This festschrift pays homage to Adam Jones (Leipzig University) through a collection of thirty-six chapters bookended by a “Prelude” and “Finale” (a nod to the importance of music in Jones’s life and that of his wife, the concert pianist Mariko Mitsuyu), all of which adds up to nearly seven hundred pages in English, German, and French. It is a credit to the editors—and, as we will see, to Jones—that the wide range of topics, languages, and even disciplines represented in the volume cohere into an exploration of sources and methods used to study African history and culture from the last centuries before colonialism to the present. The book is organized chronologically and thematically; surprisingly, it also manages to track the topics, methods, and concerns of Jones’s career. Unfortunately, the volume lacks a list of contributors, and only some authors describe their relationship to Jones. Thus the reader is often left to wonder about the historical development of the intellectual network celebrated in the volume.
Organized into ten sections, the volume opens with chapters exploring oral tradition. John Thornton compares evidence of the (geographical) origins of Kongo to new research based on historical linguistics. Robin Law explores the oral historical materials informing an underused documentary source for studying “traditional” Ọyọ history. Claude-Hélène Perrot offers a method in the form of seven questions that must be asked of oral traditions. Through a critique of the geomythology, David Henige describes what must not be asked of oral traditions, presumably with tongue firmly in cheek as he calculates the .0018 percent chance that any oral tradition will follow the criteria of production and transmission assumed by geomythologists.
The next section offers case studies of new material objects and documents for studying precolonial coastal West Africa. Peter Marks’s chapter uses historical evidence to flesh out—and challenge—art historians’ ideas about the productions of Luso-African ivories. Gérard Chouin’s chapter includes a translation of a newly discovered anonymous account of a seventeenth-century Breton traveling to the Coast of Guinea and a careful reconstruction of the traveler’s likely identity and itinerary. Natalie Everts explores rumors, accusations, and race in the context of tightly managed trade negotiations between Europeans and mixed-race employees of the West India Company and local townsfolk on the Gold Coast.
A third section explores wonderful visual sources for African history, often reproducing them in the chapters. Karsten Jahn and Ute Wardenga read between the lines of Georg Schweinfurth’s nineteenth-century map of the upper Nile region to detect the voices of Africans. Michaela Unterholzner keeps the tension between the intimate reading of individual photographs and their broad dissemination as a form of mass media in her contextualization of German mission photo collections. Umma Aliyu Musa focuses on the intimate and autobiographical dimensions of photos of Hausa women in the 1970s.
The fourth collection of chapters focuses on missionaries. Karolyn Wetjen offers a fascinating comparison of the information generated at provincial stations of the Leipzig Mission and the ways in which such information was (or was not) incorporated into publications aimed at a broader audience. Similarly, Anne Beutter compares the practices of African catechists and congregants of the Basel Mission at an outlying station with Europeans’ vague reporting on outliers’ activities. Paul Jenkins reconstructs the relationship between the King of Bamum and the Basel Mission’s “architect,” emphasizing the sincerity of the king’s interest in the missionaries, a sincerity masked by the king’s later conversion to Islam as the French took control of the Grassfields. Philipp Seitz reflects on the concept of culture in studies of missionary history and practice. Lize Kriel reflects on the role of nostalgia in the historian’s digitization of a missionary archive and the missionary’s informants’ recollections of the precolonial past in South Africa.
The historical actors at the center of the chapters constituting part 5 do the unexpected in early colonial East Africa. Alexander Mackay rapidly reverses his stance on the pressing matter of the arms trade to East Africa in Felix Brahm’s chapter. An Ottoman envoy taking a circuitous route to Zanzibar reveals the surprising value of Ottoman archives for African history (Hatice Ugur). A slave impersonates his master’s son in some shifty land transactions, frustrating said son, confusing some colonial officers, and playing into the hands of others (Geert Castryck). Doctors create racial categories and confuse biological processes as they document health in German East Africa, encoding their contradictory understandings of race and disease into an underutilized body of sources (Manuela Bauche).
The next three chapters return to West Africa, again exploring unexpected sources. Odile Georg tracks changing ideas about marrying well through press coverage of weddings in Freetown. Andreas Eckert demonstrates the value of petitions for understanding colonial history in a case study of the changing fortunes of Duala middlemen caught up in the transition to German colonial rule. Katja Werthman explores recent kurubi performances and the role of women in maintaining an oral art once thought to be dying out in Islamic West Africa.
A tighter focus on African careers unites section 7. Joël Glasman complicates the idea of “colonial intermediaries” in his study of civilian police in Togo. Dmitri van den Bersselaar describes the narrative tropes deployed by former employees whose life histories were collected to supplement the new archive of the United Africa Company. Bernhard Streck tracks the career of the missionary Bruno Gutmann and his effort to reconcile Chagga culture with Christian missionary visions.
In the next section the authors illuminate particular intersections of African and European histories through fairly unconventional archives. Holger Stoeker describes the politics and historical scholarship surrounding the return of human remains to Namibia. Katja Geisenhainer reconstructs the beginning of the ethnologist Erika Sulzmann’s career in the context of the rise of national socialism. Jochen Lingelbach explores the experiences of Polish refugees in East Africa, while Sara Pugach explores the experiences of Africans in East Germany through university archives (including reproductions of archival documents). These last two bring to light fascinating new sources for African history.
The penultimate section focuses on the politics of memory in the reconstruction of history. Tina Kramer reminds us that even basic facts about matters like the establishment of the state of Guinea-Bissau are not as clear as we might expect. Peter Lambertz offers a rich ethnography of the sensory and affective practices of remembering and spirituality among a group of Congolese practitioners of Japanese Sekai Kyûseikkyô. Beatrix Heintze’s powerful philosophical reflections explore the temporary, shifting interface between cultural memory and history. Joram Tarusarira explores such interfaces in the context of Zimbabwe’s recent past.
In the final section, Robert Kappel, Helmut Asche, and Ute Rietdorf explore the continent’s recent political and economic history. Kappel assesses Germany’s past policy and makes recommendations for the future. Asche complicates the “Africa rising” narrative. Rietdorf reconstructs the history of GDP as a concept, a measure, an indicator, and a goal applied to Africa.
For the reader interested in many of the sources and methods mustered to study African history and culture, this volume offers valuable chapters: some covering step-by-step methods, many contextualizing new and quite original sources, others exploring the philosophy of history and the politics of memory, and a few combining such agendas. In particular, many of the case studies following Jones’s exceptional tradition of source criticism will be valuable in the undergraduate classroom because the original sources are often reproduced alongside their contextualization and interpretation. Other chapters will find their afterlives in the research of scholars who consult them as specialists on topics like missionary history, colonialism, and African biography. But an index would have assisted such visitors to this long, multilanguage volume. In sum: this opus is a credit to Jones’s legacy, with extraordinarily diverse chapters harmonizing specifically because they pay tribute to him.
