bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Re-Examining Experience: The New South African Historiography
Authors: Minkley Gary 
Published: May 2006

In two recent published, edited works, a series of papers is brought together to demonstrate the explicit attempt to rethink and reconstruct the theoretical and methodological foundations of South African historiography. The editors point to the important impact the “new school” of radical historiography had in challenging and establishing a “break” with the racial and implicated “ruling class” perspective of the liberal paradigm over the last decade and a half. While acknowledging the further importance and advances made by this new radicalism in emphasizing class analysis and enriching and expanding the understanding of South Africa's capitalist development, there have also been certain crucial limitations. Marks and Rathbone argue that…it has been more concerned with the problems of capital accumulation and the state, with so-called “fractions of capital” and the white workers, than with black class formation and consciousness. The impact of Althusserian structuralism on radical writing in the seventies reinforced this trend: blacks are relegated to being no more than a silent backdrop against which the political drama is enacted, as much “dominated classes” in these texts as their authors see them in reality.This, together with what Bozzoli has called the “dominant Philistinism and anti-historical character of the culture” also prevalent in the radical historiography, prevented the generation and development of an ‘alternative’ conception of history in South Africa. If this alternative is to be developed, the stronghold of structuralist method of analysis with its “antihistorical bias” and concentration of objective tendencies needs not only to be countered, but abandoned.
The Mutapa Dynasty: A Comparison of Documentary and Traditional Evidence
Authors: Beach D.N. 
Published: May 2006

The Mutapa state occupied a triangle of land between the Zambezi river in the north, the Hunyani river and Umvukwe range on the southwest, and the Mazoe and Ruenya rivers on the southeast. It thus consisted of a small segment of the southern Zambezian plateau and an arc of the Zambezi valley lowlands. The state dated back to at least the fifteenth century, and some branches of its ruling dynasty continue to control fragments of the state under the governments of Rhodesia and Mozambique. These descendants of the Mutapa dynasty, like their fellow-members of the Korekore dialect cluster of the Shona-speaking peoples, retain traditions of their past that are passed on from generation to generation by an informal learning process. These traditions are almost all devoted to the ruling dynasties rather than to the mass of the people and are especially concerned with lines of descent and land rights. They range from myths to relatively accurate factual accounts, with a wide variety of traditions between these two extremes. It was at one time thought that the mediums of mhondoro ancestral spirits were equivalent to the professional tradition-keepers of states such as Rwanda, but this theory has not been adequately proven.The Mutapa state is of especial interest because it is the only one of four known major Shona states—Zimbabwe, Torwa, Mutapa, and Changamire—to escape being uprooted entirely by new settlements of people, and the only one that was close to Portuguese centers (in which information was recorded). It has thus been possible to compare traditions and documents in a way that cannot be done for the other states. Because of the reluctance or inability of many researchers to work in Rhodesia and Mozambique in the last fifteen years, the history of the Mutapa state has been heavily dependent upon the work of D.P. Abraham, at least as far as traditions are concerned. Abraham collected traditions from ca. 1950 to 1971; but so far the only works of his that are readily available are eight papers, of which the most important were produced in the period 1959-1963. These have formed the basis of most of the secondary writing on the Shona states; the inter-relationship between them and a developing archaeology has been discussed in an earlier article, and only a few points of this discussion need be brought in here.
Remarques Marginales a Vansina, “The Dictionary and the Historian”
Authors: Bontinck F. 
Published: May 2006

C'est à bon droit que Vansina considère les anciens dictionnaires comme des sources historiques, qui « conceal an ample description of a society and its culture at a given moment. » (HIA, 1 (1974), pp. 149-52). Pourtant il nous semble qu'il n'a pas toujours tenu compte de sa propre recommandation, très importante: « it must be constantly in mind who wrote them and for what purposes. »En effet, à titre d'example, Vansina s'applique à extraire des informations précises sur l'ancien royaume de Congo, d'un dictionnaire trilingue du milieu du XVIIe siècle, copié par le capucin flamand Georges de Geel, arrivé au Congo en juin 1651 et mort le 27 décembre de l'année suivante. Cette copie autographe est conservée à la Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio-Emmanuele de Rome et se présente sous forme d'un lexique latin-espagnol, augmenté de la traduction kikongo de chaque vocable. Vansina ne semble pas avoir eu recours à cette copie, la seule parvenue jusqu'à nous: il s'est fié à une soi-disant édition de manuscrit de G. de Geel, éditée par les jésuites J. van Wing et C. Penders, Le plus ancien dictionnaire bantou: Vocabularium P. Georgii Gelensis (Louvain, 1928). Cette édition a laissé tomber les vocables latins et espagnols et a regroupé les termes kikongo, récrits selon la graphie « moderne », par ordre alphabétique en y ajoutant la traduction française et flamande.Ne tenant pas compte du caractère particulier du dictionnaire de G. de Geel. Vansina, utilisant uniquement l'édition Van Wing/Penders, semble avoir tiré de la présence de certains termes kikongo, des conclusion très hâtives. Ainsi de la mention de certains termes ou circonlocutions kikongo, il déduit l'existence dans le société Kongo de « wine merchants, butchers, fishmongers, booksellers, shop¬keepers, clothes sellers, perfume dealers, and pharmacists. » Il y aurait eu des bou¬langers, et même des restaurants.
Une Source de l'Histoire du XIX° et du Début du XX° Siècle: Archives et Publications de l'Oeuvre de la Propagation de la Foi
Authors: Baumont Jean-Claude 
Published: May 2006

