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.

Fifty years ago, a group of 100 ivory carvings from West Africa was first identified by the English scholar William Fagg as constituting a coherent body of work. In making this important identification, Fagg proposed the descriptive label “Afro-Portuguese ivories.” Then, as now, the provenance and dating of these carved spoons, chalices (now recognized as salt cellars), horns, and small boxes posed a challenge to art historians. Fagg proposed three possible geographical origins: Sierra Leone, the Congo coast (Angola, ex-Zaïre), and the Yoruba-inhabited area of the old Slave Coast. Although Fagg was initially inclined on stylistic grounds to accept the Yoruba hypothesis, historical documents soon made it clear that the ivories—or at least many of them—were associated with Portuguese commerce in Sierra Leone. This trade developed in the final decades of the fifteenth century.

Today approximately 150 works have been identified by scholars as belonging to the “corpus” of carved ivories from West Africa. Although the sobriquet “Afro-Portuguese” remains the most common appellation, these pieces should more appropriately be referred to as Luso-African ivories. The latter term more accurately reflects the objects' creation by West African sculptors who were working within Africa. The works, although hybrid in inspiration, are far more African than they are Portuguese. In addition, no documentary evidence exists to indicate that any of the ivories were carved by African artists living in Portugal. West African artists created the sculptures within the context of their own cultures.

The establishment of a journal specifically concerned with method in African history is to be welcomed. However, the early issues of History in Africa have demonstrated that the content of the term ‘method’ is itself at stake. The great majority of contributions to date have seized on a narrow and limiting conception of method as the development of techniques of collecting and evaluating data. The necessity of such techniques is not in question, but they are subordinate to, and indeed partially determined by, a broader and more fundamental conception of method as the principles of investigation and explanation in scientific practice. There are historians who do not regard the production of historical knowledge as a scientific enterprise, hence subject to certain theoretical demands, and they would not want to. Accordingly, they need not read on, but we are confident that there are others who are interested in method in the second sense and who may also have noticed its virtual absence in the pages of this journal.

On the other hand, it would be disingenuous to imply that a common interest in method in the broader and more fundamental sense is sufficient ground for agreement. Our argument in what follows derives from an understanding of historical materialism that has nothing in common with the stereotyped views held by it bourgeois critics. Our central concern is with method as the principles of constructing scientific explanations. But what is to be explained? We attempt to show that method necessarily starts with the correct posing of questions, as well as bearing on their investigation.

Refugee life stories have developed as a popular medium for attempting to portray southern Sudanese wartime experience. These narratives of war and exile have been told, edited and published in what has become an explanatory industry in refugee work worldwide. The development of this economy of life stories from the early 1980s, however, has encouraged the propagation of standardized displaced “life stories” as a discrete narrative genre. This article traces the formulation of this distinctive style of historical explanation and argues that this genre, while claiming emancipatory agency and “voice” for marginalized people, has instead become a narrative trap.

One of the unresolved problems in African historiography concerns the Arabic and Portuguese versions of the so-called Kilwa Chronicle. Scholars who have used these sixteenth-century sources have tended to assume that the Portuguese version, which is essentially a list of the kings of Kilwa up to around 1500, is a transcription of the Arabic version known under the title of Kitab al-Sulwa. In the recent debate between Freeman-Grenville and Chittick, this assumption has created serious difficulties because the Portuguese account mentions kings who are omitted in the Kitab. Freeman-Grenville attempted to resolve the difficulty by hypothesizing that the work was defectively abridged in the extant nineteenth-century copy. Relying on the regnal durations in the Portuguese account, he computed the dynastic chronology of Kilwa backwards to the tenth century. Subsequently, Chittick's excavations did not show Kilwa important enough to have been the site of a kingdom prior to the thirteenth century. This became the basis for an alternative explanation which denied the existence of gaps or omissions in the Kitab. Chittick argued instead that the longer list of kings in the Portuguese account may have resulted from dovetailing two sources together and duplicating their information.

