During the summer of 1982 I lived in the predominantly Muslim city of Kano, in northern Nigeria, to study the Hausa language and to learn about women's lives—their activities, interests, and identities. Residence in Kano challenged the questions and theoretical assumptions of my research. The ‘silences’ I encountered in the field now inform questions for a methodology for the study of women's lives that acknowledges the connections between researcher, subject/s of life history research, and the eventual written analysis of their narrative histories. An underlying theme—and persistent question—is the extent to which such writing tells us more about the researcher or the narratives' subject/s.

Feminist theory and methodology inform this consideration of women's life histories. Feminist scholars have focused on the inscription of meaning in women's interests in writing about women. They have assigned a central role to “women's conscious perceptions” of their lived social experience in theory construction. The specific inclusion of women's, and other groups' perceptions contributes to historians' formulation of research models and methodology. I will discuss several methodological issues before returning to the ‘silences’ of my own fieldwork.

In an earlier study I described the material on Morocco, the Saharan coast, sub-Saharan Africa, and the neighboring Atlantic islands, which appeared in Richard Hakluyt's collection of English voyages, in its two editions of 1589 and 1598-1600. Up to his death in 1616 Hakluyt continued to collect additional material for an intended third edition. This material passed to Samuel Purchas (1577-1626), an Essex and then London clergyman, who had already begun to collect and publish voyage material on his own account.

In 1613 Purchas published his Pilgrimage, which appeared again in progressively enlarged editions in 1614, 1617, and 1626. Pilgrimage presented a synthesis of contemporary knowledge of the outer continents, based on accounts of voyages and journeys to and descriptions of exotic lands, some of them published, others from manuscripts collected or inspected by Purchas, the whole notionally organized as a review of religious practices throughout the world. Although Pilgrimage cites a vast range of sources and sometimes quotes from them, the work is basically a summarizing of the sources in Purchas' own words. Of much greater interest, therefore, is Purchas' other major work, his masterpiece, his Pilgrimes, which appeared in 1625 in four very large volumes running to some 4000 pages. Pilgrimes is a collection of sources, on the model of Hakluyt's collection, though Purchas more frequently presents his sources in cut versions. The material covers voyages and journeys to all parts of the known world, and is not limited to English voyages--the major limitation being only the extent of material Purchas could lay his hands on.

Historical drama can be described as a form of drama which purports to reflect or represent historical proceedings. Since time immemorial writers have combined fiction and history in creative works. Lawrence Langner has ascribed the popularity of historical drama to the desire of the theatergoer to spend an evening in the company of kings, queens, and other historical personages; the opportunity to become familiar with far greater events than those which take place in the lives of ordinary people; and that historical plays recreate great deeds done by great personages in the past. Historical facts are then creatively adapted and made available in play form to the audience. Adaptation has been defined as “the rewriting of a work from its original form to fit it for another medium … The term implies an attempt to retain the characters, actions, and as much as possible of the language and tone of the original…” The history play is also defined as “any drama whose time setting is in some period earlier than that in which it was written. We can also go further to describe the history play as one “that reconstructs a personage, a series of events, a movement, or the spirit of a past age and pays the debt of serious scholarship to the facts of the age being recreated.

Judging from the foregoing, Akinwunmi Isola's play, Efunsetan Aniwura falls into the category of historical drama, treating as it does the story of the eponymous heroine who was the second Iyalode (queen of women) of Ibadan and who died on 30 June 1874. Prominent themes in Yoruba historical plays include war, conflict, and class struggle. Olu Obafemi has declared that the dramatization of the history, myth, and legends of the Yoruba community forms the bulk of the themes of Yoruba drama. These factors are vividly portrayed in Akinwunmi Isola's plays. Akinwunmi Isola is one of the most prolific playwrights who use their mother tongue to write plays in Nigeria. He is a Professor of Yoruba language and he uses the Yoruba language in writing his plays despite the fact that he is proficient in English and French languages.

