bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Alcohol, Racial Segregation and Popular Politics in Northern Rhodesia
Authors: Ambler Charles
Published: January 2009

Historians who have studied the rise of African opposition to colonialism in Northern Rhodesia have concentrated largely on the development of political parties and their campaigns for political rights. This paper explores some of the social and cultural elements of the popular movement against British rule through an examination of challenges to restrictions on the production and consumption of alcoholic beverages. In Northern Rhodesia as in much of British-ruled east, central and southern Africa, the colonial government banned the consumption by Africans of all European-type alcoholic drinks and placed tight restrictions on the brewing and sale of grain beers. In the immediate postwar period racially discriminatory alcohol regulations emerged as a highly emotional issue and remained so despite liberalization of the restrictions on beer and wine. But the focus of popular anger was the municipal grain beer monopolies and attempts on the part of the authorities to stamp out an illegal beer trade conducted by women brewers. Beginning in the mid-1950s this anger erupted in a series of protests and boycotts directed against municipal beerhalls. The protesters, many of whom were women, opposed the exclusion of Africans from a potentially lucrative sector of trade as well as the supposedly immoral and degrading characteristics of the beerhalls. Examination of the struggle over the beerhalls illuminates some of the diverse and contradictory sources and objectives of popular political expression during this period and in particular sheds light on the interplay among issues of race, class and gender in the nationalist movement.
Early Metal Working in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Review of Recent Research
Authors: Miller Duncan E. , Van Der Merwe Nikolaas J.
Published: January 2009

Thispaper is a review of the course of research during the past decade into the history of indigenous metal working in sub-Saharan Africa. It comprises three sections: a summary of the chronology of early metallurgy and the spread of metal working; a description of African metal working in terms of mining, smelting and smithing, with particular emphasis on recent interpretations of the iron-smelting technology; and a conclusion summarizing the main developments and some lines of future enquiry. A glossary of technical terms used in this paper is appended.
White Working-class Women and the Invention of Apartheid: ‘Purified’ Afrikaner Nationalist Agitation for Legislation Against ‘Mixed’ Marriages, 1934–9
Authors: Hyslop Jonathan
Published: January 2009

The South African white general election of 1938 was largely fought around a poster. The poster was published by the supporters of D. F. Malan's hard-line Afrikaner Nationalists, who were attempting to unseat the more pro-imperial United Party (UP) government of Hertzog and Smuts. The poster portrayed the alleged threat of ‘mixed’ marriages to Afrikaner women, and attacked the UP for failing to legislate against it. Rejecting J. M. Coetzee's contention that such racist manifestations can solely be understood in terms of the unconscious, the paper argues that shifting gender relations amongst Afrikaners were crucial to this agitation. As young Afrikaner women moved into industry on a large scale during the 1920s and 1930s, men experienced women's greater economic and social independence as a challenge to their authority. Nationalist leaders played successfully on this insecurity by appealing to men to ‘protect’ women against supposed black threats, including ‘mixed’ marriages. The particular campaign of 1938, however, backfired somewhat on the Malanites. The Hertzog and Smuts supporters were divided over the proposal for legislation. But even their liberal faction was against ‘mixed’ marriages; they simply did not see a law as the best way of preventing it. The UP responded to the Nationalist campaign by arguing that white women were being insulted by the mere suggestion that they would marry across the colour line. They used this particular strand of racism to mobilise white women and men against the Nationalists. But the whole affair ultimately smoothed the way for Malan to legislate against ‘mixed’ marriage after he came to power in 1948. The combined effects of both Nationalist and UP campaigns was to strengthen racist opinion about the issue. In order to avoid the divisions in his party on the marriage question, Hertzog handed it over to a Commission of Inquiry. The 1939 De Villiers Report recommended in favour of legislation, but was not acted on because of the break-up of the Hertzog–Smuts government. Yet this UP appointed commission was ultimately used by the Nationalist government as the basis of its own racist marriage legislation.
The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900–1909
Authors: Swanson Maynard W.
Published: January 2009

