African Military History

John Lamphear

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754625216
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351960373
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This collection of essays on pre-colonial sub-Saharan African military history is drawn from a number of academic journals and includes some which are considered milestones in African historiographical discourse, as well as others which, while lesser known, provide remarkable insight into the unique nature of African military history. Selections were made so as to produce an introduction to the understudied field of pre-colonial African military history that will be useful to specialists and non-specialists alike. The volume also contains an introduction which presents one of the first significant reviews of pre-colonial African military historiography ever attempted.

[1]
The Wars of August:Diagonal Narrative in African History

ROBERT W. HARMS

THE GROWTH OF TEACHING AND RESEARCH on the history of precolonial tropical Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s presented a challenge to the Western historical consciousness. By ignoring the traditional distinction between prehistory (attributed to oral societies) and history (attributed to literate societies) as well as the distinction between ethnohistory (attributed to tribes) and history (attributed to nations), historians of precolonial tropical Africa implicitly questioned conventional notions of what the discipline of history was all about. Hugh Trevor-Roper reacted strongly in 1963:

If all history is equal, as some now believe, there is no reason why we should study one section of it rather than another; for certainly we cannot study it all. Then indeed we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque, but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped.¹

At about the same time, however, some Continental thinkers and some Anglo-American philosophers were rethinking the meaning of history and the Western historical consciousness. The result, according to Hayden White, was the idea that

the historical consciousness on which Western man has prided himself since the beginning of the nineteenth century may be little more than a theoretical basis for the ideological position from which Western civilization views its relationship not only to cultures and civilizations preceding it, but also to those contemporary with it in time and continuous with it in space. In short, it is possible to view historical consciousness as a specifically Western prejudice by which the presumed superiority of modern, industrial society can be retroactively substantiated.²

If history was to be more than the "specifically Western prejudice" so clearly illustrated by Trevor-Roper, and if the Western historical consciousness was to appreciate the diversity of human experience and the full humanity of all people, then the history of precolonial tropical Africa and other neglected areas of the world had to be written.

Beyond the philosophical questions lay more mundane and difficult issues. The first was to find data, a problem that not only set off a search in the libraries and archives of Europe and North Africa for manuscripts and documents relating to tropical Africa but that also prompted new interest in the use of oral traditions, archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, serology, and even dendochronology. This combination of techniques prompted Wyatt MacGaffey, an anthropologist, to characterize African history as the "decathelon of social science."³ Another problem was to determine the most appropriate literary forms by which to transform these data into something recognizable as history. Historians of Africa, like their counterparts in more established subfields, had two main options when constructing a historical work: the conventional vertical narrative, which traces a specific theme through a series of permutations over time, or the alternative horizontal section, which synchronically reconstructs a variety of institutions and phenomena coexisting in a certain "slice" of time. In practice, the distinction is not always clear cut, but most works can be readily identified as predominantly one or the other. The choice of form has far-reaching consequences, for form determines the kinds of questions asked, the kinds of connections made, and the sorts of boundaries drawn. Moreover, it involves fundamental notions of causality: whether the understanding of an event depends more on an understanding of its antecedents or on an understanding of its position or function within an existing system.⁴ The choice is not simply a matter of individual preference; some types of data lend themselves better to vertical treatment, and others fit more comfortably within the horizontal section.

The data on precolonial tropical Africa are as uneven as they are diverse, but three evidentiary situations can be distinguished. Each has influenced the scope of the history that can be written, and each has been associated with a certain literary form. The first situation pertains to topics on which written documents of the type traditionally used by historians can be found. Such documents were usually generated by trading contacts between the fringes of tropical Africa and the outside world, although in a few areas traders regularly penetrated the interior and, alternatively, many fringe areas were never visited at all. The parts of West Africa just south of the desert had ancient trading contacts with the Mediterranean world, and some of the legacy of these contacts can be found in surviving Arabic documents and manuscripts. As Islam spread in West Africa after the eleventh century, manuscripts of indigenous origin appeared as well.⁵ For the east coast of Africa, which has long carried on trade with the Middle East and India, scattered documents' date back to approximately A D. 120.⁶ Documentation on the western coast of Africa began to accumulate after 1446, when Portuguese explorers reached the mouth of the Senegal River, and it increased steadily through the period of the Atlantic slave trade. For the southern tip of Africa, traders' documents date from 1486, when the Portuguese rounded the Cape, and a special category of documents came into being after the beginning of permanent settlement in the Cape Colony in 1652.⁷

