bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Archives of the Verona Fathers
Authors: Ewald Janet 
Published: May 2006

In 1846 Pope Gregory XVI established the Apostolic Vicariate of Central Africa, aiming at converting Africans to Christianity, bringing Christian assistance to European traders and officials in Africa, and combating the slave trade. The participation of the Verona Fathers dates from 1872, when Propaganda Fide authorized the Institute for African Missions of Verona to direct the mission to Central Africa and appointed Daniele Comboni as Pro-Vicar Apostolic.Conditions in Africa, official mission goals, and Comboni's own policy shaped the observations and reactions of the missionaries to their African surroundings. Difficulties of supply and transportation, as well as their self-imposed obligation to minister to the Europeans, forced the early missionaries to associate with the motley assortment of local traders, especially along the White Nile and in Khartoum. Keen observations and sharp indictments of much of European activity, particularly the slave trade, resulted. Early in his career, Comboni had formulated the concept of converting Africa by using Africans as proselytizers. In their work in the mission field, Comboni and his followers generally reacted to African societies neither by ignoring them nor by objectively collecting ethnographies, but rather by evaluating their possibilities and potential in providing the environment and personnel for mission activity.Records concerning the activity of the Verona Fathers have been collected at Missionari Comboniani, via Luigi Lilio 80, CP. 10733, 00143 Rome. Most of the material is in Italian and German, with occasional English translations, and deals with the southern and central Sudan, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Egypt.
L.S.B. Leakey: A Biobibliographical Study
Authors: Ofcansky Thomas P. 
Published: May 2006

Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (1903-72) was a man of immense ability and variety. Apart from his numerous activities in the fields of paleontology, archeology, and anthropology, he achieved prominence as a naturalist, historian, political analyst, handwriting expert, and administrator. His writings not only reflect these interests but also serve as an important focal point for future research about East Africa.Especially valuable are Leakey's often overlooked contributions to newspapers such as The East African Standard (Nairobi), Kenya Weekly News (Nakuru), and The Times (London). In addition to expanding on the topics mentioned above these items, which included feature articles as well as letters to the editor, outlined Leakey's views on everything from the price of maize to the activities of Kenya's dalmation club.Because of his intimate knowledge of the Kikuyu people, Leakey rendered useful service to the British colonial government during the Mau Mau revolt. His experiences were reflected in his Mau Mau and the Kikuyu (1952), Defeating Mau Mau (1954), First Lessons in Kikuyu (1959), and Kenya: Contrasts and Problems (1966). Related articles in the Manchester Guardian (Manchester) and The Observer (London) also provided essential material for understanding Leakey's attitude towards the emergency.After Kenya gained its independence in 1963, Leakey continued to use newspapers as a forum for his political beliefs. In The East African Standard, for example, “Congratulations on Model Democracy” and “Controversial Report on Kenya Answered” defended the performance of the country's new government. His autobiography, By the Evidence: Memoirs, 1932-1951 also contained a great deal of information about Leakey's position toward Kenya's political and social evolution.
The Late Great Plot: The Official Delusion Concerning the Xhosa Cattle Killing 1856-1857
Authors: Peires J.B. 
Published: May 2006

The very idea that the Xhosa chiefs and their allies engineered the great cattle-killing which finally broke their power seems so absurd that most people who hear of it dismiss it instinctively. And indeed, they are perfectly correct to do so. Yet the sheer mass of documentary evidence in support of the proposition is such that all historians who have come into contact with it have been forced to be more circumspect with regard to the “chiefs' plot.” We have to look very carefully at this evidence before we reject its conclusions, and once we have done so, we have to answer a further and even more significant question: If the “chiefs' plot” did not exist, why did the Colonial authorities maintain that it did? Paradoxically, we will discover that an investigation of the “chiefs' plot” can tell us nothing about the Xhosa or the cattle-killing, but it can tell us a great deal about the mind and methods of Sir George Grey, that colossus of early Victorian imperialism.After nearly seventy years of epic struggle, the catastrophic defeats of the Seventh (1846-47) and Eighth (1850-53) Frontier Wars finally broke the military capacity of the Xhosa people to resist the Colonial advance from the Cape of Good Hope. Their political structures fragmented by partial incorporation into the Crown Colony of British Kaffraria; their belief structures fractured by the victories of missionary teaching and European technology; the slender remnants of their economic resources decimated by the onslaught of the lung-sickness epizootic in their cattle from 1855, the Xhosa turned, as other peoples have done in like situations, to millennarian hopes.
The Archives of the Cape Chamber of Industries
Authors: Nicol Martin 
Published: May 2006

