The formation of the Holy Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in 1622 as a part of the Papacy's attempt to centralize control over overseas missions in Roman hands led to the formation of one of the most important archival deposits in Europe for documentation pertaining to Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Archivio “De Propaganda Fide” in Rome. This Roman-directed missionary organization sent its priests to every corner of the globe, relying especially for its African enterprises on Italian clergy of the Capuchin order. In connection with research on the history of the kingdom of Kongo in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I have worked extensively with materials frcm both the archives of the “Propaganda Fide” and various deposits of the Capuchin order, including a personal visit to the “Propaganda Fide” in January 1978.

The Archivio “De Propaganda Fide” is located in Rome at Piazza di Spagna, 48, and when I visited it, it was open only four hours a day from 9:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. every day except Sunday and holidays. Aside from the short hours, however, the archive is a pleasant place to work. The staff is friendly and helpful and the reading room well-lighted and well-appointed. In addition, the material is extremely well indexed and easy to use, so that the researcher who knows the system will have no difficulty in locating relevant material with a minimum of leafing and surveying. Fr. Lowrie J. Daly, has described the organization of the collection.

The recovery of subaltern experiences in colonial contexts requires more than reading against the grain and interrogating silences. This paper describes “archival patchwork,” a way of working across diverse sources from multiple repositories, collecting small scraps of evidence about subordinated individuals, reconstructing social relationships, and stitching together patterns of daily life that aren’t visible otherwise. Archival patchwork accommodates present-day ways of working in neoliberal universities, acknowledges north-south disparities, and opens collaborative possibilities. The paper, pinned to South African history, enumerates digitization, transcription, and duplication projects that make archival sources for the colonial Cape more widely available. Although this paper’s evidence is focused in time and place, the methodology is broadly applicable.

Despite the slender evidentiary base of surviving sources, historians would dearly like to know more about colonial vital rates. In the absence of hard data, speculation has run rampant about changes in fertility and mortality. Were African birth rates always as high as they are today? Did the early years of colonial rule bring about rises in the deathrates in all areas and to the same degree? Researchers are now combing the available evidence for materials to answer questions such as these.

Unfortunately, the records of a single year's births and deaths are not a reliable indicator of long-term demographic trends. In a small population in particular, the events of a given year must be seen in the context of the years surrounding it. Inadequate reporting might lead to underestimates of either fertility or mortality rates, while uncommon events such as epidemics might be wrongly taken as typical.

These discontinuities have led researchers to concentrate on series of demographic rates rather than isolated estimates. Mathematically, this has promoted the use of techniques which convert the haphazard incidences of births and deaths into continuous functions which, although not as close to the raw data as year-by-year statistics, nonetheless give the reader a notion of trends over time.

In February of 1976 the American Historical Association published the first issue of Recently Published Articles. RPA is a current, comprehensive bibliography of scholarly historical articles in all fields, and replaces the bibliographical sections previously published in the American Historical Review under the same title. RPA is issued three times a year and, at present, lists nearly 15,000 citations annually, of which about one-eighth relate to Africa -- a number second only to that for the United States.

The creation of RPA resulted from the re-organization of the American Historical Association and its various services. A survey of American Historical Review subscribers revealed a desire by the majority for a more extensive and balanced book review section and most of the space left in the Review by the departure of the bibliography has in fact been filled by additional book reviews, including more in African history. Surprisingly -- and perhaps distressingly -- only a minority of those surveyed indicated that they consulted the bibliographical sections with any regularity. Because of this, and because the growth of the bibliographies during the 1970s (reflecting both increased output and better coverage) was adding steadily to the cost of producing the Review, it was decided to transfer these costs directly to the users -- a practice the reader will recognize as becoming more common. At the same time it was decided to intensify efforts at better and more extensive coverage, in particular to include more articles outside history proper which nevertheless have interest to historians.

