bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Notes on Traditional Market Authority and Market Periodicity in West Africa
Authors: Hill Polly 
Published: January 2009

These notes on traditional market authority and market periodicity in West Africa are intended to draw attention to the neglect of a fascinating historico-anthropological field. Given the lack of any satisfactory typology of West African markets, generalizations about all types of market must be avoided—and certain erroneous assumptions relating to the traditional relationship of chief and market are called in question. Nor should it be assumed that Christaller's ‘central-place theory’ has any application in such regions as Yorubaland and Iboland, where rural periodic markets cannot be classified hierarchically as, for instance, they can be in rural China. Although daily (or continuous) markets which, both traditionally and today, occur only in the very largest centres of population, are typologically distinct from rural periodic markets, this is rather because of their high proportion of full-time vendors than because they are necessarily apices of an hierarchical market system.Everywhere in West Africa there is a standard ‘market-week’ such that all the periodic markets in the locality are based on the same cycle. Although this has been well-known for centuries, few writers in English have been interested in mapping these weeks, or examining the relationship between them. After summarizing existing geographical material, which clearly establishes an association between 4- and 8-day market weeks (which are extraordinarily widespread in the forest zone), as well as some connexion between the 3- and 6-day market weeks, it is concluded that there are effectively only four common market weeks, viz. 3- (or 6-) day, 4- (or 8-) day, 5-day and 7-day. The 7-day market week prevails throughout Hausaland and many other Islamized savanna districts. The fact that it has existed for centuries throughout the Akan areas of southern Ghana and Ashanti (though hardly anywhere else in the forest zone) has not attracted the attention it deserves—the same applying to other questions, here posed though not answered, such as why the 4-day market week cuts right across some ethnic boundaries and not others.The article concludes with brief notes on the two traditional types of market taxation in West Africa, tolls and stall-rents, emphasis being laid on the traditional lack of market taxation in Eastern Nigeria.
La Fin de la Chefferie En Guinee
Authors: Suret-Canale Jean 
Published: January 2009

LE 31 Décembre 1957, paraissait au Journal Officiel de la Guinée Française, un arrêté signé de Keïta Fodéba, Ministre de l'Intérieur du gouvernement de la ‘;loi-cadre’, portant suppression sur le territoire de la Guinée de la ‘chefferie dite coutumière’. Nul ne conteste que, sans la suppression de la chefferie, le succès du ‘Non’ en Guinée, lors du référendum constitutionnel du 28 septembre 1958 n'eût pas été assuré. Quelques semaines après le référendum, M. Jacques Rabemananjara (aujourd'hui ministre du gouvernement de Madagascar), préfaçant le volume qui publiait le compte rendu de la ‘Conférence des Commandants de cercle’, tenue à Conakry les 25–26 juillet 1957, écrivait:L'un des bastions du régime [colonial], son artillerie lourde, celle qu'il n'engage que dans les circonstances graves, s'appelle la féodalité africaine.
The Monk's Kop Ossuary
Authors: Crawford J. R. 
Published: January 2009

This paper describes the excavation of a cave used for funerary purposes in the Mtoroshanga district of Rhodesia. The cave was found to contain a large quantity of skeletal material and pottery, together with the personal ornaments of the persons interred there. The physical type represented is similar to that of the modern Bantu-speaking peoples of Southern Africa. Bodies had been placed in the cave surrounded by pottery—although pottery, unlike the skeletal material, which was ubiquitous, was mainly placed towards the entrance of the cave. Quantities of palm-leaf and bark-cloth matting used for wrapping round the bodies of the persons interred were found. Conus shell end-whorls and glass beads indicate trade links with the outside world.There are two superimposed funerary layers in the cave, both belonging to the same culture, but at different stages of its development. The earlier layer has been dated by radicarbon dating methods to approximately the late 13th or early 14th century A.D. Prior to its use for funerary purposes, the cave had been briefly occupied for other purposes by people of the same culture.The ceramics of the site indicate that it belongs to a culture newly recognized in Rhodesia with a fairly wide distribution in the north-east of the country. Cultural affinities lie with Zambia and Malawi, rather than with the contemporary Zimbabwe culture, whose expansion, indeed, probably put an end to the occupation of the Mtoroshanga area by the people of the ossuary.
Christian Traces and a Franciscan Mission in the Central Sudan, 1700–1711
Authors: Gray Richard 
Published: January 2009

