The Bantu expansion is one of the most important large-scale problems in African culture history -- an epic enacted over two or three thousand years and ten million square kilometers, by a cast not merely of thousands, but of many millions. By definition, the problem is primarily linguistic, but it cannot fail to engage the interest of other Africanists. The evidence arising from the comparative study of the Bantu languages has to be collated with evidence derived from other sources -- especially from archeology -- and extra-linguistic factors have to be invoked as soon as we raise the question of explanation. Bantu-speaking communities did not expand by virtue of the fact that they spoke Bantu: this at least we may safely take for granted.

Until a few years ago, the argument revolved around the names of two linguists -- about as different in temperament and training as any two linguists could be -- who had both by chance turned their attention to Bantu in the late 1940s. An American linguist, Joseph H. Greenberg, working towards a genetic classification for all African languages, arrived at a controversial conclusion regarding the relationship between Bantu and the so-called “Semi-Bantu” languages of Nigeria.

The hagiographic literature of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church may be divided into two major categories: the translated lives of the saints and martyrs of the early Christian church and the lives of local saints. The essentially foreign works, which constitute the first of these groups, will be of only peripheral concern in this paper. While books such as Barlaam and Joasaph, The Life of St. George, and The Conflict of Severus did serve as models for the traditions dealing with local saints, they are of little interest to the student of Ethiopian history.

The most interesting of these local hagiographies are those about saints who lived between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. These traditions, which recount the lives of some kings and many monastic leaders, are of great importance for the reconstruction of the history of medieval Ethiopia. As Conti Rossini has written,

However, while specialists in Ethiopian literature and history have long realized the potential value of these gadlāt (singular: gadl) as sources for the study of Ethiopian history, the tendency towards idealization displayed in these works, as well as their abundant miracles and anachronisms, have left historians uncertain as to how to extract reliable information from them.

Semei Kakungulu enjoyed at least nine lives in the area of the Uganda Protectorate immediately before, during, and after the imposition of British protectorate rule there at the close of last century, in his successive roles as elephant hunter, guerrilla leader, Ganda chief, border warlord, British ally in military campaigns, “native collector,” colonial client-king, President of the Busoga Lukiko, and leader of the anti-medicine Bamalaki and Bayudaya separatist sects. The purpose of these notes, however, is not to provide more details about these successive phases in Kakungulu's extraordinary career, but rather to comment briefly on the nine major surviving vernacular accounts of his very full life.

John Rowe remarks that “it was natural that biographies, particularly of men of heroic proportions, should also [have been] mobilized in the struggle against moral decline” after the First World War by Ganda vernacular authors, along with works of moral admonition and military memoir once uncritical admiration for British Christianity gave way to a more guarded and wary respect for things British with the increased penetration of Buganda by both British rule and mercantile capitalism. Rowe may also be right in saying that the many biographies of Kakungulu in Luganda “may have reflected the particular attraction of a non-conforming heroic figure who turned his back on the ‘establishment,’ carved a kingdom for himself in the east and virtually thumbed his nose at Apolo Kagwa and the British.” Certainly, this is a major attraction as regards my biographical interest in the man! But, as I hope the following notes on his nine principal vernacular lives may indicate, there are also other explanations.

In the 1820s, when Imerina expanded to control most of Madagascar, remarkably few Merina rose in organized opposition to the king's extensive plans to change basic social and political relations. Tradition conferred sacred legitimacy on innovative royal interpretations of ideology and secured public consent with little resort to force. Potential conflicts between the king and Merina elites were muted by negotiations that proceeded within the premises of traditional ideology. As the king managed to monopolize organized force, occasional acts of violence assured that royal views of ideology dominated all others.

King Radama occupied the central position in the stream of blessing that ran from Imerina's collective ancestors downwards through him to all living Merina. As the ultimate living representative of all long-dead ancestors, he had the power to dispense their good will in the form of “superior” hasina in exchange for his subjects' offerings of “inferior” hasina. As mediator between heaven and earth, Radama alone determined how Imerina's hasina ideology would apply to the vicissitudes of everyday life. Merina, however, saw the reality that he created not merely as the product of human agency, but of ancestral beneficence as well. Since opposition to royal will implied the rejection of ancestral beneficence, attempts within Imerina to challenge the monarch's authority or the ideology on which it rested were rare indeed. Yet such cases of opposition did arise, and they reveal the nature of royal authority as seen from below.

