The Indian question in East Africa during the early 1920s can hardly be said to have been neglected by subsequent scholars. There is an abundant literature on it and the purpose here is not simply to run over the ground yet again, resurrecting past passions on the British, white settler and Indian sides. Instead, more will be said about the African side, especially the expatriate educated African side, during the controversy in Kenya immediately after World War I, when residential segregation, legislative rights, access to agricultural land, and future immigration by Indians were hotly debated in parliament, press, private letters, and at public meetings. For not only were educated and expatriate Africans in postwar Kenya by no means wholly “dumb,” as one eminent historian of the British Empire has since suggested, but their comments in newspaper articles at the time can be seen in retrospect to have had a seminal importance in articulating both contemporary fears and subsequent “imagined communities,” to employ Benedict Anderson's felicitous phrase—those nationalisms which were to have such controversial significance during the struggle for independence from British colonialism in Uganda as well as Kenya during the middle years of this century.

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.

The following exploration of social scientific thought as applied to Africa is an exercise in ethnography, not in debunking. At one level the argument, referring mainly to social change in western Zaire in the last hundred years, offers a descriptive interpretation which I assert is better than others. At another level I seek to establish what kind of phenomenon, in an ethnographic sense, historiography really is. At this level, I apply the methods of social science to a body of work in “social science” which is, in fact, myth, and which itself deals, in part, with a body of “myth” which is, in fact, social science.

In “African Traditional Thought and Western Science,” Robin Horton first shows the ways in which the first is like the second in producing model-building explanatory schemes, and then argues that the difference between the two is essentially that “in traditional cultures there is no developed awareness of alternatives to the established body of theoretical tenets; whereas in scientifically oriented cultures, such an awareness is highly developed ” He elaborates this difference between “the open and closed predicaments” in terms of such factors as unreflective versus reflective thinking, mixed versus segregated motives, absence versus presence of experimental method; these factors he finds superior in explanatory power to “most of the well-worn dichotomies used to conceptualize the difference between scientific and tradition religious thought. Intellectual versus emotional; rational versus mystical; reality-oriented versus fantasy-oriented …”

Only occasionally does Horton refer to social science, however; he seems to assimilate it to natural science.

The Atlantic slave trade in its various manifestations has never lacked scholarly attention, be it disinterested or selfish. The major focus has often been on the motivations and roles of those who participated in the trade other than as victims. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, interest tended to be confined either to the apologists for the trade or to its critics; but in recent years, the matter has not failed to engage the attention of more serious enquiry.

As a major center of the trade throughout the period, Dahomey has been studied extensively from the very beginning. Much of the work has regarded Dahomey as the slave trading state par excellence. Recently, however, I.A. Akinjogbin has advanced the stimulating and appealing argument that the Dahomey state was created partially, but explicitly, in defensive reaction to early signs of European interest in slaves on the Guinea coast. Akinjogbin further argues that–although Dahomey did in fact eventually develop into an important slave trading polity–it did so reluctantly and only because the Europeans trading along the coast demanded slaves–and only slaves–for their own goods.

Needless to say, attractive arguments rather have a way of being more readily (and less discriminatingly) accepted, and Akinjogbin's interpretation of early Dahomey history has already re-appeared in several important recent works on the history of west Africa. With this in mind, the present paper has two purposes. First, it proposes to examine the validity of Akinjogbin's thesis by examining one particular aspect of his argument: the motives of the Dahomey ruler Agaja (ca. 1708 to 1740) in conquering the coastal states of Allada and Whydah between 1724 and 1727. In discussing Akinjogbin's elucidation of Agaja's motives, we propose to concentrate not so much on the logic of his argumentation, but on his use of the sources on which any assessment of Agaja's motives must be based. With a single exception the material examined here is the same used by Akinjogbin, and in this sense the first part of the paper should be seen as a study in the use of evidence and inference.

The second part of this paper will be an examination of European and Dahomean commercial activities in the first few years after the conquest of the two coastal states. The sources describing these activities suggest that the motives and mechanisms of all parties were more complex than generally assumed.

