The political history of the medieval Western Sudan was dominated by a succession of empires exerting their domination over the region: Ghana, Mali, and finally Songhay. Oral tradition is our only evidence for the existence of yet another empire. It was called Susu and exerted its supremacy after the decline of Ghana and before the rise of Mali. Most historical treatises locate enigmatic Susu in the Kaniaga region northwest of Segou. These treatises are mainly based on oral traditions and medieval Arabic chronicles.

After rereading the conventional historical sources and examining passages in Portuguese sources thus far untapped for the history of the Western Sudan, I feel induced to present a new identification for Susu. The Portuguese evidence appears to point to a vast but nearly forgotten kingdom in the Futa Jalon and Upper Niger region as the historical descendant of ancient Susu, thus indicating the latter's location. This kingdom was called Jalo and Concho. Its ethnic core were the Susu and Jalonke, and it was on its ruins that the Muslim Fula conquerors erected the state of Futa Jalon in the eighteenth century. My interpretation of oral traditions and Arabic sources also leads me to assume an identity of Susu with the kingdoms of Sankaran and Do. I will attempt to demonstrate the identity of the polities bearing these different names in sections introducing these polities, most of which have never been subjected to close historical investigation.

In an oral discourse passed down through many generations, the village elder Vase Kamara describes how a slave named Zo Musa Kòma founded the ancient town of Musadu in Guinea-Conakry, and he explains how the legendary Kamara ancestor Foningama later became a leader in Musadu. We tentatively date some elements of the Zo Musa stories to about the fourteenth and fifteenth century, when the Manding began to assimilate and push the Southwestern and Eastern Mande-speaking peoples from the Musadu area in the Konyan to the forest. Some of the Foningama related accounts seem to correspond to the era when the Kamara who settled in the Konyan became active in the sixteenth-century Mane “invasions.”

Stories about Musadu's founding provide information about these movements and help bridge the histories of the savanna and forest peoples who live in Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, and Liberia. The Musadu legend links the Konyaka to their kinsmen who live in the traditional heartland of the Mali empire in present-day northern Guinea and southern Mali. In addition, some Manding, Vai, Loma, Gola, Kpelle, Konor, Dan, and Mano trace their origins to Musadu, and reflect one Loma writer's claim that “all of the tribes in Liberia are from Musadu, or have some association with Musadu” (Korvali 1960:7).

The main actors are Manding (Mandekan) speakers who migrated to the Mau/Gbè and Konyan regions of western Côte d'Ivoire and southern Guinea respectively. The Mauka/Gbèka and Konyaka are members of the Northern Mande language group and are classified as Maninka (Malinke). The Bamana (Bambara), Dyula (Jula), and Vai are other Northern Mande speakers. Vase claims that Foningama was Manding, and that Zo Musa was Kpelle. The Kpelle, Loma, and Konor are Southwestern Mande speakers, and the Dan (Gio) and Mano are Eastern Mande speakers.

The Guinea coast and near interior was a region of almost wholly preliterate societies before the coming of the Europeans. Islamic culture, with its literate strands, which had been spreading through the northern parts of West Africa over many centuries had barely begun to touch the Guinea region—although a handful of literate itinerant merchants and missionaries was to be encountered by the Portuguese, and Islamic religious practice had penetrated at least one royal court in Senegal. Hence the “medieval” sources in Arabic which are informative on the history of the Sudanic states of West Africa tell us little or nothing about the Guinea region. As for the oral traditions of the region, mostly collected only since 1850, these have an inbuilt “horizon” of recollection which falls far short of the arrival of the Europeans five centuries ago. Ethnographic, cultural, and linguistic evidence, systematized in recent times, can be extrapolated backwards to earlier times, but this can only be done, with any security, when trends over time have been identified from earlier hard evidence.

