One of the most important differences in technology between Africa south of the Sahara during the pre-colonial period and many other areas of the world, it is frequently suggested, was the almost complete absence in the former of any form of wheeled transport. The transport of goods overland in pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa was normally done by pack animals, where these were available, or more generally by human porterage. This lack of wheeled transport, it might be argued, had crucial implications for the history of sub-Saharan Africa, since the high cost of transport by pack animals and human porterage has often been presented as one of the principal constraints upon the expansion of trade, and hence of economic growth generally, in pre-colonial times. The lack of wheels in sub-Saharan Africa, it is clear, cannot have been due simply to ignorance, since many areas of the continent had been in contact with wheel-using civilizations outside Africa for several centuries before the colonial conquest at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, as this article will show, there is abundant evidence that, in West Africa at least, the technology of wheeled transport was quite widely known, though put to only very limited use, in the pre-colonial period. The reasons why this technology, although readily available, was nevertheless not generally adopted are, however, very far from being clear.

La grande presse a fait assez largement écho à un article publié dans Science (Schmidt et Avery 1978) selon lequel on fondait il y a 2.000 ans de l'acier au coeur de l'Afrique. Grâce à une technique hautement sophistiquée, recourant notamment au préchauffage du vent, on obtenait un métal digne d'une aciérie moderne.

The Abutia Ewe formed one of the colonial administrative ‘Divisions’ of Eweland under a so-called ‘traditional ruler’, the Divisional or Paramount Chief (fiagã). These Ewe Divisions are located in the southern half of the Volta Region (Ghana) and in southern Togo. Every Division is composed of a number of villages, each headed by a ‘Sub-divisional Chief’ (dufia). Only three villages are found in Abutia: Teti, Agove and Kloe. The fiagã or Divisional Chief comes from Teti.

The Beti are a Bantu-speaking people of approximately 500,000 persons, most of whom live between the Nyong and Sanaga rivers in central Cameroon. This article reconstructs aspects of traditional Beti society in the nineteenth century. It is based primarily on German and French archival sources available in Cameroon, German explorer's accounts and numerous oral interviews with Beti elders, some of whom were appointed chiefs, schoolteachers or functionaries under the Germans.

In 1962 LeVine and Sangree attempted to answer the question of why some Bantu-speaking peoples in Kenya and Tanzania had adopted the age-group organization and associated rituals of their non-Bantu neighbours, while other Bantu peoples in the same region had not. They examined the Tiriki, who adopted the age-set system of the Kalenjin-speaking Terik, and the Gusii, who are also Bantu and who were also in close contact with the Kalenjin-speaking Kipsigis, but who did not borrow their age-group organization . The authors suppose that the age-group organization of the Kalenjin and Maasai had military functions and that their Bantu neighbours whom they attacked and defeated may have decided to copy this institution, because they would have attributed Kalenjin and Maasai success in warfare to it (LeVine and Sangree 1962:97-8).