For long Asantehene Agyeman Prempe I (1888-1931) has had a curious, almost unenviable reputation that is in many respects undeserving. His memory in both oral and written records is one that is inexorably linked to the British occupation and colonization of Asante and the concomitant exile which he suffered. In other words, Agyeman Prempe is remembered more for his failures—his inability to retain Asante sovereignty—than for his accomplishments. However, new evidence coming to light since the 1970s is increasingly enabling the historian of Asante to offer a more accurate assessment of Prempe I's career and accomplishments. It has now been demonstrated, for instance, that the Asantehene's arrest and exile in 1896 were a function of British duplicitous conduct and the failure of the Asantehene's supreme faith in diplomacy rather than his indifference and ineptitude; that the Asantehene did not remain indifferent to his long exile in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and Seychelles (1896-1924) but fought repeatedly for his repatriation; that in the Seychelles he saw to the perpetuation of the Asante community under his care as well as the preservation of Asante values and practices; and that he accomplished significant achievements during his exile, including maintaining extensive records of both his personal correspondence and his compilation of a history of Asante.

The number of Arabic documents and manuscripts of historical significance found in the Sudan is constantly growing. The national repository for such material is the National Records Office (NRO) in Khartoum, but a substantial collection of photographed, photocopied, and microfilmed documents has also been built up at the Department of History, University of Bergen, Norway. Most of this material has been brought together as a result of fieldwork in various parts of the Sudan in connection with historical research. However, at the end of the 1970s the NRO launched a campaign to collect private documents in the rural areas, with good results. Another step in the same direction was taken in 1986, when a four years' cooperative project between the Department of History, University of Bergen, Norway, and the NRO in Khartoum, was started. Organized joint field expeditions were planned and carried out from 1987 onwards for the purpose of locating and photographing private documents. This project is financed by the Norwegian Aid Agency (NORAD) and the University of Bergen, and is part of a larger program of cooperation with the University of Khartoum. Bjørkelo is the project leader on the Bergen side and Dr. Ali S. Karrar is the local coordinator in the NRO. The 1987 expedition went to al-Matamma, al-Dāmar, Berber, Ghubush, and Kadabās in the north and photographed 196 documents. The following year various religious centres of the Gezira were visited and another 96 documents were photographed. Research on these acquisitions is planned or in progress.

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.

Les Téké tsaayi sont un rameau détaché du tronc téké il y a plusieurs siècles. Ayant quitté les savanes très claires qui bordent le Zaïre à la hauteur du Malebu pour fuir le pouvoir politique qui s'y était développé (“pour échapper au Makoko”), ils s'établirent en forêt sur les contreforts orientaux de ce qui est aujourd'hui les Monts du Chaillu et ils imposèrent à ses habitants leur système politique bicéphale.

En 1966 j'entrepris une étude qui, selon les règles anthropologiques du moment, devait se confiner à une observation exhaustive d'un village. Les 147 habitants de Vouka, sur la haute Louessé, affluent de la rive droite du Niari-Kouilou, furent donc soumis au dispositif en vigueur. Localisation spatiale, parenté et alliances, production (peu observée), rites religieux etc. …Les matériaux obtenus furent pauvres, très disparates, et fort lacunaires. Les généalogies étaient incomplètes à cause des morts de la guerre de l'impôt. La métallurgie du fer avait cessé pendant cette même guerre; il en était de même pour les rites. Les vieux se plaignaient que leurs enfants préféraient parler la langue nzabi, celle des voisins (et champ d'étude de Georges Dupré). Mon inexpérience n'était pas seule en cause. Une déculturation était évidente, conséquence d'une dévastation démographique. Face à cette situation, les bases mêmes de la recherche étaient à redéfinir. Et il fallait d'abord se tourner vers l'histoire de la colonisation et en évaluer l'impact.

