bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Note on Slavery, Seclusion and Agrarian Change in Northern Nigeria
Authors: Porter Gina
Published: January 2009

For geographers and others working on contemporary development issues in Africa, the historical perspective is of considerable significance. Such topics as the incidence and form of indigenous slavery and slave-trading in pre-colonial times are particularly pertinent to modern-day studies of population and rural development, and work published by historians is read with interest by researchers outside the discipline. Thus, some years ago, discussion was generated between geographers and historians on the impact of slave raiding in Nigeria's ‘Middle Belt’, initially stimulated by a paper in the Journal of African History. As the subsequent debate illustrated, the relationship between modern population density and settlement patterns and pre-colonial slavery is a fascinating one.
Tsetse fly in Western Narok, Kenya
Authors: Waller Richard D.
Published: January 2009

This article studies the expansion of tsetse fly in one part of Kenya Maasailand between 1900 and 1950. It follows the lines of investigation first suggested by Ford's work and examines in detail the interaction between changes in four elements in the Mara ecosystem: climate, vegetation, land use and tsetse. Tsetse was able to expand because its habitat expanded and the spread of bush and fly into the grasslands both caused, and was facilitated by, shifts in patterns of Maasai grazing and occupation in the area. Up to the 1890s, the Mara Plains were regularly grazed by Maasai herds; but the general depopulation of Maasailand in the aftermath of the rinderpest pandemic and civil war left the region vacant until after 1900 and allowed the spread of bush cover which was then colonised by tsetse. When Maasai returned, they altered their grazing patterns to avoid such areas. However, the progressive encroachment of tsetse-infested bush continued and was not halted until bush-clearing schemes and closer grazing forced the fly to retreat by destroying its habitat. The study is set within the wider context of ecological change and capitalist development in East Africa and suggests that the common assumption that colonial capitalism was responsible for the disruption of the ecosystem and, therefore, for the spread of disease and environmmental degradation needs careful re-examination in the light of a more sophisticated understanding of the processes of ecological change.
Sickle Cell Anaemia, Genetic Variations, and the Slave Trade to the United States
Authors: Schroeder Walter A. , Munger Edwin S. , Powars Darleen R.
Published: January 2009

Examination of the DNA of individuals with sickle cell anaemia who reside in various geographical areas in Africa has led to the conclusion that the gene for this genetic disease arose separately in three different locations. Similar studies of sickle cell anaemia patients in the United States provide considerable information about the frequency in the United States of these three genetic variations. On the basis of such data, it is possible to estimate the percentage of slave imports from a given African locale into the United States. When this is done, there is general concordance with previous conclusions from such sources as language studies, shipping data, etc.
Generational Conflict in the Umarian Movement after the Jihād: Perspectives from the Futanke Grain Trade at Medine
Authors: Hanson John H.
Published: January 2009

This article attempts to correct the stereotype which portrays the Futanke who joined in the jihād of al-ḥājj Umar Tal in western Mali as militant Muslim warriors who were not responsive to opportunities in production and trade. It shows that Futanke officials and settlers in the area of Jomboxo (southwestern Karta) responded quickly to the possibility of producing grain, on the land and with the slaves acquired during the jihad, and marketing it at the nearby river factory of Medine, where French officials and merchants, resident African traders and nomadic gum caravan leaders converged in a brisk commerce for three decades in the late nineteenth century. The grain sales were a response to strong demand from the desert-side economy and gum trade as well as to French needs for provisions. These emerging economic interests brought the settlers into conflict with Umarian officials and a younger generation of Futanke, recruited in the 1870s and 1880s and eager to wage war to accumulate wealth and establish their position. This social and generational cleavage hindered the effort to mobilize resistance against French encroachment and conquest.
Revolutionary Mahdism and Resistance to Colonial Rule in the Sokoto Caliphate, 1905–6
Authors: Lovejoy Paul E. , Hogendorn J. S.
Published: January 2009

The Mahdist uprising of 1905–6 was a revolutionary movement that attempted to overthrow British and French colonial rule, the aristocracy of the Sokoto Caliphate and the zarmakoy of Dosso. The Mahdist supporters of the revolt were disgruntled peasants, fugitive slaves and radical clerics who were hostile both to indigenous authorities and to the colonial regimes. There was no known support among aristocrats, wealthy merchants or the ‘ulama. Thus the revolt reflected strong divisions based on class and, as an extension, on ethnicity. The pan-colonial appeal of the movement and its class tensions highlight another important feature: revolutionary Mahdism differed from other forms of Mahdism that were common in the Sokoto Caliphate at the time of the colonial conquest. There appears to have been no connection with the Mahdists who were followers of Muhammad Ahmed of the Nilotic Sudan or with those who joined Sarkin Musulmi Attahiru I on his hijra of 1903.

