The basic purpose here is to offer an archival report about historical and ethnographic material collected partly in Mali but mostly in Guinea, when such efforts in the latter country were contrary to official government policy and in some cases could be hazardous to undertake. Owing to the risks involved in some intellectual activities in Guinea between 1958 and 1984, as well as the importance of the material recorded on reel-to-reel tapes in this archive, the research accomplished by Djibril Tamsir Niane in the 1960s that culminated in the 1969-1971 expeditions to Baga villages, was itself historically significant. Moreover, the fact that once the research had been done the recorded information survived ensuing decades of potentially destructive climatic conditions and political events is remarkable. Therefore, as a prologue to introducing the archival material in the process of preservation at the time of this writing, it seems appropriate to begin this report with a description of the circumstances under which the recordings were made and how they survived to the present day.

Parler des sources allemandes de l'histoire du Nigeria peut paraître quelque peu insolite, ce pays n'ayant jamais été une colonie allemande. Mais sa diversité, sa civilisation qui compte parmi les plus brillantes de l'Afrique Noire précoloniale ainsi que les nombreuses possibilités économiques qu'elle offre lui ont attiré bien de convoitises. Outre les Britanniqucs qui en firent leur possession, des voyageurs, des hommes de science, des commerçants, des missionnaires, des militaires et des administrateurs coloniaux des autres nations européennes y ont défilé, pour divers motifs. Ces séjours, brefs mais parfois répétés pour les uns et de longue durée pour les autres, ont permis aux nations dont les ressortissants étaient nombreux et très actifs de constituer ou d'accumuler une abondante documentation dont l'intérêt réside principaletnent dans les renseignements de première main qu'elle fournit sur des thèmes majeurs de l'historiographic Nigeriane. Et pour être complète et cohérente, l'écriture de l'histoire du Nigeria devrait tenir compte de toutes ces sources disponibles.

La méthode exige en effet que, pour écrire l'histoire, on ne se contente pas de quelques renseignements, des renseignements qu'on a sous la main; elle exige qu'on épuise préalablement toutes les sources accessibles sans exception. Il est done d'une importance majeure que ceux qui étudient l'histoire du Nigeria d'après les sources soient en mesure d'utiliser toutes les sources; il faut que ce devoir, qui leur est imposé par la méthode, leur soit facilité dans la pratique. Il faut qu'ils sachent où sont les documents et qu'ils puissent les consuiter aisément.

Two decades of civil war have left Liberians facing many challenges. One such group includes those concerned with the preservation and maintenance of Liberia's archives, which were severely compromised during the period of conflict. This paper provides a brief introduction for scholars as to the nature of Liberia's archival materials available in-country, the impact of the war on the collections, and details about how scholars interested in the history of Liberia may access these records.

There are three archival collections in Liberia. The first is at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tubman Boulevard, between 12th and 13th Streets. The second is at the Center for National Documents and Records (National Archives) at 96 Ashmun Street, while the third—the Presidential Archives—is at the Executive Mansion on Capitol Hill.

On 24 May 1966 the 500-year-old kingdom of Buganda came to an end. That was the day that Prime Minister Obote sent Colonel Idi Amin to attack the Mengo palace of Kabaka Frederick Mutesa, who was also the President of Uganda. A 120-man bodyguard defended the Kabaka; Amin had automatic and heavy weapons. Nevertheless, Obote was much annoyed that the palace held out against Amin's troops. An audience watched the battle from nearby hilltops, where expatriates and others brought out folding chairs, until a mid-afternoon thunderstorm sent everyone scurrying for cover. The Kabaka used this interruption to scale the rear wall of Mengo palace, where he hailed a passing taxicab and set off for Burundi and ultimately exile in London. Obote divided Buganda into two separate districts (East Mengo and West Mengo), promoted Amin, and gave him the palace as a barracks for his “paratroop” battalion, and more importantly also gave him Buganda's legislative hall—the Bulange—to become Amin's national military headquarters.

The casualties in the “battle of Mengo” were certainly few in number compared to the destruction Amin would wreak after his coup in 1971. But one invisible casualty of the Bulange occupation was especially significant for historians. The Bulange was not only the seat of the Lukiiko, the Ganda legislature, it was also the storage building for the Buganda government archives, which went back to the 1890s, and were still well organized anu maintained in 1956-58 when Peter Gutkind made use of them for his doctoral research. By 1963 storage space was becoming scarce when Rowe made several visits to Shaykh Ali Kulumba, the Speaker of the Lukiiko. Shaykh Kulumba opened up cupboards and closets packed with archival folders from floor to ceiling. Clearly the archives were still being preserved, but organization and access had suffered. Three years later, when Amin occupied the Bulange, he simply destroyed the entire archive—the historical record of sixty years of Buganda government ceased to exist.

