bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Experience and Experiment: A Comparison of Zabarella's View with Galileo's inDe Motu*
Authors: Schmitt Charles B.
Published: May 2006

‘Quoad congeriem vero, conficimus historiam non solum naturae liberae ac solutae (cum scilicet ilia sponte fluit et opus suum peragit), qualis est historia coelestium, meteororum, terrae et maris, mineralium, plantarum, animalium; sed multo magis naturae constrictae et vexatae; nempe, cum per artem et ministeriurn humanum de statu suo detruditur, atque premitur et fingitur.’

—Francis Bacon,Novum Organum(1620), ‘Distributio operis, pars tertia’

‘Experimentum est experientia, quae versatur circa facta naturae, quae nonnisi interveniente opera nostra contingunt.’

—Christian Wolff,Psychologia empirica(1732)

One of the tendencies which clearly marked the intellectual development of the seventeenth century was an increasing emphasis on experience. In philosophy this took the form of an empiricism which developed progressively from Gassendi to Locke; in science there emerged ever more clearly a definable ‘experimental method’, which was progressively refined from Francis Bacon to Newton. By the end of the seventeenth century the classic works illustrating these tendencies had appeared and set the trend for much of eighteenth-century intellectual activity.
‘At thy golg first eut of the hous vlysse the saynge thus’
Authors: Bühler Curt F.
Published: May 2006

In examining a number of books of hours for the use of Sarum printed on the continent for sale in England, the writer noted with some amazement the peculiar English often to be found in these volumes. It therefore seemed worth while to record, in this journal and thus for the benefit of a wider audience, some of the choicer specimens found in these printings, together with other poems which came into English religious books as translations from foreign sources. The title of this study, a typical example of the cruder continental spelling (for ‘At thy going first out of the house bless thee saying thus’), is to be found on folio 8 (signature A8) of the Horae ad usum Sarum printed in Rouen about the year 1506 by Richard Goupil for Wilham Candos.
Milton, Ficino, and the Charmides
Authors: Arthos John
Published: May 2006

The doctrine of Milton's Comus is elaborately Platonic, but the introduction of the idea of chastity at the center of the Platonic argument is generally supposed to be Milton's innovation. That virtue, by that name, is not commonly recognized as a subject of Plato's thought though his speculation on divine love necessarily includes comparable notions. But in Milton the idea stands out, not only as the subject of the masque, but for the difficulty of understanding what he means by it. He distinguishes explicitly, but without explanation, between chastity and virginity; at times he uses chastity to signify temperance, and at other times continence; at one or two places, as in the epilogue, he implies its identification with virtue generally, and as a primary means of attaining immortality.
English Bosman and Dutch Bosman: A Comparison of Texts
Authors: van Dantzig Albert
Published: May 2006

What will follow in this and subsequent papers will constitute an extended gloss of the English translation of Willem Bosman's account of the Guinea coast. This translation was published in London in 1705 under the title A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea … and was based on the 1703 Dutch edition published in Amsterdam. For the English translation I have used the edited reprint published in 1967, which was an identical copy of the 1705 edition. For the Dutch version I have used the 1737 edition, also published in Amsterdam; this was in fact the last of a series of reprints of the 1709 second edition. This second edition contained numerous amendments and additions to the first (1703) edition, and these will be noted as they occur.

In addition to including all the material in the Dutch edition which was omitted from the English translation, I have included all passages in which significant differences in tone or meaning occur. Throughout I have tried to retain the capitalization, italicization, and punctuation employed in the Dutch version–styles to which the English translation generally conformed.

Citation is by page number, paragraph, and line number within paragraph, with the first paragraph presumed to begin in each case with the first line of a page. Thus, for example, P. 17 I/8 indicates that the gloss concerns the eighth line of the first paragraph on page 17 of the English translation. Shorter passages are arranged on a FOR … READ basis, while for longer passages only the Dutch original is included after SHOULD READ.
The “Hill Refuges” of the Jos Plateau: A Historiographical Examination
Authors: Tambo David C.
Published: May 2006

The Jos Plateau comprises an area of approximately 2500 square miles in the north-central part of Nigeria. It includes a high plain, interspersed with granite hills and is bounded by a broken scarp some 1500 to 3000 feet in height. Historically as well as geographically, the Plateau has stood apart from the neighboring lower plains region. In the nineteenth century, the Muslim emirate of Bauchi controlled nearly all the territory surrounding the Plateau, but inhabitants of the Plateau successfully repelled intermittent Bauchi Incursions and maintained their independence until the arrival of the British at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Most of the literature dealing with the Plateau has focused on this theme of resistance and a number of interrelated topics. As it happens, such studies nearly always emphasize the isolated nature of the region, whether cultural or economic. As a result, a stereotyped view of the Plateau has emerged, a view which characterizes the area as a “hill refuge,” settled by small groups who lived in the most inaccessible reaches, were economically self-sufficient, and who at best maintained minimal links with each other. The isolated nature of these groups is seen as a major cause of their intrinsically conservative nature and predisposition to resist change. According to the stereotype, the people of the Plateau remain a useful subject of research since they continue to exhibit many of the “archaic” forms of social, political and economic organization that may have been prevalent throughout Africa thousands of years ago.
Anti-Witchcraft Cults in Asante: An Essay in the Social History of an African People
Authors: McCaskie T.C.
Published: May 2006

