bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Saro in the political life of early Port Harcourt, 1913–49
Authors: Dixon-Fyle Mac
Published: January 2009

The western-educated Krio population of Sierra Leone participated in British imperial activity along the West African coast in the nineteenth century. Facing a far more complex ethnic configuration than their counterparts in Yorubaland, the Sierra Leoneans (Saro) in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, acquired much influence through the manipulation of class and ethnic relations. Though most Saro here had a modest education and were working-class, a few came to form the cream of the petty-bourgeoisie and were active in economic life and city administration. Potts-Johnson, arguably their most famous member, developed a flair for operating in his middle-class world, and also in the cultural orbit of the local and immigrant working-class. I. B. Johnson, another prominent Saro, lacked this quality. Though presenting a homogenous ethnic front, celebrated in the Sierra Leone Union and in church activity, Saro society was sharply polarized on class lines, a weakness not to be lost on the numerically superior and ambitious indigenous population. Faced with a choice, the indigenes opted for the avuncular Potts-Johnson, for whom they felt a greater social affinity than for the more distant I. B. Johnson. After Potts-Johnson, however, no Saro was to be allowed scope to develop a similar appeal.
From Colonisation to Avénement: Henri Brunschwig and the History of Afrique Noire
Authors: Hargreaves John
Published: January 2009

Henri Brunschwig (1904–1989) began his career as a notable historian of Germany but became an influential pioneer of African studies in France, first at the Ecole Nationale de la France d'Outre-Mer (1948–60) and thereafter at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. His own research ranged from Brazza's role in the French occupation of equatorial Africa to the part played by Africans in establishing and sustaining French colonial rule. His lucid and original works of synthesis helped greatly to bring an evolving body of knowledge about the African past into the frame of modern world history. His emphasis both on rigorous standards of source-criticism and on the need for broad horizons in time and space continues to exercise authority over historians in France, Africa, and beyond.
‘From the Best Authorities’: The Mountains of Kong in the Cartography of West Africa
Authors: Bassett Thomas J. , Porter Philip W.
Published: January 2009

This study goes beyond the ‘first and last appearance’ approach of cartographic historians to examine the social contexts in which the Kong Mountains were first depicted in and then eliminated from nineteenth-century maps of Africa. This history shows that the conventional periodization of the history of cartography into ‘decorative’ and ‘scientific’ phases is greatly exaggerated. We trace the mountains' origins to the geographer James Rennell and show how their purported existence served to support his arguments on the course of the Niger River at the turn of the nineteenth century. The enduring depiction of the Kong Mountains throughout the century illustrates the authoritative power of maps. This authority is based on the public's belief that cartographers are guided by an ethic of accuracy and are applying scientific procedures in mapmaking. Despite doubts about the existence of this mountain chain, the ‘extraordinary authority’ of maps helped to perpetuate an erroneous spatial image of West Africa until Binger's famous expedition in the late 1880s. With the publication of his travels and maps, Binger became the new authority on West African geography. His work altered the subsequent cartography of the region and substantially contributed to French empire-building.
‘The Character and Objects of Chaka’: A Reconsideration of the Making of Shaka as ‘Mfecane’ Motor
Authors: Hamilton Carolyn Anne
Published: January 2009

An important aspect of Julian Cobbing's radical critique of the ‘mfecane’ as the pivotal concept of the history of southern Africa in the nineteenth century is the claim that the image of Shaka-as-monster was an ‘alibi’ invented by Europeans in the 1820s to mask their slaving activities. Reconsideration of this claim reveals that it is based on the misuse of evidence and inadequate periodisation of the earliest representations of Shaka. Examination of the image of Shaka promoted by the Port Natal traders in the 1820s reveals that, with two highly specific exceptions which were not influential at the time, the traders' presentation of Shaka was that of a benign patron. It was only in 1829, after the Zulu king's death, that European representations began to include a range of ‘atrocity’ stories regarding Shaka. These were not invented by whites but drew on images of Shaka already in place amongst the African communities of southern Africa. These contemporary African views of Shaka and the ways in which they gave shape to the European versions are ignored by Cobbing, and this contributes to his failure to come to grips with past myth-making processes in their fullest complexity.
Coal, Crisis, and Class Struggle: Wankie Colliery, 1918–22
Authors: Phimister Ian
Published: January 2009

Despite its pivotal economic position in Central Africa, the history of Zimbabwe's Wankie Colliery has scarcely been explored. Although the historical pattern of capital accumulation and class struggle on the colliery has yet to be traced in any detail, this article suggests that a useful starting point is the protracted labour crisis which convulsed the colliery in 1918. Attempts to expand output through intensified pressure on a dwindling supply of black labour soon established a vicious circle in which workers' health deteriorated rapidly. Hundreds of black miners were incapacitated by ‘tropical ulcers’. An ensuing commission of enquiry exonerated the colliery's management of any blame, but it is nonetheless significant for the light it casts on the British South Africa Company Administration's narrow conception of its role after the Privy Council decision depriving it of ownership of ‘unalienated’ land in the Colony. The article's last section examines the conflict between the colliery's management and organized white workers in the context of the racial division of labour. In doing so, it emphasizes the structural vulnerability of white labour in the colonial era.
Settler Farmers and Coerced African Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1936–46
Authors: Johnson David
Published: January 2009

