Was there ever a ‘Merrie Africa’, a Golden Age when Africans were perfectly integrated into their environments, when cattle lowed, well-fed children played and communities migrated only with the rhythm of the seasons? All societies have such mythological ages and in the USA the ‘Afrocentric’ political activists of recent years have certainly generated more than an average number of such quasi-fictional re-creations. Yet, one does not have to subscribe to an Afrocentric view of the world to accept that the intrusions by Arabs in East Africa and Europeans elsewhere on the continent disrupted the normal social life of African communities. True, there was a long history of violence, kidnapping, enslavement and, in Islamic areas, judicial support for domestic slavery. But the arrival of external social actors solidified the practice of slavery and accelerated the trade into new directions (Lovejoy 1981: 27–8). Many African communities reacted by getting as far away as possible from the slave-raiders and in so doing started the melancholy history of ‘flight migration’ with which the African continent continues to be plagued.

The displacement of peoples and their retreat into the interior was accelerated by the commencement of colonialism. The lesser colonial powers – Belgium, Portugal and Germany – were the most brutal in effecting their hegemony. Spurred by Stanley's discovery of forests of rubber in the Congo basin, King Leopold ordered Belgian army detachments to drive the Congolese into gathering rubber. Not for nothing was the crop called ‘red rubber’, for those who resisted were killed.