Why yet another Africanist journal? the reader may ask. And, given the astonishin, increase in the number (now over 200) of journals devoted to Africa, the question is a fair one. Every new journal should seek to justify itself to the audience it addresses.

Despite the large number of African journals now available, not all aspects of the study of the African past are covered adequately. Because this study is so recent the emphasis, both in research itself and in the format of the journals, has been on the collection, use, and presentation of data. It cannot be denied that these procedures have been and will remain the chief concerns of historical enquiry, but they are not the only ones. The value of data obviously depends, first, on its validity, and, second, on its use. The assessment of these aspects in turn depends on the close and continued scrutiny of sources as well as on the quality of historical thought. We cannot agree with Livy, who wrote of his sources for early Roman history that “it is not worth the trouble either to affirm or to dispose of these matters [improbabilities] … we must abide by the tradition.”

There have been several accounts of the practice known as ‘silent trade’ in west Africa during the last thousand years. The oldest known account, that of Herodotus, is almost twenty-five hundred years old–although it probably refers to northwest rather than west Africa. Such accounts purport to describe exchanges of imported goods for gold from sub-Saharan Africa. These exchanges are said to have been made according to very particularized rules: two (and only two) trading parties would transact business with one another. They would do this not only without the help of middlemen but also without speaking to one another, or coming face to face or even within sight of each other. Elaborate precautions would in fact be taken to prevent any kind of direct visual contact. Despite this mutual avoidance and the resulting impossibility of negotiating rates of exchange, agreement presented no serious difficulties. Bargaining was carried out through gradual adjustment of quantities, arrived at by alternate moves by the two parties. Though each of the two in turn would have to leave his goods unguarded in a place accessible to the other, neither would take advantage of this for dishonest purposes. A shared table of market and moral values, as well as (and in spite of) silence and mutual invisibility, were thus the trademarks of such exchanges.

The available accounts may conveniently be grouped into two categories. One category represents the exchanges as taking place between traders coming from what are assumed to be ‘more developed’ cultures (e.g., Carthage or medieval north Africa) and ‘less developed’ barely known cultures outside the sphere of direct influence of the greater sub-Saharan pre-colonial states. The other category refers to contacts between those barely known cultures of the hinterland and black Africans (e.g., Wangara, ‘Accanists’) playing the role of middlemen between the gold producers and the Arabs and Moors or Europeans. It is on the information provided by these middlemen that the second category of accounts depends.

It is over a decade since Professor Lawrence made a plea “for subjecting the sources for African history to that kind of critical appraisal which has customarily been applied to Greek and Roman authors.” Among Anglophone African historians, the plea has largely gone unheard. Could this conceivably be because critical source analysis is dull stuff for minds accustomed to the excitement of filling blank plains of African history with elephants of speculation and castles of moralistic stance? The opportunity provided by the reprinting of the standard sources has all too frequently been lost. One editor of an essential west African source is content to remark that the contemporary translation into English he is reprinting, considered together with another contemporary translation into French, are “all [sic], for the most part, considered faithful renditions of the original Dutch.” Standards of source-verification in published African history not uncommonly fall below the standards demanded in other fields of history; even reputable publishing houses occasionally produce works whose standards of historical enquiry are so low that they have been termed, unkindly but not altogether unjustly, “Academic Oxfam for Africa.” Perhaps a case does exist for speculation and commitment in African history, perhaps non-written sources may inform in detail as well as stimulate in general; but if the African historian dares to step outside the ivory tower of African studies, and is concerned that his subject be taken seriously by the historical profession as a whole, he must perform his exercises on the common ground of historical enquiry. This means that he must include a measure of dull critical analysis of written sources. Professor Shepperson once suggested that the time had come for more ‘dull’ African history: the present paper is intended as a contribution to this and to no other good cause.

By his own account, John Duncan was born in 1805 on a farm in southwest Scotland and enlisted in the Life Guards at the age of seventeen. He obtained his discharge in 1839 and was appointed master-at-arms to the Niger Expedition of 1841. In the course of this, while aiding his men at the Cape Verde Islands, he received a leg wound which became so serious that amputation was contemplated, and he was left with a permanent weakness in the leg. Despite this he offered his services to the Royal Geographical Society in 1844 to go to Africa and penetrate to the Kong Mountains. He was provided with instruments and funds for this purpose and given passage to Cape Coast on a warship.

