bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Left Hand of God: Despair in Medieval and Renaissance Tradition
Authors: Snyder Susan 
Published: May 2006

A man of hell, that cals himselfe Despaire(Faerie Queene, I, ix, 28)Penser's moving description of the Redcrosse Knight's encounter with Despaire in Book One of The Faerie Queene is the culmination of a long and rich movement of thought and imagery. Here, as so often in his great Renaissance epic, Spenser looks back to the middle ages, drawing on a still-vital tradition to present the ugly, sinister figure with its knives and ropes and its soulpiercing arguments.In spite of the tides of secularism, despair in its theological sense—loss of hope of salvation—figures significantly in Renaissance literature. Examining England alone, one notes its place in the traditional morality play pattern as the turning point of the hero's downward movement: Skelton's Magnyfycence is a prominent example. Despair episodes have a somewhat similar place in the prodigal son dramas which were popular during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, such plays as Lusty Juventus, Misogonus, and Nice Wanton.
Lefèvre d'Étaples and the Magdalen
Authors: Hufstader Anselm 
Published: May 2006

What did sixteenth-century Christians disagree about before they disagreed about Luther? We turn to pre-Reformation controversies expecting to find a theological vocabulary very different from what was soon to come, but at the same time a statement of some of the problems within Christianity which the Reformation set out to solve.Is it important to know whether the Saint Mary Magdalen whom the liturgy celebrates was really one person or a composite of several women, mentioned at different places in the gospels? The question would raise little debate today, but in 1518 and 1519 it inspired more than a dozen tracts, most of them by competent scholars, and in the early 1520s another four.
Mpongwe Origins: Historiographical Perspectives
Authors: Bucher Henry H. 
Published: May 2006

The Mpongwe people of the Gabon estuary live today in the immediate area of Libreville, the capital city of the Gabon Republic. Libreville is built on Mpongwe ancestral lands, and its history is only a small and comparatively recent chapter in the longer story of the Mpongwe and their neighbors. In the nineteenth century the expression “les Gabonais” or “the Gaboon people” had only one meaning—the Mpongwe of the estuary who were the coastal trading aristocracy.The Mpongwe are only one of the six peoples belonging to the Myèné-speaking group of Gabon. The other five are the Orungu, Nkomi, Galoa, Adyumba, and Enenga. Only the Mpongwe are patrilineal. Myèné is purely a linguistic classification, a subdivision of the Bantu language. All six of these societies fit into a circle whose circumference includes the three largest cities in Gabon today—Libreville, Port Gentil (formerly Cape Lopez), and Lambaréné (Map 1). From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Myèné was the coastal lingua franca between the southern Cameroun and Cabinda. The Myèné societies in general, and the Mpongwe in particular, have played a key role in Gabon's past, and continue to be an influential minority in modern Gabon. In the early nineteenth century, and for an unknown previous period, the closest non-Myèné neighbors of the Mpongwe were the Benga and the related societies to the north, and the Shekiani and Bakélé to the east. The Shekiani were the couriers in the Mpongwe trade with the Bakélé and other interior societies.
The Tsoede Myth and the Nupe Kinglists: More Political Propaganda?
Authors: Mason Michael 
Published: May 2006

“History is always written by the conquerors.”It is a convention in the writing of Nupe political history to begin with the name ‘Tsoede.’ This convention has been current at least since the early years of colonial rule, when we find ‘Tsoede,’ or ‘Edegi,’ as he is also called, being credited with the founding of the kingdom whose successive rulers can be traced up to the present. The clearest expression of the place of both ‘Tsoede’ and the kinglists which his name heads comes from the standard study of Nupe society by S.F. Nadel, who explains that
the earliest history of Nupe centres around the figure of Tsoede or Edegi, the culture hero and mythical founder of the Nupe kingdom. The genealogies of Nupe kings which are preserved in many places in Nupe country and which have also found their way into the earliest written records of Nupe history which were compiled by Mohammedan scholars and court historians, place his birth in the middle of the fifteenth century.It will be our purpose in this paper to explore the evolution of the Tsoede story and to inspect the authority of its authorship. First, let us look at the story offered in Nadel's account:
a) At the time of Tsoede's birth Nupe had not been unified under a central government.b) Whatever political forms existed elsewhere in Nupe, Tsoede's homeland Bini was a confederacy of towns. The leading Bini town was Nku, at the confluence of the Kaduna and Niger rivers.The Binis as well as some other Nupe were subordinate to the Attah of Igala.
Towards an Early History of the East African Interior
Authors: Twaddle Michael 
Published: May 2006

