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.”

Impossible to Disprove Yet Impossible to Believe: the Unforgiving Epistemology of Deep-Time Oral Tradition

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 127-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Henige
Keyword(s):  
American Indian ◽  
Carrying Capacity ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
The Past ◽  
State Of Affairs

This is not a real old time myth but it is what they say now, and it must have been like that.This man from Ulimang was highly skilled in the art of warfare—like Eisenhower.A Tahitian businessman who provides ‘Polynesian’ entertainment for tourists in Hawaii with a young Marquesan man whom he took to Samoa to be tattooed by their artistsfollowing designs recorded by early European visitors.… as for oral Traditions, what certainty can there be in them? What foundation of truth can be laid upon the breath of man? How do we see the reports vary, of those things which our eyes have seen done? How do they multiply in their passage, and either grow, or die upon hazards?Writing about American Indian reactions to their discovery of large fossil remains, Adrienne Mayor observes in passing that “[f]olklore scholars now generally accept that oral traditions about historical events endure for about a thousand years, although some oral myths about geological and astronomical events can be reliably dated to about seven thousand years.” Mayor's chosen task is to demonstrate that American Indian legends suggest that they rightly regarded fossils as the remains of long extinct megafauna populations. In aid of this, Mayor accepts these arguments in her own work. While this claim might seem extravagantprima facie, and while most folklorists would disown Mayor's claim, she is not without support from the work of a relatively small, but not uninfluential (and possibly growing), cadre of anthropologists, mythographers, geologists, and historians, whose efforts on behalf of deep-time oral tradition I address here.Some interesting—even intriguing—things have been happening recently in discussions of the carrying capacity of oral tradition—its long-term historicity, in particular.À laMayor, the thrust of this is to credit tradition with being able to preserve “intact” various pieces of information for as long as tens of thousands of years. To the historian interested in the reality of the past in oral societies, this state of affairs is challenging, perplexing, and no doubt to some, highly promising. If, for instance, it can be demonstrated that certain information in oral data is thousands of years old and at the same time an accurate recollection, then reservations about much later (say, several centuries old) orally transmitted information might need to be reassessed, and with such rethinking would come new ways to approach great swaths of the past.

The Lists of Phalaborwa Rulers: A Comparison of Variant ‘Fixed’ Sources

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 209-224
Author(s):  
R.T.K. Scully
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Specific Detail ◽  
Cultural Complex ◽  
The Past ◽  
Lines Of Descent ◽  
Political Association ◽  
Diverse Groups

In this paper I discuss genealogical material documented in the past about the ruling families of Phalaborwa in the northeast Transvaal. Recent archeological research in Phalaborwa demonstrates a continuous Iron Age cultural complex in the area centered around Lolwe hill since the eighth century A.D. Subsequent investigations of Phalaborwa oral tradition clearly link the present BaPhalaborwa Sotho-speaking population with the Iron Age past, adding considerable specific detail for the historical reconstruction of this remarkable 1000-year old metalproducing and trading society.Noble and royal genealogies among the BaPhalaborwa focus on the main line of Malatji clan rulers and in all of the Malatji lines the genealogies merge at one or other ascending levels. There is consequently a single ultimate prestige genealogy for all noble and royal families in Phalaborwa which has become fixed by the efforts of various of the tribe literates since the 1930s. Inconsistencies in oral tradition from diverse groups, however, suggest that this genealogy was not rigid in the past, but flexible, allowing certain direct lines of descent to become obscured and the collateral and even unrelated lines which have found their way into political association with the ruling house of Phalaborwa by various means to be added.

scholarly journals Historians, are Archeologists Your Siblings?

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 369-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Vansina
Keyword(s):  
Good Reason ◽  
African History ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Archaeological Material ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Relative Scarcity

The historian of pre-nineteenth century Africa…cannot get far without the aid of archaeology.Nevertheless, historians have good reason to be cautious about historical generalisations by archaeologists and about their own use of archaeological material…: it would be a rash historian who totally accepted the conclusions of Garlake and Huffman with the same simple-minded trust as I myself accepted the conclusions of Summers and Robinson.In the beginning, historians of Africa put great store by archeology. Was its great time depth not one of the distinctive features of the history of Africa, a condition that cannot be put aside without seriously distorting the flavor of all its history? Did not the relative scarcity and the foreign authorship of most precolonial written records render archeological sources all the more precious? Did not history and archeology both deal with the reconstruction of human societies in the past? Was the difference between them not merely the result of a division of labor based on sources, so that historical reconstruction follows in time and flows from archeological reconstruction? Such considerations explain why the Journal of African History has regularly published regional archeological surveys in order to keep historians up to date.

