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1
Thornton, John K. "Placing the Military in African History: A Reflection." Journal of African Military History 1, no. 1-2 (2017): 112–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/24680966-00101007.
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While discussions of the military are notably absent in academic African History, it doesn’t mean that the subject is absent from the history left by the Africans. Sources that have been used for generations contain extensive discussions of the organization, arming, training, and utilization of military forces in Africa by Africans, but these aspects of the sources are largely ignored or interpreted within the frame of other violent activity, such as slave raiding. However, simply by their existence, these sources offer future generations the opportunity to expand and finally tell the story of formal military activity in Africa. This in turn will allow for the creation of a more complete record of African political, social, and even state-building activity before the advent of European colonization.
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DjeDje, Jacqueline Cogdell. "APPALACHIAN BLACK FIDDLING: HISTORY AND CREATIVITY." African Music: Journal of the International Library of African Music 11, no. 2 (2020): 77–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.21504/amj.v11i2.2315.
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Discussions on Appalachian music in the United States most often evoke images of instruments such as the fiddle and banjo, and a musical heritage identified primarily with Europe and European Americans, as originators or creators, when in reality, many Europeans were influenced or taught by African-American fiddlers. Not only is Appalachian fiddling a confluence of features that are both African- and European-derived, but black fiddlers have created a distinct performance style using musical aesthetics identified with African and African-American culture. In addition to a history of black fiddling and African Americans in Appalachia, this article includes a discussion of the musicking of select Appalachian black fiddlers.
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Walvin, James. "Rethinking Atlantic History." New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 83, no. 3-4 (2009): 290–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/13822373-90002455.
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[First paragraph]Shaping the Stuart World 1603-1714: The Atlantic Connection. Allan I. Macinnes & Arthur H. Williamson (eds.). Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006. xiv + 389 pp. (Cloth US$ 135.00)Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America. Kenneth Morgan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. x + 221 pp. (Paper US$ 32.00)Although an important debate continues about the concept itself, the use of “the Atlantic” has embedded itself in scholarly vernacular. The scholarly output directly spawned by an engagement with the concept continues apace. That ocean, and the peoples who lived and traded along its edges, and who finally moved across it, have provided an important geographical focus for some major reconsiderations of modern history. Prompted by the Macinnes/Williamson volume, I returned to my own undergraduate and graduate notes and essays from courses on Stuart Britain: the Atlantic was totally absent – not even present as a distant speck on our intellectual map. We studied, and debated, the formal histories of migrations to the Americas (i.e. Europeanmigrations) but there was no mention of Africa or Africans. And no sense was conveyed that the European engagement with the Americas (in their totality – as opposed to North America) was a two-way, mutual force: that the European world was influenced, indeed shaped in many critical regards,by the Americas: by the land, the products, the peoples, and by the markets of that hemisphere. At its most obvious in the ebb and flow of peoples, even that eluded the historians I encountered as a student. It was as if we were talking about a different cosmos; few moved beyond the conventions of European migrations westwards and little attention was paid to that most dominant of migrations – the enforced African migrations to the Americas.
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Collins, John. "The early history of West African highlife music." Popular Music 8, no. 3 (1989): 221–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143000003524.
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Highlife is one of the myriad varieties of acculturated popular dance-music styles that have been emerging from Africa this century and which fuse African with Western (i.e. European and American) and islamic influences. Besides highlife, other examples include kwela, township jive and mbaqanga from South Africa, chimurenga from Zimbabwe, the benga beat from Kenya, taraab music from the East African coast, Congo jazz (soukous) from Central Africa, rai music from North Africa, juju and apala music from western Nigeria, makossa from the Cameroons and mbalax from Senegal.
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Ogot, Bethwell A. "Rereading the History and Historiography of Epistemic Domination and Resistance in Africa." African Studies Review 52, no. 1 (2009): 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/arw.0.0127.
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The process of narrating and interpreting the African past has long been an intellectual struggle against European assumptions and prejudices about the nature of time and history in Africa. As the historian David William Cohen states, “The major issue in the reconstruction of the African past is the question of how far voices exterior to Africa shape the presentation of Africa's past and present” (1985:198). Many historians, especially those without any background or training in African historiography, have assumed, incorrectly, that prior to European contact with Africa, indigenous “traditions” were ancient, permanent, and reproduced from generation to generation without change. This is the false image of cultural isolation and temporal stagnation that has been assiduously disseminated in many parts of the world.
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Mark, Peter. "Constructing Identity: Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Architecture in the Gambia-Geba Region and the Articulation of Luso-African Ethnicity." History in Africa 22 (January 1995): 307–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3171919.
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The precolonial architectural history of the northern Upper Guinea coast from the Gambia to the Geba rivers has yet to be studied in depth. Yet this region, the first to be visited and described by European travelers in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, is among the best-documented parts of sub-Saharan Africa for the four centuries of precolonial African-European contact. The establishment of communities of Luso-African traders in the sixteenth and seventeenth century makes the Gambia-Casamance-Bissau area important to the study of early sustained cultural interaction between Europeans and West Africans.One result of the establishment of Portuguese and Luso-African trading communities was the development of a distinctive style of architecture, suited to the climate and making use of locally-available building materials. The history of the trade itself has been extensively studied by George Brooks. His work, along with that of Jean Boulègue, provides a firm foundation for the study of local architecture and living space. It is not my intention to rewrite these excellent sources, although much of my material is drawn from the same primary documents they have used, and although, in presenting the historical context from which seventeenth-century coastal architecture developed, I necessarily cover some ground that Brooks has already trod.In addition to the history of building styles, several related questions that are highly significant to the history of European-African cultural interaction need to be addressed. These questions include: what were the respective roles of Africans, Europeans, and Luso-Africans in the development of a distinctive architectural style? Is it possible to discern the influence of evolving Luso-African construction on local African architecture? And of local building styles on Afro-European construction? In other words, to what extent does architecture reflect mutual, two-way interaction between European and African society?
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Zachernuk, Philip S. "Of Origins and Colonial Order: Southern Nigerian Historians and the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ c. 1870–1970." Journal of African History 35, no. 3 (1994): 427–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853700026785.