The period between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries is a perplexing one in the history of the east African interior. For the first part of the period archeology is the most reliable indicator of what really happened there. For the second part oral traditions supplement the archeological record. Regarding evidence, therefore, our period is one of transition. Our principal concern in this survey will be to consider how far this transition in evidence reflects actual transitions in history.This is an intricate problem. Each piece of historical evidence reflects its historical origin. This applies as much to pottery fragments and spear tips as to oral traditions. However, the former are easier to handle historically than the latter; they are products of their own time. On the other hand, oral traditions tend to be products of our time in this particular area of Africa. Before the nineteenth century indigenous literacy was restricted to a very narrow strip of land along the coast, and during our period contacts between coast and interior were extremely limited. Literate outsiders did not penetrate into the interior in any number until the last half of the nineteenth century, and even then earlier history did not receive much attention from these footloose adventurers. Oral traditions relating to the early history of the interior were only reduced to writing in substance during the subsequent colonial period-sometimes by newly-arrived European missionaries and administrators, more frequently by newly-literate African intellectuals. These circumstances create special interpretative problems. Some of these problems are common to all oral traditions relating to early history, while others are peculiar to the particular colonial situations in which the oral traditions were first recorded.
The Earlier Historiography of Colonial Africa
Authors: Roberts A.D. 
Published: May 2006

Work on volume 7 of the Cambridge History of Africa, covering the years 1905-1940, has obliged me to reflect on the nature of the literature for this period in African history. The past twenty years or so have of course seen some notable research on the subject, and much of this is now published. A common theme in this work, as in the study of earlier African history, has been an emphasis on African initiative and enterprise, whether among clerks and teachers, cocoa farmers or mineworkers. More recently, there has been a renewal of interest (often related to theories about “underdevelopment”) in the external forces which set limits to the scope and success of African initiatives. It has once again become acceptable in Africanist circles to study white farmers, trading companies, mine corporations, finance houses, administrative hierarchies, legislative councils, or mission headquarters. Thus the Cambridge History should now be able to achieve a more balanced appraisal of both local and alien factors in the colonial order than would have been possible even five years ago.The question I want to raise here is whether, for the purposes of such a volume, it is enough to think in terms of synthesizing the work of professional historians of Africa over the past two decades, or whether recent shifts of emphasis have exposed topics and questions on which we must still look for guidance to works written when colonial rule was still a living reality and African history, as an academic subject, had not yet been invented.
The Sekondi Archives
Authors: Silver James B. 
Published: May 2006

In the late 1950s, the National Archives of Ghana (NAG) began a decentralizaton programme which has progressed to the point where there is now a NAG regional depository in eight of the country's nine regions, the only exception so far being the Upper Region. Furthermore, unlike many of the efforts at bureaucratic decentralization in Ghana, which have been more de jure than de facto -- archival decentralization in Ghana is a reality. As a result, the historical researcher who limits his efforts to the Accra branch of the NAG is risking the loss of considerable richness of detail, as a recent trip to Sekondi made abundantly clear to me.Sekondi houses the Western Regional Branch of the NAG. The Western Region is, in many respects, one of Ghana's most interesting areas. Until relatively recently it was, at one and the same time, the major center of foreign business activity in the country, and one of the country's most backward and underdeveloped areas. While ironic, this juxtaposition is certainly not surprising. But more importantly, from the point of view of the researcher into Ghana's history, it affords the opportunity for a more detailed micro-level historical examination of, for instance, the relationship between “modernity” and “tradition,” or between the “capitalist mode of production” and the “pre-capitalist mode of production.” The Western Region has been almost an ideal type in this respect, and as a consequence is virtually a laboratory, not only for the historian, but also for the historically-minded sociologist, economist, and political scientist.
Uprooting Kunta Kinte: On the Perils of Relying on Encyclopedic Informants
Authors: Wright Donald R. 
Published: May 2006

In the late summer of 1976, amid considerable publicity, Doubleday and Company published Alex Haley's Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Almost overnight author and book gained considerable fame. Americans and soon others accepted the essential validity of the story of Haley's maternal ancestors, which reached back to the Gambia River and to the eighteenth century. Within a few months of its publication Roots had been serialized for televison. Before a year had passed Doubleday had sold over 1,500,000 copies of the book, it had gone into translation in several dozen languages, and Haley had been awarded a special Pulitzer Prize, neither for fiction nor non-fiction, but for something in between felicitously denominated “faction.” The magnitude of Roots' impact makes criticism of the basis of its argument somewhat indivious but perhpas all the more necessary.One aspect of Roots that added considerably to its popularity was the apparent authenticity of the genealogy which Haley used to identify his African ancestor. Haley claimed that, largely through oral history, he had proved the existence of his ancestor, one Kunta Kinte, who had been kidnapped into slavery over two hundred years ago and brought directly to the British North American colonies. A decade of diligent searching had made it possible for Haley to piece together the basic outlines of his ancestry. To nearly everyone who read the book or heard the story of his quest, such success in locating his roots in Africa, after a century of slavery and another of difficult freedom, seemed to justify the endeavor.
Early Yoruba Historiography
Authors: Law Robin 
Published: May 2006

