This paper attempts to examine specific problems encountered with the collection and interpretation of oral traditions in Sierra Leone and ways in which these were approached. I will suggest with examples that problems facing oral traditions are not always peculiar to them, as the researcher with written sources faces some similar problems.

Much has been said about methodology in collecting oral tradition for it to warrant much discussion here. One point that has been, brought out, however, is that methods which work well for one situation might prove disastrous or unproductive in another. It is thus necessary to bring out specific examples of situations encountered so as to improve our knowledge of the possible variety of approaches that could be used, while emphasizing that the researcher, as a detective, should have enough room for initiative.

For the past eight years, I have been collecting oral histories from among the Yalunka (Dialonke) and Koranko of Upper Guinea, both southern Mande peoples, and the Limba and Temne, grouped under the ‘West Atlantic.’ Extensive exploration into written sources has indicated that similar problems arise in both cases. In both situations, the human problem was evident. For the oral traditionist this problem is more alive as he is dealing first hand with human beings. A number of factors therefore, like his appearance, approach to his informants, his ability to ‘identify’ with the society in question, may affect the information he receives. These could provide reasons for distortion which are not necessarily present with written sources.

Neither Chad (or Tchad) nor the Central African Republic (or République Centrafricaine) has been much studied by American scholars. Because of this the following report discusses more than merely the archival resources of the two countries; it is hoped that the more practical aspects of research there that are discussed will render it more useful.

The Institut Tchadien des Sciences Humaines (henceforth INTSH) supervises research projects in Chad which are concerned with the social sciences—as defined by French scholarship. Research authorization is granted by the Director of the Institut, Boîte Postale 503, N'Djaména. Anyone intending to pursue research in Chad should have a letter of authorization from the Institut before leaving the United States—if possible, even before applying for a Chadian visa, since this will expedite the granting of such a visa.

Most temporary accommodations in N'Djaména (like other African countries) tend to be expensive; the only inexpensive hostel is operated by the Peace Corps for its own members. Sometimes, though, researchers have been allowed temporary accommodation pending the location of other housing. Enquiries should be sent to: Corps de la Paix, Boîte Postale 260, N'Djaména. In addition, temporary housing may sometimes be had with researchers at the Organisation pour des recherches scientifiques et techniques d'Outre-Mer, or ORSTOM.

For a long stay it is wise to rent a house. While the Peace Corps or Embassy personnel may be of some assistance, Muslim merchants near the main market should be of more help in finding a house in the African part of the town. Rents in N'Djaména are high: a mud brick house with electricity and running water will run about $175 monthly.

The precolonial history of Yorubaland, and especially of the most powerful Yoruba kingdom of Oyo, is still dominated by the influence of the Revd. Samuel Johnson, the Yoruba clergyman whose History of the Yorubas was published in 1921. Especially for the period before continuous written documentation of Yoruba affairs begins with the arrival of the first Christian missionaries in the area in the 1840s, Johnson's History remains a source of overwhelming importance, and the framework within which we study Yoruba history is still very much that established by Johnson. But despite its great importance and persisting influence, Johnson's work has still not been subjected to much critical evaluation. In particular it has commonly been assumed, implicitly rather than explicitly, that Johnson's History can be mined as a source of ‘oral tradition’ in the belief that what he wrote down is unproblematically identical with what he heard, and what he heard with what had been retained and transmitted orally down to the time that he made his enquiries.

Johnson's History is a somewhat complicated work to characterize, since it makes use of rather different sorts of sources for different periods of Yoruba history. The history of its publication was also complex. It was originally completed in 1897, the date of Samuel Johnson's “Preface,” but the manuscript was lost. Samuel Johnson having died in 1901, it was left to his brother Obadiah to reconstitute the work from Samuel's notes and drafts, a task which he apparently completed only in 1916.

In 1986 the University of Ife (later renamed Obafemi Awolowo University) unveiled a wood statue of Oduduwa, the mythical founder of the Yoruba nation. Present at the occasion was Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the most famous Yoruba politician of the twentieth century. Either for political gain, or to celebrate or praise him, an Ife intellectual told Chief Awolowo that the statue looked exactly like him and that, in trying to represent the image of Oduduwa, the carver, the highly distinguished Chief Lamidi Fakeye, had simply used Awolowo as a model.

