Slavery was a macroscopic reality in the documentable historical itinerary of the Akan region of West Africa, both as a recognized institution existing in all the societies of the region up to the late 19th century and as a crucial component of its relationships with the outside world from the late 17th to the 19th century. During this phase, and although it lagged behind other parts of West Africa, the Akan region became also one of the most important exporting areas in the Atlantic slave trade. The condition of a slave until the end of the 19th century was generally the consequence of capture in war, judicial sentence, sale for debts, and so on. Akan societies distinguished between different degrees and types of slavery: prisoners of war, convicts sold into slavery, foreign slaves who were purchased, individuals enslaved for indebtedness, children of slave parents, and the like. These gradations corresponded to differences in treatment and could guarantee certain privileges. Many slaves suffered harsh exploitation, deprivation, and constant existential precariousness, while many others were instead immersed in a whole gamut of living and working conditions that bespoke of a more or less advanced integration into the host society, mainly operating through inclusion within the institutions of matrilineal kinship. Pawnship was another widespread institution of servitude that veered toward slavery but remained distinct from it, at least in principle, due to its temporary nature.
The slaves who were shipped from the ports of the Akan region were called “Amina” (or “Mina”) or “Coromantee” in the Americas. These terms morphed into definitions of identity that the deported slaves themselves appropriated—whether or not they were of Akan origin—and that were largely based on common cultural traits originating primarily in the Akan world. The enslaved Amina/Mina and Coromantee left lasting marks on the history and culture of the black communities of several countries, especially in the Caribbean and Latin America and, to a lesser extent, in parts of North America too. A crucial reason was their role in slave insurrections and in the “Grand Maroonage,” that is, the establishment of stable communities of slaves who escaped from the plantations and eked out spaces of independence on the fringes of plantation society.
The early 19th-century abolitions of the Atlantic slave trade caused a decline in slave exports, but the demand for enslaved labor grew within the Akan region itself. While for most of the 19th century, slavery experienced an overall growth, in various coastal centers, and in some areas of the Gold Coast, this same period saw the development of anti-slavery sentiment and strong abolitionist pressures. Later in the 19th century, the abolitionist legislations put in place as a result of the colonial occupation by Great Britain and France had some crucial effects. These laws recognized for the first time the fundamental right to freedom of bonded individuals by outlawing their subjection and providing them with effective and immediate legal instruments for claiming their freedom in colonial courts. In actual terms, however, the pace of change in the realm of subjection was very slow and, all in all, unsatisfactory with respect to the initial intentions of the anti-slavery legislation. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, there were still cases of individuals sold or pawned. Slavery and pawnship, in fact, survived for decades, notwithstanding profound changes in the economic and socio-political framework. That legacy is still very much present in the memory and discourse of Akan societies in the early 21st century.
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Article
Akan Slavery in Africa and the Atlantic
Pierluigi Valsecchi
Article
Albert Luthuli
Robert Vinson
Albert Luthuli, president of the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s leading anti-apartheid organization, became the first African-born recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1961. During Luthuli’s presidency (1952–1967), the ANC became a mass organization, articulating a broad, inclusive African nationalism and leading the Congress Alliance, a multiracial, multi-ideological anti-apartheid coalition that shared Luthuli’s vision of a democratic, equitable South Africa. The Prize recognized Luthuli’s Gandhian strategy to end South African apartheid, state-sanctioned laws and policies designed particularly to ensure White supremacist racial domination over the African majority, who were approximately 75 percent of the country’s population. The Nobel also reflected Luthuli’s success in portraying apartheid as a crime against humanity that violated the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and to contextualize South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle as central to expanding global human-rights campaigns. The Nobel Peace Prize cemented Luthuli’s enduring image as an uncompromising advocate of nonviolence who—during intense debates in 1960 and 1961 within the anti-apartheid movement about the relative efficacy of violent and nonviolent tactics against an increasingly violent apartheid state—remained implacably opposed to Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), which eventually became the ANC’s armed wing. But recently available archival documents, along with autobiographical accounts and oral interviews reveal that Luthuli accepted and authorized MK while insisting that the ANC maintain its official nonviolent position. In retrospect, the Nobel Prize was the apogee of Luthuli’s global renown, as increasingly restrictive state bans limited his ability to participate in political activity. Despite Luthuli’s tragic and still-controversial 1967 death, the ANC survived lethal state repression to become in 1994 the first democratically elected governing party in South African history. But Africa’s first Nobel Peace Prize winner eventually became overshadowed by younger ANC leaders Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. This article aims to recover Luthuli from relative historical obscurity and highlight his key leadership of the ANC as it transformed into a mass anti-apartheid movement and his revolutionary belief that apartheid South Africa could become one of the world’s first truly multiracial democracies.
