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Slaves and ivory were also brought from the interior to the east coast, where the Arabs bought them and transported them to Arabia and Persia in dhows.

st, where the Arabs bought them and transported them to Arabia and Persia in dhows. The passage between Zanzibar and southern Arabia usually took between 30 and 35 days. The short passage from Kilwa to Zanzibar took only 24 hours, so no food for slaves was taken aboard. If the winds failed and the boat was becalmed for a few days

Throughout the nineteenth century demand was greater than the supply, and the price moved steadily upwards

Admittedly, the final estimates for the Saharan slave trade are very poor. This is also true for the Red Sea slave trade. However, it will be shown that all of the statistical results are completely robust with or without the estimates of slaves shipped during these two slave trades. That is, the statistical findings remain even if the Red Sea and Saharan slave trades are completely ignored because of the poor quality of their data. Combining the ethnicity data with the shipping data, estimates of the number of slaves taken from each country in Africa are constructed. 26 The construction procedure follows the following logic. Using the shipping data, the number of slaves shipped from each coastal country in Africa is first calculated. As mentioned, the problem with these numbers is that slaves shipped from the ports of a coastal country may not have come from that country, but from inland countries that lie landlocked behind the coastal country. To estimate the number of slaves shipped from the coast that would have come from these inland countries, the sample of slaves from the ethnicity data is used. Each ethnicity is first mapped to modern country boundaries. This step relies on a great amount of past research by African historians. The authors of the secondary sources, from which the data were taken, generally also provide a detailed analysis of the meaning and locations of the ethnicities appearing in the historical records. In many of the publications, the authors created maps showing the locations of the ethnic groups recorded in the documents. For example, detailed maps are provided in Higman’s samples from the British Caribbean, Koelle’s linguistic inventory of free slaves in Sierra Leone, Mary Karasch’s samples from Rio de Janeiro, Aguirre Beltran’s sample from plantation and sales records from Mexico, Adam Jones’ sample of liberated child slaves from Sierra Leone, and David Pavy’s sample of slaves from Colombia. 27 Other sources also provide excellent summaries of the most common ethnic designations used during the slave trades. These include Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, ethnographer George Peter Murdock’s Africa: Its Peoples and Their Cultural History, and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s

Admittedly, the final estimates for the Saharan slave trade are very poor. This is also true for the Red Sea slave trade. However, it will be shown that all of the statistical results are completely robust with or without the estimates of slaves shipped during these two slave trades. That is, the statistical findings remain even if the Red Sea and Saharan slave trades are completely ignored because of the poor quality of their data. Combining the ethnicity data with the shipping data, estimates of the number of slaves taken from each country in Africa are constructed.The construction procedure follows the following logic. Using the shipping data, the number of slaves shipped from each coastal country in Africa is first calculated. As mentioned, the problem with these numbers is that slaves shipped from the ports of a coastal country may not have come from that country, but from inland countries that lie landlocked behind the coastal country. To estimate the number of slaves shipped from the coast that would have come from these inland countries, the sample of slaves from the ethnicity data is used. Each ethnicity is first mapped to modern country boundaries. This step relies on a great amount of past research by African historians. The authors of the secondary sources, from which the data were taken, generally also provide a detailed analysis of the meaning and locations of the ethnicities appearing in the historical records. In many of the publications, the authors created maps showing the locations of the ethnic groups recorded in the documents. For example, detailed maps are provided in Higman’s samples from the British Caribbean, Koelle’s linguistic inventory of free slaves in Sierra Leone, Mary Karasch’s samples from Rio de Janeiro, Aguirre Beltran’s sample from plantation and sales records from Mexico, Adam Jones’ sample of liberated child slaves from Sierra Leone, and David Pavy’s sample of slaves from Colombia.Other sources also provide excellent summaries of the most common ethnic designations used during the slave trades. These include Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, ethnographer George Peter Murdock’s Africa: Its Peoples and Their Cultural History, and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links. Many of the ethnic groups in the ethnicity sample do not map cleanly into one country. The quantitatively most important ethnic groups that fall into this category include: the Ana, Ewe, Fon, Kabre, and Popo, who occupied land in modern Benin and Togo; the Kongo, who resided in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola; the Makonde, localized within Mozambique and Tanzania; the Malinke, who occupied lived within Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Guinea Bissau; the Nalu, from Guinea Bissau and Guinea; the Teke, living in land within Gabon, Congo, and Democratic Republic of Congo; and the Yao from Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania. In cases such as these, the total number of slaves from each ethnic group was divided between the countries using information from George Peter Murdock’s Africa: Its Peoples and Their Cultural History. Ethnic groups were first mapped to his classification of over 800 ethnic groups for Africa. Using a digitized version of a map provided in his book and GIS software, the proportion of land area in each country occupied by the ethnic group was calculated. These proportions were then used as weights to disaggregate the total number of slaves of an ethnicity between the countries. Using the ethnicity sample, an estimate of the number of slaves shipped from each coastal country that would have come from each inland country is calculated. Using these figures, the number of slaves that came from all countries in Africa, both coastal and inland, is then calculated. Because over time, slaves were increasingly being taken from further inland, the estimation procedure is performed separately for each of the following four time periods: 14001599, 1600-1699, 1700-1799, 1800-1900. In other words, for each time period, the shipping data and ethnicity data from that time period only is used in the calculations. In the end, the procedure yields estimates of the number of slaves taken from each country in each of the four slave trades for each of the four time periods listed above.

ivory was the basis of several kinds of transactions at the coast. It was used to discharge the debts of those who traded in the interior and was the basis for the further extension of credit, often in the form of trade goods. It was also the basis for the authority of senior merchants like Tippu Tip, who used it to acquire guns and trade goods

Shaka, as Makuza indicated, was very much taken up with muskets and their military potential.