The suppression of the revolt was important for three reasons. First, the British consolidated their alliance with the aristocracy of the Caliphate, while the French further strengthened their ties with the zarmakoy of Dosso and other indigenous rulers. The dangerous moment which Muslims might have seized to expel the Europeans quickly passed. Second, the brutality of the repression was a message to slave owners and slaves alike that the colonial regimes were committed to the continuation of slavery and opposed to any sudden emancipation of the slave population. Third, 1906 marked the end of revolutionary action against colonialism; the radical clerics were either killed or imprisoned. Other forms of Mahdism continued to haunt the colonial regimes, but without serious threat of a general rising.
The Youngmen and the Porcupine: Class, Nationalism and Asante's Struggle for Self-determination, 1954–57
Authors: Allman Jean Marie
Published: January 2009

This article examines the origins, background, composition and policies of the National Liberation Movement, a mass political organization founded in Asante in September, 1954. The central aim of the NLM was to advance Asante claims for self-determination and to oppose the CPP in their advocacy of a constitutional settlement with the British colonial government–a settlement that would bring about a unitary government in an independent Gold Coast [Ghana]. The analysis developed here places the ‘youngmen’ of Asante, the nkwankwaa, at the centre of these events. It is argued that this somewhat enigmatic group was the catalyst behind the formation of the NLM and the resurrection of Asante nationalism that it represented. The nkwankwaa forged a dynamic popular front of resistance in Asante to what they termed the ‘black imperialism’ of Nkrumah and the CPP. In exploring the pivotal role of the nkwankwaa in the rebirth and reconstruction of Asante nationalism, the discussion addresses the legacies of indirect rule in Asante, the importance of cocoa, the development of class, and the ambiguous role of Asante's political intelligentsia. Most crucially, it is suggested that the political development of the NLM turned upon the struggle within Asante between the nkwankwaa and the Asantehene (backed by the chiefs and Asante's political intelligentsia) over the very definition of ‘nation’ and of ‘self-determination’. Thus, the article highlights the historical conflicts and contradictions within Asante society–contradictions which were softened by but not subsumed within Asante nationalism, and conflicts which were distorted, but not overshadowed, by the resilience of Asante Kotoko in the face of the centralized state. The reasons for the tenacity of Asante nationalism lay not in the struggle between Asante and what was to become the Ghanaian state, but in the unresolved struggles within Asante society.
The Bondsman's New Clothes: The Contradictory Consciousness of Slave Resistance on the Swahili Coast
Authors: Glassman Jonathon
Published: January 2009

The most fruitful approaches to the study of slave resistance in the New World have involved examination of the slaves' struggles to create and control institutions of community and kinship in the face of planters' attempts to suppress local social reproduction altogether. Africanists who would attempt similar analysis of rebellious slave consciousness are hampered by the tradition of functionalist anthropology which dominates studies of African culture, especially Miers and Kopytoff's thesis of the integrative nature of African slavery. By contrast, more class-oriented approaches to studies of African slave resistance assume too stark a division between the consciousness of slaves and the consciousness of masters. It is suggested that Gramsci's concepts of hegemony and contradictory popular consciousness can be used to reconcile the cultural sensitivity of the first approach with the concern of the second for issues of domination and struggle. Thus a more nuanced view of slave consciousness might be reached.

The case studied involves resistance to the rapid rise of sugar plantations on the northern Tanzania coast in the late nineteenth century. Miers and Kopytoff's model of the ‘reduction of marginality’ is modified to accommodate a process of conflict, as slaves struggled to gain access to institutions of Swahili prestige and citizenship and as their masters struggled to exclude them. Analysis of a large-scale slave rebellion in 1873 reveals that the consciousness of the rebels was couched in the local ‘traditional’ language of a moral economy of patrons and clients. Although this language was expressive of some of the hegemonic ideas of the emergent planter class, it was also openly rebellious. It expressed neither a slave class-consciousness nor simply the ideology of the dominant planter class but was instead a contradictory consciousness of the type that Gramsci discerned in other movements of agrarian rebellion.
Reflections on Slavery, Seclusion and Female Labor in the Maradi Region of Niger in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Authors: Cooper Barbara M.
Published: January 2009

