The Jos Plateau comprises an area of approximately 2500 square miles in the north-central part of Nigeria. It includes a high plain, interspersed with granite hills and is bounded by a broken scarp some 1500 to 3000 feet in height. Historically as well as geographically, the Plateau has stood apart from the neighboring lower plains region. In the nineteenth century, the Muslim emirate of Bauchi controlled nearly all the territory surrounding the Plateau, but inhabitants of the Plateau successfully repelled intermittent Bauchi Incursions and maintained their independence until the arrival of the British at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Most of the literature dealing with the Plateau has focused on this theme of resistance and a number of interrelated topics. As it happens, such studies nearly always emphasize the isolated nature of the region, whether cultural or economic. As a result, a stereotyped view of the Plateau has emerged, a view which characterizes the area as a “hill refuge,” settled by small groups who lived in the most inaccessible reaches, were economically self-sufficient, and who at best maintained minimal links with each other. The isolated nature of these groups is seen as a major cause of their intrinsically conservative nature and predisposition to resist change. According to the stereotype, the people of the Plateau remain a useful subject of research since they continue to exhibit many of the “archaic” forms of social, political and economic organization that may have been prevalent throughout Africa thousands of years ago.

At a time of significant change in the in the practice of African history, this article is an appeal for a renewed respect for conventional historiography – referring both to careful acquaintance with earlier work and to the practice of historical analysis. Focusing on Rwanda, the argument is presented at four levels. First, it identifies four myths evident in recent presentations on Rwandan history. Second it assesses a work that avoids such assumptions by drawing on broader empirical sources than is the norm. It then examines a work that, while highlighting an important theme, neglects much of the historical work done on Rwanda over the past forty years. It concludes by proposing a way out of such “dead-end discourses.”

The political history of the medieval Western Sudan was dominated by a succession of empires exerting their domination over the region: Ghana, Mali, and finally Songhay. Oral tradition is our only evidence for the existence of yet another empire. It was called Susu and exerted its supremacy after the decline of Ghana and before the rise of Mali. Most historical treatises locate enigmatic Susu in the Kaniaga region northwest of Segou. These treatises are mainly based on oral traditions and medieval Arabic chronicles.

After rereading the conventional historical sources and examining passages in Portuguese sources thus far untapped for the history of the Western Sudan, I feel induced to present a new identification for Susu. The Portuguese evidence appears to point to a vast but nearly forgotten kingdom in the Futa Jalon and Upper Niger region as the historical descendant of ancient Susu, thus indicating the latter's location. This kingdom was called Jalo and Concho. Its ethnic core were the Susu and Jalonke, and it was on its ruins that the Muslim Fula conquerors erected the state of Futa Jalon in the eighteenth century. My interpretation of oral traditions and Arabic sources also leads me to assume an identity of Susu with the kingdoms of Sankaran and Do. I will attempt to demonstrate the identity of the polities bearing these different names in sections introducing these polities, most of which have never been subjected to close historical investigation.

Holders of Established Chairs occupy seats of some antiquity and renown, and on the occasion of their inaugural they are expected to indicate how they propose to maintain or alter the course charted by their distinguished predecessors. Holders of Personal Chairs escape this formidable task. On the other hand, they face a question which is appropriately personal: namely, why they come to be seated at all. An audience less charitable than this one, which has been hand-picked as far as possible for its generosity as well as for its wisdom, might wish to pursue this question with enthusiasm. Fortunately, a further safeguard against being unseated at the moment of investiture exists in the admirable tradition whereby I am allowed to provide my own answer without hindrance or interrogation. I have chosen to explain my presence here today in the manner commonly adopted by those who find themselves elevated beyond their customary station; that is by creating a tradition to authenticate my ancestry and hence to validate my title.

Violent territorial competition is one of the dominant forces in the history of southern Africa, and all historiography with reference to land has significant political ramifications to this day. Nineteenth-century sources in the history of the BaSotho reflect these political considerations, which were as salient then as they are today.