Infectious disease and concepts of public health, operating as societal metaphors, seem to have exercised a powerful influence on the origins and development of urban segregation in South Africa. Between 1900 and 1904 bubonic plague, threatening major centres, occasioned the mass removal of African urban populations to hastily established locations at the instigation of medical authorities and other government officials under the emergency provisions of the public health laws. Inchoate urban policy, under tentative consideration since the 1890s as economic development and social change began to stimulate black urban migration, was precipitated by this episode into specific legislation and permanent administration. Cape Town and Port Elizabeth were the two foci of this development in the Cape Colony, where the government locations at Ndabeni and New Brighton exemplify the process. These moves and the effort to consolidate them were to a large degree frustrated by practical administrative, legal, economic and human factors which have characterized the anomalies and contradictions of urban location policy ever since. A black ‘middle class’ resisted the loss of property rights and clung to aspirations of economic and social mobility or legal independence. Especially at Port Elizabeth, where independent peri-urban settlements proliferated, white officials and politicians laboured in an administrative and legal quagmire. White employers and black migrants proved only marginally amenable to location concepts modelled on the principles of quarantine. But ‘the sanitation syndrome’, equating black urban settlement, labour and living conditions with threats to public health and security, became fixed in the official mind, buttressed a desire to achieve positive social controls, and confirmed or rationalized white race prejudice with a popular imagery of medical menace. These issues of urban social order would be repeated again in connexion with such dire events as the 1918 influenza epidemic as the foundations of Union-wide policy and law were laid during and after World War I.
The Role of the Wangara in the Economic Transformation of the Central Sudan in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
Authors: Lovejoy Paul E.
Published: January 2009

The term ‘Wangara’ has most commonly been used to describe the gold merchants of ancient Mali and Ghana and has been equated with ‘Juula’ (Dyula). This article establishes another meaning for ‘Wangara’, as it has been used in the Central Sudan, particularly Hausaland. There the Wangara were descendants of merchants who were once connected with the Songhay Empire of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Since the term is also used in Borgu to describe resident Muslim merchants in the Bariba states, it is postulated that the Wangara were once a Songhay-based commercial group which established diaspora communities in the Bariba and Hausa towns before the Songhay collapse of 1591. It is argued that these Wangara merchants were instrumental in the economic development of the Central Sudan in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They were not only associated with commerce but were involved in early leather and textile production and probably were responsible for the introduction of such new products as kola nuts and the spread of the Songhay monetary system, based on cowries and gold. The immigration of the Wangara came at a time when other economic changes were taking place in the Hausa cities and Borno. The combined impact of these developments were such as to mark the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a major turning point in the economic history of the Central Sudan.
‘Tawani, Machambero!’: Forced Cotton and Rice Growing on the Zambezi
Authors: Vail Leroy , White Landeg
Published: January 2009

Between 1935 and 1960 a peculiar patterning of forced labour developed on Mozambique's lower Zambezi. By the beginning of the Salazar era a particular style of history had been imprinted upon Mozambique. Large scale recruiting of labour for the mines and farms of southern Africa coupled with mass migrations of Mozambique's people to escape the oppressions of Portuguese administration resulted in a severe labour shortage which companies operating in the colony had to face. Exacerbating this problem was the Portuguese decision in the mid-1930s to compel the colonies to produce enough cotton for the demands of the empire. To protect its position vis-à-vis already scarce male labour, the Sena Sugar Estates Ltd., Mozambique's largest employer of labour, formulated a system by which only female labour would cultivate cotton, leaving the men free to work in the company's sugar fields. This system, which was adopted in the 1940s by other employers of labour, led to severe oppression of the local people, notably the women, who were caught between the conflicting demands of interests more powerful than themselves. Only in the late 1950s and early 1960s did the pressures of the forced cultivation system end.
Government and the Decline of the Nigerian Oil-Palm Export Industry, 1919–1939
Authors: Meredith David
Published: January 2009

Between 1900 and 1925 the British Government evolved a policy concerning agricultural development in West Africa by which expatriate-owned plantations, especially for oil palms, were excluded. This prohibition created as many problems as it solved, for the Nigerian Government in particular faced the problem of competition in the international palm-oil and kernel market from plantations in South-east Asia and the Belgian Congo. In the 1920s the Nigerian Government went to considerable effort to entice British capitalists to invest in palm-oil processing (but not production), but to no avail. In the 1930s the Government concentrated on trying to rehabilitate the oil-palm industry by encouraging the establishment of small, native-owned plantations, improving native methods of oil extraction and controlling the quality of palm-oil and kernel exports. This policy was beset with difficulties of finance, inadequate research and the effects on land tenure systems. It failed, and the Nigerian palm-oil export industry lost its place in the world market.

British trusteeship does not appear to have been a positive policy as far as economic development was concerned. It created a dilemma which the colonial authorities were not equipped to solve in the economic and political context of the inter-war period.
Histoire du Peuplement et Genèse des Paysages dans l'Ouest Camerounais
Authors: Warnier Jean-Pierre
Published: January 2009

La diversité et la densité linguistiques exceptionnelles des hauts plateaux ou ‘Grassfields’ du Cameroun de l'Ouest, les découvertes archéologiques les plus récentes et l'ethnographie incitent à penser que cette région de l'Afrique a été peuplée de manière continue et relativement dense depuis plusieurs millénaires. Les paysages contemporains sont dérivés de la forêt biafréenne par déboisement. L'agriculture sur brûlis, la spécialisation régionale des productions et les vicissitudes de l'histoire de peuplement les ont modelés et leur ont imprimé la diversité qui les caractérise.
‘A Swift Agent of Government’: Air Power in British Colonial Africa, 1916–1939
Authors: Killingray David
Published: January 2009