There is a considerable literature dealing with the phemenon of twentieth-century anti-witchcraft cults among the Akan peoples of Ghana, and notably the Asante. This literature is written from the disciplinary perspective of social anthropology and it may be divided into two interpretative views of the matter. The first espouses the theory that such cults are ‘new’--creations of the twentieth century--in that they represent a reflexive response to the social disorientation assumed to have been engendered by colonial overrule. The second questions the causative link between the twentieth century and increased anomie, and suggests the location of such cults in a time perspective reaching back into the distant--but undefined--pre-colonial past. For a social historian interested in the problem of witchcraft and its suppression this literature presents a resistant difficulty. It concerns itself with the material appurtenances and the impressionistic ‘psychohistory’ of cult practices, but it is almost entirely bereft of historical data and it indulges in generalizations erected upon the flimsiest of factual considerations. McLeod, who has ably reviewed this literature, has commented upon this deficiency with regret, but--at least so far--has done little to rectify it.

In this paper I am concerned with the discrete history--social, economic and political--of three important anti-witchcraft cults that flourished in Asante between the late 1870s adn the late 1920s; in chronological order these were,domankama(‘The Creator’),aberewa(‘The Old Woman’) andhwe me so(‘Watch Over Me’). In discussing these cults as historical phenomena I seek to explicate or otherwise to dissolve some of the generalizations evident in the existing literature. I seek too to say something concerning the construction of a valid Asante (and African) social history, the relationship between social history and social anthropology in the African context, and the significance for the historian of Africa of socio-cultural phenomena such as witchcraft.
Putting the Horse Back Before the Cart: Recent Encouraging Signs
Authors: Henige David
Published: May 2006

The historian can of course be his own textual critic; but the editing of text has to precede its use as a historical document.

The view of the primacy of the properly edited source represents a notion long taken for granted by classical and medieval historians (among others) and philologists, as is evidenced by the very large number of edited texts that undergird their interpretative work, and which continue to appear regularly, including improved editions of previously-published texts. It cannot be said that Africanists (to mention only one group) have enthusiastically adopted a similar view with respect to their own sources.

In fact, if there was a hallmark of the nascent historiography of precolonial Africa, it was its commitment to rehabilitating oral sources as a legitimate tool for recovering the deeper past. The reasons for this development are obvious, perhaps even ineluctable: it provided a unifying esprit de corps which served to actuate its practitioners; it permitted the study of geographical areas not well served by other types of sources; it prompted apparently rapid progress in the field from virtually a standing start.

In the circumstances it is no surprise that written sources, typically the staple of most historical inquiry, were relegated to a supporting role. Like Akan stool disputants, African historians were frequently content to draft written/printed materials into service largely in attempts to corroborate information more gratifyingly elicited from oral sources. This state of affairs was appropriately mirrored in scholarly publishing during the period.
Perceptions of Bonduku's Contribution to the Western Sudanese Gold Trade: An Assessment of the Evidence
Authors: Perinbam B. Marie
Published: May 2006

On his way back from Mossi country in 1888, Louis Binger visited Bonduku, principal town of the Akan state of Gyaman. Commenting erroneously on the city's antiquity, Binger nonetheless appropriately referred to Bonduku's association with gold mining and the gold trade with nearby towns such as Kong and Buna. The town's more distant trading partners, he continiued, included Jenne and other Niger bend towns. In effect, the saltgold trade, to which Binger was referring, extended from the Taghaza mines in the north (northern Mali, two day's journey from Taodeni), to the southerly mines in the Bonduku and Asante regions. On his own admission, Binger obtained little information on the gold trade which, of the “hidden” variety, was conducted in traders' homes. He learned even less about gold mining. Even his own attempts to purchase a large gold nugget of 150 grams foundered on his host's opposition, claiming that the sale would bring misfortune to the peoples and their communities.

Misinformed on the city's age and frustrated in further endeavors, Binger nonetheless affirmed that a great deal of gold was in the city. He noticed, for example, that gold was the “almost exclusive” payment for European merchandise abounding in local markets. “Not a day passes,” he continued, but that commercial transactions--at his host's residence, or at any other house chosen at random--were concluded, involving gold as the exchange medium. Bonduku's inhabitants, moreover, adorned themselves with gold. Taxes were paid in gold.
Volcanic Dust in the Atmosphere and the Interpretation of African Eclipse Traditions
Authors: Davis Ronald W.
Published: May 2006

The purpose of this discussion is to call attention to the presence at various times of large quantities of volcanic dust in the atmosphere. Remarkable visual effects from this dust may imply hitherto unconsidered problems in identifying alleged references to solar eclipses in African chronicles and oral traditions. Climatologist Hubert Lamb has compiled the data on volcanic eruptions and dust veils since 1500 AD and attempted to determine possible meteorological effects.

