In the historiography of east Africa, hunter-gatherers have been given occasional mention almost since the beginning of European contacts with the interior. Early European travelers, hunters, and colonial administrators all took note of the ubiquitous “Dorobo,” as these hunters have come to be known in the literature. Furthermore, oral tradition collections from among east Africa's food-producing populations generally recall an earlier hunter-gatherer community who are said to have “disappeared,” “gone underground,” or were “driven away.”

Recent scholarship has attempted to look at these hunter groups in economic terms: (1) as a stage of economic development before achieving a “higher” level of production; (2) as a retrograde step from a food-producing economy; or (3) simply as a mode of production. But east Africa's hunter-gatherers remain inadequately dealt with in historical literature, primarily because they have usually been ignored by researchers but also because of their neighbors' and the academic community's prejudicial or misconceived notions about them.

To begin, some of the literature concerning these people will be selectively surveyed to see how ideas about them have developed. Next an attempt will be made to identify and delineate properly the various groups of hunter-gatherers living in East Africa today and in the recent past. Finally, the largest remaining community of hunter-gatherers, those living in the western highlands of Kenya who usually call themselves “Okiek,” will be looked at more closely in an attempt to advance the discussion of hunter-gatherers in general by presenting some observations concerning their socio-economic history.

That is why, regarding the time between the death of one great king and the rise of another king made famous by God, If you ask whether in that intervening period there were other kings, Of course there were, But their names are not known.

Some scholars search for historical evidence in the ancient traditions preserved by bards of the Western Sudan, while other writers express doubts that these sources can contain any information of value to historians. A period markedly affected by this question is the early thirteenth century, because it was then that the Mali empire was established, and because most of the evidence for this is derived from the Sunjata tradition, which is an essential part of the repertoire of many Mande bards (also known as “griots” or, in the Mande language, jeliw). A limited amount of information on thirteenth-century Mali is available from Arabic sources, but these were written a century to a century and a half after the reign of Sunjata, and although Ibn Khaldun confirms the existence of the famous mansa and reports that he subdued the Soso (Susu, Sosso), the external writings provide no biographical details about the purported empire-builder. Conversely, some episodes in the internal oral accounts are specifically addressed to the life and times of Sunjata, with elements from other time periods—some of which are identifiable and others not—regularly creeping in and out of the narratives. Some themes are obviously mythical, while others could have a historical basis but cannot be independently confirmed. Thus, any historian addressing thirteenth-century Mali must either accept the severe limitations of the external written sources and say very little indeed about that period, or face the difficulties involved in supplementing these with references to the oral sources.

In this paper I look at the relationship between Christianity and popular entertainment in Ghana over the last 100 years or so. Imported Christianity was one of the seminal influences on the emergence of local popular music, dance, and drama. But Christianity in turn later became influenced by popular entertainment, especially in the case of the local African separatist churches that began to incorporate popular dance music, and in some cases popular theatre. At the same time unemployed Ghanaian commercial performing artists have, since the 1980s, found a home in the churches. To begin this examination of this circular relationship between popular entertainment and Christianity in Ghana we first turn to the late nineteenth century.

The appearance of transcultural popular performance genres in southern and coastal Ghana in the late nineteenth century resulted from a fusion of local music and dance elements with imported ones introduced by Europeans. Very important was the role of the Protestant missionaries who settled in southern. Ghana during the century, establishing churches, schools, trading posts, and artisan training centers. Through protestant hymns and school songs local Africans were taught to play the harmonium, piano, and brass band instruments and were introduced to part harmony, the diatonic scale, western I- IV- V harmonic progressions, the sol-fa notation and four-bar phrasing.

