From time to time one encounters a situation where a wisp of a source yields evidence of momentous consequence for the understanding of a whole society in the past. Such a situation raises the question of how much evidentiary weight a slender source can credibly bear, for when the evidence is so slender or tenuous, the slightest misunderstanding or misinterpretation can lead to hugely magnified errors in historical reconstruction. At the same time, the more slender the evidence, the more tempted researchers will be to interpret it according to their own a priori vision of the past in question. This is a genuine problem which can only be overcome by finding more relevant evidence.

Such situations naturally crop up wherever sources (written or otherwise) are very rare, so that every scrap of evidence must be scrutinized and exploited with the greatest care and to its fullest extent, a common circumstance in African history in relation to written documents before ca. A.D. 1450 and documents at all times about topics such as, for instance, women's history or specific techniques of agriculture that were normally not recorded. The situation then, while unusual, is frequent enough to warrant a more detailed discussion of one such instance to illustrate what the problem is and how it can be tackled. This illustration will be the case of oratoi, a single word in the Periplus Maris Erythraei.

The Periplus is justly famous in African historiography. Known from a single manuscript now in Heidelberg and held to date from the early tenth century and a much later copy from that now in the British Museum, written in a mixture of classical and vulgar Greek by either a Greek living in Egypt or an Egyptian, and firmly dated to between AD 40-55, the Periplus contains the first, albeit succinct, information about the inhabitants of the East African coast, more than half a millennium before other comparable written mentions occur.

For thirty-eight days in August and September of 1607, two ships of an English expedition to the East Indies lay in the Sierra Leone estuary, mainly in order that the sailors might recover from the scurvy developed in a four-months' voyage by drinking lime-water prepared from local fruits. When the ships returned from the East, journals of the expedition became available. Richard Hakluyt collected three, including that of the expedition's commander, William Keeling. These passed eventually to Samuel Purchas, who in 1625 published extracts from them and from other journals independently collected. In Purchas' publication the Sierra Leone stage of the voyage is referred to in extracts from two writings: Keeling's daily journal, and the “large Journall” of the merchant William Finch -- not in fact a daily journal but a detailed, accurate, and very valuable synoptic description. While Finch's “Remembrances touching Sierra Leone” appears to have been published in full, Purchas cut the relevant section of Keeling's journal. He stated “I have beene bold to so shorten as to express only the most necessary Observations for Sea or Land Affaires.” The original of Keeling's journal has disappeared, and therefore, with the exception of some entries to be shortly described, what Purchas cut cannot now be reinstated. However, four other journals of the voyage which contain material on Sierra Leone have survived. The one with the briefest reference to Sierra Leone was published in 1878, and extracts from the Sierra Leone sections of the other three appeared in print in 1877 and 1923. The present paper makes use of a transcription of the whole of the relevant sections in the three manuscripts, a transcription which I hope to publish soon elsewhere.

Driven by the linguistic and material imperatives of the civilizing mission, early twentieth-century British missionaries sought to reduce Gikuyu, a language spoken in much of central Kenya, to a systematic code of words and phrases. Two of them—A.R. Barlow, a sometime renegade Presbyterian layman, and A.W. MacGregor, a conservative Anglican—produced Gikuyu grammars in what MacGregor described as a “tentative” effort to ameliorate the linguistic difficulties of European settlers and Christian evangelists.

This essay is an attempt to read these two dictionaries as historical texts, highlighting the ways in which they embodied the complexities and contingencies built into colonial hegemony. In the first instance, I argue that the dictionaries were functional tools of colonizing power. As John and Jean Comaroff have shown, missionaries' linguistic interventions were an integral part of the classifying project of colonial control: by insisting on rational modes of debate, and by defining the language in which the debate took shape, missionaries coercively imposed a hegemonizing trajectory onto cultural exchange. Following the Comaroffs, I outline the ways in which these grammars worked to colonize the language of Gikuyu subjects by creating and imposing linguistic meaning through the dictionary.

At the same time, I suggest that these dictionaries were more than functional tools of missionary enterprise. The dictionaries sit uncomfortably at the point of contact between missionary linguistic power and Gikuyu discourse: if the dictionary was to be useful for missionary purposes, then its authors were necessarily compelled to enter into the idiomatic lexicon of local conversations over power, property, and wealth.

