African Past Research Articles

Sankofa—the Need to Turn Back to Move Forward: Addressing Reconstruction Challenges that Face Africa and South Africa Today.

The Sankofa, a mythical African bird that moves forward while its head is turned backward toward a golden egg on its back, inspires the considerations of this article. The egg here represents a treasure in the form of historical wisdom. This article suggests that Africans have to rediscover and reclaim historical wisdom to address contemporary problems and challenges. It addresses the tension between universalism and particularism that continues to move Africanism to Westernism: a process that is regarded as undermining the soul of the continent. Knowledge of the past provides the potential to repossess what it means to be human in Africa. Since re-memory captures the emotional memory, it serves as a dynamic source for spiritual recovery, healing and reconciliation. To build a collective historical memory of historical wisdom; therein lies the necessary illumination. This article realises that the wisdom of history and tradition possesses the ability to redefine and reconstruct social and religious problems from within the frame of memory. It endeavours to show that a Sankofa connection with the African past provides sustenance for understanding and embodying the present and the future.

Reflections on plague in African history (14th–19th c.)

In 1347, the western and Mediterranean parts of the Old World recorded the first outbreaks of a returning mortal disease that would make its presence felt over several centuries. Known today as the Second Plague Pandemic—a zoonosis due to the bacterium Yersinia pestis—it scythed between a third and half of the population without regard for wealth or status. It deeply transformed all facets of societies, ignited fears, violence, and pogroms, tested the flexibility of religions, hierarchies, and traditions, and excited ambitions. Although the plague is commonly described as a pandemic, historical knowledge about the initial Black Death and the many recurrent waves of the disease is largely restricted to Western Europe and the Mediterranean world, where the literate elite left an impressive documentary record that served as resource to the long-lasting and flourishing heuristic tradition of Plague Studies. If, as suggested by Monica Green, the concept of ‘pandemic’ is to be taken seriously, we must consider the many excluded parts of the Old World, and especially Africa, in our plague narratives. We must recognize that these societies that did not practise ‘the reduction of speech to graphic forms’—to use the expression coined by Jack Goody—also could have experienced the brutal mortality of the plague and its radical transformative power, while producing no organized and specific, long-lasting traces. By extension, we must also recognize that all literate societies that had in common the art of writing did not practise this art in the same way and may not have produced identical categories of documentary records. Cultural differences affect the nature of the documentary archive, as illustrated by literate practices in medieval Nubia and Ethiopia. The invisibility or limited visibility of the plague in the documentary record is, therefore, a challenge for historians and a disguised invitation to accept the absence of evidence as evidence of absence. This paper is my attempt to resist this temptation, to challenge the quasi-absence of interest in the plague problem in the historiography of Sub-Saharan Africa, and to lay out the foundation of a research strategy that will be multi-disciplinary and comparative. The plague problem is not a footnote to African history. If the plague impacted African societies as it did in documented parts of the Old World, we must have missed or misread fundamental processes of change it entailed. Would we understand and interpret the history of Western Europe or the Mediterranean as we do if we ignored that the plague had occurred? Here, I do not solve the plague conundrum in Sub-Saharan Africa; rather, I build on the persuasive arguments made by other contributors to this special issue about the presence of plague in different parts of Africa before the 19th century. My purpose is to propose multiple, critical, and cumulative—but far from exhaustive—pathways to reading and rereading the traditional and less traditional sources of African history in the light of the possibility of societal crises related to plague. Besides presenting fragments of evidence, this paper also serves as an introduction to three groundbreaking papers exploring the archaeological, documentary, and genomic sources of the disease in the African past.

Report on the 24th Biannual Meeting of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists (SAfA), entitled: Building bridges to the African past

Over the past few decades, SAfA conferences have grown. SAfA meetings are intended to facilitate conversations that tackle the complex issues of cultural heritage management in Africa – examining dilemmas and their causes, and sharing opportunities, ideas and solutions. In total, 250 people registered for the conference, of which 84 were students. The Plenary Session explored “Dilemmas and Solutions in Cultural Heritage Management in Africa”. Five keynote speakers addressed provocative themes...

