Barrie Sharpe - Review of Literature on Jos

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Review: Headpanners and Dredgers: Theory in Plateau Studies Author(s): Barrie Sharpe Review by: Barrie Sharpe Source: Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 53, No. 4 (1983), pp. 84-91Published by: on behalf of the Cambridge University Press International African InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1159717Accessed: 13-03-2015 05:15 UTC

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Africa 53(4), 1983

Review article

HEADPANNERS AND DREDGERS: THEORY IN PLATEAU STUDIES

Barme Sharpe B. FREUND, Capital and Labour in the Nigerian Tin Mines, Ibadan history series, London,

Longman,1981, 275 pp., maps, bibliography, index, ?21.

J. C. MULLER, Du Bon Usage du Sexe et du Marnage: structures matrimoniale du Haute Plateau Nigerien, Serge Fleury (ed.), C.P. 67, Succursale B, Quebec, Canada, pp. 283, maps, plates. No price.

E. ISICHEI (ed.), Studies in the History ofPlateau State, Nigeria, London, Macmillan, 1982, 304 pp., maps, plates, ?25.

SISTER M. DE PAUL NEIERS, The Peoples of the Jos Plateau, Nigeria: their philosophy, manners, and customs, Peter D. Lang, 1979, 215 pp., maps, plates, Cirencester. No price.

J. C. MULLER, Parente et Mariage chez les Rukuba, Paris, Mouton, 1976, 206 pp., figs. No price.

The publication of these five books indicates a significant increase of interest in the history and sociology of a hitherto peripheral part of Nigeria. For many years the Jos region has been conceived of as a refuge area inhabited by 'archaic' societies. In the course of the last decade and a half, improvements in our understanding of Plateau society have stemmed largely from anthropological studies by Netting, Sangree, Muller and, in a rather different discourse, Plotnicov (1971). The books reviewed here can be grouped in relation to the currently prevailing anthropological bias of Plateau studies. Freund and some of the contributors to Isichei's volume use very little of the anthropological literature. Professor Isichei and Sister Neiers both use ethnography within the context of their respectively historical and pastoral projects. The two works by Muller are entirely within the ethnographic and theoretical discourse to which Muller has contributed largely, and Du Bon Usage is in fact a structuralist overview of the existing ethnographic literature. In this review I shall be concerned to create a confrontation between these historical, ethnographic and economic analyses.

Probably the most significant of the works under review is Freund's Capital and Labour, a thesis-length study of the development of the Plateau tin-mines from the pre-colonial period almost to the present day. Freund argues that this development has been largely conditioned by developments in the composition of capital, the vicissitudes of tin prices on the world market and the kinds of articulations existing between Plateau and capitalist modes of production. The book is wide-ranging in its scope. The early chapters sketch the organization of tin production before colonial penetration as a system embedded in the gida (Hausa/'house'). According to Freund, thegida was an extended family compound, expanded by the presence of clients or slaves so as to form a unit which provided for its own production and reproduction. The gida also provided for the production of the exchange good (tin), which linked it to the wider economic system and political hierarchy, via the gandu system, which is familiar from the work of Hill (1972: 1977), Wallace (1978) and Usman (1981). Freund is here concerned to show the relatively large scale of the pre-colonial tin industry and also to characterize it as something other than petty-commodity production. To me at least, the precise characterization of the industry remains unclear, but this imprecision is more than compensated by the archival material which is assembled here, and elsewhere, in the book. I shall return to the problem of the pre-colonial production organization and exchange below.

