The Rev. (Chief) Samuel Ojo, better known as Ojo Bada of Saki, who died in 1992 at the reputed age of 117, was a very versatile person indeed. A Babalawo (“diviner”) converted to a Baptist pastor and a carpenter who became a schoolteacher, he was also to graduate from a storyteller to the author of over fifty essays, pamphlets, and books. He became a Christian in 1902, received his elementary education from 1907 to 1913, and attended the Baptist Theological Seminary at Ogbomoso from 1924 to 1926. His life after 1926 revolved around the Church, as a founder of several churches and a pastor, and in education as a teacher. He took the chieftaincy title of Bada, following in his father's footsteps in 1937. His title, church, and school duties brought him more contacts with the government, first as a member of the Oyo Divisional Council from 1938 to 1958, later a member of the Oyo Provincial Council from 1959 to 1963, and finally a member of the House of Chiefs from 1961 to 1965. For his community service he received the MBE (Member of the British Empire) in 1963 and became a Justice of Peace in 1965. He devoted his spare time to writing.

It is forty-five years ago since Roland Oliver was appointed to a lectureship in the “Tribal History of East Africa” at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). This was certainly the first appointment in African history in a university in the United Kingdom, and very likely the first such in a university anywhere in the world. In 1986 he retired from the Chair of African History, to which the University had advanced him in 1963 (an event which may very well have been another first), and he spent the first years of his retirement writing his book The African Experience: Major Themes in African History From Earliest Times to the Present.

It was entirely appropriate that the International Journal of African Historical Studies should have asked Jan Vansina to review this book, for his activities in the field of African history go back almost as far as Oliver's; forty-one years have now passed since Vansina began his academic career as a researcher at the Institut pour la Recherche Scientifique en Afrique Centrale (sc. the then Belgian territories in Africa). The review article which Vansina has written begins by paying generous tribute to Oliver's pioneer achievements as a leading actor in virtually every activity needed for the understanding and the furtherance of African history—researcher, teacher, author, editor, and organizer. His first general conclusion (393) on The African Experience is that Oliver's book “lives up to its promise” as “‘a work of reflection’ on the substance of African history, the distillation of his experience of forty (sic) years.”

Le décryptage des comportements socio-culturels dans une société où la notion de développement (amajambe) est le fruit d'une démarche de type moderniste, nous enjoint à établir une distinction entre les couches sociales “sensibles” à une telle évolution—celles en particulier qui vivent en milieu urbain—et les catégories sociales qui paraissent réfractaires—en particulier dans le milieu rural—qui compte plus de 90% de la population burundaise. Ce diptyque ville/campagne ne doit pas nécessairement être perçu comme une césure, car les attitudes diverses mettent en évidence des degrés d'interaction, entre un milieu urbain ouvert à la modernité et un monde rural attaché aux traditions, et vice-versa. Les paysans savent très bien s'adapter aux innovations technologiques apportées par les projets de développement, tels que l'électrification des campagnes, l'asphaltage des grands axes de communication, etc.… Un des résultats tangibles de ces réalisations est l'accroissement de la mobilité des biens et des individus, et donc la possible intégration des régions périphériques au centre politico-administratif.

Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold
Pease porridge in the pot nine days old
Some like it hot, some like it cold
But none like it in the pot nine days old.

The recent flurry of monographs and collections relating to the social aspects of medicine and disease in Africa and elsewhere ensures that collections of essays on this topic will receive much attention and will be concomitantly influential. Under the circumstances it is particularly regretable that the volume under review has been published so many years after most of the essays in it were written, precluding their referring to the many recent advances in the field. Of the 21 articles and introductory essays in Steven Feierman and John Janzen, eds., The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), six (amounting to 24% of the text) are reprints, seven (35%) are revisions whose originals date from 1979 and 1981, and eight (41%) are originals. Of these latter, two chapters date from 1983, and two of the reprints have been supplanted by book-length monographs. One must therefore ask of the editors, the press, and the Joint Committee on African Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council whether such unusually delayed publication is justified.

In 1974 the very first issue of HA included an analysis of a small section of John Barbot's Description of the coasts of North and South Guinea. Since this represented the first fruits of a project to edit Barbot's writings on Guinea, it is appropriate that, now the completed edition is published, a review of the history of the editing, the methods and problems of the editors, and the problems that the consumer will face in using the edition, should also appear in HA.

