Thomas Spear

Oral traditions: whose history

Historians rarely pause to reflect on the history and theory of our own discipline, but it is a salutary exercise, particularly when the discipline is as young as African history. Twenty years ago a majority of African peoples emerged from colonial domination and acquired their independence. In that same year their history was also symbolically liberated from domination by the activities of Europeans in Africa through the inauguration of the Journal of African History . And one year later the new African history was given what was to become one of its dominant methodologies with the publication of Jan Vansinas De la tradition Orale . African history was to be the history of Africans, a history that had begun well before the European ‘discovery’ of Africa. The problem was sources. Western historiography was firmly based on written sources which could be arranged in sequence and analyzed to trace incremental changes and establish cause and effect relationships in evolutionary patterns of change. Unlike written documents which were recorded in the past and passed down unchanged into the present, oral traditions had to be remembered and retold through successive generations to reach the present. Their accuracy was thus subject to lapses in memory and falsification in the long chains of transmission from the initial report of the event in the past to the tradition told in the present. To overcome these problems Vansina established an elaborate and meticulous methodology by which traditions should be collected and transcribed, their chains of transmission traced and variants compared, and obvious biases and falsifications stripped off to produce primary documents suitable for writing history within the western genre.

The Shirazi in Swahili Traditions, Culture and History

“Strange foreign jewels on a mournful silent shore” Historians have frequently viewed the Swahili-speaking peoples of the East African coast as members of an Arab diaspora that spread around the Indian Ocean with trade over the last two thousand years. The interpretation flowed easily from the apparent “Arab” nature of Swahili culture--a written language using Arabic script, elaborate stone buildings and mosques constructed in urban settings, Islam, and genteel social behavior--especially when contrasted with the culture of mainland Africans, members of preliterate, uncentralized communities. Since the Swahili culture of the islands and coastal fringes bore little apparent resemblance to the cultures of the mainland, historians reasoned, its development could only have been the product of Persian and Arab merchants bringing to the “mournful silent shores” of East Africa the “jewels” of their own Muslim civilizations. The perspective was essentially diffusionist in assuming that cultural innovation and historical development in Africa could only have come from elsewhere, and racist in assuming that race and culture were so inextricably linked that a separate “race” of immigrants had to carry these new ideas. As a result, historians failed to investigate the possible African roots of Swahili culture in their Bantu language, their religious beliefs and values, their economy, or their social structure. But this charge applies not only to European historians; Swahili oral historians have long recounted the development of their societies in essentially the same terms in involved genealogies tracing the development of different Swahili families, communities, and institutions back to Persian or Arabian ancestors. When European historians came to study the oral traditions of the Swahili (usually in written, chronicle form), they thus found ready confirmation of their own assumptions and interpretations.

Ancestral Stories of Ghanaian Bimoba Reflect Millennia-Old Genetic Lineages

Oral history and oral genealogies are mechanisms of collective memory and a main cultural heritage of many populations without a writing system. In the effort to analytically address the correspondence between genetic data and historical genealogies, anthropologists hypothesised that genealogies evolve through time, ultimately containing three parts: literal – where the most recent ancestry is truthfully represented; intended – where ancestry is inferred and reflects political relations among groups; and mythical – that does not represent current social reality. While numerous studies discuss oral genealogies, to our knowledge no genetic studies have been able to investigate to what extent genetic relatedness corresponds to the literal and intended parts of oral genealogies. We report on the correspondence between genetic data and oral genealogies among Bimoba males in a single village in North-Eastern Ghana. We compared the pairwise mismatch distribution of Y chromosome short tandem repeat (Y-STR) haplotypes among all lineages present in this village to the self-reported (oral) relatedness. We found that Bimoba are able to correctly identify unrelated individuals in 92% of the cases. In contrast, they are able to correctly identify related individuals only in 38% of the cases, which can be explained by three processes: (1) the compression of genealogies, leading to increasing inaccuracy with increasing genealogical distance, (2) inclusions into the lineage from intended relations such as clan co-option or adoptions, and (3) false paternities, which in this study were found to have a minor effect on the correspondence between genetic data and oral genealogies. In addition, we observed that 70% of unrelated pairs have from six to eight Y-STR differences, a diversification peak which we attribute to an ancient West African expansion dating around 9454 years ago. We conclude that, despite all caveats, oral genealogies are reflecting ancient lineages more accurately than previously thought.

Swahili History and Society to 1900: A classified bibliography

Several years ago, Derek Nurse and I began to consider the increasing need to make revisions to our book, The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800-1500. We knew there had been significant archeological finds subsequent to its publication in 1985, but we were surprised to discover that hundreds of new books and articles had appeared. It therefore seemed expedient, not simply to revise the earlier work, but to compile a comprehensive new bibliography on early Swahili history and society that would facilitate thorough reconsideration of the issues in the future. This now includes 700 items, 428 published before 1985 and 272 published after. This is a massive literature, and it will make extensive demands on those working in the field (Spear 1999).The focus here is on the history and development of coastal societies over the past two millennia, but I have included recent ethnography, linguistics, and history for comparative purposes. What is missing, however, are sources covering literature and the arts, for which one may consult Kelly Askews excellent online bibliography (Askew 1999). I have included mainly published work, but unpublished theses and papers are also included where available. I have not, however, included archival materials in government (e.g., Tanzanian, Zanzibari, British, German, Indian, French, U.S.), mission (CMS, UMCA, LMS), or local (Salem, Hamburg, Rhodes House) collections, nor have I included material in mission publications.The bibliography is subdivided by discipline—archaeology, linguistics and language, ethnography, and history. Most items have been confirmed in OCLC WorldCat or other authoritative sources, correcting numerous errors in previous citations. Arabic names are alphabetized as they appear, inconsistently, in databases for ease of finding.

The Interpretation of Evidence in African History

In the preceding essay Janet Ewald has rightly stressed the critical importance of field work in revealing the manifold relations among different factors, institutions, and events in the past as well as those between the past and the present. She has also noted the disparate, eclectic, and even anarchic nature of the data obtained, making interpretation and analysis of the data a second, a perhaps even more difficult, hurdle that African historians must face between overcoming the confusions and complexities of field work and confronting the third hurdle of historical analysis. Having collected the evidence, then, our task shifts to its interpretation. African history has been called the decathalon of the social sciences as we sought to employ seemingly complementary methodologies, data, and theoretical perspectives of history, archaeology, comparative linguistics, anthropology, ethnography, and oral traditions to overcome the limited amount of documentary material available to us. The move was an audacious assault on disciplinary boundaries, but one that sometimes resulted in naive uses of data and analysis without proper consideration of the complexities of other fields. Wars between historians and anthropologists have been endemic. But we have all become more sophisticated in our use of other disciplinary perspectives in the process, so that today we see emerging both an increasingly sensitive anthropological history as well as a more subtle historical anthropology.

METHODS AND SOURCES FOR AFRICAN HISTORY REVISITED Writing African History . Edited by J OHN E DWARD P HILIPS . Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005. Pp. xii+531.

WRITING African History pays homage to Daniel McCalls pioneering text, Africa in Time Perspective: A Discussion of Historical Reconstruction from Unwritten Sources , published at the dawn of the era of modern African history in 1964. Surprisingly, given subsequent developments in the field, there has been no comparable text since, making this volume especially welcome. But it also bears a heavy burden if it is to become the authoritative text for the next generations of students and scholars. Does it meet this difficult test?