Studies of firearms in Africa undertaken at the University of London, 1967–1970, tentatively suggest that their initial impact was less than had been expected, and that their success in war rapidly declined thereafter. Local manufacture of firearms was very limited, perhaps through lack of necessity, though gunpowder was widely produced. Identifying types of firearms is a problem, though general conclusions may be drawn from contemporary references to certain types of weapons.

Effective use of firearms by Africans in war often depended on muskets being used primarily for hunting and crop protection. Availability of firearms may well have made agriculture possible in areas otherwise overrun with game. For these purposes, military arms would be less suitable than the African muskets cheaply manufactured at Birmingham, all parts being handmade and thus capable of being hand-repaired in the field. Twenty million are said to have been shipped from Birmingham, and another three million from Liège; millions of surplus military weapons must also have found their way to Africa.

Yet the subject can be properly studied only in Africa, where old firearms may still be found, often with their owners still available to describe their use.

For over a century scholars have been attempting to locate the area and, if possible, the actual site of the capital of the Mali empire in its period of greatness. Since the 1920S attention has been focused on an area near the Sankararni river, a tributary entering the Niger from the south, upstream from Bamako. Over recent years a Polish-Guinean archaeological expedition has been digging a site there, but with inconclusive results so far.

A close reading of the few descriptions we have of the capital of Mali, and in particular of the route taken by Ibn Battūta, who visited the capital in 1352, suggests that the city lay on the left bank of the river Niger somewhere between Segu and Bamako. This is in fact a ‘logical] site for the capital of an empire whose tributaries lay mainly in the savannah and Sahel belts, and in whose armies cavalry played a significant role. For this reason, and a number of others, the recent hypothesis of Claude Meillassoux, suggesting a location for the capital south of the R. Falémé (and perhaps also of the R. Gambia), seems doubtful. The proper name for the capital is also discussed.

In the sixteenth century most iron used in west Africa was produced within the region. Extra demand may have been met from the newly established European factors on the coast. By the end of the nineteenth century, in contrast, it was the residue in demand that was satisfied from local sources, the main bulk of iron being imported via the coast and transported inland. For the larger part of this 400-year period imported iron was cheaper than locally-produced iron. What was remarkable, then, was not that iron smelting eventually died out, but that it survived for so long and could be studied in detail in the second half of the twentieth century.

It is argued that, although the decline can be related to production constraints, such as the availability of charcoal, influences originating from the rest of the community can be seen to have prolonged the survival of local iron. The organization of labour of both the iron-smelting and blacksmithing processes, together with the way in which iron was marketed, are central to the analysis. In addition, consumption factors are of the utmost importance. Apart from the prejudice against innovation, the fact that imported iron was plainly not as suitable as local iron for the purposes to which it was put, weakened its impact. Also the ritual attitude to local iron has to be taken into consideration. The present universality of non-local sources has resulted in a change in the regard paid to the metal, but it is argued that the position of the smith is unlikely to alter significantly, since it is more related to his crucial role as supplier of tools for other essential activities such as farming, than to the production of iron itself.

In the 1890s and 1900s in the Transkei, South Africa, colonial relations were severely strained as Cape colonial officials attempted to constrain African men's hunting activities by systematically poisoning and shooting their dogs. For colonial foresters, such efforts were part of a larger strategy to ‘protect’ flora and fauna by controlling African environmental activities and mobility more thoroughly. Yet on the ground in many areas, state-sponsored dog-killing was drawn into more complex understandings of, and popular frustrations with, transformations in local landscapes and livelihoods during this period. As rural men and women responded to the particular changes in their local political ecologies arising from colonial wildlife preservation policies, they also located conflicts over state forestry and its policies of exclusion within broader popular experiences of political, economic and ecological subordination. In several communities, rumors and stories proliferated, connecting the killing of dogs to other official attempts to poison and bewitch Africans, their animals and their landscapes. Such stories were ways for people to express deeper concerns over the spreading influence of colonial power in their daily practices and its toll on local communities’ health and welfare.

