bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A Survey of African Material in the Libraries and Archives of Protestant Missionary Societies in England
Authors: Cason Maidel 
Published: May 2006

The libraries and archives of mission societies provide rare, often unique, source material concerning the last two centuries of African history. The following survey of Protestant mission societies in England is based on a survey done in 1970. In 1978 letters were written to all societies listed in order to update the material. Replies were received from twenty-one. When no information was received in 1978 this has been indicated in the text. Bibliographical and reference material has also been updated. Included for each of the societies covered is a list of the areas where the society worked in Africa, the types of material held, the mission periodicals produced and notes about access.There are two guides available which cover some of the groups considered. Rosemary Keen's A Survey of the Archives of Selected Missionary Societies (1968) describes the archives of nineteen societies. It is very uneven in coverage and includes a number of inaccuracies. A Guide to Manuscripts and Documents in the British Isles Related to Africa compiled by Noel Matthews and M. Doreen Wainwright was published in 1971 based on a survey done in 1965. It covers eleven of the societies listed here and the extent of coverage is indicated in the individual sections.Early in this century a South African writer attempted to cover all of African missions south of the Sahara. Du Plessis' A History of Christian Missions in South Africa (1911) and his Evangelization of Pagan Africa (1929) are carefully done, detailed accounts from the South African viewpoint. In 1958 Gerdener continued the coverage of South African work with his Recent Developments in the South African Mission Field.
Research in South Africa: To Know an Archive
Authors: Feinberg H.M. 
Published: May 2006

During the first half of 1985 I visited the Republic of South Africa in order to investigate the origins of the Natives Land Act of 1913. My research, emphasizing the years 1910 to 1916, required that I work in archives and libraries in three of the four provinces (excluding Natal). In the process I went to major and minor research facilities, to a few museums, and even to a small town public library. What follows is a discussion of many of the archives in South Africa, aids to making research easier, and some of the pitfalls one may face pursuing historical research in that country.The largest and most important archive in South Africa is the Central Archives Depot in Pretoria. This functions as the national archives of South Africa as well as the Transvaal Provincial Archives. All the most important central government department records are deposited there, including the Prime Minister's collection; the records of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Justice Department, Lands Department; and, of particular interest to the Africanist, the records of the Department of Native Affairs (however variously titled between 1910 and the present). The CAD also holds a substantial number of personal paper collections, including those of Jan Smuts and J.B.M. Hertzog.The Central Archives Depot is not the easiest place in which to work. Consequently, try to plan your stay so that you can have what might seem to be more than enough time to work there.
The Anti-Slave Trade Theme in Dahoman History: An Examination of the Evidence
Authors: Ross David 
Published: May 2006

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers who described pre-colonial Dahomey all stressed that the Dahomans were dedicated, enthusiastic slavers. The kingdom's first historian, Archibald Dalzel, remarked, for example, that the Dahomans were “bred solely to war and rapine.” F.E. Forbes, the author of one of the best-known nineteenth-century accounts of the kingdom, in a similar vein, declared of Dahomey that “strange and contradictory as it may sound, this great nation is no nation, but a banditti.”The views of these and other similarly-minded writers were, until the 1960s, everywhere accepted. In that decade, however, Isaac A. Akinjogbin published a series of works in which he gave an account of a long-lived Dahoman anti-slave trade tradition. Dahomey was, he claims, founded ca 1620 by a group of “highly principled and far-seeing” Aja in the Abomey area. These Aja founded the kingdom so as to be able to wage war effectively against those of their countrymen who traded in slaves.Akinjogbin believed that the Dahomans spent about ninety years making war on their slave trading neighbors. It was, he claims, only in 1730 that the European slavers and their African allies were able to force the Dahomans to abandon their anti-slave trade campaign and to begin trading in slaves themselves. The very destructive wars of the 1720s, the wars which made Dahomey a major west African power, were, it seems undertaken as part of a virtuous, anti-slave trade crusade.Although the Dahomans were forced to begin trading in slaves in 1730, they did not, Aknjogbin implies, entirely abandon their anti-slave trade ideals.
Priorities and Opportunities for Research in Swaziland
Authors: Booth Alan R. 
Published: May 2006