It has long been accepted that the Devonshire Declaration of 1923 represented a clever compromise by which the British government was able to extricate itself from a longstanding controversy surrounding Indian claims for equality with European settlers in Kenya through a statement that African interests were to be paramount in that colony. There can be no denying that the doctrine of African paramountcy proved an effective solution to the Colonial Office dilemma caused by attempting to balance the conflicting claims of the Kenya Indians and settlers. Yet another widely-stated view, that the doctrine of African paramountcy and other specific details included in the declaration were provided to the Colonial Office by British missionary and church officials, specifically J. H. Oldham and Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury is, quite simply, a myth. The Colonial Office had no need for Oldham and Davidson to devise a settlement for it; officials there had decided the main principles that they would use in making a policy statement long before Oldham entered the Indian question in May 1923. What the Colonial Office officials actually got from the missionary leader, in addition to useful phraseology, was the vital support they needed to sell the policy announced in the White Paper to influential public opinion in both Britain and India. This was a most significant achievement, and it is time to recognize Oldham's contribution for what it was rather than perpetuate an interpretation that has no basis in fact.

It is the purpose of this article to investigate certain aspects of the Pokomo (P) language, and thereby to present a more detailed picture of Pokomo history than is currently available. Pokomo is an ideal laboratory for comparative linguistics. Whereas much as been written about most adjacent peoples, such as Orma, Somali, Mijikenda (MK), and Swahili, little has been said on the Pokomo, or their neighbors, the Dahalo; virtually no archeological work has been done along the Tana river, while Pokomo (and Dahalo) traditions are scantily recorded.

Further, the Tana represents more or less the extreme northeast border of the Bantu-speaking area, and it the meeting point for northern pastoralists and southern farmers. It is surrounded on all sides by speakers of Cushitic languages, from Ogaden Somali near Garissa, through Orma and Waata (all Eastern Cushitic), to Dahalo (Southern Cushitic) and Boni (Eastern Cushitic), on the Indian Ocean. At the same time, it is fairly remote from other Bantu-speaking groups. The nearest Kamba communities are nearly 100 miles as the crow flies to the west, across semi-desert, and the nearest sizeable Giriama settlement a similar distance south of Garsen across comparable terrain. The main Swahili communities of the Lamu Archipelago, north of the mouth of the river, have--at least today--little regular contact with the Pokomo. The relatively small Pokomo population--between 40,000 and 50,000--lives huddled along the banks of the Tana from Garissa in the north to the northern bank of the Indian Ocean estuary, a stretch of some 150 miles, although, if we exclude Malankote, the Pokomo territory is only some 100 miles long. They are primarily agricultural, although fishing and some hunting are also practiced.

Lake Rudolf, which is also known as Lake Turkana, lies in the eastern arm of the great Rift Valley. It is primarily fed by the Omo River, which flows south from the Ethiopian highlands and sits in an inhospitable landscape of dormant volcanoes, wind-driven semidesert, and old lava flows. During the morning hours, strong gusts of wind usually blow from the east down the slopes of Mount Kulal and across the surface of the lake. This unrelenting wind creates large, white-capped waves on the lake's surface and makes navigation almost impossible. It also gives the lake a bluish color, reflecting the clear sky above. However, when the wind dies down in the afternoon, the lake takes on the color of green jade, due to algae that rise to the surface when the waters are calm. It is because of this afternoon and evening color that the lake has long been known as the Jade Sea (Imperato: 1998:3).

In Ghana and other regions of West Africa a funeral poster is an important part of funerary ritual. Examining two funeral posters – one about omission and the other about inclusion of names – printed to commemorate two chiefs in two Ewe communities in Ghana and Togo, this article shows funeral posters as arenas of contestation, negotiation, affirmation, and elaboration of beliefs and conflicting views. The article argues that funeral posters are written with a local audience in mind, which means that they are a very useful source for historical enquiry about how people address the subjects of kinship and relationships among chiefs.

