Christianity and Public Culture in Africa. Edited by HARRI ENGLUND. Athens, OH:Ohio University Press, Cambridge Centre of African Studies Series, .Pp. ix+. $., hardback (ISBN ----); $., paperback(ISBN ----).
KEY WORDS: African modernities, Christianity, media, political culture.
Adopting a postsecularist approach, the contributors of this volume engage inethnographic and historical investigations to demonstrate how ‘African Christianshave constituted, and not merely addressed, domains and categories for moral andpolitical practice and reflection’ (p. , emphasis added). Using the notion of publicculture, the aim is to open the study of religion in Africa to wider fields than formalpolitics and popular culture alone. The chapters consider questions about howChristian ideas, practices, and styles assume public significance and thereby cross avariety of boundaries between private and public dominions, rural and urban areas,colonial and postcolonial situations, and mainline Catholic Protestant, andPentecostal churches. At the same time they generate conflicts with other citizens,viewpoints, and practices. In their rich empirical work on the multiple ways inwhich Christians make religion public, the authors particularly highlight themediating practices of religions, such as the use of books and radio, and agriculturaland reproductive techniques.
Part I, ‘Missionary and Nationalist Encounters’, starts with vivid descriptionsby James Pritchett about the role of Protestant and Catholic missions in enrichingthe visual, material, and behavioural components of the Lunda’s life in Zambia’sMwinilunga District in the twentieth century. Pritchett presents rural Africa as asite of innovation and experimentation. For example, American and Europeansecond-hand clothing was appropriated and reworked by Lunda youth who therebycommented on global fashion trends. Marja Hinfelaar contests the Pentecostalistinterpretation of Zambia’s history as an evolution from a secular, satanic past to aChristian present and future, showing the public role of other churches, inparticular the Catholic Church’s input into the scientific socialism debate afterindependence that helped to shape different Christian and secular imaginations ofthe nation. Nicholas Kamau-Goro focuses on how Christianity influenced publicculture in colonial and postcolonial Kenya through the creative writings of Ngũgĩwa Thiong’o, who uses Christian allegories in his appropriation and rejection ofChristianity as a force of salvation from (post)colonial oppression.
Part II, ‘Patriarchy and Public Culture’ analyses the forms in which veryintimate domains become public by looking at Christianity and gender relations,sexuality and reproduction. Barbara Cooper perceptively grasps how family life,ritual performances, and the use of media are all interconnected in the demographiccompetition of the minority community of evangelical Christians in Muslim-majority Niger. By Christianising the ‘Muslim’ rite of naming a newborn child,children are claimed for and controlled by the Christian community to increase thenumber of followers. Moreover, the public performance of the naming ceremonybecomes the most important way for Christians to reach Muslims, communicatingtheir presence through sound –music, sermons and radio announcements –which
is a technique of staking a claim to the public sphere. Ruth Prince sketches theheated and complex field of public debates among traditionalists, Christians, andhuman rights activists regarding Luo culture in western Kenya. She examines howthe discourses about widow inheritance, which has become a growing concern inrelation to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, expressed in radio programmes and booklets,have historical precedents in mission Christianity. The diverse Christian idioms areoften more compelling to women than human rights discourses. With a rare focuson Pentecostal female leaders, Damaris Parsitau considers how women’s partici-pation in Kenya’s public culture is a complex mix of empowering and intolerantattitudes and outcomes.
I find Part III, ‘A Plurality of Pentecostal Publics’, where a variety ofcontradictory realities and views of the Pentecostal impact on public life in Africaare presented, to be the most intriguing and positively puzzling part of the book.Birgit Meyer’s theoretical reflection of ethnographic and historical work on Ghanaemphasizes how the very act of going public by Pentecostals is not neutral, as it isembedded in a historical legacy of a distinction between Christianity and traditionalreligion. Compared to other religious groups, Pentecostals have been able to gaina strong public position by embracing consumer items and mass media, therebytransforming the public sphere. While Meyer underscores the resulting tensions inthe public sphere, Harri Englund stresses that Pentecostal mediation of spiritualwarfare in Malawi shapes a form of spiritual kinship that advances peaceful publiclife and encourages democratic civility. The testimonies, Transworld Radiobroadcasts, and the shared everyday lives of believers and non-believers in thetownships demonstrate the importance of human relationships in proselytising.Yet, with the case of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Durban,South Africa, Ilana vanWyk reveals how intimate relationships are discouraged andPentecostals are encouraged to engage in one-off contracts with God through largemonetary sacrifices that increase distrust in the church and pastors, and amongstchurch and family members. Next, Michael Perry Kweku Okyerefo argues thatPentecostalism contributes to socioeconomic and spiritual development in Ghanaby launching social services – orphanages, schools, and medical clinics – resemblingthe pioneering missionary organisations and ensuring the Pentecostal presence inthe communities. The challenge these divergent and inspiring chapters offer for thefuture study of Pentecostalism and Christianity at large is to further develop asophisticated and alternative analytical framework to not only capture the publicappeal of religion but also its limits, taking into account the indivisibility of thematerial and spiritual.
LINDA VAN DE KAMPTilburg University, The Netherlands
SCHOLARSHIP ON AFRICA IN A TROUBLEDCOMPARATIVE FRAME
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Wissenschaft und Dekolonisation: Paradigmenwechsel und institutioneller Wandelin der akademischen Beschäftigung mit Afrika in Deutschland und Frankreich,–. By FELIX BRAHM. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, . Pp. .E, hardback (ISBN ----).
KEY WORDS: Colonialism, decolonization, Western images of Africa.
As indicated in his title, Felix Brahm seeks to make a comparative study ofscholarship on Africa in Germany and France from the inter-war era through the
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first postcolonial decade, with specific attention to paradigm shifts and institutionalchange. The outcome is somewhat narrower than the goal: there is little ontheoretical formulations beyond a general turn from colonial/eurocentric/racistperceptions of Africa towards more universalistic notions of ‘development’ or‘modernization’. The comparison between the German and French institutions isundermined by the author’s far greater concern with Germany and by the radicallydifferent colonial histories of the two countries. Decolonization also enters the storyrather late and, in the German case, plays second fiddle to the broader issues ofNazism and the ColdWar. This book is mainly a history of specific institutions andof the politics and academic aspirations of individual scholars and administrators.
Brahm has undertaken a prodigious amount of research into academic archives todraw extensive lists of courses on Africa offered by the various institutions inquestion. A similarly quantitative approach to his book suggests that the authordevoted about per cent more attention to Germany than to France. Thecomparisons are rendered particularly problematic in the context ofdecolonization – for the period under consideration in the book (–),Germany had no colonies and in general it had only a very brief colonial history.One academic outcome of this political difference that Brahm might have takenmore systematically into account is that German scholarship on Africa(Afrikanistik) tended to follow the philological model of language and literature(in this case mainly language) rather than the social science direction of France,Britain, and the United States. Brahm does give great attention to the ideologicalissues of the Nazi era and the subsequent division of Germany into two states onopposite sides of the Iron Curtin. France never went through quite the samechanges; nevertheless, the author misses opportunities for comparison by notpaying more attention to Vichy fascism, to the prominent role of Marxists inFrench Africanist scholarship, and even to the New Left student uprisings of (which Brahm discusses only in the German context).
The institutional history of African studies in France and in Germany has beencovered in a number of works which Brahm acknowledges in his extensivebibliography and notes. His most interesting effort at originality consists ofchoosing parallel sets of ‘sites’ (Standesorten), meaning clusters of institutions (bothacademic and extra-university) in the capital of each country (Paris, Berlin) and inport cities connected commercially to Africa (Bordeaux, Hamburg). However thisdoubly-comparative structure breaks down after the Second World War. Bordeauxbecomes rather peripheral to French African studies in France. In East Germany anew Africanist center at Leipzig overshadows that of Berlin. In West GermanyCologne takes a major role because of its proximity to the Federal Republic capitalof Bonn. In all these cases there are efforts (least successful in the more extensivelydiscussed German cases) to create inter-disciplinary African/area studies centers onthe American model.
Brahm has relatively little to say about the content of the scholarship produced inthese various institutions other than to note elements of colonialism, racism, andcollaboration (by several prominent German Africanists) with the Apartheidregime of South Africa. His most extensive engagement with theory concerns thestructuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss, whose dubious relevance to African studiesis never even discussed. There is a useful account of the struggles to found a newWest German African Studies Association (Vereinigung von Afrikanisten inDeutschland) more in keeping with postcolonial scholarship, but no account ofparallel developments in France.
The most engaging sections of the book involve the intersecting careers ofGerman scholars, with their varying ties to theNazi regime; all, even one involved ingenocide against Sinti/Roma people, are ultimately exonerated. It is perhaps
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significant that Brahm prefaces his introduction with a quote by Hamburgprofessor of ‘Overseas History’, Egmont Zechlin, in which he points to ‘theemancipation of the colored world from the system of European domination’ as asign that the ‘modern era has come to an end’ (p. ). Zechlin was a very ambiguouscharacter who promoted post-Second World War African studies, but hadpreviously not only supported the Nazis but also attempted to use the Germanoccupation of Paris to seize thousands of books from French colonial libraries.Brahm dug Zechlin’s unpublished pronouncement on global history out of thearchives but like much else he has unearthed here, it is not clear what we are to makeof it.
RALPH A. AUSTENUniversity of Chicago
SOCIAL IMAGINATION AND YOUTH IN CAIRO
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Connected in Cairo: Growing up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East. By MARK
ALLEN PETERSON. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, .Pp. xvii+. $., paperback (ISBN: ----); $, hardback(ISBN: ----).
KEY WORDS: Egypt, class, media, modernity.
Cairo’s cityscape has changed rapidly since the mid-s. One of the moststriking features of the revamped landscape has been the ubiquitous presence of,and importance attached to, foreign, First World goods, styles, and knowledge.Connected in Cairo by Mark Allen Peterson addresses this cosmopolitan face ofCairo in the years before the uprising, and investigates the social divisions ithelped define and elaborate among Cairenes. Peterson explores the ways in whichbeing connected had come to constitute and signify specific class positions. Hecorrectly points to the importance of imaginations of place and connection,focusing on what he terms metadeictic discourses, ‘discourses that seek to interpretand make judgments about cultural artifacts and practices by connecting them withother places’ (p. ). In a globalizing context, transnational flows are localized,creating new distinctions between products, styles, and people construed as local,and their counterparts from elsewhere. Elite status but also desires for upwardsocial mobility are expressed through cosmopolitan consumption and styles.
