Translations ought not to serve as sources for academic research. This precept is an ideal which has today become quite unattainable in many fields, notably in the natural sciences and medicine. In the human sciences it is still widely operative (at least tacitly), yet here too it is increasingly becoming Utopian. For any scholar of German literature, of course, command of the German language is (and, one hopes, will remain) an essential prerequisite: a treatise on Goethe's Faust based on a translation of this work could scarcely be taken seriously. Likewise it should be expected of classical historians that they study their Greek and Latin sources in the original language. The question becomes more problematic, however, when we consider the citation of modern pieces of research and other secondary literature. Admittedly, the majority of studies are still published in one of the major world languages, and it is possible to get by with a command of two or three modern languages (e.g. with English and French, with Russian and English, or with Arabic and French). But the internationalization of research is gaining ground steadily. A book written in Japanese on, say, the history of South America has little prospect of coming to the notice of western historians unless it is made accessible to them in translation, in this instance probably in Spanish, Portuguese, or English (leaving aside as a rare exception the historian with an above-average flair for languages).

It has been said that “Old movies seen again after many years seem different not because they have altered but because we have.” For the same reason, a rereading of older historical texts will convey different meanings, and reveal deficiencies and perhaps even profundities that were not initially apparent. In this paper, these observations are applied to a piece of research that was special to me at the time. I now see more clearly the extent to which my methods and mindset were a product of time, of place, and of my own training and preferences. So I will retrace my footsteps—insofar as is possible after all these years—and consider how the preconceptions and expectations of the moment affected the outcome. In other words, to reflect on the nature of thinking and writing.

My research was not concerned with African but Pacific Islands history. From the mid 1970s through to the early 1980s I engaged in dissertation work in the nineteenth-century history of Tuvalu, formerly the Ellice Islands. Older maps will identify Tuvalu as the southern portion of a British dependency, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony (astride the equator and just east of the International Date Line). The nine Tuvalu islands are tiny even by the standards of coral atolls; by far the largest is Vaitupu at about six square kilometers, and the group remains economically unimportant and strategically insignificant. During the nineteenth century Tuvalu was incorporated into the world economy through the whaling industry and the copra trade, and further exposed to Western influences by missionization. The paucity of exploitable resources, however, coupled with an inhospitable environment and smallness of scale, rendered the islands unsuitable for large-scale European settlement and muted the potential disruptions of outside contacts. But there were aberrant events, such as the Vaitupu Company, which placed individual island communities under strain from time to time.

One of the casualties of the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe in 1980 was the journal NADA, which came to an end with the breakup of the government ministry that sponsored it. NADA originally stood for Native Affairs Department Annual and ran to 57 issues between 1923 and 1980. Essentially, it was intended to be the Southern Rhodesian equivalent of the Uganda Journal or Tanganyika Notes and Records, and it is not surprising that out of the 912 articles published in it at least 40% were by identifiable officials of the Native Affairs Department or its successor, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Out of another 37% of contributors classifiable as ‘general,’ a considerable number were undoubtedly NAD officials hiding behind uncrackable pseudonyms and initials, while others in this category were policemen, forest and game rangers, education and agricultural officers, and so forth. Consequently, the journal always had a fairly ‘official’ image, in spite of editorial disclaimers, and this image became the more pronounced after the Rhodesian Front gained control of the government, with more official reports and statements filling the pages.

Igbo history has not been adequately researched. Worse still, the little known about the people has not been dated. It might be suggested that the major reason which makes the study of the Igbo people unattractive to researchers has been the lack of a proper chronological structure. Igbo genealogies have not been collected. The often adduced reason has been that the Igbo did not evolve a centralized political system whereby authority revolved round an individual—king or chief—which would permit the collection of regnal lists. Regrettably, Nigerian historians appear to have ignored the methodology of dating kingless or chiefless societies developed and applied elsewhere such as in east Africa. In west African history generally, there has been an overdependence for dating on external sources in European languages or in Arabic, and combining these with the main regnal list of a kingdom. Even within kingdoms, genealogies of commoners and officials have rarely been collected or correlated with the regnal lists. Among the Igbo, the external sources are rare and the regnal lists few. Even the chiefdoms—Onitsha and Aboh, Oguta and Nri—were ignored for a long time after modern historiography had achieved major advances elsewhere. Arochukwu has been another neglected Igbo chiefdom. Most of these states with hereditary leadership were peripheral to the Igbo heartland. Nevertheless, they were important because of their interactions with the heartland and the possibility of dating interactive events from their genealogies.

