bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Journal of an African Slaver, 1789-1792, and the Gold Coast Slave Trade of William Collow
Authors: Behrendt Stephen D. 
Published: May 2006

In 1929 the American Antiquarian Society published an eighty-three-page manuscript that describes commercial transactions for slaves, ivory, and gold on the Gold and Slave Coasts from 1789 to 1792. George Plimpton owned this manuscript. As it includes a slave-trading ledger of the schooner Swallow, Plimpton entitled the manuscript “The Journal of an African Slaver.” The “journal” is one of the few published documents in the English language that specifies financial transactions for slaves between European and African traders on the coast of Africa during the late eighteenth century.In his four-page introduction to the journal Plimpton stated that:The name of the ship engaged in the traffic was the schooner ‘Swallow,’ Capt. John Johnston, 1790-1792. There is a reference to a previous voyage when ‘Captain Peacock had her,’ also some abstracts of accounts kept by Capt. David McEleheran in 1789 of trade in gold, slaves and ivory on the Gold Coast. None of these names can be identified as to locality, and there is, of course, the possibility, especially taking into consideration the English nature of the cargo bartered, that the vessel was an English slaver.The journal was included with some mid-nineteenth century South Carolina plantation accounts when it was purchased at an auction in New York, thus suggesting to Plimpton that the journal's author was perhaps a “South Carolinian who made this trip to Africa.”In this research note I will identify the various vessels and traders mentioned in this manuscript by referring to the data-set I have assembled from other sources concerning the slave trade during this period. We will seethat Plimpton's “journal” is a set of account books owned by the Gold Coast agents of London and Havre merchant William Collow. I then will discuss the importance of Collow as a merchant and shipowner in the late eighteenth-century British slave trade.
Les Rois De Glidji: Une Chronologie Revisee
Authors: Gayibor N.L. 
Published: May 2006

Etablir avec une certaine fiabilité la liste chronologique des souverains d'un royaume à partir des traditions orales se révèle un exercice périlleux, dans les dédales duquel peu d'historiens osent s'aventurer. Pour peu que les origines de cet Etat remontent à quelques siècles, le talon d'Achille des sources orales est, on le sait, la chronologic Il est pourtant urgent de s'y atteler, pour ce qui concerne les formations politiques précoloniales, car l'usure du temps et surtout la disparition des particularités culturelles sous les influences de la vie moderne effacent inexorablement de la mémoire collective, le souvenir de ceux qui ont façonné le destin de leur peuple.Certains héritiers de ces Etats précoloniaux, dans le souci légitime de mieux faire connaître leur passé, ont tenté—avec plus ou moins de bonheur—de collecter et de mettre en forme les éléments épars fournis sur ce passé par les traditionnistes. C'est ce que fit le roi de Glidji Agbanon II en publiant en 1934, à la demande de l'administration française, unMémoire sur l'histoire de Petit-Popo et du royaume Guen. Dans cet ouvrage, l'auteur tente de reconstituer l'histoire du royaume de Glidji à partir d'une liste dynastique, avec les dates et les événements marquants du règne de chaque souverain et les événements survenus au cours de ces règnes. Or, cette liste ne résiste pas à la critique historique, essentiellement en ce qui concerne les XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Notre propos, à travers cette étude, est de tenter de reconstituer cette liste à partir de la critique des hypothèses d'Agbanon, à la lumière des documents d'archives et travaux divers relatifs à la période considérée.
“Portuguese” Architecture and Luso-African Identity in Senegambia and Guinea, 1730–1890
Authors: Mark Peter 
Published: May 2006

Along the West African coast and in the immediate hinterland from the Gambia River to Sierra Leone in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, a region of extensive long-distance trade, the buildings people lived in, as well as the physical layout of their communities, served as important elements in the articulation of their cultural identity. At the same time, architecture reflected contact between the various populations of the region. These groups included a small number of Portuguese and a somewhat larger population of several thousand Luso-Africans, whose commercial role as traders, declining by the late eighteenth century, was limited essentially to the navigable lower reaches of coastal rivers and waterways.These Luso-Africans, faced by Europeans who contested their efforts to define themselves as a group, were gradually marginalized and ultimately subsumed into the neighboring coastal populations, leaving only traces of their distinctive culture. Among the elements that comprised the Luso-African cultural legacy were houses built in “Portuguese” style: rectangular structures with whitewashed exteriors and a vestibule or a porch. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, these houses helped to define the Luso-African community.The local African populations of West Atlantic-speakers (Floups, Bagnuns, Bijogos, and Papels) and, further down the coast, Susus, Temnes and Bulloms, were for the most part organized into small-scale, decentralized societies. Mande-speaking peoples inhabited the small states of the lower Gambia and the more important state of Kaabu in Guinea-Bissau; they, together with ‘juula’ merchants, comprised the western outriders of the Mande diaspora. Further east, in the newly-established Islamic state of Fuuta Jaloo (Futa Jalon), lived the Fulbe.
The University of Zambia's Institute for African Studies and Social Science Research in Central Africa, 1938-1988
Authors: Musambachime M. C. 
Published: May 2006

