In some ways, The Origins of the South African War 1899–1902 is an awfully fat book for what has perhaps become an awfully thin and fatiguing subject. Do we really need yet another stab at J. A. Hobson on the Jameson Raid and the notion of the capitalist conspiracy war? Is there much to be gained from further deliberation over the 1896 Selborne Memorandum dealing with the crisis in South Africa? Despite Dr Smith's suggestion (p. x) that recent historiography of the South African War has been preoccupied more with the experience of that conflict than with its origins, the fact remains that modern English-language scholarship on the causes of the war, starting well over three decades ago with Robinson and Gallagher's Africa and the Victorians, continues to outweigh heavily writing on the actual conduct of hostilities between Britain and the Boer republics. We continue to know much more about the pre-war shenanigans between Milner and the Uitlanders than about the relationship between technology and strategy during 1899–1902 or the demographic consequences of an exhausting war. So, the question must be: does Iain Smith breathe new life into the enormously complex, broadly familiar, sometimes tedious, historical arguments over the origins of the South African War?

The latest monograph produced by the British Institute in Eastern Africa is essentially the report of Connah's archaeological work at the Later Iron Age site of Kibiro, which lies on the Ugandan shores of Lake Albert. The relatively rapid publication of this fieldwork (undertaken in 1989 and 1990) and the high production values evident in the volume (if one excuses the spelling mistakes on the back of the dust jacket) are to be congratulated. The volume is an attractive one, well illustrated throughout with a combination of photographs, figures and tables.

It is hard to put a single categorical label on Carmel Schrire's Digging Through Darkness. It is at once a chronicle of her personal development as an archaeologist and a critique of the colonial dialectic through which indigenous peoples and European invaders have come to be intertwined. Schrire, as a white South African woman, is a product of this process, adding texture to a skilfully written book interlaced with the kind of earthy irony often intrinsic to multi-cultural dialogue in southern Africa. The book ranges from panoramic discussions of European expansion and colonization to introspective essays on the contradictions of growing up Jewish in South Africa, ‘a minority within the larger white group ... [that] endure[d] the persistent effort of certain factions to ally with the Nazis’, while at the same time taking advantage of an entrenched, colour-coded caste system under which ‘the Jewish population cashed in the chips of their appearance’ (p. 30).

This expensive little book, originally a thesis for the University of Illinois, is an artless but sometimes perceptive account of certain library endeavours in British East and West Africa, based on archival and library research in Britain and the United States. It is not a history of libraries per se so much as a study of instances of external aid to the development of libraries beyond the sphere of teaching institutions. In the 1930s, one such source – as in so much of the English-speaking world – was the Carnegie Corporation. Grants to Kenya underpinned a system of circulating libraries, the depot for which was housed in the McMillan Memorial Library, Nairobi; membership was confined to whites until 1958. In Lagos, Alan Burns, as chief secretary, secured a grant to start an unsegregated but fee-charging library: in 1934 just 43 of its 481 members were African. The grant ended in 1935, but the library was still going forty years later.

This brief but welcome pamphlet is Professor Kimambo's ‘Exit lecture’ (his term) from the University of Dar es Salaam, where he was a senior lecturer in the Department of History from 1965 to 1969, became a full professor in 1970, spent the next thirteen years as Chief Academic Officer, and returned to History in 1983. It replaces the professorial Inaugural Lecture he never had time to prepare while CAO.

The first edition of Phyllis Martin's and Patrick O'Meara's collection under the simple title Africa appeared twenty years ago to meet the need which its editors, who teach in the African Studies Program at Indiana University, had felt for a multi-disciplinary introduction to the subject for undergraduates embarking for the first time on work relating to the continent. It has twenty-one chapters, each of which is written by an author – sometimes a pair of authors – who has lived and worked in Africa, some of whom have international reputations in their particular disciplines. These are arranged in four sections.