This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on the socio-economic impact of the Second World War on Africa. The focus is on the inter-relationship between the state, settler farmers and African labour in Southern Rhodesia. The war presented an opportunity for undercapitalized European farmers to enlist state support in securing African labour that they could not obtain through market forces alone. Historically, these farmers depended heavily on a supply of cheap labour from the Native Reserves and from the colonies to the north, especially Nyasaland. But the opportunities for Africans to sell their labour in other sectors of the Southern Rhodesian economy and in the Union of South Africa, or to at least determine the timing and length of their entry into wage employment, meant that settler farmers seldom obtained an adequate supply of labour. Demands for increased food production, a wartime agrarian crisis and a diminished supply of external labour all combined to ensure that the state capitulated in the face of requests for Africans to be conscripted into working for Europeans as a contribution to the Imperial war effort. The resulting mobilization of thousands of African labourers under the Compulsory Native Labour Act (1942), which emerged as the prize of the farmers' campaign for coerced labour, corrects earlier scholarship on Southern Rhodesia which asserted that state intervention in securing labour supplies was of importance only up to the 1920s. The paper also shows that Africans did not remain passive before measures aimed at coercing them into producing value for settler farmers.
On Mentally Mapping Greater Asante: A Study of Time and Motion
Authors: Wilks Ivor
Published: January 2009

This paper examines the way in which Greater Asante was ‘mentally mapped’, thereby enabling government to regulate the movement of couriers, and others, along the great-roads. Lacking clocks, speed was reckoned anthropometrically, by reference todɔn: rhythmic walking at a normal pace. Computing this against the determinate parts of the day, from dawn to dusk, on which travel (as opposed to eating and resting) was customary, it became possible to estimate the location of a courier at a given point in time. Greater Asante was ‘mapped’ as a circle, the diameter of which was the Asante month of forty-two days (of travel). The circle embraced the most distant of the territories over which the Asantehene claimed authority; these were in fact more or less twenty days from the capital. That it also embraced, in the south, lands under the sea, was of no practical relevance. Superimposing the reckoning of travel times on the matrix of the forty-two days ‘imperium’, the Asante government was able to establish a (‘Monday’) timetable for the conduct of business. The record shows that it worked remarkably well. An understanding of ‘traditional’ practices and procedures has much importance for the understanding of ‘modern’ ones: the past is encapsulated in the present.
The Makings of a Tribe: Bondei Identities and Histories
Authors: Willis Justin
Published: January 2009

Since the mid-nineteenth century, there have been several changes in the paradigms of ethnic identity in the area around the modern town of Muheza in north-eastern Tanzania. Such differing tribal schemas have been correlated with differing presentations of history, and today several varying ideas of identity and history coexist. This correlation, and coexistence, suggest that all discussions of history and identity are negotiations, in which individuals attempt to present ethnicity and history in ways which they perceive as consonant with their own interests: the creation of identity, and of history, is thus a process in which all are involved. In such discussions, both immediate situation and wider social context influence how people talk about their ethnic identity and their history, so that political and economic changes have had considerable effect in reshaping identity, and thus history, in the area. The relationship between identity and interest is, however, a two-way process. Peoples' own previous understanding of identity and history may in turn affect their perception of their interests, so that the process is recursive, reacting back on itself: people are able to redefine themselves according to their interests, but this redefinition builds on previous constructs of history and identity.
Elder Dempster and the Shipping Trade of Nigeria during the First World War
Authors: Olukoju Ayodeji
Published: January 2009

Shipping, a vital element of maritime trade, has not hitherto received adequate attention in studies on Nigerian colonial economic history. This article therefore fills a gap in the literature by studying aspects of the shipping trade during the First World War, when shipping was indispensable for maintaining economic links between Britain and her colonies. Shipping in Nigeria revolved around the practices of the Elder Dempster Shipping Company, which enjoyed an undisputed monopoly of the trade throughout the war, and the reactions of the colonial government and private shippers to them.

Scarcity of tonnage and higher freights were the chief features of shipping during the war. The allocation of shipping space, however, ranged the colonial government, the shipping company and the Combine (that is, big European) firms against non-Combine shippers. While Elder Dempster's allocation formula suited the government and the Combine firms, it was considered inequitable by other shippers. This arrangement reflected the community of interests between the colonial state and Big Business vis-à-vis smaller traders.

