The written sources for African history are scattered throughout the world, often in archives to which access is difficult. To reach them often requires a considerable expenditure of time and money, quite apart from the necessary linguistic knowledge. As a result, at least in the German-speaking world, much of the writing of African history and anthropology has for decades rested exclusively on published sources. Besides often leading to a serious deficiency of information, such an approach limits the degree of control to which written testimony can be subjected: even the most assiduous textual criticism soon reaches its limits if comparable information is lacking. In addition, where there are only a few published sources, the historian may all too easily be lulled into a false sense of security. To remedy this, it is not enough to plead for as much archival work as possible (a requirement that can today usually be taken for granted in any case) and encourage the publication of more primary sources. We should also pay more attention to the distinction between primary and secondary sources, that is, take more explicitly into account the proximity of a source to the historical event or situation concerned--quite apart from observing all the other rules of textual criticism.

This paper therefore has two purposes. First, I wish to draw attention to a hitherto-neglected source for Angolan history in the first half of the seventeenth century--the manuscript collection of Fernão de Sousa, Governor of Angola from 1624 to 1630. A rough review of its contents and arrangement will perhaps stimulate scholars to study it and facilitate its use.

A series of panels at the ASA meeting in November 1989 focused on sources and methods for the study of law in colonial Africa. At an informal discussion held afterwards, participants agreed that court records are potentially very valuable sources for historians, anthropologists, and other scholars of Africa but that they have not been used as widely as they might be. In an effort to alert Africanists to the existence of such documents and to encourage their use, those of us who had used court records in our research were asked to provide descriptions of them. This paper is a collection of the responses.

Courts were established in the African housing quarters in what was then Usumbura in 1938 as part of a broad reorganization by the colonial administration of the conditions of African residence in the city, one in the quartier of Buyenzi and the other in that of Beige (today Bwiza). These tribunals, which are still in existence, were granted jurisdiction over civil and minor criminal cases between Africans; each court had its own officials, advisors, and clerks, prominent residents of the quartier appointed by the colonial administration. Buyenzi's population was predominantly Muslim, and its court officials were men knowledgeable about Islamic law. Beige, in contrast, was a more heterogeneous community, and its court tended to be staffed by residents who had risen in the African ranks of the civil service.

Men and women of both housing quarters resorted frequently to the courts, with the Buyenzi court hearing approximately 9,000 cases and Beige almost twice that many in the years between their establishment in 1938 and independence in 1962. Their complaints covered a wide range of matters: debts, business ventures, bridewealth disputes, divorces, child rights, property transfers, and various quarrels between friends, neighbors, and family members. Procedure was relatively simple. A man or woman who wished to present a complaint went before the court and was given an appointment for the case to be heard. At the time the court considered the complaint, both accuser and defendant were present. Although the parties might bring with them supporters and witnesses, there were no intermediary personnel such as lawyers. Each individual argued his own case and answered questions put by the judges. A judgment was usually handed down immediately, and it was based on customary rather than European practice. As these courts were originally established, their autonomy was very great: in principle, unless the decisions violated colonial law, they could not be overruled by Belgian officials.

Historians of Africa have often cast a jaundiced eye in the direction of written sources; their suspicions have been particularly grave with regard to colonial documents. They have seen them as, at best, the creations of ill-informed foreign observers or, at worst, as the deliberately self-serving justifications of the ruling elite. To counter the all-too-real deficiencies of these documents, historians have laid increasing emphasis on materials produced by Africans themsleves--oral accounts. Yet these records too are problematic, and their principal weakness lies in the fact that they are often collected decades after the events and circumstances the historian wishes to understand. Each of these kinds of sources thus presents methodological difficulties. This paper advocates the use of a third type of source, African court records, which are at once contemporary and yet created by Africans themselves. These records--while not without their own particular biases--permit one to overcome some of the problems inherent in official documents and oral interviews. Courts for Africans were established by colonial regimes throughout the continent. But, although Africans participated in varying degrees in their proceedings, the records have largely remained ignored by historians. In what follows I discuss the court records in two tribunals in Bujumbura, Burundi. The paper is divided into three sections: the first is a description of the city's African community and the courts; the second is a discussion of the court proceedings and the reliability and use of the records; and the last is a brief summary of some of the data the documents have yielded.

The process of normal scholarship leads young historians to focus on their fields of research with an intensity that is unparalleled during their academic careers. It is no wonder that after a certain interval many change directions, if only to escape the tyranny of the overly familiar. Occasionally, however, we encounter a new approach to our old questions, which forcibly brings us back to our original topic, not with the initial ardor but with the nostalgia of suddenly coming across the photograph of a teenager's crush.

