This article reports on developments in archaeological research in North Africa during the last four years, as these are reflected in the 350, or thereabouts, radiocarbon (and thermoluminescence) dates that have appeared since the last review. The number of new dates, and new data, becoming available indicate that North African archaeology is flourishing, although, in contrast to the earlier decades of this century, the focus seems now to be moving toward the eastern part of the region, and toward matters of adaptation rather than of simple classification, as exemplified by the new interpretations of the Dhar Tichitt Neolithic in Mauritania.

The lower Nile Valley has yielded evidence for an intensification of subsistence activities in the Late Palaeolithic in two areas, Makhadma and Kubbaniya, both involving fish-harvesting and the latter also witnessing the use of plant-foods on a scale hitherto undocumented for this period.

At the beginning of the Holocene, there is now good evidence for an eighth millennium bc Neolithic in northern Niger, complete with sophisticated ceramics, which complements the evidence already known for similar phenomena further east in the Sahara. There is even a possibility that the Khartoum Mesolithic of the central Nile Valley might be equally old. Our understanding of the Sudanese Neolithic has greatly increased. For the first time, there appears to be a development from the Khartoum Mesolithic into the Khartoum Neolithic, albeit located outside the Valley. The Khartoum Neolithic is more or less confined to the fourth millennium bc, but did give rise to the later Kadada Neolithic. After Kadada, the focus of settlement seems to have shifted outside the Valley until Meroitic times.

In the protohistoric and historic periods, we have a better understanding of the chronology of the Egyptian Predynastic, although not yet of its development; what models exist will be radically modified if the pyramids are indeed as old as the dates on them now indicate. Finally, far from the Nile Valley in northern Niger, there comes detailed evidence of the development of a precocious metallurgical tradition within a Neolithic context.

The contents of this issue of the Journal of African History are presented in honour of the sixty-fifth birthday of Roland Oliver, Emeritus Professor of African History in the University of London and a founder editor of the Journal, by some of his former research students. The editors of the Journal are happy to be able to collaborate in this celebration, which provides a companion to the issue (vol. 27, 1986, no. 2) in honour of John Fage. On this occasion, they are most grateful to Professor Richard Gray and Dr Richard Rathbone, both of S.O.A.S., for their assistance.

The earliest documents available on the Ethiopian region, in the form of Greek and Ge'ez inscriptions, give a general picture of considerable ethnic and linguistic diversity in a relatively small area of northern Ethiopia. One of the ethnic groups referred to then and subsequently, with remarkable continuity from pre-Aksumite times until the present day, is the Agaw. Different sections of the Agaw seem to have constituted an important part of the population occupying the highland interior of northern Ethiopia from ancient times. In the early days of the gradual formation and consolidation of the Aksumite state, they seem at first to have been peripheral to the process, which was clearly dominated by the Semitic-speaking inhabitants of the area. Later, however, they assumed an increasing importance, so much so that they eventually took over political leadership, establishing the great Zagwe dynasty. The dynasty lasted for about two hundred years, and transmitted the institutions as well as the cultural and historical traditions of Aksum, almost intact, to later generations.

The exact processes of this development cannot be reconstructed for those early days. Instead, this article is a preliminary attempt to understand the integration of the Agaw into the state and society of the Ethiopian empire over hundreds, even thousands of years, by considering a relatively recent period in the history of the Agaw in the northern and north-western parts of Gojjam. The considerable sense of history which the people of this area possess, going back to the time of its conquest and conversion in the seventeenth century, together with the existence of written materials for the period, provide an opportunity to study a particular example of the entry of the Agaw into the civilization of Christian Ethiopia which may throw light upon the more distant past of their ancestors.

Debates over the ‘Zimba’ period of Zambesian history prompt a new consideration of the mythical element in oral traditions. The work of Matthew Schoffeleers on Mbona, presiding spirit of a famous rain-shrine in southern Malawi, is exploited in order to cast doubt on his reconstruction of sixteenth/seventeenth-century political history. It is suggested that Mbona was the serpentine power immanent in the Zambesi; that reports of his ‘martyrdom’ at the hands of a secular ruler are versions of an ancient and widespread myth of the lightning and the rainbow, whose opposition establishes the due alternation of the seasons and the generations; that his journey to, and subsequent flight from, Kaphiri-ntiwa, scene of the Maravi Creation myth, is a variant of the visit made to the sky by Kintu, the ‘First Man’ of Ganda tradition, who introduced sex and death to middle-earth. It is not very likely that such stories attest the rise of a great military state c. 1600 and the ensuing suppression of religious institutions.

