The histories of pre-colonial states in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa have engaged scholars for more than a century. First encountered by Europeans in the 1860s during the search for the source of the Nile, these states and their rulers inspired both admiration and frustration in their visitors. On the one hand, explorers were impressed by the power of the rulers and the complexities of their bureaucracies, but on the other, they were annoyed by the apparent vacillation of the monarchs in responding to their demands. From the historian's perspective, these initial encounters soon led to questions about the origins and longevity of these states. Stories of origins were encapsulated in myths and legends that missionaries began to record around the turn of the twentieth century, while efforts to elicit lists of kings who had ruled each state introduced African leaders to European-style historiography.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Nyamwezi long-distance trading caravans dominated the central routes through Tanzania, stretching from Mrima coast ports such as Bagamoyo and Saadani to Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika. Despite the inroads of Omani Arab and Swahili trading enterprises from the middle of the century, the Nyamwezi maintained a position of strength. In the second half of the nineteenth century, market relations emerged as the dominant form of economic organization along the central routes, although the market for many commodities was clearly fractured by transport difficulties, and non-market relations frequently substituted for weakly developed commercial institutions and tools. Most caravan porters in nineteenth-century Tanzania were free wage workers, and nearly all were clearly migrant or itinerant labourers. The development of a labour market for caravan porters was an early and significant stage in the transition to capitalism, which began in a period of violence and political upheaval. Clearly, this has implications for how scholars should view broader processes of economic transformation prior to the imposition of colonial rule, which cut short a series of significant indigenous innovations.

The argument that porters were mostly wage labourers rests on evidence that their labour was bought and sold according to fluctuating labour market conditions. Market conditions in the second half of the nineteenth century shows a broadly rising demand for porters, a demand that could only be met if caravan operators offered adequate wages and observed the customs established within porter work culture. Thus, market conditions along the central routes contributed to the development of a free wage labour, characterized by a unique labour culture.

According to their ethnographers, the Bena of the Rivers in colonial Tanganyika emerged ‘from the shadows into the light of day’ when they undertook a great migration from the forested hills of the Iringa highlands to the treeless floodplain of the Kilombero valley in the late 1800's. The phrase had two meanings – on one level, it described the physical relocation of the Bena from the shadows of the forest to the open floodplain. On another level, ‘light of day’ was a metaphor for the remembered cohesion of a distinct Bena tribal identity, distinguishable from the ‘shadows’ of prior ethnic obscurity. The Culwicks considered the chief or mtema of this period, Ndaliwali, to be the founding ancestor of a new political lineage.

The defining moment for the emergence of the Bena of the Rivers was the Battle of Mgodamtitu in 1874, when neighboring Hehe attacked Bena settlements in the foothills and forced the Bena permanently out of the highlands and into the valley. Once they had taken up their new residence, the Bena absorbed the existing settlements of the western end of the valley into their kingdom. They did this initially ‘under the guise of protector’, wrote the Culwicks, but their goal was political control of the region. By 1890, they wrote, most of the Ndamba as well as several smaller valley groups had become subjects of the Bena chief.

The Battle of Mgodamtitu caused a ‘sudden and wholesale change’, according to the Culwicks, because Bena were forced to give up cattle keeping and take up rice cultivation; to learn the ways of the river and skillful use of canoes. They had previously looked down upon ‘rice and fish-eaters’, but after their migration they found that ‘there is but one crop really worth growing, and that is rice’.

The post-World-War-II period has typically been seen as the beginning of the ‘development era’. As global power relations shifted and nationalist and international pressure to liberalize and end colonial rule mounted, the colonial powers sought to revise their rationales for the legitimacy of the colonial endeavor. Longstanding dichotomies such as metropole/colony and civilized/primitive were reworked into the categories of developed/underdeveloped. The scale and intensity of development interventions increased dramatically, and a language of planned development, undergirded by ‘science’, came to frame the policy debates of colonial administrators and the technical experts they relied on, as well as nationalists and local elites. But development had been a central feature of encounters between the West and Africa since at least the early twentieth century, so that by the 1950s, all parties involved in the encounter had substantial experience of its policies and practices. Using detailed ethnohistorical and archival data, the papers in this special issue examine development programs in the late colonial period from across the continent in order to analyze how such historical experiences contributed to the conceptualization, implementation and outcomes of these programs.

