Despite its present ethnic federalism, Ethiopian history has been marked by provincial or cultural identities, which twentieth century notions of identity have obscured. This essay gives three major reasons why ethnicity is not an effective lens to understand Ethiopia’s complex history. One, there is no agreement among either popular and academic writers on what ethnic identities in Ethiopia represents, either currently or historically. Two, a focus on ethnicity obscures the rationale behind the actions of the state and key actors during the nineteenth century. Three, an ethnic lens brings much needed scholarly attention away from key moments in the nineteenth century.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the events, forces, realities, challenges and opportunities with which the Bafokeng community in the vicinity of Rustenburg was confronted during the course of the nineteenth century, especially with regard to the loss of their land and the way they responded to this dispossession. Much of the groundwork for their subsequent successful acquisition of land was laid during this period. These successes—and the good fortune of the Bafokeng that rich platinum deposits were later discovered on the land they obtained in this way—elevated them to a prominent position at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The status of the Bafokeng was emphasized when the former South African President Nelson Mandela, the Home Affairs Minister Mango-sutho Buthelezi, the South African first lady Zanele Mbeki, and the Lesotho Queen Mother were among the guests at the coronation of Leruo Moletlegi as kgosi or chief of the Bafokeng in 2003.

The dispossession of the land of the Bafokeng by white settlers from the end of the 1830s and the Bafokeng's attempts to regain this land should be seen against a number of important nineteenth-century trends. Firstly, there was the forfeiture to the white settlers of large tracts of land claimed by indigenous communities in European colonies in the nineteenth and earlier centuries. In southern Africa white settlers seized no less than 40. million hectares of land up to 1860 and another 107. million hectares during the next hundred years. A second important trend was the mineral revolution in the interior of southern Africa. Thirdly, the settlement of a large number of missionaries among African communities in this period also influenced the dynamics of the dispossession and acquisition of land.

The paper looks at the population registration and issuing of reference books in the Transkei in the 1950s and 1960s. The dompas became the iconic object of apartheid policing within the logic of urban racial segregation and capitalist labour exploitation. The analysis proposed here investigates population registration through the lens of materiality and visuality. It sketches the visual economies that facilitated the scheme in a rural area and explores the role of photography in one of apartheid’s most notorious administrative schemes. Along the lines of Walter Benjamin’s reflections on technological mediation the paper retraces how the dompas as an image/object oscillated between panoptic surveillance and subaltern contestation.

The most important development in African historiography since 1970 is almost surely the growing awareness that oral tradition alone is insufficient as a source for reconstructing the past beyond about 1750. Henceforth historians will be increasingly obliged to turn to other bodies of data, at least if they wish to avoid writing history which, in Bradbury's words, is no more than “the rationalization of myth.” Despite pleas by, among others, Bradbury, Vansina, and Lewis as long ago as a decade or more, historians have thus far shown little sign of incorporating ethnographic data into then-catalog of sources, or comparative ethnography into their methodological tool-kit. One reason for this reluctance (at least among English language Africanists of our generation) may be a vague acquaintance with the serious abuses which European Africanists— especially those associated with the Vienna ‘culture-historical school’—committed by stretching ethnographic data to fit grand, but spurious, global schemes of human evolution. Clearly, though, earlier abuses in no way justify our refusing now to exploit a body of data we badly need, provided we examine it with appropriate care and modesty. We must admit at the outset that ethnographic comparisons for historical purposes on a continental scale will be impossible until a good many regional studies are available. In turn, such regional studies will normally be limited to selected aspects of related culture, and not to cultures as holistic units. This means that points of articulation between regional studies may well be difficult to identify.

Among the rich legacy of African oral traditions, the Sunjata epic is still one of the most complex phenonema, because it undoubtedly goes back to the times of Ibn Battuta, because of the limited variety between the available text editions, and because of its present-day popularity in sub-Saharan West Africa among people of all kinds of social background. In scholarly discussion, the epic has challenged many academics since Delafosse used the Sunjata epic as evidence for his reconstruction of the Mali empire as a thirteenth-century vast centralized polity. Although his views have been criticized since then, they have become part of history lessons at primary schools in Mali, the Gambia, Senegal, and Guinea. All these countries belong to the so-called “Mande,” an area inhabited by various ethnic groups that have close similarities in language, oral tradition, and social organization.

