Previous studies of past labor relations in different parts of Africa have relied almost entirely on documentary sources. While such records can provide valuable insights into the range of different labor categories that have existed and the relative proportions of the population involved, for much of the continent they are severely restricted in a temporal sense. Thus, for many areas suitable documentary materials covering the periods prior to 1850 are scarce; as is the case, for example, for much of East Africa. To extend scholarly understanding of the nature of labor relations prior to this date, alternative sources need to be utilized. This paper presents a brief overview of the potential scope for utilizing archaeological data, with specific reference to mainland Tanzania. The paper also highlights the many limitations of archaeological data and offers some thoughts on how these might be addressed from both a conceptual and methodological perspective. The paper concludes with an appeal for more studies oriented toward investigation of the archaeological remains of the last five hundred years and greater dialogue between the region’s historians and archaeologists.

On 18 March 1898 Okolu, an Ijesa man, accused Otunba of Italemo ward, Ondo of seizing and enslaving his sister Osun and his niece. Both mother and daughter, enslaved by the Ikale in 1894, had fled from their master in 1895, but as they headed toward Ilesa, the accused seized them. Osun claimed the accused forced her to become his wife, “hoe a farm,” and marked her daughter's face with one deep, bold line on each cheek. Otunba denied the slavery charge, claiming he only “rescued [Osun] from Soba who was taking her away [and] took her for wife.” Itoyimaki, a defense witness, supported the claim that Osun was not Otunba's slave. In his decision, Albert Erharhdt, the presiding British Commissioner, freed the captives and ordered the accused to pay a fine of two pounds. In addition to integrating Osun through marriage, the mark conferred on her daughter a standard feature of Ondo identity. Although this case came up late in the nineteenth century, it represents a trend in precolonial Yorubaland whereby marriages and esthetics served the purpose of ethnic incorporation.

Studies on the roots of African ethnic identity consciousness have concentrated mostly on the activities of outsiders, usually Euro-American Christian missions, repatriated ex-slaves, and Muslims, whose ideas of nations as geocultural entities were applied to various African groups during the era of the slave trade and, more intensely, under colonialism. For instance, prior to the late nineteenth century, the people now called Yoruba were divided into multiple opposing ethnicities. Ethnic wars displaced millions of people, including about a million Yoruba-speakers deported as slaves to the Americas, Sierra Leone, and the central Sudan, mostly between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The kingdom of Dahomey (or Fon) was probably founded during the first half of the seventheenth century, but emerged clearly as a major power only in the early eighteenth century when its king Agaja (ca. 1716–40) conquered its southern neighbours Allada (1724) and Whydah (1727), thereby establishing direct contact with the European slave-traders at the coast. Dahomey then remained the dominant power in the area until it was itself conquered by the French in the 1892–94. The kingdom ceased to exist as a political entity when its last king was deposed by the French in 1900, but a degree of institutional continuity has been maintained through the performance of rituals at the royal palace (now a museum) in the capital city Abomey. The history of Dahomey from the 1720s onwards is relatively well documented from contemporary European sources, enjoying in particular the unique distinction of being made the subject already in the eighteenth century of a published book—Archibald Dalzel's History of Dahomy (1793). There is also a rich and coherent corpus of narrative traditions relating to the kingdom's history, best known in the classic recension published in 1911 by the French colonial official Le Herissé, which is in fact merely a translation (and in some measure an abridgement, omitting some detailed material) of the account given to him by a single Dahomian informant, Agbidinukun, the chef de canton of the cercle of Abomey under French colonial rule and a brother of the last independent king of Dahomey, Behanzin (1889–94).

In 1974—the same year I ventured into the field to begin collecting oral data for my doctoral thesis, a precolonial history of a Mandinka state at the mouth of the Gambia River—Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman published their now much maligned work on African American slavery, Time on the Cross. With publication of the book, Fogel and Engerman did something few historians had done before or have done since: they made public their evidence—all of it, data and statistical methodology—so others could determine how they had arrived at their conclusions. Perhaps it was because their interpretation of slavery was so different from those preceding it that historians used Fogel and Engerman's published evidence to dismantle, piece by piece, their arguments and the way they had arrived at them.

But making available otherwise inaccessible evidence seemed to me the right thing to do. So, in the field and afterward, I offered up my oral data. (The written evidence I used was already available, either published or in archives at various places on three continents.) I deposited copies of cassette tapes of my interviews, with copies of transcribed translations, in the Gambia and in the United States. Also, within a few years of finishing the dissertation I published two volumes of translated, transcribed, and annotated oral traditions from the collection in an inexpensive series that I thought would be accessible to most interested parties. If people wanted to test my hypotheses, attack my methods, or berate my conclusions, they at least had the materials for doing so.