Contemporary notions of volcanic activity are predisposed to spectacular lava flows, which make more interesting journalism and greater popular interest. However, eruptions characterized by free-flowing lava –– conventionally termed Type A –– are relatively unimportant in the volcanic dust question. We are interested in so-called Type B events, usually violent explosions resulting from the inability of lava or steam to find convenient outlets. Such an explosion may inject huge quantities of dust and debris into the atmosphere, causing a wide variety of visual anomalies as they are carried around the world by high-altitude winds. If the dust veil is sufficiently dense it may even cause short-term alterations in weather patterns.
Some Archives in the Bandundu and Equateur Regions of Zaire
Authors: Harms Robert
Published: May 2006

Archives in the Republic of Zaire contain valuable documents for historical and ethnographic research, but finding these treasures often demands a great deal of perseverance and a certain amount of luck. Since the government archives in Kinshasa deal mainly with national administration, they generally have little to offer researchers interested in more localized topics. Although a small number of documents from the countryside have trickled into the Archives Nationales (housed in a wing of the fire station on Avenue de la Justice in Kinshasa), most of them remain dispersed throughout the network of regional, sub-regional, and zonal offices that form the core of the country's administrative system.

Since policies regarding the conservation of archives and the granting of access to them are not uniform, but made on an ad hoc basis by the officials on the spot, conditions vary widely from place to place and from time to time but I should point out that during my research in the Bandundu and Equateur Regions in 1975-76, the officials with whom I worked were unfailingly helpful, though the quality of the collections varied greatly. Some archives had disappeared or fallen into disarray during the troubles of the early 1960s; yet others remained remarkably intact, although even in the best-kept archives, many older documents had been partially eaten by insects.
The Conquest that Never was: Ghana and the Almoravids, 1076. I. The External Arabic Sources
Authors: Conrad David , Fisher Humphrey
Published: May 2006

We first conceived of this study several years ago, when our respective lines of research seemed to some extent to converge on the period of the decline of ancient Ghana. It has proved a more complex matter than we imagined, or than the deceptively simple title above might suggest--partly because it is often more difficult to prove that something did not happen than that it did. We have had to divide our analysis into two parts. First we examine the external written sources for the Almoravid conquest of Ghana. Our work in this respect has been immensely facilitated by the appearance in 1975 of Cuoq's Recueil des sources arabes, which in some sense provides the infrastructure for our argument. We have also had the invaluable privilege of seeing in proof Hopkins' and Levtzion's Corpus of early Arabic sources. In the second half of our study, it will be the turn of internal sources, mainly oral traditions. We use the terms external and internal advisedly, since the simple distinction between written sources and oral traditions is too artificial: an oral tradition was an oral tradition, whether written down in Arabic in the Middle Ages or in French in this century, and a great deal of the information in both parts of our article must have started as oral tradition.

Putting it very bluntly, we have discovered no sources, whether external or internal, which unambiguously point to such a conquest. A handful of sources suggest some link between the rise of the Almoravids and the decline of Ghana, but with a puzzling vagueness--a vagueness which decreases as the number of centuries between the alleged event, and the report of it increases.
The Boundaries of History in Oral Performance
Authors: Tonkin Elizabeth
Published: May 2006

What do African tellers of history tell it for? What do they mean by history and how differently is the past transmitted in different communities? Professional academic historians use oral data like documentary data, for their own ends. They work in a different medium--written language--and they offer back a new story to the original donors. They do not always pay attention to the ways in which these consumers produced their own versions and perpetuated them embedded in performances. The indigenous occasions of performance are also easily replaced by the record of an outside researcher's chance intervention.

Oral performances of history differ--in kind, in the extent to which past events are a focus of attention, in the readiness of individuals to answer an outsider's questions, in the types and structures of recall. The patterns I describe for one Liberian community may be quite different for its ethnic neighbors. As a social anthropologist I assume that recall is not a purely individual phenomenon, and besides trying to understand what connections there may be between types of recall and types of social condition, I want to see how personal reminiscence (as well as tradition) is formulated, sustained, and recapitulated; to whom it is repeated; whether it is hinted or used overtly as a weapon. By taking these issues into account I believe we can also interpret better the historical data from oral performance, just as we need to know about all the genres of performance if we are to recognize the uses of history there may be in apparently non-historical modes.
African History Research Program at the University of Trondheim
Authors: Simensen Jarle
Published: May 2006

