The problem of Igbo origins is indeed “a very maze within a maze.” It boggles the mind. Instead of one pan-Igbo tradition of origin there are almost as many traditions as there are those independent sub-cultural groups referred to as “clans” in the Intelligence Reports of the 1930s. In fact in some clans there are two rival traditions of origin. However, for clarity and ease of understanding, we shall here distinguish among three categories of traditions of origin found among the Ibgo people. Going from what I consider the least to the most relevant, these are:

The Memoirs of the Reign of Bossa Ahadee, King of Dahomy of Robert Norris, first published in 1789, is a history of the west African kingdom of Dahomey during the reign of Tegbesu (“Bossa”), dated by Norris to 1732-1774 (though the correct dates are now known to be 1740-1774). In addition to its separate publication in 1789, Norris' material was also included, in a revised form, in the more comprehensive History of Dahomy compiled by Archibald Dalzel, published in 1793. This second version incorporates numerous detailed alterations and elaborations, mainly stylistic but occasionally relating to matters of substance; according to the Editor of Dalzel's History, these revisions were the work of Norris himself, although he had died before the work was brought to publication. This incorporation of Norris' work into that of Dalzel has had the effect of diminishing his reputation and perceived importance, since his material has usually been cited through (and by implication attributed to) Dalzel, rather than directly under his own name. His Memoirs, however, clearly have immense historiographical significance, as the first serious attempt by a European to write the history of a west African state.

In addition to its purely historiographical interest, Norris' work remains an important source for the history of eighteenth-century Dahomey. Its value as a historical source, however, is problematical. On the one hand, Norris, as a slave trader who had operated in Dahomey for several years, had claims to be an exceptionally well-informed observer of Dahomian affairs.

Historians, not just of South Africa, but of any part of what was once British Africa up to and including Kenya, will be familiar with the significance of the University of Fort Hare at Alice, in South Africa's Eastern Cape province. The university is built on the site and retains the name of a British fort that was a major base for one of the first and most bitterly-fought, and certainly the longest, of the nineteenth-century southern African wars of conquest. However, in one of the paradoxes in which South Africa abounds, Fort Hare has become a shibboleth of modern African nationalism, priding itself on its illustrious alumni, which include many of the great names of the modern black elite in southern Africa. The paradox to some extent disappears, and the interest and complexity increases, when it is considered that Fort Hare had its origins in the liberal missionary tradition, with all its ambiguities, and that its products included homeland leaders as well as nationalist politicians, and the functionaries of segregationist and colonial states as well as assertively African political and cultural leaders.

The vicinity of Fort Hare has long been a center of education in the western tradition. From 1841, in the case of Lovedale, with nearby Healdtown and St. Matthew's following later, the great mission-schools of the Eastern Cape, supported by the Lovedale Press, made the area the cradle of the mission-educated African elite. It was from this context that Fort Hare emerged in 1916, being the creation of an interdenominational group of Protestant missionaries and of African leaders such as John Tengo Jabavu, founder of the newspaper Imvo Zabatsundu.

In 1680 Jean Barbot made the following observation about the religious institutions found in the Slave Coast Ewe communities of Keta and Anlo: “Their…religion [is] much the same as on the Gold Coast, only they have a vast quantity of idols…” A similar observation was made by Danish cartographer P. Thøning on his 1802 map of the lower Volta, when he described a site near the Anlo capitol of Anloga, as an “Amegase fetisch-plads,” an important religious shrine. Subsequently this shrine was identified as that which belonged to one of the clans from whose ranks was chosen the awoamefia, the highest leadership position in Anlo. In 1935 this clan, the Bate, was, in turn, described by the German missionary D. Westermann as composed of priests, soothsayers, and magicians. It is not surprising then, given such references, that R.A. Kea suggested that “the Anlo ruler's supremacy was based, at least initially on religious and ritual ascendancy.”

In 1978, however, when Anlo elders were consulted on this issue, most were surprisingly vehement in their denials of any such association, past or present, between religious concerns and the offices in the Anlo political system, particularly that of the awoamefia. They pointed to the popular traditions--those published in local textbooks and recited at annual festivals--to support their contention that the two clans which had gained custody of the awoamefia office, the Adzovia and Bate, had gained and retained the same through the “right of inheritance” and the “right of service” respectively.