The present paper calls on genealogical evidence overlooked by both scholars which demonstrates that the divergence between the two sources results from their varying perspectives on the dynastic politics and succession disputes. First, the Portuguese account, though occurring in João de Barros’ Da Asia written about 1552, may represent an impromptu composition given to the Portuguese during their occupation of Kilwa in 1505–12.

This article takes an introductory excursion into newspaper sources for researching Nigerian children's history during the colonial period by analyzing and describing items including news, editorials, stories, photos, advertisements, columns, debates, features, and letters among others. It situates these newspaper sources within the context of the circumstances under which they were produced and the prevailing politics of identity, gender, and agency, on the one hand, and the interaction between the forces of “tradition” and “modernity” on the other. Instead of approaching children's experience from the well-established stand-points of disease, violence, delinquency and crime, this paper examines the following areas: children and education; children and motherhood; and children as consumers. These uncharted areas of Nigerian children's history render alternative and useful perspectives on agency and the centrality of childhood to colonial state's ideas of progress, civilization, modernity, and social stability.

Missionary ethnographers provided expert knowledge during the formative years of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century anthropology, but are generally relegated to the footnotes of academic anthropology. Colonial missionaries were, nevertheless, crucial producers of cultural practices, knowledge, and texts in the particular locations where they worked. Missionary linguists, for example, contributed to the standardization of regional variations through the production of writing systems and the teaching of reading in mission schools. Missionaries also interacted with literate Africans in mission stations to produce cultural descriptions that then filtered back into local practices or auto-ethnographic representations, to be discovered anew by later anthropologists. At the same time, of course, as many missionaries themselves recognized, there was inherent tension between the scientific study of African cultural practices and the evangelizing project that sought to induce radical cultural change.

To examine the often contentious relationship between missionary expertise, social science, and ethnographic knowledge in colonial Gabon, I look comparatively at the fieldwork experiences and writings of the American Presbyterian, Robert Hamill Nassau (1835-1921), and the French Spiritan, Henri Trilles (1866-1949). Nassau worked in present-day Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and Cameroon from 1861 to 1906, while Trilles spent three extended stays in Gabon between 1893 and 1907. Both men claimed expert ethnographic understanding based on long-term, firsthand daily contact with Africans, fluency in African languages, and empa-thetic understanding of Africans, while at the same time expressing standard missionary shock and awe at African customs, fetishism, and cannibalism. Both learned African languages, traveled in the interior of present-day Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, clashed with fellow missionaries, and wrote prolifically, especially after their definitive departures from Africa. Although each man's personality, experiences, and approaches to ethnography were unique, together they nonetheless exemplify the broader uses and challenges of missionary ethnography.

The early history of the Mali empire is known to us from two sources: Mande oral literature (epic and praise poetry) recorded over the last 100 years and Ibn Khaldun's Kitab al-ʿIbar (Book of Exemplars) written in the late four-teenth century. The list of Mali kings presented by Ibn Khaldun is precise, detailed, entirely plausible, and recorded not too long after the events it purports to describe. For scholars attempting to reconstruct an account of this West African empire, no other medieval Arab chronicler or, indeed, any Mande oral traditions provide comparable information for its formative period.

There is, however, reason to question the historical reliability of Ibn Khaldun's account precisely on the grounds of its narrative richness. When read in relation to the general model of political development and decay which Ibn Khaldun worked out in the more theoretical Muqaddimah (“Prolegomena”) of Kitab al-ʿIbar, as well as the larger context of the work in which it is imbedded, the Mali kinglist takes on some characteristics of an instructive illustration rather than a fully empirical account of the past. Indeed Ibn Khaldun himself, in his contemplation of the basis for asabiyah (group solidarity) among bedouin peoples, cautions us against literal interpretation of genealogical accounts:

Ibn Khaldun is certainly not as ideologically engaged in constructing the royal genealogy of Mali as a bedouin spokesman might be in reciting the list of his own ancestors. Nevertheless, this great Arab thinker has something at stake in this story which needs to be given serious attention by all scholars concerned with either the events of the medieval western Sudan or the process by which they have been incorporated into more recent narratives.

