Nineteenth-century West Africa Research Articles

‘The True and Scientific Religion’

Abstract A scientific worldview is taken to be a dominant factor of European secularity but peculiarly absent in Africa. Taking cues from the multiple secularities and global religious history approaches, the article uses global entanglements as a critical analytical tool to investigate the formation of our present, shared conditions, without essentializing cultural European/African differences. The core question is: Why, how and under which circumstances do people adapt global regimes of secularity, in this case particularly: global debates on religion and science? The article analyzes three lecture-transcripts, delivered by the West African intellectual John Augustus Abayomi Cole and printed in the West African newspaper Lagos Standard. In the context of Christian intellectuals in late nineteenth century West Africa, these lectures discussed African religion as congruent with science. This argument was possible through Abayomi Cole’s adaptation of esotericism, specifically its claim to true religion and science. Thereby, Abayomi Cole tried to negotiate independence from European missionary oversight.

Muhammad Bello’s Curriculum of Study, as Detailed in Ḥāshiya ʿalā muqaddimat Īdāʿ al-nusūkh and Shifāʾ al-asqām: the Books and Teachers of Sokoto’s Second Ruler

Abstract In Muslim West Africa it is common practice for scholars to make a note of their teachers and the books they studied with them. Such bibliographical records both certify academic credentials and, in the nineteenth century, were a vital part of political legitimacy as a series of scholar-warriors took power across the Sahel region. Muhammad Bello, who ruled Sokoto between 1817 and his death in 1837, is one such example. However, a precise record of Bello’s education is not widely known. This article features the first English translation and critical edition of Bello’s own bibliography, Ḥāshiya ʿalā muqaddimat Īdāʿ al-nusūkh (A Commentary to the Preface of the Repository of Texts), as well a second, later account he gave in a text entitled Shifāʾ al-asqām. These documents add to our understanding of educational practices in nineteenth century West Africa, while shedding light on several important events in Sokoto’s early history.

Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement; Richard Peter Anderson. Abolition in Sierra Leone: Re-Building Lives and Identities in Nineteenth-Century West Africa.

B<scp>jørn</scp> F. S<scp>tillion</scp> S<scp>outhard</scp>. <i>Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement</i>; R<scp>ichard</scp> P<scp>eter</scp> A<scp>nderson</scp>. <i>Abolition in Sierra Leone: Re-Building Lives and Identities in Nineteenth-Century West Africa</i>.

Political Theology in Nineteenth-Century West Africa: Al-Ḥajj ʿUmar, the Bayān mā waqaʿa, and the Conquest of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi – ADDENDUM

Political Theology in Nineteenth-Century West Africa: Al-Ḥajj ʿUmar, the Bayān mā waqaʿa, and the Conquest of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi – ADDENDUM

Political Theology in Nineteenth-Century West Africa: Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar, theBayān mā waqaʿa, and the Conquest of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi

AbstractIn 1862, al-Ḥājj ʿUmar Fūtī Tall (d. 1864) conquered a prominent Muslim polity of the Middle Niger valley, the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi. Several months earlier, he had penned a long polemical work,Bayān mā waqaʿa, where he outlined his conflict with Ḥamdallāhi's ruler, Aḥmad III (d. 1862), and presented a legal justification for his eventual conquest. Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar was one of several West African Muslim intellectuals who articulated a new vision of power in the region. These intellectuals linked legitimate political rule with mastery over Islamic knowledge that they claimed only they had. Yet these linkages between religious authority and political power remain understudied. Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar'sBayānoffers one example of political theology in nineteenth-century West Africa. In this article, I trace his arguments and explain how he constructs his authority and claims to sovereignty in this work. In the process, I conceptualize two theoretical frameworks — the ‘political geography of belief’ and the ‘political theology of knowledge’ — to demonstrate how a careful engagement with Arabic sources can help develop new approaches to the study of Muslim communities in African history and beyond.

Abolition in Sierra Leone: re-building lives and identities in nineteenth-century West Africa by Richard Peter Anderson Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 306. $99 (hbk).

Abolition in Sierra Leone: re-building lives and identities in nineteenth-century West Africa by Richard Peter Anderson Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 306. $99 (hbk).

