bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Theories and Facts: the Early Gothic Migrations
Authors: Burns Thomas S.
Published: May 2006

The most salient fact about the Gothic migrations is that they forcefully underscore how old theories never die. They linger to play upon the intellect for generations until they seem to constitute facts themselves. The study of the migrations tempts the unwary with marvelous sagas and apparently straightforward accounts of trusted ancient authors. Even if we follow Odysseus' lead, and with our ears carefully plugged with scientific beeswax, rivet our eyes to the narrow channels of fact, the old theories still beckon; after all, Roman history is in part a series of thrusts and counterthrusts along the northern peripheries of the Greco-Roman world, in need of explanation then as now. The origins of the migrants and invaders of the Roman frontiers was a question appropriate to Tacitus in the late first century A.D. and to countless others across the centuries. All too often the questioners were far removed from the contact zones and looked down upon a simple battlefield of “we and they.” Such self-proclaimed Valkyries chose sides for their own reasons, usually preconditioned and often totally unrelated to the struggles below. This essay traces the evolution of the theoretical and factual elements of the early Gothic migrations and concludes with a personal sketch drawn in light of recent studies of the Roman frontier and insights from other areas, especially comparative anthropology.

The historiography of the early Gothic migrations is a classic example of the impact of contemporary attitudes, problems, and methodologies on the study of the past. So meager is the evidence that is likens to a broken kaleidoscope in which the few remaining pieces can be jostled easily from place to place.
The Archives of The Zone de Bulungu and The Sous-Region du Kwilu (Region de Bandundu, Zaire): a Situation Report
Authors: Smith Robert Eugene
Published: May 2006

In the summers of 1971, 1976, and 1979 I visited the archives of the Zone de Bulungu, and in 1979 those of the Sous-Région du Kwilu. Both are located in the town of Bulungu, in the Région de Bandundu of Zaire. These archives have had a checkered history. The Zone de Bulungu was named Territoire du Moyen-Kwilu during much of the colonial period, with headquarters first at Niadi (about seventy kilometers north of Kikwit), then at Kikwit, and finally at Bulungu.

The capital of the Sous-Région du Kwilu has been transferred several times--from Kikwit to Bandundu (ex-Banningville) to Kikwit to Bulungu. After a look at the archives in Bulungu, I was not satisfied that all of them had been transferred there from Kikwit, but when I was in Kikwit in April of 1979 I could find nothing more, and officials of the Sous-Région de Kikwit (the city) insisted that they had all been transferred to Bulungu in 1968.

I did not get into the archives of the Région de Bandundu, but since Robert Harms drew a blank during his visit to Bandundu, I will pass on unconfirmed and indirect information that these archives were never transferred to Bandundu, and are still at Kikwit, at the Service de Sous-Région: Cultures et Arts, whose office is next to the main marketplace in Kikwit. But I also suspect that materials generated before 1962 will be found in Kinshasa, where the archives of the Province de Léopoldville are located, for it was in 1962 that the Province de Léopoldville was broken into five smaller provinces.
Oral Sources on Links Between Great States: Sumanguru, Servile Lineage, the Jariso, and Kaniaga
Authors: Conrad David C.
Published: May 2006

Qui est capable, hors Dieu, de scruter le passé?

Some scholars interested in ancient Ghana and Mali dare to sift relevant oral traditions of the Western Sudan in search of historical evidence, while others express doubts that these sources can contain any information of value to historians. A period markedly affected by this question is that which saw the disintegration of Ghana and the rise of Mali in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Despite historians' general acknowledgement of the pitfalls accompanying the use of oral tradition as a source of information, much of what we know, or would like to think we know about this era, has been drawn from the legend of Wagadu and from the Sunjata epic.

Clearly a large part of the material in these oral traditions is composed of the stuff of myth and folktale, and on the face of it the prospect of trying to glean historical information from them is not an encouraging one. But woven into the patchwork fabric of these narratives are infrequent threads bearing diminishing echoes of people and events of the distant past. Vague, inaccurate, and potentially misleading as they must be, these archaic fragments nevertheless merit whatever attention is necessary to interpret their significance, in the hope that they might yield some useful historical insights.

Any pretensions to historicity in the Wagadu tradition and in the Sunjata epic may be open to question because there is so little that can be verified. While the mythical quality of some elements in the texts is obvious, there are others that could have a historical basis but cannot be independently confirmed. The material consulted here is approached with the attitude that, given the rarity of firmly documented sources, historians cannot afford to ignore the possibility that there is some information worth distilling from the oral accounts of ancient Mali and the related Soninke era that preceded it.
The Ta'līf akhbār al-qurūn min umarā' bilad Ilūrin: A Critique
Authors: Danmole H.O.
Published: May 2006

Before the advent of colonialism, Arabic was widely used in northern Nigeria where Islam had penetrated before the fifteenth century. The jihād of the early nineteenth century in Hausaland led to the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate, the revitalization of Islamic learning, and scholars who kept records in Arabic. Indeed, some local languages such as Hausa and Fulfulde were reduced to writing in Arabic scripts. Consequently, knowledge of Arabic is a crucial tool for the historian working on the history of the caliphate.