Such trends can of course be obtained from archeology, as well as from written sources. But the limited investigations of archeologists in Guinea to date, while they certainly inform on general issues such as agriculture and technology, are as yet decidedly weak, for a variety of good reasons, on the regional details of human settlement and population, and on the varieties of political structure. Moreover it is doubtful whether archeology per se can inform to any significant extent on ethnicity, language, and social characteristics. It is therefore only marginally debatable to refer to the earliest European written sources on Guinea as “the early sources.”

Murray Last obliquely suggests that [the “Kano Chronicle”] is best regarded as a rather free compilation of local legends and traditions drafted in the mid-seventeenth century by a humorous Muslim rationalist who almost seems to have studied under Levi-Strauss.

The danger lies in being carried away by one's own ingenuity.

The question of the authorship and date(s) of writing of the so-called “Kano Chronicle” (KC) and hence how historians should evaluate it as a source, have intrigued students of Kano (and wider Hausa) history since the work was first translated into English by H. R. Palmer in 1908. Palmer himself had the following to say:

The manuscript is of no great age, and must on internal evidence have been written during the latter part of the decade 1883-1893; but it probably represents some earlier record which has now perished….The authorship is unknown, and it is very difficult to make a guess. On the one hand the general style of the composition is quite unlike the “note” struck by the sons of Dan Hodio [ʿUthmān b. Fūdī, Abdulahi and Muḥammad Bello, and imitated by other Fulani writers. There is almost complete absence of bias or partizanship…. On the other hand, the style of the Arabic is not at all like that usually found in the compositions of Hausa mallams of the present day; there are not nearly enough “classical tags” so to speak, in it…. That the author was thoroughly au fait with the Kano dialect of Hausa is evident from several phrases used in the book, for instance “ba râyi ba” used in a sense peculiar to Kano of “perforce.” The original may perhaps have been written by some stranger from the north who settled in Kano, and collected the stories of former kings handed down by oral tradition.

The Beschryvinghe appeared in 1602 in Amsterdam under the title Beschrybinge ende historische verhael vant Gout koninckrijck van Gunea, anders de Gout-custe de Mina genaemt, liggende in het veel van Africa… The aim here is to ascertain whether the copperplates have ethnohistorical value as source material, i.e., whether they can be employed as source material relating to the history of Ghana at the beginning of the seventeenthth century, or whether their importance is restricted merely to their contribution to the history of ideas. The background necessary for the examination, description, and interpretation of the copperplates involves study of the genesis of the Beschryvinghe. The following discussion of the author, publisher, and printer, and copperplate techniques also points to questions of the intention, function, and reception—both of the Beschryvinghe and of the pictures.

Drawing a distinction between picture and illustration seems to me to be of little use. Even if every picture is not an illustration, every illustration is certainly a picture. In what follows I therefore consider the illustrative picture as a medium which, even if of a different quality, is comparable to the medium of language. This means that pictures, like texts, have to be read carefully. The method is thus one of precise and detailed examination and analysis of the content of the images. However, the comparability of language and image also implies that the pictures must be subjected to a rigorous critique of their status as source material, just as is the case with texts. In this context I have followed the “different stages Of ethno-historical source critique” developed by Miklós Szalay.

In December 1932 J. B. Danquah identified five stages or “ages” in the coastal political history, or the “national history,” of the Gold Coast. This paper may be described as a temporary departure from a preoccupation with “Ages” two, three, and four (1867-1930) and a tentative entry into the study of the fifth: Danquah's post-1930 “Age of Enlightenment.” What follows therefore is more of a shift in time than of space and focus—the area and arena of coastal politics in the colonial Gold Coast. If a new age did dawn in the 1930s, then for an influential core of today's Ghanaianist historians, it would seem that the turning point occurred in 1935. In that year the radical response of I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson and Nnambi Azikiwe (“Zik”) to the Ethiopian crisis galvanized those forces that presaged the later emergence of Kwame Nkrumah, one of history's winners. In sharp contrast, J.B. Danquah, one of history's losers, represented the continuity of past conservatism during—and after—the 1930s.

