Oral Historiography Research Articles

An Incident of Dynastic Succession in Sixteenth-Century Sinnār

An Incident ofDynastic Succession in Sixteenth-Century Sinnär Jay Spaulding Kean College On 11 December 1582 Mustafa Pasha received his second appointment as governor of the new Ottoman Red Sea Province of Ethiopia.1 The pasha's original tenure as Hohes beylerbey had begun almost a decade before, but his career trajectory had been rudely interrupted. In 1577 Mustafa, apparently a prudent man, had been elbowed aside by a series of ambitious officers eager to undertake the conquest of highland Ethiopia proper.2 But the Ottomans enjoyed no greater success at this perennially ill-advised venture thanhave many othersbefore or since; by 1582 the pushfull invaders were no more, and cautious governor Mustafa was reinstated. During the next six years he concerned himself primarily with preserving the small Ottoman garrisons that the Ethiopians allowed to survive at several points along the coast. One of Mustafa's reports, dated CemäziyülewÜ 994/15 May 1586, reflects particularly well die governor's defensive preoccupation witìi gathering intelligence out of what had just proven to be an unexpectedly dangerous African interior. Among other dungs, it contains one ofthe very few sixteenth-century Ottoman references to die Nile valley Funj kingdom ofSinnâr. "The Funj kinghasjustdied," Mustafa Pasha reported to his superiors, "his eldest son has been made king in his place" (Funç meliki dahi vefat ediip büyük oglu yerine melik olmusdur).3So limited are primary historical sources concerning the sixteenth-century®Northeast African Studies (ISSN 0740-9133) Vol. 4, No. 3 (New Series) 1997, pp. 23-28 23 24 Jay Spaulding Sudan tìiat even tìiis anonymous comment, preserved as it was by one of die most competent bureaucratic machines of the early Modern world, represents a significant contribution. It offers a sound and comparatively fixed date relevant to die lives of two Sudanese monarchs of tìiat dimly-seen age. But who were they? Which Funj king died, and which succeeded to die throne ofSinnar, early in 1586? The present study will propose an identification. The names of the sixteenüi-century kings of Sinnär are known primarily dirough die work of Sudanese chroniclers who wrote in Arabic. Sudanese Arabic history-writingbegan only toward the close of die eighteenth century, and it naturally reflected the prevailing cultural conceptions of tiiat age.4 The chroniclers accepted die linear interpretation of time and die division of its flow of days into units of lunar months and years demarcated by the Islamic calendar. Within the world of local Islamic scholarship, some dates were recorded with precision, notably the death dates of prominent holy men but sometimes also years of low Nile flood or other dramatic occurrences. But when the attention of die pioneering eighteendi-century chroniclers turned to the political events of secular history, dates fixed with certainty were few. The chroniclers therefore found themselves obliged to appeal to a much broader and orally grounded view of history which fliey shared with their unlettered countrymen. In this vernacular tradition, historical information preserved orally over die years normally took the form of anecdotes about personalities or events, and diese anecdotes were pegged chronologically to the respective reigns of one or another ruler.5 The result was a variegated oral national historiography, existing in many versions of greater or lesser complexity, but always organized around the stem of a putatively orderly and unbroken dynastic sequence. Not surprisingly, people tended to recall numerous events of comparatively recent times, while only a few anecdotes about the more remote past seemed wortìiy of retention. Inevitably, when die oral historiography of the late eighteentii century was reduced to writing, it had litfle to say about die sixteendi. This bias is perhaps best exemplified in the work of the chronicler Ahmad wad Tsä, who compressed the bulk of his country's history into a few brieflines before embarking upon a meaty discussion ofhis own times: An Incident ofDynastic Succession 25 The first who reigned in Sinnâr was Sultan "Amara b. NäyÜ, whom one approachedbowing down. There were tiiirteen kings in die interval of two hundred years, and after the two hundred were complete there reigned Sultan Ùnsà b. Nâsir in the...

‘Wailing for purity’

Abstract This article gives a critical overview of recent trends and developments in the academic use of oral history. The paper focuses on some of the deep‐level assumptions guiding this work. The first of these is that the medium of the evidence — its ‘oralness’ — often confers a privileged status on the material being examined. Arising out of commonsense views of language which portray speech as authentic and intimate in contrast to the supposed deadness of print, these ideas have often privileged orality as the pure and authentic essence of national cultures. In relation to oral historiography, this valorisation of the voice manifests itself in a number of ways, one of which is that scholars view their informants as ‘oral people’ apparently untouched by literacy, media and the like. The article probes how these shortcomings can be overcome and suggests a range of methodological routes for bypassing these problems.