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Freund's analysis proceeds by a quite conscious alternation between the organization of capital and the living conditions of labour. He shows how over-capitalization and speculation in tin-mining company shares determined the character of mining leases and many of the conditions in which capitalist tin production began. Later sections of the book document the complex, but fairly well known, relations between the Royal Niger Company and the British government and Nigerian administration. These relations in turn provide the context for subsequent analysis of the recruitment of mines labour, porters and the workers who built the Bauchi Light Railway. The 'Business of Tin' (Ch. 4) analyses the economic conditions in which conglomerates (such as Associated Tin Mines of Nigeria) emerged, and documents the developments in the international commodity market which led first to mechanisation of the larger tin mines and then to the continuation or reappearance of unmechanized production techniques: pick and shovel work and head-panning. Such production, Freund argues, is not a survival of a pre-colonial mode of production but is rather the result of technical problems of tin ore extraction and, more significantly, of the incorporation of small mining enterprises as buffers against worsening world prices and the rising costs of production of the large mines. Moving once more to labour, we are shown how these specifically technical and market factors promoted changes in the proportion of tributers as against contracted labour and led to the growth of purportedly disorganized 'squatter' communities which grew up on the minesfield. Wartime demands for tin led to forced labour (Ch. 5), subsequent popular dissent (Birom resistance Ch. 6) and the appearance of skilled trades unions (Ch. 7). Finally, we are shown the political economy of tin and the specific interrelations of tin production and post-independence politics in the Nigerian state (which Freund, following Turner (1976), Williams (1976) and Girvan (1970), characterizes as a 'rentier state').

This is an interesting book. Both the archives which are cited and the presentation itself are stimulating, even where the analysis is covering well-worn ground. There are relatively few of us who would care to work in both the Nigerian archives and the published and unpublished records of the tin-mining companies. The coverage of the early Nigerian archives, for example, seems quite thorough, especially in comparison with a paper by J. Grace ('Tin mining on the Plateau before 1920') in the Isichei volume. The theoretical framework serves to take Freund's analysis out of the simply descriptive or polemical discourse of some recent histories. But where the theoretical framework is over indulged, Freund's analysis falters. Especially in the sections dealing with labour there are lengthy passages of unsupported generalization. For example, the concept of gandu is invoked (pp. 8, 11, 92) to define the organization of gang labour, yet it remains unclear how a gandu organization ordered tasks or pay. (Interestingly, given the linkage between mines labour and colonial taxation, gandu denotes head tax rather than a form of labour organization in the languages of the western hinterland of the plateau.) Likewise, Freund notes a work force characteristic of early capitalism (78), artisans' workshops (129) and a 'swollen bazaar economy', but nowhere describes the social organization of this sector.

These terms (gandu, early capitalism, artisan, bazaar economy) are part of a discourse which Freund obviously considers proven and non-problematic. But, in fact, we know little about gandu or the organization of the Nigerian urban economy, and the invocation of terms such as 'early capitalism' or 'bazaar' raises issues which may well be irrelevant to the specific Plateau context. Bazaar economy, for example, unintentionally introduces the entire discourse on 'oriental despotism', the position of merchants and the economic role of the state; 'early capitalism' begs the obvious questions 'how early' and 'where'? The analysis is strongest where it is seeking to define the specificity of tin-production on the Plateau. That specificity includes the characteristics of tin-mining enteiprises, the nature of leases and the economic parameters within which mine-managers or free miners worked, all points which Freund deals with in some detail. But it also includes the organization of labour gangs, and the networks of exchange, misunderstanding and coercion in which expatriate miners, contractors, overseers, employees and casual migrant labour were situated. These are issues which Freund deals with sensibly but too briefly. Finally, there are features which are largely or entirely missing from the analysis. There are no oral accounts of mines labour from Nigerian mine-workers, yet European accounts and impressions are cited at length. This is a serious lapse: work in the mines has been experienced by enormous numbers of northern

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Nigerians, either as a stage in the life cycle or, as in the case of the forced labour of 1941-44, as a major and traumatic event. Men and women who had worked in the very first capitalist tin-mines were still living when Freund was researching this book. Only such informants could have given us the details of labour organization, of passive resistance to management, of living conditions and of the cultural matrix within which popular political consciousness developed. (The poverty of an analysis without this 'living record' can easily be seen if one compares the 'labour' sections of this book with work on South American and Central African mine workers (cf. Taussig, 1980)- or, incidentally, with the current revival of interest in the life of labour in European history. See, for example, the characterization of the 'migratory trades' ofleadminers, brickmakers and quarrymen in Samuel (ed.), 1977: 1-98, especially pp. 71-3). Freund is aware of this African and British literature: he cites the work of Rule (1971) on Cornish miners and the organization of the tributing system and relies heavily on recent English social history (Hay et al., 1977) and an excellent unpublished B.Sc. thesis (Onmar-Shittien, 1973) to analyse 'theft' of tin as a response to exploitation. Yet, even here, some significant issues escape his analysis. What for example were the 'models' of management/labour relations, of contracts, work-gang discipline, responsibilities and expectations which the expatriate mining community brought to the Plateau? Were miners as fully professionalized as the literary sources (Colonel Laws or the colonial inspectorate for example) would lead us to expect? What was the relationship between miners and the mining engineers who seem to have worked with or within large enterprises and colonial administration? In what ways were expatriate miners' models of the tribute system combined with pre-colonial forms of contract or political inequality to establish working practices? And precisely which English system and which northern Nigerian systems were involved? These questions could be multiplied. They are significant when one considers that mines labour (and cash cropping of food for the mining population) were important, perhaps major, factors in the appearance of new kinds of farm labour contract and new forms of politico-economic stratification in the communities of the Plateau and its hinterland.

