Twentieth-century historians of the Fon kingdom of Dahomey have been blessed with an unusually rich and accessible body of primary source material. Published in English and French by a succession of visitors to the kingdom, this literature includes references to Dahomean affairs beginning as early as the seventeenth century and continuing with regularity through its conquest in 1892/93 by the French. The accounts, however, are fullest in number of writers and in detail of observation for the period of the reigns of kings Gezo (1818-58) and Glele (1858-89).

European observers of the Dahomean polity approached the state for a variety of commercial, religious, and political reasons, but typically they were permitted to visit the capital, Abomey, only in conjunction with the major cycle of annual ceremonies, Xwetanu. Because Xwetanu -- or Customs, as the ceremonies were dubbed by the Europeans -- ranged in duration from several weeks to several months, travelers drew their information about the kingdom from the advantageous point of a relatively long period of time spent in close observation of the court at what was unquestionably the most important period of the year. Fascinated and sometimes repelled by the sights they witnessed, they set down their own observations, describing land forms and economic activities, court life and ceremonial, and officers and institutions of the state.

It is now possible to apply the concept of problematic to a critique of African history, in the first place to illustrate how the constitution of its object has been the site of certain ideological confrontations. Our analysis derives from the materialist problematic and therefore lays no claim to any spurious neutrality. On the other hand, neither is it ‘ideological’ in the sense of expressing personal or subjective preferences. The ability of historical materialism to produce objective knowledge does not derive from, nor is it guaranteed by, its political purposes, the overthrow of capitalism and the eventual construction of communism, but the achievement of these purposes has as one of its conditions the continuous development of materialist theory and analysis. The following critique is grounded in the concepts and methodology of historical materialism and not in any subjectively rooted ideological ‘choice.’

A preliminary question concerns the extent to which African history provides an object of a critique. There is no assumption that African history is a corpus of knowledge homogeneous in its aims, its concepts, or its methods. The assumption of a unitary object (“the African past”) has been shown to lack any scientific content. The boundaries of African history are indicated in the first place by the course of its emergence as a particular field of academic specialization. In terms of its content, it is hardly surprising that the works of African history produced to date reflect various positions within the terrain of bourgeois social thought. The latter, as we suggested earlier, is not homogeneous and operates at various levels.

In the first number of History in Africa P.E.H. Hair reiterated A.W. Lawrence's plea for a “critical appraisal” and analysis of primary sources for African history. The aim of this brief note is to appraise the originality of certain of these works. The focus will be the Gold Coast, with emphasis on the book by William Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea, first published in 1744 and reprinted (without an introduction or editorial comment) by Frank Cass in 1967.

The literature about the Gold Coast during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is rich in accounts by visitors, residents, and compilers. Dapper, Barbot, Bosman, Atkins, and Smith all provided descriptions. Only Bosman lived on the Gold Coast for an extended period of time, and the concentration of detail in his book reflects that experience. From about the 1720s to the early nineteenth century, a hiatus in the descriptive literature exists, but then Meredith, De Marree, Bowdich, and Dupuis resume the earlier tradition, so that one cannot say that the Gold Coast has been ignored in terms of European visitors or their original descriptions of the it area.

However, when we look carefully at some of these narratives, we find that not all of what is written is in fact original. For example, Barbot's account of the political organization of Elmina is an exact duplicate, in translation from the Dutch, of Dapper's description. Barbot also copied his description of the “Degrees of Blacks” from Bosman. De Marree, an early nineteenth century Dutch official on the Gold Coast, included without attribution in his narrative, a complete report by Governor General Pieter Linthorst written in 1807.

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.

Rare has been the book on Africa that has acquired a history and become the subject of study in its own right. One such is the autobiography of Théophilus Conneau, a slave dealer of French and Italian background, who lived on the west coast of Africa during the 1830s and 1840s. Various accounts of Conneau's experiences in Guinea and Liberia have been translated into four languages, and were even incorporated into a successful novel in 1933, on which was based a motion picture. The latest version of Conneau's life story (and the occasion for this paper) was published as recently as 1976.

