The Nigerian musical landscape changed significantly following the advent of Christian missionary activity and British colonial administration in the later nineteenth century. New idioms of musical practice which have evolved as a result of this historical process include a new tradition of religious, Christian, music, urban syncretic popular styles, new operatic forms and European-derived art/ classical music. This article focuses on one of these emerging styles, Nigerian art music, as reflected in the life and works of its most notable pioneer, Fela Sowande. After a brief historical background, the article discusses the circumstances of Sowande's life and the beliefs which shaped his composing career and his compositional style. In discussing elements of style in Sowande's works, it examines the nature of the interaction between African and European elements, a stylistic feature which constantly recurs in his works. The article ends by discussing the need to consolidate the growth of this new idiom by putting in place institutional structures within which it can develop.

Evaluations of colonial education policy tend to treat it as a tool for applying imperial ideology, which—among other things—denied the Africans their past. This study of the debate about history education in southern Nigeria in the 1930s suggests the need to re-evaluate this assessment. While some imperial pronouncements did deny African history, colonial administration also required historical knowledge. Further, many colonial educators thought it proper to provide African students with a sense of their past appropriate to colonial subjects. A few went much further, to actively promote pride in African history. In this ambivalent context African schoolteachers and graduates got on with the task of describing their past, often using colonial educational media, constrained but not silenced by their colonial situation. Recognising the fertile ambivalence of this aspect of imperial culture opens new and more fruitful approaches to colonial intellectual history in general.

The inhabitants of Kaokoland, Himba and Herero, have recently gained prominence in the discussions concerning a controversial hydro-electric power scheme in their region. They are depicted as southern Africa's ‘most traditional pastoralists’ by groups opposing the dam and those demanding it. The article describes how Kaokoland's pastoralists suffered tremendously from the politics of encapsulation the South African government adopted against them. Having been enmeshed in interregional trade networks, commodity production and wage labour around 1900, they were isolated by the South African government within a period of twenty years. Buffer zones for the commercial ranching area and prohibitions on movement across other newly invented boundaries limited their spatial mobility. Trade across borders was inhibited altogether. Pastoralists who had diversified their assets during the previous fifty years and had taken the chance of a first wave of commercial penetration were forced back on to subsistence herding.

This article discusses the historical construction of land tenure patterns in the Communal Areas of Zimbabwe, previously the Reserves of colonial Rhodesia. In many respects the form of communal tenure found in the Communal Areas today emerged during the early colonial period. While being glossed as ‘traditional’, communal tenure is a contradictory amalgam of local, regional and state initiatives. The discussion outlines the historical development of present tenure relations in the Communal Areas, reviews their multiple sources of legitimacy and suggests that common property regimes in Zimbabwe are not simply the artefact of colonial indirect rule.

The chiefdoms of Sierra Leone are institutions of colonial origin but nevertheless continue to serve as local government units in the post-colonial state. The prevailing view among scholars is that these institutions have little basis in indigenous political culture, and have furthermore become breeding grounds of political corruption. This view has tended to elide anthropological analysis of internal chiefdom politics. However, it is argued in this article that such conclusions are premature. With reference to the Biriwa Limba chiefdom of northern Sierra Leone, it is shown that historical precedent, in many cases relating to prominent political figures of the late nineteenth century, continues to serve as a primary means of ordering local rights in land, settlement and political representation. This phenomenon is not a product of innate conservatism but emerges rather as a pragmatic response to the persistent failure of successive Sierra Leone administrations to extend modern measures of citizenship to the bulk of the rural populace. Rights and properties have become progressively localised in villages originally registered for tax collection in the early colonial era. Here one finds one of the most telling legacies of the British policy of indirect rule in post-colonial Sierra Leone.

Since 1982 the Mouvement des forces démocratique casamançais has been fighting for the independence of the Casamance region of Senegal. In 1989, when the Mouvement initiated a sustained military campaign, Senegal's official and independent press began to provide intensive coverage of its activities and objectives. This article documents the arguments for and against Casamançais independence as documented by Senegal's press in the year following the resurgence of this conflict. The Mouvement's leadership has consistently maintained that its efforts to win independence for the Casamance are legitimate because France created the Casamance. The French, it argues, never intended the Casamance to be administratively incorporated into Senegal. Conversely, those opposed to the Mouvement have attempted to delegitimise its activities by claiming that it represents the interests of the Jola, just one of the Casamance's many ethnic groups. It is argued that the Senegalese government and other opponents of the Mouvement have attempted to label the independence movement an ethnic movement because of a distinction in African political ideology between nationalism and ethnicity. According to this ideology, nationalism, and other legitimate forms of political mobilisation, should represent a plural constituency. Those that represent the narrow interests of a single ethnic group are not considered legitimate.