Article
Algerian Civil War
Anissa Daoudi
While the literature on the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) is extensive, studies on the armed conflict between the Algerian military and the armed Islamic groups, which cost the lives of more than 200,000 remain insignificant. The complex intersections between the political, social, and economic factors leading to the war in the 1990s show that the critical junctures began after independence in 1962. These junctures continued through the 1970s (Arabization movement) and 1980s (1988 Berber Spring), which together can help in contextualizing the Algerian Civil War. These different periods reveal the history of the National Liberation Front (FLN) as a one-party rule and contextualize its historical strong relationship with the Algerian National Army, revealing the power dynamics between the two and the roots of the struggle over the country’s sovereignty. Furthermore, the 1980s were marked by the youth riots in 1988 (Berber Spring) and their crucial role in what president Chadli Benjedid presented as a political reform program, including a new constitution, which ended the political monopoly of the FLN and saw the emergence of more than thirty new political parties. In January 1992, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) overwhelmingly won the municipal elections, with a much larger number of votes than the ruling FLN in the first round. However, instead of accepting the Islamists’ victory, the military promptly stepped in and cancelled parliamentary elections, banned the FIS, and arrested its leaders. After President Mohamed Boudiaf’s assassination, the government imposed a national state of emergency and used a combination of strategies including economic reforms as well tough laws to repress the Islamic armed groups and control the situation. The idea that the armed Islamic groups started after the official ban of the FIS has been contested. Two parallel strategies were adopted by the successive governments of the 1990s: one was based on the repression of the FIS, who in turn retaliated with car bombs and assassinations of women, intellectuals, police, and military forces; and the other was based on the introduction of social and economic reforms. The country went into cycles of extreme violence for more than a decade, in which the negotiations between the Islamists and the military were not interrupted. President Liamine Zaroual’s amnesty initiative, Rahma, was unsuccessful, yet it was the basis upon which his successor, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, proposed his project of amnesty, known as the Civil Concord, in 1999, later replaced by the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation in 2005. Bouteflika resigned on April 2, 2019, after months of mass protest called the Revolution of Smiles, which started on February 22, 2019, against his candidacy to the presidency for a fifth mandate.
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ʿAlī Eisami Gazirmabe
Richard Anderson
ʿAlī Eisami Gazirmabe, later known as William Harding, was one of an estimated 99,752 “Liberated Africans” intercepted by the British Royal Navy from slave ships at sea and taken to the colony of Sierra Leone as part of Britain’s 19th-century campaign against the transatlantic slave trade. Eisami was born in the metropolitan district of Borno. He was enslaved c. 1812–1813 during the jihād waged by Hausa-Fulani jihadists against Borno. He was taken westward through the nascent Sokoto Caliphate and eventually to Oyo Ile, the capital of the Oyo Empire. For four or five years he was enslaved to a member of the Oyo aristocracy. In 1817, a Muslim uprising at Ilorin prompted his enslaver to sell Eisami to European slave traders on the coast. British naval forces captured Eisami’s slave vessel at sea, transporting him to the abolitionist colony of Sierra Leone.
In Freetown, ʿAlī Eisami took up the name William Harding. In extensive interviews with the missionary linguist Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle from 1848 to 1852, he provided detailed accounts of his native Borno. This included stories, historical accounts, and poetry in his native Kanuri, as well as a substantial narrative of his enslavement. Harding’s linguistic work with Koelle represented an important step in the study of the Kanuri language, while his “Biographical Sketch,” as published by Koelle in 1854, has become a canonical account of enslavement in Africa. Eisami’s eyewitness accounts are important sources on the 19th-century jihād movement, experiences of enslavement in Africa and the transatlantic slave trade in its final half-century of existence, and the experience of being a Liberated African in Sierra Leone.
