The intense scholarly debate concerning the shift from orality to literacy has not often directly concerned African historians in spite of the fact that many work closely with oral sources. In the process of publishing a series of locally-written histories, I discovered that transforming oral tradition into written form is ultimately political. It raised a number of important ethical dilemmas for me as a scholar and brought to my attention the power relations inherent in these transactions. Oral knowledge and its transformation is not neutral or entirely benevolent. I found out that the change from an oral to a written knowledge base takes power out of the hands of community elders and puts it into the public domain, where literate men have the advantage and where community security may be vulnerable. As scholars we need to face our own involvement in these political processes, even if we cannot ultimately control them.

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

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

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

It is impossible to write a comprehensive report on the condition of archives throughout the Republic of Zaire, for documents are not stored in national or centralized archives. For example, in Shaba Region (ex-Katanga Province), documents are kept in various bureaux at Lubumbashi. At subordinate territorial levels like the sous-region (ex-district) and zone (ex-territoire), documents are tucked away in cabinets, work rooms, and closets at their administrative centers. It is difficult to plan the time to be spent in archives in advance, for there seems to be no middle ground in their condition. Either they are in good order with documents neatly bundled in labeled file folders, or they are a complete shambles with most documents missing or stored in unclassified heaps on some shelves or on the floor. It is difficult to anticipate which archive will be in good order. There is no reason to assume that an archive in an urban center will be in better shape than an archive at an infrequently visited rural poste or vice versa. The only generalization that can be made is that an archive in Shaba Region which has been properly maintained will be a rich depository of documents. The Belgian colonial administration contained more European personnel than the administration of any other colonial power, and the paperwork produced by this bureaucracy was substantial. When the Belgians departed, they left a legacy of correspondence, reports, procès-verbaux, inquiries, etc., dating from as early as 1907, which can still be found in the little-used archives of Shaba.

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.

The Bantu expansion has been a problem for historians ever since the recognition by linguists of a single startling fact. During the nineteenth century, the descriptions of African languages available to scholars in Europe grew steadily in number; they also tended to gain in detail, and in accuracy. It thus became increasingly clear that a sinuous line could be traced across the map distinguishing a zone of extremely high diversity in the north from a zone of low diversity in the south. By the 1880s a popularizing writer could claim that this contrast was generally recognized “by students of African languages.” The situation as he described it was

In 1971 and 1973 I carried out anthropological fieldwork in Kwahu-Tafo, a rural town of about 5,000 inhabitants on the Kwahu plateau in the Eastern Region of Ghana. The first research project was a case study of the family I was staying with; the second was on ideas and practices concerning sex and birth control. As usual in anthropological research, my attention was drawn to many other things around me. One of these was Highlife. This short essay discusses the texts of some Highlife songs, which intriguingly related to my experiences in the field.

It was impossible not to be struck by the importance of Highlife in the dreariness of daily life in Ghana. In the evenings large groups of young people assembled in front of the local bar to dance and listen to Highlife, the sounds of which resounded over the town. Many of the youngsters sang the texts along with the music. The typically empty interior contrasted strangely with the crowd outside. They were attracted not only by the music but also by the light—the bar was the only place in town with electricity. And, of course, it was the place to meet members of the opposite sex. Women and children were present to sell bread, tea, fried plantains, and other snacks. Around 10 p.m. the bar usually stopped the music; the lights went off, and the people dispersed. I became curious to know what the songs were about. Although I had learned some Twi, I was not able to understand them, so I asked someone to translate one text for me. The content aroused my interest and I decided to collect more Highlife texts. Various people helped me: school pupils, teachers, university students, and others. After recording the songs I had them transcribed in Twi and then translated into English.

In returning once again to an old theme and a familiar and much discussed topic one is keenly conscious of the danger of harping on, as one observer has labelled it, a “tired refrain.” The present revisit is predicated on the simple premise that, though no new ground is broken or fundamentally fresh issues raised, the problem is an intractable one, recurrent and pervasive, and consequently, if for no other reason, deserves one more round of attention. There is also the point, as Colson has aptly observed, that “the world is not an easy place” and abounds in social scientists and others who “share in the questioning of purposes and values.” Indeed, while what is raised in this paper might bear a distressing resemblance to arguments we have heard before, it is important to remember that to the communities who bear much of the brunt of the research conducted by foreign scholars, ethical, moral, and related issues surrounding foreigner-dominated research continue to constitute a critical area for concern and therefore a legitimate topic for sustained criticism and inquiry. Many African universities, for instance, have established ‘research affiliate schemes’ as an important, indeed integral, component of their academic functions, but in the course of operating these schemes philosophical and practical issues have arisen, many of which await satisfactory answers.

