A few years ago I was reading a doctoral dissertation concerned with the history of São Tomé, when one particular word fairly leapt off the page. It came at the end of an episode telling how a particular ethnic group on the island today had arrived there. The story told how a number of Angolan slaves, later called Angolares, were shipwrecked just off the coast of São Tomé in 1544 (or 1554), “though (of course) no accurate date or account of the circumstances exists.” The survivors swam to shore and moved into the bush “building there a series of small villages called Quilombos.” It was that word, “Quilombos,” that made me jump to attention, for it is a very important word in Angolan history and a written record of it from either 1544 or 1554 would be sixty to seventy years earlier than the hitherto first-known mention of the word. If it were true, profound revisions to the accepted political history in Angola during the sixteenth century would be called for, and even the chronology of the onset of the Lunda (Ruund) kingdom far inland would have to be revised.

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.

For the reconstruction of the history of the aftermath of the Mali empire, that is, the period 1500-1800, oral traditions are the only source of information. The history of this period has been reconstructed by Person and Niane. Their work has gained widespread acceptance. In this paper I will argue that these scholars made significant methodological errors—in particular, in interpreting chronology in genealogies, and their reading of stories about invasions and the seizure of power by younger brothers.

My reading of the oral tradition raises questions about the nature of both sixteenth- and nineteenth-century Mande (that is the triangle Bamako-Kita-Kankan (see map), the region where the ‘Malinke’ live), and the medieval Mali empire, because I think that Mande royal genealogies have wrongly been considered to represent claims to the imperial throne of the Mali empire. In contrast, my reading of oral tradition suggests in retrospect that the organizational structure of the Mali empire may have been segmentary, and not centralized, ranking between segments under discussion, each group thereby creating a hierarchical image.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that the Mali empire collapsed/disintegrated in the period from 1500 and 1800. As Person put it:

Dans le triangle malinké, on ne trouvera plus au XIX siècle que des kafu, ces petites unités étatiques qui forment les cellules politiques fondamentales du monde mandingue. Certains d'entre eux savaient faire reconnaître leur hégémonie à leurs voisins, mais aucune structure politique permante n'existait à un niveau supérieur. Beaucoup d'entre eux, dont les plus puissants et les plus peuplés, seront alors commandées par des lignées Kééta qui se réclament avec quelque vraisemblance des empereurs du Mali médiéval.

A cornerstone of the Western intellectual heritage is the fervent belief in the power of the written word to transform man and society. In this tradition, the existence of writing serves as a hallmark for civilization and a marker to separate history from prehistory. While a great deal of scholarly work has dispelled many myths about literacy, thus bridging “the great divide” between the written and the oral, our intellectual and emotional attachment to writing persists. This appears to be especially the case in reference to the origins of writing systems, many of the latter being claimed and reputed to have been “independently invented.” For those peoples most involved historically in such developments, the invention and use of original scripts are points of pride, and hence claims for the “authenticity” of the scripts, that is, for their invention and coming into use having been an entirely indigenous undertaking, are passionately guarded.

Historians of writing, however, are cautious of claims for independent invention. From ancient to modern times, the history of the development of writing has been characterized by a balance between “independent invention” and “stimulus diffusion.” While epigraphers and paleographers attempt to unravel the inevitably obscure origins of certain ancient scripts possibly devised in environments free from external influence, no script devised in the last two thousand years is likely to have emerged totally independent of the stimulus of some diffused knowledge of the previous history of scripts—at the very least, the mere idea of writing. Nonetheless, for many modern observers, any suggestion of an outside stimulus on the development of such scripts is considered virtual heresy, tantamount to an attack on the intellectual ability of the peoples who claim to have single-handedly devised the scripts.

“Strange foreign jewels on a mournful silent shore”

Historians have frequently viewed the Swahili-speaking peoples of the East African coast as members of an Arab diaspora that spread around the Indian Ocean with trade over the last two thousand years. The interpretation flowed easily from the apparent “Arab” nature of Swahili culture--a written language using Arabic script, elaborate stone buildings and mosques constructed in urban settings, Islam, and genteel social behavior--especially when contrasted with the culture of mainland Africans, members of preliterate, uncentralized communities. Since the Swahili culture of the islands and coastal fringes bore little apparent resemblance to the cultures of the mainland, historians reasoned, its development could only have been the product of Persian and Arab merchants bringing to the “mournful silent shores” of East Africa the “jewels” of their own Muslim civilizations.

