The area involved is located at the northern end of Lake Malawi, near Karonga, and includes Mbande Hill, the ancient capital of the Ngonde people under their paramount chiefs, all of whom bore the title ‘Kyungu’.

Three Iron Age Industries are described:

(a) The Lufira Industry. This is so far represented only by pottery, but it was possible to obtain charcoal associated with it. The pottery appears to have some affinity with the Kalambo material. All the sites occur within cassava cultivation near the Lufira river.

(b) The Rukuru Industry. This is represented by buried hut remains, pottery, glass beads, iron, charred millet and sorghum seeds, and bone fragments. The huts which may have been conical were daga coated. They were built in one instance on a terrace of the North Rukuru river, and subsequently silted over. This area is at present under cultivation. Another site occurs on the east bank of the same river buried below hill wash. The glass beads suggest affinities with Rhodesian beads dated as early as a.d. 700, and a date before the Portuguese dominance of the east coast trade is expected. The pottery consists of gourdshaped pots and simple bowls decorated mainly with rounded point impressions. There is a certain amount of material which may be of Kisi origin from across the lake.

(c) The Mbande Industry. This represents the period of rule by the Kyungus as revealed by excavation on Mbande Hill and by examination of a number of related sites. A considerable amount of oral tradition was recorded some years ago which refers to this period. The pottery and beads differ from the material described in the Lufira and Rukuru industries, but pottery which may be of Kisi make again occurs. The glass beads resemble some of the beads from Rhodesian ruin sites (ca. 1500–1800), but there are three from the upper levels of Mbande Hill which are probably of nineteenth century date. The pottery seems to possess some features which occur in Uganda pottery.

General. No stamp or channel decorated pottery was found within the area examined, but the Lufira Ware may be a late derivative of the Channel-decorated pottery recorded from Kalambo.

The Rukuru Ware may form a link in a migration route beginning in Kenya and ending far south of the Zambezi.

Trade with the east coast before the sixteenth century is suspected with regard to the Rukuru sites, and this continued during the Kyungu period of rule. The pottery suggests that the Kisi may have been trading across the lake from an early date.

An earthwork which appears to have formed part of a wooden stockade exists on Mbande Hill. Ceremonial pottery was found in the vicinity.

The suggestions put forward in this paper may be summarized as follows. The linguistic, cultural and to some extent physical ancestors of the modern Bantu people south of the Zambezi, including the Shona, arrived in Rhodesia in the early part of the first millennium a.d. The B1 culture was not introduced by Shona migrants arriving in the eleventh century, but was a local development of the already existing Shona Iron Age A, attributable perhaps to prosperity gained from the gold trade. The B1 culture should not in fact be regarded as a separate culture from the A, that later fused with it, but as a variant of it, which because of the power and influence of those who developed and practised it eventually spread over a large area and became a common factor in the various local Shona cultures that had diverged, and continued to diverge, in the course of time.

The Ounce as a unit in the West African trade was originally applied to the goods which could be exchanged on the Gold Coast for one ounce of gold; it was generally reckoned that such goods would cost about 40s. in Europe, or half the European value of the gold. Calculations based on actual transactions show that the prime cost of an Ounce of goods was sometimes lower than this, when a favourable assortment of goods had been chosen. In the 1760's and 1770's gold was no longer being exported from the Gold Coast, but was demanded as part of the price of slaves; an ounce of gold was then valued at two Ounces of trade goods. The price of gold had risen, partly owing to a local stoppage of trade, and perhaps also because of a permanent change in the direction of Ashanti gold exports.

At Whydah, the Ounce was not in use in the first half of the eighteenth century; values of goods, including cowries, the local currency, were expressed in terms of the quantity equivalent to one slave. By 1772 the Ounce had come into use at a value similar to that on the Gold Coast. The French selling cheap brandy, and the Portuguese selling cheap Brazilian tobacco, were able to operate at very low costs per Ounce.

The ‘slave-price’ rigsdaler of Christiansborg, with regular exchange rates both with gold and with cowries, forms a link between the Gold and Slave Coast systems.

