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.

While Africa has produced ruthless and aggressive individuals, Africa has also provided thinkers and public officials with deep moral sensitivity and vision. The following essay discusses a perceptive and powerful African plea for peace and justice in nineteenth-century Buganda. In a country torn by strife, certain Ganda leaders expressed their deep distress about the growing incidence of state violence by reformulating the Kintu myth, the theological, constitutional, and social cornerstone of their kingdom. These concerned individuals boldly reshaped the Kintu story, the Ganda people's most sacred symbol, to describe the tension between peace and violence as the most important issue in Ganda politics.

Two reactions to the essay on the earliest generation of missionary photographers in West Africa published earlier in HA set up trains of thought which deserve to be minuted here as a further contribution to our praxis with images of Africa in the nineteenth century. It was pointed out by two readers of the original article that a pair of the images which, it had been asserted (104), derive from the last phase of Hornberger's photographic work, were published very early on in a non-mission context: that of three women spinning and that of one man weaving (figures 1 and 2 below).

Both images exist as photographs, as stereographic vintage prints. Both were also published as wood engravings in mission periodicals (figures 3 and 4). Two readers of the original essay have pointed out that these images were conflated into a single engraving on page 211 of Richard Oberländer's Westafrika vom Senegal bis Benguela (Leipzig, 1874). In this image (figure 5), however, only two members of the group of spinning women are depicted, placed separately in the foreground, one on each side of the weaver. It is an ironic reflection on the quality of the documentation we have to fear in this field that Oberländer's caption—“Spinnende und webende Aschanti. (Nach einer Photographie)”—asserts specifically that the engraving was taken “from a photograph,” using the singular form.

yo e andado veynte y tres años en la mar.y ví todo el levante y poniente,…y e andado la Guinea…

The first world empire (truly one on which the sun never set) was created by the union of the crowns of Portugal and Spain in 1580. If the events immediately leading up to the union were unexpected and contingent, the creation of a global hegemony had been adumbrated nine decades earlier, with the almost simultaneous voyages, to west and to east, of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama. What lay behind these voyages on the parts of Portugal and Spain, and hence the respective claims of these nations to have set in motion the process which led to world empire, form the background theme of this paper.

Concentration on the heroic figures of Vasco da Gama and Columbus has often prevented historians from appreciating the significance of earlier developments. Writers discussing Columbus and the consequent impact of Spain on the Americas regularly fail to lay sufficient weight on the seventy years of previous Portuguese discovery of the coast of Africa, and therefore on the consequent Portuguese grapplings with the political, economic, and moral problems of culture contact and imperial policy in an Outer Continent. Equally, historians of the Portuguese imperial effort, eager to reach the better-evidenced complexities of the Lusitanian contact with Asia, tend to neglect, not only the Portuguese effort in the South Atlantic, but also the rival Castilian effort in the same ocean—an effort that preceded Columbus and paralleled, to some extent, the deeds of Portugal. Yet, within Iberia the two kingdoms, Portugal and Castile (the latter in process of generating the new kingdom of Spain), were in close and involved contact, not least because the territorial shape of each in the 1490s had only been hammered out during the preceding one hundred years. There is thus a strong case for treating the global expansion of Iberia as a single process and not merely as two coincidental thrusts around the globe, ultimately in opposite directions.

The papers in this collection were generated by Rev. Vernon Anderson, a Presbyterian missionary who served in the Belgian Congo. Born in Illinois in 1896, Anderson was raised in Alabama where he attended the Alabama Presbyterian College. After graduation he continued his studies at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Louisville, from which he received his B.D. degree in 1920. Anderson joined the American Presbyterian Congo Mission and assumed a post with that mission in the Kasai Province in 1921. The earliest Presbyterian missionaries to work in the Congo had established a station at Luebo in 1891. Their missionary efforts were concentrated among the Bena Lulua of the Lulua river valley. Anderson, however, was sent to the station of Bibanga situated near the Lubilashi river in the area southeast of Luebo. Bibanga lay within the broad area between Lake Tanganyika and the Kasai river in which the Luba live. The Baluba have been separted into two groups--the Baluba-kasai and the Baluba-katanga--by one present-day scholar. The Baluba-lubilashi are a subgroup of the Baluba-kasai.

Anderson was one of the first missionaries to work among the Baluba-lubilashi, from 1921 to 1946. In addition to his duties as a missionary he spent a considerable amount of time studying Luba society, in part through the collection of primary data from informants. From this material he wrote a Ph.D. dissertation entitled Witchcraft in Africa: A Missionary Problem and received his degree in 1942 from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Another project to engage his scholarly interest in the Luba was the revision of an early Tshiluba-English dictionary.

