This article places the origins of the Maji Maji rebellion in Southeast Tanzania within the context of tensions between coast and interior, and between ‘big man’ leaders and their followers, which grew out of the expansion of trade and warfare in the second half of the nineteenth century. Without discounting its importance as a reaction against colonial rule, the paper argues that the rebellion was driven also by the ambitions of local leaders and by opposition to the expansion of indigenous coastal elites. The crucial role of the ‘Maji’ medicine as a means of mobilization indicates the vitality of local politics among the ‘stateless’ people of Southeast Tanzania.

This article explores the ways in which French colonial authorities met the life and death challenge represented by the re-emergence of yellow fever epidemics in Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal at a time when physicians knew very little about the etiology, diagnosis, transmission and treatment of most infectious and parasitic diseases. The discussion focuses on changing strategies and policies designed to address yellow fever threats, the attitudes and priorities of the authorities, the limits of ‘colonial medicine’ and the responses of people affected by sanitary measures. The article argues that because of the ignorance of the etiology and epidemiology of yellow fever, policies were misdirected and did not achieve their primary goals. Even after the introduction of germ theory, the gap between medical thinking and practice persisted for another decade. The African urban working class and underclass were the first victims of this state of affairs. The article also examines the conflict between the interests of public health, commerce and privacy rights.

This article suggests that differences in local political structures and credit protection regimes largely account for Bonny's displacement of Old Calabar as the principal slave port of the Bight of Biafra in the eighteenth century, despite Bonny's reputation for being particularly unhealthy for Europeans. We argue that this displacement occurred in the 1730s, several decades earlier than previously thought. We suggest that this was made possible by the early growth and consolidation of royal authority at Bonny. The use of state authority to enforce credit arrangements in Bonny proved more effective than the mechanisms adopted at its closest rival, Old Calabar, where, in the absence of a centralized political authority similar to the monarchy at Bonny, credit protection before 1807 was based on pawnship.

This article examines the origins and dynamics of Aberewa, an anti-witchcraft movement that rose to prominence in the Akan forest region of Asante and the Gold Coast (Ghana) in 1906–10. It suggests that while the political, social and economic changes of the early colonial period acted as a catalyst for its widespread expansion, Aberewa emerged from an earlier cult called Sakrabundi that was already moving from the savanna into the northern reaches of the Asante empire by the 1880s. The ritual trajectory and popular appeal of Sakrabundi and Aberewa are explored within the context of the ambivalent relationship between the Akan peoples and their northern savanna neighbours. An argument is made for the need to consider witchcraft and anti-witchcraft in Africa as historical processes rather than as a set of structural beliefs and practices.

The unresolved debate on the mfecane in southern African history has been marked by general acceptance of the proposition that large-scale loss of life and disruption of settled society was experienced across the whole region. Attempts to quantify either the violence or mortality have been stymied by a lack of evidence. What apparently reliable evidence does exist describes small districts, most notably the Caledon Valley. In contrast to Julian Cobbing, who called the mfecane an alibi for colonial-sponsored violence, this article argues that much documentation of conflict in the Caledon region consisted of various ‘alibis’ for African land seizures and claims in the 1840s and 1850s.

By recovering from obscurity the life story of an early Zambian historian, this paper makes a case for the adoption of a biographical approach to the study of Africa's colonial history. It argues that Simon Jilundu Chibanza III's trajectory provides valuable insights into the ambivalent social location and intricate motivations of the Zambian intelligentsia during colonial rule. An examination of his background and variegated career accounts for the complexity of his identity and the imprints which its multiple strands left upon his literary output and profound understanding of the politics of history-writing.

This article explores the relationship between slave emancipation and the spread of Islam in early colonial French Buguni (southern Mali). It examines the reconstitution of village communities in the wake of violence and enslavement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and documents the ways in which widespread mobility and trans-local social processes fostered the emergence of new forms of religious identification and practice. It demonstrates that many of the region's first Muslims were returning slaves whose conversion was a cultural consequence of slavery. Oral accounts of village histories of Islam are used in reconstructing a history that has left few traces in the archival record.

Informed by the notion of racial affinity, the European managers of the Church Missionary Society Niger Mission had required all black West Indians in their employ to make Africa their home. However, because the African posting involved a substantial devaluation in the material benefits to be derived from missionary service, West Indians vigorously objected to the idea of making Africa their home. They demanded instead to be perceived and treated as foreigners on the same footing as Europeans. Although they were subsequently defined as part of the expatriate workforce of the Mission, they were still denied parity with Europeans in the allocation of scarce benefits on the basis of racial considerations. Unresolved tensions over the redistribution of scarce resources led to the premature collapse of the West Indian scheme. This essay is an analysis of how the pursuit of socioeconomic self-interest affected the construction and representation of race and identity among the West Indians in the Niger Mission.

This article traces and contextualizes the development of veterinary policy in Kenya from 1900 to 1940, with particular reference to three diseases: East Coast Fever, bovine pleuro-pneumonia and rinderpest. Disease affected almost every aspect of society and economy in Kenya, but the threat that it posed was constructed and confronted differently by the various constituencies – official, settler and African – that made up the divided pastoral economy. Policy emerged and changed from containment to eradication as the result of continuous argument, in which the Colonial Office played a key role, about both the nature of disease and the most effective way of combating it.

