The historiography of African myth begins by documenting, comparing, and interpreting variant traditions. Where documentation is inscriptive and comparison descriptive, interpretation is notoriously complex, embracing a variety of approaches within two methodological extremes. The functionalist extreme -- what Peel calls “presentism” -- defines myth as a charter of political and ceremonial relations in society, and interprets variant traditions as rival political claims. Myth is by this definition a false reflection of the past because it is continually revised to fit the present. The historicist extreme regards myth as testimony of the past in oral societies, incorporating history into a narrative which resists revision and remains historically valid through fixed principles and “chains” of oral transmission. Variant traditions, according to this view, are dismissed as aberrations or contaminations of more authentic texts. Neither approach can evaluate the historicity of African myth unless both are somehow combined, for as the historiography of African oral traditions reveals, both tendencies are present in myth itself. This paper combines both approaches in an interpretation of variant Yoruba myths by examining the relationship between Yoruba myth and ritual.

The prevailing approach to variance within the Yoruba mythological corpus follows the historicist narrative of Beier's historiographic method. Beier interprets contradictory accounts of the same events or cultural figures by treating one of the versions, usually associated with the more local-level traditions, as a holdover from a pre-Yoruba aboriginal culture which was modified and assimilated by immigrant Yorubas who descended upon ancient Ife. Although some of his interpretations are plausible, he applies this approach indiscriminately to myth-ritual complexes which do not clearly support his aboriginal theory.

While doing research in Rhodes House Library I cam across a magnificently detailed description of parts of Kikuyuland in 1899 in the travel notebooks of Sir Halford John Mackinder. In this work Mackinder recounted his expedition's successful effort to be the first recorded group to ascend Mount Kenya. He is also one of the few travelers to leave a detailed account of this area for the nineteenth century. Furthermore, I discovered he had compiled a typescript of his notebooks clearly intended for possible publication. I did not compare the two closely at the time, as I relied on the notebooks, but when the African Studies Association announced a program to publish valuable unpublished primary sources, I immediately thought of Mackinder's work as being an important unpublished source for central Kenyan History. Here I discuss some of the implications of that thought that I have so far discovered.

Mackinder (1861–1947) was one of the intellectual founders of modern political geography. He read both natural science and modern history as a student at Christ Church College, Oxford and went on to study law and qualify as a barrister in London. Mackinder also traveled widely in 1885 as part of the Oxford extension movement, lecturing on his ideas concerning a “new geography.” He believed that there was a growing rift between the natural sciences and the humanities and that geography could act as a bridge between the two. Physical geography could aid in understanding and explaining human activities.

The Periplus of Hanno describes a purported Carthaginian voyage down the coast of western Africa—a voyage to as far as Guinea in the opinion of some scholars. The brief text is of doubtful and at best partial historical authenticity; and in any case its account of the later part of the voyage concentrates on a few episodes of high drama and exotic observation, at the expense of those other detailed particulars which might have made the Periplus, if historical, an informative as well as unique documentary source on black Africa in the first millennium B.C.. At least as far as black Africa is concerned, it must be questioned whether the Periplus is worth a fraction of the intensive scholarly effort that has been spent on it during the past four hundred years.

Current debate among ancient historians and classical philologists turns on the nature of the Periplus: is it wholly fiction? or, if fact, is it fact fictitiously extended and embellished? or, a third possibility, is it fact dramatically and perhaps intentionally summarized and slanted? But from the point of view of the historian seeking to obtain information about early sub-Saharan Africa in general and west Africa in particular, this debate can be by-passed (hence the present paper does not need or attempt to comprehend, pursue, or augment the detailed scholarly arguments and evidence available in the literature). For whether based on fact or not, the Periplus is patently a piece of literature of a kind which does not afford precise historical information.

From the time of the translation into English of Jan Vansina's Oral Tradition in 1965, the use of oral traditions as historical sources has become an increasingly technical exercise. Historians of the non-literate societies of Africa in particular have been alterted to, among others, such things as “floating gaps” and “hour-glass effects” in traditions, elongated and collapsed genealogies, the peculiarities and fallibility of human memory, the overlaying of oral traditions with successive ruling group histories, and the functioning of oral traditions as cultural charters.

Some scholars consider this ‘reification of method’ to have wrought a tool increasingly honed for historical analysis, able to lay bare within oral tradition historical facts, consistent within themselves and with other oral traditions. Others argue that the elaborateness of the methodology reflects the inherently unreliable nature of oral traditions as historical sources. They suggest that, at best, oral traditions are able to provide reliable data only about the interests of a particular group at the particular moment when they were recorded.