The twilight of the twentieth century saw major developments in the world, which profoundly redefined people's perceptions of and interest in history, both as a mode of enquiry and as an academic discipline. The significance of such changes would appear to have found resonance in the Third World. The most important of these changes included “the revolution in IT, which transformed and democratized scholarship, and the further expansion in higher education; the shift from sociology to anthropology as the most fruitful subject from which historians were now borrowing; the influence of Michel Foucault, postmodernism and the ‘linguistic turn;’ the rise of women's history, gender history, and the reconfiguration of ‘imperial’ history; and a broader shift away from the search for causation to the search for meaning.’ Some of these were to pose serious challenges either to the ways in which history was perceived by civil society or practiced by professionals. It also affected the very possibility of doing history at all. But the details, complexity, and magnitude of the changes varied from country to country in different ways.

In 1993 the “Mission Statement” of the newly-introduced Ife Journal of History gave an indication of the travails of the discipline of history in contemporary Nigeria: More than at any other time, the discipline of history today in Nigeria, is under severe stress. Perplexed by economic crises of immense proportions and dominated by the craze for money and by the politics of the moment, we have become distorted in our orientation and deluded of any deep consciousness of history. We live as if all that matters is today. In private and in public, our citizens are routinely treated to dreary lectures on the irrelevance and insignificance of a systematic knowledge of our past…We seemed determined to go on record as the first nation to make a meaningful progress without reference to the accumulated values, experiences and culture of yesteryears. … The discipline of history is routinely dismissed as dispensable. History which used to be an attractive subject has dropped to the bottom of the ladder of priorities for intending undergraduates. Historians receive little or no regard in a society that is in a haste to modernise and that places emphasis solely on science and the acquisition of material wealth.…

The articulation of antislavery among Africans remains to be studied. Overall, the staple of animated questions, debates, and conclusions of the vast literature on abolition of slavery in the last two decades or so has neglected African contributions of ideologies of antislavery to the global abolition epoch in the Atlantic world. Charting a new trajectory for the study of abolition in Africa, as well as the global abolition epoch, this study examines the ideologies of antislavery among Africans as expressed in the Gold Coast Times (Cape Coast) during the heyday of the British abolition of slavery in the Gold Coast in 1874-75. The study, echoing African agency, reveals the manifest presence of the African intelligentsia abolitionists in the late nineteenth-century Gold Coast. The origin and timing of the African intelligentsia's antislavery attitudes in the Gold Coast are not made known in the sources. However, the sources do reveal that antislavery flowered in the littoral region between Elmina and Accra, the hub of precolonial intellectual activities, political activism, and diffusion of cultures, linked to the larger Atlantic world.

Overall, I argue that antislavery existed among the African intelligentsia and that they articulated their ideologies of antislavery in several ways, both on the eve of the British colonial abolition of slavery and in its immediate aftermath. The study is divided into four main parts. The first section problematizes the sources and addresses some methodological considerations. For its part, the second portion interrogates the comparative historiography on abolition, while the third section conceptualizes the African intelligentsia abolitionists and their association with the Gold Coast Times, the main platform for the African intelligentsia's espousal of ideologies of antislavery. Divided into two parts, the final section examines the African intelligentsia's articulation of antislavery both before and after the inauguration of abolition by the colonial state.

The article examines from a global perspective the phenomenon of digital photographic archiving and questions its impact on African archives both on the continent and outside it. The authors deal with the multi-layered consequences of information technologies for African photographic archives, asking to what degree they have connected Africa to the world. They consider too how much access they have given Africans to materials that were previously either unknown to them, or beyond their reach. Finally, the article explores how much opportunity digitization offers to agents of African photographic archives, empowered by technological developments.

The archival sources gathered for my PhD research have all been posted to a blog, www.opensourceguinea.org. Among other things, the sources trace the migrants and laborers in and around the plantation island of Fernando Pó, moving through numerous empires and societies in Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Cameroon and Gabon for most of the twentieth century. Having sources “speak for themselves” to the “public” and even “amongst themselves” contributes not only to an expansionary information commons, but also to a methodological reorganization and pluralization. When a multiplicity of sources are displayed and interlinked as hypertext, the static conceptual lenses of traditional social and cultural history dissolve.

