bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Harär Town and its Neighbours in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Caulk R. A.
Published: January 2009

The survival of the Semitic-speaking, Muslim townsmen of Harär in the midst of animist Oromo (Galla) who migrated into the eastern highlands of modern Ethiopia in the late sixteenth century and settled as pastoralists is something of an anomaly, at least in the eastern Rift. Other pre-migration settlements of Muslim farmer-traders, presumably also speaking a southern Semitic language, appear to have been submerged and displaced. The Haräri's good fortune is not to be explained by their use of firearms and simple fortifications. Economic interdependence, the awe the newcomers felt for the town's saints and the greater cohesion of the townspeople probably played a greater role than mere self-defence.

A balance of power was needed, however, if the town was not to be swamped. This equilibrium seems to have been upset at the very time that the trade of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden was revived by Egypt in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Neither the succession to the amirate of pacifist princes nor the betrayal of the town to outsiders by the half-Oromo ruler, Amir Muhammad ibn Ali (1856–75), can correctly be blamed for this reverse although these are the excuses given in Haräri tradition. Rather, the repeated appeal to sections of the Oromo by factions within the town in struggles for the throne from the 1820s led to the Haräri becoming clients to neighbours who were still overwhelmingly animist herders little concerned with the commerce on which the townsmen's prosperity depended and little attracted to the titles and Muslim insignia with which the amirs rewarded those of the cultivating Oromo minority who paid taxes and rents in grain and supplied the town with other foodstuffs and its market with crops for export.

Though denigrated in the town's traditions, Amir Muhammad ibn Ali began the systematic proselytization of the surrounding Oromo and sought to induce more of them to cultivate crops for sale. Conversion and farming for the town's market, along with the appointment from the town of officials to replace the Oromo's elected officers, were the means by which, during the Turco-Egyptian occupation (1875–85), rulers with greater military resources obliged the confederation of the four great Oromo clans around the town (the Afran-Qallu) to adopt a way of life more in harmony with the interests of the townsmen. Despite the conquest of Harär and the surrounding Oromo and Somali by non-urban, Christian Ethiopians in the brief reign of Muhammad Ali's son, Amir Abdallahi (1885–7), the Islamic and mercantile legacy of the town was deeply enough rooted by then to flourish among the Afran-Qallu and to distinguish them, like the Haräri themselves, from their conquerors.
Confrontation over Kenya: the Colonial Office and its Critics 1918–1940
Authors: Wylie Diana
Published: January 2009

Between the world wars, Colonial Office decisions regarding Kenya were subject to two opposed pressures: while the settlers wrestled with officials for greater control of their own affairs, a body of pro-African reformers loudly protested every concession and lobbied for equal rights and an end to the colour bar. This humanitarian lobby was largely the creation of two former colonial servants, Dr Norman Leys and W. McGregor Ross. Working mainly through the Labour Party, these men broadcast their social democratic ethics and demonstrated that the colony's political economy was badly weighted against African progress. They were the precursors of a more full-bodied socialist approach to colonial reform which during World War Two began to permeate the imperial bureaucracy. Until African initiative became a major determinant of Colonial Office policy in the early 1950s, these critics, with their colleagues in religious and humanitarian groups, were able to hold the front against settler self-government in a few indirect ways. Their allegations that Africans had been unjustly deprived of land and that they received far less in services than they paid in taxes were officially corroborated by command papers in the thirties. By creating a body of pro-African opinion which could exert political pressure on the Colonial Office they discouraged official plans to surrender responsible government to the settlers. Their direct impact on the Colonial Office was simply to alienate officials. Records of the confrontations between these reformers and Whitehall reveal that during this period Colonial Office officials were not only powerless to initiate reform. They were also, with few exceptions, uninterested in reforming the colony's political economy.
Labour in Commercial Agriculture in Ghana in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Authors: Sutton Inez
Published: January 2009

This paper attempts to gather together information on agricultural labour in the production of cash crops in Ghana. The transition from slave and other bonded labour in the nineteenth century to wage labour in the twentieth is explored. The nature of agricultural labour in palm oil is compared to that in the production of subsequent exports, such as rubber (produced primarily on plantations) and cocoa (produced on Ghanaian-owned smallholdings). The questions of conditions of service, recruitment and sources of labour are considered historically. The preference of workers for agricultural labour is discussed, and compared to recruitment for mining and other industry.
Accommodating Imperialism: the Compromise of the Settler State in Southern Rhodesia, 1923–1929
Authors: Phimister Ian
Published: January 2009

