Introduction ^{Footnote 1}

For the better part of the past decade I have been piecing together the life story of a little-known African American who spent much of the second half of the nineteenth century in West Africa. “A biography of sorts,” is how I often describe it when asked about my project. My ambivalent answer comes from my sense that biography means a certain kind of life history – typically the kind selling well at commercial bookstores, focused on the individuality of an already-famous figure, and based on abundant sources. Instead, I was working to resuscitate someone who appears fleetingly in the historical record and whose unusual story nonetheless reveals broad processes affecting many of his contemporaries. These and other variations on what can be meant by the term biography prompt me to consider the ways that historians of Africa have approached life histories. What are the possibilities and limitations of focusing a historical study around one person?

I did not become a historian with the intention of writing a biography. Biographies are attractive because they take the shape of narratives and they create a sense of empathy between readers and their subjects. But while envying their mass appeal, professional historians have tended to disparage biographies. They are the quintessential Great Man history, centered on a noteworthy person in order to see how that individual shaped his, or occasionally her, society or country. They frequently depict their subject as a singular genius, unmistakably distinctive from the rest of his or her society. And they often are unabashedly nationalistic, focused on how this particular individual helped to forge his great nation.

These elements of biography have been no less true for Africa than for the United States or the United Kingdom. Praise singing could well be considered an oral form of biography. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, coastal elites in Anglophone West Africa merged this form with printed eulogies in the missionary tradition to produce sketches of important figures from within their ranks. ^{Footnote 2} In the 1960s, more professional historians wrote biographies of powerful figures from the colonial era – George Taubman Goldie, Jan Smuts, or African kings and chiefs – but by the 1970s and into the 1980s they also centered on African nationalist or proto-nationalist leaders like Tshekedi Khama, Jomo Kenyatta, Hastings Banda, Moshoeshoe, Sol Plaatje, Tom Mboya, and Amilcar Cabral. ^{Footnote 3} The Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria produced a steady flow of biographical studies of great Nigerians, starting in the 1970s and continuing to the present. With the 1978 publication of the Dictionary of African Biography, it was clear that biography was thriving in African history, and that its subject was a nationalist actor, typically male. ^{Footnote 4} “Great Man” biography was part of the nation-building project, intended to inspire, to show what was accomplished and how, and to instill feelings of patriotism by encouraging readers to identify with the biography’s subject. Even as African nationalism has lost much of its youthful optimism, such biographies continue to find their places in bookstores, libraries, and living rooms inside and outside of Africa. ^{Footnote 5}

My biography project is hardly a hagiographic account of a political leader, however. James Churchwill Vaughan, its subject, ultimately did lead a small-scale protest movement in colonial Lagos, but he never held political office. His major success, beyond sheer survival of the many calamities that befell him, was to make a life for himself and his family in Africa far beyond what he could have achieved, and what his embattled family members achieved, in his home state of South Carolina in the mid-nineteenth century. Vaughan was certainly an exceptional individual – and this is part of the appeal of his story – but I also wanted to use his life to illuminate the challenges and strategies faced by many people in the time and places in which he lived. That is, I wanted to combine elements of biography with those of life history, an approach quite familiar to Africanists, and microhistory, a method of social historians.

Life histories entered Africanist historical studies through anthropology, with its long tradition of incorporating them into ethnographic work. As in Mary Smith’s Baba of Karo (1954), the life history generally took the form of an extensive record of a person’s life told to and recorded by another, emphasizing the experience and perspectives of the individual. ^{Footnote 6} Rather than chart the achievements of great leaders, life histories sought to reveal broad features of social life through emblematic – or particularly talkative – informants. Such studies were relatively uninfluential, however, until in the early 1980s feminist anthropologists invigorated life history as a method for deeper understanding women’s consciousness. Marjorie Shostak’s Nisa presented the self-narrated autobiography of a fifty-year-old San woman from northeast Botswana, organized by stages in the life-cycle and sharply separated from the ethnographer’s commentary. First published in 1981, it has become a bestselling classic in anthropology. ^{Footnote 7} Baba of Karo was reissued the same year. Jean Davison’s Voices from Mutira: Lives of Rural Gikuyu Women featured translated and edited oral memoirs from seven Kenyan women. ^{Footnote 8} In these and other works, anthropologists endeavored to hear and transmit women’s voices and to understand the circumstances they described. They were deeply influenced by the feminist project, not specific to Africa, of women making meaning of their lives through narrative. ^{Footnote 9}

