Jewsiewicki and Newbury 1986 examines the sociopolitical conditions that shaped the development of historical writings in Africa. [3]. I think your questions also get to the role of a Swat honors seminar more broadly. To the victor go the spoils; and so does much of history it often appears. Il est interdit, sauf accord préalable et écrit de l’éditeur, de reproduire (notamment par photocopie) partiellement ou totalement le présent article, de le stocker dans une banque de données ou de le communiquer au public sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit. Of or relating to Africa or its peoples, languages, or cultures. The only professional historian in a position to supervise students specializing in sub-Saharan Africa was Henri Brunschwig, who had been director of studies at the École des Hautes Études (EHESS) since the previous year. Second, there’s a practical problem. In 1972, an authoritative work was published by the first French-speaking African to have received an advanced degree in history. Consequently, year after year, these publications, which record the interactions between Africans from Africa, Africans from the diaspora, African Americans, and historians from all over the world, paint a picture of the remarkable place the study of African history in English is taking in the world of international research. For the most part, they remain inclusive but wary. These works opened the eyes of the world, including African ones, to the existence of African history long before colonization and to its rich source of interesting material. Born in Ibadan in 1953, he was awarded his PhD at Ife and began working as an elementary school teacher. 19That said, it is also obvious that during the transition period of 1980–2000, we have a generation that was in part thrown to the wolves. in November 2014. The reason for this lay in the fact that in Dakar just as in France, only holders of state doctorates (the Doctorat d’État) could take up such positions. It’s also a criticism coming from a graduate student in history, so I can’t speak for the majority of students who have no direct academic engagement with the subject after their BA – but I might presume that they would take even more from a creative, debate-driven approach that comes slightly at the expense of specialist knowledge. Seven major overseas figures also contribute (including two members of the African diaspora, two from the US, two from Sweden, and one from the Netherlands). The historiography (general descriptor) of a topic is the sum total of the interpretations of a specific topic written by past and current historians. 10The GHA was an authoritative work in eight volumes written for the most part by African historians. Quite honestly, I had a negative visceral reaction to you turning this into an Empire in Africa course. I wonder how unique #1 really is? It was not until 1962 that the first two chairs in African history were created at the Sorbonne. It is notable how few researchers of the 1970–1990 generation of graduates later set about training others themselves. (Herbst, I think, badly misreads the character of colonialism by taking all of his examples from the early- and proto- periods — he is the anti-Crawford Young — but his argument about the organization of territory is very important.) 27Since 2002, several dozen joint publications have borne the stamp of Professor Falola on the important issues of the time, and not only in Nigeria. They are also aware that they are in the majority, and often at least as competent, if not more so. French Africanists showed themselves to be especially wary of what they saw as Afrocentrist tendencies, which would in some circumstances be an appropriate way of describing them. Clearly, their former supervisors know what they have written, can quote from them, and can make use of their work, yet they are just about the only ones who are able to appreciate their richness. 33It bears repeating that French-speaking historians are less frequently published than their English-speaking counterparts. African historians of the current generation are historians of universal value, as are other historians everywhere in the world. 7At independence, Britain bequeathed a relatively complete university system to Nigeria as well as Ghana, where the leading light at the time was Albert Adu Boahen, who produced major works (Boahen 1964, 1975; Boahen and Webster 1967). What I most enjoyed about the course was the pushback against unreflexive assumptions about the deep impact of Colonialism on African societies. 9 and 10) through 2009 (vol. They wrote a large number of master’s dissertations, pre-doctoral research reports, and PhD dissertations. At independence, the only university in existence was that of Dakar, which had only been a college in the 1950s under the supervision of the University of Bordeaux and only achieved university status in 1958. Fresh themes are explored each year, and its publications are evidence of the fruits of its research. Africa is the second largest continent in the world. Today, only the range of writings by African Americans and the African diaspora can compete with them. Clearly, funds are scarce, affecting the quality of tertiary education, which presents a great problem in terms of replacing the upper echelons in the future, even if the problem is less acute in research as it becomes increasingly internationalized, than for teaching. General Overviews. New historians explore and interpret the past through their own methods, priorities and values. Researchers working during the years 1980–2000 produced an impressive number of