Post by anansi on Oct 22, 2024 1:38:36 GMT -5
What are the challenges faced by researchers in the reconstruction of African history?
Written text, while some African societies kept written records, many relied on oral traditions. European colonization often marginalized these oral histories, and the written records that exist are often filtered through the perspectives of non-African writers, such as Arabs or Europeans., the way many Africans tend to keep records need a separate approach, their graphic art was not done for art sake, but a virtual books, when Europeans took these pcs, and split them up, often context is lost, and all that's left is pretty pics ,great carvings or highly technologically produced bronze, the story they told is lost, especially without an African expert in that culture to walk you through it, so the oral and archaeological records is what one would more likely focus on, example without context the below is just decoration.
The preserved collection of Aroko ‘letters’ and message assembled by John Augustus Otunba-Payne and provided to the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1886. The messages were initially donated to Oxford University 130 years ago and are now part of the University of Aberdeen.
However, for a number of traditionally-educated Yoruba who were literate in ‘reading’ aroko messages, the assemblage of cowrie shells, feathers and ancillary objects could be as perfectly understood as the essay you are now reading:
“Six in the Jebu language is E-fa, which is derived from the verb /fa/, to draw; Africans are in the habit of cleaning their ears with a feather, and look upon it as the only instrument with which this can be effectually done; the whole message, therefore, is as follows.
Efa yi ni mo fi fa o mora, ki wo no si fa mo mi girigiri
“By these six cowries I do draw you to myself, and you should also draw closely to me.”
Iye yi ni mo fi nreti, ni kankansi ni si ni ki nri o.
“As by this feather only I can reach to your ears, so I am expecting you to come to me, or hoping to see you immediately.”
The revelation didn’t stop there, as Bloxam’s presentation quoted seven other aroko ‘symbolic letters’, including friendly notes indicating a missed friendship and another documenting a much longer and complex diplomatic message between two neighboring potentates (the /Awujale/, or principal ruler of Ijebu and Kosoko, his counterpart and the /Eleko/ of Lagos) in 1851.
Illustrations of the eight aroko ‘letters’ provided by John Otunba-Payne and presented at the meeting of the Royal Anthropological Society on November 23, 1886. Image from the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 16, 1887.
Here was, at long last, evidence of an African capacity suspected and investigated by external observers, but never yet explicitly explained — communicative symbols, capable of expressing metaphor, subtlety, poetry — and perhaps history — in a way that was incontrovertibly native to the continent. In this sense, the report should have represented a monumental step forward in the level of interest and understanding in Yoruba culture and civilization, and perhaps offering new avenues and methods through which to analyze other African societies. Why, then have these letters been so little-studied in the more than 130 years since they elicited so much excitement and interest from the members of the Royal Anthropological Institute?
The samples had been provided to linguist Robert Needham Cust by John Augustus Otunba-Payne, a prominent Sierra Leone-born clerk, editor and Ijebu-Yoruba aristocrat who worked as the registrar at the Lagos Supreme Court. His examples had provided something genuinely original — the first scholarly insights into a form of indigenous communication and record-keeping among the populous Yoruba people, already known for their complex pantheon of deities and distinctive predilection for urbanism.
A court clerk, history enthusiast, editor and publisher of the first-ever almanac published in West Africa, Otunba-Payne tried unsuccessfully to draw both scholarly and popular attention to aroko as a form of “hieroglyphic” communication, as he termed it in his original almanac entry on the phenomenon. Image From Payne’s LAGOS Almanac, 1887.
As with many of his literate colleagues, Otunba-Payne was both well-traveled and well-educated by the standards of the day. Along with his professional peers in the Lagosian elite of the late 19th-century, Otunba-Payne was focused on documenting and, where possible, preserving the cultural practices he knew in intimate detail. In the lower example presented above, he translated a relatively detailed message between the Awujale of Ijebu-Ode (capital city of the Ijebu sub-group of the Yoruba) to his
The flower of this Lagosian elite created a lively urban newspaper culture in both English and Yoruba, documented by Michael Echuero’s classic study, Victorian Lagos: Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Lagos Life . Along with news of developments across West Africa and the rest of the world, newspapers in Lagos often published traditions of origin, accounts of the recent civil wars and the complex culture of the vast and variegated Yoruba groups resident in the city, both drawing from and feeding an intense interest in history that resulted in a “Lagosian Renaissance” during the 1890s.
medium.com/@ontheplumetrail/in-order-to-indicate-and-communicate-their-mind-aroko-ideographs-otunba-paynes-lagos-almanac-385bba74e8ed
Written text, while some African societies kept written records, many relied on oral traditions. European colonization often marginalized these oral histories, and the written records that exist are often filtered through the perspectives of non-African writers, such as Arabs or Europeans., the way many Africans tend to keep records need a separate approach, their graphic art was not done for art sake, but a virtual books, when Europeans took these pcs, and split them up, often context is lost, and all that's left is pretty pics ,great carvings or highly technologically produced bronze, the story they told is lost, especially without an African expert in that culture to walk you through it, so the oral and archaeological records is what one would more likely focus on, example without context the below is just decoration.
