The African rubber boom, which lasted from 1890 to 1913, had a significant economic and political impact on many parts of Africa. While the broad outlines of the boom were determined by the world market, the numerous local and regional variations were influenced more by the depletion of the rubber supplies. The factors that influenced the depletion varied according to whether the region in question was a free trade area or a concession area.

The end of the notorious concession companies in the Congo Independent State has generally been attributed to the efforts of English and Belgian reformers. Recent research on Abir, a major Congo concession company, has revealed that attempts at reform were ineffective, and that exhaustion of the of the rubber supplies had caused the rubber system in the Abir concession to break down by 1906, when serious debate on the Congo question was just beginning in Europe.

The article shows how the Abir system, which was designed to constantly increase production, led to depletion of the rubber resources. When the depleted areas merged, the territory passed into a period of crisis during which Abir lost control and production plummeted. Production figures for other Congo concession companies suggest that events in their territories followed a similar pattern.

Historians who have studied the rise of African opposition to colonialism in Northern Rhodesia have concentrated largely on the development of political parties and their campaigns for political rights. This paper explores some of the social and cultural elements of the popular movement against British rule through an examination of challenges to restrictions on the production and consumption of alcoholic beverages. In Northern Rhodesia as in much of British-ruled east, central and southern Africa, the colonial government banned the consumption by Africans of all European-type alcoholic drinks and placed tight restrictions on the brewing and sale of grain beers. In the immediate postwar period racially discriminatory alcohol regulations emerged as a highly emotional issue and remained so despite liberalization of the restrictions on beer and wine. But the focus of popular anger was the municipal grain beer monopolies and attempts on the part of the authorities to stamp out an illegal beer trade conducted by women brewers. Beginning in the mid-1950s this anger erupted in a series of protests and boycotts directed against municipal beerhalls. The protesters, many of whom were women, opposed the exclusion of Africans from a potentially lucrative sector of trade as well as the supposedly immoral and degrading characteristics of the beerhalls. Examination of the struggle over the beerhalls illuminates some of the diverse and contradictory sources and objectives of popular political expression during this period and in particular sheds light on the interplay among issues of race, class and gender in the nationalist movement.

Archaeological investigations in southern Mauretania have revealed a wealth of rather spectacular stone masonry villages which were occupied by prehistoric cultivators as early as 1000 B.C. It is argued that the inhabitants of these villages were Negro and very probably Soninke, and that the basic elements of their culture had developed without major influences from outside the area. The apparent sophistication and complexity of this cultural manifestation, combined with the close fit of developments in this area with Carneiro's theory of state formation, suggests that this prehistoric complex represented at least a powerful chiefdom which embodied many of the characteristics of subsequent West African states. The first demonstrable outside influences in the area began about 600 B.C. with the arrival of Libyco-Berbers from North Africa. Rather than causing still further cultural advances, the initial effect of this contact was the collapse of this sociopolitical organization. But with subsequent adjustment, plus the potential from trans-Saharan trade carried out by the North Africans, the basic, pre-existing pattern re-emerged, resulting eventually in a second and much more powerful African political organization in this area – the Ghana Empire.

Pressed by rival imperial powers and financially weak herself, Portugal initiated in the 1890s an experiment in governing large areas of Mozambique cheaply through the means of two chartered companies, the Companhia do Niassa and the Companhia de Moçambique. This experiment proved doubly unsuccessful. In the first place the two companies failed to provide the development capital for Mozambique ardently desired by Portugal's government. Instead, they devoted their energies to maximizing profits through the systematic exploitation of the African populace. Secondly, the fact that shares in these companies could be purchased by private persons led foreign governments, notably those of Britain and Germany, to use these companies as proxies to further their own imperial interests at Portugal's expense. Only with the corning to power of António Salazar in the late 1920s did the Portuguese government feel powerful enough to move against the anachronistic chartered companies and terminate the experiment.

An inventory of ethnolinguistic units on the Guinea coast can be drawn from early written sources, that is, from Portuguese and other European records of between 1440 and 1700. When this inventory is compared with the present-day inventory it is found that, in the particulars cited, the units have remained very much the same for three, four, or five centuries. Summary evidence relating to the coast, section by section, from the Senegal River to the Cameroons River, is presented, and this includes reference to the linguistic evidence provided by early vocabularies. Not only do all earlier units correspond to present-day units, but the sequence of units along the coast is the same in the earlier as in the present-day inventory. However, some of the units have expanded or contracted; and one of the modern units (Mende) is not recorded before 1700. It is finally suggested that research into the documented period of continuity, through study of the written records, should precede attempts to evaluate the accounts of Völkerwanderungen supplied generously in oral traditions.