Such was my response to discovering Christopher Schmitz's, “The Changing Structure of the World Copper Market, 1870-1939,” in a recent number of the Journal of European Economic History. I wondered just how I would have approached my study of the Central African mines if, between 1963 and 1983, I had had access to this account of the copper industry in its global setting. Mind you, my thirty-one years' experience with undergraduates and master's candidates suggests that it might have made no difference to me at all. So intense is the concentration of our apprentice-historians on their primary materials that it is often difficult to get them to consider contexts beyond those inherent in the sources they use.

What was new about Schmitz's synthesis? That is difficult to isolate. He has, indeed, written a series of studies of the copper industry. The article under discussion offers generalizations about the industry as a whole between 1870 and 1939 and the role of various producers and consumers in it for the same period. For the sake of Africanist readers, let me summarize them.

Although Carnarvon's attempt to unite South Africa in the 1870s was a failure, the forward movement represented by his “confederation policy” marks an important turning point in South African history. The destruction of the Zulu and the Pedi polities, which resulted directly from the confederation scheme, together with the last Cape frontier war and a rash of smaller conflicts, constituted the virtual end of organized black resistance in the nineteenth century and the beginning of untrammelled white supremacy. Britain's annexation of the Transvaal in 1877, which Carnarvon had hoped would be the decisive move towards confederation, instead set the scene for the conflict between Boer and Briton which dominated the history of the last two decades of the nineteenth century in South Africa.

Carnarvon's confederation scheme had important effects, but there is little agreement on its causes. The author of the standard work on the subject, Clement Goodfellow, took the view that Carnarvon's interest in South Africa arose essentially from its strategic importance within the empire as a whole. The Cape lay athwart the vital sea-route to Britain's eastern possessions, and confederation was designed, in Goodfellow's words, “to erect from the chaos of the subcontinent a strong, self-governing, and above all loyal Dominion behind the essential bastion at Simon's Bay.” This view, or some variant of it, sometimes with “Simonstown” or “Cape Town” or “the naval bases” or “the Cape peninsula” substituted for “Simon's Bay,” has been widely accepted and now appears as a matter of fact in the most recent and widely used general accounts of South African history.

Among the most intriguing unresolved historical questions concerning the women soldiers of Dahomey are the journalist's basic when, how and why (the who and where are givens). We know the amazons' terminal date precisely: the fourth of November 1892, when they fought their last battle against the French at the gates of Cana. But assertions in the literature as to when they got started range all the way from the reign of Wegbaja (ca. 1640-ca. 1680-85) to that of Glele (1858-89).

Neither Wegbaja nor Glele can seriously be considered as the originator of the amazons, though the former has a far better claim than the latter. The Wegbaja thesis rests on a tradition that he created the well-known corps of elephant huntresses, the gbeto, and on speculation that they became the first amazon unit. The gbeto may even predate Wegbaja: Palau Marti cites a tradition that he organized pre-existing huntresses into a special corps. Lombard offers the plausible explanation that since women provisioned the royal palace, it was only natural that some of them furnish game for the king's table. Dunglas seems to have been the first to write down the tradition tracing the gbeto to Wegbaja; he was inclined to accept it. P.K. Glèlè says Wegbaja began employing women as personal guards. Cornevin states, without giving his source, that it was the gbeto themselves who doubled as the king's bodyguards. None of this can be proved, and in any case no one has suggested that Wegbaja ever used women as real soldiers.

The Mpongwe people of the Gabon estuary live today in the immediate area of Libreville, the capital city of the Gabon Republic. Libreville is built on Mpongwe ancestral lands, and its history is only a small and comparatively recent chapter in the longer story of the Mpongwe and their neighbors. In the nineteenth century the expression “les Gabonais” or “the Gaboon people” had only one meaning—the Mpongwe of the estuary who were the coastal trading aristocracy.

The Mpongwe are only one of the six peoples belonging to the Myèné-speaking group of Gabon. The other five are the Orungu, Nkomi, Galoa, Adyumba, and Enenga. Only the Mpongwe are patrilineal. Myèné is purely a linguistic classification, a subdivision of the Bantu language. All six of these societies fit into a circle whose circumference includes the three largest cities in Gabon today—Libreville, Port Gentil (formerly Cape Lopez), and Lambaréné (Map 1). From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Myèné was the coastal lingua franca between the southern Cameroun and Cabinda. The Myèné societies in general, and the Mpongwe in particular, have played a key role in Gabon's past, and continue to be an influential minority in modern Gabon. In the early nineteenth century, and for an unknown previous period, the closest non-Myèné neighbors of the Mpongwe were the Benga and the related societies to the north, and the Shekiani and Bakélé to the east. The Shekiani were the couriers in the Mpongwe trade with the Bakélé and other interior societies.