Eritrean independence in 1993 raised fundamental questions regarding the Eritrean past. Inevitably, scholars initially focused their analysis on the history of the Eritrean nationalist movement and liberation struggle. The long guerrilla war against the Ethiopian regime attracted the interest of numerous researchers, not only because of its implications for the redefinition of the political landscape of the Horn of Africa, but also because of the ways in which it had mobilized and reorganized Eritrean society. While this literature has shed much light upon interesting aspects of the political history of independent Eritrea, further investigation of the precolonial and colonial past is still required to gain a deeper understanding of the formation of Eritrean national identity in all its intricate facets.

The question of Eritrean national identity is intimately connected to its colonial history, which in many ways remains marginalized in the analysis of Eritrean past. The Italian colonial period between 1890 and 1941 was a crucial moment in the definition of those social and political transformations which contributed to the formation of Eritrea-as-a-nation. Nevertheless, this historical phase remains underexplored. The colonial past has been an issue that European powers to varying extents have had to confront since the end of empire. Both historians of colonialism and Africanist historians have collaborated in the reconstruction of the past of colonized societies. In Italy this process remains in embryonic form. Many Africanist historians, such as Irma Taddia and Alessandro Triulzi, have already addressed the problem concerning the gaps left by Italian historiography on both the colonial past and the history of the colonized societies in its various aspects. As Triulzi points out, both practical and political reasons slowed the development of those debates that were emerging in the historiographies of other excolonial powers.

Beginning in late August 1974, I spent eight months in The Gambia, collecting oral traditions. My intention was to use what I obtained to reconstruct the history of Niumi, a precolonial “state” (Mandinka: banko) located at the mouth of the Gambia River. Over three centuries of slave trading in the river, Niumi was a dominant player in the region's political economy. Thus, one of my primary goals was to learn how Gambians remembered the centuries-long commerce that connected people living along the Gambia River to a vast Atlantic economic system, the heart of which was the sale and transportation of humans.

To my disappointment, with only a few exceptions, Gambian informants did not recall much about the slave trade. In Albreda and Juffure, the two Gambia-River villages where people were most involved in dealings with Europeans during the slave-trading era, the best informants could say little beyond noting ruins of old buildings and mentioning vague doings of “the Portuguese.” In the end, only three informants were able and willing to say anything beyond the most banal generalities about the capture, movement, and sale of slaves that occurred in the Gambia River. My assessment was that in the body of stories that Gambians held in their collective memory, a vast void existed between tales of the long-ago, and likely mythical, origins of a clan, village, or state and events that occurred much more recently, in this case after the British settled Bathurst, near the river's mouth, in 1816.

This paper addresses the challenges facing researchers seeking to explore the post-colonial history of Zambia, a country whose social infrastructure in general, and academic and research facilities in particular, are in a state of apparently perpetual decline. It describes some of the major archival resources available and their (significant) limitations. It surveys recent and ongoing attempts to document the history of nationalist movements and leaders. Finally, it explores the potential for developing a history of post-colonial Zambia which escapes the assumptions of a still dominant nationalist historiography, and which thereby contributes to a deeper understanding of the lives actually lived by Zambians since Independence.

The tendency for colonial and post-colonial governments and their advisors to seek to depoliticize issues of power, inequality and control, by turning them into “technical” or developmental issues, has been noted by historians and anthropologists. The historiography of post-colonial Zambia is a prime example of the conflation of history with development, creating a discourse that assesses historical change by the achievement of supposedly neutral development goals, and conflates the ideologies and policies of nationalist politicians with those of the nation as a whole. The relatively benign judgments passed by prominent historians of the colonial era in their postscript surveys of the government of Kenneth Kaunda's United National Independence Party (UNIP) in Zambia's First Republic (1964-72) have retained an unwarranted influence. This is partly because of the dearth of post-colonial historical studies of equal importance conducted during the last 20 years. UNIP's leading historian, Henry Meebelo, while providing valuable insights into the African perspective on decolonization, played a leading role in establishing nationalism as the unquestioned norm of progressive understanding, axiomatically placing all social forces which came into conflict with it as reactionary and illegitimate.