“We Should Have Maintained This Unity, Then There Would Be More Development:” Lessons from a Pop-Up Museum of the Fante Confederation

Abstract:This article examines the potential of an unconventional method in applied history – the pop-up museum – for analyzing relationships between history and memory and producing meaningful histories of African pasts. Specifically, we assess our application of this tool to accounts of events surrounding the Fante Confederation of 1868–1873 in the Central Region of modern-day Ghana. By utilizing a pop-up museum exhibit in the field, we determined that the construction of a meaningful history of the Fante Confederation requires the apperception of “durable bundles” – continuities between collective memory and history that also serve as survivals from the mid-nineteenth century to contemporary society. Our original sources and interlocutors in common identified themes of “unity” and “development” as particularly meaningful durable themes. We posit that these shared themes can serve as points of attachment for contemporary Fante speakers to work with histories of the Fante Confederation, and propose them as motifs around which relevant histories can be built in this case. Finally, in reflecting on our experience, we hypothesize that this model of applied history may be useful in other situations as well.

Book review

Amzat Boukari-Yabara's portrait of Guyanese scholar and activist Walter Rodney (Walter Rodney: Un historien engagé, 1942-1980, Paris: Présence Africaine, 2018) is not a traditional biography, but rather a narrative of the context in which he deployed his work as an historian and a politically engaged contributor to African and Caribbean studies in the 1960s and 1970s. The author, like Rodney himself, believes that the history of African and Afro-diasporic peoples should be written from the Africas and the Americas themselves. Whether writing about the history of the slave trade, the African past, decolonization or black power, the biographer expertly conveys Rodney's erudition while directing students of these issues toward a broader retrospective, contextualization and actualization of his thought. More than any existing biography or chronicle of Rodney's life, it is a book that redefines and actualizes what it means to be an “historien engagé,” a politically and socially committed student of the past and its lessons for the present.

Fanonist ‘pitfalls’ in the pan-African movement since 1945

The impediments to the creation of Pan-Africanism or African unity since Africa’s so-called independence from the 1960s onwards, are interrogated in this article, by drawing parallels with Fanon’s famous chapter, ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ in his The Wretched of the Earth. It is argued that a myriad of pitfalls continue to undermine the Pan-African Movement (PAM). Among them are: patriarchal attitudes; conflict over the question, ‘Who is an African?’; generational cleavages; xenophobia and ethnic conflict; neo-Garveyite vs neo-Marxist perspectives; criticisms of the African Union and the commitment of African governments to African unity; exclusion of ‘Afro-Latinos’; anti-LBGTI and cultural nationalist positions; whether Pan-Africanism as a concept has been supplanted in the last two decades by the terms Afrocentrism; Global Africans and African Renaissance. Ultimately, a precondition for forging Pan-Africanism is the political education of the African people – both on the continent and in the Diaspora, regarding the meaning of Pan-Africanism and an understanding of the African past.

The Challenge of Studying Inflation in Precolonial Africa by Klas Rönnbäck – A Response

Abstract:Following the article by Klas Rönnbäck, this article responds by stressing some key elements missing from the original article. These include the connection of African economic history to world economic history, the question of periodization and economic change, and the issue of currency devaluation in the period in question. The response concludes by posing several questions of the theoretical assumptions made by economists regarding data, and problematizes the applicability of such models to a distant pre-colonial African past.

Between religions: Baptist converts in Sierra Leone and their Islamic and African Traditional Religious past

This article focuses on Baptist converts in Sierra Leone and how they live between religions in an African multi-religious context. When converts looked back on their lives, they reconstruct their memories to fit their present religious convictions. Baptist churches teach their members to leave traditional practices and Islam. Converts break with the past and leave their former religious community. Converts´ experiences and memories of Islamic homes were often positive, but memories of African traditional religion (ATR) were more complex. However, Church members sometimes go to ATR herbalists and healers when they have severe health problems. Baptist churches compete with ATR and teach that power of Christian God is real, and healing is often part of the Church services. After conversion Baptist converts are members of their Churches with different degree of commitment. Converts often had difficulties in maintaining good relationships with their Muslim relatives. However, Christians and Muslims see that they have more in common with each other than they do with African Traditional Religion (ATR). Extended families and intermarriages helped to build better relations between Muslims and Christians. Keywords: Muslims, Baptist, Sierra Leone, African Traditional Religion, Conversion.

