bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Representation of Status in Mande: Did the Mali Empire Still Exist in the Nineteenth Century?
Authors: Jansen Jan
Published: May 2006

For the reconstruction of the history of the aftermath of the Mali empire, that is, the period 1500-1800, oral traditions are the only source of information. The history of this period has been reconstructed by Person and Niane. Their work has gained widespread acceptance. In this paper I will argue that these scholars made significant methodological errors—in particular, in interpreting chronology in genealogies, and their reading of stories about invasions and the seizure of power by younger brothers.

My reading of the oral tradition raises questions about the nature of both sixteenth- and nineteenth-century Mande (that is the triangle Bamako-Kita-Kankan (see map), the region where the ‘Malinke’ live), and the medieval Mali empire, because I think that Mande royal genealogies have wrongly been considered to represent claims to the imperial throne of the Mali empire. In contrast, my reading of oral tradition suggests in retrospect that the organizational structure of the Mali empire may have been segmentary, and not centralized, ranking between segments under discussion, each group thereby creating a hierarchical image.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that the Mali empire collapsed/disintegrated in the period from 1500 and 1800. As Person put it:

Dans le triangle malinké, on ne trouvera plus au XIX siècle que des kafu, ces petites unités étatiques qui forment les cellules politiques fondamentales du monde mandingue. Certains d'entre eux savaient faire reconnaître leur hégémonie à leurs voisins, mais aucune structure politique permante n'existait à un niveau supérieur. Beaucoup d'entre eux, dont les plus puissants et les plus peuplés, seront alors commandées par des lignées Kééta qui se réclament avec quelque vraisemblance des empereurs du Mali médiéval.
The Salt-Gold Alchemy in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Mande World: If Men are Its Salt, Women are Its Gold
Authors: Perinbam B. Marie
Published: May 2006

Given its enduring association with “civilized Africa,” “urban Africa,” “rich Africa,” and “commercial Africa,” it is hardly surprising that the trans-Saharan salt-gold trade caught the imagination of Arab authors between the eighth and sixteenth centuries. We recall, for example, that al-Ya'qubi (872/73), the principal source on the Mande empire of Ghana before al-Bakri'sKitab al-masalik wa-'lmamalik(1067/68) first revealed “commercial Africa” to the Islamic world, drawing attention to the two major trans-Saharan routes leading south to the Sudan from Zawila in the east and Sijilmasa in the west, both roads eventually conjoining at the kingdom of Ghana, an ancient heartland of the Mande world. Or that Ibn Hawqal (988) astonished the Islamic world with accounts of “rich Africa” by thrice repeating (at least) his story of the promissory note for 42,000 dinars owed by one Muhammad b. Abi Sa'dun—a salt-gold trade from Awdaghost dealing with the Soninke of Ghana—to his counterpart(s) in Sijilmasa. Or that al-Bakri (1068) confirmed the stories of “urban Africa” with his account of Sijilmasa, the trading entrepot “built in the year 575-758,” and surrounded by “numerous suburbs with lofty mansions and other splendid buildings (where) there are also many gardens.” Or that traveling south from Sijilmasa to Mali—a later heartland of the Mande world—Ibn Battuta (1355), not in the least impressed with Taghaza (the western Sahara's major saline), nonetheless acknowledged as its only virtue the “qintar upon qintar of gold” arriving there from the Malian mines, which Taghaza's inhabitants (“slaves of the Masufa,” he sniffed) exchanged for salt.
Making the James Stuart Archive
Authors: Wright John
Published: May 2006

Since the first of its volumes appeared in 1976, the James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples has become well known to students of the precolonial history of southern Africa generally, and of the Natal-Zululand region in particular. The four volumes, edited by Colin Webb and myself, which were published by the University of Natal Press between 1976 and 1986, have become a major source of evidence for students of the history of African communities in the region from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries.

Although the various volumes have been reviewed in a number of international academic journals, the Stuart Archive is still, I suspect, little known outside the ranks of historians of southern Africa. The hiatus that has occurred in the process of publication since volume 4 came out has not helped in drawing the series to the attention of a wider circle of scholars. In writing this paper, one of my aims is to bring the existence of the Stuart Archive to the attention of Africanists at a time when work on the projected three volumes which still remain to be published is about to resume.

Another and more specific aim is to outline the nature of the processes by which the Stuart Archive was brought into existence, in order to underscore for users and potential users the need to use it critically as a source of evidence.
Sources vs. Text: An “Integrated Edition of Sources”
Authors: Vansina Jan
Published: May 2006

The aim of this note is to attract attention to a new venture in scholarly publication—Beatrix Heintze's Alfred Schachtzabel's Reise nach Angola, 1913-1914. Und seine Sammlungen für das Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. Rekonstruktion einer Ethnographischen Quelle (Köln, 1995), the first issue of Afrika Archiv, a new series to be devoted to text editions. That this is not to be confused with an ordinary text edition is already intimated by the work's title, which translates as Alfred Schachtzabel's Voyage to Angola, 1913-1914, and his Collections for the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. Reconstruction of an Ethnographic Source. In other words, it speaks of a “reconstruction” and “a source edition,” not “text edition.” As well, Heintze is described as the author of this book rather than the editor. Yet she presents the work as a new kind of edition—the “integrated edition of sources.”