19世紀の西アフリカにおけるパームオイル生産と輸出 W.A.ルイスの「熱帯の発展」論・再考

19世紀の西アフリカにおけるパームオイル生産と輸出 W.A.ルイスの「熱帯の発展」論・再考

Missionary Photography: The Liberian Archive of Doctor Georgia Patton

This article focuses on the personal missionary experience of an African American woman physician, Dr Georgia Ester Lee Patton (1864–1900), later known as Georgia Washington. Patton worked in Liberia, a unique setting for missionary activities, being a colony established by former American slaves. The primary resource materials used here are missionary photographic archives, which comprise a distinct category of colonial cultural production. Photography assisted missions in promoting western achievements, disseminating Christianity, and advancing progress, by exposing Africans to western civilization. Such imagery was largely created by European photographers working within the social milieu of missionary organizations. Missionary photographs, therefore, functioned as an official public record of the missionary enterprise; today they are invaluable records of the histories of Christian missions around the globe. Missionary archives exist as both public and private archives. Private archives, as opposed to the images planned for a public audience, were compiled by individual missionaries and intended for private viewings. For this case study I use the private archive Patton compiled after she worked as a medical missionary in Liberia between 1893 and 1895. Patton later returned to Tennessee, where she became the first woman physician in the city of Memphis. This article seeks to determine how Patton’s perception of herself as an African American, as a woman, as a Christian, and as a physician influenced her unusual experience as a medical missionary in late nineteenth-century West Africa.

19世紀初頭の西アフリカにおける不信仰者の分類と奴隷化：

19世紀初頭，現在のナイジェリア北部一帯に相当するハウサランドにおいて大規模な軍事ジハードが開始された。このジハードは，数年のうちに次々と同地のハウサ諸王権を圧倒し，一般にソコト・カリフ国と呼ばれる，イスラームを統治の基盤に据えた国家の建設を実現した。ジハードと国家建設の中心にいたイスラーム知識人ウスマーン・ブン・フーディー（1817年歿）は，複数の著作の中で，ハウサランドもしくはスーダーンに住む人々を信仰の様態に基づいて分類し，更に，その分類において不信仰者と見做した人々の捕虜・奴隷化に関する規定を論じている。本稿では，国家の基盤建設期にあたる1808年以降のウスマーンが，ウラマーの多くが認めていない法学的見解に依拠することを容認する「寛容の思想」を導入し，上述の信仰の様態に基づく人間の分類を操作することによって，捕虜・奴隷化し得る不信仰者の範疇を如何に拡大したのかを明らかにし，更に，その背景に如何なる理由が存在したのかを考察する。

Alternative international systems? System structure and violent conflict in nineteenth-century West Africa, Southeast Asia, and South Asia

AbstractWere precolonial state systems different to the European model? If so, how did these state systems vary, and do variations in system structure influence the frequency of war? In this article we assess the structure off international systems in nineteenth-century West Africa, Southeast Asia, and South Asia using new data on precolonial states that corrects for some of the biases in the existing Correlates of War state system membership data. We develop a framework to capture variation in political order above and below the state, and explore the similarities and differences between these systems and the European system we know and study. We then assess how rates of inter- and intra-state war varied across these systems. Our results suggest: (1) It is the nature of hierarchy (not so much anarchy) that varies across these systems; and (2) inter-state wars are more frequent, but less intense, in systems composed of decentralised states.

Resisting conformity: Anglican mission women and the schooling of girls in early nineteenth-century West Africa

The origins of modern schooling in early nineteenth-century Africa have been poorly researched. Moreover, histories of education in Africa have focused largely on the education of boys. Little attention has been paid to girls’ schooling or to the missionary women who sought to construct a new feminine Christian identity for African girls. In the absence of personal accounts of African girls’ schooling from that period, this paper draws on a slim body of 71 letters written by women and girls associated with one British mission society in Sierra Leone between 1804 and 1826 to suggest a fluid and at times contradictory construction of gender and racial identity, which sits at odds with the ideology of domestic femininity that the missionaries sought to impart through girls’ schooling. The handful of letters written by African women and girls also casts doubt on the assumed subservience of black subjects to white officialdom.

