In 1492 Columbus made a non-stop voyage, on the high seas of the Atlantic, between the Canary Islands and an uncertain island off the coast of America, a distance of some 3,100 nautical miles. But there is a strong likelihood that he had earlier traveled on a voyage which may also have been non-stop on the Atlantic high seas and yet been even longer. According to casual references, made in notes apparently either written or authorized by Columbus himself, he had, at an unstated date, seen and perhaps been within the castle of São Jorge da Mina in Guinea. Assuming for the purposes of further discussion that this interpretation of the notes is correct, he had therefore sailed to Mina (Elmina in present-day Ghana), most probably, it is generally thought, between 1482 and 1484, not long after the Portuguese founded the fort. He must have sailed in some capacity aboard a Portuguese vessel, possibly as a trader, if not as a mariner.

Although not otherwise recorded, the voyage to Mina is plausible since it occurred during the period of nearly ten years in which Columbus was employed within the Portuguese sphere. Little is known of his activities in this period but it is evidenced that he worked at one stage as a trader and made voyages in the 1470s to the Madeira group, where he resided for a time. When he traveled to America his descriptions of features there were not infrequently in terms of comparisons with features of Guinea, indicating that he was to some extent informed about the latter region and suggesting, perhaps strongly, that he had visited certain parts, as I noted in an earlier paper.

This article examines the digitization policy of Archives du Maroc (AdM), Morocco’s national archival institution, which was set up in 2011 and opened in 2013. Given its recent creation, the AdM lead us to question the particularity of digitization in archiving policies when included from the start rather than retroactively. Through an analysis of the creation and development of AdM as a public policy connected to national efforts at transparency and “good governance,” I argue that digitization has served as a way of performing modernity through technology and international standards, thus reinforcing the legitimacy of a nascent institution.

This article presents a history of sixteenth and seventeenth century central East African efforts to define elements of a regional fashion aesthetic, one supplied by their engaged participation in wider African and Indian Ocean world economies. I investigate regional artisanal economies in the central East African mainland, looking specifically at communities in what is now southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique and their uses of one of the most “exoticized” elements of their fashion: lip ornaments often called lip-plugs. Close readings of sixteenth and seventeenth century Portuguese accounts and historical linguistics evidence reveals a new history of developing regional fashion trends. Such a history underscores the importance of regional consumers and artisanal experts in shaping wider East African precolonial economies.

Nigeria in the post-independence years has seen its share of hardship. Politically dominated by military dictatorships, economically dominated by the ravages of underdevelopment, and culturally dominated by internal ethnic tensions and external stereotyping, Nigeria certainly seems to have suffered from an overabundance of problems and a dearth of solutions in the last forty plus years. This period, full of scholarly debate on these issues, also closely parallels the academic career of A.E. Afigbo. Afigbo, who graduated with a Ph.D. in History from the University of Ibadan in 1964, was the first History doctorate produced on Nigerian soil. He is both a product and a victim of the Nigerian nation, and his scholarly writings deeply reflect these contradictions. From that point in 1964—the era of hope and anguish—to the present day—the era of anguish without hope—he has been among the vanguard of scholars in Nigerian history and African studies. He wanted to write about the past, but the present pressured him severely. Starting as a “Nigerian,” he became a “Biafran” during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70), and again a “Nigerian” thereafter. These transitions provide some kind of “political charter” to some of his writings.

It has been a remarkable career. He has authored or co-authored eight books, edited four more, and published well over a hundred journal articles. Afigbo has earned numerous prizes for his scholarship, has served on the editorial board of many acclaimed scholarly journals, including the Journal of African History and History in Africa, and has been inducted into many prestigious societies, including the Nigerian Academy of Letters. Nigeria has also honored him with its highest academic award, the National Order of Merit.

Mapping Senufo: Art, Evidence, and the Production of Knowledge – an in-progress, collaborative, born-digital publication – will offer a model for joining theories about the construction of identities and the politics of knowledge production with research and publication practice. In this article, we examine how computational methods have led us to reframe research questions, reevaluate sources, and reimagine the form of a digital monograph. We also demonstrate how our use of digital technologies, attention to iteration, and collaborative mode of working have generated fresh insights into a corpus of arts identified as Senufo, the nature of evidence for art-historical research, and digital publication. We posit that the form of a digital publication itself can bring processes of knowledge construction to the fore and unsettle expectations of a tidy, authoritative narrative.

