¹ Vansina, Jan, Living with Africa (Madison, 1994), 17Google Scholar: “In a burst of insight [I discerned that] those Bushong [oral] poems were … texts, and hence … amenable to the canons of historical method. Once one could asses the value of a tradition, it could be used as a source, like any other.”

² The phraseology comes from his own vision, as suggested in his co-edited collection of essays on historical fieldwork in Africa: In Pursuit of History: Fieldwork in Africa, ed. Adenaike, C. K. and Vansina, J. (Portsmouth NH, 1996)Google Scholar. The title of course illustrates the nature of history as a quest, but also as an object.

³ Vansina, , Living With Africa, 15Google Scholar.

⁴ In Vansina, , “Recording the Oral History of the Bakuba: I. Methods,” JAH 1(1960), 45–54Google Scholar; idem., “Recording the Oral History of the Bakuba: II. Results,” JAH 1(1960), 257-70. These were followed by a more comprehensive work on method, though drawing extensively on his experience in Bushong (the Kuba kingdom) and Rwanda: Vansina, De la tradition orale (Tervuren, 1961)Google Scholar, later translated into English as Oral Tradition (Chicago, 1965)Google Scholar, as well as in numerous other articles. He has maintained this fascination with method throughout his long and prolific career.

⁵ Wolf, Eric, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, 1982)Google Scholar. Wolf's acute phrase referred perceptively to disciplinary divisions before the 1960s, at a time when historians dealt with history but mostly neglected non-western cultures, while anthropologists dealt with non—western cultures but mostly neglected history. Vansina—and the generation to follow-sought to dissolve those distinctions.

⁶ For the laggard pace of change within the field of history in the United States over this period see Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream (Cambridge, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Tonkin, Elizabeth, Narrating Our Pasts:the Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge, 1992), 97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Harold Scheub was among the first to elaborate on the central role of “core clichés,” or mnemonic kernels in African storytelling—phrases, images, or references which distil (and reflect) larger narratives and plot segments. Among Scheub's many works see especially The Xhosa Ntsomi (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar.

⁹ For an interesting application of these insights see Hofmeyr, Isabel, “We Spend Our Years as a Tale That Is Told”: Oral Historical Narrative in A South African Chiefdom (Portsmouth NH, 1993)Google Scholar; and (in broader perspective), Barber, Karin, I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women, and the Past in a Yoruba Town (Washington, 1991)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Vansina, , Living With Africa, 34–35, 37–39, and Ch. 3, esp. 49Google Scholar: “[To the conventional historians] there was no substance to African history: nothing ever happened there. And there were no sources. Africans were not literate and hence their past belonged to ‘prehistory’ anyway …. All this ‘traditional’ stuff was for anthropologists. But most British anthropologists abhorred 'speculative history.’ They shared the fetichism of the written document and the view that African history began with the colonial conquest.”

¹¹ Ibid., 39.

¹² Ibid., 34-39.

¹³ Ibid., 37.

¹⁴ Ibid., 38.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid., 39.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Such a move was not of his own choice. While working on the art collection at the Musée Royal de l'Afrique Central—Belgium's awesome (if ponderous, and deeply revealing) colonial showcase—he was sent to study anthropology in London (as a prelude to being sent to collect art among the Kuba); there he found a whole new intellectual universe. (He adapted in a typically off-handed fashion: “Anthropology was more fun than history. … Historians, after all, only pore over dead papers in archives, while anthropologists interact with living people.” Living With Africa, 12.) But if the medievalists were too exclusively (and narrowly) enmeshed with “history,” most anthropologists of the day excluded history altogether. As a historian among anthropologists, Vansina's dilemma was how to reconcile this dichotomy. In the end he tried to close the gap between the two by introducing a historical vision to anthropologists and “anthropological” sources to his-torians—and by demonstrating to each that the fusion was feasible, even productive. Today, at least on that issue, there is no debate.

¹⁹ Vansina, , De la tradition orale (Tervuren, 1961)Google Scholar; English translation: Oral Tradition (Chicago, 1965).