Of all the things that were produced in Africa during the colonial period—cash crops, states, and tribes, to name a few—history and tradition are the least acknowledged as products of the colonial situation. This does not mean that Africans did not have history before the white man came. Rather, I am making distinctions among the following: firstly, history as lived experience; secondly, history as a record of lived experience which is coded in the oral traditions; and finally, the recently constituted written history. This last category is very much tied up with European engagements with Africa and the introduction of “history writing” as a discipline and as profession. But even then, it is important to acknowledge the fact that African history, including oral traditions, were recorded as a result of the European assault.

This underscores the fact that ideological interests were at work in the making of African history, as is true of all history. As such, tradition is constantly being reinvented to reflect these interests. A. I. Asiwaju, for example, in a paper examining the political motivations and manipulations of oral tradition in the constitution of Obaship in different parts of Yorubaland during the colonial period writes: “in the era of European rule, particularly British rule, when government often based most of its decisions over local claims upon the evidence of traditional history, a good proportion of the data tended to be manipulated deliberately.” This process of manipulation produced examples of what he wittily refers to as “nouveaux rois of Yorubaland.”

This article advances a new theory about the composition of the chronicle generally referred to as Tārīkh al-fattāsh. The Tārīkh al-fattāsh, allegedly written in the sixteenth-seventeenth century, is one of the most famous chronicles on which scholars have relied for information about West Africa’s pre-colonial history. However, there are still many puzzling issues and unsolved problems associated with this work, as edited by Octave V. Houdas and Maurice Delafosse in the early twentieth century. This analysis uses unexplored manuscripts that were either unknown or unavailable to previous scholars, and advances a new theory on the genesis and authorship of the chronicle: that the edited text in fact conflates two texts, a seventeenth-century chronicle and a nineteenth century one.

I argue here against two things: fetishizing the power and wholesomeness of colonial archives, and equating the scarcity of post-1960 repositories with new difficulties to write the past of Africa. Instead, I suggest the productive power of odd findings, and the necessity for historians to trust the energy of heterodox pieces to create original and meaningful historical narratives.

This paper focuses on the history curriculum in the schools of French West Africa in the period from 1918 to 1938. Specifically, it investigates the frames used to investigate the past, the sources for the generation of historical data, and the substance and interpretation of history taught in the schools. Written histories of the vast territories of Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF) for the most part were impelled by the development of schooling under colonial rule. Pedagogues and politicians alike could not conceive of education that did not convey a sense of the past. J.L. Monod, a school inspector and author of several texts for AOF's schools, stated: “It is necessary that native youth know the history of their own ancestors and the transformations that we have brought [about] in their own country.” Countless curriculum guides and educational legislation of the interwar years echoed these sentiments.

While history was to have a place in the schools, written texts that would form the basis for instruction were all but non-existent. As the schools expanded, both in the number of students they reached and in the years of education offered, schoolmen grappled with the rather complicated task of creating history. The issues those in the interwar years faced are ones that still confound historians of Africa: what defines the search for the past; what constitutes data about the past; and finally, what interpretations of the past can be made. The first of these issues, perhaps, was the most thorny in the interwar years for the most obvious frames were those that essentially denied the past and that derived from French political boundaries of AOF, colonie, or cercle. This initial formulation led to the questioning of whether more appropriate frames for creating history were available on other geographical, cultural, or political terms whose shape differed radically from those of the interwar years.

This paper discusses an attempt to apply historical research directly to the development of a culture of human rights and democracy in Zimbabwe. The research concerns sensitive and controversial issues around sexuality, race, and nationalism that are important in and of themselves. What I would like to argue here, however, is that the method used to design and carry out the research project is at least as interesting. This holds true from the point of view of both professional historians like myself and community activists—two perspectives that are often difficult to reconcile in practice. In this project, “ivory tower” and “grassroots” are brought together in a mutually enriching relationship that offers an alternative model to the methods that currently predominate in the production of historical knowledge in southern Africa.

Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ) is a non-government organization that was founded in 1990. It provides counseling, legal and other support services to men and women struggling with issues of sexuality. It also strives to promote a politics in Zimbabwe that would embrace sexual orientation as a human right. Toward the latter goal it has lobbied government for changes to current laws that discriminate against homosexuals and which expose gay men and women to extortion (so far, in vain). With somewhat more success, it has lobbied the police directly to raise awareness of the extortion issue. GALZ also publishes pamphlets, a newsletter, and other information designed to educate Zimbabweans in general about homosexuality and homophobia. Through these efforts it seeks to challenge popular stereotypes of homosexuals as Westernized perverts who spread diseases and corrupt children. One recent publication included detailed historical research that showed how homosexual practices—including loving and mutual homosexual relationships—have been indigenous to the country throughout recorded history, and probably from time immemorial.

The Atlantic may be a vast ocean for the most part devoid of human life, but that is not how historians see it. As the historian of the British Atlantic world David Armitage put it, “we are all Atlanticists now.” Not a little of the excitement of the historical profession has turned on the need to construct broad and transnational perspectives for the exchanges of peoples and goods which have constructed modern worlds.

This is, as every reader of this journal knows, a process in which Africa played a fundamental part. Conceptualizing an Atlantic space in the early modern era requires the inclusion of African contributions to revolutions in ideas, agriculture, and global capital brought about by the forced African diaspora produced by Atlantic slavery. And yet historians of African societies have not joined their colleagues working on the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe in the leap to embrace “Atlantic” history. While there have been some attempts to construct an African sphere of the Atlantic world, a general attempt to achieve this on a systematic basis remains lacking.

Part of the reason for this is the current general decline in research in early modern African history. While the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s saw many highly distinguished monographs, such research is no longer so easy to come by. Shunning the externalized, European perspectives on which many traditional histories of Africa were based, post-colonial students of Africa have rightly interpreted African history from the viewpoint of African societies. As this has required primarily a cultural engagement with material, practitioners have moved towards contemporary histories, which may explain the present dearth of studies reaching farther back.

This paper reflects on the ways in which Eritrea has been written about since circa 2001, the point at which the country entered a new phase of heightened authoritarianism and increased international isolation. It considers the ways in which Eritrea has been seen largely in “presentist” terms, due in no small way to the Eritrean government’s own intrinsic hostility to independent historical research, with an overwhelming fixation on its dire human rights and governance record, and on the nature of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), which governs in all but name. The paper urges a more historical approach, beginning with the critical three decades that preceded the emergence of the EPLF in the early 1970s.

In 1998 David N. Beach revisited the 1896-97 central MaShonaland rising in colonial Zimbabwe in an article titled “An Innocent Woman Unjustly Accused? Charwe, Medium of the Nehanda Mhondoro Spirit, and the 1896-97 Central Shona Rising in Zimbabwe.” Beach's main thesis was that, contrary to conventional wisdom that placed Nehanda-Charwe (and other leaders) at the center of those anti-European settler rebellions, Nehanda-Charwe might have been “an innocent woman unjustly accused.” For Beach, upstart Kaguvi-Gumboreshumba (a male spiritual leader) might have been the real hero, for he was to be found in all the sources and his tracks were better traceable than Nehanda-Charwe, who had a sporadic presence in the same sources.

Since Beach's 1998 study, I have not come across any other original study that has extended or disputed his arguments; to that end, I consider this study a response to Beach's study and an invitation to revisit the historiography of early colonial Zimbabwe through feminist lenses. My main aim is to revisit two major issues Beach raised in his study, and to look at them through a feminist lens in order to understand whether Nehanda-Charwe was indeed an “innocent woman unjustly accused” or whether something else was at play. After giving a brief background to the rebellion in MaShonaland, I will look at the issue of the credibility of evidence given by Africans to colonial officials about those who were up in arms against the colonial authority, the British South Africa Company (BSAC), with a focus on women's testimonies.

