bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A Historical Whodunit: The So-Called “Kano Chronicle” and its Place in the Historiography of Kano
Authors: Hunwick John 
Published: May 2006

Murray Last obliquely suggests that [the “Kano Chronicle”] is best regarded as a rather free compilation of local legends and traditions drafted in the mid-seventeenth century by a humorous Muslim rationalist who almost seems to have studied under Levi-Strauss.The danger lies in being carried away by one's own ingenuity.The question of the authorship and date(s) of writing of the so-called “Kano Chronicle” (KC) and hence how historians should evaluate it as a source, have intrigued students of Kano (and wider Hausa) history since the work was first translated into English by H. R. Palmer in 1908. Palmer himself had the following to say:The manuscript is of no great age, and must on internal evidence have been written during the latter part of the decade 1883-1893; but it probably represents some earlier record which has now perished….The authorship is unknown, and it is very difficult to make a guess. On the one hand the general style of the composition is quite unlike the “note” struck by the sons of Dan Hodio [ʿUthmān b. Fūdī, Abdulahi and Muḥammad Bello, and imitated by other Fulani writers. There is almost complete absence of bias or partizanship…. On the other hand, the style of the Arabic is not at all like that usually found in the compositions of Hausa mallams of the present day; there are not nearly enough “classical tags” so to speak, in it…. That the author was thoroughly au fait with the Kano dialect of Hausa is evident from several phrases used in the book, for instance “ba râyi ba” used in a sense peculiar to Kano of “perforce.” The original may perhaps have been written by some stranger from the north who settled in Kano, and collected the stories of former kings handed down by oral tradition.
Constructing a Precolonial Owan Chronology and Dating Framework
Authors: Ogbomo Onaiwu W. 
Published: May 2006

Oral tradition has been recognized by historians as a vital source for historical reconstruction of non-literate societies. However, one of its “deficienc[ies] is an inability to establish and maintain an accurate assessment of the duration of the past [it] seeks to reconstruct.” As a result of its time-lessness it has been declared ahistorical. In the same vein R.A. Sargent argues that
[c]hronology is the framework for the reconstruction of the past, and is vital to the correlation of evidence, assessment of data, and the analysis of historical sources. Any construction of history [which] fails to consider or employ dating and the matrix of time to examine the order and nature of events in human experience can probably be labelled ahistorical.Basically, the concern of critics of oral tradition is that, while they are veritable sources of history, the researcher “must work and rework them with an increasing sophistication and critical sense.” Because dating is very pivotal to the historian's craft, different techniques have been adopted alone or in combination to create a relative chronology. In precolonial African history, the most commonly used have been genealogical data which include dynastic generations, genealogical generations (father-to-son succession) and the age-set generation. Also systematically charted comets, solar eclipses, and droughts have been employed by historians in dating historical events, or in calculating the various generational lengths.A dynastic generation is determined by “the time elapsing between the accession of the first member of a given generation to hold office and the accession of the first representative of the next.”
The Contours of Vegetation Change and Human Agency in Eastern Africa's Great Lakes Region:ca. 2000 BC toca. AD 1000
Authors: Schoenbrun David Lee 
Published: May 2006

Elsewhere I have set forth a basic outline for charting histories of vegetation change through the use of paleoenvironmental data (Schoenbrun 1991). This essay builds on the previous one by laying out the contours of vegetation change and human agency in the Great Lakes region (Map 1) over the roughly three millennia afterca. 2000 BC.The history of the vegetation in eastern Africa's Great Lakes region brings into focus several important features of long-term environmental change—human action, climatic shift, and internal successional patterns. The primary sources for this history come from a variety of published palynological and limnological studies from Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zaire. Perhaps the most rewarding data for reconstructing climatic and vegetational change come from palynological studies. Pollen studies often reflect detailed changes in the constitution of plant communities, and their value for reconstructing the vegetational and climatic contexts for Holocene human history has provoked the development of a rigorous method for their analysis. Contemporary studies of plant community succession and human-vegetation relationships are a secondary source for the history of land clearance in the Great Lakes region. These works provide a means to determine the different imprints of human and climatic action on the paleoenvironmental record.In this study I combine the full range of paleoenvironmental evidence to reconstruct the form and pace of vegetation change. I focus on a part of eastern Africa famous for its great ecological diversity. One of the rewards of this endeavor is to demonstrate to paleoecologists, archaeologists, and historians alike the value of a truly interdisciplinary approach to environmental change.
The Scholarship of Jacob Egharevba of Benin
Authors: Usuanlele Uyilawa , Falola Toyin 
Published: May 2006

