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.

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 not as the product of human agency, but of ancestral beneficence, hasina, which flowed downwards on obedient Merina from long-dead ancestors in a sacred stream that connected all living Merina. For obedient Merina, politics consisted in nothing more nor less than a lifelong quest to position one's self favorably in that sacred stream as close as possible to ancestors and then to reap the benefits of that cherished association. With the passage of time, the hasina stream flowed into new generations and so generated new social relations expressed in terms of kinship. The vast transformation of the Merina political landscape only enhanced Imerina's devotion to ancestral hasina.

The origins of hasina ideology are not known, though by the time Andrianampoinimerina began to unify Imerina in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, its character is clearly perceptible. Andrianampoinimerina's son Radama built on his father's legacy. In the 1820s he transformed Imerina from a small and isolated kingdom into an empire capable of projecting its power over the length and breadth of Madagascar.

Scholars of the West African savanna have long been familiar with the use of the Arabic alphabet to create cajami or “non-Arabic” literatures in Fulfulde and Hausa. Maurice Delafosse took a rather negative position on the value of this material, basing his opinion on two formidable obstacles: the absence of natural correspondence between a Semitic alphabet and non-Semitic phonemes and the difficulty of establishing a unified system of of conventions where such a natural correspondence was lacking. He argued that the ajamiyya manuscripts were few in number, poor in quality, and did not deserve the name of literature. By contrast, several more recent authors have stressed the importance and the continuing composition in ajamiyya: Gilbert Vieillard and Alfa Ibrahima Sow, in their work on the Fulfulde of Futa Jalon, Pierre Lacroix in his work on the Adamawa dialect of the same language, and Mervyn Hiskett in his studies in Hausa. Even where the volume of material is small, they have pointed to the critical pedagogical functions of ajamiyya for the spread of Islam.

In this paper I wish to show both the importance and the problems of exploiting Fulfulde literature in a somewhat different milieu, the jihad of al-hajj Umar of the mid-nineteenth century and the state which his son Amadu Sheku ran from Segu. To achieve this I will examine a narrative poem taken from the library and archives of Segu but housed since the 1890s at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris under the title Fonds Archinard. In the process I hope to draw attention to the historical circumstances in which the ajamiyya conventions for Fulfulde were developed and maintained in Futa Jalon and then extended to the Umarian entourage, and to the necessity for textual and contextual criticism of written documents based on an understanding of the close relationship between oral and written media and the continual revision that characterize a received tradition.

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.

The interdisciplinary task of reconstructing early African history demands more than a passing familiarity with many fields of knowledge. Not least among these is geography, in its broader conception as the pursuit of an understanding of physiographic processes and the role(s) played by people in shaping and responding to these processes. A standard beginning in many a history book takes the reader through annual rainfall figures, topographic generalities, and, perhaps a cursory pedological overview of the region in which the people(s) under study live. Rarely are these introductory remarks integrated into the historical narrative. We are too often left to ourselves in determining the relevance, for example, of a bi-modal rainfall to the local agriculture in a subregion of open grasslands and woody savanna ecotones on black clay valley bottoms. We trust these are data relevant to our understanding of the region's agriculturalists.

Many readers may know that such an area will be subject to heavy soil waterlogging during the wetter months. They may also realize that mound and ridge construction are excellent responses to the risks of root-drowning such waterlogging poses to crops such as beans, and as well, that the indigenous African grain crops Sorghum spp. and Pennisetum spp. can withstand waterlogged soils for brief periods without suffering significant loss of yield (Purseglove 1972:269-71). What is likely to be poorly understood are the forces of ecological and cultural change that have been at work in such an environment transforming the very nature of its vegetational cover and soil profile. In short, a historical perspective is necessary so that we do not run the risk of presenting Africa's ecological background in the same unchanging light as colonial ethnographers did Africa's past.

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.