In the inter-war years one major role for the Royal Air Force was imperial defence. The Air Staff further argued that air power, used in substitution for the Army, would provide a more economical and effective means of policing and subjugating unrest in the remoter and more inaccessible areas of the colonial empire in Asia and Africa. The first successful major operation by the R.A.F. in Somaliland in 1920 encouraged the extension of air policing to the troublesome Middle East. The R.A.F. saw the Sudan as an integral part of its Middle East operations and throughout the late 1920s and 1930s military aircraft stationed in Khartoum were used to deal with revolt in the Southern Sudan. Continued Army opposition to substitution led the R.A.F. to seek a role in the sub-Saharan colonies. The need for defence economies as a result of the Depression, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and unrest on the Copperbelt persuaded the authorities in both London and the colonies of the need for an Air Force presence in East and Central Africa.
World War II and Africa: Introduction
Authors: Crowder Michael
Published: January 2009

Until the late 1970s the impact of the two world wars on Africa was a comparatively neglected area of its colonial history. In 1977 the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London drew attention to this neglect by organizing a symposium on the first of these two wars. A selection of the papers presented at that symposium was published in a special issue of this Journal in 1978. This proved to be a landmark in the study of the history of the First World War in Africa, which has since received much scholarly attention. By contrast, a survey written a few years ago of the Second World War in Africa could make relatively little use of original research. In 1983, however, the Académie Royale des Sciences d'Outre-Mer, Brussels, published a large collection of papers on the Belgian Congo in the Second World War, and in 1984 Richard Rathbone and David Killingray organized a further conference at S.O.A.S. on the impact on Africa of the Second World War. This elicited over thirty papers by scholars from Africa, Europe and North America; they not only provided extensive geographical coverage but also represented a wide variety of interests: political, economic, social and cultural. The conference organizers have since edited a selection of these papers in book form: the topics range from the impact of the war on labour in Sierra Leone to relations between the colonial government and Christian missions in southern Cameroons.
The Moroccan Nationalist Movement: Istiqlal, the Sultan, and the Country
Authors: Joffé E. G. H.
Published: January 2009

The conventional view of the Moroccan nationalist movement argues that its success was rooted in the experience of the Second World War in Morocco. However, this overlooks the critical differentiation in popular response to nationalist ideas that developed over the period from 1926 to independence in 1956. Whereas the pre-war nationalist movement was urban-based, with a strong middle-class and Salafiyyist tradition behind it, and picked up support from other urban groups that suffered from the Great Depression in the 1930s, it consistently lacked the essential concomitant of a broad rural base. This was in part due to the effective control of rural areas maintained by the French administration, but also arose from the development of a new élite in rural areas that had a clear interest in acquisition and control of land. Although this group had antecedents that originated from pre-colonial times, it was the conditions of the Protectorate and the development of a money-based economy which allowed it to flourish while other aspects of indigenous economic activity declined. This group, which may be considered to constitute a ‘kulak’ class, thus had an evident interest in supporting the French Protectorate authorities, and little concern for nationalist aspirations, particularly since it was also closely associated with the French administration of rural areas through its role in the caïdat. It was only when this élite found its economic interests threatened, and realized that the nationalist movement had the support of the Sultan, that its political concerns were redirected. This change occurred in 1947 with the Tangier speech, in which Mohammed V implicitly rejected French tutelage and, by inference, turned to the nationalist movement to support his dynasty. The speech coincided with the end of the consequences of the 1945 famine, which gave the nationalist movement its opportunity to extend its network into rural areas. It was this development, rather than the Second World War itself, that ensured the ultimate success of the Moroccan nationalist movement.
A New Look at the Later Prehistory of the Kalahari
Authors: Denbow James
Published: January 2009

Until recently, the later prehistory of the Kalahari has remained almost unknown and, in consequence, the long and complex past of the peoples of this region has often been condensed into an ahistorical and timeless caricature when compared with events in neighbouring countries. The summary presented here attempts to rectify this situation by drawing upon data from over four hundred surveyed sites and information from detailed excavations carried out since 1975 at twenty-two selected localities in Botswana.

