There are many things that it is like, this storytelling business. One of them (so she says in one of the paragraphs she has not crossed out yet) is a bottle with a genie in it. When the storyteller opens the bottle, the genie is released into the world, and it costs all hell to get him back in again. Her position … better, on the whole, that the genie stay in the bottle.

So says the narrator of the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee's novel, Elizabeth Costello. Costello, an aging novelist, philosophizes at a point in the book where Coetzee has conspired to provoke a moment of ethical reflection on the process of telling stories. Irony and paradox cleave to this paragraph's core—clearly, Coetzee, by continuing to write and to publish, does not really believe that the genie should stay bottled. But, while Costello intends to edit this reflection from her written work, both the narrator and Coetzee consider it worthy of inclusion in the novel, thus endorsing its importance.

Costello's comment provokes consideration of the nature and effects of narration in other representations. One such site is academic writing that uses interviews and oral histories as source material. Such writing necessitates at least two levels of narration: first, re-presentation of the primary material and second, the author's analysis, synthesis, and commentary on it. As in other genres, this distils into two kinds of material: mimesis and diegesis. Here Elizabeth Tonkin's definitions of these terms are useful. She describes mimesis as “the representation of direct speech” and diegesis as “the description of nonverbal events.”

In the drum text above, the chicken and the hawk parallel the symbiotic relationship between the “slave trade” and the period of “legitimate trade” between the Gold Coast and Britain. The former “trade” paved the way for and nourished the outcomes of the latter, and as the uneven power relations between West Africa and European nation-states become even more explicit in a globalizing economy, Europe or Britain (“the hawk”) seized on the valued resources (“eggs”) of a tiresome and ravaged Gold Coast. To halt the disgrace (animguase) of impending colonial incursion and protectionism, several Akan societies (“chickens”) became hawk-like in domestic matters—for they had less control over international forces beyond their soil—and its internal conflicts had as much to do with their inner drive to maintain “order” in juxtaposition to the exigencies of their times. The key nineteenth-century relationship between Asante of the forest interior and Elmina of the coast provides a spatial parameter and a mnemonic for examining key transformations between those two boundaries as represented by the coastal Fante polities, forest-based Asante, and the Bono, who occupied the northern forest fringe. I argue that the conflicts between and within Akan societies of varying orders were the product of multilayered factors occurring at the same time and in different places, such as power struggles and tensions born of conservatism and Christianity, that ultimately transformed all in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the Akan share a composite culture, spiritual practice, calendrical system, socio-political structure, and ethos, the transformations in Asante society were not replicated among the Fante or Bono, although the Bono offer a comparative case that diverged from much of the nascent colonial shaping of Asante and Fante society. This essay suggests that Akan societies, beyond the almost exclusive focus on Asante, are better approached thematically than in spatial or chronological isolation, since the themes of social dissolution and conflicts were shared by all in a context of Euro-African commerce, Westernization, and Christian proselytization.

A cornerstone of the Western intellectual heritage is the fervent belief in the power of the written word to transform man and society. In this tradition, the existence of writing serves as a hallmark for civilization and a marker to separate history from prehistory. While a great deal of scholarly work has dispelled many myths about literacy, thus bridging “the great divide” between the written and the oral, our intellectual and emotional attachment to writing persists. This appears to be especially the case in reference to the origins of writing systems, many of the latter being claimed and reputed to have been “independently invented.” For those peoples most involved historically in such developments, the invention and use of original scripts are points of pride, and hence claims for the “authenticity” of the scripts, that is, for their invention and coming into use having been an entirely indigenous undertaking, are passionately guarded.

Historians of writing, however, are cautious of claims for independent invention. From ancient to modern times, the history of the development of writing has been characterized by a balance between “independent invention” and “stimulus diffusion.” While epigraphers and paleographers attempt to unravel the inevitably obscure origins of certain ancient scripts possibly devised in environments free from external influence, no script devised in the last two thousand years is likely to have emerged totally independent of the stimulus of some diffused knowledge of the previous history of scripts—at the very least, the mere idea of writing. Nonetheless, for many modern observers, any suggestion of an outside stimulus on the development of such scripts is considered virtual heresy, tantamount to an attack on the intellectual ability of the peoples who claim to have single-handedly devised the scripts.

