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African Historiography: Past, Present and Future
Bahru Zewde

Today is a day of special significance. After the lapse of over a quarter of a century, African historians are assembled once again, here in Bamako, to exchange ideas and compare experiences. They are gathered to rededicate themselves to the continental association that was born in 1972. Tribute is thus due to the Association of Historians of Mali and to its president, Professor Doulaye Konate, who have worked so hard to make this eventuality possible. We owe special thanks too to the President of the Republic of Mali, His Excellency Alpha Oumar Konare, who has given unstinting support to the Association to make this day possible.

As we rededicate ourselves to our continental association, it is fitting to reflect on the state of African historiography – its genesis and its evolution. What I intend to do in this introductory speech is to highlight some of its major achievements, to identify the constraints it faces at present and to indicate the challenges of the future.

In a conference that has as its theme “African Historians in the Era of Globalisation,” it is appropriate that we begin by outlining the global context within which African historiography has been operating. There is a fair consensus that academic or professional historiography as we know it today began in Europe in the nineteenth century. The name that is closely associated with that development is that of the German historian, Leopold Von Ranke. Two major features have characterized that historiography: archival research as the basis for original historical reconstruction and the academic journal as the medium for the dissemination of research findings.

Subsequently, Rankean historiography was subjected to criticism from two major directions: Maxian historiography and the French Annales school (so designated after the name of the influential journal that served as the forum for the latter group of French historians). The two main criticisms directed against Rankean historiography was that it focussed on political history and that it preferred the narrative mode. Broadly speaking, its critics argued for a shift of focus from the political to the social and economic and the adoption of the analytical rather than the narrative style. Over the decades, the basic tenets of Rankean historiography were thus modified and amplified to enrich and deepen the realm of historical investigation. New avenues of research such as local history, social history, gender history and environmental history were explored and have now become firmly established.

African academic historiography is relatively recent in comparison with the global developments outlined above. It has had a life span of only some four decades. But that is not to say that it did not have its antecedents. Before we deal with African historiography proper, therefore, it would be instructive to identify those roots.

All human history is oral in origin. Homer and his celebrated epics, Illiad and Odyssey, bear eloquent testimony to this fact. The value of African oral tradition for historical reconstruction attests to contemporary relevance of orality. It would be superfluous to remind a predominantly West African audience like this of the important role that the griots have played in the preservation and transmission of oral history. But the phenomenon is far from being confined to West Africa. In Central Africa and the Interlacustrine states of East Africa too – to name only two prominent examples – there has developed a professional or semi-professional class of oral historians. This reality formed an important component of the evolution of African academic historiography in the 1960s, for it was based, among other things, on the scientific utilization of oral evidence.

Chronicles, both Christian and Muslim, have constituted the second important antecedent of academic historiography. In the former category, Christian Ethiopia has had one of the most sustained traditions of chronicle-writing in history. From the fourteenth century, when the first known chronicle appeared, to the twentieth, when the last of the emperors, Haile Sellassie I, opted for memoirs, there has been an almost uninterrupted succession of chronicles, the reign of a sovereign often attracting more than one chronicler. These chronicles have had their shortcomings. Their predilection for supernatural explanations of historical phenomena and their aversion to quantification are two obvious ones. Notwithstanding these limitations, however, they have been distinguished by faithful adherence to a chronological framework and the furnishing of substantial historical detail without which the reconstruction of medieval Ethiopian history would have been well-nigh impossible.

Islamic Africa has likewise produced a number of chronicles. Of these “the Kilwa Chronicle” of the Swahili coast of East Africa and “the Kano Chronicle” of northern Nigeria are the two most renowned. In addition, the Arabic and Islamic world produced the first group of scholars and travellers whose writings have formed the foundation for the history of much of northern and eastern Africa in the first half of the second millenium. The works of Al-Masudi and Ibn Khaldoun immediately spring to mind in this connection.

As so many spheres of life, the European colonization of the continent represented a negation of this traditional historiography. History now came to be perceived as the deeds and exploits of the white race in Africa, and not of the Africans themselves. History, it was argued, could be written only on the basis of written sources. The history of Africa was thus perforce that of the race that meticulously recorded its fateful intervention in the life of the continent, in other words that of the colonizer, not the colonized. In the infamous words of the Oxford don, Hugh Trevor-Roper, “the rest was darkness”.

