bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Deforestation, the decline of the horse, and the spread of the tsetse fly and trypanosomiasis (nagana) in nineteenth century Sierra Leone
Authors: Dorward D. C. , Payne A. I.
Published: January 2009

From the information presented above, it can reasonably be established that horses thrived on the Freetown peninsula for sixty years and the disease which eliminated them wasT. brucei. This disease was prevalent for at least 15 years although it eventually disappeared, probably before 1900. In addition, clearance of the forest, in three overlapping phases, was carried out prior to and during the outbreak.

From the ecology of the three species of tsetse fly possibly implicated in the outbreak of the disease in Sierra Leone, it can be deduced that deforestation and the consequent regeneration and cultivation led to favourable conditions for the expansion of at leastG. palpalisandG. longipalpis, and possibly also ofG. morsitans. Taking into account the information currently available on the inter-relationships between tsetse fly and trypanosome species, it can also be suggested thatG. longipalpiswas probably the primary source of the disease but that the disease was sustained, particularly around Freetown itself, byG. palpalisand possibly by other biting flies. ThatG. longipalpisor evenG. morsitansprobably initiated the outbreak makes the eventual disappearance of the disease more understandable since both of these species relied upon regenerated forest and an abundance of game, resources which diminished as agriculture progressed. It is likely that these primary carriers infected horses and cattle moving between the provinces and Freetown, thereby providing the link in spreading the disease to the Colony.

It appears therefore that the removal of the forest led to the outbreak of trypanosomiasis in horses. A different and more rational approach to forestry in Sierra Leone would have avoided this altogether. In fact it is fortunate that the consequences of this indiscriminate deforestation were not more serious since all three tsetse flies in question are carriers of the human sleeping sickness,T. gambiense. For some reason, however, this species of trypanosome, whilst common in the interior, is not prevalent in the coastal areas of West Africa, though there was in fact, an epidemic of this disease in the 1930s in the Kaiahun area, associated withG. palpalis.

Since the horse is relatively sensitive to tsetse fly and its associated trypanosomes, this animal is a good indicator of the presence of trypanosomiasis. Dr McCoy in his memorandum mentions that horses thrive in the Gambia and at Lagos and that ‘loin disease’ was unknown in these places. He makes no reference, however, to horses in Ghana. The history of the horse in other parts of West Africa may therefore be worth pursuing in this respect.
The Colonial Period in the Maghrib and its Aftermath: The Present State of Historical Writing
Authors: Brett Michael
Published: January 2009

The post mortem examination of the French regime in North Africa has tried to establish what went wrong, and when. It has described in detail the adverse effects of the regime upon the indigène, especially in Algeria. Rather less attention has been paid to the minority of those who, under the circumstances, prospered in various ways. The fortunes of the 25,000 Muslim Algerian landowners, for example, each with anything from 50 to 500 or more hectares, deserve to be studied. They are relevant to the current concern with the origins and growth of nationalist movements for independence. Explanations of a conflict arising inevitably out of the inequality and incompatibility of the two communities have difficulty in explaining the connexion between the nationalist leaders and the population at large. A satisfactory account should be able to identify the support for these leaders and their activities at any given time. The problem has attracted most attention in Morocco, where the success of the monarchy at the expense of the Istiqlal has called for an explanation. The well-known connexion of the Istiqlal with the Fassi community has been the starting-point of attempts to describe a political society in relation to the social and economic background of the groups and interests which it comprises. The historical investigation of this background throughout the Maghrib should provide a firm context for descriptions of political activity before and after independence.
Patterned Walling in African Folk Building
Authors: Walton James
Published: January 2009

In 1955 I spent some time at Kota Kota on the western shore of Lake Nyasa where I was fortunate to have as my guide Shehe Khalidi Bin-Amrani, a fine old Yao schoolmaster who, when I first met him, was busily teaching his pupils to read selections of the Koran from handled boards. His father, he told me, was born at Lindi, an important centre of the slave trade from where a well-defined trade route led to Lake Nyasa, but he eventually settled at Kota Kota and led the Arab traders in search of slaves. Khalidi Bin-Amrani actually took part in the last raids.
East African Coin Finds and Their Historical Significance
Authors: Freeman-Grenville G. S. P.
Published: January 2009

No historian of Africa can be indifferent to the fact that alone in Africa south of the Sahara the East African coast possesses a link between history and archaeology in its own medieval mints and also in coins imported from other lands during the past two thousand years. Its history is poorly documented, and its archaeology is still to a great extent in the stage of record and survey; the numerous finds of Chinese porcelain and other imported ceramics can at present only be assigned within a bracket of at smallest fifty years: but in the coin finds there is a key for the future establishment of a precise chronology for all of these.
Speculations on the Economic Prehistory of Africa
Authors: Wrigley Christopher
Published: January 2009

