For the past two weeks I’ve been digging into an exciting collection of oral history interviews. What makes the interviews so interesting for me is that they were conducted in 1981 and 1982 (so almost forty years ago!) in the same areas where I am currently doing oral history research into deeper gender history.
The 1981-82 project was led by historian Gerhard Liesegang, and he worked together with Teresa Oliveira, Mucojuane M. Vicente, and Manuel J. Bula (translating from Ciyaawo to Portuguese). Its aim was to reconstruct the history of this northern territory from precolonial times to the anticolonial struggle (1964-1974).
Interesting about Niassa is that it was relatively late, only in 1919, that the area was brought under direct Portuguese colonial control. Until then some of the Yaawo chiefs offered strong resistance against colonial expansion into their areas.
The interviews Liesegang and his team conducted in 1981 and 1982 were later deposited at the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique (hereafter AHM). AHM is the country’s national archive, established already during the colonial period in 1934. Though it mainly houses 19th and 20th century written documents, it also holds a collection of about 1000 oral history interviews (Liesegang 2000). For the most part this material was produced between 1981 and 1984 (ibid). This is the oral history collection to which the Niassa interviews also belongs.
The Niassa collection consists of about 60 interviews (which with many lengthy group interviews adds up to over 100 cassette tapes!). Most of the interviews were conducted in Ciyaawo-speaking areas, but some were also conducted, for instance, in the districts of Cuamba (south of the provincial capital Lichinga) and Mecula (in the northeastern corner of the province), where Emakhuwa is the more dominant language, or the Lago district where Cinyanja is widely spoken (see The Ciyaawo Language). My main interest is in the interviews conducted in Ciyaawo as my own research has focused on those areas.
Map of Niassa (zoom in to see boundaries of districts)
None of the interviews belonging to this collection have been digitized, and only some have been partially transcribed. Only a handful of interviews have been translated to Portuguese. With the permission of the AHM, in the past two weeks I have been converting the cassettes to MP3. Luckily, many of the cassettes are in surprisingly good shape!
Over the coming months, in agreement with the Archive, I will also work on getting the interviews transcribed. Ciyaawo is not widely used as a written language, which makes the task more difficult. There are excellent Ciyaawo-speaking linguists available to do the job, but the process depends a lot on available funds.
So far I have only scratched the surface of this rich material. But I am thrilled by the opportunity it offers to trace change in the oral historical narratives told in the beginning of the 80s and the ones being communicated in my interviews almost forty years later.
I have already encountered some familiar voices in the archives. Some of the male elders I interviewed last year were interviewed already in 1981 by Liesegang and his team. At the time they occupied supportive roles, accompanying elder relatives who were the main narrators. These days, now that they themselves are the elders—they are the living archives, the ones communicating these historical narratives to future generations.
What is even more exciting though is that we have the opportunity to trace the telling of these oral historical narratives much deeper than the 80s. The first historical account of the Yaawo people—a compilation of oral histories—was written by Yohanna B. Abdallah in Ciyaawo at the turn of the twentieth century. Abdallah was himself a Yaawo who was brought up in Southern Tanzania in the 1880s. He wrote his study while he was working as a priest at the Anglican mission in Unango (close to the village of Malulu in what is now the district of Sanga).
Reading (and listening to) these different oral history materials (produced at different times) alongside each other, my interest is especially in the changing histories of the acibibi (later known also as rainhas or queens). These women—usually appointed from within the maternal family of the chief—exercised significant political and religious power alongside the male chiefs in the matrilineal Yaawo communities in precolonial times. Even today acibibi exist, though their roles have changed, and many histories have been forgotten.
How has this gendered historical knowledge changed through the years? Why has it changed? And how do people understand their relation to these changing (or even forgotten) histories? These are some of the questions that will guide my fieldwork in the coming months.
References
Abdallah, Yohannah B. The Yaos: Chiikala cha Wayao. Edited and translated by Meredith Sanderson. 1919. 2nd ed. London: Frank Cass and Company, 1973.
Liesegang, Gerhard. ‘The Arquivo Historico de Moçambique and Historical Research in Maputo’. History in Africa 27 (2000): 471–477.