In this paper I take up the methodological issue of combining archived fieldwork notes and contemporary field data in the reconstruction of the recent history of Wolaitta, a former kingdom in southern Ethiopia. The old fieldwork data, archived and little known since the 1960s, consist of the notes of the German Ethiopianist ethnologist Eike Haberland (1924-1992), while the field data are based on my intermittent fieldwork in Wolaitta since 2001. In ongoing research on this subject, I intend to write an historical ethnography of Wolaitta, by combining a study of the methods and interpretive strategies of Haberland as ethnographer and product of his time, with new research. The effort may also allow us to see how his ‘facts’ and explanations fit with current concerns in anthropology and African studies. As the subject of this paper will eventually be elaborated into a book, I aim to be brief here and illustrate the value and challenge of such a reconstruction effort.

The study also is meant to contribute to understanding the dynamics of regional identity in today's Ethiopia, which has been struggling with a very problematic implementation of ethnicity-based federal policies since 1991. A study of a corpus of ethnography gathered in the heyday of German field ethnology (1950s-1960s), in conjunction with present-day research, may highlight processes of identity formation among the Wolaitta, who today in 2005 count some 1.5 million people, with perhaps an additional 80,000 living outside the Wolaitta borders elsewhere in Ethiopia, and having various shades of identification with their country and traditions of origin.

The twilight of the twentieth century saw major developments in the world, which profoundly redefined people's perceptions of and interest in history, both as a mode of enquiry and as an academic discipline. The significance of such changes would appear to have found resonance in the Third World. The most important of these changes included “the revolution in IT, which transformed and democratized scholarship, and the further expansion in higher education; the shift from sociology to anthropology as the most fruitful subject from which historians were now borrowing; the influence of Michel Foucault, postmodernism and the ‘linguistic turn;’ the rise of women's history, gender history, and the reconfiguration of ‘imperial’ history; and a broader shift away from the search for causation to the search for meaning.’ Some of these were to pose serious challenges either to the ways in which history was perceived by civil society or practiced by professionals. It also affected the very possibility of doing history at all. But the details, complexity, and magnitude of the changes varied from country to country in different ways.

In 1993 the “Mission Statement” of the newly-introduced Ife Journal of History gave an indication of the travails of the discipline of history in contemporary Nigeria: More than at any other time, the discipline of history today in Nigeria, is under severe stress. Perplexed by economic crises of immense proportions and dominated by the craze for money and by the politics of the moment, we have become distorted in our orientation and deluded of any deep consciousness of history. We live as if all that matters is today. In private and in public, our citizens are routinely treated to dreary lectures on the irrelevance and insignificance of a systematic knowledge of our past…We seemed determined to go on record as the first nation to make a meaningful progress without reference to the accumulated values, experiences and culture of yesteryears. … The discipline of history is routinely dismissed as dispensable. History which used to be an attractive subject has dropped to the bottom of the ladder of priorities for intending undergraduates. Historians receive little or no regard in a society that is in a haste to modernise and that places emphasis solely on science and the acquisition of material wealth.…

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.

For current discourse in the southwest Ethiopian hill farming populations of the Burji, Konso, and D'iraaša, the present time constitutes a spatiotemporal system of coordinates in which modern attitudes to the past and tradition intersect or are knotted with group “memories.”

What do we mean by memory? Who remembers? And how? The word “memory” is used here to refer to the common memory of a local group of people, in other words the cultural processing of memory.

In the course of time such memories have manifested themselves in different ways. This paper examines why certain events are remembered and how their transmission is expressed. Linked to this is the question of the meaning (Sinngehalt) of memory. The question of the relationship between memory and so-called real historical events is thus only secondary. Three types of possible approach are discussed in this paper: mythical time, referring to mytho-historical traditions of origin; cyclical time, as seen in the Gada system (generation grading system); and linear time, as shown in the genealogical lines of specific lineages.

In their traditions, all three population groups refer to a common original settlement area in Liban, to the east of the areas they occupy today. References to Liban, with varying geographical locations, are also found in the oral traditions of many Oromo-speaking groups. Oromo nationalists claim Liban as the common original home of all Oromo. In this paper, however, Oromo-speaking groups are not discussed, since we are mainly concerned with the Burji, Konso, and D'iraaša, for whom, according to their Liban traditions, the exodus was the moment of their separation from the Oromo-speaking Borana, who lived in Liban together with them up to that point.

