During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Portugal established a trading presence along the Upper Guinea Coast from Senegal to Sierra Leone. Emigrants from Portugal known as lançados – some of them Jews seeking to escape religious persecution – settled along the coast, where many of them married women from local communities. By the early sixteenth century, Luso-Africans, or ‘Portuguese’ as they called themselves, were established at trading centers from the Petite Côte in Senegal, south to Sierra Leone. Descendants of Portuguese immigrants, of Cape Verde islanders, and of West Africans, the Luso-Africans developed a culture that was itself a synthesis of African and European elements. Rich historical documentation allows a case study of the changing ways Luso-Africans identified themselves over the course of three centuries.

The earliest lançados established themselves along the coast as commercial middlemen between African and European traders and as coastal traders between Sierra Leone and Senegambia. Their position was formally discouraged by the Portuguese Crown until the second decade of the sixteenth century, but they nevertheless played an important role in trade with Portugal and the Cape Verde islands. Lançado communities were permanently settled on the Petite Côte, while in Sierra Leone and Rio Nunez much early commerce was in the hands of lançados who sailed there regularly from S. Domingos, north of present day Bissau. The offspring of these lançados and African women were called filhos de terra and were generally considered to be ‘Portuguese’.

Throughout the sixteenth century, the descendants of the lançados maintained close commercial ties with the Cape Verde islands. Cape Verdeans were themselves the offspring of mixed Portuguese and West African marriages. Sharing elements of a common culture and united by marriage and economic ties, mainland Luso-Africans and Cape Verdeans represented a socially complex and geographically dispersed community. Cape Verdeans, like mainland Luso-Africans, resolutely maintained that they were ‘Portuguese’, and both sub-groups employed the same essentially cultural criteria of group identification.

At the beginning of the twentieth century Muslim societies of northern Senegal and southern Mauritania moved slowly but surely into relations of accommodation with the French colonial regime. The process was led by marabouts, persons who combined various forms of Islamic learning and saintliness. It took the form of Sufi orders, often called ‘brotherhoods’, that became anchored in the emerging economy of the peanut basin in central Senegal. The accommodation permitted the marabouts and brotherhoods to develop considerable autonomy in the religious, economic and social spheres while surrendering the political and administrative domain to the French.

Of all these ‘paths to accommodation’ between Muslim societies and French colonial authorities, the one followed by Amadu Bamba Mbacke and the Murid movement is ostensibly the longest, the hardest, the most complete, and the most enduring. For these reasons the Murid movement has been much more fully studied – by Paul Marty of the colonial Muslim Affairs Bureau in the early twentieth century and by social scientists in recent decades.

The final ending of slavery in 1838 marked a radical break in the agrarian history of the Cape Colony. The liberated slaves could and did make use of the mobility that emancipation allowed them. This amounted to a real negotiation of the price of labour, for at various points in the nineteenth century the price of labour threatened the very profitability of farming. For the greater part of the century many landlords were led, in the words of one colonial official, ‘to look back…with something very like an envious eye, to the days in which slavery was tolerated by law, because then the slaveholder could command labour whenever it was needed.’

For the former slaveowners, the outcome was agricultural innovation and routine insolvency, and merchants came to have an increasingly important role in the rural political economy. But post-emancipation agrarian structures were not merely shaped by the incursion of merchant capital and the mobility of labour. The former slaveholders displayed a remarkable tenacity. Most significantly, Cape landlords were heirs to a carefully constructed political economy in which the rules governing the circulation of land and wealth were clearly defined in community and familial terms and in which the ties of credit ran both vertically and horizontally. This was a ‘moral community’ in which all were cushioned against the sometimes detrimental effects of participation in a market economy. It is for this reason that the intervention of English-speaking merchants, by not paying due regard to these rules, was of a qualitatively different kind. Community, in short, provides the backdrop against which much of the colony's agrarian history was played out.

This article seeks to provide a rather different interpretation of the post-emancipation Western Cape than is at present on offer.

Scholarly study of Christian independency in southern Africa began with the publication of Bengt Sundkler's Bantu Prophets in 1948. A rich literature subsequently followed, much of it deploying his now classic typology of Ethiopian and Zionist Churches. Nevertheless, the historical study of independency has been limited. As one scholar has recently observed, historians have tended to focus on the Ethiopian-type churches, leaving the study of the Zionist-type to anthropologists and missiologists. The neglect of Zionist-type churches by historians meant that early studies on this form of Christianity were historically weak. Missiologists distorted the whole area of inquiry with theological concerns, at first raising the spectre of syncretistic heresy, and more recently making claims about indigenous authenticity. Anthropologists initially viewed independent churches as fascinating examples of cultural resilience. The movements were seen as sources of community, loyalty and security in the face of the atomising and anomic experience of urbanization; or as foci for ‘the process of modification and adaptation’ taking place throughout rural society. But anthropologists rarely paid attention to independency's origins. Where historians did engage with Zionist-type independency, they did so through the spectacles of nationalist historiography in order to demonstrate independency's supposed proto-nationalist character.

