Since African history began to be produced in quantity one-and-a-half academic generations ago, there have rarely been shortages of new explanatory theory, though sometimes there has been paucity of data, more often of field than of archival materials. Usually there has been little open discussion of the kinds of methodological problems that both of the other circumstances pose. This contribution to that debate attempts to be deliberately simple, perhaps naive, in order to permit general points to peer through specific examples. It is about the intellectual, technical, and personal complications of field work generally and is illustrated from my own research on the last hundred years in Bulozi, the western part of Zambia. In topic as well as technique, I hope that these experiences have a wider relevance, for much attention is focused on the times of colonial impact.

I have in the title purposely set limits on the discussion. I look at the grist being brought to the mill rather than at what is done with it after it has been ground, in the belief that if the quantity and nature of adulteration can be judged -- for no grain is entirely pure -- one may hope to compensate for it in the baking and so produce reasonable bread. Also, extending the analogy a little, I shall identify types of grain, for no amount of baker's skill can produce a wheat loaf from rye flour.

The Mutapa state occupied a triangle of land between the Zambezi river in the north, the Hunyani river and Umvukwe range on the southwest, and the Mazoe and Ruenya rivers on the southeast. It thus consisted of a small segment of the southern Zambezian plateau and an arc of the Zambezi valley lowlands. The state dated back to at least the fifteenth century, and some branches of its ruling dynasty continue to control fragments of the state under the governments of Rhodesia and Mozambique. These descendants of the Mutapa dynasty, like their fellow-members of the Korekore dialect cluster of the Shona-speaking peoples, retain traditions of their past that are passed on from generation to generation by an informal learning process. These traditions are almost all devoted to the ruling dynasties rather than to the mass of the people and are especially concerned with lines of descent and land rights. They range from myths to relatively accurate factual accounts, with a wide variety of traditions between these two extremes. It was at one time thought that the mediums of mhondoro ancestral spirits were equivalent to the professional tradition-keepers of states such as Rwanda, but this theory has not been adequately proven.

The Mutapa state is of especial interest because it is the only one of four known major Shona states—Zimbabwe, Torwa, Mutapa, and Changamire—to escape being uprooted entirely by new settlements of people, and the only one that was close to Portuguese centers (in which information was recorded). It has thus been possible to compare traditions and documents in a way that cannot be done for the other states. Because of the reluctance or inability of many researchers to work in Rhodesia and Mozambique in the last fifteen years, the history of the Mutapa state has been heavily dependent upon the work of D.P. Abraham, at least as far as traditions are concerned. Abraham collected traditions from ca. 1950 to 1971; but so far the only works of his that are readily available are eight papers, of which the most important were produced in the period 1959-1963. These have formed the basis of most of the secondary writing on the Shona states; the inter-relationship between them and a developing archaeology has been discussed in an earlier article, and only a few points of this discussion need be brought in here.

Gerhard Rohlfs was born in Vegesack near Bremen in 1831. He was a frequent traveler in Africa, and in 1865-67 he became the first European to travel from north Africa across the Sahara to the west African coast, from Tripoli to Borno, then through Bauchi and Keffi to Loko, thence down the Benue to its confluence with the Niger at Lokoja, which he reached on 28 March 1867. From there, he proceeded upstream along the Niger to Raba, delivering presents to Masaba of Nupe. From Raba, he traveled overland through Yorubaland to Lagos. In 1868 he published an account of the first half of this journey, from north Africa to Borno, in Petermann's Mitteilungen. In 1872 his account of the second half, “Gerhard Rohlfs' Reise durch Nord-Afrika vom Mittelländischen Meere bis zum Busen von Guinea, 1865 bis 1867, 2. Hälfte: von Kuka nach Lagos (Bornu, Bautschi, Saria, Nupe, Yoruba),” also appeared in Petermann's. A later publication, Quer durch Afrika, which appeared in 1874-75, covered the entire journey.

Rohlfs' accounts of his travels in west Africa south of the Sahara have up to now been greatly neglected. The works mentioned above have never been published in English translation, which no doubt goes some way to explain this neglect. Rohlfs' information on his stay in Kuka (the capital of Borno) and his visits to Bauchi and Nupe have been cited by some scholars, at least. Very few, however, appear to have consulted his description of the last leg of his 1866-67 journey, in which he proceeded from the Niger south through Yorubaland to Lagos, visiting Share, Ilorin, Iwo, Ibadan, and parts of Ijebuland on the way.