The interests of the government and Elder Dempster were, however, incompatible on the question of ocean freights. Thus, high freights which boosted the firm's turnover were detrimental to the economic interests of the colonial state. The company's monopoly and the non-intervention of the Imperial government enabled it to have its way. Consequently, despite losses at sea, requisition by the Imperial government and rising running costs, Elder Dempster conducted a profitable business during the war. In achieving this, it also served the Imperial interest by effectively linking Nigeria with the metropolis.

On the whole, wartime shipping conditions, particularly Elder Dempster's practical monopoly, were a departure from pre-war trends. There was a gradual return to normality in the early 1920s but the firm remained pre-eminent in the West African shipping trade.
We Are What We Eat: Ancient Agriculture Between the Great Lakes
Authors: Schoenbrun David L.
Published: January 2009

A history of food systems in Africa's Great Lakes region is presented using mostly historical linguistic sources, with help from archaeology and paleoecology. The paper moves beyond understanding the causes and consequences of iron-working as the most important feature of the period betweenc. 1000b.c.andc.a.d.500. I argue that a history of agriculture both gives context to changes in technology and introduces powerful new explanations for historical processes of settlement and occupational specialization that took place.

Between 1000b.c.and 500b.c., in the Great Lakes region, speakers of three of Africa's four major language families practiced distinguishable food-producing systems. Two groups, Central Sudanian and Sog Eastern Sudanian, depended mainly on growing cereals and raising livestock for their sustenance. The third group, the Tale Southern Cushites, gave decidedly greater emphasis to cattle but probably also grew grains. A fourth group, the Great Lakes Bantu, grew root crops, fished and raised cattle and grain. They inherited much of their knowledge of these techniques, other than cattle-raising, from earlier Eastern Highlands Bantu-speakers. But they incorporated cattle and some grains through longstanding contacts with the two Sudanian and the Southern Cushitic communities. The eclectic food system they thus created allowed them to carry their unified, complex food-producing system throughout the wide variety of environments that they encountered in the Lakes region. Afterc.a.d.200 descendants of the Great Lakes Bantu refined this synthesis; they emphasized livestock raising inland from Lake Victoria, and mixed farmers spread throughout the Kivu Rift. Technological, demographic, ecological and sociological explanations of the technological evidence are offered.
Love for Three Oranges, or, The Askiya's Dilemma: The Askiya, al-Maghīlī and Timbuktu, c. 1500 a.d.
Authors: Blum Charlotte , Fisher Humphrey
Published: January 2009

The authors argue that, during the crucial decade of Songhay history which followed the death of Sunni Ali, Askiya Muḥammad pursued, sometimes quickly and sometimes hesitantly, three distinct ‘Islamic’ options, in contrast to the ‘received tradition’ which sharply differentiates between the reign of the last sunni's and the first of the askiyas. Askiya Muḥammad began his reign in alliance with the court clerics of the imperial capital in Gao, who were accustomed to ‘mixing’ Islamic and traditional practices. After his pilgrimage he sought out the advice of the radical Muslim scholar from the Sahara, al-Maghīlī. The strong positions of al-Maghīlī against the Jews and also the Musūfah, a Berber group strongly associated with Timbuktu, led the askiya to his third choice, the urbane and tolerant Islamic practice of the famous center of Muslim scholarship. The authors advance this as a new interpretation of predominantly old available evidence, and they suggest, on the one hand, the complexity and multiplicity of Islamic practices in the Niger Buckle region around 1500 A.D. and, on the other, the necessity of choice among the three options.
The Horse and Slave Trade Between the Western Sahara and Senegambia
Authors: Webb James L. A.
Published: January 2009

Following the late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cavalry revolution in Senegambia, the horse and slave trade became a major sector of the desert-edge political economy. Black African states imported horses from North Africa and the western Sahara in exchange for slaves. Over time, under conditions of increasing aridity, the zone of desert horse-breeding was pushed south, and through crossbreeding with the small disease-resistant indigenous horses of the savanna, new breeds were created. Although the savanna remained an epidemiologically hostile environment for the larger and more desirable horses bred in North Africa, in the high desert and along the desert fringe, Black African states continued to import horses in exchange for slaves into the period of French colonial rule.

