African Historiography Research Articles

Segregation in the Reserves: The Winter Family in Sekhukhuneland 1913–1948

ABSTRACT The role of the reserve areas in both the genesis and implementation of segregation and apartheid is an especially well-worn topic in South African historiography. But much less attention has been given to the impact of the implementation of racial segregation in society in the areas set aside as rural locations and reserves in the ninteeenth and early twentieth centuries. The experiences of the Winter family of the Sekhukhuneland area provides an illuminating case study of the processes at work in the interregnum between the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts. Their family history highlights the emergence in reserve areas of networks of interconnected families spanning both old and new elites and the racial boundaries a segregationist ideology sought to entrench. It also shows how rapidly, profoundly, and painfully these emergent social forms were dismembered after 1936, long before the enforcement of apartheid policies after 1948.

For Hannes Adonis: Demolishing Walls

The study aims to indicate how the lives of religious people can serve as a source of theological knowledge and beliefs. This study engages the life and work of Hannes Adonis through the methodology of biography as theology. A key characteristic of Hannes Adonis's life and work is the dismantling of all walls of division in church and academia. First, the methodology of biography as theology is discussed. Secondly, Adonis’s contribution to the Dutch Reformed Mission Church (DRMC)/Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa (URCSA) is engaged. Thirdly, Adonis’s impact on academia, particularly the South African historiography, is discussed.

African historiography: Reflections on rewriting the continent's past

African historiography has undergone a transformative journey, evolving from early external narratives shaped by colonial perspectives to contemporary endeavours that seek to reclaim agency in defining the continent's rich and diverse history. This abstract explores the trajectory of African historiography, emphasizing the shifts in methodologies, perspectives, and objectives that have characterized the quest to rewrite the continent's past. Historically, Africa's narrative was predominantly framed by external observers, often influenced by colonial biases and Eurocentric viewpoints. However, over the decades, a vibrant and dynamic field of African historiography has emerged, driven by scholars and intellectuals committed to unveiling authentic African histories. Central to this transformation is the interrogation of oral traditions, archaeological findings, and indigenous knowledge systems, providing a nuanced understanding of the continent's pre-colonial cultures, societies, and achievements. The post-colonial era witnessed a surge in efforts to reclaim Africa's historical narrative from the shadows of distortion and omission. Scholars engaged in the reinterpretation of historical events, challenging prevailing stereotypes and presenting alternative perspectives on key epochs such as ancient civilizations, trans-Saharan trade routes, and pre-colonial political systems. This new wave of historiography has empowered Africans to assert control over their own narratives, fostering a sense of pride and identity rooted in a comprehensive understanding of the past. Moreover, the emergence of diverse theoretical frameworks, such as Afrocentrism and postcolonial theory, has enriched African historiography by providing analytical tools to deconstruct colonial legacies and explore the interconnectedness of African societies. This article also delves into the ongoing debates within the field, including discussions on the integration of oral histories, the role of African diaspora studies, and the challenges posed by limited archival resources.

Africa and the Cattle Without History.

The premise of this article is that African historiography has yet to embrace the genetic basis of cattle tolerance to tsetse-borne trypanosomiasis due to the literature's emphasis on human illness and landscape modification. By the early 1980s, empirical research indicated that N'Dama cattle possessed a tolerance to the disease that was heritable and, as such, could be strengthened through breeding. The Gambia's first president, who was a former veterinary surgeon, contributed to the breed's reappraisal. In exploring this history, I show how an international scientific network positioned The Gambia as a supplier of N'Dama breeding stock for livestock developments in sub-Saharan Africa. My argument is that research on cattle genetics has theoretical consequences for writing about the history of African tsetse ecosystems.

