bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Writing South African Legal History: A Prospectus
Authors: Chanock Martin 
Published: January 2009

This article outlines the approach to the writing of South African legal history being taken in a book in progress on the South African legal system between 1902 and 1929. It suggests that legalism has been an important part of the political culture of South Africa and that, therefore, an understanding of legal history is necessary to a comprehension of the South African state. It offers a critique of the liberal notion of the rule of law as a defence against state power, arguing that in the South African context ideological and legitimising explanations of law should be de-emphasised in favour of an approach which emphasises the instrumental nature of law in relation to state power. Elements of the existing legal and historical literature are briefly reviewed.The basic orientation is to consider the South African legal system as essentially a post-colonial British system rather than one of ‘Roman-Dutch law’. The study is divided into four parts. The first looks at the making of the state between 1902 and 1910 and considers the role and meaning of courts, law and police in the nature of the state being constructed. The second discusses ‘social control’. It considers the ideological development of criminology and thought about crime: the nature of ‘common law’ crime and criminal law in an era of intensified industrialisation; the development of statutory criminal control over blacks; and the evolution of the criminalising of political opposition. The third part considers the dual system of civil law. It discusses the development of Roman-Dutch law in relation to the legal profession; and outlines the development of the regime of commercial law, in relation to contemporary class and political forces. It also examines the parallel unfolding of the regime of black law governing the marital and proprietal relations of blacks, and embodied in the Native Administration Act of 1927. The final segment describes the growth of the statutory regime and its use in the re-structuring of the social order. It suggests that the core of South African legalism is to be found in the emergence of government through the modern statutory form with its huge delegated powers of legislating and its wide administrative discretions.
The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: A Review of the Literature
Authors: Lovejoy Paul E. 
Published: January 2009

Recent revisions of estimates for the volume of the trans-Atlantic slave trade suggest that approximately 11,863,000 slaves were exported from Africa during the whole period of the Atlantic slave trade, which is a small upward revision of my 1982 synthesis and still well within the range projected by Curtin in 1969. More accurate studies of the French and British sectors indicate that some revision in the temporal and regional distribution of slave exports is required, especially for the eighteenth century. First, the Bight of Biafra was more important and its involvement in the trade began several decades earlier than previously thought. Secondly, the French and British were more active on the Loango coast than earlier statistics revealed. The southward shift of the trade now appears to have been more gradual and to have begun earlier than I argued in 1982. The greater precision in the regional breakdown of slave shipments is confirmed by new data on the ethnic origins of slaves. The analysis also allows a new assessment of the gender and age profile of the exported population. There was a trend toward greater proportions of males and children. In the seventeenth century, slavers purchased relatively balanced proportions of males and females, and children were under-represented. By the eighteenth century, west-central Africa was exporting twice as many males as females, while West Africa was far from attaining such ratios. In the nineteenth century, by contrast, slavers could achieve those ratios almost anywhere slaves were available for export, and in parts of west-central and south-eastern Africa the percentage of males reached unprecedented levels of 70 per cent or more. Furthermore, increasing numbers of slaves were children, and again west-central Africa led the way in this shift while West Africa lagged behind considerably.This review of the literature on the demography of the slave trade provides a context to assess the revisionist interpretation of David Eltis, who has argued recently that the slave trade and its suppression were of minor importance in African history. It is shown that Eltis' economic arguments, based on an assessment of per capita income and the value of the export trade, are flawed. The demography of the trade involved an absolute loss of population and a large increase in the enslaved population that was retained in Africa. A rough comparison of slave populations in West Africa and the Americas indicates that the scale of slavery in Africa was extremely large.
Apartheid's ‘Testing Ground’: Urban ‘Native Policy’ and African Politics in Brakpan, South Africa, 1943–1948
Authors: Sapire Hilary 
Published: January 2009

Although studies of both state ‘urban native’ policy and African life on the Witwatersrand in the 1940s have increased in volume and sophistication over the last decade, these two themes have generally been treated discretely in the literature. While a regional focus has yielded a complex and differentiated picture of urban African politics and culture, studies of the state still tend to miss this complexity by focusing on the ‘view from above’, from the vantage point of central state institutions.This article draws together these two separate historiographical threads to examine state policy from the perspective of local state officials, those individuals most intimately concerned with day-to-day administration of urban African communities in the rapidly industrialising Witwatersrand of the 1940s. Through the narrative of a deep personal antagonism between an African politician in the Witwatersrand location of Brakpan and a white administrator, the article explores the intersection of two microcosms: the world of the Afrikaner intellectual, educated in the tradition of ‘volkekunde’ and thereby claiming expert knowledge of the African, and the real worlds of the Africans the expert claimed to know—themselves shaped by new, radical currents in the changing wartime urban context. Using the Brakpan case study, the article also shows that in contrast to the national government's fumbling indecision in the face of the urban crisis, it was the municipalities which agitated for state control over all Africans, tighter influx and efflux controls and the more efficient distribution of African labour between different economic sectors. In voicing their discontent with state policy and in their policy improvizations, local officials anticipated much in the apartheid order of the 1950s.
Belief, Legitimacy and theKpojito: An Institutional History of the ‘Queen Mother’ in Precolonial Dahomey
Authors: Bay Edna G. 
Published: January 2009