Apart from relatively late Semitic influence … the civilizations of Africa are the civilizations of the Hamites, its history the record of these peoples and of their interaction with the two other African stocks, the Negro and the Bushman, whether this influence was exerted by highly civilized Egyptians or by such wider pastoralists as are represented at the present day by the Beja and Somali.…The incoming Hamites were pastoral ‘Europeans’—arriving wave after wave—better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark agricultural Negroes.
Linguistic Evidence for the Influence of the kanuri on the Hausa
Authors: Greenberg Joseph H.
Published: January 2009

The present study is intended both as a substantive historical contribution, and as an illustration of the possibilities and the limitations of one particular type of historical inferences that can be drawn from language, namely, the study of words borrowed from one language into another. Two other basic linguistic sources for culture-historical conclusions are not considered here, those based on the relationships and distribution of languages as such, and those based on the reconstructed vocabularies of particular Ursprachen, that is, the ancestral speech-forms of specific groups of genetically related languages. These latter two methods are not excluded either for dogmatic or methodological reasons, but simply because they do not yield relevant results for the particular problems being considered, although they are very useful in other connexions. It should, however, be mentioned that, as will appear at a number of points in the discussion, a valid linguistic classification furnishes an indispensible framework for nearly all inferences drawn from linguistic data including the interlinguistic contact phenomena which are the subject of the present study.
The Southern Rhodesian Iron Age
Authors: Summers Roger
Published: January 2009

The name ‘Iron Age’ has been given to a complex of post-Stone Age cultures in Southern Rhodesia. The cultures themselves vary very considerably but all are characterized by the use of iron for tools and weapons. Unlike the sequences in Europe and the Near East, that of south Central Africa shows no copper or bronze-using stage between the stone and iron-using phases and even the Neolithic seems to be missing from this part of the world.
L'Histoire Des Peuples de L'Afrique Noire
Authors: Cornevin Robert
Published: January 2009

L'histoire préeuropéenne de l'Afrique au sud du Sahara doit-elle être considérée comme une véritable science ou bien continuer une carrière subalterne dans les fourgons de l'ethnologie?
The Ashanti Question and the British: Eighteenth-Century Origins
Authors: Priestley Margaret
Published: January 2009

One of the major developments in West Africa since the later seventeenth century has been the emergence of the powerful inland Empire of Ashanti and its gradual expansion towards the coast. This process ultimately brought the Ashantis into contact with the Fantes, the conquest of whom was necessary if the Empire was to extend to the sea. Their relationship, therefore, forms a central theme in the history of the Gold Coast in modern times. But problems were created by it which extended far outside the bounds of native politics. The existence on the coast of European trading settlements in close rivalry with each other meant that any serious local upheaval was bound to have wide repercussions. For economic reasons, Europeans could not remain indifferent to changes in the balance of power which would affect trade routes from the interior to the forts and, in particular, the future of the Fante states whose people, by the eighteenth century, had long acted as middlemen in the slave trade.
Kazembe and the Portuguese 1798–1832
Authors: Cunnison Ian
Published: January 2009

During the century from 1760 to 1860 the territory of the present southern Katanga, eastern Angola and north-eastern Rhodesia lay to a great extent under the suzerainty of two powerful monarchs, Mwata Yamvo in the west and Kazembe in the east. Their common border was the Lualaba river. Both were Lunda by tribe: Mwata Yamvo was the senior in that it was from the capital of his kingdom, which had been in existence possibly for a century or more, that Kazembe's ancestor set out in the early eighteenth century to conquer east of the Lualaba. About 1740 he established his own capital near Lake Mweru in the lower Luapula valley.
Four Sierra Leone Recaptives
Authors: Fyfe Christopher
Published: January 2009

Parliament passed in 1807 the act to illegalize (called prematurely to abolish) the slave-trade. A Vice-Admiralty Court where the Navy could bring captured slave-ships for condemnation was constituted in Freetown, the capital of the Colony of Sierra Leone. From 1819 international anti-slave-trade courts, the Courts of Mixed Commission, were constituted there too. Until 1864, when the last ship destined for the Atlantic slave-trade was condemned, slave-ships were regularly brought in and the slaves freed.
Pottery Types From Archaeological Sites in East Africa
Authors: Posnansky Merrick
Published: January 2009

1. The few excavated sites with pottery in East Africa, apart from the coast, are confined to Western Uganda and the Central part of the Kenya Rift Valley.

2. Where absolute dating is impossible, relative dating by means of cultural introductions, viz., roulette decoration, the tobacco pipe, calabash pseudomorphs and graphite colouring must be used.

3. With the establishment of settled agricultural economies the variation of pottery forms increases.

4. An origin of pottery in Kenya cannot be accepted. The first pottery though is that of the Late Stone Age hunter-foodgatherers, and has simple forms.

5. The developed Elementeitan, Hyrax Hill and Gumban A wares of Kenya are part of an early, though isolated, complex of possible pre-Iron Age cultures.

6. The first true Iron Age pottery, the Dimple-based wares of Kenya and Uganda are part of a common Central African complex.

