Over a period of several months in mid-1994 I became aware, as if by chain-reaction accident, of four instances in which scholarly journals declined to accept critiques of articles that had previously appeared in them. Interestingly, in none of the four cases was the critique rejected on the grounds of inherent quality, and in all cases the critique was considerably shorter than the original article. In one case a social science journal rejected a submission simply as “too polemical.” Another critical response was declined on the grounds that the critique in question had a “style correspond(ing) to a section on ‘Commentary’ or Debate that [the journal in question] does not have.”

In a third instance, the editors of a journal rejected a criticism of an author's case on the grounds that the earlier article had already managed to “accommodate the sort of criticism” being offered, even though the latter was evidentiary rather than methodological. Finally, the editor of yet another journal solicited and received two opinions about a paper submitted to it that disputed the arguments and conclusions of an article that had appeared there a few years earlier. Both referees (I was one of them) recommended publication, and did so with detailed arguments and suggestions for revisions, which the author successfully undertook. Yet the revised paper was rejected on the grounds that it would be “incomprehensible” to most readers—even though it was less technically dense—and better written—than the published paper that it was refuting!

A great deal has been written in recent decades about the Atlantic slave trade, including the mechanics and terms of purchase, but relatively little about what Africans received in return for the slaves and other exports such as gold and ivory. And yet, if one is trying to reconstruct the material culture of, say, the Guinea Coast of West Africa during the slave-trade period, the vast European input cannot be ignored.

The written evidence consists of many thousands of surviving bills of lading, cargo manifests, port records, logbooks, invoices, quittances, trading-post inventories, account books, shipping recommendations, and orders from African traders. English customs records of commerce with Africa during the eighteenth century, when the slave trade peaked, alone contain hundreds of thousands of facts. A thorough analysis of all available data would call for the services of a research team equipped with computers, and fill many volumes. Using a portable typewriter (now finally abandoned for WordPerfect) and a card file, and sifting hundreds of published sources, I have over the years compiled an annotated master list of European trade goods sold on a portion of the Guinea Coast from Portuguese times to the mid-nineteenth century. The geographic focus is the shoreline from Liberia to Nigeria; from it more slaves left for the New World than from any comparable stretch of the African coast. I call the area “Kwaland” for the Kwa language family to which nearly all the indigenous peoples belong.

Readers of this journal will surely be familiar with the excellent research collection of published materials on Africa held in London by the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). This remains the foremost collection of its kind in Europe, and has long been widely used by visiting scholars from all around the world. But it is less well known that the library also houses a substantial and rapidly expanding collection of primary source materials, many of which relate to the history of Africa. This brief report on the archives and manuscripts relating to Africa housed in the SOAS library offers an introduction to this collection, along with an annotated listing of current holdings. With the exception of one or two of the larger items, the majority of the archive materials on Africa have been relatively little used by scholars to date, and it is to be hoped that the publication of this report will encourage greater use of this increasingly important collection.

The library has collected manuscripts in various African and Asian languages since its inception in 1916, but it is only since 1973, when a new purpose-built library was opened, that the School has begun to take in deposits of modern archives and to build up its collections of manuscripts relating to Africa and Asia. Since then the collection has developed considerably, the principal focus being upon the records of missionaries and missionary organizations, of humanitarian groups and non-governmental organizations and those who worked with them, and business records and the papers of those involved in business.

In 1929 the American Antiquarian Society published an eighty-three-page manuscript that describes commercial transactions for slaves, ivory, and gold on the Gold and Slave Coasts from 1789 to 1792. George Plimpton owned this manuscript. As it includes a slave-trading ledger of the schooner Swallow, Plimpton entitled the manuscript “The Journal of an African Slaver.” The “journal” is one of the few published documents in the English language that specifies financial transactions for slaves between European and African traders on the coast of Africa during the late eighteenth century.

In his four-page introduction to the journal Plimpton stated that:

The name of the ship engaged in the traffic was the schooner ‘Swallow,’ Capt. John Johnston, 1790-1792. There is a reference to a previous voyage when ‘Captain Peacock had her,’ also some abstracts of accounts kept by Capt. David McEleheran in 1789 of trade in gold, slaves and ivory on the Gold Coast. None of these names can be identified as to locality, and there is, of course, the possibility, especially taking into consideration the English nature of the cargo bartered, that the vessel was an English slaver.