A hundred years ago Johannesburg was not even a hole in the ground. Yet we know far more of its history since then than we do of Cape Town, the Mother City of South Africa, established at the southern tip of the continent over two centuries before. The key importance of the Witwatersrand in the development of the economy, the rapid expansion of Johannesburg and the conflict that accompanied it, have all ensured the region a dominant role in all histories of South Africa. The dramatic events surrounding the mining of gold and the growth of southern Africa's largest and wealthiest city have attracted only an increasing number of historians. These scholars have an enormous range of written sources to draw upon and are currently making innovative use of oral testimony. When we talk of the economic and social history of the Witwatersrand, we are referring to a substantial body of historical writing.The history of Cape Town over the last century is much less visible. It is less dramatic, less documented, and less researched. Explorations have been made, some of the results of which are reproduced by the Cape Town History Workshop, but there is no possibility of producing a useful mapping of the social and economic development of Cape Town until more basic research has been completed. The recording of this ‘local history’ is not only important for its own sake, for the central focus of most overviews of South African history on the Witwatersrand has dulled our ability to understand, and even perceive, major and continuing regional differences in South Africa and the forces of which they are the product.
Théophilus Conneau: The Saga of a Tale
Authors: Mouser Bruce L. 
Published: May 2006

Rare has been the book on Africa that has acquired a history and become the subject of study in its own right. One such is the autobiography of Théophilus Conneau, a slave dealer of French and Italian background, who lived on the west coast of Africa during the 1830s and 1840s. Various accounts of Conneau's experiences in Guinea and Liberia have been translated into four languages, and were even incorporated into a successful novel in 1933, on which was based a motion picture. The latest version of Conneau's life story (and the occasion for this paper) was published as recently as 1976.Conneau's story first came to press in 1854 through the editorial assistance and skill of Brantz Mayer, a lecturer, author, and journalist of the Baltimore area, known principally for his writings about Latin America. Having obtained experience and contacts with publishers by editing manuscripts and letters, Mayer was a valuable asset to a new author in 1853. Recently discovered letters from Conneau to Mayer and Mayer's own account of the relationship between them suggest an interesting beginning for this literary enterprise. Conneau found himself in 1853 in Baltimore where he met James Hall, whom he had known previously in Liberia. Hall had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Maryland settlement for freed Blacks at Cape Palmas and had served as that settlement's first governor from 1833 to 1836. Concluding that Conneau's story of a repentant slave trader would be of value to the cause of anti-slavery and black emigration from the United States to Africa, Hall suggested that Conneau write his memoirs and introduced him to Mayer.
African Materials in Vincentian Archives
Authors: Stafford Poole C.M. 
Published: May 2006

Of all the communities and religious orders in the Roman Catholic church that are involved in missionary activity, the Congregation of the Mission, while one of the more extensive, is undoubtedly the least known. Founded in 1625 by Saint Vincent de Paul (1581-1660), its original purpose was the giving of parish missions in the de-Christianized rural areas of France. The rural missions remained a special concern of Saint Vincent's community and it was in this sense that the term “mission” was originally used. Prior to the French Revolution the term missionary was used almost exclusively of members of Saint Vincent's group. In the mid-eighteenth century they also came to be known as Lazarists, a name derived from their motherhouse, the famous Saint-Lazare. Though this name has been used in other countries, the Congregation of the Mission has come to be known by different names in different localities: for instance, Vincentians in the English-speaking world, Padres Paúles in the Spanish-speaking world, and Saint Vincent's Fathers in Nigeria.Reacting against the excessive esprit de corps of numerous religious groups of his time, Vincent de Paul decreed that the work of his missionaries should be without fanfare or publicity. He even forbade some of them from writing histories of the community lest this should lead to corporate pride. It was an unfortunate precedent. This tendency, plus a general lack of historical consciousness, has caused the work of the Congregation of the Mission to be unpublicized and unknown, even by the members themselves.
Une catastrophe démographique au Moyen Congo: la guerre de l'impôt chez les Téké Tsaayi, 1913–1920
Authors: Dupré Marie-Claude 
Published: May 2006

