bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Myth of Racial Strife and Merina Kinglists: The Transformation of Texts
Authors: Berg Gerald M. 
Published: May 2006

Early history of the central highlands of Madagascar, called Imerina, must be written from oral literature. The first European account dates only to the late eighteenth century, long after the Merina monarchy arose, and it is not until the nineteenth century with the establishment of the London Missionary Society that detailed written sources appear. Moreover, unlike his colleagues in African history, the historian of Imerina cannot refer to archeology to test conclusions derived from oral sources since archeology in Imerina has only a few years of work behind it. Thus oral literature alone holds the key to questions about the foundations and growth of the Merina monarchy which by the mid-nineteenth century ruled all of Madagascar.In one respect, however, the historian of ancient Imerina is more fortunate. The Merina have produced perhaps the largest corpus of historical literature in any part of Africa. I intend first to describe this literature and to point out in very general terms the problems of using it. I will focus not only on the Malagasy milieu which gave rise to historical material, but also on two related aspects of European influence. First, I will show how European ideas of social evolution penetrated Merina thinking. Second, and perhaps more important because it has received such scant attention, is the effect of the introduction of writing and printing on Malagasy texts. I consider this the outstanding historiographical problem: how did writing, editing, and redacting change the Merina's own view of their distant past. Finally, to illustrate general points raised in the first section of this study, I will examine a particular historical problem, the founding of monarchy, and show how the transformation of Merina kinglists through years of editing created a new vision of the past. I see this transformation of Malagasy texts by writing as the most important European influence on the development of a Merina history.
Impeachable Source? On the Use of the Second Edition of Reindorf'sHistoryas a Primary Source for the Study of Ghanaian History - I
Authors: Jenkins Ray 
Published: May 2006

“The matter in the first Edition has not undergone any radical change with the exception of a few alterations here and there …The Rev. Carl Christian Reindorf began his research into the history of the Gold Coast and Asante in the early 1860s. His decision to collect and record traditions appears to have been stimulated by the death in 1860 of his grandmother and by the Basel Mission which in 1864 under the direction of J.G. Christaller entered an important phase in its study of the language, traditions, and folklore of the Gold Coast peoples. Some thirty years later Reindorf'sHistory of the Gold Coast and Asante based on Traditions and Historical Facts Comprising a Period of more than Three Centuries from about 1500 to 1860was published.The process of revisingHistory Ibegan as early as 1907 and culminated in 1951 with the publication of a revised edition in Basel and later (in 1966) in Ghana. Not surprisinglyHistory IIhas become much more widely available and used thanHistory I-- in no small measure because of the increasing demands from a new generation of historians for ‘a new look’ at the history of Ghana and the part played in it by Africans. As a result ReindorfsHistory IIhas been used increasingly in the reconstruction and reinterpretation of Ghanaian history. In his recent study of Asante Ivor Wilks recognized this development by deciding to use onlyHistory IIon the grounds that it was more readily available to the reader. Earlier Michael Kwamena-Poh had noted the difficulties in consultingHistory Iwhen, after quoting at second-hand a passage from it he cautiously added thatthis quotation is obtained from Wilks … who apparently got it from the first edition of Reindorf'sHistory of the Gold Coast and Asante, a copy of which [i] have been unable to obtain. The edition [I] used is the one revised by his sons C.J. Reindorf and C.E. Reindorf, and in which much of the information contained in the original has been left out.
The Sacred Meadows: A Case Study of “Anthropologyland” vs. “Historyland”
Authors: Curtin Patrica Romero 
Published: May 2006

In 1974 Abdul Hamid M. el Zein published The Sacred Meadows: A Structural Analysis of Religious Symbolism in an East African Town. The town in question was Lamu on an island of the same name off the northern coast of Kenya. The population of Lamu, holding steady at about 5,000 during this century, is mostly Muslim and mostly of mixed Arab and African descent. Arabs began to visit Lamu centuries ago and over time Arab traders settled on the tiny island, married local women, and created what we know today in the larger context along the East African coast as Swahili language and culture. Dhows came each year with the northeast monsoon bringing Arab sailors and a trickle of new immigrants from Arabia. (Not only Arabia, however, as dhows came from many parts of the Indian Ocean to Lamu and the east coast of Africa). As sailors, Lamu people continued to revisit Arabia, among many ports, for commerce as well as for pilgrimage to Mecca. The Arab strain in Lamu culture was therefore reinforced; that culture has therefore tended to sway toward the Indian Ocean in recent centuries and to Arabia in the past one hundred and fifty years.Until the last decade or so the town had a tight social hierarchy with the old Arab (as they identified themselves) families at the top, followed by Indian traders and merchants (who often worked in partnership with the old families), and then other merchants, such as late nineteenth century arrivals from the Hadramawt, free Africans and Bajuni (the Swahili people from nearby islands), and finally, slaves (or ex-slaves after 1907).
Bibliographie ethnographique de l'Afrique sud-Saharienne
Authors: Newbury David 
Published: May 2006