This paper addresses the debate over the status of oral traditions as historical sources, with particular reference to the use of traditions in the illumination of the precolonial past. Drawing on some of the insights of the new social historians concerning ideology and first-hand oral testimony, it examines the relationship between ideology and oral traditions in non-literate societies. The argument developed here is that, far from simply representing the interests of a particular group, oral traditions often reflect ideological struggles between the rulers and ruled in a society.

It is not easy to imagine any historian advancing such a claim these days--or at least meaning it. In fact many historians might not even be sure what Burnet meant by it. Yet, if the métier of textual criticism in history has fallen on hard times, it might not be quite true that there is no place for it at all, even in African historiography. At first glance, to be sure, it might seem quite beside the point to discuss “constituting” any text, written or oral, that Africanists might use as a source, since it must most often seem as if these texts are quite straightforward existing in the state we chance upon them and in that state only.

As is so frequently the case in the study of African history, for example, the only genuine sources for the life and activities of St. Patrick are two brief Latin texts he composed (or so it is widely believed), but which have survived only in versions committed to writing some two and a half centuries after his death. Well might we ask of materials like this: what text is to be “constituted” here? why is it necessary to engage in monotonous and time-consuming efforts to warrant the accuracy--that is, the verbal accuracy--of such texts? what is it possible to do anyway? and what is to be gained by doing it? As it happens, contemporary textual critics would have several answers to each of these questions, but here I want to deal only with a single facet of modern textual critical activity, its unending preoccupation with “authorial intent,” leaving the discussion of several other pertinent issues for another time.

An ever-growing literature on West African slavery has, for obvious reasons, tended to concentrate on societies that developed complex forms of domestic slavery and/or were closely tied to the export trade. Three major collections on slavery published in the last ten years deal almost exclusively with such groups. The history of peaples who refused, at least in the beginning, to take captives for the purpose of selling them to outsiders or keeping them for themselves has been ignored. And yet these acephalous groups are very instructive. They illustrate how certain structural features and other cultural preferences may have impeded, or at least retarded, the development of indigenous slaving institutions.

This paper discusses the role of slavery in a marginal area of the Upper Guinea coast. Emphasis will be placed on how practices surrounding the acquisition and disposal of captives were embedded in local institutions. Because these practices developed in the context of Africans dealing with each other, and not exclusively in the context of their dealings with the Europeans, they reflected modes of thinking and organizations intrinsic to certain forest groups of west Africa. A comprehensive history of why the Jola of Lower Casamance, Senegal, were slow to develop various kinds of slaving practices emphasizes their resistance to currents of change affecting the political economy of this region before, during, and after the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade.

In recent years scholars of different nationalities (including Somalis) have devoted much time and effort to acquiring information about the Somali past using different means and through the available sources on the region. However, the Arabic written sources of information on Somalia have long been neglected and remain so. The purpose of this paper is to call attention to the need for a more comprehensive reading of Arabic sources, and to show that Arabic sources have much to contribute to knowledge about Somalia. I will try to trace these sources and list them in a chronological manner, starting with the early Arab sources, especially from the period which followed the emergence of Islam on the Arabian peninsula when Islam made its way into the Horn of Africa.

Secondly, I will look at sources from medieval Islam in Somalia, when Islam spread from the coastal centers on the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean into the hinterlands of the Horn, the period which marked the struggle between Islam and Christianity. Thirdly, I will look at the period after the collapse of Muslim power in the late sixteenth century, almost two centuries when the Muslims of the Horn (the Somalis) were surrounded by Ethio-Portuguese alliances both to the north and in the Indian Ocean to the south. This period marked a time when the condition of the Somali Muslims became similar to that formerly endured by the Ethiopians, who had been surrounded by Muslims on all sides.

In November of 1854 a particularly violent clash between Dutch farmers and Ndebele tribesmen took place in the Waterberg district of the Transvaal, resulting in a spiral of killings which ultimately -- and apparently -- led to the massacre of an entire tribe. The standard account, by Theal, may be summarized briefly as follows. Hermanus Potgieter, a man of “violent temper and rough demeanour”, entered Makapan's capital with a party of men, intending to trade some ivory. This Makapan was of a ferocious disposition” and had the reputation, among the surrounding tribes, of being “a man of blood.” Unfriendly newspaper correspondents claimed that Hermanus Potgieter and his men made demands, without payment, for sheep and oxen. They also demanded gifts of African children. This seems improbable, for white men would hardly have ventured thus. Tribesmen are easily irritable and it is possible that some banal act excited “the Africans to frenzy.” Potgieter was “flayed alive,” and his skin, prepared in the same way as that of a wild animal. Makapan's forces then attacked neighboring settlements. The Farmers in Zoutpansberg and Rustenberg abandoned their homes and formed laagers. P.G. Potgieter led a force to the troubled area, where he found that the hostile tribesmen had sought refuge in a nearby cave.

