In John Fage's company one never felt subject to demands that his eminence be ritually acknowledged. Somehow he did not require this kind of reassurance and managed to be utterly free of pomp. Though he was the founder of our Birmingham Centre of West African Studies, he did not expect the rest of us to see its headship as his natural preserve. In the 1970s he unsuccessfully tried to modify the conditions of his university appointment so as to pass on the directorship to each of his CWAS colleagues in rotation, independent of rank. He was a man of elegant deportment and refined manners, cultivating what now seems an old-worldly reticence about his feelings and achievements. (At the time that oh so very British style could already induce some amusement in barbarians from, say, the European continent, South Africa, or South America. But some other styles that have become current since make one remember the old dispensation with nostalgic fondness).

All he did was done effortlessly, or so his behavior seemed to suggest: running CWAS, being a family man, co-founding (1960) and co-editing (up to 1973) with Roland Oliver the Journal of African History, co-editing (also with Oliver) the Cambridge History of Africa, authoring successful and much reprinted books, supervising theses, teaching undergraduates, helping to launch and edit the UNESCO General History of Africa, serving as the first Honorary Secretary of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom, serving in the Executive Council of the International African Institute, fulfilling increasingly senior functions in the government of the University of Birmingham, and this is not a complete list.

In a recent book, El Dorado in West Africa, Raymond E. Dumett examines the history of gold-mining in Wassa Fiase in the Western Province of the Gold Coast during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Among other thematic preoccupations, Dumett argues that until the late 1890s the British colonial authorities did very little to encourage capitalist gold-mining in Wassa Fiase. Resurrecting the ghost of local crisis, he argues that the colonial intervention in Wassa Fiase was due to king Enimil Kwao's ineptitude, structural conflict inherent in chieftaincy, and problems of African rulers' territorial jurisdictions.

Dumett also asserts that it was a forceful London-based antislavcry lobby and Governor George Strahan's tactlessness that drove the colonial state to intervene in Wassa Fiase. Although Britain was at the center stage of the unprecedented global commodification of gold in the late nineteenth century, Dumett evokes serendipity as the cause of the British colonial intervention in the gold-rich Wassa Fiase. Overall, his explication of the aims and processes of colonial rule in Wassa Fiase is couched in theses of an “unpredictable course” and “a government policy (more rather a nonpolicy) [sic] riddled with vacillation and half measures…”

The first part of the present study reviews the literature, while the second section, based on new official sources and newspaper accounts, gives additional insights into Enimil Kwao's slave-dealing trial and his consequent exile to Lagos, hence reevaluates the objectives of the colonial state and the Colonial Office. The study complements the work of Francis Agbodeka and Paul Rosenblum, who have respectively argued that colonial rule in Wassa Fiase paved the way for capitalist gold-mining.

In late 1719 the brigantine Hannover sailed from Port Glasgow on a slaving voyage to the Guinea coast. Shipowner Robert Bogle jr. and partners hired surgeon Alexander Horsburgh as supercargo to supervise their trade for provisions and slaves along the Windward Coast, Gold Coast, and at Old Calabar. The Hannover arrived off the Windward Coast in early March 1720, and during three weeks Horsburgh purchased two tons of rice and 21 enslaved Africans on Bogle's behalf. From 5 April to 2 May he traded on the Gold Coast, loading 75 chests of corn and an additional 22 slaves. The Hannover then proceeded to Old Calabar, and from late May to early July Horsburgh purchased 75 more slaves and 11,400 yams—stowing 6,000 tubers in the week before departure to the Americas. Horsburgh also purchased sixteen slaves on his own account—eight along the Windward and Gold Coasts and eight at Calabar. Illness and death followed the Hannover on its “unaccountable long passage” to the Portuguese island Anno Bom (31 August-4 September) and British colonies Barbados (arriving 31 October) and St. Kitts (November-December).

Eighty-seven of 134 Africans survived the voyage, only to be sold as slaves in the West Indies.

The journey of the Hannover, noteworthy as one of the few Scottish-based voyages in the British slave trade, is important for Africanists because the surviving ship's accounts contain the first detailed list of African traders and notables in Old Calabar history.