Although Southern Rhodesia's settler minority won responsible government from Britain in 1923, it was on terms circumscribed by the interests of metropolitan accumulation. As the dependent partner, Southern Rhodesia was obliged to accept constitutional provisions seeking to guard against initiatives which might disturb that process. Consequently, the settler state found itself hamstrung when it tried to gain some say over how the railway system operated. It was even less successful when it turned its attention to base mineral mining, where a handful of large companies did pretty much as they pleased. Efforts to find overseas markets for cattle and tobacco were also unsatisfactory. Neither the state nor settler producers could obtain the terms they wanted. Accumulation proceeded on terrain designed and dominated by imperialism.
Mass Movements and the Petty Bourgeoisie: the Social Origins of ICU Leadership, 1924–1929
Authors: Bradford Helen
Published: January 2009

Radical historians criticizing leaders of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union have focused on their petty bourgeois origins. This article argues that although most organizers of the later 1920s did not derive from the working class, neither were they able to base themselves securely within the petty bourgeoisie. Instead, like lower-middle-class Africans in general, they were being forced ever further from the white bourgeoisie and ever closer to the black masses. This was apparent in all spheres of life – economic, political, cultural, social and ideological – and was also increasingly evident in protest. As racially oppressed men and women subject to proletarianization and engaged in struggle, ICU leaders do not fit neatly into schemas which stress the bourgeois nature of the petty bourgeoisie.
Gender and Innovation: Farming, Cooking and Palm Processing in the Ngwa Region, South-Eastern Nigeria, 1900–1930
Authors: Martin Susan
Published: January 2009

Three main forms of agrarian change are shown to have occurred in the Ngwa region during the period covered in this article. The first was the adoption of a new hand-processing method for palm oil, which can be seen as a response to growing pressures on female labour resources as Ngwa farmers increased their export production of palm oil and kernels. The second was the adoption of cassava by women. This increased their workloads but helped them to fill a hungry-season gap in local food supplies. It formed part of a long-term trend of diversification within Ngwa agriculture. Finally, men began helping with cassava processing. Like their earlier entry into palm-oil processing, this move reflected not only a growing pressure on female labour resources but also a need for men to participate in processing if they were to claim a share of the saleable product. In the concluding sections of the article, gender relations are shown to have influenced farmers' patterns of saving and investment. An awareness of gender is seen to be relevant when considering both the issue of mechanisation and the history of other kinds of agrarian change.
The East African Sisal Industry, 1929–1949: The Marketing of a Colonial Commodity During Depression and War
Authors: Westcott Nicholas
Published: January 2009

Sisal growing spread rapidly in East Africa during the 1920s and 1930s to become one of the most important export crops in both Kenya and Tanganyika. The sisal industry nevertheless suffered severely from the low prices and erratic commodity markets which characterized the depression. Producers blamed the merchants and merchants blamed the market, but the sisal growers began increasingly to look for ways to bring marketing under their own control in the hope of securing a better return. During the Second World War, state control over the sisal trade enabled producers, through their powerful growers' associations, to exert a greater influence over marketing than ever before. They used this and the dramatic wartime change in market conditions, firstly, to improve the price paid them by the Ministry of Supply and, secondly, to try to consolidate their control over marketing after the war when government purchase ended. In this way they were actively supported by the Colonial Office but vigorously opposed by the London-based merchants and their client growers in East Africa. After a long struggle the independent producers failed to gain the complete control they wanted, but nevertheless considerably strengthened their own hand and reversed a trend towards greater metropolitan control over the sisal industry which had developed during the thirties. Producers could not single-handedly stabilize the market for their commodity, but through concerted action they were able to improve their return from it. The study raises questions about the assumptions behind both liberal and Marxist interpretations of imperial trade and shows that in the case of one of East Africa's most important exports relations between producers and traders were more complex than has been assumed.
Conflict and Power in Nineteenth-Century Namibia
Authors: Lau Brigitte
Published: January 2009

In explaining how one Oorlam group, the Afrikaners, lost their hegemony in Namaland in the 1860s, this article examines the impact on this region of Oorlam migrations, trade with the Cape and the advent of Christian missionaries. The kinship-based social organization of Nama pastoralists was largely replaced by the ‘commando’ organization, introduced by the Oorlams. By the 1850s, production throughout Namaland was geared less to subsistence than to the demands of Cape traders for cattle, skins and ivory. Raiding and hunting, with imported guns and horses, supplanted local traditions of good husbandry. While foreign traders made large profits, commando groups were locked into a cycle of predatory and competitive expansion. By the early 1860s, such conflict had polarised; the Afrikaners and their allies (including Herero client-chiefs) confronted several Nama/Oorlam chiefs and an army raised by a Cape trader, Andersson. The ensuing battles were not, as has been claimed, a Herero ‘war of liberation’; instead, they marked the replacement of Afrikaner by European hegemony; the country was freer than ever before to be controlled by agents of merchant capital and colonialism.
Patterning in Recent Radiocarbon Dates from Southern Africa as a Reflection of Prehistoric Settlement and Interaction
Authors: Parkington John , Hall Martin
Published: January 2009

