Dmitri van den Bersselaar

The King of Drinks: Schnapps Gin from Modernity to Tradition

Using a focus on the trajectory of commoditisation of gin in West Africa, this book investigates how imported goods acquire specific local meanings. It shows that local consumers, not foreign advertisers, produced the importance of schnapps gin for African ritual

“No Longer at Ease”: Corruption as an Institution in West Africa

This article traces the historical genesis of corruption in two West African countries: Ghana and Nigeria. It argues that corruption in Africa is an institution that emerged in direct response to colonial systems of rule which super-imposed an imported institutional system with different norms and values on an existing institutional landscape, despite the fact that both deeply conflicted and contradicted each other. During decolonization and after independence, corruption, although dysfunctional, fully evolved into an institution that allowed an uneasy cohabitation of colonial and domestic African institutions to grow into a composite, syncretic system facilitated by generalized corruption.

Establishing the facts: P.A. Talbot and the 1921 census of Nigeria

Most historians writing about twentieth-century Africa have, at one time or other, used colonial statistical data. When we do this, we normally add a disclaimer, pointing out that these statistics are likely to be unreliable, and then proceed to use them anyway. But surely, we should be able to say something more definite about the reliability of these data? If we know more about the process by which these statistics were collected, for which aims, and with what preconceived ideas in mind, we should be able to establish, if not a margin of error, then at least some idea of which aspects of colonial statistics are more reliable than others. Furthermore, the process of colonial data-collecting was linked to establishing ethnic and other categories, which have since become generally accepted. This paper addresses these questions in an analysis of the context and contents of the published report of the 1921 Census of Southern Nigeria, and discusses its usefulness as a source for historians. The issues I discuss here with specific reference to this Nigerian census are characteristic for colonial censuses in general and should therefore be of relevance to all historians using colonial census data, and also—more generally—help us to understand how some of the most basic categories describing African societies have been constructed in the process of the acquisition of information by colonial governments.

WHO BELONGS TO THE ‘STAR PEOPLE’? NEGOTIATING BEER AND GIN ADVERTISEMENTS IN WEST AFRICA , 1949– 75

This article explores the different trajectories of advertising for schnapps gin and beer in Ghana and Nigeria during the period of decolonisation and independence up to 1975. It analyses published newspaper advertisements alongside correspondence, advertising briefs, and market research reports found in business archives. Advertising that promoted a ‘modern’ life-style worked for beer, but not for gin. This study shows how advertisements became the product of negotiations between foreign companies, local businesses, and consumers. It provides insights into the development of advertising in West Africa, the differing ways in which African consumers attached meanings to specific commodities, and possibilities for the use of advertisements as sources for African history.

An Invitation to Work – Editors' Introduction

This year’s issue of History in Africa is an “invitation to work.” It has six articles directly related to the history of labor relations and the European perception of work in Sub-Sahara Africa. On top of that several contributions in this issue remind us that research into the African past can be a substantial workload when sources prove to be difficult to trace or organized in unforeseen ways and formats. A final “invitation to work” is in the arguments that Africa’s histories have become products of fixed or standardized research protocols related to the collection of data in the field or to an esteem attributed to (colonial) archives. Possibilities of breaking through the barriers of these fixed protocols are proposed by discussing fieldwork experiences as well as the desirability to break up the archive as an institution. The first section on Critical Historiography starts with David Gordon’s observation that historians have overestimated the value of oral traditions for the reconstruction of Africa’s past. With a case study on Ngongo Luteta’s rise and fall during Belgium’s efforts to establish the Congo Free State, Gordon demonstrates the importance of archival research in the writing of a history of the first decades of colonial exploitation through the Congo Free State. Gordon invites a response to his suggestion that research based primarily on oral traditions too often has avoided challenging issues in reconstructing the past. Erin Jessee and Sarah Watkins add to Gordon’s challenge to the status of oral history as evidence to reconstruct the past. Their analysis of models to represent Rwanda kings reveals how these models reflect contemporary discourses on the past. They relate this classical critique of oral traditions to the efforts at societal reconciliation in Rwanda.

In Search of Africans' Histories - Editors' Introduction

This volume marks the 40th anniversary of History in Africa. Readers will note that the journal now is published by Cambridge University Press, with the African Studies Association remaining the journal’s owner. History in Africa maintains an emphasis on theory and method, but at the same time this volume illustrates the journal’s pluriform definition of “Africa” that includes the worlds of the diaspora and recognizes regional variations in the continent. Historians long have recognized the often “vulnerable” nature of African historical sources, including the deterioration of manuscripts, the destruction of archives in conflict zones, and the loss of recorded interviews to decay, to name just three. The present volume illustrates the “resilient” nature of African historical sources in an era that brings new opportunities and challenges, especially due to the introduction of new technologies and media and their roles in the collection, preservation, and distribution of historical sources. These recent technological developments remind us that History in Africa is a global journal that produces, thanks to its focus on Africa and research methods, knowledge and inspiration for all historians as well as all those who relate themselves to the African continent historically. The contributions to this volume represent the search for Africans’ histories in existing collections as well as the adoption of innovative methods and the exploration of new issues in historiographical traditions or historical sources that illustrate the riches and dynamics of the field of research.

