Abstract

Book ReviewsH. Kjekshus, Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History. Berkeley & Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1977, pp. 223, $13.50 paper SAGE Publications, Inc.1982DOI: 10.1177/002190968201700326 Steven Feierman University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison, U.S.A. Scholars of Africa reveal their positions in their choice of the golden age. For the ahistorical and now discredited functionalist anthropologists the golden age of un- disturbed, static, integrated African society came just before European intrusion or culture contact. Historians of the era of the slave trade, whether in West or East Africa, usually project the wonderful days back to a time before the mass removal of slaves. Other historians-usually those who see European trade as essentially healthy-minimize the effects of the slave trade and see the period of intensive precolonial trade as a wonderful time when commercial contacts with Europe stimulated the local economy, but when the worst excesses of conquest were still to come. Helge Kjekshus takes a rather odd position in this respect in the present book. He sees the golden age of Tanganyikan history as the nineteenth century, the only precolonial century of extensive slave trading and intense contact with the world economy. Yet he is by no