The History of Africanization and the Africanization of History

I

The idea of Africanization is arguably one of the most important and prevalent in African historiography and African studies. I first encountered this notion some eight years ago when I started graduate school. With a background in Mexican and Latin American history, I found it necessary to immerse myself in the historiography of Africa. It was in this process that I encountered the idea of Africanization. It was not always identified in this manner, but it was clear that historians were, in one way or another, articulating a concern about how "African" was African history

The objective of this paper is to examine the history of Africanization in African historiography. It departs from two basic premises. First, the issues that come with the idea of Africanization are more pronounced in the field of African history. When compared to other fields, such as Latin American history, this indigenizing of history is not given nearly so much attention. Second, the idea that African history needs to be Africanized has been taken for granted, and has not been critically examined. Here I will contend that the historical conditions that have framed the emergence and development of African historiography have made it necessary to emphasize the issue of Africanization. I will also argue that those conditions have changed in the past fifty years, and that the questions raised in the quest to Africanize history should be redefined in view of the new challenges for African history and of historiography at large.

In the comments that follow I will look at the idea of Africanization as it evolved in a very specific historiographical tradition. Africanist historiography, as I will refer to it, emanated during the 1960s when university colleges were created in Africa following the impulse of British decolonization and the further introduction of African history into the academic scene of American and British universities. It is important to make this point because there are other traditions of historical interpretation that pertain to Africa. Not only are there important historiographies written in French, Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic, but within Anglophone academia there are those that originated in the historically black colleges of the United States and within an Afrocentric tradition.¹ All these have their own forms of conceptualizing the issue of Africanization, and there is a certain level of cross-fertilization among them. However, for the purposes of this essay I will focus on the Africanist historiographical school as a way of initiating a critical debate on the notion of Africanization.

II

Defining the idea of Africanization might seem relatively simple. It refers to the process by which knowledge about Africa is rendered as "more African," to borrow the expression of Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings in their recent Africanizing Knowledge: African Studies Across the Disciplines.² This seemingly simple definition, however, raises three questions. Why does African history need to be Africanized? How can Africanization be achieved? And how do we decide that one piece of African history is "more African" than another? Historians have debated different answers to these questions. In their introduction, for example, Falola and Jennings write:

There are a multitude of disconnected points at which African experiences and contexts might inform our practice as scholars. At any point in the process of academic research, scholars may pause to contextualize aspects of their work. For example, they might consider the selection of their sources, their use of particular methods of research, their style of writing, or their own roles in the academic community and in relation to the local African settings in which they carry out their work. Each of these components of academic practice is linked to its own set of assumptions, traditions, expectations, and preferences. We suggest that it is by investigating these links that Africanists might take advantage of the opportunity to make their scholarship "more African."³

These comments take for granted that African history and African studies need to be Africanized, even though the authors do not examine the various meanings of this notion. This is an example of how the notion of Africanization has...