Before departing for Mali, researchers should write a formal request for permit to conduct research to: Ministre de l'Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche Scientifique, Bamako. A second letter should be sent to M. Mamadou Sarr, Chef de la Division de Recherche Scientifique, B.P. 159, Bamako, advising him that the first letter has been written and stating both the research topic and the anticipated duration of the research trip.

Once in Bamako (if permission is granted), the “Autorisation de Recherche” can be obtained from M. Sarr, whose office is in the Ministry of Education Building on the Place de la Liberté. If this can be done within the first few days after arrival and before expiration of the temporary visa, the research authorization can simplify the visa renewal process at the Direction des Services de Sécurité. Authorization for access to the Archives Nationales du Mali requires a separate application, which also is issued by M. Sarr and can be applied for at the same time as the general authorization.

Every researcher is required to work under the aegis of the Institut des Sciences Humaines, of which M. Sarr is director. Those intending to do field work are assigned an I.S.H.M. “technician” who may have some background in the subject and can also be helpful in contacting informants. In principle, the technician is supposed to accompany the investigator on all field trips, and the investigator is expected to pay the technician's transportation costs, food, and lodging, as well as 2,000 Malien francs (about $5.00) per diem.

This archival research report details the uses and disuses of UNESCO’s Paris archives of its General History of Africa. By looking in detail at what African historians have been doing as well as writing, we can reach a better understanding of the reality of African history writing in the immediate postcolonial era. That means taking into account the complexity of the archive; and using J.F. Ade-Ajayi’s archive in Ibadan as an example we can see that the vast Paris collection of material relating to the writing of the General History of Africa is complemented by documents scattered across different archives.

In this article I use oral and documentary evidence gathered during recent fieldwork and archival research in the UK and Kenya to explore the ways in which the Church of Scotland Mission to Kenya attempted to use sport to “civilize” and “discipline” the people of Central Kenya. I make a case for the important contributions the topic of sport can make to the study of African and colonial history, and offer a comprehensive critique of the only book-length work which explores the history of sport in colonial Kenya, John Bale and Joe Sang’s Kenyan Running (1996).

In the six years from October 1897 to October 1903, Ndukwana kaMbengwana engaged in scores of conversations in numerous different locations with magistrate James Stuart about the history and culture of the nineteenth-century Zulu kingdom. In the 1880s Ndukwana had been a lowranking official in the native administration of Zululand; at an unknown date before late 1900 he seems to have become Stuart's personal induna or “headman,” to give a common English translation. Stuart's handwritten notes of these conversations, as archived in the James Stuart Collection, come to a total of 65,000 to 70,000 words. As rendered in volume 4 of the James Stuart Archive, published in 1986, these notes fill 120 printed pages, far more than the testimonies of any other of Stuart's interlocutors except Socwatsha kaPhaphu. From 1900, Ndukwana was also present during many of Stuart's conversations with other individuals.

In the editors' preface to volume 4 of the James Stuart Archive, after drawing attention to the length of Ndukwana's testimony, Colin Webb and I wrote as follows:

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Hausa migrants traveled to the Cameroon Grassfields where they established multiple settlements known as abakwa, a term referring to descendants of mixed marriages between Hausa men and local, mainly non-Muslim women. Previous historical studies on Hausa diaspora communities in West Africa have largely concentrated on the spread of commerce and Islam. By contrast, this article asks how gendered power asymmetries, together with the essential diaspora factors of distance and travel, influenced the marital relationships that made the diaspora possible. This approach to Hausa diaspora history emerges from Islamic court records dating from the late 1940s to the early 1960s in British mandated territory. The founding of the court resulted in the institutionalization of Islamic household patriarchy as well as debates over Hausa values, especially marriage as a primary site of belonging and patriarchal control. This article demonstrates that marital negotiations and distance interacted with colonial legal structures and community patriarchy in a manner that both intensified women’s vulnerability and provided opportunities to strategically forge new identities and relationships.

This article examines the project to digitize and preserve the archives of the Mineworkers’ Union of Zambia and has two aims. The first aim is to discuss the process of cataloguing and digitizing an archive that has undergone significant deterioration, and the theoretical and practical challenges to achieving this. The second aim is to relate making this archive more accessible to questions of knowledge production. Despite its limitations, the value of this archive is that it is primarily composed of documents produced by Africans about the world as they saw it. These are not the records of external powers, colonial officials, or those studying African peoples.