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‘Ali, Muhammad
George Michael La Rue
Muhammad ‘Ali ruled Egypt from 1805 to 1848. Long perceived as a reforming modernizer and founder of modern Egypt, historians have more recently reconsidered the impact of his economic and social policies on Egypt’s ordinary people. To determine his place in African history (and in the history of slavery and abolition) requires a broad reexamination of his policies and Egypt’s actions, and their consequences in Egypt, Sudan, within the Ottoman Empire, and in the 19th-century balance of power.
After arriving in Egypt in 1801, Muhammad ‘Ali emerged from a complex political field as the Ottoman Pasha of Egypt by 1805. He overpowered the remnants of the old Mamluk regime, pushed them to Egypt’s southern boundaries, allied with key Egyptian elites, helped to suppress the Wahhabi revolt in the Hijaz for his Ottoman overlord, and strove to reduce the power of his Albanian troops. He reestablished trade (including the slave trade) with Sudan, and planned a new army of enslaved Sudanese.
Between 1820 and 1835, Muhammad ‘Ali made a series of bold moves. The invasion of Sudan (1820–1821) and its occupation caused great political, social, and economic devastation there. Egypt toppled or threatened many Sudanese rulers, redirected Sudanese-Egyptian trade, and reshaped Sudan’s urban centers. The invaders attacked Sudanese and other African populations, conducted ongoing slave raids, enslaved thousands, and destroyed their homes. Egyptians and Sudanese found challenges and opportunities within these broader patterns. Enslaved Sudanese became soldiers in the nizam al-jadid, laborers in Muhammad ‘Ali’s new industries, diplomatic gifts, and taxable trade commodities. Newly formed elites bought African slaves for domestic tasks in Sudan and Egypt. Egypt’s new medical establishment treated Sudanese slave soldiers for guinea-worm, vaccinated incoming slaves for smallpox, and purchased Sudanese and Ethiopian women to train as hakimas—fully trained nurse-midwives.
Initially, Muhammad ‘Ali sent his new army to fight in Greece on behalf of the Ottoman Empire. Later, his challenges to Ottoman supremacy drew the attention of European powers, who feared any disruption to the delicate balance of power. The demographic impact of the bubonic plague epidemic of 1834–1835 on Egypt’s black slave population was notable, and led to increased demand for replacement slaves. This drew attention from European observers and added an abolitionist dimension to diplomatic pressure on Muhammad ‘Ali. By 1841, he gained Ottoman recognition as hereditary ruler of Egypt and parts of Sudan, his army’s size was capped, and he made trade concessions to Europe. With his imperial ambitions now limited to Africa, Muhammad ‘Ali renewed his interest in controlling more of Sudan and adjacent regions, and deflected abolitionist criticism by blaming supplying regions for continuing to raid and trade in slaves.
Article
The Almohad Empire, c. 1120–1269
Amira Bennison
The Almohad empire was founded during the mid-12th century by a militant religio-political movement that originated among the Maṣmūda tribes of the High Atlas Mountains in what is now Morocco. At its height, the empire extended across North Africa to modern Tunisia and also incorporated the southern parts of modern Spain and Portugal. The original religious leader of the movement was Muḥammad b. Tūmart, but the empire was ruled by a dynasty known as the Muʾminids after ʿAbd al-Muʾmin, Ibn Tūmart’s successor as leader of the Almohads. The empire was one of the largest Islamic political formations of its time and played an important role in the western Mediterranean and beyond prior to its demise in the mid-13th century.
The empire was distinctive in several ways. The Almohads saw their interpretation of Islam as a revival of Muḥammad’s message to which all Abrahamic monotheists should convert, a radical position leading to a black myth that they were persecutors of religious minorities, although the limited reach of medieval government meant that they could not always implement their objectives. As a Maṣmūda-backed empire, the Almohads also promoted public use of the Maṣmūda language, one of the Berber or Amazigh family of languages, alongside Arabic, and created an imperial elite from across their empire. They are also famous for their promotion of new styles of urban architecture, especially their huge square-tower minarets, and for patronage of the arts and sciences at court, making the Almohad century one of intellectual ferment as well as religious and political change.
