Writing African History

Abstract

FORTY years ago Daniel McCall published a book about the sources for African history—Africa in Time Perspective: A Discussion of Historical Reconstruction from Unwritten Sources (Oxford, 1964). It was a brisk, no-nonsense little book, a mere 175 pages long. Now John Phillips has edited a huge book as a tribute to McCall which runs to over five hundred pages. The book maintains the spirit of the original. It, too, is no-nonsense. Phillips tells us that ‘this book is about the practice of African history’; that only ‘a minimum of theory is necessary for a historian’; and that ‘the very mundane fact is that history is a job’. But it is hardly brisk. The difference between McCall's day and ours, which calls for a book three times the size, arises partly from the fact that over the last forty years much more has been done on African archaeology, African linguistics, African oral tradition, etc., than had been achieved in 1964. We know much more. Yet this book is not triumphalist, except perhaps in the chapter on historical linguistics by Christopher Ehret which essentially says that we know how to do it, are doing it and need to do more of it. Elsewhere, though, as historians know more the less confident and optimistic they have become. Susan McIntosh writes that ‘archaeology is today a much more contentious and diverse discipline than it was in the 1950s and early 1960s’ (p. 51). Here it is certainly not merely a matter of doing more of it, even though there are still huge gaps in Africa's archaeological record. David Henige is still more cautious about oral tradition as a reliable source and in his very lively chapter lambasts various simplistic ways of practising it as well as a general sloppiness in failing to make the data available.