In the conclusions, Freund argues that tin-mining '. . . has inspired no industrialisation and no linkages, backward or forward, within Nigeria . . . the mines were an enclave (whose) development must be understood in the structure of corporate capitalism.' The fundamental effect of tin-mining has been to push peasants on to a labour market and to make them dependent on a capitalist commodity trade. They have become a proletariat and Freund argues, 'it is from labour that an answer to the contradictions generated by capital penetration in Nigerian society can be evolved' (229). Why then, does Freund fail to describe the life of labour and the specifically cultural practices of that class?

The other works which are reviewed here might be expected to illuminate the pre-colonial economy (in which tin and tin production were only subordinate parts) and to fill out our knowledge of the people, societies and popular culture(s) of the region.

I feel competent only to let Sister Neiers speak for herself: in her 'reply to Father Tempels' (Neiers, 1979, 162-4), she first defines the Plateau 'pagan philosophy' concerning God (a distant but supreme being) then notes Tempels' notion of 'Power' ('a vital principle, or energy which animates the entire pagan system from within' p. 163) and then notes that she has failed to identify 'its inmost nature' (ibid.). Then:

Philosophically speaking, how does it happen that systems of thought which accord such an important role to the living, driving, dynamic element of being should not have led to a more advanced state of technical progress? [on the Plateau]. The sociological reasons for its failure to develop in this way are obvious: particularly difficult physical conditions, restricted and closed societies, geographical isolation, languages only a little beyond the threshold of formalisation . . . Must not that failure [of technical progress] be ascribed to over attachment to Mother Earth . . ? The natives give the impression that it hurts them more than it hurts us to see old trees cut down . . . We would hazard, just as a theory and with no factual information . . . that research in this direction might bring to light the underlying causes of this surprising sterility in the technical sphere.

There is more, including over a hundred pages of data which are set well within such

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ethnographic categories as description of initiation rites, political organization, morality, etc. One cannot doubt the sincerity of this book, nor claim a monopoly over ethnographic data and method, but it is hard to see what it intends to show. Perhaps it may serve as a charter for the elaboration of a novel Catholicism which seeks an African authenticity, as has happened to Tempels' 'Bantu Philosophy' in the Jamaa movement (Fabian, 1979; cf. Wambudta in Isichei). There is a large community of Catholics on and around the Plateau whose beliefs are unknown to sociologists: this book may be put in context, or rather acquire a context, in relation to the texts and tracts of the various Protestant alliances such as the Evangelical Church of West Africa, (ex-Sudan Interior Mission) and the devotional literature and philosophy of Islam in Nigeria.

Religious conversion, social change and economy are all significant by their absence in the two books by Muller. A further analysis of Rukuba chiefdoms (Le Roi Bouc Emissaire, 1980) has been reviewed in a previous issue of Africa (1980) and in Man (1983).

Parente et Mariage chez les Rukuba is an emended translation of a thesis in English (Muller, 1970). Both the English and French versions are careful analyses of the organization of a system of secondary marriage which systematically differentiates local residential units by means of complex marriage rules, into an implicit moiety organization of wife-abduction units. 'Moieties' exchange women in primary marriage. Constituent wife-abduction units of each moiety take each other's wives in secondary marriage. Unmarried youths contract pre-marital relationships within each 'wife-abduction unit'; there is a preferential marriage rule by which the eldest daughter of a woman marries the son of the woman's last lover. (This preferential marriage by rule occurs either before or shortly after the girl contracts her primary marriage and before any secondary marriage takes place.) A woman remains permanently married to all of her primary, secondary and preferential husbands. There are many other detailed ramifications of this system: notably that a technically secondary marriage is enjoined as part of the male initiation ceremony, and that the son of a preferential marriage is the 'preferred' candidate for chiefship (Muller, 1980: 22, 152ff).

