bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Prejudice and Ignorance in Reviewing Books about Africa: The Strange Case of Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Emperor (1983)
Authors: Marcus Harold G. 
Published: May 2006

In 1983 Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich issued an English version of Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Emperor, Downfall of an Autocrat, published originally in 1978. Of the fifteen reviews I have read, none was written by an Ethiopianist who might have been expected to know something about Ethiopia's most durable emperor (r. 1916-1974). In other words, the published reviews reflect ignorance about the book's subject, so much so that the critics, to a person, found that the book was not about Ethiopia, or even the emperor, but was about Poland and its then dictator Edward Gierek. They fell for the notion, origanlly invented by the book's bitter Polish readers, that The Emperor was an allegory I They comment, therefore, that Haile Sellassie's story merely “illustrates exactly how the mighty rule, and why, as a result, they fall.” Had I been asked to review Kapuscinski's book, I would have regarded the volume as a serious effort to explain Haile Sellassie and commented accordingly.I would first have stated that Kapuscinski had written a flawed book because he had uncritically believed his informants, several of whom told tall tales about the short monarch. A few examples will suffice to clarify this point. One, Mr. Richard as he is called by several raconteurs, reported that the emperor had a little dog that was permitted to urinate on the shoes of courtiers and that there was a servant whose sole duty was to wipe the offending shoes dry. True, the emperor enjoyed small dogs, but he never would have permitted any animal to humiliate his courtiers. Second, Kapuscinski recounts that the emperor's sole teacher was a French Jesuit, who never was able to inculcate reading into his young charge. In fact, the young Haile Sellassie had several teachers, among them two Capucins but nary a Jesuit. His Ethiopian Capucin, Father Samuel, introduced his student to the classics of Ethiopian and Western philosophical literature and instilled in him a profound respect for reading and learning. Third, Haile Sellassie was, by all reports, a sedulous reader in Amharic, French, and, later, in English. He not only perused books but also reports, newspapers, and magazines. Furthermore, he wrote instructions and orders, giving the lie to Kapuscinski's absurd statement (8): “Though he ruled for half a century, not even those closest to him knew what his signature looked like.”
Deferring to Trade in Slaves: The Jola of Casamance, Senegal in Historical Perspective
Authors: Linares Olga F. 
Published: May 2006

An ever-growing literature on West African slavery has, for obvious reasons, tended to concentrate on societies that developed complex forms of domestic slavery and/or were closely tied to the export trade. Three major collections on slavery published in the last ten years deal almost exclusively with such groups. The history of peaples who refused, at least in the beginning, to take captives for the purpose of selling them to outsiders or keeping them for themselves has been ignored. And yet these acephalous groups are very instructive. They illustrate how certain structural features and other cultural preferences may have impeded, or at least retarded, the development of indigenous slaving institutions.This paper discusses the role of slavery in a marginal area of the Upper Guinea coast. Emphasis will be placed on how practices surrounding the acquisition and disposal of captives were embedded in local institutions. Because these practices developed in the context of Africans dealing with each other, and not exclusively in the context of their dealings with the Europeans, they reflected modes of thinking and organizations intrinsic to certain forest groups of west Africa. A comprehensive history of why the Jola of Lower Casamance, Senegal, were slow to develop various kinds of slaving practices emphasizes their resistance to currents of change affecting the political economy of this region before, during, and after the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade.
Africana Resources in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England
Authors: Hendrix Melvin K. 
Published: May 2006

Beginning in the latter part of the sixteenth century British naval and shipping interests gradually emerged as one of the major maritime forces operating in African waters and, by the end of the eighteenth century, British shipping dominated the export slave trade. The establishment of colonial plantation economies in the Americas, the global expansion of British political and commercial interests resulting from the Napoleonic Wars, and the anti-slave trade suppression campaign in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century all brought British seafarers into intimate association with African peoples. This relationship became more intense with the scramble for colonial territories throughout the continent in the late nineteenth century.As a direct consequence of this extensive political and economic relationship a voluminous amount of documentary material exists. One of the principal depositories of this material is the National Maritime Museum (NMM) of Great Britain located in Greenwich, southeast of Central London. This essay reviews some of the documentary holdings found in the Library of the NMM, resources that scholars might find useful in reconstructing British maritime activities in relation to peoples of African descent. Located within the Museum its holdings include printed books and other printed materials, maps and atlases, rare and original manuscripts, ship's plans and drawings, collections on shipwrecks, piracy, and boats, together with various photographic and art collections. While the Library is free and open to the public, it is helpful to contact the Secretary of the NMM with a letter of introduction prior to a first visit.
From Heroism to History: Mapondera and the Northern Zimbabwean Plateau, 1840-1904
Authors: Beach D. N. 
Published: May 2006

