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THE SLOW SUPPRESSION OF THE SLAVE TRADE IN SOUTHEASTERN NIGERIA

autobiographical author who did edit her unpublished manuscript and was also a public writer, the genre in question might more properly belong to obituaries than tomemoirs. T. C.McCaskie focused his chapter upon the evolution of this mode of writing in colonial Asante. His is the one contribution which most fully lives up to the book’s promise of examining not only the textual content of the obituaries in question but also the full range of their presentation, circulation (or repression) and even practices of reception (combining private with public reading and elaborate oral commentaries extending well beyond the often very restrained information that gets printed). A number of the essays focus upon letters, sometimes preserved in ‘tin trunks’ but often culled from various state and private archives. Here writing is very directly connected to practical objects : for Catherine Burns’s herbalist, Louisa Mvemve, the legitimation of professional and civil status before South African state authorities; for Vukile Khumalo’s Zulu-language ‘epistolatory network’ around the Natal mission station of Ekukahanyeni, a variety of social but particularly political needs; for Keith Breckenridge’s workers, the management of their often very precarious lives in a South Africa of extensive labor migration; for Lynn Thomas’s Kenya schoolgirls, the pursuit of claims upon men who had made them pregnant outside of marriage. Politics and cultural uplift are the more obvious issue in Bodil Folke Frederiksen’s study of a 1945–52 Kikuyu newspaper, much of whose content also consisted of letters. The central question for the research which holds together this entire volume is whether its focus on literature and literacy moves us beyond the usual use of ‘tin trunk’ materials for reconstructing social history, i.e. how much does the contextual tail end up wagging the textual dog? Perhaps such a question is inappropriate, since the whole notion of an even semi-autonomous text is linked to a European cultural paradigm which projects like this (along with postmodernist literary theory, happily not much present here) seek to transcend. But, except for McCaskie and Furniss (as well as, in a negative sense, Barber), there is little attempt by the authors to connect modern literacy with precolonial oral or writtenIslamic forms of literary expression. Writing and literacy thus appear as Western skills, appropriated by Africans for instrumental rather than expressive purposes. Nonetheless, writings of this kind inevitably reveal something more of the ‘selves’ who produce them than other forms of evidence and so the book does live up to its promise.