William C. Burke, an African American emigrant in Liberia, wrote the following to an acquaintance in the United States on 23 September 1861:

Burke's lamentation about the impact of the American Civil War on the distant Atlantic shores of Africa underscores a problem—and opportunity—in Liberian historiography. Burke's nineteenth-century world extended past the distinct national boundaries that separated the United States and Liberia. Geographically, this was the vast littoral of the four continents—Africa, Europe, North America, and South America—abutting the Atlantic Ocean. But the Atlantic world, as historians now dubbed this sprawling transnational zone, was much more extensive. Societies near and faraway were also drawn into the web of socioeconomic activities in the basin. The creation of the Atlantic world spanned almost four centuries, from the late fifteenth to the waning decades of the nineteenth century. In this period, an unprecedented multitude of migrants crisscrossed the Atlantic creating a vast network. For example, by the nineteenth century, regular transatlantic packages such as the Mary Caroline Stevens whose delay Burke called “a great disappointment,” transported passengers, provisions, and dispatches between the United States and Liberia.

In 2003 Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh I's eighty-nine page manuscript ‘The History of Ashanti Kings and the whole country itself’ of 1907 was published in an annotated scholarly edition alongside a selection of allied texts. The same publisher is to produce a related volume containing the four hundred and fifty pages of Asantehene Osei Agyeman Prempeh II's ‘History of Ashanti’ written in the 1940s (and edited by myself). Both of these texts are written in English. However, the huge range of sources on the Asante past recorded in Akan Twi have yet to receive equal attention and treatment. This short paper introduces and contextualises one source of this kind that was researched in Asante between 1902-1910 and finished in written form in Akan Twi in 1915.

The Akuapem (Akwapim) kingdom is located less than thirty miles northeast of Ghana's capital at Accra. It has always been and remains a small polity. It comprises only seventeen historic towns scattered among hills on two parallel ridges about fifteen hundred feet above sea level. There are more towns today, many created by the cocoa economy of the early twentieth century, but Akuapem remains a compact entity. It is a Twi-speaking Akan kingdom, but an unusual one in that it is ethnically diverse.

Patrilineal Guan-speaking farmers settled on the Akuapem ridges in the early decades of the seventeenth century. They were oppressed by the matrilineal Twi-speaking Akan of the nearby Akwamu kingdom. To end this situation the Guan recruited other Akan Twi speakers as allies. These were military adventurers from the Akyem Abuakwa polity to the west. The Akyem incomers succeeded against the Akwamu but stayed on to establish their own conquest dynasty in 1733.

The literature on German Togoland, as compared with that of most of the other former European colonies on the African continent, is far from extensive. While the colony was relatively small and short-lived, the dearth of academic work is notable, since Togoland not only was prized by the Germans as their most successful colonial venture but was also viewed as a “model colony” by contemporary observers in other European imperial nations.

Only a handful of books devoted exclusively to the colony have been published since the emergence of African history in the late 1950s as an academic field in the West. The authors of these books, as well as a number of articles and dissertations, thoroughly consulted the relevant archival materials housed in Europe and North America and, to a lesser extent, in West Africa, but failed to collect the oral history of the period. Thus these studies tend to be based almost solely on the observations of Europeans and focus on the activities of the German imperialists, in particular on their administrative and economic policies. A few scholars have attempted to emphasize African experiences during this historical episode, despite a reliance on those same archival materials.

The Togoland colony dates to February 1884, when a group of German soldiers kidnapped chiefs in Anécho, a town located in present-day southeastern Togo, and forced them into negotiations aboard the German warship Sophie. Further west, a protectorate was proclaimed over the Lomé area in a treaty signed in July by Gustav Nachtigal, a German Imperial Commissioner, and one Plakkoo, an official of the town of Togo, after which the new colony was named by the Germans.