These papers, like much recent research on development, explore development discourses and the ways in which experts and government officials defined particular development problems and conceptualized solutions. But in examining particular development programs across Africa, these papers seek to bring development practice into the analysis of development discourse. Rather than situating persistence and change in development discourses largely within dominant international and government institutions, these papers argue that such discourses were inevitably intertwined with development practice. In considering the local configurations within which experts and officials sought to implement their ambitious master plans, these papers show that few if any plans remained uninfluenced by local struggles over land, labor or agricultural and environmental expertise. Neither hegemonic nor unchanging, late colonial development agendas were in fact rooted in the experiences of earlier colonial efforts to manage rural livelihoods and tied to both the global changes and local realities of the late colonial era.

This essay is about a conceptual category of historical and environmental knowledge and about how a particular group of Africans use that category to understand and debate change. It is, in effect, an exercise in translation. In the middle and upper Sangha basin forests of the Central African Republic (C.A.R.) and Cameroon, Mpiemu speakers have articulated a broad category, doli, through which they express, debate and make claims of truth about the past and present. Glossing doli as ‘history’ does little justice to the richly complex dimensions of this category, for doli encompasses a multitude of relationships to the past. It can refer to a distant unchanging past, as well as to the knowledge, beliefs and practices associated with that past. Mpiemu people hold up the knowledge, beliefs and practices as an idealized framework to guide their behavior toward one another and their uses of fields, forests, rivers and streams. But doli can also describe and frame the accumulated experiences – identifiable events, people and places – of elderly people. In all of these expressions about the past, Mpiemu use idioms linking persons and their environments, those of cords and vines and of mobility (wandering) and stasis (sitting), to articulate doli's central aim of ‘leaving a person behind’. Tracing doli's different meanings, genres and aims can illuminate how the category has changed over the twentieth century, how Mpiemu have interpreted environmental interventions in the Sangha basin, and why they have engaged in conflicts over their entitlement to valued forest resources. Hence, it offers insights into why people use natural resources as they do and provides an alternative to exclusively materialist explanations for conflicts over resource use.

Between 6.30 and 7.00 a.m. on Monday morning, 19 March 1945 the body of a young girl of ten was found on the beach a short distance from the town of Elmina at a popular bathing spot known as Akotobinsin. According to the coroner, she had been dead for between 24 and 48 hours. There was no water in her lungs or stomach which indicated that she had not died by drowning. Instead, her upper and lower lips, both cheeks, both eyes, her private parts and anus, and several elliptical pieces of skin from different parts of her body had been removed. Many of these wounds exposed large blood vessels and the coroner concluded that ‘death was due to shock and hemorrhage’. She was identified as Ama Krakraba who had been missing since the evening of Saturday, 17 March. Her frantic mother had immediately suspected foul play and had confronted Kweku Ewusie, the Regent of the Edina State, who was later accused of having ‘enticed’ the young girl to the third floor of Bridge House, where he lived, ‘by the ruse of sending her out on an errand to buy tobacco’. There she had been murdered so that her body parts could be used to make ‘medicine’ to help the Regent's faction win a court case that was critical for their political standing in Elmina. On the 24 March, after a preliminary investigation, the colony's attorney-general brought charges of murder against Kweku Ewusie and four others from Elmina: Joe Smith, Herbert Krakue, Nana Appram Esson, alias Joseph Bracton Johnson, and Akodei Mensah. They were tried at the Accra Criminal Assizes from 16 May to 2 June, found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to be hanged. The West African Court of Appeal turned down their appeal on 28 June 1945 as did the Privy Council on 14 January 1946. On 1 February 1946, Kweku Ewusie, Joe Smith and Herbert Krakue were hanged at James Fort in Accra, and on 2 February, J. B. Johnson and Akodei Mensah met the same fate.

The days are approaching when you will hear new things. Soon you will hear that an Arab is not an Arab, a Shirazi is not a Shirazi, and an African is not an African. You will hear this, and you will be told that you are all Zanzibaris.

Al-Falaq, paper of the Zanzibar Arab Association, 1946

Nani awezaye kumnyoosha Binaadamu pindi alitiwa kibyongo na Mungu? [Who can straighten out mankind, whom God has made a hunchback?]

