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Is a Journal of Method Still Necessary?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Jan Vansina
Jan Vansina*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Madison
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Thirty-four years ago David Henige launched History in Africa (hereafter HA) at a time when scholars often cut corners in their rush to construct a history of Africa, and disregarded rules of evidence, thereby running the risk that many of their reconstructions would prove to be unsound. The question was not that these scholars were wholly indifferent to methodology, but that the precolonial history of the continent was the cynosure of the field at the time, and hence that all eyes were turned towards the use of oral sources to overcome the perceived scarcity of written sources for that period and to provide voices from the continent. In their haste to fill huge voids in the story of Africa's past, scholars debated the rules of evidence in relation to such unconventional sources. They often disregarded almost every methodological canon when it came to written data. Crucial differences between primary and secondary sources were ignored, archival research was scanty, new editions of older publications were mere reprints accompanied or not by new introductions that were so uninformed as to be useless, while issues about authenticity, authorship, chronology, or translation were all brushed aside as quibbles. Thus, in the days before 1974, methodological concerns focused exclusively on oral tradition and oral history to the detriment of everything else. As its initial editorial made clear, HA was launched as a forum where scholars interested in method could publish articles about all the facets of the historical method—from epistemology to heuristics, rules of evidence, and historiography. The journal was founded and the contributors came.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 36 , 2009 , pp. 421 - 438
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2009

References

1 For an overview of what was eventually achieved to redress the situation with regard to written sources, see Heintze, Beatrix and Jones, Adam, eds., European Sources for Sub-Saharan Africa before 1900: Use and Abuse (Wiesbaden, 1987) (=Paideuma 33).Google Scholar

2 It is typical that no separate article has been devoted to the methodology of interdisciplinary research in either of the two recent volumes about sources and methods, Falola, Toyin and Jennings, Christian, eds., Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written, Unearthed (Rochester 2003)Google Scholar, and Philips, John E., ed., Writing African History (Rochester 2005)Google Scholar

3 McCall, Daniel, Africa in Time Perspective: a Discussion of Historical Reconstruction from Unwritten Sources (Boston, 1964).Google Scholar

4 The most famous ones of these were the Benin and Yoruba research schemes.

5 MacGaffey, Wyatt, “African History, Anthropology, and the Rationality of Natives” HA 5(1978), 103.Google Scholar

6 Wilmsen, Edward N., Land Filled with Flies: a Political Economy of the Kalahari (Chicago, 1989).Google Scholar This volume has triggered a major polemic and a complete re-evaluation of the use of ethnographic evidence in archeology.

7 Lentz, Carola and Sturm, Hans Jürgen, “Of Trees and Earth Shrines: an Interdisciplinary Approach to Settlement Histories in the West African Savanna” HA 28(2001), 139–68Google ScholarPubMed; Mouser, Bruce L. and Mouser, Nancy Fox, “A Rocky Road to Publication” HA 31(2004), 257–61.Google Scholar

8 Cooper, Barbara M., “Oral Sources and the Challenge of Africa History” in Writing Africa History, 191, with emphasis added.Google Scholar

9 Davis, Ronald W., “Volcanic Dust in the Atmosphere and the Interpretation of African Eclipse Traditions” HA 4(1977), 31–41.Google Scholar

10 Maret, /Nsuka, ,” History of Bantu Metallurgy: Some Linguistic Aspects” HA 4(1977), 43–66.Google Scholar

11 Quayson, Ato, “Means and Meaning” HA 25(1998), 307–18.Google Scholar The disciplines involved here are social anthropology, literary criticism, and history.

12 Ibid., 307, 318, with emphasis in the original.

13 For the data see Vansina, Jan, “Linguistic Evidence for the Introduction of Ironworking into Bantu-Speaking Africa” HA 33(2006), 321–61.Google Scholar The professional linguist, Koen Bostoen, and I debated the case by correspondence.

14 Keita, S.O.Y. and Boyce, A.J., “Genetics, Egypt and History” HA 32(2005), 221–46.Google Scholar

15 Over the years the Libyan Studies Center in Tripoli has published dozens of volumes of these testimonies. The only result in English about the whole project is a summary of findings about memory and personal reminiscences; see Vansina, Jan, “Memory and Oral Tradition” in Miller, Joseph C., ed., The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History (Folkestone, 1980), 263–77.Google Scholar

16 Vansina, Jan “Historical Tales (Ibitéekerezo) and the History of Rwanda” HA 27(2000), 375–414Google Scholar, for these sources. Transcripts on microfilm are at the Center for Research Libraries and a few other Africanist libraries.

17 0n interviewing, the passage in Albert, Isaac O., “Data Collection and Interpretation in the Social History of Africa,” in Writing African History, 299–300Google Scholar, barely scratches the surface.

18 Such parliamentary reports are the main source used in Gahama, Joseph, Le Burundi sous l'administration belge (Paris, 1983)Google Scholar

19 See e.g., the input into White, Luise, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, 2002).Google Scholar Are her sources sufficiently representative for space and time to allow for the correlations and conclusions she draws?

20 For example, Shostak, Marjorie, Nisa! The Life and Work of a !Kung woman (New York, 1983).Google Scholar This biography was solicited and constructed out of fifteen interviews. It is therefore as much the work of Ms. Shostak as of Nisa! The reader is given ethnographic information to understand the story, but at the same time people are urged to read the biography to enter in the realm of Bushman life. As a result, proper use of such data in any historical work can become very tricky.

21 Gervais, Raymond A and Marcoux, Richard, “Saving Francophone's Africa Statistical Past” HA 20(1993), 385–90Google Scholar

22 Cordell, Dennis D., “Sample Surveys: Underexploited Sources for African Social History,” in Sources and Methods in African History, 376–92.Google Scholar It is typical that sampling was not deemed worth a chapter in the contemporary Writing African History.

23 Vansina, Jan, La légende du passé: traditions orales du Burundi (Tervuren, 1972), 12–18, and map 2.Google Scholar

24 Ndoricimpa, Leonidas and Guillet, Claude, L'arbre mémoire: traditions orales du Burundi (Paris, 1984).Google Scholar The authors had access to copies of the results of the sample study.