²⁰ The more egregious examples were the oft-repeated writings of Hugh Trevor-Roper, the prestigious Regius Professor of History at Oxford, whose infamous musings inflamed a generation of historians working on Africa—and who in their turn delighted in pillorying him at every opportunity for an intellectual arrogance that was exceeded only by his ignorance. “Perhaps, in the future,” he wrote as late as 1966, “there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness …. And darkness is not a subject for history …. I do not deny that men existed even in dark countries and dark centuries, nor that they had political life and culture, interesting to sociologists and anthropologists; but history, I believe, is essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement too. It is not a mere phantasmagoria of changing shapes and costumes, of battles and conquests, dynasties and usurpations, social forms and social disintegration. If all history is equal, as some now believe, there is no reason why we should study one section of it rather than another; for certainly we cannot study it all. Then indeed we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped.” Trevor-Roper, , The Rise of Christian Europe (London, 1966), 9Google Scholar.

²¹ The term “fundamentalist” derives from T. Q. Reefe, but is widely used in the field: Reefe, T. Q., “Traditions of Genesis and the Luba Diaspora,” HA 4(1977), 183–205Google Scholar. For examples of this work see Hartwig, Gerald, “Oral Tradition Concerning the Early Iron Age in Northwestern Tanzania,” African Historical Studies 4, 1(1971), 93–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Webster, J. B., Okalany, D. H., Emudong, C. P., and Egimu-Okuda, N., The Iteso during the Asonya (Nairobi, 1973)Google Scholar; ku Odongo, Onyango and Webster, J. B., The Central Lwo during the Achonya (Nairobi, 1976)Google Scholar.

²² This term is drawn from Ranger, T. O., The African Voice in Southern Rhodesia (Evanston, 1970)Google Scholar. Of course more recent concerns focus on the plurality of “voices” and on the simple observation that every voice begs analysis if it is to be understood as a historical source: not all “voices” are self-explanatory.

²³ For example, MacGaffey, Wyatt., “African History, Anthropology, and the Rationality of Natives,” HA 5(1978), 101–20Google Scholar. The most impressive and elaborate of these have been the trilogy of de Heusch, Luc, Le roi ivre, ou l'origine de l'état (Paris, 1972)Google Scholar; idem., Rois nés d'un coeur de vache (Paris, 1982); idem., Le roi du Kongo et les monstres sacrés (Paris, 2000). For another captivating example see Wrigley, C. C., “Rukidi,” Africa 43(1973), 219–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ Henige, David, The Chronology of Oral Tradition: Quest for a Chimera (Oxford, 1974)Google Scholar; these views are elaborated in many articles by Henige.

²⁵ Miller, Joseph C., ed., The African Past Speaks (Folkestone, 1980)Google Scholar; idem., “The Dynamics of Oral Tradition in Africa” in B. Bernardi, C. Poni, A. Truilzi, eds. Fonti Orali—Oral Sources (Milan, 1978), 75-101. As far as I can determine the term “documentary analogy” was originally his.

²⁶ Spear, Thomas, “Traditional Myths and Historians' Myths: Variations on the Shingwaya Theme of Mijikenda Origins,” HA 1(1974), 67–82Google Scholar; an excellent extended example of this is found in Reefe, T. Q., The Rainbow and the Kings (Berkeley, 1981), esp. 11–13Google Scholar.

²⁷ Irwin, Paul, Liptako Speaks (Princeton, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ (Madison, 1985).

²⁹ Heusch, , Rois nés, esp. 338–66Google Scholar; for Vansina's more specific rebuttal both to de Heusch's general approach and to his specific claims see Vansina, , “Is Elegance Proof? Structuralism and African History,” HA 10(1983), 307–48Google Scholar.

³⁰ Vansina's growing awareness of the immense complexity of such traditions is shown in is “The Power of Systematic Doubt in Historical Inquiry,” HA 1(1974), 109–28Google Scholar. This was really an article where he worked through new perspectives in approaching his dates on the Kuba, as a prelude to The Children of Wool, but it also carried broader implications.

³¹ Vansina, , “Memory in Oral Tradition” in African Past Speaks, 262–79Google Scholar.

³² Vansina, , “Traditions of Genesis,” JAH 15(1974), 315–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ Vansina, , La legende du passé: Traditions orales du Burundi (Tervuren, 1972)Google Scholar.

³⁴ Vansina, , Living with Africa, 210Google Scholar.

³⁵ Ibid.

³⁶ Vansina, , Oral Tradition as History, xiGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ Ibid., xii.

³⁸ Ibid., 61.

³⁹ Ibid., 94

⁴⁰ Ibid., 12.

⁴¹ Ibid., 111.

