This article explores archival practices and ownership of the largely Arabic manuscript collections at the Djenné Manuscript Library. From 2009 to 2017 grants from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme enabled the preservation of 8,520 manuscripts and digitization of about 400,000 folios. In a politically volatile environment like Mali, the future of historical research is mostly contingent on the availability of digital archives. While these archives enable research that otherwise could not be conducted, they also limit the research experience in situ and thus affect findings. For the manuscript owners, questions arise about digital imperialism.

In early summer 1999 I spent three days at the White Sisters' archives in Rome, and the following account may best be described as a cautionary tale. My reason for being in Rome was to use the White Fathers' archives, where I spent a very productive three weeks. Since I was interested in issues of medical care and gender in colonial Uganda, both areas of activity by the White Sisters, the White Fathers' archivist suggested I try to visit the White Sisters archives as well. He called and made the arrangements for my visit, although the White Sisters' archivist, Sister Claire-Michelle, was quite reluctant.

I found the research conditions at the White Sisters archives to be very restrictive. Sister Claire-Michelle established a work space for me in a parlor on the ground floor of the house, and my time was spent there. The archives are kept on the third floor and I was not allowed to see them. The archives are not completely cataloged, although there are some lists of materials. I explained to the archivist my interest in issues of gender and health, and in general issues dealing with African women. She never really seemed to understand, and kept bringing me material about African nuns. When I did request specific materials she brought them to me only after she had screened them. At one point I requested a report written by a sister in early twentieth-century Uganda who was inspecting various stations. Rather than bring me the report, Sister Claire-Michelle read through it and then brought me some photocopied pages.

This article examines historic gendered negotiations over identity, descent, and access to land along Uganda’s southern littorals by thinking about belonging with an exceptionally diverse assemblage of small fish. Based on accounts from contemporary littoral residents, the comparative historic ethnographic record, and fisheries scientists, the article describes the reproductive practices of enkejje as they may have been visible from Uganda’s southern littorals and situates the practices of raising socially recognized children within broader historical developments of clanship and public healing. Attending to these small fish in moments and in places where groups are under construction reorients analyses of descent politics beyond an often implicit focus on male interests towards the work of grandmothers, aunts, and mothers in debating the qualities of the most foundational units of the body politic – male and female children constituted relationally as persons through their status as legitimate family members.

Historians would readily agree that among the most important sources for Asante history are the written accounts of foreign visitors who traveled to Kumase during the nineteenth century. A work such as Ivor Wilks's Asante in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975), for example, is almost unthinkable without T. E. Bowdich's Mission from Cape Castle to Ashantee (London, 1819) and Joseph Dupuis' Journal of a Residence in Ashantee (London, 1824). These two published and reprinted primary sources are justly famous for their rich evocations of encounters with Asantehene Osei Tutu Kwame (reigned 1804-23) and members of his court. But there are a number of unpublished accounts—and those published in relatively obscure places—which also contain important historical data but which are lesser known and less often cited by scholars. In English one thinks of, among others, British Governor William Winniett's journal of his visit to Kumase in 1848; in French the extensive notebooks of Marie-Joseph Bonnat; and in German, the report of the missionary A. Riis.

A number of Dutch-speaking visitors also traveled to Kumase during the nineteenth century and left valuable written accounts, though few have ever been published. Language barriers have often prevented full use of the rich data they contain. Among the more important are those of Willem Huydecoper in 1816-17, Jacob Simons in 1831-32, Jacobus de Bruijn in 1836-37, H. S. Pel in 1842, and David Mill Graves in 1857, extracts from whose journal I have translated below.

Graves served as secretary on a Dutch diplomatic and trade mission which was dispatched by Governor J. van den Bossche to the Asantehene, Kwaku Dua Panin (reigned 1834-67) in July 1857.

Several scholars of the First World War in Southern Africa have briefly looked at the composition of the Rhodesia Native Regiment (RNR), which was formed in Southern Rhodesia in 1916 and fought in the German East Africa campaign until the armistice in November 1918. According to Peter McLaughlin, who has written the most about Zimbabwe and the Great War, “[b]y 1918 seventy-five per cent of the 2360 who passed through the ranks of the regiment were ‘aliens;’ over 1000 came from Nyasaland. The Rhodesia Native Regiment had thus lost its essentially ‘Rhodesian’ character.” This would seem to suggest that because the RNR had many soldiers who originated from outside Zimbabwe, this regiment was somehow less significant to Zimbabwe's World War I history. While McLaughlin admits that “the evidence on the precise composition of the Rhodesia Native Regiment is not available”, he claims that “approximately 1800 aliens served in the unit.”

