The Journal of African History articles from May 1995

The Journal of African History archives from May 1995

The Combing of History.
May 1, 1995... So you're going to chuck criticism and go in for scholarship?(1) The value of work claiming to be historiographical depends crucially on how well it introduces new sources or kinds of sources, how innovative it is in its method, how...

Omphaloskepsis and the infantalizing of history.
May 1, 1995... By David William Cohen. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Pp. xxv+264. 38.25 [pounds sterling] /$55.25 (ISBN 0-226-11277-2); 14.25 [pounds sterling] /$20.75, paperback (ISBN 0-226-11278-0). I So you're going...

Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society and Trade in Western Africa, 1000-1630.
May 1, 1995... George Brooks' 'Western Africa', despite a preliminary map stretching east to the Benue and north to Taghaza, is limited to what Walter Rodney defined as 'the Upper Guinea Coast' and its hinterland and the Cape Verde islands. Most of it lies...

Guerre et societe au Royaume de Fetu, Ghana, 1471-1720.
May 1, 1995... L'intrusion europeenne, suivie de la traite negriere, a ete l'un des phenomenes majeurs ayant affecte durablement le continent africain depuis le XVeme siecle. Les nouveaux rapports issus de cette collaboration, au depart forcee, entre...

The Pate Chronicle.
May 1, 1995... The so-called Pate chronicles are the richest known indigenous records of East African coastal history. Only the Arabic and Portuguese versions of the medieval history of Kilwa come close to rivalling these, and, considering that we have more...

Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective.
May 1, 1995... The practice of human pawning - the giving of a person as security for a debt, with the creditor able to enjoy the fruits of the pawn's labour - has until now escaped the kind of scholarly attention which has been devoted to the study of...

The Dust Rose Like Smoke: The Subjugation ofthe Zulu and the Sioux.
May 1, 1995... In their pioneering work The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (Yale University Press, 1981), Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson confirmed that 'the dominant tradition in historical scholarship is one that deals in...

Journey to Livingstone: Exploration of an Imperial Myth.
May 1, 1995... Both the title and the opening of this book suggest that it is going to be a 'personal discovery' biography, along the lines of Molly Izzard's Freya Stark or Patrick French's Francis Younghusband. The author, forced to spend some extra time in...

Cardinal Lavigerie: Churchman, Prophet and Missionary.
May 1, 1995... To most historians of Africa the name Lavigerie probably conjures up the idea of a strongly nationalist and imperialist archbishop of Algiers, who founded the missionary orders of the White Fathers and the White Sisters, sending them to work...

The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization and Resistance, 1830-1932.
May 1, 1995... Despite the quarter century of Colonel Moammar Gadafi's unique experiments in popular revolution and his challenge to the established international order, Libya remains a little-known and much-misunderstood country. This is partly because the...

Letters from Nigeria: 1899-1900.
May 1, 1995... This is another edition of Carnegie's letters which had earlier been printed in 1902. These letters were written between December 1899 and the end of November 1900, when he was killed in an encounter with the Bassa in the Lokoja area. Letters...

The German Colonial Empire: 1884-1919.
May 1, 1995... The relationship between the publisher, Frank Cass, and W. O. Henderson goes back some 35 years. This book is the tenth of their association. Most of Henderson's work addresses either European economic history, especially the key institutions...

Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania.
May 1, 1995... Professor Feierman's first book, The Shambaa Kingdom, was and is a work of great importance. A generation of students, including myself, have been inspired by this highly readable structuralist analysis of oral history. Yet, although Feierman...

Quest for Equality: Asian Politics in East Africa, 1900-1967.
May 1, 1995... With this volume, Robert G. Gregory completes publication of three studies of East Africa Asians. First of the three to appear was The Rise and Fall of Philanthropy in East Africa: The Asian Contribution (New Brunswick, 1992). This was full of...

Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa.
May 1, 1995... Historians have traditionally cast a jaundiced gaze on the relationship between liquor and indigenous society in southern Africa. In an area of the world colonized by Protestants and inflicted with apartheid, commercial liquor has generally...

"Let us live for our children": The Teacher's League of South Africa, 1913-1940.
May 1, 1995... South Africa's coloured community has remained a marginalized community - marginalized by history and even by historians. Hence the importance of Mohamed Adhikari's book. He uses the Teachers' League of South Africa as a case study to...

To Bind the Nation: Solomon kaDinizulu and Zulu Nationalism, 1913-33.
May 1, 1995... The question which Nicholas Cope sets out to answer in this dense and richly detailed narrative is: What happened to the Zulu royal family after the death of Dinizulu in 1913? His reply to this question takes us into the often desperate life...

Namibia and Southern Africa: Regional Dynamics of Decolonization, 1945-90.
May 1, 1995... A decade ago, Tore Erikson noted in his comprehensive Namibian bibliography that there was an 'overcrowded literature' on Namibia as an international issue. Ronald Dreyer admits on his opening page that this is indeed 'well-trodden ground', but...

