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Teaching South African History in the Digital Age: Collaboration, Pedagogy, and Popularizing History
- Jill E. Kelly, Omar Badsha
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- 23 March 2020, pp. 297-325
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The digitization of African materials has made it easier than ever for students to engage with primary source documentation and undertake original research. Digitizing sources and using digital sources to teach African history has great pedagogical value, but must be done ethically. This article suggests a model for collaborative and publicly-engaged scholarship, demonstrating the potential of transnational projects and shared knowledge production while maintaining sensitivity towards questions of the hegemony of the North. The study draws on experience of a virtual internship project between North American-based university students and the South African non-profit South African History Online (SAHO).
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What's in an Alias? Family Names, Individual Histories, and Historical Method in the Western Sudan
- Gregory Mann
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- 09 May 2014, pp. 309-320
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Writing in his Les Bambara du Ségou et du Kaarta, the French colonial administrator and ethnographer Charles Monteil considered the family name, or jamu, to
sum up the history of the community which bears it: it refers to everything which concerns the ancestors, as well as the accomplishments of current members of the community, including their turpitudes and even their alliances, be they fraternal, conjugal, political, or supernatural.
Monteil was right, to a certain degree. In the Western Sudan, family names are weighted with history and significance. Yet what Monteil characterized as evidence of stability and tradition, Charles Bird has more recently called a “ticket to mobility.” The fluidity and mobility that had come to characterize the jamu eluded Monteil entirely, just as its mutability often eludes contemporary historians.
A jamu represents both an all-important identity marker and an instrument of “mobility.” Yet it is also highly contigent, even aleatory. This mobility has a double sense, signifying both the mutable nature of the name itself and its potential for “making outsiders insiders” by creating an immediate link between people who would otherwise be strangers. Jamuw—the plural takes a ‘w’—also have a deep historicity. Embedded in them are history and myth, along with suggestions of family occupational category—commonly referred to as ‘caste’—and social status. Epics such as Sundiata often provide etymologies and legendary origins of family names, and scholars have sought—misguidedly—to use these to understand the historical processes of ‘caste’ formation and other aspects of the distant Mande past.
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Robert Norris, Agaja, and the Dahomean Conquest of Allada and Whydah
- David Ross
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 311-324
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In a book in which he gave an account of the reign of Tegbesu (1740-1774), Robert Norris, the late eighteenth-century slave trader historian of Dahomey, included a brief sketch of the career of Tegbesu's father, Agaja (1718-1740), the conqueror of Allada and Whydah. Norris portrayed Agaja as a nation-builder who brought the Dahomeans and the people of Allada and Whydah, “the conquerors and the conquered,” to think of themselves as “one people.” The author claimed that Agaja saw to it after the conquest that “every part of his dominions became replenished with people.” He also argued that Agaja's new subjects were so pleased with his policy of reconciliation that they made no “efforts to regain their independence.”
Norris' account of Agaja has been very influential, especially since the 1960s when I. A. Akinjogbin not only endorsed it but added both that Dahomey was founded by a group of patriotic anti-slave trade Aja and that post-1740 Dahomey was a European-like nation state. Norris' argument, as embellished by Akinjogbin, was reproduced in a number of authoritative 1970s works and appears to have retained its appeal even though Akinjogbin's addenda have been shown to be at odds with the evidence. Norris' original thesis nevertheless is just as flawed as Akinjogbin's various supplementary claims. Agaja was far from having been a nation-builder; still less was he a far sighted statesman who saw to it that “every part of his dominions became replenished with people.”
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The Extraordinary Journey of the Jaga Through the Centuries: Critical Approaches to Precolonial Angolan Historical Sources*
- Beatrix Heintze
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- 09 May 2014, pp. 67-101
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The ancient kingdom of Angola, or more precisely Ndongo—which until 1671 essentially existed in the area north of the Kwanza River in presentday Angola—and the neighboring state of Kasanje, which was established by the Mbangala around 1630—belong to what is historiographically one of the more privileged areas of Africa, the history of which is documented by written sources extending back into the sixteenth century. These sources are even quite numerous, and, because of their diverse nature, often complement each other. Thus there are documentary as well as narrative sources, eyewitness accounts as well as other types. Particularly primary, but also secondary (as well as “tertiary” and “quaternary”) sources differ greatly in quality. Despite such differences they share one common factor: virtually without exception they were written by members of foreign, non-African cultures, who came to the area as conquerors, slave traders, and missionaries.