Captain William Snelgrave's A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea, and the Slave Trade, first published in 1734, is a work well known to historians of West Africa. The largest and most valuable section of it comprises a detailed account of voyages by the author in 1727 and 1730 to the ports of Whydah and Jakin on the Slave Coast, then recently conquered by Dahomey, and offers the earliest extended account of the latter kingdom to be published. The information in Snelgrave's book can also be supplemented by records of testimony which he provided on two occasions, in 1726 and 1731, before the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations in London.

Snelgrave was a slave-trading captain with, at the time of his book's publication, some thirty years' experience of the West African trade. The details of his career are documented principally from his book, which in addition to the voyages of 1727 and 1730 (which form its principal subject), also alludes to several earlier slave-trading voyages undertaken by him. Snelgrave's first voyage to Africa, in which he served as purser on a ship commanded by his father, was to Old Calabar in 1704; a second voyage to Old Calabar was undertaken in 1713, a voyage to Sierra Leone (on which Snelgrave was captured by pirates) in 1719, and a voyage to the Gold Coast in 1721-22. This is not, however, a comprehensive catalog of Snelgrave's voyages, since he also alludes to having visited Whydah on “several voyages” before 1727. Other evidence documents two such earlier voyages by Snelgrave to Whydah, in 1717 and 1725. He was apparently still alive in 1735, the year after the publication of his book, when he is mentioned among a group of people involved in legal proceedings to press claims on the estate of Patrick West, a recently deceased merchant of Antigua.

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.

In the 1960s a host of African nations discovered their independence and, with it, rediscovered the pleasure and the pain of the past. States such as Nigeria and Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda, using both local and expatriate scholars, embarked on the reconstruction of “national histories,” with an enthusiasm which, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, seems enviable. From an academic point of view, this period witnessed the rejection of the colonial distortion of Africa's past—i.e., the idea that basically the continent had none worth talking about—and the historiographical offensive which was thus launched may be seen to have been ultimately successful.

In terms of African politics, history was seen in many new states as a means of nation-building and the fostering of national identity. In Tanzania, for example, precolonial leaders such as Mirambo and Nyungu-ya-Mawe, the relative linguistic unity provided by Swahili, and the anticolonial Maji Maji uprising were used, both consciously and subliminally, to encourage the idea that Tanzanians had shared historical experiences which straddled both the precolonial and the colonial eras.

It must be conceded that history did not always prove as reliable an ally to African politicians as to scholars of Africa. Penetration into the Nigerian past served, indirectly at least, to magnify the regionalism which had already troubled the decolonization process in that territory, and underlined the distinct historical experiences of, for example, the Yoruba in the south and the Hausa-Fulani in the north.

Murray Last obliquely suggests that [the “Kano Chronicle”] is best regarded as a rather free compilation of local legends and traditions drafted in the mid-seventeenth century by a humorous Muslim rationalist who almost seems to have studied under Levi-Strauss.

The danger lies in being carried away by one's own ingenuity.

The question of the authorship and date(s) of writing of the so-called “Kano Chronicle” (KC) and hence how historians should evaluate it as a source, have intrigued students of Kano (and wider Hausa) history since the work was first translated into English by H. R. Palmer in 1908. Palmer himself had the following to say:

The manuscript is of no great age, and must on internal evidence have been written during the latter part of the decade 1883-1893; but it probably represents some earlier record which has now perished….The authorship is unknown, and it is very difficult to make a guess. On the one hand the general style of the composition is quite unlike the “note” struck by the sons of Dan Hodio [ʿUthmān b. Fūdī, Abdulahi and Muḥammad Bello, and imitated by other Fulani writers. There is almost complete absence of bias or partizanship…. On the other hand, the style of the Arabic is not at all like that usually found in the compositions of Hausa mallams of the present day; there are not nearly enough “classical tags” so to speak, in it…. That the author was thoroughly au fait with the Kano dialect of Hausa is evident from several phrases used in the book, for instance “ba râyi ba” used in a sense peculiar to Kano of “perforce.” The original may perhaps have been written by some stranger from the north who settled in Kano, and collected the stories of former kings handed down by oral tradition.

