This paper outlines four stages of the Bantu expansion: first, the initial push through the equatorial forest from the northern to the southern woodlands; second, the occupation of the southern woodland belt from coast to coast; third, the colonization of the Tanzania, Kenya and southern Somali coastline and of the northern sector of the lake region; fourth, the colonization south-wards, north-westwards and north-eastwards from this extended nucleus. The evidence for the first stage is largely linguistic and is likely to remain so. The outlines of the fourth stage can be established very largely from traditional evidence. It is for chronological data concerning the second and third stages that we can now turn hopefully to archaeology. In both these stages the Bantu expansion seems to have coincided fairly closely with the spread of the Iron Age; and, if the spread of the Iron Age through the area north of the southern woodlands can now be traced in something like the detail which we already have for Zambia and Rhodesia, the mystery of the Bantu expansion will have been largely unravelled.

The area involved is located at the northern end of Lake Malawi, near Karonga, and includes Mbande Hill, the ancient capital of the Ngonde people under their paramount chiefs, all of whom bore the title ‘Kyungu’.

Three Iron Age Industries are described:

(a) The Lufira Industry. This is so far represented only by pottery, but it was possible to obtain charcoal associated with it. The pottery appears to have some affinity with the Kalambo material. All the sites occur within cassava cultivation near the Lufira river.

(b) The Rukuru Industry. This is represented by buried hut remains, pottery, glass beads, iron, charred millet and sorghum seeds, and bone fragments. The huts which may have been conical were daga coated. They were built in one instance on a terrace of the North Rukuru river, and subsequently silted over. This area is at present under cultivation. Another site occurs on the east bank of the same river buried below hill wash. The glass beads suggest affinities with Rhodesian beads dated as early as a.d. 700, and a date before the Portuguese dominance of the east coast trade is expected. The pottery consists of gourdshaped pots and simple bowls decorated mainly with rounded point impressions. There is a certain amount of material which may be of Kisi origin from across the lake.

(c) The Mbande Industry. This represents the period of rule by the Kyungus as revealed by excavation on Mbande Hill and by examination of a number of related sites. A considerable amount of oral tradition was recorded some years ago which refers to this period. The pottery and beads differ from the material described in the Lufira and Rukuru industries, but pottery which may be of Kisi make again occurs. The glass beads resemble some of the beads from Rhodesian ruin sites (ca. 1500–1800), but there are three from the upper levels of Mbande Hill which are probably of nineteenth century date. The pottery seems to possess some features which occur in Uganda pottery.

General. No stamp or channel decorated pottery was found within the area examined, but the Lufira Ware may be a late derivative of the Channel-decorated pottery recorded from Kalambo.

The Rukuru Ware may form a link in a migration route beginning in Kenya and ending far south of the Zambezi.

Trade with the east coast before the sixteenth century is suspected with regard to the Rukuru sites, and this continued during the Kyungu period of rule. The pottery suggests that the Kisi may have been trading across the lake from an early date.

An earthwork which appears to have formed part of a wooden stockade exists on Mbande Hill. Ceremonial pottery was found in the vicinity.

Recent accounts of the proto-history of Africa use data from physical anthropology, but also concepts of race which physical anthropologists in general have abandoned as unsatisfactory; the paper seeks to explain this phenomenon sociologically. Late nineteenth-century political and sociological trends helped to produce patterns of thought which can no longer be regarded as affording adequate explanations of social processes. These patterns combined idealism, or the method of contrasting ideal types, with pseudo-Darwinism, which sought the origins of political development in the interaction of differently endowed groups. In African ethnography of the early twentieth century such concepts led to the view that the continent was inhabited by two groups, Caucasoids and Negroids, and by mixtures of the two which remained mixtures, to be analysed as such. The Caucasoid and Negroid types were regarded as absolute and universal, represented equally in the biological, linguistic, cultural and political aspects of man.

On admet généralement que la diffusion du fer dans la savane joignant le Nil à l'ouest africain à hauteur du lac Tchad a été un puissant facteur de civilisation, mais les considérations sur ce thème s'appuient davantage sur des analogies ou sur des survivances culturelles, des traditions ou des comparaisons ethnologiques que sur des documents archéologiques et historiques correctement mis en place.

