The Journal of African History articles from October 1997

The Journal of African History archives from October 1997

The contributions of linguistics to the study of history in Africa.
October 1, 1997... The work of historical and comparative linguists has long interested African historians. By classifying languages into families, linguists provide models of their historical development that may point to historical events and processes that...

Archaeological views on a history of landscape change in East Africa.
October 1, 1997... Since 1969 archaeological, paleobotanical and ethnographic research in Kagera region, north-western Tanzania [ILLUSTRATION FOR MAP 1 OMITTED], have contributed to a deep-time understanding of the ecological history of that region. The primary...

Punt and Aksum: Egypt and the horn of Africa. (archaeological findings on two of ancient Egypt's neighboring countries)
October 1, 1997... The ancient Egyptians tended to consider both their immediate and more remote neighbours either as excellent sources of luxury trade items and slaves, at times of political power and strength, or as uncivilized forces threatening to destroy and...

Government policy and the Nigerian palm oil export industry: 1939-49.
October 1, 1997... This paper examines the role of the imperial and colonial governments in the formulation of policy towards the Nigerian palm oil export industry between 1939 and 1949. It argues that for most of the war years colonial officials in Nigeria...

Becoming a child of the house: incorporation, authority and resistance in Giryama society. (slavery in East Africa)
October 1, 1997... The last twenty years have seen a series of studies dealing, at least in part, with the nineteenth-century history of slavery at the East African coast.(1) Each has, in its own way, focused on transformations associated with changing patterns...

Le Sahara Libyen dans l' Afrique du Nord medievale.
October 1, 1997... Any writer of Libyan history is still a pioneer, and none more so than the writer of Libyan 'medieval' history. There are a few cursory accounts of all the periods from the first Arab conquests of Barqa (Cyrenaica) in the seventh century to the...

The Berbers.
October 1, 1997... Historically the Berbers have always posed problems - whether to their Roman masters, French colonial overlords, or more recently, militant Algerian Islamicists. This important work is the fruit of collaboration between a noted archeologist,...

The Lower Zambezi Basin in Mozambique.
October 1, 1997... The title of this excellent book suggests that it might be a study of the whole region downstream of Tete which is drained by the Zambezi. In fact it is a study of the area north of the river between approximately the Shire and the sea - the...

Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times.
October 1, 1997... Drink and power are very much the themes of this book, and Akyeampong describes continuities, as well as change. This is an account of the processes by which alcohol - a substance which supported the power of elder men in the precolonial period...

Migration, Jihad and Muslim Authority: The Futanke Colonies in Karta.
October 1, 1997... In 1859, the armies of Al Hajj Umar Tal defeated the Massassi Bambara and ended a regime that had been one of the most important suppliers of slaves to European slave traders. While Umar moved soon afterwards to Segu and then to the final...

From Slaving to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the Era of Abolition: 1827-1930.
October 1, 1997... The importance of the European (primarily British) anti-slaving campaign of the early nineteenth century to the later character of the African-European relationship has long been recognized. Not least of its many consequences was the creation...

Religion, Commerce, and the Integration of the Mandingo in Liberia.
October 1, 1997... The particular history and present unsettled condition of Liberia have attracted the attention of many researchers. The focus has been placed both on the settlement place of American ex-slaves at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the...

Mfantsipim and the Making of Ghana.
October 1, 1997... More than thirty years ago Philip Foster in an original, important book, Education and Social Change in Ghana (London, 1963), turned scholarly attention to the huge significance of western education in the modern history of Ghana. Part of the...

Hoe and Wage: A Social History of a Circular Migrating System in West Africa.
October 1, 1997... This case study of the migration flows from Burkina Faso (and colonial Haute Volta) is an excellent example of the type of fruitful research that cross-disciplinary collaboration can produce. The principal data were gathered during the...

Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville.
October 1, 1997... In the past two decades the history and sociology of leisure have undergone a considerable boom in the scholarly literature. Much of that literature has focused on or even defined - leisure as a function of industrialization. Notwithstanding a...

Interdependance Villes-Campagnes en Afriques: Mobilite des Hommes, Circulation des Biens et Diffusion des Modeles Depuis les Independances.
October 1, 1997... By editing this book, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Helene d'Almeida-Topor and Jacques Senechal are challenging the idea that in Africa the rural is more important than the urban. In other words, peasants are the main producers of goods...

Madatally Manji: Memoirs of a Biscuit Baron.
October 1, 1997... The entrepreneurial role of the Asian community has been decisive in the history of twentieth-century East Africa. Asian businessmen founded some of the most important business firms in the region and pioneered local industrial and commercial...