However, the greatest problem these sources pose for historians is not their bias—for their authors were all more or less deeply involved in the contemporary political and economic circumstances that they purport to document. Rather, by far the gravest problem for anyone wishing to write not just Portuguese colonial history, but African history, is that none of these authors, unlike those who wrote about neighboring Kongo, lived at the African courts or among Africans (let alone were intimately aquainted with their culture), so that they were not able to observe or experience events directly from the inside. This considerably reduces the scope of the history that can be reconstructed and risks unjustifiably narrowing or distorting the historical perspective. The few exceptions, such as the reports told by the English slave trader Andrew Battell and the comprehensive syntheses left us by Antonio Cavazzi—both of which unfortunately have been published only as second or third hand renderings of their accounts—thus are accorded even greater historiographical weight.
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History of Bantu Metallurgy: Some Linguistic Aspects
- P. de Maret, F. Nsuka
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 43-65
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Under the influence of certain conclusions in comparative linguistics, historians, archeologists and ethnologists have been led to believe that the diffusion of the Bantu languages could be linked to that of iron metallurgy. Yet from a purely linguistic point of view, the only indications of metallurgical knowledge by the Proto-Bantus are the reconstruction of terminology directly related to metallurgical techniques, reconstructions made on the basis of words gathered from the ensemble of present-day Bantu languages.
It is thusly that Guthrie was able to reconstruct certain terms such as: “iron,” “forge,” “hammer,” and “bellows,” which led him to the conclusion, as expressed in his last article on the subject, that “the speakers of the proto–language probably knew how to forge iron before the Bantu dispersion began.”
A conclusion of such historic import, however, was based on only a few words, the reconstructions and the original meanings of which were often confused. It therefore becomes necessary to re-examine on a larger scale the vocabulary related to metallurgy in the Bantu languages.
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Of Man and Cattle: A Reconsideration of the Traditions of Origin of Pastoral Fulani of Nigeria*
- A. G. Adebayo
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 1-21
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The fair-skinned people who inhabit the Sudan fringes of west Africa stretching from the Senegal valley to the shores of Lake Chad and who speak the language known as Fulfulde, are known by many names.1 They call themselves Fulbe (singular, Pullo). They are called Fulani by the Hausa of southern Nigeria, and this name has been used for them throughout Nigeria. The British call them Ful, Fulani, or Fula, while the French refer to them as Peul, Peulh, or Poulah. In Senegal the French also inadvertently call them Toucouleur or Tukulor. The Kanuri of northern Nigeria call them Fulata or Felata. In this paper we will adopt the Hausa (or Nigerian) name for the people—Fulani.
Accurate censuses are not available on the Fulani in west Africa. A mid-twentieth century estimate puts the total number of Fulani at “over 4 million,” more than half of whom are said to inhabit Nigeria. Another estimate towards the end of 1989 puts the total number of Nigeria's Fulani (nomads only) at over ten million. If both estimates were correct, then the Fulani population in Nigeria alone must have grown 500 per cent in forty years. The dominant factor in this population growth is increased immigration of pastoralists into Nigeria in the wake of the 1968-73 Sahelian drought.
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The Lovedale Press: Literature for the Bantu Revisited
- Jeffrey Peires
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 155-175
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The fact is that the mass of the vernacular literature published in the past emanated, and still to-day emanates, from missionary presses, and naturally such literature has sought to fulfil the aims of missionary societies.
The special features of written vernacular history as a specific category of African historical documentation still await a general theoretical analysis. This article makes no attempt to remedy the deficiency, but considers two possible hypotheses from the relationship between Xhosa traditional historians and the Lovedale Press during the 1930s. First cf Vansina, that it is not only oral traditions which are affected by their mode of transmission. Second, cf Goody and Watt, that it is one thing to be literate, but quite another to find a publisher.