The suggestions put forward in this paper may be summarized as follows. The linguistic, cultural and to some extent physical ancestors of the modern Bantu people south of the Zambezi, including the Shona, arrived in Rhodesia in the early part of the first millennium a.d. The B1 culture was not introduced by Shona migrants arriving in the eleventh century, but was a local development of the already existing Shona Iron Age A, attributable perhaps to prosperity gained from the gold trade. The B1 culture should not in fact be regarded as a separate culture from the A, that later fused with it, but as a variant of it, which because of the power and influence of those who developed and practised it eventually spread over a large area and became a common factor in the various local Shona cultures that had diverged, and continued to diverge, in the course of time.

Ijo oral traditions were generally remembered by elders and a small number of specialists, such as priests and drummers. All members of an Ijo community were also expected to know the traditions of origin of their lineage and Ibe. The institutions and rituals for the ancestors (kings and founders of lineages) also served as concrete reminders of the past.

Chronological distortions alleged to characterize Ijo traditions are shown to derive from a failure to take a sufficient number of samples of the various traditional sources and types.

Analysed for content, Ijo traditions of origin suggest a number of centres of dispersion. Instead of migrations from the hinterland, a fringe belt occupied by Ijo and hinterland peoples is revealed. Bronzes discovered at a number of sites indicate early contacts with Benin and other neighbours. But these bronzes as well as the dispersion centres call for archaeological investigation.

The Ounce as a unit in the West African trade was originally applied to the goods which could be exchanged on the Gold Coast for one ounce of gold; it was generally reckoned that such goods would cost about 40s. in Europe, or half the European value of the gold. Calculations based on actual transactions show that the prime cost of an Ounce of goods was sometimes lower than this, when a favourable assortment of goods had been chosen. In the 1760's and 1770's gold was no longer being exported from the Gold Coast, but was demanded as part of the price of slaves; an ounce of gold was then valued at two Ounces of trade goods. The price of gold had risen, partly owing to a local stoppage of trade, and perhaps also because of a permanent change in the direction of Ashanti gold exports.

At Whydah, the Ounce was not in use in the first half of the eighteenth century; values of goods, including cowries, the local currency, were expressed in terms of the quantity equivalent to one slave. By 1772 the Ounce had come into use at a value similar to that on the Gold Coast. The French selling cheap brandy, and the Portuguese selling cheap Brazilian tobacco, were able to operate at very low costs per Ounce.

The ‘slave-price’ rigsdaler of Christiansborg, with regular exchange rates both with gold and with cowries, forms a link between the Gold and Slave Coast systems.

A table of slave prices at various dates during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is given in terms of Ounces and other units.

Various theories have been proposed concerning the homeland of the Nubian languages. Current historical and linguistic evidence suggests that it was in Kordofan or Darfur and that Nubian first entered the middle reaches of the Nile between A.D. 200 and 500. There it replaced Meroitic, which appears to have been spoken in the area for a long time. Meroitic may, but has not yet been proved to be a language of the Eastern Sudanic group. If so, the persistence of many cultural traits in the Sudan may be correlated with the stability of the Eastern Sudanic-speakers in the same area.

The Ashanti bureaucracy as we know it from the nineteenth century owed its structure and character to reforms in government initiated by Osei Kwadwo (1762–77) and pushed forward by his successors Osei Kwame (1777–ca. 1801) and Osei Bonsu (ca. 1801–1824). Many previously hereditary offices became appointive: biographical studies of leading officials in the early nineteenth century show that they were appointed, and promoted, by the king on merit, without regard to their origins. Freemen and slaves, Ashanti and non-Ashanti, were recruited into the bureaucracy. Administrative skills tended to be transmitted through patri-kin, and in the course of the nineteenth century powerful groups grew up which, generation after generation, provided the king with trained officials. An administrative class emerged, distinguished from other elements in society by its dependence upon the king for its very existence. Elaborate checks were instituted to prevent the bureaucracy transforming itself from a controlled to a ruling one.

Bureaucratization in Ashanti produced little quantitative change in the pattern of office growth. Its effects were upon the quality of government. A distinction began to take shape between the king acting in his private capacity through his palace functionaries, and in his public capacity through his bureaucratic officials. Government became increasingly efficient, and was extended over fields of activity previously untouched. The growth of the bureaucratic process was reflected in the increasingly absolutist nature of the Ashanti state.

