bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A Voice in the Big House: The Career of Headman Enoch Mamba
Authors: Bundy Colin 
Published: January 2009

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the administration of the Transkei was instituted, codified and elaborated. The role of the headman was crucial: he was directly responsible to the magistrate, and his ward (‘location’) became the basic administrative unit. The headman's position was also profoundly ambiguous. He was at once a state official (responsible for enforcing new legal, economic and political relationships) and a spokesman for and defender of the inhabitants of his location.Although invested with considerable powers, headmen had to remain responsive to popular pressures. In tracing the career of a single prominent headman, Enoch Mamba, this article demonstrates the possibilities and contradictions within the post. Mamba entered government employment in Idutywa as a clerk/interpreter; was appointed headman in 1893; and was dismissed – after attempting to unseat the magistrate – in 1896. Resilient and resourceful, Mamba won reinstatement by 1904; he served as a highly effective and occasionally authoritarian headman and as District and General Councillor until his death in 1916. He created and led one of the first pan-tribal political organizations in the Transkei and came to play an active role in the (Cape) SANC and the SANNC. As a politician, Mamba remained sensitive to rural issues and differed from urban-based politicians (like Rubusana, Pelem, Jabavu) in his populist and ‘Africanist’ accents.
Truths yet Unborn? Oral Tradition as a Casualty of Culture Contact
Authors: Henige David 
Published: January 2009

This essay treats the effects of acculturation on oral historical materials. Rather than addressing it as a matter of ‘contamination’, that is, as a question of extraneous data entering and distorting ‘pristine’ traditions, it is considered here to be a facet of the larger question of cultural assimilation – a case of the old and familiar constantly confronting and responding to the new and strange. Seen in this way, oral data continuously adopt and adapt whatever new, relevant and interesting materials come their way in not very different – though decidedly less visible – ways from those that written data have always done. This argument is illustrated by examples from various times and places, largely situations where missionaries, newly literate members, or colonial officials, perceptibly influenced the historical views of societies on their way to becoming literate.In fact this phenomenon seems widespread enough to justify advancing a model that can be tested against specific cases. For our purposes, this model begins with the first meeting of oral and literate cultures, although we can fairly assume that an infinity of similar but unrecorded meetings of oral cultures also resulted in change. After this initial impetus, the constraints of colonial rule, the exigencies of independence, and the aims of modern academic oral historiography each contributed in some measure to this process of ongoing change. As a result, historians, whether primarily interested in the reliability of oral data, or in the process and effects of changes in them, must look to a wider range of sources than has been customary.
Western Bantu Expansion
Authors: Vansina Jan 
Published: January 2009

Linguistic studies are now advanced enough to allow us to sketch how Central Africa was settled by farmers who spoke western Bantu languages. From the second millenium B.C. onward, yarn-growers with neolithic tools spread in the rain-forests of the Cameroons. By adapting repeatedly to different environments they expanded over the whole forest area and also over the savannas and woodlands further south. These people were in search of optimal environments, quite willing to move to settle in favoured locales. Although they multiplied there, their expansion over such huge areas meant that their settlements remained very thinly scattered over Central Africa.A thickening of settlement would only occur when new crops – the banana in the rain-forest, cereals in more open lands – allowed farmers to settle in most places. Iron-smelting was less important here than these new crops. These induced further population growth, densities rose and movements in search of the best unknown lands ceased. If the first settlement had only moderately inconvenienced the autochthones, the thickening of population led in time to their absorption, dependence on villagers, or emigration in search of ever-decreasing empty areas.
The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750
Authors: Thornton John 
Published: January 2009

Scholarly opinion on the conversion of the Kingdom of Kongo to Christianity has generally been that it was superficial, diplomatically oriented, impure, dangerous to national sovereignty or rejected by the mass of the population. This article argues that although Christianity in Kongo took a distinctly African form it was widely accepted both in Kongo and in Europe as being the religion of the country.This was possible because Kongo, as a voluntary convert, had considerable leeway to contribute to its particular form of Christianity. Also, European priests were much more tolerant of syncretism in Kongo than in regions like Mexico, where colonial occupation accompanied the propagation of Christianity. Kongo's control over the theological content allowed the religion to gain mass acceptance while its control over the Church organization and finance allowed it never to be an instrument for foreign domination, in spite of Portuguese attempts to use it as a ‘fifth column’. When European priests arrived in Kongo during the Portuguese colonial occupation at the end of the nineteenth century, they rejected the local form of Christianity, thus ending its acceptance among Europeans as Christianity.
Government and the Decline of the Nigerian Oil-Palm Export Industry, 1919–1939
Authors: Meredith David 
Published: January 2009