One of the more striking recent trends in the study of African history has been the mushrooming of studies focusing on the “underdevelopment” of Africa (or some part of it) following the publication of Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in 1972. Part of the appeal of the “underdevelopment” literature is that it stands the apologists for colonialism on their heads. Barely more than a decade earlier, as the 1950s were coming to a close, one could readily find settlers, shopkeepers, colonial bureaucrats, and others arguing that the mounting pressure for independence in sub-Saharan Africa should be resisted because European rule had brought “development” to the continent. It is not surprising, therefore, that after a decade of independence there should be a ready audience for the argument that colonial rule did not “develop” African economies but, to the contrary, actually “underdeveloped” them—and perhaps we should also not be surprised that “underdevelopment” is often not defined oris defined inconsistently.

The central focus of this essay will be the main difficulties of studying either “development” or “underdevelopment” and, in particular, the problems of determining the causes of either of these states at any given period in Africa's history. All the examples from the “underdevelopment” literature will be drawn from Rodney's book, primarily because the work seems representative of the growing body of literature on this subject and because it has been by far the most influential of the studies dealing with the topic in Africa. I would like to emphasize that in the following discussion my approach is more that of the economist than of the historian, a point which will be clearly reflected in the few points I have chosen for illustration.

The Bantu languages of Africa constitute a large cluster of languages sharing so many common features that their probable relationship was recognized very early. Doke and Cole summarize the history of this recognition, and of the comparative studies that grew out of it, up to 1943. Given an early start, a closely-knit group of languages, and workers of the quality of Meinhof, Meeussen, and Guthrie, Bantu linguistics has progressed to a stage equalled by few comparative fields outside Indo-European. Detailed reconstructions of Bantu phonology (including tonology and intonation), morphology, syntax, and lexicon have been possible.

The problems that remain are those of internal and external relationships. What are the subgroups of Bantu and what is the history of their development from the hypothetized ancestral language? What languages are related to Bantu, and what is the status of Bantu in any larger language grouping? Both questions together may be put as--does ‘Bantu’ exist? That is, do the languages recongized as Bantu--all and only those languages--constitute a well-defined linguistic group?

The simplest, and most common, assumptions are 1) that Bantu (possibly including some of the languages recognized as Bantu by the followers of Greenberg, but rejected by Guthrie) is a linguistic unit, with a common ancestor, Proto-Bantu, not shared with any other languages; 2) that it constitutes one division of a sub-group of Niger-Congo; and 3) that it in turn consists of two principal dialect areas, showing either an east-west division or a break between the forest languages (Guthrie's Zones A, B, and C) and the remainder. The principal problem for this view is the lack of support in shared innovation for any of the groupings it postulates. There is plentiful evidence in lexicostatistics both for the existence of Bantu as a distinct unit and for either of the internal borders postulated. There is even evidence for these in the form of numerous lexical and grammatical Isoglosses roughly coinciding at the boundaries of Bantu, and primarily lexical isoglosses internally. But there do not seem to be any cases where one of these boundaries is parallelled by an isogloss such that a clearly innovative feature occurs only on one side of the line.

Probably the most popular and most frequently-recited oral tradition in all of Senegambia and somewhat beyond is the epic of Kelefa Saane. From southwestern Guiné-Bissau to Bondu on the middle Senegal, griots regularly play the tune of “Kelefa” on their harp-lutes as they sing the familiar refrains:

The war was a disaster.
There was no one who could take
Kelefa Saane's place.…
Wounded men
Crawled back
To Niumi. …
Ah, the nobles are finished
War has finished the nobles…

Such epics have captured the attention of African historians since early in the years of professional interest in the continent. Over the last decade historians have made fresh examination of oral data and their use in reconstructing the African past. One volume of essays, The African Past Speaks, edited by Joseph C. Miller, assesses problems associated with analysis of these traditions. In his introductory essay Miller makes a point that most of the authors of subsequent chapters reinforce. It is that many forms of oral traditions are sociological models of the societies they come from. The structure and content of a narrative, Miller asserts, often provides insight into the nature of a particular society at some point in the precolonial past. Conversely, knowledge of the structure of the society in which traditionists tell the narrative helps one evaluate the narrative as a historical source.

