African historiography is a branch of historiography concerning the African continent, its peoples, nations and variety of written and non-written histories. It has differentiated itself from other continental areas of historiography due to its multidisciplinary nature, as Africa's unique and varied methods of recording history have resulted in a lack of an established set of historical works documenting events before European colonialism. As such, African historiography has lent itself to contemporary methods of historiographical study and the incorporation of anthropological and sociological analysis.
The chronology of African recorded history encompasses many movements of art, African nations and dialects, and its history has permeated through many mediums. History concerning much of the pre-colonialist African continent is passed down through oral tradition. As European colonization emerged, the cultural identity and socio-political structure of the continent drastically shifted, and the written documentation of Africa and its people was dominated by European academia, which was later acknowledged and criticized in post-colonialist movements of the 20th century.
African historiography became organised in the mid 20th century, and saw a movement towards utilising oral sources in a multidisciplinary approach alongside archaeology and historical linguistics, culminating in UNESCO publishing the General History of Africa from 1981, edited by specialists from across the continent. Contemporary historians are still tasked with building the institutional frameworks, incorporating African epistemologies, establishing a continental periodisation, and representing an African perspective.
There are vast amounts of ecological, cultural, linguistical, and religious diversity in Africa. Valentin Mudimbe notes that the idea of Africa was first made by non-Africans, particularly Europeans. The concept was appropriated by diasporic Africans during abolitionist movements in the 19th century as intellectuals sought an "African homeland", with their removal from the continent enabling them to view it as a whole. This planted the roots of pan-Africanist thought, however for most it was the shared experience of colonial rule and resistance to it that fostered a unified African identity.
In Africa, historiography has traditionally been undertaken by oral historians, either specialists such as the griots of West Africa, "men of memory", or elders. In accordance with African cosmology, African historical consciousness viewed historical change and continuity, order and purpose within the framework of human and their environment, the gods, and their ancestors.[1] In African societies, the historical process is largely a communal one, with eyewitness accounts, hearsay, reminiscences, and occasionally visions, dreams, and hallucinations crafted into narrative oral traditions which are performed, sometimes accompanied by music, and transmitted through generations.[2] In oral tradition, time is sometimes mythical and social, and ancestors were considered historical actors.
Some African writing systems have been developed or adapted in ancient and recent history. One of the most notable ancient languages were the hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt, which are attested to have been used for historical records from .[3] Following the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, historians were able to decipher hieroglyphs and access a new field of Ancient Egyptian history,[4] however this field was undertaken predominantly by European historians. Some ancient external sources include Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and Ptolemy's Geography .[5] In Abyssinia, Ge'ez was used for history from the 14th century. There are also plenty of written records in Arabic from Islamic scholars such as al-Masudi, al-Idrisi, Leo Africanus, al-Bakri, Ibn Battuta, and Ibn Furtu. In West Africa and the Swahili coast Africans used Arabic or adapted the Arabic script into Ajami for their languages, and works were written in Akan, Fula, Yoruba, Hausa, and Swahili. Some were chronicles which literarily recorded oral tradition, such as the Kilwa Chronicle (16th c.), Timbuktu Chronicles (17th c.), Kitab Gonja (18th c.), Funj Chronicle (early 19th c.), and Kano Chronicle . European written records about the coastal regions proliferated during their exploration of Africa from the 15th century.
Most African societies used oral tradition to record their history, meaning there was little written history. Colonial histories focussed on the exploits of soldiers, colonial administrators, and "colonial figures", using limited sources and written from an entirely European perspective, ignoring the viewpoint of the colonised under the pretence of white supremacism.[6] Africans were considered racially inferior, supporting their "civilising mission".[7] The most widespread genre of colonial narrative involved the Hamitic hypothesis, which claimed the inherent superiority of light-skinned people over dark-skinned people. Only Hamitic Africans were considered "civilisation", and by extension all major advances and innovations in Africa were thought to derive from them. Oral sources were deprecated and dismissed by most historians, giving them the impression Africa had no history and little desire to create it.[8] Some colonisers took interest in the other viewpoint and attempted to produce a more detailed history of Africa using oral sources and archaeology, however they received little recognition at the time. The liberal tradition, championed by figures such as William Miller Macmillan, sought to criticise colonialism and racial segregation.[9] Some indigenous works of this period include Samuel Johnson's History of the Yorubas (1897), Carl Christian Reindorf's The History of the Gold Coast and Asante (1895), and Apollo Kaggwa's The Kings of Buganda (1901).[10]
See also: Postcolonialism and Ancient Egyptian race controversy.
