Why yet another Africanist journal? the reader may ask. And, given the astonishin, increase in the number (now over 200) of journals devoted to Africa, the question is a fair one. Every new journal should seek to justify itself to the audience it addresses.

Despite the large number of African journals now available, not all aspects of the study of the African past are covered adequately. Because this study is so recent the emphasis, both in research itself and in the format of the journals, has been on the collection, use, and presentation of data. It cannot be denied that these procedures have been and will remain the chief concerns of historical enquiry, but they are not the only ones. The value of data obviously depends, first, on its validity, and, second, on its use. The assessment of these aspects in turn depends on the close and continued scrutiny of sources as well as on the quality of historical thought. We cannot agree with Livy, who wrote of his sources for early Roman history that “it is not worth the trouble either to affirm or to dispose of these matters [improbabilities] … we must abide by the tradition.”

In a recent book, El Dorado in West Africa, Raymond E. Dumett examines the history of gold-mining in Wassa Fiase in the Western Province of the Gold Coast during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Among other thematic preoccupations, Dumett argues that until the late 1890s the British colonial authorities did very little to encourage capitalist gold-mining in Wassa Fiase. Resurrecting the ghost of local crisis, he argues that the colonial intervention in Wassa Fiase was due to king Enimil Kwao's ineptitude, structural conflict inherent in chieftaincy, and problems of African rulers' territorial jurisdictions.

Dumett also asserts that it was a forceful London-based antislavcry lobby and Governor George Strahan's tactlessness that drove the colonial state to intervene in Wassa Fiase. Although Britain was at the center stage of the unprecedented global commodification of gold in the late nineteenth century, Dumett evokes serendipity as the cause of the British colonial intervention in the gold-rich Wassa Fiase. Overall, his explication of the aims and processes of colonial rule in Wassa Fiase is couched in theses of an “unpredictable course” and “a government policy (more rather a nonpolicy) [sic] riddled with vacillation and half measures…”

The first part of the present study reviews the literature, while the second section, based on new official sources and newspaper accounts, gives additional insights into Enimil Kwao's slave-dealing trial and his consequent exile to Lagos, hence reevaluates the objectives of the colonial state and the Colonial Office. The study complements the work of Francis Agbodeka and Paul Rosenblum, who have respectively argued that colonial rule in Wassa Fiase paved the way for capitalist gold-mining.

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.

The Association for the Publication of African Historical Sources (presently headquartered at the Department of History, Michigan State University) is now administering one umbrella National Endowment for the Humanities grant for editing, translating, and publishing significant African texts, and hopes to administer more in the future. In aid of this, the following guidelines, which should for the moment be considered to be in a draft stage, are offered in an effort both to bring uniformity to these editions and to stimulate thinking towards making the guidelines more thorough and enduring. Readers are urged to send suggestions for the latter to: David Henige, Memorial Library, 728 State St., Madison, WI 53706, U.S.A. If all goes well, it might be possible to publish an improved set of guidelines in next year's HA.

As discussed briefly below, efficient mobilization of word processing programs should enable intending editors to achieve better results at less cost. Such word processing programs as are now available are probably not equally suitable and any readers who have used any programs extensively or who have developed variants of their own, with respect either to editing or to linguistic transcription, are also urged to submit brief statements (up to ca. 1000 words) as to their experiences, whether good or bad. These could then be published en ensemble, also (probably) in the 1991 HA.

There are two book length, English language, descriptions of precolonial life on the Gambia. The earlier, Richard Jobson's The Golden Trade of the Moors of 1620, is widely available, having been reprinted three times in this century. The other, Francis Moore's Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa of 1738 is equally valuable, but much rarer. Although Moore's book appeared in several editions in the eighteenth century, it has not been published in anything close to its entirety in almost two centuries. Moore stayed much longer on the Gambia than did Jobson and his more circumstantial account deserves greater accessibility for its contemporary influence as well as its source value. I am beginning the process of preparing a new edition of Moore and present this short bibliographical note as a first product of my research.