Two series of migrations have left a profound imprint on the cultures of western central Africa: those of the Jaga who began a spectacular career with the sudden capture of the Kongo kingdom in 1569, and those of the Lunda and related peoples in central and eastern Angola. The amplitude of the Jaga migration was recognized from the beginning, whilst the scope of the Lunda migrations has not been fully realized as yet. So much is known about the latter invasions that the huge movement is subdivided into submigrations, so that the general perspective has been lost. It is this second set of migrations which was led by Kinguri, a Lunda prince who left his country after its capture by the Luba. In our opinion Kinguri's successor contacted the Portuguese around 1610, which leaves an interval following the Jaga arrival great enough to warrant the view that two invasions were involved. If so, the coincidence of two major population movements following each other so shortly in time is still remarkable and begs further investigation.

This study presents a reconstruction of the origins and major movements of the Galla and Somali of Northeast Africa which departs from most of the previous literature on the subject. The traditional view has been that the Galla occupied most of the Horn of Africa until the Somali, beginning about the tenth century, swept south and south-west from the shores of the Gulf of Aden driving the Galla before them. The pressure of the Somali has also been considered the major impetus to the Galla invasions of Ethiopia in the sixteenth century. It is the thesis of this paper that both the Galla and the Somali originated in southern Ethiopia, that the Somali expanded to the east and north much earlier than the Galla, and that the Galla lived only in southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya until their migrations began about 1530.

It has come to be widely accepted that slavery prevailed on the African continent before the arrival of the Europeans, and this indigenous slavery is said to have facilitated the rise and progress of the Atlantic slave-trade. According to P. D. Rinchon, ‘from the earliest days of the trade, the majority of the Negroes were living in a state of servitude, and the native chiefs did not have far to seek for the human merchandise’. Daniel Mannix, in one of the most recent accounts of the Atlantic slave-trade, contends that ‘many of the Negroes transported to America had been slaves in Africa, born to captivity. Slavery in Africa was an ancient and widespread institution, but it was especially prevalent in the Sudan.’ In the opinion of J. D. Fage, ‘the presence of a slave class among the coastal peoples meant that there was already a class of human beings who could be sold to Europeans if there was an incentive to do so… So the coastal merchants began by selling the domestic slaves in their own tribes.’ The main purpose of this brief study is to test these generalizations with evidence taken from the Upper Guinea Coast—the region between the Gambia and Cape Mount.

A revised estimate of the value of trans-Saharan trade in the nineteenth century suggests that, so far from declining, the caravan traffic between North Africa and the Western Sudan increased before the period of colonial partition. Evidence for this revision comes from French diplomatic and geographical missions in the 1850's and 1860's and from the Tripoli and Moroccan consulate records. In round figures the import of European goods across the desert routes and the export of ivory, ostrich plumes, gold dust and lesser items was probably not less than £1,500,000 in 1875—a peak year, after which there was a slow decline, as various factors, including recession in the European markets and the political conquest of Western Sudan, interrupted trade. The prices for European goods and Sudan produce in the early 1860's illustrate the differentials which enabled African traders to make their profit.

The various Bayajida legends in Hausa folklore describe how Bayajida, son of the king of Baghdad, came to Bornu and married the ruler's daughter. He later fled and came to Daura, fathering the founders of the seven Hausa states. The legends seem to be describing events which happened during the tenth century A.D. and Bayajida may be identical with the Ibāḍite sectary Abū Yazīd who resisted the Fāṭimids of Tunisia until he was killed by them in 947. The debris of his army may have fled across the Sahara and arrived in Bornu, then north of Lake Chad. After some time a part of this rabble which had remained unassimilated moved south-west and interbred with the indigenous inhabitants round Daura, forming the Hausa aristocracies. Different ingredients of the legends may be folk memories of events near Mecca, Berber myths of origin and perhaps Greek mythology, as well as accounting for the introduction of horses and the sinking of wells in rock by the incoming Berbers.

