When I first proposed founding a journal in 1973, while teaching at the Centre of West African Studies of the University of Birmingham, I had four broad, if also vague, ends in mind: archival reports, text criticism, historiography, and comparative studies.1 I first floated the idea with Philip Curtin, and certainly had no reason to be particularly sanguine that anything concrete would eventuate. Timing must have been everything, because James Duffy, the Executive Director of the African Studies Association, soon wrote me saying that Phil had mentioned the idea to him and, since the Association was then in a mood to foster publications, well, maybe something could come of the notion.

Matters progressed, fitfully and no doubt very slowly for the anguished editor-in-waiting. In a letter dated 26 February 1974, Jim Duffy wrote that “[w]e would expect the first editor to be responsible for the first three years of the annual.” In my reply of 7 March I wrote that “my own feeling is that I would like to remain editor more or less ad infinitum—it is a job I would like both in its mechanics and from my commitment to the utility of such a journal.”

In a further letter dated 17 May 1974 I promised to “see that every mistake is corrected and every ambiguity resolved for the typist's sake,” going so far as to commit myself that I would be “disappointed if there were so much as a single cryptic footnote citation,” at least in volume 1¡ For the first several years / was that typist, retyping every contribution to ensure a clean copy for the printers, but gave this unwelcome chore up in favor of dealing with local typists to produce camera-ready copy. Eventually word-processing and then e-mail found me, and all was well. Of course I needed to rely on those more skilled in page formatting than I was and have been lucky indeed to have had Jeff Kaufmann doing this reliably and intelligently for the past many years.

Having a publisher meant coming up with a product, and I was fortunate that enough contributors could be persuaded to audition for the new journal that the maiden issue appeared not much more than a year later, after some toing and froing regarding length, name, mailing lists, and a potpourri of minor issues. On 27 September 1974 I sent off the typescript for volume 1, but kept adding dribs and drabs for another month. No doubt this contributed to HA 191A appearing only in April of 1975, far outside our target date of late October 1974 in time for the Annual Meeting in Chicago that year. At 182 pages this proved to be considerably longer than the 128-page sized number that had originally somehow surfaced as a norm.

But enough prehistory. While editors and publishers are necessary, they are no more than the curators of the body of work created over time by a journal's contributors, and there, I think, History in Africa has been fortunate. Like a plane taking off, the size of HA continued gradually but inexorably to rise, from 182 pages to over 500 pages in many later issues. It is worth noting that among the contributors to the first few issues were Robin Law and Jan Vansina, whose work is also represented in this number, 35 years on, and others have contributed over spans of twenty years or more. Along the way, about 800 articles have appeared by authors residing in some 30 countries. How many of these would have otherwise appeared, in more traditional venues is anyone's guess—mine is that only a small minority would have found their way, or even have been written.

While little has fallen short of my modest initial hopes, I must admit to disappointment that controversial points of view—or even those less controversial, but not therefore necessarily right—have only seldom been challenged. I had envisaged—apparently under the influence of some latter-day ambrosia—numerous and contentious conversations about evidence and interpretation that would in sum advance our knowledge—or if necessary our ignorance—about various issues, for all history, perhaps especially African history, teems with uncertainties. This simply failed to happen very often, or at least often enough—a pity. On the other hand, the onset of the internet has allowed controversy to flourish in the atmosphere of an all but immediate comment-and-response cycle.

Perhaps even more disappointing has been the paucity of comparative approaches. In my foreword noted above, I wrote that “History in Africa hopes in time to become very broadly comparative and to encourage useful colloquy among the various discrete units of the discipline [of history].” This goal must be written off as largely unachieved, although a few papers dealing with non-African topics have appeared. In aid of this, from 1974 through 1984 History in Africa included a “comparative bibliography” that eventually ran to nearly fifty pages annually, but I gave this up when I could no longer convince myself that it was serving any purpose—that body of water was simply not being drunk.