Peterson, who taught at the American University in Cairo (AUC) for five years,has made good use of his familiarity with Egypt’s elite students to map out thebalancing act involved in displaying cosmopolitan skills and styles withoutcontravening what are construed as local or Arab cultural codes. The latter aremainly framed through recourse to gendered sexual norms. In the various chapters,Peterson explores how mostly elite children, students, and entrepreneurs sociallyposition themselves by drawing on consumption practices, styles, and discoursesthat signify a familiarity and connection with the West. These differentprotagonists walk a tightrope of social positioning in a landscape in which class,culture, and forms of connectedness to the outside, particularly the West, areintimately related. In this context, cosmopolitanism can signify elite status but alsoinauthenticity, while the local can be read both as lack of sophistication and asauthentic. Peterson admirably combines these explorations with accessibletheoretical discussions of media and globalization.
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Yet, however well chosen, Peterson’s forays into cosmopolitan Cairo tend tomerely touch on, rather than unpack, what is at stake in this starkly divided sociallandscape. The ethnography at times seems rather thin; for example Peterson’sdiscussion of elite young men’s visits to working-class ‘ahawi’ (street-side cafés) issuggestive, but it fails to move beyond the single case he describes. He does not tellus enough about the social lives of the young men who cherish their slummingexperience. Oddly, for a discussion of class distinction in globalizing times,Connected in Cairo does not sufficiently situate its discussions in the specificpolitical-economic and ideological climate of Egypt at the time. Moreover, the bookonly fleetingly addresses the long history of linkages between class, culture, andconnectedness, which reverberate in contemporary discussions of social distinctionand belonging. As I have argued elsewhere these two aspects – the reigningneoliberal project of Egypt’s non-democratic regime, and the way cosmopolitanCairo takes up and revitalizes longstanding debates about elite status and Westerncultural capital in the forms of languages, styles, and consumption – are central tounderstanding Cairo’s new professional upper-middle class. In the absence ofdetailed ethnography and significant attention to political-economic and historicalcontext, the discussions of Connected in Cairo feel insufficiently situated in theeveryday life of that teeming, sprawling and highly divided metropolis.
Despite these reservations, Connected in Cairo provides an accessible andinstructive reading of the everyday construction and negotiation of what isoftentimes glossed as globalization, and will be of value to students and academicsinterested in the importance of social imagination in the making of local worlds inglobal times.
ANOUK DE KONINGUniversity of Amsterdam
AN ALGERIAN DIASPORA
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Algerians without Borders: The Making of a Global Frontier Society. By ALLAN
CHRISTELOW. Gainesville, FL: Florida University Press, . Pp. xiii+.$., hardback (ISBN ----).
KEY WORDS: Algeria, African diaspora, identity, international relations.
As Allan Christelow’s rich study of Algerians who cross borders shows, Algerianmigration has a complex history involving the circulation of ideas as well as people,just as it provides a fascinating means of exploring the many strategies deployed byAlgerians in the face of Ottoman and then French control and, today, globalization.The book takes a long chronological approach (starting in the late eighteenthcentury) alongside a broad geographical framework (from the Pacific to the MiddleEast to North America – in addition to France) to better put ‘the Algerianexperience into historical and comparative perspective’ (p. ).As the author remarks, Algeria, as a ‘frontier society’ has often been situated
uncomfortably on the fault line of tensions between Western and Islamic worlds,making it acutely susceptible to geopolitical shifts (p. ). Simultaneously,however, the country has produced individuals capable of understanding amultitude of political, cultural, and intellectual environments and serving ascultural intermediaries in different roles (interpreters, scholars, and diplomats),thereby challenging – both implicitly and explicitly –many a cultural binary.Indeed, one of the book’s key aims is to analyze, through a study of the longue
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durée, the multiplicity of factors creating or foreclosing cultural, political, andreligious dialogue between Algerians and the societies with which they haveinteracted, as the internal, regional, and wider world order was continuallyreframed by, inter alia, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in , French invasion in, the decline of the Ottoman Empire, two World Wars, and decolonization.
The analysis does not neglect the significant rural-urban migrations of recentcenturies. However, much emphasis is logically placed on the longstanding linksbetween western Algeria (Oran) and Morocco, and eastern Algeria (Constantine)and both Tunis and Tripoli, for example amongst Sufi religious orders, family andcommercial networks. Using many relevant Arabic-language sources, the analysispays particular attention to the biographical trajectories of key political andreligious figures. Christelow underlines the significance of migration (hijra),whether chosen or forced, to Cairo, Medina, Mecca, and especially Damascus, thelatter emerging as a focal point for a sizeable Algerian migrant community. After, the central Algerian figure there was exiled Amir ‘Abd al-Qadir, emblematicof resistance to French conquest. Subsequently, Damascus attracted manyAlgerians fleeing repression, avoiding French conscription, and seeking out thecity’s dynamic political and cultural environment.The wider French imperial space produced new destinations for Algerians:
military service across empire or in the hexagon, work in French factories, wartimeimprisonment, or exile through official diktat all played a significant role inallowing ordinary as well as better-off Algerians to develop cultural knowledge andlinguistic skills enabling them to view their original place(s) of socialisation fromanother perspective. Christlelow also shows how Algerians proved skillful innegotiating within a context of European imperial rivalries during and after WorldWar I: this arguably foreshadowed the National Liberation Front’s (FLN) strategicuse of Cold War rivalries.
In , Syria came under French control, and many Algerians thereforerecentred their activities on Algeria itself. Usefully complementing JamesMcDougall’s work, Christelow examines the complex intersection betweenreligion, culture, and politics seen within the Islamic Reformist movement(Association of ‘Ulama), showing how figures such as Bashir Ibrahimi harnessednew ideas of religious reform and nationalism. The Association used schools andtheatre (inspired by Egyptian influences) to extend its reach into the flourishingAlgerian civil society of the s, s, and early s. For this period, moreattention could have been devoted to scouting and sporting associations and thetrade union movement as prime examples of cross-fertilization used by variousoppositional groups. However, Christelow’s analysis usefully underlines the pluralAlgerian political field before FLN hegemony and the heightened Frenchrepression after : the war for liberation (–) witnessed the rapiddisintegration of symbolic spaces for cultural, political, and inter-faith dialogue.
This war-time narrowing and fragmentation of Algerian civil society, the bookargues, left the post-independence Algerian state in an unassailably dominantposition, creating political refugee migrations both under President Boumediene(–) and during the armed conflict of the s. This conflict – and economicfactors – generated a reconfiguration and further diversification of the Algeriandiasporas with destinations now including Quebec, Belgium, Italy, and the UnitedKingdom. Interestingly, Christelow also suggests, over the last two centuriesAlgeria has focused international attention on themes such as piracy, slavery,torture, and, latterly, terrorism – all subjects informing how Algerians are perceivedabroad.
Algerians without Borders succeeds in broadening and deepening our under-standing of the political and cross-cultural impact of Algerian migration, both at
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home and abroad. This thought-provoking and refreshing addition to the literaturetakes us within and beyond the Franco-Algerian dynamic, placing Algeria within atruly global perspective over several centuries.
JAMES HOUSEUniversity of Leeds
NATIONALISM AND MEDICAL DISCOURSE
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Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt. By HIBBA
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt saw increasingly centralizedpolitical institutions arrogate to themselves authority over populations andindividual bodies, often through force. But they also accomplished control throughsubtly coercive benevolence.Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in ColonialEgypt traces this ambiguous benevolence through the famous Qasr al-Aini medicalschool and the medically trained men and women who served as intermediaries instate building and colonization. Drawing on existing literature and original archivalresearch, Hibba Abugideiri compares two discontinuous stages in this process. Inthe first Mohammed Ali Pasha (–) and his French physician-appointee, ClotBey, strove to bring continental medicine to Egypt. In the second phase, underde facto British colonization, a secular rationalist hegemony emerged throughinteractions between biomedically trained Egyptian men and their British tutors.That secular understanding of nationalism extended through popular print mediato Egyptians at large, though most effectively to the literate upper and uppermiddle classes in urban milieus. Victorian biomedicine construed in local termscame to frame an image of the Egyptian woman as the ‘republican mother’, at oncea means of achieving, and a metaphor for, Egyptian nationalism. Contra Britishexpectations but in keeping with their view that progress is gauged by women’sstatus, the imagined ‘republican mother’ became a sign of Egypt’s fitness fororderly, ‘modern’, secular self-rule.Mohammed Ali’s reforms to improve the health of the broader population
observed gender segregation norms by educating women as medical midwives andhakimas (doctresses) whose roles ran parallel to those of male doctors. Earliesttrainees were drawn from the ranks of Sudanese and Abyssinian slaves, palaceeunuchs, and orphaned Egyptian girls. They received ‘practical training inmidwifery, vaccination, bloodletting, and bandaging . . . typically taught inParisian midwifery schools’ (p. ). Despite their ambiguous respectability,these women served as health officers with broad responsibilities and access towomen’s homes. Under the British, however, indigenous male physicians gainednewfound power and professional status, and female medics lost ground. Womenwho received medical training saw their courses shortened and their rolescircumscribed. No longer able to work as general health officers, they becamenurses and nurse midwives – assistants to medical men and subject to theirauthority. A paternalistic gender hierarchy grounded in Victorian practice andconcepts of biological inevitability replaced the earlier parallel gender norms bothamong professionals and the wider population. The popular emphasis on women’sroles in nurturing, childbearing, and domestic work received secular
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rationalization, arguably deepening gender disparities ideologically by anchoringthem in science. The book is an important reminder that ‘modernization’ brings itsown gender hierarchies and constraints.
