A peine admises dans le monde de l'histoire académique, les sources orales sont vivement contestées par plusieurs spécialistes. L'ouvrage de David Henige, The Chronology of Oral Tradition, en 1974, s'en prend à la “chimère” qu'ont pu nourrir celles-ci, notamment en matière de chronologie, compte tenu du fonctionnement de la tradition orale et de ses contacts récents avec les cultures écrites. L'exemple du Bunyoro auquel, entre autres, il se réfère est particuliè rement éclairant aussi pour le Burundi. Quelles que soient nos convictions, enracinées sur l'expérience et sur les résultats acquis, concernant la richesse des témoignages oraux dans les sociétés de l'Afrique des Grands Lacs, la recherche ne peut que bénéficier de ces critiques radicales si elle en situe la portée exacte. Les problèmes d'interprètation historique sont particulièrement délicats en ce qui concerne les récits de fondation ou d'origine, vu l'ancienneté des faits évoqués et la redondance des traditions, généralement plus discrètes sur les périodes intermédiaires que sur les débuts. Aux difficultés de méthode face à des récits où les faits politiques, religieux, les mythes et la poésie, les localisations spatiales et temporelles s'emmêlent de façon aussi variée que contradictoire, s'ajoutent les problèmes idéologiques étroitement confondus avec les interprètations tirées de ces récits, voire avec les formulations les plus récentes de ces dernières. Idéologies nées des contradictions de la société locale, mais aussi du choc avec les cultures étrangères, musulmanes ou surtout, dans notre cas, occidentales.

Depuis une quinzaine d'années nous sommes préoccupé par ce type de questions dans l'histoire du Burundi et nous avons relevé avec interêt les recherches parallèles sur d'autres anciens Etats de la région, telles qu'elles transparaissent par exemple depuis 1974 dans History in Africa.

These abruptly articulated sentences form the opening of the first in a series of articles which, with time, would be seen to have initiated a new phase in the historical study of African languages. Seven of these articles appeared, at quarterly intervals, during 1949/50. They offered not only a fresh classification for the languages of the African continent; they also exemplified a fresh approach to the problem of language classification anywhere in the world. Since then, the classification itself has been revised and extended on several occasions, and the methodology has been made more explicit in some respects. But of none of these subsequent developments can it be said that they were not latent in the original publications. Even if the author had lost interest in the subject soon afterwards--which happily was not the case--the indications would still have been there for others to follow up, if and when they chose. In that sense, the achievement was complete by 1950.

Recognition of the achievement, however, was only slowly gained. Among Africanists these articles became the focus for a prolonged and sometimes acrimonious controversay, the echoes of which are with us even now. In some quarters, the classification was not at all willingly accepted; nor was the methodology which lay behind it.

“… depuis que les toubabs sont arrivés nous n'avons plus d'histoire, parce qu'ils nous l'ont volée. Ils nous ont enseigné que notre histoire, c'est seulement d'avoir été vaincus par eux. C'est vrai, nous ne savons plus de nous et de nos pères que ce qu'ils nous en disent, à savoir qu'ils nous ont vaincus un point c'est tout… Ce qui distingue le maître de l'esclave? C'est simple finalement:l'un est persuadé qu'il doit nécessairement vaincre, l'autre qu'il doit nécessairement être vaincu.”

“… un champ épistémologique s'opposera d'autant plus fortement à une menace de remaniement qu'il est peu autonome. Cet aspect de l'inertie traduit une sorte de principe de la totalité. Les croyances fournissent une intérpretation totalitaire; on ne pourra done admettre qu'elles puissent être mises en question par une perturbation d'ordre purement local, ne concernant que les faits isolés ou des idées de portée limitée.”

For the majority of historians the philosophy of history seems to be the exclusive domain of the philosophers, who often do not understand historical practice. It is thus an easy matter to consider that all discussion of this problem places itself outside both the framework of historical production and the field of its consumption. In the same manner as this refusal to admit the existence of the problem, we easily confuse a teleological history with the philosophy of history. The rejection is both obstinate and blind. I am not sufficiently competent to attempt here a collective psychoanalysis, yet the conviction that historical practice is either empirical or doctrinaire, and thus taken in hand by an ideological orthodoxy, is tenacious. In his Ecriture de l'histoire de Certeau offers, in way of explanation, certain reasons for this attitude.