During the mid-1950s British administrators in the Machakos District of Kenya enlisted categories of Kamba occult “experts”—“witchdoctors” and “cleansers”—to cleanse local “witches” and migrants from Nairobi who were believed to have taken the Mau Mau oath. A compendium of colonial documents concerning the “cleansing” campaigns illustrates how and why the socio-historical context of Mau Mau-era Machakos drove the colonial administration to break with its longstanding de facto policy of not officially combating supernatural challenges to state authority with supernatural means. The overwhelming disorder wrought by Mau Mau motivated state officials to break with precedent and to identify and employ Kamba “experts” to cleanse Mau Mau adherents and witches.

The widespread and politicized nature of the violence occurring during Mau Mau, and its perceived linkages to the supernatural, precipitated the state's shift to the employment of Kamba experts to combat “witchcraft” and Mau Mau oathing. An anthro-historical approach to understanding Mau Mau in Machakos shows that, while the cleansings constituted a group of “critical moments” at which British colonial officials could argue that they had dealt with supernatural challenges to state authority by rendering them “knowable,” the cleansings also demonstrated the degree to which state authority became situated in Kamba colonial officials and the extent to which the implementation and interpretation of British colonial cleansing policies depended on these local authorities.

The slave trade has been a major theme of historical writing on Africa for many years, but it is only recently that scholars have begun to look seriously at slavery within African societies themselves. With the recent publication of three books the trickle of studies on this subject has now become a flood. The first of these, L'esclavage en Afrique précoloniale, edited by Claude Meillassoux, contains seventeen studies of slavery, mostly from francophone West Africa. Slavery in Africa, edited by Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, includes sixteen studies, eleven of which focus on west Africa. Frederick Cooper's book, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa, presents a regionally comparative study of east African plantations. Each of these volumes opens with a general introduction to the subject of African slavery, and these will form the primary focus of this essay.

A salient impression that emerges from reading the three books is that African slave systems showed enormous diversity; plantation slaves in Zanzibar had little in common with the elite military tyeddo in Senegambia, or for that matter with Sena slaves in Mozambique, who were integrated into the acquiring lineages. Often, a single society would embrace several co-existing slave systems, and the picture is further complicated by the fact that slave systems changed over time. Miers and Kopytoff underline this diversity by suggesting no fewer than seventeen different (though sometimes overlapping) terms to describe different types of slavery (p. 77).

The following is a brief description of a collection of Arabic materials deposited by John Paden at the Herskovits Africana Library, Northwestern University. The collection includes 424 numbered volumes of which about half enclose manuscript materials while the other half enclose published books and pamphlets, most of them privately printed in Kano, Zaria, or Cairo. The collection altogether (and especially so among the pamphlets) includes a substantial proportion of works of West African authorship. However, the classical Muslim/Arabic literature, and especially the basic jurisprudential treatises and the better known diwans of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, are well represented in the collection.

This summary is made up of three parts, beginning with a few words on the classical Muslim/Arabic works in the collection. The second part is concerned with the unusual manuscript materials and includes a listing and description of these materials. Finally, the third part will be concerned with individual West African authors whose works are well represented in the collection. In most cases, these authors are represented by privately printed materials or by manuscripts of which copies generally tend to be found elsewhere.

In the references to specific manuscripts below, no attempt will be made to describe the calligraphy, the size of pages, etc. The purpose is to call attention to the availability of the sources under consideration, especially since they are scheduled to be microfilmed by the Cooperative Africana Microform Project soon.

Though mostly represented by manuscript copies, the diwans of Arabic poetry present little interest since they tend to be recent copies of works long ago published in numerous printings and editions elsewhere.

Historians of Nigeria have been curious for many years about the relationship between the various states of the southern zone since the sixteenth century. The fact that the area has produced a rich art, has a fairly elaborate set of traditional histories, and has been the subject of some systematic archeological work means that the modern scholar has somewhat more to go on in reconstructing the region's history than just the fairly sparse and disappointing contemporary texts that came out of the early Portuguese contacts and subsequent European trade and navigation. But contemporary documentation for southern Nigeria remains much weaker than that for other African areas, such as the central African zone, Gold Coast, or the western Atlantic coast.

