In my research on gender relations and household dynamics in the handicraft textile industry of the western Sudan, I have been frustrated by the silences in the oral record concerning changes during the early colonial period. Whereas I have been able to reconstruct the social history of the precolonial era, including the changes induced by increased use of slave labor, my informants have been silent on what I would consider equally significant changes in the early colonial period.

Using colonial sources, I have been able to reconstruct the broad contours of the period following the end of slavery, which hint at profound changes in the nature of the textile industry, gender relations, and household dynamics. These would, I anticipated on the basis of my previous fieldwork, be exactly the kind of transformative social change which would be recalled in the oral record. They ought to have become a central part of the social construction of the meaning of historical processes. But, as far as I have been able to determine, this has not been the case. Detail on gender relations and the productive processes appear again in my informants' accounts for the period just before and after World War II, drawn from personal experience. This paradox—apparently richer evidence in the oral record for an earlier era than for a chronologically closer one—has implications for both fieldwork strategies and for social history.

The Upper Guinea Coast—the modern Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia—is one of the few parts of Africa where people have carved stone sculptures. The stone figures sculpted there, usually in soft steatite, or soap-stone, are generally called nomoli or pomta, depending on whether they have the standard features of figures found in southeastern Sierra Leone, or of those from the Kono and Kissi areas further north. There is a third group which consists mainly of sculpted heads on pedestal-like necks. They have been known to Europeans since at least the 1850s, and scholars have been publishing articles about them since 1901. This paper is a critical review of these publications.

The aim of the present paper is to examine the concept of western medicine in South Africa by exploring the forms through which its authority was established. The paper is based on an analysis of the South African Medical Journal (SAMJ), which resurfaced after 1893 as a monthly publication. Rather than seeing the SAMJ as a documentary source, I consider it to be a powerful representation of the making and meaning of western medicine and an indicator of the ascendancy and limits of western medicine. Most importantly, the SAMJ illustrates the intersection between an emergent western medical episteme and a larger colonial discourse of race and sexuality.

Recent contributions to this journal have taken various approaches to travelers's accounts as sources of African history. Elizabeth de Veer and Ann O'Hear use the travel accounts of Gerhard Rohlfs to reconstruct nineteenth-century political and economic history of West African groups who have escaped scholarly attention. But essentially they use Rohlfs' work as he intended it to be used. Gary W. Clendennen examines David Livingstone's work to find the history under the propaganda. He argues that, overlooking its obvious problems, the work reveals a wealth of information on nineteenth-century cultures in the Zambezi and Tchiri valleys. Unfortunately, Clendennen does not use this source for these reasons. He uses it instead to shed light on the relationship between Livingstone and his brother.

John Hanson registers a basic distrust of European mediated oral histories recorded and written in the African past. He draws attention to the fact that what were thought to be “generally agreed upon accounts” may actually reflect partisan interests. Hanson dramatically demonstrates how chunks of history, often the history of the losers, are lost, as the history of the winners is made to appear universal. Richard Mohun can be seen to represent the winners in turn-of-the-century Central Africa. His account is certainly about himself. I attempt, though, to use his account to recover some of the history of the losers, the Africans, which Mohun may have inadvertently recorded.

My question is double; its two parts—one historical, one methodological—are inextricably interdependent. The first concerns the experience of the people from Zanzibar who accompanied, carried, and worked for Richard Dorsey Mohun on a three-year (1898-1901) expedition into Central Africa to lay telegraph wire. The second wonders how and how well the first question can be answered using, primarily, the only sources available to me right now: those written by Mohun himself.

In 1986 the University of Ife (later renamed Obafemi Awolowo University) unveiled a wood statue of Oduduwa, the mythical founder of the Yoruba nation. Present at the occasion was Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the most famous Yoruba politician of the twentieth century. Either for political gain, or to celebrate or praise him, an Ife intellectual told Chief Awolowo that the statue looked exactly like him and that, in trying to represent the image of Oduduwa, the carver, the highly distinguished Chief Lamidi Fakeye, had simply used Awolowo as a model.

