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1
Pesek, Michael. "Cued Speeches: the Emergence of Shauri as Colonial Praxis in German East Africa, 1850–1903." History in Africa 33 (2006): 395–412. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2006.0020.
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In 1891 the German explorer Theodor Bumiller wrote an angry letter from the shores of Lake Nyassa (modern Lake Malawi) to the Committee of the German Anti Slavery Lottery, the financiers of his expedition. The goal of the expedition was to bring a steamship onto the lake to fight alleged slave hunters. The initiator and leader of the expedition was no less a person than Hermann von Wissmann, then the empire's most popular explorer and conqueror and first Governor of German East Africa. Bumiller had been Wissmann's long-standing friend and companion on several expeditions. Since the very first days, there had been disputes over the equipping and organization of the expedition. In all previous letters that Wissmann and Bumiller had written to the committee, they had responded to reproaches of throwing the lottery's money around by arguing that Africa is not Europe and there were many eventualities with which nobody was able to reckon, if being on an expedition.However, a member of the expedition, a certain Captain Max Praeger, whose duty was to navigate the steamer on the lake, had sent a report, in which he had sharply criticized both Wissmann and Bumiller. Bumiller answered with the argument that Praeger was not in a position to give an expert opinion on the expedition, because he was not a true Afrikaner, a person who has gained first-hand experiences of the African continent and its people. Praeger, Bumiller sneered, was only sitting on the steamer's deck and thus having no contact with Africans. To Bumiller, what qualified an Afrikaner as expert on Africa were eye-to-eye encounters with African people.
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Anthony, David. "Unwritten History: African Work in the YMCA of South Africa." History in Africa 32 (2005): 435–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2005.0004.
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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.
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Zöller, Katharina. "Crossing Multiple Borders: “The Manyema” in Colonial East Central Africa." History in Africa 46 (May 6, 2019): 299–326. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/hia.2019.6.
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Abstract:“The Manyema” are people who have roots in what is today known as eastern Congo and who moved towards the East African coast – and often back – since the time when their area of origin was under African-Arab domination. In separated East and Central African historiographies, the Manyema received only marginal attention so far. Tracing this highly mobile group across East and Central Africa discloses how Manyema actors, in relation to colonial and postcolonial contexts, have negotiated their mobility and identity across East and Central Africa as a single space.
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Delgado, Érika Melek. "Freedom Narratives: The West African Person as the Central Focus for a Digital Humanities Database." History in Africa 48 (June 2021): 35–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/hia.2021.14.
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AbstractThis article discusses the methodology behind the development of new tools of research for African history that are a user-friendly source for public engagement. The focus is on biographical profiles of West African people during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which is an innovative approach to social history. The representation of enslaved Africans has typically been numbers recorded in logs and accounts compiled by slave merchants and captains. Freedom Narratives is an open-source relational database that reveals the people who constitute those numbers.
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Volz, Stephen. "Words of Batswana: Letters to the Editor of Mahoko a Becwana, 1883–1896." History in Africa 34 (2007): 349–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2007.0023.
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During the last twenty years, in conjunction with rapid political changes in southern Africa, scholars of the region's history have become increasingly interested in studying the experiences of people whose stories, like their livelihoods, were previously often restricted or ignored by those in power. This scholarly interest initially focused on instances of conflict and oppression, disclosing the violence and injustice that accompanied colonialism and apartheid, but more recent studies have given greater attention to different local and personal histories that do not necessarily share the same preoccupation with broader political issues. Rather than define their lives primarily in terms of their relations with Europeans, Africans were often more concerned with affairs within their own families and communities over which they felt that they had some measure of control and responsibility. Those problems were certainly instigated to some extent by European institutions, but they were usually addressed and managed in African terms and along the lines of locally-established norms and practices. Such African-centered historical viewpoints and activities, previously overlooked by scholars, are achieving greater recognition, but there are still numerous important sources that have not yet been fully studied.
6
Green, Tobias. "Building Creole Identity in the African Atlantic: Boundaries of Race and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Cabo Verde." History in Africa 36 (2009): 103–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2010.0011.
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The Atlantic may be a vast ocean for the most part devoid of human life, but that is not how historians see it. As the historian of the British Atlantic world David Armitage put it, “we are all Atlanticists now.” Not a little of the excitement of the historical profession has turned on the need to construct broad and transnational perspectives for the exchanges of peoples and goods which have constructed modern worlds.This is, as every reader of this journal knows, a process in which Africa played a fundamental part. Conceptualizing an Atlantic space in the early modern era requires the inclusion of African contributions to revolutions in ideas, agriculture, and global capital brought about by the forced African diaspora produced by Atlantic slavery. And yet historians of African societies have not joined their colleagues working on the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe in the leap to embrace “Atlantic” history. While there have been some attempts to construct an African sphere of the Atlantic world, a general attempt to achieve this on a systematic basis remains lacking.Part of the reason for this is the current general decline in research in early modern African history. While the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s saw many highly distinguished monographs, such research is no longer so easy to come by. Shunning the externalized, European perspectives on which many traditional histories of Africa were based, post-colonial students of Africa have rightly interpreted African history from the viewpoint of African societies. As this has required primarily a cultural engagement with material, practitioners have moved towards contemporary histories, which may explain the present dearth of studies reaching farther back.
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Okafor, Eddie E. "Francophone Catholic Achievements in Igboland, 1883-–1905." History in Africa 32 (2005): 307–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2005.0020.
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When the leading European powers were scrambling for political dominion in Africa, the greatest rival of France was Britain. The French Catholics were working side by side with their government to ensure that they would triumph in Africa beyond the boundaries of the territories already annexed by their country. Thus, even when the British sovereignty claim on Nigeria was endorsed by Europe during the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, the French Catholics did not concede defeat. They still hoped that in Nigeria they could supplant their religious rivals: the British Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the other Protestant missionary groups. While they allowed the British to exercise political power there, they took immediate actions to curtail the spread and dominion of Protestantism in the country. Thus some of their missionaries stationed in the key French territories of Africa—Senegal, Dahomey, and Gabon—were urgently dispatched to Nigeria to compete with their Protestant counterparts and to establish Catholicism in the country.Two different French Catholic missions operated in Nigeria between 1860s and 1900s. The first was the Society of the African Missions (Société des Missions Africaines or SMA), whose members worked mainly among the Yoruba people of western Nigeria and the Igbos of western Igboland. The second were the Holy Ghost Fathers (Pères du Saint Esprit), also called Spiritans, who ministered specifically to the Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria. The French Catholics, the SMA priests, and the Holy Ghost Fathers competed vehemently with the British Protestants, the CMS, for the conversion of African souls. Just as in the political sphere, the French and British governments competed ardently for annexation and colonization of African territories.
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Lovejoy, Henry B., Paul E. Lovejoy, Walter Hawthorne, Edward A. Alpers, Mariana Candido, and Matthew S. Hopper. "Redefining African Regions for Linking Open-Source Data." History in Africa 46 (April 17, 2019): 5–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/hia.2019.8.
