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DOI: 10.1177/0308275X8600600306

1986 6: 107Critique of AnthropologyJohannes Fabian

What History for Which Africa ? : Review Article

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WHAT HISTOR Y FOR WHICHAFRICA ?

ReviewArticle

Johannes Fabian - University ofAmsterdam

African Historiographies.What

History forWhich

Africa? BogumilJewsiewicki and David Newbury (eds.). Volume 12. Sage Series onAfricanModernization and Development. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications1986. 320 pp.

Critique of anthropology needs to be carried out directly and by those whoare most directly concerned.A limitation inherent in such undertakings isthat they often remain locked within disciplinary boundaries. We canavoid such closure ifwe keep an eye on developments in fields which haveacclaimed anthropology as helpful in solving their own critical problems.African History figures prominently among them and this volume is acourageous and fairly encompassing attempt critically to reexamine thesubject, methods, and motives of writing about the history of blackAfrica.

Compliments first. Jewsiewicki and Newbury have, during a periodwhich several of the contributors describe as one of relative lethargy,succeeded in stirring up twenty three accomplished scholars.All of themresponded with essays that are lucid as well as informative. Newburydeserves 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 thecumulative bibliography alone will be of great value for anyone interestedin the growth ofAfrican History during the last three decades.

The spectrum of theoretical and ideological orientations among thecontributors is wide enough without, however, making this collection ameaningless sampler.All contributors share a commitment to politicalrelevance; value-free bourgeois empiricists are not among them. Nodoubt, the latter will perceive the tendency of this volume as leftist. Onemore reason why it should have our attention.

Now to the problems. They start with the basic demand on a fair review, asummary of the content.Although it is not very long, this volume is

critique of anthropology, vol. 6, nr. 3

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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: Essayson the epistemology ofAfrican Studies by Ndaywel, Vansina, andMacGaffey (Nr. 1-3), although other contributions could just as well havefigured under this heading (e.g. Verhaegen, Nr. 20). Of epistemologicalsignificance is also much of what appears in the second part under theheading The Historiography of Oral Discourse (Nr. 4-8, withcontributions by Moniot, Bazin, Chr6tien, Henige and, once again,Vansina). Parts three and four, following roughly a distinction betweenviews from outside and inside Africa, amount to a history of the

historiography ofAfrica. Some of the essays concentrate on the successionof interpretive schemes, others on the institutional growth of the field; all ofthem are attentive to political and ideological determinants ofAfrican

history. National developments in great Brittain, France and Belgium, the

United States and South Africa are described by Twaddle, Coquery-Vidrovitch and Jewsiewicki, Newbury, and Marks. There is an essay onEthiopia by Love, two on Nigeria byAlagoa and Lovejoy, two on Senegalby Mbodji en Diouf and Klein, one on Zaire by Mumbanza mwa Baweleand Sabakinu Kivilu, and one on the Dar es Salaam department of historyby Slater. In this latter series the juxtaposition ofAfrican and expatriateassessments is of course especially interesting.

The essay which is placed at the beginning of Part three is more generalin outlook and therefore of more interest to the outsider than some of theothers. It is by Caroline Neale and is titled The Idea of Progress in theRevision ofAfrican History, 1960-1970 (Nr. 9). Neale agrees with othercontributors on the periodization ofsuccessive trends (roughly: nationalist,world system/underdevelopment, populist) but she goes further in showingthe insidious workings of an evolutionary notion of progress and itsconcomitatant idea that there be a mainstream of human history whichAfrica must join. The following quotation, although a bit lengthy, providesmuch food for thought; at the same time it is representative of the spirit ofthis volume:

In the past two decadesAfrican 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 politicaleconomy. If, however, we try to see in the broadest terms what the two positionshave 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. Whethernationalist or Marxist, this is a cultural view, not a universal truth, and in this

respect, Marxism continues the domination of Western ideas overAfricanhistory. The models of both schools of thought are Western ones, their adoptionbyAfrican academics notwithstanding. Second, both points of view have been



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

In other words, paradigm changes that may be perceived as radical by theintellectuals concerned (and may produce radically different histories) mayin fact be irrelevant if judged by what they have in common: a view of

history which, because of its allegiance to universal evaluation, howeversubtly conceived, plays with cards that are stacked againstAfrica: whateverthe prescription may be, bourgeois, Marxist, populist (see on the latter andon the notion of peoples action the essay by Bayart, Nr. 22), more likelythan not the medicine will be imported from outside. Christophe Wondji,in the concluding essay, issues a call toAfrican historians to continue theirwork 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 and

publishing due to economic marginalization.