Perhaps the first printed work in Xhosa was that of a stoic-looking cow bestriding the legend “All cattle come from God,” which appeared in 1823. The writer was Rev. John Bennie of the Glasgow Missionary Society, and the printing was done at the Chumie mission station, shortly to be renamed Lovedale. From that time, Lovedale remained the focal point of the literate Christian culture which emerged among the Xhosa of South Africa's Eastern Cape. This primacy was reinforced in 1915 when the South African Native College (now Fort Hare) was established nearby under the chairmanship of the Principal of Lovedale. The Lovedale Press flourished along with its host institution. The only available estimates indicate that up to January 1939, 238 books were produced in Xhosa, more than in any African language except Swahili.
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R.S. Rattray and the Construction of Asante History: An Appraisal
- T.C. McCaskie
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 187-206
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“It must be remembered that in Ashanti really valuable anthropological information is possessed by comparatively few of its inhabitants. Those who have accurate knowledge are the older men and women who have few dealings with the foreigner, live secluded lives in remote villages, and are ignorant of or indifferent to the social and religious changes brought about by the European.
“When Prempeh returned, to what had once been known as ‘the city of blood’, he was a cultured, elderly gentleman, who took his place at the head of the Kumasi town council, and his old capital had become almost a city, with many fine and imposing buildings. I met Prempeh twice; once when he and sixty thousand Ashantis assembled to welcome my little Moth aeroplane, as it swooped down on Kumasi, which, from a great height, looked like a small brown patch in a sea of green. I met him again on my way home, after my last ‘tour’.”
“Listen! Rattray knew no secrets, nothing…You will never know secrets…”
To the historian, no less than to any other student of Asantesεm (Asante matters), the collected works of Rattray (1881–1938) are unavoidable, an ineluctable presence. There they sit on the library shelf--a monument of colonial ethnography and manifestly a major source--to be chewed over and ransacked, to be digested and distilled, to be scissored and parcelled out in the footnotes that support or refute an argument, and ultimately--and always--to be returned to again and again. All historians of Asante use Rattray and are grateful to him. It is important at the outset to record that fact of simple gratitude, for, to the historian of Asante, there is much to criticise in Rattray's work. What follows, then, is a critical assessment of that work.
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Time and the Calendar in Nineteenth - Century Asante: An Exploratory Essay
- T.C. McCaskie
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 179-200
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Historians recognize that the perception and organization of time are fundamental to the internal ordering of all human cultures. However, the history of pre-colonial Africa has largely been written to conform to the calendrical rhythms of an imposed European chronology. Regret over this discrepancy has been tempered by recognition of the very real problems involved in rectifying it. Chief among these is the fact that linear chronology per se -- in purist interpretation requiring numbered series derived from a fixed base, and therefore the mnemonic support of a graphic record -- is beyond the technological competence of any pre-literate society. However, the inability to maintain chronologically precise memorials of the past by no means precludes the existence of sophisticated mechanisms for ordering and dividing temps courant. That is, a historical sense disordered or dissolved through the agency of unassisted, and thus all too fallible, human memory may happily co-exist with an exact (and often symbolically charged) calendrical time. Broadly speaking, the foregoing was the situation obtaining-in Asante in the nineteenth century. Time in nineteenth-century Asante, in a number of its aspects, is the subject of this paper.
The establishment of a historical chronology in nineteenth-century Asante was severely inhibited, and in ultimate terms negated, by the absence of a literate culture. It is the case that rare and isolated individuals like oheneba Owusu Ansa (ca. 1822-1884) and oheneba Kwasi Boakye (1827-1904) acquired in foreign exile skills in European languages. However, Akan Twi was not effectively reduced to writing until the mid-nineteenth century, and then not in Asante. Thus, at the time of the British usurpation in 1896 Asante was still a pre-literate culture.
