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.

This text on the Wiriyamu massacre of 1972 in Mozambique uses fieldwork and archival materials to address its historical context, the methods used to collect data for the narrative, the trajectory that the narrative took to reach the pages of The Times of London, the contest that ensued over its veracity, and its eventual acceptance as true by all parties concerned. The text concludes that both the context as well as the construction of the massacre narrative was much more complex and nuanced than the extant literature suggests. Its revelation too was governed by a series of factors, some directly related to the story and the timing of its arrival in London, and others entirely disconnected from the text of the massacre as received by The Times of London. The text discusses in the end how both the preponderance of evidence and a change in regime in Portugal among other factors delivered the narrative safely for all to agree on its veracity as a common text.

In 1974 the Ethiopian government of Emperor Haile-Sellasie was overthrown and replaced by the Provisional Military Administrative Council (PMAC). Also known as the Derg, the PMAC adopted socialism, embarked on radical social changes, and retained power for over two decades under its leader, Mengistu Hayle-Maryam, eventually was overthrown in 1991. The Ethiopian Revolution and the Derg are the topics of several authors, including those publishing close to the events, such as Raul Valdes Vivo, Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux, and John Markakis and Nega Ayele, and those writing later, such as Christopher Clapham, Edmond Keller, and Bahru Zewde, to name just a few publishing in English. But other publications, in Amharic and English, remain the focus of a lively academic and public debate in Ethiopia. Most of these writings were produced by participants in events, or, in one case, are transcripts of interviews with participants. Some of the raconteurs were revolutionaries, others were their opponents, and still others were members of the imperial regime. Taken together, these publications shed light on the genesis of the Ethiopian Revolution (the February 1974 movements), the consolidation of Derg (in November 1977), and its aftermath. This note examines some of these materials to bring them to the attention of readers of this journal.

Nearly every historian of early African history has recently encountered studies that use the history of words as a source for history more generally defined, an approach also known as words-and-things. Indeed, by now a more or less elaborate use of words-and-things has become fashionable, especially in the Anglophone literature. A number of short presentations of the overall principles underlying this approach have been published, but they all lack an extended discussion of the methodological issues involved. Perhaps this is the main reason why words-and- things analyses are almost never subjected to critical scrutiny, while the conclusions of studies based on them, however weak or strong they might be, tend to be accepted as gospel—a most unsatisfactory situation. Hence a book-length study of the methodology involved in the application of words-and-things should be very welcome.

As Klein-Arendt's book is devoted exclusively to this subject, it should fill the gap. Yet it will disorient most readers of this journal because K-A is not concerned with the solution of smaller- or large-scale problems of history as understood by such readers, but focuses on the epistemology of the central European school known as Kulturgeschichte (more or less “Culture History”), to which he subscribes and which is likely to be largely unknown to most readers. Yet when the expression “words-and-things” was first coined in 1909. it was intended to be a tool to elucidate Kulturgeschichte. Indeed, the journal from which the label stems was called Wörter und Sachen. Kulturhistorische Zeitschrift für Sprach-und Sachforschung (Words and Things, a Journal of Culture History for Research in Languages and Things) and on its very first page Rudolf Meringer stated that “[linguistics is only a portion of the science of culture … We hold that the future of Kulturgeschichte resides in the union of the science of language with the science of things” in which “things” stood for what came to be better known as “culture traits.”

Sudan Notes and Records (hereafter SNR or simply “the journal”) was a leading African scholarly journal on Sudanese studies established by the British administration of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1918. Perhaps because of the high scientific standards it upheld throughout its life span, the political underpinnings that accompanied its foundation might not be so apparent. This study argues that, from its founding until the late 1940s, when the British administration was paving the way for a transfer of power to the Sudanese, SNR had ostensibly political orientations as reflected, among other things, in the editorial policy of the journal. The political leanings of SNR had two dimensions: internal and external.

