AFTER a gruelling six months' journey from the Gabon coast, Savorgnan de Brazza approached Mbe, the capital of the Tio ruler, 1100, in August 1880. In his record of the day, Brazza relates how his guides suggested that he and his men change their clothes, 'for the Makoko is a very great chief'. To be taken seriously as the representative of an equally powerful ruler, the European must dress appropriately. Brazza quickly donned the dress coat of his naval uniform while his men' took off their rags and put on their sailors' uniform '.2 At the royal court, Makoko 1100 appeared in the regalia of a Tio ruler. As Brazza described him:He wore a large copper collar, as did his principal wife. Four pages carried a folded red cloth on their shoulders. A young man, chief of the pages, wore a uniform acquired through trade which he wore with the buttons at the back. The ruler wore a large cloth !pagne), rings around his ankles and arms, and an intricately embroidered hat fastened to his head by an iron pin with two very long feathers attached.: l While such momentous meetings were hardly the stuff of everyday life, the symbolic importance of cloth and dress in mediating social relationships also pervaded the mundane experiences of ordinary people. Throughout the region that became French Equatorial Africa, clothing and accessories were little associated with utilitarian needs, since neither climate nor work conditions made them necessary. Rather, dress conveyed identity, status, values and a sense of occasion.The association of power with wealth, ostentatiously displayed, was deeply entrenched in equatorial African societies from earliest times. Jan Vans ina in his recent book on the' peoples of the forest' has noted the etymological connections between wealth and leadership.4 Furthermore, in his study of the Tio \vho dominated the Brazzaville region in the late nineteenth century, II am grateful for the comments on previous \'ersions of this paper that I have received at several seminars. I would particularlv like to acknowledge the comments of Paula

In this book, Phyllis Martin, a well-known Africanist scholar, opens up a whole new field of African research: the leisure activities of urban Africans. Her comprehensive study, set in colonial Brazzaville and based on a wide variety of written sources and interviews, investigates recreational activities from football and fashion to music, dance and night life. In it, she brings out the ways in which these activities built social networks, humanised daily life and forged new identities, and explains how they ultimately helped to remake older traditions and values with new cultural forms.

No abstract

Many Large Language Model (LLM)s and LLMpowered apps deployed today use some form of prompt filter or alignment to protect their integrity. However, these measures aren't foolproof. This paper introduces Knowledge Return Oriented Prompting (KROP), a prompt injection technique capable of obfuscating prompt injection attacks, rendering them virtually undetectable to most of these security measures.

New hydration rates are proposed for obsidians from the Casa Diablo and Coso source areas in California's Sierra Nevada range. Obsidians from these two sources were used extensively throughout central California and western Nevada during prehistoric times. The new hydration rates presented here differ from earlier California hydration rates in that they account simultaneously for the effects of chemical source variation, climatic regime, and soil temperature. As a result of this greater degree of control over possible sources of variation, the two new hydration rates should provide archaeologists working in the Coso and Casa Diablo areas with reliable and highly accurate chronometric dating techniques.