In 1913 an old chest was discovered in a manor house in Worcestershire in the west of England. Packed with bundles of manuscripts, it contained several hundred letters and business papers written in a crabbed italic hand. These documents belonged to Thomas Bowrey, an English overseas merchant, who was born in 1662 and died in 1713. The collection of papers was later purchased by Colonel Henry Howard, and in 1931 part of it was presented to the Guildhall Library in London. These documents include an incomplete manuscript titled “Discription of the Coast of Affrica from the Cape of Good Hope, to the Red Sea” dated 1708. The notes indicate that Bowrey intended to write a book that encompassed descriptions of all the major ports of the region.

Only fragments of the draft survive. Most of the manuscript contains amendments, crossed-out sections, and blank spaces. The text consists of different versions of a preface, brief accounts of the Dutch Cape Colony and Delagoa Bay in Mosambique, as well as a draft portion which has the title “Islands of ye Coast of Africa on ye East Side of ye Cape of Good Hope: Places of Trade on Madagascar.” The densely written and in part hardly legible text is on sixteen folio pages. It gives information about Assada, Old Masselege, Manangara, New Masselege, Terra Delgada, Morondava, Crab Island, St. Vincent, St. Iago, Tulear, St. Augustin Bay, St. John's, Port Dauphin, Matatana, Bonavola, St. Mary's Island, and Antongil Bay. This document also includes descriptions of Mauritius and Bourbon, nowadays called Réunion. Most of these places were visited by English, Dutch, and French seafarers in the last decades of the seventeenth century.

As the pioneering generation of postwar British academics retired, some produced autobiographical texts which revealed the personal circumstances and intellectual influences that brought them to the study of Africa. Edited volumes have also provided broader reflections on the academic disciplines, methodologies, and institutions through which these scholars engaged with the continent. In one such text, Christopher Clapham and Richard Hodder-Williams noted the special relationship between extramural studies (also known as university adult education) and the academic study of Africa's mass nationalist movements:

The impetus for this study came to a remarkable degree from a tiny group of men and women who pioneered university extra-mural studies in the Gold Coast immediately after the [Second World War], and to a significant extent established the parameters for subsequent study of the subject [African politics]. Gathered together under the aegis of Thomas Hodgkin […], they were led by David Kimble […], and included among the tutors Dennis Austin, Lalage Bown and Bill Tordoff, all of whom were to play a major role in African studies in the United Kingdom over the next forty years.

There is no other theme in precolonial Benin Kingdom studies around which so many lances have been broken as that of consolidation of the present-day Second (Oba) dynasty and the person of its founder Oranmiyan (Oranyan in Yoruba). The main reason for this is the existence of considerable disagreements between numerous Bini and Yoruba versions of the oral historical tradition. Besides this, the story of Oranmiyan is one of the Bini and Yoruba oral history pages most tightly connected with mythology. This fact becomes especially important if one takes into account that the oral tradition is no doubt the main (though not the only) source on the consolidation of the Oba Dynasty in Benin. The key point on which different Bini and Yoruba traditions openly contradict each other, and which scholars debate, is the origin of the Dynasty. Who initiated its founding: Bini or Yoruba? Was it a request or a conquest? Are the characters of the oral tradition relations historical figures? Finally, what were historical, sociocultural, and political circumstances of the Oba accession?

If one disengages from details, three groups of traditional versions that describe the origin and life of Oranmiyan (including its period connected with Benin) can be distinguished. These groups may be designated as the Yoruba one, the Benin “official” (i.e., traditionally recognized by Oba themselves and most widely spread among common Bini) and Benin “apocryphal” traditions. In the meantime it should be borne in mind that Bini and Yoruba native gatherers and publishers of the oral historical tradition could influence each other. For example, the Yoruba Johnson could influence the Bini Egharevba, while the latter in his turn could influence another Yoruba, Fabunmi, and so on.

Doubt persists in pastoralist studies, but not the kind that David Henige champions in his explorations of historical methods. Nostalgia for past glories, when pastoral nomads were mighty and fierce or healthy and wise, throws doubt on today's mobile livestock herders surviving for much longer in modern times. Scholars of this sort direct their skepticism not at how they came to such a conclusion, which Henige would urge them to do, but at how “traditional” herding ways of life can possibly survive vis-à-vis “modernity.” In such a “disappearing worlds” approach to change, where students of pastoralist cultures confront their subjects through their approaching demise, documenting the ways of life of pastoralist peoples before they disappear has deeply romantic overtones.