As of this writing, it is uncertain what will happen to History in Africa, so I will close by saying that it is (naturally) my hope that it can carry as it has for so long, and that its contributor base will become increasingly larger, more diversified, and more engaged. I am hopeful in this because, it seems to me, African historiography has come farther faster than is true for most new fields of history. The natural optimism of the beginning became tempered sooner than might have been expected, and intramural rumination has not been wanting (despite my comment above), while new sources have been discovered and put to use with encouraging frequency. It is true that to some degree the study of Africa's past has followed the various siren songs of new departures that have characterized not only history but most other disciplines as well, but throughout—and in contrast to the limited half life of most of these new ‘paradigms'—a core cadre of truth-seekers has continued to practice, opening up new vistas by dint of mining for new evidence rather than being content to adopt new theories.

[DH]

Colonial law in Africa involved European moral and legal codes representing some rules of western law, as well as elements of African customary law. However, the colonial situation embodying political and economic domination necessarily negated the ideal practice of the rule of law. Nevertheless, the need arose to introduce some aspects of western law and codes of administration, including salary and benefits schemes for African employees of the colonial government, and legal entitlements such as court trials for accused government employees. These considerations were deemed necessary, if at least to propitiate metropolitan critics of the colonial establishment. Also some rule of law was required for the organization of the colonial economy, including regulation of productive systems and commercial relations. As well, the need for indigenous support necessitated dabbling in indigenous customary conventions. In Muslim polities such as Kano in northern Nigeria, customary conventions included Islamic law.

On the establishment of colonial rule in Kano, judicial administration was organized on three principal institutions, involving the resident's provincial court, the judicial council (emir's court), and the chief alkali's court in Kano City with corresponding district alkali courts. The resident's provincial court had jurisdiction over colonial civil servants, including African employees such as soldiers, police constables, clerks and political agents. Also, the provincial court was responsible for enforcing the abolition of the slave trade in the region. The judicial council, classified as “Grade A” court, was composed of the emir, the waziri (chief legal counselor), the chief alkali of Kano (chief judge), the imam (the religious leader of Kano mosque), the ma'aji (treasurer), and general assistants including some notable scholars of Kano city. The council adopted the sha'ria (Muslim law) and local Hausa custom, and its jurisdiction extended over “matters of violence, questions of taxation and administration, and cases involving property rights, whether over land, livestock, trade goods, or slaves.” On the issue of capital sentencing, the judicial council required the approval of the resident. The council was also prohibited from authorizing punishments involving torture, mutilation, or decapitation.

The African-American missionary, William Henry Sheppard Jr. (1865-1927), lived in the Kuba kingdom of central Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. A student of Virginia's Hampton (Normal) Institute in the early 1880s, Sheppard left the United States a decade later to preach in the Congo Free State, a colonial territory claimed by Belgian monarch Leopold II. This king's army, the Force Publique, and its local auxiliaries spawned suffering throughout the equatorial region. They pillaged villages in Kasai, the southern Congo area surrounding Sheppard's Presbyterian outposts, killing families and driving survivors into brigades that collected wild rubber for European concessionary companies. This rubber boom, in turn, generated profits that not only enriched Leopold II and his business allies, but also propelled a revolution in transportation that culminated in the mass production of tires for the bicycle and automobile. Sheppard is known for bearing witness to Congo atrocities, but his ground-breaking ethnological research remains unfamiliar to many Africanists. It is fortunate for these scholars that the college that nurtured Sheppard's fascination with folklore, Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), houses his papers, photographs, and artwork. This paper introduces and analyzes these sources.

Petermanns Geographische Mittheilungen, the leading German geographical journal of the nineteenth century, is of fundamental significance for the early scholarly study of Africa. It printed numerous accounts by practically all of the important explorers of the time, in particular under the aegis of the geographer August Petermann. Of particular significance are the cartographic supplements to the articles published in the journal. These maps showed for the first time hitherto unknown areas of Africa. Although the data for these maps were often collected in the field under difficult conditions by European travellers, and drawn up in Gotha with the assistance of numerous specialists (astronomers, geologists, cartographers, lithographers, graphic artists), their creation would have been impossible without the cooperation of Africans. That is to say, these maps, a medium seen as a most exact expression of scientific and technical progress, could not have been produced without the assistance of so-called “natives” or “savages.” This aspect of cartographic production, to which little attention has been paid so far, is the subject of a research project at the Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig initiated in May 2009. In the course of this project, a range of German-language travelers' accounts will be studied, giving special attention to the role of indigenous informants and in combination with archival materials. This paper is based on the example of the German African explorer Georg Schweinfurth.

