Neither Chad (or Tchad) nor the Central African Republic (or République Centrafricaine) has been much studied by American scholars. Because of this the following report discusses more than merely the archival resources of the two countries; it is hoped that the more practical aspects of research there that are discussed will render it more useful.

The Institut Tchadien des Sciences Humaines (henceforth INTSH) supervises research projects in Chad which are concerned with the social sciences—as defined by French scholarship. Research authorization is granted by the Director of the Institut, Boîte Postale 503, N'Djaména. Anyone intending to pursue research in Chad should have a letter of authorization from the Institut before leaving the United States—if possible, even before applying for a Chadian visa, since this will expedite the granting of such a visa.

Most temporary accommodations in N'Djaména (like other African countries) tend to be expensive; the only inexpensive hostel is operated by the Peace Corps for its own members. Sometimes, though, researchers have been allowed temporary accommodation pending the location of other housing. Enquiries should be sent to: Corps de la Paix, Boîte Postale 260, N'Djaména. In addition, temporary housing may sometimes be had with researchers at the Organisation pour des recherches scientifiques et techniques d'Outre-Mer, or ORSTOM.

For a long stay it is wise to rent a house. While the Peace Corps or Embassy personnel may be of some assistance, Muslim merchants near the main market should be of more help in finding a house in the African part of the town. Rents in N'Djaména are high: a mud brick house with electricity and running water will run about $175 monthly.

Sangalan is located in northeast Guinea in the région of MaliYambering. It was a federation of groups of villages, consisting of three taane (kafo in Malinke, districts or groups of villages): Dombiya, Uyukha, and Djulabaya. To these three taane correspond three ethnic subgroups, the Dombiyanne, Uyukhanne, and Djulabayanne. The Dombiyanne were mostly the Keita families; the Uyukhanne the Camara; and the Djulabayanne the Nyakhasso. The people of Sangalan are Dialonka—those living in Sangalan are called the Sangalanka. They are originally all from Dialonkadougou, at first a province of the Soso empire founded and ruled by Sumanguru Kante, and later a province of the empire of Mali, created by Sundiata Keita in the thirteenth century. The Sangalanka call themselves “Sosoe Forine” (Old Sosoe), the Sosoe who lived on the high mountains (dialon) of both the Soso and Manden empires. They call the other Sosoe, living along the Guinean coast, Bani Sosone (Sosoe of the Coast, near the water). The Soso Forine and Bani Sosone lived in the Futa Jallon and were driven away by the Fulani invaders in the eighteenth century.

Visual strategy begins on the first page. The most pretentious form of first page differentation is the “lead-in” quotation whereby the author prefaces the main body of the text with a quote from an esteemed scholar, a famous decision, or some other prestigious source. … The objective of the “lead-in” quote is to spark immediate attention with a titillating example of erudition, humor, or impertinence… Ideally the lead-in quote should be obscure—oriental sources are recommended—and should not have a substantive link to the subject matter of the article. … This technique can generate guilt among readers who suspect the game but lack the nerve to speak out.

His books positively clank and groan under the weight of apparatus. Very good it is too.

As indicated in the first part of this paper, I adopt a generous definition of “annotation” in this discussion. There the traditional forms, footnotes, and other textual apparatus were discussed. Here I want to concentrate on a number of forms of annotation that are not usually treated under that rubric. Included (in roughly the order in which they are likely to appear in a given work) are titles, tables of contents, prefaces, epigraphs, graphs and charts, maps, quoted matter, facsimiles, appendices, glossaries, bibliographies, and indexes. Each of these is an occasion—and an opportunity—to provide access to the text, to the author's own sources, or to the author's mind. While every work will not use all of these, certain of them (prefaces, tables of contents, bibliographies, and indexes) should be a part of every substantial scholarly study.

Stephen Greenblatt has shown that wonder was the central characteristic of the first European encounters with the New World and the decisive emotional and intellectual experience in the face of radical difference (Greenblatt 1994:27). Wonder, says Greenblatt, appears to be a category immune to all denial and ideological co-optation, and it exerts an irresistible force. It occurs in a moment when meanings are lacking and is accompanied by the fragmentation of contextual understanding (Greenblatt 1994:33).