Comparative mythology (which does not have to be technically ‘structuralist’) has positive as well as negative uses for the historian. The peoples of southern Uganda, Zaire, Zambia and Malawi appear to share a common heritage of religious thought and practice and there must be a historical basis for this cultural affinity. At the same time, differences between the myths reflect recent political divergence: whereas successful states such as those of the Ganda and Luba became more secular, the Mbona cult alone survived the disasters that overwhelmed southern Malawi in the nineteenth century.

Little attention has until now been directed to the rich information on title-holders contained in the two chronicles of the imām Aḥmad b. Furṭū written in 1576 and 1578 respectively. This neglect is partly due to the very confusing style of the imām's writing. In particular, he refers to the three highest ranking Bornoan officials by translating their Bornoan titles into Arabic: the Digma is called ‘al-wazīr al-kabīr’, the great Jarma ‘al-rā'id al-kabīr’, and the Cikama ‘al-ḥājib’. Once the meaning of these Arabic titles is decoded it appears that the political organisation of sixteenth century Borno owes very little to the Islamic model. Furthermore it becomes clear that the commander of the Bornoan corps of musketeers was the great Jarma, an official of Ngizim origin, and not a Turkish military instructor as one may have suspected.

However, since Ibn Furṭū is mainly concerned with military activities, only a few functions of the three high-ranking court officials emerge from his account; others have to be inferred from the information provided by nineteenth-century European travellers and from more recent anthropological accounts. In Borno the political organisation of the Sayfuwa state fell to pieces in the first half of the nineteenth century, when al-Amīn al-Kānemī and his successors built up a new system of administration. This progressively supplanted the old system, which was based on a great number of court titles and attendant offices. Important elements of the political organisation of the Sayfuwa survive until the present day in some former vassal states of Borno which became independent in the course of the nineteenth century or earlier.

Christopher Wrigley's objections, in ‘The River God’, to my historical interpretation of some Mbona stories do not differ substantially from those of Luc de Heusch against Vansina. In essence, the allegation is that the historical information I think can be derived from those stories finds little support in the historical facts insofar as they are known to us. Or, put somewhat more mildly, even if my historical interpretation of the Mbona stories were correct, there is no way to ‘prove’ its correctness, not even to the lawyer's standard, ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, that Wrigley claims for his own exegesis. More concretely, he holds with M. D. D. Newitt, my earlier discussion partner, that there is little or no evidence for the existence of a Lundu kingdom at the time of the Zimba raids, just before A.D. 1600. He further maintains that the few seventeenth-century references known to us do not suggest that the Lundus were different in kind from other regional power-holders, whereas I claimed — and still claim — that between the 1580s and 1622 the Lundus managed — initially with the help of the Zimba — to organize a state system, which differed from neighbouring systems in that it was considerably more centralized and repressive.

Between 1775 and 1810 Andrianampoinimerina laid the foundations of the Merina state which in subsequent decades was to rule most of Madagascar. Though various circumstances such as the development of irrigated riziculture and slavery, the monopoly of profits and of muskets from coastal trade, and the manipulation of ritual, contributed in part to the nascent monarchy's strength, they equally touched other political formations within Imerina and elsewhere and therefore do not explain why Andrianampoinimerina's organization endured while others did not. The distinctiveness of Andrianampoinimerina's case is revealed by returning to particular events, those culminating in his first successful attempt to rule at Ambohimanga in 1783. His success depended upon exploiting both good luck and pervasive kinship values which recognized individual financial prowess. Thus the resurgent trade with the east coast did not redefine Merina kinship. Rather, trade provided an expanded arena of economic activity in which Andrianampoinimerina demonstrated superior skill at kinship politics, expanding his kin group and assuming the role of sole mediator between the residents of Ambohimanga and their ancestors.

This article draws attention to the possible importance of coffee exports from Ethiopia before the mid-nineteenth century. They may well have been a factor in attempts by Ethiopian emperors in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to develop trade in Yaman, in India and with the Dutch in Java. By 1690, coffee was being exported from Zayla, and perhaps by other outlets. In 1705 and 1737 there were unsuccessful attempts by Europeans to obtain coffee direct from Ethiopia, though meanwhile the growth of plantations in European colonies had rendered such effort superfluous. Nonetheless, Ethiopia contributed to the Red Sea coffee trade during the eighteenth century, and it seems likely that coffee was exported from Enarya as well as from Harar. The kingdom of Shawa was well situated to exploit the development of coffee exports from the south-western highlands, and they would have assisted Shawa's efforts to distance itself from upheavals further north during the Zamana Masafent. The coffee trade may therefore have been more significant in the rise of Shawa in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries than historians have hitherto allowed.