Applying History: Towards a Responsive Writing

This article discusses African historiography with an emphasis on Nigeria. It posits that the themes in African historiography have continued to evolve, with historians of different eras paying attention to a broad spectrum of issues. The need at one point was to recall the glory of Africa’s past, and to debunk Eurocentric bias and prejudice by early European writers of African history was a central theme in historical research on the continent. Thus, it was employed to address pressing issues of nationalism and to combat Afro-pessimism. The article suggests that contemporary historians can use historical writing to understand, analyse, and make recommendations for policymakers in Africa in such areas as governance, trade, and bilateral relations. Looking at contemporary issues, it has become clear that today’s historians can do more to contribute to finding solutions to some of the current challenges in different African communities.

From Mustalah al Hadith to Mustalah al Ta’rikh: Transmission and Contents Criticism in Afrabic Historiography

Drawing from this same concept, Afrabic is employed considering the fact that most of the ideas therein fall within the purview of the relationship between Africa and Arabic. The task of screening and documenting authentic prophetic traditions and discarding fabricated information attributed to the Prophet of Islam resulted in the evolution of the critical study of Ḥadīth literature, technically referred to as Muṣṭalaḥ al Ḥadīth. Scholars of Ḥadīth employed a method of validating matn (text) by subjecting the isnād (chain of transmitters) to tests of reliability. Considering the similarity of the process of Ḥadīth verification and the methodology of establishing facts in historiography, which involves Heuristik (identification of sources), Kritik (testing sources for reliability), and Hermeneutik (interpretation of reliable sources for constructing a connected and significant narrative), there is a high potential for a symbiotic relationship between Ḥadīth studies and historiography. This paper makes a case for the specific application of the method of validation of information in Ḥadīth for obtaining authentic historical facts. For illustrative purposes and ascertainig the efficacy of this method and approach, two Arabic works on Medieval African Historiography, viz; Infāq al Maysūr of Muḥammad Bello and Tārikh Mai Idrīs Alūma waghazawātuh of Ibn Fartuwa were subjected to the mechanism of information validation hereby technically referred to as Muṣṭalaḥ al Tārīkh. The outcome revealed significant strengths and weaknesses of the two works. While they both subsist as useful sources of history, various dimensions of inaccurate information were detected in the accounts of the authors.

Slaving and Slave Trading in Africa

Slavery in Africa dates to antiquity. Slave trading networks in Africa transported people across the Sahara and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, with significant numbers of people sent to the Middle East, India, central Asia, and South and Southeast Asia. Africa, however, was not only a source of export of people; enslaved persons were also imported into the continent. This article reviews scholarly research into the capture, trade, and use of enslaved men, women, and children in Africa, with a focus on Ghana. It suggests that the history and legacies of slavery and slave trading cannot be understood without reference to African historiography, the politics of knowledge production, and present-day heritage tourism. In reviewing the historical and anthropological research, it also introduces some of the possibilities, problems, and challenges of archaeological approaches to studying slavery and slave trading to demonstrate that archaeology is in conversation with—and of value to—those outside the discipline.

Global and Local Pentecostal Histories: Reframing Pentecostal Historiography in Africa

Arguably, Pentecostalism’s multifaceted and global nature continues to be marred by historiographical contentions and contestations. Diverse historiographical perspectives continue to shape the understanding of contemporary Pentecostal Christianity globally. Undoubtedly, the chaotic context of the socio-economic crisis in Africa has offered Pentecostal Christianity an opportunity to become a public force worthy of critical studies. Recent historical studies indicate enormous Pentecostal success, especially among the disadvantaged in African societies. Even as a prominent feature on the world’s religious stage, Pentecostal history is unsettled, especially in Africa. Histories of Pentecostalism continue to receive a barrage of blame and accusation for historiographical biases. Scholars from the West are to blame for neglecting or completely ignoring the vital and often more significant work from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latino regarding the history, growth, and expansion of Pentecostal Christianity. This article raises the question of whether African Pentecostalism and its global significance locate within the accounts of global Pentecostal historiographies. It broadly explores issues in the international Pentecostal historiography, arguing that African Pentecostalism is a complex phenomenon originating from indigenous prophetic figures and their antecedents. Therefore, it challenges the North American Azusa Street revival trajectory; Pentecostalism in Africa sprung up in response to contextual challenges faced by the Africans, which mission Christianity could not adequately address. The historiography of African Pentecostalism is steeped in polygenesis, yet within the global context of Pentecostal history.