7. The roulette cord decoration appears in East Africa within the present millennium. Lanet, Bigo and Renge pottery wares all owe origins to the introduction.

8. The Lanet ware bears similarities to Hottentot pottery of Southern Africa and is dated to the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.

9. Bigo pottery was widespread over Western Uganda arounda.d.1500. Painted wares at chief sites. Basic forms and decoration continue in succeeding Western Uganda Kingdoms. Ritual ware developed.

10. Introduction of tobacco pipes, graphite wares and calabash forms by the late seventeenth century.

11. Copying of Banyoro graphite wares by neighbouring royal Uganda potters in last quarter of second millennium.

12. Evolution of a distinctive pottery, Entebbe Ware, amongst Lake Victoria hunter-fishing peoples.
The Working Committee of the United Gold Coast Convention
Authors: Austin Dennis
Published: January 2009

When I was in Ghana last year, Dr Danquah very kindly allowed me to read and make notes on an early Minute Book belonging to the Working Committee of the United Gold Coast Convention. I thought it was very interesting, for it covered the years 1947–51 when discontent with colonial rule came to a head, and produced first the U.G.C.C.—as it is easier to call it—and then its radical offspring, the Convention People's Party. The Minute Book was carefully, clearly written; it runs parallel to the early part of Nkrumah's Autobiography (ch. 5 to 12)—itself a valuable source of information—and it confirms, adds to and occasionally corrects the account given by Nkrumah of these interesting years when the colonial administration was beginning to retreat and the nationalists to advance. Moreover, in its beginning lay its end: the two chief protagonists in 1947 were Dr J. B. Danquah and Dr Kwame Nkrumah; and, thirteen years later, they were still opposed, as rival candidates for the presidency of the new republic.
The Karamoja District of Uganda
Authors: Barber J. P.
Published: January 2009

Uganda is a green and fertile country; a land of dense forests, banana gardens, and elephant grass; but there is, in the north-east corner, bordering Kenya and the Sudan, a district which for many months of the year is brown and dry. This is Karamoja. Karamoja forms a barrier between the abundance of Uganda and the sparseness of the desert and semidesert, which sweep from the Horn of Africa, across the north of Kenya, to the escarpment of the Rift Valley, which is the eastern boundary of Karamoja itself. The District, which is one and a half times the size of Wales but with a population of only 172,000, consists of wide, thorn scrub covered plains broken by large volcanic mountain masses. Across the plains the tribes of Karamoja, the Dodoth, the Jie, the Karamojong, and the Suk, herd their cattle. Cattle are the basis of their life and their culture. It is for their cattle that during the dry season they wander over the great plains in search of water and grass. It is for their cattle, to defend their pasture, and to increase the herds, that the tribes fight and steal from each other. Like many of Africa's cattle tribes they have not taken to westernization. They present for Uganda the problem, common to many African states, of a proud pastoral people who do not fit into the new Africa of nationalism, constitutional changes and subtle voting arrangements.
Berceaux Agricoles Primaires Sur Le Continent Africain
Authors: Portéres Roland
Published: January 2009

Les grands voyages et les transferts intercontinentaux de plantes cultivées ont eu des répercussions extrêmement importantes sur le développement des civilisations par action directe sur la prospérité de leurs agricultures et sur leurs régimes alimentaires. Il n'est que de rappeler le rôle joué par la Pomme de terre dans les pays tempérés et par le Maïs dans la zone chaude, rôle de briseurs de famine et de disette.
The Constitutional History of Ethiopia
Authors: Huntingford G. W. B.
Published: January 2009

Between 1959 and 1961 I worked with an Ethiopian research student, Gētāčaw Takla Māryām, on the constitutional history of Ethiopia from the Aksumite period (first to fourth centuries A.D.) to the end of the seventeenth century. So far as could be discovered, no serious attempt has yet been made to deal with this subject by means of strict documentation. The first step therefore has been to collect from printed Ethiopic material (mainly written in Ge‘ez) and from Ge‘ez manuscripts a body of documents and charters which will ultimately form the basis of a constitutional history. The aim has been to produce something like Stubbs's Select Charters, for some such basis is an essential preliminary in a field in which be one of the resultes of our study. For place-names the position is a little better, since Conti Rossini produced many years ago an index to names in material published up to 1894; and not long ago I compiled one for the historical texts published in the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (CSCO).The work on constitutional history, which is still in progress, has involved the study and translation of four categories of document written in Ge'ez; these are:

(1) The early Ge'ez (and Greek) inscriptions of the Aksumite period.

(2) The Lives of the Ethiopian saints (gadla qedusān) of the sixth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, including the Synaxarium (senkesār) or general collection of lives of saints.

(3) The land charters and other documents in the Book of Aksum, from the tenth to seventeenth centuries, with a few attributed to kings from the fourth to ninth centuries.