For Ilorin, a frontier emirate between Hausa and Yorubaland, a few Arabic materials are available as well for the reconstruction of the history of the emirate. One such document is the Ta'līf akhbār al-qurūn min umarā' bilad Ilūrin (“The History of the Emirs of Ilorin”). In 1965 Martin translated, edited, and published the Ta'līf in the Research Bulletin of the Centre for Arabic Documentation at the University of Ibadan as a “New Arabic History of Ilorin.” Since then many scholars have used the Ta'līf in their studies of Ilorin and Yoruba history. Recently Smith has affirmed that the Ta'līf has been relatively neglected. He attempts successfully to reconstruct the chronology of events in Yorubaland, using the Ta'līf along with the Ta'nis al-ahibba' fi dhikr unara' Gwandu mawa al-asfiya', an unpublished work of Dr. Junaid al-Bukhari, Wazīr of Sokoto, and works in English. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the information in the Ta'līf by comparing its evidence with that of other primary sources which deal with the history of Ilorin and Yorubaland.
Through the Palace Gates, Chiefs and Chronology: Developing Reliable Dating Structures
Authors: Webster J.B.
Published: May 2006

This paper sets forth the methodology employed to establish and refine a dating system based on genealogies collected during field research in two areas of Africa, Agago county in Eastern Acholi and Awe district in the Benue Valley. Interview sessions with the elders normally lasted from two to four hours and many topics might be, and usually were, discussed in the course of a single interview. To demonstrate the progression of questioning relative to multiple themes would be beyond the space available or the stamina of readers. It is proposed rather to isolate the problem of chronology and show how, throughout the fieldwork period, achieving accuracy should be a major preoccupation and of greater or lesser concern in every interview. The regnal list is not collected once or twice or thrice. It forms a problem which continuously protrudes into the interviews, more so in the early stages of fieldwork, less so in the later, but seldom totally ignored.

When historical research focused on large kingdoms such as Bunyoro or Oyo, a vague and extremely relative chronology was adequate for many research objectives. One consequence of this type of research was a precolonial history of modern African states fashioned from a series of chapters, each one concentrating on spearate tribal traditions. The impression created was of isolated groups whose interaction, except for some outstanding military conflicts, awaited the coming of Arabs and Europeans. Since these aliens brought dates, integrated regional histories were forced to await their coming.
Historical Metaphors in the Kano Chronicle
Authors: Last Murray
Published: May 2006

“There is a story that the Prophet appeared to Abdu Rahaman in a dream and said to him, ‘Get up and go west and establish Islam.’ Abdu Rahaman got up and took a handful of the soil of Medina and put it in a cloth and brought it to Hausaland. Whenever he came to a town, he took a handful of the soil of the country and put it beside that of Medina. If they did not correspond, he passed that town. So he journeyed until he came to Kano. And when he compared the soil of Kano with Medina soil they resembled one another and became as one soil. So he said, ‘this is the country that I saw in my dream.’” [xx]

I wish in this paper to treat the Kano Chronicle (henceforth KC) as a document of intellectual history, and not just as a mine from which to dig valuable ‘facts.’ The aspect of intellectual history I will discuss is the meaning of historical metaphors - or analogical geography - of which the above story is a rather special example. But first I will try and show that the first ‘edition’ of KC was completed in the mid-seventeenth century and was compiled from materials which had been developed since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries - thus locating the intellectual history in a specific period. The texts used are discussed in the appendix.

In writing this essay I am treading where many have trod before. Abdullahi Smith's work on the Sayfawa and on the origin of the Hausa states and Mervyn Hiskett's publications on the Kano Chronicle and on the Song of Bagauda are the most notable examples.
English Bosman and Dutch Bosman. A Comparison of Texts - VI
Authors: Van Dantzig Albert
Published: May 2006

[This continues the comparison of texts of the English and Dutch versions of Bosman. For earlier instalments see History in Africa 2(1975), 185-216; 3(1976), 91-126; 4(1977), 247-273; 5(1978), 225-256; 6(1979), 265-85. Procedural matters are discussed in the first instalment, to which the reader is referred.]
The Rozvi in Search of Their Past
Authors: Beach D.N.
Published: May 2006

In this paper I have three main objectives. One is to highlight and examine the work of Zimbabwean African historians under colonial rule up to the 1960s. Another is to examine the effect of the work of these historians on the traditions of the Changamire Rozvi, the rulers of the greatest state in Zimbabwe from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. The third is to show how Rozvi revival movements arose in the 1950s as a minor feature of the period of African nationalism's mobilization.

