Until the mid-1950s all the received traditions in Nigerian Borgu were unanimous that Bussa was established by Woru, the eldest son of Kisra (alhough some versions claim that it was Kisra himself), while Shabi and Bio, his younger brothers, established Nikki and Illo respectively. These traditions were recorded in the early period of colonial rule by colonial anthropologists and most of these accounts are deposited at the National Archives in Kaduna.

From the 1950s new traditions began to emerge challenging certain aspects of these earlier versions. One such aspect that has attracted attention is the order of the establishment of the principal Borgawa states. The new traditions denied any link between Kisra and Bussa, and also condemned the prominent role assigned to the Emir of Bussa. The principal objective of the present paper is to explain the political situation that gave rise to the emergence of these new traditions, and to show how suspectible oral tradition, especially traditions of origin, is to political manipulation.

Edmund Leach and J.A. Atanda have demonstrated this in different works. In his work on highland Burma Leach shows how traditions of origins “change with clock-like regularity in response to shifts in the political constellation.” In his turn Atanda shows how oral tradition “undergoes revisions when regimes change, care being taken that materials ‘useless’ to the new regime are expunged and new ‘useful’ materials added to evolve to an acceptable ‘standard version’.”

Among the most intriguing unresolved historical questions concerning the women soldiers of Dahomey are the journalist's basic when, how and why (the who and where are givens). We know the amazons' terminal date precisely: the fourth of November 1892, when they fought their last battle against the French at the gates of Cana. But assertions in the literature as to when they got started range all the way from the reign of Wegbaja (ca. 1640-ca. 1680-85) to that of Glele (1858-89).

Neither Wegbaja nor Glele can seriously be considered as the originator of the amazons, though the former has a far better claim than the latter. The Wegbaja thesis rests on a tradition that he created the well-known corps of elephant huntresses, the gbeto, and on speculation that they became the first amazon unit. The gbeto may even predate Wegbaja: Palau Marti cites a tradition that he organized pre-existing huntresses into a special corps. Lombard offers the plausible explanation that since women provisioned the royal palace, it was only natural that some of them furnish game for the king's table. Dunglas seems to have been the first to write down the tradition tracing the gbeto to Wegbaja; he was inclined to accept it. P.K. Glèlè says Wegbaja began employing women as personal guards. Cornevin states, without giving his source, that it was the gbeto themselves who doubled as the king's bodyguards. None of this can be proved, and in any case no one has suggested that Wegbaja ever used women as real soldiers.

The rising of the Ndebele and southwestern and central Shona people against colonial rule in the 1890s has become one of the classic cases of such resistance. Yet, since the independence of Zimbabwe in 1980, very little fresh research has been carried out on the subject. This paper re-examines the role of Shona religious authorities in the rising, especially that of the medium of the Nehanda spirit of the Mazowe valley in the central Shona area. In just over a century, the figure of “Mbuya Nehanda” has become the best-known popular symbol of resistance to colonial rule in modern Zimbabwe. She has been commemorated since 1980 in statues, street names, a hospital, posters, songs, novels, and poems, and is soon to be the subject of a full-length feature film. This paper examines the historical basis behind the legend.

This legend runs as follows: the historical “Nehanda” was supposed to have been the daughter of the founding ancestor of the Mutapa dynasty, who lived in the fifteenth century. Her ritual incest with her brother Matope gave supernatural sanction to the power of the Mutapa state. After her death, she became a mhondoro spirit, and this spirit possessed a number of mediums (masvikiro, singular svikiro). During periods of possession by the spirit, the svikiro was regarded as speaking with the voice and personality of the original Nehanda and not with her own. In the last part of the nineteenth century one medium, Charwe, was responsible for the organization of resistance to the government of the British South Africa Company and the settlers in the Mazowe valley, and in particular for the killing of H.H. Pollard, Kunyaira, the extremely oppressive Native Commissioner of the area. This resistance began in June 1896, and from then until her capture in late 1897 the Nehanda medium was a major factor in the war. Tried and sentenced to death in March 1898, she refused to convert to Christianity and struggled right up to the moment when she was hanged.

