Despite their uninviting aspect, dictionaries make for engrossing historical reading. Seemingly dull compilations conceal an ample description of a society and its culture at a given moment in time. Each entry in the original language constitutes a bit of information. For African languages the amount of information varies between one thousand or fifteen hundred entries in the shorter vocabularies to as many as eighty thousand for the fullest dictionaries. Anything less than a thousand words may be considered to be only a wordlist, the longest of which rarely exceeds five hundred items. Most dictionaries seem to contain between six thousand and thirty thousand entries. The extent of information is astonishing because the form is usually so condensed that it consists only of a gloss as translation of the term given. The best dictionaries contain explanations of the gloss, references to relevant publications, and examples taken from everyday speech as well as from literary usage, and they begin with a short grammatical introduction. Unfortunately, this kind of dictionary has been and remains all too rare; usually the gloss is unnecessarily laconic. Even so, the most exciting as well as the most trivial information is to be found in these tomes. For example, we learn from the 1652 Kongo dictionary (7200 entries) collected or recopied by van Geel, both that the Kongo were matrilineal–a fact stated nowhere else for the old kingdom–and that playing cards was a popular pastime.

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.

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.

Aḥmad Bul‘arāf died in September 1955 and was buried in his adopted Timbuktu. He was laid to rest in the town's Sīdi al-Wāfi al-Amīr al-Arawāni cemetery but it would be hard to identify his grave. Gravestones soon disappear into their natural sandy settings. At the time he was widely eulogized for his life's work as a man of religion, culture, and knowledge. Well-known scholars and copyists of his era composed panegyric verses in his honour. One wrote:

Decades later he still lives on in the memories of scholars as a “great hero and famous scholar, reviver of Islamic culture,” as a young writer described him in 1986, in a carefully handwritten essay in a local calligraphic style devoted to his achievement. Composed in “Sudani” script in blue ink with headings in red, when the typewriter, if not the PC, had long ago arrived in the region, this encomium to Bui‘arāf was a fitting tribute to a man who loved the written word. He cared for ideas expressed on paper, for their circulation, and how books could be stored for use in the present and in the future. He was devoted to conserving the manuscript heritage of Timbuktu. His own calligraphy in various regional variants was widely recognized and he practiced it without hesitation in the print age.

Korwo nĩNdemi Mathaathi
Baba ndagwĩtia kĩrugũ
Njoke ngwĩtie itimũ na ngo,
Riu baba ngũgwĩtia gĩthoomo.
Ndegwa rĩu gũititũire,
Thenge no iranyihanyiha,
Ndiri kĩrugũ ngagwitia,
Riu baba ngugwitia gĩthoomo.
Maitũ nĩakwĩrĩte kaing,
Ona niĩ nĩngũmenyithl˜tie,
Ndirĩ kĩrugũ ngagwĩtia,
Rĩu baba ngũgwĩtia gĩthoomo.
Njamba ĩrĩa nene Kĩnyatta,
Rĩu rĩoimĩte Rũraaya,
Jomo nĩoimĩte na thoome,
Ningĩ Jomo mũthigaani witũ.
Njamba ya bata hĩndĩ ĩno,
Kaarĩkayo no gĩtboomo,
Wambu githĩto gĩthoomo,
Baba, niĩno ngakĩina kaarĩ.
Njambo cia baba hĩndĩ ĩno,
]omo njamba ĩnyuagwo ĩmwe,
Jomo mũraata wa andũairũ,
Nowe Jotno mũraata wa twana1.1

If this were Ndemi and Mathaathi's era,
Father, I would plead for a feast,
Then demand a spear and a shield,
But now, father, I plead for education.
Bulls are now depleted,
He-goats are also fewer,
No banquet shall I ask,
Now, father, I plead for education.
Mother has often told you,
Even I have informed you,
No feast shall I demand,
Now, father, I plead for education.
The courageous warrior Kenyatta,
Has now arrived from Europe,
Jomo came through open gates,
Equally, he was our negotiator,
The important warrior of today,
His song of joy is education,
Is Wambu's honor not education?
Father, how then shall I find my joy?
Brave warriors of today,
We drink to Jomo the fearless one,
Jomo, friend of all Black people,
And Jomo the friend of children.2

Peris Wanjira Gachaũ was eleven years old when she first attended Ngoigo Independent School in 1948. She enjoyed, most of all, singing the songs her teachers taught her and other students concerning the significance of education, stolen Kikuyu land, and the promise of African independence in Kenya. “Our teachers taught us lessons of our history, culture, elders, as well as our future; and we sang in the mornings, in the afternoons, and on our way home from school, everyday.” According to Mrs. Gachaũ, the song Korwo nĩ Ndemi Mathaathi was popular among her classmates and the Kikuyu elders of her community because “everyone understood the importance of education and uhuru.” But this song most likely represented more than education and freedom to the people of Ngoigo. This song also acknowledges the memory of Kikuyu customs, the continuous transformation of Kikuyu tradition to modernity, the changing armature of Kikuyu leadership, and the future negotiation process for communicating with the outside world.