Abugideiri’s opposition of developments during Mohammed Ali’s regime,which ended in , with those of the British colonial period that began in iscertainly useful for elucidating differences in medical education and practice beforeand after British occupation. However, it succeeds in part by eliding scientific,social, economic, and political events during the book’s lacuna, –, a periodthat saw continued socioeconomic transformation under Ali’s successors andincreasing European implication in Egyptian affairs (think Suez Canal). The starkdiscrepancy that Abugideiri adduces between the start of her temporal frame andthe Anglicizing process at its end was surely complicated by the significantadvances in scientific knowledge during the interim, as well as by the state’spolitical and economic imbrications with foreign powers.
Although Abugideiri notes that Mohammed Ali expanded militarily into Syria,Arabia, Libya, and Sudan, she does not consider how Egypt’s divisive andincreasingly circumscribed colonial presence south of Aswan affected intellectualand political collaborations during the British period. ‘The unity of the Nile Valley’was a prominent refrain among educated classes from Cairo to Khartoum. On theBritish side, one is left with an impression of Egyptian exceptionalism (perhapsfostered by Foreign Office reports), as though the wider context of colonial Africaand Asia had little relevance for British strategies in Egypt. A fuller discussion ofscientific rationalism and Islam as they intersect or diverge on the issues of genderand traditional practices would also have been welcome. What was it that Egyptiandoctors with their Anglicized training sought to reform in their efforts to fashionindigenous women as ‘republican mothers’? What role did the trained midwivesand nurses play in disseminating medical rationalism to the Egyptian public? Howfully did it come to inform daily life? Such queries merely suggest the richness ofthe topics Abugideiri has delved into in this book. Gender and the Making ofModern Medicine in Colonial Egypt is a valuable analysis of how medical institutionbuilding paved the way for a syncretic indigenous medical discourse withsignificant implications for gender relations and for the rhetoric and mobilizationof anti-colonial nationalism.
JANICE BODDYUniversity of Toronto
A JESUIT IN ETHIOPIA
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Pedro Páez’s History of Ethiopia, , vol. . Edited by ISABEL BOAVIDA, HERVÉ
PENNEC, and MANUEL JOÃO RAMOS. Translated by CHRISTOPHER J. TRIBE.Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, . Pp. xx+. $., hardback(ISBN: ).
KEY WORDS: Ethiopia, missions, text editions.
Father Pedro Páez’s History of Ethiopia is an invaluable, first-hand account ofeveryday life in a Jesuit mission to Ethiopia during the opening decades of thes. Moreover, it sheds light on innumerable issues from the annals of theEthiopian Church and biblical exegesis to ethnography and the accumulation ofpower. Producing a history of early seventeenth-century Ethiopia would beimpossible without Páez’s History. The text, which was originally written in
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Portuguese, has until now never been rendered into any language, thereby confin-ing its readership to a Portuguese-speaking audience. As a result the work’sethnographical and historiographical value has often been overlooked. This volume,the first translation into English of a work that is essential to understanding thehistory of Ethiopia, should certainly be celebrated.
While Páez was indeed a missionary whose chief goal was to convert the populaceto Catholicism, he also described many local rites (such as the Ethiopian celebrationof the Eucharist) as well as local flora and fauna in a detailed and penetratingmanner. The priest’s mastery of the native tongue enabled him to translate dozensof Ethiopian religious works into Portuguese. Páez can be considered part of afellowship of early seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries (including Mateo Ricciand Roberto de Nobili) who exhibited heightened sensitivity towards the localculture of the peoples that they were eager to convert. História da Etiópia thusattests to the fact that many Jesuit texts were critical to the retention and recovery ofEthiopian written and oral traditions.
Christopher J. Tribe’s translation is based on the original Portuguese version,which was republished in . Edited by Isabel Boavida, Hervé Pennec, andManuel João Ramos, this republication brought an inaccessible work to a broaderpublic. The edition was preceded by two others: the Italian Jesuit CamilloBeccari’s edited version of autograph manuscript of the Archivum RomanumS. I. and Elaine Sanceau and Alberto Feio’s volumes, which are based onmanuscript of the Braga Public Library. However, the most recent Portugueseedition, whose character and annotations Tribe has faithfully preserved, refreshesPáez’s testimony and reestablishes its privileged position. The merit of Boavida,Pennec, and Ramos’ enterprise is not only in the diffusion of this monumentalwork, but also in its thorough critical apparatus. Taking into consideration the twoextant manuscripts of the História da Etiópia, their edition offers a comparativeanalysis and critical perspective that eluded their predecessors. They also survey thewritten sources that Páez himself drew on. In addition, it features a historicalglossary, an index, and an updated bibliography. Notwithstanding the absence ofsome recent publications, the bibliography prepares students well to approachresearch on Páez.
In their critical introduction, Boavida, Pennec, and Ramos convey the text’scontroversial nature and place it within its argumentative context. They set out therivalry between the Dominican and Jesuit orders, casting into doubt the ‘true’ or‘sincere’ vision that emerges from Beccari and Sanceau’s versions. They thenanalyze the work’s reception among the Jesuit missionaries who replaced Páez inEthiopia. To a lesser extent, the editors discuss the theological and Christologicalcontroversies between the Jesuits and the Ethiopian monks and scholars. In sodoing, they recapture the polemical environment in which História da Etiópia tookform. The introduction also explores the priest’s role in the discovery of the BlueNile.
In the context of the appreciable strides in Ethiopian studies over the past sixtyyears, there have been significant contributions in recent decades to our knowledgeof the Jesuit mission (–). Moreover, scholars have published new and
Camillo Beccari (ed.), Rerum Aethiopicarum Scriptores Occidentales Inediti a SaeculoXVI ad XIX, vols. II–III (Roma, –).
Pèro Pais, História da Etiópia, vols, introducción de Elaine Sanceau, notas deAlberto Feio e leitura paleografica de Lopes Teixeira (Porto, –).
Leonardo Cohen Shabot and Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, ‘The Jesuit Mission inEthiopia (th–th Centuries): An Analythical Bibliography’, Aethiopica. InternationalJournal of Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies, (), –.
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unanticipated readings of the ancient texts, adding further complexity to our imageof seventeenth-century Ethiopia. Tribe’s translation of the História da Etiópiaconstitutes a wonderful opportunity to explore Páez’s output from new perspec-tives. This elegant and meticulous edition has invigorated the study of Ethiopianhistory, especially with respect to the land’s political, cultural, and religiousdevelopments in the s. By dint of the editors’ and translator’s efforts, futurescholars of Ethiopia and of missionary movements the world over will benefit fromthe richness emanating from Father Pedro Páez’s quill.
LEONARDO COHENOpen University of Israel
ETHIOPIA AFFRONTED
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The Siege of Magdala: The British Empire against the Emperor of Ethiopia. ByVOLKER MATTHIES. Translated by STEVEN RENDALL. Princeton, NJ: MarkusWiener Publishers, . Pp xxiv+. $., paperback (ISBN); $., hardback (ISBN ).
In early , Great Britain launched an expedition from India, which consistedof , men and , animals including elephants, to rescue somethree dozen Europeans held prisoners by the Ethiopian Emperor, Tewodros.The campaign, at a final cost of more than £ million, had to traverse some fourhundred miles of difficult terrain to reach Magdala, where the European prisonerswere kept.
The British decision to carry out the expedition and, even more importantly, itssuccess in penetrating Ethiopia and plucking out the prisoners says a lot about howmuch the world had changed by the nineteenth century. Ethiopian rulers hadpreviously rebuffed Europeans and nothing much was done. The Portugueseenvoy, Pedro da Covilha, who arrived in Ethiopia at the end of the fifteenthcentury, had been prevented from returning to his country. A second mission sentin was kept cooling its heels for six years. When a religious controversy partlyinstigated by the Jesuit missionaries threatened the stability of the empire in theseventeenth century, the Emperor Fasiledes (–) issued a proclamationexpelling all Europeans from the country and executed a few who refused to leave.Ethiopia remained mostly closed to Europeans for the next two hundred years.
That kind of affront to European honor and image could not, of course, beallowed to stand in the nineteenth century. Tewodros’s action was largely anexpression of his frustration against European powers. When he ascended thethrone in , he had grand plans to modernize the country and restore thecentralization of the Ethiopian state that had been shattered by the resurgence offeudal anarchy since the late eighteenth century. He saw Christian Europeanpowers as natural allies in the battle against the Ottomans and the Egyptians.Accordingly, he solicited several European governments for alliance and technicalsupport. Tewodros did not at first appreciate the divergence of Ethiopian andEuropean strategic interests. The French, whom he assiduously courted, insteadsupported rebel chiefs in the north who were sympathetic to Roman Catholicmissionaries. England stood to gain more by cooperating with the Ottoman Empireand Egypt than with Ethiopia.
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Tewodros was particularly incensed by the failure of the British government toanswer a letter that he sent to Queen Victoria in . A very proud man, Tewodrosfelt slighted. Subsequent overtures from the British government simply compli-cated the issue. As the emperor’s own hold over his empire deteriorated, he grewmore intransigent. This ‘Abyssinian difficulty’, as Disraeli called it, threw theBritish government into a quandary. The detention of British officials at the handsof an African leader was considered to be a major affront to British prestige and tobe detrimental to the image that Britain wished to project globally. Many colonialofficials, especially in India, argued that that European prestige would remainunder grave threat everywhere as long as the Ethiopian emperor continued to defyBritain. The British cabinet decided on war in August .
Volker Matthies provides a superb description of the organization anddeployment of the campaign to Magdala. The task of organizing the force wasgiven to Lieutenant General Robert Napier, a noted engineer and commander-in-chief of the Bombay army. Napier worked out elaborate plans for moving his armyacross the ocean to the Red Sea coast at Zula and on to the interior of Ethiopia. Inthe words of the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, the Magdala Campaign was, ‘Anearly example of the industrialization of war’. Napier made full use of all the fruitsof industrialization including rapid firing Snider-Enfield rifles, modern artillery,rockets, telegraphs, photographic equipments, and even a railway line thatextended from the harbor at Zula to the foot of the escarpment.