If the present volume demonstrates once again that the more accomplishedthe Ideologiekritik of a field, the more depressing its prospects, it alsocontains encouragement and cause or hope. This I find in the essays on oral

history and in discussions of method and epistemology. Not that I believefor a moment that they offer a way out (something intimated in the

heading of Part five). They do not provide solutions, but they indicatewhere to look for reasons for continued work: in the praxis oftransforminghistorical events and processes into discourse. For some, perhaps only for

one, of the contributors the idea of praxis is more or less limited to datacollection and the proper application of the rule of evidence. The greatmajority are keenly aware thatAfrican historiography is to the core basedon dialogical, even confrontational encounter between a multitude ofdiscourses and interpretations. It is also fairly obvious that insights of thissort were gained by those who not only used anthropological methods andnotions but who have had the experience ofprotracted field work based onone or another form of direct communication. This is shown explicitly insuch 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 DavidNewbury with a position from which to criticize the appearance of

productivity among academically establishedAfrican historians in the US.

Reflecting on his experiences, Bazin comes to this conclusion:

I propose that a narrative becomes historical evidence insofar as we accord

more importance to what it is than to what it says.A narrative is primarily adocument of the situation in which it is told. Our request for knowledge leads todata 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 toa situation determined by a whole network of social interactions that is not

immediately comprehensible... From this point of view, the narration is adocument in itself, and must be deciphered as such: Who speaks, who listens,



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who intervenes? Why is what is said said, and why is it said in this way, at thisparticular time? We must never forget that we are not the sole listeners to thisnarration: 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 thedocumentary analogy - the idea that oral sources become valid only tothe 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 rewrittenentirely. For him, too, it was central to realize that the oral is essentially amatter of performance, hence of action, and that contrasts between literaryand oral modes are not limited to different exigencies of a technologicalnature (as important as these may be). One of the consequences is that notonly material which resembles most historical documents (stories,

narratives) constitutessources

for African history. Other kinds ofperformance (myths, epics, genealogies, autobiographies) can now beconsidered with equal care and seriousness without having to be dismissedas inherently dubious. In fact, Chr6tien goes one step further when he callsfor a demystification of (vernacular) written accounts with the help of oralsources (86). Perhaps this issue should be seen in a wider context.

Increased attention to continued rebellion and resistance has taught usnot to confuse the presence of imperialists with the reality of empire;similarly, the arrival of literacy did not as such result in the demise oforality. Where this seems to have been the case it was due to policies aimedat introducing controlled literacy in the service of educational andbureaucratic systems needed to procure a colonial labor force.

It is impossible to do justice to the rich detail of methodological insightsand recommendations contained not only in the essays I cited.

Anthropologists who have kept abreast of recent debates on the nature ofethnography and ethnographic texts will perhaps not find much that isreally new. But there is an amazing degree of convergence betweenAfricanhistory and anthropology. Some of us who may have thought that our

dabbling in history was an escape from ethnography will find in thisvolume 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 differentthemes is less than convincing. The geographical approach taken in mostreviews of the institutional growth ofAfrican history has its problems:wandering scholars do not fit the scheme; anglophone researchers workingon francophone Africa, and vice versa, are probably underrepresented(although, as I pointed out, this volume goes farther than others in bridgingthe colonial

language gap);some

regionsare

simply missing:the former

Portuguese colonies, for instance; one would have wished, in a forum thatis clearly sympathetic to Marxist approaches, to hear more about



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

The production of historical knowledge is a political question. This is due to afundamental duality in the nature of knowledge itself. Knowledge is not only aproduct 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, itrepresents a political intervention that contributes to the forces determining themovement 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. Methodologyis also, then, a political question. (249)


african history 1986

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