studies as masters and doctoral dissertations, most of them unpublished. This is why the meetings organized by Toyin Falola are so valuable: he knows how to bring together historians from the African continent and the diaspora while providing resources for Africans they can hardly ever find at home. In 1947, the year of India’s independence, Britain established two chairs of African history, one in London, which was entrusted to a former colonial administrator, Roland Oliver, later to become president of the highly reputed School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, which trained the first generation of young African historians. Though Africa may initially have lagged behind, it then took off in the most astonishing way. 24The second example is the highly respected bilingual quarterly Africa Development (Afrique et Développement), and the third is a smaller journal aimed at historians that took over from Africa Zamani and covers the activities of the Association of African Historians (Association des Historiens Africains – AHA), which periodically holds high-level pan-African conferences. One of the most outstanding of recent works covers a history of slavery in Africa. 11By contrast, French-language work lags far behind. This is a short history of Africa excluding Egypt, Ethiopia and (Dutch and British) South Africa, which are the subjects of separate histories. Meanwhile, some of the best-known French-speaking historians have crossed the Atlantic: the Senegalese Mamadou Diouf is at Columbia University (as is his compatriot, philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne), the Senegalese Mohamed Mbodj is at Manhattanville College just north of New York City, the sociologist Abdoulaye Gueye is at the University of Toronto, the historian Issiaka Mandé is at UQAM in Montreal, the Congolese Valentin Mudimbe is at Duke University, Didier Gondola and Charles Tshimanga work in other American universities, and so on. It’s hard to redesign these syllabi because external examiners are often dealing with two years’ worth of students, and need to have a stable syllabus that applies to both groups equally. n. 1. It was Diop who organized the first international conference of black writers and artists on the Sorbonne campus in 1956. The historiographical approach captures some of the real strengths of African studies for making students think critically about methods, comparisons etc, especially in thinking about nationalism, ethnicity etc which are the real strengths of African studies. [8] The French-speaking historical school got off to a good start, built on the formidable legacy of Joseph Ki-Zerbo (1972), and owed much to the teaching initiatives and research launched by Boubacar Barry, a Guinean historian working at the University of Dakar, who defended his doctoral dissertation in 1971. The Changing Definition of African-American How the great influx of people from Africa and the Caribbean since 1965 is challenging what it means to be African-American In 1959, Davidson published Old Africa Rediscovered: The Story of Africa’s Forgotten Past, which was published in France under the title L’Afrique avant les Blancs, while Suret-Canale preceded him by a year in publishing the first volume of his work Afrique noire occidentale et centrale, subtitled Géographie, Civilisations, Histoire (Suret-Canale 1958). These included Belgians Jan Vansina and Benoît Verhaegen and the originally Polish Bogumil Jewsiewicki, now a Canadian citizen, who were the founding fathers of the flourishing Kisangani School. Unfortunately, the word “Afrocentrism” is used in English to define both concepts, and this leads to many misunderstandings. The problem with the latter discussion is that it requires attention to theoretical and empirical debates about imperialism and modernity that aren’t limited to African examples. He was also a resident at Cambridge University before arriving in Austin, Texas, in 1981, very much in his prime. The whole Honors system has had a bit of an underlying problem ever since there stopped being solidly fixed canons in various specializations which one could reliably assume any external expert would know or rely upon. Oral Historiography (Aspects of African History) by David Henige (Author) ISBN-13: 978-0582643635. As a young French-speaking novice, I devoured these works because the publication of African historical works in French was still in its infancy and was almost entirely produced by non-professional French men, most of whom were former administrators of overseas territories who had switched careers following independence, the most senior of them being the archivist Robert Cornevin. These were spurned by researchers even though what they were referring to was rather Afrocentricity (French: afrocentricité), which is not the same thing as Afrocentrism (French: afrocentrisme). Several of the African historians named below edited a volume. While the past itself never changes, history – in other words, our understanding and interpretations of the past – is always evolving. To speak only of historians, a number of them, whether French, English, or Portuguese speaking, are now teaching in American or Canadian universities. Although there was not yet a real university in East Africa, the Institute of Ethnological Research of Rhodesia (the Rhodes Livingstone Institute) as well as Kampala College were lively Afro-British centers. These original African students were taught as part of the British model in the great Oxbridge tradition and produced work that was simultaneously classical in terms of its scientific orthodoxy and innovative because