia can present the following interest. Having cast a glance at the map of Central Africa and on the borders of the Ethiopian Empire, you can easily see that being located in the vicinity of the Middle Nile, halfway between Egypt and the great lakes, which belong to England, Abyssinia, which is expanding each year more and more and taking large tracts of land which had been free-rich and densely populated territory-must become the natural and main enemy of England in Central Africa. England is also our enemy. To help the enemy of our enemy, to make him as much stronger as possible-that is our main goal in Abyssinia (Seltzer 2000:144).

The nineteenth century was in many ways a revolutionary one among the Yoruba of western Nigeria. The Yoruba civil wars caused much social and political disorganization of the existing entities in Yorubaland. Among other effects, the wars caused the uprooting of conquered and devastated peoples from their original homes to new lands. The Egba people were one of these. From their original homeland they moved south to settle at Abeokuta in 1830. They were later to be joined by other displaced peoples including the Ijaiye and the Owu, thus making Abeokuta a federation of sorts. The initial decades of settlement at Abeokuta were devoted to the consolidation of the new settlement against the attacks of the stronger and older kingdoms of Ijebu and Dahomey, to continued participation in the ongoing civil wars, and to the challenges of domestic political and economic reorganization. From 1839 liberated slaves from Sierra Leone began to settle in Abeokuta, soon to be followed by European missionaries.

When the leading European powers were scrambling for political dominion in Africa, the greatest rival of France was Britain. The French Catholics were working side by side with their government to ensure that they would triumph in Africa beyond the boundaries of the territories already annexed by their country. Thus, even when the British sovereignty claim on Nigeria was endorsed by Europe during the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, the French Catholics did not concede defeat. They still hoped that in Nigeria they could supplant their religious rivals: the British Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the other Protestant missionary groups. While they allowed the British to exercise political power there, they took immediate actions to curtail the spread and dominion of Protestantism in the country. Thus some of their missionaries stationed in the key French territories of Africa—Senegal, Dahomey, and Gabon—were urgently dispatched to Nigeria to compete with their Protestant counterparts and to establish Catholicism in the country.

Two different French Catholic missions operated in Nigeria between 1860s and 1900s. The first was the Society of the African Missions (Société des Missions Africaines or SMA), whose members worked mainly among the Yoruba people of western Nigeria and the Igbos of western Igboland. The second were the Holy Ghost Fathers (Pères du Saint Esprit), also called Spiritans, who ministered specifically to the Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria. The French Catholics, the SMA priests, and the Holy Ghost Fathers competed vehemently with the British Protestants, the CMS, for the conversion of African souls. Just as in the political sphere, the French and British governments competed ardently for annexation and colonization of African territories.

I offer here a theory of “cultural convergence,” as a corollary to Darwin's natural selection, regarding how slave Creoles and culture were formed among the Gullah and, by extension, supported by other examples, in the Americas. When numerous speakers from different, and sometimes related, ethnic groups have words with similar sounds and evoke related meanings, this commonality powers the word into Creole use, especially if there is commonality with Southern English or the host language. This theory applies to cultural features as well, including music. Perhaps the most haunting example of my theory is that of “massa,” the alleged mispronunciation by Southern slaves of “master.” Massa is in fact the correct Bainouk and Cassanga ethnic group pronunciation of mansa, the famous word used so widely among the adjacent and dominant Mande peoples in northern and coastal west Africa to denote king or boss. In this new framework, the changes wrought by Mandinka, the Mande more broadly, and African culture generally on the South, are every bit as significant as the linguistic infusions of the Norman Conquest into what became English.

Mallam Muhammad Bakatsine was one of the most outstanding figures in nineteenth-century Kano history. He stands out in tradition as a figure who is almost luminescent—his virtues seem overpowering and his faults, if any, totally unrecorded. And yet we know surprisingly little about him; we don't know when he was born nor when he died. Although praised as a great scholar, we don't seem to know of anything he wrote. He was, in short, a legend in his own time, and as with most legends the personal traits and characteristics that are so necessary for us to grasp the personality of a historical character have been completely eliminated from the record. It is troublesome that the record is so vague for such an important historical figure, but even more upsetting is that the modern literature has distorted Mallam Muhammad Bakatsine's role, even to the extent of accusing him of being a collaborator with the anti-jihad forces in Kano and of being an opportunist.