Heintze is an experienced text editor, having published both a voluminous conventional collection of documents and a set of ethnographic drawings. Yet when she examined the surviving documentation pertaining to Schachtzabel's expedition in Angola, she became convinced that a standard edition of all his work would be unwise. The unpublished materials at hand are too disparate and slender.
Pease Porridge in a Pot: The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa
Authors: Fetter Bruce
Published: May 2006

Pease porridge hot, pease porridge coldPease porridge in the pot nine days oldSome like it hot, some like it coldBut none like it in the pot nine days old.

The recent flurry of monographs and collections relating to the social aspects of medicine and disease in Africa and elsewhere ensures that collections of essays on this topic will receive much attention and will be concomitantly influential. Under the circumstances it is particularly regretable that the volume under review has been published so many years after most of the essays in it were written, precluding their referring to the many recent advances in the field. Of the 21 articles and introductory essays in Steven Feierman and John Janzen, eds., The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), six (amounting to 24% of the text) are reprints, seven (35%) are revisions whose originals date from 1979 and 1981, and eight (41%) are originals. Of these latter, two chapters date from 1983, and two of the reprints have been supplanted by book-length monographs. One must therefore ask of the editors, the press, and the Joint Committee on African Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council whether such unusually delayed publication is justified.
Religious and Colonial Realities: Cartography of the Finnish Mission in Ovamboland, Namibia
Authors: Kokkonen Pellervo
Published: May 2006

Missionary work was one of the main forces in the opening of the African continent to direct western influence. In many cases, from the 1830s onwards, missionaries were the first Westerners residing in the interior of the continent, thus accumulating considerable knowledge concerning geographical conditions in their respective areas of residence.

The question arises: how did information from these people with scarce knowledge about the interior filter down to representations of geographical conditions such as maps and literary descriptions? Working in close cooperation with Africans, their conceptions were likely to be somewhat more detailed than those of the colonial administration. Politically, they often assumed the role of mediators between the foreign powers and local societies; perhaps this was also the case where geographical knowledge was concerned. The aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which the Finnish Mission in colonial Ovamboland under German influence had an active role in mapmaking.

One ostensible reason for Germany's annexation of colonies was to turn a profit from them and strengthen the economy of the homeland. An additional function of German colonies was to persuade people who otherwise would have emigrated to the United States or Latin America to stay within the German economic sphere. White settlers were to supplant what was considered inefficient African land use with commercial agriculture whose products were to be exported to Germany. Public opinion in Germany also advocated colonization for status reasons, which made politicians sensitive to it.
Resources At the Institute for Contemporary History, University of the Orange Free State
Authors: Jones H. C.
Published: May 2006

Towards the end of 1964 a campaign was launched by the University of the Orange Free State to collect political documents dating back as far as 1902 throughout South Africa. It was an attempt to gather all politically relevant documents still in private possession under one roof in a centrally situated place of safekeeping, where they could be arranged systematically and made available to researchers. The success of this venture and the rate at which political documents poured into the then Political Archive undeniably proved the need for such a center in South Africa.

It soon became clear that the function of the Political Archive extended beyond the mere collecting of documents. Scholarly interpretation of the material, the introduction thereof to the public and the stimulation of contemporary history were urgently necessary. This led to the establishment of an Institute for Contemporary History in 1970, formed around the nucleus of the Political Archive.
Place Names as an Historical Source: An Introduction with Examples from Southern Senegambia and Germany
Authors: Bühnen Stephan
Published: May 2006

Written sources for the history of sub-Saharan Africa (with the exception of East Africa) only begin to appear with the inception of Arabic records from the ninth century onwards, and these are restricted to the Sahel and the northern part of the savanna belt. European sources begin in the mid-fifteenth century, first for Senegambia. They, in turn, confine themselves to the coast and its immediate hinterland, as well as the navigable courses of rivers, with few, and often vague, references to the interior. For the time before the early written sources and for those extensive areas which only much later entered the horizon of writing witnesses, other sources illuminating the past have to be traced and tapped. Among such non-written sources are the findings of anthropology and archeology, of research in oral tradition and place names. Because of their interdependence, working with different source types contributes to the reliability of results.