In a recent book on Malawi and the First World War, Melvin Page agrees with McLaughlin's estimate that “probably more than 1000 Malawians joined the Rhodesian Native Regiment.” However, Page freely admits that the evidence on which this approximation is based is far from conclusive. By looking at the available evidence, particularly a previously unutilized regimental nominal roll in the Zimbabwe National Archives, it is possible to gain a clearer picture of the composition of the only African unit from Zimbabwe to have fought in the First World War. This analysis will not only deal with the nationality of the soldiers, which is what the two previous writers focused on, but also their ethnic/regional origin and pre-enlistment occupations.

One major consequence of the different waves of migrations in Yorubaland up to the nineteenth century was the emergence of settlements in different places and at different times. Some of these settlements were naturally located close to one another, and, as they expanded, they had to struggle among themselves or with their host communities for the control of land and other resources, as well as seek to retain their separate identity. The desire for the control of land, exercise of dominance, as well as for separate identity, with its attendant benefits resulted in mutual distrust and antagonism and, in extreme cases, degenerated into open conflict. The cases of Ife and Modakeke, Oyo and Akinmorin, and Ogbomoso and Orile-Igbon are relevant examples.

The case of Ifon and Ilobu communities is especially peculiar. Different groups migrated into the same region at different times and settled there because of an availability of arable land for agricultural practice, availability of streams and rivers, relatively secured location, and perhaps the discovery of mineral resources like rock salt. Despite the close location of these two communities and the similarity in their customs and language, their relationship has not been cordial. The closeness of these two communities, perhaps a factor in their growth and expansion, resulted in the struggle for the ownership, control, and usage of land. It also resulted in a desire to seek or exercise dominance and separate community identities, with each having recourse to superior historical tradition. These developments have produced mutual distrust and antagonism, resulting in the desire of the communities to seek ways of asserting itself from the grip of domination.

Mallam Muhammad Bakatsine was one of the most outstanding figures in nineteenth-century Kano history. He stands out in tradition as a figure who is almost luminescent—his virtues seem overpowering and his faults, if any, totally unrecorded. And yet we know surprisingly little about him; we don't know when he was born nor when he died. Although praised as a great scholar, we don't seem to know of anything he wrote. He was, in short, a legend in his own time, and as with most legends the personal traits and characteristics that are so necessary for us to grasp the personality of a historical character have been completely eliminated from the record. It is troublesome that the record is so vague for such an important historical figure, but even more upsetting is that the modern literature has distorted Mallam Muhammad Bakatsine's role, even to the extent of accusing him of being a collaborator with the anti-jihad forces in Kano and of being an opportunist.

I believe that these distortions have resulted from a very uncritical use of colonial sources. These colonial sources were not the product of careful scholarly historical research, even though they often reflect something from the oral traditions about the jihad. These colonial recorders were generally opportunists themselves, as indeed were many of those Kano citizens supplying them with information, and so we must be very cautious when using the information they provide. Too frequently—as with the story of Bakatsine's sister Habiba's alleged interview with Sheikh Usman dan Fodio resulting in a new name for their clan—they have been repeated over and over again in the literature without being examined to see if there is any merit in them.

Forty-five years ago (1965), when some of us were beginning our studies of the history of the Upper Guinea coast, there existed only a few published general histories of Guinea-Conakry or region-based models to guide us. André Arcin's substantial works (1907 and 1911) provided original but awkward structures from which we could commence our work, but his monographs tended to be based heavily upon a colonial presence, a necessity to make sense of a complex colony, and a reliance upon oral traditions or other uncitationed sources, many of which could not be tested a half century later. Christopher Fyfe's comprehensive history of Sierra Leone had just been published in 1962. Fyfe's foremost emphasis was to chronicle the development of the Sierra Leone settlement and chart that colony's progress, but his extensive documentation was extraordinary in that it demonstrated the clear link between the “Northern Rivers” and British enterprise from Freetown and opened Britain's archives as sources of information about the history of these rivers in new and profound ways.