This article traces chronologically the rise and fall of the office of thekpojito, the female reign-mate to the kings of Dahomey. The women who becamekpojitoin the eighteenth century were central to the efforts of the kings to establish legitimacy and assert control over the kingdom's expanding territory. The office reached its zenith in mid-century whenKpojitoHwanjile and King Tegbesu gained office and effectively ruled in tandem, thereby solidifying an ideological model that persisted to the end of the kingdom. The model posited a balance of power between male and female, royal and commoner. Subsequently, powerful women of the king's household worked with ambitious princes to build coalitions to seize power at times of royal succession. When their efforts succeeded, the prince was installed as king and the woman askpojito. By the nineteenth century, princes began to find alternative sources of support in their struggles for the kingship and alternative sources of guidance once enthroned. The royal family became more central in the state as princes and princesses replaced commoners in high offices. Even though alliances between princes and their fathers' wives continued, non-royal women within the palace were more constrained in their ability to wield power and the influence of thekpojitofell into steep decline.The institutional history of thekpojitois discerned through an analysis of religious change in Dahomey. Because the hierarchy of the gods was manipulated by the monarchy to reflect its changing conceptions of the nature of power, the history of religion represents an intellectual history of the ruling class. Central among the religious changes and cultural influences that had a probable impact on the office of thekpojito, and more broadly on the ability of women to exercise power in the state, were contacts with Europe and with Yoruba-speaking peoples. Those influences were associated with cultural and religious visions that promoted the individual, the male, and the royal.
New Light on Early Food-Production in the Central Sudan
Authors: Krzyzaniak Lech 
Published: January 2009

The excavations in the Central Sudanese Neolithic settlement at Kadero resulted in the discovery of a large amount of skeletal remains of domestic animals: cattle, sheep, goats and dogs. Cattle pastoralism was of great economic importance for the Kadero population and it was supplemented by the herding of sheep and goats; the presence of dogs is closely associated with this pastoralism. Preliminary examination of plant impressions on potsherds reveals the presence almost exclusively of sorghum and two kinds of millet, which were most probably cultivated. This may explain the large number of grindstones found in the Kadero settlement. The pastoralism and possible cultivation at Kadero point to a much more developed food-producing economy practised by the Central Sudanese Neolithic population, compared to that of the Esh Shaheinab settlement. Food-production at Kadero was supplemented by food-gathering activities, among which the collecting of molluscs predominated, with hunting and fishing playing a less significant role.The data yielded by the burial ground at Kadero, where the heavily prognathous inhabitants of the local settlement were buried, seem to indicate that the Neolithic Kadero population was an autochthonous one on the Upper (main) Nile. It is assumed that the domestic animals and, perhaps, also the cultivated cereals of the Neolithic Kaderans, as well as of other Central Sudanese populations, were adopted by the local food-gathering human groups following contact with other and alien peoples.
The Torodbe Clerisy: A Social View
Authors: Willis John Ralph 
Published: January 2009

