16/11/2023, 23:35 What's New About African History?

| History News Network

What's New About African History?

Historians/History

by John Edward Philips

Mr. Philips is Professor of International Society at Hirosaki University in Japan. He has published translations
of Arabic documents, chapters in edited volumes, and articles in academic journalsÊsuch as The Journal of
African History, African Studies Review, The Journal of Asian and African Studies (Tokyo) and the Journal of
African and Asian Studies (Brill, Netherlands) and The Middle East Studies Association Bulletin. He has written
about the impact of British colonialism on the Hausa language, the institution of slave soldiers in the Islamic
World, the archaeology of smoking pipes in Africa, and the survival of African culture among whites in the
United States. Most recently he edited and helped write Writing African History (Rochester University Press,
2005), a book explaining the sources and methods used in reconstructing and writing about the African past.
He is currently researching slavery in human society and working on a book about ethno-religious conflict in
the Nigerian middle belt. More information about him can be gained from his website.

In the generations that have followed World War

II, African history gradually became so accepted in
the history profession that one might wonder how
it could have been left out of scholarly history for
so long during the colonial period. This neglect of
Africa by historians was not due merely to the
colonial urge to denigrate Africans, nor even (as
some non-historians think) because parts of Africa
lacked written documents before the colonial
period. It was based on a philosophical
assumption about history and a false assumption about Africa.

Those who opposed studying and teaching the history of Africa did not,
of course, deny that Africa had a past. The argument against African
history was Hegelian, and thus similar to Francis Fukuyama's Hegelian
argument that history as a process had ended with the end of the Cold
War. The argument against African history was that history was
concerned with analyzing and explaining human political evolution.
Hegel himself had argued that the Africa kingdoms of his time
represented the original state of human political evolution, and that the
alleged lack of political evolution in these kingdoms rendered them
outside of history. The most notorious opponent of African history in the
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1960s, Hugh Trevor-Roper, echoed Hegel's opinion when he argued that

Africa had no history, only "the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes
in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe."

Those who supported the creation of academic African history generally

concentrated on precolonial history during those days. By showing the
importance of precolonial Africa, and especially by showing the political
evolution of precolonial Africa, the discipline of history could have as
important a role in understanding Africa as it had in the understanding
of any other inhabited area of the earth.

They not only succeeded brilliantly in historicizing Africa, they

developed important new methodologies in doing so. Jan Vansina, most
famously, brought a sceptical, rational approach to the use of oral
traditions as historical sources, much as Leopold von Ranke had
brought a sceptical, rational approach to the use of written documents.
Historians have always used oral sources, of course, but Vansina's
approach represented a methodological advance that brought the use of
oral sources up to the standards of the modern scientific history that
began with Ranke. Vansina's breakthrough was followed by the
increasing use of oral sources in other fields of history.

More extensive and careful use of oral traditions was not the only factor
in the growth of African history in those days. The expansion of
archaeological research in Africa by such scholars as Merrick Posnansky,
J.E.G. Sutton and others also brought new data to light with which to
investigate the evolution of African societies. Joseph Greenberg's
historical classification of African languages not only provided a method
of analyzing the evolution and spread of African languages, it slowly
revolutionized the study of historical linguistics, including American
Indian languages. Biological and genetic sources were also introduced
by way of African history, which continues to be on the cutting edge of
methodological innovation.

Nor were written documents neglected in those days. Led by John

Hunwick, R.S. O'Fahey, and others, historians increasingly tapped the
many Arabic and other written documents of Islamic Africa to
reconstruct the past of those societies. The Arab Literature of
Africa series of catalogues, published by E. J. Brill in the Netherlands,
has continued to attract attention to this formerly neglected area of the
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Islamic world, which has had much impact not only on other parts of
Africa but even on the central Islamic lands themselves but which had
been shamefully and systematically neglected in Brockelmann's
monumental five volume history of Arabic literature.

As African history moved into the mainstream of the history profession

it continued to change. Independent African countries began their own
political evolution, and the focus of African history was less on proving
that Africans had had their own political evolution before the colonial
period than on the colonial period itself, when the states of
contemporary Africa had been created, and when many of their present-
day problems had their origins.

African history within Africa and African history outside Africa also
began to diverge. Many Africans continued to be interested in
precolonial topics and in the history of local areas and individual groups
of people (not necessarily ethnic), as well as in topics that had policy
implications for their contemporary, post-colonial states. Those
ensconced in more comfortable positions outside the continent, where
funding priorities were different, not only turned to topics of more
international interest-including the creation of the African diaspora, its
culture, and its relations to the continent-but were also more consumed
by the theoretical and methodological trends, including post-
modernism, the limits of knowledge, and the linguistic turn, that have
influenced the discipline of history in general.

The discipline of history as practiced in and about Africa is now so

diverse that it is difficult to characterize. As with history in general,
there are popular histories. For example, King Leopold's Ghost looked at
the origins of the Belgian Congo, a colony that later evolved into disaster
as an independent country. Academic histories reach a smaller, more
specialized, audience but may have as much to tell us about how Africa's
present came to be. As with history elsewhere, history in Africa remains
one of the best selling genres of literature. Military and political
biographies and military histories are best sellers in the history sections
of Nigerian bookstores, just as they are in American bookstores. Making
the connection between well-documented, carefully analyzed, but too
often dryly written academic histories and the history reading public has

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led many historians in Africa to talk of a "crisis in history" just as it has

in the United States.

In this and other respects African history continues to resemble the

history of other parts of this increasingly globalized world. The future of
African history, like the future of history elsewhere, will depend as much
on the future and its concerns as on its past. The study of Africa's history
shows how its present came to be, suggesting not only new methods and
sources for historians of other sources but also the full possibilities of
human social and political evolution. The history of the world is
incomplete without the history of Africa, for it is not only the starting
point of human evolution but a continent that has given and continues
to give much to the world and which figures in daily news reports
worldwide. Understanding how Africa got to be the way it is remains
important not only for Africans but for all of us.

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