Paul E.H. Hair

Cherokee and West Africa: Examining the Origins of the Vai Script

A cornerstone of the Western intellectual heritage is the fervent belief in the power of the written word to transform man and society. In this tradition, the existence of writing serves as a hallmark for civilization and a marker to separate history from prehistory. While a great deal of scholarly work has dispelled many myths about literacy, thus bridging “the great divide” between the written and the oral, our intellectual and emotional attachment to writing persists. This appears to be especially the case in reference to the origins of writing systems, many of the latter being claimed and reputed to have been “independently invented.” For those peoples most involved historically in such developments, the invention and use of original scripts are points of pride, and hence claims for the “authenticity” of the scripts, that is, for their invention and coming into use having been an entirely indigenous undertaking, are passionately guarded. Historians of writing, however, are cautious of claims for independent invention. From ancient to modern times, the history of the development of writing has been characterized by a balance between “independent invention” and “stimulus diffusion.” While epigraphers and paleographers attempt to unravel the inevitably obscure origins of certain ancient scripts possibly devised in environments free from external influence, no script devised in the last two thousand years is likely to have emerged totally independent of the stimulus of some diffused knowledge of the previous history of scripts—at the very least, the mere idea of writing. Nonetheless, for many modern observers, any suggestion of an outside stimulus on the development of such scripts is considered virtual heresy, tantamount to an attack on the intellectual ability of the peoples who claim to have single-handedly devised the scripts.

Attitudes to Africans in English Primary Sources on Guinea up to 1650

This essay investigates the attitudes to Black Africans, specifically those of Guinea, as evidenced in the pre-1650 primary sources on Anglo-African relations. Two 1980s studies by scholars working within the field of English literature have investigated English attitudes of the period to Africans in general and have expounded what are apparently popular as well as academically-received conclusions, as follows. Contact with Africans and with the existing Atlantic slave trade, building on older ideas of the meaning of “blackness” and the inferiority of non-Christians, led the pre-1650 English to create a stereotype of barbarous and bestial Blacks which served to justify the enslavement of Africans and English slave-trading. Both studies are based in the main on an analysis of English drama of the period, with passing reference, for instance, to the Othello controversy. Historians are bound to have reservations about the extent to which imaginative literature can inform on historical process and collective attitudes, perhaps not least in respect of the category of theatrical drama, especially when the drama is presented, as in this period, to a tiny segment of a national society. As it happens, these particular studies, while exemplary in their fashion, can be criticized for too limited a critical investigation of the primary non-imaginative sources, resulting in minor errors of fact and, more important, general statements about Anglo-African contacts less than wholly valid. They also treat their subject too narrowly, tearing out what they see as a “racist” stereotype from the context of English cultural relationships in the period, which, in the time-honored and universal way of cultural self-protection, inevitably tended to discriminate against all non-English ways and manners, overtly or covertly.

The early sources on Guinea

The Guinea coast and near interior was a region of almost wholly preliterate societies before the coming of the Europeans. Islamic culture, with its literate strands, which had been spreading through the northern parts of West Africa over many centuries had barely begun to touch the Guinea region—although a handful of literate itinerant merchants and missionaries was to be encountered by the Portuguese, and Islamic religious practice had penetrated at least one royal court in Senegal. Hence the “medieval” sources in Arabic which are informative on the history of the Sudanic states of West Africa tell us little or nothing about the Guinea region. As for the oral traditions of the region, mostly collected only since 1850, these have an inbuilt “horizon” of recollection which falls far short of the arrival of the Europeans five centuries ago. Ethnographic, cultural, and linguistic evidence, systematized in recent times, can be extrapolated backwards to earlier times, but this can only be done, with any security, when trends over time have been identified from earlier hard evidence. Such trends can of course be obtained from archeology, as well as from written sources. But the limited investigations of archeologists in Guinea to date, while they certainly inform on general issues such as agriculture and technology, are as yet decidedly weak, for a variety of good reasons, on the regional details of human settlement and population, and on the varieties of political structure. Moreover it is doubtful whether archeology per se can inform to any significant extent on ethnicity, language, and social characteristics. It is therefore only marginally debatable to refer to the earliest European written sources on Guinea as “the early sources.”

