bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Afro-American Core Culture Social Dance: An Examination of Four Aspects of Meaning
Authors: Hazzard-Gordon Katrina
Published: May 2006

Most scholarly work on Afro-American social dance has been concerned with its structural aspects, primarily the question of African retentions. The work of Melville Herskovits, Joann Kealiinohomoku, Linda Wharton and Jack L. Daniel, Chadwick Hansen, Robert Farris Thompson, John Q. Anderson, Gertrude P. Kurath, Jan Hertzberg, Lydia Parrish, and others has touched on this issue.

Though this approach to the study of Afro-American vernacular dance is far from exhausted, it ignores certain significant aspects of black dance culture. Once it is established that the structural aspects of Afro-American dance are in fact African-derived, the researcher is free to raise questions concerning the function, meanings, and uses of the dance.

The anthropologist-dancer Katherine Dunham has stated that dance has greater tenacity than any other cultural form and that it is the most permanent cultural link with the past. Certainly the dance of Afro-Americans is identifiable on the basis of its continuity with both traditional and contemporary African movement. Until recently, most Afro-Americans conducted their lives in relative isolation from whites. Isolation rather than inherent tenacity may explain the similarity between their dance forms and those of contemporary Africans.
Disco: Afro-American Vernacular Performance
Authors: Friedland LeeEllen
Published: May 2006

“Disco” summons a variety of images to the minds of urban dwellers in the United States today. Many people think of teenagers carrying portable stereo tape players, sometimes called “ghetto blasters,” and recall how their loud and pulsating presence unceremoniously overwhelms all human life along their path. Some think of chic, glittering couples dancing the night away in dark discotheques. Whatever the image, disco is perceived as a style—of dancing, music, clothes. Disco is a social scene, a fad, a craze.

Disco is also, undeniably, a multi-media phenomenon, depending not only on the direct contact of social relationships but information and services transmitted by different forms of mass media. The movie Saturday Night Fever (1977) was possibly the single most important mass media event in heightening public awareness of disco dancing in the last several years. But every day, networks of media and entertainment industry ideas are negotiated and guided out to the public at large. These negotiations involve interplay between national and local television, the recording industry and local radio, local radio and the public, and then several levels of inter- and intra-community relationships. Popular images of disco are a conglomerate of data from these myriad sources.
The Legacy of Black Philadelphia's Dance Institutions and the Educators Who Built the Tradition
Authors: White-Dixon Melanye
Published: May 2006

Cultural arts institutions have played a significant role in the life of Black Philadelphians since the 1920s. Such organizations as the Philadelphia Concert Orchestra, Dra Mu Opera Company, and Heritage House (Visual and Performing Arts Center) were efforts to preserve and promote the traditions of African American culture. (“Black” and “African American” will be used interchangeably here.) Dance schools have traditionally received ardent support from the community and were established because of limited opportunities for Black youth to study dance in Philadelphia.

Marion Cuyjet's Judimar School, the Sydney (King) School of Dance, Arthur Hall's Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center, and Joan Myers Brown's Philadelphia School of Dance Arts were key institutions that created a vital training environment for dancers, dance educators, and dance companies that emerged between the late 1940s and early 1970s. Cuyjet and King studied with dance pioneer Essie Marie Dorsey in the late 1930s. Hall and Brown were students of Cuyjet and King and established themselves as third generation leaders who created dance companies as well as schools.
Bringing Fokine to Light
Authors: Nelson Karen
Published: May 2006

While valuing freedom of movement as the sine qua non for making dance expressive, his overriding goal, Michel Fokine nonetheless maintained that a dance could be beautiful only if it followed “the rigid laws that govern the creation of one of Shakespeare's sonnets.” As far as Fokine was concerned, setting dances was “all pure brain work, extracting and using the magical harmonies and rhythms that lie hidden in nature.” The “natural law” of choreography that Fokine postulated had as its main precepts principles governing rhythm and plasticity. This paper discusses Fokine's dance aesthetic, its validity, and the degree to which his aesthetic was actually realized in his work. A context for this discussion is provided in the form of a recapitulation of the principal facts of Fokine's career arid of related aspects of the careers of his forerunners. The materials with specific reference to Fokine available for study include current versions of a few of his ballets, films of a somewhat larger number, critical responses to his work, recollections of people who came into contact with him or his work, and his own statements and writings.
Anatomy of the Dance Company Boom, 1958–1980
Authors: Sussmann Leila
Published: May 2006

Alvin Toffler made an eloquent plea in 1967 for the construction of cultural statistics that would give artists, policy-makers and social scientists a reliable map of where the arts enterprises had been and where they seemed to be going. Only slow progress has been made since then.