In 1729 a book entitled Madagascar: or Robert Drury's Journal During Fifteen Years Captivity on that Island was published in London. It describes the shipwreck of an East Indiaman on the south coast of Madagascar, the enforced stay of the crew at the royal capital of the Antandroy people, the crew's escape and massacre, the survival of the midshipmen, including Drury, as royal slaves, and Drury's eventual escape to the English colony of St. Augustine. It purports to be his authentic account, digested into order by a transcriber or editor and published at the request of his friends. A certification of its authenticity is provided at the front of the first edition by Captain William Mackett, the ship's captain who brought Drury back to England, and the author states that if anyone doubts the veracity of his tale or wishes for a further account, he is “to be found every day at Old Tom's Coffee-house in Birchin Lane, London.”

The tale bears many superficial resemblances to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Knox's An Historical Relation of Ceylon and the anonymous editor is at pains to state in the preface that the book was undoubtedly likely to be “…taken for such another romance as ‘Robinson Crusoe’…” whereas it was “…nothing else but a plain, honest narrative of matter of fact.” If this is the case, then Drury's account provides a fascinating insight into the world of an emergent Malagasy kingdom at the beginning of the eighteenth century. This was a crucial moment in Madagascar's history, when the European world of long-distance trade, slaving, and piracy was exerting a strong impact on the local people, culminating in colonization by France two centuries later.

Dans les années qui suivirent la prise de Gorée par les Français (en 1677), plusieurs dirigeants de la compagnie concessionnaire française manifestèrent un grand intérêt pour les “Rivières du Sud.” Leur intention, bien sûr, était d'y étendre les activités commerciales de leur compagnie et, si possible, de les appuyer par un établissement militaire. On sait que ce dernier projet, tenté par Brüe en 1699 dans l'île de Bolama, puis en 1700 dans l'île de Bissau, échoua finalement devant l'opposition des Portugais. De cette période, et de cette politique, sont restées deux importantes descriptions françaises des régions situé es entre la Gambie et le Corubal (c'est-à-dire actuellement en Casamance et en Guinée-Bissau):

- celle de Michel Jajolet de La Courbe, relatant un voyage effectué par l'auteur lui-même de juillet 1686 à février 1687. La Courbe sera directeur de la concession française du Sénégal de 1689 à 1693. Auparavant, il avait été envoyé en mission d'inspection par la direction parisienne de la compagnie. Avant son retour en France (via les Antilles), il entreprit un voyage qui le mena d'abord, par voie de terre, d'Albréda, sur la Gambie, à Cacheu, en passant à hauteur de Ziguinchor. De Cacheu, il embarqua pour Bissau, où la compagnie française avait un commis, et, de là, il rayonna dans les îles et dans les fleuves. Ce voyage est assez bien connu puisque les manuscrits de La Courbe ont été retrouvés et publiés au début du siècle par Cultru. On sait aussi que quelques pages (seize exactement) manquaient au texte manuscrit.

The Ijebu are a subgroup of the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria. In precolonial times they established a single kingdom under the Awujale (the titular head) whose seat of government was the town of Ijebu-Ode. Structurally, the kingdom was composed of geographical divisions, each of which was identified by a name. Some of them were characterized by close socioeconomic and political ties effected through the joint control of a political association, the Pampa society, which coordinated commercial, communal, and military activities in the area. Three such divisions form the focus of this paper: Ijebu-Igbo, Imusin, and Ago-Iwoye.

The British colonial administration engendered a process of political integration in these three areas as they were each brought under a single ruler; the purpose of this paper is to highlight how Ijebu oral historical traditions were employed to give support to this integrative process., but first, an identification of the areas concerned.

The Ijebu-Igbo area is composed principally of five distinct settlements or towns: Okesopin, Ojowo, Atikori, Oke-Agbo, and Japara. Okesopin is accorded primacy as the oldest of the settlements. The term Ijebu-Igbo (forest) is an allusion to the forested nature of this area of Ijebu.

The Imusin area, made up of about fifty very small settlements, is subdivided into two geographical groups: the northern group, called Ikatun, and the southern group or Ikasi. The term Imusin means the area of the akee apple (Imu: place or area; Isin: akee apple).

Historians and social scientists concerned with African societies and cultures are well aware that the archives of Protestant and Catholic missionary groups that have worked in Africa contain valuable primary and secondary materials. In the case of Catholic missions, however, scholars are perhaps more aware of collections of documents of various congregations and orders of sisters, brothers and priests, deposited in their central archives in Rome, than they are of more local collections. There are specific historical and sociology of religion factors that determine how a particular order or congregation is organized, and especially to what extent it is responsible to the Vatican and the Papacy, and to what degree it has national and regional autonomy. With respect to official and personal documents of relevance to Africanists, there is a greater “decentralization” and dispersion of available materials than might be supposed.

