Earlier I discussed the potential of physical anthropology for the reconstruction of precolonial history in Africa. As a traditional branch of the biological sciences, physical anthropology draws on advances in genetics, population genetics, numerical taxonomy, and other biological disciplines whose paradigms define a logical framework by which the biological history of human populations can be explored. Sophisticated techniques can now be applied not only to the study of biological history, but also to the investigation of hypotheses of wider historical interest (i.e., those arising from the consideration of nonbiological sources of historical evidence). Having outlined some of the possibilities of new techniques and contrasted them to more basic techniques available to pre-war physical anthropologists, who tended to be preoccupied by the construction of racial taxonomies, I ended the paper by discussing ways by which the wider historical potential of physical anthropology could begin to be realized.

In this sequel the onus is on trying to demonstrate in a limited way some of these possibilities through an empirical study. The study in question is a biological survey of Kenyan peoples which I undertook in the early and mid-1970s. During this survey I obtained palm and finger prints from over 6,000 primary and secondary school children drawn from some 60 population units (tribes and sub-tribes). The finger and palm prints provided over 150 biological measures, which are genetically determined, to compare the population units sampled and to analyze the biological patterns of differentiation of Kenyan peoples.

In September 1987, early in my research at the Kenya National Archives, I came across a collection of photographs taken by a British missionary during the 1920s and early 1930s. The collection contained nearly 250 photos of the terrain and people of Kenya's Taita Hills, where I would soon be going for my fieldwork. I pored over the photo collection for a long time, and had reproductions made of twenty-five shots. The names of those pictured had been recorded in the photo album's captions. Many of the names were new to me, though a few WaTaita of the day who had figured prominently in the archival records were also captured on film. When I moved on to Taita in early 1988,1 took the photographs with me. Since I would be interviewing men and women old enough either to remember or be contemporaries of the people in the pictures, I planned to show the photos during the interviews. At first I was simply curious about who some of the people pictured were, but my curiosity quickly evolved into a more ambitious plan. I decided to try using the photographs as visual prompts to get people to speak more expansively than they otherwise might about their lives and their experiences.

In the event, I learned that using the photographs in interviews involved many more complexities than I had envisaged in my initial enthusiasm. I found that I had to alter the expectations and techniques I took to Taita, and feel out some of the limitations of working with the photographic medium. I had to recognize the power relations embedded in my presence as a researcher in Taita, in my position as bearer of images from peoples' pasts, and in the photos themselves. I found, too, that I needed to come to grips with a number of issues about the politics of image production, and the historical product of those politics: the bounded, selected images that are photographs. Finally, I had to address some of my own cultural assumptions about photography and how people respond to pictures, assumptions that my informants did not necessarily share.

In Paris 1931, the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme published the pamphlet, Un forfait colonial: l'esclavage en Mauritanie. Its author was a man best known in the context of radical Dahomean politics, Louis Hunkanrin, who had cause to know Mauritania better than he would have liked during ten years spent there in political exile. This exposé of slavery in Mauritania is a curious concoction -- general information damning the morals, values and work ethic of Moorish society; selected cases of injustice drawn from his personal experience; a lengthy report by a medical official despairing of Mauritania's poor food production and its relation to the slave situation; an eloquent letter to the Governor of Mauritania presenting a defense of his own actions; brutal attacks on particular French administrators; all with a large dose of French patriotism liberally sprinkled throughout. As stated in his preface, Hunkanrin's aim in exposing the crimes committed against the blacks in Mauritania was none other than “to illuminate the true face of France in this territory where the French flag flies—emblem of peace, liberty, and justice: the France of the Rights of Man, maternal France, good, generous and just,… It is well understood that I am only concerned to serve the interests of France and humanity.”

Some years ago, Robin Winks edited a series of essays entitled The Historian as Detective, invoking the intellectual joys of an Agatha Christie mystery to explain the value of history to society. It drew no examples from Africa, perhaps reflecting the infancy of African historiography at the time. However, it is no exaggeration to say that in the intervening decades, the piecing together of African history has raised for historians challenges of method and complexities of interpretation fully worthy of Hercule Poirot.

Contributions to this recent genre of detective work have been especially notable on the part of those investigating Africa's precolonial past. The reasons for this are many: a paucity of reliable witnesses, extreme difficulty (not to mention expense) in tracking down those who do exist, a shortage of suitably trained and dedicated ‘gum-shoes,’ and an abundance of clues which frustratingly seem to lead at one and the same time ‘both everywhere and nowhere,’ as Poirot would probably put it. But where detectives like him achieved fame and fortune by finding conclusive answers, detectives of early African history have had to settle for the relative obscurity which accompanies the unsolved case. ‘Mysteries’ which leave the choice of solution to the reader are more characteristic of the field than those with definitive, final-page revelations. In this, the quest for “Tarra” proves itself no exception.

