Documentary Sources and Methods for Precolonial African History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Mobley
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Cultural Bias ◽  
Local Context ◽  
African History ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Human Actors ◽  
Historical Methods

The goal of African history is not only to establish a chronology of events but also to recover the past from the local African perspective. The challenge is how to recover local ways of knowing and being in societies far different from the perspectives of both the contemporary scholar and the authors of many of the sources used to write history. For written documents, the question is how to extract meaningful data from sparse, biased, or unreliable texts. In a historical context, a documentary source is writing, whether ink or inscription, on material such as paper, papyrus, ceramic, stone, or any of the other surfaces upon which, in relation to Africa, Africans and travelers to Africa have chosen to write the continent’s history. While more and more written evidence from precolonial Africa is coming to light, the relative dearth of documents remains a major challenge for scholars seeking to investigate Africa’s past. This paucity also means that those sources available should be examined especially carefully with an eye to bias and to context. Such careful, grounded examination has not always been a strength of the field, which was initially divided between scholars who dismissed documentary sources (perceived as written by outsiders) as unreliable, and those who uncritically accepted them as eyewitness observation. Neither approach is helpful for historians seeking a nuanced understanding of Africa’s past. Used critically, written documents can provide a window into how human actors understood themselves, their history, specific events, and the world around them, which is difficult to discern in the absence of textual or visual representation. Scholars have developed to major strategies to utilize the unique strengths of documentary sources whilst minimizing their weaknesses. Firstly, historians pay close attention to local context, cultural bias, and pre-existing genealogies of knowledge about Africa and Africans evident in textual sources. Secondly, historians triangulate between different kinds of historical methods and sources such as archaeology, linguistics, ethnography, oral tradition, and even genetics and palynology.

Constructing a Precolonial Owan Chronology and Dating Framework

1994 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 219-249
Author(s):  
Onaiwu W. Ogbomo
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
African History ◽  
Accurate Assessment ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The Past ◽  
Relative Chronology ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Genealogical Data

Oral tradition has been recognized by historians as a vital source for historical reconstruction of non-literate societies. However, one of its “deficienc[ies] is an inability to establish and maintain an accurate assessment of the duration of the past [it] seeks to reconstruct.” As a result of its time-lessness it has been declared ahistorical. In the same vein R.A. Sargent argues that [c]hronology is the framework for the reconstruction of the past, and is vital to the correlation of evidence, assessment of data, and the analysis of historical sources. Any construction of history [which] fails to consider or employ dating and the matrix of time to examine the order and nature of events in human experience can probably be labelled ahistorical.Basically, the concern of critics of oral tradition is that, while they are veritable sources of history, the researcher “must work and rework them with an increasing sophistication and critical sense.” Because dating is very pivotal to the historian's craft, different techniques have been adopted alone or in combination to create a relative chronology. In precolonial African history, the most commonly used have been genealogical data which include dynastic generations, genealogical generations (father-to-son succession) and the age-set generation. Also systematically charted comets, solar eclipses, and droughts have been employed by historians in dating historical events, or in calculating the various generational lengths.A dynastic generation is determined by “the time elapsing between the accession of the first member of a given generation to hold office and the accession of the first representative of the next.”

scholarly journals The Almohads and the “Qur’anization” of War Narrative and Ritual

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 876
Author(s):  
Javier Albarrán
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Direct Study ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Religiosity And Spirituality ◽  
War Discourse

The Almohad movement (12th–13th centuries, Islamic West) had in the return to the direct study of the primary sources of Islam—the Qur’an and the Sunna—and in jihād, two of its most important pillars of legitimation and action. In this sense, it is an ideal period to study how both realities—Qur’an and jihād—were linked in a given historical context. During the Almohad period, the use of Qur’anic verses in accounts related to war episodes became widespread. We thus witness a “Qur’anization” of the war narrative, a resource adding greater religiosity and spirituality to the context of jihād, to its elaboration and discursive representation, and to its memory and remembrance through written testimonies. In this paper I study, through the main narrative and documentary sources of the period, how the Qur’an was inserted into and adapted to the Almohad war discourse. Likewise, this approach allows me to explore how the Qur’an came to life within the framework of the Almohad jihād, how it served for its justification and legitimation, and how it formed part of the ceremony and the war protocol of the Maghrebi caliphate, thus linking itself with other discursive and propaganda mechanisms such as architecture or military parades.