Chief Awolowo was very happy with this comparison, and gladly affirmed it. The story spread like wildfire. As the statue came to be interpreted, Awolowo and Oduduwa had the same physical build, elegance, and cap which they wore in the same style! Here indeed was the modern Oduduwa. To those in search of heroes, the Yoruba now had two “national” ones—Oduduwa, the progenitor and Awolowo, the modernizer—and a host of other aspiring and local ones. If Oduduwa founded the nation, Awolowo would unite it, after a period of internal division.

Both in Yoruba popular and intellectual discourse, the hero commands prominent attention. The Yoruba appear to be seeking the equivalent of a Mahdi, the reformer in Islam, a cultural, folk, and political hero. The ambition of many Yoruba elite, especially the politician, is to become a hero of the nation. Many have tried in vain—men such as Chief Adisa Akinloye, a longtime veteran politician, and the Chairman of the National Party of Nigeria during the Second Republic, and, until recently, Chief M.K.O. Abiola, the business magnate and politician who was denied the presidency of the country by the military regime in collaboration with powerful civilians.

Origin stories are an important genre of central African oral traditions. Historians have long been intrigued by these stories, for their plots tell of the beginnings of societies and of the founding of ruling dynasties. It has been possible to cross-check the information in the oral traditions of many of the societies of west central Africa against data in Portuguese written records dating to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These documents have helped to direct investigators towards the best assumptions to make when analyzing the oral traditions of west central African societies. However, writing the early history of the savanna societies in the very middle of central Africa (in southern Zaire and northern Zambia) has always been hampered by the absence of written documents which describe the area much before the early nineteenth century. Historians studying the early political history of these societies have been forced to link the events and characters of origin stories to each other without any anchor in written documentation.

Recently, doubts have been raised about the nature and function of origin stories. It is no longer clear that the first step in studying the early history of central African savanna societies is to compare different origin stories with each other, as one would a group of written documents, in order to establish a consistent historical story-line or narrative. Rather, questions raised about the nature of origin stories have brought out the point that the first step in writing the early history of this area is to resolve methodological and historiographical issues, before the historical essence can be distilled from these tales.

The formation of the Holy Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in 1622 as a part of the Papacy's attempt to centralize control over overseas missions in Roman hands led to the formation of one of the most important archival deposits in Europe for documentation pertaining to Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Archivio “De Propaganda Fide” in Rome. This Roman-directed missionary organization sent its priests to every corner of the globe, relying especially for its African enterprises on Italian clergy of the Capuchin order. In connection with research on the history of the kingdom of Kongo in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I have worked extensively with materials frcm both the archives of the “Propaganda Fide” and various deposits of the Capuchin order, including a personal visit to the “Propaganda Fide” in January 1978.

The Archivio “De Propaganda Fide” is located in Rome at Piazza di Spagna, 48, and when I visited it, it was open only four hours a day from 9:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. every day except Sunday and holidays. Aside from the short hours, however, the archive is a pleasant place to work. The staff is friendly and helpful and the reading room well-lighted and well-appointed. In addition, the material is extremely well indexed and easy to use, so that the researcher who knows the system will have no difficulty in locating relevant material with a minimum of leafing and surveying. Fr. Lowrie J. Daly, has described the organization of the collection.

The Regional Archival Center at Tamale contains extensive documentation on the former Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, which today make up the Northern and Upper Regions of Ghana. The bulk of the records relating to the colonial period are held in the main repository in Accra, but any scholar working on a northern topic should plan to visit Tamale. While there is a tendancy for “older” (i.e., pre-1940 materials) to be in Accra and for more recent items and Native Authority records to be in Tamale, there is no hard and fast rule, and many exceptions and duplications exist.

There is no catalog for the collection. Accession lists for the seventeen classifi¬cations employed are quite helpful, but they are often somewhat sketchy and sometimes give little indication of the actual contents of a file or the time period which it covers. Following is a list of the classifications, together with titles of selected files, to illustrate their extent and the types of material they contain.

