The most salient fact about the Gothic migrations is that they forcefully underscore how old theories never die. They linger to play upon the intellect for generations until they seem to constitute facts themselves. The study of the migrations tempts the unwary with marvelous sagas and apparently straightforward accounts of trusted ancient authors. Even if we follow Odysseus' lead, and with our ears carefully plugged with scientific beeswax, rivet our eyes to the narrow channels of fact, the old theories still beckon; after all, Roman history is in part a series of thrusts and counterthrusts along the northern peripheries of the Greco-Roman world, in need of explanation then as now. The origins of the migrants and invaders of the Roman frontiers was a question appropriate to Tacitus in the late first century A.D. and to countless others across the centuries. All too often the questioners were far removed from the contact zones and looked down upon a simple battlefield of “we and they.” Such self-proclaimed Valkyries chose sides for their own reasons, usually preconditioned and often totally unrelated to the struggles below. This essay traces the evolution of the theoretical and factual elements of the early Gothic migrations and concludes with a personal sketch drawn in light of recent studies of the Roman frontier and insights from other areas, especially comparative anthropology.

The historiography of the early Gothic migrations is a classic example of the impact of contemporary attitudes, problems, and methodologies on the study of the past. So meager is the evidence that is likens to a broken kaleidoscope in which the few remaining pieces can be jostled easily from place to place.

We first conceived of this study several years ago, when our respective lines of research seemed to some extent to converge on the period of the decline of ancient Ghana. It has proved a more complex matter than we imagined, or than the deceptively simple title above might suggest--partly because it is often more difficult to prove that something did not happen than that it did. We have had to divide our analysis into two parts. First we examine the external written sources for the Almoravid conquest of Ghana. Our work in this respect has been immensely facilitated by the appearance in 1975 of Cuoq's Recueil des sources arabes, which in some sense provides the infrastructure for our argument. We have also had the invaluable privilege of seeing in proof Hopkins' and Levtzion's Corpus of early Arabic sources. In the second half of our study, it will be the turn of internal sources, mainly oral traditions. We use the terms external and internal advisedly, since the simple distinction between written sources and oral traditions is too artificial: an oral tradition was an oral tradition, whether written down in Arabic in the Middle Ages or in French in this century, and a great deal of the information in both parts of our article must have started as oral tradition.

Putting it very bluntly, we have discovered no sources, whether external or internal, which unambiguously point to such a conquest. A handful of sources suggest some link between the rise of the Almoravids and the decline of Ghana, but with a puzzling vagueness--a vagueness which decreases as the number of centuries between the alleged event, and the report of it increases.

At some undefined time in the fairly recent past central and western Madagascar witnessed a conceptual 'revolution' which had far-reaching political consequences. The religious beliefs and symbols which constituted the main ingredients of this 'revolution'--and probably also the people who propagated them--were in some way connected with the Zafindraminia-Antanosy and the Anteimoro of the southeastern and eastern coast. It is quite clear that these and similar groups had been strongly influenced by Islam and that they practiced what could perhaps be described as a corrupt or diluted Islam or a syncretic 'pagan' Muslim religion. (It is significant that as their name indicates the Zafindraminia claim descent from Raminia who they hold to have been the mother of Muhammad.) One of the main ingredients of this religion was the cult of the ody or guardian amulets, objects usually made of wood which are strikingly reminiscent of the so-called “charms” or “gris-gris” sold by Muslim clerics over much of Africa. Another ingredient is represented by the institution of ombiasy. The ombiasy (the main manufacturers of ody) whom the Frenchman Etienne de Flacourt at Fort-Dauphin in the seventeenth century took to be Muslim clerics were originally the “priests” (or the “devins guérisseurs,” according to Hubert Deschamps) of the Anteimoro and the Zafindraminia-Antanosy. Subsequently this institution was disseminated throughout nearly the whole of Madagascar. Yet another ingredient was the system of divination known as sikidy, which also spread to other parts of Madagascar, including Imerina and the Sakalava country.

These beliefs, symbols, and institutions deeply influenced the people of the west coast (the present-day Sakalava country) and of central Madagascar (Imerina and Betsileo country).

The written sources for African history are scattered throughout the world, often in archives to which access is difficult. To reach them often requires a considerable expenditure of time and money, quite apart from the necessary linguistic knowledge. As a result, at least in the German-speaking world, much of the writing of African history and anthropology has for decades rested exclusively on published sources. Besides often leading to a serious deficiency of information, such an approach limits the degree of control to which written testimony can be subjected: even the most assiduous textual criticism soon reaches its limits if comparable information is lacking. In addition, where there are only a few published sources, the historian may all too easily be lulled into a false sense of security. To remedy this, it is not enough to plead for as much archival work as possible (a requirement that can today usually be taken for granted in any case) and encourage the publication of more primary sources. We should also pay more attention to the distinction between primary and secondary sources, that is, take more explicitly into account the proximity of a source to the historical event or situation concerned--quite apart from observing all the other rules of textual criticism.

