Fontes Historiae Africanae – serie

The History of Ashanti Kings and the Whole Country Itself is a key text for understanding the history of the great West African kingdom of Asante. It is perhaps the earliest example of history writing in English by an African ruler and is of compelling interest to all concerned with the production of indigenous historical knowledge in Africa.

The Goggam Chronicle is a detailed regional history set within a framework of the traditional historical narrative of Ethiopia. Goggam, an ancient province bounded almost entirely by the Blue Nile, is one of the principal regions of the medieval Ethiopian polity. The chronicler, Aläqa Täklä Iyäsus, was a remarkable church painter and engraver. Although he enjoyed the artistic favour and friendship of King Täklä Haymanot he wrote the Chronicle without royal patronage or censorship. His unconventional views and commentaries, as well as his take on some decisive events such as the battle of Embabo (1882), or religious controversies such as those between the followers of the Unction and Union doctrines are highly interesting. Of particular importance are the collection of poems inspired by dirge, martial boast and religious devotion. As such the Chronicle was and still is a goldmine for scholars of history, students of Amharic language, and early Amharic literature, and for those interested in the study of genealogy, church painting, migration, and settlement.The Chronicle was previously known only to a handful of scholars (who used incomplete extant manuscripts kept by few private and institutional libraries). This new translation is based on careful study of all the manuscripts to produce an authoritative and coherent text, while omitting early mythical genealogical chapters and unfinished post-1901 material.

The Nuer people of South Sudan hold a special if unwanted place in imperial history as the object of Britain's last 'pacification' campaign in Africa. Territorial conquest was completed with the annexation of the independent sultanate of Darfur in 1916, but military pacification continued throughout the first thirty years of the twentieth century, culminating in 'the Nuer Settlement'.These campaigns are important for another reason: they were the cause of the Sudan government redirecting the anthropologist, E.E. Evans-Pritchard (against his will) to study of the Nuer, which he did in a succession of field visits between 1930 and 1936. The trilogy of monographs that he published were formative in the development of British social anthropology and are one of the main reasons why the Nuer are so well-known internationally today.This volume consists of twenty-five administrative reports, supplemented by transcripts of five interviews with Nuer and Dinka participants. Together these cover the significant events in the contact, conquest, and pacification of the Nuer from 1898 to 1930. The documents contain some of the earliest twentieth-century ethnographic descriptions of the Nuer and their Dinka and Mabaan neighbours. Together these sources provide an historical context for further understanding Evans-Pritchard's ethnography, as well as a more detailed understanding of the events that led to incorporation of the Nuer into the colonial state.The final document is an abstract of a talk given by Evans-Pritchard to the Oxford Summer School on Colonial Administration in 1938. This contained observations, based in part on his fieldwork among the Nuer, which are relevant today to understanding the post-independence history of South Sudan. This book is a significant contribution to the source materials on the history of South Sudan and for the study of the relationship between colonial states and the development of the discipline of social anthropology.

The Chilembwe (or Nyasaland) Rising of January 1915 is one of the most fascinating episodes in the history of resistance in southern Africa. A small-scale event, suppressed within a matter of days, the Rising has been described by a leading historian (John Iliffe) as the only significant rebellion in the whole of Africa prior to the First World War to be inspired by Christianity. Its leader, John Chilembwe, a Baptist minister trained in the United States, is now lauded in official circles as Malawi's first nationalist; his image is depicted on the country's banknotes.This book contains a comprehensive selection of the verbatim and written evidence presented to the Commission of Inquiry set up to examine the causes of the Rising. Witnesses included colonial officials, missionaries and settlers but also a substantial number of Malawians, among them Presbyterian ministers and teachers, government clerks, businessmen, chiefs and headmen. Five European women, dramatically caught up in the Rising, add their own accounts of events; the Commission's report is published in full. Together, these testimonies are a fundamental source for an understanding of the causes and character of the Rising. More generally, they throw a revealing light on social and economic relations in early colonial Malawi. John McCracken provides extensive explanatory comments focusing, in particular, on the problematic nature of the sources. An appendix gives detailed notes on the individuals involved.