This essay argues that female participation in agriculture and limited seclusion in Maradi (Niger) today do not stem from the absence of agricultural slavery in the pre-colonial period but rather result from the resistance of the Katsinawa élite to the Islamic reforms of the Sokoto Caliphate and from the absence of rimji (plantation) slavery in the region. The abolition of slavery did not mark a watershed in the rise of seclusion, as M. G. Smith argues was the case in Nigeria, but rather triggered a series of reformulations of marriage and female hierarchy. Semi-legitimate and legitimate polygynous marriages permitted men and women of the wealthier classes to retain the labor of former female slaves as ‘concubines’ and later enabled them to use junior wives to perform the duties once carried out by slaves. Women countered the ambiguities of such marriages by asserting their worth through wedding ritual and later by adopting the veiling of élite women. As economic and cultural ties with northern Nigeria grew during the colonial and post-colonial periods, and as goods and services reduced some of the labor demands upon urban women, seclusion gained in popularity. By acquiescing to the dependency implicit in purdah women could protect themselves from the labor demands of others and could sometimes free themselves up to earn independent incomes of their own. Thus the recent adoption of seclusion in Maradi has not arisen out of a unilateral decision on the part of newly freed women to adopt seclusion as a sign of status, as Smith claimed for Northern Nigeria, but resulted instead from of a series of redefinitions, contestations and negotiations of marriage in which both men and women have been active.
The ‘Rod of Empire’: The Debate Over Corporal Punishment in the British African Colonial Forces, 1888–1946
Authors: Killingray David
Published: January 2009

Throughout the twentieth century the British Colonial Office sought to limit the severity of corporal punishment and to regulate more closely its use in the colonies. This article has looked at one aspect of that policy involving the African Colonial Forces. Most military officers argued that corporal punishment was essential to maintain discipline, especially in times of war or active service. The Colonial Office sought to limit severely the circumstances in which corporal punishment could be administered but accepted that its use should be retained or revived during the two World Wars.

In the Second World War the arguments for retaining corporal punishment for African soldiers were increasingly denounced by officials and various humanitarian lobbies. African Colonial Forces had come under direct War Office control in September 1939 and during the war many African soldiers served overseas alongside British and other units; they also constituted part of an imperial order which, so propaganda increasingly proclaimed after the fall of Singapore, was opposed to racial discrimination. Corporal punishment based on racial terms was out of kilter in the war and was maintained only at the insistence of senior military men. Once the war was over the Colonial Office ordered that this ‘relic of discrimination’ should be ended.
A Dagara Rebellion against Dagomba Rule? Contested Stories of Origin in North-Western Ghana
Authors: Lentz Carola
Published: January 2009

The article explores a neglected aspect of West African history, namely the historiography of ‘stateless’ peoples in north-western Ghana. At the same time, it is a contribution to the recent debate on the role of history in the construction of new ‘tribal’ identities in Africa in the colonial and post-colonial periods. After discussing local oral patrician accounts of migration and settlement, and the historical imagination of colonial officers, I analyse histories of tribal origins written recently by Dagara intellectuals, which draw upon hypotheses, evidence, tropes and narrative models from both colonial and indigenous sources. The concern is not with a conventional history of ideas, but with showing how authors with new requirements and interests can fuse disparate elements into new accounts of the past whose underlying intentions differ considerably from those of their sources. More specifically, the article discusses the claims of intellectuals' and villagers' stories with reference to different underlying political agendas, suggesting that they constitute different historiographic genres appealing to different audiences. The former are basically concerned with establishing the Dagara as a political community within a modern state, the latter with providing charters for local boundaries and rights.
Women's ‘Conservatism’ and the Politics of Gender in Late Colonial Lesotho
Authors: Epprecht Marc
Published: January 2009

The triumph of the ‘conservative’ BNP over the ‘radical’ BCP in Lesotho's pre-independence elections has long been a source of contention among analysts. While many factors are seen to have contributed to the BCP defeat, one which consistently appears in passing or in footnotes is the ‘conservative’ inclination of Basotho women who, in 1965 comprised two-thirds of the electorate. Women's ‘conservatism’ is commonly accepted as a given, stemming from their purportedly natural domesticity, religiosity or love of tradition. This article examines the actual history of Basotho women in politics in the late colonial era (1920s–1965) and finds no empirical grounds for these assumptions. On the contrary, even the most ostensibly ‘conservative’ women often adopted non-traditional, self-emancipatory behaviour. In the context of a ‘modern’ colonial state with retrograde, often punitive policies towards women, such ‘conservatism’ was in fact rather progressive. On the other hand, Lesotho's self-proclaimed ‘radicals’ exhibited strong elements of male chauvinism, ignorance and contempt for women's needs. The implication for African nationalist or other radical politicians and sympathic academics is that failure to take serious account of women and gender can undermine political integrity and effectiveness.
Wealth in People, Wealth in Things – Introduction
Authors: Guyer Jane I.
Published: January 2009

Oneof the guiding lodestones for social theorists and social historians across the entire theoretical spectrum has been ‘wealth’: the things people imbue with value, the caches they collect up by every means from prestation to predation, the performative displays they orchestrate, the treasures they store and eventually leave behind, and all the complex cultural constructions whereby such things are counted, praised and imagined as sources and instruments of power. Perhaps no other topic excites comparably and recurrently fresh interest, from the Marxian framework of capital to Veblen's ‘conspicuous consumption’, Schama's ‘embarrassment of riches’, Appadurai's ‘tournaments of value’ and Weiner's ‘dense objects’.
Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa
Authors: Guyer Jane I. , Belinga Samuel M. Eno
Published: January 2009