To take the example that will concern us in this research note, how much solid information do we have concerning the “dance boom” that reportedly took place during the Sixties and Seventies? A “dance boom” can refer to many things. It can mean rapid growth in the size of the dance audience; in the number of dance companies; in the amount of amateur participation in the art; in the number of dance performances; and so on. These aspects of the art might not all show the same trends. For instance, the number of dance performances might have increased faster during the “boom” than the number of companies—or vice versa—suggesting two very different developments. Actually, the only firm documentation we possess concerning the boom in the amount of dance activity has to do with the size of the audience, and we have that only for the Seventies, not the Sixties. Surveys done by the Louis Harris polling organization put the percentage of Americans aged 18 years and older who attended at least one live dance performance in the years 1973, 1975 and 1980 at 9%, 16% and 25%.
Changing Values in Cuban Rumba, A Lower Class Black Dance Appropriated by the Cuban Revolution
Authors: Daniel Yvonne Payne
Published: May 2006

In contemporary Cuba, a previously marginal cultural expression now publicizes new paradigms in a complex process of social change. Within institutional strategies of cultural preservation and re-education, rumba, a dance of predominantly lower class black-skinned Cubans in the nineteenth century, has emerged as a national symbol of twentieth-century Cuban society. The national status of rumba has been enhanced and institutionalized through a series of monthly public activities organized by the Castro government through the Ministry of Culture. Cuba has chosen to promote a new national and international image and it has done so through rumba more than through any other folkloric dance. Before the Revolution of 1959, Cuban ballet and modern dance received national acclaim while folkloric dances were not particularly encouraged to flourish. Since the Revolution, a shift of support and interest has occurred in Cuban cultural policies. Rumba, a dance and a dance complex, as I will discuss later, is now promoted to express identification with African-derived elements that permeate Cuban culture. It is supported to represent the interests of the working masses and to solidify participation of the artistic community in the social advancement of a new political system. Despite the appropriation of this important cultural expression of the masses by the socialist revolution, rumba is not common within all segments of the Cuban population. It remains a dance primarily performed by dark-skinned Cubans with relatively little direct participation from other segments of Cuban society.

Since 1979, rumba in Cuba has been promoted in ways that other dances have not. Other dances, such as conga and son, are easier to perform and involve the participation of a larger cross section of the total population. As rumba has been appropriated and formalized in its presentation to a national and international public, it has shifted from a spontaneous, improvisational dance to a prepared, manipulated dance. Yet, rumba continues to forcefully embody a significant aspect of national culture for the Cuban people. The goal of this paper is to deconstruct the meaning of rumba and its role in the forging of a new Cuban national identity.
Play, Role Reversal and Humor: Symbolic Elements of a Tewa Pueblo Navajo Dance
Authors: Sweet Jill Drayson
Published: May 2006

The Tewa Indians of the San Ildefonso Pueblo perform the Navajo Dance which is a parody of their Navajo neighbors. This dance event involves ritual play, humor, and sex role reversals; it also dramatizes the Pueblo Indian's stereotype of the Navajo. In this paper, I will first describe the dance event as performed on April 28, 1974, and analyze some of the symbolic elements of the event. I will then argue that the Navajo Dance is one way that Pueblo Indians deal with their ambivalent and contradictory friend/enemy relationships with the Navajo.
Ephemeral Signs: Apprehending the Idea through Poetry and Dance
Authors: Shaw Mary Lewis
Published: May 2006

Though his dance criticism constitutes no more than a few pages, the nineteenth-century poet Stéphane Mallarmé has come to be considered an important dance theorist. His dance essays set forth a complex and original view of dance as a poetry of the body and prefigure contemporary efforts to study dance as a system of signs. Mallarmé's prose style is, however, notoriously obscure and resistant to translation. Thus despite the power and beauty of their literary expression, his ideas on dance remain largely inaccessible without critical examination. Through a close reading and translation of several of his key passages on dance, this essay will seek to clarify his theory of the aesthetico-metaphysical function of dance and his concept of its relationship to his own art, poetry.
The Attack on the Renaissance in Theology Today*
Authors: Weisinger Herbert
Published: May 2006

Ever since the Renaissance first invented itself some six hundred years ago, there has been no agreement as to what it is. Its definitions have been as many and varied as the legions of scholars who have dealt with it, and the more that is learned about the Renaissance, the less certainty there is as to its extent, nature, purposes, and results. I need not rehearse the labyrinthine story of the idea of the Renaissance; the study of studies of the Renaissance has become a scholarly field in itself; and Professor Ferguson has written the history of the idea of the Renaissance with just the proper mixture of authority, wonderment, and exasperation which it deserves.
The Moralization of the Dance in Elyot's Governour
Authors: Major John M.
Published: May 2006

Amid reflections on time and motion and the evanescence of earthly things, the poet of Four Quartets brings forth out of the past a charming scene wherein men and women move together harmoniously to the strains of the country pipe and drum, ‘In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie’. These lines which Mr. Eliot has so effectively adapted are from a treatise on dancing contained in The Book Named the Governour (Book I, Chapters 19-25), by his sixteenth-century namesake, Sir Thomas Elyot. What is unusual about the treatise, and what must have been its principal attraction for Mr. Eliot, is the author's theory that the dancing together of a man and a woman ‘betokeneth Concorde’ and, further, symbolizes virtue.
Peletier and Beza Part Company1
Authors: Zemon Davis Natalie
Published: May 2006

Jacques Peletier and Theodore Beza were the best of friends the winter of 1547-1548. They and their circle spent hours together every day in the rue Saint Jacques in Paris. Then Beza abruptly departed for Geneva in October 1548, and the humanist Peletier remained behind in France. There ensued the following peculiar events, whose incongruity suggested to me that behind them lay a relation of great emotional and symbolic significance.

