In contrast to the situation in Commonwealth countries such as Canada and Australia, South Africa's participation in the Second World War has not been accorded a particularly significant place in the country's historiography. In part at least, this is the result of historiographical traditions which, although divergent in many ways, have a common denominator in that their various compelling imperatives have despatched the Second World War to the periphery of their respective scholarly discourses.

Afrikaner historians have concentrated on wars on their ‘own’ soil – the South African War of 1899–1902 in particular – and beyond that through detailed analyses of white politics have been at pains to demonstrate the inexorable march of Afrikanerdom to power. The Second World War only featured insofar as it related to internal Afrikaner political developments. Neither was the war per se of much concern to English-speaking academic historians, either of the so-called liberal or radical persuasion. For more than two decades, the interests of English-speaking professional historians have been dominated by issues of race and class, social structure, consciousness and the social effects of capitalism. While the South African War did receive some attention in terms of capitalist imperialist expansion, the Second World War was left mostly to historians of the ‘drum-and-trumpet’ variety. In general, the First and Second World Wars did not appear a likely context in which to investigate wider societal issues in South Africa.

The study of liquor provides an opportunity for re-examining relations between states and economies. Recent works in European social history have shown that liquor occupies an ambiguous space between economic, social and cultural production while studies of liquor in colonial Africa repeatedly raise the problem of how economic freedoms pertaining to liquor were constructed in relation to the perceived character of persons in society. More specifically, the notion of ‘European liquor’ in colonial discourse suggests that the liquor of colonial masters should be aspired to. ‘European liquor’ was repeatedly contrasted to indigenous brews of lower alcoholic content that were pronounced to be uncivilized and primitive. It implied that drinkers of sorghum beer, palm wine and other beverages fermented from African grains and fruits would progress to the ‘superior’ beverages of their colonial masters. Critically, it assumed that transition to the higher alcoholic content required the discipline of ‘European’ lifestyles. Gradualism, however, often gave way to expediency. Colonial regimes repeatedly set aside fears of the effect of ‘foreign’ liquor on African subjects in the interest of revenue and political gains. The importation of gin by the colonial authority in Ghana provided the regime with revenue for its administration; in colonial Nigeria and elsewhere, liquor was used by the state as a means of winning allies among chiefs.

On 5 October 1905, Baia Bari of Gassin village went before the tribunal de province of Segu seeking a divorce from her husband, Tiemoko Boaré of Koila. Both Baia Bari and Tiemoko Boaré were Muslims. Baia Bari claimed that Tiemoko Boaré had mistreated her and that she was prepared to return the bridewealth. In addition, Baia Bari sought the return of 27,000 cowries she claimed Tiemoko Boaré had taken from her, although she did not present any ‘proof’. Tiemoko Boaré agreed to the divorce but denied having taken the money. The court pronounced the divorce and called for Tiemoko Boaré to recover the bridewealth he and his kin had provided to Baia Bari's kin. The court dismissed Baia Bari's claim for the return of 27,000 cowries, because she had failed to produce evidence of the alleged ‘loan’. Neither Baia Bari nor Tiemoko Boaré appealed the court's verdict.

How Baia Bari came to bring suit for divorce against her husband for mistreatment and how the provincial court, presided over by the leading African notables of Segu, saw fit to intervene in the domestic affairs of the Boaré household is the subject of this article. The data provided in the ‘Register of Civil and Commercial Judgements Rendered by the Provincial Court of Segu during the Third Quarter of 1905’ are not detailed enough for us to ‘hear’ Baia Bari's complaints about marital mistreatment. Nor does the register tell us anything about how the members of the court understood the evidence of mistreatment, which they accepted, and Baia Bari's claim for the return of 27,000 cowries, which they rejected. Despite the sparse annotation of this case, Baia Bari's legal action raises at least two questions. First, from where did the provincial court ‘receive’ the authority to intervene in the domestic affairs of the Boaré household? Second, why did Baia Bari turn to the provincial court to seek the dissolution of her marriage?

If the aim of British colonizers, Frederick Lugard wrote, was to civilize Africans ‘and to devote thought to those matters which…most intimately affect their daily life and happiness, there are few of greater importance than the constitution of native courts’. Moreover, he argued that only from native courts employing customary law was it ‘possible to create rudiments of law and order, to inculcate a sense of responsibility, and evolve among a primitive community some sense of discipline and respect for authority’. Britain had not the manpower, the money nor the mettle to rule by force of arms alone. Essentially, in order to make colonial rule work with only a ‘thin white line’ of European administrators, African ideas of custom and of law had to be incorporated into the new state systems. In a very real way, customary law and African courts provided the ideological and financial underpinnings for European colonial rule.