Radiocarbon dates published by southern African archaeologists since the last review in this journal (in 1980) illustrate an increasingly complex record of population movement and interaction. Substantial gaps in the distributions of dates reflect the ebb and flow of people in response to changing environmental and social circumstances. More interesting perhaps is the range of intergroup relations now emerging from the last two millennia with the appearance of pastoralists and agriculturalists. Radiocarbon dates, taken along with spatial and formal patterns in the archaeological record, show clearly that the distributions between hunters, herders and farmers and between Stone Age and Iron Age communities were blurred and flexible.
Family Strategies in Nineteenth-Century Cabinda
Authors: Martin Phyllis M.
Published: January 2009

In the nineteenth century, the entrenched power of three Cabindan families, Nsambo, Npuna and Nkata Kolombo, was challenged by the rise of the Franques. The dominant figure, Francisco Franque, amassed wealth through a close alliance with Brazilian slave traders and through freighting goods and passengers in ‘coasting’ vessels which were locally built. At the same time he invested in a large household and attracted to his village dependents who provided labour and armed support for the expansion of his territorial base. Beyond the village, Franque, like other ‘big men’ at Cabinda, depended on an alliance with kinsmen for the defence of family interests. In the last quarter of the century, the Franques were weakened by the end of the slave trade, by disputes over inheritance rights, following the death of Francisco Franque, by the challenge of Manuel José Puna and by the emigration of junior family members in search of employment in the colonial economy of Angola and neighbouring territories. After 1885, under Portuguese colonial rule, the household was no longer a principal unit of production and family cohesion was no longer relevant. European settlers and companies moved into prime land and the emigration of workers, including women, intensified in the face of deteriorating economic conditions. Some individuals continued to have access to privilege, as far as that was possible in Angolan colonial society, through education. At Cabinda, the Portuguese authorities gave at least nominal recognition to some senior family members, for example at official celebrations. The name of the old families lived on through prominent individuals although their collective power and influence had been drastically undermined.
The Emergence of Capitalist Relations in South Asante Cocoa-Farming, C. 1916–33
Authors: Austin Gareth
Published: January 2009

The notion of capitalist relations in Ghanaian cocoa-farming is familiar, yet their development has been relatively little studied. In Amansie district, Asante, capitalist relations of production developed as a result rather than as a cause of the cocoa ‘take-off’, c. 1900–16. This paper examines their emergence, which occurred largely during the subsequent period of much slower growth and generally lower prices. The introduction and spread of regular wage-labour, the widening and deepening burden of rent on ‘stranger’ cocoa farms, the proliferation of ‘advances’, and the introduction of farm mortgaging are described, together with the accompanying decline of slavery, pawning, and other non-wage forms of labour. Colonial officials ineffectually deplored the growth of money-lending and, to a lesser extent, that of wage-labour. From the mid-1930s, however, the tendency towards greater separation of labour from control of the farm was partly reversed by a new insistence by northern labourers on the replacement of annual wage contracts by a managerial form of share-cropping. This demand was sustained against the opposition of farmowners and despite persistent unemployment, an achievement made possible by the migrants continued foothold in subsistence agriculture in their home areas. This case of migrant labourers successfully challenging the extension of wage relations raises questions concerning the relationships between commercial agriculture and ‘precapitalist’ social relations of production in Africa generally.
The Adoption of Autarky in Imperial Madagascar, 1820–1835
Authors: Campbell Gwyn
Published: January 2009

Traditionally, historians have viewed Queen Ranavalona I as being responsible for inaugurating an autarkic policy in Madagascar. Her expulsion of most foreigners from the country in 1835 is seen primarily as a reflection of her conservative and xenophobic attitudes. In this she is contrasted with her predecessor, Radama I, who is viewed as an enlightened and progressive monarch who, through wise domestic policies and an alliance with the British on Mauritius from 1817, built up an economically sound and prosperous empire. This paper challenges the traditional interpretation, arguing that in fact the Merina economy was in a dire condition from the second decade of the nineteenth century because the slave exports upon which it heavily depended were severely restricted in consequence of the British takeover of the Mascarenes. The subsequent alliance between Britain and Imerina totally prohibited slave exports. However, Radama I looked to Mauritius and British aid to promote legitimate exports and to help impose Merina rule over all Madagascar. Autarkic policies were initiated by Radama I in 1825–6 as a reaction against the failure of the British alliance to produce the anticipated results, and against the free trade imperialism that accompanied it. Convinced by 1825 that the Mauritius government meant to subordinate Imerina both economically and politically to British imperial interests, he reneged on the British treaty and adopted a policy designed to promote rapid economic growth within an independent island empire. Ranavalona I, far from implementing irrational and xenophobic policies, extended her predecessor's autarkic policies in a rational and systematic manner, and for precisely the same ends.
The Political Organization of Traditional Gold Mining: the Western Loby,c. 1850 toc. 1910
Authors: Perinbam Marie
Published: January 2009