Article
al-Nafzaouiya, Zaynab
Hasna Lebbady and Hiam El Hilali
Referred to as the best-known Amazigh malika (queen), Zaynab al-Nafzaouiya was centrally involved with the building of the Almoravid dynasty of Morocco and its empire in the 11th century. The Almoravids were Sanhaja tribesmen who, led by Abdellah b. Yasin, started off as religious reformers and developed into empire builders when they embarked on a campaign to regain control over trans-Sahara trade, which the Sanhaja had lost the previous century. Two Almoravid leaders, Abu Bakr b. Umar and Yusuf b. Tashfin, married Zaynab, who had already been married twice before, and brought her to the world’s notice. The sources, in which she receives brief but significant notice, mention her only as her life touches upon those of the Almoravids; however, they depict her as playing a pivotal role in both the cultural and the political spheres of Aghmat (near Marrakesh), in which she was based.
Although some called her a magician, Zaynab was actually just intelligent, knowledgeable, and capable of benefitting from the intellectual and cultural affluence that characterized her era. She was, moreover, gifted with political acumen, making her a good advisor for Abu Bakr b. Umar and a good co-ruler for Yusuf b. Tashfin. Her understanding proved to be particularly helpful concerning the founding of the Almoravid empire, stretching from modern-day Senegal to al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), which the two emirs were instrumental in building. They were both virtuous men who possessed considerable military skills; however, they were basically nomads from the desert. It was Zaynab who was familiar with the more settled and refined way of life in Aghmat, enabling her to advise them diplomatically concerning the politics of the area to which she was accustomed. She was even able to advise Yusuf b. Tashfin on how to handle Abu Bakr b. Umar, enabling him, with her at his side, to take over the leadership of the dynasty and launch the extension of its empire all the way to al-Andalus.
Article
Al-Shabaab
Oscar Gakuo Mwangi
The Somalia-based Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujaheddin, commonly known as al-Shabaab, is a violent nonstate armed actor that has been designated a terrorist group. Its origins are a function of domestic and international factors that include the resurgence of political Islam in Somalia, the Afghan War of 1979 to 1989, state collapse and the prominent rise of the Union of Islamic Courts in the country. Consequently al-Shabaab adopted Islamism, in particular Salafi jihadism, as a political ideology to achieve its objective of creating an Islamic caliphate in the Horn of Africa. Since its formation in 2006, al-Shabaab’s organizational structure, its strategies and tactics of radicalization, recruitment, financing, and military warfare have been based on Islamist doctrines. Al-Shabaab’s effective use of Salafi jihadism to pursue its objectives has made it the greatest threat to peace and stability in Somalia. By establishing links with international groups that advocate a similar ideology, such as al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab has successfully managed to transform itself from a domestic to a transnational actor, thereby also constituting a threat to international security.
Article
Amílcar Lopes Cabral, 1924–1973
Abel Djassi Amado
Amílcar Cabral, the founding father of Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau, was one of the African political leaders who masterfully exercised key and decisive roles in the twin realms of political action and theoretical development. As the founding leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde, Cabral wore several hats: he was the chief diplomat and the commander in chief of the liberation movement; he was also the master organizer of the party and of the incipient state in the liberated areas. Yet, Cabral was far from solely a man of action; he developed a complex and sophisticated political theory of national liberation that gave substance and meaning to political action.
Article
Aminu Kano
Mohammed Bashir Salau and Oyedele Oluokun
Aminu Kano was born into the family of Mallam Yusufu and Malama Rakaiya of the Sudawa quarters of Kano city in 1920. He obtained Islamic education and attended various local Western schools before serving as a teacher at the Bauchi Provincial Middle School. After leaving Bauchi, he attended the University of London, where he became more politically active. Upon returning to Nigeria from London, Kano served in different capacities, but mainly as a politician, a statesman-parliamentarian, and a cabinet minister. In the context of serving in these capacities, he was primarily committed to attacking the corruption and oppression of the emirate system, fighting for the liberation of women, fighting for Nigeria’s independence, promoting the democratization of Northern Nigeria, and fighting for Nigeria’s unity. By 1980, Kano’s focus on such issues had led to some important victories including the weakening of the emirate system. By this same date, Kano had had many wives even though he never embraced polygamy. In 1983, Kano died of a stroke. However, his ideas and work still have an impact on 21st-century Nigeria. The primary materials for the study of his ideas, work, and legacy include those Kano himself wrote, those written by other individuals, and oral data. Some of the extant literature based partly on such materials have primarily provided biographical details on Kano, while others have considered either his social and political thoughts or his legacy. Despite this, there are still significant gaps that exist in the relevant literature, which provides future research opportunities.
