Historical Archaeology in East Africa has taken two major pathways. One is a practice that uses written documents, including recorded chronicles, to complement and add to archaeological evidence that pertains to historic life, commonly referred to as ‘filling the gaps’. Usually, historic life in these instances has meant the presence of Europeans in Africa, a lens that is colored with a range of filters including colonial and imperial ideas of racial superiority, missionary commentaries on local beliefs and cultural practices, and theoretical dispositions of the archaeologists. When James Kirkman practised historical archaeology along the East African coast, he did so in a manner that is often identified as text-aided historical archaeology.Footnote 1 Kirkman's interest, like that of H. N. Chittick who followed with similar research, was to affirm foreign connections in the florescence of Swahili cities.Footnote 2 One idiosyncratic characteristic of these early inquiries is that they drew on the Swahili Chronicles, early renderings of oral traditions in Swahili language that represented the interests of different local groups, with foreign identities therein given prominence.
The second trail was blazed by Merrick Posnansky and a number of others who followed his example. Deeply dedicated to servicing the public interest when he was curator at the Uganda Museum in the late 1950s, Posnansky expanded his public philosophy to include oral traditions and other pertinent evidence such as ethnographic information and written records, if available, to inquire into the history of sites in the last millennium in East Africa.Footnote 3 Posnansky went on to explore oral traditions at Bweyorere, an Ankole royal palace site, where oral traditions helped to explicate a burning event (during which the capital suffered a severe fire) that was archaeologically documented.Footnote 4 Inquiries into the history of the Bigo earthworks were also a central part of the thrust to give greater attention to indigenous histories – a major focus of the practitioners of precolonial history in African history during the 1960s and 1970s spearheaded by Roland Oliver and his interests in precolonial Uganda, with archaeological research at the famous Bigo earthworks conducted to affirm a colonial construct pertaining to Bacwezi origins.Footnote 5
Posnansky's experiment at Bigo, important for trying to link oral traditions with archaeological evidence, nonetheless failed to affirm any connection between the two forms of historical information about Bigo as the capital site of the Bacwezi empire.Footnote 6 The deeply-flawed source of reported ‘oral traditions’ on which the Bigo hypothesis was based was a colonial concoction published in the Uganda Gazette in 1909, followed by a series of incorrect historical narratives crafted to fit the ‘evidence’.Footnote 7 Though this early experiment has serious shortcomings, it did stimulate deep interest in the possibilities of marrying oral traditions with archaeology, something that Jan Vansina noted with detailed observations in his 1965 volume.Footnote 8
The spirit of these inquiries at the time also inspired John Sutton, the first Makerere PhD in archaeology, to pursue similar interests with his research into Sirwikwa holes in the highlands of Kenya. Drawing extensively on oral traditions and local ethnography, Sutton was able to arrive at an explanation of these features as domiciles, departing significantly from colonial representations that these features were ‘cattle pens’.Footnote 9 As a student at Makerere in the mid-1960s I, too, was drawn to the excitement that surrounded these early experiments and subsequently used indigenous knowledge and oral traditions to explore the deep-time antiquity of a major ritual site in northwestern Tanzania associated with the origins of iron production in Eastern Africa.Footnote 10
This was not an historical archaeology dependent only on written documents, nor was it an academic pursuit that valorized the modern era as the most transformative among all historic eras in world history.Footnote 11 While the second pathway initially incorporated a perspective of ‘verification’ of oral traditions, such testimonies were also used to develop more expansive historical interpretations.Footnote 12 Freed of the burden to justify its practice with only colonial entanglements, this type of historical archaeology focused instead on historical issues within African societies, concerned with how Africans constructed their histories, changing and transforming them to suit their sociohistorical needs.
A deepening interest in marrying oral traditions and archaeology developed in the 1970s and 1980s, again partly influenced by Posnansky and his later engagement with West African archaeology. Diverse efforts arose in using archaeological evidence to challenge deep-seated historical interpretations, many of which arose under colonialism. These metanarratives often represented African histories as less developed and resilient than Europe's or diminished local histories by privileging outside influences. The research of Susan and Rod McIntosh in the Niger River Delta, for example, provided an important and early success story in affirming that local deep-time oral traditions about ancient settlements in the Jenne area were accurate – with archaeology attesting to local processes of settlement more than two millennia ago.Footnote 13 These findings disproved the literary interpretation that the area did not experience significant development until the coming of Islam.