It would, however, be wrong to suggest that these concerns remain the preoccupation of academics alone, because in practical terms what a university does inevitably affects the wider public and in consequence arouses their interest and curiosity. A good example of this interest by the wider public in the affairs of the university, with specific reference to research and foreign scholars, is provided vividly and colorfully by an article written by Peter Mwaura which appeared in The Sunday Post, an East African newspaper.

Near the center of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan lies a tract of broken, elevated terrain about the size of South Carolina. The region, by common convention, is called the Nuba Mountains, and the people who live there, through a familiar if misleading generalization, the Nuba. The inhabitants of the Nuba Mountains have long attracted the attention of students of African languages and cultures, for in these respects they exhibit very great diversity among themselves as well as distinctiveness in relation to the Arab and Nilotic cultural traditions that dominate the surrounding lowlands on every side. No scholar has yet deliberately undertaken to write a history of the Nuba, but many have found themselves constrained to make tangential statements or assumptions about Nuba history in the course of constructing studies with some other primary focus. The sum of these tangential comments and assumptions may read as the current state of Nuba historiography. The present study addresses a stimulating clash of opinion among those whose interests have led them to comment peripherally on the more remote Nuba past. The issue at stake is the existence, or non-existence, of a state form of government among the Nuba in precolonial times.

Students of the Nuba during the colonial and post-colonial periods have seldom failed to assign considerable importance to the role of successive Sudan governments in directing the destiny of the Nuba, however they may differ in assessing the quality of this intervention.

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

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

This essay began as a footnote in which I construed “cactus pastoralism” as an anomaly in the pastoralist literature. I had found that the raising of zebu cattle in southern Madagascar on mixed diets of grass and prickly pear cactus of the genus Opuntia did not fit the standard definition of pastoralism as “the raising of livestock on ‘natural’ pasture unimproved by human intervention.” By that definition the Mahafale herders whom I had observed striving to keep their zebu cattle alive in the arid environment by “improving” their pastures with cactus “water-food” appeared not to be pastoralists at all.

I attributed the problem to a stifling typology giving precedence to “natural” grasslands that rendered invisible human agency in the making of such landscapes. I singled out the problematic concept of “pure” or “true” nomads, in which their “life itself—as Merian Cooper wrote at the beginning of Grass, and which I quoted above—depended entirely on their keeping livestock mobile. In the footnote I reasoned that “Western scholars of pastoralist societies rely on a typology or terminology that defines the form of pastoralism in relation to whether they are close or far from pure nomadism. Pastoralist studies have flirted with the modern constitution. As Latour wrote, ‘hybrids are indeed accepted, but solely as mixtures of pure forms in equal proportion.’“

Historically subaltern groups envisage new possibilities for the creation of community museums and exhibits. This seems to be particularly true of the Global South and, even more so, of Sub-Saharan Africa and the African diaspora to Southern America – two regions of the world where, when it concerns ethno-racial minorities and social movements, presential museums and “actual” archives have more often than not been poorly funded, ill-equipped, and underscored. This article teases out the process of creating such a digital museum that focuses on African and Afro-Brazilian heritage. It is a technological and political experiment that is being developed in a country experiencing a process of rediscovery and of the patrimonialization of a set of elements of popular culture, within which “Africa” as a trope has moved from being generally considered a historical onus to (Western-oriented) progress to become a bonus for a country that is discovering itself both multiculturally and as part of the powerful group of BRIC nations (Brazil/Russia/India/China).

Literary practitioners have long been, often uncomfortably, aware of the ambivalently fruitful and constraining rhetorical influences of the past. Writers successively utilize or rebel against traditional tropes, poetic conventions, and narrative norms, balancing cultural depth against individualist innovation, acceptability against rejection, public intelligibility against the opacity of private connotation. By such gestures towards the traditions, literature challenges, upholds, or leaves unquestioned the moral, political, and cultural pre-suppositions of its day.

South African historiography is less aware than it might be of its textuality, in this sense, of its immersion in a similar “anxiety of influence,” as Harold Bloom has termed it. Little attention has been paid to its rhetorical lineaments and heritage or to the ways historians have read, used, and departed from one another. This is dramatically illustrated by the case of the historiography of Shaka Zulu (assassinated in 1828). Nowhere else has such poverty of evidence and research spawned such a massively unquestioned, long-lived, and monolithic “history.” Only in the last decade has the legendary, verbal construction of the Shaka figure been seriously questioned; only in 1991, at an important colloquium at the University of the Witwatersrand, was something approaching an academic consensus reached that the mfecane—the notion of Shaka's Zulus as the “storm-center” of a sub-continental explosion of autophagous, black-on-black violence—was no longer a credible vehicle for understanding the early nineteenth century in southern Africa.