In September 1863, the as yet unknown botanist Georg Schweinfurth announced the start of his African projects in a “call to botanists” in Petermanns Geographische Mittheilungen, describing his planned “expedition over several years to Egypt, Nubia and the countries of the Upper Nile, devoted solely to botanical purposes.” Although Schweinfurth did not publish solely in the Geographische Mittheilungen in the following years, he remained in close contact with Petermann, especially with regard to new geographical discoveries. Unlike other travelers, Schweinfurth often visited areas barely known to geographers, where he compared existing maps most carefully with his own observations. In this way he was able to correct many inaccuracies and improve European cartographic knowledge of these regions. A total of six maps by Schweinfurth appeared in the Geographische Mittheilungen between 1865 and 1877.

The Atlantic may be a vast ocean for the most part devoid of human life, but that is not how historians see it. As the historian of the British Atlantic world David Armitage put it, “we are all Atlanticists now.” Not a little of the excitement of the historical profession has turned on the need to construct broad and transnational perspectives for the exchanges of peoples and goods which have constructed modern worlds.

This is, as every reader of this journal knows, a process in which Africa played a fundamental part. Conceptualizing an Atlantic space in the early modern era requires the inclusion of African contributions to revolutions in ideas, agriculture, and global capital brought about by the forced African diaspora produced by Atlantic slavery. And yet historians of African societies have not joined their colleagues working on the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe in the leap to embrace “Atlantic” history. While there have been some attempts to construct an African sphere of the Atlantic world, a general attempt to achieve this on a systematic basis remains lacking.

Part of the reason for this is the current general decline in research in early modern African history. While the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s saw many highly distinguished monographs, such research is no longer so easy to come by. Shunning the externalized, European perspectives on which many traditional histories of Africa were based, post-colonial students of Africa have rightly interpreted African history from the viewpoint of African societies. As this has required primarily a cultural engagement with material, practitioners have moved towards contemporary histories, which may explain the present dearth of studies reaching farther back.

Writing about American Indian reactions to their discovery of large fossil remains, Adrienne Mayor observes in passing that “[f]olklore scholars now generally accept that oral traditions about historical events endure for about a thousand years, although some oral myths about geological and astronomical events can be reliably dated to about seven thousand years.” Mayor's chosen task is to demonstrate that American Indian legends suggest that they rightly regarded fossils as the remains of long extinct megafauna populations. In aid of this, Mayor accepts these arguments in her own work. While this claim might seem extravagant prima facie, and while most folklorists would disown Mayor's claim, she is not without support from the work of a relatively small, but not uninfluential (and possibly growing), cadre of anthropologists, mythographers, geologists, and historians, whose efforts on behalf of deep-time oral tradition I address here.

Some interesting—even intriguing—things have been happening recently in discussions of the carrying capacity of oral tradition—its long-term historicity, in particular. À la Mayor, the thrust of this is to credit tradition with being able to preserve “intact” various pieces of information for as long as tens of thousands of years. To the historian interested in the reality of the past in oral societies, this state of affairs is challenging, perplexing, and no doubt to some, highly promising. If, for instance, it can be demonstrated that certain information in oral data is thousands of years old and at the same time an accurate recollection, then reservations about much later (say, several centuries old) orally transmitted information might need to be reassessed, and with such rethinking would come new ways to approach great swaths of the past.

This essay began as a footnote in which I construed “cactus pastoralism” as an anomaly in the pastoralist literature. I had found that the raising of zebu cattle in southern Madagascar on mixed diets of grass and prickly pear cactus of the genus Opuntia did not fit the standard definition of pastoralism as “the raising of livestock on ‘natural’ pasture unimproved by human intervention.” By that definition the Mahafale herders whom I had observed striving to keep their zebu cattle alive in the arid environment by “improving” their pastures with cactus “water-food” appeared not to be pastoralists at all.

