The method of exposition adopted in this essay is one which divides the discussion into three concentric circles and proceeds accordingly. Firstly, we give a brief historical sketch of the antecedents. This sets the scene for the next stage, where we investigate the nature of the crisis and the reasons for it. Finally, attention is especially drawn to the materialist critique of orthodox historiography in order to bring into relief the ideological dimensions of the problem. On the whole, in this study we have drawn generously from ideas developed in works dealing generally with African historiography, even though this essay is specific to the Nigerian social formation.

Historians of West Africa seem generally to agree that the main benefit conferred on the region by early European visitors, particularly the Portuguese, was the introduction of new crops. These crops are said to have improved diets and accelerated population growth, to the point, some would argue, that human losses through the slave trade were more than offset by the enhanced ability to feed people. Usually a few crops are cited, and the subject is not pursued very far, even in economic history texts, though the societies under study were overwhelmingly agricultural. Usually, too, American crops are singled out—especially maize, cassava, sweet potatoes, and peanuts, but also tobacco, pineapples, guavas, and papayas. Sometimes these are the only crops credited to Europeans. That list occasionally includes tomatoes and avocados even though no evidence has been advanced that either plant was grown in West Africa before the nineteenth century. Some historians confuse origin with source, stating, for example, that the Portuguese brought citrus fruit and sugar cane from Asia when those Asian crops had long been established in the Mediterranean region. No one, it appears, has taken the trouble to examine all the printed sources for precolonial West Africa, plus relevant linguistic evidence, to try to determine which crops were introduced by Europeans, whence, where, and when.

Written sources for the history of sub-Saharan Africa (with the exception of East Africa) only begin to appear with the inception of Arabic records from the ninth century onwards, and these are restricted to the Sahel and the northern part of the savanna belt. European sources begin in the mid-fifteenth century, first for Senegambia. They, in turn, confine themselves to the coast and its immediate hinterland, as well as the navigable courses of rivers, with few, and often vague, references to the interior. For the time before the early written sources and for those extensive areas which only much later entered the horizon of writing witnesses, other sources illuminating the past have to be traced and tapped. Among such non-written sources are the findings of anthropology and archeology, of research in oral tradition and place names. Because of their interdependence, working with different source types contributes to the reliability of results.

So far little systematic use has been made of place names as a source for African history. Houis' 1958 dictum, “la toponymie ouest-africaine n'est pas encore sortie de l'oeuf,” has not yet been proven obsolete. In this paper I hope to stimulate the process of shedding the egg shells. It is intended as a short introduction to the potential historical treasures place names may yield, into their characteristics, and into some principles guiding their interpretation. With the aim at illustrating my arguments, I add examples of place names. These I have chosen from two areas which, at first sight, seem to have been selected rather randomly; southern Senegambia and Germany. In fact both areas share few features, both geographically and historically. Two reasons have led me to select them. First, they simply are the regions I know best. Secondly, the recourse to German place names is instructive, as research on place names has been undertaken there for more than a century, leading to a wide range of data and to the accumulation of rich research experience.

Telling the Almoravid story asks much of the imagination, as a stark paucity of documentary evidence continues to shadow much of this dynasty's character, parameters, and early development. Revisionist readings have become commonplace, particularly following the recovery of lost portions of Ibn Idhārīs al-Bayan al-Mughrib. Comparisons of this chronicle with those of Ibn Abī Zar and Ibn Khaldūn brought scholars to revise chronologies and rescript the roles played by the movement's first leaders. Although Almoravid historiography continues to rely primarily on medieval Arabic chronicles and geographies for a synthetic interpretation of how events unfolded, numismatic and archeological studies have brought perspectives of their own to this period. Consequent hypotheses reveal the wide play afforded interpretive assumptions in various attempts to integrate the diverse, and often contradictory, data. And where this is true for the Almoravids in the Maghrib, the synthetic role of hypotheses finds even greater play in attempts to understand the history of the Almoravids to the south. For here textual sources are meager indeed, allowing for the turn of a phrase to reconfigure decades of history.

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.

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.

The database used for my A Guide to Original Sources for Precolonial Western Africa published in European Languages (xxvi + 192pp., African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1987) has been subject to continuing revision and updating. The total number of entries has grown from some 780 to close on 830, and in all I estimate that something like 400 changes have been made to the published form of the Guide. Some of these are essentially cosmetic—for example, rearrangements of an entry's layout intended to make its text easier to use and understand, or the correction of obvious misprints or infelicities. But, leaving these aside, there are now a sufficient number of substantive changes to suggest that-pending the appearance of a second edition—it might be sensible to seek to publish this list of significant corrections and additions separately.