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The professional Nigerian nationalist historiography which emerged in reaction against the imperialist Hamitic Hypothesis – the assertion that Africa's history had been made only by foreigners – is rooted in a complex West African tradition of critical dialogue with European ideas. From the mid-nineteenth century, western-educated Africans have re-worked European ideas into distinctive Hamitic Hypotheses suited to their colonial location. This account developed within the constraints set by changing European and African-American ideas about West African origins and the evolving character of the Nigerian intelligentsia. West Africans first identified themselves not as victims of Hamitic invasion but as the degenerate heirs of classical civilizations, to establish their potential to create a modern, Christian society. At the turn of the century various authors argued for past development within West Africa rather than mere degeneration. Edward Blyden appropriated African-American thought to posit a distinct racial history. Samuel Johnson elaborated on Yoruba traditions of a golden age. Inter-war writers such as J. O. Lucas and Ladipo Solanke built on both arguments, but as race science declined they again invoked universal historical patterns. Facing the arrival of Nigeria as a nation-state, later writers such as S. O. Biobaku developed these ideas to argue that Hamitic invasions had created Nigeria's proto-national culture. In the heightened identity politics of the 1950s, local historians adopted Hamites to compete for historical primacy among Nigerian communities. The Hamitic Hypothesis declined in post-colonial conditions, in part because the concern to define ultimate identities along a colonial axis was displaced by the need to understand identity politics within the Nigerian sphere. The Nigerian Hamitic Hypothesis had a complex career, promoting élite ambitions, Christian identities, Nigerian nationalism and communal rivalries. New treatments of African colonial historiography – and intellectual history – must incorporate the complexities illus-trated here.
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Casteel, Sarah Phillips. "Making History Visible." Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 25, no. 1 (2021): 28–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8912768.
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While interned by the Nazis in Belgium and Bavaria during World War II, the little-known Surinamese artist Josef Nassy (1904–76) created a series of paintings and drawings documenting his experiences and those of other black prisoners. Nassy’s artworks uniquely register the presence of Caribbean, African, and African American prisoners in the Nazi camp system. While the Nassy Collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum cannot render transparent a wartime experience that has gone largely unrecorded, it illustrates how shifting from a textual to a visual lens can enable an unremembered history to enter our field of vision, thereby generating an alternative wartime narrative. After tracing Nassy’s family history in Suriname and the conditions of his European incarceration, this essay discusses two paintings that demonstrate the significance of visual art in the context of black civilian internment—for both the artist-prisoner and the researcher.
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Tilly, Charles. "Citizenship, Identity and Social History." International Review of Social History 40, S3 (1995): 1–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0020859000113586.
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With appropriate lags for rethinking, research, writing and publication, international events impinge strongly on the work of social scientists and social historians. The recent popularity of democratization, globalization, international institutions, ethnicity, nationalism, citizenship and identity as research themes stems largely from world affairs: civilianization of major authoritarian regimes in Latin America; dismantling of apartheid in South Africa; collapse of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia; ethnic struggles and nationalist claims in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa; extension of the European Union; rise of East Asian economic powers. Just as African decolonization spurred an enormous literature on modernization and political development, the explosion of claims to political independence on the basis of ethnic distinctness is fomenting a new literature on nationalism.
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Hargreaves, J. D. "African History: The First University Examination?" History in Africa 23 (January 1996): 467–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3171957.
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The first generation of history students from Africa to graduate from British universities inevitably had to face extended examinations, with specialized papers largely centered on European history. When Kenneth Onwuka Dike arrived in Aberdeen University in 1944 he had already contended successfully at Fourah Bay College with the Durham syllabuses for the General BA. Now, however, thanks to the goodwill of Professor J. B. Black (best known as author of The Reign of Elizabeth in the standard Oxford History of England), he obtained permission to sit what was probably the first examination on the history of tropical Africa to be set by any European university.In a lecture delivered almost thirty years later Dike recalled:cautiously approaching my Head of Department, the late Professor J B Black, and mildly protesting that of the thirteen final degree papers I was required to offer in the Honours School of History, not a single paper was concerned with the history of Black people. I requested that in place of the paper on Scottish constitutional law and history, which I found intolerably dull, I should be permitted to offer the History of Nigeria. The old professor took off his glasses, uttered not a word, but from the way he looked at me demonstrated that he was not a little shocked by my temerity, nevertheless, and after a series of animated discussions, the Department of History, to its great credit, accepted my proposal. Since there was no one competent to teach Nigerian history at Aberdeen, they sent me to Oxford during the summer months to study under Dame Margery Perham and Professor Jack Simmons.
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Schler, Lynn. "Writing African Women's History with Male Sources: Possibilities and Limitations." History in Africa 31 (2004): 319–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s036154130000351x.
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Colonial sources can provide historians with a wealth of information about African lives during the colonial period, but they must be read against the grain, filtering out valuable information from the biases and prejudices of European officials. The task of studying African women's history using colonial sources is even more complicated, as women were not often the focus of the colonial agenda, and contact between colonial officials and African women was relatively limited, and often indirect. Particularly in those arenas of African social, cultural, and political life deemed as women's spheres, colonial officials had little incentive to intervene. As a result, historians of later generations are faced with relatively sparse documentation of women-centered social activity during the colonial era. For their part, African women guarded cultural and political spheres under their influence from outside intervention, thus making it difficult for Europeans, and particularly European men, to gain a full and accurate understanding of women's individual and collective experiences under colonial rule.This paper will examine colonial research and documentation of African women's birthing practices.to illustrate both the potential for using these sources to understand some basic elements of women's experiences, and the limitations of this source material in providing deep and accurate insights into African women's history. Using an example from colonial Cameroon, we will see how European interest in women's birthing practices was motivated by colonial economic and scientific agendas steeped in racism and sexism, preventing European researchers from obtaining a balanced and accurate understanding of this women's sphere of social life. On the other hand, the documents reveal efforts of African women to prevent the colonial infiltration into women's arenas of influence.
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Decker, Robert. "Negritude’s Problem with History." Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 23, no. 2 (2019): 57–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/07990537-7703279.
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This essay argues for the recuperation of the writings of Léonard Sainville, a founding member of Negritude, and the incorporation of his work into the movement’s canon. Sainville was a historian and novelist whose work mitigates Negritude’s undertheorization of the concept of history and critiques European historiographical methods. Whereas writers such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor present Negritude, paradoxically, as both establishing continuity between the modernist present and the African past and marking a historical break from their poetic predecessors, Sainville argues that Pan-Africanism cannot form a sufficient basis for Negritude without sustained analysis of the cultural and historical evolution of both continental African and diasporic communities. Sainville’s historiographic intervention blurs the distinction between anti- and postcolonial thought, suggesting that the latter’s critiques of history do not follow necessarily from the failure of postcolonial history to follow the trajectory laid out for it by narratives of anticolonial overcoming.