I attributed the problem to a stifling typology giving precedence to “natural” grasslands that rendered invisible human agency in the making of such landscapes. I singled out the problematic concept of “pure” or “true” nomads, in which their “life itself—as Merian Cooper wrote at the beginning of Grass, and which I quoted above—depended entirely on their keeping livestock mobile. In the footnote I reasoned that “Western scholars of pastoralist societies rely on a typology or terminology that defines the form of pastoralism in relation to whether they are close or far from pure nomadism. Pastoralist studies have flirted with the modern constitution. As Latour wrote, ‘hybrids are indeed accepted, but solely as mixtures of pure forms in equal proportion.’“

In the drum text above, the chicken and the hawk parallel the symbiotic relationship between the “slave trade” and the period of “legitimate trade” between the Gold Coast and Britain. The former “trade” paved the way for and nourished the outcomes of the latter, and as the uneven power relations between West Africa and European nation-states become even more explicit in a globalizing economy, Europe or Britain (“the hawk”) seized on the valued resources (“eggs”) of a tiresome and ravaged Gold Coast. To halt the disgrace (animguase) of impending colonial incursion and protectionism, several Akan societies (“chickens”) became hawk-like in domestic matters—for they had less control over international forces beyond their soil—and its internal conflicts had as much to do with their inner drive to maintain “order” in juxtaposition to the exigencies of their times. The key nineteenth-century relationship between Asante of the forest interior and Elmina of the coast provides a spatial parameter and a mnemonic for examining key transformations between those two boundaries as represented by the coastal Fante polities, forest-based Asante, and the Bono, who occupied the northern forest fringe. I argue that the conflicts between and within Akan societies of varying orders were the product of multilayered factors occurring at the same time and in different places, such as power struggles and tensions born of conservatism and Christianity, that ultimately transformed all in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the Akan share a composite culture, spiritual practice, calendrical system, socio-political structure, and ethos, the transformations in Asante society were not replicated among the Fante or Bono, although the Bono offer a comparative case that diverged from much of the nascent colonial shaping of Asante and Fante society. This essay suggests that Akan societies, beyond the almost exclusive focus on Asante, are better approached thematically than in spatial or chronological isolation, since the themes of social dissolution and conflicts were shared by all in a context of Euro-African commerce, Westernization, and Christian proselytization.

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.

The widespread involvement of African peasant households in the cultivation of a high-value cash crop—coffee—in Kenya dates back only to the mid-1950s. However, this late inclusion of African households in coffee cultivation did not imply their lack of enthusiasm to cultivate the crop from an earlier date. On the contrary, European settlers in particular, and some officials of the Department of Agriculture, thwarted the aspirations of African households regarding their being permitted to cultivate coffee. The overall view was in favor of the continued imposition of an embargo on African coffee cultivation. This paper employs mainly archival records to trace the agitation for inclusion in coffee cultivation by African households in colonial Kenya generally. It then treats the specific case example of Bungoma district in western Kenya from the 1930s.

Through a review of official correspondence between colonial officials in Kenya and metropolitan authorities at the colonial secretariat in London, the paper shows how such agitation conflicted with the interests of European settlers and the policies that were privileged by the Department of Agriculture in African areas within Kenya. It demonstrates that when colonial state policy shifted (due to metropolitan and local pressure) in favor of African household involvement in coffee cultivation, the latter proved themselves to be efficient cultivators of the crop. The influence of metropolitan pressures on the eventual trajectory of colonial state policy in Kenya also demonstrates that the actions of colonial proconsuls in the colony did not always reflect the wishes of the colonial secretariat in London. This was moreso the case in Kenya, where a small but politically potent segment of European settlers exerted tremendous influence on the policies that were pursued by the colonial state.

The Malagueta Coast can serve as a classic example of a region which was integrated into the world economy as a result of world demand for its resources—spices and labor in the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries, and again in the nineteenth century palm oil, cocos fiber, and labor—and has sunk into oblivion once the demand ceased. It is similar with Liberia's rubber and iron ore industry of the twentieth century. I had wanted to write this paper, which reconstructs the discovery and commercial exploitation of the coast through a systematic analysis of published maps and reports, ever since I walked and paddled along this coast in 1968. Furthermore I intend to review the discovery of the coast in the perspective of overall Portuguese policy and politics (interior and foreign). Last, but not least, this is to help students of Liberian and West African history with a review of the early sources—among which maps are by far the most abundant.