Beginning in late August 1974, I spent eight months in The Gambia, collecting oral traditions. My intention was to use what I obtained to reconstruct the history of Niumi, a precolonial “state” (Mandinka: banko) located at the mouth of the Gambia River. Over three centuries of slave trading in the river, Niumi was a dominant player in the region's political economy. Thus, one of my primary goals was to learn how Gambians remembered the centuries-long commerce that connected people living along the Gambia River to a vast Atlantic economic system, the heart of which was the sale and transportation of humans.

To my disappointment, with only a few exceptions, Gambian informants did not recall much about the slave trade. In Albreda and Juffure, the two Gambia-River villages where people were most involved in dealings with Europeans during the slave-trading era, the best informants could say little beyond noting ruins of old buildings and mentioning vague doings of “the Portuguese.” In the end, only three informants were able and willing to say anything beyond the most banal generalities about the capture, movement, and sale of slaves that occurred in the Gambia River. My assessment was that in the body of stories that Gambians held in their collective memory, a vast void existed between tales of the long-ago, and likely mythical, origins of a clan, village, or state and events that occurred much more recently, in this case after the British settled Bathurst, near the river's mouth, in 1816.

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.

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.”

Mainly as a result of the work of E. E. Evans-Pritchard, the Azande are among the best-known African peoples. In anthropological theory they have become indissolubly associated with the study of religion and magic. Also remarkable is their expansion under the leadership of the dynasties of the Avungara and the originally Ngbandi-speaking Abandia. Starting from a small core area in the basin of the lower Mbomu, where the ancestors of the Avungara and Abandia had established themselves as rulers over parts of the resident, mainly Zande-speaking, population around the middle of the eighteenth century, the Abandia extended their rule into the region of the lower Mbomu and lower Uele, while the Avungara and their Azande followers swept eastward in a vast movement and in less than one hundred years conquered a huge area reaching as far as the upper Sue and upper Uele, integrating the population into their system of rule.

One of the reasons for the speed of this expansion is that individual members of the Avungara dynasty (who all claimed descent from Ngura, the first historical ruler in the lower Mbomu area) repeatedly founded principalities of their own in new territories. This led to the existence of a varying number of polities under numerous, more or less, powerful rulers who descended from several dynastic branches, thereby preventing the formation of a single kingdom, stable in time and place. Through the integration of numerous groups of different linguistic and ethnic origins, the population cluster was formed for which the collective name Azande has become established. The history of Azande expansion thus provides a very interesting example of a society being created through political processes, which raises questions concerning the origin, acceptance, and characteristics of centralized political organizations, as well as assimilation and acculturation processes (besides the Mangbetu in the Uele-Bomokandi area, the Azande were the only group in the region to develop centralized political structures on a wide scale).

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.”

Writing in 1963, the late D.H. Jones commented on the first volume of the Hungarian Endre Sik's History of Black Africa that

On the second volume, the same reviewer wrote four years later that it was

This is undoubtedly strong stuff, especially as Jones was some way from being a reactionary scholar; although he noted that Sik's book (hereafter HBA) is “sharply Marxist in tone,” he pointedly refrains from attacking it on that score. Sik, according to Jones, is simply incompetent.

Portuguese archives contain a wealth of documents that are insufficiently utilized by, and often unknown to, historians of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century west Africa. Lusophone sources are crucial for the period of earliest contact between Europeans and West Africans. While the publications of Avelino Teixeira da Mota are widely known, the work of contemporary Portuguese scholars such as Maria Emilia Madeira Santos, Maria Manuel Torrão, and Maria João Soares does not have the same visibility except among lusophone scholars. Relatively few Africanists have recognized the potential significance of the Portuguese archives for Senegambia, a region generally considered within the orbit of francophone or anglophone west Africa. The Portuguese archives remain a rich source of hitherto unknown documents, some of which will lead to fundamental transformations in our historical knowledge of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Upper Guinea coast.

The two of us have worked extensively on the history of the Luso-Africans in Senegambia and the Guinea of Cape Verde. Mark has investigated the construction and evolution of their identity. Horta, in particular, has for many years focused on their representation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese sources. Both writers have argued elsewhere—following Boulègue and Moraes—that among these Luso-Africans—or “Portuguese” as they were known in contemporary sources—there were New Christians, some of whom were probably practicing Jews. Evidence of the Jewish presence in west Africa remained scanty, however, and we argued that if some “Christian” Portuguese were in fact practicing Jews, they were Jews primarily in the privacy of their own communities.