Traders' documents have long been used to write the history of European expansion, but historians of Africa began to use them to shed light on the doings of the Africans themselves. To understand better the unfamiliar African institutions mentioned in the documents, historians often relied on the insights of anthropology. Some scholars supplemented the documentary evidence with evidence from oral tradition. In scope, histories based on these sources deal primarily with trade, diplomacy, and indigenous politics, although some scholars branched out to write social and economic histories set in the era of the slave trade and its aftermath.⁸ Because the data reveal change over time and because they focus on basic themes, such as politics, diplomacy, and trade, books based on them are usually standard vertical narratives. Often what differentiates them from vertical narratives written on Europe and America is the addition of an introductory chapter that presents a panoramic view of the geography and ethnography of the area as a background for the events that occupy the remainder of the book.

The second situation pertains to topics on which little or no written documentation was generated for the period prior to the explorations of the late nineteenth century but for which deep and elaborate oral traditions survive. Most common for the kingdoms of the interior, this situation is not universal for any type of indigenous political structure. Not all kingdoms retained elaborate oral traditions, and some peoples who had no kingdoms retained oral histories of named and bounded corporate groups such as clans.⁹ Because oral traditions not supported by documentary evidence pose a whole new series of methodological problems, the books relying on those traditions often contain extended meditations on the meaning of the traditions themselves. The techniques for collecting and analyzing oral traditions, first elaborated by Jan Vansina in 1961. have since been influenced by the structuralist approaches of anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Edmund Leach. Historians who work with oral traditions have recognized that many were symbolic statements of political or social ideology but have held that their symbolic formulation does not preclude their basis in historical events. Indeed, scholars have argued that, if the symbols and ideologies were themselves seen as historical phenomena, the oral traditions could be used to uncover aspects of social and intellectual history.¹⁰ In either case, it was impossible to know what to make of the traditions without a detailed understanding of the symbols, institutions, and ideologies of the group under study, knowledge that could come only from detailed field work and some familiarity with anthropology.¹¹ In spite of the novelty of the analytical methods, the scope of these books is quite conventional; it is usually political history, dotted with wars and succession struggles. In form, these books are vertical narratives with chronologies based on king-lists, genealogies, or age-set successions. But they generally depart from the vertical emphasis to give a broad geographical and ethnographic introduction and to discuss the implications of the founding myths, which often served as "social charters" for various indigenous institutions.

The third evidential situation has so far captured the interest of a very small number of historians, but it will need much more attention in the future if our knowledge of precolonial Africa is to gain any sort of balance. This situation pertains to topics for which neither deep documentation by outsiders nor elaborate oral traditions exist. It is characteristic of vast areas of Africa where local chiefs and lineage headmen successfully avoided incorporation into large states. These areas were dotted with micropolities in which the kinship structure was often indistinguishable from the political structure, making political history in the normal sense impossible.¹² A similar problem of data exists with regard to kingdoms for all levels of society below the ruling elites.¹³

There are, nevertheless, sources that can be used. Some sense of time depth can be obtained by genealogies, however shallow, and oral traditions, however sparse and sketchy. There is sometimes physical evidence of the past: clearings that have been abandoned, clusters of palm trees that mark the sites of ancient villages, dams and irrigation works constructed by ancestors whose names are sometimes remembered. But the most voluminous sources offer synchronic accounts of life in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. These include explorer and missionary accounts, which describe a variety of local customs and institutions and which were usually written in the tradition of ethnography rather than history; ethnographic studies by early colonial officials who were trying to determine how to govern the people over whom they claimed authority; and studies by anthropologists trying to recreate "traditional" African life in all its dimensions. In the absence of such sources, interviews with the oldest members of the society can sometimes be used to reconstruct the economic, social, political, and cultural patterns of late precolonial life. This information lends itself to a kind of reconstruction that differs fundamentally in scope from that based on traders' documents or deep oral traditions: it is broad instead of deep, illuminating a series of activities and institutions that existed simultaneously instead of tracing a single theme over time; it focuses on the activities of common people, seen as a group, instead of elites, often seen as individuals; and it recounts patterned behavior, which was recurrent, instead of events, which were unique. This information is best suited to a kind of historical ethnography that seeks to recreate the institutions and patterned activities of the society under study.¹⁴ It therefore raises a special set of problems about how best to fit data into a literary form.