Any meaningful assessment of biography and autobiography writing among the Swahili as a historical source needs to take at least three factors into consideration. The first is the influence of Arab literary traditions on the emergence of the genre on the East African coast; the second is the relationship between literacy and orality, and its implication for writing and narration in an African context. The role of colonialism, and the introduction of the Western “mode” of biography and autobiography writing, forms the third factor. The aim of the paper is to survey these factors, not chronologically, but as part of a general discussion on the notion and status of the genre in the Swahili context.

Swahili interface with Arabic as an essential ingredient of Islamic practice laid the foundation for the development of literate genres on the East African coast, among them the biographical and the historical. In the process, Swahili adopted styles of narrative expression which are reflected in the terms employed for them. The most common are habari (from the Arabic khabar) and wasifu (from wasf). In its original usage, khabar denoted a description of an event or events that were connected in a single narrative by means of a phrase such as “in that year.” It lacked a genealogy of narrators, and the form was stylistically flexible to include verses of poetry relevant to the events. In Swahili the current meaning of the word habari is “information” and “news” (and, hence, also a greeting) but, as a historical genre, it has been used in two ways. The first is in relation to the history of the city-states recounted through documents whose titles include the word, khabari/habari, (or the plural, akhbar in Arabic), usually translated as “chronicle(s).”

The precolonial architectural history of the northern Upper Guinea coast from the Gambia to the Geba rivers has yet to be studied in depth. Yet this region, the first to be visited and described by European travelers in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, is among the best-documented parts of sub-Saharan Africa for the four centuries of precolonial African-European contact. The establishment of communities of Luso-African traders in the sixteenth and seventeenth century makes the Gambia-Casamance-Bissau area important to the study of early sustained cultural interaction between Europeans and West Africans.

One result of the establishment of Portuguese and Luso-African trading communities was the development of a distinctive style of architecture, suited to the climate and making use of locally-available building materials. The history of the trade itself has been extensively studied by George Brooks. His work, along with that of Jean Boulègue, provides a firm foundation for the study of local architecture and living space. It is not my intention to rewrite these excellent sources, although much of my material is drawn from the same primary documents they have used, and although, in presenting the historical context from which seventeenth-century coastal architecture developed, I necessarily cover some ground that Brooks has already trod.

In addition to the history of building styles, several related questions that are highly significant to the history of European-African cultural interaction need to be addressed. These questions include: what were the respective roles of Africans, Europeans, and Luso-Africans in the development of a distinctive architectural style? Is it possible to discern the influence of evolving Luso-African construction on local African architecture? And of local building styles on Afro-European construction? In other words, to what extent does architecture reflect mutual, two-way interaction between European and African society?

The immediate circumstances which led up to the founding of Freetown in the 1790s were highly contingent, even freakish. Christopher Fyfe has stressed the role of the scientist and dubious adventurer, Henry Smeathman, in publicizing the misguided view that the Sierra Leone district provided an ideal ecological environment for settlement. More recently, Stephen Braidwood has shown that the 1787 choice of Sierra Leone as a suitable locality for settlement by the Black Poor of London, the earliest settlers, came about as a result of acceptance of Smeathman's view, not by the white philanthropists and politicians who masterminded the exodus of the Black Poor, but by the London Blacks themselves—who knew nothing of Sierra Leone from personal experience but were convinced by Smeathman's rhetoric. That the Blacks were allowed to insist on their choice might itself be regarded as freakish.

Yet, seen in a wider historical context, the foundation of Freetown, and the subsequent development of the community eventually termed “Creole,” appear less accidental and extraordinary. Why, for instance, did Smeathman chose Sierra Leone for his butterfly-collecting on his only visit to Africa? Presumably it was because he was aware that he could obtain the support and protection of the trading settlements in the Banana Islands, on Sherbro Island, and along the coast between—settlements which had been established in earlier decades by the English-speaking families of the Caulkers, Parkers, and Tuckers, families whose very names (even if corrupted from African names) point back to the later seventeenth century and the activities on this coast of the Royal African Company. And perhaps Smeathman had read John Newton's published account of his early career as a resident trader on the same coast which, although full of complaints about his treatment by his African employers, at least showed that a white could survive there.

Oral traditions are the common patrimony of a varied group of scholars. Although professional historians embraced African traditions only in the late 1950s, local -- and usually amateur -- historians had been writing from them throughout the colonial period and occasionally before. Meanwhile, students of anthropology and comparative religion from Frazer on have been studying the same traditions from very different perspectives. They have pointed out the common motifs recurring within the genre in widely scattered and disparate areas, and have related myth to its functions in present-day society, watching how it is molded to fit changing realities.

At the same time that academic historians at last began to overcome their doubts about the historical value of African oral traditions and began to use them, a French anthropologist was propounding a new approach to myth, a principle he called “structuralism.” Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that even the seemingly most direct and least stereotyped American Indian traditions he examined were actually philosophical expositions of world-view and religious belief encoded in symbolism. This article tests the structuralist approach through a detailed critique of one particular example of its application.