From time immemorial human beings have sought to document their activities in realistic forms in order to pass across information about their lives to posterity. Even before the advent of cinematography, human beings had attempted to show life, not as static, but as dynamic. Cave paintings done by early men have shown an attempt to demonstrate movement through drawings of animals with many legs, designed to simulate motion. Also, attempts at showing moving images have included the shadow plays of North Africa and India, puppetry in many parts of the world, the pot art of India, etc. These activities presented the culture of the people and showed how icons are developed, what they stand for in the people's lives, and how people made meaning out of their lives and activities. With the development of the arts of cinematography and television, these also became vehicles to document happenings and events in the lives of the people.

In this study, I discuss the television docudrama as an alternative means of documenting history. There are many reasons necessitating an alternative source of documenting history, but two examples from Nigeria will suffice to justify this position. The powers-that-be in Nigeria have decreed that it is no longer necessary to study history in primary and secondary schools, and the subject has been removed from the curriculum. Consequently, if a Nigerian citizen does not go to a tertiary institution to study history, the past of her/his people will forever remain a mystery to her/him. Currently, there is a very lively debate in Nigeria about the origins of the Yoruba people. Traditional rulers, who are supposed to be the custodians of history, are at loggerheads with each other and with eggheads in history departments. The traditional rulers are bringing out diverse facts and evidence that differ from previously written histories.

In recent years early photographs from Africa have increasingly attracted the attention of historians and ethnologists, as have those from other parts of the world for some time. It has been attempted to ascertain the general and specific circumstances which led to them being made and subsequently used. The multifarious problems raised by their interpretation have been discussed. Books and articles have been published in which historical photographs form an integral and principal component. And it has been attempted to tap hitherto neglected, or to a large extent unknown, photographic archives and collections.

One of the countries to which least attention has been paid in this field is Angola, whose photographic documentation is widely scattered and in some cases not accessible. It is likely that many valuable collections have yet to be discovered; and of those that are known, in most cases the financial means and the expertise necessary for their conservation are lacking. In the light of this generally bleak situation Jill Dias' recent systematic review of the period from 1870 to 1914 is particularly welcome. My own contribution will take her work as its starting point, but will focus exclusively on ethnographic photography.

“Ethnography” will be used here in the sense in which photographers and researchers active in Angola during the period concerned (1875-1940) understood it—as a description (more systematic in some cases than in others) of “uncivilized,” “native” African peoples and cultures. It should be remembered that the boundary between “physical” and “cultural” anthropology was at that time still fluid.

The historiography of the southern Sudan offers few examples of the critical assessment of sources. Surprisingly, the only conscious attempts at source evaluation have been made by anthropologists or ethnographers. Most historians and political scientists have been preoccupied with chronologies of administration and policy based on colonial documents and have been all too uncritical in accepting these sources for their generalizations on the history of southern Sudanese societies. Part of the reason why the historiography of the southern Sudan has lagged so far behind the rest of Africa in this respect is that, until recently, a limited number of colonial documents were the main sources available on southern Sudanese history, and these remained both unchallenged or uncorroborated by indigenous sources. Over the last ten years, however, it has become possible for scholars to collect and examine a wider variety of local materials in the southern Sudan itself, and the comparison of these materials with the older, better-known, sources can help to produce that creative tension so necessary for any critical advance to be made.

There is an urgent need for an evaluation of oral history in the southern Sudan. Oral traditions have been collected for over eighty years, but most of the recorded forms, those found in government files and reports, are composite summaries and interpretations by their collectors--government officials--rather than systematic comparisons of different accounts. In this form it is often difficult to separate the assumptions of the colonial officials from the claims of their informants, a task made particularly difficult by the fact that rarely does the record specify the source of an account or the context in which it was collected. Comparisons of modern accounts, when the source and context of the narrative are known, with these older, vaguer records can reveal something about both the traditional history of southern Sudanese societies and the assumption of colonial administrators.