scholarly journals Through the Looking Glass Space to New Ways of Knowing: A Personal Research Narrative

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabrielle Brand
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Health Professional ◽  
Health Care Professionals ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Research Experience ◽  
Looking Glass ◽  
Personal Research

This article describes how writing personal research narratives during my doctoral research journey challenged my role as a health professional and my personal beliefs and values in fundamental ways. In qualitative narrative inquiry, the reflexive account of the research experience is a key element in conducting ethical, rigorous, and meaningful forms of qualitative research. However, as a novice researcher, I was unprepared for the unlearning journey I experienced during the research process. This uncomfortable experience cut to the core of my identity by dismantling unexamined belief and value systems that lay dormant and hidden from my everyday consciousness as a health professional. In the spirit of transparency, reflexivity and “good” qualitative research, this article presents an explicit account of my exquisite and sometimes excruciating reflexive research journey that profoundly changed how I relate and work with people. I believe health care professionals should adopt a narrative view of experience that creates the “looking glass space” to locate their own stories within the broader socio-cultural and historical context of their lives, especially in relation to their health professional identity. Exchanging diminishing dialogue with deeper dialogue honours both the complexities of young peoples’ lives and social worlds and encompasses socially-conscious methodologies of promise and hope.

The significance of Drought, Disease and Famine in the agriculturally marginal zones of West-Central Africa

1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph C. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Central Africa ◽  
Western Coast ◽  
African History ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The South ◽  
Epidemiological Factors ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
West Central ◽  
Marginal Zones ◽  
To Receive

Some 170 references to drought and disease along the south-western coast of Central Africa between 1550 and 1830 suggest that climatic and epidemiological factors motivated the farmers and herders of West-Central Africa in historically significant ways. Nearly all references come from documentary sources and so bear primarily on conditions in the drier and less fertile areas near Luanda and to the south, where African reactions would have been strongest.While minor shortages of rain occurred too frequently to receive much explicit attention in the documents, longer droughts spread more widely every decade or so and attracted notice. Major periods of dryness, extending for seven years or more and touching all parts of the region, occurred perhaps once each century and produced comments throughout the documentation.Localized minor droughts hardly disrupted the lives of Africans, who had presumably devised agricultural and pastoral strategies to take account of such ordinary climatic variation. Two-or three-year rainfall shortages produced banditry and warfare that often attracted Portuguese military retaliation. Major droughts disrupted polities and societies and hence coincided with major turning points in West-Central African history in the late sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries. In the earlier case, agricultural failures produced the famed ‘Jaga’ or Imbangala warriors, who elevated pillage to a way of life and who joined the Portuguese in establishing the Angolan slave trade. The later, protracted drought from 1784 to 1793 coincided with the historic peak of slave exports from West-Central Africa.

Oral Traditions as Sources

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Belcher
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
African History ◽  
The Face ◽  
Traditional Societies ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
African Intellectuals ◽  
Oral Information ◽  
Creative Endeavor

The use of oral tradition is a distinctive and essential element in many fields of African studies. History must acknowledge it; literature sees it as the medium for much of the indigenous creative endeavor across African cultures; anthropology and its cousin disciplines rely upon oral information for their understanding of traditional societies. An appreciation of the value of the oral tradition as a source across disciplines involves two efforts: first, a survey of the reported oral tradition as available and documented in past periods, and second, a review of the principles and practices involved in the collection, analysis, and presentation of the oral tradition. The paucity of written records has been grounds for dismissal of the notion of African history—most notoriously in the case of Hegel, who in ignorance wrote off the home of the human species—and more recently a cause of pride among African intellectuals who have asserted the value of the oral tradition in the face of skepticism rooted in prejudice and too often in overt racism. An appreciation of the value of the oral tradition threads its path between extremes and occasional controversy. The era of the smartphone has made the documentation (and creation) of oral tradition almost too easy. Past generations made do in different ways. Their reports should not be dismissed, but studied; they are the available background to information collected in the modern era. Accurate collection and critical analysis are the essential tools for the understanding of oral tradition.