In 1700 reports from Tripoli reached the congregation of Propaganda Fide in Rome that Christians, ‘little or uninstructed in the Faith’, were living in Bornu. Further enquiries revealed that these rumours related not to the kingdom of Bornu, but to a neighbouring, rival kingdom, that of ‘Gourourfa’ or ‘Carnorfa’. Two sons of the ruler of Bornu, interviewed in Cairo, stated that in ‘Canorfa’ there were people ‘who venerate the Cross and erect it over the houses and churches’, while the French Consul at Tripoli reported how he had seen slaves from ‘Gouroufa’ who made the sign of the Cross. In June 1710 two Franciscans, attempting to establish contact with these ‘Christians’, set out from Tripoli, passed through Murzuk and Agades, and were later reported to have died in Katsina in August 1711.Hausa and Bornu sources indicate that these reports almost certainly referred to the Kwararafa, who on several occasions in the seventeenth century attacked Kano and Bornu. It is then pointed out that a Maltese cross was one of the motifs still used in the twentieth century as a decoration by an Aku of Wukari, a ruler of the Jukun, who are among the principal survivors of the Kwararafa. At least a section of the inhabitants of Wukari also preserved a clearly remembered tradition of having taken part in a migratory journey from the Nilotic Sudan to the Benue. It is suggested therefore that the reports of the French consul and the Franciscans, although garbled and consisting in the main of second-hand evidence, strengthen the possibility that the Maltese crosses used among the Jukun, in Nupe and at Benin indicate an influence which emanated originally from Christian Nubia and is perhaps connected with the Kisra traditions.
Slavery in Nineteenth Century Egypt
Authors: Baer Gabriel 
Published: January 2009

In nineteenth-century Egypt Circassian females were mostly kept in the harems of wealthy Turks, the concubines of ‘middle class’ Egyptians generally were Abyssinians, while male and female Negro slaves were used for domestic service by almost all layers of Egyptian society. In addition to domestic service, black slaves were used as soldiers by Egypt's rulers and, contrary to the prevalent assumption, as agricultural workers on the farms of the Muḥammad Alī family and elsewhere in Upper Egypt and during periods of prosperity and shortage of labour also in Lower Egypt. Apparently there were at least 30,000 slaves in Egypt at different times of the nineteenth century, and probably many more.White slaves were brought to Egypt from the eastern coast of the Black Sea and from the Circassian settlements of Anatolia via Istanbul. Brown and black slaves were brought (a) from Darfur to Asyūṭ, directly or through Kordofan; (b) from Sennar to Isnā; (c) from the area of the White Nile; (d) from Bornu and Wadāy via Libya and the Western Desert; (e) from Abyssinia and the East African coast through the Red Sea. The slave dealers in Egypt were mainly people from Upper Egypt and the Oases, beduin and villagers of the Buḥayra province. They were divided into dealers in black and in white slaves and organized in a guild with a shaykh. Cairo was the great depot of slaves and the centre of the trade, but a very important occasion for trading in slaves was the annualmawlidof Ṭanṭā.Official measures taken against the slave-trade were among the important causes for the final disappearance of slavery in Egypt. These were, amongst others, the appointment of foreigners, mainly British, as governors of the Sudan and commanders of special missions to suppress the trade; two Anglo-Egyptian conventions, of 1877 and of 1895, for the suppression of slavery; and, from 1877 on, the establishment of offices and later a special service for the fight against the trade and for the manumission of slaves. However, were it not for the internal development of Egyptian society, these measures could never have succeeded; this is illustrated by the tremendous obstacles they encountered and their ineffectiveness for a long time. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century most of these impediments vanished. In addition to the Mahdist revolution and the reconquest of the Sudan, the most important change was the emergence of a free labour market as a result of accelerated urbanization and the collapse of the guild system. At the same time a small but important section of Egyptians had changed their attitudes towards slavery as a result of their cultural contact with Europe.
Madagascar and Africa: II. The Sakalava, Maroserana, Dady and Tromba before 1700
Authors: Kent R. K. 
Published: January 2009

