Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-lpg2g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-15T17:39:07.275Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Tin Trunk Literati’ and Beyond: hidden sources for Africa's History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2022

David Killingray
Get access

Extract

Serendipity and surprise occasionally contribute to the work of the historian. A chance discovery of crucial documents, a word from an informant, or a brief text helping to resolve a puzzle from the past, can set the adrenalin pulsing. Despite the apparent dull, desk-bound procedures of historical research it can at times be a rather exciting venture with eureka moments. There is another dimension that never ceases to thrill me: bringing to life an insignificant voice from the past, recovering the words of those supposedly ‘without history’, giving flesh and being to a forgotten ‘common person’, and contributing a further piece of evidence to history ‘from below’.

Here is a eureka moment, John L. Comaroff, the South African social anthropologist describing finding the diary of Sol T. Plaatje written about the siege of Mafeking in 1899: “The document was discovered by accident rather than by design.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
African Research and Documentation , Volume 112 , 2010, pp. 5 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Notes

2 Comaroff, John L., ed. (1976) The Boer War diary of Sol T. Plaatje an African at Mafeking, London: Cardinal, pp. 8-9.Google Scholar

3 Willan, Brian (1984) ol Plaatje: a biography, Johannesburg: Ravan.Google Scholar

4 Barber, Karin, ed. (2006) Africa's hidden histories: everyday literacy and making the self, Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.

5 Van Onselen, Charles (1996) Kas Maine, a South African sharecropper, Oxford: James Currey.Google Scholar

6 West African travels and adventures: two autobiographical narratives from Northern Nigeria; translated and annotated by Kirk-Greene, Anthony and Newman, Paul (1971), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar

7 McCarthy, James (2006) Selim Aga: a slave's odyssey, Edinburgh: Luath.Google Scholar

8 Beals, Herbert K. et al., eds. (2007) Four travel journals: the Americas, Antarctica and Africa, 1775-1874, Aldershot: Ashgate (Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society, Series III, vol. 18).Google Scholar

9 Johnson, Douglas H. (1991) ‘Salim Wilson: the Black Evangelist of the North’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 21 (1), pp. 26-41Google Scholar

10 Killingray, David (1985) ‘Bald biographies of the barely reclaimable: Native Officers of the Gold Coast Constabulary, 1874-1907’, Ghana Studies Bulletin 3, pp. 9-15.Google Scholar

11 Fadoyebi, Isaac (1999) A Stroke of unbelievable luck; edited with an introduction by Killingray, David,Madison, WI: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison.Google Scholar

12 Killingray, David with Plaut, Martin (2010) Fighting for Britain: African soldiers in the Second World War, Woodbridge: James Currey.Google Scholar

13 Priestley, Margaret (1969) West African trade and society: a family study, London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

14 Skinner, David (1980) Thomas George Lawson: African historian and administrator in Sierra Leone, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.Google Scholar

15 Jones, Adam and Sebald, Peter, eds. (2005) An African family archive: the Lawsons of Little Popo/Aneho (Togo) 1841-1938, Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy.Google Scholar