In this study of salt production and trade, Professor Lovejoy examines the interaction between ecology, technology and social structure as a means of analysing the organisation of the salt industry of the Sokoto Caliphate and Borno. By concentrating on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lovejoy is able to establish a base-line from which to interpret earlier changes in the salt trade and thereby assess the impact of politics and economy on the history of the trade. By the end of the nineteenth century, production depended upon a combination of slavery, free migrant peasants,...

In this book, Phyllis Martin, a well-known Africanist scholar, opens up a whole new field of African research: the leisure activities of urban Africans. Her comprehensive study, set in colonial Brazzaville and based on a wide variety of written sources and interviews, investigates recreational activities from football and fashion to music, dance and night life. In it, she brings out the ways in which these activities built social networks, humanised daily life and forged new identities, and explains how they ultimately helped to remake older traditions and values with new cultural forms.

Nineteenth-century Cape Town, the capital of the British Cape Colony, was conventionally regarded as a liberal oasis in an otherwise racist South Africa. Longstanding British influence was thought to mitigate the racism of the Dutch settlers and foster the development of a sophisticated and colour-blind English merchant class. Vivian Bickford-Smith skilfully interweaves political, economic and social analysis to show that the English merchant class, far from being liberal, were generally as racist as Afrikaner farmers. Theirs was, however, a peculiarly English discourse of race, mobilised...

Bundu is an anomaly among the precolonial Muslim states of West Africa. Founded during the jihads which swept the savannah in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it developed a pragmatic policy, unique in the midst of fundamentalist, theocratic Muslim states. Located in the Upper Senegal and with access to the Upper Gambia, Bundu played a critical role in regional commerce and production and reacted quickly to the stimulus of European trade. Drawing on a wide range of sources both oral and documentary, Arabic, English and French, Dr. Gomez provides the first full account of Bundu's...

The conflict in Rwanda and the Great Lakes in 1994-1996 attracted the horrified attention of the world's media, diplomats and aid workers struggling to make sense of the bloodshed. This study shows how the post-genocide regime in Rwanda managed to impose a simple, persuasive account of Central Africa's crises upon international commentators, and explains the ideological underpinnings of this official narrative. It is a sobering analysis of how simple, persuasive, but fatally misleading analysis of the situation led to policy errors that exacerbated the original crisis.

The South African War 1899 1902 is no longer treated as 'a white man's war' by historians. Black South Africans were drawn into service by both sides, and the war affected the black communities in a variety of complex ways. Dr Nasson has written a closely focused regional study of the conflict in the Cape Colony, describing the dramatic participation of black people in the conduct of the war, and their subsequent exclusion from the fruits of peace. (The Abraham Esau, of the title, a patriotic coloured artisan, was murdered by Boer guerrillas.) Dr Nasson sets the conflict in the context of...

This substantial and thoroughly documented book is a political biography of an important figure in Sierra Leone. It is also a comment on two of the major themes of the country's history--the relations between the Colony (Krio Society) and the protectorate (the earlier inhabitants of the territory) and more importantly, the position of the imperial regime vis-a-vis its colonial subjects. The author, a Sierra Leonean and a Krio himself, skillfully examines the country's recent history through the life of Dr. H.C. Bankole-Bright, an important leader of the Krio people. The Krio, descendants of...

During the first colonial period (the Turkiyya, 1821 85), the Shendi region of the Northern Sudan was inhabited by peasants, traders and nomads. This book analyses socio-economic change among the peasants and traders during this formative period of Sudanese history. Administration, agriculture and trade in transition from a pre-colonial to a colonial economy are discussed. Anders Bjorkelo argues that Turkish demands for cash-crop cultivation and taxation in cash ruined the villages and towns and undermined the local subsistence economy, and that the role of traders as mediators in the process...

The mystical and hierarchically organized brotherhoods, the sufi, were first formed in the twelfth century in Iraq, Iran, central Asia, and North Africa. These brotherhoods drew their members from all kinship groups and all classes and professions. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the African orders were faced, as was the Muslim world in general, with the steady growth of European imperialism in the Near East, dramatically symbolized by the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt. The sufi's fear that their world was endangered combined at this point with the evident political and military...

The author shows how the societies of West Africa were transformed by the slave trade. The growth of the Atlantic trade stimulated the development of slavery within the region, with slaves working in the river and coasting trades or producing surplus grain to feed slaves in transit. A few held pivotal positions in the political structure of the coastal kingdoms of Senegambia. This local slave system had far-reaching consequences, leading to religious protest and slave rebellions. The changes in agricultural production fostered an ecological crisis.