Henige's pyrrhonist skepticism aids in exposing the assumptions behind such a romantic scholarly endeavor. “Pyrrhonists demand,” Henige reminds us, “that, to be successful, all inquiry must be characterized by rhythms of searching, examining, and doubting, with each sequence generating and influencing the next in a continuously dialectical fashion.” In his Montaigne-like essayistic book, Historical Evidence and Argument, doubting does not end inquiry like a one-man scorched-earth policy, but sets David on a journey with many twists and turns and no end in sight. Along the way, the implicit has a chance to become more explicit. Methods – the ways that we search for, examine, and doubt our evidence and eventual arguments – are thus revealed more effectively when made a subject of critical reasoning and their revelatory powers questioned.

The history of the commercial entrepôts on the Atlantic coast of West Africa in the pre-colonial period is far from being a neglected topic, but has attracted considerable academic research. The potential value of a biographical (or prosopographical) approach to the social history of such coastal communities has also long been recognized, the classic pioneering example being Margaret Priestley's study of the Brew family of Anomabu, on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), founded by the locally settled Irish slave-trader Richard Brew (died 1776). The case of the Brews, however, presents exceptionally favorable conditions for the reconstruction both of individual biography and of collective family history, in that the founder was literate and generated a considerable corpus of written records which survives to the present, while for subsequent generations of the family the early establishment of an institutionalized form of British proto-colonial administration on the Gold Coast also yielded relatively abundant documentation.

Elsewhere on the coast, and more particularly for individuals and families lower down the social scale, the amount of evidence available is likely to be much more limited and fragmentary. The present article represents a tentative attempt at a biography of a person of much lesser eminence than Richard Brew or his descendants, which may therefore be regarded as a venture into the field of subaltern history. To the extent that it also concerns someone who generated no documentation of his own, but whose life has to be reconstructed from incidental references in the records of the external agencies with whom he had dealings, it is also conceived as a methodological exploration of the possibility of extracting an African voice and perspective from European (and Eurocentric) sources.

My own history with David Henige goes back to 1985, when I had just finished a master's degree in African studies at the Centre of West African Studies in Birmingham, England, and was looking for a place and a supervisor for a planned doctoral dissertation involving a historiographical study of Nigeria. One of my supervisors, Tom McCaskie, suggested getting in touch with Henige, to see if he could assist me. The reply was elaborate and positive, which I appreciated much. Circumstances for graduate students at the time being quite different from the present, and funding systems for study abroad still in their infancy, the plan came to nothing. The connection with Henige and his work was there to stay, however.

This article is an effort to give a reflection on David Henige's career and his impact on the discipline of history in Africa, through his work as editor of History in Africa. The scope of the reflection is limited, as we concentrate on David's own contributions, rather than setting him and his work in a comparative framework. When David Henige started History in Africa in 1974, it was yet another scholarly journal on Africa, in an ever-growing series, counting already more than two hundred titles, as Henige pointed out himself. And indeed, in such circumstances, a new journal needs ‘to justify itself to the audience it addresses.’

In April 2007 David William Cohen and his graduate students held a symposium on the future of African Studies at the University of Michigan. David Cohen, two graduate students—Isabelle de Rezende and Clapperton Mavhunga—as well as five invited speakers with different disciplinary backgrounds—Pius Adesanmi, Tim Burke, Jennifer Cole, Paul Zeleza, and myself—contributed papers. The purpose of the conference, entitled “2020: Re-Envisioning African Studies,” was twofold. First, it appeared timely to reflect yet again on the state of African Studies in disciplinary-based and area studies departments. Second, David Cohen had the idea of 2020 representing both the utopia of ideal vision and the concrete question of what the field might look like when the graduate students participating might conceive their second book projects. What follows are the thoughts—not a list of solutions—by a historian who has studied in three academic contexts—Germany, Zimbabwe, Britain—who has taught in as many—Britain, Germany, USA—and who has gathered experience both in area and disciplinary-based departments.

Finding one's intellectual home in area studies is problematic for a range of reasons, not least for the exoticization and marginalization of non-western world regions in the global flows of ideas. At the same time, African Studies make for a comfortable sense of belonging. This is a community of scholars who provide a productive and engaging, if at times impassioned, conversation with colleagues across disciplinary boundaries, time periods, and the great diversity of African and diasporic societies and regions. The question is: what place does the historical discipline occupy within this field, and what is its future?