Thirty-four years ago David Henige launched History in Africa (hereafter HA) at a time when scholars often cut corners in their rush to construct a history of Africa, and disregarded rules of evidence, thereby running the risk that many of their reconstructions would prove to be unsound. The question was not that these scholars were wholly indifferent to methodology, but that the precolonial history of the continent was the cynosure of the field at the time, and hence that all eyes were turned towards the use of oral sources to overcome the perceived scarcity of written sources for that period and to provide voices from the continent. In their haste to fill huge voids in the story of Africa's past, scholars debated the rules of evidence in relation to such unconventional sources. They often disregarded almost every methodological canon when it came to written data. Crucial differences between primary and secondary sources were ignored, archival research was scanty, new editions of older publications were mere reprints accompanied or not by new introductions that were so uninformed as to be useless, while issues about authenticity, authorship, chronology, or translation were all brushed aside as quibbles. Thus, in the days before 1974, methodological concerns focused exclusively on oral tradition and oral history to the detriment of everything else. As its initial editorial made clear, HA was launched as a forum where scholars interested in method could publish articles about all the facets of the historical method—from epistemology to heuristics, rules of evidence, and historiography. The journal was founded and the contributors came.

The British Parliamentary Papers continue to be a valuable source of information for historians of the African past. A vast amount of material on African affairs involving British interests can be found in these Papers. This essay deals with the way that the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 was presented in the Parliamentary Papers, specifically volume 13 of the Irish University Reprint Series entitled Colonies—Africa: Southern Africa General, 1878-80. It examines the kind of information presented, as well as the kind of material not presented. It analyzes the function of these Papers in their own time and in secondary sources on the Anglo-Zulu War. Finally, it considers the kinds of questions historians must ask in order to make these documents as useful as possible.

The term “Parliamentary Papers” used in the broadest sense refers to all of the official published records of the British Parliament. This includes the record of its proceedings and various debates; the reports of Parliamentary Committees and non-Parliamentary Committees; and the official documents of various departments that discuss routine business. In a narrower and more precise sense, the term “Parliamentary Papers refers to specific sets of papers that came before the House of Commons, were printed for Parliament's use, and were part of a numbered series of papers.” The papers in this narrower group are considered “Sessional Papers,” popularly called “Blue Books,” a name given them in the nineteenth century because the government printers bound the majority of the papers in blue covers.

Publishing in Africa remains so difficult an enterprise that many publishers have collapsed, their dreams disappearing with them. This is especially true of the print media, particularly newspapers and magazines. During the past century, many magazines and newspapers failed to establish a loyal readership, keep costs down, insure wide circulation, or turn a huge profit. Consequently, not many African magazines can be viewed as “successful.” Drum magazine, however, remains an exception.

In 1951 Drum, a magazine written for and by Africans, was established in South Africa. Drum enjoyed a great deal of success and is now widely recognized as having been a driving force in black South African culture and life throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In the South African historiography Drum has been thoroughly researched. The magazine's impact on South African journalism, literature, gender configurations, African resistance, and urban South African culture has been documented and often lauded by various scholars. Many former members of the South African edition's payroll, both editors and staff alike, have gone on to become successes in literature, journalism, and photography. Often such staff members credit Drum for directly shaping their careers and directly state this in their writings. Consequently, Drum is often associated only with South Africa. While Drum greatly influenced South Africa, its satel¬lite projects throughout Africa were no less important. These satellite projects cemented Drum's reputation as the leading magazine newspaper in Africa and each edition became fixtures in west African and east African societies.

Nigeria in the post-independence years has seen its share of hardship. Politically dominated by military dictatorships, economically dominated by the ravages of underdevelopment, and culturally dominated by internal ethnic tensions and external stereotyping, Nigeria certainly seems to have suffered from an overabundance of problems and a dearth of solutions in the last forty plus years. This period, full of scholarly debate on these issues, also closely parallels the academic career of A.E. Afigbo. Afigbo, who graduated with a Ph.D. in History from the University of Ibadan in 1964, was the first History doctorate produced on Nigerian soil. He is both a product and a victim of the Nigerian nation, and his scholarly writings deeply reflect these contradictions. From that point in 1964—the era of hope and anguish—to the present day—the era of anguish without hope—he has been among the vanguard of scholars in Nigerian history and African studies. He wanted to write about the past, but the present pressured him severely. Starting as a “Nigerian,” he became a “Biafran” during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70), and again a “Nigerian” thereafter. These transitions provide some kind of “political charter” to some of his writings.