Only recently have historians devoted much attention to monetary developments in African history, primarily because the substantivist school of economic anthropology, which has argued that so-called western economic theory does not apply to African situations, has dominated the field. This view has been increasingly under attack in recent years, particularly by a new group of economic historians who have found many aspects of formal economic theory useful in the reconstruction of Africa's past. Marion Johnson's pioneering work on the gold mithqal and cowrie shell, for example, has documented the spread of a common currency over much of West Africa, throughout an area encompassed by Lake Chad in the east, the upper reaches of the Senegambia in the west, the southern Sahara in the north, and the region between the Volta basin and the Niger Delta in the south. The study of other currencies, including the copper rod standard of the Cross River basin in Nigeria and Cameroons, and the cloth money of the Senegambia, has demonstrated the importance of other standards besides cowries and gold, so that it is now known that virtually all of precolonial West Africa had economies sufficiently developed to require the use of circulating mediums of exchange and units of account. This breakthrough raises a number of important questions which seriously challenge, if not completely undermine, the predominant view that Africa's past, down to very recent times, has been subsistence oriented, non-market directed, and basically static.

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.

The export trade in wild rubber occupies an important place in the nineteenth-century economic history of the Gold Coast and Asante, and the impetus which it gave to the future economic development of the country was greater than is commonly recognized. The timely development of this new product by African entrepreneurs and up-country producers in the 1880s enabled the colony to diversify its export bill at a time when flagging prices for palm products and dwindling supplies of ivory, monkey skins, and surface gold threatened economic stagnation. Between 1884 and 1898 Gold Coast rubber exports registered a twenty-five fold increase in volume, thereby placing the country among the top five rubber producers of the world.

An analysis of the Gold Coast rubber trade contributes to the demolition of certain myths concerning the economically passive role of West Africans in the development of their own hinterlands. European agencies—whether mercantile or governmental—contributed only indirectly to the development of the local rubber trade. No doubt the general protection and opportunity for exercise of individual initiative which the British colonial government provided enabled the Gold Coast to escape the excesses of forced labour and expropriation which marred European concessionaire rubber operations in other parts of Africa. But it was chiefly the myriads of African merchants, middlemen and producers who supplied the driving force of the local trade during the nineteenth century.

The rubber trade accelerated the pace of economic change in Asante and other interior states where the pull exerted by the sea-borne export sector previously had been minimal. It is clear that the number of people involved in trading generally—whether as middlemen or producers—increased greatly as a result of the lucrative returns to be gained from rubber tapping. With rubber trade expansion came a growing demand by producers for a wider range of European merchandise imports, plus the acceptance of a uniform metallic currency which facilitated market transactions throughout the interior. Finally, the profits saved from rubber tapping became an important source for indigenous capital investment in cocoa-farming, particularly in Asante.

The dramatic urban change taking place on the African continent has led to a renewed and controversial interest in Africa's cities within several academic and expert circles. Attempts to align a growing but fragmented body of research on Africa's urban past with more general trends in urban studies have been few but have nevertheless opened up new analytical possibilities. This article argues that to move beyond the traps of localism and unhelpful categorizations that have dominated aspects of urban history and the urban studies literature of the continent, historians should explore African urban dynamics in relation to world history and the history of the state in order to contribute to larger debates between social scientists and urban theorists. By considering how global socio-historical processes articulate with the everyday lives of urban dwellers and how city-state relationships are structured by ambivalence, this article will illustrate how historians can participate in those debates in ways that demonstrate that history matters, but not in a linear way. These illustrations will also suggest why it is necessary for historians to contest interpretations of Africa's cities that construe them as ontologically different from other cities of the world.

Southernmost Africa (here meaning South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland) provides an excellent opportunity for investigating the relations between farming, herding and hunting-gathering communities over the past 2,000 years, as well as the development of societies committed to food production and their increasing engagement with the wider world through systems of exchange spanning the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. This paper surveys and evaluates the archaeological research relevant to these communities and issues carried out in the region since the early 1990s. Among other themes discussed are the processes responsible for the emergence and transformation of pastoralist societies (principally in the Cape), the ways in which rock art is increasingly being incorporated with other forms of archaeological data to build a more socially informed view of the past, the analytical strength and potential of ethnographically informed understandings of past farming societies and the important contribution that recent research on the development of complex societies in the Shashe-Limpopo Basin can make to comparative studies of state formation.

