The name ‘Iron Age’ has been given to a complex of post-Stone Age cultures in Southern Rhodesia. The cultures themselves vary very considerably but all are characterized by the use of iron for tools and weapons. Unlike the sequences in Europe and the Near East, that of south Central Africa shows no copper or bronze-using stage between the stone and iron-using phases and even the Neolithic seems to be missing from this part of the world.

L'histoire préeuropéenne de l'Afrique au sud du Sahara doit-elle être considérée comme une véritable science ou bien continuer une carrière subalterne dans les fourgons de l'ethnologie?

In this paper I shall be concerned first with the early spread of Mande (or Mali, or Mandingo) peoples, carrying with them Islam, into the area of the later Ashanti, and secondly, with the importance of this for an understanding of the subsequent rise of the Ashanti kingdom in the later seventeenth century. Thirty Years ago Duncan-Johnstone pointed out that ‘it was Mandingo influence that first brought Ashanti in tough with the Moslem world to the north”, and more recently Goody has stressed the role of Mande-speaking peoples, and especially of the Dyula traders, in the spread of Islam southwards along the ‘great trade route from the Niger down to Begho in the north-west corner of present-day Ashanti’. As Goody has noted, this movement of Mande speakers is reflected in a general way on the modern linguistic map of West Africa, in the line of Dyula and related Mande-tan languages that extends from the Middle Niger between Jenne and Bamako south to the Banda and Wenchi districts, in the Brong-Ahafo Region of the present Ghana.

One of the major developments in West Africa since the later seventeenth century has been the emergence of the powerful inland Empire of Ashanti and its gradual expansion towards the coast. This process ultimately brought the Ashantis into contact with the Fantes, the conquest of whom was necessary if the Empire was to extend to the sea. Their relationship, therefore, forms a central theme in the history of the Gold Coast in modern times. But problems were created by it which extended far outside the bounds of native politics. The existence on the coast of European trading settlements in close rivalry with each other meant that any serious local upheaval was bound to have wide repercussions. For economic reasons, Europeans could not remain indifferent to changes in the balance of power which would affect trade routes from the interior to the forts and, in particular, the future of the Fante states whose people, by the eighteenth century, had long acted as middlemen in the slave trade.

During the century from 1760 to 1860 the territory of the present southern Katanga, eastern Angola and north-eastern Rhodesia lay to a great extent under the suzerainty of two powerful monarchs, Mwata Yamvo in the west and Kazembe in the east. Their common border was the Lualaba river. Both were Lunda by tribe: Mwata Yamvo was the senior in that it was from the capital of his kingdom, which had been in existence possibly for a century or more, that Kazembe's ancestor set out in the early eighteenth century to conquer east of the Lualaba. About 1740 he established his own capital near Lake Mweru in the lower Luapula valley.

Parliament passed in 1807 the act to illegalize (called prematurely to abolish) the slave-trade. A Vice-Admiralty Court where the Navy could bring captured slave-ships for condemnation was constituted in Freetown, the capital of the Colony of Sierra Leone. From 1819 international anti-slave-trade courts, the Courts of Mixed Commission, were constituted there too. Until 1864, when the last ship destined for the Atlantic slave-trade was condemned, slave-ships were regularly brought in and the slaves freed.

This paper gives an account of field methods used to study the history of Zaria emirate, Northern Nigeria, in 1950. Similar methods were later used in historical studies of Bornu, Sokoto, Kano, Katsina, Daura and Maradi. I hope this procedure may be helpful elsewhere, and to illustrate it shall describe the original inquiry at Zaria, results of which have already been published.

Addis Ababa, today the most populous city on the eastern side of Africa between Cairo and Johannesburg, was founded by the Emperor Menelik II in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The event, which was important in modern Ethiopian history as a landmark in the reorganization and modernization of the State, is not without interest in the wider perspective of the African continent where it provides a unique example of rapid urban growth in an area not under European control. Whereas in such areas the capital was the result of an attempt to create a European type of city in a colonial environment, Addis Ababa represented an attempt by an African ruler to forge something new in his country's history by grafting modern institutions on a traditional living organism.

During the first decade of the Anglo-Egyptian occupation of the Sudan, the newly formed Condominium Government had slowly established its rule in the Southern Sudan. A way to the south was first cleared through the sudd-choked channels of the Bahr al-Jabal and the Bahr al-Ghazāl Rivers, and administrators and troops soon followed to secure the control of the Upper Nile Valley for Britain and Egypt against the pretensions of other European powers. In 1898 Britain successfully rejected the claims of France to the Upper Nile, but it was not until 1906 that the British Government was able to eliminate the third competitor for control of the Southern Sudan—the Congo Free State. From 1902 to 1906 desultory negotiations were carried on between the British Foreign Office and the representatives of Leopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Congo Free State, enlivened only by provocative incidents precipitated by Leopold's agents in the Southern Sudan. Both parties had valid legal and moral claims to the Upper Nile which were supported by the arms of the Force Publique on the one hand and Egyptian and Sudanese troops on the other.

In the belief that the results of this system of absolute dating are of considerable interest to historians and others concerned with the pre-colonial history of Africa, the Journal of African History has decided to publish from time to time lists of dates since c. 1000 B.C. which are being established for sub-Saharan Africa by the Radiocarbon (Carbon 14) method. (A description of this technique will be found in Professor F. E. Zeuner's Dating the Past.) The Rhodes-Livingstone Museum has kindly agreed to compile these lists for the Journal, and would be most grateful if those possessing relevant results could send a note of them to the Director, the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum, P.O. Box 124, Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia. The attention of readers is also drawn to the new dates for Southern Rhodesia published in the appendix to Mr Roger Summers'ps article in this number of the Journal.