bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Pyrrhonism in Anthropological and Historical Research
Authors: Park Thomas K.
Published: May 2006

Scepticism has fairly consistently had a bad press from those in a position of authority. The usual reasons for its disrepute are not themselves particularly reputable. They generally include at least the following claims: scepticism is a negative philosophy and hence incapable of making positive contributions to humanity, science, or religion; sceptics are nihilists who wreak havoc on social structure, science, and religion; and, though scepticism can on occasion be beneficial, the idea that we do not know anything is preposterous. These attitudes are widespread in the general populace but less common in the scientific community, where various ideas such as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle or Einstein's theory of relativity have made scepticism more acceptable. Although the usual reasons listed above might be remotely accurate representations of dogmatic scepticism, they completely misrepresent Pyrrhonic scepticism, that form of scepticism which has had most influence on Western civilization.

The position taken here is that Pyrrhonic scepticism need not be considered primarily a philosophical position. Historically, it was set forth as a philosophical position but only because philosophy once encompassed all of humanity's attempts to arrive at knowledge. Today, when science has primary claim to including under its roof most of our attempts to wrest knowledge from the world, Pyrrhonic scepticism is more approp-priately viewed as a scientific position having general implications for scientific research.

It is ironic that negative attitudes towards scepticism continue, since the dramatic historical failures of social structure, ethical beliefs, and human progress have been due to dogmatic pretensions of one sort or another, not to scepticism. This is not by chance. Scepticism is, after all, difficult to use as the justification for authority, obedience, or power.
Physical Anthropology and the Reconstruction of Recent Precolonial History in Africa
Authors: Rosa Peter
Published: May 2006

In the 1960s, when the use of non-documentary sources of evidence to reconstruct history in Africa first achieved prominence, physical anthropology was thought to offer some potential. Of particular interest to African historians was the new genetic approach, with its emphasis on comparative studies of blood group distributions. This resulted in several papers in books and journals of African history, where the promise of these new physical anthropological techniques was pointed out to historians. The influence of these early articles has waned, however, and recent books on historical method in Africa give physical anthropology little prominence.

References to physical anthropology in the book by Thomas Spear, for instance, a book that introduces “historical method” in Africa, are relegated to the chapter on “the archaeological record” and are perfunctory. In particular there is a failure to appreciate the implications of the fundamental difference between the analysis of excavated human biological remains--a branch of physical anthropology which has much in common with archeology--and the deduction of more recent evolutionary and non-evolutionary history from the comparative analysis of the biological characteristics of living peoples--a branch of physical anthropology that is much more similar to linguistics than to archeology.
Field Days: Melville J. Herskovits in Dahomey
Authors: Blier Suzanne Preston
Published: May 2006

In recent years anthropologists and literary critics, most importantly George Stocking Jr. (1983), James Clifford and George E. Marcus (1986), and Clifford Geertz (1987), have led the way to a closer reading of the writings of early anthropologists and a fuller exploration of the intellectual climates in which they were working. As the founder of African studies in this country, Melville J. Herskovits is of considerable importance in terms of related scholarship in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Although an anthropologist by training, Herskovits had a major impact on the development of African scholarship in many other disciplines—from the history of art to folklore to political and economic history. Herskovits' field research methodologies and orientations thus potentially are of considerable significance. Despite Herskovits' critical role in African studies, there has been relatively little scholarly interest to date in his African research methodologies.

Herskovits' unpublished field notes of his Dahomey research provide us with an inside look at the principal field strategies and orientations of this important African scholar. These field materials today are housed in the archives of three different research institutions: The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City; the library of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois; and the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. The largest grouping of Herskovits' Dahomey field materials (journals, financial records, artifact collection, photographs, correspondence) are at the Schomburg Center. At Northwestern University are found various diary extracts, song transcriptions, and the bulk of Herskovits' early and later correspondence. Recordings that Herskovits made in the course of the Dahomey research are located at Indiana University.
The Epic of Kelefa Saane as a Guide to the Nature of Precolonial Senegambian Society--and Vice Versa
Authors: Wright Donald R.
Published: May 2006

What oral tradition tells us is in its way ethnography; ethnography allows an understanding of the implications of traditions…

Probably the most popular and most frequently-recited oral tradition in all of Senegambia and somewhat beyond is the epic of Kelefa Saane. From southwestern Guiné-Bissau to Bondu on the middle Senegal, griots regularly play the tune of “Kelefa” on their harp-lutes as they sing the familiar refrains:

The war was a disaster.There was no one who could takeKelefa Saane's place.…Wounded menCrawled backTo Niumi. …Ah, the nobles are finishedWar has finished the nobles…

