This paper is concerned with a vitally significant – but hitherto largely unrecovered – feature of the pre-colonial African past. Historians of Africa commonly pay conventional lip service to the idea that the structural and affective dimensions of kinship are of great, and even shaping, importance in the past of many of the societies that they study. However, such acknowledgements remain in the realm of generalization, and hardly any scholarship exists that seeks to historicize kinship in any detail. This paper tries to redress this situation. It goes beyond synchronic ethnographic commonplaces, and offers a historically documented analysis and interpretation of the operation of kinship within a specific pre-colonial context.

The subject matter is the West African forest kingdom of Asante (Ashanti), now located within the Republic of Ghana. In specific terms, the paper addresses the structural characteristics and the interpersonal dynamics of kinship within the history of the Kumase Oyoko KɔKɔɔ abusua (the ruling dynasty of Asante) between, very broadly, the 1760s and the 1880s. The discussion is centred on the evolving history of relations between individuals – most centrally the Asantehene Kwaku Dua Panin and the Asantehemaa Afua Sapon – within a particular ɔyafunu koro (uterine group or stirp; ‘family’) that was a componential part of the royal dynasty. The core of the paper is an analytic reading of the konnurokusΣm, a complex dynastic conflict that involved the individuals named and that occurred in the 1850s.

In sum, this paper argues that the reconstruction and analysis of the field of kinship relations within African societies – such as the example of pre-colonial Asante discussed here – places an extremely important, if hitherto neglected, tool in the hands of historians. The interpretation of events, the understanding of actions and motives, and the overall deepening of comprehension are all enriched by the use of this tool. The enrichment thereby attained – it is argued – pays appropriate and overdue attention to specifically indigenous readings of the Asante (and African) past.

This article examines Danhomè (Dahomey) myths of dynastic origin, offering at once a critique and counter-narrative to the official dynastic history. Critical to this counter-narrative are the early women of the state, most importantly the mothers and wives of the first rulers. The provocative stories of these women not only add an important human dimension to Danhomè history but also raise important methodological issues, for events associated with their lives contradict much of what has been previously written about the origins of this kingdom. In Danhomè, events associated with the beginning of the dynasty were mythologized into an elaborate fiction of leopard birth and incest. While scholars have long questioned this account's veracity, to date a coherent alternative has been lacking. Through an analysis of the stories of these royal women, the forging of a new history of the kingdom's origins is now possible.

The middle of the nineteenth century witnessed the demise of a System of political power that had existed in the southern Mauritanian region of Brakna since the eighteenth century. Until the 1840s, tolls levied on the Senegal River gum trade had sustained the hegemony in southern Brakna of the Awlad al-Siyyid, an Arabic-speaking warrior group. Unlike more mobile warriors of the Saharan interior who depended for their livelihood on tribute extracted from nomadic pastoralists, the Awlad al-Siyyid had specialized in the control over a small area near the Senegal River, and over seasonal trading posts, known as escales, through which gum arabic was exported to the Atlantic economy. However, their increasing dependence on this trade allowed French administrators to manipulate relations among Awlad al-Siyyid chiefs by recognizing the taxing privileges of some while withholding recognition from others in a way that led, from the early 1840s on, to a bitter factional struggle within the group. The resulting conflict weakened the control of warriors over tributaries, harratin (freed slaves) and others, and caused a crisis within the political and social hierarchy of Brakna. An increasingly desperate struggle developed among Brakna warriors over a diminishing number of tributaries. This paper examines that struggle through the lens of an affair of diyya, or blood money, that emerged during the late 1840s and came to preoccupy all of the warrior groups and factions in the Brakna conflict. By competing for portions of the diyya owed to a small pastoral group as compensation for homicides, Brakna warriors, chiefs from neighboring regions and powerful tributaries in the process of repudiating their tributary status engaged in a symbolic duel that revolved around the increasingly unstable role of the warrior as a consumer of tribute and dispenser of ‘protection’.

