scholarly journals ‘History has many cunning passages’: Kwasi Apea Nuama between the Asante and the British

Africa ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-237
Author(s):  
Tom McCaskie

AbstractThis article, a companion piece to that on Kwame Tua, traces the life history of his elder full brother Kwasi Apea Nuama (c.1862–1936) as he too sought purchase and place in the new colonial order in Asante. Temperamentally a very different man from his brother, Kwasi Apea Nuama set out to make himself indispensable as the interpreter of Asante history and custom to the uncomprehending British. Both brothers, then, were mediators or translators between the old and new worlds in which they found themselves. Their heyday was the often anarchic early colonial period. Thereafter, and most especially after the British restored the office and some of the prerogatives of Asante kingship, their influence fell away. They found themselves caught between a colonial order that had little further need of their services, and a restored Asante polity that demonized them as collaborators.

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Irvan Setiawan

Tradisi lisan Maca Syekh di Kabupaten Pandeglang Provinsi Banten merupakan salah satu bentuk pengajaran yang memiliki tujuan untuk mendengar dan memahami riwayat hidup sosok Syekh Abdul Qadir Jaelani sebagai salah satu tokoh penyebar agama Islam. Hal menarik untuk diteliti dari tradisi lisan Maca Syekh adalah adanya sebuah proses akulturasi dengan melibatkan unsur budaya, agama, dan unsur politik untuk kemudian menghasilkan sebuah produk akulturasi yang dapat bertahan hingga kini. Penelitian deskriptif dengan mengacu pada data kualitatif merupakan pilihan tepat mengingat sumber data yang dicari adalah informasi essay yang banyak membutuhkan analisa kualitatif. Dari hasil analisa diketahui bahwa akulturasi dari tradisi lisan Maca Syekh di Kabupaten Pandeglang Provinsi Banten terbagi menjadi dua yaitu akulturasi tradisi dan akulturasi kebahasaan. Unsur politik dideskripsikan secara singkat karena hanya melibatkan penggunaan huruf Arab dalam penulisan Maca Syekh yang pada masa Penjajahan menjadi sebuah hal yang dianggap mewakili kalangan modernis. Maca Syekh oral tradition in Pandeglang Regency, Banten Province, is one form of teaching that aims to hear and understand the life history of Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jaelani. An interesting thing to examine from Maca Shaykh's oral tradition is the existence of an acculturation process involving elements of culture, religion, and political elements to then produce an acculturation product that can survive until now. Descriptive research with reference to qualitative data is the right choice considering the source of the data sought is essay information which requires a lot of qualitative analysis. From the results of the analysis, it is known that the acculturation of the Maca Shaykh oral tradition in Pandeglang Regency, Banten Province, is divided into two: traditional acculturation and linguistic acculturation. The political element is described briefly because it only involves the use of Arabic letters in the Maca Syekh writing which in the colonial period became something considered to represent modernists.


Author(s):  
Nicole Tarulevicz

This chapter provides an account of Singapore's recent history, interwoven with key culinary and gastronomic developments. The conventional periodization of Singapore's history into the pre-colonial, Japanese occupation, merger, and independence eras highlights some of the forces that have shaped the nation, but it also privileges state actors. From the early colonial period onward, the ordering of space and place has been a priority that has been demonstrated at the bureaucratic, regulatory, and physical levels. In the past 200 years, Singapore has been radically remade; technological innovation has been one of the mechanisms by which order is achieved. Indeed, Singapore's engagement with the global economy—be that the economy of the British Empire or of the twenty-first-century world of food security fears—has been relentless, and food has been central to the process.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Caleb Simmons

This chapter introduces the reader to the history of the Mysore kingdom and the courts of Tipu Sultan and Krishnaraja Wodeyar III. It investigates the kingdom’s development before and during the British colonial encounter in order to show the historical circumstances that led to the rearticulation of sovereignty in the late early modern and early colonial period. This chapter frames the period under discussion as a time in which the Mysore courts searched for their sovereign identity, which became intimately connected to religious idioms and the kings’ royal devotion. Lastly, this introduction provides an overall outline of the book and its major arguments.