Such epics have captured the attention of African historians since early in the years of professional interest in the continent. Over the last decade historians have made fresh examination of oral data and their use in reconstructing the African past. One volume of essays, The African Past Speaks, edited by Joseph C. Miller, assesses problems associated with analysis of these traditions. In his introductory essay Miller makes a point that most of the authors of subsequent chapters reinforce. It is that many forms of oral traditions are sociological models of the societies they come from. The structure and content of a narrative, Miller asserts, often provides insight into the nature of a particular society at some point in the precolonial past. Conversely, knowledge of the structure of the society in which traditionists tell the narrative helps one evaluate the narrative as a historical source.
The Historical Evidence in Old Maps and Charts of Africa with Special Reference to West Africa
Authors: Baesjou René
Published: May 2006

Early maps and charts of Africa--here defined as those produced before colonial penetration--have seldom been used as a source for historical studies. Generally they are valued more for their decorative qualities than for their geographical content. Jonathan Swift gave form to this viewpoint in his famous --or notorious--lines:
So geographers in Afric-mapsWith savage-pictures fill the gapsAnd o'er unhabitable downsPlace elephants for want of towns

lines which stereotyped the African cartography until today.

But it is not only eighteenth century maps that have been exposed to ridicule; those made in colonial times have also been subjected to stinging criticism. For instance, the linguist Pierre Alexandre noticed that on the official map of Cameroun made before independence a certain “Ambababoum” is shown as an important village on the road from Yaoundé to Bafia. However, it does not exist and has never existed within living memory. And, examining another map, he observed that certain peoples who do not exist are mentioned, while others who do exist are omitted.
The Quest for Kintu and the Search for Peace: Mythology and Morality in Nineteenth-Century Buganda
Authors: Yoder John
Published: May 2006

While Africa has produced ruthless and aggressive individuals, Africa has also provided thinkers and public officials with deep moral sensitivity and vision. The following essay discusses a perceptive and powerful African plea for peace and justice in nineteenth-century Buganda. In a country torn by strife, certain Ganda leaders expressed their deep distress about the growing incidence of state violence by reformulating the Kintu myth, the theological, constitutional, and social cornerstone of their kingdom. These concerned individuals boldly reshaped the Kintu story, the Ganda people's most sacred symbol, to describe the tension between peace and violence as the most important issue in Ganda politics.
The Early Sources on Guinea
Authors: Hair P.E.H.
Published: May 2006

The Guinea coast and near interior was a region of almost wholly preliterate societies before the coming of the Europeans. Islamic culture, with its literate strands, which had been spreading through the northern parts of West Africa over many centuries had barely begun to touch the Guinea region—although a handful of literate itinerant merchants and missionaries was to be encountered by the Portuguese, and Islamic religious practice had penetrated at least one royal court in Senegal. Hence the “medieval” sources in Arabic which are informative on the history of the Sudanic states of West Africa tell us little or nothing about the Guinea region. As for the oral traditions of the region, mostly collected only since 1850, these have an inbuilt “horizon” of recollection which falls far short of the arrival of the Europeans five centuries ago. Ethnographic, cultural, and linguistic evidence, systematized in recent times, can be extrapolated backwards to earlier times, but this can only be done, with any security, when trends over time have been identified from earlier hard evidence.

Such trends can of course be obtained from archeology, as well as from written sources. But the limited investigations of archeologists in Guinea to date, while they certainly inform on general issues such as agriculture and technology, are as yet decidedly weak, for a variety of good reasons, on the regional details of human settlement and population, and on the varieties of political structure. Moreover it is doubtful whether archeologyper secan inform to any significant extent on ethnicity, language, and social characteristics. It is therefore only marginally debatable to refer to the earliest European written sources on Guinea as “the early sources.”
T. O. Avoseh on the History of Epe and Its Environs
Authors: Falola Toyin
Published: May 2006

The first edition of this little book a short History of Epe-is to be freely used…No acknowledgement is necessary nor royalty required.

With the above words, Chief Theophilus Olabode Avoseh opens his second and most successful book, A Short History of Epe. His generosity was unusual, with his time to researchers, and with publications that he distributed freely and allowed others to use without seeking his permission. His unstated motto would be that knowledge should be acquired and distributed at no charge. His books on Epe and Badagri are his best known works, although he wrote several other obscure pamphlets which I have previously drawn attention to. As this is a continuation of my study on Avoseh, this essay does not intend to repeat previously published information on the author. The primary aim of the present paper is to present the text on Epe, and so to make it more accessible to a larger audience. A few additional points, made possible by the examination of the text under consideration, form the bulk of this introduction intended to shed more light on Avoseh.

