The problem of Igbo origins is indeed “a very maze within a maze.” It boggles the mind. Instead of one pan-Igbo tradition of origin there are almost as many traditions as there are those independent sub-cultural groups referred to as “clans” in the Intelligence Reports of the 1930s. In fact in some clans there are two rival traditions of origin. However, for clarity and ease of understanding, we shall here distinguish among three categories of traditions of origin found among the Ibgo people. Going from what I consider the least to the most relevant, these are:

In this paper I have three main objectives. One is to highlight and examine the work of Zimbabwean African historians under colonial rule up to the 1960s. Another is to examine the effect of the work of these historians on the traditions of the Changamire Rozvi, the rulers of the greatest state in Zimbabwe from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. The third is to show how Rozvi revival movements arose in the 1950s as a minor feature of the period of African nationalism's mobilization.

Although the first history of this country was published as early as 1900, it goes without saying that, in the colonial context, African history was played down and denigrated by most of the white writers on the subject for most of the colonial period. Although there was a strong local white tradition of writing on the minority Ndebele people, the majority Shona-speakers were largely ignored. Apart from a small group of local white antiquarians, whose work is only now undergoing re-evaluation, very little was published before 1960 on the history of the Shona. Yet, despite this general neglect, a small but devoted number of Africans were conscious of their lack of a written history and sought to remedy that lack. They found it a lonely and a difficult task. In a period when African education beyond certain limits was discouraged, they had neither access to proper training nor to primary sources other than traditions. If they were sometimes prone to trust unduly the missionary texts with which they grew up (so that one can read of “King Monomotapa” and “Queen Sheba” borrowing Solomon's Phoenician laborers to build Great Zimbabwe),” one can also read the work of two Duma historians who carefully cited Arabic, Portuguese, and archeological sources in secondary works.

The Bantu languages of Africa constitute a large cluster of languages sharing so many common features that their probable relationship was recognized very early. Doke and Cole summarize the history of this recognition, and of the comparative studies that grew out of it, up to 1943. Given an early start, a closely-knit group of languages, and workers of the quality of Meinhof, Meeussen, and Guthrie, Bantu linguistics has progressed to a stage equalled by few comparative fields outside Indo-European. Detailed reconstructions of Bantu phonology (including tonology and intonation), morphology, syntax, and lexicon have been possible.

The problems that remain are those of internal and external relationships. What are the subgroups of Bantu and what is the history of their development from the hypothetized ancestral language? What languages are related to Bantu, and what is the status of Bantu in any larger language grouping? Both questions together may be put as--does ‘Bantu’ exist? That is, do the languages recongized as Bantu--all and only those languages--constitute a well-defined linguistic group?

The simplest, and most common, assumptions are 1) that Bantu (possibly including some of the languages recognized as Bantu by the followers of Greenberg, but rejected by Guthrie) is a linguistic unit, with a common ancestor, Proto-Bantu, not shared with any other languages; 2) that it constitutes one division of a sub-group of Niger-Congo; and 3) that it in turn consists of two principal dialect areas, showing either an east-west division or a break between the forest languages (Guthrie's Zones A, B, and C) and the remainder. The principal problem for this view is the lack of support in shared innovation for any of the groupings it postulates. There is plentiful evidence in lexicostatistics both for the existence of Bantu as a distinct unit and for either of the internal borders postulated. There is even evidence for these in the form of numerous lexical and grammatical Isoglosses roughly coinciding at the boundaries of Bantu, and primarily lexical isoglosses internally. But there do not seem to be any cases where one of these boundaries is parallelled by an isogloss such that a clearly innovative feature occurs only on one side of the line.

In Part I of this paper we examined the external written sources and found no unambiguous evidence that an Almoravid conquest of ancient Ghana ever occurred. The local oral evidence reviewed in this part of our study supports our earlier hypothesis, in that we find nothing in the traditions to indicate any conquest of the eleventh-century sahelian state known to Arab geographers as “Ghana.” Instead, the oral traditions emphasize drought as having had much to do with the eventual disintegration of the Soninke state known locally as “Wagadu.”

