bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Which Family?: Problems in the Reconstruction of the History of the Family as an Economic and Cultural Unit
Authors: Vaughan Megan 
Published: January 2009

This paper explores some of the major methodological problems associated with the study of the history of the family in Africa. It sets out to explore the problem of the unit of analysis, concluding that the historian must be careful to distinguish between idealized family forms and the reality of family structures. Using both historical and contemporary examples from southern Malawi the paper explores this problem further by analysing the role of the matrilineage vis-à-vis the household over time.Both oral and written sources specifically concerned with the history of the family tend to emphasize the formal structure of kinship relations and it is difficult to know how these relate to the facts of social and economic organization. Even using present-day evidence it is difficult to integrate cultural perceptions of kinship and family relations with realities – in particular with the economic realities, which may change much faster than cultural norms. In the final section of the paper it is suggested that the nearest we can get to a knowledge of the history of the family, avoiding the problems of ideology and the drawbacks of structural and evolutionary models, is to approach the subject ‘sideways’. By studying other institutions and relationships which impinge on family structures, we may get closer to defining the boundaries of these structures. This approach is illustrated using the example ofchinjira- a non-kin-based relationship between women which exists in parts of southern Malawi. A study ofchinjiraindirectly demonstrates both the strength and the limits of kinship relations.
The View from Awdaghust: War, Trade and Social Change in the Southwestern Sahara, from the Eighth to the Fifteenth Century
Authors: McDougall E. Ann 
Published: January 2009

Early medieval wealth invested in southern Saharan agriculture and warfare tended to produce distinctive groups of dependent cultivators and professional warriors by the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Exchange surpassed initial limitations placed on it by rudimentary pastoral society through the development of the salt industry. The realization of a form of surplus readily convertible into a wide range of commodities was vital to the growth of specialized traders who, in turn, broadened the scope of economic and political activity. Growing professionalism and specialization brought with it new forms of social relations, in this case a variety of forms of dependence, as well as introducing a role for indigenous non-producers like clerics and scholars. An oasis like Awdaghust where warriors, cultivators and traders interacted was bound to experience the growing pains these changes produced.This paper suggests how an understanding of these social and economic changes can help fill the gaps which still plague the history of Awdaghust. It argues that we need to examine the pieces of written and archaeological evidence we have in the light of the changing forms of agriculture practised in the area, the region's drying climate between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, and the making of the specialized merchant-clerical groups calledzawāyā. Awdaghust thereby emerges not only as an international caravan terminus, but as a regional centre of agriculture and trade, especially the salt trade, controlled by local pastoralists. It was therefore able to outlive its so-called eleventh-century destruction by the Almoravids, and see itsZnāgamasters turn increasingly towards the salt trade and religion. But its fortunes also depended upon its large servile labour force and sufficient rainfall to support irrigated cultivation. By the fifteenth century, it would appear the drying conditions were severe enough to pose insurmountable problems, possibly even to provoke a slave rebellion said to have brought about Awdaghust's demise.
Islam in the Oral Traditions of Mali: Bilali and Surakata
Authors: Conrad David C. 
Published: January 2009

As a study of some Islamic factors involved in the construction of oral narrative by Manding bards, this article is chiefly concerned with two distinct cases in which griots have borrowed important legendary figures from the literature of Arabia. It is found that Bilali, described by traditional genealogists as progenitor of the ancient ruling branch of the Keita lineage, originated as Bilāl ibn Rabāḥ, a companion of Muhammad and the firstmu'adhdhin. Genealogies or descent lists of early Malian rulers still contain names that have apparently survived from pre-Islamic times, but in most instances these early forebears of chiefly rank have been moved forward into the Islamic era and displaced as founding ancestors by figures like Bilali, who originated in Muslim Arab literature. Similarly, at the lower levels of the social hierarchy, major artisan classes like the blacksmiths and leatherworkers have adopted their own collective ancestors from Islamic tradition.In the case of Surakata, collective ancestor of Bambara and Mandinka griots, it is recalled that he began as Surāqa ibn Mālik, in Arab tradition an enemy of Muhammad who became an early convert to Islam, a conversion that seems to have had a special resonance in a West African setting where many people have made the same shift. Pre-Islamic themes in Manding oral tradition have in many cases been obliterated by the bards' preoccupation with Islamic subjects, particularly events from the life and times of the Prophet. However, despite the pervasiveness of Islamic themes, the blood motif found in some accounts of griot ancestry indicates that at least the essence of certain elements of pre-Islamic West African culture survives in Manding oral tradition.
From Hospitality to Hostility: Ibadan and Strangers, 1830–1904
Authors: Falola Toyin 
Published: January 2009