The recent publication of the original manuscript of the autobiography of the slave trader Théodore Canot, alias Théophile Conneau, makes an important contribution to West African history. Previously historians have had to rely on the “improved” version by Brantz Mayer, published in 1854 and subsequently republished in several different forms and languages. The original manuscript is of far greater use; but we cannot altogether dispense with Mayer's book, since he obtained his information not only from Conneau's manuscript but from conversations with its author.

Unfortunately the editors of the original manuscript demonstrate little interest in African history, except as a theme for moral philosophy, and they ignore the considerable amount of research which has been conducted in order to verify particular aspects of Conneau's account. My aim here is to fill one of the gaps left by existing studies--the period between 1836 and 1841--and to assess the accuracy of Conneau's manuscript and Mayer's book for this period.

First, however, some information about Mayer's background is necessary. Born in Baltimore in 1809, he had by the time he met Conneau visited China, India, and Europe, and served as Secretary of the United States legation in Mexico for three years. But he never visited Africa and his interest in Africa must have been slight, for his huge library contained only two books relating to it. Like Conneau, he was an excellent linguist, fluent in Spanish and his father's native tongue, German. Whereas Conneau had received a fairly rudimentary education, Mayer had been taught by a private tutor and had studied law at the University of Maryland. In rewriting Conneau's autobiography, he took pains to demonstrate his knowledge of classical and contemporary literature, as well as of history.

The hagiographic literature of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church may be divided into two major categories: the translated lives of the saints and martyrs of the early Christian church and the lives of local saints. The essentially foreign works, which constitute the first of these groups, will be of only peripheral concern in this paper. While books such as Barlaam and Joasaph, The Life of St. George, and The Conflict of Severus did serve as models for the traditions dealing with local saints, they are of little interest to the student of Ethiopian history.

The most interesting of these local hagiographies are those about saints who lived between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. These traditions, which recount the lives of some kings and many monastic leaders, are of great importance for the reconstruction of the history of medieval Ethiopia. As Conti Rossini has written,

However, while specialists in Ethiopian literature and history have long realized the potential value of these gadlāt (singular: gadl) as sources for the study of Ethiopian history, the tendency towards idealization displayed in these works, as well as their abundant miracles and anachronisms, have left historians uncertain as to how to extract reliable information from them.

There is a considerable literature dealing with the phemenon of twentieth-century anti-witchcraft cults among the Akan peoples of Ghana, and notably the Asante. This literature is written from the disciplinary perspective of social anthropology and it may be divided into two interpretative views of the matter. The first espouses the theory that such cults are ‘new’--creations of the twentieth century--in that they represent a reflexive response to the social disorientation assumed to have been engendered by colonial overrule. The second questions the causative link between the twentieth century and increased anomie, and suggests the location of such cults in a time perspective reaching back into the distant--but undefined--pre-colonial past. For a social historian interested in the problem of witchcraft and its suppression this literature presents a resistant difficulty. It concerns itself with the material appurtenances and the impressionistic ‘psychohistory’ of cult practices, but it is almost entirely bereft of historical data and it indulges in generalizations erected upon the flimsiest of factual considerations. McLeod, who has ably reviewed this literature, has commented upon this deficiency with regret, but--at least so far--has done little to rectify it.

In this paper I am concerned with the discrete history--social, economic and political--of three important anti-witchcraft cults that flourished in Asante between the late 1870s adn the late 1920s; in chronological order these were, domankama (‘The Creator’), aberewa (‘The Old Woman’) and hwe me so (‘Watch Over Me’). In discussing these cults as historical phenomena I seek to explicate or otherwise to dissolve some of the generalizations evident in the existing literature. I seek too to say something concerning the construction of a valid Asante (and African) social history, the relationship between social history and social anthropology in the African context, and the significance for the historian of Africa of socio-cultural phenomena such as witchcraft.