The paper re-examines principles of social organization in pre-colonial Equatorial Africa, suggesting that the imagery of ‘accumulation’ of ‘wealth in people’ is not wrong, but not flexible enough to encompass the centrality of knowledge in these societies. People were singularized repositories of a differentiated and expanding repertoire of knowledge, as well as being structured kin (as in the kinship model) and generic dependents and followers (as in the wealth-in-people model). We argue that social mobilization was in part based on the mobilization of different bodies of knowledge, and leadership was the capacity to bring them together effectively, even if for a short time and specific purpose. We refer to this process as composition and distinguish it from accumulation.

The paper has three parts. The first substitutes an oral epic from southern Cameroon for an ethnography of the principles by which people pursued agendas and mobilized followings in their own political worlds. Colonial rule may have institutionalized pre-colonial political hierarchies, but it completely altered the terms for political mobilization. Hence the historical record is very limited for making inferences about how ‘wealth-in-people’ operated in action, under pre-colonial conditions. The second critiques the evolutionary assumptions about simple societies that still color the models of Equatorial societies. The third revisits the ethnography to illuminate the principles of composition. The conclusion makes inferences and suggestions with respect to aspects of pre-colonial social history.
Women's Worth and Wedding Gift Exchange in Maradi, Niger, 1907–89
Authors: Cooper Barbara M.
Published: January 2009

Wedding gift exchange from the turn of the century to the present has served as a medium through which women in the Maradi valley of Niger could assert their worth, create social ties and respond to a shifting political economy. Rather than exploring the implications of ‘bridewealth’ and ‘dowry’ in isolation, this paper sees wedding prestations as an ongoing and evolving dialogue in which women's roles and worth are contested, the nature of wealth is redefined and the terms of marriage are negotiated. The crisis in domestic labor which arose with the decline of slavery in the early decades of the century gave rise to informal unions through which the labor of junior women could be controlled. Women responded to these informal marriages by staging highly visible ceremonies which established the worth and standing of the bride. With the growth of an increasingly urban-centered commercial and bureaucratic economy, women have been drawn into a desperate ‘search for money’ to continue to meet their obligations in the gift economy. While the outward form of wedding gift exchange appears unchanged, the importance of cash to the acquisition of goods, services, and productive resources has radically altered both the content and the significance of gift exchange. Gifts no longer embody wealth in people derived from ability within an agro-pastoral economy. Instead they reveal the giver's access to the resources of the state and the market. Women's eroding position within the economy since 1950 has drawn them further and further into gift exchange, both in order to build a safety net in the form of exchange value stored in a woman's dowry and to secure the social ties which can ensure their continued access to increasingly contested resources.
Bemba Chiefs and Catholic Missions, 1898–1935
Authors: Garvey Brian
Published: January 2009

The attempt to introduce an element of Indirect Rule into Northern Rhodesia after 1930 highlighted the extent to which the prestige and local influence of chiefs had been reduced by the loss of political and economic power and religious control. In Bembaland the evangelical work of the White Fathers, who were established in the centre of the area from 1898, contributed to the decline of the chiefs' spiritual authority. The principal mission station of the area was separated from the local Bemba chiefdom of Ituna by a grant of concession from the British South Africa Company, and up to 1914 the religious superior was given the powers of a native chief over the inhabitants of the mission. Within the concession, the economic, political and religious association between villagers and missionaries paralleled the network of relationships which had existed in the chief's capital village. In other missions in Bembaland, chiefs were obliged to admit the establishment of mission stations as a result of a Company policy of granting zones of influence with rights of evangelization to individual missionary societies. The influence of these missions was propagated mainly through the work of itinerant catechists who entered into dialogue with village headmen and established a chain of prayer houses and regular instruction throughout the woodland communities. Attempts at resistance by both chiefs and headmen were largely ineffectual, and by 1930 the White Fathers had, with government approval, achieved considerable influence in Bembaland. During the next decade, this influence was to diminish as colonial policies brought about political and social changes in which the mission had only an ancillary part to play.
Price Fluctuations in the Early Palm Oil Trade
Authors: Latham A. J. H.
Published: January 2009

A previously unused price series from the Liverpool Mercury provides new information about the early days of the palm oil trade. A boom in 1818 drove prices to their century high, only to be followed in the 1820s by a prolonged depression. The boom may have encouraged merchants to try to bring Bonny into the oil trade, as its development as an important oil port dates from this time. However the depression of the '20s did not prevent the continued expansion of the trade, which was also sustained during the better prices of the 1830s. This information does not affect Northrup's recent suggestion that the slave trade continued to expand in the 1830s, as his evidence is inconclusive and there is no comparable information on slave prices. Yet clearly both trades were carried on side by side at the time. This was not because their supply networks were different. Slaves and oil were both sent from Ibibioland, being peripheral to the main economic activity of that region, domestic agriculture and craftwork.
The Influenza Epidemic of 1918–19 in the Gold Coast
Authors: Patterson K. David
Published: January 2009