This paper therefore has two purposes. First, I wish to draw attention to a hitherto-neglected source for Angolan history in the first half of the seventeenth century--the manuscript collection of Fernão de Sousa, Governor of Angola from 1624 to 1630. A rough review of its contents and arrangement will perhaps stimulate scholars to study it and facilitate its use.

Belgian bibliographical research on Africa dates back to 1887 when G. Kayser published in Brussels a compilation of 2276 notices relating to works on the exploration and civilization of the continent which had appeared since the beginning of printing. With the publication in 1895 of the Bibliographie du Congo, 1880-1895 of A-J Wauters and A. Buyl--a catalog of 3800 works, brochures, notices, and maps relating to the history, geography, and European occupation of the Congo Free State--documentary works took a direction which, with only a few exceptions, would not be broadened until after 1960: Congo (Zaire), Rwanda, and Burundi were clearly privileged.

In a series of articles and pamphlets Théodore Heyse described the development of Belgian colonial bibliography during different periods, followed by a synthetic overview of the whole. Each of these contributions outlined in an introduction of a few pages the most significant moments of the period under review and was comprised of a list of references classified by topic as well as an onomastic index.

Historian and chronicler of Belgian colonial documentation, Heyse was also one of the most productive bibliographers of his time. A jurist by training, with additional diplomas in politics and in social sciences, he became an official in the Ministry of Colonies in 1910, retiring in 1947 with the rank of Director General. Assigned to the Direction des Concessions, he became a renowned specialist in colonial law, especially property law. To his numerous historical and juridical publications he combined intensive activity in the field of bibliography.

The historiography of the southern Sudan offers few examples of the critical assessment of sources. Surprisingly, the only conscious attempts at source evaluation have been made by anthropologists or ethnographers. Most historians and political scientists have been preoccupied with chronologies of administration and policy based on colonial documents and have been all too uncritical in accepting these sources for their generalizations on the history of southern Sudanese societies. Part of the reason why the historiography of the southern Sudan has lagged so far behind the rest of Africa in this respect is that, until recently, a limited number of colonial documents were the main sources available on southern Sudanese history, and these remained both unchallenged or uncorroborated by indigenous sources. Over the last ten years, however, it has become possible for scholars to collect and examine a wider variety of local materials in the southern Sudan itself, and the comparison of these materials with the older, better-known, sources can help to produce that creative tension so necessary for any critical advance to be made.

There is an urgent need for an evaluation of oral history in the southern Sudan. Oral traditions have been collected for over eighty years, but most of the recorded forms, those found in government files and reports, are composite summaries and interpretations by their collectors--government officials--rather than systematic comparisons of different accounts. In this form it is often difficult to separate the assumptions of the colonial officials from the claims of their informants, a task made particularly difficult by the fact that rarely does the record specify the source of an account or the context in which it was collected. Comparisons of modern accounts, when the source and context of the narrative are known, with these older, vaguer records can reveal something about both the traditional history of southern Sudanese societies and the assumption of colonial administrators.

Following the lead of two Dutch pioneers, historians have recently made considerable progress in the critical analysis of seventeenth-century European sources relating to west Africa. Many important works, however, have yet to be dealt with. Among these are the German sources, without which the other sources cannot fully be understood. Although no German state was as important in seventeenth-century trade with west Africa as the Dutch, English, French, and Portuguese, the German literary output was as significant as that of any nation except the Dutch. Having just completed a critical English edition of seventeenth-century German writings on west Africa, I think it appropriate to review the extent to which these can be regarded as primary sources. I propose to look at each author in chronological order.

The author, who collects from others, is far from being exact.