The Fang-Bulu-Beti (1665-1850): origin and migrations in Central Africa

This research seeks to determine the starting point of the Fang-Bulu-Beti migrations of Central Africa, from the savannah to the forest. Using new African historiography, it analyzes the three main theories of common savannah origin known about this people. The first theory refers to the area around Lake Chad while another refers to the Upper Sanaga area. Cross-reading of the relevant sources, spanning the period from 1819 to 2018 reveal that that the starting point of common dispersal of the Fang-Bulu-Beti in the forest was neither in the savannahs around Lake Chad, nor in the Upper Sanaga, but in the southern Adamawa region of Cameroon. Within the period of 1665, the Fang separated from the Bulu-Beti and left that place for the forest of South-Cameroon and Gabon through the current East-region. At that same moment, certain Beti people (the Enoa, Benë and Emburi) decided to live the southern Adamawa and passed through the Mbam area to reach the forest of the current Centre region of Cameroon. The other Beti-Bulu later left that savannah environment for Upper Sanaga and for the Centre and South regions of Cameroon. Several reasons could explain this abandonment: Invasion of newly arrived people (Baare-Tchamba and Baya), some inner quarrels and the quest for enrichment towards the Atlantic coast of Kribi in the South Cameroon during 1840-1850 decade.

Apartheid’s ‘rape crisis’: understanding and addressing sexual violence in South Africa, 1970s–1990s

ABSTRACT Although rape in South Africa today is commonly framed as a post-apartheid ‘crisis’, neither sexual violence nor public concern about it in the country is new. This article explores an earlier period of ‘rape crisis’ from the 1970s to early 1990s, when sexual violence became a key topic of discussion amongst apartheid politicians, Black community leaders, feminist activists, and ordinary men and women. Focusing on the township of Soweto, it examines why public concern about sexual violence emerged during this period and how rape was conceptualised and responded to. It demonstrates how multiple and often competing social and political agendas constrained attempts to understand and address sexual violence in the country’s townships: the growth of feminist activism; the intensification of the liberation struggle and attempts to repress it; public panic about crime; and shifting gender power dynamics. These divergent responses to rape reveal the challenges of addressing sexual violence within the contexts of anti-racist movements and competing political struggles. Exploring these longer histories not only addresses a gap in South African historiography, but also helps to develop a more global and comparative understanding of how gender, race, and class intersect in producing conceptualisations of rape and responses to it.

Materials Necessary for the Formation of a Correct Knowledge of the History of Colonialism in South Africa? Reassessing the Historical Productions of Donald Moodie and Their Implications

ABSTRACT The contribution of the Rev. Dr John Philip and Donald Moodie to South African historiography has received some attention from historians, but the extent and duration of Moodie’s attempts to challenge Philip’s version of South African history have not been quite so fully explored. Nor have Moodie’s subsequent publications. This article examines Moodie’s dispute with Philip and their conflicting conceptions of history, and what Moodie’s less well-known publications reveal about his notions of the history of South Africa. In the process, it rediscovers Moodie’s mysteriously lost only full-length historical narrative and examines what the contestations around the colonial archive in the first half of the nineteenth century reveal about the challenges of the colonial archive and South African historiography today. It suggests that Moodie’s works can be located against a backdrop of conservative British intellectual thought in South Africa and that understanding the influence of Moodie’s publications is important in historicising the development of colonial knowledge systems in South Africa.