This article examines a previously overlooked publication titled The Indian Voice of British East Africa, Uganda and Zanzibar. Printed in Nairobi between 1911 and 1913, the Indian Voice has been dismissed by some scholars as “insignificant” in the wider context of Kenya’s militant press. As an important tool for discovering, exploring and analyzing the nature of racial hierarchies, diasporic identity and belonging, this article argues that the Indian Voice can be used to understand how “new kinds of self-representation” both emerged and dissolved in early twentieth-century East Africa. By contextualizing the historical significance of the newspaper, it demonstrates how the Indian Voice offers an invaluable means of generating new insights into the complex cultural and political formulations of Indian identities in diaspora. In doing so, this article contributes to remapping the historical perspective of East African Indians within the early colonial period.

This report describes the official photographic archives of Idi Amin’s government held by the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC). During his reign from 1971 to 1979, Idi Amin embraced visual media as a tool for archiving the achievements of populist military rule as his government sought to reorient Ugandans’ relationship with the state. Only a handful of the resulting images were ever printed or seen, reflecting the regime’s archival impulse undergirded by paranoia of unauthorized ways of seeing. The UBC’s newly opened collection of over 60,000 negatives from Amin’s photographers, alongside files at the Uganda National Archives, offers the first comprehensive opportunity to study the Ugandan state under Amin’s dictatorship through the lens of its own documentarians.

The so far unknown report by Norberto Correia, Portuguese administrator of the Baixo-Cunene border district, is an impressive document on forced labor and flight at the Angola-Namibia border, written by a controversial official fallen into disgrace after a regime change in the metropole. Correia’s acerbic and detailed analysis allows fresh interpretations of a border situation that is only at first glance well-known. By contrasting the Correia report with documentation from South African officials and the voices of their Ovambo partners in indirect rule, we come to clearer understanding of motivations and options at this unruly colonial border.

On 19 January 1482, a Portuguese fleet of ships under the command of Captain Don Diego d'Azambuja landed at Elmina (a small town on the Gold Coast, what is now Ghana). D'Azambuja immediately set up a meeting with the king of Elmina. King Kwamena Ansa, dressed in all of his finery, met with the Portuguese captain, and during this meeting d'Azambuja asked for permission to build a permanent settlement. At first, Ansa denied his request, stating that he should watch the waves of the sea. Just as they come to the shore, reach the shore, and go back, so too should he continue to come to Elmina, trade, and go back to Portugal. After persistent requests however, Ansa finally agreed and allowed the Portuguese to build a fort known today as Elmina Castle.

I first heard this story from men and women in Elmina during field research there in 2001. When I asked people to tell me about the history of the town and gave them free rein to discuss any topic of their choosing, this was often the story that they chose to tell. Kwamena Ansa, it seems, is a local legend. His fame has extended beyond Elmina however, and into Western scholarship. In particular, David Henige has tracked the emergence of Ansa within Elmina's oral tradition. Henige argues that, while this historical figure can be traced through written sources reaching all the way back to the early sixteenth century, his recognition as a past king by local residents in Elmina has a much shorter history. Indeed, Ansa first emerged in kinglists dating back only to the 1920s and 1930s. During this time, Henige argues, local residents began reading European texts about Elmina's history in order to negotiate colonial courts. The inclusion of Ansa on kinglists represents, therefore, an example of feedback, which is the process of the integration of information from the written record into the oral tradition.

The basic purpose here is to offer an archival report about historical and ethnographic material collected partly in Mali but mostly in Guinea, when such efforts in the latter country were contrary to official government policy and in some cases could be hazardous to undertake. Owing to the risks involved in some intellectual activities in Guinea between 1958 and 1984, as well as the importance of the material recorded on reel-to-reel tapes in this archive, the research accomplished by Djibril Tamsir Niane in the 1960s that culminated in the 1969-1971 expeditions to Baga villages, was itself historically significant. Moreover, the fact that once the research had been done the recorded information survived ensuing decades of potentially destructive climatic conditions and political events is remarkable. Therefore, as a prologue to introducing the archival material in the process of preservation at the time of this writing, it seems appropriate to begin this report with a description of the circumstances under which the recordings were made and how they survived to the present day.