The Portuguese legacy to Africa is enshrined in coastal toponymy until today. Avelino Teixeira da Mota in his “Topónimos de origem portuguesa” focused on Portuguese names still surviving in the nineteenth century, but I will focus here on contemporary fifteenth- and sixteenth-century nomenclature and what it might reveal about the African discoveries. The Portuguese initially were attracted by gold at the Rio d'Ouro (later Spanish Sahara), then slaves, and eventually malagueta—a substitute for Indian pepper—commodities known on the Lisbon market and which served to name the coasts: malagueta, marfim, ouro, esclavos. Diogo Gomes was the first to actually see Malagueta on the Gambia in 1445, but the malagueta coast was not discovered until after Henry's the Navigator's death in 1460.

Maps may be important historical documents, reflecting the situation of a given place at a given time, and comparing several maps from different periods of the same area can inform us of changes in social and human geography. For some distant parts of the world they may be the only sources for a past that provides us with few if any sources. Thus Valentim Fernandes' five maps of São Tomé are a unique source for the slow and gradual growth of the first settlements. The maps are complemented by Fernandes' 1506 description of the island.

Valentim Fernandes, a German printer who worked in Lisbon from 1495 to 1513, compiled several works on Africa and published them in 1506. Apparently he sent a copy to his friend Conrad Peutinger in Augsburg, whose book collection came into possession of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, where they survive in the Codex Hispanicus 27 (now available online. The compilation contains several texts and a map collection with description of the Atlantic islands. While Fernandes' description of Africa, as the sole copy of Diogo Gomes' account, has received wide attention as an important source for early African history, the five maps of São Tomé inserted at various places in the Codex have hardly received any attention at all.

The purpose of this paper is to present an interpretation of sorghum as the dominant metaphor of self among the Jie people, and the offering of sorghum to the Turkana women by the Jie women as a gift. The literature on food as self is extensive, emerging from various key theorists who have defined the field of food and the semiotics of food (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993; Parry 1985; Raheja 1988). These scholars are keenly aware of the symbolic utility of food as constitutive features of self identity, and they have examined the interplay between self and food and tropes. For Ohnuki-Tierney, for instance, food and food production, and their associations with metaphors, define and produce meaning. Her interpretation of rice grain as one of the foundational categories of the Japanese traditional polity explicates the role commensality of rice plays in defining boundaries between people who share the commensal food and those who do not. As each member of the commensal consume the food, the food becomes a part of his or her body. The food embodied in each individual “…operates as a metonym by being part of the self” (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993:130). In this paper I extend Ohnuki-Tierney's theoretical model in understanding the role sorghum symbolism and metaphors play in producing identities and social relations of power in the Jie society and in the Jie people's interethnic relationship with their Turkana neighbors.

Thirty-four years ago David Henige launched History in Africa (hereafter HA) at a time when scholars often cut corners in their rush to construct a history of Africa, and disregarded rules of evidence, thereby running the risk that many of their reconstructions would prove to be unsound. The question was not that these scholars were wholly indifferent to methodology, but that the precolonial history of the continent was the cynosure of the field at the time, and hence that all eyes were turned towards the use of oral sources to overcome the perceived scarcity of written sources for that period and to provide voices from the continent. In their haste to fill huge voids in the story of Africa's past, scholars debated the rules of evidence in relation to such unconventional sources. They often disregarded almost every methodological canon when it came to written data. Crucial differences between primary and secondary sources were ignored, archival research was scanty, new editions of older publications were mere reprints accompanied or not by new introductions that were so uninformed as to be useless, while issues about authenticity, authorship, chronology, or translation were all brushed aside as quibbles. Thus, in the days before 1974, methodological concerns focused exclusively on oral tradition and oral history to the detriment of everything else. As its initial editorial made clear, HA was launched as a forum where scholars interested in method could publish articles about all the facets of the historical method—from epistemology to heuristics, rules of evidence, and historiography. The journal was founded and the contributors came.

Archival research in West Africa can present many challenges. In one of the poorest regions of the world, governments struggle to maintain funding for the most basic infrastructure; thus archives and their holdings can often reside in a neglected state. Moreover, research materials may be spread over many departments and buildings, creating a labyrinthine network of officialdom, and requisite access requirements. This paper provides a brief overview of the principal archives located in Conakry, capital of Guinea. It includes current contact information and descriptions of holdings, and expands upon earlier articles by Klein (1981), Ford (1987), Conrad (1993), and Sampson (2002).

