One of the casualties of the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe in 1980 was the journal NADA, which came to an end with the breakup of the government ministry that sponsored it. NADA originally stood for Native Affairs Department Annual and ran to 57 issues between 1923 and 1980. Essentially, it was intended to be the Southern Rhodesian equivalent of the Uganda Journal or Tanganyika Notes and Records, and it is not surprising that out of the 912 articles published in it at least 40% were by identifiable officials of the Native Affairs Department or its successor, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Out of another 37% of contributors classifiable as ‘general,’ a considerable number were undoubtedly NAD officials hiding behind uncrackable pseudonyms and initials, while others in this category were policemen, forest and game rangers, education and agricultural officers, and so forth. Consequently, the journal always had a fairly ‘official’ image, in spite of editorial disclaimers, and this image became the more pronounced after the Rhodesian Front gained control of the government, with more official reports and statements filling the pages.

Although Carnarvon's attempt to unite South Africa in the 1870s was a failure, the forward movement represented by his “confederation policy” marks an important turning point in South African history. The destruction of the Zulu and the Pedi polities, which resulted directly from the confederation scheme, together with the last Cape frontier war and a rash of smaller conflicts, constituted the virtual end of organized black resistance in the nineteenth century and the beginning of untrammelled white supremacy. Britain's annexation of the Transvaal in 1877, which Carnarvon had hoped would be the decisive move towards confederation, instead set the scene for the conflict between Boer and Briton which dominated the history of the last two decades of the nineteenth century in South Africa.

Carnarvon's confederation scheme had important effects, but there is little agreement on its causes. The author of the standard work on the subject, Clement Goodfellow, took the view that Carnarvon's interest in South Africa arose essentially from its strategic importance within the empire as a whole. The Cape lay athwart the vital sea-route to Britain's eastern possessions, and confederation was designed, in Goodfellow's words, “to erect from the chaos of the subcontinent a strong, self-governing, and above all loyal Dominion behind the essential bastion at Simon's Bay.” This view, or some variant of it, sometimes with “Simonstown” or “Cape Town” or “the naval bases” or “the Cape peninsula” substituted for “Simon's Bay,” has been widely accepted and now appears as a matter of fact in the most recent and widely used general accounts of South African history.

In his foreword to Neil Skinner's first volume of translations of Frank Edgar's collection of Hausa folk stories, M.G. Smith made the following observations on the historical and sociological value of the collection:

“…to students of Hausa culture and history, [Edgar's collection] provides a comprehensive body of diverse materials, much of which being explicitly fictive, is of great ethnographic significance as a projection of Hausa attitudes and practice on to other planes. Together these texts, descriptive and narrative, supply rich first-hand materials on Hausa institutions, inter-ethnic relations and social stratification, supplementing such standard sources as the Kano Chronicle and other Emirate histories, and presenting with insight and economy the characteristic failings, virtues and orientations of Hausa differentiated by rank, sex, age and circumstance. Directly, and in narrative obliquely, the texts also present many insights into Hausa values, beliefs and social orientations. As documents that transmit the flavour of Hausa life and the background of individual experience, they have few rivals.”

It seems appropriate to refer to Smith's observations at the start of this examination of three Hausa poems since, in my opinion very similar observations could be made about the materials in several collections of Hausa prose and poetry made by a number of German scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from one of which the three poems discussed in this paper originate.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in source materials on African history in African and European archives. The registration of documents and the methodology used in their interpretation have become a major issue of many scholars. While much progress has been made concerning the written materials, another category of archival documents has received little attention. These are pictorial records in general and historical photographs in particular. Considering that photography, beginning with the daguerrotype in 1839, virtually accompanied the exploration of the interior regions of Africa, the failure to exploit photographs systematically as source materials seems rather astonishing. One explanation for this neglect may lie in the fact that historians have traditionally been preoccupied with the written word. Despite this bias, historical photographs from Africa have been used ever more frequently as illustrations by art historians, historians, and anthropologists in recent years. The lack of systematic work with the images, however, often results in an impressionistic approach and serious errors.

In an earlier study I described the material on Morocco, the Saharan coast, sub-Saharan Africa, and the neighboring Atlantic islands, which appeared in Richard Hakluyt's collection of English voyages, in its two editions of 1589 and 1598-1600. Up to his death in 1616 Hakluyt continued to collect additional material for an intended third edition. This material passed to Samuel Purchas (1577-1626), an Essex and then London clergyman, who had already begun to collect and publish voyage material on his own account.