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Abstract:In recent years, an increasing number of online archival databases of primary sources related to the history of the African diaspora and slavery have become freely and readily accessible for scholarly and public consumption. This proliferation of digital projects and databases presents a number of challenges related to aggregating data geographically according to the movement of people in and out of Africa across time and space. As a requirement to linking data of open-source digital projects, it has become necessary to delimit the entire continent of precolonial Africa during the era of the slave trade into broad regions and sub-regions that can allow the grouping of data effectively and meaningfully.
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Law, Robin. "Ethnicities of Enslaved Africans in the Diaspora: On the Meanings of “Mina” (Again)." History in Africa 32 (2005): 247–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2005.0014.
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The term “Mina,” when encountered as an ethnic designation of enslaved Africans in the Americas in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, has commonly been interpreted as referring to persons brought from the area of the “Gold Coast” (“Costa da Mina” in Portuguese usage), corresponding roughly to modern Ghana, who are further commonly presumed to have been mainly speakers of the Akan languages (Fante, Twi, etc.) dominant on that section of the coast and its immediate hinterland. In a recently published paper, however, Gwendolyn Hall has questioned this conventional interpretation, and suggested instead that most of those called “Mina” in the Americas were actually from the “Slave Coast” to the east (modern southeastern Ghana, Togo, and Bénin), and hence speakers of the languages nowadays generally termed “Gbe” (though formerly more commonly “Ewe”), including Ewe, Adja, and Fon. Given the numerical strength of the “Mina” presence in the Americas, as Hall rightly notes, this revision would substantially alter our understanding of ethnic formation in the Americas.In further discussion of these issues, this paper considers in greater detail than was possible in Hall's treatment: first, the application of the name “Mina” in European usage on the West African coast itself, and second, the range of meanings attached to it in the Americas. This separation of African and American data, it should be stressed, is adopted only for convenience of exposition, since it is very likely that ethnic terminology on the two sides of the Atlantic in fact evolved in a process of mutual interaction. In particular, the settlement of large numbers of returned exslaves from Brazil on the Slave Coast from the 1830s onwards very probably fed Brazilian usage back into west Africa, as I have argued earlier with respect to the use of the name “Nago” as a generic term for the Yoruba-speaking peoples.
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Ayana, Daniel. "The Northern Zanj, Demadim, Yamyam, Yam/Yamjam, Habasha/Ahabish, Zanj-Ahabish, and Zanj ed-Damadam – The Horn of Africa between the Ninth and Fifteenth Centuries." History in Africa 46 (May 9, 2019): 57–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/hia.2019.10.
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Abstract:This article argues that historians will have a new understanding of northeast and east Africa if they recall the medieval meaning of the terms Zanj and Ahabish, or Habasha. Before the fifteenth century the term Zanj included the diverse populations of northeast Africa, so should not be exclusive of the populations of coastal east Africa. Likewise, Habasha or Ahabish was not confined to the peoples of the northern Horn but included the diverse peoples of coastal east Africa. Uncovering older meanings of Zanj and Ahabish helps to identify elusive groups of ancient northeast Africans referred to as northern Zanj, Zanj-Ahabish, Ahabish, and Damadim. For identification, this article presents three types of historical data overlooked in the sources. The first consists of the interchangeable names northern Zanj, Damadim, Ahabish, Zanj-Ahabish, and Zanj ed-Damadim to recast the term Zanj and identify the Damadim or Yamyam. The second is the broadly inclusive meaning before the fifteenth century of the term Habasha. The third is the reported eloquence in their Buttaa ceremony of the northern Zanj, and the institutional setting of the Buttaa within the Oromo Gadaa system.
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Semley, Lorelle, Teresa Barnes, Bayo Holsey, and Egodi Uchendu. "Editors’ Introduction: “The Future of the African Past”." History in Africa 48 (June 2021): 1–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/hia.2021.21.
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We signed on as the new editorial team of History in Africa (HIA) without knowing that we all sat on the precipice of tumultuous times. After over a year of the COVID-19 pandemic, global unrest calling for a reckoning on racial justice, and events that exposed the limits and fragility of democratic institutions, we are reminded of the importance of how people experience, remember, and chronicle the past. It is a weighty and fortuitous time to think about our craft as historians and how we develop methods for analyzing and revisiting sources. How do we want to highlight our unique approaches as historians of Africa, and how do we want to push our field of African history and our discipline of history, more broadly, in new directions? We salute and thank the previous team of HIA editors – Jan Jansen, Michel Doortmont, John Hanson, and Dmitri van den Bersselaar – for their excellent stewardship of the journal over many years.
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van den Bersselaar, Dmitri. "Missionary Knowledge and the State in Colonial Nigeria: On How G. T. Basden became an Expert." History in Africa 33 (2006): 433–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2006.0006.
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Between 1931 and 1937, the Anglican missionary G. T. Basden represented the Igbo people on the Nigerian Legislative Council. The Igbo had not elected Basden as their representative; he had been appointed by the colonial government. Basden's appointment seems remarkable. In 1923 the Legislative Council had been expanded to include seats for Unofficial Members, representing a number of Nigerian areas, with the expressed aim of increasing African representation on the Council. In selecting Basden the government went against their original intention that the representative of the Igbo area would be a Nigerian. However, the government decided that there was no “suitable” African candidate available, and that the appointment of a recognized European expert on the Igbo was an acceptable alternative. This choice throws light on a number of features of the Nigerian colonial state in 1930s, including the limitations of African representation and the definition of what would make a “suitable” African candidate.In this paper I am concerned with the question of how Basden became recognized as an expert by the colonial government and also, more generally, with the linkages between colonial administrations' knowledge requirements and missionary knowledge production. Missionary-produced knowledge occupied a central, but also somewhat awkward position in colonial society. On the one hand, colonial governments and missions shared a number of common assumptions and expectations about African peoples. On the other hand, there also existed tensions between missions and government, partly reflecting differing missionary and administrative priorities, which means that the missionary expert was not often recognized as such.
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Strickrodt, Silke. "African Girls' Samplers from Mission Schools in Sierra Leone (1820s to 1840s)." History in Africa 37 (2010): 189–245. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2010.0027.
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In an article in this journal almost fifteen years ago, Colleen Kriger discussed the reluctance of historians of Africa to use objects as sources in their research. She pointed to the rich reservoir of objects “made by African hands” in museum collections around the world, which lies virtually untapped by historians. However, she also noted that while objects are “unusually eloquent remnants from the past,” they are problematic sources, presenting “special difficulties in evaluation and interpretation.”The purpose of this article is to draw attention to the existence of a number of embroidery samplers that were stitched by African girls in mission schools in the British colony of Sierra Leone in the period from the 1820s to the 1840s. So far, I have found thirteen of these samplers, which are preserved in a number of archival, private and museum collections in Europe and the USA. To historians, these pieces of needlework are of interest because they were generated by a group of people for whom we do not usually have first-hand documentary material. Moreover, they represent the direct material traces of the activity of the girls who made them, and thus appear to offer the possibility of an emphatic insight into their experience.However, these “textile documents” present serious problems of interpretation. What exactly can they be expected to tell the modern historian? In particular, how far, in fact, do they express the perspectives of the African girls who made them, as distinct from the European missionaries who directed their work? Careful source criticism and an examination of the purpose for which they were produced will help to clarify these issues.