Bi-lingual, Bi-cultural

able to slip from “How's life”

to M'estan volviendo loca,

able to sit in a paneled office

drafting memos in smooth English,

able to order in fluent Spanish

at a Mexican restaurant,

American but hyphenated,

viewed by Anglos as perhaps exotic,

perhaps inferior, definitely different,

viewed by Mexicans as alien

(their eyes say, “You may speak

Spanish but you're not like me”)

an American to Mexicans

a Mexican to Americans

a handy token

sliding back and forth

between the fringes of both worlds

by smiling

by masking the discomfort

of being pre-judged

Bi-laterally.

This paper presents a micro-scale examination of archeological field praxis and its impact on archeologists, students (foreign and indigenous), and the local communities that both host and labor for them. It is a reflexive journey that attempts to bring coherence to the multiple and changing registers of meaning, contradiction, and transformation that have taken place during excavations at Bosutswe in “post-colonial” Botswana. We discuss our interactions with one another and our encounters with “the past” as we sought to validate, transform, or escape the contemporary entanglements of multilateral “pre-judgments” that have their roots deep in the soil of colonial encounter.

Pat Mora in her short poem, Two Worlds, captures some of the contradictions inherent in a post-modern, post-colonial, transnational world, where one is sometimes offered the possibility of inhabiting multiple universes, with multiple cultural and linguistic positionalities, and sometimes even trans-ethnic or transnational identities as possible choices.

Samori Toure (d. 1900) is celebrated, both in written history and oral tradition, in Mali and Guinea because of the empire he founded and his fierce resistance against the French, as they sought to occupy their future colony of the French Sudan. Recently published anthologies of African epic (Johnson/Hale/Belcher 1997; Kesteloot/Dieng 1997; Belcher 1999) attest that an orally transmitted Samori epic exists in these countries. In this paper the texts hitherto presented as the Samori epic will be compared to some oral sketches about Samori which I recorded during two years of fieldwork conducted in southwestern Mali and northeastern Guinea. I will hypothesize that a Samori epic may be in the making, but does not yet exist. The texts hitherto presented as the epic of Samori are largely oral narratives produced more or less in concord with expectations about what an epic should look like. The focus is on Samori as a hero on the battefield, and this is not representative for the present-day oral narrative on Samori. Therefore, an epic of Samori, if it ever does come into being and takes the form of a standardized oral narrative, might deal with different issues than one might expect from reading the texts presented in the anthologies.

Existing studies of colonial architecture and urbanism in Morocco—much as in the case of France's other African holdings—usually highlight the political intentions of foreign administrators, not the local residents who lived and worked there. After three years of research in Moroccan archives, I came upon many primary sources that will allow historians to show Moroccans as energetic actors who shaped urban life in the French Protectorate (1912-56). The documents that I found hold significant potential for unraveling the social history of trades, neighborhoods, and institutions in the medina. The term “medina” designates the narrow streets and walled quarters of the premodern city, which colonial administrators kept distinct from the modern Ville Nouvelle built for European use. These sources make it clear that French administrators implementing urban policies in the medina faced the day-to-day responses of ordinary Moroccans of various social and economic classes. More importantly, they suggest that the colonial encounter played a secondary role in the quotidian choices of these residents, who worried more about relations with other locals, such as trouble-some neighbors or avaricious shopkeepers, than with French officers and civilians located in the Ville Nouvelle.

My own research focuses on the experiences of millers and butchers in Fez, but my insights into the archival treasures of this North African kingdom will help historians interested in other cities and socio-economic groupings. In this paper I will discuss five distinct types of documentation: archives of the municipality, archives of the Department of Fine Arts, documentation on religious endowments, land titles, and transcripts of judicial proceedings. By exploiting these sources, historians can begin to reconsider how and why Moroccans shaped the physical and socio-economic development of their cities.