This marriage system (which, incidentally, was emended by 'the Rukuba' in 1956), has subsequently been shown to underlie the organization of Rukuba chiefdoms via a rather specialized discourse on the nature of power, and an appeal to a specific 'ideology' characteristic of chiefdoms, a category of politico-ritual systems between lineage societies and states founded on divine kingship. To return to the texts at hand. Parente etMariage ... or the more accessible (and cheaper) Kinship and Marriage amongst the Rukuba (Muller, 1976/1970) are highly systematic accounts of the marriage system in Rukuba. There is considerable internal evidence that the reported system is the one conceived of by Muller's informants. The complexity of the Rukuba marriage system is, moreover not unique: similarly complicated systems have been reported for many of the 'societies' or 'tribes' in central Nigeria. But the accounts of these marriage systems (including Muller's account of the Rukuba system) have a rather uneasy relationship to accounts of practice and to certain other fields of discourse on custom. In this literature, for example, little is said about the effects of the 'circulation of women' (the 'marriage-go-round' as Muller terms it) on household formation or inter- and intra-household inequalities; nor on the wider pre-colonial economy which might situate marriages as exchanges; nor (with the exception of Smith's work on Kagoro and Kadara, 1980, 1982) on the reconstruction of marriage 'custom' in relation to colonial and national politics. In fact, it is not improbable that the systematic complexity of Rukuba custom is a reconstruction from more contingent, less rule-governed practices, which had ceased long before 1956. If it is a reconstruction one wonders just who are 'the Rukuba' and what were the purposes of this version of post social order. The peculiar horizons of this secondary marriage literature predispose current analyses to emphasize rule as an adequate account of social order; Parenti etMariage ... andDu Bon Usage ... both take this emphasis to its ultimate conclusion. Thus, intormation on economy or the exception to 'the rules', which was given in Muller 1970, is excised fromParente etMariage . . . (cf. Muller, 1976: 121, 124with 1970: 194-207, 212-13.) The additional material which is included in the 1976 version elaborates the classification of secondary marriage systems (from three types in 1970, to four types in 1976) or draws out analogies between Rukuba reasoning and anthropological theory. For example (1976: 120-1), the extension of the term husband to the husband's sister is explained by 'the

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Rukuba' in terms of either familiarity and co-residence or sibling unity, explanations which Muller terms 'functionalist' and 'structuralist' theories respectively. He notes 'c'est que les Rukuba discutent naturellement en termes des deux theories'. Sophisticated sociological reasoning is characteristic of Plateau systems of thought (although, as he notes [Muller, 1981: 257], there are few accounts of either the popular sociology or the interests which this indigenous sociological thinking serves.) Professor Muller has thus correctly identified an important cultural element in Plateau society. But the significances or functions of this discourse are unknown and the strategic significance of 'rules' is obscured by a presentation which privileges 'structure' and excludes 'event'.