This paper is an assessment of the local historical model of sociopolitical development and settlement history in Ìlàrè community, southwest Nigeria. Ìlàrè was at the nucleus of an early sociopolitical formation in Ìjèsàland. The formation, known as Éka Òsun, held sway over the area of northern Ìjèsàland between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The study forms part of the ongoing archeological and historical investigations on the settlement history and regional interactions in central Yorùbàland.

The episodes of settlement cycling are the hallmarks around which the historical experiences of Ìlàrè are organized. In other words, the trajectories of Ìlàrè's historical experience parallel the shifts in its settlement location (habitus). Moreover, the oral traditions stress intersocietal conflict and intergroup alliance as the important factors in the earliest sociopolitical transformations in northern Ìjèsàland. The traditions also highlight how factional competitions resulted in the continuous shift in the settlement of Ìlàrè within an area of about eight kilometers in diameter over an 800-year period. The oral historical narratives not only draw on kinship idioms in the construction of hierarchical social relations, but the narratives also emphasize intercommunity relations as the plot of historical experience and social actions.

The attempt here is to outline the historical trajectories of events that heralded Ìlàrè as the political center and that characterized its transformations to a political periphery in northern Ìjèsàland. This study also historicizes the long-term patterns of relationship between factional competition and regional inter-community relations on the one hand and sociopolitical development and settlement cycling on the other.

Several studies have demonstrated the impact of oil in Nigeria, with recent literature showing that modern Nigeria can hardly be understood without oil. There is now an abundance of literature to present an overview of the subject. In this first piece, the modest intention is to indicate the range of literature as well as identify the broad themes. An attempt is also made to locate the themes in their historical context in order to indicate some of the major changes in the literature. Subsequent essays will identify the paradigmatic shifts in the literature, as well as the major gaps that exist. In addition, we hope to argue in another essay that large bodies of work exist to sustain reliable comparative studies.

The introduction to this essay sets out the themes to be discussed, and each receives separate attention. These themes include the impact of the oil industry on Nigeria's workers, environment, and communities within the oil rich Niger Delta. They also include the impact of oil revenue on Nigeria's foreign policy, national development, and political stability. An examination of the literature from the 1950s to the present reveals several clear patterns of change. The literature begins with an optimistic view of the oil industry, shifts toward in-depth discussions during the 1970s and 1980s on the impact of the oil shock, and currently resides on issues of environmental destruction and human rights violations incurred from the oil industry. The synthesis presented here privileges research-based essays and books.

For current discourse in the southwest Ethiopian hill farming populations of the Burji, Konso, and D'iraaša, the present time constitutes a spatiotemporal system of coordinates in which modern attitudes to the past and tradition intersect or are knotted with group “memories.”

What do we mean by memory? Who remembers? And how? The word “memory” is used here to refer to the common memory of a local group of people, in other words the cultural processing of memory.

In the course of time such memories have manifested themselves in different ways. This paper examines why certain events are remembered and how their transmission is expressed. Linked to this is the question of the meaning (Sinngehalt) of memory. The question of the relationship between memory and so-called real historical events is thus only secondary. Three types of possible approach are discussed in this paper: mythical time, referring to mytho-historical traditions of origin; cyclical time, as seen in the Gada system (generation grading system); and linear time, as shown in the genealogical lines of specific lineages.

In their traditions, all three population groups refer to a common original settlement area in Liban, to the east of the areas they occupy today. References to Liban, with varying geographical locations, are also found in the oral traditions of many Oromo-speaking groups. Oromo nationalists claim Liban as the common original home of all Oromo. In this paper, however, Oromo-speaking groups are not discussed, since we are mainly concerned with the Burji, Konso, and D'iraaša, for whom, according to their Liban traditions, the exodus was the moment of their separation from the Oromo-speaking Borana, who lived in Liban together with them up to that point.

The use of colonial census data on religious conversion in historical analysis is often fraught with methodological problems. What, at first glance, might appear to have been profound structural transformations of society may in part be illusions created by changes in the census apparatus, or data collection process, itself. In this paper I will discuss how a colonial census was conducted and how local rural peoples were active agents in enumerating their own (official) religious identities. Thus, how did changes in this central tool of bureaucratic knowledge and power distort history? As an overarching critique, I suggest that the problem of the census as an exercise of colonial bureaucratic power in Africa has hardly elicited comment. Thus I suggest that the census may be a potentially fruitful avenue of historical inquiry in examining in closer detail the primary “enumerative modality” of colonial forms of knowledge.

