¹ Evans-Pritchard, E. E., “Social Anthropology: Past and Present,” Man, 50 (September 1950), 118–24;CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem., Anthropology and History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961).Google Scholar

² In general, see Fabian, J., Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).Google Scholar The point may still need making on particular topics: see, for example, O'Brien, J. and Rosebery, W., eds., Golden Ages, Dark Ages: Imagining the Past in Anthropology and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).Google Scholar

³ Ortner, Sherry B., “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26:1 (1984), 126–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Sanjek, R., “The Ethnographic Present,” Man (nt.), 26:4 (1991), 609–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ Partly this may have been due to the “eclipse of narrative” among some of the historians most attractive to anthropologists, such as Fernand Braudel and others of the Annales school. See Ricoeur, P., Time and Narrative, McLaughlin, K. and Pellauer, D., trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), I: ch. 4.Google Scholar

⁵ Ortner, , “Theory,” 144, 150.Google Scholar

⁶ Ortner came clearly to recognize this: See her “Patterns of History: Cultural Schemas in the Founding of Sherpa Religious Institutions,” in Culture through Time: Anthropological Approaches, Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko, ed., 57–93 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

⁷ For a general exposition of this position, see Carrithers, Michael, Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Human Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), a book that achieves the rare feat of being at the same time an attractive and lucid introduction to the subject and a significant work of original theory.Google Scholar

⁸ As, respectively, for example, are two excellent recent ethnographies of southern Africa: Colin Murray's Black Mountain (1993) and Richard Werbner's Tears of the Dead (1992), both published by Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute.

⁹ Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980, The subtitle is A Study in Society and History.Google ScholarPubMed

¹⁰ In using ethnohistory to refer to the historical representations current in any social setting or people, I depart from the term's most common reference, which is to a field of academic study on the frontiers of history and anthropology dealing with the histories of tribal peoples. This is a shift, however, that others are now making. For further discussion, see Peel, J. D. Y., “Review Essay” (A. Biersack, ed., Clio in Oceania, and Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, ed., Culture through Time), History and Theory, 32:2 (1993), 162–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹ From a sizeable literature dominated by Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. E., eds., Writing Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986),Google Scholar one of the most subtle is Strathem, M., “Out of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology,” Current Anthropology, 28:3 (1987), 251–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹² White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).Google Scholar

¹³ David, Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

¹⁴ See Norman's, A. P. critique of the strong form of Can's thesis, “Telling It Like It Was: Historical Narratives on Their Own Terms,” History and Theory, 30:2 (1991), 119–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁵ Carr, , Time, Narrative, and History, 59–61.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Ibid., 177–85. Notably he baulks at Paul Ricoeur's assertion of the “transcultural necessity” of the link between narrative and the temporal character of human existence. “[W]hat if we find peoples who do not construe their temporality through the activity of narrating?” he asks. It would show more confidence in his own case if he were prepared to give at least this hostage to fortune and declare that if such a people were shown to exist, his case would fall.

¹⁷ Carrithers, , Why Humans Have Cultures, chs. 4–5, is excellent on this.Google Scholar

¹⁸ White, Geoffrey M., Identity through History: Living Stories in a Solomon Islands Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁹ Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁰ See, for example, Cunnison's, I. classic History on the Luapula, Rhodes-Livingstone Paper 21 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951).Google Scholar

²¹ For a telling critique, which proceeds by the indirect route of showing the significance of narrative and of local appropriations of Christian narrative among many other peoples of southern Africa, see Terence Ranger, “No Missionary: No Exchange: No Story? Narrative in Southern Africa” (paper presented at the All Souls Seminar on Past Fantasies, Oxford, England, June 1992).

²² Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 34.Google Scholar

²³ Ibid., 35.

²⁴ Ibid., 242 (cited in another context).

²⁵ See Comaroff, John L., “Rules and Rulers: Political Processes in a Tswana Chiefdom,” Man 13 (1978), 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁶ Schapera, I., Tribal Innovators: Tswana Chiefs and Social Change, 1795–1940 (London: Athlone Press, 1970):Google ScholarGulbrandsen, O., “Missionaries and Northern Tswana Rulers: Who Used Whom?” Journal of Religion in Africa, 23:1 (1993), 44–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁷ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 14.Google Scholar

²⁸ Ibid., 15.