In evaluating statistical information found in reports of European travellers, historians have not paid sufficient attention to the possibility that African states possessed reasonably competent fiscal systems. This is demonstrated by a study of the demographic information about the central highlands of Angola collected in the 1850s by the Hungarian traveller Lázló Magyar, who probably used oral fiscal records about the numbers of villages in the area to make a detailed series of population estimates.

Our study of the population data left by Magyar suggests that it is reliable and can be used to show population trends in central Africa from 1800 to 1900. Population appears to have increased rapidly in the central highlands during this period, probably because of the importation of slaves, while it decreased dramatically after 1850 in the lands of the Lunda empire to the east.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, in Futa Jalon, the popular revolt of the Hubbu brutally revealed the underlying weaknesses of the most powerful state of its time in the region. A marabout of the Qādiriyya, Alfā Mamadu Dyuhe, took upon himself the leadership of the oppressed, the discontented, and the minority groups. The Hubbu survived for forty years, until exterminated by Samori in 1884, but the article concentrates on the movement from its inception in 1845 to the death of its founder in 1854, at the pinnacle of his success, in possession of the Futa state capital, Timbo. The Futa state, product of an Islamic revolution in the eighteenth century, had lost the fervour of its Fulbe founders in the endless contest for the position of Almamy between the rival lineages of Alfāyā and Soriyā. Based upon the jihād against paganism, upon the taxation of the conquered, and upon the slavery of more than half its population, it was rendered doubly oppressive by the political struggle for the rewards of power at all levels down to that of village headman, and doubly weak in consequence. The nomadic Fulbe, particularly angered by their treatment, were notably responsive to the preaching of Alfā Mamadu against the decadence and injustice of the rulers; so too were the Malinke of the eastern province of Fōduye-Haji. It was the breakdown of this large region into smaller and smaller chieftaincies, increasing the patronage of the reigning Almamy by multiplying the number of official predators, that created the special conditions for the Hubbu revolt. First the representations of Timbo, then the Alfāyā and the Soriyā themselves, were routed by the holy man and his increasingly numerous following. The religious leadership which had inspired the rising, however, faltered after Alfā Mamadu's death. The Hubbu, from hubb, ‘love’, the key word in the Arabic chant that bound them into a religious fraternity, failed to carry through their revolution, and instead became a community of refugees living by banditry. More important to their failure than the reform of the Futa state, undertaken by the Almamys at the insistence of their own clerics, was the fundamental inability of the movement, so characteristic of other popular revolts, to see the new society they wished to bring into existence as in any way different from the old. Slavery, for instance, was not abolished, despite the numbers of ex-slaves in the Hubbu ranks. Their failure was a failure of imagination.

While archaeology and linguistics provide an important basis for the reconstruction of the early history of those parts of eastern Africa inhabited by pastoral societies, oral traditions also can make a valuable contribution. In this paper an examination of the traditions of the Turkana of north-western Kenya reveals an often remarkably sophisticated rendering of complex processes of origin and migration. Moreover, those traditions also embody insights into basic factors concerning the development and spread of pastoralism in East Africa that the methodologies of other disciplines have only recently begun to identify.

Turkana traditions suggest that their society had not just one, monolithic ‘origin’, but rather what might be seen as a whole series of them. Highly dramatic and memorable tales of genesis provide vivid idioms of socio-political identity and also contain fundamental cosmological messages. But they also correspond to important stages of change in the development of the Turkana community, and, as such, they (together with less ‘formal’ traditions associated with them) provide vital historical information.

The factors which combined to enable the Turkana to carry out their vast and rapid territorial expansion are identified. For instance, one early tradition suggests a fundamental change in their pastoral system – the acquisition of Zebu cattle-while others emphasize important commercial contacts which provided a steady flow of iron-ware and grain. Still others trace the development of the office of Great Diviner, revealing how it became a primary focus of economic and cultural redefinition and corporate identity as alterations to the earlier generation-set system occurred. Another tradition provides a glimpse of Turkana expansion from the point of view of peoples absorbed by it.

In contrast to the negative conclusions reached by Donal Cruise O'Brien, it is here argued that the French, in the last half of the nineteenth century, maintained an Islamic policy. They practised some of it all of the time and all of it when they had the human and financial resources. They consistently opposed the Islamic state where it conflicted with their own political and economic interests. They identified it with their old nemesis of Futa Toro and the Tokolor, and then with the Tijaniyya. This attitude can be contrasted with a much more tolerant disposition towards the established monarchies, with whom thay coexisted for a much longer time and upon whom they relied to supply the cadre of chiefs.