In 1613 Purchas published his Pilgrimage, which appeared again in progressively enlarged editions in 1614, 1617, and 1626. Pilgrimage presented a synthesis of contemporary knowledge of the outer continents, based on accounts of voyages and journeys to and descriptions of exotic lands, some of them published, others from manuscripts collected or inspected by Purchas, the whole notionally organized as a review of religious practices throughout the world. Although Pilgrimage cites a vast range of sources and sometimes quotes from them, the work is basically a summarizing of the sources in Purchas' own words. Of much greater interest, therefore, is Purchas' other major work, his masterpiece, his Pilgrimes, which appeared in 1625 in four very large volumes running to some 4000 pages. Pilgrimes is a collection of sources, on the model of Hakluyt's collection, though Purchas more frequently presents his sources in cut versions. The material covers voyages and journeys to all parts of the known world, and is not limited to English voyages--the major limitation being only the extent of material Purchas could lay his hands on.

What is more characteristically English than the Navy?

The relationship between naval power and British sovereignty is one of long standing in British foreign policy. This was especially evident in the nineteenth century, when Britain achieved almost unchallenged global naval pre-eminence following the Napoleonic Wars, keeping order in a world that British commercial interests were creating. As a consequence, the traditional role of the navy as a national defense force was changing dramatically to that of an international policeman on the one hand and surrogate statesman on the other. These two roles were generally most pronounced in the emerging tropical areas of trade in Asia, Africa, and South America.

It is in relation to Africa that this essay is concerned, and over the course of the nineteenth century, the influence of the Royal Navy on African societies was an evolving, but considerable, force--as surveyor, policeman, employer, ally, adversary, diplomat, and enforcer. On the whole, Britain's Africa policy throughout much of the century was based on the suppression of the slave trade, while simultaneously providing protection for British citizens promoting “legitimate” commercial interests.

Since the trade in slaves from Africa was chiefly a maritime enterprise, its navy became the chief instrument for implementing these foreign policy objectives, a role that shifted in the second half of the century to a more direct imperialist posture.

The view of the primacy of the properly edited source represents a notion long taken for granted by classical and medieval historians (among others) and philologists, as is evidenced by the very large number of edited texts that undergird their interpretative work, and which continue to appear regularly, including improved editions of previously-published texts. It cannot be said that Africanists (to mention only one group) have enthusiastically adopted a similar view with respect to their own sources.

In fact, if there was a hallmark of the nascent historiography of precolonial Africa, it was its commitment to rehabilitating oral sources as a legitimate tool for recovering the deeper past. The reasons for this development are obvious, perhaps even ineluctable: it provided a unifying esprit de corps which served to actuate its practitioners; it permitted the study of geographical areas not well served by other types of sources; it prompted apparently rapid progress in the field from virtually a standing start.

In the circumstances it is no surprise that written sources, typically the staple of most historical inquiry, were relegated to a supporting role. Like Akan stool disputants, African historians were frequently content to draft written/printed materials into service largely in attempts to corroborate information more gratifyingly elicited from oral sources. This state of affairs was appropriately mirrored in scholarly publishing during the period.

For me collective memory is neither a narrative nor collective knowledge of the past (a sort of historical consensus). Contrary to past accounts, be they public or private, memory does not have a narrative form and is thus not of the literary kind (oral or written). Collective memory is above all a semantic code of memorization and of rememorization; it is, as well, a hierarchy of values which structures a discourse in the past while rooting it in the present. Collective memory gives meaning to the past and bears in mind certain places, facts, dates, and persons around which the memory or memories which also legitimate power build themselves. The relationship between a particular remembrance and its basic facts finds its prime meaning here. In this sense collective memory supports and rationalizes collective identity and, contrary to social fiction, offers a “definitive” reading as it bears on real, even though elapsed, relationships. Collective memory thus rejoins and often reinforces fiction and supports role and behavioral stereotypes, etc.

It is gratifying to receive compliments when one publishes books, yet I have mixed feelings about some of the kind words awarded to my two volumes of translations from seventeenth-century German sources on west Africa. What some people seem to be saying is: “Thank God I won't have to waste time learning that language!” Not only does this attitude rest on the untenable assumption that a translation is an adequate substitute for the original; it also underestimates the importance of those German works which remain untranslated.