On the internal level, editorial policy in the 1920s favored notables and tribal chiefs, rather than the intelligentsia, by allotting space in this periodical to articles “written” by Sudanese sheikhs, a phenomenon occurring at a time when the policy of Indirect Rule figured most prominently in the calculation of the administration. In the late 1930s the administration courted the intelligentsia, offering them greater opportunities in the civil service and higher education abroad. The editorial policy of SNR favored these educated elements by publishing articles and correspondences written by the intelligentsia, including Sayyed Abd el-Rahman el-Mahdi, the patron of a prominent Sudanese political party—the Umma. Until independence in 1956, the Sudanization of contribution to the journal became one of the focal points of editorial notes.

On the external level, the political bias of SNR was directly linked to the British policy vis-à-vis Egyptian claims of sovereignty over the Sudan. The study contends that one of the tactics the British used to separate the Sudan from Egypt was to foster the concept of nationalism among the Sudanese through archeological research. One of the prime vehicles for the spread of this concept was in fact SNR, whose very nature was questioned in the late 1940s by its own subscribers.

The aim of this note is to attract attention to a new venture in scholarly publication—Beatrix Heintze's Alfred Schachtzabel's Reise nach Angola, 1913-1914. Und seine Sammlungen für das Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. Rekonstruktion einer Ethnographischen Quelle (Köln, 1995), the first issue of Afrika Archiv, a new series to be devoted to text editions. That this is not to be confused with an ordinary text edition is already intimated by the work's title, which translates as Alfred Schachtzabel's Voyage to Angola, 1913-1914, and his Collections for the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. Reconstruction of an Ethnographic Source. In other words, it speaks of a “reconstruction” and “a source edition,” not “text edition.” As well, Heintze is described as the author of this book rather than the editor. Yet she presents the work as a new kind of edition—the “integrated edition of sources.”

Heintze is an experienced text editor, having published both a voluminous conventional collection of documents and a set of ethnographic drawings. Yet when she examined the surviving documentation pertaining to Schachtzabel's expedition in Angola, she became convinced that a standard edition of all his work would be unwise. The unpublished materials at hand are too disparate and slender.

Regionalizing pre-colonial Africa aids in the collection and interpretation of primary sources as data for further analysis. This article includes a map with six broad regions and 34 sub-regions, which form a controlled vocabulary within which researchers may geographically organize and classify disparate pieces of information related to Africa’s past. In computational terms, the proposed African regions serve as data containers in order to consolidate, link, and disseminate research among a growing trend in digital humanities projects related to the history of the African diasporas before c. 1900. Our naming of regions aims to avoid terminologies derived from European slave traders, colonialism, and modern-day countries.

This study juxtaposes the observations and interpretations of a twenty-first-century ethnographer with those of nineteenth-century Christian missionaries to rethink interpretations of the practice of gender in precolonial West Africa. The article uses the evolving relationship between an ethnographic researcher and a group of contemporary female ancestral masquerade chiefs to reflect on the ways in which generations of missionaries and scholars have interpreted the gendered construction of power. It critiques previous writers for assuming sex and gender in Yoruba culture to be fixed, and argues for a more fluid interpretation of the gendered identities of the observer and subject being observed.

During the last fifty years, several debates have waxed and waned regarding the implications of literacy for African history. Among social scientists in general and social anthropologists in particular, Jack Goody and Ian Watt's survey of “The Consequences of Literacy” (1963) for hitherto preliterate or partially literate and now modernizing societies, drew attention to one suggested transformation: “The importance of writing lies in its creating a new medium of communication. (…) Its essential service is to objectify speech, to provide language with a material correlative, a set of visible signs. In this material form speech can be transmitted over space and preserved over time; what people say and think can be rescued from the transitoriness of oral communication.” The consequences, in Goody and Watt's view, were immensely important: “In oral societies the cultural tradition is transmitted almost entirely by face-to-face communication; and changes in its content are accompanied by the homeostatic process of forgetting or transforming those parts of the tradition that cease to be either necessary or relevant. Literate societies, on the other hand, cannot discard, absorb or transmute the past in the same way. Instead, their members are faced with permanently recorded versions of the past and its beliefs; and because the past is thus set apart from the present, historical enquiry becomes possible. This in turn encourages scepticism; and scepticism, not only about the legendary past, but about received ideas about the universe as a whole.”

