The Journal of African History articles from January 1994

The Journal of African History archives from January 1994

Early metal working in sub-Saharan Africa: a review of recent research. (includes appendix)
January 1, 1994... This paper is a review of the course of research during the past decade into the history of indigenous metal working in sub-Saharan Africa. It comprises three sections: a summary of the chronology of early metallurgy and the spread of metal...

Islam, migration and the political economy of meaning: 'fergo Nioro' from the Senegal River Valley, 1862-1890.
January 1, 1994... The Prophet Muhammad's hijra (emigration) from Mecca to Medina, the event which marks the beginning of the Muslim era for the faithful, became a topic of public discourse and a model for political action among West African Muslims in the...

Reflections on slavery, seclusion and female labor in the Maradi region of Niger in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
January 1, 1994... THE relationship between the incidence of pre-colonial slavery and the degree of contemporary seclusion in Muslim regions of Africa has become something of a vexed question in the historiography of West Africa. The Journal of African History...

The contradictions of community politics: the African petty bourgeoisie and the New Brighton Advisory Board, c. 1937-1952.
January 1, 1994... Current writing on urban African politics in South Africa has begun to recognize the significance of civic or vigilance associations and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the struggle against apartheid. Given the suppression of...

Apartheid's 'testing ground': urban 'native policy' and African politics in Brakpan, South Africa, 1943-1948.
January 1, 1994... the Witwatersrand; H. Sapire and A. Cobley, interview with D. Bopape, Johannesburg, 21 Sept. 1983; H. Sapire, interview with D. Bopape, Johannesburg, Apr. 1988; T. Karis and G. M. Carter, From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of...

The Archaeology of Africa: Food, Metals and Towns.
January 1, 1994... This massive collection, as Shaw and Sinclair note in their preface, `has had a long and complex gestation'. Conceived in the political turmoil of the first World Archaeology Congress held at Southampton in 1986, from which South African and...

Ethnography and the Historical Imagination.
January 1, 1994... This book is a collection of articles previously published by the authors between 1985 and 1991 and includes such well-known essays as `Of totemism and ethnicity' and `Images of empire, contests of conscience' by John Comaroff, `Bodily reform...

Being Maasai: Ethnicity and Identity in East Africa.
January 1, 1994... Being Maasai is probably the most accomplished and certainly the most comprehensive volume produced thus far among the many recent historical studies of ethnicity in Africa. It is an unusually well-integrated and tightly organized collection,...

Herders, Warriors and Traders: Pastoralism in Africa.
January 1, 1994... In their Preface and Introduction to this collection of essays by anthropologists and historians, John Galaty and Pierre Bonte lay out some ambitious goals. From the outset, they promise an assault on many of the romantic, popularly held...

Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity.
January 1, 1994... The relatively short seasons of excavation undertaken by the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) at Aksum in 1973 and 1974, under the lively leadership of the late Dr Neville Chittick, have generated a refreshing breeze which has swept...

River of Blood: The Genesis of a Martyr Cult in Southern Malawi, c. AD 1600.
January 1, 1994... Once upon a time Africa was deemed to have no history, but in recent years, inspired by the example of Jan Vansina, historians of Central Africa in particular seem to feel obliged to begin their stories a thousand years ago, if not earlier....

A History of Commodity Production in Makuani: 1600-1900, Mercantilist Accumulation to Imperialist Domination.
January 1, 1994... This book is a virtually unrevised version of the author's 1980 doctoral thesis for Columbia University, though this is nowhere acknowledged, even in the bibliography. It goes beyond the trading and coastal emphases of Alpers and Hafkin(1) by...

The Thousand Generation Covenant: Dutch Reformed Covenant Theology and Group Identity in Colonial South Africa, 1652-1814.
January 1, 1994... In this significant work J. N. Gerstner reinscribes the notion of a `Chosen People' as a central ideological strut in colonial South Africa. His study follows the covenantal concept from its origins in sixteenth century theological debates in...

