A few years ago I was reading a doctoral dissertation concerned with the history of São Tomé, when one particular word fairly leapt off the page. It came at the end of an episode telling how a particular ethnic group on the island today had arrived there. The story told how a number of Angolan slaves, later called Angolares, were shipwrecked just off the coast of São Tomé in 1544 (or 1554), “though (of course) no accurate date or account of the circumstances exists.” The survivors swam to shore and moved into the bush “building there a series of small villages called Quilombos.” It was that word, “Quilombos,” that made me jump to attention, for it is a very important word in Angolan history and a written record of it from either 1544 or 1554 would be sixty to seventy years earlier than the hitherto first-known mention of the word. If it were true, profound revisions to the accepted political history in Angola during the sixteenth century would be called for, and even the chronology of the onset of the Lunda (Ruund) kingdom far inland would have to be revised.

During a visit in the summer 1970, Jacques Hymans, professor of History at San Francisco State Univeisity, found discarded papers strewn over the floor of an abandoned European-style house at Mushenge (Nsheng), the capital of the Kuba kingdom, zone Mweka, West Kasai, Democratic Republic of Congo. He salvaged them and then kept them at home. After his death Ms Kelley Hymans gave the papers to the collections of Memorial Library of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. To this a notebook, which Wisconsin obtained through the good offices of Professor Mary Douglas, has been added. This contains a census of the capital for 1939-40 carried out by Jules Lene (Lyeen) as tribute collector for the Kuba king.

Since early colonial times the Kuba people were well-known in Europe for their sculpture and their artistic textiles, and because they formed a single kingdom headed by a “divine” king. This was also the only territory in the Belgian Congo where “indirect administration” was officially practiced after 1920. Under such circumstances it is not surprising that the Kuba capital Nsheng, known as Mushenge, eventually became a minor tourist attraction for amateurs of their arts. After independence, travel in Congo became difficult and the prestige of Mushenge declined, but some of its fascination remained, and Hymans was one of the persons still attracted to it. His last visit to Mushenge occurred in 1970, not long after the death of king Bop Mabinc maKyeen. It is on that occasion that he salvaged the papers now in Madison.

The aim of this note is to attract attention to a new venture in scholarly publication—Beatrix Heintze's Alfred Schachtzabel's Reise nach Angola, 1913-1914. Und seine Sammlungen für das Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. Rekonstruktion einer Ethnographischen Quelle (Köln, 1995), the first issue of Afrika Archiv, a new series to be devoted to text editions. That this is not to be confused with an ordinary text edition is already intimated by the work's title, which translates as Alfred Schachtzabel's Voyage to Angola, 1913-1914, and his Collections for the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. Reconstruction of an Ethnographic Source. In other words, it speaks of a “reconstruction” and “a source edition,” not “text edition.” As well, Heintze is described as the author of this book rather than the editor. Yet she presents the work as a new kind of edition—the “integrated edition of sources.”

Heintze is an experienced text editor, having published both a voluminous conventional collection of documents and a set of ethnographic drawings. Yet when she examined the surviving documentation pertaining to Schachtzabel's expedition in Angola, she became convinced that a standard edition of all his work would be unwise. The unpublished materials at hand are too disparate and slender.

If very long titles were still acceptable, the one for this note would read Save the evidence: A plea for fieldworkers to make the raw materials or primary evidence from their field work accessible to all scholars— Especially all recorded oral data.

Ever since ethnographic monographs based on fieldwork were first published, they have raised problems of credibility. In the absence of any evidence at all to test the assertions made, readers of such works have been asked to trust the scholarly authority and integrity of their writers blindly, a stance diametrically contrary to basic tenets in all sciences. It may well be that, at the outset, early practitioners of the craft believed that their observations did not differ in any way from those made by natural scientists in the field—that they needed no evidence because their observations were wholly replicable. Anyone who cared to carry out the experiment—that is, to go to observe the same people in the same field—would find exactly the same situation as described in the monograph. For this was the age of the ethnographic present. Humans were divided into races and tribes, and, just like so many species of songbirds, every human tribe had its own invariant characteristics. A people-watcher need only to enumerate them.

Not so long ago this journal published an excellent overview of the issues related to the reliability of translations. But neither this, nor apparently any other study, considered the case of a text translated by its own author, hence a note on this topic may have some use. As I just finished translating of my own Le Rwanda ancien (Paris, 2001), I have been prompted to do so. The issues still are: how reliable is this sort of translation to the original? Is it really equivalent to the original?

Translations of modern works can be grouped in three categories according to the knowledge an author has about the language in which his or her work is being translated: the author does not know the language of the translation at all; the author knows that language well enough to check on the reliability of a translation; or the author knows that language to the point that he or she can translate the work him-or herself. In the first case, even the author has no idea how faithful the translation is to the original. In the second case the overall reliability of the translation can be guaranteed by the author, but his or her limited knowledge of the language in question means that he or she may be unaware that some parts of the translation may not be faithful in the sense that readers might understand them in ways the author did not intend. Moreover, the great majority of translations by others will still strike native readers of the language into which it is translated as stilted because its rhetorical devices, and perhaps its syntax, do not wholly conform to the usual practice in that language. Indeed some passages may seem quaint or even especially striking merely because standard idioms or metaphors have been too literally translated. But surely self-translation should be completely reliable, especially when the translated text has been also copy-edited by a native speaker of the language in which it is translated?

Nearly every historian of early African history has recently encountered studies that use the history of words as a source for history more generally defined, an approach also known as words-and-things. Indeed, by now a more or less elaborate use of words-and-things has become fashionable, especially in the Anglophone literature. A number of short presentations of the overall principles underlying this approach have been published, but they all lack an extended discussion of the methodological issues involved. Perhaps this is the main reason why words-and- things analyses are almost never subjected to critical scrutiny, while the conclusions of studies based on them, however weak or strong they might be, tend to be accepted as gospel—a most unsatisfactory situation. Hence a book-length study of the methodology involved in the application of words-and-things should be very welcome.

As Klein-Arendt's book is devoted exclusively to this subject, it should fill the gap. Yet it will disorient most readers of this journal because K-A is not concerned with the solution of smaller- or large-scale problems of history as understood by such readers, but focuses on the epistemology of the central European school known as Kulturgeschichte (more or less “Culture History”), to which he subscribes and which is likely to be largely unknown to most readers. Yet when the expression “words-and-things” was first coined in 1909. it was intended to be a tool to elucidate Kulturgeschichte. Indeed, the journal from which the label stems was called Wörter und Sachen. Kulturhistorische Zeitschrift für Sprach-und Sachforschung (Words and Things, a Journal of Culture History for Research in Languages and Things) and on its very first page Rudolf Meringer stated that “[linguistics is only a portion of the science of culture … We hold that the future of Kulturgeschichte resides in the union of the science of language with the science of things” in which “things” stood for what came to be better known as “culture traits.”