David Birmingham

Nkrumah and the Chiefs: The Politics of Chieftaincy in Ghana 1951-60

The end of independent chieftaincy must be one of the most fundamental changes in the long history of Ghana, and one of the central achievements that Kwame Nkrumah and his movement brought about. Nkrumah & the Chiefs examines a radical nationalist governments attempts to destroy chieftaincy in Ghana. Richard Rathbones pioneering work shows how chiefly resistance forced the government to seek control over rural areas by incorporating and redefining chieftaincy. Based primarily on previously unconsulted archival and other material in Ghana, Nkrumah & the Chiefs is a detailed analysis of this neglected side of Ghanas history.

The Date and Significance of the Imbangala Invasion of Angola

The study of Central African history is still in its infancy. Valuable indications can, however, be obtained by combining the study of oral traditions with that of Portuguese documentary evidence for events taking place near the coasts. It has long been known, for instance, that the overthrow of the powerful Songye rulers of the Luba country indirectly caused long-distance migrations, one of which, that of the Imbangala, came into contact with the Portuguese in Angola. Previous analyses of this migration have suggested that it culminated in the early seventeenth century. In this paper an attempt has been made to show that the Imbangala arrived in Angola much earlier, probably by the mid sixteenth century and certainly before 1575. This date indicates that the Luba invasion of Lunda, which was the direct cause of the migration, probably took place in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Finally, it has been tentatively suggested that the overthrow of Songye rule and the establishment of a new, expansionist Luba empire might have taken place as much as a century earlier, from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century.

The Coffee Barons of Cazengo

This chapter is based on several months of exploration conducted in 1973 in the previously little-used nineteenth-century archives then housed in the colonial museum at Luanda. At the time when the research was undertaken Angola was the world’s fourth largest producer of coffee. It was therefore interesting to find detailed evidence concerning the origins of colonial land appropriation policies and labour recruitment practices which were later to dominate the economic history of the twentieth century. The work was previously published in 1978 in the Journal of African History (Cambridge University Press). A version of this paper was discussed at the conference on Southern African History held at the National University of Lesotho in August 1977.

Administration and Taxation in Former Portuguese Africa 1900–1945

financial dealings” (20). Similarly, the 1834 abolition of slavery across the Empire is presented as a straightforward story of “Britons who would no longer tolerate the practice” (27) without Africans featuring much at all. The violence of explorers like Henry Morton Stanley is minimized. Later, Kwame Nkrumah is treated with scandalous disrespect as a mere corrupt kleptocrat in an extended gossipy section that cites only the accounts of journalist Martin Meredith. Another significant issue is the absence of gender from much of the book. To be sure, there are gendered moments, for example the treatment meted out in concentration camps during the South African war and the subsequent outcry in Britain. But important opportunities to gender discussion of the Atlantic slave trade, colonial economic policies, and nationalist movements are missed. Few African women appear in the book, and many of those who do are fictional characters, in particular characters from the works of Buchi Emecheta. Equally problematically, the authors do not take the time to explain or examine the scope of their project. With a narrative firmly based in Africa, the work does not engage questions of how Africans (and British encounters with Africa) helped to produce and reproduce British ideas of self, at least until the very last chapter. Similarly, we learn little about Africans’ analysis of Britishness and their decisions to emulate, reject, or adapt British values, culture, and socio-economics. Sources for engaging these questions do exist – for example, such newspapers as The African Times and The Gold Coast Times – but source analysis is outside the scope of this project and it shows. The weakness and strength of different sections seems entirely dependent on the research expertise of the authors and the uneven nature of the secondary sources they consulted, which are in any case hidden in footnotes rather than explored historiologically. Equally, there is no questioning of what it means to try to analyze Anglophone Africa separately from neighboring African societies and states. The drawback of this division becomes glaring in sections on modern West Africa, especially, whose many British colonies and Anglophone states were surrounded by Francophone communities with which they interacted extensively. This is not to say that Africans and Britons in the Age of Empires does not highlight important stories and themes. One cannot help but wonder, however, whether we are not being left out of deep discussions about identity, experience, and worldview that occurred in the classrooms from which this volume emerged. I would welcome an edition that undertook to present debates as well as stories, featured primary sources, was more deeply gendered, demonstrated the ways in which the African experience produced modern Britain, and asked questions about what it meant to be Anglophone and African over a long period of time.