Du Bon Usage du Sexe et du Marnage suggests an explanation of this indigenous structuralist discourse but mainly consists of summaries of the existing literature on marriage systems. The basic premise of the book is that the marriage systems of the Plateau and neighbouring areas are a group of transformations of underlying structures: secondary marriage, sister exchange and cicisbeism. Secondary marriage systems are themselves transformations of even more basic structures which oppose endogamy and exogamy, residence and exchanges, and rights in married versus unmarried women. Du Bon Usage . . . arranges the reported marriage systems (of sixteen Plateau 'societies') into sequences which show increasingly complex combinations of such basic structural elements. Thus, in part I ('Les Modeles formels'), Katab is first presented as a simple moiety system, then complicating subdivisions are introduced to produce a 'global system' which, according to Muller, stipulates the different patterns of possible marriages for women of each marriage unit. This formal model of Katab is followed by similarly formal models of Kagoro (an analysis which involves a form of preferential marriage which the ethnographer, M. G. Smith, does not confirm), Kaje, Moroa, Kachichere and Chawai. These formal models are neither theoretically informed constructs nor verbatim translations into French of the original ethnographic accounts. Instead, they paraphrase the sources without detailed page references to produce synthetic 'systems' whose 'rules' go beyond, or sometimes even contradict, the original data. These sections of the book (pp. 33-89 and the accounts of Anaguta, Buji, Chara, Amo, Jere, pp. 149-82) do not give any new information and misrepresent the information we do have in Gunn (1953; 1956) and Meek (1931). The other much more lengthy ethnographic accounts, of Piti, Irigwe, Birom and Ganawuri are based upon the published and unpublished work of Chalifoux, Sangree, Baker, Smedley, Davies and Berthoud. The core of the book, therefore, is the section on Rukuba (which summarizes Muller 1970/1976), and the Introduction and Conclusion. The introduction asserts that the marriage systems of the Plateau are a set of transformations motivated solely by the desire of each ethnic group to distinguish itself from its neighbours. These transformations do not reflect ecological, economic or political dissimilarities since, we are told, these societies have a fundamentally similar ecology and mode of production. Historical data are also explicitly excluded from the analysis (p. 28). 'Societies choose a marriage system . . . in a vast socio-logical bricollage which makes one sense for each of these societies in particular and another sense for their totality' (p. 272). By invoking this structuralist logic and the motive of ethnic differentiation Muller is able to argue that marriage systems 'think themselves', constrained only by the principle that alliances be diversified (pp. 256, 274). This is a self-fulfilling argument: marriage system differentiation is central to discourse about social organization, which is, or was, intended for officials, ethnographers and 'strangers', and this folk-sociology has been, in its turn, appropriated by a purportedly theoretical discourse of anthropology in which the possibility of elaborated links between social units is transmuted into a logical demand for ramified alliances. Muller in fact notes that Meek and Smith give formal accounts of marriage systems without explaining how Katab or Kagoro themselves conceptualize the marriage system. It is clear that Muller, and his sources, recognize that these 'marriage systems' are the scholastic constructs by which intellectuals and administrators of different 'societies' explain (and legitimate) their own world (cf. Smith, 1982) and hence their own position in it. However, the concluding pages toDu Bon Usage . .. do make some useful points: Muller notes that a common feature of these marriage systems is that they allocate group membership on bases other than kinship or descent; he also notes orderly variations in brideservice obligations, marriage ward systems and the constitution of production groups (which variations, incidentally seem to contradict the uniformity in modes

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of production that he emphasizes in the introduction, and also suggest that marriage systems might have some economically strategic implications). He notes the rich economy of these societies, yet he couples this with the argument that this allows a special form of determination: not underdetermination but rather determination by contrast with neighbouring societies at the (ill-defined) level of ideology. In the end marriage systems are, it seems, the same as myths (p. 257).

The last of the works under review is Studies in the History of Plateau State. As the title indicates, this collection is not primarily concerned with the history of Jos Plateau society. In fact on three of the papers (Nengel, Ojoade and Grace on Pengana history, Birom proverbs and early colonial tin-mining respectively) refer to the high Plateau, and only one (Morrison on 'Resistance to Jihadist penetration') deals with the northern borders of the Plateau. Two papers discuss recent religious change among Pyem (Bruce) and Ngas (Wambudta) of the eastern Plateau fringes, whilst another paper by Bruce analyses the history and organization of a Fulani slave settlement close to the Pyem settlement of Gindiri. The remainder of the papers are concerned with the history of areas south of the Plateau: Yergam (Banfa), Goemai (Agi), Alago (Adefuye), Gwandara of Lafia and the lowlands salt industry (both papers by Unomah). The editor herself provides three lengthy overviews of Plateau State history which connect the specific papers of this collection to the extensive archival material and unpublished oral history texts which have been collected by the Jos history department.

