During the course of a long and fruitful career as an historian and librarian, David Henige has made major contributions to the development of the field of African history, as well as to the historical profession in general. His insistence that historians reflect carefully on how they collect, sample and analyze their data, and the lucid way in which he has written about the historian's craft, has not only helped to remind us historians of important methodological concerns, it has also inspired us to engage with methodology as an exciting topic in its own right. One major theme in his work has been that of literacy and its impact on oral tradition, memory, and historical interpretation. His book Oral Historiography (1982) and his articles on “feedback” and chronology in oral tradition have become essential reading for all students of African history. While among historians of Africa, it is particularly in this area where he has made most if an impact, David Henige has also made important contributions to other fields of history. He is a remarkably versatile and widely read historian, who has engaged with an impressively broad range of topics – and in each case with a strong methodological concern. His wide-ranging oeuvre and impact are explored in detail in Michel Doortmont's contribution to this special issue.

My own history with David Henige goes back to 1985, when I had just finished a master's degree in African studies at the Centre of West African Studies in Birmingham, England, and was looking for a place and a supervisor for a planned doctoral dissertation involving a historiographical study of Nigeria. One of my supervisors, Tom McCaskie, suggested getting in touch with Henige, to see if he could assist me. The reply was elaborate and positive, which I appreciated much. Circumstances for graduate students at the time being quite different from the present, and funding systems for study abroad still in their infancy, the plan came to nothing. The connection with Henige and his work was there to stay, however.

This article is an effort to give a reflection on David Henige's career and his impact on the discipline of history in Africa, through his work as editor of History in Africa. The scope of the reflection is limited, as we concentrate on David's own contributions, rather than setting him and his work in a comparative framework. When David Henige started History in Africa in 1974, it was yet another scholarly journal on Africa, in an ever-growing series, counting already more than two hundred titles, as Henige pointed out himself. And indeed, in such circumstances, a new journal needs ‘to justify itself to the audience it addresses.’

In a review of my first published book one of the founding figures of african historical studies suggested that instead of giving so much attention to European colonial administrators and African traditional chiefs I should have focused upon “the clerks, the schoolmasters and the evangelists, who were to take the lead when indirect rule had failed.” The terms in which this admonition was expressed implies a confidence in the nationalist project of “educated elites” that is less tenable today than it was during the 1960s. Nonetheless, in the late stages of my own career I have come to the conclusion that of the various occupational categories cited by Roland Oliver, African clerks do deserve greater examination than they have received so far in the historiography of colonial Africa. However, if they do prefigure the political leadership of postcolonial Africa, it is less in the heroic and innovative mode of “nation-building” than in the more problematic and continuous role as “gate-keepers,” or “brokers” (honest or not) between subject populations and external sources of power/patronage.

I am not alone in this concern and an entire recent volume of essays has been dedicated to the study of such colonial “African intermediaries.” I contributed a chapter to this book and have continued to pursue a study of colonialism from “the middle” (as opposed to the “above” of my previous work as well as the social history “from below” that emerged in more recent decades). The focus of my research on this topic is upon two figures who are of both historical and literary significance: Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1900-1991), the very renowned Malian writer and scholar who produced a memoir about his early career as a colonial clerk; and “Wangrin,” a clerk and interpreter of an earlier generation, who is the subject of Hampâté Bâ's most widely read book.

In his book In My Father's House Anthony Appiah made a powerful argument for historians and intellectuals at large to recognize the diverse and complex nature of Africa's cultural and historical experiences. He stated, for instance, that: “ideological decolonization is bound to fail if it neglects either endogenous ‘tradition’ or exogenous ‘Western’ ideas, and that many African (and African American) intellectuals have failed to find a negotiable middle way.”

During the past fifty years, Africanist historians have focused much of their efforts on the goals of decolonizing or Africanizing the study of the African past. These have been guided by the need to produce a more authentic and relevant history of the continent. The search for such authenticity has shown that African cultures and societies are often the result of a broad range of influences and that the notions of what is indigenous or authentically African needs to take into account this historical complexity. Intellectual historians, in particular, have faced this question with regards to written sources. The question of literacy and its impact on the intellectual development of Africa is an interesting example of how historians have made some strides towards redefining the notion of a decolonized African history.

