Contenu du sommaire : Dossier : Voyageurs africains

This article describes the voyages of Manus Ulzen, a young man
from the West African town of Elmina, who in 1832 enlisted in the Dutch East
Indies Army. His army career took him to Java and Sumatra, and subsequently to
the Netherlands, where he spent a year in hospital for the treatment of a leg
injury sustained in an army campaign on Sumatra. The article, based on detailed
archival evidence, demonstrates that subaltern subjects, such as an illiterate
young man from West Africa, could exercise a considerable degree of control
over their life, even when far removed from their land of birth. Even in the
unfamiliar environment of a Dutch hospital, he was apparently not intimidated.
The Dutch king was persuaded to change the rules for military decorations so
that Manus Ulzen could receive his promised bronze medal. Subsequently, his
exposure to the wider world served to enhance his status in Elmina
society.

European “explorers” were not the glorious pioneers one may
imagine. In the Great Lakes Region of East Africa, as everywhere, they were
accompanied by porters, guides, and interpreters, whose help as well as the
information they provided are seldom acknowledged in European narratives of
discovery. New attention to the scattered mentions concerning these travels
points towards a cosmopolite universe of professional African informants and
travel companions who found employment with these varied expeditions. This
essay also discloses the extent of the networks used by African and Asian
traders and middlemen who paved the road to European penetration in Burundi and
Rwanda.

William Henry Sheppard (1865-1927), who became known as the
“Black Livingstone of Africa”, was one of the most famous missionary-explorers
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was also a gifted
ethnographer who documented with sensitivity and aesthetic appreciation the
cultures he encountered. He became an international celebrity championing the
human rights of the Congolese and documenting the atrocities of the Congo Free
State and the Compagnie du Kasai. Due to his race, his accomplishments fell
into obscurity after his death until the 1960s when renewed interest in his
story drew scholarly attention. This discussion does not present a chronology
of his experiences in the Congo, but places him in the context of the Black
intelligentsia of his time and of the education he received that has been
characterized reductively as “reformist”. His story is told from his point of
view, as a Black man of uncommon gifts and will who operated adroitly in a
world of white authority at a critical time in African history. For all of his
singular achievements, however, Sheppard must be seen in the context of a
community of Black missionaries, sponsored by established and independent
churches, who aligned themselves with Africans against colonialism. The product
of institutions established during the Reconstruction Era to train freed slaves
after the American Civil War, this was an extraordinary generation of men and
women who were active in an international context in a complex world of
shifting power relationships. William Henry Sheppard was one of this
generation's most gifted protagonists.

This article explores some aspects of everyday life of Senegalese
Mourid women living temporarily in Tenerife, Spain, as petty traders, salers
and braid-makers. With their roots and routes in the world, these travelling
Senegalese women are not proper migrants, because they keep coming and going to
and from Spain, visiting other European countries as well as Asia and the US.
At the same time, they are constantly on their way to Senegal. As permanent
travellers, the Senegalese women can be said to embrace more or less
cosmopolitan ideas and practices, but just to the extent that it supports their
own economic interests. As financial entrepreneurs with certain cultural and
social abilities, they are strangers in transit, or “cosmopolitan locals”,
continuously on the move. Of special interest in relation to concepts such as
cosmopolitanism and transnationalism is women's perception of self and others
in Spain and in the homeland.

This article deals with al-Maqrīzī book (1438) on
the Ethiopian muslim Kingdoms. It examines the various editions and
translations of this text as well as its sources, notably written (which raises
the issue of “plagiarism”) but also oral.

In the 1920s, when “neolithic” came to mean stone age with food
production, the word was dropped from the vocabulary of Southern African
archaeology because evidence for farming or herding had not been found in stone
age sites. Since the 1970s, however, many bones of domesticated sheep have been
found in first millennium ad local
hunter-gatherer sites. In the absence of any evidence for a two thousand year
old immigrant, pastoralist culture in southernmost Africa, this paper argues in
favor of re-introducing the term neolithic to the subcontinent.

In Victor Schœlcher's abolitionist speeches, Africa appears, in
the first place, as revealing of the negro's aptitude to civilization. Using
stories of journeys, he analyses the African's societies and discovers there
the proof of the equal nature of black and white men. However, Schœlcher thinks
that human equality does not imply equality on a cultural level. Generally
speaking, he places the African peoples at a lower « level of civilization »
than Western civilization. Pondering over this handicap, he finds two main
reasons. The first one will be due to unfortunate circumstances, as the
corruption of African society by slave trade, the climatic conditions or
isolation. The second reason, at least for the Ethiopians, whom he considers as
the pathfinders for the humanity, is due to the result of a degeneracy. To
conclude, the duty of peoples in advanced civilization, whether European or
free enlightened Afro-american, is to educate the Africans in order to instill
Western culture.