Dans les représentations françaises du passé colonial, le général Louis Léon César Faidherbe (1818-1889), gouverneur du Sénégal de 1854 à 1861 et de 1863 à 1865, a une image bien ancrée (et dont l'analyse pourrait constituer une étude historique en soi) qui persiste jusqu'à maintenant. Une grande partie de la littérature existante au sujet de Faidherbe peut être divisée en ouvrages à caractère hagiographique et en écrits de l'époque postcoloniale qui le stigmatisent en tant que colonialiste. Cependant il faudrait se demander en quoi consiste l'apport particulier de Faidherbe dans les études des civilisations africaines et comment expliquer la durée de son “charisme” auprès de ses successeurs au XXe siècle.

Nous avons essayé de systématiser les écrits de Faidherbe du point de vue de la construction du portrait de l'ethnie peul dans son oeuvre. Nous supposons que l'intérêt tout particulier à l'égard des Peul de la part des ethnologues qui écrivaient après Faidherbe doit beaucoup à l'image qu'il a créée de ce peuple. Ce succès pourrait êire expliqué moins par la somme de savoir que recèle cette image, que par son organisation et par sa correspondance avec les modes philosophiques et esthétiques de la réflexion de son temps, notamment avec “l'esprit de la modernité.” Le lecteur attentif des oeuvres ethnologiques de Faidherbe aura la sensation de découvrir une écriture vivement marquée par. le style dit de la “modernité” qui lui rappellera peut être les passages lus chez Jules Verne et lui laissera le sentiment étrange d'être plutôt dans le domaine de la littérature.

Typically—very typically—fledgling African historians launch their careers by engaging in a bout of fieldwork, sometimes in archives, but more often on location among a group of people whose activities have somehow captured their interest. Almost as typically, this work in the field then becomes the principal source for historians' future published work, which often never proceeds beyond the bounds set by the initial fieldwork.

In this process of course the data accumulated in the field—field notes—become, possibly over and over again, the primary sources for this subsequent work. In some ways this process is not particularly different from that undertaken by other historians who use printed sources more heavily. There are differences, though, not the least of which is that these orally derived field notes grow stale with the passing of time and cannot be revivified as easily as archival notes.

Moreover, of course, far more often than not, field notes are never allowed to escape into the public domain, whereas archival sources are usually already there when the historian sets about using them. What were once laboriously handwritten notebooks, and then audio tapes are now more likley to be 3.5″ diskettes, but otherwise they are as jealously guarded in the 1990s as they were in the 1950s. Indeed, perhaps moreso, in that the usable lifespan of a diskette is likely to be significantly less than that of the notebook, if not of the audio tape. In short, in perhaps twenty years posterity will find itself forced to rely on the published products—maybe yet in paper format?—rather than on the raw data which once underpinned them. In the circumstances, it might be worth considering once again the implications of this, with reference to a particular instance of respectable vintage.

As part of a projected series of edited early Portuguese texts on Guinea, in the early 1960s the late Vice-Admiral Avelino Teixeira da Mota began to assemble, partly from archives, documents for a volume he intended to call Jesuit Reports. As it happened, many of the documents, especially those from Jesuit sources, were published in 1968 by another Portuguese scholar, the late P. Antońio Brásio. But Teixeira da Mota did not abandon his project, partly because he considered that Brásio did not always take account of all copies of a document and all variant readings, and partly because Brásio was unable to accompany the documents with informed Africanist annotation. In the 1970s Teixeira da Mota sent me his own collection of documents to translate into English— and also so that I could ultimately contribute part of their annotation. My translations were completed just before Teixeira da Mota died in 1982, and I have since translated a number of other documents, all from Brásio, which help to round out the picture. Not all of the documents were written by the Jesuits themselves, but most were.

When it became clear that the publication of Teixeira da Mota's series would proceed at best very slowly, I began to publish those of the translations which were of material in the public domain, beginning with the material printed in the early seventeenth century by Guerreiro. Since much of the material related to Sierra Leone, I published in the Africana Research Bulletin of the Institute of African Studies at Freetown, and am much indebted to the organizers of the journal for providing an outlet.

In a previous number of this journal, a note on the development of a computer-based Arabic manuscript finding aid described its application to a manuscript microfilming project in Boutilimit, Mauritania. The filming of that collection was then (at the time the note was written in the spring of 1989) in its second phase, and the work was concluded in December of that year. Thanks to the technology developed for the finding aid to that collection, the catalog was completed six months later, and it is now possible to do database searches on that material (and soon on other collections now being entered in the same format). This note comes as a description of the Boutilimit collection, the film of which is now available to researchers at the University of Illinois Archives, in the University Library.

