British imperial administration in Africa and Asia has originally been characterized as “indirect rule,” but the concept of “indirect rule” has been faulted for several shortcomings, including its inadequacy in explaining relations between the limited number of European officials and the predominance of indigenous personnel in government. Recent research has rather identified political clientage as a suitable model for examining the structures and dynamics of British rule in the non-European world from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Clientage denotes a mutually beneficial relationship and solidarity between individuals or groups of unequal status and influence in society. It is characterized by dependency between a client and a patron, with varying command over resources and values. This system of cultivating relations of personal loyalty developed as a principle of political activity in many social formations.

Clientage operation necessarily involved brokerage. As a medium for political interaction, clientage in indigenous hierarchies embodied agency and linkage between ruling élites and subjects. Accordingly, clientage involved political mediation, which required brokerage or intermediary service. Similarly, clientage in the colonial context essentially involved interaction between hierarchies of imperial rulers and those of the subordinate indigenous government. Mediation and brokerage between governing officials and indigenous rulers also constituted a vital element in imperial governance and administration.

In 1913 an old chest was discovered in a manor house in Worcestershire in the west of England. Packed with bundles of manuscripts, it contained several hundred letters and business papers written in a crabbed italic hand. These documents belonged to Thomas Bowrey, an English overseas merchant, who was born in 1662 and died in 1713. The collection of papers was later purchased by Colonel Henry Howard, and in 1931 part of it was presented to the Guildhall Library in London. These documents include an incomplete manuscript titled “Discription of the Coast of Affrica from the Cape of Good Hope, to the Red Sea” dated 1708. The notes indicate that Bowrey intended to write a book that encompassed descriptions of all the major ports of the region.

Only fragments of the draft survive. Most of the manuscript contains amendments, crossed-out sections, and blank spaces. The text consists of different versions of a preface, brief accounts of the Dutch Cape Colony and Delagoa Bay in Mosambique, as well as a draft portion which has the title “Islands of ye Coast of Africa on ye East Side of ye Cape of Good Hope: Places of Trade on Madagascar.” The densely written and in part hardly legible text is on sixteen folio pages. It gives information about Assada, Old Masselege, Manangara, New Masselege, Terra Delgada, Morondava, Crab Island, St. Vincent, St. Iago, Tulear, St. Augustin Bay, St. John's, Port Dauphin, Matatana, Bonavola, St. Mary's Island, and Antongil Bay. This document also includes descriptions of Mauritius and Bourbon, nowadays called Réunion. Most of these places were visited by English, Dutch, and French seafarers in the last decades of the seventeenth century.

Benjamin Anderson (1835-1910), Liberia's great explorer of the nineteenth century, was at the forefront of encouraging the government to establish a viable economic and political presence in the deep interior. Anderson migrated from Baltimore, Maryland, when he was sixteen years old, and became a three-time Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of the Interior, mathematics professor, official surveyor, diplomat, military officer, and accomplished cartographer. He is most noted for having traveled to the fabled town of Musadu in today's Guinea. Musadu seemed to hold much promise to enrich the young colony because of its supposed natural resources such as gold, a strong political base, and connections to the interior trade routes that extended to the Niger River and beyond.

Primary source information about Anderson's life comes from his own writings, scattered publications, and archival materials. The most complete contemporary account—published here—is an obituary that an unknown author wrote shortly after Anderson died. The obituary was located in the Frederick Starr Papers (Box 9, Folder 9) in the Department of Special Collections at the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library in 2000. It is typed on 8 ½″ × 14″ paper with “Republic of Liberia, Montserrado County, Superintendents Office” pre-printed on the back of each sheet. This paper's title is the same as the original title of the obituary. The document gives several interesting bits of information about Anderson's life that are not found in any other sources, and contains considerable data that can be independently confirmed.

In the summer months of 2005 I traveled to London for the purpose of carrying out archival research in the Oriental and India Office Collection (OIOC) of the British Library at Kings Cross. My aim was to document the history of Indian immigration to the former British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia), about which very little has been published. The OIOC contains a vast amount of material relating to Asia and Africa—reportedly some 14 kilometers of shelving—including the India Office Records (IOR) and its key manuscripts detailing Indians' migration to British Central Africa.