Revolution without evolution: The ‘Way’ of change in Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons

ABSTRACTMuch has been written on Ayi Kwei Armah's disavowal of African revolution/independence and his radical imaginative recreation of African past in his early and middle fiction respectively. However, even when his radical, Afrocentric discourse is underscored and his mythical (re)construction of the black nation's past is unveiled, they are not linked to the Eurocentric philosophies against which they are deployed. This article, therefore, seeks to track the call for change in Armah's middle works, and to reread his narrative and discourse in Two Thousand Seasons in contradistinction to western progressive thought and evolutionary ethics, which spawned western historicism and legitimated imperialism in the 19th century. Approached from this perspective, Armah's ideological and ethical construct of ‘the Way’ acquires an additional meaning, and his yearning for a true revolutionary change achieves a wider and more concrete sense.

The long southern African past: enfolded time and the challenges of archive

The long southern African past before the advent of European colonialism remains neglected despite powerful post-apartheid impulses of various kinds for its recovery and celebration. In the last twenty years or so, outside of the specialist discipline of archaeology, there has been relatively little research undertaken to support those impulses. In this paper I offer my understanding of some of the things that have given distinctive shape to this field, attempt to account for its stalled aspect, identify the key challenges as I see them, and indicate some of the directions of new research currently being inaugurated. Amongst other things, I offer critiques of the prevailing periodisation, the entrenched and limiting effects of persistent thinking in terms of ethnicity, as well as of the portmanteau notion of oral traditions which operates in this field and its consignment out of the realm of political discourse. I make an argument for urgently needed intellectual histories of how this area of history became the preserve of certain disciplines and not others, and of how concepts migrated across these disciplines to become entrenched as the foundational elements in the history of the region. I go on to deal with the making and reshaping of the available archive for these periods and the methodological implications of how that making and reshaping is understood.

Gifts from Our Elders: African Artsand Visionary Art History

Gifts from Our Elders: African Arts<i>and Visionary Art History</i>

West meets east: Mixed-race Jamaicans in India, and the avenues of advancement in imperial Britain

ABSTRACTAt the turn of the nineteenth century, small numbers of elite, mixed-race Jamaicans traveled to India in order to improve their financial and social statuses. They did so by joining the East India Company Army, or by working as lawyers and civil servants. This global movement – starting in Jamaica, continuing to Britain, on to India, and oftentimes back to Britain – allowed these individuals to reposition their identity as East Indian nabobs, rather than as West Indian elites. By divorcing themselves from an enslaved, African past, they could live more effectively as white Britons. But, as anti-black prejudice escalated at the end of the eighteenth century, it became much more difficult for Jamaicans of color to undertake this journey successfully, as well as to reframe their identities.

Fusion of time and space in Hans Roosenschoon’s music: A pre-analytical strategy

n order to promote access to non-tonal music, the fusion of musical time and space may be considered as a point of departure. As a pre-analytical strategy, it relies on direct experience of the music as it is heard instead of on specialised music theoretical knowledge. The music of Hans Roosenschoon is used to illustrate five ways in which the fusion of time and space manifests itself on a metaphorical level, namely the integration of Western and African cultural spaces through music as a temporal art form, the blending of time and space in the music itself and the fusion of art music from the past with everyday life by electronic means. A true story from the South African past that combines with a visual image associated with Cape Town represents another version of fusing time and space, while on a metaphysical level past and present coalesce as melodic references to Schubert’s music are used to signify abstract ideas. Listening to music directly rather than through the filter of a rational analytical system helps to develop an appreciation of non-tonal music, a kind of music that is often regarded as inaccessible.

Settling Ọhọri: Reassessing Rebellion, Gender, and Foundation “Myths” in Colonial Dahomey

Abstract This article offers critical examinations of archival and oral data and tradition to show how members of a small community in southeastern colonial Dahomey responded to early French policies that featured arrest and banishment as mechanisms of coercion in their experiments with early modalities of indirect rule. In highlighting historical change through the prism of local politics, the article adds to historical discourses on colonial and gendered West African pasts in three notable and interconnected ways. First, it demonstrates how younger generations of Africans disaggregated from a colonial apparatus and local elders aligned with French administrators by resettling and operating outside of the purview of colonial rule. An emphasis on the role that women played in reshaping a collective anticolonial identity also offers new gendered and temporal dimensions to West African foundation traditions. Finally, the inability of colonial troops to restrict mobility reveals how some Africans considered imperial boundaries as insignificant and voluntary.