The view that Ibadan society in the nineteenth century did not discriminate against strangers, irrespective of their origins in Yorubaland, is now firmly entrenched in the literature. To be sure, Ibadan, a new nineteenth-century Yoruba city-state, founded as a consequence of the political crises of the early decades of the century, did maintain an ‘open door’ policy to strangers, many of whom went there as adventurers, craftsmen and traders, hoping to acquire wealth and fame. This article, however, controverts the view that Ibadan society gave the strangers and the indigenes equal opportunities to wealth and power. It argues that all the key political offices went only to the Oyo-Ibadan group which dominated the city-state. Strangers were also not allowed to participate fully in the leading heights of the economy, with the result that most of the wealthy citizens were also of Oyo-Yoruba origin.In the 1890s discrimination against strangers was such that a number of moves were made to expel them. However, the British, who imposed colonial rule on Ibadan in 1893, were against the expulsion of strangers.
Iwe Itan Ọyọ: A Traditional Yoruba History and its Author
Authors: FalỌla Toyin , Doortmont Michel R. 
Published: January 2009

This article offers a translation of M. C. Adeyẹmi's book, A History of Old and New Ọyọ, completed in Yoruba in 1914. The original text comprises 32 pages, divided into ten short chapters, six of which treat the history of Ọyọ from the origins to 1914. The remaining four chapters examine cultural and political institutions. The translation retains the flavour of the original text which stems from a tradition of Yoruba oral historiography. M. C. Adeyẹmi was trained by the C.M.S., and had a Bachelor of Arts degree in education at Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone. Between 1911 and 1942, he combined the functions of educationalist and missionary. His short book, which refers to no published or unpublished written work, is based on Ọyọ oral traditions describing the major developments in the political history of Ọyọ. The author did not moralise on wars and the collapse of the Ọyọ empire, nor did he use the book as a means of propagating Ọyọ hegemony in Yorubaland.The book is significant in many ways: it is a representative example of Ọyọ traditions as they existed at the beginning of this century; it complements Johnson's The History of the Yorubas where both describe the same event; it is very useful for understanding how ‘traditional’ historians study society; and it provides new information on Ọyọ in the nineteenth century and on some cultural features of the Yoruba.
Revolutionary Mahdism and Resistance to Colonial Rule in the Sokoto Caliphate, 1905–6
Authors: Lovejoy Paul E. , Hogendorn J. S. 
Published: January 2009

The Mahdist uprising of 1905–6 was a revolutionary movement that attempted to overthrow British and French colonial rule, the aristocracy of the Sokoto Caliphate and the zarmakoy of Dosso. The Mahdist supporters of the revolt were disgruntled peasants, fugitive slaves and radical clerics who were hostile both to indigenous authorities and to the colonial regimes. There was no known support among aristocrats, wealthy merchants or the ‘ulama. Thus the revolt reflected strong divisions based on class and, as an extension, on ethnicity. The pan-colonial appeal of the movement and its class tensions highlight another important feature: revolutionary Mahdism differed from other forms of Mahdism that were common in the Sokoto Caliphate at the time of the colonial conquest. There appears to have been no connection with the Mahdists who were followers of Muhammad Ahmed of the Nilotic Sudan or with those who joined Sarkin Musulmi Attahiru I on his hijra of 1903.The suppression of the revolt was important for three reasons. First, the British consolidated their alliance with the aristocracy of the Caliphate, while the French further strengthened their ties with the zarmakoy of Dosso and other indigenous rulers. The dangerous moment which Muslims might have seized to expel the Europeans quickly passed. Second, the brutality of the repression was a message to slave owners and slaves alike that the colonial regimes were committed to the continuation of slavery and opposed to any sudden emancipation of the slave population. Third, 1906 marked the end of revolutionary action against colonialism; the radical clerics were either killed or imprisoned. Other forms of Mahdism continued to haunt the colonial regimes, but without serious threat of a general rising.
The Bondsman's New Clothes: The Contradictory Consciousness of Slave Resistance on the Swahili Coast
Authors: Glassman Jonathon 
Published: January 2009