The perspective was essentially diffusionist in assuming that cultural innovation and historical development in Africa could only have come from elsewhere, and racist in assuming that race and culture were so inextricably linked that a separate “race” of immigrants had to carry these new ideas. As a result, historians failed to investigate the possible African roots of Swahili culture in their Bantu language, their religious beliefs and values, their economy, or their social structure. But this charge applies not only to European historians; Swahili oral historians have long recounted the development of their societies in essentially the same terms in involved genealogies tracing the development of different Swahili families, communities, and institutions back to Persian or Arabian ancestors. When European historians came to study the oral traditions of the Swahili (usually in written, chronicle form), they thus found ready confirmation of their own assumptions and interpretations.

This paper is a study of the methods and concerns of anthropology and history in central-south Nigeria in the period since about 1900, and of the changes which they have had to undergo in response to changing times and demands. To highlight the response of either discipline to the differing needs of different times, we shall take 1970, the date of publication of Thurstan Shaw's Igbo–Ukwu: An Account of Archaeological Discoveries in Eastern Nigeria, as our critical dividing line. Beyond doing that, however, we shall treat the years 1900 to 1970 as failing into sub-periods, with ca. 1900 to 1951 representing the high-noon, and 1951 to 1970 the twilight, of colonialism for the practice of either of these disciplines under consideration.

It is perhaps necessary to emphasize that for our first sub-period, 1900-1951, we shall be dealing mainly with the methods and concerns of anthropology, rather than also with history strictly speaking. It was a period marked by the unchallenged dominance of anthropology and anthropologists as far as the study of society was concerned. What passed for history, and therefore what, for the period, will be treated as historiography, concerns the speculations of anthropologists about the past of the peoples of central-south Nigeria, and with the work of one or two inspired indigenous amateurs such as Jacob Egharevba. By and large I agree with the view of Bill Freund, supported by Toyin Falola, to the effect that “the colonial period produced very little by way of overtly historical publication. The dominant colonial science was anthropology.” Thus this paper is on the idiosyncratic waywardness of colonial anthropology, the impact of this waywardness on the emergent historiography of central-south Nigeria from 1951 to 1970, the efforts of post-1970 anthropologists and historians to shake off this waywardness, and the part played by Shaw's Igbo-Ukwu in this struggle to end the baneful influence of that “dominant colonial science.”

In Part I of this paper we examined the external written sources and found no unambiguous evidence that an Almoravid conquest of ancient Ghana ever occurred. The local oral evidence reviewed in this part of our study supports our earlier hypothesis, in that we find nothing in the traditions to indicate any conquest of the eleventh-century sahelian state known to Arab geographers as “Ghana.” Instead, the oral traditions emphasize drought as having had much to do with the eventual disintegration of the Soninke state known locally as “Wagadu.”

An immediate problem involved in sifting the oral sources for evidence of an Almoravid conquest is that a positive identification between the Wagadu of oral tradition and the Ghana of written sources has never been established. Early observers like Tautain (1887) entertained no doubts in this regard, and recently Meillassoux seems to have accepted a connection, if not an identification, between Ghana and Wagadu when he notes that “les Wago, dont le nom a donné Wagadu, sont les plus clairement associés à l'histoire du Ghana.” However, much continues to be written on the subject, and the question remains a thorny one. On the lips of griots (traditional bards) and other local informants, Wagadu is a timeless concept, so a reliable temporal connection between people and events in the oral sources on one hand and Ghana at the time of the Almoravids on the other, is particularly elusive. Indeed, any link between the traditions discussed here and a specific date like 1076 must be regarded as very tenuous, as must any association of legendary events with Islamic dates. In western Sudanic tradition influenced by Islam, the hijra (A.D. 622) is both prestigious and convenient, a date with which virtually any event in the remote past can be associated, though such a claim may have nothing to do with any useful time scale.

