The problem of Igbo origins is indeed “a very maze within a maze.” It boggles the mind. Instead of one pan-Igbo tradition of origin there are almost as many traditions as there are those independent sub-cultural groups referred to as “clans” in the Intelligence Reports of the 1930s. In fact in some clans there are two rival traditions of origin. However, for clarity and ease of understanding, we shall here distinguish among three categories of traditions of origin found among the Ibgo people. Going from what I consider the least to the most relevant, these are:

In this brief note I hope to draw effective attention to Bibliotheca Missionum, a bibliography which, in its scope, reliability, and accessibility stands unequalled among bibliographies of any kind. More important, though, than its superior technical attributes is the fact that Bibliotheca Missionum provides entrée to a vast but largely dormant body of source materials -- materials which are as little used as they are indispensable to the proper study of the African past. With all fairness, it can be said that Bibliotheca Missionum's superiority is rivaled only by our disregard of it.

Bibliotheca Missionum was conceived by Robert Streit, a missionary of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. The first volume in the series appeared in 1917 and since then twenty-nine others have appeared. Initially the volumes appeared more or less under the auspices of the Oblates, but in the late 1920s the project was taken over by the newly-established Pontificia Biblioteca Missionaria in Rome. Streit was succeeded by Johannes Dindinger in 1930 and other Editors have since held office, but Bibliotheca Missionum continues to be referred to as “Streit and Dindinger.” Of the thirty volumes so far published, six (volumes 15 to 20) relate directly to Africa. All were published between 1951 and 1954 and include the following:

In addition, Vols. 1, 22, and 23 are devoted to work of general missiological import and naturally contain much that relates to Africa.

In his brief essay on the crisis in modern Nigerian historiography, A.O. Adeoye effectively highlighted the origin and nature of the crisis. However, his work was more of a review of the different perspectives, as well as the existing literature on the issue. But the crisis of relevance that Nigerian historical scholarship is currently facing is so acute that it may not be an exaggeration to say that the discipline of history is being threatened with extinction. This has created a great amount of apprehension and self-doubt among Nigerian historians. Nevertheless, the crisis is manifested in all aspects of historical scholarship in Nigeria.

One major area in which the crisis is manifested is at the apex level of the professional association of Nigerian historians, that is, the Historical Society of Nigeria (H.S.N.), which was formed in 1955. Apart from being the first professional body of academics to be formed in Nigeria, the society was so highly regarded that even up to the early 1980s, its activities were enthusiastically embraced by most Nigerian historians. By the mid 1980s, however, interest in the association had so much waned that majority of Nigerian historians, including very senior academics stopped paying their annual dues and participating in the Congresses. The situation has reached the depressing point where institutions now find it difficult to find enough finance to host the annual Congresses.

The attempts to revive the interest of historians by choosing themes that are relevant to the contemporary Nigerian situation have not being successful.Similarly, the prestigious Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria (JHSN) which was established in 1956, was last published in 1985 (even though there are a number of manuscripts awaiting publication) while Tarikh, which was supposed to popularize history at the tertiary and secondary school levels and among non-historians, has not fared better. In addition, the publication of the Ibadan History Series has long since been discontinued.

History records it that Obatala was the ruler of the indigenous peoples of southwestern Nigeria when they were conquered by Oduduwa. The exact date of the encounter remains problematic, owing largely to the nature of the source of information, oral tradition. At one level of interpretation, therefore, Obatala myths represent the struggle for the domination of the autochthonous groups, but there is another dimension. Although Oduduwa's image and achievements came to overshadow and dwarf Obatala's role in history, the latter has persisted as a deity, appropriated into the Yoruba pantheon as a symbol of peace:

It is essentially difficult to describe a Yoruba religious festival. It is not what happens that really matters, nor indeed is it important what is done. What does matter is the intense spiritual experience that can be shared even by strangers. During these events sacrifices, prayers, drumming, singing, dancing all combine to create an atmosphere, an emotional situation which allows the worshippers to come near the god ….

The second day of the [Obatala] festival has a feature not unlike a Passion Play. There is no spoken dialogue but singing accompanies the performance and the entire action is danced. The story is of a fight between the Ajagemo [who is the personification of Obatala] and another priest bearing the title of Olunwi. Ajagemo is taken prisoner by Olunwi and carried off from the palace. The Oba [king], however, intervenes for his release. He pays ransom to Olunwi, and Ajagemo is liberated and allowed to return to the palace. The return gradually attains the qualities of a triumphal procession.