Although the first history of this country was published as early as 1900, it goes without saying that, in the colonial context, African history was played down and denigrated by most of the white writers on the subject for most of the colonial period. Although there was a strong local white tradition of writing on the minority Ndebele people, the majority Shona-speakers were largely ignored. Apart from a small group of local white antiquarians, whose work is only now undergoing re-evaluation, very little was published before 1960 on the history of the Shona. Yet, despite this general neglect, a small but devoted number of Africans were conscious of their lack of a written history and sought to remedy that lack. They found it a lonely and a difficult task. In a period when African education beyond certain limits was discouraged, they had neither access to proper training nor to primary sources other than traditions. If they were sometimes prone to trust unduly the missionary texts with which they grew up (so that one can read of “King Monomotapa” and “Queen Sheba” borrowing Solomon's Phoenician laborers to build Great Zimbabwe),” one can also read the work of two Duma historians who carefully cited Arabic, Portuguese, and archeological sources in secondary works.
History From Linguistics: The Case of the Tana River
Authors: Nurse Derek
Published: May 2006

It is the purpose of this article to investigate certain aspects of the Pokomo (P) language, and thereby to present a more detailed picture of Pokomo history than is currently available. Pokomo is an ideal laboratory for comparative linguistics. Whereas much as been written about most adjacent peoples, such as Orma, Somali, Mijikenda (MK), and Swahili, little has been said on the Pokomo, or their neighbors, the Dahalo; virtually no archeological work has been done along the Tana river, while Pokomo (and Dahalo) traditions are scantily recorded.

Further, the Tana represents more or less the extreme northeast border of the Bantu-speaking area, and it the meeting point for northern pastoralists and southern farmers. It is surrounded on all sides by speakers of Cushitic languages, from Ogaden Somali near Garissa, through Orma and Waata (all Eastern Cushitic), to Dahalo (Southern Cushitic) and Boni (Eastern Cushitic), on the Indian Ocean. At the same time, it is fairly remote from other Bantu-speaking groups. The nearest Kamba communities are nearly 100 miles as the crow flies to the west, across semi-desert, and the nearest sizeable Giriama settlement a similar distance south of Garsen across comparable terrain. The main Swahili communities of the Lamu Archipelago, north of the mouth of the river, have--at least today--little regular contact with the Pokomo. The relatively small Pokomo population--between 40,000 and 50,000--lives huddled along the banks of the Tana from Garissa in the north to the northern bank of the Indian Ocean estuary, a stretch of some 150 miles, although, if we exclude Malankote, the Pokomo territory is only some 100 miles long. They are primarily agricultural, although fishing and some hunting are also practiced.
Dhaagicw Life-Stages: A Study in Paradigmatic Reconstruction
Authors: Bennett Patrick R.
Published: May 2006

Among the goals of diachronic linguistic research, we may recognize two types of what is commonly called “reconstruction.” One of these involves postulation of a “proto-unit,” such as vowel-quality assumed to underlie an observed correspondence set, or the probable original rule of relative-clause formation. The other involves the “reconstruction” of a system or paradigm. Examples are the postulation of an ancestral set of phonemic contrasts, or determination of the original pattern of case markings. Within each type, we may further distinguish between reconstruction of the probable situation at å given point in the history of the languages (as exemplified by most reconstructions of Proto-Bantu), and postulation of a sequence of stages and changes leading up to the present situation.

The historian often has recourse to these reconstructions. If carefully used, they may be an important form of evidence in plumbing the history of the peoples speaking the languages concerned. Though such evidence should not, generally, be used alone, linguistically-based conclusions may validly add their weight to the evaluation of other data. As one might expect, the different types of linguistic reconstruction differ widely in utility to the historian. Reconstruction of the original shape of a word meaning ‘tree,’ for example, will help the historian but little, whereas reconstructing the developmental sequence of a grammatical system, with conclusions as to the nature and relative chronology of the linguistic separations and contacts involved, is likely to be more directly useful.
The Past and Present of an Anlo-Ewe Oral Tradition
Authors: Greene Sandra E.
Published: May 2006

In 1680 Jean Barbot made the following observation about the religious institutions found in the Slave Coast Ewe communities of Keta and Anlo: “Their…religion [is] much the same as on the Gold Coast, only they have a vast quantity of idols…” A similar observation was made by Danish cartographer P. Thøning on his 1802 map of the lower Volta, when he described a site near the Anlo capitol of Anloga, as an “Amegase fetisch-plads,” an important religious shrine. Subsequently this shrine was identified as that which belonged to one of the clans from whose ranks was chosen the awoamefia, the highest leadership position in Anlo. In 1935 this clan, the Bate, was, in turn, described by the German missionary D. Westermann as composed of priests, soothsayers, and magicians. It is not surprising then, given such references, that R.A. Kea suggested that “the Anlo ruler's supremacy was based, at least initially on religious and ritual ascendancy.”