Tanganyika under International Mandate: 1919-1946.
October 1, 1997... The period of International Mandate Administration in Tanganyika comprised the majority of that country's colonial experience. Until now, there have been surprisingly few monographs available that focus specifically on the politics of mandate...

Merchant Capital and Economic Decolonization: The United Africa Company, 1929-1987.
October 1, 1997... No one would accuse David Fieldhouse of neglecting economic factors in his studies of imperialism; he is the non pareil economic expert of the imperial school. Merchant Capital and Economic Decolonization directs the readers' attention to the...

Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa.
October 1, 1997... This extensive and ambitious new study is the culmination of a decade of research and thought. At one level, it examines the era of worker militancy and trade union formation in Africa during the 1940S and early 1950s which fed into the...

Development Planning and Decolonization in Nigeria.
October 1, 1997... As we come to the end of the century, developmentalism, one of the century's most enduring discourses and endearing dreams, has lost its seductive paradigmatic and political power, challenged as a 'meta-narrative' in the western academy by the...

The Eritrean Question: The Conflict between the Right of Self-determination and the Interests of States.
October 1, 1997... One of the earliest European states to accept Eritrean exiles was Sweden. Some refugees were fortunate enough to receive university bursaries and when they chose topics for advanced research degrees, they tended to write about Eritrea. Swedish...

Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism.
October 1, 1997... This is a bold and important work, likely to be influential despite its flaws. Mamdani has two aims: to clarify the nature of 'Africa's impasse' and in so doing to unify study of South Africa and tropical Africa, too long split by a false sense...

Environment and History. Special Issue: Zimbabwe.
October 1, 1997... The collected papers of this special issue of a new journal provide not only a useful introduction to environment and history in Zimbabwe but to several main themes in this new field. The mounting worries about deforestation and erosion from...

Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War and the State.
October 1, 1997... What happened to the Nuer after Evans-Pritchard left? Nuer Dilemmas tells us, not through an historical narrative but in the form of an ethnography of debate. The difficulties of writing about the Nuer past are formidable. The written record is...

Images of Defiance: South African Resistance Posters.
October 1, 1997... Images of Defiance is an extraordinarily moving and valuable work, and the Reviews Editor of this journal is to be congratulated on doggedly seeking a reviewer for it: the book was published in 1991, but a review at this late stage is still of...

The Mind of Black Africa.
October 1, 1997... Dickson Mungazi, Regents Professor of Education and History at Northern Arizona University, is the author of a number of books on education, colonisation and decolonisation in southern Africa, particularly Zimbabwe. In the present work, the...

O Reino do Congo, Os Mbundu (ou Ambundos), O Reino dos 'Ngola' (ou de Angola) e a presenca portuguesa, de finais do seculo XV a meados do seculo XVI.
October 1, 1997... The eminent Angolan geographer Ilidio do Amaral has taken advantage of his retirement, after a long and illustrious international career in scholarship and academic administration, to comb the published documentation on the first century of...

An Islamic Alliance: 'Ali Dinar and the Sanusiyya: 1906-1916.
October 1, 1997... This book is a valuable addition to the growing body of published Arabic sources from Sudanic Africa. It contains thirty documents (with text and translation) which emanated from the diplomatic contacts between the Sultan of Dar Fur, 'Ali Dinar...

South Africa: The Dynamics and Prospects of Transformation, 1900-1994.
October 1, 1997... The Southern African Political and Economic Series (SAPES) is well known for its encouragement and promotion of black scholarship. Not only is this volume the result of SAPES' hard work but the collection is also 'the first in a series related...

Looking Back at the Uganda Protectorate: Recollections of District Officers.
October 1, 1997... This is an eclectic and informative anthology of reminiscences spanning almost half a century of Ugandan history, from the late 1940s to the mid-1990s. The greatest strength of the collection is therefore the breadth and depth of the data it...

East and Northeast Africa Bibliography.
October 1, 1997... For those of us who have struggled against the seemingly entrenched regional categorization in academic scholarship that has separated Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania ('East Africa') from Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Djibouti and Eritrea ('Northeast...

A Guide to Manuscripts and Documents in the British Isles Relating to Africa, 2 vols.
October 1, 1997... This two-volume set is an expanded new edition of the guide first compiled by Matthews and Wainwright and published in 1971. The extent to which J. D. Pearson's compilation supercedes the work of his predecessors is truly staggering, reflecting...