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.

Oral Tradition and Chronology

1971 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Henige
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Near East ◽  
Common Method ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Accurate Assessment ◽  
Main Thesis ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Folk Hero

Perhaps the weakest aspect of oral tradition is its inability to establish and maintain an accurate assessment of the length of the past it purports to relate. As time passes, societies without calendrical systems tend to become either very vague about this time depth or to relate it to present, changing circumstances. The most common method of measuring the past in many societies is in terms of king lists or genealogies. A comparison of orally transmitted king lists and genealogies in various places and times, for example, the early Mediterranean world and the Ancient Near East, the native states of India, Africa and Oceania, indicates that certain patterns of chronological distortion seem to emerge, sometimes telescoping but more often lengthening the past.The former may occur through omission of usurpers, however defined, periods of chaos or foreign domination, or by the personification of an entire epoch by a founding folk-hero. If the reasons for artificial lengthening are obvious, the mechanisms are less so. In this respect a survey of both welldocumented cases and of orally transmitted lists can be instructive. Lengthening is often the result of euhemerism; more often subtler themes emerge. These include longer reigns in the earlier, less known period, the arranging of contemporary rulers as successive ones and, most importantly, extended father/son succession throughout the list or genealogy. This last is of direct and profound chronological importance, and its occurrence is widespread enough to be termed stereotypical. Yet it is not often recognized as aberrant, even though its documented occurrence is exceedingly rare. The consequent equation of reigns with generations will almost always result in an exaggerated conception of the antiquity of the beginning of the genealogy. Other weaknesses of orally transmitted king lists include lack of multiple reigns and dynastic changes, and suspiciously perfect rotational succession systems.Within its scope this article only attempts to hint at the origin, shape and effects of these distortions. Its main thesis is that much light can be cast on African cases of this nature through a comparative analysis drawing from a whole range of societies and sources.

Masking Sunjata: A Hermeneutical Critique

2000 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 131-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Jansen
Keyword(s):  
Primary Schools ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
African History ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Scholarly Discussion ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
The Times

Among the rich legacy of African oral traditions, the Sunjata epic is still one of the most complex phenonema, because it undoubtedly goes back to the times of Ibn Battuta, because of the limited variety between the available text editions, and because of its present-day popularity in sub-Saharan West Africa among people of all kinds of social background. In scholarly discussion, the epic has challenged many academics since Delafosse used the Sunjata epic as evidence for his reconstruction of the Mali empire as a thirteenth-century vast centralized polity. Although his views have been criticized since then, they have become part of history lessons at primary schools in Mali, the Gambia, Senegal, and Guinea. All these countries belong to the so-called “Mande,” an area inhabited by various ethnic groups that have close similarities in language, oral tradition, and social organization.In the last decade History in Africa has given room to discuss the Sunjata epic, in particular in order to explore how data from the epic can be used as historical sources, and as what history for whom. Articles by David Conrad, Tim Geysbeek, Stephan Bühnen, Stephen Bulman, Kathryn Green, George Brooks, Ralph Austen, and myself come my mind. All these authors have treated the Sunjata epic as a text. This seems to be a logical and inevitable choice for the historian.However, this approach implies a choice that limits the range of interpretations which can be made about the Sunjata traditions as a source for African history.

Anecdotes as Historical Evidence for the Principate

1980 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Saller
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
African History ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Narratives

Historians' judgements about the evidential value of anecdotes have oscillated over the past decades. In the early part of this century authors of German textbooks on historical method warned students against using anecdotes on the grounds that their form was not fixed and their contents fluctuated since the narrators exercised their imaginations to improve stories with each telling. J. Vansina, an anthropologist studying the value of oral traditions for reconstructing African history, concluded in his more recent work that the anecdote is among the least reliable types of oral tradition. Nevertheless, recent scholarly works on Roman imperial history have utilized anecdotes for the sorts of social, economic, and administrative details which the available political narratives ignore. No systematic analysis has been undertaken to justify this use. I shall attempt to fill the gap by asking three basic questions: in what social contexts were anecdotes generated and transmitted; what changes in content were likely to occur during transmission; and what are the implications for the use of anecdotes as historical evidence?