It is widely accepted that the development of recording technology played an important role in the development of ethnomusicology as a discipline. For the first time, from the late nineteenh century, music could be recorded for use in scientific comparison and analysis. Jaap Kunst once wrote: “ethnomusicology could never have grown into an independent science if the gramophone had not been invented.” But the significance of recorded performance—the most objective way of capturing oral tradition—for the understanding of all aspects of culture must not be underestimated, particularly, but not exclusively, for nonliterate societies. “Oral tradition should be central to students of culture, of ideology, of society, of psychology, of art, and … of history.” And sound archives should be perceived as essential to research, “equivalent to libraries in other disciplines insofar as their importance in research is concerned.”

Almost immediately after the advent of recording technology in the late 1870s, sound archives began to emerge: the first in Europe was the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Science in 1899. Britain came late to the field: the British Institute of Recorded Sound was established with private funds only in 1947; it received its first grant-in-aid in the 1960s and in 1983 it became part of the British Library, known as the National Sound Archive.

When I first mentioned to David Henige my plan to go to Portugal to do some archival research, he expressed the hope that it would be a somewhat more welcoming atmosphere than he had encountered in 1971, with armed soldiers patrolling the grounds. Indeed it was. I spent three weeks in Lisbon doing archival research in modern African history, with a specific interest in Tanzania. The Arquivo Histórico Diplomàtico (AHD) and the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (AHU) both proved to be rich archival sources kept by accessible and friendly staff.

This paper is a brief and informal review of my research in the archives. Unfortunately, I did not survey the holdings of either of the archives I used, so I cannot speak to their scope, but the files on Africa are vast. The AHU, for example, claims over 6000 meters of documents, and not just for Portuguese colonies. They include materials dating to the sixteenth century and extensive intelligence and diplomatic materials for the twentieth century. I hope that this paper will give interested researchers a sense of the type of material available.

In going to Portugal, I had the goal of finding out what archival material existed in Lisbon concerning relations between Portugal and Tanzania. Portuguese-Tanzanian relations were largely formed through the encounter over Mozambique. When Tanzania gained independence, it began to support the Mozambican liberation movements, which was very upsetting to Portugal, especially in the context of the Cold War. The Portuguese archives proved very fruitful. I found hundreds of documents that were of great interest, including documents relating directly to my dissertation topic dealing with a diplomatic incident concerning some forged letters that implicated Portugal in a plot to overthrow the Tanzanian government.

When I read The Ivory Raiders, I was intrigued by the plot of the story, the intention of the author, Major Henry A. Rayne, to document the intricate process of political assignment and colonial intervention in the “lawless chaos” of wild African landscape and make it accessible to European readers. The encounter transpired on the banks of the Turkwell River in northern Kenya Colony, bordering the western shores of Lake Rudolf (Lake Turkana), where Rayne triumphantly captured the fugitive Mahomadi bin Abdullah, an Arab from Muscat, for engaging in illicit ivory trade. The narrative plot into which the colonial encounter cast itself surfaces in the first 25 pages of the book, and the story of Major Rayne's encounter with Mahomadi bin Abdullah is fascinating.

Portuguese archives contain a wealth of documents that are insufficiently utilized by, and often unknown to, historians of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century west Africa. Lusophone sources are crucial for the period of earliest contact between Europeans and West Africans. While the publications of Avelino Teixeira da Mota are widely known, the work of contemporary Portuguese scholars such as Maria Emilia Madeira Santos, Maria Manuel Torrão, and Maria João Soares does not have the same visibility except among lusophone scholars. Relatively few Africanists have recognized the potential significance of the Portuguese archives for Senegambia, a region generally considered within the orbit of francophone or anglophone west Africa. The Portuguese archives remain a rich source of hitherto unknown documents, some of which will lead to fundamental transformations in our historical knowledge of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Upper Guinea coast.

The two of us have worked extensively on the history of the Luso-Africans in Senegambia and the Guinea of Cape Verde. Mark has investigated the construction and evolution of their identity. Horta, in particular, has for many years focused on their representation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese sources. Both writers have argued elsewhere—following Boulègue and Moraes—that among these Luso-Africans—or “Portuguese” as they were known in contemporary sources—there were New Christians, some of whom were probably practicing Jews. Evidence of the Jewish presence in west Africa remained scanty, however, and we argued that if some “Christian” Portuguese were in fact practicing Jews, they were Jews primarily in the privacy of their own communities.