Three important topics in southern African prehistory are addressed from the perspective of these investigations. The first topic is the introduction of sheep and cattle to the sub-continent between 2,000 and 2,500 years ago. The second is the origins and social dynamics of pastoralism during the Early Iron Age, and relates these developments to the formation of stratified socio-political systems around the fringes of the Kalahari towards the end of the first millennium A.D. The third topic is the relevance to current information on the later prehistory of the Kalahari of ethnographic accounts of herding and foraging societies gathered in this same region during the twentieth century.
Origins of the AmaWasha: the Zulu Washermen's Guild in Natal, 1850–1910
Authors: Atkins Keletso E.
Published: January 2009

Research into the perspectives of both worker and consumer has shown the social history of Zulu washermen to be far more complex than was previously thought. Viewed from the standpoint of Zulu men, washing clothes was not a humiliating female task into which they had been coerced by adverse circumstances. Laundering recalled the specialist craft of hide-dressing in which Zulu males engaged as izinyanga, a prestige occupation that paid handsomely. These astute tradesmen, a number of whom may have come from artisanal families, recognized they could play a crucial role in the European household economy. ‘Craft conscious’, building on indigenous institutions and customs, they combined not merely to secure their position and bar entry into ‘the trade’, but also to impose standards of wages and regulate the labour given by the younger men. In this manner they became one, if not indeed the most, powerful group of African workmen in nineteenth-century Natal.

The social history of the AmaWasha guild compels a re-evaluation of notions regarding openness to change in traditional societies; indeed, it underscores their capacity for innovation. Moreover, it has a fundamental bearing on the structural nature and patterns of resistance of early black working populations in South Africa. This study indicates that there were intimate historical links between precolonial artisanal associations and subsequent worker organizations, activities and consciousness.
Big Business in African Studies
Authors: Hopkins A. G.
Published: January 2009

This article surveys research into the business history of Africa completed during the past decade, taking as a point of departure the author's previous essays, ‘Imperial business in Africa’, in this Journal (XVII, (1976), 29–48 and 291–305), and using as a point of reference the published proceedings of two conferences held in Paris and London in 1981 and 1983. It is apparent that knowledge of indigenous and expatriate business in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has expanded considerably during the past ten years, and also that the studies produced by specialists on Africa have particular strengths: they remain integrated with other branches of history; they have illuminated the relationship between business enterprise and official policy; and they have been concerned to explore the wider social consequences of business activities and to relate historical research to current development issues. The literature reveals some characteristic weaknesses too, quite apart from limitations of source materials: the market for knowledge remains imperfect, and specialists often fail to incorporate work which is available; and their analysis is frequently limited by a reluctance to make use of theories of the firm and of accounting techniques. An explanation of these characteristics is offered, and it is concluded that once the present deficiencies have been recognized they can be overcome, and that the quality of research will improve still further as the subject continues to grow during the next decade.
Shipping Subsidies and Railway Guarantees: William Mackinnon, Eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean, 1860–93
Authors: Munro J. Forbes
Published: January 2009

This article reassesses Sir William Mackinnon's role in the evolution of Victorian imperialism in Eastern Africa. It rejects the view that Mackinnon's activities in Eastern Africa were motivated by a desire for self-glorification and attempts, by contrast, to demonstrate the relevance of business considerations. A search for shipping subsidies and railway guarantees, spreading out from British India, accompanied the Mackinnon Group's development of steamshipping and mercantile interests in Africa, in support of investments in the Persian Gulf and western India. Promotion of these interests drew Mackinnon into schemes to lease the Sultan of Zanzibar's mainland territories and to consolidate British rule in the Transvaal by the construction of a railway from Delagoa Bay. During the 1880s the Group's shipping and commercial operations were threatened by the rise of foreign competition. Behind the formation of the Imperial British East Africa Company lay the hopes of Mackinnon and his business associates that public funds could be attracted to the defence of the Group's interests in Eastern Africa and to the reconstruction of its shipping services in the western Indian Ocean.
A Microcosm of Why Africans sold Slaves: Akan Consumption Patterns in the 1770s.
Authors: Metcalf George
Published: January 2009

The European goods which Africans consumed in the slave trade era tell us much about the African societies which imported them. However the study of the subject has involved much confusion through the application of fragmentary evidence from different societies in different stages of development towards the fashioning of broad hypotheses about the impact of the trade on West Africa as a whole. It is important therefore, when the evidence is available, to study each society and each group of African middlemen individually as well as within the wider context.

The papers (especially the barter records) of Richard Miles throw a good deal of light on one such microcosm: the Akan people of the Gold Coast in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Fante middlemen with whom Miles dealt required, for virtually every barter, an assortment of goods from five major categories: hardware, currencies, textiles, luxury items, arms and ammunition. Though all these categories were necessary for the trade, it is notable that textiles were far and away the dominant commodity desired by the Akan. Guns were in surprisingly low demand during this period which suggests that the Akan slave producers (principally the Asante) had no difficulty raising slaves through tribute in peacetime and were not forced to rely on wars and slave-raids.