The journal was included with some mid-nineteenth century South Carolina plantation accounts when it was purchased at an auction in New York, thus suggesting to Plimpton that the journal's author was perhaps a “South Carolinian who made this trip to Africa.”

In this research note I will identify the various vessels and traders mentioned in this manuscript by referring to the data-set I have assembled from other sources concerning the slave trade during this period. We will seethat Plimpton's “journal” is a set of account books owned by the Gold Coast agents of London and Havre merchant William Collow. I then will discuss the importance of Collow as a merchant and shipowner in the late eighteenth-century British slave trade.

In the late eighteenth century, Imerina was checkered with a myriad of tiny principalities, each ruled from hilltop fortresses. In just fifty years from 1780 to 1830, it was unified under a single ruler, drawing Merina into increasingly wider systems of obedience and creating a vast imperium that held sway over most of the Island of Madagascar, a landmass the size of France, Belgium, and Holland combined.

And yet, the half century of tumultuous change that characterized the empire's rise brought no revolution in the Merina's own understanding of the world of power, a view which I have termed hasina ideology. Merina saw historical reality not as the product of human agency, but of ancestral beneficence, hasina, which flowed downwards on obedient Merina from long-dead ancestors in a sacred stream that connected all living Merina. For obedient Merina, politics consisted in nothing more nor less than a lifelong quest to position one's self favorably in that sacred stream as close as possible to ancestors and then to reap the benefits of that cherished association. With the passage of time, the hasina stream flowed into new generations and so generated new social relations expressed in terms of kinship. The vast transformation of the Merina political landscape only enhanced Imerina's devotion to ancestral hasina.

The origins of hasina ideology are not known, though by the time Andrianampoinimerina began to unify Imerina in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, its character is clearly perceptible. Andrianampoinimerina's son Radama built on his father's legacy. In the 1820s he transformed Imerina from a small and isolated kingdom into an empire capable of projecting its power over the length and breadth of Madagascar.

The argument that a process of “making tribes” has invested Africa from early colonial times has been used to explain the emergence of some ethnicities which appear not to have existed before colonialism. This emergence was often accompanied by the creation of written records of male historical discourse, thus not only giving them undue prominence but also suppressing female historical discourses which were not considered pertinent to “history.”

Yet whenever history is recounted orally by either men or women, it contains messages directed to a “gendered” audience (i.e., an audience composed of people of both genders) whose participants perceive messages differently and reproduce separate but interacting discourses. Such diverse perceptions result from certain aspects in oral genres as well as small, coded markers which can evoke immensely potent but gender-specific experiences. Such instances may become public symbols and, along with more obviously historical narratives, greatly influence how people relate to their past. Thus men and women in the same audience, hearing the same story, can make connections between elements of a narrative which are obscure to outside researchers.

Recently, it has become quite common for historians of Africa to deconstruct written historical sources on the basis of the agendas of both the original writer and his informants. These agendas are rarely explicit and thus hiddenly selective. Such deconstruction is a legitimate scholarly procedure; however, as female voices have rarely been recorded—the resulting analysis reinforces the omission of women's roles in the process of remaking history and creating identity.

The dawn of the history of the kingdom of Jaara, during the era of the Jawara dynasty (from the fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth century) is shaped by the story of Daaman Gille and his companions, the most important of whom is Jonpisugo. The lives of these two characters—linked up until their death at Banbagede, where their tombs are only a few hundred meters apart—were the subject of a rich oral literature, all the more noteworthy given the rarity of written documents.

In my earlier work (Diawara 1985, 1989, 1990) I discussed the typology of narratives and the specific role of women servants as historians of their social group. The oral sources include family traditions from all social classes, except for recently acquired slaves; the recitals of professional narrators who were by heredity in the service of protector families whose history they proclaimed to the public; the narratives of servants, including the tanbasire, a collection of women's songs from among the royal servants, or the accounts of people who, with their ancestors, had long been slaves (cf. Diawara 1990).

Historical chance brings together Daama and Jonpisugo, but their respective social standing differentiates them; just as “friendship” brings together the master and the servant, so the struggle for power leads to the birth of differences in the conception of “the things of the past” among their descendants. How is the past constructed and lived differently by their respective progeny or supposed descendants? What poetic license accrues to the offspring of he who was only a servant, even if he was a royal servant? The response to this question explains the dynamic of a particular servants' oral documentation.