In the course of bibliographical work on volume 7 of the Cambridge History of Africa, I realized that there was no guide to film as a historical source for this or any other period in African history. Lists had been made of films on Africa available for loan or hire in the U.S.A., but no one had tried to list at all comprehensively what had actually been made or what had survived. I therefore decided to compile such a guide myself, tracing the making of non–fiction film in Africa from early days up to 1940: this seemed a suitable cutoff date, since it was clear that from the Second World War the scale of filmmaking in Africa, as elsewhere, increased very considerably, and in any case was beginning to attract the attention of historians.

I was emboldened in this project by the publication in 1980 of the non–fiction catalog of the British National Film Archive. This immediately showed that a wide variety of relevant films had been not only made, but preserved, and for several there are viewing as well as archive copies. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent published catalog for any other major film archive. I have been able, however, to glean much information from a variety of guides, filmographies, and historical studies. Among lists of films in archival collections, the most useful were those in the U.S. of UNESCO for ethnographic films, McClintock for films on North Africa, and South's guide to African materials in the U.S. federal archives.

Earlier I discussed the potential of physical anthropology for the reconstruction of precolonial history in Africa. As a traditional branch of the biological sciences, physical anthropology draws on advances in genetics, population genetics, numerical taxonomy, and other biological disciplines whose paradigms define a logical framework by which the biological history of human populations can be explored. Sophisticated techniques can now be applied not only to the study of biological history, but also to the investigation of hypotheses of wider historical interest (i.e., those arising from the consideration of nonbiological sources of historical evidence). Having outlined some of the possibilities of new techniques and contrasted them to more basic techniques available to pre-war physical anthropologists, who tended to be preoccupied by the construction of racial taxonomies, I ended the paper by discussing ways by which the wider historical potential of physical anthropology could begin to be realized.

In this sequel the onus is on trying to demonstrate in a limited way some of these possibilities through an empirical study. The study in question is a biological survey of Kenyan peoples which I undertook in the early and mid-1970s. During this survey I obtained palm and finger prints from over 6,000 primary and secondary school children drawn from some 60 population units (tribes and sub-tribes). The finger and palm prints provided over 150 biological measures, which are genetically determined, to compare the population units sampled and to analyze the biological patterns of differentiation of Kenyan peoples.

Ever since Malinowski formulated his concept of myths as charters, there has been a tendency among anthropologists to regard origin myths more or less as post factum constructs designed to legitimize existing privileges and positions. A classic example of this pragmatist view is Leach's study of political systems in highland Burma, in which he attempts to demonstrate that origin myths change with clocklike regularity in response to shifts in the political constellation. More recently, however, voices have been raised, particularly among historians, which insist that a society's past cannot always be manipulated at will, but that under certain conditions it has to be treated circumspectly in the way one deals with any scarce resource.

My own interpretation of this view is that accounts of the past, when they concern important aspects of a society, are often (or perhaps always) constructed in such a way that the original event is somehow preserved and recoverable. The qualification “somehow” is added on purpose to make clear that the phrase ‘oral history’ refers to such a wide range of genres and mnemonic techniques, and that the methods at our disposal to extract the original event are still so rudimentary--despite the progress made over the past dozen years or so--that for the moment one cannot do more than express belief in our ultimate capability to discover what happened in actual fact.

For the past four years I have been engaged in translating into English and editing published Danish sources for west African history. Having begun with pure translation I soon realized that, were the translations to be clear and, indeed, comprehensible, editing was sine qua non. A translation I made last year of H. C. Monrad Bildrag til en Skildring of Guinea Kysten og dens Indbyggere (Copenhagen, 1822) is finished, but not yet edited. But the main thrust of my work so far has been preparing an edited translation of Paul Erdmann Isert, Reise nach Guinea und den Caribäischen Inseln in Columbien (Copenhagen, 1788).

It has been in the course of this work that I have been made aware, both by reading and by personal communication, of the growing interest in new and careful translations of the early sources. In this paper I shall address six aspects of the work: a brief overview of the current situation regarding Danish sources for west African History from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries; a review of the available printed Danish sources and the status of their translation into other languages; a discussion of technical problems; a discussion of some of the traps of translation and interpretation; the early sources' use of earlier sources; the modern sources' use of early sources. It is my intention, here, to present a case showing the need for new and carefully edited translations of the early sources for west African history, and to champion the recognition of this field of endeavor as something far more than “just translation.”