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Martin, Phyllis M. "Contesting Clothes in Colonial Brazzaville." Journal of African History 35, no. 3 (1994): 401–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853700026773.
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The significance of dress in mediating social relations was deeply rooted in the Central African experience. In pre-colonial times, clothing, jewellery and insignia conveyed identity, status, values and a sense of occasion. Those with access to European trade cloth and second-hand clothes integrated them into their dress. Central Africans had a strong sense of the “politics of costume” long before new sources and ideas of clothing arrived with colonialism.Brazzaville, the capital of French Equatorial Africa, then became the scene of opportunity, experimentation and choice. Foreign workers from West Africa, the French Antilles and the Central African coastal regions pioneered new styles which were quickly appropriated and adapted by other townspeople. Europeans, in their attire, also seemed to confirm the importance of dress and were a model for those who considered themselves évolués. In handing out clothing, European employers and missionaries had their own agenda, which was rejected by many townspeople as an autonomous fashion sense developed in Bacongo and Poto-Poto, the African districts of Brazzaville. With an entrenched monetary economy, cloth and clothing became widely available to all with cash. Styles, costs and values became issues of contention. Clothing not only symbolized change but became a vehicle for change.In the late colonial period, the sources allow a deeper understanding of the relationship of dress to controversial social issues. Clothing became an arena for contesting and asserting class, gender and generational roles.
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Kane, Ousmane. "ARABIC SOURCES AND THE SEARCH FOR A NEW HISTORIOGRAPHY IN IBADAN IN THE 1960s." Africa 86, no. 2 (2016): 344–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0001972016000097.
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According to the late Ali Mazrui, modern Africa is the product of a triple civilizational legacy: African, Arabo-Islamic, and Western (Mazrui 1986). Each civilization left Africa with bodies of knowledge rooted in particular epistemologies and transmitted in written and/or oral form. In the first half of the twentieth century, what became known as the colonial library (Mudimbe 1988: x) had provided the sources and conceptual apparatus for studying African history, but from the mid-twentieth century onwards, nationalist intellectuals sought to deconstruct European colonial intellectual hegemony through the search for alternative sources and interpretations of African history. Notable among these intellectuals is Cheikh Anta Diop, whose work highlighted the close connections between Egypt and the rest of the continent to claim Ancient Egypt's historical legacy for the continent. Nigeria's first university – University College Ibadan, which later became the University of Ibadan – provided a forum for talented Africans and Europeans to pursue the project of decolonizing African history. Jeremiah Arowosegbe's survey provides insights into the rise and decline of academic commitment in the African continent, with particular reference to South Africa and Nigeria.
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Johnson, David. "Settler Farmers and Coerced African Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1936–46." Journal of African History 33, no. 1 (1992): 111–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s002185370003187x.
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This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on the socio-economic impact of the Second World War on Africa. The focus is on the inter-relationship between the state, settler farmers and African labour in Southern Rhodesia. The war presented an opportunity for undercapitalized European farmers to enlist state support in securing African labour that they could not obtain through market forces alone. Historically, these farmers depended heavily on a supply of cheap labour from the Native Reserves and from the colonies to the north, especially Nyasaland. But the opportunities for Africans to sell their labour in other sectors of the Southern Rhodesian economy and in the Union of South Africa, or to at least determine the timing and length of their entry into wage employment, meant that settler farmers seldom obtained an adequate supply of labour. Demands for increased food production, a wartime agrarian crisis and a diminished supply of external labour all combined to ensure that the state capitulated in the face of requests for Africans to be conscripted into working for Europeans as a contribution to the Imperial war effort. The resulting mobilization of thousands of African labourers under the Compulsory Native Labour Act (1942), which emerged as the prize of the farmers' campaign for coerced labour, corrects earlier scholarship on Southern Rhodesia which asserted that state intervention in securing labour supplies was of importance only up to the 1920s. The paper also shows that Africans did not remain passive before measures aimed at coercing them into producing value for settler farmers.
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Oyewumi, Oyeronke. "Making History, Creating Gender: Some Methodological and Interpretive Questions in the Writing of Oyo Oral Traditions." History in Africa 25 (1998): 263–305. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3172190.
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Of all the things that were produced in Africa during the colonial period—cash crops, states, and tribes, to name a few—history and tradition are the least acknowledged as products of the colonial situation. This does not mean that Africans did not have history before the white man came. Rather, I am making distinctions among the following: firstly, history as lived experience; secondly, history as a record of lived experience which is coded in the oral traditions; and finally, the recently constituted written history. This last category is very much tied up with European engagements with Africa and the introduction of “history writing” as a discipline and as profession. But even then, it is important to acknowledge the fact that African history, including oral traditions, were recorded as a result of the European assault.This underscores the fact that ideological interests were at work in the making of African history, as is true of all history. As such, tradition is constantly being reinvented to reflect these interests. A. I. Asiwaju, for example, in a paper examining the political motivations and manipulations of oral tradition in the constitution of Obaship in different parts of Yorubaland during the colonial period writes: “in the era of European rule, particularly British rule, when government often based most of its decisions over local claims upon the evidence of traditional history, a good proportion of the data tended to be manipulated deliberately.” This process of manipulation produced examples of what he wittily refers to as “nouveaux rois of Yorubaland.”
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Geary, Christraud M. "Photographs as Materials for African History: Some Methodological Considerations." History in Africa 13 (1986): 89–116. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3171537.
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In recent years there has been a growing interest in source materials on African history in African and European archives. The registration of documents and the methodology used in their interpretation have become a major issue of many scholars. While much progress has been made concerning the written materials, another category of archival documents has received little attention. These are pictorial records in general and historical photographs in particular. Considering that photography, beginning with the daguerrotype in 1839, virtually accompanied the exploration of the interior regions of Africa, the failure to exploit photographs systematically as source materials seems rather astonishing. One explanation for this neglect may lie in the fact that historians have traditionally been preoccupied with the written word. Despite this bias, historical photographs from Africa have been used ever more frequently as illustrations by art historians, historians, and anthropologists in recent years. The lack of systematic work with the images, however, often results in an impressionistic approach and serious errors.
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McCaskie, Tom C. "Exiled from History: Africa in Hegel’s Academic Practice." History in Africa 46 (November 16, 2018): 165–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/hia.2018.27.