The papers in this collection are all useful in one way or another. Banfa's presentation of Yergam history is notable for its elegant defence of a 'holistic' approach to history. Banfa argues that ethnographical accounts and oral histories should be treated as equal but variant readings of historical events. He raises a Levi-Straussian argument that the traditions of origin of different settlements are but 'a contemplation of the contradictions in the basic premises of Yergam culture' (p. 92), and then dismisses such an analysis as 'gratuitous and intellectually arrogant' (ibid.). Cross-cultural evidence for a tradition is a 'significant indicator of its authenticity'. Banfa makes explicit an approach which most of the other contributors simply subscribe to implicitly. Unomah's paper on the lowlands salt industry is mainly based on fairly recently collected (1974-76) oral histories. It is particularly interesting as an account of the manufacture and control of an important pre-colonial commodity and as an account of the politics of salt production and intensification of that production in the nineteenth century. What we now need is an account of the salt trade on and around the Plateau. (Incidentally, the statement that pre-colonial caravan routes passed through Kaduna (p. 170) is surely incorrect). Morrison's description of the interrelations of northern Plateau groups and their resistance to emirate rule relies very heavily on single interviews with groups of informants in each community, but in spite of this it does indicate some significant political alliances and economic networks among the 'societies' described by Muller. The oral history presented by Morrison, Nengel, Agi, Adefuye and Unomah (on Gwandara of Lafia) tends (strangely) to complement the archive sources. Might this not be evidence that these 'oral histories' are only 'official' accounts of history? Considerably more information is necessary before we can construct local histories or analyse historical changes in pre-colonial regional politico-economic systems.

The papers in this volume which deal with colonial history are inevitably more coherent than those that explore pre-colonial themes. Elsewhere in the book the distinction between pre-colonial and colonial history is not always too clear but the subject matter of the chapters by Isichei, Bruce, Grace and Wambudta clearly dates their accounts. In both of his chapters, Bruce (an anthropologist) gives detailed accounts of the social processes and cognitive changes which were involved in religious conversion or slavery. The paper on conversion describes the association or religious change and changes in the economy (especially the appearance of new occupational roles). The chapter on slavery provides a rare account of a localized slave-trading system and of the supernatural bases of social control in slave settlements. Professor Isichei deals with resistance to colonialism and changes and continuities under colonial rule in two chapters which cover Plateau state as a whole. Perhaps because of the data-base (colonial reports and oral data collected by undergraduate researchers), these chapters are histories of events rather than processes. Some of the oral sources have been published (in a stencilled format) asJos Oral History and Literature Texts, Vols. 1 and 2, 1981. Professor Isichei has

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written an account of recent colonial history which points up certain common themes in those texts. These chapters go some way toward illuminating that popular consciousness which eludes both Freund and Neiers, and also toward establishing those experiences and events which are common to Plateau State history and other regional traditions in Nigerian historiography.

There are relatively few specific issues which are common to all of the books under review. All of the authors, except Neiers, insist, quite rightly, that the Jos Plateau was not primitive, isolated or impoverished. Most emphasize the brutality of colonial conquest and colonial economy and all have a somewhat uneasy relationship to the documentation of history provided by colonialism. There are confrontations over method (for example the absence of oral history in Freund, the group interview techniques of Morrison, the explicitly anti-structuralist position taken by Banfa and the purely formal structuralism of Muller). But these problems need not be pursued: they reflect attempts to write respectably comprehensive work from very little information. All of the methodological and theoretical perspectives are complementary, or even mutually necessary, until we know more about this region.

The specific features of Plateau history and sociology remain to be discovered, but from these books at least three issues emerge. Firstly, Muller has clarified the systematic transformation of social structure on and around the High Plateau. What we now need is an account of the economic history of that region, an account which traces the interrelations of this indigenous discourse about structures to specific economic and hence historical developments. The materials to construct such a social history are pre-figured in the books reviewed here: Muller's structures are recognizably the ideological property of chiefs, elders and household heads rather than of subordinate men and women, simply because colonial investigators sought 'authoritative' accounts of Plateau society. Yet we can assume that the authorities of each community gave accounts of society which were, on the one hand, 'traditional' (and hence closely related to pre-existing economic organization) and were, on the other hand, a legitimation of authority. The accounts of structures are historically situated ideologies. As opposed to this structuralism, the merit of the historicist method adopted by Isichei, Banfa, Morrison and others, is that the reporters of past society are identified (although their social position, status and interests are commonly unstated). If the two approaches were to be combined we would acquire a secure, historical account of the dominant ideologies of Plateau communities. On the evidence presented here, these dominant ideologies do deal in marriage rules, kinship, household organization, exchange and ritual. They define locally specific production organization rather than some generalized gandulgida formation such as that invoked by Freund. The ideologies also serve to define that category of the dispossessed who were, and are, the 'labouring classes' of the Plateau. Furthermore, such locally dominant ideologies have, firstly, articulated with the ideology of the state, and have, secondly, generated locally and historically specific forms of opposition; forms which inform 'grass roots' political movements and an emerging national consciousness.