In 1606 Philip II of Portugal (and III of Spain) granted to a faithful court official, the Portuguese nobleman Pedro Álvares Pereira, the captaincy of Sierra Leone in Guinea, subject to his establishing an effective settlement there. This was on the lines of previous royal grants of other areas of the Atlantic world—the fifteenth-century grants of the Portuguese Atlantic islands, the grants of segments of the coast of Brazil in the 1530s, and of the coast of Angola in the 1570s. These earlier grants had led to the extension of Portuguese domain, that is, conquista, confirmed in the earlier instances by settlement but the grant made to Pedro Álvares Pereira led to no permanent settlement at Sierra Leone and not even to Portuguese overrule of the African peoples of the district. A first attempt to carry out the terms of the grant, made in 1606 through the agency of a Jesuit missionary, Fr. Baltasar Barreira, lost its initial momentum because of a sudden decline in the fortunes of Pedro Álvares Pereira. In 1608 he fell out of favor at the court, accused of corruption and malpractice—a not uncommon happening in the jealously competitive arena of the Madrid court—and hence was unable to send ships and supplies to Sierra Leone to substantiate his grant. Eventually he returned to favour and between 1612 and 1616 tried again, but for reasons which are not entirely clear but apparently included the loss of agents in a marine disaster, he gave up the struggle and in 1621, just before he died, he relinquished the grant.

In recent years scholars of different nationalities (including Somalis) have devoted much time and effort to acquiring information about the Somali past using different means and through the available sources on the region. However, the Arabic written sources of information on Somalia have long been neglected and remain so. The purpose of this paper is to call attention to the need for a more comprehensive reading of Arabic sources, and to show that Arabic sources have much to contribute to knowledge about Somalia. I will try to trace these sources and list them in a chronological manner, starting with the early Arab sources, especially from the period which followed the emergence of Islam on the Arabian peninsula when Islam made its way into the Horn of Africa.

Secondly, I will look at sources from medieval Islam in Somalia, when Islam spread from the coastal centers on the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean into the hinterlands of the Horn, the period which marked the struggle between Islam and Christianity. Thirdly, I will look at the period after the collapse of Muslim power in the late sixteenth century, almost two centuries when the Muslims of the Horn (the Somalis) were surrounded by Ethio-Portuguese alliances both to the north and in the Indian Ocean to the south. This period marked a time when the condition of the Somali Muslims became similar to that formerly endured by the Ethiopians, who had been surrounded by Muslims on all sides.

On the eve of All Saints' Day on November 1, 1898, a Portuguese army officer, Henrique Augusto Dias de Carvalho, observed a colorful and noisy crowd of people wending through the streets of Bolama beginning the celebration of dia dos finados (All Souls' Day), which day of supplication for the faithful departed is observed by Christians on November 2.

In the pages which follow, the traditions surrounding the first eight (of a total of thirty-five) kings of Buganda's traditional history will be investigated from a perspective that has not been utilized before. I hope to demonstrate that these traditions—beginning with the establishment of the first king, Kintu, in Buganda proper and ending with the death of the eighth king, Nakibinge, at the hands of the Banyoro—form an interrelated set which can be analyzed structurally as myth. While so doing, I do not wish to imply that the traditions in question demand this type of analysis and no other; different perspectives have been and will be useful for understanding early Buganda and its traditions. But I do want to show that such a structure can be discerned in the traditions and that the existence of this structure should be taken into account regardless of the type of analysis to be undertaken.

One task which will further these ends will be a discussion of the reasons for setting off the particular traditions chosen from the larger context of the set of traditions surrounding all the kings of Buganda. Following this, the selected traditions will be subjected to a structural analysis. In the process, however, I will digress frequently from the dominant mode of analysis to discuss: (1) variant or additional traditions which seem to remain outside the particular structural themes dominating the traditions as a set; and (2) alternative interpretations of the traditions, especially historical ones, which have been or might be offered. Finally, the structural themes discussed in the body of the paper will be represented in a comprehensive chart.

The article describes volumes pertaining to slavery and the slave trade in the British Parliament House of Commons Sessional Papers of the eighteenth century, published by Sheila Lambert in 1975 but seldom used by historians of Africa and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In addition, the article provides an index for the eight volumes from 1788 to 1792 that concern the slave trade. The index is arranged according to the names of individuals who provided testimony to the House of Commons or who are referred to in the testimonies, as well as according to places in Africa and the Americas that are mentioned in the testimonies. There is also a list of tables that are included in the texts and a list of ships mentioned in the testimonies, which are referenced with respect to the ships in Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. The materials were assembled in connection with the campaign to abolish the British slave trade, which was eventually achieved in 1807. As is clear from the testimonies and statistical information, the enquiry into the slave trade is a valuable source of documentary material that is relevant to scholars studying the coastal regions of Atlantic Africa in the eighteenth century and the trans-Atlantic slave trade during the period when the British trade was at its height.

