A History of the Rio Pongo: Time for a New Appraisal?

2010 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 329-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce L. Mouser
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Extensive Documentation ◽  
Clear Link ◽  
History Of ◽  
Northern Rivers ◽  
Comprehensive History

Forty-five years ago (1965), when some of us were beginning our studies of the history of the Upper Guinea coast, there existed only a few published general histories of Guinea-Conakry or region-based models to guide us. André Arcin's substantial works (1907 and 1911) provided original but awkward structures from which we could commence our work, but his monographs tended to be based heavily upon a colonial presence, a necessity to make sense of a complex colony, and a reliance upon oral traditions or other uncitationed sources, many of which could not be tested a half century later. Christopher Fyfe's comprehensive history of Sierra Leone had just been published in 1962. Fyfe's foremost emphasis was to chronicle the development of the Sierra Leone settlement and chart that colony's progress, but his extensive documentation was extraordinary in that it demonstrated the clear link between the “Northern Rivers” and British enterprise from Freetown and opened Britain's archives as sources of information about the history of these rivers in new and profound ways.Earlier works by Lucien Marie Francois Famechon, Jules Machat, Fernand Rouget, Laurent Jean B. Bérenger-Férand, Ch. Bour, and others, centering upon the peoples, economies, and terrain of coastal rivers, continued to be instructive, but these authors were writing at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and they tended to treat the histories of indigenous peoples as interesting and exotic and at the same time relatively unimportant to the colony's regional development.

Iwe Itan Ọyọ: A Traditional Yoruba History and its Author

1989 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toyin FalỌla ◽  
Michel R. Doortmont
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Original Text ◽  
New Information ◽  
Bachelor Of Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Features

This article offers a translation of M. C. Adeyẹmi's book, A History of Old and New Ọyọ, completed in Yoruba in 1914. The original text comprises 32 pages, divided into ten short chapters, six of which treat the history of Ọyọ from the origins to 1914. The remaining four chapters examine cultural and political institutions. The translation retains the flavour of the original text which stems from a tradition of Yoruba oral historiography. M. C. Adeyẹmi was trained by the C.M.S., and had a Bachelor of Arts degree in education at Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone. Between 1911 and 1942, he combined the functions of educationalist and missionary. His short book, which refers to no published or unpublished written work, is based on Ọyọ oral traditions describing the major developments in the political history of Ọyọ. The author did not moralise on wars and the collapse of the Ọyọ empire, nor did he use the book as a means of propagating Ọyọ hegemony in Yorubaland.The book is significant in many ways: it is a representative example of Ọyọ traditions as they existed at the beginning of this century; it complements Johnson's The History of the Yorubas where both describe the same event; it is very useful for understanding how ‘traditional’ historians study society; and it provides new information on Ọyọ in the nineteenth century and on some cultural features of the Yoruba.

Deferring to Trade in Slaves: The Jola of Casamance, Senegal in Historical Perspective

1987 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 113-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga F. Linares
Keyword(s):  
Structural Features ◽  
West African ◽  
Local Institutions ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Cultural Preferences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Complex Forms ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Comprehensive History

An ever-growing literature on West African slavery has, for obvious reasons, tended to concentrate on societies that developed complex forms of domestic slavery and/or were closely tied to the export trade. Three major collections on slavery published in the last ten years deal almost exclusively with such groups. The history of peaples who refused, at least in the beginning, to take captives for the purpose of selling them to outsiders or keeping them for themselves has been ignored. And yet these acephalous groups are very instructive. They illustrate how certain structural features and other cultural preferences may have impeded, or at least retarded, the development of indigenous slaving institutions.This paper discusses the role of slavery in a marginal area of the Upper Guinea coast. Emphasis will be placed on how practices surrounding the acquisition and disposal of captives were embedded in local institutions. Because these practices developed in the context of Africans dealing with each other, and not exclusively in the context of their dealings with the Europeans, they reflected modes of thinking and organizations intrinsic to certain forest groups of west Africa. A comprehensive history of why the Jola of Lower Casamance, Senegal, were slow to develop various kinds of slaving practices emphasizes their resistance to currents of change affecting the political economy of this region before, during, and after the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade.

Some Reflections on the Oral Traditions of the Galinhas Country, Sierra Leone

1985 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 151-165
Author(s):  
Adam Jones
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Tape Recorder ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
African History ◽  
Oral Literature ◽  
Main Interest ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Different Parts

Whenever historians of Africa write: “According to tradition…”, they evade the crucial question of what kind of oral tradition they are referring to. The assumption that oral tradition is something more or less of the same nature throughout Africa, or indeed the world, still permeates many studies on African history; and even those who have themselves collected oral material seldom pause to consider how significant this material is or how it compares with that available in other areas.The majority of studies of oral tradition have been written by people who worked with fairly formal traditions; and those who, after reading such studies, go and work in societies where such traditions do not exist are often distressed and disappointed. There is therefore still a need for localized studies of oral tradition in different parts of Africa. As far as Sierra Leone is concerned, no work specifically devoted to the nature of oral tradition has been published, despite several valuable publications on the oral literature of the Limba and Mende. The notes that follow are intended to give a rough picture of the kind of oral material I obtained in a predominantly Mende-speaking area of Sierra Leone in 1977-78 (supplemented by a smaller number of interviews conducted in 1973-75, 1980, and 1984). My main interest was in the eighteenth and nineteenth century history of what I have called the Galinhas country, the southernmost corner of Sierra Leone.I conducted nearly all of my interviews through interpreters and did not use a tape recorder more than a very few times. This was partly because the amount of baggage I could carry on foot was limited, but also because I soon found that some informants were disturbed by the tape recorder, and because it was difficult to catch on tape the contributions of all the bystanders.