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Abstract:Many scholars, African and otherwise, have excoriated G.W.F. Hegel for his dismissal of Africa from history and progress in his lectures on the philosophies of history and religion. This has been done by quoting his texts and setting his words in the context of his influence on nineteenth-century European imperialism and racism. A different approach informs this paper. I treat Hegel, a complicated person, as a working university academic with a career to make and an overriding desire to publicize his own thought. I provide biographical insights relevant to these matters, and go on to examine specific texts about Africa that Hegel either sought out or chanced upon, read, misread, excerpted, used, and misused in support of his theorizing and apriorism. Attention is paid throughout to the construction, recording, and dissemination of Hegel’s lectures, and to aspects of their reception and authority in the educational formation of selected modern African intellectuals. I argue that such persons and African studies more widely are still trying to come to grips with the long and enduring shadow cast by Hegel over both the past and present of the continent.
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Clarence-Smith, W. G. "African and European Cocoa Producers on Fernando Póo, 1880s to 1910s." Journal of African History 35, no. 2 (1994): 179–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853700026384.
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The decline of the Creole or Fernandino planters of Fernando Póo came later and was less severe than has sometimes been said, while the indigenous Bubi inhabitants played a far greater role in the development of the cocoa economy than has usually been acknowledged. Social discrimination against Creoles and Bubi was of little significance. The re-direction of Fernandian exports to Spain from the 1890s had no negative effect on African producers, and Creoles and Spaniards united to fight tariff policies detrimental to their interests. Bubi suffered severely from land alienation, but they kept sufficient land to be able to participate fully in the cocoa boom. Creoles lost land through debt, but so did Spaniards. The beneficiaries of land transfers were black as well as white, and a map from around 1913 shows a roughly even mix of Spanish and Creole landowners. Black and white planters were united in every aspect of labour which involved relations with the authorities. Attempts to force poor Bubi into plantation labour collapsed quickly, and wealthy Bubi cultivators had little difficulty in finding labour to employ. Access to credit was equal for all landowners, and the evidence for Africans being more spendthift than Europeans is of dubious validity. The thesis of African decline becomes more plausible from the mid-1920s, due to Spanish immigration, the formation of joint-stock companies, and accentuated social discrimination, but the extent of that decline remains to be determined. The roughly tripartite equilibrium between Bubi, Creole and European cocoa producers in the early 1910s contrasts with descriptions of other cocoa-growing areas in western Africa, suggesting the need for a re-examination of the evidence for the Creole role in cocoa cultivation and for Creole economic decline from the 1890s in West Africa.
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Zagrebelnaya, N. S., and V. N. Shitov. "HISTORY OF NATIONAL ECONOMIC SYSTEM FORMATION IN THE REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA." MGIMO Review of International Relations, no. 3(48) (June 28, 2016): 273–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.24833/2071-8160-2016-3-48-273-279.
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The article analyses specific historic features of formation of agrarian and industrial sectors of Republic of South Africa since the establishment of Cape Colony. These features resulted from much earlier colonization of South Africa in comparison with other Sub-Saharan African countries on the one hand and from a large-scale influx of Europeans to the South Africa on the other hand. The two most important of these specific features are the following. First. Contrary to other countries of Sub-Saharan Africa development of the agrarian sector of Republic of South Africa was based on private property and western technologies from the start. Second. The sector is not divided into «African» and «European» sub-sectors, and South-African agricultural produce has always been oriented to both: external and internal markets. Development of industrial sector of Republic of South Africa started with creation of extractive industries, namely: extraction of diamonds and of gold. The authors specifically emphasize the role of gold extraction which grace to its effect of multiplicator opened the way for industrial revolution in the South of Africa. Development of manufacturing was mainly based on import-substitution. The article argues that there were several stages of import-substitution and analyses their outcomes. The authors point out to the special importance of import-substitution during the period of I World War and II World War.
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Ribeiro da Silva, Filipa. "Dutch, English and African shipbuilding craftsmanship in precolonial West Africa: An entangled history of construction, maintenance and repair." International Journal of Maritime History 31, no. 3 (2019): 508–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0843871419862169.
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In comparative perspective, this article examines the shipping, construction, maintenance and repair of Dutch and English ships, boats and canoes operating in West Africa during the precolonial period. In addition, I discuss the strategies adopted by Dutch, English, and other ‘nations’ of merchants present in the various coastal regions of the African continent, to cope with the challenges posed by port-to-port navigation and transportation in shallow river estuaries along the western coast of Africa. Among these strategies were the transport of pre-fabricated boats of small dimension to the coast on board of heavier ships and recruitment of personnel specialised in ship repair and shipbuilding, to the acquisition, either temporary or permanent, of African boats and recruitment of African boatmen. In this way, merchants’ success on the coast was dependent on both European and African shipbuilding craftsmanship and navigational skills. Our analysis is based on information gathered from travelogues, journals of voyages and collections of correspondence exchanged between European merchants and their commercial agents based in Africa, and between officials of the private European commercial companies on the African coast.
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Smit, P. F. "Afro-Chinese partnership in missions. A similar history, a shared vision." Verbum et Ecclesia 19, no. 1 (1998): 78–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ve.v19i1.1155.
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In this article the possibilities of a shared mission vision and praxis between African and Chinese Christians are considered. The possibility of such an endeavour lies in the respective histories of Africa and the Chinese people as well as in a similar vision for the Church of Christ on earth. Powerful forces, of which European colonialism is probably the most important, have shaped African and Chinese Christian’s view of mission and the church. After a quick tour through the history of mission in Africa and China, the potentials and pitfalls of such a shared mission program are discussed.
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Decker, Corrie. "A Feminist Methodology of Age-Grading and History in Africa." American Historical Review 125, no. 2 (2020): 418–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa170.
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Abstract Age is an essential category of analysis for African history. For over a century, social scientists have emphasized the central role of age-grading in African cultures. Whereas most people in precolonial African societies assessed age in relative terms (juniors vs. seniors), European colonialism expanded the legal importance of chronological age. Gender mattered to both definitions of age. Faced with two incommensurable systems for understanding life stages—one based on relational (male) seniority and the other on chronological age—African women growing up during the colonial period found new ways to assert a sense of belonging among generations of women. I argue in favor of a feminist methodology that recognizes the broader trend among a generation of young women in Africa who employed conflicts over age to assert their maturity, and in doing so located themselves in their own histories. Identifying female age sets and generations thus offers new perspectives on how African girls and women make and remake history.
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Shatokhina, Viсtoriya Sergeevna. "On the history of studying proverbs in the Swahili language." Litera, no. 5 (May 2021): 174–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.25136/2409-8698.2021.5.32946.