So far little systematic use has been made of place names as a source for African history. Houis' 1958 dictum, “la toponymie ouest-africaine n'est pas encore sortie de l'oeuf,” has not yet been proven obsolete. In this paper I hope to stimulate the process of shedding the egg shells. It is intended as a short introduction to the potential historical treasures place names may yield, into their characteristics, and into some principles guiding their interpretation. With the aim at illustrating my arguments, I add examples of place names. These I have chosen from two areas which, at first sight, seem to have been selected rather randomly; southern Senegambia and Germany. In fact both areas share few features, both geographically and historically. Two reasons have led me to select them. First, they simply are the regions I know best. Secondly, the recourse to German place names is instructive, as research on place names has been undertaken there for more than a century, leading to a wide range of data and to the accumulation of rich research experience.
Listening for Silences in Almoravid History: Another Reading of “The Conquest That Never Was”
Authors: Burkhalter Sheryl L.
Published: May 2006

Telling the Almoravid story asks much of the imagination, as a stark paucity of documentary evidence continues to shadow much of this dynasty's character, parameters, and early development. Revisionist readings have become commonplace, particularly following the recovery of lost portions of Ibn Idhārīsal-Bayan al-Mughrib. Comparisons of this chronicle with those of Ibn Abī Zar and Ibn Khaldūn brought scholars to revise chronologies and rescript the roles played by the movement's first leaders. Although Almoravid historiography continues to rely primarily on medieval Arabic chronicles and geographies for a synthetic interpretation of how events unfolded, numismatic and archeological studies have brought perspectives of their own to this period. Consequent hypotheses reveal the wide play afforded interpretive assumptions in various attempts to integrate the diverse, and often contradictory, data. And where this is true for the Almoravids in the Maghrib, the synthetic role of hypotheses finds even greater play in attempts to understand the history of the Almoravids to the south. For here textual sources are meager indeed, allowing for the turn of a phrase to reconfigure decades of history.
Towards a Chronology of the Publications of Francis Moore's Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa…
Authors: Hill Matthew H.
Published: May 2006

There are two book length, English language, descriptions of precolonial life on the Gambia. The earlier, Richard Jobson's The Golden Trade of the Moors of 1620, is widely available, having been reprinted three times in this century. The other, Francis Moore's Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa of 1738 is equally valuable, but much rarer. Although Moore's book appeared in several editions in the eighteenth century, it has not been published in anything close to its entirety in almost two centuries. Moore stayed much longer on the Gambia than did Jobson and his more circumstantial account deserves greater accessibility for its contemporary influence as well as its source value. I am beginning the process of preparing a new edition of Moore and present this short bibliographical note as a first product of my research.

Francis Moore was hired as a writer, or clerk, by the Royal African Company in 1730 and spent almost four and a half years (November 1730 to May 1735), on the river Gambia, first as a writer and subsequently as Factor, at several of the Company's establishments. During his stay he apparently wrote a general journal for his own uses, as well as the “true and particular Journal of all his Proceedings relating to the Affairs of the…Company” (Moore 1738, Appendix 1:2-3) which his contract obliged him to keep. Subsequently, Moore added several other texts as well as amending and extending his journals to produce the book first published in 1738. I will discuss these additions, amendments, and extensions below.
The Malian National Archives at Kuluba: Access and Applicability
Authors: Harmon Stephen A.
Published: May 2006

The Malian National Archives are located at Kuluba, an administrative suburb of Bamako. The collection is remarkable because of its vast scope. While for the post-independence period only materials from the Republic of Mali are included, for the colonial period the collection includes documents from what was then called the French Sudan, of which Bamako was the capital. At various times the French Sudan comprised, besides all of modern Mali, portions of Mauritania, all of Burkina Faso, and for brief periods portions of Senegal, Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Benin. In addition, documents from the military department of Niger (now Republic of Niger) also came into Kuluba.

Among the documents one might not expect to find at Kuluba is a collection from the southeastern portions of Mauritania, including territory that at one time formed parts of the cercles of Kayes, Nioro, and Timbuktu, as well as the entire cercle of Nema. These districts, comprising the modern Mauritanian centers of Walata, Timbedra, and Aiun el-Arms, an area of nearly 300,000 square kilometers, were removed from the Sudan and appended to Mauritania in 1945. Many documents from what is today the nation of Burkina Faso are also found at Kuluba. All of what was later to be called Upper Volta was part of the Sudan until 1914, when it was made a separate colony. In 1932 the cercles of Wahiguya and Tugan were reattached to the Sudan, and again removed in 1947 when Upper Volta was reconstituted.
Editing Nineteenth-Century Intelligence Reports on the Sokoto Caliphate and Borno, or the Delights of a Collaborative Approach
Authors: Kanya-Forstner A.S. , Lovejoy Paul E.
Published: May 2006

For the past several years, we have been editing a series of intelligence reports on the Sokoto Caliphate and Borno, all of them prepared by French officials in Tunisia during the 1890s, using information gathered from Muslim pilgrims who were passing through the Regency on their way to or from Mecca. Now that our edition is complete and we have regained a measure of control over our lives, we have been persuaded to jot down some of our reflections on this experience for the benefit of those who might be embarking on collaborative ventures of a similar sort.

Scholarly collaboration, at least in History, usually begins in one of two, overlapping, ways. Individual researchers often develop an interest in a particular topic and then seek out one or more collaborators to work on it. The reasons for doing so can be as varied as the individuals concerned—to fill some gap in their own expertise, to lighten the research load, or to ease the loneliness which the more gregarious among us feel when working in scholarly isolation.

