It is now possible to apply the concept of problematic to a critique of African history, in the first place to illustrate how the constitution of its object has been the site of certain ideological confrontations. Our analysis derives from the materialist problematic and therefore lays no claim to any spurious neutrality. On the other hand, neither is it ‘ideological’ in the sense of expressing personal or subjective preferences. The ability of historical materialism to produce objective knowledge does not derive from, nor is it guaranteed by, its political purposes, the overthrow of capitalism and the eventual construction of communism, but the achievement of these purposes has as one of its conditions the continuous development of materialist theory and analysis. The following critique is grounded in the concepts and methodology of historical materialism and not in any subjectively rooted ideological ‘choice.’

A preliminary question concerns the extent to which African history provides an object of a critique. There is no assumption that African history is a corpus of knowledge homogeneous in its aims, its concepts, or its methods. The assumption of a unitary object (“the African past”) has been shown to lack any scientific content. The boundaries of African history are indicated in the first place by the course of its emergence as a particular field of academic specialization. In terms of its content, it is hardly surprising that the works of African history produced to date reflect various positions within the terrain of bourgeois social thought. The latter, as we suggested earlier, is not homogeneous and operates at various levels.

This paper draws attention to an ambitious project in the publication of source material for the precolonial history of West Africa, which has recently been approved for inclusion in the Fontes Historiae Africanae series of the British Academy. In addition to self-promotion, however, I wish also to take the opportunity to air some of the problems of editorial strategy and choice which arise with regard to the editing and presentation of this material, in the hope of provoking some helpful feedback on these issues.

The material to be published consists of correspondence of the Royal African Company of England relating to the West African coast in the late seventeenth century. The history of the Royal African Company (hereafter RAC) is in general terms well known, especially through the pioneering (and still not superseded) study by K.G. Davies (1957). The Company was chartered in 1672 with a legal monopoly of English trade with Africa. Its headquarters in West Africa was at Cape Coast (or, in the original form of the name, Cabo Corso) Castle on the Gold Coast, and it maintained forts or factories not only on the Gold Coast itself, but also at the Gambia, in Sierra Leone, and at Offra and Whydah on the Slave Coast. It lost its monopoly of the African trade in 1698, and thereafter went into decline, effectively ceasing to operate as a trading concern in the 1720s, although it continued to manage the English possessions on the coast of West Africa until it was replaced by a regulated company (i.e., one open to all traders), the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, in 1750.

The famous 1957 wager between Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana is a signal event in modern African history. Yet it has never been adequately historicized. How did this fateful meeting come about? An archival discovery reveals the hidden history of the wager’s construction. This wager inaugurated a tradition of comparison between Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire that shaped both the ways that Côte d’Ivoire was seen by social scientists and the ways that Ivorians saw themselves.

The history of the commercial entrepôts on the Atlantic coast of West Africa in the pre-colonial period is far from being a neglected topic, but has attracted considerable academic research. The potential value of a biographical (or prosopographical) approach to the social history of such coastal communities has also long been recognized, the classic pioneering example being Margaret Priestley's study of the Brew family of Anomabu, on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), founded by the locally settled Irish slave-trader Richard Brew (died 1776). The case of the Brews, however, presents exceptionally favorable conditions for the reconstruction both of individual biography and of collective family history, in that the founder was literate and generated a considerable corpus of written records which survives to the present, while for subsequent generations of the family the early establishment of an institutionalized form of British proto-colonial administration on the Gold Coast also yielded relatively abundant documentation.

Elsewhere on the coast, and more particularly for individuals and families lower down the social scale, the amount of evidence available is likely to be much more limited and fragmentary. The present article represents a tentative attempt at a biography of a person of much lesser eminence than Richard Brew or his descendants, which may therefore be regarded as a venture into the field of subaltern history. To the extent that it also concerns someone who generated no documentation of his own, but whose life has to be reconstructed from incidental references in the records of the external agencies with whom he had dealings, it is also conceived as a methodological exploration of the possibility of extracting an African voice and perspective from European (and Eurocentric) sources.

Many early records in West Africa arise from missionary accounts. While they may contain rich ethnographic data, this detail should be approached only after analysis and consideration of the authors of the sources in question. In early Sierra Leone, important data was recorded on behalf of the English evangelical Church Missionary Society, but the missionaries reporting on the ground comprised an insufficiently studied group of German-speaking Pietist Lutherans originating from central and northern Europe. This article analyzes the authors of this information in order to approach their accounts with a better appreciation of existing bias and to better engage with how diverse sociocultural perspectives affect the historical record.