Linguistic research has revealed a Bantu ‘substratum’ among the few ethnic relics of western Madagascar that survive in what became known as the Sakalava empire. Early in the 1600's, two Jesuits familiar with both sides of the Moçambique Channel, discovered that some 300 miles of western Malagasy littoral bore the name of Bambala and were inhabited by Bantu-speaking agriculturalists, whose idiom was only modified by Malagasy loans. Bambala's African colonies were sub-divided into riverain chiefdoms, the largest of which was Sadia, with some 10,000 inhabitants in 1617. From it, the Sakalava warriors fanned out in the 1620's, came into contact with the southwestern Maroserana dynasty and gave it an empire by 1690 stretching from St Augustine Bay to present-day Majunga.Maroserana kings adopted two of Bambala's politico-religious institutions, while the empire-building gradually decimated the original Sakalava warriors and swept away Bambala's Bantu speakers by ± 1710. Pastoralists from north, south and east replaced the former agricultural peoples while retaining the name ‘Sakalava’. But, there is no doubt that the first Malagasy empire was an African creation, and doubly so since association with gold confirms anew the close links between the Maroserana and gold-bearing Mwene Mutapa.
Lord Selborne and the British Protectorates, 1908–1910
Authors: Booth Alan R. 
Published: January 2009

The responsibility for the retention of the British Protectorates during the period leading up to Union lay more with Lord Selborne than with the British government as a whole. Governemental dealings (both Conservative and Liberal) with the Protectorates up to the era of Lord Selborne had been consistently heedless of the interests of the Africans involved.The key to the change in policy seems to have been Selborne's dealings with the Basutos. The High Commissioner, from the time of his first exposure to them until years after his departure, continually evidenced the highest regard for the Basutos' intellect, accomplishments and military prowess. Through the vehicle of the National Council, he had a real chance to learn what the nation was thinking, wishing or fearing. Through correspondence with local traders and missionaries (notably the Rev. Jacottet), Selborne had become convinced, by the eve of the National Convention, that the Protectorates, whatever the outcome of the native franchise question, must be withheld from the Union if the current African restlessness, especially in Basutoland, were not to be transformed into outright rebellion. The virtual denial of native representation by the Convention provided Selborne with a plausible and strong reason for doing so. In the face of determined opposition by the Convention, Selborne stood firm, and was backed up by the Colonial office for fear, among other reasons, that he would resign if it did not.
Barotseland's Scramble for Protection
Authors: Caplan Gerald L. 
Published: January 2009

The arrival of European concession-seekers in Barotseland coincided with a period of internal instability in that kingdom. King Lewanika, fearing both enemies within the ruling class as well as Ndebele raids, decided to follow the example of his friend Khama of the Ngwato in seeking British protection. With considerable difficulty he prevailed upon a local missionary, François Coillard, to write a letter on his behalf requesting such protection.It had already become clear that an important faction of the Lozi ruling class opposed the king's decision. Some of its members feared that his ‘protectors’ would make his overthrow that much more difficult; others were concerned that he more powerful white men would undermine the authority of the nation's traditional rulers. These suspicions received apparent confirmation when the representative who appeared to negotiate the concession proved to be an agent, not of Her Majesty's Government, but of the British South African Company. Thanks, however, to the ignorance of the missionaries who were interpreting for the court, as well as to the duplicity of Rhodes's agent himself, this distinction was successfully blurred. Opposition remained, however, until, at a critical moment in the negotiations, Khama's envoy threatened the council with harsh retribution if it refused to sanction the proposed treaty. In the face of this united stand of those who represented the power of the British government and its white associates and black collaborators, the National Council of Barotseland finally agreed to the concession, and, for better or worse, the Lozi found themselves under white ‘protection’.
The hamitic hyopthesis; its origin and functions in time perspecive
Authors: Sanders Edith R. 
Published: January 2009

