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What History for Which Africa ? : Review Article


Johannes Fabian Critique of Anthropology 1986 6: 107 DOI: 10.1177/0308275X8600600306 The online version of this article can be found at: http://coa.sagepub.com/content/6/3/107.citation

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WHA T HISTOR Y FOR WHICH AFRICA ?

Review Article
Johannes Fabian -

University of

Amsterdam

African Historiographies. What History for Which Africa? Bogumil 107 Jewsiewicki and David Newbury (eds.). Volume 12. Sage Series on African Modernization and Development. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications
1986. 320 pp.

Critique of anthropology needs to be carried out directly and by those who are most directly concerned. A limitation inherent in such undertakings is that they often remain locked within disciplinary boundaries. We can avoid such closure if we keep an eye on developments in fields which have acclaimed anthropology as helpful in solving their own critical problems. African History figures prominently among them and this volume is a courageous and fairly encompassing attempt critically to reexamine the subject, methods, and motives of writing about the history of black Africa. Compliments first. Jewsiewicki and Newbury have, during a period which several of the contributors describe as one of relative lethargy, succeeded in stirring up twenty three accomplished scholars. All of them responded with essays that are lucid as well as informative. Newbury deserves special credit for his excellent translations of the French contributions, giving a voice to scholars who are rarely listened to in the English-speaking world. The volume is carefully produced and the cumulative bibliography alone will be of great value for anyone interested in the growth of African History during the last three decades. The spectrum of theoretical and ideological orientations among the contributors is wide enough without, however, making this collection a meaningless sampler. All contributors share a commitment to political relevance; value-free bourgeois empiricists are not among them. No doubt, the latter will perceive the tendency of this volume as leftist. One more reason why it should have our attention.
Now to the problems. They start with the basic demand on a fair review, a summary of the content. Although it is not very long, this volume is

critique of anthropology, vol. 6,

nr.

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encyclopedic in scope. Coverage of historical periods is lacking - after all, this is a book on historiography, not history - but the rest is there: Essays on the epistemology of African Studies by Ndaywel, Vansina, and MacGaffey (Nr. 1-3), although other contributions could just as well have figured under this heading (e.g. Verhaegen, Nr. 20). Of epistemological significance is also much of what appears in the second part under the heading The Historiography of Oral Discourse (Nr. 4-8, with contributions by Moniot, Bazin, Chr6tien, Henige and, once again, Vansina). Parts three and four, following roughly a distinction between views from outside and inside Africa, amount to a history of the historiography of Africa. Some of the essays concentrate on the succession of interpretive schemes, others on the institutional growth of the field; all of them are attentive to political and ideological determinants of African history. National developments in great Brittain, France and Belgium, the
108 United States and South Africa
are described by Twaddle, CoqueryVidrovitch and Jewsiewicki, Newbury, and Marks. There is an essay on Ethiopia by Love, two on Nigeria by Alagoa and Lovejoy, two on Senegal by Mbodji en Diouf and Klein, one on Zaire by Mumbanza mwa Bawele and Sabakinu Kivilu, and one on the Dar es Salaam department of history by Slater. In this latter series the juxtaposition of African and expatriate assessments is of course especially interesting. The essay which is placed at the beginning of Part three is more general in outlook and therefore of more interest to the outsider than some of the others. It is by Caroline Neale and is titled The Idea of Progress in the Revision of African History, 1960-1970 (Nr. 9). Neale agrees with other contributors on the periodization of successive trends (roughly: nationalist, world system/underdevelopment, populist) but she goes further in showing the insidious workings of an evolutionary notion of progress and its concomitatant idea that there be a mainstream of human history which Africa must join. The following quotation, although a bit lengthy, provides much food for thought; at the same time it is representative of the spirit of this volume:

history has moved, on the face of it, from a position of supporting new elites which slotted into an imperial system of capitalist appropriation from the Third World, both in terms of their class position and in terms of their model of future development, to supporting the poor of Africa by exposing the workings of that systems with the tools of political economy. If, however, we try to see in the broadest terms what the two positions have in common and where they differ, at least three observations can be made. Both are characterized by a view of history that is evolutionary, unilineal, unidirectional, and assumes a progressive option to be available. Whether
In the past two decades African

nationalist or Marxist, this is a cultural view, not a universal truth, and in this respect, Marxism continues the domination of Western ideas over African history. The models of both schools of thought are Western ones, their adoption by African academics notwithstanding. Second, both points of view have been

