Corrections

Extract

Professor Philip D. Curtin of the University of Wisconsin has written to correct certain points made by Dr John E. Flint in his review of The Small Brave City State: A History of Nembe-Brass in the Niger Delta, by Ebiegberi Joe Alagoa (Journal, VI, 2(1965), 248). He points out that Mr Alagoa's book was a preliminary study in local history which was written in Nigeria while Mr Alagoa was in the service of the National Archives there. Since then, Dr Alagoa has completed a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Wisconsin, but it is not yet published. Dr Flint also accepts Professor Curtin's correction of his observation about ‘the difficulty of pursuing research in such a topic [of African history] from a base in the U.S.A.’ This would not, in any case, apply to the University of Wisconsin, since Wisconsin normally requires Ph.D. candidates in African history to conduct their research in Africa and in appropriate European archives.

Dr Robert Rotberg of Harvard and Herr Hans-Jürgen Greschat of the Philipps-Universität, Marburg, have pointed out an inaccurate compression of events in my article on ‘Witnesses and Watchtower in the Rhodesias and Nyasaland’. As some of your readers may come to accept my chronology of the imprisonment of Elliott Kenani Kamwana Chirwa (p. 92, n.4), perhaps I should set matters straight. I said that he was arrested, deported to Mauritius in June 1909, released by March 1914 and re-deported around December 1916. In fact, Kamwana was given the choice of restriction to Nyasaland's Southern Province or removal to South Africa in 1909. He seems to have returned in 1910, was sent back to South Africa, which this time refused him entry, and next went to Chinde in Mozambique, where he stayed until the outbreak of war, when the Portuguese repatriated him. The British once more detained him in the Mlanje District and after the Chilembwe revolt sent Kamwana and others back to Mauritius for about a year and then to the Seychelles until 1937. These additional details concerning his peregrinations are interesting in themselves and I thank my two correspondents for supplying them.