In February 1550, the first edition of Peletier's Arithmetic appeared with four dedicatory proems to Beza, whom he specifically identified as 'Prieur de Villeserve et Loniumeau'.2 This was more than a year after Beza had got rid of his benefices and left France.
Coexistence, Conversion, and the Crusade against the Turks
Authors: Schwoebel Robert H.
Published: May 2006

Although historians of the Turks and Turkishwestern relations have long known and used the works of fifteenth-century Latin writers dealing with the Ottoman menace, students of Renaissance intellectual history have until recently paid them scant attention. Paul Oskar Kristeller wrote in 1956 that 'compositions in prose and in verse against the Turks represent a considerable body of literary production in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that has never been listed, let alone studied'.The explanation for this neglect lies largely in the history of the last hundred years of historiography but involves, among other considerations, the reactions of historians to the peculiar requirements of Quattrocento style.
Cynthia's Revels and Music for a Choir School: Christ Church Manuscript Mus 439
Authors: Chan Mary
Published: May 2006

In two articles, dated 1958 and 1960, A.J. Sabol discussed a setting of Hedon's song ‘The Kisse’ in Cynthia's Revels (IV.iii.242) which occurs in Christ Church MS. Mus 439 and suggested convincingly that this setting was that intended for the first performance of the play at court in 1600. So far as is known the version of Hedon's song in the Christ Church manuscript does not occur elsewhere. The Christ Church manuscript was further brought to the attention of musicologists by J. P. Cutts in his discussion of the songs in Everie Woman in her Humor, for the manuscript contains the only known setting of a song which is referred to twice in that play: ‘Here's none but only I’.

The Christ Church manuscript was further brought to the attention of musicologists by J. P. Cutts in his discussion of the songs in Everie Woman in her Humor, for the manuscript contains the only known setting of a song which is referred to twice in that play: 'Here's none but only I'. It now seems profitable to look more closely at this Christ Church manuscript as a possible source for even more music in children's drama in particular, and more generally, as representing children's music at court. If we are to suggest that the collection may even represent the repertoire of the Children of the Chapel Royal then the ambiguities surrounding the performance of Everie Woman in her Humor are also highlighted.
A Rhetorical Pattern in Renaissance and Baroque Poetry
Authors: Fucilla Joseph G.
Published: May 2006

Thanks especially to the work of Professor Dámaso Alonso, the study of correlative poetry has made notable strides in recent years. He has concentrated mainly on Spanish and Italian poetry, but has made an excursus into Greek and Latin verse as well. It goes without saying that the phenomenon is universal in its scope.

In this paper I am concerned with only one of the aspects of this poetry, the disseminative-recapitulative type, because both chronologically and geographically information on it can be extended further than hitherto, and because the influences that have played a primary role in establishing its vogue are still in need of being traced with a greater degree of precision. I shall deal with this type chiefly in connection with its vogue in the Romance-speaking countries and England during the Renaissance and baroque periods.
Lipsius and the Art of Letter-Writing
Authors: Dunn E. Catherine
Published: May 2006

“The whole history of the ‘epistle,’ as a literary genre, is full of interest and invites investigation.” — W. Rhys Roberts.

One of Professor Morris Croll's earliest essays on prose style was an article on Justus Lipsius, the sixteenth-century Belgian scholar and rhetorician whose name has become identified with the “anti-Ciceronian” school of prose. Croll later studied him as the leader of a triumvirate (Lipsius, Montaigne, and Bacon), and thus clarified somewhat the relationship of English prose style to continental experiments. The indebtedness of certain English writers, like John Hoskyns and Ben Jonson, to the epistolary theory of Lipsius is now well known, but the precise role played by his Epistolica institutio in literary history has never been clearly presented. Because Professor Croll's interests were centered in prose rhythm, he analyzed the Institutio only for the light it shed upon the development of “Attic” prose structure in the Renaissance.
The Relations Between the English and Urbino Courts, 1474-1508
Authors: Clough Cecil H.
Published: May 2006

Raphael's small painting, depicting St. George Killing dragon with his sword, was the first Italian painting to enter the English Royal Collection. It was given to the King of England in 1506 by the Duke of Urbino, and it is the most tangible evidence that exists today of a connection between the English and Urbino Courts.