In retrospect, little attention was accorded to this and other breakthroughs in the general practise of African historical archaeology. Archaeologists were not part of historians' discourse about oral traditions.Footnote 14 When edited volumes were published about oral tradition research, archaeologists were not included, even though their research may have been pertinent.Footnote 15 Though this was also the era of periodic publications of radiocarbon dates in The Journal of African History, rarely did historians respond to such updates, possibly because robust discussion by archaeologists of the historical implications was missing. The two communities coexisted with mutual interests, yet rarely was there a systemic interchange of ideas, possibly because archaeological lingo often mystified historians.
Since Posnansky set the standard for local historical engagements several decades ago, there has been a sea change in historical archaeology at the global level, with many scholars advocating an archaeology of the ‘modern’ era. This historical archaeology privileges European involvement with the non-European world, which when applied to Africa may overlook the vitality of historical systems within indigenous African societies. This school of thought, promulgated from the perspective of North American based archaeologists, holds that colonial engagements are those that merit inquiry in conjunction with archaeology.Footnote 16 Concomitantly, those who practise an historical archaeology that seeks to understand internal dynamics of change and continuity are patronizingly characterized as practicing an ‘historical archeology, but not modern-world archeology because it denies the myriad relationships of power, dominance, and oppression forced on indigenous peoples by various nation states since about 1500’.Footnote 17
This bounded view of the discipline excludes most of African history and arouses objections in the African world because colonial history is once again privileged – an amplification of the colonial experience and a manifestation of the writing of African history from European documents and points of view. A dilemma facing historical archaeologists of Africa today is whether they should chose to satisfy these rigid criteria in order to meet standards set in the West, or whether to connect their archaeology with ways of seeing the contemporary world through its links to the deep past, through oral traditions and other sociohistorical evidence. This is not an either/or condition, as many of us face both conditions in our practice, as discussed in the final section of this article.
HYBRID APPROACHES
Today, archaeologists continue to practise both types of historical archaeology in East Africa as well as various hybrids. The colonial-oriented approach is steadily growing more popular at the expense of deep-time histories. This trend in African archaeology – an ever-increasing concentration on the historic period (meaning the modern era of literacy), especially with increased interests in the slave trade in both West and East Africa – parallels what Richard Reid has identified as a dominant interest in African history in the modern era.Footnote 18 The reasons for this shift are multiple. Among the influences are more accessible information held in colonial archives, a proliferation of published research during the postcolonial era, and growing popularity of ideological perspectives that privilege modern era historical archaeology over precolonial historic archaeology. There are disquieting implications held in the parallel trends in African history and African historical archaeology, foremost of which is a disappearing interest and capacity to research more ancient history in Africa. There are also pragmatic concerns expressed in this changing profile. To add significant inquiries into oral traditions and local ethnography vastly complicates and extends field research, something that few young scholars can afford to engage. It takes much greater effort and financial backing to conduct an historic archaeology that integrates ethnography, archival research, and oral traditions with archaeological evidence, not to mention mastery of an African language.
There are, however, important and positive exceptions to this trend, best illustrated by the research of Jonathan Walz in eastern Tanzania. Working with Zigua healers, Walz brings new insights into the flow of objects along historic trade routes into the interior of Tanzania. Of significant interest to historians is his treatment of objects such as glass beads that today are incorporated into healing practices among the Zigua. Healers traverse past caravan routes and gather such items from dispersed areas – integrating the past into present beliefs and practices.Footnote 19 Building on the work of historians such as J. L. Giblin, J. Glassman, S. Feierman, and I. N. Kimambo, Walz shows the advantages of focusing on present healing practices that draw on the power and vitality of the past to mitigate the painful circumstances of colonial and postcolonial histories in the lower Pangani (Ruvu) basin.Footnote 20 Walz's perspective cautions that the history of things resides not only in the past but also in the present, arising from historical motivations among the Zigua to include landscapes and things as part of their healing performances.
