For over thirty years, History in Africa: A Journal of Method has been at the forefront of publishing scholarship on textual analysis and criticism of African historical sources, historiographical essays on the literature concerning Africa's past, bibliographical essays on relevant historical topics, reflections on the role of theory in historical investigation, and archive reports. The new editorial team will maintain this profile with an emphasis on theory and method, while aiming to enhance the journal by focusing on issues that will expand its appeal beyond its current audience. We seek to broaden the framing of methodological and historiographical topics to discuss new information technologies and pedagogical issues. The new editors work with an inclusive definition of “History” and invite scholars, no matter what discipline, to join the discussion and analysis of the past. In the multi-polar world of the twenty-first century, the new editors embrace the “in” in the title and are committed to publishing an increased number of articles from scholars on the continent. We also operate with a pluriform definition of “Africa” that includes the worlds of the diaspora and recognizes regional variations in the continent. The new editors wish to bring new perspectives associated with Africa's twenty-first century renaissance into the journal. Finally, the new editors will remain faithful to the focus of David Henige, the founding and long-serving editor of History in Africa, on the critical analysis of both the epistemological bases of historical inquiry and the construction of arguments about the past.

William C. Burke, an African American emigrant in Liberia, wrote the following to an acquaintance in the United States on 23 September 1861:

Burke's lamentation about the impact of the American Civil War on the distant Atlantic shores of Africa underscores a problem—and opportunity—in Liberian historiography. Burke's nineteenth-century world extended past the distinct national boundaries that separated the United States and Liberia. Geographically, this was the vast littoral of the four continents—Africa, Europe, North America, and South America—abutting the Atlantic Ocean. But the Atlantic world, as historians now dubbed this sprawling transnational zone, was much more extensive. Societies near and faraway were also drawn into the web of socioeconomic activities in the basin. The creation of the Atlantic world spanned almost four centuries, from the late fifteenth to the waning decades of the nineteenth century. In this period, an unprecedented multitude of migrants crisscrossed the Atlantic creating a vast network. For example, by the nineteenth century, regular transatlantic packages such as the Mary Caroline Stevens whose delay Burke called “a great disappointment,” transported passengers, provisions, and dispatches between the United States and Liberia.

Les employés africains de l'Etat colonial font aujourd'hui l'objet d'un important renouveau historiographique. Des travaux récents sur les enseignants, les sages-femmes, les tirailleurs, ou encore les interprètes ont considérablement renouvelé l'histoire africaine. Dans le même temps, les termes désignant les groupes sociaux situés dans l'entre-deux de la société coloniale se multiplient: Intermédiaires culturels, intermédiaires coloniaux, middle figures, middle men, médiateurs, courtiers/brokers, etc. La question se pose dès lors des sources et méthodes pertinentes pour étudier ces catégories sociales. La présente contribution propose de s'intéresser à un type de source encore sous-utilisé par les historiens de l'Afrique: les dossiers de carrière. Elle défend l'idée que ces sources peuvent enrichir considérablement notre compréhension des carrières africaines au sein de l'Etat colonial et, partant, l'histoire des rapports entre Etat et sociétés en Afrique.

L'étude de cas concerne l'histoire de la police civile au Togo. L'enquête porte sur un corpus de 114 dossiers individuels de policiers ayant servi entre les années 1940 et le début des années 1960, dossiers actuellement conservés au Ministère de la Fonction Publique et de la Réforme Administrative à Lomé. Le recours à ce type de source n'est pas le résultat d'un parti pris, mais le constat, au terme d'une enquête historiographique et de terrain, de leur utilité pour l'histoire des corps professionnels d'Etat. Aujourd'hui bien connus des historiens et anthropologues européanistes, les dossiers de carrière—et, plus généralement, les dossiers personnels—restent pourtant peu utilisés par les historiens de l'Afrique.

Historians have relied on a variety of sources to analyze Africa's encounter with Europe and response to colonialism. Several scholars, who have published in the Heinemann African Social History Series, have relied on oral accounts to add an indigenous perspective to the history of colonialism in Africa. African history nevertheless suffers from a lack of other sources, such as diaries, journals, and personal narratives, which can enrich the historical narrative. Letters of petitions provide one of the very few opportunities to locate African men and women's voices as they confronted the new political, economic, judicial and social system that emerged in the colonial context. Petitions were widely used by every class of the African population in the colonial period and can help to re-evaluate African-European interactions and dialogues in a colonial context. Their existence challenges the notion of colonial authorities as a hegemonic force in the making of colonized societies in light of new forms of evidence that redefine this encounter. Petitions were used by individuals as well as groups as a means to seek remedy for grievance for a number of types of actions, ranging from taxation, court cases and a variety of other issues.

