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).”

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 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.’“

This paper offers a critique of the existing historiography on the late apartheid period, arguing that white workers’ role in and experience of the unraveling of racial privilege in the labor arena has been obscured by a focus on the high politics of reform and on anti-apartheid resistance emanating from African labor and the broader black population. Reporting from the archive, it discusses two under-utilized archival collections – that of the Commission of Inquiry into Labour Legislation and of the Mineworkers’ Union – as sources for starting to write white working-class organization, politics, identity, and experience into the history of reform and resistance, thereby adding a new dimension to South Africa’s broadly conceived struggle history.

The body of knowledge that constituted British imperial writing, and the expression that interacted with it were attempts to engage European readership on the imperial adventure in Africa in the age of the new imperialism. This study is an attempt to address the complex issues involved in the production of historical knowledge about precolonial Benin to justify British colonial rule. The argument advanced in this paper is that, since imperial discourse set out to deal with history in terms of civilization, British imperial writing was a struggle to articulate certain ideas about Benin into a position of dominance before the British public. As Mary Louise Pratt explains, “depicting the civilizing mission as an aesthetic project is a strategy the west has often used for defining others as available for and in need of its benign and beautifying intervention.” British imperial discourse will form the basis of the discussion in this paper.

Imperial discourse and its subjectivity raises questions about issues of power and privilege of those writers who were determined to sustain their voices in the debate on European imperialism in Africa. Their approach to the constitution of knowledge about Benin was one of many ways that opened the frontiers of knowledge about African states and societies to redefine civilization, albeit for the purposes of understanding various meanings and implications in this intellectual assault. This provides a vital entry point for examining the European colonial approach to the construction of the image of Africa. The aim is to demonstrate how this process suggests a connection from imperial expansionism to forms of knowledge and expression that reaffirmed metropolitan authority in the context of colonial subjugation.

This article explores one source through which African women’s sport history can be drawn and interpreted: the sport sections of African newspapers. In the case of Kenya, the major dailies, Daily Nation and The East African Standard, are repositories of information pertaining to the challenges that confronted female athletes. Taking into account the history and development of these media, the article addresses the question of why did Kenyan women lag behind their male counterparts in entering the sport at an international level? Focusing on the early post-colonial period, it is argued that institutional barriers abroad as well as economic and cultural factors at home disproportionately disadvantaged female runners in their career progression. These conclusions would be difficult to substantiate without investigating the Kenyan press, a valuable source for anyone seeking to access information about the lives of the women who have contributed to Africa’s sport history.

The very idea that the Xhosa chiefs and their allies engineered the great cattle-killing which finally broke their power seems so absurd that most people who hear of it dismiss it instinctively. And indeed, they are perfectly correct to do so. Yet the sheer mass of documentary evidence in support of the proposition is such that all historians who have come into contact with it have been forced to be more circumspect with regard to the “chiefs' plot.” We have to look very carefully at this evidence before we reject its conclusions, and once we have done so, we have to answer a further and even more significant question: If the “chiefs' plot” did not exist, why did the Colonial authorities maintain that it did? Paradoxically, we will discover that an investigation of the “chiefs' plot” can tell us nothing about the Xhosa or the cattle-killing, but it can tell us a great deal about the mind and methods of Sir George Grey, that colossus of early Victorian imperialism.

After nearly seventy years of epic struggle, the catastrophic defeats of the Seventh (1846-47) and Eighth (1850-53) Frontier Wars finally broke the military capacity of the Xhosa people to resist the Colonial advance from the Cape of Good Hope. Their political structures fragmented by partial incorporation into the Crown Colony of British Kaffraria; their belief structures fractured by the victories of missionary teaching and European technology; the slender remnants of their economic resources decimated by the onslaught of the lung-sickness epizootic in their cattle from 1855, the Xhosa turned, as other peoples have done in like situations, to millennarian hopes.

This note aims to provide an overview of the Tanzania National Archives (TNA) system and the records it houses. The system comprises a headquarters in Dar es Salaam and six regional branch offices located in Mbeya, Mwanza, Arusha, Dodoma, Tanga, and Singida. Access to the TNA requires a research permit from the Tanzania Commission for Research and Technology. It is best to apply well in advance. Attaching a letter of recommendation from a contact at the University of Dar es Salaam that comments specifically on the value of the proposed research project to the application can expedite its processing tremendously. Computers may be used in the archives and researchers may ask for specific folios to be photocopied. It is advisable to keep detailed records of requests.