Les Téké tsaayi sont un rameau détaché du tronc téké il y a plusieurs siècles. Ayant quitté les savanes très claires qui bordent le Zaïre à la hauteur du Malebu pour fuir le pouvoir politique qui s'y était développé (“pour échapper au Makoko”), ils s'établirent en forêt sur les contreforts orientaux de ce qui est aujourd'hui les Monts du Chaillu et ils imposèrent à ses habitants leur système politique bicéphale.En 1966 j'entrepris une étude qui, selon les règles anthropologiques du moment, devait se confiner à une observation exhaustive d'un village. Les 147 habitants de Vouka, sur la haute Louessé, affluent de la rive droite du Niari-Kouilou, furent donc soumis au dispositif en vigueur. Localisation spatiale, parenté et alliances, production (peu observée), rites religieux etc. …Les matériaux obtenus furent pauvres, très disparates, et fort lacunaires. Les généalogies étaient incomplètes à cause des morts de la guerre de l'impôt. La métallurgie du fer avait cessé pendant cette même guerre; il en était de même pour les rites. Les vieux se plaignaient que leurs enfants préféraient parler la langue nzabi, celle des voisins (et champ d'étude de Georges Dupré). Mon inexpérience n'était pas seule en cause. Une déculturation était évidente, conséquence d'une dévastation démographique. Face à cette situation, les bases mêmes de la recherche étaient à redéfinir. Et il fallait d'abord se tourner vers l'histoire de la colonisation et en évaluer l'impact.
Publish or Perish, or How to Write a Social History of the Wàndala (Northern Cameroon)
Authors: Forkl Hermann 
Published: May 2006

It has been in the tradition of this journal to elaborate a methodological apparatus to scrutinize the evidence of older written sources on African history. However, for various reasons, we tend to apply a different standard to recent sources, apparently considering them reliable per se because they developed in the same enlightened context of Western intellectual life as our own. Book reviews, nearly the only refuge for Western self criticism, sometimes cannot achieve it, as I will show.The source on which I would like to comment is a dissertation completed at Boston University in 1984. It is based on oral traditions and for this reason, strictly speaking, a written source itself, apart from a number of published as well as archival sources, whose way of quotation will be re-examined below at first. The interviews were conducted by the author in 1974/75 (Morrissey 1984:225) with north Cameroonian Wandala and Shuwa Arab informants, some of whom I became acquainted with during my own fieldwork in 1984.1 would argue, though, that the following comments are not solely of interest to scholars specializing in northern Cameroon.It might seem to some rather heavy-handed to criticize so closely a doctoral dissertation, but American dissertations are freely available to interested parties in both photocopy and microfilm. As a result they are commonly cited in other works in much the same way as more formally published studies. This being the case, it seems reasonable to submit them to the same scrutiny as any other work in the public domain. I should point out that I conducted my own fieldwork in ignorance of Morrissey's work, becoming aware of the latter only after my return from the field in 1984.
The Dating of the Aro Chiefdom: A Synthesis of Correlated Genealogies
Authors: Nwauwa A. O. 
Published: May 2006