Mapondera was born in the 1840s and spent most of his life in the upper and middle Mazowe valley until in about 1894 he embarked on a career that reached its climax in 1901 when he and a large group of allies fought a pitched battle with the Rhodesian colonial authorities that led to his trial and imprisonment. Few people of his time and region have received as much attention from modern writers: articles, sections of books and a historical novel have been based on his career, and he has even had an important building named after him.This paper examines his life. It is a long paper, partly because there is so much evidence available, but also because the evidence is often vague or contradictory on certain crucial points. For example, his son and grandson could not even agree on the identity of his father. Such points must be discussed in detail before even tentative conclusions are drawn. This paper also differs from others in that most works introduce the reader to the subject by reviewing the historiography. In this case an attempt will be made to examine the evidence first and then to refer to previous writing, to allow the readers to form their own conclusions unaffected by earlier views. It also tries to use only the terminology that would have been familiar to Mapondera and his contemporaries. Thus it refers tovarunguandvazungunot Rhodesian or Portuguese colonialists, and it refers to non-African individuals by their African names.
Virtù, andFortunain Radama's Nascent Bureaucracy, 1816–1828
Authors: Berg Gerald M. 
Published: May 2006

“I suppose pedigree and land belong to a fine match,” said Deronda coldly. “The best horse will win in spite of pedigree, my boy. You remember Napoleon'smoi-je suis ancêtre,” said Sir Hugo, who habitually undervalued birth, as men dining well agree that the good life is distributed with wonderful equality. “I am not sure I want to be an ancestor,” said Deronda. “It doesn't seem the rarest sort of origination.”In the late eighteenth century Imerina was checkered with a myriad of tiny principalities, each ruled from hilltop fortresses. In just fifty years from 1780 to 1830, it was unified under a single ruler, drawing Merina into increasingly wider systems of obedience and creating a vastimperiumthat held sway over most of the island of Madagascar, a landmass the size of France, Belgium, and Holland combined.And yet, the half century of tumultuous change that characterized the empire's rise brought no revolution in the Merina's own understanding of the world of power, a view which I have termedhasinaideology. Merina saw historical reality as the product not of human agency, but of ancestral beneficence,hasina, which flowed downwards on obedient Merina from long—of dead ancestors in a sacred stream that connected all living Merina. For obedient Merina, politics consisted in nothing more and nothing less than the lifelong quest to position oneself favorably in that sacred stream as close as possible to ancestors and then to reap the material benefits of that cherished association. Ancestors made their pleasure known by bestowing blessings, “superior”hasina, on those who honored them.
Two Lives of Mpamizo: Understanding Dissonance in Oral History
Authors: Willis Justin 
Published: May 2006

In August 1993 and February 1994 I conducted two interviews with a woman in Buhweju, a county in southwestern Uganda. The interviews were part of a series concerning the social and political history of Buhweju, which is now part of Bushenyi District. In the precolonial period, Buhweju was a small autonomous polity ruled by an hereditary “king;” in the colonial period it was subsumed into the neighboring kingdom of Nkore, which became known as Ankole.The first interview, like most of my interviews, focused on the history of the family of the interviewee, and she said that her paternal grandfather, whose name was Mpamizo, had been a Hima, or pastoralist. In Buhweju, and elsewhere in Ankole, this meant, and still means, very much more than simply being a keeper of cattle. The agriculturalist Iru and pastoralist Hima share the same language and much of the same culture, but speak and behave differently in a number of significant ways (diet and mode of subsistence being prominent among these), so that whether one is a pastoralist or an agriculturalist is very apparent to any other member of society. The woman to whom I was talking is very evidently an Iru, an agriculturalist, in her manner and in the way she lives, as is her husband, and so I was surprised to hear that her grandfather was a Hima, a pastoralist. It was partly for this reason that I went back to talk to her again: but on the second occasion, there was an important shift in her presentation of Mpamizo—a dissonance in her account of the past. Mpamizo, she now said, was an Iru. This dissonance is the subject of this paper, for it holds important lessons both about society in Buhweju and about the ways in which we interpret oral accounts of the past.
The Archives and Library of the Berlin Mission Society
Authors: van der Heyden Ulrich 
Published: May 2006