At its longest this connection lasted two generations. The dates which help to define it are: from 1474, when Federigo da Montefeltro of Urbino was elected Knight of the Garter, to 1508, the year of the death of Duke Guidobaldo, Federigo's son, likewise Knight of the Garter. This is approximately Urbino's ‘Golden Age'. Federigo received a considerable stipend as a military captain, and had few responsibilities, so that he could dispense patronage on a scale which rivaled the Duke of Milan, or even the Pope. Urbino for a short time, about 1468 to 1476, was the center of artistic creativity in Italy, when Federigo was completing his splendid Palace in Urbino.
Fortescue and the Renaissance: a Study in Transition
Authors: Ferguson Arthur B.
Published: May 2006

At one point in the development of this paper I contemplated calling it ‘Sir John Fortescue in another context'. I abandoned the title as too cryptic; but my intention remains the same, namely, to place Fortescue's thought in a less familiar but, I hope, a none the less revealing context. For the benefit of those who may well feel that the dominium politicum et regale in any other context would smell no fresher, let me hasten to add that I am not here primarily concerned with that famous formula, nor for that matter with Fortescue considered primarily as a political or legal theorist.
Queen Elizabeth I as Oriana
Authors: Strong Roy C.
Published: May 2006

On May Day 1602 Queen Elizabeth went a-maying to Sir Richard Buckley's at Lewisham. The occasion was probably graced by a show of horsemen and the song Of Cinthia, the lyrics of which represent the quintessence of the cult of the queen in the last years of her reign:

Lands and Seas shee rules below,Where things change, and ebbe and flowe,Spring, wax olde, and perish;Only Time which all doth mowe,Her alone doth cherish.
Counterfactual Arguments in Historical Analysis: From the Debate on the Partition of Africa and the Effect of Colonial Rule
Authors: Simensen Jarle
Published: May 2006

During the last decade the question of counterfactual arguments has attracted a good deal of attention both in philosophy and history. A recent example, which concentrates on the logics of counterfactual analysis in history, is T.O. Climo and P.G.A. Howells' “Possible worlds in historical explanation.” Further progress in this field probably depends both on a development of the purely logical issues involved and an analysis of the actual usage of counterfactuals in the language of practicing historians. My own approach belongs primarily to the latter category. I shall consider examples of counterfactual arguments in two hotly debated fields, first the partition of the African continent and, second, the effects of colonial rule. This approach will provide examples of the function of counterfactuals both in causal analysis and in historical evaluations. My primary aim is to establish a categorization of different usages, but the opportunity will also be taken to discuss in a general manner criteria for the legitimate use of counterfactual argument in history. In this connection I should emphasize my lack of knowledge in formal logic, except that provided by my two Norwegian collegues, Ottar Dahl, and Jon Elster, on whom I rely heavily for the more theoretical parts of this paper.

Historical analysis is preoccupied with causes, and in causal analysis there is a particular urge to identify socalled “sufficient” and “necessary” causes. In propositions about such causes some counterfactual assumptions are logically implicit. The clearest example of a necessary cause or precondition for European expansion in Africa is that of technology. To take an early and typical example, Holland Rose maintained that it was an “essential condition” of colonization that “mechanical appliances should be available for the overcoming of natural obstacles.” The implicit counterfactual is that without technology, never colonization. Counterfactuals of this kind scarcely attract attention precisely because of their obvious legitimacy.
Microfilmed African Materials from the Archive of the Sacred Congregation “De Propaganda Fide”
Authors: Daly Lowrie J.
Published: May 2006

More than sixty years ago, in his preface to Carl Russell Fish's excellentGuide to the Materials for American History in Roman and Other Archives, the General Editor, J. Franklin Jameson, wrote as follows.

In any series of guides to the materials for American history in foreign archives, the Roman archives deserve a prominent position and early treatment. Two reasons justify this statement. In the first place, although the documents in those archives relate primarily to ecclesiastical affairs, yet religious history constantly deserves the attention of the student of civil as well as of ecclesiastical history, and the influence of the Catholic Church and the scope of its operations can never be appropriately defined within confessional limits. In the second place, of all the great national archives of Europe there are none that have been so little exploited for purposes of American history as those of Rome and Italy.

Although these words were written decades ago, it still remains true that too little use is made of such archival materials, and not only by American historians. One of the microfilm additions to the collections at Saint Louis University includes precisely this type of material in a collection that runs to about 250,000 manuscript pages from the Archive of the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide (for the propagation of the faith). The congregation was definitively established by Gregory XV (1621-1623) in his constitutionInscrutabiliof June 22, 1622, although there had been some discussion about the formation of such a congregation for almost fifty years. This brief note description will be oriented toward the African materials only, but a general description of the indexes is necessary that the Africanist may be able to use them.
Background and Content of the Historical Archives of Goa
Authors: Hromnik Cyril A.
Published: May 2006