As Matthies argues, while the eventual success of the expedition owed a greatdeal to Napier’s brilliant organizational skills and to British technologicalsuperiority, the advance of the British force faced few challenges because theemperor’s power had nearly evaporated long before the arrival of the British troops.By the time that the British troops landed on the coast, Tewodros controlledlittle more than the fortress at Magdala where he kept his European prisoners.Having witnessed the hopelessness of the situation, the emperor released his foreignprisoners and committed suicide minutes before the British forces broke thefortress.
Although the book is largely based on published sources, its exhaustive use of theGerman materials makes it unique. One would have wished to see fewer and shorterquotations (some as long as four pages), especially when the quoted materials havealready appeared in other publications. Overall, it is a well organized work that willbe easily accessible to the general reader.
SHUMET SISHAGNEChristopher Newport University
KINDRED CONCERNS AND AN ABORTIVE ALLIANCE
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Alliance of the Colored Peoples: Ethiopia and Japan before World War II. ByJ. CALVITT CLARKE III. Rochester, NY: James Currey, . Pp. xvii+. $,hardback (ISBN ----).
KEY WORDS: Ethiopia, diplomatic relations, race.
J. Calvitt Clarke III, emeritus professor at Jacksonville University, has writtenan important study of Ethio-Japanese relations in the years leading up to theSecond World War. It will be of interest not only to scholars of the history of thosetwo countries, but to many others as well, not least because, as Professor Clarke socarefully shows, the Italo-Ethiopian War was important in helping to create the
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alliances that eventually fought in the Second World War. These alliances were notinevitable but instead were the result of diplomatic maneuvering, competition forinternational trade, struggles to maintain the balance of power in various parts ofthe world, and contingencies that might have turned out otherwise had a fewvariables been different. This is, as the author states in his preface (p. xii),‘a complex story in its detailed narrative and intertwined explanations’. This storythus forms an important but often neglected part of the story of the origins ofthe Second World War. Without the diplomatic maneuvering around Japaneseinterest in Ethiopia, the Italian invasion in Ethiopia, and the parallel Japaneseinvasion of Manchuria, the Tripartite Axis might never have formed in theSecond World War.
The story told here is also intrinsically important by itself. The Ethio-Japaneserelationship was an unusual case of a direct relationship between non-Westernsocieties in two of the world’s most ancient and independent empires. Thissimilarity made many people in both countries feel a natural affinity for each otherand helped win support for an alliance between the two kingdoms. Their respectiveresponses to the Great Depression and the resultant trade wars also drove the twoempires together as Japan sought markets for her products as various other empireswere gradually closed to them, and as Ethiopia sought alliances against increasingItalian pressure. Alas, a lasting alliance was not to be. Ethiopia did not offer enoughof a market to a Japan desperately seeking to expand its exports for it to be worth analliance, and Japan found more compelling reasons to ally with Italy and eventuallyGermany.
Among the many stories within the overall narrative of the Ethio-Japaneserelationship at this time is the intriguing, even legendary, tale of a young Ethiopiannobleman and a young Japanese noblewoman who attempted marriage, a marriageoften misinterpreted as an attempted dynastic marriage. The tale is well told hereand several myths are debunked. It seems both individuals involved wereresponding as much to their own stereotypes and fantasies of the other country asto the realities they might actually face in any relationship, and their doomed lovenever was consummated.
There are some weaknesses in this account as well. While the author has mined animpressive array of primary and secondary sources in Japanese, Italian, English,and even Russian, there is no evidence of anything from the Ethiopian archives,nor any explanation of why they were not available or not examined. This is asurprising lacuna in an otherwise thoroughly documented and well researchedwork.
In addition to this unexplained absence of important primary sources, there isalso one very surprising omission in secondary sources cited. The author does notappear to be aware of John Dower’s excellent comparative study of Japanese andAmerican racism in the Second World War, War without Mercy. Thus theinterpretation of Japanese racial categories and attitudes is not as nuanced as itmight be. The fact that there was, and to a certain extent still is, a Japanese categoryof yuusyokujin (colored people, or ‘people of color’ in the currently fashionableexpression of the same concept) suggests that there is also a powerful sense ofdifferentiation in Japanese thought, which includes complex and sometimescontradictory ideas of racial hierarchy. Ethiopia was, and still is, accorded inJapanese scholarship a history independent of and preceding European coloniza-tion because it is not considered a part of ‘black Africa’ in Japanese official thought.While the author mentions on page the fact that Japanese officialdom sawEthiopia more as an extension of Asian power into Africa than as an ancient blackAfrican kingdom, he nevertheless seems to lose sight of the fact that Ethiopia, likeEgypt, was and is officially seen in Japan as being in Africa but not of it. Thus he
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begins Chapter Three, ‘Japanese views on Ethiopia’, with a section ‘Japaneseattitudes toward the world’s blacks’ despite its questionable relevance.
JOHN EDWARD PHILIPSHirosaki University
EVALATING THE ROOTS OF VIOLENCE
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Frontiers of Violence in North-East Africa: Genealogies of Conflict since . ByRICHARD J. REID. Oxford: Oxford University Press, . Pp xii+. $,hardback (ISBN ----).
KEY WORDS: North-eastern Africa, political ecology, violence.
In this ambitious work, Reid addresses a subject that has received wide coveragesince the s: the enduring violence in the Horn of Africa, which heconceptualizes as ‘a mosaic of fault lines and frontier zones’ (p. ). Central to thestudy is not state continuity, but rather the ‘continuous state of violence’ that heargues is foundational to the modern polities of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, andSudan (p. ). It is an unusual, if contentious, approach to understanding a brutallycontested corner of Africa with fluid frontiers and permeable ethnicities.The author pulls together the essential elements of his theme into a seamless,impressively fluent, and highly accessible synthesis.
Geographically and temporally, the book’s focus is broad. Spatially, although itincorporates Ethiopia and its immediate neighbors, its ‘zone of violence’ mainlyconsists of the northern highlands of the Tigriniya speakers, the central region ofthe Amhara, and the southern and eastern areas of the Oromo and Somali. TheEritrean-Ethiopian frontier is seen as the epicenter of the perennial violence.Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the book is devoted to the two countries, Eritreaclaiming nearly a third of it. Much of the ‘institutionalized and cyclical social andpolitical violence’ (p. ) is attributed to geographical or environmental variation.In the persistently contested areas adjoining the highlands and lowlands from theGibe in the south to the Red Sea in the north, trading, slaving, hunting, andbanditry converged with competitive local and inter-regional politics to generateincessant conflicts, which too often had devastating repercussions on the productivecommunities of cultivators and nomadic-pastoralists.
The time depth of the study stretches back to the eighteenth century. Thelast three centuries have ‘been characterized by markedly intense, cyclical, andincreasingly institutionalized violence, and systematic persecution and/or margin-alization of particular population groups’ (pp. –). Violence was driven not onlyby the predatory pursuit for land, livestock, and labor, but also by shifting ethnic,cultural, regional, and religious identities and ambiguous loyalties. Reid sees theZemene Mesafint or Era of the Princes as the culmination of the primacy of armedviolence. Emperor Tewodros II, who brought that era to an end, is cast as thequintessence of the violent political culture. Paradoxically, Tewodros escalated and‘institutionalized’ the destructive violence. Kassa the shifta (bandit), who foughthis way from the Qwara lowlands to seize the throne (center) in as Tewodros,was the precursor of the revolutionary ‘liberation’ fighters who marched from theperiphery to the citadels of power, Addis Ababa and Asmara, respectively, in .The violent process that commenced in the mid-eighteenth century has not abated.
Reid’s fluent analysis invites us to rethink the Horn’s conflicted history, and hefrequently offers fascinating revelations. Nevertheless this reviewer remains
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skeptical of the plausibility of the analytical primacy of armed contestation. Reidglosses over such fundamental issues as factors of production, social relations, classconflicts, state formation, and social transformation. The peasantry, whose laborand produce were the primary objects of the rapacious feudal polity, is generallyinvisible; when visible, it is portrayed as placid, incapable of negotiating itssubordination. Consent is not always coerced.
The coverage of the twentieth century is the most disappointing part of thestudy. This is true of both Ethiopia and Eritrea. Modern Ethiopia, we are assured,‘was the product of a restless, cumulative militarism’ (p. ), not of the twinprocesses of class and state formation roughly analogous to the European andJapanese experiences. The two most acute contradictions – agrarian and national –which brought about the dissolution of the dynastic state, the leading role theradical intelligentsia played in the revolution and the ideas and ideology that guidedit, are all obscured or omitted. His discussion of the origins and evaluation ofEritrean anti-colonial nationalism borders on the fanciful. Reid is, of course, keenlyaware of the socioeconomic changes that Italian colonialism endangered: industrialand urban growth, which gave rise to a tiny but robust middle-class, a labor force,and ‘a vibrant press’ without which national consciousness was improbable. Yet hedismisses the transformation as ‘superficial modernity’, boldly asserting thatEritrean nationalism was ‘the product of a series of conflicts and tensions which hadtheir roots in the nineteenth century, and arguably earlier’ (pp. –), and thatactually the Italians were inadvertently co-opted into the vortex of frontier politics.
Even more puzzling, Reid alleges that the northern revolutionary guerrillas weremerely the modern version of the frontier bandit. The coupling of nebulousbanditry and purposeful social movements strikes me as bizarre. A comparativeassessment of how the ‘liberation’ movements were organized and managed andwhat it entailed to harness the rural masses without whom they could not possiblyhave won would have been more fruitful. Also, a cursory reference to how newidentities and loyalties born out of the revolution continue to compete with old andentrenched local identities would have been in order. Reid’s contention that theantagonism between the Eritrean and Tigriyan fronts was irreconcilable isdisputable, and his interpretation of Ethio-Eritrean war of – that thenew leaders so clumsily triggered seem overtly deterministic.
Reid has written an erudite and provocative, though not necessarily convincing,book. By abjuring a comparative analysis, he undercut the merits of his work. Infrequently resorting to fuzzy generalizations and dubious assertions, he diminishesthe more compelling discussions of what would have been a singular achievement.
GEBRU TAREKEInstitute of Ethiopian Studies
REVIVAL SEEN FROM WITHIN AND FROM WITHOUT
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The East African Revival: History and Legacies. Edited by KEVIN WARD and EMMA
WILD-WOOD. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, . Pp. xi+. $., hardback(ISBN ----).