Stephen Greenblatt has shown that wonder was the central characteristic of the first European encounters with the New World and the decisive emotional and intellectual experience in the face of radical difference (Greenblatt 1994:27). Wonder, says Greenblatt, appears to be a category immune to all denial and ideological co-optation, and it exerts an irresistible force. It occurs in a moment when meanings are lacking and is accompanied by the fragmentation of contextual understanding (Greenblatt 1994:33).

Wonder was already an essential topic of discourses in philosophy and art even before the voyages of discovery (Matuschek 1991); thus, for Socrates, philosophy begins with astonishment and wonder, and the art of poetry intends the creation of the wondrous (Greenblatt 1994:33). Greenblatt argues that the frequency and intensity with which European discoverers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries referred to the experience of the wondrous provoked its conceptual elucidation (Greenlbatt 1994:34). The colonization of the wondrous began; and astonishment became a means of appropriation and subjugation (Greenblatt 1994:42).

By the nineteenth century, the century of European journeys of discovery in Africa, wonder had been used up. English, French, and German travelers no longer wondered about anything. Their glance had achieved a confidence that allowed them to objectify and take possession of what was foreign to them. It was now the various Others, the objects of their glance, to whom they imputed the wonder they themselves were no longer capable of.

In the 1820s, when Imerina expanded to control most of Madagascar, remarkably few Merina rose in organized opposition to the king's extensive plans to change basic social and political relations. Tradition conferred sacred legitimacy on innovative royal interpretations of ideology and secured public consent with little resort to force. Potential conflicts between the king and Merina elites were muted by negotiations that proceeded within the premises of traditional ideology. As the king managed to monopolize organized force, occasional acts of violence assured that royal views of ideology dominated all others.

King Radama occupied the central position in the stream of blessing that ran from Imerina's collective ancestors downwards through him to all living Merina. As the ultimate living representative of all long-dead ancestors, he had the power to dispense their good will in the form of “superior” hasina in exchange for his subjects' offerings of “inferior” hasina. As mediator between heaven and earth, Radama alone determined how Imerina's hasina ideology would apply to the vicissitudes of everyday life. Merina, however, saw the reality that he created not merely as the product of human agency, but of ancestral beneficence as well. Since opposition to royal will implied the rejection of ancestral beneficence, attempts within Imerina to challenge the monarch's authority or the ideology on which it rested were rare indeed. Yet such cases of opposition did arise, and they reveal the nature of royal authority as seen from below.

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.

The immediate circumstances which led up to the founding of Freetown in the 1790s were highly contingent, even freakish. Christopher Fyfe has stressed the role of the scientist and dubious adventurer, Henry Smeathman, in publicizing the misguided view that the Sierra Leone district provided an ideal ecological environment for settlement. More recently, Stephen Braidwood has shown that the 1787 choice of Sierra Leone as a suitable locality for settlement by the Black Poor of London, the earliest settlers, came about as a result of acceptance of Smeathman's view, not by the white philanthropists and politicians who masterminded the exodus of the Black Poor, but by the London Blacks themselves—who knew nothing of Sierra Leone from personal experience but were convinced by Smeathman's rhetoric. That the Blacks were allowed to insist on their choice might itself be regarded as freakish.

Yet, seen in a wider historical context, the foundation of Freetown, and the subsequent development of the community eventually termed “Creole,” appear less accidental and extraordinary. Why, for instance, did Smeathman chose Sierra Leone for his butterfly-collecting on his only visit to Africa? Presumably it was because he was aware that he could obtain the support and protection of the trading settlements in the Banana Islands, on Sherbro Island, and along the coast between—settlements which had been established in earlier decades by the English-speaking families of the Caulkers, Parkers, and Tuckers, families whose very names (even if corrupted from African names) point back to the later seventeenth century and the activities on this coast of the Royal African Company. And perhaps Smeathman had read John Newton's published account of his early career as a resident trader on the same coast which, although full of complaints about his treatment by his African employers, at least showed that a white could survive there.