In 1964 the Spanish archivist and scholar, D. Vicenta Cortés, published summaries of a large number of entries in the Crown records of Valencia relating to the arrival of slaves between 1479 and 1516. Although about two thirds of the entries relate to lighter-skinned slaves - Guanche from the Canary Islands, Muslims and Jews from North Africa and other parts of Iberia, “blancos” apparently from the eastern Mediterranean - about one-third relate to black slaves or “negros.” Cortés described the legal and administrative context of the records but did not attempt a systematic analysis of the entries. However, she later usefully examined those relating to “negros” and offered a preliminary identification of stated provenances. In the present paper I consider the data on some 3,000 negros of stated Black African provenance, paying special attention to some 260 individuals whose provenance was given in terms of an ethnonym or narrowly located toponym and some 150 whose personal name in an African language was recorded. I note many instances where the Valencian data provide the earliest recorded documentation of an African ethnonym, while the anthroponyms are tabulated for study by field linguists.

As summarized and published by Cortés, the entries refer to some 5,400 Black Africans - the total of negros, apart from a handful stated to be from India or Brazil. This figure gives only a rough indication of the extent of the trade in Black Africans at Valencia during the period to which these entries apply, 1482-1516. About one hundred of the Africans were obtained, not more or less directly from Black Africa and normally via Lisbon, but from localities in North Africa or Iberia where it is likely that they had spent the greater part, if not all, of their lives.

Archives in the Republic of Zaire contain valuable documents for historical and ethnographic research, but finding these treasures often demands a great deal of perseverance and a certain amount of luck. Since the government archives in Kinshasa deal mainly with national administration, they generally have little to offer researchers interested in more localized topics. Although a small number of documents from the countryside have trickled into the Archives Nationales (housed in a wing of the fire station on Avenue de la Justice in Kinshasa), most of them remain dispersed throughout the network of regional, sub-regional, and zonal offices that form the core of the country's administrative system.

Since policies regarding the conservation of archives and the granting of access to them are not uniform, but made on an ad hoc basis by the officials on the spot, conditions vary widely from place to place and from time to time but I should point out that during my research in the Bandundu and Equateur Regions in 1975-76, the officials with whom I worked were unfailingly helpful, though the quality of the collections varied greatly. Some archives had disappeared or fallen into disarray during the troubles of the early 1960s; yet others remained remarkably intact, although even in the best-kept archives, many older documents had been partially eaten by insects.

Once upon a time, in the euphoric 1960s, a new generation of historians of Africa undertook to write the history of Africa and Africans through the ages, overturning previous Western suppositions that Africa had no precolonial history worth investigating. As J.D. Hargreaves has written, they were “excited by the challenge to apply their craft to the continent which Hegel had judged ‘no historical part of the world’.” Among the explorers of the largely unmapped territories of prccoloniai history were members of the Makerere Department of History and their students, many of whom were to become professional historians. This essay sketches the construction of a modern Department of History at Makerere, a task requiring a new curriculum and a new staff.

Makerere began in 1922 as a government technical school for Africans. Courses in medicine and teacher training soon replaced the original more “vocational” instruction in carpentry, surveying, mechanics, and the like. The next several decades saw an evolution into a “higher college,” preparing students from all over East Africa for examinations leading to university degrees. By the late 1930s, a top-level commission recommended fulfilment of an early forecast that Makerere would one day become a university college. In the meantime, as World War II put off any substantial changes, it loomed ever greater as the legendary “mountain” that only the best could ascend. In 1950, finally fulfilling the forecast, Makerere joined in a Special Relationship with the University of London to become the University College of East Africa.

The Swahili communities of the East African coast have often been characterized as middlemen, defined by their ability to navigate – often quite literally – the economic networks linking the African Interior and the Indian Ocean rim. Yet diversity has increasingly been recognized between Swahili communities. In this paper I add to the awareness and explication of Swahili diversity through comparative analysis of the archaeology of the southern Tanzanian town of Mikindani. In particular, I work to extend our knowledge of political and economic competition in East Africa backwards from the better documented nineteenth century. For Mikindani, its inhabitants’ changing abilities to access certain kinds of ceramics trace the competitive structures of this part of the coast and provide evidence for their success or failure in navigating a complex economic landscape.

This is a study of research and conservation activities into a newly rediscovered and opened regional archive in the Préfecture of Pointe-Noire in the Republic of Congo. The study illustrates the constraints attaching to complicated post-independence materials and the need for flexibility in approaching them. Begun as an initially well-defined project targeting a vanished colonial territorial archive, the work turned instead into the finding and reorganizing of an extremely valuable but dispersed post-independence archive. The article discusses the implications of such conditions for priorities in preservation measures and questions of digitization; it makes the case for a pragmatic approach.