This article explores the lives of several copper alloy vessels (bowls, basins, and ewers), made in Egypt and England, that were carried across the Sahara just before the dawn of the European age of exploration, and that eventually found their way to central Ghana. It considers how and why prestige metal goods, some of them produced for specific individuals, became trade commodities that traveled thousands of kilometers, ending up in Akan communities where they were given new meanings. In thinking about material things and the mutability of meaning, the article attempts to address how we might understand these trade items as discursive “objects of knowledge” connecting peoples living in different times and different places.

In Angola, a trend towards labor commodification, set in motion under the impact of the nineteenth-century produce trade and colonial rule, has been reversed in the decades since independence. Angolans have always worked mainly in the reciprocal sphere, but with the growing commercialization of the economy after the abolition of the slave trade, self-employment has also become a constant in Angolan labor history. By 2000, the rural population was thrown back to subsistence farming, while the larger part of the urban population has tried to survive by self-employment in the informal economy. Wage labor, widespread under colonialism, has become less common.

By the end of the eighteenth century the Baga, or peoples of the seaside (the bae raka), were already long-term residents of mangrove islands located between Guinea-Bissau and Iles de Los—the northern half of Guinea-Conakry's current coast. That fact is well known and accepted by everyone interested in the ethnohistory of this part of Guinea. What is less clearly documented or understood is how far they extended inland, the context of that residence which allowed them to operate economically and socially with guests upon their lands, and perhaps how outsiders influenced their characteristics, within a historically definable period. Drawing on observations from first-hand accounts written between 1793 and 1821, this study attempts to answer these questions and to suggest assumptions about the Baga experience and conclusions for particular Baga groups by 1821.

This paper flows from a longer and broader study of peoples and commercial activities in the Rio Nunez to Iles de Los section of coastal Guinea-Conakry for the 1750 to 1865 period, that period just prior to establishment of French suzerainty. It also emerges from a historian's desire to assign ethnic groups or at least ethnic types to identifiable regions and to understand relationship traits that may have operated during a specific period. The Baga were likely minor players in political and commercial transformations that accompanied the rise of slave trading or establishment of new markets for commodities' traffic occurring with its decline in the late 1830s. As producers of rice, salt, and livestock, and collectors of cola, however, and as ‘first-comers’ with claim to land through which commerce with the interior inevitably flowed, the Baga favorably served trades that found their basis in both trades and that attached interior markets to those of the coast.

The Zulu kingdom holds a special place in both popular culture and historical scholarship. Zulu—a famous name, easy to spell and pronounce—is as recognizably American as gangster rap. The website of the “Universal Zulu Nation” (www.hiphopcity.com/zulu_nation/) explains that as “strong believers in the culture of hiphop, we as Zulus … will strive to do our best to uplift ourselves first, then show others how to uplift themselves mentally, spiritually, physically, economically and socially.” The Zulu Nation lists chapters in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Miami, Virginia Beach, Los Angeles, Detroit, New Haven, Hartford, New Jersey, and Texas. Mardi Gras in New Orleans has featured a “Zulu Parade” since 1916. The United States Navy underscores its independence from Britain by using “Zulu time” instead of Greenwich Mean Time. Not to be outdone, the Russian Navy built “Zulu Class” submarines in the 1950s and Britain's Royal Navy built a “Tribal Class Destroyer,” HMS Zulu. The common factor linking black pride, Africa, and prowess in war is the Zulu kingdom, a southeast African state that first attained international fame in the 1820s under the conqueror Shaka, “the black Napoleon.” His genius is credited with innovations that reshaped the history of his region. “Rapidly expanding his empire, Shaka conquered all, becoming the undisputed ruler of the peoples between the Pongola and Tugela Rivers … In hand-to-hand combat the short stabbing spear introduced by Shaka, made the Zulus unbeatable.” In South Africa Shaka's fame continues to outshine all other historical figures, including Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger. A major theme park, “Shakaland,” commemorates his life and Zulu culture. A plan was unveiled in 1998 to erect a twenty-story high statue of the Zulu king in Durban Harbor that would surpass the ancient Colossus of Rhodes.