The history of the commercial entrepôts on the Atlantic coast of West Africa in the pre-colonial period is far from being a neglected topic, but has attracted considerable academic research. The potential value of a biographical (or prosopographical) approach to the social history of such coastal communities has also long been recognized, the classic pioneering example being Margaret Priestley's study of the Brew family of Anomabu, on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), founded by the locally settled Irish slave-trader Richard Brew (died 1776). The case of the Brews, however, presents exceptionally favorable conditions for the reconstruction both of individual biography and of collective family history, in that the founder was literate and generated a considerable corpus of written records which survives to the present, while for subsequent generations of the family the early establishment of an institutionalized form of British proto-colonial administration on the Gold Coast also yielded relatively abundant documentation.

Elsewhere on the coast, and more particularly for individuals and families lower down the social scale, the amount of evidence available is likely to be much more limited and fragmentary. The present article represents a tentative attempt at a biography of a person of much lesser eminence than Richard Brew or his descendants, which may therefore be regarded as a venture into the field of subaltern history. To the extent that it also concerns someone who generated no documentation of his own, but whose life has to be reconstructed from incidental references in the records of the external agencies with whom he had dealings, it is also conceived as a methodological exploration of the possibility of extracting an African voice and perspective from European (and Eurocentric) sources.

In 2001 I attended a meeting at the London headquarters of the Movement for a Resurgent Togoland (MORETO). Seven people—mainly middle-aged and elderly men from the inland Ewe-speaking areas of Ghana—had gathered together to share their findings about the modern political history of the area where they were born. They vocalised their dissatisfaction with the incorporation of this area within the borders of Ghana at independence in 1957, and they discussed how this situation came about, and whether it could be rectified. In the course of this meeting, I began to realize that contests over Ewe history had gone global. Controversial issues, which scholars had previously addressed through detailed diachronic local studies, were now being played out across a global diaspora, capturing the attention not only of Ewe-speakers originating from a specific town or district, or having a direct stake in a particular version of its history, but also of anonymous commentators, scattered thousands of miles across the globe. In this paper, I describe some of my encounters with Ewe-speaking people who study their recent political history, and I analyze some of their writings. I suggest that, despite recent attention to history-writing by Africans during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, further reflection is required on two key issues: firstly, the circulation of historical knowledge and forms of historical debate among Africans living in the global diaspora; secondly, the implications of this for historians researching the post-colonial period.

Those who have visited book stores in Zimbabwe in recent years, even the small one in Harare international airport, will have seen a thin volume authored by G.A. Chaza and entitled Bhurakuwacha: The Story of a Black Policeman in Colonial Southern Rhodesia. Bhurakuwacha is the longest and most detailed first hand account by an African member of the British South Africa Police (BSAP), Southern Rhodesia's paramilitary law enforcement organization, and as such constitutes an important source for studying the experience of black security force members in a white settler state.

Chaza was typical of the moderate and loyalist black middle class of the 1940s and 1950s that wanted equality with whites as part of a civilized imperial citizenry but became less significant during the anti-colonial and revolutionary violence of the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, the book only hints at Chaza's early interest in writing which began when he was a young constable in the late 1930s and continued through his post-retirement involvement in politics in the early 1960s.

The aim of this paper is to examine the first three decades of Chaza's publications within the context of African police service in the colonial era. Bhurakuwacha was written after African nationalists had come to power in independent Zimbabwe and promoted a version of history that lionized those who had resisted colonial rule and vilified those, such as African policemen, who had worked for the colonial state. Therefore, it is tempting to see Chaza's book as an effort to rehabilitate his image by portraying African colonial police as victims of racism against which some, like the author, struggled. Looking at his now forgotten earlier writings will illustrate how Chaza's views changed over the years and reveal whether or not Bhurakuwacha represents an accurate account of African colonial police service.

In an article in this journal almost fifteen years ago, Colleen Kriger discussed the reluctance of historians of Africa to use objects as sources in their research. She pointed to the rich reservoir of objects “made by African hands” in museum collections around the world, which lies virtually untapped by historians. However, she also noted that while objects are “unusually eloquent remnants from the past,” they are problematic sources, presenting “special difficulties in evaluation and interpretation.”

The purpose of this article is to draw attention to the existence of a number of embroidery samplers that were stitched by African girls in mission schools in the British colony of Sierra Leone in the period from the 1820s to the 1840s. So far, I have found thirteen of these samplers, which are preserved in a number of archival, private and museum collections in Europe and the USA. To historians, these pieces of needlework are of interest because they were generated by a group of people for whom we do not usually have first-hand documentary material. Moreover, they represent the direct material traces of the activity of the girls who made them, and thus appear to offer the possibility of an emphatic insight into their experience.

