In this paper we argue that although the problematic nature of language construction has been acknowledged by a number of skeptical authors, including the recent claim in this journal (Reagan, 2004) that there is no such thing as English or any other language, this critical approach to language still needs to develop a broader understanding of the processes of invention. A central part of our argument, therefore, is that it is not enough to acknowledge that languages have been invented, nor that linguistic metalanguage constructs the world in particular ways; rather, we need to understand the interrelationships among metadiscursive regimes, language inventions, colonial history, language effects, alternative ways of understanding language, and strategies of disinvention and reconstitution. Any critical (applied) linguistic project that aims to deal with language in the contemporary world, however estimable its political intent may be, must also have ways of understanding the detrimental language effects i...

Disinventing and (Re)Constituting Languages

Over the next few decades, global migration is likely to play an influential role in shaping the nature of politics and economies internationally. This timely study illuminates possible implications of migrant flows from a development perspective. The authors survey the magnitude of the poor to rich-country flows, the rich-country policies that are driving them, and the multiple channels through which skilled migration affects development. They provide a rich discussion of the policy options, as they search for those that avoid the worst losses to poor countries while maintaining the most liberal feasible international migration regime.

Give Us Your Best and Brightest: The Global Hunt for Talent and Its Impact on the Developing World

▪ Abstract Taking as a point of departure Fernandez's survey (1978), this review seeks to show how research on African Independent Churches (AICs) has been reconfigured by new approaches to the anthropology of Christianity in Africa, in general, and the recent salient popularity of Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches (PCCs) in particular. If the adjectives “African” and “Independent” were once employed as markers of authentic, indigenous interpretations of Christianity, these terms proved to be increasingly problematic to capture the rise, spread, and phenomenal appeal of PCCs in Africa. Identifying three discursive frames—Christianity and “traditional religion,” Africa and “the wider world,” religion and politics—which organize(d) research on AICs and PCCs in the course of the past 25 years, this chapter critically reviews discussions about “Africanization,” globalization and modernity, and the role of religion in the public sphere in postcolonial African societies.

Christianity in Africa: From African Independent to Pentecostal‐Charismatic Churches

Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750.

Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson have dramatically challenged the tendency of economists to confine their empirical search for the causes of economic growth to the recent past. They argue that the kind of institutions established by European colonialists, either protecting private property or extracting rents, resulted in the poorer parts of the pre-colonial world becoming some of the richest economies of today; while transforming some of the more prosperous parts of the non-European world of 1500 into the poorest economies today. This view has been further elaborated for Africa by Nunn, with reference to slave trading. Drawing on African and comparative economic historiography, the present paper endorses the importance of examining growth theories against long-term history: revealing relationships that recur because the situations are similar, as well as because of path dependence as such. But it also argues that the causal relationships involved are more differentiated than is recognised in AJR's formulations. By compressing different historical periods and paths, the 'reversal' thesis over-simplifies the causation. Relatively low labour productivity was a premise of the external slave trades; though the latter greatly reinforced the relative poverty of many Sub-Saharan economies. Again, it is important to distinguish settler and non-settler economies within colonial Africa itself. In the latter case it was in the interests of colonial regimes to support, rather than simply extract from, African economic enterprise. Finally, economic rent and economic growth have often been joint products, including in pre-colonial and colonial Africa; the kinds of institutions that favoured economic growth in certain historical contexts were not necessarily optimal for that purpose in others. AJR have done much to bring development economics and economic history together. The next step is a more flexible conceptual framework, and a more complex explanation.

The ‘reversal of fortune’ thesis and the compression of history: Perspectives from African and comparative economic history

Historians rarely pause to reflect on the history and theory of our own discipline, but it is a salutary exercise, particularly when the discipline is as young as African history. Twenty years ago a majority of African peoples emerged from colonial domination and acquired their independence. In that same year their history was also symbolically liberated from domination by the activities of Europeans in Africa through the inauguration of the Journal of African History. And one year later the new African history was given what was to become one of its dominant methodologies with the publication of Jan Vansina's De la tradition Orale.African history was to be the history of Africans, a history that had begun well before the European ‘discovery’ of Africa. The problem was sources. Western historiography was firmly based on written sources which could be arranged in sequence and analyzed to trace incremental changes and establish cause and effect relationships in evolutionary patterns of change. Unlike written documents which were recorded in the past and passed down unchanged into the present, oral traditions had to be remembered and retold through successive generations to reach the present. Their accuracy was thus subject to lapses in memory and falsification in the long chains of transmission from the initial report of the event in the past to the tradition told in the present. To overcome these problems Vansina established an elaborate and meticulous methodology by which traditions should be collected and transcribed, their chains of transmission traced and variants compared, and obvious biases and falsifications stripped off to produce primary documents suitable for writing history within the western genre.