Film, Charcoal, Time: Contemporaneities in Gold Coast Photographs

As photography was taken up in the entrepôts of nineteenth-century west Africa, among them Cape Coast and Accra, it became a primary mode of portraiture. When considered alongside colonial-era holdings in European and US archives, historical photograph collections in families in Ghana suggest that photography's emergence cannot be separated from a range of other emerging and far-reaching creative modernisms. These portraits entail aspects of ceremonial debut spectacles, political ascendancy rites, and the visuality of decorum in larger public performances. From the medium's inception, photographs have been held and kept as enduring objects; at the same time, they are the layered products of multiple formal, aesthetic, temporal and conceptual interventions in a range of media, only some of which are the work of a camera.

The Yoruba diaspora in the Atlantic world

1. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World: Methodology and Research by Matt D. Childs and Toyin Falola.I. The Yoruba Homeland and Diaspora 2. The Diaspora of Yoruba-Speakers, 1650-1865: Dimensions and Implications by David Eltis. 3. The Yoruba Factor in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade by Paul Lovejoy. 4. The Enslavement of Yoruba by Ann O'Hear.II. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Americas 5. Nango and Mina: The Yoruba Diaspora in Brazil by Joao Jose Reis and Beatriz Gallotti Mamigonian 6. The Yoruba in Cuba: Origins, Identities, and Transformations by Michele Reid. 7. Africans in a Colony of Creoles: The Yoruba in Colonial Costa Rica by K. Russel Lohse. 8. Yoruba in the British Caribbean: A Comparative Perspective on Trinidad and the Bahamas by Rosalyn Howard. 9. The Influential Yoruba Past in Haiti by Kevin Roberts.III. The Cultural Foundations of the Yoruba Diaspora 10. The Nagoization: Process in Bahian Candomble by Luis Nicalau Pares. 11. Santeria in Cuba: Tradition and Transformation by Christine Ayorinde. 12. From Gbe to Yoruba: Ethnic Change and the Mina Nation in Rio de Janeiro by Mariza C. Soares. 13. Yoruba Family, Gender, and Kinship Roles in New World Slavery by Kevin Roberts. 14. Revolution and Religion: Yoruba Sacred Music in Socialist Cuba by Robin Moore. 15. Lost and Found: Yorubna Elements in African American Arts by Babatunde Lawal. 16. Yorubaisms in African American Speech Patterns by Agustine AgwueleIV. The Return to Yorubaland 17. Yoruba Liberated Slaves Who Returned to West Africa by Robin Law. 18. The Yoruba Diaspora in Sierra Leone's Krio Society by C. Magbaily Fyle. 19. Liberated Slaves and Islam in Nineteenth Century West Africa by Gibril R. Cole.

Ribats and the Development of Plantations in the Sokoto Caliphate: A Case Study of Fanisau