Literature on ethnicity in Africa meets literature on multispecies ethnography to their mutual benefit. Multispecies ethnography considers people together with other-than-human beings, insisting the figure of the human is an interspecific one. We explore the ways in which multispecies ethnography needs history as part of a story about power and politics. But, the burden of the essay argues that historians of ethnicity need multispecies ethnographers’ embrace of a broader canvas of life, in motion at many scales. Historians of ethnicity need a greater awareness of change and continuity in the presence of other-than-human life forms, over time. Those same historians also might adopt the readiness of multispecies ethnographers to recognize other than the descent metaphor at the heart of thinking and making groups.

Writing in his Les Bambara du Ségou et du Kaarta, the French colonial administrator and ethnographer Charles Monteil considered the family name, or jamu, to

Monteil was right, to a certain degree. In the Western Sudan, family names are weighted with history and significance. Yet what Monteil characterized as evidence of stability and tradition, Charles Bird has more recently called a “ticket to mobility.” The fluidity and mobility that had come to characterize the jamu eluded Monteil entirely, just as its mutability often eludes contemporary historians.

A jamu represents both an all-important identity marker and an instrument of “mobility.” Yet it is also highly contigent, even aleatory. This mobility has a double sense, signifying both the mutable nature of the name itself and its potential for “making outsiders insiders” by creating an immediate link between people who would otherwise be strangers. Jamuw—the plural takes a ‘w’—also have a deep historicity. Embedded in them are history and myth, along with suggestions of family occupational category—commonly referred to as ‘caste’—and social status. Epics such as Sundiata often provide etymologies and legendary origins of family names, and scholars have sought—misguidedly—to use these to understand the historical processes of ‘caste’ formation and other aspects of the distant Mande past.

The digitization of African materials has made it easier than ever for students to engage with primary source documentation and undertake original research. Digitizing sources and using digital sources to teach African history has great pedagogical value, but must be done ethically. This article suggests a model for collaborative and publicly-engaged scholarship, demonstrating the potential of transnational projects and shared knowledge production while maintaining sensitivity towards questions of the hegemony of the North. The study draws on experience of a virtual internship project between North American-based university students and the South African non-profit South African History Online (SAHO).

English trade with Guinea in west Africa was regulated during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by royal letters patent. In 1631 Charles I issued a patent which entitled the Guinea Company, headed by Sir Nicholas Crispe, to the monopoly of trade from Cape Blanco to the Cape of Good Hope for a period of thirty-one years. The Guinea Company continued to operate during the Interregnum in spite of increased competition both from freelance merchants, known as interlopers, and from rival European powers. The Council of State in 1651 decided to allow the monopoly to run for a further fourteen years, but restricted the Company to an area lying between two points set twenty leagues to the north of Cormantine, its headquarters in Guinea, and twenty leagues south of the fort at Sierra Leone, leaving the remainder of the coast open to all English traders.

The East India Company was eager to gain a part in the Guinea trade because ships calling there on the way to India could exchange a cargo of European manufactured goods for a consignment of gold and ivory which was used to sustain operations at the factories in India. In this way the Company had less need to export large quantities of bullion from England to India, a practice which was both heavily criticized and formally restricted before 1660. In 1649 the East India Company reached an agreement with the Assada adventurers that the Guinea and East India trades should be united, but decided that this scheme could not be effected immediately.

In a book in which he gave an account of the reign of Tegbesu (1740-1774), Robert Norris, the late eighteenth-century slave trader historian of Dahomey, included a brief sketch of the career of Tegbesu's father, Agaja (1718-1740), the conqueror of Allada and Whydah. Norris portrayed Agaja as a nation-builder who brought the Dahomeans and the people of Allada and Whydah, “the conquerors and the conquered,” to think of themselves as “one people.” The author claimed that Agaja saw to it after the conquest that “every part of his dominions became replenished with people.” He also argued that Agaja's new subjects were so pleased with his policy of reconciliation that they made no “efforts to regain their independence.”

Norris' account of Agaja has been very influential, especially since the 1960s when I. A. Akinjogbin not only endorsed it but added both that Dahomey was founded by a group of patriotic anti-slave trade Aja and that post-1740 Dahomey was a European-like nation state. Norris' argument, as embellished by Akinjogbin, was reproduced in a number of authoritative 1970s works and appears to have retained its appeal even though Akinjogbin's addenda have been shown to be at odds with the evidence. Norris' original thesis nevertheless is just as flawed as Akinjogbin's various supplementary claims. Agaja was far from having been a nation-builder; still less was he a far sighted statesman who saw to it that “every part of his dominions became replenished with people.”