Exactly when Islam arrived on the Swahili coast is difficult to say, but Mombasa was a Muslim town long before the arrival of Vasco da Gama in 1498. During the two centuries or so that the Portuguese-Christians occupied this part of the sea route from Europe to India there were churches in Mombasa and elsewhere in Swahililand, but none has endured. Modern Christianity dates from 1844, when Ludwig Krapf arrived in Mombasa. Before then Mombasa was a “wholly Mohammedan” town. Krapf, a German Lutheran, was employed by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) based in London. Failing to make any converts on the island, Krapf moved into the coastal hinterland, among the Nyika, where Islam was less in evidence and where, therefore, Krapf was more hopeful of success. With remarkable perspicacity he wrote: “Christianity and civilisation ever go hand in hand…. A black bishop and black clergy of the Protestant Church may, ere long, become a necessity in the civilisation of Africa.”

In England, when attention was drawn to the east African slave trade, a settlement of liberated slaves was established on the mainland north of Mombasa island in 1875, and a church built (Emmanuel Church, Frere Town)—the first parcel of land in central Swahililand to be owned by European-Christians. There was still no church on the island. However, this was the zenith of the British imperial power and in the capital of almost every major British overseas possession, it was de rigueur—alongside the Secretariat and the Club—to have a Church of England cathedral.

I do not profess to have produced the best or [an] exhaustive history … but I hope that these feeble efforts of mine shall be a stepping stone for others to follow.

This is the first part of a study of the works of Chief Theophilus Olabode Avoseh, the Gbesiewu of Badagry, a man of culture and self–education who represents two related but distinct peoples, the Egun and the Yoruba–Awori, and who, above all, is a prolific researcher and distinguished local historian. In this first part, I will provide the biodata on Avoseh, and then introduce his minor works with translations and comments designed to bring out their significance. My primary aims are to draw attention to these obscure works and make them accessible to other researchers.

In the second part, I will examine Avoseh's major works, that is, his two studies of Badagry and Epe: A Short History of Badagry published in 1938, recently revised and awaiting publication, and A Short History of Epe published in 1960. This second part will emphasize the special aspects of Avoseh's works and their contribution to Yoruba and Aja historiography. These two major works have been of considerable value to other historians in their reconstruction of the history of the coastal cities whereas the minor works presented here are comparatively little known.

The Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique (hereafter AHM) holds mostly nineteenth- and twentieth-century documentation. Most of the documents available were generated by organs of the public (colonial) administration. There are very few fragmentary private papers (collected as “espólios”) and a few collections of documents originated by companies and associations (e.g., Notícias, Moçacor, ATCM, BNU).

In the 1890s, when the administrative capital of Mozambique was still on the Island of Moçambique, António Enes ordered all documents prior to the liberal revolution of 1833-34 to be sent to Lisbon. As a result most of the correspondence between the island of Moçambique and the colonial districts for the period ca. 1750-1830 (correspondence and registers and copies of outgoing correspondence in bound books) was sent to Lisbon where it can be consulted in the original in the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarine Most of these now exist on microfilm in the AHM as well. In the 1930s the colonial intellectuals of Mozambique working in different government services founded a scientific society. The colonial administration added to this a cultural publication (Moçambique, Documentário Trimestral, 1935-1960), and also in 1934 the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique, which was set up step by step between 1938 and 1940. Originally, this was part of the Library of the Department of Statistics (Costa 1987:4). From 1943 to 1963 it was headed by Lt. Caetano Montez and collected nineteenth- and a few early twentieth-century documents and any archival material tranferred by their originating institutions and partly indexed them.

In the following commentary on three Hausa poems presented in Part I of this essay, I attempt to analyze each poem, paying greatest attention to Wakar Talauci da Wadata. First I take up the matter of the dating of the poem from internal evidence and follow that with some general observations on the problems and methods involved in the analysis. The detailed commentary on Wakar Talauci da Wadata follows, divided into four sections: an examination of the objective conditions of poverty and wealth as they are presented in the poem; a discussion of the subjective evaluation of the condition of poverty and the condition of wealth, as Darho observed it among the Hausa; an examination of the way in which women are represented in the poem; and a discussion of the proposition that there are contradictions in the poem itself and in the social position of the poet. After discussing Wakar Madugu Yahaya and Wakar Abinda, I try to place Wakar Talauci da Wadata in the comparative context of several Western European literary products and one Arabic. The object of this excursus is to show that in the literature of other cultures, more or less distant in both time and space, there have been concerns and preoccupations that are essentially the same as those that occupied the mind of Darho.