Miles's documents also make it clear that generalizations drawn from the Gold Coast in this period cannot be extended automatically to other areas; Akan history tells us that neither can they be extended on the Gold Coast into a different era.
The River-God and the Historians: Myth in the Shire Valley and Elsewhere
Authors: Wrigley Christopher
Published: January 2009

Debates over the ‘Zimba’ period of Zambesian history prompt a new consideration of the mythical element in oral traditions. The work of Matthew Schoffeleers on Mbona, presiding spirit of a famous rain-shrine in southern Malawi, is exploited in order to cast doubt on his reconstruction of sixteenth/seventeenth-century political history. It is suggested that Mbona was the serpentine power immanent in the Zambesi; that reports of his ‘martyrdom’ at the hands of a secular ruler are versions of an ancient and widespread myth of the lightning and the rainbow, whose opposition establishes the due alternation of the seasons and the generations; that his journey to, and subsequent flight from, Kaphiri-ntiwa, scene of the Maravi Creation myth, is a variant of the visit made to the sky by Kintu, the ‘First Man’ of Ganda tradition, who introduced sex and death to middle-earth. It is not very likely that such stories attest the rise of a great military statec. 1600 and the ensuing suppression of religious institutions.

Comparative mythology (which does not have to be technically ‘structuralist’) has positive as well as negative uses for the historian. The peoples of southern Uganda, Zaire, Zambia and Malawi appear to share a common heritage of religious thought and practice and there must be a historical basis for this cultural affinity. At the same time, differences between the myths reflect recent political divergence: whereas successful states such as those of the Ganda and Luba became more secular, the Mbona cult alone survived the disasters that overwhelmed southern Malawi in the nineteenth century.
Révolte, Pouvoir, Religion: Les Hubbu du Fūta-Jalon (Guinée)
Authors: Botte Roger
Published: January 2009

In the middle of the nineteenth century, in Futa Jalon, the popular revolt of the Hubbu brutally revealed the underlying weaknesses of the most powerful state of its time in the region. A marabout of the Qādiriyya, Alfā Mamadu Dyuhe, took upon himself the leadership of the oppressed, the discontented, and the minority groups. The Hubbu survived for forty years, until exterminated by Samori in 1884, but the article concentrates on the movement from its inception in 1845 to the death of its founder in 1854, at the pinnacle of his success, in possession of the Futa state capital, Timbo. The Futa state, product of an Islamic revolution in the eighteenth century, had lost the fervour of its Fulbe founders in the endless contest for the position of Almamy between the rival lineages of Alfāyā and Soriyā. Based upon the jihād against paganism, upon the taxation of the conquered, and upon the slavery of more than half its population, it was rendered doubly oppressive by the political struggle for the rewards of power at all levels down to that of village headman, and doubly weak in consequence. The nomadic Fulbe, particularly angered by their treatment, were notably responsive to the preaching of Alfā Mamadu against the decadence and injustice of the rulers; so too were the Malinke of the eastern province of Fōduye-Haji. It was the breakdown of this large region into smaller and smaller chieftaincies, increasing the patronage of the reigning Almamy by multiplying the number of official predators, that created the special conditions for the Hubbu revolt. First the representations of Timbo, then the Alfāyā and the Soriyā themselves, were routed by the holy man and his increasingly numerous following. The religious leadership which had inspired the rising, however, faltered after Alfā Mamadu's death. The Hubbu, from hubb, ‘love’, the key word in the Arabic chant that bound them into a religious fraternity, failed to carry through their revolution, and instead became a community of refugees living by banditry. More important to their failure than the reform of the Futa state, undertaken by the Almamys at the insistence of their own clerics, was the fundamental inability of the movement, so characteristic of other popular revolts, to see the new society they wished to bring into existence as in any way different from the old. Slavery, for instance, was not abolished, despite the numbers of ex-slaves in the Hubbu ranks. Their failure was a failure of imagination.
French ‘Islamic’ Policy and Practice in Late Nineteenth-Century Senegal
Authors: Robinson David
Published: January 2009

In contrast to the negative conclusions reached by Donal Cruise O'Brien, it is here argued that the French, in the last half of the nineteenth century, maintained an Islamic policy. They practised some of it all of the time and all of it when they had the human and financial resources. They consistently opposed the Islamic state where it conflicted with their own political and economic interests. They identified it with their old nemesis of Futa Toro and the Tokolor, and then with the Tijaniyya. This attitude can be contrasted with a much more tolerant disposition towards the established monarchies, with whom thay coexisted for a much longer time and upon whom they relied to supply the cadre of chiefs.