The three major groups of materials retained within the TNA system are records from German colonial times (pre-1916/17), the British records (pre-1962), and records from various levels of government and administration of post-independence Tanzania (Tanganyika). Almost all colonial records in the collection are housed at the TNA headquarters, as are most of those post-independence documents that originate from central government and ministerial headquarters. A considerable number of post-1962 records originating from local level government and administration have also been moved to Dar es Salaam.

Among the Xhosa the institution of the ‘Right-Hand House’ acts both as a political charter and as an historical explanation. As a political charter it defines the relationship between the Ngqika Paramount (the Right-Hand House) of the Ciskei ‘Bantu Homeland’ and the Gcaleka Paramount (the Great House) of the Transkei Homeland. As it presently stands, the essence of this relationship is that the Ngqika Paramount recognizes the Gcaleka Paramount as his superior in rank, but without accepting any implications of practical political subordination. This position was defined by J.H. Soga, the standard authority on Xhosa history and customs, and himself an umNgqika, as follows:

In terms of historical explanation, secondary authorities from 1846 to 1975 have singled out the privileged status of the Right-Hand House as the principal cause of Xhosa political fragmentation.

Whereas historians of Africa normally agree that institutions and their myths of origin are, at least in part, susceptible to historical interpretation and reconstruction, they may justifiably be more doubtful of an historical approach which seeks to explain historical events by imputing to the past the continuous retrogressive operation of institutions which can be seen to be operating in certain ways in the present. In this regard the present exercise has two aims.

“Famines gather history around them,” we are told, even more so, it seems, with high numbers of dead. These numbers are treated sometimes like monuments for famines, increasing over time according to utilitarian concerns. Sources for a famine on Madagascar show that though high numbers may be useful in drawing attention to a calamity, people closer to the event may not locate this history or situate their memory via numbers. Emphasizing numbers in lieu of other ways of remembering and also forgetting a calamity appear not to be very good guides to this history.

The killing famine that struck southern Madagascar in 1930–31 attracted substantial written comment among the French. Everyone seemed to have an opinion about this famine, which followed the surprising and dramatic killing of the predominant species of prickly pear cactus by cochineal insects in the late 1920s. A large area, a seventh of the island (approximately a sixth of France), with a population at the time of around a half million people and perhaps two million head of cattle, was effected by the biological war on cactus. “Cactus pastoralists” were suddenly without a very resourceful plant. It had provided thick fences of protection to these herders and their cattle; its fruit and water a mainstay for people; its singed cladodes a critical source of water and sustenance for cattle.

The “furnace of contamination”—the rapidly reproducing cochineal choking to death their cactus hosts—started in 1925 at the southwest provincial center of Toliara and spread to the east, north, and south at a rate of 100 kilometers per year.

For scholars of southeastern Africa interested in the early history of the region, the pen of the Portuguese was indeed mightier than the sword. Although most of the first Portuguese arrivals carried either the sword or the cross, they put these down to wield the pen and leave a written record of their triumphs and travails. The documents left by Portuguese soldiers, religious men, and others in the service of the crown provide details that are relative not only to the Portuguese experience but also to African life. This paper focuses on Portuguese writings that describe the area around the port of Sofala and its hinterland, home to the Shona who live south of the Zambezi river on the central Mozambican coastal plain and the Zimbabwe plateau. Both around Sofala and further west in the interior the inhabitants speak Ndau, a dialect of the Shona language. The wealth of evidence left by the Portuguese since the sixteenth century sheds light on changes and continuities in Ndau history.

The materials that have survived are amazingly detailed and informative despite their inherent biases. Historians have long recognized the prejudices of the colonizer either creeping into the documents or jumping off the page in a more blatant manner. The examples provided here are no different. The Portuguese, like other Europeans, had certain notions stemming from a Eurocentric mentality that was an integral part of their worldview. In these records, we see how the quest for gold and a ‘civilizing’ mission coalesced into systematic exploitation.

