On 8 January 1897 the name of ‘Nigeria’ appeared in print for the first time. It was the title of an article in our leading newspaper, written by Miss Flora Shaw, who at that time ‘did the Colonies for The Times’, as Cecil Rhodes expressed it. Miss Shaw later became the wife of Lord Lugard, the great builder of Nigeria; and one of the greatest of all British Colonial Administrators. And here is what Miss Shaw said.

In 1955 I spent some time at Kota Kota on the western shore of Lake Nyasa where I was fortunate to have as my guide Shehe Khalidi Bin-Amrani, a fine old Yao schoolmaster who, when I first met him, was busily teaching his pupils to read selections of the Koran from handled boards. His father, he told me, was born at Lindi, an important centre of the slave trade from where a well-defined trade route led to Lake Nyasa, but he eventually settled at Kota Kota and led the Arab traders in search of slaves. Khalidi Bin-Amrani actually took part in the last raids.

No historian of Africa can be indifferent to the fact that alone in Africa south of the Sahara the East African coast possesses a link between history and archaeology in its own medieval mints and also in coins imported from other lands during the past two thousand years. Its history is poorly documented, and its archaeology is still to a great extent in the stage of record and survey; the numerous finds of Chinese porcelain and other imported ceramics can at present only be assigned within a bracket of at smallest fifty years: but in the coin finds there is a key for the future establishment of a precise chronology for all of these.

The peoples who occupy the region between the rivers Sankuru, Kasai and Lulua are called Kuba by their neighbours. They form a congeries of eighteen different tribes subdivided in numerous chiefdoms. These enjoy an internal autonomy but they form a single kingdom ruled by a central tribe, the Bushong, whose chief is king. He exacts tribute from the other chiefdoms and used to control, more or less, their external policy.

The lack of an adequate work in English—or indeed in any other language—on the history of the Portuguese in Africa before the nineteenth century has long been felt by those interested in what is still, in many respects, the Dark Continent, in so far as its past is concerned. In Africa as in Asia, the Portuguese pioneered the expansion of Europe; and their accounts of the indigenous peoples whom they successively discovered will always be of value as showing the state of those peoples before they were affected by contact with white rule. The reactions of the Portuguese to the African environment, whether in Morocco, Guinea, the Congo, Zambesia, or in Abyssinia inevitably affected not only the inhabitants of those regions but set precedents which were followed to a greater or lesser degree by the other Europeans who came after them.

Slavery in eighteenth-century North Africa, as described in the literature of that era, is the main theme of this paper. However, as the eighteenth century gives an arbitrary division to our topic, the scope of this study has been enlarged. The account of Morocco begins with the reign of Mulay Isma'il (1672–1727) and extends through that of Mulay Sliman (1792–1822). As conditions were much the same throughout both of these rulers' reigns, any division would be meaningless. The account of slavery in Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli has been extended in the same manner. The period of the latter eighteenth century was one of decline for all three of these Muslim states. Conditions remained the same until the period of time around 1820. Then naval action by Lord Exmouth, and diplomatic pressure by the combined European powers practically put an end to the holding of Christian slaves.

In studying the early history of the West African states, one of the difficulties encountered is that of establishing a reasonably precise framework of chronology. Eighteenth-century Ashanti, however, would appear to be an exception to this in that the reigns of its kings are dated, although with some degree of variation, in all the standard works dealing with the area. Their authors, from this point of view, have followed either Thomas Edward Bowdich or Joseph Dupuis, both of whom were in Kumasi, the Ashani capital, in the early part of the nineteenth century. In their treatment of traditions and customs, the writings of Bowdich and Dupuis are of great interest and value; the chronologies of the two authors, however, although they contain major differences, can in neither case be regarded as reliable. Fortunately there are in existence written records, hitherto little used, which make it possible to draw up a new and amended chart of the reigns of the eighteenth-century kings, and which furthermore give rise to interesting questions. These are the records of the various European companies engaged in trade on the coast, notably the English Royal African Company (1672–1750), its successor the Company of Merchants trading to Africa (1750–1821), and the second Dutch West Indies Company (1674–1791). Their agents in the forts and settlements were much interested in local developments especially in so far as trade might be beneficially or adversely affected. As a part of their duties, they kept diaries of events and dispatched reports, often of a very detailed nature, to their Companies in London and Amsterdam.

The partition of Africa is one of those historical processes which have been more discussed than studied. Everybody knows that between 1884 and 1898 the soil of Africa was very largely apportioned to the sovereignty of European powers; the results are written on the modern map, the details of the various agreements are not too difficult to check. Most writers on the subject, moreover, have clear views about the historical significance of the whole process; whether they regard it as a beneficent extension of the institutions and values of West European civilization or as an intolerable imposition of alien power, their evaluations derive from prior convictions rather than from empirical study. Despite the importance in contemporary African politics of polemical statements about Imperialism, for coherent accounts of the territorial partition of the continent it is still necessary to look to books written by public men before European archives were available, and indeed before the process itself was complete.

French colonial history, during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, was marked by two significant developments—a steady devolution of executive power from Paris to administrators abroad, and the creation of the Ministry for the Colonies in 1894. The basic reason for these changes was simply pressure of work. As communications with an expanding empire improved, the tendency to over-centralize the management of colonial affairs placed an excessive burden on the colonial section of the Ministry for the Navy. The appointment of an Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies who was responsible to a variety of ministers in the 1880's had provided no solution to the volume of business brought from Africa and Asia by the cable and the mail-steamer. Indeed, the example of Algeria where officials had been closely bound to government departments in Paris since 1871 had showed that the formulation of coherent colonial policy under these conditions was too often frustrated by divided responsibilities and changing politicians. Towards the zenith of French expansion, therefore, a single ministry took charge of all, territories except North Africa; and its first task was to apply to other areas the framework of federal administration set up in Indo-China some eight years previously. No longer were the colonies dependent for directives on a sub-department of the French Navy that had founded and protected them. The heterogeneous posts and annexed territories were grouped, as far as pacification and diplomatic conventions would permit, under governors-general who were at once military pro-consuls of empire and civil representatives of republican presidents.

As African governments have become richer of late, they have become more interested in their past, and the outside world has become more conscious that there is an African past worth investigating. Out of all these tendencies, colonial governments and newly-independent states alike have begun to put their government documents in order and to open them for historical research. This process of creating regular archives in tropical Africa has moved fast in the last decade, and it is time to begin assessing the consequences—in terms of documents now physically available, and with a view to their possible value as sources for African history.