There were two consequences of these new musical ideas. Firstly a tradition of vernacular hymns was established from the 1880s and 1890s, when separatist African churches (such as the native Baptist Church) were formed in the period of institutional racism that followed the Berlin Conference of 1884/85. Secondly, and of more importance to this paper, these new missionary ideas helped to establish early local popular Highlife dance music idioms such as asiko (or ashiko), osibisaaba, local brass band “adaha” music and “palmwine” guitar music. Robert Sprigge (1967:89) refers to the use of church harmonies and suspended fourths in the early guitar band Highlife composition Yaa Amponsah, while David Coplan (1978:98-99) talks of the “hybridisation” of church influences with Akan vocal phrasing and the preference of singing in parallel thirds and sixths in the creation of Highlife.

In 1891 the German explorer Theodor Bumiller wrote an angry letter from the shores of Lake Nyassa (modern Lake Malawi) to the Committee of the German Anti Slavery Lottery, the financiers of his expedition. The goal of the expedition was to bring a steamship onto the lake to fight alleged slave hunters. The initiator and leader of the expedition was no less a person than Hermann von Wissmann, then the empire's most popular explorer and conqueror and first Governor of German East Africa. Bumiller had been Wissmann's long-standing friend and companion on several expeditions. Since the very first days, there had been disputes over the equipping and organization of the expedition. In all previous letters that Wissmann and Bumiller had written to the committee, they had responded to reproaches of throwing the lottery's money around by arguing that Africa is not Europe and there were many eventualities with which nobody was able to reckon, if being on an expedition.

However, a member of the expedition, a certain Captain Max Praeger, whose duty was to navigate the steamer on the lake, had sent a report, in which he had sharply criticized both Wissmann and Bumiller. Bumiller answered with the argument that Praeger was not in a position to give an expert opinion on the expedition, because he was not a true Afrikaner, a person who has gained first-hand experiences of the African continent and its people. Praeger, Bumiller sneered, was only sitting on the steamer's deck and thus having no contact with Africans. To Bumiller, what qualified an Afrikaner as expert on Africa were eye-to-eye encounters with African people.

The literature on German Togoland, as compared with that of most of the other former European colonies on the African continent, is far from extensive. While the colony was relatively small and short-lived, the dearth of academic work is notable, since Togoland not only was prized by the Germans as their most successful colonial venture but was also viewed as a “model colony” by contemporary observers in other European imperial nations.

Only a handful of books devoted exclusively to the colony have been published since the emergence of African history in the late 1950s as an academic field in the West. The authors of these books, as well as a number of articles and dissertations, thoroughly consulted the relevant archival materials housed in Europe and North America and, to a lesser extent, in West Africa, but failed to collect the oral history of the period. Thus these studies tend to be based almost solely on the observations of Europeans and focus on the activities of the German imperialists, in particular on their administrative and economic policies. A few scholars have attempted to emphasize African experiences during this historical episode, despite a reliance on those same archival materials.

The Togoland colony dates to February 1884, when a group of German soldiers kidnapped chiefs in Anécho, a town located in present-day southeastern Togo, and forced them into negotiations aboard the German warship Sophie. Further west, a protectorate was proclaimed over the Lomé area in a treaty signed in July by Gustav Nachtigal, a German Imperial Commissioner, and one Plakkoo, an official of the town of Togo, after which the new colony was named by the Germans.

In 2003 Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh I's eighty-nine page manuscript ‘The History of Ashanti Kings and the whole country itself’ of 1907 was published in an annotated scholarly edition alongside a selection of allied texts. The same publisher is to produce a related volume containing the four hundred and fifty pages of Asantehene Osei Agyeman Prempeh II's ‘History of Ashanti’ written in the 1940s (and edited by myself). Both of these texts are written in English. However, the huge range of sources on the Asante past recorded in Akan Twi have yet to receive equal attention and treatment. This short paper introduces and contextualises one source of this kind that was researched in Asante between 1902-1910 and finished in written form in Akan Twi in 1915.

