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The Monuments of Aksum. Edited and Annotated by D: # Cambridge University Press

This document provides a review of two books about ancient Ethiopia and the kingdom of Aksum: 1) The Monuments of Aksum edited by David Phillipson summarizes the work of the early 20th century Deutsche Aksum-Expedition and includes unpublished photographs. It focuses on Aksum's monuments. 2) Ancient Ethiopia by David Phillipson provides a brief history of Ethiopia up to the Zagwe period with an emphasis on Aksum and its civilizations. It includes details from Phillipson's recent excavations in Aksum. The reviewer criticizes Ancient Ethiopia for being too brief to adequately address Aksum's civilizations, environment, and successor states. While useful for its illustrations

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Bakary Djaby

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152 views54 pages

The Monuments of Aksum. Edited and Annotated by D: # Cambridge University Press

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Bakary Djaby

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Journal of African History,  (), pp. –.

Printed in the United Kingdom 

#  Cambridge University Press

REVIEWS

AKSUM

The Monuments of Aksum. Edited and annotated by D W. P. Addis

Ababa and London : Addis Ababa University Press in collaboration with The
British Institute in Eastern Africa, . Pp. . £ ( ---).
Ancient Ethiopia. By D W. P. London : British Museum Press,
. Pp. . £ ( ---).
David Phillipson has done a signal service to those interested in Aksum and its
exploration in presenting this summary of the work of the Deutsche Aksum-
Expedition nearly a century after their visit to Ethiopia, particularly in adding to
the photographic record some of their unpublished material from the archives of
the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. The book concentrates on the monuments of the
city, providing also reproductions of the drawings from the DAE volumes, and
some translations from the German text by Rosalind Bedlow. A brief final chapter
adds to this most useful compendium a number of the monuments discovered by
Neville Chittick’s team in –, the excavation of which was completed recently
by Phillipson himself in the s.
Ancient Ethiopia presents a brief account of Ethiopian history from the earliest
hominids to the Zagwe! period, with by far the greatest emphasis on the civilisation
of the Aksumite period and its monuments. In this, it inevitably repeats almost
unchanged a good deal of the information provided by previous accounts.
However, it does not attempt to offer a connected history of Aksum ; the book’s
chief value is the updating to include information (generally already published by
the author in several different archaeological reports) from the latest series of
excavations at the ancient Ethiopian capital city, including illustrations of many
monuments and finds, some in colour. This adds some useful insights, such as
details about ivory working, and in addition it is tantalisingly apparent from the
text that a great deal of ongoing study on the finds is in progress, which will supply
further information in due course. Phillipson’s treatment, as one would expect, is
in general sound, precise and clear ; but there are certain disadvantages in the way
the book is presented.
Aksum is, for one of Africa’s great ancient civilisations, exceptionally under-
represented in published works, although since  when Kobishchanov’s Axum
was first published in Russian a number of general works have appeared in English,
French and Amharic. Later work has been hampered by events in Ethiopia itself.
The writer of this review, for example, when completing his own history of Aksum
during the Mengistu period, was not permitted to travel in Tigray to check certain
points better explored on site. In contrast, fresh from five years’ excavation work
on Aksum, some of it re-opening Neville Chittick’s discoveries of –, some of
it aimed at new themes, David Phillipson was in an ideal position to offer a new
presentation of Aksumite achievements.
This he has done, although in the event, the publishers have perhaps not done
the author a service by settling for so limited a treatment of a very large and
potentially exciting theme. The format is much too restricted to provide for a
properly underpinned description of Aksum, its civilisation and its environment,
let alone for dealing adequately with Ethiopian prehistory, Aksum’s successor
state(s), and critical evaluation of such themes as continuity, the dating of the
Labibela churches, and the role of the Kebra Nagast. In a mere  or so pages of

. .        

AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY

A History of Christianity in Africa : From Antiquity to the Present. By E

I. London : SPCK, . Pp. xij. £, paperback ( ---
).
Any author taking on such an enormous task as encompassed by this book has
to decide how to arrange material. Isichei has opted for a structure which is part
chronological, part geographical. The first two chapters deal with North African
Christianity of the Early Christian centuries ; the third the bridging Christianity of
 to  ; the following three chapters deal separately with Southern Africa,
East and East Central Africa, and West Africa, each to . The next two chapters
on West Africa and North Africa reach right up to the present day. Chapter  deals
with East and East Central Africa –, chapter  with West Africa over the
same period, chapter  with Southern Africa since , and the final chapter with
independent Black Africa since .
This is quite a personal book. The author can write as an insider, having lived
in Africa for  years before returning to her native New Zealand. In the
introduction she admits she is less assured than she used to be on all sorts of things.
She utilises poetry and novels, and feels free to draw parallels with the Pacific or
New Zealand. Her own sympathies are with a committed Christianity, or a
‘ preferential option for the poor ’, and she often makes little attempt to hide what
she approves and disapproves. Frequently she uses exclamation marks to em-
phasize her personal perspective. She often refers to the inadequacy of statistics,
the lack of research on even quite important areas, academic fashions which ensure
that some minor sectors are well researched but more important ones relatively
unknown.
The major themes are African agency in the spread of Christianity, and how
Africans have continually made Christianity their own. However, having chosen to
structure the book chronologically–geographically rather than thematically, it is
not the themes that remain in the reader’s mind, but the individual narratives, the

School of Oriental and African Studies  

University of London

CRUISING ALONG THE EAST AFRICAN COAST

Port Cities and Intruders : The Swahili Coast, India and Portugal in the Early
Modern Era. By M N. P. Baltimore and London : The Johns
Hopkins University Press, . Pp. xj. £ ( ---).
The introduction announces this book as an attempt to present the history of the
East African coast in the Portuguese period as a ‘ world-history ’, by which Pearson
means a study which transcends national boundaries and tries to understand
regional themes and larger systems. The author, whose knowledge of East Africa
is derived very largely from secondary sources, promises insights gained from his
work on Indian history. It is a good idea, but a disappointing book. Pearson tells
us that there was a lot of commerce along the coast ; that in the north (on the coast
of modern Kenya) this commerce had little effect beyond the coast, while in the

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853799597478
    
south the gold of the Zimbabwe plateau encouraged much wider commercial
networks and more contact between coast and interior. No surprises there. His
comparisons with India reveal that the situation was very different there, with a
great deal more political and social continuity between coast and interior – but tells
us no more than that.
One suspects that Pearson’s project was subverted by an unfortunate cir-
cumstance. The recent historiography of the East African coast, and especially the
work of archaeologists, has urged very insistently the view that the Swahili
settlements of the coast were ‘ indigenous’. Their inhabitants were Africans, not
Middle Eastern settlers ; their economies were local, not orientated to overseas
trade. Pearson’s study might by its very nature be assumed to run counter to this
new orthodoxy – since it focuses on the coast as part of a regional system – and the
points of contrast which he raises with the Indian situation do rather suggest the
comparative isolation and distinctness of the Swahili settlements. But Pearson
seems anxious to avoid any direct challenge to the ‘ indigenous’ presentation.
This concern encourages a distinctly circuitous writing style which does little for
clarity and leads to both repetition and contradiction. We never find out what a
‘ port city ’ really was, or how the port cities related to the many other Swahili
settlements of the coast (though we are told that they were the ‘ jewels in the
necklace of the whole coast ’). Pearson tells us (pp. –) that the traders of the East
African coast in  were of local origin (how does he know ?) and that the stories
of the exotic origins of ruling groups were pure ideology ; he later suggests that
traders, of foreign origin, provided the rulers of the ‘ port cities ’ (p. ). He mulls
at length over the arguments about the extent of inland trade from the northern
coast before he plucks up courage to say that the port cities of the north coast were
really entrepots, part of a long distance seaborne trade in luxuries between
Mozambique and India (though he has earlier offered rather cryptic reference to
the ‘ neglected ’ importance of a more local trade in foodstuffs and mangrove wood).
Pearson might have got out of this conceptual bind by thinking about the
relationship of ‘ port cities ’ to other settlements on the coast, or through discussion
of the internal social structures of coastal societies ; he might even, dare one say it,
have taken issue with the assumption that to be ‘ African ’ coastal settlements had
to be harmoniously integrated into a particularly local economy. But he does not.
Pearson has read widely, but there are a few uncomfortable errors or gaps in
understanding. T. Hoffman (sic) would be surprised to find himself described as
an ‘ older scholar ’ in a British historiographical tradition which Pearson criticizes ;
reference is made to a caliph in Cairo in  ; students of later history will wince
at the reference to ‘ rampant black African leaders ’ and at the passing assertion that
colonial enforcement of a private market in land caused widespread landlessness in
Kenya. While Pearson has absorbed the argument about Swahili culture being
indigenous, his understanding of other aspects of African history seems a little
dated. ‘ Tribesmen ’ lived on the coast ; they were ‘ Bantus ’ and ricocheted around
as discrete groups.
There is information here, and since this is (I think) the only book-length study
of the Portuguese period on the coast since Strandes’ Portuguese Period (which,
curiously, is not referred to here) Pearson’s work does serve a purpose. But it is
unfortunate that it really says so little. Pearson tells us nothing about the nature of
East African coastal society in , and the central question of Portuguese
interaction with this society is relegated to a couple of pages. Portuguese
enagement with coastal political structures receive even shorter shrift, with brief
references to the establishment of ‘ puppet ’ rulers. The theoretical digressions – on
definitions of ‘ hinterland ’ and on Wallerstein’s idea of ‘ world-systems ’ – raise
useful issues but do not really get very far. But there is some unintended humour :
Pearson’s discussion of the alleged difficulties of crossing the arid ‘ nyika ’ of Kenya

University of Cambridge  

G E N E R A T I O N A L H I S T O R I ES

Conflict, Age and Power in North East Africa : Age Systems in Transition. Edited by
E K  S S. Oxford : James Currey ; Nairobi : East
African Educational Publishing ; Kampala : Fountain Publishers ; Athens : Ohio
University Press, . Pp. xivj. £ ( ---) ; £.,
paperback ( ---).
This edited collection consists of papers from the third symposium on north-
eastern African herders organized by the National Museum of Ethnology in
Osaka." The introduction by Kurimoto and Simonse sets out an original approach
to the interpretation of age-sets. Criticizing earlier analyses of age-sets, focused on
their integrative function in providing a social identity and structure of authority
that cut across allegiances based on kinship, the editors stress instead their role as
‘ arenas ’ of conflict between mutually antagonistic groups – senior and junior men,
men and women or different territorial or ethnic groups. Rather than seeing age-
sets as mechanisms to distribute wealth, women and power in a hierarchical and
complementary fashion, then, they see them as vehicles by which opposed groups
contest power with one another and constitute themselves in the process.
Further, the editors see age-sets as regional systems that transcend individual
ethnic, linguistic and cultural groups, allowing them to interact with one another
in accord with a common set of rules. They identify five such regional complexes,
each of which is discussed in the studies that follow : the monyomiji group in the
southern Sudan, the Karimojong or asapan system in northern Uganda, the gada
complex among Oromo peoples of Ethiopia and Kenya and the Maasai and
Kalenjin systems of Kenya and Tanzania. Within these regional systems, age-set
institutions provide a common arena in which different ethnic groups establish
themselves and their identity by means of organized violence.
The individual papers that follow each focus on a particular set of antagonisms,
starting with age. Whereas previous studies tended to focus on the complementary
distribution of social, economic and ritual roles, Simonse, Spencer, Tornay and
Sato all focus on ways in which social relations between seniors and juniors are also
antagonistic. Tension between the two groups mounts as juniors seek to challenge
the wealth and power of elders and elders try to maintain their economic and ritual
control, until juniors are able to force a breach and be initiated into the ranks of
elders. Thus, as individual age-sets form, mature and advance in status, social
relations alternate between complementary relations and antagonistic ones in an
ongoing historical cycle.
While such alternations frequently cycle around a historical mean, however,
more forceful alternations can lead to permanent shifts in power between elders
and juniors. For Lamphear, such shifts were brought about in the nineteenth
century in Maasai and Turkana societies by new prophets and diviners able to
displace the elders, exert centralized authority over the warriors and direct the
military expansion of both societies. Conversely, Nagashima demonstrates how
age-sets declined in Iteso in the twentieth century in the face of alternative means
" Papers from the earlier two symposia have previously been published in Katsuyoshi
Fukui and David Turton (eds.), Warfare among East African Herders () and
Katsuyoshi Fukui and John Markakis (eds.), Ethnicity and Conflict in the Horn of Africa
().

University of Wisconsin-Madison  

‘BIOGRAPHY’ OF AN AFRICAN DEITY

Africa’s Ogun : Old World and New. Edited by S T. B. Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, . nd, expanded ed. Pp.
xxij. £. ( ---) ; £., paperback ( ---
).
The second, expanded, edition of Africa’s Ogun adds five new chapters to the ten
already existing in the  first edition. A new introduction to the second edition
by Sandra T. Barnes completes the new material in this publication. Already in
, Africa’s Ogun was an innovative book in its attempt to analyse and
conceptualise the diversity of expressions and cultural referents associated with the
West African orisha Ogun, popularly known in West Africa as the deity of iron,
warfare and hunting. As the title suggests, the domain of study is not limited to the
West African contexts where Ogun was nurtured, but it includes the New World,
where African slaves and their descendants perpetuated his worship. In the context
of African and Afro-American religious studies, the thematic focus on a single
deity as a strategy to address wider theoretical issues is not unique, but it is quite
rare. This methodological approach provides a suitable framework to reveal the
dynamics of transformation and the creative adaptive nature of West African
religious concepts and practices in different cultural contexts.
As John Peel warns in this volume, Ogun can neither be essentialised nor
considered in isolation. Depending on the historical moment and geographical
area, Ogun, the civilizer-destroyer, the opener of the path, can develop one or
several of his various aspects, and in any case Ogun is always inserted, whether in
religion, art or popular culture, within a complex dynamic system of interrelations.
Hence, in this publication, Ogun is treated from a multiplicity of perspectives

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853799597478
    
corresponding to the interests and disciplines of the various contributors to this
collection. Their studies range from historical contextualization, to the analysis of
sacred texts, the performative aspects of ritual or the elaboration of Ogun’s
representations in folklore, fine arts or literature. This interdisciplinary collection
constitutes a rich and valuable source of ethnographic data, but perhaps the
underlying theme is the continuous process of recreation and reinterpretation ‘ that
shapes the ways people experience, define and construct the sacred aspects of
existence, represent them in human life and make them manifest in religious
practice ’ (p. xiv).
The first edition of Africa’s Ogun provided a historical perspective to Ogun’s
spread and transformations, which is enriched in this new edition by a new chapter
by John Peel. Based on a comparative analysis of missionary data from the second
half of the nineteenth century, Peel shows how Ogun’s pre-colonial manifestations
varied significantly from place to place in Yorubaland. This well-documented
evidence demonstrates that the variability in form and meaning present in
contemporary manifestations of Ogun is the result of a long historical process, a
factor which should always be taken into account when seeking to understand
present realities.
Compared with the first edition, this second edition places more emphasis on the
processes of transformation experienced by Ogun in the New World. The dialectic
between continuity and innovation of Afro-American culture in relation to African
sources, which is a central theme of Afro-American studies, is treated in depth by
showing and analysing the great variability of cultural expressions emerging in
different geographical areas. Chapters in the first edition by Ortiz and M. Drewal
on Ogun in Brazil, and by McCarthy Brown on Ogun in Haiti, are complemented
by new ones. H. J. Drewal and John Mason deal with aspects of Ogun in relation
to scarification and body-painting rituals in Yorubaland, Cuba and North
America. Mason, who is a priest of the Afro-Cuban Santeria in Brooklyn, writes
in another chapter about the historical and contemporary meanings of Ogun in the
Lucumi tradition which exists in Brooklyn. Don Cosentino writes about another
insider-intellectual who lives in Los Angeles, the Puerto Rican Ysamur Flores, and
analyses his idiosyncratic interpretation of Ogun. He also addresses the process of
Catholic ‘ syncretism ’ of Haitian Vodou and Ogun’s presence in Soyinka’s
literature. Philip Sher discusses how in Trinidad and Tobago the African tradition
of the orichas is constantly being negotiated according to the interests and
ideologies of different groups in what could be called the politics of heritage.
The emphasis in this book on Ogun in the New World is not fortuitous ; it
responds to the increasing awareness of the trans-Atlantic dimension of West
African culture, and the importance that the Diaspora plays in the articulation of
a wider ‘ Black Atlantic World ’. It also serves to address theoretical concepts like
globalisation, pastiche or hybridity in relation to contemporary religious practice.
This stress on the American manifestations of Ogun suggests the contemporary
vitality of an ancient Yoruba deity who through intricate historical processes of
cultural blending has transcended boundaries of ethnicity, race and class to become
a trans-cultural and multi-dimensional symbol of human projections.

