Historically north-east Africa is rivalled in importance by no other region of the continent. Egypt, the focal point of this region, which also comprises Libya and the Sudan, has successively been one of the cradles of western civilisation, a major centre of Muslim culture, and in more recent times a base for Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamic resistance to political or cultural domination by the west. It was in Egypt that the first political and, more important, philosophical reaction against western tutelage in Africa took place.

Libya and the Sudan, Egypt's western and southern neighbours, have been closely linked to its destiny. This was particularly the case during our period, when the revolutionary change in Egypt that took place after the Second World War had percussive effects on the social, economic and political life of her neighbours. Historical links were reflected in similarities in the political and social sphere. The three states are predominantly Muslim and had all suffered under some form of western control, from which they only finally escaped during the period under review. They shared a background of anti-imperialist agitation and an identity with Pan-Islamism and Arab nationalism. They also experienced tensions between secular political ideologies and traditional Muslim notions of the polity. Many of these tensions were attributable to the rapid socio-economic changes taking place throughout the region but, because of the very different geographical and economic characteristics of the three states comprising it, they were varied in their nature. With a combined area of some two million square miles (c. five million sq. km) and a population of less than 60 million in 1975, there should have existed a very low population density. In reality, however, this was not the case, as most of the land was uninhabitable or unfit for cultivation.

Whether the Second World War marked a decisive stage in the colonial history of Africa, unleashing forces that, with hindsight, we can see made political decolonisation by even the most reluctant of European powers inevitable, or whether it merely hastened a process that was already, if not very obviously, under way, will long remain a matter for debate. There is much to be said for both views. What is clear is that nearly all writers on the colonial period of Africa's past accept, or at least pay lip service to, the view that for whatever reason the Second World War represented a watershed in the history of the continent. Yet curiously few of them give its course or impact detailed attention. It is as though it were an interval between the two acts of a play in which the audience is asked to accept that there has been a passage of time but is given only the barest outline of what has happened meanwhile.

There are many serious studies of, on the one hand, the years 1919–1939 – the period of classic colonial rule- and, on the other, the years immediately following the war – the period of ‘decolonisation’ or ‘the transfer of power’. Few historians have interested themselves in both periods, and the latter period has mostly been left to the attention of political scientists. Conversely, few political scientists have paid much attention to the years before 1945. The Second World War seems to represent a boundary between what is regarded as the proper territory of the historian and what is the province of the political scientist or journalist.

POLITICAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY: PRE-INDEPENDENCE

On the eve of the Second World War, the vast majority of Malagasy were French sujets who had extracted few political concessions from Paris. But political awareness was developing, especially among the urbanised Merina, whose leaders, Jean Ralaimongo and Joseph Ravoahangy, had agitated in favour of equal civil and political status with the Europeans and the reform of local labour regulations. Their campaign achieved Malagasy representation on a consultative body created in 1924, called the Délégations Économiques et Financières. The administration dominated the Délégations, quarrelled with the settlers' representatives, and ignored the Malagasy delegates. As a result the Malagasy gained limited knowledge of parliamentary procedure from them. Léon Cayla's term as governor-general (1930–9) witnessed the suppression of political activities and a decree establishing arbitrary arrest; anti-government newspapers were banned and labour was tightly controlled. Under pressure from the Popular Front government, he permitted the formation of the first trade unions in 1937. When he returned to France in 1959 he left a colony in which the mass of the population accepted French rule. But he also left behind an educated élite which harboured political and personal grievances against the administration.

The outbreak of the Second World War produced a wave of Malagasy patriotism, which the new Governor-General, Marcel de Coppet, used to mobilise Madagascar's resources. The collapse of France resulted in de Coppet's recall by the Vichy regime and the re-appointment of Cayla, who was forced to leave nine months later because he had reached retirement age. His successor was Armand Annet, who repressed all opposition, discriminated against the Malagasy, and abolished the Délégations.

Can the English-speaking countries of West Africa – Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Gambia – be considered as a separate group? Apart from Sierra Leone and Liberia they are not contiguous and might seem to have little in common other than their imported official language; even this has very different status among different groups in each country. For the Creoles of Sierra Leone and Liberians of American descent it is their native language; for the Hausa-speaking peoples of Northern Nigeria it takes second place to their own language, reduced to writing long before the advent of the British.

The impact of colonial rule by Britain on its West African colonies was uneven. For some groups, in particular the coastal communities under British rule for over a century, it deeply affected their culture and gave them strong links with others similarly affected elsewhere in West Africa. Even for Americo- Liberians that British connexion was important because of their religious and educational links with Freetown. The real founder of Nigerian political journalism in the 1890s, for instance, was John Payne Jackson, an Americo-Liberian. The number affected by such links, however, was tiny. And in all five countries there have been ‘two nations’: small coastal communities with long connexions with Britain or, in the case of Liberia, America, and much larger communities which came under British rule only at the turn of the century.

In southern Africa, as in Ireland, history is formidably active in politics. What people believe about their past has been both a consequence and a cause of conflict, and also a source of political energy. People are not chess pieces. Their next move depends not only on where they are in relation to others but also on how they got there, and on how they think they got there. No matter how loaded it may be, the historical luggage which people carry in their heads, and in their school textbooks, is an important fact.

Such luggage is generally of three types. One is the moving symbol with which men seek ‘to rally support for themselves or some cause, or to maintain a distinction’. Secondly there is the searing event which has happened recently enough for many people to have experienced it themselves, or to have grown up in homes where parents or grandparents were still affected by its having happened to them. Thirdly there is the political myth whose supposed happening is used to justify certain political beliefs or actions. All three types of luggage are carried about everywhere but their weight, both relative and absolute, varies in different societies at different times. In southern Africa in the 1930s there was an abundance of such luggage although not everybody carried the same pieces.