Afrika Kwetu, paper of the Zanzibar African Association, 1952

STUDENTS of the history of African ethnicity will recognize in the second of these quotes a Swahili version of the aphorism from Kant with which Leroy Vail introduces his important volume on the creation of tribalism in modern Africa: ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight will ever be fashioned’. True to their spirit, both aphorisms can be interpreted in contradictory ways. Vail intended to point up a theme that runs throughout his volume: that ethnic categories are rarely as clear-cut as ethnic nationalists would have them seem, and that, where such clarity exists, it is only momentary, having arisen out of complex and messy historical processes. But the editors of Afrika Kwetu, the weekly newspaper of the Zanzibar African Association that published the Swahili proverb in 1952, drew less subtle implications. The immediate context was a plea against religious chauvinism, part of the newspaper's allegation that Zanzibar's Arab nationalist leaders had violated the Islamic injunction to respect other religions ‘of the book’. But the clear implication – elsewhere made explicit – was that God and nature had fashioned humankind into irreducibly separate races and nations, and that it was foolish and even blasphemous to mix or combine them, as (they charged) their Arab rivals were seeking to do.

Concern about desiccation – the effects of deforestation on climate and soils – was an early and pervasive theme in colonial science, present at the onset of West Africa's colonial era and with roots in previous centuries. As a set of scientists' ideas linked to soil and forest conservation policy, the impact of desiccationism was initially muted, struggling unsuccessfully in nascent administrations with more pressing political and administrative agendas. But by the end of the colonial period it can be argued that anxiety about desiccation had become a cornerstone of development practice and state penetration. This article uses a case study to consider the transformation of the status of the ‘science’ of desiccation within colonial development agendas, the responses this transformation eventually provoked and its enduring legacy.

Our reflections here complement what has, in West African studies, become a general consensus about shifts in colonial forest policy. From the outset, many colonial administrations – both francophone and anglophone – were concerned both about the effects of forest loss on climate, hydrology and soils, and about the effects of ‘irrational and wasteful’ exploitation of forest as an economic resource. But early policy imperatives to establish reserves either failed to reach the implementation stage or could not be implemented due to the resistance they engendered, both from populations and indeed from agricultural or political administrations. A significant phase of reservation, at least in West Africa's humid forest and transition zones, began only in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and was pursued until the mid 1950s by colonial states which increasingly gained the strength to impose unpopular policy despite resistance. From this perspective, and given that nationalist sentiments in pre-independence struggles were often pitted against repressive colonial forest services, it could be hypothesized that independence would bring regimes more responsive to local concerns and more likely to heed resistance. Yet such a view, focusing simply on state capacity in changing political contexts, overlooks qualitative changes in the configuration of science-policy relationships within the state, a reconfiguration that it is necessary to grasp if we are to understand how post-colonial forest policy was less a rupture than a continuation or, indeed, reinforcement.

Shortly after South African College, the predecessor of today's University of Cape Town, opened its doors in 1829 faculty members found that they had a problem. In one meeting of the Faculty Senate alone, four students were brought up on charges that one had been ‘fighting and noisy’, another ‘fighting – kicking open the door of the Messenger's Room’, another ‘writing on the Professor's desk with chalk’ the words ‘Ziervogel is a vagabond’ as well as ‘threatening the messenger with his fist’, and another ‘idle, insolent & insubordinate in writing class’ who, in replying to a reprimand from the writing master, said: ‘You may go to the Devil’. Several others were noted in the records as absent from class and lying about it. Moreover, the young college had only two dozen or so books, but already nine of them had been ‘mutilated by tearing out the leaves & c’. And virtually all the means for securing property from theft – ‘various locks, claps and staples’ – had been ‘broken in the College, apparently by some of the Students.’ So intractable had the students become, in fact, that the college authorities constructed a small one-room prison with no windows on campus, which they called the ‘Black Hole’, in which to confine offenders who could be identified and condemned. Students were regularly sentenced to terms of three or four hours per day without bread or water, usually in the early evening, the number of days depending on the severity of the offense.

Students at South African College engaged in violence and intimidation of all sorts in the first half of the nineteenth century. They attacked professors and townspeople in Cape Town, preyed on each other, stole and destroyed property, and continually disrupted the operations of the college. These were not boys striving to become upstanding citizens, yet in the end they did for the most part, largely because in organizing campus violence some SAC students produced a reputation for leadership and a constituency that followed them. And that reputation proved useful later in securing positions in the city's merchant houses and in the colonial government. Later in the century, however, the violence subsided and was replaced with different means by which to produce a reputation for leadership, mainly structured competitions among students in a debating society, in sports and for high rankings in the examinations offered by the University of the Cape of Good Hope. What I wish to argue here is that the social relations created among students at South African College were important to forming elites in each successive generation. Moreover, it is important to know how these social relations were formed – mostly in competitions among students which centered around acts of violence, at first physical and later symbolic.

