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States, Archives, and the Vivid Past - A History of West Central Africa to 1850 By John K. Thornton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xx + 384. $99.99, hardcover (ISBN: 9781107127159).

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A History of West Central Africa to 1850 By John K. Thornton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xx + 384. $99.99, hardcover (ISBN: 9781107127159).

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 August 2021

David M. Gordon
David M. Gordon*
Affiliation:
Bowdoin College
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Abstract

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Keywords

Precolonialtransnationalkingdoms and statesregionalarchives
Type
Review of Books
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 62 , Issue 2 , July 2021 , pp. 284 - 288
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Vansina, J., Kingdoms of the Savanna (Madison, 1966)Google Scholar.

2 Vansina, J., Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of a Political tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, 1990)Google Scholar.

3 J. Thornton, ‘Modern oral tradition and the historic Kingdom of Kongo’, in P. S. Landau (ed.), The Power of Doubt: Essays in Honor of David Henige (Madison, 2011), 195–208.

4 L. de Heusch, The Drunken King, or, The Origin of the State, trans. and ann. Roy Willis (Bloomington, IN, 1982).

5 J. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade (Madison, 1988).

6 Vansina, Kingdoms, 97.

7 Vansina, J., ‘It never happened: Kinguri's exodus and its consequences’, History in Africa, 25 (1998), 387–403CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 The precursors to Lunda and related institutions of government are described in Vansina, J., ‘Government in Kasai before the Lunda’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 31:1 (1998), 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and J. Vansina, How Societies are Born: Governance in West Central Africa before 1600 (Charlottesville, VA, 2004).

9 J. Staller, Converging on Cannibals: Terrors of Slaving in Atlantic Africa (Athens, OH, 2019).

10 See Vansina's seminal publication on oral tradition, Oral Tradition as History (Madison, 1985), which updated and deepened his 1961 intervention. See also J. Vansina, De la tradition orale: Essai de methode historique (Tervuren, Belgium, 1961).

11 On Kongo oral traditions versus written sources, see Thornton, ‘Modern oral tradition’. Thornton has published numerous reports on Portuguese and missionary archival sources. For example, see Thornton, J., ‘The correspondence of the Kongo Kings, 1614–35: problems of internal written evidence on a Central African Kingdom’, Paideuma, 33 (1987), 407–21Google Scholar; Thornton, J., ‘New light on Cavazzi's seventeenth century description of Kongo’, History in Africa, 6 (1979), 253–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the latter, see Thornton's translation of Cavazzi on his personal blog, a great contribution in making Kongo history accessible: https://www.bu.edu/afam/people/faculty/john-thornton/john-thorntons-african-texts/.

12 Vansina, How Societies are Born.

13 de Luna, K. M., Collecting Food, Cultivating People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa (New Haven, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Closer to West Central Africa, see the emphasis on smaller scale societies in Krug, J. A., Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom (Durham, NC, 2018)Google Scholar.