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The subject of this research is the African paremiology. The object is the history of studying proverbs in the Swahili language. The author examines the chronology of studying this field of linguistics by Western European and African scholars, cites their major works, and describes the peculiarities of their scientific views. Special attention is given to the works of the founders of African paremiology, as well as the perspective of modern scholars of Tanzania and Kenya upon the scientific heritage of proverbs and sayings of the Swahili language. The article employs the theoretical research methods, namely the comparison of theoretical works in the Swahili and English languages. The analysis of a wide range of works in the Swahili language alongside the works of certain European authors, allows reconstructing the chronology of the process of studying Swahili paroemias, as well as highlighting most prominent African and European scholars in this field of linguistics. The novelty of this research lies in the fact that this topic is viewed in the domestic African Studies for the first time; foreign linguists also did not pay deliberate attention to this question. The author’s special contribution consists in translation of the previously inaccessible materials of the African and Western European into the Russian language, which helps the linguists-Africanists in their further research.
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LOVEJOY, PAUL E., and DAVID RICHARDSON. "THE BUSINESS OF SLAVING: PAWNSHIP IN WESTERN AFRICA, c. 1600–1810." Journal of African History 42, no. 1 (2001): 67–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853700007787.
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The use of people as pawns to underpin credit was widespread in western Africa during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This study examines where and when pawns were used in commercial transactions involving European slave merchants in the period c. 1600–1810. It is shown that European merchants relied on pawnship as an instrument of credit protection in many places, though not everywhere. Europeans apparently did not hold pawns at Ouidah (after 1727), at Bonny or on the Angolan coast. Nonetheless, the reliance on pawnship elsewhere highlights the influence of African institutions on the development of the slave trade.
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Hirt, Nicole. "European Missteps on Controlling African Migration." Current History 117, no. 799 (2018): 175–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/curh.2018.117.799.175.
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White, Luise. "Tsetse Visions: Narratives of Blood and Bugs in Colonial Northern Rhodesia, 1931–9." Journal of African History 36, no. 2 (1995): 219–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853700034125.
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This article looks at different kinds of historical sources – colonial science and African rumours – and argues that both can be used to reconstruct the history of changing colonial policies, and African responses to them, for tsetse and game control in the Northern Province of Northern Rhodesia in the 1930s. These sources and the arguments I have developed from them can be read as separate and distinct historical narratives, but nevertheless each articulates a specific relationship between African farmers, shifting cultivation and wild animals. Each history discloses a vision of how best to control a dreaded disease, and each history describes a separate and distinct landscape in which Africans, insects and wild animals might best live together. Moreover, each source reveals the close links between African ideas about the forcible extraction of vital fluids and European ideas about sleeping sickness, insect vectors and deforestation.
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Hamilton, Carolyn Anne. "‘The Character and Objects of Chaka’: A Reconsideration of the Making of Shaka as ‘Mfecane’ Motor." Journal of African History 33, no. 1 (1992): 37–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853700031844.
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An important aspect of Julian Cobbing's radical critique of the ‘mfecane’ as the pivotal concept of the history of southern Africa in the nineteenth century is the claim that the image of Shaka-as-monster was an ‘alibi’ invented by Europeans in the 1820s to mask their slaving activities. Reconsideration of this claim reveals that it is based on the misuse of evidence and inadequate periodisation of the earliest representations of Shaka. Examination of the image of Shaka promoted by the Port Natal traders in the 1820s reveals that, with two highly specific exceptions which were not influential at the time, the traders' presentation of Shaka was that of a benign patron. It was only in 1829, after the Zulu king's death, that European representations began to include a range of ‘atrocity’ stories regarding Shaka. These were not invented by whites but drew on images of Shaka already in place amongst the African communities of southern Africa. These contemporary African views of Shaka and the ways in which they gave shape to the European versions are ignored by Cobbing, and this contributes to his failure to come to grips with past myth-making processes in their fullest complexity.
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Barrett-Gaines, Kathryn. "Travel Writing, Experiences, and Silences: What is Left Out of European Travelers' Accounts—the Case of Richard D. Mohun." History in Africa 24 (January 1997): 53–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3172018.
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Recent contributions to this journal have taken various approaches to travelers's accounts as sources of African history. Elizabeth de Veer and Ann O'Hear use the travel accounts of Gerhard Rohlfs to reconstruct nineteenth-century political and economic history of West African groups who have escaped scholarly attention. But essentially they use Rohlfs' work as he intended it to be used. Gary W. Clendennen examines David Livingstone's work to find the history under the propaganda. He argues that, overlooking its obvious problems, the work reveals a wealth of information on nineteenth-century cultures in the Zambezi and Tchiri valleys. Unfortunately, Clendennen does not use this source for these reasons. He uses it instead to shed light on the relationship between Livingstone and his brother.John Hanson registers a basic distrust of European mediated oral histories recorded and written in the African past. He draws attention to the fact that what were thought to be “generally agreed upon accounts” may actually reflect partisan interests. Hanson dramatically demonstrates how chunks of history, often the history of the losers, are lost, as the history of the winners is made to appear universal. Richard Mohun can be seen to represent the winners in turn-of-the-century Central Africa. His account is certainly about himself. I attempt, though, to use his account to recover some of the history of the losers, the Africans, which Mohun may have inadvertently recorded.My question is double; its two parts—one historical, one methodological—are inextricably interdependent. The first concerns the experience of the people from Zanzibar who accompanied, carried, and worked for Richard Dorsey Mohun on a three-year (1898-1901) expedition into Central Africa to lay telegraph wire. The second wonders how and how well the first question can be answered using, primarily, the only sources available to me right now: those written by Mohun himself.
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SCHMIDT, PETER R. "HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY IN EAST AFRICA: PAST PRACTICE AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS." Journal of African History 57, no. 2 (2016): 183–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853715000791.
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AbstractThis forum article explores the major intellectual trajectories in the historical archaeology of Eastern Africa over the last sixty years. Two primary perspectives are identified in historical archaeology: one that emphasizes precolonial history and oral traditions with associated archaeology, and another that focuses mostly on the era of European contact with Africa. The latter is followed by most North American practice, to the point of excluding approaches that privilege the internal dynamics of African societies. African practice today has many hybrids using both approaches. Increasingly, precolonial historical archaeology is waning in the face of a dominant focus on the modern era, much like the trend in African history. New approaches that incorporate community participation are gaining favor, with positive examples of collaboration between historical archaeologists and communities members desiring to preserve and revitalize local histories.