Two reactions to the essay on the earliest generation of missionary photographers in West Africa published earlier in HA set up trains of thought which deserve to be minuted here as a further contribution to our praxis with images of Africa in the nineteenth century. It was pointed out by two readers of the original article that a pair of the images which, it had been asserted (104), derive from the last phase of Hornberger's photographic work, were published very early on in a non-mission context: that of three women spinning and that of one man weaving (figures 1 and 2 below).

Both images exist as photographs, as stereographic vintage prints. Both were also published as wood engravings in mission periodicals (figures 3 and 4). Two readers of the original essay have pointed out that these images were conflated into a single engraving on page 211 of Richard Oberländer's Westafrika vom Senegal bis Benguela (Leipzig, 1874). In this image (figure 5), however, only two members of the group of spinning women are depicted, placed separately in the foreground, one on each side of the weaver. It is an ironic reflection on the quality of the documentation we have to fear in this field that Oberländer's caption—“Spinnende und webende Aschanti. (Nach einer Photographie)”—asserts specifically that the engraving was taken “from a photograph,” using the singular form.

It hardly seems necessary to recapitulate the main lines of Lugard's life and career since these are well known and have been studied several times. It might be useful, however, to discuss the political impact of his writings--especially some of his later works--because so many of them helped to influence British colonial policy throughout Africa and the empire.

As early as 1889 Lugard had established himself as an authority on African affairs by publishing a series of articles about Nyasaland and the necessity of suppressing the slave trade. Three years later--after engineering a treaty between Mwanga, the kabaka of Buganda, and the Imperial British East Africa Company--Lugard returned to England to campaign for the retention of Uganda. In addition to making his views known in The Times and in the Pall Mall Gazette, he defended the British position in eastern Africa in such important publications as the Manchester Geographical Journal, Blackwood's Magazine, and the Chamber of Commerce Journal. The Rise of Our East African Empire, a two-volume study of approximately 350,000 words, also helped to convince the British government and public of Uganda's stategic and economic value.

In 1894 Lugard accepted employment with the Royal Niger Company, thereby starting an association with west Africa that lasted for more than forty years. During that time he wrote an astounding number of articles, books, and pamphlets about the region's economic, political, and social life. In one nine-month period, for example, Lugard wrote twelve papers that appeared in a number of journals, including the Scottish Geographical Magazine, The Nineteenth Century, National Review, and The Geographical Journal.

Twentieth-century historians of the Fon kingdom of Dahomey have been blessed with an unusually rich and accessible body of primary source material. Published in English and French by a succession of visitors to the kingdom, this literature includes references to Dahomean affairs beginning as early as the seventeenth century and continuing with regularity through its conquest in 1892/93 by the French. The accounts, however, are fullest in number of writers and in detail of observation for the period of the reigns of kings Gezo (1818-58) and Glele (1858-89).

European observers of the Dahomean polity approached the state for a variety of commercial, religious, and political reasons, but typically they were permitted to visit the capital, Abomey, only in conjunction with the major cycle of annual ceremonies, Xwetanu. Because Xwetanu -- or Customs, as the ceremonies were dubbed by the Europeans -- ranged in duration from several weeks to several months, travelers drew their information about the kingdom from the advantageous point of a relatively long period of time spent in close observation of the court at what was unquestionably the most important period of the year. Fascinated and sometimes repelled by the sights they witnessed, they set down their own observations, describing land forms and economic activities, court life and ceremonial, and officers and institutions of the state.

Some years ago, Robin Winks edited a series of essays entitled The Historian as Detective, invoking the intellectual joys of an Agatha Christie mystery to explain the value of history to society. It drew no examples from Africa, perhaps reflecting the infancy of African historiography at the time. However, it is no exaggeration to say that in the intervening decades, the piecing together of African history has raised for historians challenges of method and complexities of interpretation fully worthy of Hercule Poirot.