For blacks the most important historic event was the loss of land to white conquerors. The hundred-year war in the eastern Cape, in Natal and elsewhere, culminating in the Land Act of 1913 which prohibited Africans from buying land outside the residual reserves was a bitter memory.

French colonisation in tropical Africa resulted in the creation of 14 new countries, all of which became independent in 1960, with the exception of Guinea which had become a sovereign state two years earlier. Together these countries – namely Bénin, Cameroun, the Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Gabon, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Togo and Upper Volta – cover a vast area of over three million square miles, but their combined estimated population in 1975 was only just over 50 million. Thus though they are larger in size than Europe less the Soviet Union, they have only a tenth of its population.

To discuss francophone tropical Africa as if it were a unit is misleading. Though all the states that comprise it were colonised by France and still use French as their official language, these facts cannot disguise the many differences among them that have become much more pronounced since independence. Some countries, such as Chad and Upper Volta, suffered during the period under consideration from their land-locked position and scarce resources, which resulted in low investment and a slow, and sometimes negligible rate of economic growth. Others like Gabon and the Ivory Coast, both relatively rich in agricultural and mineral resources, enjoyed rapid economic growth. Their coastal location and good port facilities helped them to sustain an active foreign trade and to attract workers from poorer neighbouring states. Guinea, by contrast, though rich in mineral and agricultural resources and located on the Atlantic Ocean, had a government which throughout our period proved incapable of harnessing these advantages to the benefit of its people.

PRELUDE TO DECOLONISATION

DECOLONISATION AND THE PROBLEMS OF INDEPENDENCE

This volume of The Cambridge History of Africa differs from the two volumes immediately preceding it in that when it was first planned in 1975 archival sources were available to its authors only for the first five years in those few record offices that operate the 30-year rule. By and large, then, this is a volume whose contributors have been unable to use archival sources directly or refer to works based on them. Indeed as far as Africa is concerned it is only very recently that work based on the Public Record Office at Kew, covering the first ten years of our period, has been published in journals and books. Notable among these have been William R. Louis, Imperialism at bay 1941-194;: the United States and the decolonisation of the British Empire (Oxford, 1977); Ronald Robinson,' Andrew Cohen and the transfer of power in Tropical Africa, 1940-1951 ', in W. H. Morris-Jones and Georges Fischer (eds.), Decolonisation and after: the British and French experience (London, 1980); and R. D. Pearce, The turning point in Africa: British colonial policy 19)8-1948 (London, 1982).

The apocalypse, an influential Belgian magistrate wrote at the end of his colonial career, was due in 2026. University graduates, mutinous soldiers, and messianic religious figures would sweep away the massive colonial edifice constructed by Belgium in Central Africa. Nationalism and Pan-Africanism were the ineluctable consequence of education and modernisation; the achievements of the colonial system, to our satirical jurist, contained ‘the germ of their own destruction’. Elements of this prophecy were to find their echo in the momentous transformations compressed into the third of a century from 1940 to 1975. A series of shock waves totally altered the political landscape: a nationalist explosion in Zaire that engulfed the prudent calendars and Eurafrican visions of the coloniser, the turbulent eddies of which finally gave way to the would-be leviathan state of Mobutu Sese Seko (Joseph-Désiré); an ethnic revolution in Rwanda, and a precarious ethnocracy in Burundi, with the liquidation of the historical monarchies in both. As the Second World War began, however, virtually no one had any premonition of the sea changes in store.

The formal structure of the colonial state was in many respects the logical prolongation of the absolutist Léopoldian state. The centralised personal control the monarch aspired to achieve had as its counterpart the pronounced concentration of powers in the metropolitan colonial organs in Brussels. Executive authority was vested in the Ministry of Colonies, whose staff – and usually minister – tended to be recruited from Catholic and conservative milieux. The royal family also maintained an active interest, political and economic, in colonial affairs.

Colonial Spanish American music consists of several different strands: European music of the Renaissance and baroque periods; autochthonous music persisting from the pre-conquest period; African music transported chiefly from the sub-Saharan Atlantic coastal regions; and, of course, mixtures of all three – European, Indian and African.

As early as the 1550s, only half a century after the arrival of the Europeans, Latin America displayed the musical diversity which was to be characteristic of the entire colonial period. Juan Pérez Materano, the dean of Cartagena cathedral and resident in Cartagena since 1537, was putting the final touches to a treatise on music that discussed both polyphony and plain song. His royal printing licence, issued at Valladolid on 19 December 1559, permitted him to publish it anywhere in the Americas with copyright privilege lasting ten years.

In Mexico City the 1550s witnessed a dramatic revival of Aztec cult songs (Xochicuicatl). The 91 ‘flower songs’ in a contemporary Nahuatl manuscript now known as Cantares en idioma mexicano (first published in facsimile by Antonio Peñafiel in 1904) contain evocations of slain warrior ancestors dated 1551, 1553 and later. Although lacking melodies in five-line European notation, the cantares nonetheless include musical rubrics ranging from the seventeen-syllable drum-beat pattern for strophes 49–54 to the 22-syllable pattern for strophes 55–60 of Song XLV. To show the variety of the drum-beat patterns required in these cantares, Karl A. Nowotny tabulated 758 different patterns, the most complex belonging to the latest songs.