Jacob Dlamini and the hidden history tradition of South African historiography

Hidden histories are pervasive globally, particularly since the advent of 'history from below' as social history in the 1960s. Jacob Dlamini's body of work is firmly located within South African historiography's hidden histories tradition and practice. His most recent studies, both published in 2020, Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park and The Terrorist Album: Apartheid's Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police, are a remarkable contribution to this practice, indicating the purchase it has in developing and improving South African historiography. This article seeks, first, to demonstrate how Dlamini's Safari Nation deepens and enriches environmental and nature conservation historiography by incorporating the traditionally marginalised experiences of black South Africans in the making of the Kruger National Park and the development of nature conservation and leisure in South Africa. Secondly, it demonstrates how The Terrorist Album contributes to and improves South African struggle history through the telling of an often neglected or overlooked interface between surveillance technology and subterfuge in the liberation struggle. Keywords: Hidden history; struggle history; environmental history; conservation history; social history; South African historiography.

From Memory and Oral Tradition to the Construction of an African Historiography

Contemporary social theory has been emphasizing the relationship between memory and oral tradition in the production of knowledge, in its transdisciplinary aspect. This article seeks to bring up some meditations regarding the legitimacy of the contribution of memory and oral tradition in the production of historical knowledge and, simultaneously, its contribution to the formation of an African historiography. For this reason, the recognition of the contribution of modern historiography to the enhancement of a set of memorial and identity practices of a given society opens the way for us to reflect on memory and oral tradition. African oral traditions cover the vast universe of oral literature (proverbs, prayers, mythologies, legends, idioms, etc.), aspects that should not be ignored by historians, as they constitute what Maurice Halbwachs (2008) designates collective memory. Starting from a qualitative-hermeneutic perspective, it is assumed that the oral tradition is not limited to stories and legends, or even mythological reports, but, rather, it also reflects a great school of life, since it relates to and recovers vital aspects inherent to peoples. In this perspective, it is clear that both memories and oral tradition have a common functional substrate, which is to act as an antidote to forgetfulness or sources of immortality. Thus, by offering means for the preservation of collective memory, the oral tradition supports for its resumption and dissemination.

Orania: A white homeland in post‐apartheid South Africa

AbstractThis paper employs the race formation theory to trace the historical origins of the idea of Orania, an exclusively White town in post‐apartheid South Africa. A key finding is that Orania is a historical product of the centuries‐old, racist idea of a White homeland in South Africa which is referred to as The Boer Republics in South African historiography. Throughout South African history, White separatist ideas have always served as the foundation for the Afrikaner White homeland narrative. This paper uses the concept of White identity politics to frame the discourse of the “vulnerable White minority” that White residents of Orania deploy to conceal their White separatist ideas under the aegis of culture. This article demonstrates that the practice of White identity politics in Orania offers learning opportunities for anti‐racist academics who research new forms of racism in the 21st century.

Precolonial African Historiography as a multidisciplinary project

In this historiographical article we analyse the three sources from which historians obtain their material for the research of the Bahurutshe (a subgroup of the Sotho-Tswana of South Africa) in the precolonial era: oral tradition, archaeological studies of Iron Age sites, and the oldest written accounts by European visitors to the Marico. We show that because the Batswana were non-literate societies before the nineteenth century, the study of their early history is a multidisciplinary project requiring the inputs of anthropologists, archaeologists and linguists. To produce a cohesive narrative of African precolonial history is an arduous task, but the history of precolonial African societies has major significance in the bigger picture of the (South) African past and informs ongoing discourses about the history of the region. We argue that Hurutshe history fits into the broader pattern of South African history and has relevance for the understanding of current debates around controversial issues such as ethnicity and land claims.