The study of migrant labour in Africa has tended to emphasize social form rather than historical context. This study of the immense migrant labour force that worked the Northern Nigerian tin mines is placed in the context of the ongoing subsumption of labour and existing social relationships by capital. Colonial conquest was required for the establishment of tin mining in Nigeria on a capitalist basis to serve the industrial needs of the West. Pre-colonial social organization prevented the release of sufficient labour for this purpose. After conquest, a migrant labour force was built up in conjuncture with a growing reserve army of labour by means of cash taxation, penetration of the market, weakening of slavery and state use of forced labour. In the second decade of the twentieth century there was substantial pressure from mineowners for the colonial regime to institute Rhodesian-style labour recruitment methods, but this was ultimately rejected because of the costs involved, the desire to encourage cash crop growth and the overarching aim of social stability. As a result, it was largely market forces which threw up the pool of labour that worked the mines, notably from the cash crop poor parts of Northern Nigeria and neighbouring French colonies. Initially, migrant labour was the most satisfactory option for many Northern Nigerian peasants, whose wages earned most in the pre-World War I era. The purchasing power of a miner's wage tended to decline, but social forces continued to throw up cheap labour. In World War II, the state instituted forced labour to mine tin, but the scheme was expensive, unproductive and opposed by business. The 1940s represented the nadir of worker poverty and the war was followed by a period of heightened social and political resistance to capital and the state. The tin mines both helped to cause and profited from the decay of the older mode of production in Northern Nigeria.

In 1923–30 the League of Nations investigated the shipment of migrant labour between Liberia and the Spanish island colony of Fernando Po. Although the League concentrated its attention on Liberia, a closer examination reveals labour abuse as very much the product of conditions on Fernando Po itself. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, black planters on the island shifted from palm oil trading to cocoa cultivation. Dependence on migrant labour and increasing competition from Europeans resulted in economic crisis in the first years of the twentieth century, with detention of labour and the nonpayment of contracts as the outcome. The eventual investigation of the trade was the product of a desire to conserve Liberian labour for use on the African mainland, rather than an attempt to relieve its abuse.

The Hehe now live mainly in the Iringa and Mufundi districts of Tanzania. Little is known of their early history before the mid-nineteenth century, when chief Munyigumba of Ng'uluhe extended his rule over the other chiefdoms of the Usungwa highlands and central plateau of Uhehe. By his death in ca. 1878 he had also won important victories against the chiefs of Utemikwila, Usangu and Ungoni.

After Munyigumba/s death the Hehe suffered a temporary set-back when Mwambambe, who had been a subordinate ruler under Munyigumba, tried to usurp the chiefship, killed Munyigumba's younger brother and caused one of his sons, Mkwawa, to flee to Ugogo. However, eventually Mwambambe was killed in battle against Mkwawa, and his surviving followers, whom he had recruited from Kiwele, fled. By 1883, when Giraud visited Uhehe, Mkwawa was the unchallenged ruler of his father/s lands, and under him the Hehe, who had only recently acquired political unity, had extraordinary military success. Their most important raids were on the caravan route which ran from Bagamoyo on the coast to Lake Tanganyika. By 1890 these raids were a threat to German authority and a major obstacle in the way of colonization and the development of trade. In spite of the Germans' effort to make peace with them, the Hehe persisted in attacking caravans and the people who had submitted to the Germans so, in 1891, a German expedition was sent to Uhehe. This was ambushed and defeated by the Hehe, who then continued their raids, causing the Germans to return in 1894 with a larger expedition and destroy the Hehe fort. Chief Mkwawa may have attempted suicide in the fort, but he was persuaded to flee and then maintained his resistance to the Germans until 1898 when he shot himself to avoid capture. The Hehe then submitted to the Germans. Mkwawa's own determination not to surrender was a very important factor in the long struggle. During this war the Germans acquired a respect for the Hehe which has affected the way that the Hehe have been regarded and treated ever since.