South Africa's most prolific and influential historian still awaits a biographer. Such brief biographical sketches of his life as do exist say little about his career before he began work in the Cape archives in the late 1870s. Given the views he espoused in his later writings, it is at first surprising to find that he spent over five years at the Lovedale Seminary outside Alice in the eastern cape working closely with missionaries and Africans. An examination of this period of his life throws light on his historiographical career as a whole and reveals new complexities in his character.

In the early 1870s Lovedale was the most influential institution of its kind in South Africa. A non-sectarian, non-denominational Christian school and a theological seminary, it had been founded by Scottish Presbyterian missionaries in 1841. It was rejuvenated under the leadership of Dr. James Stewart--missionary, medical doctor, explorer--who came to it as teacher in 1867 and took over as its second principal in 1870. Stewart emphasized the importance of “industrial” activities, including printing and bookbinding, and greatly enlarged Lovedale's intake of students. Drawing Africans not only from the eastern Cape but increasingly also from farther afield, the school grew from 92 pupils in 1870 to 336 in 1873 and 460 in 1876.

In mid-1872 Stewart needed someone who could both teach and supervise the printing works. George McCall Theal met these requirements. He had taught at a small elementary school at Knysna in the late 1850s, then from 1867 in the public undenominational school at King William's Town, later to be known as Dale College.

Historians rarely pause to reflect on the history and theory of our own discipline, but it is a salutary exercise, particularly when the discipline is as young as African history. Twenty years ago a majority of African peoples emerged from colonial domination and acquired their independence. In that same year their history was also symbolically liberated from domination by the activities of Europeans in Africa through the inauguration of the Journal of African History. And one year later the new African history was given what was to become one of its dominant methodologies with the publication of Jan Vansina's De la tradition Orale.

African history was to be the history of Africans, a history that had begun well before the European ‘discovery’ of Africa. The problem was sources. Western historiography was firmly based on written sources which could be arranged in sequence and analyzed to trace incremental changes and establish cause and effect relationships in evolutionary patterns of change. Unlike written documents which were recorded in the past and passed down unchanged into the present, oral traditions had to be remembered and retold through successive generations to reach the present. Their accuracy was thus subject to lapses in memory and falsification in the long chains of transmission from the initial report of the event in the past to the tradition told in the present. To overcome these problems Vansina established an elaborate and meticulous methodology by which traditions should be collected and transcribed, their chains of transmission traced and variants compared, and obvious biases and falsifications stripped off to produce primary documents suitable for writing history within the western genre.

One of the most durable myths of the history of central Africa is that of the early subversion and domination of the kingdom of Kongo by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Its original statement was made by James Duffy in 1959 and was amplified by Basil Davidson two years later. According to this argument the Portuguese had found a well-developed kingdom of Kongo when they reached the mouth of the Zaire River in 1483, and had entered into an alliance with the ruler. The alliance, first made with king Nzinga a Nkuwu (baptized as João I in 1491) and strengthened and continued with his son Mvemba a Nzinga (better known under his baptized name of Afonso I, 1506-1543) involved a partnership in which Portuguese settled in Kongo and provided technological and military assistance to Kongo in exchange for trade, mostly in slaves. As a result of this exchange Kongo adopted Christianity, and for a time the two kings addressed each other as “Brother.” But the alliance, despite its good beginning, was rapidly upset by the greed of the Portuguese settlers, who saw the situation merely as an opening for quick riches through the slave trade. As a result the higher aims of the Portuguese court were subverted--first because the Portuguese, with a higher level of development, were able to benefit from their position more than Kongo; secondly because Lisbon was unable to control its settlers in Kongo or São Tomé. In the end there was a massive involvement of Portuguese in Kongolese affairs and a breakdown of authority in Kongo.

In the late summer of 1976, amid considerable publicity, Doubleday and Company published Alex Haley's Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Almost overnight author and book gained considerable fame. Americans and soon others accepted the essential validity of the story of Haley's maternal ancestors, which reached back to the Gambia River and to the eighteenth century. Within a few months of its publication Roots had been serialized for televison. Before a year had passed Doubleday had sold over 1,500,000 copies of the book, it had gone into translation in several dozen languages, and Haley had been awarded a special Pulitzer Prize, neither for fiction nor non-fiction, but for something in between felicitously denominated “faction.” The magnitude of Roots' impact makes criticism of the basis of its argument somewhat indivious but perhpas all the more necessary.