The mission of Joseph Dupuis, sent as British Consul to Kumasi, the capital of Asante, in 1820, is well known, principally through his own journal of it, published in 1824. In addition to his negotiations with the Asante authorities, Dupuis collected information on Asante history, and on the geography not only of Asante itself but also of neighboring and remoter countries in the interior—the latter presented in Part II of his Journal, entitled “On the Geography of Western Africa” [I-CXV]. His principal informants on both Asante history and West African geography were African Muslims whom he met in Kumasi, and with whom he was able to converse in Arabic. The geographical information was transmitted in part in the form of Arabic manuscripts, some (or perhaps all) of which Dupuis presented, in transcription and translation, in an appendix of “geographical documents” [cxxiv-cxxxv]; but supplementary information was obtained orally in conversations, some passages from which Dupuis purports to reproduce verbatim [XLII-XLIV].

The information which Dupuis obtained can usefully be compared with similar (but, as regards the interior, generally less extensive) material collected by Edward Bowdich on an earlier mission to Kumasi in 1817. Dupuis himself was frequently critical of alleged inaccuracies and confusions in Bowdich's account, though not always with justification. It is noteworthy that he read over at least one section of Bowdich's account to his informants in Kumasi, to obtain their comments on it [XVIII]—an interesting illustration of the potential for interaction between written texts and oral information in Africa even in precolonial times, in a manner more complex than that of “feedback” from written into oral data most commonly discussed by historians.

In 1985 an oral history project was established in Swaziland, based in the National Archives at Lobamba. The Oral History Project set itself three tasks; the establishment of an oral archive on Swazi history; the publication of a selection of transcripts form the oral archive concerning the precolonial history of Swaziland; the popularization of precolonial history.

The precolonial history of Swaziland is the history of a largely non–literate people. The colonial period is well–documented, but mostly from the perspective of the colonial administration. Oral traditions are thus a primary source for both the precolonial and the later history of Swaziland. The Project is concerned to preserve oral testimonies about all periods of Swazi history, including the immediate past. Special attention however, has been paid to the collection and preservation of the oral record pertaining to the precolonial history of Swaziland, a period for which documentary sources are largely absent.

There are several reasons for this. Firstly, the relative stability of the Swazi kingdom and its high degree of centralization imparted to early Swazi traditions a unique chronological depth. Secondly, the varied circumstances of incorporation of its many component chiefdoms have endowed Swaziland with an exceptionally rich corpus of local and regional traditons. This diversity facilitates the development of a picture of precolonial life that moves beyond the elitist versions of history which have long dominated both Swazi history and precolonial history elsewhere in southern Africa. Not only are the surviving Swazi oral traditions about the precolonial past unusually rich, but Swaziland occupied a pivotal political position in nineteenth–century southeast Africa. Its traditions illuminate the processes and forces that shaped the history of the entire region

Twentieth-century historians of the Fon kingdom of Dahomey have been blessed with an unusually rich and accessible body of primary source material. Published in English and French by a succession of visitors to the kingdom, this literature includes references to Dahomean affairs beginning as early as the seventeenth century and continuing with regularity through its conquest in 1892/93 by the French. The accounts, however, are fullest in number of writers and in detail of observation for the period of the reigns of kings Gezo (1818-58) and Glele (1858-89).

European observers of the Dahomean polity approached the state for a variety of commercial, religious, and political reasons, but typically they were permitted to visit the capital, Abomey, only in conjunction with the major cycle of annual ceremonies, Xwetanu. Because Xwetanu -- or Customs, as the ceremonies were dubbed by the Europeans -- ranged in duration from several weeks to several months, travelers drew their information about the kingdom from the advantageous point of a relatively long period of time spent in close observation of the court at what was unquestionably the most important period of the year. Fascinated and sometimes repelled by the sights they witnessed, they set down their own observations, describing land forms and economic activities, court life and ceremonial, and officers and institutions of the state.

