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.

Historical knowledge exists in all human societies. It is the cognitive appropriation of socially-determined material transformations necessary for life process. We must begin with this fact. It is a form of social consciousness, a socially-determined interpretation of the movement of those transformations. But where do we find it and how do we recognize it? Where is the place of historical knowledge? Where and how does it exist? On the printed page, in books, of course, and prior to printing and writing, in oral traditions (all those forms of a human community's collective memory--some names of people or places; songs, stories, poems, legends, tales, cosmogonic myths; drawings, carvings, cave inscriptions, tablets, bone/bamboo inscriptions; languages; old roads; etc.). Historical knowledge exists nowadays as well on tapes, cassettes, computer memory, films, pictures, etc.

Historical knowledge exists in different degrees of elaboration, of truth character, of accuracy, as well as of scope. All human societies have undergone, and continue to undergo, social transformations. Some have experienced or experience more slow processes of movement than rapid ones and thus their social awareness of those processes of transformations has been or is less sharp. That is why the conscious control and social mastering of the social process of transformation has been or is less developed. Other societies at a certain level of world social process experienced or experience more rapid processes of transformations leading to sharper forms of social consciousness of those processes and specific needs of developing ways and tools for handling those processes.

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.

It is forty-five years ago since Roland Oliver was appointed to a lectureship in the “Tribal History of East Africa” at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). This was certainly the first appointment in African history in a university in the United Kingdom, and very likely the first such in a university anywhere in the world. In 1986 he retired from the Chair of African History, to which the University had advanced him in 1963 (an event which may very well have been another first), and he spent the first years of his retirement writing his book The African Experience: Major Themes in African History From Earliest Times to the Present.

It was entirely appropriate that the International Journal of African Historical Studies should have asked Jan Vansina to review this book, for his activities in the field of African history go back almost as far as Oliver's; forty-one years have now passed since Vansina began his academic career as a researcher at the Institut pour la Recherche Scientifique en Afrique Centrale (sc. the then Belgian territories in Africa). The review article which Vansina has written begins by paying generous tribute to Oliver's pioneer achievements as a leading actor in virtually every activity needed for the understanding and the furtherance of African history—researcher, teacher, author, editor, and organizer. His first general conclusion (393) on The African Experience is that Oliver's book “lives up to its promise” as “‘a work of reflection’ on the substance of African history, the distillation of his experience of forty (sic) years.”

On 24 May 1966 the 500-year-old kingdom of Buganda came to an end. That was the day that Prime Minister Obote sent Colonel Idi Amin to attack the Mengo palace of Kabaka Frederick Mutesa, who was also the President of Uganda. A 120-man bodyguard defended the Kabaka; Amin had automatic and heavy weapons. Nevertheless, Obote was much annoyed that the palace held out against Amin's troops. An audience watched the battle from nearby hilltops, where expatriates and others brought out folding chairs, until a mid-afternoon thunderstorm sent everyone scurrying for cover. The Kabaka used this interruption to scale the rear wall of Mengo palace, where he hailed a passing taxicab and set off for Burundi and ultimately exile in London. Obote divided Buganda into two separate districts (East Mengo and West Mengo), promoted Amin, and gave him the palace as a barracks for his “paratroop” battalion, and more importantly also gave him Buganda's legislative hall—the Bulange—to become Amin's national military headquarters.

The casualties in the “battle of Mengo” were certainly few in number compared to the destruction Amin would wreak after his coup in 1971. But one invisible casualty of the Bulange occupation was especially significant for historians. The Bulange was not only the seat of the Lukiiko, the Ganda legislature, it was also the storage building for the Buganda government archives, which went back to the 1890s, and were still well organized anu maintained in 1956-58 when Peter Gutkind made use of them for his doctoral research. By 1963 storage space was becoming scarce when Rowe made several visits to Shaykh Ali Kulumba, the Speaker of the Lukiiko. Shaykh Kulumba opened up cupboards and closets packed with archival folders from floor to ceiling. Clearly the archives were still being preserved, but organization and access had suffered. Three years later, when Amin occupied the Bulange, he simply destroyed the entire archive—the historical record of sixty years of Buganda government ceased to exist.