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Global Explanations Versus Local Interpretations: The Historiography of the Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19 in Africa
- Matthew Heaton, Toyin Falola
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- 09 May 2014, pp. 205-230
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In 1918 an influenza pandemic of unprecedented virulence spread across the planet, infiltrating nearly all areas of human habitation. In less than a year the pandemic had run its course, ultimately responsible for some-where between 30,000,000 and 50,000,000 deaths worldwide. Truly, this was one of the greatest catastrophes in human history. However, despite the fact that the influenza pandemic has few historical rivals in terms of sheer loss of human life, it has not entered the meta-narrative of world history, nor indeed national histories, to the same extent that major wars or natural disasters have. To date, most of the historical work on the influenza pandemic has sought to prove that it does not deserve this relegation to the dustbin of history. Despite this common goal, however, historians have taken different approaches to illustrate the importance of the influenza pandemic of 1918 in Africa.
The purpose of this essay is to categorize the historiography of the influenza pandemic through a discussion of the different approaches taken to the study of the pandemic in Africa. Two distinct categories emerge from this analysis. The first category focuses primarily on the spread and demographic impact of the pandemic in Africa, as well as the official response of colonial governments to the pandemic. Studies in this category seem to be more concerned with emphasizing the commonalities of experience across space. These pieces also tend to compartmentalize the pandemic temporally, focusing only on the period during which the pandemic raged, and not the historical context leading up to the pandemic in a given area, or the lingering impact that the pandemic had on specific societies after its departure. The second category takes the analysis a step further and attempts to determine the relative importance of the influenza pandemic by situating it within the social or local history of a given place. Some articles focus on an entire African colony, while others focus on smaller local regions, but all pieces in this category attempt to understand the influenza not just in terms of similar patterns, numbers, and policies, but in terms of the historical context into which the pandemic occurred and the effect that the pandemic might—or might not—have had on political, economic, or religious trends in a specific area. In order to accomplish this, these studies tend to work within a broad temporal framework in a specific region, and do not engage in comparisons across space to the extent that studies in the first category do.
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Writing African Women's History with Male Sources: Possibilities and Limitations
- Lynn Schler
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- 09 May 2014, pp. 319-333
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Colonial sources can provide historians with a wealth of information about African lives during the colonial period, but they must be read against the grain, filtering out valuable information from the biases and prejudices of European officials. The task of studying African women's history using colonial sources is even more complicated, as women were not often the focus of the colonial agenda, and contact between colonial officials and African women was relatively limited, and often indirect. Particularly in those arenas of African social, cultural, and political life deemed as women's spheres, colonial officials had little incentive to intervene. As a result, historians of later generations are faced with relatively sparse documentation of women-centered social activity during the colonial era. For their part, African women guarded cultural and political spheres under their influence from outside intervention, thus making it difficult for Europeans, and particularly European men, to gain a full and accurate understanding of women's individual and collective experiences under colonial rule.
This paper will examine colonial research and documentation of African women's birthing practices.to illustrate both the potential for using these sources to understand some basic elements of women's experiences, and the limitations of this source material in providing deep and accurate insights into African women's history. Using an example from colonial Cameroon, we will see how European interest in women's birthing practices was motivated by colonial economic and scientific agendas steeped in racism and sexism, preventing European researchers from obtaining a balanced and accurate understanding of this women's sphere of social life. On the other hand, the documents reveal efforts of African women to prevent the colonial infiltration into women's arenas of influence.
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Using African Names to Identify the Origins of Captives in the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Crowd-Sourcing and the Registers of Liberated Africans, 1808–1862
- Richard Anderson, Alex Borucki, Daniel Domingues da Silva, David Eltis, Paul Lachance, Philip Misevich, Olatunji Ojo
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- 11 July 2013, pp. 165-191
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Between 1808 and 1862, officers primarily from the British navy liberated approximately 175,000 enslaved Africans from transatlantic slavers. Information on more than half of this group has survived in bound ledger books. Based on the assessment of extant data for more than 92,000 Liberated Africans whose information was copied in at times duplicate and triplicate form in both London- and Freetown-based registers, this essay explores the pitfalls and possibilities associated with using the Registers for Liberated Africans as sources for historical analysis of the slave trade. The article explains the relationship of multiple copies of the registers to each other, demonstrates the link between the African names they contain and ethnolinguistic identities, argues for crowd-sourcing – drawing on the knowledge of the diasporic public and not just scholars – and, finally, shows the importance of such an approach for pre-colonial African history.