One of the most prevalent and widely-accepted themes in the history of the Mandinka of Senegambia concerns the great Mandinka migrations--the westward movement of large groups of people that included the distant ancestors of today's Senegambian Mandinka population. The migrants are supposed to have come from traditional Manding homelands east and southeast of present locations of Mandinka peoples in Senegambia; conquest and longterm settlement were the ususal results of these migrations.

For over a century scholarly (and not so scholarly) works dealing with the western Mandinka have shown acceptance as fact and included discussions at varying length of the early westward migrations. At a 1980 conference in Dakar, which historians, linguists, anthropologists, traditionists, and others from four continents attended, considerable time actually went toward discussing and disputing the specific routes the major migrant leaders took and toward attempting to work out paradigms of the various “waves” of Mandinka migration. And lest I appear too smug in my implied criticism of studies of these migrations, I should admit that I, too, have written of the phenomena in ways that could be interpreted as scholarly discussion of their causes, timing, and (gulp) even their “flow.”

The major reason for the widespread acceptance of early Mandinka westward migrations and subsequent conquest and settlement--aside from the present ethnic and linguistic arrangement of the western Mandinka--is, of course, the frequency with which one hears tales of such in Senegambian traditions of origin. It is a rare Gambian Mandinka oral narrative--whether focusing on the history of a state, a village, or a separate lineage--that does not begin with where the ancestors originated.

In 2016, with the support of a three-year National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Collaborative Research Grant to research and write a precolonial African history of family, generations, and gender, we began building the Bantu Ancestral Roots Database (BARD). BARD is a digital repository of word-roots related to gender and life stage practices from over sixty Bantu languages. We developed it to assist us in our analysis of this large corpus of data that we used to write histories of people’s material and ideological inventions that cover the longue durée across multiple regions. BARD allows researchers with internet access to search for terms by entering at least three consecutive phonemes. If phonemes exist in that sequence in any of the 64 Bantu languages that BARD holds, those words and their meanings appear as results. In this article, we discuss the usefulness and complexities of Digital Humanities (DH) as research tools. We explain our methodology and research process using three reconstructed word-roots pertinent to our research on family and generations. The three word-roots we examine invite scholars to probe how to recover deep connections and linkages between people’s pasts in Africa and its Diasporas, particularly in ways that move beyond histories of the slave trade and enslavement. As we developed our open-access website African Social History and Data Across Bantu Matrilineal Communities (ASH-DABMC) and our database, BARD, we gained greater insight into the meanings encoded in our data even as we faced challenges. We hope the discussion of our experiences will provide an intellectual framework and inspire others considering digital projects.

Historians recognize that the perception and organization of time are fundamental to the internal ordering of all human cultures. However, the history of pre-colonial Africa has largely been written to conform to the calendrical rhythms of an imposed European chronology. Regret over this discrepancy has been tempered by recognition of the very real problems involved in rectifying it. Chief among these is the fact that linear chronology per se -- in purist interpretation requiring numbered series derived from a fixed base, and therefore the mnemonic support of a graphic record -- is beyond the technological competence of any pre-literate society. However, the inability to maintain chronologically precise memorials of the past by no means precludes the existence of sophisticated mechanisms for ordering and dividing temps courant. That is, a historical sense disordered or dissolved through the agency of unassisted, and thus all too fallible, human memory may happily co-exist with an exact (and often symbolically charged) calendrical time. Broadly speaking, the foregoing was the situation obtaining-in Asante in the nineteenth century. Time in nineteenth-century Asante, in a number of its aspects, is the subject of this paper.

The establishment of a historical chronology in nineteenth-century Asante was severely inhibited, and in ultimate terms negated, by the absence of a literate culture. It is the case that rare and isolated individuals like oheneba Owusu Ansa (ca. 1822-1884) and oheneba Kwasi Boakye (1827-1904) acquired in foreign exile skills in European languages. However, Akan Twi was not effectively reduced to writing until the mid-nineteenth century, and then not in Asante. Thus, at the time of the British usurpation in 1896 Asante was still a pre-literate culture.

In 1754 the newly-arrived governor of Angola, António Alvares da Cunha, announced to the court in Lisbon that, inspired by plans his uncle had made in 1725, he had decided to revive the old attempt to find a way overland to link Angola and Mozambique. He was initiating this enterprise by sending, at his own expense, an expedition to the fair of Cassange, the farthest known point eastwards of Luanda, to gather information about the lands between Angola and Mozambique. The governor's envoy was Manoel Correia Leitão— an experienced trader, but one who had never been to Cassange— accompanied by a pilot, António Roiz Grizante, whose task was to fix the latitude of Cassange.