The Gold Coast (modern Ghana) was severely attacked by the influenza pandemic of 1918–19. The disease was introduced by shipping along the southern coast and overland across the northern frontier. As was true elsewhere on the continent, the spread of influenza was greatly facilitated by the new colonial transportation network. Quarantines and other preventive measures were futile and therapy, African or British, could do no more than alleviate symptoms. Influenza struck the majority of the population, but mortality rates varied regionally and, to some extent, by occupation. Deaths were especially numerous in the far north. The influenza epidemic killed 100,000 or more people in less than six months and was almost certainly the worst short-term demographic disaster in the history of Ghana.
The Emirs and the Spread of Western Education in Northern Nigeria, 1910–1946
Authors: Tibenderana Peter Kazenga
Published: January 2009

This article opens with a brief mention of the major criticisms which are currently made against the emirs' role in the development of Western education in northern Nigeria during the colonial era. It is suggested that these criticisms are ill founded and that they are more often than not based on a misconception of the emirs' power in the colonial situation. It is argued that the emirs were not de facto rulers of their respective emirates and had no powers to initiate educational development projects. The main discussion focuses on their attitude to Western education and how they took advantage of the educational opportunities offered by native administration schools to foster the political interests of their sons. It then examines their efforts to persuade the British administration to expand educational facilities in their emirates including those for female education and why these efforts were generally fruitless. Examination of the historical record reveals that the emirs played a more prominent role in the advancement of Western education than has hitherto been recognized.
The Pen, the Sword, and the Crown: Islam and Revolution in Songhay Reconsidered, 1464–1493
Authors: Kaba Lansiné
Published: January 2009

This paper examines the origin of the Askiya dynasty in Songhay, with an emphasis on the alliance between the militant ‘ulamā’ and the commanders of the northwestern province during the reign of Sonni 'Alī (1464–1492). The inadequacy of Sonni 'Alī's policy for dealing with the polarization in the cities, the increased role of the officers in these political matters, the rise of militant Islam and the division of the army: all these contributed to the downfall of the Sonni dynasty and the subsequent transfer of power to a regime inspired by Islam. The conflict in Timbuktu to which the ‘ulamā’ gave a religious justification precipitated the revolution. This revealed the importance of Islam as a factor of division, a motor for social action and political change. Indeed, many Muslim leaders had come to see themselves as members of a community worthy of ruling a predominantly non-literate country governed by a non-Muslim royalty. But for this they had to rely on the officers, and in particular Muḥammad Ture who, as a high official connected with both the main warring factions, could fulfil all the conditions for success. His victory introduced a new imperial era in the history of Islam in the Western Sudan.
The Impact of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War on Portuguese and Spanish Africa
Authors: Clarence-Smith Gervase
Published: January 2009

In the present stage of research, it is easiest to discern the economic effects of war on the Iberian colonies. These were diverse in chronological, regional and sectoral terms, but the overall results were to tie the economies of the Portuguese and Spanish colonies more firmly to those of the metropoles. This did not exclude two processes pulling in other directions. Firstly, the foreign trade of the colonies persisted but was reoriented away from Europe and towards North America. Secondly, shortages and insecurity of transport led to a significant degree of import substitution and regional African trade in the colonies, in the fields of both industry and agriculture. The social impact of war resembled that in much of the rest of Africa, great hardships and labour pressures on the mass of the population, but windfall profits for a few, both black and white. The political consequences of the two conflicts remain most shadowy at present, but they appear to have heightened the covert struggle between pro-fascist and anti-fascist groups in a situation of strong repression, flaring up into open strife only in the Spanish territories in 1936.
Africans and Agricultural Production in Colonial Kenya: The Myth of the War as a Watershed
Authors: Anderson David , Throup David
Published: January 2009