The word “club” as employed in “Mombasa Club” derives from the late eighteenth century and signifies “an association of people formed mainly for social purposes and having premises, providing meals, temporary accommodation, etc., for the use of members.” The early nineteenth century saw a spate of new London clubs such as the Travellers in 1819 (for gentlemen who had traveled abroad), and in 1824 both the Athenaeum (the most intellectually elite of all the London clubs), and the Oriental (founded by officers in the service of the East India Company who were not eligible for the military clubs of Pall Mall). One purpose of these clubs was to give gentlemen living space from which their womenfolk were excluded. The expansion of a new British empire, from the beginning of Queen Victoria's long reign, saw the establishment of “English” clubs in Asia (especially in the Indian subcontinent) and in Africa (especially from Cape Town to Cairo). A major purpose of these “English” clubs abroad was to give members living space from which natives were excluded. The Mombasa Club, dating from the end of Queen Victoria's reign, fits into this pattern.

Le décryptage des comportements socio-culturels dans une société où la notion de développement (amajambe) est le fruit d'une démarche de type moderniste, nous enjoint à établir une distinction entre les couches sociales “sensibles” à une telle évolution—celles en particulier qui vivent en milieu urbain—et les catégories sociales qui paraissent réfractaires—en particulier dans le milieu rural—qui compte plus de 90% de la population burundaise. Ce diptyque ville/campagne ne doit pas nécessairement être perçu comme une césure, car les attitudes diverses mettent en évidence des degrés d'interaction, entre un milieu urbain ouvert à la modernité et un monde rural attaché aux traditions, et vice-versa. Les paysans savent très bien s'adapter aux innovations technologiques apportées par les projets de développement, tels que l'électrification des campagnes, l'asphaltage des grands axes de communication, etc.… Un des résultats tangibles de ces réalisations est l'accroissement de la mobilité des biens et des individus, et donc la possible intégration des régions périphériques au centre politico-administratif.

Belgian bibliographical research on Africa dates back to 1887 when G. Kayser published in Brussels a compilation of 2276 notices relating to works on the exploration and civilization of the continent which had appeared since the beginning of printing. With the publication in 1895 of the Bibliographie du Congo, 1880-1895 of A-J Wauters and A. Buyl--a catalog of 3800 works, brochures, notices, and maps relating to the history, geography, and European occupation of the Congo Free State--documentary works took a direction which, with only a few exceptions, would not be broadened until after 1960: Congo (Zaire), Rwanda, and Burundi were clearly privileged.

In a series of articles and pamphlets Théodore Heyse described the development of Belgian colonial bibliography during different periods, followed by a synthetic overview of the whole. Each of these contributions outlined in an introduction of a few pages the most significant moments of the period under review and was comprised of a list of references classified by topic as well as an onomastic index.

Historian and chronicler of Belgian colonial documentation, Heyse was also one of the most productive bibliographers of his time. A jurist by training, with additional diplomas in politics and in social sciences, he became an official in the Ministry of Colonies in 1910, retiring in 1947 with the rank of Director General. Assigned to the Direction des Concessions, he became a renowned specialist in colonial law, especially property law. To his numerous historical and juridical publications he combined intensive activity in the field of bibliography.

In 1974 the very first issue of HA included an analysis of a small section of John Barbot's Description of the coasts of North and South Guinea. Since this represented the first fruits of a project to edit Barbot's writings on Guinea, it is appropriate that, now the completed edition is published, a review of the history of the editing, the methods and problems of the editors, and the problems that the consumer will face in using the edition, should also appear in HA.

Why Barbot? When, twenty years ago, I decided that Barbot's account of Guinea should be edited, I already knew that it was partly unoriginal, and that in an ideal world priority would be given to editing the other, earlier, recognized compendium on Guinea, the relevant section of Dapper's account of all Africa. For although Dapper is also partly unoriginal, it has probably a wider range of new material than Barbot, not least the very detailed Kquoja account. Why then Barbot rather than Dapper? The answer is simple. I recognized the lack of critical editing of Guinea sources and felt I had to take the plunge somewhere. But whereas Dapper wrote in Dutch, a language of which I have only dictionary command, the earlier manuscript version of Barbot was in French, a language I could cope with. Dapper will have his turn. Adam Jones, one of the co-editors of “Barbot on Guinea,” having Dutch, has already published studies of Dapper's sources. Moreover, in the edition of Barbot we have taken the unusual step of including in the annotation fairly frequent references to the lines of transmission of information, for instance, not only noting the material Barbot borrowed from Dapper but also, where the material was not original to Dapper, the sources of his borrowing—thus doing part of the work of a critical edition of Dapper. In fact we have generally tried to make the edition of Barbot a starting point for the critical study of many other pre-1700 Guinea sources.