Readers may be interested to know that there are several little-known depositories of African-related Catholic missionary journals in the United States and Canada. Since these materials were not usually disseminated very widely when published, they are almost never to be found in academic and research libraries, nor, therefore, in the standard locating tools like Union List of Serials and its supplements. Because of this an effort is now being made to find at least one location in North America for each of the more than four hundred relevant journals. Likely possibilities include provincial and mother houses, teaching seminaries, monasteries, and provincial archives, as well as the libraries of institutions of higher learning affiliated with particular missionary orders. Although this project is very far from complete (and almost certainly will never attain the rather quixotic goal mentioned above) some early returns are in and several important collections have been identified. This note discusses the most useful of these, which relate to the White Fathers, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Scheutists, and the Verona Fathers. African historians need no introduction to the value of the published White Father materials. The White Fathers served throughout most of Africa and they published more than any other order on the peoples among whom they served. Many of their writings have been used by Africanists, but it remains true that the correspondence, reports, and articles which appeared in their own numerous journals have not been extensively consulted, no doubt because these journals are not widely available.

This paper is an assessment of the local historical model of sociopolitical development and settlement history in Ìlàrè community, southwest Nigeria. Ìlàrè was at the nucleus of an early sociopolitical formation in Ìjèsàland. The formation, known as Éka Òsun, held sway over the area of northern Ìjèsàland between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The study forms part of the ongoing archeological and historical investigations on the settlement history and regional interactions in central Yorùbàland.

The episodes of settlement cycling are the hallmarks around which the historical experiences of Ìlàrè are organized. In other words, the trajectories of Ìlàrè's historical experience parallel the shifts in its settlement location (habitus). Moreover, the oral traditions stress intersocietal conflict and intergroup alliance as the important factors in the earliest sociopolitical transformations in northern Ìjèsàland. The traditions also highlight how factional competitions resulted in the continuous shift in the settlement of Ìlàrè within an area of about eight kilometers in diameter over an 800-year period. The oral historical narratives not only draw on kinship idioms in the construction of hierarchical social relations, but the narratives also emphasize intercommunity relations as the plot of historical experience and social actions.

The attempt here is to outline the historical trajectories of events that heralded Ìlàrè as the political center and that characterized its transformations to a political periphery in northern Ìjèsàland. This study also historicizes the long-term patterns of relationship between factional competition and regional inter-community relations on the one hand and sociopolitical development and settlement cycling on the other.

Historical studies of Kivu are still in their very infancy. Recent work has been carried out in Bufulero, Bushi, Buhavu, and Bunande, but lacking the results of these studies, historians working from published materials have very few sources at their disposal. Existing sources include works by Colle, Moeller, Willame, and Cuypers, with the latter two based primarily on the former, at least in their historical dimensions. Because the sources are so few and are essentially similar, little critical attention has been given them; by constant citation and repetition they have become hallowed as truth and used as a basis for teaching and university theses. By this process such essentially colonial interpretations have become entrenched in the historical ontology of the region. This paper proposes to review some of the written sources in light of current research in the region, by first presenting certain themes which appear to have guided earlier historical inquiry and then discussing the works of these four influential authors in light of these themes.

The first attempts to record historical traditions in the Kivu area were influenced by earlier studies of Rwanda which emphasized the centralized and hierarchical nature of the Rwandan state. Many of the early missionaries and Zairean priests in Kivu, men to whom contemporary researchers owe much for their accumulated sources, had close contacts with the seminaries and published work in Rwanda. In most historical works, Rwanda was seen as the end development for other states in the region, and prominence was given to those historical factors which were assumed to have had a common impact throughout the area.

This continues to update the basic list of serial bibliographies of possible interest to Africanists which appeared in the 1983 volume of History in Africa and which will continue to appear to the extent that new materials are noticed. Most of the following items are of only peripheral interest to Africanists but each is likely to contain at least some material which does not appear in other bibliographies at all, or at least not so quickly. Where available, I have included OCLC numbers, which may be useful for those with access to the OCLC data base.

Published by the Magyar Mezogazdasagi Muzeum in Budapest, the Bibliographia attempts to incorporate all materials relating to rural and agricultural history and related fields, a field not so fully covered, as far as I know, by any other bibliography. Unfortunately, publication is behind (and may even have ceased); materials for 1975 and 1976 were covered in the volume published in 1979. This included a total of 5790 items in 10 major and numerous minor categories, including economic and social history, history of agrotechnics, prices and wages, agrarian ethnography, and agricultural settlements. A list (obviously incomplete) of 90 to 100 journals is included and there are geographical and author indexes.

