Needless to say, across Africa colonialism came and went, but there was no training of a national corps of African archaeologists. And with the very rare exception of Mauny (who fought hard for the preservation of Sudanese-style building in Mali), the colonial authorities failed to stop blatant acts of cultural sabotage. The hiring of villagers to pillage middle Niger tells for their terracotta statuettes began during this period, and in 1931–1932, a journalist, H. Clerisse, butchered Tondidarou, West Africa’s largest megalithic site. But West Africa was not alone in this decimation of sites.

A decade later and across the continent, two students spent two months conducting the massacre of some 600 Madagascan tombs. The loss of these tombs was all the more grave because of the lack on the island of even a single self-taught amateur archaeologist. The situation was similar in Afrique Equatorial Française and in many parts of central Africa (Gabon, French Congo, Rwanda, Burundi), where the occasional geologists or priests continued to assemble the odd surface collections. The most significant work was that of J.-P. Lebeuf along the plain around Lake Chad. He was one of the pioneers in the use of oral tradition and ethnography to provide explanations, in terms of local legends, for the ethnic relations and migrations to some 1,200 “Sao” habitation mounds. Congo fared somewhat better, largely because the few amateurs there turned professional found themselves embroiled in the great Tumba controversy, a theoretical debate with international implications.

The pre–World War I “belles pieces” collection from Tumba became the core of O. Menghin’s classic Kulturkreis, the Tumbian culture. As a leader of the Vienna culture-circle school, Menghin stressed geographical classification (forested lowlands, in this case) and diffusion or migration of homogeneous, extremely conservative cultural entities out of a very few cultural homelands. His Tumbian (“pig-raiser culture”) was homogeneous from the French Congo to Angola. It was an arrow and spearhead, biface and blade culture and had barely evolved from the great hand-axe industry period. Soon, throughout forested Africa the term tumbian was applied to axe, large flake, and pick assemblages (now known as Sangoan, Lupemban, and early Tshitolian).

It did not take long, however, for archaeologists building local sequences to begin to question the coherence of the Tumbian. In 1934–1935, a medical assistant, F. Cabu, organized a systematic collection within four kilometers of canal projects, and his acute observations demonstrated the mixed nature of the Tumba-type collection. Other geologists, G. Mortelmans and L. Cahen, or priests (such as Père Anciaux de Faveaux) became interested in prehistory, and their controlled excavations and local sequences bore out Cabu’s conclusions. If their concerns were particularistic and nomenclatural, their methods were a great improvement. Unlike professional archaeologists of the period, they were not slavishly chained to European sequences. At the first Pan-African Congress of Prehistory in 1947, Cabu, his southern African colleagues, and Breuil argued that the Tumbian was a stratigraphically mixed product of racist thinking. They recommended that the term be eliminated. Despite louis leakey’s objection, the Pan-African Congress voted for this recommendation in an all-too infrequent show of francophone-anglophone cooperation.

The slow march of professionalism continued in central Africa. Local sequences and definition of facies of the middle–Stone Age Sangoan and Lupemban and several later–Stone Age industries continued to be refined by Mortelmans, L. Cahen, and Bequaert. In 1950, de Heinzelin conducted the first fully controlled excavations in that part of the continent at Ishango, and he introduced a Bordesian quantitative approach to his lithics. Beginning in 1953, the Institute for Scientific Research in Central Africa supported many years of archaeological and physical anthropological research in Rwanda and Burundi by Hiernaux.

The amiability of relations between these researchers and their anglophone counterparts in southern Africa was particularly striking during this time, and was aided enormously by the sense of community fostered by the early Pan-African congresses. The only other part of colonial Africa where individual researchers were similarly able to escape isolation was in North Africa. Between