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A Comparison of Jacob Egharevba's Ekhere Vb Itan Edo and the Four Editions of Its English Translation, A Short History Of Benin*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
Extract
One of the most popular and most widely cited books in the study of precolonial Africa, particularly of the forest region, is Jacob U. Egharevba's A Short History of Benin. It was first published in the Edo language as Ekhere vb Itan Edo in 1933, and due to its popularity and very high demand, it quickly sold out and was reprinted in 1934. It was then translated by the author and published in English as A Short History of Benin in 1936. This English-language edition has likewise been a bestseller with four editions—the first edition in 1936, the second in 1953, the third in 1960, and the fourth one in 1968, which in turn has had reprints in Ibadan (1991) and Benin City (1994).
In 1959 Leoham Adam, Curator of the Ethnographical Collection of Melbourne University in Australia, who claimed to have first read the book in the 1930s, commended Short History for its useful contributions to the study and understanding of African societies. The late R.E. Bradbury, in writing the first foreword to the book's third edition in 1960, claimed that it”…has become something of a classic, known and relied upon not only in Nigeria, but by scholars all over the world, [as]… a valuable, indeed an indispensable, pioneering work.” In a more recent critique, Adiele Afigbo asserted that the book and its thesis has “much support from many respected historians and ethnographers… and figure prominently not only in undergraduate essays but also in Masters and Doctoral dissertations.”
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © African Studies Association 1998
Footnotes
*
Uliyawa Usuanlele would like to thank his colleagues at the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria. Toyin Falola is grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting his research on Yoruba chronicles.
References
1 His letter of commendation is reproduced in Egharevba, J. U., A Brief Autobiography, (Benin City, author, 1968), 31–33.Google Scholar
2 Egharevba, , A Short History of Benin, (3d ed.: Ibadan, Ibadan University Press, 1960), vii.Google ScholarHenceforth, Short History 3.Google Scholar
3 Afigbo, A. E., “The Benin ‘Mirage’ and the History of South Central Nigeria,” Nigeria Magazine, no. 137 (1981), 18.Google Scholar
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5 Egharevba, , Itan Edagbon Mwen, (Ibadan and Benin City, Ibadan University Press and Ethiope Publishing Corporation, 1972), ix–x.Google Scholar
6 Ibid., 25.
7 Usuanlele, U., and Falola, Toyin, “The Scholarship of Jacob Egharevba of Benin,” HA 21 (1994), 305.Google Scholar
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9 He had written a booklet on Evian on the eve of his illness which started in 1957, but was only published in 1970. See Usuanlele and Falola, “Scholarship of Jacob Egharevba,” 314.
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29 One of the issues disputed by Oronsanye, Ancient History.
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56 Ibid.
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62 Ibid., 47, with emphasis added.
63 Ibid., 47-48.
64 This problem has been pointed out in books like Urodagbon (1948), The Origin of Benin (1954) and so on. See Usuanlele and Falola, “Scholarship,” 308-09,316.
65 Ibid., 315.