The ancient kingdom of Angola, or more precisely Ndongo—which until 1671 essentially existed in the area north of the Kwanza River in presentday Angola—and the neighboring state of Kasanje, which was established by the Mbangala around 1630—belong to what is historiographically one of the more privileged areas of Africa, the history of which is documented by written sources extending back into the sixteenth century. These sources are even quite numerous, and, because of their diverse nature, often complement each other. Thus there are documentary as well as narrative sources, eyewitness accounts as well as other types. Particularly primary, but also secondary (as well as “tertiary” and “quaternary”) sources differ greatly in quality. Despite such differences they share one common factor: virtually without exception they were written by members of foreign, non-African cultures, who came to the area as conquerors, slave traders, and missionaries.

However, the greatest problem these sources pose for historians is not their bias—for their authors were all more or less deeply involved in the contemporary political and economic circumstances that they purport to document. Rather, by far the gravest problem for anyone wishing to write not just Portuguese colonial history, but African history, is that none of these authors, unlike those who wrote about neighboring Kongo, lived at the African courts or among Africans (let alone were intimately aquainted with their culture), so that they were not able to observe or experience events directly from the inside. This considerably reduces the scope of the history that can be reconstructed and risks unjustifiably narrowing or distorting the historical perspective. The few exceptions, such as the reports told by the English slave trader Andrew Battell and the comprehensive syntheses left us by Antonio Cavazzi—both of which unfortunately have been published only as second or third hand renderings of their accounts—thus are accorded even greater historiographical weight.

Under the influence of certain conclusions in comparative linguistics, historians, archeologists and ethnologists have been led to believe that the diffusion of the Bantu languages could be linked to that of iron metallurgy. Yet from a purely linguistic point of view, the only indications of metallurgical knowledge by the Proto-Bantus are the reconstruction of terminology directly related to metallurgical techniques, reconstructions made on the basis of words gathered from the ensemble of present-day Bantu languages.

It is thusly that Guthrie was able to reconstruct certain terms such as: “iron,” “forge,” “hammer,” and “bellows,” which led him to the conclusion, as expressed in his last article on the subject, that “the speakers of the proto–language probably knew how to forge iron before the Bantu dispersion began.”

A conclusion of such historic import, however, was based on only a few words, the reconstructions and the original meanings of which were often confused. It therefore becomes necessary to re-examine on a larger scale the vocabulary related to metallurgy in the Bantu languages.

The special features of written vernacular history as a specific category of African historical documentation still await a general theoretical analysis. This article makes no attempt to remedy the deficiency, but considers two possible hypotheses from the relationship between Xhosa traditional historians and the Lovedale Press during the 1930s. First cf Vansina, that it is not only oral traditions which are affected by their mode of transmission. Second, cf Goody and Watt, that it is one thing to be literate, but quite another to find a publisher.

Perhaps the first printed work in Xhosa was that of a stoic-looking cow bestriding the legend “All cattle come from God,” which appeared in 1823. The writer was Rev. John Bennie of the Glasgow Missionary Society, and the printing was done at the Chumie mission station, shortly to be renamed Lovedale. From that time, Lovedale remained the focal point of the literate Christian culture which emerged among the Xhosa of South Africa's Eastern Cape. This primacy was reinforced in 1915 when the South African Native College (now Fort Hare) was established nearby under the chairmanship of the Principal of Lovedale. The Lovedale Press flourished along with its host institution. The only available estimates indicate that up to January 1939, 238 books were produced in Xhosa, more than in any African language except Swahili.

Between 1808 and 1862, officers primarily from the British navy liberated approximately 175,000 enslaved Africans from transatlantic slavers. Information on more than half of this group has survived in bound ledger books. Based on the assessment of extant data for more than 92,000 Liberated Africans whose information was copied in at times duplicate and triplicate form in both London- and Freetown-based registers, this essay explores the pitfalls and possibilities associated with using the Registers for Liberated Africans as sources for historical analysis of the slave trade. The article explains the relationship of multiple copies of the registers to each other, demonstrates the link between the African names they contain and ethnolinguistic identities, argues for crowd-sourcing – drawing on the knowledge of the diasporic public and not just scholars – and, finally, shows the importance of such an approach for pre-colonial African history.