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BAYLY, CHRISTOPHER A. "Moral judgment: empire, nation and history." European Review 14, no. 3 (2006): 385–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1062798706000391.
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The whole field of historical writing concerned with imperialism and the expansion of Europe has always been suffused with moral judgement. Many earlier historians of empire extolled European intervention in other societies as a force for moral, political or intellectual improvement. Yet, from the beginning, radicals castigated empires as immoral, bringers of racism, genocide and underdevelopment. Asian and African intellectuals, in turn, constructed historical narratives that made the liberated nation the bearer of moral progress in history. This paper argues that historians cannot, and should not refrain from moral judgement on particular issues, such as the excesses of slave trade or the official neglect that allowed the famine in British Bengal in 1943 to kill three million people. They should, however, avoid creating grand historical narratives that describe long-term changes, such as the growth of European empires, as moral or immoral, as progressive or wholly pernicious. This approach merely reduces complex developments to simple formulae and can sometimes be misused by contemporary politicians and ideologues.
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Campbell, Gwyn. "Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the ‘Early Modern’: Historiographical Conventions and Problems." Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies 1, no. 1 (2017): 24. http://dx.doi.org/10.26443/jiows.v1i1.25.
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European-inspired scholarship underscores conventional academic consensus that African commercial entrepeneurship disappeared with the European voyages of discovery, and subsequent implantation of the Potuguese, Dutch, English, and French commercial empires. Thus the people of eastern Africa are portrayed largely as technologically backward and isolated from the main currents of global history from about 1500 until the onset of modern European colonialism from the close of the nineteenth century. This article argues that the conventional view needs to be challenged, and that Eastern African history in the period 1500-1800 needs to be revised in the context of an Indian Ocean world economy.
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Austin, Gareth. "Reciprocal Comparison and African History: Tackling Conceptual Eurocentrism in the Study of Africa's Economic Past." African Studies Review 50, no. 3 (2007): 1–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/arw.2008.0009.
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Abstract:This article argues for constructive responses to the dominance, in the analysis of African economic history, of concepts derived from Western experience. It reviews the existing responses of this kind, highlighting the fact that some of the most influential ideas applied to African economies, past and present, have been coined in the context not of Europe or North America but rather of other relatively poor regions formerly under European colonial rule. These “Third World” contributions have been enriching for African studies, though they have been duly criticized in African contexts, in accordance with the usual scholarly pattern. It is argued here that the main requirement for overcoming conceptual Eurocentrism in African history, in the interests of a more genuinely “general” social science and “global” history, is reciprocal comparison of Africa and other continents—or, more precisely, of specific areas within Africa with counterparts elsewhere. Pioneering examples of such comparisons are reviewed and, to illustrate the possibilities, a set of propositions is put forward from African history that may be useful for specialists on other parts of the world. The article concludes with suggestions for ways in which Africanists can best pursue the project of reciprocal comparison, and with a plea for us to be more intellectually ambitious.
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Cabrita, Joel. "Writing Apartheid: Ethnographic Collaborators and the Politics of Knowledge Production in Twentieth-Century South Africa." American Historical Review 125, no. 5 (2020): 1668–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa512.
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Abstract Knowledge production in apartheid-era South Africa was a profoundly collaborative process. In particular, throughout the 1930s–1950s, the joint intellectual labor of both Africans and Europeans created a body of knowledge that codified and celebrated the notion of a distinct realm of Zulu religion. The intertwined careers of Swedish missionary to South Africa Bengt Sundkler and isiZulu-speaking Lutheran pastor-turned-ethnographer Titus Mthembu highlight the limitations of overly clear demarcations between “professional” versus “lay” anthropologists as well as between “colonial European” versus “indigenous African” knowledge. Mthembu and Sundkler’s decades-long collaboration resulted in a book called Bantu Prophets in South Africa ([1948] 1961). The work is best understood as the joint output of both men, although Sundkler scarcely acknowledged Mthembu’s role in the conceptualization, research, and writing of the book. In an era of racial segregation, the idea that African religion occupied a discrete, innately different sphere that the book advanced had significant political purchase. As one of a number of African ideologues supportive of the apartheid state, Mthembu mobilized his ethnographic findings to argue for innate racial difference and the virtues of “separate development” for South Africa’s Zulu community. His mysterious death in 1960 points to the high stakes of ethnographic research in the politically fraught climate of apartheid South Africa.
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van den Bersselaar, Dmitri. "“Doorway to Success?”: Reconstructing African Careers in European Business from Company House Magazines and Oral History Interviews." History in Africa 38 (2011): 257–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2011.0012.
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The largely literate African employees of European businesses during the colonial and postcolonial period have not been studied as a group, unlike miners, railway workers and colonial intermediaries. This group has nevertheless been of great importance. Many of its members became part of the core of the management of African-owned enterprises and organizations, others started their own businesses or became successful politicians. African employees of European business, alongside government employees, formed the basis of the rapidly growing middle classes during the period after the Second World War. They gave their children a Western-style education, often at well-respected schools. In many local communities the “manager” became a figure of respect. Many employees were elected to traditional office as chiefs. Such successes were not limited to those employees who made it into management. For example, a carpenter with a steady career with a European company could build and own several houses. These African employees domesticated capitalism in West Africa, mediated changes in consumption and the rise of a consumer society, and adopted European expectations of career progression and life cycle. Working for a European business, they also found themselves at important sites of contestation during colonial and postcolonial political struggles.
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Herzfeld, Michael. "EUROPEAN REFLECTIONS ON AN AFRICAN ETHNOSCAPE." Interventions 3, no. 1 (2001): 47–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13698010020027001.
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Bloch-Hoell, Nils E. "AFRICAN IDENTITY European Invention or Genuine African Character?" Mission Studies 9, no. 1 (1992): 98–107. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157338392x00081.
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Chinweizu. "432 Centuries of Recorded Science and Technology in Black Africa." African and Asian Studies 20, no. 1-2 (2021): 9–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15692108-12341482.