A bold attempt to confirm or contradict the 1935 “discontinuity thesis” is beyond the scope of this progress report on an act of trespass into the 1930s. The modest outcome of the latter is a snapshot of Accra-based politics. It tries to bring into focus several elements: the texture, style, and ‘reach’ of urban-based politics and politicians; the place of the study and teaching of history in anticolonial nationalist thought; and the extent to which rhetoric served as a mask for the pursuit of group or personal grievance and ambition. In short, this paper re-examines an old theme—the relationship between past history and present politics, albeit within the confines of a British colonial state.

Chronology used to be an object of great interest among African historians because it was seen as essential to history, it provided exactitude where so much else was analytic, and it was such a difficult feature to handle in oral accounts. More recently, historical analysis has been concerned more with processes and periods than with defined events and dates. Although deemed to be useful when available, precise chronology is now seen as less essential to historical reconstruction; it is accepted that chronologies are subject to interpretation and debate, and that these debates themselves illuminate the way in which local communities reconstruct—and historians understand—history.

This paper addresses such issues of debate, contestation, and negotiation—that is, it explores the nature of intellectual hegemony—but it does so across cultural boundaries. It thus illustrates a fundamental contradiction in the manner by which historians have treated cultural units defined as distinct: while as independent polities they have been assumed to be culturally autonomous, source material from one is often drawn on to fill in the gaps of others. This procedure was especially common where there were powerful kingdoms whose political boundaries were assumed to be rigid and inviolate. The states of the western Interlacustrine area, each believed to be ruled by an established dynastic line whose origins reached far back into antiquity, provide an exemplary illustration of this process.

By the early twentieth century, at the time of European conquest, Rwanda was one of the most powerful of these states, having either conquered and absorbed, or at least dominated, many of the distinct kingdoms with which it formerly competed.

Oral tradition has been recognized by historians as a vital source for historical reconstruction of non-literate societies. However, one of its “deficienc[ies] is an inability to establish and maintain an accurate assessment of the duration of the past [it] seeks to reconstruct.” As a result of its time-lessness it has been declared ahistorical. In the same vein R.A. Sargent argues that

Basically, the concern of critics of oral tradition is that, while they are veritable sources of history, the researcher “must work and rework them with an increasing sophistication and critical sense.” Because dating is very pivotal to the historian's craft, different techniques have been adopted alone or in combination to create a relative chronology. In precolonial African history, the most commonly used have been genealogical data which include dynastic generations, genealogical generations (father-to-son succession) and the age-set generation. Also systematically charted comets, solar eclipses, and droughts have been employed by historians in dating historical events, or in calculating the various generational lengths.

A dynastic generation is determined by “the time elapsing between the accession of the first member of a given generation to hold office and the accession of the first representative of the next.”

Gerhard Rohlfs was born in Vegesack near Bremen in 1831. He was a frequent traveler in Africa, and in 1865-67 he became the first European to travel from north Africa across the Sahara to the west African coast, from Tripoli to Borno, then through Bauchi and Keffi to Loko, thence down the Benue to its confluence with the Niger at Lokoja, which he reached on 28 March 1867. From there, he proceeded upstream along the Niger to Raba, delivering presents to Masaba of Nupe. From Raba, he traveled overland through Yorubaland to Lagos. In 1868 he published an account of the first half of this journey, from north Africa to Borno, in Petermann's Mitteilungen. In 1872 his account of the second half, “Gerhard Rohlfs' Reise durch Nord-Afrika vom Mittelländischen Meere bis zum Busen von Guinea, 1865 bis 1867, 2. Hälfte: von Kuka nach Lagos (Bornu, Bautschi, Saria, Nupe, Yoruba),” also appeared in Petermann's. A later publication, Quer durch Afrika, which appeared in 1874-75, covered the entire journey.

