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³ Examples are Wade, A., ‘Chronique du Wâlo Sénégalais’, in Monteil, V., Esquisses sénégalaises (Dakar, 1966), 37–8;Google Scholar‘The Kano Chronicle’ (ed. Palmer, H. R.), Sudanese Memoirs, III (Lagos, 1928);Google ScholarEgharevba, J., A Short History of Benin (Ibadan, 1960), gives precise lengths for most reigns after 1600.Google Scholar

⁴ ‘Sauf preuve du contraire, je tiens donc pour nulles et non avenues les durées de régnes provenant des traditions orales’ (‘Tradition orale’, 467).

⁵ See especially, Boulegue, J., ‘Contribution à la chronologie du royaume du Saloum’, Bulletin de l'Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire, sér. B, XXVIII, nos. 3–4 (1966), 657–62.Google Scholar

⁶ Meyerowitz, E. L. R., Akan Traditions of Origin (London, 1952), 29–33. There are obvious difficulties about this account. Mrs Meyerowitz did not herself see the kuduo or brass vessels in question, and does not attempt to explain how these relics, the earliest of which would date back to the fourteenth century, survived the destruction of the old Bono state and its capital at the beginning of the eighteenth century. See Cohn Flight's artide below, and also Levtzion, Muslims and Chiefs.Google Scholar

⁷ See pp. 573–6 below.

⁸ Cornevin, , ‘The Problems’, 92.Google Scholar

⁹ A rather arbitrary exception here was made in the case of the Askia dynasty of Songhai, since it possesses the only reliably dated pre-nineteenth-century chronology from the Western Sudan.

¹⁰ This can perhaps best be illustrated by an example—the Ovimbundu chiefdom of Viye. Counting from 1901, the average of the last 12 reigns is firmly based upon contemporary documentation, and gives us an average of only 5·8 years. An average for the last 14, on Dr Childs' dating, would give 8°8. An average for all the 20 known reigns, necessarily rather more speculative, would give 10. One was torn between the advantage of using the first of these averages as being certainly true for the period concerned, or one of the others as being, almost equally certainly, nearer the truth for the whole history of the dynasty. In this case I chose 8·8, thus influencing my final result towards what I anticipated as reasonable.

¹¹ By the ‘most probable’ value I mean what mathematicians properly call the mode, a term I thought it best to avoid in this context for fear of possible confusion with ‘mode of succession’.

¹² Perhaps it would be more realistic to say that a calculation based on an average of 7 years per reign gives one a secure minimum figure for the time covered by a given list, and one based on 24 an almost equally secure maximum. Without anything else to go on, a list of 25 names could represent a period as short as 155 or as long as 500 years.

¹³ E.g. Benin, Dahomey, nineteenth-century Buganda. I make the average length of reign in the major European dynasties to be 21 years.

¹⁴ Such as the Mossi chronologies of Delafosse, M. (Haut-Sénégal–Niger, Paris, 1912), 124–47, the early part of Egharevba's Benin chronology (Short History) and some of those suggested for the Yoruba statesGoogle Scholar (Smith, R. S., Kingdoms of the Yoruba, 102).Google Scholar

¹⁵ Trautmann, T. R., ‘Length of Generation and Reign in Ancient India’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 89, no. 3 (1969), 564–77. Dr Trautmann kindly allowed me to consult this article before publication.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁶ Roland, Oliver, ‘Ancient capital sites of Ankole’, Uganda Journal, XXIII, no. 2 (1959).Google Scholar

¹⁷ Basham, A. L. estimates 27 years for a generation in ‘The average length of generation and reign in ancient India’, Studies in Indian History and Culture (Calcutta, 1964); Dr Trautmann finds a similar average for dated generations in medieval India.Google Scholar

¹⁸ The mathematicians who have tried to explain this to me include Dr Erwin Kronheimer of Birkbeck College and Dr Hilton Miller of Imperial College, University of London.

¹⁹ I have since noticed that Mr R. S. Smith has made similar experiments with the same results (Smith, , Kingdoms of the Yoruba, 103).Google Scholar

²⁰ I owe this point to Mr D. P. Henige of the University of Wisconsin.

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²⁷ See below, pp. 177–201.

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