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1
Jones, Adam. "Some Reflections on the Oral Traditions of the Galinhas Country, Sierra Leone." History in Africa 12 (1985): 151–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3171718.
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Whenever historians of Africa write: “According to tradition…”, they evade the crucial question of what kind of oral tradition they are referring to. The assumption that oral tradition is something more or less of the same nature throughout Africa, or indeed the world, still permeates many studies on African history; and even those who have themselves collected oral material seldom pause to consider how significant this material is or how it compares with that available in other areas.The majority of studies of oral tradition have been written by people who worked with fairly formal traditions; and those who, after reading such studies, go and work in societies where such traditions do not exist are often distressed and disappointed. There is therefore still a need for localized studies of oral tradition in different parts of Africa. As far as Sierra Leone is concerned, no work specifically devoted to the nature of oral tradition has been published, despite several valuable publications on the oral literature of the Limba and Mende. The notes that follow are intended to give a rough picture of the kind of oral material I obtained in a predominantly Mende-speaking area of Sierra Leone in 1977-78 (supplemented by a smaller number of interviews conducted in 1973-75, 1980, and 1984). My main interest was in the eighteenth and nineteenth century history of what I have called the Galinhas country, the southernmost corner of Sierra Leone.I conducted nearly all of my interviews through interpreters and did not use a tape recorder more than a very few times. This was partly because the amount of baggage I could carry on foot was limited, but also because I soon found that some informants were disturbed by the tape recorder, and because it was difficult to catch on tape the contributions of all the bystanders.
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Oyewumi, Oyeronke. "Making History, Creating Gender: Some Methodological and Interpretive Questions in the Writing of Oyo Oral Traditions." History in Africa 25 (1998): 263–305. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3172190.
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Of all the things that were produced in Africa during the colonial period—cash crops, states, and tribes, to name a few—history and tradition are the least acknowledged as products of the colonial situation. This does not mean that Africans did not have history before the white man came. Rather, I am making distinctions among the following: firstly, history as lived experience; secondly, history as a record of lived experience which is coded in the oral traditions; and finally, the recently constituted written history. This last category is very much tied up with European engagements with Africa and the introduction of “history writing” as a discipline and as profession. But even then, it is important to acknowledge the fact that African history, including oral traditions, were recorded as a result of the European assault.This underscores the fact that ideological interests were at work in the making of African history, as is true of all history. As such, tradition is constantly being reinvented to reflect these interests. A. I. Asiwaju, for example, in a paper examining the political motivations and manipulations of oral tradition in the constitution of Obaship in different parts of Yorubaland during the colonial period writes: “in the era of European rule, particularly British rule, when government often based most of its decisions over local claims upon the evidence of traditional history, a good proportion of the data tended to be manipulated deliberately.” This process of manipulation produced examples of what he wittily refers to as “nouveaux rois of Yorubaland.”
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Khokholkova, Nadezhda E. "Voices of Africa: Podcastas a New Form of Oral History." Observatory of Culture 18, no. 1 (May 24, 2021): 22–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.25281/2072-3156-2021-18-1-22-31.
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At the beginning of the 21st century, the digital revolution has become global. Digitalization has overcome the boundaries of the field of information technology and began to provoke the metamorphosis of sociocultural reality. Gradually, society itself and, as a consequence, social sciences are changing. African studies, despite the fact that digital transformations in the region have been slow, is no exception. New plots and sources started to appear; new practices and methods began to develop and apply. This article is devoted to the evolution of the oral tradition of the Africans and representatives of the global African diaspora in terms of the “digital turn”. It emphasizes the importance of oral history as one of the main directions in the study of the history and culture of Africa, introduces and analyzes the terms of “orature” and “cyberture”. The author focuses on the transformation of the form and content of African narratives in the post-colonial era. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that it is the first time an African podcast is considered as an oral historical digital source. The article provides a brief overview of podcasts created by people from Sub-Saharan and Southern Africa in the 2010s, describes the prerequisites for creating these projects, their thematic field, and analyzes their features. Particular emphasis is placed on issues of representations and interpretations of the cultural and historical experience of Africans and members of the African diaspora. The main dilemmas of placing podcasts into the context of oral history are articulated at the end of the article. The author also concludes that African podcasts are in line with the metamodern discourse.
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Afigbo, A. E. "Oral Tradition and the History of Segmentary Societies." History in Africa 12 (1985): 1–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3171708.
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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.
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van Dyck, Steven. "Sola Scriptura in Africa: Missions and the Reformation Literacy Tradition." Evangelical Quarterly 90, no. 1 (April 26, 2019): 61–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/27725472-09001004.
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This theoretical reflection addresses issues arising in the history of world Christianity, in particular regarding mission churches in Africa since the nineteenth century. The article first evaluates the development of oral, manuscript and print communication cultures in western culture, and their influence since the first century in the Church. Modernity could only develop in a print culture, creating the cultural environment for the Reformation. Sola Scriptura theology, as in Calvin and Luther, considered the written Word of God essential for the Church’s life. The role of literacy throughout Church history is reviewed, in particular in the modern mission movement in Africa and the growing African church, to show the importance of literacy in developing a strong church. In conclusion, spiritual growth of churches in the Reformation tradition requires recognition of the primacy of print culture over orality, and the importance of a culture of reading and study.
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Stapleton, Tim. "Kingdoms and Chiefdoms of Southeastern Africa: Oral Tradition and History, 1400‒1830." Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines 51, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 173–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2017.1298218.
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JONES, GEOFFREY, and RACHAEL COMUNALE. "Oral History and the Business History of Emerging Markets." Enterprise & Society 20, no. 1 (January 30, 2019): 19–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/eso.2018.109.
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This article highlights the benefits that rigorous use of oral history can offer to research on the contemporary business history of emerging markets. Oral history can help fill some of the major information voids arising from the absence of a strong tradition of creating and making accessible corporate archives in most countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It also permits a level of nuance that is hard to obtain even if written archives are accessible. Oral histories provide insights into why events did not occur, and why companies have chosen certain industries over others. Oral history can also shed light on hyper-sensitive topics, such corruption, which are rarely formally documented.
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Hamilton, C. A. "The Swaziland Oral History Project." History in Africa 14 (1987): 383–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3171851.