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The Falls of Félou: A Bibliographical Exploration
- P. E. H. Hair
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 113-130
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As is well known, in his Nouvelle Relation de l'Afrique Occidentale of 1728 Père Jean-Baptiste Labat published material which led many later historians to suppose that the first exploration by Frenchmen of the furthest navigable point of the Senegal River, the Falls of Félou, was that conducted in 1698 by André Brue, chief agent of the Compagnie du Sénégal and governor of the post at St. Louis, following an abortive mission towards the falls despatched by Brue in 1697. However, in 1893 Henri Froidevaux published documents which showed that an earlier governor of St. Louis, Louis Moreau de Chambonneau, after a visit in 1686 to Galam, the “kingdom” containing the falls, sent two boats upriver in 1687 which reached the falls; and that after his return to France in July 1688, Chambonneau presented his superiors with a crude map of the falls. In 1913 Prosper Cultru published an account by a contemporary of Chambonneau, Michel Jajolet de la Courbe, a visitor to St. Louis in 1685–86. This account stated that Chambonneau had made an unsuccessful attempt to visit Galam in 1685, and that La Courbe himself, at a later date, (unstated but almost certainly 1690), during his second period in Africa, visited “the highest point in the river that can be reached.” Furthermore, La Courbe's account proved that Labat had misleadingly ascribed to Brue ca.1700 a whole series of journeys through Senegambia in fact undertaken by La Courbe ca.1685. Although the alleged achievements of Brue thus decisively invalidated do not include the 1698 visit to Galam, Brue's responsibility for the 1697 venture towards the falls is thrown into doubt; and other evidence cited by Cultru makes it less than certain that in 1698 Brue actually visited the Falls himself. In 1958 Abdoulaye Ly republished the Chambonneau manuscript map of the falls, and accepted that they had first been explored by the 1687 mission. Finally, in 1968 Carson Ritchie published two accounts by Chambonneau, written in 1677, during an earlier period of service at St. Louis, which, though not claiming that the author had yet visited Galam, stated that it had already been visited by other whites, presumably French colleagues. This indicated more gradual French exploration of the region leading up the falls than was once supposed, for even La Courbe, in a document of 1963 cited by Froidevaux, had spoken of Galam being “discovered only 7–8 years previously.”
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Bushi and the Historians: Historiographical Themes in Eastern Kivu*
- David Newbury
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 131-151
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Historical studies of Kivu are still in their very infancy. Recent work has been carried out in Bufulero, Bushi, Buhavu, and Bunande, but lacking the results of these studies, historians working from published materials have very few sources at their disposal. Existing sources include works by Colle, Moeller, Willame, and Cuypers, with the latter two based primarily on the former, at least in their historical dimensions. Because the sources are so few and are essentially similar, little critical attention has been given them; by constant citation and repetition they have become hallowed as truth and used as a basis for teaching and university theses. By this process such essentially colonial interpretations have become entrenched in the historical ontology of the region. This paper proposes to review some of the written sources in light of current research in the region, by first presenting certain themes which appear to have guided earlier historical inquiry and then discussing the works of these four influential authors in light of these themes.
The first attempts to record historical traditions in the Kivu area were influenced by earlier studies of Rwanda which emphasized the centralized and hierarchical nature of the Rwandan state. Many of the early missionaries and Zairean priests in Kivu, men to whom contemporary researchers owe much for their accumulated sources, had close contacts with the seminaries and published work in Rwanda. In most historical works, Rwanda was seen as the end development for other states in the region, and prominence was given to those historical factors which were assumed to have had a common impact throughout the area.
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English Bosman and Dutch Bosman: A Comparison of Texts
- Albert van Dantzig
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- 18 October 2013, pp. 185-216
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What will follow in this and subsequent papers will constitute an extended gloss of the English translation of Willem Bosman's account of the Guinea coast. This translation was published in London in 1705 under the title A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea … and was based on the 1703 Dutch edition published in Amsterdam. For the English translation I have used the edited reprint published in 1967, which was an identical copy of the 1705 edition. For the Dutch version I have used the 1737 edition, also published in Amsterdam; this was in fact the last of a series of reprints of the 1709 second edition. This second edition contained numerous amendments and additions to the first (1703) edition, and these will be noted as they occur.