Les Téké tsaayi sont un rameau détaché du tronc téké il y a plusieurs siècles. Ayant quitté les savanes très claires qui bordent le Zaïre à la hauteur du Malebu pour fuir le pouvoir politique qui s'y était développé (“pour échapper au Makoko”), ils s'établirent en forêt sur les contreforts orientaux de ce qui est aujourd'hui les Monts du Chaillu et ils imposèrent à ses habitants leur système politique bicéphale.

En 1966 j'entrepris une étude qui, selon les règles anthropologiques du moment, devait se confiner à une observation exhaustive d'un village. Les 147 habitants de Vouka, sur la haute Louessé, affluent de la rive droite du Niari-Kouilou, furent donc soumis au dispositif en vigueur. Localisation spatiale, parenté et alliances, production (peu observée), rites religieux etc. …Les matériaux obtenus furent pauvres, très disparates, et fort lacunaires. Les généalogies étaient incomplètes à cause des morts de la guerre de l'impôt. La métallurgie du fer avait cessé pendant cette même guerre; il en était de même pour les rites. Les vieux se plaignaient que leurs enfants préféraient parler la langue nzabi, celle des voisins (et champ d'étude de Georges Dupré). Mon inexpérience n'était pas seule en cause. Une déculturation était évidente, conséquence d'une dévastation démographique. Face à cette situation, les bases mêmes de la recherche étaient à redéfinir. Et il fallait d'abord se tourner vers l'histoire de la colonisation et en évaluer l'impact.

Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (1903-72) was a man of immense ability and variety. Apart from his numerous activities in the fields of paleontology, archeology, and anthropology, he achieved prominence as a naturalist, historian, political analyst, handwriting expert, and administrator. His writings not only reflect these interests but also serve as an important focal point for future research about East Africa.

Especially valuable are Leakey's often overlooked contributions to newspapers such as The East African Standard (Nairobi), Kenya Weekly News (Nakuru), and The Times (London). In addition to expanding on the topics mentioned above these items, which included feature articles as well as letters to the editor, outlined Leakey's views on everything from the price of maize to the activities of Kenya's dalmation club.

Because of his intimate knowledge of the Kikuyu people, Leakey rendered useful service to the British colonial government during the Mau Mau revolt. His experiences were reflected in his Mau Mau and the Kikuyu (1952), Defeating Mau Mau (1954), First Lessons in Kikuyu (1959), and Kenya: Contrasts and Problems (1966). Related articles in the Manchester Guardian (Manchester) and The Observer (London) also provided essential material for understanding Leakey's attitude towards the emergency.

After Kenya gained its independence in 1963, Leakey continued to use newspapers as a forum for his political beliefs. In The East African Standard, for example, “Congratulations on Model Democracy” and “Controversial Report on Kenya Answered” defended the performance of the country's new government. His autobiography, By the Evidence: Memoirs, 1932-1951 also contained a great deal of information about Leakey's position toward Kenya's political and social evolution.

Among the various sources of information about the Africa of the Slave Trade era, one of the more voluminous and detailed is the great series of English Customs records held at the Public Record Office in London under CUST 3 and CUST 17. Each year's records are contained in a gigantic ledger. Those up to 1780, in the CUST 3 series, are organized entirely under countries, of which the whole of Africa counts as one (though each West Indian island is separately listed, and most of the North American colonies, though New England is mercifully counted as a single unit, as is “Virginia and Maryland”). In the CUST 17 series, which overlaps with the CUST 3 series from 1772 and runs until 1808, the arrangement is somewhat different, and a second series of entries is arranged under commodities. From 1796, the Cape (newly occupied) is shown separately; Sierra Leone appears in 1798, and Morocco in 1807/08. A fire destroyed all the records for 1813, and export records for the previous years, as well as an unknown number of more detailed records for earlier years, and also the records of the East India trade, and of Prize goods, and odd other parts of the records for the years before the fire. So far as Africa is concerned, it is possible to construct continuous series for Imports into England, and for re-exports, with only 1813 missing, but the export records for 1809-11 inclusive are lost. The list of countries recognized continues to vary after 1809, and from 1827 to 1845 the records divide up the coast of Africa into stretches, of which only “Gold Coast and Cape Coast” bears any relation to later divisions.

A gradual transformation is taking place in Morocco in the ease with which it is possible to have access to archives. In a year and a half in Morocco my research in the archives both of Rabat and of the town of Essaouira was expedited by the administrators and ministries responsible in a way that approached what is current in England, for example. Those who have done archival research in Morocco will recognize the significance of such a change.