John Barbot's Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea, published in 1732 (and cited hereafter as 1732) is a text well known to historians of western Africa. The problems involved in its use as a historical source have been recognized for some time, and have been clarified in recent years primarily by the scholarship of Professor Paul Hair. The history of Barbot's text is, in general terms, now clear enough. John or, as he was originally called, Jean Barbot was a Frenchman who spent some time in the African trade, in the employment of the Compagnie du Sénégal. A Huguenot, he was obliged to leave France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and settled in England, where he died at Southampton in 1713. According to his own account (1732:381) Barbot made two voyages to Africa between 1678 and 1682. The manuscript journal of his first voyage, in 1678-79, is extant and has recently been published. That of his second voyage, in 1681-82, is not known to have survived. He subsequently wrote, in French, a general account of the western African coast under the title Description des Côtes d'Affrique, which he completed in 1688, but for which he was unable to find a publisher. This manuscript (hereafter cited as 1688) is also extant, and an English translation and critical edition of it is now in preparation, under the general editorship of Paul Hair. The 1688 Description was based partly on Barbot's own observations in 1678-82, but also drew extensively from earlier published accounts, especially from that of the Dutchman Dapper, published in 1668.

The history of “the” Segeju has been the subject of lengthy published debate. The discussion has been based almost entirely on interpretation of oral traditions as recounted by Segeju informants to various scholars. A newcomer with a linguistic bias is struck by certain aspects of much of this debate:

a] the linguistic implausibility apparently involved. Baker, for example, recording fairly literally what he was told, started the history of “the” Segeju in the Middle East: this would presumably involve a community speaking Arabic or Persian. There follows reference to “segeju” travels and sojourns in mainland northeast Africa: linguistic affiliation unknown. This period terminates with their arrival at Shungwaya, in southern Somalia: linguistic affiliation unstated. Later “they” are found on the Upper Tana River: Kamba is mentioned. Finally “they” settle in their present location on the northern Tanzanian coast, where today the language affiliations of people referring to themselves as “Segeju” are various (see below).

It hardly seems necessary to recapitulate the main lines of Lugard's life and career since these are well known and have been studied several times. It might be useful, however, to discuss the political impact of his writings--especially some of his later works--because so many of them helped to influence British colonial policy throughout Africa and the empire.

As early as 1889 Lugard had established himself as an authority on African affairs by publishing a series of articles about Nyasaland and the necessity of suppressing the slave trade. Three years later--after engineering a treaty between Mwanga, the kabaka of Buganda, and the Imperial British East Africa Company--Lugard returned to England to campaign for the retention of Uganda. In addition to making his views known in The Times and in the Pall Mall Gazette, he defended the British position in eastern Africa in such important publications as the Manchester Geographical Journal, Blackwood's Magazine, and the Chamber of Commerce Journal. The Rise of Our East African Empire, a two-volume study of approximately 350,000 words, also helped to convince the British government and public of Uganda's stategic and economic value.

In 1894 Lugard accepted employment with the Royal Niger Company, thereby starting an association with west Africa that lasted for more than forty years. During that time he wrote an astounding number of articles, books, and pamphlets about the region's economic, political, and social life. In one nine-month period, for example, Lugard wrote twelve papers that appeared in a number of journals, including the Scottish Geographical Magazine, The Nineteenth Century, National Review, and The Geographical Journal.

The early cultural history of Madagascar, inseparable from that of the Indian Ocean, remains very poorly known. I agree with other authors that the peopling of the island is recent; so far we do not have any archeological evidence dating prior to the ninth century. While it is beyond doubt that the islands received people, techniques, and ideas from all the areas around the Indian Ocean, recent work confirms the dominance of a double--or rather a triple--component: an Indonesian one, much Indianized before being tinged with a particular brand of Shicite Islam around the thirteenth century; an Arabo-Persian influence; and an African, particularly Bantu, influence. The Bantu influence, is in most cases, inseparable from the preceding. Deschamps believes that the more recent, “Islamized,” arrivals brought with them new political concepts that led, according to Kent, to the emergence of the first Malagasy kingdoms at the beginning of the sixteenth century. I also agree with this point and believe that the concepts of a kingship based on the mystic pre-eminence of a sovereign of which the prototype were the Andriambahoaka were introduced into Madagascar by the first Malagasy dynasty, the ZafiRaminia (lit. “the descendants of Raminia”). These ZafiRaminia, who dominated for a time the entire coast and penetrated at an early date into the interior, largely constitute the origins of other dynasties in the central, southern, and western parts of the island. This does not preclude that these various dynasties were later strongly marked by other influences, especially that of the Antemoro.

Scholars of the West African savanna have long been familiar with the use of the Arabic alphabet to create cajami or “non-Arabic” literatures in Fulfulde and Hausa. Maurice Delafosse took a rather negative position on the value of this material, basing his opinion on two formidable obstacles: the absence of natural correspondence between a Semitic alphabet and non-Semitic phonemes and the difficulty of establishing a unified system of of conventions where such a natural correspondence was lacking. He argued that the ajamiyya manuscripts were few in number, poor in quality, and did not deserve the name of literature. By contrast, several more recent authors have stressed the importance and the continuing composition in ajamiyya: Gilbert Vieillard and Alfa Ibrahima Sow, in their work on the Fulfulde of Futa Jalon, Pierre Lacroix in his work on the Adamawa dialect of the same language, and Mervyn Hiskett in his studies in Hausa. Even where the volume of material is small, they have pointed to the critical pedagogical functions of ajamiyya for the spread of Islam.