Rohlfs' accounts of his travels in west Africa south of the Sahara have up to now been greatly neglected. The works mentioned above have never been published in English translation, which no doubt goes some way to explain this neglect. Rohlfs' information on his stay in Kuka (the capital of Borno) and his visits to Bauchi and Nupe have been cited by some scholars, at least. Very few, however, appear to have consulted his description of the last leg of his 1866-67 journey, in which he proceeded from the Niger south through Yorubaland to Lagos, visiting Share, Ilorin, Iwo, Ibadan, and parts of Ijebuland on the way.

Elsewhere I have set forth a basic outline for charting histories of vegetation change through the use of paleoenvironmental data (Schoenbrun 1991). This essay builds on the previous one by laying out the contours of vegetation change and human agency in the Great Lakes region (Map 1) over the roughly three millennia after ca. 2000 BC.

The history of the vegetation in eastern Africa's Great Lakes region brings into focus several important features of long-term environmental change—human action, climatic shift, and internal successional patterns. The primary sources for this history come from a variety of published palynological and limnological studies from Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zaire. Perhaps the most rewarding data for reconstructing climatic and vegetational change come from palynological studies. Pollen studies often reflect detailed changes in the constitution of plant communities, and their value for reconstructing the vegetational and climatic contexts for Holocene human history has provoked the development of a rigorous method for their analysis. Contemporary studies of plant community succession and human-vegetation relationships are a secondary source for the history of land clearance in the Great Lakes region. These works provide a means to determine the different imprints of human and climatic action on the paleoenvironmental record.

In this study I combine the full range of paleoenvironmental evidence to reconstruct the form and pace of vegetation change. I focus on a part of eastern Africa famous for its great ecological diversity. One of the rewards of this endeavor is to demonstrate to paleoecologists, archaeologists, and historians alike the value of a truly interdisciplinary approach to environmental change.

Uwadiae Jacob Egharevba was born in 1893 to a descendant of Ohenmwen, the Iyase of Benin Kingdom during the reign of Osemwende, ca. 1816 to ca. 1848, and Okunzuwa, a granddaughter of an Ibadan chief. Jacob's parents were long-distance traders, and he claimed to have traveled with them in the Benin and Yoruba regions until his father's death in 1902. The brief sojourn in the Yoruba country afforded him the opportunity of attending school for a year in 1899, at a time when there was no such facility in Benin because of the reluctance of the traditional elite to send their children to school. Jacob was impressed by the written word and became interested in education, although it was not until 1911 that he returned to school at Akure. He demonstrated brilliance, although his education here was terminated by relocation. On his return to Benin in 1914, he became a domestic help to Black Shaw, a senior European staff of the Public Works Department, while at the same time enrolling at St. Matthews C.M.S. school. In 1915 he converted to Christianity and, with the encouragement of Shaw and others, he was able to complete his primary education in 1916.

Between 1916 and 1921, he worked in lowly paid jobs in Warri, Port Harcourt, and Okigwe. His failure to secure any lucrative government position pushed him to trading. His writing career began in 1921 when he drafted his now famous classic, Ekhere Vb'Itan Edo. Ironically, it was this successful book that exposed his writing inadequacies. To improve his skills, he enrolled in 1926 in a five-year correspondence course with the Institute of Rationalistic Press in London. In 1933 the C.M.S. published the Ekhere Vb'Itan, which attained an instant success. It was reprinted the following year and translated as A Short History of Benin.

Although the Western world knows what a museum is, in many parts of Africa its purpose is an open question. To many Africans it is an alien institution introduced by colonialists. Their intentions were good: they wished to study and exhibit local works of art and artifacts and preserve them from deterioration and depredations by local and foreign traders. Yet collecting important art objects and artifacts, some of which were still part of active rituals, and locking them up in a building rather resembling a prison, was to many, Africans and foreigners alike, inimical in principle. Nor did many Africans show much interest in the displays within the glass cases, unless such exhibits pertained to their own particular ethnic heritage. The museums were therefore seen as white elephants staffed by eccentric colonialists, assisted by Africans glad of a job, and visited mainly by foreigners. If we trace the origin and development of the museum in Europe, we may discover why these African museums, as modeled on European institutions, failed to make an impact on the lives of Africans or to meet the needs of the communities they were meant to serve. However, we shall also see how in time certain projects have transformed them into cultural and social centers of great vitality.