Uwadiae Jacob Egharevba was born in 1893 to a descendant of Ohenmwen, the Iyase of Benin Kingdom during the reign of Osemwende, ca. 1816 to ca. 1848, and Okunzuwa, a granddaughter of an Ibadan chief. Jacob's parents were long-distance traders, and he claimed to have traveled with them in the Benin and Yoruba regions until his father's death in 1902. The brief sojourn in the Yoruba country afforded him the opportunity of attending school for a year in 1899, at a time when there was no such facility in Benin because of the reluctance of the traditional elite to send their children to school. Jacob was impressed by the written word and became interested in education, although it was not until 1911 that he returned to school at Akure. He demonstrated brilliance, although his education here was terminated by relocation. On his return to Benin in 1914, he became a domestic help to Black Shaw, a senior European staff of the Public Works Department, while at the same time enrolling at St. Matthews C.M.S. school. In 1915 he converted to Christianity and, with the encouragement of Shaw and others, he was able to complete his primary education in 1916.Between 1916 and 1921, he worked in lowly paid jobs in Warri, Port Harcourt, and Okigwe. His failure to secure any lucrative government position pushed him to trading. His writing career began in 1921 when he drafted his now famous classic, Ekhere Vb'Itan Edo. Ironically, it was this successful book that exposed his writing inadequacies. To improve his skills, he enrolled in 1926 in a five-year correspondence course with the Institute of Rationalistic Press in London. In 1933 the C.M.S. published the Ekhere Vb'Itan, which attained an instant success. It was reprinted the following year and translated as A Short History of Benin.
What Africans Got for Their Slaves: A Master List of European Trade Goods
Authors: Alpern Stanley B. 
Published: May 2006

A great deal has been written in recent decades about the Atlantic slave trade, including the mechanics and terms of purchase, but relatively little about what Africans received in return for the slaves and other exports such as gold and ivory. And yet, if one is trying to reconstruct the material culture of, say, the Guinea Coast of West Africa during the slave-trade period, the vast European input cannot be ignored.The written evidence consists of many thousands of surviving bills of lading, cargo manifests, port records, logbooks, invoices, quittances, trading-post inventories, account books, shipping recommendations, and orders from African traders. English customs records of commerce with Africa during the eighteenth century, when the slave trade peaked, alone contain hundreds of thousands of facts. A thorough analysis of all available data would call for the services of a research team equipped with computers, and fill many volumes. Using a portable typewriter (now finally abandoned for WordPerfect) and a card file, and sifting hundreds of published sources, I have over the years compiled an annotated master list of European trade goods sold on a portion of the Guinea Coast from Portuguese times to the mid-nineteenth century. The geographic focus is the shoreline from Liberia to Nigeria; from it more slaves left for the New World than from any comparable stretch of the African coast. I call the area “Kwaland” for the Kwa language family to which nearly all the indigenous peoples belong.
Further Consideration of Two Photographs Ascribed to Christian Hornberger
Authors: Jenkins Paul , Theye Thomas 
Published: May 2006

Two reactions to the essay on the earliest generation of missionary photographers in West Africa published earlier in HA set up trains of thought which deserve to be minuted here as a further contribution to our praxis with images of Africa in the nineteenth century. It was pointed out by two readers of the original article that a pair of the images which, it had been asserted (104), derive from the last phase of Hornberger's photographic work, were published very early on in a non-mission context: that of three women spinning and that of one man weaving (figures 1 and 2 below).Both images exist as photographs, as stereographic vintage prints. Both were also published as wood engravings in mission periodicals (figures 3 and 4). Two readers of the original essay have pointed out that these images were conflated into a single engraving on page 211 of Richard Oberländer's Westafrika vom Senegal bis Benguela (Leipzig, 1874). In this image (figure 5), however, only two members of the group of spinning women are depicted, placed separately in the foreground, one on each side of the weaver. It is an ironic reflection on the quality of the documentation we have to fear in this field that Oberländer's caption—“Spinnende und webende Aschanti. (Nach einer Photographie)”—asserts specifically that the engraving was taken “from a photograph,” using the singular form.
Constructing Identity: Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Architecture in the Gambia-Geba Region and the Articulation of Luso-African Ethnicity
Authors: Mark Peter 
Published: May 2006

