Early medieval wealth invested in southern Saharan agriculture and warfare tended to produce distinctive groups of dependent cultivators and professional warriors by the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Exchange surpassed initial limitations placed on it by rudimentary pastoral society through the development of the salt industry. The realization of a form of surplus readily convertible into a wide range of commodities was vital to the growth of specialized traders who, in turn, broadened the scope of economic and political activity. Growing professionalism and specialization brought with it new forms of social relations, in this case a variety of forms of dependence, as well as introducing a role for indigenous non-producers like clerics and scholars. An oasis like Awdaghust where warriors, cultivators and traders interacted was bound to experience the growing pains these changes produced.

This paper suggests how an understanding of these social and economic changes can help fill the gaps which still plague the history of Awdaghust. It argues that we need to examine the pieces of written and archaeological evidence we have in the light of the changing forms of agriculture practised in the area, the region's drying climate between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, and the making of the specialized merchant-clerical groups called zawāyā. Awdaghust thereby emerges not only as an international caravan terminus, but as a regional centre of agriculture and trade, especially the salt trade, controlled by local pastoralists. It was therefore able to outlive its so-called eleventh-century destruction by the Almoravids, and see its Znāga masters turn increasingly towards the salt trade and religion. But its fortunes also depended upon its large servile labour force and sufficient rainfall to support irrigated cultivation. By the fifteenth century, it would appear the drying conditions were severe enough to pose insurmountable problems, possibly even to provoke a slave rebellion said to have brought about Awdaghust's demise.

Depuis la synthèse précédente, les recherches archéologiques se sont développées et diversifiées en Afrique Centrale.

Pour la préhistoire, des recherches prometteuses sont effectuées sur les processus géomorphoiogiques au Congo, ce qui permettra de mieux comprendre les problèmes posés par l'interpretation des vestiges découverts dans les formations sableuses.

Du Gabon à l'Angola, on assiste à un intérêt croissant pour les vestiges des populations qui exploitent la zone littorale depuis l'âge de la pierre récent et qui sont responsable de nombreux amas coquilliers.

A l'intérieur du continent, au Congo et au Rwanda, une série de nouvelles dates se rapportent à l'âge de la pierre récent, sans qu'il soit possible de préciser les limites temporelles de ces industries.

Dans la moitié sud du Cameroun et à l'est de la Centrafrique, divers témoignages indiquent que depuis au moins le dernier millénaire avant notre ère cette partie de la forêt etait occupee par des populations sedentaires, utilisant de la ceramique, des haches polies et pratiquant sans doute une forme d'agriculture.

La fonte du fer semble débuter dans la région de Yaoundé vers le quatrième siècle avant notre ère. A l'est, au Rwanda et au Burundi, la métallurgie du fer paraît au moins aussi ancienne et l'on ne peut tout à fait exclure qu'elle soit même beaucoup plus ancienne, mais cela reste controversé. Au Congo, un fourneau pour fondre le fer a pu être daté du cinquième siècle de notre ère, tandis qu'un fourneau pour fondre le cuivre était daté du treizi`eme siècle de notre ère. Au Zaïre, dans la région du Shaba, la fonte de ces métaux remonte au quatrième siècle de notre ère.

Enfin, des séries systématiques de datations permettent d'esquisser durant l'âge des métaux les bases d'évolutions régionales au nord Cameroun, en Centrafrique, dans la cuvette centrale au Zaïre, et au Rwanda.