In the case of Umar, the French confronted a jihad that was launched before they began their own expansion in the upper valley, but they contained its influence. They quarantined the Wolof areas and pushed the Umarian state to the margins of their sphere of influence. By allowing much of the younger generation of Tokolor to depart, they turned the preaching of hijra to their own advantage. The French opposed the efforts of Ma Bâ to move into the heart of the peanut basin and the campaigns of the Madiyankobe to block the river trade or disrupt cultivation in Cayor. As soon as Mamadu Lamin mobilized for jihad they responded by driving him out of their gateway to expansion.
‘The Natives are always stealing’: white vigilantes and the ‘reign of terror’ in the Orange Free State, 1918–24
Authors: Murray Martin J.
Published: January 2009

During the formative years of capitalist agriculture, white farmers in the Orange Free State relied on both legal and extra-legal means to create a docile labour force of African workers. Coercive laws were a necessary component in the overall process of fashioning a rural working class out of quasi-independent squatter communities. Yet, no matter how repressive, the legal system alone was not sufficient to ensure work-discipline and docility on the white-owned farms. Frustrated with their inability to force African farm labourers to work diligently and to prevent them from deserting the farms, white farmers frequently turned to indiscriminate violence to sow terror amongst the dispossessed African rural population. White vigilantes formed a kind of paramilitary wing of the white farming class. While the state authorities never officially sanctioned vigilantism, those white farmers who used violence to intimidate their African labourers had little to fear with respect to prosecution, let alone conviction. Yet despite all their efforts to break the will of rural Africans, white farmers lived in continued fear of ‘native risings’. Rural Africans, too, remembered: the shooting incidents that occurred in the Orange Free State were indelibly etched in the collective memory of the emergent rural working class.
Essai d'Interprétation du Cliché de Kangere (dans la Région des Grands Lacs Africains)
Authors: Kasimba Yogolelo Tambwe Ya
Published: January 2009

The Kangere cliché is widespread in the Great Lakes region of Zaire (Lakes Kivu and Tanganyika), where the Bembe, Fulero, Havu, Lega, Nyindu, Shi, Vira and others live. This cliché has been collected since the 1910s by missionary and colonial administrator researchers. Later it has been heavily used and interpreted in different ways. Thus certain modern scholars have made Kangere the first ‘king’ of the region and the ‘father’ of allbami, that is, the ‘kings’ of various ancient kingdoms existing on the shores of the Great Lakes, including Rwanda and Burundi! Their single aim was to refute the ‘Hamitic myth’.

In fact, the Kangere cliché is woven together from different elements taken from various ethnic groups of the region. Its elements were ordered at the same time that they were collected, in the course of the 1910s and the 1920s. They constitute an African response to the preoccupation of the colonial administration of those years: the creation of vast ethnic groups and politically and administratively viable entities. Whites wanted tribes, and blacks created them; whites wanted great chiefs, and blacks created them, thebami.

In their interpretation of the Kangere cliché, these researchers quite simply confused, erroneously, the ‘bwamisymbol’ of personalized power (which existed in the area, and which chiefs of different ethnic groups possessed) with the ‘bwamistate’ or kingdom, of recent, colonial creation.
Text and Testimony in theTribunal de Première Instance, Dakar, During the Early Twentieth Century
Authors: Roberts Richard
Published: January 2009

Historians have recently come to appreciate the importance of studying the colonial legal system and the potential in mining court cases for historical data. This article is a preliminary effort to present a methodology for the study of the records of the entry level civil court, thetribunal de première instance, in Dakar, Senegal. The records are somewhat peculiar, because they are the consequence of the extension of the legal rights to the Africanoriginairesof the four communes of Senegal, which empowered them to bring civil cases before this court. However, these records share with records from other courts in colonial Africa problems of determining how the litigants' ‘testimony’ was shaped by the legal procedures of the court. This article, therefore, focusses on the context in which litigants' testimony was transformed into the texts we read as court records. In particular, it examines how the phases of litigation and how the court's bias towards written evidence shaped the court records. This research was stimulated in part by the need to locate new sources providing African ‘voices’ about the changes associated with the transition to colonialism. This article concludes with an appraisal of the historical potential of using court records for African social history.
Afrikaner Nationalism, Apartheid and the Conceptualization of ‘Race’
Authors: Dubow Saul
Published: January 2009

This paper analyses the ideological elaboration of the concept of race in the development of Christian-nationalist thought. As such, it contributes to our understanding of the ideological and theological justifications for apartheid. The paper begins by pointing to the relatively late moment (c. mid-1930s) at which Afrikaner nationalist ideologues began to address the systematic separation of blacks and whites. It takes its cue from a key address given by the nationalist leader, Totius, to the 1944 volkskongres on racial policy. Here, racial separation was justified by reference to scriptural injunction, the historical experience of Afrikanerdom and the authority of science. Each of these categories is then analysed with respect to the way in which the concept of race was understood and articulated.