The main historical problem to which Professor Curtin addressed himself in the Census relates to the total number of slaves imported from Africa into all the slave-importing Atlantic regions during the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade. The estimates of the Census put the total number at 9,566,000. It is conceded that the actual number may be either somewhat lower or higher. But Professor Curtin concludes that ‘it is extremely unlikely that the ultimate total will turn out to be less than 8,000,000 or more than 10,500,00’. After examining Professor Curtin's methods of computation and the quality of the data employed, these confident limits were found to be unwarranted and misleading. The evidence relating to the size of the slave populations of the importing regions and to the demographic processes among the slaves suggests very strongly a substantial upward revision of the import estimates of the Census, especially those for Spanish, Portuguese and French America. An estimate of British slave exports from 1750 to 1807, on the basis of hitherto unused records, points to the fact that unless complete shipping data are employed in the slave export estimates the numbers computed will continue to be far below the actual numbers.

The Nigerian police discovered dozens of corpses at a shrine in Anambra State, in southeastern Nigeria, in 2004. There were suggestions in the many newspapers covering the story that these were evidence of what Nigerians call ‘ritual murders’. In fact, the corpses almost certainly were of people who had died elsewhere and been removed to the shrine only subsequently. However, the revelation that senior political figures had attended the Okija shrine and sworn oaths there drew attention to an informal politics in which traditional shrines credited with powers of life and death may play an important role, of interest even to national politicians. Discerning why this is so entails considering the long-term effects of the colonial policy of Indirect Rule and the subsequent development of a clandestine political system in which local religious institutions sometimes play an important role.

Throughout the twentieth century the British Colonial Office sought to limit the severity of corporal punishment and to regulate more closely its use in the colonies. This article has looked at one aspect of that policy involving the African Colonial Forces. Most military officers argued that corporal punishment was essential to maintain discipline, especially in times of war or active service. The Colonial Office sought to limit severely the circumstances in which corporal punishment could be administered but accepted that its use should be retained or revived during the two World Wars.

In the Second World War the arguments for retaining corporal punishment for African soldiers were increasingly denounced by officials and various humanitarian lobbies. African Colonial Forces had come under direct War Office control in September 1939 and during the war many African soldiers served overseas alongside British and other units; they also constituted part of an imperial order which, so propaganda increasingly proclaimed after the fall of Singapore, was opposed to racial discrimination. Corporal punishment based on racial terms was out of kilter in the war and was maintained only at the insistence of senior military men. Once the war was over the Colonial Office ordered that this ‘relic of discrimination’ should be ended.

Using new evidence on the British, French and North American slave-carrying trades, this article seeks to revise Lovejoy's recently published estimates of the levels of slave exports from West and West-Central Africa in the eighteenth century. The figures suggest that Lovejoy's estimate of the total volume of slave exports from the west coast of Africa to America between 1700 and 1810 was probably reasonably accurate, being only 8 per cent lower than the total indicated here. However, the new data reveal temporal and coastal distributions of slave exports that differ substantially from those proposed by Lovejoy. In particular, they suggest that previous work significantly understated levels of slave exports between 1713 and 1740, and again in the 1760s and 1770s. Contrary to earlier findings, in fact, it appears that slave exports from the west coast of Africa to America in the decade prior to the War of American Independence were very similar to levels attained after 1783. Furthermore, in terms of coastal distributions, it seems that the Bight of Biafra and West-Central Africa, particularly the Loango coast, contributed much more substantially to the slave traffic to America during the early decades of the century than was previously assumed. These revisions of Lovejoy's figures have important implications for movements in slave prices in Africa and for assessing the demographic effects of the trade on the slave-supplying regions. In addition, they help to improve our understanding of the relationship between the slave trade and changes in sugar and other commodity production in America during the eighteenth century.

One of the most important changes to take place during the early colonial period was the transformation from slave labour to free labour. In French West Africa this resulted not from a policy decision by the French administration but from the massive departure of slaves in those societies most reliant on slave labour. The focal event was an exodus from Banamba, a Maraka town which had been a major centre both of the slave trade and of the exploitation of slave labour. During the period before the Banamba exodus, tensions were building up within various slave societies, tensions that reflected themselves in a gradual filtering away of slaves and in occasional slave revolts. The French were generally afraid to deal with these tensions and limited themselves to stopping the slave trade while reinforcing allied élites, most of whom were slave owners. There were three major factors in the exodus:

(1) Massive enslavement during the late nineteenth century created large reservoirs of slaves who were homogeneous and remembered a free state.

(2) The closing-off of recruitment pushed slave-owners to exploit slave labour more systematically.

(3) With the end of warfare and the opening of new opportunities in the cities and in the Senegambian peanut fields, slaves had increasing opportunities to go elsewhere.