In his brief essay on the crisis in modern Nigerian historiography, A.O. Adeoye effectively highlighted the origin and nature of the crisis. However, his work was more of a review of the different perspectives, as well as the existing literature on the issue. But the crisis of relevance that Nigerian historical scholarship is currently facing is so acute that it may not be an exaggeration to say that the discipline of history is being threatened with extinction. This has created a great amount of apprehension and self-doubt among Nigerian historians. Nevertheless, the crisis is manifested in all aspects of historical scholarship in Nigeria.

One major area in which the crisis is manifested is at the apex level of the professional association of Nigerian historians, that is, the Historical Society of Nigeria (H.S.N.), which was formed in 1955. Apart from being the first professional body of academics to be formed in Nigeria, the society was so highly regarded that even up to the early 1980s, its activities were enthusiastically embraced by most Nigerian historians. By the mid 1980s, however, interest in the association had so much waned that majority of Nigerian historians, including very senior academics stopped paying their annual dues and participating in the Congresses. The situation has reached the depressing point where institutions now find it difficult to find enough finance to host the annual Congresses.

The attempts to revive the interest of historians by choosing themes that are relevant to the contemporary Nigerian situation have not being successful.Similarly, the prestigious Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria (JHSN) which was established in 1956, was last published in 1985 (even though there are a number of manuscripts awaiting publication) while Tarikh, which was supposed to popularize history at the tertiary and secondary school levels and among non-historians, has not fared better. In addition, the publication of the Ibadan History Series has long since been discontinued.

For the reconstruction of history from oral sources, four broad types are usually distinguishable. These are myth, legend, songs, and what Phillips Stevens calls “popular history.” All of them fall under the generic heading of “folklore”—a term which is so broad in its application that it could include nearly all expressive aspects of culture. The only type that we will concern ourselves with in this study is myth. A comprehensive examination of the issue in question in the study requires a definition of the word myth; an examination of the characteristics of “applied history;” and the application of these characteristics to myth with a view to finding out any point of agreement between them, before a final answer will be given to the question whether “myth in the context of African traditional histories,” can be called applied history.

The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English defines myth as a “story handed down from olden time, containing the early beliefs of a race.” Vansina identifies myths by their subject matter and talks about them as those stories which “deal with and interpret the relations between the natural and the supernatural and are concerned with all that part of religious life that lies beyond the moral order. “ He says that they “attempt to explain the world, the culture, the society … in terms of religious causes.” McCall, for his part, refers to myths as “stories concerning the supernatural, the activities of deities, spirits and semi-divine heroes on the origin of the world, mankind and cultural artifacts and institutions which usually are said to have been achieved through the instrumentality of these sacred beings.” Afigbo, in turn, considers myths as having the “tendency to explain historical institutions and development by appeal to non-historic factors and forces”—as stories that see “the supernatural acting at times through the agency of man, at times through the agency of the lower animals and other times even through the agency of inanimate object, as the original and continuing causes of motion in a society.”

The technicians of historical methodology have usually emphasized that the relationship between historians and their facts is, or should be, dialectic. This supposed counsel of perfection, however, glosses over an important point whose neglect is usually, or indeed invariably, a source of serious distortion or error—that is, the fact that such a dialogue can only begin after the historian has already immersed himself in the available sources, and thus has in some way been taken captive by those sources. Indeed, if the historian can manipulate his facts, it appears that his sources can also manipulate him.

Thus the kind of history the historian writes depends all the time on the kind of sources available to him. The more the sources are narrow in focus and unidirectional in orientation, the narrower the range of the historian's work and the more such work is oriented in the direction from which the sources derive. The wider the range of the sources, and the more these are multidirectional, the more the competent and scientific historian is in a position to produce a work that does more justice to the many-faceted experiences of man in society—that is, the more the historian is in a position to take a meaningful aim at the Rankean goal of all historical effort.

This tendency for the historian to be taken captive by the provenance and the main interest of his sources has been, and continues to be, operative among the historians of Nigeria's peoples and polities.

Three mid-nineteenth century English travellers, F.E. Forbes, R.F. Burton, and J.A. Skertchly, published books which contain detailed descriptions of the way in which the Dahoman state was then organized. The three authors' works, when taken together, form the most coherent, best researched, precolonial account of the Dahoman kingdom.

Dahomey's more recent historians, while purporting to rely on Forbes', Burton's, and Skertchly's evidence, have nevertheless advanced arguments which are incompatible with that evidence. The three authors believed that Dahomey was an Abomey area slave-raiding community, whereas the kingdom's new historians claim that Dahomey was a European-like nation state. They have, it appears, while searching for their new interpretations, lost sight of their source material. As a means of drawing attention back to these sources there follows an analysis of Forbes', Burton's, and Skertchly's testimony.

