ricans back into world history. We will demonstrate the value of non-written sources in understanding early history as well as present teaching strategies that integrate topics such as gender, religion and migration patterns within and outside of Africa. Each of these approaches has applicability for African history, as well as other world regions and will provide insight how to engage students in oral, written, linguistic, and archaeological analyses in World History courses.
MAWHA November 2012, African Migration Stories
- The two most common ways that Africans have found their way into world history stem from historical migrations—the forced migrations of the Atlantic Age, and the myth and manner of the Bantu expansion. The sense that there was a world of migration experience in Africa beyond what was described in documents has led historians to explore other techniques of historical reconstruction alongside archaeology and oral traditions. In this round table the participants will discuss some of Africa’s lesser-known migrations, and offer new insights into the historical experience of Africans. Gonzales focuses in on the strategies enslaved and semi-free African women used to create opportunities to generate profit, to sustain community, and to shape diaspora medicinal and religious culture in early Colonial Mexico City. Saidi describes the matrifocal social institutions that placed migrating Bantu speakers in advantageous positions vis a vis newly neighboring settlements. Fourshey looks at how metaphors of hospitality were employed to regulate behaviour between Bantu and Batwa, and the prescription of indigeneity. Weise explores the contradictions between Nupe, Igala and Ebira migration traditions and the linguistic evidence. Vieira-Martinez discusses how we know that matrilineality was already operational when western savannah language groups migrated into the Kasai and Kwanza river basins. Although these are more local and more constrained cases of historical migration in Africa than those widely known by non-specialists, each in its own way carries significant implications for the representations we use to teach about the migrations of Bantu speaking communities and Africans in diaspora.
ASA 2012 Roundtable, The Audacity of Gender: Power, Sex and Social Roles in Africanist Research on Early Africa
- In the last decade, new research on early African History prior to the Atlantic Age has shed light on gender dynamics over the last two thousand years, yet virtually none of this research has been incorporated into the recent publications of African gender, women’s histories or recent African history textbooks. Our goal is to produce a text that synthesizes some of this new research into an intellectually rigorous, multimedia resource for use in the undergraduate classroom. This type of text is critical because it adds depth to our understanding of Africa’s varied and diverse gender systems in at least the two millennia before colonial rule, but also because it will enable us to add nuance to our understandings of colonial era interactions and post-colonial developments. While it is clearly difficult to delve into such early eras and reconstruct social systems, it is possible to analyze Africa's gender histories prior to the late pre-colonial period, when there are more plentiful written documents from outsider observers - the explorers, missionaries and colonists. This new research on early African gender dynamics is based on evidence from historical linguistic, archeological, and oral traditions. These internally generated sources have added dimension and even challenged the perspectives presented by outside observers, and scholars of African gender and African women's history. This roundtable summarizes the recent research on gender and women in Africa, methods for unearthing early African gender history, cases from west, central and east Africa, and discuss with the audience ideas on how to situate the textbook and impact the prevalent historiography.
Vieira-Martinez, Carolyn, et.al. “Interrogating Anthropologica