Between 1900 and 1925 the British Government evolved a policy concerning agricultural development in West Africa by which expatriate-owned plantations, especially for oil palms, were excluded. This prohibition created as many problems as it solved, for the Nigerian Government in particular faced the problem of competition in the international palm-oil and kernel market from plantations in South-east Asia and the Belgian Congo. In the 1920s the Nigerian Government went to considerable effort to entice British capitalists to invest in palm-oil processing (but not production), but to no avail. In the 1930s the Government concentrated on trying to rehabilitate the oil-palm industry by encouraging the establishment of small, native-owned plantations, improving native methods of oil extraction and controlling the quality of palm-oil and kernel exports. This policy was beset with difficulties of finance, inadequate research and the effects on land tenure systems. It failed, and the Nigerian palm-oil export industry lost its place in the world market.British trusteeship does not appear to have been a positive policy as far as economic development was concerned. It created a dilemma which the colonial authorities were not equipped to solve in the economic and political context of the inter-war period.
A New Look at the Later Prehistory of the Kalahari
Authors: Denbow James 
Published: January 2009

Until recently, the later prehistory of the Kalahari has remained almost unknown and, in consequence, the long and complex past of the peoples of this region has often been condensed into an ahistorical and timeless caricature when compared with events in neighbouring countries. The summary presented here attempts to rectify this situation by drawing upon data from over four hundred surveyed sites and information from detailed excavations carried out since 1975 at twenty-two selected localities in Botswana.Three important topics in southern African prehistory are addressed from the perspective of these investigations. The first topic is the introduction of sheep and cattle to the sub-continent between 2,000 and 2,500 years ago. The second is the origins and social dynamics of pastoralism during the Early Iron Age, and relates these developments to the formation of stratified socio-political systems around the fringes of the Kalahari towards the end of the first millennium A.D. The third topic is the relevance to current information on the later prehistory of the Kalahari of ethnographic accounts of herding and foraging societies gathered in this same region during the twentieth century.
Origins of the AmaWasha: the Zulu Washermen's Guild in Natal, 1850–1910
Authors: Atkins Keletso E. 
Published: January 2009

Research into the perspectives of both worker and consumer has shown the social history of Zulu washermen to be far more complex than was previously thought. Viewed from the standpoint of Zulu men, washing clothes was not a humiliating female task into which they had been coerced by adverse circumstances. Laundering recalled the specialist craft of hide-dressing in which Zulu males engaged as izinyanga, a prestige occupation that paid handsomely. These astute tradesmen, a number of whom may have come from artisanal families, recognized they could play a crucial role in the European household economy. ‘Craft conscious’, building on indigenous institutions and customs, they combined not merely to secure their position and bar entry into ‘the trade’, but also to impose standards of wages and regulate the labour given by the younger men. In this manner they became one, if not indeed the most, powerful group of African workmen in nineteenth-century Natal.The social history of the AmaWasha guild compels a re-evaluation of notions regarding openness to change in traditional societies; indeed, it underscores their capacity for innovation. Moreover, it has a fundamental bearing on the structural nature and patterns of resistance of early black working populations in South Africa. This study indicates that there were intimate historical links between precolonial artisanal associations and subsequent worker organizations, activities and consciousness.
A Microcosm of Why Africans sold Slaves: Akan Consumption Patterns in the 1770s.
Authors: Metcalf George 
Published: January 2009

The European goods which Africans consumed in the slave trade era tell us much about the African societies which imported them. However the study of the subject has involved much confusion through the application of fragmentary evidence from different societies in different stages of development towards the fashioning of broad hypotheses about the impact of the trade on West Africa as a whole. It is important therefore, when the evidence is available, to study each society and each group of African middlemen individually as well as within the wider context.The papers (especially the barter records) of Richard Miles throw a good deal of light on one such microcosm: the Akan people of the Gold Coast in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Fante middlemen with whom Miles dealt required, for virtually every barter, an assortment of goods from five major categories: hardware, currencies, textiles, luxury items, arms and ammunition. Though all these categories were necessary for the trade, it is notable that textiles were far and away the dominant commodity desired by the Akan. Guns were in surprisingly low demand during this period which suggests that the Akan slave producers (principally the Asante) had no difficulty raising slaves through tribute in peacetime and were not forced to rely on wars and slave-raids.Miles's documents also make it clear that generalizations drawn from the Gold Coast in this period cannot be extended automatically to other areas; Akan history tells us that neither can they be extended on the Gold Coast into a different era.
The River-God and the Historians: Myth in the Shire Valley and Elsewhere
Authors: Wrigley Christopher 
Published: January 2009

