History In Africa back issues from January 2006:
RECONSTRUCTING HABERLAND RECONSTRUCTING THE WOLAITTA: WRITING THE HISTORY AND SOCIETY OF A FORMER ETHIOPIAN KINGDOM
Jan 01, 2006; ... I In this paper I take up the methodological issue of combining archived fieldwork notes and contemporary field data in the reconstruction of the recent history of Wolaitta, a former kingdom in southern Ethiopia.1 The old fieldwork data, archived and little known since the 1960s, consist ...
TEACHING HISTORY IN TWENTIETH CENTURY NIGERIA: THE CHALLENGES OF CHANGE*
Jan 01, 2006; ... I The twilight of the twentieth century saw major developments in the world, which profoundly redefined people's perceptions of and interest in history, both as a mode of enquiry and as an academic discipline. The significance of such changes would appear to have found resonance in the ...
THE SPELL OF ORAL HISTORY: A CASE STUDY FROM NORTHERN IGBOLAND1
Jan 01, 2006; ... I My case study is taken from the northern Igbo of Nigeria and focuses on the village-group of Ihuwe, which name is today rendered as Ihube-thanks to its Anglicization during the period of colonial rule. This notwithstanding, the people still call themselves "Ihuwe," the form I use in ...
THE CONTEMPORARY SIGNIFICANCE OF WHAT HAS BEEN. THREE APPROACHES TO REMEMBERING THE PAST: LINEAGE, GADA, AND ORAL TRADITION
Jan 01, 2006; ... I For current discourse in the southwest Ethiopian hill farming populations of the Burji, Konso, and D'iraasa, the present time constitutes a spatiotemporal system of coordinates in which modern attitudes to the past and tradition intersect or are knotted with group ...
THE HISTORY OF AFRICANIZATION AND THE AFRICANIZATION OF HISTORY
Jan 01, 2006; ... I The idea of Africanization is arguably one of the most important and prevalent in African historiography and African studies. I first encountered this notion some eight years ago when I started graduate school. With a background in Mexican and Latin American history, I found it ...
CABO VERDE: GULAG OF THE SOUTH ATLANTIC: RACISM, FISHING PROHIBITIONS, AND FAMINES1
Jan 01, 2006; ... [Off Sao Tiago Island, March 1456] We found so great a quantity of fish that it is incredihle to record.2 [Praia, Sao Tiago, April 1816] The strictest precautions are taken against the evasion of slaves on board foreign vessels that touch here, and particularly by not allowing boats of ...
ANTHROPOLOGICAL HISTORICAL RESEARCH IN AFRICA: HOW DO WE ASK?
Jan 01, 2006; ... The appeal of history to us all is in the last analysis poetic. But the poetry of history does not consist of imagination roaming at large, hut of imagination pursuing the fact and fastening upon it. That which compels the historian to "scorn delights and live laborious days" is the ardour of ...
THE WORKS OF A.E. AFIGBO ON NIGERIA: AN HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Jan 01, 2006; ... I Nigeria in the post-independence years has seen its share of hardship. Politically dominated by military dictatorships, economically dominated by the ravages of underdevelopment, and culturally dominated by internal ethnic tensions and external stereotyping, Nigeria certainly seems to ...
PRECOLONIAL SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA AND THE ANCIENT NORSE WORLD: LOOKING FOR SIMILARITIES*
Jan 01, 2006; ... I Comparative history may be fashionable these days, but references to the past of precolonial sub-Saharan Africa in the literature on early Scandinavia, and vice versa, are still hard to come by. Perhaps this is as it should be, as Scandinavia and Sub-Saharan Africa are generally ...
GLOBAL EXPLANATIONS VERSUS LOCAL INTERPRETATIONS: THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE INFLUENZA PANDEMIC OF 1918-19 IN AFRICA
Jan 01, 2006; ... I 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 somewhere between 30,000,000 and 50,000,000 deaths worldwide. Truly, ...
VOICES FROM WITHIN AND WITHOUT: SOURCES, METHODS, AND PROBLEMATICS IN THE RECOVERY OF THE AGRARIAN HISTORY OF THE IGBO (SOUTHEASTERN NIGERIA)
Jan 01, 2006; ... I Over the past few decades, social history has variously and successfully explored the lives of neglected groups in society. Nevertheless, the question of capturing these "silent voices" in history, including those of women, remains at the heart of social history. Although few sources ...
HISTORY WITH A MISSION: ABRAHAM KAWADZA AND NARRATIVES OF AGRARIAN CHANGE IN ZIMBABWE
Jan 01, 2006; ... He was the first man who was clever enough to realize he could sell some green maize at the mine in Penhalonga. . . Even to build the good houses, you had to come and copy from Kawadza. To buy ploughshares, they had to come and copy from Kawadza. . . Even those who bought cars, they had to copy ...
THE JOURNEY OF MAJOR RAYNE ON THE BANKS OF TURKWELL RIVER: SILENT POLITICAL ASSIGNMENT AND TRAVEL WRITING
Jan 01, 2006; ... I When I read The Ivory Raiders, I was intrigued by the plot of the story, the intention of the author, Major Henry A. Rayne, to document the intricate process of political assignment and colonial intervention in the "lawless chaos" of wild African landscape and make it accessible to ...