This paper explores the use of versions of the “Hamitic hypothesis” by West African historians, with principal reference to amateur scholars rather than to academic historiography. Although some reference is made to other areas, the main focus is on the Yoruba, of southwestern Nigeria, among whom an exceptionally prolific literature of local history developed from the 1880s onwards. The most important and influential work in this tradition, which is therefore central to the argument of this paper, is the History of the Yorubas of the Rev. Samuel Johnson, which was written in 1897 although not published until 1921.

Historical tales are the most abundant and the sources most used to reconstruct the history of the kingdoms of the area between the Great Lakes. This is especially true for the history of the Nyiginya kingdom in Rwanda, where such tales, preserved at the court as well as by local people on the hills, are even more abundant than anywhere else. It is not surprising then that they form the bedrock on which authors have built their reconstructions on the history of that kingdom. Yet little attention has been paid to a general critical examination of these tales. Here, and elsewhere in the region, their contents have generally been accepted as credible, after the arbitrary erasure of all references to passages judged to refer to miracles, after the arbitrary dismissal of the bits and the variants that do not conform to one's preferred version, and after either the exclusion of local “provincial” narratives, or as happened after 1960, the exclusion of all those that stemmed from the court. Such practices will simply not do.

Because these tales form the bedrock of the history of the kingdom the Institute for Scientific Research in Central Africa (IRSAC) under my direction instituted a large collection of such sources between 1958 and 1962, and made them available in the original and in translation first in depots at Butare and Tervuren and later in 1973 on microfilm. Surprisingly enough, this collection as well as even major editions of other sources, have been completely ignored by most scholars working after 1960.

The story of Bulfinch Lambe (or Lamb) and his mission to London on behalf of the king of Dahomey (or “Emperor of Pawpaw”) has been told by Marion Johnson in an earlier article in this journal. Lambe was an employee of the Royal African Company in its factory at Jakin, the port of the kingdom of Allada, who was seized and detained by the king of Allada, as security for an unpaid debt, in 1722. He was still held prisoner in Allada when it was conquered by Agaja of Dahomey in 1724, and thus became a prisoner of the latter, who carried him off to his own capital at Abomey, further inland. Agaja soon conceived, perhaps at Lambe's suggestion, the idea of negotiating some sort of commercial agreement with the Royal African Company. A letter which Lambe wrote from Abomey to Jeremiah Tinker, Governor of the Company's factory in the neighboring kingdom of Whydah, in November 1724 reported that Agaja “talks much of settling a Correspondence with the Company, and of having White Men come here.” Lambe evidently offered himself as an intermediary, as a means of securing his release from captivity, and expressed the hope that he might persuade Agaja to acquiesce in his proposals “about my going and returning again with more White Men from the Company.” When Lambe was eventually released in 1726, this was on the understanding that he would return: Agaja himself told the English trader William Snelgrave in the following year that Lambe “had taken an Oath, and promised on his Faith, to return again in a reasonable Time with a Ship.”

Pre-colonial Dahomey's two most recent historians, Isaac A. Akinjogbin and John C. Yoder, have argued that Dahomey was a progressive nation that had much in common with the states of the modern West. Akinjogbin and Yoder have laid particularly heavy emphasis on this point when describing the kingdom's system of government. Their account of that system appears to be generally accepted. It has, at any rate, been repeated in the more important textbooks and works of synthesis.

Akinjogbin argues that, when it was founded in ca. 1620, Dahomey was organized on principles which “ran very close indeed to the modern European idea of a national state.” The kingdom was, it seems, from the very first governed by a line of monarchs who exercised absolute control over the lives and activities of their subjects. Early Dahomey's monarchy “was a strongly centralised institution, controlled all the appointments and dismissals of the chiefs and had a standing army.” In Dahomey every citizen had to “serve and be subservient to the king.”

