The History of West Africa

Abstract

While the first volumes of major co-operative surveys of the history of East Africa and of South Africa appeared in I963 and I969 respectively, West Africa has had to wait until I97I for the appearance of the first instalment of the major twovolumework planned and edited by Jacob Ajayi and Michael Crowder. They themselves are hardly to be blamed for this. If they have been luckier than the three general editors of the Cambridge History of the British Empire (who were all themselves dead by the time the last of their volumes was published), the hazards of death and warfare have combined with the notorious inability of some academic contributors to deliver their manuscript on time, to mean that something like six years have elapsed between the plan and the publication. But Professors Ajayi and Crowder were also faced with the problem that West Africa undoubtedly has more historians (abroad as well as at home) per square mile of territory than either of the regions covered by the other two co-operative histories. It has as many university history departments as the other two areas combined, and this in turn reflects the fact that the number and complexity of its ethnic units and-in many cases-the length of their recorded internal and external histories is such that they have a great deal to do. And while in the last twenty years or so, the historians of West Africa have been responsible for a formidable amount of historical writing-not least in local historical journalsthere are still many important historical questions waiting to be explored in depth, or on which little in the way of consensus has been achieved. Professors Ajayi and Crowder's response to this situation has been to adopt for their first volume, which goes up to i8oo, an essentially simple and straightforward plan, which in the event involved only thirteen chapters and authors. First there are three surveys in the general manner: a geographical one on the land and the peoples, one on prehistory, and one on stateless societies in the history of West Africa. This is followed by two rounds of regional surveys. In the first, there are chapters on the states of the western and of the central Sudan up to c. 1500, and on Songhay, Bornu and Hausaland in the sixteenth century; in the second there are chapters on the Niger delta area, Yorubaland and Dahomey, the Akan and Mossi lands, the western Atlantic coastlands, the western Sudan, and Hausaland and Bornu, and also an essay on the Atlantic slave trade, all nominally for the period i6oo-i8oo, except for the Akan-Mossi chapter, which starts in 1500. Little comment is called for on the first two introductory surveys, in which Professors Abo Mabogunje and Thurstan Shaw each give us the benefit of their great professional expertise and experience. But it should be noted that Shaw