Universidade Federal da Bahia  

The Evolution of Ethiopian Absolutism : The Genesis and the Making of the Fiscal
Military State, –. (Studia Historica Uppsaliensia ) By T
T. Uppsala : Uppsala University, . Pp. . SEK  ( --
-).
German and Scandinavian universities have developed the tradition of in-
stantaneous publication of PhD theses. This has both advantages and disadvan-
tages. The disadvantage is that writers do not have the opportunity to revise and
polish before they go public. The advantage is that it saves many a valuable thesis
from being consigned to obscure corners of library shelves, which is the fate of
many a thesis in other universities.
The publication of Tsegaye Tegenu’s PhD thesis clearly proves the latter point.
For it is a work of painstaking research which deserves the attention of all those
engaged in the study of the economic basis of the Ethiopian state. The author sets
out ‘ to identify and explain the resource base of the Ethiopian state during its
process of organising into a centralised power in the period  to  ’, and he
succeeds considerably in this respect by marshalling a vast array of Ethiopian and
foreign sources. The exhaustive use of that veritable gold mine of information on
Ethiopian land and taxation, Zekra Nagar (by the celebrated compiler, Blattengeta
Mahtama-Sellase Walda-Masqal), stands out as perhaps the single outstanding
methodological contribution of the work.
The author begins his analysis with a survey of the theories and perceptions of
absolutism, preferring Perry Anderson’s theory of the absolutist state for ‘ his
structural approach and his association of absolutism with the transition from
feudal to capitalist mode of production ’. In applying this theory to the Ethiopian
situation, he departs from earlier works by identifying two phases : the ‘ fiscal
military state ’ (–) and the ‘ enlightened absolutist state ’ (–). He
traces the origins of the first phase to the early eighteenth century with the
emergence of the Shawan state (in south-central Ethiopia), which had the requisite
material conditions (including private land ownership system) to address the
prevalent political crisis of the sixteenth century. Thus the Shawan Gabar
Madarya system came to replace the Amisho Rim system of Gondar and the Rist
Gult system of the medieval period.
In the subsequent chapters, the author focuses on the crucial period of
– and discusses in considerable detail : the evolution of a standardised
system of taxation, more particularly the introduction of qalad (land measurement)
and asrat (tithe) ; the size of government revenue ; the structure and size of the
military ; the nature of government expenditure ; and what the author terms
‘ government economic reforms ’. The book ends with a fleeting consideration of
issues of ‘ economic dynamism ’, namely, trade and urbanisation, aristocratic
patrimony and ideas of development.
The subject dealt with in the book is vast in scope and intractable in nature. The
author is to be commended for addressing the issues with remarkable conscien-
tiousness and a reasonable degree of competence. Moreover, the work is under-
pinned by a wide reading on the theory and historiography of the subject.
Understandably in a work of such complex nature, a number of problems arise. To
begin with, the idea of pushing the organisation of centralised power to the
eighteenth century seems far-fetched, just as the importance attached to the year
 seems somewhat over-blown. Nor do the ‘ absolutist ’ attributes of the
Ethiopian state from – emerge so clearly ; more accurately, the author
prefers instead to characterise it consistently as ‘ the fiscal military state ’. While the
author makes a brave effort (pp. –) to analyse the vast literature on that period,

Addis Ababa University  

G O N J A H I S T O R I O G R A P HY

History and Traditions of the Gonja. By J. A. B, H. H. T and

O A. (African Occasional Papers, no. ) Calgary : Uni-
versity of Calgary Press, . Pp. viiij. $, paperback ( ---
).
In this volume Peter Shinnie, as general editor of Calgary’s African Occasional
Papers, has brought together three unrelated texts. The most recent, ‘ Gonja
traditional and customary practice and procedure in chieftaincy matters since
 ’, is by Osafroadu Amankwatia, an Asante lawyer employed by the northern
regional House of Chiefs. It is a brief but useful description of the ‘ traditional ’
distribution of chiefly authority, written about , when Acheampong and his
National Redemption Council presided over the affairs of Ghana. The regime was
committed to decentralising authority to new district councils, and this treatise, at
least in the form we have it here, was probably intended as a guide, approved by
the Gonja Traditional Council, for elected councillors having to deal with
traditional chiefly matters.
H. H. Tomlinson’s lengthier ‘ The customs, constitution and history of the
Gonja people ’, was completed in . It is, the author says, ‘ an exposition of
fact ’, based on the record books, diaries and files of colonial administrators, works
in Arabic by Gonja Muslims, and the oral testimony of those versed in ‘ tribal
history and custom ’. Tomlinson was himself a District Commissioner in Gonja in
the early s. At this time the feasibility of ‘ indirect rule ’ was still a matter of
faith for the administration. Although Nkrumah’s rising Convention People’s
Party seemed intent on the abolition of chieftaincy, certainly in northern Ghana it
was difficult to envisage any system of local government that was not based upon

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853799597478
    
it. Tomlinson’s treatise was, and probably still is, the best available ‘ A to Z ’ for
Gonja.
The controversial item in this book is J. A. Braimah’s ‘ A history of the Gonja
state ’. Braimah, once Nkrumah’s Minister of Communications and Works,
returned from the modern to the traditional sector, and died in  as
Yagbumwura, Paramount Chief of Gonja. He was a prolific writer, and some
fifteen years ago I accepted an invitation from Shinnie to edit, with Braimah’s
agreement, a selection of his works. As Shinnie notes in the introduction to History
and Traditions of the Gonja, I subsequently withdrew from this commitment. I did
so with regret – since I had worked closely with Braimah in  – but after careful
consideration. The problem was, as I saw it, that Braimah’s views on the origins
and development of the Gonja state were largely shaped by, first, the repertoires
of the Gonja kuntungkurbe and other drummers and, second, various Arabic
chronicles and the like written by Gonja Muslims, of which the earliest are from
the first half of the eighteenth century. Unfortunately his use of both was badly
flawed.
Braimah himself [Gonja Drums, nd. but c. ] produced a mimeographed
corpus of drum recitals in English translations the quality of which is highly
uneven. Esther and Jack Goody have given us a preview of their major work on the
drum texts in Africa,  () . I cite from this one particularly alarming
translation in illustration of the problem. The drummers say, Bulimpe nya wulin-
dzi. The Goody translation, which is correct, is, ‘ the lion arises to become chief ’.
The Braimah translation is, ‘ the Vice (star) of the town of Bullom ’. On the basis
of this mistranslation, in several of his works Braimah postulates a link between
Gonja and the Bulom of Sierra Leone.
The Gonja chronicles have now been published, in the Arabic original and
English translation [I. Wilks, N. Levzion and B. Haight, Chronicles from Gonja,
Cambridge University Press, ]. Braimah died before he could consult this
collection, and used instead earlier translations often badly done into English via
Hausa. Some of these will be found in the appendices to Tomlinson’s study. Again,
Braimah could be, and sometimes was, led into serious error by his use of these
corrupt texts. They gave rise, for example, to a monumental confusion between on
the one hand Bighu, the Juula entrepot on the fringes of the Akan forestlands, and
on the other, Segu, the Bambara capital on the Middle Niger.
Working on Braimah’s manuscripts, I came to doubt the wisdom of publishing
even a selection of them. I felt that they were likely to derail, as it were, Gonja
historiography just at a time when carefully edited texts of the drum recitals and
the Arabic chronicles were (to mix metaphors) in the pipeline. I urged, never-
theless, that the whole Braimah corpus should be made available for consultation
in appropriate archival and library collections. To my way of thinking, Braimah
was unfortunate in being in the right place at the wrong time. This said, I should
add that Shinnie has, in my opinion, elected to publish the most scholarly, since
least speculative, of all Braimah’s writings. History and Traditions of the Gonja is
a most useful addition to the growing body of literature on Gonja, and we are in
Shinnie’s debt.

Northwestern University  

B O R G U’S ‘ P R O B A B L E P A S T ’

Wasangari und Wangara : Borgu und seine Nachbarn in historischer Perspektive. Bei
R K. Hamburg : Lit, . Pp. . No price given ( --
-).
Although the history of pre-colonial states and societies in the West African
savanna seems to be quite well established, there are still several historically
obscure regions. Such an area is pre-colonial Borgu in today’s western Nigeria and
northern Benin. Whereas the history of Borgu’s neighbours is better documented
and thus easier to access, Borgu has been left on the periphery of historical
scholarship. Richard Kuba’s Wasangari und Wangara fills this gap, in which Borgu
emerges as an important cross-roads between north and south as well as east and
west.
The lack of internal written sources has forced Kuba to undertake a meticulous
search for other sources – the written sources of Borgu’s neighbours, external
sources such as travel reports, colonial reports and oral traditions as well as
archaeological, linguistic and ethnographic evidence. This is also the strength of
Kuba’s research, especially his extensive efforts to collect oral traditions. He has
interviewed individuals from various social strata, including emirs and sarkis,
courtiers, griots and earth priests as well as ordinary people. In chapter one, Kuba
presents a very detailed account and evaluation of his sources as well as
methodological considerations. Here he also discusses previous research on the
topic, giving special credit to the unpublished dissertation of the late Musa Baba
Idriss."
Kuba presents new considerations and interpretations of the political and
religious structures in pre-colonial Borgu. His detailed study of the earth priests
points to the emergence of political structures before the coming of the Wasangari
warrior aristocracy. Thus in chapters two to four, Kuba looks at the internal
processes of social organisation in Borgu and traces the history of a pre-Wasangari
state, Dako. On the basis of linguistic evidence, he rejects the previous hypothesis
of a political influence of the empire of Mali on state formation in (Mande-
speaking) Borgu. Next, Kuba investigates the origins of the Wasangari and their
arrival in Borgu, which he dates at the latest to the first half of the fifteenth century.
He rejects the idea that the Kisra legend was a mere ideological, anti-Islamic
construction. Instead, he associates the legend and the immigration of the
Wasangari with political and social developments in the Central Sudan during the
first half of the second millennium. According to Kuba, the ‘ carriers of the Kisra
legend ’ were a faction of the anti-Islamic Duguwa dynasty of Borno, who were
ousted from power by the Sayfawa dynasty between the thirteenth and fifteenth
century. Arriving in the Borgu states, the Wasangari removed the indigenous local
rulers from their political posts but accepted them as earth priests. He therefore
sees the immigration of the Wasangari as more of an infiltration than an invasion,
and argues that the original identity of the Wasangari was soon blurred due to
intermarriage with the local people.
In chapters five to eight, Kuba investigates the various connections between the
Borgu states and their northern, eastern and southern neighbours. He presents the
region as a centre for the exchange of political, ideological and religious ideas, as
well as a junction of trade routes connecting the empires of the savanna with the

" Musa Baba Idris, ‘ Political and economic relations in the Bariba states : an
introduction to the historical study of a plural society from the traditions of origin to the
colonial period ’, . This thesis was never examined owing to the tragic and untimely
death of the author.

University of Helsinki  

THE LITERARY OEUVRE OF A ‘REMARKABLE

WOMAN’

Collected Works of Nana Asma’u, Daughter of Usman dan Fodio (–). By

J B and B B. M. (African Historical Sources Series, no. )
East Lansing : Michigan State University Press, . Pp. xxxj. $.
( ---).
To be aged  and at the heart of a revolution must have been exciting. To have
lived within the family that brought about the replacement of ruler after ruler with
one’s own relatives must have been a heady experience. To have been a part of the
intellectual powerhouse that thought through a new basis for society within a
reformed, just and legal Islamic polity must have been absorbing to say the least.
To be able to look back over a long life of debate, writing and action must have
been a cause for at least some satisfaction.
Remarkable times produce remarkable people. But it is not of Napoleon
Bonaparte that I speak, rather a near contemporary of his in a very different part
of the world. A woman, a scholar, an intellectual, an organiser and a linguist, Nana
Asma’u, was a leading figure in the establishment of what came to be known as the
Sokoto Caliphate. Her thought and her life are not gleaned from scraps of hearsay
and reconstruction ; for the first time we have available in English translation and
in Hausa her voice, in extenso, on many different issues, and in verse with
commentarial additions from two of the leading authorities in the field. During her
seventy-two years from  this remarkable woman produced translations,
commentaries, exhortations, elegies and histories, mostly in verse, and working
with at least four languages – Arabic, Hausa, Tuareg, and her mother tongue,
Fulfulde (Fulani). Her oeuvre has been preserved by her descendants and, most
particularly, the family of the late Waziri Junaidu of Sokoto, with whom one of the
authors of this volume, Jean Boyd, has worked closely. Her writings, collected
here, were one aspect of her life, as a son of the Waziri says in a foreword to this
book ; she also ‘ organised a public education system for women and was at the heart
of a sisterhood which esteemed service to the community ’. A remarkable woman
indeed.
This volume of works, mostly from the collection of Waziri Junaidu, presents
some  original poems and prose texts in English translation, with a number of
variants and additional items by others concerning Nana Asma’u. A first appendix
gives the Hausa text in Roman characters of fifteen of the poems, and a second
appendix gives facsimiles of ajami texts produced by copyists working on

School of Oriental and African Studies  

University of London

LOVEDU HISTORY

Die Lobedu SuW dafrikas: Mythos und RealitaW t der RegenkoW nigin Modjadji. (Missions-
geschichtliches Archiv, ). Bei E H$ . Stuttgart : Franz Steiner,
. Pp. . DM  ( ---).
The author of this PhD thesis in ethnology at Vienna University sets out to place
the Lovedu in the context of the evolution of society propounded by Walter Dostal
on the basis of ethnographic material from Arabia. This aim is really only
discussed in two brief final chapters, where the conclusion is that the data did not
permit an answer ! The introductory chapter contains a truncated account of South
African history, although it does not provide even a brief summary of the troubled
history of the eastern Transvaal during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that
should have been attempted in order to place the main section of the book in
historical perspective. The second chapter consists of notes on sources and their
authors.
The long chapter three comprises two parts. The first is a pre! cis of the Berlin
missionary Friedrich Reuter’s journal, correspondence, and notes from  to

University of Munich         .    

