In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

22 1 African Historical Demography in the Postmodern and Postcolonial Eras dennis d. cordell At the Third African Population Congress held in Durban, South Africa, in 1999, I presented a “census” of publications on African historical demography that had appeared since two landmark Edinburgh seminars on the topic in 1977 and 1981.1 My aim was to show demographers working on Africa—most of whose research is astonishingly ahistorical—that in recent decades, the labors of historians, anthropologists, and indeed even a few of their own number had laid the foundations for the serious historical study of African population. I assumed that such research was expanding. I hoped that presenting a paper at an international meeting of more than a thousand specialists on African demography would convince some that African historical demography is possible despite the scarcity of the sacrosanct forms of demographic data cherished by demographers.2 I also hoped that an overview of research might encourage more demographers to introduce historical dimensions into their own work.To my surprise, the presentation drew an audience of several hundred. Questions and comments were numerous, and debate flourished. However,the true significance of my paper lay elsewhere.My census suggested that all was not right with the world.The enumeration showed that publications in English about the history of African population had grown slowly but steadily through the late 1970s and the 1980s. However, contrary to my expectations, the number of books, as well as articles published separately or in essay collections, 23 African Historical Demography in the Postmodern and Postcolonial Eras peaked at more than thirty in 1990,plummeted to five in 1991,and remained minimal for the remainder of the decade, except for 1994 when it climbed to ten. I asked myself what lay behind this apparent reversal in research on African population history. I concluded that perhaps the rise of postmodern and postcolonial studies in the 1980s had led scholars of African history and Africanist social science and their students—the scholars of the 1990s—to turn their energies and enthusiasm away from social and economic history to cultural studies. Both postmodernism and postcolonialism raise questions about what is undoubtedly perceived as the apparent hyperempiricism, overgeneralization, quantitative bias,and hegemonic interest characteristic of demographic research.Demography, perhaps more than any other discipline in the social sciences, has been the handmaiden of the state. Censuses, surveys, and other demographic exercises are more often than not the work of state agencies; and the state deploys demographic data to administer or control its inhabitants. International organizations and agencies, which also have sponsored considerable demographic research, are extensions of the global state system.Postmodern theorists such as Michel Foucault and his successors , then, would undoubtedly dispute the objectivity and hence the validity of quantitative data collected by the state and its agents. For their part, postcolonial scholars have also roundly criticized the collection of demographic data in the colonies of the European empires. A couple of other factors also undoubtedly contributed to the decline in research in African population history. First, demography has been marginalized in the contemporary academy. Population studies are most often housed in departments of sociology, anthropology, or economics. Nonetheless, the field has remained segregated from the other social sciences, including history. Students of these disciplines seldom learn much demography.At best, they see demography as comprising discrete sets of methods learned piecemeal to answer questions raised by their research agendas in other fields. Second, demographic research has been closely linked to contemporary public policy issues and the local,national,and international institutions that foster them.3 Such research has focused mainly on the contemporary period. Neither focus nor funding has favored historical studies. However,these two features have characterized demography as a discipline since World War II.They do not date from the early 1990s, when I pinpoint the decline in new research. So they do not explain it. Postmodernism and postcolonialism, by contrast, were new to Africanist history and the social sciences in the 1980s and 1990s—some years after both had begun to influence other fields of study.Thus, it seems appropriate to explore the impact of postmodernism and postcolonialism on the production of knowledge in the field. The objective of this chapter is not to savage postmodernism and postcolonialism , though I do indeed look first at why postmodernism and postcolonialism may well have turned attention away from African historical demography for a time. This analysis is by no means as exhaustive as my census published...

Share