The excavations in the Central Sudanese Neolithic settlement at Kadero resulted in the discovery of a large amount of skeletal remains of domestic animals: cattle, sheep, goats and dogs. Cattle pastoralism was of great economic importance for the Kadero population and it was supplemented by the herding of sheep and goats; the presence of dogs is closely associated with this pastoralism. Preliminary examination of plant impressions on potsherds reveals the presence almost exclusively of sorghum and two kinds of millet, which were most probably cultivated. This may explain the large number of grindstones found in the Kadero settlement. The pastoralism and possible cultivation at Kadero point to a much more developed food-producing economy practised by the Central Sudanese Neolithic population, compared to that of the Esh Shaheinab settlement. Food-production at Kadero was supplemented by food-gathering activities, among which the collecting of molluscs predominated, with hunting and fishing playing a less significant role.

The data yielded by the burial ground at Kadero, where the heavily prognathous inhabitants of the local settlement were buried, seem to indicate that the Neolithic Kadero population was an autochthonous one on the Upper (main) Nile. It is assumed that the domestic animals and, perhaps, also the cultivated cereals of the Neolithic Kaderans, as well as of other Central Sudanese populations, were adopted by the local food-gathering human groups following contact with other and alien peoples.

The term ‘Wangara’ has most commonly been used to describe the gold merchants of ancient Mali and Ghana and has been equated with ‘Juula’ (Dyula). This article establishes another meaning for ‘Wangara’, as it has been used in the Central Sudan, particularly Hausaland. There the Wangara were descendants of merchants who were once connected with the Songhay Empire of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Since the term is also used in Borgu to describe resident Muslim merchants in the Bariba states, it is postulated that the Wangara were once a Songhay-based commercial group which established diaspora communities in the Bariba and Hausa towns before the Songhay collapse of 1591. It is argued that these Wangara merchants were instrumental in the economic development of the Central Sudan in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They were not only associated with commerce but were involved in early leather and textile production and probably were responsible for the introduction of such new products as kola nuts and the spread of the Songhay monetary system, based on cowries and gold. The immigration of the Wangara came at a time when other economic changes were taking place in the Hausa cities and Borno. The combined impact of these developments were such as to mark the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a major turning point in the economic history of the Central Sudan.

It is a salient feature of the great jihāds of the western Sudan that the leadership for these wars of religious fervour should have sprung forth from a single source, the Torodbe clerisy. It was the Torodbe ʿulamā’ who sustained the jihāds in Futas Bundu, Toro and Jallon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and prefigured the jihāds of Usumān dan Fodio and al-Hājj ʿUmar b. Saʿīd, perhaps the most illustrious leaders thrown up by Torodbe Islam.

We have long viewed these Islamic revolutions as ‘Fulani jihads’—as consummate examples of the way in which ‘Fulani’ skilfully orchestrated the people in favour of their own views. But it would now appear that those Muslims we have been calling ‘Fulani’ deserved this designation in language and culture only—that they were drawn from diverse strains of Sūdānī society—that Turudiyya suggests a métier and not an ethnic category.

The Torodbe clerisy evolved out of that mass of rootless peoples who perceived in Islam a source of cultural identity. Bound in a new persuasion—linked by a common oppression—they shook the sense of ethnic difference and sought to stimulate a counter trend of a levelling nature. Yet, having habitually recruited from all levels, and most notably from the submerged levels of society, the Turudiyya became an increasingly closed world, discoloured of their levelling intentions. This tendency was manifest in Futas Toro and Bundu especially. In these new communities, the Turudiyya took shape as a hereditary ruling class—succession to the imāmiyya became the special preserve of a select few families. The position of slaves in the new order progressively hardened; the ranks of the Turudiyya remained closed to artisans who continued to pursue their traditional crafts.

The levelling tendency of the Turudiyya movement seems to have reached its apogee in the ʿUmarian Jamāʿa. Though it is said that al-Hājj ʿUmar b. Saʿid did not extend freedom to his slaves, the ties of Islam and the community of faith came to supplant the old threads of allegiance. Among believers, superiority in the faith or stricter observance of its precepts presented a new passport to honoured status.

A previously unused price series from the Liverpool Mercury provides new information about the early days of the palm oil trade. A boom in 1818 drove prices to their century high, only to be followed in the 1820s by a prolonged depression. The boom may have encouraged merchants to try to bring Bonny into the oil trade, as its development as an important oil port dates from this time. However the depression of the '20s did not prevent the continued expansion of the trade, which was also sustained during the better prices of the 1830s. This information does not affect Northrup's recent suggestion that the slave trade continued to expand in the 1830s, as his evidence is inconclusive and there is no comparable information on slave prices. Yet clearly both trades were carried on side by side at the time. This was not because their supply networks were different. Slaves and oil were both sent from Ibibioland, being peripheral to the main economic activity of that region, domestic agriculture and craftwork.

The writing of South African history has yet to catch up with many of the historiographical advances made north of the Limpopo. This is especially obvious in the tendency to view white and black states confronting one another in the pre-conquest era as irreconcilably hostile monolithic blocks. This essay attempts to examine the reality of that interaction by focusing on the eastern Transvaal republics and the Swazi in the mid-nineteenth century. The Swazi, it suggests, were not the integrated society that is often assumed, and were forced to enlist the support of Boer factions in the eastern Transvaal to survive internal dissensions and Zulu attack. The Transvaal republics themselves were similarly divided along constitutional, political and economic lines, with access to African resources, whether for labour, for hunting, or for military assistance, constituting a crucial determinant of political power. As a result a shifting kaleidoscope of factional relationships grew up, characterized by changing political alliances and by fissions from both parties concerned. Only once they were freed from the fear of Zulu invasion after 1852 were the Swazi able to proceed undisturbed with the process of internal consolidation, and to present a more unified front to their neighbours. For the Transvaal (by then the South African Republic) that process was postponed even longer, until after the civil wars of the early 1860s, and the discovery of gold a decade after that. Only then can one talk of the South African Republic or the Swazi as being states in any meaningful way.

Between 1935 and 1960 a peculiar patterning of forced labour developed on Mozambique's lower Zambezi. By the beginning of the Salazar era a particular style of history had been imprinted upon Mozambique. Large scale recruiting of labour for the mines and farms of southern Africa coupled with mass migrations of Mozambique's people to escape the oppressions of Portuguese administration resulted in a severe labour shortage which companies operating in the colony had to face. Exacerbating this problem was the Portuguese decision in the mid-1930s to compel the colonies to produce enough cotton for the demands of the empire. To protect its position vis-à-vis already scarce male labour, the Sena Sugar Estates Ltd., Mozambique's largest employer of labour, formulated a system by which only female labour would cultivate cotton, leaving the men free to work in the company's sugar fields. This system, which was adopted in the 1940s by other employers of labour, led to severe oppression of the local people, notably the women, who were caught between the conflicting demands of interests more powerful than themselves. Only in the late 1950s and early 1960s did the pressures of the forced cultivation system end.