Alternatively, two or more scholars may decide to work together and then seek out a research topic which best suits their collective interests. The reasons for adopting this second approach can be as varied as those for the first—friendship (and those involved are almost invariably friends before they become collaborators), a sense of intellectual affinity, or more crassly the attraction of being able to claim credit individually for all the work done collectively, since co-authored works still tend to “count” as much as those bearing only one name on the cover.
Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: “Lucumi” and “Nago” as Ethnonyms in West Africa
Authors: Law Robin
Published: May 2006

Ethnicity was evidently critical for the operation of the Atlantic slave trade, on both the African and the European sides of the trade. For Africans, given the general convention against enslaving fellow citizens, ethnic identities served to define a category of “others” who were legitimately enslavable. For African Muslims this function was performed by religion, though here too, it is noteworthy that the classic discussion of this issue, by the Timbuktu scholar Ahmad Baba in 1615, approaches it mainly in terms of ethnicity, through classification of West African peoples as Muslim or pagan. Europeans, for their part, regularly distinguished different ethnicities among the slaves they purchased, and American markets developed preferences for slaves of particular ethnic origins. This raises interesting (but as yet little researched) questions about the ways in which African and European definitions of African ethnicity may have interacted. Both Africans and Europeans, for example, commonly employed, as a means of distinguishing among African ethnicities, the facial and bodily scarifications (“tribal marks”) characteristic of different communities—a topic on which there is detailed information in European sources back at least into the seventeenth century, which might well form the basis for a historical study of ethnic identities.

In this context as in others, of course, ethnicity should be seen, not as a constant, but as fluid and subject to constant redefinition. The lately fashionable debate on “the invention of tribes” in Africa concentrated on the impact of European colonialism in the twentieth century, rather than on that of the Atlantic slave trade earlier—no doubt because it was addressed primarily to Southern, Central and Eastern rather than Western Africa.
Z. K. Sentongo and the Indian Question in East Africa
Authors: Twaddle Michael
Published: May 2006

East Africa is really what one may call a ‘test case’ for Great Britain. If Indians cannot be treated as equals in a vacant or almost vacant part of the world where they were the first in occupation—a part of the world which is on the equator—it seems that the so-called freedom of the British Empire is a sham and a delusion.

The Indian question in East Africa during the early 1920s can hardly be said to have been neglected by subsequent scholars. There is an abundant literature on it and the purpose here is not simply to run over the ground yet again, resurrecting past passions on the British, white settler and Indian sides. Instead, more will be said about the African side, especially the expatriate educated African side, during the controversy in Kenya immediately after World War I, when residential segregation, legislative rights, access to agricultural land, and future immigration by Indians were hotly debated in parliament, press, private letters, and at public meetings. For not only were educated and expatriate Africans in postwar Kenya by no means wholly “dumb,” as one eminent historian of the British Empire has since suggested, but their comments in newspaper articles at the time can be seen in retrospect to have had a seminal importance in articulating both contemporary fears and subsequent “imagined communities,” to employ Benedict Anderson's felicitous phrase—those nationalisms which were to have such controversial significance during the struggle for independence from British colonialism in Uganda as well as Kenya during the middle years of this century.
A Note on French and Spanish Voyages to Sierra Leone 1550–1585
Authors: Hair P.E.H.
Published: May 2006

Writing in the 1590s about Sierra Leone, André Alvares de Almada, a Cape Verde Islands trader who had probably at one time visited Sierra Leone, commended its peoples for being “unfriendly to the English and French,” not least by fighting John Hawkins—the latter remark obviously a reference to Hawkins' well-known visit in 1567/68. But when did the French visit Sierra Leone? Elsewhere I have cited the evidence for three French voyages to the Sierra Leone estuary in the later 1560s, probably in 1565, 1566, and 1567. I now analyze archive material published in two French works that appeared long ago but are probably little known to Africanists, since both concentrate on voyages to the Americas. The first source calendars items in the registres de tabellionage (notarial registers) of the Normandy port of Honfleur relating to intercontinental voyages, the items being mainly financial agreements made before or after voyages. Dates, names of ships, and destinations are supplied for the period from 1574 to 1621: what proportion of all intercontinental voyages from Honfleur during that period is represented in the registers is uncertain. But in the eleven years between 1574 and 1584, there are recorded 24 voyages to both Guinea and America, the ships proceeding across the Atlantic from Africa. The American destination is usually described as “Indes de Pérou,” meaning the Caribbean. The African destination of 15 named vessels making 19 voyages is “Serlione” or “coste de Serlion,” in 15 instances given singly, otherwise with the addition of “et Guinée,” “et Guinée et coste de Bonnes-Gens,” or “et cap de Vert et coste de Mina.” The remaining voyages were to “Guinée,” to “cap de Vert [Cape Verde, i.e. Senegal],” to “cap des Bonnes-Gens” [Ivory Coast], or to more than one of these.
Archival Sources on the Yemeni Arabs in Urban Ethiopia: The Dessie Municipality
Authors: Ahmed Hussein
Published: May 2006