Although the archives of Nigeria have been utilized extensively, especially for historical studies, descriptive or introductory notes on them scarcely exist. With the following paper, based on a recent visit to the National Archives in Kaduna in October 1990, 1 want to contribute in filling this gap. The Nigerian Record Office (now National Archives of Nigeria) was established in 1954 on the recommendation and with the efforts of K. O. Dike, who had toured Nigeria and inspected the state of existing archives. Subsequently he became Government Supervisor of Public Records. Initially the archive was situated at the University of Ibadan, until in 1958 the first permanent block was erected.

The National Archives in Kaduna is one of the three National Archives in Nigeria, the other two being in Ibadan and Enugu. There is some division of competence between the three archives: Enugu is responsible for the southern parts of Nigeria, Ibadan for the western parts, and Kaduna for the states of Northern Nigeria. The present or former names of regions on which documents are to be found in Kaduna are as follows: Adamawa, Bassa, Bauchi, Benue, Borgu, Borno, Central Province, Gongola, Ilorin, Kabba, Kano, Katsina, Kontagora, Lokoja, Munshi, Muri, Nassarawa, Niger, Nupe, Plateau, Sokoto, Yola, and Zaria. In this listing there are of course regional overlappings; for in the course of history provinces have either been carved out or amalgamated into larger units. In some cases, moreover, more or less identical regions are itemized under different names.

The researcher interested in archival and bibliographical information on Gabon will already have consulted Hubert Deschamps' Traditions orales et archives du Gabon (Paris, 1962), and Brian Weinstein's “Gabon: A Bibliographical Essay,” Africana Newsletter [Stanford], 1 (Winter 1963), pp. 4-9. It is not my intention to supersede these two documents but rather to provide a more recent survey of what is presently available to the researcher in Libreville.

The local administrative archives, like those of most of the former French colonies in Africa, were removed to France on independence. This means that the investigator may spend less archival time in Gabon than he might have anticipated; nevertheless, there are several valuable archival resources available in Libreville. The most voluminous archives in Libreville have now been centralized by the government into the National Archives and Library under the direction of M. Gaston Rapontchombo. Much of the material was personally collected by him during twenty years' residence in France. The card catalogue (chronologically organized) begins with 1856 and is kept as current as is possible with a limited staff and budget. It is in the process of being cross-referenced by author and subject. The index cards (totaling some thirty to fifty linear feet) represent every book and article concerning Gabon (history, natural sciences, religion, politics, art, education, anthropology, and numerous other subject areas) that M. Rapontchombo could locate in his extensive investigations into European repositories. In some cases these include material about Gabon's neighbors. There are entries from about 1000 journals (French, English, Swiss, German, Scandinavian, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Belgian, Portuguese, South African, and other areas, including many other countries in tropical Africa). In many cases M. Rapontchombo has photocopied articles, and even complete books, but these had not been catalogued as of February 1974. There are also many photocopies of manuscripts from various archival collections in France.

The notarial records (Notariel Ardhief) in the Amsterdam town archives (Gemeente Archief) offer a rich source of data on Dutch West African trade for the period between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. In 1962 Patricia Carson published a fairly extensive list of references to these records for the years between 1651 and 1709, indicating thereby the importance of the notarial documents as a source material. However, to my knowledge this material has not been systematically examined by historians of West Africa. The purpose of this note is to draw once again the attention of historians to these documents. My comments are to be considered as supplementary to Carson's account.

The notarial records are, to put it mildly, extraordinarily voluminous. The prospective researcher should allot himself or herself a minimum time of about six months if he or she intends to examine even a representative sampling of the records in a thorough manner. Unfortunately, the records are neither catalogued nor indexed as far as the West African data are concerned, hence the researcher must read a great deal of superfluous material in hopes of coming across references to West Africa. The records are not easy to read, so it is not possible to ‘skim’ through the folios in the hope of spotting a West African place name. Each folio must be carefully examined. The records are in Dutch and the handwriting is in the Gothic script. Although the handwriting is generally clear and legible, it is remarkably -- indeed almost unnaturally-small, so that a magnifying glass would be an asset.