(4) The Chronicles, now mostly available in printed form, either in the CSCO, or published individually; some are to be found in periodicals.
The Caravan Trade in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Boahen A. Adu
Published: January 2009

The caravan trade, a strong chain binding Barbary, the Sahara, and the Negro territories together, was of very remote antiquity. Mauny and Lhote have convincingly shown that as early 1000 B.C. chariots were being drawn across the Sahara along two main routes: a western route from Morocco through Zemmour and Adrar to the banks of the Senegal and the Niger, and a central route from Tripoli through Cydamus (Ghadames), Ghat, and Hoggar to Gao on the Niger. By the fifth century B.C., the desert traffic—mainly in animals such as monkeys, lions, panthers, and elephants, in precious stones like carbuncles, emeralds and chalcedony, and in slaves— had become so important that ‘the Carthaginians began their great Sahara expeditions in an effort to cut out all intermediaries and to get into direct contact with the source of the riches in which they traded’. Three centuries later the Saharan trade was centred on the Tripoli-Fezzan-Bornu route (the Garamantian route) and constituted one of the main sources of the riches of Carthage. The phenomenal development of this desert traffic did not take place, however, until the introduction of the camel into Tripolitania by the Romans probably in the first century A.D. The rapid spread of the camel throughout Barbary and into the Sahara and beyond was begun by the Arabs and the Berbers. The process seemed to have gathered momentum and reached its climax during the Hilalian invasions in the middle of the eleventh century.
Landlord and Stranger: Change in Tenancy Relations in Sierra Leone
Authors: Dorjahn V. R. , Fyfe Christopher
Published: January 2009

The relations between a stranger who leaves his home to settle in a distant chiefdom in Sierra Leone and his landlord have for centuries been guided by customary rules. They are of interest to the anthropologist studying contemporary society, and to the historian who can sometimes elucidate from them otherwise obscure incidents in the past. In this article we describe the landlord-stranger relationship as it exists in Sierra Leone today, then give examples of how it has been applied at earlier periods.
Feudalism in Africa?
Authors: Goody Jack
Published: January 2009

Was feudalism a purely Western phenomenon? Is it a universal stage in man's history, emphasizing replacement of kinship by ties of personal dependence which further social development required? If it is neither a universal prerequisite nor yet exclusively Western, what are the conditions under which it is found? A host of such questions are raised by the consistent use both by historians and sociologists of the term ‘feudal’ as a description of the societies they are studying. Here I want to inquire into the implications and value of the concept as applied to African societies.
The European approach to The interior of Africa in the eighteenth century
Authors: Hallett Robin
Published: January 2009

By the middle of the sixteenth century, Europeans had made themselves aware of the broad outlines of the Continents of Asia, Africa and America. Two hundred years later many of the most striking facts of the geography of the great land-masses had been revealed. In Asia, Siberia had been traversed, China mapped, and Tibet visited, while a vigorous trade was maintained with all the countries of the Eastern Seas. Most of the coast and many of the great lakes and rivers of the Americas had been charted, and flourishing European communities established from Lima to Quebec. Far more was known of Africa than its coastline: a large part of Ethiopia had been visited during the era of Portuguese influence at the beginning of the seventeenth century; Catholic missionaries had worked in the Eastern Sudan in the first decade of the eighteenth century; the Moorish geographers, Idrisi and Leo Africanus, both of whose works were constantly used by European cartographers, provided a succinct account of the citier and states of the Sahara and the Sudan; on the Upper Senegal the French had by 1750 successfully maintained for half a century a trading post over four hundred miles from the sea; in Southern Africa individual adventurers had penetrated deep into the hinterland of the Portuguese colonies in Angola and Mozambique, and of the Dutch settlement at the Cape.
British Administration in The central Nyanza district of Kenya, 1900–60
Authors: Ogot Bethwell A.
Published: January 2009

On 10 June 1894, the British Government, after much hesitation and heart-searching, was finally compelled by circumstances to declare a protectorate over the native kingdom of Buganda. Later in the same year the country between the coast and Buganda on the caravan route up from the coast passed from the control of the Imperial British East Africa Company to that of the Acting Commissioner in Uganda, who was empowered to establish stations in it, under European officers.1
Some social and economic implications of paternalism in Uganda
Authors: Ehrlich Cyril
Published: January 2009

IT is a commonplace that British government in Uganda was, from its inception, essentially one of benevolent paternalism—just rule by kindly parents. It is also evident that, particularly in the final decade before independence, the dilemma of this policy lay in its conflict with a growing realization that the children would soon come of age. The political aspects of this dilemma are familiar. Its social and economic implications are perhaps less clear.
European and African Tradition on the Rio Real
Authors: Jones G. I.
Published: January 2009

