bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Strategic and Socio-Economic Explanations for Carnarvon's South African Confederation Policy: the Historiography and the Evidence
Authors: Cope R.L. 
Published: May 2006

Although Carnarvon's attempt to unite South Africa in the 1870s was a failure, the forward movement represented by his “confederation policy” marks an important turning point in South African history. The destruction of the Zulu and the Pedi polities, which resulted directly from the confederation scheme, together with the last Cape frontier war and a rash of smaller conflicts, constituted the virtual end of organized black resistance in the nineteenth century and the beginning of untrammelled white supremacy. Britain's annexation of the Transvaal in 1877, which Carnarvon had hoped would be the decisive move towards confederation, instead set the scene for the conflict between Boer and Briton which dominated the history of the last two decades of the nineteenth century in South Africa.Carnarvon's confederation scheme had important effects, but there is little agreement on its causes. The author of the standard work on the subject, Clement Goodfellow, took the view that Carnarvon's interest in South Africa arose essentially from its strategic importance within the empire as a whole. The Cape lay athwart the vital sea-route to Britain's eastern possessions, and confederation was designed, in Goodfellow's words, “to erect from the chaos of the subcontinent a strong, self-governing, and above all loyal Dominion behind the essential bastion at Simon's Bay.” This view, or some variant of it, sometimes with “Simonstown” or “Cape Town” or “the naval bases” or “the Cape peninsula” substituted for “Simon's Bay,” has been widely accepted and now appears as a matter of fact in the most recent and widely used general accounts of South African history.
Material on Africa (Other than the Mediterranean and Red Sea Lands) and on the Atlantic Islands in the Publications of Samuel Purchas, 1613–1626
Authors: Hair P.E.H. 
Published: May 2006

In an earlier study I described the material on Morocco, the Saharan coast, sub-Saharan Africa, and the neighboring Atlantic islands, which appeared in Richard Hakluyt's collection of English voyages, in its two editions of 1589 and 1598-1600. Up to his death in 1616 Hakluyt continued to collect additional material for an intended third edition. This material passed to Samuel Purchas (1577-1626), an Essex and then London clergyman, who had already begun to collect and publish voyage material on his own account.In 1613 Purchas published his Pilgrimage, which appeared again in progressively enlarged editions in 1614, 1617, and 1626. Pilgrimage presented a synthesis of contemporary knowledge of the outer continents, based on accounts of voyages and journeys to and descriptions of exotic lands, some of them published, others from manuscripts collected or inspected by Purchas, the whole notionally organized as a review of religious practices throughout the world. Although Pilgrimage cites a vast range of sources and sometimes quotes from them, the work is basically a summarizing of the sources in Purchas' own words. Of much greater interest, therefore, is Purchas' other major work, his masterpiece, his Pilgrimes, which appeared in 1625 in four very large volumes running to some 4000 pages. Pilgrimes is a collection of sources, on the model of Hakluyt's collection, though Purchas more frequently presents his sources in cut versions. The material covers voyages and journeys to all parts of the known world, and is not limited to English voyages--the major limitation being only the extent of material Purchas could lay his hands on.
Early European Sources Relating to the Kingdom of Ijebu (1500-1700): A Critical Survey
Authors: Law Robin 
Published: May 2006

The history of the Yoruba, as is well known, is very poorly documented from contemporary European sources prior to the nineteenth century, in comparison with their neighbors Benin to the east and the states of the ‘Slave Coast’ (Allada, Whydah, and Dahomey) to the west. There is, however, one Yoruba kingdom which features in contemporary European sources from quite early times, and for which at least intermittent documentation extends through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is the kingdom of Ijebu in southern Yorubaland. The availability of contemporary European documentation for the early history of Ijebu is especially valuable since the historical traditions of Ijebu itself do not appear to be very rich.Such, at least, is the impression given by published accounts of Ijebu history: although a large number of kings of Ijebu are recalled, thereby suggesting for the kingdom a considerable antiquity, and though there is some recollection locally of early contacts with the Portuguese, it does not seem that Ijebu traditions record much in the way of a detailed narrative of the kingdom's early history. At the same time, the European sources referring to Ijebu present considerable problems of interpretation, particularly with regard to establishing how far successive references to the kingdom constitute new original information rather than merely copying a limited range of early sources, and consideration of them helps to illuminate the character of early European sources for west African history in general. For these reasons, it seems a useful exercise to pull together all the available early European source material relating to Ijebu down to the late seventeenth century.
History of Bantu Metallurgy: Some Linguistic Aspects
Authors: de Maret P. , Nsuka F. 
Published: May 2006