G. K. Gwassa states that research institutes in Africa constitute one critical factor of development in that they have to undertake the twin problems of research which involve the search for and the discovery of the process of social development. They also undertake purposeful functional research by (especially) studying and analyzing internal economic and social conditions in order to determine the characteristics, variables, and criteria for rational economic and political actions within a given country. These have become the functions of many social science research institutions in sub-Saharan Africa. The pioneer in all this is the University of Zambia's Institute for African Studies, the oldest social science-oriented research center in black Africa.The Institute was founded in 1938 as the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute for Social Research (RLISR). In its fifty years of existence the Institute has made contributions which have earned it an international reputation for its research work. The aim of this paper is to assess the contribution of the Institute to social science research in its first fifty years of existence. In undertaking this task, I propose to discuss the topic under three broad areas: foundation, aims, and objectives; publication and research; and problems encountered and their solution.
The Nigerian National Archives, Kaduna: An Introduction for Users and a Summary of Holdings
Authors: Heap Simon 
Published: May 2006

The archives for Northern Nigeria, including not only the area north of the Niger and Benue rivers but also present-day Kwara, Kogi, and Benue states, is located at 29 Yakubu Gowon Way, Kaduna, in the heart of the busy central commercial and administrative district of the town. The Kaduna branch of the Nigerian National Archives has a large, comprehensive and unique collection of official papers of the British colonial and Nigerian independence periods; papers of native and local authorities; and newspapers, magazines, and other publications, as well as Arabic manuscripts. The archives is open on weekdays only. From Monday to Thursday its hours are 8:30 to 2:30, while on Friday there is a shortened day: 8:30 to 12:30.No documents will be produced from the repository within one hour before closing time. In 1991 240 visitors made some 800 visits to the Kaduna archives. On each visit, the visitors' book must be signed; signing out at the end of the day is also obligatory. Use of the archives requires the purchase of a searcher's registration card costing 10 naira ($1.00 or 50 pence) for students, 25 naira for others. The card is valid for the other National Archives branches at Ibadan and Enugu and lasts for that calendar year. Renewals are carried out in subsequent years. Photocopying facilities are available, give excellent reproduction, and are cheap—50 kobo (5c/3p) per exposure for students, one naira for other researchers.
On Aro Colonial Primary Source Material: A Critique of the Historiography
Authors: Nwauwa A. O. 
Published: May 2006

The successful implementation of the Lugardian system of indirect rule among the Igbo eluded British colonial officials. In Northern Nigeria the British had effectively used the Fulani aristocrats in implementing the system. The Fulani were believed to represent a superior caste of nomads who possessed superior ideas of centralization, organization, and administration. Since the Aro were able to organize their spectacular slave- trading network in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British assumed that, like the Fulani, they represented equally superior elements, and so could be used to implement the indirect rule policy in Igboland. Or, if they did not possess a centralized administration as the Fulani, which could be effectively utilized, one could be invented for the occasion.As a result the Aro began to agitate British colonial officers and anthropologists, designing to show their “foreignness” to the Igbo. British officials quickly rejected that the Aro were Igbo. Because the Igbo were acephalous the British had regarded them as very “primitive,” thus incapable of any remarkable organization or innovation. Since colonialism justified itself by the contention that, left alone, Africans were incapable of any meaningful advance, it was only logical for the British to look outside Igboland and Africa for the origin of the Aro. Consequently, Aro colonial historiography became suspect.
The Reign of Kabaka Nakibinge: Myth or Watershed?
Authors: Reid Richard 
Published: May 2006

Reliable data relating to Buganda's pre-1800 past has come to historians in the form of a thin trickle. Students of more ancient Ganda history have been compelled to rely on the accounts by literate Ganda composed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most notably the work of Apolo Kagwa. The effective usage of these accounts is fraught with difficulties, difficulties which are well-documented in the case of Buganda and which have been explored by, in particular, Wrigley, Kiwanuka, Rowe, and Henige. These writers have justifiably questioned the validity of such recorded political history. The idea that Buganda was governed by a Western-style royal dynasty, with a chronologically-structured succession list, was first put in writing by Speke, who provided the earliest such kinglist.Over the ensuing forty years this kinglist was gradually lengthened and virtually set in stone, largely through the writings of Kagwa. The explanation of precolonial Ganda government in die terminology of Western constitutional monarchy doubtless served very well the purposes of the new colonial power, which was able to claim that it was merely backing up an extant political organization able to articulate the practices of ‘civilised’ governance. This arrangement also clearly suited the Ganda, as Wrigley and Twaddle have suggested. Both authors incisively argue that the Ganda kinglist was manipulated to meet the challenges of the colonial period.There seems little reason to doubt, and every reason to believe, that the recording of Buganda's more ancient past (for which there is no corroborating written source) was indeed often carefully engineered to produce the desired results. The attempt to ‘clarify’ local power struggles, the legitimization of particular claims to authority, and die opportunity to provide the world with the definitive account of one's own ‘national history’ (an opportunity, surely, which few could resist) were all factors which have combined to demand skepticism among historians concerning the historicity of ‘traditional’ accounts.
The Elmina Dagregister of William Butler, 1721
Authors: Clement Jan J. 
Published: May 2006