Wonder was already an essential topic of discourses in philosophy and art even before the voyages of discovery (Matuschek 1991); thus, for Socrates, philosophy begins with astonishment and wonder, and the art of poetry intends the creation of the wondrous (Greenblatt 1994:33). Greenblatt argues that the frequency and intensity with which European discoverers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries referred to the experience of the wondrous provoked its conceptual elucidation (Greenlbatt 1994:34). The colonization of the wondrous began; and astonishment became a means of appropriation and subjugation (Greenblatt 1994:42).

By the nineteenth century, the century of European journeys of discovery in Africa, wonder had been used up. English, French, and German travelers no longer wondered about anything. Their glance had achieved a confidence that allowed them to objectify and take possession of what was foreign to them. It was now the various Others, the objects of their glance, to whom they imputed the wonder they themselves were no longer capable of.

One of the most popular and most widely cited books in the study of precolonial Africa, particularly of the forest region, is Jacob U. Egharevba's A Short History of Benin. It was first published in the Edo language as Ekhere vb Itan Edo in 1933, and due to its popularity and very high demand, it quickly sold out and was reprinted in 1934. It was then translated by the author and published in English as A Short History of Benin in 1936. This English-language edition has likewise been a bestseller with four editions—the first edition in 1936, the second in 1953, the third in 1960, and the fourth one in 1968, which in turn has had reprints in Ibadan (1991) and Benin City (1994).

In 1959 Leoham Adam, Curator of the Ethnographical Collection of Melbourne University in Australia, who claimed to have first read the book in the 1930s, commended Short History for its useful contributions to the study and understanding of African societies. The late R.E. Bradbury, in writing the first foreword to the book's third edition in 1960, claimed that it”…has become something of a classic, known and relied upon not only in Nigeria, but by scholars all over the world, [as]… a valuable, indeed an indispensable, pioneering work.” In a more recent critique, Adiele Afigbo asserted that the book and its thesis has “much support from many respected historians and ethnographers… and figure prominently not only in undergraduate essays but also in Masters and Doctoral dissertations.”

The introduction explores the ways in which Jan Vansina wrote Africa’s earlier history. It argues that he overturned paradigmatic knowledge in part through policing boundaries between disciplines, but always in search of new knowledge. The boundaries enclosed different kinds of labor in producing evidence about the past. Each kind of labor teaches the scholar something about place, responsibility, and imagination. These afterlives of working in Africa informed Vansina’s interdisciplinarian publishing strategies, shape-shifting them into the imaginative, and prompting new generations of scholars to chart their own paths.

The Arabic manuscripts of Timbuktu have received considerable publicity during the past 25 years, yet their contents remain largely unknown. Since 2012, an inventory of nearly 350,000 Timbuktu manuscripts in private libraries has been underway, and the contents of those libraries are now accessible in the West African Arabic Manuscript Database (WAAMD). This analysis examines 31 of the 35 libraries and in addition to reporting on their contents, notes challenges in accessing incompletely identified works, and compares the manuscripts with other West African collections.

The appeal of history to us all is in the last analysis poetic. But the poetry of history does not consist of imagination roaming at-large, but of imagination pursuing the fact and fastening upon it. That which compels the historian to “scorn delights and live laborious days” is the ardour of his own curiosity to know what really happened long ago in that land of mystery which we call the past.

This paper is about qualitative research methods, and thus more about hard labor than about poetry and imagination. But to those scholars to whom the above citation gives meaning there is a clear connection between hard labour, imagination and poetry. As scholars, we are looking for facts, and looking for facts can be hard work. As scholars, we also know that facts must be ascribed with meaning in order to become sources, a process of interpretation which demands both imagination and poetry.

I will present some of the challenges we face when doing anthropological historical research in Africa, and I will argue that the tools of qualitative methods will have to be sharpened and modified with this particular goal in mind. The main aim will be to discuss how we can acquire information in an African setting by analyzing the role of the interview as a communicative event. Other important topics to be treated are African oral tradition, the culture and tradition (the metacommunicative competence) of the respondents, and their use of metaphors to convey meaning.