Nearly a decade has passed since Carol Dickerman wrote about the high points and practical considerations of working in this most important archival collection. With some recent changes at the Archives and the mere passage of time, an update is warranted.

In August 1991 the longtime archivist, Father René Lamey, stepped down after decades of dedicated stewardship over a vast and growing collection of materials generated by the White Fathers since their founding in 1868. His encyclopedic knowledge and willing assistance to scholars will be missed by those who know him. Yet he has been replaced by Father Francois Renault, a scholar and archivist who knows the collection extremely well. Father Renault is more than familiar with the methods of African social scientists. He took a Doctorat d'Etat in history from the Sorbonne in 1971 and has spent some 12 years teaching at the Université d'Abidjan. He has published five books with foci on the Arab slave trade and is working on a sixth, which is to be a biography of the Order's founder, Cardinal Lavigerie. The fact that Father Renault is himself a productive scholar makes the task of explaining research strategies that much easier.

While Africa has produced ruthless and aggressive individuals, Africa has also provided thinkers and public officials with deep moral sensitivity and vision. The following essay discusses a perceptive and powerful African plea for peace and justice in nineteenth-century Buganda. In a country torn by strife, certain Ganda leaders expressed their deep distress about the growing incidence of state violence by reformulating the Kintu myth, the theological, constitutional, and social cornerstone of their kingdom. These concerned individuals boldly reshaped the Kintu story, the Ganda people's most sacred symbol, to describe the tension between peace and violence as the most important issue in Ganda politics.

The archives for Northern Nigeria, including not only the area north of the Niger and Benue rivers but also present-day Kwara, Kogi, and Benue states, is located at 29 Yakubu Gowon Way, Kaduna, in the heart of the busy central commercial and administrative district of the town. The Kaduna branch of the Nigerian National Archives has a large, comprehensive and unique collection of official papers of the British colonial and Nigerian independence periods; papers of native and local authorities; and newspapers, magazines, and other publications, as well as Arabic manuscripts. The archives is open on weekdays only. From Monday to Thursday its hours are 8:30 to 2:30, while on Friday there is a shortened day: 8:30 to 12:30.

No documents will be produced from the repository within one hour before closing time. In 1991 240 visitors made some 800 visits to the Kaduna archives. On each visit, the visitors' book must be signed; signing out at the end of the day is also obligatory. Use of the archives requires the purchase of a searcher's registration card costing 10 naira ($1.00 or 50 pence) for students, 25 naira for others. The card is valid for the other National Archives branches at Ibadan and Enugu and lasts for that calendar year. Renewals are carried out in subsequent years. Photocopying facilities are available, give excellent reproduction, and are cheap—50 kobo (5c/3p) per exposure for students, one naira for other researchers.

My main concern in this paper is to throw some light on the scope of the problem from the view of the development of African historical studies in East Germany after World War II. It is necessary first to discuss some negative and positive sides of German historical African studies before 1945. For several decades German research has demonstrated a startling lack of interest in the research problems of African history. In connection with the colonial conquests of the European powers, special institutes grew in social anthropology, colonial economics, and geography, although the historical development of the peoples of Africa was ignored. As an outward appearance of this development there grew in several German universities, departments for Oriental languages e.g., at the University of Berlin on the direct instruction of Bismarck, and in 1908 the Colonial Institute at Hamburg University.

Leading German historians and Africanists of the past demonstrated their theoretical ignorance in relation to African history. They proceeded from the definition of Leopold von Ranke, who classed the African peoples with the “non-history possessing” peoples who have made no contribution to world culture. G. W. F. Hegel uttered only fatalistic and stereotyped ideas—for him Africa was “no historical part of the World, it has no movement or development to exhibit.” These fundamental conceptions penetrated in one degree or another, the majority of publications on Africa up to 1945. Even Dietrich Westerman, one of the best known Africanists, who published one major book on African history in the German language, Geschichte Afrikas, in 1952 made his studies in the old tradition of seeing sub-Saharan Africa predominantly from the European point of view and continuing the image of an African peoples' history that was not accomplished by the world moulding civilized mankind and has not contributed its share to it. In short, the theoretical foundation of colonialism was rooted in German research in a deep racialist ideology. Only a few explorers and scientists swam against the tide.

