The special features of written vernacular history as a specific category of African historical documentation still await a general theoretical analysis. This article makes no attempt to remedy the deficiency, but considers two possible hypotheses from the relationship between Xhosa traditional historians and the Lovedale Press during the 1930s. First cf Vansina, that it is not only oral traditions which are affected by their mode of transmission. Second, cf Goody and Watt, that it is one thing to be literate, but quite another to find a publisher.

Perhaps the first printed work in Xhosa was that of a stoic-looking cow bestriding the legend “All cattle come from God,” which appeared in 1823. The writer was Rev. John Bennie of the Glasgow Missionary Society, and the printing was done at the Chumie mission station, shortly to be renamed Lovedale. From that time, Lovedale remained the focal point of the literate Christian culture which emerged among the Xhosa of South Africa's Eastern Cape. This primacy was reinforced in 1915 when the South African Native College (now Fort Hare) was established nearby under the chairmanship of the Principal of Lovedale. The Lovedale Press flourished along with its host institution. The only available estimates indicate that up to January 1939, 238 books were produced in Xhosa, more than in any African language except Swahili.

“… 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.

Uwadiae Jacob Egharevba was born in 1893 to a descendant of Ohenmwen, the Iyase of Benin Kingdom during the reign of Osemwende, ca. 1816 to ca. 1848, and Okunzuwa, a granddaughter of an Ibadan chief. Jacob's parents were long-distance traders, and he claimed to have traveled with them in the Benin and Yoruba regions until his father's death in 1902. The brief sojourn in the Yoruba country afforded him the opportunity of attending school for a year in 1899, at a time when there was no such facility in Benin because of the reluctance of the traditional elite to send their children to school. Jacob was impressed by the written word and became interested in education, although it was not until 1911 that he returned to school at Akure. He demonstrated brilliance, although his education here was terminated by relocation. On his return to Benin in 1914, he became a domestic help to Black Shaw, a senior European staff of the Public Works Department, while at the same time enrolling at St. Matthews C.M.S. school. In 1915 he converted to Christianity and, with the encouragement of Shaw and others, he was able to complete his primary education in 1916.

Between 1916 and 1921, he worked in lowly paid jobs in Warri, Port Harcourt, and Okigwe. His failure to secure any lucrative government position pushed him to trading. His writing career began in 1921 when he drafted his now famous classic, Ekhere Vb'Itan Edo. Ironically, it was this successful book that exposed his writing inadequacies. To improve his skills, he enrolled in 1926 in a five-year correspondence course with the Institute of Rationalistic Press in London. In 1933 the C.M.S. published the Ekhere Vb'Itan, which attained an instant success. It was reprinted the following year and translated as A Short History of Benin.

Of all the things that were produced in Africa during the colonial period—cash crops, states, and tribes, to name a few—history and tradition are the least acknowledged as products of the colonial situation. This does not mean that Africans did not have history before the white man came. Rather, I am making distinctions among the following: firstly, history as lived experience; secondly, history as a record of lived experience which is coded in the oral traditions; and finally, the recently constituted written history. This last category is very much tied up with European engagements with Africa and the introduction of “history writing” as a discipline and as profession. But even then, it is important to acknowledge the fact that African history, including oral traditions, were recorded as a result of the European assault.

This underscores the fact that ideological interests were at work in the making of African history, as is true of all history. As such, tradition is constantly being reinvented to reflect these interests. A. I. Asiwaju, for example, in a paper examining the political motivations and manipulations of oral tradition in the constitution of Obaship in different parts of Yorubaland during the colonial period writes: “in the era of European rule, particularly British rule, when government often based most of its decisions over local claims upon the evidence of traditional history, a good proportion of the data tended to be manipulated deliberately.” This process of manipulation produced examples of what he wittily refers to as “nouveaux rois of Yorubaland.”

The immediate circumstances which led up to the founding of Freetown in the 1790s were highly contingent, even freakish. Christopher Fyfe has stressed the role of the scientist and dubious adventurer, Henry Smeathman, in publicizing the misguided view that the Sierra Leone district provided an ideal ecological environment for settlement. More recently, Stephen Braidwood has shown that the 1787 choice of Sierra Leone as a suitable locality for settlement by the Black Poor of London, the earliest settlers, came about as a result of acceptance of Smeathman's view, not by the white philanthropists and politicians who masterminded the exodus of the Black Poor, but by the London Blacks themselves—who knew nothing of Sierra Leone from personal experience but were convinced by Smeathman's rhetoric. That the Blacks were allowed to insist on their choice might itself be regarded as freakish.