Conneau's story first came to press in 1854 through the editorial assistance and skill of Brantz Mayer, a lecturer, author, and journalist of the Baltimore area, known principally for his writings about Latin America. Having obtained experience and contacts with publishers by editing manuscripts and letters, Mayer was a valuable asset to a new author in 1853. Recently discovered letters from Conneau to Mayer and Mayer's own account of the relationship between them suggest an interesting beginning for this literary enterprise. Conneau found himself in 1853 in Baltimore where he met James Hall, whom he had known previously in Liberia. Hall had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Maryland settlement for freed Blacks at Cape Palmas and had served as that settlement's first governor from 1833 to 1836. Concluding that Conneau's story of a repentant slave trader would be of value to the cause of anti-slavery and black emigration from the United States to Africa, Hall suggested that Conneau write his memoirs and introduced him to Mayer.

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.

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.

One of the unresolved problems in African historiography concerns the Arabic and Portuguese versions of the so-called Kilwa Chronicle. Scholars who have used these sixteenth-century sources have tended to assume that the Portuguese version, which is essentially a list of the kings of Kilwa up to around 1500, is a transcription of the Arabic version known under the title of Kitab al-Sulwa. In the recent debate between Freeman-Grenville and Chittick, this assumption has created serious difficulties because the Portuguese account mentions kings who are omitted in the Kitab. Freeman-Grenville attempted to resolve the difficulty by hypothesizing that the work was defectively abridged in the extant nineteenth-century copy. Relying on the regnal durations in the Portuguese account, he computed the dynastic chronology of Kilwa backwards to the tenth century. Subsequently, Chittick's excavations did not show Kilwa important enough to have been the site of a kingdom prior to the thirteenth century. This became the basis for an alternative explanation which denied the existence of gaps or omissions in the Kitab. Chittick argued instead that the longer list of kings in the Portuguese account may have resulted from dovetailing two sources together and duplicating their information.

The present paper calls on genealogical evidence overlooked by both scholars which demonstrates that the divergence between the two sources results from their varying perspectives on the dynastic politics and succession disputes. First, the Portuguese account, though occurring in João de Barros’ Da Asia written about 1552, may represent an impromptu composition given to the Portuguese during their occupation of Kilwa in 1505–12.

In this paper I discuss genealogical material documented in the past about the ruling families of Phalaborwa in the northeast Transvaal. Recent archeological research in Phalaborwa demonstrates a continuous Iron Age cultural complex in the area centered around Lolwe hill since the eighth century A.D. Subsequent investigations of Phalaborwa oral tradition clearly link the present BaPhalaborwa Sotho-speaking population with the Iron Age past, adding considerable specific detail for the historical reconstruction of this remarkable 1000-year old metalproducing and trading society.

Noble and royal genealogies among the BaPhalaborwa focus on the main line of Malatji clan rulers and in all of the Malatji lines the genealogies merge at one or other ascending levels. There is consequently a single ultimate prestige genealogy for all noble and royal families in Phalaborwa which has become fixed by the efforts of various of the tribe literates since the 1930s. Inconsistencies in oral tradition from diverse groups, however, suggest that this genealogy was not rigid in the past, but flexible, allowing certain direct lines of descent to become obscured and the collateral and even unrelated lines which have found their way into political association with the ruling house of Phalaborwa by various means to be added.

Social scientists have recently become more aware of the pervasive male bias in western scholarship, a bias firmly rooted in European cultures and their offshoots. Deriving from this bias are theories which, by assuming a male-centered universe, nurtured generations of male scholars who rarely questioned their sufficiency. Although we are beginning to understand and correct for western androcentrism, we have not yet studied how African societies, especially patrilineal ones, perpetuate their own male-centered worldview in their oral traditions. Thus we have not begun to examine how distorted histories can result when African and western biases coincide and reinforce each other as androcentric researchers collect and then analyze materials which androcentric Africans consider “historical.”

