David L. Schoenbrun

We are what we eat: Ancient agriculture between the great lakes

A history of food systems in Africas Great Lakes region is presented using mostly historical linguistic sources, with help from archaeology and paleoecology. The paper moves beyond understanding the causes and consequences of iron-working as the most important feature of the period between c . 1000 b.c. and c . a.d. 500. I argue that a history of agriculture both gives context to changes in technology and introduces powerful new explanations for historical processes of settlement and occupational specialization that took place. Between 1000 b.c. and 500 b.c. , in the Great Lakes region, speakers of three of Africas four major language families practiced distinguishable food-producing systems. Two groups, Central Sudanian and Sog Eastern Sudanian, depended mainly on growing cereals and raising livestock for their sustenance. The third group, the Tale Southern Cushites, gave decidedly greater emphasis to cattle but probably also grew grains. A fourth group, the Great Lakes Bantu, grew root crops, fished and raised cattle and grain. They inherited much of their knowledge of these techniques, other than cattle-raising, from earlier Eastern Highlands Bantu-speakers. But they incorporated cattle and some grains through longstanding contacts with the two Sudanian and the Southern Cushitic communities. The eclectic food system they thus created allowed them to carry their unified, complex food-producing system throughout the wide variety of environments that they encountered in the Lakes region. After c. a.d. 200 descendants of the Great Lakes Bantu refined this synthesis; they emphasized livestock raising inland from Lake Victoria, and mixed farmers spread throughout the Kivu Rift. Technological, demographic, ecological and sociological explanations of the technological evidence are offered.

Pride of men : ironworking in 19th century West Central Africa

Part 1 The work and the setting: African history, ironworking and the mystique of the blacksmith iron production in central Africa - building a craft tradition, ca 600 BCE to 1920. Part 2 Social and econoic values of ironworking - regional patterns: smelting iron - fathers of the furnace making and changing money - iron currencies the work of the finishing forge. Part 3 Social and economic values of ironworking - localhistories: patronage and innovation in the Kubu kingdom markets for prestige along the middle Zaire. Part 4 Ironworkers in west central African society: the blacksmiths mystique unveiled - ideology, identity and the social prominence of blacksmiths. Epilogue - colonial rule and the decline of a craft tradition.

The Contours of Vegetation Change and Human Agency in Eastern Africa’s Great Lakes Region: ca. 2000 B.C. to ca. A.D. 1000

Elsewhere I have set forth a basic outline for charting histories of vegetation change through the use of paleoenvironmental data (Schoenbrun 1991). This essay builds on the previous one by laying out the contours of vegetation change and human agency in the Great Lakes region (Map 1) over the roughly three millennia after ca . 2000 BC. The history of the vegetation in eastern Africas Great Lakes region brings into focus several important features of long-term environmental change—human action, climatic shift, and internal successional patterns. The primary sources for this history come from a variety of published palynological and limnological studies from Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zaire. Perhaps the most rewarding data for reconstructing climatic and vegetational change come from palynological studies. Pollen studies often reflect detailed changes in the constitution of plant communities, and their value for reconstructing the vegetational and climatic contexts for Holocene human history has provoked the development of a rigorous method for their analysis. Contemporary studies of plant community succession and human-vegetation relationships are a secondary source for the history of land clearance in the Great Lakes region. These works provide a means to determine the different imprints of human and climatic action on the paleoenvironmental record. In this study I combine the full range of paleoenvironmental evidence to reconstruct the form and pace of vegetation change. I focus on a part of eastern Africa famous for its great ecological diversity. One of the rewards of this endeavor is to demonstrate to paleoecologists, archaeologists, and historians alike the value of a truly interdisciplinary approach to environmental change.

TREATING AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ALLERGY: METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO POLLEN STUDIES FOR THE HISTORIAN OF EARLY AFRICA'

The interdisciplinary task of reconstructing early African history demands more than a passing familiarity with many fields of knowledge. Not least among these is geography, in its broader conception as the pursuit of an understanding of physiographic processes and the role(s) played by people in shaping and responding to these processes. A standard beginning in many a history book takes the reader through annual rainfall figures, topographic generalities, and, perhaps a cursory pedological overview of the region in which the people(s) under study live. Rarely are these introductory remarks integrated into the historical narrative. We are too often left to ourselves in determining the relevance, for example, of a bi-modal rainfall to the local agriculture in a subregion of open grasslands and woody savanna ecotones on black clay valley bottoms. We trust these are data relevant to our understanding of the regions agriculturalists. Many readers may know that such an area will be subject to heavy soil waterlogging during the wetter months. They may also realize that mound and ridge construction are excellent responses to the risks of root-drowning such waterlogging poses to crops such as beans, and as well, that the indigenous African grain crops Sorghum spp. and Pennisetum spp. can withstand waterlogged soils for brief periods without suffering significant loss of yield (Purseglove 1972:269-71). What is likely to be poorly understood are the forces of ecological and cultural change that have been at work in such an environment transforming the very nature of its vegetational cover and soil profile. In short, a historical perspective is necessary so that we do not run the risk of presenting Africas ecological background in the same unchanging light as colonial ethnographers did Africas past. Fortunately for the historian of early Africa, there exists a body of theory and data, a field of inquiry, that addresses such questions-paleoecology. This study of ancient ecologies brings into sharp relief the need for scholars of early Africa to situate their ethnohistorical and material cultural reconstructions within a wider context of a changing human ecology. It is the purpose of this paper to introduce a subset of paleoecology namely, palynology, that speaks directly to the issue of past changes in the vegetational environment in which Africans made their own history.