⁴² Ibid., 149.

⁴³ Ibid., 148.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 30.

⁴⁵ The most important indication of this is the (unchanged) 2006 reprint of the 1965 translation with a short introduction by Selma Leydesdorff and Elizabeth Tonkin, where they reiterate the accusations of his 1950s anthropological rooting in functionalism—without adequate account of the evolution of his thought expressed in many works since then (New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers 2006). Yet while stating that “his work has grown in relevance” (xi), and that “[h]is book demands that historians evaluate oral testimonies and classify the kind of historical knowledge created in them,” they also note that “one can doubt if many [historians] actually had read it” (xii). (They go on to prove that sentiment for another of Vansina's works, noting that Le Rwanda Ancien: le royaume Nyiginya [Paris: Karthala 2001]Google Scholar was “a very large and unedited collection” (xv). “Large” it was; “unedited”—if that means lacking analysis—was most assuredly was not.)

⁴⁶ Of course he was not the first to note the importance of such matters: these issues—and many more—were essential elements to Lord's, A. B. classic analysis in The Singer of Tales (Cambridge MA, 1960)Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ For a full bibliography of his work up to the early 1990s, see the compilation by Henige, David in Harms, Robert, Miller, Joseph, Newbury, David, and Wagner, Michele, eds., Paths toward the Past: African Historical Essays in Honor of Jan Vansina (Atlanta, 1994), 473–82Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Vansina, , Living With Africa, 17, 41–42Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ For some examples, see Johnson, Samuel, The History of the Yorubas from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate (Lagos, 1921)Google Scholar; Kaggwa, Apolo, Bakabaka b'e Buganda (London, 1901)Google Scholar; Kagame, Alexis, Inganji Karinga (2 vols.: Kabgayi, 1943–1947)Google Scholar; “K. W.” [Tito Gabafusa Winyi IV], “The Kings of Bunyoro-Kitara,” Uganda Journal 3(1935), 155–60Google Scholar; 4(1936), 75-83; 5(1937), 53-69. The first three of these writers had many more publications.

⁵⁰ Henige, David, “The Disease of Writing: Ganda and Nyoro Kinglists in a Newly-Literate World,” The African Past Speaks (Folkestone 1980), 240–61Google Scholar. Henige was certainly not among the category of “fundamentalists” described here—to the contrary, no one was more analytical and skeptical of the information received from oral sources; this article makes the point that what many have taken to be “pure” oral sources have often been influenced by written sources. Many “fundamentalists”—in fact this was a defining characteristic—were less punctilious about the nature of the sources they used, as long as they came in oral form from the mouths of elders. Such approaches persist in more recent times as a characteristic of the commentaries of many contemporary journalists, travelers, and other assorted “instant experts,” for whom any convenient source is treated as an authoritative source. Such people often do not have either the time or inclination to engage in coherent critique of such “authentic” African sources.

⁵¹ For a debate on this see Hartwig, “Oral Traditions;” Pendler-Cudlip, Patrick, “Encyclopedic Informants and Early Interlacustrine History,” IJAHS 6(1973), 198–210Google Scholar; and Hartwig, , “Oral Data and its Historical Function in East Africa,” IJAHS 7(1975), 468–479Google Scholar.

⁵² For one example of these methods see Webster, J. B. in East African Journal (02 1970)Google Scholar; Ogot, B. A., History of the Southern Luo (Nairobi, 1967), 11–27Google Scholar.