In the 1992 volume of History in Africa, John D. Fage asked readers for possible additions to his landmark 1987 Guide to Original Sources for Precolonial Western Africa Published in European Languages, as he was preparing a second edition. I responded with a list of suggested additions and corrections that I had been storing up. This started a fruitful correspondence that continued beyond the appearance of the second edition in 1994, in which he generously acknowledged my help. In my last letter I told him I was already keeping notes on my computer for a third edition of the Guide. On 2 October 1994 he replied that “[a]s things stand at the moment, I doubt whether I shall want to do a third edition. The effort required to try and keep abreast with the literature seems to be continually increasing! … But then I don't see why—in due course—you shouldn't blossom forth yourself as the author of an ‘Additions and Corrections to Fage's Guide’. Indeed, this might be the more proper course.”

One can imagine the effect this confidence expressed by a grand old man of African historiography had on the novice to the field that I was. For a dozen years (extending beyond Fage's death in 2002) I haphazardly gathered information suitable for a supplement to the second edition. I then approached David Henige about it, and he encouraged me to complete the project systematically. This took 18 more months.

When I first proposed founding a journal in 1973, while teaching at the Centre of West African Studies of the University of Birmingham, I had four broad, if also vague, ends in mind: archival reports, text criticism, historiography, and comparative studies.1 I first floated the idea with Philip Curtin, and certainly had no reason to be particularly sanguine that anything concrete would eventuate. Timing must have been everything, because James Duffy, the Executive Director of the African Studies Association, soon wrote me saying that Phil had mentioned the idea to him and, since the Association was then in a mood to foster publications, well, maybe something could come of the notion.

Matters progressed, fitfully and no doubt very slowly for the anguished editor-in-waiting. In a letter dated 26 February 1974, Jim Duffy wrote that “[w]e would expect the first editor to be responsible for the first three years of the annual.” In my reply of 7 March I wrote that “my own feeling is that I would like to remain editor more or less ad infinitum—it is a job I would like both in its mechanics and from my commitment to the utility of such a journal.”

In a further letter dated 17 May 1974 I promised to “see that every mistake is corrected and every ambiguity resolved for the typist's sake,” going so far as to commit myself that I would be “disappointed if there were so much as a single cryptic footnote citation,” at least in volume 1¡ For the first several years / was that typist, retyping every contribution to ensure a clean copy for the printers, but gave this unwelcome chore up in favor of dealing with local typists to produce camera-ready copy. Eventually word-processing and then e-mail found me, and all was well. Of course I needed to rely on those more skilled in page formatting than I was and have been lucky indeed to have had Jeff Kaufmann doing this reliably and intelligently for the past many years.

Having a publisher meant coming up with a product, and I was fortunate that enough contributors could be persuaded to audition for the new journal that the maiden issue appeared not much more than a year later, after some toing and froing regarding length, name, mailing lists, and a potpourri of minor issues. On 27 September 1974 I sent off the typescript for volume 1, but kept adding dribs and drabs for another month. No doubt this contributed to HA 191A appearing only in April of 1975, far outside our target date of late October 1974 in time for the Annual Meeting in Chicago that year. At 182 pages this proved to be considerably longer than the 128-page sized number that had originally somehow surfaced as a norm.

But enough prehistory. While editors and publishers are necessary, they are no more than the curators of the body of work created over time by a journal's contributors, and there, I think, History in Africa has been fortunate. Like a plane taking off, the size of HA continued gradually but inexorably to rise, from 182 pages to over 500 pages in many later issues. It is worth noting that among the contributors to the first few issues were Robin Law and Jan Vansina, whose work is also represented in this number, 35 years on, and others have contributed over spans of twenty years or more. Along the way, about 800 articles have appeared by authors residing in some 30 countries. How many of these would have otherwise appeared, in more traditional venues is anyone's guess—mine is that only a small minority would have found their way, or even have been written.

While little has fallen short of my modest initial hopes, I must admit to disappointment that controversial points of view—or even those less controversial, but not therefore necessarily right—have only seldom been challenged. I had envisaged—apparently under the influence of some latter-day ambrosia—numerous and contentious conversations about evidence and interpretation that would in sum advance our knowledge—or if necessary our ignorance—about various issues, for all history, perhaps especially African history, teems with uncertainties. This simply failed to happen very often, or at least often enough—a pity. On the other hand, the onset of the internet has allowed controversy to flourish in the atmosphere of an all but immediate comment-and-response cycle.