In 1978, however, when Anlo elders were consulted on this issue, most were surprisingly vehement in their denials of any such association, past or present, between religious concerns and the offices in the Anlo political system, particularly that of the awoamefia. They pointed to the popular traditions--those published in local textbooks and recited at annual festivals--to support their contention that the two clans which had gained custody of the awoamefia office, the Adzovia and Bate, had gained and retained the same through the “right of inheritance” and the “right of service” respectively.
C.A. Willis and the “Cult of Deng: “A Falsification of the Ethnographic Record
Authors: Johnson Douglas H.
Published: May 2006

The ethnographic record of Africa, on which anthropologists and historicans rely, is drawn from accounts of widely varying quality written by observers of varying ability. It is frequently distorted, and while we often suspect distortion in specific accounts, we are not always able to pinpoint how that distortion occurred or on what sources it was based. For this reason any use of the ethnographic record must include some form of source criticism if the modern researcher is to have any hope of assessing the quality of the ethnography, or even of discovering just what the record records.

“We knew that truth is to be had,” wrote Collingwood, “not by swallowing what our authorities tell us, but by criticizing it,” and modern anthropologists apply this principle in their theoretical reassessments of the classic ethnographies of their predecessors. Many reinterpretations of the works of such anthropologists as Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard have drawn on other sources in the ethnographic record to make their criticisms. But in general anthropologists have found it easier to confine themselves to examining intellectual influences on scholarly works by tracing the genealogy of academic theories, than to investigate what shaped the thoughts and observations of non-academics. The works of soldiers and administrators, for instance, have not always been analyzed as rigorously as the works they are used to criticize. An essential element of source criticism is therefore often missing.
Beyond Migration and Conquest: Oral Traditions and Mandinka Ethnicity in Senegambia
Authors: Wright Donald R.
Published: May 2006

One of the most prevalent and widely-accepted themes in the history of the Mandinka of Senegambia concerns the great Mandinka migrations--the westward movement of large groups of people that included the distant ancestors of today's Senegambian Mandinka population. The migrants are supposed to have come from traditional Manding homelands east and southeast of present locations of Mandinka peoples in Senegambia; conquest and longterm settlement were the ususal results of these migrations.

For over a century scholarly (and not so scholarly) works dealing with the western Mandinka have shown acceptance as fact and included discussions at varying length of the early westward migrations. At a 1980 conference in Dakar, which historians, linguists, anthropologists, traditionists, and others from four continents attended, considerable time actually went toward discussing and disputing the specific routes the major migrant leaders took and toward attempting to work out paradigms of the various “waves” of Mandinka migration. And lest I appear too smug in my implied criticism of studies of these migrations, I should admit that I, too, have written of the phenomena in ways that could be interpreted as scholarly discussion of their causes, timing, and (gulp) even their “flow.”

The major reason for the widespread acceptance of early Mandinka westward migrations and subsequent conquest and settlement--aside from the present ethnic and linguistic arrangement of the western Mandinka--is, of course, the frequency with which one hears tales of such in Senegambian traditions of origin. It is a rare Gambian Mandinka oral narrative--whether focusing on the history of a state, a village, or a separate lineage--that does not begin with where the ancestors originated.
The Lovedale Press: Literature for the Bantu Revisited
Authors: Peires Jeffrey
Published: May 2006

The fact is that the mass of the vernacular literature published in the past emanated, and still to-day emanates, from missionary presses, and naturally such literature has sought to fulfil the aims of missionary societies.

The special features of written vernacular history as a specific category of African historical documentation still await a general theoretical analysis. This article makes no attempt to remedy the deficiency, but considers two possible hypotheses from the relationship between Xhosa traditional historians and the Lovedale Press during the 1930s. First cf Vansina, that it is not only oral traditions which are affected by their mode of transmission. Second, cf Goody and Watt, that it is one thing to be literate, but quite another to find a publisher.

Perhaps the first printed work in Xhosa was that of a stoic-looking cow bestriding the legend “All cattle come from God,” which appeared in 1823. The writer was Rev. John Bennie of the Glasgow Missionary Society, and the printing was done at the Chumie mission station, shortly to be renamed Lovedale. From that time, Lovedale remained the focal point of the literate Christian culture which emerged among the Xhosa of South Africa's Eastern Cape. This primacy was reinforced in 1915 when the South African Native College (now Fort Hare) was established nearby under the chairmanship of the Principal of Lovedale. The Lovedale Press flourished along with its host institution. The only available estimates indicate that up to January 1939, 238 books were produced in Xhosa, more than in any African language except Swahili.
Computer-Based Arabic Manuscript Management
Authors: Stewart C. C. , Hatasa Kazumi
Published: May 2006