In the 1976 volume of History in Africa D.N. Beach published a brief but very interesting account of his visit to and findings in the Historical Archives of Goa (HAG). The objectives of Beach's visit to the Archives were precisely and rather narrowly delimited by the particular interests of this scholar and his university. He searched for and found a number of documents bearing on Shona history, which was at the center of his professional interests, and he identified some but by far not all the relevant collections. Beach's mission in view of his limited objectives and time restrictions can be rated successful. However, there are other interesting collections in the Goa archives of value to historians with interest in the territory of south-eastern and central Africa with all its peoples rather than one particular group. To historians with broader interests in the history of south-eastern, central, and even western Africa, as well as that of the Indian Ocean, the following background and description of the contents of the Historical Archives of Goa should be of considerable interest. The account is based on a two-week visit I made to the Archives in 1971 and my four months of research in the Archives in 1974.

Although barely known to the community of modern historians, the Historical Archives of Goa are probably the best existing archives in the non-western world and the records there cover a large area of the world over a period of four hundred and fifty years from the early sixteenth to the twentieth century. These documents represent primarily the history of the Portuguese State of India from 1515 to 1961, an area which covered far more than what was known in 1961 as Goa, Damão, and Dio. For much of four centuries the viceroyalty of Goa extended for all practical purposes from the Cape of Good Hope to Nagasaki and Timor. Thus the documents collected in Goa contain the history of many countries with which the Portuguese came into contact. Among them the most prominent are, in geographic order: Mozambique, Rhodesia, Zanzibar, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, the Arab countries, Persia, the Mughal Empire, the Marathas, the Deccani Sultanates, Goa, Vijayanagar, Ceylon, Bengal, Siam, Malaysia (Malacca), China, Japan, the Moluccas, and Timor. In addition there is a good deal of information on Angola and Brazil. The wide geographic coverage of the archival holdings is matched by the depth of the period covered. Although the Archives were instituted in 1595, the holdings extend further back into the sixteenth century and provide detailed evidence for study of diplomatic, religious, political, economic, and social history, unmatched in amount and quality in any archives in the given geographic area.
The British Admiralty Records as a Source for African History
Authors: Hendrix Melvin
Published: May 2006

What is more characteristically English than the Navy?

The relationship between naval power and British sovereignty is one of long standing in British foreign policy. This was especially evident in the nineteenth century, when Britain achieved almost unchallenged global naval pre-eminence following the Napoleonic Wars, keeping order in a world that British commercial interests were creating. As a consequence, the traditional role of the navy as a national defense force was changing dramatically to that of an international policeman on the one hand and surrogate statesman on the other. These two roles were generally most pronounced in the emerging tropical areas of trade in Asia, Africa, and South America.

It is in relation to Africa that this essay is concerned, and over the course of the nineteenth century, the influence of the Royal Navy on African societies was an evolving, but considerable, force--as surveyor, policeman, employer, ally, adversary, diplomat, and enforcer. On the whole, Britain's Africa policy throughout much of the century was based on the suppression of the slave trade, while simultaneously providing protection for British citizens promoting “legitimate” commercial interests.

Since the trade in slaves from Africa was chiefly a maritime enterprise, its navy became the chief instrument for implementing these foreign policy objectives, a role that shifted in the second half of the century to a more direct imperialist posture.
Underdevelopment of Africa: Comments on Methodology
Authors: Miracle Marvin P.
Published: May 2006

One of the more striking recent trends in the study of African history has been the mushrooming of studies focusing on the “underdevelopment” of Africa (or some part of it) following the publication of Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in 1972. Part of the appeal of the “underdevelopment” literature is that it stands the apologists for colonialism on their heads. Barely more than a decade earlier, as the 1950s were coming to a close, one could readily find settlers, shopkeepers, colonial bureaucrats, and others arguing that the mounting pressure for independence in sub-Saharan Africa should be resisted because European rule had brought “development” to the continent. It is not surprising, therefore, that after a decade of independence there should be a ready audience for the argument that colonial rule did not “develop” African economies but, to the contrary, actually “underdeveloped” them—and perhaps we should also not be surprised that “underdevelopment” is often not defined oris defined inconsistently.

The central focus of this essay will be the main difficulties of studying either “development” or “underdevelopment” and, in particular, the problems of determining the causes of either of these states at any given period in Africa's history. All the examples from the “underdevelopment” literature will be drawn from Rodney's book, primarily because the work seems representative of the growing body of literature on this subject and because it has been by far the most influential of the studies dealing with the topic in Africa. I would like to emphasize that in the following discussion my approach is more that of the economist than of the historian, a point which will be clearly reflected in the few points I have chosen for illustration.
The National Archives of the Ivory Coast
Authors: Welch Ashton Wesley
Published: May 2006

As with all research conducted for academic purposes in the Ivory Coast by foreign nationals, research in the National Archives should be undertaken only with permission of the government. Such research can be carried out with a fair degree of ease in an atmosphere very conducive to research. The archives are centralized in Abidjan, which is not only the capital city but also is the point of entry for passengers who travel to the country by airplane, ship, and, to a large degree, rail. The personnel of the archives do not spare any effort to aid researchers from abroad.