In this paper I investigate the principal nineteenth-century sources for the history of land rights and land conflict affecting the BaSotho. On the basis of archival materials, I identify and assess the sources which early historians relied on. I also examine the background and orientations of these observers, in order to evaluate their interpretations of BaSotho history. The works with which I deal with are well-known to students of Lesotho history, and because they are so often used by modern scholars it is important that their origins, authenticity, and value be assessed.

Photographs create a tantalizing sense of “being there” while history was being made. They offer a means of entry into cultures that are historically non-literate, stimulating informants' memories and linking their oral traditions to specific events and persons in the culture. Their research potential in West Africa and in Nigeria, in particular, is only now being recognized (Edwards 1990; Kaplan 1990: 317-319; Scherer 1990: 131, 135, 139, 141, 145; Sprague 1978; Viditz-Ward 1985; 1991). The focus here is on photographs connected with the royal court of Benin, and with ongoing ethnographic field work initiated in 1982.1 Special attention is given to photographs taken between 1926 and 1989 by S. O. Alonge, the first indigenous and Benin royal photographer. His work illuminates political and cultural history, and contributes to the beginnings of a history of photography in Nigeria.

Evocative images have been used to illustrate books and articles about West Africa.since the early days of nineteenth-century photography. Studies of visuals, however, taken in Nigeria by indigenous photographers and reported systematic uses of photographs in research designs are still rare (Borgatti 1982; Kaplan 1980, 1991a, 1991b; Karpinski 1984; Sprague 1978). Most research extant on early uses of visuals has been on cinema (Rouch 1975a, 1975b). There has been serious interest in the condition and circumstances of Nigeria cinema and filmmakers, and a desire to create a history of African film (Mathias 1986). The impetus to codify and to create methods for the study of film and stills in anthropology points to a growing awareness of their potential as much more than entertainment and illustration. Photographs are best been as behavior and ideas captured and expressed in imagery, and studied much as we do material culture.

“There is a story that the Prophet appeared to Abdu Rahaman in a dream and said to him, ‘Get up and go west and establish Islam.’ Abdu Rahaman got up and took a handful of the soil of Medina and put it in a cloth and brought it to Hausaland. Whenever he came to a town, he took a handful of the soil of the country and put it beside that of Medina. If they did not correspond, he passed that town. So he journeyed until he came to Kano. And when he compared the soil of Kano with Medina soil they resembled one another and became as one soil. So he said, ‘this is the country that I saw in my dream.’” [xx]

I wish in this paper to treat the Kano Chronicle (henceforth KC) as a document of intellectual history, and not just as a mine from which to dig valuable ‘facts.’ The aspect of intellectual history I will discuss is the meaning of historical metaphors - or analogical geography - of which the above story is a rather special example. But first I will try and show that the first ‘edition’ of KC was completed in the mid-seventeenth century and was compiled from materials which had been developed since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries - thus locating the intellectual history in a specific period. The texts used are discussed in the appendix.

In writing this essay I am treading where many have trod before. Abdullahi Smith's work on the Sayfawa and on the origin of the Hausa states and Mervyn Hiskett's publications on the Kano Chronicle and on the Song of Bagauda are the most notable examples.

The period from 1500 to 1800 was a particularly busy phase in the history of the East African coast. It was a time which witnessed massive demographic shifts in the interior regions, as well as heavy southern Arab immigration and external meddling from Portuguese and Umani interlopers. It saw the destruction of the medieval entrepot of Kilwa Kisiwani and a decline, followed by a slow resurgence, in the fortunes of another medieval powerhouse, Mombasa. Throughout this phase, the ancient northern coastal city of Pate enjoyed a pivotal, even at times a paramount, role in the affairs of the coast. Before the middle 1500s the town seems to have been of insufficient consequence to attract much attention. Thereafter, however, the city-state capitalized on mainland alliances with powerful Orma confederations like the “Garzeda” to become a major center for regional trade, as well as a crucial strategic location in the competing religious and political ambitions of Portugal and various Arab states. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries Pate clearly was the most important state in the Lamu archipelago. Arguably, too, it was the most powerful Swahili sultanate on the entire coast.

