Historiography of Sub-Saharan Africa Research Paper

This research paper concentrates on sub-Saharan Africa. It covers recent origins of written history, the ‘discovery’ and valuation of its oral traditions, the interaction of anthropology and history, the Anglo-American de-bate, and the role of the diaspora.

1. Origins Of History

The first Sahel states emerged on the northern fringe of the savanna: Ghana (eighth to the eleventh century), Mali (thirteenth to fourteenth century), and Songhay (twelfth to sixteenth century).

Arab authors were the most knowledgeable on Africa’s past. Those who made the largest contributions to reconstructing the history of Africa, and western and central Africa in particular, include alBakri (1029–1094), al-Idrisi (1154), al’Umari (1301– 1349), and Hassan Ibn Mohammed al-Wuzza’n, known as Leo the African (1494–1552). Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) is unquestionably the ‘Father of History,’ even though Ibn Battuta (1304–1369) remains the best thanks to his personal accounts and the detail in his descriptions (Levtzion and Hopkins 1981).

Written European sources followed, beginning in the fourteenth century. Their authors were Portuguese navigators. These documents preceded the substantial addition made by codification or oral records in Arabic by Mahmoud Kati and Es-Sa’di, both Timbuktu scholars.

In the course of the ninteenth and twentieth centuries, accounts written by Africans in indigenous languages have abounded. A large share of these histories was in Kiswahili, Hausa, Fulfulde, Kanembu, Diula, and Malagasy.

The first professional historians, caught in the Hegelian trap, discounted the history of Africa (Neale 1986, Jewsiewicki and Mudimbe 1993, p. 1). However, the continent and its ‘people with no history’ were deemed worthy of a present. Ethnography was called upon (Jewsiewicki and Mudimbe 1993, p. 8) to justify the backwardness of the region. Underdeveloped Africa was expected to make do with a ‘prehistory’ (Moniot 1991, p. 197).

The International African Institute was established in London in 1928. The School of Oriental and African Studies began in 1948 to teach a new subject called history of Africa (Vansina 1992, p. 77). An overdue offspring of academic research was born. Curiously, African universities in French colonies, the local intelligentsia, and their backers in France did not see any need for the discipline (Vansina 1992, Moniot 1995, p. 647).

2. History And Anthropology

Almost eight years after publication of African Historiographies (Jewsiewicki and Newbury 1986), Jewsiewicki and Mudimbe published History Making in Africa (1993). The majority of the authors who contributed to the former work were historians. Anthropologists dominated the latter. This shift in the weight accorded to the two disciplines is a sign of the times. When focused on Africa, anthropology and history do not fit neatly into the university compartmentalization scheme. Rebellious grassroots reality has gradually overcome the rigidity that had governed the allocation of professorships.

As time passed most of the convenient cubbyholes have been banned to the realm of memory. It was once the fashion to contrast societies with no history, acephalous, precapitalist societies, with societies blessed with a state and a history culminating in capitalism. The first group was viewed as inherently handicapped by communalism, polytheism, oralism, and tribalism. The second group of nations was endowed with the virtues of individualism, monotheism, literacy, and polity, to name just a few. Criticism of the concepts of tribe and ethnicity took two different approaches, a French school and an Anglo-Saxon school (Coquerel 1983, Young 1986, Chretien and Prunier 1989, Barber and Moraes Farias 1990, Coplan 1991, 1993, van Jaarsveld 1992, Harries 1993, Jenkins 1997.

The adoption of precolonial Africa as a concept for a catchall analysis of the continent marked a milestone. This approach created the illusion of a different, idealized world. Postcolonial Africa was viewed as the child of a past to which the umbilical cord had been severed. This is the country cherished by the nationalists during their struggle for independence and the image invoked by politicians. Cheikh Anta Diop was fond of climbing the continent’s family tree back to its glorious Egyptian ancestors, while Joseph Ki-Zerbo (1972) and J. F. Ade Ajayi convey us to a not so distant past, labeled the precolonial era (Mudimbe and Jewsiewicki 1993, pp. 1–2). Historians responsible for this breakdown into periods have changed their minds and now support the anthropologists’ view of the existence of a continuum between the colonial societies and their worthy successor, sovereign Africa (Bayart 1989, Piault 1987).

The focus of historians on the past and the concentration of ethnologists on the present explain the farsightedness of the former and the shortsightedness of the latter. The outlook of these two isolated disciplines changes radically as soon as historians discover humanity as the center of their field of investigation and anthropologists take account of time, the framework for human behavior, and activity.

3. The Silent Make Themselves Heard

Africa is known for its chanted, sung, or simply recounted oral history. The griots, professional chroniclers of West Africa, the biiru, specialists in Rwandan royal ritual, ordinary storytellers in the cities and the country have provided a wealth of material to researchers accustomed to studying written material.

In 1962, Jan Vansina published his authoritative work, De la tradition orale. His name is invariably associated with the acceptance of oral accounts as a source of African history and with the elaboration of a rigorous scientific method. It took historians, or at least part of their fraternity, a long time to learn to appreciate the ‘auriture’ of oral genres (Coplan 1991, 1993, p. 8).

Zealous pursuit of sources engenders such excesses as equating the death of an old timer with the gutting of a library. This attitude refers us to a kind of pre- colonial library, to paraphrase Mudimbe. It is also called the memory of the griots and ‘oral archives’ (Bazin 1979, p. 450). Writing history Western style entails the fault of reducing documents recorded by interviewers to simple sources. This is denounced by Jewsiewicki (1986, p. 16) and Schoenbrun (1993, p. 55).