The evidence assembled on the horse trade into northern Senegambia raises the difficult issue of the relative quantitative importance of the Atlantic and Saharan/North African slave trades and calls into question the assumption that the Atlantic slave trade was the larger of the two. Most available evidence concerns the Wolof kingdoms of Waalo and Kajoor. It suggests that the volume of slaves exported north into the desert from Waalo in the late seventeenth century was probably at least ten times as great as the volume of slaves exported into the Atlantic slave trade. For both Waalo and Kajoor, this ratio declined during the first half of the eighteenth century as slave exports into the Atlantic markets increased. The second half of the eighteenth century saw an increase in predatory raiding from the desert which produced an additional flow of north-bound slaves. For Waalo and Kajoor – and probably for the other Black African states of northern Senegambia – the flow of slaves north to Saharan and North African markets probably remained the larger of the two export volumes over the eighteenth century. This northward flow of slaves continued strong after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and was only shut down with the imposition of French colonial authority.
Sebatakgomo and the Zoutpansberg Balemi Association: The ANC, the Communist Party and Rural Organization, 1939–55
Authors: Delius Peter
Published: January 2009

Sebatakgomo — a migrant worker-based movement – was founded in 1954 and went on to play a central role in the Sekhukhuneland Revolt of 1958. It was launched from within the ANC, and a number of its leaders were also members of the Communist Party. This article explores the roles played by these wider political movements in the formation of Sebatakgomo. It argues that, while ANC networks and individuals within its central leadership made an important contribution, the rural presence of the ANC was fragmentary in this period and that its central organizational strategies had been effectively checkmated by an increasingly authoritarian state. It suggests that the crucial initial impetus and strategy behind Sebatakgomo came from Communist Party members living in a migrant world and trained in the Party's history and methods of organization. In particular Alpheus Maliba, who led the Zoutpansberg Balemi Association in the northern Transvaal in the early 1940s, provided a mentor and model for Flag Boshielo, who was the driving force in the establishment of Sebatakgomo. The article also suggests that the history of Sebatakgomo provides an example of the impact of Communist Party activists in transforming the ANC into a mass organization in the early 1950s.
Textile Production and Gender in the Sokoto Caliphate
Authors: Kriger Colleen
Published: January 2009

Men and women, trained in the occupations of spinner, weaver, dyer, tailor and embroiderer, manufactured the renowned textile products of the Sokoto Caliphate, a nineteenth-century state in the central Sudan region of West Africa. The numerical distributions of men and women within these occupations were uneven, but not in accordance with the pattern described most frequently in the literature. Offered here is another, more detailed view of textile production. Women were not simply spinners but were also weavers and dyers. Uneven, too, were the geographical distributions of men and women workers. Men skilled in textile manufacturing were widely disseminated throughout the caliphate, as were women spinners; women skilled at weaving and dyeing, however, were concentrated mainly in the southern emirates of Nupe and Ilorin. Similarly, male entrepreneurs organized large-scale textile manufacturing enterprises in the north-central portion of the caliphate while enterprises created by women were located to the south.

New sources, the textile products of the caliphate, along with other contemporary evidence, reveal that women's work was more varied, more prominent, more highly skilled and more organized than previously thought. Comparative analyses along gender lines show that men's work and women's work were similar in the degree of training required and the levels of skill achieved. Labor, especially skilled labor, was critical to textile production if the caliphate was to maintain its external markets. But there were substantial differences in the degree to which men and women could mobilize and organize labor. A variety of social and political factors in caliphate society combined to assist men and hinder women in the organization and management of textile manufacturing.
‘My Friend the Shylock’: Money-Lenders and their Clients in South-Western Nigeria
Authors: Falola Toyin
Published: January 2009

As older ways of raising credit declined or were re-defined, the acquiring of loans from a specialized group of money-lenders flourished in colonial Western Nigeria. Money-lenders charged exorbitant interest and insisted on loan repayment at a fixed date. Borrowing from the modern banking system, the money-lenders prepared legal documents and required surety. Debt recovery was generally painful to defaulters; they were humiliated, harassed, and had their property confiscated. The practice generated many conflicts. The debtor was generally unhappy, especially if the money was used for consumption. Lenders cheated with high interest rates and other charges and promoted for their own ends indiscriminate lending to poor and vulnerable people. To minimize conflicts and protect debtors, the colonial administration decided to regulate the trade with ordinances, especially the Moneylenders' Ordinance of 1938 which set limits to interest and forced lenders to obtain licences. In general, lenders subverted the ordinance, creditors and debtors became more cunning as documents were falsified to protect lenders, and those who needed money continued to accept harsh terms.
New Linguistic Evidence and ‘The Bantu Expansion’
Authors: Vansina J.
Published: January 2009

New linguistic evidence about the classification of the Bantu languages does not support the current view that these languages spread as the result of a massive migration or ‘expansion’ by its speakers. Rather the present geographic distribution of Bantu languages is the outcome of many complex historical dynamics involving successive dispersals of individual languages over a time span of millennia and involving reversals as well as successes. This is as true for eastern and southern Africa, where a close correlation between the archaeological evidence documenting the diffusion of basic food-related technologies, including metallurgy and the spreading of Bantu languages has become an axiom, as it is elsewhere. The linguistic evidence concerning the dispersal of Bantu languages in these regions of Africa is completely incongruent with the archaeological record. The existing Bantu expansion hypothesis must be totally abandoned. The scrapping of the hypothesis will make room for more realistic and quite different interpretations and research hypotheses. For example, it follows that the local or regional contribution of speakers of other languages, autochthons and others, to the development of later cultures and societies was probably considerably greater than has hitherto been acknowledged and that the continuities in historical dynamics of all sorts between the Bantu-speaking parts of Africa and areas further north and west are greater than has been hitherto realized.
Environmental Decline and Ecological Response in the Upper Senegal Valley, West Africa, from the Late Nineteenth Century to World War I
Authors: Clark Andrew F.
Published: January 2009

