The appeal of history to us all is in the last analysis poetic. But the poetry of history does not consist of imagination roaming at-large, but of imagination pursuing the fact and fastening upon it. That which compels the historian to “scorn delights and live laborious days” is the ardour of his own curiosity to know what really happened long ago in that land of mystery which we call the past.

This paper is about qualitative research methods, and thus more about hard labor than about poetry and imagination. But to those scholars to whom the above citation gives meaning there is a clear connection between hard labour, imagination and poetry. As scholars, we are looking for facts, and looking for facts can be hard work. As scholars, we also know that facts must be ascribed with meaning in order to become sources, a process of interpretation which demands both imagination and poetry.

I will present some of the challenges we face when doing anthropological historical research in Africa, and I will argue that the tools of qualitative methods will have to be sharpened and modified with this particular goal in mind. The main aim will be to discuss how we can acquire information in an African setting by analyzing the role of the interview as a communicative event. Other important topics to be treated are African oral tradition, the culture and tradition (the metacommunicative competence) of the respondents, and their use of metaphors to convey meaning.