This books brings together studies which have appeared in a variety of periodicals and other publications over the course of two decades. If I had to write them again today, I would naturally do so differently, they are dated, and testify both to a particular attitude and to a particular period. I still maintain and subscribe fully to this attitude, but I will not pretend that, on certain points, my understanding has not evolved and (I hope) deepened. Those who refer to these works undoubtedly need to look also at what has been published since on the same subjects, as much to elaborate their own judgment as to discover where correction or updating is necessary.
It was the struggle for the liberation of Africa which led me to explore a hitherto unappreciated area of knowledge, the very existence of which had at times been denied. This does not lead me to claim any special merit, but I feel no inferiority complex about it either.
The marxism which has determined my attitude is not, and —unless it were to go against its own principles — would nor know how to be, a means of 'measuring' various situations and periods of history. Marxism, as a scientific attitude towards historical material, did do no more than shed light on one's research. It does not give sight to the blind.
We must now define the problems raised in this collection of writings, as well as those of equal importance which have not been raised.
The first study, which resumes and submits to a refining process ideas already put forward in the first part of my Afrique Noire in 1958, aimed to establish the nature of class in pre-colonial Africa, particularly where class antagonisms had led to the appearance of the state. 'Colonial' history and ethnology — i.e. the history and ethnology of the colonial period — had as their common failing a refusal, in the guise of a descriptive empiricism, to take the realities of class into account. Other authors, both at this period and later, did not always resist the temptation to impose on these African realities methods of analysis borrowed from other societies and other periods of history. The category 'tributary mode of production', which Marx: (for want of a more precise definition at the time when he wrote) called 'Asiatic' or 'oriental', seemed to me to characterise these African societies very exactly. There have been objections to this definition; some, for example, believe it to be too general. But the very category 'mode of production' claims to do no more that 'situate' (a word used by Marx himself) social formations which are dependent upon it; it does not seek to lend itself to detailed 'deductions' — the attitude of a speculative 'philosophy' of history, an unscientific attitude which marxism rejects on principle, and which, one could say, it came into being to oppose. And in their details, the innumerable varieties of African societies present specific features, and finally typologies, which empirical study has the function of setting forth (a function it fulfils increasingly, and with success).,
In the framework of this mode of production, as of all others, historical evolution shows successive stages : the deepening of internal contradictions results in crises, at levels where these contradictions can no longer be radically overcome but merely reproduce themselves in other forms. The feudal mode of production experienced such crises, as did the capitalist mode. The Islamic 'revolutions' that West Africa experienced from the end of the seventeenth century to the nineteenth, but most of all in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, appear to me to belong to this system of evolution.
Traditional French 'colonial' historiography only took into account the ethnic aspects (the Peuls or Fulas often but not always being implied) and the religious ones. I demonstrated that it was necessary to take into account as well — and perhaps above all else — socio-economic factors relating to the class struggle, in forms which were often complex, reflecting the very complexity of these African societies and the weight of elements in their structures that were inherited from the past. These elements bring into play, to differing degrees, the totality of oppressed strata and groups in the traditional 'tribal' monarchies: tributary peasant labourers, slaves, subordinate or enslaved ethnic groups (like the Peuls), also women and young people. Numerous authors have successfully travelled by this route.
In the development of internal contradictions which have led to these 'revolutions', the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on African societies from the seventeenth century onwards, but particularly in the eighteenth, has — as I understand it — played a decisive role. This point of view is now disputed by certain Western historians, who in a different connection seek to minimise the numerical importance of the trade itself in order to present its nature and its effects as having been less severe than was once claimed — as much in the number of deaths as in the treatment of the slaves on American plantations. This approach is, to say the least, not exempt from an ideological inspiration which aims to play down the responsibility of a Europe put on trial, so it is said, by anti-colonialist historiography, especially as regards Africa. Without completely denying the interest and the validity of some of its treatment of detail, I do not find the approach scientifically acceptable, and will explain why.
I have not tackled here — and only mention it as a reminder — the realisation of the methods to which, over the past two decades, African history owes its most important progress. Twenty years ago, some historians wielding considerable authority held the view that there is no history which does not proceed from written sources, and that in the absence of such sources, particularly archival ones, the only African history is colonial history. In fact, more written documents exist than one might imagine, including ones of African origin, and even those of colonial origin have scarcely been exploited in an African perspective. The exploitation of oral tradition and the data provided by ethnology ('ethno-history') and recourse to linguistic and archeological data, inter alia, have exposed the weakness of this prejudice, which is no less damaging in its implications for what historiography can achieve in countries possessing abundant written sources. Certainly the new methods have been narrowed down to their essentials, and they require care and a firm critical sense — just as the handling of written sources has always done. But they have amply proved their richness, even for very remote periods. Understood in this way, history demands protracted specialisation in a well-defined area; so too does a truly deep knowledge of African languages. My times in Africa — a dozen years all told — involved me in such responsibilities; and, above all, they were so often interrupted for reasons beyond my control that I was not able to become seriously involved in this area. I nevertheless believe that this kind of research can only be brought to its full realisation by African historians, who indeed are widely engaged in it already.
I have taken it upon myself in other works 2 to debunk the 'colonial' history of the conquest of Africa. Working in virgin territory, I could only mark out certain frameworks; since then, works of much greater depth have been published, and I have therefore judged it pointless to re-issue essays of mine which have clearly been outstripped 3.
On the history of the colonial period I have included an essay confined to Guinea, and on the subsequent period a study of the so-called 'traditional' chiefdom, also in Guinea, which I hope will bear witness to the fact that a marxist approach and recourse to analysis of class realities are not necessarily 'schematic', as some would say, but rather the reverse ! I have included as well a text in a rather different style — one can only call it a pedagogical style — on the teaching of African history (now, alas, almost entirely removed from French school syllabuses). This was requested from me by our Belgian colleagues. Finally, some reflections have been included concerning the neocolonialism of the present day.
If these essays are capable of awakening the interest of readers in an undervalued field of African history and of urging them onwards to read other books — detaching them, even to a small extent, from a view which too often remains Eurocentric — their publication will not be in vain.

Notes
1. For example, the remarkable work carried out during the 1970s on pastoral nomadic societies under the aegis of C.E.R.M.
2. Afrique Noire, I, 3rd edition, 1968
3. E.g. my essays on Samori (Recherches africaines, Conakry, 1959, vol. 1-4, pp. 18-22, and Revolution démocratique africaine, Conakry, no 48, May 1972, pp. 199-253), Yves Person's vast and exemplary work on Samori (Dakar, I.F.A.N. 3 vols., 1968, 1970, 1975) makes them virtually obsolete.