NIUMI IN WORLD HISTORY

The World and a Very Small Place in Africa. By D R. W. Armonk, NY
and London : M. E. Sharp, . Pp. xvj. £. ( ---) ;
£., paperback ( ---).
The book does as the title promises : it seeks to position a small and ancient West
African state, Niumi, in the broad currents of world history over the last five
centuries. From the mid-fifteenth century, Niumi, located on the northern shore
of the Gambia River estuary, became increasingly linked to and influenced by the
outside world, until it was swallowed by the British colony of Gambia. It is now
part of the Republic of Gambia. In order to analyse the fortunes of Niumi in the
process of globalization, the author adopted Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system
theory: Niumi is shown gradually to change from a small player external to the
evolving capitalist world-system into a peripheral one, losing its power, prosperity
and political identity in the process. This broad characterization, as well as the

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853799597478
    
chapter titles and subheadings, might give the impression that the book is doctrinal
and its portrayal of Niumi’s history almost cardboard. This is not the case. Wright
offers a rich, objective and sensitive reconstruction of the history of Niumi,
weighing shrewdly and skillfully the internal, regional and global factors at play.
Part I places Niumi in its regional and world context prior to the arrival of the
Europeans. Part II links the growing Atlantic trade and the evolving American
plantation complex with the fortunes of Niumi as a regional African power able to
control and exact profit from the traffic along the Gambia River. Wright
demonstrates that the first three centuries of Niumi’s involvement in the Atlantic
trade did not lead either to impoverishment or peripherisation of Niumi. Until the
mid-eighteenth century, Niumi prospered, both politically and economically.
While this is particularly true of the state and the ruling class, ordinary people,
except for slaves, were also able to benefit from the increased wealth and expansion
of their world. The growing incorporation into the outside world had its downside :
Niumi developed dependence on imported goods and on foreign markets. Niumi’s
vulnerability was first revealed in the second half of the eighteenth century, amidst
agricultural problems and political instability. As Part III shows, however, Niumi
entered a steep decline only in the nineteenth century. It was caught between three
competing forces : economic change, the rising power of the British and Muslim
militancy that weakened the ruling families of Niumi and facilitated British
colonial takeover. While in the past the British were forced to concede Niumi’s
demands, the political, technological and military change in the West in the first
half of the nineteenth century made it possible for them to act from a position of
strength, and eventually strip Niumi of access to the Gambia River. The loss of
revenues from the river traffic and the growing dependence on peanut exports led
to a deepening economic malaise, which increased during the colonial period.
The colonial period for Niumi began long before , the date of the formal
British takeover. The colonial government directly and indirectly promoted
peanut cultivation and eventually adopted a pro-Islam policy, thus profoundly
reshaping many aspects of life in the former Niumi. The dependence on peanut
exports left the Niumi area extremely vulnerable to the swings of global economy,
as the Depression and post-World-War-II era clearly proved. Niumi, like most of
Gambia, emerged from this period with a very thin elite and an impoverished
majority.
The establishment of independent Gambia did not, or perhaps could not,
improve the situation in the former Niumi. The dependence on imports and
therefore on production for exports, and the abject poverty of most of the
population continued. As one of Wright’s subheadings puts it there were ‘ New
rulers, [but] old rules ’ (Ch. ).
The book closes with a touching journalistic window onto a descendent of one
Niumi’s ruling family, the Manneh, who despite his poverty is optimistic about the
future. It is at the very end of the book that the reader sees clearly why Wright
chose the world-system theory to inform his story of Niumi. While most of the
book would have done better without the steady references to the ‘ world-system ’,
the final paragraph, where he expresses scepticism about Manneh’s optimism,
brings the point home :
As I thought … of his [Manneh’s] skinny frame and sore leg, of the empty rice
bags from Taiwan, of the pathetic millet and bitter-tomato stew that was to be
his daily meal, of the scrawny goats and chicken … of the unemployed young
men and hard-working young women and the runny-nosed kids – I had my
doubts (p. ).
Wright’s book is a successful effort to link world and local history. The
reconstruction of the dynamics of Niumi’s past is rich, original, extremely well-

Trent University, Ontario  

E U R O P E O V E R S E AS

Imperialism and Colonialism : Essays on the History of European Expansion. By

H. L. W. Westport : Greenwood Press, . Pp. xj. £. (
---).
This collection brings together twelve essays by H. L. Wesseling, the Rector of
the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (though he is probably better
known in the English-speaking academic world as the director for many years of
the Leiden Centre for the History of European Expansion). The essays themselves,
almost all of which have been published before, are arranged here under three
broad headings : ‘ Colonialism ’, ‘ Imperialism ’ and ‘ Decolonization and After ’.
Taken together, they illustrate very well the remarkable breadth of Professor
Wesseling’s interests : colonial wars, the nature of French and Dutch imperialism,
the partition of Africa, the significance of decolonization, and the writing of
overseas history, both generally and especially in the Netherlands.
Students of European expansion will, I suspect, already be familiar with most of
the essays in this collection. Three of them have appeared in Itinerario, the journal
of the Leiden centre, and one, as it happens, here (‘ The Netherlands and the
partition of Africa ’, Journal of African History  ().) Others have been
published in such prominent historical journals as The Journal of Contemporary
History and the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, or in well-known
collections as Imperialism and War : Essays on Colonial Wars in Asia and Africa,
which Wesseling himself edited with J. A. de Moor. Even the piece on the impact
of the ‘ Dutch colonial model ’ on British, Belgian, German and French colonial
theory and practice is effectively a study of this impact on the French, a topic on
which Professor Wesseling has written elsewhere, both in English and in French
(‘ The Dutch colonial model in French colonial theory, – ’, Proceedings of
the Second Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society,  ; ‘ Le mode' le
colonial hollandais dans la the! orie coloniale française, – ’, Revue française
d ’Histoire d ’Outre-Mer,  ().) Although some of the papers have been revised
for this edition, the revisions have not been very extensive. For example, ‘ The
debate on French imperialism, – ’, which first appeared in , has been
updated to include a reference to Jacques Marseille’s Empire colonial et capitalisme
français : histoire d ’un divorce, one of the most influential contributions to the
debate since the s ; but there is no attempt to summarize his argument beyond
a cryptic comment that ‘ it settled the question ’. However, a brief summary of
Marseille’s principal arguments is presented several essays later, in ‘ Overseas
history, – ’.
The treatment of Marseille illustrates another problem with collections of
previously published articles such as this. That problem is not so much one of
occasional repetition, which Professor Wesseling recognizes, as one of occasional
inconsistency. For example, the fanciful statistical survey of J. D. Singer and J. M.
Small in The Wages of War, – is rightly treated with considerable
scepticism in ‘ Colonial wars and armed peace, – ’, but it is regarded much
more favourably in ‘ The Berlin conference of – ’. Similarly, the
‘ cultivation system ’ in Java is referred to in ‘ The Netherlands as a colonial model ’,

York University, Toronto . .     -       

IMPERIAL VISIONS OF GENDER

Domesticating the Empire : Race, Gender and Family Life in French and Dutch
Colonialism. Edited by J C-S and F G. Charlottes-
ville and London : University Press of Virginia, . Pp. xij. $. (
---) ; $., paperback ( ---).
This carefully edited collection of twelve essays on imperial gender ideologies is
a welcome addition to reading lists on imperial ideologies in general and the history
of gender relations in an imperial context in particular. It is particularly useful
from a comparative perspective, as its contributors have consciously chosen to
concentrate on Dutch and French imperial discourses on how to ‘ civilize ’ or
‘ domesticate ’ the dangerous beast of sexuality, rather than to add to the already
substantial body of literature on the British Empire. Any student of gendered
language interested in the question of how both the imagery and the concep-
tualisation of gender shaped the perception as well as the re-ordering of the
imperial ‘ self ’ and the colonial ‘ other ’, often in the language of mother-child
relationships, will be delighted by the wealth of case-studies in this book.
The study of Locher-Scholten which examines the Dutch rhetoric on Javanese
servants is particularly penetrating, because it places the colonial discourse of such
literature as manuals for newcomers to the Netherlands East Indies and children’s
books firmly in the context of the changing reality of the colonial household. This
serves well to uncover the ambiguities of a rhetoric which was based on the
somewhat contradictory notions of social distance and paternalistic structures.
Horne’s discussion of the visions of social reform by the French republican think-
tank MuseT e Social, as well as Pedersen’s of the French discussion of paternity suits
and their admissibility in the Empire convince because they firmly link develop-
ments in France to those abroad, from the ideas of upholding divisions of class and
race to the notion of women as agents of ‘ moral and cultural betterment’. This
became particularly poignant, as Conklin demonstrates, when increasing numbers
of French women were accepted into the Empire after World War I – which
constitutes a striking parallel to developments in British imperialism. Bowlan
shows plausibly, however, how the idea of educating ‘ the veiled Muslim woman ’
actually constituted a threat to the notion of an eternal civilizing mission, while
Kipp discusses how Dutch missionary gender concepts were rather conservative
by comparison with the realities of Karo women in Sumatra. Clancy-Smith
convincingly shows the underlying fears of cultural hybridity in the development
of a particular notion of the Algerian woman by both the French and European
Algerians.
Rutherford and Simpson Fletcher explore the depiction of Algeria and Papua
New Guinea in gendered terms and their role for the French and Dutch national
and imperial projects, while Gouda shows how nationalists could provoke by
playing on such imagery in their criticism of the imperial project. Novels are a

School of Oriental and African Studies,

University of London  

GENDERED FREEDOMS

Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western
Cape, South Africa, –. By P S. Cape Town : David Philip,
Oxford : James Currey, Portsmouth, NH : Heinemann, . Pp. xiiij. £
( ---) ; £., paperback ( ---).
Locating gender at the centre of historical analysis, Liberating the family ?
demonstrates that ‘ amelioration and emancipation from the s through the
s mark an important period in the making of social and economic categories
in South Africa … Ideas held by different participants about the capacities and
roles of men and women crucially shaped the world of freedom into which ex-slave
women and men were liberated in . ’ (pp. –) Liberating the family ? aims ‘ to
unite a concern with ideological contests over family formation [particularly in
struggles over labour] with attention to the emotional lives of people freed from
slavery. ’ (p. ) Scully attends to this task with sensitivity, although at times rather
more is deduced about the inner lives and beliefs of freed people – or, indeed, of
settlers – than the evidence seems to warrant (e.g. p. ).
The book’s agenda is set by a series of questions. Firstly, ‘ how widespread was
the twinning of freedom and masculine authority, of freedom and feminine
subordination, in the ideologies of Abolition ? ’ The first part of the book discusses
the gendered nature of amelioration at the Cape. Ameliorative legislation would
influence later labour laws, which were also profoundly gendered (ch. ). Scully
goes on to ask the central question : what did freedom mean ? ‘ Did slave women
and men share this gendered vision of freedom ? And did significant disjunctures
exist between freed peoples’ experience of emancipation in the Cape Colony and
the different ideologies of gender promoted by abolitionists, missionaries and
government officials ? ’ Scully painstakingly explores these issues, in the context of
major source difficulties which force a heavy reliance on anecdotal evidence. While
settlers are excluded from the above questions, they too are significant (if
somewhat two-dimensional) actors in this narrative.
Struggles over gender and the family are placed at the centre of historical
processes that shaped the post-emancipation rural Western Cape, where most
former slaves resided and worked in the decades after . Part , ‘ Liberating the
family ? ’ focuses on ‘ landscapes of emancipation ’ and ‘ labouring families ’,
presenting a fascinating analysis of gendered labour legislation in this era, and the
differences between theory and practice, but presenting freed families in a wholly
positive light. The third part of the book is entitled ‘ Sexuality, race and colonial

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853799597478
    
identities ’ ; it is here that ‘ the family ’ is shown to be a site of gendered struggle.
Thus we read that ‘ for women freedom … did not necessarily entail liberation from
violent assault on their persons, either by the men they married or lived with or by
men in colonial society in general ’ (p. ).
Nevertheless, freed people, men and women, struggled to control their and their
families’ (including children’s) labour and lives in the post-emancipation era,
against what is presented as largely ungendered and monochromatically un-
sympathetic settlers (and other, somewhat more nuanced, colonial authorities and
missionaries). Missionaries loom large in this narrative. Although only  per cent
of former slaves entered mission stations after emancipation (most through familial
connections), Scully demonstrates the missions’ symbolic value as an alternative
– albeit unrealisable – way of life that was a crucial source of tension between the
various colonial actors.
Freed people played a significant role in shaping the post-emancipation socio-
economic landscape. Strategies to control their own labour – and thereby enact
their own freedom – included women’s withdrawal from domestic labour for
farmers, and a preference for casual labour rather than the longer-term contracts
favoured by farmers in the context of the post-emancipation labour legislation of
the s and s. Scully argues that ‘ the movement from domestic work for
employers into domestic work for one’s own household came to signify liberty
from slavery, and an entry into womanhood for some freed women ’ (p. ).
Frustratingly, no evidence is presented to support this contention. Ultimately,
however, ‘ economics rather than ideology mainly seems to have determined the
nature of married women’s [and men’s and children’s] work ’ (p. ).
Liberating the Family explores the ideological, socio-economic, and emotional
forces shaping freed people’s experiences of freedom through various lenses.
Scully explores different ways in which women in particular were constructed in
this period (there is less on constructions of masculinity). Thus in Part  she argues
‘ that ideologies of gender, race and sexuality themselves helped shape and produce
particular colonial narratives and experiences ’. Crucially, Scully brings rape,
sexuality, infanticide into the mainstream – as crucial locations of official colonial
discourse as well as central to constructions of freedom and identity of freed
women and men. It is a pity that these chapters are relegated to a separate, final
section in the book. Nevertheless, throughout this book, Scully demonstrates that
‘ in their struggles to define the meanings of freedom, different groups invoked
[different] connections between gender, class, and racial categories which helped
define the post-emancipation era at the Cape in part as a struggle over the meanings
of masculinity and femininity ’ (p. ). Liberating the family ? is path-breaking ; it
is elegantly argued and written, and should be read by everyone interested in the
histories of southern Africa.

University of Cape Town    

A N G L O-A F R I K A N E R R E L A T I O N S I N T H E C A P E

Cecil Rhodes and the Cape Afrikaners : The Imperial Colossus and the Colonial
Parish Pump. By M T. London : Frank Cass, . Pp.
xj. £ ( --x) ; £, paperback ( ---).
Tamarkin’s scholarly and succinct appraisal of key aspects of the political career
of Cecil Rhodes in many respects represents a watershed in both indigenous South
African and broader British imperial historiography. His intricate focus upon a key
lacuna, the dynamics behind Rhodes’ short-lived but nevertheless extraordinary
political alliance forged with large sections of Cape Afrikanerdom, throws fresh

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853799597478
    
light upon the origins of the second Anglo-Boer War as well as the murky melting
pot of ‘ mutton, mines, vines ’ and extra-territorial ambitions, issues which
dominated Cape political life in the late nineteenth century.
In his opening chapters Tamarkin reveals the essential ingredients of this
unholy alliance, or, using his own original metaphorical terminology, the ‘ mar-
riage ’ consummated between these two potentially antagonistic partners. Both
‘ bride ’ and ‘ bridegroom ’ had much to offer each other. For Rhodes it was a case
of using local Afrikanerdom as a crucial support to realise his territorial ambitions
north of the Zambesi and, ultimately, north of the Limpopo River. It was also an
alliance of necessity : the English-speaking political groupings were far too
fragmented to provide local regional backing for his schemes compared to an
increasingly Anglicised and far more cohesive Afrikaner Bond. For many Cape
Afrikaners the motivation for such a political alliance was primarily racial and
economic. Rhodes was the imperialist they thought they could trust. He was,
apparently, far removed from the interfering ‘ trust ’ and welfare policies of the
imperial metropole. Hence Rhodes’ support for the infamous  Glen Grey Act
which ensured a regular African labour supply and which effectively disen-
franchised many African voters was welcomed by many Cape Afrikaner farmers
and industrialists. Similarly, Afrikaner politicians were granted full access to
Rhodes’ formidable electoral machine which thrived in the highly corruptible
Cape political arena. In these different ways Rhodes could be seen to be acting in
defence of an indigenous ‘ South African order ’ as opposed to the much feared and
potentially politically suffocating, ‘ imperial order ’.
Nevertheless, as Tamarkin contends, ‘ underneath the solid crust of the alliance ’
there was ‘ a threatening gulf between the Cape centricism of the Bond and the
aggressive imperialism of Rhodes. Only the Cape-centric guise of Rhodes’ imperial
vision lured the Bond into the alliance ’ (p. ). It was always therefore a fragile
coalition. Rhodes’ tacit support for the  Jameson raid, a high risk attempt to
destroy Krugerism, the last main obstacle to his imperial dreams, served only to
revive kith and kinship amongst all Afrikaners, expose his political cynicism and
effectively precipitate ‘ the re-racialisation of Cape politics ’ (p. ) – English
against Afrikaner.
While Rhodes was exposed as an imposter and jingoist to his Cape Afrikaner
allies, Tamarkin challenges previous writers by emphasising the incompleteness of
their ‘ divorce ’. The partnership was slow to disengage and friendships between
Rhodes and leading Afrikaners survived, testifying to the deep personal factors
which had also once cemented this uneasy alliance. Indeed, it was such social
bonds that possibly saved Rhodes from the consequences of the earlier anti-Scab
legislation of –, which, while designed to prevent a debilitating disease
prevalent amongst sheep herds, aroused considerable opposition from cost-
conscious Afrikaner wool farmers in the Western Cape.
In summary, Tamarkin’s study provides a radical and well-substantiated
reinterpretation of this crucial period of Anglo–Afrikaner relations. His thesis
further challenges the earlier crude ethnicised vision of ‘ Boer and Briton ’ locked
in inevitable conflict and reveals the subtle social and economic nuances which
governed a highly complex political environment in South Africa during the
closing decades of the nineteenth century. At times the ‘ weight ’ of evidence
becomes, perhaps, too overwhelming for even the specialised reader easily to
absorb. There are, for example, instances of the excessive use of quotations in
support of merely one argument or contention. Aside from these minor stylistic
shortfalls, this book will emerge as a landmark in the study of Afrikaner, indeed,
white identity during this turbulent period of South African history. More
tantalisingly it will inevitably invite the reader to speculate upon alternative
political consequences had Jamesons’ ‘ deathblow ’ not occurred. Could, for

Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst  

F R A N C O-M U S L I M R E L A T I O N S I N T H E S A H A R A

La leT gende noire de la SanuV siyya : Une confreT rie musulmane saharienne sous le regard
français, –.  vols. Par J-L T. Paris : Editions de la
Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, . Pp. xiiij. FF  ( --
-).
The Sanusiyya played an important role in the revitalization of Islam in the
western Islamic lands in the nineteenth century. Triaud explores the history of this
movement within the context of European and especially French expansion in
North Africa and the Sahara, and with particular reference to the origins and
evolution of the systematic anti-Sanusi discourse which was perpetrated by French
colonial writers and officials, the leT gende noire of the title. The history of the
Sanusiyya was complex. From its formal origins in about  in Arabia, its
founder Muhammad al-Sanusi (–) established his first African zawiya in
Libya in the s. Expansion into the Sahara occurred under his son, Muhammad
al-Mahdi (–), who transferred the centre of the movement southward as
an expression of withdrawal, or hijra. Al-Mahdi’s cousin, Ahmad al-Sharif
(–), waged jihad in the attempt to maintain independence from colonial
rule, and thus the movement played itself out as an intellectual, religious and
political reaction to European expansion.
As Triaud demonstrates, by the end of the nineteenth century a Sanusiyya
presence extended across the Sahara, from Benghazi in the north to Kanem,
northeast of Lake Chad ; Sanusiyya lodges were also established in many of the
major cities of the Sokoto caliphate and Borno. The southern orientation is
particularly important. The available documentation further demonstrates the
extensive written interaction among the various Muslim governments and religious
communities throughout the Sahara, the sahel and the northern Sudan, and the
extent that political and religious rivalries connected sub-Saharan Muslim com-
munities with the central Islamic lands. In a masterful way, Triaud applies the
rigorous standards of diplomatic history in his effort to understand the relation-
ships among the various powers vying to control the regions bordering the Sahara
in the nineteenth century.
The Sanusiyya are to be compared with other Islamic reform movements,
particularly those associated with the Tijaniyya, Qadiriyya and Mahdiyya. Each of
these movements began at zawiya established by followers of particular tariqa from
which they extended their influence over large, multi-ethnic regions, sometimes in
the form of direct political control through the waging of jihad. Understandably,
scholars will want to know the similarities and differences in responses to European
expansion, in the relationship of the different movements to the Ottoman Porte,
and the economic and social consequences of these movements, especially in
relation to slavery and the institution of Islamic legal and social norms. Triaud’s
massive study of the Sanusiyya is a major contribution to our understanding of
Islamic reform movements and their relationship to European expansion.

