Is a Journal of Method Still Necessary?

I

Thirty-four years ago David Henige launched History in Africa (hereafter HA) at a time when scholars often cut corners in their rush to construct a history of Africa, and disregarded rules of evidence, thereby running the risk that many of their reconstructions would prove to be unsound. The question was not that these scholars were wholly indifferent to methodology, but that the precolonial history of the continent was the cynosure of the field at the time, and hence that all eyes were turned towards the use of oral sources to overcome the perceived scarcity of written sources for that period and to provide voices from the continent. In their haste to fill huge voids in the story of Africa's past, scholars debated the rules of evidence in relation to such unconventional sources. They often disregarded almost every methodological canon when it came to written data. Crucial differences between primary and secondary sources were ignored, archival research was scanty, new editions of older publications were mere reprints accompanied or not by new introductions that were so uninformed as to be useless, while issues about authenticity, authorship, chronology, or translation were all brushed aside as quibbles. Thus, in the days before 1974, methodological concerns focused exclusively on oral tradition and oral history to the detriment of everything else. As its initial editorial made clear, HA was launched as a forum where scholars interested in method could publish articles about all the facets of the historical method—from epistemology to heuristics, rules of evidence, and historiography. The journal was founded and the contributors came.

Today, a long generation later, HA has become a leading journal in the field and seems to have fulfilled most of its mission. First and foremost it has dwelled on every methodological facet concerning work with written sources, from finding them to reading them, combining them, editing them, translating them, evaluating them, and interpreting them.¹ It has also published a great deal about methods for handling oral traditions and the plethora of particular problems they raise, from the initial fieldwork to their final interpretation, and the necessity to make them available by making them accessible in a public repository. Besides narrative sources, contributors have also discussed iconographic and cartographic studies and have probed most sorts of particular historical arguments from extrapolation to the argument of silence. There also has been a lively interest in historiography.

On the other hand, the journal has not developed all the themes and topics the editor called for in his inaugural preface. It contains, for instance, rather little about the many issues concerning oral history proper, that is testimony from eyewitnesses or contemporary hearsay, and not much more about particular questions relating to quantitative data, on the use of fiction as a source for history, and on interdisciplinary research. Although HA has carried a few memorable articles on structuralism and Marxism, the journal has attracted few contributions dealing with the epistemology, philosophy, and the general theory of history. Most authors with such concerns seem to have preferred to write for general journals rather than for this Africanist one. As a consequence HA has carried little or nothing pro and con about such topics and practices as the validity of critical theory and postmodernism or about issues of memory and history.

Meanwhile, most historians of Africa have shifted their sights from pre-colonial or nineteenth-century history to colonial and postcolonial times in the twentieth century, with the consequence that the mix of sources they use is vastly different from the ones available for the study of earlier periods that are so well represented in the pages of HA. Given the plethora of written sources for more recent times, some are wondering whether they should worry at all about method when they think that all they have to do is simply to crosscheck different batches of documents to obtain independent confirmation of their evidence. If that is true, why then would they still need a journal concerned with method?

Actually, this type of reasoning is a complete fallacy. In fact a journal of method is just as much needed...