The pre-colonial history of the Yoruba has attracted considerable attention from academically trained historians in recent years. This academic historiography–in Yorubaland as elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa–does not antedate the 1950s, but it was preceded by a tradition of historical writing by local amateur historians which stretched back well into the nineteenth century. The modern academic historians owe a great deal to these amateur predecessors: much of the “oral tradition” utilized by the academic historians comes in fact at second hand from the writings of the amateurs, and the current generation of local historians has figured prominently among the informants from whom the academics have collected their oral evidence.This fusion of academic and amateur historiography was, indeed, given some institutional recognition in the Yoruba Historical Research Scheme launched by the government of the Western Region of Nigeria in 1956, in which both academics and local historians were employed as research associates to collect traditional material. Despite their importance, however, little serious work has been done on the early historians of Yorubaland. The existence of a local tradition of historiography in Yorubaland has been mentioned in general surveys of historical writing on Africa, and attention has been drawn to it as constituting an aspect of the development of “cultural nationalism” among western-educated Africans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These discussions of early Yoruba historiography, however, have dealt with only a few of the better known works and have given little idea of the wealth of the published material or of its character—nor is there any comprehensive bibliography of the writings of the early Yoruba historians. The present article, therefore, attempts to present as complete a survey as possible of historical writing on Yorubaland in the period before c. 1950 and seeks to make some contribution towards assessment of the value of the Yoruba local histories as sources by giving some information on the context in which the local historians wrote and the way in which they went about the task of reconstructing Yoruba history.
Archival Materials on the Brandenburg African Company (1682-1721)
Authors: Jones Adam 
Published: May 2006

Brandenburg-Prussia was the last European power to enter the African trade in the seventeenth century. In an attempt to emulate the success of the Dutch West India Company, the Great Elector granted a charter to a newly-created company in 1682. It was known under various names--as the Electoral Brandenburg African Company, the Emden Company, the Brandenburg Afro-American Company, and (after the Great Elector's successor had made himself “King in Prussia” in 1701) the Royal Prussian African Company. By 1686 it had acquired a fort and two trading posts on the western Gold Coast and a fort on the island of Arguin (now part of Mauritania). Through an agreement with the Danish crown, it was also allowed to occupy a small part of the Caribbean island of St. Thomas and sell slaves there. Nevertheless, the company never really got off the ground, and from about 1698 onwards, as its fortunes steadily declined, its representatives in Africa were left more and more to their own devices. Lacking support from Europe, the last Brandenburg-Prussian Director-General abandoned the Gold Coast in 1716, and five years later Arguin was captured by the French.In most respects the company was more Dutch than German. Its formation was the work of Benjamin Raule, the Great Elector's Dutch-born Naval Director; a large proportion of its capital, merchandise, and ships came from the Netherlands; and from about 1698 (if not earlier) the Brandenburg forts in Africa did more trade with Zeeland interlopers and English “ten per cent” ships than with vessels sent by the company. Furthermore, all but one of the Directors-General on the Gold Coast and Commandants at Arguin were Dutchmen (usually former servants of the Dutch West India Company), as were more than half of their subordinates. It is not surprising, therefore, that about three-quarters of the surviving records are in Dutch.
Recent Historical Research in the Area of Lake Kivu: Rwanda and Zaire
Authors: Chubaka Bishikwabo , Newbury David 
Published: May 2006