Since 1974 a program of African studies has been developed in the University of Trondheim within the framework of the cand. philol. degree. The major subject within this degree occupies from 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 years of study, including a thesis that in history averages about 60,000 words and must represent original research based on primary material. Since 1974 about twenty-five such theses on topics connected with African history have been completed. The theses are written in Norwegian. Microfiche copies can be obtained from: The University Library, The University of Trondheim (DKNVS), Erling Skakkes gt., 7000 Trondheim.
A Further Note on the Amsterdam Notarial Records
Authors: Jones Adam
Published: May 2006

In a note in this journal R.A. Kea advises researchers to allow at least six months for using the notarial records of the Amsterdam Municipal Archives because, he says, they have not been indexed. Although this is largely true, there is a complete index for the years 1701-1710 and about ten per cent of the other notarial records written between 1578 and 1800 have so far been indexed. The drawer of index cards for west Africa, typed in modern Dutch and arranged according to geographical location, gives the researcher a good review of the material available, since the summaries often amount to over a hundred words. The index cards may only be consulted in the archive and may not be photocopied, but it is possible to take home photocopies of manuscripts. The index will remain incomplete for many years to come. Even so, it provides a useful starting point and anyone interested in the west African coast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in a single locality, will find even a day or two spent in this archive most valuable. In addition to the notarial records, the archive contains several other documents referring to west Africa.
The Shirazi in Swahili Traditions, Culture, and History
Authors: Spear Thomas
Published: May 2006

“Strange foreign jewels on a mournful silent shore”

Historians have frequently viewed the Swahili-speaking peoples of the East African coast as members of an Arab diaspora that spread around the Indian Ocean with trade over the last two thousand years. The interpretation flowed easily from the apparent “Arab” nature of Swahili culture--a written language using Arabic script, elaborate stone buildings and mosques constructed in urban settings, Islam, and genteel social behavior--especially when contrasted with the culture of mainland Africans, members of preliterate, uncentralized communities. Since the Swahili culture of the islands and coastal fringes bore little apparent resemblance to the cultures of the mainland, historians reasoned, its development could only have been the product of Persian and Arab merchants bringing to the “mournful silent shores” of East Africa the “jewels” of their own Muslim civilizations.

The perspective was essentially diffusionist in assuming that cultural innovation and historical development in Africa could only have come from elsewhere, and racist in assuming that race and culture were so inextricably linked that a separate “race” of immigrants had to carry these new ideas. As a result, historians failed to investigate the possible African roots of Swahili culture in their Bantu language, their religious beliefs and values, their economy, or their social structure. But this charge applies not only to European historians; Swahili oral historians have long recounted the development of their societies in essentially the same terms in involved genealogies tracing the development of different Swahili families, communities, and institutions back to Persian or Arabian ancestors. When European historians came to study the oral traditions of the Swahili (usually in written, chronicle form), they thus found ready confirmation of their own assumptions and interpretations.
Mission Archives in Bremen
Authors: Brydon Lynne
Published: May 2006

The present report is intended to complement the report on the Norddeutsche Missiongesellschaft archive provided by Donna Maier in History in Africa, 8 (1981), 335-37. I worked in Bremen in the summer of 1982 and the following information may be of interest to readers. Firstly, several small organizational details have changed. The Staatsarchiv is now open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays, except Thursdays, when it remains open until 8 p.m. Photocopying is available at AO Pf per exposure and, once a week, on Thursdays, the archive can provide microfilm facilities at 20 Pf per exposure.

As a social anthropologist whose principal interest is the central Volta Region of Ghana, I was most concerned to examine material pertaining to the Ho and Amedzofe areas, the sites of two of the Bremen mission stations. However, the files under the index reports for these stations are mostly concerned with internal mission business: finance, station-building, the training of and reports from native catechists (from the 1880s), and the setting up of schools. On the other hand, the sub-section “Land und Leute” (reference 7, 1035: 41/1 and 41/2) contains several attempts by the missionaries at general descriptive ethnography. Included in this section are a relatively early account by Schlegel, “Zur Geschichte der Eweer;” a long account by Spieth of Avatime; accounts by Schosser and Spieth of Akpafu ironworking and smithing among the Ewe, respectively; and an account of Anlo by Hornberger.
Kings, Titles & Quarters: A Conjectural History of Ilesha Part II: Institutional Growth
Authors: Peel J.D.Y.
Published: May 2006

