Our New Husbands Are Here

Notes

191 Notes introduction 1. Author’s interview with Fanti Traoré (Somangoi, 24 May 1997). Among Maninka peoples, the terms “husband” and “wife” are sometimes bantered about and applied in a joking, playful way to indicate affection, appreciation, and respect . Those terms can also be used metaphorically, as a way to create a relationship with implicit debts and obligations. Sometimes, too, women invoke metaphorical “husbands” to offer a critique of their “real” husbands. 2. This schema of household-state relationships mirrors the patriarchal and patrimonial state forms described by Max Weber in Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1006–10. 3. James Sheehan defines state-making as the “ongoing process of making, unmaking , and revising sovereign claims.” He further notes that the “nature of this process constantly changes; what it means to be a state varies form time to time and place to place.” James Sheehan, “The Problem of Sovereignty in European History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 1 (2006): 3. 4. M. G. Smith, Government in Zazzau, 1800–1950 (London: Oxford University Press, 1960); D. T. Niane and Joseph Ki-Zerbo, eds., General History of Africa IV: Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). For a study that departs from this trend and pays close attention to household-making, marital ties, and state formation, see David William Cohen, Womunafu’s Bunafu: A Study of Authority in a Nineteenth-Century African Community (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977). 5. There are numerous published versions of the Sundiata epic. One of the most popular is D. T. Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, trans. G. F. Pickett (1960; Essex: Longmann, 1993). See also Bamba Suso and Banna Kanute, Sunjata (1974; London: Penguin Books, 1999); Djanka Tasey Condé and David C. Conrad, eds., Sunjata: A West African Epic of the Mande Peoples (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004). 6. Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Walter Rodney, “African Slavery and Other Forms of Social Oppression on the Upper Guinea Coast in the Context of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Journal of African History [hereafter JAH] 7, no. 3 (1966): 435–36; 192 w Notes to Page 7 Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 81. For analyses of warfare and statecraft that focus on the interior Soudan region, see Richard L. Roberts, Warriors, Merchants, and Slaves: The State and the Economy in the Middle Niger Valley, 1700–1914 (Stanford , Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987); and Ralph Austen, “Imperial Reach versus Institutional Grasp: Superstates of the West and Central African Sudan in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Early Modern History 13, no. 6 (2009): 509–41. 7. Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2003); Walter Hawthorne, “Strategies of the Decentralized: Defending Communities from Slave Raiders in Coastal Guinea Bissau, 1450–1815,” in Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies, ed. Sylviane Diouf (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 152–69. See also Andrew Hubbel, “A View of the Slave Trade from the Margin: Souroudougou in the Late Nineteenth-Century Slave Trade of the Niger Bend,” JAH 42, no. 1 (2001): 25–47; Martin Klein, “The Slave Trade and Decentralized Societies,” JAH 42, no. 1 (2001): 49–65. A classic piece on stateless societies is Robin Horton, “Stateless Societies in the History of West Africa,” in History of West Africa, ed. J.F.A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 1:78–119. 8. A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 124–51. Debates on “legitimate commerce” are outlined in Robin Law, introduction to From Slave Trade to “Legitimate” Commerce, ed. Robin Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–31. For scholars who show that the end of the slave trade did not necessarily bring about dramatic political and economic change, see Ralph Austen, African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency (London: James Currey, 1987), 100–102; Hawthorne, Planting; Martin Lynn, “The West African Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century and the ‘Crisis of Adaptation,’” in From Slave Trade to “Legitimate” Commerce, ed. Robin Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 57–77. 9. Hawthorne, Planting, is an exception to this trend. 10. Edna Bay, Wives of the Leopard (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998). Bay...