bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Oral Traditions and the Political History of Oka-Akoko
Authors: Olukoju Ayodeji 
Published: May 2006

A dominant trend in Nigerian historiography since the 1970s has been the preoccupation with writing history “from the national perspective.” This appears to be Nigerian historians' attempts to be “relevant” to current efforts at nation-building. “National history,” the object of such endeavors, has been defined by the frontline historian J. F. Ade Ajayi as “a study of the main developments in the whole Nigerian region, and among all the peoples and cultures, as perceived from the perspective of national significance and relevance, and only illustrated from the histories of individual groups and polities.”While such efforts at writing what amounts to macrohistory are commendable, emphasis on themes of “national significance and relevance” could result in overgeneralization or the deletion of vital details. This likelihood then justifies the writing of microhistory to give macrohistory a sound factual or empirical basis. The need for microhistory has been stressed by a distinguished historian:the study of microhistory, the study of the histories of the various communities that make up Nigeria is very essential. We need these studies to give us a complete picture of [the] precolonial period of our history. Once we have that as the foundation, the structure we are building, the Nigerian nation, will stand on firm knowledge.… We either know the historical antecedents of the various Nigerian communities and build a virile nation on that knowledge or we continue to run from one crisis to another.
Using the White Fathers Archive: An Update
Authors: Schoenbrun David Lee 
Published: May 2006

Nearly a decade has passed since Carol Dickerman wrote about the high points and practical considerations of working in this most important archival collection. With some recent changes at the Archives and the mere passage of time, an update is warranted.In August 1991 the longtime archivist, Father René Lamey, stepped down after decades of dedicated stewardship over a vast and growing collection of materials generated by the White Fathers since their founding in 1868. His encyclopedic knowledge and willing assistance to scholars will be missed by those who know him. Yet he has been replaced by Father Francois Renault, a scholar and archivist who knows the collection extremely well. Father Renault is more than familiar with the methods of African social scientists. He took a Doctorat d'Etat in history from the Sorbonne in 1971 and has spent some 12 years teaching at the Université d'Abidjan. He has published five books with foci on the Arab slave trade and is working on a sixth, which is to be a biography of the Order's founder, Cardinal Lavigerie. The fact that Father Renault is himself a productive scholar makes the task of explaining research strategies that much easier.
Le microfilmage des Archives Aequatoria
Authors: Vinck Honoré 
Published: May 2006

History in Africa a publié une note sur les Archives des Missionnaires du S. Coeur à Bamanya, Zaire. De fait il s'agissait des archives du Centre Aequatoria: “A little known yet important source of historical and ethnographic material.” Depuis lors (1984) beaucoup a changé au Centre Aequatoria. L'auteur de l'article, S. Nelson, a donné un bon résumé et une assez exacte évaluation de nos archives. Mais entretemps, elles se sont encore enrichies et contre son attente, elles ont été microfilmées sur place: “Microfilming may be done with prior permission, but film processing should not be attempted in Zaire.”L'évolution et l'enrichissement des archives Aequatoria se situe dans les matières suivantes et ils proviennent principalement du transfert des documents que le Père Hulstaert conservait dans sa chambre.[1] Documentation linguistique. Originaux et copies dactylographiées et corrigées des enquêtes linguistiques mongo y sont intégrées. Il s'agit de la notation sur base des formulaires de l'IAI-Londres et de formulaires de sa propre composition (120 phrases) d'environ 300 dialectes. Seuls 32 en ont été publiés. A compléter par plus de 1500 pages de vocabulaires comparés dans les mêmes dialectes. 5 études, dont une de 750 pages, de dialectologie mongo comparée, inédites en font partie. Une série de récoltes de morceaux de littérature orale est présentée par environ 1500 pages. J'estime que seule la moitié en a été utilisée pour publication. Les plus anciens documents datent de 1927. Les exemplaires imprimés mais annotés et corrigés par Hulstaert de ses dictionnaires et grammaires ont été intégrés dans nos archives. La préparation de la traduction de la Bible à trois reprises est d'une importance certaine pour l'étude de l'évolution de la langue (1936-45; 1950-1960; 1975; 1987).
Searching for History in The Sunjata Epic: The Case of Fakoli
Authors: Conrad David C. 
Published: May 2006