they were able to add their intimate knowledge of their own countries to the mix. However, more than anywhere else, it is clear that African historians focus almost all of their knowledge on Africa, knowing that they need to catch up. Internet stores and cafés have proliferated everywhere and charge incomparably lower rates than in the West. 29There are so many remarkable publications by English-speaking historians from the diaspora that we could not begin to list them all. There were no—or rather very few—ethnologists or anthropologists among the Africans themselves. The only obstacle remains access to power because blackouts occur frequently in the large cities, though an exponential rise in the use of mobile phones partially fills the gap. 2. Compared with this mass of documentation, the number of written works produced by French or British historians is almost negligible in terms of quantity. I thought your course did a marvelous job of opening up to us some of the complexity in the colonial relationship(s); this is certainly what I most took from the class. 33, 1, 2008), “Selected Papers from the 12th CODESRIA General Assembly” (vol. Afolayan 2005 provides us with a succinct chronological overview. In other words, history is factual in theory only. ISBN-10: 0582643635. The principles, theories, or methodology of scholarly historical research and presentation. Yet when we look at their output, which is all too often unpublished, we can appreciate their contribution. Historiographycan very simply be defined as the history of history. Culture, Politics, Academia and Other Shiny Objects, Research Libraries Group/OCLC Programs Talk, June 2007, Artificial Societies and Virtual Worlds (DiGRA 2005), Play of State: Sovereignty and Governance in MMOGs, History 1L The History of Play and Leisure, Spring 2008, History 1Y History of the Future Spring 2011, History 61 The Production of History, Spring 2007, History 62 The History of Reading, Spring 2007, History 62, The History of Reading, Spring 2012, History 83 What Ifs and Might-Have-Beens, Spring 2011, History 87 Development and Modern Africa, Spring 2007, History 88 The Social History of Consumption, Spring 2008, History 89 Environmental History of Africa, History 8B History of Southern Africa, Spring 2011, History 8B. The output is impressive. In fact, these writings are not necessarily substantially different, especially when we consider how freely researchers move about, particularly the new generations. The basic premise of the system is that third and fourth year students participating in the system take four small, intensely focused double-credit seminars, three in a major subject, one in a minor subject. All of these events are expertly organized by an accomplished team of graduate students and local academics, and they provide them with an opportunity to publish. Toyin Falola is a historian in the great tradition of the Ibadan School. Obviously, just as in France, there are contemporary writers who are fairly conformist, even ethnocentric, in other words Afrocentric. In recent years, however, the lack of an indegenous historiography has been to some extent corrected. Another promising sign is the reappearance of local or national publishing houses (when only one or two existed at the time of independence), allowing for local distribution at more affordable prices than for works imported from France. English-language historiography is a generation ahead of its French-language counterpart. 14It should be noted that these African students of history, in both English- and French-speaking universities (since each new nation sought to have its own university after independence), as well as students in universities in France, produced an immense amount of work. You might also want to visit our French Edition. What questions has it posed in particularly interesting or compelling forms compared to the wider discipline of history? This lead to a colonial experience that was more intensive in some areas and more scattershot over all. In any case, the recent status of the globalization of knowledge means that they will be tolerated less and less. historiography in African philosophy is includes dealing with the problems of definition, documentation and methodology. Generally speaking, education in Africa has pinned its hopes on 3G [and now 4G] mobile telephony, which makes almost anything possible. Matters were not improved by structural adjustment programs. 20The lack of confidence in African writers is no longer valid today. The history of Africa begins with the emergence of hominids, archaic humans and—at least 200,000 years ago—anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens), in East Africa, and continues unbroken into the present as a patchwork of diverse and politically developing nation states. 31To sum up, there has been a relative lag among French-speaking equatorial African historians, with the exception of those working in Cameroon and Congo and in the diaspora from the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo). The nature, dynamic, and development of the subject of African historiography have attracted the attention of many scholars. 