This article presents a fieldwork report conducted by the authors to locate certain manuscripts – namely copies of the chronicle titled Tārīkh al-Fattāsh – listed in recent catalogues of Islamic manuscripts from Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana published by the al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation and prepared by Bābā Yūnus Muḥammad. Unfortunately, after ten days of enquiry in the two countries, it became evident that the catalogues are inaccurate and that at least some of the manuscripts described do not exist.

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.

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.

History records it that Obatala was the ruler of the indigenous peoples of southwestern Nigeria when they were conquered by Oduduwa. The exact date of the encounter remains problematic, owing largely to the nature of the source of information, oral tradition. At one level of interpretation, therefore, Obatala myths represent the struggle for the domination of the autochthonous groups, but there is another dimension. Although Oduduwa's image and achievements came to overshadow and dwarf Obatala's role in history, the latter has persisted as a deity, appropriated into the Yoruba pantheon as a symbol of peace:

It is essentially difficult to describe a Yoruba religious festival. It is not what happens that really matters, nor indeed is it important what is done. What does matter is the intense spiritual experience that can be shared even by strangers. During these events sacrifices, prayers, drumming, singing, dancing all combine to create an atmosphere, an emotional situation which allows the worshippers to come near the god ….

The second day of the [Obatala] festival has a feature not unlike a Passion Play. There is no spoken dialogue but singing accompanies the performance and the entire action is danced. The story is of a fight between the Ajagemo [who is the personification of Obatala] and another priest bearing the title of Olunwi. Ajagemo is taken prisoner by Olunwi and carried off from the palace. The Oba [king], however, intervenes for his release. He pays ransom to Olunwi, and Ajagemo is liberated and allowed to return to the palace. The return gradually attains the qualities of a triumphal procession.

Talking with informants in the field lies at the methodological heart of Africanist history and anthropology. Historians and anthropologists rely on formal and informal interviews, surveys, questionnaires, and participant observation in order to generate data from Africans and to privilege an African perspective on society, culture, and change. Fieldwork serves both as a political statement empowering African voices and as a right of passage for Africanists.

Vansina's (1965) careful methodological considerations for mining and interpreting the African voice in the form of oral traditions has helped give Africanist history its distinctive character. Collecting and using oral traditions has not been unproblematic, however. Considerable debate surrounds the historicity of oral traditions (for example, Wrigley 1971; Henige 1974; Prins 1979; Miller 1980; Webster 1982; Vansina 1985).

In comparison, little attention has been paid to the interview as the encounter central to the production of knowledge. In his Oral Tradition, Vansina was concerned primarily with the chains of transmission of testimony and their possible distortions. Vansina recognized, but did not pursue, how the encounter between informant and researcher influenced the informant's testimony.

Given the growing scholarly interest in Uganda, we thought it might be useful to provide an update on research conditions in the country and the state of some of the archives. Barrett-Gaines is a historian working on the history of the salt trade in the Great Lakes region while Khadiagala is a political scientist studying the adjudication of women's property rights within the courts of law in Uganda. Barrett-Gaines still resides in Uganda, while Khadiagala completed her research in August of 1997. In disclosing our discoveries, it is our hope that additional use of the resources by both Western and Ugandan scholars will spur interest in preserving Uganda's rich historical record.

The first step toward obtaining research clearance is to request affiliation with a research institute or academic department within Uganda. There are several independent research institutions and several universities. The actual clearance process is relatively easy. For social scientists, two possibilities are Makerere Institute for Social Research (MISR) or the Center for Basic Research (CBR). Scholars intending to travel to Uganda should initiate contact with one of these organizations about four to six months prior to arrival to obtain the application forms. Addresses are supplied at the end of this paper.

Actual research clearance is granted by the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology (UNCST). The application includes a lengthy (and often redundant) form, a brief research proposal, passport-size photographs, and proof of affiliation. On approval, the UNCST issues a small red book that serves as an identification card and a letter for presentation in each district specified in the research proposal.