To the uninitiated, explanations of its workings not only make the accrediting process appear more formidable than it really is, but also unnecessarily cumbersome. The process entails a number of separate steps. Though not mandatory, an exploratory stage, to learn if the government has any reservation about the research, is strongly recommended. In it, the researcher should file a synopsis of the proposed research with the nearest Ivoirien embassy or directly with the Ministry of the Interior. The embassy will refer the proposal to the Interior Ministry for its guidance; thus, if the researcher is in a hurry to commence his or her work, it might be wise to bypass the embassy and negotiate directly with the Ministry. However, embassies are usually more responsive to enquiries than more distant bureaus. A statement similar in form, though not necessarily as detailed, of the research design should be appended to the synopsis. It should detail the research topic, the methodology to be followed, reasons for the research, the anticipated duration of the research, affiliations with academic or research institutions at home and in the Ivory Coast, and the sources of financial support.
The Archives of the Missionnaires du Sacre-Coeur (M.S.C.) at Bamanya (Zaire)
Authors: Nelson Sam
Published: May 2006

Archival research in the Equateur region of Zaire is a frustrating and often unsuccessful endeavor. Colonial documentation on a specific locality is seldom located in a central repository and items have been scattered throughout the region. What records are found are usually highly disorganized and partially decomposed. In many cases, significant sources have been lost or destroyed. With this bleak prospective, it is not surprising that historical research in this area has been very limited.

In contrast, a little known yet important source of historical and ethnographic material exists at the Missionnaires du Sacre-Coeur (M.S.C.) library at Bamanya, situated approximately ten kilometers from Mbandaka in the Equateur region. The library contains a wide range of both printed and archival material that has recently been organized and cataloged. Historians will find the archives to be of great interest and value, particularly for studies on the Nkundo-Mongo ethnic groups of the central forest region of Zaire.
The Archives of the Verona Fathers
Authors: Ewald Janet
Published: May 2006

In 1846 Pope Gregory XVI established the Apostolic Vicariate of Central Africa, aiming at converting Africans to Christianity, bringing Christian assistance to European traders and officials in Africa, and combating the slave trade. The participation of the Verona Fathers dates from 1872, when Propaganda Fide authorized the Institute for African Missions of Verona to direct the mission to Central Africa and appointed Daniele Comboni as Pro-Vicar Apostolic.

Conditions in Africa, official mission goals, and Comboni's own policy shaped the observations and reactions of the missionaries to their African surroundings. Difficulties of supply and transportation, as well as their self-imposed obligation to minister to the Europeans, forced the early missionaries to associate with the motley assortment of local traders, especially along the White Nile and in Khartoum. Keen observations and sharp indictments of much of European activity, particularly the slave trade, resulted. Early in his career, Comboni had formulated the concept of converting Africa by using Africans as proselytizers. In their work in the mission field, Comboni and his followers generally reacted to African societies neither by ignoring them nor by objectively collecting ethnographies, but rather by evaluating their possibilities and potential in providing the environment and personnel for mission activity.

Records concerning the activity of the Verona Fathers have been collected at Missionari Comboniani, via Luigi Lilio 80, CP. 10733, 00143 Rome. Most of the material is in Italian and German, with occasional English translations, and deals with the southern and central Sudan, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Egypt.
L.S.B. Leakey: A Biobibliographical Study
Authors: Ofcansky Thomas P.
Published: May 2006

Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (1903-72) was a man of immense ability and variety. Apart from his numerous activities in the fields of paleontology, archeology, and anthropology, he achieved prominence as a naturalist, historian, political analyst, handwriting expert, and administrator. His writings not only reflect these interests but also serve as an important focal point for future research about East Africa.

Especially valuable are Leakey's often overlooked contributions to newspapers such as The East African Standard (Nairobi), Kenya Weekly News (Nakuru), and The Times (London). In addition to expanding on the topics mentioned above these items, which included feature articles as well as letters to the editor, outlined Leakey's views on everything from the price of maize to the activities of Kenya's dalmation club.

Because of his intimate knowledge of the Kikuyu people, Leakey rendered useful service to the British colonial government during the Mau Mau revolt. His experiences were reflected in his Mau Mau and the Kikuyu (1952), Defeating Mau Mau (1954), First Lessons in Kikuyu (1959), and Kenya: Contrasts and Problems (1966). Related articles in the Manchester Guardian (Manchester) and The Observer (London) also provided essential material for understanding Leakey's attitude towards the emergency.