²⁹ See Bhabha, Homi, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990);Google Scholar and, acknowledging the influence of Hayden White, Fabian, J., History from Below: The “Vocabulary of Elisabethville” by Andre Yav (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990), 191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁰ Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John L., “The Madman and the Migrant” (1987), reprinted in their Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 155–78;Google Scholar significant parts of the phrasing of the last paragraph (pp. 176–77) occur on page 35 of their Of Revelation and Revolution. For a sceptical view of the decoding of the madman, see Vansina's, J. review in International Journal of African Historical Studies, 26:2 (1993), 418–19.Google Scholar

³¹ The importance of the discursive needs to be reiterated in the face of the recent powerful (and, as far as it goes, valid) argument for the significance of memory practices of a “non-inscribed” kind by Connerton, P., How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³² Marx, Karl, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 106.Google Scholar

³³ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, ch. 5, 173.Google Scholar

³⁴ Ibid., 199.

³⁵ Comaroff and Comaroff, “Madman and Migrant,” 177;Google Scholaridem, Of Revelation and Revolution, 236. These are slippery expressions since “widely rejected” is quite compatible with “widely accepted” and “was less than enthusiastically accepted” with “won a significant degree of acceptance.” But rhetorically it makes a lot of difference to call a glass half-empty rather than half-full.Google Scholar

³⁶ The Church Missionary Society was founded in 1799 by leading members of the evangelical wing of the Church of England. For an excellent recent study of its intellectual and social milieu, see Hilton, B., The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).Google Scholar The CMS's great secretary, Henry Venn (1841–73), was strongly committed to the ideal of self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating local churches, so the development of “native agency” was a priority of the mission. The presence of many Yoruba among the Christianized “liberated Africans” in Siena Leone enabled the Yoruba mission to realize this policy from the outset, a circumstance nearly unique in missions to Africa. For details, see the classic studies by Ajayi, J. F. Ade, Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891 (London: Longman, 1965),Google Scholar and Ayandele, E. A., The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria, 1842–1914 (London: Longman, 1966).Google Scholar

³⁷ For example, Crowther, S. A., Journal, November 24, 1845Google Scholar (on laying the foundation of Igbein chapel) and in a letter to Greenway, G. C., September 13, 1847;Google Scholar the Smith, Englishman J., Annual Letter, December 30, 1865Google Scholar (of Ogunpa, Ibadan's weakest congregation); Olubi, D., Journal, March 17, 1867Google Scholar (again of Ogunpa, “we may not despise small things"); Okuseinde, J., Journal, September 4, 1872Google Scholar (on rebuilding Kudeti church after its destruction by a tornado); James Johnson, Annual Report for 1879 (“it is yet a day of small things here,” on reopening of Ilugun station), Yoruba Mission, CMS Archives, Birmingham University Library. All CMS Archive references up to 1879 come from the CA 2 series (listed by individual missionary); from 1880, they come from the G3 A2 series (listed by year).

³⁸ See White, Hayden, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in his The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 1–25.Google ScholarPubMed

³⁹ Young, C. N., Journal, May 2, 1875.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ This structure has some similarity to the typical conversion narrative current in Santa Isabel (White, Geoffrey M., Identity through History, ch. 4). Here, too, a dialectical schema is used: approach/resistance/acceptance. White argues that these narratives are “mythical schemes which … work to recreate social and emotional meanings as much as they function to ‘preserve’ historical events” (p. 160), and shows, by comparing them with contemporary mission records, how much the events of many decades before had been reworked. The Yoruba approach/response/reposte structure is not only contemporary to the events reported but can be taken as shaping them, as it is intelligible as a strategy as well as a report.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Young, C. N., Journal, April 20, 1875.Google Scholar The crisp opening almost suggests that Young was anticipating the well-known debate about ancestor worship that took place in the pages of Africa in the 1960s, launched by Kopytoff's, Igor “Ancestors and Elders in Africa,” Africa, 41:2 (1971), 129–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴² Kermode's, FrankThe Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967),Google Scholar which has been so influential in shaping the discussion of emplotment, seems especially congenial to these missionary texts since it is so much to do with the literary influence of Christian ideas of completion such as pleroma, to eschata. These ideas, of course, were more than literary: They had practical social consequences.

⁴³ King, T., Journal, September 15, 1855.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Carr, , Time, Narrative, and History, 59.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ For a full account of Pearse's conversion of the three diviners, see Peel, J. D. Y., “The Pastor and the Babalawo: The Encounter of Religions in Nineteenth-Century Yorubaland,” Africa 60:3 (1990), 338–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁶ E.g., , Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);Google ScholarStromberg, P. G., Language and Self-Transformation: Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Wright, T. B., Journal, January 6, 1869.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Crowther, S. A., Journal, August 21, 1846.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ King, T., Journal, April 7, 1850.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Barber, J., Journal, January 4, 1855.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Further on slave narratives, see Curtin, P., Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967);Google ScholarDavis, C. T. and Gates, H. L., Jr., eds.; The Slave's Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