In 2001 I attended a meeting at the London headquarters of the Movement for a Resurgent Togoland (MORETO). Seven people—mainly middle-aged and elderly men from the inland Ewe-speaking areas of Ghana—had gathered together to share their findings about the modern political history of the area where they were born. They vocalised their dissatisfaction with the incorporation of this area within the borders of Ghana at independence in 1957, and they discussed how this situation came about, and whether it could be rectified. In the course of this meeting, I began to realize that contests over Ewe history had gone global. Controversial issues, which scholars had previously addressed through detailed diachronic local studies, were now being played out across a global diaspora, capturing the attention not only of Ewe-speakers originating from a specific town or district, or having a direct stake in a particular version of its history, but also of anonymous commentators, scattered thousands of miles across the globe. In this paper, I describe some of my encounters with Ewe-speaking people who study their recent political history, and I analyze some of their writings. I suggest that, despite recent attention to history-writing by Africans during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, further reflection is required on two key issues: firstly, the circulation of historical knowledge and forms of historical debate among Africans living in the global diaspora; secondly, the implications of this for historians researching the post-colonial period.

Researchers and scholars have written on the history of mining in Zambia using a variety of sources and archives. But much of the history written from local archives has relied heavily on the National Archives of Zambia. Yet, important archival holdings for researchers of the history of Zambia’s mining industry also exist in the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines Archive, the United National Independence Party Archive, and in the Mineworkers’ Union of Zambia Headquarters. These repositories house rich collections of data invaluable for understanding Zambia’s mining industry. Covering the period from the 1890s to the present, these archives make possible new questions and interpretations of Zambia’s mining industry.

Over the past few decades, social history has variously and successfully explored the lives of neglected groups in society. Nevertheless, the question of capturing these “silent voices” in history, including those of women, remains at the heart of social history. Although few sources are available that allow historians to hear these voices, new methodological insights offer opportunities. A multidisciplinary framework and a broad range of methodologies can shed new light on the lives of peasants, who have been often neglected in history and provide opportunities to “hear” their voices and concerns as historical subjects. The object of this paper is to present sortie critical perspective on the use of oral and archival sources for the study of the agricultural history of rural Africa. What I present here is my approach to the collection and use of various sources for the study of Igbo agricultural history in the twentieth century. It suggests that oral sources, in particular, offer an important opportunity in the writing of an inclusive history of agricultural change—a history that for the most part has been created by rural peasants. Another objective is to outline my personal experiences in the field and to suggest important ways of situating the researcher not only in the analysis of the evidence, but most importantly, in the context or the fieldwork environment. Both, as has been clearly shown, can affect the historian's analysis and perspective and the resulting history.

Igboland is situated in Southeastern Nigeria and lies between longitude 7°E and latitude 6°10' N. The region borders the middle belt region of Nigeria to the north, the river Niger to the west, the Ibibio people to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea and Bight of Biafra to the south. Most of the region lies on a plain less than 600 feet (about 183 meters) above sea level. Most of Igboland lies within the Guinean and Sub-Guinean physical environment and is characterized by an annual rainfall of between forty and sixty inches per annum, with a dry season lasting between three and four months in northern Igboland and a mean monthly humidity of about 90% throughout the year. The pattern of rainfall produces two distinct patterns of vegetation. The southern part of the region is characterized by heavy rainfall that produces a dense rainforest that thinned out northwards into a savanna. However, many centuries of human habitation and activities have turned the whole region into secondary forest, with only pockets of forest oasis remaining.

This article applies a translocal approach in order to make sense of the internal dynamics in the Muslim community of colonial Bujumbura. The establishment of the community and its religious evolutions – from a practical living of Islam to Qadiriyya Sufism to Islamic Reform – are interpreted in regard to, on the one hand, religious tendencies in East African Islam and, on the other hand, processes of integration, marginalization, and exclusion in an urban, colonial and Burundian context. An answer to the social needs and challenges on the local level was found in religious intensification and a widening of the geographical scope, drawing on age-old connections across East and Central Africa.