I believe that these distortions have resulted from a very uncritical use of colonial sources. These colonial sources were not the product of careful scholarly historical research, even though they often reflect something from the oral traditions about the jihad. These colonial recorders were generally opportunists themselves, as indeed were many of those Kano citizens supplying them with information, and so we must be very cautious when using the information they provide. Too frequently—as with the story of Bakatsine's sister Habiba's alleged interview with Sheikh Usman dan Fodio resulting in a new name for their clan—they have been repeated over and over again in the literature without being examined to see if there is any merit in them.

On the worldwide scale Africa is the least-known continent demographically. Until the mid-twentieth century not even the size of the population was precisely known in many areas of sub-Saharan Africa. The major problems in African historical demography have either been the almost total lack of relevant sources or, if some have been available, they have been fragmentary and non-systematic. The reliability of the most commonly-used sources in African historical demography—population counts and early censuses—remained questionable until the 1960s. However, fairly far-reaching conclusions and estimations based on these sources using indirect methods have been drawn. Despite the development of methods in historical demography, the questionable source materials have naturally provided serious grounds for argumentation.

An excellent example is the debate between the natalistic and antinatalistic school over changes in fertility and mortality in sub-Saharan African societies during the precolonial and early colonial period. The fragmentary nature of the available sources has offered a firm basis for the disagreement.

The objective of this paper is to discuss limitations, pitfalls, and opportunities related to sources used in African historical demography. The paper first reviews the conventional sources—population counts, censuses, and surveys—and then presents an old but seldom-used group of sources, Christian parish registers. The usability of parish registers is discussed through a concrete research project based on data produced since the late nineteenth century in the parishes of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (ELCIN). Finally, attention is paid on widening the range of disciplines where African parish registers could be utilized.

On 24 May 1966 the 500-year-old kingdom of Buganda came to an end. That was the day that Prime Minister Obote sent Colonel Idi Amin to attack the Mengo palace of Kabaka Frederick Mutesa, who was also the President of Uganda. A 120-man bodyguard defended the Kabaka; Amin had automatic and heavy weapons. Nevertheless, Obote was much annoyed that the palace held out against Amin's troops. An audience watched the battle from nearby hilltops, where expatriates and others brought out folding chairs, until a mid-afternoon thunderstorm sent everyone scurrying for cover. The Kabaka used this interruption to scale the rear wall of Mengo palace, where he hailed a passing taxicab and set off for Burundi and ultimately exile in London. Obote divided Buganda into two separate districts (East Mengo and West Mengo), promoted Amin, and gave him the palace as a barracks for his “paratroop” battalion, and more importantly also gave him Buganda's legislative hall—the Bulange—to become Amin's national military headquarters.

The casualties in the “battle of Mengo” were certainly few in number compared to the destruction Amin would wreak after his coup in 1971. But one invisible casualty of the Bulange occupation was especially significant for historians. The Bulange was not only the seat of the Lukiiko, the Ganda legislature, it was also the storage building for the Buganda government archives, which went back to the 1890s, and were still well organized anu maintained in 1956-58 when Peter Gutkind made use of them for his doctoral research. By 1963 storage space was becoming scarce when Rowe made several visits to Shaykh Ali Kulumba, the Speaker of the Lukiiko. Shaykh Kulumba opened up cupboards and closets packed with archival folders from floor to ceiling. Clearly the archives were still being preserved, but organization and access had suffered. Three years later, when Amin occupied the Bulange, he simply destroyed the entire archive—the historical record of sixty years of Buganda government ceased to exist.

A wide variety of documents exist in Cameroonian rural villages, few of which are likely to be preserved since many are not perceived as being worthy of long-term conservation as well as being vulnerable to damp, termites, and to recycling in the form of cigarette or wrapping paper. In this paper I consider the information contained in the different types of written record and how they interrelate. In a companion piece (Zeitlyn mss) I continue to discuss a diary written at my instigation over an eighteen-month period.

Anthropologists and historians alike are prone to a writing disease: “If in doubt write it down.” We record things often for the sake of recording (sometimes without having a specific end in mind for any particular record). Valuable serendipity often results, and our colleagues and successors, as well as the descendants of those we have worked with are sometimes the beneficiaries. Academics, and anthropologists among them, often seek out like-minded people to spend time with. This in itself raises some questions about the generalizability of information so received. But leaving that aside, the accounts of anthropologists and their key informants (for example Muchona [Turner 1967], Ogotommêli [Griaule 1965]) are striking, as much for the resemblances between academic and informant as for their putative differences.