African History: A Very Short Introduction

by John Parker

historians of Africa have also been pioneers in the development of a battery of techniques

problem of evidence

Reliable sources

allows historians to analyse, to interpret, to compare, and to theorize.

the substitution of what should have happened is supposition rath...

their objections were more frequently grounded in their understanding of what history was and thus what history could be.

antiquarianism,

‘primary sources’

written sources

African languages were not transcribed languages;

African history

fell within the established tradition of ‘imperial history’, a genre dominated by accounts of the African careers of European explorers, missionaries, proconsuls, and businessmen.

Not all of that literature was inherently unsympathetic.

Indigenous written records

One of the world’s oldest scripts was that of ancient Egypt,

Written language has also provided unusually rich sources for the history of Ethiopia.

written language called Ge’ez

accounts of Muslim travellers and geographers

locally written Arabic chronicles

Arabic script

documents written in the

Dutch language

much of this material is one-sided, prejudiced, and misguided.

Much of this material, especially the latter, was generated by Christian missions.

Interesting!

Christianity

gave rise to new ways of thinking about the past.

Samuel Johnson’s History of the Yorubas

Carl Christian Reindorf’s History of the Gold Coast and Asante

transliteration (and with it the standardization) of African languages

Hausa and Swahili,

a great deal of the linguistic, ethnographic, and historical information published under the names of Europeans was the product of the hard work of frequently anonymous ‘African informants’.

Of course!

evidence need not be solely synonymous with written texts.

oral traditions

oral tradition

the passing down from generation to generation of

events that extended into the...

oral traditions,

far from straightforward.

with narratives often advancing by way of spiritual or magical transformation rather than incremental chronological change.

Oral narratives

rarely reliable vehicles of factual information.

Journal of African History

carried articles on linguistics, on physical anthropology, and, most prominently, on archaeology.

social anthropology.

colonial-era ethnographies

mastery of historical linguistics.

historical linguistics

the ‘Bantu expansion’

continuous mass migration

physical migration as an explanation of cultural change.