Two decades of civil war have left Liberians facing many challenges. One such group includes those concerned with the preservation and maintenance of Liberia's archives, which were severely compromised during the period of conflict. This paper provides a brief introduction for scholars as to the nature of Liberia's archival materials available in-country, the impact of the war on the collections, and details about how scholars interested in the history of Liberia may access these records.

There are three archival collections in Liberia. The first is at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tubman Boulevard, between 12th and 13th Streets. The second is at the Center for National Documents and Records (National Archives) at 96 Ashmun Street, while the third—the Presidential Archives—is at the Executive Mansion on Capitol Hill.

Kenneth Onwuka Dike (1917-1983) is a definite turning point in African historical scholarship. West Africa (28 September 1957) appropriately called him “The Pioneer Historian.” Robert July credits Dike with being “responsible for many of the advances in historical scholarship that marked the two decades following the conclusion of the Second World War.”

Dike was born in Awka, Nigeria, on 17 December 1917. In 1933 he entered Dennis Memorial Grammar School (DMGS), Onitsha, Nigeria. After three years at DMGS, Dike spent another two years at Achimota College in the Gold Coast. From Achimota he moved on to Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone. At the time, Fourah Bay was affiliated to, and awarding the degrees of, Durham University. This meant that through Fourah Bay, Dike took the B.A. (in English, Geography, and Latin) of Durham University. In 1943, he went home to Nigeria, but not to stay for long. In November 1944 he left, on a British Council scholarship, for the M.A. degree in History at University of Aberdeen. In June 1947 he graduated, taking a first-class honors (the best of his year) at Aberdeen. Four months later, Dike registered for his Ph.D. at King's College, University of London. Under the supervision of Vincent Harlow and Gerald S. Graham, he did a dissertation entitled “Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830-1879.” He earned his Ph.D. degree on 28 July 1950. With it he became the first African to “pass through professional training” in Western historical scholarship.

Reliable data relating to Buganda's pre-1800 past has come to historians in the form of a thin trickle. Students of more ancient Ganda history have been compelled to rely on the accounts by literate Ganda composed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most notably the work of Apolo Kagwa. The effective usage of these accounts is fraught with difficulties, difficulties which are well-documented in the case of Buganda and which have been explored by, in particular, Wrigley, Kiwanuka, Rowe, and Henige. These writers have justifiably questioned the validity of such recorded political history. The idea that Buganda was governed by a Western-style royal dynasty, with a chronologically-structured succession list, was first put in writing by Speke, who provided the earliest such kinglist.

Over the ensuing forty years this kinglist was gradually lengthened and virtually set in stone, largely through the writings of Kagwa. The explanation of precolonial Ganda government in die terminology of Western constitutional monarchy doubtless served very well the purposes of the new colonial power, which was able to claim that it was merely backing up an extant political organization able to articulate the practices of ‘civilised’ governance. This arrangement also clearly suited the Ganda, as Wrigley and Twaddle have suggested. Both authors incisively argue that the Ganda kinglist was manipulated to meet the challenges of the colonial period.

There seems little reason to doubt, and every reason to believe, that the recording of Buganda's more ancient past (for which there is no corroborating written source) was indeed often carefully engineered to produce the desired results. The attempt to ‘clarify’ local power struggles, the legitimization of particular claims to authority, and die opportunity to provide the world with the definitive account of one's own ‘national history’ (an opportunity, surely, which few could resist) were all factors which have combined to demand skepticism among historians concerning the historicity of ‘traditional’ accounts.

Rare has been the book on Africa that has acquired a history and become the subject of study in its own right. One such is the autobiography of Théophilus Conneau, a slave dealer of French and Italian background, who lived on the west coast of Africa during the 1830s and 1840s. Various accounts of Conneau's experiences in Guinea and Liberia have been translated into four languages, and were even incorporated into a successful novel in 1933, on which was based a motion picture. The latest version of Conneau's life story (and the occasion for this paper) was published as recently as 1976.

Conneau's story first came to press in 1854 through the editorial assistance and skill of Brantz Mayer, a lecturer, author, and journalist of the Baltimore area, known principally for his writings about Latin America. Having obtained experience and contacts with publishers by editing manuscripts and letters, Mayer was a valuable asset to a new author in 1853. Recently discovered letters from Conneau to Mayer and Mayer's own account of the relationship between them suggest an interesting beginning for this literary enterprise. Conneau found himself in 1853 in Baltimore where he met James Hall, whom he had known previously in Liberia. Hall had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Maryland settlement for freed Blacks at Cape Palmas and had served as that settlement's first governor from 1833 to 1836. Concluding that Conneau's story of a repentant slave trader would be of value to the cause of anti-slavery and black emigration from the United States to Africa, Hall suggested that Conneau write his memoirs and introduced him to Mayer.