During the summer of 1998 I undertook a preliminary survey of archival materials relating to the Yemeni Arab residents of Dessie kept in the town's municipality. Until 1969, when the Arab immigrants in the entire country were subjected to a state-orchestrated public call for their expulsion—a call which manifested itself in a wave of anti-Arab demonstrations triggered by a bomb explosion on an aircraft belonging to the national carrier at Frankfurt Airport in which the Syrian Front for the Liberation of Eritrea was implicated—Dessie was the home of a large, relatively prosperous, and conspicuous Yemeni community, whose members were concentrated in several distinct quarters, one of which is still popularly known as Arab Ganda. The other areas are Sharf Tara, Taqa Tara, and Mugad, near the main daily market of Arada.

The archive of the Municipality (or Town Council) of Dessie, capital of South Wallo administrative zone in northern Ethiopia, is perhaps unique among other town archives in the country, including that of the capital, Addis Ababa, in terms of the care and sense of duty that the office has shown towards preserving materials pertaining to expatriate residents. Until recently, the vast majority of these had been of Yemeni and Hadrami origin, although there were also some Hijazis and Libyans, and a significant number of non-Arabs: Italians, Greeks, Americans, Englishmen, Indians, and Czechs/Slovaks.

I consulted all but two of the existing registers entitled Yawuch Agar Zegoch Mazgab (Register of Foreign Nationals), which seem more likely to have been misplaced than lost altogether, perhaps during the move of the Municipality to its present premises.
The Chronology of Sudanese Arabic Genealogical Tradition
Authors: Spaulding Jay
Published: May 2006

Modern nationalisms first arose during the later eighteenth century around the wide periphery of the ancient heartland of western culture and gnawed their way inward during the course of the nineteenth century to the core, culminating in World War I, Each new nationalism generated an original “imagined community” of human beings, part of whose ideological cohesion derived from a sense of shared historical experience. Since the actual historical record would not necessarily satisfy this hunger, it was often found expedient to amend the past through acts of imagination aptly termed the “invention of tradition.”

One of the many new “imagined communities” of the long nineteenth century took shape in the northern Nile-valley Sudan between the final disintegration of the old kingdom of Sinnar (irredeemable after the death of the strongman Muhammad Abu Likaylik in 1775) and the publication of Harold MacMichael'sA History of the Arabs in the Sudanin 1922. The new national community born of the collapse of Sinnar, strongly committed to Arabic speech and Islamic faith, was tested by fire through foreign conquest and revolution, by profound socio-economic transformation, and by the challenges attendant on participation in an extended sub-imperialism that earned it hegemony—first cultural, and ultimately political—over all the diverse peoples of the modern Sudan.

One important response of the nascent community to the trials of this difficult age was the invention of a new national historical tradition, according to which its members were descendedviacomparatively recent immigrants to the Sudan from eminent Arabs of Islamic antiquity.
On Being a Historian of Tuvalu: Further Thoughts on Methodology and Mindset
Authors: Munro Doug
Published: May 2006

Over twenty years ago, I started writing a doctoral dissertation on the history of the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu, an exercise that has had enduring professional and personal repercussions. Tuvalu is an atoll archipelago near the junction of the equator and the international date line, and is identified on older maps as the southern portion of a British dependency, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony—now the independent nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu respectively. The nine Tuvalu islands are tiny even by atoll standards, an aggregate 26km2spread over 360 nautical miles. During the nineteenth century Tuvalu was incorporated into the world economy by a succession of European influences. The early explorers gave way in 1821 to whalers, who, in turn, were superseded by copra traders during the 1850s. From mid-century the pace of events quickened, with the traders being joined by the very occasional labor recruiter and, more to the point, by a concerted missionary drive.

Accomplished largely through the instrumentality of resident Samoan pastors, missionization was comprehensive in scope and repressive in character. From the 1870s the occasional naval vessel visited the group and a British protectorate was declared in 1892, interspersed by the occasional scientific expedition and a brief and disastrous interlude in 1863 when some of the atolls were caught in the final stages of the Peruvian slave trade. The dominant European influences were the familiar triad of commerce, the cross, and the flag, with the primacy of trade giving way to missionary supremacy which, in turn, was displaced in local importance by a British colonial administration.
Majimaji and the Millennium: Abrahamic Sources and the Creation of a Tanzanian Resistance Tradition
Authors: Sunseri Thaddeus
Published: May 2006

Writing thirty years ago the historian of the Majimaji rebellion, Gilbert Gwassa, emphasized the purely Tanzanian nature of the uprising, as seen in the ideology which he believed was the inspiration for the widespread war against German colonialism. To Gwassa, southern Tanzanians created an innovative, secular ideology after the turn of the twentieth century which enabled Africans to resist German colonialism supra-ethnically rather than locally. Gwassa was adamant that the Majimaji ideology owed nothing to outside influences.