Two reactions to the essay on the earliest generation of missionary photographers in West Africa published earlier in HA set up trains of thought which deserve to be minuted here as a further contribution to our praxis with images of Africa in the nineteenth century. It was pointed out by two readers of the original article that a pair of the images which, it had been asserted (104), derive from the last phase of Hornberger's photographic work, were published very early on in a non-mission context: that of three women spinning and that of one man weaving (figures 1 and 2 below).

Both images exist as photographs, as stereographic vintage prints. Both were also published as wood engravings in mission periodicals (figures 3 and 4). Two readers of the original essay have pointed out that these images were conflated into a single engraving on page 211 of Richard Oberländer's Westafrika vom Senegal bis Benguela (Leipzig, 1874). In this image (figure 5), however, only two members of the group of spinning women are depicted, placed separately in the foreground, one on each side of the weaver. It is an ironic reflection on the quality of the documentation we have to fear in this field that Oberländer's caption—“Spinnende und webende Aschanti. (Nach einer Photographie)”—asserts specifically that the engraving was taken “from a photograph,” using the singular form.

Recently Edward Steinhart has discussed the assassination of the British colonial officer Harry St. G. Galt in Uganda in 1905. Steinhart's account is based almost entirely on the Entebbe Secretariat Archives and on interviews he conducted. It focuses on the political intrigue brought to light by the murder enquiry, but much of the interest derives from the mystery surrounding Galt's death. In our opinion, Steinhart comes very close to the truth when he writes of his discovery that a conclave of chiefs had been held on the night of the murder, and he begins to suspect that Kahaya, ruler of Ankole, as well as Igumira, a reactionary chief, were involved in a plot which was somehow intended to discredit Nuwa Mbaguta, enganzi (Prime Minister) of Ankole, and Igumira's rival. Steinhart is then deflected because he thinks that the evidence for a conspiracy rests only on this event, and on statements from Sir Charles Gasyonga, Kahaya's successor. We think we can come much closer to a solution to this mystery by using archival material which has hitherto escaped notice. The Diary of the White Fathers Mission at Mbarara, the capital of Ankole, refers to the events of this year, and for the first time offers a plausible motive for the assassination. The White Fathers Archives in Rome have been open to scholars for some years, but it seems that not all researchers are aware of the wealth of material which they contain. Mission archives assume particular importance in the case of Uganda, which is now virtually closed to research, and we will try to illustrate their value by reference to this incident.

The Regional Archival Center at Tamale contains extensive documentation on the former Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, which today make up the Northern and Upper Regions of Ghana. The bulk of the records relating to the colonial period are held in the main repository in Accra, but any scholar working on a northern topic should plan to visit Tamale. While there is a tendancy for “older” (i.e., pre-1940 materials) to be in Accra and for more recent items and Native Authority records to be in Tamale, there is no hard and fast rule, and many exceptions and duplications exist.

There is no catalog for the collection. Accession lists for the seventeen classifi¬cations employed are quite helpful, but they are often somewhat sketchy and sometimes give little indication of the actual contents of a file or the time period which it covers. Following is a list of the classifications, together with titles of selected files, to illustrate their extent and the types of material they contain.

[This continues the comparison of texts of the English and Dutch versions of Bosman. For earlier instalments see History in Africa 2(1975), pp. 185-216; 3(1976), pp. 91-126; 4(1977), pp. 247-273; 5(1978), pp. 225-256. Procedural matters are discussed in the first instalment, to which the reader is referred.]

De Heeren Thienen, executives of the college of directors of the West-Indische Compagnie (W.I.C.) in Amsterdam, demanded that their directors-general in Elmina keep accurate journals or day books, copies of which had to be sent to Holland regularly and at short intervals (one to three months), to each of the five “Kamers” or Chambers: Amsterdam, Zeeland, Maas, Stad, and Lande en Noorderquartier. These journals were produced during most of the period of two and a half centuries that the Dutch resided at the Gold Coast. All of the still-existing journals are now stored at the Algemeen Rijksarchief (ARA) in The Hague in Holland.