Indians' arrival into Northern Rhodesian territory can be traced in these archives to 1905, and I was interested in the period from then until the independence of the country in 1964. The information held in the IOR is partic ularly rich: because the India Office acted as an intermediary among the Colonial Office in London, the Governor's Office in Northern Rhodesia, and the Government of India in New Delhi, the records bring together and represent the concerns of all the official actors. However, when India achieved sovereignty in 1947 the doors of the India Office closed and matters relating to the Indian diaspora were transferred to the Commonwealth Relations Office and the Dominion and Colonial Offices, whose interests were empire-wide. These sets of files are presently held in the National Archives at Kew.

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.

The longtime-accepted equation of Xian with the Siamese kingdom of Suhkothai having been discarded now …

Knowledge and speculation would appear to have been confused.”

“Considering the enormous output … of theories concerning the Assyrian kings and their chronology—by far the greater art of which has proved untenable in the light of later discoveries and most of which, as we can see now, might well have

been avoided by refraining from premature speculation …

As I was growing up—when the automobile was becoming a standard accoutrement—two large car parks were in the downtown area of the city where I lived. These were not street level but were laid out 15 to 25 feet below the streets, and thousands of cubic yards of dirt had been removed to create these. Since then, much reconstruction (“urban renewal”) has occurred in the area, which entailed putting back just about as much dirt as had been removed earlier. Doubtless, each project required an enormous amount of time, labor, and money, yet the end result was a configuration very much like that which had existed before one minute, one bead of sweat, and one dollar had been spent. Some might regard this as simply an accommodation of differing needs for different times, whereas others might wonder how necessary it all had been—why, for instance, was it thought useful to render these car parks subterranean in the first place. Was the dirt needed elsewhere? Or were they make-work public works projects during economic downtimes? In short, what was the point? After all, the car parks were surrounded by imposing concrete walls, ramps were constructed to gain access; even the floors were concrete to neutralize the elements.

Existing studies of colonial architecture and urbanism in Morocco—much as in the case of France's other African holdings—usually highlight the political intentions of foreign administrators, not the local residents who lived and worked there. After three years of research in Moroccan archives, I came upon many primary sources that will allow historians to show Moroccans as energetic actors who shaped urban life in the French Protectorate (1912-56). The documents that I found hold significant potential for unraveling the social history of trades, neighborhoods, and institutions in the medina. The term “medina” designates the narrow streets and walled quarters of the premodern city, which colonial administrators kept distinct from the modern Ville Nouvelle built for European use. These sources make it clear that French administrators implementing urban policies in the medina faced the day-to-day responses of ordinary Moroccans of various social and economic classes. More importantly, they suggest that the colonial encounter played a secondary role in the quotidian choices of these residents, who worried more about relations with other locals, such as trouble-some neighbors or avaricious shopkeepers, than with French officers and civilians located in the Ville Nouvelle.

My own research focuses on the experiences of millers and butchers in Fez, but my insights into the archival treasures of this North African kingdom will help historians interested in other cities and socio-economic groupings. In this paper I will discuss five distinct types of documentation: archives of the municipality, archives of the Department of Fine Arts, documentation on religious endowments, land titles, and transcripts of judicial proceedings. By exploiting these sources, historians can begin to reconsider how and why Moroccans shaped the physical and socio-economic development of their cities.

Since 1990 I have been working on a critical edition of records of the Royal African Company of England (hereafter RAC), preserved in the Rawlinson collection of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. This material comprises letter-books containing correspondence received at the RAC's West African headquarters, Cape Coast Castle, mainly from the Company's other factories on the Gold Coast, during the period from 1681 to 1699 (though with some gaps). Two volumes of this correspondence, covering the years 1681-83 and 1685-88, were published in 1997 and 2001; a third and final volume, presenting correspondence from 1691-99, is now published.

