frican Studies focuses on the rich culture, history and society of the continent, however the growing economies of African countries have become an increasingly significant topic in Economic literature. This month, The Centre for the Study of African Economies annual conference is taking place in Oxford. To raise further awareness of the growing importance of the study of African economics, we have created this reading list of books, journals and online resources that explore the varied areas of Africa and its economy.
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Since the promulgation of the revised missal, popularly known as the Novus Ordo by Pope Paul VI, with the Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanun in 1969, a growing call for either a return to the Tridentine Mass or recognition of the legitimate place of such a rite alongside the Novus Ordo has gained an international status. Groups […]
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Hadrian’s Wall has been in the news again recently for all the wrong reasons. Occasional wits have pondered on its significance in the Scottish Referendum, neglecting the fact that it has never marked the Anglo-Scottish border, and was certainly not constructed to keep the Scots out. Others have mistakenly insinuated that it is closed for business, following the widely reported demise of the Hadrian’s Wall Trust. And then of course there is the Game of Thrones angle, best-selling writer George R R Martin has spoken of the Wall as an inspiration for the great wall of ice that features in his books.
Media coverage of both Hadrian’s Wall Trust’s demise and Game of Thrones’ rise has sometimes played upon and propagated the notion that the Hadrian’s Wall was manned by shivering Italian legionaries guarding the fringes civilisation – irrespective of the fact that the empire actually trusted the security of the frontier to its non-citizen soldiers, the auxilia rather than to its legionaries. The tendency to overemphasise the Italian aspect reflects confusion about what the Roman Empire and its British frontier was about. But Martin, who made no claims to be speaking as a historian when he spoke of how he took the idea of legionaries from Italy, North Africa, and Greece guarding the Wall as a source of inspiration, did at least get one thing right about the Romano-British frontier.
There were indeed Africans on the Wall during the Roman period. In fact, at times there were probably more North Africans than Italians and Greeks. While all these groups were outnumbered by north-west Europeans, who tend to get discussed more often, the North African community was substantial, and its stories warrant telling.
Perhaps the most remarkable tale to survive is an episode in the Historia Augusta (Life of Severus 22) concerning the inspection of the Wall by the emperor Septimius Severus. The emperor, who was himself born in Libya, was confronted by a black soldier, part of the Wall garrison and a noted practical joker. According to the account the notoriously superstitious emperor saw in the soldier’s black skin and his brandishing of a wreath of Cyprus branches, an omen of death. And his mood was not further improved when the soldier shouted the macabre double entendre iam deus esto victor (now victor/conqueror, become a god). For of course properly speaking a Roman emperor should first die before being divinized. The late Nigerian classicist, Lloyd Thompson, made a powerful point about this intriguing passage in his seminal work Romans and Blacks, ‘the whole anecdote attributes to this man a disposition to make fun of the superstitious beliefs about black strangers’. In fact we might go further, and note just how much cultural knowledge and confidence this frontier soldier needed to play the joke – he needed to be aware of Roman funerary practices, superstitions, and the indeed the practice of emperor worship itself.
Why is this illuminating episode not better known? Perhaps it is because there is something deeply uncomfortable about what could be termed Britain’s first ‘racist joke’, or perhaps the problem lies with the source itself, the notoriously unreliable Historia Augusta. And yet as a properly forensic reading of this part of the text by Professor Tony Birley has shown, the detail included around the encounter is utterly credible, and we can identify places alluded to in it at the western end of the Wall. So it is quite reasonable to believe that this encounter took place.
Not only this, but according to the restoration of the text preferred by Birley and myself, there is a reference to a third African in this passage. The restoration post Maurum apud vallum missum in Britannia indicates that this episode took place after Severus has granted discharge to a soldier of the Mauri (the term from which ‘Moors’ derives). And has Birley has noted, we know that there was a unit of Moors stationed at Burgh-by-Sands on the Solway at this time.
Sadly, Burgh is one of the least explored forts on Hadrian’s Wall, but some sense of what may one day await an extensive campaign of excavation there comes from Transylvania in Romania, where investigations at the home of another Moorish regiment of the Roman army have revealed a temple dedicated to the gods of their homelands. Perhaps too, evidence of different North African legacies would emerge. The late Vivian Swann, a leading expert in the pottery of the Wall has presented an attractive case that the appearance of new forms of ceramics indicates the introduction of North African cuisine in northern Britain in the second and third centuries AD.