Francis Moore was hired as a writer, or clerk, by the Royal African Company in 1730 and spent almost four and a half years (November 1730 to May 1735), on the river Gambia, first as a writer and subsequently as Factor, at several of the Company's establishments. During his stay he apparently wrote a general journal for his own uses, as well as the “true and particular Journal of all his Proceedings relating to the Affairs of the…Company” (Moore 1738, Appendix 1:2-3) which his contract obliged him to keep. Subsequently, Moore added several other texts as well as amending and extending his journals to produce the book first published in 1738. I will discuss these additions, amendments, and extensions below.

One of the most curious aspects of Sudanese historiography is that it has almost completely ignored the ongoing attempts to apply the methods of historical criticism to oral tradition in reconstructing the African past. Though an awareness of these attempts on the part of Sudanese historians is not lacking, it has not gone beyond vague indications, casual remarks, and limited use of oral data. This paper investigates the apathy of Sudanese historiography with respect to oral traditions, drawing on articles on the writing of history in the Sudan, as well as on historical writings that have actually made use of oral traditions.

Sudanese historiography here means writings by Sudanese on history-writing in the Sudan; general histories of the Sudan; and local histories of the Northern Sudan. The history of the Southern Sudan is excluded because the contribution of oral tradition in reconstructing the history of this region has been markedly different. I also distinguish between traditional (biographers, genealogists, etc.) and amateur historians on the one hand and modern historians on the other. The modern historians, with whom this article will deal exclusively, are graduates of the Department of History in the University of Khartoum (or a similar university by extension), which was established in the late 1940s,and who have been exposed to the Western critical spirit and modern techniques of historical research and writing.2 Unlike the modern historians, traditional and amateur historians have always made use of both oral traditions and written sources.

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.”

The early cultural history of Madagascar, inseparable from that of the Indian Ocean, remains very poorly known. I agree with other authors that the peopling of the island is recent; so far we do not have any archeological evidence dating prior to the ninth century. While it is beyond doubt that the islands received people, techniques, and ideas from all the areas around the Indian Ocean, recent work confirms the dominance of a double--or rather a triple--component: an Indonesian one, much Indianized before being tinged with a particular brand of Shicite Islam around the thirteenth century; an Arabo-Persian influence; and an African, particularly Bantu, influence. The Bantu influence, is in most cases, inseparable from the preceding. Deschamps believes that the more recent, “Islamized,” arrivals brought with them new political concepts that led, according to Kent, to the emergence of the first Malagasy kingdoms at the beginning of the sixteenth century. I also agree with this point and believe that the concepts of a kingship based on the mystic pre-eminence of a sovereign of which the prototype were the Andriambahoaka were introduced into Madagascar by the first Malagasy dynasty, the ZafiRaminia (lit. “the descendants of Raminia”). These ZafiRaminia, who dominated for a time the entire coast and penetrated at an early date into the interior, largely constitute the origins of other dynasties in the central, southern, and western parts of the island. This does not preclude that these various dynasties were later strongly marked by other influences, especially that of the Antemoro.

A vast store of untapped primary sources for African history sits waiting to be exploited in museum collections around the world—the products made by African hands, or, if you will, African “material culture.” Within this general category I include not only the masterpieces of African artists and manufacturers, but also the more humble and mundane products used as everyday objects or as items of trade or currency, and everything in between. Although selected numbers of these works have been targeted for study by some anthropologists and art historians, historians of Africa rarely include such objects as sources in their research.

This situation is not peculiar to African history—historians in general seem reluctant to interrogate sources other than those of the printed word. What, after all, does one do with objects? Not entirely ignored, historians of various schools have examined them with mixed results. Some historians have treated certain objects as the embodiments of more general, dynamic intellectual or cultural forces set in motion by elites. Other historians, especially those associated with the Annales school, see material objects occupying layers of culture more slow to change, representing the culture of commoners and the ‘structures of thought’ that shaped their mental universe. Perhaps more familiar are the studies that view certain objects as indicators of various aspects of modern industrial history—mass production and advertisement, consumer culture, and the social meanings of things in capitalist societies. Nevertheless, such studies as these are far from the norm in history, and in them objects serve primarily as illustrations of historical trends and events already sketched out to some degree. Moreover, they imply that the material evidence in objects is most useful simply for providing additional texture and detail to our views of the past. Historians seldom consider objects as sources that can show us anything new.

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.

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.