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experienced, in their time, as support for the underdog. Finally, same people have supported both points of view. ( 120f)

many of the

In other words, paradigm changes that may be perceived as radical by the intellectuals concerned (and may produce radically different histories) may in fact be irrelevant if judged by what they have in common: a view of history which, because of its allegiance to universal evaluation, however subtly conceived, plays with cards that are stacked against Africa: whatever the prescription may be, bourgeois, Marxist, populist (see on the latter and on the notion of peoples action the essay by Bayart, Nr. 22), more likely than not the medicine will be imported from outside. Christophe Wondji, in the concluding essay, issues a call to African historians to continue their work as a contribution to a unified consciousness, but he does little to lift the gloom spread by accounts of theoretical exhaustion, of despair over living and working conditions, and of restrictions on research and109 publishing due to economic marginalization. If the present volume demonstrates once again that the more accomplished the Ideologiekritik of a field, the more depressing its prospects, it also contains encouragement and cause or hope. This I find in the essays on oral history and in discussions of method and epistemology. Not that I believe for a moment that they offer a way out (something intimated in the heading of Part five). They do not provide solutions, but they indicate where to look for reasons for continued work: in the praxis of transforming historical events and processes into discourse. For some, perhaps only for one, of the contributors the idea of praxis is more or less limited to data collection and the proper application of the rule of evidence. The great majority are keenly aware that African historiography is to the core based on dialogical, even confrontational encounter between a multitude of discourses and interpretations. It is also fairly obvious that insights of this sort were gained by those who not only used anthropological methods and notions but who have had the experience of protracted field work based on one or another form of direct communication. This is shown explicitly in such a fine piece as Jean Bazins The Past in the Present. Notes on Oral Archeology; it is at work indirectly, for instance, when it provides David Newbury with a position from which to criticize the appearance of productivity among academically established African historians in the US. Reflecting on his experiences, Bazin comes to this conclusion:
narrative becomes historical evidence insofar as we accord what it is than to what it says. A narrative is primarily a document of the situation in which it is told. Our request for knowledge leads to data of a special kind: to embarrassed silences, to putting off the moment of giving an answer, and so on. The account one eventually obtains is a reaction to a situation determined by a whole network of social interactions that is not immediately comprehensible... From this point of view, the narration is a document in itself, and must be deciphered as such: Who speaks, who listens,
I propose that
more
a

importance to

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who intervenes? Why is what is said said, and why is it said in this way, at this particular time? We must never forget that we are not the sole listeners to this narration: Groups confront each other, identities are defined in subtle ways and, perhaps, as much by what is omitted as by what is said. (72f)

Jan Vansina

who, twenty five years ago, established himself as a towering authority on Oral Tradition, now has the courage to denounce the documentary analogy - the idea that oral sources become valid only to the extent that they can be assimilated to written documents - as a fallacy. This is why the long awaited new edition of his work had to be rewritten entirely. For him, too, it was central to realize that the oral is essentially a matter of performance, hence of action, and that contrasts between literary and oral modes are not limited to different exigencies of a technological nature (as important as these may be). One of the consequences is that not

only material which resembles


110 narratives) constitutes
sources

most historical documents (stories, for African history. Other kinds of

performance (myths, epics, genealogies, autobiographies) can now be considered with equal care and seriousness without having to be dismissed as inherently dubious. In fact, Chr6tien goes one step further when he calls for a demystification of (vernacular) written accounts with the help of oral sources (86). Perhaps this issue should be seen in a wider context. Increased attention to continued rebellion and resistance has taught us not to confuse the presence of imperialists with the reality of empire; similarly, the arrival of literacy did not as such result in the demise of orality. Where this seems to have been the case it was due to policies aimed at introducing controlled literacy in the service of educational and
bureaucratic systems needed to procure
a

colonial labor force.