I can claim no direct pedigree from African Studies at Wisconsin, but one of my own graduate school mentors, Robert Harms, benefitted from David Henige's and Jan Vansina's influence; all three have profoundly marked my own approaches to the historical anthropology of equatorial Africa. In this paper I draw on David Henige's illuminating and still relevant insights into the problem of “feedback,” in light of a key methodological preoccupation in my own discipline of anthropology – “fieldwork.” In particular I want to suggest how ethnographic fields are formed over time through a layering process that involves ongoing cycles of intertwined oral and written traditions.

Henige's 1973 article, “The Problem of Feedback in Oral Tradition,” prefigures by a full decade Terence Ranger's highly influential essay on “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” In that 1973 article, Henige argued that given traditions were “dynamic over time.” British Indirect Rule had led the Fante of the Gold Coast to devise new oral traditions in order to take advantage of opportunities of British Colonialism. In particular, he cites the ways printed sources, especially the Bible, but also the Qur'an, colonial sources, publications, and later scholarly works, have all found their way back into oral accounts. Henige also suggests that pre-colonial oral traditions also would have been continually reworked; present practices suggest considerable adaptability and flexibility in the past.

On 19 January 1482, a Portuguese fleet of ships under the command of Captain Don Diego d'Azambuja landed at Elmina (a small town on the Gold Coast, what is now Ghana). D'Azambuja immediately set up a meeting with the king of Elmina. King Kwamena Ansa, dressed in all of his finery, met with the Portuguese captain, and during this meeting d'Azambuja asked for permission to build a permanent settlement. At first, Ansa denied his request, stating that he should watch the waves of the sea. Just as they come to the shore, reach the shore, and go back, so too should he continue to come to Elmina, trade, and go back to Portugal. After persistent requests however, Ansa finally agreed and allowed the Portuguese to build a fort known today as Elmina Castle.

I first heard this story from men and women in Elmina during field research there in 2001. When I asked people to tell me about the history of the town and gave them free rein to discuss any topic of their choosing, this was often the story that they chose to tell. Kwamena Ansa, it seems, is a local legend. His fame has extended beyond Elmina however, and into Western scholarship. In particular, David Henige has tracked the emergence of Ansa within Elmina's oral tradition. Henige argues that, while this historical figure can be traced through written sources reaching all the way back to the early sixteenth century, his recognition as a past king by local residents in Elmina has a much shorter history. Indeed, Ansa first emerged in kinglists dating back only to the 1920s and 1930s. During this time, Henige argues, local residents began reading European texts about Elmina's history in order to negotiate colonial courts. The inclusion of Ansa on kinglists represents, therefore, an example of feedback, which is the process of the integration of information from the written record into the oral tradition.

Literacy is a personally acquired skill, and the way it is taught to a person changes how that person thinks. Thanks to David Henige historians of Africa are much more aware of how literacy influences memory and historical imagination, and particularly how literacy systems introduce linear concepts of time and space. This essay will deal with these two aspects in relation to Africa's most famous epic: Sunjata. This epic has gained a major literary status worldwide—text editions are taught as part of undergraduate courses at universities all over the world—but there has been little extensive field research into the epic. The present essay focuses on an even less studied aspect of Sunjata, namely how Sunjata is experienced by local people.

Central to my argument is an idea put forward by Peter Geschiere, who links the upheaval of autochthony claims in Africa (and beyond) to issues of citizenship and processes of exclusion. He analyzes these as the product of feelings of “belonging.” Geschiere argues that issues of belonging should be studied at a local level if we are to understand how individuals experience autochthony. Analytically, Geschiere proposes shifting away from ”identity” by drawing from Birgit Meyer's work ideas on the aesthetics of religious experience and emotion; Meyer's ideas are useful to explain “how some (religious) images can convince, while other do not.”

Doubt persists in pastoralist studies, but not the kind that David Henige champions in his explorations of historical methods. Nostalgia for past glories, when pastoral nomads were mighty and fierce or healthy and wise, throws doubt on today's mobile livestock herders surviving for much longer in modern times. Scholars of this sort direct their skepticism not at how they came to such a conclusion, which Henige would urge them to do, but at how “traditional” herding ways of life can possibly survive vis-à-vis “modernity.” In such a “disappearing worlds” approach to change, where students of pastoralist cultures confront their subjects through their approaching demise, documenting the ways of life of pastoralist peoples before they disappear has deeply romantic overtones.