Typically—very typically—fledgling African historians launch their careers by engaging in a bout of fieldwork, sometimes in archives, but more often on location among a group of people whose activities have somehow captured their interest. Almost as typically, this work in the field then becomes the principal source for historians' future published work, which often never proceeds beyond the bounds set by the initial fieldwork.

In this process of course the data accumulated in the field—field notes—become, possibly over and over again, the primary sources for this subsequent work. In some ways this process is not particularly different from that undertaken by other historians who use printed sources more heavily. There are differences, though, not the least of which is that these orally derived field notes grow stale with the passing of time and cannot be revivified as easily as archival notes.

Moreover, of course, far more often than not, field notes are never allowed to escape into the public domain, whereas archival sources are usually already there when the historian sets about using them. What were once laboriously handwritten notebooks, and then audio tapes are now more likley to be 3.5″ diskettes, but otherwise they are as jealously guarded in the 1990s as they were in the 1950s. Indeed, perhaps moreso, in that the usable lifespan of a diskette is likely to be significantly less than that of the notebook, if not of the audio tape. In short, in perhaps twenty years posterity will find itself forced to rely on the published products—maybe yet in paper format?—rather than on the raw data which once underpinned them. In the circumstances, it might be worth considering once again the implications of this, with reference to a particular instance of respectable vintage.

The aim of the present paper is to examine the concept of western medicine in South Africa by exploring the forms through which its authority was established. The paper is based on an analysis of the South African Medical Journal (SAMJ), which resurfaced after 1893 as a monthly publication. Rather than seeing the SAMJ as a documentary source, I consider it to be a powerful representation of the making and meaning of western medicine and an indicator of the ascendancy and limits of western medicine. Most importantly, the SAMJ illustrates the intersection between an emergent western medical episteme and a larger colonial discourse of race and sexuality.

In 1990 Jean Boyd and I began work on an edition of the works of Nana Asma'u. If not a trail of tears, finishing this proved at least to be an odyssey, taking two or three times as long as we had optimistically anticipated. In hopes of making it easier for others to be more realistic, we provide a brief account of this sojourn.

Adam Jones, and especially, Knut Vikør, have provided extensive guidelines for scholars working with Arabic manuscripts and preparing them for camera ready copy. Most of the technology they describe is suited to use with Macintosh PCs, and for a long time it has been Macintosh users who have been best able to deal with Arabic script and Arabic diacriticals in the transliterated form. The comments offered here reflect experience with a PC using WP 5.2 in DOS beginning in 1990. At the time, the massive size of our collection—and the need to reproduce Arabic, Hausa, and Fulfulde in WP 5.2—meant that we faced a different set of problems than those considered by others in the field using Macintoshes. Without an upgrade to WP 6.1 Windows very late in the process, this project could not have been completed satisfactorily.

In “Donald Moodie and the Origins of South African Historiography,” Robert Ross provides an illuminating account of the political agenda which drove Moodie's impressive labor of archival research, transcription, and translation to produce The Record—a title which, abbreviated in this fashion as it normally is, neatly establishes the aura of neutrality which he intended for his compilation of documents. Sections of The Record appeared in print between 1838 and 1841. A decade earlier Moodie had begun to assume the mantle of historian, but his activities then are little known. It appears also that his motives were somewhat different from those behind the later crusade. At a time when the social sciences were embryonic, and Cape historiography was still undeveloped, Moodie's interest was engaged by the relations subsisting between the indigenes and colonists. As investigator he employed certain methods of the fieldworker, notably the oral interview.