Kings, Titles, and Quarters: A Conjectural History of Ilesha I: The Traditions Reviewed

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 109-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.D.Y. Peel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Regional Centers ◽  
Conjectural History ◽  
The Town

This is an essay in conjectural history. Its subject is Ilesha, the capital of Ijesha, one of the larger Yoruba kingdoms, founded probably in the early sixteenth century roughly midway between the larger regional centers of Oyo and Benin. Except for some cursory references to Ijesha rescued from slavery in Sierra Leone in the early nineteenth century, there is absolutely no positive contemporary evidence, whether documentary or archeological, until Europeans first visited the town in 1858. Thereafter, since Ilesha was the leading member of the Ekitiparapo alliance which fought Ibadan to a standstill in the 1880s, contemporary documentation becomes fairly abundant. But my concern here is with the evolution of Ilesha's socio-political structure, with what has since come to be considered its “traditional” constitution, over roughly three centuries up to the third quarter of the nineteenth century. For that, virtually all our evidence lies in what people have said and done since the 1880s.African historians have perforce relied greatly on such evidence and since Vansina's Oral Tradition they have been able to use it both more confidently and more critically, especially in the area of Bantu Africa. My fellow sociologists, however, remain more radically sceptical. Despite their admission of the need for history, they have learned too well how dynastic tradition and legends of origin tend to serve as “characters” for contemporary arrangements and need primary interpretation in the light of this -- and have often concretely illustrated the point with devastating and, for those desirous of using oral traditions for historical ends, depressing effect.

Indigenous Struggles for Epistemic Justice

2019 ◽  
pp. 637-653
Author(s):  
Robert Nichols
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Supreme Court Of Canada ◽  
Critical Survey ◽  
Epistemic Justice ◽  
Settler Societies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Settler Colonization ◽  
Anglophone World

This chapter explores how questions of epistemic justice are expressed in the context of indigenous struggles against settler colonization in the anglophone world. It focuses specifically on how indigenous peoples in the Anglo-settler world (1) tend to preserve and transmit knowledge about their societies and the history of their struggles against colonization through various oral traditions, rather than the text-based or scriptural traditions of many other societies, and (2) have been subject to a particular form of eliminatory violence that has sought not only to subordinate and exploit them, but also to erase and replace them altogether with neo-European settler societies. This chapter considers how these two features articulate as problems of epistemic justice. Part I introduces a specific case study—the 1997 Supreme Court of Canada decision Delgamuukw v. British Columbia—as a means of clarifying the stakes and contours of the first problem. Part II offers a critical survey of work that has developed in the twenty years since Delgamuukw, which has increasingly linked the two highlighted issues.

Peering Beyond the Imperial Gaze: Using Digital Tools to Construct a Spatial History of Conquest

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy M. Mikecz
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Digital Tools ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
Digital Maps ◽  
Spatial History ◽  
Colonial Texts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Spatial Narrative

Ethnohistorians and other scholars have long noted how European colonial texts often concealed the presence and participation of indigenous peoples in New World conquests. This scholarship has examined how European sources (both texts and maps) have denied indigenous history, omitted indigenous presence, elided indigenous agency, and ignored indigenous spaces all while exaggerating their own power and importance. These works provide examples of colonial authors performing these erasures, often as a means to dispossess. What they lack, however, is a systematic means of identifying, locating, and measuring these silences in space and time. This article proposes a spatial history methodology which can make visible, as well as measurable and quantifiable the ways in which indigenous people and spaces have been erased by colonial narratives. It presents two methods for doing this. First, narrative analysis and geovisualization are used to deconstruct the imperial histories found in colonial European sources. Second it combines text with maps to tell a new (spatial) narrative of conquest. This new narrative reconstructs indigenous activity through a variety of digital maps, including ‘mood maps’, indigenous activity maps, and maps of indigenous aid. The resulting spatial narrative shows the Spanish conquest of Peru was never inevitable and was dependent on the constant aid of immense numbers of indigenous people.