The archives for Northern Nigeria, including not only the area north of the Niger and Benue rivers but also present-day Kwara, Kogi, and Benue states, is located at 29 Yakubu Gowon Way, Kaduna, in the heart of the busy central commercial and administrative district of the town. The Kaduna branch of the Nigerian National Archives has a large, comprehensive and unique collection of official papers of the British colonial and Nigerian independence periods; papers of native and local authorities; and newspapers, magazines, and other publications, as well as Arabic manuscripts. The archives is open on weekdays only. From Monday to Thursday its hours are 8:30 to 2:30, while on Friday there is a shortened day: 8:30 to 12:30.

No documents will be produced from the repository within one hour before closing time. In 1991 240 visitors made some 800 visits to the Kaduna archives. On each visit, the visitors' book must be signed; signing out at the end of the day is also obligatory. Use of the archives requires the purchase of a searcher's registration card costing 10 naira ($1.00 or 50 pence) for students, 25 naira for others. The card is valid for the other National Archives branches at Ibadan and Enugu and lasts for that calendar year. Renewals are carried out in subsequent years. Photocopying facilities are available, give excellent reproduction, and are cheap—50 kobo (5c/3p) per exposure for students, one naira for other researchers.

This article examines historic gendered negotiations over identity, descent, and access to land along Uganda’s southern littorals by thinking about belonging with an exceptionally diverse assemblage of small fish. Based on accounts from contemporary littoral residents, the comparative historic ethnographic record, and fisheries scientists, the article describes the reproductive practices of enkejje as they may have been visible from Uganda’s southern littorals and situates the practices of raising socially recognized children within broader historical developments of clanship and public healing. Attending to these small fish in moments and in places where groups are under construction reorients analyses of descent politics beyond an often implicit focus on male interests towards the work of grandmothers, aunts, and mothers in debating the qualities of the most foundational units of the body politic – male and female children constituted relationally as persons through their status as legitimate family members.

This article describes the archives of the Fellowship Foundation, best known as the organizers of the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC. The secretive character of the Fellowship probably accounts for its lack of visibility in African historical narratives to date. This article makes a case that this evangelical network was significant as a clandestine “track two” diplomatic organization with ties throughout Africa. Historians of international relations, it is suggested, may find useful sources in the public archives of Fellowship Foundation correspondence at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College in Illinois. The article reviews the records for several countries and offers examples of the banal, secretive, and sometimes usefully suggestive evidence to be found in the correspondence.

De Heeren Thienen, executives of the college of directors of the West-Indische Compagnie (W.I.C.) in Amsterdam, demanded that their directors-general in Elmina keep accurate journals or day books, copies of which had to be sent to Holland regularly and at short intervals (one to three months), to each of the five “Kamers” or Chambers: Amsterdam, Zeeland, Maas, Stad, and Lande en Noorderquartier. These journals were produced during most of the period of two and a half centuries that the Dutch resided at the Gold Coast. All of the still-existing journals are now stored at the Algemeen Rijksarchief (ARA) in The Hague in Holland.

Unfortunately, many of the manuscripts dating from before 1700 have gone, lost either by deliberate destruction, by thoughtless bureaucrats, or by accidental fires. Of the manuscripts now in the ARA many are in poor condition and are not available for consultation; others are being microfilmed, which makes studying these valuable documents somewhat tiresome. Fortunately, when I transcribed the day book of 1721 on my laptop computer, I was lucky enough to be able to use the original manuscript; a few weeks after I had finished this job the manuscript was microfilmed and is now available only in that format. The only other existing transcription of a journal of Elmina was published in 1953 by Karel Ratelband, whose Vijf dagregisters van het kasteel Sao Jorge Da Mina, covers the years 1645 to 1647.

The journals of Elmina written or dictated by the directors-general were used by the Heeren Thienen in Amsterdam primarily as a tool to control their staff on the Gold Coast.