A suspicious reader could conclude with the subsequent governor António de Vasconcelos, that this venture was a slave trading expedition by Leitão to recover some debts. But it was financed by the governor and one suspects that the whole enterprise was in fact a joint business venture, disguised as an exploration, because governors were forbidden to trade. Be that as it may, the reaction from Lisbon to this news was unexpected. The governor was ordered to abandon his plans and to recall his envoys because this enterprise was too “delicate.” Knowledge about it was to be shrouded in absolute secrecy and a report about this was to be treated as top-secret. Whereupon the governor recalled Leitão.

The historiography of African myth begins by documenting, comparing, and interpreting variant traditions. Where documentation is inscriptive and comparison descriptive, interpretation is notoriously complex, embracing a variety of approaches within two methodological extremes. The functionalist extreme -- what Peel calls “presentism” -- defines myth as a charter of political and ceremonial relations in society, and interprets variant traditions as rival political claims. Myth is by this definition a false reflection of the past because it is continually revised to fit the present. The historicist extreme regards myth as testimony of the past in oral societies, incorporating history into a narrative which resists revision and remains historically valid through fixed principles and “chains” of oral transmission. Variant traditions, according to this view, are dismissed as aberrations or contaminations of more authentic texts. Neither approach can evaluate the historicity of African myth unless both are somehow combined, for as the historiography of African oral traditions reveals, both tendencies are present in myth itself. This paper combines both approaches in an interpretation of variant Yoruba myths by examining the relationship between Yoruba myth and ritual.

The prevailing approach to variance within the Yoruba mythological corpus follows the historicist narrative of Beier's historiographic method. Beier interprets contradictory accounts of the same events or cultural figures by treating one of the versions, usually associated with the more local-level traditions, as a holdover from a pre-Yoruba aboriginal culture which was modified and assimilated by immigrant Yorubas who descended upon ancient Ife. Although some of his interpretations are plausible, he applies this approach indiscriminately to myth-ritual complexes which do not clearly support his aboriginal theory.

In August 1993 and February 1994 I conducted two interviews with a woman in Buhweju, a county in southwestern Uganda. The interviews were part of a series concerning the social and political history of Buhweju, which is now part of Bushenyi District. In the precolonial period, Buhweju was a small autonomous polity ruled by an hereditary “king;” in the colonial period it was subsumed into the neighboring kingdom of Nkore, which became known as Ankole.

The first interview, like most of my interviews, focused on the history of the family of the interviewee, and she said that her paternal grandfather, whose name was Mpamizo, had been a Hima, or pastoralist. In Buhweju, and elsewhere in Ankole, this meant, and still means, very much more than simply being a keeper of cattle. The agriculturalist Iru and pastoralist Hima share the same language and much of the same culture, but speak and behave differently in a number of significant ways (diet and mode of subsistence being prominent among these), so that whether one is a pastoralist or an agriculturalist is very apparent to any other member of society. The woman to whom I was talking is very evidently an Iru, an agriculturalist, in her manner and in the way she lives, as is her husband, and so I was surprised to hear that her grandfather was a Hima, a pastoralist. It was partly for this reason that I went back to talk to her again: but on the second occasion, there was an important shift in her presentation of Mpamizo—a dissonance in her account of the past. Mpamizo, she now said, was an Iru. This dissonance is the subject of this paper, for it holds important lessons both about society in Buhweju and about the ways in which we interpret oral accounts of the past.