It has been in the tradition of this journal to elaborate a methodological apparatus to scrutinize the evidence of older written sources on African history. However, for various reasons, we tend to apply a different standard to recent sources, apparently considering them reliable per se because they developed in the same enlightened context of Western intellectual life as our own. Book reviews, nearly the only refuge for Western self criticism, sometimes cannot achieve it, as I will show.

The source on which I would like to comment is a dissertation completed at Boston University in 1984. It is based on oral traditions and for this reason, strictly speaking, a written source itself, apart from a number of published as well as archival sources, whose way of quotation will be re-examined below at first. The interviews were conducted by the author in 1974/75 (Morrissey 1984:225) with north Cameroonian Wandala and Shuwa Arab informants, some of whom I became acquainted with during my own fieldwork in 1984.1 would argue, though, that the following comments are not solely of interest to scholars specializing in northern Cameroon.

It might seem to some rather heavy-handed to criticize so closely a doctoral dissertation, but American dissertations are freely available to interested parties in both photocopy and microfilm. As a result they are commonly cited in other works in much the same way as more formally published studies. This being the case, it seems reasonable to submit them to the same scrutiny as any other work in the public domain. I should point out that I conducted my own fieldwork in ignorance of Morrissey's work, becoming aware of the latter only after my return from the field in 1984.

Hundreds of poems, novels, plays, and films have been devoted to Shaka, the king of the Zulu. His life story has been created anew each generation, and his image has changed over the years. For many whites he represents barbarism; for many blacks both within and outside South Africa, he has become a symbol of power. The ways in which Shaka has been portrayed reveal trends of thought and ideological influences prevailing in each period. They record the shifts in white conceptions of blacks in South Africa, and some of the developments in black consciousness.

In this study I suggest that the core of the king's biography, the very basic life story which most historians accept, is but an invention. Shaka's biography closely resembles that of other African leaders such as Sundiata and Mbegha, and of biblical heroes, such as Joseph or Moses. These similarities to stories about other heroes point to the mythic character of the narrative and raise the possibility of investigating the various Shaka stories as symbolic representations of alternative world views, rather than as records of past times.

yo e andado veynte y tres años en la mar.y ví todo el levante y poniente,…y e andado la Guinea…

The first world empire (truly one on which the sun never set) was created by the union of the crowns of Portugal and Spain in 1580. If the events immediately leading up to the union were unexpected and contingent, the creation of a global hegemony had been adumbrated nine decades earlier, with the almost simultaneous voyages, to west and to east, of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama. What lay behind these voyages on the parts of Portugal and Spain, and hence the respective claims of these nations to have set in motion the process which led to world empire, form the background theme of this paper.

Concentration on the heroic figures of Vasco da Gama and Columbus has often prevented historians from appreciating the significance of earlier developments. Writers discussing Columbus and the consequent impact of Spain on the Americas regularly fail to lay sufficient weight on the seventy years of previous Portuguese discovery of the coast of Africa, and therefore on the consequent Portuguese grapplings with the political, economic, and moral problems of culture contact and imperial policy in an Outer Continent. Equally, historians of the Portuguese imperial effort, eager to reach the better-evidenced complexities of the Lusitanian contact with Asia, tend to neglect, not only the Portuguese effort in the South Atlantic, but also the rival Castilian effort in the same ocean—an effort that preceded Columbus and paralleled, to some extent, the deeds of Portugal. Yet, within Iberia the two kingdoms, Portugal and Castile (the latter in process of generating the new kingdom of Spain), were in close and involved contact, not least because the territorial shape of each in the 1490s had only been hammered out during the preceding one hundred years. There is thus a strong case for treating the global expansion of Iberia as a single process and not merely as two coincidental thrusts around the globe, ultimately in opposite directions.

In recent years early photographs from Africa have increasingly attracted the attention of historians and ethnologists, as have those from other parts of the world for some time. It has been attempted to ascertain the general and specific circumstances which led to them being made and subsequently used. The multifarious problems raised by their interpretation have been discussed. Books and articles have been published in which historical photographs form an integral and principal component. And it has been attempted to tap hitherto neglected, or to a large extent unknown, photographic archives and collections.