The Lwo language, a cluster of dialects belonging to the Western branch of the Nilotic family, was spoken as a mother tongue at the end of the colonial period by some two and a half million people scattered over a vast area of the Upper Nile basin from the Shilluk country in the Sudan to central Uganda and from northeast Zaire to western Kenya. The several components of this stock vary greatly in size, from the five thousand people who comprise the Bor groups of the western Bahr el Ghazal to the Kenya Luo group with well over a million members. Despite their extraordinary numbers, however, the Luo--like the Bor, the Shilluk, the Anywak, and other groups in the Sudan--form an enclave among peoples of quite different speech; the main continuous block of Lwo-speakers is in northern Uganda, consisting of the Alur, Acholi, and Langi peoples, together with the Jo-pa-Lwo (or Chope) group, who live in the corner of the Bunyoro district that is formed by the Victoria Nile as it flows north and then west from Lake Kyoga to the Albert confluence.

This peculiar configuration, very different from the normal pattern of linguistic fragmentation in sub-Saharan Africa, offers historians a problem and an opportunity, for it must be the residuum of an unusual event or series of events. Languages cannot travel unless people carry them; and so it is reasonable to assume that the Lwo-speakers of a few centuries ago lived as a compact community, which developed an exceptional capacity both for the incorporation of aliens and the propagation of its own genes.

Before I start, I would like to stress that the following is in no way meant as a complaint. Neither would I like you to think that I am disgusted by fieldwork in general, and fieldwork in Mali in particular. The point that I want to get across is that the personal emotional experience and state of mind during fieldwork have an impact on the way fieldworkers, in being their own instruments, practice their research. We would like to believe that this emotional state is one of euphoria, but in reality it includes negative experiences and feelings. These feelings should be accounted for—not just personally, but also professionally.

There exists a dichotomy between open and hidden discourse about experiences in the field among social scientists practising fieldwork. This dichotomy is as old as fieldwork itself and gained some acknowledgment of existence after the publication of Malinowski's Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (Malinowski 1967). This dichotomy consists of a representation of fieldwork experiences towards colleagues and the larger audience as ideal, unproblematic, and among the best experiences a person can have in life. It is almost like a holiday. It is only in an informal setting, usually the pub, that some dare to speak of the danger, nuisance, despair, and general inconvenience of it all. Even talking about severe illness or other dangers is often done with the self assured attitude of someone capable of facing Armageddon and getting out alive. Apparently, Indiana Jones does exist.

This paper charts the rise and transformation of biography as a form of Africanist history writing. Biography in African history, as in other fields, has included attention to nationalist heroes as well as the lives of slaves, women, and other subalterns. Recently, some Africanist historians have embraced transnational life histories, particularly those situated in the “black Atlantic” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some themes, methods, and limitations of such biographies are discussed in relation to the author’s own project on a nineteenth century immigrant to West Africa.

The article explores the role of women, particularly non-Western educated Temne market women in shaping the socio-economic history of Britain's oldest colony in colonial West Africa. It addresses the neglect of women's participation in the economy of the colony inherent in the androcentric literature. The article also highlights the cultural foundations of Temne women's activism in colonial Freetown. It argues that the role played by various subjects and actors should be fully integrated in the historical literature of the Sierra Leone colony.

