LGCSE History (0184) cheat sheet

Primary source = material produced at the time by a participant or eyewitness (letters, treaties, photographs, oral testimony); secondary source = later reconstruction using primary material (textbooks, articles, museum displays).

Provenance checks: author, date, place, intended audience, purpose, and the author's access to the events. A source written long after the event, or by someone without direct knowledge, is weaker evidence for detail.

Reliability and utility are separate judgements: a biased propaganda poster is unreliable for facts but highly useful as evidence of the attitudes and aims of its producer.

Detect bias through loaded or emotive language, exaggeration, omission, selective statistics and one-sided attribution of blame.

Corroborate before concluding: independent sources that agree raise confidence; sources that merely copy one another do not count as independent corroboration.

Fact = a statement that can be checked; opinion = a judgement or evaluation; inference = a conclusion drawn from the evidence but not stated in the source.

Interpretations differ because historians select different evidence, ask different questions and hold different assumptions; two conflicting interpretations can both be defensible.

Judge a source against a stated enquiry: ask 'useful for which question?' rather than 'is this a good source?'

Oral testimony gives voice to people absent from written records but is shaped by memory, later events and the interviewer's questions.

Mapungubwe (flourished c. 1075–1300) in the Limpopo–Shashe valley: hilltop elite, gold and ivory exports, imported Chinese ceramics, and burials showing marked social ranking.

Great Zimbabwe (c. 1100–1450): dry-stone enclosures, a Shona-speaking state, wealth from gold and ivory traded through Sofala; abandoned as trade routes and grazing shifted.

Toutswe tradition (c. 700–1300) in eastern Botswana: large cattle kraals, sorghum and millet farming, and long-distance exchange of salt, copper and ivory.

Earliest inhabitants were San hunter-gatherers and Khoekhoe herders; Bantu-speaking mixed farmers spread into the region during the first millennium CE, bringing iron working and new crops.

Sotho-Tswana speakers organised into merafe (chiefdoms) such as Bakwena, Bangwato, Bangwaketse, Bakgatla, Barolong and Batawana, the last splitting from Bangwato around 1795.

Political structure: kgosi advised by the kgotla, subordinate dikgosana (headmen), wards and age regiments (mophato); succession normally lay within the ruling lineage but was not automatic primogeniture.

Economy: cattle as wealth, bridewealth (bogadi) and drought insurance; sorghum, millet, beans and melons; hunting, iron and copper smelting; salt from Sua and the Makgadikgadi pans.

Long-distance trade linked the interior to Angola and the Indian Ocean coast: ivory, cattle, skins, copper and iron were exchanged for beads, cloth, glass and later guns.

Difaqane upheavals of the 1820s–30s: Kololo (Sebetwane) and Ndebele (Mzilikazi) raiding pushed many Batswana to hill strongholds, disrupted farming and opened the way for missionary contact.

1652 Dutch East India Company settlement at the Cape; Britain occupied the Cape in 1795 and permanently in 1806; the Great Trek of the 1830s carried Boer farmers inland to found republics.

The Berlin Conference (1884–85) set the 'effective occupation' rule and accelerated partition; no African representatives were present.

Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company received a royal charter in 1889 and used the 1890 Pioneer Column to occupy Mashonaland; company rule meant land seizure, taxation and forced labour.

Bechuanaland Protectorate declared in 1885 after Tswana chiefs sought British protection; the 1895 London visit of Khama III, Sebele I and Bathoen I blocked transfer of the territory to the Company.

African responses ranged from armed resistance (Ndebele–Shona 1896–97; Herero and Nama 1904–08) to diplomacy, collaboration, flight, labour migration and prophetic religious protest such as the Xhosa cattle-killing of 1856–57.

South African War 1899–1902; the Union of South Africa (1910) united British and Boer colonies and excluded Africans from the franchise; the Natives Land Act 1913 confined African landholding to about 7 per cent.

Southern Rhodesia gained responsible government in 1923; the Land Apportionment Act 1930 divided land by race; Bechuanaland's Native Administration Proclamation 1934 defined chiefly powers under colonial supervision.

Hut and poll taxes plus land alienation forced Africans into wage labour; recruitment agencies and mine compounds supplied cheap migrant workers.