Epe is an Ijebu-Yoruba town, located on the banks of the lagoon. This location has always facilitated the development of a fishing industry, commerce, and agriculture. Epe was drawn into nineteenth—century Yoruba power politics and then into international diplomacy with the British when it was occupied in the mid-nineteenth century by Kosoko, the indomitable exiled ruler of Lagos. When Kosoko returned to Lagos, not all his adherents followed, and their presence produced far-reaching changes in Epe politics and society to this very day.
Oral Evidence in a Pseudo-Ethnicity: The Fingo Debate
Authors: Stapleton Timothy J.
Published: May 2006

There is a disturbing trend emerging in South African history. Unquestioning acceptance of African oral tradition threatens to become a requirement of politically correct scholarship. The African voice knows all. Julian Cobbing has been sharply criticized for ignoring oral evidence in his revision of early nineteenth-century South African history. Cobbing claims that African migration and state formation in the 1820s was caused by the illegal activities of colonial slave raiders who covered up their operations by claiming that the Zulu kingdom under Shaka had laid waste to the interior of southern Africa. This cover story was incorporated into South African history as the mfecane (or crushing) and served to justify white supremacy by portraying blacks as inherently violent. Carolyn Hamilton attacks Cobbing for ignoring the African voice which allegedly supports the orthodox mfecane by placing Shaka at the center of events. In response, Cobbing claims that the largest record of Zulu oral evidence was distorted by James Stuart, the colonial official who collected it at the turn of the last century. Although Elizabeth Eldredge rejects the Zulucentric mfecane in favor of a broad compromise theory based on environmental and trade factors plus the activities of a few Griqua labor-raiders on the High veld, she accused Cobbing of developing a Eurocentric hypothesis which robs Africans of initiative within their own history. More critically, Jeffrey Peires, whose work on the Xhosa is deeply rooted in the conventional mfecane, describes Cobbing as “a reactionary wolf dressed up in the clothing of a progressive sheep” and implies that his ideas are nothing short of racist.
The Anthropology and Historiography of Central-South Nigeria Before and Since Igbo-Ukwu
Authors: Afigbo A. E.
Published: May 2006

This paper is a study of the methods and concerns of anthropology and history in central-south Nigeria in the period since about 1900, and of the changes which they have had to undergo in response to changing times and demands. To highlight the response of either discipline to the differing needs of different times, we shall take 1970, the date of publication of Thurstan Shaw'sIgbo–Ukwu: An Account of Archaeological Discoveries in Eastern Nigeria, as our critical dividing line. Beyond doing that, however, we shall treat the years 1900 to 1970 as failing into sub-periods, withca. 1900 to 1951 representing the high-noon, and 1951 to 1970 the twilight, of colonialism for the practice of either of these disciplines under consideration.

It is perhaps necessary to emphasize that for our first sub-period, 1900-1951, we shall be dealing mainly with the methods and concerns of anthropology, rather than also with history strictly speaking. It was a period marked by the unchallenged dominance of anthropology and anthropologists as far as the study of society was concerned. What passed for history, and therefore what, for the period, will be treated as historiography, concerns the speculations of anthropologists about the past of the peoples of central-south Nigeria, and with the work of one or two inspired indigenous amateurs such as Jacob Egharevba. By and large I agree with the view of Bill Freund, supported by Toyin Falola, to the effect that “the colonial period produced very little by way of overtly historical publication. The dominant colonial science was anthropology.” Thus this paper is on the idiosyncratic waywardness of colonial anthropology, the impact of this waywardness on the emergent historiography of central-south Nigeria from 1951 to 1970, the efforts of post-1970 anthropologists and historians to shake off this waywardness, and the part played by Shaw'sIgbo-Ukwuin this struggle to end the baneful influence of that “dominant colonial science.”
La Perception Du Mande et De L'Identite Mandingue Dans Les Textes Europeens, 1453–1508
Authors: Horta Jose da Silva
Published: May 2006

Aujourd'hui il n'est plus polémique reconnaître l'importance des textes européens pour l'étude des societes africaines qui ont établi des contacts avec les marchants, les missionaires, les prêtres, les aventuriers venus d'Europe en passant, ou même pour s'établir en Afrique. Aussi, ont-ils reçu des échos d'autres gens plus lointains, échos qui, parfois se révèlent des informations précieuses. Mais, en même temps, on a actuellement une vive conscience des problèmes d'interprétation et des doutes de crédibilité qui subissent les chercheurs à qui les textes européens puissent être utiles. Il serait presque inutile de rappeler que ces problèmes-là ne sont pas un exclusif de la manipulation des sources européennes mais se posent aussi, en ce qui concerne l'histoire de l'Afrique Occidentale, pour les sources arabes d'origine extérieure aux sociétés étudiées.

Les textes véhiculent des représentations: leurs données sur les sociétés africaines sont une construction mentale d'une réalité extérieure perçue, (re)construction qui implique la mobilisation des schémas mentaux intériorisés et d'existence préalable et autonome envers cette réalité extérieure. Des représentations qui se bornent aux limites d'un observateur ou rédacteur dont la pensée est ordonnée par des catégories européennes, exogènes à l'object de connaissance et qui, de façon plus élargie, sont relatives aux conditions de production du texte en cause.