Chief Awolowo was very happy with this comparison, and gladly affirmed it. The story spread like wildfire. As the statue came to be interpreted, Awolowo and Oduduwa had the same physical build, elegance, and cap which they wore in the same style! Here indeed was the modern Oduduwa. To those in search of heroes, the Yoruba now had two “national” ones—Oduduwa, the progenitor and Awolowo, the modernizer—and a host of other aspiring and local ones. If Oduduwa founded the nation, Awolowo would unite it, after a period of internal division.

Both in Yoruba popular and intellectual discourse, the hero commands prominent attention. The Yoruba appear to be seeking the equivalent of a Mahdi, the reformer in Islam, a cultural, folk, and political hero. The ambition of many Yoruba elite, especially the politician, is to become a hero of the nation. Many have tried in vain—men such as Chief Adisa Akinloye, a longtime veteran politician, and the Chairman of the National Party of Nigeria during the Second Republic, and, until recently, Chief M.K.O. Abiola, the business magnate and politician who was denied the presidency of the country by the military regime in collaboration with powerful civilians.

Dominated by a settler heritage, South African history has forgotten or degraded many Africans who had a significant impact on the region. The more recent liberal and radical schools also suffer from this tragic inheritance. Maqoma, a nineteenth century Xhosa chief who fought the expansionist Cape Colony in three frontier wars, has been a victim of similar distortion. He has been characterized as a drunken troublemaker and cattle thief who masterminded an unprovoked irruption into the colony in 1834 and eventually led his subjects into the irrational Cattle Killing catastrophe of 1856/57 in which thousands of Xhosa slaughtered their herds on the command of a teenage prophetess. Recently, the validity of this portrayal has been questioned. Alan Webster has demonstrated that, throughout the 1820s and early 1830s, Maqoma attempted to placate voracious European raiders by sending them cattle tribute. Only after the British army and Boer commandos had forced his Jingqi chiefdom off its land for the third time did this ruler order retaliatory stock raids against the colony in late 1834.

The earliest detailed account of Upper Guinea was written by Cadamosto, probably in 1463, and published in Italian in 1507. In the decade 1500-1509, a more detailed account was compiled by Valentim Fernandes, and a similar account of the whole Guinea coast was prepared by Pacheco Pereira—but neither of these Portuguese works was published in the sixteenth century, and even Portuguese writers of the period do not appear to have seen the manuscripts. Late fifteenth century roteiros (guides to nautical routes, “rutters” in sixteenth century English) also remained in manuscript, but being in regular use were more easily borrowed and copied: detailed roteiros for Guinea certainly contributed to Pacheco Pereira's text, and less detailed information from roteiros seems t o have trickled through to some of the non-Portuguese sources we are about to discuss. The position regarding maps was very similar; thus, non-Portuguese writers on Guinea during the first half of the sixteenth century had available the following limited sources of information: (a) references, mainly mythological, in ancient and classical accounts of Africa—e.g., Herodotus, Pliny, and Ptolemy; (b) Cadamosto's account, after its publication in 1507; (c) later experience of seamen in Guinea, passed on orally, or from notes and roteiros not now extant; (d) maps based on some or all of the above sources.

When Willem Bosman wrote his Naauwkeurige Beschryving van de Guinese- Goud-Tand- en Slavekust in 1702 the Guinea coast was perhaps enjoying more public interest in Europe than ever before. The Gold Coast and its interior had long appealed to the imagination of the western world, because it was one of the few gold-producing areas open to traders of all nations. But around 1700 interest in the whole coast of west Africa, particularly the east-west stretch or ‘Lower Guinea,’ further increased because of the rapidly increasing demand in the West Indies and Latin America for slaves from that area. As a matter of fact the “Asiento question” was one of the major issues at stake at the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession. Bosman, late Chief Merchant on behalf of the Dutch West India Company on the coast of Guinea, was in an excellent position to satisfy public curiosity.