Of those whose help I acknowledged in 1987, I can only express my continuing gratitude to P. E. H. Hair, Adam Jones, and Robin Law for the way in which they are still drawing my attention both to new sources and to my earlier errors. I have also gained useful bibliographical insights from holding in my hand many of the 3537 items listed in the great and glorious sale catalog recently put together by Paul Wilson, of Oriental and African Books, Shrewsbury, of “rare and scholarly” books published on West Africa and the western and central Sudan from the early seventeenth century onwards.

I do not profess to have produced the best or [an] exhaustive history … but I hope that these feeble efforts of mine shall be a stepping stone for others to follow.

This is the first part of a study of the works of Chief Theophilus Olabode Avoseh, the Gbesiewu of Badagry, a man of culture and self–education who represents two related but distinct peoples, the Egun and the Yoruba–Awori, and who, above all, is a prolific researcher and distinguished local historian. In this first part, I will provide the biodata on Avoseh, and then introduce his minor works with translations and comments designed to bring out their significance. My primary aims are to draw attention to these obscure works and make them accessible to other researchers.

In the second part, I will examine Avoseh's major works, that is, his two studies of Badagry and Epe: A Short History of Badagry published in 1938, recently revised and awaiting publication, and A Short History of Epe published in 1960. This second part will emphasize the special aspects of Avoseh's works and their contribution to Yoruba and Aja historiography. These two major works have been of considerable value to other historians in their reconstruction of the history of the coastal cities whereas the minor works presented here are comparatively little known.

As court musicians and specialists of the past, the Arókin of Òyó have been used as a source for Yorùbâ history, but their own views on the uses of historical information have not been investigated. For the first time a sample of these views is published here. It comes from an interview with a group of Arókin, in which they offered descriptions and other representations of the nature of their expertise. This evidence sheds light on how the Arókin have traditionally deployed historical precedent and accounted for historical innovation. They ground the resort to the past primarily on the social need to offer consolation (itùnû) to the ruler, i.e., to cool down his personal grief. It is from this that they derive the need to relate and assimilate events, so as to explain the meaning (itumòo) of present happenings. They emphasize, above the supplying of etiology and legitimation, the restoration of equanimity against grief and anger.

Arókin tradition compares the overwhelming power of song to the overwhelming power of grief. It stresses raw personal emotion as a cultural force, both as a source of disruption and as a trigger for efforts to make sense of the world with the help of the past, or with the help of newly-imported frames of explanation. The management of the king's (but also, in exceptional circumstances, of the people's) emotions requires history, and may require religious innovation. The king's grief at the loss of his children is liable to have violent, and culturally far-reaching, consequences. Despite obvious differences, this has significant points of contact with Rosaldo's account of the rage of the bereaved and “the cultural force of emotions” in connection with the Ilongot of northern Luzon, in the Philippines.

Twenty–one collaborators and I recently have championed the use of demographic insights in the reconstruction of African history. The advocacy, however, does not mean that we endorse all uses to which demography has been put in the recent literature. We all recognize the delicacy of transferring methods from one discipline to another. In this essay I would like to suggest five pitfalls into which some distinguished scholars have fallen as a caution for further research. Some of the authors of course, may not believe them pit-falls at all, but the production of history requires debates on methods as well as fact and theory.

Before, embarking on this critique, however, let me propose a framework which relates primarily to one of the three major components of demography, the study of mortality. The analysis of mortality in Africa really involves three nested questions which researchers inevitably address either implicitly or explicitly: why do organisms die? why and how do people die? and why and how do people die in Africa? In the course of explaining how demographers answer these questions, I will illustrate the methodological errors which I be¬lieve fellow historians have committed.

Death is the inevitable outcome of life; it comes to all organisms, large and small. The causes of death and disease often work in combination. Some organisms are born defective, genetically unable to function in the same way as others of their species. Others, although properly equipped, experience accidents or shortages of food. Those which have survived to maturity experience aging, a process by which the biological mechanisms which have enabled creatures to repair themselves and to fight off enemies, cease functioning, and death is the final outcome. All these causes of death can occur without the intervention of other creatures. The earth, however, is filled with a variety of organisms which are capable of killing one another. Members of some species kill each other, but the most common causes of death are interspecific, involving the relationships of prédation and parasitism.

This is, as the title makes clear, an essay; that is to say, a genre in which it is considered legitimate for the author to put forward his own more or less (in this case rather more) subjective viewpoints. As such it contains quite a number of short cuts and mouthfuls. I have also deemed it necessary, for the sake of the logic of the argumentation, to make occasional and rather long de-tours via a number of obvious, and at times downright elementary, points. My excuse is that the genre virtually requires it. And my hope is that the following pages will provide at least some food for thought.

Back in the early 1960s the distinguished Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper of Oxford University proclaimed, as every Africanist probably knows, that at least precolonial Black Africa had no history. He must have meant what he said, for he repeated his contention in 1969 by putting the label “unhistoric” on the African continent; the whole of the African continent that is, including Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Maghrib.