However, these “textile documents” present serious problems of interpretation. What exactly can they be expected to tell the modern historian? In particular, how far, in fact, do they express the perspectives of the African girls who made them, as distinct from the European missionaries who directed their work? Careful source criticism and an examination of the purpose for which they were produced will help to clarify these issues.

When Kenya-born singer-songwriter Roger Whittaker sang these doleful words in 1983, the village of Shimoni was a relatively quiet backwater on the southern Kenya coast, known primarily for its deep-sea fishing club. It is now a much larger and busier place, where tourists come to see the ‘slave cave’ that gives Shimoni its name (Swahili shimo-ni, “at the cave”), and embark on boat trips to Wasini Island and the nearby Kisite-Mpunguti Marine National Park (see Figure 1). Whittaker's song played a significant role in this development, by bringing Shimoni and its caves to wider attention, and focusing on one of a number of narratives about the caves' past usage. The lyrics of ‘Shimoni’ did not simply embellish a local tale, but (re)created it in the image of metanarratives about the history of slavery on the East African coast. As we will argue in this paper, these metarratives now dominate reconstructions of the past in Shimoni, and are reinforced by the activities and institutions that constitute and promote the caves as an important site of cultural heritage.

In an edited volume entitled The State in Tanzania, published in 1980 just before the precipitous denouement of President Julius Nyerere's philosophy of African socialism known as Ujamaa, Haroub Othman began with the question of the sub-title, “Who Controls it and Whose Interest Does it Serve?” The cover featured a large black question mark on a red background. Provocatively Othman asked, “can one say in a specific and definite sense that Tanzania is building socialism?” Exhibiting a remarkable level of open criticism of the government in a one-party state, the essays framed their issues in the Marxist terms that were long predominant in literature on the Tanzanian state. The book dealt with an ongoing concern that Tanzania's ambitious goals for democracy and development were not being met and the overarching nationalist question of which sovereign defined those goals. It was a question that continues to vex political scientists of Africa today who seek to reconcile Westphalian concepts of sovereignty with the layered realities of African polities struggling to exert sovereign authority both internally and externally.

Reviewing a representative sample of nearly fifty years of scholarship on the postcolonial Tanzanian state, one is struck by the tension enervating Othman's essays. Scholars are torn between the impulse to understand the theoretical implications of Tanzania's experience for socialism and a more pragmatic concern to evaluate the country's claim to sovereign authority.

In 1974 the Ethiopian government of Emperor Haile-Sellasie was overthrown and replaced by the Provisional Military Administrative Council (PMAC). Also known as the Derg, the PMAC adopted socialism, embarked on radical social changes, and retained power for over two decades under its leader, Mengistu Hayle-Maryam, eventually was overthrown in 1991. The Ethiopian Revolution and the Derg are the topics of several authors, including those publishing close to the events, such as Raul Valdes Vivo, Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux, and John Markakis and Nega Ayele, and those writing later, such as Christopher Clapham, Edmond Keller, and Bahru Zewde, to name just a few publishing in English. But other publications, in Amharic and English, remain the focus of a lively academic and public debate in Ethiopia. Most of these writings were produced by participants in events, or, in one case, are transcripts of interviews with participants. Some of the raconteurs were revolutionaries, others were their opponents, and still others were members of the imperial regime. Taken together, these publications shed light on the genesis of the Ethiopian Revolution (the February 1974 movements), the consolidation of Derg (in November 1977), and its aftermath. This note examines some of these materials to bring them to the attention of readers of this journal.

Forty-five years ago (1965), when some of us were beginning our studies of the history of the Upper Guinea coast, there existed only a few published general histories of Guinea-Conakry or region-based models to guide us. André Arcin's substantial works (1907 and 1911) provided original but awkward structures from which we could commence our work, but his monographs tended to be based heavily upon a colonial presence, a necessity to make sense of a complex colony, and a reliance upon oral traditions or other uncitationed sources, many of which could not be tested a half century later. Christopher Fyfe's comprehensive history of Sierra Leone had just been published in 1962. Fyfe's foremost emphasis was to chronicle the development of the Sierra Leone settlement and chart that colony's progress, but his extensive documentation was extraordinary in that it demonstrated the clear link between the “Northern Rivers” and British enterprise from Freetown and opened Britain's archives as sources of information about the history of these rivers in new and profound ways.