Gold production in the Loby region to the west of the Black Volta in the precolonial period was exclusively in the hands of lineages grouped in largely autonomous little towns, 118 in the area under study, of which Jebugu was the largest. The various peoples were a mixture of Voltaïc language speakers, who formed the majority, with Mande speakers linked to the wider Mande world. Government was not centralized, but operated at three levels of lineage organization. At the first, Level I,sukulaor units of residence for each self-governing kin group joined together as the wards of each town, under a resident chief. At Level II, each kin group in eachsukulacame under the authority of the head of its lineage, who lived in one of the larger, ‘chiefly’ towns perhaps several days' journey away. At Level III, this lineage organization for the Mande speakers was linked to the Mande-Jula capitals outside the Loby region, at Kong, Bonduku, Bobojulasso and Buna. So far as gold was concerned, this three-layered political system was a commercial organization which brought producers and distributors together in response to market demands. Voltaïc-speaking producers at Level I were linked through the lineages to Voltaïc and Mande-speaking distributors at Level II; while both producers and distributors on these levels were collectively linked to the Mande-speaking distributors on Level III, who connected the region with the outside world. The control of distributors over producers was indirect, and exercised solely through the market. This picture from the nineteenth century of fiercely independent gold miners, with traditional skills, beliefs and rights, operating only in the absence of central government, confirms accounts of gold production in the western Sudan dating from the Middle Ages, and offers a valuable case for study.

The picture is supplemented and enhanced by what happened after the arrival of the French in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and the changes they introduced in the political organization of the Loby region in 1898. The evidence shows that, until the end of World War I, Loby gold production remained largely in the hands of traditional miners, who retained their links with the old commercial-political lineage system, which continued to market the bulk of the Loby gold. The influence of the colonial state, which for all practical purposes must have been perceived as none other than a fourth political level imposed above the existing three, was itself indirect, and of a familiar kind. In response to an increased demand for gold on the coast, Loby producers raised both their output and their sales, demonstrating the effectiveness of their traditional organization.
The Renovation of Custom in Colonial Kenya: the 1932 Generation Succession Ceremonies in Embu
Authors: Ambler Charles H.
Published: January 2009

The role of custom and tradition in the development of colonial rule in Africa has received little attention from scholars. Historians of colonial Kenya, particularly, have focused on the powerful transforming impact of the colonial state and economy and on the growth of opposition movements; they have had little to say about the processes through which previously autonomous societies negotiated their incorporation into the Kenya state. Yet by the 1920s and 1930s that state had acquired a substantial degree of popular legitimacy. ‘Customary’ institutions and rituals played an important part in the development of that legitimacy. This essay examines the institution of the genealogically defined ‘generation’ in the Embu-Mbeere area in colonial central Kenya and the ceremonies held in 1932 to mark the transition from one generation to the next. These ceremonies attracted considerable attention because they provided the occasion for the proclamation of rules, supported by the British administration, relating to the bitter issue of genital mutilation in female initiation. But this was not a crude case of the manipulation of custom. The attempt to reform female initiation was part of a larger process, of which the rituals of generation succession were elements, of building the ideological basis of a new ‘tribe’ in a society previously characterized by local autonomy and collective authority. As investigation of the succession ceremonies makes clear, the notion of a tribe dominated by appointed chiefs and identified with an exclusive territory lay at the centre of this ideology.
The Spectre of a Second Chilembwe: Government, Missions, and Social Control in Wartime Northern Rhodesia, 1914–18
Authors: Yorke Edmund
Published: January 2009