Mrs Barbara Ottaway has proposed that the interquartile range of the radiocarbon dates available for a given industry will provide an estimate of the floruit of that industry. The present paper examines some four hundred radiocarbon dates which have so far been processed from Iron Age sites in Bantu Africa, and concludes that the intersextile range provides a more accurate approximation for the floruit of individual industries than does the interquartile range. This approach permits the presentation of a more precise inter-regional synthesis of Iron Age chronology than has previously been attempted. It is demonstrated that the earliest manifestations of the Early Iron Age Industrial Complex are in East Africa. Further to the south, two distinct streams of the Early Iron Age are recognized: that in the eastern part of the sub-continent had penetrated as far to the south as the Transvaal some centuries before the western stream spread into what is now Zambia. The inception of the later Iron Age, around the eleventh century A.D., is shown to have been at least as rapid as was that of the Early Iron Age.

In view of the greater precision which the above methodology imparts to the radiocarbon-based chronology, a brief discussion is presented of the calibrations which dendrochronological studies provide between radiocarbon ages and calendar ages. It is concluded that, for the period of the sub-Saharan African Iron Age, the corrections which are called for are minor in comparison with the standard errors of individual radiocarbon dates; and the application of such calibrations to Iron Age dates is not recommended.

This article examines the scars and marks left on the bodies of survivors of the Mulele rebellion (DR Congo), their signifying capacity, their relationship not only with the body but also with the uncertainty of time, the arresting of time, and the annihilation of future time that the scars and marks seem to both signify and put into effect by making the body useless, undesirable, and revolting to others. Drawing on extensive oral interviews and other forms of evidence, including scars and marks on the bodies of survivors, as well as a body of theory on psychoanalysis, continental mirror, time, laughter, and the gaze of others, this article argues that to be tortured during the rebellion was unimaginably terrible. But the suffering did not end there. There was something beyond that, something even more important that caused a kind of psychic suffering, which not only exceeded the physical, but also extended across time.

Unprecedented wartime demands by Britain and the U.S.A for strategic minerals from abroad, coupled with the loss of valuable sources of supply in Eastern Europe and South East Asia to the Axis, greatly enlarged the volume of production and the pace of economic change in the mineral-rich zones of Africa. But the sharpest upsurge in output, which helped rescue a number of African export economies from the slough of depression, coincided with British rearmament several years before the war broke out; and production in most instances reached a crest two or three years before the war ended. In one sense the mineral regions of Africa between 1937 and 1945 provided a supreme example of the old mercantilist credo that colonies existed primarily to buttress the economies of the metropole in time of war. From another perspective, the war strengthened the hold of powerful multinational corporations on African mineral development and accelerated the absorption of new mining areas and labour supplies into the world capitalist system. A wide range of African metallic and non-metallic ores played a vital – and in some cases an indispensable – role in the Allied victory in 1945. But for the African peoples and countries most directly involved, the wartime upsurge had an uneven impact. Wage increases were in no way commensurate with the increased workloads nor with the pay scales for European miners. Except in the Union of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, where greater agricultural and industrial diversification was already in train, the expansion of the mining industries perpetuated enclave development. The reliance of the industrialized West on African strategic minerals during the war was a prelude to the even greater production boom and dependency of the Cold War period.

This article investigates the role of African colonial employees in the functioning of the colonial state in French West Africa. Case studies from the 1890s and early 1900s demonstrate that in the transition from conquest to occupation, low-level African colonial intermediaries continually shaped the localized meanings that colonialism acquired in practice. Well-placed African colonial intermediaries in the colonies of Guinée Française and Soudan Français often controlled the dissemination of information and knowledge in the interactions of French colonial officials with local elites and members of the general population. The contributions of these African employees to the daily operations of the French colonial state show that scholars have long overlooked a cadre of men who played a significant role in shaping colonial rule.

This article opens with a retelling of colonial accounts of the ‘mania of 1911’, which took place in the Kamba region of Kenya Colony. The story of this ‘psychic epidemic’ and others like it would be recounted over the years as evidence depicting the predisposition of Africans to episodic mass hysteria. This use of medical and psychological language in primarily non-medical contexts serves to highlight the intellectual and political roles psychiatric ideas played in colonial governance. The salience of such ideas was often apparent in the face of increasing social tension, charismatic leadership and a proliferation of East African prophetic movements. This article addresses the attempts by the colonial authorities to understand or characterize, in psychological terms, a progression of African ‘rebellious types’ in society that often took the form of prophets and visionaries, but were diagnosed as epileptic, neurotic or suffering from ‘religious mania’.