This article examines the economic effects of the Second World War on African peasant producers in Kenya, and places the war years within the context of the colony's economic difficulties during the Depression. In the mid-1930s the Kenya government sought to encourage African production, particularly among the Kikuyu and Abaluhya, in order to bolster the fiscal base of the colonial state and to subsidize the survival of the settler farming community. Promotion of African agrarian production brought conflict with the settler farming sector, and generated a serious crisis in the political economy of Kenya. These antagonisms became sharper during the war, when, after the Japanese advance in S.E. Asia, the Allied war effort demanded greater production from Kenya's settler farmers. Assisted by high guaranteed prices, both settler and African production was able to expand during the war. Previous studies of the impact of the war in Kenya have underplayed the extent to which African producers were able to capitalise upon this economic boom. Easily able to by-pass official marketing channels, African peasants produced for the black market. By doing so during the mid-war drought and maize crisis of 1942–3, African producers were able to obtain very favourable prices. Emerging peasant households among the Kikuyu and Abaluhya were therefore economically strengthened by the circumstances of the war, as was the settler farming sector. Europeans and Africans in Kenya were set on a collision course, which was to culminate some seven years after the war in the Mau Mau rebellion.
British Propaganda and the Mobilization of the Gold Coast War Effort, 1939–1945
Authors: Holbrook Wendell P.
Published: January 2009

This article examines the nature and impact of the most extensive propaganda campaign mounted in a British West African colony during the Second World War. An avalanche of war information and appeals to the people of the Gold Coast was channelled through a new communications network which included radio broadcasting, information bureaux, and mobile cinema presentations. The innovative wartime publicity scheme was not enough to produce a completely voluntary war effort; however, the campaign was responsible for irreversibly changing mass communications techniques in the territory. The propaganda drive used in the war mobilization provided a pool of experienced propagandists and a successful structural model which proved valuable both to post-war governments charged with pre-independence political education, community development and public services, and, somewhat ironically, to anti-colonialist post-war party politics.
Africa's Strategic Minerals during the Second World War
Authors: Dumett Raymond
Published: January 2009

Unprecedented wartime demands by Britain and the U.S.A for strategic minerals from abroad, coupled with the loss of valuable sources of supply in Eastern Europe and South East Asia to the Axis, greatly enlarged the volume of production and the pace of economic change in the mineral-rich zones of Africa. But the sharpest upsurge in output, which helped rescue a number of African export economies from the slough of depression, coincided with British rearmament several years before the war broke out; and production in most instances reached a crest two or three years before the war ended. In one sense the mineral regions of Africa between 1937 and 1945 provided a supreme example of the old mercantilist credo that colonies existed primarily to buttress the economies of the metropole in time of war. From another perspective, the war strengthened the hold of powerful multinational corporations on African mineral development and accelerated the absorption of new mining areas and labour supplies into the world capitalist system. A wide range of African metallic and non-metallic ores played a vital – and in some cases an indispensable – role in the Allied victory in 1945. But for the African peoples and countries most directly involved, the wartime upsurge had an uneven impact. Wage increases were in no way commensurate with the increased workloads nor with the pay scales for European miners. Except in the Union of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, where greater agricultural and industrial diversification was already in train, the expansion of the mining industries perpetuated enclave development. The reliance of the industrialized West on African strategic minerals during the war was a prelude to the even greater production boom and dependency of the Cold War period.
Working Conditions and Worker Responses on Nyasaland Tea Estates, 1930–1953
Authors: Palmer Robin
Published: January 2009

The tea industry of southern Nyasaland employed intermittently a heterogeneous labour force of some twenty to thirty thousand and paid workers minimum wages of 7s. in 1930, rising to between 17s. 6d. and 20s. in 1953. A complex wage structure offered different rates to hoers, pluckers, factory workers and clerks. Thousands of children, butvirtually no women, were employed. Wages and working conditions were acknowledged to be unattractive, even by the industry itself, and compared favourably only with those offered in Portuguese East Africa. The initial viability of the plantation sector in the Shire Highlands was made possible by the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Lomwe from Portuguese East Africa. Lomwe workers, who sought assimilation and upward mobility, have been depicted as virtual slaves of the planters, but there is evidence of effective local, day-to-day and passive resistance on their part which left planters feeling impotent, unable to turn labour out on Sundays or in the rains or enforce unpopular thangata (labour rent) agreements, and obliged to reduce the daily tasks demanded of the worker. Confronted with an increasingly severe shortage of labour, which caused millions of pounds of tea to remain unpicked, planters began to improve working conditions on their estates, but this failed to resolve their labour problem or to dampen post-war militancy. Irresponsible actions by the British Central Africa Company increased tensions in Cholo which culminated in the serious riots of 1953 in which eleven people were killed. Government responded to this growing rural radicalism by repurchasing half of the million acres of freehold estate land which had initially been ‘bought’ from chiefs prior to the colonial occupation.
Gold, Assortments and the Trade Ounce: Fante Merchants and the Problem of Supply and Demand in the 1770s
Authors: Metcalf George
Published: January 2009

Between 1772 and 1780 Richard Miles, a servant of the Company of Merchants, kept detailed records of some 1,308 barters for slaves he made on the Gold Coast, along with a much smaller number of barters for gold and ivory. The lists provide indirect information about the Fante brokers with whom he dealt, and how they conducted their trade. The names that appear show that the Fante dealers at the waterside were numbered in the hundreds, and indicate that many of them operated on a small scale or sold slaves to supplement other forms of income. The fact that many of the élite, though friendly to Miles, preferred not to deal with him indicates a fear amongst them of becoming over-dependent on the Company of Merchants.

