Early maps and charts of Africa--here defined as those produced before colonial penetration--have seldom been used as a source for historical studies. Generally they are valued more for their decorative qualities than for their geographical content. Jonathan Swift gave form to this viewpoint in his famous --or notorious--lines:

So geographers in Afric-maps
With savage-pictures fill the gaps
And o'er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns

lines which stereotyped the African cartography until today.

But it is not only eighteenth century maps that have been exposed to ridicule; those made in colonial times have also been subjected to stinging criticism. For instance, the linguist Pierre Alexandre noticed that on the official map of Cameroun made before independence a certain “Ambababoum” is shown as an important village on the road from Yaoundé to Bafia. However, it does not exist and has never existed within living memory. And, examining another map, he observed that certain peoples who do not exist are mentioned, while others who do exist are omitted.

Mapondera was born in the 1840s and spent most of his life in the upper and middle Mazowe valley until in about 1894 he embarked on a career that reached its climax in 1901 when he and a large group of allies fought a pitched battle with the Rhodesian colonial authorities that led to his trial and imprisonment. Few people of his time and region have received as much attention from modern writers: articles, sections of books and a historical novel have been based on his career, and he has even had an important building named after him.

This paper examines his life. It is a long paper, partly because there is so much evidence available, but also because the evidence is often vague or contradictory on certain crucial points. For example, his son and grandson could not even agree on the identity of his father. Such points must be discussed in detail before even tentative conclusions are drawn. This paper also differs from others in that most works introduce the reader to the subject by reviewing the historiography. In this case an attempt will be made to examine the evidence first and then to refer to previous writing, to allow the readers to form their own conclusions unaffected by earlier views. It also tries to use only the terminology that would have been familiar to Mapondera and his contemporaries. Thus it refers to varungu and vazungu not Rhodesian or Portuguese colonialists, and it refers to non-African individuals by their African names.

Portugal has long been recognized by historians as a treasure house of manuscript collections. In Lisbon alone there are some twenty-five public archives, many of which hold rich collections of historical documents and rare printed works. Other urban centers like Coimbra, Porto, Évora, Braga, Guimarães, and Setúbal, not to mention smaller cities and towns, also have numerous archives, specialized libraries, museums, and ancient monasteries that house important manuscript and printed collections. The archaic Portuguese bureaucracy, however, has rarely been able to adequately assess the extensive contents of such a large number of depositories. Indeed, few of these institutions can boast of possessing catalogs for their holdings. When these do exist, they are more often than not either incomplete or almost totally out of date. As a result the lack of appropriate working tools turns archival research in Portugal into a rather painstaking and time-consuming affair. Instead of a dusty treasure house whose contents have been organized and assessed, what the researcher usually finds is a labyrinth of uncataloged, unknown, and uncared-for musty documents slowly deteriorating in the damp cellars of decrepit buildings.

Violent territorial competition is one of the dominant forces in the history of southern Africa, and all historiography with reference to land has significant political ramifications to this day. Nineteenth-century sources in the history of the BaSotho reflect these political considerations, which were as salient then as they are today.

In this paper I investigate the principal nineteenth-century sources for the history of land rights and land conflict affecting the BaSotho. On the basis of archival materials, I identify and assess the sources which early historians relied on. I also examine the background and orientations of these observers, in order to evaluate their interpretations of BaSotho history. The works with which I deal with are well-known to students of Lesotho history, and because they are so often used by modern scholars it is important that their origins, authenticity, and value be assessed.

The history of the Yoruba-speaking people in the nineteenth century has attracted considerable attention. The attempt to write on the era did not have to await the emergence of academic historians: some of the elites produced by the century took it upon themselves to be worthy chroniclers of their age. The most notable among these writers were Samuel Johnson, John Olawunmi George, E.M. Lijadu, Otunba Payne, and Mojola Agbebi all of whom wrote either in the English Language or in their mother tongue. A few others also wrote in Arabic, thus contributing to the Islamic historiography of the century. The contributions of all these authors are immense. Whereas the preceding centuries had virtually no chroniclers, the nineteenth century could boast of a handful whose writings have remained part of the sources for the era.

It was also a century of major activities by foreign explorers, missionaries, and officials of the British government. These were men with varying degrees of educational background, but with skill adequate enough to write letters, make entries in diaries, and report on their activities and experiences in Africa. The most talented among them wrote books and copious reports. A great deal of these writings have survived and have been widely used as primary sources to reconstruct the history of the period.