One of the countries to which least attention has been paid in this field is Angola, whose photographic documentation is widely scattered and in some cases not accessible. It is likely that many valuable collections have yet to be discovered; and of those that are known, in most cases the financial means and the expertise necessary for their conservation are lacking. In the light of this generally bleak situation Jill Dias' recent systematic review of the period from 1870 to 1914 is particularly welcome. My own contribution will take her work as its starting point, but will focus exclusively on ethnographic photography.

“Ethnography” will be used here in the sense in which photographers and researchers active in Angola during the period concerned (1875-1940) understood it—as a description (more systematic in some cases than in others) of “uncivilized,” “native” African peoples and cultures. It should be remembered that the boundary between “physical” and “cultural” anthropology was at that time still fluid.

Despite its relatively brief history, African studies has developed a remarkably abundant bibliographic infrastructure to support its aims. This is tangibly evidenced in the recent appearance of Yvette Scheven's cumulated bibliography of Africana bibliographies, which comprises citations to well over 3200 bibliographies of various stripes published between 1970 and 1986, or an average of nearly 200 each year. Of course, some of the parts of the structure overlap and even duplicate other parts, and by no means has every effort attained acceptable standards, but on the whole there has been little about which to be ashamed or mortified.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise. In theory at least, the obstacles to preparing useful bibliographies are not outrageously demanding, and not at all commensurate with their enduring value. Mechanically, there are only a few rules, but these are unrelenting: entries must be accurate in all their parts, as well as complete, yet should be economical as well, and not provide useless information; coverage must be comprehensive within stated parameters; and access must be facilitated by means of thoughtful organization, extensive cross-referencing, and thorough and sensitive indexing. The intellectual challenges to accomplishing these goals might not be overwhelming; nonetheless forethought, punctilious and constant attention to detail, linguistic ability, doggedness, and above all a commitment to the highest standards of accuracy are all imperative.

Geographical compilations used to be valued because they made things easy for those who read them: instead of being confronted with a set of barely intelligible travelers' accounts, the reader was offered their essence in a predigested form. Yet today most self-respecting historians pride themselves on using only “original” sources. In the recent historiography of Africa much useful work has been devoted to the task of showing the derivative nature of certain seventeenth-and eighteenth-century European works.

One of the victims of this growing awareness has been the monumental book on Africa by Olfert Dapper (1668). Many of Dapper's sources for individual regions have been identified, notably for the Cape of Good Hope, Senegal, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Allada, and Loango. In the case of Tunis it has even been possible to show that everything in Dapper's account derived from published sources. Not surprisingly, some scholars have contemptuously dismissed the book as a “mere compilation.”

The story of Bulfinch Lambe (or Lamb) and his mission to London on behalf of the king of Dahomey (or “Emperor of Pawpaw”) has been told by Marion Johnson in an earlier article in this journal. Lambe was an employee of the Royal African Company in its factory at Jakin, the port of the kingdom of Allada, who was seized and detained by the king of Allada, as security for an unpaid debt, in 1722. He was still held prisoner in Allada when it was conquered by Agaja of Dahomey in 1724, and thus became a prisoner of the latter, who carried him off to his own capital at Abomey, further inland. Agaja soon conceived, perhaps at Lambe's suggestion, the idea of negotiating some sort of commercial agreement with the Royal African Company. A letter which Lambe wrote from Abomey to Jeremiah Tinker, Governor of the Company's factory in the neighboring kingdom of Whydah, in November 1724 reported that Agaja “talks much of settling a Correspondence with the Company, and of having White Men come here.” Lambe evidently offered himself as an intermediary, as a means of securing his release from captivity, and expressed the hope that he might persuade Agaja to acquiesce in his proposals “about my going and returning again with more White Men from the Company.” When Lambe was eventually released in 1726, this was on the understanding that he would return: Agaja himself told the English trader William Snelgrave in the following year that Lambe “had taken an Oath, and promised on his Faith, to return again in a reasonable Time with a Ship.”