The most fruitful approaches to the study of slave resistance in the New World have involved examination of the slaves' struggles to create and control institutions of community and kinship in the face of planters' attempts to suppress local social reproduction altogether. Africanists who would attempt similar analysis of rebellious slave consciousness are hampered by the tradition of functionalist anthropology which dominates studies of African culture, especially Miers and Kopytoff's thesis of the integrative nature of African slavery. By contrast, more class-oriented approaches to studies of African slave resistance assume too stark a division between the consciousness of slaves and the consciousness of masters. It is suggested that Gramsci's concepts of hegemony and contradictory popular consciousness can be used to reconcile the cultural sensitivity of the first approach with the concern of the second for issues of domination and struggle. Thus a more nuanced view of slave consciousness might be reached.The case studied involves resistance to the rapid rise of sugar plantations on the northern Tanzania coast in the late nineteenth century. Miers and Kopytoff's model of the ‘reduction of marginality’ is modified to accommodate a process of conflict, as slaves struggled to gain access to institutions of Swahili prestige and citizenship and as their masters struggled to exclude them. Analysis of a large-scale slave rebellion in 1873 reveals that the consciousness of the rebels was couched in the local ‘traditional’ language of a moral economy of patrons and clients. Although this language was expressive of some of the hegemonic ideas of the emergent planter class, it was also openly rebellious. It expressed neither a slave class-consciousness nor simply the ideology of the dominant planter class but was instead a contradictory consciousness of the type that Gramsci discerned in other movements of agrarian rebellion.
The ‘Rod of Empire’: The Debate Over Corporal Punishment in the British African Colonial Forces, 1888–1946
Authors: Killingray David 
Published: January 2009

Throughout the twentieth century the British Colonial Office sought to limit the severity of corporal punishment and to regulate more closely its use in the colonies. This article has looked at one aspect of that policy involving the African Colonial Forces. Most military officers argued that corporal punishment was essential to maintain discipline, especially in times of war or active service. The Colonial Office sought to limit severely the circumstances in which corporal punishment could be administered but accepted that its use should be retained or revived during the two World Wars.In the Second World War the arguments for retaining corporal punishment for African soldiers were increasingly denounced by officials and various humanitarian lobbies. African Colonial Forces had come under direct War Office control in September 1939 and during the war many African soldiers served overseas alongside British and other units; they also constituted part of an imperial order which, so propaganda increasingly proclaimed after the fall of Singapore, was opposed to racial discrimination. Corporal punishment based on racial terms was out of kilter in the war and was maintained only at the insistence of senior military men. Once the war was over the Colonial Office ordered that this ‘relic of discrimination’ should be ended.
Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa
Authors: Guyer Jane I. , Belinga Samuel M. Eno 
Published: January 2009

The paper re-examines principles of social organization in pre-colonial Equatorial Africa, suggesting that the imagery of ‘accumulation’ of ‘wealth in people’ is not wrong, but not flexible enough to encompass the centrality of knowledge in these societies. People were singularized repositories of a differentiated and expanding repertoire of knowledge, as well as being structured kin (as in the kinship model) and generic dependents and followers (as in the wealth-in-people model). We argue that social mobilization was in part based on the mobilization of different bodies of knowledge, and leadership was the capacity to bring them together effectively, even if for a short time and specific purpose. We refer to this process as composition and distinguish it from accumulation.The paper has three parts. The first substitutes an oral epic from southern Cameroon for an ethnography of the principles by which people pursued agendas and mobilized followings in their own political worlds. Colonial rule may have institutionalized pre-colonial political hierarchies, but it completely altered the terms for political mobilization. Hence the historical record is very limited for making inferences about how ‘wealth-in-people’ operated in action, under pre-colonial conditions. The second critiques the evolutionary assumptions about simple societies that still color the models of Equatorial societies. The third revisits the ethnography to illuminate the principles of composition. The conclusion makes inferences and suggestions with respect to aspects of pre-colonial social history.
Gold, Assortments and the Trade Ounce: Fante Merchants and the Problem of Supply and Demand in the 1770s
Authors: Metcalf George 
Published: January 2009

Between 1772 and 1780 Richard Miles, a servant of the Company of Merchants, kept detailed records of some 1,308 barters for slaves he made on the Gold Coast, along with a much smaller number of barters for gold and ivory. The lists provide indirect information about the Fante brokers with whom he dealt, and how they conducted their trade. The names that appear show that the Fante dealers at the waterside were numbered in the hundreds, and indicate that many of them operated on a small scale or sold slaves to supplement other forms of income. The fact that many of the élite, though friendly to Miles, preferred not to deal with him indicates a fear amongst them of becoming over-dependent on the Company of Merchants.The lists, with their daily records of prices and price changes in trade ounces in all of the goods in Miles's assortments, illustrate how the Fante dealt with rapid changes in supply and demand by price alterations, by manipulating the content of assortments and by changing the value of the ounce of trade as against the ounce of gold.
The Central Beliefs of the Xhosa Cattle-Killing
Authors: Peires J. B. 
Published: January 2009