Meanwhile, within the historical profession, social history – focused on peasants, workers, slaves, women, and families – was flourishing, and with it, a new method emerged: microhistory. Just as feminist anthropologists sought to uncover perspectives overlooked by studies of the powerful, social historians like Europeanists Carlo Ginzburg and Natalie Zemon Davis endeavored to understand broad social dynamics through close examination of individual lives or particular local events involving specific, named people. ^{Footnote 10} Their subjects were not noteworthy because they were exceptional – except insofar as they had left written records of their lives – but instead were interesting because they were ordinary, showing how regular people lived, acted, and thought through particular times. Indeed, microhistory as social history is a method with an implicit argument: that history is made by a wider range of people than literate elites, and that historical forces and ordinary people act reciprocally on one another. Even when these studies centered on individual lives, though, these were not traditional biographies – not least because their fragmentary sources did not make a sustained examination of a whole life possible. ^{Footnote 11}

As they were for anthropologists writing life histories and historians of Europe and America writing microhistories, the 1980s and early 1990s were fertile years for Africanist social historians, some of whom focused on individual lives. Unlike traditional biographers, they were interested in understanding the ways historical forces were experienced, and even shaped, by ordinary people; and since their subjects did not leave extensive (or even any) written records, they relied heavily on oral testimonies. Even studies based in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries like Marcia Wright’s Women in Peril: Life Stories of Four Captives in Nineteenth Century East-Central Africa and the chapters collected in Claire Robertson and Martin Klein’s edited volume Women and Slavery in Africa drew largely on written versions of oral histories collected by missionaries, which poignantly showed how experiences of slavery were shaped by gender and age as well as other circumstances. ^{Footnote 12} Other books were based on oral histories collected and interpreted by the author, such as Timothy J. Keegan’s Facing the Storm: Portraits of Black Lives in Rural South Africa, which portrays four men’s life stories as illustrations of changing struggles for security and autonomy as South Africa transitioned from other forms of segregation and oppression to formal apartheid. In Three Swahili Women: Life Histories from Mombasa, Kenya, Sarah Mirza and Margaret Strobel present translated and transcribed interviews that reveal the diversity of Mombasa society, the salience of Swahili identity, and processes of female socialization and solidarity. Belinda Bozzoli’s Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy and Migrancy in South Africa, 1900–1983 showcases interviews with twenty-two elderly women conducted by Mmantho Nkotsoe, revealing their lives as urban workers and builders of households. ^{Footnote 13}

Such studies helped to transform our understandings of African history: they showed the centrality of women in slavery, for instance, or what it was like to live through South African segregation and apartheid. More fundamentally, they emphasized the agency of people even in “tight corners,” the messiness of historical change, and the varieties of responses to it. ^{Footnote 14} However, as with many anthropologists’ life histories, these historical studies often fell short on analysis in an effort to let their subjects speak for themselves. In fact, oral testimony was seen as so important for getting to the “real” experiences of ordinary people – “recovering their voices” – that large block quotations were often published with only minimal commentary by the researcher. Not only did this sometimes leave particular historical developments unexplained; it also assumed that as long as the researcher presented the interviewee’s words without much editing, the testimony could be taken at face value. ^{Footnote 15} Newer studies like Stephan Miescher’s Making Men in Ghana (2005) and Stephanie Newell’s The Forger’s Tale (2006) emphasized the importance of context in the collection of oral histories and the ubiquity of self-fashioning among historical, and ordinary, people. ^{Footnote 16} That is to say, they reminded readers that people can present themselves in different ways on different occasions, and the most interesting insights come not so much from noticing the phenomenon but from probing how and why given individuals fashioned themselves in given circumstances, and to what effects.