Between 1900 and 1925 the British Government evolved a policy concerning agricultural development in West Africa by which expatriate-owned plantations, especially for oil palms, were excluded. This prohibition created as many problems as it solved, for the Nigerian Government in particular faced the problem of competition in the international palm-oil and kernel market from plantations in South-east Asia and the Belgian Congo. In the 1920s the Nigerian Government went to considerable effort to entice British capitalists to invest in palm-oil processing (but not production), but to no avail. In the 1930s the Government concentrated on trying to rehabilitate the oil-palm industry by encouraging the establishment of small, native-owned plantations, improving native methods of oil extraction and controlling the quality of palm-oil and kernel exports. This policy was beset with difficulties of finance, inadequate research and the effects on land tenure systems. It failed, and the Nigerian palm-oil export industry lost its place in the world market.

British trusteeship does not appear to have been a positive policy as far as economic development was concerned. It created a dilemma which the colonial authorities were not equipped to solve in the economic and political context of the inter-war period.

This article offers a cultural approach to Murid migration to eastern Bawol. It argues that Murid settlement of eastern Bawol was part of an effort to transform the land then under French colonial domination into daar al Islam (house of Islam) or daara al Murid (house of the Murids). This endeavor to create Murid sacred space in Bawol was a conscious effort undertaken by sheikhs and disciples under the leadership of Amadu Bamba. The process of building daar al Murid unfolded in three empirically overlapping but analytically distinguishable steps: first, physical occupation of the space; second, its investment with religious meanings; and third, the containment of French cultural influences.

This article explores the alchemy whereby ritual and political worlds invisible to Europeans were rendered visible on European maps. It begins with a puzzle: representations of southwestern Africa's rivers on those maps bear little resemblance to physical reality as the cartographers would have understood it. Using GIS technology to georeference a series of maps and highlight the placement of rivers on them illustrates the convergence of cartographers’ representations and regional political cosmologies linking power to control over water. Travelers’ accounts and colonial archives illuminate how knowledge was produced and why African ideas about geography were inadvertently embedded in those maps well into the twentieth century. This method opens a window into otherwise-obscured African intellectual history and demonstrates that even something as apparently and unambiguously ‘European’ as modern mapping was the result of on-the-ground negotiations well into the colonial period.

This article investigates Ewe engagement with British administrative policy via the story of a chieftaincy dispute in Ho, British Mandated Togoland, that erupted when Britain attempted to amalgamate two neighboring chieftaincies, Ho-Dome and Ho-Bankoe, by deploying a model with an ‘ethnic stamp’, that of the neighboring Akan states. Colonial-era chieftaincy has received substantial scholarly attention. This article argues that the relationship between the models deployed to reorganize chiefly power and the roles of protagonists is just as significant as the layered conflicts within chieftaincies and their respective clans. Two responses to ‘Akanized’ amalgamation are investigated: the petitions of its opponents, and the rituals developed by chiefs, priests and peasants to herald the amalgamations.

The nature of relations between the neighbouring West African caliphates of Sokoto and Hamdullahi in the early nineteenth century has been the subject of speculation by students of the western and central Sudan from the time of Barth's visit to the area in the mid-nineteenth century. Now, working from several new manuscript finds and the evidence built up by scholars who have studied the two caliphates in detail, a tentative reconstruction of relations between the states in the crucial period 1817–37 is possible. What emerges is evidence of an intricate balance between the two caliphates and their mutually acknowledged spiritual advisers from the Kunta confederation in the Azaouad in which economic and strategic priorities as well as internal politics and theological matters all seem to play a role in determining the nature of relations between Hamdullahi and Sokoto.

In recent years the impact of the Almoravid movement on the sahelian societies has been the object of some debate. Ancient Ghana seemed to be the most rewarding area of investigation, since al-Zuhrī (1154) and Ibn Khaldūn (end of the fourteenth century) suggested its ‘conquest’ by Almoravid forces. The evidence provided by these narrative sources has been disputed, but it could not be discarded.