The 1915 Chilembwe Rising in Nyasaland had important political repercussions in the neighbouring colonial territory of Northern Rhodesia, where fears were raised among the Administration about the activities of African school teachers attached to the thirteen mission denominations then operating in the territory. These anxieties were heightened for the understaffed and poorly-financed British South Africa Company administration by the impact of the war-time conscription of Africans and the additional demands made by war-time conditions upon the resources of the Company. Reports of anti-war activities by African teachers attached to the Dutch Reformed Church in the East Luangwa District convinced both the Northern Rhodesian and the imperial authorities of the imperative need to strictly regulate the activities of its black mission-educated elite. Suspected dissident teachers were arrested, while others were diverted into military service where their activities could be more closely supervised. With the 1918 Native Schools Proclamation, the Administration laid down strict regulations for the appointment and employment of African mission teachers. The proclamation aroused the vehement opposition of the mission societies who, confronted by war-time European staff shortages, had come to rely heavily upon their African teachers to maintain their educational work. The emergence in late 1918 of the patently anti-colonial Watch Tower movement, which incorporated many African mission employees within its leadership, weakened the opposition of the missions, and served to consolidate the administration's perception of the African teachers as a dangerous subversive force. Strong measures were implemented by the administration soon after the end of the war, with large numbers of Watch Tower adherents being arrested and detained.
Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Remaking Kenya
Authors: Lonsdale John
Published: January 2009

This article explores the imaginative meanings of Mau Mau which white and black protagonists invented out of their fearful ambitions for the future of Kenya. Within the general assumptions of white superiority and the need to destroy Mau Mau savagery, four mutually incompatible European myths can be picked out. Conservatives argued that Mau Mau revealed the latent terror-laden primitivism in all Africans, the Kikuyu especially. This reversion had been stimulated by the dangerous freedoms offered by too liberal a colonialism in the post-war world. The answer must be an unapologetic reimposition of white power. Liberals blamed Mau Mau on the bewildering psychological effects of rapid social change and the collapse of orderly tribal values. Africans must be brought more decisively through the period of transition from tribal conformity to competitive society, to play a full part in a multi-racial future dominated by western culture; this would entail radical economic reforms. Christian fundamentalists saw Mau Mau as collective sin, to be overcome by individual confession and conversion. More has been read into their rehabilitating mission in the detention camps than is warranted, since they had no theology of power. The whites with decisive power were the British military. They saw the emergency as a political war which needed political solutions, for which repression, social improvement and spiritual revival were no substitute. They, and the ‘hard-core’ Mau Mau detainees at Hola camp who thought like them, cleared the way for the peace. This was won not by any of the white constructions of the rising but by Kenyatta's Kikuyu political thought, which inspired yet criminalised Mau Mau.
Suppression of the Slave Trade in the Nigerian Emirates
Authors: Ubah C. N.
Published: January 2009

This article has concentrated on the efforts made by the British colonial regime in Northern Nigeria to suppress the slave trade. It has shown that the slave trade disappeared gradually, in three phases. The first extended from 1900 to about 1908, the second lasted until about 1919, while the third continued until the disappearance of the slave trade at the end of the 1930s. The task of suppression was carried out by a variety of means: military, including the patroling of trade routes and policing of strategic locations; political and diplomatic, involving co-operation with other colonial powers in the area; and judicial, including arrest, prosecution and punishment of offenders. In all these efforts the colonial administration received assistance from the Native Authorities; by the third phase these Authorities and the Native Courts were the most active forces against slaving. The slave trade dealt to a very significant extent in children. In the environment in which the trade was conducted the dealers developed a range of tricks and subterfuges to evade detection by the law enforcement agencies. The long borders which the agencies had to patrol, the manpower problems which they faced, and the relative ease with which slaves could be obtained in times of adversity combined to make the struggle against slaving a protracted one. Time was not, however, on the side of the traders. Improvements in communications, a stronger administration, the growing effectiveness of patrols, and the deterrent effects of judicial action cut into and finally eliminated the slave trade.
Early Missionaries and the Ethnolinguistic Factor During the ‘Invention of Tribalism’ in Zimbabwe
Authors: Chimhundu Herbert
Published: January 2009

There is evidence from across the disciplines that at least some of the contemporary regional names of African tribes, dialects and languages are fairly recent inventions in historical terms. This article offers some evidence from Zimbabwe to show that missionary linguistic politics were an important factor in this process. The South African linguist Clement Doke was brought in to resolve conflicts about the orthography of Shona. His Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects (1931) shows how the language politics of the Christian denominations, which were also the factions within the umbrella organization the Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference, contributed quite significantly to the creation and promotion of Zezuru, Karanga and Manyika as the main groupings of dialects in the central area which Doke later accommodated in a unified orthography of a unified language that was given the name Shona. While vocabulary from Ndau was to be incorporated, words from the Korekore group in the north were to be discouraged, and Kalanga in the West was allowed to be subsumed under Ndebele.

Writing about sixty years later, Ranger focusses more closely on the Manyika and takes his discussion to the 1940s, but he also mentions that the Rhodesian Front government of the 1960s and 1970s deliberately incited tribalism between the Shona and the Ndebele, while at the same time magnifying the differences between the regional divisions of the Shona, which were, in turn, played against one another as constituent clans. It would appear then that, for the indigenous Africans, the price of Christianity, Western education and a new perception of language unity was the creation of regional ethnic identities that were at least potentially antagonistic and open to political manipulation.