One aspect of Roots that added considerably to its popularity was the apparent authenticity of the genealogy which Haley used to identify his African ancestor. Haley claimed that, largely through oral history, he had proved the existence of his ancestor, one Kunta Kinte, who had been kidnapped into slavery over two hundred years ago and brought directly to the British North American colonies. A decade of diligent searching had made it possible for Haley to piece together the basic outlines of his ancestry. To nearly everyone who read the book or heard the story of his quest, such success in locating his roots in Africa, after a century of slavery and another of difficult freedom, seemed to justify the endeavor.

The Lwo language, a cluster of dialects belonging to the Western branch of the Nilotic family, was spoken as a mother tongue at the end of the colonial period by some two and a half million people scattered over a vast area of the Upper Nile basin from the Shilluk country in the Sudan to central Uganda and from northeast Zaire to western Kenya. The several components of this stock vary greatly in size, from the five thousand people who comprise the Bor groups of the western Bahr el Ghazal to the Kenya Luo group with well over a million members. Despite their extraordinary numbers, however, the Luo--like the Bor, the Shilluk, the Anywak, and other groups in the Sudan--form an enclave among peoples of quite different speech; the main continuous block of Lwo-speakers is in northern Uganda, consisting of the Alur, Acholi, and Langi peoples, together with the Jo-pa-Lwo (or Chope) group, who live in the corner of the Bunyoro district that is formed by the Victoria Nile as it flows north and then west from Lake Kyoga to the Albert confluence.

This peculiar configuration, very different from the normal pattern of linguistic fragmentation in sub-Saharan Africa, offers historians a problem and an opportunity, for it must be the residuum of an unusual event or series of events. Languages cannot travel unless people carry them; and so it is reasonable to assume that the Lwo-speakers of a few centuries ago lived as a compact community, which developed an exceptional capacity both for the incorporation of aliens and the propagation of its own genes.

The 1970s have seen the growing influence of Marxism in the field of African history, with both the application of the neo-Marxist theory of “underdevelopment” to the study of the impact of international capitalism upon Africa and the employment of the more orthodox Marxist categories of “relations of production” and “mode of production” to the analysis of the indigenous social formations of Africa. The appearance in this journal of the programmatic article by Henry Bernstein and Jacques Depelchin, arguing for the development of a Marxist history of Africa, is therefore no surprise. It is, however, something of a disappointment, inasmuch as “Marxism” is peddled by Bernstein and Depelchin in a form particularly unhelpful to historians. Like Hindess and Hirst,” the ostensible inspirers of much Marxist work on African history, Bernstein and Depelchin subscribe to a particular variant of Marxism, that associated with the French philosopher Louis Althusser. While Marx should certainly be made welcome in the field of African history, since he has a great deal of interest to say on the crucial question of the relationship between economic, political, and ideological developments, it is less clear that Althusser is his most useful interpreter.

Since Bernstein and Depelchin consistently emphasize the “radical break” which supposedly exists between Marxism, represented by themselves, and “bourgeois [i.e. non-Marxist] social thought” (1979: 31; cf. 1978:2) it is first of all necessary to consider the question: who is a Marxist? Many of the features which Bernstein and Depelchin, following Althusser, present as being distinctive of Marxism would, in fact, be contested by others equally claiming to be Marxists.

Charles William Hobley, C.M.G., was born in 1867 at Chilvers Coton in Warwickshire. Educated at King Edward VI School, Nuneaton, he enrolled in 1882 for a three-year engineering course at the Mason Science College, Birmingham, and spent the next five years in the shops and drawing offices of engineering firms at Nuneaton and at Dartford in Kent. He was admitted as a student in 1888 to the Institution of Civil Engineers, to which body he was elected an Associate Member in February 1894.