⁵³ Vansina, , De la tradition orale, 191–92Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Vansina himself recognized the “subjective” dimension to interpretation, even as he deemed it essential: Vansina, , “Introduction” in Vansina, J., Mauny, R., and Thomas, L. V., eds., The Historian in Tropical Africa (London, 1964), esp. 76–83Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ One of the most elaborate attempts in this vein was Cohen, D. W., “A Survey of Interla-custrine Chronology,” JAH 11(1970), 177–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁶ Henige, Chronology of Oral Tradition. Henige's publications are by no means confined to chronological issues, but on this topic, see “Oral Tradition and Chronology,” JAH 12(1971), 371–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem., “Reflections on Early Interlacustrine Chronololgy: an Essay in Source Criticism,” JAH 15(1974), 27-46. For broader concerns, see his Oral Historiography (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; In Search of Columbus: the Sources for the First Voyage (Tucson, 1991)Google Scholar; Numbers from Nowhere: the American Indian Contact Population Debate (Norman, 1998)Google Scholar, and Historical Evidence and Argument (Madison, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ In referring to his discussions with Henige, even Vansina—an ardent exponent of rigorous critique himself—had to admit that “our discussions [on “the nature of evidence and the rules that should govern its use”] … sometimes sounded rather as if Moses had dropped in for a reminder or two about one of the commandments.” Vansina, , How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa before 1600 (Charlottesville, 2004), xi–xiiGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁸ Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., Structure and Function in Primitive Societies (Glencoe, 1952)Google Scholar, especially “On the Concept of Function in Social Science,” 178-87, esp. 183, where he refers to “functional unity, or the inner consistency of a social system.” Two well-known collections in this mode were Max Gluckman's collections of essays entitled Custom and Conflict in Africa (Oxford, 1956)Google Scholar (see especially “The Peace in the Feud,” 1-26, and “The Frailty in Authority,” 27-53), and idem., Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (London, 1963).

⁵⁹ Vansina, , Living with Africa, 11Google Scholar: “British social anthropologists … dismissed history as conjectural” (the term used by Radcliffe-Brown), and ibid., 10: “[In the eyes of structural-functionalist anthropologists] [a]ny consideration of history only muddied the analysis.”

⁶⁰ Luc de Heusch is the major exponent of such work in Africa: see note 23 for his relevant publications. Among other important exponents are Willis, Roy, A State in the Making (Bloomington, 1974)Google Scholar; and Wrigley, “Rukidi.” An earlier work of de Heusch, , Le Rwanda et la civilisation interlacustre (Brussels, 1966)Google Scholar, takes a slightly different approach to the history, drawing on local level ethnographic data (not court traditions), and using structural oppositions to explore changing social identities within an evolving political history, focusing especially on religious identity as important forms of social cohesion.

⁶¹ In Living with Africa, 207, 98, Vansina comments on Kingdoms of the Savanna: “The writing was hectic. … It was destined to be an ‘exploratory work’ …. [But] a whole generation of historians took it as a definitive synthesis. It has had too much success.”

⁶² Miller, “Dynamics;” idem., “Listening.”

⁶³ Irwin, , Liptako Speaks (Princeton 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Wright, Donald, “Can a Blind Man Really Know an Elephant? Lessons on the Limitations of Oral Tradition from Paul Irwin's Liptako Speaks,” HA 9(1982), 303–23Google Scholar; idem., “Requiem for the Use of Oral Tradition to Reconstruct the Precolonial History of the Lower Gambia,” HA 18(1991), 399-408.

⁶⁴ Throughout I have referred to the French version, because the English translation is in many ways very different, and the French version is the better book: it has greater structural integrity, and it avoids the distortions that arise from a weak translation. (To take but one frivolous example, “couteaux de jet” among the Kuba, which anyone remotely familiar with Kuba culture will identify as throwing knives, in this translation became “knives jet black in color.”) But the deficiencies of translation are not only in overt mistranslation; they also relate to the structure of presentation—the French version is much more elegant, less turgid. Yet most Anglophone critics have referred exclusively to the (flawed) translation.

⁶⁵ Cohen, D. W., “Reconstructing a Conflict in Bunafu” in The African Past Speaks, 206Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ As an indication of his esteem for some of these critics-from-within, Vansina later dedicated How Societies are Born (2004) to David Henige and Joseph Miller (and to Beatrix Heintze) “for decades of friendship and support.”

⁶⁷ (Madison 1975).

⁶⁸ Les tribus Kuba et les peuplades apparentées (Tervuren, 1959)Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Vansina, , Living With Africa, 97Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Gesheidenis van de Kuba van ongeveer 1500 tot 1904 (Tervuren, 1963)Google Scholar. Vansina's, assessment appears in Living With Africa, 98Google Scholar.

⁷¹ (Madison 1966).

⁷² Oliver, Roland, JAH 7(1966), 514CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see note 60 above for Vansina's own comments.

⁷³ De Heusch, , Roi ivre, translated as The Drunken King or The Origin of the State, trans. Willis, R. (Bloomington, 1982)Google Scholar. De Heusch begins this work (15-18) and his Rois nés, 8-9, with critiques of Vansina and uses Vansina's work as a foil throughout.

⁷⁴ Vansina, , Living With Africa, 207Google Scholar.