German voyages of ‘discovery’ and field research in that part of Africa which, politically or linguistically, has been subject to Portuguese influence in past centuries, and still is so—an area which therefore corresponds for the most part (and also sufficiently so) to present-day Angola—has so far received only sporadic attention in corresponding historical writings. Nor for the most part have they been taken into account as ethnographic sources, language barriers above all being responsible for this. This is hardly because they are negligible in terms of either their numbers or the information they contain. In the last third of the nineteenth century especially, west-central Africa, in which Portuguese had been a lingua franca for centuries, became a special area of attraction for German travelers. Admittedly, the published results are far from even. One, Augspurger's, is interesting above all for the early date of his report. The scientific reputation of others, like the Jaspert brothers, is extremely dubious. For yet others, like Baum and Jessen, ethnographic documentation was of only marginal interest. The greater part of Wilhelm's sketches have been lost.

On the other hand, one cannot write knowledgeably about the Loango coast without consulting Brun's and Pechuël-Loesche's reports. Any statement on northeast Angola in the last quarter of the nineteenth century will lose in value if one fails to use Pogge, Lux, Buchner, and Schütt. Studies on the Kisama without Mattenklodt or on the Cokwe without Baumann's great monograph would at best be a skeleton, at worst a distortion, in the context of what is possible.

The National Archives of Nigeria is located at three sites: Ibadan, Enugu, and Kaduna. Each site houses the archives for its geographical area: Ibadan for the Western Region (the present-day states of Bendel, Kwara, Lagos, Ogun, Ondo, and Oyo); Enugu for the Eastern Region; and Kaduna for the Northern Region. This paper will concentrate on the largest archives, that at Ibadan, which is housed in a large three-story pastel-colored building set in three acres of grounds within the campus area of the University of Ibadan.

The Nigerian National Archives branch at Ibadan is very rich in official papers of all Federal, Regional, and State Governments; papers of native and local authorities; papers of semi-public bodies and institutions; papers of private individuals and families, as well as those of ecclesiastical bodies and missions.

The founding and development of the Nigerian Archival Service was due very largely to the initiative of Kenneth Dike, who was awarded a Colonial Social Science Research Fellowship in 1949 to carry out research on Nigerian history. In the course of his studies Dike came across valuable historical records in government offices, the greater number of which were exposed to decay and destruction and some of which were damaged by insects and water. He reported this to the government and offered his services without salary in the task of recovering valuable historical materials.

As heavily as historians must rely on orally-derived data for their study of the African past, historians of Oceania are far more in thrall to such materials in attempting to reconstruct the history of the various Pacific island groups. Although archeology and historical linguistics can sometimes help to provide broad sequences and interrelationships as well as evidence concerning origins, neither can, of course, provide circumstantial local detail or close dating. Oral traditions, often supported by genealogies of sometimes extraordinary length and complexity, have been collected in all parts of the Pacific almost since the time of Cook, but the latter part of the nineteenth century was a period of particularly feverish activity. The result is a vast body of material, much of it still in manuscript form. Of this corpus far more relates to the Maori people of New Zealand than to the inhabitants of any other island group.

In the course of the first half of this century a homogenized orthodox view of New Zealand's more remote past developed -- an interpretation based on three pivotal events, each of which came to be dated calendrically by means of Maori genealogies. The first was the arrival of the “discoverer” of New Zealand, one Kupe, who was dated to ca. 950. Then, two centuries later, came Toi and his companions. Finally, so this version goes, the so-called Great Fleet, comprising about seven large canoes (the number varies slightly) arrived in about 1350, and New Zealand began to be well and truly peopled by Maori.

The gold mines of Kilo-Moto are located at the extreme northeast of Zaire. They include two centers of mining operations: the gold mines of Moto in the District of the Upper Uélé and the gold mines of Kilo in the District of the Kibali-Ituri. Gold was discovered there in 1903, and the mining of gold began in 1905 in Kilo and in 1911 in Moto. The local management of the gold mines of Kilo is located at Kilomines or Bambu; and that of Moto is at Watsa.