This paper highlights a rich source of history of the cultures of foreign peoples hitherto referred to little by academics—the archive and library of the Berlin Mission Society, now the Berliner Missionswerk. It will discuss the immense opportunities that the library and the archives offer for academic research. It is not intended to be a history of the Berlin Mission Society or its institutions but will rather suggest initial points of interest for further investigation. I shall also refer to the present state of research in both history and anthropology of foreign peoples based on an assessment of the materials available in the mission societies in the former German Democratic Republic. This paper then is less a contribution to theoretical problems than an attempt to draw the attention of historians, anthropologists and others to the resources of the Berlin Mission Society.In the street called Georgenkirchstrasse, No. 70, in East Berlin, opposite the fairy tale Fountain of Friedrichshain and the famous park, is the Berlin Mission House, built in 1873—the location of the Berlin Mission Society, founded in 1824. Until 1991 the latter was called the Ecumenical Missionary Centre/Berlin Mission Society (Ökumenisch-Missionarisches Zentrum/Berliner Missionsgesellschaft).As one of the largest missionary societies, its missionaries have worked since the mid-nineteenth century in South Africa and later in China and East Africa. In the long history of the Berlin Mission many printed and unpublished texts, as well as drawings, maps, and photographs were collected. The archives retain 270 meters of file. There are also the records of other missions, as well as the largest specialist library for missions and ecumenical movements (50,000 volumes and scholarly papers) in the former GDR.
Saving Francophone Africa's Statistical Past
Authors: Gervais Raymond R. , Marcoux Richard 
Published: May 2006

Colonial administration, as every other administration, was built on the production and management of numbers: export figures (to assess the economic performance of each colony); population estimates, often falsely labeled “censuses” (to establish each colony's capacity to pay the head tax); school enrollment statistics (to establish budgets and document the road to “civilization”). French colonialism was probably one of the more centralized and number-producing systems. The regional (e.g., Dakar) and central (Paris) capitals were always requesting data for budgeting or simply for monitoring the evolution of each component of the empire.In the field of population statistics, before 1945 the process yielded very few reliable data, though a more systematic examination is required to be sure. Historically this can be explained by the evolution both of data collection and training in statistics in France during the first half of the twentieth century. The situation was well documented in the first decades of the century by Fernand Faure, a prominent member of the Société de Statistique de Paris, who noted that training in statistics was not very popular in the French civil service because no specific demand was made by higher levels of administrative or political power. Nevertheless, the Société and individuals in the Statistique Générale de France did succeed in pressing for the creation in 1922 of the Institut Supérieur de Statistique de l'Université de Paris (ISUP), but the lack of means at the institute made it virtually impossible for it to meet its training objectives.
Memory, Myth and Ethnicity: A Review of Recent Literature and Some Cases from Zaire
Authors: Turner Thomas E. 
Published: May 2006

Historians, facing “an interconnected crisis of content, method and audience,” have attempted to resolve this crisis by calling upon “a new inter-disciplinary approach to the study and understanding of human memory” (Thelen, 1989a:B1). I believe that such an interdisciplinary approach can shed much light on the phenomenon of ethnicity. I shall attempt to demonstrate this point by examining a number of recent works dealing with the historical identity of the English and with “tribalism” (cultural identity) in southern Africa. Then I shall attempt to apply some of the insights gained to interviews I conducted in Sankuru Sub-Region (Kasai Oriental Region, Republic of Zaire) in 1970.According to Thelen, the crisis of content in the discipline of history arose out of the need to publish or perish. Scholars have researched and written about increasingly specialized topics. “Common questions about how people make sense of their pasts go unasked” (Thelen 1989a:B1).
Textual Incest: Nathaniel Isaacs and the Development of the Shaka Myth
Authors: Wylie Dan 
Published: May 2006

Literary practitioners have long been, often uncomfortably, aware of the ambivalently fruitful and constraining rhetorical influences of the past. Writers successively utilize or rebel against traditional tropes, poetic conventions, and narrative norms, balancing cultural depth against individualist innovation, acceptability against rejection, public intelligibility against the opacity of private connotation. By such gestures towards the traditions, literature challenges, upholds, or leaves unquestioned the moral, political, and cultural pre-suppositions of its day.South African historiography is less aware than it might be of its textuality, in this sense, of its immersion in a similar “anxiety of influence,” as Harold Bloom has termed it. Little attention has been paid to its rhetorical lineaments and heritage or to the ways historians have read, used, and departed from one another. This is dramatically illustrated by the case of the historiography of Shaka Zulu (assassinated in 1828). Nowhere else has such poverty of evidence and research spawned such a massively unquestioned, long-lived, and monolithic “history.” Only in the last decade has the legendary, verbal construction of the Shaka figure been seriously questioned; only in 1991, at an important colloquium at the University of the Witwatersrand, was something approaching an academic consensus reached that themfecane—the notion of Shaka's Zulus as the “storm-center” of a sub-continental explosion of autophagous, black-on-black violence—was no longer a credible vehicle for understanding the early nineteenth century in southern Africa.
The Vaitupu Company Revisited: Reflections and Second Thoughts on Methodology and Mindset
Authors: Munro Doug 
Published: May 2006