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Lindsay, Lisa A. "Slavery, Absorption, and Gender: Frederick Cooper and the Power of Comparison." History in Africa 47 (September 16, 2019): 65–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/hia.2019.22.
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Abstract:This essay considers Frederick Cooper’s early scholarship on African slavery, which called for and modeled a practice of comparative historiography. His critique of the “absorption model” of African slavery, enabled by comparison with the Americas, anticipated important recent trends in the study of Atlantic slavery. Revisiting this critique helps us to understand key features of cultural continuity and change among enslaved people and can inform future research about gender and the Atlantic slave trade. In particular, it suggests the limitations of an analysis that separates the assumed African assimilation of enslaved women from the export mostly of men.
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Allen, William E. "Liberia and the Atlantic World in the Nineteenth Century: Convergence and Effects." History in Africa 37 (2010): 7–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2010.0028.
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William C. Burke, an African American emigrant in Liberia, wrote the following to an acquaintance in the United States on 23 September 1861: This must be the severest affliction that have visited the people of the United States and must be a sorce [sic] of great inconvenience and suffering and although we are separated from the seane [sic] by the Atlantic yet we feel sadly the effects of it in this country. The Steavens not coming out as usual was a great disappointment and loss to many in this country.Burke's lamentation about the impact of the American Civil War on the distant Atlantic shores of Africa underscores a problem—and opportunity—in Liberian historiography. Burke's nineteenth-century world extended past the distinct national boundaries that separated the United States and Liberia. Geographically, this was the vast littoral of the four continents—Africa, Europe, North America, and South America—abutting the Atlantic Ocean. But the Atlantic world, as historians now dubbed this sprawling transnational zone, was much more extensive. Societies near and faraway were also drawn into the web of socioeconomic activities in the basin. The creation of the Atlantic world spanned almost four centuries, from the late fifteenth to the waning decades of the nineteenth century. In this period, an unprecedented multitude of migrants crisscrossed the Atlantic creating a vast network. For example, by the nineteenth century, regular transatlantic packages such as the Mary Caroline Stevens whose delay Burke called “a great disappointment,” transported passengers, provisions, and dispatches between the United States and Liberia.
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Schaffer, Matt. "Bound to Africa: the Mandinka Legacy in the New World." History in Africa 32 (2005): 321–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2005.0021.
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I offer here a theory of “cultural convergence,” as a corollary to Darwin's natural selection, regarding how slave Creoles and culture were formed among the Gullah and, by extension, supported by other examples, in the Americas. When numerous speakers from different, and sometimes related, ethnic groups have words with similar sounds and evoke related meanings, this commonality powers the word into Creole use, especially if there is commonality with Southern English or the host language. This theory applies to cultural features as well, including music. Perhaps the most haunting example of my theory is that of “massa,” the alleged mispronunciation by Southern slaves of “master.” Massa is in fact the correct Bainouk and Cassanga ethnic group pronunciation of mansa, the famous word used so widely among the adjacent and dominant Mande peoples in northern and coastal west Africa to denote king or boss. In this new framework, the changes wrought by Mandinka, the Mande more broadly, and African culture generally on the South, are every bit as significant as the linguistic infusions of the Norman Conquest into what became English.
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Crandall, David P. "Himba Animal Classification and the Strange Case of the Hyena." Africa 72, no. 2 (May 2002): 293–311. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/afr.2002.72.2.293.
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AbstractContinent-wide in African folklore the hyena is depicted as a dull witted, easily duped creature—despite the fact that the hyena is also known as a cunning and dangerous predator. This article explores why in particular the Himba of northwestern Namibia entertain the characterisation of the hyena as stupid yet from the management of their flocks and herds have experienced first hand how clever a predator the hyena is. For the Himba, the answer lies in the hyena's anatomy, in the perception that the hyena is a hermaphrodite. As such, the hyena stands at the margins of fixed social categories; it is neither this nor that but a hybrid, a creature acting outside of its proper bounds. Among the Himba, such marginal people or creatures are not felt to be dangerous, rather, their primary characteristic is stupidity.
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Fuglestad, Finn. "Precolonial Sub-Saharan Africa and the Ancient Norse World: Looking For Similarities." History in Africa 33 (2006): 179–203. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2006.0013.
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Comparative history may be fashionable these days, but references to the past of precolonial sub-Saharan Africa in the literature on early Scandinavia, and vice versa, are still hard to come by. Perhaps this is as it should be, as Scandinavia and Sub-Saharan Africa are generally considered to be worlds apart. Besides, there is the time-lag involved: pre-Christian Scandinavia, including the Norse world, came to an end in roughly the eleventh century, whereas the precolonial era in sub-Saharan Africa lasted into the 1880s at the earliest. But many years ago, when after a prolonged immersion in African history, I picked up some books, including printed primary sources, related to pre-Christian Norway, I was invaded by a strange feeling of déjà vu, of having seen it all before, precisely in sub-Saharan Africa of old. Pre-Christian Norwegian, or Norse, society suddenly began to make sense to me as it had never done before.Why the similarities I believe I have detected, and how significant are they? Is it possible that they are in some way more relevant or meaningful than the differences? Can we even speak of a problem of similarities à la Henri Frankfort? I have no ready-made answers to these questions. In fact my aim in this paper is a fairly modest one, that of offering some tentative, possibly speculative, observations, thoughts, and/or conclusions. I take as my point of departure the obvious, or trivial, point that precolonial sub-Saharan Africa and pre-Christian Norway did have something quite essential in common: the prevalence in both cases of ”pagan” (or “heathen”) and overwhelmingly agrarian kinship-type societies. In the case of Norway and Scandinavia, the Viking era (790s to somewhere in the tenth century), with its marked maritime orientation, constituted perhaps a rupture. Extensive seafaring, including maritime raiding and pillaging, not to mention the emergence of so-called sea kings, implies mobility, and mobile people do not fit readily into the “model” that is outlined in this essay. It may be, however, that the inland regions of the Nordic world were not always directly or even deeply influenced by what happened on the coast. Note that the words “pagan” and “heathen” are used here for want of a better expression, in the sense of “non-revealed” or “ethnic” religions. By kinship-type societies I mean collectivist-oriented societies composed not primarily of individuals, but of kindreds or lineages.
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Scheub, Harold. "A Collection of Stories and Its Preservation in the Digital Age." History in Africa 34 (2007): 447–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2007.0017.
