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Still Underused: Written German Sources for West Africa Before 1884

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Adam Jones
Adam Jones*
Affiliation:
J.W. Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main
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Extract

It is gratifying to receive compliments when one publishes books, yet I have mixed feelings about some of the kind words awarded to my two volumes of translations from seventeenth-century German sources on west Africa. What some people seem to be saying is: “Thank God I won't have to waste time learning that language!” Not only does this attitude rest on the untenable assumption that a translation is an adequate substitute for the original; it also underestimates the importance of those German works which remain untranslated.

For those interested in the colonial period, of course, the German literature and archival material is very rich--not only for Togo and Cameroun, but also for other countries, notably Liberia. As soon as the Germans became politically involved in west African affairs in 1884, there appeared a whole flood of publications dealing with this part of the world; and there is also a great deal of unpublished material for the whole period 1884-1939 which urgently calls for more attention from scholars interested in the African past. This is generally recognized (the usual excuse offered for not using the German material is the difficulty of access to the Potsdam archive); yet it is seldom appreciated how much German material there is for the period before 1884.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 13 , 1986 , pp. 225 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1986

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References

Notes

* This is a revised version of a paper given at the African Studies Association meeting in New Orleans, November 1985. I wish to thank Paul Jenkins, without whose help I would have been unable to describe the material of the Basel Mission adequately.

1. Jones, Adam, German Sources for West African History 1599-1699 (Wiesbaden, 1983)Google Scholar; idem., Brandenburg Sources for West African History 1680-1700 (Stuttgart, 1985).

2. See Heintze, Beatrix, “Translations as Sources for African History,” HA, 11 (1984), 131–61.Google Scholar Disappointingly, none of the reviews I have seen of my German Sources has devoted more than one sentence to the quality of the translation.

3. Between 1884 and 1939 at least twenty books and articles on Liberia were published in German and a number of publications on Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Guinea Bissau, and other countries also appeared. For Togo and Cameroun see Bridgman, Jon and Clarke, David E., German Africa: A select annotated bibliography (Stanford, 1965)Google Scholar; Knoll, Arthur J., Togo under Imperial Germany, 1884-1914 (Stanford, 1978)Google Scholar; Norris, Edward G., “Colonial German Contributions to West African Studies: A Quest for Unpublished Sources,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 101 (1976), 164–70.Google Scholar For late nineteenth-century publications see the bibliography in Essner, Cornelia, Deutsche Afrikareisende im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Zur Sozialgeschichte des Reisens (Wiesbaden, 1985).Google Scholar

4. For German interest in west Africa before the colonial era see (in addition to the works cited in note 1): Essner, Deutsche Afrikareisende; Brunschwig, Henri, L'expansion allemande outre-mer du XVe siècle à nos jours (Paris, 1957)Google Scholar; Plischke, Hans, “Deutsche Arbeit in Afrika im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert” in Beiträge zur Kolonialforschung. Deutschland und Ubersee (Braunschweig, 1950)Google Scholar; Sadji, Uta, Der Negermythos am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, 1979).Google Scholar Facsimile extracts from some early texts are given in Hirschberg, Walter, Monwnenta Ethnographica, 1: Schwarzafrika (Graz, 1962).Google Scholar

5. Modern editions with parallel French translations: Valentim Fernandes, Description de la Côte d'Afrique de Ceuta au Sénégal (1506-1507), ed. Cenival, Pierre de and Monod, Théodore (Paris, 1938)Google Scholar; idem., Description de la Côte Occidentale d'Afrique (Sénégal au Cap de Monte), ed. Théodore Monod, Avelino Teixeira da Mota and Raymond Mauny (Bissau, 1951).

6. Springer, Indienfahrt. (For full titles of German works published before 1884 see Appendix A.)

7. See Jones, Adam, “Double Dutch? A Survey of Seventeenth-Century German Sources for West African History,” HA, 9 (1982), 141–53Google Scholar; idem., “Archival materials on the Brandenburg African Company (1682-1721),” HA, 11 (1984), 379-89.

8. Mattiesen, Otto Heinz, Die Kolonial- und Überseepolitik der kurländischen Herzöge im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1940)Google Scholar cites several maps and documents (written in Dutch) at length. The latter contain disappointingly little information on Africa and, to judge from Mattiesen's remarks, there is little more to be found in the archival material, presumably now in Riga.

9. Tilleman, Eric, En liden enfoldig Beretning om det Landskab Guinea (Copenhagen, 1697).Google Scholar For archival materials see Reindorf, Joe, ed. Simensen, Jarle, Scandinavians in Africa: Guide to Materials Relating to Ghana in the Danish National Archives (Oslo, 1980)Google Scholar; Jørgersen, J.O. and Rasch, Aage, eds., Vejledende Arkivregistraturer, 14 (1969)Google Scholar; Sanders, James, “An Inventory of Microfilms of Selected Danish Archives (Rigsarkvet-Københaven) Concerning West Africa,” HA, 8 (1981), 339–71.Google Scholar Most of the German material I have found is in the bundles V-gK 1 and 77. There is also a list written in German of the company's correspondence--T.K.I.A., A 171.