In the last decade History in Africa has given room to discuss the Sunjata epic, in particular in order to explore how data from the epic can be used as historical sources, and as what history for whom. Articles by David Conrad, Tim Geysbeek, Stephan Bühnen, Stephen Bulman, Kathryn Green, George Brooks, Ralph Austen, and myself come my mind. All these authors have treated the Sunjata epic as a text. This seems to be a logical and inevitable choice for the historian.

However, this approach implies a choice that limits the range of interpretations which can be made about the Sunjata traditions as a source for African history.

Scepticism has fairly consistently had a bad press from those in a position of authority. The usual reasons for its disrepute are not themselves particularly reputable. They generally include at least the following claims: scepticism is a negative philosophy and hence incapable of making positive contributions to humanity, science, or religion; sceptics are nihilists who wreak havoc on social structure, science, and religion; and, though scepticism can on occasion be beneficial, the idea that we do not know anything is preposterous. These attitudes are widespread in the general populace but less common in the scientific community, where various ideas such as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle or Einstein's theory of relativity have made scepticism more acceptable. Although the usual reasons listed above might be remotely accurate representations of dogmatic scepticism, they completely misrepresent Pyrrhonic scepticism, that form of scepticism which has had most influence on Western civilization.

The position taken here is that Pyrrhonic scepticism need not be considered primarily a philosophical position. Historically, it was set forth as a philosophical position but only because philosophy once encompassed all of humanity's attempts to arrive at knowledge. Today, when science has primary claim to including under its roof most of our attempts to wrest knowledge from the world, Pyrrhonic scepticism is more approp-priately viewed as a scientific position having general implications for scientific research.

It is ironic that negative attitudes towards scepticism continue, since the dramatic historical failures of social structure, ethical beliefs, and human progress have been due to dogmatic pretensions of one sort or another, not to scepticism. This is not by chance. Scepticism is, after all, difficult to use as the justification for authority, obedience, or power.

Readers of Leslie Bessant's article in HA 24 (1997) on the National Archives of Zimbabwe (NAZ) might have been alarmed by one of the photographs opposite the opening page, which depicted an archive in a state of advanced decay. If they had expected the photograph to be a pictorial representation of the current condition of NAZ, they would have been disappointed. The photograph was taken in the Sāo Tomé e Príncipe archives and accompanied a short note detailing the recovery work undertaken in those archives to make them usable. NAZ is a flourishing national archive which is a pleasure to work in, staffed by professional and conscientious personnel, but it is also bearing the brunt of cuts in funding and government suspicion of researchers. I worked intensively at NAZ for nine months in 1994-95, and again for five months in 1996. This paper is by way of an informal engagement with Bessant's article; in it I aim to sketch out my own reminiscences of NAZ and also address some of the issues which face overseas researchers in Zimbabwe.

Bessant spent a sizeable part of his article discussing tea, and the notions of privilege associated with tea at NAZ. Tea under the flagpoles became an institution for me. Not only was the tea absurdly cheap (Z$0.40/US$0.04 in 1994, rising to Z$1 a few months later), but the break was a useful refueling exercise during grueling days looking at dusty files. Rather than fading in significance as Bessant suggested, tea was extremely prominent in the day of the typical researcher. Tea was also the best way of networking with other scholars in the Archives, and almost all the useful conversations I had there revolved around the tea break—which sometimes became the lunch break if debates were intense. I made many professional contacts and personal friendships over tea at the Archives.

The Shaiqiya are the northernmost Arabic-speaking community of the modern riverain Sudan, residing in the Nile bend below the Fourth Cataract as far as the borders of Nubian-speaking Dongola. Independent confirmation of the existence of the Shaiqiya under that name can be found in European sources of the sixteenth century, while charters, chronicles, saints' lives, and orally-preserved traditions allude to their participation in the political and cultural life of the wider kingdom of Sinnar, of which they formed a part. In November 1820 the Shaiqiya made one of their most dramatic contributions to the historical record by offering determined resistance to the invading Turkish armies of Muhammad Ali, Viceroy of Egypt. When they were defeated twice in quick succession, their homeland was subjected to six weeks of concentrated vengeance before the invaders marched on south. The erstwhile Shaiqi elite took service with the Turks as mercenary colonial troops and departed forever, slave revolts flared on the princely demesnes adjoining their vacant castles, and the servile entourages of the old lords disbanded and decamped. The survivors who remained, largely non-slave peasant cultivators, set out to build a new society under the tutelage of Turkish colonial officials. It is this nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial society, as popularized internationally by the Shaiqi novelist al-Tayyib Salih and the Shaiqi ethnographer Haydar Ibrahim, that is usually understood today to constitute the traditional, historically authentic, pre-modern reality of the Shaiqiya experience.