In addition to including all the material in the Dutch edition which was omitted from the English translation, I have included all passages in which significant differences in tone or meaning occur. Throughout I have tried to retain the capitalization, italicization, and punctuation employed in the Dutch version–styles to which the English translation generally conformed.
Citation is by page number, paragraph, and line number within paragraph, with the first paragraph presumed to begin in each case with the first line of a page. Thus, for example, P. 17 I/8 indicates that the gloss concerns the eighth line of the first paragraph on page 17 of the English translation. Shorter passages are arranged on a FOR … READ basis, while for longer passages only the Dutch original is included after SHOULD READ.
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Kings, Lists, and History in Kasanje
- Joseph C. Miller
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 51-96
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The more we hear about orally-preserved king lists, those initial favorites of the chronophiles among African historians, the less we trust them. Despite some early efforts to convert lists of rulers into rough calendars by applying arithmetic and statistical procedures, historians have since discovered that such dynastic sequences are filled with spuriously regular father-to-son successions, commonly exhibit telescoping in their remoter periods, and are susceptible to structuring that aligns purported kingly figures with local cosmological assumptions. Most worrisome of all is the implication of recent work on the consequences of literacy to the effect that listing may be a habit characteristic only of societies with reading and writing. If people in oral societies do not make lists, what appeared to African historians to be sequentially-ordered lists of rulers may in fact have been no more than conceptual “chunks” of royalty possessing little or no internal order. Thus the purported sequence in orally-preserved lists of kings may resemble chronology, even sequence, less than it resembles what structuralist anthropologists call “diachrony.” By “diachrony” they mean the artificial ordering of essentially unsequenced elements in a myth structure that is produced spuriously by the necessity in a non-literate culture of realizing them orally, in time. If what historians have taken as “kinglists”, imputing order and para-chronology to them, are in fact synchronous unordered categories, they have been even further off the mark than critics have charged.
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Attitudes to Africans in English Primary Sources on Guinea up to 1650
- P.E.H. Hair
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 43-68
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This essay investigates the attitudes to Black Africans, specifically those of Guinea, as evidenced in the pre-1650 primary sources on Anglo-African relations. Two 1980s studies by scholars working within the field of English literature have investigated English attitudes of the period to Africans in general and have expounded what are apparently popular as well as academically-received conclusions, as follows. Contact with Africans and with the existing Atlantic slave trade, building on older ideas of the meaning of “blackness” and the inferiority of non-Christians, led the pre-1650 English to create a stereotype of barbarous and bestial Blacks which served to justify the enslavement of Africans and English slave-trading. Both studies are based in the main on an analysis of English drama of the period, with passing reference, for instance, to the Othello controversy. Historians are bound to have reservations about the extent to which imaginative literature can inform on historical process and collective attitudes, perhaps not least in respect of the category of theatrical drama, especially when the drama is presented, as in this period, to a tiny segment of a national society. As it happens, these particular studies, while exemplary in their fashion, can be criticized for too limited a critical investigation of the primary non-imaginative sources, resulting in minor errors of fact and, more important, general statements about Anglo-African contacts less than wholly valid. They also treat their subject too narrowly, tearing out what they see as a “racist” stereotype from the context of English cultural relationships in the period, which, in the time-honored and universal way of cultural self-protection, inevitably tended to discriminate against all non-English ways and manners, overtly or covertly.
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“What Do You Mean There Were No Tribes in Africa?”: Thoughts on Boundaries—and Related Matters—in Precolonial Africa
- Donald R. Wright
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 409-426
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I made a mistake teaching my course on precolonial African history this past fall. I vowed (to myself) to be absolutely honest. I decided to admit to students how little historians know for certain about much of Africa's early history. I focused on the evidence, emphasizing how little there is for determining what occurred several centuries ago—let alone 2000 years ago—in sub-Saharan Africa. I gave one lecture—downright sterling, I thought—in which, in the first part, I taught about “Bantu Expansion” as I had done in my first year on the job, way back in 1976. I had read Roland Oliver's 1966 article in the Journal of African History, which had made everything clear to me once upon a time.
