Students of the history of North Africa in general, and of the history of the Jews there in particular, commonly think that a considerable proportion—one half or more—of the Jews who live, or until recently lived, in North Africa are descended from the Berbers, who prior to the Arab conquest formed the overwhelming majority of the population. In their opinion, these Jews were the offspring of tribes among which Jewish beliefs spread in the pre-Arab era and part of which actually embraced Judaism. This assumption, which seemingly answers the question as to the origin of the Jews who inhabited the North African hinterland, and especially the districts bordering on the Sahara, has gained such wide currency that the term ‘Berber Jew’ has been coined, i.e. Jew descended from Judaized Berbers. The proponents of this assumption apparently suppose that the stories of Jews, or Judaized people, living among Berber tribes, though describing events of the late Middle Ages or of modern times, reflect conditions precedent to the Muslim conquest of North Africa. In other words, the supporters of the theory of the Judaized Berbers think that this phenomenon cannot have originated in Muslim times since the new religion precluded every chance of Jewish proselytizing. If, therefore, Judaized people are found in Africa, even in recent times, they must be remnants of a religious movement going back to the period before the Arab conquest. In the view of the adherents of this theory, Judaism spread among the Berbers during the first centuries of the Christian era.

The three most important Arabic sources for the Empire of Mali at its height are Ibn Fadl-Allāh al-‘Umari, Ibn-Baṭṭüṭa, and Ibn-Khaldūn. These authors all had good opportunities to collect information on this remote empire. Al-‘Umarī, who wrote in 1342–9, reflects the impression that Mansä Müsā had left in Cairo during his pilgrimage. In all probability, he had not himself met Mansā Mūsā in person, but he had talked with people who had met the Sudanese emperor. One of his most important informants was ash-shaykh Abū-sa'īd ‘Uthmān ad-Dukkāli, who had lived in Mali for thirty-five years. Ibn-Baṭṭūṭa recorded his own tour through Mali from February 1352 to December 1353. This account by such an experienced traveller is a first-rate historical document. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa was travelling in a region that was well known to his own countrymen; indeed he met Moroccans all over the Sudan. He was, therefore, inhibited from exaggerating or introducing incredible stories of the sort that often occur in his accounts of remoter Countries.

In 1890 H. Carvalho published an oral tradition which told how Kinguri, a son of the Lunda chief Yala Mwaka, quarrelled with his sister Lueji and with her husband Kibinda Ilunga, a Luba who had taken over the government of the Lunda chiefdom. Kinguri migrated to Angola where he offered his services to a governor who was called Manuel. This governor used the immigrants as auxiliary troops to fight the Ngola. After the war he allowed Kinguri to settle near Ambaka. A few years later Kinguri emigrated and went to found the state of the Imbangala, better known as the kingdom of Kasanje, between the Lui and the Cuango.

My excuse for presenting this summary of Ceŵa tradition and history is that the Ceŵa are a numerous and important people. Numerically they are the most important descendants of the Malawi (the Maravi or Maraves of Portuguese records); and the fact that the name of their ancestors has been adopted by the majority party in Nyasaland led by Dr Hastings Banda, himself a Ceŵa, is one of the indications of their political importance.

Those engaged in studying the history of West African coastal communities find themselves confronted with two different classes of material —historical sources, which are mainly written records produced by Europeans who visited or resided for short periods in the area; and anthropological sources, which are mainly local African oral tradition. There is a natural tendency for historians and for anthropologists each to confine themselves mainly to the class of material they understand best and to use the other, if they use it at all, uncritically and without regard to the interdependence of these two sources. The written sources were produced by people who knew little or nothing about the societies they were describing, and they can only become meaningful if seen against the ethnographic background. The African traditions on the other hand, if used alone, are no substitute for historical records. They are not concerned with an absolute time scale and can only be placed in the right historical perspective if they can be correlated with dated historical records. Neither class is capable of standing by itself; they have to be taken together and used to correct, check, and amplify each other. In addition, the written records have other faults of their own, notably the mesmerizing effect which can be achieved by an arresting statement once it has been recorded in print. The more frequently the statement is recorded the more authoritative it becomes. Captain Adams, for example, in his Sketches taken during ten voyages to Africa made a guess at the number of slaves exported annually from the Rio Real, and this figure of 20,000 was accepted uncritically and repeated by almost every subsequent writer on the slave trade in the Bight of Biafra. When it is possible to take them together, however, a great many of the apparent differences between these two classes of material disappear. The African traditions at times provide more accurate historical detail than the written sources, while some of the latter are shown to be more legendary in character than the African and subject to just the same processes of compression and the same dependence on ‘structural time’.

Harriette Emily Colenso, oldest of the five children of the famous Bishop John Colenso of Natal, was born in Norfolk, England, in 1847, and died in Natal at the age of 85, after a life of outstanding activity and purpose. Although the average Natal colonist regarded her as fanatically prejudiced, even the local Natal Witness, the mouthpiece of colonial views, was forced to acknowledge her ‘personal and intellectual qualities’. At the height of her unpopularity in 1907, when she was defending Dinizulu, it wrote:

There is probably no person in the colony whose influence on the natives is greater, and there is none who, should she but exert her power in that direction could exercise a more pacifying effect upon the native mind. Miss Colenso is strongly endowed with the judicial faculty and … her grasp of the intricate points of trials and cases in which natives have been involved has often astonished able and experienced lawyers.

‘It has constantly been asserted that the determining principle … should be the welfare of the natives.’

GEORGE LOUIS BEER, American Colonial Delegate to the Paris Peace Conference.

The modern history of the Sudan is here considered as beginning with the Turco-Egyptian invasion of a.d. 1820. From this date written records begin to be available in quantity, in sharp contrast to the pathetic scraps which have survived for the preceding Fung Kingdom of Sennar. This transition is indeed so abrupt that it is easy to over-estimate the extent and solidity of historical knowledge for the modern period. In fact, there are still large tracts where scientific historiography has yet to begin, or where at best a few exploratory soundings have been made; and much of the field has until very recently been dominated by rather superficial ‘general surveys’ often written with an eye to the current political situation.

Review of V. Magalhães Godinho : A Economia dos Descobrimentos Henriquinos (Lisbon, 1962), JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORY, III, 3 (1962), p. 508.

Professor C. R. Boxer has written to the Editors as follows:

In my review of V. Magalhães Godinho's A Economia dos Descobrimentos Henriquinos, I asserted that the author ‘does not include in his bibliography the essential work of Ch.-Martel de Witte, O.S.B., Les Bulles Pontificales et l'expansion portugaise au XVe siècle (Louvain, 1958)’.

This work is in fact cited, in the article form in which it originally appeared, on p. 230 of the book.