Ce sont précisement les représentations qui font l'object de recherche auquel cet étude se situe: un object de charnière entre l'histoire européenne et l'histoire de l'Afrique. Il demande un double positionement et approche soit des sociétés européennes (qui produisent un discours anthropologique sur l'Africain), soit des sociétés africaines (object dinamique de ces représentations).
On Editing Barbot
Authors: Hair P. E. H.
Published: May 2006

In 1974 the very first issue of HA included an analysis of a small section of John Barbot's Description of the coasts of North and South Guinea. Since this represented the first fruits of a project to edit Barbot's writings on Guinea, it is appropriate that, now the completed edition is published, a review of the history of the editing, the methods and problems of the editors, and the problems that the consumer will face in using the edition, should also appear in HA.

Why Barbot? When, twenty years ago, I decided that Barbot's account of Guinea should be edited, I already knew that it was partly unoriginal, and that in an ideal world priority would be given to editing the other, earlier, recognized compendium on Guinea, the relevant section of Dapper's account of all Africa. For although Dapper is also partly unoriginal, it has probably a wider range of new material than Barbot, not least the very detailed Kquoja account. Why then Barbot rather than Dapper? The answer is simple. I recognized the lack of critical editing of Guinea sources and felt I had to take the plunge somewhere. But whereas Dapper wrote in Dutch, a language of which I have only dictionary command, the earlier manuscript version of Barbot was in French, a language I could cope with. Dapper will have his turn. Adam Jones, one of the co-editors of “Barbot on Guinea,” having Dutch, has already published studies of Dapper's sources. Moreover, in the edition of Barbot we have taken the unusual step of including in the annotation fairly frequent references to the lines of transmission of information, for instance, not only noting the material Barbot borrowed from Dapper but also, where the material was not original to Dapper, the sources of his borrowing—thus doing part of the work of a critical edition of Dapper. In fact we have generally tried to make the edition of Barbot a starting point for the critical study of many other pre-1700 Guinea sources.
Problems in Kalahari Historical Ethnography and the Tolerance of Error
Authors: Lee Richard B. , Guenther Mathias
Published: May 2006

The !Kung San or Bushmen of Namibia and Botswana are one of the most thoroughly documented hunting and gathering societies in the annals of African anthropology. In recent years two radically different views of the !Kung San have emerged in the anthropological literature. One sees the !Kung as hunters and gatherers living under changed circumstances and maintaining an old but adaptable way of life: the characteristic features associated with the hunter-gatherer subsistence or foraging mode of production.

The other sees these same !Kung as products of a very different history, a history of long association with Bantu-speaking overlords, followed by intense involvement with merchant capital. In this view it was the !Kungs' experience of domination and incorporation, not the dynamics of autonomous foraging that shaped their economy and social life. Their well-documented egalitarian politics and gender relations are thus a product not of their own history, but of their history of shared poverty. The San are classless today precisely because they are the underclass in a more inclusive class structure (Wilmsen 1983:17).

Which view more accurately reflects the historical realities and experience of the !Kung? A body of opinion within contemporary anthropology holds that this “revisionist” view provides a much-needed corrective to the anthropological tendency to treat African societies ahistorically. Others have denied this charge and have countered that the history of Kalahari peoples showed great variation; while some may have formed an underclass at an early date, others persisted as relatively independent (but not isolated) hunter-gatherers into the modem period.
The Memory of Maqoma: An Assessment of Jingqi Oral Tradition in Ciskei and Transkei
Authors: Stapleton Timothy J.
Published: May 2006

Dominated by a settler heritage, South African history has forgotten or degraded many Africans who had a significant impact on the region. The more recent liberal and radical schools also suffer from this tragic inheritance. Maqoma, a nineteenth century Xhosa chief who fought the expansionist Cape Colony in three frontier wars, has been a victim of similar distortion. He has been characterized as a drunken troublemaker and cattle thief who masterminded an unprovoked irruption into the colony in 1834 and eventually led his subjects into the irrational Cattle Killing catastrophe of 1856/57 in which thousands of Xhosa slaughtered their herds on the command of a teenage prophetess. Recently, the validity of this portrayal has been questioned. Alan Webster has demonstrated that, throughout the 1820s and early 1830s, Maqoma attempted to placate voracious European raiders by sending them cattle tribute. Only after the British army and Boer commandos had forced his Jingqi chiefdom off its land for the third time did this ruler order retaliatory stock raids against the colony in late 1834.
Archival Research in Guinea-Conakry
Authors: Conrad David C.
Published: May 2006

There has been an effective movement afoot in the Republic of Guinea to improve the climate of study and research for local and foreign scholars alike. The most obvious physical evidence of this is the dramatically improved archival facility in Conakry. In April 1991 Les Archives Nationales du Guinée began moving into an entirely new, specially constructed building next to the Ministère de la Jeunesse, des Arts, de la Culture et des Sports. By the summer of 1992, the lengthy process of settling into the building's 1600 square meters appeared to be complete.