The Colonial Occupation of Katanga consists of a translated and richly annotated edition of the personal correspondence of Lieutenant (later Captain) Clément Brasseur, the military officer in charge of Lofoi, the first post of the Congo Free State in Katanga. The letters date from September 1893, the month of his arrival in the region, and continue up to 9 November 1897, the day before his career of conquest and subjugation came to a violent end outside the trader Kiwala's fortified camp on the Luapula River. All of the seventeen long letters included in the volume are addressed to Brasseur's elder brother, Désiré, a fellow military officer; most of them take the form of regularly updated journals and travelogues.Brasseur's dense personal correspondence describes in exceptional detail both his day-to-day activities and administrative determinations and the numerous military operations that he and/or his local allies undertook with a view to impressing upon Katangese communities the need to comply with instructions relating to taxation in kind and labour. The striking candidness and directness of the records presented in this edition challenge top-down understandings of the violent workings of the Congo Free State, cast unprecedented light on early colonial state-building in Katanga and show that the latter process was deeply informed by African strategies and interests. These themes are systematically pursued in the volume's extensive introduction, which advances the idea that the Congo Free State is best understood as a continuation of the nineteenth-century warlord order in Central Africa, rather than the embodiment of a 'modern' colonial project.

This book rethinks the history of decolonisation and new nationhood in the Ghana-Togo borderlands, and speaks to an increasingly urgent debate on the production of knowledge about Africa. It does this through the close reading, translation and analysis of a unique primary source - a newspaper entitled Ablɔɖe(meaning 'the Key to Freedom').Ablɔɖe was initiated and sustained by a shoemaker named Holiday V. K. Komedja, and written almost entirely in his mother-tongue, Eʋe. Whilst many studies of nationalism have highlighted the importance of anti-colonial newspapers, this volume is unique - in its intensive focus on a single African-language newspaper, in providing translations of entire issues, and in following the story of decolonisation into the era of new nationhood. The manner in which Komedja recounted and explained political events challenges existing scholarly accounts of the rise and fall of Togo's first independent government, and of ethnic nationalisms and local loyalties within new nation-states. In re-reading the history of the Ghana-Togo borderlands through the pages of Ablɔɖe, this volume demonstrates that intensive inter-disciplinary engagement with specific African-language texts is indispensable to the meaningful study of Africa and Africans in global history.

Consul John Beecroft's Journal of his Mission to Dahomey, 1850 features diary entries made by John Beecroft whilst he was British Consul in West Africa. His diplomatic mission to the kingdom of Dahomey (in what is today the Republic of Bénin) in 1850 was part of the British government's efforts to suppress the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He sought (unsuccessfully) to persuade the Dahomian king, Gezo, to accept a treaty to ban the export of slaves from his dominions. This journal is a valuable source, not only for the history of British policy towards the slave trade, but also for the history of Dahomey, which was one of the most important indigenous states in coastal West Africa in the nineteenth century. This edition includes additional documents relating to the mission, including the journal of Beecroft's co-envoy, the naval officer Lieutenant F.E. Forbes. Comparison between Beecroft's and Forbes's accounts reveals numerous discrepancies, which raise important methodological issues, relating to the evaluation of such European reportage of African societies.The edition includes an editorial introduction and extensive annotation, which supplies the contextualization necessary for full understanding of the text, including cross-referencing to and comparison with other contemporary accounts of Dahomey and its dealings with the British.

This book contains some of the richest written material in existence for precolonial West Africa with unique insights into daily life in an Afro-Atlantic coastal trade settlement. Presenting the complete translated and annotated text of the Inquisition trial of Crispina Peres, an African woman born in the Guinea-Bissau region, of a Portuguese father and an African mother, it documents the Portuguese Inquisition's religious persecution of Africans on African soil. Set in a slave port in 17th century West Africa, the trial focuses on the worldview of an African woman accused of engaging in African rites and witchcraft, who is imprisoned and brought before Inquisitioners in Lisbon. It highlights her resourcefulness, resilience and spirited defence of her innocence, providing precious details on her life, household, work, health and social and commercial networks in this understudied African region.