The Akuapem (Akwapim) kingdom is located less than thirty miles northeast of Ghana's capital at Accra. It has always been and remains a small polity. It comprises only seventeen historic towns scattered among hills on two parallel ridges about fifteen hundred feet above sea level. There are more towns today, many created by the cocoa economy of the early twentieth century, but Akuapem remains a compact entity. It is a Twi-speaking Akan kingdom, but an unusual one in that it is ethnically diverse.

Patrilineal Guan-speaking farmers settled on the Akuapem ridges in the early decades of the seventeenth century. They were oppressed by the matrilineal Twi-speaking Akan of the nearby Akwamu kingdom. To end this situation the Guan recruited other Akan Twi speakers as allies. These were military adventurers from the Akyem Abuakwa polity to the west. The Akyem incomers succeeded against the Akwamu but stayed on to establish their own conquest dynasty in 1733.

The story of Bulfinch Lambe (or Lamb) and his mission to London on behalf of the king of Dahomey (or “Emperor of Pawpaw”) has been told by Marion Johnson in an earlier article in this journal. Lambe was an employee of the Royal African Company in its factory at Jakin, the port of the kingdom of Allada, who was seized and detained by the king of Allada, as security for an unpaid debt, in 1722. He was still held prisoner in Allada when it was conquered by Agaja of Dahomey in 1724, and thus became a prisoner of the latter, who carried him off to his own capital at Abomey, further inland. Agaja soon conceived, perhaps at Lambe's suggestion, the idea of negotiating some sort of commercial agreement with the Royal African Company. A letter which Lambe wrote from Abomey to Jeremiah Tinker, Governor of the Company's factory in the neighboring kingdom of Whydah, in November 1724 reported that Agaja “talks much of settling a Correspondence with the Company, and of having White Men come here.” Lambe evidently offered himself as an intermediary, as a means of securing his release from captivity, and expressed the hope that he might persuade Agaja to acquiesce in his proposals “about my going and returning again with more White Men from the Company.” When Lambe was eventually released in 1726, this was on the understanding that he would return: Agaja himself told the English trader William Snelgrave in the following year that Lambe “had taken an Oath, and promised on his Faith, to return again in a reasonable Time with a Ship.”

Pre-colonial Dahomey's two most recent historians, Isaac A. Akinjogbin and John C. Yoder, have argued that Dahomey was a progressive nation that had much in common with the states of the modern West. Akinjogbin and Yoder have laid particularly heavy emphasis on this point when describing the kingdom's system of government. Their account of that system appears to be generally accepted. It has, at any rate, been repeated in the more important textbooks and works of synthesis.

Akinjogbin argues that, when it was founded in ca. 1620, Dahomey was organized on principles which “ran very close indeed to the modern European idea of a national state.” The kingdom was, it seems, from the very first governed by a line of monarchs who exercised absolute control over the lives and activities of their subjects. Early Dahomey's monarchy “was a strongly centralised institution, controlled all the appointments and dismissals of the chiefs and had a standing army.” In Dahomey every citizen had to “serve and be subservient to the king.”

Dahomey's various eighteenth-century absolute rulers were, Akinjogbin notes, men whose aims and ambitions were at least as admirable as the aims and ambitions of any of Europe's contemporary enlightened despots. Agaja, (ca, 1708-1740), the conqueror of the Aja coast, was for example a monarch who attempted “to stop the slave trade” and who “could be unpredictably generous, magnanimous in victory and endowed with that sense of humor which men of great heart possess.” Tegbesu (1740-1774), Dahomey's best known eighteenth-century monarch, we are told, was a ruler who “greatly enriched both the monarchy and the general populace” and who created “an orderly contented community.”