That is why, regarding the time between the death of one great king and the rise of another king made famous by God,
If you ask whether in that intervening period there were other kings, Of course there were, But their names are not known.Some scholars search for historical evidence in the ancient traditions preserved by bards of the Western Sudan, while other writers express doubts that these sources can contain any information of value to historians. A period markedly affected by this question is the early thirteenth century, because it was then that the Mali empire was established, and because most of the evidence for this is derived from the Sunjata tradition, which is an essential part of the repertoire of many Mande bards (also known as “griots” or, in the Mande language, jeliw). A limited amount of information on thirteenth-century Mali is available from Arabic sources, but these were written a century to a century and a half after the reign of Sunjata, and although Ibn Khaldun confirms the existence of the famous mansa and reports that he subdued the Soso (Susu, Sosso), the external writings provide no biographical details about the purported empire-builder. Conversely, some episodes in the internal oral accounts are specifically addressed to the life and times of Sunjata, with elements from other time periods—some of which are identifiable and others not—regularly creeping in and out of the narratives. Some themes are obviously mythical, while others could have a historical basis but cannot be independently confirmed. Thus, any historian addressing thirteenth-century Mali must either accept the severe limitations of the external written sources and say very little indeed about that period, or face the difficulties involved in supplementing these with references to the oral sources.
A. B. C. Sibthorpe: A Tribute
Authors: Fyfe Christopher 
Published: May 2006

Aaron Belisarius Cosimo Sibthorpe, a village school teacher who wrote the first history of Sierra Leone, was a man of mystery, a magus. So he seems to have seen himself. The dead, he wrote, have vanished into oblivion,Except the historian, that monarch of the past, using his noblest privileges, when he takes a survey of his dominions, has only to touch the ruins and dead bodies with his pen, in order to rebuild the palaces, and resuscitate the men. At his voice, like that of the Deity, the dry bones re-unite, the living flesh again covers them, brilliant dresses again clothe them; and in that immense Jehoshaphat (Joel iii, 2, 12), where the children of three thousand years are collected, his own caprice alone regulates his choice, and he has only to announce the names of those Maroons, or those Settlers he requires, to behold them start forth from their tombs, remove the folds of their grave-clothes with their own hands, and answer like Lazarus to our blessed Saviour, ‘Here am I, Lord! what dost thou want with me?’Here is a powerful, original image. The historian peremptorily calls up the dead from the “immense Jehoshaphat”—the valley where they all lie gathered together to await the judgment of God—choosing anyone he wants, and at his call they are obliged to rise and answer him obediently, as Lazarus answered Jesus. If only for this image Sibthorpe deserves our wonder and gratitude.
In Search of One Word's Meaning:Zamanin Early Twentieth-Century Kano
Authors: Christelow Allan 
Published: May 2006

When Caliph Attahiru of Sokoto chose flight over submission to the British in March 1903, it was left to the blind and aging Waziri, Muhammad al-Bukhari, to provide those who remained behind with an explanation of how they could remain good Muslims while accepting infidel rule. Citing a text of the caliphate's founder, Shehu ʿUthman Dan Fodio, he argued that one could befriend the British with the tongue, without befriending them with the heart. It remained for others to develop the vocabulary that their tongues would need for this task.A particularly intriguing item in the vocabulary that emerged during the turbulent first decade of colonial rule was a new usage ofzaman(time, era) that occurs in the records of the Emir of Kano's judicial council in such terms ashukm al-zaman(rule of the era) and ʿumur al-zaman(things of the era). It is worth noting that the judicial council did not keep written records before being instructed to do so by British Resident C.L. Temple in 1909, so the records might be seen as preserving what was essentially oral discourse—expressions of the tongue. These terms occur uniquely in relation to legal matters in which the British had intervened. Understanding them can shed new light on the religious and political adaptation of northern Nigerian Muslim leaders to life under British rule. To explore their meaning requires a threefold process of examining various usages and understandings ofzamanin non-legal sources; describing how the judicial council used the word; and then analyzing how this usage may have been related to any of a number of influences, ranging from British officials to West African Islamic scholars to Western-educated North Africans passing through the region.
Colonizing Language? Missionaries and Gikuyu Dictionaries, 1904 and 1914
Authors: Peterson Derek 
Published: May 2006