Throughout history, libraries and archives have been the guardians of the documentary heritage of mankind. Given the rapid evolution of the new technologies, safeguarding the cultural heritage becomes more and more the concern of specialists. One of the essential goals of archival and library services is to facilitate access to the documents or materials in their care, thus ensuring that that cultural heritage is kept alive and can be an object of research and enrichment. Their other important mission is to preserve the materials in their care so that cultural heritage may be passed on intact to future generations, since the future of a nation, a people, or a community is unthinkable without knowledge of its past. Preservation and access to the collection are the main objectives of the digitization project that was implemented recently in our museum with the help of international organizations and collaborators.

One of the main goals of the Gramophone Records Museum and Research Centre of Ghana (GRMRC) is the preservation and the promotion of the nation's musical patrimony. The museum is located in Cape Coast. It is presently situated inside the building of the Centre for National Culture (CNC) just opposite the main gate of the University of Cape Coast. The museum was founded by Kwame Sarpong on the basis of his private collection, spanning over 40 years of music. From the modest beginnings in one small room inside the CNC building, it has grown to occupy an exhibition room, the archives and documentation rooms, and an office.

Africans historians have recently paid more attention to postcolonial archives, trying to locate these elusive collections as well as thinking more critically about how to use them. Uganda, in particular, has been an important site for reconsidering the role of postcolonial archives in historical research. Using the archives of Uganda Prisons Service as a case study, this article explores how official records can illuminate the social histories of public servants and the postcolonial state. Along with surveying the state of Uganda’s official archives – particularly those of the Uganda Prisons Service – it explores how these documents provide insight into the everyday experiences and concerns of prison officers after independence. Beyond its bureaucratic functions, paperwork served as a site in which officers could negotiate their responsibilities and relationships. Through the archives of the Uganda Prisons Service, we learn about the social worlds of prison officers within and beyond the prison walls, thus better understanding their experience of public service beyond narratives of corruption and brutality. Ultimately, this article demonstrates the ways in which official archives can be used to study the postcolonial state from a social history perspective.

The historiography of Cecil John Rhodes may be divided into two broad categories: chauvinistic approval or utter vilification. In the Introduction to Colossus of Southern Africa, Lockhart and Woodhouse wrote: “Those who hated [Rhodes] most were those who knew him least, and those most admired and loved him were those who knew him best.” The earlier works written soon after Rhodes death, and usually by his “intima[te]” friends, constitute the first group. Later works written by historians and journalists largely constitute the second group. Generally speaking, the category into which a particular biography or history is placed has a strong correlation to the time it was written. Chronologically, these two groups divide at about 1945, when the last of Rhodes's intimate companions died and the British Empire was beginning to be dismantled.

The earliest published biography of Cecil Rhodes was Cecil Rhodes: His Political Life and Speeches, 1881-1900 published just two years before his death. The work was published pseudonymously under the moniker “Vindex.” C.M. Woodhouse, in the “Notes on Sources” at the front of his book on Rhodes, identified Vindex as the Reverend F. Vershoyle.

The nineteenth century was in many ways a revolutionary one among the Yoruba of western Nigeria. The Yoruba civil wars caused much social and political disorganization of the existing entities in Yorubaland. Among other effects, the wars caused the uprooting of conquered and devastated peoples from their original homes to new lands. The Egba people were one of these. From their original homeland they moved south to settle at Abeokuta in 1830. They were later to be joined by other displaced peoples including the Ijaiye and the Owu, thus making Abeokuta a federation of sorts. The initial decades of settlement at Abeokuta were devoted to the consolidation of the new settlement against the attacks of the stronger and older kingdoms of Ijebu and Dahomey, to continued participation in the ongoing civil wars, and to the challenges of domestic political and economic reorganization. From 1839 liberated slaves from Sierra Leone began to settle in Abeokuta, soon to be followed by European missionaries.

In his book In My Father's House Anthony Appiah made a powerful argument for historians and intellectuals at large to recognize the diverse and complex nature of Africa's cultural and historical experiences. He stated, for instance, that: “ideological decolonization is bound to fail if it neglects either endogenous ‘tradition’ or exogenous ‘Western’ ideas, and that many African (and African American) intellectuals have failed to find a negotiable middle way.”

