The Early Iron Age people appear to have been responsible for the introduction into Zambia of pot-making, metallurgy and, less certainly, food production. Recent research has greatly increased the known number of Early Iron Age sites in Zambia and a number of regional variants have been defined, based largely on the typology of the associated pottery. Radiocarbon dates suggest that these groups are all to be dated to the first millennium a.d. and that they are contemporary with, and related to, the earliest known Iron Age in Rhodesia and some East African sites. It is suggested that the Early Iron Age people slowly spread into eastern Africa from an area west of Lake Tanganyika during the first few centuries a.d. Some related sites are known from this westerly region. This hypothesis can be compared with Oliver's interpretation of Guthrie's linguistic evidence; but the use of archaeological and linguistic arguments together is impossible until proof is available that the Early Iron Age people spoke Bantu languages.

This paper, building on the evidence of Bantu words for sheep, develops the hypothesis that livestock-keeping was introduced to southern Africa by people speaking Central Sudanic languages. It is suggested in particular that livestock may have been spread south from western Tanzania, one branch dispersing directly to southern Africa and another eastward to the Indian Ocean seaboard. It should be possible to test this hypothesis further as our knowledge of the languages involved, especially the Central Sudanic languages, grows.

It is generally accepted that Ibn-Ḥawqal crossed the Sahara and visited Awdaghost in 951/2 to be the first Arab geographer who reached the gates of bilād al-Sūdān. This is inferred from what he says about a cheque he saw in Awdaghost. A critical analysis of the references to this cheque suggests that it was a bill of debt owed by a trader from Sijilmāsa resident at Awdaghost to another trader from Sijilmāsa. The transactions between the two were part of the trans-Saharan trade, with one partner resident at Awdaghost and the other at Sijilmāsa. The bill must have been held by the creditor, whom Ibn-Ḥawqal could have met at Sijilmāsa.

It was from this man that Ibn-Ḥawqal recorded the information about the ruler of the Ṣanhāja in the southern Sahara, and probably also about his relations with Ghana and other Sudanese polities. Another valuable piece of information, about the abandoned route from Ghana to Egypt, was collected in the oases of Egypt. Also, the detailed list of Berber tribes inhabiting the area between Tadmekka and Air could have been obtained in North Africa, rather than at Awdaghost, because communications in the Sahara were more frequent between north and south than between west and east.

Ibn-Ḥawqal's description of the Sahara is stereotypic and adds nothing to what earlier geographers had to say, and the same applies to his words concerning Awdaghost itself. Towns and kingdoms in the Sudan mentioned by Ibn-Ḥawqal had already been recorded earlier by al-Yaʻqūbī, Ibn al-Faqīh and al-Masʻūdī. For a traveller who crossed the Sahara, Ibn-Ḥawqal's information is rather poor, but if he collected his information north of the Sahara, as this paper suggests, his labours as an inquisitive geographer are praiseworthy.

The introduction by the Arabs of new forms of storable wealth, together with fire-arms and gunpowder, into the interior of nineteenth century East Africa gave a direct stimulus to tribal warfare. Among the Nyamwezi of West Central Tanzania, who had practised long-distance trade in ivory before the Arab penetration took place, charismatic war-leaders appeared who created new hegemonies over the smaller, traditional units of these multi-chiefdom societies. These leaders attempted to capture the trade and control the main lines of communication. Mirambo was the most famous of them, but Nyungu-ya-Mawe, who was his exact contemporary (both died in 1884) was, perhaps, more successful. Nyungu created a polity which outlasted his own lifetime by more than a decade.

Like Mirambo, he used a corps of professional soldiers called Ruga-ruga to carry out his conquests. The latter included most of the 20,000 square miles of Ukimbu and a part of southern Unyamwezi as well. He skilfully adapted the chiefly institutions of the Kimbu to a wider hegemony, and to an economy based on the large-scale exploitation of Kimbu resources in ivory. By his appointment of vatwale, lieutenants or military governors, as his military, political and economic agents in the various provinces of Ukimbu, he was able to hold his ‘empire’ together. The proliferation of small chiefdoms had been endemic to the Kimbu, a people with a forest economy that imposed both the need for small, political units, and for freedom of movement over a wide area. Nyungu and his vatwale halted this process.