Perhaps even more disappointing has been the paucity of comparative approaches. In my foreword noted above, I wrote that “History in Africa hopes in time to become very broadly comparative and to encourage useful colloquy among the various discrete units of the discipline [of history].” This goal must be written off as largely unachieved, although a few papers dealing with non-African topics have appeared. In aid of this, from 1974 through 1984 History in Africa included a “comparative bibliography” that eventually ran to nearly fifty pages annually, but I gave this up when I could no longer convince myself that it was serving any purpose—that body of water was simply not being drunk.

As of this writing, it is uncertain what will happen to History in Africa, so I will close by saying that it is (naturally) my hope that it can carry as it has for so long, and that its contributor base will become increasingly larger, more diversified, and more engaged. I am hopeful in this because, it seems to me, African historiography has come farther faster than is true for most new fields of history. The natural optimism of the beginning became tempered sooner than might have been expected, and intramural rumination has not been wanting (despite my comment above), while new sources have been discovered and put to use with encouraging frequency. It is true that to some degree the study of Africa's past has followed the various siren songs of new departures that have characterized not only history but most other disciplines as well, but throughout—and in contrast to the limited half life of most of these new ‘paradigms'—a core cadre of truth-seekers has continued to practice, opening up new vistas by dint of mining for new evidence rather than being content to adopt new theories.

[DH]

Writing about American Indian reactions to their discovery of large fossil remains, Adrienne Mayor observes in passing that “[f]olklore scholars now generally accept that oral traditions about historical events endure for about a thousand years, although some oral myths about geological and astronomical events can be reliably dated to about seven thousand years.” Mayor's chosen task is to demonstrate that American Indian legends suggest that they rightly regarded fossils as the remains of long extinct megafauna populations. In aid of this, Mayor accepts these arguments in her own work. While this claim might seem extravagant prima facie, and while most folklorists would disown Mayor's claim, she is not without support from the work of a relatively small, but not uninfluential (and possibly growing), cadre of anthropologists, mythographers, geologists, and historians, whose efforts on behalf of deep-time oral tradition I address here.

Some interesting—even intriguing—things have been happening recently in discussions of the carrying capacity of oral tradition—its long-term historicity, in particular. À la Mayor, the thrust of this is to credit tradition with being able to preserve “intact” various pieces of information for as long as tens of thousands of years. To the historian interested in the reality of the past in oral societies, this state of affairs is challenging, perplexing, and no doubt to some, highly promising. If, for instance, it can be demonstrated that certain information in oral data is thousands of years old and at the same time an accurate recollection, then reservations about much later (say, several centuries old) orally transmitted information might need to be reassessed, and with such rethinking would come new ways to approach great swaths of the past.

If very long titles were still acceptable, the one for this note would read Save the evidence: A plea for fieldworkers to make the raw materials or primary evidence from their field work accessible to all scholars— Especially all recorded oral data.

Ever since ethnographic monographs based on fieldwork were first published, they have raised problems of credibility. In the absence of any evidence at all to test the assertions made, readers of such works have been asked to trust the scholarly authority and integrity of their writers blindly, a stance diametrically contrary to basic tenets in all sciences. It may well be that, at the outset, early practitioners of the craft believed that their observations did not differ in any way from those made by natural scientists in the field—that they needed no evidence because their observations were wholly replicable. Anyone who cared to carry out the experiment—that is, to go to observe the same people in the same field—would find exactly the same situation as described in the monograph. For this was the age of the ethnographic present. Humans were divided into races and tribes, and, just like so many species of songbirds, every human tribe had its own invariant characteristics. A people-watcher need only to enumerate them.

This paper introduces a unique collection of roughly 700 historical recordings of African popular music generated by a Swiss trading company, which today is located at the archives of mission 21 (formerly Basel Missioin) in Basel. The music was recorded and distributed by the Union Trade Company of Basel (UTC) during the 1930s and 1950s in the Gold Coast and Nigeria. The collection represents a rich resource for the study of African history and cultures and caters for the growing interest shown by social historians of Africa in everyday life and accordingly in leisure activities and consumption.