Colonially-imposed linguistic boundaries have often represented important obstacles to historical and anthropological research in Africa. Even where researchers working in African vernaculars employ data in a transfrontier context, their publications usually appear in only one European language, and are therefore often not accessible to Africans or western researchers unacquainted with that language. The resultant linguistic fragmentation of Africanist publications sometimes leaves the impression of limited sources on a given topic, whereas in fact the relevant sources may be very rich when the writings of two or more national units--often presenting quite different conceptual approaches as well as languages--are drawn on fully.Some of the most arresting examples of such myopic behavior are evident along Zaire's eastern border with former British administered areas of eastern Africa. T.O. Ranger's valuable account of the Mwana Lesa Watch Tower movement is a case in point. His discussion of Tomo Nyirenda's activities in northern Zambia is detailed and highly revealing. But the Mwana Lesa Movement was also active in the southern pedicule of Zaire, and there are numerous published works (of varying quality) in French on this fascinating example of colonial repression of African religious initiative. Although his account does draw on works in English which are based on (unspecified) Congo materials, only a single francophone source appears in Ranger's otherwise intriguing synthesis.Farther north, the long border between Zaire and former British-administered areas provides many other examples of similarly narrow linguistic horizons. Little work, for example, has appeared on the translacustrine ties among people living on the lakeshores of the western rift lakes.
The Archives of the Gold Mines of Kilo-Moto
Authors: Bakonzi Agayo 
Published: May 2006

The gold mines of Kilo-Moto are located at the extreme northeast of Zaire. They include two centers of mining operations: the gold mines of Moto in the District of the Upper Uélé and the gold mines of Kilo in the District of the Kibali-Ituri. Gold was discovered there in 1903, and the mining of gold began in 1905 in Kilo and in 1911 in Moto. The local management of the gold mines of Kilo is located at Kilomines or Bambu; and that of Moto is at Watsa.From 1905 to 1919 Kilo-Moto was a colonial state corporation and gold was mined by the colonial administration. The mines were organized into a special service depending on the Department of Public Works in the Ministry of the Colonies in Brussels. In Africa, the Governor-General and the Governor of the Province Orientale (now Haut-Zaire) were responsible for the implementation of colonial regulations in the gold mines. Africans were recruited from the rural areas by the colonial administration to work for the gold mines.From 1919 to 1926 the gold mines of Kilo-Moto were organized into an autonomous colonial state corporation managed by a Board of Directors in Brussels, appointed by the Minister of the Colonies. The service of the gold mines then moved from the Ministry of the Colonies to a separate building and this marked the beginning of the constitution of the Archives of Kilo-Moto. The headquarters of Kilo-Moto since 1937 have been located at 1, Place de Luxembourg in Brussels. From 1926 to 1967 Kilo-Moto was a private corporation, and the Management Committee and the Board of Directors of the private company have always operated from the same building.
Africanist Archival Research in Brussels
Authors: Dickerman Carol , Northrup David 
Published: May 2006

Belgian archives and libraries contain essential collections of sources for the history of central Africa, although locating and gaining access to materials can be difficult, if not impossible. We hope that by describing our triumphs and failures in using these facilities in 1980/81 we can simplify these tasks for future researchers. This survey, like others existing in English, is less than complete, having been conceived only after we completed our separate research in Belgium and thus reflecting the limitations of our particular research interests. Nevertheless, the breadth of our familiarity with the facilities and of our individual interests (Dickerman worked on the history of Burundi's capital Bujumbura; Northrup on African labor in the former Province Orientale of Zaire) seems sufficient to justify this note.In general it must be said that access to archival materials in Belgium is fairly restricted. The worst case is the Archives du Gouvernement-Général, Léopoldville/Kinshasa, the largest and most important collection for the history of the Belgian Congo. These records, estimated to occupy five to seven kilometers of shelf space, were removed from the colony just before independence and are now housed in the Archives Générales du Royaume (2-6, rue de Ruysbroek, Brussels). However, as a consequence of legal efforts by the government of Zaire to recover all or part of the collection, it has remained totally closed to all researchers.
Endre Sik and the Development of African Studies in the USSR: A Study Agenda From 1929
Authors: Darch Colin , Littlejohn Gary 
Published: May 2006