By adopting an international and regional perspective, this article provides an account of the historical origins and early evolution of these churches. Where scholars in the past have tended to disaggregate the movement, essentializing its later racial and geographical boundaries, this paper will draw the early history of the movement together, illuminating its common origin and global character. The basic ingredients of this account have been available in the work of Walter Hollenweger, Jean Comaroff, Sundkler's later book, and more recently, studies by Jim Kiernan and David Chidester. Nevertheless, the historical implication that so-called African independent churches emerged out of the global pentecostal movement continues to be ignored.

The purpose of demonstrating the origins of southern African pentecostalism is not to make the now commonplace historical and anthropological critique of authenticity, although those pursuing a theological agenda which distinguishes African Independent Churches as a separate category of Christianity would do well to pay heed to that critique. Neither is it assumed that analysis of origins explains the meaning and appeal of different southern African pentecostal movements and denominations. Rather, this paper demonstrates that pentecostalism is a global phenomenon: a collection of vital and powerful idioms about illness and healing, evil and purity which make striking resonances with peoples sharing common historical experiences of marginalization from established religion and from the values of twentieth-century industrial capitalism. At the same time pentecostalism has also exhibited a remarkable capacity to localize itself, taking on very distinct meanings in different local contexts. At the heart of this paper lies a comparative analysis of the radically different responses which the movement engendered from the South African and Southern Rhodesian states.

In 1938 or 1939, an uninitiated and unwed girl named Nangombe living in the Uukwaluudhi district of Ovamboland, northern Namibia, became pregnant. If mission and colonial accounts are to be believed, it was not an unusual occurrence at this time, but it had profound consequences for Nangombe and those close to her. By the 1930s, the belief that pre-initiation pregnancies boded ill fortune for clan, chief and community was highly contested, but it was far from extinct. When the chief discovered the pregnancy, he expelled Nangombe. She took refuge in a neighboring society and bore a daughter. While such infants were often killed at birth, Nangombe's was not. Mother and daughter returned home within the year. The chief, enraged by their reappearance, then expelled the entire family.

The problems created by Nangombe's child caused tension in her household and the family was driven to begging for food. Nangombe's mother, seeing the catastrophes already caused by the presence of her illegitimate granddaughter and fearing that worse would come, urged her daughter to kill the child. Nangombe refused, while her mother continued to offer dire predictions that their lineage would be destroyed if the child were left alive. Finally, in July 1941, Nangombe gave into her mother's pressure and strangled her daughter. Her father and the local chief reported her act to colonial officials. The colonial government of South West Africa investigated and sent her to trial with her mother, who was charged as an accessory to murder.

The nature of the case changed abruptly in the colonial capital of Windhoek. Instead of trying Nangombe for murder, the Supreme Court convened to decide whether she was insane, despite testimony from her village asserting that she was sane and that the murder had been a rational act. Her mother was transformed from a co-defendant to a witness to her daughter's physical and mental health. Nangombe was diagnosed as epileptic and, on this basis, committed to a native asylum in Fort Beaufort, South Africa. She remained there until 1946, when she was released and returned home. She lived out the rest of her life in relative anonymity, little noticed in the communities where she lived and invisible to the colonial administration – a far cry from the scrutiny and public interventions which attended her young adulthood.

Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History. By DEREK NURSE and THOMAS J. HINNEBUSCH. Edited by THOMAS J. HINNEBUSCH, with a special addendum by GERARD PHILIPPSON. (University of California Publications in Linguistics, 121). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1993. Pp. xxxii+780. $80 (ISBN 0-520-09775-0).

Shanga. The Archaeology of a Muslim Trading Community on the Coast of East Africa. By MARK HORTON. (Memoirs of the British Institute of East Africa, 14). London: The British Institute in Eastern Africa, 1996. Pp. xvi+458. £75 (ISBN 1-872-56609-x).

Nurse's and Hinnebusch's Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History is the most comprehensive study yet done of Swahili history through linguistic analysis. It is an encyclopedic work representing many years of research by the authors and other scholars, and it focuses particularly on the emergence and evolution of the Swahili language. The massive and diverse evidence they marshal is, of course, almost entirely linguistic: as such they discuss four basal parameters of language relationship and change, namely lexis, morphology, phonology and tone. (The last two are treated together, and G. Philippson reviews the latter.)