“I cry because the people cause me tocry about the Taxes…We have now tosell our children in order to getmoney to pay the Tax which is heavy.”[Labotsibeni, Queen Regent of Swaziland, 1906]“On these distant hills, catch the sun before its sets, you are mourned!I'm now just a song that everyone sings!I loved a young man,But they took him, he signed on at Mankaiana,Now I am ruined!”[Swazi women's working song, traditional]“It is sometimes said that the operations of the recruiting organization are tantamount to a policy of forced labour and that pressure is brought to bear to make Natives go to the mines. Nothing could be further from the truth.”[J.A. Genmill, General Manager, N.R.C., 1961]During the past decade the cascade of literature dealing with capital penetration into Southern Africa and its various consequences has set all of us, liberal and radical, awash. There is not sign of letup. We have learned that pre-industrial economies were self-sustaining at the very least, some of them very much more than that; and that many were dynamic in their subsequent response to market forces. We have learned that peasants had to be forced to go to work, and how efficient the systems of coercion were. We have learned how those pre-capitalist societies reacted to the seductions and the entrapments of capitalism, some through collaboration, others through patterns of resistance, most, surely, combining the two.
The Missing Migrants: African Seeds in the Demographer's Field
Authors: Fetter Bruce S. 
Published: May 2006

The three principal components of demography--fertility, mortality, and migration--can each provide information for reconstructing elements of the African past. Birth rate, more than anything else, determines the reproduction of the labor force, a particular concern of many historians. Death rate is an existential measure of the quality of life; any assessment of the long-run effects of colonial rule must take into account any discernable changes in mortality patterns that may have occurred. Finally, the study of migration is essential for understanding the redistribution of people and resources which resulted from the slave trade and colonization.Although all three indicators are essential for a complete understanding of the history of a given population, they occur with substantially different rhythms. Mortality is a one-time happening for us all. Fertility depends on both partners in a sexual union, although most clearly circumscribed by menarchy and menopause in females. Migration, particularly in Africa, has affected males more frequently than females and can be, moreover, an abrupt and irregular phenomenon. Following the three activities simultaneously is thus an extremely complex undertaking.For the developed world demographers have examined whole countries for periods as far removed as the eighteenth century and individual villages for demographic phenomena reaching back to the Middle Ages. Unfortunately for students of Africa, the materials available to us are not nearly so rich. Most colonial regimes did not conduct censuses in the current sense of the word. At most, they conducted surveys or village-by-village ‘nose counts’ which, naturally, vary enormously in their reliability.
Pasi ne (Down With) Class Struggle? The New History for Schools in Zimbabwe
Authors: Phimister I.R. 
Published: May 2006

The struggle by the people of Zimbabwe to overthrow Ian Smith's Rhodesian regime in the 1970s won the support and gripped the imagination of democratic peoples around the world. As the struggle intensified, so it began to move away from nationalism towards liberation. Control of the state was no longer seen as an end in itself. For the vision of a socialist Zimbabwe to become reality, the state would have to be fundamentally restructured. The pace and direction of this historic movement has lain at the center of all subsequent encounters between the advanced capitalist countries and their local class allies on the one hand, and progressive elements inside ZANU on the other. While the former have busied themselves with reversing such progress as was made during the war, the latter have tried to avoid the snares and pitfalls which infest the pragmatic roads leading away from the compromise reached at Lancaster House.Education no less than other state apparatuses has been a site of struggle between the forces of accommodation to the rule of capital and those of socialist transformation. By any measure, the expansion of Zimbabwe's educational infrastructure since independence in April 1980 has been phenomenal. Awarded some Z$408 million in 1982's Budget--a four-fold increase in little over three years--the Ministry of Education now caters for 1,903,917 primary school pupils, as opposed to 819,586 in 1979. Secondary school enrollment over the same period has climbed from 66,215 to 218,430. Equally impressive gains have been registered in the number of schools and schoolteachers.
Circular Arguments and Self-Fulfilling Definitions: “Statelessness” and the Dagaaba
Authors: Yelpaala Kojo 
Published: May 2006

Since the publication of Maine'sAncient Lawin 1861 social anthropological studies have been prolific. The basic intellectual and investigative interest of these social anthropologists was and continues to be the social, political, and cultural organization of preliterate societies in theirbenignstate of primitivity. Indeed, it might be said that the anthropologist created the savage, the barbarian, and the primitive and their state as an object of intellectual inquiry through fieldwork. Most of these studies conducted within the framework of what Owusu calls “structual-functional empiricism” were not exactly law-centered. Whatever glimpses of the legal system one could obtain was by accident. Law was merely part of a functioning, coherent, and consistent totality; part of the jigsaw puzzle of the primitive reality.Subsequent legal anthropological works clearly fell into two categories: those that thought that primitive societies did not have law and others that thought that they did. Those of the first group have viewed small-scale societies from the monocles of western jurisprudence, expecting to find a system of rules emanating from an authoritative source in a hierarchically-organized political system with government, courts, and a law-enforcement mechanism backed by coercive physical sanctions. Viewed from this perspective they not surprisingly found what they considered to be a pattern of “statelessness,” lawlessness, anarchy, and notions of justice and remedy based upon the principle of self-help or the law of the claw and the fang. Critics of colonialism and anthropology suggest that this characterization of the expectations of the colonial anthropologist might be a serious misrepresentation of their true expectations. The colonialist needed the anthropologist to provide the methods by which colonialism could be most effective. The anthropologist on the other hand created the savage and his state of statelessness, lawlessness, and self-help to provide a rational basis for colonialist subjugation and exploitation of the savage.
Power and Dynastic Conflict in Mampon
Authors: McCaskie T.C. 
Published: May 2006