The precolonial architectural history of the northern Upper Guinea coast from the Gambia to the Geba rivers has yet to be studied in depth. Yet this region, the first to be visited and described by European travelers in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, is among the best-documented parts of sub-Saharan Africa for the four centuries of precolonial African-European contact. The establishment of communities of Luso-African traders in the sixteenth and seventeenth century makes the Gambia-Casamance-Bissau area important to the study of early sustained cultural interaction between Europeans and West Africans.One result of the establishment of Portuguese and Luso-African trading communities was the development of a distinctive style of architecture, suited to the climate and making use of locally-available building materials. The history of the trade itself has been extensively studied by George Brooks. His work, along with that of Jean Boulègue, provides a firm foundation for the study of local architecture and living space. It is not my intention to rewrite these excellent sources, although much of my material is drawn from the same primary documents they have used, and although, in presenting the historical context from which seventeenth-century coastal architecture developed, I necessarily cover some ground that Brooks has already trod.In addition to the history of building styles, several related questions that are highly significant to the history of European-African cultural interaction need to be addressed. These questions include: what were the respective roles of Africans, Europeans, and Luso-Africans in the development of a distinctive architectural style? Is it possible to discern the influence of evolving Luso-African construction on local African architecture? And of local building styles on Afro-European construction? In other words, to what extent does architecture reflect mutual, two-way interaction between European and African society?
Historians, are Archeologists Your Siblings?
Authors: Vansina Jan 
Published: May 2006

The historian of pre-nineteenth century Africa…cannot get far without the aid of archaeology.Nevertheless, historians have good reason to be cautious about historical generalisations by archaeologists and about their own use of archaeological material…: it would be a rash historian who totally accepted the conclusions of Garlake and Huffman with the same simple-minded trust as I myself accepted the conclusions of Summers and Robinson.In the beginning, historians of Africa put great store by archeology. Was its great time depth not one of the distinctive features of the history of Africa, a condition that cannot be put aside without seriously distorting the flavor of all its history? Did not the relative scarcity and the foreign authorship of most precolonial written records render archeological sources all the more precious? Did not history and archeology both deal with the reconstruction of human societies in the past? Was the difference between them not merely the result of a division of labor based on sources, so that historical reconstruction follows in time and flows from archeological reconstruction? Such considerations explain why theJournal of African Historyhas regularly published regional archeological surveys in order to keep historians up to date.
Oral Traditions as Historical Sources in Ethiopia: The Case of the Beta Israel (Falasha)
Authors: Quirin James 
Published: May 2006

It is axiomatic that historians should use all available sources. African historiography has been on the cutting edge of methodological innovation for the last three decades, utilizing written sources, oral traditions, archeology, linguistics, ethnography, musicology, botany, and other techniques to bring respect and maturity to the field.But the use of such a diverse methodology has brought controversy as well, particularly regarding oral traditions. Substantial criticisms have been raised concerning the problems of chronology and limited time depth, variations in different versions of the same events, and the problem of feedback between oral and written sources. A “structuralist” critique deriving from Claude Levi-Strauss's study of Amerindian mythology has provided a useful corrective to an overly-literal acceptance of oral traditions, but often went too far in throwing out the historical baby with the mythological bathwater, leading some historians to reject totally the use of oral data. A more balanced view has shown that a modified structural approach can be a useful tool in historical analysis. In Ethiopian historiography some preliminary speculations were made along structuralist lines,5 although in another sense such an approach was always implicit since the analysis of Ethiopie written hagiographies and royal chronicles required an awareness of the mythological or folk elements they contain.Two more difficult problems to overcome have been the Ethiopie written documents' centrist and elitist focus on the royal monarchy and Orthodox church. The old Western view that “history” required the existence of written documents and a state led to the paradigm of Ethiopia as an “outpost of Semitic civilization” and its historical and historiographical separation from the rest of Africa. The comparatively plentiful corpus of written documentation for Ethiopian history allowed such an approach, and the thousands of manuscripts made available to scholars on microfilm in the last fifteen years have demonstrated the wealth still to be found in written sources. However, such sources, although a starting point for research on Ethiopian history, no longer seem adequate in themselves because they focus primarily on political-military and religious events concerning the monarchy and church.
The Development of African Historical Studies in East Germany; An Outline And Selected Bibliography
Authors: Büttner Thea 
Published: May 2006

My main concern in this paper is to throw some light on the scope of the problem from the view of the development of African historical studies in East Germany after World War II. It is necessary first to discuss some negative and positive sides of German historical African studies before 1945. For several decades German research has demonstrated a startling lack of interest in the research problems of African history. In connection with the colonial conquests of the European powers, special institutes grew in social anthropology, colonial economics, and geography, although the historical development of the peoples of Africa was ignored. As an outward appearance of this development there grew in several German universities, departments for Oriental languages e.g., at the University of Berlin on the direct instruction of Bismarck, and in 1908 the Colonial Institute at Hamburg University.Leading German historians and Africanists of the past demonstrated their theoretical ignorance in relation to African history. They proceeded from the definition of Leopold von Ranke, who classed the African peoples with the “non-history possessing” peoples who have made no contribution to world culture. G. W. F. Hegel uttered only fatalistic and stereotyped ideas—for him Africa was “no historical part of the World, it has no movement or development to exhibit.” These fundamental conceptions penetrated in one degree or another, the majority of publications on Africa up to 1945. Even Dietrich Westerman, one of the best known Africanists, who published one major book on African history in the German language,Geschichte Afrikas, in 1952 made his studies in the old tradition of seeing sub-Saharan Africa predominantly from the European point of view and continuing the image of an African peoples' history that was not accomplished by the world moulding civilized mankind and has not contributed its share to it. In short, the theoretical foundation of colonialism was rooted in German research in a deep racialist ideology. Only a few explorers and scientists swam against the tide.
A Supplement to A Guide to Original Sources for Precolonial Western Africa: Corrigenda et Addenda
Authors: Fage J. D. 
Published: May 2006