Drawing on the Islamic court records of Brava, a small Indian Ocean port city on the southern Benadir coast of Somalia, dating from the period 1893–1900, this essay analyzes the legal agency and economic roles of the women of Brava and sheds new light on social (especially family) relations in this town. The qāḍī’s court records give evidence of married women’s fully recognized (even if qualified) legal personhood and their full-fledged financial and economic agency. The free, married women of Brava of this period contributed fully and autonomously to the economic endeavors of their families and also interacted with non-related businessmen in and beyond Brava. They also had the legal and social capacity to defend their interests in court and to get a fair hearing in accordance with the law. Given that both Somali women’s history and East African legal history suffer from a scarcity of concrete evidence for this time-period, the aspects of everyday life in Brava that come into view in the town’s qāḍī’s court records are of great interest.

Judicial and legal records in the National Archives of Ghana headquarters repositories are important primary source materials for historians, social scientists, and other researchers, and in particular practicing lawyers. The holdings of the national archives service, both in Accra and its network, cover records relating to the political and bureaucratic activities of government. This paper focuses on the Accra holdings pertaining to judicial and legal records, in order to draw attention to the decisive attractiveness of these record series in general and, in particular, the Accra judicial and legal records to a generation inclined to both quantification and sociological analysis and to provide a guide to prospective users.

The headquarters of the national archives service, where the judicial and legal records are located, is situated on Castle Road in Accra near the junction with Barnes Road. The offices are open from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday to Friday. The search room functions between 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. The formal requirement for admission to use the archives materials is the searcher's ticket obtained from the Search Room Officer on the spot.

In this paper I consider how an African historian, Sieh Jeto, plotted his narratives. Sieh was a citizen of Jlao/Sasstown, a Kru polity in Southeastern Liberia. Jlao also author and perform other past-oriented accounts in different genres, and I have written on some of these. There is not room here to discuss all the ways in which Jlao refer to their pasts, and scene-setting is equally brief. I also confine myself to Sieh Jeto's plotting of narrative.

I first encountered Jlao in 1972, and spent a year there in 1975/76. The new regime of President Tolbert at first promised reform, but emergent contradictions and rising opposition culminated in the coup of 1980. Kru groups had several times fought against the ‘Americo Liberian’ government, and in the 1930s Sasstown was the focus of a long war (in which the League of Nations at first intervened) which they lost after painful struggles. No history could be neutral there, and some people were very cautious about provoking official wrath by talking about these times. While fanpote, ‘old time business’, of a distant past might be safer, it was denied in the official ideology that indigenous Liberians had a significant history at all.

It now seems to me that the performances I recorded at different times were part of general changes of consciousness in the country. Sieh Jeto was recommended to me by an eminent Jlao man in Monrovia.

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

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

In 1974 Abdul Hamid M. el Zein published The Sacred Meadows: A Structural Analysis of Religious Symbolism in an East African Town. The town in question was Lamu on an island of the same name off the northern coast of Kenya. The population of Lamu, holding steady at about 5,000 during this century, is mostly Muslim and mostly of mixed Arab and African descent. Arabs began to visit Lamu centuries ago and over time Arab traders settled on the tiny island, married local women, and created what we know today in the larger context along the East African coast as Swahili language and culture. Dhows came each year with the northeast monsoon bringing Arab sailors and a trickle of new immigrants from Arabia. (Not only Arabia, however, as dhows came from many parts of the Indian Ocean to Lamu and the east coast of Africa). As sailors, Lamu people continued to revisit Arabia, among many ports, for commerce as well as for pilgrimage to Mecca. The Arab strain in Lamu culture was therefore reinforced; that culture has therefore tended to sway toward the Indian Ocean in recent centuries and to Arabia in the past one hundred and fifty years.

Until the last decade or so the town had a tight social hierarchy with the old Arab (as they identified themselves) families at the top, followed by Indian traders and merchants (who often worked in partnership with the old families), and then other merchants, such as late nineteenth century arrivals from the Hadramawt, free Africans and Bajuni (the Swahili people from nearby islands), and finally, slaves (or ex-slaves after 1907).