⁷⁵ There are, of course, also many solid monographs on this general culture zone by others, less visible to outsider researchers: Miller, J. C., Kings and Kinsmen (Oxford, 1976)Google Scholar; Hoover, Jeffrey, “The Seduction of Ruwej: Reconstructing Ruund History” (Ph.D., Yale University, 1978)Google Scholar; Reefe, T. Q., The Rainbow and the Kings:a History of the Luba Empire to 1891 (Berkeley, 1981)Google Scholar; Yoder, John C., The Kanyok of Zaire: an Institutional and Ideological History to 1895 (Cambridge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pritchett, J., The Lunda-Ndembu: Style, Change, and Social Transformation in South Central Africa (Madison, 2001)Google Scholar; Thornton, John K., The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641-1718 (Madison, 1983)Google Scholar; Hilton, Anne, Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar; MacGaffey, Wyatt, Kongo Political Culture: the Conceptual Challenge of the Particular (Bloomington, 2000)Google Scholar, and even Vansina's own Children of Woot and How Societies are Born. Among many other important works on the area, see Vellut, J.-L., “Relations internationales du Moyen-Kwango et de l'Angola dans la deuxième moitié du XVIIIè siècle,” Études d'Histoire Africaine 1(1970), 75–135Google Scholar; idem., “Notes sur le Lunda et la frontière luso-africaine (1700-1900),” Études d'Histoire Africaine 3(1972), 61-166.

⁷⁶ Vansina, , Paths in the Rainforests: Towards a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, 1990)Google Scholar. Although Vansina first presented his method as “Words and Things” in The Children of Woot, 18-20, this method came of age in Paths in the Rainforest, 11-16, and How Societies Are Born, 5-11, and passim for both books.

⁷⁷ Vansina, , Children of Woot, 88Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Especially De la tradition orale, along with “Recording the Oral History of the Bakuba.”

⁷⁹ Vansina, , Living With Africa, 173Google Scholar; he added: “It may well be the single most important piece I ever wrote …. It still represents my basic attitude toward the craft of the historian today.” See also Henige, David, “Gambit Denied: Pervasive Doubt about Systematic Doubt” in Paths Towards the Past, 77–95Google Scholar. Vansina's article was hindered in its audience, perhaps, for being very closely tied specifically to his Kuba data; it was written as part of his reassessment of specifically Kuba materials. See note 17 above. From a broad although admittedly incomplete familiarity with his work, my own feeling is that two other essays might serve as candidates for the most important of his articles—not in terms of their effect on their fields, for they too were neglected, but in terms of offering radically new interpretations of established thinking, well grounded in the empirical record. “Lignages, idéologie, et histoire en Afrique centrale,” Enquêtes et Documents de l'Histoire Africaine (1980), 133–56Google Scholar, completely revised the assumptions of lineage and clan as the universal bedrock of social organization in Africa. His “Les mouvements religieux Kuba (Kasai) à l'époque coloniale,” Études d'Histoire Africaine 2(1971), 155–87Google Scholar, provided a radically new view of religious history, deriving from deep expressive culture, not the spread of specific institutions, and therefore linking various kinds of religious expression as parts of single field. Both articles appeared in the excellent journals published by the Department of History at the University of Zaire, but since these were Zairean journals that published primarily (though not exclusively) on Central Africa and were not widely distributed, these articles never received the attention or respect they deserved—and still do today.

⁸⁰ Vansina, “Traditions of Genesis,” Some of the essential features were repeated in “The Power of Systematic Doubt.” The characteristics of “Traditions of Genesis” illustrate the contradictory and incomplete nature of his own evolution: while it was based on a fundamentally different concept of oral sources, it still stressed the importance of the canons of critique; hence it would be criticized by both those who denied the validity of critique—the fundamentalists—and those who felt he did not go far enough and accept the structuralist premise that these traditions of genesis had little to do with lived history.

⁸¹ Vansina, , “L'influence du mode de compréhension historique d'une civilisation sur ses traditions d'origine: l'exemple Kuba,” Bulletin de Séances le l'ARSOM 19(1973), 220–40Google Scholar.

⁸² Vansina, La légende du passé.