What is clear is that the Mauri of Burgh-by-Sands were not the only North Africans on the Wall. We have an African legionary’s tombstone from Birdoswald, and from the East Coast the glorious funerary stela set up to commemorate Victor, a freedman (former slave) by his former master, a trooper in a Spanish cavalry regiment. Victor’s monument now stands on display in Arbeia Museum at South Shields next to the fine, and rather better known, memorial to the Catuvellunian Regina, freedwoman and wife of Barates from Palmyra in Syria. Together these individuals, and the many other ethnic groups commemorated on the Wall, remind us of just how cosmopolitan the people of Roman frontier society were, and of how a society that stretched from the Solway and the Tyne to the Euphrates was held together.
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Situated at the intersection of Europe, Asia, and Africa, the Mediterranean Sea has been for millenia the place where religions, economies, and political systems met, clashed, influenced and absorbed one another. Ranging from prehistory to the 21st century, The Great Sea is above all the history of human interaction across a region that has brought together many of the great civilizations of antiquity as well as the rival empires of medieval and modern times.
Michelle Rafferty, Publicity Assistant
Author Richard Rathbone first went to South Africa as the Students’ Visiting Lecturer Fund nominee at Cape Town University in 1976 and returned as Visiting Lecturer to the 
University of the Witwatersrand in 1979 and then as visiting professor to the universities of Cape Town and Witwatersrand in 1998. He has authored, co-authored and edited ten books on African history including African History: A Very Short Introduction. In the following piece Rathbone reveals where South Africa’s true beauty lies and why it is deserves to be “Place of the Year.” You can check out more “Place of the Year” contributions here.
South Africa has been my place of the year on a regular basis since we first got to know each other in 1976. It wasn’t quite love at first sight; rainy winter days in Cape Town spent in chilly rooms with inadequate heating aren’t exactly romantic. But like many who think they are in love, I noticed South Africa’s looks first and learnt to enjoy its company afterwards. If you start, as I did, at the Cape, you first catch your breath by that jagged seascape dominated by Table Mountain and the last land before the South Pole. And at Cape Point I saw my first baboons, and my first sea eagles soaring over the meeting of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, the meeting of hot and cold, ying and yang. But I saw all of it first during apartheid and all that beauty was deformed by very visible cruelties of the system which was older than apartheid. The beaches are scattered with the relics of ship-wrecks and the tragedies of lost lives. Piles of seashells are all that is left to memorialise the old hunter-gatherers, the strandloopers, whose beaches these once were, years before whites started building mile on mile of ugly but expensive beachfront apartments. And the most spectacular view of Table Mountain, that from Blauberg Strand, the Blue Mountain Beach, is spoilt by the grim history of Robben Island inescapably there at the edge of the famous view, a leper colony before it was escape- proof prison. In turn the majestic sweep of Hout Bay was deformed by the fish-canning factory whose sad labourers’ drawn faces betrayed harsh working conditions and poor nutrition.
Further along the coast and then inland are the beautiful winelands, glorious valleys over-shadowed by intimidating mountains. Here again beauty is bittersweet for this world once depended upon slavery and until very recently upon the labour of the descendants of those slaves whose pay was partly taken in alcohol which damaged their and their children’s health. The country’s national flower, the protea, catches the contradictions being both shamelessly pretty while being incredibly hard, irresistible and repellent. I had fallen in love with a tart, a very pretty tart, but a tart with stony heart.
But I learnt fast that the real beauty was and is still to be found less in its scenery and more in its people. In the apartheid years I was thrilled. Inspired by, and even jealous of, the commitment and courage of so many people, black and white, Afrikaaner and African. The cruelty of it all was so obvious; housing in which decent people would refuse to house a dog, the in-your-face insult of “whites only” signage and the ultimate negation of humanity, the idea that people of colour were somehow non-whites, somehow less than human in the eyes of the country’s rulers. The sheer awfulness of that all provoked something more wonderful than cowed, sullen victim-hood. Instead defiance and resistance were suffused with a warm and inclusive humanity. Although it was a state which killed, tortured and incarcerated innumerable people, it and its supporters were made absurd as well as cruel and weakened by the sting of satire, of cartoons, of performances both formal and informal. What often appeared to be obsequious behaviour was frequently audacious and thinly concealed piss-taking at the expense of thoughtless whites. It was and is a sceptical society, a society which refused dictation. And that underlying refusal to internalise the brutal and unintelligent messages of apartheid but instead to imagine and then work for a world without it has informed all that is good about today’s South Africa. So much of that is bound up in the remarkable personality of Nelson Mandela.
Of course South Africa isn’t perfect; all countries that survive revolutions, and the end of apartheid was a revolution, are bound to be imperfect because revolutions are violent affairs which generate all sorts of collateral damage, psychological as well as material. But the real reason why South Africa must be my place of the year is that despite all the many temptations to break with the idea of “a rainbow nation”, the vast majority of South Africa’s continue to subscribe to warmth and humanity, and to reconciliation.
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