This article draws on archival sources and oral histories to describe changing post-colonial land management in the North Pare Mountains of Tanzania. The independent state transformed colonial institutions but did not maintain colonial common property regimes for water source, irrigation and forest management. Farmers responded by encroaching upon and dividing the commons. After 1967, Tanzania's socialist policies affected environmental conditions in North Pare indirectly by increasing the ambiguity and negotiability of resource entitlements. The material, social and cultural legacies of these processes include environmental change, declining management capacity and persistent doubt about the value of ‘conservation’.

This article contributes to the critique of a particular historiographical construction of the rural socio-intellectual world of the Afrikaner, which portrays that world as narrowly Calvinist and culturally circumscribed, with rigidly patrolled racial borders. This challenge is effected through an investigation into the world of the Bushveld Boer through the work of Eugène Marais (1871–1936) and Christiaan Frederick Louis Leipoldt (1880–1947). The article seeks to show that the practical workings of agrarian race relations allowed for a certain measure of cultural osmosis, facilitating Afrikaner interest in African and traditional healing practices. Afrikaner interest in the paranormal and psychic, with an emphasis on European trends, is also investigated, to demonstrate that the image of intellectual isolation has been exaggerated. This is a contribution to the ongoing project of historians interested in Afrikaner identity, who probe the image of a monolithic, Calvinist past and stress variety and often secular thinking.

This article examines the trade in wild rubber that emerged in Upper Guinée, in the colony of Guinée Française, at the end of the nineteenth century. Guinée's rubber boom went through two phases. The first, from the 1880s to 1901, was dominated by local collectors and Muslim traders who directed the trade to the British port of Freetown, Sierra Leone. In the second phase, 1901–13, expatriate merchant houses entered the long-distance trade and, with the help of the colonial state, reoriented the commerce to Conakry, port city and capital of Guinée. The Guinée case offers an alternative perspective to that provided by the better studied rubber markets of Central Africa and South America, and contributes to scholarly debates about export economies, colonial rule and social change. In Guinée, local production and commercial networks maintained significant influence in the market throughout the rubber boom, thwarting colonial efforts to control the trade. The colonial state proved particularly challenged by the practice of rubber adulteration, whereby local collectors and traders corrupted rubber with foreign objects to increase its weight. While the trade exposes the limits of colonial power, rubber also played a largely overlooked role in the social and economic transformations of the period. Evidence suggests that profits from the rubber trade enabled peasants, escaped slaves and former masters to alter their circumstances, accumulate wealth and rebuild homes and communities destroyed during the preceding era of warfare and upheaval.

Human migration has played an important role in the construction or dissolution of states in southern Africa. With the coming of the colonial period there was an intensification of the process of migration, mainly for work. Such movements were premised on the uneven development of colonial economies in which some areas became suppliers of labour while others became labour markets. In the case of Swaziland, the migration of labour was dominated by male migrants as the existing labour markets offered more opportunities for men. This view has become a conventional interpretation of the disparity in the mobility of men and women within states or across borders. This article uses the experience of Swaziland to extend the discourse on why men dominated the migration currents in Swaziland during the colonial period. It points out that it is no longer useful to rely on purely economic explanations of why more men were migrating than women in colonial Swaziland. The argument pushes the frontier of analysis beyond economics and argues that a more significant explanation is to be found in the power relations at the homestead level, whereby men had the power to determine if and when women could migrate. The discussion shows that Swazi men, in collaboration with colonial administrators, employed different strategies to control the mobility of women. The intention of the men was to keep women in the rural areas and they used their power in the homestead and their influence on the colonial administration to create barriers against female migration to local and cross-border industrial centres.

The contribution made by accountancy historians to the historiography of imperial over-rule underlines the need for attention to financial records. This is especially true for the example of Northern Nigeria, where Lugard's successors initiated consolidated tax assessment based on wealth and administration of emirate finances through treasuries. The economic and political results of this decentralization were expansion of personnel and emoluments, confusion over funding for central and provincial departments and financial underpinning for regional autonomy.

This essay discusses British discourses and efforts to regulate social policy in both urban and rural areas in late colonial Tanzania. It focuses mainly on questions of social security and especially on the vague concept of social welfare and development, which after the Second World War became a favoured means of expressing a new imperial commitment to colonial people. The British were very reluctant about implementing international standards of social security in Tanganyika, mainly due to the insight that the cost of providing European-scale benefits could not be borne by the colonial regime in such a poor territory. They were far more enthusiastic in pursuing a policy of social development, embodied in social welfare centres and various other schemes. It is argued that in Tanzania, this policy remained focused on peasantization rather than on proletarianization and was characterized by a disconnection between Colonial Office mandarins in London, attempting to create bourgeois, respectable African middle classes, and colonial officials in Tanganyika, seeking to maintain the political legitimacy of the chiefs and headmen. Most Africans ignored rather than challenged many of these state efforts. However, the nationalist party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) under Julius Nyerere believed in these programmes and continued such dirigiste and poorly financed improvement schemes after independence.

This essay examines, through taxation, the relationship between British colonial administrators, Tswana Dikgosi (chiefs) and their subjects in the Bechuanaland Protectorate from 1899 to 1957. It argues that since Bechuanaland became a British territory through negotiations the Tswana rulers were able to protect their interests aggressively but with little risk of being deposed. Moreover, the Tswana succession system by primogeniture worked to their advantage whenever the British sought to replace them. Taxation was one arena where this was demonstrated. Although consultation between the Dikgosi, their subjects and the British was common, subordinate tribes sometimes fared badly under Tswana rule.