This paper considers several questions in the economic prehistory of Ethiopia. Who domesticated the banana-like ensete, the food plant which in parts of southern Ethiopia forms a monoculture? Was the ensete cultivated in ancient Egypt? Was it once cultivated extensively in northern Ethiopia as a food plant? Did the Semites, who invaded Ethiopia from South Arabia, starting about 1000 B.C., introduce the plough to Ethiopia and first develop cereal-plough agriculture there?

The Sidama peoples of southern Ethiopia are viewed as likely candidates in ensete domestication. The evidence for ensete cultivation in ancient Egypt is weighed and judged inconclusive. The cultivation of ensete for food in northern Ethiopia is viewed as recent. The suggestion is made that cereal-plough agriculture pre-dated the Semitic invasions. The ancient Cushitic inhabitants of northern Ethiopia are seen as having been in an excellent position for contacts with countries at the north end of the Red Sea, particularly Egypt, whence wheat and barley and the plough could have been introduced.

The travel literature of medieval Jewry may yield new information about the African past. The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, a case in point, throws light on the little-known eastern Sudan of the twelfth century. From the Itinerary may be reconstructed trade routes south from Alexandria to Christian Nubia, east from the Upper Nile Valley to southern Arabia and India, and west to the Fezzān and, ultimately, to the western Sudanic States. Commodities traded included wheat, raisins, figs, copper, salt, gold, precious stones, and slaves. These routes tied in with the better known trans-Saharan, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean networks of trade. Benjamin's Itinerary describes a spectrum of political development ranging from primitive Negroids south of Aswan and the tribal Beja and Rabīʻa Arabs to the more sophisticated Arab-controlled city-State of Aswan and the Christian kingdoms of Nubia. Benjamin mentions Christian Nubia only in passing, but indicates that ʻAiwa still flourished as a trading kingdom as late as 1170.

The traditions now current among the Edo of Nigeria trace the origin of the Benin dynasty and the associated cire-perdue technique of brass-casting to Ife. Some of the information recorded by European visitors to Benin since the fifteenth century is not easily reconcilable with this tradition. Material evidence, especially that contained in the Benin bronzes, and the results of archaeological investigation have also raised difficulties. It is suggested that many conflicts in the evidence could be resolved by adopting a hypothesis which would ascribe a more northerly origin to the dynasty. The Nupe-Igala area straddling the confluence of the Niger and Benue emerges as the key area in such a reconstruction of Benin dynastic affiliations. The Yoruba States would seem to be related to the same general complex, but the chronology and direction of dynastic movements still remain obscure, and the seemingly fixed points of reference become far less certain when placed in context.

Linguistic evidence strongly suggests that maize penetrated the interior of tropical Africa from the coastal regions, but the timing and mode of its introduction cannot be established. The commonly repeated assertion that the Portuguese brought maize to tropical Africa from the New World cannot be documented at this juncture, although they seem certainly to have had economic motives for doing so.

Maize was probably introduced to tropical Africa at more than one point and at different times. Maize was widely grown along the coast from the River Gambia to Sâo Tomé, around the mouth of the River Congo, and possibly in Ethiopia, in the sixteenth century. There is reference to it in all these places, in Zanzibar, and around the mouth of the River Ruvuma in the seventeenth century; and it was not only mentioned but described as an important foodstuff and a major provision for slave ships between Liberia and the Niger Delta during the same century.

Much less information is available for the interior, but it clearly seems to have been unknown in Uganda as late as 1861. Until well within the present century, it was neither a major export nor a mainstay of the diet in most of eastern and central tropical Africa, the bulk of the areas where it is now of major importance.

During the reign of Alafin Onigbogi, probably in the early sixteenth century, the Oyo capital, Oyo-ile, was abandoned to the Nupe from across the Niger. It was reoccupied only after an exile lasting some three-quarters of a century. During their exile the Alafin settled at several places in the marches of Borgu and Yorubaland, and finally founded a new capital at Oyo-Igboho.

This essay, after referring to the oral traditions of the Yoruba on which it is mainly based, describes the withdrawal of the Oyo into Borgu and attempts to identify the various halting places of the Alafin. The traditions about the founding and settling of the new capital at Igboho under Egunoju, and the existing remains of the new capital, are examined, and then the reigns of the four Alafin of Oyo-Igboho. Under Orompoto (who may have been a woman) and Ajiboyede, military successes were scored against the Borgu and Nupe, and under Abipa the Alafin's internal authority was decisively asserted. The period seems to have been one of both military and constitutional reform, and the morale of the Oyo was further improved by the introduction of new forms of religion. Under Abipa the Oyo were able to return to their former capital, and in the succeeding reigns the kingdom began to expand until it became probably the most important of the Guinea States.

Tentative suggestions are made in the essay about the chronology of the period. In particular it is postulated that Oyo-ile was abandoned about 1535, Igboho founded about 1555 Oyo-ile reoccupied about 1610.

The career of Martinez provides a guide to the economic and political fortunes of the Brazilians in the coastal States of the Bight of Benin in the eighteen-forties, fifties, and early sixties. The first phase of his career took place while the Brazilian slave trade was still at its height; the second phase covered the successful Brazilian adaptation to the new commercial patterns involved in the introduction of the palm oil trade; the third phase took place when Brazilian commerce was in decline following increased British intervention and growing contact between European merchants and the African States. The graph of his political influence follows exactly that of his commercial affluence. In the early eighteen-forties he was a prominent figure in the confused politics of the Bight. In the late forties he was as influential in Dahomey as Francesco Felix De Souza had been in the previous decade. At the end of his life his importance had declined so much that he was unable to prevent the King of Dahomey entering into an agreement which would have dealt a final blow to his commercial position.

One of the most fascinating, if misunderstood, fundamentalist sects operating in Central Africa is the body whose members term themselves Jehovah's Witnesses, the fellowship whose corporate identity is the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, Incorporated, of Brooklyn, New York. Their British branch, the International Bible Students' Association, has struggled most with varieties of recalcitrant African material, and in this unrewarding enterprise operations have been directed into the Rhodesias and Nyasaland from South Africa.

The third list of radiocarbon dates for Sub-Saharan Africa later than 1000 b.c. is considerably longer than its predecessors. As new laboratories commence operations, so more and more dates become available. During the last eighteen months, many more dates from Rhodesian Iron Age sites have been processed, where the earliest Iron Age peoples are now dated to the fourth century a.d. if not earlier. The Kalomo culture in Zambia is now securely dated. Iron smelting furnaces were being operated on the Witwatersrand in South Africa by a.d. 1000, and it is now known that Iron Age peoples were living by the Kuene river in Angola by the eighth century. Recent dates from Katanga have shown that there was a flourishing copper trade there by the same period. An important series of dates have been processed from Saharan Neolithic sites, indicating that the Sahara was suitable for pastoral peoples in the fourth century b.c. Another date for the Nok culture in Nigeria places the later stages of the culture in the third century a.d.

By a resolution of the Cambridge Radiocarbon Conference, all dates are now calculated relative to a.d. 1950.

Professors Curtin and Vansina in a recent issue of this journal (V (1964), 2, pp. 185–208) have put us in their debt by synthesizing the available information on the sources of the nineteenth-century Atlantic slave trade. For the Cameroons Highlands, a source well represented in Koelle's Polyglotta Africana, we have some corrections to make and comments to add.