This is a modern, well-equipped facility, organized and administered by trained Guinean archivists who are appropriately concerned with preservation of resources. A tour of some of the main archival storage areas revealed a large collection of bound, well-preserved documents. According to the Associate Director, Seydouba Cissé, there are five such climate-controlled rooms, containing a total of 5,000 meters of metal shelving. According to the personnel list there are two conservators on the staff. At their disposal is a studio for restoration and a room for cleaning books and documents. There is also a microfilm room (I did not have time to examine this collection), and a microfilm reading machine. In the summer of 1992 photocopying was readily available at a reasonable price per page. The card catalog in the air-conditioned reading room was in fairly good order, though some student mémoires (see below) were filed under categories inconsistent with their titles.
Archival Documents on Upper Volta: Here, There, and Everywhere
Authors: Gervais Raymond R.
Published: May 2006

Fluctuations of colonial policies toward territorial integrity were not without effects, first on the people of these colonies and then on the organization of their own administration. A case in point is the tortuous history of colonial administration in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso). Created in 1919 out of the oversized Haut-Sénégal-Niger—which extended from the Sénégal river to lake Chad—in order to rationalize the administration Upper Volta survived as an autonomous colony until January 1933, when it was officially dismembered. The northwestern part (i.e., Ouahigouya) was ceded to the French Sudan, the central and southwestern regions (Mosi and Bobo) to Côte d'Ivoire, and a small portion of the eastern portion (Fada N'Gourma) to Niger. After harsh negotiations the colony of Upper Volta was recreated in 1947. Researchers who have worked on this part of the French empire know that every adjustment brought to the administrative arrangement also caused personnel and documents to be displaced to the new centers—Abidjan, Niamey, or Bamako.

This institutional constraint on the organization of complete sets of archival documents for the study of the region's past has been strengthened by a well-known post-independence symptom: bureaucratic plethora. Indeed Burkina Faso is probably the only country in the world to possess more archivists than organized archives. The Direction des archives, with its dozen archivists in the 1980s, had not produced a single inventory of what could be found in the capital (Ouagadougou) or in the regions, although important work had been done by individual archivists appointed to specific Ministries or by expatriate researchers.
History and Consolation: Royal Yorùbá Bards Comment on Their Craft
Authors: de Moraes Farias P. F.
Published: May 2006

As court musicians and specialists of the past, theArókinof Òyó have been used as a source for Yorùbâ history, but their own views on the uses of historical information have not been investigated. For the first time a sample of these views is published here. It comes from an interview with a group ofArókin, in which they offered descriptions and other representations of the nature of their expertise. This evidence sheds light on how theArókinhave traditionally deployed historical precedent and accounted for historical innovation. They ground the resort to the past primarily on the social need to offer consolation (itùnû) to the ruler, i.e., to cool down his personal grief. It is from this that they derive the need to relate and assimilate events, so as to explain the meaning (itumòo) of present happenings. They emphasize, above the supplying of etiology and legitimation, the restoration of equanimity against grief and anger.

Arókin tradition compares the overwhelming power of song to the overwhelming power of grief. It stresses raw personal emotion as a cultural force, both as a source of disruption and as a trigger for efforts to make sense of the world with the help of the past, or with the help of newly-imported frames of explanation. The management of the king's (but also, in exceptional circumstances, of the people's) emotions requires history, and may require religious innovation. The king's grief at the loss of his children is liable to have violent, and culturally far-reaching, consequences. Despite obvious differences, this has significant points of contact with Rosaldo's account of the rage of the bereaved and “the cultural force of emotions” in connection with the Ilongot of northern Luzon, in the Philippines.
Pitfalls in the Application of Demographic Insights to African History
Authors: Fetter Bruce
Published: May 2006

Twenty–one collaborators and I recently have championed the use of demographic insights in the reconstruction of African history. The advocacy, however, does not mean that we endorse all uses to which demography has been put in the recent literature. We all recognize the delicacy of transferring methods from one discipline to another. In this essay I would like to suggest five pitfalls into which some distinguished scholars have fallen as a caution for further research. Some of the authors of course, may not believe them pit-falls at all, but the production of history requires debates on methods as well as fact and theory.