These days, Africanist historians only rarely engage and explore the sustained narrative of one individual life. With their micro-historical and interdisciplinary training, they can be sensitive and effective biographers, especially of seemingly “smaller” lives like the South African sharecropper Kas Maine, rendered with great nuance by Charles van Onselen. ^{Footnote 17} More often, though, Africanists incorporate snippets of life stories gleaned from archives, “tin trunk histories,” or oral history fieldwork to incorporate personal experiences into broader narratives of social and political change. ^{Footnote 18}

Yet Africanists are helping to revitalize the genre of biography in one area: transnational history, particularly of the “black Atlantic.” ^{Footnote 19} Together with historians of the Americas, a number of Africanists have produced new studies – including mine – that follow specific individuals of African descent through wide geographic circuits of the eighteenth and nineteenth century Atlantic world, revealing not only their extraordinary personal sagas but larger-scale dynamics. ^{Footnote 20} This trend has come about as the study of the slave trade has flourished, new research technologies have become widely available, and much is made of transnationalism both in current life and in the study of history. ^{Footnote 21} Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully’s Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography is grounded in the social and political life of South Africa’s Cape Colony while linking it to broader currents in European intellectual history. Also tracing his subject from South Africa to Europe, Roger Levine imaginatively reconstructs the activities, strategies, and even perceptions of the Xhosa chief and Christian missionary Jan Tzatzoe against the backdrop of deepening colonialism and hardening racism. James Sweet’s Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World traces its remarkable subject from present-day Benin to several parts of Brazil and Portugal, bringing to life circuits of power and resistance that connected far-flung localities. Divining Slavery and Freedom, by João Reis, illuminates the complexities of Atlantic slavery though the life story of a Brazilian slave exported from Lagos who exercised religious and political leadership in diverse, overlapping social spheres. ^{Footnote 22} Other studies highlight biographical approaches to Atlantic slaving and slavery even if they are not full-blown biographies, including Amistad’s Orphans by Benjamin Lawrence, as well as recent projects by Roquinaldo Ferriera, Sandra Greene, and Kristin Mann. ^{Footnote 23} Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard, in their transatlantic, multi-generational family study Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation call this approach “micro-history set in motion.” As they point out, “[t]here is, of course, nothing ‘micro’ about the Atlantic world of the nineteenth century, but even on that wide canvas the deepest analysis may emerge from close attention to the particular.” ^{Footnote 24}

Transnational life histories are not sweeping accounts of aggregate phenomena, just as other life histories are not. They do, however, illustrate connections, options, and comparisons. By following people over distances, readers get a sense of the political, social, and economic geographies that were more relevant, or just as relevant, in particular times and places as the colony or nation. We learn of the mobility of people’s worldviews – as in James Sweet’s Domingos Álvarez, whose commitment to healing reflected an anti-authoritarian worldview that likely got him enslaved in Dahomey and certainly resulted in his oppression by the Catholic Inquisition in Brazil and Portugal. And we see how strategies honed in one place could be used in another – as with Jan Tzatzoe’s self-portrayal as a model Christian African in both South Africa and to audiences in Britain, or in Scott and Hébrard’s Afro-Caribbean-European family’s insistence on writing as a safeguard of freedom.