Precolonial African historiography has been plagued by historical reconstructions which remain in the realm of legend because events are suspended in almost timeless relativity.Igbo history has not been adequately researched. Worse still, the little known about the people has not been dated. It might be suggested that the major reason which makes the study of the Igbo people unattractive to researchers has been the lack of a proper chronological structure. Igbo genealogies have not been collected. The often adduced reason has been that the Igbo did not evolve a centralized political system whereby authority revolved round an individual—king or chief—which would permit the collection of regnal lists. Regrettably, Nigerian historians appear to have ignored the methodology of dating kingless or chiefless societies developed and applied elsewhere such as in east Africa. In west African history generally, there has been an overdependence for dating on external sources in European languages or in Arabic, and combining these with the main regnal list of a kingdom. Even within kingdoms, genealogies of commoners and officials have rarely been collected or correlated with the regnal lists. Among the Igbo, the external sources are rare and the regnal lists few. Even the chiefdoms—Onitsha and Aboh, Oguta and Nri—were ignored for a long time after modern historiography had achieved major advances elsewhere. Arochukwu has been another neglected Igbo chiefdom. Most of these states with hereditary leadership were peripheral to the Igbo heartland. Nevertheless, they were important because of their interactions with the heartland and the possibility of dating interactive events from their genealogies.
Arabic Sources on Somalia
Authors: Mukhtar Mohamed Haji 
Published: May 2006

In recent years scholars of different nationalities (including Somalis) have devoted much time and effort to acquiring information about the Somali past using different means and through the available sources on the region. However, the Arabic written sources of information on Somalia have long been neglected and remain so. The purpose of this paper is to call attention to the need for a more comprehensive reading of Arabic sources, and to show that Arabic sources have much to contribute to knowledge about Somalia. I will try to trace these sources and list them in a chronological manner, starting with the early Arab sources, especially from the period which followed the emergence of Islam on the Arabian peninsula when Islam made its way into the Horn of Africa.Secondly, I will look at sources from medieval Islam in Somalia, when Islam spread from the coastal centers on the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean into the hinterlands of the Horn, the period which marked the struggle between Islam and Christianity. Thirdly, I will look at the period after the collapse of Muslim power in the late sixteenth century, almost two centuries when the Muslims of the Horn (the Somalis) were surrounded by Ethio-Portuguese alliances both to the north and in the Indian Ocean to the south. This period marked a time when the condition of the Somali Muslims became similar to that formerly endured by the Ethiopians, who had been surrounded by Muslims on all sides.
Ideological Confrontation and the Manipulation of Oral History: a Zambesian Case
Authors: Schoffeleers Matthew 
Published: May 2006

Ever since Malinowski formulated his concept of myths as charters, there has been a tendency among anthropologists to regard origin myths more or less aspost factumconstructs designed to legitimize existing privileges and positions. A classic example of this pragmatist view is Leach's study of political systems in highland Burma, in which he attempts to demonstrate that origin myths change with clocklike regularity in response to shifts in the political constellation. More recently, however, voices have been raised, particularly among historians, which insist that a society's past cannot always be manipulated at will, but that under certain conditions it has to be treated circumspectly in the way one deals with any scarce resource.My own interpretation of this view is that accounts of the past, when they concern important aspects of a society, are often (or perhaps always) constructed in such a way that the original event is somehow preserved and recoverable. The qualification “somehow” is added on purpose to make clear that the phrase ‘oral history’ refers to such a wide range of genres and mnemonic techniques, and that the methods at our disposal to extract the original event are still so rudimentary--despite the progress made over the past dozen years or so--that for the moment one cannot do more than express belief in our ultimate capability to discover what happened in actual fact.
A Research Agenda on the Yoruba in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Falola Toyin 
Published: May 2006