The database used for my A Guide to Original Sources for Precolonial Western Africa published in European Languages (xxvi + 192pp., African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1987) has been subject to continuing revision and updating. The total number of entries has grown from some 780 to close on 830, and in all I estimate that something like 400 changes have been made to the published form of the Guide. Some of these are essentially cosmetic—for example, rearrangements of an entry's layout intended to make its text easier to use and understand, or the correction of obvious misprints or infelicities. But, leaving these aside, there are now a sufficient number of substantive changes to suggest that-pending the appearance of a second edition—it might be sensible to seek to publish this list of significant corrections and additions separately.Of those whose help I acknowledged in 1987, I can only express my continuing gratitude to P. E. H. Hair, Adam Jones, and Robin Law for the way in which they are still drawing my attention both to new sources and to my earlier errors. I have also gained useful bibliographical insights from holding in my hand many of the 3537 items listed in the great and glorious sale catalog recently put together by Paul Wilson, of Oriental and African Books, Shrewsbury, of “rare and scholarly” books published on West Africa and the western and central Sudan from the early seventeenth century onwards.
The Obatala Factor in Yoruba History
Authors: Lawuyi O. B. 
Published: May 2006

History records it that Obatala was the ruler of the indigenous peoples of southwestern Nigeria when they were conquered by Oduduwa. The exact date of the encounter remains problematic, owing largely to the nature of the source of information, oral tradition. At one level of interpretation, therefore, Obatala myths represent the struggle for the domination of the autochthonous groups, but there is another dimension. Although Oduduwa's image and achievements came to overshadow and dwarf Obatala's role in history, the latter has persisted as a deity, appropriated into the Yoruba pantheon as a symbol of peace:It is essentially difficult to describe a Yoruba religious festival. It is not what happens that really matters, nor indeed is it important what is done. What does matter is the intense spiritual experience that can be shared even by strangers. During these events sacrifices, prayers, drumming, singing, dancing all combine to create an atmosphere, an emotional situation which allows the worshippers to come near the god ….The second day of the [Obatala] festival has a feature not unlike a Passion Play. There is no spoken dialogue but singing accompanies the performance and the entire action is danced. The story is of a fight between the Ajagemo [who is the personification of Obatala] and another priest bearing the title of Olunwi. Ajagemo is taken prisoner by Olunwi and carried off from the palace. The Oba [king], however, intervenes for his release. He pays ransom to Olunwi, and Ajagemo is liberated and allowed to return to the palace. The return gradually attains the qualities of a triumphal procession.
The National Archives—Kaduna (NAK), Nigeria
Authors: Adelberger Jörg 
Published: May 2006

Although the archives of Nigeria have been utilized extensively, especially for historical studies, descriptive or introductory notes on them scarcely exist. With the following paper, based on a recent visit to the National Archives in Kaduna in October 1990, 1 want to contribute in filling this gap. The Nigerian Record Office (now National Archives of Nigeria) was established in 1954 on the recommendation and with the efforts of K. O. Dike, who had toured Nigeria and inspected the state of existing archives. Subsequently he became Government Supervisor of Public Records. Initially the archive was situated at the University of Ibadan, until in 1958 the first permanent block was erected.The National Archives in Kaduna is one of the three National Archives in Nigeria, the other two being in Ibadan and Enugu. There is some division of competence between the three archives: Enugu is responsible for the southern parts of Nigeria, Ibadan for the western parts, and Kaduna for the states of Northern Nigeria. The present or former names of regions on which documents are to be found in Kaduna are as follows: Adamawa, Bassa, Bauchi, Benue, Borgu, Borno, Central Province, Gongola, Ilorin, Kabba, Kano, Katsina, Kontagora, Lokoja, Munshi, Muri, Nassarawa, Niger, Nupe, Plateau, Sokoto, Yola, and Zaria. In this listing there are of course regional overlappings; for in the course of history provinces have either been carved out or amalgamated into larger units. In some cases, moreover, more or less identical regions are itemized under different names.