Introduction: language and the historian of West Africa

This essay examines the contribution of one discipline, linguistics, to the work of another discipline, history. But disciplinary contributions aside, it is worth noting that language is always important to the historian, for the simple reason that by far the most important sources of historical knowledge are those transmitted through languages, whether as written documents or as oral testimony. A language is, among other things, a highly sophisticated cultural artifact, which is extremely sensitive to the social, psychological and political environment in which it is used. It therefore behoves the historian to be sensitive to the language in which sources are couched. There is also the practical problem, that sources for the history of a given area in West Africa may be in any of several European languages or Arabic, and first-hand control of oral sources may require familiarity with one or more African languages. It is not always possible for the individual historian to master all the languages required. One must then resort to translations, but problems of interpretation are almost inevitable.

Textual criticism: J. o. Hunwick

The critical study of the language of older written texts has not been a prominent feature of recent West African historical practice, no doubt because, for most areas, written texts are of fairly recent origin (within the past two hundred years). Outstanding have been J. O. Hunwick's assessments both linguistic and historical of mediaeval Arabic sources. His article, ‘The term “Zanj” and its derivatives in a West African chronicle’, is a model of its kind, carefully unpacking the possible meanings and nuances of a politically and ethnographically charged term that is no longer used in the sense in which it appears in the text (Ta'rikh al-Fattâsh, a chronicle of the Songhay Empire), but is important to proper interpretation of that text.

The historical significance of language studies: P. E. H. Hair

Hunwick is a historian, not a linguist, albeit a historian who is an expert on the Arabic language. Another historian writing in English who took a close interest in language but from a rather different perspective was the late P. E. H. Hair.