Regularity of phonological change is considered a basic principle of historico-linguistic reconstruction. In 1876 A. Leskien of the Leipzig school of neogrammarians formulated the postulate of sound change occurring without exception, meaning “that if one assembled all the facts, and analyzed them accurately and thoroughly, one could state exceptionless principles or laws for the development of language” (Lehmann 1973:87). However, it has since been argued on the basis of empirical research that languages are never in complete balance and that, therefore, change is not necessarily constant, nor parallel among groups speaking different languages. Various reasons have been found to account for irregularities in language: the impact of one language on another, the effect of children acquiring their language, etc. Yet before we enter into any etiological discussion of irregular or unstructured phonological change, the area of investigation for the present case study must be introduced, and the characteristic of the problematic nature of the case sketched.

This paper examines a transformation in Mahafale relations with the French at the end of the nineteenth century. The study is based on an analysis of Eugène Bastard's published accounts of his travels among the northern Mahafale, a remnant of the Maroseraña dynasty, in 1899. Rather than disregard Bastard as a mere colonial propagandist, which he was in part, it is worth considering him as a potential source on Mahafale history and ethnography at the beginning of the colonial period. Of central interest is his account of transgressing an old taboo, faly aux vazaha, that had kept all Mahafale territories except the coastal “exterior” closed to Europeans for generations.

Removing this idea of “tabooed white foreigners,” which Bastard thought would ease Mahafale submission to the French, was not as easy as he assumed. Each “headman” in the region, and there were many, could negotiate his own position toward this taboo. Moreover, faly aux vazaha was deeply rooted in the structure of Mahafale society, connected with group identity and an ideal of autarky or independence from others. Tampering with this taboo, this vehicle of resistance to external power, heaped new problems on the French. The more militant Mahafale responded with armed resistance, which continued until the French, using biological warfare, finally subdued the last pockets of resistance around 1930. Although Bastard oversimplified the meaning of this taboo and its removal, his reports show Mahafale actors struggling with a central part of their social structure during a turbulent historical period.

A major feature of research in African history is the reliance of African historians on oral statements for much of their evidence. Vansina's pathbreaking explorations of African oral traditions and testimonies established criteria for the collection of oral evidence and ushered in the contemporary era of scholarship in African history. Although the publication of Oral Tradition sanctioned the use of oral data, it also prompted considerable reflection about the nature, strengths, and weaknesses of oral evidence. For the most part this scholarly examination of African oral traditions and testimonies has focused on their value as sources. What has not been fully addressed are the social and cultural dynamics of the research process itself: how the interaction between a foreign fieldworker and an indigenous informant involves not only the production of knowledge but the management of asymmetrical power relationships as well. Rarely do researcher and informant interact as equal partners. During the process of fieldwork, sometimes the researcher is favored, sometimes the informant. This brief paper is a reflection on the ways the attitudes of an African people about knowledge, power, and outsiders influence the kind of oral evidence the researcher collects.

For much of the past two years I resided in a village in northern Ghana where I was conducting fieldwork among the Mamprusi people. I was seeking information which would embellish and provide an indigenous texture to the archival sources I had collected earlier as part of my efforts to reconstruct the social history of Mampurugu during the colonial period. It soon became apparent, however, that my quest for an indigenous expression of, and perspective on, historical process was mired in a complex host of conflicts and assumptions. As a white stranger in the Mamprusis' midst asking as many questions as I could about the Mamprusi past, I received answers which reflected not only the degree to which I had successfully or unsuccessfully established cordial and trusting relationships with my Mamprusi informants, but also Mamprusi attitudes about historical knowledge and their anxieties in regard to possible consequences if such knowledge were revealed to non-Mamprusi.

For a long time, scholars have known that the ancient Sino-East Africantrade relationship produced valuable accounts of East Africa in the Chinese imperial archives. Particularly, the historical documents compiled during the T'ang, Sung, and Ming dynasties contain several insightful snapshots of East Africa over the span of 800 years. Unfortunately, due to the difficulty of translating ancient Chinese texts, scholars have not been able to utilize these documents fully. In other cases, scholars have misused the translations to derive conclusions that may not be supported by the original text. In this essay I propose to re-examine the original Chinese sources and the way these sources have been used by subsequent scholars. Furthermore, I shall explore the real or potential contribution of these texts to our understanding of East African coastal history.