In his foreword to Neil Skinner's first volume of translations of Frank Edgar's collection of Hausa folk stories, M.G. Smith made the following observations on the historical and sociological value of the collection:

“…to students of Hausa culture and history, [Edgar's collection] provides a comprehensive body of diverse materials, much of which being explicitly fictive, is of great ethnographic significance as a projection of Hausa attitudes and practice on to other planes. Together these texts, descriptive and narrative, supply rich first-hand materials on Hausa institutions, inter-ethnic relations and social stratification, supplementing such standard sources as the Kano Chronicle and other Emirate histories, and presenting with insight and economy the characteristic failings, virtues and orientations of Hausa differentiated by rank, sex, age and circumstance. Directly, and in narrative obliquely, the texts also present many insights into Hausa values, beliefs and social orientations. As documents that transmit the flavour of Hausa life and the background of individual experience, they have few rivals.”

It seems appropriate to refer to Smith's observations at the start of this examination of three Hausa poems since, in my opinion very similar observations could be made about the materials in several collections of Hausa prose and poetry made by a number of German scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from one of which the three poems discussed in this paper originate.

It is now possible to apply the concept of problematic to a critique of African history, in the first place to illustrate how the constitution of its object has been the site of certain ideological confrontations. Our analysis derives from the materialist problematic and therefore lays no claim to any spurious neutrality. On the other hand, neither is it ‘ideological’ in the sense of expressing personal or subjective preferences. The ability of historical materialism to produce objective knowledge does not derive from, nor is it guaranteed by, its political purposes, the overthrow of capitalism and the eventual construction of communism, but the achievement of these purposes has as one of its conditions the continuous development of materialist theory and analysis. The following critique is grounded in the concepts and methodology of historical materialism and not in any subjectively rooted ideological ‘choice.’

A preliminary question concerns the extent to which African history provides an object of a critique. There is no assumption that African history is a corpus of knowledge homogeneous in its aims, its concepts, or its methods. The assumption of a unitary object (“the African past”) has been shown to lack any scientific content. The boundaries of African history are indicated in the first place by the course of its emergence as a particular field of academic specialization. In terms of its content, it is hardly surprising that the works of African history produced to date reflect various positions within the terrain of bourgeois social thought. The latter, as we suggested earlier, is not homogeneous and operates at various levels.

In the summer of 1992 I was fortunate enough to visit two large collections of photographs for the purpose of African historical research.Muse and subject of this essay, these collections are housed in the library of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (hereafter FCO) and the library of the Royal Commonwealth Society (hereafter RCS), both in London. Although comparable in some respects, the two contrast sharply in styles of organization. It is this contrast which motivates the present writing, as it illustrates certain effects of the organization of collections on the usefulness of photographs as historical sources, and it leads as well to some reflections on the nature of historical evidence and visual images.

Both the RCS and the FCO have substantial holdings of photographic materials which should be of interest to Africanist historians generally. The size of the RCS collection has been variously estimated at between 45,000 and 70,000 photographs, while that of the FCO is approximately as large. In both cases, the researcher must make an appointment to see the collections, and neither is open to the general public. At the time of this writing, the FCO, having moved to a new location, has closed its photo collection, with no plans to reopen in the near future.

Specialists on Nigeria will find that the FCO and RCS each have over 30 albums relevant to this country's history. The FCO has somewhat larger Nigerian holdings, while the RCS collection will be of greater interest to historians of Sierra Leone and other West African countries. The Nigerian materials in the FCO are generally older, many falling roughly between ca. 1890 and ca. 1920, while the RCS holdings tend to concentrate on the mid-twentieth century. The FCO's Nigeria albums are approximately equally divided between the northern and southern portions of the country, while those of the RCS focus more heavily on northern Nigeria.

This paper highlights a rich source of history of the cultures of foreign peoples hitherto referred to little by academics—the archive and library of the Berlin Mission Society, now the Berliner Missionswerk. It will discuss the immense opportunities that the library and the archives offer for academic research. It is not intended to be a history of the Berlin Mission Society or its institutions but will rather suggest initial points of interest for further investigation. I shall also refer to the present state of research in both history and anthropology of foreign peoples based on an assessment of the materials available in the mission societies in the former German Democratic Republic. This paper then is less a contribution to theoretical problems than an attempt to draw the attention of historians, anthropologists and others to the resources of the Berlin Mission Society.

In the street called Georgenkirchstrasse, No. 70, in East Berlin, opposite the fairy tale Fountain of Friedrichshain and the famous park, is the Berlin Mission House, built in 1873—the location of the Berlin Mission Society, founded in 1824. Until 1991 the latter was called the Ecumenical Missionary Centre/Berlin Mission Society (Ökumenisch-Missionarisches Zentrum/Berliner Missionsgesellschaft).

As one of the largest missionary societies, its missionaries have worked since the mid-nineteenth century in South Africa and later in China and East Africa. In the long history of the Berlin Mission many printed and unpublished texts, as well as drawings, maps, and photographs were collected. The archives retain 270 meters of file. There are also the records of other missions, as well as the largest specialist library for missions and ecumenical movements (50,000 volumes and scholarly papers) in the former GDR.