There is no other theme in precolonial Benin Kingdom studies around which so many lances have been broken as that of consolidation of the present-day Second (Oba) dynasty and the person of its founder Oranmiyan (Oranyan in Yoruba). The main reason for this is the existence of considerable disagreements between numerous Bini and Yoruba versions of the oral historical tradition. Besides this, the story of Oranmiyan is one of the Bini and Yoruba oral history pages most tightly connected with mythology. This fact becomes especially important if one takes into account that the oral tradition is no doubt the main (though not the only) source on the consolidation of the Oba Dynasty in Benin. The key point on which different Bini and Yoruba traditions openly contradict each other, and which scholars debate, is the origin of the Dynasty. Who initiated its founding: Bini or Yoruba? Was it a request or a conquest? Are the characters of the oral tradition relations historical figures? Finally, what were historical, sociocultural, and political circumstances of the Oba accession?

If one disengages from details, three groups of traditional versions that describe the origin and life of Oranmiyan (including its period connected with Benin) can be distinguished. These groups may be designated as the Yoruba one, the Benin “official” (i.e., traditionally recognized by Oba themselves and most widely spread among common Bini) and Benin “apocryphal” traditions. In the meantime it should be borne in mind that Bini and Yoruba native gatherers and publishers of the oral historical tradition could influence each other. For example, the Yoruba Johnson could influence the Bini Egharevba, while the latter in his turn could influence another Yoruba, Fabunmi, and so on.

The 2001 launch of the fifth volume of the James Stuart Archive reinforces this publication's reputation as a mother lode of primary evidence. The Archive's existence is largely due to the efforts of two editors, Colin De B. Webb and John Wright, who transformed a tangle of notes into lucid text. They deciphered the interviews that Natal colonist James Stuart conducted with a range of informants, many of them elderly isiZulu-speaking men. Transcribed by Stuart between the 1890s and 1920s, these discussions often explored in vivid detail the customs, lore, and lineages of southern Africa. Although references to the Archive abound in revisionist histories of southern Africa, few scholars have assessed how testimonies recorded by Stuart have critically influenced such pioneering research. Fewer still have incorporated the compelling views of early twentieth-century cultural change that Stuart's informants bring to a post-apartheid understanding of South Africa's past.

Well before the University of Natal Press published volume 5, the evidence presented in the Archive had already led scholars of South African history into fertile, unmarked terrain. One example of groundbreaking data can be found in the statements of volume 4's master interpreter of Zulu power, Ndukwana kaMbengwana. His observations of the past anchor recent studies that debunk myths surrounding the early-nineteenth-century expansion of Shaka's kingdom. Ever timely, the endnotes in volume 5 discuss these reappraisals of historical interpretation and methodology. Editor John Wright elaborates in his preface: “By the time we picked up work on volume 5, we were starting to take note … that oral histories should be seen less as stories containing a more or less fixed ‘core’ of facts than as fluid narratives whose content could vary widely.”

The absence of writing from indigenous sub-Saharan cultures has often been identified as one of the key elements that distinguished African societies from those of Europe and Asia. Literacy permits an extension of the range of human intercourse, increased bureaucratic and commercial complexity, and an enlargement and stabilization of political scale. Some scholars suggest that it also encourages a more abstract and detached way of thinking about present-day problems. Writing is, moreover, commonly assumed to transform people's understanding of the past. The evidence, therefore, that the kingdom of Bunyoro in western Uganda possessed an indigenous form of writing is potentially of great significance. In this paper I examine the limited evidence that such a method of communication did exist, before analyzing its function and importance. I will argue that the use of a coded language of flowers in Bunyoro requires a reassessment of how power was exercised in precolonial interlacustrine kingdoms, of the nature of environmental knowledge in hierarchical African societies, and of Bunyoro's place in the historiography of east Africa.

