EXTENSIVE READING SERIES – 93 –

Africa’s past:
historical sources
resolution-çözüm
ile ortak
In common with historians of all places, historians of Africa have faced significant
zorlama constraints. Before thinking about the particular problems faced by those
attempting to recover Africa’s past, it is important to stress that many such
problems are shared with historians working on other parts of the world. The lives
of ordinary working people, of women, or of children, for example, can be difficult
and often impossible to capture and to interpret. But Africa presents its own its-
zorlu
challenges; some are formidable and not all have proved capable of resolution. In onun,kendi,onunki
the process of addressing these challenges, historians have developed a range of
methods which have not only increased the sophistication of African historical
studies but have also added to the research techniques and the analytical armoury
soruşturma
of the whole field of historical enquiry. While contributing to the store of
knowledge about the past of humankind, historians of Africa have also been
bir dizi
öncü olmak pioneers in the development of a battery of techniques which make modern
historians more effective, sympathetic analysts of the lives of all our ancestors.
ortak
Evidence
merkezi kurma mücadelesi
The problem of evidence lay at the heart of the struggle to establish the field of
temeller
African history in the 1950s and 1960s. Evidence necessarily underpins all historical
research. Reliable sources provide knowledge of the past which then allows
historians to analyse, to interpret, to compare, and to theorize. The absence of
ne kadar ilgi çekici olursa olsun
sources denies us that knowledge; and however attractive it can be, the
substitution of what should have happened is supposition rather than scholarship.
The post-war pioneers of African historical studies spent their early days fighting
two big battles. One was waged against an academic establishment sceptical about
the possibility of recovering Africa’s past. Some recent observers have seen this
conservatism as innately racist, a continuation of the attitudes faced by Du Bois and
Hansberry in their efforts to claim a place for Africa in universal history. While some
of the doubters might have been animated by racism, their objections were more
frequently grounded in their understanding of what history was and thus what
history could be. The other was a methodological assault against the established
kıtlık,eksiklik
ways of ‘doing’ history, aimed at circumventing the dearth of written records for
much of the continent. The two were closely related to one another. But while the
former has, by and large, been won, the latter is far from over, demanding an
genel olarak
far over - bitmedi

1
 EXTENSIVE READING SERIES – 93 –

yaratıcılık
ongoing inventiveness in the methods by which African history is researched and
written.
durum,şartlar
Africa posed a real challenge at a particular conjuncture in the development of the
iddialar
discipline of history. By the mid-20th century, history had serious pretensions to
being a discipline with its own (and for some, even a scientific) methodology, which
sought to distance itself from antiquarianism, from anecdote, and from the
mustering of mountains of supposed facts. At the core of that methodology lay the
discovery of, and then the critical reading of, written documents: so-called ‘primary
sources’. These were to be found in the greatest abundance in archives and
libraries. Reading that material in the writers’ original languages, and if possible in
its original manuscript form, reading it in the light of other sources reading it
‘between the lines’ and ‘against the grain’, was what good historians did.
If written sources were the recognized raw materials of historical research, where
did that leave historians with ambitions to write Africa’s history? Most African
languages were not transcribed languages; that is, they were spoken rather than
written and read before the late 19th or the 20th century. But it was the earlier
history of Africa that the pioneering historians wished above all to recover.
Animated by the liberation of the continent from colonial rule, they sought to
demonstrate to sceptical colleagues and to the wider world that the continent had a
history of its own before European conquest – one that would serve as a template
bir çok
for the future. For many, sources generated by and about colonial conquest were
telafi edilemez biçimde tehlikeye atıldı gerçek , doğru
irredeemably compromised. The authentic African voice, it was argued, was
deafened or distorted in such material.
sağır sapmış
Much of what passed for African history before the 1950s fell within the established
tradition of ‘imperial history’, a genre dominated by accounts of the African careers
of European explorers, missionaries, proconsuls, and businessmen. Africans yapılmasında ve
themselves tended to be regarded as objects rather than actors in the making bozulmasında
and
unmaking of European empires. Not all of that literature was inherently
unsympathetic. In Britain and France especially, there was a lively variety of anti-
göstermek
imperialist imperial history which set out the malign impact of colonial conquest
upon Africans. But this tradition was actually closer to imperial hagiography than it
pretended to be. It too tended to objectify Africans and failed to take their long-
sonuçta
term history and their own agency seriously. After all, there is not much to choose
ebedi kurban
between being habitually disregarded or being regarded as a perennial victim. An
analogy might be a situation in which we had no history of French or British people
birleşmiş
other than that incorporated into both favourable and hostile accounts of Roman
expansion and early Christian conversion written by Romans. It was this sort of
simplification and distortion that Africa’s new historians set out to rectify.
düzeltmek
yola çıkmak
2