In the case of Umar, the French confronted a jihad that was launched before they began their own expansion in the upper valley, but they contained its influence. They quarantined the Wolof areas and pushed the Umarian state to the margins of their sphere of influence. By allowing much of the younger generation of Tokolor to depart, they turned the preaching of hijra to their own advantage. The French opposed the efforts of Ma Bâ to move into the heart of the peanut basin and the campaigns of the Madiyankobe to block the river trade or disrupt cultivation in Cayor. As soon as Mamadu Lamin mobilized for jihad they responded by driving him out of their gateway to expansion.

This article attempts to understand in substantive terms the nature of black proletarianization in Natal, South Africa. This is undertaken by moving beyond arid explanations of outside agencies to focus on some of the underlying cultural premises that ordered the day-to-day activities of northern Nguni communities. This article examines their temporal perceptions, exploring within the colonial context the shift from peasant to industrial time, and showing the central role mission churches played in the transition process.

Two important disclosures emerge as a result of this study. First, it conclusively demonstrates the existence of a rich history of nineteenth century African labour action (where until now the overwhelming assumption among historians has been that no such activity existed), much of which was related to the struggle over the definition of time. Secondly, it presents a more balanced picture of the migrant worker. One finds groups of labourers who continued to adhere to old attachments, while others adapted in a rather remarkable fashion to the conditions of the industrial workplace. Most striking of all, is that both were capable of dictating the terms of labour, whether they involved demands for the lunar month or the halfholiday and Sabbath rest day.

This article examines the unique role played by fishing, hunting and gathering groups in the survival strategy of the pastoralist societies in whose midst they live. During periods of extreme adversity, these groups acted as a refuge for destitute herdsmen and their households by absorbing population in periods of hardship and releasing individuals back into pastoralism when conditions once again allowed the accumulation of stock. Extensive quotations from the historical traditions of the peoples of the Lake Turkana region of northern Kenya are used to detail the recent history of two such fishing communities, the Elmolo and the Dies, the latter being a fishing group within Dasenech society. The epizootics that decimated the cattle herds of East Africa at the end of the nineteenth century are background for examining the interactions of the Elmolo and Dies with their pastoralist neighbours, the Samburu and Rendille, and the cultural changes initiated during this period. The subsequent changes inaugurated by the imposition of colonial rule are documented and the Elmolo are shown to be a ‘dying tribe’ in the sense that the traditional cultural features of their society are giving way to a more pastoral existence based on that of their herding neighbours.

Court records from 1905–6 offer a rare view of the status of women slaves in early colonial Northern Nigeria. It is shown that British officials found it easy to accommodate the aristocracy of the Sokoto Caliphate on the status of these women, despite British efforts to reform slavery. Those members of the aristocracy and merchant class who could afford to do so were able to acquire concubines through the courts, which allowed the transfer of women under the guise that they were being emancipated. British views of slave women attempted to blur the distinction between concubinage and marriage, thereby reaffirming patriarchal Islamic attitudes. The court records not only confirm this interpretation but also provide extensive information on the ethnic origins of slave women, the price of transfer, age at time of transfer, and other data. It is shown that the slave women of the 1905–6 sample came from over 100 different ethnic groups and the price of transfer, which ranged between 200,000 and 300,000 cowries, was roughly comparable to the price of females slaves in the years immediately preceding the conquest. Most of the slaves were in their teens or early twenties. The use of the courts to transfer women for purposes of concubinage continued until at least the early 1920s.

The terrain of Busoga and adjacent areas of eastern Uganda constituted a portion of the boundary of the broad Bantu speech community of southern, central, west-central and eastern Africa. By examining closely the settings and circumstances of contact between Bantu and non-Bantu in this portion of the ‘Bantu line’ between approximately 1500 and 1850, it is possible to see the complexity of the ‘face of contact’ between speech communities in eastern Uganda. The study reviews several different efforts to comprehend and represent the evolving contacts between Bantu-speakers in the Busoga area and, in particular, Luo-speaking immigrants. Over the long run, many groups associated with Luo immigration took over Bantu speech while gaining dominant statuses and positions within the largely Bantu-speaking communities in the area. The study distinguishes five distinctive and non-homologous zones within this narrow stretch of the Bantu borderland, emphasizing through comparative analysis the very local, immediate, and contextual character of contacts across speech boundaries. It brings forward the economic and political significance of the circumstances of contact, and locates patterns of resistance, flux, and reflux within the era following the linguistic incorporation of the ‘stranger’ Luo within Bantu speech communities. Indeed, some of the important population flows in Busoga appear to have developed out of reactions to elaborated forms of domination building over a number of years, rather than as instant expressions of boundary and cultural formation by the participants in the experience.