Under the influence of certain conclusions in comparative linguistics, historians, archeologists and ethnologists have been led to believe that the diffusion of the Bantu languages could be linked to that of iron metallurgy. Yet from a purely linguistic point of view, the only indications of metallurgical knowledge by the Proto-Bantus are the reconstruction of terminology directly related to metallurgical techniques, reconstructions made on the basis of words gathered from the ensemble of present-day Bantu languages.It is thusly that Guthrie was able to reconstruct certain terms such as: “iron,” “forge,” “hammer,” and “bellows,” which led him to the conclusion, as expressed in his last article on the subject, that “the speakers of the proto–language probably knew how to forge iron before the Bantu dispersion began.”A conclusion of such historic import, however, was based on only a few words, the reconstructions and the original meanings of which were often confused. It therefore becomes necessary to re-examine on a larger scale the vocabulary related to metallurgy in the Bantu languages.
Documentary Research on Sub-Saharan Africa in Belgium
Authors: d'Hertefelt Marcel 
Published: May 2006

Belgian bibliographical research on Africa dates back to 1887 when G. Kayser published in Brussels a compilation of 2276 notices relating to works on the exploration and civilization of the continent which had appeared since the beginning of printing. With the publication in 1895 of the Bibliographie du Congo, 1880-1895 of A-J Wauters and A. Buyl--a catalog of 3800 works, brochures, notices, and maps relating to the history, geography, and European occupation of the Congo Free State--documentary works took a direction which, with only a few exceptions, would not be broadened until after 1960: Congo (Zaire), Rwanda, and Burundi were clearly privileged.In a series of articles and pamphlets Théodore Heyse described the development of Belgian colonial bibliography during different periods, followed by a synthetic overview of the whole. Each of these contributions outlined in an introduction of a few pages the most significant moments of the period under review and was comprised of a list of references classified by topic as well as an onomastic index.Historian and chronicler of Belgian colonial documentation, Heyse was also one of the most productive bibliographers of his time. A jurist by training, with additional diplomas in politics and in social sciences, he became an official in the Ministry of Colonies in 1910, retiring in 1947 with the rank of Director General. Assigned to the Direction des Concessions, he became a renowned specialist in colonial law, especially property law. To his numerous historical and juridical publications he combined intensive activity in the field of bibliography.
One Tribe, One Style? Paradigms in the Historiography of African Art
Authors: Kasfir Sidney Littlefield 
Published: May 2006

While the historiography of art as an academic discipline can hardly be construed as a science, it is nevertheless governed by certain dominant paradigms in both of the senses that Thomas Kuhn intended. First, at any point in time there is a constellation of beliefs, values, and techniques shared by the community of scholars who comprise the discipline known as art history. This can be further broken down, altered, and refined for the various sub-fields, but taken together, the separate facets constitute a “way of seeing” art history which differs substantially from the “way of seeing,” say, political history.Applying Kuhn's second and more rigorous sense, the historiography of art is dominated by certain paradigms which serve as exemplars or models of puzzle-solutions. While these change over time (it is no longer permissible to ascribe German expressionism to “national character,” for example), they are so powerful that they function as unquestioned assumptions when in force. Even more importantly, they are frequently invisible because they are rarely made explicit. In European art history, the dominant paradigms have coalesced into entities such as “The Baroque” or “Mannerism” which are largely ontological models used to simplify the otherwise intractable complexity of European art styles and movements.
Oral Historiography and the Shirazi of the East African Coast
Authors: Pouwels Randall L. 
Published: May 2006

“Settlements of foreign, predominantly Semitic, peoples”Strandes' gambit concerning ‘Muslim Civilization’ of the east coast of Africa is a familiar one to many Africanists. Persians and Arabs, so the stories go, settled coastal sites as part of the Islamic diaspora; they vanquished less virile African societies; they built cities which were reflections of Middle Eastern prototypes; they imposed their religion; and, they ‘founded’ coastal civilization, a civilization, therefore, which was characteristically Middle Eastern. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians cannot be entirely blamed for holding such simplistic views. After all, the traditions themselves at least imply some of these things. And, given the literalist and diffusionist nature of past anthropological and historical theory, simple and biased interpretations of these traditions are not surprising.What is perhaps remarkable, given the developments in anthropological theory since the 1940s, is the persistence of such views in some quarters. Examples include portions of two recently published papers by Saad and Wilkinson. Both deal wholly or in part with the most intriguing of the coastal origin traditions, the stories which tell how many coastal towns were originally settled by immigrants who came from Shiraz or Persia (see appendix). Their interpretations are so literal as to link the Shirazi name not merely with a particular dynasty, but with a specific family or kin group which ruled in pre-fourteenth-century Kilwa.
William Smith the Plagiarist: A Rejoinder
Authors: Jones Adam 
Published: May 2006