This report begins with a discussion of living accommodations in Morocco that may be of interest to those wishing to do research in the archives. Following this section I have tried to set out, first, the types of archives to be found, as well as their accessibility, and, second, the sorts of archival material likely to be found in each archive. Finally, I have appended a few suggestions about getting permission to do research in these archives. I can speak with accuracy for Rabat and Essaouira and, though it may be unwise to say they are representative of large and small towns, at least the two examples may be of some general significance.

Those who can afford to stay at the Rabat Hilton may skip this section because it is targeted to those who cannot or would prefer not to spend that much money. A fairly inexpensive hotel, yet one that a North American would feel comfortable in, is fairly easy to find in most of the major cities or towns of Morocco. These would run about $20 to $30 a night for two people. In Rabat two possibilities are: BELERE (33, Av. Moulay Youssef) and LES OUDAYAS (4, Rue Tobrouk). Both are within an easy walk of the Royal Archives and the Archives of the Bibliothèque Générale.

Since China was initially the favorite field of activity of the C.I.C.M. founded at Scheut (a suburb of Brussels) in 1862, it is not surprising that the oldest documents in its archives refer to the China missions. In 1888, however, three years after the establishment of the Independent State of the Congo, the first C.I.C.M. missionaries were sent out there and their successors still continue their activities. Thus nowadays a very important part of the archives concerns the Congo, covering a period of nearly ninety years.

At first the Apostolic Vicariate entrusted to the C.I.C.M. missionaries covered the entire extent of the Congo except for parts of the Apostolic Vicariate of Tanganyika, created two years earlier and given to the White Fathers to administer. Gradually, however, other missionaries came to help the C.I.C.M. pioneers and were put in charge of various territories which had originally been part of the Apostolic Vicariate. Eventually the C.I.C.M. retained only Leopoldville and its surrounding area, and the regions of Lower Congo, Equator, Lake Leopold II, and Kasai which, from the religious point of view, gave rise to the present C.I.C.M. provinces of Kinshasa, Boma, Lisala, Budjala, Inongo, Kananga, and East Kasai. This dismemberment explains why the documents preserved in the archives become more and more concentrated on these regions.

Interdisciplinarity has become a sort of buzzword in academic circles. It is quite common to hear graduate students respond, in answer to a question as to what they are doing, that their work is “sort of interdisciplinary.” This answer might be construed as concealing some measure of confusion as to what exactly is being researched. But, on the other hand, there is little doubt that the most adventurous students are increasingly defining their areas of concern at the boundaries between disciplines. The matter seems to take on a particularly acute inflection in relation to Africanist research. This may be traced partly to the fact that from the very beginning of interest in African matters, much scholarly work on Africa in Western universities has been done under the rubric of “African studies.” Anthropology and history, arguably the disciplines most active in popularizing knowledge about Africa, have themselves always shared a common concern on the ways in which knowledge about Africa can be constituted. The monumental work of Jan Vansina and others in the 1960s in focusing on oral traditions and making them a respectable source for the construction of historical knowledge about Africa was thoroughly interdisciplinary in its own way.

Despite the implicit interdisciplinarity of African Studies, the theoretical implications of interdisciplinary study and the issues that it generates for questions about different types of knowledge does not seem to have engaged the attention of scholars. It is in this direction that I propose to go. I propose to engage with issues concering interdisciplinarity from the perspective of my own research on Nigerian literature. The issues that concern me relate to the question: what do specific configurations of disciplines within the interdisciplinary model have for the nature of the knowledge that is produced? But a series of subsidiary questions might be asked in relation to this major one, such as: are we being interdisciplinary when we borrow metaphors from other fields? or concepts? or whole paradigms? Or is it when we join different methods of analysis from two or more disciplines such that what finally emerges cannot be limited to any one of them?

More than sixty years ago, in his preface to Carl Russell Fish's excellent Guide to the Materials for American History in Roman and Other Archives, the General Editor, J. Franklin Jameson, wrote as follows.

Although these words were written decades ago, it still remains true that too little use is made of such archival materials, and not only by American historians. One of the microfilm additions to the collections at Saint Louis University includes precisely this type of material in a collection that runs to about 250,000 manuscript pages from the Archive of the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide (for the propagation of the faith). The congregation was definitively established by Gregory XV (1621-1623) in his constitution Inscrutabili of June 22, 1622, although there had been some discussion about the formation of such a congregation for almost fifty years. This brief note description will be oriented toward the African materials only, but a general description of the indexes is necessary that the Africanist may be able to use them.