Gold production in the Loby region to the west of the Black Volta in the precolonial period was exclusively in the hands of lineages grouped in largely autonomous little towns, 118 in the area under study, of which Jebugu was the largest. The various peoples were a mixture of Voltaïc language speakers, who formed the majority, with Mande speakers linked to the wider Mande world. Government was not centralized, but operated at three levels of lineage organization. At the first, Level I, sukula or units of residence for each self-governing kin group joined together as the wards of each town, under a resident chief. At Level II, each kin group in each sukula came under the authority of the head of its lineage, who lived in one of the larger, ‘chiefly’ towns perhaps several days' journey away. At Level III, this lineage organization for the Mande speakers was linked to the Mande-Jula capitals outside the Loby region, at Kong, Bonduku, Bobojulasso and Buna. So far as gold was concerned, this three-layered political system was a commercial organization which brought producers and distributors together in response to market demands. Voltaïc-speaking producers at Level I were linked through the lineages to Voltaïc and Mande-speaking distributors at Level II; while both producers and distributors on these levels were collectively linked to the Mande-speaking distributors on Level III, who connected the region with the outside world. The control of distributors over producers was indirect, and exercised solely through the market. This picture from the nineteenth century of fiercely independent gold miners, with traditional skills, beliefs and rights, operating only in the absence of central government, confirms accounts of gold production in the western Sudan dating from the Middle Ages, and offers a valuable case for study.

The picture is supplemented and enhanced by what happened after the arrival of the French in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and the changes they introduced in the political organization of the Loby region in 1898. The evidence shows that, until the end of World War I, Loby gold production remained largely in the hands of traditional miners, who retained their links with the old commercial-political lineage system, which continued to market the bulk of the Loby gold. The influence of the colonial state, which for all practical purposes must have been perceived as none other than a fourth political level imposed above the existing three, was itself indirect, and of a familiar kind. In response to an increased demand for gold on the coast, Loby producers raised both their output and their sales, demonstrating the effectiveness of their traditional organization.

This article seeks to redress the largely contemporary bias and technologically deterministic approach of agricultural historians of cotton in francophone West Africa. It does this by arguing that the expansion of cotton since the 1960s has depended upon major socio-economic and cultural changes in agrarian production systems during the colonial period as much as on technological innovations in the post-colonial period. The study focuses on the political–economic and socio-cultural processes behind the emergence of an export-oriented, commodity producing peasantry among the Senufo of northern Ivory Coast. A periodization of cotton development is presented in which the gradual dissolution of precolonial production units and the gestation of smaller social units with new economic needs is emphasized. This restructuring of agricultural production systems is related to a complex interplay of internal and external factors, notably coercive state policies, the monetization of Senufo society and the internalization of commodity relations, conflicts between social groups and the direct intervention of foreign agribusiness in the productive process. Despite low levels of cotton output during the colonial period, the resultant transformation of production relations was crucial to the contemporary intensification of cotton growing.

This article reconsiders the emergence of politico-religious groupings in the kingdom of Buganda in the late nineteenth century, in the light of historical writings and research since 1952. It accepts J. M. Waliggo's view that the Christian martyrdoms of the mid-1880s need to be taken seriously by secular historians as an influence upon later Christian fanaticism. However, the link to later fanaticism was only politically established during the course of the Ganda succession war of 1888–90, when Kalema's establishment of an Islamic state in Buganda prompted the creation of rival Protestant and Roman Catholic politico-religious groupings. The present writer therefore accepts the stress upon the strategic importance of the Ganda Christian martyrs in Roland Oliver's pioneering study of The Missionary Factor in East Africa but questions the view of Oliver (and subsequent historians) that European missionaries were primarily responsible for the emergence of political competition between Anglican and Roman Catholic Christians in Buganda. Nonetheless, when politico-religious groupings did emerge in the kingdom during the succession war of 1888–90, both C.M.S. missionaries and the White Fathers were most important in ensuring that the two rival politico-religious groupings did not abort themselves as a result of Ganda Christian chiefs indulging in inter-personal strife along other lines of cleavage. That, however, is largely a later story, to which Oliver's Missionary Factor still serves as the essential introduction.