The Rwandan revolution of 1959-1962 marked an important watershed not only for the history of the country but also for its historiography. Within Rwandan historical studies these political changes encouraged the development of a more broadly-based analysis, one which went beyond the earlier tendency to focus on the Nyiginya royal court. The effects of this new historiography were not limited to Rwanda alone, however, since historical perceptions ultimately derived from Rwandan studies had dominated much of the earlier research on pre-colonial history both east and west of the lake. Combined with the emergence of new analytic assumptions elsewhere in Africa, the shift in Rwanda during the 1960s therefore freed studies west of the lake from the constraints of a particularly sterile historical model and opened the way for the initiatives of a new generation of Zairean historians conducting research there in the 1970s. This changing context of research initiatives and the continuing process of reassessment within Rwanda has also aligned perceptions of Rwandan history more closely with those of other areas. We can look forward in the future to more fruitful regional historical perspectives which transcend present political boundaries; it may well be that Rwandan research of the 1980s will draw increasingly on the concepts and conclusions of Zairean research of the 1970s.Even while this new approach has perforated political boundaries on the ground, it has also dissolved the earlier rigid disciplinary boundaries of research. The major influence in this new approach came from the work of anthropologists (or historians with anthropological training).
A Note on the Town Archives of Amsterdam: The Notarial Records
Authors: Kea R.A. 
Published: May 2006

The notarial records (Notariel Ardhief) in the Amsterdam town archives (Gemeente Archief) offer a rich source of data on Dutch West African trade for the period between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. In 1962 Patricia Carson published a fairly extensive list of references to these records for the years between 1651 and 1709, indicating thereby the importance of the notarial documents as a source material. However, to my knowledge this material has not been systematically examined by historians of West Africa. The purpose of this note is to draw once again the attention of historians to these documents. My comments are to be considered as supplementary to Carson's account.The notarial records are, to put it mildly, extraordinarily voluminous. The prospective researcher should allot himself or herself a minimum time of about six months if he or she intends to examine even a representative sampling of the records in a thorough manner. Unfortunately, the records are neither catalogued nor indexed as far as the West African data are concerned, hence the researcher must read a great deal of superfluous material in hopes of coming across references to West Africa. The records are not easy to read, so it is not possible to ‘skim’ through the folios in the hope of spotting a West African place name. Each folio must be carefully examined. The records are in Dutch and the handwriting is in the Gothic script. Although the handwriting is generally clear and legible, it is remarkably -- indeed almost unnaturally-small, so that a magnifying glass would be an asset.
White Roots: Written and Oral Testimony on the “First” Mr. Rogers
Authors: Jones Adam 
Published: May 2006

Three descent groups in southern Sierra Leone derive their names from Englishmen who married African women in the late seventeenth century: the Caulkers of Shenge, the Tuckers of Gbap, and the Rogerses of Kpaka chiefdom. The names Caulker, Tucker, and Rogers occur frequently in the records of the Royal African Company T70 series and each group retains traditions about its English ancestor. Previous attempts to correlate this written and oral testimony have not been very successful. In this article I shall discuss the Rogerses, dealing first with the written material and then with their oral (or quasi-oral) traditions, which I collected in 1977–78.From the 1620s onwards, a series of English companies had agents in the Sherbro area. The main item purchased was camwood, especially from the Bum Kittam River. Sloops were also sent to Cape Mount to buy ivory and cotton textiles (cloths, shirts and breeches, which were resold at Sherbro and further north). The slave trade was of marginal importance in this area until the mid-eighteenth century.The Royal African Company entered the Sherbro trade in 1678. At first its base was on the mainland, but in 1688 it was transferred to York Island, where a weak stone fort was built. From 1689 to 1700 the company's Sherbro agent controlled trade at Sierra Leone as well as at Sherbro. The Sherbro fort also generally had at least three or four outfactories.
Interwar Schools and the Development of African History in French West Africa
Authors: Kelly Gail P. 
Published: May 2006

This paper focuses on the history curriculum in the schools of French West Africa in the period from 1918 to 1938. Specifically, it investigates the frames used to investigate the past, the sources for the generation of historical data, and the substance and interpretation of history taught in the schools. Written histories of the vast territories of Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF) for the most part were impelled by the development of schooling under colonial rule. Pedagogues and politicians alike could not conceive of education that did not convey a sense of the past. J.L. Monod, a school inspector and author of several texts for AOF's schools, stated: “It is necessary that native youth know the history of their own ancestors and the transformations that we have brought [about] in their own country.” Countless curriculum guides and educational legislation of the interwar years echoed these sentiments.While history was to have a place in the schools, written texts that would form the basis for instruction were all but non-existent. As the schools expanded, both in the number of students they reached and in the years of education offered, schoolmen grappled with the rather complicated task of creating history. The issues those in the interwar years faced are ones that still confound historians of Africa: what defines the search for the past; what constitutes data about the past; and finally, what interpretations of the past can be made. The first of these issues, perhaps, was the most thorny in the interwar years for the most obvious frames were those that essentially denied the past and that derived from French political boundaries of AOF, colonie, or cercle. This initial formulation led to the questioning of whether more appropriate frames for creating history were available on other geographical, cultural, or political terms whose shape differed radically from those of the interwar years.