Africa ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Burnham ◽  
Thomas Christensen

IntroductionIn writing the history of the Gbaya-speaking peoples, a group of some half-million population inhabiting east-central Cameroon and the western third of the Central African Republic, we are seldom able to recount the careers of famous individuals, and genealogical charters which link present leaders with long-dead heroes are uncommon. For the most part, in the pre-colonial and early colonial periods, the Gbaya were not organized politically at a level greater than very localised, clan-based groupings, and political leadership was more a matter of competition for short-lived political powers among locally influential men than of formally institutionalised chieftaincy (see Burnham, 1980a: 19 et seq.). However, in some cases during the late pre-colonial period, particularly in the westernmost parts of the Gbaya region, certain leaders began to consolidate their positions as a result of political and economic relations with the neighbouring Fulbe states of Adamawa and their associated Hausa and Kanuri traders (Burnham, 1980b). The names of men like Dogo Lokoti, Bafio and Mbartua (Bertoua) then occasionally figure in the oral histories and colonial documents, and we obtain glimpses of their personalities and careers. It is all the more striking, therefore, when we encounter a Gbaya figure who stands out clearly in the historical record. Without a doubt, Karnu, the inspiration behind the movement that has been called the Karnu Rebellion or the ‘War of the Hoe Handle’ in the Gbaya language, is the most widely known name in Gbaya history.


Author(s):  
Susan Elizabeth Ramírez

Chapter 15 discusses the Early Colonial Period, 16th-century documentary record of fisherfolk of the Peruvian North Coast. These documents “identify semi-autonomous lineages of specialized fishing groups with their own language”. Although these groups were interspersed with other lineages, the records show not only the fishing people but even the marine species that they targeted. The chapter includes a section on the complicated history of leadership of the fishing lineage from Malabrigo, and in particular the story of a leader who rebelled against the local chief lord and against the Spaniards. This account highlights the quasi-independence of fishing groups.


This book looks at the history of Indian migrants in Australia and New Zealand over a period of two and a half centuries. It looks at the history of their migration, settlement, and encounter with racism. Indians now constitute a significant ethnic minority in Australia and New Zealand. According to the most recent census figures, they number slightly more than half a million, but represent a successful ethnic community making significant contributions to their host societies and economies. The histories of their migration go back to the early colonial period, but rarely do they find any space in the global literature on Indian diaspora, probably because of their small numbers. This book covers their history over the past two and half centuries, covering both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ diaspora; the ‘old’, consisting of the labourers who migrated under pressure of colonial capital, and the ‘new’ representing the post-war professional migrants. It also looks closely at the host societies which over this period have been receiving and interacting with the Indian migrants and the contributions of a few Antipodeans who travelled to India in the early twentieth century bringing their ideas and service. However, this book is not just about the diaspora; it is also about the circulation of ideas between the Antipodes and India and the contribution of this circulation to both the British Empire and the Commonwealth.


1981 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 261-269
Author(s):  
Robert Maxon ◽  
David Javersak

On the morning of 25 November 1895 Maasai fighting men slaughtered hundreds of Kikuyu and Swahili caravan porters and askari in the Kedong Valley of Kenya (then in the Uganda Protectorate); the carnage caused one European to describe the area as the “Valley of Death.” The next day Andrew Dick, a British trader formerly with the Imperial British East Africa Company, learned of the massacre and resolved to avenge it. In a fierce counter-attack, Dick killed at least one hundred Maasai before being put to death himself.While they were dramatic events, the Kedong Massacre and the Dick Affair are of far less significance from the perspective of the 1980s than during the colonial period. They were without question also much less important than was often assumed in bringing about amicable relations between the Maasai and the British. However, the concern of this paper will be with the varying accounts of these incidents that are available to the historian today, and the problems of the sources of the early colonial history of East Africa that are put in somewhat depressing perspective by the fact that, as Charles Miller has remarked, “nearly every individual writing about the 1890s has his own version of the incidents.” Many of these versions, often accepted as independent sources, have been adopted from the accounts of others. Through comparison of accounts one can use internal evidence to suggest an individual author's unacknowledged sources and in some cases trace the “genealogy” of the account. At the risk of further complicating the picture, we will attempt to analyze the historiography of the incidents and suggest that scholars and popular writers have largely overlooked or ignored one important account of the massacre and its aftermath.