This article suggests that colonial African historiography was shaped both by the textual forms and conventions associated with local historical knowledge and by the complex political interests which emerged under colonial rule. Based on a case study of two linked debates in the small Yoruba town of Ode Remo, the article argues that beyond narratives, local historical knowledge was also contained, sometimes opaquely, in a variety of other genres and practices. During the colonial period, traditionally segmented and distributed forms of knowledge were brought together in civic debates to constitute a more general history. But while historical accounts could be inflected under political pressure or even to reflect widespread local ambitions, the enduring presence of historical knowledge in textual forms used in everyday life meant that there nonetheless remained an overall sense of what was true within the community.

By the mid-nineteenth century African societies had begun to use petitions as an instrument of agitation for reforms in nascent colonial policies. This was especially true of those societies located in the coastal enclaves where precolonial European and diasporic African influences were markedly profound. Compared with other African responses to European colonial rule, anti-colonial petitions are less spectacular. This explains, perhaps-deservingly so, why petitions or memorials, which also took the form of deputations, as a historical genre have been marginalized in the polemical studies of African responses to colonial rule. Such studies have included militant responses in the form of war, riots, social banditry, millennarianism, arson, strikes, avoidance of conscription, desertion, and mass migration. Other forms of African response, devoid of militancy or overly tumultuous actions, have been aptly described by James C. Scott as the Weapons of the Weak. These have included foot-dragging, the use of songs, and the protest politics of the indigenous African press.

This study deals with how slaveholders in the Gold Coast responded to British abolition of slavery and pawnship in the Gold Coast in 1874-75. Specifically, I examine how the African intelligentsia in the Gold Coast Colony used quasi-legal means, essentially petitions, to oppose abolition and emancipation of slaves and pawns. This opposition was undertaken on behalf of slave/pawnholders, including the indigenous rulers of the coast, especially the Fante region. Additionally, the study draws attention to Africans' use of petitions as an important historical source that can benefit the study of various aspects of colonial rule and facets of African responses.

In 1913 an old chest was discovered in a manor house in Worcestershire in the west of England. Packed with bundles of manuscripts, it contained several hundred letters and business papers written in a crabbed italic hand. These documents belonged to Thomas Bowrey, an English overseas merchant, who was born in 1662 and died in 1713. The collection of papers was later purchased by Colonel Henry Howard, and in 1931 part of it was presented to the Guildhall Library in London. These documents include an incomplete manuscript titled “Discription of the Coast of Affrica from the Cape of Good Hope, to the Red Sea” dated 1708. The notes indicate that Bowrey intended to write a book that encompassed descriptions of all the major ports of the region.

Only fragments of the draft survive. Most of the manuscript contains amendments, crossed-out sections, and blank spaces. The text consists of different versions of a preface, brief accounts of the Dutch Cape Colony and Delagoa Bay in Mosambique, as well as a draft portion which has the title “Islands of ye Coast of Africa on ye East Side of ye Cape of Good Hope: Places of Trade on Madagascar.” The densely written and in part hardly legible text is on sixteen folio pages. It gives information about Assada, Old Masselege, Manangara, New Masselege, Terra Delgada, Morondava, Crab Island, St. Vincent, St. Iago, Tulear, St. Augustin Bay, St. John's, Port Dauphin, Matatana, Bonavola, St. Mary's Island, and Antongil Bay. This document also includes descriptions of Mauritius and Bourbon, nowadays called Réunion. Most of these places were visited by English, Dutch, and French seafarers in the last decades of the seventeenth century.