Dahomey's various eighteenth-century absolute rulers were, Akinjogbin notes, men whose aims and ambitions were at least as admirable as the aims and ambitions of any of Europe's contemporary enlightened despots. Agaja, (ca, 1708-1740), the conqueror of the Aja coast, was for example a monarch who attempted “to stop the slave trade” and who “could be unpredictably generous, magnanimous in victory and endowed with that sense of humor which men of great heart possess.” Tegbesu (1740-1774), Dahomey's best known eighteenth-century monarch, we are told, was a ruler who “greatly enriched both the monarchy and the general populace” and who created “an orderly contented community.”

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers who described pre-colonial Dahomey all stressed that the Dahomans were dedicated, enthusiastic slavers. The kingdom's first historian, Archibald Dalzel, remarked, for example, that the Dahomans were “bred solely to war and rapine.” F.E. Forbes, the author of one of the best-known nineteenth-century accounts of the kingdom, in a similar vein, declared of Dahomey that “strange and contradictory as it may sound, this great nation is no nation, but a banditti.”

The views of these and other similarly-minded writers were, until the 1960s, everywhere accepted. In that decade, however, Isaac A. Akinjogbin published a series of works in which he gave an account of a long-lived Dahoman anti-slave trade tradition. Dahomey was, he claims, founded ca 1620 by a group of “highly principled and far-seeing” Aja in the Abomey area. These Aja founded the kingdom so as to be able to wage war effectively against those of their countrymen who traded in slaves.

Akinjogbin believed that the Dahomans spent about ninety years making war on their slave trading neighbors. It was, he claims, only in 1730 that the European slavers and their African allies were able to force the Dahomans to abandon their anti-slave trade campaign and to begin trading in slaves themselves. The very destructive wars of the 1720s, the wars which made Dahomey a major west African power, were, it seems undertaken as part of a virtuous, anti-slave trade crusade.

Although the Dahomans were forced to begin trading in slaves in 1730, they did not, Aknjogbin implies, entirely abandon their anti-slave trade ideals.

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing debate on African methodology—sources, issues, methods, challenges—by presenting a Ghanaian case study, for, whereas there are a number of broad overviews of African methodology, some of which include surveys of regions such as eastern or southern Africa, as well as countries like Nigeria and Senegal, a study specifically devoted to examining historical production in Ghana is yet to be essayed. This paper, however, shares common concerns with African historiography in general in terms of the quest for distinctly African constructions of history as well as the manifold ways in which African historical production might be made to relate more effectively to local contexts.

In a recent contribution to a volume dedicated to honoring Bethwell Ogot, David William Cohen (2001:53) echoed a call which was by no means new but which still has relevance for African historical production today as it did in the 1960s. Emphasizing the need for African voices, he asserted that “…there are realms of knowledge and programs of knowledge production outside the academy, and outside the field situation, that might be understood and drawn upon to work at the reconstruction of the African past.” It is in this light that this piece was originally prepared in connection with Ghana's fiftieth independence anniversary in 2007.

Ghana has had a long span of historical writing dating back several centuries, but a tradition of Ghanaian historiography is only about 50 years old, as is the case with the development of national historiographies throughout much of Africa.

In this paper I discuss known and probable migrations and areas of settlement of proto-Mande and Mande-speaking groups during eight climate periods spanning the past eight millennia. Recent scholarship concerning west African climate patterns in past times has made feasible provisional periodizations of west African history that are independent of European-derived chronologies. Concomitantly, these historical periodizations offer provocative insights regarding such long-term processes as human migrations and settlement patterns; the diffusion of cultigens and domestic animals; the development of long- distance trade routes; and the use of horse cavalry in warfare.