This was no picturesque semi-fairy story. The drunken gambling merry makers in Bethlehem, heedless of the awful wonder of that night, might easily have been figures in a Sophiatown street scene on Christmas eve…Later while Mary, Joseph and the Holy Child were still in the stable, two Roman soldiers descended upon them – a take off of African Police, complete with assegais and notebook, demanding to know their tribe, place of birth, and reason for being in Bethlehem…

This description of a nativity play, complete with a send-up of the South African police, is one snapshot from the life of the Western Areas of Johannesburg. Others could include a large demonstration to back the wage demands of teachers and a home-grown police force. Such idiosyncratic and divergent portraits of community are the backdrop to this study. This article contends that, in their commitment to religion, education and law and order, the people of the Western Areas were deeply attached to respectability. The Western Areas was a cluster of townships – including the famous Sophiatown – which formed one of the most significant black centres of population in South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. The removal of black people from the Western Areas between 1955 and 1962 constituted one of the most notorious acts of apartheid and ensured the district's place at the heart of protest against white domination. Consequently, to assert that respectability was essential to a working class district such as the Western Areas is to imply that it had a much wider significance.

RAPID population growth is commonly depicted as one of the greatest problems facing modern Africa. For decades, the tendency of birth rates to exceed mortality rates has prompted predictions of land shortage, resource depletion and mass starvation. Underlying causes of high fertility are hypothesized to have been an unusually high demand for human agricultural labour, ‘traditional religious pronatalism’ and a ‘horror of barrenness’, while in some areas the later colonial period saw a shortening of the durations of post-partum sexual abstinence and lactation. Mortality decline from the 1920s is commonly linked to the establishment of cash crop economies, networks of roads and railways, and the diffusion of western medicine, maternity facilities, missionary activity and primary education. Yet the empirical evidence supporting this model of population growth is contradictory. Areas such as Buhaya, Buganda and Bunyoro should have experienced rapid demographic expansion by natural increase in the colonial period according to dominant theories but instead experts in the early decades of this century feared the extinction of the Haya, Ganda and Nyoro. This paper will attempt to explain why population decline among the Nyoro was more severe than anywhere else in colonial Uganda, and probably East Africa.

In 1951, British colonial administrators in Tanganyika initiated the Masai Development Plan (MDP), a five-year plan whose seemingly innocuous objectives were to build more water supplies, clear tsetse infested bush and experiment with grazing controls and fodder production in a small pilot scheme. But the project was the product of broader British agendas to reassert the legitimacy of empire and rebuild the post-war economy at home and abroad. These modernization agendas reflected a shift in the racialized ethnic premises undergirding the colonial project. Whereas early colonial rule and development had depended on the creation, maintenance and exploitation of ethnic distinctions to institute indirect rule, ethnic differences were now perceived as barriers to modernization. Ethnic groups like Maasai, who had been the target of protectionist sentiments in prior years, were now the focus of heightened attempts by the state to coerce them to adopt modern economic ways. Ironically, however, ethnic differences were both disavowed and reinforced by the plan, for although it was designed to overcome cultural barriers by economic means, it was framed, as its title suggests, by ethnic assumptions about what problems ‘the Maasai’ (as opposed to other ethnic groups) faced in terms of their development.

Despite its claims to merely address technical problems, the MDP was therefore deeply intertwined with colonial imperatives to order, control and compel the progress of their most unruly subjects. At issue were the land, labor, livestock and livelihoods of Maasai people, as well as contested visions of poverty, prosperity and progress. As such, the project served to facilitate, justify and consolidate the expansion of state control into numerous realms of Maasai life and its implementation became the site of deep contestation between administrators and Maasai. Designed in part to build confidence among Maasai in government and development, the project backfired, failing to meet its own objectives and, more ominously, fueling anti-colonial mobilization.

THE recruitment of African labour at poor rates of pay and under primitive conditions of work was characteristic of the operation of colonial capitalism in Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The implications of these conditions have been generalized very widely in the historiography of colonial Kenya. Where capital was centred upon extractive industries or upon settler agriculture (as in Kenya), historians have found much evidence to indicate that colonial states (and the metropolitan government) readily colluded with capital in providing the legal framework within which labour could be recruited and maintained in adequate numbers and at low cost to the employer. The state itself was the largest employer of labour throughout British colonial Africa and shared an interest in encouraging Africans into the labour market. Criticisms of labour conditions prevailing in any colony were thus likely to be interpreted as criticisms of the state itself.