During the 1987/88 academic year an Arabic manuscript microfilm project at Boutilimit, Mauritania, under sponsorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Illinois, completed the first phase of a library preservation program with the filming of some 25.5 lineal feet/8.1 lineal meters of Arabic manuscripts (or slightly over 100,000 folios of material) on eighty-five reels. This filmed collection is available to researchers at the University of Illinois Library Archives. In contrast with what, alas, is a norm in Arabic manuscript acquisition and cataloging, and thanks to a computer program developed for this project, within four months of the termination of the filming an interim 352-page bilingual finding aid was generated for the 937 records involved. Following corrections to that finding aid in the field and additions to the collection during the 1988/89 year, indices in Arabic and English will be generated from the program. The rapidity with which this collection has thus become accessible for researchers is fairly dramatic, and the program developed for the project may well point to ways in which other comparable data sets may be efficiently managed. This description will focus on the objectives of the finding aid, the technical outline of its development, the experience to date with its application, and possible future uses for the system.
A Sudanese Merchant's Career Based on His Papers: A Research Project
Authors: Bjørkelo Anders , Ali Mustafa A.
Published: May 2006

The number of Arabic documents and manuscripts of historical significance found in the Sudan is constantly growing. The national repository for such material is the National Records Office (NRO) in Khartoum, but a substantial collection of photographed, photocopied, and microfilmed documents has also been built up at the Department of History, University of Bergen, Norway. Most of this material has been brought together as a result of fieldwork in various parts of the Sudan in connection with historical research. However, at the end of the 1970s the NRO launched a campaign to collect private documents in the rural areas, with good results. Another step in the same direction was taken in 1986, when a four years' cooperative project between the Department of History, University of Bergen, Norway, and the NRO in Khartoum, was started. Organized joint field expeditions were planned and carried out from 1987 onwards for the purpose of locating and photographing private documents. This project is financed by the Norwegian Aid Agency (NORAD) and the University of Bergen, and is part of a larger program of cooperation with the University of Khartoum. Bjørkelo is the project leader on the Bergen side and Dr. Ali S. Karrar is the local coordinator in the NRO. The 1987 expedition went to al-Matamma, al-Dāmar, Berber, Ghubush, and Kadabās in the north and photographed 196 documents. The following year various religious centres of the Gezira were visited and another 96 documents were photographed. Research on these acquisitions is planned or in progress.
Decompiling Dapper: A Preliminary Search for Evidence
Authors: Jones Adam
Published: May 2006

Geographical compilations used to be valued because they made things easy for those who read them: instead of being confronted with a set of barely intelligible travelers' accounts, the reader was offered their essence in a predigested form. Yet today most self-respecting historians pride themselves on using only “original” sources. In the recent historiography of Africa much useful work has been devoted to the task of showing the derivative nature of certain seventeenth-and eighteenth-century European works.

One of the victims of this growing awareness has been the monumental book on Africa by Olfert Dapper (1668). Many of Dapper's sources for individual regions have been identified, notably for the Cape of Good Hope, Senegal, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Allada, and Loango. In the case of Tunis it has even been possible to show that everything in Dapper's account derived from published sources. Not surprisingly, some scholars have contemptuously dismissed the book as a “mere compilation.”
Research Protocol and Resources in Burundi
Authors: Hunt Nancy
Published: May 2006

Information on the existence and resources of African libraries and archives is scanty at best, and the scene changes quickly. No one has attempted to assemble a list for researchers of such institutions and resources in Burundi since 1974, when Daniel Nyambariza provided a list of documentation and research centers and other adresses intéressantes as a preface to his bibliography. No doubt once a very useful list, much of Nyambariza's information is now obsolete. The present report, based on my experiences conducting urban, social history research in Bujumbura in 1984/85, is intended to provide specific information on gaining access to and the availability of documentary sources in Burundi. Private and public libraries and archival locations are included.

I have tried to describe Burundi's archival situation from my own experiences as well as from printed information, not all of which I was able to verify. Although there probably exists some small area of duplication between the colonial records held in Brussels at the Archives Africaines and those to be found in Burundi, most of Burundi's archives--particularly low-level, local governmental records--can be assumed to be unique. Although most printed sources are usually more readily available in European or American libraries, I have assumed that a descriptive list of libraries would be an aid to other researchers and have tried to indicate rare and/or locally–generated publications and documents. At the close I have also assembled a list of other potential research locations which I did not visit personally owing to time constraints and the scope of my research.
History and Legitimacy: Aspects of the Use of the Past in Precolonial Dahomey
Authors: Law Robin
Published: May 2006