The paper argues that both scientific racism and distinctive forms of cultural relativism were used to justify racial separation. This depended on the fact that the categories of race, language and culture were used as functionally interdependent variables, whose boundaries remained fluid. In the main, and especially after the Second World War, Afrikaner nationalist ideologues chose to infer or suggest biological notions of racial superiority rather than to assert these openly. Stress on the distinctiveness of different ‘cultures’ meant that the burden of explaining human difference did not rest solely on the claims of racial science. As a doctrine, Christian-nationalism remained sufficiently flexible to adjust to changing circumstances. In practice, the essentialist view of culture was no less powerful a means of articulating human difference than an approach based entirely on biological determinism.
‘Messing with Coloured People’: The 1918 Police Strike in Cape Town, South Africa
Authors: Nasson Bill
Published: January 2009

This article seeks to provide an interpretation of a strike by white policemen in Cape Town in 1918. It argues that this defensive dispute over wages and living conditions can best be understood not simply through an examination of service dissatisfaction in the urban police community, but by incorporating this episode into the larger picture of South African police development in the early decades of the present century. In this broader context, several factors seem general and influential: local social resentments over the terms of national police organization after Union; police practices and attitudes, especially in relation to the increasing recruitment of Afrikaners; the position of white working-class policemen in the ‘civilized labour’ stratification of Cape Town society; and, most visibly, the inflationary effect of the First World War on the living standards of poorly paid, disaffected and unorganized constables. It is argued that these converging pressures generated a severe crisis of work discipline in 1917 and 1918 which tipped the Cape Town police into a classical natural justice strike. While ordinary policemen were split between petitioners and younger, less hesitant radicals, there was considerable popular support for strikers’ claims, both within the Cape police body and the local white labour movement. The government used a strategy of provisional concessions to settle the dispute. In conclusion, it is suggested that the strike experience helped to strengthen associational bonds between lower-ranking policemen and that a commitment by the state to improved service conditions provided an anxious constabulary with a more secure ‘civilized labour’ identity in the post-World War I period.
Berbers and Blacks: Ibāḍī Slave Traffic in Eighth-Century North Africa
Authors: Savage E.
Published: January 2009

The aim of this article is to illustrate the process whereby certain Berber tribes during the eighth century A.D. substituted slaves from the Bilād al-Sūdān for Berber slaves from North Africa. From the outset, this conversion was influenced strongly, if not instigated, by Ibāḍī merchants until the slave trade became a predominantly Ibāḍī monopoly from the mid-eighth century onwards. The slave trade along the central Sudan route in particular provided the increase in the community's wealth and security, as well as the means for its establishment and expansion as a Muslim sect among diverse Berber tribes and, finally, as the origins for the subsequent, far-flung network of trans-Saharan trade.
The Antecedents of the Interlacustrine Kingdoms
Authors: Sutton J. E. G.
Published: January 2009

The main interlacustrine kingdoms have been presented, on the evidence of their royal genealogies recalling up to thirty reigns, as stretching back to a ‘Chwezi’ period some five centuries ago. This view was promoted especially in the Kitara zone, comprising Bunyoro and regions to its south and, as a close linguistic grouping, extending to Nkore, Karagwe and Buhaya. Rwanda to the south-west and Buganda to the east, though each rather distinct, share some of the same cultural and traditional features. In the central Kitara zone it has been further argued that the ‘Chwezi’ period is represented by various impressive archaeological sites – hilltop shrines, notably at Mubende, with special and archaic objects; complex earthwork enclosures at Bigo and elsewhere; and the concentrated settlement nearby at Ntusi. Certain of these have been claimed as Chwezi royal capitals of ancient Kitara, and specific features have been compared with royal abodes of recent centuries. Such literal interpretation, let alone royalist manipulation, of oral traditions is now considered too simplistic; not only are the Chwezi generally regarded as gods or mythical heroes, but also the role of archaeology is now seen as something more positive than the mere verification of verbal evidence.

Renewed archaeological research indicates that Ntusi was occupied from about the eleventh to the fifteenth centuriesa.d.and that the earthworks, including Bigo, and the settlement on Mubende hill fall into the latter half of that span. This cultural grouping thrived on a combination of cattle-keeping and grain cultivation, as is especially clear at Ntusi on fertile ground in the midst of the Bwera grasslands. It may have been the growing strains of a delicately balanced economy as competition increased for cattle and the pastures which led to its eventual breakdown. During the last half-millennium Bwera has been a peripheral and lightly populated district between Bunyoro, Nkore and Buganda. It is difficult to imagine these later kingdoms developing directly out of a supposed ‘Chwezi’ one based at Ntusi and the Bigo constructions.