Until the late 1970s the impact of the two world wars on Africa was a comparatively neglected area of its colonial history. In 1977 the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London drew attention to this neglect by organizing a symposium on the first of these two wars. A selection of the papers presented at that symposium was published in a special issue of this Journal in 1978. This proved to be a landmark in the study of the history of the First World War in Africa, which has since received much scholarly attention. By contrast, a survey written a few years ago of the Second World War in Africa could make relatively little use of original research. In 1983, however, the Académie Royale des Sciences d'Outre-Mer, Brussels, published a large collection of papers on the Belgian Congo in the Second World War, and in 1984 Richard Rathbone and David Killingray organized a further conference at S.O.A.S. on the impact on Africa of the Second World War. This elicited over thirty papers by scholars from Africa, Europe and North America; they not only provided extensive geographical coverage but also represented a wide variety of interests: political, economic, social and cultural. The conference organizers have since edited a selection of these papers in book form: the topics range from the impact of the war on labour in Sierra Leone to relations between the colonial government and Christian missions in southern Cameroons.

The conventional view of the Moroccan nationalist movement argues that its success was rooted in the experience of the Second World War in Morocco. However, this overlooks the critical differentiation in popular response to nationalist ideas that developed over the period from 1926 to independence in 1956. Whereas the pre-war nationalist movement was urban-based, with a strong middle-class and Salafiyyist tradition behind it, and picked up support from other urban groups that suffered from the Great Depression in the 1930s, it consistently lacked the essential concomitant of a broad rural base. This was in part due to the effective control of rural areas maintained by the French administration, but also arose from the development of a new élite in rural areas that had a clear interest in acquisition and control of land. Although this group had antecedents that originated from pre-colonial times, it was the conditions of the Protectorate and the development of a money-based economy which allowed it to flourish while other aspects of indigenous economic activity declined. This group, which may be considered to constitute a ‘kulak’ class, thus had an evident interest in supporting the French Protectorate authorities, and little concern for nationalist aspirations, particularly since it was also closely associated with the French administration of rural areas through its role in the caïdat. It was only when this élite found its economic interests threatened, and realized that the nationalist movement had the support of the Sultan, that its political concerns were redirected. This change occurred in 1947 with the Tangier speech, in which Mohammed V implicitly rejected French tutelage and, by inference, turned to the nationalist movement to support his dynasty. The speech coincided with the end of the consequences of the 1945 famine, which gave the nationalist movement its opportunity to extend its network into rural areas. It was this development, rather than the Second World War itself, that ensured the ultimate success of the Moroccan nationalist movement.

As a study of some Islamic factors involved in the construction of oral narrative by Manding bards, this article is chiefly concerned with two distinct cases in which griots have borrowed important legendary figures from the literature of Arabia. It is found that Bilali, described by traditional genealogists as progenitor of the ancient ruling branch of the Keita lineage, originated as Bilāl ibn Rabāḥ, a companion of Muhammad and the first mu'adhdhin. Genealogies or descent lists of early Malian rulers still contain names that have apparently survived from pre-Islamic times, but in most instances these early forebears of chiefly rank have been moved forward into the Islamic era and displaced as founding ancestors by figures like Bilali, who originated in Muslim Arab literature. Similarly, at the lower levels of the social hierarchy, major artisan classes like the blacksmiths and leatherworkers have adopted their own collective ancestors from Islamic tradition.

In the case of Surakata, collective ancestor of Bambara and Mandinka griots, it is recalled that he began as Surāqa ibn Mālik, in Arab tradition an enemy of Muhammad who became an early convert to Islam, a conversion that seems to have had a special resonance in a West African setting where many people have made the same shift. Pre-Islamic themes in Manding oral tradition have in many cases been obliterated by the bards' preoccupation with Islamic subjects, particularly events from the life and times of the Prophet. However, despite the pervasiveness of Islamic themes, the blood motif found in some accounts of griot ancestry indicates that at least the essence of certain elements of pre-Islamic West African culture survives in Manding oral tradition.

From the late seventeenth century until the 1870s gum arabic from the southwestern corner of the Sahara was the most important trade good exported to Europe from Mauritania and Senegal. This article discusses the dynamics of the gum trading system based in Saint Louis du Senegal, and details the commercial crisis in which the French colony was mired in the late 1830s and 1840s. Pressure from French capital and from Faidherbe's military forces secured the dominance of the import-export houses, as African river traders and desert gum merchants lost the advantages of their market positions. By the 1870s the importance of the gum trade had been eclipsed by the rapid expansion of peanut cultivation.