In Kenya from at least the 1920s, but especially in the 1940s and 1950s, administrators struggled with the question of how customary law could best be used in African courts. Prominent among their concerns was the codification of customary law, against which most administrators vigorously fought. British officials believed that reducing African custom to written law and placing it in a code would ‘crystalize’ it, altering its fundamentally fluid or evolutionary nature. Colonizers naturally harbored intentions of using the law to shape society (as Cooper has demonstrated for the Kenya coast) but a fluid, unwritten law provided much greater latitude to pursue these goals. It was necessary, as one administrator put it, to allow ‘changing traditions to meet current altering conditions’.

This case study of Kenya offers a different understanding of the history of customary law.

Like other empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, expansion and slavery went hand in hand in Ethiopia, contrary to imperial justifications based on the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Ethiopian empire incorporated the northwestern border enclaves of Bela-Shangul and Gumuz into greater Ethiopia. Having obtained the subordination of the local Muslim warlords, the emperor then demanded tribute from them in slaves, ivory and gold. Slaves were used as domestics in the imperial palace at Addis Ababa and the houses of state dignitaries and as farm labor on their farms elsewhere in the country. Responding to the demands of the central government as well as their own needs, borderland chiefs raided local villages and neighbouring chiefdoms for slaves. Expanding state control thus led to intensified slave raiding and the extension of the slave trade from the borderlands into the centre of the empire in spite of Ethiopia's public commitment to end slavery and the slave trade as a member of the League of Nations. The end of slavery in Ethiopia only came with the Italian occupation in 1935.

When, in 1896, the Moose kingdoms of contemporary Burkina Faso were incorporated in the colony of Haute Volta, a period of sometimes extreme hardship began for their population as the French colonizers introduced head taxes, forced labour and military recruitment, and, during the 1920s, a programme of forced cotton cultivation. The repressive colonial regime and the concomitant ‘pacification’ of the Haute Volta triggered two major migratory movements among the Moose. First, today's massive migration of Moose towards Côte d'Ivoire is generally understood to have been initiated by forced recruitment during colonial times. Until the eve of Haute Volta's independence in 1960, ‘voluntary’ long-distance migration was mainly directed towards the British Gold Coast and has been explained in terms of either the Moose's need to earn a monetary income to pay taxes or their attempts to escape the repressive French colonial regime. The latter also predominates in explanations of the second migratory movement which was towards the so-called aires-refuges: less controlled areas, situated at the margins of the Moose kingdoms and offering places to hide from colonial exactions. The relatively high population densities in the Moose kingdoms and the space-consuming land use practices are often cited as subsidiary causes.

A Green Place, a Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the Fifteenth Century. By David Lee Schoenbrun. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann: Oxford: James Currey, 1998. Pp. xiv+301. £40 (ISBN 0-325-00041-7); £15.95, paperback (ISBN 0-325-00040-9).

An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400. By Christopher Ehret. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia; Oxford: James Currey, 1998. Pp. xvii+354. £35 (ISBN 0-8139-1814-6).

Recently several historical reconstructions based on linguistic evidence and dealing with ancient times have been published in African history. In 1998 alone there are the two books reviewed here as well as a major work by Gerda Rossel. Linguistic sources contribute much to the recovery of aspects of the past, which would otherwise remain out of reach, and the standard methodologies of historical linguistics are well known to readers of this journal. Yet in practice many historians remain all too often disconcerted by such studies because they have great difficulty in evaluating them: i.e. in linking assertions made to the evidence provided and so to establish the credibility of such statements. This is not just because many historians are unfamiliar with linguistic evidence but because all the evidence necessary for evaluation is usually not available in the work studied, and often enough authors do not clearly indicate where it can be found. Indeed sometimes it is not available at all. In such cases one has to take the statements made by the authors on faith: one believes the author or not. That is clearly unacceptable. For is it not a fundamental rule in history writing that assertions must be substantiated and hence evidence must be cited or provided? Any work without substantiation cannot be considered to be a work of history at all.