Igbo history has not been adequately researched. Worse still, the little known about the people has not been dated. It might be suggested that the major reason which makes the study of the Igbo people unattractive to researchers has been the lack of a proper chronological structure. Igbo genealogies have not been collected. The often adduced reason has been that the Igbo did not evolve a centralized political system whereby authority revolved round an individual—king or chief—which would permit the collection of regnal lists. Regrettably, Nigerian historians appear to have ignored the methodology of dating kingless or chiefless societies developed and applied elsewhere such as in east Africa. In west African history generally, there has been an overdependence for dating on external sources in European languages or in Arabic, and combining these with the main regnal list of a kingdom. Even within kingdoms, genealogies of commoners and officials have rarely been collected or correlated with the regnal lists. Among the Igbo, the external sources are rare and the regnal lists few. Even the chiefdoms—Onitsha and Aboh, Oguta and Nri—were ignored for a long time after modern historiography had achieved major advances elsewhere. Arochukwu has been another neglected Igbo chiefdom. Most of these states with hereditary leadership were peripheral to the Igbo heartland. Nevertheless, they were important because of their interactions with the heartland and the possibility of dating interactive events from their genealogies.

The use of photographs as research data is becoming of increasing interest to historians of Africa. The School of Oriental and African Studies' Workshop on “Photographs as sources for African history” is only the most recent example of this emerging concern. This paper is designed to discuss some of the conceptual problems one might meet when attempting to understand photographs as data. It also discusses making photographs as a systematic part of field research. Lastly, it provides a brief primer on the type of photographic equipment best suited for fieldwork.

Historians of Africa are used to thinking of themselves as dwelling at the very cutting edge of methodological and theoretical innovation, but in the use of visual data we lag behind our colleagues in ethnology, anthropology, and sociology. Fieldwork historians, virtually all of whom take photographs, have rarely accepted photography as an integral part of their field research data. Nor has readily available visual data been widely used by historians: compare the extensive historical use of conventional anthropological data with the almost total neglect of visual anthropology.

Although the eye is our most important information-gathering sense, we find it surprisingly difficult to agree about the meaning of images. Ironically, one of the attractions of the photograph, its apparent accessibility (and implied objectivity), dissolves into subjectivity when closely ‘read.’ Since we cannot readily agree about photography's meaning and content we tend to discard or marginalize its use as data. Obviously I am overstating the case somewhat. We have of course learned to ‘read’ photographs; this is the reason we can recognize a tree as a tree. But compared to the way we have learned to read text, we read images in haphazard and non-systematic ways. Outside art history and cinema courses, image reading is rarely taught systematically.

The aim of this paper is to use African historiography as an example of how value-orientations influence historical research and writing. This can be seen as a contribution to the never-ending discussion about the problem of objectivity in history. African historiography is particularly well suited for such an analysis. Its birth as a separate area of academic study after World War II was partly the result of internal, professional developments, such as the establishment of African universities, the postwar development of the social sciences, interdisciplinary research, and a more global orientation in the Western academic world. But it was also closely related to external political and ideological developments, like African nationalism, decolonization, the cold war, development aid, and the rise of new left movements in the Western world. The subject matter of modern African history is of obvious significance not only for Africans, but also for the self-image of Europe and for the relationship between Africa and the West: the nature of European expansion, the role of capitalism in the development of the modern world, the concept of imperialism, and the global relevance of democracy and socialism. The interconnections between ideology and history are therefore particulary clear in this field.

The plan of the paper is to discuss how value-orientations within the different schools of history in this field reveal themselves in the choice of themes, in causal explanation, in basic concepts and in counterfactual argument. The term “value-orientation” I will define so as to cover interests, ideals, and personal identification. I will distinguish between three main “schools,” the term being used in the broadest sense of the word: the colonial school, also covering later historians writing in the same tradition; the Africanist school, dominant since the late 1950s; and the radical (“neo-Marxist,” “dependency,” “under-development”) school, influential since its emergence in the 1970s.