Ribat, in context of Sokoto Caliphate, was a walled military settlement established for defending and protecting frontiers and settled agricultural hinterland of any major population center. This type of institution was well known in history of other Islamic societies.1 Indeed, ninth century has been identified as golden age of classic ribat construction in early Muslim world, and at this period several of these structures were established in North Africa and central Asia. After this early golden age, ribats continued to be built in Muslim lands, but it was only during nineteenth century that they became widespread in hasar Hausa or what became known as Sokoto Caliphate. Evidently, leaders of this Muslim state, largest state in nineteenth century West Africa, drew for inspiration on this history to foster expansion of new state.1Most writers who have studied Sokoto Caliphate have recognized significance of ribats to state. However, much of scholarship devotes no more than a paragraph or two to this crucially important aspect of caliphate's defensive strategy, with passing remarks on how system worked in emirates.3 In his major work on Sokoto Caliphate, Murray Last has traced development of ribats in metropolitan Sokoto, arguing that some at least were populated with slaves:The establishment of ribats was part of policy of establishing frontiers and providing strongholds round which settlement could flourish.... Likewise Bello encouraged building within frontiers of walled towns where mosques and schools could be opened and trade and workshop started: with scholars appointed to these towns as Imams, judges, muhtasibs (legal inspectors) and teachers, Bello hoped to maintain both practice of Islam and military control of area. Since much of Bello's support had come from cattle owing Fulani, Fulani clans were persuaded to join community of Shaikh-They were taught agriculture and encouraged to breed horses, camels and flocks of sheep and goats and to reduce their herds of cattle. By this means BeUo balanced economy of Sokoto...he thus also reduced military risk....4Similarly, although Joseph P. Smaldone has acknowledged that many of these new frontier outposts were populated by slaves, he was more concerned with military dimensions of ribats than with role of institution in establishment of plantations.5By contrast, Paul E. Lovejoy, whose writings have been largely on entire Sokoto Caliphate, has perceived ribat as a major factor in growth of plantation sector.6 Indeed, he seems to be most influential exponent of this view. Lovejoy asserts that ribats influenced location of plantations and that throughout caliphate plantations were associated with economic and political consolidation and with maintenance of an active front line for defence and annual campaigns.7 According to Lovejoy, the steady stream of slaves which flowed into Sokoto and Gwandu in form of tribute was directed to officials, Fulani leaders, and scholars for use in agriculture. The military elite of ribats remained on permanent alert and were not engaged directly in farming. Instead, plantations rapidly dominated agricultural production.Although he avoided using term plantation, in his study of governmental system in Zaria emirate,' M. G. Smith first established this relationship thus:Settlement patterns emphasized defensive values and were based on compact distribution of population within walled towns, strung out along principal caravan routes. Each of these towns had a few smaller settlements near it which owed allegiance to village chief of area in which they were sited. Many but not all of these hamlets were slave slave-villages (rumada); other rumada large enough to form towns of their own, would have walls and other fortifications typical of a town (gari). …

Ivory production &amp; consumption in Ghana in the early second millennium AD

In the eighteenth to nineteenth century West Africa was the scene of the infamous Atlantic trade in ivory and slaves. The authors' researches show a different situation in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, when the people of Ghana were engaged in the indigenous procurement, manufacture and trade in ivory with neighbours across the Sahara

A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa

A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa. Edited by Florence Bernault, translated by Janet Roitman. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2003. Pp. x, 287. $67.95 cloth, $28.95 paper. The collection under review, English translation of Florence Bernault's Enfermement, prison et chatiments en Afrique du 19e siecle a nos jours, is important addition to a literature applying Foucaultian problematics to African history. The collection describes more than a particular set of penal practices; it represents ambitious attempt to chart a colonial-era shift in strategies of governance. In her introduction, Bernault suggests that the penitentiary was part of a wider-ranging attempt to make colonial spaces susceptible to imperial rule. And yet, she argues, imported practices of incarceration often resonated with precolonial practices of imprisonment, confinement, or exclusion from society, even while colonial penal practice became cut off from the intellectual systems undergirding European imprisonment and prison reform. The systems of imprisonment that emerged during the colonial and postcolonial periods thus represent a heterogeneous amalgam of African practices and colonial impositions. The framework is important and productive way to address a comparative issue as complex as prison and confinement. Bernault suggests that technologies of confinement ultimately helped constitute colonial societies. Circumscribing individual freedom was not merely a matter of sticking particular people in prison but was part of a more comprehensive project of regulating modes of life, categories of person, and types of space. Colonialism inaugurated new organizational problems with the advent of capitalist wage labor, the abolition of slavery, and the increase in peasant agriculture and sedentarization. Imprisonment and confinement were one pole of a more generalized regime of juridical projects that at times criminalized precolonial patterns of work and sociality. By formulating the collection's problematic in this way, Bernault brings into focus a critical problem in colonial and postcolonial history. Naturally, none of the chapters addresses the problem in its entirety, and even as case studies they vary widely in quality. Nonetheless, the best essays are extremely good, and the worst are simply pedestrian; all are very readable. The collection will therefore be useful for undergraduate teaching, as well as being required reading for scholars with any interest in law and governance. The essays begin with Jan Vansina's study of prisons in Angola. Vansina argues that imprisonment had no basis in precolonial practice in the Kongo kingdom or the other areas incorporated into the Portuguese colony. Rather, prisons emerged with the imposition of Portuguese law and with the exigencies of Portuguese military fortification, the transportation of prisoners to Angola, and the slave trade. There is a certain element of romanticism to his account-he attributes the absence of imprisonment and other bodily constraints upon free people in precolonial society to an African vision of human, individual, and social dignity (p. 64) -but nonetheless provides a compelling overview of a complex historical development. By contrast, Thierno Bah's study, which claims to address confinement in nineteenth-century West Africa, is a breathless catalog of carceral practices in various West African societies, ranging from sixteenth-century Songhay to precolonial Cameroon, The piece is somewhat disjointed, more a collection of anecdotes -and these culled from a very few, mostly secondary sources -than a systematic study. …