The struggles for independence in the 1950s and 1960s were mirrored by a movement towards decolonising African history, involving the refutation of colonial narratives. The new African elite now had the daunting task of achieving in the historical field what they had done in the political one. Post-colonial works were characterised by their nationalist sentiments and Afrocentrism. The period saw a methodological revolution regarding the use of oral sources, archaeology, and historical linguistics. Despite this, there were major challenges which persist, such as "academic labour migration" and overreliance on Western publishers inhibiting the growth of institutions in Africa.[11]
In the mid-20th century members of the Ibadan School in Nigeria, led by Kenneth Dike and Jacob Ade Ajayi, pioneered a new methodology of reconstructing African history using the oral traditions, alongside evidence from European-style histories and other historical sciences, destabilising the notion that Africa's history was essentially its interactions with Europeans.[12] Another influential school was the Legon School in Ghana which published on Akan history, while scholars in East Africa such as Bethwell Allan Ogot, Arnold Temu, and Isaria Kimambo made crucial progress on precolonial history. Africanists such as Basil Davidson, Terence Ranger, and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch also made important contributions. Works through the 1960s and 1970s relied upon a wealth of data to conclusively prove that Africans possessed historical consciousnesses and conceptualised, preserved, and transmitted their history through oral tradition. Jan Vansina also pioneered the study of oral tradition in Oral tradition (1961) and Oral tradition as history (1985).
Despite a vigorous assault on the validity of oral sources by structuralists, oral tradition continued to be heavily utilised in the reconstruction of African history. This movement towards utilising oral sources in a multi-disciplinary approach culminated in UNESCO commissioning the General History of Africa, edited by specialists drawn from across the African continent, publishing from 1981 to the present.[13] [14] North African scholars and intellectuals found themselves in an identity crisis, and gravitated towards the Arab/Islamic world. The General History of Africa and The Cambridge History of Africas coverage of Ancient Egypt ensured it was viewed in an African context, drawing upon the Afrocentric works of Cheikh Anta Diop which sought to wrestle the ancient civilisation from European Egyptologists and invert Western cultural assumptions. Despite all this, in the process of refuting European myths about African history, nationalist historiography embraced Western views of what constitutes history, largely focussed on narrow political themes from above, and sometimes underplayed the impact of colonialism.
The 1970s saw the onset of the "era of disillusionment" as various socio-political problems such as corruption, economic mismanagement, political instability, social malaise, and neo-colonialism endured, and the failure of African elites to deliver on their promises became apparent. Celebration of African achievement was replaced by fierce critique of the ruling elites and their neo-colonialist collaborators, and the term Africanist gained negative connotations. The dual problem of poverty and dependency bore a new Marxist historiographic ideology focussed on development. In 1972 Walter Rodney, building on previous works, introduced dependency theory to African historiography by publishing How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, which stated that Africa's natural development had been taken off course by the slave trade and colonialism into one of permanent dependency on outside forces. He also attacked modernisation theory, arguing that Africa must reject the international capitalist system in order to develop.[15] Works such as Lucette Valensi's Tunisian Peasants in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century (1985), Judith Tucker's Women in Nineteenth Century Egypt (1985), and Elizabeth Isichei's A History of African Societies to 1870 (1997) embodied a new impetus to write history from below.
The widespread mood of introspection saw the formulation of postmodernist approaches to African historiography. The most notable work of this school was Valentin Mudimbe's (1988), which argued that African scholars derived their ideas and interpretations from Western academic discourse, and that they ought to reject the Western view of what constitutes scientific knowledge. The 1990s saw the abolishment of apartheid in South Africa, creating a crisis in South African historiography as Afrikaners struggled to come to terms with their history. The collapse of communism and failed socialist experiments in Africa produced revisionist responses from neo-Marxist historians. Emphasis on the cultural embedding of knowledge has seen the domain of historical inquiry extend. Conversely, the turn away from material concerns has caused the field of economic history to be neglected in spite of its enduring relevance.