Gwassa's contention has been largely unchallenged despite obvious paradoxes. Majimaji emerged in a region widely permeated with Islamic influences by 1905, the time of the rebellion. Moreover, the Christian colonial power structure had been present in the outbreak region for some twenty years by 1905, while Christian missionaries had been active in Tanzania for almost forty years. By the time the Majimaji historical tradition was being written in Tanzania in the 1960s, the nation included many Muslims and Christians, including many of Gwassa's research informants, who helped shape his interpretation of Majimaji. Aside from these circumstantial suggestions of the possibility of an externally-influenced Majimaji tradition, a close reading of archival sources from the German period, including several documents which have not been considered in the historiographical tradition, suggest that Christian and Islamic influences helped to shape the writing of Majimaji, if not the resistance movement itself. This paper will examine some of these “Abrahamic” sources of the Majimaji tradition, and consider how they might have been used to formulate a Majimaji epic which has become a standard icon of early African colonial history.
“Why is that white man pointing that thing at me?” Representing the Maasai
Authors: Youngs Tim
Published: May 2006

The feminist anthropologist Henrietta Moore has noted that “the interpretation of ‘other cultures’ has often been likened in the anthropological literature to a process of translation.” If one accepts that interpretation and translation are closely linked (though there may be some subtle distinctions to be drawn between them), then the comparison described by Moore may be illustrated with statements from two of the most prominent of anthropological critics in recent years, Clifford Geertz and James Clifford. In his bookThe Interpretation of Cultures, first published in 1973, Geertz claimed that:

anthropological writings are themselves interpretations, and second and third ones to boot. (By definition, only a “native” makes first order ones: it'shisculture.) They are, thus, fictions, in the sense that they are “something made,” “something fashioned…”

A few years later, in a now similarly influential commentary on figures of and challenges to authority in ethnography, James Clifford declared that “[e]thnography is the interpretation of cultures. Both statements reflect the growing conviction that anthropology is not the objective or even the authoritative science that it once claimed to be. In the essay that follows I want to sketch some of the problems of cultural interpretation and translation in anthropology and to discuss one fascinating attempt to find a responsible solution to the imbalance of power inherent in anthropological representation.

Before I turn to this example, Melissa Llewelyn-Davies' film on the Maasai,Memories and Dreams, I need to outline the main arguments that have been made about the status of anthropology. These have focused on the discipline's complicity with colonialism, its male bias, and the ethnocentrism that underlies the claim of scientific objectivity. I shall take each of these points in turn and, though it is important to outline the arguments about, and proposals for, methods and forms of representation, I will consider them only in brief since they have been often discussed in detail elsewhere. Cumulatively, they have contributed to the recognition that “[c]ulture, and our views of ‘it,’ are produced historically, and are actively contested.”
If I had Known that 35 Years Ago: Contextualizing the Copper Mines of Central Africa
Authors: Fetter Bruce
Published: May 2006

The process of normal scholarship leads young historians to focus on their fields of research with an intensity that is unparalleled during their academic careers. It is no wonder that after a certain interval many change directions, if only to escape the tyranny of the overly familiar. Occasionally, however, we encounter a new approach to our old questions, which forcibly brings us back to our original topic, not with the initial ardor but with the nostalgia of suddenly coming across the photograph of a teenager's crush.

Such was my response to discovering Christopher Schmitz's, “The Changing Structure of the World Copper Market, 1870-1939,” in a recent number of the Journal of European Economic History. I wondered just how I would have approached my study of the Central African mines if, between 1963 and 1983, I had had access to this account of the copper industry in its global setting. Mind you, my thirty-one years' experience with undergraduates and master's candidates suggests that it might have made no difference to me at all. So intense is the concentration of our apprentice-historians on their primary materials that it is often difficult to get them to consider contexts beyond those inherent in the sources they use.

What was new about Schmitz's synthesis? That is difficult to isolate. He has, indeed, written a series of studies of the copper industry. The article under discussion offers generalizations about the industry as a whole between 1870 and 1939 and the role of various producers and consumers in it for the same period. For the sake of Africanist readers, let me summarize them.
A Critical Note on “The Epic of Samori Toure”
Authors: Jansen Jan
Published: May 2006

Samori Toure (d. 1900) is celebrated, both in written history and oral tradition, in Mali and Guinea because of the empire he founded and his fierce resistance against the French, as they sought to occupy their future colony of the French Sudan. Recently published anthologies of African epic (Johnson/Hale/Belcher 1997; Kesteloot/Dieng 1997; Belcher 1999) attest that an orally transmitted Samori epic exists in these countries. In this paper the texts hitherto presented as the Samori epic will be compared to some oral sketches about Samori which I recorded during two years of fieldwork conducted in southwestern Mali and northeastern Guinea. I will hypothesize that a Samori epic may be in the making, but does not yet exist. The texts hitherto presented as the epic of Samori are largely oral narratives produced more or less in concord with expectations about what an epic should look like. The focus is on Samori as a hero on the battefield, and this is not representative for the present-day oral narrative on Samori. Therefore, an epic of Samori, if it ever does come into being and takes the form of a standardized oral narrative, might deal with different issues than one might expect from reading the texts presented in the anthologies.
An Innocent Woman, Unjustly Accused? Charwe, Medium of the Nehanda Mhondoro Spirit, and the 1896–97 Central Shona Rising in Zimbabwe
Authors: Beach D. N.
Published: May 2006