⁸³ Vansina, , Living With Africa, 149Google Scholar. It may be rivaled in its neglect by another worthy book, which appeared almost simultaneously and which was also almost entirely neglected (but not quite!)—but for the opposite reason. While La Légende du passé was neglected in part because it denied the possibility of “history” from these oral sources alone, The Tio Kingdom of the Middle Congo, 1880-1892 (London, 1973)Google Scholar was neglected for being so precise and particular: it was rich with data and close to the subject, small-scale, and intimate. Indeed, it was roundly attacked for being positivistic: Vidal, Claudine, “L'ethnographie à l'imparfait: un cas d'ethno-histoire,” Cahiers d'Études Africaines 16(1976), 397–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with rejoinders by Chrétien, J-P., Perrot, C.-H., Vansina, , and Vidal, in Cahiers d'Études Africaines 17(66–67) (1977), 369–80.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar Yet The Tio Kingdom was chock full of detail—again a very condensed book—and in Vansina's eyes an experiment in “the application of process models paradigm.” (See his “Process Models in African History,” in The Historian in Tropical Africa, 375-86): “Doing the research and writing for this book was [sic] one of the most deeply satisfying experiences in my professional life: it came out just as I wanted it to.” Living With History, 151.

⁸⁴ These aspects all reinforce the feeling that this article was in part a response to the Wrigley's “Rukidi.”

⁸⁵ In Oral Tradition as History, the goal of analysis appears to be to establish the independence of oral traditions from various origins (148): “If sources are independent and confirm each other, the events or situations can be taken as proven…. Independent confirmation is conclusive proof in history.” Yet only a few pages later (159) he noted that “[w]e cannot assume that the testimony of two different informants from the same community or even society is really independent…. In history proof is given only when two independent sources confirm the same event or situation but this proof cannot be given under most conditions from oral sources alone…. Feedback and contamination are the norm.” Here his terminology is revelatory, since even the concept of “contamination” presumes an original “pure” tradition; nonetheless even the formation of such oral testimony is formed of various elements, never entirely independent of the “great pool of information kept in memory and its relatively free flow.” (159) From such ambiguity, one can see how this lends itself to critics who don't always read his work with the same contextual sensitivities and care that they themselves call for.

⁸⁶ Vansina, , Children of Woot, 19Google Scholar; also noted in Oral Tradition as History, 130.

⁸⁷ Ibid., 115: “The Rundi political system did not favor historical memory…. There was nothing to favor the rise of detailed oral traditions…. It was in everyone's interest to forget the past. The contrast with Rwanda was great.”

⁸⁸ Vansina had also led a team in Rwanda that systematically collected many thousands of pages of transcribed/translated interview data; “even though the texts are now available on microfilm … most of the information they contain … has still not been studied.” (Living with History, 84.) Vansina has drawn on some of those texts in his more recent Le Rwanda ancien; see also Vansina, J., “Historical Tales (Ibitéekerezo) and the History of Rwanda,” HA 2 (2000), 375–415Google Scholar. For one exploration of material drawn from these narratives see my “‘Bunyabungo:’ the Western Frontier in Rwanda” in Kopytoff, I, ed., The African Frontier: the Reproduction of Traditional African Societies (Bloomington, 1986), 162–92Google Scholar.

⁸⁹ Vansina, , La légende du passé, 220Google Scholar; translation mine.

⁹⁰ Ibid., 219.

⁹¹ It also drew on the work of yet another former student, who developed the concept of “core clichés” in the formation and reiteration of oral narratives: Harold Scheub, Xhosa Ntsomi; similarly Biebuyck, Daniel, Hero and Chief: Epic Literature from the Banyanga (Berkeley, 1978)Google Scholar, includes many fascinating examples of variants built on kernels of Nyanga “core clichés” or “mythemes.” See my review in the Canadian Journal of African Studies 15(1981), 364–66Google Scholar.

⁹² See for example, the review by Shorter, A., in Azania 11(1976), 185–86Google Scholar.

⁹³ Vansina, Oral Tradition as History.

⁹⁴ Jean-Pierre Chrétien's articles on variants of the royal “genesis” myth in Burundi followed in Vansina's footsteps to a remarkable degree, but rather than despairing of the data, Chrétien derived from them broader patterns, identifying two “cycles” of oral sources. (The term “cycles” alludes to a combination of elements of genre, of reference to the form of circulation within the society—rather than linear transmission—and of sequential dating between the two broad genres.) See Chrétien, J.-P., “Du hirsute au Hamite: les variations du cycle de Ntare Rushatsi, fondateur du royaume du Burundi,” HA 8(1981), 3–41Google Scholar; idem., “Nouvelles hypothèses sur les origines du Burundi” in L'arbre mémoire: traditions orales du Burundi, ed. L. Ndoricimpa and C. Guillet (Paris/Bujumbura, 1984), 11-53. For an application of this to the larger historical processes see Newbury, D., “Precolonial Burundi and Rwanda: Local Loyalties, Regional Royalties,” IJAHS 34(2001), 255–314Google Scholar.