Why Barbot? When, twenty years ago, I decided that Barbot's account of Guinea should be edited, I already knew that it was partly unoriginal, and that in an ideal world priority would be given to editing the other, earlier, recognized compendium on Guinea, the relevant section of Dapper's account of all Africa. For although Dapper is also partly unoriginal, it has probably a wider range of new material than Barbot, not least the very detailed Kquoja account. Why then Barbot rather than Dapper? The answer is simple. I recognized the lack of critical editing of Guinea sources and felt I had to take the plunge somewhere. But whereas Dapper wrote in Dutch, a language of which I have only dictionary command, the earlier manuscript version of Barbot was in French, a language I could cope with. Dapper will have his turn. Adam Jones, one of the co-editors of “Barbot on Guinea,” having Dutch, has already published studies of Dapper's sources. Moreover, in the edition of Barbot we have taken the unusual step of including in the annotation fairly frequent references to the lines of transmission of information, for instance, not only noting the material Barbot borrowed from Dapper but also, where the material was not original to Dapper, the sources of his borrowing—thus doing part of the work of a critical edition of Dapper. In fact we have generally tried to make the edition of Barbot a starting point for the critical study of many other pre-1700 Guinea sources.

In 1606 Philip II of Portugal (and III of Spain) granted to a faithful court official, the Portuguese nobleman Pedro Álvares Pereira, the captaincy of Sierra Leone in Guinea, subject to his establishing an effective settlement there. This was on the lines of previous royal grants of other areas of the Atlantic world—the fifteenth-century grants of the Portuguese Atlantic islands, the grants of segments of the coast of Brazil in the 1530s, and of the coast of Angola in the 1570s. These earlier grants had led to the extension of Portuguese domain, that is, conquista, confirmed in the earlier instances by settlement but the grant made to Pedro Álvares Pereira led to no permanent settlement at Sierra Leone and not even to Portuguese overrule of the African peoples of the district. A first attempt to carry out the terms of the grant, made in 1606 through the agency of a Jesuit missionary, Fr. Baltasar Barreira, lost its initial momentum because of a sudden decline in the fortunes of Pedro Álvares Pereira. In 1608 he fell out of favor at the court, accused of corruption and malpractice—a not uncommon happening in the jealously competitive arena of the Madrid court—and hence was unable to send ships and supplies to Sierra Leone to substantiate his grant. Eventually he returned to favour and between 1612 and 1616 tried again, but for reasons which are not entirely clear but apparently included the loss of agents in a marine disaster, he gave up the struggle and in 1621, just before he died, he relinquished the grant.

The Upper Guinea Coast—the modern Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia—is one of the few parts of Africa where people have carved stone sculptures. The stone figures sculpted there, usually in soft steatite, or soap-stone, are generally called nomoli or pomta, depending on whether they have the standard features of figures found in southeastern Sierra Leone, or of those from the Kono and Kissi areas further north. There is a third group which consists mainly of sculpted heads on pedestal-like necks. They have been known to Europeans since at least the 1850s, and scholars have been publishing articles about them since 1901. This paper is a critical review of these publications.

That photographs have been neglected in the study of African history has become, in recent years, a well-established truism. To take one point of entry into the literature which has set out to correct this deficiency: a Seminar held in SOAS in 1988 on “Photographs as Sources for African History” amply confirmed this point (Roberts 1988). The papers and discussions indicated the scope—and the problems—of some of the well-known and less well-known, holdings in this field. They also showed, however, that a number of scholars had already devoted considerable thought to the implications of historic photographic holdings for the pursuit of historical and anthropological studies not only in colonial history but also in African history per se. A similar point of entry for the German-speaking world is provided by the literature accompanying an important exhibition which toured a number of West German museums in 1989. “Der geraubte Schatten” concerned itself with the history of photography in the whole non-European world (Theye 1989; Ueber die Wichtigkeit 1990; see especially the essays by Wagner and Corbey for reflections on missionary photography).

The Gaawar Nuer recall a battle called Mut Roal which Deng Laka, the prophet of the divinity DIU, fought against the Twic Dinka and their “Arab” allies. In this battle the Dinka and the Arabs failed to coordinate their movements, were attacked, and were defeated singly. Deng Laka himself is said to have personally killed the “Arab” commander. A number of rifles were captured and placed in a hut at the Dinka shrine of Luang Deng, in recognition of the help received from both the divinity DENG and the Rut Dinka caretakers of the shrine (a number of Rut Dinka fought alongside the Gaawar in this, as in other battles). The battle was of a recent enough date to be recounted in some detail by Nuer and Dinka participants to those British officials who visited the Zeraf valley in the first three decades of this century. Though the name of the “Arab” leader involved was remembered and given, the British were uncertain about the date of the battle and the identity of the opponents, and frequently assumed that they were “slavers” from the days of the Turkiyya, the Turco-Egyptian period (1840-85).