The kingdom of Allada in the seventeenth century was an important supplier of slaves for the trans-Atlantic trade, and also an object of Christian missionary activity, but the earlier history of its interactions with Europeans is poorly documented. It has previously been assumed that the first direct Portuguese contact with the Allada area occurred in 1553. However, recently discovered documents in Portuguese archives correct this view. These comprise two petitions to the King of Portugal from an ambassador of the King of Allada currently in Lisbon: although undated, the content of one of them enables it to be dated to either 1544 or 1555, more probably the former; given the time which the ambassador had already spent in Portugal, his original dispatch from Allada occurred in 1540/1541 or 1551/1552. The petitions document the Allada king’s interest in the establishment of a Christian church in his realm, as well as commercial relations.

Jan Jansen has substantially advanced our understanding of the “status discourse” between polities, in Mande and far beyond, through a new approach to one of the more common types of historical evidence: genealogy. At the core of his paper is an analysis of genealogical metaphors used in status discourse, combined with an awareness of the principles of lineage segmentation; he uncovered a nexus of ideology and social structure. The quintessential observation made by Jansen is that “the status of recent immigration and the position of the youngest brother is very prestigious” and that both ultimately emanate from the “principles of patrilocal settlement and patrilineal descent.”

Once this is accepted, everything falls into line: the unexpected claim for the status of ‘younger brother,’ as well as the contradictory genealogies of ‘related’ lineages. His observation has escaped the attention of previous research (including my own) because it contravenes our expectation that younger age, factual or figurative, always signifies subordination under ‘older’ authority. Oral traditions from different ethnic groups in Senegambia confirm Jansen and attest to Kangaba's historical prestige.

Jansen's paper should be read in conjunction with his “The Younger Brother and the Stranger,” in which he studies the social basis of status discourse in more detail and also touches on the symbolism employed. He has overcome a crucial error in a long tradition of historical writing on the western Sudan: the taking of genealogy at face value, whereas genealogy reflects the recent state of relationship between persons or groups rather than factual ancestry.

It has been in the tradition of this journal to elaborate a methodological apparatus to scrutinize the evidence of older written sources on African history. However, for various reasons, we tend to apply a different standard to recent sources, apparently considering them reliable per se because they developed in the same enlightened context of Western intellectual life as our own. Book reviews, nearly the only refuge for Western self criticism, sometimes cannot achieve it, as I will show.

The source on which I would like to comment is a dissertation completed at Boston University in 1984. It is based on oral traditions and for this reason, strictly speaking, a written source itself, apart from a number of published as well as archival sources, whose way of quotation will be re-examined below at first. The interviews were conducted by the author in 1974/75 (Morrissey 1984:225) with north Cameroonian Wandala and Shuwa Arab informants, some of whom I became acquainted with during my own fieldwork in 1984.1 would argue, though, that the following comments are not solely of interest to scholars specializing in northern Cameroon.

It might seem to some rather heavy-handed to criticize so closely a doctoral dissertation, but American dissertations are freely available to interested parties in both photocopy and microfilm. As a result they are commonly cited in other works in much the same way as more formally published studies. This being the case, it seems reasonable to submit them to the same scrutiny as any other work in the public domain. I should point out that I conducted my own fieldwork in ignorance of Morrissey's work, becoming aware of the latter only after my return from the field in 1984.

The concerns which dominated Yoruba historiography in the nineteenth century were similar to those of the first half of this century. Primary among these concerns were the patriotic desire to document Yoruba history, explain the turbulence of the nineteenth century, and inspire the new generation with a sense of history. Isaac Babalola Akinyele (1881–1964), the first to write a chronicle on Ibadan, expressed these concerns in the preface to the first edition of his book, Iwe I tan Ibadan, published in 1911. He explained that the origin of the book was the invitation extended to him in May 1911 by an Ibadan-based society, the Egbe Onife He Yoruba (“Lovers of the Yoruba”) to give a lecture on “Ancient and Modern Ibadan.” In the same month, he delivered a lecture which he later expanded and published into a book in order to preserve history at a time when the knowledge about the past was being forgotten and the elders were passing on. Chief Akinyele believed that it was urgent to document the oriki of Yoruba Obas, again being forgotten because only a few persons were interested in them. To him the oriki reveal much about Yoruba history. He also believed that the Yoruba language was undergoing a decline, and that there was a need for a rescue mission. He concluded his preface by appealing to his readers to accept his work and to ignore any derogatory remarks on people and ethnic groups in the oriki, which were composed by poets to eulogize the achievements of chiefs and warriors during a period of warfare. Finally, he enjoined all the Yoruba to unite, to learn from the British nation where everybody, irrespective of differences in language and culture, had united in order to build a strong and prosperous nation.