In the present stage of research, it is easiest to discern the economic effects of war on the Iberian colonies. These were diverse in chronological, regional and sectoral terms, but the overall results were to tie the economies of the Portuguese and Spanish colonies more firmly to those of the metropoles. This did not exclude two processes pulling in other directions. Firstly, the foreign trade of the colonies persisted but was reoriented away from Europe and towards North America. Secondly, shortages and insecurity of transport led to a significant degree of import substitution and regional African trade in the colonies, in the fields of both industry and agriculture. The social impact of war resembled that in much of the rest of Africa, great hardships and labour pressures on the mass of the population, but windfall profits for a few, both black and white. The political consequences of the two conflicts remain most shadowy at present, but they appear to have heightened the covert struggle between pro-fascist and anti-fascist groups in a situation of strong repression, flaring up into open strife only in the Spanish territories in 1936.

The view that Ibadan society in the nineteenth century did not discriminate against strangers, irrespective of their origins in Yorubaland, is now firmly entrenched in the literature. To be sure, Ibadan, a new nineteenth-century Yoruba city-state, founded as a consequence of the political crises of the early decades of the century, did maintain an ‘open door’ policy to strangers, many of whom went there as adventurers, craftsmen and traders, hoping to acquire wealth and fame. This article, however, controverts the view that Ibadan society gave the strangers and the indigenes equal opportunities to wealth and power. It argues that all the key political offices went only to the Oyo-Ibadan group which dominated the city-state. Strangers were also not allowed to participate fully in the leading heights of the economy, with the result that most of the wealthy citizens were also of Oyo-Yoruba origin.

In the 1890s discrimination against strangers was such that a number of moves were made to expel them. However, the British, who imposed colonial rule on Ibadan in 1893, were against the expulsion of strangers.

Although the importance of the African role in the South African War (1889-1902) is now recognized, this study of the Bakgatala ba ga Kgafela is the first to demonstrate an African perception of events and argue that the Kgatla initiated military action and pursued goals independent of a simple British vs. Boer formula. The war created major economic and political opportunities for the Kgatla, a people physically separated and colonially partitioned. Half the Kgatla lived in the Kgatla Reserve of the British-ruled Bechuanaland Protectorate, and the other half lived in the Saulspoort area of the western Transvaal under Boer rule. Their leader, Linchwe I (1874–1924), maintained his capital at Mochudi in the Protectorate and received only partial allegiance from the Saulspoort Kgatia. Soon after the war began, Linchwe involved his regiments actively in fighting alongside the British in the Protectorate and raiding on their own in the Transvaal in an effort to eliminate Boer settlement and political control in Saulspoort and other areas of the western Transvaal. Kgatia regiments also emptied Boer farms of cattle which, in addition to restoring the national herd decimated by the 1897 rinderpest, Linchwe used in establishing his political hold over the Saulspoort Kgatia. Protectorate officials were grateful for Kgatia support, but Linchwe disguised the extent and nature of Kgatia operations and concealed from the British his political objectives. Linchwe's campaign made possible in the years following the war the reunification of the Kgatia under his authority, the distribution of wealth among all his people and the reduction of colonial interference in the political lives of his people.

African chiefs under colonial rule are conventionally described as collaborators. Those who failed to co-operate with their colonial masters were deposed. Tshekedi Khama, Regent of the Bangwato for his nephew, Seretse, from 1926 to 1950, does not fit this description. During the first ten years of his regency, he was almost continuously locked in conflict with the British on a whole range of issues both large and small. His sustained opposition to the British is the more remarkable in that he became regent at the age of merely twenty without having been specifically prepared for the governance of the largest of the Tswana states under British rule.