KEY WORDS: East Africa, Christianity, sources.
The East African Revival emerged as a movement within African Protestantismin the late s and s, influential throughout the whole East African region tothis day. It originated with the Ruanda Mission, operating as an autonomous
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branch of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in South West Uganda andRuanda-Urundi. Though not exactly its originators, prominent initiating figureswere the pioneer Ruanda medical missionary Joe Church, and Simeoni Nsibambi,of the Buganda chiefly class, who met in . It emphasized the classic traits ofEvangelical revivals – repentance for sin, the cross, baptism of the Spirit,sanctification, and the quest for holiness – but from the beginning it wasdistinctively African. It caused considerable alarm among church leaders with itsinsistence that church leaders and missionaries confess their sins – indeed it grewout of dissatisfaction with the state of the Anglican Church of Uganda. It wasnevertheless eventually accepted within the Church and by the CMS not leastbecause it resisted militant anti-colonialism and nationalism, and because itsprofound sense of unity among all the saved in fact provided a strong counter-balance to racial and ethnic divisions. Nor were the Balokole (‘the Saved’ inLuganda) interested in leaving their churches, despite their sometimes severecriticism and considerable tension with other elements of these churches.
This book grew out of a seminar on the occasion of the opening of the JoeChurch Archive in the Henry Martyn Centre for the study of Mission andWorld Christianity in Cambridge. The book was originally published in Uganda,and this Ashgate edition contains two additional concluding chapters. The book isstructured into five parts. In the first, KevinWard gives an historical overview. Thesecond part contains testimonies and personal perspectives. Here John Gatu, aprominent Kenyan ecumenical Presbyterian gives his own testimony of personaltransformation in the era of militant nationalism in Kenya. John Church, son of JoeChurch, gives his personal experience of growing up in the eye of the storm, offerssketches of many leading Revival figures, and describes the dilemmas of RevivalChristians in Rwanda’s nationalist struggle. Simon Barrington-Ward, formerGeneral Secretary of the CMS, explains the real tensions between the EAR andthe CMS, for himself and his two famous predecessors, Max Warren andJohn V. Taylor. Amos Kasibante describes, in ‘Revival and Pentecostalism in myLife’, the two different but interlinked movements that influenced but no longerdefine him. The third part provides historical and cultural perspectives. CynthiaHoehler-Fatton gives an account of religious movements (one Muslim) in WesternKenya some years before the EAR, suggesting cultural patterns that paved the wayfor the EAR. Ken Farrimond writes of the tensions caused, particularly around theMokono crisis of when Balokole were dismissed from ministerial training.Derek Peterson discusses what the EAR teaches about political dissent, seeing theRevivalists as subversive because they defined themselves over against the identitiesnationalist leaders were devising for them. Birgitta Larsson shifts to Tanzania totrace the ‘Haya Women’s Response to Revival’. Emma Wild-Wood argues that therevivalist confrontations in the Northern Congo-Uganda Border region concernedthe acceptability of social change.
Part four is entitled ‘Socio-theological Perspectives’. John Karanja shows howthe Revivalists’ almost defining practice of public confession created a synthesisof old and new. Esther Mombo presents the fascinating revival testimony of threewomen who chose to leave polygamous marriage on becoming saved, showing thecomplex interconnection of status and marital norms. Nick Godfrey moves toRwanda and comes right up to date by giving ‘Revivalists’ Narratives of GenocideSurvival’, showing the influences shaping these testimonies and their functions.
The fifth part is labeled ‘Sources and Scholarship’. Terry Barringer outlines thematerial of the Joe Church collection, and the research opportunities it offers.Emma Wild-Wood outlines the historiography of the EAR and places it within thestudy of African Christianity generally. And Kevin Ward, supplementing hisearlier historical overview, gives a magisterial survey of revivals in Africa. Here he
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deals with general evangelical revivals, notes the similarities to and differencesfrom other revivals in Africa (movements like those of Harris, Kimbangu orShembe), and, in a very significant few pages, notes the differences from andsimilarities to Pentecostalism (touched on earlier especially by Kasibante), whichenables him to attempt an assessment of which features of East African Christianitytoday can be strictly described as legacies of the EAR. He acknowledges that indifferent areas the influence differs, but ‘at present, Pentecostalism seems to bein the ascendant’.
This volume provides a remarkably rich coverage, for beginner and proficientalike, of the many facets of the EAR – its nature, personalities, distinguishingfeatures, wider context, driving forces, and effects.
PAUL GIFFORDSchool of Oriental and African Studies
A LONG HISTORY OF OPPOSITIONAL POLITICS
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Rethinking African Politics: A History of Opposition in Zambia. By MILES LARMER.Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing, . Pp. xvii+. $.,hardback (ISBN ----).
KEY WORDS: Zambia, politics, rebellion.
In September , Zambia was at the center of media attention, and for theright kind of reasons, when Michael Sata replaced the sitting president RupiahBanda. Thus, Zambia provided one of the rare examples of an opposition candidateactually winning an election. More importantly, it passed the true test of democracywhen the incumbent conceded defeat and stepped down graciously. Previously, in, Kenneth Kaunda had made history by being the first autocrat on the Africancontinent who declared a democratic election and then proceeded to lose the voteresoundingly. This makes Zambia perhaps an unusual case, but certainly aninteresting one for a history of opposition politics. Many political scientists andpolitical anthropologists have studied Zambia over the years. With this book, MilesLarmer provides a welcome historical study of postcolonial politics in Zambia.
Larmer challenges the myth of the supremacy of the ruling party in Zambia inthe postcolonial period. The United National Independence Party (UNIP) ruledZambia between and under Kenneth Kaunda, and Larmer argues thatprevious historical studies have tended to confirm a narrative of nationalist unityand consensual decision making during this period. Larmer rejects these nationalisthistoriographies and, in particular, argues that the declaration of a one-party statein was not an expression of popular will, but a response by UNIP to risingpolitical opposition. Overall, Larmer seeks to add nuance to the different labelsused by political scientists to describe the state, such as ‘developmental’,‘bifurcated’, or ‘neo-patrimonial’ to mention a few, and to move beyond thesnapshots provided by electoral studies. To do this it is necessary to chart andinterpret political discourse and debates over a longer period of time, interrogatingrather than assuming the validity of those descriptions.
Chapter One offers a synthesis of the literature on the late colonial period andreminds readers that at independence Zambia was very far from being a finishedproduct. Larmer thereby sets the stage for the postcolonial contestation of theZambian state. Chapter Two charts the history of political division during the First
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Republic (from until ) within the ruling party that lead to a breakawayfrom UNIP by the United Progressive Party (UPP). He argues that the declarationof a one-party state was a response to this split. Chapter Three describes thedisunity under the one party state in the s. Any state would have struggledunder the particular economic strain the Zambian state suffered after the collapse ofthe world market price for copper, however Larmer emphasises that the forces ofopposition were not new, but could be traced to the First Republic.
The author focuses on two particular events of well-articulated politicalopposition. Chapter Four tells the story of the relatively unknown armedopposition called the Mushala Rebellion, unfolding between the mid-s andthe early s. The chapter gives an account of the rebellion, which wasunsuccessful and lacked a programme for political change, yet Larmer argues that itshould be understood as ‘a distinctive and significant element of wider opposition’(p.). The rebellion showed that the one-party state was not fully entrenched inthe Northern Western Region, revealing that UNIP’s claim to be speaking onbehalf of all Zambian peoples was evidently not true. It is not clear how thisparticular rebellion ‘paved the way for the pro-democracy movement of ’(p. ). In Chapter Five, Larmer focuses on the unsuccessful coup attempt in, which he says was indicative of the growing discontent among intellectuals.In Chapter Six and Seven the grip of chronology is loosened. Larmer first reviewsthe stance of the Zambian state towards Apartheid in South Africa, which he argueswas more pragmatically than ideologically motivated. An assessment of theimportance of civil society is offered in Chapter Seven.
The substantial contribution of this book is its use of the UNIP party archives(available since ) which are complemented by interviews and the biographiesof central political actors. The book offers a cogent a history of opposition inZambia from the late s to the beginning of the s. It does not quite live upto the full title, however, as the comparative issues raised in the introduction,epilogue, and conclusion would require further expansion throughout the chaptersto really offer a full historical reappraisal of African politics, but this is a verystimulating and promising start.
MORTEN JERVENSimon Fraser University
MORALITY AND MEDIA IN MALAWI
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Human Rights and African Airwaves:Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio. ByHARRI ENGLUND. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, . Pp. x+.$, hardback (ISBN ----); $, paperback (ISBN ----).
KEY WORDS: Malawi, human rights, inequality, media.
Witches flying in aircrafts, women lying on graveyard tombs, giant rats withcharms around their necks – these are just some of the stories broadcast by thepopular Chichewa-language radio program Nkhani Zam’mabona (News from theDistricts) in Malawi. Rather than dismiss these accounts as bizarre fantasiesconcocted to attract gullible listeners, Harri Englund takes them seriously ascommentaries on the injustice, corruption, and inequality experienced by poorMalawians. In Human Rights and African Airwaves, he analyzes the production,
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content, reception, and circulation of these and other stories from the program.Englund argues that these stories – submitted by listeners, revised by editors, heardand debated by thousands of men and women throughout the country in the locallanguage of Chichewa – provide alternative ways of expressing claims andexpectations in the context of the liberal but still authoritarian state of Malawiand the continued dominance of human rights approaches to equality. The bookdraws on months of fieldwork from to , including interviews andparticipant observation with listeners and radio-station editors.
Following a brief introduction, the book is divided into three sections. Chaptersin the first section provide a brief history of radio broadcasting in Malawi andposition the study in terms of its critiques and contributions to anthropologicaldebates about equality, human rights, language, media, and witchcraft. The secondsection explores the contents and production of the program, examining recurringtopics and the editorial process of selecting, shaping, and verifying stories. Thefinal section considers the program’s popular reception and impact, as well as itscritics – primarily born-again Christians. Englund is an engaging and crisp writer,combining anecdotes, observations, stories, and interview excerpts with criticalassessments of anthropological and philosophical discussions of human rights,language, media, alterity, witchcraft, liberalism, and justice, to name just a few.Englund is well-read and the theoretical sections are smart, but their sheer number,length, and density derail the narrative at times.