To the historian, no less than to any other student of Asantesεm (Asante matters), the collected works of Rattray (1881–1938) are unavoidable, an ineluctable presence. There they sit on the library shelf--a monument of colonial ethnography and manifestly a major source--to be chewed over and ransacked, to be digested and distilled, to be scissored and parcelled out in the footnotes that support or refute an argument, and ultimately--and always--to be returned to again and again. All historians of Asante use Rattray and are grateful to him. It is important at the outset to record that fact of simple gratitude, for, to the historian of Asante, there is much to criticise in Rattray's work. What follows, then, is a critical assessment of that work.

La région sénégambienne, du fait de ses stuctures étatiques anciennes et fortement hiérarchisées, est une région de longue tradition historique. Dans chaque royaume, le pouvoir gérait un savoir historique qui se présentait comme une chronique orale des règnes. Les détenteurs spécialisés de ce savoir sont connus dès le début du XVIème siècle: les écrits portugais nomment de leur nom wolof, gewel, ceux qu'on appellera plus tard griots. Dès cette époque et dans les siècles suivants, les descriptions européennes, lorsqu'elles font preuve d'assez de curiosité, sont entremêlées de récits historiques issus de la tradition orale et communiqués par des informateurs locaux. Il n'est done pas étonnant que, dans la deuxième moitié du XIXème siècle, l'élargissement et le développement des usages de l'écrit se soient traduits par une floraison d'oeuvres issues d'une histoire véhicuiée par transmission orale depuis plusieurs siècles.

Yoro Dyao fut le premier de ces chroniqueurs sénégalais qui ont recueilli, traduit, écrit, compilé, interprété aussi, les traditions orales de leur peuple. Son premier texte, l'“Histoire des Darnels du Cayor”, a été publié, dans le Moniteur du Sénégal, en 1864. A cette époque, la formation territoriale de la colonie du Sénégal était à peine ébauchée. Celle-ci n'excédait guère le terrltoire du petit royaume du Waalo (à l'embouchure du fleuve) qui venait d'âtre conquis. Y. Dyao était issu de l'aristocratie du Waalo. A ce titre il avait fait partie de la deuxième promotion de l'Ecole des otages, fondée par Faidherbe en 1855.

With the rise of information technology, an increasing proportion of public African archives are being digitized and made accessible on the internet. The same is being done to a certain extent with private archives too. As much as the new technologies are raising enthusiasm, they have prompted discussion among researchers and archivists, on subjects ranging from matters of intellectual property to sovereignty and governance. Digital archiving disrupts archival norms and practices, opening up a field of reflection relatively little explored by historians. This article therefore seeks to reflect on the digital turn of African archives as a subject for study in its own right, located at the crossroads of political and economic interests.

Colonial sources can provide historians with a wealth of information about African lives during the colonial period, but they must be read against the grain, filtering out valuable information from the biases and prejudices of European officials. The task of studying African women's history using colonial sources is even more complicated, as women were not often the focus of the colonial agenda, and contact between colonial officials and African women was relatively limited, and often indirect. Particularly in those arenas of African social, cultural, and political life deemed as women's spheres, colonial officials had little incentive to intervene. As a result, historians of later generations are faced with relatively sparse documentation of women-centered social activity during the colonial era. For their part, African women guarded cultural and political spheres under their influence from outside intervention, thus making it difficult for Europeans, and particularly European men, to gain a full and accurate understanding of women's individual and collective experiences under colonial rule.

This paper will examine colonial research and documentation of African women's birthing practices.to illustrate both the potential for using these sources to understand some basic elements of women's experiences, and the limitations of this source material in providing deep and accurate insights into African women's history. Using an example from colonial Cameroon, we will see how European interest in women's birthing practices was motivated by colonial economic and scientific agendas steeped in racism and sexism, preventing European researchers from obtaining a balanced and accurate understanding of this women's sphere of social life. On the other hand, the documents reveal efforts of African women to prevent the colonial infiltration into women's arenas of influence.

Publishing in Africa remains so difficult an enterprise that many publishers have collapsed, their dreams disappearing with them. This is especially true of the print media, particularly newspapers and magazines. During the past century, many magazines and newspapers failed to establish a loyal readership, keep costs down, insure wide circulation, or turn a huge profit. Consequently, not many African magazines can be viewed as “successful.” Drum magazine, however, remains an exception.