Oral Narratives: Secondary Revision and the Memory of the Vietnam War1

Recent debates about oral historiography have questioned whether oral narratives should be thought of primarily as providing factual knowledge about the past, on the one hand, or the meanings invested in the past by individuals and cultural groups, on the other.2 This examination of published oral narratives about the Vietnam War takes the latter approach a step further by asking not just about the meaning of the content of these narratives, but about the rhetorical force of the oral narrative form itself. A dozen collections of oral narratives about the Vietnam War were published in the 1980s, several became best-sellers in the United States, and some, such as Bloods and Everything We Had, are widely used in school and university courses about the war.3 How can we account for their proliferation and popularity?4 The Vietnam War was America's most deeply divisive military experience since the Civil War, whose spectre has continued to haunt the United States since the withdrawal of American forces in 1973 and the capture of Saigon in 1975. The legacy of the war is the continuation of antagonisms between those who supported the US war effort and those who opposed it; a mutual mistrust by the public and policy-makers regarding the degree to which sustained foreign military intervention would be supported (the 'Vietnam Syndrome'); the military's loss of prestige in the eyes of Americans and others, both because of its defeat, and because of widespread stories about atrocities, defoliation, the bombing of civilians, drug-taking and 'fragging' (killing of officers) by the troops. In an attempt to come to terms with these fraught issues, the public has been compulsively feeding on media treatments of the war since the mid-1980s. Debates about the war continue to be highly charged and acrimonious. One of the,characteristics shared by several is the disrepute into which official military and governmental sources of information about the war have fallen. Allegations that American service personnel have suffered illness and death as a result of exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange during the war are widely believed, but, apart from two malignancies, are denied by the Veterans Administration. The belief that the government has knowingly abandoned prisoners of war and soldiers declared missing in action in Vietnam symbolizes the sense of betrayal that many veterans feel they suffered at the hands of the public and of their superiors. The

Iwe Itan Ọyọ: A Traditional Yoruba History and its Author

This article offers a translation of M. C. Adeyẹmi's book, A History of Old and New Ọyọ, completed in Yoruba in 1914. The original text comprises 32 pages, divided into ten short chapters, six of which treat the history of Ọyọ from the origins to 1914. The remaining four chapters examine cultural and political institutions. The translation retains the flavour of the original text which stems from a tradition of Yoruba oral historiography. M. C. Adeyẹmi was trained by the C.M.S., and had a Bachelor of Arts degree in education at Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone. Between 1911 and 1942, he combined the functions of educationalist and missionary. His short book, which refers to no published or unpublished written work, is based on Ọyọ oral traditions describing the major developments in the political history of Ọyọ. The author did not moralise on wars and the collapse of the Ọyọ empire, nor did he use the book as a means of propagating Ọyọ hegemony in Yorubaland.The book is significant in many ways: it is a representative example of Ọyọ traditions as they existed at the beginning of this century; it complements Johnson's The History of the Yorubas where both describe the same event; it is very useful for understanding how ‘traditional’ historians study society; and it provides new information on Ọyọ in the nineteenth century and on some cultural features of the Yoruba.

The Undefining of Oral Tradition

This paper points to flaws in formalist definitions of which have the capacity to affect reconstructions of the African past. Historical knowledge in regions such as Busoga, Uganda, is not lodged in a distinctive series of texts read as but is engaged in and derives from the everyday critical, lively intelligence which surrounds status, activities, gestures, and speech. Reflections on the organization of knowledge of past in Busoga may help scholars overcome a rigidity of thinking about the pasts of oral societies which the attempts to formalize definitions of oral have produced. African historiography has made great leaps forward in the past twentyfive years, and much of the progress rests on the extensive incorporation of oral material into the reconstruction of the African past. has become the tag of the enterprise, and with two meanings: one referencing the material available and one the process by which such material came into our present. Over time, oral has been privileged as some specific, distinctive cultural form and process within African society past and present. Oral has been taken as having specialized characteristics and its own separate processual and cultural life. A reified oral tradition, whether explicitly defined or consensually understood, has become a part of the conceptual equipment of African historians. And it has become so at a heavy cost. In a paper published in I980, David Henige (I980: 240-42) takes to task historians of the interlacustrine region of eastern Africa who treat materials as tradition when they do not formally qualify as such. In his guide to research, Oral Historiography, published in I982, Henige (I982a: z) insists on a proper, fixed and formal definition of tradition. He writes, Strictly speaking, oral traditions are those recollections of the past that are commonly or universally known in a given culture. Versions that are not widely known should rightfully be considered as Ethnohistory 36:1 (Winter I989). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc 0014-1801/89/$I.SO. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.181 on Thu, 29 Sep 2016 06:09:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Where Seldom is Heard a Discouraging Word: Method in Oral History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid HenigeDavid Henige is African Studies Bibliographer at the University of Wisconsin He is the editor of the journal History in Africa and the author of Oral Historiography (1982). This commentary is a slightly revised version of an address made by him at the 1985 annual meeting of the Oral History Association in Pensacola, Florida.