In this paper I wish to show both the importance and the problems of exploiting Fulfulde literature in a somewhat different milieu, the jihad of al-hajj Umar of the mid-nineteenth century and the state which his son Amadu Sheku ran from Segu. To achieve this I will examine a narrative poem taken from the library and archives of Segu but housed since the 1890s at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris under the title Fonds Archinard. In the process I hope to draw attention to the historical circumstances in which the ajamiyya conventions for Fulfulde were developed and maintained in Futa Jalon and then extended to the Umarian entourage, and to the necessity for textual and contextual criticism of written documents based on an understanding of the close relationship between oral and written media and the continual revision that characterize a received tradition.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers who described pre-colonial Dahomey all stressed that the Dahomans were dedicated, enthusiastic slavers. The kingdom's first historian, Archibald Dalzel, remarked, for example, that the Dahomans were “bred solely to war and rapine.” F.E. Forbes, the author of one of the best-known nineteenth-century accounts of the kingdom, in a similar vein, declared of Dahomey that “strange and contradictory as it may sound, this great nation is no nation, but a banditti.”

The views of these and other similarly-minded writers were, until the 1960s, everywhere accepted. In that decade, however, Isaac A. Akinjogbin published a series of works in which he gave an account of a long-lived Dahoman anti-slave trade tradition. Dahomey was, he claims, founded ca 1620 by a group of “highly principled and far-seeing” Aja in the Abomey area. These Aja founded the kingdom so as to be able to wage war effectively against those of their countrymen who traded in slaves.

Akinjogbin believed that the Dahomans spent about ninety years making war on their slave trading neighbors. It was, he claims, only in 1730 that the European slavers and their African allies were able to force the Dahomans to abandon their anti-slave trade campaign and to begin trading in slaves themselves. The very destructive wars of the 1720s, the wars which made Dahomey a major west African power, were, it seems undertaken as part of a virtuous, anti-slave trade crusade.

Although the Dahomans were forced to begin trading in slaves in 1730, they did not, Aknjogbin implies, entirely abandon their anti-slave trade ideals.

What do African tellers of history tell it for? What do they mean by history and how differently is the past transmitted in different communities? Professional academic historians use oral data like documentary data, for their own ends. They work in a different medium--written language--and they offer back a new story to the original donors. They do not always pay attention to the ways in which these consumers produced their own versions and perpetuated them embedded in performances. The indigenous occasions of performance are also easily replaced by the record of an outside researcher's chance intervention.

Oral performances of history differ--in kind, in the extent to which past events are a focus of attention, in the readiness of individuals to answer an outsider's questions, in the types and structures of recall. The patterns I describe for one Liberian community may be quite different for its ethnic neighbors. As a social anthropologist I assume that recall is not a purely individual phenomenon, and besides trying to understand what connections there may be between types of recall and types of social condition, I want to see how personal reminiscence (as well as tradition) is formulated, sustained, and recapitulated; to whom it is repeated; whether it is hinted or used overtly as a weapon. By taking these issues into account I believe we can also interpret better the historical data from oral performance, just as we need to know about all the genres of performance if we are to recognize the uses of history there may be in apparently non-historical modes.

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

Over a thousand miles separate the Fulbe emirate of Liptako in Upper Volta from the region of the lower Gambia River, where several Mandinka states long held political authority. Fundamental differences between the areas are easy to notice. Besides speaking its own language and following its own set of social customs, Liptako's Fulbe population practiced a mixed pastoral and agrarian mode of subsistence on land where rainfall was only marginally sufficient. The Mandinka were more strictly farmers in an area that receives on average about twice as much rainfall as Liptako. Liptako existed as a unified Fulbe state only since the first decade of the nineteenth century, whereas many of the Mandinka states of the lower Gambia date to at least three centuries earlier. Commerce was important to both regions, but Liptako's commercial focus was toward the Sahara and the desert-side trade, whereas the lower Gambia was a point of contact between savanna merchants and Atlantic shippers. But, despite these obvious differences, there is a remarkable degree of similarity in the way individuals living in the two areas remember their past, and historians find a host of like problems they must confront when attempting to reconstruct the precolonial histories of either region.

I had become increasingly aware of some of the difficulties in working with Mandinka oral tradition during fieldwork in the lower Gambia. But only recently have I become familiar with problems another historian encountered as he studied traditions from Liptako, so many miles from my own area of interest. A Fulbe emirate, Liptako rose in the wake of Usuman dan Fodio's jihad early in the nineteenth century.

“I cry because the people cause me to
cry about the Taxes…We have now to
sell our children in order to get
money to pay the Tax which is heavy.”
[Labotsibeni, Queen Regent of Swaziland, 1906]

“On these distant hills, catch the sun before its sets, you are mourned!
I'm now just a song that everyone sings!
I loved a young man,
But they took him, he signed on at Mankaiana,
Now I am ruined!”
[Swazi women's working song, traditional]

“It is sometimes said that the operations of the recruiting organization are tantamount to a policy of forced labour and that pressure is brought to bear to make Natives go to the mines. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
[J.A. Genmill, General Manager, N.R.C., 1961]

During the past decade the cascade of literature dealing with capital penetration into Southern Africa and its various consequences has set all of us, liberal and radical, awash. There is not sign of letup. We have learned that pre-industrial economies were self-sustaining at the very least, some of them very much more than that; and that many were dynamic in their subsequent response to market forces. We have learned that peasants had to be forced to go to work, and how efficient the systems of coercion were. We have learned how those pre-capitalist societies reacted to the seductions and the entrapments of capitalism, some through collaboration, others through patterns of resistance, most, surely, combining the two.

In 1974 Abdul Hamid M. el Zein published The Sacred Meadows: A Structural Analysis of Religious Symbolism in an East African Town. The town in question was Lamu on an island of the same name off the northern coast of Kenya. The population of Lamu, holding steady at about 5,000 during this century, is mostly Muslim and mostly of mixed Arab and African descent. Arabs began to visit Lamu centuries ago and over time Arab traders settled on the tiny island, married local women, and created what we know today in the larger context along the East African coast as Swahili language and culture. Dhows came each year with the northeast monsoon bringing Arab sailors and a trickle of new immigrants from Arabia. (Not only Arabia, however, as dhows came from many parts of the Indian Ocean to Lamu and the east coast of Africa). As sailors, Lamu people continued to revisit Arabia, among many ports, for commerce as well as for pilgrimage to Mecca. The Arab strain in Lamu culture was therefore reinforced; that culture has therefore tended to sway toward the Indian Ocean in recent centuries and to Arabia in the past one hundred and fifty years.

Until the last decade or so the town had a tight social hierarchy with the old Arab (as they identified themselves) families at the top, followed by Indian traders and merchants (who often worked in partnership with the old families), and then other merchants, such as late nineteenth century arrivals from the Hadramawt, free Africans and Bajuni (the Swahili people from nearby islands), and finally, slaves (or ex-slaves after 1907).

Colonially-imposed linguistic boundaries have often represented important obstacles to historical and anthropological research in Africa. Even where researchers working in African vernaculars employ data in a transfrontier context, their publications usually appear in only one European language, and are therefore often not accessible to Africans or western researchers unacquainted with that language. The resultant linguistic fragmentation of Africanist publications sometimes leaves the impression of limited sources on a given topic, whereas in fact the relevant sources may be very rich when the writings of two or more national units--often presenting quite different conceptual approaches as well as languages--are drawn on fully.

Some of the most arresting examples of such myopic behavior are evident along Zaire's eastern border with former British administered areas of eastern Africa. T.O. Ranger's valuable account of the Mwana Lesa Watch Tower movement is a case in point. His discussion of Tomo Nyirenda's activities in northern Zambia is detailed and highly revealing. But the Mwana Lesa Movement was also active in the southern pedicule of Zaire, and there are numerous published works (of varying quality) in French on this fascinating example of colonial repression of African religious initiative. Although his account does draw on works in English which are based on (unspecified) Congo materials, only a single francophone source appears in Ranger's otherwise intriguing synthesis.

Farther north, the long border between Zaire and former British-administered areas provides many other examples of similarly narrow linguistic horizons. Little work, for example, has appeared on the translacustrine ties among people living on the lakeshores of the western rift lakes.

Since 1974 a program of African studies has been developed in the University of Trondheim within the framework of the cand. philol. degree. The major subject within this degree occupies from 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 years of study, including a thesis that in history averages about 60,000 words and must represent original research based on primary material. Since 1974 about twenty-five such theses on topics connected with African history have been completed. The theses are written in Norwegian. Microfiche copies can be obtained from: The University Library, The University of Trondheim (DKNVS), Erling Skakkes gt., 7000 Trondheim.