A new field of investigation was opened by the discovery in 1939 of a number of royal tombstones in Gao-Sané close to the old capital of the Gawgaw empire. The dates of the epitaphs extend from the early twelfth to the late thirteenth century. However, none of the Arabic names given to the rulers of Gao-Sané seemed to correspond to any of the names provided in the chronicles of Timbuktu, the T. al-Sūdān and the T. al-Fattāsh. A closer look at the epitaphs shows that the third ruler of Gao-Sané, called ‘Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb and also Yāmā b. K.mā and who died in 1120, is in fact identical with Yama Kitsi mentioned in the chronicles. The available evidence suggests that by 1080 the local Berbers of Gao-Sané were able to seize power from the earlier Qanda/Kanta dynasty of Old Gao. This change of dynasty was certainly not the result of a military conquest, although it is likely that Almoravid propagandists contributed to arouse the religious fervour of the local Muslims in both Gao-Sané with its community of traders and Old Gao with its Islamic court members and dynastic factions. The clear message of the Gao epitaphs is that the new rulers of Gao-Sané, the Zāghē, tried to establish good relations with members of the former ruling clan resorting to a policy of intermarriage. By the middle of the thirteenth century the Zāghē rulers were so much integrated into the local Mandé society that they adopted the title Z.wā (Zā) which was originally the title of the Kanta rulers. Thus it would appear that in spite of the far-reaching dynastic effects resulting from the religious and political upheaval of the Almoravid period, there was no major incursion of Berber people into the kingdom of Gawgaw. Indeed, there are reasons to believe that the basic institutions of the original‘Mande’ society were destroyed only in the course of the fifteenth century, when Songhay warrior groups from the east under the leadership of the Sonni radically changed the ethnic set-up of the Middle Niger. In spite of these changes the Zarma, whose aristocracy descend from the Zā, preserve the tradition of their origin from Mali until the present day.

Research over the past five years or so indicates that in north-western and central Kenya and northern Tanzania pastoralism is much older than previously supposed. Radiocarbon dates from the central Rift valley and the Serengeti plains suggest the presence of domestic cattle by about the sixth millennium b.c. Early pottery traditions in the central Rift valley and around Lake Turkana have been more precisely identified. A continuing research project in the southern Sudan has revealed early pottery with possible northern affinities and rouletted pottery of the first as well as second millennia a.d. In north-western Tanzania, iron would still seem to have been smelted as early as the sixth century b.c. The use of iron, and perhaps of rouletted ware, by pastoral peoples in central Kenya is now dated to the late first millennium a.d. In Malawi, food-production would still seem to have been introduced early in that millennium, but the introduction of cattle has now been dated to the third or fourth century a.d., some centuries earlier than had previously been supposed. In Zambia, the surprisingly early dates for Situmpa pottery have apparently been confirmed. On the east coast, excavations at Hafun, Mogadishu and Manda have enabled more precise dating of the periods during which these ancient ports flourished, while a comprehensive survey programme has refined our knowledge of monumental sites along the Kenya coast.

In terms of Marc Bloch's celebrated definition, the traditional interlacustrine Bantu kingdom of Bunyoro, in western Uganda, is ‘feudal’ in some respects but not in others. This is shown by a survey of Bunyoro's traditional political institutions, some of which tended to decentralize, others to centralize, political power and authority. Of the first, the most important were the considerable degree of independence enjoyed by the chiefs, and the largely self-sufficient community relationships of neighbourhood and kinship. Of the centripetal institutions, some linked the people to the kingship, others bound the chiefs to the king. Examples of both types are described. It is concluded that although traditional Bunyoro shared some features with European ‘feudal’ states, it also differed from them in important respects. Thus it would be misleading to refer to it, without a good deal of qualification, as a ‘feudality’.

Since 1899 the idea has been widely held that the South African War was no isolated episode but one illuminating the fundamental characteristics of British expansion, both in the nineteenth century and beyond. Cross-reference between the particulars of South African history and theories of imperialism has long been a fact of intellectual life. This process, however, often seems to reflect less the fruitful interplay of new knowledge and evolving hypotheses than the progressive entrenchment of separate schools of thought. The purpose of this article is to highlight the gulf between different approaches, with reference to recent work; and to suggest that, notwithstanding the work of the last decade, little headway has been made in linking the development of South Africa's economy and mineral resources to the War of 1899 in any but the most general and self-evident of ways. It argues that the case for interpreting the origins of the war in the main from a metropolitan and political perspective retains considerable persuasiveness and explanatory power. Finally it puts forward an alternative way of seeing in the struggle representative features of British expansion.