The idea of Africanization is arguably one of the most important and prevalent in African historiography and African studies. I first encountered this notion some eight years ago when I started graduate school. With a background in Mexican and Latin American history, I found it necessary to immerse myself in the historiography of Africa. It was in this process that I encountered the idea of Africanization. It was not always identified in this manner, but it was clear that historians were, in one way or another, articulating a concern about how “African” was African history.

The objective of this paper is to examine the history of Africanization in African historiography. It departs from two basic premises. First, the issues that come with the idea of Africanization are more pronounced in the field of African history. When compared to other fields, such as Latin American history, this indigenizing of history is not given nearly so much attention. Second, the idea that African history needs to be Africanized has been taken for granted, and has not been critically examined. Here I will contend that the historical conditions that have framed the emergence and development of African historiography have made it necessary to emphasize the issue of Africanization. I will also argue that those conditions have changed in the past fifty years, and that the questions raised in the quest to Africanize history should be redefined in view of the new challenges for African history and of historiography at large.

[Off São Tiago Island, March 1456] We found so great a quantity of fish that it is incredible to record.

[Praia, São Tiago, April 1816] The strictest precautions are taken against the evasion of slaves on board foreign vessels that touch here, and particularly by not allowing boats of any kind to the inhabitants, the want of which gives to the port the appearance of a deserted settlement.

Numerous species of fish swim in Cabo Verdean waters, and the two streams of the Canary Current flowing past the archipelago nourish some of the richest marine resources on the globe. Yet, for centuries Portuguese colonial officials leagued with plantation owners to prohibit Cabo Verdeans from owning fishing craft and other vessels to prevent the escape of slaves, mutinous soldiers, exiled criminals, and political deportees. Denied the bounty of the sea and afflicted by multi-year droughts, tens of thousands of destitute people perished during famines. Cabo Verde during Portuguese rule was a gulag.

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.

Nigeria in the post-independence years has seen its share of hardship. Politically dominated by military dictatorships, economically dominated by the ravages of underdevelopment, and culturally dominated by internal ethnic tensions and external stereotyping, Nigeria certainly seems to have suffered from an overabundance of problems and a dearth of solutions in the last forty plus years. This period, full of scholarly debate on these issues, also closely parallels the academic career of A.E. Afigbo. Afigbo, who graduated with a Ph.D. in History from the University of Ibadan in 1964, was the first History doctorate produced on Nigerian soil. He is both a product and a victim of the Nigerian nation, and his scholarly writings deeply reflect these contradictions. From that point in 1964—the era of hope and anguish—to the present day—the era of anguish without hope—he has been among the vanguard of scholars in Nigerian history and African studies. He wanted to write about the past, but the present pressured him severely. Starting as a “Nigerian,” he became a “Biafran” during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70), and again a “Nigerian” thereafter. These transitions provide some kind of “political charter” to some of his writings.

It has been a remarkable career. He has authored or co-authored eight books, edited four more, and published well over a hundred journal articles. Afigbo has earned numerous prizes for his scholarship, has served on the editorial board of many acclaimed scholarly journals, including the Journal of African History and History in Africa, and has been inducted into many prestigious societies, including the Nigerian Academy of Letters. Nigeria has also honored him with its highest academic award, the National Order of Merit.

Comparative history may be fashionable these days, but references to the past of precolonial sub-Saharan Africa in the literature on early Scandinavia, and vice versa, are still hard to come by. Perhaps this is as it should be, as Scandinavia and Sub-Saharan Africa are generally considered to be worlds apart. Besides, there is the time-lag involved: pre-Christian Scandinavia, including the Norse world, came to an end in roughly the eleventh century, whereas the precolonial era in sub-Saharan Africa lasted into the 1880s at the earliest. But many years ago, when after a prolonged immersion in African history, I picked up some books, including printed primary sources, related to pre-Christian Norway, I was invaded by a strange feeling of déjà vu, of having seen it all before, precisely in sub-Saharan Africa of old. Pre-Christian Norwegian, or Norse, society suddenly began to make sense to me as it had never done before.