Unlike the 1903 version of the poem used by Pilaszewicz and Tahir/Goody, the version from the Mischlich collection is undated, but there is internal evidence to suggest that the poem was composed no earlier than 1874/75 and probably between 1896 and 1910.

The absence of writing from indigenous sub-Saharan cultures has often been identified as one of the key elements that distinguished African societies from those of Europe and Asia. Literacy permits an extension of the range of human intercourse, increased bureaucratic and commercial complexity, and an enlargement and stabilization of political scale. Some scholars suggest that it also encourages a more abstract and detached way of thinking about present-day problems. Writing is, moreover, commonly assumed to transform people's understanding of the past. The evidence, therefore, that the kingdom of Bunyoro in western Uganda possessed an indigenous form of writing is potentially of great significance. In this paper I examine the limited evidence that such a method of communication did exist, before analyzing its function and importance. I will argue that the use of a coded language of flowers in Bunyoro requires a reassessment of how power was exercised in precolonial interlacustrine kingdoms, of the nature of environmental knowledge in hierarchical African societies, and of Bunyoro's place in the historiography of east Africa.

It is especially interesting that the form of writing that developed in Bunyoro was based on a floral code, as the absence of both writing and flowers in African culture have been used by Jack Goody as evidence of African culture's separateness from that of “Eurasia.” Goody has written that African peoples generally did not make significant use of flowers in worship, gift-giving or decoration. He does “not know of any indigenous use of odours,” nor of plants playing a role in stories or myths. This is thought to be because of Africa's “simple” agriculture, “non-complex” societies and absence of a “culture of luxury.”

The Rwandan revolution of 1959-1962 marked an important watershed not only for the history of the country but also for its historiography. Within Rwandan historical studies these political changes encouraged the development of a more broadly-based analysis, one which went beyond the earlier tendency to focus on the Nyiginya royal court. The effects of this new historiography were not limited to Rwanda alone, however, since historical perceptions ultimately derived from Rwandan studies had dominated much of the earlier research on pre-colonial history both east and west of the lake. Combined with the emergence of new analytic assumptions elsewhere in Africa, the shift in Rwanda during the 1960s therefore freed studies west of the lake from the constraints of a particularly sterile historical model and opened the way for the initiatives of a new generation of Zairean historians conducting research there in the 1970s. This changing context of research initiatives and the continuing process of reassessment within Rwanda has also aligned perceptions of Rwandan history more closely with those of other areas. We can look forward in the future to more fruitful regional historical perspectives which transcend present political boundaries; it may well be that Rwandan research of the 1980s will draw increasingly on the concepts and conclusions of Zairean research of the 1970s.

Even while this new approach has perforated political boundaries on the ground, it has also dissolved the earlier rigid disciplinary boundaries of research. The major influence in this new approach came from the work of anthropologists (or historians with anthropological training).

C'est à bon droit que Vansina considère les anciens dictionnaires comme des sources historiques, qui « conceal an ample description of a society and its culture at a given moment. » (HIA, 1 (1974), pp. 149-52). Pourtant il nous semble qu'il n'a pas toujours tenu compte de sa propre recommandation, très importante: « it must be constantly in mind who wrote them and for what purposes. »

En effet, à titre d'example, Vansina s'applique à extraire des informations précises sur l'ancien royaume de Congo, d'un dictionnaire trilingue du milieu du XVIIe siècle, copié par le capucin flamand Georges de Geel, arrivé au Congo en juin 1651 et mort le 27 décembre de l'année suivante. Cette copie autographe est conservée à la Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio-Emmanuele de Rome et se présente sous forme d'un lexique latin-espagnol, augmenté de la traduction kikongo de chaque vocable. Vansina ne semble pas avoir eu recours à cette copie, la seule parvenue jusqu'à nous: il s'est fié à une soi-disant édition de manuscrit de G. de Geel, éditée par les jésuites J. van Wing et C. Penders, Le plus ancien dictionnaire bantou: Vocabularium P. Georgii Gelensis (Louvain, 1928). Cette édition a laissé tomber les vocables latins et espagnols et a regroupé les termes kikongo, récrits selon la graphie « moderne », par ordre alphabétique en y ajoutant la traduction française et flamande.