York University, Toronto     .       

THE FRENCH COLONIAL EMPIRE

Greater France : A History of French Overseas Expansion. By R A.

(European Studies Series) Basingstoke : Macmillan, . Pp. xvij. £.,
paperback ( ---).
During the past decade or so, a surprising number of works on the French
colonial empire have been published in French, among them a five-volume popular
series (L’aventure coloniale de la France, Paris, –), two lengthy surveys
intended for a more specialist audience (Histoire de la France coloniale, Paris,
– ; L’histoire de la colonisation française, Paris, ), and several briefer
studies as well (Guy Perville! , De l’empire français aZ la deT colonisation, Paris,  ;
Jacques Binoche-Guedra, La France d ’outre-mer, –, Paris, ). By
contrast, the most recent general account in English is still Raymond Betts’
extended (and a shade idiosyncratic) essay, Tricouleur : The French Overseas
Empire (New York, ), now twenty years old. The publication of Robert
Aldrich’s Greater France is thus nothing if not timely, and all the more welcome
for helping to fill a major gap in the literature available to Anglophone under-
graduate students of French history in Britain and North America, very few of
whom now possess a reading knowledge of French.
Despite its subtitle, Greater France is not primarily a history of French overseas
expansion in the narrow sense of that term. The acquisition and loss of the first
French colonial empire is disposed of in a brief prologue. The construction of the
second is dealt with in two chapters divided geographically, one on Africa,
Madagascar and the Comoros Islands, the other on Asia (including the Middle
Eastern mandates) and the Pacific. There is also a chapter on the growth of colonial
nationalism and decolonization, as well as a brief epilogue on the DOM-TOMs, la
Francophonie and the impact of immigration on French politics and society. Well
over half of the book, however, is devoted to a description of the colonial empire
and how it functioned under the Third Republic. All the major imperial themes are
touched upon. The process of colonial policy making, the role of the colonialist
movement and the emergence of anti-colonialist sentiments in metropolitan
France are all briefly discussed. So too are the activities of Frenchmen (and
women) overseas : explorers, missionaries, soldiers and sailors, civilian admin-
istrators and settlers. One chapter deals with the economic development of the
empire, another with the relations between France and those over whom she
imposed her domination. Special attention is also given to social and cultural
topics, including the impact of the colonial experience on French art and literature
and the place of women, both French and indigenous, in the empire.
Short books on large subjects are never easy to write, and Greater France has not
entirely succeeded in avoiding all the pitfalls involved in such an exercise.
Inevitably, given the scope of the work, a few minor (and one or two more serious)
slips have found their way into the text. For example, the British did not declare
a protectorate over Egypt in  ; the naval officer who annexed the Marquesas

York University, Toronto . .     -       

POSTCOLONIAL DIALOGUES ON SAHARAN HISTORY

Nomades et commandants. Administration et socieT teT s nomades dans l’ancienne A.O.F.

Sous la direction de E B, P B, J C et J-
L T. Paris : Editions Karthala, . Pp. . FF , paperback
( ---).
What a wonderful idea to organize a dialogue among former nomads and
administrators from the former French West African Sahara and contemporary
scholars, for whom these people are ‘ subjects ’ of research and sources of evidence.
What a disappointment when neither the promised dialogue nor the anticipated
analysis materializes.
Twenty-three short papers, some accompanied by resume! s of workshop dis-
cussions, are presented in this book in three briefly-introduced sections : conquest
(the ‘ time of bandits ’), ten chapters ; colonialism (the ‘ time of Christian peace ’),
eleven chapters ; and decolonisation (the ‘ time of good-byes ’), two chapters.
Unfortunately, as Edmond Bernus acknowledges, very few persons who ex-
perienced colonial rule – as distinct from those who define(d) it – participated in
this project, a rather critical omission considering the aims of the book.
The attempt to open a ‘ dialogue ’ between the subjects of academic enquiry
(administered and administrators) and the scholars who study them (French and
African) is an exercise in post-colonial discourse as well as a measure of the
penetration of that discourse into French studies of colonialism. Four voices
should be heard in such a dialogue, but that of the administered is virtually absent
here, as is that of African scholars – themselves a ‘ product ’ of colonialism’s most
lasting legacy, western intellectual formation. These silences speak volumes in the
first section. Former administrators and French academics perceive and present
historical reality in much the same way. Some differences of opinion and emphasis

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853799597478
    
emerge in varying accounts, but these differences remain confined to more or less
the same conceptual framework. By contrast, the contribution of the Tuareg
scholar, Rissalan ag Alfarouk, which draws more on oral than archival sources,
tends not to respect the temporal framework of the section in which it appears.
This author addresses the unstated theme of ‘ resistance to conquest ’ from the
perspective of those who refused to be educated in French established schools,
whereas for the editors, ‘ education ’ is a subject more appropriate to the section on
the ‘ time of Christian peace ’. Questions therefore arise about how broadly
representative are the ‘ eras ’ conceptualized by the editors. More importantly,
where is the dialogue that should tie these disparate perspectives and voices
together ?
Similar difficulties are also evidenced in ‘ the time of Christian peace ’. There are
wonderfully rich ‘ memoirs ’ here in need of response and analysis. Gabriel Feral’s
contribution, for example, contrasts with more traditional views of the comparative
‘ Moor ’ and Tuareg experience in underscoring not ethnographic identities but the
particularisms of conquest and their legacies, and the significance of having created
a Tuareg minority situation in a colonial state dominated by the needs of a black,
sedentary majority.
The study of colonial Africa has recently drawn attention to two issues also
raised in this book : schooling and slavery. As research shows here and elsewhere,
children of the elite – envisaged by colonial authorities as future leaders of
‘ friendly ’ (ex) colonies – often resisted attending school. Slaves, freed slaves,
‘ marginals ’ and low-castes took their places in the classroom – with all that this
implies in terms of short- and long-range consequence for social and political
evolution. The administrators also chronicle the defeat of ‘ nomadic education ’.
The need to centralize services in permanent buildings, the removal of children
from camps to attend upper-level town schools, the levying of costly ‘ school-fees ’
in kind (food, labor, animals) ultimately undermined all efforts to innovate. These
insights add considerably to our current understanding of colonial education more
generally in these regions, which has focused on the role of religion in challenging
schooling policies, and suggested new angles to explore in ‘ processes ’ like
sedentarization, social-class formation and political democratization.
The contributions on slavery are largely descriptions of colonial policy. The very
absence of the kind of ‘ case-study ’, culturally-nuanced material one finds in other
studies of African slavery under colonialism illuminates again the dearth of
published research on the subject in the Saharan context. These highlight the need
for more comparative work between desert peoples, between nomads and ‘ seden-
taries ’, and between the colonial and post-colonial ‘ servile ’ condition. The
conference discussion seems to have broached (but not developed) a fascinating
question, that of colonial ‘ slave language ’. The French imposed their ideology of
‘ moving from slavery to freedom ’ on the very terminology they used to interpret
Saharan reality, yet in local reality, the terms used to designate various ‘ slave
conditions ’ distinguished subtly different but nonetheless distinct social identities
which had nothing to do with concepts or gradations of freedom.
The ‘ time of good-byes ’ seems an afterthought. An extensive and extremely rich
interview with a Tuareg in his fifties, ag Acherif (presented by Pierre Boilley),
reaffirms the potential of this exercise really to open up the colonial experience. His
testimony leads into the final account (by Boilley) of efforts to create a virtually
autonomous ‘ French Sahara ’ (the Organisation Commune des Regions Sahariennes)
at independence. This fascinating account could have been used to give coherence
and relevance to the preceding contributions, for example, by articulating how the
differing colonial experiences of the Mauritanians and the Tuareg shaped the post-
colonial Saharan world ; how French perceptions of their destiny in the Sahara
were so much a product of those experiences ; how our understanding of post-

University of Alberta .            

A F R I C A N S T U D E N T S I N E U R O PE

West Africans in Britain, –. By H A. London : Lawrence and

Wishart, . Pp. . £., paperback ( ---).
Les eT tudiants africains en France, –. Par F G. Paris :
L’Harmattan, . Pp. . FF , paperback ( ---).
While the position of Africans in French society remains a contemporary
political issue, this echoes policy from the mid-s when the French sought to
restrict the volume of Africans studying in France. However, while today’s petty
nationalism seeks to make Africans the scapegoat for France’s economic tribu-
lations, the author of Les eT tudiants africains en France claims that policy during the
period of decolonisation was motivated by a well-intended (if paternalistic)
concern for Africans and their education. Guimont attributes this policy to a need
to control the explosion in numbers which had led to administrative difficulties and
a surplus of graduates while employment prospects for well qualified Africans
remained scarce. In addition, it was held to be undesirable that African families
should waste money funding non-scholars at second-rate institutions in the pursuit
of the prestige concomitant with education in France itself, while simultaneously
undermining attempts to develop education in West Africa.
This is a convincing case as far as it goes, but it neglects the underlying thread
of anti-communist paranoia that runs through much of the relevant documentation
produced by the Ministry for Overseas France at the time. Perhaps the more
pragmatic line predominates in the material unearthed by Guimont, although she
does mention the alleged ‘ cryptocommunism ’ of the main student union (p. ).
My study of the ministry’s archives (files unfortunately not discussed by Guimont)
suggests a more definitely geo-politically motivated policy, similar to that at-
tempted by the British, which sought to isolate West African students from the
dangerous political influences then current on European campuses. Such flirtation
with communism is explored in Adi’s West Africans in Britain, which details the
life and politics of West Africans studying at British universities between the turn
of the century and the end of colonial rule. Colonial students are a particularly
fascinating and complex group, standing as they did at the intersection of multiple
cultures. On the one hand, they tended to come from the economic elite or
sometimes even the African nobility ; on the other, they owed much of their
emerging bourgeois status to their interaction with Europeans. However, while
their education had led them to adopt western cultural norms, it also drove them
to take up their responsibilities as proponents of African nationalism. The reality
of living as Africans in the metropolitan capitals only reinforced their awareness of
the inequities of colonialism, thus simultaneously inflaming their politics and
provoking British and French authorities to seek to contain student radicalism.
Both Guimont and Adi discuss affairs of immediate relevance to the lives of
colonial students, nested within an analysis of their broader socio-political status
and significance.
Both these volumes are concisely written and synthesise primary material that
has not previously received adequate scholarly attention. Adi refers largely to PRO
records and student publications now held in the British Library. He has drawn
extensively on his doctoral thesis in preparing this book and as a consequence it is

St Antony’s College, Oxford  

C H R I S T I A N I T Y A N D P A N-A F R I C A N I S M

Orishatukeh Faduma : Liberal Theology and Evangelical Pan-Africanism, –

. By M N. M. Lanham, MD and London : The American
Theological Library Association and the Scarecrow Press, . Pp. xiiij.
£. ( ---).
Orishatukeh Faduma (–) was a lifelong exponent of liberal Christianity
and pan-Africanism. He was born William J. Davis in British Guiana in the West
Indies where his parents, rescued by the Royal Navy from a slave ship on the high
seas, had been settled. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Sierra Leone.
His intelligence and Sierra Leone’s church schools took him in  to Wesley
College in Taunton and then to a bachelor’s degree at London University, before
he returned to Sierra Leone in . Here he involved himself in the cultural
reform movement, adopting his African name in . He moved in  to the
USA, studying in Yale Divinity School –, after which he was ordained for
the Congregational ministry in . Intending to return to Sierra Leone, he was
thwarted in his efforts to gain a missionary appointment there, so he remained as
a missionary to African Americans in the South, both as a pastor and educationalist,
with an ‘ accommodationalist ’ approach similar to Booker T. Washington’s.
He moved in  to Oklahoma, not least because of the racism he encountered
in North Carolina, and because in this new territory hopes were high that blacks
could take more control of their own lives. When these hopes were dashed, he
became involved in the Back to Africa movement of Chief Alfred Sam (a

School of Oriental and African Studies,

University of London  

THE GERMAN COLONIAL PRESS AND NAMIBIA

Die ‘ Eingeborenen’ Deutsch-SuW dwestafrikas : Ihr Bild in deutschen Kolonial-

zeitschriften von bis . Bei P S. (History, Cultural Trad-
itions and Innovations in Southern Africa, ). Cologne : Ru$ diger Ko$ ppe, .
Pp. . DM  ( ---).
The ‘ Natives ’ of German South West Africa : Their Image in the German Colonial
Press, – is a welcome addition to the literature about European percep-
tions of colonial Africa. Though limited in its scope, it provides a useful account
of German views on these issues in the period before World War I.
Of all German colonies, South West Africa’s African population has probably
received the most intensive attention by the colonial press, because today’s
Namibia constituted Germany’s most important settler colony, and because of the
major war between the Germans and the Herero and Nama in –.

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853799597478
    
Scheulen’s book contains an annotated bibliography of about  titles from the
pre-World War I German colonial press, including a number of missionary
journals. The author focuses on texts in about  journals published by the
Colonial Office, various colonial interest groups, or individuals.
The first part of the book is mainly descriptive, summarizing perceptions of the
various African groups living in the territory. Authors in the German colonial
press employed ethnic stereotypes which, consisting of a mix of individual
experiences and generalized views, frequently contradicted each other. Expectedly,
Scheulen found numerous negative and outright racist statements. The more
positive descriptions documented may be more interesting. Some authors saw the
Herero, especially before the – war, as a ‘ master race ’ (Herrenvolk, pp.
–), as opposed to the Ovambo agriculturalists described as hard-working, but
displaying a subaltern mentality. In a similar vein, the Nama were sometimes
described as especially intelligent, and the Basters as the ‘ most industrious and
progressive of all Coloureds in the Protectorate ’ (p. ). The experience of the
– war naturally led to increased fears about the ‘ black danger ’ (schwarze
Gefahr), but also made some authors to acknowledge the military capabilities of
Africans (pp. –).
The second part of the book undertakes a ‘ structural evaluation ’ of the material.
Scheulen argues that ‘ utilitarian ’ motives, viewing Africans primarily in terms of
their ability to work for the colonists, was the single most widespread perspective
taken, influencing the authors’ views on ‘ native education ’, demography, and
commercial relations. Scheulen furthermore looks at how the authors evaluated the
social and cultural features of African societies, identifying a number of debates
among them, for example about the degree to which the ‘ natives ’ should be
regarded as ‘ capable of culture ’ (kulturfaW hig, p. ) and legally responsible
(rechtsfaW hig, pp. –). Before the turn of the century authors frequently
subscribed to a theory of culture as determined by environmental conditions,
informed by evolutionistic models. Later on, a racism based on anthropological
reasoning became widespread, sometimes culminating in a type of cultural
Darwinism that forecast the extinction (Aussterben) of the ‘ yellow race ’ (Nama and
Khoi-San, pp. –).
While the articles in the colonial press at times provide important bits and pieces
of factual information about African societies, Scheulen rightly concludes that
‘ many of the judgements made in the colonial press say more about the observers
than the observed. ’ (p. ). He notes some of the theoretical concepts upon which
the authors’ views of African societies were based, but rarely explores this
dimension in greater detail. Neither does he give much attention to the policy
consequences of this type of thought, except in a few cases (like the prohibition of
mixed marriages between European and Africans, pp. –). While viewing the
Herero as ‘ aristocrats ’, the Germans did their best to exterminate them physically
by means of war in  – this most dramatic difference between perception and
practice remains unexplored. The comparison between the mainstream colonial
press and missionary journals, parts of which draw ‘ a considerably more differ-
entiated picture ’ (p. ) of African societies, remains cursory.

Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin           -      

Namibia under South African Rule : Mobility and Containment, –. Edited by
P H, J S, M W and W H-
. Oxford : James Currey, . Pp. xxj. £ ( ---) ;
£., paperback ( ---).
This book presents a selection of twelve papers from the ‘ Trees never Meet ’
conference, which took place in Windhoek in , and focused on a neglected
period in Namibian historiography. The editors have shunned a rigid chronological
approach in favour of a loosely connected discussion of various themes. The richly
annotated introductory chapter, which was co-written by Jeremy Silvester,
Marion Wallace and Patricia Hayes, probes the ambiguities of colonial power,
which had to be continuously negotiated in the varying contexts of economic,
social, political and particularly gender relations. Moreover, the authors make the
important point that a transplantation of explanatory models from the South
African context to Namibia is inadequate in explaining the peculiarities of
Namibian history (pp. , ).
Hayes argues against a merely ‘ recuperative agenda ’ of the early positivist phase
in feminist studies and focuses instead on female agency as an integrative part of
historical transformation (p. ). Her study of the ‘ famine of the dams ’ shows
how colonial administrators and chiefs collaborated in preventing the migration of
African women out of Ovamboland (p. ). Thus, she emphasizes the non-
economic rationality behind the state-encouraged migration of Ovambo men to the
south during economic recession. In her view, the state indulged in a fantasy about
a gendered colonial society, rather than combating economic problems by rational
means (pp. –).
In a similar vein, Wallace describes how medical tests for venereal disease in
Windhoek were conducted rather haphazardly among African women, as if they
were ‘ not a genuine response to medical necessity ’ but to visceral fears of social
contamination and disorder (p. ). These anxieties intensified in the s due to
demographic shifts and the growing concern among Europeans about an imagined
physical degeneration of the ‘ imperial race ’ (p. ).
Meredith McKittrick adds ‘ generation ’ as another important analytical category
to the gender perspective (pp. –). She shows how young Ovambo women had
to negotiate the social barriers that were constituted by the overlapping categories
of race, class, gender and seniority.
In a particularly illuminating contribution, Robert Gordon shifts the focus from
the ‘ instrumentality of vagrancy legislation ’ to its inherent contradictions and thus
to the cultural meaning of the control of labour (p. ). He provides a sharp
analysis of what he calls the ‘ Prozac factor ’ in colonial law, i.e. the functionality of
colonial legislation in terms of the soothing effects it promised to the settlers, and
not merely in terms of the overall rationality of social engineering. Gordon argues
against the Foucauldian model that there was little appreciation among colonial
administrators of the scientific study of African societies. He concludes that power
is not always manifest in the accumulation and control of knowledge, but also in
the deliberate ignorance of rulers. Expert knowledge of African culture was
perceived as an almost inbred constituent of the colonial mind, authenticated by
proximity to, and day-to-day experience with, ‘ the native ’.
It is in the nature of an anthology that the editors have tried to establish a tone
which is not always sustained by the various contributors. This is not to denigrate
the achievements of individual authors – each chapter is well written and provides
the reader with new insights into neglected aspects of Namibian history – but it is
perhaps inevitable that some of the authors should have responded less en-

University of South Africa  

WOMEN IN COLONIAL SENEGAL

Der Reichtum der Frauen : Leben und Arbeit der weiblichen BevoW lkerung in Siin\
Senegal unter dem Einfluß der franzoW sischen Kolonisation. Bei B R-
. Hamburg : LIT, . Pp. . DM ., paperback ( --
-).
Senegal may be regarded as one of the most extensively researched regions of
Africa in almost all of the humanities and social sciences. However, much of this
research has concentrated on the Islamic societies of the Wolof and the Hal-
pulaaren, while societies such as the Sereer of Siin, which have been Islamized only
in recent times, have failed to attract comparable attention. Furthermore, research
on African societies until recently has tended to neglect gender issues. One merit
of Brigitte Reinwald’s work on the life and work of Sereer women is that it

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853799597478
    
contributes to filling these two considerable gaps in research, namely, the
development of Sereer society under colonial rule and the contribution of women
to the development of this society.
After a detailed presentation of women’s studies in African historiography,
Reinwald shows how Sereer women were affected by the economic and social
trnasformations that took place in the Fatick area during the colonial period. The
author repeatedly emphasizes the fact that until the twentieth century, in
economic, cultural and political terms, women had a very strong position in Sereer
society. However, the establishment of colonial rule led to an increasing marginal-
ization of women. Thus, the colonial administration simply took no notice of the
fact that women played a major role in the production not only of food crops like
rice and millet, but also of cash crops such as groundnuts and cotton (p. ).
Usually, only Sereer men were perceived as producers by the colonial adminis-
tration and consequently were granted access to agricultural development services
provided by the colonial administration. As a result of this policy, Sereer women
were forced to go through their husbands in order to gain access to new
technologies, credit and marketing facilities (p. ). At the end of the colonial
period, female agricultural productivity was also significantly lower than male
agricultural productivity (p. ). The dynamics of colonial rule, however, not
only led to the marginalization of Sereer women as independent producers but also
to their exclusion from the political process. Colonial rule thus supported the
formation of a new political arena increasingly dominated by men, either French
colonial administrators or local notables and chiefs. The author finally shows that
the imposition of colonial rule stimulated processes of conversion to Christianity
and Islam that became particularly accentuated in the s. These processes of
conversion again tended to reinforce existing male-dominated interpretations of
social relations and, for instance, enhanced the shift from bilinear to patrilinear
structures of descent and inheritance (p. ).
Yet, women were not passive victims of these processes of change, they tried
actively to develop strategies which would enable them to come to terms with these
structural changes and to survive under conditions of extreme stress. Thus, women
not only started to cultivate cash crops in order to improve their financial position
and set up trading networks of their own, they also tried to evade ‘ well-meant ’
forms of colonial patronage. Sereer women, for instance, boycotted regulations of
the colonial health service that tried to impose compulsory delivery in the new
maternity hospitals. Until the early s, Sereer women who refused to give birth
in the colonial clinics were in fact forcibly brought there and forced to undergo
courses in childcare and hygiene. They were not allowed to leave the hospital and
had to be fed by relatives (p. ). Manifestations of female resistance to colonial
rule were, however, usually disregarded by the male-dominated colonial adminis-
tration and, if perceived at all, were described as ‘ forms of female hysteria ’ (p.
).
Research for this study was based on both archival material and interviews
conducted with women in the Fatick area of Siin, sources which permit the author
to give a well-balanced account of the everyday life of women in Siin during the
colonial period and to show how they managed to develop initiatives enabling them
to retain at least part of their social influence on society during the colonial period.
Thus, Reinwald’s study may be seen as a welcome complement to Jean-Marc
Gastellu’s pioneering analysis L’eT galitarisme eT conomique des Serer du SeT neT gal (Paris
), which concentrated on the post-colonial period.

University of Bayreuth  

Rural Society and Cotton in Colonial Zaire. By O L. Madison :

University of Wisconsin Press, . Pp. xvij. £. ( ---
) ; £., paperback ( ---).
Osumaka Likaka’s book would perhaps better be entitled Forced Cotton
Production in Colonial Zaire, for coercion and its effect is the dominant theme of
the book. Furthermore, the book’s selected time frame is from , when the
colonial administration began requiring cotton production in designated provinces
of the colony, to  when legislated requirements and commercial concessions
were abandoned.
Apparently cotton was not grown indigenously in precolonial Congo (though
one wishes Likaka had addressed this issue directly, given the widespread evidence
for small amounts of cotton produced in other parts of precolonial Africa) and
hence the colonial government had to assign and supply the means and technology
of production : seeds, gins, markets and plots for cultivation. The latter were
assigned according to the number of ‘ healthy adult males ’ per village which, given
that women did most of the farming and transporting, and chiefs and elders never
did, provoked some interesting generational and gender dynamics, all well
delineated and discussed by Likaka. Except in one region of the southern Belgian
Congo where several companies were licensed and competed for purchasing
cotton, an exception which Likaka unfortunately does not examine explicitly for
comparisons, the African producer was required to market his\her cotton to the
concessionaire of his\her district.
In chapters on social control and social inequality Likaka then draws a bleak
picture of compulsion, beatings, taxes, fines, imprisonment, passive resistance,
cheating, theft, flight, domestic conflict and bitter compliance that all too often
were concomitant with colonialism. Oral interviews, court records, colonial
agricultural reports, and some company documents are skillfully used to convince
the reader. So persuaded and persuasive is Likaka of the leviathan nature of the
colonial regime that even the act of providing African farmers with hoes is seen as
a sinister plot to manipulate and control.
Likaka also depicts the unevenness and complexity of such exploitation. He
readily demonstrates the benefits that accrued to chiefs at the expense of subjects,
and, to a lesser extent, male heads of household at the expense of females in the
system. In an effort to reveal peasant agency and not only victimization, Likaka
also discusses peasant resistance. This section reaches a bit far, however, casually
implying that any insurgent ideology or any act of defiance against a chief or
colonial official that occurred in a cotton growing district was ipso facto due to
compulsory cotton production. Likewise Likaka is never clear about whether
producers were demanding the complete abolition of cotton production or merely
seeking to improve the terms of production and ‘ negotiate ’ higher prices – a
difference that should matter to social as well as economic historians.
By the s even colonial officials recognized that compulsory policies were
counter-productive, in part because Africans had indirectly been forced to neglect
their food crops and malnutrition became widespread. The government therefore
set up a marketing-board type of purchasing arrangement, with higher, fixed
producer prices. However these purchase prices were still always lower than world
market prices, and thus the system still relegated all risk to the producer. The
world\local price differential was ostensibly designated for market, product and
producer development. Here also Likaka persuasively exposes the manipulative,
exploitative and coercive nature of even prizes (such as bicycles and sewing
machines), cloth and salt bonuses, production premiums, propaganda and agri-

University of Northern Iowa      .     

THE ECONOMICS OF REBELLION

Mau Mau and Kenya : An Analysis of a Peasant Revolt. By W

O. M. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, . Pp. xiiij.
£. ( ---).
Mau Mau and Kenya is a well written work which provides a clear and candid
picture of the highly complex movements that were Mau Mau. It is divided into
three parts : ‘ The background to the revolt ’, ‘ The military and ideological phase ’
and ‘ Rehabilitation, independence and legacy ’. Professor Maloba surveys the
major publications appropriate to each section, giving a thoughtful and candid
analysis, asking questions and probing answers. In so doing he illuminates not only
what we ‘ know ’, but also the contradictions and lacunae which abound. Although
all sections deserve attention and raise questions for further research, this review
concentrates on ‘ The background to the revolt ’, and particularly on the economic
factors which led to the tribulation-prone birth of early nationalism and the events
of , and ultimately to the declaration of the Emergency.
Dr Maloba correctly identifies the strong influence of economic factors. Among
these, land alienation stands out as it ultimately undermined the agrarian base of
Kikuyu society, preventing land owners from giving land in use to the landless.
They in turn, unable to become landed elsewhere, became dependent on an urban
or rural settler wage economy. The rewards of labour fell well below those of land :
most wages provided for little more than bare survival. The system was one of
human waste ; it ignored that many workers had little if any additional income, that
they had families which needed food, clothing and medical care, and that children
needed education if they were to participate in the future.
Maloba’s attempts to explain Kikuyu colonial adaptations rely heavily on his
analysis of their pre-colonial past. He also argues that the Kikuyu, particularly the
educated and those fortunate enough to be able to afford education (as well as land
for cashcrops, and eventually for sons and grandsons), should bear some of the
blame for the poverty of their fellows. The view, though fashionable for a time,
that the mission-educated teachers and clerks, together with chiefs and tribunal
elders introduced ‘ land agrandizement ’ and ‘ individualism ’ in Kikuyu society,

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853799597478
    
abandoning customary obligations is based on misconceptions. This romantic view
of pre-colonial conditions is not borne out by available evidence.
Among the valuable data the author provides are statistics showing the dire
situation of many Nairobi African workers, most likely predominantly Kikuyu
some  years after the European invasion. While the Carpenter Report’s strong
criticism of labour conditions and wages provided evidence of growing government
awareness that African wages were insufficient to provide for most of the work
force, still less for their families, the report is also evidence of the continuing
European bias which presumed that African labour had land and supportive kin
groups in the reserves so that wages need not cover all the needs of the workers.
That many had neither land nor kin which could support them, and that wages
often condemned workers to abject poverty, was not seriously considered. When
the report noted that ‘ approximately  per cent of workers’ income is spent on
food ’, it did not ask how other needs were to be met from the little which remained,
nor did it show concern that the most frequently mentioned foodstuffs, though
cheap, fell far short of an adequate diet, able to maintain basic health and prevent
disease.
Among the statistics cited by Maloba is a comparison of wages for African males
in  and , which suggests that the post-World War II economy was
demanding more educated workers but had fewer places for illiterate ones. One can
also safely surmise that the illiterate workers of  were unlikely to be able to opt
out of the wage economy because they had fortuitously inherited land. One
wonders whether they swelled the desperate, crime-prone populations of the
Nairobi locations described by Maloba, which made differentiating between Mau
Mau and crime difficult if not impossible.
In his introduction, Maloba discusses the worldwide phenomenon of ‘ peasant-
based revolutionary movements ’. While it is undoubtedly true that the Kikuyu in
pre-colonial times were dependent on agriculture and fairly extensive herding, he
does not clarify whether he classifies them as ‘ peasants ’ because they relied on
land. Using that broad definition, data make it clear that the overwhelming number
of Mau Mau participants could no longer rely on land and consequently should not
be called ‘ peasants ’. Conversely, if one would like to reserve the term ‘ peasant ’ for
those whose land provided sustenance and surplus which – by trade or barter –
allowed the acquisition of goods to satisfy needs which the land itself could not,
then many twentieth-century Kikuyu were not peasants either. Data show that
Mau Mau participation correlated with lack of land and resistance to Mau Mau
with land-based sufficiency. Mau Mau may have been a movement of men and
women who – in the economy of their time – aspired to becoming peasants.
Maloba several times raises the important question of whether Mau Mau should
be regarded as a predominantly ethnic movement or whether it can lay claim to
having been a national movement. He concludes that the colonial context of Kenya
as a whole would not have allowed freedom for one part of Kenya only. Mau Mau
undoubtedly contributed to the British desire to divest itself of the burden of
colonial rule. In that sense Mau Mau contributed to the cause of freedom, not just
for the Kikuyu, but for Kenya as a whole. Only time and history can tell whether
ethnic freedom can be translated into a sense of common nationhood.
In spite of some minor criticisms and questions which remain, Maloba has
produced a solid, evenhanded introduction to one of the more important colonial
movements.