Dutch contacts with the lower Guinea coast dated from 1595 when the then newly-emerging Republic of the Northern Netherlands or the United Provinces was badly in need of a regular supply of gold in order to finance its war efforts against the Spanish crown. Dutch trade expanded quickly in west Africa, at the expense of the Portuguese, who pretended to have a trade monopoly in the area. On the Gold Coast in particular the Portuguese were in a strong position, with fixed bases in the form of their castle at Sao Jorge da Mina (later Elmina) and supporting forts at Shama and Axim. But Portugal had been under the Spanish crown since 1580 and the Dutch considered their overseas possessions as legal prey and the undermining of their trade as a valid political aim. The Dutch were able to bring cheaper and better trade goods to the coast, and this prompted the ruler of the small state of Asebu near Elmina to defy openly the supposedly exclusive rights of the Portuguese, and, in 1612, to invite the Dutch to build a fort of their own at Mori. A Dutch attack in 1625 on the great castle of Elmina failed, but in 1637 they were successful and by 1641 they had expelled the Portuguese from their last possessions on the Guinea coast. But the Dutch were never able to enjoy the kind of monopolistic position the Portuguese had had; in 1631 the English built their first Gold Coast fort at Cormantin and other nations soon joined the rush to the profitable gold trade. By the end of the century no fewer than twenty-six fortified trade posts, belonging to the chartered companies of five nations, littered the coastline.

Hundreds of poems, novels, plays, and films have been devoted to Shaka, the king of the Zulu. His life story has been created anew each generation, and his image has changed over the years. For many whites he represents barbarism; for many blacks both within and outside South Africa, he has become a symbol of power. The ways in which Shaka has been portrayed reveal trends of thought and ideological influences prevailing in each period. They record the shifts in white conceptions of blacks in South Africa, and some of the developments in black consciousness.

In this study I suggest that the core of the king's biography, the very basic life story which most historians accept, is but an invention. Shaka's biography closely resembles that of other African leaders such as Sundiata and Mbegha, and of biblical heroes, such as Joseph or Moses. These similarities to stories about other heroes point to the mythic character of the narrative and raise the possibility of investigating the various Shaka stories as symbolic representations of alternative world views, rather than as records of past times.

History is not the past: it is a consciousness of the past used for present purposes. (Greg Dening)
After empire, it was clear the history of the colonised needed repair. (Elleke Boehmer)

This paper identifies history as a major site for identity-formation in the postcolonial world. It draws attention to some strategies of historical reconstruction in African drama by focusing on Ngugi and Mugo's The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, an influential Kenyan play which has also come to be seen as providing a paradigm for the African historical play. Particular attention is drawn to the fact that the play is rooted in the counterdiscourse which authorizes revisionist histories in the postcolonial world. The creation of this play is seen as motivated by the desire of the playwrights to interrogate misconceptions and distortions in official Kenyan history, which marginalizes the popular struggle that culminated in the nation's independence. The writing of the play therefore enables the playwrights to celebrate Dedan Kimathi, who personifies the collective aspirations of the Kenyan people, but is demonized in earlier versions of their history. The essay underlines the fact that this version of history is basically conditioned by the materialist vision of the writers.

Belgian archives and libraries contain essential collections of sources for the history of central Africa, although locating and gaining access to materials can be difficult, if not impossible. We hope that by describing our triumphs and failures in using these facilities in 1980/81 we can simplify these tasks for future researchers. This survey, like others existing in English, is less than complete, having been conceived only after we completed our separate research in Belgium and thus reflecting the limitations of our particular research interests. Nevertheless, the breadth of our familiarity with the facilities and of our individual interests (Dickerman worked on the history of Burundi's capital Bujumbura; Northrup on African labor in the former Province Orientale of Zaire) seems sufficient to justify this note.

In general it must be said that access to archival materials in Belgium is fairly restricted. The worst case is the Archives du Gouvernement-Général, Léopoldville/Kinshasa, the largest and most important collection for the history of the Belgian Congo. These records, estimated to occupy five to seven kilometers of shelf space, were removed from the colony just before independence and are now housed in the Archives Générales du Royaume (2-6, rue de Ruysbroek, Brussels). However, as a consequence of legal efforts by the government of Zaire to recover all or part of the collection, it has remained totally closed to all researchers.