De Heeren Thienen, executives of the college of directors of the West-Indische Compagnie (W.I.C.) in Amsterdam, demanded that their directors-general in Elmina keep accurate journals or day books, copies of which had to be sent to Holland regularly and at short intervals (one to three months), to each of the five “Kamers” or Chambers: Amsterdam, Zeeland, Maas, Stad, and Lande en Noorderquartier. These journals were produced during most of the period of two and a half centuries that the Dutch resided at the Gold Coast. All of the still-existing journals are now stored at the Algemeen Rijksarchief (ARA) in The Hague in Holland.Unfortunately, many of the manuscripts dating from before 1700 have gone, lost either by deliberate destruction, by thoughtless bureaucrats, or by accidental fires. Of the manuscripts now in the ARA many are in poor condition and are not available for consultation; others are being microfilmed, which makes studying these valuable documents somewhat tiresome. Fortunately, when I transcribed the day book of 1721 on my laptop computer, I was lucky enough to be able to use the original manuscript; a few weeks after I had finished this job the manuscript was microfilmed and is now available only in that format. The only other existing transcription of a journal of Elmina was published in 1953 by Karel Ratelband, whose Vijf dagregisters van het kasteel Sao Jorge Da Mina, covers the years 1645 to 1647.The journals of Elmina written or dictated by the directors-general were used by the Heeren Thienen in Amsterdam primarily as a tool to control their staff on the Gold Coast.
New Publication About the C.I.C.M. Archives
Authors: Vellut Jean-Luc 
Published: May 2006

The Scheut Archive is housed in a remote Roman suburb. Intriguingly enough, it was not mentioned in Lajos Pàsztor's repertory of church archives in Italy, vol. 7 of the UNESCO series, Guide to the Sources of the History of Africa, published in 1983. One explanation for this neglect might be that the archive was not fully operational by then. These circumstances no doubt partly explain why, despite exemplary conservation and classification, this collection has up to now been insufficiently tapped by scholars. Contributing factors may have been the discredit unfortunately thrown on traditional written sources by a number of modern “Africanists,” as well as widespread ignorance among English-speaking scholars of the intricacies of Roman Catholic bureaucracies. In fact, whatever their cultural background, historians wanting to burrow their way into the massive collection of Scheut papers should brace themselves for a period of initiation in the intricacies of two overlapping multinational Church organizations.On the one hand, the Scheut congregation, as a separate institution, was established in 1862. It had its headquarters at Scheut, on the outskirts of Brussels, with a superior general in charge. It also had representation in Rome, but its main activities were carried out in its territorial branches (“provinces”) established first in the Far East and later in the Congo, each under the authority of a provincial. This organization maintained a dense internal and external network of communication within the hierarchy itself, as well as with government administrations, other religious bodies, etc. Like any organization, it knew rules and procedures, but also conflicts among various power blocs.
Kemi Morgan and the Second Reconstruction of Ibadan History
Authors: Falola Toyin 
Published: May 2006

I did not set out to write a new book, not even to write thehistory of Ibadan. I intended to re-write the old man's book.The concerns which dominated Yoruba historiography in the nineteenth century were similar to those of the first half of this century. Primary among these concerns were the patriotic desire to document Yoruba history, explain the turbulence of the nineteenth century, and inspire the new generation with a sense of history. Isaac Babalola Akinyele (1881–1964), the first to write a chronicle on Ibadan, expressed these concerns in the preface to the first edition of his book, Iwe I tan Ibadan, published in 1911. He explained that the origin of the book was the invitation extended to him in May 1911 by an Ibadan-based society, the Egbe Onife He Yoruba (“Lovers of the Yoruba”) to give a lecture on “Ancient and Modern Ibadan.” In the same month, he delivered a lecture which he later expanded and published into a book in order to preserve history at a time when the knowledge about the past was being forgotten and the elders were passing on. Chief Akinyele believed that it was urgent to document the oriki of Yoruba Obas, again being forgotten because only a few persons were interested in them. To him the oriki reveal much about Yoruba history. He also believed that the Yoruba language was undergoing a decline, and that there was a need for a rescue mission. He concluded his preface by appealing to his readers to accept his work and to ignore any derogatory remarks on people and ethnic groups in the oriki, which were composed by poets to eulogize the achievements of chiefs and warriors during a period of warfare. Finally, he enjoined all the Yoruba to unite, to learn from the British nation where everybody, irrespective of differences in language and culture, had united in order to build a strong and prosperous nation.
“Mande Kaba,” the Capital of Mali: A Recent Invention?
Authors: Green Kathryn L. 
Published: May 2006