Although attention was drawn to this material in the 1970s, only limited use has hitherto been made of it by historians. The only substantial published study of the Gold Coast which makes extensive use of the Rawlinson material is that by Ray Kea (1982), which deals with general social and economic structures and their transformations, rather than with the detailed course of events. The general neglect of this material has undoubtedly been due, in large part, to its user-unfriendly arrangement, the letters being entered according to the date of their receipt at Cape Coast, without regard for geographical provenance, which makes the process of locating documents which relate to any particular locality extremely tedious—an obstacle which its publication has now removed. The potential utility of this material in the detailed reconstruction of events on the Gold Coast is illustrated here by the case of the “Komenda Wars” of 1694-1700.

Mende raiders caught Mr. Goodman, “an educated young Sierra Leonean clerk,” at Mocolong, where he “was first tortured by having his tongue cut out, and then being decapitated.” His was a brutal fate, not unlike those which befell scores of his fellow Sierra Leoneans in the spring of 1898. Others were stripped of their Europeanstyle clothes and systematically dismembered, leaving only mutilated bodies strewn across forest paths or cast into rivers. Stories of harrowing escapes and near-death encounters circulated widely. Missionary stations burned and trading factories lost their stocks to plunder. Desperate cries were heard in Freetown. Send help. Send gun-boats. Send the West India Regiment. Almost two years after the British had legally extended their control beyond the colony of Sierra Leone, Mende locals demonstrated that colonial law had yet to win popular assent.

In 1898 Great Britain fought a war of conquest in the West African interior. To the northeast of the Colony, armed divisions pursued the Temne chief Bai Bureh's guerrilla fighters through the hot summer months, while in the south the forest ran with Mende “war-boys,” small bands of fighters who emerged onto mission stations and trading factories, attacked, and then vanished. Mr. Goodman had had the misfortune to pursue his living among the latter. In the north, Bai Bureh fought a more easily definable ‘war,’ a struggle which pitted his supporters against imperial troops and other easily identified representatives of the colonial government. No reports of brutalities done to civilians ensued. In the south, however, Sierra Leoneans and missionaries, both men and women, joined British troops and officials on the casualty rolls.

Fifty years ago, a group of 100 ivory carvings from West Africa was first identified by the English scholar William Fagg as constituting a coherent body of work. In making this important identification, Fagg proposed the descriptive label “Afro-Portuguese ivories.” Then, as now, the provenance and dating of these carved spoons, chalices (now recognized as salt cellars), horns, and small boxes posed a challenge to art historians. Fagg proposed three possible geographical origins: Sierra Leone, the Congo coast (Angola, ex-Zaïre), and the Yoruba-inhabited area of the old Slave Coast. Although Fagg was initially inclined on stylistic grounds to accept the Yoruba hypothesis, historical documents soon made it clear that the ivories—or at least many of them—were associated with Portuguese commerce in Sierra Leone. This trade developed in the final decades of the fifteenth century.

Today approximately 150 works have been identified by scholars as belonging to the “corpus” of carved ivories from West Africa. Although the sobriquet “Afro-Portuguese” remains the most common appellation, these pieces should more appropriately be referred to as Luso-African ivories. The latter term more accurately reflects the objects' creation by West African sculptors who were working within Africa. The works, although hybrid in inspiration, are far more African than they are Portuguese. In addition, no documentary evidence exists to indicate that any of the ivories were carved by African artists living in Portugal. West African artists created the sculptures within the context of their own cultures.

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.

The Akoko-Ikale constitute a significant part of the Ikale sub-ethnic group in southeastern Yorubaland. However, as far as Yoruba historiography is concerned, the Akoko-Ikale and indeed the larger Ikale nation have suffered from neglect because they remain one of the least researched groups in Yorubaland. As a result of the dearth of serious academic works on the Ikale people, official and hegemonic accounts of Ikale's origin and ethnic identity that became institutionalized during the colonial era have become the abiding mantra in Ikale contemporary historical discourse.3 For instance, the Akoko-Ikale, as well as the generality of the people of Ikale, who are culturally, linguistically, and biologically of Yoruba stock, are widely perceived to have originated from Benin and so are Edoid people.