In March 1890 he was appointed geologist to the Imperial British East Africa Company, which was trying with pitifully inadequate resources to administer and develop the British sphere in East Africa, for which it had been granted a charter by the British government. Like most of the handful of trained members of the Company's staff, Hobley had to carry out a multitude of duties outside the scope of his appointment, among them surveys for the ill-fated Central Africa Railway, road building, improvements to water supplies on the Uganda road, and exploratory surveys. During the course of these duties he devoted some time to investigating the mineral resources of the coast and hinterland. The most important exploratory survey was the journey in the stern-wheeler Kenia up the Tana River as far as Hameye, whence Hobley and a companion marched across country to the slopes of Mount Kenya and Machakos, and back to Mombasa along the Uganda road. After a period as Transport Superintendent at the coast, Hobley left East Africa in September 1893, at a time when it was becoming obvious that the Company could not long continue to meet the obligations imposed on it by its charter.

On the morning of 25 November 1895 Maasai fighting men slaughtered hundreds of Kikuyu and Swahili caravan porters and askari in the Kedong Valley of Kenya (then in the Uganda Protectorate); the carnage caused one European to describe the area as the “Valley of Death.” The next day Andrew Dick, a British trader formerly with the Imperial British East Africa Company, learned of the massacre and resolved to avenge it. In a fierce counter-attack, Dick killed at least one hundred Maasai before being put to death himself.

While they were dramatic events, the Kedong Massacre and the Dick Affair are of far less significance from the perspective of the 1980s than during the colonial period. They were without question also much less important than was often assumed in bringing about amicable relations between the Maasai and the British. However, the concern of this paper will be with the varying accounts of these incidents that are available to the historian today, and the problems of the sources of the early colonial history of East Africa that are put in somewhat depressing perspective by the fact that, as Charles Miller has remarked, “nearly every individual writing about the 1890s has his own version of the incidents.” Many of these versions, often accepted as independent sources, have been adopted from the accounts of others. Through comparison of accounts one can use internal evidence to suggest an individual author's unacknowledged sources and in some cases trace the “genealogy” of the account. At the risk of further complicating the picture, we will attempt to analyze the historiography of the incidents and suggest that scholars and popular writers have largely overlooked or ignored one important account of the massacre and its aftermath.

The word ‘Timbuktu’ usually evokes an image of a place of exotic mystery in some far-removed corner of the earth. It evoked similar ideas in the European mind as early as the sixteenth century. By this time Timbuktu was one of the major trade centers of the unknown interior of Africa. Colonies along the western coast of Africa were not only enriching European nations with slaves, but also giving them access to trade routes to the kingdoms of the interior from which they obtained gold dust and other commodities. Timbuktu was also a Muslim center for scholars including the famous Ahmad Baba, to whom reference is made later.

Besides Timbuktu, Gao and Jenne were major cities of the River Niger and its tributary the River Bani during the sixteenth century. From 1493 to 1591 the Songhay rulers extended their kingdom to include the most northern extent of the River Niger at the southern edge of the Sahara, opening trade routes with many of their neighbors, including some intercourse with Morocco.

In the Archives of the Hunt Institute is a French extract from an Arabic manuscript which recounts the fall of Timbuktu to Moroccan forces in 1591. It is not known whether the Arabic manuscript is extant today. According to this manuscript, the Pasha Judar drove Ishaq from Tondibi to Caro (which is probably a lapsus calami for Gao), to which he laid siege for a short time and then returned to Timbuktu to await orders from the Sultan. The emperor sent Mahmud Zarkun with additional troops, and the latter relieved Judar of his command, attacked Caro, and chased Ishaq to Conkia [=Kukya?], where the latter died.

The libraries and archives of mission societies provide rare, often unique, source material concerning the last two centuries of African history. The following survey of Protestant mission societies in England is based on a survey done in 1970. In 1978 letters were written to all societies listed in order to update the material. Replies were received from twenty-one. When no information was received in 1978 this has been indicated in the text. Bibliographical and reference material has also been updated. Included for each of the societies covered is a list of the areas where the society worked in Africa, the types of material held, the mission periodicals produced and notes about access.

There are two guides available which cover some of the groups considered. Rosemary Keen's A Survey of the Archives of Selected Missionary Societies (1968) describes the archives of nineteen societies. It is very uneven in coverage and includes a number of inaccuracies. A Guide to Manuscripts and Documents in the British Isles Related to Africa compiled by Noel Matthews and M. Doreen Wainwright was published in 1971 based on a survey done in 1965. It covers eleven of the societies listed here and the extent of coverage is indicated in the individual sections.