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In 1985 an oral history project was established in Swaziland, based in the National Archives at Lobamba. The Oral History Project set itself three tasks; the establishment of an oral archive on Swazi history; the publication of a selection of transcripts form the oral archive concerning the precolonial history of Swaziland; the popularization of precolonial history.The precolonial history of Swaziland is the history of a largely non–literate people. The colonial period is well–documented, but mostly from the perspective of the colonial administration. Oral traditions are thus a primary source for both the precolonial and the later history of Swaziland. The Project is concerned to preserve oral testimonies about all periods of Swazi history, including the immediate past. Special attention however, has been paid to the collection and preservation of the oral record pertaining to the precolonial history of Swaziland, a period for which documentary sources are largely absent.There are several reasons for this. Firstly, the relative stability of the Swazi kingdom and its high degree of centralization imparted to early Swazi traditions a unique chronological depth. Secondly, the varied circumstances of incorporation of its many component chiefdoms have endowed Swaziland with an exceptionally rich corpus of local and regional traditons. This diversity facilitates the development of a picture of precolonial life that moves beyond the elitist versions of history which have long dominated both Swazi history and precolonial history elsewhere in southern Africa. Not only are the surviving Swazi oral traditions about the precolonial past unusually rich, but Swaziland occupied a pivotal political position in nineteenth–century southeast Africa. Its traditions illuminate the processes and forces that shaped the history of the entire region
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Stapleton, Timothy J. "Oral Evidence in a Pseudo-Ethnicity: The Fingo Debate." History in Africa 22 (January 1995): 359–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3171922.
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There is a disturbing trend emerging in South African history. Unquestioning acceptance of African oral tradition threatens to become a requirement of politically correct scholarship. The African voice knows all. Julian Cobbing has been sharply criticized for ignoring oral evidence in his revision of early nineteenth-century South African history. Cobbing claims that African migration and state formation in the 1820s was caused by the illegal activities of colonial slave raiders who covered up their operations by claiming that the Zulu kingdom under Shaka had laid waste to the interior of southern Africa. This cover story was incorporated into South African history as the mfecane (or crushing) and served to justify white supremacy by portraying blacks as inherently violent. Carolyn Hamilton attacks Cobbing for ignoring the African voice which allegedly supports the orthodox mfecane by placing Shaka at the center of events. In response, Cobbing claims that the largest record of Zulu oral evidence was distorted by James Stuart, the colonial official who collected it at the turn of the last century. Although Elizabeth Eldredge rejects the Zulucentric mfecane in favor of a broad compromise theory based on environmental and trade factors plus the activities of a few Griqua labor-raiders on the High veld, she accused Cobbing of developing a Eurocentric hypothesis which robs Africans of initiative within their own history. More critically, Jeffrey Peires, whose work on the Xhosa is deeply rooted in the conventional mfecane, describes Cobbing as “a reactionary wolf dressed up in the clothing of a progressive sheep” and implies that his ideas are nothing short of racist.
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SCHMIDT, PETER R. "HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY IN EAST AFRICA: PAST PRACTICE AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS." Journal of African History 57, no. 2 (June 9, 2016): 183–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853715000791.
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AbstractThis forum article explores the major intellectual trajectories in the historical archaeology of Eastern Africa over the last sixty years. Two primary perspectives are identified in historical archaeology: one that emphasizes precolonial history and oral traditions with associated archaeology, and another that focuses mostly on the era of European contact with Africa. The latter is followed by most North American practice, to the point of excluding approaches that privilege the internal dynamics of African societies. African practice today has many hybrids using both approaches. Increasingly, precolonial historical archaeology is waning in the face of a dominant focus on the modern era, much like the trend in African history. New approaches that incorporate community participation are gaining favor, with positive examples of collaboration between historical archaeologists and communities members desiring to preserve and revitalize local histories.
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Campbell, Kermit E. "Rhetoric from the Ruins of African Antiquity." Rhetorica 24, no. 3 (2006): 255–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/rh.2006.24.3.255.
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Abstract Recent studies in comparative rhetoric have brought much needed attention to traditions of rhetoric in non-Western cultures, including many in Africa. Yet the exclusive focus on contemporary African cultures limits understanding of the history of rhetoric in Africa. Although extensive data on African antiquity is lacking, we know that early Nubian and Ethiopian cultures were highly civilized, socially and politically. Literacy in the ancient cities of Napata, Meroe, and Axum, and in the medieval city of Timbuktu suggests that black Africa was not exclusively oral and not without recourse to a means of recording its uses of language. This essay adds a historical dimension to comparative studies of rhetoric in Africa, showing the depth and complexity of this little known aspect of African civilizations.
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Kodesh, Neil. "History from the Healer's Shrine: Genre, Historical Imagination, and Early Ganda History." Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 3 (June 29, 2007): 527–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0010417507000618.
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Recent interpretations of oral histories in Africa have been based increasingly on the premise that each teller creates a unique oral text. Oral sources, according to this new formulation, should not be “flattened by transcription,” with individual voices operating interchangeably. Rather, these sources should be heard with all of the personal, subjective, ambiguous, and contradictory inflections with which they circulate in practice. This emphasis on multiplicity, variability, and subjectivity represents a notable departure from earlier approaches to oral history that privileged “tradition” as a distinctive cultural form and, following a meticulous methodology pioneered by Jan Vansina, sought to sift their stable and verifiable elements from the flux of performances. Perspective and performance, once considered antithetical to the pursuits of professional historians working with oral sources, now occupy a privileged position in the analytical framework.
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Mdlalose, Nomsa. "STORYTELLING AS A METHOD FOR ACQUIRING MATHEMATICAL UNDERSTANDING AND SKILL." Oral History Journal of South Africa 3, no. 1 (January 5, 2016): 3–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.25159/2309-5792/181.
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According to historical accounts of old Africa, mathematics got divorced from the heritage arena. It was subsequently perceived incongruent with locally produced knowledge. Zaslavsky (1999) affirms that the manner in which Africa is portrayed in reference to the history of mathematics and the history of numbers, one would conclude that Africans barely knew how to count. Notwithstanding this, storytelling as an aspect of African indigenous knowledge systems and of a genre of oral tradition constitutes various socio-cosmic codes. Narrative being a social phenomenon and rhythm being symbolic to innate ability to count assume storytelling and numbering affinity. The article aims to explore employment of storytelling for the purpose of assisting basic education learners to acquire mathematical understanding and skills.
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Jansen, Jan. "Masking Sunjata: A Hermeneutical Critique." History in Africa 27 (January 2000): 131–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3172110.