The foundation for the argument that follows is the demonstration in Part I of this essay of Ilesha's steady physical expansion over at least three hundred years, as manifested in the establishment of new quarters. Behind this lay Ilesha's success in exploiting the geo-political possibilities of her situation midway between Oyo and Benin, twenty-five miles back from the savanna/forest divide and so safe from Oyo's cavalry. Other aspects of Ilesha's growth as a capital were her loose hegemony, periodically reasserted, over the smaller neighboring kingdoms to the north and east; her effective continuous domination of other communities (including some earlier centers of the Ijesha Kingdom) within a 20 to 30 mile radius; and her establishment of further rural out-settlements in this area, many of them, as has been mentioned, ruled by members of her royal lineage. In what follows, we will be less concerned with the interlocking means by which this increase was brought about - slaves taken from communities defeated in war and incorporated, revenues from the trade drawn to the markets and routes which Ilesha was able to dominate, free immigrants attracted from other towns - than with how this growth was managed and affected the structure of the community. Our evidence takes two principle forms; itan told about many of the Owa, such as formed the raw material for the Itan Ilesa of Abiola, Babafemi, and Ataiyero; and the system of chiefly titles, each with distinctive attributes and traditions, which defines the political structure of the community.
Archival Research in the People's Republic of the Congo
Authors: Headrick Rita
Published: May 2006

Doing historical research in the People's Republic of the Congo is not only now possible for Americans, it is also enjoyable. Relatively little red tape is required to obtain the necessary authorizations. The Archives Nationales du Congo are well organized, run efficiently, and rich in administrative documents for French Equatorial Africa.

While I was there (February through August 1979), the procedure for getting research permits was being formalized. It would be best, at this point, to write the Ministre de la Culture, des Arts et des Sports chargé de la Recherche Scientifique in Brazzaville about your proposed work. Send a carbon of that letter to the Congolese Embassy to the United Nations in New York. (As of November, 1979, the Congolese Embassy in Washington, D.C. had not yet opened. Visa requests should also go to New York.) Also write the cultural attaché of the American Embassy, B.P. 1010, Brazzaville with your plans. After arriving in Brazzaville, the cultural attaché will apply for your “autorisation de recherche” through the minister of foreign affairs. This authorization will be sent to you and also to the appropriate ministries (depending on your topic) and will allow you to use the university and the Bibliothèque Nationale. In my case it took about three weeks to get my “autorisation” but I was able to begin work without it.

A permit from the tourist office is necessary to take pictures. The Congo has few tourists and many people do not like having their picture taken so that photography must be done with discretion and sensitivity. To travel, you should get a permit, again from the tourist office. It is advisable to inform the authorities of your plans. Note that the roads are terrible, making wheeled travel very difficult.
Traditions of Igbo Origins: A Comment
Authors: Afigbo A.E.
Published: May 2006

But if the problem that has so far engaged our attention has been extremely intricate, that which concerns the origin of the Ibo is still more so for it is a very maze within a maze. Here…we are face to face with an evolution which is practically interminable, for certain important complexities have to be taken into consideration.

The problem of Igbo origins is indeed “a very maze within a maze.” It boggles the mind. Instead of one pan-Igbo tradition of origin there are almost as many traditions as there are those independent sub-cultural groups referred to as “clans” in the Intelligence Reports of the 1930s. In fact in some clans there are two rival traditions of origin. However, for clarity and ease of understanding, we shall here distinguish among three categories of traditions of origin found among the Ibgo people. Going from what I consider the least to the most relevant, these are:

[a] traditions of oriental origin

[b] traditions of origin from neighboring “great” states

[c] traditions claiming autochthony.
A Bio-Bibliography of E.S. Grogan
Authors: Ofcansky Thomas P.
Published: May 2006

For more than fifty years Ewart Scott Grogan (1874–1967) was one of Kenya's most influential and controversial European settlers. Among other things, he helped to develop the port of Mombasa, to finance the country's forestry industry, and to experiment with new agricultural and water conservation techniques. Grogan also repeatedly fought against the British colonial government in defense of Kenya's European community; indeed, many settlers considered him to be a greater leader than Lord Delamere.

Apart from his economic, scientific, and political talents, Grogan was a gifted and prolific writer. His first literary achievement, From the Cape to Cairo, published in 1900, not only chronicled the events of a harrowing two year walking tour of Africa, but also discussed many of the problems that confronted the continent at the dawn of the twentieth century. In the book's final chapter, for example, Grogan listed a series of recommendations for the construction of a Cape-to-Cairo telegraph and railway system. He then examined the “native question,” the need for a compulsory labor program for Africans, and the benefits of an indirect form of colonial rule.

In 1909 Grogan wrote an analytical treatise called The Economic Calculus and Its Application to Tariff. In general terms the book sought to demonstrate that “there is a growing feeling that the classical system of economics has failed to justify its claim for recognition in the domain of science.” More specifically, it outlined England's policy toward free trade, umemployment, and protection of workers' rights. According to Leda Farrant, Grogan's latest biographer, the book “was recognized by the experts of the period as a valuable addition to the study of economics and is still used today as a reference book in the British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London University and many other universities and libraries throughout England.”
Ancient Malagasy Dynastic Succession; The Merina Example
Authors: Ottino Paul
Published: May 2006