Yet, seen in a wider historical context, the foundation of Freetown, and the subsequent development of the community eventually termed “Creole,” appear less accidental and extraordinary. Why, for instance, did Smeathman chose Sierra Leone for his butterfly-collecting on his only visit to Africa? Presumably it was because he was aware that he could obtain the support and protection of the trading settlements in the Banana Islands, on Sherbro Island, and along the coast between—settlements which had been established in earlier decades by the English-speaking families of the Caulkers, Parkers, and Tuckers, families whose very names (even if corrupted from African names) point back to the later seventeenth century and the activities on this coast of the Royal African Company. And perhaps Smeathman had read John Newton's published account of his early career as a resident trader on the same coast which, although full of complaints about his treatment by his African employers, at least showed that a white could survive there.

For a long time, scholars have known that the ancient Sino-East Africantrade relationship produced valuable accounts of East Africa in the Chinese imperial archives. Particularly, the historical documents compiled during the T'ang, Sung, and Ming dynasties contain several insightful snapshots of East Africa over the span of 800 years. Unfortunately, due to the difficulty of translating ancient Chinese texts, scholars have not been able to utilize these documents fully. In other cases, scholars have misused the translations to derive conclusions that may not be supported by the original text. In this essay I propose to re-examine the original Chinese sources and the way these sources have been used by subsequent scholars. Furthermore, I shall explore the real or potential contribution of these texts to our understanding of East African coastal history.

The primary source of Chinese knowledge about East Africa during the T'ang dynasty (618-907) comes from Ching–hsing Chi (“Record of Travels”) and Yu–yang Tsa–tsu (“Assorted Dishes from Yu–yang”). During the Sung dynasty (960-1279), most of the information is recorded in Chu-fan-chih (“Gazetteer of Foreigners”) and Ling–wai Tai–ta (“Information from Beyond the Mountains”). Finally, the record of the Ming (1368-1644) naval expedition into the western Indian Ocean is preserved in Wu–pei–chih (“Notes on Military Preparedness”), Hsing–ch'a Sheng–lan (“Triumphant Vision of the Starry Raft”), and Ming Shih (“History of the Ming Dynasty”).

Dans le Sud-Est de la Côte d'Ivoire le début des années soixante est marqué par la tentative de sécession du Sanwi et ses retombées. Le roi du Sanwi, décidant de se détacher de l'Etat ivoirien qui vient d'accéder à l'independance, est allé avec ses partisans s'établir au Ghana où il a formé un gouvernement provisoire. II donne légitimité à ce mouvement en faisant référence au traité d'alliance qu'un de ses prédécesseurs Amon Ndiffou avait signé avec la France, représentée par Fleuriot de Langle, le 4 Juillet 1843.

L'érection du Sanwi en Etat indépendant est le signal d'une sévère politique de répression qui s'abat sur les Anyi de la région. A Aboisso régne le sous-préfet Haccandie qui met en place un réseau d'agents de renseignements dans un pays où les villages et les families sont profondément divisées par ce qu'on commence à appeler “I'affaire du Sanwi”. En outre les crédits affectés à la région sont drastiquement réduits. Or antérieurement le Sanwi avait été le premier pôle de développement de la Colonie, dotée d'un important réseau routier pour l'écoulement des “produits” (café, cacao) et d'équipements sanitaires et scolaires. Et brusquement ce pays, d'où était issue une élite de lettrés et de fonctionnaires, se trouve déiaissé, voire sacxifie, au bénéfice d'autres parties de la Côte d'Ivoire.

Aujourd'hui il n'est plus polémique reconnaître l'importance des textes européens pour l'étude des societes africaines qui ont établi des contacts avec les marchants, les missionaires, les prêtres, les aventuriers venus d'Europe en passant, ou même pour s'établir en Afrique. Aussi, ont-ils reçu des échos d'autres gens plus lointains, échos qui, parfois se révèlent des informations précieuses. Mais, en même temps, on a actuellement une vive conscience des problèmes d'interprétation et des doutes de crédibilité qui subissent les chercheurs à qui les textes européens puissent être utiles. Il serait presque inutile de rappeler que ces problèmes-là ne sont pas un exclusif de la manipulation des sources européennes mais se posent aussi, en ce qui concerne l'histoire de l'Afrique Occidentale, pour les sources arabes d'origine extérieure aux sociétés étudiées.

Les textes véhiculent des représentations: leurs données sur les sociétés africaines sont une construction mentale d'une réalité extérieure perçue, (re)construction qui implique la mobilisation des schémas mentaux intériorisés et d'existence préalable et autonome envers cette réalité extérieure. Des représentations qui se bornent aux limites d'un observateur ou rédacteur dont la pensée est ordonnée par des catégories européennes, exogènes à l'object de connaissance et qui, de façon plus élargie, sont relatives aux conditions de production du texte en cause.