The articulation of antislavery among Africans remains to be studied. Overall, the staple of animated questions, debates, and conclusions of the vast literature on abolition of slavery in the last two decades or so has neglected African contributions of ideologies of antislavery to the global abolition epoch in the Atlantic world. Charting a new trajectory for the study of abolition in Africa, as well as the global abolition epoch, this study examines the ideologies of antislavery among Africans as expressed in the Gold Coast Times (Cape Coast) during the heyday of the British abolition of slavery in the Gold Coast in 1874-75. The study, echoing African agency, reveals the manifest presence of the African intelligentsia abolitionists in the late nineteenth-century Gold Coast. The origin and timing of the African intelligentsia's antislavery attitudes in the Gold Coast are not made known in the sources. However, the sources do reveal that antislavery flowered in the littoral region between Elmina and Accra, the hub of precolonial intellectual activities, political activism, and diffusion of cultures, linked to the larger Atlantic world.

Overall, I argue that antislavery existed among the African intelligentsia and that they articulated their ideologies of antislavery in several ways, both on the eve of the British colonial abolition of slavery and in its immediate aftermath. The study is divided into four main parts. The first section problematizes the sources and addresses some methodological considerations. For its part, the second portion interrogates the comparative historiography on abolition, while the third section conceptualizes the African intelligentsia abolitionists and their association with the Gold Coast Times, the main platform for the African intelligentsia's espousal of ideologies of antislavery. Divided into two parts, the final section examines the African intelligentsia's articulation of antislavery both before and after the inauguration of abolition by the colonial state.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers who described pre-colonial Dahomey all stressed that the Dahomans were dedicated, enthusiastic slavers. The kingdom's first historian, Archibald Dalzel, remarked, for example, that the Dahomans were “bred solely to war and rapine.” F.E. Forbes, the author of one of the best-known nineteenth-century accounts of the kingdom, in a similar vein, declared of Dahomey that “strange and contradictory as it may sound, this great nation is no nation, but a banditti.”

The views of these and other similarly-minded writers were, until the 1960s, everywhere accepted. In that decade, however, Isaac A. Akinjogbin published a series of works in which he gave an account of a long-lived Dahoman anti-slave trade tradition. Dahomey was, he claims, founded ca 1620 by a group of “highly principled and far-seeing” Aja in the Abomey area. These Aja founded the kingdom so as to be able to wage war effectively against those of their countrymen who traded in slaves.

Akinjogbin believed that the Dahomans spent about ninety years making war on their slave trading neighbors. It was, he claims, only in 1730 that the European slavers and their African allies were able to force the Dahomans to abandon their anti-slave trade campaign and to begin trading in slaves themselves. The very destructive wars of the 1720s, the wars which made Dahomey a major west African power, were, it seems undertaken as part of a virtuous, anti-slave trade crusade.

Although the Dahomans were forced to begin trading in slaves in 1730, they did not, Aknjogbin implies, entirely abandon their anti-slave trade ideals.

The historiography of continental Europe has been revolutionized since the Second World War by a group of historians generally known as Annales School, from the name of the periodical which has served as their principal forum. Originally a somewhat eccentric group, they have come in the eyes of many to incarnate historical orthodoxy. And yet Africa has scarcely been touched by these profound currents which have so powerfully affected Europe. It therefore seems necessary to attempt a brief sketch of the nature of the Annales movement and to consider how African historiography might benefit from this approach.

Annales historiography derives from a very broad and relatively recent tradition in Europe, which may be characterized as involving the rejection of the centrality of events in history in favor of more unobtrusive but more basic structures. This approach is perhaps most clearly apparent in the work of Marxist historians, but it can be seen more generally in the growing body of social and economic history written from a wide variety of ideological perspectives. Annales thus owes much both to Marxism and to such inter-war historians as Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. In addition, Annales is rooted in the peculiar French academic tradition of treating history and geography as a single indivisible subject.

