1. The few excavated sites with pottery in East Africa, apart from the coast, are confined to Western Uganda and the Central part of the Kenya Rift Valley.

2. Where absolute dating is impossible, relative dating by means of cultural introductions, viz., roulette decoration, the tobacco pipe, calabash pseudomorphs and graphite colouring must be used.

3. With the establishment of settled agricultural economies the variation of pottery forms increases.

4. An origin of pottery in Kenya cannot be accepted. The first pottery though is that of the Late Stone Age hunter-foodgatherers, and has simple forms.

5. The developed Elementeitan, Hyrax Hill and Gumban A wares of Kenya are part of an early, though isolated, complex of possible pre-Iron Age cultures.

6. The first true Iron Age pottery, the Dimple-based wares of Kenya and Uganda are part of a common Central African complex.

7. The roulette cord decoration appears in East Africa within the present millennium. Lanet, Bigo and Renge pottery wares all owe origins to the introduction.

8. The Lanet ware bears similarities to Hottentot pottery of Southern Africa and is dated to the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.

9. Bigo pottery was widespread over Western Uganda around a.d. 1500. Painted wares at chief sites. Basic forms and decoration continue in succeeding Western Uganda Kingdoms. Ritual ware developed.

10. Introduction of tobacco pipes, graphite wares and calabash forms by the late seventeenth century.

11. Copying of Banyoro graphite wares by neighbouring royal Uganda potters in last quarter of second millennium.

12. Evolution of a distinctive pottery, Entebbe Ware, amongst Lake Victoria hunter-fishing peoples.

Pre-European ironworkers in Central Africa reached a high standard of metallurgical skill, culminating in the production of beautiful ceremonial objects and instruments which show a Congo origin and inspiration. Many of these specimens, especially hoes, were traded over enormous distances. One can probably detect three phases of ironworking in Northern Rhodesia:

(1) The Earliest Period (c. a.d. 0 to ? a.d. 1000). Little is known about these earliest settlers, associated with channelled and stamped ware. Slag and tuyère fragments occur, and simple forms of weapons were probably made. Acculturation of Later Stone Age peoples took place.

(2) The Middle Period (c. ? a.d. 1OOO to a.d. 1740). Iron was still extremely rare, and iron objects are normally associated with some functional purposes. Coiled iron bangles occur, and a few ceremonial objects including gongs are rarely found; at Lusitu and in Southern Rhodesia, they are more common. The Chewa/Maravi migration brought in new ideas and tool forms around a.d. 1500.

(3) The Late Period (a.d. 1740–1900). Over the more northerly portion of the territory, there was considerable standardization of iron tool forms and techniques, which found their origin in Luba country, and were carried over the Luapula into Northern Rhodesia by repeated migrations. These forms survived to the present day when they are now dying out, and many ceremonial pieces have lost their ritual value.

At the start of the fifteenth century a.d. a group of patrilineal Bantu clans, collectively known as the Vakaranga, occupied in strength the south and south-west of what is now Southern Rhodesia. The population was mainly composed of small-scale peasant cultivators and cattle-breeders, who lived in modest, stockaded villages of thatched mud-huts and granaries, and who practised an ancestor-cult introduced by their forebears from the region of the Great Lakes—perhaps during the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

In his recent book on the Royal African Company, K. G. Davies remarked that he had found himself obliged to conduct his research as though he were working on Ancient History. I have since experienced the same feeling when dealing with a more varied range of material, and this article is a plea for subjecting the sources for African history to that kind of critical appraisal which has customarily been applied to Greek and Roman authors. In my case I was concerned only with the old European forts in West Africa, and from an antiquarian viewpoint, but the same considerations must apply more generally, and the examples that follow will, I trust, stimulate investigation of the writers where they deal with other topics.

Not long ago the present writer observed that the oldest original Nigerian chancery documents so far reported to survive go back to about the year 1820, and bear the seals of Muhammad Bello, Sultan of Sokoto, and of Muhammad al-Amīn, Sultan of Bornu. It is virtually certain that in time earlier specimens than these will come to light, and especially original examples of the letters issued by the founder of the Sokoto dynasty, Usuman dan Fodio himself. Concerning official letters and autographs of Dan Fodio, indeed, unconfirmed reports have come in on several occasions. Pending their documentation, it may be of interest to present here a more than usually authoritative transcript of a letter issued by the Shehu Dan Fodio, which has lately come into the custody of the Jos Museum, and which offers proof (were any needed) that chancery letters in the Arabic language played a part in Dan Fodio's system of government.

Hoisting the banner of St George on the mountains of Rasselas seemed a good thing to most of Disraeli's countrymen in the spring of 1868. A British consul, a special agent of the Bombay government's Aden establishment, and a number of laymen and missionaries, among them British subjects, were rescued from a mountain prison, and Theodore, the apparently mad ruler of Abyssinia (as Ethiopia was then known), committed suicide. All this for a cost of something like £9,000,000. And, having marched his men to the top of the hill, Sir Robert Napier (soon to become Baron Napier of Magdala) marched them down again. Abyssinia remained chaotic but free, and British relations with it returned to normal, that is to say the Foreign Office ceased to regard it except under compulsion.

Nyasaland has never been significant as a field of economic exploitation; mineral wealth is lacking and the territory's comparative inaccessibility has severely hampered agricultural development. However, she does possess an abundance of labour, the only mobile form of capital held in a subsistence economy. Today approximately one-third of the total male adult population is employed abroad; for, although Nyasaland is one of the most densely peopled areas in Southern Africa, she cannot provide regular paid employment for more than one-fifth of her male adults. An estimated 123,000 of the 169,000 migrant workers are in European employment in Southern Rhodesia where less than half that colony's requirements are obtainable from her own resources; the rest work mainly in South Africa and in Northern Rhodesia.

When I was in Ghana last year, Dr Danquah very kindly allowed me to read and make notes on an early Minute Book belonging to the Working Committee of the United Gold Coast Convention. I thought it was very interesting, for it covered the years 1947–51 when discontent with colonial rule came to a head, and produced first the U.G.C.C.—as it is easier to call it—and then its radical offspring, the Convention People's Party. The Minute Book was carefully, clearly written; it runs parallel to the early part of Nkrumah's Autobiography (ch. 5 to 12)—itself a valuable source of information—and it confirms, adds to and occasionally corrects the account given by Nkrumah of these interesting years when the colonial administration was beginning to retreat and the nationalists to advance. Moreover, in its beginning lay its end: the two chief protagonists in 1947 were Dr J. B. Danquah and Dr Kwame Nkrumah; and, thirteen years later, they were still opposed, as rival candidates for the presidency of the new republic.