Luc de Heusch, a Belgian disciple of Lévi-Strauss, has recently studied the traditions of Lunda state formation as myth in Le roi ivre, ou l'origine de l'Etat. His aim is to discover the univers intellectuel of the Lunda and the other peoples of the Central African savanna, but his work touches the historian in two crucial respects. First, he highlights dangers in the path of the naive and helps paint parts of the larger human dimension in which historical events and historical records have existed.

In “Agaja and the Slave Trade” it was argued that the evidence cited to support Akinjogbin's view of Agaja's attitude to the slave trade did not in fact give any support to his view. Particular reference was made to Bulfinch Lambe, whose “Proposal” was quoted by Atkins in support of his interpretation of Agaja's motives for the conquest of Whydah –– the only contemporary to give an interpretation in line with Akinjogbin's.

Atkins was not on the coast at the time of the conquest of Whydah (nor, apparently, had he been there since 1722); but it seems that he met Lambe, presumably after Lambe's return to England. Atkins refers to Lambe's “scheme of trade, said to be proposed from that Emperor [Agaja] and laid before our Commissioners of Trade;” he leaves the reader with the impression that nothing was ever done about the matter, “and Captain Lamb, tho' under a solemn Promise to return, never gave any Account of his Embassy to that Prince.”

Portugal has long been recognized by historians as a treasure house of manuscript collections. In Lisbon alone there are some twenty-five public archives, many of which hold rich collections of historical documents and rare printed works. Other urban centers like Coimbra, Porto, Évora, Braga, Guimarães, and Setúbal, not to mention smaller cities and towns, also have numerous archives, specialized libraries, museums, and ancient monasteries that house important manuscript and printed collections. The archaic Portuguese bureaucracy, however, has rarely been able to adequately assess the extensive contents of such a large number of depositories. Indeed, few of these institutions can boast of possessing catalogs for their holdings. When these do exist, they are more often than not either incomplete or almost totally out of date. As a result the lack of appropriate working tools turns archival research in Portugal into a rather painstaking and time-consuming affair. Instead of a dusty treasure house whose contents have been organized and assessed, what the researcher usually finds is a labyrinth of uncataloged, unknown, and uncared-for musty documents slowly deteriorating in the damp cellars of decrepit buildings.

South Africa's most prolific and influential historian still awaits a biographer. Such brief biographical sketches of his life as do exist say little about his career before he began work in the Cape archives in the late 1870s. Given the views he espoused in his later writings, it is at first surprising to find that he spent over five years at the Lovedale Seminary outside Alice in the eastern cape working closely with missionaries and Africans. An examination of this period of his life throws light on his historiographical career as a whole and reveals new complexities in his character.

In the early 1870s Lovedale was the most influential institution of its kind in South Africa. A non-sectarian, non-denominational Christian school and a theological seminary, it had been founded by Scottish Presbyterian missionaries in 1841. It was rejuvenated under the leadership of Dr. James Stewart--missionary, medical doctor, explorer--who came to it as teacher in 1867 and took over as its second principal in 1870. Stewart emphasized the importance of “industrial” activities, including printing and bookbinding, and greatly enlarged Lovedale's intake of students. Drawing Africans not only from the eastern Cape but increasingly also from farther afield, the school grew from 92 pupils in 1870 to 336 in 1873 and 460 in 1876.

In mid-1872 Stewart needed someone who could both teach and supervise the printing works. George McCall Theal met these requirements. He had taught at a small elementary school at Knysna in the late 1850s, then from 1867 in the public undenominational school at King William's Town, later to be known as Dale College.

This paper presents initial thoughts on the historical, linguistic, and archeological significance of the oral traditions of Nterapo communities in the Salaga area. As members of a minority, and a commoner group in the Gonja traditional sociopolitical system, the Nterapo have not been recognized as relevant as the Nchumuru and Nawuri, who have been highlighted in historical works as autochthones. Historians, cultural anthropologists, and archeologists on Gonja have often failed to identify the Nterapo as being critical for research.

The Nterapo represent a group whose history goes beyond the time of the introduction of Gonja rule in the Volta Basin from the sixteenth century. There is reason to think that the wars of Gonja expansion in the second half of the sixteenth century were particularly brutal ones, in which well-trained cavalry were pitted against local peasantries poorly equipped to withstand the invaders (Wilks et al. 1986:15). Despite this, the Nterapo survived the invasion by accepting and adapting to the process of state formation and emergence of greater sociopolitical complexity in east Gonja. The settlement history and cultural lifeways of the Nterapo can provide insights for the production of premises, conceptual frameworks, and methodological approaches that would create a deeper understanding of human experience in the Salaga area.

Historical method is a systematic body of principles for gathering, critically examining, and presenting the source material of history (Garraghan 1946:33). Written accounts and the spoken word are two important sources of historical information used for historical, anthropological, and archeological research and writing.