It is especially interesting that the form of writing that developed in Bunyoro was based on a floral code, as the absence of both writing and flowers in African culture have been used by Jack Goody as evidence of African culture's separateness from that of “Eurasia.” Goody has written that African peoples generally did not make significant use of flowers in worship, gift-giving or decoration. He does “not know of any indigenous use of odours,” nor of plants playing a role in stories or myths. This is thought to be because of Africa's “simple” agriculture, “non-complex” societies and absence of a “culture of luxury.”

In late 1990 I found myself in the Department of Manuscripts at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh working on what was supposed to be a short-term project. The aim was to create a listing of uncataloged archival material relating to the eminent Edinburgh publishers William Blackwood & Sons. Famous for publishing George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, John Buchan, and Anthony Trollope, as well as for their monthly Blackwood's Magazine, the firm was a major presence in Edinburgh from 1805 to 1980. Over the years, most of their papers have accumulated in the National Library of Scotland, making the Blackwood Papers one of the most complete archives of publishing activity to be found anywhere in Britain. I spent nine months trying to tackle this mountain of correspondence, financial records, ledgers and ephemera. Over a decade and several academic posts later, I am still in Edinburgh, and still digging through this mound of historical documentation.

One of the most intriguing of untold tales, and one of extreme importance for historians of Africa, is to be found scattered throughout the correspondence files of the firm, and centers round three items innocuously labeled in the NLS catalog as “MS. 4872-4. John Hanning Speke. Manuscript and proofs of Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile.” Speke's role in African exploration is well known. His connection with Richard Burton in the attempt to find the source of the Nile in the late 1850s led to success and spectacular conflict.

Several studies have demonstrated the impact of oil in Nigeria, with recent literature showing that modern Nigeria can hardly be understood without oil. There is now an abundance of literature to present an overview of the subject. In this first piece, the modest intention is to indicate the range of literature as well as identify the broad themes. An attempt is also made to locate the themes in their historical context in order to indicate some of the major changes in the literature. Subsequent essays will identify the paradigmatic shifts in the literature, as well as the major gaps that exist. In addition, we hope to argue in another essay that large bodies of work exist to sustain reliable comparative studies.

The introduction to this essay sets out the themes to be discussed, and each receives separate attention. These themes include the impact of the oil industry on Nigeria's workers, environment, and communities within the oil rich Niger Delta. They also include the impact of oil revenue on Nigeria's foreign policy, national development, and political stability. An examination of the literature from the 1950s to the present reveals several clear patterns of change. The literature begins with an optimistic view of the oil industry, shifts toward in-depth discussions during the 1970s and 1980s on the impact of the oil shock, and currently resides on issues of environmental destruction and human rights violations incurred from the oil industry. The synthesis presented here privileges research-based essays and books.

These people [the Maori] have carried their history in their
memories for the last thirty generations, and what should
surprise us historical most is the continuity and the
wonderful richness of the material they can supply.
My word is pure and free of all untruth; it is the word
of my father; it is the word of my father's [father],
I will give you my father's words just as I received them;
royal griots do not know what lying is.
So, why are my lords laughing? My lords think it isn't true?
By the love of God, that's how it was!
My father heard the story from his grandfather,
who heard it from his grandfather …
But the scribe who wrote Hamman's tablet made a mistake.
He wrote “Aparha” on a tablet and, without getting heard,
encased it in a clay envelope.”

In 1652 Henry Holden expressed a precocious notion of the printed text:

In a way which is in no sense adventitious,
the relationship between an anthropologist and his
informant rests on a set of partial fictions half scen-through.
[I]deally, communication between a fieldworker
and the communities he worked with should continue for long
time spans, so that it is possible to return for further information.

Bebe (Malagasy for grandmother) arrived home in the late afternoon, holding a rope tied around the neck of a male goat. She had come from a market ten miles down the coast, away from the market at Androka Vaovao where the ethnographer had located his ethnographic research. Buying the goat at a different market was worth the effort to Bebe. She had avoided paying the white foreigners' price: the tripling or quadrupling of the locals' price charged to vazaba (white foreigner). The ethnographer was asked not to come along, not to make pointless the buying trip. Before she had left for market, he had given her money for the estimated price of a young mature goat. People in Androka would hear, eventually, of her purchase, which was fine to her. Going to a distant market indicated to her neighbors that she was not in the mood to be extorted with higher prices every time she bought something for her foreigner dependent “offspring.” Several months earlier, she had first referred to the ethnographer as her offspring, zanako, when he had given her a lump sum, a two-month advance, for room and board.