The primary source of Chinese knowledge about East Africa during the T'ang dynasty (618-907) comes from Ching–hsing Chi (“Record of Travels”) and Yu–yang Tsa–tsu (“Assorted Dishes from Yu–yang”). During the Sung dynasty (960-1279), most of the information is recorded in Chu-fan-chih (“Gazetteer of Foreigners”) and Ling–wai Tai–ta (“Information from Beyond the Mountains”). Finally, the record of the Ming (1368-1644) naval expedition into the western Indian Ocean is preserved in Wu–pei–chih (“Notes on Military Preparedness”), Hsing–ch'a Sheng–lan (“Triumphant Vision of the Starry Raft”), and Ming Shih (“History of the Ming Dynasty”).

This article engages with existing scholarship that explores how colonial knowledge was constructed. Focusing on the region of Borno it will highlight the ways in which European officials collaborated with African elites when writing official histories of the region (1902–1960). These exchanges were indicative of both the ruling Kanemi dynasty’s efforts to assert their authority in Borno, as well as the efforts made by foreign colonial officials to advance their careers.

Since 1997, all the archives of Belgian Congo are deposited at the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brussels and are opened up the public. For more than fifteen years, researchers have consulted and scrutinized its documents produced by the colonial authorities between 1908 and 1960. Still several collections have not been explored. This article relates of the history and the organization of the archives of Belgian Congo.

When he sighted the southern end of Lake Victoria on 3 August 1858, John Hanning Speke (1859b:397) realized that he had discovered the “source” of the White Nile, the most important tributary of the Nile proper, and so had “almost, if not entirely, solved a problem which it has been the first geographical desideratum of many thousand years to ascertain, and the ambition of the first monarchs of the world to unravel.” That Speke was an unknown explorer and that he had made his discovery on a solo “flying trip” during the East African Expedition of 1856-59, which, under the command of the renowned explorer Richard Francis Burton, had already also discovered Lake Tanganyika, made Speke's accomplishment all the more remarkable.

As contemporaries soon asserted, Speke's discovery culminated a historical series of excursions, real and imagined, into the interior of Africa and placed Speke at the pinnacle of a line of explorers and geographers that ran from Herodotus, Julius Caesar, and Ptolemy to, in more recent times, James Bruce (the Scotsman who “discovered” the source of the Blue Nile, the second most important tributary of the Nile, in 1770), the German missionaries Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann (who “discovered,” respectively, the snow-capped mountains of Kilimanjaro in 1848 and Kenya in 1849), and noted “armchair geographers” like W.D. Cooley, Charles Beke, and James M'Queen.

The Bakgalagari were classified by Guthrie (1948) as S30 and by Cole (1954) as 60/2/5. They incorporate ethnic groups such as Bangologa, Bashaga, Babolaongwe, Balala, Bakhena, Baritjhauba, and Bakgwatheng and Baphaleng, the latter of which do not speak Shekgalagari any more. At the moment, Bakgalagari are only found in Botswana. They are thought to have arrived in southern Africa more than 2000 years ago, together with other Bantu groups (Tlou/Campbell 1997:33), and were the earliest Sotho-Tswana group to inhabit the Madikwe and Limpopo river basins (Figure 1) around 900 and 1000 CE (Tlou/Campbell, 1997).

Around 1200 CE, the Bakgalagari were already inhabiting the peripheries of this area as they migrated into Botswana, where they are estimated to have arrived around 1000 CE, as Figure 2 illustrates (cf. Tlou/Campbell, 1997:90). They would later be pushed into the Kgalagadi desert, which reinforced the peripheral and distant location of some of them from the rest of the Sotho-Tswana groups that subsequently inhabited the country.

History suggests that there were ethnic rivalries amongst the Bakgalagari, and they consequently split into various ethnic groups (Tlou/Campbell, 1997:90). These ethnic groups were dispersed in various directions in the country at different times as shown in Figure 3. Figure 3 shows the historical base and the subsequent movements of the Bakgalagari starting earlier than 1400 CE. It is possible that these movements might have been reversed at various times, and also that some people at a later stage took the same directions to find their ethic counterparts (e.g., Babolaongwe at around 1650 CE).

