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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.4 (2003) 577-585



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Rich in the Wisdom of Hindsight

David Henige


African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History. Edited by Luise White, Stephan F. Meischer, and David William Cohen (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2001) 322pp. $44.95 cloth $22.95 paper

When colonial rule still prevailed, if barely, attempts to plumb the African past were typically regarded, at best, as means to administrative ends and, at worst, as interesting stories. Missionaries and administrators collected oral data for utilitarian purposes, caring little whether they were true so long as they were serviceable. African informants responded in kind, tailoring their testimonies to the requirements of the particular occasion as they sensed them.

The next stage—coincident with, and immediately following, the end of colonial rule—ushered in quite different views, espoused by different sets of participants. African nationalists and professional historians now determined the conduct of research in the field and, as a result of their disparate but convergent aims, oral sources came front and center in a well-defined academic enterprise. The new governments invited researchers to come and discover historical places in the sun. Since great swaths of the African past were available only through oral traditions, collecting such sources became virtually a full-time enterprise in the 1960s and early 1970s. So did believing them. The zenith of this movement was encapsulated in a special issue of the Journal of African History—the journal of record for the emerging field—which published several precise precolonial chronologies, derived almost entirely from oral tradition, with scarcely a lacuna, or a doubt, to be found anywhere.1 At the time, it must have seemed as if all that remained was to tidy matters up by collecting more traditions and attaching [End Page 577] them to the existing schemata. At the end of this process, the history of African societies would lie exposed.

Before this hope could reach fruition, however, the tide once again turned. Studies in the psychology of fieldwork practices, the application of a broader comparative framework, and a greater diversity of practitioners brought a regression toward the mean. Only seldom thereafter would either of the previous extremes be explicitly defended, although neither has faded away entirely, or probably ever will. The use of oral sources began to be applied less to histories of the more remote (pre-1850) past and more to studies of the effects of colonial rule on African societies and vice versa. Furthermore, the transient hegemony of various theoretical standpoints during this period boded ill for such sources, since their thrust would have been to modify and individualize historiographical enterprises that could not tolerate such effects.

In the 1990s, the influence of cultural studies helped to return the individual—or, at least a humanized collectivity—to center stage. Writing about individuals who were not warlords, traditional rulers, or other public figures had hardly been in vogue during the 1960s and 1970s. The goal then had been to establish historical sequences and fill them with the kind of plausible details that could aggregate into a group narrative history, similar to long-standing histories of, say, the Anglo-Saxons, the Tang dynasty, or the Israelites. At different levels of analysis, the African past was to be seen, by turns, as unique and typical.

The interesting aspect of this progression from indifference to belief to doubt to disbelief is not that it was unprecedented, or even unusual, but that it has been entirely compressed into a single extended scholarly generation. That there are living, practicing exponents not only of, but from, every stage is hardly surprising, since so many exemplars of the pattern that eked out their metamorphoses over centuries now exist. Should any future frontiers of historiography remain, their cyclical treatment will probably unfold even more rapidly, perhaps even skip a stage or two.

African Voices, African Words comprises an introduction and thirteen studies divided into three parts. The first set of essays, "Giving Africa a History," by Bethwell Ogot, Megan Vaughan, Isabel Hofmeyr, Ebiegberi J. Alagoa, and Abdullahi A. Ibrahim, focuses...

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