The IFAN manuscript collection, including several fonds, is a very rich repository of mostly Arabic materials coming from different regions of the former Afrique Occidentale Française. Notwithstanding some of these manuscripts have been explored by historians since the colonial period, the potential of this collection is still untapped. This note focuses on some historical accounts from the Fonds Brevié, Fonds Vieillard, and Fonds Gaden.

This paper analyzes the “Southern” Afro-Brazilian Catholicism which was brought to West Africa by former slaves from Brazil prior to the expansion of the “Northern” European Catholic missions. In examining two significant mass baptisms held in the town of Agoué in 1846 and 1855, this paper explores the religious history of the Aguda or Afro-Brazilian freed slaves, and how they built a network of ethnic, commercial, and affective relationships by means of Catholic baptism and godparenting. The Aguda’s Catholic affiliation (rather than conversion), beyond being coextensive with Brazilian identity, served to produce a merchant community whose main activity, in the early period, was the slave trade. The paper also discusses the methodological potential of cross referencing and fertilizing West African data with Bahian data in order to elucidate how the returnees’ appropriation of Catholic ritual was shaped by their previous Brazilian experience.

This article presents an analysis of the diaries of Barthélémy Boganda, priest and later politician in French Equatorial Africa. So far unknown, these diaries, stored in the archives of the French Spiritans, shed light on earlier stages of Boganda’s life, on which fewer sources are available. The article first discusses the broad historical background of colonialism in French Equatorial Africa and the significance of Barthélémy Boganda as an historical figure, also comparing him with other leaders of Africa’s decolonization struggles. It then analyses the nature of his diaries and their different entries and argues that it is through this source material that one can better understand the complexity of his person and the historical depth of his attitudes, thoughts and action.

In most of Africa there are written materials from the eras before colonialism that offer a view of the kinds of ideas, cultural life, and currents of political thought, as well as practices and events, that predate substantial European engagement. In the present-day South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, and bordering provinces and countries, there are no equivalent discursive materials that predate a European presence. With colonialism, much knowledge about the remote past was stitched up in imperial and colonial knowledge systems and recording practices. In this paper, we discuss what digital interventions and affordances offer in terms of researching the history of the material used as sources for the remote past, and of releasing that material from distorting or anachronistic colonial classifications and categories. We consider the capacities and significance of digital interventions in calling out sequestered and lost materials, in convening innovative new assemblages of material, in creating conditions conducive to the restoration of neglected details of provenance, in documenting the twists and turns involved in the shaping of materials into sources, and in formally recognizing the archival potential of materials, notably the writings of early African literati, long positioned as being something other than sources and as “not-archive.”

Earlier I discussed the potential of physical anthropology for the reconstruction of precolonial history in Africa. As a traditional branch of the biological sciences, physical anthropology draws on advances in genetics, population genetics, numerical taxonomy, and other biological disciplines whose paradigms define a logical framework by which the biological history of human populations can be explored. Sophisticated techniques can now be applied not only to the study of biological history, but also to the investigation of hypotheses of wider historical interest (i.e., those arising from the consideration of nonbiological sources of historical evidence). Having outlined some of the possibilities of new techniques and contrasted them to more basic techniques available to pre-war physical anthropologists, who tended to be preoccupied by the construction of racial taxonomies, I ended the paper by discussing ways by which the wider historical potential of physical anthropology could begin to be realized.

In this sequel the onus is on trying to demonstrate in a limited way some of these possibilities through an empirical study. The study in question is a biological survey of Kenyan peoples which I undertook in the early and mid-1970s. During this survey I obtained palm and finger prints from over 6,000 primary and secondary school children drawn from some 60 population units (tribes and sub-tribes). The finger and palm prints provided over 150 biological measures, which are genetically determined, to compare the population units sampled and to analyze the biological patterns of differentiation of Kenyan peoples.