Ce sont précisement les représentations qui font l'object de recherche auquel cet étude se situe: un object de charnière entre l'histoire européenne et l'histoire de l'Afrique. Il demande un double positionement et approche soit des sociétés européennes (qui produisent un discours anthropologique sur l'Africain), soit des sociétés africaines (object dinamique de ces représentations).

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

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

The Guinea coast and near interior was a region of almost wholly preliterate societies before the coming of the Europeans. Islamic culture, with its literate strands, which had been spreading through the northern parts of West Africa over many centuries had barely begun to touch the Guinea region—although a handful of literate itinerant merchants and missionaries was to be encountered by the Portuguese, and Islamic religious practice had penetrated at least one royal court in Senegal. Hence the “medieval” sources in Arabic which are informative on the history of the Sudanic states of West Africa tell us little or nothing about the Guinea region. As for the oral traditions of the region, mostly collected only since 1850, these have an inbuilt “horizon” of recollection which falls far short of the arrival of the Europeans five centuries ago. Ethnographic, cultural, and linguistic evidence, systematized in recent times, can be extrapolated backwards to earlier times, but this can only be done, with any security, when trends over time have been identified from earlier hard evidence.

Such trends can of course be obtained from archeology, as well as from written sources. But the limited investigations of archeologists in Guinea to date, while they certainly inform on general issues such as agriculture and technology, are as yet decidedly weak, for a variety of good reasons, on the regional details of human settlement and population, and on the varieties of political structure. Moreover it is doubtful whether archeology per se can inform to any significant extent on ethnicity, language, and social characteristics. It is therefore only marginally debatable to refer to the earliest European written sources on Guinea as “the early sources.”

“Les mentalités, une histoire ambiguë,” tel est le titre d'un article de Jacques Le Goff (1974), qui constituera le point de départ d'une réflexion sur la profondeur et la dimension historiques des sources qui peuvent faire déceler des attitudes et des mentalités, à travers des témoignages, récits autobiographiques, ou encore des interviews. Si la perception d'un changement de mentalites ou d'attitudes profondes peut paraître “ambiguë”--parce que faiblement perceptible--, certains faits cependant traduisent des signes de changement dans la mentalité d'un groupe social, voire d'une société globalement soumise à une contrainte externe, comme par exemple lors de la colonisation au XXe siècle en Afrique noire.

Aujourd'hui, nous nous intéressons à l'histoire du dedans, à l'histoire vécue par les acteurs eux-mêmes. En confrontant ces diverses historiographies, arriverons-nous à mieux comprendre ce que doit être l'Histoire par rapport à ce que l'on nous apprend à l'école (Ferro 1981/1983), à ce que l'on ressent en temps qu'historien et à ce qui est réellement vécu (Feltz 1987)? Peut-être que la perception du fait colonial par ceux qui l'ont vécu du de-dans permettra de mieux cerner les effets de ce temps de l'histoire, la recherche de techniques quant à la collecte des sources est certes utile, elle l'est moins quand on cherche à déceler une dialectique irréversible à travers certaines données conjecturelles (Verhaegen 1986; Cannel/ Kahn 1974).

In recent years political changes in Mali have opened up new research opportunities for historians and other social scientists interested in the country's colonial and post-colonial past. With the new government has come a change in administrative attitudes regarding access to local archives, in other words those held at the level of the cercle. Although these archives can be in terrible condition, they contain precious information unique to each cercle. In the course of my own research I have been able to gain access to two such archives in southern Mali, in the summer of 1996 and again in 1998. Using these two archives as an example and drawing on the anecdotal evidence of colleagues, the following comments offer a rough appraisal of the nature of cercle archives in Mali. The paper covers the type of documentation available, the condition of the collections, and my own experiences in using them. Although my experience is limited to southern Mali, local administrations across francophone West Africa are likely to have similar holdings, given the essential uniformity of French administrative structures in colonial West Africa.

In addition to providing otherwise scarce documentary evidence on local events, these archives contain a good deal of correspondence which passed from one commandant de cercle to another, bypassing the central administration in the colony's capital. The information contained in this correspondence is therefore difficult to find in national archives, and I suspect that most of it is absent altogether. The volume of such correspondence is surprising. For example, regarding a religious movement based in one of these towns in the late 1940s, I found fifty-odd letters and telegrams addressed to the local administrator by his colleagues, asking him for information and keeping him abreast of local manifestations of the movement in their own regions. None of these messages had been routed through the central administration, and the commandant had sent his superiors no more than a digest of events in which much detail was suppressed.