The upper Senegal valley of West Africa, like other areas of Africa, experienced a period of acute environmental decline and intense ecological response by residents from the late nineteenth century until World War I. French colonial strategies caused considerable disruption and dislocation, benefitting in many ways the colonial agenda which sought to regulate labor flows. African responses to the widening crisis, including movement within the region, migration to the peanut basin and the coast, and enlistment in the war effort, often served colonial interests while sometimes directly exacerbating the environmental degradation, necessitating constant ecological adaptation. This study of an early period of intense and well-documented physical decline, and the various strategies developed by West Africans to survive and overcome obstacles, can shed light on current environmental policy debates and issues.
Written in Characters of Blood? The Reign of King Cetshwayo Ka Mpande 1872–9
Authors: Cope R. L.
Published: January 2009

Sir Bartle Frere, the British High Commissioner in South Africa 1877–80, depicted Cetshwayo ka Mpande, the Zulu king 1872–9, as a bloodthirsty monster. This article discusses the accuracy and justice of this depiction, and the nature of Zulu kingship. It shows that both Frere and the missionaries on whom he relied for evidence wished to bring the Zulu kingdom under British rule and thus had a strong motive for discrediting Cetshwayo. The fact that missionary testimony against Cetshwayo was particularly hostile and abundant at times when there seemed a real possibility of British annexation casts particular doubt on the value of this testimony. Missionaries misinterpreted and exaggerated much of the evidence, which, more dispassionately examined, appears to show that, while executions were common in the Zulu kingdom, Frere's account of the nature of Cetshwayo's reign was grossly overdrawn. The territorial chiefs of the country were responsible for many of the executions, and there is evidence that Cetshwayo attempted to ameliorate conditions. Nevertheless the tendency to attribute to him the methods of nineteenth-century British constitutionalism is unhistorical and culture-bound. Cetshwayo was a Zulu king in the tradition of his uncle Shaka, and ruled by fear and arbitrariness as well as by the law.
‘Money with Dignity’: Migrants, Minelords and the Cultural Politics of the South African Gold Standard Crisis, 1920–33
Authors: Breckenridge Keith
Published: January 2009

This paper takes as its point of departure a simple fact that has gone largely unnoticed in the historical and ethnographic literature of migrant mine labour: prior to 1933 mineworkers were paid in gold. It is argued that the ideas and practices associated with the control and transmission of metallic money were at the heart of the experience of migrant labour before the crisis and formed a major part of the self-definition of migrant gold miners during the 1920s. Moreover, both the practices and ideas of African mineworkers were reciprocally linked to the global political struggles taking place over the gold standard. From the First World War to the Christmas of 1932, the South African and Imperial states and mining capital were involved in a controversy over the form of the South African and international money supplies. Whilst in appearance an abstract and mysterious debate, the contest over the form of the money supply laid the foundations for a system of value that penetrated into the daily lives and politics of many southern Africans. Chief amongst these were hundreds of thousands of migrant mine-workers. Following from this, the paper posits a re-interpretation of the gold standard crisis. The turning point that coincided with the new year of 1933 was not merely an economic change; it constituted a major transformation of the form, value, velocity and politics of money throughout Southern Africa. Coincidently, the crisis was an economic and cultural transition for the mining industry itself and marked a dramatic re-definition of the terms of economic conflict between workers and managers. Finally, this paper calls for a new periodization of capitalist development in Southern Africa that meshes together the cultural and economic dimensions of historical processes in a manner that foregrounds the experience of the African working class.
Warriors, Tributaries, Blood Money and Political Transformation in Nineteenth-Century Mauritania
Authors: Taylor Raymond M.
Published: January 2009