In 1951 Drum, a magazine written for and by Africans, was established in South Africa. Drum enjoyed a great deal of success and is now widely recognized as having been a driving force in black South African culture and life throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In the South African historiography Drum has been thoroughly researched. The magazine's impact on South African journalism, literature, gender configurations, African resistance, and urban South African culture has been documented and often lauded by various scholars. Many former members of the South African edition's payroll, both editors and staff alike, have gone on to become successes in literature, journalism, and photography. Often such staff members credit Drum for directly shaping their careers and directly state this in their writings. Consequently, Drum is often associated only with South Africa. While Drum greatly influenced South Africa, its satel¬lite projects throughout Africa were no less important. These satellite projects cemented Drum's reputation as the leading magazine newspaper in Africa and each edition became fixtures in west African and east African societies.

As is well known, in his Nouvelle Relation de l'Afrique Occidentale of 1728 Père Jean-Baptiste Labat published material which led many later historians to suppose that the first exploration by Frenchmen of the furthest navigable point of the Senegal River, the Falls of Félou, was that conducted in 1698 by André Brue, chief agent of the Compagnie du Sénégal and governor of the post at St. Louis, following an abortive mission towards the falls despatched by Brue in 1697. However, in 1893 Henri Froidevaux published documents which showed that an earlier governor of St. Louis, Louis Moreau de Chambonneau, after a visit in 1686 to Galam, the “kingdom” containing the falls, sent two boats upriver in 1687 which reached the falls; and that after his return to France in July 1688, Chambonneau presented his superiors with a crude map of the falls. In 1913 Prosper Cultru published an account by a contemporary of Chambonneau, Michel Jajolet de la Courbe, a visitor to St. Louis in 1685–86. This account stated that Chambonneau had made an unsuccessful attempt to visit Galam in 1685, and that La Courbe himself, at a later date, (unstated but almost certainly 1690), during his second period in Africa, visited “the highest point in the river that can be reached.” Furthermore, La Courbe's account proved that Labat had misleadingly ascribed to Brue ca.1700 a whole series of journeys through Senegambia in fact undertaken by La Courbe ca.1685. Although the alleged achievements of Brue thus decisively invalidated do not include the 1698 visit to Galam, Brue's responsibility for the 1697 venture towards the falls is thrown into doubt; and other evidence cited by Cultru makes it less than certain that in 1698 Brue actually visited the Falls himself. In 1958 Abdoulaye Ly republished the Chambonneau manuscript map of the falls, and accepted that they had first been explored by the 1687 mission. Finally, in 1968 Carson Ritchie published two accounts by Chambonneau, written in 1677, during an earlier period of service at St. Louis, which, though not claiming that the author had yet visited Galam, stated that it had already been visited by other whites, presumably French colleagues. This indicated more gradual French exploration of the region leading up the falls than was once supposed, for even La Courbe, in a document of 1963 cited by Froidevaux, had spoken of Galam being “discovered only 7–8 years previously.”

Oracy is a hallmark of human society. So too is historical inquiry, as societies seek to identify and transmit those remembrances (or “imaginations”) considered important to defining collective social identity; in the process, they establish meaningful patterns by sifting and culling discrete perceptions through the analysis and critique, the repetition and elaboration, of competing testimonies. Yet, while oral communication and historical sensitivities have been present in all human societies for all time, the western historical profession was slow to mesh the two—slow to accept oral accounts as historical sources. In Africa initiatives to bring them together systematically emerged only in tandem with the growth of nationalism outside the hegemony of colonial constructs and, in particular, with decolonization.

To be sure, many people outside the discipline had considered the relations of oracy and history. But both advocates and adversaries alike saw a turning point when Jan Vansina forced the issue on the historical discipline (most decidedly against its will) in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While others before him had argued for the historical validity of oral sources, Vansina framed his position in broader perspective, as a conceptual bedrock essential to understanding Africa. Historical sources abounded in Africa, he argued. They could be identified and understood, and they were subject to the same critical apparatus as western written sources; therefore Africa not only had a history, but it was knowable in the same terms as history in Europe. This was the reference point that drove his work. Whatever position one takes on his work, Vansina is seen as among the first to challenge the professional discipline, to sustain the argument, to push a broad range of methodological tactics, to master the empirical material, and to produce work based on such methods, in such a way that his innovations could not be dismissed out of hand.