A. B. S. Chigwedere’s Pre-colonial Histories of Zimbabwe and Africa

A Zambezia essay review of ABS Chigwedere's writings on African / Zimbabwean histories.QUARTER OF a century ago, in 1962, the study of the pre-colonial history of Africa as a serious academic discipline was beginning to get under way. This was a period of high hopes. Archives virtually untapped by historians were beginning to be used, and it was hoped that the faded documents of European imperialism could be used to recover the history of the peoples of Africa rather than that of their colonizers. Oral traditions were recognized as a legitimate historical source, and researchers armed with tape-recorders were beginning to set out to recover Ae histories of peoples not recorded by observers before the nineteenth century. It was understood that Africa’s past required a multidisciplinary approach, and special stress was laid on the importance of archaeology and linguistics, though it was also hoped that such disciplines as physical anthropology, serology, palaeobotany and a host of others could be pressed into service. This was the heyday of African nationalism, and Africans and Africanists were largely united in the hope that Africa could be given a reliable history reaching as far back as that of Europe, the continent with which Africa was most frequently compared. Hugh Trevor-Roper’s opinion that this was impossible and, worse, irrelevant was often cited only to be demolished.

Second thoughts on the Shona economy: suggestions for further research

A historical analysis of how the pre-colonial Rhodesia Shona economy was structured.This paper has its beginnings in some interviews carried out in the upper Sabi valley in 1973. The trail between these interviews and the present paper is a long and devious one, but it is worth mentioning here. In the first half of 1973 my main interest was in the digging of a kind of historical trench across the central Shona country from east to west and back again, examining and analysing the traditions of a group of peoples whose ruling dynasties were mostly of the Shava (eland) totem. The basic purpose of the work was to determine the historical-political structure of the area, which happened to coincide to a great extent with the upper Sabi valley, but a certain amount of attention was paid to economic factors. As this paper makes clear, more attention should have been paid to economic, social and religious questions, but at the time I was mainly conscious of the problem involved in collecting as much political data as possible from a very wide area in a very short time. Nevertheless, it was possible to put together the raw economic data into a preliminary paper that was read at the Umtali History Conference in December 1973

Effects of coastal urbanization on salt-marsh faunal assemblages in the northern Gulf of Mexico

Author Posting. © American Fisheries Society, 2014. This article is posted here by permission of American Fisheries Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Marine and Coastal Fisheries: Dynamics, Management, and Ecosystem Science 6 (2014): 89-107, doi:10.1080/19425120.2014.893467.Coastal landscapes in the northern Gulf of Mexico, specifically the Mississippi coast, have undergone rapid urbanization that may impact the suitability of salt-marsh ecosystems for maintaining and regulating estuarine faunal communities. We used a landscape ecology approach to quantify the composition and configuration of salt-marsh habitats and developed surfaces at multiple spatial scales surrounding three small, first-order salt-marsh tidal creeks arrayed along a gradient of urbanization in two river-dominated estuaries. From May 3 to June 4, 2010, nekton and macroinfauna were collected weekly at all six sites. Due to the greater abundance of grass shrimp Palaemonetes spp., brown shrimp Farfantepenaeus aztecus, blue crab Callinectes sapidus, Gulf Menhaden Brevoortia patronus, and Spot Leiostomus xanthurus, tidal creeks in intact natural (IN) salt-marsh landscapes supported a nekton assemblage that was significantly different from those in partially urbanized (PU) or completely urbanized (CU) salt-marsh landscapes. However, PU landscapes still supported an abundant nekton assemblage. In addition, the results illustrated a linkage between life history traits and landscape characteristics. Resident and transient nekton species that have specific habitat requirements are more likely to be impacted in urbanized landscapes than more mobile species that are able to exploit multiple habitats. Patterns were less clear for macroinfaunal assemblages, although they were comparatively less abundant in CU salt-marsh landscapes than in either IN or PU landscapes. The low abundance or absence of several macroinfaunal taxa in CU landscapes may be viewed as an additional indicator of poor habitat quality for nekton. The observed patterns also suggested that benthic sediments in the CU salt-marsh landscapes were altered in comparison with IN or PU landscapes. The amount of developed shoreline and various metrics related to salt marsh fragmentation were important drivers of observed patterns in nekton and macroinfaunal assemblages