During the past few years of researching in Eritrea I had the chance to discover an important but little known source for the history of colonial Eritrea that the government that came to power in 1991 is evaluating: the regional archive of Addi Qäyyeh. This archive is in the main town of an area of the Eritrean highlands, Akkälä Guzay, and comprises a large number of documents on Italian colonialism. This documentation is exceptional; indeed, the great bulk of such documents remain in Italy, conserved in the unexploited Archivio Eritrea within the Ministerio degli Affari Esteri in Rome. To my knowledge the regional archive at Addi Qäyyeh is the only remaining colonial source in Eritrea, if we exclude some minor religious archives, and its interest is unquestionable.

As noted, the main sources for colonial Eritrea are in Italy. The documents in the Archivio Eritrea amply testify to the importance of this material. This deals with colonial papers, inquiries, historical and geographical documentation, anthropological materials, and adminstrative papers—altogether, a large amount of material as yet little utilized by scholars. The colonial history of Eritrea remains in many respects a very poor field of study, and recent work has considered only a few documents in this rich collection. However, the Archivio Eritrea is not exhaustive—a complementary source offers a different set of materials amenable to historical study.

Many documents preserved at Addi Qäyyeh have the same importance and share many subjects with those in Rome, while others are unique. Here I would just like to mention briefly some of the latter, and offer general information to intending historians of colonial Eritrea.

The extent of secure knowledge of the past of the groups of people known in scholarly literature as Baga is inconsiderable. This is in part because of the limited European interest in past times in the Baga homeland (on the coast of the post-colonial state of Guinée), and also in part because of limited scholarly investigations in recent times (the post-colonial state did not help by for long exiling or barring from access non-Marxist scholars).

Ethnographic and linguistic investigations have been undertaken only since the mid-nineteenth century and still amount to very little, with even less in print. Archeological investigations have yet to begin, apart from the brave attempt of Fred Lamp to date certain artefacts stylistically. As a result, in the 1990s the connotation and exact range of application of the term “Baga” remain unclear and the precise linguistic relationship of “the Baga language” with those neighboring languages that appear to form a language group is known only in outline. What this means that it is impossible to sum up the earlier history of the Baga briefly. The reader who continues and bravely tackles the listing and discussion of sources that follows will, however, be able to assess how much of the history can be securely reconstructed.

It is understandable that the desire to construct a history for the Baga has latterly turned on the interpretation of oral traditions. Such traditions now preferred by the Baga—or at least by certain sections, strata, or individuals—are patently of great interest to the anthropologist inasmuch as they depict what the present-day Baga, or some of them, wish to see as their past history and thus throw light on contemporary ideology and popular mindsets.

This article looks at the shifts and continuities in labor relations in Zimbabwe from c. 1900–2000. It does so by looking at three cross sections (1904, 1951, and 2002) to examine the changes that have taken place. By exploring the continuities (subsistence agriculture) and shifts (limited industrialization and urbanization) of labor relations over this period, it is hoped that the article provides a comprehensive account of the rapid and radical changes Zimbabwe underwent during the twentieth century and the impacts these have had on the peoples and economies within the southern African nation.

Those who have visited book stores in Zimbabwe in recent years, even the small one in Harare international airport, will have seen a thin volume authored by G.A. Chaza and entitled Bhurakuwacha: The Story of a Black Policeman in Colonial Southern Rhodesia. Bhurakuwacha is the longest and most detailed first hand account by an African member of the British South Africa Police (BSAP), Southern Rhodesia's paramilitary law enforcement organization, and as such constitutes an important source for studying the experience of black security force members in a white settler state.

Chaza was typical of the moderate and loyalist black middle class of the 1940s and 1950s that wanted equality with whites as part of a civilized imperial citizenry but became less significant during the anti-colonial and revolutionary violence of the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, the book only hints at Chaza's early interest in writing which began when he was a young constable in the late 1930s and continued through his post-retirement involvement in politics in the early 1960s.

The aim of this paper is to examine the first three decades of Chaza's publications within the context of African police service in the colonial era. Bhurakuwacha was written after African nationalists had come to power in independent Zimbabwe and promoted a version of history that lionized those who had resisted colonial rule and vilified those, such as African policemen, who had worked for the colonial state. Therefore, it is tempting to see Chaza's book as an effort to rehabilitate his image by portraying African colonial police as victims of racism against which some, like the author, struggled. Looking at his now forgotten earlier writings will illustrate how Chaza's views changed over the years and reveal whether or not Bhurakuwacha represents an accurate account of African colonial police service.