Nyungu was Mirambo’s ally in the early years, and was supported by him as the loyalist candidate for the important Nyamwezi chiefdom of Unyanyembe (Tabora). Later, however, in 1880, when Nyungu defeated Mirambo’s powerful vassal, Mtinginya, and seized control of the central caravan route to the coast, relations between the two men became strained. When the Germans dismantled Nyungu’s hegemony in 1895, they destroyed the only realistic attempt ever made to unify an area of extreme political complexity.

As the oldest and, for a long time, the most important French possession in West Africa, Senegal occupied a privileged position among the French West African colonies. This exceptional status was boosted by the elective institutions conceded to the colony between 1870 and 1880, namely, municipal organization, a conseil général, and deputy representation.

In 1870, ‘Senegal’ was no more than a congeries of scattered military posts and trading stations. By far the most important of these establishments were the quatre communes, famous for their special legal status and their privileged inhabitants, made up of the French and the mulattoes, who controlled the political situation, and the Senegalese. By 1870 the colony had acquired some of the important ingredients which could accelerate the growth of political consciousness: a relatively good communications network; growing urban centres; a developing élite, made up largely of traders and agents of the Bordeaux commercial firms who controlled the economic situation; and an administrative regime which had little or no place for unofficial representation.

The élite demanded a conseil général which alone, they felt, could protect their interests effectively. The outcome of their agitation was determined by three main factors: their influence; the attitude of the local administration, notorious for its hostility to elective institutions; and political vicissitudes in France. The institutions were conceded in the 1870s; that is, during the first years of the Third Republic, when the policy of assimilation began to be consciously applied in French colonies.

The establishment of these institutions widened the gap between the quatre communes, to which the reform was limited, and the rest of Senegal, where the system of indirect rule held sway, and marked the beginning of mutual jealousy and conflict between the two sections. It put Senegal ahead of the rest of French West Africa, which continued until after World War II to be governed in a less liberal fashion. It marked France's first major effort at political assimilation in West Africa, and witnessed the determination of the Bordeaux firms, who had spearheaded the movement for the conseil général, to control not only the economic but also the political life of the colony. And lastly, it helped to create the situation whereby the Senegalese, who had until then been no more than mere pawns on the political chessboard of the French and the mulattoes, emerged, with the advent of Blaise Diagne in 1914, as the politically dominant group in Senegal.

One of the most striking features of the African nationalist movement is the great effort that was made to safeguard the freedom of the press. As British subjects, most of whom were trained in Britain, educated Africans assumed that they were entitled to enjoy a free press, which was an essential ingredient in the British political tradition. Their newspapers were almost unavoidably highly critical, and colonial administrators sought to control them. A variety of factors contained official repressive enthusiasm, and these provide the key to the relatively small number of press prosecutions and the seeming reluctance to enforce press legislation. The situation is illustrated from the history of the early nationalist newspaper press in former British West Africa.

The article examines administrative policy in Idoma (Northern Nigeria) as a response to two dilemmas confronting the colonial power: (1) how to reconcile a persistent, even if varyingly intense, commitment to indirect rule with a desire for institutional change; (2) how to reconcile a synthesis of the two with the longrange objective of normative change, including ‘progress’ and ‘administrative efficiency’. While normative change remained a long-range colonial objective, institutional change assumed the highest short-range priority.

Institutional change involved a pendular course of development: on the one hand, cultivation of strong chieftaincy and centralization based on the Fulani model; on the other, ‘democratization’, rooted first in traditional Idoma constitutionalism, and finally in Western notions of majoritarian local government. These developments are traced through three historical phases. (1) 1908–1930: occupation, pacification, boundary adjustment, and the quest for an indigenous leadership; (2) 1931–1945: systematic implementation of, and subsequent retreat from, the policy of Indirect Rule; (3) Post-World War II: centralization and ‘democratization’ of the Idoma Native Authority or local government establishment. Paradoxically, ‘democratization’ promoted the centralization of authority in Idoma.

By 1960, when Nigeria became independent, it could fairly be said that the colonial power's culminating exercises in institutional change were successful. Politically and administratively, Idoma was centralized as never before. That it had yet to experience the efficiency which might have resulted from longrange normative change did not detract from that achievement.

Dans un remarquable article consacré à la négritude au XIXe siècle; Robert W. July a montré le rôle de précurseur joué par Edward W. Blyden.

‘Bien qu'il ne possédait aucun des avantages de la linguistique moderne ni de l'analyse biologique, archéologique et chimique, Blyden s'efforça de démontrer la présence nègre en Egypte et la contribution nègre à l'ancienne civilisation de la vallée du Nil.’