Article
Ancient Developments in the Middle Senegal Valley and the Inland Niger Delta
Alioune Dème
The study of West Africa has contributed to the expansion of comparative arid-lands floodplain prehistory, from both the data collection (cultural and historical) and the theoretical aspects. The neoevolutionary approach that often pictures Africa as a backward continent has been successfully challenged. In the Middle Senegal Valley and in the Inland Niger Delta, research on their societies’ complexity done along these two subcontinent’s floodplains has described new processes (including urbanization) that were not previously featured in the archaeological literature. The two floodplains, because of their ecological diversity, with the richness of their ecological diversity, attracted Saharan populations affected by drought at the end of the second millennium and the first millennium BC. However, after their initiation occupation the two areas took different trajectories in complexity and settlement organization. Large complex settlements have been found at Jenne-jeno and in the Ile a Morphil that illustrate whole new trajectories of civilization. These forms of complexity, found in areas with historically known polities, were not included in the range of possibilities predicted by standard complexity theories regarding civilizational development. Ethnographic and historical data, reveal the existence of societies with a central authority embedded within and balanced by a diffuse, segmented and heterarchical power structure; often as a strategy to resist the individual consolidation of power. These societies exhibit evidence of horizontal differentiation and consensus-based decision making. All these types of organization are characterized by the presence of several sources of power vested in corporate entities, such as lineages, age groups, cults and secret societies.
Article
Ancient Egypt and Southwest Asia
Jana Mynářová
Relations between ancient Egypt and the neighboring regions of Southwest Asia, which began to form already in prehistoric and early historic times, underwent a significant development consisting of a series of booms and declines before reaching the Iron Age (c. 1150–586 bc). The geographic conditions stand out as a crucial element in this formation process, as these enabled the essential communication between the respective cultural and political entities. In these historical periods, the relations were realized on several bases, and the presence of Egyptians in the regions of the Levant, as well as “foreigners” in Egypt, is well attested both by means of archaeological and textual evidence.
Article
An Environmental History of Southern Africa
Jasper Knight
Southern Africa has experienced significant environmental changes since the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent, starting around 180 million years ago. These environmental changes broadly reflect the interplay between tectonic and global-scale climatic drivers, which in combination result in changes to the properties and dynamics of land surface physical and ecological processes. The preserved record of such processes can be used as proxy indicators to reconstruct past environments and climates.
In southern Africa, different types of proxy indicators have formed and are preserved in different geographical areas, broadly corresponding to their individual climatic and geomorphic contexts. Three significant time intervals over which landscape evolution have taken place are the Phanerozoic, the late Quaternary, and the last 200 years.
A critical outcome of this analysis is that the record of environmental change in southern Africa is highly variable and only partly preserved, and that there are spatial and temporal gaps which mean that it is difficult to construct a continuous or unambiguous environmental history either for all areas of the region or for all time intervals. Changing physical drivers and environmental controls over time, including land surface feedbacks, are now being supplanted by a stronger imprint of human activity in the Anthropocene.
Article
Animals in African History
Sandra Swart
Animal history in Africa—the multi-species story of the continent’s past—as a separate subdisciplinary “turn” is both recent and tentative, but as an integrated theme within the broader historiography it is both pioneering and enduring. Historians of Africa have long engaged with animals as vectors of change in human history and, of course, at the same time, understood that humans were a key agent of change in animal histories too, especially in the long-lived and extensive writing on epizootics, livestock farming, pastoralism, hunting, and conservation. African animal histories should resist the imposition of intellectual paradigms from the Global North.