This account of south-central Africa, written in 1648, provides rare detail about the life of the African people of the region and their relations with the Portuguese creole community. As well as the work of the Jesuit mission, Gomes describes African gold mining, politics and social relations (including costume, marriage, medicine, witchcraft, litigation and slavery). His narrative also provides details about the coastal Macua and Portuguese knowledge of Lake Malawi, and he reports conversations with Africans in order to explain aspects of African society that might surprise or shock his fellow Jesuits. The narrative also describes the Maldive Islands and gives information about Madagascar.

History of Ashanti is unusual, perhaps unique, in that it provides a long historical account of the great West African forest kingdom of Asante by a ruler of that society. Thus, it is African history written by an African king and his assistants. This is, without a doubt, a very important document for historians of Africa. It has too a much wider resonance at the present time: here the Asante 'voice' is speaking directly to all those across the globe who claim ancestral links to the African continent, and who are still engaged in the struggle to define, to strengthen and to assert their identities in a world that long discounted the value, or even the existence, of their historical experience.

The Portuguese produced the earliest records for regions in West Africa, none more important than the Gold Coast. This edited volume provides a unique collection of sources written in Portuguese, Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish for Africa’s Gold Coast, from the late 15th to 17th century. Students, scholars, and professionals with an avid interest in early modern African, Atlantic, and world history will benefit from the English translations, many appearing for the first time. These sources add to the handful of existing translations, but especially illuminate the late 15th to 17th century relations between the Portuguese empire and the Gold Coast and offer comparative materials for other European interlocutors—Spanish, French, English, and Dutch—garrisoned on the coast or offshore in their vessels. Over that concentrated period, and especially where no other European-supplied records exist, these uncomprehending Portuguese outsiders archived important local ideas, personalities, polities, and cultural forms animating Gold Coast-Portuguese relations.

This source book of translated texts gives insight into the history of religious and social change in East Africa, from the 1890s until the 1930s, through the everyday concerns of African Christians. Originally in Luganda, the documents are written by, or about, an early Ugandan clergyman Apolo Kivebulaya who propagated a Protestant form of Christianity in Toro and Ituri (Congo). They show how a literate Christian identity was formed away from centres of power, and how African admirers responded to Kivebulaya and influenced their own societies. Kivebulaya was a forerunner of a piety propagated through the East African Revival that continues to infuse contemporary Christianity in the region and influences in the Great Lakes region.

The Sunjata epic is a foundational oral narrative for Manding populations of West Africa and claims to describe the origins of the famed medieval empire of Mali. It is both a historical source and an artistic creation of West African oral specialists, the griots (jèliw). Despite its importance, the epic is known to Anglophone non-specialists only through a handful of accounts published after 1960. Corpus of Early Accounts of the Sunjata Epic, 1889-1959 presents twenty understudied versions of the epic, recorded during the colonial period, that are not easily accessible. Previously published in French and German colonial periodicals, here these sources are translated into English, each with a scholarly introduction, allowing the reader to appreciate each version's context and purpose.

The Reports of Theophilus Opoku details the letters of a pastor living in the ethnically diverse and structurally fragile kingdom of Akuapem in the south-eastern Gold Coast during the 19th century. Between 1868 and 1908, Opoku wrote 37 reports to his employers — the board of the Basel Mission — which provide rare insight into the process of conversion, life in the newly formed Christian communities, and the uneasy relationship between mission regulations, local culture, king, and colonial government. The reports, written in a vivid narrative style, also include detailed descriptions of customary rites, conflict and cooperation between Christians and non-Christians, and factional disturbances in chieftaincy affairs. Opoku was a pioneer missionary in a rapidly changing society: his letters, which are richly introduced and annotated in this volume, are a testimony to the sincerity of his evangelistic zeal.

The Chronicles of Two West African Kingdoms presents a new reading of West African history from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Based on close analysis of Arabic manuscripts from Timbuktu and other regions, this volume provides key historical context from the Songhay Empire through the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi, along with translations and Arabic editions of the long-obscured Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār in parallel with the later production known as the Tārīkh al-fattāsh. The central observation that emerges from these texts is that Muslim scholars in premodern West Africa, who saw themselves as constitutive to the powerful kingdoms in the Western Sudan, claimed almost unprecedented authority to shape reality through narration.