Before "Baga": Settlement chronologies of the coastal Rio Nunez region, earliest times to c.1000 CE

International Journal of African Historical Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 229-254

  Fields, Edda L ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 42649095125     PISSN: 03617882     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/4129008     Document Type: Review

References (84)

1. David Berliner, "Nous Sommes les Derniers Bulongic: Sur une Impossible Transmission dans un Société d'Afrique de l'ouest"(Ph.D. thesis, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 2002);
2. Bruce L. Mouser, "Who and Where Were the Baga? European Perceptionsfrom 1793 to 1821, " History in Africa 29 (2002);
3. Ramon Sarro-Maluquer, "Religious Movements and Political Transformation in the Republic of Guinea" (Ph.D. thesis. University of London, 1999);
4. Paul E. H. Hair, "The History of the Baga in Early Written Sources, " History in Africa 24 (1997), 381-91;
5. Frederick Lamp, The Art of the Baga: A Drama of Cultural Reinvention (New York, 1996).
6. Ramon Sarro-Maluquer, "Entre migration et autochtonie: Lesrécits d'origine baga, " in Gerald Gaillard, ed., Migrationsanciennes et peuplement actuel des Cotes guinéennes (Paris, 2000), 457-65;
7. Sarro-Maluquer, "Religious Movements and Political Transformation."
8. Though the Baga remain dominant, a small but growing literature exists onthe Nalu. See Amelia Frazao-Moreira, "Récits de migration entre les Nalous de Cubucare, "
9. e siècle: Naissance d'un group etappropriation d'un nom, " both in Gaillard, ed., Migrations anciennes, 403-412 and 385-402.
10. Some scholars have suggested that "Baga" or "baka" isa Temne word meaning "a place that has been seized." See Lamp, The Art of the Baga, 40, 44.
11. Others have suggested that Susu and Fulfulde traders assigned the term tocoastal dwellers and that "Baga" was derived from a Susu word meaning"man of the sea." See Sarro-Maluquer, "Entre migration etautochtonie, " 46;
12. André Alvares de Almada, Brief Treatise on the Rivers of Guinea(c.1594), Part 1: Translated Text, trans. P. E. H. Hair (Liverpool, 1986);
13. Francisco de Lemos Coelho, Description of the Coast of Guinea, ed. Paul E. H. Hair (Liverpool, 1985);
14. Avelino Teixeira da Mota and Paul E. H. Hair, Descriçāo da Serra Leoa e dos Rios de Guiné do Cabo Verde: An Account of Sierra Leoneand the Rivers of Guinea of Cape Verde by André Donelha (Lisbon, 1977);
15. Alonso de Sandoval, De Instauranda aethiopum salute el mundo de laesclavitud negra en America (Bogotá 1956);
16. André Arcin, Historie de la Guinée Française: Rivières du Sud-Fouta-Diallon Région du Sud du Soudan (Paris, 1909), 177;
17. J. Figarol, Monographie du Cercle du Rio Nuñez, Box 1.42, Conakry, Archives Nationale, 95;
18. Georges Paroisse, "Notes sur les Peuplades Autochtones de la Guinée Française (Rivières du Sud), " L'Anthropologie 7(1896), 432.
19. Hair, "History of the Baga."
20. Mouser, "Who and Where Were the Baga?, " 338, 363-64, 351.
21. Sarro-Maluquer, "Entre migration et autochtonie, " 46.
22. Focusing instead on the 1793-1821 period, Mouser does not weigh in on theunresolved debate on the value of oral traditions in recounting the origins ofthe Baga. Mouser, "Who and Where, " 337;
23. Frazao-Moreira, "Récits de migration, " 408.
24. Berliner, "Nous Sommes les Derniers Bulongic, " 2003.
25. A speech community is defined as "those people who communicate withone another or are connected to one another by chains of speakers whocommunicate with one another, " Malcolm Ross and Mark Durie, "Introduction, " in Mark Durie and Malcolm Ross, eds., The Comparative Method Reviewed: Regularity and Irregularity in Language Change (Oxford, 1996), 16.