Writing in the 1590s about Sierra Leone, André Alvares de Almada, a Cape Verde Islands trader who had probably at one time visited Sierra Leone, commended its peoples for being “unfriendly to the English and French,” not least by fighting John Hawkins—the latter remark obviously a reference to Hawkins' well-known visit in 1567/68. But when did the French visit Sierra Leone? Elsewhere I have cited the evidence for three French voyages to the Sierra Leone estuary in the later 1560s, probably in 1565, 1566, and 1567. I now analyze archive material published in two French works that appeared long ago but are probably little known to Africanists, since both concentrate on voyages to the Americas. The first source calendars items in the registres de tabellionage (notarial registers) of the Normandy port of Honfleur relating to intercontinental voyages, the items being mainly financial agreements made before or after voyages. Dates, names of ships, and destinations are supplied for the period from 1574 to 1621: what proportion of all intercontinental voyages from Honfleur during that period is represented in the registers is uncertain. But in the eleven years between 1574 and 1584, there are recorded 24 voyages to both Guinea and America, the ships proceeding across the Atlantic from Africa. The American destination is usually described as “Indes de Pérou,” meaning the Caribbean. The African destination of 15 named vessels making 19 voyages is “Serlione” or “coste de Serlion,” in 15 instances given singly, otherwise with the addition of “et Guinée,” “et Guinée et coste de Bonnes-Gens,” or “et cap de Vert et coste de Mina.” The remaining voyages were to “Guinée,” to “cap de Vert [Cape Verde, i.e. Senegal],” to “cap des Bonnes-Gens” [Ivory Coast], or to more than one of these.

In the past twenty to twenty-five years valuable contributions have been made to southern African agrarian history. Stanley Trapido's publications, for example, opened up stimulating perspectives on the processes and forces inherent to nineteenth-century Transvaal agrarian history. Although he was modest in his 1980 chapter, “Reflections on Land, Office, and Wealth in the South African Republic, 1850-1900,” and referred to it as “a tentative and preliminary attempt to outline some important aspects of these social relationships,” it has provided historians and others with an important instrument of analysis.

However, there are still themes, regions, and periods that need attention, one of these being the central districts of the Transvaal before the industrial revolution. In this regard a little-known source which may contribute to our knowledge of the pre-industrial history of the Transvaal, and which will be published this year as an annotated source publication, should be taken note of. This is the 1871 Commission on African labor in the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR). Despite the valuable information contained in its documents on agrarian history and various aspects of race relations, especially with regard to the central districts of the Transvaal, it has been neglected by historians in the past. Of the few historians who refer to the 1871 Commission, most have merely utilised the report of the commission and have probably missed the important testimonies, correspondence, and minutes. Very few have managed to locate these documents, which are concealed among the supplementary documents of the State Secretary for 1871 in the Transvaal Archives.

This paper attempts to examine specific problems encountered with the collection and interpretation of oral traditions in Sierra Leone and ways in which these were approached. I will suggest with examples that problems facing oral traditions are not always peculiar to them, as the researcher with written sources faces some similar problems.

Much has been said about methodology in collecting oral tradition for it to warrant much discussion here. One point that has been, brought out, however, is that methods which work well for one situation might prove disastrous or unproductive in another. It is thus necessary to bring out specific examples of situations encountered so as to improve our knowledge of the possible variety of approaches that could be used, while emphasizing that the researcher, as a detective, should have enough room for initiative.

For the past eight years, I have been collecting oral histories from among the Yalunka (Dialonke) and Koranko of Upper Guinea, both southern Mande peoples, and the Limba and Temne, grouped under the ‘West Atlantic.’ Extensive exploration into written sources has indicated that similar problems arise in both cases. In both situations, the human problem was evident. For the oral traditionist this problem is more alive as he is dealing first hand with human beings. A number of factors therefore, like his appearance, approach to his informants, his ability to ‘identify’ with the society in question, may affect the information he receives. These could provide reasons for distortion which are not necessarily present with written sources.

When I first mentioned to David Henige my plan to go to Portugal to do some archival research, he expressed the hope that it would be a somewhat more welcoming atmosphere than he had encountered in 1971, with armed soldiers patrolling the grounds. Indeed it was. I spent three weeks in Lisbon doing archival research in modern African history, with a specific interest in Tanzania. The Arquivo Histórico Diplomàtico (AHD) and the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (AHU) both proved to be rich archival sources kept by accessible and friendly staff.

This paper is a brief and informal review of my research in the archives. Unfortunately, I did not survey the holdings of either of the archives I used, so I cannot speak to their scope, but the files on Africa are vast. The AHU, for example, claims over 6000 meters of documents, and not just for Portuguese colonies. They include materials dating to the sixteenth century and extensive intelligence and diplomatic materials for the twentieth century. I hope that this paper will give interested researchers a sense of the type of material available.

In going to Portugal, I had the goal of finding out what archival material existed in Lisbon concerning relations between Portugal and Tanzania. Portuguese-Tanzanian relations were largely formed through the encounter over Mozambique. When Tanzania gained independence, it began to support the Mozambican liberation movements, which was very upsetting to Portugal, especially in the context of the Cold War. The Portuguese archives proved very fruitful. I found hundreds of documents that were of great interest, including documents relating directly to my dissertation topic dealing with a diplomatic incident concerning some forged letters that implicated Portugal in a plot to overthrow the Tanzanian government.