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Among the rich legacy of African oral traditions, the Sunjata epic is still one of the most complex phenonema, because it undoubtedly goes back to the times of Ibn Battuta, because of the limited variety between the available text editions, and because of its present-day popularity in sub-Saharan West Africa among people of all kinds of social background. In scholarly discussion, the epic has challenged many academics since Delafosse used the Sunjata epic as evidence for his reconstruction of the Mali empire as a thirteenth-century vast centralized polity. Although his views have been criticized since then, they have become part of history lessons at primary schools in Mali, the Gambia, Senegal, and Guinea. All these countries belong to the so-called “Mande,” an area inhabited by various ethnic groups that have close similarities in language, oral tradition, and social organization.In the last decade History in Africa has given room to discuss the Sunjata epic, in particular in order to explore how data from the epic can be used as historical sources, and as what history for whom. Articles by David Conrad, Tim Geysbeek, Stephan Bühnen, Stephen Bulman, Kathryn Green, George Brooks, Ralph Austen, and myself come my mind. All these authors have treated the Sunjata epic as a text. This seems to be a logical and inevitable choice for the historian.However, this approach implies a choice that limits the range of interpretations which can be made about the Sunjata traditions as a source for African history.
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Chirikure, Shadreck. "Motion with Caution: Jan Vansina and the Last Two Thousand Years of the Southern African Past." History in Africa 45 (June 2018): 113–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/hia.2018.17.
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Abstract:This contribution argues that Vansina’s methodological rigor and deep reading of the dynamic nature of African communities across space and time ranks him as one of the most effective pioneers and research leaders in African history. His work on oral traditions and the necessity of reviewing generally accepted narratives, provided tools to a continent that was often ridiculed for not having a history. Although Vansina’s work had its limitations, and few of his writings were provocative to some, it firmly rebutted the idea that Africa was a traditional and forever unchanging continent.
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Doortmont, Michel R., John H. Hanson, Jan Jansen, and Dmitri van den Bersselaar. "Literacy's Feedback on Historical Analysis Revisited: Papers in Honor of David Henige." History in Africa 38 (2011): 1–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2011.0017.
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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.
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Vaněk, Miroslav. "Czeska oral history w perspektywie globalnej. Podobieństwa i różnice." Wrocławski Rocznik Historii Mówionej 3 (October 30, 2013): 161–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.26774/wrhm.47.
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The article aims to highlight the specific route of Czech oral history in comparison with developed countries, where oral history has been an age-old tradition. Czech oral history, same as oral history in other so called post-communist countries, did not experience that with oral history in 1960s and 1970s, oral history was totally unknown in the then Czechoslovakia (as well as in other countries of the so called socialist block). In the Czech Republic, oral history was used in the mid-1990s for the first time; but it took much more time before it stopped being ignored and criticized. Boom of oral history started in the end of 1990s, same like in South America or South Africa, and of course at the post-communist countries.
An increased interest in oral history, however, also brings along some problems and risks related with this new trend. I will examine some cases of journalistic work which passes itself off as oral history and which is often ideologically motivated. Mastering the method and a good knowledge of the historical context are, in my opinion, essential requirements for a valid historical interpretation, and lack of these can be crucial.
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Heintze, Beatrix. "Afrika-Archiv: A New Series of the Frobenius Institute for the Purpose of Publishing Source Material." History in Africa 24 (January 1997): 437–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3172045.
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“[D]as Wirkungsvolle wird gepflegt, die Gewissenhaftigkeit schwindet; an Stelle der Fähigkeit zu bergründen, der Kraft zu überzeugen, tritt die Sicherheìt im Behaupten.”[T]hat what impresses is cultivated, conscientiousness dwindles; the capability to explain, the power to convince are replaced by self-confidence in asserting.There is nothing more absurd—yet also nothing more common—than a scholarly lifetime of publishing based on materials to which no one else has access.The series “Afrika Archiv” (“Africa Archives”) was founded recently with the aim of publishing source material referring to the history and anthropology of Africa. In this connection the term “source material” shall be considered in a very broad sense. Thus, beside the usual library and other written sources, as well as written records of oral traditions, for instance, even editions of ethnographic collections or photographic documentation will be taken into consideration. African scholars will be able to publish material from their own countries to which we Europeans and Americans have only difficult access. Western scholars, on the other hand, could publish sources from public and private European or American archives, museums, or even widely dispersed articles in periodicals and newspapers on African history of the nineteenth century which are available only with great difficulty and expenditure of time. As a reviewer once commented, such source editions will still continue to be valued when contemporary interpretations have already long fallen into oblivion.Endeavors to record systematically varied sources on the history of the continent, the cultural and scientific history of Africa, and to make the essentials generally available to the scientific public still appear inadequate.
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Chewins, Linell. "Chiefdoms and Kingdoms of Southeastern Africa: Oral Traditions and History, 1400–1830." South African Historical Journal 68, no. 4 (October 2016): 670–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2016.1264463.
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Coswosk, Jânderson Albino. "Educational Practices on Ethnic-racial Relations and the English Language Teaching through Image and Literature in an EFL Classroom." International Journal of English and Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (April 20, 2020): 15. http://dx.doi.org/10.11114/ijecs.v3i1.4800.
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The article analyzes the unfoldings of the teaching project Introducing Literatures in English, held in 2018 at the Federal Institute of Espírito Santo (IFES), based in Alegre-ES, Brazil. The project aimed at promoting the improvement of reading, writing and speaking skills of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners, departing from African Literature in English and photography, so that they had the opportunity to improve their language skills while developing a broader discussion on Africa’s ethnic-cultural and linguistic diversity, building a viewpoint about the African continent less tied to colonialism, slavery, apartheid and victimization.For reading and written analyses, the students took into consideration the photo-book Another Africa (1998), with photographs by Robert Lyons and poems by Chinua Achebe (1930-2013). Based on the poems and photographs brought to light in Another Africa, I analyzed 1) the students’ multimodal reading process, by connecting images generated by poems and photographs and written and oral texts the students produced around them; 2) the students’ reception of the poems, considering Achebe’s constant use of code-switching and 3) the construction of new viewpoints around Africa elaborated by the students, bearing in mind the importance of the role of language, memory and history, oral and literary traditions when it comes to African writers and a new perspective concerning the colonial legacy and its impact on English language.
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Landman, Christina. "Telling Sacred Stories Eersterust and the Forced Removals of the 1960S." Religion and Theology 6, no. 3 (1999): 415–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157430199x00254.
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AbstractThe Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has introduced a process in South Africa in which healing became possible through storytelling. The Research Institute for Theology and Religion (University of South Africa) has taken up the challenge of extending this process to people who, for a variety of reasons, did not have the chance to tell their stories to this commission. This introduces a new era in oral history research in South Africa in which healing, that is discontinuity, and not truth or the establishment of a continuous tradition, is the aim of research on and through storytelling. Also, the present government, by withdrawing from moral legislation, now allows for religious communities to assist civil society in the formation of a social ethos. Consequently, the aim of oral history research for the RITR has shifted from establishing the liberational and interventionary moment in storytelling to that of focusing on its religious, healing and moral subtext. This article deals exclusively with the stories of coloured people in Eersterust, a town just outside Pretoria, which focus on the forced removals of the 1960s.
