Research over the past five years or so indicates that in north-western and central Kenya and northern Tanzania pastoralism is much older than previously supposed. Radiocarbon dates from the central Rift valley and the Serengeti plains suggest the presence of domestic cattle by about the sixth millennium b.c. Early pottery traditions in the central Rift valley and around Lake Turkana have been more precisely identified. A continuing research project in the southern Sudan has revealed early pottery with possible northern affinities and rouletted pottery of the first as well as second millennia a.d. In north-western Tanzania, iron would still seem to have been smelted as early as the sixth century b.c. The use of iron, and perhaps of rouletted ware, by pastoral peoples in central Kenya is now dated to the late first millennium a.d. In Malawi, food-production would still seem to have been introduced early in that millennium, but the introduction of cattle has now been dated to the third or fourth century a.d., some centuries earlier than had previously been supposed. In Zambia, the surprisingly early dates for Situmpa pottery have apparently been confirmed. On the east coast, excavations at Hafun, Mogadishu and Manda have enabled more precise dating of the periods during which these ancient ports flourished, while a comprehensive survey programme has refined our knowledge of monumental sites along the Kenya coast.

This paper reinterprets the invasion of Songhay by the Sa'did Sultan Mulāy al-Mansūr's mercenaries led by the Pasha Judar. The battle of Tondibi in March 1591, and the subsequent defeat of the Askiya Isḥāq II, marked a turning point in both Moroccan and West African history. The paper assumes a strong relation between the invasion, the Mediterranean problems and the commercial needs of the Sa'did. Al-Mansūr wanted to regain control of the gold trade to stimulate the economy of his kingdom. However, his expeditionary forces got bogged down in the fly-infested southern swamps because of an unexpected protracted war of resistance led by the Askiya Nūḥu. Revolts in the cities and the countryside led to repression and the exile of a group of prominent ‘ulamā’ in 1594. The Moroccans also suffered from a lack of administrative coordination as demonstrated by the competition between the governor and the treasurer. All these problems culminated in a disaster. By 1612, unable to match the mobility of the resisters, the musketeers refused to do battle with the Songhay archers. Finally, the qā' id AH al-Talamsānī deposed the Pasha, and the Sultan began to lose control of his troops. As Songhay and Morocco experienced serious crises in the seventeenth century, Europe's domination of international trade became uncontested. The invasion swallowed up both the conqueror and the conquered.

The present paper is one of a series of essays in the social history of the West African forest kingdom of Asante (presently situated in the Republic of Ghana). It concentrates on an examination of the phenomena of marriage and adultery in the Asante past, and it seeks to locate the fundamental subject of relations between the sexes within the broader framework of the superordinate relationship between the state and the social formation. Anthropological and historical work on Asante is reviewed in the light of these concerns, and an attempt is made to identify and to describe some of the crucial concepts and imperatives embedded in the ideology of the state. The argument is adduced throughout that the state was interventionist in relation to the social formation, and that it was the state that simultaneously defined the rules making for differentiation and presided over (and monitored) the rewards and penalties surrounding this process. The accumulation (the consumption) of women is interpreted as being one strand in the economics of power and differentiation; similarly, compensatory damages for adultery (ayɛfere sika) and the phenomenon of ‘child marriage’ (ɔyere akoda) are interpreted as indicators of the relations of power between men. The paper concludes with the presentation of a small sample of career histories; these are intended to convey some idea of the interventionist power of the state in peoples' lives. Underlying and informing the detailed matter of the paper is a general concern with the understanding of ideology and thought – an exercise in reconstruction that is a sine qua non for the writing of Asante (and African) social history.

The Netherlands was almost the only country in Western Europe which took no share of Africa in the course of Partition. This is at first sight surprising. For centuries the Dutch had had a presence on the Gold Coast, while at the Cape they had created the most important white colony in sub-Saharan Africa. True, the Netherlands had given up both possessions before the Partition, but by that time the Dutch were the chief traders on the Congo estuary, which after all was a major flash-point giving rise to the Partition. Curiously enough, no one has sought to examine this seeming paradox. It is therefore the aim of this article to consider the relationship between Dutch commercial expansion and the origins of Partition, and to place this question in the context of the Netherlands' principal imperial interests, in South-East Asia.

European mining companies in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast failed because they were unable to solve the problem of ‘primitive accumulation’. Their failure to solve the problem of primitive accumulation was attributable to a variety of factors, including financial manipulations by ‘share-pushers’ and ‘concession-mongers’, managerial and technological inadequacies, and the refusal of the colonial state to employ that degree of force which would have been necessary to overcome the resistance by Africans to the sale of their labour-power to the mines. The resistance mounted by African gold diggers was such that they not only refused to sell their labour-power to the mines, but also out-produced the European mining companies for most of the period under review, while those few Africans who did sell their labour-power to the mines formed a small and highly transient labour force which engaged in a largely individualistic form of resistance characterized by their consistent refusal to work at the pace demanded by management, and to turn over to management the entirety of their day's output. Thus not only did the resistance of Africans contribute to the failure to solve the problem of primitive accumulation, and to the consequent weakness of the European mining companies, but conversely the weakness of the European mining companies contributed to the structuring of the mines'labour force, and to the forms of resistance waged by mineworkers.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the administration of the Transkei was instituted, codified and elaborated. The role of the headman was crucial: he was directly responsible to the magistrate, and his ward (‘location’) became the basic administrative unit. The headman's position was also profoundly ambiguous. He was at once a state official (responsible for enforcing new legal, economic and political relationships) and a spokesman for and defender of the inhabitants of his location.

Although invested with considerable powers, headmen had to remain responsive to popular pressures. In tracing the career of a single prominent headman, Enoch Mamba, this article demonstrates the possibilities and contradictions within the post. Mamba entered government employment in Idutywa as a clerk/interpreter; was appointed headman in 1893; and was dismissed – after attempting to unseat the magistrate – in 1896. Resilient and resourceful, Mamba won reinstatement by 1904; he served as a highly effective and occasionally authoritarian headman and as District and General Councillor until his death in 1916. He created and led one of the first pan-tribal political organizations in the Transkei and came to play an active role in the (Cape) SANC and the SANNC. As a politician, Mamba remained sensitive to rural issues and differed from urban-based politicians (like Rubusana, Pelem, Jabavu) in his populist and ‘Africanist’ accents.