Through many decades of rather unnecessary intellectual justification, and as a result of the collective colonial experience through the churches, the schools and the workplaces, these imposed identities, and the myths and sentiments that are associated with them, have become fixed in the collective mind of Africa, and the modern nation states of the continent now seem to be stuck with them. Missionaries played a very significant role in creating this scenario because they were mainly responsible for fixing the ethnolinguistic maps of the African colonies during the early phase of European occupation. To a significant degree, these maps have remained intact and have continued to influence African research scholarship.
The Production and Export of Hides and Skins in Colonial Northern Nigeria, 1900–1945
Authors: Adebayo A. G.
Published: January 2009

Despite the seeming abundance of writings on the topic, the depth and breadth of the British raw materials trade with Africa is yet to be fully appreciated. There are commodities, such as cassava starch, animal and dairy products and other less prominent crops, whose exploitation under colonial rule has not been studied; and, with regard to the organization of the export trade, the relationship between the colonial state and metropolitan (industrial and merchant) capital has not been adequately defined. This paper examines the organization of the production and export of hides and skins in colonial Northern Nigeria both to fill a gap in the literature on colonial economic history and to raise questions about the true position of the colonial state vis-à-vis metropolitan capital. Relying on primary source materials, it confirms the importance of hides and skins as a commodity of the pre-colonial caravan trade; and shows that, upon the establishment of British rule over Northern Nigeria, the volume of production and export increased, reaching new and unprecedented peaks during the world wars. Colonialism had a tremendous impact on the hides and skins industry of Northern Nigeria. The colonial state forced the producers to adopt new procedures in flaying, trimming and drying hides and skins, and extended rules of control of markets, minimum standards and compulsory inspection to the industry. In the enforcement of these rules, the state practised double standards, treating African producers and European merchant companies differently. Finally, on the strength of the evidence from the controversy over export duties and railway freight charges, the paper agrees that European merchants and industrialists had unlimited access to, and sometimes prevailed on, the colonial state; but argues that the latter had autonomy in the taking of crucial decisions affecting the economy and commerce of the colony.
The Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World, 1600–90: Estimates of Trends in Composition and Value
Authors: Van Den Boogaart Ernst
Published: January 2009

Extending the approach of D. Eltis and L. C. Jennings to the seventeenth century, the author takes estimates for the decades 1623–32 and 1680–90 as the starting points for his discussion of trends in the composition and value of the Atlantic imports and exports of Western Africa. Contrary to prevalent opinion, he argues that at least from 1600 onwards the value of slave exports was two to three times higher than that of commodity exports, as measured according to the prices in America and Europe. However, during most of the century more imports were bartered in the commodity trade than in the slave trade, since the trading margin in the latter sector was considerably higher than in the former. The different margins go some way to explaining why the Portuguese concentrated on the slave trade from Angola between 1600 and 1635, which they could carry on with fewer European imports and more effectively protect, while the more efficient Dutch merchants achieved primacy in the competitive commodity trade of West Africa. The different margins also meant a very uneven distribution of imports over coastal regions. Owing to the predominance of Akan gold in the commodity trade, the Gold Coast drew an estimated fifty per cent of all imports at the beginning of the century and still accounted for 34 per cent at the end. Owing to its predominance in the slave trade, West-Central Africa drew 25 per cent of all imports throughout the century. The few available data on the composition of imports suggest that there may have been a shift from metal goods to textiles and a marked increase of Asian textiles and cowries. From 1593 on the Dutch may have initiated a shift in the gross barter terms of trade in favour of the African merchants which spread from the Gold Coast to other areas when the North-west Europeans obtained the major share in the Atlantic slave trade.
Posthumous Questions for Karl Polanyi: Price Inflation in Pre-Colonial Dahomey
Authors: Law Robin
Published: January 2009

The article analyses the determination of prices in the pre-colonial West African kingdom of Dahomey, principally with relation to the domestic economy, on the basis of detailed analysis of contemporary documentation. The influential study of Dahomey by Karl Polanyi (1966) posited pervasive state control of both overseas trade and the domestic economy, including prices, which Polanyi argued were set according to traditional notions of equity or equivalence rather than responding to supply and demand. These hypothesized stable prices were held to be reflected in the long-term stability of the exchange value of the local currency of cowry shells, at least prior to the ‘Great Inflation’ caused by excessive European imports of these shells in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although his account of the state's control and management of economic matters was in many respects inaccurate or exaggerated, Polanyi was correct in asserting that prices were subject to state regulation. However, it is shown that prices were nevertheless liable to short-term fluctuations which reflected market conditions, and overall suffered a massive increase during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, comparable in scale to the nineteenth-century ‘Great Inflation’, and likewise reflecting the uncontrolled increase in the money supply through European imports of cowries. Although these two periods of inflation were separated by a period of relative price stability between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, this was not restricted to Dahomey and should also be attributed to the operation of market forces rather than to the effectiveness of Dahomian economic administration. State intervention was probably more successful in holding down the wages of some groups of workers than in managing prices. Polanyi's insistence on the ‘non-market’ character of the Dahomian domestic economy is clearly untenable.
Technology, Trade and ‘A Race of Native Capitalists’: The Krio Diaspora of West Africa and the Steamship, 1852–95
Authors: Lynn Martin
Published: January 2009