Nonetheless, Englund has written a provocative and compelling book, which,like his earlier award-winning study, Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and theAfrican Poor (California, ), uses the methodological and theoretical power ofethnography to challenge easy accolades about the inherent value of the ideas andpractice of human rights. As Englund demonstrated in Prisoners of Freedom, thelanguage of human rights deployed by NGOs and elite activists often has littleresonance in the daily lives and experiences of poor Malawians. Instead, thedominance of human rights assumptions about freedom and rights often under-mine rather than promote struggles against poverty and injustice because of theirfailure to address the structural conditions that produce impoverishment.
Human Rights and African Airwaves provides an important complement to thatwork, exploring how ‘storytelling that addressed moral and existential quandariesin everyday experience presented a popular alternative to the human rights talkthat had become ubiquitous after the democratic transition’ (p. ). Despite oftenbizarre details or unique circumstances, these radio stories do resonate with poorMalawians, providing a platform for them to express their frustrations, grievances,and reflections about corruption, abuse, and injustice. Englund argues that thelanguage, idioms, metaphors, and assumptions of the accounts as broadcast on theradio, and then interpreted and debated by listeners (who often share stories of theirown), convey an idea of equality premised on relationality, accountability, andmutual obligation between people, especially people in differential positions ofpower and authority. The powerful, in other words, have an obligation to protectand support the less powerful rather than just use their positions to abuse, exploit,and undermine the poor. The claims of the poor on the powerful because of theserelationships produce a more potent and efficacious sense of justice than the limppromises of rights.
Human Rights and African Airwaves is a must read for students and scholars ofAfrica, human rights, and media studies. While some might challenge Englund’sarguments about equality and his critiques of human rights, everyone will learnfrom the evocative ethnographic accounts of the moral lives and dilemmas of poorMalawians. At its best, the book is a fierce, grounded commentary – through thelens of a radio program – of the rich imaginations, powerful insights, and wry
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critiques of everyday Malawians as they try to live their lives as moral beings in theface of poverty, corruption, and injustice.
DOROTHY L. HODGSONRutgers, the State University of New Jersey
BIOGRAPHY AS HISTORY IN THE NORTHERN CAPE
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Luka Jantjie: Resistance Hero of the South African Frontier. By KEVIN
SHILLINGTON. London: Aldridge Press, . Pp. xiv+. $, hardback(ISBN -).
KEY WORDS: South Africa, land tenure, resistance.
Kevin Shillington has long labored in the dry lands of the Northern Cape,producing, alongside other more scholarly works, texts accessible to broadaudiences. In Luka Jantjie he returns to research begun more than two decadesago to explore the life history of a man who came of age in the tumultuous years ofSouth Africa’s mineral revolution. Born to a chiefly family in the s when theNorthern Cape was just coming within the orbit of missionaries and an expandingBritish empire, Jantjie became an early example of what Shillington describes as amodern man: a literate pioneer convert with a keen business acumen and an astuteunderstanding of South Africa’s rapidly changing economic and political world.
That world ultimately defeated Jantjie and his people. By hook or by crook,colonists acquired large amounts of land. The Kimberly diamond mines offered asmany dangers as opportunities. Aggressive British and Boer expansion set new,narrower parameters within which leaders like Jantjie could maneuver. Violentconflict soon seemed inevitable. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, Jantjietook up his Winchester rifle. Within months Jantjie was dead, shot to the chest; hewas then decapitated and his head boiled in a vat of water to become a war trophy.
This, then, is Shillington’s narrative arc: the rise and demise of an African man inan industrializing South Africa. It is also the story of a closing frontier. The earlychapters covering Jantjie’s birth and coming of age describe a world fraught withdanger, but also one of change and possibility as new people moved into thenorthern Cape and as the region entered the orbit of expanding colonial societies:British, Boer, and Griqua. Missionaries such as Robert Moffat played an importantrole in introducing not just Christianity but also ideas about clothing andpersonhood and technologies such as printing and irrigation. Shillingtondemonstrates how the world the missionaries and their converts made led to newsensibilities and possibilities just as the age of liberal empire was about to beeclipsed by one of jingoistic nationalism and racial intolerance.
The bulk of Luka Jantjie concentrates on the three decades from the opening ofthe diamond fields to Jantjie’s death. Many of the issues discussed are well knownto specialists: industrial demands on labor and resources such as wood and food, thefractious relationships among British, Boer, and Griqua, and the steady expansionof empire from the Cape Colony. More interesting is Shillington’s exploration ofthe complex reworking of Batlhaping politics as Jantjie made claims to authority,land, and resources and emerged as a powerful chief (kgosi). Here Shillington’sresearch shines as he offers the reader a sense of Jantjie grappling with thechallenges facing him and his people.
Shifting alliances and rising conflict marked the years following the PretoriaConvention that ended British-Transvaal conflict and recognized (again) the
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republic’s sovereignty. The politics of land, including and perhaps especially thatheld within African-controlled areas, became ever more fraught as did the Britishadministration of African territories. The last half of Luka Jantjie is devoted to thedecade between the – Land Commission and Jantjie’s death. The commis-sion restricted Africans to ‘communal’ lands while opening vast tracts to whitecolonists. In so doing, the commission definitively created a land crisis for Jantjieand his people and set African and British settler on a collision course.
The outbreak of rinderpest escalated an already deteriorating situation. Duringthe war that finally settled conflicts that had been steadily mounting, Jantjieretreated to the mountains of the Langeberg where he was destitute, shivering inthe hard winter, and outgunned. His defeat led not only to Jantije’s death anddismemberment but also to the rounding up of prisoners, women, and children.Their brutal treatment became a subject of newspaper reports and humanitarianprotest.
Wonderfully researched and lavishly illustrated, at times Luka Jantjie seemscaught between an aspiration to reach a broad popular audience and a commitmentto academic scholarship. Specialists may find themselves frustrated, wonderingabout what is historiographically new: the work is conventionally structured and inthe end offers little insight into thinking about topics such as biography in Africanhistory. General readers may become lost in the details, unable to keep track of thescores of characters that populate Luka Jantjie. Nevertheless for those committed toknowing the rococo details of Northern Cape history, Luka Jantjie is well worththe effort.
CLIFTON CRAISEmory University
AN APPRECIATION OF URBANIZATION INCENTRAL AFRICA
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Villes et organisation de l’espace en République démocratique du Congo. By LEON
DE SAINT-MOULIN. Paris: L’Harmattan, . Pp. . E, paperback (ISBN----).
KEY WORDS: Democratic Republic of Congo, demography, urban.
Cet ouvrage recueille les articles que Léon de Saint-Moulin a consacrés àla démographie des villes de la République démocratique du Congo (RDC,anciennement Zaïre) entre et . S’y ajoute un texte inédit qui fait lepoint sur le semis urbain congolais en , de même que le texte non publiéd’une conférence sur Kinshasa dans le temps long (). Mais ce dernier n’a pasla qualité des autres papiers rassemblés dans cet ouvrage. La première moitiédu livre est dédiée à des études générales sur l’urbanisation du pays, la secondeà des études urbaines particulières. Fort logiquement, Kinshasa, une des plusgrandes métropoles africaines avec ses . millions d’habitants (), occupe laplus grande part; ces papiers constituent d’ailleurs une mine d’informations sur lesplans démographique, urbanistique, social et historique. Mais des contributionsapprochent également les cas de Kisangani, Bukavu et Kananga.
Le grand intérêt de ce livre est qu’il émane d’un témoin privilégié d’une périodequi a correspondu à la transition urbaine de l’Afrique centrale. En , lapopulation urbaine du pays était de , pour cent; en , elle était de , pourcent; en , de pour cent (selon des estimations scientifiques et non selon la
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définition officielle de la ville, qui réserve ce terme à une série de localités listées pardécret), alors même que la population totale a été multipliée par , durant lapériode. Entre et , Kinshasa a toujours dépassé le taux de croissancefaramineux de pour cent par an; entre et , ce même taux était encorede pour cent pour l’ensemble des villes du pays. D’article en article, Léon deSaint-Moulin a ainsi balisé les villes congolaises de jalons démographiques, ensurmontant d’énormes difficultés méthodologiques (qu’il expose fort bien). Mieux,sa réflexion se porte de manière pertinente sur la société et sur l’espace urbain. Surdeux points au moins, il a joué un rôle de pionnier. Premièrement, il a reconnu quele Congo avait connu des lieux de regroupements assez importants de population(que l’on peut qualifier de ‘villes’) avant les débuts de la colonisation ; à l’appui decette thèse, il a souligné l’existence de voies d’échanges et de marchés très anciens.Deuxièmement, il a adopté très tôt une vision positive de la ville africaine, à uneépoque où il était de bon ton de la considérer comme prédatrice. De ce point de vue,le chapitre , qui fait le point sur la place de Kinshasa dans la société nationale, est àremarquer.
Mais de manière plus générale, Léon de Saint-Moulin restitue les trans-formations considérables des villes congolaises durant un siècle décisif: larestructuration des villes par la colonisation naissante, le rôle toujours structurantde nouvelles voies de communication, le rôle des villes dans la construction d’uneunité nationale et ce malgré conflits et désorganisations politiques, enfinl’hypercentralisation de Kinshasa et l’émergence de réseaux urbains segmentés àl’échelle régionale. Convaincu du rôle décisif de la ville dans le développement,mais conscient que le développement ne se résume pas à une politique urbaine,Léon de Saint-Moulin propose un axe de développement inédit pour ce pays à laconfiguration étonnante, centre vide et périphéries actives: de Kinshasa au Kivu(Bukavu), en passant par le sud du Maniema, c’est-à-dire en suivant un arcd’urbanisation qui, même modeste, a l’avantage de relier l’ouest et l’est du pays,entre Kasaï et Bukavu.
