A Past Whose Time Has Come: Historical Context and History in Eastern Africa's Great Lakes

Abstract

The essay examines precolonial, colonial, academic, and post-independence African voices that describe and promote special versions of the past in one part of eastern Africa. By studying the connections among African intellectuals, local discursive and political constraints, and overseas discursive and political constraints that emerged between 1890 and the present, the article outlines many of the themes of academic African history. From this critical historiography, we may see how struggles for control of discourse on the African past are breaking free of an essentially European-derived conceptual framework by attending to local and regional forms of historical action. Both male and female speakers participate, often in radically different ways. Studying them, and those who listen to them and support them, will return to historians of Africa a sense of African actors' historical creativity as well as their arts of resistance.