A peine admises dans le monde de l'histoire académique, les sources orales sont vivement contestées par plusieurs spécialistes. L'ouvrage de David Henige, The Chronology of Oral Tradition, en 1974, s'en prend à la “chimère” qu'ont pu nourrir celles-ci, notamment en matière de chronologie, compte tenu du fonctionnement de la tradition orale et de ses contacts récents avec les cultures écrites. L'exemple du Bunyoro auquel, entre autres, il se réfère est particuliè rement éclairant aussi pour le Burundi. Quelles que soient nos convictions, enracinées sur l'expérience et sur les résultats acquis, concernant la richesse des témoignages oraux dans les sociétés de l'Afrique des Grands Lacs, la recherche ne peut que bénéficier de ces critiques radicales si elle en situe la portée exacte. Les problèmes d'interprètation historique sont particulièrement délicats en ce qui concerne les récits de fondation ou d'origine, vu l'ancienneté des faits évoqués et la redondance des traditions, généralement plus discrètes sur les périodes intermédiaires que sur les débuts. Aux difficultés de méthode face à des récits où les faits politiques, religieux, les mythes et la poésie, les localisations spatiales et temporelles s'emmêlent de façon aussi variée que contradictoire, s'ajoutent les problèmes idéologiques étroitement confondus avec les interprètations tirées de ces récits, voire avec les formulations les plus récentes de ces dernières. Idéologies nées des contradictions de la société locale, mais aussi du choc avec les cultures étrangères, musulmanes ou surtout, dans notre cas, occidentales.

Depuis une quinzaine d'années nous sommes préoccupé par ce type de questions dans l'histoire du Burundi et nous avons relevé avec interêt les recherches parallèles sur d'autres anciens Etats de la région, telles qu'elles transparaissent par exemple depuis 1974 dans History in Africa.

Many scholars, African and otherwise, have excoriated G.W.F. Hegel for his dismissal of Africa from history and progress in his lectures on the philosophies of history and religion. This has been done by quoting his texts and setting his words in the context of his influence on nineteenth-century European imperialism and racism. A different approach informs this paper. I treat Hegel, a complicated person, as a working university academic with a career to make and an overriding desire to publicize his own thought. I provide biographical insights relevant to these matters, and go on to examine specific texts about Africa that Hegel either sought out or chanced upon, read, misread, excerpted, used, and misused in support of his theorizing and apriorism. Attention is paid throughout to the construction, recording, and dissemination of Hegel’s lectures, and to aspects of their reception and authority in the educational formation of selected modern African intellectuals. I argue that such persons and African studies more widely are still trying to come to grips with the long and enduring shadow cast by Hegel over both the past and present of the continent.

I argue that the postcolonial Senegalese soccer stadium became a space for imagining and performing the nation for separatists from the Casamance region who tied their separatist discourse to the fortunes of Casa-Sports, a soccer club based in Ziguinchor. The twin histories of Casamançais soccer and separatism demonstrate the interplay of “space” and “place” in the stadium – constructed originally for defining and controlling the Senegalese nation but commandeered by separatists for subverting it. Non-elite Casa-Sports supporters, however, contested or ignored separatist assertions that supporting Casa-Sports meant supporting separatism, and vice versa. Thus, these non-elites revealed the stadium as a “space-place” for simultaneous, multiple national imaginings.

This tribute to Jan Vansina explores the role of archaeology in the investigation of early African history, arguing for more work on the relationship between politics and the practice of ritual. The well-trodden topic of migrations of Bantu-speakers is revisited to examine the potential of genetics and archaeology to contribute to their investigation. Vansina often claimed to be a positivist and empiricist but there are contradictions in his writings that are tied to his changing vision of the purpose of precolonial African historiography. His view that African history must be meaningful to Africans resonates with recent developments in African archaeology.

A school has no textbooks: the teachers are told “débrouillez-vous,” use the notes you took as a pupil. The pickup truck breaks down and will go no further: the passengers realize they will have to find another way home— “débrouillons-nous.” A resourceful man, who has learnt to turn his hand to a variety of things in order to survive, gives his job description with a smile as “débrouillard.” In the Democratic Republic of Congo the phrase “se débrouiller” has entered the realm of myth, joke, and national identity. The French words even puncture conversations in vernaculars. Congo has suffered from a long history of colonial oppression, economic mismanagement, political dictatorship, and most recently violent internal warfare.

The Congolese know that they must learn how to manage on their own, to sort things out by themselves, to cope somehow, to get by. Such is the necessity of being able to deal with the unexpected or the unfortunate that Congolese joke—and many sincerely believe—that “débrouillez-vous” the “golden rule of resourcefulness” is written into the constitution. In a difficult situation they will remind each other of “Article Quinze.” Congolese people understand themselves as those who endure hardship, but have the resilience to rise to whatever comes their way, to cope with the unexpected. Indeed, so often does the unexpected occur that managing events as they happen rather than planning ahead for events that might not happen often seems the most effective way to cope with life.