The Regimento da Mina

Attempts by Portugal to control the supply of gold mined on the West African Gold Coast were regulated by detailed sets of royal instructions. One of these was the Regimento of 1529 which outlined the methods used to manipulate the price paid for gold. The fortress of Mina, built in 1481 and stoutly defended until the Dutch captured it in 1637, was the key trading factory in which gold was bought in exchange for textiles, ornamental jewellery and brassware. The Portuguese also sold slave labourers to the Akan gold merchants and mine owners. It is thought possible that Chnstopher Columbus may have visited Mina while in Portuguese service and before he set out to explore the gold-mining opportunities of the Caribbean on behalf of Castile. This article first appeared in the Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana (Vol. 11, 1971).

Portugal’s Impact on Africa

In the year 1488 Bartholomew Dias became the first European mariner to sail the entire length of the Atlantic and reach the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. A century later Bartholomew’s grandson Paulo followed in his wake and disembarked on the coast of Angola bent on conquering an empire in Africa. Five hundred years after the epic voyage a replica of Bartholomew’s ship retraced his route in 1988. This chapter, written for History Today on the occasion of that anniversary exploit, examines the long-term economic consequences of the opening of the Atlantic and explores the origins of modern colonialism.

Colonialism in Angola: Kinyama’s Experience

This story is not history but is fiction based on historical circumstances. It was not intended for publication, but was given as a lecture at the University of Cape Town in 1977 in an attempt to illuminate, for the benefit of South Africans, the colonial situation in which their army had become embroiled. The lecture’s subsequent publication by the Historical Society of Nigeria in the journal Tarikh in 1980 led to its use for training undergraduates in the United States. This inspired not merely its inclusion in this collection, but the very idea of publishing a collection at all. Kinyama, it must nonetheless be emphasised, remains a fictional peasant. He was created out of the author’s imagination even if the traumatic experiences attributed to his life, and to his family, closely mirror real events in Portuguese colonial Africa in the last decades of empire.

Iberian Conquistadores and African Resisters in the Kongo Kingdom

This chapter consists of a lecture presented at the international congress of historians held in Madrid in 1990 and it was published in the two volumes of congress transactions. The topic was shaped to reflect the Spanish tradition of land-hungry colonial conquistadores. Although the Portuguese commercial tradition of seafaring colonial activity was very different from the Spanish military practice, the Portuguese empire in Central Africa was nonetheless deeply influenced by Spanish custom in the century from 1568 to 1665.

Traditions, Migrations and Cannibalism

This paper was originally presented to a university seminar in Dar-es-Salaam in August 1971. It was firmly sub-titled ‘an entertainment on the problems of historical evidence’. Unsubstantiated oral tradition would have some historians believe that a variant of it was later read in absentia to a conference of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom. There is no written record of either variant ever having been published. It is offered here as a quixotic and fossilised example of the historiography of the era.

Angola and the Church

This chapter, the most recently researched essay in this book, was presented in Portuguese to a congress hosted by the Angolan National Archives in the parliament building at Luanda in August 1997. The participants were not only old freedom fighters, seasoned politicians, administrators from the Ministry of Culture, and university academics, but also a new generation of young Angolan undergraduates. The paper attempts to encourage this rising generation of scholars to widen its range of social history to include the religious dimensions. A rich diversity of published and archival material spans 500 years of Angolan experience. This English-language version was published in the Neue Zeitschrift fur Missionswissenschaft vol. 54, (Immensee,* 1998) Number 4.