“Black Atlantic” biography shares with the most recent trends in African life histories an orientation toward social history, or the histories of ordinary people and subalterns; and it pays particular attention to “self-fashioning,” especially as its subjects moved through different locations and contexts. This latter characteristic particularly sets these studies apart from traditional biography, which has been focused on capturing the thoughts and actions of a stable subject. ^{Footnote 25} Crais and Scully, in fact, found it so impossible to reconstruct any stable subjectivity on the part of Sara Baartman that they subtitled their book A Biography and a Ghost Story. Emphasizing the continual self-fashioning of his subject, Vincent Carretta termed Olaudah Equiano, with perhaps ironic understatement, a self-made man. ^{Footnote 26} If, as a generation of social history as shown, flexible and relational identities have been a hallmark African humanity, “microhistories set in motion” offer glimpses of this principle in action and may serve as models for biographies set anywhere. ^{Footnote 27}

Three major themes of transnational life histories – mobility, politics operating at multiple scales, and self-fashioning – may be exemplified by briefly returning to my recent book Atlantic Bonds. ^{Footnote 28} Its central figure, an African American man named James Churchwill (“Church”) Vaughan, lived between 1828 and 1893. A decade before the American Civil War, Vaughan set out to fulfill his formerly enslaved father’s dying wish: that he should leave his home in South Carolina for a new life in Africa. With help from the American Colonization Society, he went first to Liberia, though he did not stay there long. In 1855, Vaughan accepted an offer of employment in Yorubaland – about which Americans knew virtually nothing – with Southern Baptist missionaries. Over the next four decades in today’s southwestern Nigeria, Vaughan became a war captive in Ibadan, served as a military sharpshooter in the ultimately ruined town of Ijaye, built and re-built a livelihood in Abeokuta and Lagos, led a revolt against white racism in missionary churches, and founded a family of activists. Following Vaughan’s journeys from South Carolina to Liberia to several parts of Yorubaland enables a view of linkages across the nineteenth century Atlantic world as well as a comparison of related and similar phenomena in various settings. His story reveals the ubiquity of slavery, or relations much like it, and the ambiguities of freedom in a range of Atlantic world locations. With his transatlantic outlook and connections, Church Vaughan could compare the particular forms of oppression for black people in the American South and different parts of West Africa like almost no one else in his time. In his adopted home of Lagos, his transcontinental perspective opened up new possibilities and critiques as well as creative new alliances.

One of the insights of this study has to do with the ways the African diaspora affected Africa itself. Black Atlantic migrants like Vaughan often could draw on lessons learned in multiple contexts as well as dispersed practical networks in their struggles for security and dignity. When in 1888 Vaughan led a rebellion against white missionaries in colonial Lagos, for instance, he and his allies – some with diasporic or enslaved backgrounds and others without – linked colonial racism to the history of Atlantic slavery, referring to the mission church as a “barracoon.” Their diasporic consciousness went beyond the level of analysis and discourse, however, to something more concrete. The rebels’ strategy of separation from the mission church paralleled the contemporaneous development of all-African American religious and educational institutions in the Reconstruction South, which Vaughan and some of his allies knew about from their contacts in the United States. Thus, Vaughan’s links to America shaped his own life as well as broader developments in West Africa. In fact, the church he helped to found, Lagos’s Ebenezer Baptist Church (originally called the Native Baptist Church), was the first non-missionary Christian church in West Africa, spearheading a much wider movement of church independence and cultural nationalism. ^{Footnote 29}

Atlantic Bonds, like other “black Atlantic” biographies, also reveals “self-fashioning” at work. Through the twentieth century – that is, after his death – Church Vaughan has been remembered in his family not only for his accomplishments, but for something more intriguing. According to a story handed down through generations, when Vaughan went to Yorubaland, he was in fact returning to the homeland from which his father had been enslaved. He knew this because he saw “country marks” on people’s faces that matched his father’s. This tale has fascinating implications – not least that it would make Vaughan perhaps the only African American (that is, from the United States) ever to undo the family separation of the slave trade by reconnecting with his specific African relatives. ^{Footnote 30} In fact, it is such an appealing story that Ebony magazine published a version of it in a feature on the U.S. and Nigerian Vaughans in 1975. ^{Footnote 31} But as I learned to my disappointment, it’s not true: Church Vaughan’s father was born in Virginia, not Africa, and there is no evidence that the tale was ever told during Vaughan’s lifetime or immediately afterward. ^{Footnote 32}