Walz's contributions include important interpretative positions on the limited and Eurocentric conceptualization of historical archaeology as a European encapsulation, ‘whereby historicity derives from entanglement with Europe’, a perspective that denies how and why Africans made and thought about their own histories, often outside European influence.Footnote 21 Walz expands East African historical horizons in ways reminiscent of Feierman's initial treatments of Shambaa myth, to proffer interpretations about mythological serpents that appear during times of duress and disaster.Footnote 22 These stories (and their semantic domains) are tied to prominent places with deep-time histories and their tellings engage the myriad changes that have impacted the Pangani basin over the centuries, ranging from the slave trade to plantation agriculture. Particularly important is the close proximity of such sites to important nodes in the caravan routes, a linking that testifies to change introduced by external and internal trade over the centuries. The eruption of snake myths are an integral part of the landscape history, mostly overlooked by historians as key indices to change.
The most significant contribution Walz makes to Eastern African history is his demonstration of active exchange between Swahili coastal settlements and the interior, particularly manifest at sites such as Kwa Mgogo near Mombo town at the western skirt of the Western Usambara Mountains. Using material culture, such as land snail beads and other commodities manufactured in the interior, ceramic affinities between the so-called hinterland and the coast, and coastal and foreign items that appear at inland sites, Walz collapses the dichotomy between coast and interior and between history and prehistory – a significant contribution to African history that affirms strong affinities between ‘Swahili’ coastal communities and their contemporary counterparts in the interior.Footnote 23 Other research in the same regions, as discussed by Paul Lane, focuses on the presence of trade routes as possible stimulus for change in subsistence practices.Footnote 24
One of the trends away from deep-time African histories is the significant growth of Diaspora archaeology, the study of the slave trade, its impact on African societies within Africa and on the Africans and their descendants who were enslaved in the Americas. There is now a well-established practice in Diaspora archaeology and African American archaeology, especially in North America, that is growing steadily and that may contribute to a diminished interest in ancient African history.Footnote 25 Study of European and Asian engagement with African societies through the medium of slavery has extended to East Africa, with the caveat that the slavers were mostly Omani Arabs, who provided slaves to Western as well as Eastern ports. The Indian Ocean Diaspora is evoking more interest from archaeologists, ranging from maroon communities in Kenya, where Lydia Marshall has effectively used oral accounts of Watoro trading of food commodities,Footnote 26 to other studies noted by Paul Lane.Footnote 27 Some studies avoid an exclusive reliance on documentary evidence, integrating local histories and emphasizing African viewpoints and quotidian material life, variously represented by the ambiguous archaeological catchphrase ‘African agency’, a kind of archaeological power-blessing sometimes meant to humanize the archaeological record.
Noteworthy from the perspective of integration of African-made histories is the research of Chaparukha Kusimba in eastern Kenya.Footnote 28 Eschewing a strictly site-based archaeology, Kusimba has meticulously collected and analyzed oral traditions about Nyika communities' interactions with slaving – how they adapted to the depredations of slaving, erecting special refuges, and scheduling their lives to include seclusion and surveillance. This attention to local histories sets this historical archaeology apart from those who seek to investigate slavery from the perspective of foreign engagements with Africa. Another new perspective emerging from historical archaeology on the coastal littoral is a new way of using the Swahili Chronicles.
Matthew Pawlowicz and Adria LaViolette examine late nineteenth-century Swahili Chronicles for Lindi, Sudi, and Mikindani, three towns along the southern Tanzania coast, finding these histories to be significantly different in their emphasis on the dominance of African groups in the narratives.Footnote 29 The contributions of African groups appear explicitly in the texts and their presence is linked to deep-time histories of material culture in the region. The material culture and the African-oriented narratives both mark off this subregion from the northern coast, challenging dominant interpretations about the Swahili world and extending an historical narrative beyond the Swahili elite to include a majority Swahili population residing in villages and towns.