Claremont, California  

Guerrilla Snuff. By M G. Harare : Baobab Books, . Pp.

xivj. $. ( ---).
Guerrilla Snuff, writes Mafuranhunzi Gumbo, ‘ is not a textbook. It has no
footnotes, no source references to bolster the concept of objectivity ’. For this
reason, firstly, the professional historian will probably find this book not very
useful. The second disappointment is that the historian who has closely studied the
history of guerrilla warfare in Zimbabwe is likely to discover that there is nothing
new for him\her in Gumbo’s book. There is nothing new about the role of African
traditional religion in the first (– risings) and second (–)
zvimurenga\umvukela, as this subject has received considerable attention from a
number of scholars, such as David Beach and Terence Ranger. David Lan’s book,
Guns and Rain : Guerrilla and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe (London ), offers
probably the most authoritative account on this subject to date.
It is a widely held view, especially in Zimbabwe, that whilst there have been
numerous scholarly publications on and about the armed liberation struggle, most
of this invaluable knowledge remains inaccessible to the public because it was
written for purely academic consumption. Guerrilla Snuff unlocks and unpacks
this knowledge by popularising in a folkloric genre ‘ history and myth for the
benefit of our modern world, as well as for rural men and women sitting in the
shade of a muchakata tree, far from from the madding academic crowd ’ (p. xi).
Written by Inus Daneel who changed his name to Mafuranhunzi Gumbo after
his adoption by the Gumbo Rufura people of Gutu in the s, Guerrilla Snuff
is a book that fictionalises chimurenga history with particular emphasis on the role
of African traditional religion and beliefs. The author also gives prominence to
other themes such as the battles that were lost and won by guerrillas, issues of
discipline and forms of heroism. He also notes how oral tradition was invoked to
inspire confidence and a sense of heroism in the guerrillas, an approach which
makes the subject more accessible to a wider readership.
Inspired by the post-war reburial of guerrilla fighters who died during the armed
struggle in Gutu district in Masvingo province, Gumbo takes the reader back in
time, through a series of reflections and recollections of how the struggle was
waged. Drawing on information he gathered during his travels with ex-guerrillas,
spirit mediums, Mwari cultists and independent church prophets to ‘ the battle-
fields, the caves where they lay hidden, the land-mine and ambush sites, places of
worship ’, Gumbo weaves a fascinating tale of how the guerrillas survived and what
spurred them on even in the thickest of offensive assaults by their enemy. Guerrilla
Snuff points to the central tenets upon which guerrilla warfare thrived, namely, the
symbiotic relationship between guerrillas and the peasants in the rural areas.
Guerrillas adopted the Maoist philosophy about guerrilla tactics : ‘ Out of the water
a fish cannot live ’, which meant that ‘ without the support of the people guerrillas
cannot survive ’.
Following from this idea, guerrillas were incorporated into local social cat-
egories ; through the agency of the spirit mediums those based in Gutu, for
example, were considered descendants and placed under the protection of the great
ancestor Mabwazhe, who was known for his legendary hunting skills and for killing
big game at close range (p. ). Guerrilla Snuff highlights some of the miraculous
and unusual occurrences bordering on myth that took place during the war. Thus,
Gumbo writes of a mythical world in which wild animals protected the guerrillas,
trees talked and birds gave warnings : ‘ All of nature spoke to you in watime. The
birds and the animals became allies. Through them the ancestors whispered
caution and encouragement ’ (p. ).

University of Minnesota–Twin Cities  

LIFE HISTORIES AND NATIONALIST HISTORY

TANU Women. Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism,

–. By S G. Portsmouth, NH : Heinemann ; Oxford : James
Currey ; Dar es Salaam : Mkuki na Nyota, . Pp. xixj. $ ( --
-) ; $., paperback ( ---).
TANU Women is a much needed counterbalance to the dominant narrative of
Tanzanian statehood that has depicted the forging of Tanzanian nationalism as
the product of a western-educated African male elite, particularly Julius Nyerere,
leader of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) in the s and first
president of independent Tanzania." According to that metanarrative, the male
elite ignited the Tanzanian masses to participate in the independence movement
that forced the British to leave Tanzania relatively easily, and with little bloodshed.
As Geiger notes, the metanarrative omits the role of Tanzanian women as the
broad base of TANU support, and of TANU women activists as shapers of TANU
organization and ideology. A central figure in Tanzanian nationalism and this book
is Bibi Titi Mohamed, the most widely recognized TANU leader aside from
Nyerere himself. Using a life-history approach, this book allows TANU women
activists to articulate their involvement in, aspirations for and expectations of
Tanzanian independence. TANU Women is many things : nationalist history, life
history and collective biography. This life history of Bibi Titi Mohamed is the
thread that unites the book from the beginning in the early s, when women
activists began to enter into the nationalist struggle, to the early s, when
several TANU veterans voice their perspectives on the meaning of the nationalist
movement for addressing women’s participation and place in the post-colonial
Tanzanian state.
" That this metanarrative remains strong in the literature on Tanzanian nationalism
can be seen in the recent collection of essays on Nyerere’s place in Tanzanian history,
which accords no role to women as actors in modern Tanzania : Colin Legum and
Geoffrey Mmari (eds.), Mwalimu : The Influence of Nyerere (London : James Currey,
).

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853799597478
    
The story of women’s involvement in TANU is rich and complex. Beginning
with a core group of women in Dar es Salaam, Geiger paints a picture of women
activists of the s : self-employed, Muslim, urban dwellers, often divorced,
with few children, and no particular ethnic consciousness. Whereas most urban
men were afraid to identify openly with TANU for fear of losing their positions in
the lower rungs of the colonial state, TANU women of Dar es Salaam had no
vested role in the colonial system and thus became the force for popularizing the
nationalist cause. Most women activists belonged to ngoma dance societies, so that
TANU women were literally ‘ constructing, embodying and performing ’ Tan-
zanian nationalism as they participated in the struggle (p. ). Ngoma societies
emerge in this history as the glue that made TANU political mobilization possible.
Several chapters move beyond Dar es Salaam to examine ‘ the hinterland ’ of
TANU nationalism, focusing on Moshi, Kilimanjaro and Mwanza, where the
social circumstances, colonial impact and political culture differed vastly from that
of Dar es Salaam. In these regions women tended to be more educated, of
Christian background and politically active before the emergence of TANU as a
result of prior mobilization against local colonial policies. As in Dar es Salaam,
many participated in ngoma, which they used to create networks that enabled
TANU leaders to mobilize local support for independence. About  women
activists are highlighted and their voices come through most profoundly when
articulating their reasons for involvement in the nationalist cause. Embedded in
the texts are tensions between these women and their husbands and fathers, their
reasons for joining TANU, and their expectations of what an independent
Tanzania would bring women. The implicit question of whether life for Tanzanian
women has improved since independence is addressed most effectively by Lucy
Lameck, a Kilimanjaro activist, who stresses the importance of having an articulate
leader like Nyerere ‘ to whom we could entrust our country ’, and an independent
state within which to fight for better conditions for women (p. ).
Geiger’s account does not focus simply on women’s participation in the success
story of Tanzanian nationalism and independence. The tensions between the
independent state’s sponsorship of the Umoja wa Wanawake wa Tanzania (Union
of Tanzanian Women), a legacy of colonial developmentalist paradigms that
viewed women as objects for improvement and the assertive, self-empowering
nationalism of Bibi Titi and her cohorts are laid bare in several concluding
chapters. Bibi Titi’s troubled relations with the increasingly authoritarian state
following independence, her fall from grace, imprisonment, and eventual ‘ re-
habilitation ’ in , are disturbing, but important, chapters of the story of
Tanzanian nationalism.
This is an important work for Tanzanian history, but also for the methodology
of oral history. Geiger’s interviews were gathered over a period of ten years, when
major transformations were taking place in the Tanzanian state and its leadership
structure, economic circumstances and the international political context. The
questions Geiger asks of her informants, such as whether their expectations of
TANU from the s were realized in the post-colonial state, have different
meanings depending on the timing of the interview, who was present (such as
neighbors, family or party functionaries), and who was asking the questions. The
reader is often left wondering how these women’s responses to questions from the
s would differ if asked in the mid-s.
The book’s strength is that it exposes the shifting historical ground which is the
context for oral history, and in so doing makes the life-history approach to writing
history a ‘ relationship between the present and the past ’ (p. ) rather than a
static, immutable truth. Geiger is not just interested in a revised, corrective meta-
narrative. This book is about the process and circumstances of remembering and

Colorado State University  

HOUSING POLICIES IN COLONIAL ALGIERS

Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations : Algiers under French Rule. By Z
Ç. Berkeley and London : University of California Press, . Pp. .
£. ( ---).
The aim of Zeynep Çelik’s study is to ‘ look at Algiers as the site of colonial
policies, based on an understanding that architecture and urban forms are key
players in definitions of culture and identity ’ (p. ). More precisely, she seeks to
study government housing policies in Algiers as a fundamental aspect of cultural
imperialism. To decide how the Algerian people should live by organizing their
space, not only the general planning of cities but also their living quarters, is indeed
a direct way of dominating their lives through their mental and physical
environment. In this regard Algiers is an interesting case-study because it
developed into a major North African city during more than a century of French
colonial rule, and its status as a settler colony greatly affected town planning.
The book is organized chronologically. The first chapter deals with the old city,
the site of early colonial intervention in the nineteenth century when there was no
concern about preserving local architecture or urban forms. Algeria was admin-
istered by the military until , and their agenda was defense ; Algiers was
initially planned not for Algerians but for expatriates and as a symbol of power.
The second chapter offers a general survey of town planning policy, including
the first plan in  by Euge' ne de Redon, the master plan approved in 
designed by Henri Prost (the famous architect and town-planner who worked in
Morocco), and the plan d ’urbanisme of . As often occurred in the colonial
context, more projects were proposed than actually implemented due to lack of
political will and financial means.
The three last chapters form the core of the study ; they explore public housing
policy, a term that the author does not use but which seems appropriate. Here the
author traces the influence on policy of the rural ‘ indigenous house ’ (ch. ) as
described by ethnologists, a model which was not suitable for the cities. The work
of several female researchers emphasized the role of women and their specific
spaces, although their findings generated a stereotyped image of local housing and
implied a static view of the gendered use of space.
The discussion of general housing policy (ch. ) is divided into several phases.
After a long period of non-intervention in the nineteenth century, the first citeT s
indigeZ nes, influenced by hygienic theories, were built in the s. In the s,
both as a response to demographic growth and in an effort to reconcile the
Algerians with French power, major new projects were launched, first under
Mayor Chevallier (–), and later with the implementation of the Plan de
Constantine (–). Finally, the author provides detailed analyses of numerous
other housing projects, notably by Fernand Pouillon and Roland Simounet.
Despite the amount of fascinating and useful information in this book, this
reader would have welcomed further exploration of certain aspects of the topic. For
example, far more plans and building projects were proposed than implemented ;
one would like to know much more about the process of decision-making, both in
Algiers and in Paris. Little is said about the structure of local government or the
participation in it of Algerians, a portion of whom had reformist ideas. The

UniversiteT Marc Bloch, Strasbourg  

C O L O N I A L A N D P O S T C O L O N I A L A B I D J AN

L’eT nergie sociale aZ Abidjan : Economie politique de la ville en Afrique noire,

–. Par M L P. Paris : Editions Karthala, . Pp. . FF 
( ---).
In France, as well as in Francophone Africa, the city stands as a favorite object
of study for social scientists. For readers unfamiliar with these approaches, Marc
Le Pape’s book, a sociological study of Abidjan, presents a number of useful
epistemological orientations. Focusing primarily on the contemporary economic
crisis in the capital of Co# te d’Ivoire, the book is of interest for historians because
it claims to shed light on the formation of urban middle classes since the colonial
period, and on the elaboration of bodies of knowledge about the city and its
inhabitants since the s.
Le Pape undertook sociological surveys of Abidjan in ,  and , and
thus has a long familiarity with the field. However, the book departs from a
classical attitude in privileging individual strategies and life stories rather than
collective patterns of survival and prosperity in the city. The first part of the book
focuses on the colonial period, a time when Abidjan experienced consistent
economic prosperity and demographic growth. Chapters  to  address discourses
and policies of tentative control over wage-earners from the s to the s, and
display a classic picture of stabilization policies. Chapter  uses judicial archives
from Abidjan’s first degree tribunal between  and . Through a few case
studies, Le Pape examines the vulnerability of city dwellers’ positions, who had to
rely primarily on capitalizing a proper ‘ reputation ’ in order to build social status.
Violence broke out because of the uncertain and fluctuating nature of these

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853799597478
    
positions. At moments of crisis, successful urbanites emerged as the ones who
mobilized a tightly knit network of family, friends, and clients who would testify
to such a reputation. Finally, Le Pape engages in deconstructing an analytical
category used by colonial and postcolonial statistics, le meT nage (household). His
field research shows that the notion does not take into account the separation
between men and women, and fails to understand how powerful communities were
elaborated around the economic and social autonomy built by women, even
married ones. Statistics also do not recover a crucial aspect of urban experience,
one that consumed important amounts of social ‘ energy ’ from city residents : the
unavoidable public nature of their life.
The last chapters (ch.  to ) analyze the contemporary economic crisis that
began in the late s. In ,  per cent of Co# te d’Ivoire’s population lived in
extreme poverty. By , thie figure had increased to  per cent. The ratio
remains much smaller in Abidjan, demonstrating that the city still stands as a
refuge during periods of economic hardship. Nonetheless, the capital has been hit
by the crisis. Le Pape reflects on long-term trends such as the increasing number
of polynuclear families, and the consistent decline of wage-earners positions. As a
result, men appear as the social category most affected by the crisis. Less engaged
in wage-earning positions, and more in petty trade and artisanat, women now
manage to capture an increasing role in urban economics. The book concludes by
examining the rise of new public sentiments in the mid-s : first, the emergence
of a new concept of national identity that increasingly portrays aliens, in a
xenophobic fashion, as a single category. Second, the author discusses the new
rupture between rich and poor people. During times of prosperity, the success
story of Co# te d’Ivoire was based on a model of enrichment as a shared social myth
linking higher and lower classes. Higher classes were seen as models, and their
strategies of economic accumulation as possible paths for everyone’s success. In
the s, the dominant perception among middle and lower classes is that of an
irrecoverable gap between rich and the poor. Interestingly, Le Pape argues that
Ivoriens remain strongly attached to social and political stability, and still believe
in economic mobility. The endurance of the Ivory Coast model is suggested by the
relatively bloodless and quiet war of succession following President Houphouet-
Boigny’s death in , and by the lack of violent protests after the devaluation of
the CFA franc in .
Le Pape’s use of life stories, and his focus on practical strategies of urban actors
is much in the vein of the new sociology inaugurated by Claudine Vidal’s,
Sociologie des passions (Paris: ). However, his analysis lacks solidity and scope.
Chapter  for example, on the regulation of labour in the s, is only  pages
long, and fails to place administrative policies in larger perspective. This short
book, had it been more firmly developed, could have been an important one.

