On Updating J.D. Fage's Guide to Precolonial Sources for Western Africa

I

In the 1992 volume of History in Africa, John D. Fage asked readers for possible additions to his landmark 1987 Guide to Original Sources for Precolonial Western Africa Published in European Languages, as he was preparing a second edition. I responded with a list of suggested additions and corrections that I had been storing up. This started a fruitful correspondence that continued beyond the appearance of the second edition in 1994, in which he generously acknowledged my help. In my last letter I told him I was already keeping notes on my computer for a third edition of the Guide. On 2 October 1994 he replied that "[a]s things stand at the moment, I doubt whether I shall want to do a third edition. The effort required to try and keep abreast with the literature seems to be continually increasing! . . . But then I don't see why—in due course—you shouldn't blossom forth yourself as the author of an 'Additions and Corrections to Fage's Guide'. Indeed, this might be the more proper course."

One can imagine the effect this confidence expressed by a grand old man of African historiography had on the novice to the field that I was. For a dozen years (extending beyond Fage's death in 2002) I haphazardly gathered information suitable for a supplement to the second edition. I then approached David Henige about it, and he encouraged me to complete the project systematically. This took 18 more months.

II

The first question that arose in revising Fage's Guide was where to draw the line between precolonial and colonial western Africa, defined as the region from Senegal to Angola. One might argue that colonialism began in 1456, when Portuguese ships came across the uninhabited Cape Verde Islands, or in 1466, when new colonists on the main island of São Tiago were given the right to trade with the African mainland for slaves. Or possibly in 1482, when the Portuguese built the castle of São Jorge da Mina on the Gold Coast. Or maybe in 1485, when the Portuguese Crown authorized the colonization of São Tomé, found uninhabited in the 1470s. By the late seventeenth century, the Gold Coast was already dotted with European forts and trading posts, and the French were dug in on the coast of Senegal. But Fage thought the turning point between precolonial and colonial came in the mid-nineteenth century.

By the 1860s, he wrote in his introduction to the Guide,

Europeans had generally come to view black Africans as a separate species whose societies were not to be thought of or studied in the same ways that their own were. From this time on, the majority of European accounts of western Africa are no longer more or less dispassionate. Increasingly they have become reconnaissances preparatory to the establishment of European control, or actual arguments for it… [W]ith the initiation of formal colonial systems in western Africa, after [Gen. Louis-Léon-César] Faidherbe had become governor of a Colony of the Senegal (1854) and the British had annexed Lagos (1861), a whole new literature was beginning to be published which is colonial rather than African in content and tone. In the reports on, or critiques of, this or that colonial administration or activity, the Africans and their societies tend to seep into the background or, if they are the subject of observation and study, it is so that they can be more easily administered or made more useful and productive in the colonial system.

I am not convinced that the mid-nineteenth century saw a seminal change in European attitudes toward Africans. From the very beginning, Portuguese tended to look down on blacks; the English and French adopted the same attitude even before they became deeply involved in Africa. Distinguishing tendentious colonial reconnaissance or support from more objective observation is difficult at best. It seemed to me better to fix on an event that marked a definitive transition. I think the crucial juncture between precolonial and colonial was the moment the...