The need to address and underscore the threat to identity posed by Ikale's historigraphical neglect and its fundamentally flawed Edo identity constitutes the major plank for this study. It is against this backdrop that this paper finds it expedient to focus on the origin and ethnic identity of the Akoko-Ikale. This important Ikale sub-group is singled out for scrutiny because of my belief that a systematic attempt at tracing the origin and pattern of migration of specific and very significant Ikale lineage groups such as the Akoko-Ikale represents the best way to discredit Ikale's widely alleged Edo identity and Benin ancestry.

As the pioneering generation of postwar British academics retired, some produced autobiographical texts which revealed the personal circumstances and intellectual influences that brought them to the study of Africa. Edited volumes have also provided broader reflections on the academic disciplines, methodologies, and institutions through which these scholars engaged with the continent. In one such text, Christopher Clapham and Richard Hodder-Williams noted the special relationship between extramural studies (also known as university adult education) and the academic study of Africa's mass nationalist movements:

The impetus for this study came to a remarkable degree from a tiny group of men and women who pioneered university extra-mural studies in the Gold Coast immediately after the [Second World War], and to a significant extent established the parameters for subsequent study of the subject [African politics]. Gathered together under the aegis of Thomas Hodgkin […], they were led by David Kimble […], and included among the tutors Dennis Austin, Lalage Bown and Bill Tordoff, all of whom were to play a major role in African studies in the United Kingdom over the next forty years.

A preceding article examined the ethnographic, linguistic and archeological enquiries of G.W.B. Huntingford (1901-1978) and L.S.B. Leakey (1903-1972) in the Kenya highlands in the “high colonial” era of the 1920s and 1930s—the one, a young settler, researching independently in the Kalenjin region west of the Rift Valley, the other brought up on an Anglican mission station in Kikuyu country to the east and then, as an ambitious prehistorian, concentrating his activities in the Rift itself. That article pointed to their contrasting approaches to these disciplines, observing how each in his own way separately compartmentalized his anthropology from his archeology, with the result that any sense of the history of the existing peoples whom they studied-Nandi and Kikuyu-was effectively denied. This sequel examines their archeology more critically, beginning with their basic approaches and methods, and then tracing the impact of their work on subsequent scholarship and research endeavors, and especially on those anxious to reconstruct East African history in the changing intellectual climate leading to Independence.

The article concerns itself therefore with what Leakey in the late 1920s designated “Neolithic cultures” in the Nakuru-Elmenteita basin within the elevated stretch of the Rift Valley, to which subject Mary Leakey subsequently contributed, leading to Sonia Cole's essays at synthesis in the 1950s/1960s; and also with the Azanian hypothesis of Huntingford, which was rediscovered by Basil Davidson in the late 1950s and, with some deft transformation, catapulted centerstage for an emerging picture of East African history of a positive and enlightened sort.

Between 1590 and ca. 1610 the English sailor Andrew Battell lived in Central Africa, first in Angola until 1606/07 and then in Loango. His reports about these lands are a priceless source for the otherwise poorly documented history of Angola between ca. 1590-1606, especially since his is the only known eyewitness account about the way of life of the notorious Jaga. He actually lived with one of their bands supposedly for at least twenty months (26-27). In addition his account is also one of the very earliest about Loango. Hence modern historians of Angola and Loango have relied extensively on him. They all, myself included, have used the text edition by E.G. Ravenstein of The Strange Adventures of Andrew Battell of Leigh (London, 1901) and did so without referring back to the original documents. These are, first Battell's information in Samuel Purchas' Purchas His Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages and Places discovered from the Creation unto the Present (London, 1613), and later, the more detailed “The Strange Adventures of Andrew Battell” in Samuel Purchas His Pilgrimes (London, 1625), also known as Hakluytus posthumus after its frontispiece. Given the absolute reliance of modern scholars on Ravenstein, it is worthwhile to evaluate its reliability compared to the original publications.