Moodie has attracted a novelist, but not yet a biographer. In what has been published concerning him thus far, the man remains elusive. The entry in the Dictionary of South African Biography was prepared by the chief archivist of Natal and describes in a few short paragraphs his life before The Record and his transfer to that colony in 1845. Born in the Orkney Islands in 1794, Moodie entered the Royal Navy in 1808. A lieutenant at the time of his retirement on half pay in 1816, he left for India in 1820 but remained instead at the Cape, where his brothers Benjamin and John had settled. The next fifteen or so years, which the DSAB dispatches in a few lines, is the period which is of interest here. During that time he married Sophia Pigot and experienced bouts of insecurity respecting employment—aspects of his personal life with some relevance for the course of action he pursued.

In the works of many generations of white writers on Africa, the “Great White Hunter” has remained one of the most powerful and enduring images. A model of Caucasian masculinity, he quickly masters a hostile and wild environment in ways which amaze the aboriginal population, who are usually portrayed as savage and incompetent. Perhaps the best known real-life example of this classic image was Frederick Courteney Selous, a product of the English public school system, who hunted elephants in southern and central Africa during the 1870s and 1880s. Never having made much money from the ivory trade because of the dwindling number of elephants, Selous became an employee of Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company (BSAC) in the 1890s and worked towards the colonization of Southern Rhodesia. After fighting against the Ndebele in 1893 and 1896, Selous eventually based himself in England and became a recognized environmental expert, safari guide, and collector/seller of zoological specimens.

Through writing six books and numerous articles from 1881 to the 1910s, Selous successfully created and popularized an image of himself as a skilled, yet sporting, hunter, a painfully honest gentleman of the bush, and a friend, as well as leader, of Africans. He was an adventurer with a dramatic habit of narrowly escaping danger and these episodes were often illustrated through drawings in his books. Discussing one such incident, a writer of hunting stories once remarked that “throughout Lobengula's country the story went that Selous was the man even the elephants could not kill. It helped to build the ‘Selous Legend’ among the Rhodesian tribes.”

Palavers, great meetings, grand conferences, “tribal” meetings— these are terms used to describe meetings among peoples in and near Sierra Leone, meetings in which political, diplomatic, and economic questions are discussed and sometimes resolved at the village, intervillage, and occasionally, national levels. These conferences vary in size and importance, depending on dimensions of conflicts or questions to be resolved. This paper focuses on one such conference that convened at Forékariah, the capital of Moria, in 1805 and on circumstances leading to it. It is based largely upon a lengthy first-hand report deposited at the University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago. This paper is presented in two parts: a description of the conference and its placement in Sierra Leone and Morian histories, and the text of the report produced by Sierra Leone observers.

From the earliest records of British officials at Sierra Leone, there are citations to specific “indigenous” meetings and allusions to others that supposedly occurred (indeed they would have had to occur for certain events to follow). One of the earliest large conferences described in detail in these records is one that convened at Forékariah from 24 March to 6 April 1805. The extant contemporary written record of this conference was produced by Alexander Smith, the Sierra Leone Company's and Governor William Day's principal representative at the conference. Other observers from Freetown included William Francis, Andrew Moore, Captain Smith, and Charles Shaw. Alexander Smith did not identify a specific interpreter nor describe what method he used to record the detailed arguments presented by participants. Certainly the filter of language and inter pretation must have influenced the record's content. If one places the conference within the framework of Company and Sierra Leone history, however, and accepts the premise that the Freetown observers were relatively unbiased since they were not principal parties to the palavers resolved, the report can be seen as one of a very few in which Sierra Leone's officials presented themselves in such uninvolved fashion.

Of all the things that were produced in Africa during the colonial period—cash crops, states, and tribes, to name a few—history and tradition are the least acknowledged as products of the colonial situation. This does not mean that Africans did not have history before the white man came. Rather, I am making distinctions among the following: firstly, history as lived experience; secondly, history as a record of lived experience which is coded in the oral traditions; and finally, the recently constituted written history. This last category is very much tied up with European engagements with Africa and the introduction of “history writing” as a discipline and as profession. But even then, it is important to acknowledge the fact that African history, including oral traditions, were recorded as a result of the European assault.