In 1995 I whined to Dave Henige about the difficulties involved in producing a 753-page volume of 383 pages of translated poetry (each including a work number, language of the original, source of the text, an historical introduction, and related text section) containing three orthographies, four languages, 947 footnotes, 241 pages of barely-arranged Arabic-script (but not all Arabic language) facsimiles, six maps, three glossaries, two works cited lists (published and unpublished), two appendices, and an index – all without a copy editor, and for a press demanding camera-ready copy from two novices an ocean apart who had access only to primitive email (remember CompuServe?) that would scramble poetic verse and jumble margins. When I finally took a breath, he smiled. Dave loves a challenge, and loves even more, passing one on. “Write about it,” he said. Suddenly I found myself signed up for the “Technical Problems in Preparing Text and Translations for Camera-Ready Copy” Historical Texts Panel at ASA's 1996 meetings. But that was not enough for Dave. He also expected an article, which I duly produced: “This Will (Not) Be Handled By the Press: Problems and Their Solution in Preparing Camera-Ready Copy for The Collected Works of Nana Asma'u, Daughter of Usman Dan Fodiyo 1793-1864” for History in Africa 25 (1998). In fact, it was Dave who rained on our anticipated title, “The Complete Works…,” dryly inquiring, “How can you be sure?” So it was “Collected Works…” instead.

Common to the matrilineal peoples of eastern central Africa is their clan system, and the reciprocal joking or “funeral friendship,” relations that exist between clans with figuratively complementary names (Cunnison 1959:62-71; Richards 1937; Stefaniszyn 1950). This paper, however, focuses on the southeastern Shaba Pedicle, and the anomalous, one-sided joking between the Vulva and (allegedly pubic) Hair clans of the Lala and Lamba chiefs. I suggest that this joking, like the claim that these clans share a common mythical ancestor, is best explained in terms of nineteenth-century Lala and Lamba history, and of their competing claims to the Pedicle's easternmost end. This region of Bukanda lies between the Aushi to the north (in Bwaushi), the Lala and Swaka to the east and south (in Ilala and Maswaka), and the Lamba (of Ilamba) to the west. The main distinction among these closely-related and adjacent peoples, with their similar customs and languages, is in the histories and traditions of their chiefs.

The bizarre relationship between the chiefly Vulva and Hair clans is not widely known. I only heard of it during my fieldwork in Ilamba. The Lala, like the Lamba, straddle both the Congolese and Zambian sides of the Shaba Pedicle, and the literature on this region, in both French and English, is fragmentary and marked by an ahistorical and uncritical acceptance of oral traditions. The Lala are probably best known in relation to Mwana Lesa's Watchtower movement of the 1920s (Verbeek 1977,1983). Norman Long's Social Change and the Individual (Manchester, 1968) is the only modern ethnography on the Lala, yet this study of the enterprising Jehovah's Witnesses has little to say about dieir history or clans. Fortunately, Léon Verbeek's Filiation et usurpation (1987) has sorted through the oral and colonial histories, and has paved the way for comparative ethnohistories of the peoples on both sides of the Shaba Pedicle.

In 1995 Paul Jenkins, the former Basel Mission archivist, called my attention to Carl Christian Reindorf's Ga manuscripts kept at the archives in Basel, knowing that I had lived and worked in Ghana in the 1980s and that I was able to speak, read, and write the Gã language of Accra and its neigborhood. Of course I already knew Reindorf and his monumental History of the Gold Coast and Asante published in 1895 in English, as I had written my M.A. thesis on late-nineteenth-century Asante history, and moreover I was very much interested in Gã history. Reindorf's massive, substantive, and systematic work about the people of modern southern Ghana may be considered a pioneering intellectual achievement because it was one of the first large-scale historical work about an African region written by an African, and it was highly innovative, including both written sources and oral historical narratives and new methods for the reconstruction of African history. The book has excited interest ever since it first appeared 110 years ago because it contains an unrivaled wealth of information on the history and culture of southern Ghana.

A preliminary glimpse at the two heaps of folios wrapped with linen ropes at the archives showed that the manuscripts-none of them were dated–contained two different versions of the English History. That day, when I first laid my hands on the brownish, carefully folded papers, I was not aware that I was to embark on an intensive period of arduous transcribing and translating work (sometimes “lost in translation”), breathtaking archival investigations in Basel, London, and Accra, and of an exciting text/context research (unearthing sources, excavating informants, examining sediments/versions).