On the face of it there is little reason why we should bother with this type of point of view now in the 1990s. After all, the avalanche of articles and books on African history—including several multi-volume General Histories—which have been published since the 1960s, in a sense bear testimony to the absurdity of Trevor-Roper's position.

And yet, for all that, I am not quite certain that the malaise engendered by Trevor-Roper and his like has been entirely dissipated. After all, Trevor-Roper remains a frequently-quoted historian. But more to the point, there is often in my opinion a rather embarrassing insistence in the specialist Africanist litera¬ture on the “extraordinary complexity and dynamism” of Black Africa's past; an insistence not infrequently coupled with the urge, apparently never appeased, to put to rest the myth of Primitive Africa. There is also an equally embarrassing insistence on behalf of many Africanists to pin the label “state” on even the tiniest of polities in precolonial Africa, thus obscuring the appar¬ent fact that perhaps a majority of Africans in the precolonial era lived in so-called “acephalous” societies.

Aaron Belisarius Cosimo Sibthorpe, a village school teacher who wrote the first history of Sierra Leone, was a man of mystery, a magus. So he seems to have seen himself. The dead, he wrote, have vanished into oblivion,

Here is a powerful, original image. The historian peremptorily calls up the dead from the “immense Jehoshaphat”—the valley where they all lie gathered together to await the judgment of God—choosing anyone he wants, and at his call they are obliged to rise and answer him obediently, as Lazarus answered Jesus. If only for this image Sibthorpe deserves our wonder and gratitude.

There are two book length, English language, descriptions of precolonial life on the Gambia. The earlier, Richard Jobson's The Golden Trade of the Moors of 1620, is widely available, having been reprinted three times in this century. The other, Francis Moore's Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa of 1738 is equally valuable, but much rarer. Although Moore's book appeared in several editions in the eighteenth century, it has not been published in anything close to its entirety in almost two centuries. Moore stayed much longer on the Gambia than did Jobson and his more circumstantial account deserves greater accessibility for its contemporary influence as well as its source value. I am beginning the process of preparing a new edition of Moore and present this short bibliographical note as a first product of my research.

Francis Moore was hired as a writer, or clerk, by the Royal African Company in 1730 and spent almost four and a half years (November 1730 to May 1735), on the river Gambia, first as a writer and subsequently as Factor, at several of the Company's establishments. During his stay he apparently wrote a general journal for his own uses, as well as the “true and particular Journal of all his Proceedings relating to the Affairs of the…Company” (Moore 1738, Appendix 1:2-3) which his contract obliged him to keep. Subsequently, Moore added several other texts as well as amending and extending his journals to produce the book first published in 1738. I will discuss these additions, amendments, and extensions below.

History records it that Obatala was the ruler of the indigenous peoples of southwestern Nigeria when they were conquered by Oduduwa. The exact date of the encounter remains problematic, owing largely to the nature of the source of information, oral tradition. At one level of interpretation, therefore, Obatala myths represent the struggle for the domination of the autochthonous groups, but there is another dimension. Although Oduduwa's image and achievements came to overshadow and dwarf Obatala's role in history, the latter has persisted as a deity, appropriated into the Yoruba pantheon as a symbol of peace:

It is essentially difficult to describe a Yoruba religious festival. It is not what happens that really matters, nor indeed is it important what is done. What does matter is the intense spiritual experience that can be shared even by strangers. During these events sacrifices, prayers, drumming, singing, dancing all combine to create an atmosphere, an emotional situation which allows the worshippers to come near the god ….

The second day of the [Obatala] festival has a feature not unlike a Passion Play. There is no spoken dialogue but singing accompanies the performance and the entire action is danced. The story is of a fight between the Ajagemo [who is the personification of Obatala] and another priest bearing the title of Olunwi. Ajagemo is taken prisoner by Olunwi and carried off from the palace. The Oba [king], however, intervenes for his release. He pays ransom to Olunwi, and Ajagemo is liberated and allowed to return to the palace. The return gradually attains the qualities of a triumphal procession.

The successful implementation of the Lugardian system of indirect rule among the Igbo eluded British colonial officials. In Northern Nigeria the British had effectively used the Fulani aristocrats in implementing the system. The Fulani were believed to represent a superior caste of nomads who possessed superior ideas of centralization, organization, and administration. Since the Aro were able to organize their spectacular slave- trading network in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British assumed that, like the Fulani, they represented equally superior elements, and so could be used to implement the indirect rule policy in Igboland. Or, if they did not possess a centralized administration as the Fulani, which could be effectively utilized, one could be invented for the occasion.