One of the more perplexing issues in the history of Asante's relations with the Europeans on the nineteenth-century Gold Coast has been that of the origin and significance of the so-called “Elmina Note,” the pay document which authorized the Asantehene to collect two ounces of gold (or its equivalent in trade goods) per month from the Dutch authorities at Elmina. Not only have modern historians of Ghana evidenced no small amount of confusion on this matter, but during 1870/71 the Asantehene, the British, and the Dutch also disagreed strongly over the political significance of the note, as the Dutch negotiated to cede their “possessions” on the Gold Coast to the British. Failure to resolve these disagreements contributed significantly to the Asante decision to invade the British “protected” territories in 1873. This action in turn led to the British invasion of Asante in 1874, which most historians agree constitutes a critical watershed in Asante history. Clearly, the matter of the “Elmina Note” (or kostbrief as it was known to the Dutch) is one of some historical and historiographical importance. An examination of the relevant Dutch, Danish, and British documentation now makes possible a resolution of the major questions concerning its origin and meaning.

The debates between the Asante, the British, and the Dutch show that in the later nineteenth century there was considerable agreement over certain issues: first, no one disputed that the Dutch had for some time past paid to the Asantehene (actually to an envoy dispatched by the king to Elmina) a stipend (or kostgeld, as the Dutch termed it) of two ounces of gold per month, or twentyfour ounces per year.

Twenty–one collaborators and I recently have championed the use of demographic insights in the reconstruction of African history. The advocacy, however, does not mean that we endorse all uses to which demography has been put in the recent literature. We all recognize the delicacy of transferring methods from one discipline to another. In this essay I would like to suggest five pitfalls into which some distinguished scholars have fallen as a caution for further research. Some of the authors of course, may not believe them pit-falls at all, but the production of history requires debates on methods as well as fact and theory.

Before, embarking on this critique, however, let me propose a framework which relates primarily to one of the three major components of demography, the study of mortality. The analysis of mortality in Africa really involves three nested questions which researchers inevitably address either implicitly or explicitly: why do organisms die? why and how do people die? and why and how do people die in Africa? In the course of explaining how demographers answer these questions, I will illustrate the methodological errors which I be¬lieve fellow historians have committed.

Death is the inevitable outcome of life; it comes to all organisms, large and small. The causes of death and disease often work in combination. Some organisms are born defective, genetically unable to function in the same way as others of their species. Others, although properly equipped, experience accidents or shortages of food. Those which have survived to maturity experience aging, a process by which the biological mechanisms which have enabled creatures to repair themselves and to fight off enemies, cease functioning, and death is the final outcome. All these causes of death can occur without the intervention of other creatures. The earth, however, is filled with a variety of organisms which are capable of killing one another. Members of some species kill each other, but the most common causes of death are interspecific, involving the relationships of prédation and parasitism.

Broadcasting archives have been being digitized in West Africa since the 2000s. Their digital transfer, presented as both a solution to their decay and a necessary step to take them into the new century, presents considerable challenges. This article, while emphasizing the historiographical value of the archives as sources and traces, argues that the processes they undergo, which also participate in these technical objects’ afterlife, are connected to a long and circulatory history of cooperation in broadcasting. Located at the interface of past, present, and future, they also provide an opportunity to question certain geopolitical fracture lines, especially those of knowledge and memory.

The IFAN manuscript collection, including several fonds, is a very rich repository of mostly Arabic materials coming from different regions of the former Afrique Occidentale Française. Notwithstanding some of these manuscripts have been explored by historians since the colonial period, the potential of this collection is still untapped. This note focuses on some historical accounts from the Fonds Brevié, Fonds Vieillard, and Fonds Gaden.

In most of Africa there are written materials from the eras before colonialism that offer a view of the kinds of ideas, cultural life, and currents of political thought, as well as practices and events, that predate substantial European engagement. In the present-day South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, and bordering provinces and countries, there are no equivalent discursive materials that predate a European presence. With colonialism, much knowledge about the remote past was stitched up in imperial and colonial knowledge systems and recording practices. In this paper, we discuss what digital interventions and affordances offer in terms of researching the history of the material used as sources for the remote past, and of releasing that material from distorting or anachronistic colonial classifications and categories. We consider the capacities and significance of digital interventions in calling out sequestered and lost materials, in convening innovative new assemblages of material, in creating conditions conducive to the restoration of neglected details of provenance, in documenting the twists and turns involved in the shaping of materials into sources, and in formally recognizing the archival potential of materials, notably the writings of early African literati, long positioned as being something other than sources and as “not-archive.”

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.

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.’