An immediate problem involved in sifting the oral sources for evidence of an Almoravid conquest is that a positive identification between the Wagadu of oral tradition and the Ghana of written sources has never been established. Early observers like Tautain (1887) entertained no doubts in this regard, and recently Meillassoux seems to have accepted a connection, if not an identification, between Ghana and Wagadu when he notes that “les Wago, dont le nom a donné Wagadu, sont les plus clairement associés à l'histoire du Ghana.” However, much continues to be written on the subject, and the question remains a thorny one. On the lips of griots (traditional bards) and other local informants, Wagadu is a timeless concept, so a reliable temporal connection between people and events in the oral sources on one hand and Ghana at the time of the Almoravids on the other, is particularly elusive. Indeed, any link between the traditions discussed here and a specific date like 1076 must be regarded as very tenuous, as must any association of legendary events with Islamic dates. In western Sudanic tradition influenced by Islam, the hijra (A.D. 622) is both prestigious and convenient, a date with which virtually any event in the remote past can be associated, though such a claim may have nothing to do with any useful time scale.

Writing in 1963, the late D.H. Jones commented on the first volume of the Hungarian Endre Sik's History of Black Africa that

On the second volume, the same reviewer wrote four years later that it was

This is undoubtedly strong stuff, especially as Jones was some way from being a reactionary scholar; although he noted that Sik's book (hereafter HBA) is “sharply Marxist in tone,” he pointedly refrains from attacking it on that score. Sik, according to Jones, is simply incompetent.

Hopkins' observation that bibliographies are “the basis of all academic study” would seem to be indisputable. Yet this paper is in large part a response to a study that indicates that, if not open to dispute in principle, in practice this dictum is more widely ignored than heeded. The study in question purports to demonstrate that, by and large, historians admittedly do not attempt to make systematic use of bibliographic tools, relying instead on footnotes, word of mouth, and serendipity, thereby falling short of their academic obligation to be exhaustive in the research enterprise. I was reluctant at first to credit this claim, preferring to put it down to a defect in the questionnaire approach of the author. But then I discovered that the latest edition of the Jahresberichte für deutsche Geschichte, by far the pre-eminent German historical bibliography, had escaped deflowering (that is, its pages had remained uncut) on the shelves of our Reference Department for nearly two years!

One robin does not, as they say, make a spring and I would hesitate to draw any far-reaching conclusions from this single example, no matter how egregious. Yet, when I began to search out historical bibliographies, I was surprised at how many there were, particularly so for serial bibliographies and indexes, of which I have so far found about 900, at least three times as many as I had naively anticipated initially.

Bibliographies come in a variety of forms. There are major retrospective bibliographies, which aim to include all or virtually all that has been published on a particular subject during a particular period of time. Such bibliographies sometimes appear as articles, but more often as books. For African studies, Scheven has undertaken to produce periodic indexes of bibliographies of this kind, in both formats.

Three descent groups in southern Sierra Leone derive their names from Englishmen who married African women in the late seventeenth century: the Caulkers of Shenge, the Tuckers of Gbap, and the Rogerses of Kpaka chiefdom. The names Caulker, Tucker, and Rogers occur frequently in the records of the Royal African Company T70 series and each group retains traditions about its English ancestor. Previous attempts to correlate this written and oral testimony have not been very successful. In this article I shall discuss the Rogerses, dealing first with the written material and then with their oral (or quasi-oral) traditions, which I collected in 1977–78.

From the 1620s onwards, a series of English companies had agents in the Sherbro area. The main item purchased was camwood, especially from the Bum Kittam River. Sloops were also sent to Cape Mount to buy ivory and cotton textiles (cloths, shirts and breeches, which were resold at Sherbro and further north). The slave trade was of marginal importance in this area until the mid-eighteenth century.

The Royal African Company entered the Sherbro trade in 1678. At first its base was on the mainland, but in 1688 it was transferred to York Island, where a weak stone fort was built. From 1689 to 1700 the company's Sherbro agent controlled trade at Sierra Leone as well as at Sherbro. The Sherbro fort also generally had at least three or four outfactories.