The Shaiqiya are the northernmost Arabic-speaking community of the modern riverain Sudan, residing in the Nile bend below the Fourth Cataract as far as the borders of Nubian-speaking Dongola. Independent confirmation of the existence of the Shaiqiya under that name can be found in European sources of the sixteenth century, while charters, chronicles, saints' lives, and orally-preserved traditions allude to their participation in the political and cultural life of the wider kingdom of Sinnar, of which they formed a part. In November 1820 the Shaiqiya made one of their most dramatic contributions to the historical record by offering determined resistance to the invading Turkish armies of Muhammad Ali, Viceroy of Egypt. When they were defeated twice in quick succession, their homeland was subjected to six weeks of concentrated vengeance before the invaders marched on south. The erstwhile Shaiqi elite took service with the Turks as mercenary colonial troops and departed forever, slave revolts flared on the princely demesnes adjoining their vacant castles, and the servile entourages of the old lords disbanded and decamped. The survivors who remained, largely non-slave peasant cultivators, set out to build a new society under the tutelage of Turkish colonial officials. It is this nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial society, as popularized internationally by the Shaiqi novelist al-Tayyib Salih and the Shaiqi ethnographer Haydar Ibrahim, that is usually understood today to constitute the traditional, historically authentic, pre-modern reality of the Shaiqiya experience.

The “Zimbabwe controversy” is a name by which disputes over the origins of the people who produced stone ruins and mines in southern Africa are known. Those disputes occurred between informed and lay opinion; informed opinion being represented by archeologists, and lay opinion by local cult archeologists and, at the turn of the century, explorers and excavators. One aspect of lay opinion that has seldom been discussed is the role of popular fiction. Popular novels are often mentioned in works on the Zimbabwe controversy as representing particular viewpoints, but there have been no detailed analyses of their role in that controversy. This paper will set popular novels into the context of the ideologies that influenced them, and gauge their influence on lay opinion and the degree to which they reflected viewpoints that were expressed in political disagreements over the site of Great Zimbabwe.

There are four major nineteenth-century novels that are pertinent to the Zimbabwe controversy: H. M. Walmsley's The Ruined Cities of Zululand, and three works by H. Rider Haggard—King Solomon's Mines, She, and Elissa? The first novel was published in time to incorporate knowledge of recently-reported stone ruins and gold mines. In the 1820s and 1830s stone kraals were known to have been built by black people. By the 1860s, however, when other explorers “discovered” stone ruins, they argued that black people could not have built them. Their arguments were based on prevalent systems of classifying humanity. It was generally believed that races were tied to discrete levels of culture by their average intelligence and their blood. Consequently, races could be characterised in terms of a set number of items of culture. It was also generally accepted that the overall record of humanity was one of cultural progress, or step-by-step advancement toward ever better and more complex cultures. Racial characters were thought to set a limit on the level that each race could reach. It was argued, for instance, that black Africans had reached the limit of their potential progress, whereas Europeans were still undergoing advancement. Consequently, Europeans were seen to belong to the most advanced races in the world; other races were ranked below them, and were thought to represent primitive stages through which Europeans had already passed.

A series of panels at the ASA meeting in November 1989 focused on sources and methods for the study of law in colonial Africa. At an informal discussion held afterwards, participants agreed that court records are potentially very valuable sources for historians, anthropologists, and other scholars of Africa but that they have not been used as widely as they might be. In an effort to alert Africanists to the existence of such documents and to encourage their use, those of us who had used court records in our research were asked to provide descriptions of them. This paper is a collection of the responses.