This article explores the reasons for Tshekedi's opposition to the British and the way in which he conducted this opposition, and asks why the British did not depose him as they almost certainly would have deposed a chief who behaved remotely like him in one of their other African territories. It concludes that while Tshekedi basically accepted the colonial situation in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, he was determined that the British should make no inroads into the powers of the chiefs as determined at the end of the nineteenth century when his father Khama III had accepted British protection. He was also resolved to hand over the chieftaincy intact to his ward, Seretse. Furthermore Tshekedi, unlike most African chiefs of his day, was Western-educated, having attended Fort Hare, and believed that the function of the British Administration was to teach him ‘how to govern…not how to be governed’. He reacted strongly against measures that were imposed on him without consultation or explanation, especially, those which he suspected were designed to limit his power or might affect the welfare of his people. In opposing such measures, he employed both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ resources and was as skilful as any African nationalist of the time in mobilising press, parliament and public opinion in Britain in his support.

While the British did consider deposing him, and in 1933 temporarily suspended him from office, they were confronted by the fact that there was no other leader in Gammangwato who would be accepted as a legitimate alternative by the Bangwato or who would be remotely as competent as he was. After ten years of wrangling with Tshekedi the British learnt that it was in their interests to collaborate with him. For the next decade Tshekedi and the Administration worked largely in harmony. It was only in the late 1940s that Tshekedi began to use his formidable intellectual powers and administrative experience to challenge the colonial system itself.

When sleeping sickness was discovered to be epidemic in the Congo Free State in 1904, the administration responded by attempting to implement public health measures which had evolved in Europe in relation to plague and cholera epidemics. These measures were to identify and isolate victims and suspected victims of the disease and to map out the infected and uninfected zones. This article describes the early sleeping-sickness campaign of the Belgian authorities in the Uele District of Province Orientale between 1904 and 1914, focusing on the formation of isolation camps or lazarets. Uele district had been identified as a potentially rich and uninfected zone to be protected from contamination by the establishment of a cordon sanitaire. Public health policy and practice during this period provides an example of attempted ‘social engineering’ on the part of a colonial authority. While sleeping sickness provided the major impetus for the gradual development of the colonial medical service by the 1920s, the early period between 1903 and World War I was particularly onerous for the African populations in the north-east. The public health policy was perceived by many Africans as one more element in the on-going conquest and exploitation of the region. Examples are provided to demonstrate the ways in which numerous sleeping-sickness regulations affected African societies in Uele.

This article examines the economic effects of the Second World War on African peasant producers in Kenya, and places the war years within the context of the colony's economic difficulties during the Depression. In the mid-1930s the Kenya government sought to encourage African production, particularly among the Kikuyu and Abaluhya, in order to bolster the fiscal base of the colonial state and to subsidize the survival of the settler farming community. Promotion of African agrarian production brought conflict with the settler farming sector, and generated a serious crisis in the political economy of Kenya. These antagonisms became sharper during the war, when, after the Japanese advance in S.E. Asia, the Allied war effort demanded greater production from Kenya's settler farmers. Assisted by high guaranteed prices, both settler and African production was able to expand during the war. Previous studies of the impact of the war in Kenya have underplayed the extent to which African producers were able to capitalise upon this economic boom. Easily able to by-pass official marketing channels, African peasants produced for the black market. By doing so during the mid-war drought and maize crisis of 1942–3, African producers were able to obtain very favourable prices. Emerging peasant households among the Kikuyu and Abaluhya were therefore economically strengthened by the circumstances of the war, as was the settler farming sector. Europeans and Africans in Kenya were set on a collision course, which was to culminate some seven years after the war in the Mau Mau rebellion.