During February of 1987 the National Museum of Mali in Bamako and the Fowler Museum of Cultural History at UCLA began a collaborative project to study and document social institutions that support weaving and associated technologies in Mali, and to collect examples of locally-produced textiles for each of the two museums. Claude Daniel Ardouin, Director of the National Museum of Mali until 1987, defined a textiles collection project as part of what he conceived to be the National Museum's mandate to protect Mali's cultural heritage, a heritage in which the production of textiles plays a significant role. Ardouin quite literally reinvented Mali's National Museum as an actively archival institution, believing it to be essential and instrumental in conserving the country's rich artistic traditions. Toward this end, in 1986 Ardouin and Philip L. Ravenhill, then Director of the West African Museums Project, began discussions with Doran H. Ross, Deputy Director of the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, about collaborative, long-term research. Resources and expenses would be shared, resulting in a mutually enriching collaboration.

Early 1987 marked the first field season of the partnership that developed out of that early meeting. By 1991, under the joint auspices of Ross and Samuel Sidibe, present Director of the National Museum of Mali, the collaboration had completed the projected five field seasons of textiles documentation and collection covering five regions of Mali. This paper addresses some practical aspects of this extended, institutionally sponsored, collaborative fieldwork. It also discusses the collaborative project under the sometimes harsh light of postcolonial self-examination.

In African studies the potential for collaboration between students of history and those of material culture or art has long been recognized. On the one hand, items of material culture, both ancient and modern, can shed light on aspects of the past which remain obscure in written and oral sources; on the other, in order to see a material culture (or parts of it) in perspective, we need to study the historical background of the area concerned. The contribution of material culture to historical knowledge of sub-Saharan Africa has received considerable attention; but the same can hardly be said of the use of historical sources in understanding material culture.

This does not mean that such sources have been neglected. Most of them certainly were in the colonial and immediate post-colonial periods, but things have improved. In many recent books, articles, and exhibitions devoted to Africa's material culture, considerable use has been made of the writings and engravings of early European visitors. Scholars are delighted if they can discover old records of anything resembling the objects that are today found either in museums or still in use in Africa. Indeed, it has become almost obligatory to search old books for textual and visual material. No historian can object to this interest in early sources. Yet looking at what has been published recently, one wonders whether we have nearly reached the end of the road. The same classic travelers' accounts are cited again and again (even the same passages!), and it is beginning to look as if this source of information will soon run dry. What, if anything, remains to be done?

The African material culture network—if indeed one can posit a network—is multidimensional, consisting of scholars, objects, and information. The linkage between scholars and objects of material culture that are the focus of their study is information, in particular, the ways in which that information is collected, codified, and communicated. Documentation is the process that generates and orders the information about objects, relates objects one to another, and channels appropriate information into scholarly inquiry.

The primary network is one of people: the scholars who are engaged in the study of the object—the mask, the ritual vessel, the woven textile, the dwelling. Information about the object; its use and function; its esthetic and formal qualities; the technique of its manufacture; and its social, economic, and historical context comes from many sources: from examination of the object itself; from contextual, collection, and associated data, including oral data; and from the published literature, unpublished written records, and visual images. These three kinds of data, in turn, constitute secondary networks: information which is generated, processed, and utilized by scholars or other specialists (curators, librarians, archivists, bibliographers). These secondary networks correlate roughly to the institutional settings of museums, archives, and libraries. Information does not exist in a vacuum; it serves a purpose, even if one not always apparent. Thus, the process of creating and manipulating information about African material culture objects, or simply documentation, has as its goal to match in perfect overlay the information about objects with scholarly inquiry.