Writing in 1963, the late D.H. Jones commented on the first volume of the Hungarian Endre Sik's History of Black Africa that
“this is simply another pot-boiling account of the European colonisation of Africa, about 1910 vintage, distinguished from others of its kind only by the slightly greater space it allots to speculation about the mysterious native past…Professor Sik's unexacting standards of evidence are those of the crudest type of political controversy.”On the second volume, the same reviewer wrote four years later that it was
“a very bad book which invites the strictures levelled against its predecessor: a crudely partisan selection and treatment of the evidence, a very imperfect acquaintance with recent research, an outmoded, essentially European-centred perspective…Professor Sik is…deficient in narrative skill and historical insight…All the diversity and detailed irregularity of the historical landscape is smothered under a uniform blanket of naive moralising which all but obliterates its significant features.”This is undoubtedly strong stuff, especially as Jones was some way from being a reactionary scholar; although he noted that Sik's book (hereafter HBA) is “sharply Marxist in tone,” he pointedly refrains from attacking it on that score. Sik, according to Jones, is simply incompetent.
Historical Writing in Nineteenth Century Segu: A Critical Analysis of an Anonymous Arabic Chronicle
Authors: Hanson John H. 
Published: May 2006

All too often Africanist historians use Arabic sources without serious consideration of the circumstances surrounding their composition. Many historians have used the Kano Chronicle, for example, as a primary source for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Hausaland. Since it is a history of the kings of Kano, organized by reign, one could assume that successive writers, contemporaneous with the reigns, produced a documentary record of their era which was perpetuated by subsequent contributors to the chronicle. Murray Last's recent analysis reveals, however, that one man compiled the Kano Chronicle during the mid-seventeenth century, and that it was updated by subsequent writers a few reigns at a time. Although many historians found it convenient and advantageous to assume that the Kano Chronicle was a reliable primary source, Last clearly demonstrates the need for close textual analysis of any Arabic source used for historical reconstruction.B.G. Martin errs in the opposite direction. He attributes a nineteenth-century Arabic chronicle to a twentieth-century cleric, Cierno Malik Diallo of Kidira, Senegal. Diallo is actually the custodian of one of several versions of this anonymous Arabic account of Umar Tal's jihad (hereafter Chronicle X). The Umarian chronicles, of which Chronicle X is merely an example are one group of written materials generated in the aftermath of the jihads of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century West Africa. Host of the efforts in documentary analysis have focused on the writings of Uthman dan Fodio, Muhammad Bello, and other members of the Sokoto elite.
The Nine Lives of Semei Kakungulu
Authors: Twaddle Michael 
Published: May 2006

Semei Kakungulu enjoyed at least nine lives in the area of the Uganda Protectorate immediately before, during, and after the imposition of British protectorate rule there at the close of last century, in his successive roles as elephant hunter, guerrilla leader, Ganda chief, border warlord, British ally in military campaigns, “native collector,” colonial client-king, President of the Busoga Lukiko, and leader of the anti-medicine Bamalaki and Bayudaya separatist sects. The purpose of these notes, however, is not to provide more details about these successive phases in Kakungulu's extraordinary career, but rather to comment briefly on the nine major surviving vernacular accounts of his very full life.John Rowe remarks that “it was natural that biographies, particularly of men of heroic proportions, should also [have been] mobilized in the struggle against moral decline” after the First World War by Ganda vernacular authors, along with works of moral admonition and military memoir once uncritical admiration for British Christianity gave way to a more guarded and wary respect for things British with the increased penetration of Buganda by both British rule and mercantile capitalism. Rowe may also be right in saying that the many biographies of Kakungulu in Luganda “may have reflected the particular attraction of a non-conforming heroic figure who turned his back on the ‘establishment,’ carved a kingdom for himself in the east and virtually thumbed his nose at Apolo Kagwa and the British.” Certainly, this is a major attraction as regards my biographical interest in the man! But, as I hope the following notes on his nine principal vernacular lives may indicate, there are also other explanations.
Of Biases and Queens: The Shi Past Through an Androgynous Looking Glass
Authors: Sosne Elinor 
Published: May 2006

Social scientists have recently become more aware of the pervasive male bias in western scholarship, a bias firmly rooted in European cultures and their offshoots. Deriving from this bias are theories which, by assuming a male-centered universe, nurtured generations of male scholars who rarely questioned their sufficiency. Although we are beginning to understand and correct for western androcentrism, we have not yet studied how African societies, especially patrilineal ones, perpetuate their own male-centered worldview in their oral traditions. Thus we have not begun to examine how distorted histories can result when African and western biases coincide and reinforce each other as androcentric researchers collect and then analyze materials which androcentric Africans consider “historical.”By analyzing data from the Shi kingdom of Ngweshe in eastern Zaire, this paper addresses the linked problems of African and western bias. It argues that -- contrary to the Shi conception of politics as a series of on-going contests and formal structural relationships between royal men, a view I shared while in the field -- one cannot begin to understand the Shi past without acknowledging the role played by non-royal women in shaping its course. More specifically, a careful reading of the data suggests that despite the cultural emphasis on patrilineal descent and the insistence that a reigning king be the biological son of his predecessor, many men who succeeded to the Ngweshe kingship were not the sons of previous monarchs; and even when they were, the selection of a king depended as much on who his mother was as on who his father might have been.
The Presence of Islam Among the Akan of Ghana: A Bibliographic Essay
Authors: Silverman Raymond A. , Owusu-Ansah David 
Published: May 2006

