The Politics of the Production and Reception of Sources–Editors’ Introduction

This 2016 volume of History in Africa offers eight articles that explore the production and use of sources for African history from precolonial times to the present. These are followed by a thematic section containing four articles that look at aspects for African history through the lens of sports. A section of archival reports concludes the volume.

Most of the contributions to this issue offer a critical analysis of written sources. At first glance, this might appear as a return to more conventional sources, following volumes in which we featured, among others, oral history, statistical analysis, archaeology, photographs, and material culture. However, many of our contributors offer new insights about known sources through a careful analysis, not only of the production of the sources themselves, but particularly of how they were used in specific contexts, and how that use has influenced historians’ subsequent reading of the sources. We historians are highly skilled in source critique: the careful unpicking of what the producer of a source at the time could or could not have witnessed, what information was included or omitted (intentionally or unintentionally), what audience the writer was addressing, and what he or she may have been intending to achieve through the production of the source. We are very aware of the fact that most of our written sources contain crucial silences, and that the production of the source–whether a travel report, a petition, memoir, or piece of routine administrative paperwork–was always to some degree political. What many of the contributors to this issue address, however, goes one step further: to critically understand a historical source, we should not only be aware of the politics of its initial production, but also of the politics of its use and reception which resulted in particular histories of reading the sources that have continued to influence our understanding of the material, no matter how much “reading between the lines” we do.

The first three articles explore sources produced by European travellers, beginning with Jared Staller’s discussion of primary source material on Angola initially recorded by Andrew Battell and printed by Samuel Purchas from 1613 to 1625. That the publisher had revised Battell’s writing has been discussed previously in this journal.¹ Staller adds to our understanding by carefully comparing the revisions that Purchas made to Battell’s writing between the 1614 and 1617 editions of Battell’s Pilgrimage. Staller shows how the British editor’s concerns, such as producing an accessible text, updating and defining accurate data, and the tensions between Protestants and Catholics in England, led to details of Angolan history being altered.

Source material relating to the European trade with the Kingdom of Dahomey is discussed in Neal Polhemus’s contribution, which presents a newly rediscovered copy of the diary of William Snelgrave, who visited King Agaja of Dahomey in April 1727. Snelgrave’s diary was published in 1734 and has been an important source for historians, although some of the details of his account have been disputed. Additional questions stem from the subtle but significant differences between Snelgrave’s manuscript version and the published diary, as examined by Robin Law in an earlier contribution to this journal.² The written diary discussed by Polhemus, and included as an appendix to the article, is in Snelgrave’s own handwriting and was sent from the West African coast in 1727, which makes it the earliest extant version. As details in both the manuscript and published versions of the diary appear to have been informed by knowledge of political and individual disputes that had emerged after Snelgrave’s visit, this earlier account is of particular significance.

A very interesting source is discussed by Sven Outram-Leman: the account of Alexander Scott, a sailor from Liverpool, who, after being shipwrecked, spent six years as a slave in the Sahara from 1810 until 1816. His narrative was published in two parts in 1820 and 1821 as an authoritative account of the inaccessible West African interior, including a geographical dissertation by one of the foremost...