Spear and shield had again won the day, reinforcing the traditionalist Zulu military ethos, and wiping away memories of the disastrous war against the Voortrekkers.

ond, it analyzes the consequences of the subsequent cattle losses in South Africa, and notably Natal, by examining the huge demand that arose for imported cattle and the role of Madagascar as a major supplie

Africa in 1896-1897, cattle diseases and other natural blights were ravaging stock and causing immense concern to farmers and political

y diminishing rainfall. De Kiewet claims that between 1882 and 1925 South Africa suffered from a severe drought approximately every

possible to maintain and the disease spread rapidly through Pondoland in the early 1880s to Kaffraria and the Cape Colo

Cape before the end of 1896 and in late November 1897 Cape Town w

by 77 percent in 1897, compared to a decrease for white-owned stock of 48 percent. Subsequently white owned stock, increased although in 1898 the number of African-owned cattle decreased by a further 34 percent: Thus whereas Africans in Natal possessed 494,402 cattle in 1896, just over double the total white owned stock, by 1898 their cattle stock had plummeted to 75,842, or just under half the number of cattle owned by whites.18 A second epidemic of rinderpest hit South Africa in 1901, its impact accentuated by the demand for cattle established by the South African War of 18991902. Moreover, it was closely followed by an outbreak of East Coast Fever, a disease that caused as much destruction to cattle, albeit over a more extended period of time, as rinderpest. East Coast Fever first attracted the atten

For example, Ballard claims that as a result of rinderpest and a locust plague, the maize and sorghum crop declined by between 24 and 98 percent in fifteen out of the twenty-four Natal administrative districts in 1895-1896.39 This combined with the rapid expansion or urban mining centers meant that by 1899 South Africa was generally no longer self-sufficient in food. Competition from foreign suppliers grew as freight rates declines due to improved transport facilities, in the form of ocean steam ships and the rapid extension inland of railways. The result was an increase in imported wheat, maize, vegetable and dairy products. Madagascar emerged as an important supplier of both maize, a staple food crop in Natal, and beans in the periods 1877-188

It was precisely in the 1870s - the Scramble for Africa - that Africans became more deeply enmeshed in southern Africa's emerging capitalist economy, frequently using their wages to buy guns. African gun ownership concerned both British and Boer settlers, who saw firearms not only as tools of civilian life on the frontier but also as instruments of political power. It also concerned British and Boer officials, who incorporated disarmament into their plans to despoil Africans of their land. While developing plans to disarm, dispossess, and disenfranchise Africans, British settlerpoliticians argued that whites should take care to maintain their skills with arms - not to denude the environment of animals but to defend against attacks by dangerous Africans.

G. 3 Southern Africa in the 1870s. (Map by author and

To understand colonial gun control, it is important to r

colonies of

olitics. The commission's investigations did overturn one stereotype. Throughout the English-speaking world, settlers on the frontier were supposed to be heavily armed and skilled with weapons. Yet the testimony before the commission revealed that settlers in the Eastern Cape were lightly armed and inexperienc

ces. According to the 50th Ordinance of 1828, all Cape citizens were equal before the law

y. Guns had been subject to.a variety of sporadically enforced regulations since the seventeenth century. In the 1870s, permits to purchase firearms could be issued by unsalaried justices of the peace as well as by salaried resident magistrates. Rules for issuing permits were spelled out in the colony's Circular No. 4 of 1874, which instructed resident magistrates to issue gun permits only to Africans who were "fit" to possess guns without defining how, exactly, they were to determine fitne

n Africa had different native policies. There were two independent Boer republics across the Orange River from the Cape Colony, the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (also known as the Transvaal). These restricted citizenship to European men and deprived Africans of all civic rights, including any right to possess weapons. To the east, in the British colony of Natal, guns had to be registered with British magistrates who supervised African chiefs. (African chiefdoms remained substantially intact so that chiefs might administer customary law under the supervision of the colony's lieutenant governor.) Chiefs retained a degree of autonomy in certain other regions along the Cape Colony's borders, such as the Transkei, Lesotho, and Griqualand East, while the Mpondo remained indepen

s.35 In 1876 the British settlers of the Eastern Cape began to protest what they considered irregularities in the regulation of African gun ownership. The debates that ensued acquired a broad significance for South African politics, and their prominence, in parliament and in newspapers, accented the importance of skills in the use of firearms and highlighted the everyday practice of carrying weapon

Justices of the peace received no such instructions, and many settlers felt that they were too liberal in issuing permits

For example, the Maasai, who were important intermediaries in the ivory trade, did not hunt elephants themselves but gained access to ivory through groups of Dorobo and Okiek, sometimes using ties such as marriage and sometimes forcing these hunters to turn over both elephant ivory and hippopotamus teeth for minimal compensation (Wright, 1985, p. 546; Kasfir, 1992, p. 322-3).

This allowed for substantial accu- mulation on the part of intermediaries in the trade; it also allowed these inter- mediaries to continue to profit even as their operating costs grew with the increased distance of the ivory frontier from the coast (Sheriff, 1986 and 1987).

In spite of the rhetoric of peace and order, the destruction at the leading edge of Swahili expansion in the Eastern Congo - which involved raids on villages, removal of people and property, confiscation or destruction of food crops, and the spread of small pox - was only slowly followed by the estab- lishment of a new order.

he first participants in the trade were elephants, the only group for whom ivory was truly essential. Tusks had and have important functions for elephants. They are used in feeding, in marking territory, as both offensive and defensive weapons, and as markers of status (Shoshani, 1992, p. 48). The questions for further study arising here relate to the ways in which hunting by humans affected elephant populations. To what extent were their physical reproduction and collective behaviour affected as they were reduced in numbers left: 263.997px; top: 561.245px; fon