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Towards an Early History of the East African Interior*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Michael Twaddle
Michael Twaddle*
Affiliation:
University of London
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Extract

The period between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries is a perplexing one in the history of the east African interior. For the first part of the period archeology is the most reliable indicator of what really happened there. For the second part oral traditions supplement the archeological record. Regarding evidence, therefore, our period is one of transition. Our principal concern in this survey will be to consider how far this transition in evidence reflects actual transitions in history.

This is an intricate problem. Each piece of historical evidence reflects its historical origin. This applies as much to pottery fragments and spear tips as to oral traditions. However, the former are easier to handle historically than the latter; they are products of their own time. On the other hand, oral traditions tend to be products of our time in this particular area of Africa. Before the nineteenth century indigenous literacy was restricted to a very narrow strip of land along the coast, and during our period contacts between coast and interior were extremely limited. Literate outsiders did not penetrate into the interior in any number until the last half of the nineteenth century, and even then earlier history did not receive much attention from these footloose adventurers. Oral traditions relating to the early history of the interior were only reduced to writing in substance during the subsequent colonial period-sometimes by newly-arrived European missionaries and administrators, more frequently by newly-literate African intellectuals. These circumstances create special interpretative problems. Some of these problems are common to all oral traditions relating to early history, while others are peculiar to the particular colonial situations in which the oral traditions were first recorded.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 2 , 1975 , pp. 147 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1975

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Footnotes

*

I must thank Roland Oliver for initially encouraging me to write this papei, and David Henige, Merrick Posnansky, Andrew Roberts, John Sutton, John Tosh, and Bertin Webster for commenting helpfully on it in draft. Needless to say, their advice was not unanimous and I alone am responsible for what appears here.

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