Before, embarking on this critique, however, let me propose a framework which relates primarily to one of the three major components of demography, the study of mortality. The analysis of mortality in Africa really involves three nested questions which researchers inevitably address either implicitly or explicitly: why do organisms die? why and how do people die? and why and how do people die in Africa? In the course of explaining how demographers answer these questions, I will illustrate the methodological errors which I be¬lieve fellow historians have committed.

Death is the inevitable outcome of life; it comes to all organisms, large and small. The causes of death and disease often work in combination. Some organisms are born defective, genetically unable to function in the same way as others of their species. Others, although properly equipped, experience accidents or shortages of food. Those which have survived to maturity experience aging, a process by which the biological mechanisms which have enabled creatures to repair themselves and to fight off enemies, cease functioning, and death is the final outcome. All these causes of death can occur without the intervention of other creatures. The earth, however, is filled with a variety of organisms which are capable of killing one another. Members of some species kill each other, but the most common causes of death are interspecific, involving the relationships of prédation and parasitism.
Inkatha and Its Use of the Zulu Past
Authors: Golan Daphna
Published: May 2006

Clashes between supporters of Inkatha and those of the ANC have resulted in the death of thousands of people in the last five years. The political death toll in 1990 was the highest South Africa has ever seen. While Inkatha, a Zulu-based movement, attempts to maintain the ethnic division enforced by the apartheid regime, the ANC is struggling for a non-ethnic and color-blind democracy and a political system elected on the basis of “one man, one vote.” Their struggle is about the future of South Africa, about sharing power and resources. It is also, however, about the past and the use of its symbols.

In this paper I look at the ways Inkatha has, since its formation, used the Zulu past to draw support, to achieve political gains, and to educate the youth in KwaZulu. I have used political speeches of Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, Inkatha's leader, as well as speeches by other key individuals in the movement, texts by the historians of the movement, novels written in the spirit of Inkatha, and most important, Inkatha textbooks on “good citizenship,” a subject introduced in all KwaZulu schools as a compulsory in 1978.
The Haroun Ould Sidia Collection of Arabic Manuscripts
Authors: Stewart C. C.
Published: May 2006

In a previous number of this journal, a note on the development of a computer-based Arabic manuscript finding aid described its application to a manuscript microfilming project in Boutilimit, Mauritania. The filming of that collection was then (at the time the note was written in the spring of 1989) in its second phase, and the work was concluded in December of that year. Thanks to the technology developed for the finding aid to that collection, the catalog was completed six months later, and it is now possible to do database searches on that material (and soon on other collections now being entered in the same format). This note comes as a description of the Boutilimit collection, the film of which is now available to researchers at the University of Illinois Archives, in the University Library.
J.W. Davidson at Cambridge University: Some Student Evaluations
Authors: Shepperson George , Hair P.E.H. , Munro Doug
Published: May 2006

Before arriving in Canberra in 1950 as the foundation Professor of Pacific History at the Australian National University, J.W. (Jim) Davidson (1915-1973) was an Oxbridge don and author of a small book onThe Northern Rhodesian Legislative Council(1948). A New Zealander by birth and upbringing, Davidson arrived at Cambridge in late 1938 on a Strathcona Scholarship and embarked on a PhD dissertation at St John's College, becoming a Fellow in 1945 and from 1 January 1947, a University Lecturer in Colonial Studies. While the formal details are easily established, little of substance is known about Davidson's activities at Cambridge. As Davidson's biographer-to-be, I was fortunate to receive a letter from P.E.H. Hair, one of Davidson's undergraduate students at Cambridge, who learned of my work from a footnote in one of my journal articles. Hair put me in contact with a fellow Davidson student, George Shepperson, which led to another fruitful correspondence.

Davidson is well known as the founding father of modern Pacific Islands historiography, and perhaps even better known as a Constitutional Advisor and Consultant to various Pacific territories approaching independence or self-government. These aspects of his life have been amply documented, not least by Davidson himself. A largely unknown aspect of Davidson's career is his undergraduate teaching: after all, he spent most of his working life at an institution devoted to research and postgraduate supervision, unfettered by the demands of undergraduate teaching. With this in mind, and with their permission, it was decided to publish the recollections of Paul Hair and George Shepperson of Jim Davidson as their History tutor at John's.
Kenneth Onwuka Dike,Trade and Politics, and the Restoration of the African in History
Authors: Nwaubani Ebere
Published: May 2006

The removal from history follows logically from the loss of power which colonialism represented. The power to act independently is the guarantee to participate actively and consciously in history. To be colonized is to be removed from history except in the most passive sense.

Kenneth Onwuka Dike (1917-1983) is a definite turning point in African historical scholarship.West Africa(28 September 1957) appropriately called him “The Pioneer Historian.” Robert July credits Dike with being “responsible for many of the advances in historical scholarship that marked the two decades following the conclusion of the Second World War.”

