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 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 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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tribes no longer exist, at least in the writings of Africanists, but they tend to be replaced by very similar looking entities, going under a variety of aliases. Perhaps purely as a result of laziness of thought, there remains a tendency of write of the Zulu, the Tswana, or the whomever, and not to probe the assumption that these units have some actual existence. Nevertheless, like all working assumptions, this has to be continually re-examined. In this paper, therefore, I return to one of the classic problems in southern African history (in the broadest sense), namely that of the relationship between the Khoisan and the Bantu-speaking Africans. It has of course been widely studied, especially by linguists and physical anthropologists, and, to a lesser extent by archeologists. These disciplines show complementary results. Linguistics shows that many loan-words crossed from Khoisan to the Bantu languages - though not, apparently, in the reverse direction - and that this occurred to its greatest extent in the various Nguni languages of the south-east coastal belt. Physical anthropology has shown that the proportion of Khoisan genes in the Bantu speaking population increases from north to south. The archeological evidence is less clear. For eastern Zambia, Phillipson has argued that “the Early Iron Age folk and their late stone age neighbours… can be shown to have existed in several regions” and that “throughout the first millenium the two populations clearly to a large extent maintained their own separate identities”. This situation seems to have lasted until “four or five centuries ago.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

G. K. Gwassa states that research institutes in Africa constitute one critical factor of development in that they have to undertake the twin problems of research which involve the search for and the discovery of the process of social development. They also undertake purposeful functional research by (especially) studying and analyzing internal economic and social conditions in order to determine the characteristics, variables, and criteria for rational economic and political actions within a given country. These have become the functions of many social science research institutions in sub-Saharan Africa. The pioneer in all this is the University of Zambia's Institute for African Studies, the oldest social science-oriented research center in black Africa.

The Institute was founded in 1938 as the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute for Social Research (RLISR). In its fifty years of existence the Institute has made contributions which have earned it an international reputation for its research work. The aim of this paper is to assess the contribution of the Institute to social science research in its first fifty years of existence. In undertaking this task, I propose to discuss the topic under three broad areas: foundation, aims, and objectives; publication and research; and problems encountered and their solution.

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.

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.

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.

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.