I will present examples from the history of French colonial southern Mali during the postwar period in arguing that the colonial census was a complex social and political process that must be ‘deconstructed’ if we are to make critical use of such state-generated numbers. Southern Mali occupied what was believed, in the French imagination, to be an active frontier of Islamization, separating the “Muslim” Sahel (and Sahara) from the “fetishist” forest regions to the south. This religious frontier status elicited mixed views. As Jean-Loup Amselle has argued, colonial officials in southern Mali adopted a highly ambiguous stance toward Islam, “going from one extreme to another, sometimes seeing Islam everywhere, sometimes nowhere.”

The primary geographical focus for the historical study of Islam in west Africa, until recently, was the western and central Sudan. As the often-cited J. S. Trimingham wrote (1962:7) “The Guinea States in the south lie outside our sphere since they were not in contact with the Sudan states and were uninfluenced by Islam.” Trimingham's conclusion paralleled those of early twentieth-century French and English scholars who dealt with the issue of Islam in west Africa. Paul Marty's voluminous studies, dating from the second decade of this century, dealt with the Islamic and Muslim-influenced traditions of the various peoples of Francophone west Africa. H. R. Palmer, one of the early British writers of this century, concentrated on the northern territories of Nigeria, where Islam has enjoyed a long history.

Two factors explain the focus of these scholars on the western and central Sudan. First, the better known Islamic-influenced kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and Kanem-Bornu were all located in this region. Second, the Islamic states of the western and central Sudan, in particular, presented the greatest problem to both the French and the British during the early periods of the colonial era. Therefore, the focus on this area may have been motivated by the desire of these writers to understand the Islamic factor. Whatever the motivation of writers like Marty, Palmer, and their associates, Trimingham was wrong to conclude that the “the Guinea States” (i.e., the peoples living in the coastal forest belt) were “uninfluenced by Islam.”

In June 1963 Daudi Dabaso Wawera, who at that time was District Commissioner of Isiolo, and Chief Hajji Galma Diida were killed in a Somali ambush near Mado Gashi, fifty kilometers from Garba Tulla, in the area surrounding the Waso Nyiro river in Eastern Kenya. While both of them were killed, their companions and escorts were not touched, in an ambush that was premeditated and calculated. It was a political assassination, insignificant for the processes leading to Kenya's independence later that year, but quite significant for the subsequent historical responses offered by the Boorana of the area, to their eventual integration into a newly-created independent African nation.

That integration was not at all easy; in particular, the time leading to Kenya's independence was a turbulent one for the Waso Boorana. They were part of a larger group of semi-nomadic pastoralists who made up most of the population of that colonial administrative segment of northern Kenya, known as the Northern Frontier District (N.F.D.) As a result they lived in a territory claimed by ethnic Somali to be part of the newly created Somali republic, and who still wanted the actual constitution of a Greater Somalia, a political and symbolic construction that would include all Somali living in northeast Africa.

While support for the Somali cause was not unified among the peoples of northern Kenya, the Muslim Boorana of the Waso area of the Isiolo District in particular showed an immediate support for the claims of secession expressed by their Muslim Somali brothers.

This checklist of published versions of the Sunjata epic aims to include the widest possible corpus of written variants of the Mande tradition available through publishers, libraries, and in unpublished higher degree dissertations. It builds upon the work of Guy Tombs, Stephen Belcher, John Johnson, David Conrad and Ralph Austen. Entries are arranged alphabetically, by the name of thejeli (griot or bard, plural jeliw) or writer. Included in each entry are (1) the bibliographical reference (and subsequent references if the item has been republished or published in a translation or excerpted form); (2) the name of the performer (or writer); (3) details of the location and date of the performance; (4) details of the recorders) and translators); (5) the format of the published version (including the language(s) and the type of translation); and (6) the coverage of the published version. Coverage is indicated by use of a simple five-fold division of material traditionally included within the epic:

1. 1. Paternal ancestry of Sunjata—links with the Middle East, Bilali, the Three Simbons, etc.

2. 2. Buffalo-woman tale

3. 3. Birth and childhood of Sunjata

4. 4. Exile of Sunjata

5. 5. Return and war with Sumanguru

In December 1932 J. B. Danquah identified five stages or “ages” in the coastal political history, or the “national history,” of the Gold Coast. This paper may be described as a temporary departure from a preoccupation with “Ages” two, three, and four (1867-1930) and a tentative entry into the study of the fifth: Danquah's post-1930 “Age of Enlightenment.” What follows therefore is more of a shift in time than of space and focus—the area and arena of coastal politics in the colonial Gold Coast. If a new age did dawn in the 1930s, then for an influential core of today's Ghanaianist historians, it would seem that the turning point occurred in 1935. In that year the radical response of I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson and Nnambi Azikiwe (“Zik”) to the Ethiopian crisis galvanized those forces that presaged the later emergence of Kwame Nkrumah, one of history's winners. In sharp contrast, J.B. Danquah, one of history's losers, represented the continuity of past conservatism during—and after—the 1930s.