The kingdom of Dahomey (or Fon) was probably founded during the first half of the seventheenth century, but emerged clearly as a major power only in the early eighteenth century when its king Agaja (ca. 1716–40) conquered its southern neighbours Allada (1724) and Whydah (1727), thereby establishing direct contact with the European slave-traders at the coast. Dahomey then remained the dominant power in the area until it was itself conquered by the French in the 1892–94. The kingdom ceased to exist as a political entity when its last king was deposed by the French in 1900, but a degree of institutional continuity has been maintained through the performance of rituals at the royal palace (now a museum) in the capital city Abomey. The history of Dahomey from the 1720s onwards is relatively well documented from contemporary European sources, enjoying in particular the unique distinction of being made the subject already in the eighteenth century of a published book—Archibald Dalzel's History of Dahomy (1793). There is also a rich and coherent corpus of narrative traditions relating to the kingdom's history, best known in the classic recension published in 1911 by the French colonial official Le Herissé, which is in fact merely a translation (and in some measure an abridgement, omitting some detailed material) of the account given to him by a single Dahomian informant, Agbidinukun, the chef de canton of the cercle of Abomey under French colonial rule and a brother of the last independent king of Dahomey, Behanzin (1889–94).
Historical Discourse: the Achievement of Sieh Jeto
Authors: Tonkin Elizabeth
Published: May 2006

In this paper I consider how an African historian, Sieh Jeto, plotted his narratives. Sieh was a citizen of Jlao/Sasstown, a Kru polity in Southeastern Liberia. Jlao also author and perform other past-oriented accounts in different genres, and I have written on some of these. There is not room here to discuss all the ways in which Jlao refer to their pasts, and scene-setting is equally brief. I also confine myself to Sieh Jeto's plotting of narrative.

I first encountered Jlao in 1972, and spent a year there in 1975/76. The new regime of President Tolbert at first promised reform, but emergent contradictions and rising opposition culminated in the coup of 1980. Kru groups had several times fought against the ‘Americo Liberian’ government, and in the 1930s Sasstown was the focus of a long war (in which the League of Nations at first intervened) which they lost after painful struggles. No history could be neutral there, and some people were very cautious about provoking official wrath by talking about these times. While fanpote, ‘old time business’, of a distant past might be safer, it was denied in the official ideology that indigenous Liberians had a significant history at all.

It now seems to me that the performances I recorded at different times were part of general changes of consciousness in the country. Sieh Jeto was recommended to me by an eminent Jlao man in Monrovia.
African Material Culture Information Network
Authors: Stanley Janet L.
Published: May 2006

The African material culture network—if indeed one can posit a network—is multidimensional, consisting of scholars, objects, and information. The linkage between scholars and objects of material culture that are the focus of their study is information, in particular, the ways in which that information is collected, codified, and communicated. Documentation is the process that generates and orders the information about objects, relates objects one to another, and channels appropriate information into scholarly inquiry.

The primary network is one of people: the scholars who are engaged in the study of the object—the mask, the ritual vessel, the woven textile, the dwelling. Information about the object; its use and function; its esthetic and formal qualities; the technique of its manufacture; and its social, economic, and historical context comes from many sources: from examination of the object itself; from contextual, collection, and associated data, including oral data; and from the published literature, unpublished written records, and visual images. These three kinds of data, in turn, constitute secondary networks: information which is generated, processed, and utilized by scholars or other specialists (curators, librarians, archivists, bibliographers). These secondary networks correlate roughly to the institutional settings of museums, archives, and libraries. Information does not exist in a vacuum; it serves a purpose, even if one not always apparent. Thus, the process of creating and manipulating information about African material culture objects, or simply documentation, has as its goal to match in perfect overlay the information about objects with scholarly inquiry.
Museum Collections as Sources for African History
Authors: Kriger Colleen E.
Published: May 2006

A vast store of untapped primary sources for African history sits waiting to be exploited in museum collections around the world—the products made by African hands, or, if you will, African “material culture.” Within this general category I include not only the masterpieces of African artists and manufacturers, but also the more humble and mundane products used as everyday objects or as items of trade or currency, and everything in between. Although selected numbers of these works have been targeted for study by some anthropologists and art historians, historians of Africa rarely include such objects as sources in their research.

This situation is not peculiar to African history—historians in general seem reluctant to interrogate sources other than those of the printed word. What, after all, does one do with objects? Not entirely ignored, historians of various schools have examined them with mixed results. Some historians have treated certain objects as the embodiments of more general, dynamic intellectual or cultural forces set in motion by elites. Other historians, especially those associated with the Annales school, see material objects occupying layers of culture more slow to change, representing the culture of commoners and the ‘structures of thought’ that shaped their mental universe. Perhaps more familiar are the studies that view certain objects as indicators of various aspects of modern industrial history—mass production and advertisement, consumer culture, and the social meanings of things in capitalist societies. Nevertheless, such studies as these are far from the norm in history, and in them objects serve primarily as illustrations of historical trends and events already sketched out to some degree. Moreover, they imply that the material evidence in objects is most useful simply for providing additional texture and detail to our views of the past. Historians seldom consider objects as sources that can show us anything new.
Erieza Kintu's Sulutani Anatoloka: A Nineteenth-Century Historical Memoir From Buganda
Authors: Rowe John A.
Published: May 2006

An 85-year-old villager named Erieza Kintu died at Kabubu in the county of Bulemezi, kingdom of Buganda, sometime in 1965. His passing was virtually unnoticed, except by relatives and a few neighbors. Through my research trips between 1962 and 1964 had on several occasions brought me to within a few miles of his house, I never met Kintu. Yet he is one of my best sources for the history of Buganda in the 1890s. Indeed, his memory of the so called “rebellion” by Kabaka Mwanga against the British in 1897 is the single best source I know, particularly valuable as an “insider” eyewitness participant. Even more importantly, unlike the earlier “official” histories of Mwanga's uprising, Kintu's view is from the point of the losers in the conflict—those who had resisted the new order of Christianity, private land tenure, and protectorate status within the British empire.

