In mid-1995, walking out of the door of my house, I received a telephone call. On the other end of the line was a distinct, well-spoken, but clearly faraway male voice. The man introduced himself, saying:

My name is Vusi Kaunda, calling from Johannesburg, South Africa. I recently read an article you wrote about the YMCA, referring to events that took place some 75 years ago. I have been working for the South African YMCA for 10 years and I never knew anything about all this. Where did you get your information?

Conditions did not permit us to take this conversation to its logical conclusion. I was on the way to conduct a history class; we had clearly connected at an inconvenient time. But that verbal exchange has stayed on my mind ever since. It demonstrated the power of the written word to connect people separated by thousands of miles, yet discover that they have a common purpose. Ours is to tell the story of the African voice in a new inclusive historiography of South Africa's Young Men's Christian Association.

My discovery of the YMCA of South Africa came as a result of researching the life of Max Yergan, an African-American YMCA Secretary who, representing the “jim crow” “Colored Work” Department of a segregated North American YMCA, entered the Union of South Africa after considerable opposition, on the second day of January 1922. This was Yergan's third overseas posting and second African assignment, the first being in Kenya, and then Tanganyika during the East Africa campaign of World War I. He had joined the YMCA as a Shaw University sophomore in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1911, rapidly rising in its ranks to become a national figure in their Black “Y” network. Yergan became the third “non-white” YMCA Traveling Secretary in South Africa and the first to attempt to do so on a full-time basis, succeeding J. K. Bokwe and D. D. T. Jabavu.

Situated at the edge of the central business district in downtown Nairobi, the Kenya National Archives (KNA) is a reservoir and living example of historical and ethnographic knowledge. Straddling the boundary between “tourist” Nairobi and “real” Nairobi, the KNA inhabits a space that transcends both function and class in a cosmopolitan, urban setting. The archives look out on the landmark Hilton Hotel, together with the swarms of up-market tourists and wealthy locals it attracts. On the KNA's rear, Tom Mboya street serves a modern gateway to the crushing, chaotic avenues and alleys that the vast majority of Nairobi's citizens tread daily as they depart from and return to the stark realities of Nairobi's eastern slums. Engulfed by the wailing horns of passing matatus and the rhythmic calls of street hawkers, the spaces inside and outside the archive offer a rich terrain for social scientists interested in both contemporary and historical Kenya.

The composition of the KNA's clientele also reflects the boundaries that the archives span. Throughout the day, international tourists and local schoolchildren trickle into the groundfloor museum (currently undergoing a major renovation supported by the Ford Foundation) to view the extensive collection of artifacts and photographs representing Kenya's diverse cultures and rich history. Tucked away upstairs, a broad spectrum of patrons works and studies in the archives' reading room, using the KNA's resources for a variety of professional and personal projects.

Michael Scott, the long-term Gandhi-esque opponent of the South African government, was a man of many talents and one of his ignored skills was using a cine-camera. Between 1946 and 1948 as he worked in Tobruk squatter settlement near Johannesburg and environs and traveled to Namibia, in addition to his powerful writing, he also filmed scenes he encountered. The purpose of this note is to share the delight of viewing “Civilization on Trial in South Africa.” It is, as far as I can ascertain, the first “protest” film made in South Africa, yet is not mentioned in the standard histories of film in southern Africa (Cancel 2004, Davis, 1996, Botha/van Aswegen 1992, Tomaselli 1988). While working on another project I fortuitously came across a copy in the Smithsonian Film Archives that I had copied and have deposited in the Namibian Archives.

The Smithsonian catalog dates this 24-minute edited black and white film to ca. 1950, and believes that it was shot between 1946 and 1952, prior to the implementation of the Group Areas Act, although it seems likely that shooting was completed earlier, before Scott was declared a Prohibited Immigrant in the late 1940s. Certainly, reading the documents on Scott's travels to Namibia, it seems likely that portions of his film was shot before 1948. In his autobiography, A Time to Speak, Scott mentioned showing the film in 1949 (Scott 1958:248). The Smithsonian obtained the film from the late Colin Turnbull, an Oxford educated Africanist anthropologist (J. Homiak, personal comment).