In 1947, the colonial government in British Cameroon established an Islamic court in the Grassfields to try cases involving the region's Muslim population, primarily comprised of Fulani and Hausa diaspora communities that had settled the area since the late nineteenth century. Colonial debates over the creation and purview of the court reveal uncertainties that permeated Indirect Rule's legal categories of native and non-native, or tribe and race, which were to be governed by customary and civil law, respectively. Comparing legal regimes in British Cameroon with Northern Nigeria, the homeland of “native” Hausa and Fulani, shows that Islamic law sat uneasily across the divide between customary and civil law. With the importation of the court to the Grassfields, where Fulani and Hausa transformed into “native foreigners,” the delineation between customary and civil law was rendered even more obscure, illustrating that it could never neatly correspond to constructions of race and tribe.

Bulama (otherwise Bolama) Island is the furthest inshore member of the Bissagos Islands, off the West African coast, in the present-day state of Guiné-Bissau. On the east side of the wide estuary of Rio Jeba, it stands near the mouth of Rio Balola. Small, low-lying, partly surrounded by sandbanks and swamps, often uninhabited, and considered by whites scenically attractive but very unhealthy, Bulama has appeared in historical records with disproportionate frequency. It may have been noted during the earliest stages of Portuguese “Discovery;” two centuries on, it was investigated by the French. It was later the locality of a disastrous British settlement, the proposed home for a colony of African-Americans, and for sixty years the site of a colonial capital; and it was the subject of a well-meant arbitration by a President of the U.S.A. Finally, it was the center for an international conference on its own past, held in 1990. That past, of little importance in itself, nevertheless provides a keyhole glimpse of much of the history of the western Guinea coast over four centuries.

Our knowledge of the earlier history of the island of Bulama is slight and depends on European sources. The region of the estuary of Rio Jeba—or “Rio Grande” as it was originally known—was first visited by Europeans in the 1450s. The earliest Portuguese ship to arrive was probably the one on which a certain Diogo Gomes traveled, the date probably 1456. The account of this voyage, as edited by a contemporary scholar in the 1490s from the oral narrative of Diogo Gomes in old age, indicates that the Portuguese landed at a point along Rio Jeba and saw wild animals: deer, elephants, and crocodiles.

The Songhay Empire was a remarkable west African state, flourishing in several areas including territorial and trade expansion, development of a strong military and centralized government, unprecedented support for learning and scholarship, and skilful relations with the greater Sudanic and Islamic lands. Songhay arose out of the remains of the Mali empire under the rule of Sonni Ali ca. 1464. Yet it was the empire's second ruler, Askiya Muhammad, who initiated the century-long golden age of peace and stability, bringing Songhay to its zenith. This era was particularly fruitful for the cities of Gao, Timbuktu, and Jenne, the empire's administrative, scholarly, and trade centers respectively. Timbuktu soared to preeminence in the Sudan and became known in other parts of the Muslim world, producing many respected scholars. However, by the later part of the sixteenth century fractious disarray among the descendants of Askiya Muhammad weakened the state, ultimately leading to the Moroccan invasion of 1591. Songhay's capitulation to the invaders ended the age of the great medieval west African states.

In an oral discourse passed down through many generations, the village elder Vase Kamara describes how a slave named Zo Musa Kòma founded the ancient town of Musadu in Guinea-Conakry, and he explains how the legendary Kamara ancestor Foningama later became a leader in Musadu. We tentatively date some elements of the Zo Musa stories to about the fourteenth and fifteenth century, when the Manding began to assimilate and push the Southwestern and Eastern Mande-speaking peoples from the Musadu area in the Konyan to the forest. Some of the Foningama related accounts seem to correspond to the era when the Kamara who settled in the Konyan became active in the sixteenth-century Mane “invasions.”

Stories about Musadu's founding provide information about these movements and help bridge the histories of the savanna and forest peoples who live in Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, and Liberia. The Musadu legend links the Konyaka to their kinsmen who live in the traditional heartland of the Mali empire in present-day northern Guinea and southern Mali. In addition, some Manding, Vai, Loma, Gola, Kpelle, Konor, Dan, and Mano trace their origins to Musadu, and reflect one Loma writer's claim that “all of the tribes in Liberia are from Musadu, or have some association with Musadu” (Korvali 1960:7).