The analysis of the relationship between oral and written documentation and the expression or articulation of political power and interest is now extremely sophisticated for the Asante case, yet it remains obstinately one-sided, as Asante history has tended to be interpreted from the political center, Kumase. Some scholars have intermittently called for another, more broadening and less constraining, perspective, and a very few have acted upon this plea by considering the nature of historic Asante society from various points on the ‘periphery.’ Among other things the present paper is a contribution to this ill-developed but much-needed ‘view from the periphery,’ even though the ‘periphery’ in the present case is as politically central as could be envisaged without resorting to the heavily researched Kumase perspective. I deal here essentially with oral historical perceptions of power--and struggles for it and validations of it--in the major territorial division of Mampon, but first I address one or two more general points, obvious perhaps, but usefully alluded to in the present context nonetheless.First, there is now a respectably large literature concerning the use (and usefulness) of African oral historical materials. This literature evinces two broad tendencies. One is a very proper scepticism about and mistrust of the regrettably widespread reliance on unsupported oral tradition. The other is an intellectualist attempt to divorce such traditions from ‘actual’ historical experience by interpreting them within a synchronic, often ‘structuralist,’ framework. Both approaches are valid, but they are ultimately ordained by a simple absence of ‘external’ or qualifying data. Asante is favored here in the sense that the ability to cross-check between oral memory and the written record is the most developed for all of Sub-Saharan Africa.
The Court Records of Sefwi Wiawso, Western Region, Ghana
Authors: Roberts Penelope A. 
Published: May 2006

The Divisions of Sefwi Wiawso, Sefwi Bekwai, and Sefwi Anwhiaso in the Western Frontier District of the Gold Caost were brought within the operations of the Native Jurisdiction Ordinance (1883) under the ‘Headchief of Sefwi Wiawso in 1909.’ They were administered from the Ankobra District until 1911 when an increase in the number of Assistant District Commissioners permitted the appointment of a Commissioner to the Western Frontier District. The headquarters of the Western Frontier District were at Amoya, a very small town near the Bia River and the Ivory Coast border. Three years later, however, in 1914, the Sefwi District was created and new headquarters established in the old capital of Sefwi Wiawso, the town of Wiawso perched on the top of a steep hill and not far from the important ferry crossing of the Tano River. The Sefwi Wiawso Native Tribunal was first established at this date. A few years later Native Tribunals were also established at Sefwi Bekwai and Sefwi Anwhiaso. The present court rooms in Wiawso were built in 1927/28 and the court records for Sefwi Wiawso to which I had access date from this time.The court records had been deposited (in 1970) on the floor and shelves of a storeroom at the back of what is now the District Magistrate's Court in Wiawso. Some of the earlier volumes seemed to be missing and many were in bad repair. I did my best to rebind these before returning them to the store.
Kilwa Dynastic Historiography: A Critical Study
Authors: Saad Elias 
Published: May 2006

One of the unresolved problems in African historiography concerns the Arabic and Portuguese versions of the so-called Kilwa Chronicle. Scholars who have used these sixteenth-century sources have tended to assume that the Portuguese version, which is essentially a list of the kings of Kilwa up to around 1500, is a transcription of the Arabic version known under the title ofKitab al-Sulwa. In the recent debate between Freeman-Grenville and Chittick, this assumption has created serious difficulties because the Portuguese account mentions kings who are omitted in theKitab. Freeman-Grenville attempted to resolve the difficulty by hypothesizing that the work was defectively abridged in the extant nineteenth-century copy. Relying on the regnal durations in the Portuguese account, he computed the dynastic chronology of Kilwa backwards to the tenth century. Subsequently, Chittick's excavations did not show Kilwa important enough to have been the site of a kingdom prior to the thirteenth century. This became the basis for an alternative explanation which denied the existence of gaps or omissions in theKitab. Chittick argued instead that the longer list of kings in the Portuguese account may have resulted from dovetailing two sources together and duplicating their information.The present paper calls on genealogical evidence overlooked by both scholars which demonstrates that the divergence between the two sources results from their varying perspectives on the dynastic politics and succession disputes. First, the Portuguese account, though occurring in João de Barros’Da Asiawritten about 1552, may represent an impromptu composition given to the Portuguese during their occupation of Kilwa in 1505–12.
New Light on Cavazzi's Seventeenth-Century Description of Kongo
Authors: Thornton John K. 
Published: May 2006