Le mode de présentation du livre n’est certes pas sans failles. Ainsi, lajuxtaposition des articles n’évite pas des redondances assez nombreuses, notam-ment sur le plan des méthodes, quant à la fiabilité des différents recensements.On peut regretter (et comprendre) la baisse de tonus des publications récentes,à l’exception d’un tableau très intéressant sur les estimations de nombreuses villescongolaises en . Il n’en reste pas moins que cette compilation est bienvenue etservira très utilement les chercheurs malheureusement trop rares qui s’aventurent àcomprendre un fait social essentiel pour ce grand pays.
JEAN-LUC PIERMAYUniversité de Strasbourg
BEYOND ASHANTI
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The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. By REBECCA SHUMWAY. Rochester,NY: University of Rochester Press, . Pp. xii+. $, hardback (ISBN---).
KEY WORDS: Gold Coast, ethnicity, kingdoms and states, slave trade.
Despite its significance in Atlantic Africa and in the making of the AtlanticWorld, large historiographic gaps still exist in the study of the Gold Coast.Indeed, the precolonial history of the central region of the Gold Coast and of its
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populations has been largely ignored by historians. It is within this historiographicvoid that Rebecca Shumway’s work offers a number of significant interventions.This solidly-researched and comprehensive study of state and coalitionformation, ethnogenesis, and transatlantic trade in the seventeenth- and eight-eenth-century Gold Coast will be an essential starting point for future inquiries inthe field.This book tracks the political and cultural development of coastal peoples in
the Gold Coast from the seventeenth century through the long eighteenth century.The Borbor Fante – ancestors of modern Fante peoples in southern Ghana –madea radical transformation from small, autonomous, and warring polities to whatShumway terms a ‘Coastal Coalition’. As a multi-state alliance, this coalitionof Fante-speaking polities was formed both for mutual defense against theexpansionist Asante kingdom and to capitalize on common trade opportunitieswith Europeans along the coast. The processes by which this coalition developedand the related ethnogenesis of Fante peoples –marked by a new common tongue,reverence for a powerful war shrine, and the formation of commoner militiasin coastal states – forms part of a complex political and cultural geographythat places coastal peoples at the center of Shumway’s analyses. The value of thiswork is in moving away from the Asante-centric emphasis of so many studies ofGold Coast history. By disaggregating Fante state formation and culture from amonolithic and homogeneous ‘Akan’ milieu, Shumway demonstrates the uniquecircumstances and reactions to changing historical tides of the coastal peoples ofthe southern Gold Coast. She rightfully elevates places like Anomabo andMankessim – critical commercial, political, and cultural sites in the central regionof the Gold Coast – to levels of historical importance rivaling Elmina and CapeCoast.
Both the principal strength and the weakness of Shumway’s study rest withher effort to complicate the idea of a common Akan-speaking ethno-linguisticheritage of the coastal populations of the Gold Coast. She crafts interesting,even brilliant, analyses of how the slave trade shaped both state formationand ethnogenesis of Fante peoples. Two icons of Fante culture – the war shrineof Nananom Mpow and the asafo militia system – originated as reactions tothe destabilizing influences of the slave trade and the ever present threat ofAsante invasion. Both provided Fante peoples with a sense of protection. The useof Fante as a regional lingua franca and even the existence of the CoastalCoalition – a unique political configuration among Akan-speakers in the GoldCoast –were responses to the same sense of threat (and commercial opportunities).To this end, Shumway convincingly discusses the ‘double descent’ system ofinheritance or agnatic descent patterns among Fante peoples as a result of the‘integrative role’ of asafo companies and, ultimately, as a unique Fante response tocircumstances generated during the slave trade era (p. ). In this way, shesuccessfully carves out a space for Fante peoples and demonstrates the impossibilityof lumping them in with a homogenous ‘Akan’ culture assumed and imagined by awide range of scholars.
Nevertheless the sweeping nature of some of her historiographic assessments –particularly Shumway’s assessment of recent trends in African diasporichistorical studies, falls a bit short. In targeting the field of African diaspora historyas responsible for projecting a sense of Akan homogeneity, she seems to bemisreading the works of Stephanie Smallwood, Robin Law, and GwendolynMidloHall among others. Even if these scholars can be charged with relying upon anexisting historiography of precolonial Ghana that embraces notions of Akanhomogeneity, their actual interpretations are far more nuanced and sophisticatedthan Shumway allows. Indeed, of the books published in the past decade, only
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Kwasi Konadu’s The Akan Diaspora in the Americas () is guilty of developingan uncomplicated vision of a homogeneous ‘Akan’ cultural heritage in the GoldCoast – one that, he argues, survived virtually intact in the Western Hemisphere forcenturies.
Among the contributions offered by Shumway is her analysis of Anomabo – aplace, according to a British governor of settlements in the Gold Coast, ‘where theNegroes are Masters’ (p. ). Unlike the slave trade conducted through Cape Coastand Elmina, which were controlled by European trading companies, the physicaland political terrain at Anomabo meant that the Borbor Fante and, later, theCoastal Coalition had a direct role in what Shumway styles a central ‘hub’ of theslave trade. Indeed, the volume of trade at Anomabo outstripped that of both CapeCoast and Elmina and the town’s elite demonstrated their agency in and masteryover the slave trade conducted at their coast.
For some, the role of the Anomabo elite in the full spectrum of historicalagency will not come as a surprise and Shumway may linger on this a beat toolong as she seems to be responding to a dated historiographic current thatfocused on Atlantic Africans as victims or passive objects in the processesoccurring around them. For most readers, the elevation of Anomabo and thecentrality of Fante peoples in commercial, political, and cultural affairs inShumway’s narrative will serve as a refreshing counterbalance to the Asante-centricism and notions of ‘Akan’ homogeneity in the study of the Gold Coast andits diaspora.
WALTER C. RUCKERUNC-Chapel Hill
FROM WOMAN ’S WAR TO MASS MOVEMENT
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The Women’s War of : Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria. By MARC
MATERA, MISTY L. BASTIAN and SUSAN KINGSLEY KENT. London: PalgraveMacmillan, . Pp. xiv+. £, hardback (ISBN ---).
KEY WORDS: Nigeria, family, gender, protest.
The Women’s War of , known in the older literature as the Aba Riots, hasbecome one of the best-studied examples of gender resistance in colonial Africa.The event, which could be easily turned into a successful documentary or dramaticmini-series, lends itself to lively historiographical debates in graduate seminars, andthe primary sources available can be used to engage both undergraduate andgraduate students in methodology, survey, and specialty courses. The work underreview here is one of two recent books published on the event; it uses the abundantsource documents to reconstruct the history of the episode and its aftermath. Thesecond work assembles the same set of documents as a teaching aid with someanalysis of the event that overlaps, and sometimes differs from, the book underreview. The books complement one another well and could profitably be usedtogether.
Issues of causation, process, and outcome form the core of Marc Matera, MistyBastian, and Susan Kent’s book. It repeats the well-known outline of the event’s
Toyin Falola and Adam Paddock, The Women’s War of : A History of Anti-Colonial Resistance in Eastern Nigeria (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, ).
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history drawing upon archival data. The book’s narrative about the event’s impacton reforming the colonial administration, built around a ‘Warrant Chief’ system, isalso well known. As to the event’s origin, which many previous scholars treat asanti-colonial, the current book sees the war not simply as a case of anti-colonialresistance but as a broader attempt to redefine women’s relations with men, a pointmade many years ago by Caroline Ifeka-Moller. The motives for the war, drawnfrom archival sources, reveal anger directed at male leaders in village politics and inthe colonial office, at the policy of taxation, and at various authoritarian institutionsof colonial governance and control. The sources, however, are less compliant whenused to sustain the authors’ key conclusion that the war was about ‘shifting thebalance of all men’s relations to women’ (p. ).
The authors recognize the multiple driving forces that emerged as more andmore women joined: some women were eager to be part of the system while manyothers asked for a radical change. The trio’s reflections on the body of evidencereveal the multiple tensions, but they themselves highlight the most pervasive,radical view among the women, a view that questioned and then destroyed the‘material manifestations’ of a colonial regime. Described as brave warriors, the aimof the radical participants in the women’s war, as explained, was not to enthronematriarchy or unsettle ‘masculine concerns’, but to rethink the world in whichresources of the land would be shared with equality and justice.
The most difficult issue the three authors grapple with is the overall outcome ofthe resistance on the women. Their assessment of the impact of the resistanceincludes an overview of historiographic debates about the consequences of the riots.An extreme view, expressed as far back as by Judith Van Allen, dismissed thewar as a failure, concluding that women never regained their autonomy and settledinto an entrenched system of patriarchy. However, carrying forward a feministinterpretation in the works of notable scholars such as Nina EmmaMba and GloriaChuku, this book attributes success to the women and engraves their efforts innationalist political thought.
Indeed, the authors’ overall assessment of the war is positive. They note theelement of resistance in the events but go beyond this make a bolder point that thewar was an attempt ‘to meet social change head-on, to try to shape change and toassimilate that change in relation to a clear, pre-existing vision of the world’(p. ). In stressing the spiritual and cosmological dimensions of the war, theauthors broaden our analysis beyond political and economic explanations, carefullylinking protest to existing notions of death and barrenness. As more and morewomen in some other groups in the south-east were drawn into the protest, theyargue, an ‘expansive notion of womanhood’ emerged, enabling women to developgreater networking skills that led to a ‘true mass movement’ (p. ). The bookconcludes by pointing to the movement as a ‘model, a memory, and a methodof protest’ (p. ) informing contemporary women’s associations as well ascontemporary political actions. On the continuity of women’s resistance, historicaleras and contexts do shape activities and behavior; however a linear genealogy ofresistance is always difficult to make, since one movement may not necessarily haveany connection with the previous ones. It remains unclear whether these Igbo andIbibio women were typical or whether their self-consciousness became widespreadafter .
The gendered analytical framework of the book means that the text could be usedfor women’s history and for Nigerian studies. The basic outline and contours of thesocial and political history are clearly mapped out in a way that students canunderstand. While the authors do not ignore divergent views and the generalizedthemes imposed by the colonial documents, the authors privilege the testimonies ofthe women and foreground cogent social and political issues. The major
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achievement of this addition to the literature is a clear demonstration of the linkagebetween policies, gender, and self-constructions.
