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.

A wide variety of documents exist in Cameroonian rural villages, few of which are likely to be preserved since many are not perceived as being worthy of long-term conservation as well as being vulnerable to damp, termites, and to recycling in the form of cigarette or wrapping paper. In this paper I consider the information contained in the different types of written record and how they interrelate. In a companion piece (Zeitlyn mss) I continue to discuss a diary written at my instigation over an eighteen-month period.

Anthropologists and historians alike are prone to a writing disease: “If in doubt write it down.” We record things often for the sake of recording (sometimes without having a specific end in mind for any particular record). Valuable serendipity often results, and our colleagues and successors, as well as the descendants of those we have worked with are sometimes the beneficiaries. Academics, and anthropologists among them, often seek out like-minded people to spend time with. This in itself raises some questions about the generalizability of information so received. But leaving that aside, the accounts of anthropologists and their key informants (for example Muchona [Turner 1967], Ogotommêli [Griaule 1965]) are striking, as much for the resemblances between academic and informant as for their putative differences.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Unesco's General History of Africa (henceforth GHA) is now nearing completion—seven out of the eight volumes having been published in English, at least—and the time is ripe to draw attention to its role in the historiography of African history, a role very different from that played by the Cambridge History of Africa with which it is often compared. In certain ways the Unesco project has been a unique venture, and not just in African history but, in general, because it broke with old established practice. The work was not guided by one or two editors but by a large committee. History-writing by committee seemed not only distasteful but impossible to achieve to many, both because of the practical difficulties involved and because it seemed incredible that so many editors could agree on a common text, without falling into sheer banality. Now that the volumes are out, readers can judge for themselves. Many among them actually wonder how exactly these volumes and chapters were created. Because I have been an active member of the committee since its creation in 1971 and of its bureau since 1983, I can provide a general answer to this question. But the time has also come to draw attention to the records generated by this project. Future researchers will find a huge mass of papers involving hundreds of historians of Africa that touch on practically all aspects of Africa's historiography between ca. 1965 and today.

In two recent published, edited works, a series of papers is brought together to demonstrate the explicit attempt to rethink and reconstruct the theoretical and methodological foundations of South African historiography. The editors point to the important impact the “new school” of radical historiography had in challenging and establishing a “break” with the racial and implicated “ruling class” perspective of the liberal paradigm over the last decade and a half. While acknowledging the further importance and advances made by this new radicalism in emphasizing class analysis and enriching and expanding the understanding of South Africa's capitalist development, there have also been certain crucial limitations. Marks and Rathbone argue that

This, together with what Bozzoli has called the “dominant Philistinism and anti-historical character of the culture” also prevalent in the radical historiography, prevented the generation and development of an ‘alternative’ conception of history in South Africa. If this alternative is to be developed, the stronghold of structuralist method of analysis with its “antihistorical bias” and concentration of objective tendencies needs not only to be countered, but abandoned.

In late 1719 the brigantine Hannover sailed from Port Glasgow on a slaving voyage to the Guinea coast. Shipowner Robert Bogle jr. and partners hired surgeon Alexander Horsburgh as supercargo to supervise their trade for provisions and slaves along the Windward Coast, Gold Coast, and at Old Calabar. The Hannover arrived off the Windward Coast in early March 1720, and during three weeks Horsburgh purchased two tons of rice and 21 enslaved Africans on Bogle's behalf. From 5 April to 2 May he traded on the Gold Coast, loading 75 chests of corn and an additional 22 slaves. The Hannover then proceeded to Old Calabar, and from late May to early July Horsburgh purchased 75 more slaves and 11,400 yams—stowing 6,000 tubers in the week before departure to the Americas. Horsburgh also purchased sixteen slaves on his own account—eight along the Windward and Gold Coasts and eight at Calabar. Illness and death followed the Hannover on its “unaccountable long passage” to the Portuguese island Anno Bom (31 August-4 September) and British colonies Barbados (arriving 31 October) and St. Kitts (November-December).

Eighty-seven of 134 Africans survived the voyage, only to be sold as slaves in the West Indies.

The journey of the Hannover, noteworthy as one of the few Scottish-based voyages in the British slave trade, is important for Africanists because the surviving ship's accounts contain the first detailed list of African traders and notables in Old Calabar history.

In November of 1854 a particularly violent clash between Dutch farmers and Ndebele tribesmen took place in the Waterberg district of the Transvaal, resulting in a spiral of killings which ultimately -- and apparently -- led to the massacre of an entire tribe. The standard account, by Theal, may be summarized briefly as follows. Hermanus Potgieter, a man of “violent temper and rough demeanour”, entered Makapan's capital with a party of men, intending to trade some ivory. This Makapan was of a ferocious disposition” and had the reputation, among the surrounding tribes, of being “a man of blood.” Unfriendly newspaper correspondents claimed that Hermanus Potgieter and his men made demands, without payment, for sheep and oxen. They also demanded gifts of African children. This seems improbable, for white men would hardly have ventured thus. Tribesmen are easily irritable and it is possible that some banal act excited “the Africans to frenzy.” Potgieter was “flayed alive,” and his skin, prepared in the same way as that of a wild animal. Makapan's forces then attacked neighboring settlements. The Farmers in Zoutpansberg and Rustenberg abandoned their homes and formed laagers. P.G. Potgieter led a force to the troubled area, where he found that the hostile tribesmen had sought refuge in a nearby cave.