After Kenya gained its independence in 1963, Leakey continued to use newspapers as a forum for his political beliefs. In The East African Standard, for example, “Congratulations on Model Democracy” and “Controversial Report on Kenya Answered” defended the performance of the country's new government. His autobiography, By the Evidence: Memoirs, 1932-1951 also contained a great deal of information about Leakey's position toward Kenya's political and social evolution.
The Late Great Plot: The Official Delusion Concerning the Xhosa Cattle Killing 1856-1857
Authors: Peires J.B.
Published: May 2006

The very idea that the Xhosa chiefs and their allies engineered the great cattle-killing which finally broke their power seems so absurd that most people who hear of it dismiss it instinctively. And indeed, they are perfectly correct to do so. Yet the sheer mass of documentary evidence in support of the proposition is such that all historians who have come into contact with it have been forced to be more circumspect with regard to the “chiefs' plot.” We have to look very carefully at this evidence before we reject its conclusions, and once we have done so, we have to answer a further and even more significant question: If the “chiefs' plot” did not exist, why did the Colonial authorities maintain that it did? Paradoxically, we will discover that an investigation of the “chiefs' plot” can tell us nothing about the Xhosa or the cattle-killing, but it can tell us a great deal about the mind and methods of Sir George Grey, that colossus of early Victorian imperialism.

After nearly seventy years of epic struggle, the catastrophic defeats of the Seventh (1846-47) and Eighth (1850-53) Frontier Wars finally broke the military capacity of the Xhosa people to resist the Colonial advance from the Cape of Good Hope. Their political structures fragmented by partial incorporation into the Crown Colony of British Kaffraria; their belief structures fractured by the victories of missionary teaching and European technology; the slender remnants of their economic resources decimated by the onslaught of the lung-sickness epizootic in their cattle from 1855, the Xhosa turned, as other peoples have done in like situations, to millennarian hopes.
The Archives of the Cape Chamber of Industries
Authors: Nicol Martin
Published: May 2006

A hundred years ago Johannesburg was not even a hole in the ground. Yet we know far more of its history since then than we do of Cape Town, the Mother City of South Africa, established at the southern tip of the continent over two centuries before. The key importance of the Witwatersrand in the development of the economy, the rapid expansion of Johannesburg and the conflict that accompanied it, have all ensured the region a dominant role in all histories of South Africa. The dramatic events surrounding the mining of gold and the growth of southern Africa's largest and wealthiest city have attracted only an increasing number of historians. These scholars have an enormous range of written sources to draw upon and are currently making innovative use of oral testimony. When we talk of the economic and social history of the Witwatersrand, we are referring to a substantial body of historical writing.

The history of Cape Town over the last century is much less visible. It is less dramatic, less documented, and less researched. Explorations have been made, some of the results of which are reproduced by the Cape Town History Workshop, but there is no possibility of producing a useful mapping of the social and economic development of Cape Town until more basic research has been completed. The recording of this ‘local history’ is not only important for its own sake, for the central focus of most overviews of South African history on the Witwatersrand has dulled our ability to understand, and even perceive, major and continuing regional differences in South Africa and the forces of which they are the product.
Théophilus Conneau: The Saga of a Tale
Authors: Mouser Bruce L.
Published: May 2006

Rare has been the book on Africa that has acquired a history and become the subject of study in its own right. One such is the autobiography of Théophilus Conneau, a slave dealer of French and Italian background, who lived on the west coast of Africa during the 1830s and 1840s. Various accounts of Conneau's experiences in Guinea and Liberia have been translated into four languages, and were even incorporated into a successful novel in 1933, on which was based a motion picture. The latest version of Conneau's life story (and the occasion for this paper) was published as recently as 1976.

Conneau's story first came to press in 1854 through the editorial assistance and skill of Brantz Mayer, a lecturer, author, and journalist of the Baltimore area, known principally for his writings about Latin America. Having obtained experience and contacts with publishers by editing manuscripts and letters, Mayer was a valuable asset to a new author in 1853. Recently discovered letters from Conneau to Mayer and Mayer's own account of the relationship between them suggest an interesting beginning for this literary enterprise. Conneau found himself in 1853 in Baltimore where he met James Hall, whom he had known previously in Liberia. Hall had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Maryland settlement for freed Blacks at Cape Palmas and had served as that settlement's first governor from 1833 to 1836. Concluding that Conneau's story of a repentant slave trader would be of value to the cause of anti-slavery and black emigration from the United States to Africa, Hall suggested that Conneau write his memoirs and introduced him to Mayer.
African Materials in Vincentian Archives
Authors: Stafford Poole C.M.
Published: May 2006

Of all the communities and religious orders in the Roman Catholic church that are involved in missionary activity, the Congregation of the Mission, while one of the more extensive, is undoubtedly the least known. Founded in 1625 by Saint Vincent de Paul (1581-1660), its original purpose was the giving of parish missions in the de-Christianized rural areas of France. The rural missions remained a special concern of Saint Vincent's community and it was in this sense that the term “mission” was originally used. Prior to the French Revolution the term missionary was used almost exclusively of members of Saint Vincent's group. In the mid-eighteenth century they also came to be known as Lazarists, a name derived from their motherhouse, the famous Saint-Lazare. Though this name has been used in other countries, the Congregation of the Mission has come to be known by different names in different localities: for instance, Vincentians in the English-speaking world, Padres Paúles in the Spanish-speaking world, and Saint Vincent's Fathers in Nigeria.