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.

Researchers keen to examine the representation of native people in European accounts of exploration and travel need bring under review the mechanism by which field notes became books, and, once they were books, the multiplicity and diffusion of editions, often themselves quite different from one another. An example that illustrates well this need is British Royal Naval Captain James Cook's posthumously published account of his third voyage to the Pacific Ocean in the years 1776-80. The standard scholarly source is J.C. Beaglehole's monumental edition, The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery (1955-74), a twenty-year editing project for the Hakluyt Society, which made available for the first time Cook's own writings until his death at Kealakekua Bay, Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), on 14 February 1779, during the third voyage. However, the need for Beaglehole's project arose, according to the president of the Hakluyt Society, because the original publications differed very widely from Cook's own writings. They were “official” accounts, published by order of George III, and they performed that always interesting exercise—they “improved” on Cook's own writings. It is well known that Cook did not prepare his journals for the press: in the case of the first two voyages to the Pacific, this was his choice. In the case of the third, the choice was not his to make, he being five years deceased. How wide are those differences?

In the case of Cook's description of a month-long mooring in Nootka Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, do substantive differences occur between Cook's logs and journal and Bishop John Douglas' edition? Answering that question necessarily involves consulting first editions of the various published accounts.

During the spring of 1927 a dialog was initiated through correspondence with the District Commissioner of Asante regarding the existence of a witch-finding shrine near the town of Mampong. As in most Asante communities, the people of Mampong had become both business patrons and seekers of the medicines offered through dozens of witch-finding movements that had proliferated throughout the Gold Coast Colony since at least late in the nineteenth century. Many in the British administration, and virtually all the Christian clergy, saw the practice of witch-finding and the presence of the shrines in towns and villages where the churches retained converts as icons of unenlightened behavior and contrary to Christian morals. Since some converts were also patrons of the witch-finding priests, the shrines were also seen as threats to the stability and retention of Christian folds. Europeans brought to Africa a multitude of social practices and ideologies of the person which they tried to impose through various forms of taboo, law, health administration, technology, and education. (Beidelman 1982: Comaroff/Comaroff 1997: Conklin 1997) Yet in the Gold Coast Colony after the annexation of Asante in 1896, no feature of the European colonial presence was more contested than the legal suppression of witch-finding shrines.

The opposing sides to the debate had witnessed the same events in Mampong, but regarded the disciplinary measures taken by the colonial officials from extremely contrary points of view. Acting under the direction of the District Commissioner, local British officials were on the lookout for new witch-finding shrines, identified by the British in the archival literature with the European term of “fetish.”

Once upon a time, in the euphoric 1960s, a new generation of historians of Africa undertook to write the history of Africa and Africans through the ages, overturning previous Western suppositions that Africa had no precolonial history worth investigating. As J.D. Hargreaves has written, they were “excited by the challenge to apply their craft to the continent which Hegel had judged ‘no historical part of the world’.” Among the explorers of the largely unmapped territories of prccoloniai history were members of the Makerere Department of History and their students, many of whom were to become professional historians. This essay sketches the construction of a modern Department of History at Makerere, a task requiring a new curriculum and a new staff.

Makerere began in 1922 as a government technical school for Africans. Courses in medicine and teacher training soon replaced the original more “vocational” instruction in carpentry, surveying, mechanics, and the like. The next several decades saw an evolution into a “higher college,” preparing students from all over East Africa for examinations leading to university degrees. By the late 1930s, a top-level commission recommended fulfilment of an early forecast that Makerere would one day become a university college. In the meantime, as World War II put off any substantial changes, it loomed ever greater as the legendary “mountain” that only the best could ascend. In 1950, finally fulfilling the forecast, Makerere joined in a Special Relationship with the University of London to become the University College of East Africa.