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Abstract During the 1970s and 1980s, American and European investigators discovered evidence of such African scientific achievements as the following: (1) the domestication of assorted plants in The Egyptian Nile Valley ca. 18000 BP; and domesticated cattle in the Kenyan Highlands, ca, 15000 BP. These were achieved thousands of years before plant and animal domestication in South west Asia, the hitherto presumed place where domestication first occurred; and (2) the making of Carbon steel in Tanzania, in the 1st c. BC, using techniques the discoverers called “semi-conductor technology – the growing of crystals”. These and other records of advanced scientific achievements, and at such dates, should prompt a profound revision of our understanding of the scientific knowledge developed by pre-20th century Africans before Europeans conquered and colonized and shattered African societies. They should also prompt a revision of the history of science in the world. In this article I shall present 13 exhibits drawing from the history of spectacular African achievements in science and technology. They range in time from ca. 43200 BC to 1952 AD. And they cover, geographically, Lesotho in Southern Africa; to Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in East Africa; to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa; to Egypt in North Africa; and to Liberia and Nigeria in West Africa.
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DE LANGE, ERIK. "THE CONGRESS SYSTEM AND THE FRENCH INVASION OF ALGIERS, 1827–1830." Historical Journal 64, no. 4 (2021): 940–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0018246x2000062x.
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AbstractThe Congress system that arose in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars facilitated European imperial expansionism throughout the nineteenth century. Yet, the ties between that system and expansionism have rarely been unwound and studied in detail. Taking the French invasion of Algiers in 1830 as a case in point, this article shows how the Congress system's shared discourses of security and threat perceptions as well as its common practices of concerted diplomacy fostered European imperialism in North Africa. The article emphasizes obscured continuities and understudied multilateral diplomatic efforts. It uncovers the ways in which the post-1815 system decisively shaped the aims, justifications, and execution of the French war against Algiers. European, North African, and Ottoman actors each furthered or contested the idea that the invasion was part of an international legacy dating back to the Congress of Vienna, related to the concerted repression of North African ‘Barbary piracy’. In bringing these connections to light, it becomes apparent that the post-1815 international system cannot be understood in isolation from nineteenth-century imperialism.
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WARIBOKO, WAIBINTE E. "I REALLY CANNOT MAKE AFRICA MY HOME: WEST INDIAN MISSIONARIES AS ‘OUTSIDERS’ IN THE CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY CIVILIZING MISSION TO SOUTHERN NIGERIA, 1898–1925." Journal of African History 45, no. 2 (2004): 221–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853703008685.
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Informed by the notion of racial affinity, the European managers of the Church Missionary Society Niger Mission had required all black West Indians in their employ to make Africa their home. However, because the African posting involved a substantial devaluation in the material benefits to be derived from missionary service, West Indians vigorously objected to the idea of making Africa their home. They demanded instead to be perceived and treated as foreigners on the same footing as Europeans. Although they were subsequently defined as part of the expatriate workforce of the Mission, they were still denied parity with Europeans in the allocation of scarce benefits on the basis of racial considerations. Unresolved tensions over the redistribution of scarce resources led to the premature collapse of the West Indian scheme. This essay is an analysis of how the pursuit of socioeconomic self-interest affected the construction and representation of race and identity among the West Indians in the Niger Mission.
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Simensen, Jarle. "Value-Orientation in Historical Research and Writing: The Colonial Period in African History." History in Africa 17 (January 1990): 267–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3171816.
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The aim of this paper is to use African historiography as an example of how value-orientations influence historical research and writing. This can be seen as a contribution to the never-ending discussion about the problem of objectivity in history. African historiography is particularly well suited for such an analysis. Its birth as a separate area of academic study after World War II was partly the result of internal, professional developments, such as the establishment of African universities, the postwar development of the social sciences, interdisciplinary research, and a more global orientation in the Western academic world. But it was also closely related to external political and ideological developments, like African nationalism, decolonization, the cold war, development aid, and the rise of new left movements in the Western world. The subject matter of modern African history is of obvious significance not only for Africans, but also for the self-image of Europe and for the relationship between Africa and the West: the nature of European expansion, the role of capitalism in the development of the modern world, the concept of imperialism, and the global relevance of democracy and socialism. The interconnections between ideology and history are therefore particulary clear in this field.The plan of the paper is to discuss how value-orientations within the different schools of history in this field reveal themselves in the choice of themes, in causal explanation, in basic concepts and in counterfactual argument. The term “value-orientation” I will define so as to cover interests, ideals, and personal identification. I will distinguish between three main “schools,” the term being used in the broadest sense of the word: the colonial school, also covering later historians writing in the same tradition; the Africanist school, dominant since the late 1950s; and the radical (“neo-Marxist,” “dependency,” “under-development”) school, influential since its emergence in the 1970s.
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ENGEL, ELISABETH. "Southern Looks? A History of African American Missionary Photography of Africa, 1890s–1930s." Journal of American Studies 52, no. 2 (2018): 390–417. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s002187581700192x.
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This article traces and analyzes the missionary photography of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the most important independent black American institution that began to operate in colonial South Africa at the onset of the politics of racial segregation in the 1890s. It argues that AME missionary photography presents a neglected archive, from which a history of black photographic encounters and a subaltern perspective on the dominant visual cultures of European imperialism and Christian missions in Africa can be retrieved. Focussing in particular on how AME missionaries deployed tropes of the culturally refined “New Negro” and the US South in their visual description of South Africa, this article demonstrates that photography was an important tool for black subjects to define their image beyond the representations of black inferiority that established visual traditions constructed.
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Yorke, Edmund. "The Spectre of a Second Chilembwe: Government, Missions, and Social Control in Wartime Northern Rhodesia, 1914–18." Journal of African History 31, no. 3 (1990): 373–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853700031145.
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The 1915 Chilembwe Rising in Nyasaland had important political repercussions in the neighbouring colonial territory of Northern Rhodesia, where fears were raised among the Administration about the activities of African school teachers attached to the thirteen mission denominations then operating in the territory. These anxieties were heightened for the understaffed and poorly-financed British South Africa Company administration by the impact of the war-time conscription of Africans and the additional demands made by war-time conditions upon the resources of the Company. Reports of anti-war activities by African teachers attached to the Dutch Reformed Church in the East Luangwa District convinced both the Northern Rhodesian and the imperial authorities of the imperative need to strictly regulate the activities of its black mission-educated elite. Suspected dissident teachers were arrested, while others were diverted into military service where their activities could be more closely supervised. With the 1918 Native Schools Proclamation, the Administration laid down strict regulations for the appointment and employment of African mission teachers. The proclamation aroused the vehement opposition of the mission societies who, confronted by war-time European staff shortages, had come to rely heavily upon their African teachers to maintain their educational work. The emergence in late 1918 of the patently anti-colonial Watch Tower movement, which incorporated many African mission employees within its leadership, weakened the opposition of the missions, and served to consolidate the administration's perception of the African teachers as a dangerous subversive force. Strong measures were implemented by the administration soon after the end of the war, with large numbers of Watch Tower adherents being arrested and detained.