The middle of the nineteenth century witnessed the demise of a System of political power that had existed in the southern Mauritanian region of Brakna since the eighteenth century. Until the 1840s, tolls levied on the Senegal River gum trade had sustained the hegemony in southern Brakna of the Awlad al-Siyyid, an Arabic-speaking warrior group. Unlike more mobile warriors of the Saharan interior who depended for their livelihood on tribute extracted from nomadic pastoralists, the Awlad al-Siyyid had specialized in the control over a small area near the Senegal River, and over seasonal trading posts, known as escales, through which gum arabic was exported to the Atlantic economy. However, their increasing dependence on this trade allowed French administrators to manipulate relations among Awlad al-Siyyid chiefs by recognizing the taxing privileges of some while withholding recognition from others in a way that led, from the early 1840s on, to a bitter factional struggle within the group. The resulting conflict weakened the control of warriors over tributaries, harratin (freed slaves) and others, and caused a crisis within the political and social hierarchy of Brakna. An increasingly desperate struggle developed among Brakna warriors over a diminishing number of tributaries. This paper examines that struggle through the lens of an affair of diyya, or blood money, that emerged during the late 1840s and came to preoccupy all of the warrior groups and factions in the Brakna conflict. By competing for portions of the diyya owed to a small pastoral group as compensation for homicides, Brakna warriors, chiefs from neighboring regions and powerful tributaries in the process of repudiating their tributary status engaged in a symbolic duel that revolved around the increasingly unstable role of the warrior as a consumer of tribute and dispenser of ‘protection’.
Black Ethnicities, Communities and Political Expression in Late Victorian Cape Town
Authors: Bickford-Smith Vivian
Published: January 2009

In 1994 the National Party of Mr de Klerk defeated the African National Congress in only one of nine South African provinces, the Western Cape. The reason for this success lay in the support that the NP received from a large majority of Coloured South Africans in this region. Many were worried about the possibility of losing homes and jobs to ‘Africans’, and believed that the ANC was a specifically African party. These worries and beliefs were encouraged by Nationalist Party politicians. But the success of the latter's campaign was premised on the existence of more enduring self-identities, while simultaneously lending them new content.

This article attempts to explain the emergence of different black ethnicities, and particularly the emergence of Coloured ethnicity, in the British Cape Colony, and its capital, Cape Town. Because of a low non-racial franchise and (theoretical) equality of all before the law, the Victorian Cape provided the possibility of formal black political expression – the establishment of parties, electioneering and political mobilization.

The different black ethnicities that emerged were not the inevitable result of different ‘cultures’ or distant historical experiences. But nor were they simply created by élite Ethnic mobilizers in response to white racialization and discrimination, as was sometimes suggested in revisionist South African historiography of the Apartheid era. This historiography was understandably eager to challenge belief in the immutability of race and ethnicity that underpinned ‘separate development’ – a policy which itself served to reshape, perpetuate and reinforce perceptions of ethnic difference.

Labels, like ‘Coloured’ or ‘Native’ may have been imposed by whites and used by black élites to challenge state policies or to demand resources. But the labels had to continue to make sense to those they wished to mobilize. The content of ethnicities could not be purely ‘imagined’ by élites.
Testing the Boundaries of Marginality: Twentieth-Century Slavery and Emancipation Struggles in Nkanu, Northern Igboland, 1920–29
Authors: Brown Carolyn A.
Published: January 2009

In 1914 the Enugu Government Colliery and the construction of its railway link to the Biafran coast used slave-owning chiefs as labor recruiters. Although aware of slavery in the Nkanu clan area the state simply outlawed the slave trade and excessive treatment but left it to slaves to secure their ‘freedom’. Nkanu slavery was unusually pervasive, incorporating over half of some villages, with few opportunities for manumission or marriage to the freeborn. Severe ritualistic proscriptions excluded slave men from village politics. But forced labor destabilized slavery, causing unrest which reached crisis proportions in the fall of 1922. The revolt presents a unique opportunity for historical study of the goals, ideology and strategies of indigenous slave populations creating ‘freedom’ within the emergent colonial order.

When owners demanded slaves' wages, the slaves resisted and demanded full social and political equality with the freeborn. Slaves who remained in the village struggled to provision Enugu's urban working class. For both slavery hindered opportunities in the colonial economy. In retaliation owners evicted slave families, increased their labor requirements and unleashed a reign of terror, abduction and sacrifice of slave women and children. By the fall of 1922 local government collapsed forcing the state to develop a policy on emancipation. It is significant that this struggle converted the slaves from a scattered subordinate group of patrilineages to an aggressive and cohesive community.
Rounding up Spinsters: Gender Chaos and Unmarried Women in Colonial Asante
Authors: Allman Jean
Published: January 2009

Between 1929 and 1932 in a number of villages and towns throughout rural Asante, chiefs were ordering the arrest of all women who were over the age of fifteen and not married. A woman was detained until she spoke the name of a man whom she would agree to marry and the man in question paid a release fee. If the man refused, he too was imprisoned or fined up to £5. If he agreed, he paid a small marriage fee to the woman's parents and one bottle of gin. Based on the correspondence of colonial officials, customary court records and the life histories and reminiscences of women who were among the spinsters caught, this article explores gender and social change in colonial Asante by dissecting and contextualizing the round-up of unmarried women. It seeks to understand this unusual episode in direct state intervention into the negotiating of marriage and non-marriage as part of the general chaos in gender relations that shook Asante in the years between the two World Wars. This chaos, often articulated in the language of moral crisis was, more than anything, about shifting power relationships. It was chaos engendered by cash and cocoa, by trade and transformation. From 1921 to 1935, with cocoa well-established in many parts of Asante, women's roles in the cash economy were changing and diversifying. Many wives were making the move from being the most common form of exploitable labour during the initial introduction of cocoa to themselves exploiting new openings for economic autonomy. That women were beginning to negotiate their own spaces within the colonial economy precipitated a profound crisis in conjugal obligations in Asante - a crisis requiring drastic measures. The rounding up of unmarried women was one of several weapons used by Asante's chiefs in the struggle to reassert control over women's productive and reproductive labour.
The Flowing Eye: Water Management in the Upper Kuruman Valley, South Africa,c.1800–1962
Authors: Jacobs Nancy
Published: January 2009