The primary geographical focus for the historical study of Islam in west Africa, until recently, was the western and central Sudan. As the often-cited J. S. Trimingham wrote (1962:7) “The Guinea States in the south lie outside our sphere since they were not in contact with the Sudan states and were uninfluenced by Islam.” Trimingham's conclusion paralleled those of early twentieth-century French and English scholars who dealt with the issue of Islam in west Africa. Paul Marty's voluminous studies, dating from the second decade of this century, dealt with the Islamic and Muslim-influenced traditions of the various peoples of Francophone west Africa. H. R. Palmer, one of the early British writers of this century, concentrated on the northern territories of Nigeria, where Islam has enjoyed a long history.Two factors explain the focus of these scholars on the western and central Sudan. First, the better known Islamic-influenced kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and Kanem-Bornu were all located in this region. Second, the Islamic states of the western and central Sudan, in particular, presented the greatest problem to both the French and the British during the early periods of the colonial era. Therefore, the focus on this area may have been motivated by the desire of these writers to understand the Islamic factor. Whatever the motivation of writers like Marty, Palmer, and their associates, Trimingham was wrong to conclude that the “the Guinea States” (i.e., the peoples living in the coastal forest belt) were “uninfluenced by Islam.”
Creating and Using Photographs as Historical Evidence
Authors: Papstein Robert 
Published: May 2006

The use of photographs as research data is becoming of increasing interest to historians of Africa. The School of Oriental and African Studies' Workshop on “Photographs as sources for African history” is only the most recent example of this emerging concern. This paper is designed to discuss some of the conceptual problems one might meet when attempting to understand photographs as data. It also discusses making photographs as a systematic part of field research. Lastly, it provides a brief primer on the type of photographic equipment best suited for fieldwork.Historians of Africa are used to thinking of themselves as dwelling at the very cutting edge of methodological and theoretical innovation, but in the use of visual data we lag behind our colleagues in ethnology, anthropology, and sociology. Fieldwork historians, virtually all of whom take photographs, have rarely accepted photography as an integral part of their field research data. Nor has readily available visual data been widely used by historians: compare the extensive historical use of conventional anthropological data with the almost total neglect of visual anthropology.Although the eye is our most important information-gathering sense, we find it surprisingly difficult to agree about the meaning of images. Ironically, one of the attractions of the photograph, its apparent accessibility (and implied objectivity), dissolves into subjectivity when closely ‘read.’ Since we cannot readily agree about photography's meaning and content we tend to discard or marginalize its use as data. Obviously I am overstating the case somewhat. We have of course learned to ‘read’ photographs; this is the reason we can recognize a tree as a tree. But compared to the way we have learned to read text, we read images in haphazard and non-systematic ways. Outside art history and cinema courses, image reading is rarely taught systematically.
Physical Anthropology and the Reconstruction of Recent Precolonial History in Africa, II: A Dermatoglyphic Survey From Kenya
Authors: Rosa Peter 
Published: May 2006

Earlier I discussed the potential of physical anthropology for the reconstruction of precolonial history in Africa. As a traditional branch of the biological sciences, physical anthropology draws on advances in genetics, population genetics, numerical taxonomy, and other biological disciplines whose paradigms define a logical framework by which the biological history of human populations can be explored. Sophisticated techniques can now be applied not only to the study of biological history, but also to the investigation of hypotheses of wider historical interest (i.e., those arising from the consideration of nonbiological sources of historical evidence). Having outlined some of the possibilities of new techniques and contrasted them to more basic techniques available to pre-war physical anthropologists, who tended to be preoccupied by the construction of racial taxonomies, I ended the paper by discussing ways by which the wider historical potential of physical anthropology could begin to be realized.In this sequel the onus is on trying to demonstrate in a limited way some of these possibilities through an empirical study. The study in question is a biological survey of Kenyan peoples which I undertook in the early and mid-1970s. During this survey I obtained palm and finger prints from over 6,000 primary and secondary school children drawn from some 60 population units (tribes and sub-tribes). The finger and palm prints provided over 150 biological measures, which are genetically determined, to compare the population units sampled and to analyze the biological patterns of differentiation of Kenyan peoples.