Those engaged in studying the history of West African coastal communities find themselves confronted with two different classes of material —historical sources, which are mainly written records produced by Europeans who visited or resided for short periods in the area; and anthropological sources, which are mainly local African oral tradition. There is a natural tendency for historians and for anthropologists each to confine themselves mainly to the class of material they understand best and to use the other, if they use it at all, uncritically and without regard to the interdependence of these two sources. The written sources were produced by people who knew little or nothing about the societies they were describing, and they can only become meaningful if seen against the ethnographic background. The African traditions on the other hand, if used alone, are no substitute for historical records. They are not concerned with an absolute time scale and can only be placed in the right historical perspective if they can be correlated with dated historical records. Neither class is capable of standing by itself; they have to be taken together and used to correct, check, and amplify each other. In addition, the written records have other faults of their own, notably the mesmerizing effect which can be achieved by an arresting statement once it has been recorded in print. The more frequently the statement is recorded the more authoritative it becomes. Captain Adams, for example, in his Sketches taken during ten voyages to Africa made a guess at the number of slaves exported annually from the Rio Real, and this figure of 20,000 was accepted uncritically and repeated by almost every subsequent writer on the slave trade in the Bight of Biafra. When it is possible to take them together, however, a great many of the apparent differences between these two classes of material disappear. The African traditions at times provide more accurate historical detail than the written sources, while some of the latter are shown to be more legendary in character than the African and subject to just the same processes of compression and the same dependence on ‘structural time’.
Bunyoro: An African Feudality?
Authors: Beattie J. H. M.
Published: January 2009

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’.
Nineteenth-Century Negritude: Edward W. Blyden
Authors: July Robert W.
Published: January 2009

Almost a century ago, Edward W. Blyden evolved a philosophy of Africanism which foreshadowed many concepts of today's African intellectual leaders. Basing his system of thought on the notion that racial qualities were exclusive and complementary, he urged the African to cultivate his own qualities and avoid bad imitations of the characteristics of other races. A deep religiousness and close communion with nature had developed in Africa a humanitarian regard for social responsibilities and personal relations conspicuously absent in materialistic Europe. The African needed only to follow his natural instinct and to reaffirm his own values in order to regain his ancient sense of dignity and once again make his unique contribution to world culture.
The Prehistoric Origins of African Culture
Authors: Clark J. Desmond
Published: January 2009

The paper traces the beginnings of human culture in Africa, its evolution and spread, and shows the feedback relationship that exists between biological evolution and culture. It is demonstrated how environment is the most important factor in producing variability at the food-gathering level, and the present-day regional differences in culture are shown to have been in existence for some 40,000 years. The history of the introduction and spread of domestication is summarized, and evidence is adduced to indicate that the diffusion of Iron Age economy in southern Africa was due as much to adaptation as to immigration, thus demonstrating a real and traceable continuity up to the present day.
Sources of the Nineteenth Century Atlantic Slave Trade
Authors: Curtin Philip D. , Vansina Jan
Published: January 2009

A large proportion of the slaves captured at sea by the British Royal Navy during the early nineteenth century were landed at Sierra Leone. Statistical data on the make-up of the Sierra Leonean population at this period is available from several sources, and it provides some interesting clues to the scope and size of the slave trade from different parts of Africa.
Christianity and Politics in Dahomey, 1843–1867
Authors: Ellingworth Rev. Paul
Published: January 2009

A study of the interaction between the aims of African rulers, the British and Gold Coast governments, and Wesleyan missionaries in Dahomey between 1843 and 1867 suggests that neither Africans nor Europeans made any consistent distinction, at this time, between the religious and secular aspects of British influence in Dahomey.
Algeria: Some Problems of Modern History
Authors: Johnson Douglas
Published: January 2009

The study of modern Algerian history has encountered many difficulties, and a number of myths and misunderstandings have persisted. However, it is now possible to discuss certain problems with a reasonable chance of success. This article examines three such problems and tries to disengage some of the main themes of modern Algerian history. First, it examines the state of the country, both politically and economically, at the time of the French expedition of 1830. Secondly, it analyses the principal characteristics of European settlement and the ways in which it developed. Thirdly, it considers the nature of opposition to French rule and the reasons why the differences between the Muslim and nonMuslim communities grew larger.
A Note on the Afro-Portuguese Ivories
Authors: Ryder A. F. C.
Published: January 2009

In his book Afro-Portuguese Ivories (Batchworth Press, London, n.d.), William Fagg established the identity of an interesting hybrid art-form in a number of ivory objects—spoons, forks, salt-cellars and horns—carved for European use and to European design, but fashioned according to the canons of the African artist. While certain that the carvers were Africans, Fagg is unable to assign them to any particular region, or even to be certain that they were working in Africa. His tentative conclusion is that three regions have a claim to be considered as the home of these ivories: the area around what is now Freetown in Sierra Leone, the Bakongo coast, and the old Slave Coast between Whydah and Lagos. Von Luschan's theory of a Benin origin is firmly ruled out. Among his three alternatives, Fagg inclines to the Slave Coast, and in particular to its Yoruba sector, because of stylistic affinities between the ivories and Yoruba carving. Such a hypothesis runs into serious chronological difficulties, for whereas many representational features of the ivory carvings suggest that they belong to the sixteenth century, the Portuguese did not frequent the Whydah—Lagos coast until the seventeenth century, and even then the trade was with Brazil, not Portugal.
The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela: a Twelfth-Century Jewish Description of North-East Africa
Authors: Hess Robert L.
Published: January 2009