Colonial rule took several forms - indirect rule through chiefs, direct rule by officials, chartered company rule and settler self-government - and each shaped the ways Africans could protest.

Pan-Africanism (Du Bois, Garvey, the 1945 Manchester Congress) and the 1955 Bandung Conference supplied ideas, networks and confidence to nationalist leaders.

Ghana became independent in March 1957 under Nkrumah's Convention People's Party, the first sub-Saharan colony to do so; 1960 saw seventeen African states become independent.

Kenya: the Mau Mau revolt (1952–60) and the state of emergency preceded KANU and Kenyatta leading the country to independence in 1963.

Zambia 1964 (UNIP, Kaunda), Malawi 1964 (Banda), Tanganyika 1961, Nigeria 1960; Zimbabwe 1980 after the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979 and the liberation war.

Botswana: Bechuanaland People's Party formed 1960; Botswana Democratic Party formed 1962; self-government 1965; independence on 30 September 1966 with Seretse Khama as president.

South Africa: Union 1910, apartheid from 1948, Sharpeville 1960, Rivonia trial 1964, Soweto 1976, Mandela released 1990, first democratic election 1994.

The Organisation of African Unity, founded at Addis Ababa in 1963, coordinated support for liberation movements and demanded majority rule in southern Africa.

Pressures for decolonisation: the Second World War, the Atlantic Charter 1941, the United Nations, Cold War competition, the cost of empire and organised nationalist protest at home.

First World War (1914–18): alliance blocs, imperial rivalry, naval arms race and Balkan nationalism; the trigger was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.

Treaty of Versailles 1919: German war-guilt clause, reparations, territorial losses, disarmament and the League of Nations; the terms are often linked to later resentment and instability.

The League of Nations (1920) relied on collective security and mandates but had no army and no American membership; it failed over Manchuria (1931) and Abyssinia (1935).

Second World War (1939–45): causes include Versailles grievances, appeasement (Munich 1938), fascist expansion and League failure; outcomes included the United Nations (1945) and superpower rivalry.

Cold War: capitalism versus communism; Truman Doctrine 1947, Marshall Plan 1948, NATO 1949, Warsaw Pact 1955; crises at Berlin 1948–49, Korea 1950–53, Cuba 1962 and Vietnam 1955–75.

Détente in the 1970s gave way to renewed tension; Gorbachev's reforms, the collapse of Eastern European regimes in 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 ended the Cold War.

Africans in the world wars: campaigns in Togo, the Cameroons, South West Africa, German East Africa and North Africa; large numbers of African soldiers and carriers served, and veterans later entered nationalist politics.

Southern Africa as a Cold War theatre: Cuban and Soviet support for the MPLA in Angola from 1975, South African intervention, the battle of Cuito Cuanavale 1987–88, the 1988 Tripartite Accord and Namibian independence in 1990.

Migrant labour: Witwatersrand gold from 1886 drew men from Bechuanaland, Mozambique and Nyasaland on contracts; compounds, deferred pay and passes controlled the workforce.

Rural effects of migration: women took over farming and remittances bought cattle and goods, but long absences weakened households and spread tuberculosis and venereal disease.

Cash taxation (hut and poll tax) and land alienation forced Africans into wage labour; forced labour was also used on roads and settler farms in company and settler colonies.

Transport: the railway reached Bulawayo in 1897 and Salisbury in 1902, with a line across Bechuanaland; railways carried cattle, grain and recruits and shaped the growth of towns.

Missions, for example the LMS at Kuruman from the 1820s, introduced literacy, mission schools and written Setswana; converts were often the young or the poor, causing generational tension.

Environment and disease: rinderpest in 1896–97 killed most cattle, droughts and the 1930s Depression hit exports, and veterinary cordon fences restricted livestock movement.

Urbanisation produced townships, squatter settlements and pass laws; African trade unions and strikes, such as the 1946 South African mineworkers' strike, linked workplace grievances to nationalist politics.

Independent Botswana: diamonds at Orapa (from 1971) and Jwaneng (1982) through Debswana (formed 1969), copper-nickel at Selebi-Phikwe, and the Botswana Meat Commission (1965) for beef exports.