Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola , editors. Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa . (New African Histories Series.) Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 2009. Pp. viii, 276. Cloth $49.95, paper $26.95.

Abstract

Over the past half century or more, the project of establishing the professional discipline of African history has been largely successful. But this has come, Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola argue, at the expense of losing connections with earlier “fellow travellers”—Africa's “homespun historians” (pp. 13, 15). These nonprofessional historians, active citizens of local politics, worked as teachers, journalists, and clerks. They shared with their professional counterparts the need to create historical knowledge as a means of better preparing for the future. This collection of twelve essays bridges the gap between these two bodies of scholarship by establishing qualities of nonprofessional African intellectuals not always appreciated before. They are revealed here as creative, historically situated actors with multiple and often changing ambitions as “cartographers for Africa's political communities” (p. 13), far more than the mere repositories of static “traditional” knowledge they were once thought to be. This book extends a project initiated by earlier collections to break down the idea that Africa's intellectual history is bound by tradition, and lacks ingenuity and authorial figures. An important early work edited by Leroy Vail, The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (1991), revealed the invented nature of what was once thought to be primordial. But it stressed too narrowly the moment and framework of the colonial crucible. Two more recent works, Axel Harneit-Sievers's edited collection A Place in the World: New Local Historiographies from Africa and South Asia (2002) and Toyin Falola's Yoruba Gurus: Indigenous Knowledge Production in Africa (1999), examine the work of homespun African historians but remain anchored to locality and ethnicity in explaining them. Karin Barber's more recent edited collection, Africa's Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (2006), uncovers the inventiveness of Africans using literacy to forge identities within times of profound social change. It does not, however, examine the production of history. This collection applies the insights of Barber's volume to historians, searching for the individual actors who often simultaneously asserted their own place in the world by creating historical texts about it. These historians undertook a wide array of projects, sometimes serving ethnic communities, sometimes forging other types of community. Many chapters investigate continuities in historical knowledge from precolonial times. If many of the historians studied have a local focus, their work is seen to be shaped by far more than local ambition within colonial administrative structures. History could be written to promote radical or conservative ideals, to invoke African republics or kingdoms. The history they produced is much richer and far less predictable than any simply account allows, drawing on but not bound by diverse sources of inspiration, including The Pilgrim's Progress, the Bible, Islamic history, long-established moral discourses and fables, and contemporary need. Non-Africans appear in an equally diverse array of roles as allies, opponents, and collaborators. One comes away sharply aware that history writing has long been, and will continue to be, a lively African enterprise because homespun historians are the “drill sergeants mustering up Africa's political communities” (p. 24).