To its credit, however, colonial rule generated a corpus of historical data that ended up being deposited in central archives that subsequently evolved into national archives. These archives have constituted an almost inexhaustible reservoir of material and have made possible the production of numerous theses, monographs, books and articles after independence. The absence until fairly recently of such a national archive in Ethiopia, which as is all too well known, had escaped colonial rule, dramatically underscores this truism.

Moreover, even under colonial rule, Africans did not always let Europeans appropriate African history. Some members of the educated elite, rooted deeply in their traditions but with exposure to Western education and modes of thought, composed the histories of their peoples. Samuel Johnson’s collation of Yoruba traditions, John Egharevba’s history of Benin and Sir Apollo Kagwa’s account of Buganda fall into this category. In independent Ethiopia as well, a group of prolific intellectuals recast the country’s rich historiographical tradition with an injection, however tentative, of more modern methods of historical reconstruction and verification.

The struggle for political independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s was accompanied by a concerted effort to decolonise African historiography. This decolonisation was accomplished through the alliance of white liberal and African nationalist historians. It was an alliance that was not without it stresses and strains. Nonetheless, it was an alliance that endured and has to its credit the great achievements of the last four decades in the realm of African historiography. The bedrock of this new historiography was what amounted to a methodological revolution – the critical and scientific use of oral evidence for historical reconstruction and the tapping of the ancillary disciplines of archaeology and historical linguistics to lend historical investigation time depth and reliability.

The major centres of this new historiography are all too well-known. In the Anglophone world, the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States stand out prominently. The exploits and travails in that process have been recounted recently in considerable detail by the two respective pioneers, Roland Oliver and Jan Vansina. In Africa itself, the Ibadan School – as it came to be known – became the paradigm for the new nationalist historiography. Pioneered by the two doyens, K.O. Dike and Jacob Ajayi, the Ibadan saga has been immortalized in the Ibadan History Series and the Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria. This nationalist historiography remained in ascendancy until it was challenged by an offshoot in northern Nigeria, based at the Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria. The latter introduced into historical analysis an Islamic and class perspective.

The class perspective of historical enquiry was in a way a ramification of developments taking place in Eastern Africa. What came to be known as the Dar es Salaam School, represented by historians like Terence Ranger, Walter Rodney and Arnold Temu, was distinguished by the shift of focus from nation to class. In Kenya, the doyen of Kenyan historians, Bethwell Ogot, pioneered what came to be known as the history of peoples through his magisterial study of the Luo. In Francophone West Africa, the new banner was carried by, among others, Cheikh Anta Diop and Joseph Ki Zerbo. The former’s thesis of the black African genesis of Egyptian civilization continues to reverberate in the African-American perception of the black heritage.

The achievements of the new African historiography has been little short of phenomenal. In the realm of training, while the metropolitan centres produced the first crop of Africanist and African historians, the latter in turn were instrumental in the fostering of generations of African historians, mostly in the continent itself. The professors of today were the graduate and post-graduate students of the 1970s and 1980s. Thousands of dissertations and theses have been produced over those three decades. Few research themes have remained unexplored. Beginning with slavery and slave trade and resistance to colonial rule, the realm of investigation has ranged over a wide panorama of issues and themes, including the global ones mentioned at the outset like gender and environment.

Hundreds and thousands of articles, monographs and books have been written, including the major works of synthesis, the Cambridge History of Africa and the UNESCO General History of Africa, both of them running into several volumes. Journals, the standard-bearers of academic historiography, have also appeared and flourished, providing fora for the dissemination of original and path-breaking historical research pertaining to Africa. In the anglophone world, the Journal of African History, the International Journal of African Historical Studies and the Canadian Journal of African Studies are worthy of particular citation, while History in Africa has specialized in the dissemination of methodological breakthroughs. In the francophone world, the culture-oriented Presence africaine has been supplemented by the more academically inclined Cahiers d’etudes africaines.

Another notable development has been the emergence and growth of fora that bring together African and Africanist historians with their colleagues in related disciplines. The African Studies Association of North America, which has fostered a tradition of annual colloquia, has probably been the most successful of such fora. It has had its pluses and minuses. On the plus side obviously is the bringing together on a regular basis of so many scholars and experts who have dedicated their lives to African studies. On the minus side is the occasional, and perhaps inevitable, degeneration of some of its panels into trivia and political agitation. The growth of African studies has also had a catalytic effect on the promotion of African-American history. Indeed, the two have been institutionally linked in many instances.