Rethinking resistance: revolt and violence in African history

This collective volume reinterprets the genre of resistance studies, introduces recent conceptual perspectives and considers examples of African (civil) wars and insurgent movements. Contributions: Rethinking resistance in African history, an introduction, by Klaas van Walraven and Jon Abbink. Part I (Historical perspectives): Resistance to Fulbe hegemony in nineteenth-century West Africa, by Mirjam de Bruijn and Han van Dijk; Colonial conquest in central Madagascar: who resisted what?, by Stephen Ellis; Revisiting resistance in Italian-occupied Ethiopia: the Patriots' Movement (1936-1941) and the redefinition of post-war Ethiopia, by Aregawi Berhe. Part 2 (Social inequalities and colonial hierarchies): Ambiguities of resistance and collaboration on the Eastern Cape Frontier: the Kat River Settlement 1829-1856, by Robert Ross; African mutinies in the Netherlands East Indies: a nineteenth-century colonial paradox, by Ineke van Kessel; Absence of evidence is no proof: slave resistance under German colonial rule in East Africa, by Jan-Georg Deutsch. Part 3 (Violence, meaning and ideology in resistance): The Kawousan War reconsidered, by Kimba Idrissa; 'Sawaba''s rebellion in Niger (1964-1965): narrative and meaning, by Klaas van Walraven; The vagaries of violence and power in post-colonial Mozambique, by Gerhard Seibert. Part 4 (Resistance as heritage and memory): Herero genocide in the twentieth century: politics and memory, by Jan-Bart Gewald; 'Namibia, land of the brave': selective memories on war and violence within nation building, by Henning Melber; Dervishes, 'moryaan' and freedom fighters: cycles of rebellion and the fragmentation of Somali society, 1900-2000, by Jon Abbink

The Church Missionary Society and the Governors of Lagos, 1862–72

This article examines conflict between spiritual and temporal power in nineteenth-century West Africa – the uneasy relationship between the Church Missionary Society in Yorubaland and the official British presence in the nearby port of Lagos. Having encouraged Britain to intervene in Lagos in order to extirpate the slave trade, the mission soon found itself disagreeing with the policies of the colonial government concerning both the expansion of the Lagos colony and relations with the largely Christian Egba tribe. The dispute developed into a concerted attack on the colonial governors both from missionaries in the field and from the CMS headquarters in London.

&lt;sc&gt;Colleen E. Kriger&lt;/sc&gt;. &lt;italic&gt;Pride of Men: Ironworking in Nineteenth-Century West Central Africa&lt;/italic&gt;. (Social History of Africa.) Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann. 1999. Pp. xix. 261. Cloth $59.95, paper $24.95

Journal Article Colleen E. Kriger. Pride of Men: Ironworking in Nineteenth-Century West Central Africa. (Social History of Africa.) Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann. 1999. Pp. xix. 261. Cloth $59.95, paper $24.95 Get access Kriger Colleen E.. Pride of Men: Ironworking in Nineteenth-Century West Central Africa. (Social History of Africa.) Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann. 1999. Pp. xix, 261. Cloth $59.95, paper $24.95. Candice L. Goucher Candice L. Goucher Washington State University, Vancouver Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 106, Issue 2, April 2001, Page 691, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/106.2.691 Published: 01 April 2001

Pride of Men: Ironworking in Nineteenth-Century West Central Africa

Pride of Men: Ironworking in Nineteenth-Century West Central Africa