⁵² See, too, White, James (himself a former slave), Journal, October 22, 1862:Google Scholar “Formerly it was your notion [he tells pagan interlocutors at Ota] that when a black man is sold and taken to white man's country, that the person is gone to the other world, believing him to be really dead.” For similar ideas about the identity of the enslaved and the dead among the BaKongo, see McGaffey, W., Modern Kongo Prophets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 126–40.Google Scholar See, too, Orlando Patterson's idea of the slave as “a socially dead person,” in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 38 ff.Google Scholar

⁵³ Barber, J., Journal, January 4, 1855.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Thus, the Englishman Edward Roper to Venn, H., December 3, 1861.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Moore, W. to the Reverend Jones, W., April 30, 1863. Dahomey actually attacked Abeokuta, the Egba capital, on only three occasions, but fears of an invasion were recurrent almost every dry season till the late 1880s. These fears tended to enhance mutual feelings of dependence between the Christian body and the town authorities.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Pearse, S. to Venn, H., December 31, 1859. The source of the quotation is not acknowledged.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Pearse, S., Annual Letter to Venn, H., January 13, 1868. The reference is to Luke 5:5.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Phillips, C., Senior, Journal, March 22, 1855;Google ScholarHinderer, D., Journal, July 22, 1851,Google Scholar specifically comparing the manner of Oluyole's death to Herod's; Okuseinde, J., Journal, January 20, 1878, on an influential man in Ibadan who said he'd like to be a Christian if his position would let him.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ There are many instances, including, among others, the king of Ota, a senior diviner at Oyo, several chiefs at Ibadan, a war chief at Ijaye, and a chief at Isaga.

⁶⁰ Peel, J. D. Y., Aladura: A Religious Movement among the Yoruba (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 214.Google Scholar

⁶¹ For a fuller discussion of this line of thinking by Yoruba clergy, see Peel, J. D. Y., “Between Crowther and Ajayi: The Religious Origins of the Yoruba Intelligentsia,” in African Historiography: Essays Presented to J. F. Ade Ajayi, Falola, Toyin, ed. (Harlow and Lagos: Longman, 1993), 64–79.Google Scholar

⁶² Olubi, D., Journal, February 6, 1867.Google Scholar

⁶³ On Crowther's early life, the main primary source, apart from his journals and letters in the papers of the Siena Leone, Yoruba, and Niger missions of the CMS, is the autobiographical “Letter of Mr Samuel Crowther to the Rev. William Jowett, in 1837,” printed as an appendix to Journals of the Rev. J. F. Schon and Mr S. Crowther (London: 1842; rpt. Frank Cass, 1970).Google Scholar Also of some value is Page, J., The Black Bishop: Samuel Adjai Crowther (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1908),Google Scholar which drew on Crowther family traditions. Modem scholarship is dominated by the work of J. F. Ade Ajayi: Apart from Christian Missions in Nigeria, see his “Bishop Crowther: An Assessment,” Odu, 4 (1970), 3–17, and his introductions to the 1970 reprints of Crowther's published journals of the Niger expeditions of 1841 and 1854.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Crowther, S. A. to Venn, H., September 18, 1847.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ Idem, Journal, January 31. 1848.

⁶⁶ Judges, 17:13. Crowther, S. A., Journal, quarter ending June 25, 1847.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Josipovici, Gabriel, The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988),Google Scholar ch. 6. Also of great value are the chapters on Joshua and Judges and on I and II Samuel by Gunn, D. M. and Rosenberg, J., respectively, in The Literary Guide to the Bible, Alter, R. and Kermode, F., eds. (London: Collins, 1987).Google Scholar

⁶⁸ One might even see this as an early showing of a topic which has continued high on the intellectual agenda of Africa—state formation—and which provided a crucial terrain for the convergence of social anthropology and African history since in the 19605. See Forde, D. and Kaberry, P. M., eds., West African Kingdoms in the Nineteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1967),Google Scholar and “Systèmes étatiques africains,” special issue, Cahiers d'études africaines, 22:87–88 (1982).Google Scholar

⁶⁹ Mudimbe, V. Y., The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 47.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ Horton, R., “African Conversion,” Africa, 41:2 (1971), 85–108;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and, more fully, “On the Rationality of Conversion,” Africa, 43:3 (1973), 219–35 and 43:4, 372–99.Google Scholar For a recent evaluation of Norton's thesis and something of the debate it triggered, see Hefner, R. W., ed., Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 20–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷¹ Hinderer, D., Half-Yearly Report, ending September 1859.Google Scholar

⁷² Carrithers, , Why Humans Have Cultures, 76,Google Scholar citing Bruner, Jerome, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

⁷³ For a fuller exposition of the ideas in this and the following paragraph, see Peel, , “Pastor and Babalawo.”Google Scholar