Why the similarities I believe I have detected, and how significant are they? Is it possible that they are in some way more relevant or meaningful than the differences? Can we even speak of a problem of similarities à la Henri Frankfort? I have no ready-made answers to these questions. In fact my aim in this paper is a fairly modest one, that of offering some tentative, possibly speculative, observations, thoughts, and/or conclusions. I take as my point of departure the obvious, or trivial, point that precolonial sub-Saharan Africa and pre-Christian Norway did have something quite essential in common: the prevalence in both cases of ”pagan” (or “heathen”) and overwhelmingly agrarian kinship-type societies. In the case of Norway and Scandinavia, the Viking era (790s to somewhere in the tenth century), with its marked maritime orientation, constituted perhaps a rupture. Extensive seafaring, including maritime raiding and pillaging, not to mention the emergence of so-called sea kings, implies mobility, and mobile people do not fit readily into the “model” that is outlined in this essay. It may be, however, that the inland regions of the Nordic world were not always directly or even deeply influenced by what happened on the coast. Note that the words “pagan” and “heathen” are used here for want of a better expression, in the sense of “non-revealed” or “ethnic” religions. By kinship-type societies I mean collectivist-oriented societies composed not primarily of individuals, but of kindreds or lineages.

In 1918 an influenza pandemic of unprecedented virulence spread across the planet, infiltrating nearly all areas of human habitation. In less than a year the pandemic had run its course, ultimately responsible for some-where between 30,000,000 and 50,000,000 deaths worldwide. Truly, this was one of the greatest catastrophes in human history. However, despite the fact that the influenza pandemic has few historical rivals in terms of sheer loss of human life, it has not entered the meta-narrative of world history, nor indeed national histories, to the same extent that major wars or natural disasters have. To date, most of the historical work on the influenza pandemic has sought to prove that it does not deserve this relegation to the dustbin of history. Despite this common goal, however, historians have taken different approaches to illustrate the importance of the influenza pandemic of 1918 in Africa.

The purpose of this essay is to categorize the historiography of the influenza pandemic through a discussion of the different approaches taken to the study of the pandemic in Africa. Two distinct categories emerge from this analysis. The first category focuses primarily on the spread and demographic impact of the pandemic in Africa, as well as the official response of colonial governments to the pandemic. Studies in this category seem to be more concerned with emphasizing the commonalities of experience across space. These pieces also tend to compartmentalize the pandemic temporally, focusing only on the period during which the pandemic raged, and not the historical context leading up to the pandemic in a given area, or the lingering impact that the pandemic had on specific societies after its departure. The second category takes the analysis a step further and attempts to determine the relative importance of the influenza pandemic by situating it within the social or local history of a given place. Some articles focus on an entire African colony, while others focus on smaller local regions, but all pieces in this category attempt to understand the influenza not just in terms of similar patterns, numbers, and policies, but in terms of the historical context into which the pandemic occurred and the effect that the pandemic might—or might not—have had on political, economic, or religious trends in a specific area. In order to accomplish this, these studies tend to work within a broad temporal framework in a specific region, and do not engage in comparisons across space to the extent that studies in the first category do.

Over the past few decades, social history has variously and successfully explored the lives of neglected groups in society. Nevertheless, the question of capturing these “silent voices” in history, including those of women, remains at the heart of social history. Although few sources are available that allow historians to hear these voices, new methodological insights offer opportunities. A multidisciplinary framework and a broad range of methodologies can shed new light on the lives of peasants, who have been often neglected in history and provide opportunities to “hear” their voices and concerns as historical subjects. The object of this paper is to present sortie critical perspective on the use of oral and archival sources for the study of the agricultural history of rural Africa. What I present here is my approach to the collection and use of various sources for the study of Igbo agricultural history in the twentieth century. It suggests that oral sources, in particular, offer an important opportunity in the writing of an inclusive history of agricultural change—a history that for the most part has been created by rural peasants. Another objective is to outline my personal experiences in the field and to suggest important ways of situating the researcher not only in the analysis of the evidence, but most importantly, in the context or the fieldwork environment. Both, as has been clearly shown, can affect the historian's analysis and perspective and the resulting history.