DENYING HISTORY IN COLONIAL KENYA: THE ANTHROPOLOGY AND ARCHEOLOGY OF G.W.B. HUNTINGFORD AND L.S.B. LEAKEY
Jan 01, 2006; ... I Colonial attitudes and prejudices can be readily identified by every student perusing Africanist literature of the early twentieth century. More than that, one gets to recognize different slants, notably between an administrative outlook and that of white settlers (varying according to ...
LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE FOR THE INTRODUCTION OF IRONWORKING INTO BANTU-SPEAKING AFRICA
Jan 01, 2006; ... Did Africans once independently invent the smelting of metals or did they obtain this technology from Europe or the Middle East? This continues to be an unresolved and hotly disputed issue, mainly because the dates for the earliest appearance of smelting in Africa south of the Sahara remain ...
POLITICAL SONGS, COLLECTIVE MEMORIES, AND KIKUYU INDI SCHOOLS
Jan 01, 2006; ... I Peris Wanjira Gachau was eleven years old when she first attended Ngoigo Independent School in 1948. She enjoyed, most of all, singing the songs her teachers taught her and other students concerning the significance of education, stolen Kikuyu land, and the promise of African ...
ACKNOWLEDGING KNOWLEDGE: DISSEMINATION AND RECEPTION OF EXPERTISE IN COLONIAL AFRICA
Jan 01, 2006; ... I At every level, the functioning of African colonial societies depended on the availability and mediation of useful information and knowledge. The majority of the existing literature on "colonial knowledge" focuses on one area of this broad field: the various forms of knowledge about ...
CUED SPEECHES: THE EMERGENCE OF SHAURI AS COLONIAL PRAXIS IN GERMAN EAST AFRICA, 1850-1903
Jan 01, 2006; ... I In 1891 the German explorer Theodor Bumiller wrote an angry letter from the shores of Lake Nyassa (modern Lake Malawi) to the Committee of the German Anti Slavery Lottery, the financiers of his expedition. The goal of the expedition was to bring a steamship onto the lake to fight ...
MISSIONARY EXPERTISE, SOCIAL SCIENCE, AND THE USES OF ETHNOGRAPHIC KNOWLEDGE IN COLONIAL GABON
Jan 01, 2006; ... I Missionary ethnographers provided expert knowledge during the formative years of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century anthropology, but are generally relegated to the footnotes of academic anthropology.1 Colonial missionaries were, nevertheless, crucial producers of cultural ...
MISSIONARY KNOWLEDGE AND THE STATE IN COLONIAL NIGERIA: ON HOW G. T. BASDEN BECAME AN EXPERT*
Jan 01, 2006; ... I Between 1931 and 1937, the Anglican missionary G. T. Basden represented the Igbo people on the Nigerian Legislative Council. The Igbo had not elected Basden as their representative; he had been appointed by the colonial government. Basden's appointment seems remarkable. In 1923 the ...
IF YOU CAN'T BEAT THEM, JOIN THEM: GOVERNMENT CLEANSINGS OF WITCHES AND MAU MAU IN 1950s KENYA
Jan 01, 2006; ... I During the mid-1950s British administrators in the Machakos District of Kenya enlisted categories of Kamba occult "experts"-"witchdoctors" and "cleansers"-to cleanse local "witches" and migrants from Nairobi who were believed to have taken the Mau Mau oath. A compendium of colonial ...
PRODUCING A RECEIVED VIEW OF GOLD COAST ELITE SOCIETY? C.F. HUTCHISON'S PEN PICTURES OF MODERN AFRICANS AND AFRICAN CELEBRITIES1
Jan 01, 2006; ... I In the early 1920s British West Africa saw a flurry of colonial activity, in which the formation of the colonial state-originally started in this region in the 1870s-was brought to a higher plane. The introduction of Indirect Rule in the newly-amalgamated Nigeria by governor Frederick ...
THE GERMAN MAPS AT THE EAST AFRICANA COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF DAR ES SALAAM
Jan 01, 2006; ... I The documents originated by the German colonial administration in German East Africa are located in two main archives: the Tanzania National Archives in Dar es Salaam, where they are identified under the name "German Records," and the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, where they are collected ...
HOW TO DISTIL WORDS AND OBTAIN CULTURE HISTORY*
Jan 01, 2006; ... I Nearly every historian of early African history has recently encountered studies that use the history of words as a source for history more generally defined, an approach also known as words-and-things. Indeed, by now a more or less elaborate use of words-and-things has become ...
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES ON CHARLES JOHN ANDERSSON'S JOURNEY TO THE OKAVANGO RIVER
Jan 01, 2006; ... Recently in this journal (Wilmsen 2003:360-375), I delineated Charles John Andersson's route to the Okavango River based on entries in his diaries and an overlooked map of the route published by Thomas Baines in 1866.1 noted there that, while the place, Okambombo, where Andersson first stood on ...