During the past fifty years, Africanist historians have focused much of their efforts on the goals of decolonizing or Africanizing the study of the African past. These have been guided by the need to produce a more authentic and relevant history of the continent. The search for such authenticity has shown that African cultures and societies are often the result of a broad range of influences and that the notions of what is indigenous or authentically African needs to take into account this historical complexity. Intellectual historians, in particular, have faced this question with regards to written sources. The question of literacy and its impact on the intellectual development of Africa is an interesting example of how historians have made some strides towards redefining the notion of a decolonized African history.

Memories of political pedagogies in the elite colonial classroom are typically fragmentary and constitute limited historical evidence. But when contextualized and used in combination with coetaneous sources, such as textbooks and lesson notes, they can be crucial in the reconstruction of the transmission of political knowledge, its classroom assimilation and postcolonial negotiation. This article pieces together a number of unconnected but mutually consistent epiphanic moments in the life-writing and interviews of writers Chinua Achebe and Chike Momah, tracing and identifying a mysterious textbook of logic – R.W. Jepson’s Clear Thinking (1936) – and its use as a tool to rein in and redirect anti-colonial nationalist undercurrents at Government College, Umuahia, the elite colonial school famous for having produced eight renowned Nigerian writers.

The Rev. Carl Christian Reindorf began his research into the history of the Gold Coast and Asante in the early 1860s. His decision to collect and record traditions appears to have been stimulated by the death in 1860 of his grandmother and by the Basel Mission which in 1864 under the direction of J.G. Christaller entered an important phase in its study of the language, traditions, and folklore of the Gold Coast peoples. Some thirty years later Reindorf's History of the Gold Coast and Asante based on Traditions and Historical Facts Comprising a Period of more than Three Centuries from about 1500 to 1860 was published.

The process of revising History I began as early as 1907 and culminated in 1951 with the publication of a revised edition in Basel and later (in 1966) in Ghana. Not surprisingly History II has become much more widely available and used than History I -- in no small measure because of the increasing demands from a new generation of historians for ‘a new look’ at the history of Ghana and the part played in it by Africans. As a result Reindorfs History II has been used increasingly in the reconstruction and reinterpretation of Ghanaian history. In his recent study of Asante Ivor Wilks recognized this development by deciding to use only History II on the grounds that it was more readily available to the reader. Earlier Michael Kwamena-Poh had noted the difficulties in consulting History I when, after quoting at second-hand a passage from it he cautiously added that

Stretching across North-central India from Kāthiāvaṛa to Orissa lies a great geographical and cultural shatterbelt formed by the Vindhyan mountains and their associated tracts, an area traditionally characterized by high internal subdivision and political fragmentation. The northwestern extension of this belt comprises the frontier zone today known as Rājasthān (“the land of the Princes”). Strategically situated between the rich Gangetic plains of Hindustān to the northwest and the fertile regions of Mālvā and Gujarāt to the south and southwest, it forms an area of marginal agricultural importance whose historical significance lay primarily in its position as a key transitional zone between larger cultural centers, criss-crossed and intersected at a number of points by major caraven routes.

Dans les pays africains sous administration beige l'expression écrite des me'moires collectives qui apparalt dans les années 1940–1950 était inconcevable hors de la sphère d'influence des églises chrétiennes. La presse catholique en particulier a été le premier vecteur de cette forme moderne de l'affirmation des identités culturelles. Au Burundi il s'agit de Rusizira Amarembe, édité à Gitega de 1940 à 1954, et de son successeur Ndongozi, publié de 1954 à 1978. Comme leurs titres l'indiquent ces périodiques étaient rédigés en kirundi, dans le prolongement de la scolarisation assurée par les missions en langue vernaculaire. Le premier signifiait “le semeur de paix”, ou plus exactement “celui qui prépare le terrain de la prospérité”, et le second, plus simplement, “l'éclaireur.”

Comme nous l'avons déjà souligné ailleurs, ces publications devaient bénéficier de la double autorité de la chose imprimée et du parler quotidien, de la technologie des colonisateurs et de la culture des ancêtres, faisant écho aux préoccupations d'un nouveau milieu socioculturel, celui des Africains lettrés. C'est dans ce contexte que s'amorga l'écriture d'une histoire nationale, destinée à fixer de manière systématique les “choses du passé” (ivya kera) jusque là seulement narrées localement à l'occasion des veillées des enclos.