F.E. Forbes was a naval officer who became interested in Dahomey while serving on board one of the anti-slave squadron's ships. R.F. Burton, the well-known explorer and author, made a study of the kingdom while he held the position of British Consul for the Bight of Biafra. J.A. Skertchly was an entomologist who developed an interest in Dahomey while on a West African specimen collecting trip.

Forbes gathered his material in 1849/50, while Burton collected his in 1863/64. Both visited Dahomey as members of anti-slave trade factfinding missions and both considered that their instructions obliged them to find out as much as they could about the way in which the kingdom was organized. Forbes' and Burton's books are published versions of their official reports.3 Skertchly, who collected his evidence in 1871, had intended to spend only about a week in Dahomey but was detained there for almost eight months, during which he was unable to collect specimens.

When I first arrived at the National Archives of Zimbabwe in July of 1984, I was flattered and even a little embarrassed by the cosseting I got just for being a visiting researcher. The Archives' staff took a personal interest in me that extended beyond research and into the realm of creature comfort. The daily routine had more in common with a spa than a work place: tea was put on for researchers every morning and afternoon in the Archives' back garden, and the reading room closed early enough in the afternoon to make the first round of gin and tonics at the sun-downer. In other words, doing research at the National Archives was living a privileged existence.

That sort of privilege was replaced by a growing sense of professionalism and mainstreaming between 1985 and 1993. Morning and afternoon tea no longer played such an important role in the daily routine, and everything seemed busier. This was a change in tone, not a change in the physical or professional excellence of the institution: the grounds were still beautiful, the facilities were still clean and comfortable, and the staff were still friendly and helpful. But in 1989, and even more so in 1993, a feeling of intensity had replaced the sense of luxury and ease I had felt in 1984 and 1985. The National Archives had been transformed from a spa to a work place. And, in the process, researchers had also been transformed from guests to workers.

Le cheminement de l'Histoire s'est fait lentement depuis le temps de ses pères fondateurs au Grand Siècle de Périclès; mais le processus vers l'état des connaissances actuelles s'est accéléré dès la fin du XVIIe siècle avec les débuts de l'Histoire méthodique enrichie par l'Erudition au XVIIIe siècle, pour en arriver à rechercher un sens dans une Histoire conceptualisée. Le XIXe siècle sera marqué par le développement des Philosophies de l'Histoire: elles ont cours encore aujourd'hui bien qu'elles soient entachées de doute, de scepticisme, de relativisme (Bourde/Martin 1983). Le grand débat qui oppose les historiens se situe au niveau de l'interprétation, du sens à donner à l'analyse d'une source, qu'elle soit écrite, orale, archéologique, sonore ou imagée. Ou bien l'analyse critique des documents et leur confrontation permettent de reconstituer la fresque historique à travers ses tenants et aboutissants, ou bien l'on essaye d'aller plus loin en intégrant l'analyse critique dans une conception que l'on se fait de l'évolution historique, en admettant au préalable qu'il existe une dynamique sousjacente, un moteur, une problématique en fait.

It is widely accepted that the development of recording technology played an important role in the development of ethnomusicology as a discipline. For the first time, from the late nineteenh century, music could be recorded for use in scientific comparison and analysis. Jaap Kunst once wrote: “ethnomusicology could never have grown into an independent science if the gramophone had not been invented.” But the significance of recorded performance—the most objective way of capturing oral tradition—for the understanding of all aspects of culture must not be underestimated, particularly, but not exclusively, for nonliterate societies. “Oral tradition should be central to students of culture, of ideology, of society, of psychology, of art, and … of history.” And sound archives should be perceived as essential to research, “equivalent to libraries in other disciplines insofar as their importance in research is concerned.”

Almost immediately after the advent of recording technology in the late 1870s, sound archives began to emerge: the first in Europe was the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Science in 1899. Britain came late to the field: the British Institute of Recorded Sound was established with private funds only in 1947; it received its first grant-in-aid in the 1960s and in 1983 it became part of the British Library, known as the National Sound Archive.

In this paper I take into account informants who oversee fieldworkers in local arenas. My intention is not to question the importance of participant-observation as the hallmark of field research but to elevate the recognition of informants in fieldwork. The argument centers on local overseers who are integral to participant-observation by controlling more of what the researcher observes, and with whom one participates, than they are usually given credit for in the literature. I intentionally use “overseer” rather than the usual “gatekeeper” label to convey a strong sense of informant involvement in ethnographic research (cf. Ellen 1984 where “gatekeeper” is used to describe a range of actors who control access, channel activities, and so on). The case study is drawn from my experiences with a host family in southwest Madagascar with whom I lived for 10 months in 1997.