Article
Animating African History: Digital and Visual Trends
Paula Callus
Contrary to popular belief, the animated moving image on the African continent has long and diverse histories across many countries. Although it shares both the technology and some of the formal aspects of cinema, its historical development followed a different trajectory to that of indexical film, both in Europe and in Africa. This may be because of animation’s ability to draw upon a range of artistic practice, which means it can take many guises; at times it appears like a cartoon, or sometimes like puppets or sculptures that come to life; at other times it is a metamorphic drawing or painting, or even a photographic montage. In addition, while animation tends to be associated with content specifically intended for a children’s audience, it has in fact been an effective vehicle to conceal sociopolitical critique that would otherwise be considered problematic. Different animators in Africa have used animation to this end, presenting subversive and social-realist content within the unrealistic depictions of fantastical stories, the parodic, comedic or allegorical, or culturally located visual metaphors. African animators have also used animation to safeguard and give permanence to the stories, myths, and legends they grew up with. These legends have occasionally also informed animated superheroes in games such as the Kenyan mobile phone application Africa’s Legends, or the cast of an Afro-futurist setting such as the Nigerian “Afro-anime” production Red Origins. With the onset of digital technology, the landscape of animation in Africa has seen a blossoming of activity from expert and non-expert prod-users. Their work circulates in formal and informal settings, whether visible at a festival, on television and mainstream media, in online social networking spaces or on video streaming sites such as YouTube or Vimeo. The prolific characteristic of animation made for digital spaces has resulted in a paradoxical simultaneous visibility and invisibility. Networks of African artists have benefited from the visibility and distribution that the Internet and smart phone technologies offer; for example, Kenyan multimedia artists Just a Band were quoted as saying that they were discovered online before they were discovered in Nairobi. However, the ephemeral quality of these digital spaces can also be problematic from the archivist’s perspective as digital traces change. For this reason it is increasingly important to capture the traces that African artists leave in this dynamic space as they reflect the zeitgeist.
Article
An Introduction to the Lower Niger Bronzes of Southern Nigeria
Philip M. Peek
Southern Nigeria is rich in copper alloy cast works, such as those of the 9th-century burial goods of Igbo-Ukwu, the busts from 13th-century Ife, and the heads and plaques from the early 16th century from Benin City. Much scholarship has been devoted to these centers and yet there are other, perhaps even more historically important, works which have barely been acknowledged. The label “Lower Niger Bronzes” was proposed in the 1960s by William Fagg to account for those few pieces which did not fit with the three well-known centers’ works.
On closer examination, these bronzes are far more numerous and of greater antiquity than previously realized. The quality and composition of these works indicate that most were likely cast prior to the European coastal trade in Nigeria which dates from the late 15th century. Leopard skull replicas, humanoid bell heads, small hippos, scepter heads, and masks make up only a portion of the works now under study. Without their original cultural contexts, these artifacts are somewhat mysterious, yet with careful study of their compositions and forms, much is revealed of a period of southern Nigerian history which predates the current arrangement of ethnic groups.
Article
The Anlu Rebellion
Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué
From 1958 to 1961, Kom women in western Cameroon cast aside their regular domestic and agricultural duties to engage in a revolt against British administrative interference in agriculture—normally their domain—and the alleged plan by the ruling political party, the Kamerun National Congress (KNC), to sell Kom land to Nigerian Igbos. In keeping with the practices of anlu, a centuries-old women’s organization generally deployed against people who violated the Kom moral code, women interfered with burial rituals; hurled insults at men in public; demanded the closing of schools, courts, and markets; set up roadblocks; destroyed and burned property; and defied both traditional and British authorities in the Bamenda Grassfields of western Cameroon. Their tactics included stripping naked in front of men. While local men considered the sight of the vagina in public to be a bad portent and thus understood the seriousness of the revolt, flabbergasted British officials had no idea what was to come. By seizing control of resources and demonstrating in public, Kom women disturbed local political power, and protested against British rule in the Southern Cameroons. They were a crucial force in the victory of the Kamerun National Democratic Party (KNDP) in 1961, which brought a restoration of political order at the time of independence.
Article
Anthropological and Ethnographic Methods and Sources
Constance Smith
For scholars of African history, anthropology offers a number of valuable and invigorating methodological avenues, from engaging directly in ethnographic fieldwork to analyzing anthropological data compiled by others. Given the asymmetries of written documents and the biases of archival material for Africa, anthropological methods and sources offer a different type of access to those who, for various reasons, tend not to appear in other forms of documentary record. The materials of past ethnographic research—texts and material objects, produced and collected by anthropologists and their assistants as well as by missionaries, government officials, travelers, and others—constitute one of the largest categories of written source material. However, the contexts in which such research was conducted can present certain challenges when using these materials as sources. For example, the complex entanglements between colonial governance and the making of anthropological knowledge make it imperative for historians to be aware of the discipline’s intellectual history and how its ways of seeing and ordering have shaped portrayals of Africa’s diverse cultures.
