Archives and Material Culture: Critiques and Reviews - Editors’ Introduction

This 42nd issue of History in Africa offers twenty articles in five thematic sections, ranging from critical source analysis and historiography to a review and analysis of the writing of history in Africa since 1960, and a mixed set of articles on material culture and commerce. A section with archival reports concludes this issue.

In recent years, History in Africa has, from the editorial perspective, always tried to bring to the fore common themes and focus points in the articles submitted and eventually published, adding direction and meaning to the individual contributions in terms of trends and common perspectives. When articles are submitted to the editors, such commonalities are not always self-evident. However, the editorial process, including the grouping together of articles, more often than not brings to light specific trends and common interests. This year, despite the wide array of themes, subject areas and geographical areas, as well as historical periods, the commonality seems to be in the subjects of archives and archival study. Almost all of the contributions – with the exception of the fourth section – deal with (written) archives in one way or another, and if not, they deal with the written (or archived) registration of oral source materials, or are otherwise about texts. And with some imagination, the fourth section, about material culture, deals with aspects of archival issues, in the form archaeological findings, and collections of art-objects and tradeware with a particular cultural background and context. In that sense this 42nd edition of History in Africa can be labelled the Archival Issue.

The first section on critical source analysis focuses on historical critique in general, with an emphasis on the written word, in what can be classified as more or less formal or formalized texts. Mariana Candido addresses a relatively new field in the history of the Black Atlantic, studying African women from the lower social classes in Angola in the nineteenth century. The instrument that enables Candido to do this are the parish registers of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Luanda in Angola, which registered the baptisms, marriages, and burials of all church members, regardless of race or social status. These registers therefore offer valuable insights into the make-up of local society and more specifically to the position of women in it, offering “a more gender-inclusive history.”

Mauro Nobili and Mohamed Shahid Mathee revisit the study of the chronicle Tārīkh al-fattāsh, which purports to present the history of the Songhay Empire between 1100 and the seventeenth century. Their research, which makes use of hitherto unused manuscripts, emphasizes the necessity of a review and critique of earlier editions. Their work allows for a new theory on the origin and authorship of the text, and brings to light that the text as we know it is based on several manuscripts, dating from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Nobili and Mathee’s work is valuable in it own right, as it shows the importance of detailed text critique in the field of historiography, and adds to our understanding of historiographical traditions in West Africa. On a different level, and implicitly, the article shows how important it is to safeguard historical documents in West Africa, an issue that has recently gained importance because of the outbreak of violence in Mali and elsewhere in the Western Sudan, with a distinct anti-intellectual character.

Alexander Keese’s study on the Correia Report deals with a very different issue in a very different time frame. The period is the Interbellum, the context that of diverging colonial views on social conditions, more specifically labor conditions, in the border area between Angola and South West Africa. The Correia Report is a valuable source for our understanding of social change in South West Africa after the First World War, with South Africa moving into the former German colony, and the Portuguese regime in Angola being considerably weakened due to events at home. As Keese states in his conclusion: “Agents of colonial rule might be racist and misinformed, or unmotivated or intellectually incapable...