The provisional historical schema comprising eight climate periods and Map 1 depicting ecological zones are principally derived from the pioneering studies of Sharon E. Nicholson and of Susan and Roderick McIntosh, and from the analyses I have presented elsewhere: (1) The Atlantic Wet Phase which extended from ca. 5500 to ca. 2500 B.C., was succeeded by (2) a two-and-a-half millennia-long period of desiccation. (3) There was a six centuries-long transiton period between ca. 300 B.C. and ca. 300 A.D., during the latter part of which ecological conditions improved sufficiently to permit the development of intra- and trans- Saharan commerce. (4) Four centuries of moderate rainfall ca. 300-ca. 700, and (5) four centuries of abundant rainfall ca. 700-ca. 1100, were followed by (6) a four centuries long dry period extending from ca. 1100 to ca. 1500. (7) A brief wet period, ca. 1500-ca. 1630, preceded (8) a two centuries-long dry period lasting until ca. 1860.

Puisqu'il n'existe pas de mots qui ne soient à personne
(Bakhtin 1979 in Todorov 1981: 83)
Le discours, c'est-à-dire le langage dans sa totalité concrète et vivante.
(Bakhtin 1963 in Todorov 1981: 44)

European travel accounts are widely used as sources to write the history of societies that did not themselves produce a large amount of textual documentation. On the Coast of Guinea, and more particularly on the area formerly known as Gold Coast (approximately the littoral of modern Ghana), many of the written documents providing historians with information on coastal societies prior to nineteenth century were produced by Europeans travelers. Most of these individuals were merchants, craftsmen, pastors or soldiers who had settled several years in the numerous forts and trading posts erected along the seashore to protect and enhance the trade of chartered companies. Others were seamen and merchants who only spent a few weeks at a stretch plying the African Coast aboard men-of-war or trading ships, exchanging manufactured goods for gold, slaves, and ivory. Professional writers, who had not traveled to Africa, but had obtained data from various written sources or from travelers, also composed some of the accounts. Therefore, these documents show an extraordinary diversity in form and content, which historians and archeologists need to investigate before using them as primary sources for reconstructing the past.

In the first part of the present paper, which focuses on a specific genre, the seventeenth-century travel accounts, I recall the historiography of the recent critique of these sources. I also point out that despite decisive methodological breakthroughs, some heuristic dimensions or attributes of these texts are yet to be recognized and assessed. I then re-examine these sources from the dual perspective of historic and linguistic anthropological methods and introduce an exploratory approach centered on the Bakhtinian approach to discourse.

Traditional accounts of the nineteenth-century Fulbe conquest in northern Cameroon tell roughly the same story: following the example of Usman Dan Fodio in Nigeria, the Fulbe of Cameroon organized in the beginning of the nineteenth century a “jihad” or a “holy war” against the local pagan populations to convert them to Islam and create an Islamic state. The divisions among the local populations and the military superiority of the Fulbe allowed them to conquer almost all northern Cameroon. They forced those who submitted to give an annual tribute of goods and servants, and they raided the other groups. In these traditional accounts the Fulbe are presented as unchallenged masters, while the local populations are depicted as slaves who were powerless over their fate; their role in the conquest of the region and in the administration of the new political order is supposed to have been insignificant.

I will show that, on the contrary, in the area of Banyo the Wawa and Bute played a crucial role in the conquest of the sultanate and in its administration. I will then re-examine the cliche that all members of the local populations were the slaves of the Fulbe by distinguishing the fate of the Wawa and Bute on one side from that of the Kwanja and Mambila on the other, and by showing the importance of the Fulbe's identity in shaping the definition of slavery. Finally I will argue that, if the historical accounts found in the scientific literature invariably insist on Fulbe hegemony and minimize the role played by the local populations, it is because those accounts are often based on Fulbe traditions, and because these traditions are remodeled by the Fulbe in order to correspond to their discourse on identity.

This introduction explains why it is important to include the history of labor and labor relations in Africa in Global Labor History. It suggests that the approach of the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations 1500–2000 – with its taxonomy of labor relations – is a feasible method for applying this approach to the historiography on labor history in Africa. The introduction ends with an analysis of four case studies that are presented in this special section, with a specific focus on shifts in labor relations and how they could be explained.