In contrast to most other nonliterate African peoples, the Himba and Herero -- pastoral Bantu peoples of southwestern Africa -- have developed quasiannual chronologies based upon important episodes and occasional conditions of the region in which they live. For example, to establish the time of a personal or family event, a Himba may refer to the epoch of the disarming or the epoch of the locust invasion as readily as we refer to 1917 or 1923. Such a chronological system is naturally of interest to the student of African history, for it is a key to the events that are considered important by the Himba themselves. But beyond this, a system of ordered epochs is also of value for demographic and other sociological studies in which the ages of individuals are important for, while the Himba, like most non-literate peoples, do not enumerate the years of their lives or the years that have passed since crucial events, many are able to provide the names of the epochs of their birth, marriage, childrens' births, and so forth. It remains, then, for the investigator merely to correlate the epochal names with our numbered years in order to determine, with a fair degree of approximation, individuals' current ages and their ages at their life crises -- data which are important for certain kinds of detailed sociological research. In essence this procedure is simple enough, but establishing a sufficiently accurate correlation between the Himba epochs and the numbered years has proved to be a difficult task and one requiring a variety of approaches. The nature of the Himba epochal chronology and the method employed for correlating it with the years of the Christian calendar are the subjects of this paper.

Despite its very visible career in anthropology and folklore, structuralism has been little used by historians of precolonial Africa. Only Ronald Atkinson has applied the method of Lévi-Strauss in the Edmund Leach variant, although a number of historians have attempted to elucidate symbolic meanings by other means. Rather surprisingly as well, given the two decades or so that have elapsed since Lévi-Strauss developed its axioms and analysis, no historian of Africa has ventured to discuss the validity of structuralism for coping with the interpretation of myths of origin or other oral traditions, except in passing. The topic has surfaced only here and there in the never-ending debate about traditions as expressions of the present, or of the past, or of both. Given the influence of structuralism elsewhere, though, it is due time that the approach be discussed for its own sake.

The reticence to do so became especially incongruous when a senior structuralist, Luc de Heusch, began to cover ground that historians had recently trod. In his Le roi ivre he discussed at length myths in the kingdoms of southeastern Zaire and adjacent areas. This did prompt publication of two articles about his Luba and Lunda interpretations, but no general assessment of this work in toto. Jeffrey Hoover faulted de Heusch's Lunda material but still praised his “provocative ideas” and the method, “which bore some good fruit,” while Thomas Reefe prefaced his critique of Luba material by calling the book “stimulating” and sidestepped the issue by noting that “no matter what the final assessment of this book will be by historians…” Others were equally bland in their references to this work, while still refuting de Heusch on specifics. Everyone felt, it seems, that a general assessment was beyond or outside their competence. Yet a general critique would have been of use for de Heusch is one of the oldest and most experienced structuralists in anthropology, perhaps the first disciple of Lévi-Strauss. Trained in Paris, he imbibed the approaches of the Griaule school, the protostructuralism of Georges Dumézil, and the early teaching of the master himself. Of all structuralists he remains the most faithful to the method of Lévi-Strauss.

“Settlements of foreign, predominantly Semitic, peoples”

Strandes' gambit concerning ‘Muslim Civilization’ of the east coast of Africa is a familiar one to many Africanists. Persians and Arabs, so the stories go, settled coastal sites as part of the Islamic diaspora; they vanquished less virile African societies; they built cities which were reflections of Middle Eastern prototypes; they imposed their religion; and, they ‘founded’ coastal civilization, a civilization, therefore, which was characteristically Middle Eastern. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians cannot be entirely blamed for holding such simplistic views. After all, the traditions themselves at least imply some of these things. And, given the literalist and diffusionist nature of past anthropological and historical theory, simple and biased interpretations of these traditions are not surprising.

What is perhaps remarkable, given the developments in anthropological theory since the 1940s, is the persistence of such views in some quarters. Examples include portions of two recently published papers by Saad and Wilkinson. Both deal wholly or in part with the most intriguing of the coastal origin traditions, the stories which tell how many coastal towns were originally settled by immigrants who came from Shiraz or Persia (see appendix). Their interpretations are so literal as to link the Shirazi name not merely with a particular dynasty, but with a specific family or kin group which ruled in pre-fourteenth-century Kilwa.

The Indian question in East Africa during the early 1920s can hardly be said to have been neglected by subsequent scholars. There is an abundant literature on it and the purpose here is not simply to run over the ground yet again, resurrecting past passions on the British, white settler and Indian sides. Instead, more will be said about the African side, especially the expatriate educated African side, during the controversy in Kenya immediately after World War I, when residential segregation, legislative rights, access to agricultural land, and future immigration by Indians were hotly debated in parliament, press, private letters, and at public meetings. For not only were educated and expatriate Africans in postwar Kenya by no means wholly “dumb,” as one eminent historian of the British Empire has since suggested, but their comments in newspaper articles at the time can be seen in retrospect to have had a seminal importance in articulating both contemporary fears and subsequent “imagined communities,” to employ Benedict Anderson's felicitous phrase—those nationalisms which were to have such controversial significance during the struggle for independence from British colonialism in Uganda as well as Kenya during the middle years of this century.

