The purpose of this article is to promote the revival of African economic history. Poverty, the most pressing issue confronting the continent, has received world-wide publicity in recent years. Yet historians have continued to neglect the history of economic development, which is central to the study of poverty, in favour of themes that have their origins in the Western world rather than in Africa. However, there is now an exceptional opportunity to correct the balance. Unknown to most historians, economists have produced a new economic history of Africa in the course of the past decade. This article introduces and evaluates two of the most important contributions to the new literature: the thesis that Africa has suffered a ‘reversal of fortune’ during the last 500 years, and the proposition that ethnic fragmentation, which has deep historical roots, is a distinctive cause of Africa's economic backwardness. These arguments are criticized on both methodological and empirical grounds. But they are also welcomed for their boldness, their freshness and their potential for re-engaging historians in the study of Africa's economic past – not least because it is relevant to Africa's economic future.

What was the indigénat? This article approaches this question via three arguments. First, a study of the indigénat (the regime of administrative sanctions applied to colonial subjects) challenges the idea that French West Africa formed part of an ‘empire of law’. Second, a dynamic spectrum of political statuses developed around the indigénat until its abolition in 1946. This spectrum is no less significant than one of its poles alone, that of colonial citizens. Third, the indigénat, its narrative of reform, and its relationship to law, bureaucracy, and authority illuminate the tensions between imperial rhetoric and colonial governance.

Studies of slavery in Africa during the period of the Atlantic slave trade have largely ignored questions of how political processes affected enslavement during the period and also the extent to which notions of who could be enslaved were modified. Documentation for the kingdom of Kongo during the 1500s to 1800 allows us to explore how the trade was sustained and the social and political dynamics behind it. In a state that consistently exported large numbers of slaves throughout the period of the trade, kings of Kongo at first observed quite a pronounced distinction between foreign-born captives subject to enslavement and sale in the Atlantic trade and freeborn Kongos who were largely proctected from enslavement and sale overseas. In time, however, the distinctions that separated foreign-born and Kongos fell apart as later political authorities and others disregarded such distinctions and all Kongos became subject to enslavement and sale overseas. This was a product of internal Kongo conflicts, which witnessed the collapse of institutions and the redefinition of polity, what it meant to be a citizen or freeborn, and who could be enslaved.

Changes that have taken place in the ways in which the slave past has been remembered and commemorated in the Western Cape region of South Africa provide insight into the politics of identity in this locality. During most of the twentieth century, public awareness of slave heritage was well buried, but the ending of apartheid provided a new impetus to acknowledge and memorialize the slave past. This engagement in public history has been a vexed process, reflecting contested concepts of knowledge and the use of heritage as both a resource and a weapon in contemporary South African identity struggles.

Cette contribution reconsidère le site de Garumele (Niger) à la lumière de récents travaux archéologiques. Garumele est dit dans les sources historiques avoir été la capitale de l'empire de Kanem-Borno peu avant la fondation de Birnin Gazargamo (deuxième moitié du quinzième siècle). Cet article reconcilie sources archéologiques et historiques pour évaluer la véracité de cette tradition – mais aussi pour considérer les facteurs méthodologiques et théoriques qui contribuent au mystère des origines du Kanem-Borno.

Multiple, overlapping, and competing forms of authority contributed to the highly centralized Buganda kingdom. Their enduring salience, commonly considered characteristic of heterarchy, challenges our understanding of the early history of the kingdom. A map that specifies the location of 292 chiefs and authority figures in the capital reveals not only the critical importance of multiple forms of authority but also the development of those forms over several centuries. The allocation of space in the capital and other historical sources indicate that compromise and co-optation characterized the practice of power in the ancient kingdom: the king was surrounded, literally and figuratively, by others who curbed his authority.

This article examines the changing nature of patrilineality in east-central Uganda from the sixth century. While traditional anthropological models of lineality have been largely dismissed in recent scholarship, the problem remains that patrilineages and patriclans have played important roles in the lives of the Ganda, Gwere, Soga and their North Nyanza ancestors. By carefully examining changes and continuities in the form and content of patrilineality it becomes possible to understand it as historically contingent. In North Nyanza, patrilineal descent was the norm for inheritance and for household formation, but relationships formed through mothers were also crucial in the creation of new communities and in the legitimation of political power. This was not static: as communities negotiated their changing circumstances, so they adapted the form of their particular patrilineality to serve their needs.