Henige's pyrrhonist skepticism aids in exposing the assumptions behind such a romantic scholarly endeavor. “Pyrrhonists demand,” Henige reminds us, “that, to be successful, all inquiry must be characterized by rhythms of searching, examining, and doubting, with each sequence generating and influencing the next in a continuously dialectical fashion.” In his Montaigne-like essayistic book, Historical Evidence and Argument, doubting does not end inquiry like a one-man scorched-earth policy, but sets David on a journey with many twists and turns and no end in sight. Along the way, the implicit has a chance to become more explicit. Methods – the ways that we search for, examine, and doubt our evidence and eventual arguments – are thus revealed more effectively when made a subject of critical reasoning and their revelatory powers questioned.

In 1995 I whined to Dave Henige about the difficulties involved in producing a 753-page volume of 383 pages of translated poetry (each including a work number, language of the original, source of the text, an historical introduction, and related text section) containing three orthographies, four languages, 947 footnotes, 241 pages of barely-arranged Arabic-script (but not all Arabic language) facsimiles, six maps, three glossaries, two works cited lists (published and unpublished), two appendices, and an index – all without a copy editor, and for a press demanding camera-ready copy from two novices an ocean apart who had access only to primitive email (remember CompuServe?) that would scramble poetic verse and jumble margins. When I finally took a breath, he smiled. Dave loves a challenge, and loves even more, passing one on. “Write about it,” he said. Suddenly I found myself signed up for the “Technical Problems in Preparing Text and Translations for Camera-Ready Copy” Historical Texts Panel at ASA's 1996 meetings. But that was not enough for Dave. He also expected an article, which I duly produced: “This Will (Not) Be Handled By the Press: Problems and Their Solution in Preparing Camera-Ready Copy for The Collected Works of Nana Asma'u, Daughter of Usman Dan Fodiyo 1793-1864” for History in Africa 25 (1998). In fact, it was Dave who rained on our anticipated title, “The Complete Works…,” dryly inquiring, “How can you be sure?” So it was “Collected Works…” instead.

In 2003 Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh I's eighty-nine page manuscript ‘The History of Ashanti Kings and the whole country itself’ of 1907 was published in an annotated scholarly edition alongside a selection of allied texts. The same publisher is to produce a related volume containing the four hundred and fifty pages of Asantehene Osei Agyeman Prempeh II's ‘History of Ashanti’ written in the 1940s (and edited by myself). Both of these texts are written in English. However, the huge range of sources on the Asante past recorded in Akan Twi have yet to receive equal attention and treatment. This short paper introduces and contextualises one source of this kind that was researched in Asante between 1902-1910 and finished in written form in Akan Twi in 1915.

The Akuapem (Akwapim) kingdom is located less than thirty miles northeast of Ghana's capital at Accra. It has always been and remains a small polity. It comprises only seventeen historic towns scattered among hills on two parallel ridges about fifteen hundred feet above sea level. There are more towns today, many created by the cocoa economy of the early twentieth century, but Akuapem remains a compact entity. It is a Twi-speaking Akan kingdom, but an unusual one in that it is ethnically diverse.

Patrilineal Guan-speaking farmers settled on the Akuapem ridges in the early decades of the seventeenth century. They were oppressed by the matrilineal Twi-speaking Akan of the nearby Akwamu kingdom. To end this situation the Guan recruited other Akan Twi speakers as allies. These were military adventurers from the Akyem Abuakwa polity to the west. The Akyem incomers succeeded against the Akwamu but stayed on to establish their own conquest dynasty in 1733.

On the evening of 8 October 1973, a group of physicians led a watchnight ceremony on the campus of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra, Ghana. At midnight, Dr. Portuphy-Lamptey, the Chief Medical Administrator, pulled a lanyard to raise an official flag inaugurating the Hospital's Golden Jubilee Anniversary. The next day, the Ghanaian Commissioner for Health, Lieutenant Colonel A.H. Selormey, unveiled an anniversary plaque that thanked and praised the hospital staff who had worked at Korle Bu over the past fifty years. In a speech to assembled dignitaries, Selormey appealed to Ghanaians to use the Golden Jubilee Celebration as a means of arousing a “full consciousness” of Ghana's “great heritage.” In the months that followed, the 50th Anniversary Celebration Committee organized a series of events to commemorate the role of the institution in the history of the Gold Coast and Ghana, including a formal dinner during which the assembled guests joined together to sing Korle Bu Oyiwala doŋŋ, a popular tribute to the hospital sung in the local language of Ga (see Figure 1). Several months later, at the closing ceremony, the Committee unveiled a statue of Gordon Guggisberg, the British governor credited with building the hospital, an iconic image that is still standing in front of the hospital today.