My paper dealing with the Andriambahoaka universal sovereigns and the Indonesian heritage that they embodied brought out the eminently religious character of the Malagasy marvelous tales, disarticulated fragments from a Malay myth of origin. As Françoise Raison has noted, the religious value of Ibonia was still perfectly felt in Imerina during the first half of the nineteenth century. I do not hark back to the possibilities offered by the notion of Hikayat--or in Malagasy the Tantara--at once narration and imitation--“semblance,” as it was called in the Arthurian Romance of the Grail. These notions refer to these Shiʿite syntheses, sometimes with gnostic and dualist ideas borrowed from neo-platonism and the ancient Babylonian philosophies of Lights which, introduced into Madagascar by an Indonesian relay, conceived the descendants of Andriambahoaka in the image of that of the imāms descended from Muḥammad through his daughter Fāṭima and her husband ʿAlī--prototype of Ramini, ancestor of the ZafiRaminia and fourth Caliph, but more importantly the first imām, initiator, after the cycle of revelation that Muḥammad closed, of the cycle of explanation, of initiation, of the “return,”, that is, of walayāt.

We are far from this “pedagogical model” that I evoked previously with regard to the other celestial line of the knights seeking the Grail. Far, too, from the unsatisfactory notions of ideology or the “imaginary” such as Georges Duby uses in his recent work, even though his chapter on “L'exemplarité celeste” returns to an infinitely richer universe, very near that which Henry Corbin describes. Can one truly explain from an agnostic point of view facts that are essentially perceived and experienced as religious? In any event going from Ibonia and the marvelous tales of the Andriambahoaka to the historical legends and genealogies in the first chapter of the Tantara ny Andriana of Callet, translated as Histoire des rois, we pass on to something entirely different.
European Models and West African History. Further Comments on the Recent Historiography of Dahomey
Authors: Ross David
Published: May 2006

Pre-colonial Dahomey's two most recent historians, Isaac A. Akinjogbin and John C. Yoder, have argued that Dahomey was a progressive nation that had much in common with the states of the modern West. Akinjogbin and Yoder have laid particularly heavy emphasis on this point when describing the kingdom's system of government. Their account of that system appears to be generally accepted. It has, at any rate, been repeated in the more important textbooks and works of synthesis.

Akinjogbin argues that, when it was founded in ca. 1620, Dahomey was organized on principles which “ran very close indeed to the modern European idea of a national state.” The kingdom was, it seems, from the very first governed by a line of monarchs who exercised absolute control over the lives and activities of their subjects. Early Dahomey's monarchy “was a strongly centralised institution, controlled all the appointments and dismissals of the chiefs and had a standing army.” In Dahomey every citizen had to “serve and be subservient to the king.”

Dahomey's various eighteenth-century absolute rulers were, Akinjogbin notes, men whose aims and ambitions were at least as admirable as the aims and ambitions of any of Europe's contemporary enlightened despots. Agaja, (ca, 1708-1740), the conqueror of the Aja coast, was for example a monarch who attempted “to stop the slave trade” and who “could be unpredictably generous, magnanimous in victory and endowed with that sense of humor which men of great heart possess.” Tegbesu (1740-1774), Dahomey's best known eighteenth-century monarch, we are told, was a ruler who “greatly enriched both the monarchy and the general populace” and who created “an orderly contented community.”
Kings, Lists, and History in Kasanje
Authors: Miller Joseph C.
Published: May 2006

The more we hear about orally-preserved king lists, those initial favorites of the chronophiles among African historians, the less we trust them. Despite some early efforts to convert lists of rulers into rough calendars by applying arithmetic and statistical procedures, historians have since discovered that such dynastic sequences are filled with spuriously regular father-to-son successions, commonly exhibit telescoping in their remoter periods, and are susceptible to structuring that aligns purported kingly figures with local cosmological assumptions. Most worrisome of all is the implication of recent work on the consequences of literacy to the effect that listing may be a habit characteristic only of societies with reading and writing. If people in oral societies do not make lists, what appeared to African historians to be sequentially-ordered lists of rulers may in fact have been no more than conceptual “chunks” of royalty possessing little or no internal order. Thus the purported sequence in orally-preserved lists of kings may resemble chronology, even sequence, less than it resembles what structuralist anthropologists call “diachrony.” By “diachrony” they mean the artificial ordering of essentially unsequenced elements in a myth structure that is produced spuriously by the necessity in a non-literate culture of realizing them orally, in time. If what historians have taken as “kinglists”, imputing order and para-chronology to them, are in fact synchronous unordered categories, they have been even further off the mark than critics have charged.
A Note on the Archives of the Propaganda Fide and Capuchin Archives
Authors: Thornton John K.
Published: May 2006

The formation of the Holy Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in 1622 as a part of the Papacy's attempt to centralize control over overseas missions in Roman hands led to the formation of one of the most important archival deposits in Europe for documentation pertaining to Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Archivio “De Propaganda Fide” in Rome. This Roman-directed missionary organization sent its priests to every corner of the globe, relying especially for its African enterprises on Italian clergy of the Capuchin order. In connection with research on the history of the kingdom of Kongo in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I have worked extensively with materials frcm both the archives of the “Propaganda Fide” and various deposits of the Capuchin order, including a personal visit to the “Propaganda Fide” in January 1978.