There are many things that it is like, this storytelling business. One of them (so she says in one of the paragraphs she has not crossed out yet) is a bottle with a genie in it. When the storyteller opens the bottle, the genie is released into the world, and it costs all hell to get him back in again. Her position … better, on the whole, that the genie stay in the bottle.

So says the narrator of the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee's novel, Elizabeth Costello. Costello, an aging novelist, philosophizes at a point in the book where Coetzee has conspired to provoke a moment of ethical reflection on the process of telling stories. Irony and paradox cleave to this paragraph's core—clearly, Coetzee, by continuing to write and to publish, does not really believe that the genie should stay bottled. But, while Costello intends to edit this reflection from her written work, both the narrator and Coetzee consider it worthy of inclusion in the novel, thus endorsing its importance.

Costello's comment provokes consideration of the nature and effects of narration in other representations. One such site is academic writing that uses interviews and oral histories as source material. Such writing necessitates at least two levels of narration: first, re-presentation of the primary material and second, the author's analysis, synthesis, and commentary on it. As in other genres, this distils into two kinds of material: mimesis and diegesis. Here Elizabeth Tonkin's definitions of these terms are useful. She describes mimesis as “the representation of direct speech” and diegesis as “the description of nonverbal events.”

Using my experience working in the Regional Archives of Labé (Guinea), this essay examines the importance of using local archives to write political histories of postcolonial Africa. In doing so, I argue that the fractured and fragmentary nature of the postcolonial holdings of archives – often cited as a hurdle to writing histories of Africa after independence – is in fact the product of the states that (sometimes inadequately) maintain these repositories. As such, these “imperfect” archives should be approached as an opportunity to examine the local practice of statehood in postcolonial Africa.

Petermanns Geographische Mittheilungen, the leading German geographical journal of the nineteenth century, is of fundamental significance for the early scholarly study of Africa. It printed numerous accounts by practically all of the important explorers of the time, in particular under the aegis of the geographer August Petermann. Of particular significance are the cartographic supplements to the articles published in the journal. These maps showed for the first time hitherto unknown areas of Africa. Although the data for these maps were often collected in the field under difficult conditions by European travellers, and drawn up in Gotha with the assistance of numerous specialists (astronomers, geologists, cartographers, lithographers, graphic artists), their creation would have been impossible without the cooperation of Africans. That is to say, these maps, a medium seen as a most exact expression of scientific and technical progress, could not have been produced without the assistance of so-called “natives” or “savages.” This aspect of cartographic production, to which little attention has been paid so far, is the subject of a research project at the Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig initiated in May 2009. In the course of this project, a range of German-language travelers' accounts will be studied, giving special attention to the role of indigenous informants and in combination with archival materials. This paper is based on the example of the German African explorer Georg Schweinfurth.

In September 1863, the as yet unknown botanist Georg Schweinfurth announced the start of his African projects in a “call to botanists” in Petermanns Geographische Mittheilungen, describing his planned “expedition over several years to Egypt, Nubia and the countries of the Upper Nile, devoted solely to botanical purposes.” Although Schweinfurth did not publish solely in the Geographische Mittheilungen in the following years, he remained in close contact with Petermann, especially with regard to new geographical discoveries. Unlike other travelers, Schweinfurth often visited areas barely known to geographers, where he compared existing maps most carefully with his own observations. In this way he was able to correct many inaccuracies and improve European cartographic knowledge of these regions. A total of six maps by Schweinfurth appeared in the Geographische Mittheilungen between 1865 and 1877.

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.

Feedback—the process by which written versions of history influence subsequent presentations of oral history—is now a well-documented process. In writing on African history, Henige in particular has emphasized the importance of feedback in oral history, and has suggested that feedback from written sources is a process of contamination which has affected oral history all over the continent.

Some aspects of the oral history of Bonde, the area around the town of Muheza in northeastern Tanzania, would seem to present a counterexample to this thesis of written history as a contaminant of hitherto pure oral history: oral histories of at least two important nineteenth-century events in this area are at variance with fairly widely-available published sources. Evidence from Bonde suggests that, here at least, feedback from written sources is not a particular and unique influence on the making of oral history.