This paper focuses on the history curriculum in the schools of French West Africa in the period from 1918 to 1938. Specifically, it investigates the frames used to investigate the past, the sources for the generation of historical data, and the substance and interpretation of history taught in the schools. Written histories of the vast territories of Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF) for the most part were impelled by the development of schooling under colonial rule. Pedagogues and politicians alike could not conceive of education that did not convey a sense of the past. J.L. Monod, a school inspector and author of several texts for AOF's schools, stated: “It is necessary that native youth know the history of their own ancestors and the transformations that we have brought [about] in their own country.” Countless curriculum guides and educational legislation of the interwar years echoed these sentiments.

While history was to have a place in the schools, written texts that would form the basis for instruction were all but non-existent. As the schools expanded, both in the number of students they reached and in the years of education offered, schoolmen grappled with the rather complicated task of creating history. The issues those in the interwar years faced are ones that still confound historians of Africa: what defines the search for the past; what constitutes data about the past; and finally, what interpretations of the past can be made. The first of these issues, perhaps, was the most thorny in the interwar years for the most obvious frames were those that essentially denied the past and that derived from French political boundaries of AOF, colonie, or cercle. This initial formulation led to the questioning of whether more appropriate frames for creating history were available on other geographical, cultural, or political terms whose shape differed radically from those of the interwar years.

To the historian, no less than to any other student of Asantesεm (Asante matters), the collected works of Rattray (1881–1938) are unavoidable, an ineluctable presence. There they sit on the library shelf--a monument of colonial ethnography and manifestly a major source--to be chewed over and ransacked, to be digested and distilled, to be scissored and parcelled out in the footnotes that support or refute an argument, and ultimately--and always--to be returned to again and again. All historians of Asante use Rattray and are grateful to him. It is important at the outset to record that fact of simple gratitude, for, to the historian of Asante, there is much to criticise in Rattray's work. What follows, then, is a critical assessment of that work.

It is the purpose of this article to investigate certain aspects of the Pokomo (P) language, and thereby to present a more detailed picture of Pokomo history than is currently available. Pokomo is an ideal laboratory for comparative linguistics. Whereas much as been written about most adjacent peoples, such as Orma, Somali, Mijikenda (MK), and Swahili, little has been said on the Pokomo, or their neighbors, the Dahalo; virtually no archeological work has been done along the Tana river, while Pokomo (and Dahalo) traditions are scantily recorded.

Further, the Tana represents more or less the extreme northeast border of the Bantu-speaking area, and it the meeting point for northern pastoralists and southern farmers. It is surrounded on all sides by speakers of Cushitic languages, from Ogaden Somali near Garissa, through Orma and Waata (all Eastern Cushitic), to Dahalo (Southern Cushitic) and Boni (Eastern Cushitic), on the Indian Ocean. At the same time, it is fairly remote from other Bantu-speaking groups. The nearest Kamba communities are nearly 100 miles as the crow flies to the west, across semi-desert, and the nearest sizeable Giriama settlement a similar distance south of Garsen across comparable terrain. The main Swahili communities of the Lamu Archipelago, north of the mouth of the river, have--at least today--little regular contact with the Pokomo. The relatively small Pokomo population--between 40,000 and 50,000--lives huddled along the banks of the Tana from Garissa in the north to the northern bank of the Indian Ocean estuary, a stretch of some 150 miles, although, if we exclude Malankote, the Pokomo territory is only some 100 miles long. They are primarily agricultural, although fishing and some hunting are also practiced.

For more than fifty years Ewart Scott Grogan (1874–1967) was one of Kenya's most influential and controversial European settlers. Among other things, he helped to develop the port of Mombasa, to finance the country's forestry industry, and to experiment with new agricultural and water conservation techniques. Grogan also repeatedly fought against the British colonial government in defense of Kenya's European community; indeed, many settlers considered him to be a greater leader than Lord Delamere.

Apart from his economic, scientific, and political talents, Grogan was a gifted and prolific writer. His first literary achievement, From the Cape to Cairo, published in 1900, not only chronicled the events of a harrowing two year walking tour of Africa, but also discussed many of the problems that confronted the continent at the dawn of the twentieth century. In the book's final chapter, for example, Grogan listed a series of recommendations for the construction of a Cape-to-Cairo telegraph and railway system. He then examined the “native question,” the need for a compulsory labor program for Africans, and the benefits of an indirect form of colonial rule.