The anthropological and historical literature dealing with Africa abounds with references to a people called the ‘Hamites’. ‘Hamite’, as used in these writings, designates an African population supposedly distinguished by its race— Caucasian—and its language family, from the Negro inhabitants of the rest of Africa below the Sahara.There exists a widely held belief in the Western world that everything of value ever found in Africa was brought there by these Hamites, a people inherently superior to the native populations. This belief, often referred to as the Hamitic hypothesis, is a convenient explanation for all the signs of civilization found in Black Africa. It was these Caucasoids, we read, who taught the Negro how to manufacture iron and who were so politically sophisticated that they organized the conquered territories into highly complex states with themselves as the ruling elites. This hypothesis was preceded by another elaborate Hamitic theory. The earlier theory, which gained currency in the sixteenth century, was that the Hamites were black savages, ‘natural slaves’—and Negroes. This identification of the Hamite with the Negro, a view which persisted throughout the eighteenth century, served as a rationale for slavery, using Biblical interpretations in support of its tenets. The image of the Negro deteriorated in direct proportion to the growth of the importance of slavery, and it became imperative for the white man to exclude the Negro from the brotherhood of races. Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1798 became the historical catalyst that provided the Western World with the impetus to turn the Hamite into a Caucasian.
Dingane's attack on Lourenço Marques in 1833
Authors: Liesegang Gerhard 
Published: January 2009

The reasons for Dingane's attack on Lourenço Marques in 1833 may have been (a) the policy of expansion pursued by governor Ribeiro, which Machakane of Matola and perhaps Dingane himself may have tried to check, (b) lack of caution in treating Dingane, (c) perhaps also inability to meet Dingane's demands (this may have been due to economic difficulties after the partial breakdown of the slave trade in 1830), (d) the fact that Ribeiro probably maintained relations with Soshangana (which has been stressed by Lobato). Dingane seems to have regarded the governor as one of his subjects, although the Portuguese did not regard themselves as his subjects but as depending on MoÇambique.In the period 1830–1838, the Zulu seem to have been more important for Lourenço Marques than any other Nguni group, as they were dominating many of the territories near it. In that period the Zulu empire included people of a language different from that of the majority, who do not seem to have been integrated into the Zulu nation through the national regimental system in the same way as Nguni groups subjected by the Zulu. In 1831–4 Zulu armies fighting near Lourenço Marques consisted of a few hundred Zulu warriors assisted by groups of auxiliaries (probably totalling 2,000–3,000 men) furnished by the local chiefs.
The Development of Institutions in the States of the Eastern Niger Delta
Authors: Alagoa E. J. 
Published: January 2009

It has been observed for a long time that the states of the Eastern Niger Delta responded in recognizable ways to the introduction of European overseas trade in slaves and palm-oil from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century. It is suggested here that by the time of European advent these states were already in the process of profound changes in response to other internal situations.First, migration from the fresh water Central Delta to the salt-water Eastern Delta (possibly before A.D. 1000) dictated changes. A change from a farming to a fishing economy led to changes in the social and political system.Second, the inability of the fishing economy to satisfy all the basic needs of these communities led to the growth of long distance trade to the hinterland and to other parts of the Niger Delta. This trade set in motion other structural changes which were accelerated by the European overseas trade.Thus were the institutions of the farming village, based largely on age and the simple lineage, developed into the kingship (before about 1400) and House system (before about 1600) of the states of the Eastern Niger Delta, described variously as city-states and trading states.
Oral Tradition and Chronology
Authors: Henige David P. 
Published: January 2009

