P. F. de Moraes Farias

Silent Trade: Myth and Historical Evidence

Since it is related by so many we can accept it Ca da Mosto There have been several accounts of the practice known as ‘silent trade’ in west Africa during the last thousand years. The oldest known account, that of Herodotus, is almost twenty-five hundred years old–although it probably refers to northwest rather than west Africa. Such accounts purport to describe exchanges of imported goods for gold from sub-Saharan Africa. These exchanges are said to have been made according to very particularized rules: two (and only two) trading parties would transact business with one another. They would do this not only without the help of middlemen but also without speaking to one another, or coming face to face or even within sight of each other. Elaborate precautions would in fact be taken to prevent any kind of direct visual contact. Despite this mutual avoidance and the resulting impossibility of negotiating rates of exchange, agreement presented no serious difficulties. Bargaining was carried out through gradual adjustment of quantities, arrived at by alternate moves by the two parties. Though each of the two in turn would have to leave his goods unguarded in a place accessible to the other, neither would take advantage of this for dishonest purposes. A shared table of market and moral values, as well as (and in spite of) silence and mutual invisibility, were thus the trademarks of such exchanges. The available accounts may conveniently be grouped into two categories. One category represents the exchanges as taking place between traders coming from what are assumed to be ‘more developed’ cultures (e.g., Carthage or medieval north Africa) and ‘less developed’ barely known cultures outside the sphere of direct influence of the greater sub-Saharan pre-colonial states. The other category refers to contacts between those barely known cultures of the hinterland and black Africans (e.g., Wangara, ‘Accanists’) playing the role of middlemen between the gold producers and the Arabs and Moors or Europeans. It is on the information provided by these middlemen that the second category of accounts depends.

History and Consolation: Royal Yorùbá Bards Comment on Their Craft

As court musicians and specialists of the past, the Arokin of Oyo have been used as a source for Yorubâ history, but their own views on the uses of historical information have not been investigated. For the first time a sample of these views is published here. It comes from an interview with a group of Arokin , in which they offered descriptions and other representations of the nature of their expertise. This evidence sheds light on how the Arokin have traditionally deployed historical precedent and accounted for historical innovation. They ground the resort to the past primarily on the social need to offer consolation ( itunu ) to the ruler, i.e., to cool down his personal grief. It is from this that they derive the need to relate and assimilate events, so as to explain the meaning ( itumoo ) of present happenings. They emphasize, above the supplying of etiology and legitimation, the restoration of equanimity against grief and anger. Arokin tradition compares the overwhelming power of song to the overwhelming power of grief. It stresses raw personal emotion as a cultural force, both as a source of disruption and as a trigger for efforts to make sense of the world with the help of the past, or with the help of newly-imported frames of explanation. The management of the kings (but also, in exceptional circumstances, of the peoples) emotions requires history, and may require religious innovation. The kings grief at the loss of his children is liable to have violent, and culturally far-reaching, consequences. Despite obvious differences, this has significant points of contact with Rosaldos account of the rage of the bereaved and “the cultural force of emotions” in connection with the Ilongot of northern Luzon, in the Philippines.

An archive of Yorùbá religious ephemera

An archive of ephemera seems almost a contradiction in terms. If archives come into being because governments and individuals preserve papers they consider to be worth keeping, then an archive should be a crystallisation of past and present values concerning texts. Most of Nigerias archives are in fact that kind of crystallisation, whether they are local government records, newspaper collections, Arabic-language chronicles, or little-known collections of personal letters and diaries, preserved because the individuals concerned, and subsequently their heirs, had a sense of their value. Unlike these treasures, the archive we are going to discuss here is an artificial creation for a specific purpose, an aggregation of print and media texts that hardly anyone in present-day Nigeria would think were worth collecting and preserving. It is one outcome of a collaborative project funded by the British Academy, involving ourselves and two colleagues from SOAS John Peel and Louis Brenner to investigate the role of the media in the constitution of new religious publics in Yoriibaland. The aim was to cut a narrow but deep slice into contemporary social history in western Nigeria. We selected a particular geographical focal point (the suburb of Ibadan called Agbowo) and a particular temporal frame (1996-9, the duration of the project funding but also, as it turned out, the last and darkest three years of military rule before General Obasanjo converted himself into a civilian and became President of the first elected government in Nigeria for 16 years.) The 1990s were not only marked by ever deepening financial crisis, recession and disorder; they were also a period during which the longstanding live-and-let-live cohabitation of Muslims and Christians in western Nigeria which is evenly divided between the two faiths, and formerly remarkable for the non-politicisation of religion unravelled into ever more strident and polarised competition and antagonism. An array of increasingly evangelical, uncompromising Christian sects emerged to confront an increasingly purist Islam. Just at the same time, new media technology became widely available, notably desk-top publishing and video tape; and with the proliferation of states and the crumbling of government revenues, the long-established medium of TV became fragmented and vulnerable to private interests. Thus the explosion of religious activity, led by Born-Again Christians, coincided with unprecedented means for colonising and exploiting public space.

Archive as work-in-progress

Abstract This paper describes an electronic archive being created to investigate the role of the media in the constitution of new religious publics in western Nigeria in the late 1990s. The aim of the project is to capture the arguments, silences and shared ground between Muslim, Christian and traditional constituencies as articulated in their media productions, and to represent these in a multimedia format in keeping with the subject matter. The electronic archive consists of digitised pamphlets, videos, off‐air television and radio recordings, newspaper articles, posters, pamphlets and tracts, supported by transcriptions of interviews and questionnaire responses. It was designed to capture a cross section of religiously oriented media items circulating among the heterogeneous, antagonistic but often overlapping religious constituencies in Yorubaland, and it focuses on Agbowo, a suburb of Ibadan. The paper discusses the nature of this deliberately created archive as a work‐in‐progress where the processing of the material (translating from Arabic and Yoruba, subtitling videos, producing synopses and brief summaries, transcribing oral performance genres, devising multiple‐keyword links across genres) is itself a mode of research.