Some comments and questions regarding Martin Klein's posting on this
subject. in the first run of my upper-level "honors" undergraduate
seminar in colonial Africa.
1) Colonial rule.
Is Ba's *Fortunes of Wangrin* available in an English translation? I
can only find a French-language version in our catalog.
In the first run of my upper-level "honors" undergraduate seminar in
colonial Africa we did four weeks on the structure and experience of
colonial rule.
Local studies are also what I have, mostly, and I'm generally happy
with that. For general frameworks, we looked at Lugard's *Dual
Mandate*, Young's *African Colonial State*, Dane Kennedy's *Islands
of White*, Nicholas Thomas' *Colonialism's Culture*.
We then did a week on "customary law" and "language, writing and
power", both of which have an immensely rich literature. Then we did
a week on local studies of the social life of colonial rulers and the
problematics of colonial rule, in which we read *The Flogging of
Phineas Macintosh*, which worked well alongside some selections from
Charles Rey's diaries (*Monarch of All I Survey*); Richard Rathbone's
*Murder and Politics in Colonial Ghana*, which the students felt was
rather tedious past the first quarter or so; a bit from Joan
Sharwood-Smith's *Diary of a Colonial Wife*. I also made a
collection of oral testimonies called *Tales From the Dark Continent*
available, which one student looked at and found useful.
2) Crime.
We just read the Crummey anthology this week in discussion revolts
and resistance, and the students were frankly puzzled by the
categorization of the essays, particularly by the essays that were
said to be about "criminality". If I were going to focus on "crime"
as a separate category, I think I'd turn largely to the South African
literature--not just Van Onselen, but also Bonner's essay on the
Russians (printed in *Apartheid's Genesis*, the latest History
Workshop anthology) and essays by Paul la Hausse and Keith
Breckenridge in JSAS a few years back. And maybe I'd show the movie
"Mapantsula".
The problem may simply be with the category of criminality as a distinct
type of social experience. The literature on "customary law" is in some
sense about crime, as is the literature on prostitution and the experience
of urban women. The banditry literature works best alongside literature on
rural revolts and protest. Material on theft from industrial workplaces
(what was called "tshwete" in Zimbabwe) works best with the history of
industrialization or workers.
3) The social basis of nationalism.
Isn't this weird? I also was struck by how difficult it was to
assemble readings on this subject. Having never really researched it,
I just assumed that good historical studies of the membership of
nationalist movements and the formation of nationalist ideology would
be plentiful...but they really aren't, at least not in the social
history mode I'd prefer. We're going to combine our discussion of
nationalism with ethnicity via Anderson's *Imagined Communities* and
read, among several things, the Hogdkin *Nationalism in Colonial
Africa*, Nkrumah's autobiography and a bit of Jean Marie Allman's
*Quills of the Porcupine*. But I'd love to see citations from others.
We're also going to look specifically in a later week at Mau Mau as a
sort of "case study" not only of nationalism, but African social
history generally, and read Kanogo, Lonsdale, Luise White, Josiah
Kariuki and Cora Ann Presley.
My students also have a hard time seeing what's at stake in many of
these debates or in these materials generally, whether we're dealing
primarily with scholarship from both sides of the Atlantic or primary
materials from colonial and African sources. Eventually, at least in
this small advanced seminar, they've come around and grasped
something of the nature of the issues on the table. But it's a lot of
work to get to that point. Interestingly, in another course I'm
teaching on the history of the "image of Africa", the students have
been engaged and willing to debate from the very beginning. There may
be a phase change in the debates students are attuned to, I don't
know. I'm a bit young to start moaning about the good old days, but
the temptation is there.
Melvin E. (Mel) Page--History pagem@etsuarts.east-tenn-st.edu
East Tennessee State University fax: (615) 929-5373
Johnson City, TN 37614 voice: (615) 929-6802