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There is never an end to stories.“The art of composing oral narratives,” said Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, a Xhosa storyteller,is something that was undertaken by the first people, long ago, during the time of the ancestors. When those of us in my generation awakened to earliest consciousness, we were born into a tradition that was already flourishing. Narratives were being performed by adults in a tradition that had been established long before we were born. And when we were born, those narratives were constructed for us by old people, who argued that the stories had initially been created in olden times, long ago. That time was ancient even to our fathers; it was ancient to our grandmothers, who said that the tales had been created years before by their grandmothers. We learned the narratives in that way, and every generation that has come into being has been born into the tradition. Members of every generation have grown up under the influence of these narratives.In the late 1960s and in the 1970s, I made a number of research trips to southern Africa for the purpose of studying the oral traditions of the Xhosa, Zulu, Swati, and Ndebele peoples. The Xhosa and Zulu live in South Africa, the Swati in Swaziland, and the Ndebele in the southern part of Zimbabwe. During each of those trips many of the performances and discussions were taped. I witnessed thousands of performances.
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Maderspacher, Alois. "The National Archives of Cameroon in Yaoundé and Buea." History in Africa 36 (2009): 453–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2010.0009.
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Even in learned journals on African and imperial history, few references have been made to the records contained in the archives in Cameroon, West Africa. Kamerun was a German colony (Schutzgebiet) from 1884-1916/19. In 1911, the Germans took over New Cameroon (Neu Kamerun), 295,000 km2 of land of French Equatorial Africa, ceded during the second Morocco Crisis. After World War I this transaction was reversed and the German colony was separated into French and British League of Nations Mandates in 1919. These mandates were transformed into United Nations Trusteeships in 1946. Finally, French Cameroun became independent in 1960, and after a plebiscite in 1961, one part of the British Cameroons joined Nigeria and the other part reunited with the formerly French part, now the independent Federal Republic of Cameroon.Due to the involvement of three colonial powers in Cameroon, the national archives in Yaoundé and Buea are an excellent source for the colonial history of West Africa, allowing for a simultaneous analysis of German, French, and British files. Whereas the colonial files in the European archives mainly give us the point of view of high politics, the archives in Cameroon offer a different dimension. The files reveal the intricacies of the colonial system on the ground, and the problems with which the colonial administrator had to cope in the bush: How did one introduce European legal tender in a territory never touched by Europeans before? How did one cope with the colonial rivals, who were couching at the frontiers to take over the territory? How did one attempt to win peoples' hearts and minds day in and day out? What happened when the new colonial power took over a territory with an already developed administration from another colonial power, as it took place in Cameroon in 1911 and 1916/19? The national archives of Cameroon contain potential answers to these questions. Hence this paper will focus on the sources that are available for the colonial period in these archives.
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Keita, S. O. Y., and A. J. Boyce. "Genetics, Egypt, and History: Interpreting Geographical Patterns of Y Chromosome Variation." History in Africa 32 (2005): 221–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2005.0013.
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Modern Egypt, the site of Africa's earliest state, lies near the crossroads of two other continents, and has had historic interactions with all its neighboring regions. This alone would make it an ideal place to study historical population biology. Egypt can also be conceptualized as a linear oasis in the eastern Sahara, one that traverses several regions of Africa. An oasis can be a way station or serve as a refugium, as well as be a place of settlement with its own special biological and cultural adaptive strategies. Both of these perspectives—crossroads and oasis/refugium—can be expected to provide insight into the processes that could have affected the Nile valley's populations/peoples. From these vantage points this presentation will examine aspects of what might be called the historical genetics of the Nile valley, with a focus on the Y chromosome. The time-frame is the late pleistocene through holocene; within this there are different levels of biocultural history. Of special interest here is patterns of north-south variation in the Egyptian Nile valley.
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Alexander, Josephine Olufunmilayo. "Exploring Nnedi Okorafor's decolonial turn in the Binti Trilogy." Image & Text, no. 37 (November 1, 2023): 1–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a29.
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Nnedi Okorafor is one of the best-known speculative fiction writers who has centred African perspectives and delinked from Western models. In her trilogy, Binti (2015), Binti Home (2017) and Binti the Night Masquerade (2017a), Okorafor disrupts the dominant white-masculine supremacist convention and traditions for a more diverse and inclusive narrative. In this article, I use decolonial thinking and the lens of Sankofa, a decolonial and African knowledge philosophy and worldview, to explore how Okorafor uses settings, characterisation, and ancient African traditional knowledge to achieve a decolonial turn in speculative fiction. By centring Sankofa, Okorafor sets her fantastic stories in Namibia among the indigenous and marginalised Himba people. She creates strong female characters who embody a multiplicity of beings operating intricately in a complex earthly, spatial and spirit world, and she exploits ancient African traditional culture and knowledge systems to create her 'organic fantasy' and a world of speculative fiction that transforms Western understandings of the genre.
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Mapunda, Bertram B. B. "A Critical Examination of Isaria Kimambo's Ideas Through Time." History in Africa 32 (2005): 269–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2005.0015.
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In this paper I attempt to review critically the historical thought of Isaria Kimambo through time by examining a selected number of his publications and manuscripts. The paper also incorporates comments from his peers and colleagues, as well as his own assessment. In conclusion, the paper appeals to historical institutions and organizations in the developing world (including the Department of History, University of Dar es Salaam and the Historical Association of Tanzania) to cultivate a culture of awarding outstanding historians for the purpose of promoting creativity, commitment, and devotion to the discipline.Isaria Ndelahiyosa Kimambo turned 72 years of age in 2003, For half his lifetime Kimambo has served the Department of History of University Dar es Salaam and the Historical Association of Tanzania (HAT). Established in 1964, the Department of History is one of the oldest departments in the University, which started in 1961 as a college of the University of London. In 1963 this became the college of the University of East Africa, based at Makerere, Uganda, and in 1970 it became a full-fledged University. HAT, which became a non-governmental organization in 2000, was born in 1966, with Kimambo as one of the founding members.Kimambo joined the Department of History in 1965, when he was in his third year of doctoral studies at Northwestern University. In 1967 he successfully defended his dissertation entitled “The Political History of the Pare People to 1900,” which was based on research he conducted in Upare in northeastern Tanzania. In 1969 he became the Head of History Department, the first indigenous Head, taking over from Terence O. Ranger, who left the Department and joined the University of California at Los Angeles as Director of African Studies.
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Cunningham, Tom. "“These Our Games” – Sport and the Church of Scotland Mission to Kenya, c. 1907–1937." History in Africa 43 (June 23, 2015): 259–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/hia.2015.12.
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Abstract:In this article I use oral and documentary evidence gathered during recent fieldwork and archival research in the UK and Kenya to explore the ways in which the Church of Scotland Mission to Kenya attempted to use sport to “civilize” and “discipline” the people of Central Kenya. I make a case for the important contributions the topic of sport can make to the study of African and colonial history, and offer a comprehensive critique of the only book-length work which explores the history of sport in colonial Kenya, John Bale and Joe Sang’sKenyan Running(1996).