It has been said that “Old movies seen again after many years seem different not because they have altered but because we have.” For the same reason, a rereading of older historical texts will convey different meanings, and reveal deficiencies and perhaps even profundities that were not initially apparent. In this paper, these observations are applied to a piece of research that was special to me at the time. I now see more clearly the extent to which my methods and mindset were a product of time, of place, and of my own training and preferences. So I will retrace my footsteps—insofar as is possible after all these years—and consider how the preconceptions and expectations of the moment affected the outcome. In other words, to reflect on the nature of thinking and writing.My research was not concerned with African but Pacific Islands history. From the mid 1970s through to the early 1980s I engaged in dissertation work in the nineteenth-century history of Tuvalu, formerly the Ellice Islands. Older maps will identify Tuvalu as the southern portion of a British dependency, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony (astride the equator and just east of the International Date Line). The nine Tuvalu islands are tiny even by the standards of coral atolls; by far the largest is Vaitupu at about six square kilometers, and the group remains economically unimportant and strategically insignificant. During the nineteenth century Tuvalu was incorporated into the world economy through the whaling industry and the copra trade, and further exposed to Western influences by missionization. The paucity of exploitable resources, however, coupled with an inhospitable environment and smallness of scale, rendered the islands unsuitable for large-scale European settlement and muted the potential disruptions of outside contacts. But there were aberrant events, such as the Vaitupu Company, which placed individual island communities under strain from time to time.
Portuguese Documents on Africa and Some Problems of Translation
Authors: Hair P.E.H. 
Published: May 2006

In 1983 a note in History in Africa described a survey of Portuguese archive documents on West Africa organized by Vice-Admiral Avelino Teixeira da Mota but left stranded by his untimely death in 1982. The task of continuing the project—by extending the survey, completing the transcription of the survey documents and other relevant material, and publishing the transcripts—has latterly been taken up by the present successor of Teixeira da Mota in the directorship of the same scholarly unit, Dr Maria Emilia Madeira Santos. The first two volumes of Portugaliae Monuments Africana appeared in 1993 and 1995, volume 3 has been at the press since 1997, and the material for at least two more volumes is in advanced preparation. As the title shows, the geographical range of the series is wider than that of the original survey. The documents appear in Portuguese (or occasionally Latin). But a brief summary of each document is supplied in French and English, as well as in Portuguese, making the contents to some extent accessible even to those African historians who do not read (late-medieval) Portuguese. Having translated into English some thousand or so of these document summaries, I now discuss some of my problems in translating, and hence certain problems for African historians in using this material.PMA earns all those responsible the highest commendation for undertaking this difficult project; it is invaluable for that period of early African-European contacts it progressively covers; and it deserves the support of the scholarly community. The comments that follow are intended to make it better known and to explain some of its features, advantages and limitations.
The Arquivo Historico de Moçambique and Historical Research in Maputo
Authors: Liesegang Gerhard 
Published: May 2006

The Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique (hereafter AHM) holds mostly nineteenth- and twentieth-century documentation. Most of the documents available were generated by organs of the public (colonial) administration. There are very few fragmentary private papers (collected as “espólios”) and a few collections of documents originated by companies and associations (e.g., Notícias, Moçacor, ATCM, BNU).In the 1890s, when the administrative capital of Mozambique was still on the Island of Moçambique, António Enes ordered all documents prior to the liberal revolution of 1833-34 to be sent to Lisbon. As a result most of the correspondence between the island of Moçambique and the colonial districts for the period ca. 1750-1830 (correspondence and registers and copies of outgoing correspondence in bound books) was sent to Lisbon where it can be consulted in the original in the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarine Most of these now exist on microfilm in the AHM as well. In the 1930s the colonial intellectuals of Mozambique working in different government services founded a scientific society. The colonial administration added to this a cultural publication (Moçambique, Documentário Trimestral, 1935-1960), and also in 1934 the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique, which was set up step by step between 1938 and 1940. Originally, this was part of the Library of the Department of Statistics (Costa 1987:4). From 1943 to 1963 it was headed by Lt. Caetano Montez and collected nineteenth- and a few early twentieth-century documents and any archival material tranferred by their originating institutions and partly indexed them.