In 1909 Grogan wrote an analytical treatise called The Economic Calculus and Its Application to Tariff. In general terms the book sought to demonstrate that “there is a growing feeling that the classical system of economics has failed to justify its claim for recognition in the domain of science.” More specifically, it outlined England's policy toward free trade, umemployment, and protection of workers' rights. According to Leda Farrant, Grogan's latest biographer, the book “was recognized by the experts of the period as a valuable addition to the study of economics and is still used today as a reference book in the British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London University and many other universities and libraries throughout England.”

My paper dealing with the Andriambahoaka universal sovereigns and the Indonesian heritage that they embodied brought out the eminently religious character of the Malagasy marvelous tales, disarticulated fragments from a Malay myth of origin. As Françoise Raison has noted, the religious value of Ibonia was still perfectly felt in Imerina during the first half of the nineteenth century. I do not hark back to the possibilities offered by the notion of Hikayat--or in Malagasy the Tantara--at once narration and imitation--“semblance,” as it was called in the Arthurian Romance of the Grail. These notions refer to these Shiʿite syntheses, sometimes with gnostic and dualist ideas borrowed from neo-platonism and the ancient Babylonian philosophies of Lights which, introduced into Madagascar by an Indonesian relay, conceived the descendants of Andriambahoaka in the image of that of the imāms descended from Muḥammad through his daughter Fāṭima and her husband ʿAlī--prototype of Ramini, ancestor of the ZafiRaminia and fourth Caliph, but more importantly the first imām, initiator, after the cycle of revelation that Muḥammad closed, of the cycle of explanation, of initiation, of the “return,”, that is, of walayāt.

We are far from this “pedagogical model” that I evoked previously with regard to the other celestial line of the knights seeking the Grail. Far, too, from the unsatisfactory notions of ideology or the “imaginary” such as Georges Duby uses in his recent work, even though his chapter on “L'exemplarité celeste” returns to an infinitely richer universe, very near that which Henry Corbin describes. Can one truly explain from an agnostic point of view facts that are essentially perceived and experienced as religious? In any event going from Ibonia and the marvelous tales of the Andriambahoaka to the historical legends and genealogies in the first chapter of the Tantara ny Andriana of Callet, translated as Histoire des rois, we pass on to something entirely different.

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.”

Despite its very visible career in anthropology and folklore, structuralism has been little used by historians of precolonial Africa. Only Ronald Atkinson has applied the method of Lévi-Strauss in the Edmund Leach variant, although a number of historians have attempted to elucidate symbolic meanings by other means. Rather surprisingly as well, given the two decades or so that have elapsed since Lévi-Strauss developed its axioms and analysis, no historian of Africa has ventured to discuss the validity of structuralism for coping with the interpretation of myths of origin or other oral traditions, except in passing. The topic has surfaced only here and there in the never-ending debate about traditions as expressions of the present, or of the past, or of both. Given the influence of structuralism elsewhere, though, it is due time that the approach be discussed for its own sake.

The reticence to do so became especially incongruous when a senior structuralist, Luc de Heusch, began to cover ground that historians had recently trod. In his Le roi ivre he discussed at length myths in the kingdoms of southeastern Zaire and adjacent areas. This did prompt publication of two articles about his Luba and Lunda interpretations, but no general assessment of this work in toto. Jeffrey Hoover faulted de Heusch's Lunda material but still praised his “provocative ideas” and the method, “which bore some good fruit,” while Thomas Reefe prefaced his critique of Luba material by calling the book “stimulating” and sidestepped the issue by noting that “no matter what the final assessment of this book will be by historians…” Others were equally bland in their references to this work, while still refuting de Heusch on specifics. Everyone felt, it seems, that a general assessment was beyond or outside their competence. Yet a general critique would have been of use for de Heusch is one of the oldest and most experienced structuralists in anthropology, perhaps the first disciple of Lévi-Strauss. Trained in Paris, he imbibed the approaches of the Griaule school, the protostructuralism of Georges Dumézil, and the early teaching of the master himself. Of all structuralists he remains the most faithful to the method of Lévi-Strauss.