The travel literature of medieval Jewry may yield new information about the African past. The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, a case in point, throws light on the little-known eastern Sudan of the twelfth century. From the Itinerary may be reconstructed trade routes south from Alexandria to Christian Nubia, east from the Upper Nile Valley to southern Arabia and India, and west to the Fezzān and, ultimately, to the western Sudanic States. Commodities traded included wheat, raisins, figs, copper, salt, gold, precious stones, and slaves. These routes tied in with the better known trans-Saharan, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean networks of trade. Benjamin's Itinerary describes a spectrum of political development ranging from primitive Negroids south of Aswan and the tribal Beja and Rabīʻa Arabs to the more sophisticated Arab-controlled city-State of Aswan and the Christian kingdoms of Nubia. Benjamin mentions Christian Nubia only in passing, but indicates that ʻAiwa still flourished as a trading kingdom as late as 1170.
A Reconsideration of the Ife-Benin Relationship
Authors: Ryder A. F. C.
Published: January 2009

The traditions now current among the Edo of Nigeria trace the origin of the Benin dynasty and the associated cire-perdue technique of brass-casting to Ife. Some of the information recorded by European visitors to Benin since the fifteenth century is not easily reconcilable with this tradition. Material evidence, especially that contained in the Benin bronzes, and the results of archaeological investigation have also raised difficulties. It is suggested that many conflicts in the evidence could be resolved by adopting a hypothesis which would ascribe a more northerly origin to the dynasty. The Nupe-Igala area straddling the confluence of the Niger and Benue emerges as the key area in such a reconstruction of Benin dynastic affiliations. The Yoruba States would seem to be related to the same general complex, but the chronology and direction of dynastic movements still remain obscure, and the seemingly fixed points of reference become far less certain when placed in context.
The Introduction and Spread of Maize in Africa
Authors: Miracle Marvin P.
Published: January 2009

Linguistic evidence strongly suggests that maize penetrated the interior of tropical Africa from the coastal regions, but the timing and mode of its introduction cannot be established. The commonly repeated assertion that the Portuguese brought maize to tropical Africa from the New World cannot be documented at this juncture, although they seem certainly to have had economic motives for doing so.

Maize was probably introduced to tropical Africa at more than one point and at different times. Maize was widely grown along the coast from the River Gambia to Sâo Tomé, around the mouth of the River Congo, and possibly in Ethiopia, in the sixteenth century. There is reference to it in all these places, in Zanzibar, and around the mouth of the River Ruvuma in the seventeenth century; and it was not only mentioned but described as an important foodstuff and a major provision for slave ships between Liberia and the Niger Delta during the same century.

Much less information is available for the interior, but it clearly seems to have been unknown in Uganda as late as 1861. Until well within the present century, it was neither a major export nor a mainstay of the diet in most of eastern and central tropical Africa, the bulk of the areas where it is now of major importance.
Time and Oral Tradition with Special Reference to Eastern Nigeria
Authors: Jones G. I.
Published: January 2009

African Oral traditions differ critically from recorded history in their treatment of time. Time is relative and ‘Historical time’ is replaced by ‘structural time’. Eastern Nigerian traditions have a beginning, the ‘remote past’, and an end, ‘the recent past’ and episodes which should belong to a middle period between these extremes are pushed either into the ‘remote’ or the ‘recent past’ or are forgotten altogether. This can be seen as soon as Eastern Delta traditions are compared with the relevant European historical records.
New Light on Medieval Nubia
Authors: P. L.  , Shinnie M.
Published: January 2009

The importance of the Christian states of Nubia in medieval times has hitherto been under-estimated by historians of Africa. There is now sufficient information to show that they played a significant part in the history of the Nile valley for some 800 years. Not only did the existence of Christian states impose a barrier to the expansion of Islam, but the Dongola kingdom at least was at times an important force in the politics of the area.

The recent campaign of excavations made necessary by the building of the Aswan dam has provided much new information about the material culture of the period, and shows a much higher artistic and social development than earlier emphasis on ecclesiastical monuments had suggested. Nubia is now seen to have had a highly developed civilization with considerable urban development. Detailed study of the pottery has made possible more precise dating of buildings and objects, as well as showing periods of increased and decreased trade with Egypt.