Probably the most popular and most frequently-recited oral tradition in all of Senegambia and somewhat beyond is the epic of Kelefa Saane. From southwestern Guiné-Bissau to Bondu on the middle Senegal, griots regularly play the tune of “Kelefa” on their harp-lutes as they sing the familiar refrains:

The war was a disaster.
There was no one who could take
Kelefa Saane's place.…
Wounded men
Crawled back
To Niumi. …
Ah, the nobles are finished
War has finished the nobles…

Such epics have captured the attention of African historians since early in the years of professional interest in the continent. Over the last decade historians have made fresh examination of oral data and their use in reconstructing the African past. One volume of essays, The African Past Speaks, edited by Joseph C. Miller, assesses problems associated with analysis of these traditions. In his introductory essay Miller makes a point that most of the authors of subsequent chapters reinforce. It is that many forms of oral traditions are sociological models of the societies they come from. The structure and content of a narrative, Miller asserts, often provides insight into the nature of a particular society at some point in the precolonial past. Conversely, knowledge of the structure of the society in which traditionists tell the narrative helps one evaluate the narrative as a historical source.

This paper is concerned with the process, problems, and politics of knowledge transfer in King Leopold's Congo. Since European languages were infrequently taught in Congo schools, the availability of printed materials in local African languages served as the primary means of achieving literacy and subsequently knowledge beyond that learned through practical experience.

With the exception of Swahili, used in the Eastern Congo as a lingua franca, none of the several dozen major languages or the several hundred minor languages and dialects spoken in the Congo Basin had been reduced to written form before modern missionaries established themselves there beginning in 1879. Between 1879 and 1908, when the Congo was the personal possession of Leopold II, nineteen Congolese languages were reduced to written form and more than 400 titles in these languages were published. To the sophisticated modern reader such a narrow choice of literature may seem unworthy of study. But this printed media stock--primers, readers, textbooks, religious tracts, Gospels, and magazines--was all that was available to some tens of thousands of seekers after literacy and the major printed communications between Westerners and Africans in the Congo Basin. This fact, alone, gives such materials significance.

Most of this literature was prepared for use in elementary schools. In 1908, when King Leopold's Congo was annexed by the Belgian Parliament, some 46,000 pupils of all ages were enrolled in colonial schools. Another 50,000 had probably attended these schools between 1879 and 1908. Over ninety-nine percent of these pupils attended schools run by eighteen mission societies (nine Protestant and nine Catholic).

Few slaving agreements contracted between African sellers and American purchasers appear to have survived. They were rarely committed to paper, were destroyed after commitments were fulfilled, or were removed from business records kept by slave traders. The contract discussed here is of considerable interest as a document which, although brief, records important information and offers intriguing insights concerning African-European and African-African relationships in Guinea-Conakry at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The slaving contract is dated 15 November 1804, and apparently was negotiated aboard the merchant ship Charlotte of Bristol, Rhode Island, Jonathan Sabens, master, anchored at the Iles de Los archipelago.

Nov. th[ursday] 15-1804

Shipe Charlotte

fortay days after date I Promas to pay Jno. Sabens or orde[r] nin[e] hundard and ni[ne]ty five Bars to be Pade in Rice and Slave Say fore tun of Rice at nity Bars par tun the Remandr in Slaves at one hundard and Twenty Bars par Slave.

[signed in Arabic] Fadmod [Fendan Modu Dumbuya]
[signed in Arabic] Muhammad Sa'ab shokr Mohammed Sakib Fana/Ta/ Mohammed Shabaan
(the month before Ramadan)

Respecting the American traders involved, the Charlotte was jointly owned by George D'Wolf and Jonathan Sabens of Bristol, Rhode Island. Captain Jonathan Sabens was an experienced mariner, involved in at least three previous slaving voyages, including one as master of the Charlotte. Members of the D'Wolf family were associated with numerous slaving voyages to west Africa and continued to invest in slaving ventures long after Rhode Island made the trade illegal in 1787.

It must be premised that the journal contains statements that appear to be absolutely irreconcilable with the present topography of the Bahamas.

Despite its disappointingly meager immediate results, its role as catalyst for the great age of worldwide culture contact inevitably resulted in a lively interest in every detail of Columbus' first voyage to the New World. Continuing unabated for nearly five centuries, the interest has assumed many forms, ranging from the putative effects of contact on the Amerindians to the identity of Columbus' first landfall--just where did the Old World first view the New World? Though it might seem to be both straightforward and of minor interest, the latter issue has in fact aroused great controversy for more than two centuries and remains far from settled today, as it appears that the most recent bid for consensus has been rudely shattered in its turn.