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Vansina, Jan. "Is a Journal of Method Still Necessary?" History in Africa 36 (2009): 421–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2010.0000.
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Thirty-four years ago David Henige launched History in Africa (hereafter HA) at a time when scholars often cut corners in their rush to construct a history of Africa, and disregarded rules of evidence, thereby running the risk that many of their reconstructions would prove to be unsound. The question was not that these scholars were wholly indifferent to methodology, but that the precolonial history of the continent was the cynosure of the field at the time, and hence that all eyes were turned towards the use of oral sources to overcome the perceived scarcity of written sources for that period and to provide voices from the continent. In their haste to fill huge voids in the story of Africa's past, scholars debated the rules of evidence in relation to such unconventional sources. They often disregarded almost every methodological canon when it came to written data. Crucial differences between primary and secondary sources were ignored, archival research was scanty, new editions of older publications were mere reprints accompanied or not by new introductions that were so uninformed as to be useless, while issues about authenticity, authorship, chronology, or translation were all brushed aside as quibbles. Thus, in the days before 1974, methodological concerns focused exclusively on oral tradition and oral history to the detriment of everything else. As its initial editorial made clear, HA was launched as a forum where scholars interested in method could publish articles about all the facets of the historical method—from epistemology to heuristics, rules of evidence, and historiography. The journal was founded and the contributors came.
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Drønen, Tomas Sundnes. "Anthropological Historical Research in Africa: How Do We Ask?" History in Africa 33 (2006): 137–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2006.0011.
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The appeal of history to us all is in the last analysis poetic. But the poetry of history does not consist of imagination roaming at-large, but of imagination pursuing the fact and fastening upon it. That which compels the historian to “scorn delights and live laborious days” is the ardour of his own curiosity to know what really happened long ago in that land of mystery which we call the past.This paper is about qualitative research methods, and thus more about hard labor than about poetry and imagination. But to those scholars to whom the above citation gives meaning there is a clear connection between hard labour, imagination and poetry. As scholars, we are looking for facts, and looking for facts can be hard work. As scholars, we also know that facts must be ascribed with meaning in order to become sources, a process of interpretation which demands both imagination and poetry.I will present some of the challenges we face when doing anthropological historical research in Africa, and I will argue that the tools of qualitative methods will have to be sharpened and modified with this particular goal in mind. The main aim will be to discuss how we can acquire information in an African setting by analyzing the role of the interview as a communicative event. Other important topics to be treated are African oral tradition, the culture and tradition (the metacommunicative competence) of the respondents, and their use of metaphors to convey meaning.
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Schmidt, Peter R., and Jonathan R. Walz. "Re-Representing African Pasts through Historical Archaeology." American Antiquity 72, no. 1 (January 2007): 53–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/40035298.
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Historical archaeology in Africa has long privileged issues framed in terms of European sources and the impact of imperialism and colonialism on African peoples. With its emphasis on modernity, historical archaeology of this persuasion overlooks historical archaeologies concerned with revising metanarratives that misrepresent African pasts. We argue that historical archaeologists need to listen to local histories, often held in oral form, and that the appropriate task of historical archaeology is making histories that include, not exclude, local historicities. A critical historical archaeology in Africa is illustrated by cases in which oral traditions play a central role in unveiling the historical significance of archaeological remains as well as circumstances in which careful readings of archaeology and local histories subvert standard histories based on outsiders' interpretations and observations. We draw case studies from the Swahili Coast, Great Zimbabwe, the Kalahari, and the Cwezi period of the Great Lakes. Our approach accepts that if archaeologists employ materiality—regardless of its chronological age—to transform historical representation, then such historical revision creates a more comprehensive practice for historical archaeology, a matter of vital interest for both history and anthropology.
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Shetler, Jan Bender. "Elizabeth A. Eldredge.Kingdoms and Chiefdoms of Southeastern Africa: Oral Traditions and History, 1400–1830." American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (April 2016): 689–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.2.689.
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van den Bersselaar, Dmitri. "“Doorway to Success?”: Reconstructing African Careers in European Business from Company House Magazines and Oral History Interviews." History in Africa 38 (2011): 257–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2011.0012.
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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.
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Conrad, David C. "“Bilali of Faransekila”: A West African Hunter and World War I Hero According to a World War II Veteran and Hunters' Singer of Mali." History in Africa 16 (1989): 41–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3171778.
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“An only son must never die in war until the end of the world.”(Seydou Camara, “Bilali of Faransekila,” 1:396)Discussing the significance of Kande Kamara's oral history of West African experiences in the First World War, Joe Harris Lunn observes that, although historians have begun to examine the effects of that war on west Africa, their studies are mostly based on written sources, “and therefore shed little light on the lived reality of the war for the African masses whose perceptions of their experiences were never recorded.” Of particular value then, is the oral history provided by the Guinean veteran Kande Kamara, offering as it does an opportunity for assessing the European war's impact on west Africans. Lunn finds, however, that west African soldiers who served in France during the First World War have left very few records of either their wartime experiences or its effects on their later lives. The text by the late Malian hunters' singer Seydou Camara that is presented here helps to redress this lamentable deficiency because, although it is a step or two removed from the sort of firsthand eyewitness account offered by Kande Kamara, it provides valuable support for and confirmation of certain elements of Kande Kamara's testimony. Composed and sung by Seydou Camara, “Bilali of Faransekila” provides us with an oral traditional counterpart to Kande Kamara's firsthand account.
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Distefano, John A. "Hunters or Hunted? Towards a History of the Okiek of Kenya." History in Africa 17 (January 1990): 41–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3171805.
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In the historiography of east Africa, hunter-gatherers have been given occasional mention almost since the beginning of European contacts with the interior. Early European travelers, hunters, and colonial administrators all took note of the ubiquitous “Dorobo,” as these hunters have come to be known in the literature. Furthermore, oral tradition collections from among east Africa's food-producing populations generally recall an earlier hunter-gatherer community who are said to have “disappeared,” “gone underground,” or were “driven away.”Recent scholarship has attempted to look at these hunter groups in economic terms: (1) as a stage of economic development before achieving a “higher” level of production; (2) as a retrograde step from a food-producing economy; or (3) simply as a mode of production. But east Africa's hunter-gatherers remain inadequately dealt with in historical literature, primarily because they have usually been ignored by researchers but also because of their neighbors' and the academic community's prejudicial or misconceived notions about them.To begin, some of the literature concerning these people will be selectively surveyed to see how ideas about them have developed. Next an attempt will be made to identify and delineate properly the various groups of hunter-gatherers living in East Africa today and in the recent past. Finally, the largest remaining community of hunter-gatherers, those living in the western highlands of Kenya who usually call themselves “Okiek,” will be looked at more closely in an attempt to advance the discussion of hunter-gatherers in general by presenting some observations concerning their socio-economic history.