L'Oeuvre de la Propagation de la Foi a été fondée à Lyon le 3 mai 1822 par quelques laïcs organisant et mettant en oeuvre une initiative d'une jeune lyonnaise, Pauline Marie Jaricot, pour venir en aide aux Missions catholiques, par la prière et par les secours financiers. Ces derniers, indispensables dans l'abandon où la période révolutionnaire avait plongé les missionnaires, étaient réunis au moyen du « sou par semaine » que versait chaque associé, puis répartis entre les missions selon leurs besoins.La Propagation de la Foi est la plus ancienne et la plus importante des oeuvres qui se sont créées au cours du XIX° siècle pour des motifs semblables (Oeuvre de la Sainte-Enfance, 1843, Oeuvre de Saint-Pierre Apôtre, 1889). Peu après celui de Lyon, un Conseil Central fut aussi créé à Paris, puis un Conseil Supérieur dont dépendaient les deux Conseils Centraux de Lyon et de Paris. L'Oeuvre fut dirigée conjointement à partir de 1830, lorsque disparut le Conseil Supérieur, par les deux Conseils Centraux de Paris et de Lyon, ce dernier gardant une certaine prééminence, en tant que Conseil fondateur. Pendant un siècle environ, l'expansion européenne, puis mondiale de la Propagation de la Foi n'entraina aucune modification. Mais, en 1922, à la demande de la Papauté, les laïes qui composaient les deux Conseils acceptèrent que l'Oeuvre ait désormais son centre à Rome (création d'un Conseil Supérieur dépendant de la Sacrée Congrégation romaine de la Propagande et de Conseils nationaux).Ces données rendent compte de deux caractéristiques des Archives de la Propagation de la Foi qui se trouvent in France:1. Elles sont surtout intéressantes pour la période allant des origines (1822) au transfert de la direction de l'Oeuvre à Rome.2. Ces Archives sont réparties entre deux fonds, celui de Lyon et celui de Paris où se trouvaient avant 1922 les deux Conseils responsables de l'Oeuvre.Nous ne parlerons ici que des Archives de Lyon, les plus importantes il est vrai. Le fonds parisien peut être consulté dans le local des Oeuvres Pontificales Missionnaires (5, rue Monsieur, 75007 Paris).
A Catalog of the National Archives of the Liberian Government
Authors: Shick Tom W. 
Published: May 2006

In the course of my research into the social history of nineteenth century immigrants to Liberia from America, I had the occasion to consult the Liberian Archives in Monrovia. Although the focus of my own research was limited in scope, I was exposed to the full range of materials available in this repository. In 1966, Svend Holsoe was instrumental in helping to organize the archival documents, and he prepared a catalog listing of the same. The present effort should be considered a “second edition” of Holsoe's original work, which only circulated privately. Wherever possible I have additionally tried to include some idea of the extent of each volume or bundle by noting page content where known or estimating the number of pieces included in each bundle. The need for this new listing has arisen from the impact of the course of time on the collection. Over the period of almost a decade since Professor Holsoe's catalog was prepared, factors such as climate conditions and reorganization efforts necessitated by space limitations have altered the content of the collection considerably.The government archival material comes under the administrative authority of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It has been organized and housed in a separate facility directly across from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Ashmun Street in Monrovia. Mr. Augustine D. Jallah is the Director of Archives and the person immediately responsible for the care of the documents. Permission to use the material must be received directly from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Theories and Facts: the Early Gothic Migrations
Authors: Burns Thomas S. 
Published: May 2006