Debates over the ‘Zimba’ period of Zambesian history prompt a new consideration of the mythical element in oral traditions. The work of Matthew Schoffeleers on Mbona, presiding spirit of a famous rain-shrine in southern Malawi, is exploited in order to cast doubt on his reconstruction of sixteenth/seventeenth-century political history. It is suggested that Mbona was the serpentine power immanent in the Zambesi; that reports of his ‘martyrdom’ at the hands of a secular ruler are versions of an ancient and widespread myth of the lightning and the rainbow, whose opposition establishes the due alternation of the seasons and the generations; that his journey to, and subsequent flight from, Kaphiri-ntiwa, scene of the Maravi Creation myth, is a variant of the visit made to the sky by Kintu, the ‘First Man’ of Ganda tradition, who introduced sex and death to middle-earth. It is not very likely that such stories attest the rise of a great military statec. 1600 and the ensuing suppression of religious institutions.Comparative mythology (which does not have to be technically ‘structuralist’) has positive as well as negative uses for the historian. The peoples of southern Uganda, Zaire, Zambia and Malawi appear to share a common heritage of religious thought and practice and there must be a historical basis for this cultural affinity. At the same time, differences between the myths reflect recent political divergence: whereas successful states such as those of the Ganda and Luba became more secular, the Mbona cult alone survived the disasters that overwhelmed southern Malawi in the nineteenth century.
French ‘Islamic’ Policy and Practice in Late Nineteenth-Century Senegal
Authors: Robinson David 
Published: January 2009

In contrast to the negative conclusions reached by Donal Cruise O'Brien, it is here argued that the French, in the last half of the nineteenth century, maintained an Islamic policy. They practised some of it all of the time and all of it when they had the human and financial resources. They consistently opposed the Islamic state where it conflicted with their own political and economic interests. They identified it with their old nemesis of Futa Toro and the Tokolor, and then with the Tijaniyya. This attitude can be contrasted with a much more tolerant disposition towards the established monarchies, with whom thay coexisted for a much longer time and upon whom they relied to supply the cadre of chiefs.In the case of Umar, the French confronted a jihad that was launched before they began their own expansion in the upper valley, but they contained its influence. They quarantined the Wolof areas and pushed the Umarian state to the margins of their sphere of influence. By allowing much of the younger generation of Tokolor to depart, they turned the preaching of hijra to their own advantage. The French opposed the efforts of Ma Bâ to move into the heart of the peanut basin and the campaigns of the Madiyankobe to block the river trade or disrupt cultivation in Cayor. As soon as Mamadu Lamin mobilized for jihad they responded by driving him out of their gateway to expansion.
Essai d'Interprétation du Cliché de Kangere (dans la Région des Grands Lacs Africains)
Authors: Kasimba Yogolelo Tambwe Ya 
Published: January 2009

The Kangere cliché is widespread in the Great Lakes region of Zaire (Lakes Kivu and Tanganyika), where the Bembe, Fulero, Havu, Lega, Nyindu, Shi, Vira and others live. This cliché has been collected since the 1910s by missionary and colonial administrator researchers. Later it has been heavily used and interpreted in different ways. Thus certain modern scholars have made Kangere the first ‘king’ of the region and the ‘father’ of allbami, that is, the ‘kings’ of various ancient kingdoms existing on the shores of the Great Lakes, including Rwanda and Burundi! Their single aim was to refute the ‘Hamitic myth’.In fact, the Kangere cliché is woven together from different elements taken from various ethnic groups of the region. Its elements were ordered at the same time that they were collected, in the course of the 1910s and the 1920s. They constitute an African response to the preoccupation of the colonial administration of those years: the creation of vast ethnic groups and politically and administratively viable entities. Whites wanted tribes, and blacks created them; whites wanted great chiefs, and blacks created them, thebami.In their interpretation of the Kangere cliché, these researchers quite simply confused, erroneously, the ‘bwamisymbol’ of personalized power (which existed in the area, and which chiefs of different ethnic groups possessed) with the ‘bwamistate’ or kingdom, of recent, colonial creation.
Afrikaner Nationalism, Apartheid and the Conceptualization of ‘Race’
Authors: Dubow Saul 
Published: January 2009