Construire l'histoire d'un pays quand on ne dispose que de la mémoire et des traditions orales est une situation familière à l'anthropologue. Y parvenir est une entreprise qui n'est pas toujours couronnée de succès. Le principal moyen de remonter dans le passé est fourni par les généalogies de personnes illustres qui ont été transmises de diverses façons. Puis de les comparer entre elles en les posant sur une même échelle temporelle. Les écueils sont nombreux. Plus le personnage est important, plus ses héritiers, ou ses détracteurs tendent à fournir des informations divergentes. Un exemple célèbre est la généalogie des rois du Dahomey qui est loin d'être entièrement claire.

L'histoire des Téké tsaayi intéresse une zone plus restreinte, un carré d'environ 100 kilomètres de côté situé à l'ouest des sources de l'Ogooué dans la forêt qui couvre les monts du Chaillu. Les autres groupes téké se trouvent dans les savanes situées à l'est de cette zone, à l'exception des Téké laali. Le travail de comparaison mené sur 13 généalogies a permis de remonter jusqu'aux débuts du 18e siècle et d'esquisser, sur près de trois siècles, un rythme temporel marqué d'abord par la métallurgie, puis par les guerres, puis par la traite et l'invention du masque Kidumu. Chacune des périodes a suscité un ou plusieurs héros dont le souvenir était diversement conservé en 1966-72. Parfois l'énumeration tourne court et cela renseigne aussi sur la faible profondeur de la mémoire. Ces généalogies constituent des documents exceptionnels qui contrastent avec l'épaisseur bien mince du passé dans une société ol'on arrive généralement aux temps immobiles dès que l'on dépasse la 3e génération, comme je le montre aussi dans ce travail.

Gerhard Rohlfs was born in Vegesack near Bremen in 1831. He was a frequent traveler in Africa, and in 1865-67 he became the first European to travel from north Africa across the Sahara to the west African coast, from Tripoli to Borno, then through Bauchi and Keffi to Loko, thence down the Benue to its confluence with the Niger at Lokoja, which he reached on 28 March 1867. From there, he proceeded upstream along the Niger to Raba, delivering presents to Masaba of Nupe. From Raba, he traveled overland through Yorubaland to Lagos. In 1868 he published an account of the first half of this journey, from north Africa to Borno, in Petermann's Mitteilungen. In 1872 his account of the second half, “Gerhard Rohlfs' Reise durch Nord-Afrika vom Mittelländischen Meere bis zum Busen von Guinea, 1865 bis 1867, 2. Hälfte: von Kuka nach Lagos (Bornu, Bautschi, Saria, Nupe, Yoruba),” also appeared in Petermann's. A later publication, Quer durch Afrika, which appeared in 1874-75, covered the entire journey.

Rohlfs' accounts of his travels in west Africa south of the Sahara have up to now been greatly neglected. The works mentioned above have never been published in English translation, which no doubt goes some way to explain this neglect. Rohlfs' information on his stay in Kuka (the capital of Borno) and his visits to Bauchi and Nupe have been cited by some scholars, at least. Very few, however, appear to have consulted his description of the last leg of his 1866-67 journey, in which he proceeded from the Niger south through Yorubaland to Lagos, visiting Share, Ilorin, Iwo, Ibadan, and parts of Ijebuland on the way.

The subject of African land ownership is and will continue to be a highly emotional issue of great importance in the new South Africa. Africans and Afrikaners alike have strong historical ties to the land. Thousands of Africans owned land outside the Reserves before 1948. These landowners included large numbers of Africans who purchased over 3,000 farms and lots between 1913 and 1936 in the Transvaal, Natal, and even the Orange Free State (plus uncounted African buyers in the Cape Province). Individuals, tribal groups, or people organized into partnerships owned land. In the 1990s Africans complain bitterly about land losses, especially after 1948 as a result of the apartheid policy of forced removals which aimed to eliminate the so-called “black spots” from white areas. In addition, some Africans point to the problem of land losses between 1913 and 1948, and others resent the severe restrictions resulting from the Natives Land Act, Act No. 27 of 1913, which prevented Africans from freely buying land in three of the four provinces of South Africa after 1913.

On 8 November 1994 the South African Parliament passed the Restitution of Land Rights Act, a law which is intended to allow Africans to reclaim their lost land. Claims by former owners or their descendants will be buttressed by legal documents of one type or another. Some of these legal documents have an interesting and unintended use, however: historians can take advantage of them to build an understanding of African land ownership before and after apartheid began in 1948.

