In my research on gender relations and household dynamics in the handicraft textile industry of the western Sudan, I have been frustrated by the silences in the oral record concerning changes during the early colonial period. Whereas I have been able to reconstruct the social history of the precolonial era, including the changes induced by increased use of slave labor, my informants have been silent on what I would consider equally significant changes in the early colonial period.

Using colonial sources, I have been able to reconstruct the broad contours of the period following the end of slavery, which hint at profound changes in the nature of the textile industry, gender relations, and household dynamics. These would, I anticipated on the basis of my previous fieldwork, be exactly the kind of transformative social change which would be recalled in the oral record. They ought to have become a central part of the social construction of the meaning of historical processes. But, as far as I have been able to determine, this has not been the case. Detail on gender relations and the productive processes appear again in my informants' accounts for the period just before and after World War II, drawn from personal experience. This paradox—apparently richer evidence in the oral record for an earlier era than for a chronologically closer one—has implications for both fieldwork strategies and for social history.

During the summer of 1982 I lived in the predominantly Muslim city of Kano, in northern Nigeria, to study the Hausa language and to learn about women's lives—their activities, interests, and identities. Residence in Kano challenged the questions and theoretical assumptions of my research. The ‘silences’ I encountered in the field now inform questions for a methodology for the study of women's lives that acknowledges the connections between researcher, subject/s of life history research, and the eventual written analysis of their narrative histories. An underlying theme—and persistent question—is the extent to which such writing tells us more about the researcher or the narratives' subject/s.

Feminist theory and methodology inform this consideration of women's life histories. Feminist scholars have focused on the inscription of meaning in women's interests in writing about women. They have assigned a central role to “women's conscious perceptions” of their lived social experience in theory construction. The specific inclusion of women's, and other groups' perceptions contributes to historians' formulation of research models and methodology. I will discuss several methodological issues before returning to the ‘silences’ of my own fieldwork.

The reference to Antera Duke of Old Calabar in HA 16 (1989) encourages me to contribute a note on this historical notable.1 A gross imbalance exists in the scholarly study of black slavery. The shelves of academic libraries groan under the weight of books on black slavery in the Americas. Yet for every hundred books on trans-Atlantic black slavery and the Middle Passage, there is at best a single volume on black slavery in Africa. Moreover, the curt preliminary chapter dealing with slavery in Africa mandatory in books on black slavery in the Americas, not uncommonly limits itself to repeating anachronistic moralizing cliches that show little awareness of up-to-date Africanist knowledge of slavery in Africa—and exhibit little empathy with past African enterprise. There is some excuse. Any historical social process shared between preliterate and literate societies will inevitably have fuller and clearer source material in respect of the latter than in respect of the former. Information on black slavery in the Americas, on the Middle Passage, and on the non-African aspects of the procurement of slaves, is relatively abundant; information on the transmission of an individual African from an earlier non-slave situation, through the hands of Africans, to the point where he or she was handed over to non-Africans, is almost nonexistent. This being so, the publication in 1956 of the diary of an African slave trader, Antera Duke of Old Calabar, a diary covering the years from 1785 to 1788, was an outstanding historiographical event.

Captain William Snelgrave's A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea, and the Slave Trade, first published in 1734, is a work well known to historians of West Africa. The largest and most valuable section of it comprises a detailed account of voyages by the author in 1727 and 1730 to the ports of Whydah and Jakin on the Slave Coast, then recently conquered by Dahomey, and offers the earliest extended account of the latter kingdom to be published. The information in Snelgrave's book can also be supplemented by records of testimony which he provided on two occasions, in 1726 and 1731, before the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations in London.

Snelgrave was a slave-trading captain with, at the time of his book's publication, some thirty years' experience of the West African trade. The details of his career are documented principally from his book, which in addition to the voyages of 1727 and 1730 (which form its principal subject), also alludes to several earlier slave-trading voyages undertaken by him. Snelgrave's first voyage to Africa, in which he served as purser on a ship commanded by his father, was to Old Calabar in 1704; a second voyage to Old Calabar was undertaken in 1713, a voyage to Sierra Leone (on which Snelgrave was captured by pirates) in 1719, and a voyage to the Gold Coast in 1721-22. This is not, however, a comprehensive catalog of Snelgrave's voyages, since he also alludes to having visited Whydah on “several voyages” before 1727. Other evidence documents two such earlier voyages by Snelgrave to Whydah, in 1717 and 1725. He was apparently still alive in 1735, the year after the publication of his book, when he is mentioned among a group of people involved in legal proceedings to press claims on the estate of Patrick West, a recently deceased merchant of Antigua.

In 1983 Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich issued an English version of Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Emperor, Downfall of an Autocrat, published originally in 1978. Of the fifteen reviews I have read, none was written by an Ethiopianist who might have been expected to know something about Ethiopia's most durable emperor (r. 1916-1974). In other words, the published reviews reflect ignorance about the book's subject, so much so that the critics, to a person, found that the book was not about Ethiopia, or even the emperor, but was about Poland and its then dictator Edward Gierek. They fell for the notion, origanlly invented by the book's bitter Polish readers, that The Emperor was an allegory I They comment, therefore, that Haile Sellassie's story merely “illustrates exactly how the mighty rule, and why, as a result, they fall.” Had I been asked to review Kapuscinski's book, I would have regarded the volume as a serious effort to explain Haile Sellassie and commented accordingly.

I would first have stated that Kapuscinski had written a flawed book because he had uncritically believed his informants, several of whom told tall tales about the short monarch. A few examples will suffice to clarify this point. One, Mr. Richard as he is called by several raconteurs, reported that the emperor had a little dog that was permitted to urinate on the shoes of courtiers and that there was a servant whose sole duty was to wipe the offending shoes dry. True, the emperor enjoyed small dogs, but he never would have permitted any animal to humiliate his courtiers. Second, Kapuscinski recounts that the emperor's sole teacher was a French Jesuit, who never was able to inculcate reading into his young charge. In fact, the young Haile Sellassie had several teachers, among them two Capucins but nary a Jesuit. His Ethiopian Capucin, Father Samuel, introduced his student to the classics of Ethiopian and Western philosophical literature and instilled in him a profound respect for reading and learning. Third, Haile Sellassie was, by all reports, a sedulous reader in Amharic, French, and, later, in English. He not only perused books but also reports, newspapers, and magazines. Furthermore, he wrote instructions and orders, giving the lie to Kapuscinski's absurd statement (8): “Though he ruled for half a century, not even those closest to him knew what his signature looked like.”

The Association for the Publication of African Historical Sources (presently headquartered at the Department of History, Michigan State University) is now administering one umbrella National Endowment for the Humanities grant for editing, translating, and publishing significant African texts, and hopes to administer more in the future. In aid of this, the following guidelines, which should for the moment be considered to be in a draft stage, are offered in an effort both to bring uniformity to these editions and to stimulate thinking towards making the guidelines more thorough and enduring. Readers are urged to send suggestions for the latter to: David Henige, Memorial Library, 728 State St., Madison, WI 53706, U.S.A. If all goes well, it might be possible to publish an improved set of guidelines in next year's HA.

As discussed briefly below, efficient mobilization of word processing programs should enable intending editors to achieve better results at less cost. Such word processing programs as are now available are probably not equally suitable and any readers who have used any programs extensively or who have developed variants of their own, with respect either to editing or to linguistic transcription, are also urged to submit brief statements (up to ca. 1000 words) as to their experiences, whether good or bad. These could then be published en ensemble, also (probably) in the 1991 HA.