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Hauser-Renner, Heinz. "Examining Text Sediments–Commending a Pioneer Historian as an “African Herodotus”: On the Making of the New Annotated Edition of C.C. Reindorf's History of the Gold Coast and Asante." History in Africa 35 (January 2008): 231–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.0.0008.
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In 1995 Paul Jenkins, the former Basel Mission archivist, called my attention to Carl Christian Reindorf's Ga manuscripts kept at the archives in Basel, knowing that I had lived and worked in Ghana in the 1980s and that I was able to speak, read, and write the Gã language of Accra and its neigborhood. Of course I already knew Reindorf and his monumental History of the Gold Coast and Asante published in 1895 in English, as I had written my M.A. thesis on late-nineteenth-century Asante history, and moreover I was very much interested in Gã history. Reindorf's massive, substantive, and systematic work about the people of modern southern Ghana may be considered a pioneering intellectual achievement because it was one of the first large-scale historical work about an African region written by an African, and it was highly innovative, including both written sources and oral historical narratives and new methods for the reconstruction of African history. The book has excited interest ever since it first appeared 110 years ago because it contains an unrivaled wealth of information on the history and culture of southern Ghana.A preliminary glimpse at the two heaps of folios wrapped with linen ropes at the archives showed that the manuscripts-none of them were dated–contained two different versions of the English History. That day, when I first laid my hands on the brownish, carefully folded papers, I was not aware that I was to embark on an intensive period of arduous transcribing and translating work (sometimes “lost in translation”), breathtaking archival investigations in Basel, London, and Accra, and of an exciting text/context research (unearthing sources, excavating informants, examining sediments/versions).
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Ojo, Olatunji. "Beyond Diversity: Women, Scarification, and Yoruba Identity." History in Africa 35 (January 2008): 347–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.0.0015.
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On 18 March 1898 Okolu, an Ijesa man, accused Otunba of Italemo ward, Ondo of seizing and enslaving his sister Osun and his niece. Both mother and daughter, enslaved by the Ikale in 1894, had fled from their master in 1895, but as they headed toward Ilesa, the accused seized them. Osun claimed the accused forced her to become his wife, “hoe a farm,” and marked her daughter's face with one deep, bold line on each cheek. Otunba denied the slavery charge, claiming he only “rescued [Osun] from Soba who was taking her away [and] took her for wife.” Itoyimaki, a defense witness, supported the claim that Osun was not Otunba's slave. In his decision, Albert Erharhdt, the presiding British Commissioner, freed the captives and ordered the accused to pay a fine of two pounds. In addition to integrating Osun through marriage, the mark conferred on her daughter a standard feature of Ondo identity. Although this case came up late in the nineteenth century, it represents a trend in precolonial Yorubaland whereby marriages and esthetics served the purpose of ethnic incorporation.Studies on the roots of African ethnic identity consciousness have concentrated mostly on the activities of outsiders, usually Euro-American Christian missions, repatriated ex-slaves, and Muslims, whose ideas of nations as geocultural entities were applied to various African groups during the era of the slave trade and, more intensely, under colonialism. For instance, prior to the late nineteenth century, the people now called Yoruba were divided into multiple opposing ethnicities. Ethnic wars displaced millions of people, including about a million Yoruba-speakers deported as slaves to the Americas, Sierra Leone, and the central Sudan, mostly between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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Pilossof, Rory. "Labor Relations in Zimbabwe from 1900 to 2000: Sources, Interpretations, and Understandings." History in Africa 41 (May 6, 2014): 337–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/hia.2014.11.
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AbstractThis article looks at the shifts and continuities in labor relations in Zimbabwe from c. 1900–2000. It does so by looking at three cross sections (1904, 1951, and 2002) to examine the changes that have taken place. By exploring the continuities (subsistence agriculture) and shifts (limited industrialization and urbanization) of labor relations over this period, it is hoped that the article provides a comprehensive account of the rapid and radical changes Zimbabwe underwent during the twentieth century and the impacts these have had on the peoples and economies within the southern African nation.
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Skinner, Kate. "Local Historians and Strangers with Big Eyes: The Politics of Ewe History in Ghana and Its Global Diaspora." History in Africa 37 (2010): 125–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2010.0022.
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In 2001 I attended a meeting at the London headquarters of the Movement for a Resurgent Togoland (MORETO). Seven people—mainly middle-aged and elderly men from the inland Ewe-speaking areas of Ghana—had gathered together to share their findings about the modern political history of the area where they were born. They vocalised their dissatisfaction with the incorporation of this area within the borders of Ghana at independence in 1957, and they discussed how this situation came about, and whether it could be rectified. In the course of this meeting, I began to realize that contests over Ewe history had gone global. Controversial issues, which scholars had previously addressed through detailed diachronic local studies, were now being played out across a global diaspora, capturing the attention not only of Ewe-speakers originating from a specific town or district, or having a direct stake in a particular version of its history, but also of anonymous commentators, scattered thousands of miles across the globe. In this paper, I describe some of my encounters with Ewe-speaking people who study their recent political history, and I analyze some of their writings. I suggest that, despite recent attention to history-writing by Africans during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, further reflection is required on two key issues: firstly, the circulation of historical knowledge and forms of historical debate among Africans living in the global diaspora; secondly, the implications of this for historians researching the post-colonial period.
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Owino, Meshack, and J. Mark Souther. "“Curating Kisumu” and “Curating East Africa:” Academic Collaboration and Public Engagement in the Digital Age." History in Africa 47 (June 2020): 327–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/hia.2020.11.
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AbstractThis essay examines the origin, permutations, potentials, challenges, and implications of two successive, collaborative public history research, teaching, and learning projects undertaken by the Department of History at Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, and the Department of History and Archeology at Maseno University, Kisumu, Kenya between 2014 and 2018. The two projects explored how opportunities created by the mobile revolution in Africa could be leveraged to generate new ways of acquiring historical information and knowledge between students and faculty in universities separated by enormous distances and by disparate social, economic, and political experiences. Specifically, the projects examined how the cellphone revolution could reshape the production and dissemination of knowledge about important sites, places, events, and people in modern Africa. The essay examines the conception and permutations of the two projects; identifies and explores their potentials and challenges; and proffers thoughts and suggestions that may guide similar future endeavors.
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Adotey, Edem. "Where is My Name? – Contemporary Funeral Posters as an Arena of Contestation and (Re)negotiation of Chiefly Relations Among the Ewe of Ghana and Togo." History in Africa 45 (March 9, 2018): 59–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/hia.2018.4.
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Abstract:In Ghana and other regions of West Africa a funeral poster is an important part of funerary ritual. Examining two funeral posters – one about omission and the other about inclusion of names – printed to commemorate two chiefs in two Ewe communities in Ghana and Togo, this article shows funeral posters as arenas of contestation, negotiation, affirmation, and elaboration of beliefs and conflicting views. The article argues that funeral posters are written with a local audience in mind, which means that they are a very useful source for historical enquiry about how people address the subjects of kinship and relationships among chiefs.