With that as a basis I laid out an entire scheme about how these humans, who spoke related languages, had populated nearly all of sub-equatorial Africa since the beginning of the modern era. I had maps on overhead projection (copies handed out) showing when the Bantu migrated where; I spoke of the evidence for it all, even reading from Ptolemy's Geography and the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea; and recalled how clear it all was to myself and the students, who wrote down nearly every word and made notations on the maps.
Then, in the second part of the lecture, I talked about how incorrect it all was (student pens here coming to rest)—how our reading of some of the linguistic evidence was faulty, how we read things into Ptolemy and the Periplus because they fit the scheme, and how subsequent archeological evidence has simply proved most of the neat scheme wrong. I concluded with an honest, if pessimistic, note that, because of the paucity of evidence, there simply is a lot about early African history that we will not be able to know.
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Kings, Titles, and Quarters: A Conjectural History of Ilesha I: The Traditions Reviewed
- J.D.Y. Peel
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 109-153
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This is an essay in conjectural history. Its subject is Ilesha, the capital of Ijesha, one of the larger Yoruba kingdoms, founded probably in the early sixteenth century roughly midway between the larger regional centers of Oyo and Benin. Except for some cursory references to Ijesha rescued from slavery in Sierra Leone in the early nineteenth century, there is absolutely no positive contemporary evidence, whether documentary or archeological, until Europeans first visited the town in 1858. Thereafter, since Ilesha was the leading member of the Ekitiparapo alliance which fought Ibadan to a standstill in the 1880s, contemporary documentation becomes fairly abundant. But my concern here is with the evolution of Ilesha's socio-political structure, with what has since come to be considered its “traditional” constitution, over roughly three centuries up to the third quarter of the nineteenth century. For that, virtually all our evidence lies in what people have said and done since the 1880s.
African historians have perforce relied greatly on such evidence and since Vansina's Oral Tradition they have been able to use it both more confidently and more critically, especially in the area of Bantu Africa. My fellow sociologists, however, remain more radically sceptical. Despite their admission of the need for history, they have learned too well how dynastic tradition and legends of origin tend to serve as “characters” for contemporary arrangements and need primary interpretation in the light of this -- and have often concretely illustrated the point with devastating and, for those desirous of using oral traditions for historical ends, depressing effect.
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Contradictions at the Heart of the Canon: Jan Vansina and the Debate over Oral Historiography in Africa, 1960–1985
- David Newbury
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- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 09 May 2014, pp. 213-254
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Oracy is a hallmark of human society. So too is historical inquiry, as societies seek to identify and transmit those remembrances (or “imaginations”) considered important to defining collective social identity; in the process, they establish meaningful patterns by sifting and culling discrete perceptions through the analysis and critique, the repetition and elaboration, of competing testimonies. Yet, while oral communication and historical sensitivities have been present in all human societies for all time, the western historical profession was slow to mesh the two—slow to accept oral accounts as historical sources. In Africa initiatives to bring them together systematically emerged only in tandem with the growth of nationalism outside the hegemony of colonial constructs and, in particular, with decolonization.
To be sure, many people outside the discipline had considered the relations of oracy and history. But both advocates and adversaries alike saw a turning point when Jan Vansina forced the issue on the historical discipline (most decidedly against its will) in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While others before him had argued for the historical validity of oral sources, Vansina framed his position in broader perspective, as a conceptual bedrock essential to understanding Africa. Historical sources abounded in Africa, he argued. They could be identified and understood, and they were subject to the same critical apparatus as western written sources; therefore Africa not only had a history, but it was knowable in the same terms as history in Europe. This was the reference point that drove his work. Whatever position one takes on his work, Vansina is seen as among the first to challenge the professional discipline, to sustain the argument, to push a broad range of methodological tactics, to master the empirical material, and to produce work based on such methods, in such a way that his innovations could not be dismissed out of hand.