For over thirty years, History in Africa: A Journal of Method has been at the forefront of publishing scholarship on textual analysis and criticism of African historical sources, historiographical essays on the literature concerning Africa's past, bibliographical essays on relevant historical topics, reflections on the role of theory in historical investigation, and archive reports. The new editorial team will maintain this profile with an emphasis on theory and method, while aiming to enhance the journal by focusing on issues that will expand its appeal beyond its current audience. We seek to broaden the framing of methodological and historiographical topics to discuss new information technologies and pedagogical issues. The new editors work with an inclusive definition of “History” and invite scholars, no matter what discipline, to join the discussion and analysis of the past. In the multi-polar world of the twenty-first century, the new editors embrace the “in” in the title and are committed to publishing an increased number of articles from scholars on the continent. We also operate with a pluriform definition of “Africa” that includes the worlds of the diaspora and recognizes regional variations in the continent. The new editors wish to bring new perspectives associated with Africa's twenty-first century renaissance into the journal. Finally, the new editors will remain faithful to the focus of David Henige, the founding and long-serving editor of History in Africa, on the critical analysis of both the epistemological bases of historical inquiry and the construction of arguments about the past.

On the evening of 8 October 1973, a group of physicians led a watchnight ceremony on the campus of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra, Ghana. At midnight, Dr. Portuphy-Lamptey, the Chief Medical Administrator, pulled a lanyard to raise an official flag inaugurating the Hospital's Golden Jubilee Anniversary. The next day, the Ghanaian Commissioner for Health, Lieutenant Colonel A.H. Selormey, unveiled an anniversary plaque that thanked and praised the hospital staff who had worked at Korle Bu over the past fifty years. In a speech to assembled dignitaries, Selormey appealed to Ghanaians to use the Golden Jubilee Celebration as a means of arousing a “full consciousness” of Ghana's “great heritage.” In the months that followed, the 50th Anniversary Celebration Committee organized a series of events to commemorate the role of the institution in the history of the Gold Coast and Ghana, including a formal dinner during which the assembled guests joined together to sing Korle Bu Oyiwala doŋŋ, a popular tribute to the hospital sung in the local language of Ga (see Figure 1). Several months later, at the closing ceremony, the Committee unveiled a statue of Gordon Guggisberg, the British governor credited with building the hospital, an iconic image that is still standing in front of the hospital today.

The purpose of this paper is to present an interpretation of sorghum as the dominant metaphor of self among the Jie people, and the offering of sorghum to the Turkana women by the Jie women as a gift. The literature on food as self is extensive, emerging from various key theorists who have defined the field of food and the semiotics of food (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993; Parry 1985; Raheja 1988). These scholars are keenly aware of the symbolic utility of food as constitutive features of self identity, and they have examined the interplay between self and food and tropes. For Ohnuki-Tierney, for instance, food and food production, and their associations with metaphors, define and produce meaning. Her interpretation of rice grain as one of the foundational categories of the Japanese traditional polity explicates the role commensality of rice plays in defining boundaries between people who share the commensal food and those who do not. As each member of the commensal consume the food, the food becomes a part of his or her body. The food embodied in each individual “…operates as a metonym by being part of the self” (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993:130). In this paper I extend Ohnuki-Tierney's theoretical model in understanding the role sorghum symbolism and metaphors play in producing identities and social relations of power in the Jie society and in the Jie people's interethnic relationship with their Turkana neighbors.

The widespread involvement of African peasant households in the cultivation of a high-value cash crop—coffee—in Kenya dates back only to the mid-1950s. However, this late inclusion of African households in coffee cultivation did not imply their lack of enthusiasm to cultivate the crop from an earlier date. On the contrary, European settlers in particular, and some officials of the Department of Agriculture, thwarted the aspirations of African households regarding their being permitted to cultivate coffee. The overall view was in favor of the continued imposition of an embargo on African coffee cultivation. This paper employs mainly archival records to trace the agitation for inclusion in coffee cultivation by African households in colonial Kenya generally. It then treats the specific case example of Bungoma district in western Kenya from the 1930s.