⁷⁴ Johnson, S., Journal, November 16, 1882.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ For a suggestive exploration of how Ifa as oral literature differs from Sc?pture and of what occurs when attempts are made to assimilate it to Christian forms, see Barber, Karin, “Discursive Strategies in the Texts of Ifa and in the ‘Holy Book of Odu’ of the African Church of Orunmila,” in Farias, P. F. de Moraes and Barg, K., eds., Self-Assertion and Brokerage: Early Cultural Nationalism in West Africa (Birmingham: Centre of West African Studies, 1990), 196–224.Google Scholar

⁷⁶ E.g., the recent speculative attempt by Andrew Apter to give pagan credentials to Bishop Crowther: Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 194–204.Google Scholar

⁷⁷ Words that have been used in the British coronation service since 1689 at the point when a copy of the Bible is presented—nowadays by the moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland—to the sovereign. Lowther-Clarke, W. K., Liturgy and Worship (London: Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, 1932), 699.Google Scholar

⁷⁸ There is no full-length modern synthetic history of the Yoruba wars. But see Ajayi, J. F. Ade and Smith, R. S., Yoruba Warfare in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964);Google ScholarAkintoye, S. A., Revolution and Power Politics in Yorubaland, 1840–1893 (London: Longman, 1971);Google ScholarAwe, Bolanle, “Militarism and Economic Development in Nineteenth-Century Yoruba Country,” Journal of African History, 14:1 (1973), 65–77;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFalola, Toyin, The Political Economy of a Pre-Colonial West African State: Ibadan, 1830–1900 (Ile-Ife: University of Ife Press, 1984).Google Scholar

⁷⁹ See Miller, J. C., “Introduction,” in The African Past Speaks, Miller, J. C., ed. (Folkestone and Hamden, Conn.: Dawson and Archon, 1980);Google Scholar for a Yoruba study, Peel, J. D. Y., “Making History: The Past in the Ijesha Present,” Man, 19:1 (1984), 111–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸⁰ Pearse, S., Journal, November 12, 1963.Google Scholar

⁸¹ Barber, J., Journal, January 14, 1855. We may doubt the claim which concludes this entry, that Barber succeeded in convincing the babalawo of the error of his views.Google Scholar

⁸² White, J., Journal, January 11, 1866.Google Scholar It does seem unlikely that the Aro would have spontaneously used the missionary metaphor of light/darkness that White puts into his mouth here.

⁸³ Allen, W. S., Journal, May 24, 1873.Google Scholar

⁸⁴ In the Yoruba Bible, owe is used to render both the Book of Proverbs (lwe Owe) and the parables of the New Testament, e.g., “And he spake this parable unto them” (O si pa owe yi fun won) (Luke 15:3).

⁸⁵ On Yoruba narrative genres and their relationship to other oral genres, see Deirdre LaPin, “Story, Medium, and Masque: The Idea and Art of Yoruba Storytelling” (Ph.D. disser., University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1977), ch. i. There is some regional variation in these terms, but LaPin notes that the use of owe as story + proverb (= parable) is particularly found at Ibadan, where W. S. Allen's instance came from.

⁸⁶ See text above (p. 592).

⁸⁷ One thinks of Aristotle, Poetics 145 Ib: “… poetry [= owe] is more akin to philosophy and a better thing than history [= isan]; poetry deals with general truths, history with specific events.”

⁸⁸ Allen, W. S., Journal, January 27, 1878. If any reader wonders why old men appear so often as Allen's interlocutors, the reason is that throughout the 1870s and 1880s the bulk of Ibadan's young and active male population was absent from the town for long periods on campaigns in Ijesha and Ekiti.Google Scholar

⁸⁹ I.e., “The intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature,” (Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays,Google ScholarEmerson, C. and Holquist, M., trans. [ Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981], 84 ff).Google Scholar

⁹⁰ Quoted by Williams, J. A. T., Journal, February 26, 1880, at Palma, in a discussion about the afterlife. My colleague Akin Oyetade tells me that the common contemporary form of the proverb is “Arve l'oj” (The world is a market …).Google Scholar Still, the idea of aiye l'ajo (journey of life) is very much still current: See Drewal, M., Yoruba Ritual (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), ch. 3.Google Scholar

⁹¹ Hinderer, D., Journal, September 17, 1858.Google Scholar

⁹² Ibid., May 2, 1856.

⁹³ Maser, J. A., Journal, May 3, 1858, at Lagos.Google Scholar

⁹⁴ On the constitutive role of canonical language in the making of stories (and hence also lives) among modem American evangelical Christians, see Stromberg, , Language and Self-Transformation, 11–13 et passim.Google Scholar