It is a salient feature of the great jihāds of the western Sudan that the leadership for these wars of religious fervour should have sprung forth from a single source, the Torodbe clerisy. It was the Torodbe ʿulamā’ who sustained the jihāds in Futas Bundu, Toro and Jallon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and prefigured the jihāds of Usumān dan Fodio and al-Hājj ʿUmar b. Saʿīd, perhaps the most illustrious leaders thrown up by Torodbe Islam.We have long viewed these Islamic revolutions as ‘Fulani jihads’—as consummate examples of the way in which ‘Fulani’ skilfully orchestrated the people in favour of their own views. But it would now appear that those Muslims we have been calling ‘Fulani’ deserved this designation in language and culture only—that they were drawn from diverse strains of Sūdānī society—that Turudiyya suggests a métier and not an ethnic category.The Torodbe clerisy evolved out of that mass of rootless peoples who perceived in Islam a source of cultural identity. Bound in a new persuasion—linked by a common oppression—they shook the sense of ethnic difference and sought to stimulate a counter trend of a levelling nature. Yet, having habitually recruited from all levels, and most notably from the submerged levels of society, the Turudiyya became an increasingly closed world, discoloured of their levelling intentions. This tendency was manifest in Futas Toro and Bundu especially. In these new communities, the Turudiyya took shape as a hereditary ruling class—succession to the imāmiyya became the special preserve of a select few families. The position of slaves in the new order progressively hardened; the ranks of the Turudiyya remained closed to artisans who continued to pursue their traditional crafts.The levelling tendency of the Turudiyya movement seems to have reached its apogee in the ʿUmarian Jamāʿa. Though it is said that al-Hājj ʿUmar b. Saʿid did not extend freedom to his slaves, the ties of Islam and the community of faith came to supplant the old threads of allegiance. Among believers, superiority in the faith or stricter observance of its precepts presented a new passport to honoured status.
The Basle Mission Trading Company and British Colonial Policy in the Gold Coast, 1918–1928
Authors: Gannon Margaret 
Published: January 2009

In February 1918 the Gold Coast Government, on orders from the British Colonial Office, seized the holdings of the Basle Mission Trading Company, a Swiss-based firm suspected of promoting pro-German sentiment and actions within the Colony. As a result of the growing sentiment towards trusteeship and the continuing resistance to non-British activities in the Gold Coast, the properties of the company were entrusted to the Commonwealth Trust Ltd, a British firm created for this purpose. The firm was committed to providing a portion of its profits to promoting philanthropic activities among the indigenous populations. The resources of the Trading Company, valued at £558,017 in the Gold Coast and £254,383 in India, were transferred to the Commonwealth Trust at no expense whatever to the latter.For a decade the Swiss Government protested against the confiscation of the Company as a violation of the rights of a neutral nation. In the same years the Commonwealth Trust encountered such financial difficulties that it was unable to supply any support at all for its philanthropic commitments.By 1928 continuing international pressure, including a Swiss threat to submit their claim for arbitration before the League of Nations, led the British to restore the properties to the Trading Company owners, compensating them with £250,000 for losses suffered during the decade. The Commonwealth Trust was also reimbursed for the surrender of the properties, bringing the total cost of the restoration to £305,000.The irony of the entire episode is that the total cost of the resolution was assigned to the Gold Coast colonial treasury, absorbing one-fourth of the total Gold Coast reserve fund. Gold Coast Council members protested that the original decision and its reversal were made by the British Government, and their consequences ought not to become burdens on the Gold Coast. Such protests were unavailing. Thus the project undertaken on the principle of trusteeship resulted in no benefit whatsoever to the indigenous population; rather the colony paid dearly for the privilege of being the object of trusteeship policy.
‘Morts Pour La France’; The African Soldier in France during the Second World War
Authors: Echenberg Myron 
Published: January 2009

The involvement of African combatants in France from 1939 to 1945 probably surpassed the large mobilization of an earlier generation during the First World War. Carefully prepared ideologically and well received by the French public, Africans nevertheless paid a heavy price in lives and suffering as soldiers during the Battle of France and as prisoners of the Germans. Liberation brought a new set of tribulations, including discriminatory treatment from French authorities. These hardships culminated in a wave of African soldiers' protests in 1944–5, mainly in France, but including the most serious rising, the so-called mutiny at Thiaroye, outside Dakar, where thirty-five African soldiers were killed.The war's impact was ambiguous. Tragedies like Thiaroye sent shock waves throughout French West Africa, delegitimizing naked force as a political instrument in post-war politics and sweeping away an older form of paternalism. Yet while a militant minority were attracted to more radical forms of political and trade-union organization, most African veterans reaffirmed their loyalties to the French State, which ultimately paid their pensions.
Coercion and Control in Nyasaland: Aspects of the History of a Colonial Police Force
Authors: McCracken John 
Published: January 2009