The existing works on the history of education in northern Nigeria are generally agreed that the main factor which hindered the spread and development of girls' education in the area during the colonial era was Muslims' opposition to female education. While it is not denied in this article that opposition to female education existed among Muslims, it is argued that this was not the main factor which retarded the advancement of girls' education during the period covered by this article. It is suggested that the British educational policy, which placed much emphasis on co-education, instead of building girls' schools, coupled with the parsimony with which the British administration spent money on girls' education, were mainly responsible for hindering the development of girls' and women's education in northern Nigeria during the colonial era. It is argued that the introduction of co-education made Western education for girls unappealing to many Muslim parents who otherwise would have sent their daughters to school if girls' schools had existed in sufficient numbers. The article attempts to show that this could not be realized as a result of the British administration's unwillingness to spend substantial sums of money on girls' education. It is also suggested that the preferential treatment accorded by the British administration to the aristocracy, in the recruitment of pupils for girls' schools and the W.T.C., was inimical to the advancement of girls' education generally.

The Tea Industry in the Cholo and Mlanje districts of southern Nyasaland emerged during the 1930s under the shelter of the International Tea Regulation Scheme of 1933 which restricted exports by the world's leading producers. In contrast to its East African neighbours, Nyasaland's Tea Industry was well organized locally by the Nyasaland Tea Association and was effectively represented in Britain by its London Committee. Though having to accept restrictions on the planting of new tea, which occasioned some local controversy, the industry, in common with other tea-producing countries, benefited from the rising prices of the 1930s for which the Tea Regulations were largely responsible. By 1938 tea had become one of Nyasaland's few profitable industries. A seeming further advantage was the bulk buying scheme, at guaranteed prices, organized by the British Ministry of Food which lasted throughout the 1940s, but the industry's wartime performance was sluggish as a consequence of poor growing seasons combined with serious shortages of manpower and fertilizer. As a poor quality, low price producer facing chronic labour shortages, which prevented millions of pounds of tea from being picked, Nyasaland greeted with hostility Imperial decisions to withdraw eastern Africa from the International Tea Scheme in 1948, to end bulk buying in 1950, and generally to encourage the free expansion of production. Nyasaland's tea planters were told that henceforth they must face open competition.

This article examines the nature and impact of the most extensive propaganda campaign mounted in a British West African colony during the Second World War. An avalanche of war information and appeals to the people of the Gold Coast was channelled through a new communications network which included radio broadcasting, information bureaux, and mobile cinema presentations. The innovative wartime publicity scheme was not enough to produce a completely voluntary war effort; however, the campaign was responsible for irreversibly changing mass communications techniques in the territory. The propaganda drive used in the war mobilization provided a pool of experienced propagandists and a successful structural model which proved valuable both to post-war governments charged with pre-independence political education, community development and public services, and, somewhat ironically, to anti-colonialist post-war party politics.

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.

Unprecedented wartime demands by Britain and the U.S.A for strategic minerals from abroad, coupled with the loss of valuable sources of supply in Eastern Europe and South East Asia to the Axis, greatly enlarged the volume of production and the pace of economic change in the mineral-rich zones of Africa. But the sharpest upsurge in output, which helped rescue a number of African export economies from the slough of depression, coincided with British rearmament several years before the war broke out; and production in most instances reached a crest two or three years before the war ended. In one sense the mineral regions of Africa between 1937 and 1945 provided a supreme example of the old mercantilist credo that colonies existed primarily to buttress the economies of the metropole in time of war. From another perspective, the war strengthened the hold of powerful multinational corporations on African mineral development and accelerated the absorption of new mining areas and labour supplies into the world capitalist system. A wide range of African metallic and non-metallic ores played a vital – and in some cases an indispensable – role in the Allied victory in 1945. But for the African peoples and countries most directly involved, the wartime upsurge had an uneven impact. Wage increases were in no way commensurate with the increased workloads nor with the pay scales for European miners. Except in the Union of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, where greater agricultural and industrial diversification was already in train, the expansion of the mining industries perpetuated enclave development. The reliance of the industrialized West on African strategic minerals during the war was a prelude to the even greater production boom and dependency of the Cold War period.