Ongoing transitions – Editors’ Introduction

When taking over the editorship of History in Africa , the current editors foresaw several lines of development for the journal. The first one was to re-examine the inheritance of David Henige and build on this to keep the journal contemporary with new developments and trends in methodology and method, emerging technologies and the growing and changing availability of sources. Secondly, the editors felt that to comply with ever more stringent demands of academic quality control a full peer review system needed to be introduced, as well as action undertaken to make the journal visible in ranking systems. Thirdly, the editors decided that the journal was in need of a larger input from African scholars in Africa, to reflect developments in the continent better. Fourthly, it was decided that the paper version of the journal was in need of a more modern and professional look and format, enhancing readability, and falling into line with comparable journals, most specifically the sister journal African Studies Review . The production of this third post-Henige issue has proven transition to be an ongoing process. All four points of development have been instituted, some with immediate results, others as a work in progress. Volume 37 (2010) saw the extension of the Editorial Board with several African members working in Africa, the consolidation of Heniges work with the publication of numerous articles inherited from him, and an agenda for further development. At the Annual General Meeting of the African Studies Association in San Francisco in 2010, two panels were organized to honor Henige and his work. Many of the contributions to these panels were included in volume 38 (2011), making it a Festschrift, definitively concluding the Henige era. The current issue of History in Africa is therefore the first regular issue under the regime of the new editorial team.

Doorway to Success?: Reconstructing African Careers in European Business from Company House Magazines and Oral History Interviews

The largely literate African employees of European businesses during the colonial and postcolonial period have not been studied as a group, unlike miners, railway workers and colonial intermediaries.2 This group has nevertheless been of great importance. Many of its members became part of the core of the management of African-owned enterprises and organizations, others started their own businesses or became successful politicians.3 African employees of European business, alongside government employees, formed the basis of the rapidly growing middle classes during the period after the Second World War. They gave their children a Western-style education, often at well-respected schools. In many local communities the

John Parker and Richard Rathbone, African History: a very short introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press (pb £6.99 –978 0 19280 248 4). 2007, 144 pp.

an interesting and useful examination of the lives of these men, but one would have liked the analysis to be expanded by a closer look at the data about class, caste and gender issues within the tariqa and a more comprehensive application of Benedict Anderson’s concepts in Imagined Communities. In his conclusion Professor Glover returns to the themes of the strengths of Murid modernizing ideology and the construction of the Murid identity which assisted its members in building a viable community in the twentieth century, a community that has transcended ethnic and national boundaries. The expansion of Muridiyya as a global movement validates his use of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities as an analytical tool and his emphasis on the adaptive and innovative ideas of Amadu Bamba and Maam Cerno, for, as the author points out, ‘There is a discernible process of Murid historical identification that incorporates and situates historical changes and events into their sense of modernity . . . . For the Murids, the eternal was not a static notion from a reactionary fundamentalist point of view; rather it was the Sufi mystical path that had a link to the past, local and global relevance for the present, and a way to the future’ (p. 192). For those who are interested in contemporary global Islam this study by John Glover and the other fine, recent examination of Muridiyya by Cheikh Anta Babou provide stimulating data and analysis.

Simon Ottenberg, Farmers and Townspeople in a Changing Nigeria: Abakaliki during colonial times (1905–1960). Ibadan: Spectrum Books (pb N3000, £24.95 – 978 029 533 X). 2005, xxi + 364 pp.

related to the Ngoni penetration and later Maji Maji struggles than to Mkwawa and the Hehe hegemonic expansionism that is characteristic of the pre-colonial history of northern Njombe. It is due to this omission that A History of the Excluded fails to explain in convincing detail the Maji Maji struggles in southern Ubena – especially so for the battles at Yakobi Mission and the Nyikamtwe (the Valley of the Skull). The same is true of the downplayed role of the military school of the Wanyikongwe so well described by Ndembwela Ngunangwa in Indigenous African Education (1988). Narratives of the descendants of people who fought those battles could have provided a more rounded picture of the Bena’s early colonial resistance and social history. The theme of ‘exclusion within incorporation’ permeates the book. It is argued that Njombe District was ‘marginalized even as it was incorporated into the colonial economy’. Under the two colonial regimes the district provided migrant labour for the mines and plantations, while being effectively excluded from ‘agricultural markets, from access to medical services, from schooling – from all opportunity . . . to escape the impoverishing trap of migrant labour’ (p. 1). One would like to query whether the creation of a labour reserve in Njombe devoid of other development initiatives was really an act of exclusion or one of incorporation by ‘proletarianization’. I would argue this was an attempt at ‘proletarianization’ of a district that proved abortive. Colonial capitalism penetrated, but did not significantly alter, the traditional familyoriented, resource-based, subsistence-level ‘peasant mode of production’. By remaining with their land and other ‘means of production’, the peasantry had an ‘exit option’ within the so-called ‘private family sphere’ which they pitched against the local development goals posed by the state, both colonial and post-colonial. These doubts notwithstanding, the author(s) have done an excellent job in reconstructing and describing the process of social change from the perspective of struggling individuals. The result has been an illuminating social history of a group of people that would later come to form a dynamic middle class in a locally sourced political economy in Tanzania. It is a worthy present by one of the authors to a nation that has given him a wife.