26. Building on a rich body of language and ethnographic sources, historianshave used the comparative method to reconstruct the early social and politicalhistories of Bantu speech communities in Eastern, Central, and Southern Africa.For examples of the historical and comparative linguistic method applied to the Bantu language group, see the works of Christopher Ehret, Jan Vansina, Derek Nurse, Thomas Spear, David Schoenbrun, and Kairn Klieman, including Christopher Ehret, An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History;1000 B.C. to A.D. 400 (Charlottesville, 1998);
27. Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, 1990);
28. Derek Nurse, "The Contribution of Linguistics to the Study of History in Africa, " Journal of African History 38 (1997), 359-91;
29. Thomas Spear, The Swahili (Philadelphia, 1985);
30. th Century(Portsmouth, N.H., 1998).
31. Kairn Klieman, The Pygmies Were Our Compass : Bantu and Batwa in the History of West Central Africa, Early Times to c. 1900 CE (Portsmouth, N.H., 2004);
32. Roger M. Blench and Kevin C. Mac Donald, eds., The Origins and Developmentof African Livestock: Archaeology, Genetics, Linguistics, and Ethnography(London, 2000);
33. Kay Williamson, The Pedigree of Nations: Historical Linguistics in Nigeria: An Inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Port Harcourt on Tuesday, 7 April 1987 (Port Harcourt, 1987);
34. Tal Tamari, Les Castes de l'Afrique occidentale: artisans et musiciensendogames (Nanterre, 1997).
35. Ross and Durie, "Introduction, " 5-6.
36. David Dalby, "Mel Languages in Polyglotta Africana, Part 1: Baga, Landuma, and Temne, " Sierra Leone Language Review 4 (1965), 130;
37. Dalby, "The Mel Languages: A Reclassification of Southern 'West Atlantic', " African Language Studies 4 (1965), 1-17;
38. J. David Sapir, "West Atlantic: An Inventory of the Languages, their Noun Class Systems and Consonant Alternation, " in Current Trends in Linguistics in Sub-Saharan Africa (The Hague, 1971), 46;
39. W. A. A. Wilson, 'Temne and the Atlantic Group, " Sierra Leone Language Review 2 (1963), 26.
40. Sapir, "West Atlantic, " 45;
41. Konstantin Pozdniakov, Sravnitel'naia Grammatika Atlantichskikh lazykov(Moscow, 1993), 3;
42. Edda L. Fields, "Rice Farmers in the Rio Nunez Region: A Social History of Agricultural Technology and Identity in Coastal Guinea, ca. 2000 BCEto 1880 CE" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2001), 42-46.
43. Jean L. Donneux, "Hypothèses pour la comparative des langues Atlantiques, " Africana linguistica 6 (1975), 41-129;
44. Pozdniakov, Sravnitel'naia Grammatika.
45. A large body of comparative linguistic data exists for West Africa'smajor language families. For the Mande language family, see Raimund Kastenholz, "Comparative Mande Studies: State of the Art, " Sprache und Geschichtein Afrika (1991/92), 107-58;
46. Kastenholz, "Essai de classification des dialects Mande-Kan, "Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika (1979), 205-233;
47. Kastenholz, Mande Languages and Linguistics (Hamburg, 1988).
48. Sapir, "West Atlantic, " 49, 62-64.
49. Only two brief morphological studies and no dictionaries or glossaries ofthese languages have been published. W. A. A. Wilson, "Temne, Landuma andthe Baga Languages, " Sierra Leone Language Review 1 (1962), 27-38;
50. Erhard Voeltz and Mohamed Camara, "Nalu-French Lexique" (unpublished).
51. Guillaume Segerer, La Langue bijogo de Bubaque (Guinée Bissau)(Paris, 2003);
52. Segerer, "Description de la Langue bijogo, GuinéeBissau" (Paris: Doctoral thesis, 2000).
53. Donald Ringe has shown that a mathematically predictable percentage ofchance similarities, false cognates, exist. And the use of longer wordlists -500 words instead of 100 - neither statistically increases nor decreases theprobability of chance similarities. See Donald A. Ringe, Jr., "OnCalculating the Factor of Chance in Language Comparison, " Transactions ofthe American Philosophical Society 82, 1 (1992), 1-110.