10. Andree, Richard, “Seltene ethnographica des Stadtischen Gewerbe-Museums zu Ulm,” Bässler Archiv, 4 (1914), 29–38.Google Scholar

11. Zentrales Staatsarchiv, Merseburg, R.65.33 ff. 2-66v; R.65.56 ff. 93-205v.

12. Schott, Kurze Nachrichten; Einsiedel, Nachricht. For their role in German attitudes to Africa see Sadji, , Negermythos, 181–277.Google Scholar

13. Nettelbeck, , Joachim Nettelbeck, 2: 1–82.Google Scholar

14. Isert, Reise, letters 2-10.

15. Oldendorp, , Geschichte, esp. 271–335.Google Scholar See Hair, P.E.H., “The Languages of Western Africa, c. 1770: A Note and a Query,” Bulletin of the Society for African Church History, 1 (1963), 17–20Google Scholar; idem., “Collections of Vocabularies of Western Africa Before the Polyglotta: a Key,” Journal of African Languages, 5 (1966), 208-17; Fodor, István, Pallas und andere afrikanische Vokabularien vor dem 19. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur Forschungsgeschichte (Hamburg, 1975).Google Scholar

16. Translations appeared of Cadamosto (Nürnberg, 1508: reprinted Göttingen, 1980), Pieter de Marees (by two publishers, both in Frankfurt am Main, 1603), Olfert Dapper (Amsterdam, 1670; reprinted, New York, 1967). Whether the translation was by Dapper himself, as John Thornton has claimed, remains to be proved. Giovanni Cavazzi (Munich, 1694), Willem Bosman (Hamburg, 1708) and L.F. Rømer's two books on the Gold Coast (Copenhagen, 1758 and 1769).

17. Sadji, , Negermythos, 41–180.Google Scholar

18. See Schramm, , Deutschland, 170-216, 552.Google Scholar Schramm is good on biographical details, but studied the sources from a purely European perspective. He did, however, publish the original German replies given by the shipowner C. Hartung to the British parliamentary committee on west Africa of 1842, and these provide considerable information on German trade: Schramm, Percy, Kaufleute zu Haus und über See. Hamburgische Zeugnisse des 17., 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg, 1949), Nr. 14b.Google Scholar

19. Haas, Waltraud and Jenkins, Paul, A Guide to the Basel Mission's Ghana Archive (Basel, 1979).Google Scholar For a review see HA, 10 (1983), 411–13.Google Scholar

20. One can gain some idea of the contents of the archive from Volume 3 of the mission's official history: Schlatter, Wilhelm, Geschichte der Basler Mission 1815-1915. Mit besondrerer Berücksichtigung der ungedruckten Quellen (3 vols.: Basel, 1916).Google Scholar

21. The Staatsarchiv kindly provided me with a photocopy of its 39-page catalog for the Norddeutsche Mission records. See Maier, D.J.E., “The Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft Archives,” HA, 8 (1981), 335–37Google Scholar; Brydon, Lynne, “Mission Archives in Bremen,” HA, 11 (1984), 375–77.Google Scholar For the history of the mission see Schreiber, Anton W., Bausteine zur Geschichte der Norddeutschen Missions-Gesellschaft (Bremen, 1936).Google Scholar

22. See, however, Hornberger, Christian, “Das Ewegebiet an der Sklavenküste von West-Afrika,” Petermanns Mittheilungen (1867), 48–54.Google Scholar Schreiber mentions (Bausteine, 277-88) several works which I have not yet seen and which may contain some relevant information, including four biographies and four works by Zahn, Franz Michael: Die Arbeit der Norddeutschen Missionsgesellschaft (Bremen, 1864)Google Scholar; Einige Bedenken gegen die Mission (Bremen, 1865)Google Scholar, including a list of 126 ransomed slave children; Von der Elbe bis zum Volta (Bremen, 1867)Google Scholar; and Vier Freistätten im Sklavenlande (Bremen, 1870).Google Scholar

23. Koelle, Schlenker, Reichard, and Schön went to Africa in the service of the Church Missionary Society. The Basel Mission eventually decided that it would be impractical to use German as a language of instruction on the Gold Coast. The Norddeutsche Mission, however, did publish one linguistic study in German: Schlegel, Schlüssel.

24. See Appendix 2; Schramm, , Deutschland, 235–87, 563–71Google Scholar; Vogt, Westafrika.

25. Harding, Leonard, “The West Africa Trade of Hamburg in the 19th Century” in Liesegang, Gerhard, Pasch, H. and Jones, Adam, eds., Figuring African Trade (Berlin, 1986).Google Scholar

26. An exception is Maier, D.J.E., Priests and Power. The Case of the Dente Shrine in Nineteenth-Century Ghana (Bloomington, 1983)Google Scholar, but this deals mainly with the period after 1884.

27. For examples of the last type of study see Sadji, Neger-Mythos; Bitterli, Urs, Die Entdeckung des schwarzen Afrikaners. Versuch einer Geistesgeschichte der europäisch-afrikanischen Beziehungen an der Goldkuste im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Zurich, 1970).Google Scholar

28. For a good sociological study of the Germans who traveled to Africa in the nineteenth century see Essner, Deutsche Afrikareisende.

29. Ernst van den Boogaart is examining this question with reference to Dutch works, using auction records as one of his sources. The most useful material for Germany would be found in the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel.

30. See the review of my German Sources by McCaskie, T.C., Africa, 54 (1984), 102–03.CrossRefGoogle Scholar