Despite its relatively brief history, African studies has developed a remarkably abundant bibliographic infrastructure to support its aims. This is tangibly evidenced in the recent appearance of Yvette Scheven's cumulated bibliography of Africana bibliographies, which comprises citations to well over 3200 bibliographies of various stripes published between 1970 and 1986, or an average of nearly 200 each year. Of course, some of the parts of the structure overlap and even duplicate other parts, and by no means has every effort attained acceptable standards, but on the whole there has been little about which to be ashamed or mortified.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise. In theory at least, the obstacles to preparing useful bibliographies are not outrageously demanding, and not at all commensurate with their enduring value. Mechanically, there are only a few rules, but these are unrelenting: entries must be accurate in all their parts, as well as complete, yet should be economical as well, and not provide useless information; coverage must be comprehensive within stated parameters; and access must be facilitated by means of thoughtful organization, extensive cross-referencing, and thorough and sensitive indexing. The intellectual challenges to accomplishing these goals might not be overwhelming; nonetheless forethought, punctilious and constant attention to detail, linguistic ability, doggedness, and above all a commitment to the highest standards of accuracy are all imperative.

The appeal of history to us all is in the last analysis poetic. But the poetry of history does not consist of imagination roaming at-large, but of imagination pursuing the fact and fastening upon it. That which compels the historian to “scorn delights and live laborious days” is the ardour of his own curiosity to know what really happened long ago in that land of mystery which we call the past.

This paper is about qualitative research methods, and thus more about hard labor than about poetry and imagination. But to those scholars to whom the above citation gives meaning there is a clear connection between hard labour, imagination and poetry. As scholars, we are looking for facts, and looking for facts can be hard work. As scholars, we also know that facts must be ascribed with meaning in order to become sources, a process of interpretation which demands both imagination and poetry.

I will present some of the challenges we face when doing anthropological historical research in Africa, and I will argue that the tools of qualitative methods will have to be sharpened and modified with this particular goal in mind. The main aim will be to discuss how we can acquire information in an African setting by analyzing the role of the interview as a communicative event. Other important topics to be treated are African oral tradition, the culture and tradition (the metacommunicative competence) of the respondents, and their use of metaphors to convey meaning.

Like most kids of my age and time, I was a pack rat in my youth, collecting toy cars, trucks, and tanks; comic books; baseball cards; postage stamps, and … chronological tables. Unfortunately for my later financial well-being, I kept—and kept up with—only the last. I remember little specific about the primal urge to collect these lists, but I remember enough to recall that I was entirely naive at the beginning. I wanted exotic names, exotic places, and exotic dates. Most of all I wanted dates. It did not disturb me in the least when I found out that Arakan was founded in 2666 BC, and that a complete list of its rulers until 1784 A.D. had been preserved for my edification. A strictly successive treatment of the thirty dynasties of pharaonic Egypt was infinitely preferable to new-fangled efforts to reduce this chronology by over 2000 years by shortening reigns and insisting that more than one dynasty ruled at a time. It seemed only natural to me that scores of European bishoprics were able to trace their episcopal lines right back to immediately post-New Testament times. I must have seen historical time as an infinitely replicable vacuum that needed to be filled

This idyll did not last very long—a sea change was all too soon in arriving. It probably was not an epiphany, but a gradual realization that I was encountering other lists of the same offices that were replete with gaps, disagreements, and question marks rather than dates.

During the period of the Kenya Emergency (1952–1960), an assemblage of anticolonial forces waged war against the British colonial apparatus and its allies. Their notoriety would be crystallized in a single, enigmatic phrase: “Mau Mau.” Through considering the character of both contemporary and current framings, this article contends that Mau Mau exists as a historical method in itself, rather than simply as a phenomenon subjected to the analytical frameworks of historians. Mau Mau’s mythological dimension—something acknowledged in even its earliest formal studies—has rarely been focused upon in any sustained way that centers its implications for historical methodology. Yet it existed as a signifier set within enormous discursive webs and systems of information that people interfaced with in myriad ways. More concretely, understandings of and debates about Mau Mau drove human action through their articulation in realms such as (counter)insurgency, politics, and popular culture in geographically-disparate regions of the world. Approaching “events” such as Mau Mau in this fashion reveals the layout of these discursive webs and how they formed around flows of imperial capital, anticolonial resistance, and professional networks.