This article examines the impact of the introduction of the new technology of steam power into the West African trade in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the changes that the introduction of steampower was expected to lead to was the opening up of the trade to small-scale African traders such as the Krios. Many Krios did make use of the steamships to extend their trading activities and entered areas previously ignored. Many used the steamship services to develop a coastwise trade; others, particularly in the Niger Delta, used them to enter the export trade to Britain. Yet others pioneered the use of steam launches, particularly on the River Niger and along the Slave Coast. In time however, such Krios found their ability to utilize the opportunities provided by the steamships under assault, partly from the European traders' counter-attack and partly from the general depression in the West African trade – itself indirectly caused by the introduction of the steamship – that set in by the 1870s. By the end of the century the position of Krios in the export-import trade of West Africa was being severely squeezed, just as it was in other areas of West African life. For them, steam power did not prove to be the boon it had been anticipated as being.
The Birth of an African Private Epistolography, Echo Island 1862–1901
Authors: Spaulding Jay
Published: January 2009

This study examines the surviving private correspondence from Echo Island (Jazīrat Abū Ranāt, formerly Abranarti), a small nineteenth-century agricultural community in the Shāīquiyya country of the northern Sudan. The central question addressed is a discordance between the preoccupations of the letters and the concerns manifested in the considerably larger literature of contemporary legal records surviving from the same community, a clash that finds resonance in the familiar historiographical rivalry between advocates of culturally autonomous consciousness and partisans of material or socioeconomic determinisms. It is suggested that the private correspondence from Echo Island may best be interpreted as a new technique of bond management in the microsociological sense that arose and flourished in an age when the community found itself compelled to respond to a colonial setting vastly larger in scale than what had previously prevailed. The world of subjective ideas evidenced in the correspondence ignored, probably deliberately, most of the pressing immediate concerns of the community revealed in the contemporary legal documents; however, it opened a new ‘mode of communication,’ a conceptual terrain across which members of the elite exercised their virtuosity in mutual manipulations of status.
Selling the Iron for their Shackles: Wandala–Montagnard Interactions in Northern Cameroon
Authors: Maceachern Scott
Published: January 2009

The Muslim Wandala state controlled large areas of the plains south of Lake Chad between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries a.d. The Wandala also engaged in an extremely complex, and often hostile, set of relations with the inhabitants of the Mandara Mountains, which bordered their state to the south and closely adjoined successive Wandala capitals. These Wandala – montagnard relationships had diverse economic, ritual, political and military aspects. Their complexity appears to be due in large part to the fact that the Wandala and many of the montagnard groups share ethnic origins, and to the violent processes by which differentiation took place and the Wandala gained hegemony on the plains. These processes probably began with a Wandala use of trading advantages to gain access to the Kanuri market system and the subsequent use of products so obtained to expand their dominion.
The ‘House’ and Zulu Political Structure in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Kuper Adam
Published: January 2009

The rise of the Zulu power in the early nineteenth century has conventionally been treated as the outstanding example of a contemporary southern African process of ‘state-formation’, which was associated with revolutionary social changes. This paper advances an alternative view, that there were strong continuities with established forms of chieftaincy in the region, and in particular that the Zulu political system was based on a traditional, pan-Nguni homestead form of organization.

The Zulu homestead was divided into right and left sections, each with its own identity and destiny. This opposition was mapped into the layout of ordinary homesteads and royal settlements. It was carried through into the organization of regiments. The homestead and its segments provided both the geographical and the structural nodes of the society. The developmental cycle of the homestead ideally followed a set pattern, creating a fresh alignment of units in each generation. The points of segmentation were provided by the ‘houses’, constituted for each major wife and her designated heir. Each of these houses represented the impact, within the homestead, of relationships sealed by marriage with outside groups, whose leaders threw their weight behind particular factions in the political processes within the family.
Tsetse Visions: Narratives of Blood and Bugs in Colonial Northern Rhodesia, 1931–9
Authors: White Luise
Published: January 2009