The kingdom of Benin has the reputation of being one of the most important examples for a king-oriented state-formation in sub-Saharian Africa. In the past few decades much research has appeared on the early history of this kingdom, the origin of its kingship, and the time of the early Ogiso kings, who are considered by many historians as the autochthonous founders of Benin kingship around 900. These Ogiso rulers are assumed to have been replaced between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries by kings of the later Oba dynasty, which supposedly descends from the Yoruba town of Ife and which continues in office at the present.

The abundance of literature on the early history of the Benin kingdom often hides the fact that, apart from sporadic—and for the most part isolated—reports from travelers, a few archeological accounts, and some vaguely dated objects from Benin, the reconstruction of the early history of Benin is based almost exclusively on the data of the Bini local historian Jacob Egharevba, who published prolifically on Benin history and culture from 1930 to 1970. The most famous of his works is the Short History of Benin—a small publication, where the author deals with the history of the kingdom from its origins until the twentieth century.

The first edition of this little book a short History of Epe-is to be freely used…No acknowledgement is necessary nor royalty required.

With the above words, Chief Theophilus Olabode Avoseh opens his second and most successful book, A Short History of Epe. His generosity was unusual, with his time to researchers, and with publications that he distributed freely and allowed others to use without seeking his permission. His unstated motto would be that knowledge should be acquired and distributed at no charge. His books on Epe and Badagri are his best known works, although he wrote several other obscure pamphlets which I have previously drawn attention to. As this is a continuation of my study on Avoseh, this essay does not intend to repeat previously published information on the author. The primary aim of the present paper is to present the text on Epe, and so to make it more accessible to a larger audience. A few additional points, made possible by the examination of the text under consideration, form the bulk of this introduction intended to shed more light on Avoseh.

Epe is an Ijebu-Yoruba town, located on the banks of the lagoon. This location has always facilitated the development of a fishing industry, commerce, and agriculture. Epe was drawn into nineteenth—century Yoruba power politics and then into international diplomacy with the British when it was occupied in the mid-nineteenth century by Kosoko, the indomitable exiled ruler of Lagos. When Kosoko returned to Lagos, not all his adherents followed, and their presence produced far-reaching changes in Epe politics and society to this very day.

Etablir avec une certaine fiabilité la liste chronologique des souverains d'un royaume à partir des traditions orales se révèle un exercice périlleux, dans les dédales duquel peu d'historiens osent s'aventurer. Pour peu que les origines de cet Etat remontent à quelques siècles, le talon d'Achille des sources orales est, on le sait, la chronologic Il est pourtant urgent de s'y atteler, pour ce qui concerne les formations politiques précoloniales, car l'usure du temps et surtout la disparition des particularités culturelles sous les influences de la vie moderne effacent inexorablement de la mémoire collective, le souvenir de ceux qui ont façonné le destin de leur peuple.

Certains héritiers de ces Etats précoloniaux, dans le souci légitime de mieux faire connaître leur passé, ont tenté—avec plus ou moins de bonheur—de collecter et de mettre en forme les éléments épars fournis sur ce passé par les traditionnistes. C'est ce que fit le roi de Glidji Agbanon II en publiant en 1934, à la demande de l'administration française, un Mémoire sur l'histoire de Petit-Popo et du royaume Guen. Dans cet ouvrage, l'auteur tente de reconstituer l'histoire du royaume de Glidji à partir d'une liste dynastique, avec les dates et les événements marquants du règne de chaque souverain et les événements survenus au cours de ces règnes. Or, cette liste ne résiste pas à la critique historique, essentiellement en ce qui concerne les XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Notre propos, à travers cette étude, est de tenter de reconstituer cette liste à partir de la critique des hypothèses d'Agbanon, à la lumière des documents d'archives et travaux divers relatifs à la période considérée.

In 1492 Columbus made a non-stop voyage, on the high seas of the Atlantic, between the Canary Islands and an uncertain island off the coast of America, a distance of some 3,100 nautical miles. But there is a strong likelihood that he had earlier traveled on a voyage which may also have been non-stop on the Atlantic high seas and yet been even longer. According to casual references, made in notes apparently either written or authorized by Columbus himself, he had, at an unstated date, seen and perhaps been within the castle of São Jorge da Mina in Guinea. Assuming for the purposes of further discussion that this interpretation of the notes is correct, he had therefore sailed to Mina (Elmina in present-day Ghana), most probably, it is generally thought, between 1482 and 1484, not long after the Portuguese founded the fort. He must have sailed in some capacity aboard a Portuguese vessel, possibly as a trader, if not as a mariner.