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JONES, DAVID CRAWFORD. "WIELDING THE EPOKOLO: CORPORAL PUNISHMENT AND TRADITIONAL AUTHORITY IN COLONIAL OVAMBOLAND." Journal of African History 56, no. 2 (June 12, 2015): 301–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853715000018.
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AbstractBased on both archival research and oral interviews conducted in northern Namibia, this article traces the history of public flogging in Ovamboland throughout the twentieth century. In contrast to recent scholarship that views corporal punishment in modern Africa mainly through the lens of colonial governance, the article argues that because the South African colonial state never withdrew the power to punish from the region's traditional authorities, these indigenous leaders were able to maintain a degree of legitimacy among their subjects, who looked to the kings and headmen to punish wrongdoers and maintain communal norms. Finally, the article explores why nostalgia for corporal punishment remains a salient feature in Namibian society today, 25 years after the end of colonial rule.
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Lamphear, John. "The People of the Grey Bull: the Origin and Expansion of the Turkana." Journal of African History 29, no. 1 (March 1988): 27–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853700035970.
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While archaeology and linguistics provide an important basis for the reconstruction of the early history of those parts of eastern Africa inhabited by pastoral societies, oral traditions also can make a valuable contribution. In this paper an examination of the traditions of the Turkana of north-western Kenya reveals an often remarkably sophisticated rendering of complex processes of origin and migration. Moreover, those traditions also embody insights into basic factors concerning the development and spread of pastoralism in East Africa that the methodologies of other disciplines have only recently begun to identify.Turkana traditions suggest that their society had not just one, monolithic ‘origin’, but rather what might be seen as a whole series of them. Highly dramatic and memorable tales of genesis provide vivid idioms of socio-political identity and also contain fundamental cosmological messages. But they also correspond to important stages of change in the development of the Turkana community, and, as such, they (together with less ‘formal’ traditions associated with them) provide vital historical information.The factors which combined to enable the Turkana to carry out their vast and rapid territorial expansion are identified. For instance, one early tradition suggests a fundamental change in their pastoral system – the acquisition of Zebu cattle-while others emphasize important commercial contacts which provided a steady flow of iron-ware and grain. Still others trace the development of the office of Great Diviner, revealing how it became a primary focus of economic and cultural redefinition and corporate identity as alterations to the earlier generation-set system occurred. Another tradition provides a glimpse of Turkana expansion from the point of view of peoples absorbed by it.
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Hodgkinson, Dan. "Nationalists with no nation: oral history, ZANU(PF) and the meanings of Rhodesian student activism in Zimbabwe." Africa 89, S1 (January 2019): S40—S64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0001972018000906.
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AbstractIn Zimbabwe after 2000, ZANU(PF) leaders’ past experiences of student activism in Rhodesia were celebrated by the state-owned media as personifications of anti-colonial, nationalist leadership in the struggle to liberate the country. This article examines the history behind this narrative by exploring the entangled realities of student activism in Rhodesia throughout the 1960s and 1970s and its role as a mechanism of elite formation in ZANU(PF). Building on the historiography of African student movements, I show how the persistence of nationalist anti-colonial organizing and liberal traditions on campus made student activism in Rhodesia distinct from that in South Africa and independent African countries to its north. The article then examines how and why three former activists, who took up elite political careers in the party that they subsequently left, contested the ruling party's anti-colonial, ‘patriotic’ rendering of these experiences. These three men's stories invoked imagined and older forms of nationalism or institutional ethic that had been abandoned by the party as it turned to more authoritarian rule. Stories of Rhodesian student activism thus provided space for justifying alternative political possibilities of nationalism, which implicitly critiqued the ruling party's ‘patriotic’ narrative, as well as for nostalgic anecdotes of life on campus, their journeys into adulthood, and the excitement of being part of a dynamic, transformational political project.
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Jules-Rosette, Bennetta, and Robert Cancel. "Introductory Remarks on African Humanities." African Studies Review 29, no. 1 (March 1986): 1–2. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0002020600011665.
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This issue of the African Studies Review is devoted to research in the African humanities. The appearance of new approaches to the study of literary texts, oral traditions, and the popular arts has inspired us to assemble this collection. Recently, the African humanities have been neglected as an important area in which new empirical and theoretical advances have been made for the study of oral texts, art, and performance.The articles in this collection by Robert Cancel, David Coplan, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, and V. Y. Mudimbe were presented at the Conference on Popular Arts and the Media in Africa held at the University of California, San Diego from May 17-19, 1982. This conference was sponsored by the Joint Committee on African Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. We would like to thank the Joint Committee for their support of this conference and our initial efforts to develop a research synthesis for the African humanities.This collection begins with V. Y. Mudimbe's commentary on the nature of African art and the limitations of research models used to study it. He questions the role and position of African arts, especially visual arts, in the post-colonial world. He suggests that the time has passed where most of these works can be judged simply as self-enclosed cultural referents, isolated from the effects of the last two hundred years of history. The process of “aesthetization” that he describes is one which, in various transformations, informs each of the papers that follow. When Fanon suggested that to take on a language is to “take on a world,” he foreshadowed the ideas that acknowledge the development of Africa's humanities in a context of cultural interchange with other world traditions. This is not to accept the Victorian pronouncements that credited all African achievements to various forms of Western influence. Rather, it is a movement towards the view that African culture, always fluid and dynamic, has been responsive to all manner of influences, both local and foreign.
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Quirin, James. "Oral Traditions as Historical Sources in Ethiopia: The Case of the Beta Israel (Falasha)." History in Africa 20 (1993): 297–312. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3171976.