The lists, with their daily records of prices and price changes in trade ounces in all of the goods in Miles's assortments, illustrate how the Fante dealt with rapid changes in supply and demand by price alterations, by manipulating the content of assortments and by changing the value of the ounce of trade as against the ounce of gold.
The Central Beliefs of the Xhosa Cattle-Killing
Authors: Peires J. B.
Published: January 2009

The Xhosa cattle-killing movement of 1856–7 cannot be explained as a superstitious ‘pagan reaction’to the intrusion of colonial rule and Christian civilization. It owes its peculiar form to the lungsickness epidemic of 1854, which carried off over 100,000 Xhosa cattle. The Xhosa theory of disease indicated that the sick cattle had been contaminated by the witchcraft practices of the people, and that these tainted cattle would have to be slaughtered lest they infect the pure new cattle which were about to rise.

The idea of the resurrection of the dead was partly due to the Xhosa belief that the dead do not really die or depart from the world of the living, and partly to the Xhosa myth of creation, which held that all life originated in a certain cavern in the ground which might yet again pour forth its blessings on the earth. Christian doctrines, transmitted through the prophets Nxele and Mhlakaza, supplemented and elaborated these indigenous Xhosa beliefs. The Xhosa and the Christian elements united together in the person of the expected redeemer Sifuba-sibanzi (the broad-chested one). The central beliefs of the Xhosa cattle-killing were neither irrational nor atavistic. Ironically, it was probably because they were so rational and so appropriate that they ultimately proved to be so deadly.
‘Legitimate Commerce’ and Peanut Production in Portuguese Guinea, 1840s–1880s
Authors: Bowman Joye L.
Published: January 2009

This article examines the transition from the slave trade to ‘legitimate commerce’ in Portuguese Guinea between 1840 and 1880. Peanuts became the principal export crop. They were cultivated on plantation-like establishments called feitorias located primarily along the banks of the Rio Grande and on Bolama Island. From the 1840s through the 1870s, Luso-African, other Euro-African and European traders built these feitorias. These traders depended upon both slave and contract labour to cultivate their export crop.

Although Portugal claimed Portuguese Guinea, French trading houses dominated ‘legitimate commerce’ in this West African enclave. The demand for increased peanut production came from the burgeoning French oil mills rather than from Portuguese industries. French merchants supplied the ships needed to transport the crop as well as many of the imported goods sold locally. By the 1870s the Portuguese realized they needed to break this French monopoly. By that time Europe was suffering from an economic recession, peanut prices were falling and cheaper oilseeds from India and America were entering the market. Portugal's attempts to establish commercial dominance met with little success.

The economic crisis of the 1870s not only created difficulties for feitoria owners and their workers, but also for Fulbe groups in the process of expansion. These Fulbe wanted to establish political control in order to reap the economic benefits the peanut trade offered — especially access to firearms and in turn, slaves. As peanut production fell from 1879 onward, Fulbe groups began fighting amongst themselves for control of shrinking resources. By 1887, the feitoria system and this phase of peanut production had ended. The Portuguese, like the Fulbe, had to look for new ways to survive economically.
Women and Resistance to Colonialism in Morocco: the Rif 1916–1926
Authors: Pennell C. R.
Published: January 2009

This article attempts to investigate the role of women in rural society in Morocco, and by extension in the Muslim world of the Near and Middle East. It does so by examining the evidence thrown up by a major crisis, the Rif war of the 1920s. The mobilization and organization of tribal society by Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Karī;m (Abdelkrim) to fight the war against the Spanish and the French extended to women as well as men, involving them in new tasks under new laws. In the end, however, the evidence points not so much to a revolution in women's lives as to the activation for the purposes of war of a traditional ‘female space’. In so doing, it points to the real importance of the women's sphere in a society which was sexually strongly segregated, confirming the impression derived from studies of more literate, urban and aristocratic Muslim societies of North Africa and the Middle East.
Dispossession and Accumulation in the South African Interior: The Boers and the Tlhaping of Bethulie, 1833–61
Authors: Keegan Timothy
Published: January 2009