The Xhosa cattle-killing movement of 1856–7 cannot be explained as a superstitious ‘pagan reaction’to the intrusion of colonial rule and Christian civilization. It owes its peculiar form to the lungsickness epidemic of 1854, which carried off over 100,000 Xhosa cattle. The Xhosa theory of disease indicated that the sick cattle had been contaminated by the witchcraft practices of the people, and that these tainted cattle would have to be slaughtered lest they infect the pure new cattle which were about to rise.The idea of the resurrection of the dead was partly due to the Xhosa belief that the dead do not really die or depart from the world of the living, and partly to the Xhosa myth of creation, which held that all life originated in a certain cavern in the ground which might yet again pour forth its blessings on the earth. Christian doctrines, transmitted through the prophets Nxele and Mhlakaza, supplemented and elaborated these indigenous Xhosa beliefs. The Xhosa and the Christian elements united together in the person of the expected redeemer Sifuba-sibanzi (the broad-chested one). The central beliefs of the Xhosa cattle-killing were neither irrational nor atavistic. Ironically, it was probably because they were so rational and so appropriate that they ultimately proved to be so deadly.
‘Legitimate Commerce’ and Peanut Production in Portuguese Guinea, 1840s–1880s
Authors: Bowman Joye L. 
Published: January 2009

This article examines the transition from the slave trade to ‘legitimate commerce’ in Portuguese Guinea between 1840 and 1880. Peanuts became the principal export crop. They were cultivated on plantation-like establishments called feitorias located primarily along the banks of the Rio Grande and on Bolama Island. From the 1840s through the 1870s, Luso-African, other Euro-African and European traders built these feitorias. These traders depended upon both slave and contract labour to cultivate their export crop.Although Portugal claimed Portuguese Guinea, French trading houses dominated ‘legitimate commerce’ in this West African enclave. The demand for increased peanut production came from the burgeoning French oil mills rather than from Portuguese industries. French merchants supplied the ships needed to transport the crop as well as many of the imported goods sold locally. By the 1870s the Portuguese realized they needed to break this French monopoly. By that time Europe was suffering from an economic recession, peanut prices were falling and cheaper oilseeds from India and America were entering the market. Portugal's attempts to establish commercial dominance met with little success.The economic crisis of the 1870s not only created difficulties for feitoria owners and their workers, but also for Fulbe groups in the process of expansion. These Fulbe wanted to establish political control in order to reap the economic benefits the peanut trade offered — especially access to firearms and in turn, slaves. As peanut production fell from 1879 onward, Fulbe groups began fighting amongst themselves for control of shrinking resources. By 1887, the feitoria system and this phase of peanut production had ended. The Portuguese, like the Fulbe, had to look for new ways to survive economically.
The Dahomean Middleman System, 1727–c. 1818
Authors: Ross David 
Published: January 2009

During the first quarter of the eighteenth century, European merchants bought more slaves in the Bight of Benin than on any other part of the West African coast. From c. 1720 until 1727 much of their buying was concentrated in Savi, the capital of a small Aja state called Whydah. When the Dahomeans overran Savi in 1727 they stopped the inland slave suppliers from travelling to the coast, prevented the local Hueda from going inland to collect slaves, and insisted that the Europeans bought slaves only from Dahomean dealers. In an attempt to make sure that the Europeans had nothing more to do with their former trading partners the Dahomeans burned the factories in Savi and forced their European occupants to retire to Grehue, Savi's port, a spot on the coast where the Europeans maintained a number of fortified warehouses.The middleman policy did not at first operate satisfactorily. There were two reasons for this. The first was that the Dahomeans were, in practice, unable to prevent the Europeans from continuing to trade with the Hueda. The second was that the inland suppliers refused to sell slaves to Savi's conquerors. The Dahomeans solved their ‘coastal’ problem in the 1740S by placing a garrison in Grehue. This garrison kept the exiled Hueda at bay and held the Europeans in what amounted to open captivity. The Dahomeans were never able completely to solve their ‘supply’ problem. In the 1730s and 1740S the inland merchants took their slaves to ports which opened up on the Bight to the east of Grehue. Only in the 1750s and 1760s did they channel substantial numbers of slaves through Dahomey. In the last decades of the century they again boycotted the Dahomean market. Dahomey therefore prospered as a middleman state only between c. 1748 and c. 1770.An examination of their eighteenth century trading suggests that the Dahomeans were a slave-raiding community whose members realised in 1727 that they would soon run out of fresh raiding grounds. They appear to have introduced their middleman policy in an attempt to ensure that they would continue to profit from slave trading even after they had ceased to be able to take large numbers of captives themselves. Although the policy was by no means a complete success, it was important in that it seems to have led the Dahomeans to begin placing garrisons in the territories they ravaged. It appears, in fact, to have been the pursuit of their middleman goals that led them to begin creating the often described nineteenth century ‘greater’ Dahomean state. The middleman programme ceased to be of much importance after c. 1818, when the fall of Oyo enabled the Dahomeans to resume raiding widely in unexploited territory.