For those interested in the colonial period, of course, the German literature and archival material is very rich--not only for Togo and Cameroun, but also for other countries, notably Liberia. As soon as the Germans became politically involved in west African affairs in 1884, there appeared a whole flood of publications dealing with this part of the world; and there is also a great deal of unpublished material for the whole period 1884-1939 which urgently calls for more attention from scholars interested in the African past. This is generally recognized (the usual excuse offered for not using the German material is the difficulty of access to the Potsdam archive); yet it is seldom appreciated how much German material there is for the period before 1884.

The history of the Yoruba, as is well known, is very poorly documented from contemporary European sources prior to the nineteenth century, in comparison with their neighbors Benin to the east and the states of the ‘Slave Coast’ (Allada, Whydah, and Dahomey) to the west. There is, however, one Yoruba kingdom which features in contemporary European sources from quite early times, and for which at least intermittent documentation extends through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is the kingdom of Ijebu in southern Yorubaland. The availability of contemporary European documentation for the early history of Ijebu is especially valuable since the historical traditions of Ijebu itself do not appear to be very rich.

Such, at least, is the impression given by published accounts of Ijebu history: although a large number of kings of Ijebu are recalled, thereby suggesting for the kingdom a considerable antiquity, and though there is some recollection locally of early contacts with the Portuguese, it does not seem that Ijebu traditions record much in the way of a detailed narrative of the kingdom's early history. At the same time, the European sources referring to Ijebu present considerable problems of interpretation, particularly with regard to establishing how far successive references to the kingdom constitute new original information rather than merely copying a limited range of early sources, and consideration of them helps to illuminate the character of early European sources for west African history in general. For these reasons, it seems a useful exercise to pull together all the available early European source material relating to Ijebu down to the late seventeenth century.

For almost two decades, the cult of Mumbo or Mumboism has attracted the attention of historians and other social scientists interested in the colonial history of western Kenya. This has led to its recognition as an important protest response to colonial rule among the Gusii and Luo from the period just prior to World War I through the 1930s. Its importance has been magnified by ascribing to it responsibility for the looting of Kisii town, the administrative headquarters of what was then South Kavirondo district in southwestern Kenya. The Gusii people living near Kisii did indeed loot the town in September 1914 in the aftermath of the withdrawal of the British administration and a battle between an invading German force from German East Africa to the south and British troops, but the responsibility of the cult of Mumbo is at very best problematical. An examination of contemporary documentary and published primary sources shows that the cult of Mumbo or its teachings had nothing whatever to do with the looting and destruction of Kisii town, and offers a cautionary note on the use and abuse of colonial sources in Kenya history.

Such a cautionary note is particularly highlighted by two recently published secondary works: Bill Freund's The Making of Contemporary Africa and E.S. Atieno-Odhiambo's chapter in volume VII of the UNESCO sponsored General History of Africa. In constructing their broad accounts, neither author had the opportunity to make extensive use of primary source material.

In two recent published, edited works, a series of papers is brought together to demonstrate the explicit attempt to rethink and reconstruct the theoretical and methodological foundations of South African historiography. The editors point to the important impact the “new school” of radical historiography had in challenging and establishing a “break” with the racial and implicated “ruling class” perspective of the liberal paradigm over the last decade and a half. While acknowledging the further importance and advances made by this new radicalism in emphasizing class analysis and enriching and expanding the understanding of South Africa's capitalist development, there have also been certain crucial limitations. Marks and Rathbone argue that

This, together with what Bozzoli has called the “dominant Philistinism and anti-historical character of the culture” also prevalent in the radical historiography, prevented the generation and development of an ‘alternative’ conception of history in South Africa. If this alternative is to be developed, the stronghold of structuralist method of analysis with its “antihistorical bias” and concentration of objective tendencies needs not only to be countered, but abandoned.

Although the East African campaign (1914-1918) was, in comparative terms, one of the Great War's minor episodes, it is a vital aspect of Africa's military history. Despite this importance, however, much remains unknown about this conflict, which claimed the lives of untold thousands of European and African soldiers. Understanding the operational and historical evolution of the campaign requires more than just a survey of books, articles, and official documentation. Newspapers such as the Leader of British East Africa and the East African Standard are invaluable sources for information about day-to-day fighting and living conditions. Unfortunately, very little work has been done with newspapers published outside the operational theater, which oftentimes contain materials unavailable elsewhere.