This article draws attention to the scope and significance of the Registers of Liberated Africans, which were recently retraced in the Public Archives of Sierra Leone after a period of neglect. These registers, spanning the period between 1808 and 1819, provide details of the names and physical characteristics of the first groups of “recaptives” released at Freetown by royal naval patrols in the immediate aftermath of British abolition of the slave trade. This evidence, when combined with other categories of records generated by colonial administrators, offers a rare opportunity to reconstruct biographical information about enslaved Africans after their release from slaving vessels. The methodology discussed in this article demonstrates how nominal linkage across diverse categories of records surviving in Sierra Leone and Britain makes it possible to trace aspects of the subsequent movements of individuals after their cases had been adjudicated by the Vice Admiralty Court at Freetown.

The following exploration of social scientific thought as applied to Africa is an exercise in ethnography, not in debunking. At one level the argument, referring mainly to social change in western Zaire in the last hundred years, offers a descriptive interpretation which I assert is better than others. At another level I seek to establish what kind of phenomenon, in an ethnographic sense, historiography really is. At this level, I apply the methods of social science to a body of work in “social science” which is, in fact, myth, and which itself deals, in part, with a body of “myth” which is, in fact, social science.

In “African Traditional Thought and Western Science,” Robin Horton first shows the ways in which the first is like the second in producing model-building explanatory schemes, and then argues that the difference between the two is essentially that “in traditional cultures there is no developed awareness of alternatives to the established body of theoretical tenets; whereas in scientifically oriented cultures, such an awareness is highly developed ” He elaborates this difference between “the open and closed predicaments” in terms of such factors as unreflective versus reflective thinking, mixed versus segregated motives, absence versus presence of experimental method; these factors he finds superior in explanatory power to “most of the well-worn dichotomies used to conceptualize the difference between scientific and tradition religious thought. Intellectual versus emotional; rational versus mystical; reality-oriented versus fantasy-oriented …”

Only occasionally does Horton refer to social science, however; he seems to assimilate it to natural science.

The Atlantic slave trade in its various manifestations has never lacked scholarly attention, be it disinterested or selfish. The major focus has often been on the motivations and roles of those who participated in the trade other than as victims. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, interest tended to be confined either to the apologists for the trade or to its critics; but in recent years, the matter has not failed to engage the attention of more serious enquiry.

As a major center of the trade throughout the period, Dahomey has been studied extensively from the very beginning. Much of the work has regarded Dahomey as the slave trading state par excellence. Recently, however, I.A. Akinjogbin has advanced the stimulating and appealing argument that the Dahomey state was created partially, but explicitly, in defensive reaction to early signs of European interest in slaves on the Guinea coast. Akinjogbin further argues that–although Dahomey did in fact eventually develop into an important slave trading polity–it did so reluctantly and only because the Europeans trading along the coast demanded slaves–and only slaves–for their own goods.

Needless to say, attractive arguments rather have a way of being more readily (and less discriminatingly) accepted, and Akinjogbin's interpretation of early Dahomey history has already re-appeared in several important recent works on the history of west Africa. With this in mind, the present paper has two purposes. First, it proposes to examine the validity of Akinjogbin's thesis by examining one particular aspect of his argument: the motives of the Dahomey ruler Agaja (ca. 1708 to 1740) in conquering the coastal states of Allada and Whydah between 1724 and 1727. In discussing Akinjogbin's elucidation of Agaja's motives, we propose to concentrate not so much on the logic of his argumentation, but on his use of the sources on which any assessment of Agaja's motives must be based. With a single exception the material examined here is the same used by Akinjogbin, and in this sense the first part of the paper should be seen as a study in the use of evidence and inference.

The second part of this paper will be an examination of European and Dahomean commercial activities in the first few years after the conquest of the two coastal states. The sources describing these activities suggest that the motives and mechanisms of all parties were more complex than generally assumed.