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Chebanne, A. M., and K. C. Monaka. "Mapping Shekgalagari in Southern Africa: a Sociohistorical and Linguistic Study." History in Africa 35 (January 2008): 133–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.0.0012.
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The Bakgalagari were classified by Guthrie (1948) as S30 and by Cole (1954) as 60/2/5. They incorporate ethnic groups such as Bangologa, Bashaga, Babolaongwe, Balala, Bakhena, Baritjhauba, and Bakgwatheng and Baphaleng, the latter of which do not speak Shekgalagari any more. At the moment, Bakgalagari are only found in Botswana. They are thought to have arrived in southern Africa more than 2000 years ago, together with other Bantu groups (Tlou/Campbell 1997:33), and were the earliest Sotho-Tswana group to inhabit the Madikwe and Limpopo river basins (Figure 1) around 900 and 1000 CE (Tlou/Campbell, 1997).Around 1200 CE, the Bakgalagari were already inhabiting the peripheries of this area as they migrated into Botswana, where they are estimated to have arrived around 1000 CE, as Figure 2 illustrates (cf. Tlou/Campbell, 1997:90). They would later be pushed into the Kgalagadi desert, which reinforced the peripheral and distant location of some of them from the rest of the Sotho-Tswana groups that subsequently inhabited the country.History suggests that there were ethnic rivalries amongst the Bakgalagari, and they consequently split into various ethnic groups (Tlou/Campbell, 1997:90). These ethnic groups were dispersed in various directions in the country at different times as shown in Figure 3. Figure 3 shows the historical base and the subsequent movements of the Bakgalagari starting earlier than 1400 CE. It is possible that these movements might have been reversed at various times, and also that some people at a later stage took the same directions to find their ethic counterparts (e.g., Babolaongwe at around 1650 CE).
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Sutton, J. E. G. "Archeology and Reconstructing History in the Kenya Highlands: the Intellectual Legacies of G.W.B. Huntingford and Louis S.B. Leakey." History in Africa 34 (2007): 297–320. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2007.0021.
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A preceding article examined the ethnographic, linguistic and archeological enquiries of G.W.B. Huntingford (1901-1978) and L.S.B. Leakey (1903-1972) in the Kenya highlands in the “high colonial” era of the 1920s and 1930s—the one, a young settler, researching independently in the Kalenjin region west of the Rift Valley, the other brought up on an Anglican mission station in Kikuyu country to the east and then, as an ambitious prehistorian, concentrating his activities in the Rift itself. That article pointed to their contrasting approaches to these disciplines, observing how each in his own way separately compartmentalized his anthropology from his archeology, with the result that any sense of the history of the existing peoples whom they studied-Nandi and Kikuyu-was effectively denied. This sequel examines their archeology more critically, beginning with their basic approaches and methods, and then tracing the impact of their work on subsequent scholarship and research endeavors, and especially on those anxious to reconstruct East African history in the changing intellectual climate leading to Independence.The article concerns itself therefore with what Leakey in the late 1920s designated “Neolithic cultures” in the Nakuru-Elmenteita basin within the elevated stretch of the Rift Valley, to which subject Mary Leakey subsequently contributed, leading to Sonia Cole's essays at synthesis in the 1950s/1960s; and also with the Azanian hypothesis of Huntingford, which was rediscovered by Basil Davidson in the late 1950s and, with some deft transformation, catapulted centerstage for an emerging picture of East African history of a positive and enlightened sort.
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Schoenbrun, David L., and Jennifer L. Johnson. "Introduction: Ethnic Formation with Other-Than-Human Beings." History in Africa 45 (June 2018): 307–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/hia.2018.11.
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Abstract:Literature on ethnicity in Africa meets literature on multispecies ethnography to their mutual benefit. Multispecies ethnography considers people together with other-than-human beings, insisting the figure of the human is an interspecific one. We explore the ways in which multispecies ethnography needs history as part of a story about power and politics. But, the burden of the essay argues that historians of ethnicity need multispecies ethnographers’ embrace of a broader canvas of life, in motion at many scales. Historians of ethnicity need a greater awareness of change and continuity in the presence of other-than-human life forms, over time. Those same historians also might adopt the readiness of multispecies ethnographers to recognize other than the descent metaphor at the heart of thinking and making groups.
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Ogunleye, Foluke. "Television Docudrama as Alternative Records of History." History in Africa 32 (2005): 479–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2005.0019.
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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.
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Silverman, Raymond A. "Material Biographies: Saharan Trade and the Lives of Objects in Fourteenth and Fifteenth-Century West Africa." History in Africa 42 (March 27, 2015): 375–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/hia.2015.4.
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AbstractThis article explores the lives of several copper alloy vessels (bowls, basins, and ewers), made in Egypt and England, that were carried across the Sahara just before the dawn of the European age of exploration, and that eventually found their way to central Ghana. It considers how and why prestige metal goods, some of them produced for specific individuals, became trade commodities that traveled thousands of kilometers, ending up in Akan communities where they were given new meanings. In thinking about material things and the mutability of meaning, the article attempts to address how we might understand these trade items as discursive “objects of knowledge” connecting peoples living in different times and different places.
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Twaddle, Michael. "Some Implications of Literacy in Uganda." History in Africa 38 (2011): 227–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2011.0009.
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During the last fifty years, several debates have waxed and waned regarding the implications of literacy for African history. Among social scientists in general and social anthropologists in particular, Jack Goody and Ian Watt's survey of “The Consequences of Literacy” (1963) for hitherto preliterate or partially literate and now modernizing societies, drew attention to one suggested transformation: “The importance of writing lies in its creating a new medium of communication. (…) Its essential service is to objectify speech, to provide language with a material correlative, a set of visible signs. In this material form speech can be transmitted over space and preserved over time; what people say and think can be rescued from the transitoriness of oral communication.” The consequences, in Goody and Watt's view, were immensely important: “In oral societies the cultural tradition is transmitted almost entirely by face-to-face communication; and changes in its content are accompanied by the homeostatic process of forgetting or transforming those parts of the tradition that cease to be either necessary or relevant. Literate societies, on the other hand, cannot discard, absorb or transmute the past in the same way. Instead, their members are faced with permanently recorded versions of the past and its beliefs; and because the past is thus set apart from the present, historical enquiry becomes possible. This in turn encourages scepticism; and scepticism, not only about the legendary past, but about received ideas about the universe as a whole.”
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Wilson, James A. "Political Songs, Collective Memories and Kikuyu Indi Schools." History in Africa 33 (2006): 363–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2006.0025.