District Six: The Spirit of Kanala.
May 1, 1995... The part of Cape Town known as District Six officially came into existence towards the end of the nineteenth century. It was known colourfully as Kanaladorp, either because of its proximity to a canal or because of the Malay term, 'kanala'...

A Life's Mosaic: The Autobiography of Phyllis Ntantala.
May 1, 1995... Hybridity has become the catchword of cultural studies. In this engaging autobiography, Phyllis Ntantala has no need of the horticultural metaphor. Nevertheless, the world she portrays is a powerful evocation of what it means to grow up to be...

Insect Man: A Fight Against Malaria in Africa.
May 1, 1995... Alec Smith briskly recounts his career in tropical epidemiology, beginning in 1950 when he joined the Colonial Medical Research Service in Tanganyika, continuing with various positions in malaria-control projects in Tanzania until 1972, and...

Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa.
May 1, 1995... John Sorenson has written an interesting and challenging book 'about the creation of images, the construction of histories, and the formation of identities in the Horn of Africa' (p. 3). He uses discourse, in the sense of Michel Foucault, as...

Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination.
May 1, 1995... In 1990, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto mounted an exhibition entitled 'Into the Heart of Africa' It was designed, as its progenitor Jeanne Cannizzo described in the catalogue, to illustrate the dialogue between the ethnographic other and...

Rwanda.
May 1, 1995... The recent scramble for material on Rwanda, prompted by unparalleled political events, has made this volume of the World Bibliographical Series an important and timely source of material on the little-known central African country. This work,...

Le passe de l'Afrique par l'oralite.
May 1, 1995... The controlling criterion behind the selection of works in this annotated compilation appears to be that they were written in France, and usually presented at one stage as university theses (but not in Francophone Africa) and drew on 'oral...

Voyage d'Eustache Delafosse sur la cote de Guinee et en Espagne (1479-1481).
May 1, 1995... Scholars will welcome these three handy, handsomely produced and well-illustrated, semi-hardback editions, from Paris, of important primary texts for African history - but only variously and up to a point. The edition of Zurara reproduces the...

From the Congo Free State to Zaire: How Belgium Privatized the Economy. A History of Belgian Stock Companies in Congo-Zaire From 1885-1974.
May 1, 1995... In his new memoir, Living with Africa (Madison, 1994), Jan Vansina asserts that the question of the intended audience is 'the most serious challenge facing the writing of African history' (p. 242). Jacques Depelchin proudly numbers himself...

A Burning Hunger: Three Decades of Personal Struggles Against Poverty.
May 1, 1995... Des le debut de ce livre, l'auteur se pose la question de savoir si son ouvrage n'est pas un livre de plus sur le Sahel, la pauvrete et les modes varies de lutte pour la survie, dans des societes ou la detresse humaine est partout presente. Des...

Sierra Leone.
May 1, 1995... Since 1925, when Oxford University Press published the first major bibliography on Sierra Leone (by H. C. Luke), very little attempt has been made to build on his effort. In volume 148 of the World Bibliographical Series, Margaret Binns and...

New linguistic evidence and 'the Bantu expansion.'
May 1, 1995... Most historians believe in the Bantu expansion: the Bantu languages spread over a subcontinent as the result of a single continuous migration or `expansion'. This migration, was fueled by a population explosion which was produced by the...

Environmental decline and ecological response in the upper Senegal valley, West Africa, from the late nineteenth century to World War I.
May 1, 1995... The precariousness of the environment and the complexity of the ecology of the upper Senegal valley, part of the West African Sahelian zone, have dramatically and demonstrably influenced the region's socio-economic history.(1) This paper...

Tsetse visions: narratives of blood and bugs in colonial Northern Rhodesia, 1931-9. (Zambia)
May 1, 1995... This article explores the interaction of popular culture and imperial science, arguing that the very specific vampire accusations that emerged in the Northern Province of Northern Rhodesia in the 1930s involved local and colonial ideas about...

Written in characters of blood? The reign of King Cetshwayo ka Mpande 1872-9.
May 1, 1995... The British High Commissioner in South Africa, Sir Bartle Frere (1877-80), said the history of the Zulu King Cetshwayo ka Mpande (1872-9) was `written in characters of blood'. This was certainly an apt characterization of his own contribution...

'Money with dignity:' migrants, minelords and the cultural politics of the South African gold standard crisis, 1920-33.
May 1, 1995... `... money is a social rather than an economic phenomenon, a kind of myth or belief universally held in society...': Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money 1450-1920. During August 1920, Induna Mgwiya at the East Rand Proprietary Mine's...

'The Birth of an African Private Epistolography: Echo Island 1862-1901.' (comment on article by Jay Spaulding, The Journal of African History, vol. 34, 1993, p.115)
May 1, 1995... Editors' note. An article by Jay Spaulding, `The Birth of an African Private Epistolography, Echo Island 1862-1901', was published in this Journal (vol. XXXIV, 1993, 115-41). The Editors have received the following comment on this article,...