Secondly, the oral texts which are cited by Isichei and others give us some insight into pre-colonial or early colonial modes of constructing history or of framing 'events'. All of the works reviewed here impose those events which have been emphasized by European historiography: colonial conquest; the development of capitalist tin-mining; the incorporation of localized polities into the state. Yet even within these books, there is evidence of a different view of history: Isichei notes the indigenous 'great man' theory of history in accounts of incipient state formation of Kerang in Mwahaval, which was only curtailed by the death of Jepnuan, and gives evidence of the Mada, Eggon, Tal and Montol refusal to accept colonialism as a new period of history. Freund simply ignores periods of tin-mining labour history where dissent may have taken forms other than outright rebellion or trade union activity; Muller's account of Rukuba marriage constructs a 'traditional past' which certainly seems to reflect the desires and expectations of some of 'the Rukuba' in the present. There is here an unexplored historical consciousness which may well be specific to Plateau society.

A final problem is raised most directly by Freund: the tin mines certainly were central to Plateau economy before the Nigerian 'oil boom', and may well become significant to industrialization in the future. But one doubts whether they were ever quite so encapsulated as Freund suggests. Indeed, one could argue that the economic decline of the tin-fields and the

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growth of capitalist agriculture has reduced the linkages of the tin-field economy (and community) to the wider society by reducing the rural networks which provided the tin-fields with food, craft products and seasonal or permanent migrant-labour. It remains to be discovered how the changes in tin-mining and other industries affected social and cultural change on and beyond the Plateau. The 'multi-disciplinary' theoretical practice of the people of the Plateau has much to offer as a model for scholarly co-operation in understanding Plateau society.

REFERENCES

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Girvan, N. 1970. 'Multinational corporations and dependent underdevelopment in mineral-export economies'. Social and Economic Studies 19(4).

Gunn, H. D. 1953. Peoples of the Plateau Area of Northern Nigeria. Ethnographic Survey of Africa, Western Africa, London: IAI.

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Hay, D., P. Lineburgh, J. G. Rule, E. P. Thomson, C. Winslow. 1977. Albion's Fatal Tree, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Hill, P. 1972. Rural Hausa: a Village and a Setting. Cambridge: CUP. - 1975. Population, Prosperity and Poverty: Rural Kano 1900 to 1970, Cambridge: CUP.

Isichei, E. (ed.). 1981.Jos Oral History and Literature Texts, Vol. 1 and 2. Jos: University of Jos, History Department.

Meek, C. K. 1931. Tribal Studies in Northern Nigeria, Vol. I, II. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.

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Issue Table of ContentsAfrica, Vol. 53, No. 4, 1983Volume Information [pp.109-112]Front Matter [pp.1-2]Oral Tradition and Early Colonial PoliticsKarnu's Message and the 'War of the Hoe Handle': Interpreting a Central African Resistance Movement [pp.3-22]Chiefs of Rain. Chiefs of Ruling: A Reinterpretation of Pre-Colonial Tonga (Zambia) Social and Political Structure [pp.23-42]

'Ceux qui Refusent le Matre': La Conception du Pouvoir Chez les Minyanka du Mali [pp.43-58]Cattle and Class? Rights to Grazing Land, Family Organization and Class Formation in Msengezi [pp.59-74]Notes and News [pp.75-79]Letter to the Editor [p.80]ObituariesProfessor Meyer Fortes 1906-83 [pp.80-82]Jan Voorhoeve 1923-83 [pp.82-83]

Correction: Defunct Labour Reserve? Mambwe Villages in the Post-Migration Economy [p.83]Review ArticleHeadpanners and Dredgers: Theory in Plateau Studies [pp.84-91]

Reviews of Books / Comptes Rendusuntitled [pp.92-93]untitled [pp.93-94]untitled [pp.94-95]untitled [pp.95-96]untitled [p.97]untitled [pp.97-98]untitled [pp.98-100]untitled [pp.101-102]untitled [pp.102-104]

Recent Publications [pp.105-108]Back Matter