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It is axiomatic that historians should use all available sources. African historiography has been on the cutting edge of methodological innovation for the last three decades, utilizing written sources, oral traditions, archeology, linguistics, ethnography, musicology, botany, and other techniques to bring respect and maturity to the field.But the use of such a diverse methodology has brought controversy as well, particularly regarding oral traditions. Substantial criticisms have been raised concerning the problems of chronology and limited time depth, variations in different versions of the same events, and the problem of feedback between oral and written sources. A “structuralist” critique deriving from Claude Levi-Strauss's study of Amerindian mythology has provided a useful corrective to an overly-literal acceptance of oral traditions, but often went too far in throwing out the historical baby with the mythological bathwater, leading some historians to reject totally the use of oral data. A more balanced view has shown that a modified structural approach can be a useful tool in historical analysis. In Ethiopian historiography some preliminary speculations were made along structuralist lines,5 although in another sense such an approach was always implicit since the analysis of Ethiopie written hagiographies and royal chronicles required an awareness of the mythological or folk elements they contain.Two more difficult problems to overcome have been the Ethiopie written documents' centrist and elitist focus on the royal monarchy and Orthodox church. The old Western view that “history” required the existence of written documents and a state led to the paradigm of Ethiopia as an “outpost of Semitic civilization” and its historical and historiographical separation from the rest of Africa. The comparatively plentiful corpus of written documentation for Ethiopian history allowed such an approach, and the thousands of manuscripts made available to scholars on microfilm in the last fifteen years have demonstrated the wealth still to be found in written sources. However, such sources, although a starting point for research on Ethiopian history, no longer seem adequate in themselves because they focus primarily on political-military and religious events concerning the monarchy and church.
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Ambelu, Ayele Addis. "African Form of Indigenous Mass Communication in the Case of Ethiopia." ATHENS JOURNAL OF MASS MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS 7, no. 3 (March 17, 2021): 183–204. http://dx.doi.org/10.30958/ajmmc.7-3-3.
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The purpose of this article is to explore African form of indigenous mass communication with emphasis on Ethiopian indigenous form mass communication institutions, tools, manuscripts, and regulatory bodies. The method employed for this study is qualitative. First hand documents, tools and observation were considered as sources of primary data. Furthermore, pertinent literature was reviewed. The data was analyzed qualitatively where description of the responses on the bases of themes was given emphasis. The finding of this study argued that drum beating, horn blowing and town crying are a form of mass communications in the ancient time. In ancient time news in Africa was first made public from the tower in the center, squares of the city, palace main stairs, market and church. Town Criers, Azmari and shepherds were the journalists and the essential news presenters in ancient times. In the same manner, Afe Negus (mouth of the King) and Tsehafe Tezaze (Minister of Pen) were originally indigenous information regulatory bodies of the empire regime. This research discovered the oldest African newspaper in Ethiopia, a news sheet entitled Zenamewale (Daily News) and the first written newspaper and inscriptions of king Ezana are the first types of African form of news, which dates back to 320 A.D. Zena mewale is believed to be the first handmade press so far known in Africa for 700 years. This confirmed that Ethiopia has 3,000 years of indigenous forms of oral mass communication and handmade press history in Africa. Keywords: indigenous mass communication institutions, tools of traditional mass communication, manuscripts, regulatory bodies, Ethiopia
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Sutton, J. E. G. "The African Lords of the Intercontinental Gold Trade Before the Black Death: al-Hasan bin Sulaiman of Kilwa and Mansa Musa of Mali." Antiquaries Journal 77 (March 1997): 221–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s000358150007520x.
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Where we are able to combine external sources of the ‘medieval’ period with local African ones – oral and linguistic, ethnographic and archaeological – we can begin to discern the place of Africa, or of parts of it, in world history. At the same time, we begin to gain chronological perceptions for regions where otherwise we are apt to fall back on synchronic notions of ‘traditional’ cultures and societies living as if in a permanent ethnographic present. The occasional allusion bearing a calendar date of universal applicability presses questions of correlation over broad distances, in a way that radiocarbon measurements (which we should hesitate to call ‘dates’) cannot do. Notwithstanding the importance of the latter technique for the study of the African Iron Age, the individual results are inherently imprecise (whether ‘calibrated’ or not) and, being run on specific samples, bear frequently an uncertain relationship to the historical event or episode in question.
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Depaepe, Marc, and Annette Lembagusala Kikumbi. "Educating girls in Congo: An unsolved pedagogical paradox since colonial times?" Policy Futures in Education 16, no. 8 (April 10, 2018): 936–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1478210318767450.
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Generally speaking, colonial education in Congo did not engender a very great widening of consciousness among the local population. Mostly, it resulted in inevitable submission through discipline and order. This was particularly the case for girls, for which fewer initiatives were taken than for boys. Moreover, gender stereotypes from the ‘mother’ country clearly dominated the evolution of female education in Congo. At best girls were trained for care-taking professions. After independence, some Congolese leaders, like Mulele (the first Minister of Education of the Democratic Republic of Congo) and Mobutu (who called himself ‘the founding president of Zaire’) wanted to break the colonial tradition by putting education in a more authentic African context. However, both educational models – the one of Mulele as well as the one of his adversary Mobutu - were in the end not very successful. The least we can say, at the basis of some oral history, is that the pedagogical paradox between the rhetoric of emancipation and the existing everyday educational realities in Africa is far from being solved.
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Förster, Larissa, Dag Henrichsen, Holger Stoecker, and Hans Axasi╪Eichab. "Re-individualising human remains from Namibia." Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4, no. 2 (2018): 45–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/hrv.4.2.4.
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In 1885, the Berlin pathologist Rudolf Virchow presented three human skeletons from the colony of German South West Africa to the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory. The remains had been looted from a grave by a young German scientist, Waldemar Belck, who was a member of the second Lüderitz expedition and took part in the occupation of colonial territory. In an attempt to re-individualise and re-humanise these human remains, which were anonymised in the course of their appropriation by Western science, the authors consult not only the colonial archive, but also contemporary oral history in Namibia. This allows for a detailed reconstruction of the social and political contexts of the deaths of the three men, named Jacobus Hendrick, Jacobus !Garisib and Oantab, and of Belck’s grave robbery, for an analysis of how the remains were turned into scientific objects by German science and institutions, as well as for an establishment of topographical and genealogical links with the Namibian present. Based on these findings, claims for the restitution of African human remains from German institutions cannot any longer be regarded as a contemporary phenomenon only but must be understood as part of an African tradition of resistance against Western colonial and scientific practices.
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Clark, A. F. "The Challenges of Cross-Cultural Oral History: Collecting and Presenting Pulaar Traditions on Slavery from Bundu, Senegambia (West Africa)." Oral History Review 20, no. 1 (March 1, 1992): 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ohr/20.1.1.
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LANDAU, PAUL S. "ORAL HISTORIES OF SOUTHERN AFRICA - Kingdoms and Chiefdoms of Southeastern Africa: Oral Traditions and Histories, 1400–1830. By Elizabeth A. Eldredge . Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 438. $99.00, hardback (ISBN 978-1-58406-514-4)." Journal of African History 58, no. 2 (June 7, 2017): 361–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853717000238.
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Tuchscherer, Konrad, and P. E. H. Hair†. "Cherokee and West Africa: Examining the Origins of the Vai Script." History in Africa 29 (2002): 427–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3172173.
