Editor's Introduction: Genealogies of Knowledge in Northeast Africa, Part I

In this and its next number, NEAS revisits some of the foundations of modern scholarship on the Horn of Africa and adjacent regions. Those foundations include not only the accumulated evidence from more than a century of scholarly research in a wide range of academic disciplines, but also the conceptual frameworks and written narratives produced by travelers, government administrators, academics, and long-time observers over five generations and more. As we look forward in future issues to exploring new themes and comparative approaches, it is equally important to reflect upon the paradigms and critical sources that have shaped the study of northeast Africa up to the present. And as we seek to expose our readers to the work of a new generation of scholars, we intend regularly to acknowledge the pioneering contributions of our intellectual predecessors.

In this spirit, we invited three colleagues to remember—in whatever way they chose—the legacies of three eminent historians who, sadly, have left us in the past two years: Professors Merid Wolde Aregay and Hussein Ahmed of Addis Ababa University, and Professor Robert O. Collins of the University of California at Santa Barbara. As the tributes to their work make clear, each was tremendously influential in his respective field, leaving corpuses of research and writing upon which future scholarships will invariably build. We are certain that their ideas will continue to circulate through the pages of NEAS in the future, and we invite those who knew them or worked with them or even debated with them to submit their own testimonials in our "Comments" section, which will appear beginning with volume 12.

The articles featured in this issue of NEAS also acknowledge, in their own ways, the legacies of earlier generations of knowledge production in northeast Africa. Douglas Johnson has assiduously catalogued nearly four decades of British intelligence reports from the Sudan (starting in 1898) and offers some reflections on their value—and limitations—for early administrators and ethnographers as well as for contemporary researchers. While the initial geographical focus of the monthly intelligence reports was the former Egyptian Sudan, they covered events, local personalities, commercial matters, and community affairs from the Red Sea coasts to Chad and northeastern Congo—reminding us that even then the authorities regarded the entirety of northeast Africa as an interconnected arena.

Lidwien Kapteijns traces the intellectual origins of I. M. Lewis's classic paradigm of Somali clanship to the late colonial period, and sees it as a construct reflecting a "consensus" worked out between the colonial state and its Somali subjects. While the paradigm has served scholars and policy makers for more than 50 years as a framework for understanding Somali social and political behavior, Kapteijns argues that it is outdated and inadequate for explaining the violence and civil strife in Somalia since 1978. Her provocative reassessment offers a counterpoint to the recently published Festschrift presented to the distinguished Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics on the occasion of his 80th birthday, which will be reviewed in the next issue of NEAS.

Finally, François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch present a richly documented survey of more than a century of archaeological and textual research on the patterns of early Islamization in the Horn of Africa. Drawing on material evidence from a wide geographical area and utilizing Amharic, Arabic, and European-language sources, they provide the kind of careful synthesis and thoughtful speculation that should inspire future scholars of Muslim-Christian interaction in the Horn—which not so incidentally will serve as a theme in a forthcoming issue of NEAS. The essay also serves as a fitting complement to Ficquet's eloquent tribute to the late Professor Hussein Ahmed.

Our next number (NEAS 11:2) will include revised versions of four papers originally presented at the panel "Continuity in the Making of Ethiopian Archives" at the 17th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa. By examining how and why certain documents were preserved in highland Ethiopian society over five centuries, our contributors add another dimension to our understanding of the processes of knowledge production in...