This paper considers the intensification of agriculture along racial lines in South Africa by looking at the history of one spring and nine miles of river valley. It illustrates how racial conflict included struggles over nature, and how whites and blacks had different perceptions and abilities regarding its exploitation.

The ‘Eye’ of Kuruman is a large spring in a semi-arid region. Tswana herders originally used it as a water hole. Their food production system was extensive, making use of wide areas rather than increasing output in a limited area. Pastoralism was more important than agriculture. Irrigation, introduced by representatives of the London Missionary Society, was not widely practiced away from the missions until a subsistence crisis during the 1850s. It continued after the crisis passed. However, households continued to operate with the logic of extensive production, fitting irrigation into the pre-existing system.

In 1885, tne British annexed the region as part of the Crown Colony of British Bechuanaland. They demarcated African reserves at springs and in river valleys, and grazing lands were opened for white settlement. The upper Kuruman valley was designated a Crown reserve and the Eye became a town site. Downstream were Tswana households which cultivated with less security than on a native reserve. Land alienation with rinderpest devastated stock keeping and caused a widespread famine at the turn of the century, yet Tswana cultivators did not greatly intensify their use of irrigable lands. More extensive methods endured and wage labor became the basis of support.

In the twentieth century under Union government, use of the Eye intensified, and access to the valley became segregated by race. After 1918 the municipality of Kuruman operated a modern irrigation project, and in 1919, evicted black cultivators living at the Eye. Blacks continued to live and garden at Seodin, five miles downstream, but suffered water shortages which made even their casual irrigation impossible. Political expediency dictated against their pressing for water rights. In the 1940s the Department of Native Affairs drilled boreholes, but these were not sufficient to sustain cultivation. In 1962, the policy of Apartheid mandated the removal of blacks from Seodin. Despite state aid, the whites-only irrigation project never developed into a commercial success.
Poor Women and Nationalist Politics: Alliances and Fissures in the Formation of a Nationalist Political Movement in Salisbury, Rhodesia, 1950–6
Authors: Scarnecchia Timothy
Published: January 2009

The relationships between specific groups of women and men are explored during a formative period of urban nationalist politics, showing the failure of nationalists to incorporate women's demands, rather than the absence of women's struggles. It is important to view historical events as they occurred within larger processes of class formation and gender contestations, but it is no longer sufficient simply to prove the historical role of women in the nationalist movements themselves. Women's contributions still need to be written about, but gender history needs to be addressed as the relation between the sexes in order to avoid facile and rather confused accounts of class-and gender-defined struggles. This article first explores the Reformed Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union attempts to capitalize on an alliance with poorer women during the early 1950s. Secondly, new opportunities created by spatial and economic transformations in the urban economy in the 1950s are discussed in terms of a social mobility that led a minority of women to new social status. The Bus Boycott in 1956, led by the City Youth League, is then addressed as an event in nationalist history, but also as the interaction of women's class mobility and the violence which threatened it, either on a day-to-day basis or in the particular events of the Bus Boycott. The implications of these two separate events for the relationship of specific groups of women to nationalist politics, and nationalist historiography, are analyzed.
Women, Gender and Colonialism: Rethinking the History of the British Cape Colony and its Frontier Zones, c. 1806–70
Authors: Bradford Helen
Published: January 2009

That many studies in African and imperial history neglect women and gender is a commonplace. Using a case-study – the British Cape Colony and its frontier zones – this article attempts to demonstrate some consequences of this neglect. It argues, firstly, that it generates empirical inaccuracies as a result of the insignificance accorded to gender differentiation and to women themselves. Secondly, representations of women as unimportant, and men as ungendered, result in flawed analysis of both men and the colonial encounter. This view is argued in detail for two events: an 1825 slave rebellion and an 1856–7 millenarian movement. The article concludes that if gender and half the adult populace are marginalized in this way, the price is frequently interpretations which have limited purchase on the past.
Muslim Politics and Resistance to Colonial Rule: Shaykh Uways B. Muḥammad Al-Barāwī and the Qādirīya Brotherhood in East Africa
Authors: Martin B. G.
Published: January 2009

Shaykh Uways b. Muḥammad al-Barāwī (1847–1909) was an important leader of the Qādirīya brotherhood in southern Somalia, on Zanzibar, and along the East African coast from Kenya to Mozambique, and founded his own branch of Qādirīya, the Uwaysīya. Before his death in 1909 when he was assassinated by representatives of the rival Sālihīya brotherhood (under the leadership of Muḥammȧd 'Ȧbdallah Hasan, the ‘Mad Mullah’), Uways missionary activities were very considerable.