In 1994 the National Party of Mr de Klerk defeated the African National Congress in only one of nine South African provinces, the Western Cape. The reason for this success lay in the support that the NP received from a large majority of Coloured South Africans in this region. Many were worried about the possibility of losing homes and jobs to ‘Africans’, and believed that the ANC was a specifically African party. These worries and beliefs were encouraged by Nationalist Party politicians. But the success of the latter's campaign was premised on the existence of more enduring self-identities, while simultaneously lending them new content.

This article attempts to explain the emergence of different black ethnicities, and particularly the emergence of Coloured ethnicity, in the British Cape Colony, and its capital, Cape Town. Because of a low non-racial franchise and (theoretical) equality of all before the law, the Victorian Cape provided the possibility of formal black political expression – the establishment of parties, electioneering and political mobilization.

The different black ethnicities that emerged were not the inevitable result of different ‘cultures’ or distant historical experiences. But nor were they simply created by élite Ethnic mobilizers in response to white racialization and discrimination, as was sometimes suggested in revisionist South African historiography of the Apartheid era. This historiography was understandably eager to challenge belief in the immutability of race and ethnicity that underpinned ‘separate development’ – a policy which itself served to reshape, perpetuate and reinforce perceptions of ethnic difference.

Labels, like ‘Coloured’ or ‘Native’ may have been imposed by whites and used by black élites to challenge state policies or to demand resources. But the labels had to continue to make sense to those they wished to mobilize. The content of ethnicities could not be purely ‘imagined’ by élites.

This paper challenges the conventional view that the 1907 miners' strike constituted a landmark in the history of Afrikaner employment in the Witwatersrand gold mining industry. According to this view, the participation of Afrikaners during the dispute, as first-time miners and strike-breakers, gained them a permanent and proportionally large niche in the industry, for the first time. In sharp contrast, this paper demonstrates that Afrikaners already constituted a substantial percentage of white underground workers, particularly as a discrete category of workmen, the miners, well before the strike had even begun

The Afrikaner miners lacked training and mining skills. Yet, like the overseas professional miners, most of whom were British-born, they were classed as skilled workmen, eligible for skilled wages. This anomaly occurred because the so-called skills of the overseas professional miners were fragmented by the labour practices peculiar to the Rand. The expertise of the foreign miner derived from his all-round capabilities and experience. These were exclusively defined to constitute his so-called skill, and hence his skilled wage. But on the Witwatersrand, the overseas professional miners were required to draw on only one of their numerous accomplishments in a ‘specialized’, but only semi-skilled, capacity. They were employed either as supervisors of Africans, who performed drilling tasks, or as specialist pit men doing a single pit task among many: pump minding, pipe fitting, timbering or plate laying. Such fragmentation of the foreign miners' a11-round skills facilitated the entry of lesser trained men as miners, notably the Afrikaners.

To become a miner, more specifically a supervisor, the Afrikaner needed only a brief period of specific instruction, which he acquired in one of several ways: through mine-sponsored experiments with unskilled white labour, rather than black; through the informal assistance of qualified miners; and through management-sponsored learner schemes intended to provide a core of compliant Afrikaner miners who would break the monopoly of skills and collective strength of the overseas professional miners. Such training enabled the Afrikaner to earn the compulsory, but readily available, blasting certificate, the award of which was confined to whites. Although most Afrikaners possessed this certificate, the hallmark of a skilled miner, they could not earn the customary white skilled wage because they were obliged to work under a System of contracts and not on day's pay.

The incompetent Afrikaner miners nevertheless obtained billets easily, partly because of the industry's growth, but mainly because the overseas pioneer miners were decimated by the preventable occupational mining disease, silicosis: the locally born simply filled their places. The Afrikaners, of course, were also vulnerable to silicosis; but it was only from 1911 onwards that this gradually developing disease claimed them in significant numbers too.

The overseas miners shunned the Afrikaners not only for ethnic reasons but also for material ones: they feared that the local miners, who were inefficient and had not been trained in the lengthy apprenticeships traditional in the industry, would undercut skilled wage rates. Management also scorned them because of their incompetence. Despite their relatively large numbers – they comprised at least one-third of the miners – the Afrikaners, who were unsuccessful, isolated and spurned, made little impact on the socio-economic and cultural fabric of the industry's work-force, either at the time of the 1907 strike or during its immediate aftermath.