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An Ethnographic Classic Brought to Light1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2012
Extract
In 1825, António Candido Pedroso Gamitto, a cadet aged nineteen in one of the Lisbon regiments, was sent to Africa as an ensign. He himself was well aware of how this course of events interfered with his education:
At a period of life when a youth who is his own master and not lacking in means dedicates himself to studies, that is what happened to me. As I grew older I realised that I had lost the best time and opportunity for study; and when I wanted to remedy this it was already too late for in Africa there are no teachers, nor even libraries, and it was difficult to have enough books sent from Europe.
Lamenting my lost time, I was obliged to content myself with what instruction I could obtain through reading, and this was done at an advanced age in a life which seventeen years in the African climate had ruined.
In saying these things I am speaking on my own behalf and I do so with the sole object of procuring the indulgence of my readers (vol. i, p. 22).
Statements such as this reveal immediately that Gamitto, even if he lacked formal education, had an ingenuous insight into his own limitations, and it may have been this quality that made him a successful ethnographer.
Résumé
MISE EN LUMIERE D'UN OUVRAGE ETHNOGRAPHIQUE CLASSIQUE
Cet article est un examen critique de la traduction faite par le Dr. Ian Cunnison de l'ouvrage portugais O Muata Cazembe, par António Gamitto. Gamitto, capitaine dans l'armée portugaise, fut envoyé en Afrique Orientale en 1825. En 1831, il fut nommé commandant en second de la dernière d'une série de trois expéditions au moyen desquelles les Portugais cherchaient à entrer en relations commerciales avec les Lunda Orientaux de Cazembe et, par leur intermédiaire et celui des Lunda Occidentaux apparentés, qui habitaient plus loin dans le continent, a établir des communications avec leurs colonies sur la côte occidentale. Le titre du livre est emprunté du nom du personnage principal de l'histoire de Gamitto, à savoir le roi (Muata) Cazembe. L'ouvrage revêt la forme d'un journal particulier qui fait ressortir que Gamitto était non seulement un observateur bien disposé et juste, mais aussi un ethnographe excellent, ce qui est confirmé par une comparaison de ses constatations avec les études récentes faites sur les lieux au sujet des peuples Malaŵi et Ceŵa. Une des plus remarquables de ses découvertes ethnographiques est que les Malaŵi étaient un peuple matrilineál et il a également remarqué l'existence de l'institution connue sous le nom d' ‘amitié funèbre ’. Il s'intéressa également à leurs langues, pour lesquelles il avait une oreille sensible. Les passages les plus précieux du livre de Gamitto sont probablement ceux qui donnent des descriptions détaillées des procédés techniques et des coutumes qui, par suite de l'arrivée des Européens, ne sont plus, ou qui ne sont que très rarement pratiqués.
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- Copyright © International African Institute 1964
References
page 46 note 2 Dr. Cunnison gives a useful outline of the main features of these expeditions and their place in history in ‘Kazembe and the Portuguese’, Journal of African History, ii, 1961, 61–76Google Scholar.
page 46 note 3 When Gamitto's rendering of tribal names differs from the modern form (it happens to be the same in this instance), I use the latter. Cunnison seems to have compromised between the two in the case of the name Cheva, which Gamitto gives as Chévas and the modern rendering of which varies between Chewa and Cewa. Following a modification of Atkins's orthography, I use Ceŵa. I follow Gamitto's method of using initial capitals for the vernacular terms he recorded, and I use italics for the modern renderings (Atkins's orthography, again) of such terms.
page 46 note 4 Following the chronology adopted by Cunnison, Ian, ‘The Reigns of the Kazembes’, Northern Rhodesia Journal, iii (1956), 131–8Google Scholar, at p. 134.
page 47 note 1 Lacerda's journal, continued after his death by Father F. J. Pinto, is translated by SirBurton, Richard F., in The Lands of Cazembe, London: John Murray for the Royal Geographical Society, 1873Google Scholar.
page 48 note 1 Published in Lisbon by the Divisão de Publicações e Biblioteca, Agência Geral das Colónias.
page 48 note 2 Published in Lisbon in 1854 by the Imprensa Nacional.
page 49 note 1 All my field-work was most generously financed by the Colonial Social Science Research Council, to whom I take this opportunity of recording my thanks.
page 49 note 2 Both in his Translator's Preface and in other works, such as ‘Kazembe and the Portuguese’ and The Luapula Peoples of Northern Rhodesia, Manchester: Manchester University Press for Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1959Google Scholar.
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page 49 note 4 I am grateful to Miss Killie Campbell of Durban for allowing me to use her first edition of O Muata Cazembe and for her hospitality, which is a by-word among scholars privileged to work in her magnificent Africana collection. For translations I am indebted to Mr. José Cotta, at the time a student of architecture at the University of Natal, and to Mr. L. Ivens Ferraz, then a student of social anthropology and Bantu languages at the University of the Witwatersrand.
page 50 note 1 As it happens, the majority dialect or group of dialects, spoken by about a million people or some two-thirds of the so-called Nyanja-speakers. But for the fortuitous circumstance that it was the Nyanja or Lake dialect that was first recorded and standardized by missionaries, either Ceŵa or Malaŵi might have been a more appropriate designation for the language as a whole.
page 51 note 1 Stefaniszyn, B., ‘Funeral Friendship in Central Africa’, Africa, xx (1950), 290–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tew, Mary, ‘A Further Note on Funeral Friendship’, Africa, xxi (1951), 122–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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page 52 note 1 Poole, E. H. Lane, ‘The Date of the Crossing of the Zambezi by the Ngoni’, Journal of the African Society, xxix (1929–30), 290–2Google Scholar.
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page 53 note 1 ‘Notes on Some Tribes in British East Africa ’, p. 291.
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