Thirty-four years ago David Henige launched History in Africa (hereafter HA) at a time when scholars often cut corners in their rush to construct a history of Africa, and disregarded rules of evidence, thereby running the risk that many of their reconstructions would prove to be unsound. The question was not that these scholars were wholly indifferent to methodology, but that the precolonial history of the continent was the cynosure of the field at the time, and hence that all eyes were turned towards the use of oral sources to overcome the perceived scarcity of written sources for that period and to provide voices from the continent. In their haste to fill huge voids in the story of Africa's past, scholars debated the rules of evidence in relation to such unconventional sources. They often disregarded almost every methodological canon when it came to written data. Crucial differences between primary and secondary sources were ignored, archival research was scanty, new editions of older publications were mere reprints accompanied or not by new introductions that were so uninformed as to be useless, while issues about authenticity, authorship, chronology, or translation were all brushed aside as quibbles. Thus, in the days before 1974, methodological concerns focused exclusively on oral tradition and oral history to the detriment of everything else. As its initial editorial made clear, HA was launched as a forum where scholars interested in method could publish articles about all the facets of the historical method—from epistemology to heuristics, rules of evidence, and historiography. The journal was founded and the contributors came.

Since 1990 I have been working on a critical edition of records of the Royal African Company of England (hereafter RAC), preserved in the Rawlinson collection of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. This material comprises letter-books containing correspondence received at the RAC's West African headquarters, Cape Coast Castle, mainly from the Company's other factories on the Gold Coast, during the period from 1681 to 1699 (though with some gaps). Two volumes of this correspondence, covering the years 1681-83 and 1685-88, were published in 1997 and 2001; a third and final volume, presenting correspondence from 1691-99, is now published.

Although attention was drawn to this material in the 1970s, only limited use has hitherto been made of it by historians. The only substantial published study of the Gold Coast which makes extensive use of the Rawlinson material is that by Ray Kea (1982), which deals with general social and economic structures and their transformations, rather than with the detailed course of events. The general neglect of this material has undoubtedly been due, in large part, to its user-unfriendly arrangement, the letters being entered according to the date of their receipt at Cape Coast, without regard for geographical provenance, which makes the process of locating documents which relate to any particular locality extremely tedious—an obstacle which its publication has now removed. The potential utility of this material in the detailed reconstruction of events on the Gold Coast is illustrated here by the case of the “Komenda Wars” of 1694-1700.

Literacy is a personally acquired skill, and the way it is taught to a person changes how that person thinks. Thanks to David Henige historians of Africa are much more aware of how literacy influences memory and historical imagination, and particularly how literacy systems introduce linear concepts of time and space. This essay will deal with these two aspects in relation to Africa's most famous epic: Sunjata. This epic has gained a major literary status worldwide—text editions are taught as part of undergraduate courses at universities all over the world—but there has been little extensive field research into the epic. The present essay focuses on an even less studied aspect of Sunjata, namely how Sunjata is experienced by local people.

Central to my argument is an idea put forward by Peter Geschiere, who links the upheaval of autochthony claims in Africa (and beyond) to issues of citizenship and processes of exclusion. He analyzes these as the product of feelings of “belonging.” Geschiere argues that issues of belonging should be studied at a local level if we are to understand how individuals experience autochthony. Analytically, Geschiere proposes shifting away from ”identity” by drawing from Birgit Meyer's work ideas on the aesthetics of religious experience and emotion; Meyer's ideas are useful to explain “how some (religious) images can convince, while other do not.”

This report provides practical ideas and methodological warnings regarding the use of Ghanaian archives for the writing of social history.

Located in the small town of Alice in South Africa's Eastern Cape Province, the University of Fort Hare (UFH) was established in 1916 and for many years was the only institution of higher education in sub-equatorial Africa which was open to black students. Therefore, among Fort Hare's alumni are well-known African nationalists and politicians such as Oliver Tambo and Govan Mbeki of the African National Congress (ANC); Robert Sobukwe, who founded the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC); Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP); Eluid Mathu, who was the first African member of the Kenya Legislative Council,;President Robert Mugabe and Herbert Chitepo of Zimbabwe; Prime Minister Ntsu Mokhehle of Lesotho; former Prime Minister Fwanyanga Mulikita of Uganda; and many others. While Fort Hare was taken over by the apartheid government in 1959 and incorporated into a network of ethnic universities within the homeland system, from the 1960s to early 1990s various banned liberation movements were active on campus and students periodically clashed with security forces. As a result, “[i]t is thus not surprising that with its venerable history of resistance and struggle, the UFH was chosen to be the repository of most of the archives of the Liberation Front.”