Ne tenant pas compte du caractère particulier du dictionnaire de G. de Geel. Vansina, utilisant uniquement l'édition Van Wing/Penders, semble avoir tiré de la présence de certains termes kikongo, des conclusion très hâtives. Ainsi de la mention de certains termes ou circonlocutions kikongo, il déduit l'existence dans le société Kongo de « wine merchants, butchers, fishmongers, booksellers, shop¬keepers, clothes sellers, perfume dealers, and pharmacists. » Il y aurait eu des bou¬langers, et même des restaurants.

Few slaving agreements contracted between African sellers and American purchasers appear to have survived. They were rarely committed to paper, were destroyed after commitments were fulfilled, or were removed from business records kept by slave traders. The contract discussed here is of considerable interest as a document which, although brief, records important information and offers intriguing insights concerning African-European and African-African relationships in Guinea-Conakry at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The slaving contract is dated 15 November 1804, and apparently was negotiated aboard the merchant ship Charlotte of Bristol, Rhode Island, Jonathan Sabens, master, anchored at the Iles de Los archipelago.

Nov. th[ursday] 15-1804

Shipe Charlotte

fortay days after date I Promas to pay Jno. Sabens or orde[r] nin[e] hundard and ni[ne]ty five Bars to be Pade in Rice and Slave Say fore tun of Rice at nity Bars par tun the Remandr in Slaves at one hundard and Twenty Bars par Slave.

[signed in Arabic] Fadmod [Fendan Modu Dumbuya]
[signed in Arabic] Muhammad Sa'ab shokr Mohammed Sakib Fana/Ta/ Mohammed Shabaan
(the month before Ramadan)

Respecting the American traders involved, the Charlotte was jointly owned by George D'Wolf and Jonathan Sabens of Bristol, Rhode Island. Captain Jonathan Sabens was an experienced mariner, involved in at least three previous slaving voyages, including one as master of the Charlotte. Members of the D'Wolf family were associated with numerous slaving voyages to west Africa and continued to invest in slaving ventures long after Rhode Island made the trade illegal in 1787.

Historians who work in certain diaspora areas of the Mande people are frequently told by Mandekan speakers that their ancestors came from “Mande Kaba” (Kaaba). When reporting this, they usually then proceed to explain that Kaba is the Mande term for the French-named town of Kangaba, capital of the Mali empire. However, in my work on the precolonial state of Kong in northeastern Côte d'Ivoire, it became important to question exactly what this phrase means in the context of oral traditions and chronology.

The hypothesis equating Kaba, Kangaba, and the capital of the Mali empire dates back in print to the early French studies of ancient Mali, and particularly to Maurice Delafosse, that prolific writer on West African oral traditions, religion, and languages. In his 1912 magnum opus, Haut-Sénégal-Niger, Delafosse cited Kangaba, “sans doute” as the capital of the pre-Sunjata “royaume” of Mali. In his annotation of the French translation of the mid-seventeenth century compilation, Ta'rikh al-Fattash, Delafosse again presented this idea. The Ta'rikh stated that “[t]he town which served previously as the capital of the emperor of Mali was named Diêriba [jāriba]; following, there was another named Niani [Yan.”

In a note Delafosse explained that Diêriba “is also the name of the town called Kangaba on our [French] maps, which after having been the first capital of the manding empire, is still today the chief town of the province of Manding or Malli.” He was most likely relaying information from his interpretation of traditions as well as his own personal observations of early twentieth-century Kangaba. The Keita family, claiming descent from Sunjata Keita, the founder of the Mali empire, enjoyed political control of Kangaba, and were recognized as having held this position for some time.

Several years ago, Derek Nurse and I began to consider the increasing need to make revisions to our book, The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800-1500. We knew there had been significant archeological finds subsequent to its publication in 1985, but we were surprised to discover that hundreds of new books and articles had appeared. It therefore seemed expedient, not simply to revise the earlier work, but to compile a comprehensive new bibliography on early Swahili history and society that would facilitate thorough reconsideration of the issues in the future. This now includes 700 items, 428 published before 1985 and 272 published after. This is a massive literature, and it will make extensive demands on those working in the field (Spear 1999).