Contributions to this recent genre of detective work have been especially notable on the part of those investigating Africa's precolonial past. The reasons for this are many: a paucity of reliable witnesses, extreme difficulty (not to mention expense) in tracking down those who do exist, a shortage of suitably trained and dedicated ‘gum-shoes,’ and an abundance of clues which frustratingly seem to lead at one and the same time ‘both everywhere and nowhere,’ as Poirot would probably put it. But where detectives like him achieved fame and fortune by finding conclusive answers, detectives of early African history have had to settle for the relative obscurity which accompanies the unsolved case. ‘Mysteries’ which leave the choice of solution to the reader are more characteristic of the field than those with definitive, final-page revelations. In this, the quest for “Tarra” proves itself no exception.

It is well known that indigenous contemporary written documentation exists for the precolonial and early colonial history of some of the coastal societies of South-Eastern Nigeria. The best known example is Old Calabar, for which there exists most notably the diary of Antera Duke, covering the years 1785-88, a document brought from Old Calabar to Britain already during the nineteenth century. More recently John Latham has discovered additional material of a similar character still preserved locally in Old Calabar, principally the Black Davis House Book (containing material dating from the 1830s onwards), the papers of Coco Bassey (including diaries covering the years 1878-89), and the papers of E. O. Offiong (comprising trade ledgers, court records, and letter books relating to the period 1885-1907). In the Niger Delta S. J. S. Cookey, for his biography of King Jaja of Opobo, was able to use contemporary documents in Jaja's own papers, including correspondence from the late 1860s onwards. In the case of the neighboring community of Bonny (from which Jaja seceded to found Opobo after a civil war in 1869), while earlier historians have alluded to the existence of indigenous written documentation, they have done so only in very general terms and without any indication of the quantity or nature of this material.

The Malagasy proverb “You can't catch a locust if your armpit is not close to the ground” (Ny valala tsy azo raha tsy andrian'elika) perhaps characterizes archival research in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar. There are at least eight research facilities with archival materials in town: the National Archives (Foiben'ny Arisivam-Pirenena Malagasy); the Academie Malgache; CIDST (Centre d'Information et de Documentation Scientifique et Technique); the National Library (Tranomboky-Pirenena); the University Library; and three church archives (American Lutheran, Norwegian Lutheran, and Catholic). In this paper I give some background information on the collections in the National Archives, outline how to use the facilities, provide an annotated bibliography of the finding aids there, and give some tips for one's stay in Antananarivo.

Madagascar's National Archives inherited many documents from the monarchical period. At the beginning of the colonial administration, the French deposited royal documents at the Queen's Palace (Rova) in Antananarivo. During their occupation they added documents from the territorial and central administrations. The whole collection was transferred to French headquarters before the Malagasy direction of Civil Affairs was created. On 1 March 1958 the Service des Archives de Madagascar was instituted. From then on, the archives have been under the jurisdiction of the head of government.

The National Archives are remarkable for their materials on the following topics: the history of the Malagasy people; their customs and practices; and their way of thinking that distinguishes them from the majority of other people. Moreover, the National Archives have collections that do not exist in other libraries, such as the Academie Malagasy and CIDST.

Modern nationalisms first arose during the later eighteenth century around the wide periphery of the ancient heartland of western culture and gnawed their way inward during the course of the nineteenth century to the core, culminating in World War I, Each new nationalism generated an original “imagined community” of human beings, part of whose ideological cohesion derived from a sense of shared historical experience. Since the actual historical record would not necessarily satisfy this hunger, it was often found expedient to amend the past through acts of imagination aptly termed the “invention of tradition.”

One of the many new “imagined communities” of the long nineteenth century took shape in the northern Nile-valley Sudan between the final disintegration of the old kingdom of Sinnar (irredeemable after the death of the strongman Muhammad Abu Likaylik in 1775) and the publication of Harold MacMichael's A History of the Arabs in the Sudan in 1922. The new national community born of the collapse of Sinnar, strongly committed to Arabic speech and Islamic faith, was tested by fire through foreign conquest and revolution, by profound socio-economic transformation, and by the challenges attendant on participation in an extended sub-imperialism that earned it hegemony—first cultural, and ultimately political—over all the diverse peoples of the modern Sudan.