Nevertheless, documents have raised problems in understanding the history of the area that cannot be fully solved by recourse to the other sources of information, in spite of the comparative richness of non-documentary sources. One of these documentary problems is the issue of the Ife-Benin relationship as documentated in archeology, contemporary texts, and art history. The problems raised by the relationship between these two southern Nigerian cities ultimately reflects on a much larger set of questions concerning the relationship of all the early states south of the Niger, at a period quite near the origin of the state system that would predominate the rest of the pre-colonial period.

Dans le Sud-Est de la Côte d'Ivoire le début des années soixante est marqué par la tentative de sécession du Sanwi et ses retombées. Le roi du Sanwi, décidant de se détacher de l'Etat ivoirien qui vient d'accéder à l'independance, est allé avec ses partisans s'établir au Ghana où il a formé un gouvernement provisoire. II donne légitimité à ce mouvement en faisant référence au traité d'alliance qu'un de ses prédécesseurs Amon Ndiffou avait signé avec la France, représentée par Fleuriot de Langle, le 4 Juillet 1843.

L'érection du Sanwi en Etat indépendant est le signal d'une sévère politique de répression qui s'abat sur les Anyi de la région. A Aboisso régne le sous-préfet Haccandie qui met en place un réseau d'agents de renseignements dans un pays où les villages et les families sont profondément divisées par ce qu'on commence à appeler “I'affaire du Sanwi”. En outre les crédits affectés à la région sont drastiquement réduits. Or antérieurement le Sanwi avait été le premier pôle de développement de la Colonie, dotée d'un important réseau routier pour l'écoulement des “produits” (café, cacao) et d'équipements sanitaires et scolaires. Et brusquement ce pays, d'où était issue une élite de lettrés et de fonctionnaires, se trouve déiaissé, voire sacxifie, au bénéfice d'autres parties de la Côte d'Ivoire.

In this paper I have three main objectives. One is to highlight and examine the work of Zimbabwean African historians under colonial rule up to the 1960s. Another is to examine the effect of the work of these historians on the traditions of the Changamire Rozvi, the rulers of the greatest state in Zimbabwe from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. The third is to show how Rozvi revival movements arose in the 1950s as a minor feature of the period of African nationalism's mobilization.

Although the first history of this country was published as early as 1900, it goes without saying that, in the colonial context, African history was played down and denigrated by most of the white writers on the subject for most of the colonial period. Although there was a strong local white tradition of writing on the minority Ndebele people, the majority Shona-speakers were largely ignored. Apart from a small group of local white antiquarians, whose work is only now undergoing re-evaluation, very little was published before 1960 on the history of the Shona. Yet, despite this general neglect, a small but devoted number of Africans were conscious of their lack of a written history and sought to remedy that lack. They found it a lonely and a difficult task. In a period when African education beyond certain limits was discouraged, they had neither access to proper training nor to primary sources other than traditions. If they were sometimes prone to trust unduly the missionary texts with which they grew up (so that one can read of “King Monomotapa” and “Queen Sheba” borrowing Solomon's Phoenician laborers to build Great Zimbabwe),” one can also read the work of two Duma historians who carefully cited Arabic, Portuguese, and archeological sources in secondary works.

The “Zimbabwe controversy” is a name by which disputes over the origins of the people who produced stone ruins and mines in southern Africa are known. Those disputes occurred between informed and lay opinion; informed opinion being represented by archeologists, and lay opinion by local cult archeologists and, at the turn of the century, explorers and excavators. One aspect of lay opinion that has seldom been discussed is the role of popular fiction. Popular novels are often mentioned in works on the Zimbabwe controversy as representing particular viewpoints, but there have been no detailed analyses of their role in that controversy. This paper will set popular novels into the context of the ideologies that influenced them, and gauge their influence on lay opinion and the degree to which they reflected viewpoints that were expressed in political disagreements over the site of Great Zimbabwe.

