A theme of this book is interconnection, an aim to assert that the separate approaches of different disciplines must be brought together if we are to understand the actual unity of an oral representation of pastness. In such a unified approach, we can also recognise key distinctions between genres and see how these relate to the social formation in which they appear, and which they help to reproduce.

In this concluding chapter, I argue that we must also make connections between terms commonly distinguished: truth and falsehood, memory and history. These connectivities are also imbricated in the final topics of discussion – personal identity, social identity, and their relation to history-as-recorded.

Truth, falsehood and forgetfulness

In the analyses I have presented of African narrations, I have not given much time to their status as historical evidence, concentrating rather on their constitutive features, because these must be understood before such evaluative judgments can be made. Historians may object that I have downplayed distinctions between true and false, given that their business is to try to reconstruct the passage of the past, and for that it is crucial to test for what in an account is true, or can be shown to be false. As with ‘time’, ‘truth’ is a term to which massive attention has been given, and this book cannot rehearse all the arguments.