During the last fifty years, several debates have waxed and waned regarding the implications of literacy for African history. Among social scientists in general and social anthropologists in particular, Jack Goody and Ian Watt's survey of “The Consequences of Literacy” (1963) for hitherto preliterate or partially literate and now modernizing societies, drew attention to one suggested transformation: “The importance of writing lies in its creating a new medium of communication. (…) Its essential service is to objectify speech, to provide language with a material correlative, a set of visible signs. In this material form speech can be transmitted over space and preserved over time; what people say and think can be rescued from the transitoriness of oral communication.” The consequences, in Goody and Watt's view, were immensely important: “In oral societies the cultural tradition is transmitted almost entirely by face-to-face communication; and changes in its content are accompanied by the homeostatic process of forgetting or transforming those parts of the tradition that cease to be either necessary or relevant. Literate societies, on the other hand, cannot discard, absorb or transmute the past in the same way. Instead, their members are faced with permanently recorded versions of the past and its beliefs; and because the past is thus set apart from the present, historical enquiry becomes possible. This in turn encourages scepticism; and scepticism, not only about the legendary past, but about received ideas about the universe as a whole.”

The largely literate African employees of European businesses during the colonial and postcolonial period have not been studied as a group, unlike miners, railway workers and colonial intermediaries. This group has nevertheless been of great importance. Many of its members became part of the core of the management of African-owned enterprises and organizations, others started their own businesses or became successful politicians. African employees of European business, alongside government employees, formed the basis of the rapidly growing middle classes during the period after the Second World War. They gave their children a Western-style education, often at well-respected schools. In many local communities the “manager” became a figure of respect. Many employees were elected to traditional office as chiefs. Such successes were not limited to those employees who made it into management. For example, a carpenter with a steady career with a European company could build and own several houses. These African employees domesticated capitalism in West Africa, mediated changes in consumption and the rise of a consumer society, and adopted European expectations of career progression and life cycle. Working for a European business, they also found themselves at important sites of contestation during colonial and postcolonial political struggles.

Beginning in late August 1974, I spent eight months in The Gambia, collecting oral traditions. My intention was to use what I obtained to reconstruct the history of Niumi, a precolonial “state” (Mandinka: banko) located at the mouth of the Gambia River. Over three centuries of slave trading in the river, Niumi was a dominant player in the region's political economy. Thus, one of my primary goals was to learn how Gambians remembered the centuries-long commerce that connected people living along the Gambia River to a vast Atlantic economic system, the heart of which was the sale and transportation of humans.

To my disappointment, with only a few exceptions, Gambian informants did not recall much about the slave trade. In Albreda and Juffure, the two Gambia-River villages where people were most involved in dealings with Europeans during the slave-trading era, the best informants could say little beyond noting ruins of old buildings and mentioning vague doings of “the Portuguese.” In the end, only three informants were able and willing to say anything beyond the most banal generalities about the capture, movement, and sale of slaves that occurred in the Gambia River. My assessment was that in the body of stories that Gambians held in their collective memory, a vast void existed between tales of the long-ago, and likely mythical, origins of a clan, village, or state and events that occurred much more recently, in this case after the British settled Bathurst, near the river's mouth, in 1816.

Why explore the life of an archive, and what might it mean to study its “life” as opposed to writing its history? The proposition of an archive having a life is, on the face of it, counter-intuitive. Once safely cloistered in the archive, we imagine that a record, an object or a collection is preserved relatively unchanged for posterity. Under those conditions does it even have an ongoing history worth investigating, let alone a life?