There is growing scholarly interest in the history of postcolonial Africa. However, this study entails several methodological challenges, including insufficient availability of archival materials. A multi-archival strategy offers one solution to the challenge of locating new documentary sources. In this paper, I suggest that nonconventional archives such as the National Archives of the United States should be explored in historical studies of postcolonial African countries, including smaller countries like Rwanda. Focusing on the political events that occurred in Rwanda in January 1961 that led to significant changes in the country, this paper demonstrates how American archival materials can enhance our understanding by shedding light on what existing colonial archives have not revealed.

In this paper I take up the methodological issue of combining archived fieldwork notes and contemporary field data in the reconstruction of the recent history of Wolaitta, a former kingdom in southern Ethiopia. The old fieldwork data, archived and little known since the 1960s, consist of the notes of the German Ethiopianist ethnologist Eike Haberland (1924-1992), while the field data are based on my intermittent fieldwork in Wolaitta since 2001. In ongoing research on this subject, I intend to write an historical ethnography of Wolaitta, by combining a study of the methods and interpretive strategies of Haberland as ethnographer and product of his time, with new research. The effort may also allow us to see how his ‘facts’ and explanations fit with current concerns in anthropology and African studies. As the subject of this paper will eventually be elaborated into a book, I aim to be brief here and illustrate the value and challenge of such a reconstruction effort.

The study also is meant to contribute to understanding the dynamics of regional identity in today's Ethiopia, which has been struggling with a very problematic implementation of ethnicity-based federal policies since 1991. A study of a corpus of ethnography gathered in the heyday of German field ethnology (1950s-1960s), in conjunction with present-day research, may highlight processes of identity formation among the Wolaitta, who today in 2005 count some 1.5 million people, with perhaps an additional 80,000 living outside the Wolaitta borders elsewhere in Ethiopia, and having various shades of identification with their country and traditions of origin.

The African-American missionary, William Henry Sheppard Jr. (1865-1927), lived in the Kuba kingdom of central Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. A student of Virginia's Hampton (Normal) Institute in the early 1880s, Sheppard left the United States a decade later to preach in the Congo Free State, a colonial territory claimed by Belgian monarch Leopold II. This king's army, the Force Publique, and its local auxiliaries spawned suffering throughout the equatorial region. They pillaged villages in Kasai, the southern Congo area surrounding Sheppard's Presbyterian outposts, killing families and driving survivors into brigades that collected wild rubber for European concessionary companies. This rubber boom, in turn, generated profits that not only enriched Leopold II and his business allies, but also propelled a revolution in transportation that culminated in the mass production of tires for the bicycle and automobile. Sheppard is known for bearing witness to Congo atrocities, but his ground-breaking ethnological research remains unfamiliar to many Africanists. It is fortunate for these scholars that the college that nurtured Sheppard's fascination with folklore, Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), houses his papers, photographs, and artwork. This paper introduces and analyzes these sources.

This article examines the potential of an unconventional method in applied history – the pop-up museum – for analyzing relationships between history and memory and producing meaningful histories of African pasts. Specifically, we assess our application of this tool to accounts of events surrounding the Fante Confederation of 1868–1873 in the Central Region of modern-day Ghana. By utilizing a pop-up museum exhibit in the field, we determined that the construction of a meaningful history of the Fante Confederation requires the apperception of “durable bundles” – continuities between collective memory and history that also serve as survivals from the mid-nineteenth century to contemporary society. Our original sources and interlocutors in common identified themes of “unity” and “development” as particularly meaningful durable themes. We posit that these shared themes can serve as points of attachment for contemporary Fante speakers to work with histories of the Fante Confederation, and propose them as motifs around which relevant histories can be built in this case. Finally, in reflecting on our experience, we hypothesize that this model of applied history may be useful in other situations as well.

There can be few areas of the world which have been more systematically misrepresented than Africa, especially that part of the continent south of the Sahara. For centuries, and certainly since the Midas-like Mansa Musa sat astride West Africa on the maps of fourteenth-century Spain, the weird and wonderful imagery of Africa has flooded Europe's vision of that continent. Much of this imagery has been generated by Europeans, and even where it has been generated by Africans themselves, the original meaning and intention is often difficult to discover. The imagery has, to the non-African world, become Africa; this is the case to the point where, at the end of the twentieth century, almost every adjective placed before the name “Africa” is loaded, has some ideological or political currency, and indeed has a history of its own.