This article examines the changing function of the Nyasaland police force between the 1890s and 1962. Initially, the police consisted of small groups of armed ex-soldiers, totally untrained in conventional police duties and employed by district officers in pressing labour and enforcing the payment of hut tax. In 1920, however, the authorities responded to the threat seemingly posed by the emergence of ‘dangerous classes’ – particularly labour migrants returned from the south – by forming a trained, centralized force, commanded in the Shire Highlands, though not elsewhere, by European police-officers. In the reorganized districts the police succeeded in protecting urban property. But so limited was the size of the force that the prevention and detection of crime was hardly attempted over the greater part of the country, while campaigns such as that against the Mchape witchcraft eradication movement foundered in the face of popular opposition.Substantial changes began in the mid-1940s in response to urbanization and the increasing complexity of police duties, coming to a climax in the 1950s as the colonial government struggled to maintain authority. At first the emphasis was on raising educational standards and improving conditions of service. But following the crisis of 1953, it switched to expanding police numbers and increasing the coercive power of the force; this process was accelerated in the aftermath of the 1959 emergency.Recruitment policies were influenced by the technical requirements of the authorities and by the ethnic stereotypes they evolved – a combination which resulted in the recruitment of a disproportionate number of Yao policemen in the first few decades and of more Lomwe and Chewa later. Policemen were attracted less by the rates of pay than by the privileges on offer. An inner corps of policemen spent their lives upholding colonial authority, but most could not be placed in a distinctive category of ‘collaborator’.
Fishing and the Colonial Economy: the Case of Malawi
Authors: McCracken John 
Published: January 2009

Despite the evident importance of fishing in Malawi, its role in the territorial colonial economy has been largely ignored. This paper focuses on the evolution of fishing and fish-trading at the south end of Lake Nyasa (Lake Malawi), emphasising the interaction between ecological change and changes in market opportunity. During the late nineteenth century, fishing played an important role in the economy of the Mang'anja people alongside agricultural production. Communual tasks such as the setting of nets or building of canoes were conducted by male members of anmbumbaor matrilineage group who traded fish with the agriculturally productive highland regions nearby in exchange for maize and beans. Little changed initially with the estalishment of colonial rule, though some labour previously employed in fishing may have been diverted into cotton-growing which the Government encouraged in the Upper Shire Valley. The establishment of military camps during the First World War, combined with the sudden drying up of Lake Chilwa, the major source of fish in the Shire Highlands, created the opportunity for enterprising fishermen to start a regular trade in dried fish to Blantyre and Zomba from about 1917. This was stimulated in the 1920s by the steady rise of water levels on the Shire River which brought cotton production virtually to a halt making fishing an attractive alternative.The advent in the 1930s of non-African commercial fishermen who used lorries to transport fresh fish to Blantyre and dried fish to Salisbury did not prevent a further expansion of African fishing and fish-trading, many of the traders using bicycles to extend their sales into the southern Malawian hinterland. Officials tended to side with African fishermen when their interests clashed with those of incomers, notably the Greek Yiannakis brothers. But they had little success in introducing new techniques to improve productivity and fell back in the 1950s On the prohibition of exports to the Rhodesias, a policy aimed at ensuring a regular supply of fish to workers on European estates within Malawi.By the 1950s, European companies were recorded as being responsible for over half the fish caught in Malawi. African fishing had been affected by the emergence of a small group of capitalist entrepreneurs, most of them former labour migrants, who had invested their savings in imported nets and boats and employed labour on a regular basis. Mang'anja fishermen now faced competition from Tonga migrants using new technical and organisational methods. In contrast to under-development sterotypes, the indigenous industry continued to expand, with migrant workers playing an important role in the development of fishing.
Slavery, Emancipation and Labour Migration in West Africa: the case of the Soninke
Authors: Manchuelle François 
Published: January 2009

L'etude des conséquences de l'émancipation des esclaves est d'une grande importance pour la comprehension de l'histoire du travail en Afrique occidentale. Le système social des Soninké de la haute vallée du Sénégal, comme pour beaucoup de peuples sahéliens à l'époque précoloniale, reposait largement sur l'esclavage. L'apparition des migrations de travail chez les Soninké, cependant, s'explique beaucoup moins par l'abolition de l'esclavage que par la disparition progressive du commerce esclavagiste en Sénégambie au dix-neuvième siècle. En effet, c'est alors que furent substitutés à la traite intérieure les migrations saisonnières des jeunes Soninké. Ces migrations, traditionnellement orientées vers le commerce en Gambie, furent détournées vers la production d'arachide dans cette même région, probablement sous l'influence des trafiquants d'esclaves Soninké. Quant à l'émancipation, elle ne créa nullement un exode chez les esclaves nouvellement libérés mais elle permit leur entrée dans la courant des migrations saisonnières. Dans ce sens, l'abolition de l'esclavage fut un phénomêne important dans l'histoire du travail en Afrique occidentale. De plus, elle suscita des transformations dans 1'organisation du travail familial chez les Soninké, qui résultèrent en un surcroît de migrants.En conclusion, l'histoire des Soninké illustre l'importance de la question des migrations traditionnelles pour la compréhension des migrations modernes en Afrique occidentale, rappelant en cela l'histoire des migrations de travail en Europe, qui furent elles aussi les héritières de courants plus anciens de mobilité géographique.