Duncan's plans at this date seem to have been somewhat indefinite. The Royal Geographical Society was told in 1844 that Duncan, “full of zeal and activity though not professing to be very scientific,” was going to the west coast of Africa. It was not known, however, whether he would “follow the line between Loanda on the west and Mozambique on the east” or would “confine his explorations to the country of Koomassie [Asante] and the Kong Mountains, east of Cape Coast, and to an excursion to the new settlement at Abbe Accuta [Abeokuta] where the missionary Crowther is now established.” During his journey Duncan wrote several letters to the Society. One, dated at Anamabu in December 1844, explained that he had been refused permission by the Asantehene to go beyond Kumasi and so he was planning to ascend the Volta river instead. A second from Whydah written in April 1845 described his travels along the coast and on the lagoons. The last letter was written at Cape Coast in October 1845 and described his visit to the Dahomey capital. In addition, it contained an account of a journey he claimed to have made to “the town called Adofoodiah, at 13°6'N.” This last letter was written at a time when Duncan was entirely without resources, and he ended by saying that he wanted to go to Timbuktu “passing to the left of Ashanti.” A footnote to the letter, as published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, noted that “funds have since been sent to Mr Duncan to assist him in carrying out his views of visiting Timbuctoo and descending the Niger.” However, this expedition was never undertaken and Duncan returned to England shortly afterward.

African myths of origin have long both fascinated and perplexed historians. Naively taken as fact, they have led historians to create their own myths, such as the Hamitic Myth and its corollary, Sudanic Civilization. The most radical corrective has been to dismiss origin myths altogether on the anthropologial rationale that all myths are simply cultural charters and bear little resemblance to historical fact. By so doing, however, quite frequently we uncritically dismiss our sole source for the history of African peoples prior to the nineteenth century. The task, then, is to try to sift the historical wheat from the mythical chaff in order to recover as much valid historical evidence as possible from origin myths without violating the canons of historical method.

A case in point is the Singwaya tradition of Mijikenda and other Kenyan coastal peoples' origins. The Singwaya tradition is one of the most frequently cited and discussed myths of origin of African peoples. Most of the discussion, however, has taken place in a void, because the myth concerns peoples about whom we have known very little and whose traditions have been collected only fragmentarily at best. Its appeal has lain in the fact that this tradition has been collected dozens of times from the 1840s to the present from virtually all the coastal peoples, including the Bajun, the Pokomo along the Tana River, the nine different Mijikenda peoples, the Segeju, the lowland Taita, and two Mombasa Swahili groups. Its widespread distribution has caused the tradition to have a fatal fascination for historians.

The first collections of traditions of origin for the coastal peoples were made in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Krapf, Rebmann, Guillain, Burton, Wakefield, New, and Taylor, the earliest missionaries and travelers in the Mijikenda area. These collections were sketchy, and although they mentioned northerly origins they did not specifically mention Singwaya. Starting with Hollis' earliest collections in 1897, the traditions rapidly acquired greater detail. Collections by Johnstone, Platts, MacDougall, Champion, Pearson, Werner, Osborne, Sharpe, Weaving, Hobley, Griffiths, Dammann, Kayamba, and Prins among various coastal peoples all relate a common theme: that the Pokomo, the Taita, seven of the nine Mijikenda peoples, the Segeju, and the Kilindini and Jomvu Swahili all shared common origins in a place called Singwaya located on the southern Somali coast; that they were driven from there by an invasion of the Galla; and that they migrated south in several groups to their present areas of settlement.

“And so,” commented Goody and Watt in their celebrated discussion of the consequences of literacy,

However applicable these remarks may be to classical Greece, they are not applicable to colonial Buganda without considerable emendation. This paper attempts to suggest why this is so, paying particular attention to the development of indigenous historical writing. It is therefore more narrow in analytical focus than Rowe's recent survey of historical writings in Luganda. On the other hand, it is somewhat broader in intent than Kiwanuka's introduction to his translation into English of the early part of Apolo Kagwa's Ekitabo kya Basekabaka be Buganda, the only other substantive study in this field.