So how did this story come to be part of Church Vaughan’s legacy? Reconstructing a genealogy of the “country marks” tale itself, I eventually concluded that it originated with Vaughan’s Lagos-born daughter, who told it when she visited her cousins in the United States in the 1920s. Her visit highlighted and reinforced the ties between the two branches of the family, but it also made clear the vast differences in their prospects and experiences. Vaughan’s daughter Aida Arabella Vaughan Moore was wealthy and cultured, married to a barrister who had recently been elected to the Lagos Legislative Council. While some of her American cousins were prospering after migrating north, they as well as the more embattled ones she visited in South Carolina faced a relentless environment of white supremacy, including a rash of deadly “race riots” early in the decade that touched some of them personally. I surmise that that Mrs. Moore described her father as a returning Yoruba descendant – and by implication her U.S. cousins also as Yoruba-Americans – as a way to make common cause and express solidarity. Then the story took on a life of its own. Altogether, the tale of the country marks does not reflect Church Vaughan’s self-fashioning as much as his daughter’s efforts on his behalf, but it does point to the opportunities provided by mobility to remake oneself – a consistent phenomenon in many life histories, especially transnational ones.

In practical terms, transnational biographies are difficult to execute: they require the discipline of following the subject where that person went, through a range of locations, archives, and sources. ^{Footnote 33} When they focus on relatively obscure subjects, as my book does, they require needle-in-haystack sleuthing and painstaking piecing together of fragments of evidence. But they often offer valuable insights into African and broader dynamics. Histories of mobile people, whether they lived centuries ago or more recently, challenge scholars to rethink political geography from the bottom up. They show the specific networks that made up what are commonly glossed as “global” forces and the movement of people and political ideas among them. They also help us to uncover structural features of political economies, because by mapping individuals’ strategies, we illuminate the obstacles or opportunities they faced. And transnational life histories combat the unfortunate tendency some have to think of Africa as always “behind” the rest of the world by putting Africa and other places in the same temporal frame.

Just as an earlier generation of life histories prompted a re-examination of oral history methodology, so transnational microhistories reveal the limits of documents, especially those seen in isolation. The most famous example is probably Olaudah Equiano, whose Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (first published in 1789) detailed his origins in West Africa and capture by slavers, but who also signed documents, discovered by Vincent Carretta, placing his birth in South Carolina. ^{Footnote 34} In Scott and Hébrard’s Freedom Papers, a succession of documents produced in Haiti and New Orleans rather than one by itself shows the persistent efforts of a formerly enslaved African woman to ensure the freedom of herself and her Saint Domingue-born daughter. In a work-in-progress by Kristin Mann, a Lagos court case seemingly about the inheritance rights of children turns out to be – when read along with documents about the same people in Brazil – about the relationships and resentments between a former master and his former bondspeople. ^{Footnote 35} In my study, American-produced documents about “country marks,” when read against obituaries and other descriptions produced in Nigeria, are revealed as evidence of affiliation and aspiration rather than direct genealogy.

I am certainly not arguing that historians should all produce life histories, traditional biographies, or even “biographies of sorts.” Nevertheless, life histories, whether in set motion or located largely in one place, belong firmly in our repertoire of approaches into the African and diasporic past. They help us to understand relationships between structure and agency, revealing how individual lives, social processes, institutions, and contexts affect one another. At the same time, Africanist life histories of whatever variation help to redefine what “biography” is. Along with the Great Men – of Africa as well as elsewhere – we have ordinary people doing great things, people living through extraordinary circumstances, people who reinvented themselves, and people whose viewpoint makes us see things in new ways. To read and write “biographies of sorts” is to get to know people whose lives shaped the world, even if we have never heard of them before.