The (Hi)story of their Lives: Mythic Autobiography and “The Lost Generation”

1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-56
Author(s):  
Marc Dolan
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Lost Generation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Eyewitness Account

Of what use is autobiography to history? At first glance, autobiographies would seem invaluable to historians. After all, no attempt to reconstruct or understand the past would seem complete without a sprinkling of quotations from some form of “eyewitness account.” Among the various forms of such accounts available to historians, the formal autobiography often provides the most comprehensive and comprehensible account extant of the personal experience of historical events. Yet even so strong an admirer of the genre as Allan Nevins was forced to admit that very few autobiographies were ideally suited to the traditional historian's purpose. Most, he conceded, were “imperfect” historical documents at best and could prove “far more deeply misleading” than many other historical sources.

Comment: African Art and African History

1962 ◽  
Vol 5 (02) ◽  
pp. 25-27
Author(s):  
Philip D. Curtin
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Mixed Data ◽  
Human Society ◽  
African History ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
African Art ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point

In discussing these three papers as they relate to history, it is an essential starting point to realize that the discipline of history is changing and has changed considerably in the last quarter century. History began as an account of the great deeds of our own ancestors, a record of the past that was essentially a backward extension of our own group personality. It long ago outgrew its concern with our tribal past and came to be concerned with the past of other peoples who share our Western culture. More recently, historians have become increasingly concerned with the past of other cultures as well. Some remnants of the older historical tradition are still around, but broadly speaking history now can be defined as the study of change in human society. With this shifting focus inside the discipline itself, some of the barriers that used to surround history have also begun to disappear. One of these barriers was a distinction between history and pre-history, made according to the kind of evidence that each used. Historians worked with documentary evidence, leaving the pre-historians to worry with the kind of problem that could be solved only through the combined use of archaeology, oral tradition, linguistic evidence, and the like. In African history no such distinction is possible, and it is now generally abandoned. Documentary evidence about the history of Africa south of the Sahara begins about the ninth century, but it has to be used alongside non-documentary evidence. Documentary evidence, used by itself, only begins to tell the whole story when we come to the twentieth century, and even here it overlaps with the oral evidence of people still alive. African history is thus dominantly a history based on mixed data. The old line between history and pre-history is no longer useful, and the Journal of African History recognized this fact when, for convenience, it set a new division between history and pre-history at the beginning of the Iron Age — a date which will, of course, be somewhat different for different parts of Africa.

scholarly journals The Power of Systematic Doubt in Historical Enquiry

1974 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 109-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Vansina
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
African History ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Common Reference ◽  
Historical Materials ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Points Of View

Many readers have probably noticed that the manuals of historical method which deal with verbal societies are primarily concerned with the sources available and the application of a critique to them. This is true for McCall's or Gabel and Bennett's works on Africa. But what is to be done with the sources once they are ready for evaluation remains vague. How does one reconstruct the past? How does one explain, or eventually interpret, history? Of the two works mentioned, only the first pays some attention to the question of “historical synthesis.’ McCall lists three possibilities: (a) that the sources support each other; (b) that they contradict each other; and (c) that they have no common reference or meeting point. This last situation is the most common in African history and indicates merely that not enough is known and that eventually new data could lead to new interpretative situations-either (a) or (b). The manual stresses that sources should be classified by discipline so that comparison of sources yields either confirmation or contradiction, with obvious and known data reinforcing the validity of the result. Once this is achieved it would seem that the job is finished, except for the warning that historical reconstruction requires a certain type of mind: imaginative yet disciplined.Yet the job is not finished. By comparing we have only established the degree of validity of reported events or situations. We have only verified how the observation, to borrow a term from the scientific experimental method, is correct. The impression remains that historical research is fairly mechanical: to find sources, subject them to a critique, assemble them. Reconstruction follows, with suitable use of imagination. That is the craft. Yet anyone who works with historical materials knows that that is not the practice of the craft. Josephine Tey's novel The Daughter of Time features a police sergeant who more nearly exemplifies historical practice–he guesses, ponders, backtracks, and finds sources almost by intuition. If he had made a few more mistakes he would have been a recognizable historian at work. A recent volume, The Historian's Workshop, though impressionistic, also yields a more realistic picture. In the real world historians start out with a hunch, an idea which leads them to an interest in documents or in oral traditions. Then the data suggest what Popper calls a historical interpretation – “untestable points of view.” The practitioner feels that the interpretation is not enough. It should be doubted and controlled by reference to more data until the point is reached at which no more control is possible. Then the historian feels satisfied with the result–even though it still remains an interpretation, because there remains the selective point of view implicit in the idea that initiated the research.

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