Dike was born in Awka, Nigeria, on 17 December 1917. In 1933 he entered Dennis Memorial Grammar School (DMGS), Onitsha, Nigeria. After three years at DMGS, Dike spent another two years at Achimota College in the Gold Coast. From Achimota he moved on to Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone. At the time, Fourah Bay was affiliated to, and awarding the degrees of, Durham University. This meant that through Fourah Bay, Dike took the B.A. (in English, Geography, and Latin) of Durham University. In 1943, he went home to Nigeria, but not to stay for long. In November 1944 he left, on a British Council scholarship, for the M.A. degree in History at University of Aberdeen. In June 1947 he graduated, taking a first-class honors (the best of his year) at Aberdeen. Four months later, Dike registered for his Ph.D. at King's College, University of London. Under the supervision of Vincent Harlow and Gerald S. Graham, he did a dissertation entitled “Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830-1879.” He earned his Ph.D. degree on 28 July 1950. With it he became the first African to “pass through professional training” in Western historical scholarship.
Swahili History and Society to 1900: A Classified Bibliography
Authors: Spear Thomas
Published: May 2006

Several years ago, Derek Nurse and I began to consider the increasing need to make revisions to our book,The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800-1500. We knew there had been significant archeological finds subsequent to its publication in 1985, but we were surprised to discover that hundreds of new books and articles had appeared. It therefore seemed expedient, not simply to revise the earlier work, but to compile a comprehensive new bibliography on early Swahili history and society that would facilitate thorough reconsideration of the issues in the future. This now includes 700 items, 428 published before 1985 and 272 published after. This is a massive literature, and it will make extensive demands on those working in the field (Spear 1999).

The focus here is on the history and development of coastal societies over the past two millennia, but I have included recent ethnography, linguistics, and history for comparative purposes. What is missing, however, are sources covering literature and the arts, for which one may consult Kelly Askew's excellent online bibliography (Askew 1999). I have included mainly published work, but unpublished theses and papers are also included where available. I have not, however, included archival materials in government (e.g., Tanzanian, Zanzibari, British, German, Indian, French, U.S.), mission (CMS, UMCA, LMS), or local (Salem, Hamburg, Rhodes House) collections, nor have I included material in mission publications.

The bibliography is subdivided by discipline—archaeology, linguistics and language, ethnography, and history. Most items have been confirmed in OCLC WorldCat or other authoritative sources, correcting numerous errors in previous citations. Arabic names are alphabetized as they appear, inconsistently, in databases for ease of finding.
The Records of the University of Fort Hare
Authors: Morrow Seán , Gxabalashe Khayalethu
Published: May 2006

Historians, not just of South Africa, but of any part of what was once British Africa up to and including Kenya, will be familiar with the significance of the University of Fort Hare at Alice, in South Africa's Eastern Cape province. The university is built on the site and retains the name of a British fort that was a major base for one of the first and most bitterly-fought, and certainly the longest, of the nineteenth-century southern African wars of conquest. However, in one of the paradoxes in which South Africa abounds, Fort Hare has become a shibboleth of modern African nationalism, priding itself on its illustrious alumni, which include many of the great names of the modern black elite in southern Africa. The paradox to some extent disappears, and the interest and complexity increases, when it is considered that Fort Hare had its origins in the liberal missionary tradition, with all its ambiguities, and that its products included homeland leaders as well as nationalist politicians, and the functionaries of segregationist and colonial states as well as assertively African political and cultural leaders.

The vicinity of Fort Hare has long been a center of education in the western tradition. From 1841, in the case of Lovedale, with nearby Healdtown and St. Matthew's following later, the great mission-schools of the Eastern Cape, supported by the Lovedale Press, made the area the cradle of the mission-educated African elite. It was from this context that Fort Hare emerged in 1916, being the creation of an interdenominational group of Protestant missionaries and of African leaders such as John Tengo Jabavu, founder of the newspaper Imvo Zabatsundu.
Dahomey's Royal Road
Authors: Alpern Stanley B.
Published: May 2006

Nineteenth-century European visitors to the kingdom of Dahomey were not easily impressed, certainly not by any infrastructural refinement. So when one after another perceived grandeur in the Cana-Abomey road, it was no small compliment. For French travelers the road was “magnifique,” “superbe,” a “merveille,” “fort belle,” “vraiment belle,” or “des plus belles.” For British travelers “splendid” or—perhaps the ultimate accolade—as broad as any thoroughfare in England.

This remarkable road was the last leg of the regular route from Dahomey's Atlantic port of Whydah to the royal capital at Abomey. Its basic purpose was not to impress foreigners on their approach to the capital, as one might imagine, but to allow the kings of Dahomey to travel to and from Cana in style.