But it would be dishonest to say that the story of African historiography has been one of unqualified success. Particularly since the 1980s, the euphoria of the 1960s has subsided considerably, both in Africa itself and elsewhere. The political and economic crises that the continent has faced in the past two decades has had its unavoidable impact on academia. History, as one of the most academic of disciplines, has inevitably suffered. There has been what someone has described as “academic labour migration”, some of it internally within the continent but most of it to the more attractive centres of the West. This has not only vitiated the impressive developments of the 1960s and 1970s in historical training and research but also accentuated Africa’s dependence on Western academia. Nowhere is this dependence probably more pronounced than in the realm of publication. African historians have become acutely dependent on the publishing houses of the West, be it for articles or books.

Another major handicap has been the fragmentation of historical research, with the country rather than the region – let alone the continent – serving as the focal point. Comparative history remains woefully underdeveloped. Salutary correctives to this national fixation have come from the activities of CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa) and OSSREA (Organization for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa). CODESRIA has been creating continental networks for the integration of research and played a not negligible role in the efforts since 1994 to resuscitate the continental historical journal, Africa Zamani.

OSSREA has been fostering research linkages in Eastern and Southern Africa through annual competitions (followed by winners' workshops) in social science research in general and gender research in particular. Its journal, the Eastern Africa Social Science Research Review (EASSRR), has served as perhaps the most viable medium for the dissemination of social science research of regional as well as continental pertinence. OSSREA has also fostered workshops on various social science disciplines, including history. It was within the framework of one of those workshops in 1888 that the Association of Historians of Eastern and Southern Africa was formed, although it has not been able to achieve much of consequence. A similar regional history workshop is scheduled for the end of October 2001.

Presently, African history finds itself at a crucial juncture. It faces enormous challenges in the spheres of research, institution-building and organization. With regard to research agenda, there is a need to do more social history (in the broad sense of the term). Intellectual history, not as the history of ideas per se but in relation to their social context and import, deserves greater attention. Africa has had probably no rival in producing “philosopher-kings”. Senghor, Nkrumah and Nyerere are only three of the most notable examples. In the larger sense, too, the African educated elite (or the intelligentsia, to use a word that has now become less fashionable) has played a role quite out of proportion to its size.

As suggested above, there is also a need to grow out of the national framework within which much of African historiography has been stuck. Regions like Senegambia, the Horn and the Maghrib – to mention only three – clearly have an internal unity of their own. A more healthy rapport than has hitherto prevailed has to be established with metropolitan centres of Africanist research. A balance needs to be struck between the continental and the global. Institutionally, there is a need to create and foster regional centres of excellence, very much in the way Ibadan, Legon and Makerere served in the 1960s and 1970s. African historians also face the challenge of exploiting to the full the opportunities presented by Information Technology.

It is my contention that the greatest of the challenges probably lies in the organizational sphere. The crucial point here is the building of horizontal linkages in place of the vertical linkages with Europe and America that have prevailed up to now. The resuscitation of our continental journal, Africa Zamani, has to continue with redoubled energy. Regional journals like the Transafrican Journal of History, now a shadow of their glorious days in the 1970s, need to be reinvigorated. The interaction with South African historians, which has barely begun, requires greater attention. The 1994 History Workshop Conference in the University of Wits, which brought together over two hundred Africans and Africanists from all over the world, showed both the possibilities and difficulties of that undertaking. Finally, one can hardly over-emphasize the imperative of greater interaction with the ever-growing African Diaspora.

The linchpin of our organizational endeavours is bound to be the rebirth of the Association of African Historians. That is why this congress is of such crucial importance. We face a formidable test. But we cannot afford to fail. By grounding our association on a secure foundation, we will ensure that we join the ranks of our colleagues elsewhere in the world, as we so woefully failed to do at the 19^th International Congress of Historical Sciences held in Oslo in August 2000. More importantly, we shall create the mechanism to tackle some of the serious problems that African historiography faces today.

Bahru Zewde. 2000. A century of Ethiopian historiography. Journal of Ethiopian Studies XXXIII, no. 2 (November).

Falola, Toyin, ed. 1993. African historiography: Essays in honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi. London and Lagos.

____. 2001. Nationalism and African intellectuals. Rochester.

Giggers, Georg. 1997. Historiography in the twentieth century: From scientific objectivity to the postmodern challenge. Hanover and London.

Jewsiewicki, Bogumil, and David Newbury, eds. 1986. African historiographies: What History for which Africa. Beverley Hills.

Oliver, Roland. 1997. In the realms of gold: Pioneering in African history. Madison.

Vansina, Jan. 1994. Living with Africa. Madison, 1994.

____. 1985. Oral tradition as history. Madison.

 

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