Poor William Smith must be squirming in his grave. After 250 years, his New Voyage to Guinea has been judged a fraud. Reviewing the reprint edition published in 1967, H.M. Feinberg writes thatthe reprint publisher wasted its money, and the African history community is no more enlightened because of their effort. A fraud, however ancient, has been uncovered, and another old, “classic” description can now be struck from bibliographies of “valuable” works.Feinberg gives a number of examples of how Smith plagiarized from Bosnian's New and Accurate Description of Guinea, published nearly forty years earlier. Each of the passages he quotes is evidently a rephrased version of a passage in Bosman. He makes no mention, however, of the many occasions when Smith has something new to say. Smith's personal observations on Conny's Castle, Dixcove, Sekondi, Komenda, Cape Coast, Elmina, Tantumquerry, Winneba and Accra are passed over in silence. In fact Feinberg himself has elsewhere cited Smith as an independent source on Elmina.Probably Feinberg is most unfair to Smith by concentrating only on Smith's account of Gold Coast affairs. While this is admittedly Feinberg's area of expertise, it is precisely in areas of the coast to the windward of the Gold Coast that Smith is most valuable and least derivative. Here, too, some material is taken from Bosman -- for instance, on Cape Mount, Cape Mesurado and the “Quaqua Coast”. But almost everything else records Smith's own impressions of events which he himself witnessed. Among the most valuable passages are eight pages on the River Sierra Leone and a 48-page narrative of events at Sherbro, where the Royal African Company was losing its foothold on York Island.
Is Elegance Proof? Structuralism and African History
Authors: Vansina Jan 
Published: May 2006

Despite its very visible career in anthropology and folklore, structuralism has been little used by historians of precolonial Africa. Only Ronald Atkinson has applied the method of Lévi-Strauss in the Edmund Leach variant, although a number of historians have attempted to elucidate symbolic meanings by other means. Rather surprisingly as well, given the two decades or so that have elapsed since Lévi-Strauss developed its axioms and analysis, no historian of Africa has ventured to discuss the validity of structuralism for coping with the interpretation of myths of origin or other oral traditions, except in passing. The topic has surfaced only here and there in the never-ending debate about traditions as expressions of the present, or of the past, or of both. Given the influence of structuralism elsewhere, though, it is due time that the approach be discussed for its own sake.The reticence to do so became especially incongruous when a senior structuralist, Luc de Heusch, began to cover ground that historians had recently trod. In his Le roi ivre he discussed at length myths in the kingdoms of southeastern Zaire and adjacent areas. This did prompt publication of two articles about his Luba and Lunda interpretations, but no general assessment of this work in toto. Jeffrey Hoover faulted de Heusch's Lunda material but still praised his “provocative ideas” and the method, “which bore some good fruit,” while Thomas Reefe prefaced his critique of Luba material by calling the book “stimulating” and sidestepped the issue by noting that “no matter what the final assessment of this book will be by historians…” Others were equally bland in their references to this work, while still refuting de Heusch on specifics. Everyone felt, it seems, that a general assessment was beyond or outside their competence. Yet a general critique would have been of use for de Heusch is one of the oldest and most experienced structuralists in anthropology, perhaps the first disciple of Lévi-Strauss. Trained in Paris, he imbibed the approaches of the Griaule school, the protostructuralism of Georges Dumézil, and the early teaching of the master himself. Of all structuralists he remains the most faithful to the method of Lévi-Strauss.
Oral Tradition and Sierra Leone History
Authors: Fyle C. Magbaily 
Published: May 2006

This paper attempts to examine specific problems encountered with the collection and interpretation of oral traditions in Sierra Leone and ways in which these were approached. I will suggest with examples that problems facing oral traditions are not always peculiar to them, as the researcher with written sources faces some similar problems.Much has been said about methodology in collecting oral tradition for it to warrant much discussion here. One point that has been, brought out, however, is that methods which work well for one situation might prove disastrous or unproductive in another. It is thus necessary to bring out specific examples of situations encountered so as to improve our knowledge of the possible variety of approaches that could be used, while emphasizing that the researcher, as a detective, should have enough room for initiative.For the past eight years, I have been collecting oral histories from among the Yalunka (Dialonke) and Koranko of Upper Guinea, both southern Mande peoples, and the Limba and Temne, grouped under the ‘West Atlantic.’ Extensive exploration into written sources has indicated that similar problems arise in both cases. In both situations, the human problem was evident. For the oral traditionist this problem is more alive as he is dealing first hand with human beings. A number of factors therefore, like his appearance, approach to his informants, his ability to ‘identify’ with the society in question, may affect the information he receives. These could provide reasons for distortion which are not necessarily present with written sources.
Yet More Serial Bibliographies
Authors: Henige David 
Published: May 2006