Although not otherwise recorded, the voyage to Mina is plausible since it occurred during the period of nearly ten years in which Columbus was employed within the Portuguese sphere. Little is known of his activities in this period but it is evidenced that he worked at one stage as a trader and made voyages in the 1470s to the Madeira group, where he resided for a time. When he traveled to America his descriptions of features there were not infrequently in terms of comparisons with features of Guinea, indicating that he was to some extent informed about the latter region and suggesting, perhaps strongly, that he had visited certain parts, as I noted in an earlier paper.

Sudan Notes and Records (hereafter SNR or simply “the journal”) was a leading African scholarly journal on Sudanese studies established by the British administration of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1918. Perhaps because of the high scientific standards it upheld throughout its life span, the political underpinnings that accompanied its foundation might not be so apparent. This study argues that, from its founding until the late 1940s, when the British administration was paving the way for a transfer of power to the Sudanese, SNR had ostensibly political orientations as reflected, among other things, in the editorial policy of the journal. The political leanings of SNR had two dimensions: internal and external.

On the internal level, editorial policy in the 1920s favored notables and tribal chiefs, rather than the intelligentsia, by allotting space in this periodical to articles “written” by Sudanese sheikhs, a phenomenon occurring at a time when the policy of Indirect Rule figured most prominently in the calculation of the administration. In the late 1930s the administration courted the intelligentsia, offering them greater opportunities in the civil service and higher education abroad. The editorial policy of SNR favored these educated elements by publishing articles and correspondences written by the intelligentsia, including Sayyed Abd el-Rahman el-Mahdi, the patron of a prominent Sudanese political party—the Umma. Until independence in 1956, the Sudanization of contribution to the journal became one of the focal points of editorial notes.

On the external level, the political bias of SNR was directly linked to the British policy vis-à-vis Egyptian claims of sovereignty over the Sudan. The study contends that one of the tactics the British used to separate the Sudan from Egypt was to foster the concept of nationalism among the Sudanese through archeological research. One of the prime vehicles for the spread of this concept was in fact SNR, whose very nature was questioned in the late 1940s by its own subscribers.

Two reactions to the essay on the earliest generation of missionary photographers in West Africa published earlier in HA set up trains of thought which deserve to be minuted here as a further contribution to our praxis with images of Africa in the nineteenth century. It was pointed out by two readers of the original article that a pair of the images which, it had been asserted (104), derive from the last phase of Hornberger's photographic work, were published very early on in a non-mission context: that of three women spinning and that of one man weaving (figures 1 and 2 below).

Both images exist as photographs, as stereographic vintage prints. Both were also published as wood engravings in mission periodicals (figures 3 and 4). Two readers of the original essay have pointed out that these images were conflated into a single engraving on page 211 of Richard Oberländer's Westafrika vom Senegal bis Benguela (Leipzig, 1874). In this image (figure 5), however, only two members of the group of spinning women are depicted, placed separately in the foreground, one on each side of the weaver. It is an ironic reflection on the quality of the documentation we have to fear in this field that Oberländer's caption—“Spinnende und webende Aschanti. (Nach einer Photographie)”—asserts specifically that the engraving was taken “from a photograph,” using the singular form.

The mission of Joseph Dupuis, sent as British Consul to Kumasi, the capital of Asante, in 1820, is well known, principally through his own journal of it, published in 1824. In addition to his negotiations with the Asante authorities, Dupuis collected information on Asante history, and on the geography not only of Asante itself but also of neighboring and remoter countries in the interior—the latter presented in Part II of his Journal, entitled “On the Geography of Western Africa” [I-CXV]. His principal informants on both Asante history and West African geography were African Muslims whom he met in Kumasi, and with whom he was able to converse in Arabic. The geographical information was transmitted in part in the form of Arabic manuscripts, some (or perhaps all) of which Dupuis presented, in transcription and translation, in an appendix of “geographical documents” [cxxiv-cxxxv]; but supplementary information was obtained orally in conversations, some passages from which Dupuis purports to reproduce verbatim [XLII-XLIV].

