Historians/History

What's New About African 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 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 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 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.

Related links
Timothy Burke,"Pointless Little Countries," Cliopatria, January 11, 2005
Timothy Burke,"Teaching Africa I: The Problem of a Core Curriculum," Cliopatria, February 11, 2005
Timothy Burke,"Teaching Africa II: The Possibilities of Sequencing," Cliopatria, March 2, 2005