The most salient fact about the Gothic migrations is that they forcefully underscore how old theories never die. They linger to play upon the intellect for generations until they seem to constitute facts themselves. The study of the migrations tempts the unwary with marvelous sagas and apparently straightforward accounts of trusted ancient authors. Even if we follow Odysseus' lead, and with our ears carefully plugged with scientific beeswax, rivet our eyes to the narrow channels of fact, the old theories still beckon; after all, Roman history is in part a series of thrusts and counterthrusts along the northern peripheries of the Greco-Roman world, in need of explanation then as now. The origins of the migrants and invaders of the Roman frontiers was a question appropriate to Tacitus in the late first century A.D. and to countless others across the centuries. All too often the questioners were far removed from the contact zones and looked down upon a simple battlefield of “we and they.” Such self-proclaimed Valkyries chose sides for their own reasons, usually preconditioned and often totally unrelated to the struggles below. This essay traces the evolution of the theoretical and factual elements of the early Gothic migrations and concludes with a personal sketch drawn in light of recent studies of the Roman frontier and insights from other areas, especially comparative anthropology.The historiography of the early Gothic migrations is a classic example of the impact of contemporary attitudes, problems, and methodologies on the study of the past. So meager is the evidence that is likens to a broken kaleidoscope in which the few remaining pieces can be jostled easily from place to place.
The Archives of The Zone de Bulungu and The Sous-Region du Kwilu (Region de Bandundu, Zaire): a Situation Report
Authors: Smith Robert Eugene 
Published: May 2006

In the summers of 1971, 1976, and 1979 I visited the archives of the Zone de Bulungu, and in 1979 those of the Sous-Région du Kwilu. Both are located in the town of Bulungu, in the Région de Bandundu of Zaire. These archives have had a checkered history. The Zone de Bulungu was named Territoire du Moyen-Kwilu during much of the colonial period, with headquarters first at Niadi (about seventy kilometers north of Kikwit), then at Kikwit, and finally at Bulungu.The capital of the Sous-Région du Kwilu has been transferred several times--from Kikwit to Bandundu (ex-Banningville) to Kikwit to Bulungu. After a look at the archives in Bulungu, I was not satisfied that all of them had been transferred there from Kikwit, but when I was in Kikwit in April of 1979 I could find nothing more, and officials of the Sous-Région de Kikwit (the city) insisted that they had all been transferred to Bulungu in 1968.I did not get into the archives of the Région de Bandundu, but since Robert Harms drew a blank during his visit to Bandundu, I will pass on unconfirmed and indirect information that these archives were never transferred to Bandundu, and are still at Kikwit, at the Service de Sous-Région: Cultures et Arts, whose office is next to the main marketplace in Kikwit. But I also suspect that materials generated before 1962 will be found in Kinshasa, where the archives of the Province de Léopoldville are located, for it was in 1962 that the Province de Léopoldville was broken into five smaller provinces.
Oral Sources on Links Between Great States: Sumanguru, Servile Lineage, the Jariso, and Kaniaga
Authors: Conrad David C. 
Published: May 2006

Qui est capable, hors Dieu, de scruter le passé?Some scholars interested in ancient Ghana and Mali dare to sift relevant oral traditions of the Western Sudan in search of historical evidence, while others express doubts that these sources can contain any information of value to historians. A period markedly affected by this question is that which saw the disintegration of Ghana and the rise of Mali in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Despite historians' general acknowledgement of the pitfalls accompanying the use of oral tradition as a source of information, much of what we know, or would like to think we know about this era, has been drawn from the legend of Wagadu and from the Sunjata epic.Clearly a large part of the material in these oral traditions is composed of the stuff of myth and folktale, and on the face of it the prospect of trying to glean historical information from them is not an encouraging one. But woven into the patchwork fabric of these narratives are infrequent threads bearing diminishing echoes of people and events of the distant past. Vague, inaccurate, and potentially misleading as they must be, these archaic fragments nevertheless merit whatever attention is necessary to interpret their significance, in the hope that they might yield some useful historical insights.Any pretensions to historicity in the Wagadu tradition and in the Sunjata epic may be open to question because there is so little that can be verified. While the mythical quality of some elements in the texts is obvious, there are others that could have a historical basis but cannot be independently confirmed. The material consulted here is approached with the attitude that, given the rarity of firmly documented sources, historians cannot afford to ignore the possibility that there is some information worth distilling from the oral accounts of ancient Mali and the related Soninke era that preceded it.
The Ta'līf akhbār al-qurūn min umarā' bilad Ilūrin: A Critique
Authors: Danmole H.O. 
Published: May 2006