One of the most important newspapers in this category was the Rhodesia Herald. Apart from the Reuter's News Agency field dispatches, the newspaper included scores of articles and letters to the editor written by Rhodesians from the front or by family members who remained at home. These items covered a wide range of topics, including recruitment difficulties, experiences of individual soldiers, and, perhaps most importantly, the exploits of the 2nd Rhodesia Regiment, which fought in the East African bush for twenty-three months.

On his way back from Mossi country in 1888, Louis Binger visited Bonduku, principal town of the Akan state of Gyaman. Commenting erroneously on the city's antiquity, Binger nonetheless appropriately referred to Bonduku's association with gold mining and the gold trade with nearby towns such as Kong and Buna. The town's more distant trading partners, he continiued, included Jenne and other Niger bend towns. In effect, the saltgold trade, to which Binger was referring, extended from the Taghaza mines in the north (northern Mali, two day's journey from Taodeni), to the southerly mines in the Bonduku and Asante regions. On his own admission, Binger obtained little information on the gold trade which, of the “hidden” variety, was conducted in traders' homes. He learned even less about gold mining. Even his own attempts to purchase a large gold nugget of 150 grams foundered on his host's opposition, claiming that the sale would bring misfortune to the peoples and their communities.

Misinformed on the city's age and frustrated in further endeavors, Binger nonetheless affirmed that a great deal of gold was in the city. He noticed, for example, that gold was the “almost exclusive” payment for European merchandise abounding in local markets. “Not a day passes,” he continued, but that commercial transactions--at his host's residence, or at any other house chosen at random--were concluded, involving gold as the exchange medium. Bonduku's inhabitants, moreover, adorned themselves with gold. Taxes were paid in gold.

C.W. de Kiewiet's A History of South Africa Social and Economic, published by Oxford University Press in 1941, remains one of the most-used general histories of that country. No other single work by a professional historian on South Africa has been so influential, so often cited and quoted. Yet few readers of the book have known anything about its author's career or about the circumstances under which it was written. “Before you study the history,” advises E.H. Carr in What is History?, “study the historian,” to which he adds: “Before you study the historian, study his historical and social environment.” In this short paper all that can be done is to say something of the historian, and of how he came to write his book. This is, then, the history of A History.

Born in Holland in 1902, C.W. de Kiewiet was taken by his parents to South Africa the following year. He grew up in Johannesburg and attended the University College, which from 1922 was known as Wits. There he studied under W.M. Macmillan, the Professor of History, who was then working on the papers of the missionary John Philip and beginning to prepare what would become his two classic works, The Cape Colour Question and Bantu, Boer, and Briton. Macmillan supervised the thesis on the Cape northern frontier which de Kiewiet completed for his M.A. degree in 1924.

Historical knowledge exists in all human societies. It is the cognitive appropriation of socially-determined material transformations necessary for life process. We must begin with this fact. It is a form of social consciousness, a socially-determined interpretation of the movement of those transformations. But where do we find it and how do we recognize it? Where is the place of historical knowledge? Where and how does it exist? On the printed page, in books, of course, and prior to printing and writing, in oral traditions (all those forms of a human community's collective memory--some names of people or places; songs, stories, poems, legends, tales, cosmogonic myths; drawings, carvings, cave inscriptions, tablets, bone/bamboo inscriptions; languages; old roads; etc.). Historical knowledge exists nowadays as well on tapes, cassettes, computer memory, films, pictures, etc.

Historical knowledge exists in different degrees of elaboration, of truth character, of accuracy, as well as of scope. All human societies have undergone, and continue to undergo, social transformations. Some have experienced or experience more slow processes of movement than rapid ones and thus their social awareness of those processes of transformations has been or is less sharp. That is why the conscious control and social mastering of the social process of transformation has been or is less developed. Other societies at a certain level of world social process experienced or experience more rapid processes of transformations leading to sharper forms of social consciousness of those processes and specific needs of developing ways and tools for handling those processes.