The main actors are Manding (Mandekan) speakers who migrated to the Mau/Gbè and Konyan regions of western Côte d'Ivoire and southern Guinea respectively. The Mauka/Gbèka and Konyaka are members of the Northern Mande language group and are classified as Maninka (Malinke). The Bamana (Bambara), Dyula (Jula), and Vai are other Northern Mande speakers. Vase claims that Foningama was Manding, and that Zo Musa was Kpelle. The Kpelle, Loma, and Konor are Southwestern Mande speakers, and the Dan (Gio) and Mano are Eastern Mande speakers.

In the beginning of 1999 Professor David Beach died in Harare, only about three months after an unexpected illness which proved to be brain cancer had cut short his academic activities. His early death after more than thirty years of intensive research on the precolonial history of Zimbabwe and Mozambique motivated some of his friends and colleagues to plan a panel on his work in the 2000 CAAS conference in Edmonton, Canada. This paper was originally written for this Conference which I did not manage to attend. Not only his figure as historian and friend but also the context he was working in interested me, including the problem of local production of knowledge in Africa in the colonial and postcolonial environment. In this paper I shall present some biographical data on David Beach, outline the sequence of his research and writing, cover his concept and contribution to history, the reception of his work in Mozambique, ending with some comments regarding the problems of local production of scientific knowledge in African countries. The coverage is in places somewhat sketchy and some subjects like the reception of his studies in Zimbabwe have only been referenced briefly, and that in North America omitted.

The sections of the paper which deal with the sequence of his research, method, etc. and focus on sociological aspects of his production are based mainly on indications in Beach's own published work. Additional information came from his correspondence, hints he gave in casual conversation during my four visits to Harare in 1971 and 1982-1995, and during his six visits to Maputo in 1987, 1989, 1990, 1992, 1994 and 1997, as well as some observations.

One of the foremost achievements of missionary enterprise in the African region was the training of individuals, particularly clergymen, who came to play pioneering roles in the documentation of the history of their peoples. One of the reasons usually advanced by such chroniclers for taking part in this tedious attempts at historical reconstruction, is basically, to safeguard the history of their people and most especially, the need to prevent their history from being distorted, forgotten or sent into some oblivion. Examples of clergymen or missionary influenced personalities who have performed such tasks in Nigeria include Reverend Samuel Johnson, on the history of the Yoruba, J.D. Egharevba on the history of Benin, and Reverend Samuel Ojo, on the history of Ilorin and Shaki.

These chronicles have their limitations. The writers often serve as public image launderers for the people they write about. As a result, a lot of bias and subjectivism is embellished in what they attempt to project. Historical facts are distorted in this process. The lack of the chroniclers' basic methods of historical research is also evident in their narrative method of historical writing. This approach does not provide any opportunity for proper historical analysis. In spite of the limitations of these chronicles, they have served as very useful sources of primary information for contemporary historians. More importantly, their writings have been able to create a sense of identity and cultural awareness among their intended audience. In other words they have sometimes proved more relevant and acceptable to the intended audience even more than the works of contemporary historians.2 It is with this hindsight that we examine Iwe Itan Ofa by The Very Reverend J.B. Olafimihan.

As of July, 1973, the National Archives of Cameroon were located in two offices: a main branch at the capital, Yaoundé, and a second collection at Buea, the former British West Cameroon capital. Both centers are open to researchers during normal government office hours. Access to the Yaoundé collection requires no special formalities for any bona fide academic researcher (manuscript documents are closed to individuals working on their own private economic or legal affairs). To work in Buea it is necessary to have the written permission of the Yaoundé Director of Archives. Documents are considered ‘open’ if they are more than thirty years old. Conditions of work in both centers are reasonably comfortable and pleasant. Relatively few scholars are usually to be found in the reading rooms, and documents are produced fairly rapidly and in generous quantities.

These are all to be found in Buea: they cover the period beginning with the earliest British administration in 1914. Files for the Buea Residency (covering both the Bamenda and the southern regions of former West Cameroon) are well catalogued. Efforts were also being made to catalogue files from subordinate administrative centers. Some material relevant to the British administration of Cameroon is also to be found in various Nigerian archives.