The Archivio “De Propaganda Fide” is located in Rome at Piazza di Spagna, 48, and when I visited it, it was open only four hours a day from 9:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. every day except Sunday and holidays. Aside from the short hours, however, the archive is a pleasant place to work. The staff is friendly and helpful and the reading room well-lighted and well-appointed. In addition, the material is extremely well indexed and easy to use, so that the researcher who knows the system will have no difficulty in locating relevant material with a minimum of leafing and surveying. Fr. Lowrie J. Daly, has described the organization of the collection.
J. W. Blake: A Tribute
Authors: Hair P. E. H.
Published: May 2006

J. W. Blake, who died on 7 March 1987, was a significant and notable link in the chain of African historiography. In the 1930s he learned Portuguese, assembled Portuguese sources, and did meticulous research among the difficult and then largely unpenetrated archives of the English High Court of Admiralty. The result was a monograph on European Beginnings in West Africa, 1454-1578, published in 1937, followed by two volumes of documents relating to the same period, Europeans in West Africa, published in 1942. The outbreak of war in 1939 delayed the second publication and by preventing Blake from visiting French archives made it one nation short in its documents. The titles of these very solid works express exactly what they contain. The monograph was much admired by the distinguished Portuguese scholar, Avelino Teixeira da Mota, and by the small but growing band of Anglo-American historians who from the 1950s developed an interest in the history of Guinea. Indeed, the 1937 work was almost the earliest work to make a serious study of the first stages of European contact with Black Africa. But it was essentially a work about Europeans overseas, since Blake had been trained in a tradition of what was then called ‘imperial history.’ In modern parlance it was Eurocentric, and its references to the experiences and reactions of Africans were, by later standards, naive and uninformed.
Hunters or Hunted? Towards a History of the Okiek of Kenya
Authors: Distefano John A.
Published: May 2006

In the historiography of east Africa, hunter-gatherers have been given occasional mention almost since the beginning of European contacts with the interior. Early European travelers, hunters, and colonial administrators all took note of the ubiquitous “Dorobo,” as these hunters have come to be known in the literature. Furthermore, oral tradition collections from among east Africa's food-producing populations generally recall an earlier hunter-gatherer community who are said to have “disappeared,” “gone underground,” or were “driven away.”

Recent scholarship has attempted to look at these hunter groups in economic terms: (1) as a stage of economic development before achieving a “higher” level of production; (2) as a retrograde step from a food-producing economy; or (3) simply as a mode of production. But east Africa's hunter-gatherers remain inadequately dealt with in historical literature, primarily because they have usually been ignored by researchers but also because of their neighbors' and the academic community's prejudicial or misconceived notions about them.

To begin, some of the literature concerning these people will be selectively surveyed to see how ideas about them have developed. Next an attempt will be made to identify and delineate properly the various groups of hunter-gatherers living in East Africa today and in the recent past. Finally, the largest remaining community of hunter-gatherers, those living in the western highlands of Kenya who usually call themselves “Okiek,” will be looked at more closely in an attempt to advance the discussion of hunter-gatherers in general by presenting some observations concerning their socio-economic history.
Value-Orientation in Historical Research and Writing: The Colonial Period in African History
Authors: Simensen Jarle
Published: May 2006

The aim of this paper is to use African historiography as an example of how value-orientations influence historical research and writing. This can be seen as a contribution to the never-ending discussion about the problem of objectivity in history. African historiography is particularly well suited for such an analysis. Its birth as a separate area of academic study after World War II was partly the result of internal, professional developments, such as the establishment of African universities, the postwar development of the social sciences, interdisciplinary research, and a more global orientation in the Western academic world. But it was also closely related to external political and ideological developments, like African nationalism, decolonization, the cold war, development aid, and the rise of new left movements in the Western world. The subject matter of modern African history is of obvious significance not only for Africans, but also for the self-image of Europe and for the relationship between Africa and the West: the nature of European expansion, the role of capitalism in the development of the modern world, the concept of imperialism, and the global relevance of democracy and socialism. The interconnections between ideology and history are therefore particulary clear in this field.