The Garamantes first come to our notice with Herodotus' Survey of Libya. Hekataeus of Miletus traveled along the Libyan coast over half a century before Herodotus, but his work is preserved only in fragments. Hekataeus may have mentioned the Garamantes, but if so, that part of his work has not survived. The Histories of Herodotus (iv.174) lists the “Garamantes” among the peoples of eastern Libya, giving to each a brief description; and iv.183 refers to them in another list, this one a sequence of stopping places on a desert trail which includes “the country of the Garamantes.”

The earlier paragraph had fewer than half a dozen lines and the later one fewer than two dozen; not very much in total, but as Vansina has recently affirmed, the medievalist's axiom also applies to Africa: “the fewer the sources… the more they are treasured and scrutinized.”

The intent of this paper is to attempt to determine how the two references, four paragraphs apart, are related to each other; and thereby to prepare the way to extract as much as we can learn from these two references about the Garamantes in the time of Herodotus, the fifth century BC.

In this paper I review the evolution of a nineteenth-century travel diary from the original “remark books” to a polished fair copy version prepared for publication. The journals in question are those kept by Lieut. Hugh Clapperton RN while serving on the Borno Mission in 1822-25. The central issue is how best to reach into and interpret the raw material itself—the author's original observations and thoughts at the time. Each case will have its particularities—in the context of the period and the journey, in the character and interests of the writer, and in the writer's own attitude to the purpose of the journal he or she kept. While the Clapperton material is just one case among many, a review of its internal development—as it proceeded towards publication—allows us to draw some conclusions which may have wider application.

By his own account, John Duncan was born in 1805 on a farm in southwest Scotland and enlisted in the Life Guards at the age of seventeen. He obtained his discharge in 1839 and was appointed master-at-arms to the Niger Expedition of 1841. In the course of this, while aiding his men at the Cape Verde Islands, he received a leg wound which became so serious that amputation was contemplated, and he was left with a permanent weakness in the leg. Despite this he offered his services to the Royal Geographical Society in 1844 to go to Africa and penetrate to the Kong Mountains. He was provided with instruments and funds for this purpose and given passage to Cape Coast on a warship.

Duncan's plans at this date seem to have been somewhat indefinite. The Royal Geographical Society was told in 1844 that Duncan, “full of zeal and activity though not professing to be very scientific,” was going to the west coast of Africa. It was not known, however, whether he would “follow the line between Loanda on the west and Mozambique on the east” or would “confine his explorations to the country of Koomassie [Asante] and the Kong Mountains, east of Cape Coast, and to an excursion to the new settlement at Abbe Accuta [Abeokuta] where the missionary Crowther is now established.” During his journey Duncan wrote several letters to the Society. One, dated at Anamabu in December 1844, explained that he had been refused permission by the Asantehene to go beyond Kumasi and so he was planning to ascend the Volta river instead. A second from Whydah written in April 1845 described his travels along the coast and on the lagoons. The last letter was written at Cape Coast in October 1845 and described his visit to the Dahomey capital. In addition, it contained an account of a journey he claimed to have made to “the town called Adofoodiah, at 13°6'N.” This last letter was written at a time when Duncan was entirely without resources, and he ended by saying that he wanted to go to Timbuktu “passing to the left of Ashanti.” A footnote to the letter, as published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, noted that “funds have since been sent to Mr Duncan to assist him in carrying out his views of visiting Timbuctoo and descending the Niger.” However, this expedition was never undertaken and Duncan returned to England shortly afterward.

It is generally recognized that during the period from ca. 1450 to 1900, when commercial relations between sub-Saharan Africa and the outside world were extended and strengthened, a wide range of systems and institutions for mobilizing labor were in use in different regions. I speak here of those operating beyond the primary locus of household and lineage. Such means of labor production and control ranged from chattel slavery to pawnship, corvées, various kinds of patronclient relations, bride service, cooperative labor, and also, in more and more contexts over time, wage labor. Slavery, of course, has received the attention of many scholars, as have some of the other categories. However the study of wage labor in precolonial times is still in its infancy.