Oral Historiography

Journal Article Oral Historiography Get access Oral Historiography, by David Henige. Longman: London, New York and Lagos, 1982. viii+150 pp. £3.95, paperback. The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History, edited by Joseph C. Miller. Wm Dawson and Sons, Folkestone, and Archon Books, Hamden, Connecticut, 1980. xii+284 pp. £17 in UK, cloth cover. Luganda Proverbs, compiled by Fedinand Walser. Dietrich Reimer Verlag: Berlin, 1982. xi+510 pp. DM 65, limp covers. MICHAEL TWADDLE MICHAEL TWADDLE Insitute of Commonwealth StudiesLondon Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 83, Issue 333, October 1984, Pages 571–572, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a097651 Published: 01 October 1984

Oral Historiography

Oral Historiography

Oral Historiography

Oral Historiography

A Survival Kit for Field Research:

The publishers “blurb” on the back cover informs us that Oral Historiography is a “major re-evaluation of the collection and interpretation of historical data.” This, it certainly is not. Rather, it is a concise re-statement of what can be found scattered elsewhere, much of the best of it in Professor Henige's own previous work and in History in Africa, the premier English language journal of historical fieldwork which Professor Henige edits. Characteristically Henige himself makes far more modest claims for the volume asking that “this should be regarded simply as an effort to draw together a few of the many strands relating to the prospects of oral historical research and the problems associated with carrying it out successfully.”

Oral Historiography and the Shirazi of the East African Coast

“Settlements of foreign, predominantly Semitic, peoples”Strandes' gambit concerning ‘Muslim Civilization’ of the east coast of Africa is a familiar one to many Africanists. Persians and Arabs, so the stories go, settled coastal sites as part of the Islamic diaspora; they vanquished less virile African societies; they built cities which were reflections of Middle Eastern prototypes; they imposed their religion; and, they ‘founded’ coastal civilization, a civilization, therefore, which was characteristically Middle Eastern. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians cannot be entirely blamed for holding such simplistic views. After all, the traditions themselves at least imply some of these things. And, given the literalist and diffusionist nature of past anthropological and historical theory, simple and biased interpretations of these traditions are not surprising.What is perhaps remarkable, given the developments in anthropological theory since the 1940s, is the persistence of such views in some quarters. Examples include portions of two recently published papers by Saad and Wilkinson. Both deal wholly or in part with the most intriguing of the coastal origin traditions, the stories which tell how many coastal towns were originally settled by immigrants who came from Shiraz or Persia (see appendix). Their interpretations are so literal as to link the Shirazi name not merely with a particular dynasty, but with a specific family or kin group which ruled in pre-fourteenth-century Kilwa.

Oral Historiography

Oral Historiography

Truths yet Unborn? Oral Tradition as a Casualty of Culture Contact

This essay treats the effects of acculturation on oral historical materials. Rather than addressing it as a matter of ‘contamination’, that is, as a question of extraneous data entering and distorting ‘pristine’ traditions, it is considered here to be a facet of the larger question of cultural assimilation – a case of the old and familiar constantly confronting and responding to the new and strange. Seen in this way, oral data continuously adopt and adapt whatever new, relevant and interesting materials come their way in not very different – though decidedly less visible – ways from those that written data have always done. This argument is illustrated by examples from various times and places, largely situations where missionaries, newly literate members, or colonial officials, perceptibly influenced the historical views of societies on their way to becoming literate.In fact this phenomenon seems widespread enough to justify advancing a model that can be tested against specific cases. For our purposes, this model begins with the first meeting of oral and literate cultures, although we can fairly assume that an infinity of similar but unrecorded meetings of oral cultures also resulted in change. After this initial impetus, the constraints of colonial rule, the exigencies of independence, and the aims of modern academic oral historiography each contributed in some measure to this process of ongoing change. As a result, historians, whether primarily interested in the reliability of oral data, or in the process and effects of changes in them, must look to a wider range of sources than has been customary.