Two synopses of the holdings of the National Archives of Ghana were published fifteen years ago, one by David Henige, the other by R. E. Dumett. Henige's article offers a more detailed breakdown of some series (notably ADM 1–21 and SCT 1–44), while Dumett provides a more descriptive account and gives more details on ADM 22–262. In the meantime several of the inventories on which Henige and Dumett based their reports have disappeared or disintegrated, and others are rapidly heading in the same direction. The need for a full printed catalog is urgent; unless work on this is begun soon, the whole archive will have to be re-inventoried. In February/March 1987 I was able to check a few of the references given by Henige and Dumett or in the surviving inventories, and perhaps my notes may be of some use to future researchers.

In Paris 1931, the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme published the pamphlet, Un forfait colonial: l'esclavage en Mauritanie. Its author was a man best known in the context of radical Dahomean politics, Louis Hunkanrin, who had cause to know Mauritania better than he would have liked during ten years spent there in political exile. This exposé of slavery in Mauritania is a curious concoction -- general information damning the morals, values and work ethic of Moorish society; selected cases of injustice drawn from his personal experience; a lengthy report by a medical official despairing of Mauritania's poor food production and its relation to the slave situation; an eloquent letter to the Governor of Mauritania presenting a defense of his own actions; brutal attacks on particular French administrators; all with a large dose of French patriotism liberally sprinkled throughout. As stated in his preface, Hunkanrin's aim in exposing the crimes committed against the blacks in Mauritania was none other than “to illuminate the true face of France in this territory where the French flag flies—emblem of peace, liberty, and justice: the France of the Rights of Man, maternal France, good, generous and just,… It is well understood that I am only concerned to serve the interests of France and humanity.”

In his foreword to Neil Skinner's first volume of translations of Frank Edgar's collection of Hausa folk stories, M.G. Smith made the following observations on the historical and sociological value of the collection:

“…to students of Hausa culture and history, [Edgar's collection] provides a comprehensive body of diverse materials, much of which being explicitly fictive, is of great ethnographic significance as a projection of Hausa attitudes and practice on to other planes. Together these texts, descriptive and narrative, supply rich first-hand materials on Hausa institutions, inter-ethnic relations and social stratification, supplementing such standard sources as the Kano Chronicle and other Emirate histories, and presenting with insight and economy the characteristic failings, virtues and orientations of Hausa differentiated by rank, sex, age and circumstance. Directly, and in narrative obliquely, the texts also present many insights into Hausa values, beliefs and social orientations. As documents that transmit the flavour of Hausa life and the background of individual experience, they have few rivals.”

It seems appropriate to refer to Smith's observations at the start of this examination of three Hausa poems since, in my opinion very similar observations could be made about the materials in several collections of Hausa prose and poetry made by a number of German scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from one of which the three poems discussed in this paper originate.

Twenty–one collaborators and I recently have championed the use of demographic insights in the reconstruction of African history. The advocacy, however, does not mean that we endorse all uses to which demography has been put in the recent literature. We all recognize the delicacy of transferring methods from one discipline to another. In this essay I would like to suggest five pitfalls into which some distinguished scholars have fallen as a caution for further research. Some of the authors of course, may not believe them pit-falls at all, but the production of history requires debates on methods as well as fact and theory.

Before, embarking on this critique, however, let me propose a framework which relates primarily to one of the three major components of demography, the study of mortality. The analysis of mortality in Africa really involves three nested questions which researchers inevitably address either implicitly or explicitly: why do organisms die? why and how do people die? and why and how do people die in Africa? In the course of explaining how demographers answer these questions, I will illustrate the methodological errors which I be¬lieve fellow historians have committed.

Death is the inevitable outcome of life; it comes to all organisms, large and small. The causes of death and disease often work in combination. Some organisms are born defective, genetically unable to function in the same way as others of their species. Others, although properly equipped, experience accidents or shortages of food. Those which have survived to maturity experience aging, a process by which the biological mechanisms which have enabled creatures to repair themselves and to fight off enemies, cease functioning, and death is the final outcome. All these causes of death can occur without the intervention of other creatures. The earth, however, is filled with a variety of organisms which are capable of killing one another. Members of some species kill each other, but the most common causes of death are interspecific, involving the relationships of prédation and parasitism.