In 1929 the American Antiquarian Society published an eighty-three-page manuscript that describes commercial transactions for slaves, ivory, and gold on the Gold and Slave Coasts from 1789 to 1792. George Plimpton owned this manuscript. As it includes a slave-trading ledger of the schooner Swallow, Plimpton entitled the manuscript “The Journal of an African Slaver.” The “journal” is one of the few published documents in the English language that specifies financial transactions for slaves between European and African traders on the coast of Africa during the late eighteenth century.

In his four-page introduction to the journal Plimpton stated that:

The name of the ship engaged in the traffic was the schooner ‘Swallow,’ Capt. John Johnston, 1790-1792. There is a reference to a previous voyage when ‘Captain Peacock had her,’ also some abstracts of accounts kept by Capt. David McEleheran in 1789 of trade in gold, slaves and ivory on the Gold Coast. None of these names can be identified as to locality, and there is, of course, the possibility, especially taking into consideration the English nature of the cargo bartered, that the vessel was an English slaver.

The journal was included with some mid-nineteenth century South Carolina plantation accounts when it was purchased at an auction in New York, thus suggesting to Plimpton that the journal's author was perhaps a “South Carolinian who made this trip to Africa.”

In this research note I will identify the various vessels and traders mentioned in this manuscript by referring to the data-set I have assembled from other sources concerning the slave trade during this period. We will seethat Plimpton's “journal” is a set of account books owned by the Gold Coast agents of London and Havre merchant William Collow. I then will discuss the importance of Collow as a merchant and shipowner in the late eighteenth-century British slave trade.

Despite the slender evidentiary base of surviving sources, historians would dearly like to know more about colonial vital rates. In the absence of hard data, speculation has run rampant about changes in fertility and mortality. Were African birth rates always as high as they are today? Did the early years of colonial rule bring about rises in the deathrates in all areas and to the same degree? Researchers are now combing the available evidence for materials to answer questions such as these.

Unfortunately, the records of a single year's births and deaths are not a reliable indicator of long-term demographic trends. In a small population in particular, the events of a given year must be seen in the context of the years surrounding it. Inadequate reporting might lead to underestimates of either fertility or mortality rates, while uncommon events such as epidemics might be wrongly taken as typical.

These discontinuities have led researchers to concentrate on series of demographic rates rather than isolated estimates. Mathematically, this has promoted the use of techniques which convert the haphazard incidences of births and deaths into continuous functions which, although not as close to the raw data as year-by-year statistics, nonetheless give the reader a notion of trends over time.

Despite its relatively brief history, African studies has developed a remarkably abundant bibliographic infrastructure to support its aims. This is tangibly evidenced in the recent appearance of Yvette Scheven's cumulated bibliography of Africana bibliographies, which comprises citations to well over 3200 bibliographies of various stripes published between 1970 and 1986, or an average of nearly 200 each year. Of course, some of the parts of the structure overlap and even duplicate other parts, and by no means has every effort attained acceptable standards, but on the whole there has been little about which to be ashamed or mortified.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise. In theory at least, the obstacles to preparing useful bibliographies are not outrageously demanding, and not at all commensurate with their enduring value. Mechanically, there are only a few rules, but these are unrelenting: entries must be accurate in all their parts, as well as complete, yet should be economical as well, and not provide useless information; coverage must be comprehensive within stated parameters; and access must be facilitated by means of thoughtful organization, extensive cross-referencing, and thorough and sensitive indexing. The intellectual challenges to accomplishing these goals might not be overwhelming; nonetheless forethought, punctilious and constant attention to detail, linguistic ability, doggedness, and above all a commitment to the highest standards of accuracy are all imperative.

In February of 1976 the American Historical Association published the first issue of Recently Published Articles. RPA is a current, comprehensive bibliography of scholarly historical articles in all fields, and replaces the bibliographical sections previously published in the American Historical Review under the same title. RPA is issued three times a year and, at present, lists nearly 15,000 citations annually, of which about one-eighth relate to Africa -- a number second only to that for the United States.

The creation of RPA resulted from the re-organization of the American Historical Association and its various services. A survey of American Historical Review subscribers revealed a desire by the majority for a more extensive and balanced book review section and most of the space left in the Review by the departure of the bibliography has in fact been filled by additional book reviews, including more in African history. Surprisingly -- and perhaps distressingly -- only a minority of those surveyed indicated that they consulted the bibliographical sections with any regularity. Because of this, and because the growth of the bibliographies during the 1970s (reflecting both increased output and better coverage) was adding steadily to the cost of producing the Review, it was decided to transfer these costs directly to the users -- a practice the reader will recognize as becoming more common. At the same time it was decided to intensify efforts at better and more extensive coverage, in particular to include more articles outside history proper which nevertheless have interest to historians.