This seems to be confirmed by contemporary reports given by Casati and Emin Bey, who each recorded the annihilation of an Egyptian army patrol on the Bahr el-Zeraf (the Giraffe River) in 1885. There are some difficulties in reconciling this date with other evidence concerning floods and the opening of age-sets also mentioned by Gaawar and Dinka oral sources. In this paper I will examine the evidence contained in various orally based accounts collected between 1904 and 1982 and compare them with the few contemporary written accounts we have of battles near the Bahr el-Zeraf in the late nineteenth century. I conclude that the battle of Mut Roal was probably fought against the Mahdists in 1896, rather than against “slavers” in 1885. This conclusion in itself has further implications for our understanding of Arab-Nuer relations, and even Nuer-Dinka relations in the late nineteenth century.

This discussion seeks to evaluate some of the previous writings on the biological origins of the northern Nile valley population or peoples, who came to be known as “ancient Egyptians.” The subject is of interest for three reasons. The first is that Egypt lies at a geographical crossroads and would have been subject to possible colonization or migration from all directions. The second is that Egypt is in Africa and there is no scientific reason to think that Egyptians would not share some biological origins with other Africans. The third reason is that previous discussions have been misguided in focusing on “race” as opposed to biological affinity. There seems to be a problem in understanding that human genetic variation cannot always be easily described. Genetic origins can cut across ethnic (sociocultural or national) lines. At what village along the Nile valley today would one describe the “racial” transition between “Black” and “White”—assuming momentarily that these categories are real? It could not be done.

Missionary work was one of the main forces in the opening of the African continent to direct western influence. In many cases, from the 1830s onwards, missionaries were the first Westerners residing in the interior of the continent, thus accumulating considerable knowledge concerning geographical conditions in their respective areas of residence.

The question arises: how did information from these people with scarce knowledge about the interior filter down to representations of geographical conditions such as maps and literary descriptions? Working in close cooperation with Africans, their conceptions were likely to be somewhat more detailed than those of the colonial administration. Politically, they often assumed the role of mediators between the foreign powers and local societies; perhaps this was also the case where geographical knowledge was concerned. The aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which the Finnish Mission in colonial Ovamboland under German influence had an active role in mapmaking.

One ostensible reason for Germany's annexation of colonies was to turn a profit from them and strengthen the economy of the homeland. An additional function of German colonies was to persuade people who otherwise would have emigrated to the United States or Latin America to stay within the German economic sphere. White settlers were to supplant what was considered inefficient African land use with commercial agriculture whose products were to be exported to Germany. Public opinion in Germany also advocated colonization for status reasons, which made politicians sensitive to it.

This paper draws attention to an ambitious project in the publication of source material for the precolonial history of West Africa, which has recently been approved for inclusion in the Fontes Historiae Africanae series of the British Academy. In addition to self-promotion, however, I wish also to take the opportunity to air some of the problems of editorial strategy and choice which arise with regard to the editing and presentation of this material, in the hope of provoking some helpful feedback on these issues.

The material to be published consists of correspondence of the Royal African Company of England relating to the West African coast in the late seventeenth century. The history of the Royal African Company (hereafter RAC) is in general terms well known, especially through the pioneering (and still not superseded) study by K.G. Davies (1957). The Company was chartered in 1672 with a legal monopoly of English trade with Africa. Its headquarters in West Africa was at Cape Coast (or, in the original form of the name, Cabo Corso) Castle on the Gold Coast, and it maintained forts or factories not only on the Gold Coast itself, but also at the Gambia, in Sierra Leone, and at Offra and Whydah on the Slave Coast. It lost its monopoly of the African trade in 1698, and thereafter went into decline, effectively ceasing to operate as a trading concern in the 1720s, although it continued to manage the English possessions on the coast of West Africa until it was replaced by a regulated company (i.e., one open to all traders), the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, in 1750.

The !Kung San or Bushmen of Namibia and Botswana are one of the most thoroughly documented hunting and gathering societies in the annals of African anthropology. In recent years two radically different views of the !Kung San have emerged in the anthropological literature. One sees the !Kung as hunters and gatherers living under changed circumstances and maintaining an old but adaptable way of life: the characteristic features associated with the hunter-gatherer subsistence or foraging mode of production.

The other sees these same !Kung as products of a very different history, a history of long association with Bantu-speaking overlords, followed by intense involvement with merchant capital. In this view it was the !Kungs' experience of domination and incorporation, not the dynamics of autonomous foraging that shaped their economy and social life. Their well-documented egalitarian politics and gender relations are thus a product not of their own history, but of their history of shared poverty. The San are classless today precisely because they are the underclass in a more inclusive class structure (Wilmsen 1983:17).