Given the significance of Pate in the affairs of the East African coast from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, scholars long have realized that a history of the sultanate is exigent to an understanding of the entire coast during this time. What would seem to be fortunate to this end is that historians have the Pate chronicles as a research aid. Taken together, these constitute the most detailed indigenous history of any coastal city-state up to the onset of the colonial era. However, as attested by the difficulties Chittick encountered in his attempts to work with them, these documents present the historian with a superabundance of (often confusing) information. Confronted with this, Chittick concluded that the only possible value of these chronicles was as a source of/for children's fables. Thus surmised, a historian of this important Swahili sultanate would seem to be left with very little indeed.

In African studies the potential for collaboration between students of history and those of material culture or art has long been recognized. On the one hand, items of material culture, both ancient and modern, can shed light on aspects of the past which remain obscure in written and oral sources; on the other, in order to see a material culture (or parts of it) in perspective, we need to study the historical background of the area concerned. The contribution of material culture to historical knowledge of sub-Saharan Africa has received considerable attention; but the same can hardly be said of the use of historical sources in understanding material culture.

This does not mean that such sources have been neglected. Most of them certainly were in the colonial and immediate post-colonial periods, but things have improved. In many recent books, articles, and exhibitions devoted to Africa's material culture, considerable use has been made of the writings and engravings of early European visitors. Scholars are delighted if they can discover old records of anything resembling the objects that are today found either in museums or still in use in Africa. Indeed, it has become almost obligatory to search old books for textual and visual material. No historian can object to this interest in early sources. Yet looking at what has been published recently, one wonders whether we have nearly reached the end of the road. The same classic travelers' accounts are cited again and again (even the same passages!), and it is beginning to look as if this source of information will soon run dry. What, if anything, remains to be done?

The old Oyo ‘empire’ was the largest and best-known of the Yoruba kingdoms. Located in the savannah below the bend of the river Niger in the Bussa-Jebba region of southwest Nigeria, it achieved prominence during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but collapsed and disintegrated in the early years of the nineteenth. Its origins and early history are imperfectly known because the traditions dealing with this period are enmeshed in myth and legend. This state of affairs has led one writer to conclude that the history of this period “is beyond meaningful’ enquiry.

Two major problems confront anyone attempting to reconstruct early Oyo history. The origins of the kingdom are linked both to the process of the settlement of the Yoruba people in their present location and to that of state formation among them. Furthermore, information about these processes is to be found in traditional accounts that seem to have been fossilized since the publication of Samuel Johnson's The History of the Yorubas in 1921. Indeed, many subsequent ‘traditions’ seem in no small measure to be derived from this work. It is therefore appropriate to begin this paper with a discussion of the influence of Johnson's work, followed by an analysis of Johnson's sources and motives, insofar as these can be determined. In 1901 an Iiebu man found it necessary to make an emphatic declaration on Yoruba history:

The wealth of the photographic record of Portuguese Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is only beginning to be appreciated. Until recently it was not only ignored but totally neglected. As a result much has been destroyed. The full extent of the surviving material is, as yet, unknown. Collections of photographs are dispersed in various archives, libraries, and private collections throughout Portugal. In most cases almost nothing is known of the photographers or of the circumstances in which then-work was produced. The photographs themselves have not been studied, so that the work of dating and evaluating their content has yet to be done.

In this paper then I can present only a very preliminary and incomplete survey and exploration of some of the very diverse categories of photographic sources available for the history of Portuguese-speaking Africa between the 1870s and early 1920s, concentrating particularly on Angola and Mozambique. Whenever possible I also try to draw attention to some of the practical and theoretical problems involved in their interpretation as a step towards assessing more accurately their historical and sociological value.