Igboland is situated in Southeastern Nigeria and lies between longitude 7°E and latitude 6°10' N. The region borders the middle belt region of Nigeria to the north, the river Niger to the west, the Ibibio people to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea and Bight of Biafra to the south. Most of the region lies on a plain less than 600 feet (about 183 meters) above sea level. Most of Igboland lies within the Guinean and Sub-Guinean physical environment and is characterized by an annual rainfall of between forty and sixty inches per annum, with a dry season lasting between three and four months in northern Igboland and a mean monthly humidity of about 90% throughout the year. The pattern of rainfall produces two distinct patterns of vegetation. The southern part of the region is characterized by heavy rainfall that produces a dense rainforest that thinned out northwards into a savanna. However, many centuries of human habitation and activities have turned the whole region into secondary forest, with only pockets of forest oasis remaining.

He was the first man who was clever enough to realize he could sell some green maize at the mine in Penhalonga… Even to build the good houses, you had to come and copy from Kawadza. To buy ploughshares, they had to come and copy from Kawadza… Even those who bought cars, they had to copy from Kawadza… Chief Gandanzara used to walk on foot whenever he wanted to meet anyone. But because of seeing Kawadza riding a horse, he himself decided to ride on a horse… We can say in Mani-caland, or we can say in Zimbabwe, most of the good things were started with Kawadza.

Histories of Africa produced during the colonial period generally begin with the premise that indigenous societies existed in a timeless, static condition. The sort of broad social changes that formed the very basis of history had seemingly never occurred within Africa. Therefore history in Africa began with early European contacts and colonial-era accounts proceeded to chronicle the variety of European activities in Africa. Even more than most Europeans in the colonies, missionaries viewed themselves as direct agents of change and therefore creators of history. Their personal accounts, usually written for public consumption back home, inevitably included both struggles and successes inherent to mission work. More specifically, in their accounts of agricultural change among African societies, missionaries frequently attempted to script for themselves the central role as protagonists driving a story of progress and civilization. In order to highlight the problematic nature of missionary accounts and their influence on other interpretations, I examine here a variety of historical sources relating to Abraham Kawadza. His life experiences support a self-peasantization approach to rural history that challenges any mission-centric interpretation of agrarian change in colonial Zimbabwe.

When I read The Ivory Raiders, I was intrigued by the plot of the story, the intention of the author, Major Henry A. Rayne, to document the intricate process of political assignment and colonial intervention in the “lawless chaos” of wild African landscape and make it accessible to European readers. The encounter transpired on the banks of the Turkwell River in northern Kenya Colony, bordering the western shores of Lake Rudolf (Lake Turkana), where Rayne triumphantly captured the fugitive Mahomadi bin Abdullah, an Arab from Muscat, for engaging in illicit ivory trade. The narrative plot into which the colonial encounter cast itself surfaces in the first 25 pages of the book, and the story of Major Rayne's encounter with Mahomadi bin Abdullah is fascinating.

Colonial attitudes and prejudices can be readily identified by every student perusing Africanist literature of the early twentieth century. More than that, one gets to recognize different slants, notably between an administrative outlook and that of white settlers (varying according to the territory), and a further contrast with that of Protestant and Catholic missionaries, not to overlook mission-educated Africans. But facile characterizing by occupation, economic interests, class, race, or even religion can misrepresent individual intellects and achievements, whether in original contributions to knowledge or in setting the direction of continuing research. In reviewing here the anthropological and archeological endeavors in the Kenya highlands during the 1920s and 1930s of George Wynn Brereton Hiintingford (1901-1978) and Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (1903-72), both of British parentage (and sons of Anglican clerics), it is noticeable that, while each was unmistakably a product of his time and situation, neither falls perfectly into any neat category of European society in colonial Africa. Neither belonged to the administrative corps, although both took on assignments for the Kenya government on occasions, and were at hand to volunteer their wisdom about “native customs” and mentality whenever inexperienced officials, insensitive settlers or zealous missionaries encountered distrust or open protest.

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.

