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Early Wolof States

subjects on the historian's agenda: crime, 'native administration', nutrition, the diminution of famine in later colonial Africa, monastic poor relief in Ethiopia, osu slavery among the Igbo, administrative history in South Africa. Underlying such reminders is the awareness that though the very poor are most visible in towns, most are still in the countryside, where the extent of family care inevitably eludes close analysis. As is to be expected from John IlifTe, the prose is terse and pithy. Abstractions are kept to a minimum; pathos is concentrated in vivid and abundant quotations; there are fleeting moments of sardonic humour. Some pages are in what might be called the omniscient Gallic mode of social history (by no means peculiar to French scholars), which has been known to lapse into the accumulation of instances, liberally quantified, and gathered from large expanses of space and time. Iliffe is certainly partial to numbers, but his material is rigorously organised, the overall design respects chronology and geography, and there is no shortage of signposts. It must be regretted, more than usually, that the publishers could not place the notes at the foot of the page. With impressive restraint, the author has confined them to source-citations, yet these are necessarily so numerous as to occupy almost eighty pages. If placed below the text, they would average between a fifth and a quarter of each page, yet there they would have greatly eased the task of the enquiring reader. Still, the book has been made instantly available in paperback, and at a fair price. This is only fitting for a work which constitutes a majestic summa, drawing on more than fifty years of African studies to bring within a common frame the weak, the voiceless and the self-effacing as well as the articulate and strong.