The study of history in Africa is critically underfunded, with governments favouring hard sciences and technology-based disciplines. Funso Afolayan writes that African historians ought to write history for Africans rather than just for their Western colleagues. Contemporary historians are still tasked with building the institutional frameworks, incorporating African epistemologies, and representing an African perspective.[16]
Periodisation of African history was rooted in Eurocentrism, and centred around Africa's interactions with outsiders rather than on its internal developments. There is no agreed upon periodisation for Africa history, with the difference in temporal stages of state formation between parts of the continent providing disagreement. Basil Davidson considered Africa's ancient period to be until 1000 AD, however Corisande Fenwick posited the time of the Arab conquests as an endpoint. Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore proposed "Medieval Africa" as from 1250 to 1800, having revised the start date back from 1400.[17] Despite this, the European terms "ancient", "medieval", and "modern" have long been criticised as failing to represent African realities and capture its complexity.[18]
Most African societies used oral tradition to record their history. They generally have a reverence for the oral word, and have been termed oral civilisations, contrasted with literate civilisations which pride the written word.[19] Historians generally view oral traditions as neither entirely symbolic or wholly true, but a synthesis of the two, requiring great skill and subtlety to separate them.[20] In African epistemology, the epistemic subject "experiences the epistemic object in a sensuous, emotive, intuitive, abstractive understanding, rather than through abstraction alone, as is the case in Western epistemology" to arrive at a "complete knowledge", and as such oral traditions, music, proverbs, and the like were used in the preservation and transmission of knowledge.
Oral tradition gives valuable insights to African perspectives and mentalities, crucial to social history.[21]
See main article: Auxiliary sciences of history.
See main article: Marxist historiography.
Marxist historiography is the study and interpretation of history through the lens of Marxist theory, and involves analysing historical events in relation to social classes and materialistic phenomena. It maintains that history is shaped by the constant struggle of people against their material and social contexts.[22] Marxist thought has been highly influential in African historiography. Scholars largely focussed on colonial history, and emphasised the agency of Africans in contrast to colonial and liberal historiographies. Among African scholars, the ideas of Antonio Gramsci regarding the manipulation of cultural norms in the maintenance of power hegemony were particularly influential. Marxist historiography greatly affected narrative writing and advanced a "cause and effect" interpretation of events, in contrast to them being viewed as a series of accidents or related to divine will.
While the school's generalisations led to the recognition of widespread patterns and the reinterpretation of events, they sometimes inhibited the study of specific historical situations and often ignored cultural context. Despite this, Marxist approaches have been crucial in the development of a critical and holistic study of colonialism and Africa's relationship with the West, making clear that Africa's underdevelopment and relegation on the world stage was largely the result of European conquest and exploitation of human and natural resources.
See main article: Social history. Social history, sometimes called "history from below", is a field which aims to look at the lived experiences of the past.
Migrations are a common theme in African history. They are split into voluntary migrations and forced migrations. The study of African migrations requires a multidisciplinary approach, and there remains big gaps in our knowledge. There has been sparse research into much of Africa's migration history. Michael McCormick's Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300 - 900 (2002) researched cross-Mediterranean migrations, and included research on North Africa, but there has been no comparable study from an African perspective. Historiography of the Atlantic slave trade is by far the most developed sub-field on African migrations, however that of trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean migrations are growing.
See main article: Postcolonialism. Post-colonialist historiography studies the relationship between European colonial domination in Africa and the construction of African history, and has its roots in the concept of Orientalism. Western imperialism is viewed as the product of insatiable desire for power over the non-Western world, with this ambition to dominate extending to subjecting cultures to scientific scrutiny. As a result, knowledge produced from this endeavour is invalid as a projection of Western stereotypes and formulations. Another point made is the relativity of true knowledge and its cultural embeddings, discouraging external critique. While Orientalism's characterisation of Western imperialism has come under criticism, themes of relativism have continued in postmodernism.