University of Wisconsin-Madison  

THE FEMALE URBAN EXPERIENCE

Courtyards, Markets, City Streets : Urban Women in Africa. Edited by K

S. Oxford : Westview Press, . Pp. xj. £. ( --
-) ; £., paperback ( ---).
Towns are growing rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa, and increasing proportions of
populations live in urban environments. However, according to Kathleen Sheldon,
most urban studies discuss the roles of women and gender in this process simply
as ‘ add-ons ’, to be noted in passing, rather than as integral to the process of urban

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853799597478
    
growth and development. Her edited collection is intended as a corrective, setting
out to ‘ present all areas of women’s lives as central to an understanding of urban
Africa ’ and to ‘ take a gendered approach to the process of urbanization ’ (p. ).
The book certainly contains a huge amount of data about the experiences of
women in urban Africa. As a text in English, there is perhaps an inevitable bias
towards Anglophone states, but there are also chapters on Senegal (Antoine and
Nanitelamio), Zaire (Schoepf) and Cameroon (Beat Songue). There is an extensive
(though not exhaustive) bibliography compiled by Sheldon, as well as detailed
references at the end of each chapter. Sheldon’s introduction is a valuable
bibliographic survey, which situates the geographically-specific chapters within
the broader literature from across the continent. The introduction also sets out
Sheldon’s organising principle of four aspects to women’s involvement in urban
Africa : migration, courtyards (family), markets (economy) and city streets (pol-
itical activism). Above all, the introduction demonstrates the heterogeneity of
women’s experiences of urbanization, showing, for example, that in Ghana, urban
women prefer to remain single than marry an unsatisfactory partner, while in
Senegal, they want to marry at all costs. Despite its claims to the contrary, the
introduction shows that there are few, if any, common patterns to women’s urban
experiences across the continent, beyond the broadest shared context of struggle
between men and women.
There is, however, a difficulty with the book’s claim to take a gendered approach
to the process or urbanization. This claim implies that the book will demonstrate
how women have shaped, or are shaping, the urban environment, and its economy,
society, and geography. Questions of process must consider not only how, but why,
women have affected the urban spaces, and the urban spaces have affected women.
The most successful essays deal effectively with this question of interaction
between gender and urbanization. The explicit focus on the historical process of
urbanization in the section on ‘ migration ’ lends itself to insights into how and why
gender issues interact with urban environments. Robertson, for example, writing
on Nairobi, demonstrates how it was as much the attempt to keep women out of
town, as the presence of women in the towns, which shaped the social, economic
and political life of the city. Moreover, the attack on women shifted from a
question of control over women’s sexuality to a question of control over their
economic activities as the urban environment changed. A similar dialectic is seen
in Coles’ essay on Hausa women in Kaduna, which highlights how women have
defined the imagined community of the town ; these definitions are to some extent
shared by men and women, and have changed over time as women have found new
ways to live in, and recreate, the city.
This dialectic between town and gender is seen in few of the other essays. In the
section on markets, Osirim shows how women are forming the urban economy in
Harare and Bulawayo, and the chapter works well both as urban study and as
gender study. Hansen’s chapter on civil courts in Lusaka demonstrates how
urbanization has influenced ‘ traditional ’ family forms, and shows women taking an
active part in reshaping the experience of marriage for both urban men and urban
women. It provides an interesting contrast with Nauright’s piece on Alexandra
Township outside Johannesburg, where women’s agency in preserving municipal
rights, and the very existence of the township as part of the city, is explained in part
by the urban setting itself, which facilitated women’s networking and co-operation.
By contrast, Hansen shows that conflicts between women were exacerbated by the
urban setting. Both essays demonstrate a sensitivity to the dialectic between gender
and urban environment, while highlighting that there is no common female urban
experience, even within sub-regions of the continent.
Other essays are much less successful in this respect. Antoine and Nanitelamio’s
chapter on polygyny in Dakar, like Hansen’s essay, examines the reforming of

University of the West of England  

P R O P E R T Y, P O L I T I C S A N D H I S T O R Y

The Transformation of Property Rights in the Gold Coast : An Empirical Analysis

Applying Rational Choice Theory. By K F-S. Cambridge :
Cambridge University Press, . Pp. xiij. £\$. ( --
-).
This book starts from the assumption that African poverty is partly the result of
underuse of land, which in turn is the result of insecure property rights : the
insecurity discouraging investment. Firmin-Sellers considers aspects of the origins
and persistence of such insecurity in relation to the late colonial period in southern
Ghana. Within African historiography the book’s main contribution is to introduce
the language of ‘ new institutionalist ’, rational-choice, political economy to the
history of property rights in southern Ghana. Within (and outside) the family of
rational-choice political economists, the author argues against the economic-
determinist assumption that, in response to demand, the rules surrounding
economic activity gradually become more efficient at promoting economic growth.
Rather, she emphasises the importance and complexity of the political obstacles to
such an outcome. In particular, she points to conflict of sectional interest groups ;
to the costs of enforcing formal rules ; to information asymmetries within
principal–agent relations (for example, subordinates lacking incentive to give
higher authority all the relevant information they possess) ; and to ‘ path-
dependence ’ (not defined, but in this context apparently meaning the constraints
which past choices impose on future ones).
The empirical discussion centres on a comparison of the Ga and Akyem
Abuakwa ‘ traditional states ’. Firmin-Sellers argues that in both cases there was
prolonged conflict between different indigenous interests each seeking to establish
different systems of property in land. In the Ga case neither side achieved
dominance in local politics, and as a result property rights remained insecure. In
Akyem Abuakwa, in contrast, Okyenhene Ofori Atta I and J. B. Danquah achieved
political control by the end of the s. By restraining opportunistic behaviour by
stool authorities at all levels (stopping sub-chiefs selling stool land for private gain,
ending the inflation of court fees), they demonstrated a ‘ credible commitment ’ to
respect property rights. This was rewarded by rising tax revenue during the s,
which Firmin-Sellers assumes is evidence of increased willingness to ‘ invest ’ in
the state and its development budget (she dismisses in an endnote the possibility
that it might have reflected stronger enforcement : perhaps as a result of the very
fact that the Okyenhene had consolidated his authority). This argument is at least

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853799597478
    
consistent with the findings of a quantification of different categories of stool
income and expenditure during this decade : the fact that she has attempted this
tricky exercise is itself valuable. In the s, she argues, the settlement in Akyem
Abuakwa was dissolved by the CPP, which reinforced the insecurity of property
rights nationwide. Nkrumah’s party had achieved political control but used it in
ways that undermined rather than guaranteed property rights. Firmin-Sellers
offers a useful account, framed in terms of path-dependence, of how the stages of
constitution-building which the British and the CPP’s more conservative op-
ponents went through during – established some of the mechanisms for a
dominant central government which were then taken over by Nkrumah.
The general argument is interesting and suggestive, but as yet is too slight
empirically to be convincing. Firmin-Sellers has used colonial and (in Akyem
Abuakwa) chieftaincy archives, but with major gaps. In particular, there is no
reference to provincial or district records, whether administrative or judicial, and
none to the rich unofficial collection of papers in Rhodes House. Perhaps because
of this, the author seems to have lacked the access to detailed correspondence and
minutes that would have helped avoid a tendency to assert rather than to document
motive or ignorance on the part of colonial officials. A recurrent theme is
information : Firmin-Sellers argues that the colonial government, lacking ‘ the
most basic information about the African populations ’ (p. ), and unwilling to
pay the costs of gathering the information itself, relied on the chiefs : but this
control of information gave the chiefs, above all Ofori Atta, the chance to
manipulate colonial officials. Up to a point such a view of indirect rule is almost
unexceptionable. But by the period with which the author is concerned, it is
questionable whether the British were really without ‘ the most basic information ’ :
the adjectives are not defined, but under perhaps the most obvious definitions such
data were published in Cardinall’s The Gold Coast, (n.d., but c. ), which
is not cited. Again, while it is well established that the colonial government
essentially backed Ofori Atta against his African opponents, it is not clear – and the
book does not demonstrate – that this was out of any lack of information about
alternatives. The author seems to overlook the fact that colonial government
contacts with African subjects were far from confined to paramount chiefs, as an
examination of district commissioners’ diaries and correspondence would show.
Again, the British had only to read the Cape Coast press to gain access to the views
of Ofori Atta’s critics. More generally, Kobina Sekyi was scarcely a slouch at
making his positions known. If the British preferred Ofori Atta’s position, their
choice may have been informed ; to test this, one could examine the relevant
papers.
While plausibly rejecting simple economic determination of institutional change,
the author is rather uncritical about the reverse relationship ; she assumes that
institutional phenomena have determinate economic consequences – specifically,
that insecure property rights seriously inhibited productive investment. For Accra,
this claim is left precisely as an assumption, no evidence being given about the level
of investment (p. ). Similarly, the discussion of Akyem Abuakua does not
confront the fact that the cocoa take-off of the s–s had occurred within
what, on the author’s account, was presumably an insecure property rights regime.
Even more strikingly, the second great boom in Ghanaian cocoa planting, in the
mid- and late-s, took place precisely when – as Firmin-Sellers argues – such
insecurity was being reinforced. These apparent paradoxes may be capable of
resolution, but I suggest that this would require an examination of the detailed
evolution of land tenure, something which does not fit into a volume whose
empirical content is mainly about politics, local and national.
Firmin-Sellers’s book is important for its promising conceptual framework,
which is used to suggest some interesting conclusions. The empirical work shows

London School of Economics and Political Science  

ELECTIONS WITHOUT DEMOCRACY

Multi-Party Politics in Kenya : The Kenyatta and Moi States and the Triumph of
the System in the Election. By D T and C H.
Oxford : James Currey, Nairobi : E.A.E.P., and Athens : Ohio University Press.
Pp. xj. £., paperback ( ---).
Why do multi-party elections not necessarily constitute democracy ? When do
ethnic differences become dangerous ? How may economic liberalization threaten
political stability or democratization ? Such questions preoccupy scholars of
African politics, a domain enlivened during the s by a resurgence of multi-
party politics and pressures to ‘ democratize ’. Kenya’s crucial turning point was its
 election, the country’s first multi-party contest since the s. David
Throup and Charles Hornsby’s volume offers an extraordinarily detailed account
of that event.
The authors demonstrate a superb command of constituency politics, candidates’
biographies, and the jealousies, rivalries, and day-to-day changes of political
fortune that underwrite Kenya’s lively factional politics. After briefly discussing
the independence struggle, the Kenyatta state, and the pre- Moi state, the
authors devote  pages (five-sixths of the book) to the period from January 
to December . Chapter themes include the Moi regime in crisis, the rise and
fall of the opposition, ruling party repression, the electoral process, the campaign,
party primary elections, polling day events, and election results (including a -
page district-by-district analysis of apparent electoral malpractices, which inflated
the size of the ruling party’s parliamentary majority but did not affect the
presidency). Detailed appendices present constituency vote totals for primary,
parliamentary and presidential contests. Completed before Kenya’s  multi-
party election (when Moi was re-elected). The book also includes a postscript on
– politics,  election predictions and an appendix of – by-election
results. The authors draw largely on Kenyan newspapers and news journals,
reports of election observer groups, and their own interviews with political and
business elites.
A conclusion familiar to those who follow African politics is that the  return
of multipartyism in Kenya did not produce democracy (p. ). Instead multi-
party politics brought continued autocratic rule, state-sponsored ‘ ethnic ’ violence,
widespread voter registration irregularities, electoral fraud, denial of media
coverage and of public speaking opportunities to opposition politicians, abductions
and harassment of opposition candidates, and financial scandals. Whatever the
 election outcome, the ruling party (Kenya African National Union or
KANU) had no intention of relinquishing power. The news, however, is not
entirely gloomy ; the authors suggest that the  multi-party competition forced
the ruling party to ‘ rebuild its mass support ’ and brought it ‘ closer to the
grassroots ’ (p. ).
The composition of the political elite changed little, but democratization
‘ broadened political and social freedoms in Kenya significantly, and empowered a

University of Denver  

HISTORICIZING CULTURAL EXPRESSION

Inventing Masks : Agency and History in the Art of the Central Pende. By Z. S.
S. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, . Pp. xxviij. $.
( ---).
Since the academic study of African art took off in the s, new and often
controversial ideas have succeeded one another with increasing rapidity. Funda-
mentally, the critical process has been dedicated to breaking down the century-old
concept of Primitive Art, which defines it by contrast with Fine Art. Talk about
Art is in effect part of the political struggle to define civilization, to defend or
oppose relations of dominance within and between societies. Unlike Fine Art,

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853799597478
    
Primitive Art was supposedly the work of anonymous artisans, compelled by
collective ancestral tradition and therefore lacking in creative genius, whose
products, intended for religious purposes, could only be recognized as Art by
enlightened and discriminating foreign collectors. Zoe$ Strother’s study of the
masks made and used by the Pende in the southwestern part of the Democratic
Republic of Congo goes far towards the complete demolition of this condescending
view. It is one of a number of excellent recent studies which take the study of ‘ art ’
out of the museum and into the field. Innovative methods enable the author to
propose a precolonial history of Pende art.
Strother begins with the question of authorship : who invents masks ? For the
Pende, a mask is above all a dance with a theme. One invents a song, then develops
a dance to go with it, and a suitable name. Then the rhythm is worked out with
expert drummers. Finally, a sculptor is asked to make an appropriate face-piece for
the costume, an object which later may become a museum’s ‘ Pende mask ’.
Inventors are usually young men eager to make a name for themselves ; elders who
invented a famous mask are anxious (even after death) that it not be forgotten.
Mask themes include representations of personality types or situations that have
caught the imagination. Pende believe that the sexes have distinctly different
personalities reflected in their faces, and therefore in male and female masks.
Sculpture is judged by how well it abstracts from the ‘ real ’ appearance of persons
to express ontological truths by the treatment of eyes, forehead, chin and other
features. ‘ It was the sculptor’s task to give the audience a perfected vision in which
movement and inner character were stamped on the face through his mastery of
physiognomic theory’ (p. ). Strother compares Pende physiognomy with the
parallels nineteenth-century European thought established between human types
and animal species and concludes that both systems serve powerfully ‘ to
naturalize social and cultural difference by making it seem innate, inalienable and
inevitable ’ (p. ).
The mask costume as a whole is intended to enhance, visually and acoustically,
the dancer’s movement. Pende pay great attention to gestures, hairstyle and bodily
form, all considered indicative of degrees of panache. Distinguished performers go
to great trouble and expense to acquire the right kind of foot-rattles to accent the
rhythm ; three different kinds of rattle are each proper to different kinds of mask.
‘ Any dancer or musician, blindfolded, is able to identify a mask by the sound of
its foot rattles alone ’ (p. ).
A great mask, like great plays in western theater, ‘ elicits reinvention ’, without
which it would disappear. Strother compares masks to popular television pro-
grammes, which are shaped by, even in anticipation of, audience reaction. In the
process of reinvention, masks, like folksongs, gradually take on classical qualities
of perfection. In their journeys across time and space, the facepiece, costume, name
and other elements may change, but the fact that the dance remains the same
enables Strother to conclude that formally different face-pieces, which would
normally be regarded as different masks, in fact belong to the same genre. She goes
on to identify the oldest masks by their distribution in different parts of the country
which have had different political histories, and finds that although many masks
nowadays are primarily regarded as entertainment, the oldest were means of
facilitating communication with the dead.
During the colonial period a revolutionary category of masks appeared, intro-
duced by the first age-grades of men to experience the colonial system of forced
labour. Unlike the more traditional masks, these took the form of frightening
apparitions. They show that the colonial occupation was experienced as a sorcery
attack that threatened to destroy every decency of life and ‘ witness to a real fear of
annihilation ’ brought on by the demands of tax collectors, labour recruiters,
medical officers, merchants, missionaries and agricultural monitors.

University of Louisville  

H Y P O T H E S ES

The Making of Bamana Sculpture : Creativity and Gender. By S C. B-

S. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, . Pp. xxj. £ (
---).
This book is primarily based on fieldwork carried out in – in the Beledugu
and Kita areas of Mali. It also draws upon earlier fieldwork about the symbolism
of boZ goZ lan (mud cloth) dyeing, carried out in –, mainly in the Beledugu.
Earlier fieldwork resulted in a Yale doctoral dissertation (defended in ), as well
as several articles, most of which have appeared in the journal Res. The book,
which has a substantial anthropological as well as art historical focus, joins the
burgeoning literature on Bamana craftspersons and, more generally, ‘ caste people ’
(nyamakalaw).
Brett-Smith’s major claims are that carving ritual sculpture is symbolically
equivalent to sexual intercourse, and that the ritual objects are equivalent to
children. Secondary claims, which in Brett-Smith’s argumentation are intended to
support the previous ones, include assertions that the sculptor is dependent, for
success in his work, on the inspiration and protection provided by usually female
djinn ; that many successful sculptors progressively assume a feminine gender
identity ; that some exceptionally powerful ritual objects are secretly carved by
uncircumcised boys, and yet others by adult married women, of blacksmith status ;
that blacksmiths formerly had a special set of tools for carving ritual objects ; and
that the female sexual organs are extolled in a secret Komo song. (The Komo is an
adult men’s initiation society.)
Brett-Smith’s informants are not precisely located in space or social structure.
In accordance with a frequent practice in ethnographic writing, aimed at protecting
informants’ identities, Brett-Smith does not provide her interviewees’ real names.
Instead, she provides them with elaborate fictional names (personal names, clan
names, and even, apparently, in one case, a nickname). This is potentially
misleading, since clan names are closely related to social status, while other kinds
of names may connote both social status and particular circumstances of a person’s
life history. I would suggest using first names only, clan names only, initials, or
even numbers, but not fabricated full names. Worse, the only geographical
indications – ‘ Kita area ’ and ‘ Beledugu area ’ – are far too vague. Each of these
areas measures several thousand square kilometres, and is therefore characterized
by considerable variation in both culture and social structure. The author should
have at least mentioned the arrondissement in which each of her informants
habitually resided.
The book is marred too by frequent errors of translation. Most significantly,
Brett-Smith claims that fura ci designates a girls’ excision ceremony, that this
expression literally means ‘ breaking a leaf ’, and that it is an allusion to the physical
operation. However, in both the Beledugu and the Kita areas, fuZ ra refers to boys’
circumcision as well as girls’ excision. In the Beledugu area only, fuZ ra also denotes
the last in a series of marriage rituals, following which the wife may reside in her
husband’s household on a continuous basis. FuZ ra, the designation for the above
ceremonies, carries a low tone, whereas fuT ra, meaning a leaf, carries a high tone ;
they are, thus, two totally distinct words, which cannot be confused by any