As court musicians and specialists of the past, the Arókin of Òyó have been used as a source for Yorùbâ history, but their own views on the uses of historical information have not been investigated. For the first time a sample of these views is published here. It comes from an interview with a group of Arókin, in which they offered descriptions and other representations of the nature of their expertise. This evidence sheds light on how the Arókin have traditionally deployed historical precedent and accounted for historical innovation. They ground the resort to the past primarily on the social need to offer consolation (itùnû) to the ruler, i.e., to cool down his personal grief. It is from this that they derive the need to relate and assimilate events, so as to explain the meaning (itumòo) of present happenings. They emphasize, above the supplying of etiology and legitimation, the restoration of equanimity against grief and anger.

Arókin tradition compares the overwhelming power of song to the overwhelming power of grief. It stresses raw personal emotion as a cultural force, both as a source of disruption and as a trigger for efforts to make sense of the world with the help of the past, or with the help of newly-imported frames of explanation. The management of the king's (but also, in exceptional circumstances, of the people's) emotions requires history, and may require religious innovation. The king's grief at the loss of his children is liable to have violent, and culturally far-reaching, consequences. Despite obvious differences, this has significant points of contact with Rosaldo's account of the rage of the bereaved and “the cultural force of emotions” in connection with the Ilongot of northern Luzon, in the Philippines.

Along the West African coast and in the immediate hinterland from the Gambia River to Sierra Leone in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, a region of extensive long-distance trade, the buildings people lived in, as well as the physical layout of their communities, served as important elements in the articulation of their cultural identity. At the same time, architecture reflected contact between the various populations of the region. These groups included a small number of Portuguese and a somewhat larger population of several thousand Luso-Africans, whose commercial role as traders, declining by the late eighteenth century, was limited essentially to the navigable lower reaches of coastal rivers and waterways.

These Luso-Africans, faced by Europeans who contested their efforts to define themselves as a group, were gradually marginalized and ultimately subsumed into the neighboring coastal populations, leaving only traces of their distinctive culture. Among the elements that comprised the Luso-African cultural legacy were houses built in “Portuguese” style: rectangular structures with whitewashed exteriors and a vestibule or a porch. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, these houses helped to define the Luso-African community.

The local African populations of West Atlantic-speakers (Floups, Bagnuns, Bijogos, and Papels) and, further down the coast, Susus, Temnes and Bulloms, were for the most part organized into small-scale, decentralized societies. Mande-speaking peoples inhabited the small states of the lower Gambia and the more important state of Kaabu in Guinea-Bissau; they, together with ‘juula’ merchants, comprised the western outriders of the Mande diaspora. Further east, in the newly-established Islamic state of Fuuta Jaloo (Futa Jalon), lived the Fulbe.

The analysis of the relationship between oral and written documentation and the expression or articulation of political power and interest is now extremely sophisticated for the Asante case, yet it remains obstinately one-sided, as Asante history has tended to be interpreted from the political center, Kumase. Some scholars have intermittently called for another, more broadening and less constraining, perspective, and a very few have acted upon this plea by considering the nature of historic Asante society from various points on the ‘periphery.’ Among other things the present paper is a contribution to this ill-developed but much-needed ‘view from the periphery,’ even though the ‘periphery’ in the present case is as politically central as could be envisaged without resorting to the heavily researched Kumase perspective. I deal here essentially with oral historical perceptions of power--and struggles for it and validations of it--in the major territorial division of Mampon, but first I address one or two more general points, obvious perhaps, but usefully alluded to in the present context nonetheless.

First, there is now a respectably large literature concerning the use (and usefulness) of African oral historical materials. This literature evinces two broad tendencies. One is a very proper scepticism about and mistrust of the regrettably widespread reliance on unsupported oral tradition. The other is an intellectualist attempt to divorce such traditions from ‘actual’ historical experience by interpreting them within a synchronic, often ‘structuralist,’ framework. Both approaches are valid, but they are ultimately ordained by a simple absence of ‘external’ or qualifying data. Asante is favored here in the sense that the ability to cross-check between oral memory and the written record is the most developed for all of Sub-Saharan Africa.