2 - Use of the Term ‘Empire’ in Historical Research on Africa: A Comparative Approach

This paper explores the use of the term ‘empire’ in historical research on Africa to illustrate the problem of ‘comparability’ and the requirement for measure- ment and appropriateness of the ‘measurement language’. Taking the reader through a review of the literature, beginning with Maurice Delafosse's populari- sation of the concept in his essays on ancient Ghana, Mali and Songhai in 1912 and climaxing with pointers in the multi-volume UNESCO General History of Africa in the late twentieth century, the author exposes the essential inconsist- ency in African and Africanist use of the term, ‘empire’, which inevitably crept into the study of African history in the heydays of ‘conceptual Eurocentrism’. He maintains that the usage of the term ‘empire’ in African historiography was employed due to the need to name those African states which were extensive territorially and multi-ethnically; and states designated ‘empires’ were charac- terised by certain elements of an imperial organisation rather than by a fully formed imperial system. And for analogues and comparisons, the form of de- pendence between the centre and the subordinated tribes and early states that developed in Africa reminds us rather of the relations existing on the other con- tinents in the early stages of large state formation. Hence, the term ‘early em- pire’ seems more justified to describe these states in research on the history of Africa. The author calls for the need to conduct discussion, with the help of a comparative method, on the specific features of those ‘early empires’.

Toward a fluid, shape-shifting methodology in organizational communication inquiry: African feminist organizational communication historiography

ABSTRACT Since W. Charles Redding’s call to maintain a sense of history in the subfield of organizational communication, our approach has largely been focused on institutionalizing and legitimizing organizational communication through static development narratives of the subfield’s emergence in the 1940s and 1950s, and key developments in topical interests in subsequent decades. While this is not unique to organizational communication, it makes it difficult to see the various ways history, as an organizing practice, is implicated in the constitution of a field. In this article, I suggest a shift toward fluid, shape-shifting practices of history as one way organizational communication can move toward a more open and inclusive practice—vital for coming to terms with history as a colonial structure and progressing in our own decolonial project. Toward this end, I propose African feminist organizational communication historiography as a novel approach for writing origin narratives, introducing theories, and legitimizing organizational forms that have been rendered alternative in organizational communication scholarship.

Trends in European Historiography of African History in the Second Half of the 20th Century

The article is devoted to the main trends in Western historiography of Africa in the second half of the XX century. The author examines how approaches and ideas in the study of African history by European and American scientists were changing during the formation of African studies as a separate science. There is a change in the perception of Africa by Western scientists from the “unhistorical” object of the world history to the region with its own unique history. The article highlights the influence of historical processes on changes of the views and approaches of Africanists. The author has come to the conclusion that Western historiography during the reviewed period has significantly expanded its theoretical and methodological base and it has made significant progress in the study of African history.

Shipwreck and Psychosis: Sheila Fugard’s The Castaways

Sheila Fugard’s The Castaways (1972) is neglected in South African literary historiography because its experimental modernism was at odds with the emphasis in the 1970s on politically committed literature. Further, its dialogism and preoccupation with the spiritual inflection of whiteness make it, at times, recondite. Fugard resets the events of the wreck of the Indiaman Grosvenor in 1782 as the hallucinated interiority of Christiaan Jordan, an escaped inmate of a psychiatric institution. The destruction of the ship and fate of her castaways (and contemporary parallels) constitute the language of his psychosis. This inward turn of shipwreck narrative is occasionally apparent in the historical and literary archive but is developed most fully and resonantly in The Castaways. While this essay considers and contextualizes the novel, it also places in counterpoint a fragmented account of my obsession with shipwreck and personal history of psychosis and dissociation. The two levels of writing are intended to set up eddies in a watery relation.

Historical significance and the challenges of African historiography: analysis of teacher perspectives

ABSTRACT The history, people, and culture of many African nations have been written, projected, and interpreted in different ways. The contents and variability in the early accounts about African nations, which were based largely on external viewpoints and interests which barely represented the realities in Africa, created confusions about African historiography and affected how Africans, their cultures, and histories were perceived in Western cultures. Drawing on the literature on African historiography, this paper examines Ghanaian History teachers’ perspectives of historically significant events in Ghana’s past, and how these perspectives translate into classroom practice. Findings demonstrate teachers’ consciousness and belief in traditional African cultural practices and the unique modes of preserving and doing African history. The paper makes a case for how African historiography and History education should look different to those conducted in Western contexts.