12At the same time, two Europeans whose refreshing outlook heavily influenced young African historians with little interest in the colonial history textbooks that were available then were doing impressive work in scientific popularization for the general public on the eve of independence. See more. It also had less in the way of larger-scale political centralization than most other areas that went through 19th century colonization did. I’ve tended in the past to rely on a few big overview texts that I think have strong, interesting arguments and then to throw in a collection of books and articles that I find challenging or interesting, worth debating or discussing, with a relatively minimal organization. For example, historians are familiar with the migration of Asians that resulted in the peopling of the Americas. This caused a generational vacuum, especially in some French-speaking universities that copied the French elite intelligentsia model aggravated by privileges of seniority. His lino cuts and etches eternalized many historical buildings. African historians of the current generation are historians of universal value, as are other historians everywhere in the world. Both were initially held by former colonial administrators, with modern history occupied by former governor Deschamps, an expert on Madagascar, while Robert Mauny took the chair of African medieval Islam, of which he was an authoritative specialist (1961). African historiography A deliberate parallel came to be drawn between the growing disaffection of the African no longer feeling represented by the 'elites'of the 1960s, and the birth of a radical historiography. I’m thinking here of ways to organize the existing body of scholarly publication around debated or contentious propositions, not arguments which reflect my own sympathies or views. 32There is a general tendency today to speak of the re-appropriation of history, or rather of the writing of history. This section is brief because its beginnings are already well known. They appreciate being able to discuss their history among themselves at ever more frequent inter-African meetings in Dakar, Ouagadougou, or Lomé, but also in Ibadan, Nairobi, or Addis Ababa. Meanwhile, these researchers continue working under conditions where the difficulties defy imagination. Researchers working on the African continent are capable of engaging in scientific cooperation with foreign research organizations as well as with their own governments (even if they are their political opponents) so as to make the best of available opportunities, such as an office or information technology. Well, I think every subfield in history could make a claim of methodological distinctiveness, but the specifics of that claim would vary somewhat from field to field, I think. Many of today's historians would probably agree with Du Bois' inclusive definition of African American history as the interaction of African, American, and African American peoples and cultures. The overwhelming majority of authors published in these journals are Africans working in Africa. [9] The claims of “subaltern” studies and of the thinking behind postcolonial studies, which at first were rejected wholesale by most French Africanists, are now a key feature of this research. Fernand Braudel even wrote the preface. The wider these researchers’ linguistic abilities, the more aware they will be of different streams of research. In French-speaking countries, the first African was Harris-Memel Foté, who produced a brilliant dissertation on slavery in the lagoon area of the Ivory Coast in 1986. What is to be deplored is the lack of awareness, even the indifference, displayed by many French readers on this subject. Of course, some African intellectuals engage in covert games with international institutions that occasionally offer them comfortable sinecures, although this occurs less and less often. 1) The historiography of Africa is methodologically and/or epistemologically distinctive. I don’t know that I want to solve the problem of comparison by abolishing comparison and taking a region of Africa as historically self-referencing. Its renaissance at the end of the 1990s was due to the joint efforts of the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS) and UNESCO, with the aim of ensuring the active participation of African historians at the meeting of historians from all over the world held in a different city every five years (Oslo 2000, Sydney 2005, Amsterdam 2010, Jinan, China 2015). Professors recruited in haste, proud of their titles, social advancement, and income, were in some cases unwilling to hand over their sought-after positions to better-qualified and more innovative younger individuals. Other profs might tackle classic works in the field more methodically, while you tended toward newer, and in some cases quirkier, monographs, but in all cases the basic goal feels the same: to engage students in exciting historiographical debates in the field. I don’t know if it is distinctive, but it has important lessons for other approaches, and is very useful pedagogically in helping us think about them in concrete ways. I will not dwell on the huge practical difficulties they face as these are all too well known. HISTORIOGRAPHY Since very early times, human beings have had some sense of the past, both their own and that of their community or people. This offers insights into a great deal of current research, particularly in West Africa. The first is that of the role played by CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa), an inter-governmental organization for research in the human sciences, which has operated for a generation with considerable success. The flaw with the “going bigger” approach is that it will accentuate that sense of vagueness about specificity save for a command over the history of empire as it developed in metropolitan Britain itself. Given this, the enduring pessimistic outlook of the West seems outdated. This is partly your #2, but also gets to the rapid institutional and social changes that Africans experienced/took