The discovery of important frescoes in the cathedral at Faras makes it possible to study the artistic development, and also adds new material for a study of the eastern, particularly Persian, influences already suspected in Nubian art. Information about domestic life is made available by the excavations at Debeira West, the first predominantly domestic site to have been excavated, whose material remains provide new evidence on diet, crafts and agriculture.
A Propos du Nom Del'oasis de Koufra Chezles Gégraphes Arabes Du XIe et du XIIe Siècle
Authors: Lewicki T.
Published: January 2009

Dans une étude publiée en 1939 et traitant d'une oasis appelée S. b.rū par le géogrphe arabe al-Bakrī (1067–8) et D.b.r par l'auteur anonyme du Kitāb al-Istibsār fī 'agā’ib al-amsār (1191), oasis dont le centre porte le nom de Ŝ.b.rū dans le traité géographique d'al-Idrīsī (1154), nous avons essayé d'identifier ce lieu avec le groupe d'oasis de Koufra de nos cartes. Selon toute vraisemblance, Koufra était, dans le haut Moyen Age, une étape sur la grande voie saharienne, dont parlent certains géographes arabes médiévaux, à partir d'Ibn al-Fakīh al-Hamadānī (902–3), et qui reliait le pays de Gāna, dans le Soudan occidental, fameux par ses mines d'or, à l'Egypte. Cette voie, qui nous montre que les Egyptiens s'intéressaient depuis longtemps au commerce de l'Afrique occidentale, partait probablement de Koumbi Saleh actuel, ruines situées en Mauritanie du Sud et identifiées par la plupart des savants avec la capitale du royaume de Gāna. Elle passait, ensuite, conformément à un passage de l'ouvrage d'al-Fakīh al-Hamadānī, par les territoires de trois peuples noirs: Kūkū (aussi: Kawkaw), M.r.nda et M.rāwa, et aboutissait au Wabat Mir (« Les Oasis de l'Egypte »), c'est-à-dire a 1'Oasis de Dakhla et de Kharga. De ces trois « peuples » noirs, le premier, à savoir: Kūkū (Kawkaw), n'est pas inconnu aux autres géographes arabes médiévaux qui mentionnent un royaume et une yule de ce nom. Il s'agit du royaume négre, jadis puissant, de Songhaï et de sa capitale Gao située sur la boucle du Niger. A en croire al-Ya'kūbī, géographe et historien arabe, écrivant dans la deuxième moitié du IXe siècle (ii mourut en 897 de notre ère), c'était un important état soudanais dont la puissance égalait, a cette époque, celle du royaume de Gāna.
The Fulani Jihād: a Reassessment
Authors: Waldman Marilyn Robinson
Published: January 2009

This article re-evaluates the jihād of Usuman dan Fodio. It first traces the history of the age-old Sudanic pattern of royal tolerance, and sometimes encouragement, of learned Muslims without the implementation of their demands for reform. Then it shows that Usuman and the sarki of Gobir at first interacted according to this pattern. But, finding this relationship unsatisfactory and unlikely to produce the reforms he desired, Usuman sought to remain on cordial terms with the court but intensified his appeal to the people of Hausaland and possibly his criticisms of the existing political and social orders. He attracted followers, not so much because they sympathized with his religious goals, as because in his person and in his criticisms their own discontent with Hausa government and society could find expression. Usuman's eventual conflict with the sarkuna did not arise because he actively sought or plotted it; it arose because the sarkuna felt compelled to abandon their hitherto concessive relations with Usuman in order to attempt to contain his appeal, to undermine his authority, and finally to threaten the existence of his community. An analysis of the conduct of the jihzād bears out an emphasis on Usuman's preference for peaceful pressure, on his lack of planning for a war, and on his many-sided relationship with his followers. The necessity of justifying a war he had not sought, together with the largely secular interests of his followers, gave a tone to the jihād not totally in keeping with its avowed aims. However, because Usuman's leadership was essential, he managed to overcome the many factors which militated against its unity.
The Failure of British Land Policy at the Cape, 1812–281
Authors: Duly L. C.
Published: January 2009

During the first years of British rule at the Cape, a complacency, reinforced by a disregard for colonial conditions and by a disdain for day-to-day supervision, relegated land administration to a marginal function of the Cape Town and London governments. The first major change in the land code was made in 1812 by Governor Cradock, who wanted to obtain the loyalty of the Boer in order to ensure continued British overlordship of the colony, but from 1813 to 1828 and beyond, Government failed to develop an effective administrative system for processing the applications for land grants under the Cradock code. No check was made on the incompetent officials in Cape Town who were entrusted with transforming the decrees of government into a workable land alienation system. On occasion, London, which had but a fleeting interest in land policy in the period under review, imposed new restrictions on the administrative process in order to obtain some other goal. The persistent lack of constructive activity by the British suggests that they did much to prevent the Boer from identifying himself with the Cape Town government.
Concepts of race in the Historicography of northeast Africa
Authors: Macgaffey Wyatt
Published: January 2009