Methodologically, historians are also experimenting with field methods that draw heavily on ethnographic techniques. The emergence of historical ethnography has developed a rich, syncretic approach, in which communities’ own relationships with, and understandings of, the past are brought to the fore. Although ethnography is known for its immersive and long-term fieldwork, elements of the technique can also be incorporated into other historical methods. This is in part a matter of approach, rather than of different source material. For example, engaging ethnographically with archives can offer different insights into issues of governance and the production of knowledge.
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Anthropology and the Study of Africa
Jessica Johnson
Anthropology is the study of human societies and cultures. It developed from the 19th century with a focus on the study of societies located outside Europe, often colonized peoples. It has since transformed and diversified but maintains an interest in cross-cultural comparison and social and cultural diversity. Anthropologists often conduct long-term ethnographic research, or fieldwork, living among a community in order to learn their language and become familiar with local norms, ways of life and cultural assumptions. The method is also referred to as participant-observation, which captures its dual nature. Anthropologists aim both to join in, and learn though participation, and to maintain a degree of critical distance from which to observe and question what they see and hear around them. Their findings are generally written up in the form obf ethnographic monographs and articles detailing their research and discussing their observations in relation to the work of other anthropologists working in similar and/or distant locations.
Africa has long been central to anthropological research, particularly for British-trained anthropologists. This is in part a reflection of British colonial history, as colonialism afforded opportunities for anthropologists to travel to Africa and live among African communities. African scholars and research assistants have played important roles in developing the anthropology of Africa and continue to do so. Contemporary ethnographic writing tends not to be holistic in the sense of aiming to produce a exhaustive account of a particular people and their way of life, but rather focuses on particular issues of interest in connection to wider debates, both scholarly and policy-oriented. In the 21st century, anthropologists of Africa study a wide range of topics, from gender relations to religion, development projects to social media.
Article
Aquatic Culture in Atlantic Africa and the Diaspora, 1444–1800
Kevin Dawson
Early modern Atlantic Africans developed similar canoe-making and canoeing traditions. Rather than treating water as physical and mental barriers, Africans wove fresh-waterways, salt-waterways, and adjoining landscapes together to create seamless waterscapes of social, cultural, spiritual, political, and economic meaning and belonging. Waterscapes and aquatic fluencies expanded Africans’ cultural horizons by tens of thousands of miles, as they swam and canoed across their surfaces, dove into their depths, and surfed their waves.
African maritime architecture developed to allow dugouts to negotiate particular hydrographic challenges. African dugouts differed from those crafted by Amerindians, Europeans, Oceanians, and Asians. Accounts suggest that the general shape of dugouts has remained fundamentally unchanged for hundreds of years. However, this does not indicate technological stagnation, as designs continuously evolved with important innovations significantly informing performance and usage, as reflected by surf-canoes. Surf-canoes were innovative watercraft designed to navigate surf-zones—the dynamic space where waves break—that remained off limits to European and American vessel and mariners, forcing them to rely on African expertise to link African and Atlantic markets. In an age with few energy sources—when most societies harnessed wind, animal, and, perhaps, river power—Atlantic Africans used wave power to slingshot surf-canoes laden with fish or tons of cargo ashore, even as the surf threatened to capsize and destroy surf-canoes. While Oceanians rode waves in outrigger canoes, Atlantic Africans are the only known peoples to bridle waves’ energy as part of their daily productive labor.
African dugouts on both sides of the Atlantic were crucial to transatlantic trade and European expansion. Little scholarship has been devoted to African dugouts. Green coastal waters important to many Africans’ experiences cannot be separated from the deep blue seas traversed by Western mariners, as it is not enough to describe how Europeans crossed oceans without considering how they got ashore. Traditional lines of inquiry have relegated African-descended peoples and their ability to shape the historical processes to the background, assuming they were passively affected by European circumstances. Virtually all the goods and many of the 12.5 million enslaved people exported out of Africa were transported in canoes to awaiting merchant and slave ships, with surf-canoes bearing much of this load.
In the Americas, enslavers quickly realized that African canoe-making and canoeing traditions could be profitably exploited. Most plantations were constructed along broad shallow waterways, similar to African waters, to facilitate the shipment of slave-produced cash crops to seaports. Hence, many planters employed captives as canoe-makers and canoeists to link their plantations to overseas markets.
