ABSTRACT
In a sense, there had always been strangers at the gates. Oddly enough, it was North Africa which saw the stranger arrive in greater military force than anywhere else on the continent during the first half of the nineteenth century. The destabilization of southern African societies had in a sense begun in the late seventeenth century, when small groups of whites from the Dutch colony at the Cape, equipped with guns, horses and ox-wagons, began to trade and fight for cattle with the Khoi pastoralists of the immediate hinterland. On the surface at least, West Africa during most of the nineteenth century showed fewer signs of impending destabilization than any other part of the continent. The nineteenth century, however, saw a radical change in the tempo of the intercontinental trade, which led to a large increase in the penetration of Africa by coast-based caravans, some of them under non-African leadership.