Since the first of its volumes appeared in 1976, the James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples has become well known to students of the precolonial history of southern Africa generally, and of the Natal-Zululand region in particular. The four volumes, edited by Colin Webb and myself, which were published by the University of Natal Press between 1976 and 1986, have become a major source of evidence for students of the history of African communities in the region from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries.

Although the various volumes have been reviewed in a number of international academic journals, the Stuart Archive is still, I suspect, little known outside the ranks of historians of southern Africa. The hiatus that has occurred in the process of publication since volume 4 came out has not helped in drawing the series to the attention of a wider circle of scholars. In writing this paper, one of my aims is to bring the existence of the Stuart Archive to the attention of Africanists at a time when work on the projected three volumes which still remain to be published is about to resume.

Another and more specific aim is to outline the nature of the processes by which the Stuart Archive was brought into existence, in order to underscore for users and potential users the need to use it critically as a source of evidence.

Missionary work was one of the main forces in the opening of the African continent to direct western influence. In many cases, from the 1830s onwards, missionaries were the first Westerners residing in the interior of the continent, thus accumulating considerable knowledge concerning geographical conditions in their respective areas of residence.

The question arises: how did information from these people with scarce knowledge about the interior filter down to representations of geographical conditions such as maps and literary descriptions? Working in close cooperation with Africans, their conceptions were likely to be somewhat more detailed than those of the colonial administration. Politically, they often assumed the role of mediators between the foreign powers and local societies; perhaps this was also the case where geographical knowledge was concerned. The aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which the Finnish Mission in colonial Ovamboland under German influence had an active role in mapmaking.

One ostensible reason for Germany's annexation of colonies was to turn a profit from them and strengthen the economy of the homeland. An additional function of German colonies was to persuade people who otherwise would have emigrated to the United States or Latin America to stay within the German economic sphere. White settlers were to supplant what was considered inefficient African land use with commercial agriculture whose products were to be exported to Germany. Public opinion in Germany also advocated colonization for status reasons, which made politicians sensitive to it.

Early history of the central highlands of Madagascar, called Imerina, must be written from oral literature. The first European account dates only to the late eighteenth century, long after the Merina monarchy arose, and it is not until the nineteenth century with the establishment of the London Missionary Society that detailed written sources appear. Moreover, unlike his colleagues in African history, the historian of Imerina cannot refer to archeology to test conclusions derived from oral sources since archeology in Imerina has only a few years of work behind it. Thus oral literature alone holds the key to questions about the foundations and growth of the Merina monarchy which by the mid-nineteenth century ruled all of Madagascar.

In one respect, however, the historian of ancient Imerina is more fortunate. The Merina have produced perhaps the largest corpus of historical literature in any part of Africa. I intend first to describe this literature and to point out in very general terms the problems of using it. I will focus not only on the Malagasy milieu which gave rise to historical material, but also on two related aspects of European influence. First, I will show how European ideas of social evolution penetrated Merina thinking. Second, and perhaps more important because it has received such scant attention, is the effect of the introduction of writing and printing on Malagasy texts. I consider this the outstanding historiographical problem: how did writing, editing, and redacting change the Merina's own view of their distant past. Finally, to illustrate general points raised in the first section of this study, I will examine a particular historical problem, the founding of monarchy, and show how the transformation of Merina kinglists through years of editing created a new vision of the past. I see this transformation of Malagasy texts by writing as the most important European influence on the development of a Merina history.

At a time of significant change in the in the practice of African history, this article is an appeal for a renewed respect for conventional historiography – referring both to careful acquaintance with earlier work and to the practice of historical analysis. Focusing on Rwanda, the argument is presented at four levels. First, it identifies four myths evident in recent presentations on Rwandan history. Second it assesses a work that avoids such assumptions by drawing on broader empirical sources than is the norm. It then examines a work that, while highlighting an important theme, neglects much of the historical work done on Rwanda over the past forty years. It concludes by proposing a way out of such “dead-end discourses.”