Establishing a comparison between so-called “Latin” America and “Portuguese-speaking” Africa may well prove useful in highlighting certain major differences between those countries of America and Africa having undergone early colonization. But the main difference will not concern the hundred and fifty years between the independences of the early nineteenth and those of the late (1974-1975) twentieth century. It will lie in the very nature of the states created, on the one hand, by independences without decolonization - the colonial (Latin) states - and, on the other hand, by independence with decolonization - the decolonized (African) states: states, that is, which are differently embedded into colonialities of power. But such a comparison will also help to bring out certain common features stemming from the “longue durée” of Iberian colonizations. One such feature, despite the distance involved, is the Creole issue: the persistence and political importance of social milieus stemming from the first age of colonization. Although those old colonial elites were pre-capitalist - in the sense of not accumulating via the capitalist mode of production - they were, however, fully integrated into the merchant capitalist world-system.

This paper discusses an emerging problem in Ghana and its implications for Ghana’s archives and historical writing. It explains why some important documents intended for state and institutional archives eventually find their way back into public circulation – some have even been used to wrap roasted food! The paper provides methodological insights to historians and researchers and perhaps warnings too that they should consider alternative sources to archives in their quest for information on Ghana; for after all some researchers on Ghana have come across some amazing documents and historical evidence among the food vendors on Ghana’s streets.

On his way back from Mossi country in 1888, Louis Binger visited Bonduku, principal town of the Akan state of Gyaman. Commenting erroneously on the city's antiquity, Binger nonetheless appropriately referred to Bonduku's association with gold mining and the gold trade with nearby towns such as Kong and Buna. The town's more distant trading partners, he continiued, included Jenne and other Niger bend towns. In effect, the saltgold trade, to which Binger was referring, extended from the Taghaza mines in the north (northern Mali, two day's journey from Taodeni), to the southerly mines in the Bonduku and Asante regions. On his own admission, Binger obtained little information on the gold trade which, of the “hidden” variety, was conducted in traders' homes. He learned even less about gold mining. Even his own attempts to purchase a large gold nugget of 150 grams foundered on his host's opposition, claiming that the sale would bring misfortune to the peoples and their communities.

Misinformed on the city's age and frustrated in further endeavors, Binger nonetheless affirmed that a great deal of gold was in the city. He noticed, for example, that gold was the “almost exclusive” payment for European merchandise abounding in local markets. “Not a day passes,” he continued, but that commercial transactions--at his host's residence, or at any other house chosen at random--were concluded, involving gold as the exchange medium. Bonduku's inhabitants, moreover, adorned themselves with gold. Taxes were paid in gold.

In mid-1964 the Smith regime in Southern Rhodesia was moving towards a final ban on the African nationalist parties, ZAPU and ZANU. At the same time it was widely believed to be preparing for a Unilateral Declaration of Independence and the nationalist parties in their turn were trying to find ways to prevent this. Both chose to launch sabotage campaigns, so as to demonstrate African opposition. In late June 1964 there was a wave of sabotage in Chipinga and Melsetter in Rhodesia's eastern districts. Roadblocks were erected, the police camp was attacked, dynamite was laid at bridges. Notes were left at the scene of some of these actions purporting to come from “the Crocodile Gang.” On the early evening of 4 July 1964, a 45-year-old foreman at the Silver Streams Wattle Factory in Melsetter, Pieter Johannes Andries Oberholzer, was driving home with his wife and daughter along the Umtali/Melsetter road. He came to a low roadblock made of stones; he tried to ram it; the car turned over; Oberholzer was stabbed to death; his assailants dispersed when another vehicle approached. Police found two notes at the site of the attack. One read “Confrontation Smith. Crocodile Gang will soon kill all whites. Beware!” The other read: “Crocodile Group in Action. We shall kill all whites if they don't want to give back our country. Confrontation!”

How are we to read the significance of July 4? The events have been described in five main sources and they look very different from these varying perspectives. “What is Truth?” asks Ndabaningi Si thole, in the earliest of the sources. The Crocodile Gang's killing of Oberholzer constitutes a historical equivalent to the famous old Japanese film, Rashomon, with its presentation of different but equally plausible narratives of a violent event.