This continues to update the basic list of serial bibliographies of possible interest to Africanists which appeared in the 1983 volume of History in Africa and which will continue to appear to the extent that new materials are noticed. Most of the following items are of only peripheral interest to Africanists but each is likely to contain at least some material which does not appear in other bibliographies at all, or at least not so quickly. Where available, I have included OCLC numbers, which may be useful for those with access to the OCLC data base.Published by the Magyar Mezogazdasagi Muzeum in Budapest, the Bibliographia attempts to incorporate all materials relating to rural and agricultural history and related fields, a field not so fully covered, as far as I know, by any other bibliography. Unfortunately, publication is behind (and may even have ceased); materials for 1975 and 1976 were covered in the volume published in 1979. This included a total of 5790 items in 10 major and numerous minor categories, including economic and social history, history of agrotechnics, prices and wages, agrarian ethnography, and agricultural settlements. A list (obviously incomplete) of 90 to 100 journals is included and there are geographical and author indexes.
Femmes, servitude, et histoire: les traditions orales historiques des femmes de condition servile dans le royaume de Jaara (Mali) du XVe au milieu du XIXe siecle
Authors: Diawara Mamadou 
Published: May 2006

Tandis qu'hommes et femmes de statut libre rivalisent pour la maîtrise des traditions orales relatives à leur histoire, les informations d'origine servile restent un domaine féminin par excellence. Ces données orales méritent une attention particuliére puisqu'elles concernent directement ou non une part importante de la population. D'aprés le Rapport sur l'esclavage dans le cercle du Sénégal-Niger (1904), les esclaves représentaient 40% de la population du cercle de Nioro (Klein, 1983:52) et 50% de celle de Gunbu (Meillassoux 1975:225), deux circonscriptions administratives au coeur du royaume de Jaara. Comment dans la société patrilinéaire soninke, ceux qui, habituellement considérés comme dépourvus de famillle, d'ancêtres et d'enfants, socialement parlant, produisentils, conservent-ils et transmettent-ils leurs propres documents d'histoire? En se limitant au cas des femmes, quel est leur impact sur ce document et le rapport de celui-ci avec l'appareil idéologique des dominants? La réponse à ces questions requiert une réflexion préalable sur: le probléme de la documentation, le cadre chronologique, le cadre spatial et le lieu social en questions.La bibliographie concernant les femmes africaines en tant que source de l'histoire de leur société est d'une pauvreté désarmante. La mode des études féminines des années 1970 n'est pas passée par là. Sosne dans son étude consacrée aux Shi, une société patrilinéaire de l'est du Zaïre (Sosne 1979:225), démontre clairement ce qu'elle appelle la vision androgyne du monde grâce à une étude des structures politiques du pays. Perrot (1982:8,11) insiste sur le rôle des femmes en tant qu'érudites dans le domaine des traditions orales du Ndenye de Côte d'Ivoire. A propos du Bénin, Palau-Marti affirme que “les traditions les plus secrètes se transmettaient par les femmes dont quelques unes étaient les vraies historiennes du Dahomey” (Palau-Marti 1964:139). Barber souligne le rôle des femmes âgées dans la conservation des oríkì (textes à la fois littéraires et historiques) chez les Yoruba du Nigéria (Barber 1987:5). Selon l'auteur, ces personnages sont de loin plus compétentes que les hommes. Strobel (1983:119) insiste sur le rôle des femmes esclaves dans la transmission de l'idéologie qui soutend l'organisation de la société à Mombasa. A propos des généalogies “de maître en élève” (“academic genealogy”) des intellectuels de Sokoto, Boyd et Last (1985:298) constatent que lorsqu'il s'agit des hommes, on cite rarement les femmes dont ils tiennent leurs connaissances.
Studying the History of Those Who Would Rather Forget: Oral History and the Experience of Slavery
Authors: Klein Martin A. 
Published: May 2006

Research on oral history tends to be concerned with two very different types of sources. I would refer to them as oral traditions and oral data. Oral traditions are formally preserved, not always as narratives, but in some fixed form. They can, for example, be passed on as songs, as drum names, or as proverbs. They are part of the collective memory of the group and get passed on from generation to generation. They serve a legitimating function and must of necessity be analyzed in terms of who and what they legitimate. There is also a large body of data at any time which individuals hold in memory, data about individual experience, data that consist essentially of things that people have seen and experienced. It is not preserved in any formal way because it is not deliberately structured for legitimation or communication. Popular writers in western countries have tapped this rather rich treasure trove in recent years to write about the Depression, two World Wars, and the Spanish Civil War among other things. Oral tradition is limited in what it passes on, and once the transition from generation to generation is made, the amount of data is forever circumscribed.Oral data are largely concerned with people describing things they experienced. They are valid primarily during the lifetime of those being interrogated. They are absolutely essential for the reconstruction of the history of peoples without history, those low down in any social order who have little to legitimate.