As so often happens with the vanquished, their history was suppressed by the victors, who—through the control of schooling and the printing press— ensured that only their own version of the conflict would become history. Yet somehow, at the age of almost seventy years the non-literate Erieza Kintu managed to dictate his oral memoirs to the manager of the Baganda Cooperative Society Press, and the result was Sulutani Anatoloka, a printed pamphlet that went on sale in Kampala priced one shilling a copy. After a few days no doubt the small edition was sold out and disappeared from view. Fortunately, one copy wound up in the hands of a prominent anthropologist from the University of Chicago, Lloyd Fallers, who was director of the East African Institute of Social Research at Makerere University in the early 1950s. Years later, when Fallers returned to Chicago, he brought back the pamphlet and offered me a photocopy, which I translated from Luganda into English in 1964. At that time I knew nothing about the author, except what was printed in his memoir covering the years from 1892 to 1899, nor did I know the circumstances surrounding the publication, or even the date when it had been printed. So here was a mysterious, unique, and potentially invaluable historical source—if only one could investigate its provenance.
Computing Domestic Prices in Precolonial West Africa: A Methodological Exercise from the Slave Coast
Authors: Law Robin
Published: May 2006

The present paper is a by-product of a recently completed study of the impact of the Atlantic slave trade in the West African ‘Slave Coast’ (roughly, the modern Republic of Bénin). One of the most striking features of the operation of the European trade in this region was the prominence among the commodities imported of cowry shells (brought ultimately from the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean), which were used locally as a currency. Assessment of the impact of the European trade obviously requires detailed empirical study of the operation of this cowry currency, and in particular of the question of whether the massive importation of cowries which it involved led to significant depreciation of their local value. A more extended treatment of this subject is in preparation. Although there is a great deal of contemporary documentation of the prices of various commodities in local markets between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, this evidence presents considerable problems of interpretation and evaluation. This paper deals with these methodological issues, in the belief that they may be potentially illuminating for the study of other areas than the Slave Coast.
Integrating Arochukwu into the Regional Chronological Structure
Authors: Nwauwa A. O.
Published: May 2006

The Niger-Benue Valley regional chronology is expanding. This is satisfying. Dates from the early city states and chiefdoms in the lower Cross river valley have been suggested and integrated into the larger regional chronological structure. Arochukwu was one such chiefdom. Utilizing the available genealogies from within Arochukwu and its satellite settlements, and guided by the existing methodology of chronology, I have calculated what I believe to be fairly reliable dates which locate the foundation of the chiefdom, ca. 1690/1720. These dates have been interrelated with the importation of the first guns into Calabar, since firearms were said to have been used in the war which ultimately resulted in the foundation of the Aro chiefdom (Arochukwu). They appear firm. Aro influence was evident in the whole of the Niger Benue-Cross river area, especially during the period when the Atlantic slave trade climaxed. Hence it seems appropriate to situate the foundation generation in the wider framework.

Arochukwu was not merely the product of the Atlantic trade, but also a response to events in the interior of the Bight of Biafra as far north as the Benue valley. The chiefdom was an offshoot of the Igbo movement into the tropical rain forest, accelerated by the southward expansion of ironsmelting and smithing, and correlated with the foundation of the Efik towns of Calabar. It was founded as a response to the shift in power centers from the upper Benue valley, which had been linked to the Rio del Rey trade route, down the river to concentrate on the Niger. It was significant that the Kwararafan takeover in Idah occurred in exactly the same generation when Arochukwu was founded.
Of Mice and Manuscripts: A Memoir of the National Archives of Zimbabwe
Authors: King Anthony
Published: May 2006

Readers of Leslie Bessant's article in HA 24 (1997) on the National Archives of Zimbabwe (NAZ) might have been alarmed by one of the photographs opposite the opening page, which depicted an archive in a state of advanced decay. If they had expected the photograph to be a pictorial representation of the current condition of NAZ, they would have been disappointed. The photograph was taken in the Sāo Tomé e Príncipe archives and accompanied a short note detailing the recovery work undertaken in those archives to make them usable. NAZ is a flourishing national archive which is a pleasure to work in, staffed by professional and conscientious personnel, but it is also bearing the brunt of cuts in funding and government suspicion of researchers. I worked intensively at NAZ for nine months in 1994-95, and again for five months in 1996. This paper is by way of an informal engagement with Bessant's article; in it I aim to sketch out my own reminiscences of NAZ and also address some of the issues which face overseas researchers in Zimbabwe.