The Memoirs of the Reign of Bossa Ahadee, King of Dahomy of Robert Norris, first published in 1789, is a history of the west African kingdom of Dahomey during the reign of Tegbesu (“Bossa”), dated by Norris to 1732-1774 (though the correct dates are now known to be 1740-1774). In addition to its separate publication in 1789, Norris' material was also included, in a revised form, in the more comprehensive History of Dahomy compiled by Archibald Dalzel, published in 1793. This second version incorporates numerous detailed alterations and elaborations, mainly stylistic but occasionally relating to matters of substance; according to the Editor of Dalzel's History, these revisions were the work of Norris himself, although he had died before the work was brought to publication. This incorporation of Norris' work into that of Dalzel has had the effect of diminishing his reputation and perceived importance, since his material has usually been cited through (and by implication attributed to) Dalzel, rather than directly under his own name. His Memoirs, however, clearly have immense historiographical significance, as the first serious attempt by a European to write the history of a west African state.

In addition to its purely historiographical interest, Norris' work remains an important source for the history of eighteenth-century Dahomey. Its value as a historical source, however, is problematical. On the one hand, Norris, as a slave trader who had operated in Dahomey for several years, had claims to be an exceptionally well-informed observer of Dahomian affairs.

In 1680 Jean Barbot made the following observation about the religious institutions found in the Slave Coast Ewe communities of Keta and Anlo: “Their…religion [is] much the same as on the Gold Coast, only they have a vast quantity of idols…” A similar observation was made by Danish cartographer P. Thøning on his 1802 map of the lower Volta, when he described a site near the Anlo capitol of Anloga, as an “Amegase fetisch-plads,” an important religious shrine. Subsequently this shrine was identified as that which belonged to one of the clans from whose ranks was chosen the awoamefia, the highest leadership position in Anlo. In 1935 this clan, the Bate, was, in turn, described by the German missionary D. Westermann as composed of priests, soothsayers, and magicians. It is not surprising then, given such references, that R.A. Kea suggested that “the Anlo ruler's supremacy was based, at least initially on religious and ritual ascendancy.”

In 1978, however, when Anlo elders were consulted on this issue, most were surprisingly vehement in their denials of any such association, past or present, between religious concerns and the offices in the Anlo political system, particularly that of the awoamefia. They pointed to the popular traditions--those published in local textbooks and recited at annual festivals--to support their contention that the two clans which had gained custody of the awoamefia office, the Adzovia and Bate, had gained and retained the same through the “right of inheritance” and the “right of service” respectively.

The most salient fact about the Gothic migrations is that they forcefully underscore how old theories never die. They linger to play upon the intellect for generations until they seem to constitute facts themselves. The study of the migrations tempts the unwary with marvelous sagas and apparently straightforward accounts of trusted ancient authors. Even if we follow Odysseus' lead, and with our ears carefully plugged with scientific beeswax, rivet our eyes to the narrow channels of fact, the old theories still beckon; after all, Roman history is in part a series of thrusts and counterthrusts along the northern peripheries of the Greco-Roman world, in need of explanation then as now. The origins of the migrants and invaders of the Roman frontiers was a question appropriate to Tacitus in the late first century A.D. and to countless others across the centuries. All too often the questioners were far removed from the contact zones and looked down upon a simple battlefield of “we and they.” Such self-proclaimed Valkyries chose sides for their own reasons, usually preconditioned and often totally unrelated to the struggles below. This essay traces the evolution of the theoretical and factual elements of the early Gothic migrations and concludes with a personal sketch drawn in light of recent studies of the Roman frontier and insights from other areas, especially comparative anthropology.

The historiography of the early Gothic migrations is a classic example of the impact of contemporary attitudes, problems, and methodologies on the study of the past. So meager is the evidence that is likens to a broken kaleidoscope in which the few remaining pieces can be jostled easily from place to place.

The reference to Antera Duke of Old Calabar in HA 16 (1989) encourages me to contribute a note on this historical notable.1 A gross imbalance exists in the scholarly study of black slavery. The shelves of academic libraries groan under the weight of books on black slavery in the Americas. Yet for every hundred books on trans-Atlantic black slavery and the Middle Passage, there is at best a single volume on black slavery in Africa. Moreover, the curt preliminary chapter dealing with slavery in Africa mandatory in books on black slavery in the Americas, not uncommonly limits itself to repeating anachronistic moralizing cliches that show little awareness of up-to-date Africanist knowledge of slavery in Africa—and exhibit little empathy with past African enterprise. There is some excuse. Any historical social process shared between preliterate and literate societies will inevitably have fuller and clearer source material in respect of the latter than in respect of the former. Information on black slavery in the Americas, on the Middle Passage, and on the non-African aspects of the procurement of slaves, is relatively abundant; information on the transmission of an individual African from an earlier non-slave situation, through the hands of Africans, to the point where he or she was handed over to non-Africans, is almost nonexistent. This being so, the publication in 1956 of the diary of an African slave trader, Antera Duke of Old Calabar, a diary covering the years from 1785 to 1788, was an outstanding historiographical event.