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Korwo nĩNdemi MathaathiBaba ndagwĩtia kĩrugũNjoke ngwĩtie itimũ na ngo,Riu baba ngũgwĩtia gĩthoomo.Ndegwa rĩu gũititũire,Thenge no iranyihanyiha,Ndiri kĩrugũ ngagwitia,Riu baba ngugwitia gĩthoomo.Maitũ nĩakwĩrĩte kaing,Ona niĩ nĩngũmenyithl˜tie,Ndirĩ kĩrugũ ngagwĩtia,Rĩu baba ngũgwĩtia gĩthoomo.Njamba ĩrĩa nene Kĩnyatta,Rĩu rĩoimĩte Rũraaya,Jomo nĩoimĩte na thoome,Ningĩ Jomo mũthigaani witũ.Njamba ya bata hĩndĩ ĩno,Kaarĩkayo no gĩtboomo,Wambu githĩto gĩthoomo,Baba, niĩno ngakĩina kaarĩ.Njambo cia baba hĩndĩ ĩno,]omo njamba ĩnyuagwo ĩmwe,Jomo mũraata wa andũairũ,Nowe Jotno mũraata wa twana1.1If this were Ndemi and Mathaathi's era,Father, I would plead for a feast,Then demand a spear and a shield,But now, father, I plead for education.Bulls are now depleted,He-goats are also fewer,No banquet shall I ask,Now, father, I plead for education.Mother has often told you,Even I have informed you,No feast shall I demand,Now, father, I plead for education.The courageous warrior Kenyatta,Has now arrived from Europe,Jomo came through open gates,Equally, he was our negotiator,The important warrior of today,His song of joy is education,Is Wambu's honor not education?Father, how then shall I find my joy?Brave warriors of today,We drink to Jomo the fearless one,Jomo, friend of all Black people,And Jomo the friend of children.2Peris Wanjira Gachaũ was eleven years old when she first attended Ngoigo Independent School in 1948. She enjoyed, most of all, singing the songs her teachers taught her and other students concerning the significance of education, stolen Kikuyu land, and the promise of African independence in Kenya. “Our teachers taught us lessons of our history, culture, elders, as well as our future; and we sang in the mornings, in the afternoons, and on our way home from school, everyday.” According to Mrs. Gachaũ, the song Korwo nĩ Ndemi Mathaathi was popular among her classmates and the Kikuyu elders of her community because “everyone understood the importance of education and uhuru.” But this song most likely represented more than education and freedom to the people of Ngoigo. This song also acknowledges the memory of Kikuyu customs, the continuous transformation of Kikuyu tradition to modernity, the changing armature of Kikuyu leadership, and the future negotiation process for communicating with the outside world.
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Siegel, Brian. "Chipimpi, Vulgar Clans, and Lala-Lamba Ethnohistory." History in Africa 35 (January 2008): 439–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.0.0003.
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Common to the matrilineal peoples of eastern central Africa is their clan system, and the reciprocal joking or “funeral friendship,” relations that exist between clans with figuratively complementary names (Cunnison 1959:62-71; Richards 1937; Stefaniszyn 1950). This paper, however, focuses on the southeastern Shaba Pedicle, and the anomalous, one-sided joking between the Vulva and (allegedly pubic) Hair clans of the Lala and Lamba chiefs. I suggest that this joking, like the claim that these clans share a common mythical ancestor, is best explained in terms of nineteenth-century Lala and Lamba history, and of their competing claims to the Pedicle's easternmost end. This region of Bukanda lies between the Aushi to the north (in Bwaushi), the Lala and Swaka to the east and south (in Ilala and Maswaka), and the Lamba (of Ilamba) to the west. The main distinction among these closely-related and adjacent peoples, with their similar customs and languages, is in the histories and traditions of their chiefs.The bizarre relationship between the chiefly Vulva and Hair clans is not widely known. I only heard of it during my fieldwork in Ilamba. The Lala, like the Lamba, straddle both the Congolese and Zambian sides of the Shaba Pedicle, and the literature on this region, in both French and English, is fragmentary and marked by an ahistorical and uncritical acceptance of oral traditions. The Lala are probably best known in relation to Mwana Lesa's Watchtower movement of the 1920s (Verbeek 1977,1983). Norman Long's Social Change and the Individual (Manchester, 1968) is the only modern ethnography on the Lala, yet this study of the enterprising Jehovah's Witnesses has little to say about dieir history or clans. Fortunately, Léon Verbeek's Filiation et usurpation (1987) has sorted through the oral and colonial histories, and has paved the way for comparative ethnohistories of the peoples on both sides of the Shaba Pedicle.
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Abbink, Jon. "Reconstructing Haberland Reconstructing the Wolaitta: Writing the History and Society of a Former Ethiopian Kingdom." History in Africa 33 (2006): 1–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2006.0001.
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In this paper I take up the methodological issue of combining archived fieldwork notes and contemporary field data in the reconstruction of the recent history of Wolaitta, a former kingdom in southern Ethiopia. The old fieldwork data, archived and little known since the 1960s, consist of the notes of the German Ethiopianist ethnologist Eike Haberland (1924-1992), while the field data are based on my intermittent fieldwork in Wolaitta since 2001. In ongoing research on this subject, I intend to write an historical ethnography of Wolaitta, by combining a study of the methods and interpretive strategies of Haberland as ethnographer and product of his time, with new research. The effort may also allow us to see how his ‘facts’ and explanations fit with current concerns in anthropology and African studies. As the subject of this paper will eventually be elaborated into a book, I aim to be brief here and illustrate the value and challenge of such a reconstruction effort.The study also is meant to contribute to understanding the dynamics of regional identity in today's Ethiopia, which has been struggling with a very problematic implementation of ethnicity-based federal policies since 1991. A study of a corpus of ethnography gathered in the heyday of German field ethnology (1950s-1960s), in conjunction with present-day research, may highlight processes of identity formation among the Wolaitta, who today in 2005 count some 1.5 million people, with perhaps an additional 80,000 living outside the Wolaitta borders elsewhere in Ethiopia, and having various shades of identification with their country and traditions of origin.
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Afigbo, A. E. "The Spell of Oral History: A Case Study from Northern Igboland." History in Africa 33 (2006): 39–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2006.0003.
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My case study is taken from the northern Igbo of Nigeria and focuses on the village-group of Ihuwe, which name is today rendered as Ihube— thanks to its Anglicization during the period of colonial rule. This not-withstanding, the people still call themselves “Ihuwe,” the form I use in this paper. The Northern Igbo area, especially the area around Awka, Orlu, and Okigwe, is commonly regarded as the heartland of Igbo culture and civilization. Ihuwe, in that portion of old Okigwe Division known today as Okigwe Local Government Area (LGA), lies in a region of southern Nigeria that has been identified as having witnessed human activity from very early times, at least from the period of Acheulean culture. It also lies on the geographically and historically prominent Nsukka-Udi-Okigwe cuesta, which archeology tells us entered the Iron Age quite early in African history, no later than about the eighth century BCE. We are thus dealing with one of the areas of ancient human occupation, as well as an area known for its dense demographic profile. It is these features–early human settlement and occupation with its attendant consequence of severely attenuated oral history, dense demographic profile, and being the cradle land of Igbo culture—that help to define the Northern Igbo and mark them out from the Western, Eastern, Southern, and North-Eastern Igbo, believed to be relatively more recent descendants from them.Perhaps another feature that calls for mention here is their political culture. Although, like their other Igbo kinsmen, they could boast of having evolved only micro-, and therefore weak, states (what social anthropologists of the colonial period refused to refer to as states), they had their own special model of these micro-states.