The efficacy of archives in affording researchers a view of a past, our awareness of the incompleteness of the glimpse offered, our gratitude for the historical accident or deliberate act that preserved the fragments on which we depend, and our understanding that particular records reflect the biases and interests of their writers, all of these recognitions concentrate our attention on the status, possibilities and limitations of records as sources. The historical disciplines have a range of sophisticated methods for mining these sources, of attending to their biases, reading them against the grain, and filling in the gaps. As historians, we acknowledge our debts to the archives, or archival configurations which house these sources, thanking fulsomely the skilled professionals who facilitate our enquiries. We rue failing institutional contexts when the conditions of preservation and care deteriorate, and where we can, we organize interventions to support archives. Much of the disciplinary practice of history depends on ideas about archives as neutral, professional storehouses, committed to holding deposited records as far as is possible unchanged over time. Indeed, this is the understanding of archives that underpins the professional practice of the archivists. Thankfully, professional archivists mostly do an outstanding job in ensuring conditions of preservation.

In the six years from October 1897 to October 1903, Ndukwana kaMbengwana engaged in scores of conversations in numerous different locations with magistrate James Stuart about the history and culture of the nineteenth-century Zulu kingdom. In the 1880s Ndukwana had been a lowranking official in the native administration of Zululand; at an unknown date before late 1900 he seems to have become Stuart's personal induna or “headman,” to give a common English translation. Stuart's handwritten notes of these conversations, as archived in the James Stuart Collection, come to a total of 65,000 to 70,000 words. As rendered in volume 4 of the James Stuart Archive, published in 1986, these notes fill 120 printed pages, far more than the testimonies of any other of Stuart's interlocutors except Socwatsha kaPhaphu. From 1900, Ndukwana was also present during many of Stuart's conversations with other individuals.

In the editors' preface to volume 4 of the James Stuart Archive, after drawing attention to the length of Ndukwana's testimony, Colin Webb and I wrote as follows:

Ebrahiem Manuel sits opposite me, about to embark upon his story. His living room is filled with material manifestations of his research: boxes overflowing with books and papers cover his entire sofa, newspapers and articles line the floor, and collages of images and texts hang on the walls and sit in the cabinets. It is clear that he is consumed by his passion for heritage, and his personal journey of discovery. He speaks in an animated, almost theatrical tone, raising and lowering his voice, stressing certain syllables, alive as he tells his story of “the ancient kietaabs.”

The journey began in 1997, when Ebrahiem returned to South Africa after years at sea, working as a cook on shipping vessels. Upon his return, he began a quest to learn about his personal heritage, inspired by a dream he had had about his grandfather. This search led him to an old kietaab, given to him by an elderly aunt. This was not the first time he had come across the old book; he remembered seeing it as a child, amongst other kietaabs, stored out of reach of the children, on top of his grandfather's wardrobe. It was inside this book that a possible key to his ancestors was to be found.

This significant find was a range of hand-written inscriptions inside the book, in Arabic, English, and an unknown script. The Arabic script and its corresponding English transliteration read “Imaam Abdul Karriem, son of Imaam Abdul Jaliel, son of Imaam Ismail of Sumbawa.” Here was his family tree, starting from his great-grandfather and leading to two generations before him and, it seemed, their place of origin, the island of Sumbawa in eastern Indonesia. Ebrahiem then decided to go to Indonesia to solve what had become the mystery of “the ancient kietaab.”

Aḥmad Bul‘arāf died in September 1955 and was buried in his adopted Timbuktu. He was laid to rest in the town's Sīdi al-Wāfi al-Amīr al-Arawāni cemetery but it would be hard to identify his grave. Gravestones soon disappear into their natural sandy settings. At the time he was widely eulogized for his life's work as a man of religion, culture, and knowledge. Well-known scholars and copyists of his era composed panegyric verses in his honour. One wrote:

Decades later he still lives on in the memories of scholars as a “great hero and famous scholar, reviver of Islamic culture,” as a young writer described him in 1986, in a carefully handwritten essay in a local calligraphic style devoted to his achievement. Composed in “Sudani” script in blue ink with headings in red, when the typewriter, if not the PC, had long ago arrived in the region, this encomium to Bui‘arāf was a fitting tribute to a man who loved the written word. He cared for ideas expressed on paper, for their circulation, and how books could be stored for use in the present and in the future. He was devoted to conserving the manuscript heritage of Timbuktu. His own calligraphy in various regional variants was widely recognized and he practiced it without hesitation in the print age.