Historians who work in certain diaspora areas of the Mande people are frequently told by Mandekan speakers that their ancestors came from “Mande Kaba” (Kaaba). When reporting this, they usually then proceed to explain that Kaba is the Mande term for the French-named town of Kangaba, capital of the Mali empire. However, in my work on the precolonial state of Kong in northeastern Côte d'Ivoire, it became important to question exactly what this phrase means in the context of oral traditions and chronology.The hypothesis equating Kaba, Kangaba, and the capital of the Mali empire dates back in print to the early French studies of ancient Mali, and particularly to Maurice Delafosse, that prolific writer on West African oral traditions, religion, and languages. In his 1912 magnum opus, Haut-Sénégal-Niger, Delafosse cited Kangaba, “sans doute” as the capital of the pre-Sunjata “royaume” of Mali. In his annotation of the French translation of the mid-seventeenth century compilation, Ta'rikh al-Fattash, Delafosse again presented this idea. The Ta'rikh stated that “[t]he town which served previously as the capital of the emperor of Mali was named Diêriba [jāriba]; following, there was another named Niani [Yan.”In a note Delafosse explained that Diêriba “is also the name of the town called Kangaba on our [French] maps, which after having been the first capital of the manding empire, is still today the chief town of the province of Manding or Malli.” He was most likely relaying information from his interpretation of traditions as well as his own personal observations of early twentieth-century Kangaba. The Keita family, claiming descent from Sunjata Keita, the founder of the Mali empire, enjoyed political control of Kangaba, and were recognized as having held this position for some time.
Four Years in Asante: One Source or Several?
Authors: Jone Adam 
Published: May 2006

Since its publication in 1874-1875 the account by the Basel missionaries Friedrich (‘Fritz’) August Ramseyer (1842-1902) and Johannes Kühne (1840-1915) of their captivity in Asante, Vier Jahre in Asante, has constituted one of the major written sources on the nature of precolonial society in what is now southern Ghana. Stationed at Anum, near the east bank of the lower Volta, Ramseyer and Kühne were captured together with Ramseyer's wife and infant son in June 1869 by an Asante force which had invaded Ewe territory. They were taken to Asante and eventually, after a seven-month stay in a hamlet which they christened Ebenezer, to Kumase, where they were held hostage from December 1870 until the approach of a British military expedition in January 1874. Apart from the independent French trader Joseph-Marie Bonnat, who was captured in the same month and shared many of their experiences, Ramseyer and Kühne spent longer in Asante than any other author before the twentieth century. Moreover, as prisoners they were able to observe African society from an unusual perspective: “these men saw all from below; the white man was the slave, the negro the master.”While the importance of this source is generally recognized, it has escaped the notice of most commentators that what Ramseyer and Kühne left us was not one source but at least five—a manuscript, two German editions, and an English and a French translation, all written within a relatively short period of time as part of what has been called “the scramble for Gold Coast Africana.” In this paper I shall explore some of the relationships among these different sources.
Oral Historical Traditions and Political Integration in Ijebu
Authors: Oduwobi Tunde 
Published: May 2006

The Ijebu are a subgroup of the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria. In precolonial times they established a single kingdom under the Awujale (the titular head) whose seat of government was the town of Ijebu-Ode. Structurally, the kingdom was composed of geographical divisions, each of which was identified by a name. Some of them were characterized by close socioeconomic and political ties effected through the joint control of a political association, the Pampa society, which coordinated commercial, communal, and military activities in the area. Three such divisions form the focus of this paper: Ijebu-Igbo, Imusin, and Ago-Iwoye.The British colonial administration engendered a process of political integration in these three areas as they were each brought under a single ruler; the purpose of this paper is to highlight how Ijebu oral historical traditions were employed to give support to this integrative process., but first, an identification of the areas concerned.The Ijebu-Igbo area is composed principally of five distinct settlements or towns: Okesopin, Ojowo, Atikori, Oke-Agbo, and Japara. Okesopin is accorded primacy as the oldest of the settlements. The term Ijebu-Igbo (forest) is an allusion to the forested nature of this area of Ijebu.The Imusin area, made up of about fifty very small settlements, is subdivided into two geographical groups: the northern group, called Ikatun, and the southern group or Ikasi. The term Imusin means the area of the akee apple (Imu: place or area; Isin: akee apple).