Several scholars of the First World War in Southern Africa have briefly looked at the composition of the Rhodesia Native Regiment (RNR), which was formed in Southern Rhodesia in 1916 and fought in the German East Africa campaign until the armistice in November 1918. According to Peter McLaughlin, who has written the most about Zimbabwe and the Great War, “[b]y 1918 seventy-five per cent of the 2360 who passed through the ranks of the regiment were ‘aliens;’ over 1000 came from Nyasaland. The Rhodesia Native Regiment had thus lost its essentially ‘Rhodesian’ character.” This would seem to suggest that because the RNR had many soldiers who originated from outside Zimbabwe, this regiment was somehow less significant to Zimbabwe's World War I history. While McLaughlin admits that “the evidence on the precise composition of the Rhodesia Native Regiment is not available”, he claims that “approximately 1800 aliens served in the unit.”

In a recent book on Malawi and the First World War, Melvin Page agrees with McLaughlin's estimate that “probably more than 1000 Malawians joined the Rhodesian Native Regiment.” However, Page freely admits that the evidence on which this approximation is based is far from conclusive. By looking at the available evidence, particularly a previously unutilized regimental nominal roll in the Zimbabwe National Archives, it is possible to gain a clearer picture of the composition of the only African unit from Zimbabwe to have fought in the First World War. This analysis will not only deal with the nationality of the soldiers, which is what the two previous writers focused on, but also their ethnic/regional origin and pre-enlistment occupations.

Parler des sources allemandes de l'histoire du Nigeria peut paraître quelque peu insolite, ce pays n'ayant jamais été une colonie allemande. Mais sa diversité, sa civilisation qui compte parmi les plus brillantes de l'Afrique Noire précoloniale ainsi que les nombreuses possibilités économiques qu'elle offre lui ont attiré bien de convoitises. Outre les Britanniqucs qui en firent leur possession, des voyageurs, des hommes de science, des commerçants, des missionnaires, des militaires et des administrateurs coloniaux des autres nations européennes y ont défilé, pour divers motifs. Ces séjours, brefs mais parfois répétés pour les uns et de longue durée pour les autres, ont permis aux nations dont les ressortissants étaient nombreux et très actifs de constituer ou d'accumuler une abondante documentation dont l'intérêt réside principaletnent dans les renseignements de première main qu'elle fournit sur des thèmes majeurs de l'historiographic Nigeriane. Et pour être complète et cohérente, l'écriture de l'histoire du Nigeria devrait tenir compte de toutes ces sources disponibles.

La méthode exige en effet que, pour écrire l'histoire, on ne se contente pas de quelques renseignements, des renseignements qu'on a sous la main; elle exige qu'on épuise préalablement toutes les sources accessibles sans exception. Il est done d'une importance majeure que ceux qui étudient l'histoire du Nigeria d'après les sources soient en mesure d'utiliser toutes les sources; il faut que ce devoir, qui leur est imposé par la méthode, leur soit facilité dans la pratique. Il faut qu'ils sachent où sont les documents et qu'ils puissent les consuiter aisément.

In an article in History in Africa about the Ganda monarch Mutesa, Richard Reid argued that Mutesa likely suffered from syphilis. In a chapter on Mutesa in a just published volume, John Rowe concluded that the disease from which Mutesa suffered was gonorrhea. While on the surface similar—both sexually transmitted, neither particularly desirable—the diseases are actually quite different. Popular biographies often offer gossip about individuals' medical histories, but there can be legitimate reasons to investigate the medical history of past leaders, two of which are pertinent here. First, the medical conditions from which they suffered may well have affected their lives and their decisions as leaders. Reid addresses this point, speculating that Mutesa's syphilis may have progressed to an extent that it affected him mentally. Reid suggests that this might help explain Mutesa's erratic behavior toward the latter years of his reign, as he shifted his favor from one court group and foreign delegation to another. Rowe raises a similar point about Mutesa's health and competing groups, although in a different way. Rowe shows how Mutesa's illness became a point of competition between foreign missionaries and indigenous religious specialists as each sought to win his favor by curing his lllness. Reid and Rowe also both mention the effect Mutesa's illness had on the perception of him as Kabaka. The Baganda equated the health and well-being of the Kabaka with the health of the kingdom, and Mutesa's extended illness and bedridden state would not have been a positive attribute.