Perhaps the weakest aspect of oral tradition is its inability to establish and maintain an accurate assessment of the length of the past it purports to relate. As time passes, societies without calendrical systems tend to become either very vague about this time depth or to relate it to present, changing circumstances. The most common method of measuring the past in many societies is in terms of king lists or genealogies. A comparison of orally transmitted king lists and genealogies in various places and times, for example, the early Mediterranean world and the Ancient Near East, the native states of India, Africa and Oceania, indicates that certain patterns of chronological distortion seem to emerge, sometimes telescoping but more often lengthening the past.The former may occur through omission of usurpers, however defined, periods of chaos or foreign domination, or by the personification of an entire epoch by a founding folk-hero. If the reasons for artificial lengthening are obvious, the mechanisms are less so. In this respect a survey of both welldocumented cases and of orally transmitted lists can be instructive. Lengthening is often the result of euhemerism; more often subtler themes emerge. These include longer reigns in the earlier, less known period, the arranging of contemporary rulers as successive ones and, most importantly, extended father/son succession throughout the list or genealogy. This last is of direct and profound chronological importance, and its occurrence is widespread enough to be termed stereotypical. Yet it is not often recognized as aberrant, even though its documented occurrence is exceedingly rare. The consequent equation of reigns with generations will almost always result in an exaggerated conception of the antiquity of the beginning of the genealogy. Other weaknesses of orally transmitted king lists include lack of multiple reigns and dynastic changes, and suspiciously perfect rotational succession systems.Within its scope this article only attempts to hint at the origin, shape and effects of these distortions. Its main thesis is that much light can be cast on African cases of this nature through a comparative analysis drawing from a whole range of societies and sources.
Western Ibo Society and its Resistance to British Rule: The Ekumeku Movement 1898–1911
Authors: Igbafe Philip A. 
Published: January 2009

When the Royal Niger Company attempted to establish its authority in the Asaba hinterland in the 1880s, the existing town societies in the area provided the foundations of a resistance movement which became known as the Ekumeku. In 1900 the area came under the direct administration of the British government. British rule led to regulations against aspects of the people's religious and political practices and to the establishment of native courts, and provided a shelter under which missionary activities flourished. All these were considered by the people as inimical to their traditional way of life. This situation provoked a consolidation of the Ekumeku forces and galvanized the movement into action. Between 1902 and 1910 the Ekumeku offered a courageous and prolonged resistance to British rule in the Asaba hinterland.In spite of this enduring consistency in opposing the establishment of European rule, the Ekumeku movement was not investigated along relevant lines primarily because it was much misunderstood in official circles, which took its external manifestations for its essence. This paper attempts, from oral and written sources, a study of the actual nature of the Ekumeku as a resistance movement, its organization, its responses to the challenges posed by European encroachment on the Asaba hinterland and its sources of strength which gave it its resilience.In addition to administrative measures, legal enactments, special town laws and prosecution in the native courts, it is shown that the colonial administration relied heavily on the use of armed force to destroy the movement.
The Rise and Fall of Zimbabwe
Authors: Huffman T. N. 
Published: January 2009

Two hypotheses are available for the origin of the Zimbabwe culture. A religious hypothesis attributes its development to an African society in isolation, placing it in the class of a primary state. In contrast, the trade hypothesis maintains that it was a secondary state resulting from the gold trade.If the religious hypothesis is correct, then Zimbabwe would be an exception to all other known cases of primary state formation. The archaeological evidence points to a horticultural subsistence throughout the Iron Age sequence in the area and a small population until Period III/IV. On the other hand, all known primary states were based on large populations and intensive agriculture. It is more likely that Zimbabwe is a typical case of secondary state formation.The stratigraphy on the Acropolis indicates that a social transition from Period II to III probably occurred at Zimbabwe and was not the result of an immigrant group, and the short chronology places this transition around A.D. 1250. The evidence available from Arab documents, trade imports and ancient mining demonstrates that trade existed well before then. Consequently, the evolution of the Zimbabwe culture was almost certainly due to the Arab gold trade.