Over twenty years ago, I started writing a doctoral dissertation on the history of the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu, an exercise that has had enduring professional and personal repercussions. Tuvalu is an atoll archipelago near the junction of the equator and the international date line, and is identified on older maps as the southern portion of a British dependency, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony—now the independent nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu respectively. The nine Tuvalu islands are tiny even by atoll standards, an aggregate 26km2 spread over 360 nautical miles. During the nineteenth century Tuvalu was incorporated into the world economy by a succession of European influences. The early explorers gave way in 1821 to whalers, who, in turn, were superseded by copra traders during the 1850s. From mid-century the pace of events quickened, with the traders being joined by the very occasional labor recruiter and, more to the point, by a concerted missionary drive.

Accomplished largely through the instrumentality of resident Samoan pastors, missionization was comprehensive in scope and repressive in character. From the 1870s the occasional naval vessel visited the group and a British protectorate was declared in 1892, interspersed by the occasional scientific expedition and a brief and disastrous interlude in 1863 when some of the atolls were caught in the final stages of the Peruvian slave trade. The dominant European influences were the familiar triad of commerce, the cross, and the flag, with the primacy of trade giving way to missionary supremacy which, in turn, was displaced in local importance by a British colonial administration.

Scholars can elevate African voices as they recycle evidence from abandoned lines of research. This article discusses how to apply the confirmation and recycling methods of interdisciplinary research to engage with African historiologies. After reviewing contentious debates about Shungwaya from ca. 1955–2000, it draws on Mijikenda elder Thomas Govi’s descriptions of uganga and clanship (in a published collection of oral traditions) as a historiological theory for reimagining cross-linguistic collaborations, the formation of “stone towns,” and Islamic conversion in the settlement history of littoral East Africa.

The chronology of the history of the Benin kingdom is seen by many historians as clarified in the main back to the thirteenth century and even earlier. Apart from the reports of European travelers and missionaries and some information given by merchants, this chronology is based mainly on the Benin kinglist for the periods before 1897. This list names 38 kings (obas) of Benin and covers past centuries with seemingly great accuracy (see table 1).

In spite of the many names of former obas and the pretended accuracy of the list's time-frame, it would be problematic to take it as historically factual since it cannot be corroborated by any documentation before the mid-nineteenth century. The data concerning the period before this time are almost exclusively based on the writings of the Benin amateur historian Jacob Egharevba. In his work Egharevba reported on important events in the oral traditions of Benin and connected the reign of former kings with specific years. In doing so he forced his African oral material into a linear European time scheme and into the framework specified by European written sources.

Unfortunately, very few historians have as yet critically analyzed the chronological data for Benin. This is surprising, since the great Benin researcher Bradbury noted some time ago that Egharevba's “chronological conclusions have been accepted too uncritically, especially for the period up to the first European contact” (Bradbury 1959:285f) and have been seen as historical facts without any further consideration ever since. Neither the question of so-called “genealogical parasitism,” nor any of the other fundamental problems which arise when studying kinglists have been addressed.

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.

This article argues that historians will have a new understanding of northeast and east Africa if they recall the medieval meaning of the terms Zanj and Ahabish, or Habasha. Before the fifteenth century the term Zanj included the diverse populations of northeast Africa, so should not be exclusive of the populations of coastal east Africa. Likewise, Habasha or Ahabish was not confined to the peoples of the northern Horn but included the diverse peoples of coastal east Africa. Uncovering older meanings of Zanj and Ahabish helps to identify elusive groups of ancient northeast Africans referred to as northern Zanj, Zanj-Ahabish, Ahabish, and Damadim. For identification, this article presents three types of historical data overlooked in the sources. The first consists of the interchangeable names northern Zanj, Damadim, Ahabish, Zanj-Ahabish, and Zanj ed-Damadim to recast the term Zanj and identify the Damadim or Yamyam. The second is the broadly inclusive meaning before the fifteenth century of the term Habasha. The third is the reported eloquence in their Buttaa ceremony of the northern Zanj, and the institutional setting of the Buttaa within the Oromo Gadaa system.