A History of Obolo (Andoni) in the Niger Delta.
January 1, 1994... Obolo is the indigenous name of a community in the eastern Delta of the River Niger, better known as Andoni (the origin of this latter name being uncertain, and discussed only briefly and inconclusively in this book, p. xi). The author...

I Reuniao Internacional de Historia de Africa: Relacao Europa-Africa no 3. quartel do Sec. XIX.
January 1, 1994... Historians of Africa have tended to neglect the third quarter of the nineteenth century, sandwiched as it is between two dramas - the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade and the European partition of Africa. So it was a good choice for...

Kingdom in Crisis: The Zulu Response to the British Invasion of 1879.
January 1, 1994... John Laband's most valuable contribution treads faithfully (although, at times, contentiously) in the footsteps of Jeff Guy's pioneering work The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom (London, 1979), which, although primarily concerned with the...

Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa, 1884-1915.
January 1, 1994... The thirty years of German colonial rule of Namibia is by far the most researched period of the history of the country. Numerous books, unpublished manuscripts and doctoral theses in the English and German languages have appeared over the...

Marriage, Perversion and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1894-1930.
January 1, 1994... In addition to its considerable virtues as a work of excellent scholarship on early twentieth-century Zimbabwe, Diana Jeater's book stands as a marker of sorts, a sign of important intellectual transitions. Within southern African...

Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda.
January 1, 1994... Justin Willis's study of networks, clientage and social identity in an East African city and its hinterland illustrates clearly how useful it is to examine the historical construction of ethnicity rather than treat ethnic groups as the given...

Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, 2 vols.
January 1, 1994... Unhappy Valley ultimately adds up to a manifesto about the conception and writing of African history. Along the way its separate chapters accumulate a remarkable range of insights and provocations about the experiences of Kikuyu people,...

Sudan: 1898-1989, The Unstable State.
January 1, 1994... One must sympathize with political scientists who attempt studies which are both historical and up-to-date, for events are likely to overtake them between proof and publication. This happened to Peter Woodward, whose book was near completion...

Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal: 1930-1985.
January 1, 1994... This important study on the political economy of Senegal situates the case within a comparative perspective, also within the current debates around the twin concepts of state and society. The post-colonial regime in Senegal is seen as one...

Uganda Since Independence: A Story of Unfulfilled Hopes.
January 1, 1994... This is no ordinary work of academic history. During the events that it recounts the author's father, two brothers and two nieces were murdered, his home was destroyed and his mother spent three months in the forest living `like a wild...

L'histoire dans les chants et les danses populaires: la zone culturelle Bemba du haut-Shaba (Zaire).
January 1, 1994... It is well known that songs are sources for history, especially for social history, and their uses as such have long since been convincingly demonstrated. But, until now, no systematic collection of such songs has ever been undertaken....

Sweet Mother: Modern African Music.
January 1, 1994... This lively and richly illustrated book is clearly a labour of love, growing out of Wolfgang Bender's longstanding devotion to African popular music - a devotion that began before `world music' was either fashionable or easily accessible. His...

Religions of South Africa.
January 1, 1994... David Chidester is to be commended for writing a very readable introduction to South African religions. Each of the seven chapters presents a carefully argued and meticulously documented analysis of its topic - African religious, Christian...

Frontline Nationalism in Angola and Mozambique.
January 1, 1994... This is another exciting addition to the James Currey African stable and can be recommended unreservedly as the best available introduction to the recent tragic history of Angola and Mozambique. Although it is a slim volume, it is packed with...

Hailey: A Study in British Imperialism, 1872-1969.
January 1, 1994... After Lugard, Sir Malcolm (later Lord) Hailey is one of the few twentieth-century colonial administrators who might seem an obvious subject for a full scholarly biography. His distinguished career began with entry into the Indian Civil...