This underscores the fact that ideological interests were at work in the making of African history, as is true of all history. As such, tradition is constantly being reinvented to reflect these interests. A. I. Asiwaju, for example, in a paper examining the political motivations and manipulations of oral tradition in the constitution of Obaship in different parts of Yorubaland during the colonial period writes: “in the era of European rule, particularly British rule, when government often based most of its decisions over local claims upon the evidence of traditional history, a good proportion of the data tended to be manipulated deliberately.” This process of manipulation produced examples of what he wittily refers to as “nouveaux rois of Yorubaland.”

Interdisciplinarity has become a sort of buzzword in academic circles. It is quite common to hear graduate students respond, in answer to a question as to what they are doing, that their work is “sort of interdisciplinary.” This answer might be construed as concealing some measure of confusion as to what exactly is being researched. But, on the other hand, there is little doubt that the most adventurous students are increasingly defining their areas of concern at the boundaries between disciplines. The matter seems to take on a particularly acute inflection in relation to Africanist research. This may be traced partly to the fact that from the very beginning of interest in African matters, much scholarly work on Africa in Western universities has been done under the rubric of “African studies.” Anthropology and history, arguably the disciplines most active in popularizing knowledge about Africa, have themselves always shared a common concern on the ways in which knowledge about Africa can be constituted. The monumental work of Jan Vansina and others in the 1960s in focusing on oral traditions and making them a respectable source for the construction of historical knowledge about Africa was thoroughly interdisciplinary in its own way.

Despite the implicit interdisciplinarity of African Studies, the theoretical implications of interdisciplinary study and the issues that it generates for questions about different types of knowledge does not seem to have engaged the attention of scholars. It is in this direction that I propose to go. I propose to engage with issues concering interdisciplinarity from the perspective of my own research on Nigerian literature. The issues that concern me relate to the question: what do specific configurations of disciplines within the interdisciplinary model have for the nature of the knowledge that is produced? But a series of subsidiary questions might be asked in relation to this major one, such as: are we being interdisciplinary when we borrow metaphors from other fields? or concepts? or whole paradigms? Or is it when we join different methods of analysis from two or more disciplines such that what finally emerges cannot be limited to any one of them?

The Institute of the Consolata for Foreign Missions was founded in Turin, Italy in 1901 by the General Superior, Giuseppe Allamano (1851-1926). The primary purpose of the mission is to evangelize and educate non-Christian peoples. Allamano believed in the benefit of religion and education when he stated that the people “will love religion because of the promise of a better life after death, but education will make them happy because it will provide a better life while on earth.” The Consolata distinguishes itself for stressing the moral and secular education and its enthusiasm for missionary work. To encourage young people to become missionaries, Allamano convinced Pius X to institute a world-wide mission day in 1912. Allamano's original plan was for his mission to work among the “Galla” (Oromo) people of Ethiopia and continue the mission which Cardinal Massaia had begun in 1846 in southwestern Ethiopia. While waiting for the right moment, the Consolata missionaries ministered among the Kikuyu people of Kenya. In 1913 the Propaganda Fides authorized the Consolata Mission to begin work in Kaffa, Ethiopia. In 1919 it entered Tanzania and, accepting a government invitation in 1924, the Consolata installed itself in Italian Somalia and in 1925 in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. Before the World War I the mission also expanded in Brazil, in 1937, and after 1937 its missionaries went to Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Canada, the United States, Zaire, Uganda, South Africa, and South Korea.

Conversation manuals and phrase books offer a window into the worldview of those who compile them, and might provide clues about society at large as well. Because they focus on ordinary conversation and verbal interactions, the inclusion of particular topics and sentences indicates what issues were important to the person who compiled the phrase book and might furnish information about everyday life at the time of publication. Information may be gleaned not only from the actual phrases, but from the organization of the book, verb forms, and other less obvious indicators.