As the investigations of Walz, Marshall, Kusimba, and Pawlowicz and LaViolette illustrate, the divisions that inform global historical archaeology today do not influence most practices in East Africa. Meanwhile, a new frontier in historical archaeology in East Africa is slowly emerging, with initiatives taken by local groups and communities to capture and revitalize their histories as well as contest conventional interpretations. Among the most vital of these community projects is that involving diverse ethnic groups at the Shimoni Caves of southeastern Kenya. One group in the larger community has challenged the given historical narratives about the caves as slaveholding pens, with their points of view now incorporated into public representations.Footnote 30 Income from the Shimoni Caves heritage site supports schools, teacher salaries, and a host of other projects that contribute to local wellbeing. Such initiatives, because they inevitably involve colonial entanglements and postcolonial cultural transformations, involve archaeologists in assessments of materiality, benefits that accrue to communities, and reconciliation of interpretative debates.Footnote 31
FROM THE PRESENT TO THE FUTURE
At a time when oral traditions have become deeply compromised by the death of so many history-keepers after the HIV/AIDS pandemic,Footnote 32 there is growing concern that research into the intersections of oral testimonies with archaeological evidence will fade proportionately. But this fear is ill-founded, for the disappearance of specific genres of oral tradition testimony has been accompanied by the emergence of alternative, subaltern histories.Footnote 33 In settings where earlier research tended to focus on oral testimonies held by elites and recognized male storytellers, new opportunities have emerged to investigate subaltern accounts, often histories held by women.Footnote 34 The absence of colonial records for much of daily life in colonial times marks important opportunities for a new period of inquiry into oral traditions and oral histories linked to landscape history, architecture, and ritual places.
This new historical archaeology incorporates a community approach when community members see it in their interests to investigate their histories to ensure their preservation under conditions of rapid change. Over the last six years, several local groups in northwest Tanzania have worked to rescue and revitalize their histories. The first case pertains to the palace of King Kahigi II (1890–1916) of Kihanja Kingdom.Footnote 35 Kihanja Kingdom was marked by a prominent and very large royal compound built by the German colonial government at Kanazi in a German colonial style. The record about Kanazi is sparse but oral histories are foremost among the limited sources that provide a sense of what life was like in this extraordinary but very rural royal compound.
By 2008, the main residence and the court building were both seriously degraded, leading to efforts to restore and stabilize Kanazi Palace.Footnote 36 As participants and archaeologists, we saw that oral traditions and oral histories, along with archaeology, provided the only significant evidence for understanding elite colonial entanglements in northwest Tanzania. The goal was to conduct an historical archaeology of daily life at Kanazi, adding historical dimensions to a museum within the restored structures. The royal family and clan saw this to their benefit after years of lost prestige and degradation to the royal compound.
A popular and instructive story about Kanazi Palace focuses on King Alfred Kalemera (1916–43), Kahigi's successor, who had a taste for fancy cars. He owned and operated the first motorcycle with a sidecar.Footnote 37 When British judicial policy freed the royal court for other uses, the Kings of Kanazi are said to have converted it to a garage. Excavations at the entry to the court revealed a number of used car parts, confirming that the court was indeed later used for car repairs. As excavations continued within the court building, we came to understand how important car ownership was to the former kings at Kanazi. Exploring a storeroom once used for tribute, there was no evidence for mundane food stuffs; rather, we documented numerous car parts, including parts to a Willys Jeep, a Peugoet 404, and a Landrover – a small sampling of a once prosperous life (Figs. 1a and b).Footnote 38
(a) left: Royal court at Kanazi undergoing restoration. The throne platform is on the left and the tribute room in the background, where excavations documented many used auto parts. (b) right: Excavation inside court tribute room, with a large variety of used auto parts discarded within the court, later used as a garage: Unit I, level 5.
This conjunction between oral traditions and archaeological evidence illustrates the importance of an integrative approach to historical archaeology in Africa during more recent times. Inquiries spread to elderly shopkeepers in Bukoba town, where men now in their seventies remembered their fathers' stories or held direct oral histories about their interactions with the former kings. The King of Kihanja continued to receive local tribute from his subjects as well as a handsome government stipend higher than other leaders and as much as a highly placed civil servant in British service.Footnote 39 King Kalemera's conspicuous consumption was treated as a mark of wealth and standing, with credit lines allowing him greater privilege and access to the physical signatures of material wellbeing.
Archaeological inquiries at Kanazi have helped to illuminate the history of elite consumption in rural Tanganyika, showing it to be far more expansive than a just-so story about a motorcycle side-car. Over the last 45 years and many excavations in the back and front yards of rural residences ranging from chiefs to common folk, we have documented nothing that could be considered consumption of luxury commodities. At Kanazi the record was significantly different: fancy painted ceramics dating to the twentieth century, gin bottles, medicine bottles of various sizes, and a large variety of used auto parts.Footnote 40 When other families, including chiefs and important functionaries, were eating from banana leaves, the royal family used fine china purchased from merchants in Bukoba, further negotiating an enhanced standing in their otherwise politically diminished lives.