Reacting against the excessive esprit de corps of numerous religious groups of his time, Vincent de Paul decreed that the work of his missionaries should be without fanfare or publicity. He even forbade some of them from writing histories of the community lest this should lead to corporate pride. It was an unfortunate precedent. This tendency, plus a general lack of historical consciousness, has caused the work of the Congregation of the Mission to be unpublicized and unknown, even by the members themselves.
Some Important Collections of Catholic Missionary Journals in North America
Authors: Henige David
Published: May 2006

Readers may be interested to know that there are several little-known depositories of African-related Catholic missionary journals in the United States and Canada. Since these materials were not usually disseminated very widely when published, they are almost never to be found in academic and research libraries, nor, therefore, in the standard locating tools like Union List of Serials and its supplements. Because of this an effort is now being made to find at least one location in North America for each of the more than four hundred relevant journals. Likely possibilities include provincial and mother houses, teaching seminaries, monasteries, and provincial archives, as well as the libraries of institutions of higher learning affiliated with particular missionary orders. Although this project is very far from complete (and almost certainly will never attain the rather quixotic goal mentioned above) some early returns are in and several important collections have been identified. This note discusses the most useful of these, which relate to the White Fathers, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Scheutists, and the Verona Fathers. African historians need no introduction to the value of the published White Father materials. The White Fathers served throughout most of Africa and they published more than any other order on the peoples among whom they served. Many of their writings have been used by Africanists, but it remains true that the correspondence, reports, and articles which appeared in their own numerous journals have not been extensively consulted, no doubt because these journals are not widely available.
Une catastrophe démographique au Moyen Congo: la guerre de l'impôt chez les Téké Tsaayi, 1913–1920
Authors: Dupré Marie-Claude
Published: May 2006

Les Téké tsaayi sont un rameau détaché du tronc téké il y a plusieurs siècles. Ayant quitté les savanes très claires qui bordent le Zaïre à la hauteur du Malebu pour fuir le pouvoir politique qui s'y était développé (“pour échapper au Makoko”), ils s'établirent en forêt sur les contreforts orientaux de ce qui est aujourd'hui les Monts du Chaillu et ils imposèrent à ses habitants leur système politique bicéphale.

En 1966 j'entrepris une étude qui, selon les règles anthropologiques du moment, devait se confiner à une observation exhaustive d'un village. Les 147 habitants de Vouka, sur la haute Louessé, affluent de la rive droite du Niari-Kouilou, furent donc soumis au dispositif en vigueur. Localisation spatiale, parenté et alliances, production (peu observée), rites religieux etc. …Les matériaux obtenus furent pauvres, très disparates, et fort lacunaires. Les généalogies étaient incomplètes à cause des morts de la guerre de l'impôt. La métallurgie du fer avait cessé pendant cette même guerre; il en était de même pour les rites. Les vieux se plaignaient que leurs enfants préféraient parler la langue nzabi, celle des voisins (et champ d'étude de Georges Dupré). Mon inexpérience n'était pas seule en cause. Une déculturation était évidente, conséquence d'une dévastation démographique. Face à cette situation, les bases mêmes de la recherche étaient à redéfinir. Et il fallait d'abord se tourner vers l'histoire de la colonisation et en évaluer l'impact.
Publish or Perish, or How to Write a Social History of the Wàndala (Northern Cameroon)
Authors: Forkl Hermann
Published: May 2006

It has been in the tradition of this journal to elaborate a methodological apparatus to scrutinize the evidence of older written sources on African history. However, for various reasons, we tend to apply a different standard to recent sources, apparently considering them reliable per se because they developed in the same enlightened context of Western intellectual life as our own. Book reviews, nearly the only refuge for Western self criticism, sometimes cannot achieve it, as I will show.

The source on which I would like to comment is a dissertation completed at Boston University in 1984. It is based on oral traditions and for this reason, strictly speaking, a written source itself, apart from a number of published as well as archival sources, whose way of quotation will be re-examined below at first. The interviews were conducted by the author in 1974/75 (Morrissey 1984:225) with north Cameroonian Wandala and Shuwa Arab informants, some of whom I became acquainted with during my own fieldwork in 1984.1 would argue, though, that the following comments are not solely of interest to scholars specializing in northern Cameroon.

It might seem to some rather heavy-handed to criticize so closely a doctoral dissertation, but American dissertations are freely available to interested parties in both photocopy and microfilm. As a result they are commonly cited in other works in much the same way as more formally published studies. This being the case, it seems reasonable to submit them to the same scrutiny as any other work in the public domain. I should point out that I conducted my own fieldwork in ignorance of Morrissey's work, becoming aware of the latter only after my return from the field in 1984.