This article seeks to illuminate some important themes in nineteenth-century South African history by examining the fate of a small chiefdom of difaqane refugees who settled in 1833 just north of the Orange River under the patronage of a French Protestant missionary. It situates the history of the Tlhaping of Bethulie against the background of the expansion of white settlement north of the Orange River and the development of colonial capitalism in the larger region. The processes of white state formation north of the Orange in the middle years of the century, especially the seminal role of British intervention during the period of the Orange River Sovereignty, are examined. The corresponding rise of white elites and the varied primitive forms of capital accumulation employed by the emerging Boer notables are investigated. The article then seeks to provide a concrete study of these themes in a local setting. These encircling developments provided the context for the rising tensions and conflicts at the Bethulie mission station and in the Tlhaping community in the 1850s. The gradual alienation of the Bethulie lands to private ownership eventually led to the destruction of the territory and the break-up of the community. These processes are examined within the context of the rise of local Boer notables and the nature of state structures in the Orange Free State Republic established in 1854. In the end those who orchestrated and benefited from the dismemberment of the Bethulie territory were those who controlled the instruments of patronage and power in the local Boer state.
The Dahomean Middleman System, 1727–c. 1818
Authors: Ross David
Published: January 2009

During the first quarter of the eighteenth century, European merchants bought more slaves in the Bight of Benin than on any other part of the West African coast. From c. 1720 until 1727 much of their buying was concentrated in Savi, the capital of a small Aja state called Whydah. When the Dahomeans overran Savi in 1727 they stopped the inland slave suppliers from travelling to the coast, prevented the local Hueda from going inland to collect slaves, and insisted that the Europeans bought slaves only from Dahomean dealers. In an attempt to make sure that the Europeans had nothing more to do with their former trading partners the Dahomeans burned the factories in Savi and forced their European occupants to retire to Grehue, Savi's port, a spot on the coast where the Europeans maintained a number of fortified warehouses.

The middleman policy did not at first operate satisfactorily. There were two reasons for this. The first was that the Dahomeans were, in practice, unable to prevent the Europeans from continuing to trade with the Hueda. The second was that the inland suppliers refused to sell slaves to Savi's conquerors. The Dahomeans solved their ‘coastal’ problem in the 1740S by placing a garrison in Grehue. This garrison kept the exiled Hueda at bay and held the Europeans in what amounted to open captivity. The Dahomeans were never able completely to solve their ‘supply’ problem. In the 1730s and 1740S the inland merchants took their slaves to ports which opened up on the Bight to the east of Grehue. Only in the 1750s and 1760s did they channel substantial numbers of slaves through Dahomey. In the last decades of the century they again boycotted the Dahomean market. Dahomey therefore prospered as a middleman state only between c. 1748 and c. 1770.

An examination of their eighteenth century trading suggests that the Dahomeans were a slave-raiding community whose members realised in 1727 that they would soon run out of fresh raiding grounds. They appear to have introduced their middleman policy in an attempt to ensure that they would continue to profit from slave trading even after they had ceased to be able to take large numbers of captives themselves. Although the policy was by no means a complete success, it was important in that it seems to have led the Dahomeans to begin placing garrisons in the territories they ravaged. It appears, in fact, to have been the pursuit of their middleman goals that led them to begin creating the often described nineteenth century ‘greater’ Dahomean state. The middleman programme ceased to be of much importance after c. 1818, when the fall of Oyo enabled the Dahomeans to resume raiding widely in unexploited territory.
Slavery and Fanompoana: the Structure of Forced Labour in Imerina (Madagascar), 1790–1861
Authors: Campbell Gwyn
Published: January 2009

A recent school of historical thought has emerged, centred around the writings of Maurice Bloch, which asserts that the imperial Merina economy from the early nineteenth century became totally dependent upon slave labour. It claims that there was such an influx of slaves into Imerina that slave numbers rose dramatically and all free Merina were relieved from productive work to engage in essentially non-productive occupations, notably the military, imperial administration and commerce. This article, which traces the development of forced labour in Madagascar and examines the structure of labour under autarky, takes issue with this viewpoint. It emphasises not only that the slave population of Imerina in the nineteenth century was lower than asserted, but that Bloch misunderstands the nature offanompoanawhich, from the adoption of autarky in the mid-1820s, formed the organizing principle of most sectors of the imperial Merina economy outside subsistence agriculture. The impoverishment of the Merina economy which was a root cause of autarky led to a great decline in slave-holding amongst peasants who were in consequence largely obliged to work their own ricefields, either alone, or alongside the few slaves they managed to retain. By contrast, the Merina elite increasingly monopolized available labour resources, slave andfanompoana. Fanompoana, traditionally a limited form of prestation to the crown, was radically restructured under autarky between 1825 and 1861. Far from being ‘unproductive’, the imperial army, the largestfanompoanainstitution, constituted a huge and elaborate commercial organization which was used to exploit the empire's resources and channel them to the imperial heartland. At the same time,fanompoanaunits comprising Merina soldiers and colonists established farms and engaged in commerce in the provinces. Finally,fanompoanalabour was widely used on the east coast plantations, and especially in the attempt to forge an industrial revolution in Imerina. In sum, this article argues thatfanompoanarather than slavery formed the basis of the imperial Merina economy under autarky, ad was a major factor contributing to the failure of autarkic policies.