Most famously, perhaps, Africa was for a long time “dark”, and still that image periodically appears in assorted Western media, a comforting crutch to an audience which remains somewhat confused as to what to make of the continent. Africa is often supposed to have a “heart,” in a way that neither Europe nor North America does. This is perhaps related to the continent's geographical shape, for it is rather more self-contained than Europe, Asia, or the Americas. It is more likely, however, that an African “heart” is sought precisely because it cannot, using the clumsy surgical tools of Western culture, be found. In more recent times, Africa's “dark heart” has been replaced by its “troubled heart;” but the idea remains unchanged.

Les Archives de la Société des Pères Blancs comportent essentiellement les documents suivants: Correspondance entre la Maison Généralice et les missionnaires, Rapports, Statistiques, Diares, Enquêtes et Etudes diverses.

Ces divers éléments concernent La Maison Généralice des Pères Blancs (Alger, puis Rome) avec tout l'éventail de ses relations; les Provinces (c'est-à-dire les pays d'Europe et d'Amérique) d'où sont originates les missionnaires et qui s'occupent de leur formation; mais surtout les pays ou territoires africains où travaillent les Peres Blancs. Voici la liste de ces régions et les dates indiquant l'arrivée des missionnaires, et, le cas échéant, leur depart.

The aim of this paper is to use African historiography as an example of how value-orientations influence historical research and writing. This can be seen as a contribution to the never-ending discussion about the problem of objectivity in history. African historiography is particularly well suited for such an analysis. Its birth as a separate area of academic study after World War II was partly the result of internal, professional developments, such as the establishment of African universities, the postwar development of the social sciences, interdisciplinary research, and a more global orientation in the Western academic world. But it was also closely related to external political and ideological developments, like African nationalism, decolonization, the cold war, development aid, and the rise of new left movements in the Western world. The subject matter of modern African history is of obvious significance not only for Africans, but also for the self-image of Europe and for the relationship between Africa and the West: the nature of European expansion, the role of capitalism in the development of the modern world, the concept of imperialism, and the global relevance of democracy and socialism. The interconnections between ideology and history are therefore particulary clear in this field.

The plan of the paper is to discuss how value-orientations within the different schools of history in this field reveal themselves in the choice of themes, in causal explanation, in basic concepts and in counterfactual argument. The term “value-orientation” I will define so as to cover interests, ideals, and personal identification. I will distinguish between three main “schools,” the term being used in the broadest sense of the word: the colonial school, also covering later historians writing in the same tradition; the Africanist school, dominant since the late 1950s; and the radical (“neo-Marxist,” “dependency,” “under-development”) school, influential since its emergence in the 1970s.

The N'ko alphabet made its first appearance in Bingerville, Côte d'Ivoire, on 14 April 1949? The invention of Souleymane Kanté of Kankan, Republic of Guinea, this alphabet constituted an attempt to provide a truly indigenous written form for Mande languages. Since its invention, a grassroots movement promoting literacy in the N'ko alphabet has spread across West Africa from the Gambia to Nigeria. A significant number of the speakers of Mande languages in Francophone as well as Anglophone West Africa have learned the N'ko alphabet, even though their governments use French or English as official languages and Muslim Mande-speaking religious leaders use Arabic in prayers and for study and teaching. The number of those who are literate in N'ko has increased without government intervention or support during the colonial and independence periods and without official support from the Islamic religious community. N'ko spread at the grassroots level because it met practical needs and enabled speakers of Mande languages to take pride in their cultural heritage. Informants from Kankan and its vicinity, one small part of the large region of N'ko's spread, said that their motivation to learn the alphabet was due to pride in their culture.

Here I examine the emergence of the N'ko alphabet as an indigenously created writing system currently used by speakers of Mande languages in the Republic of Guinea and in other countries across West Africa; the reasons behind the alphabet's creation and the process by which the alphabet evolved; seeks briefly to identify the process by which the alphabet was disseminated under the guidance of its creator in a grassroots movement fueled by individual initiative, I offer some indications as to the depth and breath of N'ko literacy within the Mande-speaking community. Finally, it discusses the motivation for learning the N'ko alphabet and the problems it poses for one local community.