Early in this century a South African writer attempted to cover all of African missions south of the Sahara. Du Plessis' A History of Christian Missions in South Africa (1911) and his Evangelization of Pagan Africa (1929) are carefully done, detailed accounts from the South African viewpoint. In 1958 Gerdener continued the coverage of South African work with his Recent Developments in the South African Mission Field.

The centenary anniversary of Dr. David Livingstone's death in 1973 occasioned a number of further additions to the already vast corpus of literature dealing with the renowned missionary-explorer's career. More importantly, the centennial observances resulted in an undertaking which promises to be a singular landmark in Livingstone studies as well as being of more general importance to Africanists in a variety of areas. This undertaking, which is described below in some detail by its principal researcher, Gary Clendennen, came to be known as the David Livingstone Documentation Project. Its first stage has now been completed with the publication of David Livingstone: A Catalogue of Documents. Clendennen provides ample information concerning the goals and the general development of the Project below, but some thoughts on its potential importance both to students of Livingstone and to Africanists interested in the milieu in which he worked also seemed to be worthy of mention. Accordingly, Clendennen's presentation is followed by my overview Of fields where we need further research on this pivotal figure in European contact with the interior of Africa and its peoples, together with some suggestions regarding how the material brought together by the Project can further such research.

The Société des Missionnaires d'Afrique, more commonly known as the Pères Blancs or White Fathers, began its work of proselytizing in northern and sub-Saharan Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their archives, located in Rome, are a treasure trove for Africanists of all disciplines. In founding the order in 1868, Cardinal Lavigerie, archbishop of Algiers, charged its members to bring Christianity to Africa not by imposing European civilization on Africans but rather by converting the inner man while maintaining the external indigenous forms of dress, food, shelter, and especially language. Lavigerie wrote that it was thus indispensible for the fathers to learn the local language as rapidly as possible, and in areas where the language had not yet been studied, one member of the mission was to spend one or two hours each day compiling a dictionary. In addition, the superior of each post was to keep a daily journal in which he entered, among other matters, information gleaned from the local people about their history, geography, and customs. This journal, Lavigerie wrote, could easily become “une mine féconde.” Another obligation of the superior was to send a monthly letter to the Maison-Mère in Algiers describing the progress of the mission, the health of its members, and any extraordinary local events or activities by the authorities.

These injunctions of Lavigerie have yielded a very valuable collection of material on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa that is housed in the White Fathers' headquarters in Rome. (The transfer from Algiers took place in 1952.)

The archives of two Roman Catholic congregations of French origin which have missionaries in Gabon are located in Rome: the Sisters of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception of Castres (commonly called the Blue Sisters) and the Brothers of Saint Gabriel of Saint Laurent-sur Sèvres. The Blue Sisters were founded by Emilie de Villeneuve in 1836 to improve the condition of women, in particular by educating poor and orphaned girls. The Brothers of Saint Gabriel were organized by Louis Grignion de Montfort in 1715 to provide a primary education for poor boys and were reorganized in 1821 by Gabriel Deshayes. Initially both congregations worked only in France. They entered Gabon at the request of the Holy Ghost Fathers-the sisters in 1849 and the brothers in 1900. The sisters had communities at most of the mission stations--in the Estuary at first and from the 1880s along the Ogooué river and other points in the interior. The brothers operated schools at Libreville and Lambaréné, and after the Second World War at Port-Gentil and Oyem as well. During the past century both congregations became primarily missionary bodies, with the sisters active in Africa and South America and the brothers in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. These international activities led to the transfer of their headquarters to Rome in the 1950s.

The sisters who worked in Gabon prior to the Second World War included many with intelligence but few with much formal education beyond the primary grades. They spent their time in social service, health care, and elementary education. The latter included French as well as religion and the domestic arts. The sisters had much less contact with the government or the colonial administration than did the Holy Ghost Fathers, who were their ecclesiastical superiors. Though some sisters toured to provide medical aid to persons away from the mission stations, most of their contacts with Africans took place in or near the stations.