Archival research in Africa

Despite the promises of the digital humanities, archival research in Africa continues to be a highly personalized and ‘analogue’ process. This is especially true for historians of the post-colonial period, who often find that state repositories contain few or no records from the years after independence. Drawing on a research project on the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), this research note discusses some of the methodological challenges for the study of the recent African past. It suggests ways that social scientists and historians can obtain and interpret documentary materials in the absence of centralized state archives. Those who study contemporary African history seldom have the luxury of working in a formal archive, state or otherwise.

Slave to Modernity? General Ḥusayn’s Journey from Tunis to Tuscany (1830s-1880s)

Following the career of General Ḥusayn b. ʿAbdallāh, a prominent Circassian slave who served the Ottoman governors of Tunis from his childhood in the 1830s until his death in Tuscany in 1887, this paper attempts to grasp more than the colonial dimension of the North African past and to assess other global and transnational dynamics that molded the histories of modernity in the Maghrib. His exile in Florence redirects our attention to Mediterranean spaces, such as Tuscany, which were neither imperial nor colonial and which have been erased from the main narrative of colonized North Africa.

Africa as Tradition in U.S. African American Muslim Identity

Abstract In this article I take up David Scott's “heuristic of tradition” to examine Africa as tradition in African American Muslim identity. First, I explore the structure and narrative of claims made for and to Africa by U.S. African American Muslims. Second, I ask: When U.S. African American Muslims claim an Islamic African past, to whom are they speaking and to what ends? I contend that U.S. African American Muslims find themselves neither Muslim enough to be authoritative to non-Black Muslims nor Muslim enough to be representative of U.S. American Muslims in the U.S. American popular imagination. In this context, I also trace the genealogical claims to an Africa made through hip-hop to demonstrate how a sonic religious lineage recenters U.S. African American Muslims within the broader U.S. Muslim community. Thus, I argue that as tradition, Africa labors against the erasure of the U.S. African American Muslim as legitimately Muslim.

First geophysical exploration in the tumuli zone of central Senegal: a multidimensional approach

ABSTRACTIn western and central Senegal, several thousand burial mounds are known, but only a very few have been archaeologically investigated. The result is that an important portion of the later prehistory of this region remains poorly understood. This concerns the monuments themselves but equally their direct environs, where settlements are supposed but remain largely undiscovered despite extensive standard surveys. The situation is especially distressing given that a high number of sites are prone to destruction due to erosion and agriculture; an unknown number has already been lost and with them an important archive of the African past. Geophysical prospecting is an efficient method for pre-exploring and documenting not only the tumuli, but also their immediate environs. It is in this context that a first trial geophysical exploration that integrated fluxgate gradiometry and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) surveys was undertaken at sites near the town of Mbacké. That study delivered useful information on the preservation, layout and inner structure of the sites and its results are presented here.

“A RICH STOREHOUSE FOR RESEARCH”: THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE WESTERN CAPE ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICE

Without the existence of archival repositories, or institutions responsible for the safekeeping and preservation of records, there will be no fundamental source for studying the past. The primary role of archives the world over is to preserve historical sources of information for the benefit of future generations. For understanding the South African past, particularly from its early beginnings at the Cape, the Western Cape Archives and Records Service (WCARS) in Cape Town, plays an instrumental role in the proper recordkeeping of some of our country’s most valuable and irreplaceable records. Despite the centuries of possible hazardous influences such as water, damp and weather damage to the paper-based sources, the oldest records have largely remained intact. The aim of this article is to describe the efforts of archivists and record their pleas for more effective storage space/locations. It is also intended to shed light on the historical development of WCARS as a renowned research institution that today serves the interests of a wide spectrum of the public; most notably academics, historians, scholars and family researchers from not only the Western Cape region, but also from across South Africa and abroad.

From One Crisis to the Other: History and Literature in The Crisis from 1910 to the Early 1920s

This essay investigates the role of literature and the links between literature, news-reporting, and history in the NAACP magazine The Crisis between 1910 and the early 1920s. We do not study literature per se and do not provide an analysis of the literary style, nor do we assess the literariness of the short stories and poems printed in the 1910s. Rather, we examine the place accorded literature in the Crisis and its role in relation to the rest of the magazine, from news commentary, political essays, and echoes of the African past, to illustrations and advertisements.