The Kedong Massacre and the Dick Affair: A Problem in the Early Colonial Historiography of East Africa

1981 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 261-269
Author(s):  
Robert Maxon ◽  
David Javersak
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Valley Of Death

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.

Imperial Business in Africa Part II. Interpretations

1976 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. G. Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Distribution ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Size Structure ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Business History ◽  
African History ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance

This article, which is in two parts, aims to establish expatriate business history as a necessary and important part of modern African history. Part I surveyed approximately fifty histories of European companies in West, Central and East Africa during the colonial period and drew attention to newly-discovered and little-known records. Part II begins by assessing the quality of the studies listed in Part I, and suggests ways in which the level of scholarship can be raised to meet standards set by professionally-written business history. The article then formulates and explores a number of propositions concerning the spatial distribution and changing size, structure, strategy and performance of expatriate business in Africa. It is argued that many of these propositions cut across established but inadequately supported views, and that the development of business history has wider implications for the study of the colonial history of Africa.

How Finance Colonised Aotearoa: A Concise Counter-History

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Catherine Cumming
Keyword(s):  
Financial Institutions ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Financial Instruments ◽  
Financial History ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of

This paper intervenes in orthodox under-standings of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history to elucidate another history that is not widely recognised. This is a financial history of colonisation which, while implicit in existing accounts, is peripheral and often incidental to the central narrative. Undertaking to reread Aotearoa New Zealand’s early colonial history from 1839 to 1850, this paper seeks to render finance, financial instruments, and financial institutions explicit in their capacity as central agents of colonisation. In doing so, it offers a response to the relative inattention paid to finance as compared with the state in material practices of colonisation. The counter-history that this paper begins to elicit contains important lessons for counter-futures. For, beyond its implications for knowledge, the persistent and violent role of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa has concrete implications for decolonial and anti-capitalist politics today.  

Indigenous Written Sources for the History of Bonny

1989 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 185-196
Author(s):  
Susan M. Hargreaves
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Niger Delta ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Additional Material ◽  
Court Records ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Similar Character ◽  
Written Sources

It is well known that indigenous contemporary written documentation exists for the precolonial and early colonial history of some of the coastal societies of South-Eastern Nigeria. The best known example is Old Calabar, for which there exists most notably the diary of Antera Duke, covering the years 1785-88, a document brought from Old Calabar to Britain already during the nineteenth century. More recently John Latham has discovered additional material of a similar character still preserved locally in Old Calabar, principally the Black Davis House Book (containing material dating from the 1830s onwards), the papers of Coco Bassey (including diaries covering the years 1878-89), and the papers of E. O. Offiong (comprising trade ledgers, court records, and letter books relating to the period 1885-1907). In the Niger Delta S. J. S. Cookey, for his biography of King Jaja of Opobo, was able to use contemporary documents in Jaja's own papers, including correspondence from the late 1860s onwards. In the case of the neighboring community of Bonny (from which Jaja seceded to found Opobo after a civil war in 1869), while earlier historians have alluded to the existence of indigenous written documentation, they have done so only in very general terms and without any indication of the quantity or nature of this material.

Note on the Life of Francisco de Cárdenas Valencia

1945 ◽  
Vol 2 (01) ◽  
pp. 21-29
Author(s):  
Eleanor B. Adams
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Bibliographical Note ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Erroneous Belief ◽  
History Of

Very little has been known about the life of the seventeenth century Yucatecan historian, Francisco de Cárdenas Valencia, author of the Relación historial eclesiástica de la provincia de Yucatán. He completed this important work on the early colonial history of Yucatan in February, 1639, but although it was known and used by Diego López de Cogolludo and later historians, it remained unpublished for nearly three hundred years. In 1937 it was finally printed in the Biblioteca histórica mexicana de obras inéditas. In his bibliographical note to this edition, Federico Gómez de Orozco tells the history of the manuscript, refuting the erroneous belief that Cárdenas Valencia wrote two works, but he does not give much new data concerning its author.

A Brief History of Singapore

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Tarulevicz
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
First Century ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Japanese Occupation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of

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.

Freedom's Debtors

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Economic Capital ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into

Freedom’s Debtors is a history of the British movement to abolish the slave trade, told through the lens of the history of early colonial Sierra Leone. After the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, Sierra Leone became the judicial, military, and economic capital of British efforts to interdict slave ships. British antislavery, widely seen as a great sacrifice of economic and political capital on the altar of humanitarianism, was in fact profitable, militarily useful, and crucial to the expansion of British power in West Africa. The colony was closely connected to the elite leaders of the abolitionist movement in Britain, and became closely identified with their business interests. This history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone offers insight into how antislavery policies were used to justify colonialism and reframes a moment considered a watershed in British public morality as the beginning of morally ambiguous and exploitative colonial history. From Sierra Leone, it is easier to see British antislavery as it really was: acquisitive, devoted to coercive and gradual schemes for emancipation, militarised, and shot through with imperial ambitions.

Note on the Life of Francisco de Cárdenas Valencia

1945 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-29
Author(s):  
Eleanor B. Adams
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Bibliographical Note ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Erroneous Belief ◽  
History Of

Very little has been known about the life of the seventeenth century Yucatecan historian, Francisco de Cárdenas Valencia, author of the Relación historial eclesiástica de la provincia de Yucatán. He completed this important work on the early colonial history of Yucatan in February, 1639, but although it was known and used by Diego López de Cogolludo and later historians, it remained unpublished for nearly three hundred years. In 1937 it was finally printed in the Biblioteca histórica mexicana de obras inéditas. In his bibliographical note to this edition, Federico Gómez de Orozco tells the history of the manuscript, refuting the erroneous belief that Cárdenas Valencia wrote two works, but he does not give much new data concerning its author.

Northern Rhodesia Tax Stamps as an Aid to Chronology

1987 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 363-368
Author(s):  
Mwelwa C. Musambachime
Keyword(s):  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mnemonic Devices ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Tax Payers

It is well known that historians studying preliterate societies, in which oral traditions are the main sources of data used in reconstructing the past, have experienced problems in ‘arranging’ events in their order of occurrence. To establish chronology, historians have used a number of aids such as mnemonic devices and occurrences of eclipses and droughts which are then correlated to the western calendar. This paper discusses an aid which, used together with oral traditions, can be very useful in reconstructing the early colonial history of Northern Rhodesia between 1910 and 1927. This aid is the tax stamp given to all tax payers during this period. To understand the importance of the tax stamps to chronology, perhaps it is best to begin with a description as to how events were recorded in the precolonial period.

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
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial Order

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.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Caleb Simmons
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Colonial Encounter

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.

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