Efforts to institute a system for the control and prohibition of khat in Kenya are examined in this article. Prohibition was introduced in the 1940s after an advocacy campaign led by prominent colonial officials. The legislation imposed a racialized view of the effect of khat, seeking to protect an allegedly ‘vulnerable’ community in the north of the country while allowing khat to be consumed and traded in other areas, including Meru where ‘traditional’ production and consumption was permitted. Colonial policy took little account of African opinion, although African agency was evident in the failure and ultimate collapse of the prohibition in the face of widespread smuggling and general infringement. Trade in khat became ever more lucrative, and in the final years of colonial rule economic arguments overcame the prohibition lobby. The imposition of prohibition and control indicates the extent to which colonial attitudes towards and beliefs about cultural behaviour among Africans shaped policies, but the story also illustrates the fundamental weakness of the colonial state in its failure to uphold the legislation.

By using new sources and a complementary historical and geo-analytical approach, this article illustrates that the Natives Land Act (no. 27 of 1913) failed to stop Africans from buying land. New evidence demonstrates that African land ownership outside the reserves in the Transvaal actually increased after 1913. This evidence leads to a deeper questioning of the extent to which the South African government was able to impose rural territorial segregation by 1936 and reveals the limits of white power in the early Union period.

Colonial forest reservation in the Benin Division of southern Nigeria was remarkably extensive, with reserves taking up almost 65 per cent of the Division by 1937. This paper explores both the various strategies employed by the colonial government in order to bring about large scale reservation and the role of reservation in changing land politics. In doing so, it provides nuanced insights into the interaction between the colonial government and local rulers under indirect rule. It shows that both Oba Eweka II (1914–33) and Oba Akenzua II (1933–79) supported reservation for strategic reasons, but also highlights the government's many underhand tactics in dealing with the Obas.

The perspectives of African informants and researchers profoundly shaped the writings of government ethnologist Dr. Nicholas Jacobus van Warmelo who not only collected information from local African informants but also relied on African researchers who wrote manuscripts in the vernacular that would constitute part of his archive. This study explores the process of producing knowledge on the ‘Transvaal Ndebele’, and provides an analysis of Van Warmelo's texts and of his researchers' manuscripts. By looking at the role of local interlocutors, I make a case for African agency in shaping the ‘colonial’ expert's conceptions of Ndebele identity. This article provides an account of the co-production of cultural knowledge. Van Warmelo was employed by the South African Native Affairs Department to identify and fix ‘tribes’, a highly political enterprise, and in the process generated an archive. His work was as much appropriated by the apartheid state for social engineering as by Ndebele interlocutors involved in contemporary struggles over chieftainship.

A major component of the South African War, the imperialist conflict that gave birth to modern South Africa, was the violence that occurred between white settlers and indigenous black populations. This article seeks to understand the particular nature of this violence in the northern districts of the Cape Colony. The war intruded into a region in which memories of conquest were alive, and where recently established settler authority was extremely fragile. Here, the war has to be seen as the final chapter in the closing of a nineteenth-century colonial frontier. The conflict was one between masters and servants in a region where capitalist relations of production had yet to take hold. Conflict continued in the years immediately after the war, and an essential task of the post-war state was to calm disgruntled black subjects.

This article focuses on the historical and political factors that shaped Khwe (San) and Mbukushu ethnic identities and their interrelationship between 1938 and 1989 in west Caprivi, Namibia. While acknowledging the multi-authored nature of identity-building, the article demonstrates that the colonial and apartheid states made significant contributions to the construction of ethnicity in west Caprivi through veterinary interventions in the 1930s and apartheid policies regarding ‘Bushmen’ in the 1950s, and by securing Khwe collaboration during Namibia's liberation struggle in the 1970s and 1980s. These state interventions, together with Khwe and Mbukushu responses to them, also shed light on why land and political authority became so central to struggles between the two groups.

