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The-landlord-stranger relationship, as it applied to arrangements between Africans as owners of the land and Europeans seeking to settle or trade upon Africa's west coast during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was all things to all parties. Africans saw these agreements as tending to contain Europeans within specified zones and forcing them to abide by African contractual regulations and proscriptions. By controlling foreigners, landlords could regulate the introduction of change and technology and maintain for themselves those by-products beneficial for continuance of local power. Naturally, landlords profited from increased trade and new markets for local products. Restricted from local politics by these agreements, Europeans often saw this relationship as little more than rents, anchorage duties, taxes, licenses, or African attempts to take advantage of European enterprise. Still, they remained on the coast, married Africans, had large families, and often sent sons abroad where they could receive a finishing education. This paper traces the evolution of the landlord-stranger relationship in the trading communities of two rivers on the Windward Coast, the Rio Nunez and the Rio Pongo (Figure 1), from approximately 1790 to 1860. Here the relationship was an agency of change and a process through which local societies allowed foreign ideas to influence local institutions. Both parties to these arrangements initially sought the security of rigid contractual tenancy guarantees. With time, however, accommodation to some European ideas and assimilation of Europeans in local institutions were the rule on both rivers.'

The path to the publication of our collaborative research concerning an aspect of earliest Church Missionary Society history has been an irregular, and often despairing, one. For a time it seemed unlikely that we would ever finish our research, and that was simply the research part of it. The prospect of collaboration by husband and wife, persons trained in disciplines—history and sociology—guided by approaches seemingly opposed to each other, was not a promising one from the start. Simply put, could we cooperate, work through the processes of writing, thinking, and rewriting/rethinking within a single household, and endure the stress associated with meeting demands placed upon us by a publisher and full-time jobs as instructors? Had we been aware that this project would last for nearly thirty years for Bruce and twenty for Nancy, and consume entirely too much of our lives, we are pretty certain—in retrospect—that we would never have embarked on it.Bruce was the first to encounter the archive of the Church Missionary Society, during his dissertation research in London in 1966. At that time his principal objective was to scan records found in that archive for bits and pieces of data relating to political development and economic transformation of a part of coastal Guinea/Conakry from 1800 to 1850. That was a region where the Church Missionary Society had operated schools and mission stations between 1808 and 1816/17. Among the Society's earliest missionaries sent to West Africa was one named Peter Hartwig—a person who, according to other missionaries and early historians, had deserted the sacred cause to become a slave trader, and yet had returned to the Society's service at the eleventh hour, only to die in 1815 in a yellow fever epidemic then sweeping the African coast. Still, something seemed to be amiss in that narrative, for correspondence found in the archive suggested that it was a very complex affair. It was apparent that a careful review of Hartwig's experiences would be a worthwhile research project, but for a later time.

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A B S T R A C T : The Yangekori Rebellion was among the earliest extensive uprisings within Africa to be reported in European documents. This rebellion, which lasted for more than a decade, included domestic and market-bound slaves as well as free persons, all of whom became involved in promoting significant changes in traditional socioeconomic and political patterns. What made this rebellion unique and more informative for the present and for research relating to external slave trading and to rebellion within the diaspora, however, were its complex and local-based context, its multiple centers and its substantial involvement in a timely religious movement intent on transforming coastal society. Also instructive is the synergetic response that occurred among autocratic and otherwise quarrelsome rulers who were responsible for ending this rebellion, for re-establishing landholding patterns, and for defending themselves effectively against socioeconomic and political change.K E Y W O R D S : Slavery resistance, slave trade, Islam, Guinea, Sierra Leone.