African historiography has over the past decade begun to pay increasing attention to photographs as a source for African history. A growing body of work has raised a number of methodological and theoretical questions about how scholars can and should work with images. From their experience with written documents, historians are aware of the ideologically charged conditions under which colonial knowledge was produced. This awareness has armed scholars with a skepticism to look beyond the image itself and examine the physical and technological environment in which photographers worked. Posed studio shots that create “natural” settings and post-event retouching are only some of the practices photographers used to endow their images with a greater semblance of accuracy.

Andrew Roberts and David Killingray's “outline” of photography in Africa charts the development of photographic techniques and how their use created specific kinds of images of Africa; Virginia-Lee Webb emphasizes photographers' manipulation of not only their subjects, but also the environment in which they were photographed. What this work has produced is an oft-spoken axiom that photographic images of Africa (or any other place) ought not be taken at face value. This axiom has guided a significant amount of scholarship, although Beatrix Heintze wisely cautions against overinterpretation.

Scholars who work with written documentary evidence from the colonial period have well established the ways in which administrators, missionaries, and other Europeans represented Africans as an “other,” as they sought to create cultural and social distance between themselves and Africans. Still other scholars have combined written and oral materials to show how Africans established their own identities and interpreted colonial discourses to create alternative, liberating discursive spaces.

In an earlier issue of this journal I published the text of a letter to King George I of England written in the name of King “Trudo Audati” (better known under the name which he is given in in local tradition, Agaja) of the west African kingdom of Dahomey. Although dated 1726, this letter was received in England only in 1731, when it was belatedly delivered to London by Bulfinch Lambe, a former employee of the Royal African Company of England, who had spent some time in captivity in Dahomey, and who claimed to have written the letter at King Agaja's dictation. Lambe was accompanied to England by an African interpreter called “Captain Tom,” who vouched for the letter's authenticity; this man's African name was given as “Adomo Oroonoko Tomo,” though the middle name “Oroonoko” at least was surely not authentic, but borrowed from the popular romantic novel by Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave (1689). An official enquiry by the Board of Trade decided that the letter itself was a forgery, though on grounds I at least find unpersuasive; but it was acknowledged that Lambe had been charged with some sort of message from King Agaja, and arrangements were made for the repatriation of the interpreter “Adomo Oroonoko Tomo” to Dahomey, which was effected in the following year, 1732.

The key role of the Nyamwezi in the nineteenth-century caravan trade of East and Central Africa is well known. The convergence of rapid change in Unyamwezi, a region connecting areas of economic specialization, is more obscure. The development of agro-pastoralism in Unyamwezi was an adaptation and an opportunity forged by (unequal) partnerships between the Nyamwezi commercial elite and Tutsi immigrants. Patron-client relationships reflected prevailing economic and political forces, reversing the pattern of pastoral dominance in the Great Lakes region. Two different agro-ecological, sociological and political regions – the East African woodland savannah and the Great Lakes zone – were interlinked in a trans-regional cattle, salt, and labor economy intertwined with global capitalism. Human mobility stimulated change but so too did movements of livestock, diseases, agricultural regimes, and ecological boundaries.

As the pioneering generation of postwar British academics retired, some produced autobiographical texts which revealed the personal circumstances and intellectual influences that brought them to the study of Africa. Edited volumes have also provided broader reflections on the academic disciplines, methodologies, and institutions through which these scholars engaged with the continent. In one such text, Christopher Clapham and Richard Hodder-Williams noted the special relationship between extramural studies (also known as university adult education) and the academic study of Africa's mass nationalist movements:

The impetus for this study came to a remarkable degree from a tiny group of men and women who pioneered university extra-mural studies in the Gold Coast immediately after the [Second World War], and to a significant extent established the parameters for subsequent study of the subject [African politics]. Gathered together under the aegis of Thomas Hodgkin […], they were led by David Kimble […], and included among the tutors Dennis Austin, Lalage Bown and Bill Tordoff, all of whom were to play a major role in African studies in the United Kingdom over the next forty years.