L'histoire sociale et l'histoire des mentalités permettent certainement de mieux évaluer les rapports qui se créent entre des sociétés dont les fondements culturels sont tout à fait différents. Peut-être serait-il utile de réexaminer ces orientations historiques au vu des tendances actuelles de l'historiographie contemporaine, en tenant compte de la spécificité de la conscience des sociétés africaines qui semble poser parfois des problèmes de réflexion et d'ordre méthodologique, tels que l'ethnocentrisme et l'originalité des sources de l'histoire africaine. Notre approche théorique et notre problématique concernent essentiellement le terrain préparé par l'expansion missionnaire à la faveur du mouvement de colonisation dès la fin du XIXe siècle. Cette expansion, perçue dans toutes ses formes, a nécessairement occasionné des répercussions au sein des sociétés colonisées dans un grand nombre de domaines de la vie sociale. Notre propos, ici, est de voir comment l'historien peut arriver à cerner ces effets, surtout à segmenter les divers secteurs où une station missionnaire a sécrété une influence. L'historien doit donc, dans la mesure du possible, percevoir les données historiques qui couvrent tous les domaines de l'évolution d'une société.

D'emblée, nous tenons à souligner que nous n'aborderons pas la question de la domination culturelle d'une religion sur une autre, telle qu'on pourrait le faire pour le christianisme au cours de la situation coloniale. Au niveau de la dynamique des groupes en présence, nous serons plutôt porté à essayer de comprendre les mouvements d'interaction culturelle produit par l'installation d'une station missionnaire dans un endroit déterminé et d'en dégager les facteurs qui permettront à l'historien de faire une histoire des mentalités.

As foundation money for overseas research grows more difficult to obtain, historians of Africa will perforce seek archival resources closer to home. A rough listing of African materials in American archives has been published, the Handbook of American Resources for African Studies, but the catalog evidently relied in part on reports written by American archivists who had little or no training in African history. As a result many available sources have been inadequately described. Take the case of the Southern Historical Collection, a repository for private manuscripts at the University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill. Although several collections with African papers in this repository are briefly noted in the Handbook, there was no indication of important materials like the forty-page eyewitness description of the court of the Mijjerteyn Sultan written in 1878. Nor, for that matter, is this account noted in the unpublished description of the papers available at the Collection; in fact, even if a researcher should ask, the archivist probably could not readily locate the account unless the researcher already had a name and date for it.

The Southern Historical Collection holds three kinds of documents relating to Africa: (1) The Khedive of Egypt hired several former Confederate officers to conduct mapping expeditions in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia when he began his military conquests to the south in the 1870s. These officers' papers consist of letters, diaries, and printed material concerning their explorations and their daily lives in Cairo. (2) Several groups of papers contain information on missionary activities, mostly by Episcopalians, in Liberia from 1829 to 1880, and (3)there are a number of scattered items in various collections, mainly travelers' accounts of brief visits to Africa.

Stephan Bühnen has applied some of my ideas to a wider region than southwestern Mali, and shown that the principles of Mande status discourse make possible new interpretations on sources and political processes in the entire West African Sudan. Inspired by Bühnen's analysis, I am convinced that the principles of Mande status discourse may shed light on various processes, varying from political struggles between families to the construction of contemporary ethnic identities. I hope that this reply will not be the end of the discussion on West African genealogies, and that others will join us.

Although Bühnen ideas are fruitful, there are also points to contest. Lack of space forces me to focus on three points of Bühnen's critique: the way I elaborate the term “segmentary;” his remarks that I overlook a “bulk of testimony recorded in medieval Arabic sources;” and his complaint of my “inadequate understanding of historical polities.”

Since Bühnen accepts my analysis of the Mande genealogies and their relation to nineteenth-century society, I will take this as my point of departure. I will argue that we cannot deduce the “historical reality of polities” for the available material without being misled by our own prejudices and fallacies. The ‘old’ sources are not as one-dimensional as Bühnen thinks: a status claim does not necessarily represent an irreversible hierarchy in a relationship. Bühnen ignores the context, overlooks the dynamics of Mande status discourse, and presupposes his model of chiefdoms.

I admit that I am vague about the way I operationalize the term “segmentary,” but a definition of “segmentary” is not necessary to my argument since I focus on a discourse which shows that any relation in Mande is hierarchical as well as based on a dichotomy—for instance, ‘older-younger’ or ‘founder-stranger.’