During a violent storm the Danish-Norwegian frigate Fredensborg was wrecked on 1 December 1768, at Tromøy, an island outside Arendal in southern Norway. The long journey in the triangular route was nearly completed when the crew of 29 men, three passengers, and two slaves managed to save their lives under very dramatic conditions. The Captain, Johan Frantzen Ferents, and the Supercargo, Christian Hoffman, saved the ship's logbook and other journals. These, together with other documents which are in the national archives in Denmark and Norway, make it possible for us to follow the course of the frigate from day to day, both during the journey and after the wreck.

The Fredensborg was built in 1752-53 by the Danish West India-Guinea Company in Copenhagen. On its first journey in the triangular trade, and during five subsequent journeys to the West Indies, it sailed under the name of Cron Prins Christian. In 1765, when the Guinea Company replaced the West India-Guinea Company, taking over the forts on the Gold Coast and all trading rights and ships, the name was changed to Fredensborg, after the Danish-Norwegian fort at Ningo. At that time Denmark-Norway owned the islands of St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix in the West Indies and their need for slaves was growing.

They weighed anchor in Copenhagen on 24 June 1767 with 40 men on board, and anchored in the road at their main fort Christiansborg on the Gold Coast 100 days later, on 1 October 1767. Because of an inadequate supply of slaves, the Fredensborg remained in the road for 205 days. This had a very adverse effect on the health of the crew, with 11 deaths, including that of the Captain, Espen Kiønig. One of the deceased had drowned.

In 1901 the katikkiro or ‘prime minister’ of Buganda, Apolo Kagwa, published a vernacular history of his country entitled The Book of the Kings of Buganda. Most of this work dealt with the events of his own lifetime, but it also included a circumstantial account of the twenty-nine reigns which, he alleged, had preceded that of King Mutesa, who received the first European visitors and who died in 1884. This version of the Ganda past has not since been challenged in its essentials either by Ganda traditionalists or by European or European-trained commentators. Some of the former have tried to lengthen the history still further by naming ancestors or forerunners of King Kintu, with whom Kagwa began his tale. But these additional kings are plainly legendary, like the dragon Bemba, or abstractions, like ‘King Buganda,’ and have not achieved official status. Scholars, by contrast, have been inclined to shorten the list slightly, holding with Sir Harry Johnston that the first real king of Buganda was Kimera [K3] and relegating the first two of Kagwa's rulers, Kintu and Cwa, to a nebulous prehistory. In other respects they have generally accepted Kagwa's account with only a few amendments and hesitations, and have used it as the basis for quite elaborate chronological and developmental studies.

That is why, regarding the time between the death of one great king and the rise of another king made famous by God, If you ask whether in that intervening period there were other kings, Of course there were, But their names are not known.

Some scholars search for historical evidence in the ancient traditions preserved by bards of the Western Sudan, while other writers express doubts that these sources can contain any information of value to historians. A period markedly affected by this question is the early thirteenth century, because it was then that the Mali empire was established, and because most of the evidence for this is derived from the Sunjata tradition, which is an essential part of the repertoire of many Mande bards (also known as “griots” or, in the Mande language, jeliw). A limited amount of information on thirteenth-century Mali is available from Arabic sources, but these were written a century to a century and a half after the reign of Sunjata, and although Ibn Khaldun confirms the existence of the famous mansa and reports that he subdued the Soso (Susu, Sosso), the external writings provide no biographical details about the purported empire-builder. Conversely, some episodes in the internal oral accounts are specifically addressed to the life and times of Sunjata, with elements from other time periods—some of which are identifiable and others not—regularly creeping in and out of the narratives. Some themes are obviously mythical, while others could have a historical basis but cannot be independently confirmed. Thus, any historian addressing thirteenth-century Mali must either accept the severe limitations of the external written sources and say very little indeed about that period, or face the difficulties involved in supplementing these with references to the oral sources.