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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.
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Sall, Ousmane. "The Impact of Social and Digital Medias on Senegalese Society." Studies in Media and Communication 5, no. 2 (June 4, 2017): 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.11114/smc.v5i2.2422.
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West African countries especially Senegal, have a very rich history of written and oral communication based on their culture and traditions. Today, Senegal is inescapable about the adoption and use of new technologies in Africa. Senegal experienced a boom of cell phones users over the past 5 years in 2012 for example, we noticed “88% mobile subscriptions” compared with “46% mobile subscriptions in 2008” {world bank,2013}. That explains mobile phones are no more to make a call or to send a text message but also to interact with people around and entertain. In fact, digital communication is expanding in all Senegalese spheres like the workplace, school, universities... in the latter half of the 20th century before the explosion of social media, people only depended on old media like TV, Radio, Newspapers… to get informed. For this study, we are going to focus on how social media are impacting economically and politically on Senegalese society and how young people are managing the transition between traditional media and new media.
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Ojaide, Tanure, and Enajite Ojaruega. "Tradition and subjectivities: Warri-related comedians and their art." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 57, no. 2 (October 23, 2020): 81–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/tl.v57i2.8321.
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By some coincidence, many Nigerian stand-up comedians were born, raised, live in, or are associated with Warri and its environs. By Warri, as understood in the area, we mean Warri and its surroundings and, to a large extent, what is called the ‘core Delta’ of Nigeria’s Delta State. The comedians include Gordons, I Go Dye, AY and Real Warri Pikin. We investigate what is possibly responsible for the natural talent of these comedians. We relate the success of these comedians to the notion of Warri as ‘not coming last’, the history of the city of many ethnicities, boma boys, the blues nature of suffering pain and deprivations but laughing them off, and some indigenous traditions such as the Urhobo udje oral poetic performance which aims to elicit laughter as a means of maintaining normalcy and preventing anybody from deviating from the communally-established norms. We use multiple concepts such as laughter as a means of regulating people’s lives, satire, historicism, culture, and aesthetic considerations to study these Warri-related comedians and their art. We investigate the commonalities, subjectivities, traditions, and individual talents that have made Warri-born, raised, resident, and related comedians so successful—not only in Nigeria, but also in Africa and the world.
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Brandl, Rudolf. "Some Aspects of Oral History in Consideration of Musical Traditions from Africa and Levante, Based on a Neurosemiotical Approach." International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 16, no. 1 (June 1985): 3. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/836460.
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Banshchikova, Anastasia, and Oxana Ivanchenko. "Memory about the Arab Slave Trade in Modern-Day Tanzania: Between Family Trauma and State-Planted Tolerance." Antropologicheskij forum 16, no. 44 (2020): 83–113. http://dx.doi.org/10.31250/1815-8870-2020-16-44-83-113.
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The article discusses the results of field research conducted in Tanzania from August 24 to September 14, 2018, which focused on the historical memory of the Arab slave trade in East Africa and the Indian Ocean in the 19th century, as well as its influence on the interethnic relations in the country today. Structured and nonstructured interviews (mostly in-depth) were conducted in Dar es Salaam, Bagamoyo and Zanzibar. In general, opinions were almost equally divided: half of the respondents were convinced that the relations were good overall, while the other half believed that there are some tensions. Since both positions are well-argued and substantiated, it is possible to trace a number of patterns in the people’s perception. The history of the Arab slave trade lies between family trauma on the one hand, and tolerance, non-discrimination imposed by the state, on the other. Two ways of reproducing the historical memory largely oppose each other: the school system places the blame on Europeans, promoting peaceful interethnic relations, presenting the slave trade as an essential part of colonialism, and subsequently emphasizing the story of overcoming the colonial past; meanwhile, the oral tradition censors nothing and tells the history of the ancestors’ suffering in its entirety. Thus, bearers of the oral tradition with a low level of education turn to be the most vulnerable category; they become the least tolerant to the Arab-Tanzanian part of the country’s population.
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Quayson, Ato. "Means and Meanings: Methodological Issues in Africanist Interdisciplinary Research." History in Africa 25 (1998): 307–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3172191.
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Interdisciplinarity has become a sort of buzzword in academic circles. It is quite common to hear graduate students respond, in answer to a question as to what they are doing, that their work is “sort of interdisciplinary.” This answer might be construed as concealing some measure of confusion as to what exactly is being researched. But, on the other hand, there is little doubt that the most adventurous students are increasingly defining their areas of concern at the boundaries between disciplines. The matter seems to take on a particularly acute inflection in relation to Africanist research. This may be traced partly to the fact that from the very beginning of interest in African matters, much scholarly work on Africa in Western universities has been done under the rubric of “African studies.” Anthropology and history, arguably the disciplines most active in popularizing knowledge about Africa, have themselves always shared a common concern on the ways in which knowledge about Africa can be constituted. The monumental work of Jan Vansina and others in the 1960s in focusing on oral traditions and making them a respectable source for the construction of historical knowledge about Africa was thoroughly interdisciplinary in its own way.Despite the implicit interdisciplinarity of African Studies, the theoretical implications of interdisciplinary study and the issues that it generates for questions about different types of knowledge does not seem to have engaged the attention of scholars. It is in this direction that I propose to go. I propose to engage with issues concering interdisciplinarity from the perspective of my own research on Nigerian literature. The issues that concern me relate to the question: what do specific configurations of disciplines within the interdisciplinary model have for the nature of the knowledge that is produced? But a series of subsidiary questions might be asked in relation to this major one, such as: are we being interdisciplinary when we borrow metaphors from other fields? or concepts? or whole paradigms? Or is it when we join different methods of analysis from two or more disciplines such that what finally emerges cannot be limited to any one of them?
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Bühnen, Stephan. "Place Names as an Historical Source: An Introduction with Examples from Southern Senegambia and Germany." History in Africa 19 (1992): 45–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3171995.
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Written sources for the history of sub-Saharan Africa (with the exception of East Africa) only begin to appear with the inception of Arabic records from the ninth century onwards, and these are restricted to the Sahel and the northern part of the savanna belt. European sources begin in the mid-fifteenth century, first for Senegambia. They, in turn, confine themselves to the coast and its immediate hinterland, as well as the navigable courses of rivers, with few, and often vague, references to the interior. For the time before the early written sources and for those extensive areas which only much later entered the horizon of writing witnesses, other sources illuminating the past have to be traced and tapped. Among such non-written sources are the findings of anthropology and archeology, of research in oral tradition and place names. Because of their interdependence, working with different source types contributes to the reliability of results.So far little systematic use has been made of place names as a source for African history. Houis' 1958 dictum, “la toponymie ouest-africaine n'est pas encore sortie de l'oeuf,” has not yet been proven obsolete. In this paper I hope to stimulate the process of shedding the egg shells. It is intended as a short introduction to the potential historical treasures place names may yield, into their characteristics, and into some principles guiding their interpretation. With the aim at illustrating my arguments, I add examples of place names. These I have chosen from two areas which, at first sight, seem to have been selected rather randomly; southern Senegambia and Germany. In fact both areas share few features, both geographically and historically. Two reasons have led me to select them. First, they simply are the regions I know best. Secondly, the recourse to German place names is instructive, as research on place names has been undertaken there for more than a century, leading to a wide range of data and to the accumulation of rich research experience.