Since the publication of Maine's Ancient Law in 1861 social anthropological studies have been prolific. The basic intellectual and investigative interest of these social anthropologists was and continues to be the social, political, and cultural organization of preliterate societies in their benign state of primitivity. Indeed, it might be said that the anthropologist created the savage, the barbarian, and the primitive and their state as an object of intellectual inquiry through fieldwork. Most of these studies conducted within the framework of what Owusu calls “structual-functional empiricism” were not exactly law-centered. Whatever glimpses of the legal system one could obtain was by accident. Law was merely part of a functioning, coherent, and consistent totality; part of the jigsaw puzzle of the primitive reality.

Subsequent legal anthropological works clearly fell into two categories: those that thought that primitive societies did not have law and others that thought that they did. Those of the first group have viewed small-scale societies from the monocles of western jurisprudence, expecting to find a system of rules emanating from an authoritative source in a hierarchically-organized political system with government, courts, and a law-enforcement mechanism backed by coercive physical sanctions. Viewed from this perspective they not surprisingly found what they considered to be a pattern of “statelessness,” lawlessness, anarchy, and notions of justice and remedy based upon the principle of self-help or the law of the claw and the fang. Critics of colonialism and anthropology suggest that this characterization of the expectations of the colonial anthropologist might be a serious misrepresentation of their true expectations. The colonialist needed the anthropologist to provide the methods by which colonialism could be most effective. The anthropologist on the other hand created the savage and his state of statelessness, lawlessness, and self-help to provide a rational basis for colonialist subjugation and exploitation of the savage.

Avelino Teixeira da Mota, who died on 1 April 1982 (obituary, The Times, 23 April 1982), was most widely renowned in international scholarship for his contributions to the history of maps and navigation during the period of the Portuguese “Discoveries.” But at the heart of his studies was Africa. His service in Guiné between 1945 and 1957, largely in a hydrographic survey, and in Lisbon as director of the Early Maps Unit from 1959, led him to issue a stream of publications on Africa--mainly west Africa and within that region mainly western Guinea--first through the Centro de Estudos da Guiné Portuguesa at Bissau, then through the Agrupamento (now Centro) de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga. As well as publishing copiously himself, Teixeira da Mota encouraged and edited the writings of many other Africanists. Aged only 61 when he died (suddenly, though after a long debilitating disorder that he thought he had overcome), and with more than 120 books and articles published, Teixeira da Mota had planned and announced many more publications. One list of proposed publications appeared in the apologia pro vita sua which he inserted at the start of his 1977 tri-lingual edition of Donelha's “Account of Sierra Leone.” Africanists, as they express deep respect and unbounded admiration for what this serving naval officer--a natural scholar with no university training— achieved, will understandably be wondering what now happens to the further publications he planned.

At the request of Admiral Teixeira da Mota's widow, Senhora Maria de Lourdes Teixeira da Mota, I visited Lisbon in June 1982; and I also discussed the future of the Africanist papers and documentation left by Teixeira da Mota, with Dr. Ignácio Guerreiro of the Centro de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga (in the absence overseas of the new director, Professor Luís de Albuquerque) and with Commandante António Estácio dos Reis of the Navy Museum.

A gradual transformation is taking place in Morocco in the ease with which it is possible to have access to archives. In a year and a half in Morocco my research in the archives both of Rabat and of the town of Essaouira was expedited by the administrators and ministries responsible in a way that approached what is current in England, for example. Those who have done archival research in Morocco will recognize the significance of such a change.

This report begins with a discussion of living accommodations in Morocco that may be of interest to those wishing to do research in the archives. Following this section I have tried to set out, first, the types of archives to be found, as well as their accessibility, and, second, the sorts of archival material likely to be found in each archive. Finally, I have appended a few suggestions about getting permission to do research in these archives. I can speak with accuracy for Rabat and Essaouira and, though it may be unwise to say they are representative of large and small towns, at least the two examples may be of some general significance.

Those who can afford to stay at the Rabat Hilton may skip this section because it is targeted to those who cannot or would prefer not to spend that much money. A fairly inexpensive hotel, yet one that a North American would feel comfortable in, is fairly easy to find in most of the major cities or towns of Morocco. These would run about $20 to $30 a night for two people. In Rabat two possibilities are: BELERE (33, Av. Moulay Youssef) and LES OUDAYAS (4, Rue Tobrouk). Both are within an easy walk of the Royal Archives and the Archives of the Bibliothèque Générale.