The rising of the Ndebele and southwestern and central Shona people against colonial rule in the 1890s has become one of the classic cases of such resistance. Yet, since the independence of Zimbabwe in 1980, very little fresh research has been carried out on the subject. This paper re-examines the role of Shona religious authorities in the rising, especially that of the medium of the Nehanda spirit of the Mazowe valley in the central Shona area. In just over a century, the figure of “Mbuya Nehanda” has become the best-known popular symbol of resistance to colonial rule in modern Zimbabwe. She has been commemorated since 1980 in statues, street names, a hospital, posters, songs, novels, and poems, and is soon to be the subject of a full-length feature film. This paper examines the historical basis behind the legend.

This legend runs as follows: the historical “Nehanda” was supposed to have been the daughter of the founding ancestor of the Mutapa dynasty, who lived in the fifteenth century. Her ritual incest with her brother Matope gave supernatural sanction to the power of the Mutapa state. After her death, she became a mhondoro spirit, and this spirit possessed a number of mediums (masvikiro, singular svikiro). During periods of possession by the spirit, the svikiro was regarded as speaking with the voice and personality of the original Nehanda and not with her own. In the last part of the nineteenth century one medium, Charwe, was responsible for the organization of resistance to the government of the British South Africa Company and the settlers in the Mazowe valley, and in particular for the killing of H.H. Pollard, Kunyaira, the extremely oppressive Native Commissioner of the area. This resistance began in June 1896, and from then until her capture in late 1897 the Nehanda medium was a major factor in the war. Tried and sentenced to death in March 1898, she refused to convert to Christianity and struggled right up to the moment when she was hanged.
Seen, Said, or Deduced? Travel Accounts, Historical Criticism, and Discourse Theory: Towards an “Archeology” of Dialogue in Seventeenth-Century Guinea
Authors: Chouin Gérard
Published: May 2006

Puisqu'il n'existe pas de mots qui ne soient à personne(Bakhtin 1979 in Todorov 1981: 83)Le discours, c'est-à-dire le langage dans sa totalité concrète et vivante.(Bakhtin 1963 in Todorov 1981: 44)

European travel accounts are widely used as sources to write the history of societies that did not themselves produce a large amount of textual documentation. On the Coast of Guinea, and more particularly on the area formerly known as Gold Coast (approximately the littoral of modern Ghana), many of the written documents providing historians with information on coastal societies prior to nineteenth century were produced by Europeans travelers. Most of these individuals were merchants, craftsmen, pastors or soldiers who had settled several years in the numerous forts and trading posts erected along the seashore to protect and enhance the trade of chartered companies. Others were seamen and merchants who only spent a few weeks at a stretch plying the African Coast aboard men-of-war or trading ships, exchanging manufactured goods for gold, slaves, and ivory. Professional writers, who had not traveled to Africa, but had obtained data from various written sources or from travelers, also composed some of the accounts. Therefore, these documents show an extraordinary diversity in form and content, which historians and archeologists need to investigate before using them as primary sources for reconstructing the past.

In the first part of the present paper, which focuses on a specific genre, the seventeenth-century travel accounts, I recall the historiography of the recent critique of these sources. I also point out that despite decisive methodological breakthroughs, some heuristic dimensions or attributes of these texts are yet to be recognized and assessed. I then re-examine these sources from the dual perspective of historic and linguistic anthropological methods and introduce an exploratory approach centered on the Bakhtinian approach to discourse.
The Oral History of Royal Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate: An Interview with Sallama Dako
Authors: Stilwell Sean , Hamza Ibrahim , Lovejoy Paul E.
Published: May 2006

A powerful community of royal slaves emerged in Kano Emirate in the wake of Usman dan Fodio's jihad (1804-08), which established the Sokoto Caliphate. These elite slaves held administrative and military positions of great power, and over the course of the nineteenth century played an increasing prominent role in the political, economic, and social life of Kano. However, the individuals who occupied slave offices have largely been rendered silent by the extant historical record. They seldom appear in written sources from the period, and then usually only in passing. Likewise, certain officials and offices are mentioned in official sources from the colonial period, but only in the context of broader colonial concerns and policies, usually related to issues about taxation and the proper structure of indirect rule.

As the following interview demonstrates, the collection and interpretation of oral sources can help to fill these silences. By listening to the words and histories of the descendents of royal slaves, as well as current royal slave titleholders, we can begin to reconstruct the social history of nineteenth-century royal slave society, including the nature of slave labor and work, the organization the vast plantation system that surrounded Kano, and the ideology and culture of royal slaves themselves.