Karamojong oral tradition provides several trickster characters such as the rabbit, the self-appointed moral guard. This rabbit pretends to defend the weak and the powerless, yet secretly steals from them, but in the end gets exposed for what it really is. Then there is the clever fox, which skilfully tricks people with its clever manipulations, convincing them that it is honest and upright, not unlike the rabbit, but then it too gets caught stealing. Napeikisina, the one-breasted villain trickster, the symbol of humanity's penchant for evil, masquerades her insatiable cannibalistic propensities and desire for recognition, but her penchant for evil eventually becomes apparent, thus frightening people, and like all the other tricksters she too gets caught.

Ben Knighton seems to possess some of the attributes of some of these tricksters. With amazing legerdemain, he skilfully manages to conjure up oral and written texts in an attempt to persuade people to believe that what they read is authentic, in order to offer himself as the paramount authority on all matters Karamoja. But he too ends up getting caught, like all the Karamojong tricksters.

Exactly when Islam arrived on the Swahili coast is difficult to say, but Mombasa was a Muslim town long before the arrival of Vasco da Gama in 1498. During the two centuries or so that the Portuguese-Christians occupied this part of the sea route from Europe to India there were churches in Mombasa and elsewhere in Swahililand, but none has endured. Modern Christianity dates from 1844, when Ludwig Krapf arrived in Mombasa. Before then Mombasa was a “wholly Mohammedan” town. Krapf, a German Lutheran, was employed by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) based in London. Failing to make any converts on the island, Krapf moved into the coastal hinterland, among the Nyika, where Islam was less in evidence and where, therefore, Krapf was more hopeful of success. With remarkable perspicacity he wrote: “Christianity and civilisation ever go hand in hand…. A black bishop and black clergy of the Protestant Church may, ere long, become a necessity in the civilisation of Africa.”

In England, when attention was drawn to the east African slave trade, a settlement of liberated slaves was established on the mainland north of Mombasa island in 1875, and a church built (Emmanuel Church, Frere Town)—the first parcel of land in central Swahililand to be owned by European-Christians. There was still no church on the island. However, this was the zenith of the British imperial power and in the capital of almost every major British overseas possession, it was de rigueur—alongside the Secretariat and the Club—to have a Church of England cathedral.

A wide variety of documents exist in Cameroonian rural villages, few of which are likely to be preserved since many are not perceived as being worthy of long-term conservation as well as being vulnerable to damp, termites, and to recycling in the form of cigarette or wrapping paper. In this paper I consider the information contained in the different types of written record and how they interrelate. In a companion piece (Zeitlyn mss) I continue to discuss a diary written at my instigation over an eighteen-month period.

Anthropologists and historians alike are prone to a writing disease: “If in doubt write it down.” We record things often for the sake of recording (sometimes without having a specific end in mind for any particular record). Valuable serendipity often results, and our colleagues and successors, as well as the descendants of those we have worked with are sometimes the beneficiaries. Academics, and anthropologists among them, often seek out like-minded people to spend time with. This in itself raises some questions about the generalizability of information so received. But leaving that aside, the accounts of anthropologists and their key informants (for example Muchona [Turner 1967], Ogotommêli [Griaule 1965]) are striking, as much for the resemblances between academic and informant as for their putative differences.

In 1995 I whined to Dave Henige about the difficulties involved in producing a 753-page volume of 383 pages of translated poetry (each including a work number, language of the original, source of the text, an historical introduction, and related text section) containing three orthographies, four languages, 947 footnotes, 241 pages of barely-arranged Arabic-script (but not all Arabic language) facsimiles, six maps, three glossaries, two works cited lists (published and unpublished), two appendices, and an index – all without a copy editor, and for a press demanding camera-ready copy from two novices an ocean apart who had access only to primitive email (remember CompuServe?) that would scramble poetic verse and jumble margins. When I finally took a breath, he smiled. Dave loves a challenge, and loves even more, passing one on. “Write about it,” he said. Suddenly I found myself signed up for the “Technical Problems in Preparing Text and Translations for Camera-Ready Copy” Historical Texts Panel at ASA's 1996 meetings. But that was not enough for Dave. He also expected an article, which I duly produced: “This Will (Not) Be Handled By the Press: Problems and Their Solution in Preparing Camera-Ready Copy for The Collected Works of Nana Asma'u, Daughter of Usman Dan Fodiyo 1793-1864” for History in Africa 25 (1998). In fact, it was Dave who rained on our anticipated title, “The Complete Works…,” dryly inquiring, “How can you be sure?” So it was “Collected Works…” instead.