As music and dance undoubtedly play an important role in African social and religious life, they have received much attention and there is a longstanding tradition of ethnomusicological research that has led to a great number of sound collections. The historian interested in the “modern” and “postmodern” or in popular culture, however, tends in many cases to be frustrated by the material contained in these archives. The ethnographic collectors often showed a blind eye to the modernizing forces within the African musical cultures they researched and concentrated on documenting what they perceived as the “original” or “traditional.” Furthermore the collection and documentation of the popular music of the day was rarely on the agenda of national research institutions and archives in postcolonial Africa. In the case of Ghana at least three initiatives have resulted in important collections of music that go beyond a narrow ethnographic documentation. The first, by Prof. Kwabena Nketia at the Centre of African Studies at the University of Ghana, features a mixture of field recordings and a few commercial records. The others focus specifically on the commercial and popular. These are the Gramophone Records Museum in Cape Coast, discussed below by its founder Kwame Sarpong and the Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation (BAPMAF) of John Collins in Accra.

The notion that the colonial entity administered as Ogoja Province represented a Nigerian form of “the frontier” persisted right through the period of British rule in Nigeria. In a late colonial geography, Ogoja and eastern Calabar are referred to as the “pioneer fringe.” Marginalized by the economic geography of colonialism, as a result of its relatively low population density, in contrast to much of southeastern Nigeria, and by virtue of its terrain, crossed by unforded rivers and characterized by heavy, clayey soils which restricted wet-season travel, it could still be characterized in the 1940s as a “traceless praierie [sic]” by one of its most seasoned European observers, and as “the Lost Province” in common colonial parlance. Scholarly exploration has done little to address this marginalization, a fact both pivotal in the administration and development of Ogoja Province and restrictive of our attempts to understand and describe these administrative processes. The dynamics of community, trade, and migration in Ogoja, and the systematic misunderstandings to which these dynamics were subject, both constitute historical processes which call for scrutiny, and help shape development and welfare projects undertaken in the later colonial period and in post-independence Nigeria. This study investigates the problematic interaction of ethnography and administration at the colonial margin, and the implications of this both for the historical study of Ogoja and its hinterland and for economic and social development planning in the area.

In late 1719 the brigantine Hannover sailed from Port Glasgow on a slaving voyage to the Guinea coast. Shipowner Robert Bogle jr. and partners hired surgeon Alexander Horsburgh as supercargo to supervise their trade for provisions and slaves along the Windward Coast, Gold Coast, and at Old Calabar. The Hannover arrived off the Windward Coast in early March 1720, and during three weeks Horsburgh purchased two tons of rice and 21 enslaved Africans on Bogle's behalf. From 5 April to 2 May he traded on the Gold Coast, loading 75 chests of corn and an additional 22 slaves. The Hannover then proceeded to Old Calabar, and from late May to early July Horsburgh purchased 75 more slaves and 11,400 yams—stowing 6,000 tubers in the week before departure to the Americas. Horsburgh also purchased sixteen slaves on his own account—eight along the Windward and Gold Coasts and eight at Calabar. Illness and death followed the Hannover on its “unaccountable long passage” to the Portuguese island Anno Bom (31 August-4 September) and British colonies Barbados (arriving 31 October) and St. Kitts (November-December).

Eighty-seven of 134 Africans survived the voyage, only to be sold as slaves in the West Indies.

The journey of the Hannover, noteworthy as one of the few Scottish-based voyages in the British slave trade, is important for Africanists because the surviving ship's accounts contain the first detailed list of African traders and notables in Old Calabar history.

In an article in History in Africa about the Ganda monarch Mutesa, Richard Reid argued that Mutesa likely suffered from syphilis. In a chapter on Mutesa in a just published volume, John Rowe concluded that the disease from which Mutesa suffered was gonorrhea. While on the surface similar—both sexually transmitted, neither particularly desirable—the diseases are actually quite different. Popular biographies often offer gossip about individuals' medical histories, but there can be legitimate reasons to investigate the medical history of past leaders, two of which are pertinent here. First, the medical conditions from which they suffered may well have affected their lives and their decisions as leaders. Reid addresses this point, speculating that Mutesa's syphilis may have progressed to an extent that it affected him mentally. Reid suggests that this might help explain Mutesa's erratic behavior toward the latter years of his reign, as he shifted his favor from one court group and foreign delegation to another. Rowe raises a similar point about Mutesa's health and competing groups, although in a different way. Rowe shows how Mutesa's illness became a point of competition between foreign missionaries and indigenous religious specialists as each sought to win his favor by curing his lllness. Reid and Rowe also both mention the effect Mutesa's illness had on the perception of him as Kabaka. The Baganda equated the health and well-being of the Kabaka with the health of the kingdom, and Mutesa's extended illness and bedridden state would not have been a positive attribute.