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Korieh, Chima J. "Voices from Within and Without: Sources, Methods, and Problematics in the Recovery of the Agrarian History of the Igbo (Southeastern Nigeria)." History in Africa 33 (2006): 231–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2006.0015.
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Over the past few decades, social history has variously and successfully explored the lives of neglected groups in society. Nevertheless, the question of capturing these “silent voices” in history, including those of women, remains at the heart of social history. Although few sources are available that allow historians to hear these voices, new methodological insights offer opportunities. A multidisciplinary framework and a broad range of methodologies can shed new light on the lives of peasants, who have been often neglected in history and provide opportunities to “hear” their voices and concerns as historical subjects. The object of this paper is to present sortie critical perspective on the use of oral and archival sources for the study of the agricultural history of rural Africa. What I present here is my approach to the collection and use of various sources for the study of Igbo agricultural history in the twentieth century. It suggests that oral sources, in particular, offer an important opportunity in the writing of an inclusive history of agricultural change—a history that for the most part has been created by rural peasants. Another objective is to outline my personal experiences in the field and to suggest important ways of situating the researcher not only in the analysis of the evidence, but most importantly, in the context or the fieldwork environment. Both, as has been clearly shown, can affect the historian's analysis and perspective and the resulting history.Igboland is situated in Southeastern Nigeria and lies between longitude 7°E and latitude 6°10' N. The region borders the middle belt region of Nigeria to the north, the river Niger to the west, the Ibibio people to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea and Bight of Biafra to the south. Most of the region lies on a plain less than 600 feet (about 183 meters) above sea level. Most of Igboland lies within the Guinean and Sub-Guinean physical environment and is characterized by an annual rainfall of between forty and sixty inches per annum, with a dry season lasting between three and four months in northern Igboland and a mean monthly humidity of about 90% throughout the year. The pattern of rainfall produces two distinct patterns of vegetation. The southern part of the region is characterized by heavy rainfall that produces a dense rainforest that thinned out northwards into a savanna. However, many centuries of human habitation and activities have turned the whole region into secondary forest, with only pockets of forest oasis remaining.
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Money, Duncan. "Rebalancing the Historical Narrative or Perpetuating Bias? Digitizing the Archives of the Mineworkers’ Union of Zambia." History in Africa, May 3, 2021, 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/hia.2021.6.
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Abstract This article examines the project to digitize and preserve the archives of the Mineworkers’ Union of Zambia and has two aims. The first aim is to discuss the process of cataloguing and digitizing an archive that has undergone significant deterioration, and the theoretical and practical challenges to achieving this. The second aim is to relate making this archive more accessible to questions of knowledge production. Despite its limitations, the value of this archive is that it is primarily composed of documents produced by Africans about the world as they saw it. These are not the records of external powers, colonial officials, or those studying African peoples.
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Amusa, Saheed B., and Abimbola O. Adesoji. "Historical Scholarship and Training at Ife: Growth, Personalities, and Professorships, 1962–2022." History in Africa, September 29, 2022, 1–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/hia.2022.5.
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Abstract This paper is the first part of a detailed historical assessment of historical scholarship and training at the Department of History of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. It examines the growth and development of the Department since the inception of the University in 1962. It discusses the pioneer academic staff of the Department and subsequent people that taught in the Department over the years. The paper shows that the Department of History at Ife has excelled in all areas of historical scholarship over the years and that its professors and other scholars have contributed immensely to the reconstruction of African past. This is done through brief but succinct profiling of the professors and their professorial inaugural lectures as well as other scholars affiliated with the Department. The paper concludes that the Department of History at the Obafemi Awolowo University is a force to reckon with in the comity of schools of history in sub-Saharan Africa.
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Floor, Karen J. "Oral-based Bible translation: A contextualised model for the nomadic Himba people of southern Africa." In die Skriflig/In Luce Verbi 55, no. 3 (September 23, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ids.v55i3.2752.
Full textAbstract:
Historically, the work of Bible translation has involved multiple disciplines in a commitment to translate Scripture with integrity and faithfulness to the original Greek and Hebrew texts. Translating Scripture for primary oral societies has added another dimension to the need for accuracy, beauty and clarity in Scripture translation. It has been widely accepted in Western literate society that the Bible is accessed in written print in the form of a book. For oral-preference societies, such as the nomadic Himba and San peoples of southern Africa, a printed Bible has presented a challenge. Few people read or wish to read as their primary means of communication. In the case of the San family of languages, complex phonemic systems of up to 85 contrastive clicks have presented a challenge in developing ‘readable’ orthographies. This article has highlighted the rationale for oral-based Bible translation. The research aimed to address the translation needs of oral societies – some of whom are nomadic or semi-nomadic people groups. The recent missiological positioning of certain Bible translation practitioners has led to an oral-based approach to Bible translation which validates the cultural identity of modern oral communicators. Orally crafted translations of Scripture passages have been recorded and made available to oral societies through a range of media, including MP3 players, SD cards and mobile phone applications. The effectiveness of oral-based Bible translation among the Himba people has been seen in their response. What began as a three-year pilot project to explore the potential impact of oral-based Scripture among oral societies has led to a unanimous demand for a second three-year phase, and an expressed desire for a full oral-based Bible in the Himba language. The oral-based approach as described is currently used in nearly 20 other oral Bible translation, which reflects a felt need for oral-based Scripture among oral societies in southern Africa.Contribution: Insights from the emerging practice of oral-based Bible translation in southern Africa provide valuable data for missiological approaches to communicating the gospel in the context of modern oral societies.
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Blumenthal, Anna, Serge Caparos, and Isabelle Blanchette. "How Threat Shapes Attention and Memory in the Himba, a Remote People of Namibia." Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, May 18, 2023, 002202212311750. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00220221231175063.
Full textAbstract:
Threatening stimuli capture our attention more rapidly than benign stimuli, and threatening experiences lead to longer lasting and more vivid episodic memories. The common interpretation of these findings is that humans share an evolved fear response that enables prioritized processing of threats, providing a survival advantage. This response is assumed to be universal; however, these findings have been documented almost entirely in WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations. Here, we address this gap by examining threat detection and fear memories in a remote African culture, the Himba. We found that threats captured attention more rapidly than benign stimuli, and that fear memories, despite differing in content, were shaped by threat in a similar manner to that reported in WEIRD populations.