This paper needs to be read against the background of the critique which has gradually been gathering force over the last half-dozen years or so of the concept of the mfecane. By the mfecane is meant the idea that in the 1820s much of the eastern half of southern Africa was thrown into turmoil by a series of wars and population migrations set in motion by the explosive expansion of the Zulu state under Shaka. Ever since Theal first popularized it in the late nineteenth century, this idea has remained one of the bedrock concepts around which the history of southern Africa in the later eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century has been written. The term mfecane itself did not become widely used until as recently as 1966, when, in his widely influential book, The Zulu Aftermath, Omer-Cooper repackaged what had previously been called “the wars of Shaka” for an emerging Africanist readership. Since then the concept of the mfecane has permeated the literature, both popular and academic, inside and outside southern Africa, to the point where it is regarded as a fixed fact of the sub-continent's history.

What do African tellers of history tell it for? What do they mean by history and how differently is the past transmitted in different communities? Professional academic historians use oral data like documentary data, for their own ends. They work in a different medium--written language--and they offer back a new story to the original donors. They do not always pay attention to the ways in which these consumers produced their own versions and perpetuated them embedded in performances. The indigenous occasions of performance are also easily replaced by the record of an outside researcher's chance intervention.

Oral performances of history differ--in kind, in the extent to which past events are a focus of attention, in the readiness of individuals to answer an outsider's questions, in the types and structures of recall. The patterns I describe for one Liberian community may be quite different for its ethnic neighbors. As a social anthropologist I assume that recall is not a purely individual phenomenon, and besides trying to understand what connections there may be between types of recall and types of social condition, I want to see how personal reminiscence (as well as tradition) is formulated, sustained, and recapitulated; to whom it is repeated; whether it is hinted or used overtly as a weapon. By taking these issues into account I believe we can also interpret better the historical data from oral performance, just as we need to know about all the genres of performance if we are to recognize the uses of history there may be in apparently non-historical modes.

Work on volume 7 of the Cambridge History of Africa, covering the years 1905-1940, has obliged me to reflect on the nature of the literature for this period in African history. The past twenty years or so have of course seen some notable research on the subject, and much of this is now published. A common theme in this work, as in the study of earlier African history, has been an emphasis on African initiative and enterprise, whether among clerks and teachers, cocoa farmers or mineworkers. More recently, there has been a renewal of interest (often related to theories about “underdevelopment”) in the external forces which set limits to the scope and success of African initiatives. It has once again become acceptable in Africanist circles to study white farmers, trading companies, mine corporations, finance houses, administrative hierarchies, legislative councils, or mission headquarters. Thus the Cambridge History should now be able to achieve a more balanced appraisal of both local and alien factors in the colonial order than would have been possible even five years ago.

The question I want to raise here is whether, for the purposes of such a volume, it is enough to think in terms of synthesizing the work of professional historians of Africa over the past two decades, or whether recent shifts of emphasis have exposed topics and questions on which we must still look for guidance to works written when colonial rule was still a living reality and African history, as an academic subject, had not yet been invented.

The Guinea coast and near interior was a region of almost wholly preliterate societies before the coming of the Europeans. Islamic culture, with its literate strands, which had been spreading through the northern parts of West Africa over many centuries had barely begun to touch the Guinea region—although a handful of literate itinerant merchants and missionaries was to be encountered by the Portuguese, and Islamic religious practice had penetrated at least one royal court in Senegal. Hence the “medieval” sources in Arabic which are informative on the history of the Sudanic states of West Africa tell us little or nothing about the Guinea region. As for the oral traditions of the region, mostly collected only since 1850, these have an inbuilt “horizon” of recollection which falls far short of the arrival of the Europeans five centuries ago. Ethnographic, cultural, and linguistic evidence, systematized in recent times, can be extrapolated backwards to earlier times, but this can only be done, with any security, when trends over time have been identified from earlier hard evidence.