Postmodernist historiography or deconstruction considers the past to be an ideological product of the present, thus reflecting present power relations and realities. The past is considered to be directly unknowable since traces of it are subject to people's perspectives and subjective interpretation. This approach is more accommodating to oral tradition. Deconstruction has faced staunch opposition in African studies, as it is perceived to dangerously depart from problems facing the continent and distract the intellectual agenda.[23]
Critics argue that this particular movement towards an African alternative results in the disintegration of African into a vast multitude of cultural identities, having ramifications for pan-Africanism. Historians are challenged with focussing on cultural context while countering the criticism that subscribing to the project's European norms might render the whole enterprise of African history worthless to the continent's future.
See main article: Economic history.
See also: Economic history of Africa. Economic history is the study of history using methodological tools from economics or with a special attention to economic phenomena. There are three main schools of thought in African economic history: neoclassical, Marxist, and one centred on dependency theory. Periodisation is split into four periods: the first is from the earliest hominids, through the Stone and Iron ages, and covers the development of agriculture; the second begins in the 16th century and revolves around the Atlantic slave trade; the third begins in the 19th century with the abolition of the slave trade and covers the colonial period; and the fourth covers postcolonial history from the mid 20th century to the present.
The neoclassical approach emphasises trade and exchange systems in African economies, with early pioneers being Kenneth Dike and A. G. Hopkins. Its initial efforts were to disprove Eurocentric ideas that markets and trade did not play important roles in precolonial Africa. Rational choice theory is central to this approach. The neoclassical school has received criticism for focussing too heavily on exchange, and ignoring production.
The Marxist approach applies Marxist economic theory, specifically the theory of "modes of production". Leading scholars were Jean Suret-Canale and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch. The approach considers multiple modes of production able to coexist within an economy, with the colonial period characterised by the domination of the colonial mode over the precolonial or pre-capitalist mode.
Dependency theorists emphasise unequal exchange as a causal factor of underdevelopment, and apply world-systems theory. This approach was introduced to African historiography by Walter Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). It posits a rich centre (the Global North) which accumulates wealth to the detriment of a periphery (Latin America, Africa, and Asia). Leading scholars include Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, and Charles E. Alpers. This approach has been criticised for denying Africans agency.
New economic history applies econometrics to economic history, and utilises technology able to process large amounts of quantitative data. Prominent scholars include Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. They advance a "reversal of fortunes" theory, positing that as a result of colonialism, richer regions in 1500 became poorer due to the implementation of extractivist and exploitative institutions, while poorer and less populated areas grew richer due to settler colonialism. This approach has been criticised for not taking into account historical changes over long periods, and for compressing history by considering century-old events causal to the present.
See main article: Afrocentrism and Afrocentricity.
Following the early ideological traditions of Pan-Africanism, popularised by Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois, and Négritude, advocated by Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, in the second half of the 20th century African-Americans became closely involved and took greater interest in the study of Africa. This led to the formulation of Afrocentrism, which sought to challenge Eurocentric assumptions and attitudes dominant in academia, such as the notion of universality in contradiction of differing ontologies and perspectives more relevant to a particular context. Essentially, it stressed the importance of centring analysis and explanation in African ideas, interests, and presuppositions. Relatedly, Afrocentricity, coined by Molefi Kete Asante, seeks to ground the study of the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora within their own historical, cultural, and sociological contexts.[24] [25] Afrocentrist histories are rooted in old pan-Africanist visions of racial unity and cultural diffusion, and consider Ancient Egypt as having played a central role in African history. Another idea espoused by Asante, building off of the work of Cheikh Anta Diop, is that Africa should use Ancient Egypt as its foundational source of scholarly inspiration, similar to the role Ancient Greece and Rome plays in European scholarship.
Afrocentrism is largely marginal to mainstream scholarship, and more closely resembles popular history. Its ideas and the discourse surrounding them have often attracted criticism and controversy. While most scholars recognise the need for African studies to be rooted in African thought, they have warned against usurping discredited notions of white supremacy with discourse of black supremacy. Afrocentrist histories remain popular in the African diaspora in the Americas amid an ongoing struggle for respect, equality, and empowerment in their respective societies, and are influential regarding the popular perception of Africa. They often ignore advances made in African historiography in the last half century, and rely on crude generalisations and clichés. Few African scholars have shown interest in the subject, indicating the irrelevance of racial discourse throughout much of the continent in the present day.
o=precolonial, c=colonial, p=postcolonial, n=new (temporary categorisation so older generations go at the top, not finished, going through)