The history of the Yoruba-speaking people in the nineteenth century has attracted considerable attention. The attempt to write on the era did not have to await the emergence of academic historians: some of the elites produced by the century took it upon themselves to be worthy chroniclers of their age. The most notable among these writers were Samuel Johnson, John Olawunmi George, E.M. Lijadu, Otunba Payne, and Mojola Agbebi all of whom wrote either in the English Language or in their mother tongue. A few others also wrote in Arabic, thus contributing to the Islamic historiography of the century. The contributions of all these authors are immense. Whereas the preceding centuries had virtually no chroniclers, the nineteenth century could boast of a handful whose writings have remained part of the sources for the era.It was also a century of major activities by foreign explorers, missionaries, and officials of the British government. These were men with varying degrees of educational background, but with skill adequate enough to write letters, make entries in diaries, and report on their activities and experiences in Africa. The most talented among them wrote books and copious reports. A great deal of these writings have survived and have been widely used as primary sources to reconstruct the history of the period.
Sudan Notes and Records and Sudanese Nationalism, 1918–1956
Authors: Hamad Bushra 
Published: May 2006

Sudan Notes and Records (hereafter SNR or simply “the journal”) was a leading African scholarly journal on Sudanese studies established by the British administration of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1918. Perhaps because of the high scientific standards it upheld throughout its life span, the political underpinnings that accompanied its foundation might not be so apparent. This study argues that, from its founding until the late 1940s, when the British administration was paving the way for a transfer of power to the Sudanese, SNR had ostensibly political orientations as reflected, among other things, in the editorial policy of the journal. The political leanings of SNR had two dimensions: internal and external.On the internal level, editorial policy in the 1920s favored notables and tribal chiefs, rather than the intelligentsia, by allotting space in this periodical to articles “written” by Sudanese sheikhs, a phenomenon occurring at a time when the policy of Indirect Rule figured most prominently in the calculation of the administration. In the late 1930s the administration courted the intelligentsia, offering them greater opportunities in the civil service and higher education abroad. The editorial policy of SNR favored these educated elements by publishing articles and correspondences written by the intelligentsia, including Sayyed Abd el-Rahman el-Mahdi, the patron of a prominent Sudanese political party—the Umma. Until independence in 1956, the Sudanization of contribution to the journal became one of the focal points of editorial notes.On the external level, the political bias of SNR was directly linked to the British policy vis-à-vis Egyptian claims of sovereignty over the Sudan. The study contends that one of the tactics the British used to separate the Sudan from Egypt was to foster the concept of nationalism among the Sudanese through archeological research. One of the prime vehicles for the spread of this concept was in fact SNR, whose very nature was questioned in the late 1940s by its own subscribers.
La Chute De La Dynastie Des Sisse: Considerations Sur La Dislocation De L'Empire Du Ghana A Partir De L'Histoire De Gao
Authors: Lange Dierk 
Published: May 2006

Les Sissé étaient un clan royal établi au Ghana dont le règne s'étendait au moins jusqu'à l'époque almoravide. La plupart des historiens partagent en effet la conviction que l'empire du Ghana des auteurs arabes correspond au Wagadou de la tradition soninké et de ce fait ils estiment que les Sissé connus par la tradition furent les rois du Ghana. Mais, malgré ces identifications plausibles il est évident que la reconstruction de l'histoire du plus ancien empire ds l'Afrique occidentale qui en ressort est fondée sur des bases fragiles. La fragilité de cette reconstruction devient éclatante quand on se tourne vers la question de la dislocation du Ghana.Jusqu'à une date récente l'opinion prévalait que le Ghana fut l'objet d'une conquête par les Almoravides à la suite de laquelle sa vitalité fut brisée. D. Conrad et H. Fisher ont pris le contre-pied de cette opinion en soutenant que ni les textes écrits, ni les traditions orales ne portaient trace d'une telle conquête. Ils contestent l'existence d'une rupture dynastique correspondante et ils nient que le Ghana fut affaibli par l'intermède almoravide. D'autres voix se sont levées qui mettent en évidence les dangers d'une approche trop littéraliste. Mais malgré les efforts déployés une quasi-certitude ne fut jamais mise en question: l'emplacement de l'empire du Ghana. Pour les auteurs concernés l'identité entre le Ghana et le Wagadou constituait un problème, mais la solution de ce problème fut toujours cherchée dans la convergence des différentes indications sur Koumbi Saleh en tant que capitale de l'empire des Sissé et donc des Soninké.