part in. They gather on the topic more than a hundred scholars for an international conference held in Nairobi. It is surrounded by large areas of water. On this subject, see Coquery-Vidrovitch (1997, 2006, and 2010); on French Africanist historiography, see Dulucq (2009). Africanists have to think through problems of archival interpretation in creative ways, have to think about the status of oral narrative in new ways, have to grapple with debates about nomothetic and ideographic knowledge in a unique way, have distinctive issues with the validity of comparative or universal history, have to struggle with the “constructedness” of their field of knowledge in special ways. The study of African history has largely been conducted by Western scholars or African scholars trained in the West. Today, a small but important group of historians from at least a dozen sub-Saharan countries take part in this conference in various ways. So, for example, two weeks on the social history of colonial Africa with a changing selection of required and extended readings. Several of these concern Nigeria (Falola 1998), and their author also produced a history of Nigeria in two volumes as well as a delightful autobiography deeply rooted in his country (Falola 2004). African researchers from Benin, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Senegal (among others) work in various West African countries and have blazed trails in several remarkable areas. Meanwhile, other journals have regularly appeared over the past forty years, especially in South Africa since the ferment of the last decade of apartheid, including Africa Insight: Development through Knowledge, the journal published by the Africa Institute of South Africa (vol. However, due to time constraints and inadequate knowledge, we will restrict ourselves here to historical literature published in French and English, especially in West Africa. Those I cited are often part of that lost generation I mentioned, who were eventually forced to emigrate by the major difficulties they faced during the 1980s if they wished to pursue their research after already spending a substantial part of their professional life at universities in their own countries. 4Initially, African historiography was indebted to the work of the former colonialists. This was Joseph Ki-Zerbo, from Burkina Faso, who became Inspector of National Education. Historiography is a difficult and co… That tool is language, or rather languages. The way it is actually recorded, written about, and changed through time makes history quite fluid. This periodical has been online since 2001–2002 (vol. That said, EHESS can be rightly proud of the presence of the Congolese Elikia M’Bokolo, who has held French citizenship for some thirty years and has lived in France since the beginning of his studies and is now approaching retirement. The central concept of the Honors program is that courses are being taught at an advanced, challenging level, so I don’t want to spend a lot of time just laying out a bare-bones sequential history of modern Africa. Swarthmore has an elaborate system of Honors seminars. They are therefore writing in their own way. Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Armand Colin © Armand Colin. Meanwhile, there are French speakers in Germany (such as the Malian Mamadou Diawara), others in Sweden, even in China. African synonyms, African pronunciation, African translation, English dictionary definition of African. Clearly, the selection process was inadequate. If this idea intrigues you, then maybe you should take a look into historiography. Traditionally, historical writing on the history of South Africa has been divided into broad categories or historiographical schools, namely a British imperialist, a settler or colonialist, an Afrikaner nationalist, a liberal and a revisionist or The following would, for example, work quite well: 1) The historiography of early medieval Britain and Ireland is methodologically and/or epistemologically distinctive. I wouldn’t say that your seminar is an outlier in terms of the ratio of specific historical knowledge to theoretical debate. 21As is the case everywhere, most knowledge can be gathered on one’s own continent. As a general rule, students study in the former colonial language. A native or inhabitant of Africa. 42, 2012), and the South African Historical Journal, which is more international and is among the best available today. John C. Miller has defined Oral tradition as a narrative describing, or purporting to describe, eras before the time of the person who relates it. It is notable that it was a historian, the Gambian Florence Mahoney, who was the first African woman to be awarded a PhD in 1963 by the University of London (Mahoney 1963). It includes historical and archival research and writing on the history of the Philippine archipelago … See Coquery-Vidrovitch, Chanson-Jabeur, and Goerg (2002). Define historiography. The first delegation of African historians attended in 2000, when a round table was organized exclusively for them. Clearly, African historians today give great attention to their own historio­graphy (Kimba 2004; Ekanza, Kiéthéga, and Thioub 2002, 2007). A person of African ancestry. I really want to focus on one big theme of this kind rather than trying to throw everything but the kitchen sink in the mix, which has been more of my approach in the past. 6These two centers played a crucial role as the epicenters for training the first generation of African historians who began and often completed their PhDs before independence. 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