The interview is but one example of a series of interviews conducted with current and past members of this royal slave hierarchy by Yusufu Yunusa. As discussed below, Sallama Dako belonged to the royal slave palace community in Kano. By royal slave, we mean highly privileged and powerful slaves who were owned by the emir, known in Hausa as bayin sarki (slaves of the emir or king).
Tomosyn Is Expressed in β-Cells and Negatively Regulates Insulin Exocytosis
Authors: Zhang Wei , Lilja Lena , Mandic Slavena A. , Gromada Jesper , Smidt Kamille , Janson Juliette , Takai Yoshimi , Bark Christina , Berggren Per-Olof , Meister Björn
Published: May 2006

Tomosyn, a syntaxin-binding protein, is capable of dissociating mammalian homolog of the Caenorhabditis elegans unc-18 gene from syntaxin and is involved in the regulation of exocytosis. We have investigated the expression, cellular localization, and functional role of tomosyn in pancreatic β-cells. Western blotting revealed a 130-kDa protein corresponding to tomosyn in insulin-secreting β-cell lines. RT-PCR amplification showed that b-, m-, and s-tomosyn isoform mRNAs are expressed in β-cell lines and rat pancreatic islets. Immunohistochemistry revealed punctate tomosyn immunoreactivity in the cytoplasm of insulin-, glucagon-, pancreatic polypeptide–, and somatostatin-containing islet cells. Syntaxin 1 coimmunoprecipitated with tomosyn in extracts of insulin-secreting cells. Overexpression of m-tomosyn in mouse β-cells significantly decreased exocytosis, whereas inhibition of tomosyn expression by small interfering RNA increased exocytosis. Hence, in the pancreatic β-cell, tomosyn negatively regulates insulin exocytosis.
Predictors of Postpartum Diabetes in Women With Gestational Diabetes Mellitus
Authors: Löbner Kristian , Knopff Annette , Baumgarten Andrea , Mollenhauer Ulrike , Marienfeld Sabine , Garrido-Franco Marta , Bonifacio Ezio , Ziegler Anette-G.
Published: May 2006

The aim of this study was to stratify risk for postpartum diabetes in women who have gestational diabetes. Women with gestational diabetes were recruited between 1989 and 1999, and 302 were followed with oral glucose tolerance tests at 9 months and 2, 5, 8, and 11 years postpregnancy. The 8-year postpartum diabetes risk was 52.7% (130 diabetic cases). Risk was increased in women with autoantibodies to GAD and/or insulinoma antigen-2 (adjusted hazard ratio 4.1; P < 0.0001), women who required insulin during pregnancy (4.7; P < 0.0001), women with BMI >30 kg/m2 (1.5; P = 0.04), and women with more than two prior pregnancies (2.5; P = 0.02). Women without these risk factors had a postpartum diabetes risk of 14% by 8 years, and risk rose incrementally to 96% by 8 years in autoantibody-positive women. Parity status, C-reactive protein concentration, a diabetes family history, maternal age, weeks of gestation, and the child’s birth weight did not significantly affect risk in multivariate analysis. Prospective diabetes assessment is indicated and intervention should be considered in women with gestational diabetes who are autoantibody positive, require insulin treatment during pregnancy, or are obese.
Activation of Vascular Protein Kinase C-β Inhibits Akt-Dependent Endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase Function in Obesity-Associated Insulin Resistance
Authors: Naruse Keiko , Rask-Madsen Christian , Takahara Noriko , Ha Sung-woo , Suzuma Kiyoshi , Way Kerrie J. , Jacobs Judith R.C. , Clermont Allen C. , Ueki Kohjiro , Ohshiro Yuzuru , Zhang Junqing , Goldfine Allison B. , King George L.
Published: May 2006

Activation of protein kinase C (PKC) in vascular tissue is associated with endothelial dysfunction and insulin resistance. However, the effect of vascular PKC activation on insulin-stimulated endothelial nitric oxide (NO) synthase (eNOS) regulation has not been characterized in obesity-associated insulin resistance. Diacylglycerol (DAG) concentration and PKC activity were increased in the aorta of Zucker fatty compared with Zucker lean rats. Insulin-stimulated increases in Akt phosphorylation and cGMP concentration (a measure of NO bioavailability) after euglycemic-hyperinsulinemic clamp were blunted in the aorta of fatty compared with lean rats but were partly normalized after 2 weeks of treatment with the PKCβ inhibitor ruboxistaurin (LY333531). In endothelial cell culture, overexpression of PKCβ1 and -β2, but not PKCα, -δ, or -ζ, decreased insulin-stimulated Akt phosphorylation and eNOS expression. Overexpression of PKCβ1 and -β2, but not PKCα or -δ, also decreased Akt phosphorylation stimulated by vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). In microvessels isolated from transgenic mice overexpressing PKCβ2 only in vascular cells, Akt phosphorylation stimulated by insulin was decreased compared with wild-type mice. Thus, activation of PKCβ in endothelial cells and vascular tissue inhibits Akt activation by insulin and VEGF, inhibits Akt-dependent eNOS regulation by insulin, and causes endothelial dysfunction in obesity-associated insulin resistance.