This article analyzes trends in demography and labor relations in Tanzania for four cross-sections: 1800, 1900, 1950, and 2000. It discusses the quality and nature of the sources available on demography and labor relations in Tanzania for the aforementioned cross-sections. Subsequently, it reconstructs the main trends in the population size and composition, and connects them to the major shifts in labor relations in relation to the major historical events that took place in Tanzania over the last two centuries.

The author, who collects from others, is far from being exact.

John Barbot's Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea, published in 1732 (and cited hereafter as 1732) is a text well known to historians of western Africa. The problems involved in its use as a historical source have been recognized for some time, and have been clarified in recent years primarily by the scholarship of Professor Paul Hair. The history of Barbot's text is, in general terms, now clear enough. John or, as he was originally called, Jean Barbot was a Frenchman who spent some time in the African trade, in the employment of the Compagnie du Sénégal. A Huguenot, he was obliged to leave France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and settled in England, where he died at Southampton in 1713. According to his own account (1732:381) Barbot made two voyages to Africa between 1678 and 1682. The manuscript journal of his first voyage, in 1678-79, is extant and has recently been published. That of his second voyage, in 1681-82, is not known to have survived. He subsequently wrote, in French, a general account of the western African coast under the title Description des Côtes d'Affrique, which he completed in 1688, but for which he was unable to find a publisher. This manuscript (hereafter cited as 1688) is also extant, and an English translation and critical edition of it is now in preparation, under the general editorship of Paul Hair. The 1688 Description was based partly on Barbot's own observations in 1678-82, but also drew extensively from earlier published accounts, especially from that of the Dutchman Dapper, published in 1668.

During the summer of 1998 I undertook a preliminary survey of archival materials relating to the Yemeni Arab residents of Dessie kept in the town's municipality. Until 1969, when the Arab immigrants in the entire country were subjected to a state-orchestrated public call for their expulsion—a call which manifested itself in a wave of anti-Arab demonstrations triggered by a bomb explosion on an aircraft belonging to the national carrier at Frankfurt Airport in which the Syrian Front for the Liberation of Eritrea was implicated—Dessie was the home of a large, relatively prosperous, and conspicuous Yemeni community, whose members were concentrated in several distinct quarters, one of which is still popularly known as Arab Ganda. The other areas are Sharf Tara, Taqa Tara, and Mugad, near the main daily market of Arada.

The archive of the Municipality (or Town Council) of Dessie, capital of South Wallo administrative zone in northern Ethiopia, is perhaps unique among other town archives in the country, including that of the capital, Addis Ababa, in terms of the care and sense of duty that the office has shown towards preserving materials pertaining to expatriate residents. Until recently, the vast majority of these had been of Yemeni and Hadrami origin, although there were also some Hijazis and Libyans, and a significant number of non-Arabs: Italians, Greeks, Americans, Englishmen, Indians, and Czechs/Slovaks.

I consulted all but two of the existing registers entitled Yawuch Agar Zegoch Mazgab (Register of Foreign Nationals), which seem more likely to have been misplaced than lost altogether, perhaps during the move of the Municipality to its present premises.

The present paper is a by-product of a recently completed study of the impact of the Atlantic slave trade in the West African ‘Slave Coast’ (roughly, the modern Republic of Bénin). One of the most striking features of the operation of the European trade in this region was the prominence among the commodities imported of cowry shells (brought ultimately from the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean), which were used locally as a currency. Assessment of the impact of the European trade obviously requires detailed empirical study of the operation of this cowry currency, and in particular of the question of whether the massive importation of cowries which it involved led to significant depreciation of their local value. A more extended treatment of this subject is in preparation. Although there is a great deal of contemporary documentation of the prices of various commodities in local markets between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, this evidence presents considerable problems of interpretation and evaluation. This paper deals with these methodological issues, in the belief that they may be potentially illuminating for the study of other areas than the Slave Coast.

In 1982 Carol Dickerman and David Northrup published a useful article on Africa-related archives in Belgium. Their work was limited, however, to two public institutions in Brussels which, in the past 12 years, have moved and grown. What is needed now is a more up-to-date and comprehensive list of Belgian public and private collections with historical or ethnological archives concerning Africa.

In Belgium such archives are unfortunately not grouped in one place, but are spread over a dozen public and private institutions according to their nature—diplomatic, military, religious, ethnological—or origin. Thus the foreign researcher who attempts to find these archives must often undertake trying adventures, and once they have succeeded, they still must obtain numerous authorizations to use reading rooms and to consult and photocopy documents. Thus this paper aims to list the different Belgian institutions with major archives, to indicate what is available in their collections, and to describe how to gain access, in the hope that foreign researchers will be able to benefit fully from the archival riches of Belgium.

The Africa-related documents in Belgian archives and libraries mostly concern Central Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition, some collections are relevant to Belgian African politics in general and to Leopold II's expansionist aims in other parts of the continent.