A Mask of Calm: Emotion and Founding the Kingdom of Bunyoro in the Sixteenth Century

Rich vernacular traditions about the aftermaths of the social trauma of a major famine, sometime in sixteenth-century eastern Africa, narrate the founding of a new dynasty in Bunyoro, one of the regions oldest monarchies. Scholars often understand such traditions about the founding of new dynasties as chartering the new political order. Whether traditions credit that order with the aura of antiquity or strengthen it by excluding social elements discordant with the new orchestrations of power, they are exercises in legitimation. When scholars recognize that such traditions were set in the aftermath of widespread violence, a spirit of mourning emerges in them. Spirits of mourning, joined to those of legitimation, shape traditions about the founding of a new dynasty by deftly inflecting the problem of accountability. In Bunyoro, traditions about its founder depict him as a barbarian cultural neophyte, of fluctuating emotional stability, improvising a new political order. These unflattering, realistic representations of the founding dynasts affective comportment were designed to appeal to emotional repertoires in the different life experiences of audience members, enlisting their participation in the project of reviving sovereignty in the aftermaths of traumatic violence. Mourning and legitimation run through historical narratives initiating an aftermath to structural violence, and reveal that loss and worry shape narratives of transformed sovereign authority, and revive it in the aftermaths of structural violence. Mourning lends emotional depth and counterpoint to matters of bureaucracy, economy, gender, and so forth, in crafting satisfying accounts of transformation and accountability in political life. That emotional depth, in turn, helps explain the durability of traditions.

Jan Vansina (1929–2017): a founder figure in the study of Africa’s past, early and recent

Jan Maria Jozef Vansina, Vilas Professor Emeritus at the University of WisconsinMadison, died peacefully at home on 8 February 2017, surrounded by his family. He was born on 14 September 1929 in Antwerp, Belgium. In his career, Vansina published a score of books and hundreds of articles and supervised more than fifty PhD dissertations, above all in African history, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he worked from 1960 until his retirement in 1994. An exuberant man with a restless mind and an abiding desire to revise his views on the past in light of new evidence, Vansina always had time for younger scholars, especially in Africa, but on all the other continents as well. He continued to write and publish until the end of his life; six of his twenty books appeared after retirement. His teaching, scholarship and mentoring helped to establish the guild study of Africa’s past around the world and archaeology was part of that project pretty much from the beginning. Vansina claimed only to have come to archaeology in 1960 when he arrived in Madison at Philip Curtin’s invitation, though he ‘had helped out in some digs’ before then (Whitehead and Vansina 1995: 306). But his utterly catholic interest in the world meant that he had been thinking and writing about objects, space, ecology, built form, technology and the ways in which all of that interacted with people and other life forms since his earliest engagements with the past as a medievalist at the University of Leuven, Belgium (1946– 1951), and his immediate hiring thereafter by the Institute for Scientific Research in Central Africa (IRSAC). Vansina arrived in the then Belgian Congo to take up that post before the end of 1952. He would be engaged with the continent in one way or another until the end of his life, sixty-five years, or four and a half generations, later. One generation of archaeologists, his age-mates, knew Vansina as a participant in foundational scholarly gatherings, such as the July 1957 gathering in London, ‘La Deuxième Conference sur l’Histoire et l’Archéologie Africaine’ (Vansina 1957). At that late colonial moment, when Africa’s earlier past beckoned with renewed weight, historians and archaeologists routinely shared ideas. A next generation— this time including graduate students, but still mixing historians and archaeologists — met him through his writings on the history of the Bantu languages and the pitfalls of correlating that complicated story with the findings of archaeology (Vansina 1979, 1980, 1984, 1995a; Eggert 2005). A third generation met him as the author of Paths in the Rainforest (Vansina 1990) and of “A slow revolution: farming in subequatorial Africa” (Vansina 1994/95). The book presented the first, sweeping history of flexible complexity — ‘political tradition’ — in the