Tandis qu'hommes et femmes de statut libre rivalisent pour la maîtrise des traditions orales relatives à leur histoire, les informations d'origine servile restent un domaine féminin par excellence. Ces données orales méritent une attention particuliére puisqu'elles concernent directement ou non une part importante de la population. D'aprés le Rapport sur l'esclavage dans le cercle du Sénégal-Niger (1904), les esclaves représentaient 40% de la population du cercle de Nioro (Klein, 1983:52) et 50% de celle de Gunbu (Meillassoux 1975:225), deux circonscriptions administratives au coeur du royaume de Jaara. Comment dans la société patrilinéaire soninke, ceux qui, habituellement considérés comme dépourvus de famillle, d'ancêtres et d'enfants, socialement parlant, produisentils, conservent-ils et transmettent-ils leurs propres documents d'histoire? En se limitant au cas des femmes, quel est leur impact sur ce document et le rapport de celui-ci avec l'appareil idéologique des dominants? La réponse à ces questions requiert une réflexion préalable sur: le probléme de la documentation, le cadre chronologique, le cadre spatial et le lieu social en questions.

La bibliographie concernant les femmes africaines en tant que source de l'histoire de leur société est d'une pauvreté désarmante. La mode des études féminines des années 1970 n'est pas passée par là. Sosne dans son étude consacrée aux Shi, une société patrilinéaire de l'est du Zaïre (Sosne 1979:225), démontre clairement ce qu'elle appelle la vision androgyne du monde grâce à une étude des structures politiques du pays. Perrot (1982:8,11) insiste sur le rôle des femmes en tant qu'érudites dans le domaine des traditions orales du Ndenye de Côte d'Ivoire. A propos du Bénin, Palau-Marti affirme que “les traditions les plus secrètes se transmettaient par les femmes dont quelques unes étaient les vraies historiennes du Dahomey” (Palau-Marti 1964:139). Barber souligne le rôle des femmes âgées dans la conservation des oríkì (textes à la fois littéraires et historiques) chez les Yoruba du Nigéria (Barber 1987:5). Selon l'auteur, ces personnages sont de loin plus compétentes que les hommes. Strobel (1983:119) insiste sur le rôle des femmes esclaves dans la transmission de l'idéologie qui soutend l'organisation de la société à Mombasa. A propos des généalogies “de maître en élève” (“academic genealogy”) des intellectuels de Sokoto, Boyd et Last (1985:298) constatent que lorsqu'il s'agit des hommes, on cite rarement les femmes dont ils tiennent leurs connaissances.

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing debate on African methodology—sources, issues, methods, challenges—by presenting a Ghanaian case study, for, whereas there are a number of broad overviews of African methodology, some of which include surveys of regions such as eastern or southern Africa, as well as countries like Nigeria and Senegal, a study specifically devoted to examining historical production in Ghana is yet to be essayed. This paper, however, shares common concerns with African historiography in general in terms of the quest for distinctly African constructions of history as well as the manifold ways in which African historical production might be made to relate more effectively to local contexts.

In a recent contribution to a volume dedicated to honoring Bethwell Ogot, David William Cohen (2001:53) echoed a call which was by no means new but which still has relevance for African historical production today as it did in the 1960s. Emphasizing the need for African voices, he asserted that “…there are realms of knowledge and programs of knowledge production outside the academy, and outside the field situation, that might be understood and drawn upon to work at the reconstruction of the African past.” It is in this light that this piece was originally prepared in connection with Ghana's fiftieth independence anniversary in 2007.

Ghana has had a long span of historical writing dating back several centuries, but a tradition of Ghanaian historiography is only about 50 years old, as is the case with the development of national historiographies throughout much of Africa.

Traditional accounts of the nineteenth-century Fulbe conquest in northern Cameroon tell roughly the same story: following the example of Usman Dan Fodio in Nigeria, the Fulbe of Cameroon organized in the beginning of the nineteenth century a “jihad” or a “holy war” against the local pagan populations to convert them to Islam and create an Islamic state. The divisions among the local populations and the military superiority of the Fulbe allowed them to conquer almost all northern Cameroon. They forced those who submitted to give an annual tribute of goods and servants, and they raided the other groups. In these traditional accounts the Fulbe are presented as unchallenged masters, while the local populations are depicted as slaves who were powerless over their fate; their role in the conquest of the region and in the administration of the new political order is supposed to have been insignificant.