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Collet, Hadrien. "LANDMARK EMPIRES: SEARCHING FOR MEDIEVAL EMPIRES AND IMPERIAL TRADITION IN HISTORIOGRAPHIES OF WEST AFRICA." Journal of African History 61, no. 3 (2020): 341–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853720000560.
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AbstractThe history of medieval West Africa is defined by the age of three great empires that succeeded one another: Ghāna, Māli, and Songhay. How did these empires come to frame our view of the West African past? To answer the question, we have to understand first how the European and Eurocentric concept of an empire was imposed on a specific African context and why it thrived. In this respect, the case of Sudanic empires in particular illuminates the process of history writing and scholars’ relationship with their time and object of study. In the last few years, Sudanic empires have made a prominent return to the historical conversation. I propose here a critical reflection on ‘empire’ and ‘imperial tradition’ in the western Sahel based on europhone and non-europhone (Arabic) historiographies, from the first histories written in postmedieval West Africa to those produced by twenty-first-century scholarship.
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Ruderman. "Intra-European Trade in Atlantic Africa and the African Atlantic." William and Mary Quarterly 77, no. 2 (2020): 211. http://dx.doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.77.2.0211.
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Johnson, Marion. "The Slaves of Salaga." Journal of African History 27, no. 2 (1986): 341–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853700036707.
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Salaga was one of the leading slave-markets of West Africa in the 1880s. The story of the slaves – where they came from, who brought them to Salaga, who bought them, and what happened to them afterwards – can be pieced together from the reports of a great variety of travellers, black and white, officials, soldiers, merchants and missionaries, of various nationalities, African and European. Thus, on the eve of the European occupation which put an end to it, it is possible to lift the veil that usually conceals the internal slave trade of pre-colonial Africa, and gain some idea of its scale and workings, and of the range of attitudes towards slavery and the slave trade.
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Trotter, Joe W. "African American Fraternal Associations in American History: An Introduction." Social Science History 28, no. 3 (2004): 355–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0145553200012797.
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The growth of black fraternal associations is closely intertwined with the larger history of voluntary associations in American society. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, compared to its European counterparts, the United States soon gained a reputation as “a nation of joiners.” As early as the 1830s, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville described the proliferation of voluntary associations as a hallmark of American democracy. In his view, such associations distinguished America from the more hierarchically organized societies of Western Europe. “The citizen of the United States,” Tocqueville (1947 [1835]: 109) declared, “is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he only claims its assistance when he is quite unable to shift without it.” Near the turn of the twentieth century, a writer for theNorth American Reviewdescribed the final decades of the nineteenth century as the “Golden Age of Fraternity” (Harwood 1897).
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Büttner, Thea. "The Development of African Historical Studies in East Germany; An Outline And Selected Bibliography." History in Africa 19 (1992): 133–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3171997.
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My main concern in this paper is to throw some light on the scope of the problem from the view of the development of African historical studies in East Germany after World War II. It is necessary first to discuss some negative and positive sides of German historical African studies before 1945. For several decades German research has demonstrated a startling lack of interest in the research problems of African history. In connection with the colonial conquests of the European powers, special institutes grew in social anthropology, colonial economics, and geography, although the historical development of the peoples of Africa was ignored. As an outward appearance of this development there grew in several German universities, departments for Oriental languages e.g., at the University of Berlin on the direct instruction of Bismarck, and in 1908 the Colonial Institute at Hamburg University.Leading German historians and Africanists of the past demonstrated their theoretical ignorance in relation to African history. They proceeded from the definition of Leopold von Ranke, who classed the African peoples with the “non-history possessing” peoples who have made no contribution to world culture. G. W. F. Hegel uttered only fatalistic and stereotyped ideas—for him Africa was “no historical part of the World, it has no movement or development to exhibit.” These fundamental conceptions penetrated in one degree or another, the majority of publications on Africa up to 1945. Even Dietrich Westerman, one of the best known Africanists, who published one major book on African history in the German language, Geschichte Afrikas, in 1952 made his studies in the old tradition of seeing sub-Saharan Africa predominantly from the European point of view and continuing the image of an African peoples' history that was not accomplished by the world moulding civilized mankind and has not contributed its share to it. In short, the theoretical foundation of colonialism was rooted in German research in a deep racialist ideology. Only a few explorers and scientists swam against the tide.
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Yearwood, Peter J. "Continents and consequences: the history of a concept." Journal of Global History 9, no. 3 (2014): 329–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1740022814000151.
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AbstractOriginally intended to provide an accessible overview for colleagues in Papua New Guinea, this article outlines the emergence of the continental division of the world in classical antiquity. In medieval Europe this survived as a learned conception which eventually acquired emotional content. Nevertheless, the division was still within the context of universal Christianity, which did not privilege any continent. Contrary to the views of recent critics, the European sense of world geography was not inherently ‘Eurocentric’. While Europeans did develop a sense of continental superiority, Americans, Africans, and many Asians also came to identify themselves with their continents and to use them as weapons against European domination. The application of the division to Melanesia is also considered.
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Worsfold, Brian. "Eurocentrism in hybridity : a critique of Charles Van Onselen's "The Seed is Mine: the life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894-1985"." Journal of English Studies 2 (May 29, 2000): 171. http://dx.doi.org/10.18172/jes.59.
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For decades, contributors to the literary discourses of South Africa, writers, critics and commentators alike, worked to end apartheid. Now that apartheid is over, new discourses must evolve. For this reason, at this critical time of transition, all literary works coming out of South Africa are crucial to the continuity of South African literatures. Charles van Onselen's work would be a remarkable social history at any time but, coming as it does in the immediate post-apartheid period, it takes on a special relevance. This fictionalised social history which records the survival of a MaSotho peasant farmer in the western Transvaal during the pre-apartheid and apartheid periods gives a unique insight into an area of human existence that remains virtually unrecorded and only touched on in Sol T. Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa, written in 1910. This minutely-documented account of Kas Maine's story reflects the human condition of the Black population in rural South Africa as the screws of proxy European colonisation are tightened by South Africa's neo-colonialists. More significantly, van Onselen reconstructs the rural Black South African man whom apartheid not only degraded but also concealed from view. To what extent, however, is this reconstruction that of a White South African and what are his reasons for producing a model at this moment in South Africa's history?