The problem of akori beads consists above all in the question of their [organic or inorganic] composition. If, according to the ‘water theory’, akori were some kind of corals, then how to explain their findings in old graves, where they remained in good state of preservation after the human bones decayed? In the present stage of research the following explanation might be offered: the term of ‘akori’ served for the designation of cylindrical and oval beads of varying composition and colour, made maybe of some now unknown kind of coral, but certainly also of stone or glass; perhaps the akori recovered from the sea-shores and rivers were not really corals but worked jewels from the corpses of those buried in the water or offerings to the sea-deity Olokun. The discovery in Ife of large production of glass beads seems to support this.

Contrary to Professor Carlo Giglio I maintain that article xvII of the Wihalē treaty was in the Italian text worded in such a way that it, if legally valid, limited Ethiopian sovereignty and created a relationship which in substance amounted to a protectorate. The Italian negotiator Antonelli who had drafted this text could hardly be ignorant of its implications, and by allowing it to remain unchanged at the same time as he signed a different Amharic version he created the imbroglio, whether he intended to do so or not, and whether he actually tried to hinder the notification of the protectorate or not.

On the other hand, once it is established that the Italian version of article xvII was void, then there is no basis whatsoever for the Italian claim to a protectorate over Ethiopia. Article XVII was the ‘act’ on which the notification and the acknowledgements were based. The latter are therefore legally meaningless without article xvII. De jure the protectorate did not exist. Since the Italian government failed to gain control over Ethiopia's foreign relations or internal affairs, the protectorate never came into any de facto existence either. Professor Giglio's proposition that an Italian protectorate over Ethiopia was legally established regardless of the validity of article XVII, and functioned from 1889 to 1896 is not tenable.

Attempts to promote closer relations among the states of Southern Africa in the third quarter of the nineteenth century were thwarted inter alia by intense rivalry between the two British coastal colonies, Natal and the Cape. The sources of this struggle have usually been sought in the strenuous efforts made by each colony to monopolize the transit trade to the interior and in their attempts to develop in the hinterland those markets which the metropolitan countries of Europe did not offer them. But Natal's geographical situation tempted her also to seek economic salvation in the Indian Ocean. At various stages of the colony's history, Natal's businessmen and politicians showed considerable interest in the commercial potential of the region, in its labour resources, and in the creation of steamship and telegraphic lines of communication through the Ocean to the East and Europe. These, it was believed, would not only be of economic advantage to Natal but would also afford her greater independence in many ways from the older-established and far wealthier sister colony. Yet these conflicting ambitions and policies—particularly the commercial connexions of each colony with Mauritius—did much to exacerbate relations between them. Both in 1866 and in 1876, proposals merely for a free trade treaty in each other's produce were easily defeated. The divergence of interests and sympathies between the two colonies, so evident at the National Convention in 1909, stemmed from a great variety of sources—political, economic, geographical and others. Their rivalry had a long history, but was seldom so pronounced as in the earliest years of their relationship.

Archibald Dalzel, the author of The History of Dahomey, was born in Scotland in 1740. Unable to practise the medical profession in which he had been trained, he entered the service of the Committee of Merchants Trading to Africa (African Committee) in 1763 as Surgeon, and was posted to Cape Coast in West Africa. There he started slave trading, which remained his only stable employment until his death in 1811. Despite the apparent ease with which profit could be gained from the slave trade during that period, and despite the energy and optimism which he put into his ventures, Dalzel was never a success. He was twice declared a bankrupt and died a disappointed man. The only monument which he left behind and by which he is still remembered is his brilliant compilation on the History of Dahomey.

LE 31 Décembre 1957, paraissait au Journal Officiel de la Guinée Française, un arrêté signé de Keïta Fodéba, Ministre de l'Intérieur du gouvernement de la ‘;loi-cadre’, portant suppression sur le territoire de la Guinée de la ‘chefferie dite coutumière’. Nul ne conteste que, sans la suppression de la chefferie, le succès du ‘Non’ en Guinée, lors du référendum constitutionnel du 28 septembre 1958 n'eût pas été assuré. Quelques semaines après le référendum, M. Jacques Rabemananjara (aujourd'hui ministre du gouvernement de Madagascar), préfaçant le volume qui publiait le compte rendu de la ‘Conférence des Commandants de cercle’, tenue à Conakry les 25–26 juillet 1957, écrivait:

L'un des bastions du régime [colonial], son artillerie lourde, celle qu'il n'engage que dans les circonstances graves, s'appelle la féodalité africaine.