The plan of the paper is to discuss how value-orientations within the different schools of history in this field reveal themselves in the choice of themes, in causal explanation, in basic concepts and in counterfactual argument. The term “value-orientation” I will define so as to cover interests, ideals, and personal identification. I will distinguish between three main “schools,” the term being used in the broadest sense of the word: the colonial school, also covering later historians writing in the same tradition; the Africanist school, dominant since the late 1950s; and the radical (“neo-Marxist,” “dependency,” “under-development”) school, influential since its emergence in the 1970s.
What the Stranger Brings: The Social Dynamics of Fieldwork
Authors: Lance James
Published: May 2006

A major feature of research in African history is the reliance of African historians on oral statements for much of their evidence. Vansina's pathbreaking explorations of African oral traditions and testimonies established criteria for the collection of oral evidence and ushered in the contemporary era of scholarship in African history. Although the publication ofOral Traditionsanctioned the use of oral data, it also prompted considerable reflection about the nature, strengths, and weaknesses of oral evidence. For the most part this scholarly examination of African oral traditions and testimonies has focused on their value as sources. What has not been fully addressed are the social and cultural dynamics of the research process itself: how the interaction between a foreign fieldworker and an indigenous informant involves not only the production of knowledge but the management of asymmetrical power relationships as well. Rarely do researcher and informant interact as equal partners. During the process of fieldwork, sometimes the researcher is favored, sometimes the informant. This brief paper is a reflection on the ways the attitudes of an African people about knowledge, power, and outsiders influence the kind of oral evidence the researcher collects.

For much of the past two years I resided in a village in northern Ghana where I was conducting fieldwork among the Mamprusi people. I was seeking information which would embellish and provide an indigenous texture to the archival sources I had collected earlier as part of my efforts to reconstruct the social history of Mampurugu during the colonial period. It soon became apparent, however, that my quest for an indigenous expression of, and perspective on, historical process was mired in a complex host of conflicts and assumptions. As a white stranger in the Mamprusis' midst asking as many questions as I could about the Mamprusi past, I received answers which reflected not only the degree to which I had successfully or unsuccessfully established cordial and trusting relationships with my Mamprusi informants, but also Mamprusi attitudes about historical knowledge and their anxieties in regard to possible consequences if such knowledge were revealed to non-Mamprusi.
A Premise for Precolonial Nuba History
Authors: Spaulding Jay
Published: May 2006

Near the center of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan lies a tract of broken, elevated terrain about the size of South Carolina. The region, by common convention, is called the Nuba Mountains, and the people who live there, through a familiar if misleading generalization, the Nuba. The inhabitants of the Nuba Mountains have long attracted the attention of students of African languages and cultures, for in these respects they exhibit very great diversity among themselves as well as distinctiveness in relation to the Arab and Nilotic cultural traditions that dominate the surrounding lowlands on every side. No scholar has yet deliberately undertaken to write a history of the Nuba, but many have found themselves constrained to make tangential statements or assumptions about Nuba history in the course of constructing studies with some other primary focus. The sum of these tangential comments and assumptions may read as the current state of Nuba historiography. The present study addresses a stimulating clash of opinion among those whose interests have led them to comment peripherally on the more remote Nuba past. The issue at stake is the existence, or non-existence, of a state form of government among the Nuba in precolonial times.

Students of the Nuba during the colonial and post-colonial periods have seldom failed to assign considerable importance to the role of successive Sudan governments in directing the destiny of the Nuba, however they may differ in assessing the quality of this intervention.
A la naissance de l'histoire écrite sénégalaise: Yoro Dyao et ses modeles (Deuxieme Motie Du XIXème Siecle, Debut Du XXème Siecle).
Authors: Boulègue Jean
Published: May 2006

La région sénégambienne, du fait de ses stuctures étatiques anciennes et fortement hiérarchisées, est une région de longue tradition historique. Dans chaque royaume, le pouvoir gérait un savoir historique qui se présentait comme une chronique orale des règnes. Les détenteurs spécialisés de ce savoir sont connus dès le début du XVIème siècle: les écrits portugais nomment de leur nom wolof, gewel, ceux qu'on appellera plus tard griots. Dès cette époque et dans les siècles suivants, les descriptions européennes, lorsqu'elles font preuve d'assez de curiosité, sont entremêlées de récits historiques issus de la tradition orale et communiqués par des informateurs locaux. Il n'est done pas étonnant que, dans la deuxième moitié du XIXème siècle, l'élargissement et le développement des usages de l'écrit se soient traduits par une floraison d'oeuvres issues d'une histoire véhicuiée par transmission orale depuis plusieurs siècles.

Yoro Dyao fut le premier de ces chroniqueurs sénégalais qui ont recueilli, traduit, écrit, compilé, interprété aussi, les traditions orales de leur peuple. Son premier texte, l'“Histoire des Darnels du Cayor”, a été publié, dans le Moniteur du Sénégal, en 1864. A cette époque, la formation territoriale de la colonie du Sénégal était à peine ébauchée. Celle-ci n'excédait guère le terrltoire du petit royaume du Waalo (à l'embouchure du fleuve) qui venait d'âtre conquis. Y. Dyao était issu de l'aristocratie du Waalo. A ce titre il avait fait partie de la deuxième promotion de l'Ecole des otages, fondée par Faidherbe en 1855.