PAUL LANDAU

verification." This creative thinking was on display in his first publications, which exhibited
"energetic and thorough" (i.e. "systematic") attempts to think about the solidity of asser-
tions about the past. All right, the early Henige would say, let us take a look at this or that
"problem": for example, that of a particular Akan stool (Abrem) in its putative existence in
the past, for which Henige scoured the available evidence searching for mention of this stool
(and therefore for a whole political history), thinking perhaps it was a recent creation. In the
event he found evidence of the stool in early dynasties, although with connections displeas-
ing to its partisans. This kind of conclusion typified Henige's modality. History is not a neat
story that satisfies one set of expectations perfectly, it is about what is real, and what is real is
imperfect.
Henige wrote further about Ghana and Africa, but would return many times to the
subject of historical memory in more far-flung venues. Thus one finds in several of his books
a world of material from all subfields of history. Beginning with The Chronology of Oral
Tradition, one finds not only Wolof and Imbangala examples, but also Polynesian, ancient
Sumerian, and Kashmiri examples, too. As in Vansina's book on oral tradition, the effect is
often dazzling. We learn, for instance, about the medieval Irish derbJhine system of political
organization and inheritance, for two pages of Chronology. The derfhine system, it turns
out, demonstrates the positive virtues of situationally forgetting one's ancestors, not remem-
bering them, throwing kinglists out the door.' Indeed there are reasons in many places in the
world that people misremember or forget.
Thirty-three years later, in an article about the veracity of places as they are located in
traditions, Henige investigated scholarly reconstructions on the whereabouts of Yamatai, a
place which features in Japanese oral tradition as a fabled capital. Again there were reasons
to forget as well as to remember. Henige hypothesizes that the "Japanese authorities have a
vested interest in locating Yamatai at a point as close as possible to the locus of the inchoate
Japanese state of Yamato, as recorded in later traditional histories, rather than in areas that
are closer to China but [and/or] more distant from the traditional Japanese heartland."6
Thereby the traditional identification of Yamatai-not a small matter in Japanese historiog-
raphy-is thrown into doubt.
Henige knew that something similar goes on in many archaeologists' attempts to use
oral traditions to understand what their digs are unable to tell them alone. Not only in Japan,
not only in Ghana, but in many venues, archaeologists have braided together genealogical
oral traditions with their stratiographic analyses, producing what they then reread as a story
confirming the solidity of both.
The pressures to attribute, assert, and produce, have deformed source criticism for
canonical, written texts, as well as for oral traditions. By no means did Henige ignore written
texts. Henige wrote a monograph about Christopher Columbus to coincide with the 500th
anniversary of 1492, and in an extended bout of detective work, he casts doubt on the mu-
tual independence of Las Casas' and Christopher Columbus' brother's canonical accounts of

6