The Iron Age cultures of Northern Rhodesia have until fairly recently remained unknown, whilst work in Southern Rhodesia and in South Africa has revealed a long sequence in both those territories. Mr R. R. Inskeep undertook some excavations in 1958, and since 1959 Iron Age research has expanded considerably. Work has been concentrated in the Southern Province of the territory with the aid of a grant from the Nuffield Foundation, and a number of large scale excavations have been carried out. This paper gives an outline of our general conclusions as they appeared at the completion of the fieldwork.

The aim of the inquisitorial studies is often described as extending the frontiers of our knowledge; but the study of the remoter past of Black Africa is rather the discovery of islands in the ocean of our ignorance, or the sighting from afar of mountains protruding through the mists which obscure knowledge of what rivers and ridges lie between. Soon a rift in the clouds will make plain the valleys of which we had guessed—or reveal instead an unimagined landscape.

By the middle of the sixteenth century, Europeans had made themselves aware of the broad outlines of the Continents of Asia, Africa and America. Two hundred years later many of the most striking facts of the geography of the great land-masses had been revealed. In Asia, Siberia had been traversed, China mapped, and Tibet visited, while a vigorous trade was maintained with all the countries of the Eastern Seas. Most of the coast and many of the great lakes and rivers of the Americas had been charted, and flourishing European communities established from Lima to Quebec. Far more was known of Africa than its coastline: a large part of Ethiopia had been visited during the era of Portuguese influence at the beginning of the seventeenth century; Catholic missionaries had worked in the Eastern Sudan in the first decade of the eighteenth century; the Moorish geographers, Idrisi and Leo Africanus, both of whose works were constantly used by European cartographers, provided a succinct account of the citier and states of the Sahara and the Sudan; on the Upper Senegal the French had by 1750 successfully maintained for half a century a trading post over four hundred miles from the sea; in Southern Africa individual adventurers had penetrated deep into the hinterland of the Portuguese colonies in Angola and Mozambique, and of the Dutch settlement at the Cape.

In 1800 the Itsekiri kingdom of Warri in the north-western corner of the Niger delta had a highly centralized government. In 1848, the king died, followed shortly by his two principal heirs, and a state of anarchy developed in which order was maintained largely through the balance held between the two largest descent groups or ‘Houses’. The latter part of the century saw the rise, and defeat by the British of Nana Olomu, possibly the greatest of the delta traders, whose power over the Itsekiri derived from his trading monopoly. One cannot divorce these striking changes in Itsekiri social and political structure from the trade in slaves and later in palm oil, for the Itsekiri were by profession the middlemen between the interior peoples—the Urhobo and Isoko and to some extent the Benin—and the European traders.

In 1899 the Condominium Government was faced by administrative problems which, whatever their complexity in detail, fell into two broad divisions: those of the northern Sudan, and those of the Sudan south of the tenth parallel. Pacification was of course the first task everywhere; but even here there was a sharp contrast. In the north this was a politically urgent matter. The remote and heterogeneous tribes of the south, on the other hand, offered no political threat to the new government; and their pacification and administration would have been a heavy, perhaps a crushing, financial burden in the early years of the Condominium. The pacification of the south was therefore a process which lasted not for years but for decades; and the more constructive aspects of administration were correspondingly delayed. Moreover, in the north there was a recognizable foundation on which to build. The north was a part, if an outlying and culturally impoverished part, of the literate world of Islam; nor had it lost the traditions and techniques of ‘westernizing’ administration introduced during the Turco-Egyptian régime.

On 10 June 1894, the British Government, after much hesitation and heart-searching, was finally compelled by circumstances to declare a protectorate over the native kingdom of Buganda. Later in the same year the country between the coast and Buganda on the caravan route up from the coast passed from the control of the Imperial British East Africa Company to that of the Acting Commissioner in Uganda, who was empowered to establish stations in it, under European officers.1

IT is a commonplace that British government in Uganda was, from its inception, essentially one of benevolent paternalism—just rule by kindly parents. It is also evident that, particularly in the final decade before independence, the dilemma of this policy lay in its conflict with a growing realization that the children would soon come of age. The political aspects of this dilemma are familiar. Its social and economic implications are perhaps less clear.

La communication présentée par le Dr Richard Pankhurst au 1er Congrès International des Africanistes se recommande à l'attention des éthiopisants à la fois par l'originalité du sujet (« Misoneism and Innovation in Ethiopian History ») et par l'abondance de la documentation sur laquelle elle s'appuie. Cependant, labsence de son auteur n'ayant pas permis qu'elle sok discutée, il convient de formuler ici une breve remarque.