When Willem Bosman wrote his Naauwkeurige Beschryving van de Guinese- Goud-Tand- en Slavekust in 1702 the Guinea coast was perhaps enjoying more public interest in Europe than ever before. The Gold Coast and its interior had long appealed to the imagination of the western world, because it was one of the few gold-producing areas open to traders of all nations. But around 1700 interest in the whole coast of west Africa, particularly the east-west stretch or ‘Lower Guinea,’ further increased because of the rapidly increasing demand in the West Indies and Latin America for slaves from that area. As a matter of fact the “Asiento question” was one of the major issues at stake at the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession. Bosman, late Chief Merchant on behalf of the Dutch West India Company on the coast of Guinea, was in an excellent position to satisfy public curiosity.

Dutch contacts with the lower Guinea coast dated from 1595 when the then newly-emerging Republic of the Northern Netherlands or the United Provinces was badly in need of a regular supply of gold in order to finance its war efforts against the Spanish crown. Dutch trade expanded quickly in west Africa, at the expense of the Portuguese, who pretended to have a trade monopoly in the area. On the Gold Coast in particular the Portuguese were in a strong position, with fixed bases in the form of their castle at Sao Jorge da Mina (later Elmina) and supporting forts at Shama and Axim. But Portugal had been under the Spanish crown since 1580 and the Dutch considered their overseas possessions as legal prey and the undermining of their trade as a valid political aim. The Dutch were able to bring cheaper and better trade goods to the coast, and this prompted the ruler of the small state of Asebu near Elmina to defy openly the supposedly exclusive rights of the Portuguese, and, in 1612, to invite the Dutch to build a fort of their own at Mori. A Dutch attack in 1625 on the great castle of Elmina failed, but in 1637 they were successful and by 1641 they had expelled the Portuguese from their last possessions on the Guinea coast. But the Dutch were never able to enjoy the kind of monopolistic position the Portuguese had had; in 1631 the English built their first Gold Coast fort at Cormantin and other nations soon joined the rush to the profitable gold trade. By the end of the century no fewer than twenty-six fortified trade posts, belonging to the chartered companies of five nations, littered the coastline.

Many readers have probably noticed that the manuals of historical method which deal with verbal societies are primarily concerned with the sources available and the application of a critique to them. This is true for McCall's or Gabel and Bennett's works on Africa. But what is to be done with the sources once they are ready for evaluation remains vague. How does one reconstruct the past? How does one explain, or eventually interpret, history? Of the two works mentioned, only the first pays some attention to the question of “historical synthesis.’ McCall lists three possibilities: (a) that the sources support each other; (b) that they contradict each other; and (c) that they have no common reference or meeting point. This last situation is the most common in African history and indicates merely that not enough is known and that eventually new data could lead to new interpretative situations-either (a) or (b). The manual stresses that sources should be classified by discipline so that comparison of sources yields either confirmation or contradiction, with obvious and known data reinforcing the validity of the result. Once this is achieved it would seem that the job is finished, except for the warning that historical reconstruction requires a certain type of mind: imaginative yet disciplined.

Yet the job is not finished. By comparing we have only established the degree of validity of reported events or situations. We have only verified how the observation, to borrow a term from the scientific experimental method, is correct. The impression remains that historical research is fairly mechanical: to find sources, subject them to a critique, assemble them. Reconstruction follows, with suitable use of imagination. That is the craft. Yet anyone who works with historical materials knows that that is not the practice of the craft. Josephine Tey's novel The Daughter of Time features a police sergeant who more nearly exemplifies historical practice–he guesses, ponders, backtracks, and finds sources almost by intuition. If he had made a few more mistakes he would have been a recognizable historian at work. A recent volume, The Historian's Workshop, though impressionistic, also yields a more realistic picture. In the real world historians start out with a hunch, an idea which leads them to an interest in documents or in oral traditions. Then the data suggest what Popper calls a historical interpretation – “untestable points of view.” The practitioner feels that the interpretation is not enough. It should be doubted and controlled by reference to more data until the point is reached at which no more control is possible. Then the historian feels satisfied with the result–even though it still remains an interpretation, because there remains the selective point of view implicit in the idea that initiated the research.