Driven by the linguistic and material imperatives of the civilizing mission, early twentieth-century British missionaries sought to reduce Gikuyu, a language spoken in much of central Kenya, to a systematic code of words and phrases. Two of them—A.R. Barlow, a sometime renegade Presbyterian layman, and A.W. MacGregor, a conservative Anglican—produced Gikuyu grammars in what MacGregor described as a “tentative” effort to ameliorate the linguistic difficulties of European settlers and Christian evangelists.This essay is an attempt to read these two dictionaries as historical texts, highlighting the ways in which they embodied the complexities and contingencies built into colonial hegemony. In the first instance, I argue that the dictionaries were functional tools of colonizing power. As John and Jean Comaroff have shown, missionaries' linguistic interventions were an integral part of the classifying project of colonial control: by insisting on rational modes of debate, and by defining the language in which the debate took shape, missionaries coercively imposed a hegemonizing trajectory onto cultural exchange. Following the Comaroffs, I outline the ways in which these grammars worked to colonize the language of Gikuyu subjects by creating and imposing linguistic meaning through the dictionary.At the same time, I suggest that these dictionaries were more than functional tools of missionary enterprise. The dictionaries sit uncomfortably at the point of contact between missionary linguistic power and Gikuyu discourse: if the dictionary was to be useful for missionary purposes, then its authors were necessarily compelled to enter into the idiomatic lexicon of local conversations over power, property, and wealth.
Forget the Numbers: The Case of a Madagascar Famine
Authors: Kaufmann Jeffrey C. 
Published: May 2006

“Famines gather history around them,” we are told, even more so, it seems, with high numbers of dead. These numbers are treated sometimes like monuments for famines, increasing over time according to utilitarian concerns. Sources for a famine on Madagascar show that though high numbers may be useful in drawing attention to a calamity, people closer to the event may not locate this history or situate their memory via numbers. Emphasizing numbers in lieu of other ways of remembering and also forgetting a calamity appear not to be very good guides to this history.The killing famine that struck southern Madagascar in 1930–31 attracted substantial written comment among the French. Everyone seemed to have an opinion about this famine, which followed the surprising and dramatic killing of the predominant species of prickly pear cactus by cochineal insects in the late 1920s. A large area, a seventh of the island (approximately a sixth of France), with a population at the time of around a half million people and perhaps two million head of cattle, was effected by the biological war on cactus. “Cactus pastoralists” were suddenly without a very resourceful plant. It had provided thick fences of protection to these herders and their cattle; its fruit and water a mainstay for people; its singed cladodes a critical source of water and sustenance for cattle.The “furnace of contamination”—the rapidly reproducing cochineal choking to death their cactus hosts—started in 1925 at the southwest provincial center of Toliara and spread to the east, north, and south at a rate of 100 kilometers per year.
The 1858–1859 Gbebe Journal of CMS Missionary James Thomas
Authors: Kolapo Femi J. 
Published: May 2006

James Thomas, whose journal is transcribed and appended to this introduction, was a ‘native agent’ of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) at Gbebe and Lokoja at the confluence of the Niger-Benue rivers between 1858 and 1879. A liberated slave who had been converted to Christianity in Sierra Leone, he enlisted in the service of the CMS Niger Mission headed by Rev. Samuel A. Crowther. Thomas was kidnapped around 1832 from Ikudon in northeast Yoruba, near the Niger-Benue confluence. He lived in Sierra Leone for twenty-five years before returning as a missionary to his homeland.Gbebe was an important mid-nineteenth-century river port on the Lower Niger. It was located on the east bank of the Niger, a mile below its confluence with the Benue, and about 300 miles from the Atlantic. Aboh, Onitsha, Ossomari, Asaba, Idah, and Lokoja were other famous mid-nineteenth century Lower Niger towns. From an 1841 estimated base of about 1,500, its population rose to about 10,000 by 1859. Contemporary exploration and trading reports by W. B. Baikie, S. Crowther, T. Hutchinson, and J. Whitford indicate that the town occupied an important place in the commercial life of the region.However, little is known about the town's sociopolitical structures and processes, and still less is known about its relationship with its neighbors. Hence the internal sociopolitical and economic basis for the settlement's economic role in the region is largely unresearched. The reports of James Thomas, Simon Benson Priddy, and Charles Paul, CMS missionaries resident in the town for several years, contain evidence that would be useful for such an endeavor.
Useful Anachronisms: The Rwandan Esoteric Code of Kingship
Authors: Vansina Jan 
Published: May 2006