Earlier works by Lucien Marie Francois Famechon, Jules Machat, Fernand Rouget, Laurent Jean B. Bérenger-Férand, Ch. Bour, and others, centering upon the peoples, economies, and terrain of coastal rivers, continued to be instructive, but these authors were writing at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and they tended to treat the histories of indigenous peoples as interesting and exotic and at the same time relatively unimportant to the colony's regional development.

Michael Scott, the long-term Gandhi-esque opponent of the South African government, was a man of many talents and one of his ignored skills was using a cine-camera. Between 1946 and 1948 as he worked in Tobruk squatter settlement near Johannesburg and environs and traveled to Namibia, in addition to his powerful writing, he also filmed scenes he encountered. The purpose of this note is to share the delight of viewing “Civilization on Trial in South Africa.” It is, as far as I can ascertain, the first “protest” film made in South Africa, yet is not mentioned in the standard histories of film in southern Africa (Cancel 2004, Davis, 1996, Botha/van Aswegen 1992, Tomaselli 1988). While working on another project I fortuitously came across a copy in the Smithsonian Film Archives that I had copied and have deposited in the Namibian Archives.

The Smithsonian catalog dates this 24-minute edited black and white film to ca. 1950, and believes that it was shot between 1946 and 1952, prior to the implementation of the Group Areas Act, although it seems likely that shooting was completed earlier, before Scott was declared a Prohibited Immigrant in the late 1940s. Certainly, reading the documents on Scott's travels to Namibia, it seems likely that portions of his film was shot before 1948. In his autobiography, A Time to Speak, Scott mentioned showing the film in 1949 (Scott 1958:248). The Smithsonian obtained the film from the late Colin Turnbull, an Oxford educated Africanist anthropologist (J. Homiak, personal comment).

Towards the end of 1886 four missionaries set foot on Cameroonian soil in the harbor of Douala. They were representatives of the Switzerland based Basel Mission (BM) who had arrived to take over from the pioneers of Christian mission work in Cameroon, the British Baptists, two years after this part of west-central Africa had been brought under German colonial rule in 1884. Their challenge was founded on the key objectives of consolidating and expanding the web of christian communities which had been established along the Atlantic coast north of the Wouri estuary.

Today, just over 110 years later, traces of the Basel Mission's enterprise are widely spread over the Anglophone South West and North West Provinces of Cameroon. These remnants of the past have been partly reshaped to suit the specific patterns of church activities and administration among their African target groups; partly they have been effaced through the erosive impact of time. But only partly, for numerous episodes and aspects of this chapter on religious and social history are well documented both in substantial collections of records and in several publications.

De Heeren Thienen, executives of the college of directors of the West-Indische Compagnie (W.I.C.) in Amsterdam, demanded that their directors-general in Elmina keep accurate journals or day books, copies of which had to be sent to Holland regularly and at short intervals (one to three months), to each of the five “Kamers” or Chambers: Amsterdam, Zeeland, Maas, Stad, and Lande en Noorderquartier. These journals were produced during most of the period of two and a half centuries that the Dutch resided at the Gold Coast. All of the still-existing journals are now stored at the Algemeen Rijksarchief (ARA) in The Hague in Holland.

Unfortunately, many of the manuscripts dating from before 1700 have gone, lost either by deliberate destruction, by thoughtless bureaucrats, or by accidental fires. Of the manuscripts now in the ARA many are in poor condition and are not available for consultation; others are being microfilmed, which makes studying these valuable documents somewhat tiresome. Fortunately, when I transcribed the day book of 1721 on my laptop computer, I was lucky enough to be able to use the original manuscript; a few weeks after I had finished this job the manuscript was microfilmed and is now available only in that format. The only other existing transcription of a journal of Elmina was published in 1953 by Karel Ratelband, whose Vijf dagregisters van het kasteel Sao Jorge Da Mina, covers the years 1645 to 1647.

The journals of Elmina written or dictated by the directors-general were used by the Heeren Thienen in Amsterdam primarily as a tool to control their staff on the Gold Coast.