No event has an autonomous life. It's always limited to things around it.
Jean-Luc Godard (1966)

It only takes three generations for personal contact to be lost, and then the
memory, if it exists at all, passes on to strangers, us.
Peter Greenaway (1994)

In this journal (HA 20:185-235, hereafter 1993), Lee and Guenther attack me personally and my work, particularly my book Land Filled with Flies, which elsewhere they (1995:298) say has “a density of error and misrepresentation unrivaled in recent anthropology.” This is not the first nor the last such attack, which began in 1989 when, in a symposium at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Lee implied that I was complicit in destroying data that he insinuated I wished not to be available for further inspection. He also then accused me, along with my colleague James Denbow, of pandering to the supposed need of the Government of Botswana to create a homogeneous national identity. We were to have done this by orienting our research toward a subversion of evidence of differences among the various peoples—especially “Bushmen”—of the country. Lee has never retracted this nor his accusation of data forgery, although he (1993:20n6) has elliptically acknowledged that the latter is false. Since then, Lee and Guenther, together and alone, have expanded their litany of alleged malfeasance and intensified their attacks. Most recently, Guenther (1999) continues to accuse me of “doctoring” evidence (this term was first used in 1993:217).

Much has changed since I first undertook research in South Africa six years ago. It is only having recently begun a a new research project that I have realized just how different things are now. Even more has changed since the ending of minority rule, as there has been a restructuring of both the State Archives Service and of the libraries of national deposit, as discussed later in this paper. The paper emerges from my reflections at this time and discusses both my experience of using archives in South Africa in the past and some of the resources which I have been able to make use of in planning my next research trip. My original research was on Afrikaner nationalist politics and identities in the 1930s and 1940s, and I now plan to work on Afrikaner moderates and English-speakers in the United Party during the same period, examining issues of identity and ideology, imperialism and nationalism. My work has taken me to several different archives in South Africa, which fall into two distinct types. The first of these are government archives, and the second are university archives. This paper will draw on my experiences of the archives I visited in 1997 and 1998, and on a brief trip I made to South Africa in 2002.

Government archives in South Africa are held by the National Archives of South Africa (NASA), established in 1996 by the National Archives of South Africa Act (No. 43 of 1996). The National Archives replaced the old State Archives Service, and was structured to take into account changes in the provincial structure and to “reflect the post apartheid political order.”

In a previous article in History in Africa the rules and regulations of the Mombasa Club, dating from 1903 or earlier, were laid out (Frankl 2001). Since that article was written, the original Mombasa Club Rules, a booklet of sixteen pages printed in Mombasa and dated 1899, has come to light in the Public Record Office at Kew. One of the three signatories to that document was Rex Boustead, Proprietor. Edward Rodwell (1988:20) asked “Who was Rex Boustead?” This paper attempts to answer that question.

Altogether there were six Boustead children, of whom Rex was the last born. The Bousteads, originally from Cumrenton in Cumberland, were connected with Ceylon from the early nineteenth century. Rex's paternal grandfather, John Boustead St., was paymaster of the Ceylon Rifles Regiment for more than half a century. Rex's father, John Boustead Jr. (1822-1904)—his occupation is given as “Army Agent” in Rex's birth certificate—was an only son, the second of five children. He married Augusta Phoebe Twentyman (1824-1911) at St Mary's Walthamstow in 1853; between 1854 and 1863 she gave birth to six children. John Boustead Jr. had several estates in Ceylon, and it is clear from his will that he was a moderately wealthy man, for he left £6662, a not inconsiderable sum in 1904.

All the children of John Boustead junior were born in England, all married, and all died in England. Of the boys, all except Rex went to Harrow School. John Melvill (known as “Jack”), the oldest brother (who had east African connections), was born on 31 March 1854, at Walthamstow.