Unfortunately, many of the manuscripts dating from before 1700 have gone, lost either by deliberate destruction, by thoughtless bureaucrats, or by accidental fires. Of the manuscripts now in the ARA many are in poor condition and are not available for consultation; others are being microfilmed, which makes studying these valuable documents somewhat tiresome. Fortunately, when I transcribed the day book of 1721 on my laptop computer, I was lucky enough to be able to use the original manuscript; a few weeks after I had finished this job the manuscript was microfilmed and is now available only in that format. The only other existing transcription of a journal of Elmina was published in 1953 by Karel Ratelband, whose Vijf dagregisters van het kasteel Sao Jorge Da Mina, covers the years 1645 to 1647.

The journals of Elmina written or dictated by the directors-general were used by the Heeren Thienen in Amsterdam primarily as a tool to control their staff on the Gold Coast.

Palavers, great meetings, grand conferences, “tribal” meetings— these are terms used to describe meetings among peoples in and near Sierra Leone, meetings in which political, diplomatic, and economic questions are discussed and sometimes resolved at the village, intervillage, and occasionally, national levels. These conferences vary in size and importance, depending on dimensions of conflicts or questions to be resolved. This paper focuses on one such conference that convened at Forékariah, the capital of Moria, in 1805 and on circumstances leading to it. It is based largely upon a lengthy first-hand report deposited at the University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago. This paper is presented in two parts: a description of the conference and its placement in Sierra Leone and Morian histories, and the text of the report produced by Sierra Leone observers.

From the earliest records of British officials at Sierra Leone, there are citations to specific “indigenous” meetings and allusions to others that supposedly occurred (indeed they would have had to occur for certain events to follow). One of the earliest large conferences described in detail in these records is one that convened at Forékariah from 24 March to 6 April 1805. The extant contemporary written record of this conference was produced by Alexander Smith, the Sierra Leone Company's and Governor William Day's principal representative at the conference. Other observers from Freetown included William Francis, Andrew Moore, Captain Smith, and Charles Shaw. Alexander Smith did not identify a specific interpreter nor describe what method he used to record the detailed arguments presented by participants. Certainly the filter of language and inter pretation must have influenced the record's content. If one places the conference within the framework of Company and Sierra Leone history, however, and accepts the premise that the Freetown observers were relatively unbiased since they were not principal parties to the palavers resolved, the report can be seen as one of a very few in which Sierra Leone's officials presented themselves in such uninvolved fashion.

In early summer 1999 I spent three days at the White Sisters' archives in Rome, and the following account may best be described as a cautionary tale. My reason for being in Rome was to use the White Fathers' archives, where I spent a very productive three weeks. Since I was interested in issues of medical care and gender in colonial Uganda, both areas of activity by the White Sisters, the White Fathers' archivist suggested I try to visit the White Sisters archives as well. He called and made the arrangements for my visit, although the White Sisters' archivist, Sister Claire-Michelle, was quite reluctant.

I found the research conditions at the White Sisters archives to be very restrictive. Sister Claire-Michelle established a work space for me in a parlor on the ground floor of the house, and my time was spent there. The archives are kept on the third floor and I was not allowed to see them. The archives are not completely cataloged, although there are some lists of materials. I explained to the archivist my interest in issues of gender and health, and in general issues dealing with African women. She never really seemed to understand, and kept bringing me material about African nuns. When I did request specific materials she brought them to me only after she had screened them. At one point I requested a report written by a sister in early twentieth-century Uganda who was inspecting various stations. Rather than bring me the report, Sister Claire-Michelle read through it and then brought me some photocopied pages.

All social groups make rules and attempt, at some times and under some circumstances, to enforce them. Social rules define situations and the kinds of behavior appropriate to them, specifying some actions as “right” and forbidding others as “wrong.” When a rule is enforced, the person who is supposed to have broken it may be seen as a special kind of person, one who cannot be trusted to live by the rules agreed on by the group. He is regarded as an outsider.