It is impossible to do justice to the rich detail of methodological insights and recommendations contained not only in the essays I cited. Anthropologists who have kept abreast of recent debates on the nature of ethnography and ethnographic texts will perhaps not find much that is really new. But there is an amazing degree of convergence between African history and anthropology. Some of us who may have thought that our dabbling in history was an escape from ethnography will find in this volume reasons to believe that we are on the right way after all. If this collection of essays contains flaws they are first of all those that affect collections. The division in parts supposedly grouping different themes is less than convincing. The geographical approach taken in most reviews of the institutional growth of African history has its problems: wandering scholars do not fit the scheme; anglophone researchers working on francophone Africa, and vice versa, are probably underrepresented (although, as I pointed out, this volume goes farther than others in bridging the colonial language gap); some regions are simply missing: the former Portuguese colonies, for instance; one would have wished, in a forum that is clearly sympathetic to Marxist approaches, to hear more about

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constructions of African history in countries that call themselves socialist. And what about the Africanist boom in Japan? Even if the readers head spins from names of contributors alone one would have liked to hear what

Vellut, Ranger and perhaps others had

to say. But for none of this the editors can be seriously blamed. It is to their credit that they picked up the gourd, shook it, and cast the pieces. What came out made much sense to this reviewer and I predict it will do so to others. It is also impossible to review all the contributions, or even the major issues raised. One that seems to occupy historians more than it does anthropologists is the role of state and nation in providing the structures for events in recent African history. The suspician is perhaps justified, here as in other contents, that state and nation may be categories of thought rather than realities or, at any rate, objects of experience. I should like to conclude, therefore, with a few critical recommendations, all of them indicating, in one way or another, possible ways of breaking up the 111 conceptual confines of Western political institutions. First, I should think that it was now time to aim, whenever African history and historiography are discussed, at the entire sphere of African culture, including its diaspora. This should become a matter of principle, not of gratuitous extension. One cannot complain about the artificiality of former colonial boundaries within Africa and accept similarly artificial continental frontiers. Second, vast phenomena of religious protest and religious escape (assuming that both often are forms of negating existing political power structures) would deserve more attention than they get in MacGaffeys brief and aphoristic essay or in Bayarts equally brief review of popular resistance to the state. Third, since it seems obvious that the cutting edge of African historiography is in discussions of the nature of oral performance, it would seem timely to go further than some of the contributors do in paying attention to recent advancements in linguistic and literary theory in these matters. This regards above all views of the production of texts, historical and historiographic, expressive-performative and interpretive. Fourth, an important theme in this volume is the formation and power of stereotypes. Given that interest, one would have welcomed recognition, however brief, of recent advances in the history of early travel and iconography. Finally, relatively little attention is given to the rather mundane question of linguistic competences required for research in this field. Which raises the more general question of the linguistic aspects of colonial (and postcolonial) confrontations between Africans and expatriate intruders. The kind of historical ethnology of Africa which once relied much on the linguistics of the day is hardly mentioned in this work, perhaps rightly so. African historians will do well, however, to keep an eye on developments represented, for instance, by the journal Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika (Language and History in Africa; many of the contributions are in English) and recent work on the history of vehicular languages.

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giving

There is a good way to end this appreciation of the word to Henry Slater,

African historiographies by

The production of historical knowledge is a political question. This is due to a fundamental duality in the nature of knowledge itself. Knowledge is not only a product of contemporary social reality, and in some sense a reflection of it, but also contributes to the molding of that same social reality; that is to say, it represents a political intervention that contributes to the forces determining the movement of a particular present toward a particular future. A dialectical relationship exists between these two processes; of reflection, on the one hand, and intervention, on the other. Significantly different forms of historical knowledge are produced on the basis of different methodologies. Methodology is also, then, a political question. (249)

112

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