In the introduction to their edited volume International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard take on the thorny question of why development policies change and why they sometimes persist or reappear after a period of dormancy. Much recent scholarship has located the reasons for persistence or change in development approaches within international institutions such as multilateral and bilateral aid agencies and Western scientific and social scientific disciplines. Both Arturo Escobar and James Ferguson argue for the existence of a hegemonic development discourse with standardized interventions aimed at ‘solving’ homogenized ‘problems’. Grounded in Western institutions such as the World Bank, this development discourse is maintained by an interlocked network of experts and expertise. In their analyses, development approaches and interventions are minimally affected by the particularities of locale. Other scholars concerned with identifying and understanding significant change in development policy have also focused their studies on Western organizations and disciplines and excluded from their analysis the role that development practice might play in change. But Cooper and Packard challenge scholars to consider the ways in which development policies might be molded by the practice of development, when they note ‘it is not clear that the determinants of these policies are as independent of what goes on at the grassroots as they appear to their authors or their critics to be’.

The urban townships of South Africa have been contested terrain since their inception. Different groups have struggled to control territory, various resources and political activities within the confines of the locations and, all too frequently, violence has been an integral part of these struggles. Groups as varied in composition and ideology as squatter movements, well-organized criminal outfits, student groups, vigilantes, traditional courts (makgotlas), migrant gangs, youth gangs, municipal political groups and national political movements – with much overlapping between these categories – have all at one time or another sought to impose their will on township residents and have regarded violence as an essential element in their campaigns.

While much attention has been deservedly devoted to the violence employed by the state as a means of subjugating, dividing and controlling township residents, the different ways in which black urban groups struggled to assert control over their environments have received relatively little scrutiny. These processes cannot be regarded in isolation from the state's quest for control, but neither should they be subsumed by the larger focus on a revolutionary struggle. Rather, I would argue that a more informed understanding of the conditions and challenges faced by black urbanites requires study of the nature of localized power and violence within the townships. African groups pursued agendas which served their own interests and had a considerable impact on social relations and perceptions of power and authority, both within the locations and in the broader context of national/racial politics.

Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes. By STEPHEN HOWE. London and New York: Verso, 1998. Pp. x + 337. £22 (ISBN 1-85984-873-7); £15, paperback (ISBN 1-85984-228-3).

Stephen Howe's book is certainly, to date, the most comprehensive study on Afrocentrism. Its subtitle, Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes, makes quite clear its object of analysis. Divided into three parts, it dwells successively on ancestors of the movement and their influences, the new visions heralded by its members and, finally, today's orientations of Afrocentrism. They are introduced by a systematic presentation of Afrocentrism as a concept and as a space in which one finds a multiplicity of trends. But let us suppose that there is such a thing as Afrocentrism entertained by ‘blacks’, ‘Afro-Americans’, and ‘African-Americans’, since Howe uses these terms interchangeably and which, as he puts it, would reproduce in some of its expressions what Walker Connor called ‘ethnonationalism’. In his introduction, Howe summarizes its complexity and predicaments. As a matter of fact, this introduction exposes Howe's positions about Afrocentrism.

In 1941, Prime Minister Godfrey Huggins of Southern Rhodesia presented a prescription for his colony's survival under white stewardship. ‘It is essential for the preservation of the European civilization,’ he wrote, ‘that the African should be advanced’. A decade later, the variables in this explicitly racial equation had been fleshed out, and black Southern Rhodesians were subjected to a revised and actively interventionist regime of governance – a regime that we would immediately recognize today as one of ‘development’. As such, it had much in common with the forms and strategies through which ‘development’ was pursued elsewhere in the late colonial world: its local theorists sought justification in the sciences of nature and society, while its political apologists claimed to be twinning moral uplift with the material improvement of those ‘natives’ supposedly entrusted to their civilized care.

The four papers in this collection bring a varied set of perspectives as well as examples to bear on several common themes. The authors describe continuities and changes in colonial policies toward Africans' access to and use of land and natural resources and discuss some of the sources of knowledge that informed colonial officials' thinking about African land use practices. Implicitly if not directly, each poses the question of whether colonial officials learned anything from their interactions with African farmers and/or herders? By bringing together evidence from different though overlapping periods of time (all of them cover the late 1940s and 1950s) and a variety of colonial contexts (colonies under French and British rule, with and without European settlers), as a group these papers invite reflection on the circumstances that led colonial officials to acknowledge, or deny, that Africans might know something about their environments and that such knowledge ought to inform the design of conservation and development schemes.