Before the advent of colonialism, Arabic was widely used in northern Nigeria where Islam had penetrated before the fifteenth century. The jihād of the early nineteenth century in Hausaland led to the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate, the revitalization of Islamic learning, and scholars who kept records in Arabic. Indeed, some local languages such as Hausa and Fulfulde were reduced to writing in Arabic scripts. Consequently, knowledge of Arabic is a crucial tool for the historian working on the history of the caliphate.For Ilorin, a frontier emirate between Hausa and Yorubaland, a few Arabic materials are available as well for the reconstruction of the history of the emirate. One such document is the Ta'līf akhbār al-qurūn min umarā' bilad Ilūrin (“The History of the Emirs of Ilorin”). In 1965 Martin translated, edited, and published the Ta'līf in the Research Bulletin of the Centre for Arabic Documentation at the University of Ibadan as a “New Arabic History of Ilorin.” Since then many scholars have used the Ta'līf in their studies of Ilorin and Yoruba history. Recently Smith has affirmed that the Ta'līf has been relatively neglected. He attempts successfully to reconstruct the chronology of events in Yorubaland, using the Ta'līf along with the Ta'nis al-ahibba' fi dhikr unara' Gwandu mawa al-asfiya', an unpublished work of Dr. Junaid al-Bukhari, Wazīr of Sokoto, and works in English. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the information in the Ta'līf by comparing its evidence with that of other primary sources which deal with the history of Ilorin and Yorubaland.
Through the Palace Gates, Chiefs and Chronology: Developing Reliable Dating Structures
Authors: Webster J.B. 
Published: May 2006

This paper sets forth the methodology employed to establish and refine a dating system based on genealogies collected during field research in two areas of Africa, Agago county in Eastern Acholi and Awe district in the Benue Valley. Interview sessions with the elders normally lasted from two to four hours and many topics might be, and usually were, discussed in the course of a single interview. To demonstrate the progression of questioning relative to multiple themes would be beyond the space available or the stamina of readers. It is proposed rather to isolate the problem of chronology and show how, throughout the fieldwork period, achieving accuracy should be a major preoccupation and of greater or lesser concern in every interview. The regnal list is not collected once or twice or thrice. It forms a problem which continuously protrudes into the interviews, more so in the early stages of fieldwork, less so in the later, but seldom totally ignored.When historical research focused on large kingdoms such as Bunyoro or Oyo, a vague and extremely relative chronology was adequate for many research objectives. One consequence of this type of research was a precolonial history of modern African states fashioned from a series of chapters, each one concentrating on spearate tribal traditions. The impression created was of isolated groups whose interaction, except for some outstanding military conflicts, awaited the coming of Arabs and Europeans. Since these aliens brought dates, integrated regional histories were forced to await their coming.
Historical Metaphors in the Kano Chronicle
Authors: Last Murray 
Published: May 2006

“There is a story that the Prophet appeared to Abdu Rahaman in a dream and said to him, ‘Get up and go west and establish Islam.’ Abdu Rahaman got up and took a handful of the soil of Medina and put it in a cloth and brought it to Hausaland. Whenever he came to a town, he took a handful of the soil of the country and put it beside that of Medina. If they did not correspond, he passed that town. So he journeyed until he came to Kano. And when he compared the soil of Kano with Medina soil they resembled one another and became as one soil. So he said, ‘this is the country that I saw in my dream.’” [xx]I wish in this paper to treat the Kano Chronicle (henceforth KC) as a document of intellectual history, and not just as a mine from which to dig valuable ‘facts.’ The aspect of intellectual history I will discuss is the meaning of historical metaphors - or analogical geography - of which the above story is a rather special example. But first I will try and show that the first ‘edition’ of KC was completed in the mid-seventeenth century and was compiled from materials which had been developed since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries - thus locating the intellectual history in a specific period. The texts used are discussed in the appendix.In writing this essay I am treading where many have trod before. Abdullahi Smith's work on the Sayfawa and on the origin of the Hausa states and Mervyn Hiskett's publications on the Kano Chronicle and on the Song of Bagauda are the most notable examples.
The Rozvi in Search of Their Past
Authors: Beach D.N. 
Published: May 2006

In this paper I have three main objectives. One is to highlight and examine the work of Zimbabwean African historians under colonial rule up to the 1960s. Another is to examine the effect of the work of these historians on the traditions of the Changamire Rozvi, the rulers of the greatest state in Zimbabwe from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. The third is to show how Rozvi revival movements arose in the 1950s as a minor feature of the period of African nationalism's mobilization.Although the first history of this country was published as early as 1900, it goes without saying that, in the colonial context, African history was played down and denigrated by most of the white writers on the subject for most of the colonial period. Although there was a strong local white tradition of writing on the minority Ndebele people, the majority Shona-speakers were largely ignored. Apart from a small group of local white antiquarians, whose work is only now undergoing re-evaluation, very little was published before 1960 on the history of the Shona. Yet, despite this general neglect, a small but devoted number of Africans were conscious of their lack of a written history and sought to remedy that lack. They found it a lonely and a difficult task. In a period when African education beyond certain limits was discouraged, they had neither access to proper training nor to primary sources other than traditions. If they were sometimes prone to trust unduly the missionary texts with which they grew up (so that one can read of “King Monomotapa” and “Queen Sheba” borrowing Solomon's Phoenician laborers to build Great Zimbabwe),” one can also read the work of two Duma historians who carefully cited Arabic, Portuguese, and archeological sources in secondary works.