As a result the Aro began to agitate British colonial officers and anthropologists, designing to show their “foreignness” to the Igbo. British officials quickly rejected that the Aro were Igbo. Because the Igbo were acephalous the British had regarded them as very “primitive,” thus incapable of any remarkable organization or innovation. Since colonialism justified itself by the contention that, left alone, Africans were incapable of any meaningful advance, it was only logical for the British to look outside Igboland and Africa for the origin of the Aro. Consequently, Aro colonial historiography became suspect.

Historians, facing “an interconnected crisis of content, method and audience,” have attempted to resolve this crisis by calling upon “a new inter-disciplinary approach to the study and understanding of human memory” (Thelen, 1989a:B1). I believe that such an interdisciplinary approach can shed much light on the phenomenon of ethnicity. I shall attempt to demonstrate this point by examining a number of recent works dealing with the historical identity of the English and with “tribalism” (cultural identity) in southern Africa. Then I shall attempt to apply some of the insights gained to interviews I conducted in Sankuru Sub-Region (Kasai Oriental Region, Republic of Zaire) in 1970.

According to Thelen, the crisis of content in the discipline of history arose out of the need to publish or perish. Scholars have researched and written about increasingly specialized topics. “Common questions about how people make sense of their pasts go unasked” (Thelen 1989a:B1).

Paul Erdmann Isert's Reise nach Guinea und den Caribäischen Inseln in Columbien (Copenhagen 1788) seems to have enjoyed a lively reception, considering the number of translations, both complete and abridged, which appeared shortly after the original. Written in German, in Gothic script, it was quickly ‘lifted over’ into the Roman alphabet in the translations (into Scandinavian languages, Dutch, and French), thus making it available to an even greater public than a purely German-reading one. In the course of my research for the first English translation, I have found that the greatest number of references to Reise in modern bibliographies have been to the French translation, Voyages en Guinée (Paris, 1793). This indicates a greater availability of the translation, a greater degree of competence/ease in reading French than the German in its original form, or both. The 1793 translation has recently been issued in a modern reprint, with the orthography modernized and with an introduction and notes by Nicoué Gayibor. Having recently completed my own translation, I have now had the opportunity to examine the 1793 edition more closely, and have noticed a number of variations and divergencies from the original. I would like to examine these here, largely as an illustration of problems in translation, using both a copy of the 1793 edition and the new reprint. The latter, barring a few orthographical errors—confusion of f's and s's—is true to its predecessor.

Literary practitioners have long been, often uncomfortably, aware of the ambivalently fruitful and constraining rhetorical influences of the past. Writers successively utilize or rebel against traditional tropes, poetic conventions, and narrative norms, balancing cultural depth against individualist innovation, acceptability against rejection, public intelligibility against the opacity of private connotation. By such gestures towards the traditions, literature challenges, upholds, or leaves unquestioned the moral, political, and cultural pre-suppositions of its day.

South African historiography is less aware than it might be of its textuality, in this sense, of its immersion in a similar “anxiety of influence,” as Harold Bloom has termed it. Little attention has been paid to its rhetorical lineaments and heritage or to the ways historians have read, used, and departed from one another. This is dramatically illustrated by the case of the historiography of Shaka Zulu (assassinated in 1828). Nowhere else has such poverty of evidence and research spawned such a massively unquestioned, long-lived, and monolithic “history.” Only in the last decade has the legendary, verbal construction of the Shaka figure been seriously questioned; only in 1991, at an important colloquium at the University of the Witwatersrand, was something approaching an academic consensus reached that the mfecane—the notion of Shaka's Zulus as the “storm-center” of a sub-continental explosion of autophagous, black-on-black violence—was no longer a credible vehicle for understanding the early nineteenth century in southern Africa.

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 Malian National Archives are located at Kuluba, an administrative suburb of Bamako. The collection is remarkable because of its vast scope. While for the post-independence period only materials from the Republic of Mali are included, for the colonial period the collection includes documents from what was then called the French Sudan, of which Bamako was the capital. At various times the French Sudan comprised, besides all of modern Mali, portions of Mauritania, all of Burkina Faso, and for brief periods portions of Senegal, Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Benin. In addition, documents from the military department of Niger (now Republic of Niger) also came into Kuluba.

Among the documents one might not expect to find at Kuluba is a collection from the southeastern portions of Mauritania, including territory that at one time formed parts of the cercles of Kayes, Nioro, and Timbuktu, as well as the entire cercle of Nema. These districts, comprising the modern Mauritanian centers of Walata, Timbedra, and Aiun el-Arms, an area of nearly 300,000 square kilometers, were removed from the Sudan and appended to Mauritania in 1945. Many documents from what is today the nation of Burkina Faso are also found at Kuluba. All of what was later to be called Upper Volta was part of the Sudan until 1914, when it was made a separate colony. In 1932 the cercles of Wahiguya and Tugan were reattached to the Sudan, and again removed in 1947 when Upper Volta was reconstituted.