Courts were established in the African housing quarters in what was then Usumbura in 1938 as part of a broad reorganization by the colonial administration of the conditions of African residence in the city, one in the quartier of Buyenzi and the other in that of Beige (today Bwiza). These tribunals, which are still in existence, were granted jurisdiction over civil and minor criminal cases between Africans; each court had its own officials, advisors, and clerks, prominent residents of the quartier appointed by the colonial administration. Buyenzi's population was predominantly Muslim, and its court officials were men knowledgeable about Islamic law. Beige, in contrast, was a more heterogeneous community, and its court tended to be staffed by residents who had risen in the African ranks of the civil service.

Men and women of both housing quarters resorted frequently to the courts, with the Buyenzi court hearing approximately 9,000 cases and Beige almost twice that many in the years between their establishment in 1938 and independence in 1962. Their complaints covered a wide range of matters: debts, business ventures, bridewealth disputes, divorces, child rights, property transfers, and various quarrels between friends, neighbors, and family members. Procedure was relatively simple. A man or woman who wished to present a complaint went before the court and was given an appointment for the case to be heard. At the time the court considered the complaint, both accuser and defendant were present. Although the parties might bring with them supporters and witnesses, there were no intermediary personnel such as lawyers. Each individual argued his own case and answered questions put by the judges. A judgment was usually handed down immediately, and it was based on customary rather than European practice. As these courts were originally established, their autonomy was very great: in principle, unless the decisions violated colonial law, they could not be overruled by Belgian officials.

Talking with informants in the field lies at the methodological heart of Africanist history and anthropology. Historians and anthropologists rely on formal and informal interviews, surveys, questionnaires, and participant observation in order to generate data from Africans and to privilege an African perspective on society, culture, and change. Fieldwork serves both as a political statement empowering African voices and as a right of passage for Africanists.

Vansina's (1965) careful methodological considerations for mining and interpreting the African voice in the form of oral traditions has helped give Africanist history its distinctive character. Collecting and using oral traditions has not been unproblematic, however. Considerable debate surrounds the historicity of oral traditions (for example, Wrigley 1971; Henige 1974; Prins 1979; Miller 1980; Webster 1982; Vansina 1985).

In comparison, little attention has been paid to the interview as the encounter central to the production of knowledge. In his Oral Tradition, Vansina was concerned primarily with the chains of transmission of testimony and their possible distortions. Vansina recognized, but did not pursue, how the encounter between informant and researcher influenced the informant's testimony.

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

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

A major feature of research in African history is the reliance of African historians on oral statements for much of their evidence. Vansina's pathbreaking explorations of African oral traditions and testimonies established criteria for the collection of oral evidence and ushered in the contemporary era of scholarship in African history. Although the publication of Oral Tradition sanctioned the use of oral data, it also prompted considerable reflection about the nature, strengths, and weaknesses of oral evidence. For the most part this scholarly examination of African oral traditions and testimonies has focused on their value as sources. What has not been fully addressed are the social and cultural dynamics of the research process itself: how the interaction between a foreign fieldworker and an indigenous informant involves not only the production of knowledge but the management of asymmetrical power relationships as well. Rarely do researcher and informant interact as equal partners. During the process of fieldwork, sometimes the researcher is favored, sometimes the informant. This brief paper is a reflection on the ways the attitudes of an African people about knowledge, power, and outsiders influence the kind of oral evidence the researcher collects.

For much of the past two years I resided in a village in northern Ghana where I was conducting fieldwork among the Mamprusi people. I was seeking information which would embellish and provide an indigenous texture to the archival sources I had collected earlier as part of my efforts to reconstruct the social history of Mampurugu during the colonial period. It soon became apparent, however, that my quest for an indigenous expression of, and perspective on, historical process was mired in a complex host of conflicts and assumptions. As a white stranger in the Mamprusis' midst asking as many questions as I could about the Mamprusi past, I received answers which reflected not only the degree to which I had successfully or unsuccessfully established cordial and trusting relationships with my Mamprusi informants, but also Mamprusi attitudes about historical knowledge and their anxieties in regard to possible consequences if such knowledge were revealed to non-Mamprusi.