Korwo nĩNdemi Mathaathi
Baba ndagwĩtia kĩrugũ
Njoke ngwĩtie itimũ na ngo,
Riu baba ngũgwĩtia gĩthoomo.
Ndegwa rĩu gũititũire,
Thenge no iranyihanyiha,
Ndiri kĩrugũ ngagwitia,
Riu baba ngugwitia gĩthoomo.
Maitũ nĩakwĩrĩte kaing,
Ona niĩ nĩngũmenyithl˜tie,
Ndirĩ kĩrugũ ngagwĩtia,
Rĩu baba ngũgwĩtia gĩthoomo.
Njamba ĩrĩa nene Kĩnyatta,
Rĩu rĩoimĩte Rũraaya,
Jomo nĩoimĩte na thoome,
Ningĩ Jomo mũthigaani witũ.
Njamba ya bata hĩndĩ ĩno,
Kaarĩkayo no gĩtboomo,
Wambu githĩto gĩthoomo,
Baba, niĩno ngakĩina kaarĩ.
Njambo cia baba hĩndĩ ĩno,
]omo njamba ĩnyuagwo ĩmwe,
Jomo mũraata wa andũairũ,
Nowe Jotno mũraata wa twana1.1

If this were Ndemi and Mathaathi's era,
Father, I would plead for a feast,
Then demand a spear and a shield,
But now, father, I plead for education.
Bulls are now depleted,
He-goats are also fewer,
No banquet shall I ask,
Now, father, I plead for education.
Mother has often told you,
Even I have informed you,
No feast shall I demand,
Now, father, I plead for education.
The courageous warrior Kenyatta,
Has now arrived from Europe,
Jomo came through open gates,
Equally, he was our negotiator,
The important warrior of today,
His song of joy is education,
Is Wambu's honor not education?
Father, how then shall I find my joy?
Brave warriors of today,
We drink to Jomo the fearless one,
Jomo, friend of all Black people,
And Jomo the friend of children.2

Peris Wanjira Gachaũ was eleven years old when she first attended Ngoigo Independent School in 1948. She enjoyed, most of all, singing the songs her teachers taught her and other students concerning the significance of education, stolen Kikuyu land, and the promise of African independence in Kenya. “Our teachers taught us lessons of our history, culture, elders, as well as our future; and we sang in the mornings, in the afternoons, and on our way home from school, everyday.” According to Mrs. Gachaũ, the song Korwo nĩ Ndemi Mathaathi was popular among her classmates and the Kikuyu elders of her community because “everyone understood the importance of education and uhuru.” But this song most likely represented more than education and freedom to the people of Ngoigo. This song also acknowledges the memory of Kikuyu customs, the continuous transformation of Kikuyu tradition to modernity, the changing armature of Kikuyu leadership, and the future negotiation process for communicating with the outside world.

At every level, the functioning of African colonial societies depended on the availability and mediation of useful information and knowledge. The majority of the existing literature on “colonial knowledge” focuses on one area of this broad field: the various forms of knowledge about their subjects on which colonial states depended. Most of our attempts to understand such knowledge have tended to analyze colonial knowledge as a system: we have tried to identify which were the sets of shared basic assumptions and rules that governed the creation and presentation of knowledge. In analyzing the processes through which colonial knowledge was produced, we have looked at the role of “Orientalism” and other forms of “Othering.” We have examined various investigative modalities. Finally, we have seen how such knowledge may be compared to a pidgin language that allows for communication between colonizers and representatives of the colonized. We have also examined the opportunities for Africans to manipulate the outcomes of colonial knowledge creation, as well as such basic but essential factors as the realities of government support and funding.

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.

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.

Between 1931 and 1937, the Anglican missionary G. T. Basden represented the Igbo people on the Nigerian Legislative Council. The Igbo had not elected Basden as their representative; he had been appointed by the colonial government. Basden's appointment seems remarkable. In 1923 the Legislative Council had been expanded to include seats for Unofficial Members, representing a number of Nigerian areas, with the expressed aim of increasing African representation on the Council. In selecting Basden the government went against their original intention that the representative of the Igbo area would be a Nigerian. However, the government decided that there was no “suitable” African candidate available, and that the appointment of a recognized European expert on the Igbo was an acceptable alternative. This choice throws light on a number of features of the Nigerian colonial state in 1930s, including the limitations of African representation and the definition of what would make a “suitable” African candidate.

In this paper I am concerned with the question of how Basden became recognized as an expert by the colonial government and also, more generally, with the linkages between colonial administrations' knowledge requirements and missionary knowledge production. Missionary-produced knowledge occupied a central, but also somewhat awkward position in colonial society. On the one hand, colonial governments and missions shared a number of common assumptions and expectations about African peoples. On the other hand, there also existed tensions between missions and government, partly reflecting differing missionary and administrative priorities, which means that the missionary expert was not often recognized as such.