I will show that, on the contrary, in the area of Banyo the Wawa and Bute played a crucial role in the conquest of the sultanate and in its administration. I will then re-examine the cliche that all members of the local populations were the slaves of the Fulbe by distinguishing the fate of the Wawa and Bute on one side from that of the Kwanja and Mambila on the other, and by showing the importance of the Fulbe's identity in shaping the definition of slavery. Finally I will argue that, if the historical accounts found in the scientific literature invariably insist on Fulbe hegemony and minimize the role played by the local populations, it is because those accounts are often based on Fulbe traditions, and because these traditions are remodeled by the Fulbe in order to correspond to their discourse on identity.

Puisqu'il n'existe pas de mots qui ne soient à personne
(Bakhtin 1979 in Todorov 1981: 83)
Le discours, c'est-à-dire le langage dans sa totalité concrète et vivante.
(Bakhtin 1963 in Todorov 1981: 44)

European travel accounts are widely used as sources to write the history of societies that did not themselves produce a large amount of textual documentation. On the Coast of Guinea, and more particularly on the area formerly known as Gold Coast (approximately the littoral of modern Ghana), many of the written documents providing historians with information on coastal societies prior to nineteenth century were produced by Europeans travelers. Most of these individuals were merchants, craftsmen, pastors or soldiers who had settled several years in the numerous forts and trading posts erected along the seashore to protect and enhance the trade of chartered companies. Others were seamen and merchants who only spent a few weeks at a stretch plying the African Coast aboard men-of-war or trading ships, exchanging manufactured goods for gold, slaves, and ivory. Professional writers, who had not traveled to Africa, but had obtained data from various written sources or from travelers, also composed some of the accounts. Therefore, these documents show an extraordinary diversity in form and content, which historians and archeologists need to investigate before using them as primary sources for reconstructing the past.

In the first part of the present paper, which focuses on a specific genre, the seventeenth-century travel accounts, I recall the historiography of the recent critique of these sources. I also point out that despite decisive methodological breakthroughs, some heuristic dimensions or attributes of these texts are yet to be recognized and assessed. I then re-examine these sources from the dual perspective of historic and linguistic anthropological methods and introduce an exploratory approach centered on the Bakhtinian approach to discourse.

In this paper I discuss known and probable migrations and areas of settlement of proto-Mande and Mande-speaking groups during eight climate periods spanning the past eight millennia. Recent scholarship concerning west African climate patterns in past times has made feasible provisional periodizations of west African history that are independent of European-derived chronologies. Concomitantly, these historical periodizations offer provocative insights regarding such long-term processes as human migrations and settlement patterns; the diffusion of cultigens and domestic animals; the development of long- distance trade routes; and the use of horse cavalry in warfare.

The provisional historical schema comprising eight climate periods and Map 1 depicting ecological zones are principally derived from the pioneering studies of Sharon E. Nicholson and of Susan and Roderick McIntosh, and from the analyses I have presented elsewhere: (1) The Atlantic Wet Phase which extended from ca. 5500 to ca. 2500 B.C., was succeeded by (2) a two-and-a-half millennia-long period of desiccation. (3) There was a six centuries-long transiton period between ca. 300 B.C. and ca. 300 A.D., during the latter part of which ecological conditions improved sufficiently to permit the development of intra- and trans- Saharan commerce. (4) Four centuries of moderate rainfall ca. 300-ca. 700, and (5) four centuries of abundant rainfall ca. 700-ca. 1100, were followed by (6) a four centuries long dry period extending from ca. 1100 to ca. 1500. (7) A brief wet period, ca. 1500-ca. 1630, preceded (8) a two centuries-long dry period lasting until ca. 1860.