The very full description of west central Africa given in Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo's book, Istorica Descrizione de’ tre regni Congo, Matamba ed Angola, first published in 1687, has long been one of the most important sources for the reconstruction of the social, political, economic, and religious history of these three Central African states in the seventeenth century. This is true even though it has long been known that Cavazzi was not an eyewitness to all that he described, especially in the kingdom of Kongo, which he visited only briefly after finishing the draft of the book. Therefore, the recent discovery of a new, unknown manuscript version of Cavazzi's work among the family papers of Dr. Carlo Araldi of Modena is very useful, for it helps us to understand the sources that Cavazzi used to write the portions of his work on Kongo, the one area of west central Africa of which he had no first hand knowledge.Since the Istorica Descrizione was published several years after Cavazzi's death by another Capuchin, Fr. Fortunato Alamandini, who noted in his own introduction that he had edited the final version from a confused mass of documents and notes, the new manuscript initially raised the hope that fuller versions of Cavazzi's original source material might be contained in it. I therefore examined the portions of the manuscript pertaining to Kongo with high hopes that the document would contain masses of fresh eye-witness source materials that Fr. Alamandidi had weeded out to make Istorica Descriizione a publishable work.
Bantu in the Crystal Ball, I
Authors: Vansina Jan 
Published: May 2006

More than one-third of Africa is occupied by people who speak related languages belonging to a single family called Bantu. This has been recognized for more than a century. As early as 1886 Harry Johnston argued that this situation was the result of differentiation from a real single ancestral language, later called UrBantu or Proto-Bantu. The inevitable question arises: How could one language or a group of closely related dialects diffuse over such a vast area? The fact of Bantu expansion remains a major puzzle in the history of Africa. Many have risen to the bait of solving it.My main goal here is to recount the salient features of this century-long inquiry and in doing so to lead to an assessment of the present situation. Given the nature and the paucity of the available data, much of proposed reconstruction has been conjectural, so that the study of Bantu expansion also has been an exercise in conjectural history and in speculation. The available data are disparate and drawn from different disciplines, and the results tell us something about what can and what cannot be done in interdisciplinary research. In the telling I hope to demonstrate how much different considerations of the question have been moulded by the major themes in European and American intellectual history of the last century and how much scholarly tradition, once established, has directed and limited the solutions proposed.
Deep-Down Time: Political Tradition in Central Africa
Authors: Vansina Jan 
Published: May 2006

Around 1850 the peoples of central Africa from Duala to the Kunene River and from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes shared a common view of the universe and a common political ideology. This included assumptions about roles, statuses, symbols, values, and indeed the very notion of legitimate authority. Among the plethora of symbols connected with these views were the leopard or the lion, the sun, the anvil, and the drum, symbolizing respectively the leader as predator, protector, forger of society, and the voice of all. Obviously, in each case the common political ideology was expressed in slightly different views, reflecting the impact of differential historical processes on different peoples. But the common core persisted. The gigantic extent of this phenomenon, encompassing an area equal to two-thirds of the continental United States, baffles the mind. How did it come about? Such a common tradition certainly did not arise independently in each of the hundreds of political communities that existed then. However absorbent and stable this mental political constellation was, it must have taken shape over a profound time depth. How and as a result of what did this happen? Is it even possible to answer such queries in a part of the world that did not generate written records until a few centuries ago or less?This paper addresses this question: how can one trace the social construction of such a common constellation over great time depths and over great regional scale? All the peoples involved are agriculturalists and the political repertory with which we are concerned could not easily exist in its known form outside sedentary societies.
The Myth of the Capitalist Class: Unofficial Sources and Political Economy in Colonial Malawi, 1895-1924
Authors: Woods Tony 
Published: May 2006

One of the prevalent theories in Malawian historiography is that primitive accumulation created a unified capitalist class which worked in concert with the colonial state and sowed the seeds of poverty by viciously exploiting the indigenous community. This proposition relies almost exclusively on official sources, and scholars have rarely looked for unofficial material to corroborate it. Such a lacuna is regrettable because unofficial data indicate that Malawi's colonial capitalists were often a badly fragmented class antagonistic to the colonial administration. Moreover, the capitalists' divisions paralyzed them politically and thus allowed the state to enact legislation which was often antithetical to capitalists' ambitions and prerequisites. As a result, the capitalists often found themselves economically imperiled. Few documents demonstrate this trend better than the colony's most important expatriate newspaper, The Nyasaland Times.The Nyasaland Times first appeared in 1895. Published by R.S. Hynde at the Blantyre Mission press, it immediately declared that “we are devoted to the planting interests of the community—the interest, we venture to state, on which the commercial prosperity of B.C.A. [British Central Africa] depends.” That the planters needed a voice devoted to them can scarcely be denied. By 1895 both the administration and the missions had established papers which were often hostile to the planters. In particular, Sir Harry Johnston's British Central African Gazette reflected the Commissioner's almost feral antipathy towards the planters in its editorials.