Whither African History?

Historians of Africa often lament the provincialism of their field, that few books receive a wide airing or make a significant mark on other historiographies. Yet African history has long been experimental and methodologically inventive, and has grown ever more so over recent decades, primarily through greater attention to craft, theory, and a diverse range of sources linking past to present. However a strict empiricism is still strongly engrained in many quarters, while the more interesting experiments do not easily cohere into a 'school' that can readily be observed and taught, in the way that developments in other fields such as Subaltern Studies have been followed by scholars like myself over the years.

Yet despite this dynamism, African history has never been more at risk – of disappearing into diaspora studies in North America as diversity agendas there prescribe histories that view Africa only through the lens of Atlantic mobility and slavery; or, in Africa itself, of fissioning into unrelated national histories. All the more reason, then, to pay attention to a work that asks new questions and suggests new ways of proceeding, especially when it takes the whole of sub-Saharan Africa as its canvas.

Most historians of Africa specialize in a region, and most of the finest work is found in microhistories that focus on one locality to provide rich and layered accounts of developments there. Attention to languages and the ways they change over time has also deepened recent African histories, such as those by Julie Livingston and Derek Petersen.¹ No continent has achieved more interesting fusions of history and anthropology, and this has been especially so during the last decade of research into African cultural and gender history, particularly with the emergence of ethnographic history as an Africanist genre that combines theoretical and methodological innovations with unusual formal experimentation.²

Other new work moves beyond the traditional obsession with orality in African history³ – as if Africans only spoke and did not write – to focus on the new textualities and subjectivities that emerged in diverse sites in Africa from the 1880s, ranging from letter-writing, production of the popular 'market literature', translation, the use of typewriters and scribes, to public readings and performances.⁴ A visual turn has also been in evidence, with Patricia Hayes and Paul Landau in the lead, taking the field beyond European representations of Africa.⁵ Practitioners in these two areas – the textual and the visual – are not talking enough to each other, however. We now have far more material on Africans producing and consuming texts than we do for African visual sources, where too many scholars still read popular paintings as memory, without adequately considering their conditions of production and consumption.⁶ And if the field as a whole was once lopsided in terms of orality, it is now lopsided toward the present,⁷ with the most experimental writing exploring the recent past.

Few historians conceive of African history as a unity any more, at least outside the undergraduate classroom. Even there, we ask when and how 'Africa' emerged, and avoid reifying it as a transhistorical entity by identifying common features in the past that help explain its troubled present. A major debate has arisen over African history's orientation toward Europe: a controversy that to some degree offers an Africanist version of the 'provincializing Europe' debates that Dipesh Chakrabarty has sharpened for both Subalternists and Europeanists alike.⁸ Steven Feierman has argued that African histories still remain too focused on external factors – the arrival of Europeans, Atlantic slavery and empire – and urges historians to look toward African experiences and practices.⁹ Not all agree with Feierman or have taken up his challenge.¹⁰

Into this new and exciting mix has now arrived John Iliffe's challenging and impressive Honour in African History. Iliffe attempts something along the lines proposed by Feierman by choosing to focus on honour as an indigenous rubric by which to reread African history. In Iliffe's treatment, honour is heroism, dignity, respect, respectability and endurance; its...