Which view more accurately reflects the historical realities and experience of the !Kung? A body of opinion within contemporary anthropology holds that this “revisionist” view provides a much-needed corrective to the anthropological tendency to treat African societies ahistorically. Others have denied this charge and have countered that the history of Kalahari peoples showed great variation; while some may have formed an underclass at an early date, others persisted as relatively independent (but not isolated) hunter-gatherers into the modem period.

G. K. Gwassa states that research institutes in Africa constitute one critical factor of development in that they have to undertake the twin problems of research which involve the search for and the discovery of the process of social development. They also undertake purposeful functional research by (especially) studying and analyzing internal economic and social conditions in order to determine the characteristics, variables, and criteria for rational economic and political actions within a given country. These have become the functions of many social science research institutions in sub-Saharan Africa. The pioneer in all this is the University of Zambia's Institute for African Studies, the oldest social science-oriented research center in black Africa.

The Institute was founded in 1938 as the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute for Social Research (RLISR). In its fifty years of existence the Institute has made contributions which have earned it an international reputation for its research work. The aim of this paper is to assess the contribution of the Institute to social science research in its first fifty years of existence. In undertaking this task, I propose to discuss the topic under three broad areas: foundation, aims, and objectives; publication and research; and problems encountered and their solution.

A dominant trend in Nigerian historiography since the 1970s has been the preoccupation with writing history “from the national perspective.” This appears to be Nigerian historians' attempts to be “relevant” to current efforts at nation-building. “National history,” the object of such endeavors, has been defined by the frontline historian J. F. Ade Ajayi as “a study of the main developments in the whole Nigerian region, and among all the peoples and cultures, as perceived from the perspective of national significance and relevance, and only illustrated from the histories of individual groups and polities.”

While such efforts at writing what amounts to macrohistory are commendable, emphasis on themes of “national significance and relevance” could result in overgeneralization or the deletion of vital details. This likelihood then justifies the writing of microhistory to give macrohistory a sound factual or empirical basis. The need for microhistory has been stressed by a distinguished historian:

The period from 1500 to 1800 was a particularly busy phase in the history of the East African coast. It was a time which witnessed massive demographic shifts in the interior regions, as well as heavy southern Arab immigration and external meddling from Portuguese and Umani interlopers. It saw the destruction of the medieval entrepot of Kilwa Kisiwani and a decline, followed by a slow resurgence, in the fortunes of another medieval powerhouse, Mombasa. Throughout this phase, the ancient northern coastal city of Pate enjoyed a pivotal, even at times a paramount, role in the affairs of the coast. Before the middle 1500s the town seems to have been of insufficient consequence to attract much attention. Thereafter, however, the city-state capitalized on mainland alliances with powerful Orma confederations like the “Garzeda” to become a major center for regional trade, as well as a crucial strategic location in the competing religious and political ambitions of Portugal and various Arab states. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries Pate clearly was the most important state in the Lamu archipelago. Arguably, too, it was the most powerful Swahili sultanate on the entire coast.

Given the significance of Pate in the affairs of the East African coast from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, scholars long have realized that a history of the sultanate is exigent to an understanding of the entire coast during this time. What would seem to be fortunate to this end is that historians have the Pate chronicles as a research aid. Taken together, these constitute the most detailed indigenous history of any coastal city-state up to the onset of the colonial era. However, as attested by the difficulties Chittick encountered in his attempts to work with them, these documents present the historian with a superabundance of (often confusing) information. Confronted with this, Chittick concluded that the only possible value of these chronicles was as a source of/for children's fables. Thus surmised, a historian of this important Swahili sultanate would seem to be left with very little indeed.

It is axiomatic that historians should use all available sources. African historiography has been on the cutting edge of methodological innovation for the last three decades, utilizing written sources, oral traditions, archeology, linguistics, ethnography, musicology, botany, and other techniques to bring respect and maturity to the field.

But the use of such a diverse methodology has brought controversy as well, particularly regarding oral traditions. Substantial criticisms have been raised concerning the problems of chronology and limited time depth, variations in different versions of the same events, and the problem of feedback between oral and written sources. A “structuralist” critique deriving from Claude Levi-Strauss's study of Amerindian mythology has provided a useful corrective to an overly-literal acceptance of oral traditions, but often went too far in throwing out the historical baby with the mythological bathwater, leading some historians to reject totally the use of oral data. A more balanced view has shown that a modified structural approach can be a useful tool in historical analysis. In Ethiopian historiography some preliminary speculations were made along structuralist lines,5 although in another sense such an approach was always implicit since the analysis of Ethiopie written hagiographies and royal chronicles required an awareness of the mythological or folk elements they contain.