This paper needs to be read against the background of the critique which has gradually been gathering force over the last half-dozen years or so of the concept of the mfecane. By the mfecane is meant the idea that in the 1820s much of the eastern half of southern Africa was thrown into turmoil by a series of wars and population migrations set in motion by the explosive expansion of the Zulu state under Shaka. Ever since Theal first popularized it in the late nineteenth century, this idea has remained one of the bedrock concepts around which the history of southern Africa in the later eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century has been written. The term mfecane itself did not become widely used until as recently as 1966, when, in his widely influential book, The Zulu Aftermath, Omer-Cooper repackaged what had previously been called “the wars of Shaka” for an emerging Africanist readership. Since then the concept of the mfecane has permeated the literature, both popular and academic, inside and outside southern Africa, to the point where it is regarded as a fixed fact of the sub-continent's history.

What do African tellers of history tell it for? What do they mean by history and how differently is the past transmitted in different communities? Professional academic historians use oral data like documentary data, for their own ends. They work in a different medium--written language--and they offer back a new story to the original donors. They do not always pay attention to the ways in which these consumers produced their own versions and perpetuated them embedded in performances. The indigenous occasions of performance are also easily replaced by the record of an outside researcher's chance intervention.

Oral performances of history differ--in kind, in the extent to which past events are a focus of attention, in the readiness of individuals to answer an outsider's questions, in the types and structures of recall. The patterns I describe for one Liberian community may be quite different for its ethnic neighbors. As a social anthropologist I assume that recall is not a purely individual phenomenon, and besides trying to understand what connections there may be between types of recall and types of social condition, I want to see how personal reminiscence (as well as tradition) is formulated, sustained, and recapitulated; to whom it is repeated; whether it is hinted or used overtly as a weapon. By taking these issues into account I believe we can also interpret better the historical data from oral performance, just as we need to know about all the genres of performance if we are to recognize the uses of history there may be in apparently non-historical modes.

When Kenya-born singer-songwriter Roger Whittaker sang these doleful words in 1983, the village of Shimoni was a relatively quiet backwater on the southern Kenya coast, known primarily for its deep-sea fishing club. It is now a much larger and busier place, where tourists come to see the ‘slave cave’ that gives Shimoni its name (Swahili shimo-ni, “at the cave”), and embark on boat trips to Wasini Island and the nearby Kisite-Mpunguti Marine National Park (see Figure 1). Whittaker's song played a significant role in this development, by bringing Shimoni and its caves to wider attention, and focusing on one of a number of narratives about the caves' past usage. The lyrics of ‘Shimoni’ did not simply embellish a local tale, but (re)created it in the image of metanarratives about the history of slavery on the East African coast. As we will argue in this paper, these metarratives now dominate reconstructions of the past in Shimoni, and are reinforced by the activities and institutions that constitute and promote the caves as an important site of cultural heritage.

Since its publication in 1874-1875 the account by the Basel missionaries Friedrich (‘Fritz’) August Ramseyer (1842-1902) and Johannes Kühne (1840-1915) of their captivity in Asante, Vier Jahre in Asante, has constituted one of the major written sources on the nature of precolonial society in what is now southern Ghana. Stationed at Anum, near the east bank of the lower Volta, Ramseyer and Kühne were captured together with Ramseyer's wife and infant son in June 1869 by an Asante force which had invaded Ewe territory. They were taken to Asante and eventually, after a seven-month stay in a hamlet which they christened Ebenezer, to Kumase, where they were held hostage from December 1870 until the approach of a British military expedition in January 1874. Apart from the independent French trader Joseph-Marie Bonnat, who was captured in the same month and shared many of their experiences, Ramseyer and Kühne spent longer in Asante than any other author before the twentieth century. Moreover, as prisoners they were able to observe African society from an unusual perspective: “these men saw all from below; the white man was the slave, the negro the master.”

While the importance of this source is generally recognized, it has escaped the notice of most commentators that what Ramseyer and Kühne left us was not one source but at least five—a manuscript, two German editions, and an English and a French translation, all written within a relatively short period of time as part of what has been called “the scramble for Gold Coast Africana.” In this paper I shall explore some of the relationships among these different sources.