The extent of secure knowledge of the past of the groups of people known in scholarly literature as Baga is inconsiderable. This is in part because of the limited European interest in past times in the Baga homeland (on the coast of the post-colonial state of Guinée), and also in part because of limited scholarly investigations in recent times (the post-colonial state did not help by for long exiling or barring from access non-Marxist scholars).

Ethnographic and linguistic investigations have been undertaken only since the mid-nineteenth century and still amount to very little, with even less in print. Archeological investigations have yet to begin, apart from the brave attempt of Fred Lamp to date certain artefacts stylistically. As a result, in the 1990s the connotation and exact range of application of the term “Baga” remain unclear and the precise linguistic relationship of “the Baga language” with those neighboring languages that appear to form a language group is known only in outline. What this means that it is impossible to sum up the earlier history of the Baga briefly. The reader who continues and bravely tackles the listing and discussion of sources that follows will, however, be able to assess how much of the history can be securely reconstructed.

It is understandable that the desire to construct a history for the Baga has latterly turned on the interpretation of oral traditions. Such traditions now preferred by the Baga—or at least by certain sections, strata, or individuals—are patently of great interest to the anthropologist inasmuch as they depict what the present-day Baga, or some of them, wish to see as their past history and thus throw light on contemporary ideology and popular mindsets.

Towards the end of 1964 a campaign was launched by the University of the Orange Free State to collect political documents dating back as far as 1902 throughout South Africa. It was an attempt to gather all politically relevant documents still in private possession under one roof in a centrally situated place of safekeeping, where they could be arranged systematically and made available to researchers. The success of this venture and the rate at which political documents poured into the then Political Archive undeniably proved the need for such a center in South Africa.

It soon became clear that the function of the Political Archive extended beyond the mere collecting of documents. Scholarly interpretation of the material, the introduction thereof to the public and the stimulation of contemporary history were urgently necessary. This led to the establishment of an Institute for Contemporary History in 1970, formed around the nucleus of the Political Archive.

The author, who collects from others, is far from being exact.

John Barbot's Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea, published in 1732 (and cited hereafter as 1732) is a text well known to historians of western Africa. The problems involved in its use as a historical source have been recognized for some time, and have been clarified in recent years primarily by the scholarship of Professor Paul Hair. The history of Barbot's text is, in general terms, now clear enough. John or, as he was originally called, Jean Barbot was a Frenchman who spent some time in the African trade, in the employment of the Compagnie du Sénégal. A Huguenot, he was obliged to leave France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and settled in England, where he died at Southampton in 1713. According to his own account (1732:381) Barbot made two voyages to Africa between 1678 and 1682. The manuscript journal of his first voyage, in 1678-79, is extant and has recently been published. That of his second voyage, in 1681-82, is not known to have survived. He subsequently wrote, in French, a general account of the western African coast under the title Description des Côtes d'Affrique, which he completed in 1688, but for which he was unable to find a publisher. This manuscript (hereafter cited as 1688) is also extant, and an English translation and critical edition of it is now in preparation, under the general editorship of Paul Hair. The 1688 Description was based partly on Barbot's own observations in 1678-82, but also drew extensively from earlier published accounts, especially from that of the Dutchman Dapper, published in 1668.

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.

“[D]as Wirkungsvolle wird gepflegt, die Gewissenhaftigkeit schwindet; an Stelle der Fähigkeit zu bergründen, der Kraft zu überzeugen, tritt die Sicherheìt im Behaupten.”

[T]hat what impresses is cultivated, conscientiousness dwindles; the capability to explain, the power to convince are replaced by self-confidence in asserting.

There is nothing more absurd—yet also nothing more common—than a scholarly lifetime of publishing based on materials to which no one else has access.

The series “Afrika Archiv” (“Africa Archives”) was founded recently with the aim of publishing source material referring to the history and anthropology of Africa. In this connection the term “source material” shall be considered in a very broad sense. Thus, beside the usual library and other written sources, as well as written records of oral traditions, for instance, even editions of ethnographic collections or photographic documentation will be taken into consideration. African scholars will be able to publish material from their own countries to which we Europeans and Americans have only difficult access. Western scholars, on the other hand, could publish sources from public and private European or American archives, museums, or even widely dispersed articles in periodicals and newspapers on African history of the nineteenth century which are available only with great difficulty and expenditure of time. As a reviewer once commented, such source editions will still continue to be valued when contemporary interpretations have already long fallen into oblivion.

Endeavors to record systematically varied sources on the history of the continent, the cultural and scientific history of Africa, and to make the essentials generally available to the scientific public still appear inadequate.