The second case arises out of a strong community initiative in Katuruka village to preserve and restore sacred sites and to research and preserve extant oral testimonies in a village archive. My role was first as an invited participant and eventually as a co-producer of historical knowledge, especially as subaltern histories came to light and compelled wider dissemination and acknowledgement. The upshot of village inquiries was the emergence of the history of a once powerful female ritual figure who, during a period of German colonial manipulations of the geopolitics of Bukara Kingdom, arose as an influential and powerful political figure. Njeru, the white sheep, at age 12 in 1900, married King Rugomora Mahe (c. 1650–75).Footnote 41 Thereafter she was invested with conducting the new moon ceremonies, rituals of renewal at the ancient Kaiija shrine tree. As caretaker of the royal burial estate, she received tribute from her subjects and was treated like, as well as called, a Mukama or King. The most influential ritual/political figure in the northern section of Bukara kingdom, her history remained submerged until women recently came to be acknowledged as the keepers of oral history in the wake of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.Footnote 42
Njeru's history was clearly articulated by women in Katuruka, collapsing the androcentric circumscriptions that once obscured her ritual and political roles and opening new historical understandings of ritual and political life in the Great Lakes. Njeru's history is now part of a heritage trail that villagers have created to earn income from heritage tourism (also aimed at teaching local history in schools) to create job opportunities for unemployed school-leavers and others in the village. The ritual regalia house, Buchwankwanzi, has been rebuilt where it used to sit, in the midst of a major archaeological site associated the origins of iron working and the capital of the later Hinda dynasty (Fig. 2).Footnote 43 Deeply involved in those investigations nearly fifty years ago, villagers now incorporate archaeological evidence into their heritage discourse.
Reconstruction of Buchwankwanzi ritual house by Katuruka villagers in the burial estate of King Rugomora Mahe.
Additional archaeological inquiries, at the request of the community and with their participation, have documented Early Iron Age smelting furnaces now on display, have enhanced the value of the heritage experience at Katuruka, and have reinforced historical identity. Ancillary research reveals that little is known about the once scores of female ritual officials who once curated the royal regalia of many Haya kings and conducted their rituals of renewal.Footnote 44 These histories, resulting from community initiatives, do not undermine the historical canon with their different ontologies – such as the fact that Njeru was visited monthly during the new moon ceremonies by her husband, King Rugomora, in the form of a snake [who] curled upon her naked lap.Footnote 45 Nor is there a threat to epistemological authority of our historical discipline through the enriched views they confer to Haya history.Footnote 46
There is an opportunity to see into the future of African historical archaeology though the lens of community initiatives and participatory research. This change has been coming since Posnansky risked incorporating local participation and was also recognized as a potential development more than a decade ago by Robertshaw, who presciently observed that debates arising in communities between archaeologists and local views ‘have the potential to subvert the usual relationship of power between the exotic Western archaeologist or African scholar and his or her local informants. However, this power relationship can only be subverted if the archaeologist sheds the mantle of expertise and engages his or her audience as equals'.Footnote 47 This moment has arrived.
A clear vista is opening, informed by what people in villages and urban neighborhoods find to be most important for their own historical identities. No longer is African archaeology the provenance of educated Westerners, let alone educated African archaeologists with their agendas to investigate the dynamics, say, of the slave trade and the role of other commodities such as spices in that complex trade. While such topics may elicit the interest of historians and ‘global’ historical archaeologists, they may mean little to the historical sensibilities of the communities that are the foci of such studies. The gap between modernity and precolonial history does not go unnoticed locally. People listen to their sons and daughters when they return from their daily lessons, never hearing a word uttered in support or in sympathy with their ancient local history. This elicits deep disquiet about the direction of culture change, a condition captured by Reid's observation that: ‘The deep past remains critically important; the longer it is marginalized, the less healthy the body politic will become, and the more troubled the society in denial.’Footnote 48 Local reflections on these conditions set in motion attempts to reclaim histories, leading to collaborations with archaeologists practicing a new archaeology by working with communities to learn what issues have historical importance, to help set research goals, and to participate in archaeological investigations.