The focus here is on the history and development of coastal societies over the past two millennia, but I have included recent ethnography, linguistics, and history for comparative purposes. What is missing, however, are sources covering literature and the arts, for which one may consult Kelly Askew's excellent online bibliography (Askew 1999). I have included mainly published work, but unpublished theses and papers are also included where available. I have not, however, included archival materials in government (e.g., Tanzanian, Zanzibari, British, German, Indian, French, U.S.), mission (CMS, UMCA, LMS), or local (Salem, Hamburg, Rhodes House) collections, nor have I included material in mission publications.

The bibliography is subdivided by discipline—archaeology, linguistics and language, ethnography, and history. Most items have been confirmed in OCLC WorldCat or other authoritative sources, correcting numerous errors in previous citations. Arabic names are alphabetized as they appear, inconsistently, in databases for ease of finding.

C.W. de Kiewiet's A History of South Africa Social and Economic, published by Oxford University Press in 1941, remains one of the most-used general histories of that country. No other single work by a professional historian on South Africa has been so influential, so often cited and quoted. Yet few readers of the book have known anything about its author's career or about the circumstances under which it was written. “Before you study the history,” advises E.H. Carr in What is History?, “study the historian,” to which he adds: “Before you study the historian, study his historical and social environment.” In this short paper all that can be done is to say something of the historian, and of how he came to write his book. This is, then, the history of A History.

Born in Holland in 1902, C.W. de Kiewiet was taken by his parents to South Africa the following year. He grew up in Johannesburg and attended the University College, which from 1922 was known as Wits. There he studied under W.M. Macmillan, the Professor of History, who was then working on the papers of the missionary John Philip and beginning to prepare what would become his two classic works, The Cape Colour Question and Bantu, Boer, and Briton. Macmillan supervised the thesis on the Cape northern frontier which de Kiewiet completed for his M.A. degree in 1924.

Nineteenth-century European visitors to the kingdom of Dahomey were not easily impressed, certainly not by any infrastructural refinement. So when one after another perceived grandeur in the Cana-Abomey road, it was no small compliment. For French travelers the road was “magnifique,” “superbe,” a “merveille,” “fort belle,” “vraiment belle,” or “des plus belles.” For British travelers “splendid” or—perhaps the ultimate accolade—as broad as any thoroughfare in England.

This remarkable road was the last leg of the regular route from Dahomey's Atlantic port of Whydah to the royal capital at Abomey. Its basic purpose was not to impress foreigners on their approach to the capital, as one might imagine, but to allow the kings of Dahomey to travel to and from Cana in style.

In Fon traditions Cana dates back to the origins of the kingdom in the early seventeenth century and may have preceded Abomey as tribal chef-lieu. When Dahomey was subject to the Yoruba empire of Oyo (from the 1730s or 1740s to the 1820s), Cana was the place where Oyo messengers collected the annual tribute. King Gezo (1818-58) is said to have begun his successful challenge of Oyo very early in his reign by having those messengers slaughtered.

The Periplus of Hanno describes a purported Carthaginian voyage down the coast of western Africa—a voyage to as far as Guinea in the opinion of some scholars. The brief text is of doubtful and at best partial historical authenticity; and in any case its account of the later part of the voyage concentrates on a few episodes of high drama and exotic observation, at the expense of those other detailed particulars which might have made the Periplus, if historical, an informative as well as unique documentary source on black Africa in the first millennium B.C.. At least as far as black Africa is concerned, it must be questioned whether the Periplus is worth a fraction of the intensive scholarly effort that has been spent on it during the past four hundred years.

Current debate among ancient historians and classical philologists turns on the nature of the Periplus: is it wholly fiction? or, if fact, is it fact fictitiously extended and embellished? or, a third possibility, is it fact dramatically and perhaps intentionally summarized and slanted? But from the point of view of the historian seeking to obtain information about early sub-Saharan Africa in general and west Africa in particular, this debate can be by-passed (hence the present paper does not need or attempt to comprehend, pursue, or augment the detailed scholarly arguments and evidence available in the literature). For whether based on fact or not, the Periplus is patently a piece of literature of a kind which does not afford precise historical information.

Aaron Belisarius Cosimo Sibthorpe, a village school teacher who wrote the first history of Sierra Leone, was a man of mystery, a magus. So he seems to have seen himself. The dead, he wrote, have vanished into oblivion,

Here is a powerful, original image. The historian peremptorily calls up the dead from the “immense Jehoshaphat”—the valley where they all lie gathered together to await the judgment of God—choosing anyone he wants, and at his call they are obliged to rise and answer him obediently, as Lazarus answered Jesus. If only for this image Sibthorpe deserves our wonder and gratitude.