In their Portraits of Nobel Laureates in Peace, Wintterle and Cramer wrote that “the odds against the baby born at the Seventh-Day Adventist Mission near Bulawayo in Rhodesia in 1898 becoming a Nobel Prize winner were so astronomical as to defy calculation. He was the son of a proud people, the descendant of Zulu chieftains and warriors. But pride of birth is no substitute for status rendered inferior by force of circumstance, and in Luthuli's early years, the native African was definitely considered inferior by the white man. If his skin was black, that could be considered conclusive proof that he would never achieve anything; white men would see to that. However, in Luthuli's case they made a profound mistake--they allowed him to have an education.”

If there is an extra-royal gentry in Zulu society, then it was into this class that Albert John Luthuli was born. Among the Zulus, chieftainship is hereditary only for the Paramount Chief; all regional chiefs are elected. The Luthuli family though, at least through the 1950s, monopolized the chieftainship of the Abasemakholweni (literally “converts”) tribe for nearly a century. Luthuli's grandfather Ntaba, was the first in the family to head the tribe and around 1900, his uncle Martin Luthuli took over.

One of the more perplexing issues in the history of Asante's relations with the Europeans on the nineteenth-century Gold Coast has been that of the origin and significance of the so-called “Elmina Note,” the pay document which authorized the Asantehene to collect two ounces of gold (or its equivalent in trade goods) per month from the Dutch authorities at Elmina. Not only have modern historians of Ghana evidenced no small amount of confusion on this matter, but during 1870/71 the Asantehene, the British, and the Dutch also disagreed strongly over the political significance of the note, as the Dutch negotiated to cede their “possessions” on the Gold Coast to the British. Failure to resolve these disagreements contributed significantly to the Asante decision to invade the British “protected” territories in 1873. This action in turn led to the British invasion of Asante in 1874, which most historians agree constitutes a critical watershed in Asante history. Clearly, the matter of the “Elmina Note” (or kostbrief as it was known to the Dutch) is one of some historical and historiographical importance. An examination of the relevant Dutch, Danish, and British documentation now makes possible a resolution of the major questions concerning its origin and meaning.

The debates between the Asante, the British, and the Dutch show that in the later nineteenth century there was considerable agreement over certain issues: first, no one disputed that the Dutch had for some time past paid to the Asantehene (actually to an envoy dispatched by the king to Elmina) a stipend (or kostgeld, as the Dutch termed it) of two ounces of gold per month, or twentyfour ounces per year.

The Ashanti Regional Office of the National Archives of Ghana is a repository of great value for historians and social scientists of Asante, and of major importance for Ghana studies generally. So far, its contents are semiorganized and they are decaying steadily. Having worked several stretches in it during the period from 1979 to August 1985, I offer the following account from a researcher's perspective, aimed at providing a guide to some practicalities of using this archive; at highlighting its need for greater resources; at going some way to clarify how its contents are arranged; and finally, at briefly illustrating their--hitherto underestimated--importance to scholars.

The NAG-K is situated in the grounds of the National Cultural Centre. The formal requirement for admission is a NAG Searcher's Ticket, obtainable on the spot or at the Accra headquarters, normally by means of a letter of introduction. The Archivist, Mr. C.A. Azangweo, and his often-changing staff have maintained an impressive friendliness and helpfulness over very difficult years. But as in the Ghanaian public service generally, low pay has led to an exodus of skilled personnel and contributed to low morale among most of those who remain, while suspension of non-salary expenditure has undermined conditions of work and, more importantly, the physical state of the documents themselves.

During the first half of 1985 I visited the Republic of South Africa in order to investigate the origins of the Natives Land Act of 1913. My research, emphasizing the years 1910 to 1916, required that I work in archives and libraries in three of the four provinces (excluding Natal). In the process I went to major and minor research facilities, to a few museums, and even to a small town public library. What follows is a discussion of many of the archives in South Africa, aids to making research easier, and some of the pitfalls one may face pursuing historical research in that country.

The largest and most important archive in South Africa is the Central Archives Depot in Pretoria. This functions as the national archives of South Africa as well as the Transvaal Provincial Archives. All the most important central government department records are deposited there, including the Prime Minister's collection; the records of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Justice Department, Lands Department; and, of particular interest to the Africanist, the records of the Department of Native Affairs (however variously titled between 1910 and the present). The CAD also holds a substantial number of personal paper collections, including those of Jan Smuts and J.B.M. Hertzog.

The Central Archives Depot is not the easiest place in which to work. Consequently, try to plan your stay so that you can have what might seem to be more than enough time to work there.