La Democrature: dictature camouflee, democratie truquee.
January 1, 1994... Max Liniger-Goumaz has written a very odd volume. Ostensibly this is a book about authoritarian politics in contemporary Black Africa. In practice, this turns out to be a very long and impassioned attack on the two regimes which have presided...

Afrika: Eine neue Welt in deutschen Schritfen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts.
January 1, 1994... In the year 1992 we were overwhelmed by literary works commemorating the `discoveries' of Christopher Columbus. It is all the more welcome, then, to review a volume that deals with European, discoveries, of a different sort - the `discovery'...

Un centenaire: 1885-1985, Les relations Europe-Afrique au crible d'une commemoration.
January 1, 1994... This small book, published under the sponsorship of Leiden's indefatigable Institute for the History of European Expansion, has not been widely advertised and may well escape the eye of even the most scholarly of scramblers for Africa. This...

Scenes from African Urban Life: Collected Copperbelt Papers.
January 1, 1994... Scenes from African Urban Life is a collection of essays on the towns of the Zambian Copperbelt by the renowned urban sociologist, A. L. Epstein. While most of the essays have been published before, and remain in their original state, the...

Historical Dictionary of Angola, 2d ed.
January 1, 1994... This extremely useful dictionary builds on and updates Phyllis Martin's first edition published over a decade ago. Greatly expanded and revised, it contains well over a hundred new entries, reflecting the profound changes which have affected...

Historical Dictionary of Mozambique.
January 1, 1994... Mario Azevedo's book appears as the forty-seventh volume in the Scarecrow Press' African Historical Dictionaries Series, which have been coming out since the mid-seventies. The format of these books is now well established. Following a...

Historical Dictionary of the Sudan, 2d ed.
January 1, 1994... Two new editions of important reference works on Sudan in the same year is something of a glut. Both appear after a significant interval, thus ensuring considerable new material is incorporated; and both involve the original compilers, thus...

Sudan.
January 1, 1994... Two new editions of important reference works on Sudan in the same year is something of a glut. Both appear after a significant interval, thus ensuring considerable new material is incorporated; and both involve the original compilers, thus...

Black Writers in Britain: 1760-1890.
January 1, 1994... Expanding maritime trade, especially the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the growth of empire brought a steady stream of people of African origin to Europe. By the mid-eighteenth century the British black population may have numbered...

The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa.
January 1, 1994... When I first opened this book, edited by two distinguished contributors to the field, I hoped to find an up-to-date discussion of research on the social history of medicine and health-care in Africa. I was very disappointed. The volume is a...

The Letters of Ahmad Ibn Idris.
January 1, 1994... This is the third in a series of excellent studies concerning the eminent early nineteenth-century Sufi leader Ahmad b. Idris produced by a group of scholars centered at the University of Bergen. It offers the texts and annotated translations...

From Kingston to Kenya: The Making of a Pan-Africanist Lawyer.
January 1, 1994... This short but lively autobiography is full of interest for students of the West Indies, colonial East Africa and pan-Africanism. Thompson was a schoolmaster in Jamaica when, `bursting at the seams with patriotism' and angered by his reading...

Historical Dictionary of the Central African Republic, 2d ed.
January 1, 1994... Cet ouvrage est le no[degrees] 51 de la serie `African Historical Dictionaries' et constitue une second edition du n[degrees] publie en 1980. Le term `seconde dition' doit etre pris au sens large car il s'agit en realite d'une mise a jour...

Burundi.
January 1, 1994... In her introduction, compiler Morna Daniels quips that Burundi is an LDC, Least Documented Country. This is certainly true. In many libraries, even at the university level, this volume will be the only source dealing specifically with...

Gabon.
January 1, 1994... Clio Press must be commended for engaging the tried and true skills of Dr Gardinier in the publication of the Gabon volume of its World Bibliographical Series. This series is meant to meet the needs of the English-reading public and to appeal...