From 1905 to 1919 Kilo-Moto was a colonial state corporation and gold was mined by the colonial administration. The mines were organized into a special service depending on the Department of Public Works in the Ministry of the Colonies in Brussels. In Africa, the Governor-General and the Governor of the Province Orientale (now Haut-Zaire) were responsible for the implementation of colonial regulations in the gold mines. Africans were recruited from the rural areas by the colonial administration to work for the gold mines.

From 1919 to 1926 the gold mines of Kilo-Moto were organized into an autonomous colonial state corporation managed by a Board of Directors in Brussels, appointed by the Minister of the Colonies. The service of the gold mines then moved from the Ministry of the Colonies to a separate building and this marked the beginning of the constitution of the Archives of Kilo-Moto. The headquarters of Kilo-Moto since 1937 have been located at 1, Place de Luxembourg in Brussels. From 1926 to 1967 Kilo-Moto was a private corporation, and the Management Committee and the Board of Directors of the private company have always operated from the same building.

Biography is on its way to enjoying immense popularity in the teaching of African history. A number of reasons account for this optimism. First is the current impetus from the postmodernist challenge of universalist and essentialist categories—with their emphasis on the individual and their exhaustive exposition of power and language. Second is the existence of massive research projects presently underway, together with the success of already published monographs. And lastly is the popularity and success that African novels have enjoyed in the teaching field of African studies and African history in particular. All three combined make us more sanguine.

The popularity of African novels lies in their ability to convey to the reader how a society might have functioned with or without a state. Since most often a novelist tries to recreate a historical moment, a novel becomes a pedagogical tool of what Klein has called a “reasonable representation of what society may have been like.” In the most popularly utilized novels, an individual is cast at the center of the unfolding story. Most often, the African novel concerns itself with the impact of colonialism and the transition from traditional to contemporary African realities. This is frequently done with the aim of conveying to the reader the processes of adjustment and the pros and cons of this adjustment.

As a must, there is a stern, often cold, and not very understanding colonial agent or agents. He is not alone, but is paired with a sympathetic and liberal missionary (although generally one who imparts conservative Victorian values).

The Luso-African [or Afro-Portuguese] ivories from West Africa include hunting horns (so-called “olifants” or “oliphants”), spoons, and lidded bowls (saltcellars) embellished with human figures and animals. These objects, first imported into Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century, have engendered debate over dating and provenance. While scholars agree that the early sixteenth-century pieces were produced by “Sape(s)” (or “Sapi”) artists from the Upper Guinea Coast (“Serra Leoa” in Portuguese sources), there is substantial disagreement whether post-1550 ivories came from “Serra Leoa” or Nigeria. This article argues for Serra Leoa, based on a methodological approach whereby Portuguese written documents, establishing the socio-historical context, and demonstrating continued production by “Sape” artists, are a necessary pre-condition to any stylistic comparison of objects.

I offer here a theory of “cultural convergence,” as a corollary to Darwin's natural selection, regarding how slave Creoles and culture were formed among the Gullah and, by extension, supported by other examples, in the Americas. When numerous speakers from different, and sometimes related, ethnic groups have words with similar sounds and evoke related meanings, this commonality powers the word into Creole use, especially if there is commonality with Southern English or the host language. This theory applies to cultural features as well, including music. Perhaps the most haunting example of my theory is that of “massa,” the alleged mispronunciation by Southern slaves of “master.” Massa is in fact the correct Bainouk and Cassanga ethnic group pronunciation of mansa, the famous word used so widely among the adjacent and dominant Mande peoples in northern and coastal west Africa to denote king or boss. In this new framework, the changes wrought by Mandinka, the Mande more broadly, and African culture generally on the South, are every bit as significant as the linguistic infusions of the Norman Conquest into what became English.