This article looks at different kinds of historical sources – colonial science and African rumours – and argues that both can be used to reconstruct the history of changing colonial policies, and African responses to them, for tsetse and game control in the Northern Province of Northern Rhodesia in the 1930s. These sources and the arguments I have developed from them can be read as separate and distinct historical narratives, but nevertheless each articulates a specific relationship between African farmers, shifting cultivation and wild animals. Each history discloses a vision of how best to control a dreaded disease, and each history describes a separate and distinct landscape in which Africans, insects and wild animals might best live together. Moreover, each source reveals the close links between African ideas about the forcible extraction of vital fluids and European ideas about sleeping sickness, insect vectors and deforestation.
‘Our Strike’: Equality, Anticolonial Politics and the 1947–48 Railway Strike in French West Africa
Authors: Cooper Frederick
Published: January 2009

This essay is both a reinterpretation of the place of the French West African railway strike in labor history and part of an exploration of its effects on politics and political memory. This vast strike needs to be studied in railway depots from Senegal to the Ivory Coast. Historians need both to engage the fictional version of the strike in Ousmanne Sembene'sGod's Bits of Woodand avoid being caught up in it. Interviews in the key railway and union town of Thiès, Senegal, suggest that strike veterans want to distinguish an experience they regard as their own from the novelist's portrayal. They accept the heroic vision of the strike, but offer different interpretations of its relationship to family and community and suggest that its political implications include co-optation and betrayal as much as anticolonial solidarity. Interviews complement the reports of police spies as sources for the historian. The central irony of the strike is that it was sustained on the basis of railwaymen's integration into local communities but that its central demand took railwaymen into a professionally defined, nonracial category of railwayman. The strike thus needs to be situated in relation to French efforts to define a new imperialism for the post-war era and the government's inability to control the implications of its own actions and rhetoric. Negotiating with a new, young, politically aware railway union leadership in 1946 and 1947, officials were unwilling to defend the old racial wage scales, accepted in principle thecadre uniquedemanded by the union, but fought over the question of power – who was to decide the details that would give such a cadre meaning? The article analyzes the tension between the principles of nonracial equality and African community among the railwaymen and that between colonial power and notions of assimilation and development within the government. It examines the extent to which the strike remained a railway strike or spilled over into a wider and longer term question of proletarian solidarity and anticolonial mobilization.
João dos Santos Albasini (1876–1922): the Contradictions of Politics and Identity in Colonial Mozambique
Authors: Penvenne Jeanne Marie
Published: January 2009

This essay considers the life and career of the leading Mozambican intellectual of the early twentieth century, João dos Santos Albasini (1876–1922). A journalist and political activist, Albasini took advantage of the political space opened by Portugal's First Republic (1910–26) to challenge the articulation of colonial policy with respect to citizenship, land alienation, labor conscription and opportunities for education and economic participation. As a founding member of theGrêmio Africano, a Lourenço Marques social group and political lobby, he helped launch the group's newspapers,O Africano(1908–19) andO Brado Africano(1918–74). With theGrêmionewspapers as his vehicle, he sharply contrasted colonial and Republican ideals with the racism and injustice Mozambicans faced in the colonial capital of Lourenço Marques (today Maputo). The Portuguese deemed Albasini a worthy opponent, in part because of his ability to employ Portugal's most revered cultural symbols with an ironic twist.

The essay considers two sets of questions. The first set relates to the definition and analysis of issues Albasini highlighted and pursued. What was Albasini's political and social vision of possible choices within this seemingly fluid era? How does one recover and interpret Albasini's vision and style? Are their meaning and value to be found within the discourses of class struggle, ethnicity, assimilation and nationalism? To what extent did Albasini's vision shape contestation of political and social policy in colonial Mozambique in the critical first quarter of the twentieth century?

A second set of questions confronts Albasini's place in local society and his legacy. Who comprised theGrêmio Africano?What was it about João dos Santos Albasini that inspiredGrêmiomembers and subsequent generations of Mozambicans to view him as a beacon? What did the rest of the local population think about Albasini, during his lifetime and after? What was his impact, and how did it relate to the broader issues of politics, historical agency and identity in early twentieth-century southern African history?
A New Look at the History of Pate
Authors: Chittick Neville
Published: January 2009

This article, based on a critical examination of the Pate Chronicle in the light of archaeological and external historical evidence bearing on the subject, presents a case for a revision of the early history of the town. It maintains that Pate was the latest of the settlements to rise to importance in the region, being of little importance before the sixteenth century, and preceded by other city-statés, the earliest of which was Manda. The origins of Pate do not go back before the fourteenth century; the first dynasty there, the Batawi, was ruling up to around the seventeenth century, after which the Nabahani took over the sultanate.