The controversy arises not at all from the fact that there exist several and contradictory independent testimonies bearing on the issue. Quite the contrary, as there is only a single surviving source, the so-called Diario de a bordo, which purports to be, at least in part, a record of Columbus' voyage on a day-by-day basis. The history of this text as we have it is complicated and this goes some way towards explaining why so many issues based on it remain moot. The only known extant copy was discovered as recently as 1790 and is in the handwriting of Bartolomé de las Casas, the noted missionary and historian of the early Indies, who was also a friend of several members of Columbus' family.

Under the not very informative cover title of Munger Africana Library Notes 3, the library of that name published in 1971 a group of four French documents, collectively called The Choiseul papers, secret documents prepared for the peace negotiations to end the Seven Years' War in 1762/63. There is no indication as to the original authorship of these documents, except that the first, with a date of 6 January 1681, is noted as “sent on behalf of M. de Bussy.” The editor, Monique le Blanc, in her short introduction which places these documents in their historical setting, says that they were obtained from the family of the Duc de Nivernais, the French representative at the negotiations. The editor also notes that they were used in part by André Delcourt in his IFAN Memoire La France et les établissements français au Sénégal entre 1713 et 1763 (Dakar, 1952). The translator, James Greenlee, provides brief notes concerned mainly with the orthography of the copyists, who, he suggests, may in two cases have been Spanish. (Their French spelling is in some ways similar to that of Jean Barbot nearly a century earlier--were they, like him, from La Rochelle?)

The purpose of the present brief note is both to draw attention to these documents, which are reproduced in facsimile (slightly reduced in size), but also, regretably, to warn those who wish to use them to beware of the translation which accompanies them. The documents consist of four secret mémoires--one entitled “first secret mémoire on the Coast of Africa”, dated 1761 (translated as “last secret communication…”), a second entitled “First secret mémoire on Senegal and the Island of Gorée,” followed by a second secret mémoire on Senegal and Gorée and a third secret mémoire on the west coast of Africa, forwarded to the Duc de Nivernais by the Comte de Choiseul, then Minister of Foreign Affairs.

It is well known that historians studying preliterate societies, in which oral traditions are the main sources of data used in reconstructing the past, have experienced problems in ‘arranging’ events in their order of occurrence. To establish chronology, historians have used a number of aids such as mnemonic devices and occurrences of eclipses and droughts which are then correlated to the western calendar. This paper discusses an aid which, used together with oral traditions, can be very useful in reconstructing the early colonial history of Northern Rhodesia between 1910 and 1927. This aid is the tax stamp given to all tax payers during this period. To understand the importance of the tax stamps to chronology, perhaps it is best to begin with a description as to how events were recorded in the precolonial period.

Near the center of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan lies a tract of broken, elevated terrain about the size of South Carolina. The region, by common convention, is called the Nuba Mountains, and the people who live there, through a familiar if misleading generalization, the Nuba. The inhabitants of the Nuba Mountains have long attracted the attention of students of African languages and cultures, for in these respects they exhibit very great diversity among themselves as well as distinctiveness in relation to the Arab and Nilotic cultural traditions that dominate the surrounding lowlands on every side. No scholar has yet deliberately undertaken to write a history of the Nuba, but many have found themselves constrained to make tangential statements or assumptions about Nuba history in the course of constructing studies with some other primary focus. The sum of these tangential comments and assumptions may read as the current state of Nuba historiography. The present study addresses a stimulating clash of opinion among those whose interests have led them to comment peripherally on the more remote Nuba past. The issue at stake is the existence, or non-existence, of a state form of government among the Nuba in precolonial times.

Students of the Nuba during the colonial and post-colonial periods have seldom failed to assign considerable importance to the role of successive Sudan governments in directing the destiny of the Nuba, however they may differ in assessing the quality of this intervention.

Methodism was introduced into Nigeria as a result of the separate missionary activities of the Primitive Methodist Church and the Wesleyan Methodist Church, both from Britain. In 1962 the Nigerian Methodist Church gained her autonomy from the British Methodist conference. The checkered history of the Methodist church in Nigeria has affected the organization of the records of the church and consequently researchers' access to and utilization of these records. An attempt is made in this paper to examine critically the problems that might face the scholar who intends to use Methodist church records in Nigeria for research purposes. Ways of overcoming these problems are suggested.