Oral traditions: whose history

“Strange foreign jewels on a mournful silent shore”Historians have frequently viewed the Swahili-speaking peoples of the East African coast as members of an Arab diaspora that spread around the Indian Ocean with trade over the last two thousand years. The interpretation flowed easily from the apparent “Arab” nature of Swahili culture--a written language using Arabic script, elaborate stone buildings and mosques constructed in urban settings, Islam, and genteel social behavior--especially when contrasted with the culture of mainland Africans, members of preliterate, uncentralized communities. Since the Swahili culture of the islands and coastal fringes bore little apparent resemblance to the cultures of the mainland, historians reasoned, its development could only have been the product of Persian and Arab merchants bringing to the “mournful silent shores” of East Africa the “jewels” of their own Muslim civilizations.The perspective was essentially diffusionist in assuming that cultural innovation and historical development in Africa could only have come from elsewhere, and racist in assuming that race and culture were so inextricably linked that a separate “race” of immigrants had to carry these new ideas. As a result, historians failed to investigate the possible African roots of Swahili culture in their Bantu language, their religious beliefs and values, their economy, or their social structure. But this charge applies not only to European historians; Swahili oral historians have long recounted the development of their societies in essentially the same terms in involved genealogies tracing the development of different Swahili families, communities, and institutions back to Persian or Arabian ancestors. When European historians came to study the oral traditions of the Swahili (usually in written, chronicle form), they thus found ready confirmation of their own assumptions and interpretations.

The Shirazi in Swahili Traditions, Culture and History

Comments on Christopher Ehret, "Bantu History: Re-Envisioning the Evidence of Language

Traditions of origin and their interpretation: The Mijikenda of Kenya

The closing decades of the nineteenth century were eventful ones for the kingdom of Buganda. Under the dynamic leadership of Kabaka Suna II (d. 1856), the kingdom had achieved unprecedented size and influence among the many kingdoms to the north and west of Lake Victoria at just the time when new, and troubling, forces began to impinge on the lake region. By the mid-1840s trade routes from the east coast had been extended beyond Karagwe around and across Lake Victoria to Buganda by Muslim traders from Zanzibar. The guns, cloth, and other trade goods that the traders exchanged for ivory and, later, slaves introduced a new and potentially destabilizing element into local and regional politics, threatening both the position of central rulers if subsidiary chiefs were able to acquire arms independently and the security of states unable to acquire arms. In Buganda, Suna moved quickly to bring the traders to the capital, to settle them in their own quarter under his control, and to impose a royal monopoly on trade. His successor, Kabaka Mutesa (1856-1884), initially excluded the traders while he consolidated his own power, but then reintroduced the royal monopoly and sought to prohibit the traders from reaching his arch enemy, Bunyoro. To further augment his own forces, he continually tried to entice the soldiers accompanying Swahili, and later European, caravans to desert to his own forces, and he repeatedly requested arms and support from Speke, Stanley, and the missionaries who followed them. The two kabakas were largely successful in these policies, but increasing dependence on trade required extensive expansion of state control to procure ever-diminishing quantities of ivory as well as to acquire slaves.1 Mutesa was also faced from the early years of his reign with a threat from Egyptian forces to the north. Throughout the 1860s and early 1870s the Egyptian seemed to be alternately arrayed with or against Buganda's enemy *The following article is based on an honors thesis, "Mutesa, Missionaries, and Misconceptions: A Fresh Look at the Christianization of Buganda," written by Jean Brierley at La Trobe University in 1976. Jean was struck by cancer shortly after finishing the thesis, and was thus unfortunately unable to revise it for publication herself. The original was considerably longer, was limited somewhat by the paucity of sources available in Australia, and was written prior to the extensive literature on health and healing now available. Nevertheless, Brierley still has something valuable to add to the discussion of conversion in Buganda. In revising it for publication, I have had to reduce it considerably and to reorganize the argument extensively, but I have sought to do so without altering or updating its content or diluting Jean's forceful argument and feisty style. She would not have approved otherwise. Jean's original acknowledgements were to Jenni Gliddon, Janine Free, Helen Ferguson, and myself for friendship, support and advice. I, in turn, would like to thank Jim Brierley for his help and kind permission to revise and publish Jean's work, Bill Darrow and John Rowe for their helpful comments on my drafts, and most of all, Jean, for the restless energy, acerbic wit, and perceptive insights she brought to her work and to all who worked with her. (TTS)

Thomas Spear

Papers

Oral traditions: whose history

The Shirazi in Swahili Traditions, Culture and History

Comments on Christopher Ehret, "Bantu History: Re-Envisioning the Evidence of Language

Traditions of origin and their interpretation: The Mijikenda of Kenya

Mutesa, the missionaries, and christian conversion in buganda*