There are different ways of representing informants in the literature. One way is to draw a wide line between informant and participant-observer. Informants are defined as local people who willingly provide information to participant-observers. Participant-observers are non-locals involved in intense interaction with members of a community over a long period such as a year. The two are not to overlap. Evans-Pritchard found informants vital to his Azande research, participant-observation central to his Nuer fieldwork. “Azande would not allow me to live as one of themselves; Nuer would not allow me to live otherwise. Among Azande I was compelled to live outside the community; among Nuer I was compelled to be a member of it” (Evans-Pritchard 1940:15). This tradition, of treating each as a separate method, is widespread (see, for example, Bernard 1995:136-79; Casagrande 1960; Ellen 1984; Freilich 1970:541; Herskovits 1955:376; Jackson 1997:188; Malinowski 1961:1-25; Pelto and Pelto 1973:242-43; Spradley 1980:177).

The foundation for the argument that follows is the demonstration in Part I of this essay of Ilesha's steady physical expansion over at least three hundred years, as manifested in the establishment of new quarters. Behind this lay Ilesha's success in exploiting the geo-political possibilities of her situation midway between Oyo and Benin, twenty-five miles back from the savanna/forest divide and so safe from Oyo's cavalry. Other aspects of Ilesha's growth as a capital were her loose hegemony, periodically reasserted, over the smaller neighboring kingdoms to the north and east; her effective continuous domination of other communities (including some earlier centers of the Ijesha Kingdom) within a 20 to 30 mile radius; and her establishment of further rural out-settlements in this area, many of them, as has been mentioned, ruled by members of her royal lineage. In what follows, we will be less concerned with the interlocking means by which this increase was brought about - slaves taken from communities defeated in war and incorporated, revenues from the trade drawn to the markets and routes which Ilesha was able to dominate, free immigrants attracted from other towns - than with how this growth was managed and affected the structure of the community. Our evidence takes two principle forms; itan told about many of the Owa, such as formed the raw material for the Itan Ilesa of Abiola, Babafemi, and Ataiyero; and the system of chiefly titles, each with distinctive attributes and traditions, which defines the political structure of the community.

On 24 November 1989 the Library at the University of Swaziland in Kwaluseni formally received a large portion of the papers and manuscripts of the eminent Swazi writer, historian, statesman, and current chief executive of the Swaziland National Trust, J. S. M. Matsebula. The deposit of these papers has formed the nucleus of a small, but interesting and rapidly expanding, Swaziana Collection and this contribution, it is hoped, will inspire other prominent Swazis and scholars of Swaziland similarly to deposit their materials. The preeminent anthropologist, Hilda Kuper, has recently offered her large and valuable collection of manuscripts and field notes to the University of Swaziland, and the elder statesman, J. J. Nquku, founder of the Swaziland Progressive Party (among other accomplishments), is preparing his personal papers for the Collection as well. Additionally, it has just been learned that the Swaziland Oral History Project materials will be transferred to the University of Swaziland from the University of the Witwatersrand.

James Shadrack Mkhulunyelwa Matsebula was born in 1918, outside Mbabane, the capital of Swaziland, into a family which has traditionally played a significant role in ritual Swazi royal life. The King's first wife is chosen from the Matsebulas and is known as laMatsebula. He was educated in Swaziland and South Africa and has written on a wide variety of topics in several genres and languages.

The history of the Yoruba-speaking people in the nineteenth century has attracted considerable attention. The attempt to write on the era did not have to await the emergence of academic historians: some of the elites produced by the century took it upon themselves to be worthy chroniclers of their age. The most notable among these writers were Samuel Johnson, John Olawunmi George, E.M. Lijadu, Otunba Payne, and Mojola Agbebi all of whom wrote either in the English Language or in their mother tongue. A few others also wrote in Arabic, thus contributing to the Islamic historiography of the century. The contributions of all these authors are immense. Whereas the preceding centuries had virtually no chroniclers, the nineteenth century could boast of a handful whose writings have remained part of the sources for the era.

It was also a century of major activities by foreign explorers, missionaries, and officials of the British government. These were men with varying degrees of educational background, but with skill adequate enough to write letters, make entries in diaries, and report on their activities and experiences in Africa. The most talented among them wrote books and copious reports. A great deal of these writings have survived and have been widely used as primary sources to reconstruct the history of the period.