Two periods of marked change are discernible therefore, one around the middle of this millennium, the other at its beginning. That earlier, mid-Iron Age, revolution witnessed the introduction of cattle on a large scale and the first intensive exploitation of the interlacustrine grasslands. Cattle becoming then an economic asset, it may be inferred that ownership of stock and defence of the pastures became sources of prestige and patronage, with obvious social, political and military implications. This situation opened opportunities for other specializations, including the production of salt for distant distribution. Traditions concerning gods and heroes, and the continuing popularchwezicults, illustrate the changes and may also echo the cultural and economic importance of iron and its working among agricultural populations from before the pastoral revolution.
British Justice and the Native Tribunals of the Southern Gold Coast Colony
Authors: Gocking Roger
Published: January 2009

As a result of the policy of indirect rule which British administrators introduced into the Colony of the Gold Coast at the turn of the twentieth century, customary courts, or what were called Native Tribunals, became important venues of adjudication for the indigenous population. As a result, however, of the powerful impact of British justice on the Colony, the judicial responsibilities, procedure, personnel and the nature of the customary law that these courts applied underwent profound changes. It was an excellent example of how important was the cultural interchange between European and African ideas during the colonial period, which, however, both academic lawyers and historians have neglected. The former have preferred to focus on the superior courts as venues of juridical interaction while the latter have focused far more on ‘what was said about change than what was said about order’. By looking, however, at this example of cultural interaction on a fundamentally popular level, we can see that this ‘transforming moment’ in the colonial situation can be seen neither as something ‘imposed’ on African society by colonial administrators nor as simply generating new mechanisms for privileged groups to take advantage of. The Native Tribunals never fully came up to what British administrators or African lawyers considered the highest standards of British rule of law. Nevertheless, their most important function was to popularize recourse to judicial institutions which increasingly adopted more and more of the features of the British legal system.
The Path of the Leopard: Motherhood and Majesty in Early Danhomè
Authors: Blier Suzanne Preston
Published: January 2009

This article examines Danhomè (Dahomey) myths of dynastic origin, offering at once a critique and counter-narrative to the official dynastic history. Critical to this counter-narrative are the early women of the state, most importantly the mothers and wives of the first rulers. The provocative stories of these women not only add an important human dimension to Danhomè history but also raise important methodological issues, for events associated with their lives contradict much of what has been previously written about the origins of this kingdom. In Danhomè, events associated with the beginning of the dynasty were mythologized into an elaborate fiction of leopard birth and incest. While scholars have long questioned this account's veracity, to date a coherent alternative has been lacking. Through an analysis of the stories of these royal women, the forging of a new history of the kingdom's origins is now possible.
Of Slaves and the Gift: Kabre Sale of Kin During the Era of the Slave Trade
Authors: Piot Charles
Published: January 2009

While numerous reports in the ethnographic and historical literature on West African societies document the sale of kin into slavery during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, theorists of the trade have not dealt with the logic of selling close relatives. This article examines an instance of such sale among a Voltaic people, the Kabre, located in the hinterland of Dahomey and Ashanti, and attempts to theorize its meaning as a way of maneuvering between complementing sets of values, both human and material, that emerge at the intersection of the local Kabre ‘gift’ economy with the larger regional political economy of slaving. The essay thus examines Kabre prestational forms – and the complex conceptions of value, wealth, alienation and personhood that accompany them – and the ways in which they interacted with the currencies and slaving practices, and the distinctive forms of alienation these entailed, that entered the area during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Understanding such local forms and practices, however, requires us to depart from neoclassical modes of analysis like those typically employed by economic historians of the slave trade.
The Will of Abraham and Elizabeth September: the Struggle for Land in Gordonia, 1898–1995
Authors: Legassick Martin
Published: January 2009

This article is concerned with the loss of their land to the whites by the September family and their struggle to regain it. Abraham (‘Holbors’) September, an exslave, was a member of the Baster community of the Gordonia settlement (1880–89) where he was the first person to lead water from the Orange River to irrigate land. The article traces the estabishment of the Gordonia settlement and the granting of land in it, and its government as part of British Bechuanaland (1889–95) and the Cape Colony (1895–). It discusses the historiography of the loss of land by Basters to whites, testing explanations of land loss by subsequent historians against written records and oral tradition, with attention to the role of ‘land lawyers’. Abraham September died in 1898. The remainder of the article focuses on the September family as a case-study of land loss. It deals with the administration of his estate – in the course of which his land was ‘sold’ to whites – from the different points of view of the official record and of oral tradition. It then outlines correspondence in the archives from 1920 through to the 1960s protesting against this land alienation as a failure to implement the will of Abraham September and his wife Elizabeth. It concludes with some comments on sources. Is the official record or oral tradition a more accurate reflection of what happened to the land of the September family?