By analyzing data from the Shi kingdom of Ngweshe in eastern Zaire, this paper addresses the linked problems of African and western bias. It argues that -- contrary to the Shi conception of politics as a series of on-going contests and formal structural relationships between royal men, a view I shared while in the field -- one cannot begin to understand the Shi past without acknowledging the role played by non-royal women in shaping its course. More specifically, a careful reading of the data suggests that despite the cultural emphasis on patrilineal descent and the insistence that a reigning king be the biological son of his predecessor, many men who succeeded to the Ngweshe kingship were not the sons of previous monarchs; and even when they were, the selection of a king depended as much on who his mother was as on who his father might have been.

The very full description of west central Africa given in Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo's book, Istorica Descrizione de’ tre regni Congo, Matamba ed Angola, first published in 1687, has long been one of the most important sources for the reconstruction of the social, political, economic, and religious history of these three Central African states in the seventeenth century. This is true even though it has long been known that Cavazzi was not an eyewitness to all that he described, especially in the kingdom of Kongo, which he visited only briefly after finishing the draft of the book. Therefore, the recent discovery of a new, unknown manuscript version of Cavazzi's work among the family papers of Dr. Carlo Araldi of Modena is very useful, for it helps us to understand the sources that Cavazzi used to write the portions of his work on Kongo, the one area of west central Africa of which he had no first hand knowledge.

Since the Istorica Descrizione was published several years after Cavazzi's death by another Capuchin, Fr. Fortunato Alamandini, who noted in his own introduction that he had edited the final version from a confused mass of documents and notes, the new manuscript initially raised the hope that fuller versions of Cavazzi's original source material might be contained in it. I therefore examined the portions of the manuscript pertaining to Kongo with high hopes that the document would contain masses of fresh eye-witness source materials that Fr. Alamandidi had weeded out to make Istorica Descriizione a publishable work.

[This continues the comparison of texts of the English and Dutch versions of Bosman. For earlier instalments see History in Africa 2(1975), pp. 185-216; 3(1976), pp. 91-126; 4(1977), pp. 247-273; 5(1978), pp. 225-256. Procedural matters are discussed in the first instalment, to which the reader is referred.]

More than one-third of Africa is occupied by people who speak related languages belonging to a single family called Bantu. This has been recognized for more than a century. As early as 1886 Harry Johnston argued that this situation was the result of differentiation from a real single ancestral language, later called UrBantu or Proto-Bantu. The inevitable question arises: How could one language or a group of closely related dialects diffuse over such a vast area? The fact of Bantu expansion remains a major puzzle in the history of Africa. Many have risen to the bait of solving it.

My main goal here is to recount the salient features of this century-long inquiry and in doing so to lead to an assessment of the present situation. Given the nature and the paucity of the available data, much of proposed reconstruction has been conjectural, so that the study of Bantu expansion also has been an exercise in conjectural history and in speculation. The available data are disparate and drawn from different disciplines, and the results tell us something about what can and what cannot be done in interdisciplinary research. In the telling I hope to demonstrate how much different considerations of the question have been moulded by the major themes in European and American intellectual history of the last century and how much scholarly tradition, once established, has directed and limited the solutions proposed.

Of all the communities and religious orders in the Roman Catholic church that are involved in missionary activity, the Congregation of the Mission, while one of the more extensive, is undoubtedly the least known. Founded in 1625 by Saint Vincent de Paul (1581-1660), its original purpose was the giving of parish missions in the de-Christianized rural areas of France. The rural missions remained a special concern of Saint Vincent's community and it was in this sense that the term “mission” was originally used. Prior to the French Revolution the term missionary was used almost exclusively of members of Saint Vincent's group. In the mid-eighteenth century they also came to be known as Lazarists, a name derived from their motherhouse, the famous Saint-Lazare. Though this name has been used in other countries, the Congregation of the Mission has come to be known by different names in different localities: for instance, Vincentians in the English-speaking world, Padres Paúles in the Spanish-speaking world, and Saint Vincent's Fathers in Nigeria.