There are four major nineteenth-century novels that are pertinent to the Zimbabwe controversy: H. M. Walmsley's The Ruined Cities of Zululand, and three works by H. Rider Haggard—King Solomon's Mines, She, and Elissa? The first novel was published in time to incorporate knowledge of recently-reported stone ruins and gold mines. In the 1820s and 1830s stone kraals were known to have been built by black people. By the 1860s, however, when other explorers “discovered” stone ruins, they argued that black people could not have built them. Their arguments were based on prevalent systems of classifying humanity. It was generally believed that races were tied to discrete levels of culture by their average intelligence and their blood. Consequently, races could be characterised in terms of a set number of items of culture. It was also generally accepted that the overall record of humanity was one of cultural progress, or step-by-step advancement toward ever better and more complex cultures. Racial characters were thought to set a limit on the level that each race could reach. It was argued, for instance, that black Africans had reached the limit of their potential progress, whereas Europeans were still undergoing advancement. Consequently, Europeans were seen to belong to the most advanced races in the world; other races were ranked below them, and were thought to represent primitive stages through which Europeans had already passed.

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.

In the works of many generations of white writers on Africa, the “Great White Hunter” has remained one of the most powerful and enduring images. A model of Caucasian masculinity, he quickly masters a hostile and wild environment in ways which amaze the aboriginal population, who are usually portrayed as savage and incompetent. Perhaps the best known real-life example of this classic image was Frederick Courteney Selous, a product of the English public school system, who hunted elephants in southern and central Africa during the 1870s and 1880s. Never having made much money from the ivory trade because of the dwindling number of elephants, Selous became an employee of Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company (BSAC) in the 1890s and worked towards the colonization of Southern Rhodesia. After fighting against the Ndebele in 1893 and 1896, Selous eventually based himself in England and became a recognized environmental expert, safari guide, and collector/seller of zoological specimens.

Through writing six books and numerous articles from 1881 to the 1910s, Selous successfully created and popularized an image of himself as a skilled, yet sporting, hunter, a painfully honest gentleman of the bush, and a friend, as well as leader, of Africans. He was an adventurer with a dramatic habit of narrowly escaping danger and these episodes were often illustrated through drawings in his books. Discussing one such incident, a writer of hunting stories once remarked that “throughout Lobengula's country the story went that Selous was the man even the elephants could not kill. It helped to build the ‘Selous Legend’ among the Rhodesian tribes.”

Following the lead of two Dutch pioneers, historians have recently made considerable progress in the critical analysis of seventeenth-century European sources relating to west Africa. Many important works, however, have yet to be dealt with. Among these are the German sources, without which the other sources cannot fully be understood. Although no German state was as important in seventeenth-century trade with west Africa as the Dutch, English, French, and Portuguese, the German literary output was as significant as that of any nation except the Dutch. Having just completed a critical English edition of seventeenth-century German writings on west Africa, I think it appropriate to review the extent to which these can be regarded as primary sources. I propose to look at each author in chronological order.

This paper is about the exploration of discrepancies between words and deeds of Portuguese colonial rule in Guinea-Bissau, Portugal pretending to “integrate” and “enable” into colonial society those individuals of African origin who were deemed to be “civilized.” The essay illustrates potentials and limitations of margins of maneuver of those supposedly subjected under colonial rule. Against this background I will analyze the transformations, continuities, and ruptures of creole identities throughout time, showing how identitarian categories and classifications evolved, changed, and disappeared. It will be shown how the intersection with other identities has been a key characteristic of creole identity over time. In doing so, the analysis focuses on different areas, such as population demographics and classifications, education, and political participation.

The method of exposition adopted in this essay is one which divides the discussion into three concentric circles and proceeds accordingly. Firstly, we give a brief historical sketch of the antecedents. This sets the scene for the next stage, where we investigate the nature of the crisis and the reasons for it. Finally, attention is especially drawn to the materialist critique of orthodox historiography in order to bring into relief the ideological dimensions of the problem. On the whole, in this study we have drawn generously from ideas developed in works dealing generally with African historiography, even though this essay is specific to the Nigerian social formation.

This essay argues that the history of southern Ghana exhibits far more continuity from the era of the slave trade to the time of British colonization in the late-nineteenth century than one can find in the existing historiography. Emphases on the expansion of the Asante kingdom and on the increased activity of European missionaries, capitalists, and bureaucrats have obscured the steady growth of indigenous cultural, political and social institutions which culminated in the formation of the Fante Confederation of 1868.