Recent accounts of the proto-history of Africa use data from physical anthropology, but also concepts of race which physical anthropologists in general have abandoned as unsatisfactory; the paper seeks to explain this phenomenon sociologically. Late nineteenth-century political and sociological trends helped to produce patterns of thought which can no longer be regarded as affording adequate explanations of social processes. These patterns combined idealism, or the method of contrasting ideal types, with pseudo-Darwinism, which sought the origins of political development in the interaction of differently endowed groups. In African ethnography of the early twentieth century such concepts led to the view that the continent was inhabited by two groups, Caucasoids and Negroids, and by mixtures of the two which remained mixtures, to be analysed as such. The Caucasoid and Negroid types were regarded as absolute and universal, represented equally in the biological, linguistic, cultural and political aspects of man.
The Origins of the Galla and somali
Authors: Lewis Herbert S.
Published: January 2009

This study presents a reconstruction of the origins and major movements of the Galla and Somali of Northeast Africa which departs from most of the previous literature on the subject. The traditional view has been that the Galla occupied most of the Horn of Africa until the Somali, beginning about the tenth century, swept south and south-west from the shores of the Gulf of Aden driving the Galla before them. The pressure of the Somali has also been considered the major impetus to the Galla invasions of Ethiopia in the sixteenth century. It is the thesis of this paper that both the Galla and the Somali originated in southern Ethiopia, that the Somali expanded to the east and north much earlier than the Galla, and that the Galla lived only in southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya until their migrations began about 1530.
Economic aspects of political movements in nigeria and in the coast 1918–1939
Authors: Hopkins A. G.
Published: January 2009

This article attempts to contribute towards an understanding of the rise of nationalism in Nigeria and in the Gold Coast by exploring a neglected theme, namely the economic policy of political organizations in the period between the two World Wars. Before about 1918 political organizations did not have a coherent economic policy. After World War I economic problems became more important, and political parties began to take account of them by formulating a programme of economic development. An attempt was made by a man named Tete-Ansa to implement this programme, but he proved unsuccessful. The persistence of economic discontent, together with the failure of moderate leadership, led to the rise of new leaders and to the development of a more radical policy at the close of the 1930's. It was this policy which won mass support, and which played a vital part in the achievement of independence after World War II.
The Problem of the Bantu Expansion
Authors: Oliver Roland
Published: January 2009

This paper outlines four stages of the Bantu expansion: first, the initial push through the equatorial forest from the northern to the southern woodlands; second, the occupation of the southern woodland belt from coast to coast; third, the colonization of the Tanzania, Kenya and southern Somali coastline and of the northern sector of the lake region; fourth, the colonization south-wards, north-westwards and north-eastwards from this extended nucleus. The evidence for the first stage is largely linguistic and is likely to remain so. The outlines of the fourth stage can be established very largely from traditional evidence. It is for chronological data concerning the second and third stages that we can now turn hopefully to archaeology. In both these stages the Bantu expansion seems to have coincided fairly closely with the spread of the Iron Age; and, if the spread of the Iron Age through the area north of the southern woodlands can now be traced in something like the detail which we already have for Zambia and Rhodesia, the mystery of the Bantu expansion will have been largely unravelled.
More on the Invasions of Kongo and Angola by the Jaga and the Lunda
Authors: Vansina Jan
Published: January 2009

Two series of migrations have left a profound imprint on the cultures of western central Africa: those of the Jaga who began a spectacular career with the sudden capture of the Kongo kingdom in 1569, and those of the Lunda and related peoples in central and eastern Angola. The amplitude of the Jaga migration was recognized from the beginning, whilst the scope of the Lunda migrations has not been fully realized as yet. So much is known about the latter invasions that the huge movement is subdivided into submigrations, so that the general perspective has been lost. It is this second set of migrations which was led by Kinguri, a Lunda prince who left his country after its capture by the Luba. In our opinion Kinguri's successor contacted the Portuguese around 1610, which leaves an interval following the Jaga arrival great enough to warrant the view that two invasions were involved. If so, the coincidence of two major population movements following each other so shortly in time is still remarkable and begs further investigation.
African Slavery and other Forms of Social Oppression on the Upper Guinea Coast in the Context of the Atlantic Slave-Trade
Authors: Rodney Walter
Published: January 2009

It has come to be widely accepted that slavery prevailed on the African continent before the arrival of the Europeans, and this indigenous slavery is said to have facilitated the rise and progress of the Atlantic slave-trade. According to P. D. Rinchon, ‘from the earliest days of the trade, the majority of the Negroes were living in a state of servitude, and the native chiefs did not have far to seek for the human merchandise’. Daniel Mannix, in one of the most recent accounts of the Atlantic slave-trade, contends that ‘many of the Negroes transported to America had been slaves in Africa, born to captivity. Slavery in Africa was an ancient and widespread institution, but it was especially prevalent in the Sudan.’ In the opinion of J. D. Fage, ‘the presence of a slave class among the coastal peoples meant that there was already a class of human beings who could be sold to Europeans if there was an incentive to do so… So the coastal merchants began by selling the domestic slaves in their own tribes.’ The main purpose of this brief study is to test these generalizations with evidence taken from the Upper Guinea Coast—the region between the Gambia and Cape Mount.