In April 2007 David William Cohen and his graduate students held a symposium on the future of African Studies at the University of Michigan. David Cohen, two graduate students—Isabelle de Rezende and Clapperton Mavhunga—as well as five invited speakers with different disciplinary backgrounds—Pius Adesanmi, Tim Burke, Jennifer Cole, Paul Zeleza, and myself—contributed papers. The purpose of the conference, entitled “2020: Re-Envisioning African Studies,” was twofold. First, it appeared timely to reflect yet again on the state of African Studies in disciplinary-based and area studies departments. Second, David Cohen had the idea of 2020 representing both the utopia of ideal vision and the concrete question of what the field might look like when the graduate students participating might conceive their second book projects. What follows are the thoughts—not a list of solutions—by a historian who has studied in three academic contexts—Germany, Zimbabwe, Britain—who has taught in as many—Britain, Germany, USA—and who has gathered experience both in area and disciplinary-based departments.

Finding one's intellectual home in area studies is problematic for a range of reasons, not least for the exoticization and marginalization of non-western world regions in the global flows of ideas. At the same time, African Studies make for a comfortable sense of belonging. This is a community of scholars who provide a productive and engaging, if at times impassioned, conversation with colleagues across disciplinary boundaries, time periods, and the great diversity of African and diasporic societies and regions. The question is: what place does the historical discipline occupy within this field, and what is its future?

In a review of my first published book one of the founding figures of african historical studies suggested that instead of giving so much attention to European colonial administrators and African traditional chiefs I should have focused upon “the clerks, the schoolmasters and the evangelists, who were to take the lead when indirect rule had failed.” The terms in which this admonition was expressed implies a confidence in the nationalist project of “educated elites” that is less tenable today than it was during the 1960s. Nonetheless, in the late stages of my own career I have come to the conclusion that of the various occupational categories cited by Roland Oliver, African clerks do deserve greater examination than they have received so far in the historiography of colonial Africa. However, if they do prefigure the political leadership of postcolonial Africa, it is less in the heroic and innovative mode of “nation-building” than in the more problematic and continuous role as “gate-keepers,” or “brokers” (honest or not) between subject populations and external sources of power/patronage.

I am not alone in this concern and an entire recent volume of essays has been dedicated to the study of such colonial “African intermediaries.” I contributed a chapter to this book and have continued to pursue a study of colonialism from “the middle” (as opposed to the “above” of my previous work as well as the social history “from below” that emerged in more recent decades). The focus of my research on this topic is upon two figures who are of both historical and literary significance: Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1900-1991), the very renowned Malian writer and scholar who produced a memoir about his early career as a colonial clerk; and “Wangrin,” a clerk and interpreter of an earlier generation, who is the subject of Hampâté Bâ's most widely read book.

The social isolation of the African soldiery is a recurrent assumption in the historiography of the Second World War in Anglophone Africa; such factors as the experience of Hausa soldiers within a cohesive barracks community, a strong sense of warrior identity, and few ties to civilian life are too often generalized into an account of the soldiery as necessarily isolated. Focusing on Ijebu in southwestern Nigeria, an area with little history of colonial military service prior to the Second World War, this paper will argue that far from being deeply isolated, Ijebu soldiers and their families strove desperately to maintain customary obligations during the men’s military service in South Asia and the Middle East in 1944 and 1945. By examining soldiers’ petitions to the Ijebu District Officer, as well as petitions from their wives, brothers, and parents, we will see that soldiers were bound by a powerful sense of obligation to their extended family not only in terms of financial support, but also in relation to labor, security, administration, and redistribution. Contextualizing these sources in terms of the ethnography of customary obligations in southwestern Nigeria, this paper will argue that neither soldiers nor their families primarily regarded these men as martial professionals, but instead perceived soldiering as a subordinate and secondary concern to family and economic commitments, as expressed through customary obligations. Although it likely differs from the experience of soldiers from supposedly “martial” groups, the experience of the Ijebu sheds light on the military service of the newer groups recruited during the war.

This paper deals with aspects of the still relatively neglected history of African medicinal plants. The core of the paper is a discussion in tabular form of the plants collected in the West African forest kingdom of Asante in 1817 by Henry Tedlie, a member of the well known English mission led by Thomas Bowdich. More generally, the paper considers episodes in the accumulation of Akan, Asante, and African plant specimens by Europeans, and the eventual classification of these in a western authorized botanical taxonomy that is now in worldwide use. The gathering of potentially medicinal plants is a little studied facet of European global expansion, from exploration to colonialism and beyond, and of the sovereign scientific orthodoxy that became established alongside it. The paper frames and discusses relevant details of this process over the longue durée, from pre-Linnaean taxonomies to current controversies over bioprospecting.