The information which Dupuis obtained can usefully be compared with similar (but, as regards the interior, generally less extensive) material collected by Edward Bowdich on an earlier mission to Kumasi in 1817. Dupuis himself was frequently critical of alleged inaccuracies and confusions in Bowdich's account, though not always with justification. It is noteworthy that he read over at least one section of Bowdich's account to his informants in Kumasi, to obtain their comments on it [XVIII]—an interesting illustration of the potential for interaction between written texts and oral information in Africa even in precolonial times, in a manner more complex than that of “feedback” from written into oral data most commonly discussed by historians.

The precolonial architectural history of the northern Upper Guinea coast from the Gambia to the Geba rivers has yet to be studied in depth. Yet this region, the first to be visited and described by European travelers in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, is among the best-documented parts of sub-Saharan Africa for the four centuries of precolonial African-European contact. The establishment of communities of Luso-African traders in the sixteenth and seventeenth century makes the Gambia-Casamance-Bissau area important to the study of early sustained cultural interaction between Europeans and West Africans.

One result of the establishment of Portuguese and Luso-African trading communities was the development of a distinctive style of architecture, suited to the climate and making use of locally-available building materials. The history of the trade itself has been extensively studied by George Brooks. His work, along with that of Jean Boulègue, provides a firm foundation for the study of local architecture and living space. It is not my intention to rewrite these excellent sources, although much of my material is drawn from the same primary documents they have used, and although, in presenting the historical context from which seventeenth-century coastal architecture developed, I necessarily cover some ground that Brooks has already trod.

In addition to the history of building styles, several related questions that are highly significant to the history of European-African cultural interaction need to be addressed. These questions include: what were the respective roles of Africans, Europeans, and Luso-Africans in the development of a distinctive architectural style? Is it possible to discern the influence of evolving Luso-African construction on local African architecture? And of local building styles on Afro-European construction? In other words, to what extent does architecture reflect mutual, two-way interaction between European and African society?

En Novembre 1985, à l'occasion de la finale de la Coupe du Zaire des clubs champions opposant Tshinkunku de Kananga à Bilima de Kinshasa, la “UNE” de la rubrique sportive du quotidien de Kinshasa Salongo décrivait ainsi la mobilisation des habitants de Kananga:

L'hallali de guerre résonna: toutes les vieilles sorcières des Bakwa

Katawa et Bena Mutombo accoururent “nues” à l'appel du grand chef

Kalamba pour immoler Bilima.

Ce reportage, qui passa presqu'inaperçu, avait pourtant un caractère hautement symbolique puisqu'il traduisait une réalité devenue banale: la division de fait du groupe ethnique “Luluwa,” qui avait cent ans d'existence, en deux groupes distincts, les Bakwa Katawa et les Bena Mutombo.

Ce constat nous poussa à en savoir davantage sur les origines du groupe ethnique usager du Ciluba appelé “Luluwa,” sur les influences que le groupe a subies, la stabilisation de sa dénomination, le moment privilègié de la création de ce groupe, et enfin la dynamique de sa scission en deux groupes presque antagonistes. Notre hypothèse de travail est que l'administration coloniale n'a pas créé de toutes pièces un groupe ethnique ex nihilo; elle a mis en place un cadre et des institutions qui ont permis l'élargissement de l'identité ethnique existante à un ensemble plus grand. Il en est résulté un “centre“ et une “périphérie.” Le centre comprend les descendants de Mande Katawa (Bena Kapuku, Bena Mande, Bena Mukadi, et Bena Mukangala), les descendants de Ntiite Maloba, et ceux de Muena Mushilu; ces clans entourent en quelque sorte la ville de Kananga. La “périphérie” comprend tous les clans qui ont en commun l'éloignement géographique de la ville de Kananga, et done un accès un peu tardif à la modernité.

For a long time, scholars have known that the ancient Sino-East Africantrade relationship produced valuable accounts of East Africa in the Chinese imperial archives. Particularly, the historical documents compiled during the T'ang, Sung, and Ming dynasties contain several insightful snapshots of East Africa over the span of 800 years. Unfortunately, due to the difficulty of translating ancient Chinese texts, scholars have not been able to utilize these documents fully. In other cases, scholars have misused the translations to derive conclusions that may not be supported by the original text. In this essay I propose to re-examine the original Chinese sources and the way these sources have been used by subsequent scholars. Furthermore, I shall explore the real or potential contribution of these texts to our understanding of East African coastal history.