The field of the methodology of oral tradition has become increasingly specialized and technical. This much is clear from even a casual acquaintance with publications in this area. The fact is that ever since the publication in 1961 of Jan Vansina's epoch-making book, Oral Tradition, the study of the methodology of oral tradition has become a minor academic industry among historians, psychohistorians and anthropologists. Different aspects of the problems posed by the use of this family of historical evidence--dating and chronology, reliability, methods of collection and preservation, techniques of analysis (synchronic, diachronic, and multi-disciplinary)--continue to be probed in monographs, learned journals, and higher degree theses.

This wide-ranging and laudable concern for the methodology of oral tradition has not only helped to underlie the centrality of oral tradition as a source for the history of Africa, especially of Black Africa, in the precolonial period or even in the colonial period; it has also made all would-be exploiters of this source alert to many of the problems associated with its use. Yet it must be conceded that all this feverish, if determined, activity has not established, and there is little likelihood that it will ever establish, a science of oral tradition as exact and universal in its application as the methods of physics and mathematics. Each user of oral tradition, like each user of documentary or other sources of history, still has, and always will have, to decide for himself, and in the light of criteria and parameters acceptable to him, what use to make of each corpus of tradition and of each event or strand in the corpus.

This brief introduction to a special section on Digital History in African Studies situates three articles on recent digital humanities initiatives among African historians within the broader histories of the use of digital methodologies in the study of Africa. In particular, it highlights the way that Africanist digital scholarship sits at the intersection of digital historical representation, community engagement, and academic research. While Africanist digital history builds on the work of a much broader digital humanities community, historians of Africa also draw on their discipline’s long history of methodological innovation to raise important questions about the potential contributions and limitations of digital technologies in academic research.

The violent and competitive context in which trade relations between the states of Senegambia and Europeans evolved required moments of calm and stability, which were decisive and important factors in the cohabitation of trade actors. Diplomacy was a fundamental political lever for European trade in Senegambia. It had become a major stake in the daily lives of the actors. Diplomacy was generally reserved for field actors from different political cultures and with different political and economic ambitions. Diplomacy took the form of negotiations, and took the form of simple agreements of principle, notably in the context of palavers, or the conclusion of trade and peace treaties. The aim of diplomacy, for example, was to establish strong, peaceful commercial relations between trade players and to regularize the tax system, which was the fundamental basis of trade and the expression of the sovereignty of local chiefs towards the Europeans.

This paper considers an under-used and under-discussed archive of unpublished documentary sources that concern the rise and fall of an eastern Congolese warlord, Ngongo Luteta, during the late nineteenth century. It argues that Africanist historians not only need to pay greater attention to unpublished documentary sources – the weight of methodological discussion usually orients around oral sources – but also to treat them with the same interpretive rigor as oral sources. The argument is demonstrated by discussing the existing studies of Ngongo Luteta, which tend to focus on oral fieldwork even while they often employ documentary sources, and, then, pointing to some interpretive strategies for unpublished documentary sources that suggests a more complicated history of the interactions between Ngongo Luteta and the emergent Congo Free State.

Gluckman’s 1940 essay “An Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand” (aka as “The Bridge”) is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential in social anthropology for signalling a paradigm shift. This paper publishes a chapter of a previously unpublished, undated manuscript by Gluckman – probably from 1946 – describing how he did fieldwork in Zululand. A contextualizing essay discusses why Gluckman went to Zululand, what his preparations were, how he famously got “banned,” the role of the regent and the native commissioners in orchestrating this, and how local anti-semitism also played its part. It also suggests that his “banning,” coupled to his marriage in 1939 to Mary Brignoli, a member of the communist party, were crucial factors leading to this paradigm change. Finally, the afterlife of “The Bridge” is sketched showing how dismal was its original reception among peers and colleagues.

All social groups make rules and attempt, at some times and under some circumstances, to enforce them. Social rules define situations and the kinds of behavior appropriate to them, specifying some actions as “right” and forbidding others as “wrong.” When a rule is enforced, the person who is supposed to have broken it may be seen as a special kind of person, one who cannot be trusted to live by the rules agreed on by the group. He is regarded as an outsider.

But the person who is thus labeled an outsider may have a different view of the matter. He may not accept the rule by which he is being judged and may not regard those who judge him as either competent or legitimately entitled to do so. Hence, a second meaning of the term emerges: the rule-breaker may feel his judges are outsiders.