scholarly journals From cooperative practice to research and back

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (02) ◽  
pp. 194-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kiri Langmead
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Construction ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Research Performance ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Social Enterprises ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Construction Of Knowledge ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
A Site

Purpose This paper aims to explore how experiences and emotions arising from the performance of ethnography shape the construction of knowledge about democratic practice in two social enterprises. It argues that ethnographers can develop a more nuanced understanding of organisational practices by moving beyond the self-reflexive work of being aware of one’s position to embrace the emotional work of engaging reflexively with this position, re-embedding reflexive moments in the process of knowledge construction. Design/methodology/approach Reflections are made on the emotions and experiences arising during a 12-month ethnographic study in two social enterprises. Findings The author found that engaging reflexively with relational and emotional processes of meaning-making opened up three analytical starting points. First it highlighted and helped the researcher to see beyond the limits of their assumptions, opening them to new understandings of democracy. Second, it gave rise to empathetic resonance through which the researcher was able to feel into the practice of democracy and re-frame it as a site of ongoing struggle. Finally, it brought to consciousness tacit ways of knowing and being central to both research and democratic praxis. Originality/value The paper adds to limited literature on processes of knowledge construction. Specifically, it contributes new insights into how emotional experiences and empathetic resonance arising at the meeting point of research performance and democratic praxis can offer analytical starting points for a more nuanced understanding of democratic organising in social enterprise.

Eclipse Maps

1965 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Gray
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
African History ◽  
Solar Eclipses

These maps show the paths of central eclipse for 164 total solar eclipses visible in Africa in the period A.D. 1000 to 2000. It is hoped that they may suggest periods and areas where records of eclipses might be found in oral tradition or other sources, and also that they, or their originals, will assist in at least the preliminary stages of identifying such a record with a particular eclipse. The originals have been drawn on a scale of 1: 10,000,000, and photographic copies of these and the master grid are available, on indestructible plastic, price £7. 10s. the set, from the Editors of the Journal of African History.

scholarly journals Legends and Facts About the Life of M. A. Dostoevsky in Darovoe (1837—1839)

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-60
Author(s):  
Albina Bessonova
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
State Archive ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Village

The history of the Dostoevsky estate Darovoe, which is an important period in the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky, still contains unresolved issues. The most ambiguous is the fate of the writer's father, who ended his days in Darovoe. The cause of the tragic death of M. A. Dostoevsky and the place of his burial are still controversial. The document from the State Archive of the Tula region, published for the first time, allows to dispel all doubts about the location of the grave of M. A. Dostoevsky. The article examines the history of the issue, including oral tradition, analyzes well-known documentary sources, and the entry in the metric book of the Holy Spirit Church of the village Monogarovо in 1839 confirms the testimony of A. M. Dostoevsky about the burial of his father in the churchyard. The fact of M. A. Dostoevsky's affair with the house serf Ekaterina Alexandrova is questioned, since it was based on rumors and undocumented. The author analyzes the oral tradition phenomenon and its influence on the formation of the image of M. A. Dostoevsky as a cruel landowner killed by peasants out of revenge. New archival documents allow us to revise the stereotypes that have become entrenched in Dostoevsky studies.

African Historical Writing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toyin Falola
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Black People ◽  
African History ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Methodological Innovation ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Black Intellectual ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
Intellectual Movement

This chapter looks at African historical writing. Several intellectual currents fused to produce the emergence of modern African historiography. First, the global black intellectual movement, expressed in the politics of Pan-Africanism, argued that the knowledge of African history was key to the understanding of the past and future of black people. Second, within Africa itself, a tradition of indigenous writing had already demonstrated the richness of the continent’s history. The third current that moved writing about Africa to the mainstream academy began in the 1940s during the era of decolonization, the transfer of power from Europeans to Africans, and the creation of independent nations. The chapter then explores a key methodological innovation that emerged in African studies first but has had application in other fields—oral tradition as a pathway into pasts either largely devoid of written records or dominated by the written records of colonial occupiers.

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