⁹⁵ The most notable exception to his avoidance of addressing theoretical issues directly is found in “Is Elegance Proof?,” a comprehensive critique of the principles of structuralism as exemplified in de Heusch's Rois nés. Other excursions in this field include “Lignage, idéologie, et histoire;” “Knowledge and Perceptions of the African Past” in Jewsiewicki, Bogumil and Newbury, David, eds., African Historiographies (Newbury Park, 1985), 28–41Google Scholar; “The Ethnographic Account as Genre in Central Africa,” Paideuma 33(1987), 433–44Google Scholar; and in several other overviews.

⁹⁶ Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating our Pasts, 146n15: “The tightness of Vansina's methodological excursions is in contrast to the greater openness of his methods in practice, in his empirical historical studies. [In The Children of Woot] for instance, he has made a sensibly opportunist use of structuralist explanation [even when in conceptual commentaries, he has attacked stucturalist analysis used for historical purposes].” Indeed, each of his five major “empirical historical studies”—excluding La Légende du Passé, discussed in the text above—is methodologically innovative and explicit, and each includes an illuminating discussion of method in practice that goes beyond the general conceptual issues addressed in his two conceptual volumes: Tio Kingdom, 15-29; Children of Woot, 15-89; Paths in the Rainforest, 3-33; Le Rwanda ancien, 11-22, 255-74 (translated as Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom (Madison, 2004), 3–13, 207–220)Google Scholar; and How Societies Are Born, 1-14. In addition, each of these volumes was associated with significant methodological articles written in tandem with them. For The Tio Kingdom see “The Use of Process Models in African History,” in The Historian in Tropical Africa, 375-89. For The Children of Woot see “Traditions of Genesis” and “Probing the Past of the Lower Kwilu Peoples,” Paideuma 19/20(1974), 332–64Google Scholar. For Paths in the Rainforest see “Deep Down Time,” HA 16(1989), 341–62Google Scholar; “Lignage, idéologie et histoire;” “Towards a History of Lost Corners of the World,” Economic History Review 35(1982), 165–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The History of God among Kuba,” Africa [Rome] 28(1983), 17–39Google Scholar; “Western Bantu Expansion,” JAH 2 (1984), 129–45Google Scholar. For Antecedents to Modern Rwanda see “Historical Tales (Ibiteekerezo).” For How Societies are Born see “A Slow Revolution: Farming in Subequatorial Africa,” Azania 29/30(1994/1995), 15–26Google Scholar.

⁹⁷ Hamilton, Carolyn, Terrific Majesty: the Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge MA, 1998), 207–08Google Scholar. Similarly, in her discussion of the work of James Stuart, Hamilton calls for the need to distinguish between his scholarly research (as “an authority on Zulu customs and history”) on the one hand and his public advocacy (in the colonial arena) on the other. His scholarly work was “tentative and exploratory” (ibid., 164-65); he sought to develop a coherent methodology but respecting different variants among oral testimonies.” (150) Stuart constantly added new material, “rigorously distinguishing between material from different sources … cross-referencing but never merging, never synthesizing or ironing out the contradictions.” (ibid., 144) He sought, as faithfully as possible, “to record the original content of the testimonies.” (ibid., 151-52). Such a distinction (between public advocacy and private scholarship) can be seen as analogous to Vansina's operational dilemma as well: that of simultaneously developing a rigorous methodology (very similar to Hamiton's approving portrayal of Stuart's methods) and that of public advocacy, but in Vansina's case the “advocacy” was not to the colonial/administrative power but to another power: the hegemonic scholarly community of the day.

⁹⁸ Tonkin, , Narrating Our Pasts, 3Google Scholar.

⁹⁹ Hamilton, , “Ideology and Oral Traditions: Listening to the Voices ‘from Below,’” HA 1(1987), 67–86Google Scholar. See also Hofmeyr, “We Spend Our Years”.