In 1901 the katikkiro or ‘prime minister’ of Buganda, Apolo Kagwa, published a vernacular history of his country entitled The Book of the Kings of Buganda. Most of this work dealt with the events of his own lifetime, but it also included a circumstantial account of the twenty-nine reigns which, he alleged, had preceded that of King Mutesa, who received the first European visitors and who died in 1884. This version of the Ganda past has not since been challenged in its essentials either by Ganda traditionalists or by European or European-trained commentators. Some of the former have tried to lengthen the history still further by naming ancestors or forerunners of King Kintu, with whom Kagwa began his tale. But these additional kings are plainly legendary, like the dragon Bemba, or abstractions, like ‘King Buganda,’ and have not achieved official status. Scholars, by contrast, have been inclined to shorten the list slightly, holding with Sir Harry Johnston that the first real king of Buganda was Kimera [K3] and relegating the first two of Kagwa's rulers, Kintu and Cwa, to a nebulous prehistory. In other respects they have generally accepted Kagwa's account with only a few amendments and hesitations, and have used it as the basis for quite elaborate chronological and developmental studies.

The medical history of Africa is a vital but neglected field. Disease has been a significant factor throughout African history, and attempts to control endemic and epidemic afflictions have been an important aspect of change in the twentieth century. Unfortunately, historians have rarely paid more than cursory attention to issues involving human health. There is some mention of disease in many pre-colonial studies, especially those of the “trade and politics” variety, but comment is usually directed toward the effects of tropical diseases on Europeans rather than the impact of local and induced diseases on African populations. Similarly, works on the colonial period often mention medical services in passing, but rarely make a serious attempt to assess their reception by local peoples and the results of their activities.

It is to be hoped that as the historiography of Africa moves away from its early preoccupation with trade, politics, and the “origins of nationalism,” and as new archival and other sources become available, scholars will take a greater interest in the role of disease and medicine in the history of the continent. In this essay I will discuss some recent writings in this field by historians and by persons in other disciplines whose works are useful to historians, and will suggest possibilities for future research. Coverage will be selective rather than exhaustive, and will be confined to sub-Saharan Africa.

Despite their uninviting aspect, dictionaries make for engrossing historical reading. Seemingly dull compilations conceal an ample description of a society and its culture at a given moment in time. Each entry in the original language constitutes a bit of information. For African languages the amount of information varies between one thousand or fifteen hundred entries in the shorter vocabularies to as many as eighty thousand for the fullest dictionaries. Anything less than a thousand words may be considered to be only a wordlist, the longest of which rarely exceeds five hundred items. Most dictionaries seem to contain between six thousand and thirty thousand entries. The extent of information is astonishing because the form is usually so condensed that it consists only of a gloss as translation of the term given. The best dictionaries contain explanations of the gloss, references to relevant publications, and examples taken from everyday speech as well as from literary usage, and they begin with a short grammatical introduction. Unfortunately, this kind of dictionary has been and remains all too rare; usually the gloss is unnecessarily laconic. Even so, the most exciting as well as the most trivial information is to be found in these tomes. For example, we learn from the 1652 Kongo dictionary (7200 entries) collected or recopied by van Geel, both that the Kongo were matrilineal–a fact stated nowhere else for the old kingdom–and that playing cards was a popular pastime.

As of July, 1973, the National Archives of Cameroon were located in two offices: a main branch at the capital, Yaoundé, and a second collection at Buea, the former British West Cameroon capital. Both centers are open to researchers during normal government office hours. Access to the Yaoundé collection requires no special formalities for any bona fide academic researcher (manuscript documents are closed to individuals working on their own private economic or legal affairs). To work in Buea it is necessary to have the written permission of the Yaoundé Director of Archives. Documents are considered ‘open’ if they are more than thirty years old. Conditions of work in both centers are reasonably comfortable and pleasant. Relatively few scholars are usually to be found in the reading rooms, and documents are produced fairly rapidly and in generous quantities.

These are all to be found in Buea: they cover the period beginning with the earliest British administration in 1914. Files for the Buea Residency (covering both the Bamenda and the southern regions of former West Cameroon) are well catalogued. Efforts were also being made to catalogue files from subordinate administrative centers. Some material relevant to the British administration of Cameroon is also to be found in various Nigerian archives.