In Fon traditions Cana dates back to the origins of the kingdom in the early seventeenth century and may have preceded Abomey as tribalchef-lieu. When Dahomey was subject to the Yoruba empire of Oyo (from the 1730s or 1740s to the 1820s), Cana was the place where Oyo messengers collected the annual tribute. King Gezo (1818-58) is said to have begun his successful challenge of Oyo very early in his reign by having those messengers slaughtered.
Cannibals, Warriors, Conquerors, and Colonizers: Western Perceptions and Azande Historiography
Authors: Ivanov Paola
Published: May 2006

Mainly as a result of the work of E. E. Evans-Pritchard, the Azande are among the best-known African peoples. In anthropological theory they have become indissolubly associated with the study of religion and magic. Also remarkable is their expansion under the leadership of the dynasties of the Avungara and the originally Ngbandi-speaking Abandia. Starting from a small core area in the basin of the lower Mbomu, where the ancestors of the Avungara and Abandia had established themselves as rulers over parts of the resident, mainly Zande-speaking, population around the middle of the eighteenth century, the Abandia extended their rule into the region of the lower Mbomu and lower Uele, while the Avungara and their Azande followers swept eastward in a vast movement and in less than one hundred years conquered a huge area reaching as far as the upper Sue and upper Uele, integrating the population into their system of rule.

One of the reasons for the speed of this expansion is that individual members of the Avungara dynasty (who all claimed descent from Ngura, the first historical ruler in the lower Mbomu area) repeatedly founded principalities of their own in new territories. This led to the existence of a varying number of polities under numerous, more or less, powerful rulers who descended from several dynastic branches, thereby preventing the formation of a single kingdom, stable in time and place. Through the integration of numerous groups of different linguistic and ethnic origins, the population cluster was formed for which the collective name Azande has become established. The history of Azande expansion thus provides a very interesting example of a society being created through political processes, which raises questions concerning the origin, acceptance, and characteristics of centralized political organizations, as well as assimilation and acculturation processes (besides the Mangbetu in the Uele-Bomokandi area, the Azande were the only group in the region to develop centralized political structures on a wide scale).
Donald Moodie: South Africa's Pioneer Oral Historian
Authors: Malherbe V.C.
Published: May 2006

In “Donald Moodie and the Origins of South African Historiography,” Robert Ross provides an illuminating account of the political agenda which drove Moodie's impressive labor of archival research, transcription, and translation to produce The Record—a title which, abbreviated in this fashion as it normally is, neatly establishes the aura of neutrality which he intended for his compilation of documents. Sections of The Record appeared in print between 1838 and 1841. A decade earlier Moodie had begun to assume the mantle of historian, but his activities then are little known. It appears also that his motives were somewhat different from those behind the later crusade. At a time when the social sciences were embryonic, and Cape historiography was still undeveloped, Moodie's interest was engaged by the relations subsisting between the indigenes and colonists. As investigator he employed certain methods of the fieldworker, notably the oral interview.

Moodie has attracted a novelist, but not yet a biographer. In what has been published concerning him thus far, the man remains elusive. The entry in the Dictionary of South African Biography was prepared by the chief archivist of Natal and describes in a few short paragraphs his life before The Record and his transfer to that colony in 1845. Born in the Orkney Islands in 1794, Moodie entered the Royal Navy in 1808. A lieutenant at the time of his retirement on half pay in 1816, he left for India in 1820 but remained instead at the Cape, where his brothers Benjamin and John had settled. The next fifteen or so years, which the DSAB dispatches in a few lines, is the period which is of interest here. During that time he married Sophia Pigot and experienced bouts of insecurity respecting employment—aspects of his personal life with some relevance for the course of action he pursued.
“Rats Fell from the Ceiling and Pestered Me:” Phrase Books as Sources for Colonial Mozambican History
Authors: Sheldon Kathleen
Published: May 2006

Conversation manuals and phrase books offer a window into the worldview of those who compile them, and might provide clues about society at large as well. Because they focus on ordinary conversation and verbal interactions, the inclusion of particular topics and sentences indicates what issues were important to the person who compiled the phrase book and might furnish information about everyday life at the time of publication. Information may be gleaned not only from the actual phrases, but from the organization of the book, verb forms, and other less obvious indicators.

Contemporary examples include phrase books in the United States that present basic terms related to housekeeping or construction for English-speakers who hire Spanish-speaking workers. Another example is from Joseph Lelyveld, who found the apt title for his bookMove Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, in a Fanagalo phrase book. The excerpt “Move your shadow” was part of a set of orders for white golfers to use with African caddies, and was emblematic of white attitudes toward blacks during the apartheid era.

In this paper I look at the kind of social and historical information that can be extracted from phrase books compiled during the colonial era in Mozambique. Phrase books differ from dictionaries and grammars because they provide an idiosyncratic list of topics and sentences deemed important to daily life by the compiler.