On 2 October 2008 Guinea celebrated 50 years of independence. Earlier that year many new ministries were created, including the Ministère de la Culture, des Arts et Loisirs. For the first time in the nation's history, Guinea had its own dedicated ministry of the arts, thus potentially streamlining academic and archival research. The new Ministry faced many hurdles, however, for the story of Guinea's archives during the last 50 years is a tale of both marvel and neglect.

During the nation's First Republic (1958-1984), Guinea's archives became established under the Presidency of Sékou Touré. The Archives Nationale, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and Radiodiffusion Télévision de Guinée were all created during his reign, and Guinea's archival resources were said to be among the best in West Africa. As Touré's grip on power strengthened, the nation's economic malaise grew, and Klein (1981:333) reported that in the early 1980s, when he conducted research in Conakry, he had been warned to expect significant damage to the archival contents.

The Ta:rikh Mandinka from Bijini has been published in a classical format (as a monograph in Brill's African Sources for African History Series), but the publishing process of this book was rather extraordinary. This note on the publication serves as an instructive (and encouraging) account for all who work on the documentation and publication of African historical sources. Our “Bijini Experience” illustrates how literate and script-loving persons (academics and publishers alike) can tackle a source in which the oral and the written have always been blurred.

Even in learned journals on African and imperial history, few references have been made to the records contained in the archives in Cameroon, West Africa. Kamerun was a German colony (Schutzgebiet) from 1884-1916/19. In 1911, the Germans took over New Cameroon (Neu Kamerun), 295,000 km2 of land of French Equatorial Africa, ceded during the second Morocco Crisis. After World War I this transaction was reversed and the German colony was separated into French and British League of Nations Mandates in 1919. These mandates were transformed into United Nations Trusteeships in 1946. Finally, French Cameroun became independent in 1960, and after a plebiscite in 1961, one part of the British Cameroons joined Nigeria and the other part reunited with the formerly French part, now the independent Federal Republic of Cameroon.

Due to the involvement of three colonial powers in Cameroon, the national archives in Yaoundé and Buea are an excellent source for the colonial history of West Africa, allowing for a simultaneous analysis of German, French, and British files. Whereas the colonial files in the European archives mainly give us the point of view of high politics, the archives in Cameroon offer a different dimension. The files reveal the intricacies of the colonial system on the ground, and the problems with which the colonial administrator had to cope in the bush: How did one introduce European legal tender in a territory never touched by Europeans before? How did one cope with the colonial rivals, who were couching at the frontiers to take over the territory? How did one attempt to win peoples' hearts and minds day in and day out? What happened when the new colonial power took over a territory with an already developed administration from another colonial power, as it took place in Cameroon in 1911 and 1916/19? The national archives of Cameroon contain potential answers to these questions. Hence this paper will focus on the sources that are available for the colonial period in these archives.

Two decades of civil war have left Liberians facing many challenges. One such group includes those concerned with the preservation and maintenance of Liberia's archives, which were severely compromised during the period of conflict. This paper provides a brief introduction for scholars as to the nature of Liberia's archival materials available in-country, the impact of the war on the collections, and details about how scholars interested in the history of Liberia may access these records.

There are three archival collections in Liberia. The first is at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tubman Boulevard, between 12th and 13th Streets. The second is at the Center for National Documents and Records (National Archives) at 96 Ashmun Street, while the third—the Presidential Archives—is at the Executive Mansion on Capitol Hill.

If very long titles were still acceptable, the one for this note would read Save the evidence: A plea for fieldworkers to make the raw materials or primary evidence from their field work accessible to all scholars— Especially all recorded oral data.

Ever since ethnographic monographs based on fieldwork were first published, they have raised problems of credibility. In the absence of any evidence at all to test the assertions made, readers of such works have been asked to trust the scholarly authority and integrity of their writers blindly, a stance diametrically contrary to basic tenets in all sciences. It may well be that, at the outset, early practitioners of the craft believed that their observations did not differ in any way from those made by natural scientists in the field—that they needed no evidence because their observations were wholly replicable. Anyone who cared to carry out the experiment—that is, to go to observe the same people in the same field—would find exactly the same situation as described in the monograph. For this was the age of the ethnographic present. Humans were divided into races and tribes, and, just like so many species of songbirds, every human tribe had its own invariant characteristics. A people-watcher need only to enumerate them.