During the last twenty years, in conjunction with rapid political changes in southern Africa, scholars of the region's history have become increasingly interested in studying the experiences of people whose stories, like their livelihoods, were previously often restricted or ignored by those in power. This scholarly interest initially focused on instances of conflict and oppression, disclosing the violence and injustice that accompanied colonialism and apartheid, but more recent studies have given greater attention to different local and personal histories that do not necessarily share the same preoccupation with broader political issues. Rather than define their lives primarily in terms of their relations with Europeans, Africans were often more concerned with affairs within their own families and communities over which they felt that they had some measure of control and responsibility. Those problems were certainly instigated to some extent by European institutions, but they were usually addressed and managed in African terms and along the lines of locally-established norms and practices. Such African-centered historical viewpoints and activities, previously overlooked by scholars, are achieving greater recognition, but there are still numerous important sources that have not yet been fully studied.

A school has no textbooks: the teachers are told “débrouillez-vous,” use the notes you took as a pupil. The pickup truck breaks down and will go no further: the passengers realize they will have to find another way home— “débrouillons-nous.” A resourceful man, who has learnt to turn his hand to a variety of things in order to survive, gives his job description with a smile as “débrouillard.” In the Democratic Republic of Congo the phrase “se débrouiller” has entered the realm of myth, joke, and national identity. The French words even puncture conversations in vernaculars. Congo has suffered from a long history of colonial oppression, economic mismanagement, political dictatorship, and most recently violent internal warfare.

The Congolese know that they must learn how to manage on their own, to sort things out by themselves, to cope somehow, to get by. Such is the necessity of being able to deal with the unexpected or the unfortunate that Congolese joke—and many sincerely believe—that “débrouillez-vous” the “golden rule of resourcefulness” is written into the constitution. In a difficult situation they will remind each other of “Article Quinze.” Congolese people understand themselves as those who endure hardship, but have the resilience to rise to whatever comes their way, to cope with the unexpected. Indeed, so often does the unexpected occur that managing events as they happen rather than planning ahead for events that might not happen often seems the most effective way to cope with life.

Anthropologists pay considerable attention to the writing style, the construction of a text, and the question of ethnographic authority, particularly since Derek Freeman's critique of Margaret Mead's Samoa writings. Although the issue of representation of the history and culture of far-flung peoples in the form of the written report is a long and distinguished tradition in the field of cultural anthropology, the Freeman/Mead debates have raised a number of questions ranging from the problem of faulty citation practices to the issue of vulnerable ethnographic authority. The debate over Freeman's critique of Mead has developed into a major controversy and was featured at the 1983 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (Marshall 1993:604). Since then, numerous articles and books have been written on the debate, and while many people have become tired of the “whole mess”, the case continues to attract scholarly attention.

Critiques of Freeman often revolve around the sources Freeman used to support his historical argument against Mead, illuminating how Freeman used rhetorical devices, selectively omitted vital passages in historical documents that he cited, and “heavily” used partial quotations and (sometimes) ellipses, in order to “…undermine Mead's ethnographic authority and enhance his own” (e.g., Marshall 1993:604).

If there is to be a “great Karamoja debate”, then it is necessary to keep in focus the leading issues, with the constraints of historiographical and methodological concerns. Since 1990 publications on the Karamojong have in general taken the line expressed in Mirzeler and Young's abstract: “The transformation of local modes of conflict by large-scale infusion of the AK-47 has had far-reaching effects …”. Against this trend I cite the French critic, Alphonse Karr (1808-1890), “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”. My perversity is sustained by studying the Karamojong over 23½ years, living there 1984-86, and returning for fieldwork across Karamoja in 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2005. Taking copies of my monograph to deposit for Karamojong literati to read, the dominant impression was that mobile telephones notwithstanding, this was the same Karamoja. I will not have the last word, but history will.

The issue in Mirzeler's paper above is that “Pastoral Politics” has been mis-represented. Of course any part of an article cannot fully represent the whole, but my book cites Mirzeler no less than 49 times, often giving multiple page references. There is therefore no attempt at disguise or misappropriation: readers are invited and enabled to see for themselves. Where I have fallen down is in five sentences in one chapter, which Allen enjoys for its rare antipathy, where I have inverted commas in manifestly the wrong places. Sadly this is merely where my incompetence got the better of my conscientiousness. These five sentences were my précis, which I knew contained phrases it would have been appropriate to quote, so I marked them with inverted commas with the full intention of checking with the original article. Since I did not have it in my study, my intention was never executed, so now Mirzeler has his reward and I a lifetime's chagrin.