But the person who is thus labeled an outsider may have a different view of the matter. He may not accept the rule by which he is being judged and may not regard those who judge him as either competent or legitimately entitled to do so. Hence, a second meaning of the term emerges: the rule-breaker may feel his judges are outsiders.

Peter Hartwig was a German seminarian recruited by the Church Missionary Society in 1803 to serve as one of its first two missionaries in Africa. He was sent to Freetown, a settlement established for Africans and people of African descent who had returned to Africa from Britain and the Americas. Hartwig was to reside at Freetown temporarily and to be supervised while there by a locally-based Corresponding Committee composed of Sierra Leone Company officials. The Society directed that, after a year's residence in Sierra Leone, Hartwig and his fellow recruit Melchior Renner would establish a mission among Susu peoples north of Freetown, where they were to convert indigenous Africans to Christianity. Hartwig, however, failed to meet the Society's expectations, violated the norms of the Corresponding Committee that the Society had established at Freetown to guide mission progress, and left the Society's service within three years of reaching the coast. He seemingly had become unable to adjust to changing realities, a wrongdoer and a moral example to other missionaries of what to avoid becoming.3 How are we to interpret his failure from a sociological perspective?

Several scholars of the First World War in Southern Africa have briefly looked at the composition of the Rhodesia Native Regiment (RNR), which was formed in Southern Rhodesia in 1916 and fought in the German East Africa campaign until the armistice in November 1918. According to Peter McLaughlin, who has written the most about Zimbabwe and the Great War, “[b]y 1918 seventy-five per cent of the 2360 who passed through the ranks of the regiment were ‘aliens;’ over 1000 came from Nyasaland. The Rhodesia Native Regiment had thus lost its essentially ‘Rhodesian’ character.” This would seem to suggest that because the RNR had many soldiers who originated from outside Zimbabwe, this regiment was somehow less significant to Zimbabwe's World War I history. While McLaughlin admits that “the evidence on the precise composition of the Rhodesia Native Regiment is not available”, he claims that “approximately 1800 aliens served in the unit.”

In a recent book on Malawi and the First World War, Melvin Page agrees with McLaughlin's estimate that “probably more than 1000 Malawians joined the Rhodesian Native Regiment.” However, Page freely admits that the evidence on which this approximation is based is far from conclusive. By looking at the available evidence, particularly a previously unutilized regimental nominal roll in the Zimbabwe National Archives, it is possible to gain a clearer picture of the composition of the only African unit from Zimbabwe to have fought in the First World War. This analysis will not only deal with the nationality of the soldiers, which is what the two previous writers focused on, but also their ethnic/regional origin and pre-enlistment occupations.

yo e andado veynte y tres años en la mar.y ví todo el levante y poniente,…y e andado la Guinea…

The first world empire (truly one on which the sun never set) was created by the union of the crowns of Portugal and Spain in 1580. If the events immediately leading up to the union were unexpected and contingent, the creation of a global hegemony had been adumbrated nine decades earlier, with the almost simultaneous voyages, to west and to east, of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama. What lay behind these voyages on the parts of Portugal and Spain, and hence the respective claims of these nations to have set in motion the process which led to world empire, form the background theme of this paper.

Concentration on the heroic figures of Vasco da Gama and Columbus has often prevented historians from appreciating the significance of earlier developments. Writers discussing Columbus and the consequent impact of Spain on the Americas regularly fail to lay sufficient weight on the seventy years of previous Portuguese discovery of the coast of Africa, and therefore on the consequent Portuguese grapplings with the political, economic, and moral problems of culture contact and imperial policy in an Outer Continent. Equally, historians of the Portuguese imperial effort, eager to reach the better-evidenced complexities of the Lusitanian contact with Asia, tend to neglect, not only the Portuguese effort in the South Atlantic, but also the rival Castilian effort in the same ocean—an effort that preceded Columbus and paralleled, to some extent, the deeds of Portugal. Yet, within Iberia the two kingdoms, Portugal and Castile (the latter in process of generating the new kingdom of Spain), were in close and involved contact, not least because the territorial shape of each in the 1490s had only been hammered out during the preceding one hundred years. There is thus a strong case for treating the global expansion of Iberia as a single process and not merely as two coincidental thrusts around the globe, ultimately in opposite directions.