There is a disturbing trend emerging in South African history. Unquestioning acceptance of African oral tradition threatens to become a requirement of politically correct scholarship. The African voice knows all. Julian Cobbing has been sharply criticized for ignoring oral evidence in his revision of early nineteenth-century South African history. Cobbing claims that African migration and state formation in the 1820s was caused by the illegal activities of colonial slave raiders who covered up their operations by claiming that the Zulu kingdom under Shaka had laid waste to the interior of southern Africa. This cover story was incorporated into South African history as the mfecane (or crushing) and served to justify white supremacy by portraying blacks as inherently violent. Carolyn Hamilton attacks Cobbing for ignoring the African voice which allegedly supports the orthodox mfecane by placing Shaka at the center of events. In response, Cobbing claims that the largest record of Zulu oral evidence was distorted by James Stuart, the colonial official who collected it at the turn of the last century. Although Elizabeth Eldredge rejects the Zulucentric mfecane in favor of a broad compromise theory based on environmental and trade factors plus the activities of a few Griqua labor-raiders on the High veld, she accused Cobbing of developing a Eurocentric hypothesis which robs Africans of initiative within their own history. More critically, Jeffrey Peires, whose work on the Xhosa is deeply rooted in the conventional mfecane, describes Cobbing as “a reactionary wolf dressed up in the clothing of a progressive sheep” and implies that his ideas are nothing short of racist.

A few years ago I offered an assessment of the Pate “Chronicles” as a tradition-based source for the history of the East African coast. That paper drew on recensions and versions that were readily available at that time to researchers interested in their historiography. Reasons of length and scope, cited at the end of the paper, restricted discussion to Sultan Fumo Madi b. Abu Bakr and his predecessors (Sultan nos. 1-24), that is to say, up to the time of the Battle of Shela, ca. 1807-13. To reiterate, in that paper I established the following points:

(1) All recorded versions appear to have been based on an oral tradition that was extant in the mid- to late nineteenth century among Nabahani family members. The existence of a “Book of the Kings of Pate,” mentioned by Werner and Prins, is problematic (see 3 below).

(2) Despite the number of versions of the Pate “Chronicles,” they appear to have actually come from only two informants, Bwana Kitini and Mshamu bin Kombo, who was a relative or possibly, as Tolmacheva claims, Bw. Kitini's brother.

(3) Except for minor, though discernible, differences between the lists of the sultans given by both informants, most versions are consistent to a surprising degree. This seems attributable to the fact that there were only two informants, Kitini and Mshamu, who also were related, and who therefore themselves probably shared the same source(s). Given the differences of detail beyond the kinglists, if one of those earlier sources was a written one, such as an actual “Book of the Kings of Pate,” that source seems to have afforded the informants little beyond names and regnal dates.

This short report gives the rationale behind the creation of the website https://archivescolonialesbrazzaville.wordpress.com/, dedicated to the colonial archives of French Equatorial Africa in January 2015. It is argued that researchers and archivists can build highly useful websites in Africa even with a limited Internet connection.

In recent years, an increasing number of online archival databases of primary sources related to the history of the African diaspora and slavery have become freely and readily accessible for scholarly and public consumption. This proliferation of digital projects and databases presents a number of challenges related to aggregating data geographically according to the movement of people in and out of Africa across time and space. As a requirement to linking data of open-source digital projects, it has become necessary to delimit the entire continent of precolonial Africa during the era of the slave trade into broad regions and sub-regions that can allow the grouping of data effectively and meaningfully.

These abruptly articulated sentences form the opening of the first in a series of articles which, with time, would be seen to have initiated a new phase in the historical study of African languages. Seven of these articles appeared, at quarterly intervals, during 1949/50. They offered not only a fresh classification for the languages of the African continent; they also exemplified a fresh approach to the problem of language classification anywhere in the world. Since then, the classification itself has been revised and extended on several occasions, and the methodology has been made more explicit in some respects. But of none of these subsequent developments can it be said that they were not latent in the original publications. Even if the author had lost interest in the subject soon afterwards--which happily was not the case--the indications would still have been there for others to follow up, if and when they chose. In that sense, the achievement was complete by 1950.

Recognition of the achievement, however, was only slowly gained. Among Africanists these articles became the focus for a prolonged and sometimes acrimonious controversay, the echoes of which are with us even now. In some quarters, the classification was not at all willingly accepted; nor was the methodology which lay behind it.