Such trends can of course be obtained from archeology, as well as from written sources. But the limited investigations of archeologists in Guinea to date, while they certainly inform on general issues such as agriculture and technology, are as yet decidedly weak, for a variety of good reasons, on the regional details of human settlement and population, and on the varieties of political structure. Moreover it is doubtful whether archeology per se can inform to any significant extent on ethnicity, language, and social characteristics. It is therefore only marginally debatable to refer to the earliest European written sources on Guinea as “the early sources.”

Since its publication in 1874-1875 the account by the Basel missionaries Friedrich (‘Fritz’) August Ramseyer (1842-1902) and Johannes Kühne (1840-1915) of their captivity in Asante, Vier Jahre in Asante, has constituted one of the major written sources on the nature of precolonial society in what is now southern Ghana. Stationed at Anum, near the east bank of the lower Volta, Ramseyer and Kühne were captured together with Ramseyer's wife and infant son in June 1869 by an Asante force which had invaded Ewe territory. They were taken to Asante and eventually, after a seven-month stay in a hamlet which they christened Ebenezer, to Kumase, where they were held hostage from December 1870 until the approach of a British military expedition in January 1874. Apart from the independent French trader Joseph-Marie Bonnat, who was captured in the same month and shared many of their experiences, Ramseyer and Kühne spent longer in Asante than any other author before the twentieth century. Moreover, as prisoners they were able to observe African society from an unusual perspective: “these men saw all from below; the white man was the slave, the negro the master.”

While the importance of this source is generally recognized, it has escaped the notice of most commentators that what Ramseyer and Kühne left us was not one source but at least five—a manuscript, two German editions, and an English and a French translation, all written within a relatively short period of time as part of what has been called “the scramble for Gold Coast Africana.” In this paper I shall explore some of the relationships among these different sources.

The argument that a process of “making tribes” has invested Africa from early colonial times has been used to explain the emergence of some ethnicities which appear not to have existed before colonialism. This emergence was often accompanied by the creation of written records of male historical discourse, thus not only giving them undue prominence but also suppressing female historical discourses which were not considered pertinent to “history.”

Yet whenever history is recounted orally by either men or women, it contains messages directed to a “gendered” audience (i.e., an audience composed of people of both genders) whose participants perceive messages differently and reproduce separate but interacting discourses. Such diverse perceptions result from certain aspects in oral genres as well as small, coded markers which can evoke immensely potent but gender-specific experiences. Such instances may become public symbols and, along with more obviously historical narratives, greatly influence how people relate to their past. Thus men and women in the same audience, hearing the same story, can make connections between elements of a narrative which are obscure to outside researchers.

Recently, it has become quite common for historians of Africa to deconstruct written historical sources on the basis of the agendas of both the original writer and his informants. These agendas are rarely explicit and thus hiddenly selective. Such deconstruction is a legitimate scholarly procedure; however, as female voices have rarely been recorded—the resulting analysis reinforces the omission of women's roles in the process of remaking history and creating identity.

When Kenya-born singer-songwriter Roger Whittaker sang these doleful words in 1983, the village of Shimoni was a relatively quiet backwater on the southern Kenya coast, known primarily for its deep-sea fishing club. It is now a much larger and busier place, where tourists come to see the ‘slave cave’ that gives Shimoni its name (Swahili shimo-ni, “at the cave”), and embark on boat trips to Wasini Island and the nearby Kisite-Mpunguti Marine National Park (see Figure 1). Whittaker's song played a significant role in this development, by bringing Shimoni and its caves to wider attention, and focusing on one of a number of narratives about the caves' past usage. The lyrics of ‘Shimoni’ did not simply embellish a local tale, but (re)created it in the image of metanarratives about the history of slavery on the East African coast. As we will argue in this paper, these metarratives now dominate reconstructions of the past in Shimoni, and are reinforced by the activities and institutions that constitute and promote the caves as an important site of cultural heritage.