Conducting historical research in countries with few resources necessary for the maintenance of documents and other sources on which we, as historians, depend is an exercise commonly fraught with difficulty. It need hardly be said that different problems confront us according to the themes and chronology of our studies, and so this paper cannot hope to be a comprehensive guide to any and every researcher working on Uganda. It can, however, illustrate some difficulties and successes of my particular research experience, which has been based overwhelmingly on the perusal of archival data. That experience was gained on two separate trips, one between January and August 2003 and one for the month of September, 2004. My research topic concerns the political history of two colonial districts in eastern province between 1945 and 1962. More particularly, it has set out to explore how political identity related to issues of class and class conflict in what was supposedly the first nationalist era. While I settled on these two districts, I initially began with three, and so conducted research at local archives for what were in the 1950s three districts of eastern province. Those districts were Teso, Busoga, and Bukedi, whose archives are at Soroti, Jinja, and Tororo respectively.

Attaining research permission in Uganda is a straightforward affair. Applications are made to the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology (UNCST), a body based in Uganda House on Kampala Rd., the main artery running through the city center. Their application forms can be downloaded from the internet at www.uncst.co.ug, or they can be telephoned at 00256 41 250499. The Council requires a brief research proposal, which is usually processed within a month of submission. On arrival in Kampala, they also require that one is ‘attached’ to a local institution before research papers are released. One can choose from Makerere University's Makerere Institute for Social Research (MISR) or the Centre for Basic Research (CBR) in Kololo, a research center for social sciences established by Mahmood Mamdani some years ago. Both institutions are in Kampala, are easy to access, and each charge around $US100 for annual membership.

From time immemorial human beings have sought to document their activities in realistic forms in order to pass across information about their lives to posterity. Even before the advent of cinematography, human beings had attempted to show life, not as static, but as dynamic. Cave paintings done by early men have shown an attempt to demonstrate movement through drawings of animals with many legs, designed to simulate motion. Also, attempts at showing moving images have included the shadow plays of North Africa and India, puppetry in many parts of the world, the pot art of India, etc. These activities presented the culture of the people and showed how icons are developed, what they stand for in the people's lives, and how people made meaning out of their lives and activities. With the development of the arts of cinematography and television, these also became vehicles to document happenings and events in the lives of the people.

In this study, I discuss the television docudrama as an alternative means of documenting history. There are many reasons necessitating an alternative source of documenting history, but two examples from Nigeria will suffice to justify this position. The powers-that-be in Nigeria have decreed that it is no longer necessary to study history in primary and secondary schools, and the subject has been removed from the curriculum. Consequently, if a Nigerian citizen does not go to a tertiary institution to study history, the past of her/his people will forever remain a mystery to her/him. Currently, there is a very lively debate in Nigeria about the origins of the Yoruba people. Traditional rulers, who are supposed to be the custodians of history, are at loggerheads with each other and with eggheads in history departments. The traditional rulers are bringing out diverse facts and evidence that differ from previously written histories.

For the reconstruction of history from oral sources, four broad types are usually distinguishable. These are myth, legend, songs, and what Phillips Stevens calls “popular history.” All of them fall under the generic heading of “folklore”—a term which is so broad in its application that it could include nearly all expressive aspects of culture. The only type that we will concern ourselves with in this study is myth. A comprehensive examination of the issue in question in the study requires a definition of the word myth; an examination of the characteristics of “applied history;” and the application of these characteristics to myth with a view to finding out any point of agreement between them, before a final answer will be given to the question whether “myth in the context of African traditional histories,” can be called applied history.

The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English defines myth as a “story handed down from olden time, containing the early beliefs of a race.” Vansina identifies myths by their subject matter and talks about them as those stories which “deal with and interpret the relations between the natural and the supernatural and are concerned with all that part of religious life that lies beyond the moral order. “ He says that they “attempt to explain the world, the culture, the society … in terms of religious causes.” McCall, for his part, refers to myths as “stories concerning the supernatural, the activities of deities, spirits and semi-divine heroes on the origin of the world, mankind and cultural artifacts and institutions which usually are said to have been achieved through the instrumentality of these sacred beings.” Afigbo, in turn, considers myths as having the “tendency to explain historical institutions and development by appeal to non-historic factors and forces”—as stories that see “the supernatural acting at times through the agency of man, at times through the agency of the lower animals and other times even through the agency of inanimate object, as the original and continuing causes of motion in a society.”