Le cheminement de l'Histoire s'est fait lentement depuis le temps de ses pères fondateurs au Grand Siècle de Périclès; mais le processus vers l'état des connaissances actuelles s'est accéléré dès la fin du XVIIe siècle avec les débuts de l'Histoire méthodique enrichie par l'Erudition au XVIIIe siècle, pour en arriver à rechercher un sens dans une Histoire conceptualisée. Le XIXe siècle sera marqué par le développement des Philosophies de l'Histoire: elles ont cours encore aujourd'hui bien qu'elles soient entachées de doute, de scepticisme, de relativisme (Bourde/Martin 1983). Le grand débat qui oppose les historiens se situe au niveau de l'interprétation, du sens à donner à l'analyse d'une source, qu'elle soit écrite, orale, archéologique, sonore ou imagée. Ou bien l'analyse critique des documents et leur confrontation permettent de reconstituer la fresque historique à travers ses tenants et aboutissants, ou bien l'on essaye d'aller plus loin en intégrant l'analyse critique dans une conception que l'on se fait de l'évolution historique, en admettant au préalable qu'il existe une dynamique sousjacente, un moteur, une problématique en fait.

Despite the slender evidentiary base of surviving sources, historians would dearly like to know more about colonial vital rates. In the absence of hard data, speculation has run rampant about changes in fertility and mortality. Were African birth rates always as high as they are today? Did the early years of colonial rule bring about rises in the deathrates in all areas and to the same degree? Researchers are now combing the available evidence for materials to answer questions such as these.

Unfortunately, the records of a single year's births and deaths are not a reliable indicator of long-term demographic trends. In a small population in particular, the events of a given year must be seen in the context of the years surrounding it. Inadequate reporting might lead to underestimates of either fertility or mortality rates, while uncommon events such as epidemics might be wrongly taken as typical.

These discontinuities have led researchers to concentrate on series of demographic rates rather than isolated estimates. Mathematically, this has promoted the use of techniques which convert the haphazard incidences of births and deaths into continuous functions which, although not as close to the raw data as year-by-year statistics, nonetheless give the reader a notion of trends over time.

The Bantu expansion has been a problem for historians ever since the recognition by linguists of a single startling fact. During the nineteenth century, the descriptions of African languages available to scholars in Europe grew steadily in number; they also tended to gain in detail, and in accuracy. It thus became increasingly clear that a sinuous line could be traced across the map distinguishing a zone of extremely high diversity in the north from a zone of low diversity in the south. By the 1880s a popularizing writer could claim that this contrast was generally recognized “by students of African languages.” The situation as he described it was

The conquest of Whydah by the Dahomians under King Agaja in March 1727 was indisputably an event of great historical importance. In Dahomian tradition it was recalled above all-- with a degree of oversimplication--as marking the beginning of Dahomey's involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, and was regarded as Agaja's greatest triumph, commemorated in his surname “Hunyito” (“taker of ships”) and his heraldic emblem, a European ship. It also made a considerable impression on contemporary European observers, being perceived from the first as an especially dramatic and significant event - “a great Revolution,” in the words of one eyewitness. Part of the impact of the fall of Whydah lay in the scale and comprehensiveness of the human and material destruction which the Dahomian conquest involved, and the contrast with Whydah's former prosperity: “such a terrible Desolation by the Sword, Fire and Famine, as hardly ever befel any Country… It was a lamentable Story to hear, and a dismal Sight to see, the Desolation of so fine a Country, lately exceedingly populous, now destroyed in such a manner by Fire and Sword”. In addition, the defeat of Whydah by Dahomey had been wholly unexpected. Before the event Bulfinch Lamb, an English trader held captive in Dahomey, had advised Agaja against attacking Whydah, urging that given the large population and access to imported European firearms of the latter “there was no probability of Success.”

Historians of Nigeria have been curious for many years about the relationship between the various states of the southern zone since the sixteenth century. The fact that the area has produced a rich art, has a fairly elaborate set of traditional histories, and has been the subject of some systematic archeological work means that the modern scholar has somewhat more to go on in reconstructing the region's history than just the fairly sparse and disappointing contemporary texts that came out of the early Portuguese contacts and subsequent European trade and navigation. But contemporary documentation for southern Nigeria remains much weaker than that for other African areas, such as the central African zone, Gold Coast, or the western Atlantic coast.

Nevertheless, documents have raised problems in understanding the history of the area that cannot be fully solved by recourse to the other sources of information, in spite of the comparative richness of non-documentary sources. One of these documentary problems is the issue of the Ife-Benin relationship as documentated in archeology, contemporary texts, and art history. The problems raised by the relationship between these two southern Nigerian cities ultimately reflects on a much larger set of questions concerning the relationship of all the early states south of the Niger, at a period quite near the origin of the state system that would predominate the rest of the pre-colonial period.

While Africa has produced ruthless and aggressive individuals, Africa has also provided thinkers and public officials with deep moral sensitivity and vision. The following essay discusses a perceptive and powerful African plea for peace and justice in nineteenth-century Buganda. In a country torn by strife, certain Ganda leaders expressed their deep distress about the growing incidence of state violence by reformulating the Kintu myth, the theological, constitutional, and social cornerstone of their kingdom. These concerned individuals boldly reshaped the Kintu story, the Ganda people's most sacred symbol, to describe the tension between peace and violence as the most important issue in Ganda politics.

During the summer of 1987 I was able to visit manuscript collections in Ibadan, Kaduna, Zaria, Kano, and Sokoto to check and expand data for my projected contribution to the multi–volume Arabic Literature in Africa, edited by myself and R. S. O'Fahey. These notes are based on my experiences with the various collections at that time.

Two synopses of the holdings of the National Archives of Ghana were published fifteen years ago, one by David Henige, the other by R. E. Dumett. Henige's article offers a more detailed breakdown of some series (notably ADM 1–21 and SCT 1–44), while Dumett provides a more descriptive account and gives more details on ADM 22–262. In the meantime several of the inventories on which Henige and Dumett based their reports have disappeared or disintegrated, and others are rapidly heading in the same direction. The need for a full printed catalog is urgent; unless work on this is begun soon, the whole archive will have to be re-inventoried. In February/March 1987 I was able to check a few of the references given by Henige and Dumett or in the surviving inventories, and perhaps my notes may be of some use to future researchers.

This collection brings together six papers of the some seventy that were presented at the international symposium held at Université Laval in October, 1987 entitled “Mémoires, Histoires, Identités”. Organized jointly by the History Department of Université Laval, the Ecole des Hautes études en sciences sociales de Paris and the Laboratoire 363 “Tiers-Monde-Afrique” CNRS/Université Paris VII, the symposium aimed to stimulate reflection and research on the links between the construction of identities and the production of history as a discourse on the past, and thus on the links maintained by two modes of production of History-the academic and the popular. Achieving this objective required a broadening of the empirical field to avoid unduly singularizing African experiences.

The papers here concentrate on the process of the production of history by historical actors or by cultural intermediaries who, educated or not, are not of the university milieu which imposes the western conception of historical discourse. The relationships between academic and popular discourse and between the norms of the dominant culture and the practices of dominated cultures are at the center of the analyses.

Isaiah Berlin recently summarized the past century as follows:

The other, without doubt, consists in the great ideological storms that have altered the lives of virtually all mankind: the Russian Revolution and its aftermath – totalitarian tyrannies of both right and left and the explosions of nationalism, racism, and, in places, of religious bigotry, which, interestingly enough, not one among the most perceptive social thinkers of the nineteenth century had ever predicted.

La région sénégambienne, du fait de ses stuctures étatiques anciennes et fortement hiérarchisées, est une région de longue tradition historique. Dans chaque royaume, le pouvoir gérait un savoir historique qui se présentait comme une chronique orale des règnes. Les détenteurs spécialisés de ce savoir sont connus dès le début du XVIème siècle: les écrits portugais nomment de leur nom wolof, gewel, ceux qu'on appellera plus tard griots. Dès cette époque et dans les siècles suivants, les descriptions européennes, lorsqu'elles font preuve d'assez de curiosité, sont entremêlées de récits historiques issus de la tradition orale et communiqués par des informateurs locaux. Il n'est done pas étonnant que, dans la deuxième moitié du XIXème siècle, l'élargissement et le développement des usages de l'écrit se soient traduits par une floraison d'oeuvres issues d'une histoire véhicuiée par transmission orale depuis plusieurs siècles.

Yoro Dyao fut le premier de ces chroniqueurs sénégalais qui ont recueilli, traduit, écrit, compilé, interprété aussi, les traditions orales de leur peuple. Son premier texte, l'“Histoire des Darnels du Cayor”, a été publié, dans le Moniteur du Sénégal, en 1864. A cette époque, la formation territoriale de la colonie du Sénégal était à peine ébauchée. Celle-ci n'excédait guère le terrltoire du petit royaume du Waalo (à l'embouchure du fleuve) qui venait d'âtre conquis. Y. Dyao était issu de l'aristocratie du Waalo. A ce titre il avait fait partie de la deuxième promotion de l'Ecole des otages, fondée par Faidherbe en 1855.

Dans les pays africains sous administration beige l'expression écrite des me'moires collectives qui apparalt dans les années 1940–1950 était inconcevable hors de la sphère d'influence des églises chrétiennes. La presse catholique en particulier a été le premier vecteur de cette forme moderne de l'affirmation des identités culturelles. Au Burundi il s'agit de Rusizira Amarembe, édité à Gitega de 1940 à 1954, et de son successeur Ndongozi, publié de 1954 à 1978. Comme leurs titres l'indiquent ces périodiques étaient rédigés en kirundi, dans le prolongement de la scolarisation assurée par les missions en langue vernaculaire. Le premier signifiait “le semeur de paix”, ou plus exactement “celui qui prépare le terrain de la prospérité”, et le second, plus simplement, “l'éclaireur.”

Comme nous l'avons déjà souligné ailleurs, ces publications devaient bénéficier de la double autorité de la chose imprimée et du parler quotidien, de la technologie des colonisateurs et de la culture des ancêtres, faisant écho aux préoccupations d'un nouveau milieu socioculturel, celui des Africains lettrés. C'est dans ce contexte que s'amorga l'écriture d'une histoire nationale, destinée à fixer de manière systématique les “choses du passé” (ivya kera) jusque là seulement narrées localement à l'occasion des veillées des enclos.

The kingdom of Dahomey (or Fon) was probably founded during the first half of the seventheenth century, but emerged clearly as a major power only in the early eighteenth century when its king Agaja (ca. 1716–40) conquered its southern neighbours Allada (1724) and Whydah (1727), thereby establishing direct contact with the European slave-traders at the coast. Dahomey then remained the dominant power in the area until it was itself conquered by the French in the 1892–94. The kingdom ceased to exist as a political entity when its last king was deposed by the French in 1900, but a degree of institutional continuity has been maintained through the performance of rituals at the royal palace (now a museum) in the capital city Abomey. The history of Dahomey from the 1720s onwards is relatively well documented from contemporary European sources, enjoying in particular the unique distinction of being made the subject already in the eighteenth century of a published book—Archibald Dalzel's History of Dahomy (1793). There is also a rich and coherent corpus of narrative traditions relating to the kingdom's history, best known in the classic recension published in 1911 by the French colonial official Le Herissé, which is in fact merely a translation (and in some measure an abridgement, omitting some detailed material) of the account given to him by a single Dahomian informant, Agbidinukun, the chef de canton of the cercle of Abomey under French colonial rule and a brother of the last independent king of Dahomey, Behanzin (1889–94).

Dans le Sud-Est de la Côte d'Ivoire le début des années soixante est marqué par la tentative de sécession du Sanwi et ses retombées. Le roi du Sanwi, décidant de se détacher de l'Etat ivoirien qui vient d'accéder à l'independance, est allé avec ses partisans s'établir au Ghana où il a formé un gouvernement provisoire. II donne légitimité à ce mouvement en faisant référence au traité d'alliance qu'un de ses prédécesseurs Amon Ndiffou avait signé avec la France, représentée par Fleuriot de Langle, le 4 Juillet 1843.

L'érection du Sanwi en Etat indépendant est le signal d'une sévère politique de répression qui s'abat sur les Anyi de la région. A Aboisso régne le sous-préfet Haccandie qui met en place un réseau d'agents de renseignements dans un pays où les villages et les families sont profondément divisées par ce qu'on commence à appeler “I'affaire du Sanwi”. En outre les crédits affectés à la région sont drastiquement réduits. Or antérieurement le Sanwi avait été le premier pôle de développement de la Colonie, dotée d'un important réseau routier pour l'écoulement des “produits” (café, cacao) et d'équipements sanitaires et scolaires. Et brusquement ce pays, d'où était issue une élite de lettrés et de fonctionnaires, se trouve déiaissé, voire sacxifie, au bénéfice d'autres parties de la Côte d'Ivoire.