Uways' branch of the Qādiriya was probably behind certain episodes of Muslim resistance to European penetration into Buganda in the late 1880's, at the behest of Sayyid Barghash of Zanzibar. Indeed the relations between Shaykh Uways and successive rulers of Zanzibar, Barghash, Khalīfa, and Ḥamid b. Thuwaynī were very close. In 90's, certain Muslim elements in Tanganyika, in conjunction with theṭarīqa, made trouble for the Germans in SE Tanganyika during the ‘Mecca Letters affair’ at Lindi in 1908. This episode revealed a division in the Tanganyika Muslim community.

The Uwaysīya was responsible for massive conversions to Islam in the coastal region, in inner Tanganyika, and on the Eastern fringes of the Congo at the end of the 19th and the beginning decades of the 20th centuries.
Measuring the Immeasurable: The Atlantic Slave Trade, West African Population and the Pyrrhonian Critic
Authors: Henige David
Published: January 2009

No problem has exercised Africanists for so long and so heatedly as the slave trade. Now that any difference of opinion as to its morality has ended, debate tends to concentrate on its economic and political aspects, particularly on its magnitude and regional characteristics. In the past few scholarly generations, sophisticated statistical manipulations have supplied more evidence, but it has been concentrated on the number of slaves who arrived in the New World. Nonetheless, dearth of evidence (sometimes total) regarding the other components of the trade has not seemed to discourage efforts to arrive at global figures and, by extension, to determine its effects on African societies.

The present paper asks why this should be so, and wonders how any defensible conclusions can ever be reached about almost any facet of the trade that can go beyond ideology or truism. It concludes that no global estimate of the slave trade, or of any ‘underdevelopment’ or ‘underpopulation’ it may have caused, are possible, though carefully constructed micro-studies might provide limited answers. Under the circumstances, to believe or advocate any particular set or range of figures becomes an act of faith rather than an epistemologically sound decision
The Slaves of Salaga
Authors: Johnson Marion
Published: January 2009

Salaga was one of the leading slave-markets of West Africa in the 1880s. The story of the slaves – where they came from, who brought them to Salaga, who bought them, and what happened to them afterwards – can be pieced together from the reports of a great variety of travellers, black and white, officials, soldiers, merchants and missionaries, of various nationalities, African and European. Thus, on the eve of the European occupation which put an end to it, it is possible to lift the veil that usually conceals the internal slave trade of pre-colonial Africa, and gain some idea of its scale and workings, and of the range of attitudes towards slavery and the slave trade.
Social Values and Social Policy
Authors: Wilding Paul , George Vic
Published: January 2009

Social values are clearly an important influence on the development and administration of social policies. In discussions about social values, however, different political groupings use the same words but with different meanings. This article compares and contrasts ‘ideal-type’ liberal and socialist conceptions of the three social values of freedom, individualism and equality. It then goes on to discuss how far social policy reflects these differing conceptions. The conclusion drawn is that, so far as social policy is concerned, in the clashes between liberal and socialist conceptions of social values liberal values tend to emerge as dominant.
No Hiding Place: On the Discomforts of Researching the Contemporary Policy Process
Authors: Pollitt Christopher , Harrison Stephen , Hunter David J. , Marnoch Gordon
Published: January 2009

It has never been easy to conduct research into currently sensitive policy issues, but there is now accumulating evidence to indicate that various forms of resistence to scholarly investigation are on the increase. Such a climate handicaps all social policy research, but may have the greatest impact on ethnographic projects. Yet, it is argued, ethnography is increasingly widely recognised among academics as having a particularly valuable contribution to make to the study of the policy process. Unfortunately, many policy practitioners (and occasionally some academic colleagues) perceive ethnographic research as being of questionable validity and low helpfulness. This behoves policy-oriented ethnographers to demonstrate that they do indeed have procedures for assuring validity, even if their style of investigation is never likely to be popular with government.
Innovation in Social Policy – the Case of the Therapeutic Community
Authors: Manning N. P.
Published: January 2009

Students of social policy have studied in some depth the fate of new ideas when they came close to inclusion in new policies, and especially new legislation. Less attention has been paid to the process whereby new ideas are generated, and the impact of advocacy on the future of simultaneous but independent innovation. Here, the therapeutic community, developed during the last war in response to largely neurotic difficulties in military personnel, is examined as a case study of innovation, and of the fate of innovation as a result of official support, and enthusiastic proselytization by committed practitioners.