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Wells, Julia C. "‘deep wounds… left… in hearts and minds’: South African Public History." Public History Review 24 (January 4, 2018): 1–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v24i0.5781.
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Public history practise in South Africa holds out much promise of further things to come. It can close the gulf between history and heritage. This chapter argues that the role of the public historian should not be conflated with the dynamics of the heritage sector, but suggests how trained academics can indeed put their skills to work in a society that is passionately interested in understanding itself and how its pasts created the present. The student movement sharply raised the image of universities in crisis, requiring a whole new, relevant curriculum and rethinking the ways that universities relate to their publics. Public historians can work towards creating invented spaces for co-production of knowledge, moving beyond the traditional oral history interview. The divide between academia and communities is huge and needs to be constantly tackled, providing access to the secluded information of the professional world. I suggest that due to their privileged place in society, many historians have been unable or unwilling to engage with the recovery agenda – the massive need for affirmation of African identity, capacity and culture. A handful of dedicated public historians do not fit this mould and have been exemplary in rolling up their sleeves and boldly engaging with the messy complications of dealing with non-academic communities to produce new forms of historical knowledge, based on inclusiveness.
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Naidoo, S. "THE STRUGGLE FOR AUTHORITY IN GEORGE MCCALL THEAL’S KAFFIR FOLKLORE (1882)." Southern African Journal for Folklore Studies 24, no. 1 (September 30, 2016): 78–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.25159/1016-8427/1674.
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This article focuses specifically on George McCall Theal’s collection of folktale texts, Kaffir Folklore (1882), as an example of an early South African ethnographic publication, and argues that the folktale transcriptions contained therein, although a part of Theal’s general colonialist project, are hybrid, containing the voices of both coloniser and colonised. The key argument is that the presence of the African voices in this text reveals simultaneously that Theal’s editorial aspirations were never absolutely imposed, and that agency and influence (albeit limited) of the colonised Xhosa co-authors were present. The article offers an analysis of the paratext (the preface, the introduction and the explanatory notes) of Kaffir Folkore, rather than a close reading of the tales themselves. To facilitate an understanding of Theal’s editorial practice, Kaffir Folkore is compared to Harold Scheub’s The Xhosa Ntsomi (1975). More generally, drawing on postcolonial folklore and book-history scholarship, the article explores how folklore texts of the colonial era, although contributing to the establishment of a literary and cultural orthodoxy in modern South Africa, constitute a telling hybrid genre, which invites a re-evaluation of colonial relations, and of individual texts themselves. In short, these texts synthesise different literary traditions (European and African), different mediums (the oral and the written), different disciplinary approaches (ethnography, folklore, literature), and most significantly, the voices of different subjects. Kaffir Folklore (1882) epitomises this synthesis.
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Akingbe, Niyi. "A battle cry against depravity: Lamenting generational dispossession in Tanure Ojaide’s Labyrinths of the Delta and the endless song*." Imbizo 5, no. 1 (June 23, 2017): 3–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.25159/2078-9785/2825.
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Themes of despoliation of fauna and the ecosystem of the oil rich Niger-Delta in Nigeria are often embodied in the works of Tanure Ojaide. Notably, the economic pillage of the region constitutes a major focus of his poetry which draws inferences from his Urhobo oral history and tradition in order to articulate the disturbing effect of this devastation. Nevertheless, Ojaide in Labyrinths of the Delta (1986) and the endless Song (1989) devoutly criticises the deprivation and dispossession of the common men and women of the pre-colonial Niger Delta by the Ogiso and Orodje – the dreadful Bini and Urhobo traditional rulers who were eventually defeated by the masses. The paper’s overarching focus lies in its engagement with the poetic narrative of abuse of power constructed against the background of deprivation and within the context of a juxtaposition of the pre-colonial dispossession of the Niger Delta by her vicious traditional rulers against the postcolonial siphoning of her oil resources by the country’s successive political leaders. The paper adopts New Historicism as a theoretical framework to illustrate three discursive planks: to establish that tyranny is associated with the wielding of political power in pre-colonial Africa – and specifically in the Niger Delta; an effort to establish that the current economic dispossession in the Niger Delta is grounded in the faulty colonial administrative system and further reinforced by the neo-colonial forces of multinational companies. Finally, the paper succinctly states that resistance culture is inherently rooted in the African psychology, and that the transformation of post-colonial society resides in the resolve of the masses to effect a political change during a given period.
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Zavyalova, Olga Yu. "Tradition and Literature (Culture of Laughter of Mali and Guinea)." Vostok. Afro-aziatskie obshchestva: istoriia i sovremennost, no. 4 (2021): 150. http://dx.doi.org/10.31857/s086919080016046-7.
Full textAbstract:
This article continues the topic of the previous one [Zavyalova, Kutsenkov, 2020]. It reveals how great is the role of humor in the cultures of West Africa, where it manifests itself in various spheres of life of its peoples. The Kɔ̀tɛba Folk Theater in Mali and Guinea is another traditional aspect of humor based on satire. The secret society of Kɔ̀rɛduga “jesters” is characteristic of the traditional cultures of Manden. The Dogon have guardians of brussa, alamonyou, who play the role of clowns during the release of masks, and female jesters yayeré, who are wives of the inhabitants of a given village, originating from other villages. The Manden and Dogon humor permeates all spheres of the traditional way of life, and it plays one of fundamental roles in the manner of communication, in the theater and in oral literature. Thus, satire is aimed either at resolving possible conflicts in the absence of mutual understanding between representatives of various social, age and other groups, at resolving conflicts associated with violation of etiquette. All satirical folklore genres function on this basis. Fairy tales and anecdotes ridicule violations of the norms of etiquette inherent in this particular culture. The folk theater touches on topical, actual violations of traditional norms of behavior. In conclusion, the authors note that humor is one of the foundations of the “virtual” reality of the culture created by these societies. When such regulators are violated and their semantic content changes, the whole reality and even the very existence of these peoples will change.