The primary source of Chinese knowledge about East Africa during the T'ang dynasty (618-907) comes from Ching–hsing Chi (“Record of Travels”) and Yu–yang Tsa–tsu (“Assorted Dishes from Yu–yang”). During the Sung dynasty (960-1279), most of the information is recorded in Chu-fan-chih (“Gazetteer of Foreigners”) and Ling–wai Tai–ta (“Information from Beyond the Mountains”). Finally, the record of the Ming (1368-1644) naval expedition into the western Indian Ocean is preserved in Wu–pei–chih (“Notes on Military Preparedness”), Hsing–ch'a Sheng–lan (“Triumphant Vision of the Starry Raft”), and Ming Shih (“History of the Ming Dynasty”).

There is a disturbing trend emerging in South African history. Unquestioning acceptance of African oral tradition threatens to become a requirement of politically correct scholarship. The African voice knows all. Julian Cobbing has been sharply criticized for ignoring oral evidence in his revision of early nineteenth-century South African history. Cobbing claims that African migration and state formation in the 1820s was caused by the illegal activities of colonial slave raiders who covered up their operations by claiming that the Zulu kingdom under Shaka had laid waste to the interior of southern Africa. This cover story was incorporated into South African history as the mfecane (or crushing) and served to justify white supremacy by portraying blacks as inherently violent. Carolyn Hamilton attacks Cobbing for ignoring the African voice which allegedly supports the orthodox mfecane by placing Shaka at the center of events. In response, Cobbing claims that the largest record of Zulu oral evidence was distorted by James Stuart, the colonial official who collected it at the turn of the last century. Although Elizabeth Eldredge rejects the Zulucentric mfecane in favor of a broad compromise theory based on environmental and trade factors plus the activities of a few Griqua labor-raiders on the High veld, she accused Cobbing of developing a Eurocentric hypothesis which robs Africans of initiative within their own history. More critically, Jeffrey Peires, whose work on the Xhosa is deeply rooted in the conventional mfecane, describes Cobbing as “a reactionary wolf dressed up in the clothing of a progressive sheep” and implies that his ideas are nothing short of racist.

The historian of pre-nineteenth century Africa…cannot get far without the aid of archaeology.

Nevertheless, historians have good reason to be cautious about historical generalisations by archaeologists and about their own use of archaeological material…: it would be a rash historian who totally accepted the conclusions of Garlake and Huffman with the same simple-minded trust as I myself accepted the conclusions of Summers and Robinson.

In the beginning, historians of Africa put great store by archeology. Was its great time depth not one of the distinctive features of the history of Africa, a condition that cannot be put aside without seriously distorting the flavor of all its history? Did not the relative scarcity and the foreign authorship of most precolonial written records render archeological sources all the more precious? Did not history and archeology both deal with the reconstruction of human societies in the past? Was the difference between them not merely the result of a division of labor based on sources, so that historical reconstruction follows in time and flows from archeological reconstruction? Such considerations explain why the Journal of African History has regularly published regional archeological surveys in order to keep historians up to date.

If ever South Africa could boast of a Robinson Crusoe of her own, as affable, shrewd, politically sagacious, courageous and large-hearted as Defoe's, here is one to life… “Mr Fynn”

[Fynn is] a greater ass and Don Quixote than one could possibly conceive.

The fictional referents in these diametrically opposed judgments of Henry Francis Fynn (1806-61) alert us to the “constructed” nature of the reputation of this most famous of Shakan eyewitnesses. Although Nathaniel Isaacs' Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa (1836) first introduced Shaka and his Zulu people to the British reading public, and had easily the profoundest influence on popular conceptions, Fynn was the more widely acknowledged “expert” on the Zulu. Having pursued an extraordinarily tortuous, violent, and well-documented career through forty formative years of South African frontier history, he left a body of writings which belatedly attained authoritative status in Shakan historiography. Since 1950, Fynn's so-called “Diary” has become the paramount, and until recently largely unquestioned, source on Shaka's famous reign (ca. 1815-1828). As recent political power struggles centered on the “Shaka Day” celebrations in Zululand have amply demonstrated, there is no more appropriate juncture at which to reassess the sources of this semi-mythologized Zulu leader's reputation.