Any mention in a text to something demonstrably more recent than its attributed date of composition is an anachronism. The presence of an anachronism is absolute proof that the purported date given for the redaction of the final the text is wrong and that the real date occurred later than the date implied by the anachronism. In rare cases an anachronism can also occur in reverse, namely, when it can be shown that the anachronism implies the presence of something (an archaism, a practice) which had been replaced or had disappeared by the purported date for the manuscript. Anachronisms can be very useful both to date a document and in some cases to show us something about the dynamics involved in the creation of a text. The detection of anachronisms is common with regard to written documents, but they can also be used for the study of oral documents which have been memorized word by word, especially when only one version of such documents has survived. That is the case for the Rwandan esoteric code of kingship, which yields an excellent example of how a systematic search for anachronisms throws light on such a document and allows a historian to use its contents with much greater confidence than was the case otherwise.Ubwiiru is the name given in Rwanda to a set of eighteen pieces in prose, called “roads” or “ways,” which vary in length between 74 and 1252 lines and were learned by heart since “immemorial times” by specialists called abiiru.
Angola's Eastern Hinterlands in the 1750s: A Text Edition and Translation of Manoel Correia Leitão's “Voyage” (1755–1756)
Authors: Sebestyén Evà , Vansina Jan 
Published: May 2006

In 1754 the newly-arrived governor of Angola, António Alvares da Cunha, announced to the court in Lisbon that, inspired by plans his uncle had made in 1725, he had decided to revive the old attempt to find a way overland to link Angola and Mozambique. He was initiating this enterprise by sending, at his own expense, an expedition to the fair of Cassange, the farthest known point eastwards of Luanda, to gather information about the lands between Angola and Mozambique. The governor's envoy was Manoel Correia Leitão— an experienced trader, but one who had never been to Cassange— accompanied by a pilot, António Roiz Grizante, whose task was to fix the latitude of Cassange.A suspicious reader could conclude with the subsequent governor António de Vasconcelos, that this venture was a slave trading expedition by Leitão to recover some debts. But it was financed by the governor and one suspects that the whole enterprise was in fact a joint business venture, disguised as an exploration, because governors were forbidden to trade. Be that as it may, the reaction from Lisbon to this news was unexpected. The governor was ordered to abandon his plans and to recall his envoys because this enterprise was too “delicate.” Knowledge about it was to be shrouded in absolute secrecy and a report about this was to be treated as top-secret. Whereupon the governor recalled Leitão.
Dust to Dust: a User's Guide to Local Archives in Mali
Authors: Mann Gregory 
Published: May 2006

In recent years political changes in Mali have opened up new research opportunities for historians and other social scientists interested in the country's colonial and post-colonial past. With the new government has come a change in administrative attitudes regarding access to local archives, in other words those held at the level of the cercle. Although these archives can be in terrible condition, they contain precious information unique to each cercle. In the course of my own research I have been able to gain access to two such archives in southern Mali, in the summer of 1996 and again in 1998. Using these two archives as an example and drawing on the anecdotal evidence of colleagues, the following comments offer a rough appraisal of the nature of cercle archives in Mali. The paper covers the type of documentation available, the condition of the collections, and my own experiences in using them. Although my experience is limited to southern Mali, local administrations across francophone West Africa are likely to have similar holdings, given the essential uniformity of French administrative structures in colonial West Africa.In addition to providing otherwise scarce documentary evidence on local events, these archives contain a good deal of correspondence which passed from one commandant de cercle to another, bypassing the central administration in the colony's capital. The information contained in this correspondence is therefore difficult to find in national archives, and I suspect that most of it is absent altogether. The volume of such correspondence is surprising. For example, regarding a religious movement based in one of these towns in the late 1940s, I found fifty-odd letters and telegrams addressed to the local administrator by his colleagues, asking him for information and keeping him abreast of local manifestations of the movement in their own regions. None of these messages had been routed through the central administration, and the commandant had sent his superiors no more than a digest of events in which much detail was suppressed.
Bibliography of Primary Sources of the Pre-Nineteenth Century East African Coast
Authors: Pouwels Randall L. 
Published: May 2006

The following bibliography is intended to supplement the excellent one (largely) of secondary sources compiled by Thomas Spear and published inHistory in Africa27(2000). Research for a forthcoming monograph on the East African coast in the ‘middle’ period has taken me in recent years into a number of libraries and archives in India, East Africa, and Europe. There I have been able to build an extensive listing of source material and oral informants interviewed in East Africa. While this compilation includes many of the titles in Spear's list, study carried out in Goa and Lisbon afforded me the opportunity of viewing primary sources not included in Spear's collection. Despite the fact that this is still a work in progress, I submit this supplementary list hoping it might prove useful to other scholars interested in East Africa and the western Indian in the pre- and early-modern period.Readers also will note that I have included some secondary listings not included in Spear's bibliography. This is due to the fact that my ideas concerning what is relevant to coastal history appear to be somewhat broader than Spear's. Consequently, this list includes some titles on southern and central Africa, as well as of coastal literature, which I have found to be useful and apposite to coastal studies. Naturally, I have tried not to duplicate titles found in Spear's list.