Historians have written extensively about agricultural extension services and the linkages between colonial administrations and rural communities in British Africa. Most studies argue that it is possible to identify a qualitative shift in strategies between the inter- and the post-war periods. The former is characterized by modest attempts at promoting soil conservation, while the latter is described as a period when colonial governments in British Africa – guided by scientific knowledge – tried to transform peasant agriculture to increase production. This article questions this division by using colonial Malawi as a case. It reveals that the strategies and intensity of agricultural extension services changed over time but that the aim of intervention, i.e. to combat soil erosion, remained the focal point throughout the colonial period. This shows that it is important to distinguish between strategies and scale of intervention on the one hand and their aims and contents on the other. Changes in the former took place within the conservation paradigm. Additionally, this article reveals that agricultural extension services were directed by colonial officials' perceptions about African farmers rather than detailed empirical knowledge about existing farming methods.

The focus of this article is an examination of the evolution of Nkrumah's political thought during the last years of his life. There is a discernible radicalization as Nkrumah's intellectual thought developed between 1966 and 1972. He had clearly abandoned the constitutional path to independence and begun to adopt revolutionary armed struggle as the only solution to Africa's myriad problems of capitalism, neo-colonialism and imperialism. The unfolding social and political struggles in Vietnam and Latin America and the unrest in America's black cities impacted profoundly on his thinking. The coup d'état which deposed Nkrumah on 24 February 1966 forced him into exile in neighbouring Guinea-Conakry. It therefore provides the political background against which Nkrumah's intellectual thinking unfolded.

This article is a study of Somali popular songs of the period 1960–90, which opened with the establishment of the Somali national state and ended with its collapse. It focuses on these songs as a discursive site in which a particular dilemma of the new Somali state clearly comes into focus, namely the desire to be ‘modern’, while at the same time turning to ‘tradition’ (i.e. a particular construction of Somali cultural authenticity and traditional religious morality) to mark and anchor a new Somali collective self-understanding and communal identity. The discursive push-and-pull of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ evident in the songs expresses itself specifically in debates about moral womanhood – that is to say, about what ‘good’ women should be like. Since the collapse of the state in 1991, Somali discourses about common public identity and gender norms have undergone dramatic change, with the sites of popular culture multiplying, especially outside of Somalia, and accessible through the internet. Although an interpretation of Islam that distances itself from Somali ‘tradition’ has been gaining importance as a source of legitimization, as is evident both in the struggle over the state in Somalia and in everyday life in Somalia and the diaspora, this is not a major concern in the Somali popular songs from the period after 1991.

It was born auspiciously this flag raised above us
We will not differentiate among any Somalis
Since none of us are closer to it than the others,
Let us be equal in front of our flag
(Waa samo ku dhalayoo calanka noo saaran
Soomaali oo dhan, kala sooci mayno
Uma kala sokeynno, ha loo sinnaado)
Somali popular song, articulating the hope of Somali unity and equality, sung by Faduumo Abdillaahi ‘Maandeeq’ in the early 1960s

This article deals with the 1958 referendum that the French held in Niger to gain approval for the Fifth Republic and reorganization of their empire. It reassesses the French record in Niger, where more people voted ‘No’ – in favour of immediate independence – than in other territories, except Guinea. It does this on the basis of research on the history of the Sawaba movement, which led Niger's autonomous government until the plebisicite. It shows that the French forcibly intervened in the referendum to realize a ‘Yes’ vote and preserve Niger for their sphere of influence after independence in 1960. In detailing the violence and manipulation of the referendum and its aftermath, the article criticizes a revisionist viewpoint which disputed the significance of French intervention. The analysis draws on research on the Sawaba movement, benefiting from insights of social history into the grassroots forces in the nationalist movements of the 1950s. It discusses the historiography of Niger's referendum in relation to new archival sources and memoirs, drawing parallels with other territories, notably Guinea. It concludes that France's interventions in 1958 are crucial for understanding the long-term consequences of the transformations of the independence era.