To researchers thinking of using the extremely decentralized archives of the Republic of Niger the task of locating documents may seem formidable indeed. As of 1972 little effort had been made to collect important documents in one location, so that the bulk of the records of Niger's colonial government–and a few valuable assessment reports and ethnographic studies as well–are scattered among the préfectures, sous-préfectures, government offices, and small libraries of the country. This decentralization necessitates travel but it also has advantages, expecially for those who combine archival and field research. By being able to do both at the same time it is possible to let one kind of data inform the other, with the result that the questions being asked of all of the various sources can continually be rethought.

Permission for all research to be undertaken in Niger must be obtained through the Centre Nigérien de Recherches en Sciences Humaines, B.P. 318, Niamey. The C.N.R.S.H. asks researchers to submit a detailed description of their project, a summary of their preparation in the languages in which the research is to be conducted, and a projected budget showing the sources and amounts of funding. In addition researchers are asked to agree to send a copy of any thesis or publication which results from their research in Niger and to contribute time to the training of Nigerian historians and social scientists.

The researcher interested in archival and bibliographical information on Gabon will already have consulted Hubert Deschamps' Traditions orales et archives du Gabon (Paris, 1962), and Brian Weinstein's “Gabon: A Bibliographical Essay,” Africana Newsletter [Stanford], 1 (Winter 1963), pp. 4-9. It is not my intention to supersede these two documents but rather to provide a more recent survey of what is presently available to the researcher in Libreville.

The local administrative archives, like those of most of the former French colonies in Africa, were removed to France on independence. This means that the investigator may spend less archival time in Gabon than he might have anticipated; nevertheless, there are several valuable archival resources available in Libreville. The most voluminous archives in Libreville have now been centralized by the government into the National Archives and Library under the direction of M. Gaston Rapontchombo. Much of the material was personally collected by him during twenty years' residence in France. The card catalogue (chronologically organized) begins with 1856 and is kept as current as is possible with a limited staff and budget. It is in the process of being cross-referenced by author and subject. The index cards (totaling some thirty to fifty linear feet) represent every book and article concerning Gabon (history, natural sciences, religion, politics, art, education, anthropology, and numerous other subject areas) that M. Rapontchombo could locate in his extensive investigations into European repositories. In some cases these include material about Gabon's neighbors. There are entries from about 1000 journals (French, English, Swiss, German, Scandinavian, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Belgian, Portuguese, South African, and other areas, including many other countries in tropical Africa). In many cases M. Rapontchombo has photocopied articles, and even complete books, but these had not been catalogued as of February 1974. There are also many photocopies of manuscripts from various archival collections in France.

Les Archives de la Société des Pères Blancs comportent essentiellement les documents suivants: Correspondance entre la Maison Généralice et les missionnaires, Rapports, Statistiques, Diares, Enquêtes et Etudes diverses.

Ces divers éléments concernent La Maison Généralice des Pères Blancs (Alger, puis Rome) avec tout l'éventail de ses relations; les Provinces (c'est-à-dire les pays d'Europe et d'Amérique) d'où sont originates les missionnaires et qui s'occupent de leur formation; mais surtout les pays ou territoires africains où travaillent les Peres Blancs. Voici la liste de ces régions et les dates indiquant l'arrivée des missionnaires, et, le cas échéant, leur depart.

Scholars working on the pre-1700 history of the Guinea coast find invaluable the series of bilingual editions of early Portuguese texts (Gomes, Pacheeo Pereira, Fernandes) issued at Dakar and Bissau in the 1950s by a group of French and Portuguese scholars. A fourth early text, that of Zurara, was very competently edited in French by L. Bourdon and published in Dakar in 1960. These texts can be reinforced and supplemented by the collection of documents published in many volumes by Fr. António Brásio since 1952. Earlier editions of Guinea texts of this vintage were much less satisfactory, largely because the editors lacked knowledge of the African background. This criticism applied to texts presented in Portuguese (Cadamosto, Almada, Lemos Coelho), in Dutch (De Marees and Ruiters), and in English (Cadamosto and Pacheeo Pereira). In more recent years, while there has been a flood of reprints, mostly unedited, there has been a lull in the publication of volumes of edited texts. However, shorter texts have recently been examined–in Thilmans' 1971 analysis of a section of Dapper's work, and in a number of papers by Avelino Teixeira da Mota, which have included materials from the project about to be described.