One important response of the nascent community to the trials of this difficult age was the invention of a new national historical tradition, according to which its members were descended via comparatively recent immigrants to the Sudan from eminent Arabs of Islamic antiquity.

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.)

For scholars of southeastern Africa interested in the early history of the region, the pen of the Portuguese was indeed mightier than the sword. Although most of the first Portuguese arrivals carried either the sword or the cross, they put these down to wield the pen and leave a written record of their triumphs and travails. The documents left by Portuguese soldiers, religious men, and others in the service of the crown provide details that are relative not only to the Portuguese experience but also to African life. This paper focuses on Portuguese writings that describe the area around the port of Sofala and its hinterland, home to the Shona who live south of the Zambezi river on the central Mozambican coastal plain and the Zimbabwe plateau. Both around Sofala and further west in the interior the inhabitants speak Ndau, a dialect of the Shona language. The wealth of evidence left by the Portuguese since the sixteenth century sheds light on changes and continuities in Ndau history.

The materials that have survived are amazingly detailed and informative despite their inherent biases. Historians have long recognized the prejudices of the colonizer either creeping into the documents or jumping off the page in a more blatant manner. The examples provided here are no different. The Portuguese, like other Europeans, had certain notions stemming from a Eurocentric mentality that was an integral part of their worldview. In these records, we see how the quest for gold and a ‘civilizing’ mission coalesced into systematic exploitation.

Traditional accounts of the nineteenth-century Fulbe conquest in northern Cameroon tell roughly the same story: following the example of Usman Dan Fodio in Nigeria, the Fulbe of Cameroon organized in the beginning of the nineteenth century a “jihad” or a “holy war” against the local pagan populations to convert them to Islam and create an Islamic state. The divisions among the local populations and the military superiority of the Fulbe allowed them to conquer almost all northern Cameroon. They forced those who submitted to give an annual tribute of goods and servants, and they raided the other groups. In these traditional accounts the Fulbe are presented as unchallenged masters, while the local populations are depicted as slaves who were powerless over their fate; their role in the conquest of the region and in the administration of the new political order is supposed to have been insignificant.

I will show that, on the contrary, in the area of Banyo the Wawa and Bute played a crucial role in the conquest of the sultanate and in its administration. I will then re-examine the cliche that all members of the local populations were the slaves of the Fulbe by distinguishing the fate of the Wawa and Bute on one side from that of the Kwanja and Mambila on the other, and by showing the importance of the Fulbe's identity in shaping the definition of slavery. Finally I will argue that, if the historical accounts found in the scientific literature invariably insist on Fulbe hegemony and minimize the role played by the local populations, it is because those accounts are often based on Fulbe traditions, and because these traditions are remodeled by the Fulbe in order to correspond to their discourse on identity.

The !Kung San or Bushmen of Namibia and Botswana are one of the most thoroughly documented hunting and gathering societies in the annals of African anthropology. In recent years two radically different views of the !Kung San have emerged in the anthropological literature. One sees the !Kung as hunters and gatherers living under changed circumstances and maintaining an old but adaptable way of life: the characteristic features associated with the hunter-gatherer subsistence or foraging mode of production.

The other sees these same !Kung as products of a very different history, a history of long association with Bantu-speaking overlords, followed by intense involvement with merchant capital. In this view it was the !Kungs' experience of domination and incorporation, not the dynamics of autonomous foraging that shaped their economy and social life. Their well-documented egalitarian politics and gender relations are thus a product not of their own history, but of their history of shared poverty. The San are classless today precisely because they are the underclass in a more inclusive class structure (Wilmsen 1983:17).

Which view more accurately reflects the historical realities and experience of the !Kung? A body of opinion within contemporary anthropology holds that this “revisionist” view provides a much-needed corrective to the anthropological tendency to treat African societies ahistorically. Others have denied this charge and have countered that the history of Kalahari peoples showed great variation; while some may have formed an underclass at an early date, others persisted as relatively independent (but not isolated) hunter-gatherers into the modem period.