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853799597478
    
Bamana, and have no etymological connection. SıZ (not ci) means a ceremony taking
place at night ; in its verbal usages, it also means ‘ to pass the night ’ (asleep or
awake, depending on context). Thus, fuZ ra sıZ means a nocturnal ceremony,
preceding any of the above rituals. In the Beledugu only, sıf fuZ ra refers to a
ceremony held by women in the earlier part of the night to celebrate an abundant
shea-nut harvest ; bilingual informants invariably translate this term as ‘ le mariage
du karite! ’ (‘ the shea nut’s wedding ’). (Sıf , meaning a shea nut or tree, carries a
rising tone, and is therefore distinct from the previous sıZ , which has a low tone).
Brett-Smith’s misinterpretation of the expression fuZ ra sıZ not only weakens her
discussion of Bamana ideas about sexuality and reproduction, but calls into
question the specific analogies she draws among the blacksmith’s varied activities
(excision [which, she believes, was often performed by men of this status] ; wood
carving ; and the fabrication of agricultural implements). Inexplicably, to, the
staple millet paste food, is spelled tot throughout the book.
Brett-Smith presents several folk etymologies that I have never encountered in
the field, and that were denied, upon inquiry, by my informants. In her own
interpretations of the etymologies and deeper meanings of Bamana words, Brett-
Smith seems to proceed by focusing on just a few of the varied meanings of each
word, and occasionally confuses unrelated words. Given the wide meaning range
of certain Bamana words, and the fact that they do not map easily onto the semantic
categories of English and other Western European languages, it is possible to prove
almost anything using this method. Consider, for example, the case of jigin, a word
that appears in Brett-Smith’s book with the meanings of ‘ to descend ’ and ‘ to give
birth ’, but that is not extensively analyzed. The word’s meanings also include : to
reveal (the Koran) ; to memorize (especially an Arabic book) ; and to manifest itself
(said of the masks of certain initiation societies). Nevertheless, Muslim informants
would surely deny that the revelation of the Koran to the Prophet Muhammad was
in any way like a birth, nor does it necessarily follow (though the possibility may
be worth investigating) that some persons perceive an analogy between memoriz-
ation of the Koran and the initial revelation, or between the Koranic revelation and
some masquerades. Quite probably, the only element of meaning common to all
the above uses of jigin is that of a (literal or metaphorical) change of position.
A penultimate point. Brett-Smith repeatedly implies that she is continuing the
research tradition inaugurated by Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen ; she
stresses that, like them, she privileges the statements of several exceptionally
knowledgeable informants. However, it must be noted that, whatever its other
shortcomings, Marcel Griaule’s and Germaine Dieterlen’s work on the Dogon was
based on – and presents – the results of interviews with a large number of
informants; clearly identifies all informants; involved long-term personal relation-
ships with key informants; and was not based on systematic mistranslation, though
it may well contain some errors (more excusable in the context of the s to
s than in that of the s to s).
In conclusion, Sarah Brett-Smith has presented us with several hypotheses.
However, given the weakness of her fieldwork methods, each of her findings will
have to be independently corroborated before it is accepted.

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique  

SHORTER NOTICES

Malagasy, ‘ un pas de plus ’. L’unification de Madagascar. Tome III : –. By

M P. Paris et Montre! al : L’Harmattan, . Pp. . FF  ( -
--).
There is a long tradition of foreign visitors to Madagascar who have been
inspired to write on the history of the Great Red Island. Many are people who, like
Michel Prou, are not professional historians but first came to know the island in
some other capacity and were then led to do further research. In this case, the
fascination exercised by Madagascar has resulted in the production of a trilogy on
the long nineteenth-century history of Imerina, the central region of the island
which has constituted its political centre of gravity throughout the last two
centuries. This third and final volume of the series deals with the French invasion
of , the suppression of various armed resistance movements and governor-
ship of General Gallieni which did so much to mould the subsequent history of
French colonization. Gallieni is the central figure of this volume and is seen as
providing the climax to the unification of the island.
M. Prou provides us with a detailed reconstruction of the actions of the French
colonial government through the reports of the officers who imposed colonial
administration on every region of Madagascar. Although the book is based on
extensive archival research, it includes no footnotes because, the author tells us, to
include them would have doubled the length of an already long text. This is
indicative of a failure to think through exactly for whom the book is intended : it
is far too detailed to attract any general reader or even professional historians of
anywhere except Madagascar, but at the same time lacks the scholarly apparatus or
the attention to various scholarly debates which specialist malgachisants would
expect. At the same time it is written in a narrative style which, while having the
virtue of being quite readable, is hardly enough in itself to attract a general
readership. The net result is a rather old-fashioned narrative which, while based
on scrupulous research, pays scant attention to the inner workings of Malagasy
society and passes over many aspects of social, intellectual and economic history.
It provides probably the most detailed account yet produced of the bureaucratic
history of the ten years of French colonization.

Afrika-studiecentrum, Leiden  

Transatlantic Slavery : Against Human Dignity. Edited by A T.

London : HMSO, . Pp . £., paperback ( : ---).
This book is the catalogue of the permanent exhibition on the Atlantic slave
trade recently opened in the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool. It
comprises, besides numerous illustrations, fifteen brief essays on aspects of the
operation, impact and longer-term consequences of the slave trade in Africa,
Europe and the Americas ; and a concluding ‘ catalogue ’ of the exhibits (the great
majority of which are actually illustrated in the book). The essays are mostly
written by academics who served as guest curators in the preparation of the
exhibition, and are described as being ‘ adaptations of briefing papers prepared for
the gallery ’ (p. ). They differ markedly in character, however, including both
attempts at balanced synthesis and personal (in one or two cases, polemical)
statements ; and their sequence and scope do not seem to correspond with the
organization of the exhibition itself, as reflected in the catalogue. Nevertheless,
their authors include some of the leading authorities in relevant fields, and the best
of them represent excellent examples of brevity without sacrificing clarity or

University of Stirling  

La recherche en histoire et l’enseignement de l’histoire en Afrique centrale francophone :

Actes du colloque international organiseT par l’UniversiteT de YaoundeT , l’UniversiteT
de BueT a, l’UniversiteT de Provence, l’UniversiteT de Bangui, Aix-en Provence, –
et avril . Institut d’Histoire Compare! e des Civilisations, Universite! de
Provence. Aix-en-Provence : Publications de l’Universite! de Provence, . Pp.
. FF  ( ---).
Included in this volume are the programme, opening and closing remarks,
summary of discussions and all but two of the thirty papers presented at this 
conference devoted to historical research and teaching in the former French
colonies of central Africa. More archival document than edited publication, the
reader encounters both dross and riches. There are reports on teaching and
research climates in Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Mali, Congo-
Brazzaville, Chad, Senegal, Gabon and the United States. Only in America are
things going at all well, as universities and pedagogical institutes on the African
continent uniformly share a lack of resources as well as a complex participation in
the politics of developing and disseminating nationalist history.
There are papers from prominent historians of Central Africa based in the west
– notably Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Phyllis Martin and David Birmingham
– but this volume’s greatest contribution is to voice the concerns pressing upon
francophone African scholars located in Libreville, Ndjamena, Bangui, Bue! a and
Yaounde! . With half the papers focusing on Cameroon, a number of scholars –

Florida International University  

Historical Dictionary of Tunisia. By K J. P. London : The Scarecrow

Press, Inc. . nd edition. Pp. xxviij. £. ( ---).
This volume provides a wealth of information for scholars, students, and others
interested in Tunisia. Tunisia itself has a long, complex, and in some ways unique
history. For example, the country has been a cross-roads of civilization since
Phoenician times. More recently, although its Arab and Islamic personality
predominates, it has been heavily influenced by Mediterranean cultural currents as
well.
Other distinguishing characteristics include the country’s experience in the
nineteenth century with modernization and reform ; the character of its successful
struggle against French colonialism ; the highly effective single-party regime that
emerged after independence ; programmes of radical reform in such areas as
religion and women’s rights, the latter contributing to Tunisia’s striking success in
family planning and birth control ; an early transition from socialism to state
capitalism and subsequently to privatization ; and the rise and decline of several
experiments in political liberalization.
To provide information about these and many other topics, Kenneth Perkins’
valuable volume offers a detailed chronology, a list of Tunisian rulers since ,
and a thoughtful introductory essay describing the country’s geography, popu-
lation, economy and history. The heart of the book is the dictionary itself, which
provides short, and sometimes not-so-short, accounts of hundreds of events, places
and personalities, and such diverse topics as music, olives, women and the Young
Tunisian Movement. Finally, the book contains a ‘ Selected twentieth-century
bibliography ’, which lists hundreds of books and articles grouped according time
period or topic. The latter includes domestic politics, Islam and politics, inter-
national relations, education and culture, language, the media, religion, women
and more.
All who are interested in Tunisia owe Perkins a debt for his fine contribution.
While it is possible to quibble here and there with a particular dictionary account
or with failure to include an entry that might have been useful, overall, this
volume, is an enormously valuable reference work.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee  

Afrika-studiecentrum, Leiden  

Slave Captain : The Career of James Irving in the Liverpool Slave Trade. Edited,
with an introduction, by S S. Wrexham, Clwyd : Bridge Books,
. Pp. . £., paperback ( ---).
Slave Captain relates the story of Captain James Irving, a Scot in the Liverpool
slave trade, who, along with ten crew (including his cousin and namesake), was
shipwrecked and enslaved in Morocco for  months in –. While in
captivity, Irving wrote a ,-word journal of his experiences, a transcription of
which was deposited anonymously in the Lancashire Record Office in .
Suzanne Schwarz reproduces this manuscript in section two, and corroborates its
details through careful examination of shipping documents, the Irvings’ personal
correspondence and Foreign Office papers in the Public Record Office relating to
British attempts to negotiate their freedom. The letters regarding Captain Irving’s
slave-trade career and his later African captivity are reproduced in section three.
Schwarz’s introduction first places Irving’s career in the context of the late
eighteenth-century British slave trade. We learn that Irving worked as surgeon on
five Liverpool slave voyages before attaining command of a small slaving schooner

Harvard University        .        

Journal of a Missionary Tour to the Labaya Country (Guinea\Conakry) in . By

Revd. J U G (Edited by B L. M). Leipzig : University
of Leipzig (Papers on Africa, History and Culture Series, no. ) . Pp. vj.
No price given ( ---).
John Ulrich Graf was a Swiss (or German) native who served for many years as
a missionary to the ‘ liberated Africans ’ of the Sierra Leone colony. In , he was
commissioned by the Church Missionary Society to lead an expedition to the
Susu-speaking region to the north of the colony. Accompanied by six members of
his Gloucester congregation, Graf sought out areas where Islam was not yet so
entrenched as to elide the Christian message. The expedition followed the
Konkoure! river inland, and Graf had hoped to continue to the Solima Yalunka
kingdom. This plan was abandoned when an illness exacerbated his frustration
with local protocols of travel. The expedition turned for home shortly after
reaching Doubouya in Labaya country.
Bruce Mouser’s edited transcript of Graf’s journal appears here in the first of a
new series of research papers, published by the University of Leipzig under the
general editorship of Adam Jones. Alterations to the original (English) text are kept
to a minimum, and editorial contributions amount to an introduction, a com-
prehensive index and numerous informative footnotes. By these means, the
reader’s attention is drawn to issues of comparative historical interest. Graf’s
operational methods are particularly noteworthy. In order to cut costs, Graf was
determined to pay directly for food and lodging. This represented a departure
from the established practice whereby a local leader would accept a gift from a
traveller on the understanding that, as ‘ landlord ’, he would provide hospitality and
safe passage to the next major town. Graf’s stubborn adherence to his own methods
frequently tried the patience of his hosts – especially when he arrived, un-
announced, in villages holding initiation ceremonies.
Many European and Krio travellers in the pre-colonial Upper Guinea Coast

Croydon, Surrey  

La reT pression de la traite des Noirs au XIX e sieZ cle : L’action des croisieZ res françaises
sur les coV tes occidentales de l’Afrique (–). Par S D. Paris :
E! ditions Karthala, . Pp. . FF , paperback ( ---).
This posthumous publication, based on a  thesis, now somewhat ab-
breviated, has appeared partly as a tribute to a distinguished historian of the later
stages of the Atlantic slave trade, who himself spent time editing the census of
French slavers assembled by Jean Mettas, another historian who also died
prematurely. Daget deals courageously and doggedly with a subject delicate for a
French historian. After Waterloo, the terms of peace pushed France into measures
against the slave trade. From , a French navel fleet operated off western
Africa, ostensibly to help to suppress the trade, but in actuality, up to at least the
s, more to hold off British seizure of French slavers. Repression was regarded
in Paris as another trick of perfidious Albion, laid on in order to damage French
economic interests in Africa. Hence, support for naval action against slave ships
was deliberately weak and devious. Only slowly was effective legislation enacted.
‘ L’e! goı$ sme national prime et la cause des ne' gres dans tout cela paraı# t bien
lointaine ’ (p. ) – so the editor in his preface summarises Daget’s argument.
While the validity of the claim is better left to French historians to assess, the
exhaustive detail supplied by Daget about the period’s illegal or dubiously legal
French slaving voyages contains much of direct interest to African historians.
On relevant sections of the coast, such as Sierra Leone and the Niger delta,
unpublished sources in French and British archives are lavishly cited. Some
voyages are described in detail ; while in general, what can be quantified is counted
and presented in tables. A certain amount is learned about some of the African
polities of the coast, their trading elites and their reactions to intensifying
European contacts. Anglo-French rivalry produced one minor benefit for students
of the pre- Guinea coast who are attempting to identify localities and
toponyms. The early close mapping of the Guinea coast by the Hydrographic
Section of the British navy, resulting in the African Pilot as well as a series of
standard charts, was rapidly followed up and challenged by French naval
hydrographers, notably Boue$ t-Willaumez, who published his Description nautique
in . However, the immediate effect of the rivalry was to determine to some
extent the pattern of subsequent colonial expansion – not merely that West Africa
would be divided between Britain and France but that each would gain favoured
places on the coast. Daget concludes by pointing out that humanitarian sentiments
eventually overcame diplomatic and economic constraints, but did so only by the
acceptance of the view that to enslave Africans was to practise the barbarity of the
Africans themselves, from which they could only be positively relieved by the
mission civilisatrice of colonial rule.

University of Liverpool . . . 

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The Monuments of Aksum. Edited and Annotated by D: # Cambridge University Press

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The Monuments of Aksum. Edited and Annotated by D: # Cambridge University Press

Uploaded by

Journal of African History,  (), pp. –.

Printed in the United Kingdom 

The Monuments of Aksum. Edited and annotated by D W. P. Addis

A History of Christianity in Africa : From Antiquity to the Present. By E

School of Oriental and African Studies  

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University of Cambridge  

University of Wisconsin-Madison  

‘BIOGRAPHY’ OF AN AFRICAN DEITY

Universidade Federal da Bahia  

Addis Ababa University  

History and Traditions of the Gonja. By J. A. B, H. H. T and

Northwestern University  

University of Helsinki  

THE LITERARY OEUVRE OF A ‘REMARKABLE

Collected Works of Nana Asma’u, Daughter of Usman dan Fodio (–). By

School of Oriental and African Studies  

NIUMI IN WORLD HISTORY

Trent University, Ontario  

Imperialism and Colonialism : Essays on the History of European Expansion. By

York University, Toronto . .     -       

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School of Oriental and African Studies,

University of Cape Town    

Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst  

York University, Toronto     .       

THE FRENCH COLONIAL EMPIRE

Greater France : A History of French Overseas Expansion. By R A.

York University, Toronto . .     -       

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School of Oriental and African Studies,

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UniversiteT Marc Bloch, Strasbourg  

L’eT nergie sociale aZ Abidjan : Economie politique de la ville en Afrique noire,

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Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique  

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Afrika-studiecentrum, Leiden  

Transatlantic Slavery : Against Human Dignity. Edited by A T.

University of Stirling  

La recherche en histoire et l’enseignement de l’histoire en Afrique centrale francophone :

Florida International University  

Historical Dictionary of Tunisia. By K J. P. London : The Scarecrow

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee  

Afrika-studiecentrum, Leiden  

Journal of a Missionary Tour to the Labaya Country (Guinea\Conakry) in  . By

Collected Works of Nana Asma’u, Daughter of Usman dan Fodio (–). By

West Africans in Britain, –. By H A. London : Lawrence and

Orishatukeh Faduma : Liberal Theology and Evangelical Pan-Africanism, –

Journal of a Missionary Tour to the Labaya Country (Guinea\Conakry) in . By