The three principal components of demography--fertility, mortality, and migration--can each provide information for reconstructing elements of the African past. Birth rate, more than anything else, determines the reproduction of the labor force, a particular concern of many historians. Death rate is an existential measure of the quality of life; any assessment of the long-run effects of colonial rule must take into account any discernable changes in mortality patterns that may have occurred. Finally, the study of migration is essential for understanding the redistribution of people and resources which resulted from the slave trade and colonization.

Although all three indicators are essential for a complete understanding of the history of a given population, they occur with substantially different rhythms. Mortality is a one-time happening for us all. Fertility depends on both partners in a sexual union, although most clearly circumscribed by menarchy and menopause in females. Migration, particularly in Africa, has affected males more frequently than females and can be, moreover, an abrupt and irregular phenomenon. Following the three activities simultaneously is thus an extremely complex undertaking.

For the developed world demographers have examined whole countries for periods as far removed as the eighteenth century and individual villages for demographic phenomena reaching back to the Middle Ages. Unfortunately for students of Africa, the materials available to us are not nearly so rich. Most colonial regimes did not conduct censuses in the current sense of the word. At most, they conducted surveys or village-by-village ‘nose counts’ which, naturally, vary enormously in their reliability.

Each of the following three papers is devoted to one or more aspect of conducting field research in Zambia. In this sense they form a complementary set, although this result was more fortuitous than planned. The intent had been to collect together several short papers which would address themselves to the manifold facets of fieldwork in African historical research. It is hoped that it will still be possible to do this, and it may be useful to discuss some (though by no means all) of the considerations that might merit attention in this regard:

1] With the increasing difficulties in securing research clearance in Africa, it is important -- perhaps even imperative -- that intending field workers develop viable back-up research proposals. The ways in which such alternatives can be applied could probably be illustrated best by one or two case experiences; for, if anything, it appears that the ability to pursue first intentions will diminish in the future.

2] Does Professor Kashoki's paper describe views which are representative of general opinion? Is there widespread disenchantment within Africa -- with the research attitudes and behavior of field researchers; with their commitments to the concerns of host countries; and with their care in assuring that the fruits of their labors are made easily available for local consumption? The views of other African historians, archivists, and librarians can help to reinforce or modify the arguments noted by Professor Kashoki, both by focusing on issues he has raised and by introducing new ones.

3] Graduate students (not to mention other researchers) cannot always function intellectually as freely as they might wish. They have always had to defer to the opinions and interests of their supervisors and their graduate faculty, as well as to the suspected attitudes of relevant funding agencies. Now it appears that the research priorities of host governments must be added to this litany, may even come to dominate it, as we begin to hear of “research brigades” and similar expedients. Whether this should be seen as good or bad will depend on a number of specific variables. In either instance, however, the short- and long-term ramifications of this new phenomenon need to be discussed.

My case study is taken from the northern Igbo of Nigeria and focuses on the village-group of Ihuwe, which name is today rendered as Ihube— thanks to its Anglicization during the period of colonial rule. This not-withstanding, the people still call themselves “Ihuwe,” the form I use in this paper. The Northern Igbo area, especially the area around Awka, Orlu, and Okigwe, is commonly regarded as the heartland of Igbo culture and civilization. Ihuwe, in that portion of old Okigwe Division known today as Okigwe Local Government Area (LGA), lies in a region of southern Nigeria that has been identified as having witnessed human activity from very early times, at least from the period of Acheulean culture. It also lies on the geographically and historically prominent Nsukka-Udi-Okigwe cuesta, which archeology tells us entered the Iron Age quite early in African history, no later than about the eighth century BCE. We are thus dealing with one of the areas of ancient human occupation, as well as an area known for its dense demographic profile. It is these features–early human settlement and occupation with its attendant consequence of severely attenuated oral history, dense demographic profile, and being the cradle land of Igbo culture—that help to define the Northern Igbo and mark them out from the Western, Eastern, Southern, and North-Eastern Igbo, believed to be relatively more recent descendants from them.

Perhaps another feature that calls for mention here is their political culture. Although, like their other Igbo kinsmen, they could boast of having evolved only micro-, and therefore weak, states (what social anthropologists of the colonial period refused to refer to as states), they had their own special model of these micro-states.