Through a review of official correspondence between colonial officials in Kenya and metropolitan authorities at the colonial secretariat in London, the paper shows how such agitation conflicted with the interests of European settlers and the policies that were privileged by the Department of Agriculture in African areas within Kenya. It demonstrates that when colonial state policy shifted (due to metropolitan and local pressure) in favor of African household involvement in coffee cultivation, the latter proved themselves to be efficient cultivators of the crop. The influence of metropolitan pressures on the eventual trajectory of colonial state policy in Kenya also demonstrates that the actions of colonial proconsuls in the colony did not always reflect the wishes of the colonial secretariat in London. This was moreso the case in Kenya, where a small but politically potent segment of European settlers exerted tremendous influence on the policies that were pursued by the colonial state.

The database used for my A Guide to Original Sources for Precolonial Western Africa published in European Languages (xxvi + 192pp., African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1987) has been subject to continuing revision and updating. The total number of entries has grown from some 780 to close on 830, and in all I estimate that something like 400 changes have been made to the published form of the Guide. Some of these are essentially cosmetic—for example, rearrangements of an entry's layout intended to make its text easier to use and understand, or the correction of obvious misprints or infelicities. But, leaving these aside, there are now a sufficient number of substantive changes to suggest that-pending the appearance of a second edition—it might be sensible to seek to publish this list of significant corrections and additions separately.

Of those whose help I acknowledged in 1987, I can only express my continuing gratitude to P. E. H. Hair, Adam Jones, and Robin Law for the way in which they are still drawing my attention both to new sources and to my earlier errors. I have also gained useful bibliographical insights from holding in my hand many of the 3537 items listed in the great and glorious sale catalog recently put together by Paul Wilson, of Oriental and African Books, Shrewsbury, of “rare and scholarly” books published on West Africa and the western and central Sudan from the early seventeenth century onwards.

Conversation manuals and phrase books offer a window into the worldview of those who compile them, and might provide clues about society at large as well. Because they focus on ordinary conversation and verbal interactions, the inclusion of particular topics and sentences indicates what issues were important to the person who compiled the phrase book and might furnish information about everyday life at the time of publication. Information may be gleaned not only from the actual phrases, but from the organization of the book, verb forms, and other less obvious indicators.

Contemporary examples include phrase books in the United States that present basic terms related to housekeeping or construction for English-speakers who hire Spanish-speaking workers. Another example is from Joseph Lelyveld, who found the apt title for his book Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, in a Fanagalo phrase book. The excerpt “Move your shadow” was part of a set of orders for white golfers to use with African caddies, and was emblematic of white attitudes toward blacks during the apartheid era.

In this paper I look at the kind of social and historical information that can be extracted from phrase books compiled during the colonial era in Mozambique. Phrase books differ from dictionaries and grammars because they provide an idiosyncratic list of topics and sentences deemed important to daily life by the compiler.

Modern nationalisms first arose during the later eighteenth century around the wide periphery of the ancient heartland of western culture and gnawed their way inward during the course of the nineteenth century to the core, culminating in World War I, Each new nationalism generated an original “imagined community” of human beings, part of whose ideological cohesion derived from a sense of shared historical experience. Since the actual historical record would not necessarily satisfy this hunger, it was often found expedient to amend the past through acts of imagination aptly termed the “invention of tradition.”

One of the many new “imagined communities” of the long nineteenth century took shape in the northern Nile-valley Sudan between the final disintegration of the old kingdom of Sinnar (irredeemable after the death of the strongman Muhammad Abu Likaylik in 1775) and the publication of Harold MacMichael's A History of the Arabs in the Sudan in 1922. The new national community born of the collapse of Sinnar, strongly committed to Arabic speech and Islamic faith, was tested by fire through foreign conquest and revolution, by profound socio-economic transformation, and by the challenges attendant on participation in an extended sub-imperialism that earned it hegemony—first cultural, and ultimately political—over all the diverse peoples of the modern Sudan.

One important response of the nascent community to the trials of this difficult age was the invention of a new national historical tradition, according to which its members were descended via comparatively recent immigrants to the Sudan from eminent Arabs of Islamic antiquity.