Sierra Leone and the Grand Duke of Tuscany

In 1606 Philip II of Portugal (and III of Spain) granted to a faithful court official, the Portuguese nobleman Pedro Alvares Pereira, the captaincy of Sierra Leone in Guinea, subject to his establishing an effective settlement there. This was on the lines of previous royal grants of other areas of the Atlantic world—the fifteenth-century grants of the Portuguese Atlantic islands, the grants of segments of the coast of Brazil in the 1530s, and of the coast of Angola in the 1570s. These earlier grants had led to the extension of Portuguese domain, that is, conquista , confirmed in the earlier instances by settlement but the grant made to Pedro Alvares Pereira led to no permanent settlement at Sierra Leone and not even to Portuguese overrule of the African peoples of the district. A first attempt to carry out the terms of the grant, made in 1606 through the agency of a Jesuit missionary, Fr. Baltasar Barreira, lost its initial momentum because of a sudden decline in the fortunes of Pedro Alvares Pereira. In 1608 he fell out of favor at the court, accused of corruption and malpractice—a not uncommon happening in the jealously competitive arena of the Madrid court—and hence was unable to send ships and supplies to Sierra Leone to substantiate his grant. Eventually he returned to favour and between 1612 and 1616 tried again, but for reasons which are not entirely clear but apparently included the loss of agents in a marine disaster, he gave up the struggle and in 1621, just before he died, he relinquished the grant.

The Cowboys: A Nigerian Acculturative Institution (ca. 1950)

From 1952 to 1955 I carried out field research in eastern Nigeria, centered at Enugu, and I wrote the paper below, with the present title, before leaving Nigeria, which to my regret I have never revisited. It is reproduced with a very slightly edited text (but added explanatory footnotes), since it now supplies a twofold historical testimony, first, to an African situation, and second, to the discourse interests (and terminology) of an expatriate “colonialist,” a British academic historian, half a century ago. In the paper I commented on the first. I now let the second speak for itself. The article should incite Nigerian scholars—or ex-Cowboys—to question, correct, enlarge, and update my account.

ELEPHANTS FOR WANT OF TOWNS: THE INTERETHNIC AND INTERNATIONAL HISTORY OF BULAMA ISLAND, 1456-1870

Bulama (otherwise Bolama) Island is the furthest inshore member of the Bissagos Islands, off the West African coast, in the present-day state of Guine-Bissau. On the east side of the wide estuary of Rio Jeba, it stands near the mouth of Rio Balola. Small, low-lying, partly surrounded by sandbanks and swamps, often uninhabited, and considered by whites scenically attractive but very unhealthy, Bulama has appeared in historical records with disproportionate frequency. It may have been noted during the earliest stages of Portuguese “Discovery;” two centuries on, it was investigated by the French. It was later the locality of a disastrous British settlement, the proposed home for a colony of African-Americans, and for sixty years the site of a colonial capital; and it was the subject of a well-meant arbitration by a President of the U.S.A. Finally, it was the center for an international conference on its own past, held in 1990. That past, of little importance in itself, nevertheless provides a keyhole glimpse of much of the history of the western Guinea coast over four centuries. Our knowledge of the earlier history of the island of Bulama is slight and depends on European sources. The region of the estuary of Rio Jeba—or “Rio Grande” as it was originally known—was first visited by Europeans in the 1450s. The earliest Portuguese ship to arrive was probably the one on which a certain Diogo Gomes traveled, the date probably 1456. The account of this voyage, as edited by a contemporary scholar in the 1490s from the oral narrative of Diogo Gomes in old age, indicates that the Portuguese landed at a point along Rio Jeba and saw wild animals: deer, elephants, and crocodiles.

Guides To the Records of Early West African Missions

The systematic, academic study of history is barely two centuries old. Its progress has been marked by the discovery of new methods of investigation and of new felds to investigate, the two advances often linked, since many new fields were only recognized as worthy of exploitation when new methods made their exploitation profitable. In this perspective, the very recent development of interest in African history need not be regarded as sinister either, on the one hand, for its lateness, or, on the other, for its present intensity since African history has had to await the working of more obvious and more fundamental fields, where methods were invented and tested which are now being applied, with relative ease, to the study of the history of the remaining parts of the globe. As yet, however, African history is a raw field of study, a few vigorously-pursued excavations here and there contrasting with vast deserts of obscurity, where pioneers must resist the lure of mirages of speculation. The rawness of African historical studies is in no way more evident than in the lack of instrumenta studiorum shaped for the field. With very few significant exceptions, there are no bibliographical guides, no biographical dictionaries, no Monumenta or Fontes, no encyclopaedias, no local histories, no dictionaries of toponymy, no Fasti of clerics... The series to which the volumes under review 1) belong aims to fill one of the gaps, by providing guides to the manuscript material preserved in Western Europe which relates to the history of West Africa. The series has already had a warm reception from African historians, and the present two volumes are especially welcome to the African church historian.