Researchers keen to examine the representation of native people in European accounts of exploration and travel need bring under review the mechanism by which field notes became books, and, once they were books, the multiplicity and diffusion of editions, often themselves quite different from one another. An example that illustrates well this need is British Royal Naval Captain James Cook's posthumously published account of his third voyage to the Pacific Ocean in the years 1776-80. The standard scholarly source is J.C. Beaglehole's monumental edition, The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery (1955-74), a twenty-year editing project for the Hakluyt Society, which made available for the first time Cook's own writings until his death at Kealakekua Bay, Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), on 14 February 1779, during the third voyage. However, the need for Beaglehole's project arose, according to the president of the Hakluyt Society, because the original publications differed very widely from Cook's own writings. They were “official” accounts, published by order of George III, and they performed that always interesting exercise—they “improved” on Cook's own writings. It is well known that Cook did not prepare his journals for the press: in the case of the first two voyages to the Pacific, this was his choice. In the case of the third, the choice was not his to make, he being five years deceased. How wide are those differences?

In the case of Cook's description of a month-long mooring in Nootka Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, do substantive differences occur between Cook's logs and journal and Bishop John Douglas' edition? Answering that question necessarily involves consulting first editions of the various published accounts.

Throughout the 1920s, British officials in London and Accra dedicated considerable time and bureaucratic energy to the planning and construction of Takoradi harbor, an ambitious project that, they expected, would revolutionize the Gold Coast’s economic prospects. But by 1930, their efforts had created a structure beset with constructional defects, considerable flaws, and financial shortcomings. This article seeks to explain the sizeable gap separating Takoradi-envisioned from Takoradi-realized by examining the massive paper record compiled during the harbor’s planning and construction. Demonstrating that the structure was born largely from illusion, affect, and a particular version of “common sense” thinking, it encourages historians to not only give further attention to the detailed, and often overwhelming, corpus of blueprints, reports, and correspondence that such projects engendered, but to use them to reflect upon the ways in which colonial statecraft actually sought to limit, rather than expand, the knowledge it had at its disposal.

In the historiography of east Africa, hunter-gatherers have been given occasional mention almost since the beginning of European contacts with the interior. Early European travelers, hunters, and colonial administrators all took note of the ubiquitous “Dorobo,” as these hunters have come to be known in the literature. Furthermore, oral tradition collections from among east Africa's food-producing populations generally recall an earlier hunter-gatherer community who are said to have “disappeared,” “gone underground,” or were “driven away.”

Recent scholarship has attempted to look at these hunter groups in economic terms: (1) as a stage of economic development before achieving a “higher” level of production; (2) as a retrograde step from a food-producing economy; or (3) simply as a mode of production. But east Africa's hunter-gatherers remain inadequately dealt with in historical literature, primarily because they have usually been ignored by researchers but also because of their neighbors' and the academic community's prejudicial or misconceived notions about them.

To begin, some of the literature concerning these people will be selectively surveyed to see how ideas about them have developed. Next an attempt will be made to identify and delineate properly the various groups of hunter-gatherers living in East Africa today and in the recent past. Finally, the largest remaining community of hunter-gatherers, those living in the western highlands of Kenya who usually call themselves “Okiek,” will be looked at more closely in an attempt to advance the discussion of hunter-gatherers in general by presenting some observations concerning their socio-economic history.

In this paper I look at the relationship between Christianity and popular entertainment in Ghana over the last 100 years or so. Imported Christianity was one of the seminal influences on the emergence of local popular music, dance, and drama. But Christianity in turn later became influenced by popular entertainment, especially in the case of the local African separatist churches that began to incorporate popular dance music, and in some cases popular theatre. At the same time unemployed Ghanaian commercial performing artists have, since the 1980s, found a home in the churches. To begin this examination of this circular relationship between popular entertainment and Christianity in Ghana we first turn to the late nineteenth century.

