Endre Sik and the Development of African Studies in the USSR: A Study Agenda From 1929

Abstract

Writing in 1963, the late D.H. Jones commented on the first volume of the Hungarian Endre Sik's History of Black Africa that “this is simply another pot-boiling account of the European colonisation of Africa, about 1910 vintage, distinguished from others of its kind only by the slightly greater space it allots to speculation about the mysterious native past…Professor Sik's unexacting standards of evidence are those of the crudest type of political controversy.”On the second volume, the same reviewer wrote four years later that it was “a very bad book which invites the strictures levelled against its predecessor: a crudely partisan selection and treatment of the evidence, a very imperfect acquaintance with recent research, an outmoded, essentially European-centred perspective…Professor Sik is…deficient in narrative skill and historical insight…All the diversity and detailed irregularity of the historical landscape is smothered under a uniform blanket of naive moralising which all but obliterates its significant features.”This is undoubtedly strong stuff, especially as Jones was some way from being a reactionary scholar; although he noted that Sik's book (hereafter HBA) is “sharply Marxist in tone,” he pointedly refrains from attacking it on that score. Sik, according to Jones, is simply incompetent.