An increasing hue and cry (Farias 1992) has been raised in opposition to this tendency. The critics are anxious to upgrade the role of reputedly passive traditionists (Ba 1980). While David W. Cohen (1989, p. 12) insists on the contrast between material provided by the Africanist community and that produced by Africans who collect data on a daily basis, Jan Vansina was an early advocate of another reading of these documents, as revealed in a text of Jewsiewicki (1979, p. 81).

As soon as we escape the pull of the two fetishes constituted by the roving reporter and the Westernstyle historiographer, we are attracted by other types of history, and vice versa. We can then pay heed to nonformalized oral texts, unofficial samples taken from lower rungs of the social ladder. Their particular form and their non-verbal character require another method of analysis, yielding a more fertile approach to Africanist research (Olivier de Sardan 1976, Diawara 1990, Barber 1991). The field is further enriched by the involvement of anthropologists who tap the upstream end of oral production and characterize its interface with society (surface sociale). Their tools bridge a major gap neglected by historical studies which concentrate entirely on the oral text and lose sight of the life, environment, and experiences of participants in society (Moniot 1986, p. 58).

The history of the continent has become a professional endeavor. It involves ‘interrogating and revealing the historian’s operation’ (Moniot 1995, p. 647). From now on, the Africanists can forget the ‘automatic legitimation of being specialists in a small exotic field’ (Cooper 1995, p. 236).

4. The Anglo-American Debate

Vansina (1992, p. 91) takes advantage of the lessons of historiography consisting in recognizing the past in the present and vice versa, and aims his harshest criticism at the postmodern drift of David W. Cohen. The latter (1994, p. XV) stresses the fact that historical knowledge is not the monopoly of poetry or formalized narratives but that it is constantly being proclaimed and cited. Henige (1995, p. 314) vehemently attacks what he calls Cohen’s ‘predilection […] for subordinating the substance of sources to their interpretation’.

5. The Diaspora Includes Africa; In Fact, It Is Africa

What position do African specialists take in this controversy, which almost boils down to an ‘American-American’ debate? Jewsiewicki (1986, p. 9) makes a statement that has lost none of its pertinence for historians and other Africanists. ‘The Africanist historian and the African historian share neither the same responsibilities nor the same existential constraints’ (cf. Vansina 1994, p. 221). This is certainly true, except that another schism has split the African scholars’ camp, divided between a diaspora and a home community, and occasionally bridged by a coming and going between the two shores. Africans abroad still focus more on debates that are often kindled overseas, in America or Europe.

Nevertheless, practically everything written is in the language of academics, which is not the idiom of indigenous populations. A UNESCO policy to remedy this situation, adopted in the 1970s, remains a pious vow even though issues of l’Histoire Generale de l’Afrique have appeared in Kiswahili and Hausa. Anyway, who is able to read them? Where can you get a copy and what would it cost? Does the body of literature constitute history for the average person? The question posed by the African Historiographies subtitle, ‘What history for which Africa?’ is as relevant as ever. The role of Africans in this international forum appears to be rather marginal. The empire of Western historiography is bigger than ever (Vansina 1994, p. 220). The hopes raised by studies in the English-speaking world, which benefits from the North American alternative to the intellectual heirs of the British Empire and from a more substantial organization (Jewsiewicki 1986, p. 15), continue to fade. In the meantime, the New World option has become an attractive outlet for the brain drain from tropical dictatorships. Zaire has forfeited its chances to develop a school of thought liberated from the domination of Brussels. The ex-colonies reproduce the models elaborated in the former centers of colonial power (Chretien 1997) despite the fact that English-speaking and French-speaking African authors have begun to read one another’s works (Coquery-Vidrovitch 1997). Their marginality becomes even more pronounced as the tendency to consume (E Nziem 1986, p. 25) concepts developed outside Africa grows. It makes little difference whether they are the products of non-Africans or of Africans of the diaspora, which never stops expanding (Jewsiewicki 1979, p. 81).

Intellectual dependence resembling the economic impasse of the continent is worsening. While additions to the circle of recognized Africanists are becoming rare, a heavy storm of productivity is brewing in Africa, as far as reading about and interpreting the past are concerned. Student theses, cassettes recorded by individuals in different villages, radio stations, and other relevant institutions are mushrooming. The harvest has never been so bountiful (Cohen 1994, p. XV, Diawara 1997).

This analysis is not intended to deny the essential, unanticipated impact of African studies on social sciences in general. The ‘dissolution of world history’ by the history of Africa is a reality (Feierman 1993). In evaluating African studies, one is inclined to dismiss the crucial role played by the diaspora, which actively propagates its share of the African experience (Macamo 1999). Expatriates are deprived of their birthright by attributing any success they achieve to their severance of ties to their dismal native lands in the tropics. Mudimbe and Appiah (1993, p. 113), referring to the impact of African studies on American disciplines, cite the necessity ‘to locate ourselves as much in the current history of those disciplines as in the current state of African Studies […].’

In fact, a wider influence of African studies on intellectual life is detected—in Western Europe and elsewhere as well as in America (Feierman 1993, p. 200, note 13). The impact of Africanist historiography on that of France, the former metropole, is undeniable (Coquery-Vidrovitch and Jewsiewicki 1986, pp. 143–44).

A glimpse at what is on the horizon suggests the tide is turning, the groundswell stemming from the unprecedented creativity of local bards, both griots and other producers of historical material. This resurgence is amplified by a foreign legion, which gives a boost to those who have remained on their native soil. Hope is raised by the fact that disciplines applied to Africa are inevitably linked to academic trends in Europe and the US. No longer cramped by a narrow view of a particular field of study, Africanists have demonstrated the benefits of multidisciplinary collaboration. In addition, Africanists have been instrumental in fostering a dialog and creating an interface between traditional academic approaches in Anglo-Saxon and French-speaking countries.

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