The appearance of transcultural popular performance genres in southern and coastal Ghana in the late nineteenth century resulted from a fusion of local music and dance elements with imported ones introduced by Europeans. Very important was the role of the Protestant missionaries who settled in southern. Ghana during the century, establishing churches, schools, trading posts, and artisan training centers. Through protestant hymns and school songs local Africans were taught to play the harmonium, piano, and brass band instruments and were introduced to part harmony, the diatonic scale, western I- IV- V harmonic progressions, the sol-fa notation and four-bar phrasing.

There were two consequences of these new musical ideas. Firstly a tradition of vernacular hymns was established from the 1880s and 1890s, when separatist African churches (such as the native Baptist Church) were formed in the period of institutional racism that followed the Berlin Conference of 1884/85. Secondly, and of more importance to this paper, these new missionary ideas helped to establish early local popular Highlife dance music idioms such as asiko (or ashiko), osibisaaba, local brass band “adaha” music and “palmwine” guitar music. Robert Sprigge (1967:89) refers to the use of church harmonies and suspended fourths in the early guitar band Highlife composition Yaa Amponsah, while David Coplan (1978:98-99) talks of the “hybridisation” of church influences with Akan vocal phrasing and the preference of singing in parallel thirds and sixths in the creation of Highlife.

A major theme in the historiography of the Rift Valley region of east Africa has been the series of raids and wars during the nineteenth century between groups of Maa-speaking peoples who dominated the plains from northern Kenya to central Tanzania. Since the 1840s European and African observers have tended to divide the combatants into two factions, usually called the Maasai on one hand and the Iloikop (or Kwavi) on the other. Since the 1880s European administrators and western scholars have tended to designate the groups they have called Maasai as “pastoralists” or sometimes “pure pastoralists” and the groups they have called Iloikop/Kwavi as “agriculturalists” or “semi-pastoralists.” According to this interpretation, the “Iloikop Wars” or the “Wars between the Maasai and the Iloikop” of the nineteenth century pitted agricultural Maa-speakers against pastoral Maa-speakers. In surveying the relevant literature and in analyzing the European descriptions in light of explanations of my Maasai informants, it became clear that this orthodox dichotomy rests on a mistakenly static perception of socio-economic groups and denies the precariousness of pastoral life in the Rift Valley. Scholarly acceptance of the Maasai-Iloikop (Kwavi) dichotomy as the basis of interpretation of nineteenth-century Maasai history has resulted in a serious distortion of that history and an avoidance of more complex and important issues. In this paper I will review the literature on the “identities” of the Maa-speaking peoples -- identities attributed to them by outside observers -- and subject those interpretations to the perceptions and explanations of the Maa-speaking peoples themselves.

In 1891 the German explorer Theodor Bumiller wrote an angry letter from the shores of Lake Nyassa (modern Lake Malawi) to the Committee of the German Anti Slavery Lottery, the financiers of his expedition. The goal of the expedition was to bring a steamship onto the lake to fight alleged slave hunters. The initiator and leader of the expedition was no less a person than Hermann von Wissmann, then the empire's most popular explorer and conqueror and first Governor of German East Africa. Bumiller had been Wissmann's long-standing friend and companion on several expeditions. Since the very first days, there had been disputes over the equipping and organization of the expedition. In all previous letters that Wissmann and Bumiller had written to the committee, they had responded to reproaches of throwing the lottery's money around by arguing that Africa is not Europe and there were many eventualities with which nobody was able to reckon, if being on an expedition.

However, a member of the expedition, a certain Captain Max Praeger, whose duty was to navigate the steamer on the lake, had sent a report, in which he had sharply criticized both Wissmann and Bumiller. Bumiller answered with the argument that Praeger was not in a position to give an expert opinion on the expedition, because he was not a true Afrikaner, a person who has gained first-hand experiences of the African continent and its people. Praeger, Bumiller sneered, was only sitting on the steamer's deck and thus having no contact with Africans. To Bumiller, what qualified an Afrikaner as expert on Africa were eye-to-eye encounters with African people.