Earlier works by Lucien Marie Francois Famechon, Jules Machat, Fernand Rouget, Laurent Jean B. Bérenger-Férand, Ch. Bour, and others, centering upon the peoples, economies, and terrain of coastal rivers, continued to be instructive, but these authors were writing at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and they tended to treat the histories of indigenous peoples as interesting and exotic and at the same time relatively unimportant to the colony's regional development.

The basic purpose here is to offer an archival report about historical and ethnographic material collected partly in Mali but mostly in Guinea, when such efforts in the latter country were contrary to official government policy and in some cases could be hazardous to undertake. Owing to the risks involved in some intellectual activities in Guinea between 1958 and 1984, as well as the importance of the material recorded on reel-to-reel tapes in this archive, the research accomplished by Djibril Tamsir Niane in the 1960s that culminated in the 1969-1971 expeditions to Baga villages, was itself historically significant. Moreover, the fact that once the research had been done the recorded information survived ensuing decades of potentially destructive climatic conditions and political events is remarkable. Therefore, as a prologue to introducing the archival material in the process of preservation at the time of this writing, it seems appropriate to begin this report with a description of the circumstances under which the recordings were made and how they survived to the present day.

The turbulent modern history of South Africa, which includes notable events such as the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the banning and exile of the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), and the dramatic transition from apartheid to democracy in the early 1990s, has drawn academics from a number of fields to studying the nation from a variety of angles. Two such topics which have attracted scholarly attention are the foreign policy of South Africa both during apartheid, and subsequently after its demise in 1994, and the multi faceted activities of the liberation movements fighting against it. When looking at the international relations of South Africa from the end of the Second World War, through until the present day, it is almost impossible to analyse this dimension of South Africa's past without examining the lasting effects that the political mindset of apartheid had upon foreign policy decision making, and the international community. Likewise, the history of the liberation movements such as the ANC and the PAC were shaped by their attempts to defeat apartheid and the eventual end to the struggle. The histories of the ANC and South African foreign policy are inextricably linked, demonstrating the importance of what has, and is occurring in the country, creating a complex, but truly intriguing area of research for academics.

Conducting archival research on these two areas of interest is relatively easy in South Africa, with on the whole, well stocked, largely deserted, and easy to use archives located across the country.

The Mitchell collection at the Manuscripts and Archives Department of The University of Cape Town (UCT) consists of the papers of Diana Mary Mitchell, a leading white Rhodesian liberal in the 1960s and 1970s as well as private papers of some other politically active Rhodesians, such as Morris Hirsch, Pat Bashford and Allan Savory. This report presents the Mitchell collection as an instrument to investigate issues of agency by liberal White Rhodesian women in the period 1950-1980, thus aiming to counter some dominant trends in the historiography of Rhodesia and Zimbabwe.

Diana Mitchell was born in Salisbury, Rhodesia, in 1932. Her father was a merchant marine officer and her mother was originally from Australia. She attended Eveline High School in Bulawayo and with financial help from her mother she completed a BA in History at Cape Town University in 1953. Before entering formal party politics, Mitchell ran a “backyard school” which provided schooling for African children who otherwise would have had no access to education. After the announcement of the illegal Declaration of Independence (UDI), in 1965 the Rhodesian Front (RF) closed such schools and Mitchell charges this move as being “the key to my activism.” While Mitchell acknowledges that she “worked voluntarily because I could afford to, my husband was the breadwinner […] so I could afford to be this so called ‘liberal’ because of my standard of living,” she became heavily involved in parliamentary politics and was one of the founding members of the Centre Party (CP).

This short note introduces Synchrotext software, which was designed for representing African oral traditions and other kinds of performances and events. I began my documentation and analysis of Haya oral tradition in 1968. Synchrotext is the product of a decades-long project to adequately represent Haya oral traditions with an appropriate technology and an analytic frame that communicate the meaning and art in performance. Synchrotext provides a means of hearing the indigenous voices of oral tradition centered in their own time and inflected with their own intonation.

For some time now, the computer has been employed to enhance research and education in the humanities. Internet sites like the Perseus Project demonstrate the powers of automated information-processing. To date, the computer's constantly evolving, massive, sophisticated storage-and-retrieval capabilities have been focused almost exclusively on the cultural heritage of written texts. And, although computer-assisted archives of recorded oral performances do exist, there remain current needs of oral traditions research that I believe can be more effectively met. In this short note, I would like to specify what those needs are and to introduce the software I have designed to speak to them.

The needs to be discussed relate to five practices that are among those of current concern to students of oral traditions: representation of primary data, research and analysis, modes of collaboration, education, and the safeguarding of performance traditions: Each set of needs is discussed in turn, and each becomes a context for the description and evaluation of software design.