A table of slave prices at various dates during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is given in terms of Ounces and other units.

The Ashanti bureaucracy as we know it from the nineteenth century owed its structure and character to reforms in government initiated by Osei Kwadwo (1762–77) and pushed forward by his successors Osei Kwame (1777–ca. 1801) and Osei Bonsu (ca. 1801–1824). Many previously hereditary offices became appointive: biographical studies of leading officials in the early nineteenth century show that they were appointed, and promoted, by the king on merit, without regard to their origins. Freemen and slaves, Ashanti and non-Ashanti, were recruited into the bureaucracy. Administrative skills tended to be transmitted through patri-kin, and in the course of the nineteenth century powerful groups grew up which, generation after generation, provided the king with trained officials. An administrative class emerged, distinguished from other elements in society by its dependence upon the king for its very existence. Elaborate checks were instituted to prevent the bureaucracy transforming itself from a controlled to a ruling one.

Bureaucratization in Ashanti produced little quantitative change in the pattern of office growth. Its effects were upon the quality of government. A distinction began to take shape between the king acting in his private capacity through his palace functionaries, and in his public capacity through his bureaucratic officials. Government became increasingly efficient, and was extended over fields of activity previously untouched. The growth of the bureaucratic process was reflected in the increasingly absolutist nature of the Ashanti state.

A revised estimate of the value of trans-Saharan trade in the nineteenth century suggests that, so far from declining, the caravan traffic between North Africa and the Western Sudan increased before the period of colonial partition. Evidence for this revision comes from French diplomatic and geographical missions in the 1850's and 1860's and from the Tripoli and Moroccan consulate records. In round figures the import of European goods across the desert routes and the export of ivory, ostrich plumes, gold dust and lesser items was probably not less than £1,500,000 in 1875—a peak year, after which there was a slow decline, as various factors, including recession in the European markets and the political conquest of Western Sudan, interrupted trade. The prices for European goods and Sudan produce in the early 1860's illustrate the differentials which enabled African traders to make their profit.

Attempts to promote closer relations among the states of Southern Africa in the third quarter of the nineteenth century were thwarted inter alia by intense rivalry between the two British coastal colonies, Natal and the Cape. The sources of this struggle have usually been sought in the strenuous efforts made by each colony to monopolize the transit trade to the interior and in their attempts to develop in the hinterland those markets which the metropolitan countries of Europe did not offer them. But Natal's geographical situation tempted her also to seek economic salvation in the Indian Ocean. At various stages of the colony's history, Natal's businessmen and politicians showed considerable interest in the commercial potential of the region, in its labour resources, and in the creation of steamship and telegraphic lines of communication through the Ocean to the East and Europe. These, it was believed, would not only be of economic advantage to Natal but would also afford her greater independence in many ways from the older-established and far wealthier sister colony. Yet these conflicting ambitions and policies—particularly the commercial connexions of each colony with Mauritius—did much to exacerbate relations between them. Both in 1866 and in 1876, proposals merely for a free trade treaty in each other's produce were easily defeated. The divergence of interests and sympathies between the two colonies, so evident at the National Convention in 1909, stemmed from a great variety of sources—political, economic, geographical and others. Their rivalry had a long history, but was seldom so pronounced as in the earliest years of their relationship.

In 1899 the French Colonial Ministry parcelled out the greater part of the French Congo among various concession companies in imitation of a similar policy adopted earlier by the Congo Free State. British companies which had pioneered the trade found themselves being treated as squatters and interlopers subject to legal prosecutions. They claimed that the French government had infringed the provisions of the Berlin Act and called for the diplomatic support of the Foreign Office. Their call was backed by the British Chambers of Commerce.

For long British humanitarians had been decrying the treatment of Africans in the Congo basin whose lands were being expropriated, and they had repeatedly appealed to the British government to ensure that the provisions of the Berlin Act were enforced. Consequently, the British merchants and the humanitarians found common ground for agitation.

In the face of such a powerful combination the Foreign Office had to act and protracted Anglo-French negotiations ensued. They were brought to an end in 1906 when the French government, while maintaining the principle of concessions, agreed to compensate the British firms for their losses.