Conducting historical research in countries with few resources necessary for the maintenance of documents and other sources on which we, as historians, depend is an exercise commonly fraught with difficulty. It need hardly be said that different problems confront us according to the themes and chronology of our studies, and so this paper cannot hope to be a comprehensive guide to any and every researcher working on Uganda. It can, however, illustrate some difficulties and successes of my particular research experience, which has been based overwhelmingly on the perusal of archival data. That experience was gained on two separate trips, one between January and August 2003 and one for the month of September, 2004. My research topic concerns the political history of two colonial districts in eastern province between 1945 and 1962. More particularly, it has set out to explore how political identity related to issues of class and class conflict in what was supposedly the first nationalist era. While I settled on these two districts, I initially began with three, and so conducted research at local archives for what were in the 1950s three districts of eastern province. Those districts were Teso, Busoga, and Bukedi, whose archives are at Soroti, Jinja, and Tororo respectively.

Attaining research permission in Uganda is a straightforward affair. Applications are made to the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology (UNCST), a body based in Uganda House on Kampala Rd., the main artery running through the city center. Their application forms can be downloaded from the internet at www.uncst.co.ug, or they can be telephoned at 00256 41 250499. The Council requires a brief research proposal, which is usually processed within a month of submission. On arrival in Kampala, they also require that one is ‘attached’ to a local institution before research papers are released. One can choose from Makerere University's Makerere Institute for Social Research (MISR) or the Centre for Basic Research (CBR) in Kololo, a research center for social sciences established by Mahmood Mamdani some years ago. Both institutions are in Kampala, are easy to access, and each charge around $US100 for annual membership.

Le pèlerinage de Mansa Musa, plus grand sultan du Mali, en 724/1324, est l’un des événements les plus célèbres du Moyen Âge africain. Le souverain est lui-même devenu, ces dernières années, une figure de l’histoire mondiale. Pourtant, des pans entiers de cet événement restent inconnus, notamment son voyage et séjour dans la péninsule Arabique. Cette étude se focalise sur son voyage depuis Le Caire vers La Mecque, à l’aller comme au retour, et à son séjour dans la ville sainte à l’occasion de son pèlerinage. Au travers de la présentation et de la discussion de nouvelles sources, j’apporte des éclairages nouveaux sur cet épisode fameux, dont la trame reste paradoxalement encore nébuleuse par endroits.

The earliest European accounts of the Lower Guinea coastlands are fewer and less informative than those available for the coastlands of Upper Guinea. This is not surprising. The exploration of the 900 or so miles of the Guinea coast to about as far as Cape Mesurado was a more deliberate process, over some eighteen years, than was that of the nearly 2000 miles of coast between Cape Mesurado and Cameroun, which seems to have been undertaken essentially in the five years, 1471/75. It was also probably a more open process, involving sailors and merchants of many nations besides the Portuguese, men who were full of a Renaissance wonder at what they saw and keen to communicate their new knowledge. Some of these men or their followers were soon – certainly by about 1500 – residing more or less permanently in African communities on the Upper Guinea coasts, subject to little or no effective control from the Portuguese authorities, becoming lançados. On the other hand, by the later 1470s the discovery of the gold wealth of Mina had led the Portuguese crown to seek to establish a royal monopoly over sea trade with Lower Guinea, and to confine it to a few posts over which it sought to assert its direct control.

The first comprehensive account of the Upper Guinea coasts to have survived is to be found in the Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis of Duarte Pacheco Pereira, almost certainly written between the years 1505 and 1508. It is constructive to compare this work with its contemporary, the Description of the West Coast of Africa written by Valentim Fernandes, probably in 1506 or 1507, which describes the Guinea coast only as far as Cape Mount (although it also has fascinating accounts of the islands of São Tomé and Annobón in the Gulf of Guinea).

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.”

In an introduction to a University of Zambia publication entitled A Catalogue of Unpublished Materials in Zambia, published in 1978, J. K. Rennie observed that in Zambia there were “many depositories or collections of private and official papers, the extent of whose holdings are imperfectly known and the state of whose preservation was uncertain.” The Catalogue, which was supposed to be the first in a series and was intended to be a “guide to unpublished primary materials … and an aid to research in history and social sciences,” identified thirty government and non-government depositories located in various parts of Zambia. The wealth and diversity of materials held in these depositories were of immense value and benefit to researchers— academics and students interested in historical studies requiring archival research. Rennie, and others who assisted him in locating and documenting these depositories, made what they called a “humble minor beginning in a much larger enterprise. This paper is intended as a further contribution to this enterprise.

In Zambia, one depository that is little known by social science researchers is the archives held by the ruling United National Independence Party (UNIP), located in Freedom House, the party headquarters at the southern end of Cairo Road, which forms part of the Research Bureau of the party. This archives holds important files formerly held by the African National Congress (ANC) formed in 1948 and disbanded in 1973 after the Chôma declaration which ushered in the one-party state and of UNIP, formed in 1960, which today is the only political party in Zambia.