Bessant spent a sizeable part of his article discussing tea, and the notions of privilege associated with tea at NAZ. Tea under the flagpoles became an institution for me. Not only was the tea absurdly cheap (Z$0.40/US$0.04 in 1994, rising to Z$1 a few months later), but the break was a useful refueling exercise during grueling days looking at dusty files. Rather than fading in significance as Bessant suggested, tea was extremely prominent in the day of the typical researcher. Tea was also the best way of networking with other scholars in the Archives, and almost all the useful conversations I had there revolved around the tea break—which sometimes became the lunch break if debates were intense. I made many professional contacts and personal friendships over tea at the Archives.
An Overview of the African National Congress Archives at the University of Fort Hare
Authors: Stapleton T.J. , Maamoe M.
Published: May 2006

Located in the small town of Alice in South Africa's Eastern Cape Province, the University of Fort Hare (UFH) was established in 1916 and for many years was the only institution of higher education in sub-equatorial Africa which was open to black students. Therefore, among Fort Hare's alumni are well-known African nationalists and politicians such as Oliver Tambo and Govan Mbeki of the African National Congress (ANC); Robert Sobukwe, who founded the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC); Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP); Eluid Mathu, who was the first African member of the Kenya Legislative Council,;President Robert Mugabe and Herbert Chitepo of Zimbabwe; Prime Minister Ntsu Mokhehle of Lesotho; former Prime Minister Fwanyanga Mulikita of Uganda; and many others. While Fort Hare was taken over by the apartheid government in 1959 and incorporated into a network of ethnic universities within the homeland system, from the 1960s to early 1990s various banned liberation movements were active on campus and students periodically clashed with security forces. As a result, “[i]t is thus not surprising that with its venerable history of resistance and struggle, the UFH was chosen to be the repository of most of the archives of the Liberation Front.”
The Early Years of the Mombasa Club: A Home Away From Home for European-Christians
Authors: Frankl P.J.L.
Published: May 2006

The word “club” as employed in “Mombasa Club” derives from the late eighteenth century and signifies “an association of people formed mainly for social purposes and having premises, providing meals, temporary accommodation, etc., for the use of members.” The early nineteenth century saw a spate of new London clubs such as the Travellers in 1819 (for gentlemen who had traveled abroad), and in 1824 both the Athenaeum (the most intellectually elite of all the London clubs), and the Oriental (founded by officers in the service of the East India Company who were not eligible for the military clubs of Pall Mall). One purpose of these clubs was to give gentlemen living space from which their womenfolk were excluded. The expansion of a new British empire, from the beginning of Queen Victoria's long reign, saw the establishment of “English” clubs in Asia (especially in the Indian subcontinent) and in Africa (especially from Cape Town to Cairo). A major purpose of these “English” clubs abroad was to give members living space from which natives were excluded. The Mombasa Club, dating from the end of Queen Victoria's reign, fits into this pattern.
Une Critique “Beachienne” de la Littérature d'Expression Anglaise Récente Portant sur les Femmes et la Sexualité en Afrique Subsaharienne
Authors: Epprecht Marc
Published: May 2006

Cet article a trois objectifs. Premièrement, attirer l'attention sur quelques contributions de David Beach à l'historiographie de l'Afrique subsaharienne. Deuxièmement, faire reconnaître l'importance de quelques travaux portant sur l'Afrique subsaharienne inspirés par le féminisme et la théorie “queer”. Et troisièmement, démontrer une démarche d'historien qui promet de renforcer une analyse qui est généralement déjà solide. Je conclus avec quelques suggestions “beachiennes” pour faire augmenter l'intérêt chez les intellectuels et universitaires africains pour l'étude de l'histoire des femmes, de la différence sexuelle, et de la sexualité.

Commençons par une explication du mot “beachien.” David Beach était un des pionniers de l'étude de l'histoire des Shona du Zimbabwe et, plus récemment, de la province du Zambèze au Mozambique. Il était moderniste jusqu'au bout des ongles. Il croyait en la valeur et la possibilité de la quête de la vérité. Ce n'était pas une croyance naïve en une vérité immuable. Il avait plutôt conscience du fait que certaines assertions sont moins véridiques que d'autres. Selon David c'est la vocation de l'historie(ne) de lutter contre les distorsions, les erreurs et la démagogie autant des politiciens que des autres historien(ne)s. Alors, quand j'utilise le terme “critique beachienne”, je parle de méfiance envers les métanarrations simplistes et de l'histoire efficace (ou “usable” comme on dit en anglais). Ce parti pris implique la résolution—voire un fanatisme—pour vérifier chaque mot (et chaque chiffre) des données sans exception. Enfin, l'exemple de Beach évoque une loyauté profonde envers l'Afrique et une foi en l'apport positif du travail sérieux et honnête des historiens et historiennes au peuple du continent et pour leur bien.