This article examines the transition from the slave trade to ‘legitimate commerce’ in Portuguese Guinea between 1840 and 1880. Peanuts became the principal export crop. They were cultivated on plantation-like establishments called feitorias located primarily along the banks of the Rio Grande and on Bolama Island. From the 1840s through the 1870s, Luso-African, other Euro-African and European traders built these feitorias. These traders depended upon both slave and contract labour to cultivate their export crop.

Although Portugal claimed Portuguese Guinea, French trading houses dominated ‘legitimate commerce’ in this West African enclave. The demand for increased peanut production came from the burgeoning French oil mills rather than from Portuguese industries. French merchants supplied the ships needed to transport the crop as well as many of the imported goods sold locally. By the 1870s the Portuguese realized they needed to break this French monopoly. By that time Europe was suffering from an economic recession, peanut prices were falling and cheaper oilseeds from India and America were entering the market. Portugal's attempts to establish commercial dominance met with little success.

The economic crisis of the 1870s not only created difficulties for feitoria owners and their workers, but also for Fulbe groups in the process of expansion. These Fulbe wanted to establish political control in order to reap the economic benefits the peanut trade offered — especially access to firearms and in turn, slaves. As peanut production fell from 1879 onward, Fulbe groups began fighting amongst themselves for control of shrinking resources. By 1887, the feitoria system and this phase of peanut production had ended. The Portuguese, like the Fulbe, had to look for new ways to survive economically.

This paper analyses the demography of nineteenth-century Madagascar in the light of the debate generated by the demographic transition theory. Both supporters and critics of the theory hold to an intrinsic opposition between human and ‘natural’ factors, such as climate, famine and disease, influencing demography. They also suppose a sharp chronological divide between the pre-colonial and colonial eras, arguing that whereas ‘natural’ demographic influences were of greater importance in the former period, human factors predominated thereafter. This paper argues that in the case of nineteenth-century Madagascar the human factor, in the form of the Merina state, was the predominant demographic influence. However, the impact of the state was felt through natural forces, and it varied over time. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Merina state policies stimulated agricultural production, which helped to create a larger and healthier population and laid the foundation for Merina military and economic expansion within Madagascar. From the 1820, the cost of such expansionism led the state to increase its exploitation of forced labour at the expense of agricultural production and thus transformed it into a negative demographic force. Infertility and infant mortality, which were probably more significant influences on overall population levels than the adult mortality rate, increased from 1820 due to disease, malnutrition and stress, all of which stemmed from state forced labour policies. Available estimates indicate little if any population growth for Madagascar between 1820 and 1895. The demographic ‘crisis’ in Africa, ascribed by critics of the demographic transition theory to the colonial era, stemmed in Madagascar from the policies of the imperial Merina regime which in this sense formed a link to the French regime of the colonial era. In sum, this paper questions the underlying assumptions governing the debate about historical demography in Africa and suggests that the demographic impact of political forces be re-evaluated in terms of their changing interaction with ‘natural’ demographic influences.

The three most important Arabic sources for the Empire of Mali at its height are Ibn Fadl-Allāh al-‘Umari, Ibn-Baṭṭüṭa, and Ibn-Khaldūn. These authors all had good opportunities to collect information on this remote empire. Al-‘Umarī, who wrote in 1342–9, reflects the impression that Mansä Müsā had left in Cairo during his pilgrimage. In all probability, he had not himself met Mansā Mūsā in person, but he had talked with people who had met the Sudanese emperor. One of his most important informants was ash-shaykh Abū-sa'īd ‘Uthmān ad-Dukkāli, who had lived in Mali for thirty-five years. Ibn-Baṭṭūṭa recorded his own tour through Mali from February 1352 to December 1353. This account by such an experienced traveller is a first-rate historical document. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa was travelling in a region that was well known to his own countrymen; indeed he met Moroccans all over the Sudan. He was, therefore, inhibited from exaggerating or introducing incredible stories of the sort that often occur in his accounts of remoter Countries.