Africanist History and the History of Africa

Abstract

Africans have been conceptualising their lives and sodal relationships historically since the advent of agriculture and stockherding gave importance to questions of origin, genealogy and property long centuries ago. As state mechanisms and dass contradictions evolved in many parts of the continent, historical interpretation became increasingly formalised in the hands of spedalists. Informal traditions frequently survived in a masked form reflecting subversive interpretations and sodetal conflicts. The issues that mattered to such historians, the lineage of kings, the point of origins of peoples, the coming of an ecological disaster or a political defeat, belonged to a problematic that stemmed from prevailing material and sodal conditions. Although presented as objective truth, the tales of praise-singers, diviners and court offidals were actually ideological in purpose. They represented the appropriation of sodal knowledge by particular groups for particular ends. In much of Africa historical knowledge was conveyed purely by word of mouth in poetic, musical and dramatic settings. However, in some regions, such as the Ethiopian highlands, the East African coast and the West African savanna, the spread of literacy created the possibility of written history as weIl. The chronides of Ethiopian monks and Timbuktu scholars were not simply royal commission work: they expressed the outlook of the dass of men who wrote them, a dass whose world-view was closely linked to spedfic traditions of Christian and Islamic knowledge. With the conquest and partition of Africa by the European B. Freund, The Making of Contemporary Africa