There is a precedent for historical reconstruction of such broad scope in the histoire totale of Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.¹⁵ Africanists could find in Braudel a kindred spirit: he wrote about a region that was not, during the period he covered, at the center of world history, and he had an eye for the common instead of the spectacular. He had, however, arrived at his particular approach by a very different path. In defining the analytical scope of his grand enquête. he had been particularly influenced by two social sciences that made every aspect of society the proper scope of inquiry: geography, which includes the study of human ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• 1 'The Wars of August: Diagonal Narrative in African History', American Historical Review, 88, pp. 809-34.
• 2 "'He Swalloweth the Ground with Fierceness and Rage": The Horse in the Central Sudan', Part II, Journal of African History, 14, pp. 355-79.
• 3 'Spears, Style and Time among Maa-Speaking Pastoralists', Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 4, pp. 206-20.
• 4 'The View from Awdaghast: War, Trade and Social Change in the Southwestern Sahara, from the Eighth to the Fifteenth Century', Journal of African History, 26, pp. 275-301.
• 5 'Archers, Musketeers and Mosquitoes: The Moroccan Invasion of the Sudan and the Songhay Resistance (1591-1612)', Journal of African History, 22, pp. 457-75.
• 6 'Portuguese Musketeers on the Zambezi', Journal of African History, 12, pp. 531-3.
• 7 'The Art of War in Angola, 1575-1680', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30, pp. 360-78.
• 8 'Dahomey and the Slave Trade: Reflections on the Historiography of the Rise of Dahomey', Journal of African History, 27, pp. 237-67.
• 9 'Horses, Firearms, and Political Power in Pre-Colonial West Africa', Past and Present, 72, pp. 112-32,
• 10 'The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on the Societies of the Western Sudan', Social Science History, 14, pp. 231-53.
• 11 'The Sacred Musket. Tactics, Technology and Power in Eighteenth-Century Madagascar', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 27, pp. 261-79.
• 12 'Sources of Conflict in Southern Africa, c. 1800-30: The 'Mfecane' Reconsidered', Journal of African History, 33, pp. 1-35.
• 13 "'The Character and Objects of Chaka": A Reconsideration of the Making of Shaka as "Mfecane" Motor', Journal of African History, 33, pp. 37-63.
• 14 'Firearms in South Central Africa', Journal of African History, 12, pp. 545-56.
• 15 'Military Organisation and the Pre-Colonial Polity of the Bemba of Zambia', Man, 10, pp. 199-217.
• 16 'Professional Warriors in Nineteenth-Century Yoruba Politics', Tarikh, 1, pp. 72-81.
• 17 'Production and Reproduction of Warrior States: Segu Bambara and Segu Tokolor, c. 1712-1890', International Journal of African Historical Studies, 13, pp. 389-419.
• 18 'Firearms and Princely Power in Ethiopia in the Nineteenth Century', Journal of African History, 13, pp. 609-30.
• 19 "'For God, Emperor, and Country!" The Evolution of Ethiopia's Nineteenth-Century Army', War in History, 1, pp. 278-99.
• 20 'War and Militarism in Pre-Colonial Buganda', Azania, 34, pp. 45-60.
• 21 'The Wasaki War: An Oral Narrative of Southwestern Kenya', Anthropos, 74, pp. 864-80.
• 22 'War, Famine and Pestilence in Late Pre-Colonial Tanzania: A Case for a Heightened Mortality', International Journal of African Historical Studies, 21, pp. 637-76.
• Name Index