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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.