TOYIN FALOLAThe University of Texas, Austin
DWELLING AND BELONGING IN THE MANDARAMOUNTAINS
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The Dancing Dead: Ritual and Religion among the Kapsiki/Higi of NorthernCameroon and Northeastern Nigeria. ByWALTER E. A. VAN BEEK. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, . Pp. xii-. $, hardback (ISBN ).
KEY WORDS: Cameroon, religion, ritual.
Walter van Beek’s The Dancing Dead is a remarkable testament to a career spentin great part working in Kapsiki communities in the northern Mandara Mountainsof Cameroon. Since the s, his research in and writing about this region hasilluminated a variety of aspects of Kapsiki lifeways, including their symbolicsystems, the relations between blacksmiths and non-smiths, marriage practicesand gender roles, and the symbolism of beer in Kapsiki society. His accessibleand absorbing The Kapsiki of the Mandara Hills, which focused on the complexrelationships between Kapsiki men and women, has been virtually the onlyanglophone ethnography on this important area of Central Africa. Now, yearslater, van Beek has returned with a second, equally fascinating, English-languageethnography of the Kapsiki and their Higi compatriots in Nigeria.
The Dancing Dead examines Kapsiki and Higi ritual systems, perhaps the mostspectacular of which are the structures of ritual and mourning that surround thedeaths of individuals, and which figure in the book’s title and cover image.However, its range is wider than that. It includes three primary sections, the first ofwhich provides necessary historical and cultural background, while the second andthird discuss ‘rituals of dwelling’ and ‘rituals of belonging’ respectively. Rituals ofdwelling include a complex set of beliefs and sacrifices that position Kapsiki/Higiindividuals, households, and communities in a challenging social landscapeinhabited by persons both human and non-human. Such positioning of peoplein the landscape is everywhere a salient issue in the densely populated anddomesticated northern Mandara Mountains. Rituals of belonging, on the otherhand, figure in the life-cycles of Kapsiki and Higi people themselves, and includethose rituals associated with birth (with particular attention to the birth of twins, anevent fraught with potential and hazard), with marriage and initiation, and finallywith death. Needless to say, these two categories of ritual are intimately linked,through a set of common symbolic associations and through their positions in acycle that works on annual and longer rhythms.
Through the book, van Beek integrates detailed ethnographic descriptions ofthese central elements in Kapsiki/Higi society with a broader theoretical discussionof how ritual works in that society. He notes, first, that Kapsiki/Higi ritualinvolves elements of both imagistic and doctrinal modes of religiosity, to useHarvey Whitehouse’s differentiation between low-frequency/high-intensityreligious experiences that persist as memorable events in a person’s life, and high-frequency/low-intensity experiences that are reinforced through repetition andlearning of doctrinal systems. Like most traditional African religious systems,Kapsiki/Higi does not have a formal, centralised doctrinal structure, and the
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assumption is frequently made that such religious systems function almost entirelyin the imagistic mode. Van Beek observes, however, that some Kapsiki/Higi ritualsare somewhat repetitive and involve activities that also take place in everyday life;they have lower emotional investment, and he relates their performance to relativelystraightforward cognitive inversions of the natural world. Such rituals make up animportant element in his category of rituals of dwelling, while rituals of belongingare rather more imagistic, involving greater emotional involvement, activities, andbehaviours not found in everyday life, greater specialisation, and more complex anddemanding cognitive systems.
These theoretical claims certainly make sense upon reading, and as noted vanBeek weaves them closely and convincingly through his ethnographic observations.He is also careful to note that these two categories of Kapsiki ritual are not mutuallyexclusive – and that, for that matter, there are elements of ritual, like cursing, thatdo not fit into this dichotomy and are not extensively treated in this book. In myexperience as an archaeologist working in other Mandara societies further to thenorth, the distinction between those rituals (often of sacrifice) associated witheveryday activities like communal eating and drinking and the more spectacularlife-cycle rituals seems to make a great deal of sense. On the other hand, ancestorsplay a greater role in ritual activity in the northern communities I am familiar withthan they appear to among the Kapsiki/Higi. This illustrates the cultural diversitythat we see among the many small montagnard societies in the northern Mandara,an observation with which I am sure van Beek would agree. While reading thisbook, I continually encountered observations and interpretations that resonatedwith my own experiences in the area. One particular strength of the book is that vanBeek’s decades of fieldwork in the region allow him to depict the variabletransformation of Kapsiki/Higi ritual systems in their encounter with the trulydoctrinal religious systems of Christianity and Islam, and in doing so he providesthe reader with a vivid description of the dynamism of this society.
The Dancing Dead is a pleasure to read. Van Beek writes gracefully andengagingly, and his affection and respect for the Kapsiki and Higi people withwhom he has lived and worked is evident on every page. This is the kind of book,and the Kapsiki and Higi are evidently the kind of people, that will capture theattention of sometimes-reluctant students in anthropology courses, and make themthink about complex cultural systems quite different from their own. It will equallyreward Africanist historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists with a greaterprofessional background in the area and/or the topic. It should be read by anyonewith an interest in this part of Africa, or in the functioning of ritual systems moregenerally.
SCOTT MACEACHERNBowdoin College
A HAGIOGRAPHY OF SHEKU AMADU
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L’inspiration de l’éternel: Éloge de Shékou Amadou, fondateur de l’empire peul duMacina, par Muhammad b. ‘Alî Pereejo. Edited by GEORGES BOHAS, ABDERRAHIM
SAGUER, and BERNARD SALVAING. Brinon-sur-Sauldre France: GrandvauxVecmas, . Pp. . E, paperback (ISBN ----).
KEY WORDS: West Africa, Islam, text editions.
This elegant work benefits from the framework put in place by the ANR-VECMAS Project (Valorisation et Edition Critique des Manuscrits Arabes
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Subsahariens). The VECMAS Project’s main goal is to organize the scholarly workon sub-Saharan manuscripts in Arabic. The methods used include content analysis,translation, and the analytical and descriptive study of manuscripts. The bookcomprises an edition and translation of the manuscript entitled Fath al-samad fîzikr shaikh min ‘akhlâk shaikhunâ ‘Ahmad (‘The Inspiration of the Lord asmanifested in the mention of certain aspects of the exemplary conduct of ourSheikh Ahmad’) of Muhammad b. A’Alî Perrejo.This is a two-part book, with a French-language section that includes an
introduction, annotated translation, and bibliography, and an Arabic section,which has a foreword, edition of the text, index of technical terms, and list ofreferences. The Arabic text of the Fath al-samad fî zikr shaikh min ‘akhlâkshaikhunâ ‘Ahmad itself (pp. –) is a hagiography that opens with anintroduction, develops over seven chapters, and ends with a conclusion. Theintroduction deals with the illumination and greatness of holy men or wali.The first chapter praises the generosity of Sheku Amadu, as well as his asceticism.The second chapter deals with his spiritual wisdom. The third chapter describes hisvirtues in relation to his words and actions. The fourth chapter delves intohis spiritual elevation and dedication to God. The fifth chapter presents his piety,his patience and his exhortations to others. The sixth chapter uncovers his miracles.The seventh chapter has praise poems about his greatness. The conclusionmentions the date of his death and quotes some of the orations that were dedicatedto him. The critical edition work is based on three versions of the manuscript: thephotographed copy of Almamy Maliki Yattara and Bernard Salvaing which datesback to ; the copy that is held under the number at the Centre AhmadBaba of Timbuktu (IHERIAB); and, lastly the copy published by Ahmad Al-AmînCissé in in Bamako. In the section devoted to the presentation of the work(pp. –), the authors deemed it worthwhile to go beyond what is said in Fathsamad about Sheku Amadu through reference to complementary informationdrawn from secondary works on his political and spiritual commitments.
Sheku Amadu is considered a true model of saintliness who lived under theguidance of the founding Sufi masters, namely the great scholars representative ofeastern Sufism in the line of Al-Ghazali, the great masters of Muslim Andalusia,and the representatives of the Shadiliyya (pp. –). The analysis of the text inrelation to the religious and historical stakes brings forth valuable information onthe character of Sheku Amadu and on the religious and political culture of theIslamic state of the Macina, the Dîna, in the Middle Niger valley. Temporal andspiritual interests are equally key in understanding Sheku Amadu, who is reportedto have said: ‘What use do I have of sleep! If I sleep in the day, my subjects strayabout, and if I sleep at night, it is I who stray. Given these two reasons, how canI sleep?’ (p. ). In that context, the text of Muhammad b. Ali Pereejo and thepoems that follow it assert the legitimacy of Sheku Amadu both within the Dînaand without. Sheku acquired a broad Islamic foundation through perfectingnotably his knowledge of fiqh. The authors argue that his was a Sufism withoutreference to an institutionalized brotherhood tradition (p. ), despite the claimthat he was under the guidance of founding Sufi masters (pp. –). Connectionsbetween Timbuktu’s Kunta and Hamdullahi’s Dîna through a comparativeanalysis of texts such as the Fath samad, Nayl al-ibtihaj de sanûssi and the Kitâbal-tarâ’if wal-talâ’id fî karâmat of Muhammad b. al-Muhtar b. Abu Bakr al-kuntî(d. ) remain unpersuasive.
The authors provide an outstanding translation of the manuscript of the Fathsamad. The critical edition also deserves praise. The whole work closes with anextremely helpful index of terms established by Djamel Eddine Kouloughli for theArabic section (pp. –). This biographical narrative, situated between history
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and literature, is an important written source for the history of West Africa. Thisvolume of the Fath al-samad fî zikr shaikh min ‘akhlâk shaikhunâ ‘Ahmad willpromote the visibility and the re-evaluation of West African manuscripts in Arabicand Ajami; it shows a way forward toward the renewal of the sources of Africanhistoriography. Unfortunately, today Mali’s north is controlled by Islamist andirredentist groups and Timbuktu has become a place of tension and conflict. ManySufi holy men’s tombs were destroyed by Islamists. The manuscripts are at risk ofbeing destroyed or scattered around the world.