The article questions the contention that, in the process of partition and the delimitation of borders in Africa, no account was taken of local conditions. The possibility of indirect African influence on the process is examined. At least some of the treaties concluded between Europeans and African rulers were genuine, and regarded as a contractual obligation by both sides. There were cases of African rulers seeking to promote their political interests by entering into an alliance with Europeans. Such treaties were sometimes utilized by European powers in their negotiations with rivals, to support their territorial claims. There were some attempts to define colonial borders so that they coincided with the frontiers of traditional African politics. Thus, treaties between African rulers and Europeans played a role in the process of the partition. In this connexion, it is important to remember that traditional African polities were often polyethnic, or encompassed only a segment of an ethnic group, and did not correspond to the modern European concept of ‘nation states’. There were also occasions in which questions regarding the local economy and communications were considered when borders were delimited. The considerations employed may have been wrong. But it seems necessary to modify the generalization that local circumstances were disregarded in the border-making process.

These notes on traditional market authority and market periodicity in West Africa are intended to draw attention to the neglect of a fascinating historico-anthropological field. Given the lack of any satisfactory typology of West African markets, generalizations about all types of market must be avoided—and certain erroneous assumptions relating to the traditional relationship of chief and market are called in question. Nor should it be assumed that Christaller's ‘central-place theory’ has any application in such regions as Yorubaland and Iboland, where rural periodic markets cannot be classified hierarchically as, for instance, they can be in rural China. Although daily (or continuous) markets which, both traditionally and today, occur only in the very largest centres of population, are typologically distinct from rural periodic markets, this is rather because of their high proportion of full-time vendors than because they are necessarily apices of an hierarchical market system.

Everywhere in West Africa there is a standard ‘market-week’ such that all the periodic markets in the locality are based on the same cycle. Although this has been well-known for centuries, few writers in English have been interested in mapping these weeks, or examining the relationship between them. After summarizing existing geographical material, which clearly establishes an association between 4- and 8-day market weeks (which are extraordinarily widespread in the forest zone), as well as some connexion between the 3- and 6-day market weeks, it is concluded that there are effectively only four common market weeks, viz. 3- (or 6-) day, 4- (or 8-) day, 5-day and 7-day. The 7-day market week prevails throughout Hausaland and many other Islamized savanna districts. The fact that it has existed for centuries throughout the Akan areas of southern Ghana and Ashanti (though hardly anywhere else in the forest zone) has not attracted the attention it deserves—the same applying to other questions, here posed though not answered, such as why the 4-day market week cuts right across some ethnic boundaries and not others.

The article concludes with brief notes on the two traditional types of market taxation in West Africa, tolls and stall-rents, emphasis being laid on the traditional lack of market taxation in Eastern Nigeria.

The outbreak of the First World War made unprecedented demands on the manpower resources of the British East Africa Protectorate (Kenya). To meet military requirements for labour, the colonial government followed a policy of recruitment of Africans, in which there was initially some confusion over method and the degree to which compulsion could be utilized. Criticism of the policy by European settlers and the press, part of a larger agitation for more settler influence in the war effort and for greater control over the labour potentiality of the African population, led to a clarification of policy in the Native Followers' Recruitment Ordinance of 1915, which finally established the conscription of African males for the carrier corps. African reluctance to serve was heightened by complaints about conditions, and there frequent attempts to evade conscription. The campaigns of 1917 made particularly heavy demands for military labour, and the government attempted to recruit as many able-bodied male Africans as possible, under the ‘Grand Levy’ organized by John Ainsworth. The settler community, aroused by the consequent labour shortage, renewed its campaign for measures to ensure a flow of labour from the reserves and for a greater degree of government control over the African population, setting the scene for post-war squabbles about labour. For the carriers, conditions at the front were very bad in 1917–18, and the problems of carriers returning home in poor health, only partly relieved by the welfare organization set up by Ainsworth, were complicated by famine and an influenza epidemic. The events left a lasting impression in the minds of the Africans of Kenya.