Historians would readily agree that among the most important sources for Asante history are the written accounts of foreign visitors who traveled to Kumase during the nineteenth century. A work such as Ivor Wilks's Asante in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975), for example, is almost unthinkable without T. E. Bowdich's Mission from Cape Castle to Ashantee (London, 1819) and Joseph Dupuis' Journal of a Residence in Ashantee (London, 1824). These two published and reprinted primary sources are justly famous for their rich evocations of encounters with Asantehene Osei Tutu Kwame (reigned 1804-23) and members of his court. But there are a number of unpublished accounts—and those published in relatively obscure places—which also contain important historical data but which are lesser known and less often cited by scholars. In English one thinks of, among others, British Governor William Winniett's journal of his visit to Kumase in 1848; in French the extensive notebooks of Marie-Joseph Bonnat; and in German, the report of the missionary A. Riis.

A number of Dutch-speaking visitors also traveled to Kumase during the nineteenth century and left valuable written accounts, though few have ever been published. Language barriers have often prevented full use of the rich data they contain. Among the more important are those of Willem Huydecoper in 1816-17, Jacob Simons in 1831-32, Jacobus de Bruijn in 1836-37, H. S. Pel in 1842, and David Mill Graves in 1857, extracts from whose journal I have translated below.

Graves served as secretary on a Dutch diplomatic and trade mission which was dispatched by Governor J. van den Bossche to the Asantehene, Kwaku Dua Panin (reigned 1834-67) in July 1857.

A preceding article examined the ethnographic, linguistic and archeological enquiries of G.W.B. Huntingford (1901-1978) and L.S.B. Leakey (1903-1972) in the Kenya highlands in the “high colonial” era of the 1920s and 1930s—the one, a young settler, researching independently in the Kalenjin region west of the Rift Valley, the other brought up on an Anglican mission station in Kikuyu country to the east and then, as an ambitious prehistorian, concentrating his activities in the Rift itself. That article pointed to their contrasting approaches to these disciplines, observing how each in his own way separately compartmentalized his anthropology from his archeology, with the result that any sense of the history of the existing peoples whom they studied-Nandi and Kikuyu-was effectively denied. This sequel examines their archeology more critically, beginning with their basic approaches and methods, and then tracing the impact of their work on subsequent scholarship and research endeavors, and especially on those anxious to reconstruct East African history in the changing intellectual climate leading to Independence.

The article concerns itself therefore with what Leakey in the late 1920s designated “Neolithic cultures” in the Nakuru-Elmenteita basin within the elevated stretch of the Rift Valley, to which subject Mary Leakey subsequently contributed, leading to Sonia Cole's essays at synthesis in the 1950s/1960s; and also with the Azanian hypothesis of Huntingford, which was rediscovered by Basil Davidson in the late 1950s and, with some deft transformation, catapulted centerstage for an emerging picture of East African history of a positive and enlightened sort.

Michael Scott, the long-term Gandhi-esque opponent of the South African government, was a man of many talents and one of his ignored skills was using a cine-camera. Between 1946 and 1948 as he worked in Tobruk squatter settlement near Johannesburg and environs and traveled to Namibia, in addition to his powerful writing, he also filmed scenes he encountered. The purpose of this note is to share the delight of viewing “Civilization on Trial in South Africa.” It is, as far as I can ascertain, the first “protest” film made in South Africa, yet is not mentioned in the standard histories of film in southern Africa (Cancel 2004, Davis, 1996, Botha/van Aswegen 1992, Tomaselli 1988). While working on another project I fortuitously came across a copy in the Smithsonian Film Archives that I had copied and have deposited in the Namibian Archives.

The Smithsonian catalog dates this 24-minute edited black and white film to ca. 1950, and believes that it was shot between 1946 and 1952, prior to the implementation of the Group Areas Act, although it seems likely that shooting was completed earlier, before Scott was declared a Prohibited Immigrant in the late 1940s. Certainly, reading the documents on Scott's travels to Namibia, it seems likely that portions of his film was shot before 1948. In his autobiography, A Time to Speak, Scott mentioned showing the film in 1949 (Scott 1958:248). The Smithsonian obtained the film from the late Colin Turnbull, an Oxford educated Africanist anthropologist (J. Homiak, personal comment).