It has been a remarkable career. He has authored or co-authored eight books, edited four more, and published well over a hundred journal articles. Afigbo has earned numerous prizes for his scholarship, has served on the editorial board of many acclaimed scholarly journals, including the Journal of African History and History in Africa, and has been inducted into many prestigious societies, including the Nigerian Academy of Letters. Nigeria has also honored him with its highest academic award, the National Order of Merit.

One problem facing any historical anthropologist or anthropological historian of Madagascar is locating sources that are scattered around the globe. A recent guidebook on African source materials in the United States makes important advances toward resolving this problem, notably for South African materials in the United States, but Madagascar is poorly represented there. Researchers of Madagascar can help each other connect the gaps between recognized research materials by sharing with colleagues what they have found at less well-known archives.

In the United States there are numerous Malagasy archival resources that may not be evident from a quick search through RLIN, Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), or Center for Research Libraries (CRL) databases. Small archives may fall outside the range of microfilm projects, such as the Cooperative Africana Microform Project (CAMP), and therefore remain off the researcher's radar screen. Yet quite good materials, such as those at the Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, may be relatively nearby and welcoming to the researcher.

The Malagueta Coast can serve as a classic example of a region which was integrated into the world economy as a result of world demand for its resources—spices and labor in the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries, and again in the nineteenth century palm oil, cocos fiber, and labor—and has sunk into oblivion once the demand ceased. It is similar with Liberia's rubber and iron ore industry of the twentieth century. I had wanted to write this paper, which reconstructs the discovery and commercial exploitation of the coast through a systematic analysis of published maps and reports, ever since I walked and paddled along this coast in 1968. Furthermore I intend to review the discovery of the coast in the perspective of overall Portuguese policy and politics (interior and foreign). Last, but not least, this is to help students of Liberian and West African history with a review of the early sources—among which maps are by far the most abundant.

The Portuguese legacy to Africa is enshrined in coastal toponymy until today. Avelino Teixeira da Mota in his “Topónimos de origem portuguesa” focused on Portuguese names still surviving in the nineteenth century, but I will focus here on contemporary fifteenth- and sixteenth-century nomenclature and what it might reveal about the African discoveries. The Portuguese initially were attracted by gold at the Rio d'Ouro (later Spanish Sahara), then slaves, and eventually malagueta—a substitute for Indian pepper—commodities known on the Lisbon market and which served to name the coasts: malagueta, marfim, ouro, esclavos. Diogo Gomes was the first to actually see Malagueta on the Gambia in 1445, but the malagueta coast was not discovered until after Henry's the Navigator's death in 1460.

Between 1931 and 1937, the Anglican missionary G. T. Basden represented the Igbo people on the Nigerian Legislative Council. The Igbo had not elected Basden as their representative; he had been appointed by the colonial government. Basden's appointment seems remarkable. In 1923 the Legislative Council had been expanded to include seats for Unofficial Members, representing a number of Nigerian areas, with the expressed aim of increasing African representation on the Council. In selecting Basden the government went against their original intention that the representative of the Igbo area would be a Nigerian. However, the government decided that there was no “suitable” African candidate available, and that the appointment of a recognized European expert on the Igbo was an acceptable alternative. This choice throws light on a number of features of the Nigerian colonial state in 1930s, including the limitations of African representation and the definition of what would make a “suitable” African candidate.

In this paper I am concerned with the question of how Basden became recognized as an expert by the colonial government and also, more generally, with the linkages between colonial administrations' knowledge requirements and missionary knowledge production. Missionary-produced knowledge occupied a central, but also somewhat awkward position in colonial society. On the one hand, colonial governments and missions shared a number of common assumptions and expectations about African peoples. On the other hand, there also existed tensions between missions and government, partly reflecting differing missionary and administrative priorities, which means that the missionary expert was not often recognized as such.