Reacting against the excessive esprit de corps of numerous religious groups of his time, Vincent de Paul decreed that the work of his missionaries should be without fanfare or publicity. He even forbade some of them from writing histories of the community lest this should lead to corporate pride. It was an unfortunate precedent. This tendency, plus a general lack of historical consciousness, has caused the work of the Congregation of the Mission to be unpublicized and unknown, even by the members themselves.

The formation of the Holy Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in 1622 as a part of the Papacy's attempt to centralize control over overseas missions in Roman hands led to the formation of one of the most important archival deposits in Europe for documentation pertaining to Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Archivio “De Propaganda Fide” in Rome. This Roman-directed missionary organization sent its priests to every corner of the globe, relying especially for its African enterprises on Italian clergy of the Capuchin order. In connection with research on the history of the kingdom of Kongo in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I have worked extensively with materials frcm both the archives of the “Propaganda Fide” and various deposits of the Capuchin order, including a personal visit to the “Propaganda Fide” in January 1978.

The Archivio “De Propaganda Fide” is located in Rome at Piazza di Spagna, 48, and when I visited it, it was open only four hours a day from 9:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. every day except Sunday and holidays. Aside from the short hours, however, the archive is a pleasant place to work. The staff is friendly and helpful and the reading room well-lighted and well-appointed. In addition, the material is extremely well indexed and easy to use, so that the researcher who knows the system will have no difficulty in locating relevant material with a minimum of leafing and surveying. Fr. Lowrie J. Daly, has described the organization of the collection.

Readers may be interested to know that there are several little-known depositories of African-related Catholic missionary journals in the United States and Canada. Since these materials were not usually disseminated very widely when published, they are almost never to be found in academic and research libraries, nor, therefore, in the standard locating tools like Union List of Serials and its supplements. Because of this an effort is now being made to find at least one location in North America for each of the more than four hundred relevant journals. Likely possibilities include provincial and mother houses, teaching seminaries, monasteries, and provincial archives, as well as the libraries of institutions of higher learning affiliated with particular missionary orders. Although this project is very far from complete (and almost certainly will never attain the rather quixotic goal mentioned above) some early returns are in and several important collections have been identified. This note discusses the most useful of these, which relate to the White Fathers, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Scheutists, and the Verona Fathers. African historians need no introduction to the value of the published White Father materials. The White Fathers served throughout most of Africa and they published more than any other order on the peoples among whom they served. Many of their writings have been used by Africanists, but it remains true that the correspondence, reports, and articles which appeared in their own numerous journals have not been extensively consulted, no doubt because these journals are not widely available.

Africanists doing field research that includes the recording of interviews and oral traditions have increasingly noted the importance of bringing such materials into print at reasonable prices. Though Indiana University has maintained an archive for such recorded oral materials for several years, access to and the use of these recordings have been difficult at best for most students of Africa.

In an effort to meet the perceived need for the publication of edited transcriptions of recorded interviews from African field research, the Ohio University Center for International Studies is launching this year a new sub-series within its established Africa Series of Papers in International Studies. The published oral materials from the African field will be advertised as a distinct sub-series, but they will appear in the same format as the existing monograph series and will be numbered sequentially among the monographs.

Scholars and students of Africa who have recorded oral materials which they would like published are invited to submit edited transcriptions for consideration and possible publication in the new sub-series. Typescripts should range in length between 125 and 250 pages, double-spaced, and should be as carefully edited and made ready for publication as possible before submission.

Each manuscript of edited transcriptions should be a self-contained and independent contribution, fully able to be understood by readers without the need for consulting other references. To this end, it is requested that each potential contributor organize, edit, and supplement the data gathered in the field in ways that will optimize their usefulness.

Each contribution should contain an introduction explaining the circumstances in which the research was conducted, unusual problems encountered together with the methods by which these were overcome, and special research techniques that would assist future scholars.