54. Important debate continues on this hypothesis. This hypothesis has twoimplications: that core vocabulary words are some of the oldest words in alanguage, and that sound changes, which distinguish daughter languages fromtheir linguistic ancestors, are encoded in core vocabulary words. Some linguistsresist the notion that one can identify a set of vocabulary words that areculturally neutral in all of the world's languages. Others have questioned thestability of "core" vocabulary, demonstrating that both core andnon-core vocabulary is affected by borrowing. When the borrowings are subject tothe same sound changes as cognates, it is difficult to distinguish the borrowedwords from inherited forms. See C. H. Borland, "Computing African Linguistic Prehistory, " in Derek F. Gowlett, ed., African Linguistic Contributions: Papers in Honour of Ernst Westphal (Pretoria, 1992), 6-11;
55. Borland, "How Basic is 'Basic' Vocabulary?, " Current Anthropology 32, 3 (1982), 315-16.
56. Lyle Campbell, "On Sound Change and Challenges to Regularity, "in Durie and Ross, eds., The Comparative Method Reviewed, 72-89.
57. Because of space considerations, I chose to publish selected data for Nalu, Mbulungish, and Mboteni, addressing the dearth of available data for theselanguages; Sitem and Temne are much better documented. See C. F. Schlenker, ACollection of Temne Traditions, Fables and Proverbs (London, 1861);
58. Maurice Houis, "Contes Baga (Dialecte du Koba), " Etudes Guinéen (1950), 3-15;
59. Houis, "Les minorités ethniques de la Guinéecô tière - Situation linguistique, " Etudes Guinéen(1950), 25-48;
60. Houis, "La système prenominale et les classes dans lesdialectes bagas, " Bulletin de l'IFAN (1953), 381-404;
61. Wilson, "Temne, Landuma and the Baga Languages";
62. Wilson, "Temne and the Atlantic Group";
63. Tina Weller Ganong, "Features of Baga Morphology, Syntax and Narrative Discourse" (M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Arlington, 1998).Colleagues who wish to consult unpublished language data for the Rio Nunezregion may contact me personally.
64. Raimo Antilla, Historical and Comparative Linguistics (Philadelphia, 1989), 396-98;
65. Ehret, African Classical Age, 23-28;
66. Anthony Fox, Linguistic Reconstruction: An Introduction to Theory and Method (Oxford, 1995), 279-91;
67. Nurse, "The Contribution of Linguistics, " 363-66;
68. Derek Nurse and Thomas Hinnebusch, Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History (Berkeley, 1993), 24, 266-71;
69. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 7, 39-42;
70. David Schoenbrun, "Early History in Eastern Africa's Great Lakes Region: Linguistic, Ecological, and Archaeological Approaches ca. 500 B.C. to A.D. 1000" (Ph.D. thesis, UCLA, 1991), 105-107, 110-14;
71. Jan Vansina, "New Linguistic Evidence and the Bantu Expansion, "Journal of African History (1995), 179;
72. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest, 11, 16.
73. The Nalu language has six dialects, three spoken in Guinea-Conakry andthree spoken in Guinée-Bissau. Because of the paucity of research on Nalulanguages, the relationship between the Nalu dialects remains unknown. F. K.Erhard Voeltz, "Les Langues de la Guinée, " Cahiers d'Etude des Langues Guinéennes (1996), 1, 24-25.
74. Sapir, "West Atlantic, " 47. |
75. Fields, "Rice Farmers in the Rio Nunez region, " 68.
76. Nurse, "Contribution of Linguistics, " 369-71.
77. Jan Vansina, "Review Article: Linguistic Evidence and Historical Reconstruction, " Journal of African History 40 (1999), 469-73.
78. Colin Renfrew, "Introduction: The Problem of Time Depth, " in Colin Renfrew, April McMahon, and Larry Trask, eds., Time Depth in Historical Linguistics (Cambridge, 2000), ix-xiv.
79. Sheila Embleton, "Lexicostatistics/Glottochronology: From Swadesh to Sankoff to Starostin to Future Horizons, " in Renfrew, McMahon, and Trask, eds., Time Depth in Historical Linguists (Cambridge, 2000), 143-66.
80. Christopher Ehret, "Testing the Expectations of Glottochronology Against the Correlations of Language and Archaeology in Africa, " in Renfrew, McMahon, and Trask, e'ds., Time Depth in Historical Linguists, 373-99.
81. Christoher Ehret, "Language and History, " in Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse, eds., African Languages: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2000), 273-75;
82. Vansina, "New Linguistic Evidence, " 175-76;
83. Kent D. Bimson, "Comparative Reconstruction of Proto-Northern- Western Mande" (Ph.D. thesis, UCLA, 1980).
84. Paul Hair also hypothesized that the Baga migrated to the coast fromtheir homeland in the South. Hair, "The History of the Baga, " 386.