The preserved collection of Aroko ‘letters’ and message assembled by John Augustus Otunba-Payne and provided to the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1886. The messages were initially donated to Oxford University 130 years ago and are now part of the University of Aberdeen.
However, for a number of traditionally-educated Yoruba who were literate in ‘reading’ aroko messages, the assemblage of cowrie shells, feathers and ancillary objects could be as perfectly understood as the essay you are now reading:
“Six in the Jebu language is E-fa, which is derived from the verb /fa/, to draw; Africans are in the habit of cleaning their ears with a feather, and look upon it as the only instrument with which this can be effectually done; the whole message, therefore, is as follows.
Efa yi ni mo fi fa o mora, ki wo no si fa mo mi girigiri
“By these six cowries I do draw you to myself, and you should also draw closely to me.”
Iye yi ni mo fi nreti, ni kankansi ni si ni ki nri o.
“As by this feather only I can reach to your ears, so I am expecting you to come to me, or hoping to see you immediately.”
The revelation didn’t stop there, as Bloxam’s presentation quoted seven other aroko ‘symbolic letters’, including friendly notes indicating a missed friendship and another documenting a much longer and complex diplomatic message between two neighboring potentates (the /Awujale/, or principal ruler of Ijebu and Kosoko, his counterpart and the /Eleko/ of Lagos) in 1851.
Illustrations of the eight aroko ‘letters’ provided by John Otunba-Payne and presented at the meeting of the Royal Anthropological Society on November 23, 1886. Image from the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 16, 1887.
Here was, at long last, evidence of an African capacity suspected and investigated by external observers, but never yet explicitly explained — communicative symbols, capable of expressing metaphor, subtlety, poetry — and perhaps history — in a way that was incontrovertibly native to the continent. In this sense, the report should have represented a monumental step forward in the level of interest and understanding in Yoruba culture and civilization, and perhaps offering new avenues and methods through which to analyze other African societies. Why, then have these letters been so little-studied in the more than 130 years since they elicited so much excitement and interest from the members of the Royal Anthropological Institute?
The samples had been provided to linguist Robert Needham Cust by John Augustus Otunba-Payne, a prominent Sierra Leone-born clerk, editor and Ijebu-Yoruba aristocrat who worked as the registrar at the Lagos Supreme Court. His examples had provided something genuinely original — the first scholarly insights into a form of indigenous communication and record-keeping among the populous Yoruba people, already known for their complex pantheon of deities and distinctive predilection for urbanism.
A court clerk, history enthusiast, editor and publisher of the first-ever almanac published in West Africa, Otunba-Payne tried unsuccessfully to draw both scholarly and popular attention to aroko as a form of “hieroglyphic” communication, as he termed it in his original almanac entry on the phenomenon. Image From Payne’s LAGOS Almanac, 1887.
As with many of his literate colleagues, Otunba-Payne was both well-traveled and well-educated by the standards of the day. Along with his professional peers in the Lagosian elite of the late 19th-century, Otunba-Payne was focused on documenting and, where possible, preserving the cultural practices he knew in intimate detail. In the lower example presented above, he translated a relatively detailed message between the Awujale of Ijebu-Ode (capital city of the Ijebu sub-group of the Yoruba) to his
The flower of this Lagosian elite created a lively urban newspaper culture in both English and Yoruba, documented by Michael Echuero’s classic study, Victorian Lagos: Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Lagos Life . Along with news of developments across West Africa and the rest of the world, newspapers in Lagos often published traditions of origin, accounts of the recent civil wars and the complex culture of the vast and variegated Yoruba groups resident in the city, both drawing from and feeding an intense interest in history that resulted in a “Lagosian Renaissance” during the 1890s.
medium.com/@ontheplumetrail/in-order-to-indicate-and-communicate-their-mind-aroko-ideographs-otunba-paynes-lagos-almanac-385bba74e8ed