Contemporary examples include phrase books in the United States that present basic terms related to housekeeping or construction for English-speakers who hire Spanish-speaking workers. Another example is from Joseph Lelyveld, who found the apt title for his book Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, in a Fanagalo phrase book. The excerpt “Move your shadow” was part of a set of orders for white golfers to use with African caddies, and was emblematic of white attitudes toward blacks during the apartheid era.

In this paper I look at the kind of social and historical information that can be extracted from phrase books compiled during the colonial era in Mozambique. Phrase books differ from dictionaries and grammars because they provide an idiosyncratic list of topics and sentences deemed important to daily life by the compiler.

One of the most popular and most widely cited books in the study of precolonial Africa, particularly of the forest region, is Jacob U. Egharevba's A Short History of Benin. It was first published in the Edo language as Ekhere vb Itan Edo in 1933, and due to its popularity and very high demand, it quickly sold out and was reprinted in 1934. It was then translated by the author and published in English as A Short History of Benin in 1936. This English-language edition has likewise been a bestseller with four editions—the first edition in 1936, the second in 1953, the third in 1960, and the fourth one in 1968, which in turn has had reprints in Ibadan (1991) and Benin City (1994).

In 1959 Leoham Adam, Curator of the Ethnographical Collection of Melbourne University in Australia, who claimed to have first read the book in the 1930s, commended Short History for its useful contributions to the study and understanding of African societies. The late R.E. Bradbury, in writing the first foreword to the book's third edition in 1960, claimed that it”…has become something of a classic, known and relied upon not only in Nigeria, but by scholars all over the world, [as]… a valuable, indeed an indispensable, pioneering work.” In a more recent critique, Adiele Afigbo asserted that the book and its thesis has “much support from many respected historians and ethnographers… and figure prominently not only in undergraduate essays but also in Masters and Doctoral dissertations.”

The later precolonial history of a vast area in west central Africa between the Kwango and the Lubilash rivers starts with—and is dated by—the tradition of exodus of Kinguri and his companions from the heartland of the Lunda commonwealth. For the last two decades, however, several scholars have claimed that this tradition is merely a later addition to the older body of the traditions told by a dozen or so different peoples in west central Africa. Yet so far no one has examined where and when and how the Kinguri exodus tradition could have grafted itself onto the traditions of so many peoples over such a vast area. If true, this claim also requires a radical revision of the accepted history of western Lunda expansion. To examine the claim and its consequences is the aim of this article, which begins with the earliest written report of the Kinguri's exodus story.

Readers of Leslie Bessant's article in HA 24 (1997) on the National Archives of Zimbabwe (NAZ) might have been alarmed by one of the photographs opposite the opening page, which depicted an archive in a state of advanced decay. If they had expected the photograph to be a pictorial representation of the current condition of NAZ, they would have been disappointed. The photograph was taken in the Sāo Tomé e Príncipe archives and accompanied a short note detailing the recovery work undertaken in those archives to make them usable. NAZ is a flourishing national archive which is a pleasure to work in, staffed by professional and conscientious personnel, but it is also bearing the brunt of cuts in funding and government suspicion of researchers. I worked intensively at NAZ for nine months in 1994-95, and again for five months in 1996. This paper is by way of an informal engagement with Bessant's article; in it I aim to sketch out my own reminiscences of NAZ and also address some of the issues which face overseas researchers in Zimbabwe.

Bessant spent a sizeable part of his article discussing tea, and the notions of privilege associated with tea at NAZ. Tea under the flagpoles became an institution for me. Not only was the tea absurdly cheap (Z$0.40/US$0.04 in 1994, rising to Z$1 a few months later), but the break was a useful refueling exercise during grueling days looking at dusty files. Rather than fading in significance as Bessant suggested, tea was extremely prominent in the day of the typical researcher. Tea was also the best way of networking with other scholars in the Archives, and almost all the useful conversations I had there revolved around the tea break—which sometimes became the lunch break if debates were intense. I made many professional contacts and personal friendships over tea at the Archives.