On the worldwide scale Africa is the least-known continent demographically. Until the mid-twentieth century not even the size of the population was precisely known in many areas of sub-Saharan Africa. The major problems in African historical demography have either been the almost total lack of relevant sources or, if some have been available, they have been fragmentary and non-systematic. The reliability of the most commonly-used sources in African historical demography—population counts and early censuses—remained questionable until the 1960s. However, fairly far-reaching conclusions and estimations based on these sources using indirect methods have been drawn. Despite the development of methods in historical demography, the questionable source materials have naturally provided serious grounds for argumentation.

An excellent example is the debate between the natalistic and antinatalistic school over changes in fertility and mortality in sub-Saharan African societies during the precolonial and early colonial period. The fragmentary nature of the available sources has offered a firm basis for the disagreement.

The objective of this paper is to discuss limitations, pitfalls, and opportunities related to sources used in African historical demography. The paper first reviews the conventional sources—population counts, censuses, and surveys—and then presents an old but seldom-used group of sources, Christian parish registers. The usability of parish registers is discussed through a concrete research project based on data produced since the late nineteenth century in the parishes of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (ELCIN). Finally, attention is paid on widening the range of disciplines where African parish registers could be utilized.

There is never an end to stories.

“The art of composing oral narratives,” said Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, a Xhosa storyteller,

is something that was undertaken by the first people, long ago, during the time of the ancestors. When those of us in my generation awakened to earliest consciousness, we were born into a tradition that was already flourishing. Narratives were being performed by adults in a tradition that had been established long before we were born. And when we were born, those narratives were constructed for us by old people, who argued that the stories had initially been created in olden times, long ago. That time was ancient even to our fathers; it was ancient to our grandmothers, who said that the tales had been created years before by their grandmothers. We learned the narratives in that way, and every generation that has come into being has been born into the tradition. Members of every generation have grown up under the influence of these narratives.

In the late 1960s and in the 1970s, I made a number of research trips to southern Africa for the purpose of studying the oral traditions of the Xhosa, Zulu, Swati, and Ndebele peoples. The Xhosa and Zulu live in South Africa, the Swati in Swaziland, and the Ndebele in the southern part of Zimbabwe. During each of those trips many of the performances and discussions were taped. I witnessed thousands of performances.

In this paper I take up the methodological issue of combining archived fieldwork notes and contemporary field data in the reconstruction of the recent history of Wolaitta, a former kingdom in southern Ethiopia. The old fieldwork data, archived and little known since the 1960s, consist of the notes of the German Ethiopianist ethnologist Eike Haberland (1924-1992), while the field data are based on my intermittent fieldwork in Wolaitta since 2001. In ongoing research on this subject, I intend to write an historical ethnography of Wolaitta, by combining a study of the methods and interpretive strategies of Haberland as ethnographer and product of his time, with new research. The effort may also allow us to see how his ‘facts’ and explanations fit with current concerns in anthropology and African studies. As the subject of this paper will eventually be elaborated into a book, I aim to be brief here and illustrate the value and challenge of such a reconstruction effort.

The study also is meant to contribute to understanding the dynamics of regional identity in today's Ethiopia, which has been struggling with a very problematic implementation of ethnicity-based federal policies since 1991. A study of a corpus of ethnography gathered in the heyday of German field ethnology (1950s-1960s), in conjunction with present-day research, may highlight processes of identity formation among the Wolaitta, who today in 2005 count some 1.5 million people, with perhaps an additional 80,000 living outside the Wolaitta borders elsewhere in Ethiopia, and having various shades of identification with their country and traditions of origin.

These people [the Maori] have carried their history in their
memories for the last thirty generations, and what should
surprise us historical most is the continuity and the
wonderful richness of the material they can supply.
My word is pure and free of all untruth; it is the word
of my father; it is the word of my father's [father],
I will give you my father's words just as I received them;
royal griots do not know what lying is.
So, why are my lords laughing? My lords think it isn't true?
By the love of God, that's how it was!
My father heard the story from his grandfather,
who heard it from his grandfather …
But the scribe who wrote Hamman's tablet made a mistake.
He wrote “Aparha” on a tablet and, without getting heard,
encased it in a clay envelope.”

In 1652 Henry Holden expressed a precocious notion of the printed text: