In “Agaja and the Slave Trade” it was argued that the evidence cited to support Akinjogbin's view of Agaja's attitude to the slave trade did not in fact give any support to his view. Particular reference was made to Bulfinch Lambe, whose “Proposal” was quoted by Atkins in support of his interpretation of Agaja's motives for the conquest of Whydah –– the only contemporary to give an interpretation in line with Akinjogbin's.

Atkins was not on the coast at the time of the conquest of Whydah (nor, apparently, had he been there since 1722); but it seems that he met Lambe, presumably after Lambe's return to England. Atkins refers to Lambe's “scheme of trade, said to be proposed from that Emperor [Agaja] and laid before our Commissioners of Trade;” he leaves the reader with the impression that nothing was ever done about the matter, “and Captain Lamb, tho' under a solemn Promise to return, never gave any Account of his Embassy to that Prince.”

One wonders what Fernand Braudel and the school of the Annales have done to become a kind of Trojan Horse for the wholesale condemnation of the historical value of oral tradition. Yet they are the banner raised by W.G. Clarence-Smith in a recent article in his journal to preach jihad against its historical value. Clarence-Smith claims that the historiographical revolution effected by Annales has resulted in the definitive exclusion of oral traditions from the halls of Clio. Oral traditions are at best ambiguous “signs” about the past and are very much of the present. They lack absolute chronology and they are selective, so away with them. If they be worthy of attention at all, let anthropologists and sociologists be concerned, save in a few rare instances where a historian wants to check on some European printed source. And even then, caveat emptor. Significantly, the article is not just the expression of the views of one person; rather it is symptomatic of much of the criticism which has been leveled at oral tradition, mostly by fasionable anthropologists. And it brings this criticism to its logical conclusion.

But first a word about Braudel, the Annales, and oral tradition in general. The Annales School was founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch before World War II. Fernand Braudel is its most distinguished exponent. His major theoretical pronouncements can be found in his Ecrits sur l'histoire, a collection of articles reprinted and published in 1969. This and his two major historical works should be read by those who want to know more about his views and ways of dealing with history. The basic tenets that members of the Annales School hold is that the history of events is but the spray of past developments; other time depths tell us more about the waves of the past. There is the time of the conjoncture, the trend, and the even longer time periods -- sometimes many centuries long -- the longue durée or long term. Successful history writing does not liminate the study of events, but analyzes them against the movement of these longer and deeper-running trends.

In the Jesuit scheme of things the missionary fields of Madagascar and Maduré (that is, Madura in south India) fell to the Order's Toulouse province. What follows is a brief description of some of the materials relating to Madagascar in the archives of the Toulouse Jesuits, based on a recent short visit there.

I might mention first the most important Jesuit missionary journal of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relating to Madagascar. Like most missionary periodical publications, this particular journal underwent several changes of title. Beginning publication in 1838 as Lettres des Scolastiques de Vals, the title was later changed to Lettres du scolasticat de Vals, and then to Lettres de Vals. From 1882 to 1897 it was known as Lettres d'Uclès, then until 1901, again as Lettres de Vals; finally, from 1903 until 1914 it was called Lettres de Gemert. The Toulouse archives has a complete set of these, none of which was originally issued for public consumption and hence are difficult to locate. As each of the titles suggests, this journal consisted of letters written from missionaries in the field to their Apostolic Vicars. Such letters were then excerpted and summarized and sent on to Vals, a Jesuit training seminary, for circulation among the missionaries in training there. Originally the excerpts were handcopied and arranged by region: Madagascar, India, Oceania, etc., but later they were lithographed or printed.

More than sixty years ago, in his preface to Carl Russell Fish's excellent Guide to the Materials for American History in Roman and Other Archives, the General Editor, J. Franklin Jameson, wrote as follows.

Although these words were written decades ago, it still remains true that too little use is made of such archival materials, and not only by American historians. One of the microfilm additions to the collections at Saint Louis University includes precisely this type of material in a collection that runs to about 250,000 manuscript pages from the Archive of the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide (for the propagation of the faith). The congregation was definitively established by Gregory XV (1621-1623) in his constitution Inscrutabili of June 22, 1622, although there had been some discussion about the formation of such a congregation for almost fifty years. This brief note description will be oriented toward the African materials only, but a general description of the indexes is necessary that the Africanist may be able to use them.

In the late 1950s, the National Archives of Ghana (NAG) began a decentralizaton programme which has progressed to the point where there is now a NAG regional depository in eight of the country's nine regions, the only exception so far being the Upper Region. Furthermore, unlike many of the efforts at bureaucratic decentralization in Ghana, which have been more de jure than de facto -- archival decentralization in Ghana is a reality. As a result, the historical researcher who limits his efforts to the Accra branch of the NAG is risking the loss of considerable richness of detail, as a recent trip to Sekondi made abundantly clear to me.

Sekondi houses the Western Regional Branch of the NAG. The Western Region is, in many respects, one of Ghana's most interesting areas. Until relatively recently it was, at one and the same time, the major center of foreign business activity in the country, and one of the country's most backward and underdeveloped areas. While ironic, this juxtaposition is certainly not surprising. But more importantly, from the point of view of the researcher into Ghana's history, it affords the opportunity for a more detailed micro-level historical examination of, for instance, the relationship between “modernity” and “tradition,” or between the “capitalist mode of production” and the “pre-capitalist mode of production.” The Western Region has been almost an ideal type in this respect, and as a consequence is virtually a laboratory, not only for the historian, but also for the historically-minded sociologist, economist, and political scientist.

In the 1976 volume of History in Africa D.N. Beach published a brief but very interesting account of his visit to and findings in the Historical Archives of Goa (HAG). The objectives of Beach's visit to the Archives were precisely and rather narrowly delimited by the particular interests of this scholar and his university. He searched for and found a number of documents bearing on Shona history, which was at the center of his professional interests, and he identified some but by far not all the relevant collections. Beach's mission in view of his limited objectives and time restrictions can be rated successful. However, there are other interesting collections in the Goa archives of value to historians with interest in the territory of south-eastern and central Africa with all its peoples rather than one particular group. To historians with broader interests in the history of south-eastern, central, and even western Africa, as well as that of the Indian Ocean, the following background and description of the contents of the Historical Archives of Goa should be of considerable interest. The account is based on a two-week visit I made to the Archives in 1971 and my four months of research in the Archives in 1974.

Although barely known to the community of modern historians, the Historical Archives of Goa are probably the best existing archives in the non-western world and the records there cover a large area of the world over a period of four hundred and fifty years from the early sixteenth to the twentieth century. These documents represent primarily the history of the Portuguese State of India from 1515 to 1961, an area which covered far more than what was known in 1961 as Goa, Damão, and Dio. For much of four centuries the viceroyalty of Goa extended for all practical purposes from the Cape of Good Hope to Nagasaki and Timor. Thus the documents collected in Goa contain the history of many countries with which the Portuguese came into contact. Among them the most prominent are, in geographic order: Mozambique, Rhodesia, Zanzibar, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, the Arab countries, Persia, the Mughal Empire, the Marathas, the Deccani Sultanates, Goa, Vijayanagar, Ceylon, Bengal, Siam, Malaysia (Malacca), China, Japan, the Moluccas, and Timor. In addition there is a good deal of information on Angola and Brazil. The wide geographic coverage of the archival holdings is matched by the depth of the period covered. Although the Archives were instituted in 1595, the holdings extend further back into the sixteenth century and provide detailed evidence for study of diplomatic, religious, political, economic, and social history, unmatched in amount and quality in any archives in the given geographic area.

This paper results from two visits to the Archives at Zanzibar in 1975 and 1976, lasting in all approximately three weeks. Access to these archives has not been an easy matter for some time, though more recently a few scholars have been able to secure permission to use them. This paper is an examination solely of the Arabic materials in the Archives, and may be of use to those who intend to use the Archives, particularly non-Arabic-speaking scholars.

The collection was originally housed in the museum of Bayt al-Amānī before it was moved to its present site, a modern building centrally situated on the main road to the airport. There is a large reading room with an open shelf library containing various studies on Zanzibar, Zanzibar government publications, and a newspaper collection. Other documents are available on request from stacks housed in the lower part of the building. Regretably, however, no photocopying facilities are presently available. Copies of an inventory prepared in 1954 may be consulted in the reading room.