Did Africans once independently invent the smelting of metals or did they obtain this technology from Europe or the Middle East? This continues to be an unresolved and hotly disputed issue, mainly because the dates for the earliest appearance of smelting in Africa south of the Sahara remain inconclusive. All the earliest sites in Western and West-Central Africa from Walalde in Senegal to the Tigidit cliffs and Termit in Niger, the firki plains south of lake Chad, Taruga, and perhaps Nsukka in Nigeria, Ghwa Kiva (Nigeria), and Doulo (Cameroon) in the Mandara mountains, Gbabiri (Ndio district) in the Central African Republic, and a few sites in Rwanda, Burundi, and Buhaya cannot be dated more closely than between 840 and 420 BCE. Greater precision is impossible because the C14 curve runs flat during these four centuries, hence all these sites yield the same date. (Alpern, Killick, Me Eachern, Holl, Jézégou/Clist, Kanimba Misago). If the earliest “real” dates fell before 800 BCE, they would support independent invention, while later dates strengthen the case for borrowing. Still, this information does tell us that ironworking was adopted in the northern parts of West and West -Central Africa and in the region of the Great Lakes within the span of a mere four centuries.

The emergence of ironworking must have left linguistic traces in the relevant terminology irrespective of whether it spread by borrowing or by independent invention—hence historical linguistics can contribute to this debate. That approach is best tested by an examination of the relevant vocabulary in Bantu languages because the historical study of those languages is further advanced than that of any other language family in Africa (Nurse/Phillipson). Moreover Bantu-speakers occupy a large portion of the continent.

This article introduces, reproduces, and contextualizes two letters written in 1938 from Edinburgh by Hastings Kamuzu Banda to Samuel C. Banda (Chief Mwase of Kasungu) and Ernest C. Matako. At the time Banda was studying in Edinburgh. The letters, from a period when sources on Banda are scarce, illuminate his political and educational thinking and his personal life and attitudes at the time. The article also discusses the archival context of the letters, which were found in the papers of Godfrey Wilson, the Director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute from 1938 to 1941. The copies were found in the course of research into the lives of the anthropologists Monica Wilson, née Hunter, and Godfrey Wilson.

Nearly every historian of early African history has recently encountered studies that use the history of words as a source for history more generally defined, an approach also known as words-and-things. Indeed, by now a more or less elaborate use of words-and-things has become fashionable, especially in the Anglophone literature. A number of short presentations of the overall principles underlying this approach have been published, but they all lack an extended discussion of the methodological issues involved. Perhaps this is the main reason why words-and- things analyses are almost never subjected to critical scrutiny, while the conclusions of studies based on them, however weak or strong they might be, tend to be accepted as gospel—a most unsatisfactory situation. Hence a book-length study of the methodology involved in the application of words-and-things should be very welcome.

As Klein-Arendt's book is devoted exclusively to this subject, it should fill the gap. Yet it will disorient most readers of this journal because K-A is not concerned with the solution of smaller- or large-scale problems of history as understood by such readers, but focuses on the epistemology of the central European school known as Kulturgeschichte (more or less “Culture History”), to which he subscribes and which is likely to be largely unknown to most readers. Yet when the expression “words-and-things” was first coined in 1909. it was intended to be a tool to elucidate Kulturgeschichte. Indeed, the journal from which the label stems was called Wörter und Sachen. Kulturhistorische Zeitschrift für Sprach-und Sachforschung (Words and Things, a Journal of Culture History for Research in Languages and Things) and on its very first page Rudolf Meringer stated that “[linguistics is only a portion of the science of culture … We hold that the future of Kulturgeschichte resides in the union of the science of language with the science of things” in which “things” stood for what came to be better known as “culture traits.”