Peter Hartwig was a German seminarian recruited by the Church Missionary Society in 1803 to serve as one of its first two missionaries in Africa. He was sent to Freetown, a settlement established for Africans and people of African descent who had returned to Africa from Britain and the Americas. Hartwig was to reside at Freetown temporarily and to be supervised while there by a locally-based Corresponding Committee composed of Sierra Leone Company officials. The Society directed that, after a year's residence in Sierra Leone, Hartwig and his fellow recruit Melchior Renner would establish a mission among Susu peoples north of Freetown, where they were to convert indigenous Africans to Christianity. Hartwig, however, failed to meet the Society's expectations, violated the norms of the Corresponding Committee that the Society had established at Freetown to guide mission progress, and left the Society's service within three years of reaching the coast. He seemingly had become unable to adjust to changing realities, a wrongdoer and a moral example to other missionaries of what to avoid becoming.3 How are we to interpret his failure from a sociological perspective?

This article describes the archives of the Fellowship Foundation, best known as the organizers of the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC. The secretive character of the Fellowship probably accounts for its lack of visibility in African historical narratives to date. This article makes a case that this evangelical network was significant as a clandestine “track two” diplomatic organization with ties throughout Africa. Historians of international relations, it is suggested, may find useful sources in the public archives of Fellowship Foundation correspondence at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College in Illinois. The article reviews the records for several countries and offers examples of the banal, secretive, and sometimes usefully suggestive evidence to be found in the correspondence.

The Malagueta Coast can serve as a classic example of a region which was integrated into the world economy as a result of world demand for its resources—spices and labor in the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries, and again in the nineteenth century palm oil, cocos fiber, and labor—and has sunk into oblivion once the demand ceased. It is similar with Liberia's rubber and iron ore industry of the twentieth century. I had wanted to write this paper, which reconstructs the discovery and commercial exploitation of the coast through a systematic analysis of published maps and reports, ever since I walked and paddled along this coast in 1968. Furthermore I intend to review the discovery of the coast in the perspective of overall Portuguese policy and politics (interior and foreign). Last, but not least, this is to help students of Liberian and West African history with a review of the early sources—among which maps are by far the most abundant.

The Portuguese legacy to Africa is enshrined in coastal toponymy until today. Avelino Teixeira da Mota in his “Topónimos de origem portuguesa” focused on Portuguese names still surviving in the nineteenth century, but I will focus here on contemporary fifteenth- and sixteenth-century nomenclature and what it might reveal about the African discoveries. The Portuguese initially were attracted by gold at the Rio d'Ouro (later Spanish Sahara), then slaves, and eventually malagueta—a substitute for Indian pepper—commodities known on the Lisbon market and which served to name the coasts: malagueta, marfim, ouro, esclavos. Diogo Gomes was the first to actually see Malagueta on the Gambia in 1445, but the malagueta coast was not discovered until after Henry's the Navigator's death in 1460.

Palavers, great meetings, grand conferences, “tribal” meetings— these are terms used to describe meetings among peoples in and near Sierra Leone, meetings in which political, diplomatic, and economic questions are discussed and sometimes resolved at the village, intervillage, and occasionally, national levels. These conferences vary in size and importance, depending on dimensions of conflicts or questions to be resolved. This paper focuses on one such conference that convened at Forékariah, the capital of Moria, in 1805 and on circumstances leading to it. It is based largely upon a lengthy first-hand report deposited at the University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago. This paper is presented in two parts: a description of the conference and its placement in Sierra Leone and Morian histories, and the text of the report produced by Sierra Leone observers.

From the earliest records of British officials at Sierra Leone, there are citations to specific “indigenous” meetings and allusions to others that supposedly occurred (indeed they would have had to occur for certain events to follow). One of the earliest large conferences described in detail in these records is one that convened at Forékariah from 24 March to 6 April 1805. The extant contemporary written record of this conference was produced by Alexander Smith, the Sierra Leone Company's and Governor William Day's principal representative at the conference. Other observers from Freetown included William Francis, Andrew Moore, Captain Smith, and Charles Shaw. Alexander Smith did not identify a specific interpreter nor describe what method he used to record the detailed arguments presented by participants. Certainly the filter of language and inter pretation must have influenced the record's content. If one places the conference within the framework of Company and Sierra Leone history, however, and accepts the premise that the Freetown observers were relatively unbiased since they were not principal parties to the palavers resolved, the report can be seen as one of a very few in which Sierra Leone's officials presented themselves in such uninvolved fashion.