Out of War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariane C. Ferme
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Cultural Survival ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Rural Landscapes ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
Sensory History ◽  
History Of

Out of War is an ethnographic engagement with the nature of intercommunal violence and the material returns of history during and after the 1991–2002 Sierra Leone civil war. The questions raised concern the nature and reckoning of time and reality, fact and fiction; the experience of violence and trauma; the reversibility of perpetrator and victim, friend and enemy; and past, present, and future in the colony and postcolony. The book is a reflection on West African epistemologies and ontologies that contribute to questions in counterpoint with those of international humanitarianism, struggling with the possibilities of truth and quandaries of justice. In the context of massive population displacements and humanitarian interventions, the ethnography traces strategies of psychological, political, and cultural survival and material dwelling in liminal spaces in the midst of the destruction of the social fabric engendered by war. It also examines the juridical creation of new figures of crimes against humanity at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone scene, in the aftermath of war, is visualized as a landscape of chronotopes, neologisms that summon the uncertainty of war: the sobel (“soldier by day, rebel by night”), pointing to the instability of distinctions between enemy and friend, or of opposing parties in the war (the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front [RUF] and soldiers in the national army), and the rebel cross, pointing to the possibility that the purported neutrality of the Red Cross masked partisan interests alongside the RUF. Chronotopes also testify to the difficulty of discerning between facts and rumors in war, and they freeze in time collective anxieties about wartime events. Finally, beyond the traumas of war, the book explores the returns of material traces in counterpoint to the more “monumental” presence of Chinese investments in Africa today, and it explores the forgotten sensory history of another China (Taiwan versus the People’s Republic of China) and another Africa inscribed in ordinary agrarian practices on rural landscapes, and in the fabric of domestic life, particularly since the non-aligned movement emerged from the Bandung conference in 1955.

Examining the entry of Walmart into South Africa: A stakeholder management perspective

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-89
Author(s):  
Tembinkosi Bonakele ◽  
Dave Beaty ◽  
Fathima Rasool ◽  
Drikus Kriek
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Stakeholder Management ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Key Stakeholders ◽  
Management Perspective ◽  
Labour Standards ◽  
History Of ◽  
Primary Focus

The recent entry of the US multinational Walmart into South Africa has proved to be a source of controversy. Key stakeholders in South Africa objected to the merger and attempted to block it unless certain conditions were met. The aim of this study was to examine the controversy and the conditions surrounding the merger. The research employed a qualitative archival analysis to examine publicly available sources of information with regard to the merger. The findings revealed key stakeholders’ concerns that Walmart’s entry would lead to an increase in imports which would displace local producers, increase unemployment, marginalise trade unions and lower labour standards unless certain conditions were met. The results also revealed problems relating to the firm’s primary focus on “business” while neglecting “public interest” issues, naively relying on their “local retailer” to manage key stakeholders, and assuming that their perceived controversial reputation regarding treatment of trade unions and their views about unemployment as well as the controversies surrounding their history of entry into other global markets would not have the major negative impact it did on stakeholders in South Africa.

The Art of Love Poetry

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Gray
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Erotic Love ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function ◽  
Meaning And Function ◽  
Comprehensive History

Love begets poetry; poetry begets love. These two propositions have seemed evident to thinkers and poets across the Western literary tradition. Plato writes that “anyone that love touches instantly becomes a poet.” And even today, when poetry has largely disappeared from the mainstream of popular culture, it retains its romantic associations. But why should this be so—what are the connections between poetry and erotic love that lead us to associate them so strongly with one another? An examination of different theories of both love and poetry across the centuries reveals that the connection between them is not merely an accident of cultural history—the result of our having grown up hearing, or hearing about, love poetry—but something more intrinsic. Even as definitions of them have changed, the two phenomena have consistently been described in parallel terms. Love is characterized by paradox. Above all, it is both necessarily public, because interpersonal, and intensely private; hence it both requires expression and resists it. In poetry, especially lyric poetry, which features its own characteristic paradoxes and silences, love finds a natural outlet. This study considers both the theories and the love poems themselves, bringing together a wide range of examples from different eras in order to examine the major structures that love and poetry share. It does not aim to be a comprehensive history of Western love poetry, but an investigation into the meaning and function of recurrent tropes, forms, and images employed by poets to express and describe erotic love.

The Experience of Poetry

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Attridge
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

The question this book addresses is whether, in addition to its other roles, poetry—or a cultural practice we now call poetry—has, across the two-and-a-half millennia from the composition of the Homeric epics to the publication of Ben Jonson’s Works and the death of Shakespeare in 1616, continuously afforded the pleasurable experience we identify with the crafting of language into memorable and moving rhythmic forms. Parts I and II examine the evidence for the performance of the Iliad and the Odyssey and of Ancient Greek lyric poetry, the impact of the invention of writing on Alexandrian verse, the performances of poetry that characterized Ancient Rome, and the private and public venues for poetic experience in Late Antiquity. Part III deals with medieval verse, exploring the oral traditions that spread across Europe in the vernacular languages, the importance of manuscript transmission, the shift from roll to codex and from papyrus to parchment, and the changing audiences for poetry. Part IV explores the achievements of the English Renaissance, from the manuscript verse of Henry VIII’s court to the anthologies and collections of the late Elizabethan period. Among the topics considered in this part are the advent of print, the experience of the solitary reader, the continuing significance of manuscript circulation, the presence of poet figures in pageants and progresses, and the appearance of poets on the Elizabethan stage. Tracking both continuity and change, the book offers a history of what, over these twenty-five centuries, it has meant to enjoy a poem.

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