The Wandalá community of northern Cameroon and adjoining portions of north-eastern Nigeria have a long tradition of state forms of government. In recent centuries, following conversion to Islam, they have composed an historiography in Arabic, an effort entailing the adaptation of alien characters to the names and titles of a language whose sound system differs considerably from the one for which the symbols were originally intended. Some individual examples of this literature have already been published, at least in translation, but with widely varying degrees of formality and precision. The volume reviewed here offers a critical edition and an accurate, persuasively annotated translation of all seventeen known Wandalá historical manuscripts in Arabic. Nine of the manuscripts are state chronicles that convey greater or lesser amounts of historical information arranged according to the remembered sequence of Wandalá monarchs. One composition is a dramatic patriotic epic, probably attributable to the days of the intrusive eastern warlord Rabih Fadl Allah at the dawn of the present century but couched in the form of a narrative of the defense of the Wandalá kingdom against an eighteenth-century invasion from Borno. Four documents are lists of local authorities at the south-eastern town of Mime. Two manuscripts list title officials of the central court together with some of their duties, while a third describes some of the tax obligations incumbent upon various groups of subjects.

Diamonds were discovered in Sierra Leone in 1930, and in 1934 sole mining rights were granted to the Sierra Leone Selection Trust (SLST), a subsidiary of the London-based Consolidated African Selection Trust, part of De Beers empire. In 1956, partly to restrict the increasingly prevalent illicit mining, and partly for political reasons, SLST opened part of its lease to mining by licensed miners under the Alluvial Diamond Mining Scheme (ADMS). The Sierra Leone government took over 51 per cent of the SLST shares in 1970, and a new company, the National Diamond Mining Company (NDMC), was formed. In 1980 SLST sold out to British Petroleum and left Sierra Leone.

Kwame Bediako is one of a new generation of West African Christian scholars, who confidently assert the essential ‘Africanness’ of African Christianity against all inclined to emphasize its foreignness. While deeply indebted to the first generation of African theologians of the 1960s, Bediako feels that they accepted too readily that Christianity was a foreign religion which needed to be ‘Africanized’ by incorporating elements from the traditional African religious heritage. It was the posing of this stark dichotomy – Christian or African? – which in Bediako's view led the Ghanaian Catholic priest Osofo Damuah to renounce Christianity and to found his own neo-traditional African, explicitly non-Christian, religious movement, ‘Afrikania’.

This book is a history of Ethiopian plough agriculture set within the larger context of environmental history. The subject is further examined through such key themes as demography, urbanization, crop varieties and farm resources. The book is in two parts: Part I is a broad narrative of what the author calls the ‘ox-plow revolution’ and its social and economic consequences. Part II consists of three well-chosen case studies, namely Ankober in northern Ethiopia, a district which in the nineteenth century served as the royal granary of the Shoan kingdom; Gera, an area located in the forest zone in south-western Ethiopia; and Ada, the agricultural backyard of the capital city, Addis Ababa.

Apolo Kagwa was katikiro or chief minister of Buganda from 1889 to 1926. His career well exemplifies the thesis that, in the context of colonial intrusion, collaboration could be the most effective form of resistance. His co-operation with the British probably saved the Ganda monarchy, while earning him a knighthood. Not least among the achievements of this remarkable man was the publication, in 1901, of his Bakabaka b'e Buganda, ‘The Kings of Buganda’. Over half the book is a compilation of oral history, based on what Wrigley calls ‘the five generations of primary and secondary reminiscence’ (p. 12) : that is, the span of memory from ego's grandfather/grandmother to ego's grandson/granddaughter. It reaches back to about the middle of the eighteenth century. The remainder of the book is Kagwa's recension of oral tradition having to do with the more distant Ganda past. Wrigley tells us that Kingship and State is ‘an extended commentary’ on Kagwa's work, but warns us that it is ‘at least as much about tradition as it is about Buganda’ (p. 7). It is, and unfortunately so, for Wrigley locks his inquiry into the unprofitable debates of the 1970s about the nature of African tradition.

This book, a doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Zürich in 1994, takes as its starting point the modern idea that hunger and famine are not fatalities determined by nature. Basing herself on the example of Northern Chad during the final pre-colonial decades and the first decades of French colonial rule, the author argues rather that famines, although partly caused by natural factors, reflect the political, economic and social conditions of the societies in which they take place. Famines, she claims, reflect power relations and the violence that sometimes flows from them.

Addis Ababa University has established a notable record for scholarly production in a constantly changing, but never sympathetic, political environment. The imperial regime of Haile Sellassie discouraged liberal and critical thinking, and succeeding Derg tried to bring the university under its ideological and institutional control. The guerrilla movement which overthrew the Derg has proven no more tolerant of intellectual or institutional independence. Ethiopian scholars have had to define the meaning of scholarship and then to carry it out in daunting, shifting, and, at times, hazardous, conditions. This makes their achievements even more worthy of respect.

These four essays by the distinguished historian Anthony Low, best-known to Africanists for his writings on Uganda, constitute the Wiles Lectures given at the Queen's University, Belfast in 1994. Tightly argued, they revolve around a straightforward point. Despite the political impulse which brought about attempts to create an egalitarian society in the Asian and African countryside, the dominant pattern in the generation after the Second World War was one of the strengthening of the class of rich peasants or kulaks. With a few exceptions, Low points to the effacement of landlord regimes and systems based on inequality from above and through status. Attempts to break the back of the rich peasants succeeded only in certain authoritarian states such as China and Viet Nam and even then, the kulaks reasserted themselves. It is the radical experiments such as Mengistu's Ethiopia and Nyerere's Tanzania that Low best likes to juxtapose with displays of power and effective accumulation from below. The implication must be the evisceration of continued attempts to create an egalitarian countryside. Low ranges widely in making this point looking at East Africa, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, India, China and the Pacific and his breathtaking sweep makes this suggestive book an enjoyable read.

This mammoth volume is yet another milestone in Joseph Miller's continuing survey of the ever more extensive writings on slavery around the world. From a working bibliography for a university course, this undertaking has expanded and blossomed to become this wonderful research tool for scholars, with 10,344 entries. The pervasiveness of slavery in human history is becoming ever more apparent, bringing out the peculiarity of the twentieth century. The listings include secondary scholarly works directly relevant to slavery and written from the perspective of any discipline. The framework is basically geographical by enslaving nation. The major problems here is the category ‘Muslim’, which might more fruitfully have been broken up into its constituent geographical entities. Asia, which always accounted for a far larger number of slaves than the Americas, is under-represented, in part reflecting scholarly coyness about this delicate topic. The entries are not annotated, but there are two lengthy indices, for authors and for subjects. The emphasis is on works in English, with a partial representation of writings in major West European languages. Despite these restrictions, the task is reaching the limits of the book format, as the fascination of scholars with this subject shows no sign of abating. Future editions will perhaps need to be available only in electronic format.