A bold attempt to confirm or contradict the 1935 “discontinuity thesis” is beyond the scope of this progress report on an act of trespass into the 1930s. The modest outcome of the latter is a snapshot of Accra-based politics. It tries to bring into focus several elements: the texture, style, and ‘reach’ of urban-based politics and politicians; the place of the study and teaching of history in anticolonial nationalist thought; and the extent to which rhetoric served as a mask for the pursuit of group or personal grievance and ambition. In short, this paper re-examines an old theme—the relationship between past history and present politics, albeit within the confines of a British colonial state.

In the late eighteenth century Imerina was checkered with a myriad of tiny principalities, each ruled from hilltop fortresses. In just fifty years from 1780 to 1830, it was unified under a single ruler, drawing Merina into increasingly wider systems of obedience and creating a vast imperium that held sway over most of the island of Madagascar, a landmass the size of France, Belgium, and Holland combined.

And yet, the half century of tumultuous change that characterized the empire's rise brought no revolution in the Merina's own understanding of the world of power, a view which I have termed hasina ideology. Merina saw historical reality as the product not of human agency, but of ancestral beneficence, hasina, which flowed downwards on obedient Merina from long—of dead ancestors in a sacred stream that connected all living Merina. For obedient Merina, politics consisted in nothing more and nothing less than the lifelong quest to position oneself favorably in that sacred stream as close as possible to ancestors and then to reap the material benefits of that cherished association. Ancestors made their pleasure known by bestowing blessings, “superior” hasina, on those who honored them.

Chronology used to be an object of great interest among African historians because it was seen as essential to history, it provided exactitude where so much else was analytic, and it was such a difficult feature to handle in oral accounts. More recently, historical analysis has been concerned more with processes and periods than with defined events and dates. Although deemed to be useful when available, precise chronology is now seen as less essential to historical reconstruction; it is accepted that chronologies are subject to interpretation and debate, and that these debates themselves illuminate the way in which local communities reconstruct—and historians understand—history.

This paper addresses such issues of debate, contestation, and negotiation—that is, it explores the nature of intellectual hegemony—but it does so across cultural boundaries. It thus illustrates a fundamental contradiction in the manner by which historians have treated cultural units defined as distinct: while as independent polities they have been assumed to be culturally autonomous, source material from one is often drawn on to fill in the gaps of others. This procedure was especially common where there were powerful kingdoms whose political boundaries were assumed to be rigid and inviolate. The states of the western Interlacustrine area, each believed to be ruled by an established dynastic line whose origins reached far back into antiquity, provide an exemplary illustration of this process.

By the early twentieth century, at the time of European conquest, Rwanda was one of the most powerful of these states, having either conquered and absorbed, or at least dominated, many of the distinct kingdoms with which it formerly competed.

Goan inquisition case summaries from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provide invaluable information about African and Asian slaves in the Estado da Índia, the eastern domains of the Portuguese Empire stretching from southern Africa to China. As most of the full trial records have been destroyed, the case summaries fill a crucial gap. The summaries also provide context for extant Goan trials. This article discusses the methodological challenges of using these records.

Telling the Almoravid story asks much of the imagination, as a stark paucity of documentary evidence continues to shadow much of this dynasty's character, parameters, and early development. Revisionist readings have become commonplace, particularly following the recovery of lost portions of Ibn Idhārīs al-Bayan al-Mughrib. Comparisons of this chronicle with those of Ibn Abī Zar and Ibn Khaldūn brought scholars to revise chronologies and rescript the roles played by the movement's first leaders. Although Almoravid historiography continues to rely primarily on medieval Arabic chronicles and geographies for a synthetic interpretation of how events unfolded, numismatic and archeological studies have brought perspectives of their own to this period. Consequent hypotheses reveal the wide play afforded interpretive assumptions in various attempts to integrate the diverse, and often contradictory, data. And where this is true for the Almoravids in the Maghrib, the synthetic role of hypotheses finds even greater play in attempts to understand the history of the Almoravids to the south. For here textual sources are meager indeed, allowing for the turn of a phrase to reconfigure decades of history.