Two more difficult problems to overcome have been the Ethiopie written documents' centrist and elitist focus on the royal monarchy and Orthodox church. The old Western view that “history” required the existence of written documents and a state led to the paradigm of Ethiopia as an “outpost of Semitic civilization” and its historical and historiographical separation from the rest of Africa. The comparatively plentiful corpus of written documentation for Ethiopian history allowed such an approach, and the thousands of manuscripts made available to scholars on microfilm in the last fifteen years have demonstrated the wealth still to be found in written sources. However, such sources, although a starting point for research on Ethiopian history, no longer seem adequate in themselves because they focus primarily on political-military and religious events concerning the monarchy and church.

An 85-year-old villager named Erieza Kintu died at Kabubu in the county of Bulemezi, kingdom of Buganda, sometime in 1965. His passing was virtually unnoticed, except by relatives and a few neighbors. Through my research trips between 1962 and 1964 had on several occasions brought me to within a few miles of his house, I never met Kintu. Yet he is one of my best sources for the history of Buganda in the 1890s. Indeed, his memory of the so called “rebellion” by Kabaka Mwanga against the British in 1897 is the single best source I know, particularly valuable as an “insider” eyewitness participant. Even more importantly, unlike the earlier “official” histories of Mwanga's uprising, Kintu's view is from the point of the losers in the conflict—those who had resisted the new order of Christianity, private land tenure, and protectorate status within the British empire.

As so often happens with the vanquished, their history was suppressed by the victors, who—through the control of schooling and the printing press— ensured that only their own version of the conflict would become history. Yet somehow, at the age of almost seventy years the non-literate Erieza Kintu managed to dictate his oral memoirs to the manager of the Baganda Cooperative Society Press, and the result was Sulutani Anatoloka, a printed pamphlet that went on sale in Kampala priced one shilling a copy. After a few days no doubt the small edition was sold out and disappeared from view. Fortunately, one copy wound up in the hands of a prominent anthropologist from the University of Chicago, Lloyd Fallers, who was director of the East African Institute of Social Research at Makerere University in the early 1950s. Years later, when Fallers returned to Chicago, he brought back the pamphlet and offered me a photocopy, which I translated from Luganda into English in 1964. At that time I knew nothing about the author, except what was printed in his memoir covering the years from 1892 to 1899, nor did I know the circumstances surrounding the publication, or even the date when it had been printed. So here was a mysterious, unique, and potentially invaluable historical source—if only one could investigate its provenance.

Dominated by a settler heritage, South African history has forgotten or degraded many Africans who had a significant impact on the region. The more recent liberal and radical schools also suffer from this tragic inheritance. Maqoma, a nineteenth century Xhosa chief who fought the expansionist Cape Colony in three frontier wars, has been a victim of similar distortion. He has been characterized as a drunken troublemaker and cattle thief who masterminded an unprovoked irruption into the colony in 1834 and eventually led his subjects into the irrational Cattle Killing catastrophe of 1856/57 in which thousands of Xhosa slaughtered their herds on the command of a teenage prophetess. Recently, the validity of this portrayal has been questioned. Alan Webster has demonstrated that, throughout the 1820s and early 1830s, Maqoma attempted to placate voracious European raiders by sending them cattle tribute. Only after the British army and Boer commandos had forced his Jingqi chiefdom off its land for the third time did this ruler order retaliatory stock raids against the colony in late 1834.

Unesco's General History of Africa (henceforth GHA) is now nearing completion—seven out of the eight volumes having been published in English, at least—and the time is ripe to draw attention to its role in the historiography of African history, a role very different from that played by the Cambridge History of Africa with which it is often compared. In certain ways the Unesco project has been a unique venture, and not just in African history but, in general, because it broke with old established practice. The work was not guided by one or two editors but by a large committee. History-writing by committee seemed not only distasteful but impossible to achieve to many, both because of the practical difficulties involved and because it seemed incredible that so many editors could agree on a common text, without falling into sheer banality. Now that the volumes are out, readers can judge for themselves. Many among them actually wonder how exactly these volumes and chapters were created. Because I have been an active member of the committee since its creation in 1971 and of its bureau since 1983, I can provide a general answer to this question. But the time has also come to draw attention to the records generated by this project. Future researchers will find a huge mass of papers involving hundreds of historians of Africa that touch on practically all aspects of Africa's historiography between ca. 1965 and today.