This paper analyses the ideological elaboration of the concept of race in the development of Christian-nationalist thought. As such, it contributes to our understanding of the ideological and theological justifications for apartheid. The paper begins by pointing to the relatively late moment (c. mid-1930s) at which Afrikaner nationalist ideologues began to address the systematic separation of blacks and whites. It takes its cue from a key address given by the nationalist leader, Totius, to the 1944 volkskongres on racial policy. Here, racial separation was justified by reference to scriptural injunction, the historical experience of Afrikanerdom and the authority of science. Each of these categories is then analysed with respect to the way in which the concept of race was understood and articulated.The paper argues that both scientific racism and distinctive forms of cultural relativism were used to justify racial separation. This depended on the fact that the categories of race, language and culture were used as functionally interdependent variables, whose boundaries remained fluid. In the main, and especially after the Second World War, Afrikaner nationalist ideologues chose to infer or suggest biological notions of racial superiority rather than to assert these openly. Stress on the distinctiveness of different ‘cultures’ meant that the burden of explaining human difference did not rest solely on the claims of racial science. As a doctrine, Christian-nationalism remained sufficiently flexible to adjust to changing circumstances. In practice, the essentialist view of culture was no less powerful a means of articulating human difference than an approach based entirely on biological determinism.
The Antecedents of the Interlacustrine Kingdoms
Authors: Sutton J. E. G. 
Published: January 2009

The main interlacustrine kingdoms have been presented, on the evidence of their royal genealogies recalling up to thirty reigns, as stretching back to a ‘Chwezi’ period some five centuries ago. This view was promoted especially in the Kitara zone, comprising Bunyoro and regions to its south and, as a close linguistic grouping, extending to Nkore, Karagwe and Buhaya. Rwanda to the south-west and Buganda to the east, though each rather distinct, share some of the same cultural and traditional features. In the central Kitara zone it has been further argued that the ‘Chwezi’ period is represented by various impressive archaeological sites – hilltop shrines, notably at Mubende, with special and archaic objects; complex earthwork enclosures at Bigo and elsewhere; and the concentrated settlement nearby at Ntusi. Certain of these have been claimed as Chwezi royal capitals of ancient Kitara, and specific features have been compared with royal abodes of recent centuries. Such literal interpretation, let alone royalist manipulation, of oral traditions is now considered too simplistic; not only are the Chwezi generally regarded as gods or mythical heroes, but also the role of archaeology is now seen as something more positive than the mere verification of verbal evidence.Renewed archaeological research indicates that Ntusi was occupied from about the eleventh to the fifteenth centuriesa.d.and that the earthworks, including Bigo, and the settlement on Mubende hill fall into the latter half of that span. This cultural grouping thrived on a combination of cattle-keeping and grain cultivation, as is especially clear at Ntusi on fertile ground in the midst of the Bwera grasslands. It may have been the growing strains of a delicately balanced economy as competition increased for cattle and the pastures which led to its eventual breakdown. During the last half-millennium Bwera has been a peripheral and lightly populated district between Bunyoro, Nkore and Buganda. It is difficult to imagine these later kingdoms developing directly out of a supposed ‘Chwezi’ one based at Ntusi and the Bigo constructions.Two periods of marked change are discernible therefore, one around the middle of this millennium, the other at its beginning. That earlier, mid-Iron Age, revolution witnessed the introduction of cattle on a large scale and the first intensive exploitation of the interlacustrine grasslands. Cattle becoming then an economic asset, it may be inferred that ownership of stock and defence of the pastures became sources of prestige and patronage, with obvious social, political and military implications. This situation opened opportunities for other specializations, including the production of salt for distant distribution. Traditions concerning gods and heroes, and the continuing popularchwezicults, illustrate the changes and may also echo the cultural and economic importance of iron and its working among agricultural populations from before the pastoral revolution.
Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century England: the social context of illegitimacy in rural Kent
Authors: Reay Barry 
Published: January 2009

More bad history has been written about sex than any other subject. Our ignorance about the sexual attitudes and behaviour of people in the past is compounded by a desire to rush to rash generalisation. This is unfortunate, for (consciously or not) our perceptions of the present are shaped by our assumptions about the past. Britain's current preoccupation with ‘Victorian values’ is but a politically visible example of a more general phenomenon. And, more specifically, we do not know a great deal about lower-class sexuality in nineteenth-century England. There are studies of bourgeois desires and sensibilities, but little on the mores of the vast bulk of the population.As Jean Robin has demonstrated recently, one of the most fruitful approaches to the subject is the detailed local study – the micro-study. It may not appeal to those with a penchant for the broad sweep, but such an approach can provide a useful entry into the sexual habits of the people of the past. This article is intended as a follow-up to Robin's work. It deals with a part of rural Kent and, like Robin's work, it covers an aspect of nineteenth-century sexuality – in this case, the social context of illegitimacy. More particularly, this study (and here I differ from Robin) will question the usefulness of the concept of a ‘bastardy-prone sub-society’ (more of which later), a term still favoured by many historical sociologists. The experience of rural Kent suggests that bearing children outside marriage should be seen not as a form of deviancy but rather as part of normal sexual culture.