For those wishing to pursue research on precolonial wage labor in Africa the lack of documentary sources has proved to be a significant barrier. The nature of proletarianized or semi-proletarianized wage labor in colonial societies or societies closely tied into the capitalist system usually demands of researchers that they look to sources of an official or institutional nature. For example, one can think of the records of companies, trade unions, benefit societies, colonial governments, courts, commissions of inquiry, and so on. But for precolonial Africa these types of documentary sources usually do not exist. This has led many scholars to say that the concept of wage labor is itself not useful when contemplating African labor systems before the onset of colonization. They point to the lack of a cash currency, continuing ties to the land, the temporary nature of much work, the absence of a bourgeoisie, apparent lack of worker consciousness, and so on. But there are other difficulties less related to such theoretical conceptions and generalizations about the supposed non-existence of wage labor which have severely taxed the most resolute historian, and help explain the dearth of written sources.

The entry into the Zulu territory of Natal in 1837 of the Trekker leader Piet Retief; his meeting with the Zulu Chief Dingane; the resultant agreement (Retief recovers some stolen cattle in return for a concession to a part of Natal); the subsequent meeting of the two leaders; the untoward actions of Dingane (the killing in February 1838 of the unsuspecting Retief and his sixty-seven followers, and the mortifying and widespread attacks on all the Trekker encampments in Natal); the gathering of a new contingent of Trekkers; the defeat of Ding-ane's forces ten months later at ‘Blood River’; and, finally, the discovery in December 1838 (near the identifiable remains of Retief) of the agreement, the title deed to Natal--these events, tragic and dramatic, constitute a brief but special chapter of settler and, notably, of Afrikaner history.

The treaty's miraculous recovery, the eyewitness reports of its finding, the long line of historians crediting its authenticity, and the title deed's very genuineness all came under unexpected--and unwelcomed, suspicion, scrutiny and debate in the 1920s, however. To appreciate that debate it is necessary to begin at the beginning.

The French naturalist, traveler, and writer Louis A. Dele-gorgue, who was with the Trekkers during some of the time between 1838 and 1840, was probably one of the first to provide a connected published account--after the discovery of the treaty in December 1838--of the Retief-Dingane encounter. Thereafter Hendrik Cloete, who was sent by the Cape Government as a special commissioner to negotiate with the Volksraad of Natal in May 1843, set out a relatively full account of Retiefs misadventures in Natal.

For long Asantehene Agyeman Prempe I (1888-1931) has had a curious, almost unenviable reputation that is in many respects undeserving. His memory in both oral and written records is one that is inexorably linked to the British occupation and colonization of Asante and the concomitant exile which he suffered. In other words, Agyeman Prempe is remembered more for his failures—his inability to retain Asante sovereignty—than for his accomplishments. However, new evidence coming to light since the 1970s is increasingly enabling the historian of Asante to offer a more accurate assessment of Prempe I's career and accomplishments. It has now been demonstrated, for instance, that the Asantehene's arrest and exile in 1896 were a function of British duplicitous conduct and the failure of the Asantehene's supreme faith in diplomacy rather than his indifference and ineptitude; that the Asantehene did not remain indifferent to his long exile in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and Seychelles (1896-1924) but fought repeatedly for his repatriation; that in the Seychelles he saw to the perpetuation of the Asante community under his care as well as the preservation of Asante values and practices; and that he accomplished significant achievements during his exile, including maintaining extensive records of both his personal correspondence and his compilation of a history of Asante.

Our primary concern in this essay is with reconstructing the history of material culture. As anyone who has ever looked into the material culture of Ethiopia quickly discovers, the travel accounts of early European visitors can be a rich and varied source for illuminating any number of such traditions, including those of metal-, leather-, basket-, and woodworking, as well as pottery, weaving, and painting. Dating from the first part of the sixteenth century, the descriptions of journeys and residences in Ethiopia became more prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when they also begin to include illustrations of more than the landscape. As sources for the reconstruction of a particular material tradition, these accounts can offer valuable insights into the nature of the objects and the people who produced and used them. Conversely, they can be frustrating to work with, since the pertinent data they contain most often come in the form of a sentence here or there. Rarely are there entire sections dedicated to descriptions of particular traditions or processes, unless one happened to be of special interest to the writer.

Among those scholars who have used travel accounts to great effect is Richard Pankhurst. For many decades, as even a cursory examination of his numerous publications illustrates, he has been mining this mother lode for the scattered sentences and tantalizing suggestions they offer. His most comprehensive writing on this subject is an often-cited 1964 article, “Old Time Handicrafts of Ethiopia.” Divided into sections, each dealing with a different tradition, Pankhurst cited various descriptive accounts that mentioned specific traditions. The basic approach taken in this and other publications that have followed is one perhaps best described, in keeping with the mining metaphor, as one of “prospecting” or in some cases mining “surface deposits.”