Abstract
Africans have been conceptualising their lives and social relationships historically since the advent of agriculture and stockherding gave importance to questions of origin, genealogy and property long centuries ago. As state mechanisms and class contradictions evolved in many parts of the continent, historical interpretation became increasingly formalised in the hands of specialists. Informal traditions frequently survived in a masked form reflecting subversive interpretations and societal conflicts. The issues that mattered to such historians, the lineage of kings, the point of origins of peoples, the coming of an ecological disaster or a political defeat, belonged to a problematic that stemmed from prevailing material and social conditions. Although presented as objective truth, the tales of praise-singers, diviners and court officials were actually ideological in purpose. They represented the appropriation of social knowledge by particular groups for particular ends.
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For the standard British Africanist analysis, see Roland Oliver and John Fage, A Short History of Africa (Penguin, 1st edn., 1962, 5th edn., 1975);
John Fage, History of Africa (Hutchinson, 1978) and the new multi-volume Cambridge History of Africa, edited by Oliver and Fage. The American style is epitomised in
Curtin, Feierman, Thompson and Vansina, African History (Longman, 1978), although the last two authors are originally from South Africa and Belgium respectively. Africans axe largely responsible for the UNESCO History of Africa that has begun to be published.
Pre-Africanist views that may be noted with profit are W.E.B. DuBois, The World and Africa (International Publishers, 1965), reflecting a specific Afro-American tradition and
Samuel Johnson’s History of the Yorubas (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966 reprint), a typical but distinguished example of the kind of written histories Africans were producing during the colonial period.
Consensus and criticism within the field can be better understood by a progressive examination of Vansina, Mauny and Thomas, Ranger and Fyfe, the three collections discussed in the text and cited in the notes. On method and oral tradition, see its foremost champion, Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), but also his remarks on its abuse: ‘Comment: Traditions of Genesis’, JAH, XV (1974). A collection presenting a critical view of anthropology is
Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (Ithaca Press, 1973). A brilliant portrait of one of the most influential anthropologists of the colonial
era has been penned by Richard Brown: ‘Passages in the Life of a White Anthropologist: Max Gluckman in Northern Rhodesia’, JAH, XX (1979).
Some of the earliest criticisms of Africanist history by Wrigley, Saul and Ochieng are cited in the text. The under-developmentalist hypothesis is raised in E.A. Alpers, ‘Rethinking African Economic History’, KHR, I (1973) and Samir Amin, ‘Underdevelopment and Dependence in Black Africa — Origin and Contemporary Forms’, JMAS, X (1972). See also Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1972).
Arguably the finest work in the South African liberal tradition is C.W. DeKiewiet, A History of South Africa: Social and Economic (Oxford University Press, 1940). The tradition was extended under Africanist influence with
Leonard Thompson and Monica Wilson, eds, Oxford History of South Africa (Oxford University Press, 1969–71). Among the landmarks of the new historiography of southern Africa are:
Frederick Johnstone, Class, Race and Gold (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976);
Charles van Onselen, Chibaro (Pluto Press, 1976)
and Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore, eds, Economy and Society in Pre-industrial South Africa (Longman, 1980). Drawing on underdevelopmentalist and Marxist thought is the major collection by
Neil Parsons and Robin Palmer, The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa (Heinemann, 1977).
A notion of the critical ideas of some of the established African historians emerges from J.F.A. Ajayi’s essay in the Ranger collection cited earlier, E.A. Ayandele, ‘How Truly Nigerian is Nigerian History?’ in his Nigerian Historical Studies (Frank Cass, 1979) and Bethwell A. Ogot, ‘Towards a History of Kenya’, KHR, IV (1976). An interesting synthesis that has moved fairly far from the Africanist paradigm is Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch and Henri Mouniot, L’Afrique noire de 1800 a nos jours (Presses Universitaires de France, 1974). Ailsa Auchnie, ‘African Historical Research in the Paris Region’, AA, LXXX (1981) usefully surveys the situation of African historiographic work in contemporary France.
Three recent works have particularly influenced the writing of this chapter, the writings cited in the notes by Said, Swai and Bernstein & Depelchin. For an expanded version of Swai’s hypothesis, see A J. Temu and B. Swai, Historians and Africanist History: a Critique (Zed Press, 1981).
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© 1984 Bill Freund
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Freund, B. (1984). Africanist History and the History of Africa. In: The Making of Contemporary Africa. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17332-7_1
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