Te Kaharoa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Haurua ◽  
Byron Rangiwai

The shift to neoliberalism in the 1980s meant that higher education in Aotearoa New Zealand became business-orientated—a situation which prevails today (Narayan, 2020; Olssen, 2002). The digitisation of business means that for businesses to remain relevant, they must embrace digital marketing (Herhausen et al., 2020; Makrides et al., 2020). Indeed, in higher education, too, the need for digital marketing is inescapable (Sawlani & Susilo, 2020). This paper will discuss digital marketing in higher education and will look specifically at some aspects of the digital marketing approach of Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. This paper will begin with a very brief history of Māori business during the early colonial period, as well as a short description of contemporary Māori business. This article will discuss the most current understandings of digital marketing in higher education. Importantly, this paper will use the three relationship marketing success factors identified by John (2020)—trust, commitment, and service orientation—and relate these to the four values of Te Wānanga o Aotearoa (2020)—Te Aroha, Te Whakapono, Ngā Ture, and Kotahitanga—as a means of identifying gaps in Te Wānanga o Aotearoa’s current digital marketing approach.


2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (569) ◽  
pp. 821-854
Author(s):  
Su Fang Ng

Abstract A forgotten archive at Oxford, the working library of Mark Wilks (1759–1831), sometime Resident of Madras who wrote the influential Historical Sketches of the South of India (1810), offers evidence of Anglo-Indian collaboration in the early colonial period following the 1799 defeat of Tipu Sultan. Examining new manuscript evidence, this article shows how Wilks, a friend of Colin Mackenzie, the surveyor of Mysore, used texts from the vast Mackenzie Collection to compose his history, abstracting selected translations for his own library. Wilks had the help of Mackenzie’s assistants, in particular Kavali Venkata Lakshmayya. Lakshmayya (and others) provided Wilks with translations of land grants and genealogical narratives, both of which were used to establish historical chronology. Because the British saw themselves as restorers of ancient Indian practices, chronology was as important for public policy as for historiography. Working with Wilks, Lakshmayya compiled a large manuscript folio that was at once a table to convert dates among western, Islamic, and Indian calendars, and a historical abstract giving a timeline of key events. This and other manuscripts show Wilks’s use of the Mackenzie Collection beyond only inscriptions. Historical chronology was established through a mix of sources: inscriptions, narrative accounts, and published works. Moreover, Wilks incorporated narratives written by native interpreters into Historical Sketches. Indian history was the result of Anglo-Indian collaboration. Native interpreters contributed significant intellectual labour, and their historiographical work laid the foundation for the writing of the early history of South India.


Africa ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisha P. Renne

AbstractThe practice of pawning children, whose labour served as interest paid on loans, was common in precolonial and early colonial Ekiti Yoruba society. Known as , these children would work for the lender until their kinsmen had repaid the debts they had incurred. British colonial officials came to view this practice as a form of slavery and eventually outlawed it. This paper considers the life history of one older man who worked as an in a small Ekiti Yoruba town, focusing on his memories of child-pawning and how this practice has been interpreted by his children. The paper then examines the process whereby people's changed thinking about the moral bases of pawning parallels contemporary reassessments of the practice of child-fostering by young parents, some of whom claim that it is ‘like slavery’. How subsequent generations of townspeople remember slavery, child-pawning and, more recently, child-fostering, have implications for reproduction, since what it means to have the number of children who can be ‘raised well’ may contribute to social and economic pressures to limit family size. This study of memories of pawning and child-fostering, which support reduced fertility, underscores the ways that distinctive historical experiences have had different consequences for how reproduction is perceived and practised.


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