The African-American missionary, William Henry Sheppard Jr. (1865-1927), lived in the Kuba kingdom of central Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. A student of Virginia's Hampton (Normal) Institute in the early 1880s, Sheppard left the United States a decade later to preach in the Congo Free State, a colonial territory claimed by Belgian monarch Leopold II. This king's army, the Force Publique, and its local auxiliaries spawned suffering throughout the equatorial region. They pillaged villages in Kasai, the southern Congo area surrounding Sheppard's Presbyterian outposts, killing families and driving survivors into brigades that collected wild rubber for European concessionary companies. This rubber boom, in turn, generated profits that not only enriched Leopold II and his business allies, but also propelled a revolution in transportation that culminated in the mass production of tires for the bicycle and automobile. Sheppard is known for bearing witness to Congo atrocities, but his ground-breaking ethnological research remains unfamiliar to many Africanists. It is fortunate for these scholars that the college that nurtured Sheppard's fascination with folklore, Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), houses his papers, photographs, and artwork. This paper introduces and analyzes these sources.

When he sighted the southern end of Lake Victoria on 3 August 1858, John Hanning Speke (1859b:397) realized that he had discovered the “source” of the White Nile, the most important tributary of the Nile proper, and so had “almost, if not entirely, solved a problem which it has been the first geographical desideratum of many thousand years to ascertain, and the ambition of the first monarchs of the world to unravel.” That Speke was an unknown explorer and that he had made his discovery on a solo “flying trip” during the East African Expedition of 1856-59, which, under the command of the renowned explorer Richard Francis Burton, had already also discovered Lake Tanganyika, made Speke's accomplishment all the more remarkable.

As contemporaries soon asserted, Speke's discovery culminated a historical series of excursions, real and imagined, into the interior of Africa and placed Speke at the pinnacle of a line of explorers and geographers that ran from Herodotus, Julius Caesar, and Ptolemy to, in more recent times, James Bruce (the Scotsman who “discovered” the source of the Blue Nile, the second most important tributary of the Nile, in 1770), the German missionaries Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann (who “discovered,” respectively, the snow-capped mountains of Kilimanjaro in 1848 and Kenya in 1849), and noted “armchair geographers” like W.D. Cooley, Charles Beke, and James M'Queen.

Michael Scott, the long-term Gandhi-esque opponent of the South African government, was a man of many talents and one of his ignored skills was using a cine-camera. Between 1946 and 1948 as he worked in Tobruk squatter settlement near Johannesburg and environs and traveled to Namibia, in addition to his powerful writing, he also filmed scenes he encountered. The purpose of this note is to share the delight of viewing “Civilization on Trial in South Africa.” It is, as far as I can ascertain, the first “protest” film made in South Africa, yet is not mentioned in the standard histories of film in southern Africa (Cancel 2004, Davis, 1996, Botha/van Aswegen 1992, Tomaselli 1988). While working on another project I fortuitously came across a copy in the Smithsonian Film Archives that I had copied and have deposited in the Namibian Archives.

The Smithsonian catalog dates this 24-minute edited black and white film to ca. 1950, and believes that it was shot between 1946 and 1952, prior to the implementation of the Group Areas Act, although it seems likely that shooting was completed earlier, before Scott was declared a Prohibited Immigrant in the late 1940s. Certainly, reading the documents on Scott's travels to Namibia, it seems likely that portions of his film was shot before 1948. In his autobiography, A Time to Speak, Scott mentioned showing the film in 1949 (Scott 1958:248). The Smithsonian obtained the film from the late Colin Turnbull, an Oxford educated Africanist anthropologist (J. Homiak, personal comment).

Writing in his Les Bambara du Ségou et du Kaarta, the French colonial administrator and ethnographer Charles Monteil considered the family name, or jamu, to

Monteil was right, to a certain degree. In the Western Sudan, family names are weighted with history and significance. Yet what Monteil characterized as evidence of stability and tradition, Charles Bird has more recently called a “ticket to mobility.” The fluidity and mobility that had come to characterize the jamu eluded Monteil entirely, just as its mutability often eludes contemporary historians.

A jamu represents both an all-important identity marker and an instrument of “mobility.” Yet it is also highly contigent, even aleatory. This mobility has a double sense, signifying both the mutable nature of the name itself and its potential for “making outsiders insiders” by creating an immediate link between people who would otherwise be strangers. Jamuw—the plural takes a ‘w’—also have a deep historicity. Embedded in them are history and myth, along with suggestions of family occupational category—commonly referred to as ‘caste’—and social status. Epics such as Sundiata often provide etymologies and legendary origins of family names, and scholars have sought—misguidedly—to use these to understand the historical processes of ‘caste’ formation and other aspects of the distant Mande past.